Shoer writes:

With the advent of superluminal travel, each species soon discovered the network of Channels traversing the galaxy, allowing near-instantaeous travel from Channel Anchor to Channel Anchor. The giant artifacts spoke of a precursor civilization - but where are they now? Their ruins, gargantuan structures on planetary scales, float dead in the Burial Grounds or the Sea of Relics, but no explorers have ever located their ruins on a planet. The only unexplored portions of the galaxy seem uninhabitable: the vast Far Reaches, and the irradiated Cathedral at the galactic core...

Sounds like a smashing setup for a novel to me.

via Joseph Shoer

Metheny includes details about the biology and behavior of her alien species, as well as the ecology of the fictional Morae River region. In addition to the The Morae River blog, she has also published a book exploring the imaginary ecosystem.

[The Morae River via lines and colors]

The Gigatus
The Sabulo
The Blue -Throated Hulompolus
The Balandic Cula
The Spotted Bufodd
The Greater Fugamus
The Red Tailed Mardik
The Banded Terrinsc
The Mountain Uru

This is something I've struggled with in my own fiction, and it's a much messier problem than you would think. Even when you feel like your tough woman space captain and your sensitive young astro-biologist are incredibly well drawn and full of character and neuroses, and nobody would ever imagine they were the same person. And then you're looking over your novel for the tenth time, and you realize that they're all sounding absolutely identical.

It makes sense, in one way — your characters are all aspects of you, after all. They all came out of your head, unless you based them on your friends or other fictional characters. (And even if they're based on someone else, they're still your creations, when it comes down to it.) You're speaking through their mouths. But that doesn't mean they're doomed to sound like you, or like the same person. This is totally a solveable problem.

Here are some solutions to the issue, ranging from least crude to crudest. If the least crude solution works for you, then you don't need to worry about the rest of them — but I've used all of these methods at various times, and there's no shame in using tough measures on your characters.

1) Listen to how people talk. I have a feeling this is what "real" writers do. Don't listen to how people talk on television or in the movies — go to a bar or cafe and just listen to the conversations around you, and try to hear how people are speaking. If you can write down snippets of people's conversations without being a total creep, then do that. V.S. Pritchett writes about doing this when he was a young writer — and one of those snippets of conversation even found its way into a short story that he later published. Try to get a feel for the rhythms of conversation, and the way different people form sentences. Bottom line is, if your characters all sound the same, then they're not sounding like natural dialogue at all.

2) Try to "hear" your characters' individual voices. This is not really cruder than the first one, actually. If your characters are really that vivid in your head — if you really feel like they're real, breathing people that you've brought to life inside a living story — then you should be able to hear their voices. And they don't just sound different because they choose different words to express themselves — they are saying different things.

Say Space Captain Starjumper makes lots of definitive statements, because she's got lots of points to get across, while Astrobiologist Second Class Sparrow is constantly raising tentative half-questions. Maybe Captain Starjumper has an undercurrent of insecurity, and that's part of why she has to make sharp statements all the time. And Sparrow really knows more than he's saying. The way in which people say the things they say also provides the reader with more information.

3) Realize your characers are not talking to you, or directly to the reader. Unless you're really doing some kind of post-modern fourth-wall-shredding exercise, your characters are talking to each other. And think about what kind of reaction your characters are hoping to get when they say something. Not the reaction they actually do get — it's too easy to jump straight to that — but the reaction they expect. Fine, Navigator Angstrom's revelation that he turns gay whenever the ship is in hyperspace meets with a stunned silence. But was Navigator Angstrom hoping for a stunned silence? Was he trying to provoke an angry response, or some kind of accepting, reassuring statement? Was he trying to guilt-trip the captain for making so many hyperspace jumps lately? It sounds obvious, but it's often hard to remember: the response you're hoping for shapes the way you talk. And every one of these characters has a script in his/her head for how this conversation is going to go, whether it goes that way or not. You, as the author, know the way you want/need for the conversation to go, but you need to know what the characters want/expect as well.

Update: Zack Stentz, writer on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Fringe, points out another helpful way of looking at this: "Every interaction between two people is on some level a negotiation for status." Remember that, and your characters' speech will automatically get richer and more interesting. Apparently this advice originates with Terry McNally, co-writer of Earth Girls Are Easy.

4) Try giving each character a few unique verbal tics, or habitual words. Maybe Captain Starjumper says "I declare" a lot, in between all those declarative statements she makes. (Okay, bad example.) Maybe Navigator Angstrom makes lots of puns, or tosses lots of sarcastic jokes into the end of every comment. Give
each character a few habits of speech, and maybe after a while those props will help you hear each character speaking differently. You may even be able to go back and take out some of these tics, if they get too repetitive, and if the speech around them has started to differentiate itself from the rest.

5) Go one step further, and give them catch phrases and stuff. This worked for Dickens, after all. A lot of Dickens characters basically have the same verbal habits over and over — the most famous of these, of course, is Mrs. Malaprop, who always uses words incorrectly, and gave us the term malapropism. (Update: Various people have pointed out this is not true. Sorry about the mix-up. I've read almost every Dickens novel, and somehow I believed this incorrectly. My bad!)

But it's true of a lot of minor Dickens characters. And especially if you're going for humor, there's nothing wrong with having a character who comes out with variations on the same funny line on several occasions. Maybe your astrobiologist character constantly states the obvious, but prefaces it by saying, "I have made a cunning observation."

6) Realize that you may have, at most, three or four character "voices" and refine those. As regular readers of this blog know, I utterly, unreservedly love Joss Whedon. But he is a perfect example of a writer who has a few voices that he uses over and over. There's always the stilted British person (Giles/Wesley/Adelle), the funny, quippy nerd (Xander/Topher/etc.) and the lost/crazy girl (River/Echo/Fred/etc.) And the amazing thing is — those characters are all wildly individual and have tons of depth. You would never mistake Giles for Adelle, even leaving apart that she's way prettier. (Well, somewhat prettier.) Whedon may have a few basic voices that he reuses over and over again, but he finds other ways to make his characters unique and distinct from each other. He's also worked, over the years, to refine each of those voices and make the most of their strengths.

7) Vary your sentence lengths, and play with punctuation. If all else fails, try this. In real life, some people tend to speak in longer sentences, others in shorter ones. (Actually, we all vary our sentence lengths all the time, but our average sentence lengths vary quite a bit.) There's nothing wrong with just deciding arbitrarily that Captain Starjumper's average sentence will be five words long, while Navigator Angstrom's will be twenty. Also, you can try giving one character lots of emdashes or colons in his/her speech — but do this sparingly, and only for one character. In my new fantasy novel, I have one character who includes lots of parenthetical statements, and I put those in actual parentheses. But I made sure to avoid any funny punctuation games with any other character's speech, so it didn't start annoying the reader too much.

8) Adjust the French/Anglo-Saxon mix. Those of us who write in English are lucky — it's actually two languages in one. (Plus random language detritus from a dozen other languages.) We're speaking a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and French, the language of the Normans who conquered England in 1066. And just as the Enterprise's engines are a mix of matter and anti-matter, your speech is a mix of French and Anglo-Saxon. And some people definitely use more words of Latin origin than others — it's often a badge of education and upper-class status to use lots of obviously Latinate words. So if all else fails, try experimenting with having one of your characters use more Anglo-Saxon words than the rest of them, or more fancy French words. Grab a dictionary of etymology and think about which words come from which language — you can give your characters a more Germanic or more French "voice" without actually making them speak a foreign language at all. You could also just try having some characters use more one- or two-syllable words than the rest, but this might be subtler and more fun.

Illustrations from Jovike, vivir_descalzo_mx and Terry McCombs on Flickr.

The new issue of The New Yorker profiles Cameron — from his stormy marriages to his obsession with scuba diving — as well as offering a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Avatar. There's a great deal in there about Cameron's tempestuous and controlling personality (when he's gone over to the emotional dark side, the crew refer to him as "Mij" — "Jim" backwards), and the particularly colorful insults he lobs at the crew ("Watching him light is like watching two monkeys fuck a football."). But the article also reveals how much detail Cameron put into Pandora, the planet where Avatar is set:

All directors have a God complex; Cameron takes his unusually seriously. For "Avatar," he worked with a linguist to develop the Na'vi language, inspired by fragments of Maori he picked up in New Zealand years ago. He based Pandora, and its myriad flora (spike tears, cliff slouchers, stinger ivy) and fauna (direhorses, banshees, slinths), partly on the creatures of the coral reefs and kelp forests he has seen at the abyssal depths. He hired a team of artists to execute his ideas, but reserved one creature for himself: the thanator, a six-legged black pantherlike beast, twenty-four feet long, covered in plate scales, with a reptilian double set of jaws and a threat display resembling that of a fan lizard.

As well as how nitpicky he has been about bringing his particular vision of Pandora to life:

Any disagreement is resolved with the indisputable logic of an older sibling who has invented a game and deigned to let his kid brother play: his universe, he wins. "I hate this fucking thing, but I can be very specific about it," he said, when an image of a rock arch sacred to the Na'vi came up on the screen. "This looks like petrified wood," he said, circling the offending part with a red laser pointer. "It has a longitudinal grain structure. It looks very fragile to me. This hard, crystally structure looks like barn wood. We want to say that this arch formed as igneous rock, that it's a lava formation that got eroded, but it's fracturing out along the crystal planes of minerals."

Regardless of your feelings on Cameron or Avatar, it's a fascinating look at Cameron's control-freakishness and the themes that have played throughout his movies. Cameron talks about Avatar as primarily a film about women and how men relate to their mothers or lovers (which is also how he largely views his Terminator movies and Aliens), but also sees it as his answer to science fiction adventure tales like John Carter of Mars. We also get a few more details on the film we haven't heard before (the Na'vi arrows apparently seal off wounds — which help the movie's PG-13 rating — and the marines have to employ modern ballistic weapons instead of futuristic energy weapons because of the humidity on Pandora), and a description of filming with the mecha AMP Suit (which Cameron himself is wearing in the picture above). The magazine also had other directors of big budget epics — Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Peter Jackson — weigh in with their views on Cameron, his world-building, and what they've seen of Avatar.

Man of Extremes: The Return of James Cameron [The New Yorker]

It's another outing of Free Advice for Struggling Writers, our semi-regular writing advice column, in which free advice could cost you... your sanity. Or more likely, ten whole precious minutes.

I was thinking about denouements a lot, after the ongoing debate over Dumbledore's funeral in Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. The story's main action wraps up with the showdown between Harry, Dumbledore, Snape and Draco... do we need to see Albus going in the ground afterwards? Do we need the closure? Obviously, we know without seeing it that they're going to bury Dumbledore — there's no tradition in the Potterverse of eating the honored dead, that I know of — and you could argue the story ends with Dumbledore dying and Harry deciding he can't go back to Hogwarts. But given that the whole sixth book is about the relationship between Harry and Dumbledore in many ways, it feels unsatisfying not to say goodbye to Dumbledore properly. It blunts the emotional impact of the whole story.

This is definitely something I've struggled with in my own work — the locomotive of the story's main plot has deposited my characters at their destination, and is now chugging off into the distance. But the characters are still milling around on the platform, with one last chance to talk to each other, to resolve all of the issues from that long train ride, before they disperse forever.

How do you let these poor beleaguered travelers have their say, without making the reader feel trapped in a railway station?

As far as I can see, there are several uses for a denouement:

1. Explain what the hell happened, that you were too busy detonating things to explain during your climax.

2. Wrap up all the loose ends, including stray plot devices and random plot threads that didn't already get blown up.

3. Give your characters some emotional closure, and one last chance to work through the choices they've made.

4. Hint at how life will go on, after the book is over. (And lay down some landmines for your characters to step on in the sequel, if any.)

5. Provide some resolution to the themes of your story.

I'm basically going to argue that reason #5 is the only absolute requirement for your denouement — and even that can be done in a sentence, if you're deft. Reasons #1-4 may only be necessary if you botched your climax*, and in any case you can let your readers do a lot of heavy lifting, if you provide a few cunning hints about how things are shaking out.

While I was sorting our my thoughts on this topic, I was lucky enough to run into Doug Dorst, author of the amazing Alive In Necropolis, and asked him what he thought made for a good denouement. It turns out he struggled with this same question in his own novel: "I don't think I nailed it. I felt like I was going on and on. It felt like this uneasy series of sacrifices."

By "sacrifices," Dorst means he wanted to give every character a satisfying conclusion to his or her arc, but there just wasn't space "It could have gone on for another hundred pages... I didn't want it to be like the last Lord Of The Rings movie, which had like nine endings."

Dorst came up with one clever solution to his problem: He described one key scene of his denouement only in a police report, which was quick and efficient, plus the form of the police report added a bit of stylized coolness. It wasn't as rich or descriptive as actually narrating the scene, but the reader can always add some of that themselves.

The main thing that occurs to me, after talking to Dorst, is a general maxim: There will always be loose ends. Always. Even if you spent 1,000 pages tying up loose ends after your story begins winding down, all of that frenetic resolution will probably just generate a new batch of loose ends, which you'll need another 1,000 pages to cope with.

Another maxim that occurs to me is: There are a lot of things that are way more interesting to read about when they take place during a crisis. Both because your space wizard will have to speak a lot more concisely when he/she is dodging the enemy's laser-spells at the same time, and because people who think they are about to die tend to make a lot more interesting snap judgments. Think about that bit in the penultimate episode of Buffy season four, where Buffy and her friends process their relationship while climbing down into the evil army monster base: it's a lot more interesting than processing their relationship over iced tea.

Here's what it boils down to, for me. (Feel free to disagree, as always.) The climax is where your plot ends. The denouement is where your story ends.

(We had a lengthy discussion about the difference between plot and story here — suffice to say that I wound up being convinced that "story" means something more emotionally rich, more mythic, more character-centric, than "plot," which is more to do with "we have to find the Mystical Sceptre of Alpha Centauri before the Oort Warlocks do!")

Sometimes your plot and your story end in the same sentence: the space wizard Xxamuel finds the Mystical Sceptre and strikes down the head Oort Warlock, and in that split second, Xxamuel finally understands why his father was so distant throughout his childhood. Xxamuel vanquishes the Oort Warlock, and his longstanding childhood issues, in the very same breath. He stands triumphant, a whole man at last. The end.

But if your plot doesn't end with enough of a clear-cut catharsis to resolve the main themes of your novel, then yes, you need a denouement.

And yes, you may feel as though some of the loose ends of your story are crying out to be addressed. But if that's the case, I'd try and do it as ruthlessly, and quickly, as possible. Remember: readers actually like it when you make them do a lot of the work themselves. And a big part of the pleasure of reaching the end of a book is getting to imagine in your own mind how the characters will go on afterwards — the story keeps unspooling in your head after you stop turning pages, except that the training wheels have come off. So the less you spoonfeed the reader in your final pages, the more you're inviting her/him to start imagining the story after the book ends.

Try borrowing from the cinematic device of the camera's slow pan across the battlefield, in which you glimpse all the characters doing something. So instead of this:

"Xxamuel," said Rachel, "I would have parlance."

"Speak," said Xxamuel, still studying the Mystical Sceptre and admiring its lingering glow.

"We lost much in this battle," Rachel said. "I gave up my Bracelets of Stellar Beauty, and now must walk as a mortal woman through the spacelanes. So I have decided to return to Proxima, there to live in contemplation as my beauty wanes."

"Nay, woman," said Xxamuel. "Stay, and be my wife. With the Mystical Sceptre, all things are possible."

"You cannot keep the Mystical Sceptre," the wise old counselor Zithra interjected. "It must be returned to the Shadowed Halls of Alpha Centauri." He reached for the Sceptre, and Xxamuel considered for a moment, then handed it over with a muttered "Tcha."

"I have a hole in my hand, and yet it still grips," marveled Oxblood, flexing his massive hand to show off the huge circular hole that the magical laser blast had instantly cauterized. "Betimes I shall pilot my shuttle with this hand, and the hole will fit perfectly around the thruster control. Verily, it is a fortunate wound!"

"Now that the Holy Order of Comet Swift has been disbanded," wept Zallah, "I must return to my old vocation as a barmaid in the Jump Station. Those tankards will weigh heavy, even on an antigrav tray."

"Nay, woman," said Xxamuel. "Stay, and be my wife. Rachel will not have me, now that I have lost the Mystical Sceptre."

You can do this:

Xxamuel looked around the shattered remains of his Dome-city throneroom, and saw Rachel already slipping away, tears in her eyes. Xxamuel started to go after Rachel, but the wise Zithra tapped him on the shoulder and took the Mystical Sceptre from his grasp, stowing it safely in his robes. Nearby, Oxblood flexed his wounded hand, marveling that the massive hole did not impair his mighty grip, and Zallah wept into the tatters of her Comet Frost Orbit habit. Over on the far end of the room, Robert the Ogre coughed up a few Oort Warlock bones and slowly, contemplatively, donned the helmet he had so long ago cast aside.

Both examples are pretty wretched, but you get the idea — give us a nice panoramic sweep of your scene, or give us little grace notes that just hint at what your characters are going to do next.

Most of all, try to think of ways those plot loose ends relate to your novel's theme, and make them part of a thematic resolution. I was talking to Annalee about this the other day, and she was saying she thinks of the denouement as the place where the story harkens back to its beginnings — the main plot is resolved, and life settles into a new version of "normal," and in some ways we look back at the status quo that the novel started with.

Say the theme of your novel is "Xxamuel deals with his daddy issues," and maybe in a larger sense, the theme is "family." Then one way to approach all of your loose-end tying is to make sure it all feels like a last approach to the theme. (Without being heavy-handed, of course.) This doesn't mean shoe-horning lingering plot questions into a homily about "family," but rather it's just one way of thinking about which loose ends to prioritize, and which ones you might want to let slide. To the extent that your theme is the sinew of your story (just as plot is the bones) your final moments can feel more weighty if they feel thematic.

But what do you think?

* - This asterisk is dedicated to giggling about the term "climax," which sadly is the best term for what I'm talking about here. They should come up with a better word for this, like "plotgasm." Oh, wait.

Yes, it's time for another outing of Free Advice for Struggling Writers, our semi-regular writing advice column, which I'm hoping to make more regular.

You remember the Topic Sentence — when you were an impressionable young scribble-ninja, your schoolteachers pounded it into you. It's the thing where you start (or occasionally end) a paragraph with a single pithy sentence that sums up the rest of the paragraph. It's the pastry shell into which the paragraph's meat is stuffed. This paragraph does not begin with a topic sentence, as such.

It's very tempting to use topic sentences in your fiction, and sometimes it may actually make sense. When you're doing a chunk of exposition, for example, the topic sentence may actually make the infoshovel go down more easily. You can start a paragraph by saying, "The Elysian Confederacy grew quickly in the outer rim of the galaxy, but then ran into trouble." And the rest of the paragraph explains how quickly the Confederacy grew, and what sort of trouble it encountered.

But when you get farther away from the essay format, the topic sentence becomes more and more of a treacherous friend. Take this paragraph:

Captain Samson was in a terrible mood. He stormed around the flight deck, barking semi-intelligible instructions at Navigator Ingalls and Second Gunnery Master Jordan. Samson nearly maimed Chief Petty Officer Jorgenson during weapons trials. And then, during a tactical session with the ship's five strategic telepaths, the Captain broadcast thoughts of such astounding belligerence, Senior Telepath Vonox actually fainted.

So what's wrong with that paragraph? Well, it's pretty badly written in general — sorry about that. Whenever I try to write "example" paragraphs from non-existent fiction, my writing gets much worse for some reason. But the main thing that's wrong with it is that the first sentence is completely redundant. If the rest of the paragraph is even remotely well written, you will already know that Captain Samson is in a terrible mood without needing to be told.

But the reverse is just as likely to happen. You can have a paragraph where the first sentence says everything that you need to say, and then the rest of the paragraph elaborates needlessly:

Every stomp of Jordan's boots on the crumbling shale announced that he wasn't going to let some ancient book tell him what to do with his life. He strode ahead of the rest of us, and his heavy gait was full of defiance in the face of prophecy. He kicked rocks out of his way and muttered under his breath about long-dead gods who should keep their opinions to themselves.

That first sentence can stand alone — or can be combined with other sentences which actually convey some new information. But trying to turn it into a topic sentence results in a dull, repetitive paragraph.

Another huge problem with topic sentences I've noticed, in my own writing and other people's, is the tendency to separate out "theme" and "action." Let's say you have a paragraph where the topic sentence contains meaningful context, and the following sentences all describe actions, or circumstances, that we need to know about, and which only make sense if you know the context. It still may make more sense to intersperse the "context" stuff with the "action" stuff a bit more, rather than maintaining some kind of artificial, ninth-grade-essay separation from "topic" and substance."

But for sure, there are some good uses of the topic sentence as well. Even at the best of times, it smacks of "telling" rather than "showing," but there's nothing wrong with a little telling if you do it with style. It can be fun to set up a theme with a clever opening sentence, and then provide variations and amplifications on it in the sentences that follow. And if you're especially sly, your topic sentence can set up an expectation, which the rest of the paragraph then subverts as much as it bears out.

My personal favorite, among topic sentences that actually do some heavy lifting, is the quote followed by the narrator's own observations that bear it out. Like so:

"The ghosts of Delta Prime do not need your pity, Earthling," Allura told me, and it was true. The ghosts were too busy going to their ghostly shopping malls, getting spectral manicures and pedicures, and playing undead bingo, to wonder what I thought of them. I saw them everywhere: holding remembrance services for the living, dancing on the planet's shifting air currents, and huffing the exhaust from my land cruiser, which seemed to affect them like really good sake.

I guess my main point about topic sentences is: Don't overuse them. It can be tempting, in prose fiction, to try and sound pithy, or to signpost for the reader what's going on at any given time. But too much of this sort of tour-guiding in your stories can bore and annoy the reader, even if he/she isn't consciously aware of the reason. A little bit of topic sentencing, here and there, can feel delightfully retro and whimsical. (Chosen at random, here's a lovely topic sentence from P.G. Wodehouse: "George Mackintosh did not, I am glad to say, carry out his mad project to the letter.") But too often, they come across as "telling you what I'm going to tell you, and then telling you what I'm telling you." Best to get the news out there straight away, without any harrumphing and prefacing, most of the time.

So that's this week's Free Advice for Struggling Writers. Next week, if I can bestir myself to finish it, you'll get my dissertation on "denoument versus picking at a scab." So what do you think about topic sentences?

Awesome pulp cover scans by Matthew Kirscht on Flickr.

We were talking about a book he'd written, and I asked him if he'd tell me the answer to a Big Unanswered Question in the book. (I won't say who this novelist is because I don't have time to call him and ask him if I can quote him.)

NOVELIST: I can't tell you, Josh. I don't know the answer.
ME: Really? It's like, a big unanswered question for the characters and for the reader.
NOVELIST: For me, as well. I don't know.

Which lead us to this: there will always be a point in your world-building when the world you've built outgrows the scope of the story you're telling. The edges are fuzzy; the next town over is mysterious. Perhaps you've hinted at something which suggests something else, which would really turn things on its fucking head IF you were to go down that path BUT YOU ARE NOT.

Not now. Not yet. And possibly, never. If you're world-building well, your world should feel full and alive and bustling in the corners, even if you've never actually made it over to the corner to see what the fuck is going on there. The world is true to your vision, but there is ambiguity and mystery and things undiscovered. I can know a thousand things about my the world I've created, but if there aren't a thousand others just outside of my creative periphery, then I start getting a little sketchy and bored.

This is the type of thing that drives studio and network executives crazy.

In the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season 2 finale "Born to Run," Cameron invites John Connor to get up on top of her and cut her open in order to check and see if her nuclear power source is leaking. This is what she says (although she never actually says it) but we can wonder whether this is what her plan actually is. Certainly she knows whether it's sound or not, so perhaps she's doing it for John's benefit. On the other hand, she's not exactly clinical about the way she makes him straddle her. Here's the conversation I had with one of my executives:

EXECUTIVE: I don't get that scene.
ME: How so?
EXECUTIVE: I just don't get it. Why does she do that? Why does he do it? Was he going to kiss her? Does she want him to? What does she really want from him here?
ME: Well, we've got a lot of different possibilities. I'm sure she has her reasons. We don't really know Cameron's mind, do we?
EXECUTIVE: Shouldn't we know it?
ME: We, who? The royal we, you and me? Or the audience?
EXECUTIVE: Well. Any of the above.
ME: Like I said. You could read that scene many different ways.
EXECUTIVE: Do you have a favorite?
ME: They're all God's children.

Which is why they usually hated me.

Now whether you want to believe it or not, this was not me just being lazy. This is the way that I like my drama, both written and watched-organic, ambiguous, a little messy and inclusive of multiple interpretations.

Which, I grant you, on a bad day is barely distinguishable from lazy.

I can think of at least four reasons Sarah let John go by himself with Weaver into the future at the end of season 2. I can think of any number of reasons why he chose to do so. I also welcome the idea that both of these decisions were horrible decisions, and you might think that the Sarah Connor and John Connor that exist in your head would never do what they did. Because while I may lead you down a particular path, it is your god-given right as a participant in this television show to veer off the path at any time and start hacking your own way through the jungle.

Which is not to say I abdicate responsibility. Bad writing is a demon that takes all forms and often finds a warm and inviting host with writers who confuse the arbitrary with the mysterious.

So in that spirit, let me now contradict everything I've said previously by also saying that in Sci Fi TV there is NOTHING more important than the proper, specific detail. To wit:

In Episode 102 of the Sarah Connor Chronicles ("The Turk," written by John Wirth), the Terminator Cromartie kidnaps a scientist to assist it in growing cyborg skin. Cromartie has brought the skin recipe back from the future, and writes it on the scientist's wall so the scientist can follow it.

When writing the script, John had actually spent time on the phone with a cell biologist trying to get a formula which would best approximate something you might use to grow skin for a cyborg. John had given that formula to our production designer and he, in turn, had given it to the on-set painter so it could be written on the wall. These are the types of things we do all day.

The night before we were scheduled to shoot that scene, John Wirth and I went down to the set to see how it looked. It's late and I know the crew wants to get on their work. But here's the conversation we have:

ME: There's something…not right.
JOHN: I agree. It's just…what is it?
ME: It's not…I dunno…right.
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Could you be a little more specific? We'll fix it. But, you know, maybe a direction to go in? Font size? Pen color? Anything?
ME: It's just…I can't think of any other way to say it…but it doesn't look like a Terminator wrote it.
JOHN: Exactly.
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Huh.

What followed was a lengthy conversation where we ran through a number of issues:

Had we ever seen Terminator handwriting? Do they write in a particular style? Would they be as precise as a computer or would they be in some way affected by their biped-ness, their height relative to surface…Would they disguise their writing as more human-like? And seriously - where was the fucking manual for this?

Eventually we took the entire wall down and did it all over again. This time…more…Terminator-y.

Now this type of conversation occurs on every set on every television show in the world every day. I'd be willing to bet that as I write this at ten o'clock at night, somewhere in Hollywood a showrunner is staring at a set of drapes, a pair of shoes, a bloody handprint, or a gunshot wound and trying to find the perfect balance between story, character and filmic verisimilitude. That's the job. (Frankly, that's everyone's job.)

But in Sci Fi you also get this:

ME: We need to re-do that urinal morph, Jim.
JIM: What's the problem?
ME: She looks like she's coming out of the urinal.
JIM: Isn't she?
ME: No. She's supposed to be morphing from a urinal into a woman. Right now it looks like the urinal is birthing her. That's gross.
JIM: I getcha.
ME: Think "the prow of a ship."
JIM: Awesome. Great note. I'll make it so.
(Because they do love to make it so.)

TV fiction is a depictive media, while written fiction is a suggestive one. A novel's language casts different shadow plays off the back part of each reader's skull while a tv show casts one vision for everyone. We all have our own idea of what China Mieville means when Detective Borlu "unsees" someone in the neighboring city, but God help the poor schmuck who has to decide what that idea means for everyone.

So we (or I, since it's my blog post) try to balance the concrete specificity of what can be seen (Terminator handwriting, urinals) with the novelistic "suggestiveness" of what we don't see but feel (why does she do what she does?). This is not exclusive to science fiction, but especially true of it; speculative fiction is just that - speculative. Creating a beautiful unanswered question can be a complete work of art - just ask Schrödinger and his cat.

Just know that some day somebody will open that box and, dead or alive, there better be a fucking awesome kitty in there.

Josh Friedman was the showrunner on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Welcome to Free Advice for Struggling Writers (as if there's any other kind), a new semi-regular column here at io9. We've taken a few stabs doing a writing advice column for ages, but I always felt a bit presumptuous giving anybody else advice about how to write. But now that I'm in the middle of revising a fantasy novel, I'm having all sorts of thoughts about novel-writing that might actually be helpful. And which might, at least, start some interesting conversations.

So — a lot of people seem to regard the "elevator pitch" as a necessary evil. And I've certainly thought of it that way myself. OMG, my future society has 29 social classes, and there's a war between ninth-dimensional nano-roaches and sentient clouds that only live between galaxies! How can I possibly scrunch all that greatness down into two sentences?

But I'm going to try and explain, in about 800 words, why the elevator pitch is a really good thing to think about — and why it should be woven into the fabric of your novel as you're writing it.

People often think of the "elevator pitch" as being some kind of crass Hollywood thing: like "It's Rain Man – With Time Travel! It's 28 Days Later meets 9 1/2 Weeks!" But really, the "elevator pitch" just summarizes what your story is about. And if you can't explain what your story is about in a couple sentences, maybe that's actually a bad sign.

Here's how I've gotten to think about the elevator pitch lately: It's a contract with your readers.

Forget the agent you're going to pitch your book to, forget the editor, forget all the people between you and the reader. Eventually, if you're lucky, readers are going to be picking up your book based on some version of the same pitch. (You can't really control your back cover copy, but you'll do a lot of the marketing of your book anyway.)

And when you describe your book in a few pithy sentences, you're making a promise to your potential readers, about what they'll get if they invest time and money in your book. You warrant that you'll deliver a story about a guy who gets migraines that let him rewrite the past. Or a dragon who disguises herself as a racehorse so she can take part in the Kentucky Derby. If the reader buys your book based on that pitch, you'd better deliver on it.

And that means that your "dragon disguised as racehorse" book really has to be about the dragon disguised as the racehorse. Your reader is going to expect the dragon to be the main character, and there should be some compelling reason the dragon wants to be a race horse, and then we should see the dragon's quest for a horse disguise, and how the dragon learns to live among horses. The reader is going to be wondering if any of the horses, or jockeys or owners, see through the dragon's glamour (or plastic surgery?). The reader will be counting on there being some kind of arc where the dragon changes, and accomplishes something, in the course of becoming a thoroughbred. And most people who've consumed sporting narratives in the past will expect the book to end with a huge, crucial, suspenseful race, which the dragon/horse either wins, or loses in some poignant fashion. And you'd have at least a sneaking suspicion that some people will learn the dragon's true identity at the end.

But wait – in the course of writing this novel, you get fascinated by the culture of the jockeys. And you invent a marvelous backstory for the dragon's jockey, but also a whole subplot involving a different jockey, who's part gnome. And also – there's a bookie who's using magic to figure out the odds. And once you think about the backstory of your dragon main character, you invent a whole dragon culture, and a dragon civil war, and you decide that dragons are facing extinction because people are trafficking in dragon eggs. And so on. These subplots, and digressions, and possibly philosophical lines of inquiry, are marvelous and should absolutely be in your novel. It's part of the joy of speculative fiction that you can draw such a broad canvas – but as you're writing your novel, remember that your readers are expecting it to be about the dragon who becomes a racehorse.

Look at it this way – a decent writer can deliver the dragon/racehorse story in its barest outlines, carrying the reader from A to B to C like a dependable mount. A good writer can give you the dragon/racehorse story, but throw in tons of complexity and subplots and exploding ideas and supporting characters and world-building, until it's really the story of a whole world. But it takes a really brilliant writer to give you that whole tapestry of complexity, but still make the story about the dragon who becomes a racehorse.

And I'm by no means saying you have to follow your readers' expectations for how your dragon/racehorse story will go – in fact, part of trying to be the brilliant writer, instead of the decent writer or the good writer, is surprising the reader. But here's the key: You have to know what the reader's expectations are, and then make a conscious decision to subvert them. If you ignore the reader's expectations, and then your story just goes off the track (so to speak), you risk losing the reader. Say halfway through, your dragon/racehorse breaks a leg and gets shot in the head. If you haven't set up that development at all, the reader may just feel cheated, not surprised by your clever twist.

So the reader is expecting your dragon to face challenges learning to carry a small human around a racetrack, but eventually surmount them and build up to the big race at the end. There are a million ways you could have something different happen, but you still need to be following the story beats that lead to the Big Race, while laying the seeds of your surprising twist.

So how do you weave in all the backstory and subplots and thoughts about the humaneness of horse-racing, without having them overwhelm your "A" plot? That's a huge topic for another column (and possibly for the comments on this one, if you like) but in a nutshell: if you stick in that stuff artfully, it can help build suspense in your main plot. Just as your suspense reaches fever pitch – OMG! The dragon has a sprained ankle! – you cut away to one of your subplots, or go off into a digression about the fastest dragon who ever lived, and how that dragon failed to outpace the egg-traffickers. But also, have a certain amount of faith in your reader, that as long as you're hitting the story beats about your dragon protagonist and putting that stuff front and center, the reader will be able to recognize that as the main plot, even if there's 10 pages of other stuff sandwiched between scenes with your main dragon.

The bottom line is, stop thinking of the "elevator pitch" as a necessary evil that you're going to use to hoodwink some agent into thinking your book is Seabiscuit meets The Last Dragon, when it's really so grand and multilayered, you need a whole book just to describe it. The "elevator pitch" isn't just how you market your book – it can also be a way to think of what your book is really actually about.

Pulp magazine covers from Toyranch and Terry McCombs on Flickr.

Here's a description of the program:

Shared Worlds, an innovative two week workshop in fantasy and science fiction worldbuilding is currently seeking applications for attendance from students grade eight to twelve who have an interest in creative writing and fantasy worldbuilding.

The program is held from July 19 through August 1 on the campus of Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, and offers an intensely creative atmosphere in which students learn all aspects of building their own fictional world through instruction in creative writing, history, art, philosophy and physics and then apply that knowledge by creating fiction, games and more.

This year's instructors include assistant director and two time World Fantasy Award winning author Jeff VanderMeer, Weird Tales fiction editor Ann VanderMeer, role playing game designer Will Hindmarch, Spiderwick Chronicles creator Holly Black and New York Times bestselling author Tobias Buckell, plus Wofford College's own Dr. Christine Dinkins, philosophy professor, and Jeremy Jones, lecturer and camp director.

Although the emphasis of this think tank for teens is on fantasy, according to Jeff VanderMeer the things that the participants learn will be very useful in real life.

"This really is a unique opportunity for talented teens to mix having fun and flexing their imaginations with developing skills that will serve them well no matter what they decide to do with their lives."

Tuition is $2,250 and includes room, board, instruction and all needed program material. Students who pay in full before May 1st will receive a discount of $250. A limited number of partial scholarships ($500) are available.

Find out more here. Hurry up and enroll now!

The discussion, over at Livejournal's Fangs, Fur & Fey community (for published urban fantasy authors), proves that there's no perfect approach. If you plan too much in advance, you risk getting trapped or bored - or your plans may have to change drastically as things turn out differently than you expected. But if you don't plan at all, you may wind up getting lost and wandering around for months or years. At the very least, it's a good idea to know how your book ends.

The general consensus is, it seems to vary from book to book. In one case, author Kelly Meding had an image stuck in her head of one of her characters trapped in a fire. Once she figured out that image and what it meant for the story, she had the idea, and some of the structure, of her novel's sequel. Another writer takes a big sheet of newsprint and draws boxes for each of the novel's chapters, sketching out what might happen in each chapter. Perhaps the best advice for thinking through what your novel will be about comes from Kristine Katherine Rusch: In a writing workshop, she told someone: "Tell yourself a story." And then it clicked.

Springboarding from this discussion thread, Bond tries to figure out what elements make a first novel a good candidate for a trilogy, or even an ongoing series. It comes down to compelling characters and vast world-building, of course. But she also thinks that the ending of each book in the series is crucial in building interest in the next installment. But most of all, the premise of the trilogy (or series) has to be a big enough idea, something people often overlook:

It has to be an idea that throws off lots of little ideas, giving lots of potential roads to travel down. One of the satisfying things I get out of the series I read is the sense of surprise at where the story goes, because the central idea is big enough to have more than one possible narrative in it. If that makes any sense whatsoever. I think this may also be one quality of stories that lend themselves to fan fiction—there are plenty of stories left in the world for fans to add.

In a separate blog post, Bond also asks the crucial question: will there really be chocolate, as we know it, in our spacefaring far future?

On his website, Leskiw gives us a terrifically detailed portrait of this imaginary Pacific Island nation (see a much larger version of the map here), with an especial focus on the future of its road systems:

This nation consists of three principal islands: Breda: the most populous island and home to the nation's capital city, St. Paul and largest metropolitan area, Aberdeen-Portsmouth-Oxford; Wright: the smallest and least populous island; and Mann: the largest island in area, but dominated by mountains and an active volcano and thus largely wilderness, although the western coast is densely populated and home to Wellington, the nation's third-largest city.

The nation is located somewhere in the south Pacific and was most likely a British colony at one time and consequently roundabouts and European interchange designs are prevalent. The nation's roads are divided into five classes and each one is identified by it's own unique color-coded signage. Motorways are blue, primary highways are green, secondary highways are red, regional roads are yellow, and local roads are white. Motorways are identified by the label Mx beside the international symbol for limited-access highways, primary and secondary highways are identified by a black on yellow Australian-style shield affixed on the appropriate background color, and regional and local roads are referred to by name or primary destinations. All motorways and the Route 99/Manton Bay Tunnel are tolled.

Prior to 2007 all motorways on the Isle of Breda operated on a system-wide toll ticket system, however the M2 extension. M8, and M9 were opened using electronic toll collection via overhead gantries and in 2025 the entire system on the Isle of Breda switched over to this system eliminating the need for toll booths. The M7 and M10 motorways employ mainline toll booths. Driving is on the left; distances are in kilometers; national speed limits are 120km/h: motorways, 90km/h: rural, and 40km/h: urban, however dual carriageways are usually posted at 100km/h and urban arterials at 60-70km/h.

Roads are a crucial part of the landscape in most countries, and yet we rarely think of them as a storytelling medium. Still, Leskiw manages to explain through his fictional maps what the future of a small nation might look like. He considers very pragmatic details about what the future might hold for mundane objects like toll booths. You can call this world-building for everyday life. We've got no zeppelins or floating cities - just overhead gantries for toll collection.

Because he lives in Michigan, Leskiw has also created a map of an alternative Michigan, above. I'm not sure what region this is supposed to correspond to, or what exactly changed historically to make his alternate Michigan come into existence. I love the idea that he's traced Michigan's road history back to some critical point and changed one or two things so that the state's road system evolved differently.

Here is another one of Leskiw's imaginary islands, called Pellie Island (bigger version here). He's been designing these road maps for years, and has dozens on his website. He also collects old road maps of actually-existing regions. His eccentric, beautiful work is a reminder that science fiction stories lurk in every medium, even the humble road map.

The Map Realm [Leskiw's fictional map gallery]

We asked Gunn the same questions about creating believable characters that we asked six other authors last week, and her answers were so great we felt they deserved her own post.

So how do you create memorable, relatable characters in a futuristic or other-worldly setting?

I usually start with the characters, and let them tell me about their problems and the world they live in, rather than imagining it all abstractly ("world-building") and then putting the characters in place. It's kind of like being the character's shrink. I try to pick up on the clues they drop about their idiosyncrasies, about where they are and what their world is like. I try to figure out what they're trying to hide and get them to expand on that. Then I review the text and add weirdnesses, if needed (and they are always needed), and try to extrapolate the science-fictional whys and wherefores of the world or time.

Without all of the little references and shorthands that you can use in a present-day setting, how do you make your characters identifiable to readers?

I try to identify with the characters myself. If the story is set in some place or time very different from here and now, I try to reference thoughts, emotions, locales, and situations that are that are identifiable to myself, and then crank them, say, 147 degrees away from the identifiable: far enough to be strange, but not so far as to be incomprehensible. My idea of comprehensible may be a little extreme for some readers, so I workshop the story to make sure that I haven't gotten too far out of control. However, I think that SF readers like being somewhere totally strange and interacting with people they don't understand, so I don't want to get too normal. I try to leave a trail of cookies so readers can have the sort of brain-sparks that discovery and chocolate chips provide.

And when you're putting your characters into a place and time that's vivid and different, how do you make your characters stand out against that backdrop?

I usually think of the characters as explaining their time and place to me, so they are part of their milieu and the reader and I see their world through their POV. It's a matter of making a setting that is strange and weird to the reader seem normal enough to the character, without making it boring. By the end of the story, the reader (and the author) should have come to understand the POVs of characters in the story, and share them, or question them, or both. Personally, I really like stories that, when I have finished them, cause me to have a little shock of re-adjustment to my own world. I like to be shaken and changed a little.

Top image by Paul Mavrides and Jay Kinney, from Infinite Matrix.

Get to know them as individuals, rather than types. If your characters are cut off from all the present-day cultural references, like "lawyer who went to Harvard," then it's even more important to think of them as individuals, says Elizabeth Bear, Campbell- and Hugo-winning author of Carnival and Undertow. "Try very hard to know them as people," she urges. "That goes for any setting, past or present or future — or alternate reality."

In particular, you should think, "'This is a person who happens to have the following traits, and all that they imply,' rather than 'this is a nuclear physicist who grew up in Iowa.'"

Try making your characters scientists. Or at least, have them be obsessed with stuff that's relavant to your storyline, advises Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of the Mars trilogy and the Science In The Capital series. Having scientists as your characters lets you "explore the setting and the character at once." And it helps if your characters obsess about the mysteries and explanations in your story. They can also be obsessed with a planet, spaceship, new procedure or alien.

Base them on people you know. The most realistic characters are often based closely on your friends or people you've met, says Rudy Rucker, Philip K. Dick-winning author of the -Ware novels and Postsingular. That goes double for your aliens, A.I.s and robots, he adds. It's always better to copy your friends than to lift from "received ideas about how SF characters might behave. Who wants to see yet another a humorless talking head with a BBC accent? The absolute worst thing in Matrix III was when Keanu gets to the virtual office of the Big Computer Mind, and he meets, like, a tweedy professor with a white beard. Ugh! At the very least it should have been a fat hacker in a T-shirt, preferably high on pineal extract." Also: to make your characters stand out, try having them say quirky, unexpected things. "Forget your Star Trek memories, and remember your wild and crazy friends — the ones who say things that Make No Sense," Rucker advises.

Give them a thought-out world. The more carefully thought out the world you're placing your characters into, the more we'll be able to believe that they live there, says Tobias Buckell, author of Sly Mongoose. And that also makes it easier to "contrast them against this imaginary place."

Figure out what they love, and what they fear. Try to find what drives your characters, including what they want and need, Bear urges. And understand what traumatizes them. "I tell people I like to know what they'd want on their tombstone: that seems to give me a really good handle on who they are."

She adds:

Characters we can relate to have fears and damage, but moreover, for me they have to be devoted to something — an ideal, a person, whatever. Even villains become much more sympathetic when we're introduced to whatever it is that they love.

Kage Baker, author of the Company novels, agrees: "It isn't the way a person relates to his hovercar that makes him memorable; it's what's going on in his heart." No matter what planet or time you're living in, there will be "certain constants in human existence: struggle against poverty, rebellion against authority, love and desire, loneliness, curiosity. Any reader can relate to those." Make sure your character has loves and hatreds that readers can see themselves in, and the rest will take care of itself.

Don't aim for larger-than-life — and overshoot. One pitfall with science fiction characters is that authors sometimes make their characters "bigger than life, or archetypal" to let them compete with the big, brash colorful worlds they live in. A common mistake is veering past archetypal, all the way into "over the top, or maybe somewhat cliche." If you do try for archetypal characters, think of the classics from all genres, like Sherlock Holmes' quirky genius or Captain Ahab's drive.

Don't obsess too much about setting and toys. If you spend pages and pages on dense descriptions of your settings and how exactly your hovercar works, you're distracting the reader from your characters, says Baker.

It's enough to say "He climbed into his hovercar" and your reader will get the idea. You don't need to give a geography lesson: "They were sitting in the courtyard drinking fire-palm wine" or "She trudged back from the well, balancing her water jar" or "They looked out across the desert and saw the yellow mountains of Califia before them" all give brief, intense impressions of a place, without stopping the narrative in its tracks or drawing focus from the main character.

Find out who's hurting. If your story involves a new situation or technological breakthrough, figure out who suffers as a result — maybe that should be your main character, says Robinson, quoting from Damon Knight (who was quoting James Blish in turn.)

Keep your characters grounded. The stranger the setting, the more ordinary your characters should be, says Terry Bisson, Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of Bears Discover Fire. "For example, in my most recent story, the narrator 'had a job and an apartment, but that was all.' The story wasn't about the setting but about the character."

Your characters should be "totally convinced they live in the present, rather than the future. Because, of course, it IS the present to them," says David J. Williams, author of The Mirrored Heavens. Make sure your world, and your characters, both have a believable past, that anchors their present. "As Gibson said, the future's already here, it's just unevenly distributed. Same is true for the past: it's always with us, but sometimes beneath the surface. How one handles that is the key to character."

Program director Jones said:

Take a minute to imagine this: you're fourteen years old. You spend all your free time reading books. Suddenly, you find yourself sitting in a college classroom with a bunch of other people who like to read science fiction and fantasy, too. There's a philosophy professor and a college theater major sitting off to the side. A two-time World Fantasy Award winning author is over in the corner taking notes and pitching in every now and then. The girl to your left is drawing a walking plant and the guy to your right is trying to explain how you can't have an ovular-shaped planet because of gravity. Someone else is explaining how the energy force "leaking" into your world from another dimension has altered the shape of the planet, defied gravity, and encouraged the plants to evolve into sentient and mobile creatures. Sounds exhilarating, doesn't it?

And VanderMeer added:

These kids worked their butts off the entire time and just did a phenomenal job. I mean, create a world in one week? And then write about it? A huge challenge, and yet they seemed to enjoy it so much they didn’t want to leave. One thing I really liked doing was bringing twenty “artifacts” from our house, ranging from an old Romanian medal to an Egyptian-looking statue to a jewelry box with a tiny boat in it, and giving them out on the first day. Then, as they created their worlds they had to figure out how that artifact fit in—who owned it, who made it, what was the story behind the piece. Some had a bigger challenge than others, but the next week when we sat down and they told me what their artifact was, they all had created amazing stories. All kinds of subtle motivation, ingenious solutions. It was very satisfying, and they had a lot of fun—and were happy they got to keep their artifacts afterwards.

Find out more on the SharedWorlds site.

First off, though, let's consider your motivations. Why are you building a world? Is it just for yourself, while you are bored at lunch? Or do you want to use it for the backdrop of a story or game you'll share with others? These questions help you consider what to put in that world. After all, if the world is just for you, why not have it populated with masturbating alien slave men? But if you're planning to invite other people into your world, you might not want to overshare your fantasies quite so much (unless you're John Norman, and that, as they say, is another post).

1. Do a little research.
Every cool fake world is based on an interesting real one. Want a world with lots of machines? Look to contemporary Japan or nineteenth century England for inspiration. Want a world that's sparsely populated and devoted to farming? Read up on Northern Russia, and find out what kinds of dwellings and cultures exist there. Since this is a quick and dirty worldbuilding exercise, don't spend too long with the research. This is a fake world, so you don't have to be accurate. You just need a few models to base your creativity on. If you like, you can just chuck reality altogether and create a world that's based on dreams, City of Lost Children-style. Or a world based on computer-induced hallucinations like The Matrix. And hey, if you're feeling generous, you can even hire a researcher to do some of this work for you, just like Neal Stephenson did with his Baroque Cycle.

2. Have a few rules.
There is nothing more annoying than an alternate reality where anything goes. That's one of the reasons why the mental landscapes in The Cell were so annoying: When our psychologist in that flick used her special machines to enter the mind of the serial killer, suddenly they were in "mind space" and nothing made sense. Sure it looked pretty, but who wants to hang around just looking at crap if there are no ground rules at all? Even if your rule in "mind space" were just something simple like "If you die in mind space you die in reality" (a typical rule) that goes a long way toward making the action in your world more exciting. Rules create problems, and solving problems is exactly what people like to do in a world.

3. Don't obsess over consistency.
Look, we're worldbuilding on the fly here, so don't worry about being insanely consistent. That's why you want to have just a few rules rather than twenty gazillion. Otherwise there will be so many problems for your characters to deal with that walking across the street will be like filing a legal brief. You do want a few things to remain consistent, however, so spend five or ten minutes making a list of the most important constants in your world. These could be things like the names of countries and characters, or the capabilities of special technologies. It could even be a list of laws or ideologies perpetuated by an oppressive government, 1984 style.

4. Consider what's good and what's bad about your world.
Let's say you're whipping up a completely awful world like the one in Hellraiser or the post-apocalyptic Earth in the Terminator series. It's great to show us a bunch of crushed skulls and people with pins in their faces, but nobody is going to stick around for a pure torture world unless they are Matthew Barney fans. There's got to be something cool, fun, or intriguing about your universe. In Terminator, for example, the cool part of the sucktastic world is the human resistance and its ability to seize control of some of the Terminators. Of course, you have to consider the opposite as well. If you create a paradise-like world where everybody lives in peace and has biotech that cures all diseases, you need to invent something problematic or wrong to set stories in motion. Even if the problematic thing is just a bad love affair. In Octavia Butler's trilogy Lilith's Brood, we are treated to a world where aliens with complete power over their genomes live without war and cruise through the universe in eco-harmony. Sounds perfect, right? Unfortunately, they only way they can reproduce is by swallowing planets and assimilating other species' DNA into their genomes. And the human population of Earth is their new object of assimilation into the happy peaceful ecotopia. Doesn't sound so peaceful anymore, does it?

5. Create characters who are plausibly the products of your world.
Not all worldbuilding has to have characters, but usually it does. Even if you don't have characters, you're likely to have ecosystems, and this rule can apply to those too. Either way, you want the life in your world to make sense. Obviously an agrarian culture won't produce a computer whiz, since it will be devoted to farming rather than information technology. A technical whiz from an agrarian world might invent something like the cotton gin, however. By the same token, a highly technological and urban world probably wouldn't be conducive to warriors who fight with crossbows on horseback. Sure you could invent some convoluted rules to make that happen, like in Rebecca Rowe's novel Forbidden Cargo where an extremely high-tech society stages elaborate samurai battles in virtual reality. But this is quick and dirty worldbuilding, so I'm going to say you should stick with Occam's Razor as a defining principle for your characters: Go with the simplest explanation for their origins, and make things complicated later.

Alright, you've got a few rules. Now start building. I expect to see some seriously cool alternate realities by nightfall.

Amongst the more expected selections - Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Larry Niven's Ringworld and Frank Herbert's Dune all get shout-outs - Orson Scott Card manages to bring up a name that you probably didn't see coming:

For years, I have told my writing students that the best example of world-building in fiction is James Clavell's "Shogun." When you read this book, the world-creation is so thorough that you think you can speak Japanese. You can't - but it feels as if you can.

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., on the other hand, plays the role of the buzzkill:

I'm not going to be terribly enthusiastic about most world-building that I read, because my non-authorial background is rooted in analyzing the building blocks of societies, especially from environmental, political, economic, historic, and technical points of view. In this regard, few authors deal well with economics, fewer still with environmental or technical/engineering issues, and almost none with any sort of politics except copying feudalism, corrupted democratic systems, or monarchies.
That doesn't even take into account trade, climate, social history, disease, and a few dozen other items.

In the end, most so-called world building is the verbal equivalent of "Houdini-ism," where the reader tends to think more is there than is because of the distractions of a few well-placed details and props... and, for most readers, that's exactly what they want.

For those who like to see (extremely) minor controversy, you should also check out the comments section where a fan complains about the lack of non-white-male writers on the list and is promptly told to shoot themselves by Jeffrey Ford.

What are the Best Examples of SF/F Worldbuilding? [SF Signal]

One of the most infamous fake commercials from a scifi movie is this ad for Fruity Oaty Bars, a made-up product that appears in Firefly spinoff flick Serenity. Director Joss Whedon wanted to evoke the Asian-Western mashup culture of the far future in this ad, which looks like a mixture of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and North American iconography. In the film, it also contains a subliminal message that sets off government experiment River's "kill kill kill" programming — when this perky clip airs in a bar, she goes apeshit and murders everyone in the joint.

Another popular scifi ad is this one, for the soft drink Slurm that Fry loves so much in Futurama. It's pretty much a pitch-perfect parody of typical soft drink and beer ads, with the single futuristic addition that the company admits that the drink is literally addictive. Oh, and it's being sold by a mutant snail.

For sheer audacity in world-building, one of my favorites of the bunch is this ad, from Confederate States of America, for the Slave Shopping Network. The flick takes place in an alternate future where the Confederacy won the Civil War, and now slaves are sold on HSN-esque channels, and given Prozac to make them better workers. I just love the way the nice white lady says "You can have the whole family or break them up!" Creeptastic.

Then there are movies that simply update today's brands for tomorrow, to give you a sense of how familiar products might evolve. You may have noticed in 2001: A Space Odyssey that this happens quite a bit. There are references to the Hilton and Howard Johnsons hotel chains, Crest toothpaste, and these two shots showing that IBM will be making spacesuit and spaceship controls in the "far future" of 2001.

You can see more product placement from 2001 here.

Meanwhile, Pepsi actually worked with the Back to the Future creators to imagine a future branding strategy for Pepsi, including a product called "Pepsi Perfect." You can buy Pepsi Perfect bottles on eBay for way too much money.

5. Sun of Suns, by Karl Schroeder. Rebel, former pirate, and kickass airbike rider Hayden lives in Virga, a giant bag of air floating in space, built by a post-human society. The air is heated by high-tech suns dragged around by city-states that create their own gravity by building on the inside of vast, spinning tubes. Virga is a kind of eighteenth-century world of kings, despots and pirates, and many of the city-states horde sun power — they'll attack out any nation that tries to assert independence by building its own sun. Most people remain dependent on a few big sun-owning nations for their warmth; those who refuse to toe the line live in the cloud-draped sunless reaches of "winter." Hayden, whose mother was killed after she built a pirate sun, is out to change all that, even if it means killing the leader of Slipstream, one of Virga's most powerful nations. The characters may be a little two-dimensional, but you'll keep reading just to visit the vast, globular floating oceans, the strange cities, and bizarre barren outposts in Virga. Plus, pirate battles in zero gee! Sun of Suns is the first in a trilogy, and the second novel just came out in hardback.

4. Ringworld, by Larry Niven. A classic 1960s world-building epic about aliens on a quest to find out more about a vast artificial Dyson ring built around a dying sun. This is the novel that inspired the people who created the game Halo, which also takes place on a ring world. Expect strange weather, bizarre vistas from on and below the massive structure, and alien encounters that feel very Star Trek (but at a time when Star Trek was still the shit).

3. Lilith's Brood, by Octavia Butler. This trilogy of novels by MacArthur winner Octavia Butler is about what happens to humanity after earth is destroyed in some kind of nuclear apocalypse, and all the human survivors are rescued by powerful, mysterious aliens called the Oankali. Three-sexed, the Oankali reproduce via a third sex called the TK, which mixes genetic material inside its own body and creates offspring. All their technology is biological too. Lilith, one of the human survivors that the Oankali enlist to help them deal with the other human survivors, discovers that the Oankali recreate their species every few hundred years by merging their genetic material with other species. And the humans are next on their list of species to merge with. Set aboard vast biological ship-words and a newly geo-engineered Earth, Lilith's Brood traces three generations of humans and Oankali as they have children together — children who grow more alien to both species with each generation. Yes, it's a very complicated and subtle allegory about colonialism. And yes, it's an amazing tale of the unknown. Enjoy it for either, or for both.

2. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville. It's a world where bureaucrats raise demons with steam-driven machines, and "thaumaturgists" remold human bodies with their hands. A strange kind of species-transforming weather called The Torque occasionally rips through, converting humans into half-insects, half-birds, half-seamonsters. It's been years since a Torque came through, and all the different post-Torque human groups live separated into nineteenth-century style ghettos in a city whose polyglot heart is in a train station called Perdido Street. Everything is steaming along normally in the city — anarchists print subversive pamphlets, artists date across species lines, and scientists study winged creatures from around the globe. But trouble comes to town in the form of dream-eating moths who suck people's minds out, and the only creatures who can stop them are a mad scientist, his half-insect lover, a sentient garbage dump, and a trans-dimensional spider.

5. The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin. A classic novel by one of the supreme world-builders in SF, The Dispossessed is a tale of two planets: one is a lush, economic powerhouse ruled by greed, consumerism, and a rich elite; the other a desert planet full of the descendants of rebels who fled the first planet two centuries before. It has scant resources but is governed by a feminist-anarchist belief system that preaches collective ownership, gender equality, and sexual liberation. Shavek, a physicist from the anarchist planet, is one of the first to visit the home planet in many generations, and his experiences traveling between worlds reveal chinks in the Utopia he's left behind — and unexpected benefits on the corrupt home world, where scientific innovation flourishes in an atmosphere of capitalist competition. What's stunning about this novel is that LeGuin avoids simplistic judgments, and shows in honest detail how even the most progressive culture can be corrupt. And even the most corrupt culture can foster creative brilliance.