EPISODE 08: WORLDS IN SPACE AND TIME

What this episode covers

Episode 08: Worlds in Space and Time | 13 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.

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