Let’s build THE FUTURE! [cue dramatic music]

The Writing Excuses crew explores another angle on the massively multifaceted gem of a topic known as “worldbuilding.” We’ve touched on governments, religions, and magic systems in the past. This time we’re looking at a more exclusively science-fictional aspect of worldbuilding: extrapolating a future setting from what we know about the present.

We start with Howard explaining why and how he went about it all wrong, and then managed to salvage it in spite of that. We move on to strategies for doing this sort of future prediction, and how to employ them in concert to worldbuild underneath your next novel. Strategies include “worst-case scenario,” “best-case scenario,” “the human factor,” and “what’s cool?”

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Empire of the East, by Fred Saberhagen

Writing Prompt: “were-cuttlefish,” courtesy of Dan Wells.

Courtesy of Howard Tayler: those popping noises made by (we assume) the were-cuttlefish.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: A guiding decision — is the future of your story comprehensible or not? Post-singularity? Consider consequences. Strategies: worst-case scenario, best-case scenario, consider the human element, what’s cool. Are you telling character-driven stories or idea stories? Can you work backward — what story do you want to tell, now what framework does that imply?

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 30: World Building the Future!
[Howard] The Future! 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry.
[Dan] [Eerie humming sound] Sorry.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Brandon] All right. We’ve already impressed you with the title of this podcast. I think it’s downhill from here.
[Dan] Our work is done.

[Brandon] Yeah. We have had… we’ve talked a lot about world building fantasy, perhaps because I’m often in the driver’s seat and that’s what I do the most of, but we do have an excellent science fiction world builder as part of our podcast and we thought we should really do another science fiction podcast.
[Howard] That would be cool for me.
[Brandon] So we’re going to talk about… just like we talked world building magic, we want to kind of talk about world building the future… technology, society, politics, that sort of thing, for science fiction. So, Howard, how’d you go about building the technology for Schlock Mercenary?
[Howard] I went about it all wrong. I started telling the story before I had good reasons to back things up. Then I started making up those reasons as I went. So there’s a 1000 years of history between the time that you and I are currently living in and the time that the strip takes place in which some fantastically improbable events must have occurred for the world to look like it looks. Now since then I have made some guidepost sorts of decisions that… uh… the world that they are living in needs to be enough like ours that I can write social satire, that is…
[Brandon] Relevant?
[Howard] Comprehensible. Beyond that…
[Brandon] I want to say, I don’t think you did it necessarily the wrong way. We talk about there not being many wrong ways…
[Howard] I didn’t do it the way I would do it if I had to do it over.
[Dan] He may have done it the hard way.

[Brandon] Okay. Because, I think it’s very frequently when you’re just beginning something and brainstorming something, you can say, “I want to have X happen. How can I make X happen in my story?” Or “how can I make such a thing exist and make it relevant and make it actually work with the world building?” I do this all the time. I sat down before and said, “I want to tell a story about knights in plate mail and make it… this powerful, magical plate mail… how can I work that into a magical system I’ve been developing before and make everything work together?” You do that with technology, I assume?
[Howard] One of the things that I do with the technology is that any time I’m going to use something technological that we haven’t seen before in the strip, I consider the consequences. If this exists and will impact the plot in whatever way, what else might it impact? What is it going to change? I started doing that fairly early on, when I realized that the teraport was… what Larry Niven calls receiverless teleportation, which means you can teleport from the location of your teleport machine to anywhere. He says receiverless teleportation will result in a very short war. When I realized I’d built receiverless teleportation, I then went on to say, “Well, okay, there’s going to be a very short war.” I started looking at the upsets to commerce. What had they been using before? Well, what they had been using before must have had some sort of power structure behind it… political power, not mechanical power or energy power. How did that work? Once I started thinking along those lines, I reverse engineered the gatekeepers and their monopoly. That grew into, I think, some of the best stories I’ve ever told, because the implications of the teraport being brand-new technology were huge.
[Brandon] Right. Okay. I want to ask this, since you already brought it up. You like to use what’s going on in your comic strip to satirize what’s going on nowadays in our world. So how important is it for you to look to the future and try to accurately represent how social interaction would be? I mean, how do you walk that balance if you want to satirize our world?
[Howard] That’s a tough one. I made fun of HMOs… poor healthcare early in the strip and then realized that the logical progression of health care is it gets cheap enough over time… because it’s fundamentally a technological commodity. Healthcare gets cheap enough over time that a 1000 years from now, we really should all have universal robotically provided healthcare. Why didn’t we? I haven’t gone there in the strip, so I need to hold that back so I can keep making fun of the fact that people still get sick and die and it’s expensive to not get better. Does that make sense?

[Brandon] Right. Yeah. So in this case… but, this is part of the form you’re doing. Since you are doing satire, you have to kind of nudge things in a certain direction so that you can continue to have your satire. But there is this argument against science fiction, that the more realistically you try to build your science fiction, the bigger chance you have of alienating your reader or making the work incomprehensible. I mean, I had this problem honestly with the Time Machine. Great classic of science fiction, HG Wells. In this book, the man… the protagonist travels forward so far in time that humankind has evolved and then evolved beyond that and then evolved beyond that to the point that it’s completely incomprehensible to me. So it became not a science fiction story but something else to me. I’m not even sure what to explain. Science fiction has that trouble.
[Howard] Vernor Vinge describes a principle… I think he invented the term called singularity. It’s the point beyond which none of our predictions can make any sense at all because enough has changed that… the whole world is just absolutely, completely, irretrievably different. Schlock Mercenary is not set in a post-singularity setting. Charles… Charlie Stross, Charles Stross? Glass House, which is the only thing of his that I’ve read, which I need to repent of… is a post-singularity book, and was fascinating because he took pains to make things comprehensible. The setting that he put these people in, in the Glass House, was a re-creation of 20th and 21st century Earth life as it was remembered post-singularity. So he was able to do these social satire thing in ways that were hugely fascinating because… From somebody in the far-flung future looking back at how we lived back in caveman times before television was on your eyeballs or whatever… I’m not suggesting that’s what’s in the book. He was able to say things that you couldn’t say in another way. Brilliantly done.

[Brandon] Okay. Let’s stop for our book of the week. Dan is actually going to do this week’s book of the week?
[Dan] Yes. This week’s book of the week is Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagen. One of my very, very favorite novels as a child… well as a teen, I guess. It is a fantasy book, you think, but the deeper you get into it, you realize that it’s actually a future Earth where technology has ceased to work the way it’s supposed to, and magic has taken over. The way he extrapolates this future Earth is very interesting it’s set in India after this event, and by the end of the book, which is actually three novellas, you figure out how we got from where we are now to this very mystical god-imposed magic future. It’s really interesting. I love it. I recommend it highly. It is on audible. You can get it, audiblepodcast.com/excuse, 15 day free trial, you can get this book for free, and help support audible and our podcast.

[Brandon] All right. So. This is world building the future. Let’s talk about strategies for extrapolating what we have now to look to the future. What strategies do you guys use actively when you’re trying to build your science fiction?
[Howard] Strategy number one, I would call the worst-case scenario. Take something that is an issue today, extrapolate the worst-case, and then wrap a story around that. A guy who does this a lot is Paolo Bacigalupi with Clockwork Girl…
[Brandon] Windup Girl?
[Howard] Windup Girl and… what’s the one about the boats? Boat Breaker?
[Brandon] Yeah. Ship Breaker.
[Howard] Ship Breaker. In both of these books… sorry, Paolo, I wish I could remember your book titles faster… in both of these stories, he looks at something… something unpleasant. In Windup Girl, it’s seeds and how when you buy seeds, they’re sterile. What is the biological trend there? When he does this, the result for us as a reader is that on the one hand, you look at this and you think, “Oh, gosh, that’s a horrible thing. We must put a stop to it right now lest this book come to pass.” On the other hand, we might look at it and think, “Well, if it does come to pass, maybe some of these strategies that these characters are using will help us.”
[Brandon] Right. This is again… a lot of science fiction is less about predicting the future and more about talking about our current human experience by looking to the future and using the future as a metaphor for what could happen or what we fear will happen.
[Dan] And that’s the next strategy of future prediction I’m going to say, is don’t forget about human weaknesses. Always think about where greed is going to take us as a society, where commercialism, materialism, privatization… all of these trends that we can kind of see now. I’m writing a science fiction right now, actually, and that’s kind of the take I’m looking at it… I guess it’s the anti-Roddenberry. How horrible is our society going to get because humans are selfish, greedy little things?
[Howard] If we’re trying to quantify strategies… we’ve talked about worst-case scenario, we’ve talked about the human element, the other one that I would look at is best case scenario. Take something that is a huge problem right now, and postulate a fix — a wonderful, perfect, fantastic fix for it. Now start building changes around that. I mean, let’s say the fix is we want cheap power for automobiles or…
[Brandon] I’ve got a good example of that. Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon is about someone discovering a cure for autism. The book is simply about what happens when a cure for autism occurs… to people who are autistic or have… the friends and family of those who are autistic… how… you know, because being autistic is fundamentally part of your personality, if that get cured, your personality changes. Very fascinating book, wonderful book. It’s not approaching science fiction from a real doomsday sort of thing, it’s actually looking at a best case scenario. We found a cure. Yay! What does this do?
[Howard] Now let’s tell interesting stories about people who are impacted by that. That’s what I would come back to with each of these, is that the story is not about the worst-case scenario or the best case scenario, it’s about the people.

[Brandon] Okay. I’m going to actually throw out a caveat there. That’s the sort of story I like to read. That is not actually the only type of story. In science fiction, there is a grand history of idea stories, in particular, where… and these tend to work better as short stories… but it is all about the idea and less about the characters.
[Howard] If you are writing a short story, it is fun to throw down 5000 words with 20 characters, none of whom are especially deep but all of whose lives have been touched by whatever this change is, so that you can illustrate the change. Those are fun.
[Brandon] Or you can pull the Asimov idea. Often he would have books or short stories where the characters were not as interesting as the problem, and it dealt with the problem and how to fix it. This is okay. It really is.
[Dan] There’s also something like Ringworld which was very, very idea driven. The thing is, I don’t know if something like Ringworld would work as well today. I don’t know if it would get published today.
[Brandon] I don’t know. Ringworld is one half adventure fiction at the same time.
[Howard] Ringworld is a space opera in which…
[Dan] I suppose. I may be remembering far less adventure than it actually had.
[Howard] [garbled]

[Brandon] This is an argument that we should not have when we are limited to 15 minutes. So I’m going to throw out another strategy. This is the Brandon strategy of writing science fiction. What’s cool? See, this is not how I approach necessarily writing other things, but sometimes I do. I do work backward a lot, particularly in my science fiction. I say, “What would be a really awesome story to tell? Let’s build a framework for it.” That’s okay. I’m not necessarily sitting down when I write science fiction generally to try and write something that’s going to extrapolate to the future to look toward… what can we change, what’s going wrong, all of these sorts of social science fiction which are wonderful, which I love to read. One of my favorite stories of all time is Harrison Bergeron. But when I sit down to write it, I end up writing stuff about really cool space battles.
[Dan] A good example of that is actually Firefly. I can’t say for sure that that’s how it was developed, but it really feels like it. He wanted to tell a western in space, which demanded certain ways that his world functioned. You work backwards from there, and say, “Well, we need frontier planets, we need a big central government, we need all of these other things, how can we explain them?”
[Brandon] That’s a great example. Firefly.
[Howard] One of the things that you look at Firefly… the world building that he did there. He established a solar system which had hundreds of habitable worlds on it. Some were planets in their own right, some were moons, whatever. Then he established no FTL travel. So that we’re not escaping that system. We have lots of worlds at our disposal, but we can’t run away from the whole thing. Those two principles made the universe very, very compelling.

[Brandon] We have a writing prompt. I think we have a writing prompt that will come magically to us from the ether. You are instructed to write your story based on this concept, and here it is.
[Unearthly voice] Oh, no, it’s the were-cuttlefish! [strange chomping noises] You are out of excuses and time. Now go write quickly before it gets you. [more strange chomping noises] [Pop! Pop!]