Settings: The Future, and Other Worlds

Leaving the opera in the year 2000, hand-coloured lithograph by Albert Robida (late 19th century)
courtesy of wikipedia

What if your story presents itself as happening not in the present, and not in the past, but in a time that hasn't happened yet?

For me this is both the easiest and the trickiest kind of setting.   It's easiest because, for me, almost no effort is needed to make the stories interesting.  It’s either the way I grew up or I’m just wired to respond to them, but future stories, and especially stories about space travel, have always had a shortcut to my attention.  It’s trickiest because in order to do it right, it requires the most amount of proper work.

I could go on and on and on about this subject, and at a later time I may do so, but time is short, so let’s hit some of the broad strokes in order to keep moving forward.

First off, there are a couple different ways to approach future settings, depending on how large a part the setting itself plays in the evolution (that is, the slow reveal) of your story.

Whole World Approach

courtesy of whereswaldo.com

This is where the setting, and the work that went into creating it, basically dominates the story.  Any action or character development rides side seat to information about why the world is the way it is, and how it came to be that way.

This is probably the most frequently seen kind of future story, and it’s the most labor intensive when it’s done right, and that’s probably the largest part of the fun.

I keep mentioning excessive work loads.  What kind of work are we talking about?

Let’s say you get an idea about a story set in the future.  It’s probably either a particular problem that’ll have to be solved, or a particular feature of a possible future world that sparks your interest, or (most commonly in my experience) both these things feeding off each other.

How do you make this idea into a story?

Let’s consider the question from the opposite end of the production, if you follow me: in the end, what are the key characteristics  you want your story to have?  Speaking generally, I’d say good stories are believable and satisfying.  If you have these two things, you’re well on your way to having a good story.  If your story isn’t believable, or isn’t satisfying, I have a hard time making a case that it was good.

So how do you make this idea of a future world believable and satisfying?

The answer is work.  I mentioned in the last part of this series that future stories take all the problems that past stories present (research and more research) and raise them to the next square power.  This is because not only do future stories require ingenuity and insight to make their key points new and interesting, but it takes research and imagination to make them believable.  You might think that a new robotic fish idea you’ve read about in Popular Science is captivating (and I would almost certainly agree), but if you’re going to make a whole world out of the mental image of people living underwater and traveling around in or communing with such robots, it’s going to take some further information about how the things work, when they break down, what good or bad power supplies for them might be, what water pressure and temperatures they can withstand, and so forth.

How do you get to a future like this?  I think most often writers get there by taking some aspect of the present and extrapolating what they believe the natural eventual result to be.  Cars become flying cars, telephones become video phones, fancy fur coats become future fancy fur coats (see the first illustration above).  The more research you put into the parts of the world you’re “aging” into their future versions, the more realistic results you’re likely to get.  And the more imagination and care you put into trying to portray a balanced and sensible understanding of how this world works, the more easily you’ll be able to draw your audience into this time you’ve created to share your characters and problem with them there.

But all this leads us to the central conundrum of the Whole World approach to future storytelling, and my real reason for including the Where’s Waldo picture above: when should details about the world be included in the narrative?

The answer absolutely, positively has to be when they serve in logical relation to the plot, or when they have an emotional connection to the characters.  Only at these times should details and events in your world take center stage, and only for as long as it takes to believably get them across.

This rule of course goes for all settings in all stories, but I feel like future fiction holds the title for the worst and most frequent offenders when it comes to details for detail’s sake alone getting shoved into the storytelling when it really has no place there.

Why the constraint?  Because in the end, relating information to your audience that doesn’t directly or indirectly bear on the lives and personalities of the characters or the problem the characters are trying to solve is ineffective and boring storytelling.  You can have the coolest fictional world in the history of science fiction, completely self-consistent and apparently inevitable, given the way you see the world as it is now, and the way it’s going.  But if you give us equal parts of details which have to do with the story and details which don’t, then the narrative is going to slow and slow and slow until we don’t want to hold up the book any longer.

I myself am one of the worst offenders, by the way, of breaking this rule that I can think of off the top of my head.  Another important point to go into detail about later: rules like these are actually much more helpful in the revision and second draft phase than in the first draft.  In the first draft, break every rule you have to in order to let the bird out of your heart.

So what’s the matter with world building?  Absolutely nothing at all, it’s one of my favorite things.  But remember that audiences can only get by on so much wonder before they start looking at their watches and trying to figure out how the characters are going to wrap this thing up.

The Small Stage Approach

I think of this as the opposite of the Whole World approach, and it’s one you see for instance in a lot of independent science fiction; you constrain the action to a limited number of places and times, and generally have few characters talking about the world instead of going out of your way to show and describe it to the audience.  This is also, to be fair, more common in stories where the plot takes precedence over most other aspects of the storytelling.  (Examples of this include Moon and Primer, among others.)

This approach reduces the scope of the work necessary to just the bare minimum needed to tell the story.  So if you’d like to do less research and less thinking about how to build up the world of the story, and confine the action just to the characters and their troubles, this is a much cleaner and mellower way to go about pushing the action of your story beyond today and tomorrow.

The drawback to this approach to setting is you sort of wind up with a setting-less story, unless you find a way to include a lot of exposition about the world the characters occupy through their interactions.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all, but if what you want to tell is a story that is essentially future-y; after all, you could set a story in the present and have it all happen in a couple of rooms without showing us the outside world much, and have basically the same result.  Plus although there’s less leg work involved, I’m inclined to think this approach takes a lot of practice to get just right.