week 03 / 2025

“Hello, good evening, welcome / to nothing much”—it’s WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency, the only critical foresight research journal that quotes marginal British indie-rock acts of the early 1990s in the hope of you appreciating the irony.

Things still feel like they’re moving slowly, but we can put that down to two days spent on the induction process at STPLN, where I am to be incubated as a creative entrepreneur over the coming year. What does that mean? I’m still not entirely sure! It’s one of those things whose doing will apparently be worked out in the process of its being done.

What I can tell you is that it looks like I’ll be spending a year in the company of a dozen or so young artists of prodigious talent and originality, and (it seems) wrestling with a savage case of imposter syndrome.

Plus ça change, I guess! But what else of the week, hmm?

ticked off

• Ten hours up at STPLN, as already mentioned. (A bit more than ten, really, as I hung around chatting a while afterwards on both days, as you do. Not yet sure how I’ll account for time at STPLN in the weeks ahead; my intention is to actually use the building as my workspace, once the necessary infrastructure is available, but I suppose I’ll only count off time spent on workshops or lectures provided by the organisation? Guess we’ll see.)
• Six and a half hours of admyn. (Again, probably more than that, but these are the hours of admyn that actually made it into the ledger in a sloppily documented week, and we can only count that which is made countable.)
• Three hours prepping for and doing an interview for This Very Website (see below), and another hour writing stuff for my personal blog.
• Two hours of meetings for PROJECT PORTON, which is (the only) one of the two prospects mentioned last week (which came through); some you win, some you lose. (This will be a longish and slowish gig, and the sort of thing I can’t talk about until it’s done, because some clients are just like that—so it’s apologies to those of you who have expressed a frustration with the codewords system, but this is why it exists.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always. (I’m looking at ways of shaking up how I go about using this allotment of time in the coming year, but the time itself is non-negotiable.)

Bit of a lossy week, but that’s always the way when you have a couple of days blocked out for on-site activities, even if they’re pretty casual in form; maybe more so, in fact.

kinmaking

As mentioned above, got a really great interview-discussion recorded between myself and the one and only Cameron Tonkinwise, whose work I have admired from afar for many years; super to get a couple of hours monopolising his attention. Y’all will get the benefit further down the line, in the form of a published version of the conversations, though I’m not sure exactly when just yet.

Also sent an hour catching up with Abigail Sykes again. Gotta catch your local rural friends on the rare moments they pass through the city!

reading

I think I must have read Alastair Reynolds’ The Prefect around the time of its initial paperback release in 2008, because the copy I have is a first printing. There were elements of its Banks-meets-Sterling plot that felt very familiar as they unfolded this time round, but other elements that felt really fresh and surprising... so I really can’t be sure whether I read it and forgot it, or whether I didn’t read it, but nonetheless managed to infer the outline of its plot from having read other stuff set in the same universe and locale?

Doesn’t make much difference, though: if you’re in the market for a space opera procedural in which a morally upright posthuman policeman-equivalent ends up dealing with a cascading set of runaway disasters and deceptions, well, you might want to put this on your list. Good stuff.

I will also mention the ninth trade volume of Monstress, the insanely maximalist dark-science-fantasy-horror graphic novel sequence written by Marjorie Liu and drawn by Sana Takeda, but I will say little more about it, because I genuinely don’t feel qualified. That’s partly a matter of not knowing comics as a medium like I know prose fiction, but it’s also a particular issue with this series, because it really is So Much. I keep meaning to go back to the start and read it through again to pick up all the worldbuilding detail… I must like it, because I’ve bought and read nine volumes of it, but I’m damned if I could even start to tell you what’s going on with it!

a clipping

This week’s clipping was a late contender, discovered on Friday afternoon via Austin Kleon’s newsletter, but instantly shouldered its way to the top of the pile. I must confess that I’d never heard of the writer and critic Lucy Sante before Austin linked to her recently-instantiated newsletter, but it seems she’s the sort of person who can write a paragraph like this:

The English language is a magnificent instrument. It has become the language of empire and the lingua franca of a large percentage of the world not just because of Anglo-Saxon rapacity, but because of the relative simplicity of its grammar and syntax and its wide range of registers. The latter is most directly attributable to its merger of two language families following the Norman conquest. The familiar example is that in medieval England animals had Anglo-Saxon names if they were on the hoof (pig, calf, steer) and Latin ones if they were on the table (pork, veal, beef). Somehow, though, rather than becoming a two-tier class-based tongue, it blended the two strains, and furthermore invited loan words to pitch their tents. The result was a riotous democracy of words, most deeply enjoyed by the Elizabethans, who reveled in having two keyboards to play. The defining example is Shakespeare’s “The multitudinous seas incarnadine/ making the green one red.” You see the decorator’s pointed brush tracing arabesques in the first line, the house painter’s roller laying down two broad stripes in the second.

Well, crikey! Tell the truth, a person who can write paragraphs like that could probably persuade me to do almost anything, short of violence. Sante’s newsletter is in the writing-about-writing genre, and I’ve been meaning to read less of that sort of thing—but clearly an exception must needs be made here, wouldn’t you say?

That'll do for now, I reckon. Thanks for reading!

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 03 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!