World Building Assistance

Not an imperative for most of you here, but it's a major element in Aurora Universe stories that take place on "seeded worlds," where the Galen or their surrogates planted people kidnapped from Earth many centuries ago. I've built worlds like Andros (used in Empress of the Dawn, my most-read story) and Nova Iberia (in Companions), based on what I could glean from easily-available history and culture of the Byzantine Empire and late Medieval Spain, and also fleshed out Shadar's Tanzrobi and Westfold (turning the latter into a steampunk culture). But there are people here who have grown up in countries other than the U.S. or England, and might have ideas for seeded worlds that wouldn't occur to me or that I couldn't research adequately. The trick is to start with some traditional culture, and imagine how it might evolve after separation from its parent country, with added complications of elements imported from other seeded worlds thanks to Scalantran trading ships.

Examples:

www.brightempire.com/empress.pdf

www.brightempire.com/Companions.html

www.brightempire.com/Tanznight.pdf

www.brightempire.com/Westfold.pdf

--Brantley

You do an outstanding job of world-buliding, Brantley, and you've done an incredible job with the seeded worlds of the AU. Perhaps others enjoy it as well, but I've found that unless one is writing a period novel with the objective of publishing for profit, it takes a lot more time than I'm willing to put in for a free story. You have to deal with more than setting and culture but also language.

I find it so much easier to deal with the world we know or perhaps one that is slightly in the future (my favorite) so that you can extrapolate current culture, people and events forward. The characters and the plot are more interesting to me than setting. Especially the characters.

My idea of reasonable-effort world-building was Josh Whedon's approach to Firefly and Serenity. Take what we know, assume a mix of high tech and ancient technology (it was all set in a single solar system with a bunch of primitive terraformed moons and a few very planets with advanced tech), mix together English and a bunch of Chinese curses and a handful of Chinese sayings and you've got something that's fun but also believable as a future setting. The Old West mixed with a space opera setting. He didn't have to work very hard at it, and most of that work was both fun and tongue-in-cheek. His real effort went into characters and dialog, which is why it was so much fun to watch.

Most people, when they think of Firefly, think of the characters and not the setting or even the plots. The plots were just there to give the characters a way to develop and interact. The plot didn't really go anywhere and nobody cared.

Serenity was more plot driven as is required for a feature movie, but I still watched it for the characters. I could care less what they did or where they did it.

That series has almost a cult following now... which tells us what we have to do if we want loyal fans forever. Its all about creating characters that people love. Or hate. Remember the Operative, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor? Awesome character. Serious bad guy, but in the end, he saw truth.

First rule of characters... they have to undergo changes which endear them to readers. Everyone in the Firefly and Serenty cast was different at the end than the beginning. That's why we watch.

Most of us violate that one rule in our stories. But then, that's what novels are for.

Bottom line... build great characters who readers connect emotionally to, and nothing else really matters.

Shadar

Characters, of course. Those seeded world stories wouldn't work without characters like Kalla and Ju'lette, and my first true AU-3 story, THRONE OF THE GODS, was character driven. Ditto our stories about Alisa. It's a matter of synergy, combining two kinds of appeal. It's not one thing or the other to me, it's both.