From One World, Many By Kristene Perron

From One World, Many

By Kristene Perron

One of the most frequent comments I receive as a speculative fiction author is, “Where do you get those crazy ideas?” My response could easily be, “Have you seen our world?” Worldbuilding is one of my favourite parts of the writing process because there is so much source material to draw on.

The natural world is a treasure chest of weird, scary, and positively puzzling creatures and behaviours. Consider the Acanthaspis petax, a member of the Assassin Bug (Reduviidae) family, found in East Africa and Malaysia. This clever little psychopath injects ants with a paralysis-inducing saliva and a venom that dissolves the ant’s innards, then piles the exoskeletons (up to 20!) onto its back and glues them together with a sticky excretion. Hidden under its victims’ bodies, Acanthaspis petax can move around freely and enjoy protection from spiders (spiders are reluctant to attack ants because they swarm). Now, imagine this Assassin Bug on a bigger scale, make it intelligent and sapient, give it language and culture, give it bigger and more intelligent prey and predators and, voila, you have yourself a race of creepy aliens.

The human world is no less fascinating.

When Joshua Simpson and I sat down to hash out details of our co-authored Warpworld series, we frequently drew upon human history and culture as a guide. Our different backgrounds were an excellent jumping off point for discussions of gender, nationality, politics, religion, colonization, and other issues that thread through our story. Though our books are not set on earth, all the problems and challenges our characters face have happened right here at home.

Conflict is the heart of fiction and nowhere is conflict more apparent and volatile than between cultures. Even countries that share a border and a language can hold wildly differing views and the farther you travel from home the more striking these differences can become.

In 1992, like so many other English speakers with a desire to travel, I moved to Japan and taught conversational English. Never before, nor since, have I encountered a culture with such a complex and rigid set of rules for social etiquette. My employer once laughed as she recounted a joke she had played on a visiting Canadian friend. According to Japanese custom, however you are greeted, you must follow the same level of protocol. If someone bows to you with a simple nod of the head, you do the same. If they bow deeply, you bow deeply. My boss’s Canadian friend, having been made aware of this and wanting to make a good impression, dutifully got down on hands and knees in several public locations to return the ultra-formal bows offered to him by Mrs. Kakegawa’s friends, who were, of course, all in on the prank. And while that particular cultural anecdote is humorous she also told me about how she was forced by her family to break off a happy relationship with the man she loved because of a supposedly long-dead caste system, a concept that was barbaric to my Canadian way of thinking but was completely normal to her.

Travel is an excellent tool for worldbuilding, but you don’t need to travel to the other side of the world to build an alien culture, you only need to look in the mirror. What are your customs, beliefs, superstitions, celebrations, rituals, etc, and where did they originate? Why do we shake hands when we meet someone new? Why do we knock on wood for luck? Why do we put trees inside our house and decorate them with lights in December? What would an alien with no prior knowledge of earth or humanity assume about us by these actions? At its heart, building new worlds is how we create a lens to look at our own without the biases of our geography and culture.

Thanks for listening and if you’d like a peek at how Josh and I built our warped worlds, you can pick up a free copy of Warpworld Vol. 1 anywhere fine ebooks are sold or visit www.warpworld.ca.