All the world’s a stage
Every story requires worldbuilding on the part of the author. The stage must be set, and the lights hung, before the audience files in. For historical fiction, the author reconstructs the world of the past such as the story demands. Contemporary stories also require research. Readers are distracted by flaws in 1:1 scale models of subjects they know well. The audiences for science fiction and fantasy don’t demand realism per se, but they want a measure of consistency that respects the effort they put into suspending disbelief. They reward the crafting of fantastical worlds that exceed their expectations.
Untitled Science Fiction Project (USFP) requires worldbuilding on my part. I’ve been working at it for a while now and think I’m where I need to be to shift my emphasis toward the characters and plot of an actual story set in the world. This post outlines how I came this far and owns up to some of the mistakes along the way. More experienced writers may notice unowned mistakes.
Genesis Vector
My previous two projects, Raether’s Enzyme and The Gray God have been described as dark. (I like to think Raether has a dazzling and beautiful light at the end of its tunnel.) While I was writing The Gray God, the red band trailer for Hellboy (2019) dropped. When I realized it was a reboot, I lost interest in the movie. But I’m a sucker for epic trailer music, and the cover of Smoke on the Water by 2WEI got its hooks into me in a good way. I knew then that I wanted the next project to have an epic score. I wanted it to be awesome and fun. That’s all I knew. Was it science fiction or fantasy? Didn’t know. Just knew that it would be cool.
Spoiler: It’s science fiction
Yeah, you knew that already. USFP. I didn’t know it until The Gray God was off with the developmental editor. I just have more science fiction in me than fantasy. To honor the original intent, I set some stakes in the ground early on.
- It’s not hard science fiction. Well, not The Martian levels of hard. Meeting that bar and leaving room for epic Rule of Cool shenanigans is, well, very hard. So: reactionless thrusters and faster-than-light travel are in play. Aiming for 3-4 on the Moh’s Scale of Science Fiction Hardness.
- Adventure is possible. So, no 1984 levels of dystopia.
- The Singularity hasn’t happened. The emergence of godlike AI or similarly godlike post-humanity rewrites all the rules and dominates the world. By its very nature, the world after the Singularity isn’t one we can anticipate. There’s room for recognizable stories among the still-human survivors, but my last two stories had eschatological overtones. I need a break from that. Maybe you do too.
I strive to tell interesting stories that are fair to their characters and worlds. Towards those ends, I’ve set additional constraints.
- Humanity tends to make a muddle of things. The future holds progress, but we’re still a bunch of primates prone to screeching and flinging poo. Nation-state conflict is still a problem, but systems of cooperation have prevented Armageddon.
- It’s not your utopia. Or mine. We all make mistakes. Sorry.
- People are still people. Genetic engineering and cybernetic augmentation are enabling technologies, but they operate on the periphery of what it is to be human.
- People still fight. Yes, there are killer drones and robots, but their hackability has prevented warfare from being completely automated. Attempts to do so ended badly.
- No near-peer aliens. The odds of encountering intelligent life that happens to be technologically on par with us is too low. It could be rationalized somehow, but to be fair, I think the odds favor our finding Precambrian swamps and/or being found by aliens that operate in Clarke’s Third Law territory.
- No force fields. This one’s really arbitrary. A line drawn between USFP and free-wheeling space opera. This is a tough one that I may revisit. Characters and ships having ‘shields’ allows for more spectacle, but it seems like a technology that would permeate its world. I want to see if I can pull my adventure off without relying on this trope.
The sum of these constraints suggests the science fiction space inhabited by The Expanse. Sure enough, it does. I dig The Expanse. An interesting (and certainly deliberate) feature of that world is how it downplays computer and information technology in human space. People use computers, but they remain the sole agents of change before the arrival of the alien protomolecule technology. I respect that choice. It keeps the story centered on people and allows the action to be driven by human nature and human politics. Writing in today’s world of emerging AI applications, I feel that pending a Butlerian Jihad (Frank Herbert’s way of factoring AI out of his Dune universe), a future world should have forms of machine intelligence. That pulls us toward the kaleidoscopic virtual worlds of cyberpunk.
So, one more stake in the ground:
- Artificial intelligence, robots, and networking are prevalent, but not dominant, in human affairs. We’re somewhere short of the Singularity and our interaction with the machines hasn’t transformed us into something unrecognizable.
Science Fiction is home to numerous subgenres. My constraints exclude some and contain others. Choosing among the available subgenres further informs the worldbuilding by highlighting tropes that characterize the subgenre. Within limits, you can blend subgenres in a way that pleases readers. As The Gray God embarked on its journey through the submission process, the component genres coalesced in the space bounded by the constraints. USFP would combine military science fiction with (post-)cyberpunk skullduggery.
Then I thought of an entertaining way to bring the two subgenres together. I’ll leave it at that, for now.
Exploring the Trope-iary Maze
Genres all have characteristic tropes associated with them. I read many of the foundational works of military sci-fi and cyberpunk over the years. In the lead-up to USFP, I read more recent works. I saw which tropes carried their weight across the years and I had a good time. Too good. There are legions of books, movies, anime, comics, and video games that play in these genres. I risked cheerfully chasing tropey knowledge across source material indefinitely. It was time to cheat.
The internet abounds with communities who delight in building encyclopedias or wikis. Wikis exist for anything that has a fandom. There are wikis for tropes. TV Tropes started with the modest goal of cataloging the tropes of television shows. Over the years, it expanded to cover all media with an emphasis on science fiction and fantasy. It names tropes great and small and provides positive and negative examples from books, movies, television, games, and more. If you love stories, trivia, and encyclopedic scope, it is as glorious as it is dangerous. I spent untold hours of my youth studying The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, The Star Trek Concordance, and the D&D sourcebooks. That joy in disappearing down a rabbit hole came back in force as I plunged into TV Tropes to explore my genres. It’s light, fast reading. You can argue with some of its examples and make note of others as source material that demands attention. And you can wander off course chasing the patterns of themes and ideas in unexpected directions. I did all these things and had a great time doing them. And I wasn’t getting a world built. I had to stop, or I’d need an intervention.
It was time to start filling in the space whose borders I’d defined. Thanks to the TV Tropers, I had a wealth of blocks to fit between the lines and a better sense of how they might fit together. And I found peace with the certainty that whatever I came up with, it probably already had an entry in the trope wiki.
Fire and Anvil
Organizing a worldbuilding project has come a long way since the days of notepads and graph paper. For Raether and The Gray God, I relied on OneNote and Scrivener to record the research and imaginary elements I was adding to our present-day world (Pacific Northwest Edition). USFP is all imaginary elements. Organizing the planets, technologies, governments, megacorps, and history could be done with the previous tools, but it turns out there are better ones for the job. I experiment with my writing process with each new project. USFP’s experiment includes using the new tools.
Worldbuilding–whether in service of story development, RPG campaign planning, or for the fun of it–created a market for specialized software that is up to the task. Two of the big players in this space are WorldAnvil and Campfire. Both offer a suite of modules to support maps, encyclopedias, timelines, character development, and more. So much more. Both are fundamentally web-based and have a subscription business model. Being web-based permits you to share your projects with other people in their worldbuilding community and collaborate on development. Subscription levels determine access to features.
Both products offer a rich feature set and showcase the users who have done amazing work with the tools. Two things tipped the scale for me.
- WorldAnvil is a purely online service. Campfire has a desktop client that can work offline.
- WorldAnvil projects default to public. Campfire defaults to private.
Call me old-fashioned. I’m just not excited about all the things being in the cloud all time. I also don’t think I should have to pay for a baseline level of privacy. So, I went with Campfire.
Fits and starts
The shape of the story world was bounded and a constellation of tropes floated about waiting to be placed in the puzzle. I had ideas re the characters and story in very general terms. My thinking was that by fleshing out the world and its history, I’d have a substrate that would inform both the characters and the action.
I jumped into the Campfire timeline module to sketch history over the several hundred years to come. Some combination of my thinking, the process, and the tool didn’t click. I set dates for key technological development and First Contact. The latter marks the end of Earth, Inc. and the beginning of the Probationary Era. And then I stalled. I couldn’t identify how granular I needed to be. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t patient or clever enough to build a history that delivered the world I wanted for my story. It was time to cheat again. I would build the world that suited me and write as much of its history as I needed to rationalize it.
The encyclopedia module would capture a snapshot of the story world. Tropes would find their homes among its articles. This clicked. Articles spawned other articles. Tropes were embraced or discarded. Technological limits came into focus. Research ranged far and wide. Ecological succession. Fusion power. Wabi-sabi. Terraforming. Torchships. Principal classes of naval ships. Intermodal cargo containers. Synthetic biology. Multinational corporations. NGOs. PMCs. Drone warfare. Cyberwarfare. Transhumanism. Corporatism. Social credit. Keiretsu. Lines extending from the present to interesting places in the future. Each new article brimming with potential for more detail and suggesting related topics, demanding their own research.
It was a process that wanted to branch and grow forever. I realized that I don’t have forever. It was time to stop. For now. The systems of the world exist in sketch form. Political and economic ecologies provide opportunities for conflict and cooperation. Mysterious alien benefactors offer humanity new worlds for an unexpected price and threaten us with extermination for a specific transgression.
Mapulation
One of the joys of old-school worldbuilding was sitting down with some graph paper and mapping out planets, continents, kingdoms, cities, towns, and dungeons. As you might expect, the modern era has software to help you out with that. Campfire (and WorldAnvil) have tools to integrate maps into your worldbuilding projects, but both defer creating the maps to third parties. For good reasons. It turns out that a fantasy map-making program is a complex drawing tool in its own right. Two major players in this market are Worldographer and ProFantasy Software. They offer feature-rich packages that enable dedicated users to create rich maps ranging in scale from astronomical to humble abodes. I decided to take them out for a spin.
Fractal Terrains 3 from ProFantasy. The use of fractal algorithms to generate realistic rugged terrain goes back to the 1980s, famously starring in the Genesis planet sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Fractal Terrains harnesses that magic to create worlds with intricate mountain ranges and crinkly coastlines that you can zoom into from a global perspective down to a tiny island off the coast. (There’s a certain point in the zoom spectrum where things start looking strange.) You can control a wide variety of parameters: climate, sea level, tree line elevation, map projection style, and color scheme, to name a few. It’s pretty neat and there’s a free trial version to play with.
Campaign Cartographer 3 from ProFantasy. This will let you do any sort of map you want. In the hands of a skilled artist, it enables the creation of fantasy maps that are worthy of publication or inclusion in a AAA video game. It is incredibly powerful and flexible—to a downright daunting degree. For a newbie, its complex palettes of tools and customization options are labyrinthine. Everything you need is there…somewhere. YouTube tutorials are a must to even get started.
Worldographer has its own complexities, but like Fractal Terrains, it will offer to make a map to start you out. You supply the parameters, and it conjures a map for your world in the style of your choice. I found it simpler and more approachable. With my background in worldbuilding for Traveller, Worldographer’s process for setting up an icosahedral planet hex map was straightforward. This simplifies a globe into twenty flat triangles. You don’t have to worry about whether Greenland is bigger or smaller than it appears.
I set my parameters–I’m looking for an Ice Age world with more land relative to ocean than Earth—and rolled the world-making dice in Worldographer many times. The results were interesting but not satisfying. Part of it was that I had a vague notion that action on the planet would be split between a more temperate equatorial continent and an unsettled polar land mass. Rolling the dice wasn’t delivering that. No problem I could do that on my own. The other thing was the map was, for a lack of a better word, arbitrary. It wasn’t completely random. There was a system in play. It just didn’t feel right. I got it into my head that what was missing was plate tectonics. There were no great mountain ranges thrust up by colliding plates. It bugged me. More than it should have.
So off I went down a geological rabbit hole. It turns out that plate tectonics is hard and not thoroughly understood. The number of plates in play on Earth changes depending on who you ask and how close you look. And their movements are…complicated. So, I spent some time trying to build my world from the plates up and failed. A cool online simulator tried to help me, but still I floundered. Ultimately, I wound up drawing my world’s equivalent of Pangea, breaking the supercontinent up and utterly faking it.
With my continents in place in outline form, I iced things over from the poles based on Earth’s last glacial epoch. It turns out that my North American perspective made my idea of how icy Earth was rather exaggerated. Sure, Canada and much of Europe were unrecognizable. Many other areas weren’t that bad. It made sense when I thought about it. There were still tropics and hot deserts. It’s not like those ecologies evolved after the glaciers retreated. With that in mind, I tried to fill every hexagon on my map with something that made sense. It also turns out that climates and biomes are…complicated. I was obsessing over details that could inform my story, but they probably wouldn’t.
The mapping process had gone over budget. Just like the encyclopedia. It was time to put it on hold until I could focus on regions that the story needed. I wouldn’t know which until I had more of the story in mind.
How long is the coast of Britain?
By the light of fractal geometry the answer is: It depends on the length of your ruler. The coast “gets longer” the closer you look at it. If your ruler is 200km long, then the length is 2400km. With a smaller ruler, say 50km, you can trace out the details of the coastline more precisely and get a result of 3400km. We see increasing complexity as we zoom.
In each phase of my worldbuilding adventure I had no good idea what the right size was for the ruler. I kept zooming in and finding/inventing ever-increasing detail. My trope research, timelining, encyclopedia writing, and map-making overshot what I likely needed to make my story work. If this story leads to a series, I might recoup my investment. As it is, I won’t be able to work in all the detail I’ve come up with, but I’ll have plenty of things to choose from.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s to set a time budget for your worldbuilding and stick to it. You can always come back a fortify your imaginary world later. Better a half-built world and a story than an exquisitely built world where nothing ever happens.
Moving forward, I plan to focus on characters and story and build whatever else is strictly needed. Like hero spaceships and villain lairs. Such fun!