the scenario doesn’t know it’s a scenario: an interview with Madeline Ashby

Madeline Ashby is many things, but the two main things—as her website will tell you—are “author” and “futurist”. With regard to the former, she has five novels to her name so far—the Machine Dynasty trilogy (vN, iD, ReV), Company Town, and last year's Glass Houses—plus her non-fiction collaboration with Scott Smith, How to Future.

The knowledge and experience that went into that last title came from various sources: her (second) Master's degree in strategic foresight, of course, but also consulting work for organisations like the World Bank and the World Health Organisation, often with storytelling as a central element of her contributions.

As you will discover below, Madeline is a super-strong advocate of the character-driven approach to worldbuilding, and also the (perhaps less well known?) IKEA-visiting approach to rewriting. Names that surface in our discussion range from Christopher Nolan to Thelma Schoonmaker, from Walter Ong to Orphan Black; we talk about the US Plain Writing Act, about the vital sentence or two that makes the whole story come to life... and about the pinnacle sin of slide-deck presentations.

(Please note: this interview was actually recorded over a year ago, in early 2024.)

Paul Graham Raven: Can you tell us what it says on your business card—if indeed you have a business card?

Madeline Ashby: Well, I did have business cards. I think my last business card from Changeist, Scott Smith and Susan Cox-Smith’s firm, said “futurist” or “critical futurist”, I can’t recall. And I did have business cards that at one point said “strategic foresight consultant”. I always kind of wanted one that said “overeducated ne’er-do-well”, I feel as though that would probably be more accurate. Another would be “intellectually promiscuous”. Like, you know—go between a lot of disciplines, get interested in different things.

I feel like the dirty secret about academia and novel writing is that, much like writing a dissertation, a novel is about things that you are interested in at the time, meeting your ability to express that interest or explain it to people in a way that doesn’t bore them. It’s really about the eternal desire to tell other people how cool something is in a way that doesn’t make them want to abandon you. That’s really the big task of writing a novel: how can I keep you here long enough to hear about how cool this thing is? And that’s why we have to add drama to it.

I really do see it as this as very similar to writing a dissertation or a master’s thesis or any kind of capstone project, that you are putting all of your obsessions in one place. And I think filmmakers do that, I think designers do that, everyone who’s doing creative work is basically doing that, and they’re constantly updating the story of their own obsessions.

PGR: That may explain that sense one sometimes gets, in the professions you’ve just listed and others—you know, finding oneself among other people who spent a lot of their childhood saying “no, no, no, wait, come back!”

MA: Yes!

PGR: But okay, let’s park that one. Hashtag not-all-socially-awkward-people…

MA: Right. Correct.

PGR: What were you mostly doing about a year ago, work wise?

MA: I would have been prepping a novel called Glass Houses, which is coming out in August 2024 from Tor Books. I would have been doing… not final rewrites, but like, the rewrites which became the sort-of-acceptable rewrites? I feel people don’t necessarily understand that novels sort of accrete like coral. They sort of build over time in layers, between writes and rewrites, and parts erode and then parts grow back and then other parts come in, and different fish come along and swim through holes that you didn’t know were there.

To me, the act of writing a novel—the successive writes and rewrites of a novel—are very similar to shopping in IKEA. The first time you walk through an IKEA, because all of them are slightly different, based on the available space, you’re on the track where you see every demo room, every little space that they’ve curated, and there’s all kinds of little things that you can pick up and scan with your phone and look at, and kids running around, and, like, the smells of meatballs and whatever. And you go very slowly, because you’re picking everything up, you’re looking at it and you’re sort of evaluating—does this fit? Could I buy this? What is this? Is this me?

The second time through IKEA, you might also go through that process. But the third and fourth and however many more times until you die, you start to notice things like, oh—there’s the shortcut! And the shortcut was always there; the thing that you left behind you in the draft was always there. It’s a tunnel that you left for yourself to get out of a crowd or a clot or a point of friction, or what have you.

I think in the act of writing, when it’s really clicking, you see those tunnels almost instantly. And then by the end—by the rewrite stage, the re-rewrite stage, the many stages of getting the novel into production, which is what I was in most recently—that’s when you actually just go straight to the inventory section and follow the little map, like “oh, we go to here to this thing to fix this,” and I order it or I pick it off the shelf and I know what I’m fixing, I know exactly where it’s going to go, exactly what to do with it. I know how to build it, because I’ve done it a million times before.

And that, unfortunately, is a very sort of acquisitive, capitalist metaphor for like what it feels like to write a book! Because you are building something, but you’re also seeking the things that will give you the capacity to build it. You have to know if it goes with everything else. Is it deliberately clashing? Are we changing the aesthetic of something? What does that aesthetic say?

I mention this because last year I did a little project that was in part funded by IKEA, with Anab Jain at Superflux—I did this tiny, like, n-th of an n-th of a percentage of it, talking about the future of New York City. And I ended up just writing a long essay about my grandfather’s time in New York.

Until the United States joined the second world war, my grandfather had been a lifelong New Yorker; he was born in the cold-water tenements on the east side in 1912, the same year that the Titanic sailed. He was there until ‘41, doing a lot of jobs he did not tell his kids about, and then going off to England to repair the planes that helped Nazis die. So I ended up writing about a lot of his history and how that would change—how his history would have been different in a different century, I guess—as kind of a way in.

Another thing that I did was writing a short story for a publication that is as of now only out in French, it’s called Black Trends. It was a short story called “Alert”, and it’s about the murder of a scientist at the Alert station at the top of Canada in the Arctic, and why that might have happened, the sort of various security crises and other threats that happen in what I ended up calling “the cold rush”—the melting of massive chunks of ice, opening up the trade channel up there, and things like deep sea computation, changes to the wildlife and changes to messaging landscape… you know, what happens when the big money goes anywhere is that place then becomes this instant honeypot, right? So, what happens when that’s a frozen landscape that very few people understand? I mean, I’ve watched a huge amount of documentaries, I did a lot of research and read a lot of truly scary trends reports, but I wouldn’t say that I understand it at all.

PGR: No boots on the ground, eh?

MA: Exactly. I mean, I would love to go, if anybody is offering trips!

PGR: We’ll pass that on to the many Arctic exploration firms that we’re in contact with… it’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it, right?

MA: Mmmhmm.

PGR: What really leaps out is... as you said earlier, you do a lot of things that involve telling people about things that you want them to be excited about.

MA: Well, interested in...

PGR: How about: things to which you believe they should pay attention, for one reason or another?

MA: Yeah, okay!

PGR: Right—so we’ve just set that on the table, so to speak. Now: if I say the word “worldbuilding” to you, what do you take it to mean? And what relation does it have to your practice?

MA: So I came up through if not the oldest, then definitely one of the oldest, genre science fiction writing workshops in Canada, which is the Cecil Street Irregulars. It’s been around since, I think, before I was born. And we practice the Milford model, the hot-seat model—I think it’s the same model the CIA uses in their workshops, or did when Iowa was being founded.

Worldbuilding in sf has a very particular context: you are building a world that is different from the world that the majority of people—or the majority of your readership, the majority of your audience, maybe not of the world—would recognize. Because I could be writing about what life is like today in Toronto, where I live, and people who are in another spot on the planet would not necessarily be clued in to that. Even Americans, I would say—there’s definitely an uncanny-valley feeling that Americans have, and that I had when I came to Canada, which was like “oh, the same things are different” and so on. It’s tilted just that little bit in this other direction, just enough to kind of be unsettling—which is why David Cronenberg is such a great filmmaker, because he is just always that little bit into that zone.

Now, I am not a person who is interested in reading a massive Star Wars crawl at the beginning of your book, or your report about how the world is different. I don’t necessarily need a list, I don’t necessarily need a many-paragraph description. I prefer in my own work to dribble those details out and give you only as much as you need to keep going. What the Turkey City Lexicon calls infodumps, I find those exquisitely boring and torturous, and I try to avoid them as much as humanly possible. When I come across them in fiction of any kind, my eyes tend to glaze over because it’s not characters doing things—and characters, I think, are what actually moves the story.

So there’s this ongoing debate in sf right now—or in genre, I should say, because it’s fantasy as well, and it’s all universes and portal stories and whatever—about how much of the “world” should you have “built”, before you start telling the story? And for me, it’s kind of the reverse—I think that the world gets built the more you think about what the characters are doing, because characters do things that are in character for them, within the box of the available options that you’ve set out in that kind of world.

So I often in my own writing, I sort of find the answer to something as I’m sitting there—and I hate to say, but the answer is to sit down and do it, which no writer ever wants to hear. You’re gonna find what the world is really like through the behavior of the characters who inhabit it, right? They’re the ones who end up telling you what’s going on, what might work… and they tell it to you in a really specific voice. So I end up seeing the characters and plot and emotions before I see a lot of the world; then in successive drafts it sort of percolates upward. Which is kind of contra how I think most genre writers are told to do it?

But to me, that’s just how it comes along. And that’s in part, I think, because I’ve been immersed in it for longer, right? I’ve been, for lack of a better term, method acting… when I’m working, when I’m writing for these characters, then the longer I’m immersed in them, the longer I’m performing them, the more detail I see about the place that they live, or the world in which they live, if that makes any sense.

PGR: Yeah, I think so. I think that it may once have been different, but for as long as I’ve been paying attention, in the default discourse on how one should write science fiction, the character driven argument very much takes precedent. So that’s probably a good 20 years now. I think that’s very much the dominant paradigm.

I’m thinking particularly of after the great New Weird debates, you know, with Mike Harrison’s famous statement about the “clomping foot of nerdism”, so on and so forth. You know: we all understand it happens, this worldbuilding stuff, but it’s a bit declassé, isn’t it?

MA: I guess it depends on the kind of fiction that you are trying to write and the kind of audience that you are writing for, because some people are genuinely very into the details—like, they almost want more of the world than they want character, emotion, development, even plot. And some people are more plot readers—they just do not have time for the evocation of emotion, the evocation of feeling, the evocation of sensory detail, if it’s not serving the plot. Those are just different types of readers, people who enjoy different things out of whatever it is that they’re reading Selfishly, I hope that those people continue to [focus on worldbuilding], because the longer they keep building their world, the fewer times they actually submit work! [laughs] That’s good for me.

I don’t imagine things in order, I guess. I try to impose some order when I’m working with clients—that’s one of the differences, I think, between my creative practice of straight commercial fiction and then my creative practice for writing foresight scenarios for clients. The client work is for sure more constrained in terms of word count, the time period that we’re talking about, the demographic that we’re talking about, the problems that we’re talking about... it’s like, you know, “make dinner out of durian, marshmallow fluff and beef jerky”. So I think that there’s definitely situations where you have to be more ordered and more disciplined, in part so that you can explain it to other people: here’s why I did this!

And that’s not wrong—like, to me that’s not a hassle. To me that’s a thing I should probably do more often! But when it’s just me by myself, and I’m the one making, I’m the one discovering, I’m the one trying to put it together… then it’s a different story. It’s a different process, it’s more luxuriant, I would say.

A thing that I really wish I had understood about writing those scenarios and doing that kind of work earlier on in my career—one, I wish my brain had been better and more organized. Two, I took for granted a lot that people understood that the scenario doesn’t know it’s a scenario. The same is true of most fiction: the people in a novel don’t know that they’re in a novel, the people that are in a short story don’t know that they’re in one, they aren’t behaving as though they are in one. They believe that they are living their life, right? They’re method acting, too, in a weird way.

The scenario takes place from the point of view of people in it, so there’s a huge amount that they take for granted, and you are meant to read from your own perspective about what they take for granted. But that’s a layer, that’s a cognitive layer, or a perspectival layer. It’s like an f-stop on a camera or something like that, where you’re like “okay, I am aware that I am looking at something through a lens”, but you have to be aware that no one else, no one in the story sees the lens, right? No one knows they’re on camera.

And I really wish that I had explained myself more, but I was worried about being tiresome and boring, and also I kind of didn’t feel like I had the authority to do that—like, they asked you for the story, not for an explanation, you know what I’m saying? They have their own explanation, it’s already there in the fact that they came to you for this thing. Why should you explain, why should you belabor the point?

I had a conversation with my friend Karl Schroeder, when I was doing some work for the WHO at the beginning of the pandemic. I wrote a suite of short stories, I was commissioned to do them in spring of 2020 and they were set, I believe, in October of 2021; they were about, you know, what would life be like in certain areas, given certain things?

And I said to Karl, “this is probably one of the biggest jobs, some of the most important work I’ll ever be asked to do; do you have any advice?” And he basically said, well, if you’re concerned, what you need to do is write something at the top of each short story that says what it is there to do. These people—if you’re lucky, they’ll read all of them, but these people are extremely busy. Their executive function is getting pulled every which way, right? So, you have to make it simpler for them, easier to grasp, so put a little executive summary at the top.

And that blew my mind—because I was always worried about being condescending with those, if that makes sense? And then last year, something really caused me to rethink a lot of things. I found out from a friend of mine who’s an attorney in New York, their entire business had to redo all its documentation to fit with the US Plain Writing Act. The Plain Writing Act makes sure that all documentation that federal contractors work with follows guidelines that are visually and cognitively clear for the widest possible variety of readers. There’s guidance on opacity, word choice, structure, how many clauses are in the sentence.

Once I understood that from the perspective of a federal standard—like, you know, you have to build this sentence like you’re building a road! It has to meet certain standards before anybody can use it. Again, back to that building metaphor: are we building something that everybody can use? Are we welcoming people into our space?

You know, architecture degrees when you’re an undergrad are not about how you build a building. That’s a very different degree! They are about how buildings are used, how spaces are used… so now I think, or I try to: are these stories for everybody? That perspective, to me that’s actually a challenge, and it’s a worthwhile one.

PGR: I’m reminded of the way my teeth would grind when it was like, “okay, I’ve written the academic paper, now I have to write the abstract.” If I could have written it in 300 words, I wouldn’t have just written it in 7,000 words, you know?!

MA: I will share a helpful tip for anyone in grad school! I went to a Jesuit university for undergrad, I was part of an honors program there that was really just a classics program—it was like Heraclitus to Hitler in just two years. You’re gonna see the same twenty people every day for two years, and you’re gonna go through history, literature, and philosophy. You won’t have written tests, you’re going to have oral exams, because we’re training you to be PhDs—we’re giving you little baby thesis defenses.

And because they were training us for eventual grad school, one of the techniques that they taught us, I forget what the term for it was, but if you are reading exceptionally dense material, highlight the topic sentence and the closer sentence of every paragraph and nothing else—especially literary theory, which I love because it is philosophy and reading and worldbuilding.

PGR: It’s really interesting that you compare philosophy and theory to worldbuilding, because I came to that same conclusion having been a science fiction writer first, and then going to [grad school] and just finding that social theory—thinking that way, writing that way—used basically the same brain muscle as reading and writing sf, if you like. There’s that sense of having to construct a thing in the head...

MA: It’s a lens through which you view reality, And in the era of virtual production, this is really easy to forget, but lenses in film-making exist for a reason; aspect ratios exist for a reason! One of the reasons people get really fascinated by the work of Christopher Nolan is that he deliberately switches between the IMAX aspect ratio and and more traditional aspect ratios; he will go in and out of those things, deliberately. I think people are not attracted necessarily to the scope and scale; everybody thinks that’s what it is, but that’s not what they’re into. What they’re into is the intentionality of someone providing that change for you. It’s a thing he did for you, it’s a thing he did to elicit a reaction in you. It is the seduction of the viewer. Right? I’ve provided this thing, this thing for you...

It’s the same as, if you go to a sushi master, you’re there not because you love fish, you’re there because you want what the master can do and no one else can do. So we can think about how we show people a world in the same way—like, are we pulling wide? Are we drawing down in? What are we showing to people, and when, is a huge consideration. Like, what does the reader know and when do they know it? It’s hugely important.

This came up when I was working with Malka Older and Heli Kennedy and E. C. Myers and Lindsay Smith, we did this audio drama with Realm Media for Orphan Black—it was a continuation of the Orphan Black TV series. Now, Orphan Black has always been very intricately plotted while also dispensing, usually quite accurately, very interesting information about things like genetic engineering, genetic copyright and, and so on. So, in doing our own version of that, the whole project taught me how to outline in a way I never learned how to do it before; we did sort of storybreaking, writer’s-room style work. I’d never been a comfortable outliner, and this project was the one that taught me, in part because there’s a massive amount of information that the reader—or listener, in this case—has to be familiar with, and deciding what they know and when they know it is hugely important.

And that in itself is also building the world, right? Like, am I giving you everything all at once, or am I handing you a small but powerful flashlight so you can get into the corners on your own? Am I giving you a lens that is so wide it’s almost blurry at the edges, a 70mm lens? Or am I getting you into like the tiniest macro detail? And again, it goes back to the plain language thing: I am here providing something, I’m creating an experience for you. How you build the world with words, or with any other detail, should be fundamentally an act of generosity.

PGR: Though at the same time, because there is always that need to withhold until the appropriate moment... it’s generous, but it’s also necessarily a bit of a come-on as well, right?

MA: Sure. I mean, it’s tool usage. To hear Walter J Ong describe it, we humans were once oral storytellers only, and we carried a lot of information in our stories. He says that most tellings of the Iliad and the Odyssey have extremely fine-grained information about how to sacrifice an animal appropriately, because to that culture, that was incredibly vital information. But there’s also stuff about how you build a ship, how you sail these seas, this is what a good sky looks like… all these different things are contained within that story to help people remember. There’s also a huge number of mnemonic devices in that oral literature, and there is also—especially in epic poetry, obviously—cadence. And that’s still very important in reading and writing, and other media—because the rhythm of how something is told, the timing of how something is told, the editing of what we say and when, or what people know and when, or what they see and when, is hugely important. Thelma Schoonmaker, she’s Martin Scorsese’s lifelong editor, she edited the vast majority of his films, and she famously said in an interview “well, they’re not violent until I edit them!”

And having just gone through this with a book, it’s like, you know, the book got stronger the more we cut away from it...

PGR: Yeah, that’s always the painful lesson, isn’t it?

MA: Yes. Yeah. And again, it’s about how I can get you to listen to this thing that I think is so cool? And often, it’s by giving you only this much, right? By hinting only at this one thing…

PGR: By hinting at the right thing.

MA: … at the right thing, yeah.

So I did a short story for my friends August Cole and Peter W. Singer at Useful Fiction. I wrote a short story that eventually got read at NORAD. I feel like you have to choose, when you’re writing, especially with stories that take place within a foresight scenario, within a world that has been researched and developed and so on… when you are writing one of those, it’s not like writing for commercial fiction, where everybody is already a reader. You’re writing for people who may not read a lot of fiction, who may not read a lot generally, or whose experience of reading has been made painful by the amount of official documentation they have to read. They may have a very rough relationship with reading.

Given that, you have to then pick a perspective or a point of view character, the person or narrator that a broader variety of people can identify with. So I wrote this short story about, you know, quite terrible things happening—but I wrote it from the point of view of a thirteen year old boy delivering a presentation in class, because it’s an easy expository thing, you know: he has to explain it to the entire class. And one detail that I included was another kid in class bullying him, and saying “that’s not true, my dad says it was the so-and-sos who actually did this,” and he advances a conspiracy theory in class, which may actually have happened, that might be the thing—like, you don’t find out.

But later, when I was talking about it with August and some other people, he said he loved that. That’s only one sentence—you just drop it in the pot, you drop it in there and it tells the reader everything that they need to know about how this event has played out, how the public impression of this event has unfolded. Because there’s one line, this kid not believing another kid, trying to score points in his own petty way… which is a very human thing, I think everybody’s had that happen to them, or maybe been that person doing that. It’s a recognizable human moment, many years in the future.

And I think that’s part of the challenge: how do we create really recognizable, understandable, relatable human moments in those stories? Because otherwise, if the world is so built that most of your document is just describing it, I mean, that could just be a PowerPoint! I try to do things that can’t be explained in a single PowerPoint slide, or to evoke things that aren’t, you know, “deck friendly”. Because otherwise, what’s the point?

PGR: Yeah, the PowerPoint slide is one of those lenses, but it’s one that works in a particular way for a particular audience. And we could get theoretical about it, we can talk about the very reductive power of it—I mean, the PowerPoint slide is one of Haraway’s God tricks, right?

MA: It’s like an infographic, like a hieroglyph. It is a meaning device—a meaning-sharing device, but it does it in a visual and textual way; animation is there, sometimes. Again, it is constraining your vision to a purpose, but it is quite deliberate in that—it can be very dense. Not wall-of-text dense, of course… the best background is the cleanest one, the best PowerPoint is just a series of images while someone is talking.

PGR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone needs to remind an awful lot of academics that.

MA: It’s true. It’s true. I speak from personal experience of having made this mistake. Learn from my mistakes!

PGR: Same. I have a theory where, okay, you can have text on the slide, but having text on the slide that you then read out loud is just the worst thing for everyone in the universe. You can feel galaxies die as that happens.

MA: I could be at the buffet right now! I could be doing literally anything else.

PGR: Literally, literally anything else.

Massive thanks to Madeline for taking the time to chat—and to you for taking the time to read. If you wanted to go buy one of Madeline's books (or hire her to do some foresight work!) you'd be making a wise and informed choice, and I'm sure she'd be very grateful.