Category: Worldbuilding

Life below zero: building the Ice Age

As I write this post, parts of the US are digging themselves out of a massive snowstorm. (Locally, of course, the anti-snow bubble was in full effect, and the Tennessee Valley area got only a dusting.) Lots of snow, cold temperatures, and high winds create a blizzard, a major weather event that comes around once every few years.

But our world has gone through extended periods of much colder weather. In fact, we were basically born in one. I’m talking about ice ages. In particular, I’m referring to the Ice Age, the one that ended about 10,000 years ago, as it’s far better known and understood than any of the others throughout the history of the planet.

The very phrase “Ice Age” conjures up images of woolly mammoths lumbering across a frozen tundra, of small bands of humanity struggling to survive, of snow-covered evergreen forests and blue walls of ice. Really, if you think about it, it paints a picturesque landscape as fascinating as it seems inhospitable. In that, it’s no different from Antarctica or the Himalayas or Siberia today…or Mars tomorrow. The Earth of the Ice Age, as a place, is one that fuels the imagination simply because it is so different. But the question I’d like to ask is: is there a story in the Ice Age?

Lands of always winter

To answer that question, we first need to think about what the Ice Age is. A “glaciation event”, to use the technical term, is pretty self-explanatory. Colder global temperatures mean more of the planet’s surface is below freezing (0° Celsius, hence the name of this post), which means water turns to ice. The longer the subzero temps, the longer the ice can stick around. Although the seasons don’t actually change, the effect is a longer and longer winter, complete with all the wintry trappings: snow, frozen ponds and lakes, plant-killing frosts, and so on.

We don’t actually know what causes these glaciation events to start and stop. Some of them last for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. The worst can cover the whole world in ice, creating a so-called “Snowball Earth” scenario. (While interesting in its own right, that particular outcome doesn’t concern us here. On a snowball world, there’s little potential for surface activity. Life can survive in the deep, unfrozen oceans, but that doesn’t sound too exciting, in my opinion.)

If that weren’t bad enough, an Ice Age can be partially self-sustaining. As the icecaps grow—not just the ones at the poles, but anywhere—the Earth can become more reflective. Higher surface reflectivity means that less heat is absorbed, dropping temperatures further. And that allows the ice to spread, in a feedback loop best served cold.

Living on the edge

But we know life survived the Ice Age. We’re here, after all. The planet-wide extinction event that ended the Pleistocene period came at the end of the glaciation event. So not only can life survive in the time of ice, it can thrive. How?

Well, that’s where the difference between “ice age” and “snowball” comes in. First off, the whole world wasn’t completely frozen over 20,000 years ago. Yes, there were glaciers, and they extended quite far from the poles. (Incidentally, the glaciers that covered the eastern half of America stopped not that far from where I live.) But plenty of ice-free land existed, especially in the tropics. Oh, and guess where humanity came from?

Even in the colder regions, life was possible. We see that today in Alaska, for instance. And the vagaries of climate mean that, strangely enough, that part of the world wasn’t much colder than it is today. So one lead on Ice Age life can be found by studying the polar regions of the present, from polar bears to penguins and Eskimos to explorers.

The changing face

But the world was a different place in the Ice Age, and that was entirely because of the ice. The climate played by different rules. Hundreds of feet of ice covering millions of square miles will do that.

The first thing to note is that the massive ice sheets that covered the higher latitudes function, climatically speaking, just like those at the poles. Cold air is denser than warm air, so it sinks. That creates a high-pressure area that doesn’t really move that much. In temperate regions, high pressure causes clockwise winds along their boundaries, but they tend to have stable interiors.

Anyone who lives in the South knows about the summer ridge that builds every year, sending temperatures soaring to 100°F and causing air-quality and fire danger warnings. For weeks, we suffer in miserable heat and suffocating humidity, with no rain in sight. It’s awful, and it’s the main reason I hate summer. But think of that same situation, changing the temperatures from the nineties Fahrenheit to the twenties. Colder air holds less moisture, so you have a place with dry, stale air and little prospect for relief. In other words, a cold desert.

That’s the case on the ice sheets, and some thinkers extend that to the area around them. Having so much of the Earth’s water locked into near-permanent glaciers means that there will be less precipitation overall, even in the warm tropics. That has knock-on effects in those climates. Rainforests will be smaller, for example, and much of the land will be more like savannas or steppes, like the African lands that gave birth to modern humans.

But there are still prospects for precipitation. The jet stream will move, stray winds will blow. And the borders of the ice sheets will be active. This is for two reasons. First, the glaciers aren’t stationary. They expand and contract with the subtle seasonal and long-term changes in temperature. Second, that’s where the strongest winds will likely be. Receding glaciers can form lakes, and winds can spread the moisture from those lakes. The result? Lake-effect precipitation, whether rain or snow. The lands of ice will be cold and dry, the subtropics warm (or just warmer) and dry, but the boundary between them has the potential to be vibrant, if cool.

Making it work

So we have two general areas of an Ice Age world that can support the wide variety of life necessary for civilization: the warmer, wetter tropics and the cool convergence zones around the bases of the glaciers. If you know history, then you know that those are the places where the first major progress occurred in our early history: the savannas of Africa, the shores of the Mediterranean, the outskirts of Siberia and Beringia.

For people living in the Ice Age, life is tough. Growing seasons are shorter, more because of temperature than sunlight; the first crops weren’t domesticated until after the ice was mostly gone, when more of the world could support agriculture. Staying warm is a priority, and making fire a core part of survival. Clothing reflects the cold: furs, wool, insulation. Housing is a must, if only to have a safe place for a fire and a bed. Society, too, will be shaped by these needs.

But the Ice Age is dynamic. Fixed houses are susceptible to moving or melting glaciers. A small shift in temperature (in either direction) changes the whole landscape. Nomadic bands might be better suited to the periphery of the ice sheets, with the cities at a safe distance.

The long summer

And then the Ice Age comes to an end. Again, there’s no real consensus on why, but it has to happen. We’re proof of that. And when it does happen…

Rising temperatures at the end of a glaciation event are almost literally earth-shattering. The glaciers recede and melt (not completely; we’ve still got a few left over from our last Ice Age, and not just at the poles), leaving destruction in their wake. Sea levels rise, as you’d expect, but they could also sink, as the continents rebound when the weight of the ice is lifted.

The tundra shrinks, squeezing out those plants and animals adapted to it. Conversely, those used to warmer climes now have a vast expanse of fresh, new land. Precipitation begins to increase as ice turns to water and then evaporates. The world just after the Ice Age is probably going to be a swampy one. Eventually, though, things balance out. The world’s climate reaches an island of stability. Except when it doesn’t.

Our last Ice Age ended in fits and starts. Centuries of relative warmth could be wiped out in a geological instant. The last gasp was the Younger Dryas, a cold snap that started around 13,000 years ago and lasted around a tenth of that time. To put that into perspective, if it were ending right now (2016), it would have started around the time of the Merovingians and the Muslim conquest of Spain. But we don’t even know if the Younger Dryas was part of the Ice Age, or if it had another cause. (One hypothesis even claims it was caused by a meteor striking the earth!) Whether it was or wasn’t the dying ember of the Ice Age doesn’t matter much, though; it was close enough that we can treat it as if it were.

In the intervening millennia, our climate has changed demonstrably. This has nothing to do with global warming, whatever you think on that topic. No, I’m talking about the natural changes of a planet leaving a glacial period. We can see the evidence of ancient sea levels and rainfall patterns. The whole Bering Strait was once a land bridge, the Sahara a land of green. And Canada was a frozen wasteland. Okay, some things never change.

All this is to say that the Ice Age doesn’t have to mean mammoths and tundra and hunter-gatherers desperate for survival. It can be a time of creation and advancement, too.

Magic and tech: travel

Let’s start our look into the intersection of magic and technology by focusing on travel. It’s an important part of life, communication, government, and far more; indeed, it encompasses much of what makes a civilization possible. So how would it change in the presence of magic?

Movement

In our mundane world, in the timeframe we’re discussing, you had a few possible modes of travel. Foot travel (walking or running) is, of course, the oldest and most reliable. It’s also one of the slowest. On foot, you’re lucky to cover a few miles an hour (2-3 is common for walking; running can get as high as 15 or more, but only for relatively short distances), which translates to a rough maximum of 15-20 miles per day. And your feet are going to be awfully sore.

Riding, usually on horseback, is another possibility. (It wasn’t an option in the New World, but we’re making a decidedly Eurocentric culture here, so that’s okay.) This is a bit faster, with less physical exertion on the part of the traveler, but it comes at a cost: animals are expensive, they need their own care, and there are places they can’t go. None of these problems is solved by the other forms of animal-powered travel, ranging from carts to sleds. All in all, animals might get you double the travel, maybe averaging 30-40 miles per day.

Boats are another good option, if the terrain allows them. You need rivers, and they need to be able to support craft. That means no rapids or waterfalls, no dams, no seasonal drying, and so forth. But where it works, it’s worth it. Going downriver is easy, and you can cover vast distances quickly. Sixty miles in a day? Not that hard, especially since the current will keep you moving while you take a break from the oars. The downside, though, is obvious: you can only go where the rivers go.

All this is a far cry from what we’re used to today. In modern times, it’s easier to measure distance covered per hour, not per day. We have cars (about 30-60 mph, depending on speed limits), bicycles (anywhere from 10 mph up), and airplanes (200 mph is on the low end). All of these contribute to a cultural cohesion that didn’t—couldn’t—exist 600 years ago. People tended to stay close to home back then, and one of the reasons was because it was just so hard to go anywhere else. We think nothing of a fifteen-hour flight to another continent or three days of driving on a road trip, but earlier societies were much more limited in their mobility. The next town over might be a couple hours’ ride; going from your farmstead to the big city might be a weekend’s journey. And you’d only go far if it was worth it.

Just add magic

In our magical society, however, things are much more familiar, because magic helps alleviate some of the worst restrictions. Our wizards don’t have haste spells—not for lack of trying—but they have plenty of ways of increasing physical stamina, removing exhaustion, and healing general aches and pains. All of these can be used by foot and animal traffic, and they have a huge effect. Sure, you still need to eat, and so do the horses, but you don’t have to stop to do it. That already adds maybe 50% or more to your total coverage for a day, taking that 15 miles of walking and turning it to as much as 25.

But we (rather, our wizards) can do better. A recent invention in our fantasy kingdom involves something like the magical equivalent of a perpetual motion machine: a stored “pool” of magical energy is slowly released to turn a wheel or gear at a relatively constant speed, much like a flywheel. Once started, inertia keeps the wheel spinning, with small losses for friction countered by the stored magical power. (Flywheels, in principle, may date back almost a thousand years, so it’s reasonable to suggest that our magical culture might be playing with them in its later Middle Ages.)

Where this gets interesting is when one industrious mage connected this fairly well-known device to a cart by a system of gears, shafts, and the like. The resulting contraption moved forward, accelerating to a walking pace. After a decade or so of refinement, thanks to generous grants from interested nobility, the wizards of our budding nation have a self-propelled vehicle that can run for about 24 hours, with a top speed of 10 mph on flat, level ground. Rougher terrain drops this by up to half, and “refueling” the storage pool is expensive (it’s easiest to retain the services of a mage to ride with you), but the upsides are obvious.

Put simply, it’s a car. It doesn’t have much range, its speed isn’t great, it’s exorbitantly priced, but it compares well with some of the earliest attempts at automobiles. Going up against traditional modes of transit, it’s a no-brainer. Even with only the nobility being able to use them, these magic-mobiles radically alter the nature of society. The king’s decrees, courts, justice, benevolence, all of it can be delivered much faster than any other way. Soldiers can’t be transported, and only small amounts of goods can, but information transport is much more efficient in our magical world.

Such vehicles would also create the need for infrastructure to accommodate them. High-quality roads are a priority, to maximize the magic-mobiles’ power output; the ultimate goal is to connect every city with them. This causes a demand for great amounts of low-skilled laborers, with the knock-on effect of low unemployment in the traditionally slow summer and winter seasons. Rest stops have begun to spring up on the roads, mostly in the form of inns and taverns founded by enterprising merchants. And novice mages have both an extra income source and a way to practice one of the more complex spells: the storing of magical energy in an artificial vessel.

In addition to our magical cars, the wizards have a few other tricks up their sleeves. Human flight, they have found, is essentially impossible even for the greatest mages. But something like it can be approximated. A simple jumping spell can be augmented by more experienced magic users so that it flings them up to 500 feet into the air. An equally easy slow-fall spell keeps the mage from descending too fast (and getting hurt). Given a running start, each bound can cover about the same distance horizontally as vertically, and the whole process from one jump to the next takes about a minute. It’s not much faster than walking (6 mph, give or take), but it also brings the advantage of aerial scouting. Problem is, it’s individual; only a mage can work the spells, and he can only cast them on himself and maybe a person he’s carrying.

Movement in the water benefits from the magical motor above, and in exactly the same way, but some parts of the kingdom have another option. Weather control is beyond the best archmage, but most adepts can summon a concentrated jet of air or water. The former makes sails usable even in the calmest conditions, and at smaller sizes than otherwise needed. Water jets, on the other hand, help all watercraft, from the smallest raft to the biggest galleon. By Newton’s Third Law—the wizards don’t know it as such, but they’ve figured out the important part—the vessel is moved as a reaction to the propulsive force of the jet. It’s not that much of a force, but it adds up over time, which makes it worth it for longer journeys. (The same reasoning applies to the ion engines of modern spacecraft.)

Where do you want to go?

With their magical cars, Superman-like leaping wizards, and jet-powered boats, the high people of our kingdom have easy ways to move around. Even the poorer folk can benefit from the endurance spells. Together, the magical additions at the ends of the class spectrum combine to create a more cohesive society than any in Europe’s 14th century. Knowledge of current events diffuses throughout the realm at a much faster pace. Authority is much closer to hand.

Cargo transport, unfortunately, doesn’t yet have a magical panacea. River travel is still the best option, at least where it is an option. The increased speeds, however, mean that fresh foods are more commonly found in cities, among other luxuries. (On a more martial note, naval warfare is completely different, though we’ll look at that later on.) Travel upriver is far easier, too, if you have a mage on your craft.

Our magical kingdom won’t be completely modern, but it will have reached a kind of transitional stage of travel. It’s reminiscent, in a way, of the early railroad days, when people were first exposed to the idea of higher-speed transit. Indeed, given time, something like a railroad may develop. All it would take is more incremental progress in the magic motor, allowing it to provide more force. That would enable higher speeds, larger carrying capacities, or both. Once it gets to the point where even poorer peasants can afford a ride to the next town, they’ll soon stop being peasants at all. But that’s a tale for a different day.

Magic and tech: introduction

Now that the New Year’s pleasantries are out of the way, it’s time to get back to the work of worldbuilding. It’s work that never truly stops, you know. Worldbuilding isn’t just a rabbit hole, it’s a bottomless pit for your spare time. But it’s undeniably fun, in that creative sort of way. In that sense, these are my favorite posts to write.

Anyway, this post is going to serve as an introduction to a new series of worldbuilding articles. These will be about the “regular” length for my posts (about 2,000 words), and they’ll cover a very specific subject: the interaction of magic and technology. Look around the fantasy section of your favorite bookstore, whether physical or virtual, and you can find plenty of examples of worlds where these two forces coexist. It’s a staple of certain subgenres, after all.

But many of these worlds are just our own, only viewed from a different angle. So much fantasy (I’m not only talking about books here, but games and movies and TV, too) takes the classic D&D approach of “medieval, but with wizards“, and that’s really a shame. Why? It’s simple, if you think about it. Magic changes the game. With magic, the rules of history don’t apply.

Now, I’m not saying all fantasy is this way. There are plenty of stories out there that take a…nontraditional approach to magic and technology. The “magitech” and “technomancer” styles are good examples of this, but not the only ones. Any segment of fantasy has its highs and lows; to me, great worldbuilding is definitely one of the highs. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy a good sword-and-sorcery romp as much as the next guy, but I do find more fulfillment out of a detailed setting that feels real. It’s hard to describe, but depth and logic play strong parts.

And I especially love good magic systems. More importantly, I want to see a world that understands its magic, a world that reacts to it. I can suspend my disbelief for things that are physically impossible, but not those that are logically impossible. Throwing fireballs, summoning demons, reviving the dead—and, for sci-fi, add in FTL travel, teleportation, and so on—those are all fine, as long as there’s a reason for them. It can even be a literal miracle, if that fits the setting. Just don’t make it a deus ex machina, that’s all.

The intersection

So let’s get back to this whole “series” idea. Remember that? Here’s what I’ve got in mind.

First, this is an irregular series. It won’t be every week, and it doesn’t have a definite end. I could write about something like this for an eternity, but I won’t. Instead, “Magic and tech” posts will be interspersed with the more regular worldbuilding and literary articles on Mondays. I’ll try to do one a month, but don’t hold me to that.

Second, I know I’ve spent the last few months talking in generalities. This will be different. I’m going to take a specific example and work it to the ragged edge. The setting I’m making will have a few built-in assumptions, and I’ll go over the basics in a moment. Almost everything else I intend to flow logically from those assumptions. My logic doesn’t always work the same way as everybody else’s, so feel free to call me out when (not if) I screw up.

Third, the setting will be mine, but don’t let that stop you from swiping bits and pieces of it for your own. Maybe the assumptions are altered slightly, or history took a different path. Who cares? Change the names and a few of the details, and it’s yours.

The assumptions

There are, to a first approximation, an infinite number of possibilities for combining magic systems, technology development, cultural development, and historical circumstance. That won’t do. We need to narrow things down, so I’ll be starting from a known origin point. The core assumptions I’ll be making are:

  1. Magic exists. That’s a no-brainer, if you read the title of this series, but it bears repeating. Specifically, magical aptitude is a function of a few different factors, not all of them scientific. All we really need to know, though, is that about one out of every 80 people has the talent, and about two out of three of those never realize they have it or give up trying to harness it. Actual mages make up about 1/250 of the adult population.

  2. Magic is known. People understand that some among them have a power unexplainable by natural laws. To them, it’s taken as a given, the same way some people can write songs or make statues from marble. It’s a gift, yes, but no more than any other creative gift.

  3. Magic is fairly predictable. Sure, there are a lot of possibilities for thinking outside the box, but most mages in this setting are conservative and low-key. They’ve made something like a cross between art and science, and most of them don’t mind keeping it that way.

  4. Technology is at a level roughly comparable to the High Middle Ages. No steam engines or (technology-based) electricity, but a few peripheral countries are lacking in mages, and they have developed the earliest gunpowder weapons as a defense.

  5. Technology stagnated earlier in history, due to the conservative nature of most mages. Within living memory, however, things have started to progress again. We’re not talking a millennia-long Dark Ages—A Song of Ice and Fire, I’m looking at you—but about 400 years of the status quo.

  6. Religion is…complicated. The supernatural is generally agreed to exist, but there is no single faith that unites a vast section of the world. Most religions do favor magic over technology, but some are the opposite, considering magic anathema. A couple eschew both, feeling that magic is too powerful for mortals, but technology is too soulless.

  7. The inhabitants of the world are otherwise modern humans. This is almost an afterthought, but it helps to be clear on this point. We’re working with people like us, not aliens or elves.

More to come

So that’s the rough sketch. Now it’s time to fill in the blanks. As I write this series, I’ll fill in a table of contents down here. (The hardest part will be remembering to do it!) As always, comments and constructive criticism are most welcome, and I’d love to hear about your own creations. Other than that, there’s nothing left to say but this: strap yourself in and enjoy the ride.

Contents

  1. Travel
  2. Information technology
  3. Information
  4. Power
  5. Weapons
  6. Defenses
  7. Medicine
  8. Heating and cooling
  9. Construction
  10. Art

More on calendars

When this post goes up, it will be the start of 2016. A new year. Time to throw out those old calendars and set up the new ones. (Well, probably not. Most people just use the calendars on their computers or phones these days.) But before you toss that record of the old year, take a look at it, because it’s actually quite interesting.

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about holidays. This time around, I’m going to look at the whole calendar. Not just our own, mind you, but others throughout history and the modern world. Some of them have features that might be useful to a writer looking to make his fantasy world distinctive.

Into the west

Let’s start with our familiar western calendar. It’s the simplest, but only because we’re familiar with it; if we grew up using, say, the Islamic calendar, then we would be used to that. Now, you already know the basics, if you’re above the age of 4. The year is divided into twelve months, beginning in January and ending in December. Months have fixed numbers of days, but they aren’t the same: we’ve got four of them with 30 days, seven with 31, and then February, which can have 29 in leap years (like this one), but normally has 28.

Months can then be divided into weeks of 7 days each (though only February divides exactly). Days, of course, are 24 hours long, not counting Daylight Saving Time, and hours are subdivided into 60 minutes, which are, in turn, subdivided into 60 seconds. Going back to the other end, years are counted from the putative birth of Christ, with the only real nod to religious diversity being the “modern” names for either side of the dividing line: Christian Era (CE) and Before Christian Era (BCE) versus the traditional Anno Domini (AD) and Before Christ (BC). We can also group the years into decades, centuries, and millennia, but these are more a notational convenience than a function of the calendar.

So that’s what the Western calendar is. But why is it like that? Why are the months uneven? Why does the year start in January? Do we really need leap years?

Let’s start with the first question there. Our calendar is the result of a long chain of cause and effect reaching far back into history, but its current form was largely determined by the Romans. They were the ones that gave us our twelve months, with essentially today’s names. As usual, though, it’s not that simple.

First off, the Roman (Julian, technically; Julius Caesar’s reign saw more than its share of calendar reforms) New Year was in March, so January and February were at the end of the calendar. February 29, the leap day, would have been the last day on the list. The year starting in March basically lasted until the Gregorian reform: sometime since 1582, depending on where you live. (In America, the one time a non-specialist would encounter the Julian-to-Gregorian switchover is in genealogy. Some dates in the 18th century—when Britain and the colonies that would become the US switched—are recorded as OS or NS. These stand for Old Style and New Style, meaning what we now call the Julian and Gregorian calendars, respectively.)

Incidentally, moving the year’s starting date messed up the naming. September comes from the Latin word for “seven”, which you wouldn’t expect from the ninth month. But a few hundred years ago, it would have been linguistically accurate. The same goes for October (eight), November (nine), and December (ten).

Just about the one thing the Romans didn’t give us for our calendar is the AD/BC split. That one came a few centuries later. Before then, years were reckoned from the time of a well-known event or the coronation of a noble figure such as a king or emperor.

Written in the stars

Let’s turn to the scientific aspect of the calendar for now, since that’s where we can get more insight. We’ll get back to the history shortly, I promise.

The year, scientifically speaking, is the time it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun once, while the day is how long it takes our planet to rotate on its axis. These are the only “natural” units of time measurement; weeks and months and hours are all human invention. Both the year and the day can be found by observation: the day is roughly the time between one noon and the next, and the stars (including the Sun) will return to the same position in the night sky after a year. (Technically, this isn’t entirely accurate, but the inaccuracies are far below the calendar’s resolution.)

Clever readers will note that we’ve already run into a big problem: the year is not made of a whole number of days. It’s not 365 days long, nor is it 366. In fact, it’s something like 365.2422 days. So, if our calendar only had 365, we would effectively lose a day about every four years. But if we made every fourth year a day longer, that makes up for the discrepancy. Hence, leap years.

The Julian calendar had one every four years, no matter what. By the time of the Gregorian reform, the difference between 365.2422 and 365.25 had added up, and they had to skip a few days to get things back on track. (How many days depends on when the reform took place.) To stop that from happening again, they also changed the rules to make only certain century years leap years. And that’s why 2000 was special: the next leap year ending in 00 won’t be until 2400.

The sun and the moon

There’s another way to count the days, and it can even work at night. The Western calendar is a solar calendar; it’s based around the sun. But our months are remnants of a connection to a lunar calendar. It’s right there in the name, too.

Other calendars are exclusively lunar in nature. The Islamic calendar is one example. Months start and end based on the phase of the moon, and in many Muslim countries that is a literal statement, even today. But the lunar period isn’t a whole number of days, either, so Islamic months can have either 29 or 30 days. Due to religious circumstances, the Islamic calendar has exactly twelve months, meaning that it will always be short of the solar year. The current year for Muslims is 1437, and the calendar’s epoch (basically, its starting date) was in 622. Simple arithmetic shows that 1394 solar years have passed since then, a difference of 43.

This doesn’t fit with the seasons, but it’s not really meant to. An alternative is to try to combine the lunar and solar cycles into a single calendar. In the West, we have only the remnants of that, in our months, but some other cultures use what’s called a lunisolar calendar. The most familiar example would be the Jewish religious calendar. Here, we still have twelve months, and they’re still based on the cycle of the moon. Normally. But this is a solar calendar, too, and the seasons are important. So, to keep them roughly where they should be, the Jewish calendar adds extra months. It’s like our leap days, but 30 at a time. Seven of these every 19 years keeps things fairly even, plus or minus a month.

From scratch

I’m not going to try to explain the Mayan calendar. It confuses me, so I don’t even know where to begin. Instead, I’ll move on to some thoughts on making a fantasy (or even sci-fi) calendar.

First things first, you need to know the relationship between the year and the day. That’s the key. If you’re working with Earth (or a reasonable facsimile), you already know this, and you can move on. Otherwise, you’re deep in worldbuilding territory, and you’ll probably have to work things out yourself. In that case, remember that it’s going to be pretty rare to have a year with an integral number of days. In fact, it’s almost impossible, and it’s surely temporary. Just about every calendar, with the possible exception of one for an interstellar empire, will have leap days of some sort. They might be scattered throughout the years, or they may come in bunches, but they will be there.

The year and the day mark the cornerstones of the calendar, no matter what kind you have. In between, however, things are wide open. Obviously, lunar-based calendars require at least one moon, and that moon needs to be in an orbit that fits. Phobos, the inner moon of Mars, would be completely useless for a lunar calendar, for example: its orbital period is about 7-1/2 hours. Multiple moons give us the possibility of measuring by conjunctions, but that can get into some heavy math that might be too much for a fantasy world. That’s not to say it’s not worth trying, just that it may not be worth the effort in the end.

Even without a big moon in a nice, useful orbit, cultures would likely develop divisions of time between the day and year. Seasons are appropriate for this, and I’ve got just such a post for that. Weeks are more of an invention of civilization. Our seven-day week dates back to Babylonian times, but many cultures have a shorter period of days than the month. Cyclical religious observances are one excuse for a week, but more mundane concerns, like markets, can also come into play. (A story I’m currently writing has a culture with a week of six days, while the French Revolution tried to institute a ten-day week. About the only place they succeeded was in D&D’s Forgotten Realms setting.)

Now, when the year starts is a question that depends heavily on not just your world but your culture. The Romans liked it in spring, and that has a lot going for it in an agrarian society. The Gregorians moved it to January (to have it closer to Christmas or something like that), but that put it in wintertime. There are arguments for just about any day of the year to be New Year’s, but it’s probably—though not always—going to be at the start of the month, and the date will likely have some cultural, religious, or economic significance.

We can go “below” the day, too, but we begin to run into limitations of technology. Hours are fairly easy, and many early cultures settled on numbers like 12, 24, or 60 of them in a day. Why? For the same reason that there are twelve inches in a foot and twelve (troy) ounces in a pound: it’s easier to divide into halves, fourths, and thirds. (Decimal numbers are great for working on paper, but horrible for eyeballing.) Of course, another planet with a different rotation period will have different hours. On Mars, the obvious “hour” would be about a minute and a half longer than ours.

Measuring minutes and seconds is…harder. It’s likely beyond the reach of many early civilizations, and they likely wouldn’t see the need for it, anyway. We have 60 minutes in an hour or seconds in a minute because, again, 60 is easier to work with until pen and paper are widespread calculating devices. If hours had only been subdivided after the French invented the metric system, we’d probably have 100 of them. (Put the metric system in ancient times, and we would all be using Swatch’s silly Internet Time today, I guess. Anybody remember that thing?)

Last but not least, we come to the reckoning of years. For the West, we count from a monk’s imperfect calculation of the birth of Christ. Muslims go by the rather more specific date of Muhammad’s move to Medina, while Jews start their calendar with the traditional date of the Biblical creation of the world. Other options exist, though. One common one in history is dating by years since a ruler’s rise to the throne; when a new ruler is crowned, a new era begins. Another is a cycle of years called indictions. In this system, the last year of one cycle is followed by the first of a new cycle. We might say that this is the seventh year of the 2010s, for example, or the sixth year of this decade. In a way, the Mesoamerican calendars function something like this. (I’ve actually seen this in fantasy before, too. Scott Lynch, in The Lies of Locke Lamora, has a kind of indiction system. Each year is named after one of the setting’s twelve gods, in a specific order. When the last one is reached, the whole thing loops back to the start.)

Happy New Year

However the calendar works, it gives an otherworldly feel to any fiction. To give you one example, my aforementioned story is set on a different planet. (Well, the first part is mostly set on Earth, but that’s neither here nor there.) That planet has a different day length (24 hours, 23 minutes, approximately) and year length (about 374.16 local days) than our own, meaning that I had to do some work.

What I came up with was a calendar of twelve months, each 30 days long, which doesn’t really have any relation to the orbital period of the planet’s moon; it’s more a matter of convenience. Each month is made of five weeks of six days. The extra days are scattered around the calendar, a few at the end of each season. There are more of them at the end of spring, and fewer at the end of fall, and this has a scientific basis: the eccentricity of the planet’s orbit. Days in this fictional world are 24 hours long, but their hours are slightly longer than our own. Hours can be divided into minutes, and further into seconds, but this is more a math trick than something practical.

You can do things differently, and you probably should. What you make should be tailored for your fictional world, for your story. The key is suspension of disbelief. It doesn’t really make much sense for a world with no connection to Earth at all to be calling their months October and their days Saturday. (I didn’t talk much about the names of the days. They’re pretty obvious, though: planets or gods, not that there’s much difference in older times.) Now, you can say that it’s an author translation of unfamiliar terms, and that’s fine, but taking a little bit of time to work things out can pay off in making your world feel more real.

Holidays: reality and fantasy

Today, for me, marks the winter solstice. (Officially, it happens just before 5AM tomorrow morning, going by UTC time. I’m in the US Eastern Time Zone, which is 5 hours behind that, so it’s a few minutes before midnight locally.) As the days grow shorter and the year runs out, thoughts naturally turn towards the holidays, of which there are so many right now. Christmas, of course, is only a few days away. Hanukkah isn’t too far behind us. New Year’s Day is on the horizon, bringing 2015 to a close. And that’s not counting the not-so-holy holidays this time of year, like Pearl Harbor Day (and the birthday of one of my uncles) back on the 7th or Boxing Day (and the birthday of a different uncle) on the 26th.

Indeed, in our modern, Western calendar, every month is chock full of holidays. (Except August, much to my brother’s delight; it’s totally bare, so his birthday is all by itself.) But that’s one culture, in one time, and nothing says that everybody has the same holidays. It’s common knowledge that Jews and Muslims don’t celebrate Christmas, for example, while Thanksgiving is an American tradition with no counterpart across the Atlantic. Many countries celebrate Independence Day, but only the USA has it on the Fourth of July.

And what about fictional cultures? What holidays do they have? Tolkien’s hobbits were good English folk, and they essentially used our calendar and our holidays, just with the Christianity filed off. That’s good enough for a lot of stories, but we might want to go deeper. To do that, we need to understand the origins of holidays.

For every season

For a “traditional” pre-industrial society, whether agrarian or hunter-gatherer, life is sustained directly by the earth itself. Food comes from nature, and it is the single most important facet of life. And food follows the seasons, whether the growing seasons of plants or the mating or hibernating or migrating seasons of animals. Life, living, is governed by the calendar. That’s where most of our traditional holidays come from. As it turns out, they might have different names, but almost every culture has a similar set.

Imagine an analog clock face. Now, imagine that this represents the year. Summer, the season with the highest temperatures, can go at the top, with the solstice at the 12 o’clock position. Winter, conversely, will be the low point: 6 o’clock. The spring and autumn equinoxes then fit in at 9 and 3, respectively. And time passes like this in its eternal cycles. Simple, right? Each of those four points I identified are important markers in the year that are recognized by most cultures. (Tropical cultures are a bit of an exception, since they don’t have the most obvious distinction of the seasons, the changing length of the night. But they can still tell the seasons by patterns in rainfall, winds, and the natural behavior of plants and animals.)

For a lot of places in the temperate zones, the spring (vernal) equinox marks the point in the year when temperatures are warm enough to make planting viable. In the same way, the autumnal equinox is a good sign that cold weather is moving in soon, and it’s time to start thinking about harvests and preparing for winter. Since temperate locales tend to show a big difference between hot and cold seasons, this is a very important part of the calendar. Freezing weather kills many plants, including most of those a pre-industrial society depends on for food. Planting too early and harvesting too late are both very real dangers that can, at the worst, lead to widespread famine. (Look up the Year Without a Summer for a fairly recent example of this.)

In a similar vein, the solstices are milestones in the calendar. Among older cultures, the winter solstice has been historically more important, whether as a time to look forward to the spring ahead or to celebrate the passing year. Summer, in temperate regions, is a relative time of plenty already, so it gets less attention. Besides, no one who lives a pastoral life looks forward to the lean times of winter.

So, for many cultures that haven’t reached the Industrial Age (where advances in technology allow food yields to increase faster than the population), these four times are some of the most likely suspects for holidays. And we can add to them four more: the midpoints between each pair. On our imaginary clock, those are at 1:30, 4:30, 7:30, and 10:30; on the calendar, they’re around the beginning of February, May, August, and November. Indeed, some calendars—the Celtic calendar is one example—use those to determine the seasons, while our familiar equinoxes and solstices become their midpoints.

Altogether, then, we have eight days that make obvious sense for agrarian holidays. On our calendar, roughly, they are: February 1, March 20, May 1, June 21, August 1, September 23, November 1, and December 21. And true enough, the Western world has seasons for just about all of them:

  • Early February: Groundhog Day is a modern spectacle that hearkens back to actual folk wisdom regarding the coming of spring. The Christian feast day of Candlemas probably replaced many of those “pagan” traditions. And America’s bloodsport of choice has its biggest day around this time, too: the Super Bowl.

  • Late March: Essentially everybody celebrates the first of spring. (If you’re a Celt, then that was in the last section, as Imbolc. Otherwise, it’s probably right here.) Most of the European rituals were subsumed into Easter, but the pagan origins are still evident. Look elsewhere in the world, though, and you’ll find planting holidays and end-of-winter feasts aplenty.

  • Early May: By the middle of spring, lots of flowers are blooming, and that’s the basic idea around these holidays. Nowadays, May Day celebrates workers in industrialized countries, but the floral connection still exists. The US has never really been a big May Day place, so Mother’s Day pops up here. It’s not a traditional festival-type holiday, though, so we’ll get to it later. The Celts, by the way, started counting summer here, calling it Beltane.

  • Late June: Again, we don’t really have a lot going on this time of year, but that wasn’t always the case. Midsummer was celebrated by plenty of cultures, and it’s a very big thing in northern Europe to this day. Christianity appropriated it as St. John’s Day, but find somebody in America who knows that. Of course, we have the nearby Fourth of July, so it’s understandable. Anyway, midsummer holidays tend to celebrate the long days, maybe even with bonfires that try to further drive back the night.

  • Early August: By August, summer is starting to run out, and fall is approaching. The earliest harvests start around this time, and the traditional Anglo-Saxon calendar marks August 1 as a “first harvest” festival for wheat crops, called Lammas (Lughnasa by the Celts). The timing doesn’t work everywhere, nor does it work for every crop, so not everybody has a harvest holiday around here, although they’ll have one somewhere.

  • Late September: Traditional harvest festivals tend to fall around the first of autumn. In other words, right here. The Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the equinox, and its light can be seen as a blessing to those working the fields, giving them a little extra to see by. Harvest, of course, is a time of hard work, but also of feasting. Before modern food storage techniques, people had to eat what they could, lest it go to waste.

  • Early November: Celts have Samhain, Christians have All Saints’ Day, and children have Halloween. These are all connected, as the Church took over the pagan festival, then the people took over the holy feast. Some other cultures have something here, but this one isn’t that big a time to celebrate, as it means that winter is coming. Maybe if you’re a Stark…

  • Late December: In modern times, we’d see it as ending the year with a bang. For a lot of people (not just Christians, for that matter), Christmas is the holiday. But it has its pagan origins, too: traditional Yule and Roman Saturnalia. All of them have the same general idea, though. A feast to get through the long winter nights, a time to look forward to spring, a day to reflect on the year that was and the year that soon will be, all of that fits this time of year. So does gift-giving, that most popular of Christmas traditions. What better time to give to those in need, if not the shortest day of the year?

Getting religion

So that’s it for the agrarian calendar. Add religion to the mix, and things get hairy. For Christianity, it’s mostly simple, as the Church subsumed the pagan holidays into its own, sometimes only by changing their names. They did add some of their own, like Ash Wednesday or the feast of the Assumption, that don’t match up to the seasons. Judaism and Islam, which keep their own calendars, have their own holidays, like Hanukkah and Ramadan, and the same would be true even for fictional religions.

Here, it’s hard to give guidelines. Religious observances that aren’t anniversaries of known events can fall anywhere in the year. They can even be movable, and not in obvious ways: calculations of the date of Easter drove centuries of Christian astronomy. And those that are annual commemorations don’t necessarily need any connection to the actual date the event happened. After all, there isn’t even Biblical evidence that Jesus was born in December. (That he was crucified in spring is pretty solidly confirmed, however.)

My best advice is to think about the religion. What days are most important? Those will likely be the ones most celebrated. Then look at the rest of the calendar. People like feasts, but they don’t want too many too soon. That gets expensive. So the next most celebrated holidays will likely be those far from other holidays. It’s not an exact science—it doesn’t explain the American August drought—but it’s a good start.

Also, if your story involves a polytheistic religion, think about the different gods and their functions. Gods of agriculture and nature are going to be more tied to the seasons. Death and winter are often linked, for obvious reasons, so a death god might have a holiday in or near winter. Spring is seen as a time of love, fire goes with summer, and I’m sure you can find other relations.

Inventions

As states become more centralized, especially once industrialization comes about, the nature of holidays begins to change. Sure, the usual suspects are still there: harvest feasts, planting festivals, summer bonfires and winter gifts. But these are increasingly accompanied by a new set of holidays, and we should spend some time on them.

Many of our “secondary” holidays originally had a religious significance, largely stemming from the Catholic saints’ days. Valentine’s Day is one of these, though it also falls on the day of a Roman feast (Lupercalia) that had many of the same romantic connotations. Saint Patrick’s Day is another, but it’s also a “nationalist” holiday, with its strong Irish connection. For these, as for Christmas and Halloween, it’s a case of the secular overtaking the religious. Likewise, Thanksgiving originally had some religious overtones, but these are all but forgotten.

Other holidays are directly nationalist, and these obviously depend on the country. But they all have in common the idea of commemorating a person or group. In the US, for example, we have holidays to honor Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther King Jr., veterans (originally of World War I, but later expanded to all of them), mothers, fathers, workers, and presidents. The specifics will differ, but a fictitious country would likely have its own set of honored people. This would depend on history, societal norms, technological advancement, and the circumstances around the formation of that country, all of which are good topics for future posts.

Elsewhere

On other planets, the seasons still work the same way. A terrestrial planet with a year like Earth’s will have a natural calendar like Earth’s. The names and dates will be changed, but the broad outline will remain the same.

We don’t even know what kind of life can arise on less-familiar worlds, but it stands to reason that they’d have similar ideas about the calendar. Of course, around a red M star, a habitable world’s year only lasts a few weeks, so things will likely break down at this extreme. At the other end of the spectrum, habitable planets around F stars might have years 3 or more times that of ours, meaning longer, more extreme seasons. More holidays would appear in a longer calendar like this, if only to break up the monotony.

Now, a society spanning multiple worlds has a conundrum. Most of the holidays, at first, would be those of the homeworld. But colonies would soon become like nations on Earth, each developing their own set of observances (for the same reasons, no less). Almost all of these would be purely local, but some would rise in prominence, as St. Patrick’s Day has done here.

Conclusion

However you do it, holidays add flavor to a world. They’re an important part of life. They have been for thousands of years, and they will be as long as we continue to observe them.

Most of a culture’s holidays are going to come from its roots, and each will have a story. Some are religious, others entirely dependent on the whims of the seasons. A few started out as movements for political or social change, or to honor the leaders of such. And today, every day of the year has been claimed in the name of some organization. (My own birthday of October 16, for instance, is Boss’s Day, which would be great if I had employees. It’s also World Food Day and World Anesthesia Day, because of historical anniversaries.)

As I said before, most stories won’t need this level of detail. But it can find a place in worldbuilding, and it’s always good to have the answers to the kinds of questions you never thought to ask. So, consider this a gift. And whichever holiday you happen to be celebrating over the next week or so, I hope you enjoy it.

The changing of the seasons

Winter is coming. It’s not just a catchy motto from Game of Thrones, you know. No, winter really is on its way, as the seasons move on their eternal cycle. And this change from fall to winter can make you wonder. We know why the seasons change: our planet’s tilt, combined with its movement around the sun. But what does that truly mean? And, from a worldbuilding perspective, does it have to be that way? Well, let’s take a look.

Reason for the season

The Earth is tilted on its axis. Anybody past about the third grade knows that, and it’s patently obvious just by looking at the sky at different points in the year. Right now, our world has somewhere in the vicinity of 23° of axial tilt, and that’s a fairly stable number. It hasn’t changed much at all in written history, and only within about a degree either way throughout all of human existence. In the distant past (millions of years ago), there were periods where it was much higher or lower, but things are much more settled in this modern era.

Now, the axis doesn’t move, at least on scales of a single year. (We’ll ignore precession and other effects for the moment, as they tend to work on much larger periods of time.) What does that mean for us? Only that different parts of the world will get more sunlight at different times of the year. And that’s what causes the seasons to change.

Summer, of course, is when your part of the world gets the most direct sunlight, and that happens when your half of the world points more towards the sun. Winter is the exact opposite, and it’s on the other side of the year. Spring and fall (autumn, if you prefer) are in the middle, when the planet’s tilt is roughly perpendicular to the sun’s rays. But the Earth has two hemispheres: northern and southern. They can’t both be pointed at the sun, thus the complementary seasons that make Christmas a summertime holiday in Australia.

Tropical highs and lows

There’s a lot more to it than that, though. Because of the Earth’s tilt of about 23°, we can divide the world into a few sections. First, we have the tropics, the area around the equator, from the Tropic of Cancer in the north, to the Tropic of Capricorn in the south. Coincidentally enough, these lines are at exactly the latitude equal to the axial tilt. (It’s not a coincidence at all; it’s the whole reason why they exist.) Every point in the tropics will have the sun directly overhead at some time in the year.

The polar regions are also defined by the tilt. The Arctic and Antarctic Circles are at a latitude of about 67°, or as far from the pole (90°) as the axial tilt, or in math terms: $90° – a$. Everywhere in a polar region will have a time when the sun is at the nadir, and a day where it doesn’t rise at all. But it will also have days where the sun doesn’t set, giving us the “midnight sun” of Alaska and Scandinavia.

In between the polar and tropical regions lie the temperate zones. In these, the sun will never be directly overhead or directly below, and it will rise and set every day. And it’s here that seasonal variation has the most visible effects.

Day and night

If the Earth wasn’t tilted, there wouldn’t be any seasons. Every night would be 12 hours long, no matter where you were. But we don’t live in that world, we live in one that is tilted. Thus, our nights change in length. At the equinoxes, the lengths of day and night are equal, hence the name. At the solstices, they’re as far apart as can be. In between, there’s a gradual shifting that gives us the feeling that days are growing longer or shorter.

As you get farther from the equator, the variation grows. Thus, at my latitude of around 35° north, I might only get about 9 hours or so of daylight on the winter solstice, but summer nights will also be that short. Up in New York, it might be split 16/8, while London might be 17/7 or 18/6. Helsinki, up near 60°, is going to have some long winter nights, but there will always be a sunrise. Barrow, Alaska and McMurdo Station in Antarctica are both inside the polar region, so they’ll have days without nights, or vice versa.

An added complication

The whole thing would be perfectly symmetrical but for one little detail. Earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a perfect circle. It’s an ellipse. That ellipse doesn’t move any more than the axis does. (Again, we’re ignoring precession.) As of right now, the perihelion, the point closest to the sun, comes around in January, during the northern winter. Orbital mechanics dictates that the aphelion, then, is six months later.

As anyone who has played Kerbal Space Program knows, things move more slowly at apoapsis. (“Aphelion” is just the apoapsis of something orbiting the sun.) Therefore, since our apoapsis occurs in July, northern summer is a little bit longer than winter, while the southern hemisphere is the other way around. It’s not much of a difference, only about one or two days, so it doesn’t affect the climate that much. But it’s something you may have to keep in mind.

Another world

So all that works for Earth. How about a different planet? How would the seasons work? The answer: about the same. Earth is simply the most convenient example, since we’re already living here. Mars has seasons, too; the Phoenix lander was killed by the rigors of a Martian polar winter. For the rest of the solar system, things get dicey. Jupiter doesn’t have much tilt, for example, while Uranus is practically lying on its side. Mercury has its resonance-lock thing going on, which screws everything up. And moons don’t really work the same way.

But for your ordinary, habitable, terrestrial world, seasons are going to be like Earth’s. Summer and winter, spring and fall, they’re all going to be there. They may be different lengths, based on the planet’s orbital period and eccentricity. The tropical and polar zones may be larger or smaller, if the tilt isn’t our 23°. The division of day and night might scale differently, due to these same factors. But from a scientific point of view, that’s all you have to worry about. The years-long summers and winters of Westeros are scientifically implausible; you need magic to account for them.

Summer is always going to be the hottest part of the year, with the most sunlight and shortest nights. Winter will be the coldest; the sun will hang low in the sky, and its rays will strike more glancing blows on the world. Spring and autumn will both be marked by equinoxes, days when the periods of daylight and darkness are the same length. Spring tends to get warmer as you go through it, while autumn cools down.

In the tropics of your fictional world, there won’t be as much seasonal variation, especially close to the equator. The poles, by contrast, will be marked by long summer days, cold winter nights, and periods of total darkness or everlasting sunshine. In between will be the temperate zones, where civilization tends to flourish. And the southern hemisphere will always be backwards when it comes to the calendar.

But this is all speaking from the view of orbital mechanics. On the ground, there is a lot of room for change. Latitude only determines the kinds of seasons you have, whether tropical, temperate, or polar. A location’s climate is certainly affected by this, but many more factors come into play, so many that I’ll dedicate a future post to them.

Colonization and the New World

It’s common knowledge that the Old World of Europe, Asia, and Africa truly met the New World of the Americas in 1492, when Columbus landed in the Caribbean. Of course, we now know that there was contact before that, such as the Vikings in Newfoundland, about a thousand years ago. But Columbus and those who followed him—Cortés, Pizarro, de Soto, Cabot, and all those other explorers and conquerors Americans learn about in history class—those were ones who truly made lasting contact between the two shores of the Atlantic.

Entire volumes have been written over the last five centuries about the exploration, the conquest, the invasion of the Americas. There’s no need to repeat any of it here. But the subject of the New World is one doesn’t seem to get a lot of exposure in the world of fiction, with the notable exception of science fiction. And I think that’s a shame, because it’s an awfully interesting topic for a story. It’s full of adventure, of gaining knowledge, of conflict and warfare. Especially for American writers (not limited to the United States, but all of North and South America), it’s writing about the legacy we inherited, and it’s odd that we would rather tell stories about the history of the other side of the ocean.

Written by the victors

Of course, one of the main reasons why we don’t write many stories about exploration and colonization is political. We know a lot about the Spaniards and Englishmen and Frenchmen that discovered (using that term loosely) the lands of America. We have written histories of those first conquistadors, of those that came after, and of the later generations that settled in the new lands. We don’t, however, have much of anything from the other side.

A lot of that is due to the way first contact played out. We all know the story. Columbus discovered his Indians (to use his own term), Cortés played them against each other to conquer them, and smallpox decimated them. Those that survived were in no position to tell their tale. Most of them didn’t have a familiar system of writing; most of those written works that did exist were destroyed. And then came centuries of subjugation. Put that all together, and it’s no wonder why we only have one side of the tale of the New World.

But this already suggests story possibilities. We could write from one point of view or the other (or both, for that matter), setting our tale in the time of first contact or shortly after, in the upheaval that followed. This is quite popular in science fiction, where the “New World” is really a whole new world, a planet that was inhabited when we arrived. That’s the premise of Avatar, for example.

Life of a colony

Colonization has existed for millennia, but it’s only since 1492 that it becomes such a central part of world history. The Europeans that moved into the Americas found it filled with wonders and dangers. For the Spanish, the chief problem—aside from the natives—was the climate, as Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean mostly fall into the tropical belt, far removed from mid-latitude Spain.

The English had it a little better; the east coast of the United States isn’t all that different from England, except that the winters can be harsher. (This was even more the case a few hundred years ago, in the depths of the Little Ice Age.) It’s certainly easier to go from York to New York than Madrid to Managua.

No matter the climate, though, colonists had to adapt. Especially in those times, when a resupply voyage was a long and perilous journey, they had to learn to live off the land. And they did. They learned about the new plants (corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and many more) and animals (bison and llamas, to name the biggest examples), they mapped out river systems and mountain chains. And we have reaped the benefits ever since.

Building a colony can be fun in an interactive setting; Colonization wouldn’t exist otherwise. For a novel or visual work, it’s a little harder to make work, because the idea is that a colony starts out exciting and new, but it needs to become routine. Obviously, if it doesn’t, then that’s a place where we can find a story. Paul Kearney’s Monarchies of God is a great series that has a “settling new lands” sequence. In the science fiction realm of colonizing outer space, you also have such works as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars (and its colorful sequels).

Terra nullius

Whenever people moved into new land, there was always the possibility that they were the first ones there. It happened about 20,000 years ago in Alaska, about 50,000 in Australia, and less than 1,000 in Hawaii. Even in the Old World, there were firsts, sometimes even in recorded history. Iceland, for example, was uninhabited all the way through Roman times. And in space, everywhere is a first, at least until we find evidence of alien life.

Settling “no man’s land” is different from settling in land that’s already inhabited, and that would show in a story with that setting. There are no outsiders to worry about. All conflict is either internal to the colonists’ population or environmental. That makes for a harder story to write, I think, but one more suited to character drama and the extended nature of books and TV series. It doesn’t have to be entirely without action, though, but something like a natural disaster would be more likely than war.

This is one place where we can—must—draw the distinction between space-based sci-fi and earthly fiction or fantasy. On earth (or a similar fictitious world), we’re not alone. There are animals, plants, pests everywhere we go. We have sources of food and water, but also of disease. In deep space, such as a story about colonizing the asteroid belt, there’s nothing out there. Nothing living, at least. Settlers would have to bring their own food, their own water, their own shelter. They would need to create a closed, controlled ecosystem. But that doesn’t leave much room for the “outside” work of exploration, except as a secondary plot.

Go forth

I’m not ashamed to admit that I could read an entire book about nothing but the early days of a fictional colony, whether in the Americas or on an alien planet. I’ll also admit that I’m not your average reader. Most people want some sort of action, some drama, some reason for being there in the first place. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But let’s look at that question. Why does the colony exist at all? The Europeans were looking for wealth at first, with things like religious freedom and manifest destiny coming later on. The exploration of space appears to be headed down the same path, with commercial concerns taking center stage, though pure science is another competitor. Even simple living space can be a reason to venture forth. That seems to be the case for the Vikings, and plenty of futuristic stories posit a horribly overcrowded Earth and the need to claim the stars.

Once you have a reason for having a colonial settlement, then you can turn to its nature. The English made villages and towns, the French trading posts. Antarctica isn’t actually settled—by international agreement, it can’t be—but the scientific outposts there point to another possibility. If there are preexisting settlements, like native cities, then there’s the chance that the colonists might move in to one of them instead of setting up their own place. That’s basically what happened to Tenochtitlan, now known as Mexico City.

Colonies are interesting, both in real history and in fiction. They can work as settings in many different genres, including space opera, fantasy, steampunk (especially the settling of the Wild West), and even mystery (we still don’t know what really happened at Roanoke Island). Even just a colonial backdrop can add flavor to a story, giving it an outside pressure, whether by restless natives or the cold emptiness of space. A colony is an island, in a sense, an island in a sea of hostility, fertile ground for one’s imagination.

Alternate histories

For a lot of people, especially writers and other dreamers, one of the great questions, a question that provokes more thought, debate, and even argument, is “What if?” What if one single part of history was changed? What would be the result? These alternate histories are somewhat popular, as fictional sub-genres go, and they aren’t just limited to the written word. It’s a staple of Star Trek series, for example, to travel into the past or visit the “mirror universe”, either of which involves a specific change that can completely alter the present (their present, mind you, which would be our future).

What-if scenarios are also found in nonfiction works. Look at the history section of your favorite bookstore, digital or physical. You’ll find numerous examples asking things like “What if the D-Day invasion failed?” or (much earlier in the timeline) “What if Alexander had gone west to conquer, instead of east?” Some books focus on a single one of these questions, concocting an elaborate alternative to our known history. Others stuff a number of possibilities in a single work, necessarily giving each of them a less-detailed look.

And altering the course of history is a fun diversion, too. Not only that, but it can make a great story seed. You don’t have to write a novel of historical fiction to use “real” history and change things around a little bit. Plenty of fantasy is little more than a retelling of one part of the Middle Ages, with only the names changed to protect the innocent. Sci-fi also benefits, simply because history, in the broadest strokes, does repeat itself. The actors are different, but the play remains the same.

Divergence

So, let’s say you do want to construct an alternate timeline. That could easily fill an entire book—there’s an idea—but we’ll stick to the basics in this post. First and foremost, believability is key. Sure, it’s easy to say that the Nazis and Japanese turned the tide in World War II, eventually invading the US and splitting it between them. (World War II, by the way, is a favorite for speculators. I don’t know why.) But there’s more to it than that.

The Butterfly Effect is a well-known idea that can help us think about how changing history can work. As in the case of the butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane, small differences in the initial conditions can grow into much larger repercussions. And the longer the time since the breakaway point, the bigger the changes will be.

I’m writing this on September 21, and some of the recent headlines include the Emmy Awards, the Greek elections, and the Federal Reserve’s decision to hold interest rates, rather than raising them. Change any bit of any of these, and the world today isn’t going to be much different. Go back a few years, however, and divergences grow more numerous, and they have more impact. Obviously, one of the biggest events of the current generation is the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. Get rid of those (as Family Guy did in one of their time-travel episodes), and most of the people alive today would still be here, but the whole world would change around them.

It’s not hard to see how this gets worse as you move the breakaway back in time. Plenty of people—including some that might be reading this—have ancestors that fought in World War II. And plenty of those would be wiped out if a single battle went differently, if a single unit’s fortunes were changed. World War I, the American Civil War (or your local equivalent), and so on, each turning point causes more and more difference in the final outcome. Go back in time to assassinate Genghis Khan before he began his conquests, for instance, and millions of people in the present never would have been born.

Building a history

It’s not just the ways that things would change, or the people that wouldn’t have lived. Those are important parts of an alternate history, but they aren’t the only parts. History is fractal. The deeper you go, the more detail you find. You could spend a lifetime working out the ramifications of a single change, or you could shrug it off and focus on only the highest levels. Either way is acceptable, but they fit different styles.

The rest of this post is going to look at a few different examples of altering history, of changing a single event and watching the ripples in time that it creates. They go in reverse chronological order, and they’re nothing more than the briefest glances. Deeper delving will have to wait for later posts, unless you want to take up the mantle.

Worked example 1: The Nazi nuke

Both ways of looking at alternate timelines, however, require us to follow logical pathways. Let’s look at the tired, old scenario of Germany getting The Bomb in WWII. However it happens, it happens. It’s plausible—the Axis had a lot of scientific talent that defected around that time, including Albert Einstein, Werner von Braun, and Enrico Fermi. It’s not that great a leap to say that the atomic bomb could be pushed up a couple of years.

But what does that do to the world? Well, it obviously gives the Axis an edge in the war; given their leaders’ tendencies, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that such a weapon would have been used, possibly on a large city like London. (In the direst scenario, it’s used on Berlin, to stop the Red Army.) Nuclear weapons would still have the same production problems they had in our 1940s, so we wouldn’t have a Cold War-era “hundreds of nukes ready to launch” situation. At most, we’d have a handful of blasts, most likely on big cities. That would certainly be horrible, but it wouldn’t really affect the outcome of the war that much, only the scale of destruction. The Allies would likely end up with The Bomb, too, whether through parallel development, defections, or espionage. In this case, the Soviets might get it earlier, as well, which might lead to a longer, darker Cold War.

There’s not really a logical path from an earlier, more widespread nuclear weapon to a Nazi invasion of America, though. Russia, yes, although their army would have something to say about that. But invading the US would require a severe increase in manpower and a series of major victories in Europe. (The Japanese, on the other hand, wouldn’t have nearly as much trouble, especially if they could wrap up their problems with China.) The Man in the High Castle is a good story, but we need more than one change to make it happen.

Worked example 2: The South shall rise

Another what-if that’s popular with American authors involves the Civil War. Specifically, what if the South, the Confederacy, had fought the Union to a stalemate, or even won? On the surface, this one doesn’t have as much military impact, although we’d need to tweak the manpower and supply numbers in favor of our new victors. (Maybe France offered their help or something.) Economically and socially, however, there’s a lot of fertile ground for change.

Clearly, the first and most obvious difference would be that, in 1865 Dixie, slavery would still exist. That was, after all, the main reason for the war in the first place. So we can accept that as a given, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it would be the case 150 years later. Slavery started out as an economic measure as much as a racial one. Plantations, especially those growing cotton, needed a vast amount of labor. Slaves were seen as the cheapest and simplest way of filling that need. The racial aspects only came later.

Even by the end of the Civil War, however, the Industrial Revolution was coming into full force. Steam engines were already there, and railroads were growing all around. It’s not too far-fetched to see the South investing into machinery, especially if it turns out to be a better, more efficient, less rebellious method of harvesting. It’s natural—for a Yankee, anyway—to think of Southerners as backwards rednecks, but an independent Confederacy could conceivably be quite advanced in this specific area. (There are problems with this line of reasoning, I’ll admit. One of those is that the kind of cotton grown in the South isn’t as amenable to machine harvesting as others. Still, any automation would cut down on the number of slaves needed.)

The states of the Confederacy depended on agriculture, and that wouldn’t change much. Landowners would be reluctant to give up their slaves—Southerners, as I know from personal experience, tend to be conservative—but it’s possible that they could be wooed by the economic factors. The more farming can be automated, the less sense it makes for servile labor. Remember, even though slaves didn’t have to be paid, they did have costs: housing, for example. (Conversely, slavery can still exist if the economic factors don’t add up in favor of automation. We can see the same thing today, with low-wage, illegal immigrant labor, a common “problem” in the South.)

Socially, of course, the ramifications of a Confederate victory would be much more important. It’s very easy to imagine the racism of slavery coming to the fore, even if automation ends the practice itself. That part might not change much from our own history, except in the timing. Persecuted, separated, or disfavored minorities are easy to find in the modern world, and their experiences can be a good guide here. Not just the obvious examples—the Palestinians, the Kurds, and the natives of America and Australia—but those less noteworthy, like the Chechens or even the Ainu. Revolt and rebellion might become common, even to the point of developing autonomous regions.

This might even be more likely, given the way the Confederacy was made. It was intended to be a weak national government with strong member states, more like the EU than the US. That setup, as anyone familiar with modern Europe will attest, almost nurtures the idea of secession. It’s definitely within the realm of possibility that the Confederate states would break up even further, maybe even to the point of individual nations, and a “black” state might splinter off from this. If you look closely, you can see that the US became much more centralized after the Civil War, giving more and more power to the federal government. The Confederates might have to do that, too, which would smack of betrayal.

Worked example 3: Gibbon’s nightmare

One of the other big “change the course of history” events is the fall of the Roman Empire, and that will be our last example today. How we prevent such a collapse isn’t obvious. Stopping the barbarian hordes from sacking Rome really only buys time; the whole system was hopelessly corrupt already. For the sake of argument, let’s say that we found the single turning-point that will stop the whole house of cards from falling. What does this do to history?

Well, put simply, it wrecks it. The Western world of the last fifteen hundred years is a direct result of the Romans and their fall. Now, we can salvage a lot by deciding that the ultimate event merely shifted power away from Rome, into the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire centered on Constantinople. That helps a lot, since the Goths and Vandals and Franks and whatnot mostly respected the authority of the Byzantines, at least in the beginning. Doing it like this might delay the inevitable, but it’s not the fun choice. Instead, let’s see what happens if the Roman Empire as a whole remains intact. Decadent, perhaps, and corrupt at every level, but whole. What happens next?

If we can presume some way of keeping it together over centuries, down to the present day, then we have a years-long project for a team of writers, because almost every aspect of life would be different. The Romans had a slave economy (see above for how that plays out), a republican government, and some pretty advanced technology, especially compared to their immediate successors. We can’t assume that all of this would carry down through the centuries, though. Even the Empire went through its regressive times. The modern world might be 400 years more advanced, but it’s no less likely that development would be retarded by a hundred or more years. The Romans liked war, and war is a great driver of technology, but you eventually run out of people to fight, and a successful empire requires empire-building. And a Pax Romana can lead to stagnation.

But the Dark Ages wouldn’t have happened, not like they really did. The spread of Islam might have been stopped early on, or simply contained in Arabia, but that would have also prevented their own advances in mathematics and other sciences. The Mongol invasions could have been stopped by imperial armies, or they could have been the ruin of Rome on a millennium-long delay. Exploration might not have happened at the same pace, although expeditions to the Orient would be an eventual necessity. (It gets really fun if you posit that China becomes a superpower in the same timeline. You could even have a medieval-era Cold War.)

Today’s world, in this scenario, would be different in every way, especially in the West. Medieval Europe was held together by the Christian Church. Our hypothetical Romans would have that, sure, but also the threat of empire to go with it. Instead of the patchwork of nation-states that marked the Middle Ages, you would have a hegemony. There might be no need for the Crusades, but also no need for the great spiritual works iconic of the Renaissance. And how would political theory grow in an eternal empire? It likely wouldn’t; it’s only when people can see different states with different systems of government that such things come about. If everybody is part of The One Empire, what use is there in imagining another way of doing things?

I could go on, but I won’t. This is a well without a bottom, and it only gets deeper as you fall further. It’s the Abyss, and it can and will stare back at you. One of my current writing projects involves something like an alternate timeline—basically, it’s a planet where Native Americans were allowed to develop without European influence—and it has taken me down roads I’ve never dreamed of traveling. Even after spending hundreds of hours thinking about it, I still don’t feel like I’ve done more than scratch the surface. But that’s worldbuilding for you.

On rogues and rebels

A popular trope in fiction is that of the rebel. Rebels, in their various disguises as rogues, thieves, pretenders, vigilantes, and terrorists, live outside the normal bounds of society in some way, and that apparently speaks to some primal instinct in us all. We may not empathise with them, and we rarely support them, but we enjoy them. Sometimes, the rebels are the good guys (Star Wars, V for Vendetta), sometimes they’re bad (every hostage movie ever), but they’re almost always interesting.

But what makes a “good” rogue, character-wise? I can’t claim to know the answer, but I do know what makes a rebel “real”: motivation. Few people turn to the “dark side” on a whim. There’s a reason why someone in real life becomes a rebel. What that specific reason is, however, depends on many factors.

Today’s terrorist groups are founded on ideological grounds, and the same is true throughout history. Religion is the one we’re most familiar with, as it’s so easy to spur people to violence over differences in faith. Peaceful religious rebels exist, too, but we so rarely hear of them in the news. Still, they’re out there, and they were formed on the same basis as ISIS and the IRA. Many of the first English colonies in the Americas, for example, were intended as religious endeavors; the Pilgrims, to name one, intended to create a utopia ordered around their ideals, far away from the influence of the outside world.

Religion isn’t the only motivator for rebellion. Politics can work, as well. That’s what got us the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and a thousand others throughout time. (Obviously, once the rebels take power, they’re no longer rebels, but everyone has to start somewhere.) Political rebellion can happen in just about any form of government, too, and it’s not always an attempt at overthrowing the whole system. In medieval monarchies, succession laws created a breeding ground for pretenders, some of whom gathered followers and pressed their claims.

Other factors can come into play. Economic inequality got us the Occupy movement a few years ago, but it’s also a good explanation as to why some turn to crime. Society itself can also turn people into rebels—minorities of any kind are especially susceptible—but it’s more likely to “amplify” other effects. How, you might ask? Put simply, people become marginalized (for whatever reason), which leads them into rebelling. Once they begin to rebel against authority, social pressures polarize the reactions of others, causing a “with us or against us” dichotomy. From here, there are a couple of paths, but the outcome is the same either way: the “rebels” tend to become more extreme, more hardened against negative opinion.

Individual rebels

The lone rebel is popular in all forms of fiction. He can appear on either side of a fight, as good or evil or (increasingly) as an anti-hero. For the individual rebel, think of Batman, a vigilante who works in the shadows, following his own moral compass. But also think of the Joker, because he’s no less distant from society.

Individual rebels in fiction tend to be outcasts, if for no other reason than the simple fact that it’s the easiest way to motivate a rebellious character. The orphan turned to a life of crime (or of fighting it), the woman in a man’s world, the racial minority—not just black in a sea of white, but also an elf among humans or the single Earthling in a universe full of aliens—whatever the cause, this character is alone. He has few or no connections to the society around him, so he has no reason to follow its norms, no reason to try to conform.

Loners like this are good protagonists in many stories, and some of my favorite lead characters are of this sort. I’d say that’s true for a lot of people, if the popularity of lone-star action heroes is any indication.

Organizations

It’s usually social factors that create individual rebellion. By contrast, organized rebellion tends to be caused by “the system”. The Rebel Alliance is fighting the Empire. Freedom fighters want to create their own nation where they can live in peace. The faithful are sent by God to wrest control from the heretics running the kingdom. (The savvy reader will note that each of these examples makes the rebels look like the good guys. That’s by design. But you could just as easily invert expectations. After all, the scenarios equally describe the Confederate States of America, the Chechens, and al-Qaeda, respectively.)

Organizations range from the small (a band of anarchists, for example), to the large (national rebellions). At each stage, they can fight for good or bad. The common trait that all of them share, though, is that they all have a “mission”. Why do they fight society? Answer that, and you can better characterize the group. (And that goes just as well for real life, a fact that many people forget.)

Smaller groups tend to be localized. The Thieves’ Guild, a common trope in fantasy, is one example, but any kind of organized crime fits. Assassination plots work, too, as do “heists”. On the side of the good guys, there aren’t a lot of familiar options, unfortunately. Small paramilitary organizations might work, but a band of adventurers (or, in science fiction, the crew of a ship) doesn’t quite fit, unless there’s a very specific reason why they’ve been shunned by society. Of course, it’s possible to make criminal groups sympathetic; look at Robin Hood.

A larger organization, one spanning more than a single locality, is more likely to exist in modern or futuristic settings, as communication over greater distances becomes more practical. Today, we tend to equate “organized rebel group” with “terrorists”, but that’s largely a function of media manipulation. It might be less likely, but it’s no less possible to have a large group of rebels fighting for good. (Again, the Rebels of Star Wars serve as illustration.)

While the lone rebel as a protagonist is a staple of fiction, rebellious groups tend to be the bad guys or, at best, a backdrop. This makes intuitive sense, as it’s awfully difficult to characterize a group from the inside without focusing your attention on a handful of its members. Sure, the good guys might belong to a rebellion, and they might even believe in its cause, but it’s harder to work that into a story, in my opinion.

Governments in fiction

I’ll continue this ongoing not-quite-series for another week today by looking at the idea of government and how it is realized in fiction. This time, we almost have to lump science fiction and fantasy in together, simply because they share so many similarities. Most important among those is the fact that they are often (but not always) set in worlds besides our own, in societies besides our own. And a society needs a government of some sort; even true anarchy is, in effect, a form of government.

The rules of rule

Government is as varied as anything in this world. In the modern world, we have representative democracies (like the US is intended to be); parliamentary republics (much of Europe); monarchies (Thailand, Saudi Arabia); juntas (Burma, aka Myanmar); theocracies (ISIS, if you consider them an actual government); and dysfunctional anarchies (Somalia). Go back through history, and you find even more possibilities.

In fiction, though, many of the finer distinctions are lost. Much fantasy tends to go with the most known examples out of the Middle Ages: feudal monarchy, merchant republic, and a distant and inscrutable theocracy. Science fiction set in the future or on alien worlds prefers something more modern: democracy, corporate oligarchy, utopia (either libertarian or socialist), or a distant and inscrutable hive mind.

But there’s more to it than that.

Who rules?

That’s a simple question, but a profound one. Who’s in charge? We have options:

  • A single person: This is true of monarchies, dictatorships, and many theocracies. A single ruler is well-attested in history, from hunter-gatherer chieftains, to the pharaohs of Egypt, through the Chinese emperors, to the French kings and the Arabian emirs.

  • A small group of people: Not necessarily a council, but more of a cabal. They’re usually unelected, and they’re certainly not representative of the people as a whole. An example might be the two consuls of Rome, who had a sort of “power-sharing” system.

  • A larger group of people: Republics and democracies generally have a large government. This isn’t always because of bureaucracy; a system where each representative has N constituents will obviously need more and more representatives as the population grows. Of course, this smaller segment of society can then choose its own government and even a leader. Most modern countries in the West use a system like this, with a president or prime minister leading a larger body.

Why do they rule?

The rule of law is very important, but the reason the rulers are there in the first place shouldn’t be forgotten, either. Again, there are plenty of possibilities.

  • Will of the people: Ideally, this is the goal of representative democracies and republics. People vote for those most likely to support them. We can argue forever about just how effective this is, but the intent is clear.

  • Will of God: Leaders can claim their position is the result of divine will. Theocracies, quite obviously, follow this method, but medieval kings and emperors in West and East claimed the same thing. The coins of many countries in the British Commonwealth still bear an inscription that translates to “By the grace of God, Queen”, even if nobody really believes that anymore.

  • Family connections: Inheritance of rule was (and is) common in the world. Thrones and seats can be passed from father to son, mother to daughter, or any other relation. And nepotism remains a factor in any position of power. (There’s a reason why Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are two of the current election favorites in the US as I write this.)

  • Cold, hard cash: If you can’t get elected, you don’t know the right people, and God won’t help you, you can always buy your way in. Rule by the rich is a hallmark of feudalism and merchant republics alike, but oligarchs are the secret power in many countries today.

How do they rule?

This one’s a lot harder to break down into bullet points. How do your rulers rule? Do they have a codified set of laws, like the US Constitution? Or do they turn to holy scripture (or some facsimile thereof) for laws, morality, and punishment? Or is it simply power, the idea that might makes right?

A “lawful” system like those of most republics, democracies, and similar governments of today gives us a way to change the system from within. The Constitution can be amended, for example. And the turnover inherent in an electoral government means that outmoded ideas eventually get cast aside.

On the other hand, a theocratic system is, by definition, conservative. I don’t mean the political notion of conservative, here, but a philosophical one. Holy books can’t be changed, only reinterpreted, but there are some passages in every scripture that are all but absolute. There aren’t too many ways to read “Thou shalt not kill,” after all. (I don’t think there are too many ways to interpret “the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” either, but some disagree.)

Similarly, a government ruled by the powerful will tend to be conservative, simply because those in charge don’t want to change things enough to put themselves on the outside. Military conquerors and coups don’t like to reinstitute elections, and corporate overlords aren’t going to allow a higher corporate tax. Power takes care of itself, and a more pessimistic person might say that’s the general tendency of all governments. But that’s a different post.

Far-fetched

Really, like I’ve said in many other posts, the best way to make your fictional culture more realistic is to work it out. Using logic, common sense, and the knowledge at everyone’s fingertips, you can figure out just what kind of society you’re making and how it relates to the ones we know.

Government has its reasons for existing, no matter what you might think of it. Those reasons will be the subject of a future post, but you can probably think of a few of them right now. Think of the three main questions I’ve asked so far. Who rules? Why are they the ones in charge? And how do they stay at the top? Answer those, and you’re well on your way to a properly realistic solution.