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How to write science fiction & fantasy - part two

teacher avatar Damien Walter, Writer for The Guardian, BBC, Wired.

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      0:59

    • 2.

      2001 How Stanley Kubrick rewrote science fiction

      14:46

    • 3.

      Our place in the universe

      11:22

    • 4.

      Darko Suvin's Novum

      13:01

    • 5.

      Birthing the Novum

      16:55

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About This Class

Advanced SciFi & Fantasy

Writing the 21st century myth

Damien Walter, writer on sci-fi and geek culture for The Guardian, BBC, WIRED and graduate of the Clarion writers workshop, leads a journey into scifi and fantasy storytelling.

#

When Damien Walter asked Twitter to name the greatest 21st century myth he got an unexpected answer – from Neil Gaiman himself

“When the 21st century myth comes along, we will know.”

Neil Gaiman

For as long as there have been humans, there have been stories. Stories to help us understand our mysterious universe and give meaning to our lives. Stories to give us comfort in darkness and inspire us to reach for the light.

Science fiction & fantasy are the most popular stories of the 21st century. On the cinema screen, in our Netflix streams and in video games, billions of us watch, read and play the amazing stories of scifi and fantasy.

Damien Walter, writer on sci-fi and geek culture for The Guardian, BBC, WIRED and graduate of the Clarion writers workshop, leads a journey into scifi and fantasy storytelling. 

Science Fiction is our modern mythology

As science transformed how we saw the universe, life and human existence, our old myths died. We began a search for new myths to give meaning to the modern world, myths we call science fiction.

Watch the trailer

From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and a thousand stories beyond, great storytellers have crafted new myths for the age of science.  

But as we grow into the 21st century, even the modern myths of science fiction are getting old. The need for new myths for our fast changing world is greater than ever

Meet Your Teacher

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Damien Walter

Writer for The Guardian, BBC, Wired.

Teacher

Damien Walter ( BA / MA / PGCHE / HEA) teaches good writers how to be great. His research and critical writing have been published in The Guardian, Wired, BBC, The Independent, Aeon and with Oxford University Press. He is a former director of creative writing at the University of Leicester, a member of the Higher Education Academy, and a graduate of the Clarion writers workshop taught by Neil Gaiman. He consults widely for businesses in technology, healthcare, and manufacturing to help them tell great stories.

 

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hello, welcome to advanced science fiction and fantasy writing, the 21st century myth. In this class, we are looking at an advanced technique for writing sci-fi and fantasy stories. And that is the Novum, the element in a sci-fi and fantasy story that is new. And we will discuss that in more detail. And in order to understand the idea better, we're going to look at one of the most famous know vm's in science fictions storytelling is in a tremendously famous movie, often cold greatest science fiction story ever told, written by Sarah prophecy clock, directed by the great cinema or to Stanley Kubrick. It is 2001, a Space Odyssey. 2. 2001 How Stanley Kubrick rewrote science fiction: And they wanted to create a myth. And I think what will make Nim river being good designs which are movie deploying them NVMe good was 2001. A Space Odyssey is widely considered the greatest science a fiction story ever told its creator. Or to a movie director, Stanley Kubrick, the greatest filmmaker of old time. Kubrick set out to make a myth for the modern age. And the only good science fiction movie, science fiction Kubrick believed was a failure at myth-making. Yes, it's possible, probable or likely that Stanley Kubrick was a bit of a dick. But he was also a genius. And he was right. 2001 is famous for leaving audiences. Much like the movies, ape man starts scratching their heads and bemusement and shrinking. In confusion. Shrinking eight men, strange black rectangle dancing space stations, talking computers that it does just all lights. Then what in the hell Spice Baby? What does it all mean? To answer that question, we need to go back further. Further. No, forward, back, forward. Back to the most famous transition in cinematic history and key to the meaning of 2001. A band of apes clinging to life on the prehistoric Savannah, hunted by leopards, chased from the waterhole by a rival band. F is NADH. And till at dawn, the apes wake to see the monolith, a slab of black against the sky, the apes begin to shrink and cry on something. Within them, awakens. The rational human mind, opens its eyes for the first time. One picks up a bone and uses it for the first time in all of creation as a weapon, as a tune. After killing with it the holes, the weapon at the sky. The bone becomes a space satellite. Into that single transition bone to satellite 2001 condenses the whole of human history. The bone is the first human tool. The first technology, the first weapon. The satellite is the final human tool than last technology, the Ultimate Weapon. 2001 is a story about technology. How technology took humankind for mass extinction to the edge of the universe. And it's a story about the limits of technology. How I'll technology can take us into space, but cannot take us to the Stones. For over a century. Science fiction told new stories for the age of science, myths, of man's journeys among the stars. Technology, science fiction told us would shoot rockets to the moon, would build stations in space, technology would colonize the planets and take humans to the stars. 2001 was pitched to Hollywood, is a homage to the technological myths, science fiction, with a space race between America and Russia in full swing. Those myths seemed lost to becoming a reality. But while Stanley Kubrick dedicated meticulous care under grand budget to show the world of vision of space travel. His homage to science fiction is laced with irony. The shuttle to space is empty. The station is half through Indonesia. Rivals of the scientists who built the technology. If 200,001 seems not to have dated, it's because the sci-fi fantasy as space traveling dreamed up never became a reality. However, majestic human technology looks as it dances to the theme of the blue to new enqueue bricks 2001. It is taking us nowhere until the monolith appears again. Office see clock was already among the greats of science fiction when Stanley Kubrick recruited him as 2 thousand and one's co-writer. The movie would make him a legend. But Kubrick did not use clark science-fiction stories for inspiration to make the proverbial, good science fiction movie. Kubrick set out to deconstruct the myths of sci-fi and rewrite them. Talks 2001 is the story of an advanced alien civilization intervening and human evolution to gift us the power of science and technology. 2-breaks 2001 is a more enigmatic story. The monolith is stripped of all contexts. It might be a probe sent by aliens, but it might just as easily be a dimensional portal. A dream of the humans subconscious or the face of God. Clocks, alien artifact is transmitted. By Kubrick into a pure symbol. Each appearance of ammonia left marks a new stage in human evolution. From eight man to toolmaker, from toolmaker to space fairer. And then in Jupiter orbit from Spaceman to stop child. Clogs story Charles, the evolution of human technology. Kubrick story is about evolution on a deeper level, the evolution of consciousness. Human technology reaches its pinnacle in the spaceship discovery sent on its multi-year mission to Jupiter. Human consciousness emerges in a new form in how the ship's artificial intelligence. How is the final manifestation of the rational human mind, a mind that operates on the circuitry of the computer. Enqueue bricks 2001. The rational human mind is the creator of technology, but also the origin of violence. Human technology was born. The need to survive and with it kinda lust for murder and age later, humanity is still at war with itself. Now with nuclear weapons in place of animal bones. When howls own survival is threatened, he manifests the violence of the rational mind and turns murderous. As 2001 reaches peak symbolism, astronauts and scientists, Dave Bowman must literally climb inside the rational human mind and with methodical and deliberate action, switch it off. The rational mind is the final frontier. Beyond it is the infinite universe. The first audiences to see 2001 came expecting a science fiction flick. Many were disappointed, some board or enraged, walked out. The movie was almost pulled from cinemas. Then a different audience found the movie. Kids from the 19 sixties counterculture who saw on the big screen and experience they had only found in drugs like LSD, an experience that we're calling the psychedelic. Those who went through the psychedelic experience came back believing that reality was very different from the scientific model. Space and time were only projections of the rational human mind. Birth and death were illusions created by fear. There was no such thing as ally and all life. Consciousness is experiencing itself subjectively. 2001 puts the psychedelic experience up almost cinema screen. Dave Bowman, freed from the limitations of the rational human mind, is ready to turn on, tune in and drop out of rational reality to experience the infinite universe. His last words before leaving the finite behind, the gateway to the styles is not free technology, but for the expansion of human conscience. Nice. Okay? Yes, admittedly, the psychedelic light show that follows ism and told to law. But it's a bird Dora attempt to show the unshare labled screen. What does going beyond space and time look like? Exactly? Kubrick draws on all of his powers as a genius of cinematic storytelling direct present on screen the emergence of a new human consciousness. Bowman's passage beyond the illusions of life and death is shown as the national sees himself. Pause for each of the stages. Coexistence is rebuff to a new level of consciousness is delivered in the movies most challenging symbol, the stock chart. Stanley Kubrick like to state that humankind was the missing link between ape men and a truly advanced species. 2001 sets out to tell the unevolved humans of the 19 sixties that these things they believe in rockets, Orbital stations, moon basis, starships, even space and time itself adjusts the myths of a finite Qm consciousness. Man. 2001 is not a Space Odyssey because it follows the discovery to Jupiter, but because it tells the story of space itself, of space and time as constructs of the rational human mind from the moment they had dreamed into existence. To the moments are new human consciousness transcends the aisle journey to the stars. 2001 tells us we'll begin not when we build a big enough rocket ship, but when we see that the space which is full of styles is not out there. In year 2001, became a turning point for science fiction. As an outsider and mosses storyteller, Kubrick sold and naive failings of sci-fi AS modern myths. And we wrote them as a new mythology. Popular sci-fi would continue to tell stories of starships and space stations using fantastical inventions like war pensions and hyper drives to bridge the gulfs of the finite universe. Space became a backdrop for Fairy Tales of good versus evil, light versus dark. Cif thus is Jedi. Contemporary science fiction began a turn into inner space towards the psychological myth-making of New Wave creators like JG bowed, Samuel Delaney on a cylinder Gwen, and towards the brutalist cyber punk provision, a humanity trapped on planet earth forever. Today's Authors of cinema have tried and failed to match the myth-making of Kubrick 2160 years after its creation, 20 years after the future at depicted became the past. 2001 remains the touchstone of modern myth-making. 3. Our place in the universe: Great cinema or to Stanley Kubrick, it is 2001, a Space Odyssey. Welcome back. We're going to begin this class by considering another one of our tunnel questions. If you're paying attention in the first workshop for advanced science fiction and fantasy, you will have picked up the idea of eternal questions at the heart of every great sci-fi and fantasy story. And the 21st century mix that we hope to tell with those stories isn't a tunnel question. And at the heart of 2001, a Space Odyssey is one of the great questions that humankind has considered throughout thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of history. What is man's place in the universe? What is man's place in the universe? A quick apology, festival for the, for the gendered use of man. Here. I could say, woman, could say human. It just sounds better to say man's place in the universe. It sounds more profound, I'm partial to it, but please take the use of the word man to me, men or women, or whatever gender identity we may identify on that spectrum. Why is the place of humankind in the universe? If you're thinking about this question today, you probably have. And quite a clear idea of what the answer to this is. We are, apes were evolved from, from apes over a period of many millions of years. And human beings are a kind of miraculous eight, because we have the power of tech, knowledge and science and technology allow us to make tools. And we've used those tools to better understand our universe. And we see that we are on a kind of bowl of rock orbiting and kinda big nuclear explosion, which you call it a star in the galaxy full of stars, which is itself orbiting a black hole. And they're all, as far as we know, an infinite number of galaxies in a huge expanding universe which exists actually in dimensions beyond space and time. But we won't get into Einstein's relativity ferry at this point, although I guess it does, doesn't become relevant. And this is on the whole, the myth that we have and not using that would say it's not true. I'm using the word myth in the context of our course that we tell stories about our universe. These are great foundational mix to the universe. And this is our answer to what is man's place in the universe? Of course. If you go back not too far in history, people had different ideas. They felt that we were creations of a kind of great creator, god. And the, we're at the center of the Universe, on the Earth and the Sun and the planets and the stars orbiting it on crystal spheres around us. That was a different myth. And these are ideas of what man's place in the universe is in Stanley Kubrick. And obviously flock together, developed a different idea of what man's place in the universe might be. One of the ideas that we're talking about in this course is the idea of open challenges with, in science fiction and fantasy writing. The, as we asked these atone or questions about the universe and the place of humankind within that universe. We develop different Alan says we create different mics and now open challenges to those myths. So in the first workshop, we looked at the work of Mary Shelley, who addressed the eternal question, what is human? And she took the idea which was becoming very popular at the time that human is a man, is a machine. And she created a myth around the idea. And in not map Frankenstein and Modern Prometheus, she had the idea that, well, if a man is a machine, then you can just take loads of spare parts together and make a new human. And what would that mean? And she found that the idea was kind of existentially horrifying, is initially an idea for a Gothic horror story. And in all answering it, she created the modern science fiction novel. Stanley Kubrick took up another open challenge in standing. Kubrick was a hugely ambitious storytelling that's really important to think about the ambition that storytellers bring when they make great science fiction and fantasy stories. We'll talk about that a little bit. Mole. Standing cubic took up a different open challenge. He took up the idea of what is man's place in the universe and that, that had been different mythic idea isn't science fiction had told one strong math for about a century, articulating the idea of us as miracle apes on his bowl of roll-call putting a stop. Standing, Kubrick fought. I'm not sure that's right. I think there might be another idea. I think that might be an idea that comes from this emerging counterculture, from psychedelia, from people experimenting with what's become illegal drugs like LSD and psilocybin. And this is an idea that man is the consciousness at the heart of the universe and our level of consciousness. Is creating the universe. And this was the idea that he expressed in 2001, a Space Odyssey. As I talk about this, I want to just get a warning for second, not to get hung up on what the right onset is to these questions. You may find you say, no, humans evolved from apes and we're on a rock at the edge of the universe. That's fine. I, whatever my personal opinions all teaching this course, my personal opinions on the issue. What's really cool about science fiction and fantasy? We can play with these ideas. I don't know what Stanley Kubrick really believed about man's place in the universe by news fantastic, uh, playing with these ideas. And as writers, as creators and his artist, we want to develop an open mind, an open flexible mind to all of the possibilities of the universe so that we can play with them to tell great stories. Stanley Kubrick set out to play with a new idea of man's place in the universe when he took the whole myth-making, myth-making tradition of science fiction. And he rewrote it. He rewrote the mythology of science fiction into a new kind of mythology. And in doing that in the late 19 sixties, he created the greatest science fiction story ever told ordinate remains in that position some 60 years later. Wonderful achievement. As a storyteller. Something that you, if you are also varying, ambitious, may wish to emulate. And that's the point of a Coursera which kind of look at the ways that we can tell great science fiction and fantasy stories. Whether they'd be books, short stories, movies, video games, all the other mediums that are available for storytelling. So well is man's place in the universe as somebody who's drawn to writing science fiction and fantasy stories, I am certain that you have your own answers to these eternal questions. What is a human being? What is the place of human beings within the universe? In today's workshop, we've seen the onset that Stanley Kubrick and office see clock expressed in 2001, a Space Odyssey. And this identifies one of the great open challenges in science fiction and fantasy storytelling. Articulating your own answer to this question. A different kind of metaphor referenced a couple of times in this course already. Want if human beings of within some kind of giant simulation, simulation Fairy is in new idea coming out to physics. Now you can take some of these ideas coming out of physics. You could look into the work of the physicist and computational scientists, Stephen Wolfram and his just emerging ideas in the last few months that the basis of existence, he's like pixels. And that these very simple computational equations create all of the wonders of reality that we see. If you're interested in that, take a look. Steven Wolf rims, write-ups on that. And there's fantastic ideas coming out, physics, coming out of philosophy, coming out of a huge range of areas of modern fought. And as a science fiction fantasy writer, you can pick out these ideas and say, hmm, what if the basis of the university's pixels? What if it is a simulation? And then what would the place of human beings within that simulation be? Maybe where really the players of the game and bodies hair just like characters within a game. Another idea, but the challenge is to find your own ideas of what humans place in existence in the universe is TEN lows into great science fiction and fantasy stories and integrate 21st century MF. So throughout the course we're going to be coming back to these open challenges, which are identified by these eternal questions. And then adding to them the techniques, the advanced techniques of science fiction and fantasy writing. The first of these techniques is called the Novum. 4. Darko Suvin's Novum: The Novum, Novum, the new idea. And this is where we get to what Novum from its, from a Latin root word essentially means new. And the Novum is the new idea. That's at the heart of a science fiction or a fantasy story does apply to both. And it also evokes the idea, the ovum and also related. And it was worth, which is like the AIG, which is the idea that kind of gives birth to the science fiction or fantasy story and sits. So that's how the Novum, it's a concept developed by the science fiction Scala and academic dark clothes suit and an over many decades SUV and wrote about the importance specifically of science fiction writing. And the Novum was the idea that he developed to define what made science fiction special and important. He related it to an idea called cognitive estrangement. So if you think about what happens in your mind when you're reading, watching experience being a science fiction story, the events of the story quite unreal. That may be very similar to reality or they may be very, very radically different from reality. And yet for the time we were watching, we accept them as on some level, real, we're experiencing them. It's just a great powers storytelling that it can take on real events and give us the feeling that we are experiencing them. Fast Poisson, we are within these experiences. And this is what seeming called cognitive estrangement, that we're simultaneously within and without these unreal experiences. And one of the things that allows us to achieve this effect as a storyteller, and especially science fiction storyteller is the Novum. And the Novum is some kind of new idea at the heart of his story in science fiction, it's often a technological idea. It's a new kind of technology which has been introduced to the world and it's changed the weld as the first example, we will look at a very famous science fiction novel called neuro Mansa by winning Gibson. A neuroma is kind of a crying story. It's about a group of characters in the near future of humankind. It was written in the 19 nineties. So the future depicted is now slightly old fashioned. But it was a future where human beings interact in a very deep level. We technology had cybernetic Linz and invented. The cyber punk genre of science fiction. At the heart of New romance or is a Novum, cold cyberspace. When William Gibson was writing in the early 19 nineties and romance was published 1994. The Internet didn't really exist. It was just on his way in. But willing Gibson watched kids playing arcade games and he saw how absorbed they were into these games. And he realized that the future of technology was going to be us actually being absorbed within the technology within computers. And this gave me the idea for cyberspace, a consensual hallucination, that human beings enter and we move around as kind of virtual beings within this space. This had a huge influence on the development of the Internet. And of course now we do to an extent exist within cyberspace. You're probably watching this video on an online platform. You probably spend a lot of your day on your phone, on your computer, on social networks. And we're within these virtual realms. And Gibson coined the term cyberspace for this. And this is the Novum at the heart of neural amounts to new technology of cyberspace that defines the story. And when I say it's at the heart, every neural events interacts with cyberspace in some way. And we're going to come back to how the Novum is always at the heart of the story. It doesn't have to be a technology. Could be an idea, the Novum can be an idea. So what is the new idea? In Isaac Asimov's Foundation? It's, the idea is psycho history. So throughout the foundation series of novels, which go on quite a long time of three initially and then they'll be more. Asimov keeps bringing the story back to psycho history, the force which is shaping the story or the foundation. Novels. So the nova can be a technology, the note and can be an idea. The Novum can be in location. Do you mean by Frank hub? But the new idea causes the cognitive estrangement which allows a science fiction story to operate, is a planet, is the planet Iraqis planet dune, the sand planet with its giant sand whims and the spice Milan's which has produced that nice boilers. And whether it comes from and if this planet Arac is that. So the heart of the story, everything is story from pole mole deep, who's the hero of the story? Will account is round him tool the events they all interact with the planet Iraqiness, which is the Novum in that story. Another kind of location. And this is a Novum style of nova, has become very popular in many sci-fi stories is a starship. What's the Novum install walls. 40 given away to you? You might say it's the light side, it looks like say, but not quite. Now everything is about lightsabers install was, but especially in the fast stream movies, What does everything come back to us? The Millennium Falcon. The Millennium Falcon is the Novum at the heart of the story. It connects all the characters. It connects all the events of the story. And that's why when they rebooted Style wall, it's the reboot is only to battle, rediscovering the Millennium Falcon. Because he's very difficult to do a science fiction story without its Novum. The Starship Enterprise. Again in a very similar weights, the millennium folk in the enterprise is at the heart of every star trek story. And when you get raid, when stuff doesn't work is because the enterprise isn't there. And you find the further it gets away from the enterprise, the less Star Trek. Star Trek style was both go around a star ship as the Novum firefly. A brief Lee lived the very successful, much loved television show You Bi Jiao Sweden. And again, it's a stylesheets serenity is Novum at the heart of the story. No VMS. Four developed by dark OSU and to define what we're special in science fiction. But in fact, you find no rooms all the way through fantasy storytelling as well. To office. He knew each other. Cs Lewis JRR Tolkien. There will both be being talked about a lot in the progression of this course. A lion, the witch, and the wardrobe. The wardrobe is the Novum in the line in which and the wardrobe is the portal to magical worlds. Who are we talking about? Portal fantasies and the progression of this course as well. Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien, one of the most famous Novi, no vm's in sci-fi and fantasy stories heading to one ring. One ring connects together with the characters Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, sore wrong. Galadriel. The list goes on. All of the events in the story about the one ring is the Novum. The, brings. The story into existence is a mind like an AIG, the ovum. The story emerges from the Novum. It's a great tool to use. Where does the Novum come from? Considering combination and two things. On the one hand, the Novum, especially when it's a technology or an idea, there is a logical underpinning to what the Novum is. So the Millennium Falcon on Starship Enterprise, these are technological creations and they have engines, they fly free space, cyberspace in Euro Mensa. Again, you know, this is a technological creation and there was a logic to how it works. And you can pick up. Any advanced can technology, small phones, self-driving cars, don't like robots. It's just a few things around and eat today that have emerged from technology. And you can start to think about how these will become the Novum of your storing. Along with that logical side though. The logos is also the mythic side, the mythos signed it comes from dreams, the size that is non logical design that seems to emerge from the subconscious and the side that is symbolic. 2001, a Space Odyssey. It's the most famous Novum in science fiction story telling. And it's the monolith that's at the heart of the story. The big black MAN left. That P has it fast in the pre-history of humankind than we find one on the moon that we find on an orbit around Jupiter. It connects all the parts of the stories. Every character within 2001 interacts with the monolith in some way. And the monolith has both a logical explanation. In alpha C Kellogg's novel, we're told that this is an emissary, a probe from an alien civilization. It's like a big chunk of technology that he's teaching the ape men skills to advance them as human beings. In Stanley Kubrick was 2001. It's purely symbolic, it's a symbol. And this is the other half of the Novum width, the logical, the logos side. We also need a symbolic meaning for the Novum. So if you look at the Millennium Falcon, it's a technology, it's a starship a has hyper drives. It wasn't how symbolic meaning it means freedom. And whenever we talk about a symbol with giving it words, but the symbol means mole. Then the words that you can, that you can actually apply to it directly. And what makes the sin, the Novum so strong is both the logical and symbolic meaning, the logos and the mythos combined together. And once you know that, once you know the ANOVA Ms. made from both logical and mythic meaning combined together. And they, it's always at the absolute heart of the story, becomes a super powerful tool for telling your own sci-fi and fantasy stories and creating your own 21st century myths. So no Writing Challenge for this class. We're gonna be hunting to know them by bringing together the mythos and logos and seeing how it can compose a story around it. 5. Birthing the Novum: To dive deeper into the idea of the Novum, we're going to be doing quite simple but very useful writing exercise. And you can use this exercise to do many things beyond finding the Novum, but it's a great way to Hun towel to find a new Nova, new ideas got hace his story and create whole new worlds of imagination, can come out to this simple exercise to prepare. Find yourself a plain piece of paper and a pen or a new page on your digital writing tablet. It's going to be better to do this by hand. If you fall on my other places, right, can be found on the internet. You will find videos about the joys of handwriting and why using a hands is such an important part of creativity. And for this exercise, it's really important to handwrite, find yourself a pen, find self piece of paper or digital writing tablet, if that's what you've transitioned to as I have. And find yourself somewhat quiet of wisdom space where you're not going to be distracted once you've done that, we can proceed with the x size. The outline of this exercise is that we are going to be bringing together something from your mythos mind as something from your logos mind, something mythic, something logical, something imaginative, something brought from the well known factual. We'll start with a mythos. Close your eyes. Take a moment to register your breathing. Breathing in. Breathing out. If you feel the need to calm down. To become more focused, let yourself count ten breaths. Ten breaths in timber of sound. If you lose track of that counts dealt again. Like no way up stamina bring you into your breathing. Allow yourself to feel your body. You've got an edge like I got an answer mine under my nose there. You can scratch that h I've got an inch try and just register. Oh, I've got an ache in my shoulder, my hips feeling a bit stiff. You're not as old and falling. Pause me. You may have different sensations in your body. Register, your breathing, come into your body. Take a moment to do that and take a few minutes to do that, take longer if you want, then come back and proceed with the exercise. Close your eyes. See yourself in a wide open field. Grass is blowing in the breeze. You're walking over the field towards the distant horizon, on one hand is just touching the tops of the grass. You can feel the warm enough, undo your toes. And you can sense the heat of the sun on the back of your neck. You walk through the grass and into tendrils of white mist. And as you walk, the MACed becomes Deepa and thicker. Until you can see only whiteness. There is only white mist. There is only pure whiteness surrounding you in every direction. Your hand now feels nothing. You'll toes a standing Noah. Your body has no sense of temperature. Whiteness, white, all white, black, white, black, white, black, white. Make an agreement. You're going to make an agreement with your imagination. But whatever comes from your imagination is good. It's been given to you as a gift. By your imagination. It's a wonderful gift for you to accept. What ever comes from your imagination is good. Pure white, mist, absolute white, nothingness. Deep, black, void. Nothing. Nothing in the void is something, something an image, a sound, a color, sense. There is something in the space of whiteness. Open your eyes, come back into your body. What did you find in the white black void? Right now, write down a single sentence to describe what you found in the void. I'm writing mind down, right? You'll stamp Mine was the feathers of a whole OK. The feather of a whole OK, the feather from a hoax wing. Whenever you as well as writes it down as a single sentence, read it back to yourself. Class poll to that image. This is a fragment of the mythos brought out from your imagination. We're going to accept the spin. We're not gonna question it. We don't know what it means. It doesn't have a meaning. We don't go into applying a meaning to it. We now have half of a Novum communist, the feather of a whole quantity you find. Tell me, OK, now we're going to find the other half of annoy them which constantly logos. There's a number of ways to do this. We'll think about two. You can go Google searching, go and look at the latest news in science and technology. Read about the work of today's top philosophers. Take a google search in the Wikipedia for any of the world's great religions. Read about any modern theologian, any area of intellectual achievement or find an idea. The idea is a slice of logos for you. Or you can answer a question we're going to, for the purposes of this writing exercise. So the question, man's place in the universe, what he's man's place in the universe. Combine your logos. The idea you've researched? Well, the answer to your question Will the question itself with the mythos image that you have? What is man's place in the universe? The Fed or the whole haven't pre-plan this. I don't know if it's going to go anywhere productive, but I trust my imagination. I come to this agreement where my imagination or whatever it gives me as good. And with my logical mind that whatever ideas it finds interesting will be useful. And these can work together. What do I get? If I ask the question, man's place in the universe and the fed, all the whole OK. Human beings, fallen angels. Not angels as in human beings who have wings but hope like beings fly through dimensions for the dimensions of reality. And one of them has been struck our reality. And a feather has been awesome. It's fallen for the dimensions to the sloppily dimension. And it's been shattered and every one of its feathers that have flown off has become a different human consciousness on this strange planet. And we're trying to gather all the feathers together, world human beings together and take off again into the great dimensions that the hawk angels Ones flew in. And at the heart of this story is a Novum, IS a feather. A multi-dimensional feather, like a facet of crystal but flexible, still feathery. And human beings a hunting this feather. The multi-dimensional feathers, the Novum, and the heart of my story. What's the odds of your story? What you find? If you take this fragment of the mythos and they slice of logos and play with them together. Whatever image you go, you can use the question, man's place in the universe. You can use the question, what is a human being? You can use the idea of Mandela excuse machine. If you want, you can pose another tunnel question. You can take the piece of research, whatever idea your logical mind attached itself to you. When you combine them together, what November they give you. So I'm going to draw myself a multi-dimensional feather roughly. And what do we know about the Novum? We know that Novum is always at the heart of the story. To new ideas, to symbolic image at the heart of the story. So having drawn the Novum, I can say who might find the feather? The feather is found by a boy who can't walk. A boy in a wheelchair. And he finds the feather falls from the sky. He has been crippled in an accident. I don't need to know the accident is yet. And he's in his lowest ever. The boy, he doesn't need a name yet. The lowest of all possible fantasies in this bag because he can't run anymore. And the feather falls from the sky and lands on his lap. And we might assume that the Fed will help him fly. At some point, who is hunting? Who's hunting the fellow? Who would want not to have lost the feather. Scientist, an ambitious scientist who summons the feathers from the multi-dimensional space. I am literally just making this up. I think it's gone quite good though. Who might find the feather? Who might be hunting the Fettah? Who might have lost the Vienna. He might have lost the femoral. Boy, I've assigned taste. The feather was lost by an SRS who inherited it from her grandfather. And she for a huge party in a Zeppelin. And as that plane and the feather escaped, tumbled from the Zeppelin and a phenol New Boy, a carpet boy in a wheelchair, a scientist, an ambitious scientist who wants to study in a multi-dimensional further the RAs, who inherited the feather. And because she's a responsible, she lost it. I think you get the idea. I think you get the IBM. But once you have found a Novum from this combination of the mythos than logos assemble, drawn up from your soul within. Remember you can use the exercise to go diving in your cell that anytime for any reason. But it's a great way to find, you know, guns, a piece of logic, the answer to an eternal question, some kind of research, some kind of new scientific idea. Once you've found this Novum, your imagination is going to play with it. And it's just gonna generate stories. Stories, you know, it will generate far too much for any single story and then you edit, you edit down. I mean, you have the idea. You can create a story from this. Now wherever you are watching this exercise, please, please go and find the written notes on a writing challenge and get working on your own science fiction and fantasy stories on non-neural 21st century MF, My name is Damian walter. Thank you very much for joining me again for the second workshop in advanced science fiction and fantasy writing, the 21st MF. I hope this has given you some inspiration and that you were with excitement and passion. Go and get working on your own stories. Thank you.