by Ray Nayler
Ray Nayler returns to Asimov’s with “Catch a Tiger in the Snow” in our [November/December issue, on sale now!] Here Ray discusses an oft-overlooked source of inspiration that helped him write this latest short story
The other day, I was walking my six-year-old daughter home from school. As we passed by a bed of flowers, she pointed at them and said, “Papa, look at those flowers. They just planted them! Don’t forget to notice things.”
It was a piece of advice I have given her a number of times, that she was now returning to me. Notice things about the world. Pay attention to it. It’s ok to daydream, but also wake up. “Be alert,” as David Lynch once said. “Do the work!” Look around you and see the world.
In that moment with my daughter, I was not following my own advice. As sometimes happens, I was a bit rushed to get home, trying to do too much, thinking about the next thing. So hearing my own advice reflected back to me was, in fact, exactly what I needed.
Many treatises exist on the creative aspects of writing—the imagining of plots, the invention of characters and conversations, and—especially in SF, the attention to the rules of the world in which those interactions are occurring. This last aspect, in SF, is often referred to as “worldbuilding,” which like many bits of jargon is a word I liked the first time I heard it, and then cared for less and less as it was used more loosely to apply to—well, just about all aspects of an SF story or book. So now one hears all the time about an author’s “imaginative worldbuilding” but quite often in a floppy, lazy way that communicates nothing insightful.
Imagination is an undeniably important aspect of creativity. But creativity is much more than simply “imagining” something new. Even more than imagination, I think observation of the mundane, present, everyday world is what enables convincing, creative, expansive worldbuilding. Without it, imagination is useless.
Paul Virilio said, “when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck,” highlighting the unintended, unforeseen (and often negative) consequences of new technologies. But the SF writer, creating a world that a reader can immerse themselves in, needs to go further than ships and shipwrecks. An SF writer needs to capture the nuances of how invented technologies and other novums interact with their characters, how they alter the world around them over years or decades, how they interact with culture, changing and being changed by it.
In order to do this, we SF writers have to be alert and do the work. We need to watch how existing technologies and structures, human and natural, social and governmental, ecological and industrial, interact in our world. This allows us to model the cascading possibilities, affordances and limitations our own novum introduces.
Even more than imagination, I think observation of the mundane, present, everyday world is what enables convincing, creative, expansive worldbuilding. Without it, imagination is useless.
One example that comes to mind is observing the impact (because it is such a dominant feature of the American landscape, and the global landscape) of the automobile. Note the feeling of driving at night down a massive superhighway, passing towns reduced to nothing more than a blurry web of lights out in the darkness. Observe the trash that always collects at the margin of the roads. Think of the terrible cost our cars impose on animals. Watch the blank, lost faces of commuters waiting at stoplights, half-conscious. Think of the sense of freedom, as a counterpoint, of a line of two-lane blacktop stretching to the horizon: one of the core symbols of the American experience.
Then transfer all of this observation to your novum. Think deeper than the positive-negative binaries of ship and shipwreck. What will the first generation that encounters this technology think of it? As they aged, people whose childhoods were in the gaslight-and-horses era, and whose adult lives were spent in the electricity-and-automobiles era, felt nostalgic when they heard the increasingly rare clopping of horses’ hooves. In a post-combustion-engine era, would the growl of a combustion engine evoke nostalgia, like the clopping of a horse’s hooves once did? In a world of unlimited rocket travel, would the sound of a distant rocket launch be something like the horn of a train in the night, evoking the same longing feelings for travel?
What trash will this new thing leave behind? Will the charred landscapes of rocket pads be strewn with empty packets of astronaut food and discarded ripstop flight suits? Will robotic garbage-eating jellyfish sometimes malfunction, bursting and strewing garbage back into the sea, compounded with their gelatinous corpses?
What feelings will its ruins call up? Would an abandoned and outdated rocket pad evoke, for a future resident of that rocket-infused world, the same sense of nostalgia and loss that an old Esso station with its bubble-headed gas pumps along a highway does for people traveling Route 66? Will the future inhabitants of Mars be fascinated by how “retro” the husks of the early human settlements look? Will groups of teenagers go exploring through abandoned asteroid mining colonies? What happens to the future when it ages and becomes the past?
There are so many other questions to be answered. Who fixes it when it breaks? Who has to live next to the factory where it is made? Who works there? What do they smell like when they get off work? What do they have to wash off their skin? Are they underpaid? Well compensated for a dangerous job? Where are the materials sourced? Who takes the thing apart after it has exhausted its useful life?
So many questions. These are questions answered imaginatively, of course, but fine-tuning the imagination so that it can be granular and specific, mingling the rich details of lived experience with invention to create a convincing alternate world, requires a vast amount of observation.
That’s why worldbuilding begins at home, in attentive observation of the world we live in. The here and now.
It was this attention to the world around me, on a day when I was not feeling so distracted, that inspired my story in this issue of Asimov’s. I heard my daughter in the other room, chanting a typical school refrain: “Eeny meeny miny mo. Catch a tiger in the snow . . .”
And from that, a story began to take shape . . .
From Earth to the Stars 