There’s a joke I like quite a bit about the size of the first rocket. Legend has it that the rocket was sized the way it was so that its peices could fit through train tunnels. Train tunnels were sized so that the sudden pressure change wouldn’t blow out the windows in train cars. Train cars are sized that way so that they fit on the tracks. Tracks are sized that way because horse-drawn carriages created consistent ruts in roads, so they just went with that standard width. Carriages were sized that way to fit behind two horses side-by-side.
So the first rocket was designed to fit behind two horses’ asses.
Regardless of whether the story is true, we should take its primary lesson to heart: sometimes, the biggest human advances are still constrained by decisions made hundreds of years before. This can lead to technology that has some, to be frank, stupid drawbacks.
We see this quite a bit in cybersecurity, as a matter of fact. There is a whole class of attacks called downgrade attacks, wherein a malicious party abuses backwards-compatibility to take advantage of older, weaker security practices.
A slightly more accessible example might be that of uncovering ancient roads in Greece, or other very-old countries. While these archaeological layers may not necessarily be bad or limiting in any way, they certainly had influence over the placement of new construction. The knowledge of that influence was gradually lost to time, but the effects were still felt hundreds of years later.
Why You Should Think About Horse Butts
The chief sin of worldbuilding is creating a world that is flat and uninteresting. Most of the time, character is woven into a world by the introduction of conflict. In fantasy worlds, this conflict often takes the shape of some war, or a racial tension, or an otherwise tumultuous period of time. It’s easy to think about the big things when constructing your world.
What about the small things? Those things that give life in your world a distinct character? Our world is full of small things, technologies we take for granted. These things can range from knick knacks—little figurines, perhaps, or a Rubik’s cube—to necessary infrastructural things like lightbulbs and irrigation and transit systems. If there is magic in your world, what stops people from using that as the chief light source? Does it stop people from using it as the chief light source? In a world (or region) without horses, how do people travel? What are the pack animals? How are the animals packed? There are so many questions that can be answered by tracing the lineage of the thing.
That doesn’t mean that your world must be planned intricately from creation to destruction, of course. That would be a ton of work, and authors don’t always have the page count to fit all of that worldbuilding in anyway. It is super important, however, to remember that infrastructure matters.
An example I like is Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris. In my opinion, Mr. Sanderson does an amazing job on his worldbuilding in general, but the point about infrastructure shines through in his debut novel. Elantris centers on the titular city of Elantris, which has fallen from grace due to a cataclysmic event in the world. The Elantrians, a god-like people with the ability to create magical artifacts and cast spells, suddenly lose their powers. The city is crippled. The rest of the world, fearful of the “disease” which has overcome the Elantrian population, keeps them locked in their crumbling city, a dysfunctional prison. Since the Elantrians had no need of physical solutions to infrastructural problems, they were left without any kind of resources. Their plumbing, lighting, agriculture, and transit all centered on their ability to perform magic. While there are some issues with characterization in Elantris, its setting is excellent. Sanderson weaves a compelling world, one in which a society must learn to survive “like the normal people do” once again.
Interesting, believable narratives can spring from infrastructural problems. What ties the plot of Elantris together is that the overarching issue is solved due to long forgotten knowledge. If the Elantrians had all understood the source of their power, hadn’t forgotten the basic structure of magic, the conflict of the story would never have happened. It was a narrative centered on the notion that advancement has layers, and sometimes those layers go so deep that we utilize them without understanding.
My computer science friends know all about this kind of thing. Protocols on top of protocols on top of specifications on top of… it’s silicon all the way down.
Cultural Diversity and Technology
This doesn’t mean that we can’t keep making steampunk fantasy worlds—certainly there is a market for alternate histories where the industrial revolution was the final big tech advancement, otherwise the aesthetic wouldn’t be so popular. However, it does give us kind of a free “seed” for creating fresh new ideas. It is one we would be remiss not to plant.
For example, in James Islington’s Licanius Trilogy, technology is divisive. The roots of technology in the Licanius world are magical ones, though this magic is distributed unevenly. Most people in the world have no ability to wield the Gift, a magic attunement thought to be granted by god. While there are few Gifted, there are even fewer Augurs—especially now that they’ve all been wiped out in a great war. Magical artifacts exist which can be used by anyone, but their origin is not understood, and so more of them cannot be made.
The consideration of where power (as in “energy”) comes from can be an important one for any story. In the case of Islington’s work, power sources define the society to a terrifying extent. The inequality created by the Gift and the Augurs is the keystone of the plot. If artifacts were well-understood and readily available, the class divide between the Gifted and non-Gifted would not be so prevalent. Alas, the tension between the two subgroups is ever-present.
So much of the story can grow out of how a culture feels about a source of power. Perhaps, like certain peoples in Licanius, your cultures view a prevailing power source as literally blasphemous to use. Maybe they worship the power source. Further, tensions exist around the availability of the power. This is just a basic fact of human existence, one which we could write entire volumes about. For now, it suffices to say that cultural dynamics are often shaped around the characteristics and availability of power sources—those most basic aspects of day-to-day life.
Settlement and Resources
The last thing I want to touch on for this article is how the presence of resources clearly dictates where settlements begin. I’m from Northern Massachusetts, which has a rich history of mill cities (as many colonial states do). Of course, these mills were powered by running water, so there are many cities built next to rivers. Prior to such industrial endeavors, rivers were sources of good drinking water and fish. The river is a source of power, even without its industrial implications. Per the theme of long-lasting effects, we can observe that virtually all of these mill cities still exist in some capacity today even though the mills are no longer operational.
Rivers are not the only resource dictating settlement, however. It’s important to consider building materials, availability of food (can people hunt/fish/forage, or is agriculture necessary?), and habitable grounds to live on. All of these things can make or break a settlement. What about flash-in-the-pan resources, such as gold or oil? As proven by the ghost towns of post-Gold Rush California, settlements cannot sustain themselves on non-renewable resources alone. Does your world have a valuable resource that won’t ever “grow back”?
We can create sensible, realistic-feeling worlds by giving just a little consideration to the fundamentals of life. What are the important resources in our world? What odd quirks do those resources have? To borrow an example from one of my favorite creators, I turn to @Swordsfall1.
Swordsfall bills itself as an afro-punk scifantasy, where technology and magic are interwoven as one. Brandon Dixon, the man behind the game, had a fun thread recently about the source of magic in Swordsfall. Essentially, artifacts of power are made out of a solid manifestation of magic called Azurean Crystals, and only a tiny portion of the population, known as Crystal Priests, can shape these things. These creations shape all of the technology of the setting, Tikor. Azurean Crystals primarily form underwater or near shorelines. Then it would make sense for thriving settlements to exist near the ocean, or perhaps even on the ocean. This resource is valuable, so piracy is a major concern, as outlined in this resource’s WorldAnvil article.
Placement of natural resources is such a simple thing, but its effects on the development of society are far-reaching. While this question may not matter for every world you make, it’s certainly worth considering!
Conclusion
Resources, technology, and culture are all strongly-interwoven things in the real world. It can be difficult to parse and dissect all of the deep-seated connections that exist today, but they are there to find if you’re willing to dig. I hope I’ve demonstrated my belief that a rich world benefits from considering these layers, and further, that considering such things can be an excellent starting point to “find” your stories.
Have you been employing similar strategies in your worldbuilding already? Perhaps you have a thing or two to add. I’d love to hear from you!
Please let me know what you think in the comments below! I’ve also gone and put all my socials in the about page (social media, not social security!), so you can get in touch with me directly if you prefer.
Happy building!
Andrew
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