From here on, science fiction is going to be the primary focus, so when I say "worldbuilding" just assume it's SF. And, yes, I'm eventually getting to the nuts and bolts, but I think it's important to understand what we're doing and why, before we get to the how.
Why? The first thing to keep in mind is that fantasy and science fiction are still FICTION. They are stories, and if they don't work as stories no amount of research and worldbuilding matters. All worldbuilding should be in service to the story.
Fitting the world to the story is kind of the Platonic ideal of worldbuilding from a literary standpoint. If you want a particular thing to happen to particular characters, create a world in which it can happen. I will discuss the opposite approach, fitting the story to the world, below.
The "Cambias Test": This is a concept I came up with long ago as part of a failed roleplaying game project. It's a simple question: "Does this setting allow stories which would be impossible in the real world or in the past?" If the answer is no, then just use one of those instead.
An obvious corollary of the Test is that you only need to do as much worldbuilding as you need to for a particular story. By this I don't mean that you should be slapdash or lazy. Merely that a short story's background can be lightly sketched in, whereas a novel series probably needs a detailed world. Too much "world" can choke a story if you're too enamored of what you've created and try to shove it all in the reader's face.
Stealing: It is very common to use renamed or "reskinned" versions of real-world places, events, and cultures for fiction. It's practically universal in fantasy, and quite common in SF.
There are some good reasons for this. A real-world society has its own internal logic and will hang together. If your horse nomad tribes look and act like Mongols or Comanches, then they make sense because those real-world horse nomads made sense. However, see the Cambias Test above: if your story could be set in medieval Mongolia or early 19th-century Texas, why not just do that?
Fitting the Story to the World: Of course, sometimes there are real-world reasons for why you can't make up a world to fit your story.
One obvious constraint in SF is if you're using an actual planet or celestial body. You can't make up details unless they're consistent with what is already known, so in effect you have to fit the story to the science.
For example, in his classic novel Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement read an article about an exoplanet orbiting Barnard's Star. (Note, Peter van de Kamp's announcement in the 1960s of a giant planet orbiting Barnard's Star turned out to be an experimental error. But in 2018 a planet was discovered circling Barnard's Star, very different from what was described fifty years before.) Anyway, Clement started with what was known: an estimate of the planet's mass and orbital period. Using then-current theories he came up with a plausible world — a huge, high-gravity planet spinning at an insanely fast rate so it's distorted into a fat disk shape, with surface gravity of about 3 times Earth at the equator and something like a hundred times that at the poles. Then he created a biosphere and intelligent beings living on that world — and then he came up with a story.
Fitting the story to the world also becomes important when you're working within a "sandbox" setting you've already created. Or if you're using a published setting invented by someone else.
Okay, so you've got a setting, either a real world or maybe a planet in some other writer's sandbox. How do you create a story for that environment — one which actually makes use of it, not just as windowdressing? There are several things to hang a story on.
Impossible Desires: What can or can't happen in that fictional world which is different from our current environment? This is basically a character motivation version of the Cambias Test. If the setting creates a desire different from the desires of people on contemporary Earth, then there's your story right there.
Signature Events: Is there an important or characteristic occurrence in that world which doesn't happen here and now? For example, Mercury rotates with a period of 176 days relative to the Sun, and of course it's very close to the Sun so daytime temperatures can get up to 700 Kelvin (about 800 Fahrenheit). That's deadly, but the slow rotation means a walking human could stay ahead of the dawn line. That's a good story hook. (I know it's been done but I can't track down the story or the author.)
Playing Tourist: Exploration of a sufficiently interesting setting can be all the excuse you need for a story. Jules Verne did it, H.G. Wells did it, Larry Niven did it, and I've done it myself. You'll want a goal to pull your characters across the world, and then the places they visit can hinder or help them on their way. It's useful if that goal is an Impossible Desire not available on Earth in 2022, and the characters experience a Signature Event or two along the way, but not necessary. This approach does depend on just how good your setting really is. If you happen to know more than almost anyone else about a real planet or moon, just do this.
Hardness and Handwaving: How realistic should you be? It depends. As I mentioned above, science fiction is fiction. Scientific accuracy is a literary choice for your story.
In particular, very realistic or "hard" SF makes the reader's "suspension of disbelief" easier, because all the elements of the story really could happen. It allows the author to do some pop-science tourism, showing off cool stuff that really might exist. And it supports themes of discovery, gritty realism, knowledge as power, and humanity's place in what appears to be an amoral Universe.
But there are degrees of hardness. You may allow yourself one or a few pieces of "magic" like faster-than-light travel, gravity control, or whatever. This allows the author to put recognizable near-future humans into alien environments on planets of other stars, interacting with alien civilizations or travelling into the past. A solidly "hard SF" story of interstellar travel would have to be set centuries in the future, when humans and human society are almost unrecognizable to a contemporary reader. So sometimes less hard science makes it easier for the reader to accept a story!
And if you want or need something blatantly unrealistic, like prophecies or interbreeding with aliens, then go ahead and do it. As I said, accuracy is a literary choice. However! To sell that unreal element, make the other aspects of the story as plausible and grounded as possible. Weird stuff happening to weird people in a weird setting is probably just too damned weird.
Next Time: The Future!
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