Establishing a Timeline

One of the classic conundrums in sci-fi world building is determining how far into the future you want to set your world. Although not an absolute requirement, and quite easy to dismiss if your project is set in a long time ago, in a galaxy far away—should you decide to care about such things, this decision can have a significant long reverberating impact on the rest of your project.

If you set your world too close to the present day, you run the risk of creating a timeline that collides with current events. Such is the case with Star Trek. Supposedly the Eugenics Wars happened back in the mid-90’s and World War III will supposedly occur in 2026 (which at the time of writing does present itself as non-zero possibility). Star Trek is set far enough into the future (although given its technological achievements it may be too optimistic by a few hundred years by this writer’s estimation), that issues of conflicting aspects of history can be easily ignored (i.e. Star Trek is not our potential future since its past is not our past/present). Still, I think there is real value in cutting your world off from the present and firmly planting itself into the future.

The classic way to achieve this is to have some sort of cataclysmic event, an inciting moment where our real history and the history of the project diverge. Popular tropes here include but are not limited to, nuclear war, climate and ecological devastation, or global pandemics. This effectively creates a soft (or hard, depending on your perspective) reset on the world that we know which in turn lays the foundation for new possibilities, unencumbered by the real world historical forces that came before and allows for a degree of freedom in which to imagine and play.

Another approach is to simply ignore it. Although alt-history is a big aspect of the world building genre, I don’t think they are necessarily one and the same. The former is—at its core—about positing a question; one altered fact, one crucial change, and playing out the consequences of said change as a thought experiment, however elaborated and completely beyond the initial scope of the question it may (and more often than not inevitably) becomes. World building has the luxury of more degrees of movement. It can start from the past and discover its way into the future. But it can just as easily start from the end and move backwards. It has the benefit of determining any number of starting points and branching out from there, not necessarily confined working its history sequentially through a series of casual effects.

It can start as small as a single bedroom, inside of a small run down apartment unit, that is on 20th floor of a industrial tenant, situated within the housing district of a mining colony, belonging to a multi-national conglomerate with ties to the central government, acting as a spine of a world or story, of which each degree of scale provides ample opportunity to be filled in with miscellaneous detail.

This is more or less the approach I’m taking for this project, although our starting point may not be quite as atomic as a single bedroom, I don’t intend to start “at the beginning”. Despite that, I do have a general sense of what the timeline looks like. And it looks something like this:

The Present

This one is self-explanatory. The present is just “now” give or take half a century or so. The idea is to not touch this in any way shape or form. When is our setting for this project? After “The Present”. How long after? Doesn’t matter. We’re keeping it as vague as possible. At some point we’re going to switch the calendar to further reinforce the ambiguity of it all.

The Gap

The gap is more of an extension of the present. These two sections of the timeline are deliberately left vague. The gap even more so, it is the most malleable and least detailed section. It just means that if we need a few years or decades to make the timeline work in the future, we can just extend or contract the gap.

Imperial Splendor

This is the first section that involves any real decision making. We’re going to try to keep it simple, at least at the beginning. I’m deliberately leaving room for the possibility of multiple dynasties, warring factions, ebbs and flows in imperial power, but the main thing here is that I want to bring in the aesthetics of the Long 19th Century. Gundam Wing being one of my primary influences takes a lot of its visual cues from this time period (although earlier in the century). This era also serves as the stand in for the classic trope of the “Precursors” or the Old Empire, although in our case is not so removed that it is shrouded in myth and/or legend.

Imperial Civil War

This is the era that immediately predates our “current era”. We’re going to throw in an age of conflict that has direct ramifications into the current state of our world and sets up the social, economic, and political context of the moment. We’ll leave it vague as usual, this could be one devastating war, like a World War, or a long period of instability that exhibits outbreaks of hostility but is characterized by political fragmentation, or a combination.

The Future

Or rather, “the present” in our world building project. Again, as with the previous ages we’re going to intentionally leave this vague but there are a few details that I’ve decided on here already. We haven’t achieved super-luminal travel, however we have cracked faster-than-light communications. The old empire at its furthest extent of power reached at least to the moons of Jupiter, although without establishing much in the way of settlements. The current power in the solar system will be centred around Earth, with Mars and the orbital space colonies being smaller centres of power.

And that’s it. That’s all we’re committing to at this moment. We’re not even going to put dates or number of years to this timeline. We want to keep as much flexibility as possible and fill it in piece by piece.