Worldbuilding – Page 6 – Prose Poetry Code

Alien phonologies

As promised, this post will begin a look at creating a conlang for aliens. By “alien”, I mean any intelligent, non-human species, not just those living on other planets. A race of uplifted cats in a far-future science fiction story would be no less alien than an Area 51 Gray. Either way, we’re not dealing with the same structures that give humans the power of speech.

And that’s the first thing to think about when designing an alien conlang. How is this race different? It may not be as satisfying from an astrobiological standpoint, but readers (or players or viewers, depending on your chosen media) will tend to judge aliens contrastively. We’re only human, so we’ll look at aliens through human-tinted glasses. If you’re taking the “harder” design approach, then it’s your job to please those anthropocentric sensibilities and build the creatures that express what you’re trying to say. At the same time.

It’s a difficult, thankless task. I can’t help you earn recognition and praise, but I can make things a little easier. Just as our interminable series on creating human languages began with sounds, so will our look at alien conlangs. But first, we’re going to see what makes human language, well, human.

The ability of speech

Human beings have a vast capability for making sounds. Developed over countless generations through the slow, gradual process of evolution, our speech organs are far and away our primary means of communication. Other species can create sound. Dogs bark, cats meow, and so on. Some of them even have a small capacity for rudimentary language.

What makes humans different is a matter of speculation, but one thing we have over “lesser” animals is our larger brain. Among its many other useful properties, it gives us a greater grasp on the abstract. Language, at its core, can be described as a system of logical relations, and humans are equipped—uniquely so, on this planet—to consider these relations in an abstract context.

For aliens, brainpower will be of utmost importance. How capable are they of this “higher” thought? The better they are able to comprehend the abstractions of language, the more complex that language can become.

The vocal tract

Higher thought wouldn’t be very useful without a way to express it, so we have a well-developed means of creating a vast array of sounds: the vocal tract. Put simply, sounds are produced in the larynx, then modified in various ways on their journey into and out of the mouth and nose. If, for example, the vocal cords vibrate, then the effect is to create a “voiced” sound. A phoneme produced with the back of the tongue placed against the soft palate (or velum, hence velar) will sound different from one made when the front of the tongue touches the teeth (a dental consonant). It’s these distinctions—and many others—that combine to give us the IPA chart.

If you know anything about conlanging in general, you probably already have a good understanding of this part of phonetics, so let’s switch our focus to how it affects alien races. Here, physiology will play a role. The human body’s linguistic implements are not a given. They are by no means universal. We have a mouth, a nose, a tongue, a set of teeth, and so on, but there’s no guarantee that aliens will have all of those…or only those.

It’s always easier to take away, so we’ll start with that. “Humanoid” aliens without noses, for instance, will obviously find nasal phonemes impossible. Those with less dextrous tongues would have a hard time with a retroflex consonant. Without our level of conscious control over the vocal folds, voicing distinctions are out of the question. If the lips can’t round, you can’t have rounded vowels. Basically, any part of the vocal tract you remove obliterates an entire series of potential phonemes.

On the other hand, each new area will add whole classes of phonemes that are beyond human capabilities. A race with a larger, more complex mouth would have more points of articulation. One with extra tongue muscles might have whole new manners of articulation.

Mental and sensory development can come into play here, too. An alien species with poor pitch detection (in other words, a tone-deaf race) won’t be speaking something like Chinese, while one with evolved perfect pitch might be more likely to speak a tonal language. Races with better hearing may have an entire class of “whispered” phonemes. Anything you can think of, as long as it makes sense for the body and brain of your alien creation, is in play here.

Other cues

But language isn’t all about generating and shaping sound. There’s more to it than that, even in the realm of phonology and phonetics. Tone, as mentioned above, can be integral to a race’s language. Stress and rhythm also play a role. Add in syllabic constraints like the sonority hierarchy (which may be different for aliens), and you’ve got an enormous playground for creation.

For the truly alien, though, it’s not entirely clear that they’ll speak with words as we know them. Some species might also use other auditory cues, from grunts to whistles to whatever else you can think of. Others may have a complex secondary language of gesture and sign, which could accompany spoken language or even replace it under certain circumstances. It’s even possible that the other senses may come into play. It’s been said that if they could write, dogs’ stories would mostly be about smells. Aliens with advanced senses of smell and the means to generate a small range of scents could incorporate those into their language as a suprasegmental component, an olfactory counterpart to tone.

In the end, it comes down to this: how do your aliens work? Once again, that contrast between human and alien helps us. Find the ways they’re different, and you’ll know where to begin. From there, the sky really is the limit.

A final word

Lastly, I’d like to make a note about orthography, because I don’t have the slightest idea how it would work. Alien languages with similar sounds can be transcribed into something resembling human tongues. If the biology works out, it might even be the right thing to do.

But how do we represent new points (or manners) of articulation? How do you indicate that this syllable is spoken at a pitch so high it’s above the range of human hearing? Or say a word means “mother” if you speak it while holding your left hand up, but it’s “death” if you raise your right eyebrow. How would you write that? Figuring out how to represent alien language might be just as hard as communicating in it, and that’s before we even start looking at the differences in grammar and lexicon.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m on a bit of an alien kick right now, and this is the conlang portion of that. Later on, I hope to explore the other dark corners of xenolinguistics, a word I may have made up this very moment. If you like that, be sure to check out my sporadic Monday posts about creating the aliens themselves.

Magic and tech: heating and cooling

Humans are virtually unique among species in altering their environment to better suit their needs. (How much they alter that environment is a matter of some debate, but that doesn’t concern us now.) No other species that we know of has created an artificial means of changing the ambient temperature of an enclosed area. Some animals and plants can regulate their internal temperature, but not that of their surroundings. We’re alone in that.

Heating things up is fairly easy. Fire is one of the oldest inventions of mankind, and it’s practically the standard marker for human habitation. Almost nothing in nature can cause fires—lightning is one of a very few examples—and wildfires are uncontrolled by definition. A tended fire, then, screams for a human interpretation.

Fire, of course, has been useful for many things throughout history. Cooking was one of its earliest uses, with pottery and metalworking coming along later. And as the ages have passed, our command of the flame has only grown. We’ve gone from open fires to furnaces and ovens and incinerators. We’ve changed from using wood to coal to electricity and gas and even lasers.

On the other side of the coin, cooling is much, much harder. Fans are old, but they’re awfully inefficient. Ice melts, and if you don’t have a way to make it, you’ve got to carry it in from elsewhere, losing some (or most) along the way. Some places had the ability to store food in the frozen ground, but that usually only works about two or three months out of the year. It wasn’t until the Scientific Revolution that we starting developing ways to create artificial cold, through vacuum pumps and air compressors. Today, we can reach somewhere around a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature, but the vast majority of our ancestors were virtually out of luck.

Where we stand

So, the state of our magical world is, compared to ours, pretty dire. We’ll start with cooling technology. That’s easy, because there basically isn’t any. Without magic, we’re mostly limited to fans and (when we can find it) ice. Instead of modern air conditioning, houses were built to control the flow of heat. High ceilings allowed hot air to rise, effectively cooling the lower floor. Houses could be constructed to take advantage of the prevailing winds. And food that needed to be preserved could be salted or smoked or pickled. Or kept in cellars, where the temperatures are fairly steady and cool.

As in our world, heat is another matter altogether. Our created world has a good command of fire, even before you add in the arcane. They can work (some) metals, which requires great heat and, more importantly, control of that heat. Houses have hearths and fireplaces, and sometimes ovens. A few public buildings have something similar to the Roman hypocaust, a kind of central heating created by piping hot air underneath a raised floor and behind the building’s walls.

Magic’s helping hands

In fantasy stories, fire is typically the most destructive magical element, as well as the most “flashy”. The fireball is the sword-and-sorcery spell. As usual in this series, however, we’ll eschew the over-the-top explosions and stick to something more low-key, but much more effective in advancing the state of a civilization.

It’s still simple to command fire in our magical world, and it is most certainly given to militaristic and destructive uses, but more peaceful mages have investigated arcane fire for its more beneficial properties. A reliable fire-starter is merely the first of these. Starting a fire in older days tended to be…difficult, but the mages have created a solution. It’s a tiny magical crystal, of the same kind we’ve seen in previous entries, but attuned to fire and heat. Attached to the end of a short stick, it causes tinder to ignite within a few seconds. In modern terms, it’s a lighter.

Larger versions of this produce much more heat, but they’re more expensive and less efficient, making it less than practical to use them for home heating. Mages are working on that problem, however. A few richer individuals can afford the waste, and they do use these fire crystals to heat their homes in the winter. But even their cooks prefer the tried-and-true methods of a proper fire, even if it was started by magic.

Cooling is a harder problem, even for magic. That’s because, technically speaking, there’s no such thing as cold. There’s only the absence of heat. Making something colder requires taking away some of its heat. Fans, for example, work by causing a breeze; the moving air carries away the heat near your body, which has the effect of cooling it. That’s one strategy that can be exploited by magical means, and our mages have done so. Electric fans obviously need electricity, but arcane ones can be powered by the same force providers we’ve already met. Those are expendable—and thus costly—but they get the job done.

Besides these forms of crystallized magic, the wizards of our magical world have a few other tricks up their sleeves. Personal spells, of course, are very important. Mages can light their own fires at the touch of a finger and an arcane word. They can provide their own cooling winds. And some of them can even use spells to increase their own ability to withstand extremes of hot and cold.

Far and wide

But the biggest impact of this greater command of fire is in the knock-on effects it brings to the rest of the world. Starting fires is great, but they’re only useful if you, well, use them, and it’s hard to find medieval-era technology that couldn’t benefit from better ways of making heat.

Metallurgy is the obvious winner here. With magic allowing bigger, hotter, more controllable fires and sources of heat, it becomes possible to melt and boil metals otherwise impervious to the era’s tech. This leads to better, purer alloys, among other things. Steel, naturally, will be one of the first. Historical methods of production were largely limited to small batches until the Industrial Revolution.

Cooking advances with better heat, too. So do many manufacturing professions. And if magical methods of heating become easier and cheaper—this is not a given in our setting, but it could be in others—then wood and charcoal fall out of favor everywhere, because magic takes over. Environmentalists rejoice, because even this modest level of magic means that coal never becomes needed for heat. Nor does oil. The entire fossil fuel industry is obsoleted before it’s even born.

It’s counterintuitive, but better heat technology will also lead to a greater understanding of cold. Most of the early discoveries about cold had to wait until things like steam power and vacuum pumps arrived. Magic short-circuits that, though. Magical means of power generation take the place of steam engines, even in laboratory settings, potentially allowing the science of refrigeration to progress much earlier. Our magical kingdom is on the verge of such discoveries, with all they represent. The first true refrigerators and freezers may be less than a lifetime away. Even if they aren’t, nothing more than an easy way of producing ice is a century or more of advancement.

Next time

The next part of this series will move on from heating a house to building it. We’ll see how magic aids in construction, from building materials to architectural designs. For now, since summer has started, find somewhere cold and enjoy the fact that you can.

On marriage in fiction

For about as long as humans have had any sort of community, we’ve had the concept of marriage. What it means has changed greatly throughout the ages, but the basic idea of people bonding for the rest of their lives has endured. It’s so ingrained in our collective mind that it almost has to be inherited from our ancestors, a “civilized” response to some innate need. But it’s also one of the more ritualized parts of our society, and that has also endured throughout history.

In fiction, however, marriage serves a different purpose. It’s often an event, a set piece, an excuse to move the story along. It can be a time for great upheaval (e.g., the Red Wedding of Game of Thrones), and that’s fine, because the real thing is, too. Just in a different way, hopefully.

For exotic or alien cultures, however, the process of marriage itself can lead to an interesting story arc. From romance and courting to the arranged marriages popularly shown in medieval fantasy, the possibilities for drama are easy to see. Yet the worldbuilding aspects are just as important for marriage in unfamiliar or nonexistent locales. Marriage, like so many other things, is inherently tied to a culture. By making a fictitious culture’s marital wrappings different, unusual, you make that culture unique.

Popping the question

We’re all pretty familiar with the “common” Western marriage. Two people (a man and a woman historically, but it can be just about any two adults nowadays) who love each other decide to get married, for whatever reason. This may follow a lengthy period of dating and engagement, or it can be a spur-of-the-moment thing. One way or another, though, they take the plunge.

There’s some bureaucratic paperwork to fill out, since we live in a society where these things are regulated. Then, the bulk of the work is in planning the wedding. That ceremony can be religious or secular, and it can range from a simple, perfunctory proclamation by a justice of the peace all the way to a lavish church ceremony with hundreds in attendance.

However it works, the core of the wedding is, effectively, a contract. In theory, it’s a binding oath on both participants, a formalization of what biologists call pair bonding. Once this contract is confirmed—the “I do” part—the two are, for all intents and purposes, married.

But it doesn’t end there. Many cultures have ritualized the hours that come after the initial bonding. Most of the scenes we see of dramatic weddings, such as throwing rice, have some significance that has been lost to time. But all of it meant something at some point. The reception, the honeymoon, the “first night”—everything had a meaning, even if it doesn’t anymore.

Answering the questions

Marriage, as we understand it, is built on assumptions. In non-Western or non-modern cultures, some of those assumptions are invalid. So, by changing some of them, we can create a distinct “flavor” for the concept of marriage and its concrete aspects. You merely need to know which assumptions you can work with.

Who gets married?

Until very, very recently, most of the US defined marriage as between exactly one man and exactly one women. The fallout of dissolving that definition is still playing out as we speak, but it doesn’t matter much for our purposes. That’s because, for the vast majority of human history, the formal pair bonding that is marriage has been between men and women. It’s the little details that have changed.

Monogamy is our “default” for marriage: a person can have a single spouse. It’s codified into law in most places, and it’s a cornerstone of the Christian tradition. But that’s an assumption that doesn’t have to hold. A few societies in the past have embraced multiple spouses; this is traditionally called polygamy, though the more general term polyamory is appropriate when you’re talking about something other than “one man, multiple wives”. Polygamous sects exist today, but they’re in the minority, and the practice is usually highly stigmatized, if not outright illegal.

In a polygamous society, marriage might be less of a spectacle, simply because it’s more common. For the “lesser” side (the one where there can be many spouses), it may not hold the same glamour that it does for us monogamists. A hierarchy would develop on the “many” side—usually the wives—where some would have more prestige than the others. And, of course, this sort of culture readily accepts the less-savory aspects of marriage.

Besides “how many”, the other assumption we can challenge is “who”. Same-sex marriage gets all the limelight today; it’s as simple as changing “man and woman” to “adults”. But there can be other restrictions on who can marry. If, as gay-marriage opponents profess, the whole purpose is procreation, then are seniors allowed to marry? What about impotent men and infertile women? If sex is the reason for marriage, then are people with STDs condemned to the single life forever? (This last one is not an academic question, especially in Renaissance times.)

And then there are the related questions of age and, well, relation. Our modern age of consent of 18 is a bit on the high side, historically speaking, but most jurisdictions don’t use it as the minimum for marriage. However, “minimum” is just that. Not everyone will get married the minute they come of age, whatever that age really is. Historians can point to data showing that “commoners” in centuries past tended to get married in their early to mid twenties, just like today. To counter that, we have stories of children wedding, but those cases were not the norm, and they were arranged specifically for political or financial reasons, as we’ll see below.

Blood relation (consanguinity, to use the technical term) is another factor. Everyone’s related in some way, if you go back far enough, but it’s only the really close ones that bother people. Broadly speaking, the size of the community will help determine which degrees of relation are acceptable, but other reasoning, such as the need to keep a “pure” bloodline, also come into play. Marriage between first cousins is acceptable in some places, taboo in others, while closer relatives are generally forbidden everywhere. In older days, the bar could be set higher, banning second or even third cousins. This naturally presented a problem among the medieval and later nobility, who became so intertwined that it was nearly impossible to find someone who fit the consanguinity criteria.

Why are they getting married?

Today, we expect people to marry for love or companionship. Historically, that wasn’t always the case. Marriage is intimately associated with inheritance, so when inheritances grow to be very large, it stands to reason that some would want to influence them. Arranged marriages are a common feature of many cultures in many times. Typically, it’s the parents who make those decisions, and the children are expected to follow along out of filial duty. (When they don’t, there’s sure to be drama.)

Other arrangements can also work. In smaller societies, it could be a tribal or village elder who does the matchmaking, or possibly a cabal of the older members of the community. Religious leaders work, too, if the society leans that way. In a fantasy setting, it could even be fate, magic, or the gods.

A looser sort of arranged marriage can happen in clannish cultures. This ties in a bit with consanguinity, in that the arrangement is “no one in our clan”, and clans are arranged along family lines. Depending on the specifics, this can be a little more open than a fully-arranged pairing, in that the matchmakers only operate at a “higher” level. In other words, you’ll marry someone from that clan, but you can pick who it is.

And then there are the forced marriages. Our modern sensibilities associate this with repressive societies, with slavery and barbarism. But then there seems to be a growing subculture devoted to fantasizing about non-consensual relationships, so there you go. In my opinion, it’s hard to disconnect the idea of a forced marriage from rape and plunder, but it’s also closely tied to polygamous cultures. That makes sense, if you think about it. Why force yourself to be forever stuck with someone who likely hates you?

How does it work?

How these people—whoever they are and however they got together—actually get married is the big question. Wedding ceremonies may be the second oldest and second most important of any human festivity. (Funerals are almost certainly first.) I’ll admit that I haven’t studied every culture in the world, but I’ve never heard of one that didn’t do something special for marriage.

Designing a fictional wedding is a massive undertaking. (I do know this one from experience.) The best guides here are the necessities of the story and a few sociological factors that appear to be mostly universal. The ceremony is supposed to be the symbolic joining of two (or more) people in matrimony. Even if marriage isn’t religious in nature—and it probably is, given what history shows us—symbolism will be rampant.

We talk of “tying the knot”, and that’s basically a symbol for the pair bond of marriage. We throw rice as a symbol of fertility and prosperity. The bridal veil, the white dress? Symbols of purity and chastity. Throwing the bouquet is symbolic as a passing of the torch of womanhood. The groom carrying his bride across the threshold symbolizes the support he’s expected to provide as the head of the new family, as well as the threshold itself directly referencing the “new life” the couple has begun.

For worldbuilding purposes, that’s what you’re looking for. You probably won’t want to copy the Western features directly, as they evolved from our peculiar set of circumstances. But the things they symbolize are the things our ancestors considered most important in a marital union. Figure out what your invented culture values most, then find ways to represent those values in the wedding itself.

And finally, since you’re writing a story, remember not to write yourself into a corner. You might need a reason for the prospective spouses to back out at the last minute: “Speak now, or forever hold your peace.” And then there’s the question of what happens after the wedding. But that, as they say, is another story.

Building aliens – Introduction

Is there anything more “sci-fi” than an alien? Sure, some of the best science fiction stories are wholly concerned with humanity, but the most popular tend to be the ones with aliens. Star Trek, Star Wars, and any other franchise beginning with the word “star” are the best illustrations of that point, but it’s easy to see anywhere you look. Aliens are all over the place, in movies, TV, video games, books, and every other creative media you can think of.

But there are aliens and there are aliens. In earlier days of TV and movies, for example, most aliens were typically just actors in makeup, which severely limited their appearance to the humanoid. Modern video games have returned to this state, mainly because of the cost of 3D modeling. (In other words, if everything is close enough to human, then they can all use the same base model.) Books were never under this sort of pressure, so authors’ imaginations could run wild. Think of Larry Niven’s two-headed, three-legged Puppeteers, for instance.

Looks, however, aren’t everything. In visual media, they’re a lot, but for the written word, it’s more about how an alien thinks, acts, sees the world. It’s how aliens are characterized. In harder sci-fi, it’s even about how they exist in the first place.

This series of posts, if I may be so ambitious, will cover all of that. I’ll probably only write about one of these a month, each covering a small part of the topic. As has become my usual pattern, we’ll start with the broader strokes, then fill in the details later on. Along the way, I’ll try to keep a balance between the hard worldbuilding bits and the space-opera fun. Because aliens are both.

First, though, let’s cover the basics.

What we know

This is an easy one: nothing. At this point in time—unless something has happened in the three weeks since I wrote this post—we don’t know if aliens exist. (Ignore fringe theories for the moment.) We really don’t even know if they can exist. All we have are theories, hypotheses, and speculation. In other words, a perfect breeding ground for the imagination.

Of course, we’ve worked out the basics of how astrobiology (life outside of Earth) would work. We can confidently say that a few old theories are wrong, like the fabled canals on Mars or jungles of Venus. But what we don’t know is a vast field. Are we alone? The premise of this whole series is that we are not, but we can’t yet be sure. Are we the first intelligent life in the universe…or the last? Did life arise on Earth, or did it spread here from elsewhere?

Today, in 2016, we simply cannot answer any of those questions in a rigorously scientific manner. Thus, it falls to us creative writers to fill in the blanks. How you do that will depend on the expectations of your genre and medium, but also how deep you wish to delve.

Forks in the road

We have a few different ways to play this. Some will work better than others, obviously, and some will resonate better with different segments of your audience. So this is our first big “branching point”, the first decision you’ll have to make.

The hard way

Here, “hard” doesn’t mean “difficult”. Well, it kinda does, but not in the way you think. No, this is a reference to hard science fiction, where the object is the most realistic and plausible scenario, based on as few “miracles” of technology, biology, and the like as possible. Yes, that does make the creation of aliens more difficult, because you have to think more about them, but the results can be amazing.

Hard SF aliens are best suited to written works, if for no other reason than they’re the least likely to be humanoid in body or mind. (We’ll see why in a later post.) Those visual media that have tried to build aliens in this harder style tend to make them incomprehensible to mere humans, or they focus on the ramifications of their existence more than their appearance. But hard sci-fi is often seen as too boring and too “smart” for movie and TV audiences, so there aren’t very many good examples.

The easy way

Now, this time I’m talking about difficulty. In total contrast to the harder style above, many works opt to make their aliens to fit the needs of the story, with varying degrees of care for their actual plausibility. In a few cases, they can be made to illustrate a concept or explore a particular section of human psychology. (Older Star Trek series often did both of those.) This might be termed the space-opera method of alien creation.

Obviously, this is more palatable for visual and interactive media, because space-opera aliens tend to fall into the category of Humans But. In other words, this type of alien race can be described as, “They’re humans, but…” Maybe they’re all women, or they have catlike features, or they’re overly aggressive. They could have multiple differences, but they’re still largely human at heart. What makes them special is how they are different from humanity.

Examples of this style aren’t hard to find at all. They probably make up the majority of aliens in fiction. Why? Because they’re easy. Easy to create, easy to visualize, easy to characterize.

The PPC way

For our series, we’ll take a hybrid approach, if only because we have so much ground to cover. I’ll spare you the highly technical intricacies of biology and biochemistry, but we’ll certainly be going deeper into those fields than the shoulder-pads-and-forehead-ridges crowd. The idea is to keep suspension of disbelief while still allowing for a good story. (Honestly, the hard sci-fi approach only really makes for one good story: discovery.)

Likewise, I’ll assume you’re the best one to know what sort of character you need, so we won’t really cover that too much. We’ll probably touch on the psychological aspects, but those are most definitely not my specialty. And we’ll try to make something more interesting than humans in makeup.

Where we go from here

As I said, this series will probably be something close to monthly, but I already have the first few posts planned out. Again, these mostly cover things from a higher level. The finer details will be in the nebulous future.

Here’s what I have so far:

This introduction
Biochemistry, DNA, and alternative forms of life
Evolution and genetics
Interaction with the environment
Physiology
Intelligence, sentience, and sapience

These won’t be the only posts, and they likely won’t even be consecutive. If I come up with something that I think needs to be said, I’ll say it, no matter what the schedule reads. But these six are a good start, and they outline the main areas I feel should be covered.

Remember, we’re making “softer” aliens out of “harder” stuff. That’s why you don’t see a post dedicated to characterization, or one specifically focusing on appearance or mating rituals. Those can come later. (If you’re worried at the lack of language as a topic, also remember that a third of the site is dedicated to exactly that. I will be writing “alien languages” posts, but those will show up on Fridays.)

So that’s it for the intro. Come back soon for the real start to the series. I’ll see you then.

Magic and tech: medicine

Human history is very much a history of medicine and medical technology. You can even make the argument that the very reason we’re able to have the advanced society we have today is because of medical breakthroughs. Increased life expectancy, decreased infant mortality, hospitals, vaccines, antibiotics—I can go on for hours. It all adds up to a longer, healthier life, and that means more time to participate in society. The usual retirement age is 65, and it’s entirely likely it’ll hit 70 before I do, and the quality of life at such an advanced age is also steadily rising. That means more living grandparents (and great-grandparents and great-uncles and so on) and more people with the wisdom that hopefully comes with age.

Not too long ago, things were different. The world was full of dangers, many of them fatal. Disease could strike at any time, without warning, and there was little to be done but wait or pray. Childbirth was far more often deadly to the mother or the child…or both. Even the simplest scratches could become infected. Surgery was as great a risk as the problems it was trying to solve. (Thanks to MRSA and the like, those last two are becoming true again.) If you dodged all those bullets, you still weren’t out of the woods, because you had to worry about all those age-related troubles: blindness, deafness, weakness.

Life in, say, the Middle Ages was very likely a life of misery and pain, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t medicine, as we’ll see. It was far from what we’re used to today, but it did exist. And there is probably no part of civilization more strongly connected to magic than medicine. What would happen if the two really met?

Through the ages

Medicine, in the sense of “things that can heal you”, dates back about as far as humanity itself. And for all of that history except the last few centuries, it was almost exclusively herbal. Every early culture has its own collection of natural pharmaceuticals (some of them even work!) accompanied by a set of traditional cures. In recent decades, we’ve seen a bit of a revival of the old herbalism, and every drugstore is stocked with ginkgo and saw palmetto and dozens of other “supplements”. Whether they’re effective or not, they have a very long history.

Non-living cures also existed, and a few were well-known to earlier ages. Chemical medicine, however, mostly had to wait for, well, chemistry. The alchemists of old had lists of compounds that would help this or that illness, but many of those were highly toxic. We laugh and joke about the side effects of today’s drugs, but at least those are rare; mercury and lead are going to be bad for you no matter what.

Surgery is also about as old as the hills. The Egyptians were doing it on eyes, for example, although I think I’d rather keep the cataracts. (At least then I’d be like the Nile, right?) Amputation was one of the few remedies for infection…which could also come from surgery. A classic Catch-22, isn’t it? Oh, and don’t forget the general lack of anesthesia.

What the earlier ages lacked most compared to today was not the laundry list of pills or a dictionary of disorders. No, the thing that most separates us from earlier times when it comes to medicine is knowledge. We know how diseases spread, how germs affect the body, how eyes and ears go bad. We’re unsure on a few minor details, but we’ve got the basics covered, and that’s why we can treat the sick and injured so much better than before. Where it was once thought that an illness was the will of God, for instance, we can point to the virus that is its true cause.

And then comes magic

So let’s take that to the magical world. To start, we’ll assume the mundane niceties of medieval times. That’s easier than you might think, because our world’s magic won’t be enough to let its users actually see viruses and other infectious agents. Nor will it allow them to see into the human body at the same level of detail as a modern X-ray, CT scan, or ultrasound. And we’ll short-circuit the obvious idea by saying that there are no cure-all healing spells. Real people don’t have hit points.

But improvements aren’t hard to find. Most of medicine is observation, and we’ve already seen that the magical world has spells that can aid in knowledge, recall, and sensory perception. An increase in hearing, if done right, is just as good as a stethoscope, and we can imagine similar possibilities for the other senses.

Decreasing the ability of the senses is another interesting angle. In normal practice, it’s bad form to blind someone, but a numbing spell would be an effective anesthetic. A sleeping spell is easy to work and has a lot of potential in a hospital setting. And something to kill the sense of smell might be a requirement for a doctor or surgeon as much as the patient!

The practice of surgery itself doesn’t seem like it can benefit much from the limited magic we’re giving this world. It’s more the peripheral aspects that get improved, but that’s enough. Think sharper scalpels, better stitches, more sterilization.

Herbal medicine gets better in one very specific way: growth. It’s not that our mages can cast a spell to make a barren field bloom with plant life, but those plants that are already there can grow bigger and faster. That includes the pharmaceuticals herbs as well as grain crops. Magic and alchemy are closely related, so it’s not a stretch to get a few early chemical remedies; magic helps here by allowing easier distillation and the like.

Some of the major maladies can be cured by magical means in this setting. Mostly, this goes back to the sensory spells earlier, but now as enchantment. We’ve established that spells can be “stored”, and this gets us a lot of medical technology. An amulet or bracelet to deaden pain (pain is merely a subset of touch, after all) might be just as good as opium—or its modern equivalents. Sharpened eyesight could be achieved by magic as easily as eyeglasses or Lasik surgery.

In conclusion

The field of medicine isn’t one that can be solved by magic alone. Not as we’ve defined it, anyway. But our magical kingdom will have counterparts to a few of the later inventions that have helped us live longer, better lives. This world will still be dangerous, but prospects are a bit brighter than in the real thing.

What magic does give our fantasy world is a kind of analytical framework, and that’s a necessary step in developing modern medicine. Magic in this world follows rules, and the people living there know that. It stands to reason that they’ll wonder if other things follow rules, as well. Investigating such esoteric mysteries will eventually bear fruit, as it did here. Remember that chemistry was born from alchemy, and thus Merck and Pfizer owe their existence to Geber and Paracelsus.

Chemistry isn’t the only—or even the most important—part of medicine. Biology doesn’t directly benefit from magic, but it shares the same analytical underpinnings. Physical wellness is harder to pin down, but people in earlier times tended to be far more active than today. For the most part, they ate healthier, too. But magic won’t help much there. Indeed, it might make things worse, as it means less need for physical exertion. Also, the “smaller” world it creates is more likely to spread disease.

In the end, it’s possible that magic’s medical drawbacks outweigh its benefits. But that’s okay. Once the rest of the world catches up, it’ll be on its way to fixing those problems, just like we have.

Fantasy governments

As we get ever deeper into this seemingly unending election season, it’s hard not to think about governments. I’ve already done a post about the future of government, covering science fiction, but what about the past? What does government look like in a fantasy world?

Many works, when they think about it at all, default to the “feudalism-lite” model of D&D and video games. I call it “lite” because, while it does bear some of the hallmarks of medieval European feudalism—the hierarchical structure, the figurehead monarchy—it lacks the deeper roots of feudalism. Rarely will you see kings asserting their divine right to rule, for instance. The lower classes are given much more freedom, especially of movement, than they had historically.

In essence, fantasy feudalism is more like the later days, when the system was breaking down. After the Black Death wiped out so much of Europe’s population, those who survived effectively became that much wealthier. They did begin to gain some of the freedoms that Dark Age serfs lacked, simply because they knew that the labor vacuum made them more valuable. It’s in this era that we also see the rise of the merchant republics in Italy and the stirrings of absolutist monarchy in France, and this is when the idea of class warfare truly begins.

From a storytelling point of view, that’s a good compromise. Before the plague, it was much harder for people to rise above their station. After, they had a bit more upward mobility. It still wasn’t quite the free-for-all of much fantasy, where random peasants address the king with familiarity and candor, but we can make allowances for dramatic effect.

But the world of fantasy gives us so much more. With a little bit of worldbuilding work, we no longer have to settle for the stripped-down version of late feudalism popular in sword-and-sorcery fiction. If we put some thought into it, we can do better.

Low fantasy

It’s popular to divide fantasy into “low” and “high”, largely based on the amount and power of magic available to the world. Game of Thrones and the books that spawned it are, in this system, low fantasy (though getting higher with each volume or season). Something like the Dragonlance series, by contrast, has lots of powerful wizardry, so it’s classified as high fantasy. Since low fantasy is closer to our world, we’ll start with it.

Most systems of governing in a low fantasy world will resemble ours quite closely, as those worlds are very similar to our own. Monarchies are thousands of years old in our world, and those seem to be the most common everywhere, so they’ll be well-represented. Republics, of the Roman style, are rarer; if they exist in a fantasy realm, they should have a good backstory to explain why. Finally, as much as we uphold it as an ideal, democracy is historically highly uncommon on the national level. In older ages, it breaks down as populations grow; it’s entirely possible for an early democracy to evolve into a republic as people decide that voting on everything is a waste of time.

Each of these major types of government covers a broad range of political theory. Monarchies can be absolutist or dictatorial, with a king or emperor ruling with an iron fist, or they can be parliamentary, as England became in the 13th century. A republic can be full of partisan bickering, even in medieval times, and it has a clear path to a parliamentary system, simply by electing a leader from the representative body.

But fantasy also gives us the opportunity to explore other methods of government, those that didn’t gain purchase in our Western societies for whatever reason. Some might not have been possible for us, either given the evolutionary history of European culture or the limitations of the medieval world. So let’s take a look, shall we?

Socialism is a hot topic right now, no matter where you are in the Western Hemisphere. Definitions differ, but the general idea is a state where everyone contributes to the populace as a whole. It’s usually highly centralized, enforcing a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor (a welfare state, in other words), and offering numerous public services.

In earlier times, public and social services seem to have always existed on some scale, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility to have a socialist state. Producing it from a monarchy might be unlikely, but republics can do it. Socialism does appear more likely to come about early in the development of a civilization, at the tribal or village level. After all, it’s easier to redistribute wealth when there’s not that much of it, and sharing—socialism is just institutionalized sharing—is as old as humanity.

Communism, on the other hand, is the product of 19th century political thinking. The original idea, basically, was to empower the working classes at the expense of the educated, noble, or otherwise privileged. That didn’t work, and just about every communist state in our world has either turned into a dictatorship or oligarchy (USSR, China) or grown towards capitalism (Vietnam). Medieval-era fantasy likely won’t have the chance to try, unless they have some bright thinkers to come up with the notion in the first place.

Theocracy is, literally, rule by religion. We’ve seen a few attempts at a theocratic state throughout history. Papal Rome might be considered one, at least when it wasn’t just a regular autocracy that happened to be ruled by the Pope. The followers of Muhammed after his death tried to implement a government based on their scriptural writings. And, of course, many of today’s terrorist groups claim to want the same. Nobody’s really succeeded for any length of time, though, except maybe the repressive, authoritarian regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

For fantasy, it’s entirely possible to have a theocracy. (High fantasy has it even easier, since you can have the gods themselves intervene, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.) At its core, theocracy isn’t that much more than a monarchy ruled by a religious leader. Its code of laws will be scripture. But theocracies are highly conservative by their very nature, and they don’t exactly tend to be breeding grounds for new advances in any field other than, well, theology. For that reason, fantasy theocracies might work best as a “bad guy” government.

High fantasy

With the addition of magic and the divine, high fantasy opens up a few more options for government, some that we cannot emulate in our world. That does mean it’s harder for an author to imagine how they would work, but they’re great for making a place truly exotic.

First, as noted above, theocracy gets a boost from being in high fantasy. This direct theocracy, as I’ll call it, is one where divine beings directly interfere with the workings of a state that follows them. At the far end, it degenerates into an absolute dictatorship, one controlled by a tyrannical deity, probably something far more horrific than anything ISIS could do. But there is a place for a less-awful direct theocracy, especially in a polytheistic culture. In a way, that one could conceivably turn into a kind of theocratic republic, where party lines are drawn based on which god’s teachings you follow.

The idea of a government run by magical means is probably as old as fantasy itself. This thaumatocracy can take many forms. Rule by the adept is a subset of oligarchy, roughly equivalent to republics where only landowners could be elected as representatives. Using magic itself to rule or otherwise control the populace edges closer to socialism or even communism. And if magic can in any way be used for warfare, then there’s also the potential for a strong practitioner to rise to autocracy. So this one is highly sensitive to conditions, and which outcome you get will depend on history.

If magic (sorcerous, divine, or whatever) can contact or summon the dead, then there’s the chance that a government based on this could form. It’s even got a name: thanatocracy, rule by the dead. The Inca are said to have believed that their deceased rulers could continue to influence the living; thanatocracy is the logical extension of that to a world where they really can. By its very nature, this would be a very conservative state, probably one founded by a culture practicing ancestor worship. There’s the potential for an oligarchy to form, if talking to the dead is a skill available only to a cabal of priests or wizards. But the nature of the afterlife will also play a big role, as will the number of dead consulted for questions of government.

Slight modifications

In a few cases, it’s not the type of government that’s unrealistic or ahistorical, but some defining quality of it. The following are a few subsets of governments that have the possibility of existing in fantasy:

Matriarchy is one of the most popular. Traditionally in most societies with inherited power, the right to rule passes down through the male line first. There are very good biological, sociological, and historical reasons for this, but fantasy cultures don’t have to follow our rules. It’s easy to envision, for instance, a matriarchal monarchy, one ruled by a queen who is succeeded by her eldest daughter. You likely want to have some reason why the men weren’t in power; perhaps this is a non-human race, like D&D’s drow.
Meritocracy is a high ideal of a lot of thinkers. Its goal is that rule goes to those most qualified, probably as determined through some sort of examination. China tried something like this, but it was never as successful as it could have been, because the political machinery needed to start a meritocracy is easy to “break”. Like a radioactive element, meritocracy decays into bureaucracy. Those in power adjust the qualifications so they stay in power. But maybe a fantasy culture could break that cycle.
The junta or other forms of military dictatorship can readily be adapted to a fantasy setting. We have all too many examples, both in the real world and in fiction, but there’s always space for new ideas. Militaries tend to come to power when they overthrow a legitimate government, so there is a ready-made source of conflict. And it doesn’t take much for them to break into factions, each led by a warlord who thinks he has sole right to rule.

Keep thinking

I’m sure you can come up with other ideas. An earlier post goes into a bit more detail about creating your own governments. Extrapolating to a fantasy world is fairly straightforward. Remember that a government, as with any part of society, is rarely created from scratch. It has a history, even if you never write it. The more outlandish it is, the better chance you’ll need to defend it at some point. So, for those “crazier” governments, think a little more about how they came about. Usually, you can find something that’ll works.

The future of auxlangs

Auxlangs are auxiliary languages: conlangs specifically created to be a medium of communication, rather than for artistic purposes. In other words, auxlangs are made to be used. And two auxlangs have become relatively popular in the world. Esperanto is actually spoken by a couple million people, and it has, at times, been considered a possibility for adoption by large groups of people. Lojban, though constructed on different principles, is likewise an example of an auxlang being used to communicate.

The promise of auxlangs, of course, is the end of mistranslation. Different languages have different meanings, different grammars, different ways of looking at the world. That results in some pretty awful failures to communicate; a quick Internet search should net you hundreds of “translation fails”. But if we had a language designed to be a go-between for speakers of, say, English and Spanish, then things wouldn’t be so bad, right?

That’s the idea, anyway. Esperanto, despite its numerous flaws, does accomplish this to a degree. Lojban is…less useful for speaking, but it has a few benefits that we’ll call “philosophical”. And plenty of conlangers think they will make the one true international auxiliary language.

So let’s fast-forward a few centuries. Esperanto was invented on the very edge of living memory, as we know, and Lojban is even younger than that, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. Once auxlangs have a bit of history behind them, will any of them achieve that Holy Grail?

The obvious contender

They’d have to get past English, first. Right now, the one thing holding back auxlang adoption is English. Sure, less than a quarter of the world’s population speaks it, but it’s the language for global communication right now. Nothing in the near future looks likely to take its place, but let’s look at the next best options.

Chinese, particularly Mandarin, may have a slight edge in sheer numbers, but it’s, well, Chinese. It’s spoken by Chinese, written by Chinese, and it’s almost completely confined to China. Sure, Japan, Korea, and much of Southeast Asia took parts of its writing system and borrowed tons of words, but that was a thousand years ago. Today, Chinese is for China. No matter how many manufacturing jobs move there (and they’re starting to leave), it won’t be the world language. That’s not to say we won’t pick a few items from it, though.

On the surface, Arabic looks like another candidate. It’s got a few hundred million speakers right now, and they’re growing. It has a serious written history, the support of multiple nations…it’s almost the perfect setup. But that’s Classical Arabic, the kind used in the Koran. Real-life “street” Arabic is a horrible mess of dialects, some mutually unintelligible. But let’s take the classical tongue. Can it gain some purchase as an auxlang?

Probably not. Again, Arabic is associated with a particular cultural “style”. It’s not only used by Muslims or even Arabs, mind you, but that’s the common belief. There’s a growing backlash against Muslims in certain parts of the world, and some groups are taking advantage of this to further fan the flames. (I write this a few hours after the Brussels bombings on March 22.) But Arabic’s problems aren’t entirely political. It’s an awful language to try to speak, at least by European standards. Chinese has tones, yes, but you can almost learn those; pharyngeal and emphatic consonants are even worse for us. Now imagine the trouble someone from Japan would have.

Okay, so the next two biggest language blocks are out. What’s left? Spanish is a common language for most of two continents, although it has its own dialect troubles. Hindi is phonologically complex, and it’s not even a majority language in its own country. Latin is dead, as much as academics hate to acknowledge that fact. Almost nothing else has the clout of English, Chinese, and Arabic. It would take a serious upheaval to make any of them the world’s lingua franca.

Outliving usefulness

It’s entirely possible that we’ll never need an international auxiliary language at all, because automatic translation becomes good enough for daily use in real-time. Some groups are making great headway on this right now, and it’s only expected to get better.

If that’s the case, auxlangs are then obsolete. There’s no other way of putting it. If computers can translate between any two languages at will, then why do you need yet another one to communicate with people? It seems likely that computing will only become more ubiquitous. Wearables look silly to me, but I’ll admit that I’m not the best judge of such things. Perhaps they’ll go mainstream within the next decade.

Whatever computers you have on your person, whether in the form of a smartphone or headgear, likely won’t be powerful enough to do the instantaneous translation needed for conversation, but it’ll be connected to the Internet (sorry, the cloud), with all the access that entails. Speech and text could both be handled by such a system, probably using cameras for the latter.

For auxlang designers, that’s very much a dystopian future. Auxiliary languages effectively become a subset of artlangs. But never fear. Not everyone will have a connection. Not everyone will have the equipment. It’ll take time for the algorithms to learn how to translate the thousands of spoken languages in the world, even if half of them are supposed to go extinct in the coming decades.

The middle road

Auxlangs, then, have a tough road ahead. They have to displace English as the world language, then hold off the other natural contenders. They need real-time translation to be a much more intractable problem than Google and Microsoft are making it out to be. But there’s a sliver of a chance.

Not all auxlangs are appropriate as an international standard of communication. Lojban is nice in a logical, even mathematical way, but it’s too complicated for most people. A truly worldwide auxlang won’t look like that. So what would it look like?

It’ll be simple, that’s for sure. Think something closer to pidgins and creoles than lambda calculus. Something like Toki Pona might be too far down the scale of simplicity, but it’s a good contrast. The optimum is probably nearer to it than to Lojban. Esperanto and other simplified Latins can work, but you need to strip out a lot of filler. Remember, everyone has to speak this, from Europeans to Inuits to Zulus to Aborigines, and everywhere in between. You can’t please everybody, but you can limit the damage.

Phonology would also tend to err on the side of simplicity. No tones, no guttural sounds half the world would need to learn, no complex consonant clusters (but English gets a pass with that one, strangely enough). The auxiliary language of the future won’t be Hawaiian, but it won’t be Georgian, either. Again, on the lower side of medium seems to be the sweet spot.

The vocabulary for a hypothetical world language will be the biggest problem. There’s no way around it that I can see, short of doing some serious linguistic analysis or using the shortcut of “take the same term in a few big languages and find the average”. Because of this, I can seriously see a world auxlang as being a pidgin English. Think a much simplified grammar, with most of the extraneous bits thrown out. Smooth out the phonology (get rid of “wh”, drop the dental fricatives, regularize the vowels, etc.) and make the whole thing either more isolating or more agglutinative—I’m not sure which works best for this. The end result is a leaner language that is easier to pick up.

Or just wait for the computers to take care of things for us.

Magic and tech: defenses

Last time, we looked at how magic can augment a civilization’s offenses. Now, let’s turn to the other side of the coin and see what we can do about protecting ourselves against such force. It’s time to look at defense.

In the typical fantasy setting, sans magic, the common personal defense is, of course, armor. Sword-and-sorcery fiction often throws in some sort of spell-based defense, anything from walls of force to circles of protection to arrow-deflecting fields. And it’s a fairly common thing to give most potential offensive magic some sort of counterbalance. (The spell that can’t be blocked or resisted usually has a very good reason, and it’ll probably be a superweapon.) First, though, let’s look at what the mundane world has to offer.

Real-world protection

For personal protection, armor of various sorts has been around for millennia. Just about anything can be used as an armor material, as long as it does the job of preventing puncture or dissipating kinetic energy. Cloth, leather, many kinds of metal, wood, paper…you name it, somebody’s probably made armor from it. Exactly which material is used will depend on a civilization’s technological status, their geography (mo metal deposits means no metallic armor), their cultural outlook on warfare, the local climate, and many other factors. In general, though, pretty much everybody will use some armor, stories of naked Viking berserkers notwithstanding.

In the time period we’re focusing on in this series, the later Middle Ages, the best armor tended to be made of metal. But metal was relatively expensive, so not every single levied soldier is going to be running around in full plate. The best armor would be had by those with the means to procure it: nobles, knights, and the like. A well-equipped army will have better protection, naturally, while hurried musters of villagers will net you a company of men in whatever they could find, just like with weapons.

Remember that armor is designed as protection first, and most of its qualities will follow. The main type of injury it was protecting against was puncture—cutting and stabbing. Blunt trauma a very distant runner-up. We’ll take a look at medicine in a future post, but it’s helpful to think about how deadly even the smallest open wounds were back then. Without antibiotics or a working knowledge of sanitation and antiseptics, infection and sepsis were far more commonplace and far more dangerous. The best medicine was not to be wounded in the first place, and most armors show this.

Armor evolves alongside weapons. That’s why, once gunpowder spread to every battlefield in Europe, the heavier types of armor began to fall out of fashion. When fifty or more pounds of plate could no longer render you impervious to everything, why bother wearing it in the first place? (In modern times, materials science has advanced enough to create new plate that can take a shot, and now we see heavier armor coming back into vogue.)

Shields, in a sense, are nothing more than handheld armor. Some of them, depending on the culture, might have specialized defenses for a particularly common kind of attack. Others will instead use more of a weaker material, like your typical round shield made of hardwood. Again, guns tended to make most shields obsolete, at least until science could catch up. Today’s riot shields would make a 14th-century soldier salivate, but they’re based on the same old principles.

Larger-scale defenses work a different way. The usual suspects for city protection are walls, ramparts, moats, killing fields, and the like. Each one has its own purpose, its own specific target. Some of them fell by the wayside, victims of progress—how many modern cities have walls?—and some were remade to keep up. Most of them represent a significant allocation of materials and labor; bigger cities can afford that, but smaller towns might not be able to.

Magically reinforced

When the world becomes more dangerous as a result of weaponized magic, it stands to reason that new defenses will be developed to protect against such threats. One of the best ways of preventing injury, as we know, is never being hit at all. A spell to sharpen one’s senses lets a soldier react more quickly to an attack, meaning that there’s a better chance of dodging it. But that’s a waste of magical talent. Armies can comprise hundreds or even thousands of soldiers, and there’s not enough time (or enough mages) to enchant them all on the eve of battle.

Our “easy out” of stores of magical energy won’t help much here, so what can we do? Since personal defenses are, well, personal, and we’ve already said that very few people are mages, it doesn’t seem like we have a lot of options. Enchanted materials are the best bet. Armor can be fortified against breaking, making it harder to penetrate. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start, and it will take a lot of heat off our soldiers.

It’ll also have a secondary effect, one that will come to the fore in later years. Harder, stronger materials push back the date of gunpowder-induced obsolescence by quite a while. A fortified plate across your chest won’t make you not feel a bullet, but it’ll stop that bullet from piercing your skin and hitting something vital. Like Kevlar jackets today, these would cause the impact energy to spread out, which lowers the pressure on any one spot. That’s enough to save lives, especially if the enchantment isn’t too costly. And it wouldn’t be, because it’s valuable enough to research better ways of doing it.

Fortified shields benefit in the same way, but there we get a side bonus. Shields can become stronger or they can become lighter. The second option might be a better one, if mobility is the goal.

Protecting against magical attacks is far tougher. Wards are the best way in our setting, but they have a severe downside: one ward only counters one specific type of attack. We’ve seen that magic gives us a bunch of new weapons. Warding against all of them is inconvenient at best, impossible at worst. This is a case for good espionage (another post idea!) and scouting—if you know what to expect, you’ll be able to defend against it. Still, armor can hold a few different wards, and those who can afford it will likely invest in a bit of extra protection.

On the large scale, we see the same ideas, just bigger. Wards can be made on walls, for example, and a gate can receive a fortifying enchantment. The increased size makes these ludicrously expensive, but can you put a price on the lives of your citizens? Moats, however, become practically useless, and drawbridges are little more than a degenerate case of a gate.

Picking up the pieces

Besieged settlements in our magical setting are far more perilous than anything medieval Europe knew. In pitched battles, too, the advantage will tend to go to the attacker. That isn’t too far off from what happened in our own world, from the Renaissance to the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Once gunpowder reigned supreme, defense took a back seat.

It’s the strategy and tactics that will change the most. Protracted sieges are less of a risk for the offensive side, as you can always bomb the city into oblivion. Staying in one place will only get you killed, so guerilla warfare becomes much more attractive for an outnumbered foe. It might be better for a defender to give up the city and work from the shadows as an organized resistance movement.

Magic, then, creates an asymmetry in warfare. This little bit of it gives the offense the edge. Defense needs a lot more help. Of course, it’s said that the best defense is a good offense. In our magical world, that won’t be so much a witty aphorism as a standard doctrine.

Creating a sport

Humans have probably played games for about as long as they’ve been human. Some of these are mental (chess, etc.), while others are mostly physical in nature. These physical games, when they become somewhat organized and competitive (two other universals in humanity), can be called sports.

This post, then, looks at what it takes to create the rudiments of a fictional sport. I’ll admit, very few stories will need such fine detail. The specifics of a sport likely won’t feature in any work of fiction, though there are examples of sports being a focus. The video game Final Fantasy X has its Blitzball, for example; it’s both a mini-game and a major part of the culture of Spira, the game’s fictional world. Similarly, the Harry Potter book/movie series has its game of Quidditch, which forms a backdrop for certain events of its story. (And that fictitious sport later received its own video game, Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup.)

Again, let’s spell out what the post considers a sport. It has to be mainly physical, first of all. Go and chess are both classic games with long histories and intricate strategies, but they are tests of the mind, not the body, so they don’t meet our definition.

Second, sports are competitive. They pit one person or group against one or more others of relatively equal strength. The opposing forces don’t have to be present at the same time—baseball is effectively 9 against 1—but each side must have an equal opportunity to claim victory.

Third, sports have goals. This can be a literal goal, as in soccer or basketball, or a figurative one, like the highest or lowest score. Goals also imply an ending condition, such as time, score, or distance. Otherwise, you don’t have a sport.

Finally, the key factor in turning a game that meets all of the above criteria into a sport is some form of organization. This can be nothing more than a common set of rules, or it can be organized leagues with sponsorship and broadcast rights and billion-dollar contracts. Pickup games of street basketball and gym-class dodgeball fail this test, but they are simplified versions of “true” sports, so they get a pass.

Historical sports

In modern times, we’re familiar with quite a few sports. America has the familiar triumvirate of football, baseball, and basketball, all very popular. Hockey, soccer and rugby are three other big ones around the world, and the Olympics this summer will showcase dozens more. And that’s not counting track and field events, racing (whether on foot or using a vehicle), golf, cricket, and all those others we tend to overlook.

Each of these “modern” sports has a history, but all those histories, whether long (soccer dates back centuries) or short (BMX racing, now an Olympic sport, started in the 1970s) boil down to same thing. Someone, somewhere, started playing a game. More people then began playing. With more players, rules evolved. As the game grew in popularity, it became more fixed in its form, and thus a sport was born.

But sports don’t remain fixed forever. Different rule sets can emerge, and those can give rise to new sports. Rugby split off from soccer when players decided they wanted to pick up the ball and run with it. (Later on, Americans decided they liked a turn-based version better: football.) Cricket never caught on much in the US, but rounders, a simplified version played in English schoolyards, did; after a lot of tweaking, it developed into baseball. The list of “derivative” sports goes on: street hockey, beach soccer and volleyball, Australian rules football…

Nor do sports ever truly die. The Mesoamerican civilizations (Aztec, Maya, Olmec, etc.) have become famous in recent years for the archaeological evidence for their ball game, which dates back as far as 1600 BC. Despite all that has happened since then, a descendant of the Aztec game, now known as ulama, is still played in parts of Mexico. Over in the Old World, the Greek fighting sport pankration, a staple of the classical Olympics that was dropped when they were modernized, has been modified, organized, and subsumed into mixed martial arts.

Birth of a sport

Every culture has its sports. Sometimes, they’re inextricably linked. Few play cricket outside of Britain and its former colonies. Racing on an oval, as in NASCAR, is quintessentially American. Others gain more widespread appeal. Soccer—whatever you want to call it—is a worldwide game. Baseball bas become popular throughout the Americas and Asia. And so on.

Most sports will come about because of a culture. They’ll be part of it, at the start. Sometimes, they’re related to warfare, possibly as training (running, javelin throwing) or as a war “proxy” (the Mesoamerican ball games, maybe). Alternatively, they can be childhood games that “grew up”.

Which sports a culture plays can depend on its outlook on life, its technological advancement, and plenty of other factors. Technology’s role, of course, is easy to understand. After all, you can’t race automobiles until they’re invented. In the same vein, European games before the 1500s didn’t use rubber balls, because they didn’t have them; they tended to use wrapped animal bladders or things like that.

The level of organization is also dependent on these factors. Video replays obviously require video, but that’s an easy one. Precise timing is also necessary for many sports, but it took a long time to master. And from a cultural perspective, it’s not hard to imagine that a more egalitarian society might focus on loosely defined individual competitions rather than team games, while a martial civilization may see rigorously regulated team sports as a perfect metaphor for squad-level battles.

Taking steps

So let’s think about what it takes to make a sport. Looking back at the introduction, we see that we need an organized, competitive, and physical endeavor with well-defined goals. That’s a pretty good start. Let’s break it down in a different way, though, by asking some basic questions.

Who’s playing? Options include one-on-one, like martial arts; one against the “field”, like racing and golf; or team-against-team, as in baseball or football. Anything other than a contest between opposing individuals also requires a total count of players. For “serious” team sports, you can also work out rules for substitutions and things like that.
Where are they playing? Indoors or outdoors is the natural first approximation. But you’ll also want to know the size and shape of the playing area. This is usually the same for every event, but not always. Baseball fields have a bit of variation in the size of the outfield, and the racetrack at Daytona is almost five times as long as the one in Bristol.
What do they need to play? In other words, what equipment does the sport require? Balls are very common, though their composition (rubber, bladder, wood, etc.) can vary. Sticks show up in quite a few sports: baseball, hockey, and cricket are just three. Nets, posts, racquets—the possibilities are virtually endless. That’s not even counting vehicles or, as in polo, animals.
What are they trying to do? “Get the ball in the goal” is one possible objective. “Reach a certain point before X” is another. Those two, in fact, cover most sports Americans recognize as such. Add in “Don’t let the ball touch the ground”, and you’re pretty much set. You can also substitute “puck” or whatever for “ball”, if your sport uses one of those instead. Note that this is the main objective, not the entirety of the rules.
What is and is not allowed? These are the finer rules of the game. They’re the bulk of the gameplay, but a fictitious story is allowed to gloss over them when they’re not pivotal to the action. You have to be consistent, though, but from a storytelling perspective. A sport’s rules don’t necessarily have to make sense. Football’s “catch rule”, the definition of “charging” in basketball, and the whole sport of cricket are evidence of this.
Who wins, and how? This is the victory condition. Some games are time-based, where they end after a certain period has elapsed. Others, such as baseball or tennis, finish after a set number of turns or scores. Sports where score is kept will generally be won by the side with the most scores; golf, though, is a counterexample. Races, of course, go to the one who finishes first, and a few sports (gymnastics and figure skating, for instance, but also boxing) are scored by judges.

There are quite a few other details you can add, like what happens after an event, whether there is enough organization for leagues and championships, etc. The level of detail is important here, though: don’t get lost in impertinent trivia. It’s fun, but you probably don’t need it for the story.

In those stories where it’s warranted, on the other hand, an invented sport can add flavor to a culture. It’s a good illustration that we’re looking at a different set of people. This is what they think is fun. Sure, many cultures will have similarities in their sports. Soccer could plausibly be created just about anywhere, at almost any time. Many of the martial events at the original Olympics came about from soldierly pursuits, and everybody has soldiers. But it’s the differences that we notice the most.

With fantasy, there’s also the potential for new sports that are beyond our capability. Anything involving magic fits this bill; our two fantastic examples above are both physically impossible for ordinary humans. But fantasy worlds might be more amenable to bizarre sports. The same is true in futuristic science fiction. We can’t play games in zero-G today, but that doesn’t mean people on 24th century starships can’t. As with everything in worldbuilding, the only limits are in your mind.

Worldbuilding and the level of detail

Building a world, whether a simple stage, a vast universe, or anywhere in between, is hard work. Worse, it’s work that never really ends. One author, one team of writers, one group of players—none of these could hope to create a full-featured world in anything approaching a reasonable time. We have to cut corners at every turn, just to make the whole thing possible, let alone manageable.

Where to cut those corners is the hard part. Obviously, everything pertinent to the story must be left in. But how much else do we need? Only the creator of the work can truly answer that one. Some stories may only require the most rudimentary worldbuilding. Action movies and first-person shooters, for example, don’t need much more than sets and (maybe) some character motivations. A sprawling, open-world RPG has to have a bit more effort put into it. The bigger the “scale”, the more work you’d think you need.

Level of detail

But that’s not necessarily true. In computer graphics programming, there’s a concept called mipmapping. A large texture (like the outer surface of a building) takes up quite a chunk of memory. If it’s far enough away, though, it’ll only be a few pixels on the screen. That’s wasteful—and it slows the game down—so a technique was invented where smaller versions of the texture could be loaded when an object was too far away to warrant the “full-sized” graphics. As you get closer, the object’s texture is progressively changed to better and better versions, until the game engine determines that it’s worth showing the original.

The full set of these textures, from the original possibly down to a single pixel, is called a mipmap. In some cases, it’s even possible to control how much of the mipmap is used. On lower-end machines, some games can be set to use lower-resolution textures, effectively taking off the top layer or two of the mipmap. Lower resolution means less memory usage, and less processing needed for lighting and other effects. The setting for this is usually called the level of detail.

Okay, so that’s what happens with computer graphics, but how, you might be wondering, does that apply to worldbuilding? Well, the idea of mipmapping is a perfect analogy to what we need to do to make a semi-believable world without spending ages on it. The things that are close to the story need the most detail, while people, places, and events far away can be painted in broad, low-res strokes. Then, if future parts of the story require it, those can be “swapped out” for something more detailed.

The level of detail is another “setting” we can tweak in a fictional work. Epic fantasy cries out for great worldbuilding. Superhero movies…not so much. Books have the room to delve deeper into what makes the world tick than the cramped confines of film. Even then, there’s a limit to how much you should say. You don’t need to calculate how many people would be infected by a zombie plague in a 24-hour period in your average metropolis. But a book might want to give some vague figures, whereas a movie would just show as many extras as the producers could find that day.

Branches of the tree

The level of detail, then, is more like a hard cutoff. This is how far down any particular path you’re willing to go for the story. But you certainly don’t need to go that far for everything. You have to pick and choose, and that’s where the mipmap-like idea of “the closer you are, the more detail you get” comes in.

Again, the needs of the story, the tone you’re trying to set, and the genre and medium are all going to affect your priorities. In this way, the mipmap metaphor is exactly backwards. We want to start with the least detail. Then, in those areas you know will be important, fill in a bit more. (This can happen as you’re writing, or in the planning stages, depending on how you work.)

As an example, let’s say you’re making something like a typical “space opera” type of work. You know it’s going to be set in the galaxy at large, or a sizable fraction of it. Now, our galaxy has 100 billion stars, but you’d be crazy to worry about one percent of one percent of that. Instead, think about where the story needs to be: the galactic capital, the home of the lost ancients, and so on. You might not even have to put them on a map unless you expect their true locations to become important, and you can always add those in later.

In the same vein, what about government? Well, does it matter? If politics won’t be a central focus, then just make a note to throw in the occasional mention of the Federation/Empire/Council, and that’s that. Only once you know what you want do you have to fill in the blanks. Technology? Same thing. Technobabble about FTL or wormholes or hyperspace would make for usable filler.

Of course, the danger is that you end up tying yourself in knots. Sometimes, you can’t reconcile your broad picture with the finer details. If you’re the type of writer who plans before putting words on the page, that’s not too bad; cross out your original idea, and start over. Seat-of-the-pants writers will have a tougher time of it. My advice there is to hold off as long as feasible before committing to any firm details. Handwaving, vague statements, and the unreliable narrator can all help here, although those can make the story seem wishy-washy. It might be best to steer the story around such obstacles instead.

The basic idea does need you to think a little bit beforehand. You have to know where your story is going to know how much detail is enough. Focus on the wrong places, and you waste effort and valuable time. Set the “level of detail” dial too low, and you might end up with a shallow story in a shallower world. In graphics, mipmaps can often be created automatically. As writers, we don’t have that luxury. We have to make all those layers ourselves. Nobody ever said building a world was easy.