Interview with Alicorn on how story conflict is optional and characters in utopia should do fewer drugs

Do you want to introduce yourself to the readers of Thing of Things?

Hi, Thing of Things readers! I’m Alicorn. Sometimes I write things. If Ozy does their job right there will be links in this post.

[For example, you can find an index of all of Alicorn’s writing here, should this interview spark joy.]

Indeed! I will put in links. I decided I wanted to interview you because you’re the only person I know who writes stories that take place in utopias (Chaser 6, Vanda Nosseo, Will, Rescue) that make me go “ooh, I want to go there” rather than “please god let utopia have suicide rights.” Do you have thoughts about why other writers are so bad at this?

I only have guesses why other writers are so bad at this. Maybe they want their stories to be exciting and high-stakes more than they want them to take place in a utopia. Maybe they have a kind of pessimistic view of human nature, and think the closest anybody could get to a nice place to live would still kind of suck, like the “free will” response to the Problem of Evil but for speculative fiction. Maybe they typical-mind harder than I do about what things might be fun.

I have a better idea of how they’re bad at it, though. It’s the same thing where people who are writing porn run out of ideas and start putting in larger numbers before the word “orgasms”. Their utopian characters are on drugs because that’s a handle they have for “experiencing cool weird fun pleasurable stuff”; they are hooking up with strangers and having a great time by fiat because that’s a handle they have for “doing desirable relatable fun pleasurable stuff”.

Not that I never put a utopian character on drugs or in bed. The main character of Chaser 6 spends much of the story doing both of those things simultaneously. But it’s not the focus.

So it’s something like-- they’re automatically filling in “what’s cool and fun?” with “casual sex! drugs!” without thinking “are these things that famously start inducing ennui by the time you turn 35?”

Yeah, basically. I hate ennui. I avoid the overwhelming majority of video games that I don’t avoid for other reasons because they give me ennui. Ennui is poison to a utopia, but pumping up the hedonism won’t fix it, and I don’t think assigning characters custody of one of the last remaining genuine Stradivarius violins and then imperiling it to spice up their Tuesday fixes it either. (The story I’m referencing there was very much instrumental in inspiring me to attack the problem of writing a utopia right.) Casual sex and drugs are things a lot of people enjoy and utopia should have space for them, but if that’s the vision the whole thing orbits around, you’re leaving a lot of people with other tastes out, you’re not making it clear where you put the LARPers and the woodworkers and the people who like sports for some reason, and utopia should be roomier than that.

(I can’t find the original posting of that story but for some reason it appears to have been reproduced on someone’s LinkedIn here. [Ozy ETA: it has been found on LessWrong.])

That’s also a thing I’ve noticed in a lot of utopias-- it feels like everyone is similar to the author, or the kind of person the author thinks is Good, and I’m like “but where are the weird people? Where are the people who have devoted themselves obsessively to shaving 0.1 seconds off the world record speedrun for an obscure video game? For that matter, where are the people who are kind of annoying and disagreeable?”

There’s an interesting balance to strike there, where - I do believe in the thing where “Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded.” A utopia should produce healthy people within a generation or two! There are things I do not think are likely to crop up in healthy people, and that does shape how I write utopias working out. (The main character of “Will” is supposed to be healthy in this way, though I may or may not have succeeded.)

But I spend attention on holdovers, too, people who came up in the brutal and primitive conditions but held on long enough to see the other side. And I don’t think speedrunning is unhealthy. I would not enjoy it as a hobby at all, but there’s nothing that makes a speedrunner a bad utopia-neighbor. And even people who are kind of annoying and disagreeable... I think with enough attention, enough abundance? Between utopian levels of really aggressive selection effects, and utopian levels of every qualified person being freed up from whatever more tractable problems were previously calling for their attention, you can find them friends too.

If they want them. If they don’t, utopia should have room for them to be grouchy hermits in the woods.

I’m curious about how you think about utopia producing healthy people. It seems like it could easily fall into the failure mode of bad cozy fantasy where everyone talks like they spend eight hours a day watching Mental Health TikTok. You have to figure out how to distinguish “utopia should have healthy people” from “utopia should exclusively have people who have traits I approve of.”

Eugh, I hate it when characters in books sound like they swallowed a therapy textbook. I tend to think of health as just - “just” - the absence of damage. Obviously there are a lot of ways people can be damaged, and some of them are harms of omission rather than something happening to them like abuse or a loved one dying or their brain chemicals deciding to fuck around. You still have to think about how, like, parenting works, if you’re working in a setting where parenting is a thing. But the extrapolation I’m running is more like “what if none of the bad stuff happened, or at least a lot less of it, and you replaced it with stuff that was fine”, than like “what if everyone followed These Seven Simple Steps To Heal Your Inner Child”.

I’m curious about your writing process for stories set in utopias. How do you worldbuild them? What’s the process of coming up with a plot like?

Sometimes I stall pretty bad on the plot part. I took a while to figure out how to make Chaser 6 have a plot, which I had to do because I have not yet abandoned the pretense of writing “stories” instead of “worldbuilding documents”. The process was “I whined to my beta readers for a while” - that I do a lot - and then I tried the technique where you re-write every word of the entire work in progress and see if you can keep going from there, which worked that time (but not the other time I’ve tried it since).

That’s not unique to utopias, though: in any setting there’s something I want to show off, and some background facts I want to color that display, and I have to figure out who to follow at what point(s) in their life to get those things on the page in a narrative of some kind. That was easy in “Rescue” - though I’m not actually sure I would have identified that as a utopian setting without your doing it for me because the focus is so tight and I don’t go into what’s happening anywhere else. The thing I wanted to show off in Rescue is a sequence of events that can pass for a plot. In “Will”, I was expressly trying to do, like, the Stradivarius violin thing except, uh, good, where I was asking, “what’s left that has legible-to-readers import and isn’t just playing around, and who gets to solve that problem, and why”. And Vanda Nossëo is different, because that’s a glowfic setting. I just hang around like an ambush predator and wait for a coauthor whose participation produces a plot organically.

I LOVE the Vanda Nosseo Sesat thread. I guess that is a utopian society failing to reckon with an outside non-utopian society, and not as much set in a utopia. But I love it so much.

The thread is full-glowfic-user-locked so linking to it will not work very well for most of your readers.

I’m not very artistically satisfied with it because a lot of what went down in there was a result of author-to-author failure to communicate. A little bit of that makes a story feel more populated and naturalistic, but it’s easy to have too much, and that felt like too much. But it does have some really good bits. Vanda Nossëo glowfics are sort of an attempt at iterating towards a more perfect utopia by means of stress-testing, and boy did that thread do some stress-testing.

Like, someone comes up with a weird situation that it seems like Vanda Nosseo would handle badly, and then you’re like “hm, how would Vanda Nosseo handle that?”

Yes, exactly. I consult the peanut gallery a lot for those, because one of the advantages VN has is that it’s really, really big, it can hire dedicated and talented people to answer any question that would have come up, so it’s okay if not every answer to the question comes out of my own personal brain, as long as it’s congruent with what’s established.

I guess that’s a useful general technique for stepping outside of “what would be cool for me, personally” when writing utopias-- asking other people how they think a good society would handle it, or what would be cool for them.

I don’t usually run through a list of everybody I know and ask for each one “what are YOU up to in this universe”, but having it on background is probably doing a lot, yeah, and I have some pretty weird friends.

I’m curious how you find the thing you want to show off and the background color facts, although maybe that isn’t too different from regular worldbuilding.

I have taken to describing my approach to stories as going “would that be fucked up or what?” Things that would be fucked up (or what) just sort of come to me; I don’t have a lot of analysis of that process available.

Utopias are, obviously, not quite doing that, they’re meant to not be fucked up. (Although I have some stories about things being fucked up that have what I would call utopian elements without being utopias per se - Specter Sanctuary and Hollow Grove come to mind.) I come up with those more in the attitude of writing a spec. I’m going, how do I want this to work, given that I’m a nice person who doesn’t want to ruin everybody else’s life and believes in pluralism and stuff, and then I imagine my way through it like I’m designing myself a house. Chaser 6 when?? I wrote the spec, and nobody has built it for me yet.

Chaser 6 is very much “I would like to be able to do everything at once, why must I choose between cuddling a partner and going to a party and gardening and learning economics.” Wish fulfillment for an extremely specific (but common!) wish.

100%.

A lot of people are like “if you’re writing a utopian story, you can’t have any conflict, except the utopia against people outside the utopia.” Do you have thoughts on putting conflict in utopian stories? You implied you had some trouble with this for Chaser 6.

I think the need for conflict per se is overblown. Sometimes a series of things happen and somebody going “but who are you doing it versus?” is missing the point. You need a plot - maybe you need a plot; does the original Omelas have a plot? Things barely happen in an order there, it’s a long description of a state of being that a city could have - but a plot doesn’t have to be a fight. Will’s plot is a quest, but no one is opposed to the protagonist completing it, it just happens that no one has already done it and I am writing about the person right for the job at the time that’s right for the quest. Chaser 6’s plot is a journey of self-discovery, which means that she tries something new which works for someone else that she knows, and comes to a conclusion about how it fits into her life, and she is not doing this versus anyone or anything, she just doesn’t know the answer until she attempts empiricism. (I’m not sure how people who dislike spoilers work, so I’m not sure how to balance describing more as opposed to less here.) I think if you must have a plot, what you need there is something like “a reason for events to happen in an order”. You don’t need anyone to be in conflict, necessarily.

My general policy on my blog is that it is silly to try to discuss stories without spoiling them, and I can stick a “read these stories first if you would like the discussion unspoiled.” It’s not like they’re long mostly.

If we were talking about dystopias instead you’d have to make them read Ibyabek, which is.

I have commented before, I don’t remember if I made this comment in your hearing, that your stories often have a very interesting structure where they tend not to do the inciting incident/rising action/climax/falling action thing, and instead to be a series of events logically connected to each other which ends when the series of events ends. Like, speaking of Ibyabek, the moment of highest tension and suspense happens like halfway through the story.

I hate suspense, as an emotion. I am playing with it from very far away by poking at it with a stick, I don’t personally enjoy experiencing it and have only low-resolution intuitions for how to get people to leave me gratifying comments about having induced it in them. Of course my events are logically connected to each other and end when I’m done. In a way I don’t really see what else I could possibly do.

Some people like utopian writing because they think it creates visions of a better world-- you see this with some writing about solarpunk, and also with Jason Crawford talking about progress studies fiction. Do you typically take a political angle when you create utopias? (In some kind of broad sense that isn’t specifically about whether people should vote Democrat, but more about how society should be ordered.)

I’m not trying to be political about it, but it would be pretty surprising if I managed not to have any incidental politics woven in. Some things are appealing, or seem to me to work or be very close to it; and other things aren’t appealing and seem to me to not only fail to work but not even be easily patched; and I will tend to write the former as utopian and the latter not so much. Which things those are is not unrelated to how I think about real world societal arrangements; it’s not a coincidence which settings are the ones where you can find stuff like “communism” or “universal basic income” in my body of work.

But you don’t have the intent of being like “look at this good world! Get on making it, people!”

If you find me people who can make me Chaser 6......

But yeah, no, my stuff is usually too speculative to have a realistic incremental pathway between here-and-now to the setting in question by political means.

What’s your favorite of your utopian stories?

As a story, or as a setting?

Either!

Chaser 6 is my favorite setting. I’m not sure how strong it is as a story in part because the plot gave me so much trouble and that means I’ve run it through my head too many times to see it fresh; Will may be a stronger work of fiction.

Do you have advice for writers who want to write their own utopian fiction?

I think it should be clear what corner of the world I should be looking in to find any given sort of person, even when your story is set in a specific one corner. If your setting turns on those people not existing, you might have a pretty comfy world for everyone who remains, but something went wrong in getting there, and that’s going to occlude my reading of the story.

Can you give an example of the sort of thing you mean?

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect has many problems with it especially at the end, and it’s not focusing on the people who are having a nice time at all, and it’s more “utopian elements” than “utopia”; but in reading it, it doesn’t make it particularly hard to guess that you could in that world go find the weird religions, or the people who are re-domesticating staple crops to get interesting new varieties the long way, or the people who are LARPing full time that they’re in Star Wars. There’s negative space left by the malcontent perspective character which makes it clear that they are all still chugging along just fine and merely do not feature in the selected plot.

Are there other things you wanted to say that I didn’t get around to?

I think I want to kind of reiterate the thing about stakes - a story can perfectly cromulently hang on very small stakes, things that matter to even only one person, as long as you sell that they care about whatever it is. Leave the Stradivariuses alone.

That is extremely true. In my opinion, how objectively high the stakes are basically doesn’t matter for reader investment, what matters is how well you sell the reader on this specific thing mattering to this person whose wellbeing they’re invested in.

“Make your characters want something right away even if it’s only a glass of water.”

People in utopias can want a glass of water, and it would be kind of fucked up (or what) if everything on that scale were obviated by a screamingly high-intervention setting.

OK! Now it is time to recommend a thing.

You warned me about this, so I thought of things! Unfortunately, I thought of too many things. Maybe you need to warn the next person very slightly less to see if you can land on an amount of warning that yields only one thing.

How about I selfishly recommend that more people get into glowfic? Come, join us, we’ve got utopias and also things that would be fucked up (or what).

How would they get into glowfic if they cared to do this?

The best way is to get recommendations from an existing glowfic reader, based on your fandom/trope/etc. preferences, for the first several glowfics you read. After that you can do a random walk around the settings, characters, and authors you like best, but the handholding to start out is really helpful compared to picking random things and discovering that they are part seven of twelve in a high-context crossover romp by two authors who can read each other’s minds and expect their audience to have read forty threads’ worth of prior art. The people on the glowfic discord server are friendly and will provide recommendation handholding for any random stranger who wants it.

People sometimes get into writing glowfic without being big glowfic readers first but I do not really know how they do that unless they are me and invented it.