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On 7 November, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion with James Morrow, Julie Czerneda, and Steven Gould on the topic of ecology as it relates to building a world in which to set your stories. The panel will skew in a literary direction, with an emphasis on the uses of ecology in writing fantasy stories: the environment as a character in a story, and how realistically versus fantastically it will be defined. In preliminary discussions of what we might talk about, Morrow suggested that one interesting point of departure might be the notion that “you can’t write good fantasy if you don’t understand physics.” (He’s trying to track down the original quote--possibly Tolkein?--and if he succeeds, I’ll try to provide details in a sequel blog entry next week, after I return from the convention.)
The basic notion behind the quote is that whether you’re writing hard science fiction or “soft” fantasy, you still need to have some organizing system of principles that describes how the world works. Ecological science is a good basis for this, because we are all familiar with the basic principles on a gut level, from seeing them at work in our reality, or can learn the basic principles quickly with a little research. Needless to say, as a recovering scientist, my focus tends to be more on the scientific aspects of ecology, and indeed, I’m going to propose a pre-conference workshop on the scientific aspects of ecology in the context of building a realistic-seeming world for a future convention. Here, I’ll provide some musings that may eventually lead to something more integrated.
A brief aside: If you’re thinking “why bother with realism when I’m writing about Elves and dragons?”, the answer should be clear: in the context of writing, realism means that everything seems to hold together and function logically, even if the logic is “this world is governed by illogic”; it does not necessarily mean that the story is mimetic (i.e., that it resembles the world we see outside our door).
Ecology derives from the Greek oikos (literally, “house”, but more practically, “where we live”) and as a discipline, it focuses on the functioning of the world in which we live. Most non-ecologists immediately think that ecology is just a small branch of biology, but it’s much more complex and interesting than that simplistic description: ecology involves a wide range of topics, from hard sciences such as physics (thermodynamics, chemistry, biochemistry) to softer sciences such as sociology (cultural studies, religion, psychology) to near-sciences that are slowly and reluctantly trying to become true sciences (i.e., economics). These disciplines interact in scarily and wonderfully complex ways, since no natural ecological system is wholly independent of our human systems: we both shape, and are shaped by, our environment in myriad fascinating ways. The complexity becomes particularly vexing when you throw wild cards such as magic and non-human psychology into the mix.
But there are ways to cope. From a writing perspective, the key point is that ecology is not just stage-dressing: it has clear consequences for those who live within an ecosystem, and those who live within the ecosystem strongly affect it in turn. In short, ecology describes and provides the physical context in which the story takes place. Even “simple” biological ecology is complex: every action has consequences, and the consequences generally create feedbacks (echoes, rebounds) that in turn have consequences for the person or thing that initiated the action. From a physics perspective, think “cause and effect”; from a very different perspective, think karma. Rule 1 of developing a realistic world is that you must understand the consequences of actions and of any changes in the “known rules” that define those consequences. Because it’s so easy to get things wrong, the best bet is to start with what we know works: the real world and thus, the discipline of ecology. That provides a firm foundation for subsequent literary edifices.
Good advice for all speculative fiction is to change only a few things (ideally, one at a time) and then rigorously explore the consequences of those changes. For example, if you want to change something such as the food web that describes how energy flows within an ecosystem, you should start with a basic understanding of how its real-world analogue works. One crucial constraint is that real-world food webs are constrained by thermodynamic considerations: because energy is lost each time a higher level organism consumes a lower-level organism, it takes a large number of herbivores and omnivores (e.g., us) to feed a much smaller number of top predators (e.g., dragons). This is why the peasant’s cattle traditionally suffer the depredations of dragons (high-energy food!), why there aren’t many dragons lying around in most worlds (it takes many sheep to feed one dragon), why they sleep a lot (it’s not possible to output large quantities of energy continuously), and why dragons get VERY hungry after they use their fiery breath: flame = lots of highly concentrated energy expended quickly, and they need to replace that energy somehow.
As a less dramatic but equally energy-intensive example, consider how even simple mobility (walking about) requires consumption of a large amount of energy and the ability to liberate that energy quickly. Thus, your intrepid band of adventurers needs to schlep a ton of food with them, or find it along the way, if they’re going to survive their weeks-long stroll to Mordor. Most writers seem to assume that adventurers photosynthesize, or stop at McDonalds along the way. But in the absence of packets of freeze-dried food that expand to 20 times their dry weight, surviving on a long wilderness expedition takes a lot of time both for hunting and gathering and for prepping your food. In terms of energy output, if you want to create mobile plants, you need to figure out botanical analogues of muscles, which plants lack; it’s why we don’t have to fear feral carnivorous plants in the real world. Muscles, in turn, require botanical equivalents of the quick-release energy systems that animals have. Compare the carnivorous Venus fly trap with more aggressive predators such as John Wyndham’s triffids.
The traditional fantasist’s way to sidestep the known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology is to invoke magic, which will have its own consequences for your storytelling. For example, consider “real” zombies, which, being corpses, cannot last long before they decay into a mess of disgusting goo. Specifically, without breathing (providing the oxygen required to burn fuels such as sugars) and without metabolizing (producing those fuels), they would rapidly become nonfunctional. Natural flesh starts to decay about 10 minutes after the lungs stop working; when oxygen no longer reaches the cells, they start dying, despite heroic biochemical efforts to prevent this. On the more plausible side, it's worth noting that the traditional zombie food (brains) is reasonably nutrient dense, but you’ll still have to eat a lot of brain to chase highly motivated prey animals (i.e., us) for any length of time. So hungry zombies makes sense, within a story's internal logic.
As an aside, it would be amusing to imagine a zombie-based epic fantasy in which our intrepid band of undead humans, Elves, Hobbits, and Dwarves treks across the land, on their way to throw the One Ring into the Cracks of Doom, but forced to raid castles and villages along the way just to keep their energy levels high. (“Hello? Saruman? Could we stop in for a few moments to pick your brain?” Or: "Brains! Goblin brains! OMG, delish!")
You can sidestep the problem of biological zombies by invoking supernatural zombies, for whome sustenance is less of a problem: they can last as long as the magic or evil spirit driving them endures. If you want fast-moving, immortal, undead zombies, you probably can’t do it with real biology, but you can develop a magical equivalent of biology that permits this shambling-about, brain-devouring behavior. Understanding those imposed constraints lets you determine what is and isn’t possible in your story.
From a sociological perspective, consider, for example, how language arises from a culture’s physical context. Despite the popular meme, the Inuit and Dene do not really have hundreds of words for snow, but Amazonian tribes probably have no words for snow and Inuit and Dene probably have no words for tropical rainforest. Here’s one interesting way that ecology intrudes on something that seems purely cultural: Language arises from our communication needs, and a people develops habits and vocabularies that reflect the constraints they face, whether those constraints are physical (e.g., George Martin’s 7-year winters in Game of Thrones) or social.
Economics is particularly interesting because it seems to be an inherent and inescapable characteristics of any society, human or otherwise. Traditional capitalism assumes no environmental or ecological consequences; these are mathematically (and philosophically) inconvenient to consider, and are therefore dismissed as “externalities”. Modern environmental economics recognizes that human use of natural resources inevitably has environmental and ecological consequences that must be carefully considered. Since I’ve dissed economics twice already in this essay, it’s important to note its very real and practical aspects: economics shares the same etymological roots (eco) as ecology because both are about competition for and allocation of scarce resources. This competition creates social structures (e.g., feudal societies), consequences of those structures (warfare, trade networks), and language related to those consequences (e.g., the jargon of economics).
If you’re going to write about a feudal culture that raises armies to implement its geopolitical goals, you need to understand that it takes a large number of farmers to sustain each soldier. The actual number depends on the nature of your story world’s agriculture (the crops and their productivity, the technology available to harvest them). As a writer, you don’t need to do a complex thermodynamic calculation to figure out how many farmers are required--but you do need to be aware that you can’t draft everyone in the kingdom to fight your wars because that would leave nobody behind to grow and harvest your crops. Medieval societies developed complex webs of customs about whether, when, and for how long people could be forced to provide military service. The practical goal was to avoid losing half the kingdom’s population to starvation in the following year, since even if you won this year’s battles, you’d lose for sure next year if half your soldiers died from famine. Such societies also evolved complex customs such as scutage to provide practical alternatives for those who couldn’t leave their other responsibilities behind.
I briefly mentioned magic earlier. Magic is difficult to do right because it is difficult to account for all of the consequences. (This is also a problem in science fiction; few authors explore the obvious consequences of technologies such as teleportation devices and replicators.) Whether or not the fictional characters follow explicit rules, you, as author, must define those rules because they tell you what you can and cannot plausibly do. Allowing magic users to do anything they want is possible, but very difficult to do in a way that makes for an entertaining and self-consistent story; if there are no limits on power, there’s no interest because readers know the character can’t fail. Superman is boring because he has no limits; Batman is interesting because he is (comparatively) easy to kill.
However, a little thought allows all kinds of clever alternatives. For example, in John Ostrander and Timothy Truman’s Grimjack series, the city of Cynosure represents a meeting point among hundreds of dimensions, each with its own rules of magic and physics. Those dimension-specific rules bleed into the city, so that gunpowder may work in one tavern, but not in the tavern 20 feet down the street: different rules of physics. To survive in that world, you need to develop an intimate knowledge of how reality varies from place to place. As an intellectual exercise, it would be fascinating to rigorously explore the consequences of this and other worlds where the rules of science don’t apply, or apply in different ways than they do in our world.
Gods are difficult to do right, and deserve an entirely separate essay, because they play by very different rules. The lesson of the Greek gods is a good one: they’re ridiculously powerful compared to me and thee, but they’re not omnipotent. Like magic, your gods should be constrained by rules, whether the rules of physics or mutually negotiated treaties about how they’re allowed to interact. These rules define how they interact with each other and with us.
Phew. I haven't even considered "worldbuilding" from the perspective of the psychological worlds (more than one: economic, political, religious) we each live in. Clearly this is a topic that requires a full book to cope with in adequate detail. But this short treatment should give you some things to consider in your writing.
The basic notion behind the quote is that whether you’re writing hard science fiction or “soft” fantasy, you still need to have some organizing system of principles that describes how the world works. Ecological science is a good basis for this, because we are all familiar with the basic principles on a gut level, from seeing them at work in our reality, or can learn the basic principles quickly with a little research. Needless to say, as a recovering scientist, my focus tends to be more on the scientific aspects of ecology, and indeed, I’m going to propose a pre-conference workshop on the scientific aspects of ecology in the context of building a realistic-seeming world for a future convention. Here, I’ll provide some musings that may eventually lead to something more integrated.
A brief aside: If you’re thinking “why bother with realism when I’m writing about Elves and dragons?”, the answer should be clear: in the context of writing, realism means that everything seems to hold together and function logically, even if the logic is “this world is governed by illogic”; it does not necessarily mean that the story is mimetic (i.e., that it resembles the world we see outside our door).
Ecology derives from the Greek oikos (literally, “house”, but more practically, “where we live”) and as a discipline, it focuses on the functioning of the world in which we live. Most non-ecologists immediately think that ecology is just a small branch of biology, but it’s much more complex and interesting than that simplistic description: ecology involves a wide range of topics, from hard sciences such as physics (thermodynamics, chemistry, biochemistry) to softer sciences such as sociology (cultural studies, religion, psychology) to near-sciences that are slowly and reluctantly trying to become true sciences (i.e., economics). These disciplines interact in scarily and wonderfully complex ways, since no natural ecological system is wholly independent of our human systems: we both shape, and are shaped by, our environment in myriad fascinating ways. The complexity becomes particularly vexing when you throw wild cards such as magic and non-human psychology into the mix.
But there are ways to cope. From a writing perspective, the key point is that ecology is not just stage-dressing: it has clear consequences for those who live within an ecosystem, and those who live within the ecosystem strongly affect it in turn. In short, ecology describes and provides the physical context in which the story takes place. Even “simple” biological ecology is complex: every action has consequences, and the consequences generally create feedbacks (echoes, rebounds) that in turn have consequences for the person or thing that initiated the action. From a physics perspective, think “cause and effect”; from a very different perspective, think karma. Rule 1 of developing a realistic world is that you must understand the consequences of actions and of any changes in the “known rules” that define those consequences. Because it’s so easy to get things wrong, the best bet is to start with what we know works: the real world and thus, the discipline of ecology. That provides a firm foundation for subsequent literary edifices.
Good advice for all speculative fiction is to change only a few things (ideally, one at a time) and then rigorously explore the consequences of those changes. For example, if you want to change something such as the food web that describes how energy flows within an ecosystem, you should start with a basic understanding of how its real-world analogue works. One crucial constraint is that real-world food webs are constrained by thermodynamic considerations: because energy is lost each time a higher level organism consumes a lower-level organism, it takes a large number of herbivores and omnivores (e.g., us) to feed a much smaller number of top predators (e.g., dragons). This is why the peasant’s cattle traditionally suffer the depredations of dragons (high-energy food!), why there aren’t many dragons lying around in most worlds (it takes many sheep to feed one dragon), why they sleep a lot (it’s not possible to output large quantities of energy continuously), and why dragons get VERY hungry after they use their fiery breath: flame = lots of highly concentrated energy expended quickly, and they need to replace that energy somehow.
As a less dramatic but equally energy-intensive example, consider how even simple mobility (walking about) requires consumption of a large amount of energy and the ability to liberate that energy quickly. Thus, your intrepid band of adventurers needs to schlep a ton of food with them, or find it along the way, if they’re going to survive their weeks-long stroll to Mordor. Most writers seem to assume that adventurers photosynthesize, or stop at McDonalds along the way. But in the absence of packets of freeze-dried food that expand to 20 times their dry weight, surviving on a long wilderness expedition takes a lot of time both for hunting and gathering and for prepping your food. In terms of energy output, if you want to create mobile plants, you need to figure out botanical analogues of muscles, which plants lack; it’s why we don’t have to fear feral carnivorous plants in the real world. Muscles, in turn, require botanical equivalents of the quick-release energy systems that animals have. Compare the carnivorous Venus fly trap with more aggressive predators such as John Wyndham’s triffids.
The traditional fantasist’s way to sidestep the known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology is to invoke magic, which will have its own consequences for your storytelling. For example, consider “real” zombies, which, being corpses, cannot last long before they decay into a mess of disgusting goo. Specifically, without breathing (providing the oxygen required to burn fuels such as sugars) and without metabolizing (producing those fuels), they would rapidly become nonfunctional. Natural flesh starts to decay about 10 minutes after the lungs stop working; when oxygen no longer reaches the cells, they start dying, despite heroic biochemical efforts to prevent this. On the more plausible side, it's worth noting that the traditional zombie food (brains) is reasonably nutrient dense, but you’ll still have to eat a lot of brain to chase highly motivated prey animals (i.e., us) for any length of time. So hungry zombies makes sense, within a story's internal logic.
As an aside, it would be amusing to imagine a zombie-based epic fantasy in which our intrepid band of undead humans, Elves, Hobbits, and Dwarves treks across the land, on their way to throw the One Ring into the Cracks of Doom, but forced to raid castles and villages along the way just to keep their energy levels high. (“Hello? Saruman? Could we stop in for a few moments to pick your brain?” Or: "Brains! Goblin brains! OMG, delish!")
You can sidestep the problem of biological zombies by invoking supernatural zombies, for whome sustenance is less of a problem: they can last as long as the magic or evil spirit driving them endures. If you want fast-moving, immortal, undead zombies, you probably can’t do it with real biology, but you can develop a magical equivalent of biology that permits this shambling-about, brain-devouring behavior. Understanding those imposed constraints lets you determine what is and isn’t possible in your story.
From a sociological perspective, consider, for example, how language arises from a culture’s physical context. Despite the popular meme, the Inuit and Dene do not really have hundreds of words for snow, but Amazonian tribes probably have no words for snow and Inuit and Dene probably have no words for tropical rainforest. Here’s one interesting way that ecology intrudes on something that seems purely cultural: Language arises from our communication needs, and a people develops habits and vocabularies that reflect the constraints they face, whether those constraints are physical (e.g., George Martin’s 7-year winters in Game of Thrones) or social.
Economics is particularly interesting because it seems to be an inherent and inescapable characteristics of any society, human or otherwise. Traditional capitalism assumes no environmental or ecological consequences; these are mathematically (and philosophically) inconvenient to consider, and are therefore dismissed as “externalities”. Modern environmental economics recognizes that human use of natural resources inevitably has environmental and ecological consequences that must be carefully considered. Since I’ve dissed economics twice already in this essay, it’s important to note its very real and practical aspects: economics shares the same etymological roots (eco) as ecology because both are about competition for and allocation of scarce resources. This competition creates social structures (e.g., feudal societies), consequences of those structures (warfare, trade networks), and language related to those consequences (e.g., the jargon of economics).
If you’re going to write about a feudal culture that raises armies to implement its geopolitical goals, you need to understand that it takes a large number of farmers to sustain each soldier. The actual number depends on the nature of your story world’s agriculture (the crops and their productivity, the technology available to harvest them). As a writer, you don’t need to do a complex thermodynamic calculation to figure out how many farmers are required--but you do need to be aware that you can’t draft everyone in the kingdom to fight your wars because that would leave nobody behind to grow and harvest your crops. Medieval societies developed complex webs of customs about whether, when, and for how long people could be forced to provide military service. The practical goal was to avoid losing half the kingdom’s population to starvation in the following year, since even if you won this year’s battles, you’d lose for sure next year if half your soldiers died from famine. Such societies also evolved complex customs such as scutage to provide practical alternatives for those who couldn’t leave their other responsibilities behind.
I briefly mentioned magic earlier. Magic is difficult to do right because it is difficult to account for all of the consequences. (This is also a problem in science fiction; few authors explore the obvious consequences of technologies such as teleportation devices and replicators.) Whether or not the fictional characters follow explicit rules, you, as author, must define those rules because they tell you what you can and cannot plausibly do. Allowing magic users to do anything they want is possible, but very difficult to do in a way that makes for an entertaining and self-consistent story; if there are no limits on power, there’s no interest because readers know the character can’t fail. Superman is boring because he has no limits; Batman is interesting because he is (comparatively) easy to kill.
However, a little thought allows all kinds of clever alternatives. For example, in John Ostrander and Timothy Truman’s Grimjack series, the city of Cynosure represents a meeting point among hundreds of dimensions, each with its own rules of magic and physics. Those dimension-specific rules bleed into the city, so that gunpowder may work in one tavern, but not in the tavern 20 feet down the street: different rules of physics. To survive in that world, you need to develop an intimate knowledge of how reality varies from place to place. As an intellectual exercise, it would be fascinating to rigorously explore the consequences of this and other worlds where the rules of science don’t apply, or apply in different ways than they do in our world.
Gods are difficult to do right, and deserve an entirely separate essay, because they play by very different rules. The lesson of the Greek gods is a good one: they’re ridiculously powerful compared to me and thee, but they’re not omnipotent. Like magic, your gods should be constrained by rules, whether the rules of physics or mutually negotiated treaties about how they’re allowed to interact. These rules define how they interact with each other and with us.
Phew. I haven't even considered "worldbuilding" from the perspective of the psychological worlds (more than one: economic, political, religious) we each live in. Clearly this is a topic that requires a full book to cope with in adequate detail. But this short treatment should give you some things to consider in your writing.