Considering that this thread https://www.writingforums.org/posts/1477995/ popped up recently, I thought it would be an interesting idea to ask all the world builders out there what's a cool thing from your world that doesn't appear in your current project?
The mines and brothels on Mars, also the giant mutant spiders. The process of sub-space travel and how it works. The technical explanation on how the Uldivarion fusion weaponry works. The alloys used by the Centuria and Uldivarion hull and armor plating is made up of. Well that is all I got that more than likely won't really be explained.
A huge national park where bison are thriving. The fictional country where my story is set used to have a huge population of bison until the destruction of their habitat and poaching reduced it to only a couple hundred. Thanks to intense efforts on part of environmental organizations, dedicated individuals and local government, the population is now up to about 4,000 again.
An in-depth explanation of the differences between Magic, Non-Magic, and the Strong and Weak forms of Anti-Magic Non-Magic is any physical phenomenon which manifests physical effects in adherence to the laws of Conservation of Mass, Energy, Momentum... Magic is any physical phenomenon which manifests physical effects in violation of the laws of Conservation Strong Anti-Magic is any physical phenomenon which manifests no physical effects of it's own (beyond the Non-Magical effects of the phenomenon's physical components), but which erodes Magic - and thus weakens/negates the physical manifestations thereof - while leaving Non-Magic unaffected Weak Anti-Magic is any physical phenomenon which manifests no physical effects of it's own (see note re. Strong Anti-Magic), but which suppresses the physical manifestations of Magic - leaving the Magic itself unharmed - while leaving Non-Magic unaffected as well as the extensive debates amongst scholars as to what Magic and Anti-Magic fundamentally are with respect to the laws of nature at large. EDIT: I am planning on including this in my second book, but there's really no good place for it in my first one. Does that still count as my "current project"?
Sure. If it doesn't fit in what you're doing, but it does the sequel, then it's not what you're working on now.
Things that probably won't feature in The Dragon Child: The explaination of how they light the extremely tall candles The inner mechanics of mountain people's politics How the secret census works for magical human-likes
1. I could think of a few ways engineering wise this could be possible, but its just so easy to say magic. 2. Ohhh, I have an idea. Okay, so each person is given a certain amount of political power based on how high up in the MTs they were when they were born. This obviously leads to a cold war of building platforms to raise the peaks of a MT, sabatoge to steal women before the give birth and drag them to lower ground, and an experimental trampoline type construction that never had any happy endings. 3. Again, magic seems like too easy of an answer here....
Too many to count. There is a whole world out there, for *** sake, and I only use a tiny part of the planet where my MCs happen to trudge across. I won't talk about cultural issues, or society, or .. or.. it's just impossible. I can't put a world in one novel. Which may be why there is a chance that a companion volume will arise out of the ashes..
Likewise - I'm working from the destroyed ashes of our world but theres loads of stuff i worked out about how stuff functions that doesnt make it into the book (there could be sequels (or a prequel)
I'm not sure I know what all I'm going to use, and I don't plan stuff that I'm not going to use, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to make the joke about Afghanistan in 2034 marketing itself as an up-and-coming ski-tourism destination. The world has plenty of problems, but not all in the same places.
Pages upon pages consisting of nothing but world-building in one way or another. I want to be direct and show the world as my characters experience them. Mishu is't going to care about some ancient war fought centuries before her birth, and unless someone forced her to listen to it, she'll happily ignore it. In fact, she'll even abbreviate it in her narration.
good call - its just been pointed out that i can't get away with a shitload of expo about the 'world' under the guise of my MC briefing new recruits . I was thinking about other authors work and its notable that in moon is a harsh mistress Heinlien never explains why there's a penal colony on the moon , there just is
I think that history is very important, as is politics, society, you name it. There are authors who give a whole world in their novels (ie. Tolkien), but one has to decide what the aim of the novel is. How fast-paced, how much centered on action. Tolkien-style is not for everyone - I am thinking of me there
Thinking about the deathlands books (which are roughly analogous with mine though i'm hoping for a bit of a less pulpy style) in the very first one, pilgramage to hell James Adrian (aka Jack Axler) spends the first two chapters scene setting and describing his post nuke world - however for me those are the weakest chapters of the book and aren't really needed , i could happily start reading at chapter three as the mutant bandits attack the trade convoy. (in actual fact I bought fire and ice which is i think Deatlands #9 first , and it wasnt harmed by not having read the expo as it was obvious enough that the action was set in a post nuclear war america and that was all the scene setting necessary)
My current WIP takes place in an alternate reality where World Wars I & II never took place, leading to a very different, if still recognizable modern world. It's set in Great Britain in 2044, and although I have been able to world build quite bit, with largely different technology, a larger population and different demographics, I haven't really found a way to weave this massive historical difference into the story without it feeling forced.
For me it's the backstories to my characters and their relationships before the story proper begins. Particularly the main character's father's life (he is deceased by the time of the novel) around his relationship with her mother and also the main character's childhood with her former closest friend. Mucking around, causing trouble, and generally being arch in ways expected of young ladies of certain strata in their society.
Aside from a lot of backstory which I put together to help inform who the characters are now, there are things like: -Chupacabras prefer venison to goat. -Certain Royal personages aren't strictly human -Easter Island was a Fae prank that got out of hand -The Lady of the Lake is in the Sonic the Hedghog fandom.
I wrote a scene that concerns events that took place on the ship wherein the original colonists of the world in one of my WIP's arrived. Enough time has passed and a particular event took place on the new world that leaves the colonists' origins only as myth and legend. I wrote the scene of actual events only as a source for what later becomes mythologized. The actual scene of real events has no place in the story.
I'm currently world building, so i'm going go predict what future me will say, and that will be all the tales of Yore before the beginning of the "Civilised Era"
I actually just realized yesterday that my Doctor Who fanfiction has a bit of backstory behind my Villain Protagonist's favorite series of spy movies: When the reptilian humanoid species called the silurians made their public First Contact with humanity in about the 2500s (give or take a couple hundred years) after spending all of our recorded history living underground, there was a predictable backlash from human supremacists who did not want the two species to live in peace. One of the first cultural achievements that started to humiliate the human supremacists into losing their base of support was a series of films revolving around a fictional mixed-species super-spy named Taska Venkman (her father was human, mother silurian) who served in one of the first attempts at an intergovernmental agency for making sure that human and silurian nations work together. Silurian supremacist villains played a large part in the series, but the human supremacist villains played an even larger part, and the fictional war profiteers who showed how easy it was to play the two against each other (and how little they actually differed from one another) were an even larger part than that. One of the greatest villains of the series was a Hitler figure who went about trying to exterminate a new religion that started to gain traction after human and silurian theologians started trading notes on the faiths that each species had developed in their separation. She was never able to get the human-supremacists and the silurian supremacists to work together outright against this "common enemy," but she did manage to maneuver them into attacking each other directly less often than they attacked this new symbol of multiculturalism. The movie itself wasn't as well received as were most of the previous and later entries in the series critics said that the execution of the message was more ham-fisted than it was the other times and less likely to persuade anybody, largey because the new writing team didn't put as much effort into making sense of A) the in-story propaganda that the new multicultural religion was more dangerous to the human supremacists than were the terrorist actions of the silurian supremacists (and vice versa) B) the internal logistics and procedures of the villain's organization itself but the villain herself stood out from the crowd due to the original actress's impressive hamminess and scenery-chewing. The writers decided for their next movies in the series that they would let the villain be "the one that got away" by having her reputation in-story be of escaping justice and the agency never being able to find her, rather than risking trying to bring the character herself back and losing what little support they already had with the fandom. Many fans did not like this approach and were disappointed such a great character and actress would only ever be given a single horrible script, so a large theme in the fan-fiction community was to completely re-writing that movie so that character would have a story that was more worthy of her presence in it, and many of the more common elements that these fanfic writers came up with were eventually adapted into various reboots when the character was brought back to new continuities with different actresses (and MUCH higher critical acclaim ). Also, the fictional religion created for the character's poorly-recieved original movie was very quickly de-fictionalized by real people deciding to follow it like Dude-ism, Scientology, or The Force EDIT: AND, can I just say that I didn't know most of this about the Taska Venkman series when I started my post about half an hour ago?
