World Building

by Romie J. Stott

I. Beginning to Build a World
      1. Technology
      2. Society
      3. Historical Precedents
      a) Currency
      b) Economics
      c) Time & Numeral Systems
      d) Religion
      e) Sexual Taboos
      f) Art
II. Check Your Facts
III. Trace the Implications
IV. Absurdist or Highly Irregular Worlds

As an author of speculative fiction, you have a wonderful freedom: you can write about whatever you want. If you want people to fly, they can fly. If you want killer robots to terrorize the populace, they will. If you want a race of immortals who can make food out of thin air, you have them. When inventing a story idea, you don't have to take anything for granted.

There's a catch: your readers know not to take things for granted until they're told they can, so they will watch everything you do and pick it apart for information. A line which would be innocuous or poetic in a work of literature may have dramatic consequences you don't intend. Loose metaphors can confuse a reader horribly; mention a character's "glowing green eyes" too often, and your reader may assume the character possesses supernatural vision, or neon implants.

In a sense, you are hampered by your own omnipotence. You can't presuppose things which might be obvious to another author, or another reader set. For instance, if you write, "Joe went to the corner store to buy a carton of milk," you've just assumed the following:

1. Streets or pathways are laid out in some kind of grid pattern, such that there are corners.

2. The society has some kind of merchant or service class which owns and runs stores.

3. Milk is not free; Joe had to buy it.

4. It is likely that the society uses coin, paper, or electronic money. It is possible that barter or exchange of services is used in payment, but it is unusual for a society to develop centralized goods distribution (stores) before it invents a systemized means of exchange.

5. Either the society keeps livestock, or it chemically synthesizes milk and this is too common to be remarked upon. In either case, these industries require inputs and release byproducts. Presumably, these industries are widespread enough that Joe can take for granted that milk will be available to him at no remarkable cost.

6. Wax-covered paper (used to make cartons) is viewed as appropriate packaging. These resources are plentiful enough that they are not saved for special projects, (trees exist, as does the technology for producing paper,) and the society embraces the idea of disposable containers.

7. Given that buildings are clustered closely enough together to require Joe to call a place "the corner store," (and that there is likely more then one store, again requiring the clarification,) Joe probably does not reside in an agrarian setting. The milk is probably produced elsewhere and transported to the store; this requires a great deal of infrastructure and some kind of reliable transportation system. It is possible that the store owns the means of production for the milk – that it has a cow on premises, or a milk-producing machine; if so, this means of production is probably inconvenient or expensive, such that Joe prefers to subcontract to this store. In either case, the store charges enough for the milk to make it worthwhile.

8. Joe cannot himself produce milk, or prefers not to. He views himself as a consumer – as someone who can purchase what he needs instead of having to create it himself. Presumably, society has advanced to a point where this kind of behavior is supportable.

9. A carton is a desirable amount of milk for someone like Joe.

10. Joe can show himself in public, presumably without too much fear of violence or social ostracism. If he is in a class-based society, he is not in the "untouchable" caste. If there is an expectation of violence on the way to the store, either Joe is secure in his ability to come out relatively unscathed, or this milk is very important to him.

If things get so complicated with a simple sentence, imagine what happens when you start throwing in the fun stuff – wizards and spaceships and empathy boxes. You want to make sure your reader makes the same assumptions you do. The most important way you do that is to make your world internally logical, so your reader can assume that what is true in one paragraph is still true in the next. Before we begin, there is something you have to understand:

You are under no obligation to make your world externally logical.

The fact is, you're writing a work of fiction. Your readers know that going in (and if they don't, you have a pretty severe marketing problem). They're going to be willing to suspend a certain amount of disbelief so long as you're consistent about what they can and cannot take for granted.

Internal logic is your contract with the reader. You will never jar your reader out of the story by writing something blatantly contradictory; in return, your reader will accept your premise without question. If your premise – the basis of your world – is that Japan won World War II, your reader has no right to say, "that's unbelievable because Japan lost in the real world."

On the other hand, your reader is allowed to be irritated if all your Japanese characters act like Americans.

If your premise is that magic exists and wizards can make objects appear out of thin air, your reader doesn't get to say, "but matter can't be created from nothing!"

. . . but she can complain if your characters spend ten pages looking for a ladder because you forgot your wizard could just "poof" one.

If your premise is that what we perceive as reality is actually a computer construct, and our body heat is the energy source for a race of sentient artificial intelligence, your audience can't complain that there are more efficient ways to get electricity. However, they're allowed to be irked if the character they saw beat up ten guys a scene ago is suddenly helpless and afraid because of two attackers.

The willingness of your audience to accept externally illogical ideas is a beautiful thing. It's what lets you have light sabers and artificial gravity. It's what lets you have talking trees and people with three heads. It's what lets you write a world in which all cats are female and all dogs are male.

Now it's your job not to mess it up.

I. Beginning to Build a World

Authors of what is known as "hard" science fiction often take the idea of "world building" fairly literally; before they even begin to think about society or technology, they design the planet. They figure out the percentage of the surface occupied by water, the chemical composition of the soil, the planet's spin and how it affects weather patterns, the sort of sun the planet orbits, and how much radiation is filtered by what kind of atmosphere. In effect, the planet is developed as lovingly – and sometimes more lovingly – than the main character of the story. In many cases, the planet is not merely the setting for the story; it is the story. (Read Larry Niven's Ringworld for a particularly famous example.)

The rest of us probably start with a less scientific concept. Maybe it's an image of a three-headed woman riding a dragon; maybe it's an astronaut sneaking along the outside of a space station. Maybe it's just a "what if": what if a nuclear bomb went off in London? What if the moon landing was a hoax? What if you could have conversations with your television? We gradually develop these ideas into full fledged stories, and as we do so we may fill files with drawings of monsters and doodads, with family trees for all of our characters, with lists of clues for mysteries, and with carefully plotted-out fight sequences. Finally, we sit down to write. . .

. . . only to realize we have no idea what the land looks like, how many people live there, and how they make a living. In a panic, we fall back on stereotypes and vague assumptions about "the way things have always been."

You've seen it happen. It's the high fantasy novel where characters are always traveling through green deciduous forest, pay for everything with coin money that is almost identical in exchange rate to pounds sterling, and can muster a devoted and well-trained army with very little expense or forethought.

Pre-trained and outfitted armies come from places. To get to you quickly, they need reliable roads. (See U.S. Highway System and “all roads lead to Rome.”) If there are reliable roads, why are your characters constantly hiking in the woods? Are there bandits on the roads? Why do these bandits frighten characters who can kill a chimera without blinking?

Writers are not painters, and our story worlds are not blank canvases that get covered up by the action of the narrative. You would not give your main character a heroin addiction without considering the physical, emotional, social, and financial effects; why wouldn't you give your world the same level of consideration?

Fortunately, you have a starting place, in that we all live on a complex and populous planet, built on the laws of science and the rules of diverse societies. We have thousands of years of history, religion, mythology, and government. Everything that has ever been written, no matter how fantastic or outlandish, has had some basis in the Earth that actually exists. After all, this is where you come from. Whether you believe in nature or nurture, your thought patterns have been uniquely shaped by the world that is.

At the very least, you start out knowing two things about your world:

1. It is in some ways similar to the real world.
2. It is in other ways different from the real world.

The differences are what you work with, but they affect and are intimately related to the similarities. When in doubt, turn to history and science. Look at matriarchal societies that have and do exist, and find the similarities between them. Look at how nuclear theory developed, and how big or small the cognitive leaps were from step to step. Study a few revolutionary leaders, and figure out why people followed them, or what they had to promise.

Whatever the differences between your world and this one, they probably fall under two major subheadings: technology and society.

1. Technology

Technology can be anything from guns to magic to economics to spaceships. Basically, technology equals tools. Maybe they're physical tools, like swords, coins, or screwdrivers. Maybe they're intellectual tools like mathematics, military strategy, or musical notation.

Whatever they are, they are things which were created to be useful, and to help accomplish a goal. They may have had unforeseen consequences, and they may no longer be serving their original use, but they were developed over a period of time because they were needed. There have probably been prototypes which have been discarded; there have probably been advances which never caught on, either because they were inconvenient, because nobody knew about them, or because nobody needed them.

The more streamlined the technology, or the more multi-function, the longer its development probably took. Think of it as the cell phone principle: each generation gets smaller but offers more features. At the same time, even the most carefully developed technology can be rendered obsolete by advances in other areas. We can find an excellent example in the history of the sword:

Early swords were either for stabbing (gladius) or for slicing (scimitar). After hundreds of years, these developed into weapons which could both slice and stab (broadsword) and even be used sort of like lances (claymore). Eventually, the gun was invented, and armor was thus rendered obsolete. Guns would not be accurate until the invention of rifling, nor would reload times be instantaneous until someone thought of incorporating the gunpowder into the bullet itself; thus, the sword remained useful for a brief period.

However, without the interference of armor, bulky swords were a waste of resources; instead of strength, fighters needed the speed that came with a smaller sword (rapier, saber). After a few decades, slashing became passé for duelists; straight thrusts were faster and less likely to be blocked by a trained opponent (smallsword, epee). As guns became faster and more accurate, swords ceased being militarily viable; swordplay was relegated to sport, with blades made to neither stab nor slash (fencing foil).

Most technology advances along lines similar to this. First there are a bunch of related but unconnected ideas; then someone connects them by experimentation or careful thought. Next, the design or concept is refined in ways that make it more useful or easier to work with. Eventually, it reaches its ideal form, where any major non-cosmetic change would diminish its function. It remains in this form until forces in society or advances in science demand or facilitate a new or better form; at this point, it goes back to the refining stage, or it is replaced, or it is phased out.

Any piece of technology your story uses is in one of these stages. If it's just been invented, chances are it's somehow unreliable or unwieldy. The laser pistol doesn't always fire. The spell doesn't always work the way it's supposed to. The recipe ingredients are hard to get. The computer program has a rounding error which makes it sometimes give the wrong answer.

If the technology has been around a while – and has been used by a lot of people – improvements have probably been made. Someone's realized that the kick does more damage when aimed for certain parts of the body. Someone's made the pilot's seat adjustable for different people's heights. Someone's figured out that you can simplify the ten-step calculation down to just two.

How long it takes for these improvements to happen varies dramatically, because it requires getting the technology to a person with the resources, skills, and desire to improve it. Something can be around a long time and not change, or it can develop very rapidly. Ordinarily, the more people there are using the technology, the sooner someone will take action. (For instance, personal computers double in processing speed every eighteen months, but the Space Shuttle has changed very little in thirty years.)

If the technology has been around a long time, it has probably reached its most useful form. People file patents for "new and revolutionary" scissors and can openers every year, but the basic design remains the same. We're happy with the Arabic numeral system, and multiplication tables are pretty much set in stone. Certain technology becomes "standard" once enough people have used it, especially if there's some kind of centralized authority – a power company which says all plugs need to fit a certain type of socket, or a public school system which teaches everyone to spell the same way. This standardization can cause people to reject "new, better" refinements, for the same reason as always: function. Interchangeability has become too important.

Finally, your technology may be obsolete but still in use, perhaps as a cheap alternative to something better, or perhaps because of the nostalgia market. Maybe your character wears outdated clothes because he likes their style, or maybe he can't afford newer ones. Maybe teleporters exist, but some people are so poor they still have to take the bus – or maybe some people are so rich that they can waste time taking the bus and enjoy the scenery. Either way, outdated technology is rarely used by the middle class; it tends to be a shoddy compromise for the poverty-stricken, or a foible for the well off.

Remember: your technology doesn't have to be something that makes sense in the real world, so long as its creation followed a reasonable pattern of development. You can have psychic androids who shoot fire out of their foreheads, provided that the world has at some point contained less advanced non-psychic robots, a combustible fuel source, telepathy, and someone with time, knowledge, and resources, who wanted to combine the three.

2. Society

A society is a group of people bound by a shared set of laws, customs, belief systems, and communal experiences. These rules and traditions are in some way internalized by all members of the society, whether they agree with them or not. Even the smallest, simplest society, like a classroom or a family unit, will gradually come to share some type of etiquette and conflict resolution, a specialized vocabulary of nicknames and slang, and a literary tradition of often-repeated stories and jokes. It will also possess an official or unofficial hierarchy – often both.

For the purposes of world building, society can mean anything from caste systems to religions to laws to customs. Unlike technology, societal constructs don't develop suddenly through the inspiration of a single inventor. Revolutions, when they happen, are usually bloody and rarely succeed perfectly. More than a century after the U.S. Civil War, interracial marriage is still a hot-button topic and some towns are fiercely segregated. 200 years after the French Revolution, titled nobles still live in Paris.

Societal change takes time because society is formed around tradition; religion and law provide a sense of continuity over generations, and act as psychic safety nets. This means that outdated practices can carry on long after their original purposes are gone – it can lead to massive inefficiency, or bigotry, or unnecessary constraints on liberty. It can also create outwardly nonsensical traditions which are nevertheless meaningful to the participants – decorating a Christmas tree, or carrying a Chinese dragon puppet down the street. (For more specialized examples of traditions that still exist for outdated reasons, read The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer.)

Although these customs may seem strange, and sometimes harmful, they did not develop in a vacuum. For any practice to become widespread in a community, it must have once served an important use. (For example, nobody would pass a law forbidding people to carry guns in church if it hadn't ever been a problem.) For any practice to remain in use, it must still benefit someone with the influence to keep it going. This could be someone with money, weapons, or political power; it could also be a large, stubborn, and vocal segment of the population.

As a rule of thumb, the larger the society, the longer change will take. A small island nation will experience faster lingual drift (adding new words and dropping old ones) than a large empire with a formalized bureaucracy will. (This bureaucracy would be unnecessary in the smaller nation, which doesn't need as large a government.) It's common sense: one person has more influence in a group of four than in a group of 4,000.

At the same time, the more isolated the society, the slower the change. A group of people which is never exposed to new ways of thinking will have no reason to reconsider its customs. This is why change tends to happen faster in urban areas than in rural ones. Moreover, city-dwellers are less likely to feel threatened by change because they have more options – if one supermarket closes down, they can shop at another. If a small town loses its market, its customers may have to travel 30 miles to the next one. This attitude toward change can extend to less tangible areas – attitudes toward homosexuality, religion, and medicine.

Finally, the more homogeneous the group, the more resistant to outsiders. We trust people who are similar to us because we predict that they will make the same decisions we will. By the same token, we can assume that things which are okay for them are okay for us; I am more likely to mimic the clothes of someone my age and size than someone half as old and twice as heavy.

Countless studies have shown that people are more receptive to new ideas which come from their peers. Diverse groups will define "peer" more broadly than homogeneous ones. For instance, a group of 12 white people and one black person will feel more comfortable defining the black person as "other" than a group of 3 white people, 4 black people, 2 Asians, and a Lakota Indian would. Basically, if a member of a society is viewed as abnormal – as an outlier on the bell curve – his or her opinion is more likely to be ignored. The more mixed the society, the greater the area under the curve (and the stranger someone has to be to count as "odd").

3. Historical Precedents

It is often said that you have to know the rules of grammar before you can break them. The same thing could be said about world building: before you build a new and different world, you need to understand the overriding patterns in the real world. The big key is research – but here's a quick and dirty guide to a few of the basics.

a. Currency

It has been said that money is the root of all civilization. Currency has several advantages over the barter system: it's more convenient and it acts as a store of wealth. You can't save a chicken for a rainy day – the chicken might die in the meantime. You can't loan someone a chicken and expect to get the same chicken back later – either it'll be older, or it'll be a different chicken. Finally, if you want to buy a shirt and the weaver doesn't want a chicken, you're out of luck unless you can find somebody else who wants a chicken and has something the weaver needs - a song, or a promise to retile the weaver's roof.

Currency is a contract between the buyer, the seller, and the body which issues the currency. Instead of giving the weaver a chicken, I give him $30 which represent a chicken – or a stool, or a part of a cow, or a dozen candlesticks. These $30 are better than an IOU or a marker because they are guaranteed by the government or a bank; as long as the government or the bank sticks around, those $30 are worth something – even if I skip town tomorrow.

The disadvantage to currency – whether it's coin money, paper money, salt, or cocoa pods – is that its symbolic value is greater than its actual value. If you save up hundreds of rubies and one day everyone decides rubies are worthless, there's not much you can do. You still own the rubies, but you've lost all of your money. So in order for currency to succeed, you need a stable government – if people are afraid that they'll wake up tomorrow and the dollar will be worthless, they'll stick to chickens, which at least provide eggs.

Here are the steps by which a society develops money:

1. Barter – goods exchanged for goods.

2. People get tired of the inconvenience of bartering once they are trading with a large number of people over an extended area for increasingly specialized goods. Instead of bartering, people use something which is considered to have inherent value as a medium of exchange (gold, salt). A group of people begins to specialize in measuring the amount and purity of the gold, salt, etc.; these people eventually move beyond scales and magnifying glasses to mint coins (or packets or bars) with their marks on them – verification that this gold, salt, etc. has already been analyzed and separated into convenient and consistent units.

3. Coin money, while more convenient than barter, is heavy in large quantities and takes up a lot of space. The people who specialize in money – who now call themselves bankers – set up shop near markets. While traders shop at the market, the bankers store their money and give them pieces of paper with the amounts written on them. Traders find it is easier to exchange the pieces of paper than to withdraw the coin money. Meanwhile, some bankers loan out the coin money to people who will pay it back with interest.

4. Banks become large enough to have branches in more than one city; the paper money is good not only at one market, but at several. Eventually, printing money is taken over by a government so that the money can be used at all the markets. However, you can still walk into any bank and ask them to give you the value of the paper money – the gold, or salt, or emeralds.

5. Eventually, the society's wealth reaches the point where it is greater than any one natural resource – there's not enough gold or salt to represent every financial transaction, and mining for more would cost more money than it would create. Besides, nobody ever goes into a bank and asks for gold anymore – people buy gold from jewelers. The government decides to print new money which cannot be exchanged for gold.

6. Now the society can have more wealth than it has natural resources. However, the society faces a greater risk of inflation – if the government decides to print a billion dollars to cover its debts, any individual dollar will be worth less. For stability, small countries often decide to tie their currency to that of a larger country; several South American countries use the U.S. dollar and western Europe forms a monetary union which replaces individual currencies with the Euro. Meanwhile, some investors make money by taking advantage of currency fluctuations.

7. As technology develops and as people keep track of more and more wealth, people become accustomed to thinking of money as numbers instead of as a physical entity. As infrastructure (credit card readers, etc.) is built, people carry decreasing amounts of cash, and prefer electronic transactions - they're more convenient and require less advance budgeting. At present, cash is still used for smaller transactions - paying tolls and parking meters, tipping baggage handlers - because the cost of the electronic transaction would exceed the amount of money being transferred. It is possible that this will change as technology develops to decrease the transaction cost, but it is unlikely that cash will ever be phased out completely.

b. Economics

Most of Economics can be simplified to the following: things are worth what someone will pay for them. In more technical terms, the price of any given item is the point where supply and demand meet. If I'm only willing to sell something for a minimum of 20 cows, and the person I'm talking to is only willing to buy it for a maximum of 30 cows, then we'll agree on a price somewhere between 20 and 30 cows. Whether it's closer to 20 or 30 depends on which of us is a better bargainer.

The reason it gets complicated is that our bargaining is not solely dependent on which of us talks better; it has to do with market forces. If I know that the price of grain is about to go up, I might want less cows than I would otherwise. If the guy next door sells the same thing I do and asks for just 25 cows, I'm going to have a hard time getting any more than that. If I know that I need 20 cows to feed my tribe for the winter, and that I'll have to pay one cow in taxes, I'm not going to accept any less than 21 cows (or more, if I'm worried that some of them might be sick).

Basically, goods are worth more if they're more useful or more rare. Water is supremely useful, but it's also plentiful in most parts of the world inhabited by humans – so a diamond (rare, useful for its hardness) will sell for more than water. (And as water gets more polluted, the price of clean water goes up.)

However, if I discover a diamond mine and sell a lot of diamonds at once, the price of diamonds will drop. Some might not sell at all, if everyone who wants a diamond already has one. This means that sometimes someone can make more money by producing very little than by producing a lot – instead of selling 200 diamonds for $1K a piece, I could try to sell 20 diamonds for $12K each.

Of course, if there's someone else selling diamonds, she's not going to let me get away with that – she'll undersell me and I'll sell no diamonds. But maybe I can convince her to sell her diamonds at the same price I do – then we're both making $12K a diamond.

This is called a "cartel," and it's what DeBeers does with diamonds and OPEC does with petroleum. Most governments will try to break up cartels to keep prices at a reasonable level. (Governments like for goods and money to change hands frequently because this creates more wealth, for reasons outside the scope of this article.)

Another reason a price might be unusually high is if someone has a monopoly on the good – if only one person or company sells it. We usually think of monopolies as giant corporations, but a dancer has a monopoly on his dancing. Yoko Ono has a monopoly on being Yoko Ono.

When they can, companies will develop at least partial monopolies through branding – Coke and Pepsi may both be cola, but some people will live and die loving one and loathing the other. These same people have no trouble ordering cheese enchiladas from a different restaurant every day – at least until one of the restaurants mounts an aggressive ad campaign.

If a good costs more to make than anyone is willing to pay for it, nobody will make it – no matter how useful it is. A merchant who sells at a loss too many times will go out of business – and into the poorhouse. For the same reason, something which is cheap in one country may be unavailable in another – the good might be cheap, but the transportation may be prohibitively expensive.

Sometimes a government will subsidize a good or an industry because it produces a useful good but no individual can bear the cost of business. For instance, a government may pay part or all of the cost of its citizens' education because few factories could afford to teach all their workers to read.

By contrast, a government might fine particular industries to cover hidden costs – over-fishing, or air pollution, or deforestation. Finally, a government might place tariffs on foreign goods, either to punish another government for political reasons or to protect its own industries (so that the other country doesn't wind up with a monopoly).

c. Time and Numeral Systems

Every time system on Earth is based on natural rhythms. Times of day are in relation to the sun – when it rises, when it sets, and when it reaches its apex in the sky. The sun is great for telling time both because it creates light – which grows your food and lets you see where you're going – and because it's really easy to see. Two people may disagree about when lunchtime is, but if one says "meet me when this stick casts a two-foot-long shadow," they'll show up at the same time.

Nobody is sure how 24-hour days (divided into two 12-hour stretches) arose, although the average resting heart rate for a human is 60 beats a minute. France once tried to switch to metric time – 10 hour days – but this was unsuccessful. For whatever reason, an hour is a convenient unit of time, and there happen to be 24 of them. (AM and PM are once again based on the sun.)

Weeks are dependent on the moon; it takes 14 days for the moon to go from dark to full, and vice versa, and it's easy to tell when it's exactly half full.

Months are also approximately in relation to the moon, which waxes and wanes in a 28-day cycle. Again, the key is convenience – everyone can see the moon. At the same time, people tell time by the seasons, which are important both for knowing what kind of weather to expect and for knowing when to plant what. This leads to a 365-day year, which almost divides evenly by 28. (365 divided by 28 equals 13 remainder 1.)

For whatever reason, (there are various theories,) many cultures are phobic of the number 13, and so they prefer to use 12 months. Also, cultures that use a 12-hour time system are attracted to the parallelism of 12 months. Finally, most cultures recognize 4 seasons, and 12 is easily divisible by four. Unfortunately, 12 does not divide evenly into 365. (365 divided by 12 equals 30 remainder 5.)

Different cultures have reconciled this problem in different ways. Some of them extend the length of some of the months so that they're 30- and 31-days long. Some of them add an extra "festival" month to balance the calendar. Finally, some use multi-year cycles of months – – instead of having a one-year calendar, they may have a three- or five-year calendar (although this is more attractive to a nomadic than an agrarian culture).

Most advanced counting systems are base 10; other common advanced systems are base 20, base 40, and base 60, which are remarkably similar to base 10. These numbers are not arbitrary; it is no coincidence that humans have 10 fingers and 10 toes. Numbers are only useful if they actually allow you to count things – and with base 10, your hands are natural calculators. There are other useful advanced systems – notably binary, base 16, and base 13 – but these are only used in special fields. Nothing beats convenience.

That said, some extremely simple and isolated tribal cultures don't get as high as base 10, which is only useful if you have 10 things that need counting. These cultures may have the number set {none, 1, 2, 3, many}. In this case, none and many act as limits like zero and infinity; if there are more than three of something, then it's plentiful enough to not need counting. Only extremely advanced cultures recognize numbers lower than zero.

d. Religion

In fiction, we often characterize priests, shamans, and other religious figures as people who exploit the fear of death and meaninglessness to enhance their own social standing and power – or as benevolent and sometimes misguided people who feel a calling to help others.

Neither of these characterizations is always inaccurate, but it is important to realize that religions don't create themselves out of thin air – they exist because a society wants or needs them. A priest or shaman is a specialized laborer just like a hunter or a tent builder. His job is to answer two basic questions:

1. Why do things happen the way they do?
2. What happens when we die?

Because of question 1, religions often begin with folktales or myths – stories of Hera & Demeter, Isis & Anubis, and Ananzi the spider. As science and technology develop further, they are embraced by the religion as better answers to question 1.

It is for this reason that the Roman Catholic church and Islamic Moors held onto and passed down scientific knowledge throughout medieval times. Pure science – science for science's sake - was not sponsored by corporations and private donors (although governments often funded technological development like advances in shipbuilding). Pure science was sponsored almost exclusively by the church, as an investigation of question 1, and many great early scientists were monks.

The church as political is not something inherent to religion - it's an effect of groupthink. Any time a unified group of people has the same goal or viewpoint, they will work together to manifest that goal or viewpoint, discouraging dissention within the ranks. The same is true of a soccer team. Religion just tends to attract larger groups - at least in the modern world.

Religion and science come into conflict when science begins to replace religion; as scientists find more answers to the question of why things happen, people start to question the religious explanations – and the necessity of the religion. In retaliation, religious groups start to withhold scientific funding and punish scientists who attempt to investigate phenomena viewed as spiritual.

Often, this is not merely a reaction from the religious hierarchy; scientists also experience a backlash from the general population. Where scientists try to explain why things happen in unbiased clinical terms, religions take more human-friendly approaches. Priests explain not merely why things happen, but how to increase the chances they'll happen the way you want them to. If you are sick because God is angry, all you have to do is make up with him. If you are sick because you didn't wash your hands, you can't go back and erase it. Whimsy is still more predictable than random chance.

Most cultures view their god or gods as humans with special abilities; some mix these with animal gods. Again, the key is approachability – for a religion to be successful, people must be able to relate to the god. As an outgrowth of this tendency, most cultures personify death.

Personifications of death can be grouped into four categories[1]:

1. Friendly Death – Death is a reassuring presence, perhaps offering sustenance. (e.g. Jesus comes to your bedside.)
2. Disgusting Death – Death is skeletal, rotting, or covered in maggots.
3. Remote Death – Death is mysterious and cold.
4. Seductive Death – Death is physically attractive or beguiling, but still somehow dangerous.

A given personification may combine more than one of these elements; for example, the grim reaper is both disgusting and remote. Even within a culture, different people may view death differently. However, the overriding societal opinion gives a clue to how most people in the society expect to die.

Friendly Death is favored by people who believe in a pleasant afterlife, and believe that death has some kind of sense behind it – that it is purposed or cyclical. It is unlikely that most deaths in the society are violent. Disgusting Death is common in societies where most deaths are due to illness – normally without the aid of advanced medicine. Remote Death is typical of urban technological societies which are isolated from natural cycles. Seductive Death appears in violent or marginalized societies, often accompanied by a suicide warrior class.

e. Sexual Taboos

Some human customs are founded not on religious dictates, but on seemingly arbitrary practices. However, these customs are remarkably consistent across cultures, and anthropologists theorize that they are necessary for civilization.

One example is the incest taboo, which is universal among humans and common to most animals, although the definition of what relationship is taboo varies among cultures. Although it is true that western-defined incest leads to an increased risk of passing on certain recessive genetic problems, these genetic problems are themselves extremely rare; there must be another reason for the taboo.

Some scientists believe that the incest taboo encourages wider genetic dissemination – if my daughter and son each have four children, then I have eight grandchildren; if my daughter and son have four children together, I only have four grandchildren.

From an animal/biological standpoint, the success of my life can be measured in terms of how many new humans I produce (and immortalize myself through), so I will encourage my children to seek out different sexual partners. Other anthropologists think the incest taboo has more to do with "gifting" – when my daughter marries outside of the family, her new family feels tied to mine and is likely to provide a shared defense in times of trouble.

At a few points in history, noble families have married within themselves with the idea of keeping their bloodline pure. Although this was a relatively common practice in ancient Egypt, in most of history noble incest has been looked upon with distaste and even revulsion by the nobles' subjects. As a result, instead of strengthening a claim to the throne, incest (particularly father/child or brother/sister) often weakens it. The notion that royal incest is common in the Western world comes largely from unreliable sources seeking to discredit the nobles involved.

We think of homosexuality as a common taboo, but many cultures are indifferent toward it. Some of these cultures accept one of the homosexual partners as transgendered; others think homosexuals are holy men. These are often the cultures which respect madmen and drug use; homosexuality is viewed as another altered state.

The cultures which most aggressively despise homosexuality are usually agrarian. They want to produce more food by farming more land, and so they need more children; these same cultures are often suspicious of old unmarried women. The focus is fertility.

Once a society reaches a sufficient population density that there is competition for resources, opposition to homosexuality slowly dies out. (This is mirrored in animal populations.) Although this usually occurs in urban industrialized settings, it is also common in hunter-gatherer tribes.

f. Art

A time period's art, music, architecture, and literature usually mirror each other. Baroque music was highly ornamented and rigidly ordered to increase tension; baroque architecture was similarly ornate and dramatic. Baudelaire's poems, Monet's paintings, and Debussy's musical compositions share a dream-like quality which emphasizes light, beauty, and fleeting impressions. Music in particular reflects the rhythms in the primary language of the composer.

II. Check Your Facts

Any world you invent will be in some way different from present-day Earth, and in some way similar to present-day Earth. When you're deep in the process of creating, you mostly focus on the ways your world is different – maybe the politics are matriarchal, people can breathe underwater, and something in tiger pelts controverts the laws of probability.

These differences are what make your world unique, and if you didn't care about them, you wouldn't write speculative fiction. However, the similarities to the real world are just as important, and shouldn't be neglected – no matter how humdrum.

Check your facts; check your facts; check your facts. Sci-fi readers in particular are the pickiest people you'll ever come across, and if you get something wrong, they will never let you forget it. Nor should they; an incorrect "fact" can jar a reader out of even the most hypnotic story and break the spell you worked so hard to create.

Even if you're certain something is true – even if you have clear memories of reading it in your 8th grade history textbook – check it again, and make sure you have a reliable source. A lot of "common knowledge" is flat out wrong. Marie Antoinette never said "let them eat cake" – although many French peasants believed she did, it was another queen entirely[2]. Blood is not red in arteries and blue in veins; it looks blue because of diffraction through the skin.

When doing your research, remember that not all sources are equal. If you're not sure about something, make sure that two or three sources say the same thing – and then check their bibliographies in case they got it from the same place. Then check that source. When researching history, older (preferably primary) sources are usually better. When researching science (including psychology), use the newest sources you can find – otherwise, you run the risk of repeating a theory which has since been disproved.

If you can't find what you need in a book, ask a librarian, or write to a professor who specializes in the area. Most people will be flattered to be asked for advice, and if a professor didn't care about getting a subject right, (s)he probably wouldn't have written a doctorate about it. However, don't assume that someone who is a specialist in one area knows anything more than you outside that specialty. Be as dubious of professors as of books. If something sounds wrong, check it.

Here are some things to look out for:

Technology That Already Exists

Before you invent a new gadget – be it a method of space travel or a medieval-style fantasy weapon – make sure it doesn't conflict with what already exists. It's fine to write a "what if" scenario – what if virtual reality had caught on, what if samurai used guns instead of swords, what if drugs had no negative side-effects and drug use became a purely ethical question – but if you're writing a realistic story about interstellar travel, don't let people lean out the open windows of the space ship. If you want to write about the future, you have to keep up with current advances. Subscribe to the relevant trade journals if you can.

By the same token, don't rewrite history when you don't have to. Sword & Sorcery authors constantly invent "new" shiny weapons for their characters that are exact parallels to historical weapons. Before you pin a new name and inventor on something, make sure someone didn't get there before you. After thousands of years of human civilization, it would be surprising if someone could find a truly new configuration of blade and handle. If something already does a job well, there is little need to invent an alternative.

Patterns of Social Development

A classic speculative fiction writing exercise has authors come up with two unrelated concepts – say, Henry VIII and supercomputers – and write about what would happen if they coexisted. This has lead to a lot of fun and fascinating stories.

However, unless you're going for absurdism, it's important to remember that things happen through cause and effect. A society which has not invented representative democracy will not be ruled by a president. A group of hunters will not invent a plow. A car cannot exist before the invention of the wheel – or the invention of the axle.

Just because two things have existed does not mean they can coexist. You need to know not just what did happen, but what could have happened – and that means finding out how an idea developed. Art, politics, and science are all built on what has come before. New ideas can't happen without old ones – and old ideas are replaced by the advent of something new and better.

Things That Are In Common Between Now and Your World

Just because you can invent something new doesn't mean you have to. Normally, if something doesn't have to be different for the sake of the story (either for a plot point or to establish milieu), you should stick with what already exists. If your story is peopled with humans, keep their blood red. If your main character discovers a new species of frog, use the scientific naming conventions that already exist.

Unless they are told otherwise, readers will assume that your world is basically the same as the real one. This means that every time you change something, you'll have to explain it. Readers don't mind this as long as it's important – but they'll be bored by an intrusive narrator who drops in every sentence to note that orchestras tune to B instead of A, electrical plugs have four prongs, people take salt in their coffee instead of sugar, cats wear collars on their tails instead of their necks. . .

Done correctly, creative departures from reality are delightful and elegant. But sometimes, creativity is laziness. If you can't remember whether a banjo has five or six strings, check. If you get it wrong – even if you're consistent throughout the story – it will be distracting. And don't think you can escape this by giving the banjo a new name and calling it a different instrument. Readers will figure it out and be irritated – and they'll start to doubt your other more careful inventions.

Check your facts.

III. Trace the Implications

Nothing happens in a vacuum. In both a literal and a figurative sense, your world is an ecosystem. Even a small change can have a far-reaching effect. Put people in space ships and they may not act much different from people on sailing ships; change the average pregnancy length from nine months to eight and you can expect a higher birthrate, a higher infant mortality rate, and an accompanying shift in views about the sanctity of childhood – which will affect the psychology and history of every character in the story.

Tracing implications is the most important part of world building. No matter how cool a new gadget is, or how complicated a legislature, it's just a bauble unless it's integrated into a larger context. Science fiction draws much of its power and prestige from its predictions of scientific and social advances. Many genres focus almost exclusively on tracing implications – near-future sci-fi, alternate histories, and good cyberpunk.

Tracing implications is just as important for memorable fantasy or horror. The books which stay with a reader are those with worlds external to the book. At the end of the story, the heroes successfully evade the zombies, but we stay up until three in the morning worrying about what's left for them on an Earth where death is no longer final. The heroes defeat the evil wizard, and we fantasize about rebuilding the lost kingdom while working to prevent the racial wars which were only held back by the wizard's despotic reign.

Implications are important because they allow the reader to play along. Even if (s)he guesses wrong about what's going to happen, (s)he still gets to guess. Equally important, they allow the reader to be swept along; the reader knows (s)he's in the hands of a competent author. If the world isn't developed along reasonable lines, readers stop trusting the plot. If a writer didn't follow the logical ramifications of his or her world-building decisions, how can we assume the ending of the story will follow logically from the beginning?

Tracing implications is the hardest – but most rewarding – step in the pre-writing process. Inventing the basis of a world is simple; you play around until you come up with a few concepts you like, and then you're done – often the ideas just pop into your head. Researching is easy; it might be time-consuming, but it's purposeful and concrete – you start out with a stack of books and wind up with a stack of note cards.

Following the implications of a decision looks a lot like doing nothing. Most of the time, it involves staring into space, pondering. For some authors, it requires finding friends who are willing to listen to them think out loud for hours on end. It's the step that can make usually charming authors forgetful, inconsiderate bores. Worst of all, the only way to get better at the process is to become smarter – read a lot of philosophy and nonfiction, follow history and current events with a critical eye – and get better at noticing the underlying patterns.

If you're just starting out, it might be helpful to examine the implications of any decision in five areas: technology, society, environment, economics/finance, and psychology/art. For example, let's imagine that the U.S. has decided to recast marriage – as of now, any marriage only lasts one year, after which it must be renewed to stay in effect.

(This example is intended to acquaint you with the kind of thinking you have to do; these are not necessarily the best or only conclusions that can be drawn from the data. If you really want to write a story about this subject, you'll have to go much more into depth.)

The One Year Marriage: Implications

Technology

Technology is driven by people who are willing to pay for it. Many people are willing to pay a lot for weddings on the grounds that they only happen once. If weddings are yearly events like birthday parties, people are going to be less inclined to rent out expensive chapels.

On the other hand, people may be willing to buy more expensive wedding dresses since they'll get more wear out of them. Engagement rings will either be larger – "don't bother hitting on my wife, I take good care of her and she'll still be with me a year down the line" – or they'll disappear, since it would be silly to have a two-year engagement for a marriage that will only last one.

Then again, weddings might go casual – like starting a business or filing your taxes. Services might arise to streamline the inconvenience of the process; you have your accountant, your lawyer, your insurance provider – and someone who files your marriage certificate each year. He might send you little "don't forget to schedule an appointment!" postcards the way your dentist does. E-filing online will become popular, but some people will worry that it's unreliable.

Society

Because non-renewal of marriage will be so much easier and cheaper than divorce under our current system, couples will be much less likely to integrate finances. Upon the birth of a child, primary custody will be awarded to one parent; similarly, houses will not be co-owned. Given historical precedent, both the child and the house will probably go to the same parent – most likely the mother, who may demand she be given a house before she is willing to bear a child.

Women will be less likely to give up their jobs even temporarily since they will need to keep their resumes current. If they decide to be stay-at-home moms, they may start farming small plots of land, raising livestock, and taking up handicrafts – so as to retain the possibility of self-sufficiency. The birth rate may drop substantially.

Religion will have less of a role in marriage since "two becoming one" will be interpreted in a practical economic sense rather than a spiritual one. As a result, resistance to gay marriage may die down. There may be an upswell of support for polygamy since one person can clearly marry several people over the course of a lifetime – why not all of them at once? Another segment of society may view polygamy as horribly destructive – they may worry about "corporate marriage" taking the place of "the traditional mom & pop."

Environment

Children can expect to grow up in a house where the composition of the parental unit changes at least once. This could either lead to a hoarding instinct, wherein people try to keep as much stuff as possible to insulate against uncertainty, or it could encourage a "disposable" view of objects. Both tendencies would lead to a strong demand for mass-produced consumer goods – which would probably increase pollution, thereby contributing to global warming, thereby creating more severe weather patterns, thus more uncertainty and more need for consumer goods.

Alternately, people may assume they will relocate frequently, and so they may focus on owning a small number of carefully-crafted items, perhaps artisan made. These items would be small enough for easy transport, but high-impact enough that they could give a feeling of home wherever they were. We might wind up with a vaguely Japanese aesthetic of an apartment half full of small high-quality pieces, and half full of things that will be thrown out a month from now.

Economics/Finance

With more women staying in the labor force, competition for high-level jobs will be more fierce. Either this will encourage people to work longer hours and show they are good workers, or it will lead to more job sharing – two person teams taking the responsibility of the same job title. Which way it goes depends on who has more power – corporations or voters.

Corporations will want to employ as few people as possible so they won't have to put as much money into paying for training and benefits. Voters will know that if they put in too many hours at the office, their marriages will fall apart. If they're smart, the voters will encourage the creation of socialized medicine to decrease corporations' hiring burdens.

On the other hand, the birth rate will drop. In the long run, this will lead to a social security crisis, an increase in legal immigration to fill low-paying jobs, accompanying racism, government-backed financial grants to encourage childbearing, and a sharp rise in taxes.

Almost no-one will be willing to put a spouse through school – at least not without drawing up elaborate contracts. Otherwise, the risk of defaulting on the loan is too high.

Psychology/Art

Since divorce will lose a lot of its stigma, single parents will not be viewed as immoral, and bearing a child out of wedlock will not be considered unusual or unfortunate. On the other hand, divorced people will still feel abandoned – and most married people will feel less sure of their spouses (although some will proudly proclaim that their marriages are more meaningful since they're clearly choice instead of habit).

Unless there is a strong social support network, the suicide rate will be high. Uncertainty makes people depressed. Even more art will focus on loneliness and abandonment, and partner-swapping soap operas will share prime time with situation comedies. At the same time, people will be much less likely to stay with abusive partners – staying will be as active a choice as leaving, and leaving won't be considered as disruptive. After all, it's been prepared for.

IV. Absurdist or Highly Irregular Worlds

Very few people write absurdism well, which can confuse readers into thinking there is no difference between good and bad absurdism. Good absurdism, like satire, is not random; it uses careful symbolism to explore emotional and philosophical themes. It may not use real world rationality, but it has a rigid internal logic; without this, it would be unsatisfying to the reader – just a poorly-planned collage. If you intend to write absurdism, satire, or fable, you are not immune to the need for coherent world building.

Absurdism, satire, and fable have a different goal than most writing. Their intent is not to transport the reader with a good story, but to advance the philosophy of the author. This can be extremely entertaining, just as adventure stories may have good morals – but the entertainment is a means to an end. These genres comment on the real world and seek to influence it. As such, the worlds in which they take place remain symbiotically connected to what actually exists.

Building an irregular world is like inventing the rules for a board game. These rules do not have to be logically inferred from one another – they just have to be regularly applied. In the board game Monopoly, you go to jail if you roll doubles three times in a row. Why? For game balance, so that one player with an unusual run of luck can't wind up with twice as many turns as everyone else.

Justifications for the rules of your world can be similarly external – but the rules must be justified. Why is the queen's head on backward? To show that she's leading the country in the wrong direction. Why does everyone yell each time the main character introduces himself? Because they think he retains an artificial notion of who he is.

In short, you are aware of your audience and your audience is aware of you. Your world doesn't have to make internal sense – but it must make external sense, at least emotionally, because it is about the real world. Be careful when adding new elements, and make sure you know the symbolism you intend – otherwise, you may wind up saying something you don't mean.

Conclusion

The stories which stay with us happen in worlds we can imagine ourselves visiting outside the pages of the book. Maybe we want to talk to the main character over a cup of hot coffee; maybe we want to hack our way through the evil corporation's supercomputers; maybe we imagine what it was like to live in the village where the yellow plague hit hardest.

These stories have lives outside of themselves not because the prose was prettier or the plot twists more shocking. They last because of their authors' careful attention to detail – detail that quietly reveals a world outside the confines of the story, a world where our own dreams and imaginations can run free.

If you start to get buried by the whys and wherefores of creating your world, just stop and remember what it feels like to be a fan. Every author starts out as a kid adding scenes and flourishes to someone else's story. Now it's your job to continue the tradition by making a place someone else could get lost in. It's worth the time.

[1] Johnathan F. Basset and John E. Williams suggested the four perceptions of Death in an article called "Personification of Death, as Seen in Adjective Checklist Descriptions, Among Funeral Service and University Students" in Volume 45 of Omega: The Journal of Death and Dying (Number 1/2002), pp. 23-41. However, the redefinitions (and renamings) of said perceptions and the observation of their connections to other cultural norms are entirely my own.
[2] Some historians believe that "let them eat cake" is properly attributed to Marie-Therese, the wife of Louis XIV. However, it has been credited to several bourbon princesses, and the quote itself may be apocryphal. However, it is certain that the quote did not come from Marie Antoinette. It appeared in Rousseau's Confessions when she was only 10 years old and still living in her native Austria.

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Romie Stott is the associate editor of Reflection's Edge.

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