EPISODE 08: WORLDS IN SPACE AND TIME
Episode 08: Worlds in Space and Time | 12 January 2026
Trent and Stephen contemplate Chapter 6 of The Worldbuilding Workshop, “Worlds in Space and Time,” including:
Star Wars, Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and Game of Thrones as exemplars for understanding breadth vs. depth;
The "fuzzy boundaries" of worlds in space and time;
Deciding what "matters" in a particular world;
The Lord of the Rings as a model for deconstructing scope and sequence;
Alice Walker's Everyday Use and Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead as vehicles to discuss sociocultural change on a timeline;
How Colin Woodard's American Nations deconstructs the United States in terms of sociocultural differentiation across the nation's colonial and expansionist history;
Attending to the full set of political, economic, social, and cultural dynamics when evaluating historical causality;
Determining relevance and granularity through the world deconstruction process;
Navigating information in the present versus other historical eras;
The relationship between nuanced analysis and moral judgment;
Consequences of global interconnectivity and the impact on societal decision-making; and
The exchange of ideas, information, and resources through space and time.
Episode References:
Walker, A. (1973, April). Everyday use. Harper's Magazine.
Kingsolver, B. (2022). Demon Copperhead: A novel. Harper.
Woodard, C. (2011). American nations: A history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America. Viking.
Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. Free Press.
Levitt, S. & Dubner, S. J. (2005). Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything. William Morrow.
Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Allen Lane.