Marie Brennan - New Worlds, Year Two: More Essays on the Art of Worldbuilding

Published by Book View Caf

www.bookviewcafe.com

ISBN: 978-1-61138-783-4

Copyright 2019 by Marie Brennan

All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

Cover art by Romansl

Cover design by Pati Nagle

Welcome to the second year of New Worlds!

My Patreon project on worldbuilding has been going steadily since it began two years ago, and shows no sign of stopping any time soon. Which is great, because this turns out to be the bestpossibly the onlyway for me to discuss worldbuilding in the kind of depth I crave.

In most books about writing, this subject receives a single chapter at most, and then only if the book is aimed at science fiction and fantasy authors. But those chapters tend to be formulaic, with nods in the direction of big topics like religion and government. They dont dig into the nitty-gritty, because they cant: there simply isnt space for it. Even in a book devoted entirely to the worldbuilding, you suffer limitations of space. This topic is fractal; the more you unpack one topic, the more things you discover inside it.

But as I said in the introduction to the first volume, Patreon turns out to be an ideal way for me to dig into this subject on the level I think it deserves. The ongoing support of my patrons lets me take my time, writing not just about religion but about sacred sites and sacred texts, the different practices of a religion and the specialists who lead those rituals. At some point in the future I can circle back around to discuss monasticism, or lay religious leaders, or leave everyday life behind and dig into theogony, theodicy, eschatology, hamartiology, and other cosmological and philosophical concepts that lie behind a religions daily practice. The same is true for fashion, or government, or any other aspect of culture you might name.

During the course of a given year I wind up leaping from subject to subject, because I dont want to bore my readers by spending too long on any one thing. (Six months straight of me maundering on about religion might get old, especially if that isnt a particular area of interest for you.) But for these collections, I rearrange my weekly essays to create the best through-line I can, for a more coherent reading experience.

Where this volume is concerned, that means we start off with topics related to interpersonal armed conflictstarting with weapons and ending up on duelingthen take a long tour through personal beauty, from what we consider beautiful, to the ways we achieve that with not only our bodies but the things we put on them. This leads to the topic of marriage (continuing a subject that began in New Worlds, Year One), before venturing onward to writing and books, timekeeping, the aforementioned religious topics, various kinds of magic and superstition, and then finally a dive into folkloric monsters, continuing my trend of choosing some Halloween-suitable topic for the month of October.

Finally, the volume closes out with four of my theory posts, which are less about specific aspects of culture and more about how writers can approach worldbuilding in their work. These are one of the bonus goals unlocked by my lovely patrons, appearing in the months that have five Fridays instead of four.

If you enjoy these collections and would like to join the ranks of the patrons who make them possible, you can do that at my Patreon page. All patrons receive a weekly photograph from my travels, themed to that weeks topic whenever possible; at higher tiers you get complementary ebooks, the chance to select topics via a monthly poll, and behind-the-scenes essays about how I approach worldbuilding in my own work (which lately has been a live tour through the work Alyc Helms and I have been doing on a collaborative novel). At the top levels you can ask me questions about worldbuildingyour own, or someone elsesor even send me your work for critique.

The New Worlds Patreon is certain to continue on through a third year, and likely a fourth as well. My list of topics to discuss never seems to grow shorter; like I said above, no sooner do I start talking about one thing than I think of three others I ought to address. The exact content of the third year will depend on my patrons choice, but may include anything from policing and punishment to drugs, sports, travel, or the ever-sexybut incredibly vital!issue of sanitation. (Pop quiz: in which country and time period was human excrement worth so much money that people stole it? The answer is at the end of this book!)

May this collection give you many interesting ideas and avenues to pursue!

(5/4/18)

You know that opening scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey? Apart from the black monolith, it probably isnt far wrong. Though we cant prove this archaeologically, odds are good that human beings have been hitting each other with the nearest available object since before they were human beings. As evolution has shrunk our teeth, weve had to resort to external supplements.

Starting with sharp rocks. Stone tool technology is a huge enough field that its used to divide human prehistory: first the Paleolithic or old rock era, then the Mesolithic or middle rock era, and finally the Neolithic or new rock era. The earliest techniques just involved knocking a few flakes off a fist-sized pebble to get a sharp edge, but over a million years or so early hominids figured out how to make more sophisticated shapes, until they were manufacturing quite detailed projectile points.

Its likely there were other weapons in use, made of perishable materials like wood or bamboo that dont survive in the archaeological record. A club is simply a nice hefty stick of wood, and a staff is a longer, thinner stick of wood that trades weight for angular momentum and reach; both are very easy to make. And we do know that as techniques got more refined, people started producing sharp edges out of bone, ivory, and shell, as well as rocks. But where weapons were concerned, stones seem to have been the height of technology.

Which places certain constraints on those weapons. Stones can be extremely sharp, but they are both heavy and brittle, so unless you have magic or handwavy technology to justify otherwise, you cant make something like a sword out of them. The sword-sized objects we find were decorative or ceremonial, not for active useand if youve heard of Mesoamerican obsidian swords, those are actually clubs with obsidian edges set along their length. (Some Polynesian societies did a similar thing with shark teeth.) You can use stone for arrowheads, spear points, and small axes and daggers, and to shape better clubs and staves, but large blades are Right Out.

Metallurgy upended all of this. In the late Neolithic, humans figured out how to work copper, which led fairly rapidly to bronze, as they began alloying copper with tin to make a much harder and more durable material. With bronze, you can make swordssmall ones, anyway. I own a replica of a Taiwanese Bronze Age sword with a blade 42 centimeters long: compare that with my 88-centimeter steel rapiers, much less something like a two-handed sword. Bronze is still pretty dang heavy; its advantage over stone is that its less likely to crack in half when you hit something hard.

From there we went to iron, which lets you make thinner, lighter shapes that wont bend into uselessness the first time you swing them, and which holds a better edge than bronze. This had an interesting effect on warfare in ways totally unrelated to its material properties. Bronze requires copper and tin, and sometimes traces of other metals; those are much less abundant than iron, and often require long-distance trade. Iron didnt just mean better weapons: it almost meant cheaper, more numerous weapons. And then we moved on to steel, the alloy of iron and carbon that we use in all corners of our lives today.