Bibles: Building a World

[This is adapted from an article delivered at the St. Hilda's Mystery Conference.]

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, designed to organize everything the author knows about a fictional world.

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 only 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

• · 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? 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, CSFW 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? Once I saw the Corridor of Blood between Arras and Vimy, I knew that A Citizen of the Country had to be set there.
• 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? In The Knowledge of Water, 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, or in twentieth-century French society.
• 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 science fiction, 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..."