Wole Talabi and the Purpose of Stories

My interview with Nigerian science fiction writer Wole Talabi with thoughts from other people I met earlier in my Imaginize.World podcast. Here I share reflections on how time brings meaning in science fiction storytelling. The focus is on Wole Talabi and I talk about Chen Qiufan and Debbie Urbanski in the Prelude.

Prelude

Science fiction - the punctuation between two worlds

Our beliefs hang together in a world beyond space and time. That’s why what we call “science fiction” makes a difference. It lives in what Chen Qiufan told me when I asked him how he defines science fiction: it is unique: “it’s not science or fiction, is something in between, the space, the tension, the punctuation between two worlds.” Chen’s stories take us into that space where the past and the future merge into a (startling) believable present. AI204 Ten Visions for our Future (More from our YouTube interview in Paris in November 2023[1])

Time - the beginning or the end?

Debbie Urbanski plays with time in her ingenious of short story “An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried”. She reverses time. Forces us to look back.

She changes perspectives in her novel After World where the reader lives in the ambiguity of start and end: “the end of humanity being both an end for humans, but also the beginning for the world. It really depends on the point of view and where you stop the story, and where you start the story.”

Storyworkers are key characters in After World where the Digital Human Archive Project if being built. Their “job is just to tell every human’s story, every human who’s alive during the time of the Great Transition”. This is about to happen. No spoilers! (YouTube interview in March 2023)[2]

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Wole Talabi Layering to Make Our Present

Stories that layer the past and the future

In October 2024, I talked with Wole Talabi about stories. I told him when reading his stories, especially “Saturday’s Song” I felt the past and the future were like layers in the same space. He went into detail saying that “the main narrators of ‘Saturday’s Song’ are embodied days of the week. And what they do is they tell stories.

They tell stories of things that have happened, things that will happen, things that are happening.

And the whole idea is when I think of these characters, I think of them as characters that sit outside of space and time.”

A consensus negotiated reality sits on all our stories and becomes our reality

Wole continues by explaining his strong interest in storytelling: “I strongly believe that the entire world and everything we experience and our entire reality is a story. ... Our entire experience of the world is heavily dependent on the story that we tell ourselves about the world.

"Whenever anything happens to us, we construct a story about what happened… in order to give our lives some kind of meaning, some kind of purpose.

"And it’s entirely possible two, three people experience the same thing and tell each other different stories about it.

"And when they tell the story of what happened to someone else, they will tell completely different stories because of what they believe. And what they believe is essentially the story they’ve told themselves.” (see on YouTube https://youtu.be/atHfHmal2ek at 18:18)

“What we have is a consensus negotiated reality that basically sits on the parts of all our stories that we agree on, and that is what becomes our reality …

"The story of characters in ‘Saturday’s Song’, gives me the ability to talk about the past, about the future, about the present, all at the same time, and tell stories from a different, sometimes more interesting way.”

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[1] Chen Qiufan https://youtu.be/WvHKL_mCsCU

[2] Debbie Urbanski https://youtu.be/xUVa4X_t1aE?

Share your thoughts here. How have you used storytelling?

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