World-building in Space: Filling in Those Parsecs
/Space is very big and very empty… but it doesn’t have to be. What makes space so interesting is how it’s so large and so full of possibility. Our fertile minds have been populating the stars with people and places for as long as we’ve ever thought to turn our heads skyward. But it’s been up to writers like you to make those galaxies a place you want to book your next science expedition to.
Worldbuilding in space fiction is not easy. According to NASA, Alpha Centauri—our closest celestial neighbour—is just over 4 light years away. So, the first thing you need to do when you begin worldbuilding is figuring out how your wagon-train-to-the-stars is going to get there.
The warp core of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Enterprise-D, courtesy of Paramount Domestic Television.
Space fiction has no shortage of forms of locomotion. Star Trek has warp speed. Stargate has ancient rings that create wormholes between one another. Battlestar Galactica has FTL Drives that jump their ships from one point in space to another.
Regardless of how, when creating a world that spans the stars, traversal is key. Otherwise, no one is ever going to cross the void to meet each other. After that, you can build the appropriate level of technology in the rest of your futuristic world to complement it.
Next, with your fancy “space wheels” to get around, you’ll ask: why do you get around? Are we going out there just to chart nebulae and play ping-pong with comets?
Not quite. To make this universe compelling, you need to recall a natural—ironically—human instinct: socialization. This is when you need to start populating worlds with all those quirky—sometimes gross, sometimes-oddly-attractive—aliens.
There are plenty of takes on aliens and you want to tailor them to the sub-genre of space fiction you want to write. Are you looking to write an uplifting vision of the future? Are you looking to write how the horror space can never be truly comprehended? You need to carefully consider how your aliens reflect this.
Executor Pallin, a member of Turian Law enforcement in Mass Effect, courtesy of Bioware.
Mass Effect does a great job of this by introducing us to a whole galactic community, with the central idea of the game being to pull a diverse set of races together to combat an existential threat. Most space fiction tends to develop their aliens by fixating on a particular characteristic and building their culture around that, and Mass Effect is no exception.
The Turians are a civilization built on the concept of “public service first,” resulting in a heavy military focus. Meanwhile, the Asari are a race blessed with the strongest biotic powers and have a strong spiritual side launching off that. These focal points help define the races more clearly and help us relate them to humanity in some way. They also help us develop their home worlds, social systems, cuisines, and religions.
At the same time, there’s something to be said for the terrifying and unknowable alien. The Xenomorphs in Alien work into their sci-fi-horror genre because we don’t even know what they look like or what they’re capable of for most of the film. In this genre, less is sometimes better.
Of course, for your galaxy-spanning world to live and breathe, you need to tie all of these things together. Connection is key. All the parts of this massive, galaxy-spanning world must influence each other in some way to be compelling.
Think about these examples:
A battle between two Starfleet Vessels and a Klingon Bird-of-Prey from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
How do the Klingons interact with the Federation in Star Trek? Largely through war, given the Klingons’ volatile nature and the Federation’s steadfastness.
How do scientific organizations interact with a newly discovered planet? They feel the need to push too far on a strange world that someone put up a “do not walk on the deadly space grass” sign that no one could understand.
Will someone look at the green-skinned-space-babe and say in Captain Kirk’s stilted voice, “I’d tap that,” to breach the question of how interspecies mingling works.
Well… maybe not that last one necessarily.
If you connect these distant worlds and fill them with interesting people and places that interact in intriguing, funny, or dramatic ways, you’ll want to be boldly going there. And once you want to go there, your audience will want to follow you there too.
Shawn Brixi — I’m an avid fan and writer of science fiction and fantasy. From the Alien to Star Trek, I’ve always been a fan of any media taking place in space and of the science of space and stellar exploration as a whole! I even built a model of the Hubble Telescope back in Grade 8 (before some goof broke it).
It’s my hope to eventually write a great book; whether it takes place in the cosmic void or another world entirely is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, I hope to entertain you all here on this blog!
