Convincing Fakes

There is an art form to faking worldbuilding well. As much as that may sound strange coming from me, it is a part of using worldbuilding properly. There’s a few tricks I’ve learned playing around with all of the disciplines within worldbuilding that can help fake a deeper world than you’d expect.

First off is: Speculative biology and evolving a biosphere is something I’ve only lightly touched on before. It will be something that will get more exploration later, that said forming a body plan or two can help sell an alien biosphere. A body plan is the rough out line of what the body of any creature will look like. On Earth the head, four limb +/- tail is one of the most common body plans in vertebrates. Thus if one wants a new creature that is found deep in the unexplored forest having six limbs, say four legs and two wings, is suspicious because Earth doesn’t have a six limbed vertebrates.

If I create a world where there are humans with wings, that implies a head, six limbs and possibly a +/- tail. Say I add dragons, the quadrupedal with wings kind, this builds the case for a six limbed body plan. If these are the only six limbed creatures in the world it weakens the worldbuilding, and in my experience leads to people writing off the setting of the story as shallow. Thus outside of magic, or science inventing a new body plan, use it in other places. Maybe there are six legged dogs, birds with four wings, six winged snakes, or whatever else you can come up with. Finding the right mix of body plans is more art than science. Id suggest having a primary and a secondary. Use the second as an outlier rather than the common.

The next short cut is importing things from other works, often called tropes. If I say, “The elven woman startled me when she appeared.” what comes to mind? Take a moment and write it down.

I mean it.

Good? Okay.

My guess is she’s fair skinned, has pointed ears, likely in a dress and that dress is green or blue-white, she has a slender build, and our speaker is probably in a forest. If she's armed its likely with a slender blade, a slight curve is possible but unlikely as that tends to get overridden, or, and more likely, a bow. Size is where it gets tricky. Generally elves are human sized, except for when they are making cookies, or toys. But I’m confident enough to guess petite, and probably on the more slender of builds.

Even if I am off base with what you specifically pictured, how far is my guess from the generic elf? As much as I respect the Tolkienesque line of elves they have become the baseline, only lets you go so far before we run into conflict. The Drow are a good example of deviation without going too far. For those who don’t know the Drow are black, gray or purple skinned, silver haired, slavers who live under ground and are forced into worshipping a spider deity called Lolth. (Technically they weren’t a spider when the Drow became the Drow but that’s for another time or someone else’s video essay.) As they are the evil elves their inversion of typical elf makes sense, without breaking the elf trope. The phrase “in the mirror darkly” wouldn’t be misplaced when it comes to the Elf/Drow relationship.

I wouldn’t say that the Drow are the line when it comes to elves. Yet they are clearly on the elf side; say we continue the scene from above, “The elven woman startled me when she appeared. She was a well-endowed 3 ft. even, dark leather jacket, black jeans, heavy boots, steel studs piercing her nose, with lots of chain tying the outfit together. Her battle axe was slung over her shoulder…” For most that would be on the other side of the line, even if you were to squint at it. When her character is revealed to be a heavy drinking, quick to brawling, inventive type. I think very few would still maintain she qualifies as an elf.

A clever audience member may assert, “She is a rebel! You could maintain the trope with this character rejecting it!” Which is good point. However, she isn’t a rebel, and in fact is a paragon of what an elf is in this world I would say calling her species gnomes, would be a closer fit. I suspect inventing a new term would be the best plan of action. If naming isn’t your strong suit polling your favorite AI for suggestions can be useful, either they will find a good name for the creature in question or give you something to work with. I’m partial to having Chat GPT and Grok duel it out, although any text based AI will work, I picked Korrathi from Chat GPT, and Cinderkin from Grok. I would use both, Korrathi being the ‘native’ term for the species and Cinderkin being what they are called in ‘common’ since I’d likely run a language per race as that’s another trope of fantasy. All in all importing tropes from the wider world can save you time, just make sure that you use the correct ones and know when you’ve gone too far and thus make the trope detrimental rather than helpful.

The last tool that can be used to make a convincing fake of your worldbuilding is the pointer. I’m borrowing the term from computer programming where instead of saying a variable is a thing; you point to something else, usually a memory location. In this context it would be using analogy, or similar to show what is without having to re-invent the wheel. For example if I were to describe, “The creature before me had the head of an elephant, body of a heavyweight fighter, all coated in the skin and fur of a snowy leopard.” That’s three pointers that give you a good description of what could be paragraphs of imagery.

In essence this is the same trick from above with the tropes except much more specific. With a higher degree of specificity comes a gamble: If you point to something the person doesn’t know they won’t have any way of understanding. Which is why I call this method pointers, as with programming you can point to valid locations and there be nothing useful there.

For example, spot all the references in this, a scene pulled from the sketch of a future Irmenspace book:

“Bridge” James said as they entered the lift, “Alex; I can’t believe we are being Capricaed. I bet there’s even a Baltar down there somewhere working with the Toasters.”

“Wouldn’t Toasters have to jump in, which would be wormhole drives? These guys are clearly using hyperdrives,” Alex said double checking the situation outside.

“So we’re getting Reached,” James said rolling his eyes, “It doesn’t mean we need to get out of here ASAP. I just hope we don’t end up last man out.” He punched the intercom, “Caiphas to Bridge.”

“We hear you Captain,” A woman’s voice came though the intercom.

“Tell Thrace and Karino to wrap it up out there,” James paused, “Also make sure Jerome gets his team back up here. Allice can’t stay in wonderland.”

“Understood Captain,” the woman responded.

“Who was that?” Alex pondered aloud.

“The ships mental model,” James said as the doors opened to the bridge. Alex rolled her eyes.

“Captain on deck,” A taller female android with long brown hair, her civilian cloths standing out in the sea of military uniforms. “Who is your friend?”

“I’m Alex,” Alex offered her hand, “I take it you’re Serina?”

“Yes,” Serina said taking Alex’s hand, “I would go into pleasantries, however given the circumstances I will leave it to a single question: How did you know my name?”

“James, named your ship Spirit of Fire,” Alex said shooting James a knowing look. “He can explain it.”

“Hey it fits!” James shot back, a bit too defensively.

I will be surprised if you get all the references, as the point is you don’t. There’s probably a name, or concept in there that has a reference that will provide more context. But you probably don’t know all of them. Now with all of the references you’ll know a lot more about the characters, their roles in the story going forward, their personalities and the likes. While I’m focusing on a characters in this example, there is a lot that can be done with the world as well. Especially if references are done in world, like done here, you can build with what you point to. In essence you make smoke and the readers should figure out there’s fire.

In addition to referencing things outside of the world one can reference things inside of the world: foreign nations, rival schools, news papers, events we don’t see, and anything else you can think of. By referencing these things you create them, in concept which is often more important than in detail. Having concepts floating around allows for a feathering of the edges of the world. This soft edge is more ‘realistic’ as there’s always a background to the background. These names and concepts are what will add backdrop to the backdrop and ‘flesh out’ your worlds.

I know this week was a bit of a grab bag, however my specific topics have turned into a research, and editing log jam and I’m working to get unjammed. Expect a few collections of micro notes going forward while I get unstuck.

See you next week