CJ's Creative Studio - Making Believable Fictional Civilizations

While fiction ultimately lives or dies by its characters, the world the characters are in should not be short-changed. The environment surrounding the characters informs not only the choices they make, but also who they are. The art of creating a believable setting for our tales of wonder is an aspect of writing that should not be short changed. I hope that this introduction into that process will help to guide, inform, or remind the writer of the care in which all aspects of story writing must be tended to. Other entries will explore each of the topics in more detail.

I'm a science fiction writer by preference. It's understandable, I think, that I feel science fiction and fantasy can provide a writer with a lot of freedom in building these stages, but the need for believability is just as important if you are doing something contemporary. The times and places of fictional works can be as familiar as Earth of today/the near future/the historical past, or they can be as fantastical as the Ringworld, or the cyber-reality of the Matrix, or even the mysteries found at the edge of the universe. And yet, in an attempt to bring the reader into the work, the author must make their world have enough verisimilitude that it doesn't distract the reader. No matter how fantastic, the world must emerge from the pages as real and vivid. It can be a very difficult and frustrating process, but it is also one with many rewards.

Setting, at its most basic, is simply time and location. When and where are the actions of our story taking place? It can seem as simple as, "Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...", but it really isn't for the writer who cares. Even if you aren't going to reveal it to the audience, the writer must know how long ago "long ago" was, and how far away that galaxy is. Why? Well, mostly, because you don't know when that might be a useful thing to know. Also, it starts you on the path of questions and discovery. If 99.9% of what you develop never gets seen directly on the page, that's great. Because no matter how subtly, the information you developed DOES make it onto the page in some form.

Usually, a writer will start with some very definite ideas of where and when...or have those decisions sort of forced on them. After all, if you have Earth being a space-faring world exploring other star systems, then unless you are breaking causality with some time travel, it's pretty darned likely that your story is set in the future. How far into the future you will have to decide, but in the future it is. Other times it is the place is as determined by default. If I'm going to write a story about the Tojan War, more than likely I'll want to set the piece in Hellas and/or Asia Minor as opposed to, say, somewhere in Meso-America.

More often, at least one of the variables will have some degree of flexibility. If you place your story sometime in the not near future when Earth has trading relations with some interstellar civilizations, then you should have at least a passing idea of how far into the future you are going...this will help you account for technology as well as evolution (of species and the planet itself). By making your story about interstellar trade, you have also made your life a bit more difficult.

This is something that is pretty much limited to the SF/F domain (and related genres): you have to figure out your rules of physics. Often these rules are the same as the ones we are generally aware of, but once we start getting into hyperspace or magic/magick or metaphysics, then the writer needs to lay down some ground rules. While I'm not asking you to limit your imagination, what I am asking is that you make your story internally consistent. If I have to render a poetic incantation in order to make gold into lead, then it isn't consistent if then I have only our hero (or villain) be able to do the same trick by simply winking their left eye. Settle on the poetic incantation. (Of course if you want to allow the incantation to be a rhyming quatrain as well as a free-form haiku...well, I leave that to you and your conscience :-)

I hope it goes without saying that for each and every race that has a civilization, you must create their world. Now, admittedly, some aliens are more in-the-background than others. That's OK, but even if you aren't going to given them the full development treatment, you still need to make their worlds make some sort of sense as it will color their views of others.

Building planets can be rather involved, so I'm going to sort of gloss over the high points. I think first and foremost you need to decide what sort of stellar system it is. Does it have one start or more? Recent research suggests that just because a system has more than one star doesn't preclude it from being able to have habitable planets--though I'd hate to know the odds.

Next, is your world a planet orbiting its star, or is it a moon of a planet, or is it manufactured, or maybe something even less mainstream? If it is a planet, does it have moons of any significant size? This is important for things as mundane as whether or not a planet has tides, how extreme its weather might be, and for possibly hinting at some aspects of mythologies.

Does this world have oceans? If the weather is extreme, do our aliens shelter themselves and if so, how?

For soft science fiction, it's almost enough just to have the definitions. For science fiction that tries to get the science intentionally correct, there are things like orbital dynamics, habitable zones, and other mathematical minutiae that have to be addressed. Since I prefer writing hard science fiction, this part to me is very important. I can't say I always get the math right, but I do try.

Also remember that the improbable probably still isn't too improbable. Even with the few hundred planets we've discovered outside our own solar system over the past twenty years or so, many of them surpassed in strangeness even the wild speculations of planetary scientists. So...while needing some sort of plausibility, you can feel free to let your imagination out for a bit of a stroll.

While I prefer to make my worlds before I define my aliens, sometimes it's better to work the other way around and create the world to suit your species choice. Sometimes there you have specific characteristics in mind for a particular alien species. If it's very important to you that they have gills, scales, fins, and in all ways seem very fish-like, it might not be in the realm of immediate plausibility that they inhabit a planet that doesn't have any oceans or lakes of any consequence.

Again, as with building worlds, you can let your imagination not only take a stroll, you can send it out on walkabout. Just a quick examination at the wide range of creatures on our own world, both extant and extinct, and you can see that a wide amount of variability can be accommodated in any given environment.

This is where everything starts getting put together. Is the culture technological? For how long? What is their economy based on? How do they handle their energy needs? Transportation? Waste? Food?

Are the inhabitants of your land all of the same race or species, or is there a variety. If there is only one, then is that natural, or is it the result of some sort of extinction event?

What does their architecture look like? Do they build high or do they spread out?

As you can see, there is a lot of our own mundane existence that we can use to construct a believable world. The thing you need to...

STOP!!! Stop. Don't get ahead of me. The hard part is yet to come: you have to create a government.

If ever there is anything that will make you appreciate what the founders of your country went through in order to create a more perfect society, then creating your own governments will do it for you. You see, other than families, the impact of a culture's government has more influence on people's/alien's lives than just about anything else. While you might come to the question thinking that the answer is simple, it is not (and here is where all those history classes you took come in handy).

An easy example is that after the United States was established, many former colonies tried to simply adopt the U.S. Constitution as the model for their people. Time and time again, it failed. You see, for a government to be self-sustaining, the vast majority of the populace must be able to wear it like a good suit. You can't just make a knock-off and expect it to be satisfactory. So...try to not have too many shortcuts when you're building your government.

Here's the key: constantly try to figure out how things break. Inevitably, corruption or larceny will throw a monkey wrench into the most Utopian government machinery. What happens then? Civil war? Anarchy? A brief stumble and then a righting? There are so many things. And then there are the side-effects: does this affect the public's perceptions? Will thoughts of change start floating in the breeze of discontent? How might those outside your government react? How might your government react to that reaction?

What sorts of local or regional government do you have? Even if you try to make things easy on yourself and have a global government, it's almost inevitable that fiefdoms will arise. Remember, you have to decide how everything interacts with each other. Do they all follow the same model, or are there significant differences? You only have to look at how the various countries and regions of today find themselves variously in conflict and agreement in sometimes confounding ways to see how no country is an island beholden only to itself (unless of course your story concerns just such a place).

When internal conflicts inevitably happen, how are they dealt with? What is the police force (or whatever) like? How are conflicts resolved? What are typical penalties and how are they enforced? Is there a justice system? Is it instead a system of laws? Is it a theocracy bound by scriptural interpretation? There are many permutations that can evolve depending on the other circumstances you are building into your world(s).

And then...the last big governmental stumbling block: the law of unintended consequences. You build levees and such to control flood waters only to discover twenty years later that you've actually disrupted natural processes so much that the consequences of flooding are worse than ever. Remember, no matter how carefully you've constructed your government(s), something is going to happen when you are writing the story that you never foresaw. GREAT! Go with that. Stuff like that enhances an environment and makes it all the more real.

No matter how much you have come up with, it's important to remember the necessity of randomness. Bridges suddenly collapse. Timmy sneezes so hard that he bangs his head on the sharp edge of a table, causing a hemorrhage that soon leads to his death. A rain drop happens to fall on the only possible place in a power station where a short-circuit could occur. You heard your father say, "Stay away from people, you'll catch their dreams," when what he really said wasn't "dreams" but "germs".

The key to chaos is that it isn't totally random. Within constraints specific to a system, any results can happen--but not outside of those constraints. However, systems are rarely found in isolation, so the effects of other systems may or may not have influence on yours. Basically, you can have occasional seemingly random stuff happen, but don't make it too outlandish.

What is the relationship of the people in your world to those outside your immediate scope? Cordial? War-like? Isolationist? How much of the economy is touched by outside forces? Are the others like your group, or are they different? How so?

Economics and diplomacy are the major themes in this category. Delicate balances can shift with the single stroke of a pen, or of a word said at exactly the right/wrong time.

So much of what happens in our world happens in the background. Even with the never ending stream of babble from television, much goes on that isn't in public view but which ripples through. This can often also fall into the sub-category I already mentioned of unintended consequences.

What led up to a place becoming what it was? We are all colored by the past. American, for example, might not have survived had the invasion by British forces in 1812 not bound the fragile states into a common cause. Even then, the wrenching period of the Civil War defined the character of the people. As the history Shelby Foote noted, before the Civil War, it was common to say "The United States are", after the Civil War we would say "The United States is"...that's what the war did [for Americans], it changed the country from an "are" to an "is" (which goes a long way to explaining why Americans treat collective nouns differently than, say, the Brits...but I digress).

One of the neat things about Human history is that it tends to repeat itself. The repetition isn't perfect, and is often colored by all of those other things I've already mentioned, but it give you a starting place. Empires rise, empires fall. The young always feel misunderstood and must rebel. The oldsters always feel that youth is out of control, but needs them to incite change.

As for countries...wars and peace tend to cycle. Subjugators inevitably fall due to revolt or invasion. The weak are inevitably subjugated/enslaved/killed/exiled.

The single most important lesson from history: it is always easier to build or conquer than it is to maintain.

One aspect of a society that is often overlooked is that they need to communicate. Authors will usually just use their native tongue, through in some appropriate technology, and then leave it at that. Honestly, that's probably a pretty good way to go: readers are familiar with that paradigm and you don't have to waste a lot of time trying to become a linguist.

On the other hand, when you look at Tolkien's ring cycle, where would it be in our pantheon of literature had he not taken time to work out various languages? In our own lives we can see that the design of a language, as well as the number of languages we know, colors our view on the world. Joss Whedon's Firefly series took the notion that of Earth's space-faring cultures, it was ultimately the Americans and Chinese that prevailed; as a result, everyone in the 'verse speaks both English and Chinese. It colored the fabric of the entire multi-world society.

As you can tell, I've only just started scratching the surface. While there is much to expand on, I hope that you are starting to see how sitting down and doing the prep work might lead you to have a more vibrant and multi-layered tale. It is very easy to get so caught up in the arcs that focus on our characters that we forget that life goes on around them...sometimes in spite of them, and often completely oblivious of them. If only a few drops of that start to seep into your tale, you will have improved it over what so many other writers think to do.