True, but how much research you do as you build your world will depend on how closely related you want it to be to various real-world touchstones.
You research will inform every step along the world-building process. Every chapter that follows in this book assumes you’re doing relevant research along the way. In addition to getting your historical facts straight if you’re writing the next Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, research into the details of your world will help you balance plausibility and realism.
Studying historical events, languages, and customs can make you and your novel a lot smarter, but this is fantasy after all, historical or otherwise, so what readers want most from you is a glimpse into the deeper recesses of your imagination.
If you’re writing a fantasized version of pre–Columbian Mexico, for instance, knowing the history of those cultures and their fascinating religious practices will ground it, but if there isn’t some creativity, some special spark that makes it your own, why not just write a well-researched piece of historical fiction? Once you make one of these Aztec guys a wizard or awaken the feathered dragon of Xitchitxtchitl, it stops being historical fiction and becomes fantasy. Don’t spare the imagination, even if you’re grounding your world in the here and now or then and there, as opposed to a world of your own creation.
PLAUSIBILITY VERSUS REALISM
Realism is an important factor in historical and contemporary fantasy, alternate history, or near-future science fiction. If your contemporary wizard, like Harry Dresden, lives in Chicago, you need to go to Chicago. Breathe the air. Listen to how people talk. Make sure you know that they take the L to work, not the subway; that they drive on expressways, not freeways. Be sure to mention the pizza, too. It is an undisputed fact that pizza was perfected in Chicago. As were hot dogs.
In historical fantasy, you need to know when things like the electric light or the crossbow were invented and make sure that if someone in 1492 has a flashlight, it’s part of the fantasy, not just a boneheaded mistake.
In created or fantasized worlds, all you need is plausibility, but that’s no small thing. You have to clearly define a new set of rules germane to your world and stick to them. Fantasy and science fiction readers not only are willing to suspend their disbelief—they read those genres very specifically in order to do that—but also are hoping to experience a place where the impossible is possible. They want to inhabit, while they’re reading your novel, a world rich in magic or the space-faring empires of the distant future.
Have fun creating your world, but take it as seriously as does international bestselling science fiction and fantasy author Kevin J. Anderson. “Doing the research and world building is the first step in developing the plot and characters,” he says. “As I create the society, the history, the political structure, the geography … all those things lead to ideas for the story. I might develop part of a religion, which makes me think of a character, who becomes an integral part of a story.” Again, be prepared to skip back and forth between steps.
CHAPTER 16
KNOW YOUR GEOGRAPHY
“Good stories, well told, are what matters,” cautions Pyr editor Lou Anders. “Whether you obsessively build maps, or disdain them as Joe Abercrombie and M. John Harrison do, what you do in them is what counts.”
But then, according to Kevin J. Anderson, his Terra Incognita books “are heavily driven by geography; the major conflicts flow from the locations of countries, of trade routes, of mines, deserts, ocean passages—I draw maps in detail and refer to them as I choreograph the plotlines.”
MAPS ARE YOUR FRIENDS
Sketching out a rough map can help you remain logically consistent within your own world, with travel times that make sense and don’t change, and with star systems or cities and other landmarks all in their proper place in relation to each other. You only have to tell your readers that the castle is eight miles north of town once for that to be fixed forever in space. Write that down on a map or in a note, remember where you wrote it down, refer back to it, and keep yourself and your world honest.
The balance of reality and fantasy, realism and plausibility, in your geography is entirely up to you. If you want the whole thing to be utterly bizarre, like a world that’s really one giant tree, or a world inside a planet-sized whale swimming in an endless ocean, or something strange yet grounded in the fringes of science, like the exotic landscapes of Larry Niven’s The Smoke Ring or Ringworld, go right ahead. If you’d rather take a more conservative approach and create a continent for your fantasy world that’s not unlike Europe, then do that. A bizarre world doesn’t automatically make you more creative, or a better writer. Truly strange worlds can overwhelm even a very strong story. Unless you intend for the world itself to be a metaphor for something germane to the story, like Ringworld, keep it simple.
RESEARCH YOUR MAPS
Some knowledge of the basics of geography can help you make your maps more plausible, and it can provide new ideas. Do you know where and why deserts form? Which direction rivers flow? Do you know why a certain part of a continent might be sunny and warm year round while another might have long, cruel winters?
If you spend some time learning how mountain ranges form and why they tend to cluster in certain patterns, if you understand where rivers begin and how they flow, if you know a little something about weather and the effects of geographical features on it, your map—your whole world—will look right, even if the overwhelming majority of readers would never be able to articulate what you did right and what you did wrong. If you skimp on the research, your readers will feel like something is off.
Look at political boundaries with the same critical eye. As you scan a reasonably detailed political map of the world, you’ll find that there are very few straight lines. Political boundaries pretty much exclusively followed natural features like rivers and mountain ranges until very recently, at least in historical terms. One of the weird things about the United States of America is how many straight-line political boundaries we have, like the state of Colorado, which is actually rectangular. America is a young country, divided up by modern surveying techniques, and we were fairly civilized about parceling out land so that North and South Dakota didn’t have to fight a war over where their state lines were drawn.
Skip to Chapter 25, which discusses available technology, and decide if your world has this sort of luxury. If not, the border between the Kingdom of Jarmon and the Ghringley Protectorate probably runs along something either side can defend, like a river or a mountain range.
CHAPTER 17
FILL YOUR WORLD WITH MONSTERS
You could probably find a science fiction novel, even a fantasy novel, that doesn’t have any monsters in it, at least monsters in the traditional sense. Monsters aren’t an essential component to every science fiction and fantasy story. But they are fun, and are as much a mainstay of both genres as anything else. The flying monkeys of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the beholders and mind flayers of Dungeons & Dragons, the beast that crawls through the darkness in Robert E. Howard’s “Red Nails,” Dune’s mighty sandworms, the throw rug gone bad in the Star Trek episode “Devil in the Dark” … these are as much a part of our experience of the genres as wizards and starships.
WHAT’S A MONSTER?
It’ll help if we settle on a definition. Charles Manson has been described as a monster, for instance, but is he? He’s not a very nice guy and was responsible for horrifying acts of violence, but for our purposes, he’s a villain, not a monster. He’s not possessed of supernatural powers (regardless of what he may think), and despite being a violent sociopath he is as human as you and I.
A monster is any creature of a species that is neither a part of the civilization of sentient people or among the ranks of mundane flora and fauna.
I think we can generally settle on who is part of a civilization of sentient people. This means that if your world has a human kingdom, a gnome enclave, an empire of elves, and a city of zylvaani, and all these different t
ypes of humanoids (assuming zylvaani are humanoid) think of each other as a society of equals or sentient enemies, then gnomes, elves, and zylvaani aren’t monsters.
We can easily define what “mundane flora and fauna” is, but you’ll have to decide if all the mundane plants and animals of the real world also exist in your created fantasy world. Do people in that world ride horses, or giant beetles called ridgebacks because of the ridges on their backs? If these ridgebacks fill the same role as horses, they aren’t monsters either, actually, since to people inside that world, who see them every day, a ridgeback is no more “monstrous” than a horse would be to us.
It’s Different
An easier definition: A monster is any animal you’ve never seen before.
If you’d never been to a zoo or circus to see a lion in real life, never saw a picture of a lion, had never heard of such a thing, then were suddenly confronted by an enormous raging cat with massive claws and daggerlike fangs, you’d probably tell your friends about your encounter with, and narrow escape from, a monster: a giant cat-thing that looked at you as though you were a Happy Meal.
The human species has enjoyed a privilege that no other animal on the planet has ever attained, even the now-extinct Tyrannosaurus Rex: We are the apex predator in every environment on Earth. Some people are still killed by animals, sure, but it’s a statistically irrelevant occurrence. In the so-called “Summer of the Shark,” in 2001, five people worldwide were killed by sharks. That year at least fifty million sharks were killed by humans (some say as much as double that number). Encountering a lion out alone in the open savannah of central Africa would have to be a scary experience, but for the overwhelming majority of us, lions are curiosities we keep in zoos for the entertainment of our children. For all their inherent ferocity, sharks and lions are not monsters.
It’s Scary
Here’s a more specific definition of a monster: A monster is something that tips the predator-prey scales on us, and is at least a potentially superior predator.
In the case of living things that scare us—monsters—the idea of being hunted and eaten, of being treated like prey, works at a very primal part of our shared experience. We’ve created a world in which we can go on about our daily lives without worrying that we’re being stalked by leopards. Wolves and some species of bears came perilously close to extinction at our hands, and the bestselling novel and blockbuster movie Jaws caused such a frightening spree of sport fishing for sharks, especially the great white, that author Peter Benchley campaigned to get people to stop killing them before there were none left. He showed us a “monster” living off our beaches and we responded like any predator whose territory is threatened: We went after it with all the weapons our evolution has provided us—fishing hooks, rifles, dynamite, and God knows what else.
THINK THROUGH YOUR MONSTERS
The question of whether or not to include monsters in your world and story is entirely your call, but if you do, approach the creation of new monsters and/or the inclusion of traditional, archetypal monsters (like dragons and unicorns) with as much care as you expend in placing mountain ranges on your map.
“First,” according to Mike Resnick, monsters and aliens “have to fulfill the needs of the story. Second, I try to create monsters or aliens that are not quite what the reader is expecting. Mainly, I try to keep them from ever being considered generic.”
If you do decide to use those mythological/fantasy archetype creatures like dragons and unicorns, make sure they are clearly your dragons and unicorns.
Anne McCaffrey created a rich culture of dragons for her Pern novels, which in part inspired the chromatic and metallic dragons of Dungeons & Dragons. Smaug the dragon from Tolkien’s The Hobbit breathed fire and was red, and the red dragon of D&D is a nod to that seminal text, but the poison-gas-belching green dragon or the acid-spitting black dragon of D&D veers sharply away from Tolkien.
Restrictions to the type, size, shape, and capabilities of dragons in your fantasy world are limited only by your imagination. Fantasy readers like the archetypal tropes of the genre and expect to see them—they’re what define fantasy as a genre, after all—but they’re also very sensitive to what’s been done before. Coughing up the same tired Smaug clone isn’t going to set you apart. It will not help you find your voice, your world, or your own readership. Keeping in mind Mike Resnick’s advice that your monsters must “fulfill the needs of the story,” don’t create a world full of monsters before you know at least in general terms what you want them to do in order to move the story forward.
The Monster as Metaphor
Monsters can serve as metaphors, like that funny rug-monster called the Horta in Star Trek’s “Devil in the Dark.” In the beginning of the episode, harried miners call in Captain Kirk to save them from some kind of mindless, vicious monster that’s been killing their comrades in the deep tunnels of a remote mining outpost. In the end it’s revealed that the Horta is really a sentient being that’s protecting a clutch of eggs from the careless miners. The monster serves as an allegory, a warning against the evils of poor resource and habitat management. If it was only an acid-spewing throw rug, we wouldn’t still be talking about that episode more than forty years later. In that case, at least, the monster was the story.
Support the Main Character
Monsters don’t need to be the primary focus of the story; but can fill supporting roles. The flying monkeys in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz were just particularly scary minions of the Wicked Witch. They captured Dorothy, and Toto too, but the story didn’t hinge on their existence. One of the things that made the flying monkeys work is that even though the Wicked Witch had more mundane human guards whom she sent after Dorothy, the monkeys made the capture of Dorothy scarier, more dramatic.
Fantasy or science fiction writing often comes down to the act of replacing things: police or soldiers become squadrons of flying monkeys, the Horta takes the place of endangered animals displaced by “progress,” and so on.
WHAT CREATURES ARE IN YOUR WORLD?
Do any or all of the animals we know from our own world also exist in your created world? Even if you’re writing historical fantasy, it pays to answer this question. In this kind of fantasy, the answer’s probably “yes,” but what if you decided to write a historical fantasy set in Ancient Rome? Further suppose that the fantasy element—what makes it historical fantasy, and not just historical fiction—is that all of the animals we know today never evolved, but instead the Romans live alongside dinosaurs, or if not dinosaurs then a biosphere dominated by dragons. The setting makes it historical, and the dragons or dinosaurs make it fantasy. James Gurney did much the same in his popular Dinotopia series.
Flora and Fauna
The question of what defines mundane flora and fauna comes down to a choice between three solutions:
1. This is a world in which all of the animals we know from the real world exist (though we’ll only see the ones appropriate for the part of the world in which our story is set, so polar bears and leopards aren’t mixed together). There are no monsters: no created animals at all.
2. This is a world in which some or all of the animals we know from the real world exist side by side with monsters and various created flora and fauna. Such is the case with the overwhelming majority of fantasy novels. For instance, there are both horses and monsters in Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Moorcock’s Young Kingdoms. If you decide to go this way, think through the reason why everyone knows what a horse is but people are surprised by the giant man-eating zix. Consider questions like these:
Where does the zix come from?
Is it just an animal that evolved on this world alongside the horse, or has it come to this world through a portal from the Dimension of Horrors?
If the zix is the size of Godzilla, evolved as part of the ecosystem of your world, and has a taste for flesh, why hasn’t it eaten everything in the world by now?
Keep in mind that the animal kingdom resembles a pyramid, with a small nu
mber of large predators on the top and an increasingly large number of diminishingly small prey at the bottom. If every animal on an alien planet is a monstrous carnivore, chances are they all ate each other before your astronauts got there.
3. This is a world in which none of the animals we know from the real world exist, and absolutely everything has been replaced by created animals and monsters. These creatures often but not always fill the same niches that real animals fill, like mounts, draft animals, scary predators, and so on. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom (Mars) is a world filled with exotic created beasts, with no Earth animals at all.
This can be fun but a big commitment. If you opt to go this way, make the animal that fills in for the horse not just a giant beetle, but a giant beetle that does something a horse can’t do, like walk up walls (since bugs can do that) or fly (like some species of beetles can do). Be prepared to keep extensive notes and refer to them often. If the beetle flies in one scene, it can still fly later on when you want them to be trapped on the mountaintop, so you’ll need to address that somehow.
Science fiction authors don’t really have to wrestle with this question. It’s safe to assume that any alien planet surely will not have Earth animals on it, unless someone has taken specific action to bring them there. But science fiction readers will demand that some careful thought be put into the flora and fauna of an alien planet. Consider the conditions there. If the planet orbits a cool red dwarf star, for instance, chances are it’s pretty cold on that planet. Animals will be adapted accordingly—they’ll have fur or blubber to keep them warm, maybe wide feet to help them walk on snow, and so on. Make sure you set some rules for the alien animals’ ecosystem, and be consistent with your application of those rules, while at the same time walking that fence between showing your readers what they need to see to keep the story moving forward, and trying to impress them with your extensive background notes.
The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Page 7