109. Interview with Michael Kilman, Co-Author of Build Better Worlds, part 2 of 2
Jul 15, 2024Season 1Episode 109
BETH BARANY
“Every culture is telling different stories to some degree. And when we share our each other's stories and we read and learn and engage and practice empathy, then we stand a better chance of understanding the ways in which our diversity is a tool for the future.” --Michael Kilman
Follows on from the mini-series where host of the How To Write The Future podcast, Beth Barany, delved into the book Build Better Worlds by Michael Kilman and Kyra Wellstrom. In Episode 109, “Interview with Michael Kilman, co-author of Build Better Worlds, part 2 of 2.” Beth continues her interview with co-author Michael Kilman about how our upbringing and culture can affect us each differently and why anthropology is important for the future,
Sensitivity warning: There is a mention of the Gaza war in an anthropological context.
About Michael Kilman
Michael Kilman is an author and anthropologist and lectures at the University of Colorado at Denver and is host of the YouTube series Anthropology in 10 or Less. After teaching anthropology for 9 years and working with 25 native American Tribes over the course of ten years, Michael published four science fiction novels in a series called The Chronicles of the Great Migration. His most recent co-written book, Build Better Worlds: An Introduction to Anthropology, for Game Designers, Fiction Writers, and Filmmakers, uses the social science of anthropology to help people with fictional world building.
Kyra Wellstrom earned a Bachelor's Degree in anthropology from Metropolitan State University of Denver and a Masters Degree in forensic anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. She currently teaches archaeology, cultural anthropology, forensic anthropology, and biological anthropology, always with a focus on bio-cultural interaction and holism. Kyra has a passion for teaching and enjoys helping students engage with material by encouraging their creativity. She designs her courses with a focus on game play, multimedia interaction, and world building.
RESOURCES
Build Better Worlds: An Introduction to Anthropology for Game Designers, Fiction Writers and Filmmakers by Michael Kilman and Kyra Wellstrom https://books2read.com/bbwhtwtf
“Every culture is telling different stories to some degree. And when we share our each other's stories and we read and learn and engage and practice empathy, then we stand a better chance of understanding the ways in which our diversity is a tool for the future.” --Michael Kilman
Follows on from the mini-series where host of the How To Write The Future podcast, Beth Barany, delved into the book Build Better Worlds by Michael Kilman and Kyra Wellstrom. In Episode 109, “Interview with Michael Kilman, co-author of Build Better Worlds, part 2 of 2.” Beth continues her interview with co-author Michael Kilman about how our upbringing and culture can affect us each differently and why anthropology is important for the future,
Sensitivity warning: There is a mention of the Gaza war in an anthropological context.
About Michael Kilman
Michael Kilman is an author and anthropologist and lectures at the University of Colorado at Denver and is host of the YouTube series Anthropology in 10 or Less. After teaching anthropology for 9 years and working with 25 native American Tribes over the course of ten years, Michael published four science fiction novels in a series called The Chronicles of the Great Migration. His most recent co-written book, Build Better Worlds: An Introduction to Anthropology, for Game Designers, Fiction Writers, and Filmmakers, uses the social science of anthropology to help people with fictional world building.
Kyra Wellstrom earned a Bachelor's Degree in anthropology from Metropolitan State University of Denver and a Masters Degree in forensic anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. She currently teaches archaeology, cultural anthropology, forensic anthropology, and biological anthropology, always with a focus on bio-cultural interaction and holism. Kyra has a passion for teaching and enjoys helping students engage with material by encouraging their creativity. She designs her courses with a focus on game play, multimedia interaction, and world building.
RESOURCES
Build Better Worlds: An Introduction to Anthropology for Game Designers, Fiction Writers and Filmmakers by Michael Kilman and Kyra Wellstrom https://books2read.com/bbwhtwtf
Welcome back everyone to the next part of my conversation. With Michael Kilman the co author of Build Better Worlds. Enjoy! Let's talk about your fabulous book. How can writers that we're talking to are probably listening to this, what is the best way for them to use your book in their creative process?
MICHAEL KILMAN:
The economics chapter because those are so deeply hand in hand and really just getting a core idea for, okay, what kind of world am I looking at here? How do I think in anthropological terms? And then the end of the chapter, we have a series of bullet points questions for you to consider and think about, in relation to your world. So really this book is a reference guide. It's kind of like, okay, here's what we know about how political systems work, or here's how we know about religion or gender systems. It's not an attempt to be like, you must do this in the most authentic way possible. The purpose of the book is guideposts. It's- okay, here's how the real world works, and here's some examples for different diverse ways of approaching these things. And then you can use that to think and get the wheels turning for your own work.
BETH BARANY:
That's great. And I'll just share with everyone just one question in the political chapter, which I haven't skimmed yet, and thought about and talked about. What is the size of your society and how integrated is it? Just that one question. And then does it fit into one of the four basic political systems, which, I'm sure you talk about here in the chapter on the four basic political systems. I've had writers who realize they've created a magic system. They've got a magic school and they've got the students and the apprentices and they realize, oh, I haven't yet thought through the political system. There's a king. There's different cultural groups out there, but then mages and the king The mages are treated this way and they have these rules, and the king has this relationship with them. At first thinking about politics was really challenging for this author. It wasn't a topic they.Really dwelled on, even in their regular daily life. So having a book like this is so useful. Just give the framework and think about the different kinds of political systems and just the question of integration Some cultures might be really mixed. Some cultures might be very polarized. Some a mix, depending on how you do it. And different neighborhoods where I live in Oakland, some are really integrated, some are not. And even within one city.
MICHAEL KILMAN:
And that, that question of integration is really talking about how formalized is your society, right? Are you as a society with lots of rules and boundaries? Are there certain kinds of procedures and behaviors that you must adhere to in the law? Like the integration of how much power does the political system have to wield over you? Your example-- They built this magic school. If you live in a dictatorship, you know what things that you're going to be allowed to learn in your magical school are going to be different than if you're in a democracy. If you are in an area that demands productivity, a very capitalist society, your magic is going to be focused around career choices and gaining access to resources for a lot of people. If it's more democratic and more egalitarian, you're gonna be focused more on what kinds of interesting questions can the mages ask? Because they have much more freedom of movement. Those kinds of things you're talking about the economic side. Who has access to this college? Who doesn't? Are there ways of learning magic outside of the college and how are those people viewed? And so you begin, once you start to think about the integration of these systems and how they work, you can start to see, oh, there's so many ripe areas for conflicted and really interesting story elements.
BETH BARANY:
Yeah, absolutely. So fascinating. Now let's talk about our day-to-day life. How can anthropology help us in our day-to-day life?
MICHAEL KILMAN:
Yeah, so this is my motto, whenever I teach classes or whatever, I'm giving lectures or talking to anybody about anthropology. The purpose of anthropology is to understand the human experience. It doesn't mean you have to like it, doesn't mean you have to agree with what other people are doing. When you're looking at international conflicts or wars, the important part is to understand how do we get to this point? What does each player want? What is their point of view? For example, a lot of the conflict going on in Israel and Gaza with the Palestinians, people a lot of times will say, this is a holy war. This has been going on forever, and that's simply not true. This is a war that began really in the 1920 s when the British kind of took over the area and were making promises to both sides. And you end up with a competing nationalism situation. And both sides very much think that they own that land and they have a right to that land and they struggle to see that what the other side is saying and there gets born this longstanding conflict. Before we can take sides, before we can make judgements, we understand the processes of things going on. And when you do that in your own life, even in interpersonal relationships, then you-- I like to say you suffer a little less, right? Because if you're not always making assumptions, then you're not creating less points where you can either embarrass yourself or misjudge someone's intentions. And so understanding cultural backgrounds and how cultures work can be an opportunity to understand difference and conflict. Also, when you understand those differences in conflict, sometimes you can solve problems you couldn't otherwise.
BETH BARANY:
Absolutely. And you can have a stance or position of compassion. This person isn't wrong or bad, they just come from a completely different culture. Their upbringing and everything that was around them is completely different than what I have. And because it's automatic, we either tend to think people are exactly like us or it's a surprise when people do things that aren't what we would do. And then often we go right to judgment so this is great'cause we all have family cultures. And the family history shapes how our parents raised us and shapes our assumptions and what we think is right and good. And that brings me to, I think it was the chapter on religion where you talk about purity. And I was really struck by that concept because I hadn't heard it framed like that before. But that got me thinking about how we use in our daily language. Oh, that's great. Oh, that's bad. Oh, that stinks. Oh, that smells so good. We tend to use"that stinks," for example, for something that don't like, right? Related to what is rotten, related to what is bad. And I thought how biological that was and how rooted that is. And then that comes into our religious system, and of course much broader into any moral system. I'm wondering what you think of just inviting people in their everyday life to start noticing where they draw the lines, where they use language that is around, oh, that stinks, or, oh, that's great.
MICHAEL KILMAN:
Here's another suggestion for people. So one of the chapters were potentially, and I posted a long article of this on my website, because it was like a chapter that I was thinking about while we were writing the book originally, But I just wasn't sure if it was gonna work. And now I'm like, ah, we should have put this chapter in. But it's a chapter on what we call schismogenesis. And schismogenesis is the creation of identity through opposition. And if you wanna think about our political culture in this country. There's no better example of schismogenesis than that, right? Both liberals and conservatives are ardently so fixed on the identity of the other and less on the issues that when you inject facts into the middle of the circumstances, they just essentially look at the other side and say, I am not that. So I will not identify or communicate with that. And you see that in religion too, by the way, where someone says, I'm a Christian, or I'm a Muslim, or I'm a Buddhist, or I'm a Pagan, But then they set themselves up in opposition to others. And with that we get this concept of what's clean, what's dirty? How do we figure out what's clean or dirty when new ideas come in? How do we figure that out? We take our myth structure that we're familiar with, and then we apply that knowledge, and then we try to understand this new idea. And then we decide, is this something that brushes up against me? Is it a schismogenesis moment where I basically set up opposition to this thing immediately? Or is this something I accept wholeheartedly? I like it? Or is it something in between? Very few things are binary in the world. Most of them are a range of experience, right? It's not always a hard yes or a hard no. Those exist, but it can be also like somewhere in the middle. And that's a lot of the human experience.
BETH BARANY:
Oh, I love that. I hope you do put that in your book.
MICHAEL KILMAN:
On my website, there's a series of articles Cognitive mapping is one that we're gonna definitely get into which is, how do your sense organs, or how does neurodivergence, or how does superpowers, for example, way you think and how you experience the world?
BETH BARANY:
Ooh, I love that. My heroine in my sci-fi mystery series, she's got an ocular implant so she can see pretty much all the wavelengths. And sometimes it malfunctions. She's also got an internal screen, like a little computer screen in her head where she's receiving all this data and has an internal AI that helps her sort through everything. I like to put her in situations where things go wrong cause it's no fun if it's always easy.
MICHAEL KILMAN:
And
BETH BARANY:
I like to think about how does this affect her? Does she forget to change her settings when she's in a new place? Is her AI can't plug into the macro setting? I have her like far away from everything.
MICHAEL KILMAN:
Think if like you're coldblooded or you have six limbs, like that's gonna change how you perceive and move through the world, right? If you're coldblooded and you have an empire that's going through an arctic era, you're gonna have to do additional things. Maybe you have to have a magic system that is ever warm or something like that, where you gotta keep your blood warm, right? Somehow draw in extra sunlight Those kinds of things. And I think the fun part about looking at diverse experiences is you get to play with different rules, see how they work. And what happens when you take a set of rules, which is a culture, right? And then you put it up against another set of rules and where does the conflict ensue, right? If you have warm-blooded versus cold-blooded creatures and they're trying to live together in a city, that's gonna create some really interesting dynamics. And there'll be a natural kind of segregation to some degree. Or what is like a mixed marriage between a cold-blooded and a warm-blooded person look like. So there's all kinds of really interesting places you can go with this stuff.
BETH BARANY:
That is so cool. It makes me think about, gosh, I can't even remember. Maybe it was a Dr. WHO episode where people had to wear. Oh no, it was actually in Star Trek where someone comes into a culture that has an atmosphere they can't breathe. So of course they have to be wearing, masks. And then that could be used as a power play if you are going to change the atmosphere that affects the guest coming in or vice versa.
MICHAEL KILMAN:
The gravity level-
BETH BARANY:
Exactly.
MICHAEL KILMAN:
I think it was DS9 where they had a disabled character who had to live in different gravity. She was disabled in earth level gravity. She wasn't wheelchair bound when she was able to move in much less gravity. So there's lots of really interesting things you can do with this stuff.
BETH BARANY:
Yeah, so fun. Oh my goodness. And let's wrap it up. We could talk for hours. This is so juicy. You have so much material in this book, but let's bring it back to the theme of my podcast, which is How to Write the Future. Why is anthropology important for the future?
MICHAEL KILMAN:
Think of how globalized we are. Think of the variety of human problems, like very serious existential crises we're facing, on an economic level, on a climate change level, on a population level. We have a huge amount of people in this world, and we have a whole host of problems, right? And the thing is, every problem we have is a human problem. Either we've created it or we've created systems to adapt to other things, and that's created different problems, right? These are all human creations, everything we do. So what better way to make a better future than to understand how cultural systems work, and how people come to their conclusions, because the reality is we want to be diverse. If we're not diverse, then we're going to try to tackle the problems the same way over and over again, and we'll just bang our head into the wall. But if we can leverage lots of different knowledge from different religions, from different genders, from different ethnicities, from different cultural histories and languages, if we can leverage all that stuff, then we stand a much better chance of solving the world's major problems. And I think storytelling's a part of that because every culture is telling different stories to some degree. And when we share each other's stories and we read and learn and engage and practice empathy, then we stand a better chance of understanding the ways in which our diversity is a tool for the future.
BETH BARANY:
I love that. I love that so much and all the more reason why I constantly say to my students and on this podcast like We need your stories. We need your stories, Michael. We need everybody's stories because of that injection of new ideas and different ways of looking at reality, so that as humanity we can get new ideas and do things differently and make solutions to these problems that a lot of times seem intractable. So where can people find you? Tell us how to find you and Kyra.
MICHAEL KILMAN:
Everything's essentially living on my website, which LoridiansLaboratory.com. Of course you can find Build Better Worlds online at any of the major retailers. We're on Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Apple, Amazon, all those places. There's not a lot of physical stores that carry Build Better Worlds at the moment. But you can absolutely get a copy online, pretty easily. I also have a substack. Kyra is less out there than I am. I tend to be the one who does a lot of the interviews and those kinds of things, but Kyra is the brilliant person in the background of a lot of this stuff, and she's smarter than me. I have a substack where I'm publishing stuff all the time. I put this podcast, up there. I have other podcasts. I'm on podcasts fairly regularly. I'm always posting essays and articles and short fiction. You can either look for me on Substack with my name, Michael Kilman, or Loridian's Laboratory. I'm pretty easy to find on Google, if nothing else.
BETH BARANY:
That's great. I just wanna say thank you so much, Michael, for taking the time out of your busy schedule. I know you have very full life, being a dad and teaching and everything, so I'm really glad we were able to connect and we'll definitely have to have you back with Kyra. So thank you again. And I just wanna tell all of our listeners to write long and prosper.
