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Bibles
as a World-Building Device
(This paper was delivered at the St. Hilda's Mystery Conference
at Oxford)
Most novels have outlines. But many novels-especially science fiction
and historical fiction-also have collections of reference materials that
are explicitly organized into a bible. A bible is a book or a database
or a set of files, or all three, in which everything one knows about one's
world is organized.
Bibles can be very elaborate. The bible for Star Trek-not the complete
bible but only the one given to prospective authors-runs five volumes.
The bible for one book I co-wrote, Future Boston, was two looseleaf volumes,
almost a thousand pages, as well as a fairly large database of information.
(In comparison, the book itself was about 400 pages.)
A bible is not an outline. It has nothing to do with the plot of the
book. Its purposes are two: first, to organize information, and second,
to generate it.
Organization of a bible
A bible is organized in at least the following sections:
- Characters. Each character in the book has a biography.
Minor characters, referred to in passing in one story, have a few sentences.
Major characters can have entire subsections. When was the character
born, when did he die, where did he go to school, with whom, what is
his family, to what other characters is he related? We had genealogical
charts of the main families. Who are his friends and his enemies? What
are his beliefs? What are his accomplishments, his failures? What, physically,
does he look like?
- Timeline. What are the main events in the story?
What historical events and characters can be used in this timeline?
In Future Boston, we integrated events from Boston's real historical
past into the future of the city, so, for example, during the Revolution
of 2061 our orators quoted Patrick Henry and Ben Franklin. We also integrated
characters' personal timelines with the general timeline of the story;
a character had just moved into a good area of the city in 2061, which
suggested a way in which he could prosper in a story set slightly earlier.
- Geography. What places are involved in your story?
Do they have contemporary maps? If not, you might want to draw some.
Are there important buildings or other places? Can you get or make pictures,
floor plans, elevations, or schematics? What subregions exist in your
geographical area--nations, or neighborhoods in a city? What rivers,
borders, or other geopolitical features are involved? Is there the possibility
of a war over boundaries?
- Weather. What seasonal changes does your country
go through? What's the weather? What are the growing seasons, if this
is important? Is there any traumatic weather and how does it affect
the characters and the timeline? Obviously the flooding in Paris in
1910 was a big reason for choosing that period.
- Economics. How do people in this society make their
living? What jobs are there? What jobs don't exist because they are
in the process of disappearing or being created? How much do people
earn? Is it enough? How do characters feel about their jobs? Do they
think they ought to feel anything about their jobs? What sorts of class
distinctions and class consciousness do they feel? How are these enforced,
through laws, psychology, or social myth? Is there a common consciousness
among people engaged in the same kind of work? How is it expressed--in
beliefs, actions, social organizations, style of dress, neighborhood
one lives in, and so on?
- Politics. What political events are perceived as
important by the characters? What events are really important? What
governmental organizations are there? What group, racial, ethnic, or
national consciousness? What conflicts are there among groups? How do
allegiances conflict among the characters? Where does the power lie?
Who has it? What are the sources of political power?
- Science. What scientific and technical advances take
place during the story? What advances, already made, exert an influence
on this world?
- Art and literature. What books, paintings, statues,
and other kinds of art are important? What tendencies in the society
do they express? Are there new kinds of art in this society? Is there
censorship, and if so, who exerts it?
- Fashion and popular culture. What do people wear?
How do they do their hair? Is it different for various classes and ages,
for different political beliefs? Who determines fashion? Are there laws
about fashion? How are children dressed? What games do children play?
What sports are popular? What music do the characters listen to? What
music, art, and literature are "underground" or associated
with particular classes, age groups, or genders?
- Religion, culture, and superstitions. What is the
official state religion? Are there tolerated religions? Underground
religions? Cults? Who follows each religion? What are the ceremonies?
What overlaps are there among religions?
- Language. Insults. Slang. Swear words.
- Sex. Sexual patterns are clearly very different from
society to society. A sly science fictional treatment of sex as a worldbuilding
tool is Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, a SF novel
about a society in which all people are sexually undifferentiated most
of the time, but when they come into season, may become either male
or female, and don't know which in advance. In actual historical mysteries,
one's choice of sexual partners may be regulated by law. How does sex
work in this society? What are the prevailing sexual attitudes and patterns?
Do they differ among subgroups of the society? What do the individual
characters think and do about sex? What are the patterns of marriage,
of family organization?
- Taboo groups. Jews in Nazi Germany. Witches in colonial
Massachusetts.
- The sense of the past. How do characters and groups
in this society interpret history? What objects from the past do they
value, collect, or hold sacred? What objects from the past do they scorn?
Why?
And finally, for the mystery, what is a crime? What
crimes does the society recognize and punish? What are the most serious
crimes? Is murder a crime? Under what circumstances? What are the distinctions
between legal rights to perform something and actual feelings that something
is a crime? Recently a mother aborted one twin to save the other; the
public reaction shows how passionate such questions can be and how deeply
they can express the workings and contradictions of a society.
Using bibles to generate questions and ideas
When information is organized into a bible, during the process of worldbuilding,
it usually becomes evident what is missing. In SF worldbuilding is vital
because the society is largely extrapolated or made up. In the historical
mystery our work is directed toward what Ruth Rendell has called "the
representation of an old consciousness." Creating the bible, separately
from the work of outlining or writing the book, makes one aware of how
the society expresses and maintains an inner coherence, and how that coherence
manifests itself in everything from the placement of bridges over a river
to the pattern of a shoe. While we're working on bibles, we often find
that we have failed to notice part of that consciousness.
By creating the bible, one notes, or ought to note, social features such
as the following:
- Persistence of themes and concerns.
- Responsiveness of the society to change, if the story
or series persists for any length of time.
- The tendency of a change in the society to propagate
through all parts of it, for example for a scientific innovation to
become cultural, for fractals to become patterns on T-shirts and virtual
reality to appear as weather reports.
- Complexity and internal contradictions, for example,
slavery or homelessness in a rich society...
- ...which the society notes and attempts to interpret or explain,
often in ludicrous ways, for example by theories of genetics.
- The seriousness of apparently trivial objects and signs,
such as the use of fur on clothing, and the tendency of these signs
to change meaning precipitously as social attitudes change.
- Nostalgia for an imagined past, combined with adaptive
reuse of the past and fantasies of the future. (This is great fun if
the story goes on long enough that you have also written about these
pasts as they "were" the first time round.)
The well-built society should exhibit what Roland Barthes calls syntagmatic
and paradigmatic cohesiveness, which is roughly the tendency of a
society's or character's choices to be coherent in two ways. The succession
of events, the paradigm, makes sense, and the choice of events at
a particular moment, the syntagma, is characteristic of the society
and the character making the choice.
For example, a character in a particular society might say, "I
have an enemy; I can choose what to do. I can kill him, but then I'll
have his ghost after me, or I can go to the foreign Catholic priest
who will exorcise the ghosts of his ancestors, which will make him
helpless before me..."
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