
Worldbuilding - japaget
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/worldbuilding.php
======
pmoriarty
_" When you are trying your hand at worldbuilding, please try to avoid ice
planets, desert planets, swamp planets, farm planets, volcano planets, and
other single-biome planets. The pejorative term for this mistake is
Monocosm..."_

What about arguably the most famous and most successful planet in science
fiction? Dune, a desert planet, was a monocosm.

~~~
Iv
That's a trope, an overused cliché. Dune magnifies it, as can often be done.
But if your universe involves travels between places, it is a waste to make a
planet a single place with no variation. That would be like saying that USA is
just a giant corn field.

I find Starwars stupidly annoying about it, where a planet is usually a single
place and present no variation. Seeing that there are swamps on Dagobah, I
expect there also must be nice sunny beaches somewhere.

~~~
jacobolus
Star Wars (the original film and its two sequels) uses this (and similar
shortcuts in other aspects, like making the storm troopers wear full body
armor to be completely interchangeable, or putting the main characters in a
small insular group with no outside friends or living relatives, or giving the
evil empire an unspeakable super weapon, or giving the Jedi characters
arbitrary convenient magical powers, or making the robot R2D2 able to do
almost anything in the empire’s computer systems) as a way of simplifying and
clarifying the story. The universe of Star Wars is not supposed to be a
realistic one. It’s a mishmash of previous (terrestrial) movie plots, themes,
characters, and scenes lightly painted over with a space setting.

The different planets _are_ single places, with settings chosen to fit the
needs of the storytelling. Think of them as backdrops in a stage play. As far
as the films are concerned anything not on screen might as well not exist, and
the rest of the various planets don’t need to be consistent with a realistic
broader universe. Trying to paint them all in would waste scarce screen time
and confuse the audience.

Arguably this is one feature that made the “Star Wars universe” hopeless to
adapt to try to tell stories with broader context. If you start trying to
flesh out the details, the planets, galactic government, spaceship technology,
concept of the Jedi, etc. all start to fall apart, because they were never
very carefully designed in the first place, but just hacked together to meet
the particular needs of the original story.

------
praptak
Worldbuilding has its own Stackexchange which sometimes has interesting
discussions about difficulties in creating internally consistent fantasy
worlds.
[https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com)

~~~
oelmekki
Wanted to mention that as well. This stack exchange is incredible, it's like
soundcloud for science fiction. I don't contribute myself, but I'm subscribed
to weekly newsletter, I always enjoy it.

------
trynewideas
I don't know what's inspiring all these worldbuilding posts to make the HN
front page, but I'm enjoying the hell out of it.

~~~
danso
What other posts have there been?

~~~
zeptomu
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989538)

There was recently a thread about crafting plausible maps (aka "mapmaking", a
related topic).

~~~
danso
Thanks! These are titles that I imagine didn't catch my eye at the time.

------
pavel_lishin
Greg Egan has recently released another novel, Dichronauts, which features
another universe where the laws of physics are changed due to a sign change.
(The first one is the Clockwork Rocket trilogy.)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30351492-dichronauts?fro...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30351492-dichronauts?from_search=true)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9756310-the-clockwork-
ro...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9756310-the-clockwork-
rocket?from_search=true)

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Greg Egan is the only sci-fi author in my adult life who makes me think "I
like this, but I'm not smart enough to really understand it." Feel free to
take that as a recommendation either for or against. :)

~~~
solotronics
I recently had an existential crisis reading an Egan book where a brain
modification allows people to control the collapse of quantum waveforms and
therefore the protagonist can "smear" into infinite possibilities and then
"collapse" to the one where the desired outcome occurs. Do we already exist
across an infinite number of dimensions and we are just limited by our ability
to comprehend a single possibility? it's a fun thought.

~~~
Chattered
Which book is that? I'd love to read.

So far, _Incandescence_ is the toughest of his novels that I've read, and the
main world is an extreme and beautiful conception where the ambient forces are
all peculiar and the inhabitants are figuring out their cosmology as the novel
goes on.

That said, I really could have used more diagrams while I was reading. I only
found out after finishing that Egan has a whole bunch of Java applets on his
website explaining the experiments that the main characters in the novel carry
out, and why they give the results they do.

~~~
solotronics
Quarantine it's a full novel. I feel like minded and the Egan books hit upon
so many of the things I dream about. This author along with William Gibson and
Neal Stephenson really resonate with a lot of the cutting edge concepts we
deal with. I had no idea Egan was a programmer but it's apparent he is a
genius reading his books so it fits.

------
perryprog
Really cool subreddit for this type of discussion:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/)

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Also a Stack Exchange!
[https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/)

------
AlanSE
Just an FYI, I am one of the supporters of this guy on Patreon:

[https://www.patreon.com/nyrath](https://www.patreon.com/nyrath)

There are a few things I really liked on the site and believed very strongly
were important to continue disseminating. My particular interest was in some
of the rocket designs and space colonization material. The author has done a
good deal of genuine original research and covers some very granular design
details.

------
PhasmaFelis
If you like this, be sure to flip to the bottom of the page for the site's
full table of contents. The (literal) Worldbuilding section is just one small
part of Atomic Rockets, which covers practically every aspect of sci-fi and
the real science (or lack thereof) behind it, in wonderfully well-researched
and illustrated detail.

------
fernly
What a gorgeous site! The Internet is an amazing place; thank you!

