Tag: worldbuilding

My Worldbuilding Weekend

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

(2008-09-07 10:23)

Folks must be writing New Ceres’ stories – I’m getting asked lots of stray questions about the universe.

For the record, Matt’s questions are the best [New comment: Matthew Farrer – whose story was published in the New Ceres anthology.] This is partly because he understands the nature of shared universes so deeply and respects them; it’s partly because he is such a good writer; and it’s partly because he pays attention. The worst questions (and I won’t name names) are from someone who wants a high tech story and wants to superimpose it on a static backdrop and even some of the physical fundamentals of the world are expected – in this particular writer’s mind – to change to fit plot needs.

This made me think.

This is hardly the first time I have had lots of people ask me about universes and worldbuilding. I get Medieval questions all the time, in fact. I’m doing a Sydney workshop on the stuff of the Medieval imagination in October, which just shows this sort of question is a regular part of my existence.

Each and every writer who talks to me brings with them a set of assumptions. Some of these assumptions are about the way research fits with writing. Some are about the way a given society works.

Some of them are about the story line and characters. The writers who frustrate me are the ones who assume that they can twist everything to fit. That static backdrops make for perfect fiction.

Why bother attempting proper world-building, whether it’s for historical fiction or speculative fiction, if your attitude is going to undermine your writing (and your world building) before you begin? Because that attitude does undermine the believability of the world. It carries through to the reader, always. [New comment: the problem is that New Ceres wasn’t designed for static backdrop, not that static backdrop is never suitable for fiction. In using the world as a painted cartoon background, the world would have been shifted from something dynamic and tarrying to something for pop adventure ie New Ceres was colour, not part of the fabric of the story.]

The reason for good worldbuilding and asking the right questions and understanding the answers is the reader. In an ideal book, they have enough clues to the world on enough levels so they are able to accept it and its implications and enjoy the book. So that there’s no “Well, it was OK, but something niggled.” Or so that they don’t have to race to check out “Could that really have happened.” It’s a trust thing.

Reader trust is built up with little clues and with the approach to the writing as much as it’s built up through getting ‘facts’ right. There are other ways of creating that trust than by using solid worldbulding, if your writerly soul can’t deal with solid worldbuilding. Read Alice and Wonderland again and you’ll see one approach. Most fiction, however, of any genre (including literary) has a consistent universe lying beneath it, reinforcing what it says and making it more convincing for the reader. The reader can immerse themselves in it for the duration. It’s one of the reasons I love reading – it takes me to other places and other times (tonight I might visit Alaska, tomorrow, Narnia).

Sometimes, it’s hard to convince writers of this, especially if they’re at the stage where they’re moving from short stories to novels. I don’t know why this is so. If the person was writing fiction set in a media tie-in universe, I would say “You know, making Darth Vader Luke’s son won’t work, don’t you?”

At the level of settings (and without making gratuitous Star Wars jokes), this sort of thing is harder to explain. Bringing the wrong approach to your world building questions can produce a high level of discomfort in a reader. A reader may not realise that the reason why they didn’t enjoy a New Ceres story as much as they ought was because the etiquette used was modern or that the sunlight had different effects in this story to all the other ones they’d read, but the feeling of “I just don’t like this story as much” still remains.

It’s even more complicated with Medieval settings. With any historical setting, in fact. New Ceres has solid world building behind it (you should see the files on my computer!), but, compared with actual human history it’s infinitesimal.

Think of how much we each lived yesterday. Think of all the humans in history having a full lifetime of yesterdays. Then think, if you’re writing about all those yesterdays, how do you choose what you need so that you can convince the reader everything is real, without convincing the reader they need a nap rather than finishing your book? I might choose the bit of my particular yesterday where the symptoms of cutting down cortisone hit because it was funky and funny. If I were writing it as fiction, I’d emphasise how jumpy I was and how exhausted and I’d tell it in such a way as to betray some of my secrets. I’d use it to bring a character to life, not as a straight description of a day.

Then there’s the matter of the notions of history we carry with us. I just discovered that a pop article I wrote on those notions (as applied to modern Arthurian fiction) has been put onto an undergraduate reading list in Germany. Not something I would have expected to happen, but it does highlight that finding out how we package our thoughts and how other people package their thoughts is terribly important.

If I want to use background to betray a character’s private longings and fears or to give a particular emphasis to an action scene (heighten the action, or enhance its significance, perhaps) then the shoddy “I’ll just add this to my story – I know what I’m doing” approach is just not a good idea. A writer might be strong enough to carry off a generally convincing story without that extra level of understanding, but they’re still undercutting their own taletelling on other levels.

A good writer takes a lot of care with words. They make sure that those words reflect the deep and precise meaning they need to convey and that those words link to other words and add to their meaning as well. Words are more than the sum of their parts: we all know this. World building, too, is more than the sum of its parts. This is all old hat.

I find it entirely fascinating that it’s possible to tell just how effectively a writer will use a world from the type of questions they ask subject experts. The type of question helps elucidate a universe that can underpin a whole novel – or undermine one. This, for me, is new hat.

Let’s Build a World: New Astronomical Finds for Your SF Stories

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

I’ve got a file (actually a dozen files) of cool science stories that I might use in science fictional world-building. What sf author doesn’t? Even fantasy stories need good science. For instance, an urban fantasy involving werewolves really should depict the phases of the moon accurately. This week, images and data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes have furnished a treasure trove of research ideas. Rather than post them separately, I’ve gathered a few that I find particularly exciting.

 

There Could be Many Water Worlds in the Milky Way

Astronomers are curious about how many terrestrial planets in our galaxy are actually “water worlds.”
These are rocky planets that are larger than Earth but have a lower density, which suggests that volatiles like water make up a significant amount (up to half) of their mass-fraction. According to a recent study by researchers from the University of Chicago and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), water worlds may be just as common as “Earth-like” rocky planets. These findings bolster the case for exoplanets that are similar to icy moons in the Solar System (like Europa) and could have significant implications for future exoplanet studies and the search for life in our Universe.

“We have discovered the first experimental proof that there is a population of water worlds, and that they are in fact almost as abundant as Earth-like planets. We found that it is the density of a planet and not its radius, as was previously thought, which separates dry planets from wet ones. The Earth is a dry planet, even though its surface is mostly covered in water, which gives it a very wet appearance. The water on Earth is only 0.02% of its total mass, while in these water worlds it is 50% of the mass of the planet.”

However, planets around M-type stars typically orbit so closely that they are tidally locked, where one side is constantly facing toward its sun. At this distance, any water on the planet’s surface would likely exist in a supercritical gas phase, increasing their sizes. As a result, Luque and Pallé theorized that in this population, water is bound to the rock or in closed volumes below the surface, not in the form of oceans, lakes, and rivers on the surface. These conditions are similar to what scientists have observed with icy moons in the outer Solar System, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Titan.

Given that they are tidally locked to their suns, these planets may also have liquid oceans on their sun-facing side but frozen surfaces everywhere else – colloquially known as “eyeball planets.” While astronomers have speculated about the existence of this class of exoplanet, these findings constitute the first confirmation for this new type of exoplanet. They also bolster the growing case for water worlds that form beyond the so-called “snow line” in star systems (the boundary beyond which volatile elements freeze solid), then migrate closer to their star.

In the past, glaciers may have existed on the surface of Mars, providing meltwater during the summer to create the features we see today. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA

Mars Had Moving Glaciers, but They Behaved Differently in the Planet’s Lower Gravity

On Earth, shifts in our climate have caused glaciers to advance and recede throughout our geological history (known as glacial and inter-glacial periods). The movement of these glaciers has carved features on the surface, including U-shaped valleys, hanging valleys, and fjords. These features are missing on Mars, leading scientists to conclude that any glaciers on its surface in the distant past were stationary. However, new research by a team of U.S. and French planetary scientists suggests that Martian glaciers did move more slowly than those on Earth.

These findings demonstrate how glacial ice on Mars would drain meltwater much more efficiently than glaciers on Earth. This would largely prevent lubrication at the base of the ice sheets, which would lead to faster sliding rates and enhanced glacial-driven erosion. In short, their study demonstrated that lineated landforms on Earth associated with glacial activity would not have had time to develop on Mars.
In addition to explaining why Mars lacks certain glacial features, the work also has implications for the possibility of life on Mars and whether that life could survive the transition to a global cryosphere we see today. According to the authors, an ice sheet could provide a steady water supply, protection, and stability to any subglacial bodies of water where life could have emerged. They would also protect against solar and cosmic radiation (in the absence of a magnetic field) and insulation against extreme variations in temperature.

Continue reading “Let’s Build a World: New Astronomical Finds for Your SF Stories”…

Making fertiliser

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

The other day I noticed that I wasn’t the only person who was tired. We’re all emotionally exhausted. If life were the same as it usually is, this is when we’d take time off and maybe even go on holiday.

I wrote those sentences then my thoughts led me into talking about how holidays are affected even for those who can still take them and I realised… one of the reasons we’re so tired is because there’s no escape form the pandemic. I’m in iso. As long as I am in iso, I’m safe. It should be simple, really. I should be shut off from the emotional fatigue. But it isn’t. And I’m not.

This is the moment I need to call forth my promise to myself.

Life has been challenging for me for a few years now, and I told myself that if I was going to continue to have garbage thrown at me, I was going to turn it into fertiliser and grow the best garden. When I remember this, the exhaustion takes a step back. Let me make some fertiliser right now.

I like lists of ten, so I’m going to list ten things that make life that much easier when one is Gillian in a pandemic.

1. Soft material. I use an amazingly soft blanket to snuggle in, and every time I do this I fight the long time alone.

2. Basic dance exercise. Keeps my body capable, even when I can’t go outside for weeks on end and things hurt. Also means I can fling my arms around flambuoyantly.

3. Chocolate. I don’t need to explain chocolate.

4. Other peoples’ stories. Books and TV and streaming services – when things get too much I can dig a hole in someone else’s world and only emerge when I want to. I choose to call this fairy tale groundhogging, for I found a Cinderella film last night and it took me right back to the days when there were solutions to problems. Now… not so many solutions, but I’m still allowed to dream.

5. World building. I finished writing a novel and the next one is a while off for I have to build a world. This gives me so many excuses to delve into intellectual places I normally don’t have enough time for. Six months I have, to delve. Maybe a year. To imagine a different world. Then I find a few people in that world and I write about them, but this deep level of world building is such a good place to be. I have a giant piece of paper on the back of the door, I have two notebooks… and this time I’m auctioning off place names to raise money for SF fans to meet each other. The geography of my three new countries will give a bunch of people what the world building does me: a feeling of being in contact with others at a time when… we aren’t so much.

6. Cooking. Today I intend to cook enough curries to last me one meal a day until after the weekend. Cooing calms me right down. I also talk to myself. When I’m in the middle of a novel, I might talk to my characters or argue with my plot. While other writers pen more drafts… I cook.

7. Online conferences. I can turn the vision off (so no-one sees me in my PJs) and listen to academics talk about their fascinating research while I do those stretches and gentle exercise and fling my arms around. A university professor says something that changes my own research or is important to my writing, so I stop in the middle of a paper and race to my desk and take notes. Free online academic conferences are the best form of academic training or updating for writers. I can break down stereotypes and I can learn how coin hoards change the way we see a place and its coinage and I can be reminded of the Welsh triads. Right now my world building is dominated by what I recently learned about Celtic Law because the experts in that law were handily on my computer.

8. The capacity to lose my temper without hurting anyone. Let’s face it, to only see two or three people in real life over a period of months is not an emotionally good place to be in. Chronic illness and iso leave me ready to snap when someone tells me off for being ill, or who thinks it’s a privilege to be single and of my age and alone. I lose my temper to myself, privately, then turned the garbage into fertiliser and asked everyone to think about chatting with me on Zoom. And now I have friends around me from a distance and I’d love to say I never lost my temper directly at anyone in achieving this, I’d love it if that side of things was very private… but I only lost that temper once in anyone else’s presence. Things are not easy for any of us. We often only see the good things in the lives of others because it’s so important to get through things. Having space to lose my temper and to curse the world and to move past it and regain civilisation is a lovely luxury.

9. I own the shell of an emu egg. It looks like a large, speckled avocado, but it’s an emu egg and it’s mine. My next dream is cook with the other parts of an emu egg, but that’s harder to achieve. Another dream is to paint emu eggs, but I’m not good at painting and the egg shells are not cheap. Painting is easier to achieve in the US, where emus are farmed. My egg comes from an emu that was never constrained and constricted and (given emus) quite possibly bullied children. I was bullied by emus as a child. And now I have an egg.

10. I can take moments to ponder the important questions. My important question at this precise moment is whether other places have birds that bully in the way emus do. We also have cassowaries, but I’ve never met one because they’re far more dangerous than emus. And we have magpies that swoop. It’s swooping season right now, in fact, and I’m safe inside and cannot be got. I wish I could see a person on a bike, with a mask to protect from COVID-19 and a helmet studded with spines to protect against magpies. In fact, I wish I had a picture and could make postcards with funny comments.

This post was brought to you by a way-too-early swooping season and by an emu’s egg.