Week Three: Writing New Mythologies

Reading Assignment: This week we are reading A Hundred Thousand Kingdoms a fantasy novel by N. K. Jemisin. After having experimented a bit with building our own worlds, we will try to take what we have learned as a platform to begin looking at how Jemisin is building her world. Jemisin is becoming one of the most important authors in the fantasy genre and is one of the most interesting world-builders in contemporary fantasy. 

Her work is different at the assumptive level than the seemingly endless fantasies that are placed in white supremacist, patriarchal, hetero-normative worlds, and her assumptions are very skillfully represented and expressed. In addition, her concepts have a cosmic reach that elevates the experience of reading her work onto an archetypal plane. 

Please read as much of the book as you can before coming to class.

In Class: This week we will be discussing the novel assigned for this week. We will undertake to examine the following questions (feel free to think about them before coming to class):

1. From the syllabus of Junot Diaz for his course in world-building for the Writing program at M.I.T.:

What are the primary features of this world--spatial, cultural, biological, fantastic, cosmological? 

What is the world’s ethos (the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize the world)? 

What are the precise strategies that are used by its creator to convey the world to us and us to the world? 

How are our characters connected to the world? 

And how are we the viewer or reader or player connected to the world?”


2. In the second half of the class I would like to discuss the situation for diverse creators in the current mediascape. and especially the situation for women making genre. 
 
“Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”--Samuel R. Delany from the Paris Review Interview Here

In the Land of Make Believe, Racial Diversity is a Fantasy--Washington Post Opinion Piece

N.K. Jemisin's Blog is Here

Link to Feminist Frequency and Anita Sarkeesian's important examination of the representation of women in video games. 

William Gibson Interview in which he discusses his own world-building and the origins of cyberspace as a locale for fiction.