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November 22, 2005
Speculation : Worldbuilding
My intent when I started this blog was that it would reflect the kinds of things I actually spend my time thinking about (within the limits of propriety when it comes to my job and other people). I have however come to realize that there is a whole class of stuff I think about which hasn't really been captured here. I'm not sure I am going to make it a regular feature of this blog; but I should at least acknowledge its existence.
I have long aspired to be a fiction writer (specifically a writer of science fiction and fantasy); but truth be told, what gets me excited about developing fiction is creating the background of the stories – elaborating in my mind and in my notes the world in which the story takes place, not the story itself. I have begun to suspect that this is why I never get around to finishing my stories – once I have developed all of the details of the background; I become disinterested in the story itself.
The result is I spend (waste?) a lot of time thinking about questions like: How big of a crew would a spaceship like that have? What kind of ecology would keep all of those monsters alive in the evil forest? (Saying "its magic" is just a cop-out to me.) What does the reproductive cycle of this alien species look like and how has it shaped their culture? How does "magic" work? What are its limits?
I have designed several alien species from the ground up, including what other kinds of life forms would appear on their planet to fill in the various ecological niches. Perhaps the most interesting is a species that has three and a half genders which are involved in reproduction (one gender undergoes a transformation in their lifecycle which results in their serving a slightly different role in the process late in life). The complexities of their reproductive cycle would of course result in complexities in their society, which I also developed.
Likewise I have designed many spaceships, and considered the effect of different technologies on the politics and culture of the society that uses them. While faster-than-light travel appears to be impossible in the real world, just what rules you choose to break in order to get it to work can have interesting consequences. Consider two solutions: A "warp drive" that allows you to travel faster than light, along with the technologies that allow you to detect and attack such craft in transit (essentially the "Star Trek" model). Alternatively you could have a "Jump Drive" that (after allowing the drive to "charge up") allows you to instantaneously jump to a distant location in the universe, where your ability to detect spacecraft is still limited to slower-than-light means.
A key observation is that "Warp Drive" encourages empire building while "Jump Drive" discourages it? Why? Because a primary motivation for building geographically large political organizations is that (because of fundamentals of geometry) their borders grow more slowly than their volume. Thus the larger the political entity, the more resources they can put into defending each unit of border. That's all well and good when the technology provides the means to defend borders (as "Warp Drive" would); but consider "Jump Drives" – as described, you could jump and attack any planet inside your enemy's territory, without actually passing through the border, so the advantage of size is completely lost. I once started outlining a story set in a galactic republic (which had been built using a "warp drive") soon after the discovery of "jump drive" technology. The story was about the fall of the empire (with hints towards the problems of fighting a war on terrorists using a military designed to fight more conventional wars.)
Actually, it is quite often that I come up with one story idea, and in the process of fleshing out the world surrounding it, I discover that the "real story" is elsewhere. A long time ago I started a fantasy story where griffons started attacking the livestock maintained by some villages (the story was about two heroes with different approaches to solving the problem). The story however got me thinking: Why did the griffon start attacking? Why Now? My answer was that a dragon had moved in and made a nest in the mountains, and was eating so much that the griffons has to travel farther to get their meals. But then why did the dragon move? At that point I saw an interesting pattern – the dragon moved because of some change where it had been living, which was caused by something else, which had been caused by something else, which finally led back to the villages building a dam on the river. The real story then become one of ecological consequences, and was much more interesting than the one I started with. But, as usual, once I had worked out the details, I lost interest in the project.
Anyway, I don't know how much of this kind of random speculation I want to spend time writing up (if for no other reason than a good deal of it is intrinsic to stories I'd still like to write someday, even if I have doubts that I ever will); but I at least wanted to acknowledge that I spend a fair amount of energy doing this.
Posted by Steven at November 22, 2005 02:33 PM
Comments
I like the outlines of your eco-story. But my preverse brain strats up with 'if they then lose the dam... nothing changes.' The griffons are in their new hunting grounds, the dragon has its new nest and so on. Undoing the results of that small eco-change would require a whole other book.
Posted by: Roland at November 23, 2005 07:12 AM
Ro - absolutely. In my outline, they realize this and decide to kill off the griffons as the "only" solution. The story ends with the villages getting overrun by giant rodents (whose population had been kept in check initially by another predator which had been eaten by the griffons and then by the griffons themselves). Once you mess up an ecology, there are no easy answers to putting it back together.
Posted by: Steven at November 23, 2005 07:45 AM
