The Worldbuilding is in the Details:

How to turn a Setting into a World

The best piece of worldbuilding I have ever read came in the pages of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. If you haven’t read it, read it, it’s a masterpiece of science fiction, but the detail that got to me wasn’t some tidbit of galactic history that Le Guin wove. It wasn’t some crazy alien monster (Gethen actually had pretty mild wildlife). It didn’t even have to do with Le Guin’s fascinating study of gender through Gethen’s asexual society. No, the best piece of worldbuilding was that on this icy planet, in addition to forks and knives, the native inhabitants have a little hammer by their tablemat for breaking thin layers of ice that form on their drinks.

It’s a small detail, it makes perfect sense, and I never would have thought to include it. And yet it is details like that, more than any lengthy and involved history of empires, or elaborate magic systems, that make a world believable.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve read too many books that take place in mythical magical worlds… that seem just like this one. Settings with people that act like people from normal modern society, only with wizards, and kings who are surprisingly liberal in their outlook for a, you know, feudal lord.

So here are some tips to make your worldbuilding feel genuine. Really, more questions to think about than any sort of checklist.

1: What Do They Eat?

Okay, I’m stealing this one from an old video essay (The Shandification of Fallout), but through most of human history the biggest question has not been “Which Empire is the best?” Or even “Which religion is right?” Its “How do I get enough food to make it to tomorrow?” We are biological beings are our core, and though we often don’t think about agriculture in our day-to-day life, if grocery stores suddenly stopped stocking the essentials, it would very quickly become the most important issue of the day.

 In your own world, whether it’s explicitly on the page or not, you should be able to answer:“ What do they eat?” In a medieval kingdom this might be easy, peasants grow wheat. Good enough! But what if your novel takes places in the icy north? Or in the desert? Or in another dimension? How about a space station? Do they ship food in, or can they grow it on site? If they get cut off from their supply routes due to a war or demonic incursion, is food going to be a problem? If your adventures have been traveling longer than they expected, have they eaten through their supplies? This both grounds the world and gives you plenty of opportunities to find conflict.

In my upcoming sequel to The Sightless City, a large chunk of the narrative takes place deep in the Wastes, in a raider city. What surrounds this raider city? Farmlands, of course! Wasteland re-irrigated, and manned by captured slave labor, because a population of raiders and bandits still needs something to eat.

This question can be extended to other natural resources, of course. I’ve been recently playing the horrendously named Triangle Strategy. This game eschews the normal “teenagers kill god through the power of friendship” JRPG story for one focused on conflicts over… Salt and iron. Though the story is messy at points the more grounded nature of the conflict makes the more fantastical parts of the story feel real.

That being said, don’t worry too much about every detail. No one’s going to dock your novel if you don’t provide the exact locations and yearly output of your world saltpeter mines.

2: Not Just the Material, but the Cultural.

There are many reasons that Ursula Le Guin became one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time, but among them was her deep familiarity with anthropology. What anthropology teaches is that a lot we assume to be human nature or just the obvious ways of seeing things or doing things, is in fact the product of our social, historical, and cultural environments. Societies are massively diverse in their practices, their ways of understanding the world, and their moral/religious systems. Yet it’s so common for science fiction and fantasy books to have characters that act like 21st-century middle-class Americans.

This is something that has been changing as the genre has gotten more diverse, with more cultural backgrounds informing authors’ writing, but I think people still underestimate the changes the material and historical worldbuilding would have on their characters’ cultures and worldviews. Societies create narratives that support their own power structures, a feudal system will have moral and theological systems bent in the service of maintaining social feudal order, while a communist society would have myths that extol its own systems of power.

The political bent of these morals and myths are often invisible to the inhabitants of their world, just as our own stories of “self-made men pulling themselves by their bootstraps” are often not understood as the capitalistic propaganda that they are. Ideologies come from historical context. It can be jarring to see feudal warriors advocate for a liberal understanding of freedom and human rights. There are ways around this, of course. Disco Elysium discusses ideas of communism, liberalism, and fascism, but it grounds those concepts in historical analogs within its own universe.

So when you write characters in these stories, recall that they may be awash in a different cultural background than yourself. If you want to expand your own understanding, read diverse stories (and also check out some anthropological ethnographies while you’re at it!)

3: The Fog of War (and Politics (and Religion))

If there’s one thing people in the real world don’t do, it’s agree.

Religion, disagree. Politics, disagree. Basic obvious medical facts, you bet people disagree! Yet, in many fantasy or science fiction settings, people are too often on the same page, exempting maybe a few servants of the Dark Lord. Of course, this can be reasonable if the story is in a culturally homogenous setting or one dominated by some hegemonic ideology. Or, you know, if the gods are real and talking to people, that might also limit theological diversity.

Even so, I think bringing ideological differences into your story is a great way to both expand the world and bring conflict. Your chosen one is to be the new king/queen. What about those who reject their interpretation of the prophecy, or those who don’t think there should be a king at all? You might have an explanation of how magic works or many competing theories.

Many fictional universes have long sketched out histories, which is awesome! But often these being set in stone in the authors mind can translate to them being set in stone in characters minds. But in the real world, people disagree about history all the time, what happened, why it happened, whose history gets to be told. Not all opinions on this are equally valid, some people can just be wrong, but history is often made by ignorant people.

4: Language

This is the one I’m the worse at, considering I got a D in French in college. But still, I should bring it up. Having your world be linguistically consistent is a great way to make it feel real. A Clockwork Orange works so well as a believable future because of the Russian-inspired Nadsat slang Burgess employed. Tolkien started his massive feat of worldbuilding as a linguistic project. He created the language of elves, and then wrote the mythology around it.

You don’t necessarily have to go too far. Frank Hubert uses existing language and names to allude to the historical and cultural past of his different houses and cultures, and that’s perfectly valid. Just be careful not to go in a problematic direction, and give all your heroes anglicized names and the villains foreign ones.

5: And how do you come up with all this?

Read!

Read. Read. Read. Talk to people. Watch things. Read.

Seriously, learn about history, about different cultures, about mythologies and speculative technologies. There’s so much richness in our own past, our own present, the cultures and creatures that inhabit our world. Even the most speculative fiction is grounded in live and read human experiences. So go out there and experience! The more you take from our world, the richer your own settings and universes will become!

And that’s the end of my tips for today! This was not meant to be exhaustive, nor required—just a list of different things to think about when crafting your own world and stories.

Until next time!

​Noah Lemelson is a short-story writer and novelist based in LA. He writes Science Fiction, Fantasy, Surreal-Horror, "Insert-Adjective-Here"-Punk and all sort of weird nonsense. His debut Dieselpunk Fantasy novel, The Sightless City, was released by Tinyfox Press in 2021.

You can find Noah’s work at Noahlemelson.com or you can follow his Twitter

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