Almost every story I write, in any genre, is alternative world, meaning it is set somewhere other than the world we know. This is true even of most of my science fiction, which as a genre more often embraces Earth heritage than fantasy. Historical fantasy is a subgenre, but far less common than science fiction that somehow involves Earth, spins off from the present Earth, or otherwise grounds itself in the “real world.” However, I tend to seek ways to avoid this terrestrial connection. Why? It’s complicated.
No, really: that’s the reason. Writing a story associated with the real world is complicated, and it becomes more complicated the more closely associated with the present real world it is. It might seem strange to say that writing a story grounded in the real world is more complicated than writing a story in which you must invent the world as well as the story and the characters, but the trick about alternative world storytelling is that you get to make it up. There’s no baggage except what you develop, no plausibility or historical accuracy to worry about, no concern about whether the story will age well or not, like some of the classic science fiction from the mid-twentieth century and its assumptions about what the future would be. Not so with a real-world setting.
Most of the stories I want to tell are naturally set in alternative worlds, where things like magic or alternative physics exist, or different geography, history, or entirely alien species. For all many of my settings, especially for stories like Impressions or Golems and Kings, are historically inspired, they are nonetheless other, unbound by any need to be true to our real history and our real-world considerations. Occasionally, though, I have a story idea that is based in the real world, or something so close to it as to be indistinguishable, and then I’m left with a conundrum.
In those instances, I see two choices: I can write the story and set it in the real world, with all the associated complexity and difficulty, or I can go to the effort of creating an alternative world that is both close enough to ours to work for the story, but sufficiently distinct to not be too obviously a rip-off of our world. For some of my short stories, like Ship in a Bottle, I set it explicitly in the real world. This is easier to do in a small story like that one. For other stories, it gets more challenging.
Based on the March Elegant Literature prompt, I wrote a story that’s been rattling vaguely around in my head for a little while (I say based on, not for, because the first draft was quite rough and about twice the acceptable word count). In my head, the story is set in a version of the real world, more or less contemporaneous with ours, in which a great war takes place and there is now a rebellion against an occupying force. It might seem straightforward enough to set this story in the real world, since the war is a perfect excuse to not worry about real towns, street names, and other such details, but I didn’t want readers to be distracted by the use of real countries and peoples.
In that case, I chose to split the difference in a compromise that may or may not work (at the time of this writing, I’m waiting to hear from my writing group what they think of the approach). Essentially, I set the story in the real world like I imagined it being set, but in the writing, I avoided mentioning any specific place names, countries, nations, or peoples, and arranged the descriptions to give few hints to those effects. This goes against the use of specificity, which we discussed in a recent post, but it seemed an acceptable solution for this particular story, especially since it’s not long, and the focus has little to do with those omitted elements.
Rogue Planet, though…that technique won’t suffice for Rogue Planet. When I first did the rough outline for the story, I thought it could. It’s set far enough in the future, and little enough of the focus is on Earth, that I thought I could largely get away without considering world politics, crewmember origins, how events conspired to produce the present which the book depicts, et cetera. Going back and creating detailed fact sheets for all of the crewmembers, though, I realized I was wrong. I couldn’t ignore such factors completely, or my crew would be terribly bland, and my plot would be ungrounded. As I’ve been tumbling the story around in the story idea melanger at the back of my head while I’ve been working on Golems and Kings, I’ve realized I need to commit to the real-world setting, or to developing a whole alternative world.
I will almost certainly choose the real-world option for the story. It works better for the story I’m trying to tell with Rogue Planet, and keeps the focus where it should be. There’s already plenty to juggle with the enormous main cast of characters without adding the additional need to adequately communicate interesting worldbuilding which would ultimately prove to be more of a distraction to the story than an asset. My solution is to take a page out of those classic science fiction novels, and simply try not to overthink my extrapolations into the future. After all, I’m writing a science fiction book, not a book of prophecies. Avoiding brand names and contemporary slang to the greatest extent possible helps reduce the temporal dissonance, too.
Since it’s set an indeterminate but not insignificant number of years in the future, I suppose there’s an argument to be made that Rogue Planet isn’t exactly set in the “real world.” The world changes quickly, and writing about the future has less of a requirement for facts and research than writing about the past. However, it still must be grounded in a believable way, and it will necessarily come with baggage. Nobody has preconceived notions about how some alternative world will evolve over a few millennia, but every single reader will bring into the story ideas about what they think the future will be like, and that’s an additional element of the story experience I will have to manage. As I said, this kind of writing is complicated. Sometimes, though, it’s worth handling that complexity to tell a particular story.
IGC Publishing 