Worldbuilding The Long Dark

One of the guilty pleasures of speculative fiction is the opportunity to imagine whole other worlds, and then bring them to life on the page.

There are some aspects of worldbuilding that I like to treat as a pastime in their own right in parallel to the actual writing. I wrote a whole series of posts about the massive drawing project for Admiral George Leonard, from The Ashes of Home.
https://thebaldpatch.blogspot.com/search/label/Battleships

That project was self-indulgent relaxation for me. It goes light years beyond the handful of rough sketches that I actually needed for the purposes of the story. In fact, the novels I’ve written so far have been fairly light on true worldbuilding.

The Shayla stories are set thousands of years in the future. There’s space travel and advanced tech, ships and planets for story settings, but strip out those elements and the world she inhabits is firmly rooted in current and past Earthly cultures. Worldbuilding largely consisted of placing a filter over the world we know, and deciding which features to amplify and which to fade out.

When it came to Tiamat’s Nest, I was starting even closer to home. Earth, later this century, but changed by a shifting climate and the ravages of conflicts and migrations as a vastly diminished population makes a new life in the new habitable zones.

Writing The Long Dark is presenting an entirely new challenge for me. Here, I’m starting out with a planet similar in size and temperature to Earth, but vastly different in most other respects. It supports non-Earthly life - a first for me - but humans can’t survive unprotected out in the open. In fact, their entire way of life is different from anything we know.

So, I’m having to go back to the drawing board and question just about every aspect of life that we take for granted. Of course, for simplicity and sanity, there has to be an undercurrent of familiarity, but I still have to look for hidden assumptions and bring them out into the open to see if the environment might drive a different set of norms that will play into the story somehow. I can’t simply transplant “small town England” onto alien soil and hope for it to make sense.

As a result, I’m expecting the first draft to take longer than usual, to leave me more time to mull over worldbuilding aspects as I go. Having said that, the last couple of months have been more productive than I expected and, for now at least, the words are flowing well.

Ha! I’ve probably jinxed it now!