Category: Worldbuilding

Exoplanets for builders

In just over two decades, we’ve gone from knowing about nine planets (shut up, Pluto haters) to recognizing the existence of thousands of them. Almost all of those are completely unsuitable for life as we know it, but researchers say it’s only a matter of time before we find “Earth 2.0”. Like any other 2.0 version, I’m sure that one will have fewer features and be harder to use, but never mind that.

As so many science fiction writers like to add in a large helping of verisimilitude, I thought I’d write a post summarizing what we know about planets outside our solar system, or exoplanets, as we enter 2017. Keep in mind that there’s a lot even I don’t know, although I’ve been following the field as a lay observer since 2000. Nonetheless, I hope there’s enough in here to stimulate your imagination. Also, this will necessarily be a technical post, so fantasy authors beware.

What we know

We know planets exist beyond our solar system. They’ve been detected by the way they pull on their stars as they orbit (the Doppler or radial velocity method), and that’s how we found most of the early ones. The majority of those known today, thanks to the Kepler mission, have been discovered by searching for the change in their stars’ light intensity as the planets pass before them: the transit method. In addition, we have a few examples of microlensing, where the gravity of a planet bends the light of a “background” star ever so slightly. And we’ve got a handful of cases where we’ve directly imaged the planets themselves, though these tend to be very, very large planets, many times the size of Jupiter.

However we see them, we’re sure they’re out there. They can’t all be false positives. And thanks to Kepler, we’ve got enough data to start drawing some conclusions. Of course, these must be considered subject to change, but that’s the way of science.

First, our solar system, with its G-type star orbited by anywhere from eight to twenty planets (depending on who’s counting) starting at about 0.3 AU, looks very much like an outlier. We don’t have a “hot Jupiter”, a gas giant exceedingly close to the star, with an orbit on the order of days. Nor do we have a “warm Neptune” (a mid-range gaseous planet somewhere in the inner system) or a “super-Earth” (a larger terrestrial world, possibly with a thick atmosphere). This doesn’t mean we’re unique, though, only that we can’t assume our situation is the norm.

Second, we’ve got a pretty good idea about which stars have planets. To a first approximation, that’s all of them, but the reality is a little more nuanced. Bright giants don’t have time to form planets. Small red dwarfs don’t have the material to create Jupiter-size giants. Neither of these statements is an absolute—we’ve got examples of gas giants around M-class stars—but they’re tendencies. Everything else, seemingly, is up in the air.

What we can guess

Planets do appear to be everywhere we look. There are more of them around M stars, but that’s largely because there are so many more M stars to begin with. A lot of stars have planets with much closer orbits, so close that you wouldn’t expect them to form. Gas giants aren’t restricted to the outer system, like they are here. And there’s a whole class, the super-Earths, that we never knew existed.

We can make some educated guesses about some of these planets. For example, many of the super-Earths, according to computer simulations, may actually be tiny versions of Neptune, so-called “gas dwarfs”. If that’s true, it severely cuts our number of potentially habitable worlds. On the other hand, the definition of the habitable zone has only expanded since we started finding exoplanets. (Even in our own solar system, what once was merely Earth and maybe the Martian underground now includes Europe, Titan, Enceladus, Ganymede, Ceres, the cloud tops of Venus, and about a dozen more exotic locales.) Likewise, studies suggest that a tide-locked planet around a red dwarf star doesn’t have to be frozen on one side and scorched on the other.

We’ve got a few points where we don’t even have data, though. One of these, possibly the most important for a writer, is the frequency of Earthlike worlds. By “Earthlike”, I don’t simply mean terrestrial, but terrestrial and capable of having liquid water on the surface. Where’s the closest one of those? Until about a year ago, the answer might have been anywhere from 15 to 500 light-years away. But then came Proxima b. If it turns out to be potentially habitable—in the month and a half between my writing this post and it going up, we may very well know—then that almost ensures that Earthlike worlds are everywhere. Because what are the chances that the next-closest star to the Sun has one, too?

Creating a planet

For the speculative writer, this lack of knowledge is a boon. We have the freedom to create, and there are few definite boundaries. Want to put a gas giant in the center of a star’s habitable zone, with multiple Earthlike moons? We can’t prove it’s impossible, and the real-life counterpart might really be out there, waiting to be found.

Basically, here’s a rundown of some of the factors that go into creating an exoplanet:

  • Star size: Bigger stars are shorter-lived, but smaller ones require their “classically” habitable planets to be much closer, to the point where they’ll likely be tide-locked. G-type dwarfs like ours are a happy medium, but not a common one: something like 1% of stars are in the G class, and there’s not much data saying that planets are more likely around them.

  • Star number: Most stars, it seems, are in multiple systems. Binaries can host planets, though; we’ve detected a class of “Tatooine” planets (named after the one in Star Wars, because scientists are nerds) circling binary systems. For close binaries, this is a fairly stable arrangement, but with huge complexities in working out parameters like temperature. Distant binaries like Alpha Centauri can instead have individual planetary systems.

  • Planet size: We used to think there was a sharp cutoff between terrestrial and gaseous planets, based on the difference between the largest terrestrial we knew (Earth) and the smallest gas planets (Uranus and Neptune). Now we know that’s simply not true. It’s more of a continuum, and there may be super-Earths much larger than the smallest mini-Neptunes. And those gas dwarfs appear to be the most common type of planet, but that could be nothing more than observation bias, the way we thought hot Jupiters were incredibly common ten years ago. On the smaller end of the scale, we haven’t found much, but there’s no reason to expect that exoplanet analogues of Mars, Mercury, Pluto, and Ganymede don’t exist.

  • Surface temperature: This is a big one, as it’s critical for life as we know it. We know that liquid water exists between 0° and 100°C (32–212°F), with the upper bound being a bit fluid due to atmospheric pressure. That 100 (or 180) degrees is a lot of room to play with, but remember that it’s not all available. DNA, for example, can break down above about 50°C. Below freezing, of course, you get into subsurface oceans, which might be fun for exploration purposes.

  • Atmosphere: Except for a couple of gas giants, we’ve got nothing here. We have no idea if the nitrogen-oxygen mix of Earth is common, or if most planets we find would be CO2 pressure cookers like Venus. Or they could retain their primordial hydrogen-helium atmospheres, or be nearly airless like Mars. Something tells me that we’ll find all of those soon enough.

  • Life: And so we come to this. Life, we know, changes a planet, just as the planet changes it. A biosphere will be detectable, even from the distance of light-years. It will get noticed, once telescopes and instruments are sensitive enough to see it. And it will stand out. Some chemicals just don’t show up without life, or at least not in the quantities that it brings. Methane, O2, and a few others are considered likely biotic markers. The million-dollar question is just how likely life really is. Is it everywhere? Are there aliens on Proxima b right now? If so, are they single-celled, or possibly advanced enough to be looking back at us? Here is the writers’ playground.

What’s to come

Assuming the status quo—never a safe assumption—our capability for detecting and classifying exoplanets is only expected to increase in the coming years. But I’ve heard that one before. Once upon a time, the timeline looked like this: Kepler in 2004 or 2005, the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) in 2009, and the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) in 2012. In reality, we got Kepler in 2009 (it’s now busted and on a secondary mission). TPF was “indefinitely deferred”, and SIM was left to languish before being mercy-killed some years ago. The Europeans did no better; their Darwin mission suffered the same let’s-not-call-it-cancelled fate as TPF. Now, both missions might get launched in the 2030s…but they probably won’t.

On the bright side, we’ve got a small crop of upcoming developments. TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Sky Survey, I think) is slated to launch this year—I’ll believe it when I see it. The James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble’s less-capable brother, might go up in 2018, but its schedule is going to be too crowded to allow it to do more than confirm detections made by other means.

Ground-based telescopes are about at their limit, but that hasn’t stopped us from trying. The E-ELT is expected to start operations in 2024, the Giant Magellan Telescope in 2025, and these are exoplanet-capable. The Thirty Meter Telescope was supposed to join them in about the same timeframe, but politically motivated protests stopped that plan, and the world is poorer for it.

Instead of focusing on the doom and gloom, though, let’s look on the bright side. Even with all the problems exoplanet research has faced, it’s made wonderful progress. When I was born, we didn’t know for sure if there were any planets outside our own solar system. Now, we’re finding them everywhere we look. They may not be the ones science fiction has trained us to imagine, but truth is always stranger than fiction. Forget about “Earth 2”. In a few years, we might have more Earths than we know what to do with. And wouldn’t that make a good story?

Worldbuilding on the fly

Writing is a long, involved process. Worldbuilding is an integral part of that process, in those works that need it. And just as there are different ways to go about writing a novel, movie, or video game, there’s no one way to build the world your story needs.

A lot of authors plan their works out in detail. For more visual media, it’s almost always this way, simply because there you have things like an effects budget and the limitations of the medium. The writer is only one part of a larger team, and he has to fit in with that team. In those cases, the world, like most other parts of the story, must be constructed before any actual writing is done.

On the other hand, those of us working purely in the written word don’t have such constraints. We’re usually working alone (not counting editors, cover artists, etc.; indies like me don’t have to worry about any of those anyway), and thus we don’t have to coordinate quite as much. That means we aren’t required to plot out the details beforehand. We can get away with a much rougher sketch of where we want the story to go.

In “writing jams” like NaNoWriMo, it’s crucial that we work this bit of literary improvisation. We’re often working under a strict, if informal, time limit, so there’s not enough time to waste on the equivalent of storyboarding. For Nocturne last November, to give you a concrete example, I started with not much more than a beginning and a vague idea of an ending. As I progressed, I filled in more and more details, and that sometimes took the story in directions I could not have anticipated on November 1. It’s a more organic style of writing, and it may not be for everyone. But it works for building the story’s world, too.

Throwing something together

Let me put this out there first: if you’re worldbuilding on the fly, so to speak, you’re never going to get anything as deep as if you plan and plot early. But then, that’s not the point of the exercise. Sometimes, you really don’t need a truly deep world, you just need the facsimile of one. You can get that easily enough.

If you don’t mind the necessary limitations of the process, then we’re ready to go. First, how much work you’ll need to do will depend on what you’re making. Short stories (and similar works in some other medium) might not require much more than a few names. Novels and longer works are going to need more thought. But it won’t be too much more. So let’s take a look at some of the different parts of worldbuilding that we can tinker with in the middle of writing:

  • Character names: Obviously, it’s almost certain you’ll have the protagonist’s name chosen before you start writing. (If you’ve got more than one, then the same goes for all of them.) And other major characters will likewise be the kind that can’t be, say, randomly chosen or generated. Everybody else—the NPCs, to use gaming terminology—is fair game. If they’re only going to appear in one scene, how much thought do they really need?

  • Place names: The same goes for places, in general. Those central to the story are most likely to be worked out prior to the writing. Minor places mentioned in passing can be named as they come up. Those that no one will ever go to are just names, after all, so what does it matter how you came up with them?

  • Cultural aspects: These are a bit harder, because it’s not just a matter of picking a name from a list. But foreign peoples, for instance, can be given “foreign” mannerisms (defined by your target audience or the standards set by the central cast), and that will serve in a pinch. Again, it’s a matter of prioritization: the less important something is, the less time you should spend thinking about it.

  • Geography: This one’s almost too easy. If your story doesn’t include a map, you practically get a blank canvas. Sticking to the common conventions of our planet (rivers run downhill, etc.) takes you most of the way. You can also extend this to astronomy, for example. Need a solar eclipse? They may only happen once or twice a year around the world, but your story is special. Unless it’s centered on observations of the sun, few will care that the event happened at just the right time and place. (Of course, if that eclipse lasts an hour and a half, you’ll need to provide an explanation as to why.)

Pay no attention

Naming is the easiest part of worldbuilding, in terms of efficiency. For the cost of making a few words, you get something that will stick in a reader’s mind. And this works even when you don’t put too much effort into making them. Sure, if you throw together a mishmash of names from around the world, they’re going to clash. But keeping to a small circle of sources gets you quite far.

This is what I’ve done for my Linear Anthology series of short stories. Most “common” names are simple English words describing people, constructions, or natural phenomena: River, Jasmine, Ford, Melody. The higher class of the setting, however, uses names I’ve drawn from a number of sources that are, in our world, in close proximity. Some come from Scandinavia, others from Finnish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian—all places not too far from each other. In a few cases, I’ve changed spellings, and that’s a good way to “hide” the true nature of your names. But since I don’t expect ever doing a book signing in Helsinki, I’m not worried about someone calling me out on the absurdity of my names.

Basically, what I’ve done is decide on a theme for my naming. From there, I’ve tweaked a few things as I’ve gone, such as deciding that the Scandinavian-style names are restricted to the northern part of the setting. These little additions don’t change much in the grand scheme of things, but they add a little bit of flavor that makes your world feel a slightly more alive.

For culture, it’s a little harder. In a short story, you might not have to worry about it too much, but longer works will have many references to a culture, and it’s best if you’re not slavishly copying medieval Europe (for fantasy) or Star Trek (for sci-fi). Here, you can swipe an idea or two from somewhere you like…but only if it fits. And remember that cultural changes will have knock-on effects throughout society. It might be great to add a caste system, but then that will create secondary conflicts with protagonists going outside their “appropriate” station. Which may be what you want, come to think of it.

As for the world itself, fantasy authors can all but assume they’re working with a world similar enough to Earth that they only have to worry about minor differences. Science fiction gets less of a pass by default, but you can still lean hard on the genre tropes here. That’s why they’re tropes: they’re the literary shortcuts we’ve come to accept. If you’re writing a sci-fi short story where it doesn’t matter how FTL travel works, then why bother coming up with an explanation that will, inevitably, leave at least somebody unsatisfied? Working under a time limit, that’s just wasteful. And you can always go back and fill in the blanks later, if need be.

And that’s really the moral of this post. You don’t have to get everything right the first time. Paint in broad strokes to begin with, then fill in details as needed. It may turn out that you never needed them at all.

On space battles

It’s a glorious thing, combat in space, or so Hollywood would have us believe. Star Wars shows us an analog of carrier warfare, with large ships (like Star Destroyers) launching out wing after wing of small craft (TIE Fighters and X-Wings) that duke it out amid the starry expanse. That other bastion of popular science fiction, Star Trek, also depicts space warfare in naval terms, as a dark, three-dimensional version of the ship-to-ship combat of yore. Most “smaller” universes ape these big two, so the general idea in modern minds is this: space battles look like WWII, but in space.

Ask anyone who has studied the subject in any depth, however, and they’ll tell you that isn’t how it would be. There’s a great divide between what most people think space combat might be like, and the form the experts have concluded it would take. I’m not here to “debunk”, though. If you’re a creator, and you want aerial dogfighting, then go for it, if that’s what your work needs. Just don’t expect the nitpickers to care for it.

Space is big

The first problem with most depictions of space battles is one of scale. As the saying goes, space is big. No, scratch that. I’ll tell you right now that saying is wrong. Space isn’t big. It’s so huge, so enormous, that there aren’t enough adjectives in the English language to encompass its vastness.

That’s where Hollywood runs into trouble. Warfare today is often conducted via drone strikes, controlled by people sitting at consoles halfway around the world from their targets. We rightfully consider that an impersonal way of fighting, but what’s striking is the 10,000 miles standing between offense and defense. How many Americans could place Aleppo on a map? (The guy that finished third in the last presidential election couldn’t.) Worse, how would you make a drone strike dramatic?

In space, the problem is magnified greatly. Ten thousand miles gets you effectively nowhere. From the surface of Earth, that doesn’t even take you past geostationary satellites! It’s over twenty times that to the Moon, and Mars is (at best) about another 100 times that. In naval warfare, it became a big deal when guns got good enough to strike something over the horizon. Space has no horizon, but the principle is the same. With as much room as you’ve got to move, there’s almost no reason why two craft would ever come close enough to see as more than a speck. A range of 10,000 miles might very well be considered point-blank in space terms, which is bad news for action shots.

Space is empty (except when it isn’t)

Compounding the problem of space’s size is its relative emptiness. There’s simply nothing there. Movies show asteroid belts as these densely packed regions full of rocks bumping into each other and sleek smuggler ships weaving through them. And some stars might even have something like that. (Tabby’s Star, aka KIC 8462852, almost requires a ring of this magnitude, unless you’re ready to invoke Dyson spheres.) But our own Solar System doesn’t.

We’ve got two asteroid belts, but the Kuiper Belt is so diffuse that we’re still finding objects hundreds of miles across out there! And the Main Belt isn’t that much better. You can easily travel a million miles through it without running across anything bigger than a baseball. Collisions between large bodies are comparatively rare; if they were common, we’d know.

Space’s emptiness also means that stealth is quite difficult. There’s nothing to hide behind, and the background is almost totally flat in any spectrum. And, because you’re in a vacuum, any heat emissions are going to be blindingly obvious to anyone looking in the right direction. So are rocket flares, or targeting lasers, radio transmissions…

Space plays its own game

The worst part of all is that space has its own rules, and those don’t match anything we’re familiar with here on Earth. For one thing, it’s a vacuum. I’ve already said that, but that statement points out something else: without air, wings don’t work. Spacecraft don’t bank. They don’t need to. (They also don’t brake. Once they’re traveling at a certain speed, they’ll keep going until something stops them.)

Another one of those pesky Newtonian mechanics that comes into play is the Third Law. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That’s how rockets work: they spit stuff out the back to propel themselves ahead. Solar sails use the same principle, but turned around. Right now, we’ve got one example (the EmDrive) of something that may get around this fundamental law, assuming it’s not experimental error, but everything in space now and for the near future requires something to push on, or something to push against it. That puts a severe limit on craft sizes, speeds, and operating environments. Moving, for example, the Enterprise by means of conventional thrusters is a non-starter.

And then there’s the ultimate speed limit: light. Every idea we’ve got to get around the light-speed barrier is theoretical at best, crackpot at worst. Because space is huge, light’s speed limit hampers all aspects of space warfare. It’s a maximum for the transmission of information, too. By the time you detect that laser beam, it’s already hitting you.

Reality check

If you want hyperrealism in your space battles, then, you’ll have to throw out most of the book of received wisdom on the subject. The odds are severely stacked against it being anything at all like WWII aerial and naval combat. Instead, the common comparison among those who have researched the topic is to submarine warfare. Thinking about it, you can probably see the parallels. You’ve got relatively small craft in a relatively big, very hostile medium. Fighting takes place over great distances, at a fairly slow speed. Instead of holding up Star Trek as our example, maybe we should be looking more at Hunt for Red October or Das Boot.

But that’s if reality is what you’re looking for. In books, that’s all well and good, because you don’t have to worry about creating something flashy for the crowd. TV and movies need something more, and they can get it…for a price. That price? Realism.

Depending on the assumptions of your universe, you can tinker a bit with the form of space combat. With reactionless engines, a lot of the problems with ship size and range go away. FTL travel based around “jump points” neatly explains why so many ships would be in such close proximity. Depending on how you justify your “hyperspace” or “subspace”, you could even find a way to handwave banked flight.

Each choice you make will help shape the “style” of combat. If useful reactionless engines require enormous power inputs, for instance, but your civilization has also invented some incredibly efficient rockets on smaller scales, then that might explain a carrier-fighter mode of warfare. Conversely, if everything can use “impulse” engines, then there’s no need for waves of smaller craft. Need super-high acceleration in your fighters, but don’t have a way to counteract its effects? Well, hope you like drones, because that’s what would naturally develop. But if FTL space can only be navigated by a human intelligence (as in Dune), then you’ve got room for people on the carriers.

In the end, it all comes down to the effect you’re trying to create. For something like space combat, this may mean working “backward”. Instead of beginning with the founding principles of your story universe, it might be better to derive those principles from the style of fighting you want to portray. It’s not my usual method of worldbuilding, but it does have one advantage: you’ll always get the desired result, because that’s where you started. For some, that may be all you need.

Magic and tech: clothing and fashion

We humans are peculiar in a great many regards, but one of those is our clothing. Call it a cultural imperative, but we all wear clothes. Those few of us that don’t, such as nudists or those few indigenous peoples who still haven’t adopted at least a loincloth, are seen as odd by the rest of our species. (The story of Genesis is at pains to point out that, once they received the higher wisdom of the tree, Adam and Eve very specifically became “ashamed” of their nakedness.) But the big picture tells a different story: as life on this planet goes, we are the weird ones. Only humans feel the need to cover some or most of their bodies in some other substance most of the time.

This may be from an evolutionary quirk, as humans are a rarity in another way. How many other animals choose to leave their evolved habitat? Very few. That’s not just how evolution works, but why. Species adapt to their environments, and there’s a kind of “inertia” that keeps them there. It’s probably because adapting is hard, and where’s the reproductive advantage in doing it all over again?

Putting something on

The first and most obvious choices for human clothing, looking back to prehistoric times, were likely animal skins. Despite the misguided crusades of PETA and others, that’s still an attractive option today. How many of you own a leather jacket, or a fur coat, or something of that sort? Skins are a good choice for protecting us from the elements (one of the original and most important uses for clothing), because, hey, it works for the animals they belong to.

Any culture can make clothing out of animals. It’s not that hard to do, all things considered. And there’s a lot of technological progress that can be made there. Tanning, the process of transforming raw hides into leather, may have been one of the defining developments of the Neolithic, alongside agriculture and villages, if only because it’s one of our oldest examples of a “manufacturing” process.

A few other materials coming from animals see use for clothing. Wool is the big one, but the hair of a few other mammals can also work. Biblical-style sackcloth, for instance, used animal hair, as did medieval hairshirts, strangely enough. Outside of the mammals, we also find silk, which comes from the cocoon of the silkworm. Like hair, silk is a fiber, and we can spin fibers into threads, then weave threads into cloth. Simple as that.

But the best fibers, in terms of cost, ease of use, and animal ethics, come in the form of plant fibers. And it’s those that formed the basis for most day-to-day clothing in the Western world until modern times. As a matter of fact, even our synthetic world of polyester and nylon and the like still holds ample evidence of plant use. I’m wearing an awful lot of cotton right now, for example, and linen (from flax) hasn’t gone away after all these centuries.

Dressing up

Intimately related to clothing is the idea of fashion. It’s all well and good to say that humans cover themselves with animal or plant parts, but how they do so is one of the hallmarks of a culture. What parts do we cover? (That’s a more nuanced question than you might think; in America, it’s different for men and women and children.) What sorts of clothes are acceptable? What kinds of styling do we use, and when?

A lot of questions like this are highly specific to a culture, and it’s hard to draw many general conclusions. Most every culture agrees that the pelvic region should be covered, for instance—though even that is not universal. And it’s rare to find a place that doesn’t have a fashion “hierarchy”, where certain people are expected to wear “better” clothes at certain times. Think of a suit, a tuxedo, or our “Sunday best”, then compare that to what we might wear at the beach, or just around the house.

One of the more interesting—and more visible—aspects of fashion is color. At some point long ago, our ancestors discovered they could dye those materials they used for their clothing. Today, we take that for granted, but it wasn’t always thus. Purple is seen as a royal color in the West because one shade of purple (Tyrian purple) was once worn exclusively by royalty. And why did they choose that particular purple? Because it was just about the most expensive kind of dye you could find: literally worth its weight in silver.

Throughout the ages, that becomes the refrain of high fashion. And high fashion eventually trickles down to low fashion, but low fashion has made its own developments in the meantime. Some of those developments are modern, such as the boxer briefs I’m wearing as I write this. Others have a much longer history, like sandals. Sometimes, the history is longer than you’d expect; art from over 2,000 years ago shows women wearing something that looks an awful lot like a bikini.

Fashionable magic

Whatever form it takes, fashion is an integral part of a culture, and it’s also an important part of any study of clothing. Thus, as we turn to our magical realm, we’ll treat the two of them as inseparable.

First, though, we need to make the clothes. In olden days, that was a laborious, time-consuming task. It’s not a stretch to say that the whole Industrial Revolution came about as a way to simplify that task. Spinning fibers into threads took so much time that some researchers have concluded that it was effectively a constant job for medieval-era women. They’d do it while they weren’t doing anything else, and sometimes when they were. Weaving was likewise hard work. Dyers might have been respected, but only if you weren’t downwind of them. And forget about all those things we take for granted, like zippers or standard sizes.

Industry changed all that, and so can magic. We’ve already seen how magic, within the boundaries we have set, can improve the manufacturing capabilities of our realm. Applying that to clothes-making will likely be one of the first things the mages do. It’s a no-brainer. In our world, it was one of the first true cases of factory automation. That’s not going to be any different if it’s magic powering the factories. (Putting all those women out of work will have…interesting consequences.)

On the other hand, dyeing doesn’t get much of a boost from magic. It’ll benefit from the advances in chemistry made possible by magic itself and the general inquisitiveness that magic will bring, but there are fewer direct applications. Processing the materials for dyes might be automated, though, in much the same way as spinning thread. The same goes for extracting the plant fibers for clothes in the first place; every American student has heard of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin.

One thing is for certain: magic will make clothes cheaper across the board. When clothes cost less, people will have more of them. Even the poorest folks will be able to afford richly dyed fabrics instead of plain whites, browns, and grays. That’s the point when fashion becomes “mainstream”. Once a sufficient percentage of the population has access to finery, styles can develop. Fashion transforms from a noble quirk to a cultural phenomenon. What form it will take is nearly impossible to predict. And it’s a moving target, even in older times. How many people do you know in 2017 wearing bell-bottoms or tie-dyed shirts? How many have you seen in corsets and pantaloons outside of reenactments?

To end this post, let’s look at one very intriguing possibility that sprang from the development of clothes: computers. I know that sounds crazy, but bear with me. Weaving complex fabric patterns on a loom is difficult. It’s hard to make a machine that can do that, and harder still to develop one that can change its patterns. Joseph Marie Jacquard did just that about 200 years ago. He created a mechanized loom that could change its weave based on a pattern of holes punched in a series of “input” cards. Punched cards. Herman Hollerith took them for his census-counting machine at the end of the 19th century. Sixty or so years later, IBM used them to store the data for their first computers.

Now, the “programming language” of Jacquard looms isn’t Turing-complete, and nobody would claim that someone using the loom was truly programming a computer, but the seed of the idea is there. In fact, almost everything an early computer would need can be done with the magic we’ve seen in this series, some six centuries before it “should” exist. That doesn’t mean our magical realm has computers, or will get them anytime soon, but it’s definitely one of those strange paths you might want to look down. In this new year, I’ll try and find more of them for us to explore.

On colonialism

The process of colonization ran for untold millennia before it came to a halt in the past few generations, but colonialism is uniquely tied to the period beginning around 1500, with the first Spanish incursions into the Americas, and ending with the independence movements of British, French, German, and other territories around the end of World War I. That’s about 400 years worth of colonial sensibilities, a fairly large swath of “modern” history affected by the building and upkeep of colonies.

What can we use from that time to build a good story? It’s a little beyond the traditional view of fantasy, but this period has become a significant part of the post-medieval fantasy subgenre. Paul Kearney’s Monarchies of God series and Django Wexler’s The Thousand Names are two excellent works I’ve read in recent years that fit into the “colonial era”; the first is a voyage of exploration to a new world, the latter a native uprising in a faraway imperial holding. These neatly bracket the ends of the era, in fact: colonialism begins with the first attempt at a colony, and it ends when the native—or nativized—population revolts against its distant masters.

Making a colony

The colony itself, obviously, is the central focus of a colonial story. At the beginning, it’s very much a tale of people struggling to tame a hostile environment. The true stories of European settlers coming to America are riveting. They’re full of doubt and faith, strife both with the natives and with each other, desperation and perseverance. Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, and southern Asia all have equally gripping accounts of the trials and tribulations the supposedly advanced Europeans had to endure to make those places their own. Even in the realm of science fiction, one can imagine a story about the first colonists on the moon, Mars, or a planet in a distant solar system to fall along the same lines.

After the initial struggles, the colony is not out of the woods by any means. They’ll have to adapt to their new location, to the sheer distance from their homeland. In 18th-century Australia, for instance, colonists might as well have been on another world, because they about as likely to return to England. The churning waters of the Atlantic meant that the Americas were little better off. India and Indochina were surrounded by hostility, and the antagonism of the natives of Africa is the stuff of legend. Add to that the unfamiliar terrain, the entirely new set of flora and fauna, even the differences in climate—a colony today wouldn’t be a sure thing, and these people managed it as much as 500 years ago!

Eventually, the early turbulence settles, probably after a generation or two. Once the original settlers have died off, you’re left with a population that is truly “native”. That’s where the real fun of colonialism comes in. The home government (or corporation, or whatever) might want to send more colonists, and this will cause a clash between the newcomers and those who have grown up in the colony. Or the colony’s patrons back home might want something to show for their initial outlay; some colonies were established purely for profit, especially in the Far East.

It’s entirely likely for these tensions between the colony’s native inhabitants and their motherland to grow into rebellion or open revolt. It took England’s American colonies a century and a half to reach that point, longer for India and South Africa, but it did happen. Of course, that coincided with an increased liberalism in political thought, part of the Enlightenment that ran through the entire Western world. Without the philosophies of the late 18th century, the cause of American independence (and the Mexican, African, Indian, and others that followed in its wake) might have been delayed by decades.

Our land

There’s a single wild card that makes colonizing into colonialism: the natives. Whether we’re talking about Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, or any other preexisting population, they’ll have something to say about the foreigners landing on their shores, claiming their lands. In our history, we know how that turned out, but it wasn’t always a sure thing.

Australia had a relatively sparse population anyway, but its indigenous inhabitants tended to live in the same general areas that the colonists wanted to take for themselves. They’re the best lands on an otherwise marginal continent, so that’s not surprising. The Americas, on the other hand, may have been peopled to a much larger extent. Upper estimates put the total Native American population in 1491 as high as 100 million. Half that sounds more reasonable, but that’s still a lot more natives than you might think from watching westerns.

We know what happened to most of them, though: they died. Disease and what might be called an early example of ethnic cleansing did them in. The same things tended to have the same effect—devastation—on all the other native populations of the world, but the Americas get top billing, thanks to a combination of factors. One, the US has a lot more global power than Australia or South Africa. Two, the colonization started earlier, so the effects of this interchange of genes, ideas, and disease vectors weren’t understood as well as in the 1700s. And third, the violent persecution of the indigenous peoples didn’t end with colonialism; anti-Indian sentiment ran high for the first century of the United States’ existence. Yes, apartheid lasted longer as an institution, but it was more political than militant.

But enough about that. Let’s get back to colonialism. Anywhere there’s a society, even a tribal one, in place, there’s bound to be friction. The Europeans won everywhere both from the disease factor and because of their relative level of technology. Once the illnesses had run their course, and the surviving native remnants were immune or simply too remote to become infected, the guns and horses utterly outclassed anything they could bring to bear.

It wasn’t always constant warfare and subjugation, though. Many colonies wanted to work with the natives. The reasons for cooperation are obvious: here’s a culture that’s already entrenched. They know the land in a way you never will, and all they want are a few of your high-quality guns or blankets or iron pots. In exchange, they teach you how to live better. And some of the colonists badly needed such lessons. Religious dissidents and petty criminals make poor settlers in the best circumstances, and colonies were far from that. It’s not surprising, then, that so many histories of colonization start with a few years of working in concert with the natives.

The colonial populations always seem to grow faster than the indigenous ones, because they’re not susceptible to the diseases they brought and because they’re often being supplemented by a steady influx of new colonists from the homeland. Thus, it’s almost natural that the settlers start taking more and more land, squeezing out the natives. That’s when the squabbles start. Maybe it begins as a raid here or an assassination there. Eventually, it can become something far greater, as in the cases of King Philip’s War in America and the Zulu wars in Africa. (Sometimes, as with the French and Indian War, it can be helped along by outside forces.)

If all-out war happens, it’s rarely to the sole detriment of the colony. The natives can inflict some serious wounds—the Zulus certainly did—but a colonial nation necessarily has a sizable military backing. It’s often just a matter of time before the inevitable attrition takes its toll.

On the other hand, there’s another way a native population can be effectively destroyed by colonists: marriage. Intermingling between European and American began with the first voyage of Columbus, if not the Viking landings half a millennium earlier. It’s here where those cultural differences can come to the fore. Men taking native wives—even if by force—will have a moderating effect on the persecution of those natives. Some might even abandon their own societies to join those of their spouses, but far more will introduce half-native children into the larger colonial mix. This plays havoc with the casual racism of the period, creating systems of delineation like those in Mexico, but also further blurring the line between the “good” guys and the “bad”.

In the story

For a story set in the age of colonialism, you’ve got plenty of options. Your story could be the founding of a colony, from the first landfall (if not before, looking at the original cause of the migration) to the pivotal event that ensures its survival. With natives added in, that gives you ample opportunity for action, intrigue, and first-contact diplomacy. You can delve into the indigenous culture, possibly through the eyes of a hostage or envoy, or you might turn things around and give the POV of the natives defending their homes from invaders.

The second phase of colonialism, after the initial generation is dead and gone, might be considered the “boom” phase. New settlers are coming in, while existing ones are expanding their families at a high rate. Food and land are in abundance. Here, the tensions between foreign and indigenous are still in play, but then you have the growing class of born-and-raised native sons and daughters. What are their stories? Where do they stand? They may resent the “actual” natives for causing trouble, but equally despise the motherland they’ve never known, who only sees their home as a trading post, a military base, and a source of cheap labor.

If you’re following the American model, it’s not too far to go for the third phase: rebellion. If it’s successful, this is where the colony ends, but colonialism may remain for some time. Most likely, it’ll finally die out with the original rebels or their children, but animosity between “native” and “outsider” won’t go away so easily, even as those labels become less and less meaningful. It may even get worse.

In the end, though, it’s your story. Following the historical trail of cause and effect, however, is a good start towards realism. We know this outcome can happen, because it did. People, even people set in a different world, tend to have the same motivations, the same influences. Barring unforeseen circumstances—magic or aliens, for example—it’s hard to imagine colonialism turning out too differently. It’s human nature.

Magic and tech: economy

One of the biggest topics of the last decade has been the economy. We’re finally climbing out of the hole the banks dug for us in 2008, and it’s been long enough that most people have taken notice. Employment, income, wages, and benefits are important. So are less obvious subjects like inflation, debt and credit, or mortgages. Even esoteric phrases like “quantitative easing” make the news.

The economy isn’t a modern invention, however. It’s always been there, mostly in the background. From the first trade of goods, from the first hiring of another person to perform a service, the economy has never truly gone away. If anything, it’s only becoming bigger, both in terms of absolute wealth—the average American is “richer” than any medieval king, by some measures, and today’s billionaires would make even Croesus jealous—and sheer scope.

How would magic affect this integral part of our civilization? The answer depends on the boundaries we set for that magic, as we shall see.

Scarcity

Our economy, whether past, present, or foreseeable future, is based on the concept of scarcity. For the vast majority of human history, it was only possible to have one of something. One specific piece of gold, one individual horse, one of a particular acre of land or anything else you can think of. You could have more than one “instance” of each type—a man could own twenty horses, for example—but each individual “thing” was unique. (Today, we can easily spot the friction caused when this notion of scarcity meets the reality of lossless digital copying, the lashing out by those who depend on that scarcity and see it slipping away.)

Some of those things were rarer than others. Gold isn’t very common; gems can be rarer still. Common goods were relatively cheap, while the rare stuff tended to be expensive. And that remains true today. Look at any “limited edition”. They might have nothing more than a little gold-colored trim or an extra logo, but they’ll command double the price, if not more.

Supply and demand

All that only applies to something people want. It’s a natural tendency for rare, desirable goods to climb in value, while those things that become increasingly common tend to also become increasingly worthless. This is the basis of supply and demand. If there’s more of something than is needed, then prices go down; if there’s a shortage relative to demand, then they go up.

Although it’s a fairly modern statement, the concept is a truism throughout history. It’s not just a fundamental idea of capitalism. It’s more a natural function of a “scarcity economy”. And you can apply it to just about anything, assuming all else is equal. A shortage of laborers (say, due to a plague) pushes wages higher, because demand outstrips supply. That’s one of the ultimate killers of feudalism in the Middle Ages, in fact. Its converse—a glut of supply—is the reason why gas prices have been so low in America the past year or so.

Interconnected

Another thing you have to understand about the economy is that it’s all connected. Today, that’s true more than ever; it’s the reason we can talk about globalism, whether we consider it a bringer of utopia or the cause of all the world’s ills. For less advanced societies, the connectivity merely shrinks in scale. There was, for example, no economic connection between Europe and the Americas until the fifteenth century, apart from whatever the Vikings were up to circa 1000. The Black Death had no effect on the economy of the Inca, nor did the collapse of the great Mayan cities cause a recession in Rome. Similarly, Australia was mostly cut off from the “global” economy until shortly before 1800.

Everything else, though, was intertwined. The Silk Road connected Europe and Asia. Arab traders visited Africa for centuries before the Portuguese showed up. Constantinople, later Istanbul, stayed alive because of its position as an economic hub. And like the “contagious” recessions of modern times, one bad event in an important place could reverberate through the known world. A bad crop, a blizzard blocking overland passes, protracted warfare…anything happening somewhere would be felt elsewhere. This was the case despite most people living a very localized lifestyle.

Making magic

In role-playing games, whether video games or the pen-and-paper type, some players make it their mission to break the economy. They find some loophole, such as an easily creatable magic item that sells for far more than its component cost, and the exploit that to make themselves filthy rich. It happens in real life, too, but government tends to be better at regulating such matters than any GM. (The connection between these two acts might make for an interesting study, come to think of it.)

We’re trying for something more general, though, so we don’t have to worry about something as fine-grained as the price of goods. Instead, we can look at the big picture of how an economy can function in the presence of magic. As it turns out, that is very dependent on the type of magic you have at your disposal.

First, let’s assume for a moment that wizards can create things out of thin air. Also, let’s say that it’s not too difficult to do, and it doesn’t require much in the way of training or raw materials. Five minutes of chanting and meditating, and voila! A sword falls at your feet! Something more complex might take more time, and living things can’t be created at all, but crafted goods are almost as easy as a Star Trek replicator.

Well, that destroys any economy based on scarcity. It’s the same problem media companies have with computers: if something can be copied ad infinitum, with no loss in quality, then its unit value quickly drops to zero. Replicating or creating magic, if it’s reasonably widespread, would be like giving everyone a free 3D printer, a full library of shape files, and an unlimited supply of feedstock. Except it’d be even better than that. Need a new sword/axe/carriage/house? Call up the local mage. No materials needed; you’re only paying for his time, the same as what would happen to books, music, and movies without licensing fees and DRM.

So that’s definitely a “broken” economy. Even a single user of such magic breaks things, as he can simply clone the most expensive or valuable items he knows, selling them whenever he needs the cash. Sure, their value will eventually start to drop—supply and demand in action—but he’ll be set for life long before he gets to that point.

It’s the economy, stupid

For our magical kingdom, let’s look at something more low-key. It doesn’t have creation magic. Instead, we have at our disposal a large amount of “automating” magic, as we’ve seen in previous parts. What effect would that have on the economy? Probably the same effect increasing automation has in our real world.

Until very recently, most work was done by hand, occasionally with help from machines that were powered by people, animals, or natural forces. The Industrial Revolution, though, changed all that. Now, thanks to the power of steam (and, later, electricity), machines could do more and more of the work, lightening the load for the actual workers. Fast-forward to today, where some studies claim as many as 40% of jobs can be done entirely automatically. (For labor, we’re actually getting fairly close to “post-scarcity” in many fields, and you can see the strain that’s beginning to cause.)

Magical force and power can easily replace steam and electricity in the above paragraph. The end result won’t change. Thus, as magic becomes more and more important in our fictional realm, its effects stretch to more and more areas of the economy. As discussed in the post about power, this is transforming the workforce. Unskilled labor is less necessary, which means it has a lower demand. Lower demand, without a corresponding decrease in supply, results in lower wages, fewer working hours, fewer jobs overall. We know how that turns out. The whole sordid story can be found in all sorts of novels set in Victorian England or Reconstruction America—Charles Dickens is a good start. Or you can look at modern examples like Detroit or Flint, Michigan, or any steel town of the Midwest.

There is an upside, though. After this initial shock, the economy will adjust. We see that today, as those displaced in their jobs by robots have begun branching out into new careers. Thus, it’s easy to imagine a magical society embracing the “gig economy” we’re seeing in Silicon Valley and other upscale regions, except they’d do it far earlier. You could even posit a planned socialist economy, if the magic works out.

But mages are human, too. They’re subject to need and greed the same as the rest of us. So they might instead become the billionaires of the world. Imagine, for instance, wizards as robber barons, hoarding their techno-magic to use as a lever to extract concessions from their rivals. Or they could simply sell their secrets to the highest bidder, creating something not much different from modern capitalism. If magic has a distinct military bent, then they could become the equivalent of defense contractors. The possibilities are endless. All you have to do is follow the chain of cause and effect.

The economy is huge. It’s probably beyond a single author to create something entirely realistic. But making something that passes the sniff test isn’t that hard. All you have to do is think about why things are the way they are, and how they would change based on the parameters you set. Oh, and you might want to find one of those munchkin-type players who likes to find loopholes; for the economic side, they’re more useful than any editor.

Building aliens: sentience and sapience

Creating aliens is fun and all, but why do we do it? Mostly, it’s because those aliens are going to have some role in our stories. And what kind of organism plays the biggest role? For most, that would be the intelligent kind.

Sentient aliens are the ultimate goal, thanks to a lifetime of science fiction. Yes, the discovery tomorrow of indisputably alien bacteria on Mars would change the entire world, but we’re all waiting for the Vulcans, the Mandalorians, the asari, or whatever our favorite almost-human race might be.

Mind over matter

It’s hard to say how plausible sentience is. We’ve only got one example of a fully intelligent species: us. Quite a few animals, however, show sophisticated behavior, including dolphins, chimps, octopuses, and so on. Some are so intelligent (relative to the “average” member of the animal kingdom) that authors will draw a line between sentience (in the sense of feeling and experiencing sensation) and sapience (the higher intelligence that humans alone possess). For aliens, where even defining intelligence might be nearly impossible at the start, we’ll keep the two concepts merged.

A sentient alien species remains a member of its home biosphere. We’ll always be evolved from our primate ancestors, no matter what the future holds. It’ll be the same for them. Their species will have its own evolutionary history, with all that entails. (Hint: I’ve spent quite a few posts rambling on about exactly that.) The outcome, however, seems the same: an intelligent, tool-using, society-forming, environment-altering race.

We don’t know much about how higher sentience comes about. We don’t even know what it means to have consciousness! Let’s ignore that minor quibble, though, and toss out some ideas. Clearly, intelligence requires a brain. Even plants have defensive mechanisms activated when they feel pain, but it takes true brainpower to understand what happens when inflicting pain upon another. Sentience, in this case, can be equated with the powers of reasoning, or an ability to follow logical deduction. (Although that opens the door to claiming that half of humanity is not sentient. Reading some Internet comments, I’m not sure I would disagree.)

Other factors go into making an intelligent alien race, too. Fortunately, most of them default to being slightly altered expressions of human nature. Sentient aliens usually speak, for example, except in some of the more “out there” fiction. Even in works like Solaris, however, they still communicate, though maybe not always through direct speech. Now, we know language can evolve—I’m writing in one of them, aren’t I?—but it was long thought that humans were the unique bearers of the trait. Sure, we had things like birdsong and mimicry, but we’re the only ones who actually talk, right? Attempts at teaching language to “lesser” animals have varied in their efficacy, but recent research points to dolphins having at least a rudimentary capacity for speech. That’s good news for aliens, as it’s a step towards disproving the notion that language is distinctly human.

What else do humans do? They form societies. Other animals do, too, from schools of fish to beehives and anthills, but we’ve taken it to new extremes. Sentient aliens probably would do the same. They may not follow our exact trajectory, from primitive scavengers to hunter-gatherers to agrarian city-states to empires and republics, but they would create their own societies, their own cultures. The shapes these would take depend heavily on the species’ “upbringing”. We’re naturally sociable. Our closest animal kin show highly developed social behaviors—Jane Goodall, among others, has made a living off researching exactly that. An alien race, on the other hand, might develop from something else; imagine, for instance, what a society derived from carnivorous, multiple-mating, jungle-dwelling ancestors would look like.

Likewise, the technological advancement won’t be the same for aliens as it was for us. Some of that could be due to basic science. An aquatic species is going to have an awful time crafting metal tools. Beings living on a higher-gravity world, apart from being generally shorter and stouter, might take much longer to reach space, simply because of the higher escape velocity. A species whose planet never experienced an equivalent to the Carboniferous period could be forced far sooner into developing “green” energy.

Differences in advancement can also stem from psychological factors. Humans are altruistic, but not to a fault. We’re basically in the middle of a spectrum. Another race might be more suited to self-sacrifice (and thus potentially more amenable to socialist or communist forms of organization) or far less (therefore more likely to engage in cutthroat capitalism). Racial, sexual, and other distinctions may play a larger or smaller role in their development, and they can also drive an interest in genetics and similar fields.

Even their history has an effect on their general level of technology. How much different, for instance, would our world be if a few centuries of general stagnation in Europe—the Dark Ages—never occurred? What would the effects of “early” gunpowder be? Aliens can be a great place to practice your what-ifs.

The garden of your mind

We are sentient. We are sapient. No matter how you define the terms, no other species on Earth can fit both of them at the same time. That’s what makes us unique. It’s what makes us human.

An alien species might feel the same way. Intelligence looks exceedingly rare, so it’s stretching the bounds of plausibility that a planet could hold two advanced lifeforms at the same time. On the other hand, science fiction is often about looking at just those situations that sit beyond what we know to be possible.

One or many, though, aliens will always be alien to us. They won’t think just like us, any more than they’ll look just like us. Their minds, their desires and cares and instincts and feelings, will be different. For some authors, that’s a chance to explore the human condition. By making aliens reflections of some part of ourselves, they can use them to make a point about us. Avatar, for example, puts its aliens, the Na’vi, in essentially the same role as the “noble savages” of so many old tales. Star Trek has Klingons to explore a warrior culture, Vulcans for cold, unassailable logic, and hundreds of others used for one-off morality plays.

Others use aliens to give a sense of otherworldliness, or to show how small, unimportant, or deluded we humans can be. Aliens might be a billion years older than us, these stories state. They’d be to us what we are to trilobites or coelacanths…or the dinosaurs. Or if you want to take the view of Clarke and others, a sufficiently advanced alien would seem magical, if not divine.

Whatever your sentient aliens do, whatever purpose they serve, they’ll have thoughts. What will they think about?

Borrowing and loanwords

Languages can be a bit…too willing to share. Pretty much every natural language in existence has borrowed something from its neighbors. Some (like English) have gone farther than others (like Icelandic), but you can’t find a single example out there that doesn’t have some borrowing somewhere.

For the conlang creator, this presents a problem. Conlangs, by definition, have no natural neighbors. They have no history. They’re, well, constructed. This means they can’t undergo the same processes of borrowing that a natural language does. For some (particularly auxlangs), that’s a feature, not a bug. But those of us making naturalistic conlangs often want to simulate borrowing. To do that, we have to understand what it is, why it happens, and what it can do for us.

On loan

Most commonly, borrowing is in the form of loanwords, which are exactly what they sound like. Languages can borrow words for all sorts of reasons, and they can then proceed to do terrible things to them. Witness the large number of French loans in English, and the horrified shudders of French speakers when we pronounce them in our Anglicized fashion. Look at how terms from more exotic languages come into English, from chop suey to squaw to Iraqi. Nothing is really safe.

Pronunciations change, because the “borrowing” language might not have the same sounds or allow the same syllables. Meanings can subtly shift in a new direction, as cultural forces act on the word. Grammar puts its own constraints on loanwords, too; languages with case and gender will have to fit new words into these categories, while those without might borrow without understanding those distinctions.

But let’s take a step back and ask ourselves why words get borrowed in the first place. There are a few obvious cases. One, if the borrowing language doesn’t already have a word representing a concept, but a neighbor does, then it doesn’t take a psychic to see what’s going to happen. That’s how a lot of agricultural and zoological terms came about, especially for plants and animals of the Americas and Australia. It’s also how many of Arabic scientific words came into English, such as alcohol and algebra.

Another way loanwords can come about is through sheer force. The classic example is the Norman Conquest, when Anglo-Saxon fell from grace, replaced in prestigious circles by Norman French. Another “conquest” case is Quechua, in the Andes, where Spanish took the place of much of the native vocabulary. And then there’s Japanese, which borrowed a whole system of writing from China, complete with instructions on how to read it; just about every Chinese character got reinterpreted in Japanese, but their original—yet horribly mangled—Chinese pronunciations stuck around.

Third, a relative difference in status, where a foreign language is seen as more “learned” than one’s own, can drive borrowing. That’s one reason why we have so many Latin and Greek loans in English, especially “higher” English. Educated speakers of centuries past looked to those languages for guidance. When they couldn’t find the right word in their native tongue, the first place they’d look was the classics.

Taking more

Words are the most commonly borrowed item in language, but they’re not the only thing that can be taken, and they’re not always taken in isolation. English pronouns, for example, are a curious mix of native terms passed down with only minor changes all the way from Proto-Germanic and beyond—I and me aren’t that much different from their equivalents in most other European languages. But in the third person, the he, she, they, and it, things get weird. Specifically, the plural pronouns they, them, and their are, in fact, borrowed. Imposed, if you prefer, as they seem to be a result of the Viking invasions of England in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Other bits of grammar can be lifted, but the more complicated they are, the less likely it’s going to happen. There aren’t a lot of examples of languages borrowing case systems. (Getting rid of one already present, however, is a plausible development for a language suddenly spoken by a large number of foreigners, but that’s a different post.) Borrowing of pronoun systems is attested. So is heavy borrowing of numeral words; this one is particularly common among indigenous languages that never needed words for “thousand” and “million” before Westerners arrived on the scene.

As I said above, Japanese went so far as to import a script. So did Korean, Vietnamese, and quite a few other languages in the region. They all took from the same source, Chinese, because of the much higher status they perceived it to have. Others around there instead borrowed from Sanskrit. On our side of the world, you have things like the Cherokee syllabary, although it’s not a “proper” borrowing, as the meanings of symbols weren’t preserved.

One other thing that can be taken isn’t so much a part of grammar as it is a way of thinking about it. As part of its mass importation of Latin and Greek, English picked up the Latin style of word formation. Instead of full compounds, which English had inherited from its German forebears, Latin used a more purely agglutinative style, full of prefixes and suffixes that added shades of meaning. It’s from that borrowing that we get con- and pro-, sub- and super-, ex-, de-, and so many more.

Word of warning

It’s easy to go too far, though—some would say English did long ago. So where do we draw the line? That’s hard to say. For some conlangs, borrowings, if they’re used at all, might need to be restricted to the upper echelons of the vocabulary. The technical, scientific terminology common to the whole world can be used without repercussion. Nobody will call out a conlang set in today’s world for borrowing meter and internet and gigabyte. Similarly, place names are fair game. Beyond that, it’s a matter of style and personal preference. If your conlang really needs a lot of loans, go for it.

There’s one more thing to think about. Borrowings get “nativized” over time, to the point where we no longer consider words like whiskey or raccoon to be loans. It’s only those that are relatively new (karaoke) or visibly foreign (rendezvous) that we take to be imports. Even those quixotic attempts to purge the language of its outside influences miss quite a lot here; you wouldn’t find even the hardiest Anglo-Saxon revivalist wanting to change Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, but ado is a pre-Norman loanword.

So this gives you an out: some words can be loans, but they were borrowed so long ago that the speakers have all but forgotten where they came from. Any conlang set in Europe, for instance, wouldn’t be wrong in having a lot of Roman-era Latin loans. Asian conlangs would almost be expected to have an ancient crust of Chinese or Sanskrit, or a newer veneer of Arabic.

Whatever you do, it’s an artistic choice. But it’s a choice that can have a profound effect on your conlang’s feel. A few well-placed borrowings give a conlang a sense of belonging to the real world. And if you’re making your own world, then you can create your own networks of linguistic borrowing, based on that world’s history. The principles are the same, even if the names are changed.

Magic and tech: government

Fantasy’s association with the High Middle Ages has the unfortunate side effect of locking the entire genre into the feudal monarchy of medieval Europe, specifically England. True, there are counterexamples, and the subgenre of “flintlock fantasy”, set in the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, allows authors to explore other varieties of government, but the classic of kings and lords and knights is still prominent. Does it have to be?

No, it doesn’t. It’s just the default option. We’re used to reading feudal fantasy, so that’s what we think of when we consider the genre. But, as I’ve written before, it’s not the only way to go.

This series, however, is about magic and technology, not politics. So how does magic affect government? Well, we’ll see. First, though, a warning: unlike most other posts in the series, this one will skip right to the meat of the question. My earlier post on fantasy governments (linked above) does a good enough job of explaining the kinds of government available.

The rule of magic

In our magical realm, we don’t have some of the stranger varieties of magic. Total surveillance, for example, isn’t feasible. Precognition is out. Remember, we’re working with a much more down-to-earth system of arcane art.

That also means that wizards aren’t all-powerful. Although it’s obvious that government would utilize magic, it won’t be dominated by it. There simply isn’t the power, nor are there enough practitioners. We’re in that sweet spot where magic isn’t strong enough to take over, but it will still have a sizable influence. In that, it’s a bit like lobbying in our own time.

What it can do, however, is make the government more modern, just as it does for most other aspects of society. Kings kept power because they had it. Some used their power to increase that same power, leading to absolute monarchies like France and Russia. Others had checks on royal prerogative, such as England or the elected rulers of central Europe.

Magic will be another check on power. The government can’t regulate or repress all aspects of it, and it knows that. The only other option is to accept magic for what it is, to work with it rather than against it. So that’s what our magical realm does. By accepting that there is a segment of the population (the wizards) with strength out of proportion to its size, the government takes a reduction in its own power for the sake of stability.

Rulers understand that a wizard could, if he so chose, assassinate them easily. That fear is a motivator, a damper on the inevitable slide towards tyranny. Thus, we have a system that does not become an absolute dictatorship. Our magical society is not an empire whose reins are held in one pair of hands.

But magic is also a counter to heredity. While it may be passed down from parents to their children, it can also occur in “wild” form. If anyone can potentially become a mage, from the royal family to the lowest beggar, but there’s no guarantee that mages will give their status to the next generation, then there can’t be an arcane aristocracy. A preexisting mundane one remains, but it is weakening.

In historical Europe, the Black Death was one of the causes of the manorial system’s downfall; for our fantasy realm, the discovery and harnessing of magic fulfills the same purpose. Magic decreases the need for labor, freeing lower-class citizens from the restraints of land-working. As they spend more time idle, there’s less cause to tie them to the land of a manor lord. Cities are growing, trades flourishing, exactly as in the later 14th century and into the 15th.

Our magical realm isn’t a republic, but it is showing signs of moving in that direction. Both the mages (from their magic) and the growing middle class (from their newfound freedom of social movement) have asked for a share of the governing. They’re still willing to defer to their king, but not to submit before him. Thus, a parliamentary monarchy is in the process of forming, as in medieval England.

On a more local level, while some lords retain their power, the cities are often experimenting with elected governors and mayors. Typically, these are, in fact, mages; they’re considered good candidates because they are obviously both intelligent and restrained. Mundane people can hold office, but they have to be exceptional. Institutionalized elections are in the future, but ad hoc representation is taking hold.

Summing up

So that’s where we stand. Our magical kingdom isn’t ruled by a tyrant, whether an iron-fisted dictator or a grand, evil wizard. It’s rather more like what we’re used to, and closer to today than “then”. And things are only going to get better. Just as magic has compressed the scientific advancement of a few centuries into the span of decades, it’s doing the same for government. True representative government may not be that far off.

This is largely because of the ground rules we’ve made. Since magic isn’t world-shattering in its power, and it’s too common to be confined to a small cabal, the conditions for a “thaumatocracy” just aren’t there. Instead, we get something that’s marginally ahead of the “high” fantasy still stuck in the 1200s, something more like a post-gunpowder, pre-modern setting. Think less Agincourt and more Yorktown. With magic, we come closer to Reformation and Revolution, because the world is moving, and it will take government along for the ride.

Building aliens: physiology

We’re a few parts into this series now, and we still haven’t discussed what aliens look like! It’s time to remedy that. Here, we’ll look at alien physiology and body structure. From cells to organs to “the surface”, we’ll see what goes into making something seem alien, yet plausible.

On the inside

A lot of the earlier parts go into making aliens. After all, they are organisms evolved in and adapted to a specific environment. That’s going to affect their nature. If you’ve ever watched some of those David Attenborough nature shows, then you probably know this already. Fish that live deep in the ocean tend to be flatter. Desert plants have ways of capturing and storing water. Humans lost most of their body hair, while gaining the larger brains that enable us to write (and read) posts like this.

Physiology, of course, is about more than just appearances. It’s also about how the body works. And that’s a complicated matter. We, as humans, have a bunch of organs, almost all of which have to function just right. Some have redundancy—we can live without one lung, or one kidney. Others, like the heart, brain, or liver, are alone; notice how many of those have extra protection. And then there are a few that don’t really seem to be of any use. We can get by just fine without tonsils, for instance. I do. And the appendix literally does more harm than good, having the sole purpose of occasionally becoming inflamed or worse.

Other complex organisms have organs, too. Some of them have different sets of them. Ruminants (like cows) have multiple stomachs, for example. Birds, being egg-layers, have extra equipment for that purpose. And so on.

But the systems that organs control are fairly general. Those things an organism must do will often have dedicated systems. In addition, there will be a few other “support” systems to make these work. So let’s look at what’s biologically required of us, and we’ll see how that translates to aliens.

Intake

Everything living requires some sort of energy input. For us, that comes in the form of food, water, and air. We need all of these to run the chemical reactions that create life as we know it. So does everything else. Thus, we’ve got a mouth that’s front and center, our universal access point for input. So do most other animals.

Plants are a little different. They don’t need to “eat” in the same way we do. Much of their energy input comes from photosynthesis, a different kind of reaction using sunlight as the power source. But they still require water, and they still need air. (And that includes some oxygen, not just CO2.) So you won’t see plants with mouths, except in the case of carnivorous plants—and most of those instead use a trapping mechanism.

As for aliens, the situation depends on evolutionary history and environment. If your aliens eat and drink, then they’ll have some equivalent to a mouth for that purpose. After the mouth, there’s the digestive tract, where nutrients are extracted from the food. While it won’t necessarily be human-like, it has the same function as ours, so it might be somewhat similar to something on Earth.

Output

Not everything is digestible. The leftovers are mostly useless to us, so there’s no point keeping them around. Thus, our bodies get rid of them, in the form of waste. Animal waste, including human, does have its uses (e.g., as fertilizer or fuel), but it’s mostly just that: waste. Because we don’t want it inside us, we’ve got a system to get it out.

For solid waste, of course, we’ve got a dedicated part of the body. Liquid waste (urine) gets mixed in with other parts, however, in a bit of evolutionary parsimony: we’re not going to use both functions at the same time, so it wouldn’t hurt to let one organ do two unrelated jobs. Other organisms, including aliens, might not do this, which is okay unless you’re really into that sort of thing. Excretory systems, in an advanced, sapient species, may develop cultural taboos, too, but that’s a subject for a later post.

Reproductive

The sole reason to live, from an evolutionary perspective, is to reproduce. At its core, that’s why sex is enjoyable—if we didn’t like it, we wouldn’t do it as much. And so it stands to reason that reproductive organs have a lot of cultural significance attached to them. But they’re also interesting from a biological standpoint.

As stated above, human reproduction overlaps with excretion, but that’s not necessarily a given in aliens. What is, though, is that they’ll reproduce. And it’s likely to be sexual reproduction, not the asexual style used by, say, bacteria. Sexual reproduction requires at least two parents (possibly more, as in the recent news about three-parent IVF), but that gives it the benefit of better genetic mixing. By taking genes from two sources, organisms have a better chance to resist a bad mutation. That’s not the only upside, but it’s one of the biggest.

The internal part of reproduction has its own intricacies. For mammals and many other animals, only one parent actually contains the reproductive machinery. Males can impregnate, but females give birth. It doesn’t have to be this way. Other species on our planet show hermaphroditism (some or all members have both sets of reproductive organs). Another possibility, though harder to make work, is more than two sexes. And then there are odder methods. An alien race could be all females, but some can temporarily express “maleness”. Or the males could carry eggs for a period of time.

Just as important as the organs at work is the way reproduction happens. Are babies born live, as in mammals? Do they hatch from eggs? How many are born at once? For this one, humans are mostly one-at-a-time, but multiple births aren’t exactly rare. Other species, especially those that lay eggs, have larger litters or clutches.

(Oh, and before you ask, it’s astronomically unlikely that we’d be compatible enough with an alien race to reproduce with them. Half-human hybrids, though great for storytelling purposes, are not the hardest of science.)

Senses

Organisms must experience the world around them, if for no other reason than to obtain food and find a mate. For that purpose, we have our senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing. Each one has a use, and each has developed over the ages.

Evolution determines which senses are present. The ecological niche of a species is a good indicator of what its sensory capabilities will be. Cave-dwellers often have poor eyesight—if they even have eyes at all. Carnivores might have heightened senses of smell to track prey, while scavengers may have weakened taste. Here, the best guideline is reasoning: think of what your aliens would need where they live—or, if they’re highly advanced, where they originally came from.

Exotic senses can exist, within reason. Echolocation is popular in Earth animals, especially those without a good sense of sight. An herbivore living in a dangerous area might develop better peripheral vision. Hearing in the infrasonic and ultrasonic is perfectly valid for aliens, as are infrared and ultraviolet sight. Some birds seem to have sensitivity to magnetic fields. About the only things that aren’t possible are those that, well, aren’t possible. Like psionics, or seeing X-rays.

Each sense is going to have at least one organ behind it. We’ve got eyes, ears, the nose, the tongue, and the skin. Others are possible, though. Whiskers, antennae, suckers, tails, and anything you can think of can go towards the sensory system, if you can give it a good reason for being there.

Body plans

The outside of the body—what a species looks like—is probably more important from a storytelling point of view.

We humans have a distinct body symmetry. Left side looks like right, and we’ve got a lot of double organs, like lungs, eyes, and ears. And most animals are the same way. There might be small differences, such as fish with both eyes on the same side of the head, but those tend to be exceptions that prove the rule. This bilateral symmetry isn’t the only option. Starfish, for example, show a radial body plan: arms sticking out from around a center. Many plants aren’t really symmetrical at all, instead opting for a kind of “fractal” body plan.

Another thing we, as animals, have is segmentation. You might recall from science classes long ago that our bodies are divided into three segments: head, thorax, and abdomen. The head is where the brain lies, while the other two make up the body proper. And each of those segments has a pair of limbs (it’s a pair because of that bilateral symmetry). If we had another segment, say between the thorax and abdomen, we might have a second pair of legs (like a centaur) or arms (like Goro from Mortal Kombat). And if we kept growing new end segments as we aged, we’d be literal human centipedes!

Interesting minutiae

That covers the most important parts of an organism’s physical body. There are plenty of other systems (circulatory, nervous, endocrine, etc.) that will likely have counterparts in an alien race, but they follow much the same logic as those mentioned above.

Some other bodily things to think about include:

  • Defenses: Some organisms have evolved methods to defend against predators…or each other. Some plants are poisonous. Many snakes are venomous. Cacti and porcupines are both covered in sharp and pointy armor, while turtles and snails opt instead for hard shells. If your aliens were very recently not near the top of the food chain, then they’ll likely have their own ways of protecting themselves.

  • Pheromones: Human pheromones are mostly mythical, but a lot of animals do have them. They’re used to attract mates, mark territory, or as a further defense mechanism. Aliens could have them, as well, although they likely wouldn’t have any effect on us.

  • Vestigial organs: Evolution rarely discards that which is no longer needed. If it’s not actively harming the reproductive process, it’ll likely stick around far past its expiration date. That’s what happened with the human appendix, and it’s possible for an alien species, too.

  • Blood: It’s a staple of sci-fi that aliens don’t always have red blood. Sometimes, theirs is even toxic to us. Both cases result from using a different chemical mix than our iron-based hemoglobin. So if you’re looking for a hard-science excuse for green blood, that’s where you’ll want to start.

Conclusion

I could go on for hours, but this post is long enough already. Again, the best way to create aliens is to think about them. Environment affects appearance. Ecology matters. Inside and out, an alien race is beholden to its environment. If it isn’t, then it’s only a matter of time before it becomes so. But we, as worldbuilders, can work backwards: make what we want, then create the world to justify it.