This week I sat down with Stant Litore, author of Write Worlds Your Readers Won’t Forget, The Zombie Bible, Ansible: A Thousand Faces, and the inspiration behind the Emmy-nominated Love Death and Robots episode Running with the Tyrannosaur, for a conversation about the anthropology of hearth, home, and belonging in worldbuilding.
Stant opens with his Bones to Pick about what speculative fiction consistently gets wrong about domestic life and culture, and from there we go deep. We talk about why every home in fiction answers two fundamental questions: what does it shelter, and what does it shelter from? We explore solastalgia, the grief not for a home you left but for a home that no longer exists, how ancient Roman domestic space reveals class, power, and vulnerability, and what Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places means for writers who want their worlds to feel truly inhabited.
We also get into why character wounds and the loss of home are the engine of the best plot choices, and Stant closes with one of the most practical worldbuilding frameworks I have heard articulated in a single conversation.
You can watch the full episode below.
If you found this useful, subscribe to the Loridian’s Laboratory Substack for more conversations at the intersection of anthropology, worldbuilding, and speculative fiction. And if you are building fictional worlds of your own, check out Build Better Worlds, the worldbuilding textbook I co-authored with Kyra Wellstrom.
And, if you have questions about forensics, bodies, and biology, Kyra will be joining me this coming Thursday, March 26th at 7pm for another Livestream Q&A Session. You can put your questions in the chat in advance, or ask them live at this link.
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