New Worlds, Year Three

Marie Brennan

Description

The boundless complexity of worldbuilding can create a daunting challenge for writers of science fiction and fantasy. In the third volume of the NEW WORLDS series, award-winning fantasy author and former anthropologist Marie Brennan provides not only the building blocks for creating a setting, but advice on exposition and other aspects of craft. Whether you need guidance on security or sanitation, demographics or demons or drugs, you're sure to find inspiration here.This volume collects essays from the third year of the New Worlds Patreon.

Sujets

• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: Book View Cafe
• Date de parution: 10 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611388794
• Langue: English

Extrait

New Worlds, Year Three
A Writer’s Guide to the Art of Worldbuilding
Marie Brennan

Published by Book View Café
www.bookviewcafe.com
ISBN: 978-1-61138-879-4
Copyright © 2020 by Marie Brennan
All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Cover art by sakkmesterke
Cover design by Pati Nagle
Table of Contents
Introduction
Traveling the World
One If by Land
Two If by Sea
Three If by…Something Else
Finding Your Way
The Map Is Not the Terrain
Places to Stay
Papers, Please
In the Beginning: Egalitarianism
Foundations of Power
Divine Rights
Forms of Government
Demographics
Cities I: Where and Why and What
Cities II: Inside the Walls
Special Cities
Water Supplies
Public Sanitation
Private Necessities
Trash
Disease
Plagues
Germs and Bad Air
Vaccination
Elemental Imbalances
Herbalism
Other “Medicine”
Poison
Stimulants
Alcohol
Painkillers
Hallucinogens
What Is Art?
Sculpture
Painting
Photography
Toys
Games
Sports
Gambling
Security Systems
Locks…and How to Pick Them
Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe
Ciphers and Steganography
Chimeras
Shapechangers
Angels
Demons
Duality
Emic and Etic
Where Do You Start?
Exposition, Part I
Exposition, Part II
Afterword
About Marie Brennan
Other Books by Marie Brennan
About Book View Cafe
Introduction
Welcome to the third year of New Worlds !
Like the previous two volumes, this is the fruit of my Patreon project on worldbuilding, which has now been rolling for three straight years. I’ve wanted for ages to write a book about the subject, but couldn’t figure out how to tackle it; as it turns out, part of the reason is that I need to write not one book, but three and counting.
Because approaching it this way allows me to explore the subject to a depth far beyond what a generalized book of writing advice, or even one focused specifically on setting, can provide. I’ve lost count of how many times now I’ve started to write an essay on a certain subject and realized halfway through that actually, I need to break it up into multiple sections. Even with more than a hundred and fifty of these essays under my belt, I swear my list of things to discuss in the future hasn’t gotten any shorter.
Fortunately, I have the steadfast support of my patrons allowing me to keep on marching through that list. And sometimes that support backs me up where I least expect it: when I instituted monthly topic polls for my higher-level patrons, the very first thing they voted for was sanitation! Which I thought was going to be this weird niche thing I wanted to write about but nobody else wanted to read. On the contrary; they were delighted to have me ramble on about it for a few weeks. (And that means the explanation for what I mentioned in the afterword of Year Two , concerning Tokugawa-era Japan and why people there stole barrels of human excrement, is in this volume.)
As usual, I’ve done my best to arrange the essays from the third year of New Worlds into the most coherent order possible. In this case that means going from travel to government to cities to sanitation to disease and medicine and drugs, and then onward—with less in the way of obvious transitions—to leisure activities, art, security, and the last of my monster-themed essays that were originally posted in honor of Halloween. And then the last section is devoted to my “theory posts,” essays that leave behind specific aspects of culture and look instead at underlying principles, and how you can implement this stuff in fiction. Those are posted in the months that have five Fridays instead of four, of which there were an unusual number this time, so you get five of them in this volume.
If you enjoy these collections and would like to join the ranks of the patrons who make them possible, you can do that at my Patreon page . All patrons receive a weekly photograph from my travels, themed to that week’s topic whenever possible; at higher tiers you get complementary ebooks, the chance to select topics via monthly poll, and behind-the-scenes essays about how I approach worldbuilding in my own work (which lately has been a “live” tour through the work Alyc Helms and I have been doing for our upcoming novel The Mask of Mirrors , which we’re publishing under the joint name of M.A. Carrick). At the top levels you can ask me questions about worldbuilding—your own, or someone else’s—or even send me your work for critique.
In the meanwhile, I roll onward into Year Four. I’m hoping to dig further into topics like government and economics and religion—the large building blocks of society—but also to intersperse those with smaller, quirkier things like carnivals, prostitution, or apprenticeships.
May the assembled volumes of New Worlds give you inspiration and fascinating new trivia!
Traveling the World
(6/7/19)
I’ll admit I’m prone to complaining about how unpleasant travel has gotten these days. The combination of security theater at the airports and the loss of amenities on the planes themselves means that most flights are just something I have to endure, and cross my fingers that no sudden delays or misplaced pieces of luggage will interfere with the rest of my plans.
But when I get to complaining too much, I remind myself that we have it easy .
Travel in the past was not a thing people undertook lightly, and compared to what we have today, it was slow, dangerous, and miserably uncomfortable. Even for the rich: the limitations of technology meant the world’s swankiest carriage wasn’t a tenth as comfortable as a cheap car today.
The vehicles themselves are only part of the story, though. We’ll get to those in more detail soon, but first I want to talk about a few other things—starting with infrastructure.
There’s a reason so many empires, both real and fictional, are known for their good roads. Without the ability to travel quickly and reliably (for relative values of those words), you won’t have an empire, because your more distant provinces will be so far out of contact that they’ll see very little reason why they should keep paying attention to the capital. Whether it’s a revolt by the local people or the provincial governor deciding to give himself a promotion, they’ll soon break away.
In addition to roads, you need accommodations for travelers. Call them hotels, motels, inns, hostels, or caravanserais; regardless of the name, they provide safety and shelter compared to pitching your own tents or sleeping rough outside. The same is true for port cities and sea travelers—and although we often forget it, ports themselves are a form of infrastructure. Yes, there are natural harbors ships can dock in, but many are dug out to be deeper, or have breakwaters constructed for protection, and they also benefit from piers, warehouses for goods, port authorities, and more things not found in nature.
Speaking of goods, that brings us to the question of why the journey is happening. Travel for leisure is a relatively new phenomenon; in the past only the elite had the time and money necessary to go to the countryside for the summer. And the distances they traveled were much, much smaller—often no more than a day’s journey, or maybe a few days. Which, given the speeds of the time, meant less than a hundred miles. If you were an English gentleman, spending your winter in Bali would mean spending the entire autumn getting there, and the entire spring getting back.
When travel happened, it was usually for more load-bearing purposes. Literal loads: trade has always been a major concern, and it’s grown vastly more important in modern times, as improved travel facilitates the long-distance transport of even perishable goods. Archaeological analysis shows, however, that the general principle is an ancient one. You might not be able to ship exotic fruit across the world, but materials like seashells, obsidian, gems, and metals could and did travel hundreds or even thousands of miles. They likely weren’t taken that whole distance by a single person; instead they would be traded across shorter links, passing from hand to hand until something from Guatemala wound up in Minnesota. Completely self-sufficient communities have always been rare.
Some travelers were pilgrims, going to a distant holy site for spiritual benefit. Others were soldiers, heading off to defend their country’s borders or invade a neighboring land. Government officials might need to travel in order to take up a new post, inspect someone else’s doings, collect taxes, or conduct a survey of holdings. Messengers were constantly on the move, bearing word from the center to the periphery and back again.
I said before that this kind of thing is necessary for the maintenance of an empire. That was a brief gesture in the direction of the myriad of effects that come from travel being (relatively) quick and reliable. Some of these overlap with mass communication, but it’s only since the invention of the electric telegraph that we’ve had a widespread system for conveying information without someone having to carry it to its destination.
Having good travel unifies a society in countless ways. It means that people from different places will encounter each other more regularly, forging social and economic links. News will disseminate quicker and farther, increasing the feeling that what happens in another place is relevant to your own life. And not all of that news will be weighty matters of business or governance, either; gossip allows for the invention of celebrity, and people will begin looking to central locations like capitals for guidance on what to wear and what meals to cook for guests. Dialect differences begin to smooth out, until you get a standard form of the language used far beyond its original home. (“French” as we think of it today was not always spoken throughout France, but rather was born out of the dialect spoken in the Île-de-Fra