  Fantasy
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Imagination is more important than knowledge.
-Albert Einstein
What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.
-Albert Einstein
Everything starts as somebody's daydream.
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Genesis
In my last newsletter, "Fantasy Newsletter (December 24, 2008)" , I encouraged you to create a world this year.
I didn't tell you where to begin, so I thought I'd touch on some ideas here today.
There are basically two methods to world building in fantasy and science fiction. I've heard them called top-down vs. bottom-up, but there are probably other ways to describe it. In "top-down" creation, you know what you're going for: a particular culture, scene, setting, structure, something, and you invent a backstory for it. In "bottom-up" creation, you start with a few basic rules and build the world around that; whatever comes out of it becomes your setting.
I tend to use a mixed approach. I know, generally, what I want to create; I go back and forth. Of course, it's rare that I take the world creation to its logical conclusion, but a mixed approach lets me better envision the world, change things around so they make sense with whatever plotline is in my head.
A world, of course, is a complex thing. We're all familiar with maps at the beginning of books, usually printed so small that you need a magnifying glass to read the things. They make it look like all you have to do is make a squiggly-lined continent, throw in a few inverted Vs for mountains, make more squigglies for rivers, and maybe dot a few cities here and there.
But I suggest saving mapping for later. The first part of worldbuilding is to determine what kind of world your characters will be inhabiting. For fantasy, imagination is the limit. For science fiction, imagination needs to be tempered with physical reality, though that can be fudged if you're careful (for instance, Larry Niven's Ringworld is great on paper; ambitious, yes, and possesses essentially the same structural mechanics as a suspension bridge. But it's ultimately unstable; orbits are more chaotic than they seem).
Most fantasy worlds are, in some ways, copies of Earth. This is not surprising, as we like to have something to relate to as readers. But there's nothing that says this has to be the case. The aforementioned Ringworld (itself a simplification of a Dyson sphere) works in a science fiction setting. In fantasy, you get things like Terry Pratchett's Discworld, a flat land balanced on the back of a turtle.
And what about atmosphere, gravity, moons, sun? How about a world that is a moon, where a gas giant primary hangs perpetually in the sky, as Earth does from the Moon? What if the gravity is twice that of Earth, or half - how would that affect the inhabitants? And there's the oft-portrayed multiple moons or multiple suns, or both - be careful, here; such systems are generally unstable, and tidal forces prevent the oh-so-photogenic "giant moon" art you see in science fiction.
How about a world where the rotation is so fast that you weigh significantly more at the poles than at the equator? Or one that is almost constantly bombarded by space dust, its nighttime sky always sparkling? Or one that has no sun, that generates heat from some other source?
Just make sure you can justify the physical characteristics of your world, by science or magic (as we all know, any sufficiently advanced etc.) - you want the readers to believe in your world, not scoff at it. |
This week, I'm going to focus on science fiction Picks.
Here's an interactive I stumbled across:
And some more conventional items:
From The Mailbox
Joshiahis  writes in with this Fantasy story:
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Until next time,
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Fantasy: January 21, 2009 Issue [#2836]
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