How can language help shape your worldbuilding? We're not necessarily talking about conlang here -- that can certainly be part of worldbuilding, but it doesn't have to be, and many works of speculative fiction manage perfectly fine without invented languages. But the words you choose in description and dialogue will also communicate something to your reader.

There are so many ways that words can create the vibes for your world: the aural quality of different languages, choosing character and place names, the cadence and flow of sentences, and the conscious emulation of other genres or eras. We also explore what the conceptual availability of certain ideas, technologies, or worldviews may mean for the vocabulary, idioms, and metaphors of a culture. Being very intentional about word choice can help a writer communicate a location's aesthetic, let a reader know what to expect from a book's tone, help reveal character through dialogue, and even drop information about all your other worldbuilding in quick and subtle ways. And since we are huge word nerds, we delight in examining all of it!

The episode begins, however, with a 15-minute diversion into how much we love Shakespeare, so -- enjoy that! And happy birthday, Bill!

We are also delighted to announce that we are, for the fifth year in a row, a Finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Fancast! Anyone who has a WSFS membership for this year can vote, and we would love your consideration. Membership costs $50 and gets you access to the voters' packet, digital versions of almost everything you'll find on the Finalists lists -- novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, poetry, and even audio and video.

[Transcript for Episode 153 -- Thank you, Scribes!]

Sometimes, people will say of a book that "the setting is another character". But what does that really mean, and how can a writer craft it? Ai Jiang joins us to discuss creating worlds and settings that have their own personalities! From the physical geography to the architecture, from the scale of the location to its dynamism, writers can make a lot of choices to make their setting feel unlike any other.

The setting can do a lot to set the mood and tone of a story. Is it bright and peppy, or dark and gloomy? What's the vibe? The overlap between setting and aesthetic can be quite high, communicating a lot to your reader about what they might expect from the story and characters.

We also often talk about how characters are the products of their circumstances -- and that means they're also products of their surroundings! What about the physical space that they exist in, or have existed in during their life, has shaped them?

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Our Guest: Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, Ignyte, Bram Stoker, and Nebula Award winner, and Hugo, Astounding, Locus, Aurora, and BFSA Award finalist from Changle, Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. Her work can be found in F&SF, The Dark, The Masters Review, among others. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop’s 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of A Palace Near the Wind, Linghun and I AM AI. Find her on X (@AiJiang_), Insta (@ai.jian.g), and online (http://aijiang.ca).

In amazing fantasy and science fiction worlds -- Who's doing the work? Where does the food come from? The clothes? Who does the caregiving? Guest august clarke joins us to discuss the hands and bodies that create a society.

Labor is something that’s often sort of invisible in stories if it’s not explicitly the driving focus of a book – So, why is that? How can authors better incorporate labor into their worlds? Labor intersects with so many other components of a world, after all: ideas about currency and property, concepts of time, religion, social class, technology. With labor touching so much of our characters' lives, where do we use SFF to examine & explore our world’s labor issues, and where can we get creative and try to imagine escaping dominant paradigms?

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About Our Guest: august clarke is here and queer, etc. They have been published in PRISM international, Portland Review, and Eidolon. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Young Adult Fiction and a Locus Award, Dragon Award, and Pushcart nominee. They researched queerness, labor, and monstrosity at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the indie-bestselling series The Scapegracers, which he writes as H. A. Clarke.