﻿Have you ever wondered what the world would look like through the eyes of a cat?
Or a dinosaur? Or an… alien living on a far distant sun? An old portrait, maybe?
If that’s something you do, it’s really not that weird, I promise! It’s fun to riddle
out how the world changes depending on the body you experience it with. Honestly, it’s sort of
the starting place for a lot of beloved stories. It’s how we got The Land Before Time and Redwall,
Finding Nemo and A Bug’s Life. Come to think of it, pretty much half of all Pixar
movies are kind of… just… this. And yet, for how common it is,
it sure is a misunderstood fantasy. You start to talk about stories told from the perspective of
animals and objects and people go, oh, you mean like WARRIOR CATS? Nothing wrong with
Warrior Cats, but I think that’s how people tend to see this stuff—stories for kids. Even better,
you hear it called furry stuff, as if that were a meaningful insult of some kind.
For whatever reason, Xenofiction has a pretty bad reputation.
People don’t tend to take it seriously. Even Hans Zimmer declined to do the soundtrack
for The Lion King at first because it was an animal movie. Because the stories humans should
care about are stories about humans, right? But I will tell you now: xenofiction is way
weirder and way more powerful than you would have ever thought.
It turns out there’s a great deal humans can learn from… being a little less human, for a while.
Spoiler warning: we’re going to talk about the book Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky in
this video. It is a mindbending story, definitely one of the craziest things I’ve ever read. If you
want, you can get ahead by listening to the audiobook for free before you watch the video,
thanks to our sponsor Audible. Visit the link in the description or go to audible.com/talefoundry
to get started! “Portia is used to a city of a thousand angles,
a chain of walls and floors and ceilings strung at every possible slant, a world of taut silk
that can be taken down and put back up, divided and subdivided and endlessly tailored to suit.
The giants must live their lives amongst these rigid, unvarying right angles,
entombed between these massive, solid walls. Nothing makes any attempt to mimic nature.
Instead, everything is held in the iron hand of that dominating alien aesthetic.”
This is the perspective of an intelligent spider, entering a human habitat. It’s a passage from the
book Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. What Portia is seeing here is what humans might see,
if they were able to shed their skin and wear a different one for a little while;
if they could see themselves—their lives—from the outside.
Of course, humans can’t actually do that. But stories like this—pieces
of xenofiction—can bring you close. Sometimes uncomfortably close.
When your genre is basically everything-except-for-humans,
you have a lot of material to work with. Like I said earlier, it gets weird.
We all know there are a lot of animal stories in the mix. Books like Warrior Cats, Silverwing,
Raptor Red, Animorphs if you’re feeling a little dangerous. I think Watership Down has to be one
of my favorites, because it’s not just a story from the perspective of rabbits—it’s
an interpretation of reality from their point of view. The author gives them their own language,
their own mythology, their own way of making sense of the world around them. Honestly,
I love it so much, I actually have a whole script ready for that one whenever we have the
time to turn it into a video, so keep an eye out! Okay, but those are animal stories. Not human, but
still familiar. You see them. You know them. You share a lot of things about our world with them.
Xenofiction gets far stranger when it steps even further from humanity and tries to give you
the opportunity to look out through the eyes of something completely alien. The book Dragon’s Egg
by Robert L. Forward chronicles the evolutionary cycle of a pinhead-sized, hypercompressed species
living on the surface of a neutron star, far, far away from Earth. Even weirder, the 1884
novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott
takes us on a parodical journey into the world of geometry, treating the landscape of shapes and
dimensions as if they themselves are traversable landscapes. It features such characters as The
King of Lineland and A Square. Probably the weirdest stab I’ve seen at a totally alien
perspective is actually in the sequel to Children of Time; Children of Ruin. The story introduces a
bizarre sort of… composite lifeform I’m just going to call The We. There’s a lot strange
about this thing, but just the prose alone tells you most of what you need to know: it only refers
to itself as a combined entity. Never “us”, but “these-of-we”. Never “they”, but “others-of-we”.
I think the craziest I’ve seen xenofiction get is when the stories enter the perspective
not of an animal, not of an alien, but of something that isn’t animate at all: objects.
This sort of includes robots and AI, stories like There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradburry,
and 17776 or What Football Will Look Like in The Future by Jon Bois.
But I think it’s even more interesting when we try to give thought and sensation to things
which should never have them. And apparently I’m not the only one who’s felt this way,
because according to the author Mark Blackwell, around the time the Victorian Novel first emerged,
there was quite an obsession with what he calls object biographies: stories surrounding objects,
their histories, and their experiences. Those are pretty hard to get your hands on though, so
if you want a modern approximation, there’s always The Portrait by Willem Jan Otten.
Whenever I read these stories, something strange happens to me.
I get the sensation of becoming estranged my reality. Many of the things I always knew are
still there in some form or other—things like language, senses, the ability to rationalize—but
they feel and act so much differently. These new shapes and new perspectives force
them to work in different ways. And this is not just a me thing.
It’s a known phenomenon. It’s actually an artistic technique
called defamiliarization. The goal is to take familiar objects or situations and present them
in ways that force the audience to view them differently—to feel less familiar with them.
It sounds a little strange, but it’s really surprisingly common. It shows up in Dadaism,
postmodernism, much of epic theater, and a whole lot of science fiction. Some have even gone so far
as to say that defamiliarization is at the heart of all art and poetry, using the various mediums
to re-contextualize and awaken new understandings of the known world within the audience.
I’m… not sure I’d take it that far, but I do think it’s more central to a lot of art than we tend to
think. It’s part of what an artist is doing when they stylize a common visual, or take a photo from
an obscure angle. And literature is especially guilty of this. Here, let me give you an example:
What if someone were to tell you that they were going to “spin their clothes in a wet metal tube
and then bake them in a different metal tube to undo their wetness”? Would you wonder at
the strange ritual they were about to undertake… or would you recognize that they’re just about to
do their laundry and move on? The language makes it weird. However you take it, it forces you to
approach something mundane very differently. Also, credit to the author of that example…
Oh. Okay, apparently it was a… Tumblr-user named
nogirlfriend? Well, wherever you are now, thanks for the post! It’s a really good example of this.
Tumblr post or not, this is what defamiliarization can look like.
It changes something you’d ordinarily just accept into something you have
to question. Question: why is it so hard
to capture life in art? To draw or paint or write the world as you see it?
Why, when you draw an eye or paint a tree, do they always seem a little different from reality?
There are a lot of reasons. Technique, method, understanding of perspective and space and color
theory. Sure. These all contribute. But another problem standing in the way is the fact that you
think eyes are round, and trees are green. Yes, in an anatomical sense, the eye ball is
a sphere, and yes, most tree leaves are full of chlorophyll and do look green in even lighting.
But as you see them, obscured by lids and lashes, eyes are much closer to trapezoids
or diamonds or slivers or arches. As you see them, treetops appear blue
in the dim dawnlight, or crimson at dusk. It’s when your more generalized understanding
overrides what you see—when you draw the eye as an orb in the face, or paint the leaves a bright
green at sunset –that this dissonance occurs. And this isn’t just an art thing, either.
A lot of your experience is actually just pattern recognition. Instead of taking
stimulus as it comes, complex psychological processes immediately reconfigure the things
you experience to produce an understandable interpretation that you can respond to.
You try to turn what you see into something you understand—something familiar to you.
The result is that, instead of recognizing the specificity and the nuance of the things
you observe, you only recognize their forms. They become symbols to you,
and just as they do in the sketchbook or on the canvas, they override your perception.
The American Psychological Association calls this the Symbolic Process.
And it’s…. mostly a good thing, actually. We like language and maths.
The ability to assess complex things and process them rapidly is important…
but it can also narrow your vision; create a myopia of the mind.
Remember Portia, the little spider person entering a human habitat for the first time?
To you, the geometry she’s seeing is probably comfortable. Right angles are very uniform and
very reliable. Permanent structures have served you well. The rigidity of it all
also means stability… but it’s hard to see beyond that. If you could look through her eyes and see
what you are, the way that you live, you might be surprised. You might suddenly begin to wonder,
what if your home did mimic nature a little more? What if the unvarying, entombing,
solid walls your world is built from were a little more versatile, a little more… tailored to suit?
That kind of thinking might inspire architecture your kind has never seen before. It might make you
want to live differently. It might just make you think differently, push the imagination
into places it wasn’t able to go before. And if that’s all it does, I think it’s enough.
Xenofiction is more than escapism. It’s more than stories about animals and aliens
and robots. It’s a way to take off your skin and where a different one for a while. It’s a
way break through your symbolic thinking to see the world differently, more honestly.
It’s a way to see… yourself. I think the easiest way to start
on this journey would be to try reading Children of Time yourself!
I… cannot overstate how mind-bendingly strange the experience is. It spans generations and worlds. It
sees humanity seed out intelligence to distant planets, and it explores what happens when that
intelligence touches things like spiders and octopi. If you want to get out of your head,
this is probably the story that’s going to do it for you.
And you can listen to the whole audiobook for free, thanks to our sponsor, Audible.
Audible is… amazing. We use it constantly for our research, and honestly… just to
relax. You cannot always make the time to stop your life and get absorbed in a book,
and audiobooks are outrageously expensive. Audible has been an incredible solution for us,
allowing us to handle all the things involved in running a channel like this,
while listening to our favorite stories—and plenty of new stuff we’d never hear anywhere else.
If you liked this video and you want to see some of its ideas in action, use this as an
opportunity to hear Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky for free. Sign up for a free 30-day
trial by visiting audible.com/TaleFoundry, or by texting the code talefoundry to 500-500.
Links in the description. The audible original for this book is fabulous. It’s almost like watching
a nature documentary, but wrapped up into a generation-spanning story. Equally parts soothing
and uncomfortable, there’s so much you get out of the narrator’s performance that you just wouldn’t
get reading the text with your own two eyes. And when you’re done with Children of Time,
that’s not the end! There’ll still be plenty left to experience. Audible Premium will also
give you access to audible plus—an absolutely massive collection of select audiobooks,
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together. Or, if you really just want access to that spacious audible plus catalogue,
you could just choose to pay half as much and use that alone! Whatever’s best for you!
Again, to get your free Children of Time audiobook and see what exactly we’re talking about with
this whole xenofiction thing, sign up for a free 30-day trial by visiting audible.com/talefoundry,
or by texting the code talefoundry to 500-500. Links in the description.
You know, I never really thought about it until now, but I guess, technically… almost everything
I write is xenofiction? I mean, it’s usually from human perspectives, so it wouldn’t look like it to
you… but to me… I guess it counts? Huh.
Maybe that’s why I was so into the idea of doing this video?
Either way, big thanks to the human behind the show who helped me put this together:
Sylvan, couldn’t have done this without you. Great work! Thanks for being so open about your
love of “critter fics”, despite the weird reputation they tend to have with people.
That’s all for now. Thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up!