WORLD BUILDING 101

WORLD BUILDING 101

I’ve agreed to ‘compere’ a session entitled ‘World Building’ at the up-coming ‘Futura’ conference in Wolverhamption (15th June; I'll be joined on the panel by Kim Lakin-Smith and Janet Edwards) so I thought it would be an idea to think of the questions I could pose to the panellists … and, of course, my own answers to them.

So this, I guess, is Rod Rees’ ‘World Building 101’.

In writing fiction there are five elements – plot, theme, characters, style and setting – but in Science Fiction and Fantasy SETTING looms very large indeed.  SF and Fantasy tales invariably need a bespoke world to serve as the stage on which the story plays out (actually I’m hard pushed to think of a SF/Fantasy book that hasn’t a setting unique to itself … ‘Flowers for Algernon’, perhaps?). The examples are legion: Orwell’s Oceania; Herbert’s Arrakis, Prachett’s Discworld; Tolkien’s Middle Earth, my own Demi-Monde. From this it’s obvious that World Building is a skill every SF/Fantasy writer needs in his or her tool box.

But as I know from bitter experience World Building isn’t easy so let’s look at the KEY INGREDIENTS that a New World must have or as I call it, the CONSISTENCY CRAMPS.

1.       Your New World must be suitable for purpose. Remember this is the stage your characters will perform on and it must provide some – hopefully not all – of the pressures, dilemmas and threats your heroes must struggle with and triumph over. I say not all because it’s easy to lose yourself in world-building and to forget that it is, when all said and done, just a stage … it’s not a substitute for character interaction and dynamics. Think of your New World as another lead character and you won’t go far wrong. Personally I also like to reference my New Worlds with aspects of the Real World … it gives the readers an anchor against all the creative madness you have squalling around them.

2.       Your New World must allow the reader to suspend disbelief. To do this your New World must be coherent and, above all, consistent. There is nothing more aggravating for a reader to invest his time entering and exploring a New World only to find that the writer couldn’t be arsed to remember it’s intricacies and foibles, or WORSE has to keep playing that dreaded surprise get-out-of-jail illogic card to get his hero out of a corner he or she has been written into. And to do this needs PLANNING (see point #3 below).

3.       Your New World must be planned. Okay, so there’s a school of thought that the best way to develop a New World is just to dive right in and wing it. My view is that this is bollocks. At the very least the writer must understand the spatial co-ordinates of his New World – how all the elements (countries/planets/Zones of Frightfulness whatever) fit together – and for this you need a MAP! I’m not talking here of a supreme example of cartography, but at least a sketch of where everything fits (a piece of advice: if you want said map to feature in your published book don’t make it too complex – the Demi-Monde map suffers from this and is waaaaaaaay too small). Next up are the physical aspects of your New World (the physics/magic that applies there, the weather, geography, environment, biology, astronomy, zoology and so on … the stuff I hate doing) which make the New World believable. Sure these physical aspects might be fantastic but if they’re consistent, have a coherent logic and your characters believe in them then there’s no problem. Finally, we come to the interesting bit, the cultural/political/religious mores of the inhabitants populating your New World and who your characters have to interact with. I spend most time on these as they have the greatest impact on my protagonists. All-in-all New World building is a lot of work but if you want to suspend disbelief, the suspension starts here.

Okay, so you’ve spent days/weeks/months/years constructing your New World and the temptation to ram all this effort into the first chapter of your magnum opus as one huge info-dump is almost irresistible. BUT you must resist, you must resist the RASH OF THE INFO-DUMP.

The old adage in fiction writing is show don’t tell (only if you’re a genius like Orwell are you permitted to ignore this maxim). So your aim must be to let the reader discover the New World in a natural, unforced sort of way with information coming their way via the observations and actions of your characters. Seduction rather than rape and all that. The solution I came up with for the Demi-Monde was two-fold. First I pinched an idea used by Frank Herbert in ‘Dune’ and had mini-info-dumps in the form of extracts for manuals etc. at the beginning of each chapter and, secondly, I put all of my hard work on display in the Demi-Monde web site.

We come now to the URGE OF NEW LANGUAGE-ITIS which must, at all costs be controlled. Not

many of us are philologists like Tolkien so the subject of a writer developing a new language/vocabulary/series of terminologies to be used in their New World is (to me, anyway) a thorny one. My experience is that publishers (and a great many readers) HATE anything that smacks of a new language so the policy I’ve adopted is to use new words only when they convey new meanings. Unfortunately as the Demi-Monde was my first series I didn’t heed this warning and I thought to spice things up by using punning words rendered camel-case style (HimPerialism, ImPuritanism et al) and the kicking that I got from some (thankfully a minority) of readers was profound. So be VERY careful before you introduce a new language. And please be especially careful in naming your protagonists: if I see one more name rendered as Hzzzhgsdhyfi or something equally silly I think I’ll hurl chunks. Multiple ‘Zs’ do not an exotic name make.

Right, now we’re onto the CURSE OF THE CLICHÉ. There are a lot of SF/Fantasy writers out there all busily constructing worlds, some of them very, very similar. I mean, if I see one more story set in a faux-mediaeval world beset by wizards and witches, or a US High School plagued by vampires, murder will be done. Come on, kids, you can do better than that. Think outta the box!

Okay, nearly over. We now come to the CONDESCENDING ADVICE bit. If I was asked what I had learnt from building the Demi-Monde it would be:

1.       Once you’ve built a world you must abide by the restrictions you’ve imposed on it (nothing unsuspends disbelief faster than inconsistency) and that means having a reference (please make notes otherwise you’ll be continually flipping back thru your manuscript checking whether the vampire-infested Blood Lands are to the north or south of the werewolf-dominated Pack Lands or some such unproductive shit. And

2.       The world must be real to the characters you have living, working, struggling inside it. You may think it’s weird as hell to have variable gravity or time that flows at different rates during the day but to your characters living in this New World, that’s the way it is. Don’t have them saying ‘Gosh, that’s a surprise,’ every time you lay something odd on your reader.

That’s it. I hope it helps! Enjoy your building.

THE DEMI-MONDE FALL 3

This is the third of the plates that will be included in 'The Demi-Monde: Fall' I'm not sure why I chose Edinburgh to nuke - I went their on my honeymoon and thought it a fine city - but I needed somewhere to waste so the bad guys could convince the good guys to be PINC'd.

I've been playing around with PINC thinking about building a story around it and to this end I've beefed up the definition.

PINC (Personal Implanted nanoComputer) is a neurochip developed by ParaDigm CyberResearch. When implanted in a human brain, PINC gives instant access to the databases held on ParaDigm CyberResearch’s quantum computer, ABBA, which provides each PINC-equipped individual – known as PINCs – with 3 yottaQuFlops of cybermemory, the equivalent to every book, newspaper, instruction manual and leaflet produced since the invention of the written word: PINC has been described as the humankind’s ‘sixth sense’. Additionally, PINCs have the ability to communicate, PINC-to-PINC, via the medium of the ABBA-platformed PolyNet, this communication being known as TelePathy. It is estimated that as of November, 2040, 50% of the world’s population – 4.5 billion humans – have been PINC-equipped. Since it was first trialled in 2015, PINC has been responsible for most of the major economic, political, social and cultural shifts that the world has experienced, including the development of the pan-global, anti-PINC political movement known as The Natural Mind Party. The true impact of PINC on the human brain was revealed in the Reynolds Enquiry, the findings of which were published in 2040.

noöPINC

Just finalising the artwork for ‘the Demi-Monde: Fall’. This is noöPINC – the 2^nd-generation Personal Implanted nanoComputer – that features heavily (and crucially) in the book. NoöPINC is a cyborg-virus – a virus with man-made elements incorporated into its structure – these nanocybernetic structures acting as inception points for the development of the virus. The virus grows around them and by doing so absorbs the artificial elements into its genetic structure. Artwork as always by Nigel Robinson.

 

 

Got to say I'm bloody pleased with it. Sort of captured the somewhat creepy aspect of the device. Well done, Nigel!

THE DEMI-MONDE FALL 2

Here's the second preview of the illustrations that will be going into 'Fall' (excuse the typos - they're in the process of being corrected). This bit was written four years ago (doesn't time fly ...) and as I was looking for a symbol of a re-rejuvenated Britain it seemed that resuscitating the Blue Streak was the way to go. The Blue Streak was to have been the British ICBM, a totemic symbol of Britain's might and place in the world, but the deprivations of the Second World War, the country's economic decline and unease in Washington meant that the project was cancelled. All I'm hoping is that I wasn't being unwittingly prescient when I wrote this piece ...

Invent-10n

Hard at work on a novella I'm writing for Peter Coleborn and Alchemy Press. I had originally conceived it as a cut and paste piece made up of a montage from various diaries, newspaper cuttings etc. but Ive reined back and it'll be a tad more conventional now. It's a story set in a near-future Britain and features one of my favourite characters, a reBopper named Jenni-Fur. I got interested in the 30's jazz slang of people like Cab Calloway so I decided to update it a little and jenni-Fur's patois is the result. In her own words she's lush thrush with a tight tush.

I'm quite a way into the story now but the ending is proving to be a little tricky - it's a real downer.

Anyway here's Jenni-Fur:

THE DEMI-MONDE FALL

The final edit of the last book of the series 'Fall' is now with the publishers so I had to turn my attention to the plates that I would use in the book. As some of my readers will have twigged, the 'Real World' in the Demi-Monde is out-of-kilter with our world so I thought it would be fun to show some of these counter-factual differences as newspaper cuttings.

Here's the first:

I couldn't resist the idea of the marvellous Marilyn being exiled to the UK. The thought of her starring in some of the Elstree comedies is mouth-watering!

WHO WAS AGENT ELLI?

I attended a talk on the Cambridge Five given in Oxford yesterday by Professor Christopher Andrew (author of The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5). I was keen to sit in on the talk as my new book ‘Faktion’ is currently out with publishers and Philby and Cairncross (two of the ‘Five’) feature in the story. Moreover, I hoped that Professor Andrew would speak about the mysterious ‘Elli’, the GRU agent who penetrated MI5 in the early years of the Second World War  and whose identity has never been revealed  and has been much speculated on ever since.

This is an important subject for me, given that the unveiling of the identity of Elli is the prime thrust of ‘Faktion’s’ plot and I was hoping that nothing the good Professor would say would lead me to doubt my own – somewhat radical – identification of who Elli was. He didn’t … in point of fact he hardly mentioned Elli apart from confirming – in response to my question as to how confident he was that Elli was Leo Long (his preferred candidate) – that he was ‘very confident’.

Very confident he may be, but I also think he is very wrong.

First, perhaps, a brief summary of what is known for certain about Elli (much of this coming from the defector Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk who gave himself up to the Canadians in September, 1945, rather than be shipped back to the USSR):

·         Elli was a man;

·         He was a GRU agent who had access to MI5 intelligence (that he was a GRU agent is important, the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye being the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army. The Cambridge Five were run by the NKVD, the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs, Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, which was the forerunner of the KGB and the secret police organisation that implemented the orders of the Soviet Communist Party. The rivalry between the NKVD and the GRU was long and bitter);

·         He had access to sensitive government policy documents (it was Elli who tipped Stalin off about the Quebec Agreement, signed in August 1943, under which the UK and the US agreed to collaborate on the building of the atomic bomb);

·         Gouzenko first heard of Elli when on a cipher course in Moscow in 1942, so Elli must have been active before this date;

·         He is described as ‘ou nego shto-to Russkoe’ … having something of the Russian about him; and,

·         He was active during the 1940’s, dropping off the intelligence radar circa 1950.

Pretty poor pickings information-wise to identify an agent who was, perhaps, the most important of all the Soviet agents – and there were a lot of them – to have penetrated Britain’s intelligence community.

And this paucity of information has, as might be expected, stimulated a great deal of controversy regarding the identity of ‘Elli’. That’s why I went to Professor Andrew’s talk: to see if I had gone wrong in my own surmising as to the identity of Elli.

Christopher Andrews claims Elli was Leo Long, who he describes as a ‘sub-agent of Anthony Blunt’. In support of this contention he cites the un-corroborated testimony of Oleg Gordievski (a Soviet defector) and the ‘fact’ that ELLI in Russian translates as the plural of the English letter ‘L’. (I am reliably informed by my in-house Russian expert – Nelli – that this is ‘bollocks’: no Russian would ever refer to double-L as Elli. And, anyway, I doubt the Soviets would have been so stupid as to give their most important agent a code-name made up of his initials). But of equal concern is that as Leo Long was a sub-agent of Anthony Blunt’s he would have been run by the NKVD. Elli was run by the GRU. No … the Leo Long hypothesis is weak to the point of unsustainability.

To my mind, the journalist Chapman Pincher has a more coherent set of arguments when he suggests that Elli is Roger Hollis – Hollis worked for MI5 from 1939, eventually becoming Director-General in 1956 (see Pincher’s Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain for details). A large part of Pincher’s ‘evidence’ supporting the ‘Hollis is Elli’ conjecture is persuasive but circumstantial. For instance, he refers to the ‘ou nego shto-to Russkoe’ description of Elli as inferring that Elli had pre-Revolutionary connections with Russia (Nelli disputes this: in her opinion the phrase is so ambiguous as to invite several, equally plausible, interpretations) and apparently the Hollis family is able to trace its lineage back to Peter the Great. But my biggest problem with the ‘Hollis is Elli’ hypothesis is that Hollis would have been too junior in the period running up to 1942 (when Gouzenko first heard of him) to be regarded as the Soviets’ most important intelligence asset in Britain (apparently Elli’s intelligence was so highly thought of that it went straight to Stalin). Moreover, Hollis’s Russian antecedents were tenuous to say the least and I am doubtful they would have stimulated gossip in the GRU’s Moscow cipher school, where Gouzenko heard the rumour.

So, if Elli is neither Long nor Hollis, who was he?

We are looking for a man who had access to important intelligence (the sort not available to junior agents in MI5); was so highly regarded that he was run separately from all the other first-rank Soviet agents in Britain; was active before 1942, leaving the stage around 1950; had pre-existing connections with Russia; AND whose identity is so sensitive – embarrassing? – that it has been very effectively protected by both the Russians and the Brits from enquiring journalists and historians ever since.

And I think I know just the man who ticks all these boxes. Elli isn’t anyone the historians or the journalists have ever flagged. Yeah, I know who Elli was.

Sorry … but you’ll have to read ‘Faktion’ to find out who my candidate is!