week 04 / 2025
Slipping on the bison-skin cloak, dancing around the fire in the lowering light—WEEKNOTES will banish the unquiet spirits which ail you! This week, the train remounts the rails, and the deep past is as alien as the far future, while also as familiar as childhood itself.
Weave your way to the front and get a lung-full of the sacred smoke—it's time once again for WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency.
The year seems to be properly off the blocks now, which is good news. Let's see what made it into the ledger...
ticked off
- Fifteen hours on PROJECT HORNIMAN: comments upon and notes toward and drafting of a longish piece of theoretical writing. (Good to really spend a decent tranche of time on it, though it was the sort of binge in which you realise halfway through that the initial direction of travel was all wrong, and that you need to start again from scratch.So, very much “two steps forward, one step back” sort of territory—but hey, that still nets a step forward, right? And now I have a better feel for where it needs to go, too.)
- Five hours on PROJECT LOFTY, thinking through the worldbuilding side of a narrative prototype. (Thankfully LOFTY, which is framed and contracted as an art commission, was pitched in such a way that the worldbuilding stage actually provides usable material for the final deliverables. That wasn’t exactly planned for, though I suppose we can maybe credit my subconscious mind for this bit of creative foresight.)
- Seven and half hours of admyn, maybe more. (Some of these were not directly work-related, as they concerned my attempts to identify the necessary moves to re-up my residency permit and file my citizenship claim... but ploughing through paragraphs of obtuse bureaucratic Swedish feels enough like work that I’m listing it here anyway. This is why rich people have lawyers, I suppose.)
- Two and half hours of meetings related to PROJECT PORTON. (Onboarding stuff, mostly, so not exactly exciting—but nonetheless always agreeable to be doing contract work with the sort of outfit that deems onboarding around values as mission-critical as onboarding around, say, how and when to file your timesheets.)
- Two hours pasting up and posting the second part of my interview with Bruce Sterling on This Very Website.
- Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, de rigueur.
Busy week. Focussed week!
Also a week in which some more work came over the transom, albeit work that’s not happening until we're quite a number of months down the road. But you know what? I’ll take it.
kinmaking
Less a new connection than an established friend, but: I had a good long chat over Czech pivo and goulash with Hildreth England, which covered everything from the magic trick of creative triangulation to the solo-career lyrics of Jerry Cantrell, surviving front-man and guitarist of Alice in Chains.
Less kinmaking than knowledge-seeking, but: I also spent an hour around Thursday lunchtime in an online seminar about serious gaming for urban transitions and transformations, staged by JPI Urban Europe.
Plus some good meetings and chats are slipping into the schedule for the weeks and months ahead, so the kinmachine is spinning back up to speed. If you’d like to get on board yourself, do please drop me a line!
reading
Finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s Shaman this week; it was my second time reading it. It would be waaaay too strong a claim to say it’s KSR’s best novel, but I think it might be my favourite? Not science fiction, but nonetheless speculative in (I would argue) a very closely related way, Shaman recounts the adolescence of Loon, a young man of the ice age—though we would classify him as a child, because our lives are very different. KSR does a great job of bringing this home with the whole first section, which tells the tale of Loon’s “wander”, a coming-of-age expedition analogous to those which still feature in the customs of various aboriginal peoples.
Loon is turned out into the snowstorms of winter, stark-bollock naked and stripped of any of the many tools his people use regularly; the point is to prove that he can bootstrap himself back to a state in which he can survive the elements alone, making everything he needs from the world around him. And he does, though not without panic and incident and mishap and injury… and at the end of the section he literally limps back into camp, to the cheers and congratulations of his pack, and LSR delivers the kicker, in the form of the pack’s herb-woman saying to Loon “now you are twelve”.
BOOM.
It’s a fine and at times quite moving story, at least for me. I also find that it plays to KSR’s strengths, namely the evocation of natural landscape and the depiction of complex social dynamics, while not asking too much of what can at times be a rather utilitarian prose style. Recommended, even—or perhaps particularly?—if you’ve not read any of his stuff before.
a clipping
I read a lot of good stuff this week, but the best piece still stands out by a country mile, and has been sat in the back of my mind ever since I read it. I’m going to recommend it in particular to anyone among the readers of this journal who, like me, identifies politically as being on the left, and who is ready to start (or already is) asking how we of the left have failed so badly over the last decade or so.
If you are such a reader, a bunch of stuff in this piece will likely make you uncomfortable; you may even be tempted to mock or monster its author and the people they are writing about. I certainly felt both of those urges.
Those urges are exactly why we have failed. Until we face that fact, we will continue to fail.
I think I’d taken the end of history for granted; I’d wanted peace as much as these young men want someone to defend them. I’m compelled by great men, too; I studied classics, and own a bust of Julius Caesar that I bought as my 25th birthday present to myself. But I tend to take great and small men alike on their merits. And I don’t envy those that live in times that need them. I never once conceived of Trump as a world-historical figure marked by greatness. I think, perhaps, we get the great men we deserve.
OK, that’s all for this week. Hope all's well with you, dear readers.
This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 04 of 2025. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend who you think might also like it!
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