“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” –Carl Sagan
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (otherwise known as the late 1970s) a documentary series aired called Connections, narrated by James Burke. It was about a bit of everything, but mostly about how the inventions and materials that shape our lives have unexpected and often vast interdependencies. What does this have to do creating ecologies for second-world fantasies?
I’ll get to that.
Now James Burke’s documentary series may not have always been factually correct and certainly had an extremely Eurocentric point of view, but the series was mind-blowing to me as a child. The major lesson I pulled from that show was not ‘fact,’ but process: the idea that the consequences of a decision, invention, or material all ripple, multiplying far beyond the initial triggering event. If you’re obsessed with creating worlds, as I was and still am, that has some serious ramifications. Because, not to put too fine a line on it, matter matters. What the everyday objects in a story are made from reflects the world it is set in.
To flip that quote from the late, great Carl Sagan: if apples don’t exist in your universe, you can’t have apple pie.
Anytime a writer sits down to write a story, they’re faced with decisions about worldbuilding. And if they’re writing SFF, that question often starts with: how much like Earth is it? And if it is like Earth, which parts and when? The ecology of the Pliocene era would be vastly different from what’s available now in the deserts of New Mexico, but that was indeed a question Julian May grappled with in her Pliocene Exile books. Or perhaps, like Kameron Hurley’s Worldbreaker Saga, the ecology might be so different from Earth’s that there’s no chance of confusing the two.
So why does ecology matter? Does it matter?
Like most worldbuilding, the answer is: it matters as much as you want it to.
Certainly, there’s no requirement to create a unique ecology for a story. Plenty of writers skip that part of worldbuilding and jump to what ‘feels’ right. But there is a potential landmine to that: because what feels right is often deeply cultural and subject to forces that you may not even realize are shaping your preconceived biases. The number of TV shows and video games set in medieval Europe or Asia which feature potatoes, tomatoes, or corn because they’ve become so ubiquitous that we rarely remember these crops simply weren’t to be found on those continents prior to the invasion of the Americas is hilariously plentiful. Likewise, coconuts wouldn’t be ‘exotic’ if your story takes place in a Polynesian-centered setting, would they?
A second-world fantasy isn’t limited to these real-world constraints, but even with worlds where tomatoes evolved in Westeros, the processing of materials requires consideration. We give little thought these days to the climate and technological requirements of processing wheat, how sugar was considered a spice in Europe for most of the middle ages, or how often pie crusts weren’t meant to be eaten at all.
But wait. Why am I talking about materials and products when I’m supposed to be talking about ecologies? Why am I talking about apple pies when we really should be talking about apple trees?
I suppose the obvious answer is: because you can’t have one without the other. The ecology of your world supports the economy of your world. It all starts with the wilderness, the plants that grow, the creatures that survive on them, etc. From a writing perspective, therefore, the things you probably will mention—the animals your heroes ride, the clothing they wear, the food they eat—hinge off the things you probably won’t, such as what are the staple crops and how sophisticated are the trade systems. What kind of fruit does the local ecology support? How difficult are the crops to grow? Who makes what and how well?
This may all sound incredibly dull, but trust me, from a writing perspective this is pure opportunity, best not squandered. Wars have been fought over the fact that country A has resources (better soil, better water, salt mines, those pretty flowers) that country B wants to possess. (I refer to this as the “I like, I’ll take it” rule of invasion—always popular in Europe, especially in their dealings with anyone who wasn’t in Europe.) Strip all the magic and morality from Tolkien and I still have no trouble believing Sauron wanted to invade Gondor. I mean seriously, would you want to live in Mordor if you had the option of invading the green and pleasant land next door?
When I originally sat down to create the world of Ompher (where my A Chorus of Dragons books are set) the first thing I did was work up a map, the currents, and the climate. The second thing I did was figure out what the ecologies looked like, which drove the economics, and that in turn set up who’d invaded each other, who hated each other, and perhaps most importantly: what was for dinner? Could my hero have apple pie? (Sort of. He can have apples, as it turns out—an expensive import from parts of the empire with the colder climate to support them—but nobody’s thought to use them in a way we’d describe as ‘pie.’)
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So, it’s worth it to take a moment to ask yourself some questions about your world. What do the staple crops look like? Where do they grow? What is the wilderness like and what are its herd animals and its apex predators? It’s perfectly acceptable to have T-Rexes running through your forests, but they need to have a food source large enough to keep the engines firing. And that food source needs to be able to survive too. Also, while apex predators don’t always compete with each other, they often do. We don’t have hyenas in Europe because we do have wolves, and so hyenas never had a chance to adapt to the different climate.
Whatever you do, make sure you think through the ramifications of your changes. If you have no horses in your world, and people ride three-legged lizard creatures, what about all of the other equine beings that aren’t, strictly, horses? Do zebras still exist? How about donkeys? WHY did the people domesticate three-legged lizard creatures, when water buffalo were probably right there? (Assuming that is in fact the case.)
Consider the domino fall of each decision you make. If you don’t have horses, or something very close to being a horse in its speed and carrying capacity, then it’s less likely the stirrup is created in Asia, eventually to make its way to Europe. And, depending on whose theories you’re listening to (it’s controversial), that means you don’t have the medieval knight. Oh yes, and you don’t have Genghis Khan, who encouraged a spread of technology which absolutely and unarguably changed the world. It also means nobody reopens the trade routes between Europe and Asia. And that means you probably don’t end up with a teensy pandemic better known as the Black Death, which (besides wiping out a hefty section of Europe) also helped usher out feudalism and usher in the Renaissance.
All that because you got rid of horses. Whew.
But that brings me to my last point about second world fantasy world ecologies, which is this: it’s not Earth (because otherwise it wouldn’t be second-world, now would it?). You don’t need to worry about when potatoes made their debut outside the Americas. If you want chocolate and roses growing in the same climate, no one can stop you. There is no such thing as ‘anachronistic’ or ‘inaccurate’ when you are creating the whole universe and all its history. The only thing you should worry about is how your changes internally link to each other, and the consequences of those changes. And once you’ve done that?
Well I suppose you might want to get around to writing the book. At the very least, enjoy your apple pie.
Jenn Lyons lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, three cats, and a nearly infinite number of opinions on anything from mythology to the correct way to make a martini. The first three novels in her epic fantasy Chorus of Dragons series—The Ruin of Kings, The Name of All Things, and The Memory of Souls—are available from Tor Books.
Excellent essay, thank you. Along these lines and also excellent is Bret Devereaux’s “A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry” blog, which you can easily get absorbed in for hours at a time: https://acoup.blog/author/aimedtact/
it’s not Earth (because otherwise it wouldn’t be second-world, now would it?). You don’t need to worry about when potatoes made their debut outside the Americas. If you want chocolate and roses growing in the same climate, no one can stop you.
Tolkein went back and forth about this: Middle Earth has potatoes and tobacco, but no tomatoes. He put them in an early edition of The Hobbit but took them out again, making Gandalf ask for cold chicken and pickles instead.
The Shire lacks chillies, which I regard as an oversight. Hobbits would have enjoyed a good curry.
But, then, is Middle Earth a secondary world?
The D&D campaign I am currently writing is set in a very small, quite pretty, walled town with lots of towers and Tudor style houses that is basically a military school/border post. There are a few hundred troops, and a few merchants/craftspeople to provide for them. But, once I had a tailor, leather worker, balcksmith, butcher and a breadmaker etc I realised that they would need regular supplies. So, a few miles down the road from the pretty town, is an ugly, dirty, smelly town with a rough palisade wall and wattle and daub huts housing the abbatoir, tannery, etc. to keep the pretty town going.
I mean, the overall gist of the piece is nice, but after tut-tutting about lazy authors who don’t research that potatoes didn’t exist in Medieval Europe, we then get this gem:
Oh yes, and you don’t have Genghis Khan, who encouraged a spread of technology which absolutely and unarguably changed the world. It also means nobody reopens the trade routes between Europe and Asia. And that means you probably don’t end up with a teensy pandemic better known as the Black Death, which (besides wiping out a hefty section of Europe) also helped usher out feudalism and usher in the Renaissance.
As if those trade routes didn’t exist to begin with? Weren’t always open? And yeah, the Black Death was brutal… but there are many instances of equally devastating plagues that came from Asia which had major impacts on Europe. The Antonine Plague killed nearly a third of the population in many areas, and arguably spelled the end of the Classical Roman Empire, while the Plague of Justinian wrecked the population and economy of Rome right as it was beginning to re-expand into Europe. Both of those are major historical counterfactuals, both predated the widespread introduction of the stirrup.
There are no hyenas in Europe now, but they existed during the ice age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_hyena
@3 You are right that there’s also the challenge of technology when worldbuilding; that is, what kind of technology can exist in certain kinds of societies. There’s an excellent book, “The Most Powerful Idea in the World” by William Rosen, about how and why the Industrial Revolution occurred when and where it did; specifically, what led to the development of effective steam power in 18th century England. He shows how, first, people of knowledge had adduce laws of nature such as the existence of a vacuum and the properties of gases. In early 17th century England there came the first modern patent law, which effectively monetized “ideas” (“intellectual property”) and gave people a financial incentive to improve on existing technology. Further, in England, there also came about the development of the joint-stock company that limited liability of investors. it was possible for the upper classes—the aristocracy–to invest in nascent industrial development without losing their status, which was not the case in France at the time (which is why many scientific discoveries and theories came from France, but which lagged in practical development—French nobility could not become involved in “commerce” without risking “derogation” and forfeiting their privileges).
That is, it’s not just a matter of a genius inventor coming up with a device or process. There has to be a social, philosophical and economic infrastructure that can enable that device or process to proliferate and transform society.
Oh I just loved Connections!
Personally I usually start with a real culture and/or region ands start to change things around, introduce megafauna to a steppe environment for example. Or shift the Comanche to Mediterranean environment with horned ponies rather than horses.
@@@@@ 2 But, then, is Middle Earth a secondary world.
I think Tolkien coined the term Secondary World in large part to describe what he was doing with Middle-Earth, so I would think so!
@2 Middle Earth is our history, after a lot of semi-divine intervention and reshaping the world and so on.
Not exactly about apples or tomatoes, but this got me to thinking about all the authors who move enormous armies around without giving any thought to feeding, clothing, and armoring them. Either your invading army is going to be ravaging the land, and spend a significant amount of time foraging and not being battle-ready, or there will be an enormous wagon train of supplies behind them, which creates a major logistic vulnerability, too. I don’t even recall grandmaster Tolkein bothering to feed his armies, other than providing his smaller companies with elvish power bars. (One could argue that the Gondor army marching to Mordor didn’t have to carry supplies for the way home since they didn’t expect to be going home; but then how many starved to death within sight of the white city?)
@1 I definitely join with you in recommending A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. That blog is a real gem; it has made me think about the past in a very different and more nuanced way. It’s especially nice since Bret Devereaux is aware of and encourages its use by worldbuilders.
Since no one’s mentioned it, Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday is also quite helpful for worldbuilding premodern societies for Second World fantasies and the like. Or if you just want to know what the worldviews of premodern people were or might have been like.
The business of world building has been on my mind quit a bit of late. Netflix is streaming a new series, Connected. It is a brilliant look at how disparate things are connected. I suggested you watch it if you have a Netflix account. The connections they follow are so mind blowing it made me wonder if any writer is strong enough to carry the burden of world building. The episodes I have watched so far involve only connections within in natural world. How does a lake on the African continent that dried up 1000 years age enable the Amazon Basin to exist?
I studied ecological connections in grad school because I knew, just knew, that humans cannot act outside the boundaries of the natural world. It is the basis of all human survival. Connections between a new technology, such as a new machine or new trading relationship can only be built upon the natural world.
Can any writer see all these connections and work them into a fictional second world? I envision becoming buried under reams worth of paper with notes and maps;every wall of a domicile covered with web maps and yarn lines showing causational pathways.
On the other hand, such created ecological relationships could interconnect (ha) with your plot or plots for a smackdown book such as dreams are made of.
One quick personal note, sure I read the Dunes books and they left my ecological imagination as dry as a sand dune. I felt it was too obvious and tortured. Hate me if you must but watch Connected anyway huh?
One quick personal note, sure I read the Dunes books and they left my ecological imagination as dry as a sand dune. I felt it was too obvious and tortured.
Dune is a good read but it always rather grinds my gears when people praise it as a great work of ecological imagination. It isn’t. You have giant sandworms with enormous teeth roaming around the desert. WHAT DO THEY EAT? Well, later on we discover that they are basically filter feeders and eat sand plankton. (Obviously the enormous teeth are vital for this.)
To quote:
“Now they had the circular relationship: little maker to pre-spice mass; little maker to shai-hulud; shai-hulud to scatter the spice upon which fed microscopic creatures called sand plankton; the sand plankton, food for shai-hulud, growing, burrowing, becoming little makers.”
It cannot be emphasised too strongly that this is a deeply stupid ecology.
For a start, there is no primary production. No equivalent of plants. Nothing is transducing an external source of energy – sunlight, chemicals, whatever – into biomass. It has only one actual animal species in it – the sandworm, in the three stages of its life cycle, feeding either on spice or on other sandworm.
Now, that’s not impossible – look at the grendels. But if adult sandworm are filter feeders, why have they got metre-long teeth? Why do they hunt anything walking on the desert surface? Where is the spice – the only input of energy to the sandworm species – coming from? Well, in “Children of Dune” we learn that water plus sandtrout excretions produces a pre-spice mass.
Let me rephrase this in terms of rabbits.
Medium rabbits grow into big rabbits. Small rabbits grow into medium rabbits. Big rabbits eat small rabbits. Small rabbits eat mushrooms. Mushrooms grow on medium rabbit droppings. This is a sealed system with no other inputs except the occasional human, who is eaten by big rabbits.
Phrased like that, you can see how stupid it is.
It’s not just the physical ramifications you have to keep an eye on, it’s the historical ramifications too. What killed Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series for me was reading the short story set in the Late Roman Republic where Mark Anthony domesticates a dragon and it’s implied that dragons were incorporated into the legions. And then you go back to the series and realise that it’s our history with added dragons.
So if Imperial Rome had legions with dragon support, why would the history be the same?
So, a few miles down the road from the pretty town, is an ugly, dirty, smelly town with a rough palisade wall and wattle and daub huts housing the abbatoir, tannery, etc. to keep the pretty town going.
This is actually pretty realistic. Lots of mediaeval towns had strict laws about what trades could go where. Smelly and unpleasant trades like tanning went outside the walls, and generally downstream so that their wastes were washed away. Maybe put it a bit closer than a few miles away, though. That’s quite a way to haul all your dressed meat etc.
I don’t even recall grandmaster Tolkein bothering to feed his armies, other than providing his smaller companies with elvish power bars.
He doesn’t explicitly describe details of provisioning, but as the great essays on ACOUP (mentioned above) discuss, he keeps the armies behaving within the limits of what their logistics would have allowed.
@9 John Ringo has a series where he sets up a scenario where Middle Earth is actually in the far future.
Two authors who also think about ecology in their worlds are Steven Brust and L.E. Modesitt. Brust has said that one of the first thing he does when creating a world is think about what kind of food people eat and then basing the ecology on what is necessary to produce that food. And anyone who has read Modesitt knows his attention to detail on ecology
From what i remember, historians started to care about this kind of stuff between ww1 and ww2. I remember an anecdote about Marc Bloch (one of the founder of the Annales, the historical journal that was behind the movement toward a more sociological study of history), writing to a friend historian how interesting was studying jams: every farmer family had their recipes and tradition for jams… but a tradition of preparing jams imply a cheap access to sugar: when did sugar exactly become something that any farmer family could afford as a routine matter?
Another example is the tradition of north Italian cheeses (like Parmesan) and cured meats (like prosciutto, salame, pancetta etc) and its link to the great plagues of the 14th centuries.
The many plagues that ravaged Europe in the 14th centuries (like the one detailed in the background of the Decameron), as they reduced population but left buildings and properties intact, and reduced the amount of workers available to take care of the needed works, led to a strong increase in salaries for the common population.
And how the commoners decided to spend their more abundant money? they started to buy better clothes, leading to an expansion to the textiles industry, and especially they started to eat meat at an unprecedented rate. And all the tradition of high-quality animal-derived food production of the North of Italy was established immediately after as a response to the greatly increased demand.
For some reason, I’m reminded of the TV show Firefly, where the setting is minimally developed planets and where the character of Kaylee accepted a strawberry as payment and almost had an orgasm biting into it.
The good old Mongol Empire, so unlike those evil European ones.
@7
This seems a fine excuse to link to The Greatest Shot In Television
Some of us are still angry about the sack of Baghdad in 1258.
My favourite example of this is that the Democratic party does better along what was the eastern shoreline of North America in the Cretaceous.
This doesn’t seem a large step; Wikipedia notes that some roses are native to North America, and that florists’ supplies come at least partly from the tropics — work out how to have moisture all the way down instead of Mexico’s dryness and the two could overlap naturally. Chocolate and apples may be the most climate-separated major crops, since apples need serious cold to germinate (although there are strains being developed that aren’t as demanding).
Being horseless doesn’t necessarily mean being tradeless. Llamas can’t be ridden or harnessed, but they made tolerable pack animals; it’s possible trade might have to focus on high value-to-weight items in the absence of bovids that can be harnessed.
@2: I would have thought the Shire a little cool for chillies — although hobbits are presented as industrious enough that they could have had greenhouses if they’d come from a warmer climate.
@16 re @3: stinks aren’t the only issue; cf Venice, which exiled forging and glass-working because fire was a danger. How the land thus freed gets reused can be a story in itself; we were told (by guide pamphlets etc.) that “ghetto” derives from ~Italian “getto” (“forge”), because what claimed to be the oldest Jewish confined-district in Europe (then observing its quincentennial) was where metal work had been before being moved out of the main archipelago, although the etymology is disputed.
My impression is that there was more trade in the Indian Ocean than along the Silk Road, but it tends to get ignored since the endpoint wasn’t in Europe.
I don’t think Tolkien explicitly mentions supply trains much. But the Rohirrim make a quick dash to an allied country, and the army to the Black Gate isn’t that big or going that far, so the operation seems plausible to me. Denethor was a wise and foresighted leader (contra the movies) so stocks were probably high.
OTOH some of Toklien’s other military movements are more challenging. The ride of the Eorlingas from the top of the Anduin all the way to Gondor. King Elessar’s military adventures in the east, when the land north of Mordor seems to be actual wasteland.
I hadn’t known Tolkien used ‘Secondary World’, for his subcreation; he seems to have used it differently than the modern usage, of a distinct world, whereas Tolkien’s pretends to be our own past. OTOH that conceit doesn’t really impinge on the reader much, unlike an urban or explicitly historical fantasy.
Excellent essay. Reminded me of this tangential musing from a few years back on why Westeros hadn’t had an industrial revolution:
https://theconversation.com/game-of-thrones-why-hasnt-westeros-had-an-industrial-revolution-25240
Sorry, can’t get the insert link function to work.