18 Worldbuilding with Simon Roy and C.M. Kosemen

Posted on October 10, 2016 by dan

A Martian

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To celebrate the publishing of my Martian Sherlock Holmes short story, “The Lords of the World,” this is a re-release of a conversation I had with Simon Roy and Memo Kosemen back in 2013. Today we’ve ganged up to talk about worldbuilding and to, you know, build a world.

It all goes back to a conversation I had with Memo back in 2009 and the wild speculation that resulted. Actually it goes back to a book called War of the Worlds, but nobody’s heard of that, I’m sure.

Themes discussed include:

Postcolonial Africa

The Balkans

The former Soviet Union

The Caucasus

The British Empire’s ethnic division funtimes

Proxies in the Cold War

Crazy Nationalist Mythology

Religious Martians who make pilgrimage to Mount Olympus or the Head Rock. You know the one I’m talking about.

Episcopalians in Africa

The War Nerd on post-colonial Africa

Planet of Adventure! By Jack Vance.

Skull Deformation

Fallen Stars

And what conversation about post-colonial oppression would be complete without Slobodan Milošević and Robert Mugabe?

 

 

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  • Peter Queckenstedt

    I found this blog and podcast because I had stumbled across Prophet and wanted to find out more about Simon Roy. These discussions are really cool to listen in on and I would be excited to see these kinds of chats evolve further. Lots of fun, thanks for taking the time to put this stuff up!

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  • Loving this podcast. If you are taking requests, go long form. I could listen to this sort of high level storytelling theory and real time plot breaking for an hour or more.

    • bensendaniel

      Thanks! I love storytelling theory too. 🙂

      I’m also open to requests about topics.

      Part of the reason I split up our conversations is to cater to people with short attention spans 🙂 The other reason, though, is this way I can keep up a steady stream of podcasts. If I have time, though, I’ll try to post some more supplementary stuff over and above the weekly podcast.

      By the way, if you liked this podcast and want more, here is some further discussion of Martian Law (http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/?p=2313 )

      Here is the story, itself (http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/?p=2351 )

      And here is the current conversation I’m having with Simon about his post-apocalyptic project (http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/?p=2490 )

      • Yeah I’ve been digging in for most of an afternoon. I work as an artist in the game industry, which leaves great big patches of time to fill at my desk. Podcasts are great for keeping the brain active without distracting from my work. I would wager, though i have nothing to support it, that most podcast listeners have longer attention spans than other audio media consumers.
        TOPIC REQUEST! World building is something I enjoy doing (most of time by accident), but it can in some ways be putting the cart before the horse. How do you take the fancy high concept world you’ve made and decide which plot best explores that world?

        • bensendaniel

          Good request. Worldbuilding versus Storytelling is a topic I spend a lot of time th9nking about. There are some podcasts already in the queue where I will touch on it more or less directly. In the mean time, here’s a discussion I had with the people at SpecEvo on that very subject http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/?p=2126

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