World Building Within Science Fiction

What Is World-Building?

Simply put, building your own world within Science Fiction means having a chance to create a world that your story and characters can exist in, which preferably also links to the themes and subtext of your work. You get to choose the technology that exists. Whether there’s aliens, robots, cyborgs, whatever. You can set it in the distant future or a nearby dystopia. You get to decide the rules of space travel, design ships, make up whole planets for people to live on. World building is only limited by your imagination.

Although, that last part isn’t strictly true as there are several approaches you can take, the simplest two being: all bets are off, create the most fantastical bizarre world you want that has everything you need to tell the story you want to tell. Or, apply some harder science to your world and make sure everything works as it should.

You can have a space ship that just is what it is, or you can try and explain how the space ship works and where the materials come from. In Star Wars everything is ready built and just works, whereas more hard sci-fi themed movies and books would try to explain what powers the ships, how the gravity works within the vessel, and how the ship slows itself down after such great speeds rather than coming to a sudden comfortable halt.

The same goes for everything on your planet. You get to decide the way robots work. The way buildings work. The types of Transportation. Again you can just go with it, or have a reasonably serious or completely working explanation. Both are extremely fun approaches, although one requires a lot more research than the other.

What Approach Do I Prefer?

Honestly, i’m more within the former. I like the speculative side of science fiction rather than the hard sci-fi stuff when it comes to my writing. I wouldn’t know how to begin to describe the mechanics of things found in an Arthur C. Clarke novels, or how the ship behaves in Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero. Stephen Baxter’s The Raft has a lot of elements of fantasy within it, but it’s all described from an engineering perspective. That is above my pay grade.

With Unclaimed Outpost I tried to keep things relatively within the structure of real world technology, a sort of soft to medium sci-fi I guess, but if someone told me all the science in my book was wrong I wouldn’t argue with them. I tried my best, but I was more interested in creating the world I wanted to create for my character and story to exist in than worrying about every scientific detail.

Some authors pride themselves on the science, and that’s fantastic. That is their thing and there are some out there who absolutely excel at it. But I’ll always put character and story first. The science is a setting, not the driving force. In my yet unreleased Taten Chronicles books i’ve created a whole space opera world and while I did look plenty of things up, if the science didn’t work, I blagged it. Thanks God we invented the … type deal, because at the end of the day, I want my world building to be fun and exciting, not a lesson in engineering or physics. I’ll save that for the people who enjoy it.

So What Can You Do Within These Worlds?

The short answer… anything. I absolutely loved coming up with new foods and clothes in Taten Chronicles. New sports. Cultures and Off-World bases. You can design ships and weapons and develop whole political system for everyone occupying the ‘system’. And that’s just space opera stuff. On Earth you can shape the planet however you want it. Create a dystopian or Utopian future. Make predictions for how things will be twenty or fifty years from now.

You can add or remove an element and build a whole world around that. Say electricity stop working tomorrow and never came back, what kind of world would you shape from that? Could we adapt? Or would it bring about years of chaos. Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow is a great example.

I really enjoy creating societies within World Building. Maybe it’s my love of Star Trek growing up, but playing God is fun. Deciding how they behave and why? It will always be built around the story and theme of what I want to say, but there’s so many little details to enjoy while creating these worlds. World Building could be a full time job.

I’m currently writing notes for a book at the moment that sets about a hundred years in the future with one massive change in technology and that’s a really fun way to world build too. To work out how everything will change. How society will evolve. What will disappear and what will grow. What would space travel look like then, if we’ve bothered with it. If we haven’t continued, why? What happened? Money? Lost of Interest? Materials?

Every element of world building can branch of in to so many different directions and often you’ll find these directions add so much depth and wealth to your story, or even just a greater understanding of what you’re trying to say overall.

Endless Possibilities

These endless possibilities is what makes world-building so vitally important to your story, but also why it can be a fun time sink. You have to chose what’s important to tell the reader, and what’s just something you know within the context of the world you’ve created. If all sunglasses have orange lenses in the future is that something that’s significant within the story what everyone needs to know about, or some quirky detail that you’ve decided and has no baring on anything so doesn’t need to be said. (although most likely you will slip It harmlessly in there somewhere)

There is a discipline to it as well. Like I said, the possibilities are endless, but you’re creating a book or film or piece of art at the end of the day, not an actual world. Playing God is fun, but you need an end product unless creating this world becomes your hobby (there are worse ways to spend your time) So at some point you need to recognise that enough of the world has been created for you to tell the story you want to tell, or its easy to get lost in every minor detail that no-one else will ever know.

A Big Part Of Why I Write Sci-fi

World building is a massive part of why I enjoy writing science fiction. I love creating the confines in which my story is set. The rules of which my characters live by. I’m sure at some point in the future i’ll write something more contemporary that has to work within the modern world and science, but at the moment i’m having to much fun making shit up.

Alongside my love of writing it, I also like reading about these different worlds. Seeing what others have created. How they’ve gone about certain problems. World building is a great tool within writing, and one I hope gets forever continually used.