The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction

by Philip Athans

  CHAPTER 18

  FILL YOUR WORLD WITH PEOPLE

  In the previous chapter, I talked about a world in which humans, elves, gnomes, and zylvaani regarded one another as normal. That means we’ll have to broaden our definition of the word people, which is generally used interchangeably with human. In a world that also includes societies of gnomes, elves, and zylvaani, it’s entirely appropriate to specify that someone is a human, and that “elves are people too.”

  In more than one fantasy source, elves and humans are referred to as races. I think that’s a bit of a misnomer, which makes it difficult to distinguish between humans of different races. I’m a human, and so are Oprah Winfrey, George Takei, and Fareed Zakaria, but we look a little different from each other, and we’ve called those differences race. It will be impossible to ignore racial distinctions if you’re writing contemporary or near-future science fiction, or historical or contemporary fantasies, but you’re entirely in control of the racial mix of the humans in your created world. And those distinctions do not have to be limited to humans. Thanks to the Star Trek Voyager character Tuvok, we know that Vulcans in the Star Trek universe come in at least two of the colors that humans come in. In our world, race has been a matter of conflict ranging from subtle, personal bigotry to outright genocide. It will be up to you to decide how different races of humans, different races of elves, and so on interact with each other. This can give your world an added layer of plausibility and allow you to opine on matters of racial politics.

  DRAW SOME LESSONS FROM HISTORY

  “A good trick for an author is to study human cultures and history,” Kevin J. Anderson told me. “Learn the differences in our own sociology, and draw from those ingredients, exaggerate them, mix and match, and create something with a few familiar components and a few surprising ones.”

  This is true if you’re creating a rich array of elves (a fantasy archetype) or zylvaani (a new fantasy or science fiction species). The archetypes tend to be obvious, drawn as they are from centuries if not millennia of folktales and legends. Elves, gnomes, dwarves, ogres, trolls, and so on are free for the taking, though as with archetypical monsters, you should make every effort to create an elf of your very own. The Keebler elves bear scant resemblance to the regal elves of The Lord of the Rings. Your elves should occupy, to the best of your ability, a third category.

  Likewise, your aliens don’t have to be Little Green Men from Planet X. Or, if they are, they should be Little Green Men who act differently from what the reader’s come to expect.

  This can be a difficulty when you decide to fall back on the archetypes. Kevin J. Anderson explains, “I try not to fall back on elves or dwarves … they tend to carry pointy things.”

  Ouch. But seriously, you have the whole history of myth and folklore to draw from, and centuries of fantasy and science fiction stories to inspire you—and to inform you of what has been done before. This is a good place to remind ourselves that anyone who wants to write in the fantasy or science fiction genres should also be reading those genres. If you’re setting out to define your peculiar brand of dwarves, think carefully about how they compare to the dwarves in other fantasy novels you’ve read, and ultimately you will have to judge for yourself if you’ve created something you’re excited about or if you’re just carting out a cliché.

  Mix and Match

  As with monsters and flora and fauna, if you’re starting with a created world, it’ll be entirely up to you to determine the mix of sentient species and how many, if any, races are represented in each. It might be tempting, again as with monsters, to sit down and just start brainstorming so you end up with a dozen races of elves, three races of gnomes, five colors of zylvaani, the feyfolk, the unicorn-men, the merfolk, and three races of humans (all of whom hate each other) … on and on—but why?

  “Why not?” won’t quite suffice. Richly realized fantasy worlds full of color and detail can be great fun to create, and some have managed to resonate with readers for decades or longer, but they must be created with care.

  How many races of elves do you need? To answer that you have to ask lots more questions: How different are they from each other? Maybe one race of elves has wings, another breathes underwater, and so forth, so basically there’s an elf for every environment. That’s fun. Are there civilized elves and wild elves? Why will that distinction matter? Will we ever meet all of these elves? Would it be better not to have aquatic elves and merfolk? How often is your story going to go underwater, even?

  Some of this can be handled with the good old casual mention. A lot of world building comes from the occasional offhand remark: Someone refers to the winged elves, but we never meet one. We know they’re there, but that superfluous reference only tells us that there are lots of different kinds of elves. Maybe in the sequel we’ll finally meet a winged elf, and because of that casual mention in the first book, readers won’t start wondering where these guys came from all of a sudden. This works best if you’ve made it clear why it’s taken your hero this long to meet a winged elf: there are only a few left and they live in a remote part of the world, far from the human kingdoms.

  What Do You Need?

  Let the mix of species and races evolve with your story. What does your story need right now?

  Comic relief: The zylvaani is a race of funny little guys that humans think are cute and hilarious.

  The mentor: The zylvaani are a small group of creatures possessed of ancient wisdom who occasionally take on pupils.

  The wise man: The zylvaani are an ancient, nearly extinct race of scholar-priests who live in the thin air at the top of the highest mountains where their monasteries hold all the mysteries of the universe.

  Take your thinking a step beyond that. For instance, if your story needs wise men living on top of the mountains, why do they have to be zylvaani and not humans? Real-world humans live at startling altitudes and often go about their daily lives with no problem when visitors from the lowlands are dropping like flies from altitude sickness. If the wise men are zylvaani, there must be a reason. Dig deeper, and decide why there are both humans and zylvaani in your world and what makes them different.

  In her Pern series, Anne McCaffrey eventually revealed that the humans on Pern were descendants of space colonists from Earth. Maybe the zylvaani evolved on your world and were nearly killed off by invading humans. Maybe the zylvaani are aliens from another planet or dimension. Maybe the zylvaani and humans share a common ancestry, like humans and Neanderthals.

  You can spread this thinking as wide as you want. Possibly there are fifty different intelligent species on your world. What if animals from various environments on Earth had also developed the complex creativity needed to form language and technology, so that humans share the world with a fish civilization, a kingdom of intelligent birds, a lizard empire, and so on?

  There will be lots more to consider in terms of species and race, which we’ll cover as we discuss political systems, religions, and languages.

  CHAPTER 19

  TAKE US TO THEIR LEADER

  If history has taught us anything, it’s that people form groups to protect themselves from other groups. When the groups are very big and powerful, we call them “governments,” but when they’re smaller they have other names: corporations, families, syndicates, unions, special interest groups, charities, clubs, gangs, teams ….

  You’ve started to do some thinking about the people of your created world, and the time has come to start dividing them into groups. These divisions can be as simple or as complex as your story calls for. Let’s repeat that: as your story calls for. For the same reason you have to keep a reasonable eye on how many races of elves or space-faring pirate-raiders you have in your world, don’t go nuts with political systems—unless you want to.

  We’re talking about individual imaginative choices. If it propels your story forward, makes a social or political point, or otherwise enriches the tale you have to tell, then by all means make your hero a member of a t
rade guild, a religion (though more on that one later), a secret society, a militia unit, a duchy, and an empire. Let’s work our way backward through that example.

  HE’S A CITIZEN OF AN EMPIRE

  If you’re like me and are honest with yourself, your identity as a citizen of the United States of America rarely intrudes on your day-to-day life. I’m not a politician or a lobbyist, nor do I serve in the military. If someone asks me my opinion of some point of national or international politics, I’ll be more than happy to sound off, and I may or may not be in agreement with whatever policies are being enacted or acted upon in Washington D.C., but I am not a policy maker. So what does being a citizen of this “empire,” say about me?

  I’m free to join a political party and run for office. I’m a citizen, not a convicted felon, and I have not been judged mentally ill (not been judged, anyway). I’m not a politician because I choose not to be a politician, just like I chose not to join the military. So if your hero is like me, and your story is smaller in scope, the empire may not ever really come into it—or will it?

  I am writing this book in English because I was born in America. Had my grandparents decided to stay in Sparta, I would be writing this in Greek right now. I’m not religious, and that’s at least in part due to the fact that I live in a country that, for the time being anyway, doesn’t force me to adhere to a certain religion or meld cultural, racial, and religious identity like my Greek Orthodox grandparents’ upbringing did. I’m firmly middle class, but compared to the average citizen of most of the sub-Saharan African nations I’m wondrously wealthy, so surely the fact that I’m an American tempers my socioeconomic reality and outlook. Does that mean that even if your book isn’t about the hero actively saving the empire and becoming the emperor himself, or defeating the empire a la Luke Skywalker, the nature of the empire your hero calls home still matters? You bet.

  Forms of Government

  This is a good place to think about the way your fantasy government is organized. I’ve been using the word empire as an example, because it has a nice ring to it and has been used both in popular fantasy and popular science fiction, but that hardly means you have to start with an empire. Do some research into political science, at least enough to look up the definitions of this partial list of forms of government:

  anarchy

  mercantilism

  democracy/republic

  oligarchy

  feudalism

  dictatorship/totalitarianism

  communism

  confederacy/federation

  You can combine these with each other and further modify them with any number of the following:

  geriatocratic

  patriarchal

  matriarchal

  militaristic

  plutocratic

  theocratic

  magocratic

  Does your hero come from a theocratic oligarchy (a nation ruled by a closed group of religious leaders) that’s facing off in a world-spanning war against a magocratic confederacy (a coalition of smaller nation-states ruled by wizards) while a geriatocratic republic (a nation ruled by elected officials who are all senior citizens) tries desperately to engineer a peace treaty?

  More Inspiration from the Past

  Look back through history for examples of governments that fit into these categories, test the boundaries, and create categories of your own. Could your world contain an elvocracy (only elves are allowed to hold power)? How about a patriarchal, theocratic republic (in which only male members of one particular clergy can be elected to parliament)? It’s yours to decide.

  Mike Resnick has drawn ideas from history, but he has a much bigger bag of tricks. “Of course there are other sources,” he says, “and the more unusual and the less-used the better. I won the Prix Tour Eiffel [and he was the only American, the only English-language writer to win it] for my novel The Dark Lady, told in the first person of an alien whose entire society was extrapolated from the matriarchy and herd instincts of the African elephant. Which is to say: source material is everywhere, and if you don’t just look where everyone else is looking you’re more likely to create something unique and memorable.”

  HE’S A CITIZEN OF A DUCHY

  Using myself as an example again, I’m a citizen of the “duchy,” or state, of Washington. I became a citizen of the state of Washington when my job was moved two thousand miles west from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where I worked while actually living in Schaumburg, Illinois … and I was born in Rochester, New York.

  Culturally speaking, Washington isn’t really a lot different from Illinois—the pace is a little slower, maybe, and aside from a slight shift in accent and a completely unfathomable desire to be Green Bay Packer fans, Wisconsin is even more like Illinois. But some states are substantially different from one another. Louisiana and New Hampshire are at least as different from each other as, say, France is from Germany.

  So if you take the time to tell the reader that your hero comes from a particular duchy, make that duchy at least as different from the other duchies as Louisiana is from New Hampshire. If they’re more like Illinois and Wisconsin, why do you need that division? What does it add to the story?

  If the Duke of Illinois and the Baron of Wisconsin are brothers who hate each other and the two duchies are at war, with the emperor remaining neutral for some reason, then which duchy your hero belongs to will matter even if the cultural differences between those two duchies are few. Do what moves your story forward.

  HE’S A MEMBER OF A MILITIA UNIT

  So he’s loyal to the—which? Empire? Duchy? Neither? Maybe he lives in a duchy within an empire and hates both the evil duke and the really evil emperor, so his militia unit is really a group of freedom fighters condemned as traitors by their own government. Maybe each duke is required to raise some number of troops, so each town has a separate militia and the hero is perfectly happy to march off to war in defense of duke and emperor. If neither is the case, don’t bother with the militia—unless that’s the reason why your hero knows all these really cool spear-fighting moves even though when the book starts he’s just a simple farmer: he’s a simple farmer who spent some years in the militia. That’s a good reason to tell us he’s a militiaman, even if we never see him march off to war with the militia.

  HE’S A MEMBER OF A SECRET SOCIETY

  What does this secret society do, and how does being a member make your hero more heroic? Is it a social club, like a fantasy version of the Kiwanis? Or is he a member of the Fraternal Order of the Flaming Skull, keepers of the Tome of the Allmind, leaders of which have entrusted him with a page from the tome that he must memorize so if the last copy is ever destroyed it can be recreated by the thousand members, each having memorized one of the tome’s thousand pages? What does the Allmind have to say about the world that will move your story forward?

  If all you can tell us about this cryptic tome is that a thousand people are memorizing it, and it has nothing to do with the story besides “adding color,” then please take a moment to collect yourself and jettison the Order of the Flaming Skull. But if the evil Duke Blagojevich of Illinois is systematically killing the thousand devotees of the Flaming Skull in order to wipe the words of the Allmind from the memory of mankind, that sounds like a story is forming.

  HE’S A MEMBER OF A RELIGION

  We’ll talk about religion in more detail later, so set that aside for now.

  HE’S A MEMBER OF A UNION OR GUILD

  What do occupation-based organizations do in your world? In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the Spacing Guild maintained complete control of travel between the stars. In an empire comprised of far-flung planets orbiting distant stars, that control made them as powerful as the emperor himself. Is your hero, the simple farmer/militiaman, a member of the farmer’s guild? The spear-fighters guild? Is his guild affiliation just a cover for his activities as part of the Fraternal Order of the Flaming Skull? If you can’t answer these questions with something that moves your story forward, dump the
union.

  TO SUM UP

  Author Kevin J. Anderson says he’s often inspired by history. He recommends that authors should “study histories other than America or England. Japan, ancient China, Maori, Russian … they are rich in legends, events, rulers, scandals, tragedies, heroic battles, wars. All of those things can provide inspiration, even a template, for a new story.”

  Your world is not an end to itself. The setting is there to propel your story forward and make your characters richer. If you’re doing any sort of world building that doesn’t function in both of those capacities, you’re wasting your time and your readers’.

  * * *

  STEP FOUR | DETAILS

  “Like our own world, a fantasy setting is layered with themes, histories, inhabitants and cultures. Like the smith who turns various ores into steel, we must add these elements in just the right amounts until our visions take shape and eventually develop life of their own.”

  —LOGAN MASTERSON, Fantasy Magazine