'There’s no need to invent new types of landscape, culture or biology, let alone rewriting history or the laws of physics.'

Those who create new science fiction worlds are paying homage to God, says Philip Purser-Hallard

One of the most fascinating and time-consuming aspects of writing science fiction and fantasy – which, just this once, I’m going to refer to jointly as ‘speculative fiction’ (SF) – is the need to create universes.

This isn’t, on the whole, something that the writers of detective stories or chick-lit have to contend with.

In mainstream fiction it’s assumed that the world in which the characters live and move and have their being is a reasonable facsimile of the one we’re all supposedly familiar with.

There’s no need to invent new types of landscape, culture or biology, let alone rewriting history or the laws of physics.

Occasionally a mainstream writer might imagine a new country, but even these tend to be based on real-world settings. Anthony Hope’s Ruritania is a generic Middle-European state with the serial numbers filed off, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex South-West England with the names changed to protect the innocent.

Similarly, Vladimir Nabokov’s Zembla is clearly a microcosm of his native Russia (and, anyway, may only exist in the mind of Pale Fire’s deranged narrator).

However his Antiterra, an Earth where twentieth-century North America is a patchwork of English and Russian colonies, marks Ada or Ardor out as unmistakeably a work of speculative fiction –albeit an unusually highbrow one, with lots of artistically justified incest.

Worlds of difference

When creating worlds, planning is vital, as is consistency. In worldbuilding terms, making stuff up as you go along is the sure sign of a cowboy.

However outlandish or counterintuitive the rules of a fictional universe, they must remain constant. An SF reader is exploring a new and unfamiliar environment. The reader needs to trust that information learned remains reliable, and that the new ground they’re negotiating stays solid (unless it’s a gas giant or a waterworld, of course) beneath their feet.

The alien planets and future Earths of science fiction, the roads-not-taken of alternative history, even the wonderlands and hinterlands of fantasy, must be strange yet plausible.

They must retain some recognisable elements to tie them to reality. Indeed, most such worlds are intended to be accessible from our own – whether by spaceship, through a magic door, or by simply waiting for hundreds of years.

If any deviation from recognisable reality is enough to make you reject a story as ‘far-fetched’, then it’s safe to say that SF isn’t the genre for you.

But all readers are (for the moment) only human, and we all have imaginative thresholds. Characters who behave entirely unlike people can be a particular sticking-point, which is one reason why so many works of utopian fiction are frankly unreadable.

This and other worlds

CS Lewis believed that ‘To construct plausible and moving other worlds, you must draw on the only real “other world” we know, that of the spirit.’

His own fictional universes – the thoughtful planetscapes of his Cosmic Trilogy as much as the allusive, chivalric world of Narnia – demonstrate the remarkable power of SF to move and even modify the human soul.

Lewis’ friend JRR Tolkien believed that human beings build worlds because we are made in the image of our creator.

Part of God’s own act of creation was to give humanity the will and power to be ‘sub-creators’, whose ‘Secondary Worlds’ might prove as strange and as enduring as Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

Naturally no human creation can rival that of God: the most brilliant of human geniuses can never truly comprehend the full complexity of another person, let alone a universe full of them.

Nonetheless, in imitating God’s infinitely greater act of creation, the makers of SF stories are involved in a meticulous act of worship, of homage and of love.

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