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The Big Idea: Theodora Goss
Nov. 13th, 2025 06:03 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Reality is both objective and subjective, but what if reality could be fundamentally changed just by enough people thinking about it really hard? Author Theodora Goss is here today not only to present her newest collection of short stories, but to make you question our very reality and what it means for something to be considered “real” in society. Follow along in the Big Idea for Letters from an Imaginary Country, and contemplate reality along the way.
THEODORA GOSS:
One of my favorite writers is Jorge Luis Borges, and one of my favorite stories by Borges is “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” I’ll try not to spoil the story too much, but if you haven’t read it and would like to before finding out what I’m going to say about it, don’t look any further. Instead, go find a copy of Borges’ short story collection Labyrinths. Once you’ve read the story (and every other story in the collection—you will inevitably want to read them all), you can come back here.
All right, let’s keep going. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is about a secret society that creates an encyclopedia for an imaginary world named Tlön. Because the encyclopedia describes that world in so much detail, it begins to materialize; objects from Tlön being to appear in our world. Eventually, our world starts to become Tlön—the imaginary world has taken over the real one. This concept inspired two of the stories in my short story collection Letters from an Imaginary Country: “Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology” and “Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology.” Imaginary anthropology is just one of the imaginary sciences; one can also study imaginary archaeology, imaginary sociology, imaginary biology—and certain fields, such as economics, may always have been imaginary anyway. They are based on the Tlön Hypothesis: that if a group of people imagine something, describe it clearly and in sufficient detail, and get enough other people to believe in it, that thing becomes real. So imaginary archaeologists can imagine and then excavate an ancient civilization. Imaginary biologists can imagine and then locate a new species of animal. Practitioners of imaginary anthropology can imagine and then travel to contemporary human societies—countries like Cimmeria and Pellargonia. Of course, creating these societies can result in unexpected consequences, which is what my stories are about.
On one hand, the Tlön Hypothesis is a fantastical element—of course we can’t create reality just by imagining it. On the other, it’s fundamentally and demonstrably true. We can’t create real reality through imagination, but human beings don’t live most of their lives in real reality—where we find trees and rivers and mountains. As far as we know, other animals spend their lives in that reality. But we human beings spend most of our lives in an imagined reality that includes, and counts as “real,” countries and governments and corporations. I’m drawing here on Yuval Noah Harari’s idea, described in Sapiens, that any human society is largely an “imagined order.” We are born into that order, and its rules and values tell us how to live. We think of that order as “real” because it seems as natural and inevitable to us as trees and rivers and mountains. In the United States, we believe that we have a constitution (not just a piece of paper with writing on it) and that we spend money (not just other pieces of paper with more writing). We have also created a social structure that enforces those rules and values, so that if we steal pieces of paper with one kind of writing (doodles on napkins, for example), no one will care—but if we steal pieces of paper with a different kind of writing (like hundred dollar bills), we will be put in prison.
You could say I made up the Tlön Hypothesis because it seemed like a cool idea for my story. However, the Tlön Hypothesis is also the basis for human civilization—a society comes into being because we imagine it, and the only way to change that society is to imagine another order for it. (We had better get on that quick, by the way, because our “real” reality is starting to destroy the actual real reality, including trees and rivers and mountains, as well as the animals to whom they are crucially important.)
All of the stories in Letters from an Imaginary Country are, to a certain extent, about how we create the world through telling stories about it, whether those stories are fairy tales or academic papers. They are about the power of language, which I think is our main human superpower—the ability to communicate with one another in complex ways, and to create social structures because we agree on certain things, or wars because we disagree on others. All the great things we have achieved as a species are a function of our ability to communicate, as are all the terrible things we have done throughout human history. Indeed, the idea of human history itself depends on language.
I suppose if I want a reader to get any central idea from my collection, it’s that we have the power to make and remake our world through language (which is why writers, who seem so powerless in our capitalist system, are the first targets of authoritarian regimes). So let’s use language carefully, clearly, well. I’m certainly not the first writer to say this. George Orwell said it in much more specific detail; Ursula K. Le Guin, with much greater eloquence. But it’s worth repeating as many times as we need to hear it.
You might not get that particular point from reading my stories, at least not consciously—after all, I hope they are also fun reads. Feel free to enjoy them without philosophizing too much. But I’m grateful for the opportunity to philosophize here, and to talk about why I wrote them as well as how much I owe to an amazing writer named Borges.
Letters from an Imaginary Country: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
It’s that time of year again where I always manage to get COVID. I have gotten COVID literally every single year since 2020, and pretty much exclusively around the holidays. I also happen to be flying to San Francisco this week and hanging out with a bunch of people while there, so I figured today was a good day to walk into my local Kroger and get a COVID shot.
