(I can sew, but it drives me wild, so it’s one of the first hard-won skills I abandoned.)
Do you have any fashion resources you refer to?
On a related topic, if you ever get a chance to watch The Supersizers Go… grab it! This British TV show where Sue Perkins (comedian) and Giles Coren (food critic) dressed up and ate the food of an era is brilliant.
I haven’t done an official study, but I think fantasy is overpopulated by orphans.
The lone hero is a classic protagonist because they’re not tied down by familial commitments and are free to adventure. An orphan is also on a search (quest) for who they might be.
But for all the advantages offered by an orphan re plot development and character growth, I wonder if part of their appeal is due to our unacknowledged desire to escape intergenerational trauma. We’re all curious as to who we’d be if we weren’t shaped by the suffering of those who contributed to our genes.
In truth, genes are inescapable. However, in fantasy an orphan hero presents as a blank slate. Their experience, and their experience alone, shapes who they are.
And yet, hearing the stories of those who came before us could be the key to our own resilience.
I value fiction precisely because it offers an escape as well as a safe space to explore difficult issues. But life is challenging and as much as stories can be part of our healing, we all need help sometimes. Our stories are integral to us and should be shared carefully. In Australia you can find help from Lifeline and Beyond Blue. Wherever you are in the world, please be kind to yourself, respect your own needs, and choose wisely the people who will help you to tell your stories.
David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute, was a guest on StarTalk recently. He was talking about a lot of things, but the bit that caught my attention was the idea that language is just a thin layer over our evolutionarily ancient brains. So, when we sleep on a problem that vast part of us that isn’t defined or constrained by language gets to work.
What an intriguing idea.
If we don’t reason from language but from patterns I can imagine AI advocates arguing that AI is even better than us at pattern recognition, so woohoo! Go, AI!
BUT (yep, all capitals) we take in so much more information than an AI. It might be fed the internet, but we have bodies that are sensory hogs. We interrogate our environment constantly in ways we don’t understand, and hence, can’t replicate with AI.
Whatever “intelligence” emerges from AI it won’t be human because it doesn’t have our body, including our ancient brain.
I’m truly fascinated by the idea that so much of our self is unknowable. We are ancient, instinctive, communal yet forever locked into an individual bodily self. I’m currently asking my non-verbal brain, “who am I?” and it’s answering … “I am” by breathing and listening and being.
Was Descartes wrong to say, “I think, therefore I am”?
I grew up around horses, so to me they’re friendly creatures who’ll happily exchange slobber for apples. That familiarity—horses as pets—blunted the meaning behind the four horsemen of the apocalypse for me.
Historically, a horse and its rider were a terrifying war machine. Think of medieval knights or Mongol archers or the impact of mounted Spaniards invading South America.
To translate that terror into modern terms, substitute drones.
Pestilence.
Famine.
War.
Death.
All carried by drone.
But because they’re carried by drones, and our era is what it is (namely, connected via the internet) let’s add a fifth drone. Silence.
Silence is broken connection; a failure to communicate, a loss of trust, and the loss of bonds of community.
We have to keep talking and listening, creating and appreciating creativity, or we lose a fundamental aspect of human existence.
In 1962 Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. She was warning of the loss of life, the silencing, resulting from the use of dangerous chemicals. Silent was a powerful word then; a word that warned of loss; of ending. Today it is just as powerful.
People sometimes ask why there is so much dystopian fiction and so very little utopian fiction. Often the answer given is that utopian fiction is harder to write because the conflict is less, or less obvious.
Hmm.
I’ve written a dystopian fantasy series, The Faerene Apocalypse, and I agree that it was never hard to find sources of conflict in that world.
Novels (all stories) need tension to progress and to keep the audience engaged.
But tension can be subtle. The conflict in a utopian novel mightn’t hit you in the face, but it exists. The questions of what next and why and who, how they’ll do what they choose to do, all of these questions boil down to a fundamental tension of existence—free will.
In a utopia the characters may have built a system where free will is a positive force both individually and socially, but it still exists. Harmony isn’t frozen perfection. Entropy must be countered by creation.
So, no, I don’t believe that lack of conflict is the reason utopian fiction is rare. I think the issue is authority.
In dystopian fiction authority collapses. Either the story is set in a lawless land or the authority is corrupt.
Look at the Wizard of Oz (book or movie). The authority for that world is literally named in the title, and yet, he’s merely smoke and mirrors, collapsing on revelation.
In a utopian story the authority mustn’t collapse. The instant it can be questioned, the utopian bubble bursts. Doubt is the death of utopia—of course, handled deftly, the questioning of authority in a utopian novel can become the source of conflict for the story, and be triumphantly asserted in the ending, but…
(and here’s the point this post has been building to)
To write a utopian novel the author has to be confident in the authority that legitimises the utopian community. Belief in that authority underpins the utopia both in the fictional world and for the reader.
And let me tell you that, as an author, it is very, very, very hard to summon the sort of confidence to be all-in with a single authority.
The modern world lives by Lord Acton’s maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The authority that underpins a utopia has to be absolute. Anything less allows for cracks to form, beginning the fracturing of the utopia. Yet, absolute power itself corrupts. So, the authority of the utopia is the reason it will fail—unless the author presents an authority so compelling, so confident, that we can believe it transcends the limits of our lived experience of fallible humanity.
Imagining a utopia is, therefore, a political act. It requires the suspension of disbelief in pursuit of believing in a greater good, a cause. The author must convince the audience to sacrifice their doubt and embrace an authority that can deliver them from themselves.
It sounds a heck of a lot like a cult, doesn’t it?
A golden age is characterised by confidence. It may be confidence in society itself, in technology, in philosophy or art, or even in expansion. The key is that when people look back on it they see a clarity and power that they feel is missing from the present.
We desire that impression of past confidence even if the people who lived through the so-called golden age experienced it as chaos, coflict, and a fight for survival.
Will our era be seen as a time when humans looked beyond themselves to find (in the animal kingdom or in outerspace) sapience or to build it (as with generative AI)? Will this be the golden age of alien contact, whatever form that alien sapience inhabits?
I designed Caldryn Parliament to be a suitable setting for golden age fiction. The Realm’s first millennium is approaching. Its people have centuries of survival and success bolstering them. Its institutions have defeated or assimilated all challenges. It is a time of confidence, and yet, it is also a time of questions and of an invitation to change.
There is so much to explore that I’m frustrated I can’t write all the books, all at once.
A golden age promises answers, but its answers are compelling due to the chaos that spawns them.
Over on Facebook I was discussing how the word disorder is increasingly common in popular culture. We’re looking for certainty and finding possibilities instead.
Golden age fiction asserts its certainties and offers them as an ordering of the disorder.
I wish I could tie a nice, orderly bow and wrap up this post so that it’s a complete and coherent whole. Sadly, what you’re getting instead are my messy thoughts as I attempt to tease out how I’m using my writing to make sense of the world, and why I think golden age fiction has such an appeal.
I was thinking about how agency—the ability to change our lives in small and big ways—is a theme in my novels, and then, I realised it’s the basis for most stories. Whether it’s Cinderella or Spiderman or Bluey, characters face challenges, make choices, and change their worlds.
Stories remind us that we’re not powerless.
One of the problems I have with how AI is being pushed into our lives is that it suffocates agency.
We’re being shown ads in which people ask AI for solutions to everyday problems. What is wrong with this pasta sauce? How do I wash this dress? And by ask for solutions, I mean the actor in the ad chats to the AI in their phone as if talking to a friend.
This is diabolically clever because who hasn’t, when faced with a problem, phoned a friend? The AI is being presented as standing in for a friend.
But these are the innocuous questions. They are helpful tips and handy hints. They don’t shape our lives. I get why advertisers are starting with these lulling examples of incorporating AI in our lives.
The problem is that humans are lazy and emotional labour is hard work. Thinking about the future is challenging. Making decisions, and bearing the costs of those decisions, is a burden that we flinch from.
AI provides the path out of these difficulties.
We begin by relying on it for answers, and end by trusting it to decide for us.
“My AI told me to…” will become people’s excuse for everything.
And once we relinquish agency, we shrink ourselves. We shrink our futures.
If we let an AI life coach (for lack of a better term) decide our lives, then we’re no longer telling our own stories. In fact, we’ll be living lives designed by those who own the AIs.
Do we have a responsibility to feed the current generation of AIs so that they’re formed by more than troll-farm slop?
Everything I write on my website or publish on my Facebook page is available for scraping. Yes, I own the copyright to that work, but I’m okay with AI ventures feeding that data to their monsters. If we want AI to be less monstrous we have to shape it. These incipient AIs are a very clear demonstration of what’s always been true; namely, that what we communicate (in words, music, painting, dancing, etc.) shapes our society.
If we want “nice” AIs we have to feed them decency.
And yes, I know it’s more complicated than that. AI ethicists are clear that the rules written into AIs must adhere to our social values. What’s under dispute are the nature of those values and how to resolve conflict between them. What is protected under freedom of speech? What should be forever silenced?
Maybe as the current adults in a world where a new sapience may emerge we should all communicate our best thoughts and hopes and be the people we hope the AIs will respect and imitate.
I’ve been binge-reading The Legend of the Arch Magus series by Michael Sisa. If you like overpowered heroes and can tolerate some violence in your fantasy novels, it’s good. I preferred the earlier books with the town building and discovering the world, but I’ll keep reading. Thankfully it’s in Kindle Unlimited so my book budget can survive the hit. The series is 14 books so far.
Despite all the algorithmic nonsense that rules our online lives, the best marketing tool remains word-of-mouth recommendations.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot because my books aren’t in bricks and mortar bookstores or libraries. Yes, I want to get paperback editions out, but that’s a 2026 goal and, even then, there’s a heap of hurdles before my paperbacks appear in-person (so to speak).
You see, in bookstores and libraries the booksellers and librarians advocate for books. They stock them and they promote them.
But when you’re online, your advocate is an uncaring bunch of algorithms and—vitally—real people.
Reviews from real people (as opposed to those from Scammer-McScammer-Mucky-Faces) teach the algorithms and make them unbelievably more effective at putting an author’s books in front of the right readers. Consequently, reviews are angel feathers from heaven for authors, especially for indie authors.
But even better than reviews are recommendations. When someone mentions my books to a new reader I swear, an angel gets their wings!
Looking at what I’ve recommended recently—not just books—reveals something fascinating. It took a bit of digging and self-reflection, but I persisted with the question of why I recommend so few things.
Recommendations require you to share part of yourself. A recommendation reveals what you value. If something left you happier, healthier, braver, or whatever the experience was, recommending it to someone permits them a peek into your life and soul. You’re inviting them to know you.
For some people being known is a thrill. Chasing intimacy is a joy in their life. However, for others of us, being known is scary. The truth is, though, that being known is the only way to build genuine, enduring connections. So, take a leap occasionally and share something you value with someone you value. A recommendation is a gift.
Last week I mentioned Patricia C Wrede, her fantasy novels, and their brilliant world-building. If you’re an author, let me recommend her advice on writing and world-building.
But I also want to talk about world-building from a different perspective. In creating Caldryn Parliament and its Realm I deliberately set about building a safe space. There is danger in it, as well as heartbreak and grief. Nonetheless, it is a space removed from real life; one where I can guarantee a happy ever after.
The intriguing aspect of a created safe space is that it becomes a place where we can play. Novels are where we safely explore and test ideas. In reading we become different people in different worlds making courageous decisions and surviving (at least in my books) to go on to new adventures.
Underpinning this concept of a safe space is Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, of “other spaces”.
Writing this post I took a deep breath, and then, opted for the sensible decision of providing you with a link to his thoughts on heterotopia rather than trying and failing to summarise them. This isn’t just intellectual inability or laziness on my part. The article I’m linking to gives so many jumping off points for understanding how the setting we choose for a novel frames the otherness of the story and contributes to what we explore.
So, thank you to MIT for sharing the article. It is a pdf and will probably download automatically, so please be aware of this before clicking the link: https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf
