Fantastical Evolution: A Perfect, Unreasonable New standard & Alternatives

World building is crucial for the science fiction and fantasy genre, where the world of earth may be anywhere from barely sufficient to extremely important ( in genres such as steam punk, dieselpunk or cyberpunk ). As such, world builders take great pains to ensure the uniqueness, appeal, scientific realism and wonder of their worlds. This article proposes a method to approach fantastical works, through a concentrated focus on world building.

Given my interest in the world of hard magic ( as opposed to soft magic ), I began to come across a series of revelations and ideas that I have employed to work on my own projects. I would like to share these in the hope that they will be useful for fellow world builders, get feedback from them so I can improve upon them, and work toward a better world for all world builders.

I believe the highest class of fantastical work has lots of properties, and understandably, those properties will take up a whole article by itself. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on the property of internal synergy.

By internal synergy, I mean how well the components or systems of the world interact with one another. Earth, for obvious reasons, has high internal synergy; the headphone jack most headphones have will fit into most laptops and audio systems. Another example are the omni directional devices in Attack of Titan, because such devices work best in their world, but not in ours.

To create worlds of high caliber, I believe it is important to have extremely high internal synergy.

I contend that the strongest way to create a world with high internal synergy, among other properties, is through Fantastical Evolution.

Fantastical Evolution is the organic growth of a systemic universe from point A to point B, where the former is the assumed start point and the latter is the concerned end point. The creator of this universe, goes step by step, day by day starting from the beginning of the universe, and proceeding to create the next logical step based on the previous. It takes into account everything natural to a universe ( with or without life ), drawing from disciplines such as anthropology, chemistry, physics, societal sciences, the creative sciences, as well as mathematics / technology to determine what a universe at point B would look like, had it started from point A.

In the end, point B is effectively the next logical step from point A. Fantastical evolution uses so much logic in the construction of worlds, that in the end, ubiquitous obviousness will be prevalent; just like many of us don’t think twice before going on the internet ( despite the OSI protocol, the server-client architecture, DNS routing and all that jazz behind the scenes ) and how to use it is fairly apparent, such will be the world to its denizens.

Once this path is understood and charted, it would be trivial to pick any point along that path and commence populating it with elements of narrative. If sentient beings are to be found in this universe, then it is only natural that the universe would be a hot bed for personal tales and epic stories.

Once I decided to go ahead and chart the universes for my project through this method, I quickly realized the sheer volume of work I was to go through to be successful. Even if, for a moment, I assumed I was an expert in astrophysics, quantum mechanics, bio-anthropology and mathematics, etcetera, I still had to take into account how my fantastical universe would factor magic into my design, and then I had to imbibe the fractal-like growth of societal, cultural and individualistic lenses in psychological states in the world, not to mention the denizens’ perception of their world.

Therefore, perfect Fantastical Evolution would take more than a lifetime to do, and while that is unfortunate, Fantastical Evolution may still be useful; not as a procedure, but as a standard.

The idea of Fantastical evolution has inspired me to create worlds that are only similar to earth in the degree of granularity and consistency that earth has, and different in every other aspect.

There are alternatives to Fantastical Evolution; alternatives that are more feasible and still quite effective.

Everyday Design Theory

By forming the culture, everyday perceptions, common objects, famous melodies, favorite pastimes, old grudges and intimate relationships, a world builder can take an interesting and extremely effective approach to system / world design.

Node Theory

Node theory attempts to construct a fictional universe by assembling various nodes that are linked to and from each other. These nodes represent seminal points in causal histories; thereby by following one node to the next, over a span of time, one can get a feel for the creation of universe.

Point of Original Essence

The point of original essence is the origin of everything that, through natural causal forces, became everything that the universe is and continues to be today.

To conclude, I present Fantastical Evolution as a process that is as impractical as it is effective, and by trying to work up to that standard, three other processes that can be used to make better worlds.