It's the start of SEASON SEVEN! And original co-host Rowenna Miller is back to join us in a reflection of how multiple years of doing this podcast has affected how each of us thinks about worldbuilding. What have we learned from our many amazing guests, and how have they inspired us to think about worldbuilding in new ways? Have our worldbuilding interests and focuses shifted? And since the real world we live in has been... um... interesting over the past several years, how has that -- and the changes in our own lives and careers -- influenced our work?

(Transcript for Episode 157 -- Thank you, scribes!)

Our Guest: Rowenna Miller is the author of the Unraveled Kingdom trilogy, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill, and The Palace of Illusions, as well as short fiction. She is also a prior cohost of this podcast! And also an English professor, and a fairly handy seamstress. She lives in Indiana with her husband, two daughters, four cats, and an ever-growing flock of chickens.

It's one of the first choices you'll make when writing a story, consciously or not: what point of view are you writing from? First person singular? Third person limited? Omniscient? Something else? The POV can affect a reader's experience of the narrative and the worldbuilding, either subtly or dramatically -- so how do you decide what's right for this story? Kate Elliott joins us to explore the possibilities!

In this episode, we look at how the point of view can shape both what you communciate about a world and how you communicate it. The POV shows the rhythms of life and can be a good way to feed worldbuilding to the reader -- but it can also expose a character's gaps in knowledge or their biases and prejudices! After all, a commoner and a noble living in same location will interact with different pieces of the world and in very different ways. That, in turn, can affect how the author thinks of the world: what we spotlight, where we might have gaps, and prompting a need to check our own biases. And on top of all of that, POV is also something with its own trends within genres and over time! So we dig into those influences as well.

Transcript for Episode 156

Our Guest: Kate Elliott has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for over thirty years with a particular focus in immersive world building and epic stories of adventure & transformative cultural change. She’s written epic fantasy, space opera, science fiction, Young Adult fantasy, and the Afro-Celtic post-Roman alternate-history fantasy with lawyer dinosaurs, Cold Magic, as well as two novellas set in the Magic: The Gathering multiverse. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Norton, and Locus Awards. Her novel Black Wolves won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Epic Fantasy 2015. She lives in Hawaii, where she paddles outrigger canoes and spoils her schnauzer.

We often think about "making things make sense" in worldbuilding and building internal consistency, scientific realism, and other logic-based considerations into our fiction -- But what happens when your worldbuilding principle is “What would be awesome?" Jim C. Hines, who embraced this principle for a forthcoming book, joins us to explore the possibilities!

The Rule of Cool, credit to, is defined thusly: "The limit of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness." In other words, if it's cool enough, you can get away with it. This often applies to sci-fi tech and fantasy magic. Let's be real, things like faster-than-light travel, lightsabers, and starfighters will always be "rule of cool", in one way or another (so far as we currently understand physics), and magic doesn't have to be something you break down and quantify and explain perfectly. So what can we play with? And where do those decisions intersect with narrative tone, genre standards, and reader expectations?

[Transcript TK]

Our Guest: Jim C. Hines is the author of the Magic ex Libris series, the Princess series of fairy tale retellings, the humorous Goblin Quest trilogy, and the Fable Legends tie-in Blood of Heroes. He also won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. His latest novel is Terminal Peace, book three in the humorous science fiction Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse trilogy. He lives in mid-Michigan with his family.