The World that Ended

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Today's post is about world building! 


    I don't know about you, but when I come across a writer or artist that wants to talk about 'world building', I kind of roll my eyes and feel just a little ... I don't know... bored? Put out?

Artists and writers live inside their own heads for a large portion of their lives. They sit with the different bits and pieces of an imaginary world, refining it little by little, until one day, they produce a piece of work that you get to see or read. Only after they've refined their vision well enough, do you get to see a complete world that is presented in the service of the story they want to tell (either visually or written).

People who truly love the vision that is presented in that story, think they want to see more about that world. In truth, it takes a very rare... almost fanatical zealot... who actually, truly, deeply loves to learn more about the rules and designs of the universe they enjoyed in your story. The only group of people that I've actually seen to have that level of admiration, are Trekkers.  I didn't know this until just now (when I was checking my spelling), but there is a difference between Trekkies and Trekkers. Apparently, Trekkies are, more or less, casual fans of the Star Trek universe. Meanwhile, Trekkers are those die-hard fans that purchase schematic books, read the lore on dilithium crystals and analyze warp cores, bridge designs, etc. And yes, I do have a book on the schematic layout of the STNG Enterprise!

Anyway, artists love to talk about their worlds. A rare few like to read/listen about it unless it is baked into a story... which is where it should exist. Anything outside the story, even if 'authoritative' is not canon until it appears as a completed piece of art. (That's my opinion anyway!)
    
So if by some strange miracle, you're one of those elite few who want to see the hamburger as it's being made... then I guess the rest of this is for you.  If not, then feel free to ignore all of this. If I did my job right, by the time I complete the series, none of this will be a surprise. You may even get a new appreciation - if you're reading this after I completed the Punk City series - and see that yes, way back then, I had been working on doing everything I can to immerse myself into that make-believe world.


You're still reading?...

I had to check. Okay...get ready!

In "The World Ender", my primary purpose for that story was to transition the reader from the current world we live in, to the wildly different world of Meteora. Although I describe some of the technical aspects of the structure of the dome, I have not shown what life is really like inside of it.

Those details will appear in the second book - Project: Blackbox. I won't reveal too much about what life inside the dome is like now, but I won't leave you completely in the dark. If I can leave you with one thing, one hint about life inside the dome, it's this: the French Revolution.

If you go out into the internet and look up some of the interesting tidbits of the French Revolution, then hopefully you'll land on some the facts and details that I did. What I learned, was that the people hated the rich, monarchical people so much, that they wanted to change everything. And by everything, I mean EVERYTHING.

Instead of a clock face with 12 hours (that looped around twice to demark 24 hour days), they made it only have 10 hours... for the whole day! It was during this time they also transitioned from the 'Imperial system' of measurement to what is now known as the metric system. They tried to apply this base 10 system to the concept of time. (It didn't work out so well!)

They also decided to change the entire calendar, removing the names of the days of the week, changing the length of the week, changing the length of the months and turned their calendar into a cumbersome bureaucratic nightmare that put farmers at odds with the immutable properties of the sun, the season and the land.

Pretty much the only successful thing that came out of the French Revolution was the metric system.

But... 

What if you lived inside a closed-in space? No windows... no sunrise or sunset. Everything about the transition of night and day is controlled like a light switch. What if you had no need to farm or grow anything? You could change the hours of the day and no one would notice. There have been studies, both anecdotal and scientific, that show when people are removed from the signals provided by sunrise and sunset, they lose the biological impulses of sleepiness and wakefulness. Their circadian rhythm goes haywire and they can stay awake for much longer than 24 hours and sleep in shorter intervals than the recommended 8 hours in bed.

So keep the French Revolution in mind as you read the next books in the series. Everything you take for granted, everything that anchors you into our 'normal' way of doing things, thinking about things, is going to be challenged!

I'd love to talk with you in more detail, but it is getting late for me as I right this so I must put an end to it for today. But don't be surprised if I kick up another blog article on another aspect of the boring 'World building'. (Heck, I may even make it a series!)

Thanks for reading this far! See you next time.























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