The Creative Process III: Worldbuilding, Part II

In my last post, I recounted my aversion to worldbuilding and the impact this had on the early development of the Known Universe, an act of creation that more or less happened by accident.

My first short story, Space Toast, was written for Pulp Kings Magazine without any consideration for worldbuilding, as was the next story, and the next. After years of toiling over maps and histories for epic fantasies that never materialized, I found solace in the simplicity of writing short-form stories without any consideration for consistency or internal connectivity. If I wanted to have a girl participate in a speed dating venue on an alien world where one of her dates was a talking chimp with a cybernetic brain, that’s what I wrote (Adventures in Warp Dating, 2019). When Pulp Kings contracted me to write a four-part serial in 2020, I dove in with the same lack of consideration for all things worldbuilding, prioritizing character development, plot structure, and jokes. My rationale was that the universe is big and weird, so having the reader meet bizarre aliens and explore strange new worlds in tandem with the characters kind of worked.

Unfortunately, failing to do any worldbuilding whatsoever created a big problem later on. Once I expanded the original serial in late 2022, I realized I had no idea how anything in this universe worked. This wasn’t a series of silly Douglas Adams-esque short stories anymore where anything could conceivably happen if it led to a punchline—I’d established that there’s a mega-corporation that encompasses potentially thousands of galaxies, but never bothered to explain how intergalactic travel was even possible. Besides establishing things like a Chief Executive Overlord and Supreme Head Office Command, I had no clue how GaliCor’s command hierarchy functioned. As for communication systems, currency, technological limitations, languages, culture, religion . . . fuhgettaboutit. Being vague is all well and good when you’re writing a 5000-word short story that aims for laughs above all else, but that lack of detail doesn’t really fly in a novel (for supposedly being fantasy’s answer to Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is remarkably consistent and well ordered).  

Realizing my novel had some pretty big deficiencies, I had to work overtime to patch all the holes in the universe, an undertaking that lasted throughout the editing process. Fortunately, this was still a sci-fi comedy, so I wasn’t really bound by any constraints closely resembling those of reality. This isn’t The Expanse, for crying out loud, so I just had to come up with something that sounded kind of funny that also sort of made sense. Intergalactic travel? Let’s say a dude invented a drive that could traverse the “quantum fabric” connecting every galaxy in the universe. Perfect—now my story makes sense!

Truth be told, implementing worldbuilding retroactively wasn’t all that hard. Most of the fixes took the form of footnotes, and everything that needed fleshing out got fleshed out in a way that seemed natural. The hardest part was realizing I actually wanted to develop the Known Universe more, but was limited in what I could do on account of the book already being written and on its way to the printers. Still, I was and still am interested in exploring more of GaliCor’s various divisions, its hierarchy, its interpersonal politics, the lives of those at various points along the corporate ladder . . . fun worldbuilding stuff I hadn’t dabbled in for years.

As such, this year I’ll be releasing several new short stories/novelettes that explore new corners of Corporate Space, delving into things I wasn’t able to include in the book. You can sign up for my newsletter to be first in line!

And of course, there are the sequels . . .