Worldbuilding for Masochists Episode 149: Especially the Lies: Building Unreliable Worlds, ft. MARINA LOSTETTER
What happens when the world your characters -- or your readers -- first find themselves in turns out to be not quite what it appears? Marina Lostetter joins us to explore the different ways that a writer can play with an unreliable world. Maybe it means a story of scientific discovery that reshapes how their characters perceive their place in the universe; maybe it means a story where information has been deliberately suppressed and has to be fought for; maybe it's a world where knowledge has simply been lost and must be recovered. It could even mean a world that is, itself, changing as the story goes on!
What are the challenges for on-boarding readers to an unreliable world? How is it different in a story that starts in what seems to be our modern real world and then reveals the Matrix or a portal universe versus a story that begins in a fantasy world, so that the author has to get the reader up to speed on that before they can start introducing the world's secrets? What role does self-mythologizing play at both the personal and the societal level? How about the pressure of a character maintaining a lie, either for themself, someone else, or their whole nation? Building these things may mean thinking about your world in layers of who knows what -- and how easy or difficult it is to peel back those layers.
We also wrangle with the difficulty in combining an unreliable world with an unreliable narrator. Characters lying to teach other is one thing -- but a narrative lying to the reader or viewer is a riskier choice! It can be beautiful when done well -- but it can also be a breach of trust that impairs the overall story.
About Our Guest: The open skies and dense forests of the Pacific Northwest are ideal for growing speculative fiction authors–or, at least, Marina would like to think so. Originally from Oregon, she now resides in Arkansas with her spouse, Alex. In her spare time she enjoys globetrotting, board games, and all things art-related. Her original short fiction has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed, Uncanny, and Shimmer Magazine. Her space opera trilogy NOUMENON and the stand-alone space adventure ACTIVATION DEGRADATION are available from Harper Voyager. The first two books in her first dark fantasy trilogy, THE HELM OF MIDNIGHT and THE CAGE OF DARK HOURS, are out from Tor. In addition, she has written tie-in materials for Star Citizen and the Aliens franchise. She is represented by DongWon Song of the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and she skeets on Bluesky as @MarinaLostetter.