This blog has, unfortunately for the moment, devolved a bit into "Stuff is happening and I'm busy!" Today is no exception to that. In part because I'm finalizing the edits for Murder of Mages so I can turn it in tomorrow.
On top of that, I've got a fair amount of pre-ArmadilloCon work on my plate. Part of that is the administrative side of the Writers' Workshop, part is the actual workshopping work for my group, and part is doing additional research and reading to prepare for some of the panels I'm on.
As part of that research, I've been revisiting Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, two books that have strongly shaped my ideas of worldbuilding. I've also been thinking about the Columbian Exchange, and how that could be applied to worldbuilding. I'll be posting more on that in the near future. And that ties into geography, first and foremost, shaping the worlds we build.
And with geography, there's maps. I've been re-working the maps to appear in Thorn of Dentonhill and Murder of Mages so they are of publishable quality. Which is an excellent way for me to be productive while the back of the brain churns on writing things.
So, back to work in the word mines.
Showing posts with label Guns Germs and Steel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guns Germs and Steel. Show all posts
Monday, July 14, 2014
Monday, December 19, 2011
Interstellar Worldbuilding: You are who your neighbors make you
My space opera stuff is all still in its building and outlining phase, but every once in a while I do a big push of figuring stuff out. And when I do, I always get a sense that the scope STILL isn't big enough. For example, I've roughly defined the area within a 100ly radius of Earth (roughly 4.2 million cubic light years), which includes 4660 stars. Off those, 1568 stars have planets, 361 of those have life of some sort, and 153 of those have intelligent life. And of those 153, 71 have achieved interstellar travel by the year 2373.
(Excel spreadsheets and some extreme dorkiness on my part are responsible for all this information.)
One thing I asked myself is how one can apply the lessons from Guns, Germs and Steel on an interstellar scale. It's a challenging thing to speculate, as how can you tell what resources will really make a difference on an interstellar scale? Do germs really matter at all?
But one thing that became clear as I mapped stuff out was this: who your interstellar neighbors are matters. Because the technology difference between "capable of interstellar travel" and "not capable of interstellar travel" are so extreme, it would make Pizarro's defeat of the Incans seem like a balanced fight. Once interstellar travelers come upon a planetbound species, what they decide to do defines the entire encounter. If they're genocidal conquerors, then the planetbound species will be eliminated. If their imperialists, then the planetbound species are now part of the empire, full stop.
So I decided, for things to make sense to me, Earth's neighbors had to be preservationists. They had to be of the mindset that when you encounter a lower-tech society, you might do a little clandestine research for the sake of science, but you otherwise leave them the hell alone. Perhaps even a step further: they had to have just enough militant in them to draw a line and defend a defenseless species from an invading force.
Using that knowledge helped me define our immediate neighbors, as well as humanity's role on the interstellar scene (which is more or less like a teenager who is smarter than he's wise on his first internship).
Of course, the same logic applies when two interstellar species clash. If you have one species with no respect for alien life who will commit acts of genocide without a moment's hesitation, then the species they come in contact with must devote themselves to defense. They have no other choice.
But it's more than just wars and genocide, of course. You want alien species to work together and cooperate, or at least trade. Because if you don't, how else can you get a cool cantina scene?
(Excel spreadsheets and some extreme dorkiness on my part are responsible for all this information.)
One thing I asked myself is how one can apply the lessons from Guns, Germs and Steel on an interstellar scale. It's a challenging thing to speculate, as how can you tell what resources will really make a difference on an interstellar scale? Do germs really matter at all?
But one thing that became clear as I mapped stuff out was this: who your interstellar neighbors are matters. Because the technology difference between "capable of interstellar travel" and "not capable of interstellar travel" are so extreme, it would make Pizarro's defeat of the Incans seem like a balanced fight. Once interstellar travelers come upon a planetbound species, what they decide to do defines the entire encounter. If they're genocidal conquerors, then the planetbound species will be eliminated. If their imperialists, then the planetbound species are now part of the empire, full stop.
So I decided, for things to make sense to me, Earth's neighbors had to be preservationists. They had to be of the mindset that when you encounter a lower-tech society, you might do a little clandestine research for the sake of science, but you otherwise leave them the hell alone. Perhaps even a step further: they had to have just enough militant in them to draw a line and defend a defenseless species from an invading force.
Using that knowledge helped me define our immediate neighbors, as well as humanity's role on the interstellar scene (which is more or less like a teenager who is smarter than he's wise on his first internship).
Of course, the same logic applies when two interstellar species clash. If you have one species with no respect for alien life who will commit acts of genocide without a moment's hesitation, then the species they come in contact with must devote themselves to defense. They have no other choice.
But it's more than just wars and genocide, of course. You want alien species to work together and cooperate, or at least trade. Because if you don't, how else can you get a cool cantina scene?
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Worldbuilding: Geography is destiny
First up in discussing worldbuilding is a bit of Required Reading. As far as I'm concerned, Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond is essential reading for anyone interested in doing worldbuilding work, be it secondary fantasy worlds or alternate history worlds or even other planets with interstellar worldbuilding.
The central premise in GG&S is this question: if all human societies are, more or less, equally clever, why did European and Asian societies advance faster and thus achieve domination over the globe? What advantage did they have? The only answer possible is those societies had a geographical advantage. They lived in a region where agriculture and animal domestication could thrive, which then allowed them the free to develop other advances, culminating in the Guns, Germs and Steel that would give a culture the ability to dominate over another.
So the first important lesson to derive from GG&S is this: no culture has ever advanced technologically without first moving past the hunter-gatherer stage to agriculture. In order for any member of society (or, more specifically, a significant chunk of that society) to be able to spend their days fiddling with things, they can't be worried about where their next meal is coming from. If your food source isn't stable, your society isn't growing. I won't name names, but there is a rather noted series from a highly regarded genre author in which a the depicted society has advanced supercomputers while still being hunter-gatherers. This is patently ludicrous.
The blessings of geography boil down to having good natural resources that can be domesticated. Diamond posits that over 13,000 years of trial and error, there simply isn't a species of plant or animal that humans didn't TRY to domesticate. (He also notes the key difference between domesticated and tamed. You can have, say, a tamed lion. You can't have a domesticated one.) The plants and animals that are the most important in our society NOW, and have been for centuries, are the ones that have stood the test of time for their usefulness to society.
What does this mean for worldbuilding? For starters, if you have a society that's more technological and socially advanced, then it has to have a solid history of agriculture and animal domestication. Your society should have some Key Crops that forms the backbone of the calories consumed by the people. Think about what they might be. Here and now, there are only a dozen species that make up 80% of the tons of food grown: wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, soybeans, potato, manioc, sweet potato, sugar cane, sugar beets and bananas. Same with animals. There are only fourteen Large Domesticable Mammals: sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, horses, Arabian camels, Bactrian camels, llama/alpaca, donkey, reindeer, water buffalo, yak, Bali cattle and mithan. Something to note: of those animals, all but one were native to Europe & Asia. South America had llamas, while North America, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa had none.
Of course, you can make up different crops and domesticated animals that form the backbone of your society. Especially with secondary worldbuilding, they can be unique crops to your world. But they should share aspects that the successful crops and animals from our world. Your advanced societies will be shaped by the plant and animal resources they had available due to geography. And a less advanced society should specifically LACK those initial geographical resources to give reason why they didn't develop.
The central premise in GG&S is this question: if all human societies are, more or less, equally clever, why did European and Asian societies advance faster and thus achieve domination over the globe? What advantage did they have? The only answer possible is those societies had a geographical advantage. They lived in a region where agriculture and animal domestication could thrive, which then allowed them the free to develop other advances, culminating in the Guns, Germs and Steel that would give a culture the ability to dominate over another.
So the first important lesson to derive from GG&S is this: no culture has ever advanced technologically without first moving past the hunter-gatherer stage to agriculture. In order for any member of society (or, more specifically, a significant chunk of that society) to be able to spend their days fiddling with things, they can't be worried about where their next meal is coming from. If your food source isn't stable, your society isn't growing. I won't name names, but there is a rather noted series from a highly regarded genre author in which a the depicted society has advanced supercomputers while still being hunter-gatherers. This is patently ludicrous.
The blessings of geography boil down to having good natural resources that can be domesticated. Diamond posits that over 13,000 years of trial and error, there simply isn't a species of plant or animal that humans didn't TRY to domesticate. (He also notes the key difference between domesticated and tamed. You can have, say, a tamed lion. You can't have a domesticated one.) The plants and animals that are the most important in our society NOW, and have been for centuries, are the ones that have stood the test of time for their usefulness to society.
What does this mean for worldbuilding? For starters, if you have a society that's more technological and socially advanced, then it has to have a solid history of agriculture and animal domestication. Your society should have some Key Crops that forms the backbone of the calories consumed by the people. Think about what they might be. Here and now, there are only a dozen species that make up 80% of the tons of food grown: wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, soybeans, potato, manioc, sweet potato, sugar cane, sugar beets and bananas. Same with animals. There are only fourteen Large Domesticable Mammals: sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, horses, Arabian camels, Bactrian camels, llama/alpaca, donkey, reindeer, water buffalo, yak, Bali cattle and mithan. Something to note: of those animals, all but one were native to Europe & Asia. South America had llamas, while North America, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa had none.
Of course, you can make up different crops and domesticated animals that form the backbone of your society. Especially with secondary worldbuilding, they can be unique crops to your world. But they should share aspects that the successful crops and animals from our world. Your advanced societies will be shaped by the plant and animal resources they had available due to geography. And a less advanced society should specifically LACK those initial geographical resources to give reason why they didn't develop.
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