Starting is always the most exhilarating part of any project. But that exhilaration quickly turns to disappointment when you finally put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard in this case) and the result doesn’t live up to what you had envisioned in your mind. It’s easy to get discouraged at this point. Hell, look at the giant gaps between posts as I delayed publishing because what I have written didn’t quite live up to my own expectations. I think the mistake here is thinking that you’re working on a book; that there’s an end state that you’re working towards. But world building isn’t linear. Neither is writing books for that matter. But even more so than ever before, the text is living, it is subject to change and evolution, and doesn’t have to be constructed to its final perfection before publishing. And it most certainly should not hold up other…

In the previous post, we established the roughly defined eras of this world building project. Now, let’s take the time to take a closer look at the political landscape the era of interest (“the future”, for lack of a better term). Just as before, we will be taking a gradual approach to fleshing out the various intricacies of government, political alliances and interest, ideologies, and balance of power. Not all of which will be established in this post. However, we will be establishing the rough outlines of a political equilibrium within the solar system. Following the collapse of the era of Imperial Rule, the political situation will have devolved into four major factions. In reality, there will be more than just four. And their characters and individual constitutions, will be more akin to a web varying alliances and economic cooperation treaties superimposing themselves on top of each other to…

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…

Storytelling and its cousin world building has always been a passion of mine. There’s something truly satisfying about crafting a world in your mind, hewing it from an amorphous idea into specific details that brings forth, if not life, something adjacent to it. I am not alone in this passion and I don’t pretend that this project will be anything special, innovative, particularly good, or even interesting. But if we have creative energies we need to channel somewhere, a blog seems to be safe place to get it out. Now that we’ve established the purpose (or lack thereof) of this project. Let us decide on a genre. There’s two main contenders here and I don’t claim to be any kind of trailblazer. As you can imagine, someone with these proclivities might have a great love for both fantasy and science fiction. You would be right. But which one should we…