Worldbuilding Fiction: 4 Questions You Have to Ask
Worldbuilding in fiction is a perilously seductive thing: too much, and it consumes you; too little, and you miss out on all the fun.
That’s the thing: worldbuilding is seductive because it’s so darn fun. There’s nothing quite like conjuring an entire world for your fictional characters to inhabit. Science fiction and especially fantasy stories thrive on a steady diet of worldbuilding.
I’m generally a fan of the idea that with worldbuilding, you want to consider all aspects in order to create a believable world. And on that note, I’ve created a set of questions to guide your fantasy and science-fiction worldbuilding from the ground up.
1). One Planet or Many?
The first question you want to answer is the question of which planet your story takes place on. Is it Earth, or somewhere else?
A common approach is for the story to be set on an Earth-like world, but with fantasy landmasses and everything else.
George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is a good example. Westeros looks and feels something like Britain, albeit writ larger, and the ancient land bridge and the presence of dire wolves give it a bit of a New World feel. Essos, in the East, has a more Eurasian feel, with the Valyrian-derived city-states having a vaguely Mediterranean flair while the Dothraki are obviously patterned after the Eurasian Steppe nomads.
On the other hand, Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series takes place on Roshar, a world of magical storms and curious flora and fauna. For one example, check out chulls.
You could also have multiple worlds, and I say that not least because I’m working on a space opera fantasy set in a multiple-world system. What I’ve found is that it’s important to think about what makes each world unique, as well as the ways in which it relates to the others. But more about that below.
2). Landforms and Lifeforms
Now that you have your planet or planets, you’ll want to think about landforms and lifeforms. Of course, that also means you’ll want to think about seas.
If you’re going for a very big-picture, high-concept world, I’d advise taking a little time to familiarize yourself with biogeography. The book I’d recommend here is The Monkey’s Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped History. The title is a reference to the historical fact that the ancestors of the New World monkeys, the platyrrhines, reached South America by rafting across the Atlantic from Africa.
Do a little more digging, and you’ll discover that there are all kinds of interesting patterns and rhythms in historical biogeography.
For example, a lot of major mammal groups have deep evolutionary roots in North America, Eurasia, and/or Africa.
Both camelids (camels and llamas and alpacas) and equids (horses, zebras, and donkeys) have deep North American roots, and members of both groups colonized Eurasia and later South America, as well as Africa in the case of the equids. Ironically, the end-Pleistocene extinction cost North America its camels, llamas, and horses, and South America also lost its horses.
Canids, including wolves, foxes, and the extinct “bone-crushing dogs”, have roots in North America, while felids, including felines (“little cats”), pantherines (“big cats”) and machairodontines (“saber-toothed cats”) are from Eurasia.
Once you consider that the Bovidae (cattle, bison, sheep and goats, antelope, musk-oxen, etc.) have African and Eurasian roots, and the Cervidae (deer) are Eurasian, while both elephants and ourselves are African, the overall picture starts to become clearer.
In essence, Africa, Eurasia, and North America formed a kind of super-ecosystem, an intercontinental “super-reactor” of species that could arise, compete with other species, and spread across wide areas before either dying off or giving rise to new species.
By way of comparison and contrast, consider South America, which was an island continent with fauna that existed in “splendid isolation”. Dispersals from Africa gave it monkeys, as we have seen, as well as its fascinating native rodents.
Much later, the Great American Interchange saw migrations between South and North America, but over time, the invaders from North America — including camels, horses, tapirs, cats, dogs, and bears — did much better in South America, while holding their own in North America.
We haven’t even touched birds, reptiles, amphibians, and freshwater fish, not to mention everything else. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to make sense of all this complexity: base your fantasy-world landforms on real-world ones, possibly as they were in the past, or build your own patterns of biogeography.
3). Humans and Spin-Offs
Your world will probably have humans, although it doesn’t have to. If it does have humans, why not get creative and add another human species in addition to our own?
Another human species?
Well, yes, why not? As I’ve covered before, human evolution is a rich source of inspiration for fantasy and sci-fi races. You can use human evolution to inform your world-building in any number of different scenarios: alternative history, science fiction, and fantasy.
Tolkien famously popularized the humans-elves-dwarves-and-hobbits (HEDH) complex, and as cliched as it may seem now, it does show some interesting possibilities.
In your world-building, think about what sentient species you will have — only humans (Homo sapiens), or multiple species of humans, or some other combination — and what will set them apart.
4). Society and Technology: Stone Age to Star Age
Your fictional humans or other sentient beings will need social organization, and that means thinking about their technology and subsistence strategies, i.e. how they get their food.
Here’s a fun fact: despite evidence that our species has been around for a good 300,000 years and only started to engage in agriculture about 12,000 years ago, with early civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia arising only about 5,000 years ago, very few fantasy fiction books seem to be concerned with prehistoric hunter-gatherers.
Perhaps this is only to be expected: however fascinating those cultures may be, they lacked the complex social hierarchies and dynastic intrigues of ancient and medieval Eurasian and North African civilizations.
An additional consideration is that for most of us, the majority or all of our ancestors became agricultural far enough back in the distant past that hunter-gatherer cultures are no longer as accessible, even in imagined form, as medieval or pseudo-medieval creations.
Agriculture opened up new possibilities for us: larger populations meant larger population centers, specialized craftsmen, priests, and kings, and in time we had standing armies, aqueducts, roads, and eventually the economic dynamo of the Industrial Revolution.
Of course, agriculture hasn’t all been a bed of roses: early agriculturalists ate nutritionally poorer diets than their hunter-gatherer ancestors, and large, sedentary populations with lots of domestic animals were prone to a great deal of epidemic disease.
Dealing with civilizations also means you’re dealing with human societies that have enough wealth for there to be recognizable class stratification, meaning elite groups of priests, nobility, and warriors presiding over some combination of free people, peasants, and slaves.
Admittedly, this may be a particularly compelling reason to set your story in a complex, stratified society: more potential for conflict on a grand scale, both within and between societies.
Of course, you could also choose an industrial setting, looking at the complex, runaway freight train of economic, political, and social changes that have resulted since the Industrial Revolution. Since the Industrial Revolution literally created the entire phenomenon of modern economic growth, it is a fundamental transformation that continues to define our world today.
I’ve previously characterized the sweep of human development from prehistory to hypothetical future as Stone Age to Star Age, with the period from the 18th century on characterized as “Steam to Stars”.
From the “Steam Age” of the 18th-19th centuries on, technology and economic growth become major factors to engage with in world-building. For better or for worse (or both), the opportunities and challenges these things bring will tend to drive important conflicts in fantasy and science fiction societies.
With that said, a lot of the fun comes from the social and political consequences, by which I mean essentially every revolution from the French Revolution on.
Conclusion: Have Fun With It
Worldbuilding is fundamentally about building a fantastic stage on which to bring your story/stories to life.
As an imaginative exercise, worldbuilding can be perilously seductive, but it’s quite doable to avoid the pitfalls.
If you’re struggling, read up on real-world history, geography, evolution, biogeography, architecture and engineering, whatever you need, until you find something to get excited about.
On the other hand, if you’re finding yourself consumed by your worldbuilding, prune it back a little and try the “worldconjuring” approach: focus on drawing out stories and adjusting your world at need.
Most importantly, have fun and let your imagination soar as you create your world and populate it with characters with interesting stories to tell!
Check out my new author blog below!
Previous post:
