When I see “world building” discussed, Lord Of The Rings almost always pops up, and for good reason. Whatever one’s opinions about LOTR, we acknowledge it’s a major archetypal template for modern world-building in fantasy. While wizard-and-elf fantasy isn’t my genre of choice, it shares with science fiction the necessity of world building — something most other fiction genres can ignore.

(What prompted me to write this entry was a Guardian piece, here, in which six sci-fi/fantasy [SFF] authors share their brief thoughts on world building, and how they approach it. I don’t intend this as a response to that; I merely acknowledge that the article set me on the path of this discussion.)

Tautologically, if you’re writing novels set in modern times or in the past, or any other fiction piece that takes place within the scope of known history, you don’t have to create a universe, because it already exists. Fictional elements include characters and their actions, and perhaps a made-up corporation or small town, but the world isn’t meant to be imaginary. The flip side is that when a story is set in the future (or an alternate past or present), or includes elements of magic, spirits, etc., then suddenly you are world building.

As A Reader

Though I recognize that many readers don’t pay too much attention to the world building efforts of the authors they read, for me it is something I can’t ignore. It’s also something I enjoy noticing — because to me it’s often the most interesting part of the story. If an author introduces some future invention — like, say, faster-than-light travel or sentient computers — I enjoy examining the potential for change in human society that such an invention would cause, and wondering whether and how the author envisioned those resulting changes.

While reading, I can usually tell the difference between off-hand references and actual world building. For example, when “the Clone Wars” are first mentioned in the first Star Wars film (1977), I don’t think George Lucas was engaging in any real world building; he certainly didn’t have in mind what eventually played out in Attack Of The Clones. It was just a phrase that sounded science fictionish and provided a backstory for Ben Kenobi. In other stories, it’s more clear that world building took place, even if the author doesn’t provide huge “info-dumps”. There’s something to the consistency of the story and the backdrop of the fictional universe that rings more true when the creator has put in the effort.

Of course, neither method is right or wrong; it’s a choice like all other choices in writing. (In films, of course, quite a bit can be shown, while in a book it must be written.) Regardless of the author’s intent, I often find myself wondering about things, wishing for at least a little background or explanation, if it’s not provided. How did a particular group of people come to be marooned on this jungle world? Why did the galaxy-spanning government permit such a strong culture of corruption and bribery? What is the history that led to each planet having such an expensive standing military? In a galaxy with such ubiquitious anti-gravity devices, why are most structures squat and thick?

Especially when I was younger, but even a little bit now, I like when supplementary material is included — like maps, timelines, or a list of sentient species. If the author has already done that work for herself, to keep things straight in her head while writing, then it can help me keep things straight in my head while reading to (except in the rare cases when I’m able to finish a book in a day or two). Perhaps obviously, my desire for these increases proportionately with the complexity of the world building. Some fictional universes, like the Star Wars one, have become so detailed and complex over time that entire websites are devoted to listing all the non-human species, spacecraft variants, battles, and planets; but I think that’s a notable exception. In most cases, a one-page appendix should be sufficient.

One of the most disappointing and frustrating things for me is when an author introduces a future invention, or a new type of government, but then doesn’t consider all the ways such a development would affect everything.

Though I haven’t (yet) read any of his books, I was surprised to hear recently that sci-fi writer Alastair Reynolds considers world building beneath him. He says: “I don’t need to know how the sewage system works to tell a story about someone on another planet.” While that’s (generally) true, it can be a recipe for disaster in certain cases. Because if somewhere else in the story you mention new advances in bacteria engineering, but you have sewer tunnels exactly like those back on Old Earth, a reader is going to wonder why those huge advances in bacteria technology weren’t applied to sewer systems. And those kinds of oversights do show up in science fiction. A lot. In one place, a soldier will use a “disruptor” weapon that releases the molecular bonds of matter, but in another scene miners are using old-style physical drills — why aren’t they using the disruptor rays too?

(Notably, Reynolds is known for writing a series of novellas and novels set in the Revelation Space universe, which is internally consistent and apparently well conceived, so perhaps his comment was disingenuous. Or perhaps he’s doing the world building unconsciously and doesn’t realize that the rest of us have to struggle with it.)

Similar oversights occur in stories about magic, especially those that are supposedly set in the “real” world. If you’re writing about a centuries-old magic-wielding team that fights for justice and peace, you need to add at least a line of explanation about why they failed to intervene in the Holocaust or other atrocities.

As A Writer

I like to refer to myself an “aspiring writer”. Not because I aspire to write — clearly I do write, both nonfiction and fiction. But because I aspire while I write. Instead of fulfilling a contract with a publisher, I seek to accomplish something with each story, as well as striving to improve my writing as I go, in plot development, character descriptions, dialog, and action, but also regarding how I reveal and work on my world building.

For me, world building often takes place long before I come up with the rest of the story. Before I can conjure a character’s backstory, I have to know what kind of world she grew up in. Before I can lay out the basics of the plot, I need to know how humanity got to that place, and why. Did they invent a star drive or artificial gravity? If so, that changes how quickly planets can be colonized and what kind of trade can happen between them. Was there a war, an epedimic, a revolution somehwere in this fictional future? If so, how might that affect the language, technology, clothing, or food?

(I understand that many authors do the reverse of this — the story pops into their head and they backfill the world building as they go. I’ve tried that method a couple of times and it always results in paradoxes or nonsensical situations.)

It’s important to me because I believe the real world is internally consistent and therefore my fictional world should be too. In real life, there’s a reason we use rubber (instead of some other material) for our tires, but plastic for our water bottles. There are reasons we still use bicycles and cars, despite the development of aircraft. There are even reasons that most cars, bikes, and aircraft are privately and corporately owned, rather than part of public transportation. Sometimes the reasons are economic; sometimes ideological. So in my fictional worlds, I want those reasons to make just as much sense as they do in real life. It’s important to me when I write to know just how things developed over time. If my story is set in the year 2500 CE, obviously some technological changes will have occurred; the question for me isn’t necessarily “what devices do they have?” but rather “how did those devices affect everything else?” Just as in real life, the answers aren’t always simple, and there are often overlapping causes and effects — but those causes and effects do exist.

To return to the improvised example Reynolds brought up (the sewage system mentioned above), there are easy enough ways around this. Best practice: don’t mention the sewage system at all. Don’t have your characters hiding in sewer tunnels, don’t mention the toilet part of the bathroom in your spaceship, don’t have a shootout at the waste treatment facility. Because all of those things are technological and part of a society’s infrastructure — none of which existed 500 years ago and few of which will exist (in their current form) in another half a millenium. Unless you want to do world building.

In real life, in the current time, sewage systems depend on gravity, the natural gravity of the planet, with waste flowing downhill to a wastewater treatment plant. (There are rare exceptions.) It affects the designs of entire cities, locations of facilities, contours of underground infrastructure, and even to some degree where the lower-priced neighborhoods are located. But if, a few hundred years from now, Dr. Zed Goodfuture invents a cheap and efficient artificial gravity machine, or Dr. Gams McAss bioengineers bacteria for specific processes, or some other scientist develops any other superior technology that you mention anywhere else in your story, that technology is going to affect the sewer system. Designs will change, cities will be shaped differently, underground pipes will get smaller or larger or be made out of different materials, or something. Does any of this make a difference in the story you’re writing? Maybe not. But if I’m going to mention Dr. McAss’s work, then I darn well am going to consider its wider implications. As an author, I need to understand that this one development (bacterial bioengineering) changes all kinds of stuff, from food processing and storage to materials manufacture, from wastewater treatment to planetary colonization.

And, to be honest, working on that kind of thing is more fun for me than writing a story, though I understand that few others enjoy it, and only if I write a story will anyone get to see any of my world building efforts. If (when!) I ever finish the novel I’m working on, you might or might not like the story or the characters, but you can rest assured that I did my due diligence on the world building. (My spouse and children can testify; they are likely tired of hearing how the alien language changed over time and which extraterrestrial words were incorporated by humans after the two species met up, and why all starships have the same basic design in this universe, and why humans look the way they do after five hundred years.) There are reasons — political, technological, and ideological — why buildings look the way they do, and why they look different on the Outer Worlds than they do on the Old Worlds. And so on.

Varying Viewpoints On How, And How *Much* To Explain

Authors use varying methods to explain the way their fictional world came to be. As already mentioned, some use clickbait-like throwaway lines (“the Clone Wars”) and others employ the dreaded info-dump — page after page of convoluted exposition and backstory. Better than both, in my opinion, is the practice of judicisouly spreading it around: a bit of dialog here, a paragraph of explanation there, or a description of some object or place that inherently gives some of its reason for being that way. If the reader can learn something the same time a character learns it, all the better.

Readers (and authors) have different preferences of course. Some readers like the throwaway lines — they can prompt wide imagination with just a couple of words — but I think it’s a lazy method. Other readers prefer almost entirely dialog-driven narrative (and writers like John Scalzi seem to prefer this). Some don’t need or want any backstory at all and don’t care a whit about careful or consistent world-building as long as something interesting is happening right now.

Personally, I don’t mind info-dumps — if they’re well-written and considered. Don’t list all the former emperor’s nephews and the marriages of his aunts and the color of the velvet on his toilet seats, because that’s just stupid and wastes everyone’s time. But if part of the story’s background is that there was a former emperor, then by all means mention that, and say why, and what happened to him. Some readers tend to skim those parts, but I devour them. Maybe don’t do it on the first page, when I haven’t yet decided if I like your book or your characters, and certainly don’t do it while the main character is in the middle of a cliche of looking in a mirror so you have an excuse to describe her appearance. But once you’ve got me hooked and wondering about stuff, stop for a paragraph or two to give some background.

As a writer, I try to envision myself as a reader, which is difficult since I already know the story. But I do know that no one wants me to begin with: “Four hundred years earlier, the complex reasons that humanity abandoned Earth include...” You want to learn that organically, when it happens to be relevant, just as it begins to affect the plot. I also know you don’t care why all the large starships are spherical in my universe, but that you won’t mind if I explain it in a single clear sentence. And I know you don’t want to read about every battle and strategy of the Kravin War, but I’m going to mention a few of them when it explains the main character’s viewpoints on violence and sentience.

And yes, I often wish other authors were so considerate.

It Depends On The Story

As both a reader and an aspiring writer, the type of story makes a difference in what I want to read — or to how I write. As indicated earlier, a film can do a lot of exposition without taking up any time. Just showing me a battered spaceship hull can tell me its age or the wealth of its owners or what it’s just experienced. In a written story, the author has to say all that (if it’s relevant). The length has something to do with it too. In a short story, neither the author nor the reader has time to get too deep into anything but what’s happening now, though a few hints at world building can go a long way. On the other hand, novels are built for this. In my experience, there is little so rewarding as having a well-crafted fictional universe revealed bit by marvelous bit as the characters move through them. For me, this is almost as satisfying as experiencing a masterful plot arc reach its conclusion.

A Word On Worlds

I don’t know who started this horrible trend, but I think Star Wars is most infamous for it. Desert planet. Ice planet. Jungle planet. Forest moon of Endor. While it’s true we haven’t explored anywhere beyond our own solar system in real life, a few things simply don’t make sense when it comes to fictional planets.

Many “hard” sci-fi writers get it right that, if Earth-like planets are out there, that’s where human colonists would settle. But many don’t. If we postulate a planet with a breathable atmosphere, gravity and temperature within a certain range, then we can easily infer other things, like climate zones, and the weather not being the same over the entire planet at the same time. There are polar areas that never get straight-down sunlight and tropical zones that always get head-on sunlight. It’s difficult to imagine a combination of physics that would allow an entire planet to be desert and habitable by humans and relatively the same all over (Tatooine). Because if the polar areas were hot desert, then the equatorial areas would be far too warm for habitation. Similarly, an ice planet (Hoth), if it existed, and was cold and icy (but still habitable) at the equator, then the polar regions would be far colder and thus uninhabitable. Similar problems exist with the jungle planets and forest moons.

So, when I design the imaginary planets in my fictional universes, I try to take these things into account. Certain things can vary — size/mass, gravity, rotational periods, continent shapes, life forms (if any) — but at some point in the imagination I have to force myself to be realistic. Beyond a certain degree of variation to any of that, the logic of habitability breaks down and we couldn’t live there without serious modification (of either the humans or the ecosystem), and then that modification has to be part of the story.

In that vein, I imagine my future planetary explorers classifying worlds with some sort of check list. If the planet meets a certain list of requirements, then it is “Earth like” or habitable for humans (at least at some latitudes). If it doesn’t meet all of those requirements then it falls into some other classification, like “Class B” or something.

Conclusion

I don’t have some magnificent point to make here. I’m just talking, as if this was a dialog but the other person simply sat quietly and listened. (The other person can stop listening now and respond in the comments.)

Perhaps some authors really do all their world building on the fly, as they write, and keep it consistent in their minds without any real effort. Others of us have to write down timelines, lists of planets or non-human species, descriptions of governments or economies, and so on. How much of that seeps into the story is a different choice altogether.