This week, I’m looking at worldbuilding. And connection.
I’ve been on lots of journeys in my life. On land and sea, as well as in the air. I’ve had my share of adventures on journeys, so I guess it was inevitable that they would feature in my writing. I’ve been on ships that have collided, run aground, flooded and had fires on board. I was on a Jumbo jet that crash-landed.
All these events have been useful in helping me write adventures.
I have a whole Galaxy to play with, and a future that stretches away as long as I want. The possibilities for journeying are endless.
As long as you remember the words of the master, there really is no limit to what you can devise.
Let’s look first at keeping the inhabited parts of the Galaxy connected.
I enjoy writing stories featuring giant spaceships, too big to land, endlessly circling the galaxy, like the cruise liners on Earth. They’re miniature cities, enclosed communities where just about anything is possible. As well as transporting my characters to and fro, the liners are places where interesting people live, and adventures happen.
Then there are the merchant ships. Crewed by traders, carrying cargo of every description and keeping planets and industry connected. Traders are handy characters to have, as they tend to have chequered pasts and can be adapted to a multitude of roles.
Obviously, those sorts of ships are firmly placed in the far future.
If we don’t go quite so far forward from today, we will start to spread out through our Solar System. There, I’ve devised the shuttle craft of the Andorra Pett universe. These ships transport people and goods between Earth, the Moon, Mars and the space station off Saturn.
All done at speeds which, although far slower than light, still reduce the travel time to days.
To create these spaceships and make them work, I had to take a crash course in Rubber Science. If you don’t know, that’s the art of making the imaginary technology of the future seem both realistic and plausible.
You can read more about it here.
I invented my own version of a faster-than-light drive, using something that my wife christened the Padgett Inverter, while Andorra has to rely on the more boring Centi-drive to get around.
That all works on a larger scale.
When you come down to travel on a planet, to make it Sci-fi, I’ve used the Mag-Lev system, originally invented by Professor Eric Laithwaite, as a means of mass transit.
As well as applying the principles of magnetic induction to make cars that run by drawing power from a supply buried in the road.
There is one genre that I write in, where transport is dealt with in quite a different way. And that’s Steampunk. Based on the society of the late nineteenth century, with some modifications, it assumes that Oil and Electricity did not become the dominant sources of power. Instead, Coal is the thing that society runs on.
Before the oil-powered internal combustion engine was invented, steam cars and motor bicycles were developed. In Norlandia, my fictional world, these steam vehicles have been refined and perfected, running on powdered coal dust in the absence of oil. Of course, I had steam locomotives pulling trains as well.
Then, I had the idea to use Coal Gas, stored in pressurised vessels, to drive a sort of Victorian jet engine, giving my world a technological leap forward that I took full advantage of. Flying machines are a fully functioning part of life in this Victorian world.
Not only that, clockwork has become more than a toy, powering all manner of devices, with both internal and interchangeable springs that act as battery packs.
The one thing that remains the same in Norlandia as here is the ship. Here was where my knowledge of ships and driving them really came into its own. Journeys on cargo and passenger ships feature in just about all of my Steampunk adventures. It allows me to use all the knowledge I gained in my working life to create a realistic atmosphere that’s genuine.
Whatever form it takes, a journey is an event. It’s so much more than just a means of getting from one place to another. As part of a story, it can be central to the plot or the place where everything happens.
For more on worldbuilding, you can check out my textbook.
Do you want to write Sci-fi or Steampunk adventures?
Are you struggling with World Building?
Do you want to create a world: or even a universe, but you’re put off by all the science you think you need to know before you can start?
If the answer to any of those questions is yes, I’ve tried to simplify the process by showing you another way.
This guide is based on the World-building workshops that I hold as a member of the Exeter Authors Association. The aim is to show you an easier way of doing things, with chapters on such subjects as Location, Characters, Sidekicks and Steampunk. I’ll tell you the method that I’ve used to create several universes in the future and in an alternative present, maintaining realism without getting bogged down in the technicalities.
Creating a Sci-fi World contains exercises and suggestions, as well as examples from my novels, there are even some short stories to illustrate how my methods can be applied.
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