RE: Fashion of Off-World (World Building Notes)

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I like this a lot ! Especially the idea of friendly tame giant spiders. I can picture some of them being kept as house pets, with the kids snuggling in the spider silk and subtly learning how to use the stuff. But if someone introduces their guard-spider as "Shelob" you know not to mess with them....

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Hahahha I can totally see that!

You know, I've always had this idea to not include anything from Earth in the stories, but I decided recently that I'd actually like to take some things from Earth, but maybe bastardised versions of things.

I was just thinking there, I did take Humans, but that's different haha

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Now that's a really interesting topic all of it's own ! Making everything totally new needs a huge amount of imagination and organisation if it's going to fit into a coherent world.

I think I tend to use analogues a lot - things that do the job of something we're familiar with, but subtly twisted just enough that it's not identical. It's a bit lazy, a kind of shorthand that avoids having to explain absolutely every object a reader sees.

But strangely, none of the people I write about are actually human at all, even though I don't mention it one way or the other. I'm old enough that I come from an era where "aliens" on TV were either fully humanoid with just slightly odd (usually silver) clothes, or got a pair of ears and some coloured makeup, or for the really alien ones got a mask and an ill-fitting furry suit.

The Empire I write about started off as the "bad guys" in a wargame - one of the other players got Terra, and I was one of the alien empires, with people who looked human on the outside but weren't on the inside. I beat the crud out of the Terran Empire and conquered it 😁

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That's the thing, explaining everything to the reader and getting bogged down in details is something I dread. I try not to get too bogged down, although, I worry sometimes if I'm giving enough detail.

Like, sci-fi in and of itself is pretty out there, and some people find it tough to follow for the fact that some concepts can be out there and some worlds are, well, alien and may be hard to make a mental image of.

That's why I try to write each planet with a different tone or flavour, which not only helps to keep readers (and myself) grounded and the mind settled on an idea of the place.

I have a world Kah-Vita, which has a western kind of vibe, where they were essentially blasted back to the frontier days. Then there's the mega-city in Jex, which is cyberpunk and futuristic. Then there's the heavily forested world Dosha which to me, feels a bit more fantasy than sci-fi, but it's still alien. I think the little bit of genre hopping helps to make each place feel unique and it also helps to write each person with a different voice based on where they are.

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