A couple of years ago I taught a class via Zoom for the Pioneer Valley Writers Workshop, on science fiction worldbuilding. Now I've decided to write up and expand my notes for that course and post that all here in a series of blog posts. My ultimate goal is to keep adding to this series and improving it, making a resource for science fiction writers, game designers, and anybody else who cares.
Let's begin with a definition: Worldbuilding is the art (and science) of creating settings for works of fiction, and conveying knowledge of that setting to the audience. Note that this doesn't restrict worldbuilding to science fiction or fantasy — it's part of all fiction.
Real-ish Settings: "Real world" worldbuilding means creating fictional towns and countries, and integrating them into the real world. Examples include Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Conrad's republic of Costaguana, any basically any fictional setting which isn't in the atlas. This often shades over into alternate history (see below), since the existence of fictional cities and countries would logically change the course of events, though in practice authors and readers simply ignore this.
In this sort of worldbuilding, your fictional locations have to be realistic — they have to look and feel like real places. The easiest way to do this is to base the fictional town on a real one in the same region, of about the same size and demographics. So if I want to write a horror story set in Deerfield, Massachusetts, but don't want to offend my neighbors by depicting them as inbred cannibals, I'll just move the town a few miles upriver (across the river from Northfield and nudging Bernardston to the west a bit), rename it "Kingsfield" and get on with the story. It will feel like a small Western Massachusetts town because it is a small Western Massachusetts town.
Historical Settings: A different set of worldbuilding problems confront writers who want to use real or "real-ish" (see above) settings, but in a different historical era. A subset of historical fiction involves secret history, where the events of the story are supposedly "real," but never made it into the historical record for various reasons.
The great thing about historical settings is that millions of people already did all the work of creating the setting for you. All you have to do is research. That research is your first problem. People who enjoy historical fiction tend to be very interested in, and at least somewhat knowledgeable about history, so you really have to get the details right.
Reading just one book isn't enough. You really have to dig in. Memoirs and travelogues from the period are your best resources. Some big scholarly tome by a 19th-century British writer is always useful. (No matter what the subject, that big scholarly British tome is certain to exist.) Period photos are incredibly useful, although they don't help with subjects before the invention of photography. If at all possible, talk to a historian who specializes in that period — they may be able to suggest other sources for more research.
The second problem when you're using historical settings is simply that the real world has no obligation to be plausible. I once wrote a rather snotty critique of a colleague's story set during World War II because the central event seemed so unrealistic. You guessed it: the story was based on a real incident.
That doesn't matter! You can't personally tell every reader "No! It's totally real!" Which means your task as a writer is to convey, through the story, that this blatantly implausible thing actually existed. This is a question of art, not science, so I can't tell you the infallible way to accomplish it. Suffice to say, the more realistically you depict your historical setting, the better the odds are that you can sell the reader something implausible — whether it's your own invention or a real thing.
Alternate Histories: The alternate history subgenre is lumped in with science fiction mostly for historical reasons: it was SF authors and readers who made alternate history a popular genre, and SF fans seem to like it. Basically the idea is to imagine if history had gone otherwise, and figure out what society would look like.
There are two main approaches to building an alternate history. The first is where you pick a year or an event, change it, and try to extrapolate what happens from there. The Civil War and World War II are the most popular alternatives, with a failed or averted American Revolution and the Roman Empire somehow not collapsing as perennial favorites. You pick a change and then apply your knowledge of how history works in order to see what comes of it.
The second approach is to pick an event to change which leads to the world you want to use for your story. This does mean you need to research and understand why the world didn't wind up that way historically. For example, if you want a story set in a world where the Aztec and Inca empires of the New World never got conquered by the Spanish, you have to address the factors which gave the Spanish an advantage: technology, disease, and endemic political instability in the two empires. This may mean your change point needs to be much earlier: send some Europeans across the Atlantic in the 1200s or so, so that the massive disease outbreaks have burned out before Columbus shows up. Maybe handwave that the aftermath of great plagues leads to social reforms in Aztec and Inca society which reduces their instability.
Whichever method you use, you need a very good understanding of the history around the event you're changing — both before and after. Do the research!
Fantasy Worldbuilding: Fantasy worlds, with magical powers and supernatural creatures, require more building than realistic or historical settings. In fact, one could argue that fantasy needs more worldbuilding than SF, since SF writers operate within the constraints of known (or hypothetical) science while fantasy authors need to imagine whole alternate systems of magic, unnatural biology, and mythologies.
"Wainscot" Fantasies: The Enclyclopedia of Fantasy uses this term to describe fantasy settings coexisting with our own world, as in the Harry Potter series. In these, most of the worldbuilding is already done, as in realistic fiction. You've got the world outside your window, just with secret magic stuff going on.
The author does have to create the fantastic elements — and, crucially, explain why they don't have more visible effect on the world. It often winds up leading to secret history where the influence of the fantastic is being deliberately concealed. I used that approach in my book The Initiate, and I cleverly added a rule that most supernatural beings are immaterial spirits which affect human perceptions directly, inside the brain. So you may see a terrifying demon, but if you take its picture with your cell phone all you get is a distorted blob.
Secondary Worlds: A "secondary world" is a fantasy which takes place in a setting unconnected to the real world, as in The Lord of the Rings (though even that is supposedly an imaginary prehistory). This is where you can have pretty much anything you can imagine since you don't have to shoehorn it into Earth and its history. However, there is a big nerd question which crops up, and that is simply how are there humans in this alien environment? Usually the answer is, "because there are," and that's all. I'd love to see a secondary-world fantasy which featured nonhuman protagonists.
Creating a fantastic secondary world takes basically all the steps I'm going to outline for making alien planets and civilizations in this series of blog posts. Plus you have to put considerable and serious thought into the role of magic and gods in your world. Good luck!
A Note on Sensitivity, Inclusion and Appropriation: There are plenty of minefields waiting when you do anything involving real-world societies and cultures — and I can personally attest that there are people out there who will try to judge a fictional alien civilization by the standards of this week's conventional Twitter wisdom.
I think most of that is nonsense. The best way to be respectful or sensitive is to know what you're talking about. If you want to write about life on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, you have to have seen it for yourself. Go there, spend some time, talk to people, learn the in-jokes and the things which will make reservation residents nod in familiarity.
There's a common phrase in the fiction field: "Write what you know." I think it is better to reverse it: "Know what you write." Learn, find out, and do your damnedest to get it right. There will still be outraged critics. Nowadays there are people who literally make a living by being outraged. Don't worry about them. If you've gotten it right and told the truth, your conscience is clear.
Next Time: Why?
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