Me too. It unlocks the imagination so much more to branch out like that in science fiction. It would be fascinating to have a story with a planet where an intelligent humanoid species coexisted with an intelligent balloon creature species.
Great insights on the need for more diversity in regard to planetary worldbuilding! I'll keep your remarks in mind when I try to take on the massive challenge of creating a whole planet from scratch *gulp*. Just curious--do you read history or sociology books or articles when doing research for your worldbuilding?
I dive into all sorts of books to inform my worldbuilding. History, science, archeology, mythology, religion. You name it. It really makes a difference in creating unique lived-in worlds.
For example, I read a NASA theory that proposed that photosynthesis may look different on other planets depending on the type of star they orbited. Planets orbiting a red dwarf star might have black vegetation instead of green vegetation because less direct sunlight strikes the planet than with a yellow dwarf star like the Sun. That led to me making Lathos a planet with mostly red plant life instead of green plant life since it orbits an orange dwarf star. When aliens from Lathos visit Earth, it feels alien to them precisely because the plant life is more green than red.
That's amazing attention to detail! I like how you ground your explanation in actual scientific rationale. Definitely something I need to work on in my own sci-fi stories 😅.
The first book in C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, "Out of the Silent Planet", defied the trope a bit, I think: you had three primary races with different languages, varied climate, the whole shebang.
That's one of the things I like about his space trilogy. C.S. Lewis is so good at world building. (The Chronicles of Narnia still remains one of my favorite series.)
This is a really brilliant line of thought, rarely exercised in sci-fi. The idea of two worlds half a galaxy apart, going to war with one another, but time passes by much quicker for one than the other, resulting in the possibility of one world forgetting they were even at war, while the other is thoroughly aware.
Not even to mention how an invasion might play out, wherein soldiers undergo a sense of 'jet-lag' on a much larger temporal scale. Like being shipped off to fight a war, and returning only to discover everyone you loved has been dead for hundreds of years, and meeting your great-great-great-grandchildren.
I came up with 'standard time' for my books. Basically, planets have their own time zones but everyone in space around it runs on one designated time zone. Makes life easier when you don't need to add time zone to orbital mechanics calculations.
Same! Im made a rule in where the space communities only were allowed to travel to the standard space time planets, which is based on Earth’s own time as its a means of safety for the communities. The only exceptions are a few races are allowed to go around this rule.
A peace keeping organization that has been around the space community for a long time. They set these rules because of abuse from past space farers who would take advantage of resources and the local populaces of certain planets (along with dangers of space travel etc etc). Though they don’t police the space community with an iron fist, they work with the central space government to make sure that everyone follows these rules not as a means to bar folks, but as safety guard rails. They have also blocked several planets and put them on no travel zones because of how dangerous they were to travelers in terms of time.
"One isn't the loneliest number on alien planets in popular science fiction. It's the only number." Love this line! Rings true for many worlds I see or read about in science fiction. Are they doing it because they are lazy, I don't know. I can only speak for myself. Sometimes I embrace the number 1 and sometimes I kick it to the curb. All depends on multiple factors. What topics do I enjoy worldbuilding? Which topics do I hate? What's the timeline for my project? What's the scale of the setting? Is it multiple planets or 1 planet? Is it soft or hard science fiction? Am I just lazy?
Aliens living in their caves on Mars are right now making films about the fact that the entire earth speaks American English, is arid and mostly dry, and there are in fact no cities or large towns at all upon earth. That is because aliens only appear to visit the back end of the western half of the United States.
Most people live in a "one" world of their own culture and ideals. We are still seeing the result of this in the attempts to force religions and ideologies upon one another peoples. We see this in the constant demonization of other cultures which we are told to perceive as a threat, despite them showing no actual threat (Hello China, previously it was Iraq/Syria.) People travel, but they do not view these new places as real places, nor their inhabitants as real people. They are "exotic" toys for tourist's amusement.
It is to me understandable that writers craft "one" worlds, in sci-fi or any other genre, because that is how we are programmed from birth.
I totally understand why many writers take that approach. But I think that's also why I argue against going the oneness route. Sci-fi should push beyond the comfortable and familiar "alien planet as Earth allegory" and give us something truly unique and thought provoking. The best sci-fi does exactly that.
I completely agree, and good writers would of course push out beyond their comfort zones in this regard. It could perhaps be argued that said good writers are less likely to in their real lives fall into the trap of "one", (better branded perhaps tribalism) and would in their life see genuine diversity as it actually is, rather than as it is today, a word thrown around to score social brownie points within their chosen tribe. Writing is a reflection of society, and when you find a problem in writing, you are likely seeing a reflection of a deeper problem in society. No matter the depth of imagination, no writer truly transcends his own reality.
In general, John, I agree there's no reason alien planets won't have all the diversity we find on Earth. And it's true that when we see no diversity, often we're staring at world-building shortcuts and plot service. I think there's a logical carve-out, though, and that's theme service.
Sci-fi is frequently allegorical. (Looking over the comments here, I can see that's already been brought up a lot.) The difficulty in working with allegory is achieving focus and clarity. "What's this supposed to be allegorical for, and how?" the reader will ask, and our story needs to give clear answers or the allegory will fall flat. The more diversity (and kinds of diversity) we have in our world-building, the more we have to go on inventive, imaginative tangents away from the nub of the story, and as a result, the less clear our answers about allegory tend to be. To get an allegory to work, we have to simplify, strip away what's irrelevant to it.
We can take it too far, of course, and then our story lacks imagination, or it feels claustrophobic or unrealistic. All the same, I'd rather read a story that gets imaginative about just one thing and manages in the end to say something really meaningful about its theme than a story with oodles of imagination where the author appears to have "followed his nose" and gotten nowhere. If the "one world" cliche is a problem, the contrary problem is sci-fi where "it's all world-building, all flights of fancy, and little or no pay-off." Honestly, I put down stories more often over seeing the latter problem play out than the former, because in the hodge-podge I lose faith that the author has any real idea where he's going.
I think, then, the productive question about diversity to be asking ourselves is, "Given what this story is really about, what's the function of diversity in it? How can I create diversity and put it in service of – rather than obscure – the theme?"
I don't find Star Trek and Star Wars as monolithic as all that. ST: TOS and TNG were guilty of the "one world" cliche, but they were episodic TV (all of TOS, TNG in its early seasons) piggybacking on allegorical sci-fi. How much can you squeeze into an hour-long TV show and still make your point? Not everything and the kitchen sink! In both Star Trek and Star Wars, there is diversity – it's just been expanded to galactic scale. The premise of ST: DS9 is to show us the Federation's "melting pot," to move Star Trek away from episodic storytelling and examine the challenges of diversity. I don't think Tatooine suffers from the cliche at all. Is there, out there somewhere, an all-desert world baked by twin suns where life hangs by the thread of a single precious resource? It sounds probable to me, and it's interesting to wonder how life hacks it there. Tatooine has more diversity in advanced intelligent life than Earth: humans, Hutts, Jawas, and Tusken Raiders. It's not the only planet in Star Wars like that.
I've often thought the same. Even the legendary Dune series is guilty of this. I think it is largely because many sci-fi writers use "other worlds" as an allegorical means to reference real-life nations, or geographical regions found on Earth. That and the fact that most planets we mere humans of the 21st century are familiar with, often lack the sort of biological and geological diversity required to host what we consider life.
However, the racial 'oneness sin' in sci-fi doesn't bother me nearly as much, so long as there is provided a much needed backstory as to the dominant species of the planet in question. One great example of this was Olaf Stapleton's Last and First Men, wherein Martians (from Mars, obviously) were actually gaseous clouds that made up some sort of collective and sentient organism that communicated exclusively specific frequencies of radiation. Whom by extension, did not consider carbon-based life as sentient, because of their inherent inability to communicate outside of radiation (when they invade Earth, they mistake radio towers as the dominant species, and humans as little more than cattle). He provided a deep explanation of the species' evolutionary backstory, as well as the social implications of how that evolutionary history effected their ability to perceive, and be perceived (humans in the story initially thought the Martians were some kind of weather anomaly).
As for the geographical 'oneness sin', again for me it depends. I love Dune, but obviously there's a bit of the aforementioned allegory to real-life based countries at play there. However another great example of the 'oneness' done right, are the Krogan from the Mass Effect series. Their planet was a desert wasteland, but only because of the centuries of persistent nuclear war that eventually rendered their home-world nearly inhabitable.
Nonetheless, I really appreciate your insight because it harkens a sense of wariness for authors like myself to not filled our worlds with proverbial silhouettes of what could be so much more.
You make some good points. I think the examples you cited from Last and First Men and Mass Effect work well as exceptions to the oneness trope because they take great pains to weave reasons for the lack of biodiversity or geographical into the story that make sense within the story's logic. I'm only troubled with stories where the author gave little effort to world-building beyond thinking, 'Let's make a desert planet like Tatooine. That would be cool.' Or made a planet where every alien there has the same culture, same history, same government, same beliefs, etc, without a plausible reason for it within the story itself.
Agreed. Tatooine feels more like a dingy bar in a bad part of town, than it does an actual planet. Although I do love me a good slum planet. A world defined and illustrated by its inherent anarchistic untidiness.
Remember the balloon-like creatures Sagan hypothesized could live on Jupiter? I love stuff like that!
Me too. It unlocks the imagination so much more to branch out like that in science fiction. It would be fascinating to have a story with a planet where an intelligent humanoid species coexisted with an intelligent balloon creature species.
Haha.... we have some balloons here, but I'd argue they're not all that intelligent.
That's because they're in Washington DC. That place is full of hot air and empty heads.
Great insights on the need for more diversity in regard to planetary worldbuilding! I'll keep your remarks in mind when I try to take on the massive challenge of creating a whole planet from scratch *gulp*. Just curious--do you read history or sociology books or articles when doing research for your worldbuilding?
Thank you. 😊
I dive into all sorts of books to inform my worldbuilding. History, science, archeology, mythology, religion. You name it. It really makes a difference in creating unique lived-in worlds.
For example, I read a NASA theory that proposed that photosynthesis may look different on other planets depending on the type of star they orbited. Planets orbiting a red dwarf star might have black vegetation instead of green vegetation because less direct sunlight strikes the planet than with a yellow dwarf star like the Sun. That led to me making Lathos a planet with mostly red plant life instead of green plant life since it orbits an orange dwarf star. When aliens from Lathos visit Earth, it feels alien to them precisely because the plant life is more green than red.
That's amazing attention to detail! I like how you ground your explanation in actual scientific rationale. Definitely something I need to work on in my own sci-fi stories 😅.
The first book in C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, "Out of the Silent Planet", defied the trope a bit, I think: you had three primary races with different languages, varied climate, the whole shebang.
That's one of the things I like about his space trilogy. C.S. Lewis is so good at world building. (The Chronicles of Narnia still remains one of my favorite series.)
Oh, yeah, those are the absolute best.
Yes! Not only do we have that one type of planet...people also don’t add in the time differences between planets. Not every planet runs on Earth time.
Totally agree. Time would be measured on another planet according to its own rotation and revolution cycles.
This is a really brilliant line of thought, rarely exercised in sci-fi. The idea of two worlds half a galaxy apart, going to war with one another, but time passes by much quicker for one than the other, resulting in the possibility of one world forgetting they were even at war, while the other is thoroughly aware.
Not even to mention how an invasion might play out, wherein soldiers undergo a sense of 'jet-lag' on a much larger temporal scale. Like being shipped off to fight a war, and returning only to discover everyone you loved has been dead for hundreds of years, and meeting your great-great-great-grandchildren.
I came up with 'standard time' for my books. Basically, planets have their own time zones but everyone in space around it runs on one designated time zone. Makes life easier when you don't need to add time zone to orbital mechanics calculations.
Same! Im made a rule in where the space communities only were allowed to travel to the standard space time planets, which is based on Earth’s own time as its a means of safety for the communities. The only exceptions are a few races are allowed to go around this rule.
Who's governing that rule though?
A peace keeping organization that has been around the space community for a long time. They set these rules because of abuse from past space farers who would take advantage of resources and the local populaces of certain planets (along with dangers of space travel etc etc). Though they don’t police the space community with an iron fist, they work with the central space government to make sure that everyone follows these rules not as a means to bar folks, but as safety guard rails. They have also blocked several planets and put them on no travel zones because of how dangerous they were to travelers in terms of time.
"One isn't the loneliest number on alien planets in popular science fiction. It's the only number." Love this line! Rings true for many worlds I see or read about in science fiction. Are they doing it because they are lazy, I don't know. I can only speak for myself. Sometimes I embrace the number 1 and sometimes I kick it to the curb. All depends on multiple factors. What topics do I enjoy worldbuilding? Which topics do I hate? What's the timeline for my project? What's the scale of the setting? Is it multiple planets or 1 planet? Is it soft or hard science fiction? Am I just lazy?
Aliens living in their caves on Mars are right now making films about the fact that the entire earth speaks American English, is arid and mostly dry, and there are in fact no cities or large towns at all upon earth. That is because aliens only appear to visit the back end of the western half of the United States.
Most people live in a "one" world of their own culture and ideals. We are still seeing the result of this in the attempts to force religions and ideologies upon one another peoples. We see this in the constant demonization of other cultures which we are told to perceive as a threat, despite them showing no actual threat (Hello China, previously it was Iraq/Syria.) People travel, but they do not view these new places as real places, nor their inhabitants as real people. They are "exotic" toys for tourist's amusement.
It is to me understandable that writers craft "one" worlds, in sci-fi or any other genre, because that is how we are programmed from birth.
I totally understand why many writers take that approach. But I think that's also why I argue against going the oneness route. Sci-fi should push beyond the comfortable and familiar "alien planet as Earth allegory" and give us something truly unique and thought provoking. The best sci-fi does exactly that.
I completely agree, and good writers would of course push out beyond their comfort zones in this regard. It could perhaps be argued that said good writers are less likely to in their real lives fall into the trap of "one", (better branded perhaps tribalism) and would in their life see genuine diversity as it actually is, rather than as it is today, a word thrown around to score social brownie points within their chosen tribe. Writing is a reflection of society, and when you find a problem in writing, you are likely seeing a reflection of a deeper problem in society. No matter the depth of imagination, no writer truly transcends his own reality.
In general, John, I agree there's no reason alien planets won't have all the diversity we find on Earth. And it's true that when we see no diversity, often we're staring at world-building shortcuts and plot service. I think there's a logical carve-out, though, and that's theme service.
Sci-fi is frequently allegorical. (Looking over the comments here, I can see that's already been brought up a lot.) The difficulty in working with allegory is achieving focus and clarity. "What's this supposed to be allegorical for, and how?" the reader will ask, and our story needs to give clear answers or the allegory will fall flat. The more diversity (and kinds of diversity) we have in our world-building, the more we have to go on inventive, imaginative tangents away from the nub of the story, and as a result, the less clear our answers about allegory tend to be. To get an allegory to work, we have to simplify, strip away what's irrelevant to it.
We can take it too far, of course, and then our story lacks imagination, or it feels claustrophobic or unrealistic. All the same, I'd rather read a story that gets imaginative about just one thing and manages in the end to say something really meaningful about its theme than a story with oodles of imagination where the author appears to have "followed his nose" and gotten nowhere. If the "one world" cliche is a problem, the contrary problem is sci-fi where "it's all world-building, all flights of fancy, and little or no pay-off." Honestly, I put down stories more often over seeing the latter problem play out than the former, because in the hodge-podge I lose faith that the author has any real idea where he's going.
I think, then, the productive question about diversity to be asking ourselves is, "Given what this story is really about, what's the function of diversity in it? How can I create diversity and put it in service of – rather than obscure – the theme?"
I don't find Star Trek and Star Wars as monolithic as all that. ST: TOS and TNG were guilty of the "one world" cliche, but they were episodic TV (all of TOS, TNG in its early seasons) piggybacking on allegorical sci-fi. How much can you squeeze into an hour-long TV show and still make your point? Not everything and the kitchen sink! In both Star Trek and Star Wars, there is diversity – it's just been expanded to galactic scale. The premise of ST: DS9 is to show us the Federation's "melting pot," to move Star Trek away from episodic storytelling and examine the challenges of diversity. I don't think Tatooine suffers from the cliche at all. Is there, out there somewhere, an all-desert world baked by twin suns where life hangs by the thread of a single precious resource? It sounds probable to me, and it's interesting to wonder how life hacks it there. Tatooine has more diversity in advanced intelligent life than Earth: humans, Hutts, Jawas, and Tusken Raiders. It's not the only planet in Star Wars like that.
I've often thought the same. Even the legendary Dune series is guilty of this. I think it is largely because many sci-fi writers use "other worlds" as an allegorical means to reference real-life nations, or geographical regions found on Earth. That and the fact that most planets we mere humans of the 21st century are familiar with, often lack the sort of biological and geological diversity required to host what we consider life.
However, the racial 'oneness sin' in sci-fi doesn't bother me nearly as much, so long as there is provided a much needed backstory as to the dominant species of the planet in question. One great example of this was Olaf Stapleton's Last and First Men, wherein Martians (from Mars, obviously) were actually gaseous clouds that made up some sort of collective and sentient organism that communicated exclusively specific frequencies of radiation. Whom by extension, did not consider carbon-based life as sentient, because of their inherent inability to communicate outside of radiation (when they invade Earth, they mistake radio towers as the dominant species, and humans as little more than cattle). He provided a deep explanation of the species' evolutionary backstory, as well as the social implications of how that evolutionary history effected their ability to perceive, and be perceived (humans in the story initially thought the Martians were some kind of weather anomaly).
As for the geographical 'oneness sin', again for me it depends. I love Dune, but obviously there's a bit of the aforementioned allegory to real-life based countries at play there. However another great example of the 'oneness' done right, are the Krogan from the Mass Effect series. Their planet was a desert wasteland, but only because of the centuries of persistent nuclear war that eventually rendered their home-world nearly inhabitable.
Nonetheless, I really appreciate your insight because it harkens a sense of wariness for authors like myself to not filled our worlds with proverbial silhouettes of what could be so much more.
You make some good points. I think the examples you cited from Last and First Men and Mass Effect work well as exceptions to the oneness trope because they take great pains to weave reasons for the lack of biodiversity or geographical into the story that make sense within the story's logic. I'm only troubled with stories where the author gave little effort to world-building beyond thinking, 'Let's make a desert planet like Tatooine. That would be cool.' Or made a planet where every alien there has the same culture, same history, same government, same beliefs, etc, without a plausible reason for it within the story itself.
Agreed. Tatooine feels more like a dingy bar in a bad part of town, than it does an actual planet. Although I do love me a good slum planet. A world defined and illustrated by its inherent anarchistic untidiness.