On The Creator’s Roulette, we have talked a number of times about Scifi, whether it is humor and satire in the genre, or inspiration from old Scifi books. Today, I have the pleasure of hosting author David Colby on the series and he will share about worldbuilding in the genre. Currently laboring on works spanning science fiction, fantasy and all the bizarre fusions in between, David is publishing novels and short stories through Thinking Ink Press and Fiction Silicon Valley. You might remember Thinking Ink Press from Betsy Miller’s features on co-authoring and crowdfunding.
Below are three pieces of advice that David has to offer for worldbuilding from his own experiences.
On Worldbuilding
By David Colby
The year is 1987 and somewhere in California, a bunch of adults are putting on outfits and making believe that they’re on a spaceship rocketing through the stars at speeds faster than light. They’ll use artificial gravity, shield emitters, and high-energy particle beam weapons to tell stories of love, hope, redemption, racism, law, justice, order, chaos, and truth.
Well.
After two really, incredibly terrible first seasons, at least. Eventually Star Trek: The Next Generation did manage to get its act together and create five years of seminal television science fiction. However, a scene that happened many, many, many times on the show would be a character (usually the much put-upon, perpetually unlucky in love chief engineer, Geordi La Forge) needing to bring some vital report to the captain. Despite the starship USS Enterprise having an internal and external communications system that allows for near instant communications across light years, this report would usually be brought by having Geordi pick up a plastic prop, walk it through the ship, and drop it onto Captain Picard’s desk.
The PADD – Personal Access Display Device – is clearly some kind of futuristic information storage device, capable of holding and projecting information on it in the form of text (and, if we want to be generous, video too.) And yet, despite having thought up this marvelous invention (which we all now recognize as a tablet computer), Star Trek never quite took the intuitive leap to realize that if the document is digital and your communication system is wireless…that…you…can…just…
E-MAIL THE FRIGGING DOCUMENT!
This isn’t because the writers were incompetent, with the exception of Brannon Braga, but rather because it is nearly impossible to fully or accurately figure out what it is that human beings will do with a new piece of technology once they get their hands on it. And that, really, is what worldbuilding in science fiction is all about: Figuring out what humans do with their new toys.
It can be a daunting subject. Did anyone born before the year 2000 ever expect that phones would become not only communication devices and cameras and game platforms and social media hubs? Did any of us predict how young people would use phones to capture tiny moments of life, of time, of love, of heartbreak and tragedy, and share them with millions of people? Did we ever imagine just how impactful that would be to our society? Most of us were totally blindsided.
But how can you try to be, at the very least, slightly more insightful when writing your works?
Well, hopefully, we can find out!
Where do you begin with worldbuilding? Well, this is all assuming that you have a plot and character in mind – I highly recommend you start with that. It’s good to have an idea about what is going to matter in your world before you start to build it. For example, you don’t have to waste brain space on how fisheries of the FUTURE work if your character isn’t going to be involved with fishing. Once you’ve identified the most important parts of the narrative, you can begin to map those onto the surrounding world, work out the ramifications, and then feed those ramifications back into your narrative.
Building a world that reflects the protagonist’s central conflict.
Let’s start with an example. And because I’m egotistical, the example will be me!
I wanted to write a story about long distance love affairs. Possibly because, at the time, I had just fallen madly in love with a girl on the internet. Possibly because I had just been reading about the ways that people in the 18th century kept romance alive with love letters that we still have access and can read to this very day. Whatever the reason, I decided to tell a story about this distance and that meant I had to set it somewhere. Because I’m a nerd, I set it in space.
The first thing I had to think about was how and why teenagers would be in space. The primary reason to have teens in space is to have their families in space. To have families in space required long-term space-based activities. Long-term space-based activities included construction and research. Construction led to thinking about space elevators – an ancient sci-fi concept – and space elevators led to the realization that the amount of industrial capacity it’d take to build and maintain this kind of endeavor would require a large multinational partnership.
That led to questions about why a multinational partnership might be formed, which led to researching future economic and ecological possibilities, which led to the realization that a massive ecological repair effort would be required to forestall the disastrous effects of climate change. This led to researching our energy infrastructure and learning about Helium-3 and the possibilities of using it for fusion power plants, which led to the concept of a lunar colony (where there’s a large amount of Helium-3 that can be relatively easily extracted…well, “relatively” for something in space.)
This led to a slight reorganization in my thoughts. Since, well, obviously, you have to stop climate disaster before you can build a space elevator. So, I put the lunar colony first, and…well, it doesn’t take much extrapolation to combine the drastic actions a state would take to fend off disaster with the difficulty of mining anything (let alone mining stuff in space) to realize that the living conditions on that lunar colony would be far from humane.
A basic understanding of human nature led to the extrapolation that the lunar colonists would want this inhumane treatment to stop…which led to the realization that a space elevator would be a direct threat to their hopes for freedom (as it would instantly allow any nation-state on Earth to move huge numbers of soldiers, police and colonists into space)…which led to the realization that the space elevator would be an instant and obvious target for political terrorism.
And with that, I had my inciting incident for Debris Dreams, my young adult sci-fi novel. All of it born from wanting to write about two lesbians being unable to kiss.
Research can inspire your imagination.
Researching the possible consequences of a space-based terror attack led to learning about Kessler Syndrome – the way that space based debris cause an exponentially propagating series of impacts (things hit things, which break into things, which then hit more things, which break into more things, and so on.) And suddenly, I not only had a reason why this terror attack would start a war, but it’d also trap our space-based teenager in space. You can’t safely launch a space shuttle into orbit when there’s a bunch of debris in orbit. You can’t safely de-orbit when there’s a bunch of space debris in orbit.
End result: There is a war, and the main characters are the only ones who can deal with it. And now we have a military sci-fi novel to go with the lesbians wanting to kiss. From there, all the worldbuilding was incidental details and extrapolations from technologies that would have to exist for this society to exist. But you can see how it works. A question leads to an answer, which prompts a new question, which prompts new answers, which cause the plot and setting to spin off into wild, exciting new areas and possibilities.
Now, to be honest, I did kind of do a lot of cheating with this example. A great deal of this worldbuilding that I did was already done before I even started. Space elevators were an idea I had known about for years. Kessler Syndrome was a concept I had read about months before I started writing Debris Dreams. The possibility of America and China (the multinational force I hypothesized for my future) combining into an alliance has been floated in multiple different novels and TV shows and movies. Helium-3 mining on the moon for fusion power plants has been floated since the 1980s. But that’s why my final piece of advice is this.
Be well read.
Research and study everything of interest to you and read other books, watch TV shows and movies, and keep your mind engaged with modern events. Watch how real people use technology in their day to day lives and think about how those people might use any technologies you introduce in your novel.
And be prepared for some future reader to open up your book, see your prediction on some technology, then scoff and mutter about how silly people in the past were. If it can happen to The Next Generation, it’ll happen to you too.
Can you think of other examples of extremely precinct or poorly thought out worldbuilding?
I hope you enjoyed this post by David. Connect with him on Goodreads.
Banner Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay
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