How to write science fiction & fantasy

1. Introduction: Science fiction is our modern day morphology. For 200 years, science has revolutionized our view of the universe. Great storytellers have worked to create new motifs for the modern era and told great stories of science fiction. Even as in the 20th century, science fiction and fantasy have come to fill the cinema and television screen to populate the virtual worlds of computer games and role-playing games. The future for science fiction may perhaps eclipse it's past. The 21st century. Next, I'll still to be written. Who will write the great mythic stories of the 21st century? Could it be you? Could you be the writer of the great myth for the 21st century? Could you all stories live on? 2. Frankenstein - how a teenage goth invented science fiction: The stench of lightning and charred flesh fills the air. You awaken on a mortuary slab in agony. You don't know it, but you've just been hit with the force of a lightening bolt. Nobody has being stitched together. The internal Logan's wedged into the ribcage, the lens paste pieced together from the bodies of dead human beings. The pain is beyond all description. And you, you stagger, awake up with one question in your mind, a question that will throw you into the world on a journey in which you will commit crimes, commit mud, destroy, even the few things that you might claim to love on a quest for your creates a, you are not a human, you are not a child of God. You are a month stone. You are Frankenstein monster. The year is 1816, summertime. Everyone understandably wants to go on vacation for young, relatively wealthy autistic, creative types. Book, a villa together on the banks of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. They say is the semi legendarily Villa de adapting. And the for young people in question would become some of the most famous literary and artistic figures in English. And some might say World History, Lord Byron, famous epic poets and political revolutionary, sea-based Shelley, the Romantic poets and jump Polydorus. Who was rather less famous than the others, but we believe was the creator of the modern vampire. The for, for these young creative figures was the wife of person-based shelling, commonly known as Mary Shelley. Therefore, her actual name came from her mother, who was also a novelist, an intellectual in London, or the day Mary Wollstonecraft. And so the full name of the young lady we are talking about is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who in true contemporary style we will refer to buy her three initials, M, W, S, and ws is only 19. The men are in their early twenties. These are for kids out to party, at least in the style of the early 18 hundreds that don't have any television, they don't have any films or movies. So to entertain each other. In the evening, they tell stories and they tell stories of Gothic horror. Indeed, you'd have to say that these four are GFS, not because they were conforming to any style known as golf at the time, but because they were the prototypical GFS, the young teenagers in the 19 eighties here might seem strolling for your town center in strange romantic revival cloves. We're basing themselves on these four young Bohemians. And most golf at all, I believe must have been Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelly and ws are young, intense intellectual who had gone into the public life of London and got to known many, if not all of the great artists and intellectuals. Which is how she come into contact with percy best Shelly and they had married very young ages by our contemporary standards. And in our conversations with those great intellectuals of the day, end Ws began to develop ideas about in particular philosophy. And she would express many of these ideas and the Gothic tale of horror that she told for her friends in the holiday of 1816. And it was a story that we now know as Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus, to correct that common but well-known era. Frankenstein is not the monster. Frankenstein is the creator of the monster. Frankenstein is arrogant. That can be no other word for him. And arrogant. But very powerful scientific thinker. And he wants to do what only Prometheus admit was done before, which is to steal fire from the gods. By which we mean to take the power of the gods for ourselves, which for Frankenstein is the power of creation and the power of life and death. And he's seeking to make life. Does indeed Satan the creation of his monster. If it was true of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley at it's true of many young, teenage gulfs that we may know today that she was perhaps depressed or suffering some kind of existential angst about the Universe around her. She might have had good reason. M ws was living at a very particular time in human history. When our ideas about the universe, our wellness selves place in the world and then the universe was being severely challenged. For thousands of years. We had, as a culture, believed that we were creations of God, divine, being sparks of an ultimate creative force in the universe and whatever suffering we went through. That knowledge that we were children of this divine creator, and that we've worth filling their purpose in the world gave us a sense of meaning that this meaning, this story was being stripped away by an even more powerful force. For centuries. People have looked out into the galaxies and the universe beyond the earth and found different meanings using first telescopes like Galileo Galilei. And they had seen and suspected that in fact, we were not the center of the universe. We were one of many planets orbiting the sun. They had used microscopes to look down and found the microscopic life, unlike humans, were indeed constructed of selves. And our whole view of the world was being changed by one tremendously powerful new force in the world, the force of science. Think about what was happening in 1816. This was, if not the air around the year of the discovery of electromagnetism, the force that will give Frankenstein life. It's only a few decades before the discovery of the nerve cell, probably about a century and a half before the first organ transplant. When long-held belief was proven that you can take an organ from one human being and place it into another to extend their lifespan. Yet, all of this scientific discovery was prefigured in the aerating 16 by the young and Ws. Not a bad achievement for teenage girl. Humans. No longer the children of God now are understood ourselves in a new way. We were now man as a machine. The early 18 hundreds was the emergence of the industrial revolution that changed the machines were making in the world. And so it became a natural idea. The thinkers of the day to start to consider the human beings were machines. And by thinking of the human body in this way, we were able to start considering the ads. We fixed our machine as we're able to take random spare parts and fix up the steam engines of the day. We too would be able to do this with the human body. And this was the idea that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly turned into story. And from here we have the seed of Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus. What if a young ambitious scientists was able to take the parts, the spare parts from dead bodies, from the broken machine bodies of men, and stitch them together to make a new life. What would the consequences of this B, all those moment will be loss. In time. Like rain. 3. Science fiction is our modern mythology: Look, think about what Mary Shelley dead. She was 19 years old and she told a story, she wrote a novel. And 200 years later, almost everyone in the world can still tell you about Frankenstein. This is a story that has survived the two centuries. Think about all the stories that are told to nobody will ever remember all the novels that wherever rich and that nobody will ever written, read. And Mary Shelley created a story that survived for 200 years. Why? Why is it a Frankenstein stayed with us for this long. Why is it we are told and Lee told this story over and over again. It's because Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley created a myth, a modern myth for the age of science, this word, myth, it comes from the ancient Greek. When they had two ways of thinking about the mind, the logos, the logical minds that gives us technology and science, brings order in the world. The mind that has given us the age of science that we live in today. But they also had the muthos. And the mythos was the dreaming mind that today we think of is the unconscious mind. And the mythos was the mind or the poet, mightily, the artist and the mind of the storyteller and the stories that spoke to the mythos within us. These were sacred stories. These are stories of heroes, stories, gods, and for all of human history, we have had myths through to the modern day. A new myths that we tell for the age of science, beginning with Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, a modern Prometheus, myths that we now call science fiction. Science has revolutionized our view of the universe. We have been in a race to do what humans have always done to find new stories. To give the new reality of the universe. Meaning. If Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelly was the first writer to ask if man is a machine. And if she was among the first intellectuals, artists, creators, writers, and storytellers, to adress the new realities that science was showing humans about the universe that we inhabited. She would not be the last. The idea of man as machine and a Frankenstein monster that Mary Shelley created in a work of literature has echoed through. Two centuries of modern storytelling that have followed on Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus, who is Roy Batty, the replicant at the heart of the movie Blade Runner, based on a novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by the novelist Philip K. Dick, who is Roy Batty, if not a version of Frankenstein monster. He has been created by human beings. To do the work of the machine replicants in a world of Blade Runner used as slaves and as machines. Roy Batty is created as the ultimate super soldier and he escapes that fate to return to a fan to confront his creator, the founder of Tirole cooperation. What are the Androids of a television series, Westworld, but a multiple cost of Frankenstein monsters. Exploring the metaphysical questions of what it is to think of man as a machine. Can we be reset? Can our personalities be overwritten? Again, we see this question of man as machine. In Macau ski Brothers movie The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves as neo, as the now iconic to our contemporary culture moment of swallowing the red pill. Waking up from an illusionary human wealth to find is trapped in a world of machines to see wakes like an embryo thing into a new well from machine, cuckoo, man as machine. This is the storytelling tradition of science fiction. Science fiction is alum model. He made philology. For 200 years. Science has revolutionized our view of the universe. Great storytellers, beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelly frankenstein, a modern previous, have worked to create new myths for the modern era and told great stories of science fiction. If we are faced with an infinite universe, we have a near infinite number of stars and near infinite number of planets. How well humans go boldly into that space where we encounter alien civilizations, alien empires, will we fight walls as we once for naval battles on the planet of, well, Well the reality. Of an infinite view of us. Beef, strike ninja. Still, if human beings are creations of genetics and DNA as it possible, we might manipulate that DIO experienced mutations in it that will create super human beings who might behave heroically or perhaps Vin honestly and well way in some ways become like the gods of ancient history, many of whom are characters in the stories that we tell of super human. And ventures as we have developed the technology of computation and we're bought computers. In the world knows computers have gained empower and have a gun to create within them in time, new worlds and realities, often obeying their own laws of physics and philosophies. Is it possible to allow wrong, well-known universities in some sense, a computer simulation? Are we only characters within some cosmic. As we have considered the possibilities of alien life on other planets we've seen reflected the plasticity of our own existence and the hypocrisy of attitude to those who are different from the norm within our society. And we have explored the power dynamic and the politics of the real world through the fantasy, some metaphors of science fiction and fantasy. Even as in the 20th century, science fiction and fantasy have come to fill the cinema and television screen to populate the virtual worlds of computer games, role-playing games, and to create some of the most profoundly philosophically interesting works of literature around. Even as science fiction has done all of this and more, the future for science fiction may perhaps eclipse. It's passed because sci-fi and fantasy, we're not simply entertaining. Of course they're entertaining. And anything that we love is entertaining. In that way we want to be entertained by the stories that we watch. But we're also in the fields of sci-fi and fantasy, doing something rather wonderfully and strangely important, we are creating the modern myths for the world that science is showing us. Hence, science fiction, fantasy, drawing on the ancient myths from the past and bringing them back into the modern world. And the process of myth appear as the wonderful JRR Tolkien. Cold it. This is the real importance of sci-fi and fantasy. And this is the topic of this course in advanced science fiction and fantasy writing, the 21st century myth. We're gonna be searching through the great 20th-century History of science fiction, diving back into the ancient myths of the past and how they have been brought into the present in fantasy. And we're going to be seeking the new mix for the 21st century. Sometime ago, I asked my followers on Twitter, which are the great sci-fi and fantasy franchisee is thinking of things like Marvel, superhero Avengers, Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, you name it. Which of these great franchises was the great mythology or the 21st century? And none other than Neil fucking Gaiman replied to me to say that those all seemed like rather twentieth-century maps are made of the 21st century. If we're still count, there is something very 20th century literary. There were born in the 20th century and run into the 21st. But there's also in the values and the E false conveyed in these twentieth-century myths. Something particularly last century, the 21st century myths. I'll still to be written. Maybe they're being written at that mind map. Maybe they've just been published. Maybe some of the great writers of science fiction, fantasy, or just coming to the fore have already compose them by suspect. They are yet to be written. Who will write them? Who will write the great mythic stories of the 21st century? Will it be Neil Gaiman? Could be strong possibility. One of the great storytellers all time will be me. Could I have the honor as possible? I am in the game. Could it be you? Could UV the writer of the great myth for the 21st century, could your stories live on myths that we profoundly need to give meaning to this, the 21st century that we're all living in. Perhaps, perhaps if you follow the course and advanced sci-fi and fantasy writing, the 21st century MF. It might help you fulfill that goal, even if that isn't your ambition. Even if you're simply a huge fan of sci-fi and fantasy, I invite you to come along on this journey. 4. Why is Science Fiction happening?: Good afternoon. Welcome to the first workshop for advanced science fiction and fantasy writing, the 21st century myth. The fame of this course, of course, is science fiction and fantasy. I'm going to open this workshop with a question. Why is science fiction happening? Simple question. Might be a complicated question when you stop to think about it and get into the answer, I assume if you all engaged with this course that the majority of you will already be in some way fans or possibility creators of science fiction and fantasy. Maybe you love watching Avengers movies. Maybe you're a big fan of Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe you being reading comic books since the 19 forties. Perhaps you've been to every Hugo awards ceremony. Hello George Martin. Probably only be you if you happen to be tuning in. I would be honored. Although I think it's probably unlikely given how busy you must currently be working on the Winds of Winter. Think it's the Winds of Winter. And if you're a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, you will know what I'm talking about. But the question for this workshop, why is science fiction happening? Why is fantasy happening? Why do literally billions of people, millions of people, billions of people cram into darkened, sacred temple-like cinema screenings of films like The Avengers. So the avenges, the second Avengers movie in Bali and the entire island for the Davey Avengers launched the entire rod into 4 million people plus stories just came to a halt because everyone went to the cinema and I went to see it in a local Balinese cinnabar. And he was an amazing experience. And that's on the, literally the other side of the world. From weather films made in Hollywood. These are global events. Why? Why billions of people watching Avengers movies, Star Wars movies, whatever the big franchise aids at the time. Why was it an almost weld shattering event when both the Avengers and Game of Thrones came to an end on the same week. What's that about? Why a sci-fi and fantasy happening? Why do billions and billions of people power their play station or their Xbox and disappear into worlds of science fictional fantasy. Why when we go into a virtual world, into a video game, video games today, especially with younger people, but really across the whole population. Now the most Popular pastime, distraction, entertainment, whatever you choose to call them. Above. Anything else. Why when we turn on video games, why on video games about getting up in the morning, Washington going to the office, which is the mundane life and lot of people. Perhaps it's because we want to escape that mundanity. But why do we time and again travel often spaceships go and fancy realms where we can be heroic character with a special magical acts, so sword or the ability to cast spells. Why? While we saw enraptured? By entering sci-fi and fantasy worlds? It's an easy question, but it's not an obvious sounds. Really isn't at all. Tell me tell me your own says wherever you find this, tell me your answers. Today's. Why can billions of people, again, tell you in detail about the adventures of a boy wizard visiting school. Uh, why can nearly all of those people tell you with a certain amount of surety? Which house at Hogwarts, switch Hogwarts house the sorting hat which sorted, sorted them into. I am a raven claw, bone and bread. Which house you invented, invented ideas by JK Rowling. Probably almost everybody in the world. People across all seven continents can tell you which Hogwarts house they belong to. Y. Y may sound like an easy question. It's not an easy answer. Why can billions of people telling you what a starship is? Why do billions of people believe that one day humans will travel in ships to the stars as we once travelled on the sea, in bugs, still do. And when we travelling starships, we will find alien civilizations on planets a bit like our own, or perhaps they'll even be more than that. Because none of this has ever happened. It's a complete fantasy and a sci-fi story. And yet today, probably two-thirds of the population, at least, I'd actually guess everyone. I'd guess the, you could go to lost tribes in the Amazon jungle. I think so. And they'd have an idea about starships. Why is that? And belief? Why does so many people in so lots of people believe that perhaps even in the near future, they will be able to upload their mind to a computer and it will live on forever. Well, there'll be able to upload their minds your computer, and then have it placed into an Android. There'll be able to walk around with an Android's body. Popular ideas. There's many ideas like this from Britain's gather is transhumanism, which is very much part of the culture, sci-fi and fantasy. But they say isn't just something that people find to be an interesting idea. And many people, you may be among them, believe this idea. They believed this idea in the same way that many people believe that will go to heaven. It's a belief in their life. And it comes from sci-fi and fantasy stories. I appropriately, by now made my point on this matter. The thesis of this course, in answer to the question, why is science fiction happening? The faces of the course is that science fiction and fantasy, myth. They are modern myths. And we have already touched on this idea in the opening talk to the course, that we are creating a modern mythology from sci-fi and fantasy stories consent as some of the ways that myths. Let's think of Greek myths that most of you are probably familiar with. Great myths of gods like Zeus, heroes like Hercules or Heraclius. Myths like the Iliad and the Odyssey. The wall between Greece and Troy. Odysseus's journeys across the islands. Myths like Theseus and the Minotaur. So think about how those myths a similar, very similar to the sci-fi and fantasy stories we tell. They tend to have super powerful characters like The Avengers. In fact, at least one of the Avengers is actually a god from old myths, as we know, full, full. They happen in Unreal places. Imagine places which don't always obey the rules of physics as we know them, like alien wells or parallel dimensions, all lost Greek items. They're incredibly popular. Billions of people watch the avenges today. Well, the Star Wars movies or Harry Potter's movies, Lord of the Rings movies have read the books and they play the games. And all the other ways that sci-fi and fantasy manifest. And it'll the less popular stories, you know, I focus on the popular stories so that we can share talking about them. There's thousands of stories which are fascinating that small, fewer people know about. But they really great myths. Mega popular, the Greek mips. Everybody in ancient Greece, neither myths, everybody. And they've lasted all the way through 3 thousand years, very often to the present day, long-lasting and mega popular. And people believe them. We don't know whether the stories of the Greek gods, Zeus and Athena and all of the other gods, the whole pantheon dots. We don't know if they were originally stories that people began to believe, that they became something people believed. Or maybe they were real. Maybe they're really worried golds and people told story about them. But I guess we're making the assumption as rational, well-done people that was not true. Tell me in the comments if you believed they were true. But just in the way people now, I've come to believe in trans human ideas like they can be uploaded your computer. Nymphs tend to full people's beliefs as well. And sci-fi and fantasy, our modern myths. They share oldest same qualities and this tends to raise the question. Then. Watches a myth. I've used the word a lot in the opening talk. I'm using. 5. What is myth?: What is a myth? I'd use the word law in the opening told name using again. In this workshop, what is a myth? While we covered briefly in the opening tool that we get the word myth from the Greek idea mythos. Mythos comes from early in Greek society, in Greek civilization. When the Greek culture understood itself by creating method stories and wherever we look in the world, early cultures, early civilizations had powerful myths. The Greeks as we being through have myths of superheroes, gods, demons, other worlds, all of these things. Ancient Hindu culture, the great mix of the Hindu pantheon, Ganesh via the elephant god. If you go to South America, North America as the tribes that had their own mythic stories. Many of them still hugely popular, widely remembered across Africa. And Nancy, despite a trickster god among many other gods from Africa. And these mythic stories repeat again and again. And I do tend to happen early on and a culture, and then Greek culture from mythos began to use more logos. And so you have the famous Greek philosophers like Aristotle. And then we're thinking more than logos throughout the logical mind, logos and the dreaming mind of mythos. And that's where the word myth comes from. We know that their stories, myths and stories. Many of you would have come to this course. From my earlier course, the rhetoric of story. And the rhetoric of story will be interesting to everyone on this close. If you haven't engaged with that. It's recommended it's not compulsory. It's recommended for a couple of reasons. Because of course we have myths, sci-fi, fantasy, we're talking about stories. It's on that cosine. I go into the mechanics of storytelling, seven foundations and touting path with stories. When not looking specifically at storytelling. Kozol's of mythic ideas we're going to be talking about have characters, plot, scenes, events, structure, conflicts, emotions. But we're not talking specifically about how you do that part of the storytelling on their skulls were looking specifically at the structuring of the myths, the making modern myths. So if you wanna get deep brings and storytelling side of things, please go and check out the rhetoric of story. And as useful as well for understanding what the story pontiff him, if he's doing. Don't wave. Mips. We are capturing the power of story because stories are not just things that we watched. Stories are how we think. The latest psychological and scientific neuroscientific insights. The story is that stories are the shape and structure of our mind and our psychology. And this is why mythic stories are so powerful. And to get more into this. But if you want to know more bounce story, please, please, please go and look into the rhetoric story. It's only about five hours long. Tolkien, JRR Tolkien. Draw asking what a myth is. Jrr Tolkien was very significant thinker on the idea of myth in the molten era. Here is a quote from Mr. JRR Tolkien, created Lord of the Rings is a story that we will be talking about in some depth. And then later parts of the course, Tolkien coined a term called MRF Appiah. He did exist before token, but he popularized a, he gave its modern meaning, which is the construction of modern mix new maps for the modern world. So the idea of papaya is at the heart of this course. On Tolkien said that one of the interesting things about maths is that their significance is not easily penned on paper. By analytical reasoning is at its best when presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit ways FEM portends it's defender. Thus, at a disadvantage, these tokens on weds, unless he is careful and speaks in parables, he will kill what he is studying by Vivi section for MRF is alive, full myth is alive. That's a very important idea. Mf is alive and once and in all of its parts and dies before it can be dissected. This is an idea that we're going to repeat quite often in the course. But whilst we can give meanings to mix and to mythic stories, if we try and pin down a specific meaning, we will kill the myths. Because myths are stories that talk to the mythic mind. They don't talk to the logos mine, which is where meaning, where we try and get the logos is determined to find specific meanings and things. But myths talk to the logos minded dreaming mind, the imagination, the how, the SOL. And then not about meaning. They're very often about feeling or about being. Myths can be thought of as living things. And when we try and pin down that meaning like a butterfly, we kill them. So we're not gonna talk too much about single specific meanings. We do readings of mics, we do meanings that we can take from a method we want to, but we're not trying to say that that's the only thing that the MRF means. And this gives us an idea of what a metaphase, the answer to this question, myth is a story that speaks to a myth also in a world and dies when we tried to name its meaning. And that's, I think as much as we can say about me. We tried to pin miffed down anymore. Myth itself dies just like individual mythic stories. And now we, okay, now we get to the big question. The big question. So why? If myths come from all the times, ancient civilizations and even from the earliest times in those civilizations. And if mips in some way, if mythos was somebody replaced by logos, logic, reason, science. Why do we need 21st century maps? This is the hard palate of Our first question, why science fiction happening? Why are all these myths happening? And why are they not just, you know, they're not just being told. These are a huge part of our modern life, our modern culture. You and many other people probably spend more time in the inner worlds that mips help us explore than you do at work? Depends what kind of job you have, depends how hard you work. But there are a huge part of our life. Why do we need 21st century mix? So here are some suggested ideas to think about to expand and deepen the course. When I'm putting forward ideas like this. As I said in the introduction, talking about these ideas, stretches, means and the limits of my intellectual capacity and my learning in the subject. And what I'm saying is they're absolutely to challenge it stuffy to chew on, for you to think about, for you to feel feature imagined with. And the more interactive these workshops become more chance there will be to debate these ideas and never take what I'm saying here is gospel. We need mics because however logical we become, we have our rich in a world and inner life. And myths help us access that. And a lot of our world has become highly and increasingly more and more materialistic, centered on the external world, how it can be measured, how we can manipulate the external world to make it better. And we do this, the power that lets us control the material world, but makes us more and more materialistic is science. So science has grown and become more powerful. We actually have this growing matching need to return to the mythos. Mind, the imagination to get back into a Han Solo body and to feel and to be instead of thinking and finding meaning and everything. And this is what we need. 21st century Mexico, because the 21st century is the most driven by science, reason, rationality, logos of any century. Until white that out. We need 21st century myths. Note this duality between mythos and logos. And think about the name, the phrase science fiction. Science fiction, if you're a fan, you're very familiar with the term science fiction, you probably take it for granted. Most of us do. But think about it. Science fiction is fascinating. It's absolutely fascinating. Fascinating to consider. It's a fascinating part of our culture. Because it unites two opposite. So unite science. The power of science, logos with the mythos, the fiction, the story, the need for the story. And these two powerful forces, often conflicting. I'll unified in science fiction, waking and dreaming, science fiction, conscious and unconscious science fiction. If you familiar with the ideas from psychology of system one and system two, which are a conscious, non-conscious minds. I always forget which one is system one and system two. But you find this duality there as well. Logo some metals like we've said, sci-fi and fantasy. Sci-fi and fantasy. The name of this course, advanced sci-fi and fantasy writing, the 21st century myth. I'm throughout the course, you take on new one idea from this introductory workshop. Take the idea that this duality between science and fiction, logos, mythos, rationality versus imagination. However you want to phrase it, is at the core of creating the 21st century myth. 6. Writing Challenge 1 - Eternal Questions: So welcome to the opening workshop writing challenge for advanced sci-fi and fantasy writing, the 21st century MF, these Writing Challenge sections will take up a little bit more of the workshops that follow this. But for this initial workshop, we wanted to explore some of the introductory ideas a little bit more depth, that this is only going to run about five to ten minutes. You can also find a summary as a written document on whatever platform you are following the course. To introduce you to the Writing Challenge. And the aim of this challenge is to get you writing your own 21st century myths. And we're going to be hoping that as many people as possible who are following the course are producing their own myths and who knows? Maybe we'll find ways of getting those new mess read. Maybe we'll find ways of publishing them, of getting them out into the world. And going from being a course in writing 21st century myths to actually introducing new Twenty-First Century myths to the well. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. So in this introductory talk to the course, we were looking at Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelly. And at the heart of Frankenstein is the first technique that we're thinking of for myth making. Because if you look at myths through history, myths explain things to us, they answer questions to give you an example. The myth of Romulus and Remus was the answer to the question, how was Rome founded? And these were the young twin brothers raised by wolves who went on to found Rome. And there's a lot more to that myth, but they were in answer to an eternal question. We're going to note this down here. I must apologize for the occasional or foreignness or I'm reasonableness of my handwriting as we do this. So please, I hope you can follow along and my, you know, quite frequent spelling mistakes as well. We are all baked human in our spelling and grammar are eternal questions. At the center of every myth is an eternal question. And if we think about Frankenstein, there's an eternal question, a big one at the center of the modern myth there is Frankenstein NA, is the question, what is a human? Which is carp so far in this introductory. The thing about eternal questions is that once he phrase them into a specific question, you might argue, well, is that specifically the question? And it's not the only way of phrasing the question. It might be something other than more like is a human or machine or other ways of exploring the same idea. But this is the kind of idea that is at the heart of many myths. And I would definitely argue is at the heart of Frankenstein. And to go about thinking about creating our own 21st century myths. Addressing an eternal question is a great idea. We can think about other questions like. What is space or what is time? What are these things? How did the universe come into existence? Was it created by God? Who knows creation myths, you know? What is evil? Where does evil come from? So you get the idea, you know, these are the beggar tonal questions of philosophy, of science, of human life and theirs loads of different ways of answering these questions. And Frankenstein is quite specific answer to this question. What is a human? Let's think about it. Let's think, you know, and I want you to know that I'm just doing this ad hoc. This is not something I'm pre-planning because I don't want you to think that, you know, there is only some special way of tackling these questions or stein, create your own MF. You know, this is something that we can all do. So I draw like a quadrant here. And I'm going to put in here as a way of approaching eternal questions. Some ways of answering different ways of answering the same question. And I'm going to call these inner two ends, outer, social and universal. Okay? Inner, outer social and use inverse colonies are different ways of thinking about these big questions. So let's think about the question, what is a human? But at this end again here, a human in a, from the inner perspective, what do you feel you are from inside? So we might say that he in a perspective of being human is something like a sold, like we all feel we have a, so we'll feel WE unique that we play some role in the world we only see for our own eyes. We're only here for years. And it leads us to this kind of soulful conclusion that we have is so how about outer? How to other, how do we see other people? Other people maybe from an outer perspective, look a bit like characters, right? You know, it looks like we're watching a kind of story. You have other people in Wheaton. Guess what? Characters are motivated by an history, but we don't really know, right, going through this a bit quickly because I want to get too hung up on it. It's just one way of answering these questions. Social, what does society think of people where people have a function or role in society, which we now call a job. So you know, people are known to be a doctor or a cleaner. And this is how socially we call people. And what about universally from the perspective of the universe? Or let's say another way to put the same idea in a physical sense. Well, this might bring us to this idea that was in Frankenstein, that a human being is like a machine. You know, we're just a body with just a mechanism which just sad parts within a very machine-like universe were just a physical entity in a router, social universal soul, character, job machine TE, one way of answering this question. So if we look at Frankenstein, what does marinate Mary Shelley do in Frankenstein? She looks at this universal physical idea. So we could do this with any answer. She looks at this idea and she says, well, what if we are a machine? Why for humanism machine? And Shelley is essentially a romantic. She believes that these physical definitions of the universe science is very keen on, you know, a taking over too much. And it all looks from that perspective, it looks very bleak. That the idea of a human being, a machines very bleak. And she puts that idea into the story of Frankenstein. So she creates a human being. She says, What if we could make human beings in the way we, we make machines? What would that be like? What would it be like to, you know, awake after being struck by lightning, being stitched together from dead bodies, would it be very horrifying? So it becomes a kind of Gothic horror story. And we would be very angry. There's my Frankenstein stick man who's, who's made a parts. And she follows this idea for the story. But you could take any of these answers. You can say, well, what if human beings Wi-Fi in their idea of ourself is true, what if we're rarely a soul? So put humans into the world is a soul. Mary Shelley used of metaphor to do that. You know, the metaphor of a kind of constructed human. How could you find a metaphor for a, so maybe a video game program, maybe your program in a video game. What would that mean to be a program in a video game and then you play that out. Okay, that's as far as I'm going to take this exercise, don't go too much deeper into this other than to say, all the way through the course, we're gonna be coming back to these eternal questions here. We're gonna be doing that because at the heart of all of the modern myths that we're going to be looking at a bit of a spoiler. Next session is about 2001, a Space Odyssey. There is eternal question at the heart of that, you can consider what it is. There are also other techniques that we're gonna be exploring, but this first technique, the asking and answering of eternal questions. And if you open the document that you will find on whichever learning platform you are watching this on your webpage, open that document, you will find the written writing challenge using eternal questions, we're going to be introducing a new technique can each session these techniques will build up and you will have a full toolkit for building on the advanced level sci-fi and fantasy stories that tell 21st century myths for the age of science, or perhaps even for beyond the age of science. Thank you very much for watching and engaging with this. Good luck in your writing.