Worldbuilding Handbook

Earnest Worlds

'The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.' - Aristotle

In a vague sense, Harry Potter is a verbose form of The Hobbit, only, seen through a more optimistic lens, and placed firmly within the present world, rather than the distant past. They talk of the same truths, they both are Aristotelian. And these points are key.

We can talk about Star Wars, indeed. The genius of Star Wars, to my mind, is that it is placed firmly within both the future and the past. It is both science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, it has both scientific and historical elements creating the entire piece. George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, has stated many times that Star Wars is more fantasy than science, and in his words, it is a 'space opera'. I have come to realise the true genius of Star Wars was placing the audience firmly in a historical space, as it were (and I mean space quite literally).

We know he spent around two years studying world mythos and history, for his universal story and quite minimalist space opera. I would posit this is one of the reasons why it is the single most successful science fiction franchise in history, in either film or otherwise.

However, if we put a pin in this because we will return to it later, regarding the religious side of things. For example, Lucas notes that The Force is, in fact, not supernatural or divine, but natural. It is merely part of the world and thus is within the domain of science and nature, rather than religion, supernaturalism, and divinity. Of course, the Jedi Order itself is religious, but to my knowledge, none of the elements within the galaxy are divine in nature.

This, too, was genius, to my mind. By definition, creating it the way he did, pulled in all humans, not just the Eastern or Western, atheistic or theistic. Almost every culture on Earth is capable of enjoying and relating to the Star Wars secondary world.

Back to what we may call world-structure. Now, I would say once you know the type of -topia, the genre, and sub-genre, you also know your audience, but in truth, this is split into two lines of thought.

First, independent of what you are writing, you ought to try to write it as earnestly as possible, for if you do this, it is likely to become quite universal and reach people far outside of the initial audience.

Secondly, the audience should not be at the forefront of your mind whatsoever, instead, it should be at the back of your mind. You must write for yourself and the creation itself, long before you write for others. Indeed, you should never be writing for others in any primary or secondary sense. Writing for others is closer to a result or side effect of writing a worldbuilding-novel. The audience should be in the back of your mind, always, when writing science fiction and fantasy novels. I will return to this point later.

Here I may note that by 'worldbuilding-novel' I mean to exclude all the other forms of novels which are distinctly different from what we are talking about here, and some of which are written with the audience in mind. Then, there is non-fiction in general, of course, which is completely written with the audience in mind. But, here, we are just talking about the worldbuilding-novel or the creative-novel (this is most likely a superior term).

Worldbuilding-novels exclude the like of social commentary and many satirical novels, such as Animal Farm, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, Flatland, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Because they are, indeed, written for an audience. Of course, worldbuilding is required for these novels, as well, but they simply do not fall under the same structure we are talking about.