In the world of writing especially in science fiction and fantasy, creating world that are different and interesting can be a challenge that can yield great rewards. The whole idea is to do something different, wonderful, terrible something that gives the story and the characters within it the right setting for their adventures.
What kind of worlds are there to use as a starting point? Looking at the basics we have Utopia which is a world of blissful content where everything is right and at the other end of the spectrum there is dystopia, which is world of chaos and discontent. Dystopian doesn’t have to be a post apocalyptic world but it would be fair to say that the post apocalyptic world is dystopian.
In between this there are many shades that can be added to these worlds, Star Trek was often very good at creating worlds that on the surface seemed utopian but under the surface the reality was very different. In the film Avatar a magical utipoian world was used as the setting but it was being threatened by human ambition and greed. The important point to take from this is that in a Utopian world if everything is fine there is no story, it either has to be an illusion or under threat.
This point was covered in the Matrix, when agent Smith told Morbius that the original Matrix was created as a comfortable utopia for humans, but we rejected it as being too good so it had to be re-made to be far less perfect for us to accept it. This is the same with story telling – the worlds we create for our stories have to have conflict within them or be part of conflict to have a story.
Lets forget the conflict for a though and think about what fictioneering we could do with our worlds to make them unique and fatastical. The key here is to look at everyday parts of the world and change them.
Examples of this are like:
- A world with two suns.
- Mountains that float.
- Flying cars.
These have all been used, but just rolling off my head what about:
- Waterfalls that flow upwards.
- A world where the sun never sets or rises.
- Water that can be breathed.
- Rocks that move and are alive.
The possibilities are limitless and all these different little things are products of our diseased imaginations. Bring it on and let it shine! I think that every story needs to have the right world or universe created for it and it can make the story telling so much fun!
What strange worlds have you guys thought up?
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