As kids, growing up in Nowhere, Suburbia, USA, me and my friends yearned for other worlds.
When the only real thing to do in your town is walk down to the local strip mall to look at video games you can’t afford, you tend to find other ways to escape: you make up characters who can go on adventures for you, you read a ton of books from Lord of the Rings to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Earthsea, you dream up worlds and stories and places that are infinitely better and more exciting than your crappy town.
And when you can get your friends to sit down with each other around a table with enough pizza and rule books to keep you entertained and fed for an entire weekend, you take those characters and those stories and worlds, and you add dice and you share them. But all the while, what you’re really doing is looking for your own escape, dreaming of all the places you want to go and all the adventures that you’ll be able to have… one day.
That was me.
Fast forward a few years. I escaped Nowhere, Suburbia by going to college in NYC, ended up with a mountain of student debt big enough to tempt any dragon, and faced the prospect of spending the rest of my life tied to a pointless job in some other pointless town, squandering the skills I’d worked to develop in university, because, let’s face it, writing doesn’t pay.
And then, three years after leaving New York, my mom died.
Something you should know about me: my family isn’t actually from the States. My mom was from Calbayog, in the Philippines, and my dad grew up on the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta. The only reason I was born and grew up in Suburbia, USA at all is because my parents, both immigrants, had worked long and hard to afford the new house in the quiet neighborhood.
My family has never been American. When my mom died, my dad’s reasons for staying in the States disappeared almost instantaneously. He moved back to Malta, and I looked around the town where I was living and working: a small, mountain city in the middle of the Blue Ridge, where half my monthly income went to pay off my rent and debt.
At times I still miss that town, though I know if I’d stayed, I would’ve withered, maybe faster maybe slower. But now, I had a decision to make. I could try to make it work here: find a steady job, build some sort of stable career. Maybe climb corporate ranks so that I’d have some slight hope of making enough to pay off my loans in my lifetime.
Or I could answer the call, and go running after that adventure I’d always dreamed of.
For me, world building has always been at the heart of my storytelling, both in my speculative work and in my non-fiction. I sincerely believe that we are shaped by the environments we grow up in, and that there is beauty and wonder in all this wild world. Every single one of us contains multitudes — unique experiences and impossible dreams, the gifts needed to create entire new universes. But not all of us are given the resources and care that is needed for that infinite potential to bloom.
Yes, our world is full of great and marvellous things, but it is also haunted by darkness: our societies underpinned by systematic inequalities, widespread hatred and internalised bigotry, looming existential crises and extinction events brought on by greed.
All those years ago, I craved adventure for its own sake. I was bored by my sheltered life, privileged (and also troubled) as it was, and so I built new worlds to escape.
Now, having spent the better part of a decade slipping between continents and living in five different countries, I have seen so many realities that could have been. I have seen how our world treats those who think and live different, how so much of our modern life and society is built on exploitation, shortsightedness, and a lack of compassion and imagination.
These days, I build worlds, not only to escape, but in hope that things might be different. This reality and its looming future is not inevitable. It never was. We shape it every day by what we do, what we create, and what we imagine.
So my dear, dear readers, all of you striving and creating and growing up in this wondrous, awful, extraordinary, dying world. Let’s imagine better.
These stories are for you.
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