The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction

by Philip Athans

  You might be starting to wonder if the process of world building is endless. It may seem as though there are too many things—an infinite number of factors—to keep in mind. But heed the basic advice at the heart of all of this: keep yourself firmly planted in the minds and needs of your characters. There is an awful lot you’ll need to know about the science fiction universe or fantasy world those characters inhabit, but don’t let yourself get off track and start world building without a purpose. The purpose of a novel is to tell a story through the actions of its characters.

  And the process is not infinite. It’s easier tackled if you think in terms of broad categories, such as those that follow.

  CHAPTER 20

  WHEN IN ZYLTARIIA…

  Bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson offers this advice on the subject of creating cultures: “In my Saga of Seven Suns I created the Ildirans, which are (on the surface) fairly human but have dramatic cultural differences as you get to know them. Over the course of seven volumes in the series, I explored and enriched that race, unfolding one more detail after another. A race has to have a certain shared basis with humanity, or they will be too distant for the reader to relate to.”

  An excellent place to start. Different people have different patterns of behavior, different social expectations, a different idiom, colloquialisms, table manners…. If you’re creating a world from the ground up, those cultural peculiarities will be yours to invent. If you’re working in a contemporary, near-future, or historical setting, get your research cap on.

  This can be the hardest part of world building. Governments are fairly easily categorized, religions may be copied from the rich history of human mythology and superstition, and maps can be redrawn from real-world sources both contemporary and historical. Cultures can also be re-imagined from the real world. But more than anything, the cultural “upbringing” (for lack of a better word) of your characters—hero, villain, and supporting cast alike—has the biggest effect on how real, how sympathetic, and how plausible they and your world are.

  In the previous chapter we touched on the relative difference between Illinois and Wisconsin as an example of how subtle the differences between political subdivisions can be. But consider the differences and similarities between two English-speaking nations: the United States and Great Britain.

  A quick list:

  The British have a parliament, Americans have a Senate and House of Representatives.

  The British have a prime minister, Americans have a president.

  The British have a foreign secretary, Americans have a secretary of state.

  The British drive on the left, Americans drive on the right.

  The British buy things with pounds and weigh things in stone, Americans buy things with dollars and weigh things in pounds.

  How much do all of those things matter? The difference between the foreign secretary and the secretary of state is a matter of semantics—but semantics matters. In your fantasy world, is there a foreign secretary or a minister of barbarian affairs, because the evil empire thinks everyone who doesn’t live in the empire is a barbarian? See how that job title tells us something about the empire?

  When it comes to answering the question of “What do I call it?” you may be surprised by how much your decision will tell readers about your world’s culture. If the emperor has a foreign secretary, the title doesn’t tell us much, but when we see the foreign secretary planning the genocide of the gnome population of Zyltariia, we start to wonder: Is this what foreign secretaries do, or is this particular foreign secretary overreaching? If this guy holds the title Minister of Gnomic Eradication, he’s just doing the job the emperor hired him for, isn’t he? If you chose to be subtle and simply call him the foreign secretary, then you’re telling us that the empire has things to hide, and perhaps that when the post was first formed, it had a less evil agenda.

  Of course, if you give someone the official title Minister of Gnomic Eradication, we also know that the empire is openly racist against gnomes, and entirely unashamed to be so.

  DEFINING CULTURE

  Before we go any farther, let’s make a list of a few things that define a culture—or more accurately, help define a culture, since in all fairness no culture can be defined by one thing.

  religion

  colloquialism/idiom

  weights and measures

  diet/cuisine

  music, art, and pop culture

  nationalism and individual liberty

  prejudice/racism/tolerance

  manners

  A pretty short list, but it’ll keep us busy for a while. The first three we’ll tackle in the chapters that follow, but let’s spend a paragraph at least on the rest of the list now.

  Diet/Cuisine

  How many times have you asked friends, coworkers, or family, “What does everyone want for lunch—Mexican, Chinese, or Indian?” Clearly we’re talking about three distinct cultural traditions here. On the other hand, it’s a stretch to discern the precise difference between Polish and Russian cuisine. My wife is Polish-American and we live in an area where there’s a large immigrant population from Russia, so there are plenty of Russian restaurants that serve all sorts of stuff she grew up eating as “Polish food.” In contrast, the difference between Polish food and Japanese food, say, is huge.

  Some cultures don’t tend to identify as strongly with their cuisine as do, say, the French and the Italians. Their regional dishes are matters of extraordinary nationalistic pride. Not only what people eat, but how they eat it—with forks, their hands, chopsticks—when they eat, and where they eat, can be of vital significance to a culture.

  If the evil galactic empire eats meat while the rebel folk indigenous to the swamp world of Darvon are vegetarians, that might piss off some meat eaters among your readers. But don’t be too afraid to piss people off. You’re going to do it anyway.

  Remember that scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where the heroes are confronted with the horrifying spectacle of eating monkey brains? That was fun. Or the scene in Galaxy Quest when one of the characters is presented with a bowl of what appears to be live leaches? Yum. Weird food can be used for fun and effect, and it can also be a way for characters to communicate with each other. If the custom in Zyltariia is to offer a guest in your house a piece of fruit, and our heroine is not offered a piece of fruit when she visits her ex-boyfriend’s new wife, then she has just received a message. That’s the kind of detail that can move a story forward, using customs to show readers where the characters stand in relation to each other and the plot.

  Music, Art, and Pop Culture

  These can be difficult to portray in prose form—music especially—but it can be done, and I encourage you to try. Here’s a line that tells us a little about Galen and how he feels about being in Zyltariia: “The discordant cacophony of the Zyltariian orchestra stung Galen’s ears.” He hates the music, anyway. But is it really “discordant,” or is Galen just prejudiced against Zyltariians? Use these details if his reaction to the music moves your story forward somehow. Otherwise, it’s fine to say only that there’s an orchestra playing; that still sets a scene and tells us we’re someplace special. Maybe it lets us know that the owner of the house is wealthy enough to afford an orchestra. Perhaps orchestras are routinely hired for ceremonies during which someone is sacrificed to the fire god, and Galen had no idea there was going to be a sacrifice until he saw the orchestra. Now the presence of the orchestra isn’t just window dressing but a call to action. Can Galen rescue the sacrificial victim before the evil deed is done?

  Describe the Art of the World

  Art may challenge your powers of description, but anything worth doing is worth doing well. Most cities in our real world tend to look more or less the same now, but a lot of what makes Paris Paris, for instance, is the richness of its architecture. The Eiffel Tower has become a symbol of the city.

  The Trevi Fountain in Rome isn’t just a public waterworks project. People travel a
very long way to see the Statue of Liberty: a work of art with enormous cultural meaning. When the Taliban blew up the giant Buddhas of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley it was a crime not just against the Buddhist philosophy but against the entire human race. What does that act tell us about the culture of the Taliban? What does the extent to which the Greek government is going to preserve the Parthenon tell us about Greek society?

  The Importance of Popular Culture

  When the Berlin Wall came down, what did East Germans do first? Well, most of them visited with long-separated relatives, but then they went to McDonalds, bought Rolling Stones CDs, and went to the movies. A cogent argument could be made that one of the reasons the Soviet Union failed was because it cut its population off from popular culture. How we’re entertained tells us a lot about each other. Time and again it’s been the popular artworks that have lived on the longest. In five hundred years, a historian who really wants to know what it was like to live in America in, say, the last twenty years of the twentieth century, should read Stephen King, Danielle Steel, and Tom Clancy—for the same reason we still read William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and the fantasy adventure story Beowulf. The religion you’ve created for your world, or the pomp and circumstance of official ceremonies, will tell us what the people of that culture aspire to, but what makes people laugh, or what they think is pretty or “cool,” will tell your readers more about what it’s really like to live, day to day, in that strange new world.

  Nationalism and Individual Liberty

  These don’t always go hand in hand. Some societies have exhibited jaw-dropping degrees of nationalist fervor while utterly eradicating (or trying to, at least) all sense of individual liberty—Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, for instance.

  The expectations of the people about personal liberty within a particular culture go a very long way toward helping to define how your characters behave—and what makes them different.

  Captain Kirk is obviously only tenuously interested in the United Federation of Planets, quickly and casually defying direct orders up to and including the Prime Directive, while at the same time maintaining a purely objectivist self-confidence. The Enterprise is “his” ship, not Starfleet’s. That tells us volumes about this character. No one has to say out loud: “Captain Kirk is a self-centered non-patriot who’s so good at his job that the government leaves him alone to do with the galaxy as he damn well pleases.”

  Prejudice/Racism/Tolerance

  How a culture balances these issues will also drive a character and plot. Part of what makes R. A. Salvatore’s Drizzt Do’Urden so popular is that he comes out of the Underdark into a world that instantly hates him because of the color of his skin. He’s a dark elf, and dark elves have become synonymous with evil, so the above-world people perceive Drizzt as evil, too. How he changes first his own mind then causes the people around him to change theirs has been resonating in a very special way with readers for the twenty-plus years that Salvatore has been writing about this character.

  Racism is still the hottest of the hot-button issues in America today, so it’s not something to deal with lightly. If you create a culture in which there is an endemic racism against gnomes, you have begun to write a novel about racism. That issue will have a tendency to eclipse any other point you’re trying to make. By all means, proceed with a novel that delves as deeply into that subject as you’re intellectually capable of, but proceed with the utmost caution.

  Manners

  These aren’t as much fun as cool stuff like plasma weapons, stardrive technology, and evil death cults, but even if you don’t sit down and think about manners before you start writing, your work will be infused by them. Don’t limit your thinking to the hyper-formalized systems of manners that you might encounter in Victorian parlors. A simple problem like how people greet each other will raise its head in your writing.

  Do they say hello, well met, or greetings? Live long and prosper? Do they shake hands, salute, or kiss? And of course there’s more.

  When they sit down to dinner, do they start ripping into suckling pigs with both hands, or do they all wait for the baroness to start eating first? Do men and women walk hand in hand in the street, or would such a wanton display of lust mean prison terms for them both? Is it rude to burp, kiss, sneeze, or ask “How ya doin’?” Is it polite to fart, smile, bow, or ask “In what way may I serve?”

  The fast way through all this is to adopt a system of manners and protocol that you’re comfortable with. It’s fine if people in your fantasy world approach each other in more or less the same way that we do.

  On the other hand, you may want to tilt your world a little more toward Victorian, or Persian, or feudal Japanese cultures. All of these were more strict, more formal, more ritualistic than we tend to be today.

  We haven’t made it to education, law, access to power, economic opportunity, sexual mores … the list is almost endless, but we have to stop somewhere, so how about this?

  In an essay first published in 1940 entitled “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” George Orwell described English culture in 1940:

  But in all societies the common people must live to some extent against the existing order. The genuinely popular culture of England is something that goes on beneath the surface, unofficially and more or less frowned on by the authorities. One thing one notices if one looks directly at the common people, especially in the big towns, is that they are not puritanical. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the world. They have to satisfy these tastes in the face of astonishing, hypocritical laws (licensing laws, lottery acts, etc., etc.) which are designed to interfere with everybody but in practice allow everything to happen. Also, the common people are without definite religious belief, and have been so for centuries.

  He continues:

  One can learn a good deal about the spirit of England from the comic coloured postcards that you see in the windows of cheap stationers’ shops. These things are a sort of diary upon which the English people have unconsciously recorded themselves. Their old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life, are all mirrored there.

  If you can write a couple of paragraphs like that about your created world, you’re headed in the right direction.

  CHAPTER 21

  DEFINE A SYSTEM OF WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

  Authors of contemporary or urban fantasy or near-future science fiction don’t generally have to spend much time suffering over systems of weights and measures. If you’re writing the story of a wizard in present-day America, time will be measured by days, weeks, months, and years; distance by inches, feet, and miles; weight in pounds; and money in dollars. If your science fiction story is set a few decades in the future, it’s unlikely that we’ll have redefined our system of weights and measures much if at all—even if the United States adopts the metric system.

  If you’re writing historical fantasy, weights and measures can become a big research topic for you. You’ll have the challenge of depicting a society that measures distance in, say, cubits, and you must make that understandable to a contemporary audience. If you’re writing in a created fantasy world, far-future science fiction, or science fiction in which the dominant culture is alien, you might be tempted to create a system of measures all your own. Before you do that—before you do anything—some words of caution. I will put them in italics so no one can say I didn’t emphasize it strongly enough:

  If you’re translating everything your characters do and say from their native language, either real-world foreign, historical, or created, choose with the utmost caution what you choose not to translate.

  For instance, if a centon is the same as a minute …

  MAKE TIME THAT MAKES SENSE

  In the old Battlestar Galactica television series from the late seventies,
our heroes are humans who have been separated from the rest of humanity and are on a pilgrimage to find what has for them become the legendary Earth. It’s naturally assumed that though the actors are speaking English, their characters are speaking their own native language, and they’ve got their own system of weights and measures. To emphasize this point, the characters say “Wait a centon” instead of “Wait a minute.”

  I’m sure there are hardcore fans out there who will find my opinion sacrilegious, but I believe that was a terrible decision. If a centon and a minute are essentially the same, why not translate centon into minute and get on with telling the story? No episode was improved by the fact that they worked in centons instead of minutes.

  And please heed this advice: Never, in any science fiction story, put the word Earth before a unit of measurement:

  “I give you five of your Earth minutes to surrender.” It sounds silly.

  If you’re dead-set on creating your own units of time, make them mean something. It’s statistically impossible that any planet revolves around its sun at exactly the same speed Earth does, so an alien planet your characters visit will have a longer or shorter year than we do. In science fiction you must address this, but in a created fantasy world a year can be identical to Earth. Why not?

  Whatever you do, do it for a reason. Do it to make a point, to move your story forward—not just because.

  WHEN IS A CUBIT NOT A CUBIT?

  The same considerations apply to units of distance such as inches, centimeters, feet, cubits, yards, meters, leagues, miles, kilometers, light-years, and parsecs. If it matters that a distance is “three cubits long” and not “four and a half feet long,” then okay. Otherwise, leave it in normal measure.