Worldbuilding: The March of Science in the Fantasy World

Today's required reading: The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean.

It's a look at chemistry through the lens of history, The Disappearing Spoon talks about every element on the periodic table, its properties and its history, not to mention the history how the periodic table itself came about.  I found it a fascinating read, and the history of science in general is a subject I feel gets something of a short shrift, both in academia (in study of history or science) and in worldbuilding.

Until this century, science was something someone-- anyone with the time and inclination-- could putter around with.  There were, of course, men (and women) of scholarship working out of universities.  But there was plenty of science being done, more or less, by the bored and wealthy as a hobby.  A lot of discoveries came about through trial and error of people filling up their spare time.  X-rays, for example, were discovered by someone who was just messing around with different stuff to see what would happen.  When said messing around resulted in a picture of his bones, he was convinced he had actually gone insane, and in order to prove to himself that it wasn't real, he kept repeating it over and over, and then showed it to his wife (who fainted dead away).

Most science was done with the time honored tradition of the following steps.

1. Poke something.
2. See what happens.
3. Poke it again and see if it happens again.

Secondary worldbuilding tends to ignore science and the history of science.   I've been guilty of it as well.  History in secondary worldbuildingn tends to be mostly about kings and nations and wars.  But the history of a civilization is more than that.  When looking at your world's history, ask yourself: Who was the Socrates of this world?  Who was the Pythagoras?  The Isaac Newton?  Galileo?  Kepler?  Pastuer?  Curie?

Will this stuff come into play in what you write?  Probably not.  But it's always more interesting when you know it.

Another thing to think about, in a fantasy setting-- is magic studied like it's a science?  Does the advancement or understanding of magic have its own history?  Does your world have, say, a Pythagoras, Newton or Galileo of magic?*

The other good reason to read The Disappearing Spoon?  Little bits of science trivia you just might apply in your worldbuilding.  Here's a free one: copper is a natural disinfectant, killing bacteria.  Water piped through copper pipes won't have bacteria, nor will copper coins or doorknobs.

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*- As an old-school D&D player, I always loved all the "Bigby's ____ Hand" spells for just that reason.  I just imagined this semi-scholarly mage who kept working, tirelessly, to perfect Giant Hand magic. 

Perils of the Science-Fiction Writer: Avoiding Obsolescence

I'll admit I'm not a big short story reader, nor am I as versed in the classics as I ought to be.  That said, I have a certain fondness for Ray Bradbury's All Summer In A Day, and to a lesser extent, The Martian Chronicles.  Both are very human stories that take place on Venus and Mars, respectively.  But they were very much the Venus and Mars of imagination, the Venus and Mars that couldn't be written about after the 1950s.

It's easy to see how, when all that was known about Venus was its cloud cover, a writer might imagine a Venus where the rain almost never stops.  Now we know that isn't even remotely close to the truth.  We know that All Summer In A Day is an impossible story.  It's still a great story, and it holds up in the sense that you can willfully ignore real-Venus in favor of its pulp-Venus setting.  You allow yourself that willful suspension of disbelief because you know the context.*

We live in an exciting time, in terms of astronomical news.  We are constantly hearing news of another planet being discovered in orbit of a distant star.  We've just learned of an Earth-sized planet in orbit of Alpha Centauri B.

But that also makes it a... challenging time to be a sci-fi writer, especially one that does the kind of in-depth worldbuilding that I do.  Any day I expect the news of a discovery to come that invalidates a major element of my work.  And I can only imagine if, say, such news comes in between finishing a work and it being published.  Would that be embarrassing?  Will it be embarrassing in 60 years?  Or will readers shrug and say, "Hey, that was the 2010s.  They hadn't even met the Helari** yet." 

This is probably why some of the better sci-fi gives themselves some breathing room-- putting a few centuries between now and the story.  Therefore the minor or major discoveries in the near future can be handwaved away.  Write too close to the day-after-tomorrow, and the work seems very dated.  I love Snow Crash, for example, and it's still a highly regarded work... but it's set in a 1998 that was a nigh-absurd extrapolation when it was written, let alone in retrospect.

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For some other news: Rayguns Over Texas now has a cover!  I'm absurdly excited for this book, especially since I'm being printed with such good company. 


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*- And, of course, one can write something in a deliberate retro-pulp style, but then you're almost writing fantasy instead of sci-fi. 
**- The Helari, of course, would find it amusingly quaint.

Milestone Entry: 300th Post, and How To Look To the Future

So, amazingly enough, I've made 300 posts here.  Though I think the main thing that demonstrates is dogged perseverance.  If you look at the earliest days of this blog, when I first started I hit the ground running, posting nearly daily.  Then that petered out, and for many months my posting style was... haphazard.  Which is pretty typical.  The internet is positively littered with blogs-- especially writer's blogs-- that start with a fury and burn out just as fast.  But getting past that phase, to push through despite the fact that doing so feels like screaming into a hurricane, that's the challenge.  That's what it takes to get a novel done.

I had been thinking about the future.  Not my future, specifically, but as any sci-fi worldbuilder would, what the future in general is going to look like.  Of course, actually predicting it is nigh-impossible.  But you can at least get a sense of where the technology will take us. 

Twenty years ago, there were a series of commercials from AT&T showing us where the technology was taking us, the things we will be doing in the future.

On one hand, the general accuracy of all this pretty good.  Most of the things presented here are part of our reality today: video conferencing, pervasive telecommunication anywhere in the world, wireless communication, voice controlled systems, automatic tollbooths, electronic books, distance learning.  Most of what's not part of our world today is technologically possible, but the infrastructure or wide-range implementation hasn't been done.

Take, for example, the "Keep and eye on your home, when you're thousands of miles away."  Utterly possible-- my parents have it set up in their house, for example-- but not common.  But how much longer will it really be before Apple releases iHouse? 

On the other hand, what is interesting is how the implementation misses the mark.  "Tuck your baby in from a phone booth."  The concept of long-distance video calls is spot on, but... a phone booth?  They saw where things were going, but didn't imagine the widespread of personal communication devices more or less eliminating public payphones.    Or "pay a toll without slowing down."  Common practice... but nobody swipes their credit card on their own dashboard as they drive by.  "Borrow a book from thousands of miles away."  That one is kind of amusing how clunky it is, but I can see how the this-is-clearly-wrong image we're presented with came about.  They wanted the visuals to signal "book" and "library", so we see her sitting in a cubicle in a library, looking at a screen, that shows the actual book, and pages being turned.  So the book isn't a digital object, so much as there's a camera pointed at a book sitting on a counter on the other side of the world.  "Answer a phone call.... on your wrist." Wrist phones?  I'm sure it's possible, but not something people have really demanded.    But it's spot on in terms of the concept of what we've achieved-- that you can get a call out in the middle of natural nowhere.  Just last year I got message from my agent that he needed a synopsis of one project, and I found the file, polished it and sent it to him... all while out by the Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park. 

The future is a pretty awesome place to live.

Time to keep driving into it.

Future Worldbuilding: Geopolitics in the Interstellar (Part Two))

Last time, I talked about working out every culture's homeworld, how advanced they are, and when they achieved FTL tech.  So, knowing that, the rest is simple, right?  Whoever has the most advanced tech, who gets there first, they're the most powerful, right?

Not necessarily.

First of all, there's a matter of location.  Where species are in terms of not only each other, but other worlds, and what those resources mean.  A species that hits the stars and finds they have thirty-some odd other stars within 10 light-years, and most of those have vibrant solar systems chock full of potential resources-- they're going to have a different interstellar experience than a species whose closest star is 15 light-years away. 

Even with that, I make deliberate decisions, since I'm the worldbuilder here, for example, if a species takes an aggressive or isolationist stance in exploration.  If they focus on staying close to home, or perhaps try and spread themselves thinner than they should.

For example-- I've set up my FTL rules so increases in velocity jump in increments.  Ships form a field around themselves, and the level of that field determines their velocity.  An Alpha Field is the slowest FTL field, then Beta Field, Gamma and so on.*  This gave me an easy way to benchmark future tech-- I can measure general advancement of cultures compared to each other without having to get too specific about what that means, techwise.  A culture that can form a Zeta field is more advanced in general than a culture that one can only form a Delta field.  I don't need to figure out the specifics of hull composition or missile yields for every different culture.  So, every culture is rated by their maximum speed.  And with that, I can estimate a reasonable radius a species can maintain control over.  That Zeta culture can spread out, say, 30 light-years from home, while the Delta really can only manage 16.  But at the same time, a culture's nature might be to push themselves.  They might have to push themselves to reach resources they need.

So, that process of building every culture out from their homeworlds, figuring out what they build and where, who they bump into, what they decide to do when they bump into each other-- that's the real gearwork of the worldbuild here.  It's not sexy, and it's not stuff that really appears in the text.  Iceberg rules apply in spades here.

Then comes the next big step: figuring out who the Big Dogs are.  Of course, the Big Dogs are the ones I chose-- especially the ones that are big dogs because they joined up to form larger empires.  I've got eight First Tier* level powers, and four of those are joint-species collectives of some sort or another.  And also, that isn't just about tech level, but about dominion and influence. The Colmerohn are more advanced than the Zutheka-- but the Colmerohn are slow and deliberate, and would rather withdraw than engage in conflict, while the Zutheka are hyper-aggressive conquerors.  So the Colmerohn are a Third Tier power, and the Zutheka are First Tier.

The next step: figuring out the "borders".

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*- I've worked out the math, but you knew I did.  An Alpha field will make the trip to Alpha Centauri in 2.95 years.  With a Delta field, it takes 40 days.  An Epsilon field cuts that down to under two weeks.  If you managed to form a Xi field**, that trip is slightly over a minute.
**- No one has a Xi-field level of tech.
***- There are also three Zeroth-level, i.e. very high tech isolationists.  

Worldbuilding: Space Opera and the Future of Food

 I take the food aspect of worldbuilding pretty seriously, as you can tell.   This is just as true in Sci-fi and Space Opera as it is in Fantasy. 

On some level, I've often been disappointed by a lot of the SF I've read and watched along these lines.  Not that I necessarily want some sort of long infodump of alien farming, but food sourcing gets elided quite often.

Take, for example, the Replicators on Star Trek.  I kind of hate them.  They're a cheap answer to a major element of civilized culture.  On TNG, it even gives them the "high ground" to look down their nose at another species that still, you know, eats actual meat.  Because in their enlightened future, they don't need to deal with any messy reality of food production.  How do we feed ourselves?  We talk to a hole in the wall, and it appears like magic.

But taking magic tech out of the equation, the practical realities of how people produce, store and prepare food-- especially on long, deep space flights-- should be a worldbuilding element the writer is aware of, even if they never talk about it much. 

A fantastic resource Space Opera writers should check out is Mary Roach's Packing for Mars.  In it, Roach digs into every little practical "but what about this?" question that NASA was thought of (and they really thought about all of them), and solutions they've come up with, as well as the ones they still struggle with.  Food supplies for a manned mission to Mars is a major concern.*  The whole book is worth the time.

Alien foods are another thing to consider, specifically in terms of humans eating alien foods.  Now, biochemistry is not even remotely a strong suit of mine, but I'm given to understand that it's highly unlikely we'd be able to digest alien biomatter, let alone extract useful nutrients out of it.  Presuming no negative reactions**, it would just pass through our systems untouched.

However-- they still may be interesting to eat. Spices, for example.  We don't really get useful nutrients out of pepper or cinnamon or cumin, but they all make food more interesting. Alien spices can create unique culinary opportunities.   And that's also where xenobiodiversity can come into play, especially in terms of interspecies trade.  In the future you build, the trade of raw materials will, of course, be crucial, but there's nothing unique to, say the gold or molybdenum*** found on Earth compared to the gold or molydbenum on Starkasia or Paxica or wherever else people go in the galaxy.  But paprika?  Now that's something you can't get anywhere else.  That could be worth quite a lot out there.

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*- As is the human waste element, which Roach gets into as well.  There were NASA scientists who suggested the possibility of having the problems solve each other: the waste material could be purified and used as a raw protein base to be repurposed as a food supply.  Scientifically possible.  But astronauts in the discussion shot this down: "We're not eat shitburgers on the ride home."
**- Which, I would imagine, would be more likely to be allergic reactions rather than toxic ones. 
***- Or whatever matters.  "Molybdenum" is just a fun name.

Future Worldbuilding: How I Love Spreadsheets and Map Tools

All right, so I've talked about mapping things out and alien civilizations, but when dealing with things on an interstellar scale, when you're talking about 4660 stars within a 100 light-year radius of Earth, with 153 alien homeworlds, not to mention colonies, outposts, stations and other holdings, one has to have a way to keep all that straight.

It helps that, when you come down to it, I'm a BIG spreadsheet geek.

About a decade or so ago, I had an office job in which my duties could be boiled down to, "Make Excel do my bidding."  I'm not saying I'm an expert at Excel, but I've figured out a lot of tricks, without which I would never have been able to construct this universe, this interstellar community, to the degree that I have.

One of my biggest struggles is trying to visualize all that data, get a real sense of who is neighbor to who, where borders are.  I'm still a big fan of ChView, which is an old program but has the advantage of being (relatively) easy to import Excel data into stellar maps.  But even with that, it's still challenging to really feel who is close to who.  I've developed some tricks-- being able to define any homeworld as a central star, and then getting the distance from that star to every other star, and then figure out who is close to that.

Also, I like having data at my fingertips that I can use to generate cultural ideas.  Since I used a certain degree of randomization to determine which worlds had life, which life was intelligent, and which civilizations had reached the stars, to then look through that information and say to myself: OK, these three civilizations are all within a (interstellar) stone's throw of each other, so what does that mean?  Are they allies, or enemies?  Or, these two are close to each other, but also relatively close to this more advanced, aggressive species.  So are they united against the common enemy?

I'm curious, does anyone out there have more interesting star-map making tools?  I do like ChView, but it has flaws, for certain-- it's an old program that hasn't been updated in many years.  But is there anything better?  Most of the other things I've seen are weaker in design, or are not capable of importing data in an easy way; I'd have to start from scratch.    Any recommendations?

Future Worldbuilding: Geography of the Interstellar

I'm sure my credentials as something of a map geek when it comes to worldbuilding are well established.  I don't know one can seriously do worldbuilding without a sense of where things are, and who one's neighbors are.   In making a world map, one has to have a decent sense of geography and earth science to have the whole thing be sensible.  Expanding this to an interstellar map, the base science understanding one needs to give it verisimilitude also expands.  I, personally, hit a wall at a certain point with higher-math stuff, but I at least try and match star types and Goldilocks-zones and attempt to get the physics of multiple-star systems something approaching correct. 

Of course, how one works their travel from star-system to star-system affects how you do your maps.  For future-worlds that use hyperspace travel, like Babylon 5 or David Weber's Honorverse or Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series, the actual space between stars is kind of irrelevant.  Every star is a key point, and the linking paths matter-- but the result can look more like a subway map instead of islands in an ocean.  That's not bad-- it fits the needs of the world and the story.

What needs to work is a proper sense of scale, which sometimes gets thrown out the window if worldbuilding is done in an on-the-fly manner, as much of the Star Trek verse was.  For all the talk of vast, interstellar distance done on that show, there was still a very real sense that everywhere in the known galaxy was just a hop-skip-and-jump away.  The linked map doesn't show-- possibly because it's nigh-impossible with the limitations of a 2-D map-- what was implied in the series: that Klingon, Romulan and Cardassian space all border each other, as well as Federation space. 

Not that after-the-fact mapbuilding can't yield some interesting results.  Both Firefly and Battlestar Galactica implied that their future-civilizations were in singular star systems, but with multiple planets in each one (twelve in BSG, who knows how many in Firefly).  Someone in the creative department (not necessarily in the shows themselves, but in designing the "official" material for dedicated fans) came up with clever ideas, casting both verses as multi-star systems-- and making some very nice looking maps in the process.

Now, for me, I'm dealing with near-Earth stuff (something most of those other ones didn't deal with much, frankly-- BSG and Firefly dodged the idea completely).  I'm not going to create a map of an interstellar verse that spreads 100 light-years from Earth and not pretend we don't know what stars are in that sphere, and where they are in relation to each other.

Of course, what is happening at each those stars is another matter: dead planets, living planets, planets with civilizations, planets that are home to interstellar civilizations?  The answers to these questions matter, and need to be taken seriously.

But more on that next time.

Future Worldbuilding: Unfolding the Future

One thing I've noticed in most "future timelines"-- be it for books or television or movies-- the worldbuilding tends to gloss over the "near" future.  This, of course, makes perfect sense.  If you're imagining the 24th or 25th or 48th century, what happened in the late 21st century isn't necessarily all that important... unless it's a big deal.  And you don't really want to put a "big deal" too close to the present, else your world is going to be outdated before too long.

Broad brushstrokes is another matter, and can even be pretty crucial.  The Star Trek Universe doesn't have a lot of details about the 21st Century*; beyond the Bell Riots**, a manned Mars mission and Zephram Cochrane/Warp Speed/First Contact, we really don't know much of anything.  Babylon 5 was even vaguer.  Firefly was vague, but in the sense that the past was nearly myth: "Earth-that-was" and such.*** 

But as a writer and a worldbuilder, I'm big on knowing, even if it doesn't ever inform the text.  Just as the names Chuck Yeager, Neil Armstrong or Sally Ride mean something, especially to those in their fields, other milestones would be similarly remembered.  Who was the first person on Mars, and what did they say?  The captain and crew of the first ship to go at hyper-light speeds?  The first human to make alien contact, the first to step on a planet in another solar system?  The names and history matter.

The short-lived, interesting failure**** Defying Gravity did get this sort of thing right.  The series, set in the 2050s, had already landed on Mars-- a mission that was at least a partial disaster.  Not to mention the fact that the first words on Mars were kind of lame. ("Red Planet, Conquered.")  So when the show, in its penultimate episode, had one of its characters as the first person to walk on Venus, it was an event in the world of the show.  What she said when she stepped off the lander mattered.  History was being made.

And that's what it's all about.  Making history, just forward.

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*- Though having the show in the '60s predict the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s was kind of amusing, especially since when the Voyager crew traveled to 1996-- the present when it aired-- there were fans complaining that the Eugenics Wars weren't happening on the show. 
**- Which, frankly, seem scarily possible right now.
***- Though I read a theory that Firefly could be a potential future of the Dollhouse-verse.  Which I can see.
****- I did like the attempt to import the style of a Grey's Anatomy workplace-drama onto a science-fiction setting.  It worked for me in making the SF aspects of living in the 2050s just part of normal life.  But I think the result was a show that really only appealed to the narrow overlap who liked both kinds of shows, instead of either.

Further Smaller Steps For Man

Yesterday was a pretty amazing day, one that gives me a lot of hope for the future of the human race.  For one, Curiosity landed on Mars, and even though there wasn't a lot to see, it did make for some exciting spectacle. Watching the video feed from NASA's JPL was full of intensity, as they would applaud every minor success.  But that's not the only thing: Oscar Pistorius ran in the Olympic semi-finals in the Men's 400m. He may not have won, but he ran.

Just let that really sink into your brain: In 24 hours*, we landed a robot science lab on Mars AND a man with no legs ran in the Olympics.

That's pretty damn amazing, what we-- the collective we of humanity-- can achieve.

Of course, being a writer-- especially a SF/F one-- this puts me in the mind of Future Worldbuilding.  What can we achieve, what can't we achieve, and where are we going to go?  When I've been crafting a Space Opera Setting, one of my goals was to maintain a certain degree of plausibility.**  

So, for the rest of August, it will be Future Worldbuilding Month, with a specific focus on Space Opera.   I'll talk some about my own ideas, compare some to my strong points of inspiration.***

So let's look to the future.

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*- I'm pretty sure they were within the same 24 hour period, but it could have been a few hours more apart than that.  But close enough.   
**- In as much as a setting with aliens and FTL travel can be plausible.
***- Including what are, in my mind, the five defining series of Televised Space Opera: Star Trek, Babylon 5, Farscape, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica.  We'll get into all of those.

Worldbuilding: Crawling Towards Advancement

Today's required reading: The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. 

A look at chemistry through the lens of history, The Disappearing Spoon talks about every element on the periodic table, its properties and its history, not to mention the history how the periodic table itself came about.  I found it a fascinating read, and the history of science in general is a subject I feel gets something of a short shrift, both in academia (in study of history or science) and in worldbuilding.

Until this century, science was something someone could putter around with.  There were, of course, men (and women) of scholarship working out of universities.  But there was plenty of science being done, more or less, by the bored and wealthy as a hobby.  A lot of discoveries came about through trial and error of people filling up their spare time.  X-rays, for example, were discovered by someone who was just messing around with different stuff to see what would happen.  When said messing around resulted in a picture of his bones, he was convinced he had actually gone insane, and in order to prove to himself that it wasn't real, he kept repeating it over and over, and then showed it to his wife (who fainted dead away). 

Most science was done with the time honored tradition of the following steps.

1. Poke something.
2. See what happens.
3. Poke it again and see if it happens again.

Secondary worldbuilding tends to ignore science and the history of science.   I've been guilty of it as well.  History in secondary worldbuildingn tends to be mostly about kings and nations and wars.  But the history of a civilization is more than that.  When looking at your world's history, ask yourself: Who was the Socrates of this world?  Who was the Pythagoras?  The Isaac Newton?  Galileo?  Kepler?  Pastuer?  Curie? 

Will this stuff come into play in what you write?  Probably not.  But it's always more interesting when you know it.

The other good reason to read The Disappearing Spoon?  Little bits of science trivia you just might apply in your worldbuilding.  Here's a free one: copper is a natural disinfectant, killing bacteria.  Water piped through copper pipes won't have bacteria, nor will copper coins or doorknobs.