- Reflections on Research for Fictional Realities
- 30 Books for Researching Fictional Realities:
- Peeling Back the Skin of the Status Quo:
- Specific Research - The Devil's P.A.:
The longer I have been creating fictional worlds the more concerned I have become that these imagined realities are not only logical, convincing and coherent but also feel distinctive and alive, much like I would wish one of my fictional characters to be.
It was quite enough to write using familiar ideas from films and books when I was in my early teens, but nowadays generic or derivative ideas feels unsatisfying, routine and uninteresting. To create vibrant worlds I typically I find myself wanting to imagine little details that bring my worlds alive, or develop systems of logic, philosophies or cultural practices that invoke a sense of what live is like in the imagined reality.
Trying to improve the scope of my imagination has made me curious about a great variety of fields of knowledge. It started primarily with a fascination with history, not so much what kings and generals were up to or world changing events, but what people's lives were like, the tools they used, the food they ate, what they believed in, what they desired and what they were afraid of and many other aspects that created their lived realty.
From learning more about history my curiosity branched out into science, technology, philosophy, biology and many other fields.
Below I have listed a range of books I have found helpful for improving my imaginative architecture and vocabulary. While quite a few of these books are famous or appear on recommended lists of great non fiction, this is a personal list. For example, there are two books about Arab history, which reflects my interest and travel within that culture, but they could easily have been Jewish history or Chinese history and might have made much the same contribution in terms of helping me to learn about a culture and history different from that to which I was exposed during my upbringing, and which thus tends to form my generic sense of history.
I have also included particular books because they resonated with me in some way or made me feel as though my capacity to imagine other worlds was expanded and deepened by reading them.
Trying to improve the scope of my imagination has made me curious about a great variety of fields of knowledge. It started primarily with a fascination with history, not so much what kings and generals were up to or world changing events, but what people's lives were like, the tools they used, the food they ate, what they believed in, what they desired and what they were afraid of and many other aspects that created their lived realty.
From learning more about history my curiosity branched out into science, technology, philosophy, biology and many other fields.
Below I have listed a range of books I have found helpful for improving my imaginative architecture and vocabulary. While quite a few of these books are famous or appear on recommended lists of great non fiction, this is a personal list. For example, there are two books about Arab history, which reflects my interest and travel within that culture, but they could easily have been Jewish history or Chinese history and might have made much the same contribution in terms of helping me to learn about a culture and history different from that to which I was exposed during my upbringing, and which thus tends to form my generic sense of history.
I have also included particular books because they resonated with me in some way or made me feel as though my capacity to imagine other worlds was expanded and deepened by reading them.
30 Books for Researching Other Realities
Further below I have listed a range of books I have found helpful for improving my imaginative vocabularly. While quite a few of these books are famous or appear on recommended lists of great non fiction, it is a personal list. I have included particular books because they resonated with me in some way or made me feel as though my imagination was expanded and deepened.
Ross E Dunn
Ibn Battuta was essentially the Marco Polo of the Muslim world. This book describes his epic 14th century journey from his home in what is now Morocco, across Africa and Asia to China and India. It has lots of wonderful detail about the cultures and environments he encountered and how he saw those environments as a man raised in Medieval Muslim culture. To read a book like this, which shows not only a past reality quite exotic to my own experiences, but how a man from another contemporary culture viewed those experiences, seems to me to considerably widen the imagination.
Leonard Shlain
I could cite dozens of books that presenting a particular theory about the forces influencing the development of cultures. Shlain's theory, which is disputed by others, is that cultures that derive authority from books such as The Bible, The Koran or the Torah have a tendency to become patriarchal societies where feminine forms of knowledge and indeed women, are less well respected and the rule of unyielding law is paramount. He suggests that more feminine cultures focus more on images and tend to be more fluid and less proscriptive.
What I find helpful about this kind of book is not just it presents a way of looking at the world and seeing certain patterns with it, which may or may not seem reasonable, but also that the author’s efforts to exploring and present his ideas in more depth intersect a wide range of fields and open up ideas and new areas of research.
Asimov's New Guide to Science
Issac Asimov
While known primarily as a science fiction writer Asimov wrote many introductory texts. This is a good general book on the history of science. He writes with authority but in an accessible manner. A wider knowledge of science always seems to help in make your fiction and your worlds more convincing.
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
Neil Sheehan
Part biography of John Paul Vann, an American Lieutenant Colonel, part history and critical analysis of the Vietnam War. I found this a great book to get a sense of the difference in a projected reality, way a reality difference between intension and what was believed and what was actually going on the ground and the ramifications of abstract ideas imposed on a living reality to terrible consequences.
Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth
Gitta Sereny
Speer was Hitler’s architect and logistics minister towards the end of WW2. The book is partly an examination of Speer, conscience following the Nazi atrocities, but it also contains illuminating detail about one of the most brutal societies of the modern era. It captures well the attitude of those in insidious power and how mundane they were really yet what an dark, alien society and reality they were constructing for themselves and others to tragic consequences.
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
Lewis Mumford
I first came across this book while studying history at University. It’s a bit heavy going but full of insight into how urban spaces developed and reflected the cultures of the civilisations that built them. If you are creating a urban fiction in another world, this is a helpful book to shape your thinking about how that city might be structured and how this would help shape that society of the people who live there.
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
M. Mitchell Waldrop
James Burke
This book was written to accompany a TV series broadcast in the 1980s in the United Kingdom which can be watched online here.
Each chapter, reflecting each episode of the series, takes a form of technology we take for granted in our everyday lives today, such as the ball point pen, and shows technological and cultural developments across centuries or millennia that made the invention of that technology possible. A very useful reference if you are inventing technology for fiction and need to develop some understanding of how and why it came about, or indeed why other sorts of technology you might expect to exist in your world, did not evolve.
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
Amin Maalouf and J. Rothschild
I find it very helpful when reading history to get varying perspectives, particularly on well known historical periods or events which are typically represented in book and films from a particular perspective. This book uses original sources to show how Arabs saw the Christian invaders and what the felt about their arrival in their lands.
DIMENSIONS: A Casebook of Alien Contact
Jacques Vallee
I trawled through dozens of books on ESP, UFOs and other worldly ideas when I was researching the background of a science fiction novel. A lot of them are very wishful in tone or push theories that are almost purely speculation and I would hesitate to recommend them. This book is an exception. He suggests that these experiences may derive from some kind of unconscious and that they are filtered through the cultural perceptions of the individuals witnessing them. Thus Egyptians saw winged discs or chariots, 19th century Americans saw airships with strange pilots, and modern observers see what they interpret as space ships, but actually show no actual evidence of being extra terrestrial at all. He charts the aspects and patterns of these experiences which are common across the ages.
Vallee doesn’t draw any ultimate conclusions about the reality or unreality of these phenomena, but suggest, instead of being dismissed, they should be studied from a cultural and sociological perspective.
The Discoverers
Daniel J Boorstin
A substantial history of cultural, geographic, technical and natural exploration and technological development. It is divided into four section: Time, Earth and Seas, Nature and Society. Boorstin gives considerable emphasis to particular individuals who contributed to their various fields, which not every one's style of history but the ground he covers and the little insights and observations along the way are very helpful towards imagining fictional worlds.
Everyday Life Through the Ages (Reader's Digest)
Michael Worth Davison
A great book to help with world building for fantasy fiction. It does not go into any degree of depth, but covers a lot of ground historically and has lots of pictures and diagrams to help gives a sense of common items and practices what ordinary people were experiencing in different cultures and different historical periods.
Face Of Battle: A Study of Agincourt,Waterloo and the Somme
John Keegan
As the title suggests, this is an in depth study of three major battles and the changing nature of warfare, as reflected in how those battles were fought and won. It contains quite vivid descriptions of how soldiers were maimed and killed by the different forms of military technology available at the time, which is useful for considering writing about warfare. I also think it is fairly important, if you are to write about violence in fiction to have some grasp of how wretched, confusing and messy the whole affair is in reality and how unlike the kind of choreographed action ballet typically seen on the big screen.
Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition
Ed Regis
Over twenty years old, but an entertaining journey through way out science and the zone where science borders on science fiction.
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
Robert Fisk
Robert Fisk is a veteran journalist who has spent several decades reporting from the front line across the Middle East. Fisk was actually there when many significant events took place, and his perspective can be very illuminating as a result. It also contains much of his characteristic lucid, sometimes ironic but beautifully written analysis of the politics of the region centred around the concept of social justice.
The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions
Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong has written many books in the field of comparative religion and spirituality and is considered a leading scholar in the field. Her best known book is probably The History of God, but this book in particular I found accessible, illuminating and enjoyable to read. It not only gave a thorough sense of how religious ideas, philosophies and visions of reality evolve as cultures change, but also some consideration of the spiritual and religious impulse in human beings and how religious ideas develop in relationship to cultures and the experience of those within them.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond
A history of humankind that looks at the 'success' of Western civilisation from the perspective of geographic, biological and technological factors. Useful for world building.
A History of Private Life, Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
History of Private Life, Volume II: Revelations of the Medieval World
Phillippe Aries (Series Editor), Georges Duby (Series Editor), Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)
The History of Private Life series collects scholarly articles by varying authors on the changing nature of Private Life through the ages. They are translated from French. While it is not light reading by any measure, I found it very useful for getting a sense of the lived realities and patterns of life of people in other times, which of course could be analogous to the lives of people in other realities. Little details from these books really help open up the imagination, such as people in earlier times typically reading aloud and rarely reading silently, or how different life might be like when everyone in a community is sleeping in a fortified hall for warmth and protection and only the elite have their own private spaces.
There are two more volumes, which I have not read, but I suspect they could be equally valuable.
The Women's History of the World
Rosalind Miles
This may not be the best women's history of the world, it just happens to be the one I have read. I would recommend reading this or something like it because you can reading a lot of history seldom encountering more than passing mentions of the lives of the women who lived in a particular period of time. It is an attempt to capture what feminists call 'Herstory', the hidden, and largely unrecorded experiences and contribution of women in the passage of time.
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
Jorge Louis Borges
This is actually primarily a collection of short stories by the famous Argentinean writer, but they in total they form a kind of fictional text book or demonstration for understanding how to use and develop metaphysics in imaginative fiction - coherent visions of how reality, or different kinds of reality can work around particular philosophies or aspects of human experience.
Borges describes an infinite library where every book and every version of every book, even down to tiny print errors exists, but there is no definitive index to the whole collection. Within this library lost souls wander for years, searching for the exact book they need to find understanding. They know it must be there somewhere because every book there ever was or ever could be is, but they lack a means to find where in the library the answers they seek can be found.
Another example is the story Tlon Urqbar Orbis Terius (or something like that). It describes a group of of mischievous scholars who, for reasons unexplained, create an encyclopaedia for a civilisation that never existed and also manufacture false artefacts from this civilisation to make the ruse all the more convincing. The whole question becomes: if we gain our knowledge from books like encyclopaedias and trust that knowledge simply because we are told what is in an encyclopaedia is a true or fairly accurate, if boring, description of real world things, can we trust reality itself?
The Passion of the Western Mind
Richard Tarnas
A journey through the development of Western philosophy. Developing coherent philosophies seems to be a vital component of creating an imagined reality. Characters and entire societies may after all behave in specific ways because of how they see themselves and their world. There are many many books about the history of philosophy, this is the most lucid and accessible I have come across.
Joseph Campbell in conversation with Bill Moyers
My good friend Charles Spiteri is often saying that he sees creating fiction as an exercise is creating your own mythologies. Joseph Campbell was the foremost scholar of world mythology in his time. Joseph Campbell's academic work is very detailed and I found it can be difficult to grasp, is very much written with a scholarly bent and can be a little difficult to take in. This book is a transcript of a conversation between Campbell and Bill Moyers a well known American journalist and this makes his ideas far more accessible for a general reader. This was also a television series. There are several editions of this book, the harder one to find has beautiful colour plates to complement the discussions - the kind of images you can stare at for minutes at a time..
Reader's Digest Natural Wonders of the World
Richard L. Scheffel (Editor), Susan J. Wernert (Editor)
I don’t think I have ever actually read a word of the text in this book; it could be Noble Prize winning stuff for all I know. Why I found it useful is that it has a huge range of photographs of amazing landscapes from across the globe. Great for when you want to get some inspiration for imagining some way out places in a reality far far away from here.
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe
Arthur Koestler
An analysis of humankind's changing vision of the cosmos from ancient times to the modern era. You get a good sense from this book the way a cultural sees the universe at a particular point in history also reflects how they see themselves. The chapters about Johannes Kepler are particularly fascinating - Koestler charts Kepler's chaotic experiences of trying to conduct science and manage a bewildering range of interests and affairs against the backdrop of the 100 years war, including little diversions like travelling back home to try and prevent his mother from being burnt for witchcraft at one point.
The Story of Art
E,H. Gombrich
First published in 1950 and apparently the best selling book about art of all time, it was originally intended to introduce the history of art to younger readers and is a common prescribed text for introductory history of art courses. It is enjoyable to read, the ideas are easy to grasp and Gombrich does a pretty convincing job of demonstrating how the art produced in different periods of history is an expression of the realities and beliefs of a culture and not necessarily the technical abilities of the artists.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Kuhn
Kuhn's theory is that in any given era there is a paradigm of knowledge in science which provides the directions and questions scientists pursue. Every so often these paradigms become restrictive, rather than helpful and it takes new scientists to break them and then the process starts again. While this book is more specifically focused on the development of scientific ideas it also functions a useful demonstration of how ideas themselves develop and paradigms of knowledge and understanding form, becoming dominant and dictate the sorts of questions people ask and explore. Way of looking at realities and the resistance of certain worldviews.
Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 and Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-62
Doris Lessing
This is the two volume autobiography of Nobel Prize wining writer Doris Lessing, a white colonial native of the former state of Rhodesia, who has lived in the United Kingdom for many decades and is now in her 80s. She has written both general fiction and science fiction. This might not be specifically useful for building realities, but Lessing is very interested in how writing works, and introspects her own consciousness to discuss the writing process in some depth. I found it useful for understanding more about how writer’s construct realities and themselves through the writing process and hence understand and improve my own writing process.
Ways of Seeing
John Berger
This was a television series broadcast in I think the 70s. This book is very useful for understanding how learned rules and assumptions construct our vision of reality. If you are trying to create metaphysics for an imaginary world, I think a book like this can be useful reading.
Peeling Back the Skin of the Status Quo
Seeing reality as a journey...
As I have moved away from writing fictionn that is principally fantasy and write more fiction set in or directly about the contemporary world I have become more interested in understanding the mechanics of that world. Under the headlines.
Below I have listed writers whose articles or columns I regularly read and sites I read regularly.
Tariq Ali
Veteran socialist writer and activist. He has a broad and focused view of history. His uses irony a lot in his writing is darkly dry and witty.
Uri Avnery
A Israeli writer, former Irgun member turned peace activist whose website is available in Hebrew and in English. I enjoy his practical but humourous style.
BBC
I usually have a scan of the news on this site each day and if I see an interesting article will follow it up on other sources around the web, as the BBC's commentary and analysis usually feels stunted and flat footed to me so I like to get wider perpectives.
Noam Chomsky
Famous linguist and political dissadent. I enjoy his dry wit as well as challenging analysis of prevailing ideology and status quo view of society and world affairs.
Jonathan Cook
An independent journalist based in Nazareth who writes frequently on the Israeli Occupation. Also very good is this article on journalism.
Democracy Now
Syndicated US television show presented by Amy Goodman.
Robert Fisk
The Middle East correspondent for The Independent. Having travelled in the Middle East and taken an interest in the history of the region for a couple of decades, I find this columns informative and engaging. I also enjoy his ocassional pieces on writing and history and his analysis of journalism.
Amira Hass
An Israeli Journalist who writes very short and succinct but engaging pieces often about Gaza and the West Bank, but also on the practice of Journalism and general human rights issues. Her work appears in Haaretz. Her assertion that the role of the journalist is to "challenge the centres of power" is something that seems accurate to me.
The Independent
Usually scan through their site once or twice a week and read some of the columnists regularly. It is one of the better source of news on the Internet though I still find it weak in its analysis and willingness to question prevailabing wisdom on many issues.
Naomi Klein
Canadian journalist well known for her books on global capitalism such as No Logo and The Shock Doctrine.
Medialens
A site that attempts to analyse the deficiencies of the corporate media. Very good, detailed articles often on very recent issues in the news and stripping back the propaganda involved. Sometimes takes viewpoints I am not so sure about but also well executed and worth looking at.
George Monbiot
Monbiot writers a weekly column in the Guardian newspaper, but I tend to read them on his website. He writes a lot about ecology and global warming and I find his columns among the most iniformative on the subject as he is constantly presenting new research and ideas as he encounters them. Also very good on a wide range of civic and political issues. I have read pretty much the entire archive of his column as well. Another thing I like about his work is that he will admit when he is wrong and publish so.
John Pilger
I have been following Pilgers work for a long time now. I appreciate the fact that he goes to the places he writes about and pulls no punches on state and invidual propaganda and criminal actions.
Geoffrey Robinson
An Australian QC living in London with a long standing engagement with human rights and international law. He was also at one point presenting Hypotheticals on television.
Arundati Roy
Indian writer and activist, probably best internationally known for her Booker Prize winning novel The God of Small Things. As I have been to India a couple of times I find.
Joseph Stiglitz
Noble prize winning economist.
Tomsdispatch
A co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, he also writes a regular column The Guardian. He writes lucidly and dynamically about economic issues.
ZNet
Like many who write fictions, when I am developing ideas for a novel or as I am writing I will find myself trying to describe things I haven't experienced imagine experiences, places or technologies I am not particularly familiar with. I can write some rough draft material loosely following an idea, but that are areas where I feel powerless and find myself drawing upon cliches or stock ideas. Vague ideas influenced by common sense or common images.
