Most worldbuilders have some interest in maps. Some people make rough maps, some make detailed atlases, including topography, battlefields, different languages and cultures, etc. I have a rough map of Khasran’s world in my head, though I’ve never drawn it, because there are so many blanks still.

Here are 2 fascinating sites for the map lover.

The Map Room is a blog simply stuffed with information and links (lots of links!) about maps and map lore of all kinds, from the most advanced current satellite technologies to the most ancient hand-made maps.

Just a scroll down the first page gives an idea of the variety that blogger Jonathan Crowe covers. Today’s most recent posts link to the US Bureau of Land Management’s study of potential solar energy development on federal land; an article on location, mobile phones and the web; a new digital terrain map of the Earth; a story on geotagging; and an online exhibit of antique astronomical maps. And more, much, much more!

Serious map hogs will love everything on this site. After you’ve snooped through current posts, skip over to the Archives drop-down menu and browse by category–dozens of them!

For example, if you’re working in the real world, whether in alternate times or elsewhere in history, you’ll like the long list of “Cities” for which Crowe has posted mapping articles.  Worldbuilders working with space travel will have fun in “Astronomy,” while I was personally captivated by “Big Maps” which features articles on all sorts of room size (or even garden size) maps and dioramas).

However, most worldbuilders will probably hit the jackpot in “Imaginary Worlds.” Many of these posts are about existing imaginary worlds (lots of Tolkien-related material, no surprise). However, Crowe blogs about a variety of useful and fascinating sites.  Among them I found today’s other fabulous mapmaking resource:

The Cartographer’s Guild: A Forum for Cartography Enthusiasts

This site is an extensive forum that seems to cover all aspects of mapmaking, though gaming and imaginative mapmaking seem to be especially featured in the topics and discussions.

There are specific discussion forums for many categories of maps, including town/city mapping, dungeon/subterranean mapping, modern/sci fi mapping, and board game mapping. There’s even a whole forum dedicated to toponymy, the study of place names, for those of us stumped by the challenge of inventing place names.

Post categories include maps and works in progress, so that mapmakers can share their work. Then there’s the Cartographer’s Choice forum, which showcases some of the most beautiful and skilled examples of members’ work. Looking at just a couple of gorgeous examples makes me wish I had another lifetime to take up mapmaking as a hobby. If you want to practise the craft of mapmaking, the Cartographer’s Guild is the forum for you!

I don’t usually go into politics or current events here, but in this case I feel compelled to make an exception. From an anonymous Iranian correspondent to Time comes this extraordinary report on the effect of watching a certain film trilogy in that defiant city this week.  World builders, take note: your creative work might be more important than you imagine.  Tolkien’s care, skill and love created a mythology that has a profound effect on an audience he could never have anticipated.

Watching the Lord of the Rings in Tehran (excerpt)

Gandalf the White

“In normal times, Iranian television usually treats its viewers to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. But these are not normal times, so it’s been two or three such movies a day. It’s part of the push to keep people at home and off the streets, to keep us busy, to get us out of the regime’s hair. The message is “Don’t worry, be happy.” Channel Two is putting on a Lord of the Rings marathon as part of the government’s efforts to restore peace.

“Lots of people, adults and kids, are watching in the room with me. On the screen, Gandalf the Grey returns to the Fellowship as Gandalf the White. He casts a blinding white light, his face hidden behind a halo. Someone blurts out, “Imam zaman e?!” (Is it the Imam?!) It is a reference, of course, to the white-bearded Ayatullah Khomeini, who is respectfully called Imam Khomeini. But “Imam” is at the same time a title of the Mahdi, a messianic figure that Muslims believe will come to save true believers from powerful evildoers at the time of the apocalypse. Isn’t that our predicament?”

You can read the rest here. Then you might be tempted, as I am, to put on a green scarf and go stand with these people:

Protest in Tehran - Getty Images

How about some world UN-building today for a change?

Even if you haven’t seen the new Star Trek, by now you’ve almost certainly seen that clip in the trailer, showing a planet collapsing into itself. Cool? Yes! Realistic? Not so much, according to Sci Fi Wire science columnist Wil McCarthy.

For anyone who’s seriously thinking of destroying a planet in their game or story, McCarthy just posted an essay on the real-world physics of destroying a planet. He goes into some fascinating detail about what forces would be required, and gives a step-by-step of what might happen to an earthlike planet with a singularity at its core. Here’s an excerpt:

“In the case of an explosion, the energies involved are colossal. The Earth (for example) weighs 6 billion quadrillion tons, and even if we ignore the force required to break it into small pieces, we still need to accelerate every scrap of it to escape velocity—over 10,000 meters per second—in every possible direction, to overcome their collective gravity and keep them from falling back together again. That means almost a quadrillion quadrillion gigajoules of kinetic energy. That’s the equivalent of every lightning storm on Earth for a million quadrillion years, or the total heat output of the sun for three full decades. Yeah. And of course, to achieve the required visual effect we need to deliver all that energy in a fraction of a second, so even if the Death Star were made entirely out of fully charged Toyota Prius batteries, you’d still need 50 billion billion Death Stars firing simultaneously to make it happen.

Do you get what I’m saying here?”

You can read the rest of his tasty planetary physics ramble here.

It’s so cool, it makes me want to destroy a planet, just so I can write about it!

My friend John Freeman, who got me started in entertainment writing way back when he was the editor of Titan Magazines‘ Babylon 5 and Star Trek magazines, is now the editor of new geekdom site Weird & Beard: “Stuff and Guff for Geeks and Bearded Folks.” He recently talked me into doing some more writing for him–without much difficulty, I might add; he’s always been one of my favorite editors!

Here’s a taste of the kind of fun he lets me have: my list of 10 Reasons to Love the New Star Trek Movie.

Not a review, but the list is spoiler heavy so read with caution (though I don’t consider what I’ve posted here to be very spoilerific).

10. The Tribble

Blink and you’ll miss it (I did), sitting in a cage on Scotty’s desk. Its presence is a perfect little signpost that the new timeline still belongs to the universe we know and love.

9. Preposterous Plot Contrivances

They give fans something to nitpick and argue about (and we have to have something to nitpick and argue about!). And what’s classic Trek without preposterous plot contrivances?

8. Nero’s Tattoos

Though Nero’s personality falls short of Khan or Borg Queen level badassery, his tattoos at least make him the most badass-looking Romulan in Trek history.

If you want to see 7 through 1, then click over to  Weird & Beard, where you’ll find the whole list (and ‘ware big spoilers!). You’ll also find a repost of my two-part Le Guin article from last month,  lots of genre and weird news, Geek Heaven, reviews and other tasty bits.

John has a knack for finding news and other odd bits that no one else has collected in one place.  Come join the fun!

Last month I posted that I would be entering On the Premises Mini Contest #8:

Premise: Write a bland, generic sentence. Then revise it by adding key details that help establish the story’s setting and (if relevant) character. (We called this the “worldbuilding” exercise.)

The results are in, and one of my two entries won an honorable mention, taking fifth place in overall points. Here it is:

GENERIC: The dog stole the bone.

DETAILED: Right under the High Priest’s nose, the mage hound nipped the Sacred Shinbone of Silverfist off the altar, and bolted out into the Old City’s labyrinth of alleys.

To read the other entries, go to On The Premises, Mini Contest #8.  You’ll find some excellent examples of how to turn bland narrative into story-building stealth exposition.

In both of my entries, I was going for plot and/or character as well as description.  After writing this one, I’m still wondering what happens next! There may be a new story in this little off-the-cuff sentence, and I’ve begun to think that maybe it takes place in that “city of poets” I wrote about last time.

I was skimming the headlines on Yahoo News this morning, when this one snagged me:

“Stability lets Basra, a city of poets, return to its roots”

“City of Poets” – now there’s an image to set a worldbuilder’s heart beating! The article  itself adds drama to the poetry:

Basra

“Basra, Iraq – At Al Rasheed radio, poet Khalid al-Mayahi leans into the microphone and pours out his heart to the city, using words that could have gotten him killed before Iraqi forces took back Basra last year from Shiite extremists.

“I am a monk for your love. I built the biggest church in my soul for you,” he recites, waving his arms with passion to echo the verses he’s written. The poignant improvisation of violinist Na’el Hamid next to him soars onto the airwaves. The announcer picks up a traditional Arabic oud to accompany them.

Oud (lute) player

In this city, with its crumbling beauty and centuries of culture, the poetry and music that were driven underground when the militias were in charge are beginning to blossom again.

The live program is mesmerizing, and in this deprived city, it falls like a welcome rain. The phone lines light up with young women who want to share their own love poems; a poetry-loving police sergeant calls in to every show.” (Read the rest here)

(*images are not from the article, sources below)

It’s not only setting that you can take from these paragraphs, it’s circumstance. If war, tyranny or disaster strip away the arts, religion, or customs that give meaning and identity to people’s lives, how will they endure the loss? And when people see an opportunity to regain those freedoms, what will it mean to them? How will they react?

Thanks to this article, I have just glimpsed an ancient, unexplored  city somewhere in Khasran, perhaps  on the banks of a river or the shores of the Middle Sea, a place where people take life slowly and value the power of words, and take quarrels so seriously that they seldom allow them. No story yet, but I’m sure that will come in time.

If you want to see what a major writer does with a setting and a situation like these, read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Voices.

*Image sources: Basra palace; Oud player

As I wrote in the previous post, Ursula K. Le Guin has just won the Nebula Award for her latest novel, Powers.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin the worldbuilder seems tireless these days. She has already established several rich and inexhaustible universes to play in; yet at an age when most people are slowing down, she created a new one, The Annals of the Western Shore.

For the benefit of those who think they love Le Guin, but haven’t heard of anything she’s written since The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, here’s a short list of my favorite recent work. They’re all in print, like pretty much everything Le Guin has ever published, so if your bookseller doesn’t have them in stock, order them; or go to Le Guin’s Bookshelf at Powell’s Books, where they will be in stock; or just request them from your library. I’m not reviewing here, you can find plenty of good reviews in print for any of these titles.

In no particular order:

The Telling. Le Guin evokes no less than 3 distinct societies here; that of the narrator, and two societies of the world she is visiting. She makes me want to stay in one of them, and run like a scared rabbit from the other two. Maybe one of the finest examples of Le Guin’s unique brand of anthropological (rather than technological) science fiction.

Changing Planes. A worldbuilder’s master class, this collection of linked stories creates a new society in every single story. Her approach here is somewhat anthropological, as a visitor observes and describes each world; and the stories grow from the descriptions. Read and learn how to dispense worldbuilding exposition without sliding into deadly info-dumps!

The Birthday of the World. My favorite story in this collection, Coming of Age in Karhide, proves yet again that Le Guin can write about the most challenging subjects without either feeling or causing any inappropriate discomfort. Its also a lesson in linguistic sleight of hand to see her dealing with the gendered pronouns of English, while writing about a non-gendered race.

Lavinia. Set in the age of Troy, Lavinia tells the story of Aeneas’s wife, who has only a line or so in the Aeneid. I went from reading Beowulf to Lavinia without the slightest culture shock, a tribute to Le Guin’s ability to set a reader down in the ancient world as if it were home.

The Annals of the Western Shore: Gifts; Voices; and shiny new Nebula winner, Powers. I’ve read the first 2 of these so far, and this time, Le Guin is writing about people who have “gifts”, which we might call psychic powers. As always she imagines societies that are a blend of the familiar and the strange, yet she makes their strangeness also seem familiar and inevitable.

The last 3 books of the Earthsea Cycle: Tehanu; Tales from Earthsea; The Other Wind. Any of these will upend any notion you may have that Earthsea is a commonplace “epic fantasy” (and make the SciFi miniseries look even more of a lame-brained travesty.) Tehanu, in particular, transformed my worldview, by expressing cultural conflicts that I was experiencing in daily life without even being aware of them. Le Guin’s forward to Tales from Earthsea gives some insight into her worldbuilding process, at least for Earthsea, and also some comments on the nature of fantasy and its commercialization. Read (or reread) the early Earthsea novels before any of these, then read these in the order I’ve listed them.

Ursula K. Le Guin won the Nebula Award this weekend.

I’m delighted to report this news of my favorite living writer. The Nebula was awarded to her novel Powers, the third in her new series The Annals of the Western Shore.

She also made this year’s Tiptree Award Honor List for her new novel Lavinia.

Le Guin is one of the most honored and respected of American writers in any genre. Until this week, I’d have said she is also among the most overlooked by science fiction readers and commentators, not to mention booksellers.

Whenever I mention Le Guin to friends who are readers, their response is always that they love Le Guin, especially The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), A Wizard of Earthsea (1970), or perhaps The Lathe of Heaven (1971). 

This seems to me the equivalent of saying, “Oh, yes, I’m a great Tolkien fan. I love The Hobbit.“

Critics and scholars seem to be equally stuck in Le Guin’s early career. Just this year, I’ve read 2 “overviews” of Le Guin by literary scholars, which begin and end with novels she wrote almost 40 years ago.

(The notable exception to this roll of literary dishonor is Strange Horizons, which recently published an essay discussing revisioning in the latest 3 Earthsea books, and a very fine review of Lavinia.)

In recent years I’ve also found Le Guin’s work increasingly absent from the chain bookstores near me (there are no convenient independent booksellers nearby). The local Barnes & Noble and Waldenbooks both have extensive spec fic, comics and manga sections; but the last time I stopped in, I found not a single Le Guin novel on the shelves in either one.

Luckily, Le Guin is always in stock on line at her “bookshelf” in Powell’s Books, her home bookstore in Portland OR, and virtually all of her fiction is still in print.

To most SF/F fans, Le Guin is a spec fiction writer, though in fact her published work includes many realistic literary short stories, poetry, essays, translations, and childrens’ books. I have the impression she doesn’t bother much with genre labels, she writes what she wants to write.

Le Guin once wrote that she thought her main theme was marriage; and perhaps it is, if marriage is taken as one very intimate aspect of working out the messy tangle of human relationships. Many people think of Le Guin as a feminist writer, though it seems to me that some who apply this label to do so because she wrote one novel about a culture of androgynes, where gender conflicts by definition don’t exist. If she fits that genre, its in the most positive sense of feminism: a belief that no one, male or female, should be limited by their gender or sexual orientation; not in the sense of “man hating separatism.”

For me, Le Guin’s most important theme is domination vs cooperation. Does society work best if some people and groups have power over others, or if everyone has to work by consensus and cooperation? How much power, how much consensus, and when is either extreme taken too far?

And because there’s no better way to understand the nature and effect of power than to listen to the powerless, Le Guin’s stories often take the perspective of a subservient or disenfranchised group: a literate, civilized people conquered by barbarians who believe all writing is demonic (Voices); a harmonious traditional society whose social and cultural fabric is being shredded by a ruthlessly modernizing government (The Telling); women in several societies where men have all the political, economic and magical power (such as Tehanu, another Nebula winner).

Reading Le Guin for nearly 40 years has taught me to listen for those voices of the powerless in my own life, and in the real world. I count that her most valuable gift to me.

I hope that these two recent honors will remind many people that Le Guin has never stopped writing in all the years since those early classics, and inspire them to discover for themselves that what she’s writing these days is as far beyond The Left Hand of Darkness as The Lord of the Rings is beyond The Hobbit.

Next up, I’ll list some of Le Guin’s best recent fiction so you know where to start reading.

How do you put humor into an imaginary world?

Beginners and hacks think that the only requirement for humor in any setting is a few wisecracking characters who fire off lots of clever insults.  You can see this in any third-rate comedy, and in a lot of amateur writing.

Even in real world comedy, wisecracking characters are only funny if they and their situations are carefully constructed. Much of what makes us laugh arises from our own cultural definitions, so you can’t just have your invented world characters sling the same sort of wisecracks you hear in the latest comedy.  Cutting and pasting real world humor into your invented world either won’t be funny, or it won’t fit the world, or both.

Imaginary world humor has to accomplish 2 things:

First, the humor must belong solidly in the context of the world. Whatever your characters are doing or saying that’s funny has to come from their own personalities, their own story, and their own culture.

Second, it still has to be funny to your audience, who is not from that culture. Here’s where the worldbuilding comes in: you have to provide enough information and cultural understanding to let your audience see instantly why this speech or moment is unexpected, ironic, or otherwise hilarious.

This is also why it’s much easier to put humor into a realistic fantasy or SF setting–our world with only a few small changes–than it is to make a sweeping futuristic epic funny. In realistic spec fic, you’re already working within a familiar cultural context.

I’m still trying to achieve those 2 steps in my holiday story.  Yes, I started it over 2 months ago. The first draft tried to turn into a serious family drama. The second was lighter, but was only funny to the characters. Now I’m back to rough draft experimenting with the characters and narrative voice. I’m also spending some time analyzing other stories that I’ve found funny. Sorry to say, not many of these are secondary world  SF or fantasy. Didn’t I say its hard to pull off?

(I could stop here and list some my favorite funny spec fic stories. Maybe I’ll post one after I’ve done more research.)

You may well ask why I’m trying to change a story that wants to be serious, instead of letting the story evolve naturally. Here’s why:

The darker the events of the universe you’re depicting, the more important humor may be, just to give the audience a break, a little gleam of light in the profound darkness. And the longer the story, the more important this is. I have often abandoned stories and authors who dive into unrelenting grim darkness. And every world that I really love has at least some humor lurking in it somewhere. Even that miserable, treacherous wreck of a hobbit, Gollum is funny sometimes, or we wouldn’t be able to stand being around him.

I confess, I also have a more selfish reason: humor seems a lot more fun to write. I’m pretty sure the Foglios are having the time of their lives writing Girl Genius! I may never achieve hilarious, but I think its important to try at least for a little lightness now and then.

Over on Genrewonk, the blog of spec fic writer S. Andrew Swann, there’s a pithy excerpt from a lecture on worldbuilding that he gave at the Western Reserve Spring Writer’s Conference last month.

Here’s a tiny bit of what he says about his 3 C’s of Worldbuilding:

“When we talk about world-building we are talking about how that world is presented on the page, and what the reader takes away from the setting of the story. Its success is based on three things; the clarity of how the setting is presented, the conciseness with which it is done, and the underlying consistency of the world.”

Read the rest here at Genrewonk: Worldbuilding v. 2

The post also contains a link to his full article on worldbuilding. I think I’ll revisit that link later this week; as it fits in perfectly with a new series of posts I’ve been planning.

Swann is a new name for me (so many books, so little time…); a look at his many published novels shows that among others, he has a contemporary mystery series involving dragons, dwarfs and other fantasy critters in his hometown of Cleveland. Now that’s a man who can write what he knows without being chained by “realism”!

Thanks to new commenter A Cameron, whose blog And the Chain brought Swann to my attention, and also for making some ego inflating comments about WorldBuildingRules! in the same post where he mentions Swann.