Think About The Future – World-Building For Dystopian Sci-Fi

Hello, there!

One of my favorite parts about developing an entirely new story is world-building!  I know it isn’t every author’s cup of tea, but for me, it’s a large chunk of why I write.

However, this year I’m building a world I’ve never built before – a dystopian future on Earth.

Fantasy vs. Sci-Fi vs. Dystopian World-Building

The first fictional world I ever truly built and fleshed out was for the Sword of Dragons, a fantasy-adventure saga that’s still on-going, and may even be the reason you’ve found yourself here!  Building such a world took years and years, and it continues to be built with each new novel I write.

It started with a map – I drew up a basic map of Halarite, all four continents, and a detailed map of the central continent, Edilas.  From there, I established the kingdoms, where the orcs resided, and more, and with that as a basis, I was able to start fleshing out the cultures and history.

Combining that map with a fleshed-out central religion (The Order of the Ages) and the magic system, it gave me a very solid foundation to build the stories and characters on, and in fact informed every aspect of the novels written today!

It was a world 100% of my own making, borrowing from real history and mythologies while making up its own rules.

When I started working on Chronicles of the Sentinels, well that was an entirely different exercise.  As a story that starts in the here-and-now (actually I wrote it to be around 2024 or 2025), it required an entirely different kind of world-building.  I didn’t have to build up our current-day world, but I did have to establish how magic worked, why it worked the way it did, and how it existed throughout the Universe beyond Earth.

A really fun part about it was looking into history and ancient legends, and figuring out how those worked into the new reality I had built up for the story.  Especially Babylonian mythology.  Combining ancient history with ancient myths, I turned Marduk into a god-like magic being, his son Nabu into a demigod, and was able to explain the more ‘magic-like’ stories and legends of human history over the past four thousand years.

It was a lot of fun, and was such a fresh world-building exercise that it made me use completely different skill sets!

More recently, I’ve looked to the future, starting with Project Sirius, the YA Sci-Fi that’s currently in the hands of round 2 of beta readers :D  Instead of building an original world or researching history, I looked to the far-flung future of humanity, with a bit of optimism that we would eventually get the heck off of this poor, exhausted rock and start colonizing our own star system, followed by the star systems immediately surrounding us.

Again, this took a completely different skill set.  But I still had to look into both history and present-day knowledge.  Why?  Well, for starters, how do we get to the future without know where we are now and how we got here?

Artwork by Samuel Nordius

But also is the idea of a self-sustaining society on a giant ship in space.  I had to research things like “how big does a self-contained population need to be while still ensuring genetic diversity?”  When I had the answer to that, the next question was, “how much land is needed for farming to feed a population of 5,000?”  When that proved to be an ungodly number, I started looking into things like, “advances in crop efficiency,” and the future possibilities of farming.  With a little sci-fi “magic” thrown in there, I was able to pare the size of the ship down considerably.

All of that research, all of those questions that I found answers to, informed how the society aboard the Sirius would be built.  What laws there might be to ensure continued genetic diversity without changing population, etc.  It let me build the self-contained society while also informing me what the society that built the Sirius in the first place must be like.

And that brings us to my latest story, a dystopian sci-fi set around 100 years from now, give or take.  A less-than-optimistic look at our future, this story will be about a self-contained city in a future ravaged by climate change.  I was able to use some of the research I’d done for Project Sirius to figure some of it out, but for this, I was able to do a little more down-to-Earth world-building.

Once again, it took more reading.  More learning.  More investigating.  Where might said-city be built someday?  Why?  By whom?  How did the governments of the world react to this city’s construction?  What happened to make the city close its doors?  How have recent worldwide disasters, such as the COVID-19 Pandemic, affected the culture of the society within its walls?  (Think Demolition Man and you might come up with the answer to that question yourself ;) )

I had to take a look at where we’re at as a society right now, dealing with increasing world-wide disasters, many of which are caused by climate change, and figure out how we might respond to an ever-increasingly-disastrous climate change and unstable society.

Inevitably, the question of cybernetics came up.  And what I’ve learned about cybernetics in the real world over the past ten years of hungrily reading about advances in it, and people’s reactions to it, it greatly informed my vision of this less-than-ideal future city and society.

Thus, this new project, currently dubbed Living Remnant, has actually become a Dystopian Sci-Fi with Cyberpunk elements.

World-Building Informs Your Story

The lesson I’ve taken away from this?  Well, actually, there’s a lot!  However, one big one is that every single one of my stories, and the characters inhabiting them, have been built upon a foundation of world-building.

However, in some cases, such as with Living Remnant, it’s a two-way street.  It began with a plot idea, the thought of how a mind-upload to a computer might actually work.  From there, I created the character of Alys.  Once I had the very basics of who she was and what the plot would revolve around, I started world-building, which affected what Alys did for a living, and why she was the way she was.

Including prejudices and flaws (remember that last post about making sure you don’t make a character too flawed?) as well as strengths.

Hmm…makes me wonder if there’s another blog in my future, discussing writing very different kinds of characters, and the reading and investigating I’ve had to do for them!  Cardin Kataar was a warrior all of his life, so stepping up to fight evil is part-and-parcel for him!  But all of the characters in the other stories I’ve written or am writing?  Not so much.

How does a computer tech, for instance, learn to fight the bad guys?

Well, for starters, Alys isn’t just a tech.  In order to make it believable that she can defend herself (even if not expertly,) she’s trained in martial arts as a hobby, something I did myself once upon a time.  Mika Kai in Project Sirius has an obsession with archery.  And Chris in Chronicles of the Sentinels…well, he struggled at first.  A lot!  But that’s why he received training between books 1 and 2 :)

Anywho, enough of my inane ramblings from one day, yeah?  ;)  I hope you enjoyed reading, and getting this little insight into my next writing project!

And don’t worry – I’m still working on the plot for the next Sword of Dragons novel!  Unfortunately, it’s just not quite ready for writing to begin.  You might even say that the story is still in the fermentation process, not yet ready for distillation ;)

Thanks for reading!
-Jon Wasik

When A Story “Matures” And Is Ready For A First Draft

Story writing is a long, non-linear process.  And I do mean long, at least for me.

Today, I came to realize that the process can be analogous to brewing alcohol.  Sound far-fetched?  Stick with me, I promise it’ll make sense!

When a story idea first pops in my head, that’s when it starts.

Over time, I brainstorm, coming up with plot points, characters, themes, all the things necessary to write a story, but this process happens in spurts over the course of weeks, months, or most often years.

I still buy journals for them eventually, although as I get older, writing with pen and paper gets harder.  But I start to write the ideas down in those journals.  I start to formulate more than just ‘ideas’ and the disparate pieces begin to form into a coherent story.  What starts as “Oh wouldn’t this be cool?!  Oh that’d be perfect!” eventually becomes “A leads to B leads to C.”

Sometimes I’ll be far along in the process, thinking I’m just about there, when all of a sudden, bam!  Some new idea sparks in my head about the story and its themes, and it’ll change, or at least modify, all of my original ideas.

The story begins to mature.  It becomes something greater than the sum of its parts.

And when that happens…that’s when I want to actually start writing the first draft.  Fermentation has completed, and writing the manuscript is the act of distillation.

But it isn’t finished after the first draft.  Distillation is, in itself, a process.  Writing the story, then editing.  Now that I think about it, editing is like letting a wine age – it gets better the longer you work on it, to a point.

One of the things that becomes difficult for a writer is the need to eventually end that aging process.  It is, after all, possible to let some alcohols age too long.  Likewise, it is (at least in my opinion) possible to over-edit a novel.

Eventually you just have to call it done and release it into the wild, to be consumed by your audience.

And lets face it, some books are best consumed fast and hard.  Some are meant to be sipped and enjoyed over long periods.  Some are ‘one and done,’ some are six rounds of shots.  Some leave you feeling warm and fuzzy inside, and some knock you on your ass and leave you with an emotional hangover!

The Frustration Of Not Being Able to Write When It’s Ready

What brought this analogy to mind?  Today, an idea struck me.  But this isn’t a brand-new idea, no – this is an idea for how to enhance a story I’ve been developing for the past few years.

Living Remnant

I’ve been excited about the story for years, and I even wrote a short story out of the first chapter as a sort of treatment for it, to share with others and get their thoughts (they were very excited about it!)

But today, after reading Cinder by Marissa Meyer, I had the inspiration to make cybernetics a big part of the story.  To include issues of bigotry and purity key themes to a story that already hinted at it.  And thus, what was formerly just a dystopian story has now become a cyberpunk dystopian story.

And all of the pieces just clicked together in my head, and what felt like a “cool story” has become so much more!

The fermentation felt completed today.  The story was ready to be told.

Except…I can’t.  I don’t have the time right at this moment.

And I am beyond frustrated that I have to let this story sit for a while longer.  Maybe letting it go longer will mean I’ll come up with more ideas in the future, and it’ll get even better before I start actually writing it.  I sure hope so.

I know there are those out there who will try to say, “If it’s important to you, you’ll make the time!”  But there’s a lot of very important things going on in my life right now.  I’m about to start more voice acting classes, work has grown ever busier (money is, unfortunately, important to survival), and I’m still recovering from the exhaustion of last year.

So for now…I must rest.  And for now, I’ll just start writing down the plot in a journal as time and energy permits.  Believe me, I didn’t intend this – my next novel was to be the Sword of Dragons book 5.  But this story might just preempt that one.  After all, book 5 is still fermenting.

-Jon Wasik

PS: I know, two blogs in two days, crazy, right?  But I was inspired and had to get this one written right away :)