Climate change is on everyone’s mind’s lately, to the point where “climate fiction” is now a recognized subgenre — both within speculative fiction and without. Given my focus in this Patreon, however, I’m not going to attempt to spin scenarios about what our world might realistically look like in fifty or a hundred years, or how we’re going to respond to it; other people have already done that in far greater depth, with far greater knowledge of the subject, than I could hope to do.

Instead, we’re going to take a look at the climate changes humanity has already experienced, and what we’ve done about them.

Broadly speaking, we can lump these into two major categories: changes in precipitation, and changes in temperature. Furthermore, we can specify that, for it to count as “climate change” in a meaningful sense, it has to be a lasting alteration, not a brief one. Short-term change is weather; long-term trends are climate. And only the latter drives significant adaptations from society.

Of those two categories — please forgive the incoming pun — temperature tends to sneak under the radar. As we’re in the process of finding out, you can get significant alterations in weather patterns from global shifts of only a degree or two; in the days when no one had reliable thermometers marked with a systematic scale, that kind of shift was impossible to measure. And a gradual, large-scale drift like the one that produced the eras we term the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age happens on a timeline so slow, people are apt to notice it only across the generations: maybe your grandfather tells stories about how frost never used to strike after the spring equinox, or conversely, the ground had always thawed by then.

These changes are still significant! Agriculture depends on people knowing when it’s safe to put crops in the ground, and having enough time for them to mature before autumn storms or winter freezes kill them. As the average temperatures drift from what they used to be, harvests get poorer, because local customs are adapted to the weather patterns everyone expects. But as those patterns break, people will gradually change their customs to match, growing crops better suited to the conditions that now prevail.

Changes in precipitation can be a lot more calamitous. In this historical record, we most often hear about this as an issue of drought, when a persistent lack of rainfall across multiple years results in famine. It’s also possible, however, for the problem to go the other way; too much rainfall leads to flooding and crops drowning in the field. Or, in a worst case scenario, you get both: current theories hold that the decline of the Khmer Empire owed a lot to unpredictable shifts between not enough rain and far too much, which wrecked the stability of a society that depended upon sophisticated hydroengineering.

People can also adapt to changes in rainfall, of course, but it’s more difficult because the effects are more sudden. While unusual heat or frost can kill crops, a slow upward or downward drift in average temperatures gives you time to change from wheat to barley or vice versa, as you plant something hardier for the conditions. Droughts and flooding arrive more abruptly, and in between instances, you get good years where it seems like everything is back to normal. It’s only when you look back on the pattern that you can see where things started going downhill — and by then, quite a lot of people may have starved.

Attempts to engineer our way out of trouble are not a new phenomenon. The aforementioned hydraulic works, discussed in more detail last year, are all about trying to buffer against the vagaries of water being over- or under-supplied. Farmers can also insulate their fields with straw or attempt to shade them with taller plants, to mitigate the effects of heat and cold and reduce evaporation. But mostly, the response to this has had to take the form of changing our own behavior: planting something more tolerant of the conditions at hand, so that at the end of the day — or the season — we have something to eat.

I’ve been speaking of this primarily in terms of crops because that has been the overwhelming consideration — and also the only part even vaguely in human control. If climate shifts produce more hurricanes or tornadoes or blizzards . . . well, historically speaking, there is bugger-all people have been able to do about it. Even now, we can only do so much to fortify our houses and cities against those kinds of storms. And while it’s true that climate change can also introduce novel diseases, neither the people of the time nor historians looking back now can generally tell where exactly those epidemics came from. All people could do was hunker down and hope to survive, or migrate somewhere they hoped would be safer.

Because climate has historically been every bit as much out of our control as weather. While it’s true that human action can affect the globe, as we’re seeing right now, it tends to require a scale of influence we really only hit with the Industrial Revolution. Before that, our population was too small, our output of climate-changing factors too restricted. We have changed local climates through actions like deforestation, which can lead to desertification, but the biggest alterations have mostly come about through natural forces: volcanic eruptions, changes in ocean circulation, and the like.

I should note in passing a particular subset of (thus far fictional) climate change, which is the process of terraforming. Science fiction has long played with the idea that humans could deliberately alter the climate of a whole planet specifically to make it hospitable — and not just the climate, but the entire composition of the atmosphere and the biomes of the land and sea. Most novels have handwaved their effects into existence, caring more about it as a background device to allow for human settlement on other planets; only a few have really devoted attention to the mechanisms by which this might be achieved. If you’re interested in that end of things, I am definitely not qualified to help you! But it’s an intriguing question to explore — not least because the precursors to such ideas are being explored right now on our own planet.

Back to the home front: bear in mind that, more than any given set of conditions, the problem tends to be change. Some conditions are, admittedly, more favorable than others; mild temperatures and moderate rain — however those are defined for the region — are going to produce better results than the alternative. But humans are very good at adapting to the situation at hand, and thriving as much as possible under those circumstances.

It’s when the rug gets pulled out from under us that havoc truly results. Then the behaviors and patterns that protected us before suddenly become maladaptive. Even if the new situation is entirely survivable, we may not be acting in the best fashion to get through it. But figuring that out, and making the necessary changes, is easier said than done . . . and no, that isn’t simply a not-very-coded slam against all the inertia getting in the way of responding to our current climate crisis. People cannot easily abandon cities threatened by rising sea levels or the depletion of the local aquifer, or pivot their economy toward resources that better suit the new reality. That’s especially true of everyone at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, for whom the immediate concern has to be their ability to get by today.

As I said above, these changes are mostly going to play out on a timescale that means we only see a snapshot of one moment along the line — or, perhaps, look back upon it in retrospect. (A few authors will have their story elapse over generations or centuries, but that’s not common.) Still, knowing that context can help set the stage for a plot . . . one with far too much relevance for us today.

Weather tends to show up in novels merely as a background detail — all too often as an example of the pathetic fallacy, where e.g. it’s raining because the protagonist is sad. Every so often, it rises to the level of plot device: there’s a snowstorm so characters can get snowed in somewhere. Speculative fiction honestly has a dearth of weather worked into the general description of a scene, despite the fact that any time the story moves outside, there must be some kind of weather in play.

But if that were all, I wouldn’t be devoting an essay to this subject. After all, this Patreon is about worldbuilding, which means not just the physical but the cultural side of a setting. (Given my inclinations, the cultural side more than anything else). So how is weather itself a part of society?

Depending on where you live, you already know some of the answers to that. Weather shapes our houses, our clothing, and our food, in ways discussed in previous essays. It also gives a rhythm to our lives: if you live in a region where afternoon thunderstorms are expected in the summer, or the monsoon blows through at certain times of year, that affects what activities people undertake at what times. But there are other, more directly weather-focused elements, too.

Let’s start with a question we tend to take for granted nowadays: can you see the weather coming?

Weather forecasting as a formal science got started in the nineteenth century, and it began with us more rigorously measuring what the weather even was. You can’t do much in the way of prediction unless you have a mass of data about highs, lows, wind speed and direction, pressure changes, precipitation, and so on. And you need that data to be spread over a large area, because of course weather is never purely a local phenomenon! This included giving scientific instruments to ship captains, since the ocean is a key driver of weather . . . and also the safety of those captains can depend on knowing what the weather is about to do.

Fast communication is key, too. If you hear that an area upwind of you is getting a cold snap or a storm front, odds are good that’s headed your way shortly. What really sets forecasting going, though, is computers — which can crunch huge amounts of data vastly quicker than humans can — and weather balloons and satellites to measure conditions from above. Thanks to those things, especially improved computer modeling, the precision of our forecasts has improved astonishingly: these days, the prediction for four days from now is as accurate as the prediction for tomorrow was thirty years ago.

Of course, people have been trying to predict the weather for a lot longer than we’ve had computers, or even thermometers. This has largely been short-term and based on observations of immediate phenomena: for example, “red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning” is accurate for regions where weather tends to move from west to east, as the tint of the sky signals the location of a high-pressure (good weather) system and whether it’s headed toward you or moving away. Or, where I grew up — at the tail end of Tornado Alley — we all learned that a certain greenish cast to the sky meant the weather was ripe for forming twisters.

The thing about that green sky is, it does mean a likelihood of severe weather . . . but not necessarily tornadoes. And that’s the flaw of this kind of weather lore, that it can be inconsistent, or outright incorrect. That whole North American tradition of Groundhog Day, where the presence or absence of shadows seen by a groundhog predicts how much longer the winter will last? It has absolutely no statistical underpinning. Some analyses even give it a negative correlation, showing that Punxsutawney Phil’s predictions are less accurate than random chance! Maybe we need to update our proverb.

But humans are not content merely to know what the weather is likely to do an hour or a day from now. We would really, really love to control it, to suit our own purposes.

And for millennia, people have been promising the ability to do exactly that. This is honestly one of the underpinnings of certain elements of religion: you pray or make offerings to a deity of the sky or agriculture in the hopes of getting the rain or sun necessary for a good crop, or a deity of the sky or sea to get the wind you need for your ocean voyage. Humans can’t control the weather, but gods can, so you ask them nicely for their help. Colloquially, we often call society-wide weather rituals “rain dances,” and dancing is indeed a common element, though not a universal one.

Rainmakers, however, peddle claims of a more direct skill. They assert that they, on their own, can end a drought — or, less commonly, end a deluge that’s causing flooding or drowning the crops. Historically, they attributed their power to magic; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they instead dressed their assertions up in scientific trappings. Charles Hatfield, one famous American rainmaker, used a secret mix of chemicals in evaporating tanks to “attract” rain to an area. His apparent success rate (likely due to him being a good weather predictor, rather than weather-worker) was high enough that he was able to charge the City of San Diego ten thousand dollars — in early 1900s money! — to fill their empty reservoir.

Which promptly backfired on him, as the region experienced torrential rains that broke a dam, killed about twenty people, and caused an estimated $3.5 million in damage. Rainmakers who promised results they failed to deliver could and did get sued for fraud, but rainmakers who “succeeded” too well could also wind up in trouble.

This idea has not gone away. If anything, it’s trying to accelerate into the realm of actual, reliable science. We’ve been conducting experiments in cloud seeding for decades, aiming to encourage rain or snow through scattering material in the atmosphere. Its efficacy is debatable, and people have understandable concerns about the environmental impact of the material used. Other, newer concepts involve things like reflecting some of the sun’s energy back out into space, to slow the effects of global warming.

Science fiction can take these ideas to an extreme. Especially in closed environments like biomes, stories may depict weather as scheduled down to the minute, so characters know to expect a quarter-inch of rain between 3:17 and 4:01 p.m. That’s plausible when the “rain” is actually coming out of ceiling pipes; when it’s the product of natural planetary forces, it’s much more of a stretch. At that point, you’re more in the realm of fantasy, where a sorcerer can summon a storm on demand . . . which would probably have a lot more society-wide effects, especially in military contexts, than most novels take the time to imagine.

With the rise of climate fiction as a subgenre, though, we might expect to see a lot more weather control showing up in our stories. And so, with an eye toward that, next week we’ll take a look at climate change!

I live in California — specifically in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place whose history is indelibly shaped by the gold rush of 1848. And, having proposed in last week’s essay a speculative path to industrialization involving the discovery of some kind of unobtanium, I find myself led naturally to the notion of a rush: a sudden influx of hopeful miners to the location of a newly discovered mineral deposit, seeking to make their fortunes in one fell swoop.

We hear about these mostly as gold rushes, but they can actually happen for other resources, too; there have been silver rushes and diamond rushes. So what elements are necessary to cause a rush?

First and most obviously, the object of the rush must be highly valuable. Nobody’s going to travel for months, often through rugged wilderness (because all the sites closer to home have already been claimed), to go after an ordinary resource like iron or coal. Or rather, they will, but not in the kind of sudden mass migration that leads us to call such an event a rush. If people don’t grow starry-eyed at the thought of getting their hands on some of that thing, it’s not fancy enough for this scenario. Think especially in terms of value versus volume: something that wows people when you hold it in the palm of your hand will have much more power to attract prospectors than something that requires an entire cartload to impress.

Second, it has to be (theoretically) easy to obtain. This is both a legal and a technological angle, with the legal part being the question of who owns the land where the resource is found. I suspect it’s no accident that, of the nine countries Wikipedia lists as having major gold rushes in the 19th century, eight of them were areas colonized by Europeans, with Greece as the sole outlier. In places like Australia, Venezuela, and the United States, a frontier mentality prevailed which facilitated the idea that any random guy could move in and start panning for gold. Try the same trick in England of the same era, and the landowner will have words and possibly bullets for you — not to mention the unlikelihood of finding major gold deposits not already under exploitation.

At least, easily accessible ones. This is the technological side of the equation: if extracting the resource requires sophisticated training and/or expensive equipment, then that’s going to limit active parties to the well funded, well organized operations. These days a lot of our mineral extraction involves digging up ore, sometimes from deep underground, and subjecting it to complex chemical and physical processes. It’s a far cry from some guy with a pan on the bank of a stream believing he might strike it rich.

And finally, people have to hear about it. This seems like an easy requirement to meet, but again, notice that “gold rush” is a phrase we associate with the nineteenth century. There are a handful from earlier — all of them in the context of Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas — but the mass communication of newspapers and especially the electric telegraph made it vastly easier to spread the news widely, creating a large pool of hopeful prospectors willing to pack up their lives and go in search of fortune.

(You might think, by the way, that the accessibility of the location might matter. One look at the Klondike Gold Rush, however, puts paid to that notion. People were willing to risk freezing off their body parts, dying of starvation, being eaten by bears, or falling off a mountain to get to where there was gold. It certainly does help if it’s easier to get to, especially if there are ships or trains, but it’s not a requirement.)

That mass media thing, of course, cuts both ways. Whoever first discovers the resource probably doesn’t want anybody to know about it! Marshall and Sutter at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 wanted to keep their gold to themselves. Alas, despite oaths of secrecy, the guy they sent to secure mineral rights for their land blabbed the tale repeatedly along the way and failed in his mission to boot. Sutter not only didn’t get to keep the gold to himself, but lost all his workers to prospecting, his crops and cattle to squatters, and his entire dream of a profitable agricultural rancho there.

Of course, not everybody who rushes to a source of gold, silver, diamonds, or any other valuable material makes their fortune. In fact, the vast majority of them don’t. Advantage goes to those who get there first, as they stake out and deplete the best claims — which of course contributes to the feverish sense of urgency, people making snap decisions rather than thinking it through. Between the cost of getting there, the cost of equipment (which may not be specialized but is still an expense for the kind of poor man hoping to strike it rich), and the cost of supporting yourself and any allies or employees in the wilderness, most people start out in the hole. In the California Gold Rush, it’s estimated that a few lucky souls truly acquired a fortune, about half made a modest profit, and the rest lost their shirts.

Which is why the actual smart move — albeit the much less glamorous one — is to be the guy selling picks and shovels. It was less than two months after the discovery at Sutter’s Mill that Samuel Brannan bought every piece of prospecting equipment he could find and opened a store in the then-tiny town of San Francisco, so he could sell those things to the people he knew would come — knew in part because he was also one of the first people to publicize the discovery! (The story goes that he couldn’t put it in his newspaper because all his staff had run off, so instead he walked through the streets with a vial of gold, shouting about it to everyone who could hear.) Selling pans at seventy-five times the price he paid for them, he made out like a bandit and became enormously wealthy.

Selling picks and shovels is also a lot safer. Any time riches or the dream of them are at stake, you’re going to get people fighting over them, and a gold rush is no different. Claim-jumping is the act of starting to work on a site someone else has claimed as their own — usually not while they’re conducting active operations, but if they haven’t gotten to it yet or have decided it’s not as promising as another location, neither of which mean they’re ready to let you have it instead. Even when people respect those boundaries, any dispute is liable to escalate to fighting . . . and, of course, any pre-existing tensions are likely to be exacerbated by the tense conditions. Black, Latino, and Chinese miners — along with smaller numbers from other marginalized groups — faced particularly intense threats and bloodshed; it’s no accident that they were less likely to reap a profit than their white counterparts. Meanwhile, Native Americans were massacred by miners who wanted them out of the way.

This kind of thing is also environmentally disastrous, because the men (and much smaller number of women) chasing a vision of gold don’t care very much about anything else. Deforestation, soil runoff, and active pollution from toxic chemicals wreak havoc on the land and anybody relying on it for their survival. In just a few short years, this can transform not only the immediate landscape of the claims but anything downstream of them, and not for the better.

And all of these things could happen in a speculative world! Any planetary colonization scenario is ripe for it, so long as interstellar travel is available to the masses. Even something non-mineral, like the hunting of fantastical beasts could potentially look like a gold rush, if someone finds a critical use for their horns or hides or other body parts. As long as it’s local to a certain area, valuable, relatively easy to get, and advertised widely, the fever will take hold, and people will come.

There’s a particular type of alternate history whose premise is: what if [fill in the blank past society] industrialized? (Rome is a particular magnet for this.)

The challenge of such speculation is that we have precisely one data point for what de novo industrialization looks like. Many parts of the world have industrialized, but they’ve done it by adopting the concepts and technologies developed elsewhere. As a result, our explanations for how it happens run the risk of being just-so stories, with no way to test them and see if they’re correct. Those being the only explanations we have, though, we pretty much have to go with them whenever we attempt to depict either an alternate historical industrialization, or this process happening in a secondary world.

But before we ask what it takes to industrialize, we should first look at what industrialization is.

I’m going to give a simple answer to this. An industrial society is one that’s figured out mechanized methods of production, rather than everything having to be done by hand. In order make that mechanization work, we had to harness new sources of energy — specifically, fossil fuels — and then reorganize labor around creating and operating the machines. As a consequence of such changes, a society of this type develops more specialized division of labor, and also tends to support higher, denser populations.

So: how do you get there from an agrarian society where muscles provide most of the power?

Obviously this is in large part a technological question. A Bronze Age society can’t industrialize for the simple reason that their metallurgy can’t support the kinds of technology necessary for powerful steam engines; hunter-gatherers, even less so. Even an iron-working society can’t necessarily manage it, because a boiler capable of surviving useful levels of pressure isn’t something any old blacksmith can bang together. But technology is only one side of the equation, and if all you’re looking at is the metallurgy, it’s easy to think that surely any place with good blacksmiths could figure it out — that it’s pure chance no other time period industrialized. In reality, you also have to ask yourself, what are we making these machines for?

Yes, aeolipiles — primitive steam turbines — existed nearly two thousand years before the Industrial Revolution got rolling. But they were essentially toys, producing very little power and using up tons of fuel to do it. They had no practical function. It took a completely different design to arrive at a steam engine that could do anything useful . . . and the odds that anybody was going to put in the work for that design were low, because what purpose would it serve?

When your vision of the Industrial Revolution is that change at its height, with massive engines driving locomotives or machines that fill whole rooms, you miss how inefficient, ineffective, and unreliable early steam engines were. Even if some Greek inventor tinkered around with the aeolipile or asked “I wonder if there’s a better approach?”, he would wind up spending tons of money and effort on making a device that still wasn’t worth it. The argument I’ve seen — the best just-so story we have for the Industrial Revolution — is that it started where it did and when it did because eighteenth-century Britain found itself in a situation where even a kind of crappy steam engine was better than no engine at all: coal was needed for heating purposes, their coal mines had gotten deep enough that they were flooding with water, and oh look, the fuel you need for the engine is right there where you’ll be using it. No need to pay for transporting it anywhere. The economics worked out to make that a problem worth solving with a new technological development.

Coal has been used for a long time in cooking and heating, but we’ve tended to go for the easy surface deposits first, and to switch away from it when those become less accessible. The roots of Britain’s industrialization probably lie in deforestation and the more intensive mining of coal in the century or two leading up to the development of actual steam engines — a set of circumstances that didn’t prevail in, say, Rome. They handled their mechanical problems with slave labor and had much less need for coal, living where they did; as near as I can tell, peninsular Italy had very little coal anyway (compared to Britain). So trying to invent a steam engine there would be a solution in search of a problem to solve: not a situation that favors the kind of technological development that has to pass through multiple not-very-effective stages before it gets to the good stuff.

And the good stuff, as you all probably learned in school, is steam engines that are smooth and efficient enough to be useful in textile production. Once you have those, it’s worth the cost to build them in places other than on top of coal mines and transport coal to them. Other uses, too, but after the water-pumping prologue, textile industrialization really is Act I of the Industrial Revolution, because it’s an easy place for a better (but still not amazing) engine to make a difference. So here, again, the just-so story says Britain was the right place at the right time: they had huge industries in both wool and (thanks to colonialism) cotton, meaning that productivity gains in something as basic as the spinning of thread could produce absolutely explosive growth. Everything after that — trains and steamships and cool steampunk gadgets — is flying on the momentum created by coal mining and thread.

Of course, all of this is the mundane path to industrialization. In a speculative world, it’s entirely possible to change the starting conditions and create a different trajectory; so long as it still follows the general pattern of “non-muscle energy source allows for new, mechanized, mass production,” it will feel industrial. If that energy source is the discovery of a vein of some mineral which, when a small quantity is placed into a device, becomes an abundant form of power, maybe nobody has to slowly iterate through crappy devices to reach a point where it makes economic sense to transport the stuff elsewhere. Or it’s a method of channeling magical power from the sky, recently discovered by an innovative sorcerer, which turns out to be useful for some productive task. (Quite possibly it’s still textiles: as noted in the previous essay, those are, alongside food, one of the basic survival requirements that have historically demanded the most time and labor.)

I’ll admit to ambivalent feelings about that latter example, because of what kind of magic I like in my stories. An industrialized form of magic is one that, by definition, can be depersonalized. At that point, no matter what words you attach to it, I no longer find it very magical: it’s just technology by a different name. I can still enjoy stories in such a setting; I’ll just enjoy them for reasons other than the magic. And I freely admit this is a personal opinion, not one shared by every reader. For worldbuilding purposes, it’s entirely fine to create a speculative twist on the process of industrialization — and then it helps to understand what does and does not make sense!

Given the surge in popularity of “tradwife” influencers these days, it seems an appropriate time to take a direct look at what it actually means for everything you need to be produced at home.

Starting with two basic facts: first, that essentially nobody has ever produced everything they need at home. And second, that the more you have to do so, the more your life sucks.

If you want an illustration of what I mean, check out the book Lost in the Taiga by Vasily Peskov. It’s a nonfiction account of the Lykov family, who fled religious persecution and spent fifty years living in almost total isolation in the Russian wilderness. By the time they started having regular contact with anyone outside their family, they were living the most horrifyingly marginal existence you can imagine: their house was a filthy, windowless lodge, they wore crude skins for clothing, and multiple family members (especially children) had died due to the almost complete lack of medicine. The weather itself had nearly killed them more than once when their crops failed, at one point necessitating the Lykovs taking turns keeping round-the-clock watch on their few surviving plants, to keep wild animals from destroying them.

And even then, the Lykovs weren’t fully self-sufficient. They depended on metal tools like their cooking pot which, if lost or destroyed, were completely irreplaceable. Yes, it’s possible to cook without metal vessels; yes, you could theoretically make stone tools if you didn’t have access to metal knives. But every such step toward self-sufficiency requires more labor, until every single hour in your day is devoted to the task of bare survival.

Granted, the Lykovs were not living in the most forgiving environment. But if you check out the stories of people who exited the “trad life,” you’ll find account after account of how much work they poured into living that way, until there was simply no time or energy left over for enjoying its supposed benefits. It’s an open secret at this point that the glossy, successful tradwives pulling in huge amounts of money from their work are showing a highly edited version of their existence, often involving armies of paid assistants — and/or their children, whose free time becomes a sacrifice on the altar of their mother’s career as an influencer.

Because that’s the first thing to know about home production as a system: everybody works. If you’re old enough to do some kind of simple task, like shelling peas, then you do it. Furthermore, you work nigh-constantly, because there is always more to do. The internet likes to pass around the claim that medieval Europeans worked less than moderns, but if you start to crunch the actual numbers, that doesn’t really hold up . . . especially when you consider the tendency to ignore women’s work. Even if a saint’s day or other religious festival meant the men weren’t going out to labor in the fields, the women still had to tend children, cook meals, clean up afterward, and probably spin thread while they watched the celebrations. Life will not go on hold just because it’s a special day.

But what do I mean when I say “home production”? It’s a fuzzy concept, but generally speaking, it refers to the idea that stuff is mostly made and used at home. You can also, of course, make stuff at home and then trade or sell it elsewhere; given how often houses doubled as workshops, it’s inevitable those two modes will overlap. And piecework, where someone gets paid per item they make, has gone hand-in-hand with home production for centuries, as a way for a household to bring in a little more money. Home production in the sense I mean it here, though, is about the idea of self-sufficiency: rather than buying things ready-made, you make them you and your family, for you and your family.

Measured by the time and effort invested, home production focuses almost entirely on food (including drink) and clothing, and neither one is fully seasonal. Winter still entails agricultural labor, and when it doesn’t, the men are probably working on making or repairing tools they’ll use when the weather warms up, or taking care of livestock. The women are busy turning the raw outputs into actual food, and the aforementioned spinning, which has to fill almost every moment it can if you’re to have enough thread to weave enough cloth to clothe everybody in the family. They might also make simple medicines at home, or crude furniture, or other necessities and minor luxuries, but those are a side note to the overwhelming demands of sustenance and shelter for the body.

And that’s still not the whole story, is it? Blacksmiths have been high on the list of necessary trades since we invented metalworking. (All right, since we invented iron-working. Apparently the proper term for someone who works bronze is a brownsmith!) Successful metalworking requires so much training and specialized knowledge, not to mention equipment, not to mention time, that nobody’s doing that and also being a full-time farmer. Pottery is much the same, because building and operating your own kiln is way too much to add atop everything else. Other things can be done at home, like milling grain, but they’re so labor-intensive that it’s vastly more efficient to have a specialist with the right tools do the job.

This is how “home production” turns out to be a spectrum. Yes, people used to produce most of what they needed at home — but not everything, and at the first opportunity, they started outsourcing certain tasks. If you could buy or trade for thread already spun (perhaps from a local poor spinster), you did; if you could buy or trade for cloth already woven, you did. You were, essentially, buying a respite from the endless labor that is the genuine trad life. Furthermore, specialization of labor is good for us as a society: a dedicated weaver can make finer cloth than someone who’s doing that in her spare time, and god knows a dedicated physician can know more about medicine than someone tossing a few herbs into tea and hoping that will do the job. When you don’t have to do everything yourself, you get better results.

But the belief that the traditional life was somehow purer and better isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. The transcendentalist philosophers of nineteenth century America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, touted the benefits of “simple living” out in nature. In recent years the internet has given them something of an unfair shake; it’s true they weren’t entirely self-sufficient, but neither did they claim to be. (Thoreau in particular has become the target of “his mom did his laundry and brought him sandwiches!” We don’t actually know how his laundry got done, and he himself admits he regularly walked into town to dine with friends and family.) It is true, however, that they approached their vision of simplicity from a relatively privileged direction, and could therefore afford a great deal of assistance and modern convenience. Their lives would have been significantly more difficult if the innovations of the Industrial Revolution had not made things like the production of their clothing faster and cheaper than the womenfolk of their families could manage by hand.

The flip side, of course, is that there can be genuine satisfaction in making stuff yourself. Especially if your job feels very separated from material reality — you spend all your time on the computer moving words or numbers around, all to create something far removed from the physical product, or that never becomes a physical product at all — then sinking your hands into a mass of dough, or sewing your own skirt, or raising vegetables, or any of the other simple tasks of creation often feels rewarding all out of proportion to its necessity . . . or maybe rewarding because it isn’t necessary. It reconnects you with the fruits of your labor, and that can be very good for the brain.

So although I have a ton of issues with the entire “trad” movement (even before we get to the often reactionary politics behind it), I recognize and value some of the impulse there. And for writers, it’s worth not only acknowledging the ugly reality of what real self-sufficiency looks like, but understanding the conditions that make people nostalgic for the concept. I would wholeheartedly believe in a spacefaring civilization where anything can be printed from a replicator on the spot — and therefore has thriving communities of hobbyists who enjoy making stuff by hand instead.

If your mental image of a shepherd is a person with a crook and a dozen sheep on a hillside above a farm, you need to scale up. And also, those sheep probably won’t be on the hillside for very long.

Transhumance is, admittedly, one of those topics where my knowledge is noticeably regional. I’m familiar with cattle ranching in the American West and, more globally, sheepherding — which I believe is similar to goats, both of them being caprines — but much less so with camels, and basically not at all with yaks or llamas or reindeer. I don’t even know if transhumance is a thing practiced with all those species! So take this with a grain of salt.

Having brought up the technical term: what is transhumance? (Not to be confused with transhumanism.) It is the practice of moving livestock between pastures, and in particular, the seasonal patterns thereof. On the extreme end, a herding society may be fully nomadic, packing up everyone and everything to move with the animals. On the nearer end, most people stay put, and only a small number of caretakers have to move around.

One way or another, though, the animals have to move. If you have a decent-sized pasture and just one cow you keep on hand for milking, she might be able to shift from spot to spot in the pasture, letting one area regrow while she grazes on another. As numbers increase, though, there’s no single pasture big enough, and keeping the herd in the same place will rapidly ensure they have nothing to eat. How large a herd you can support in how large an area will vary based on local conditions — good soil and regular rain will bring on faster, lusher growth than poor soil and aridity — but also, shifting pasture isn’t purely a matter of bare survival. Bringing your livestock to fresh grazing will improve the quality of their milk and, in the case of animals like sheep, the fineness of their wool. So the more a region is dedicated to animal husbandry rather than farming, the larger the herds will be and the more transhumance will shape the world around them.

So far, so dry and logistical. Let me take this out of the realm of theory and put it into a shape that might matter for a story: if you lived in Spain in, say, 1540, then twice a year you would watch two and a half million sheep go ambling down the roads.

Spain practiced seasonal transhumance, where livestock move between summer and winter pastures. Thanks to the geography of the peninsula, in summer the sheep lived in the cooler, wetter lands of Old Castile and León, and then in winter they were driven south to the fields and hills of Extremadura and Andalusia. This ensured they had fresh grass year-round, which contributed to the excellence of Spain’s wool industry.

Wasn’t that terribly disruptive to everybody in between those two regions? Hell yes, it was — and for those at the ends of the route, too. Farmers weren’t supposed to plow the pastureland or use it for crops, and as the political power of the Mesta (the association of livestock owners) grew, this led to them pushing for more territory, forcing farmers off their land. To prevent the sheep from trampling crops, there were dedicated rights-of-way for the sheep (called cañadas) that nobody was supposed to build on or cultivate, but of course farmers encroached on those boundaries. And since the sheep had to follow set routes and the people along them hated this disruption, anybody selling lodgings or food often set an extortionate price — which in turn meant the wealthier members of the Mesta, each with thousands of sheep, eventually squeezed out the smaller livestock owners.

Seasonal transhumance on that gobsmacking scale is fairly rare, but smaller versions of it are extremely common. In mountainous areas, the transition is vertical rather than north to south: in the winter livestock will live down in the valleys, then be driven up to the slopes when the weather warms. In these cases a small number of shepherds (or cowherds or goatherds — whatever terms is appropriate) go with them to herd the animals, and to protect them. Those herdsmen have to be tough, because they’re frequently living alone or in very small numbers, in rough accommodations, and vulnerable to all kinds of threats. Outlaws and poachers, mountain lions and wolves, all may have an interest in snacking on an isolated flock.

Doing all of this benefits enormously from assistance. We probably could not have herded large livestock in any meaningful quantities without first domesticating dogs, who can sprint about to keep a herd clumped together or chivvy a straying beast back into the flock. Dogs also double as a warning system and assistant guard against the threats mentioned above. The addition of horses again makes it easier for a small number of humans to control and direct a large number of animals. Cattle ranching on the scale it’s been practiced in the American West is essentially unthinkable without mounted cowboys, as the average herd driven from Texas to the Kansas railheads in the late nineteenth century was three thousand head.

What usually puts an end to this kind of thing is the growth of enclosure. That doesn’t always mean literal fencing (though it can); it just means that land is cut off from common use, reserving it only to the landowner and whatever they choose to do with it. Often there are valid reasons for enclosure, as tighter control over a piece of land means you can do things like complex crop rotations for higher productivity without worrying that somebody’s sheep will interfere . . . but it also generates a huge amount of resentment among those common people, sometimes to the point of outright rebellion.

And sometimes rebellion itself is the cause of transhumance decline. Wars make it hard to move livestock safely across large distances, and with the pattern broken, it may be difficult to get back. Or perhaps you’ve been raising sheep for fleeces, and something causes that market to crater, so it’s no longer worth the expense of moving them back and forth. Conversely, something like an epidemic or an extended dry period can cause transhumance to surge, as there’s no longer as much need for farmland or the soil is no longer as fertile for crops.

So this can be anything from a background detail in a political brangle, to a source of income for an innkeeper on a livestock migration route, to a major inconvenience for a character attempting to travel quickly down roads filled with sheep, to the reason why your lonely shepherd protagonist stumbles across an ancient evil awakening in the hills. (We’ve had plenty of innocent farmboys in the fantasy genre. It’s time for the shepherds to shine!) Just remembering that humans are rarely the only ones living in an area can make a difference to the story!

Even if you work very, very hard with your worldbuilding, you may not be able to get readers to interpret it the way you want them to.

I’ve titled this essay “the past is a foreign country” because that’s a recognizable phrase (though few people know it’s from a book by the English novelist L. P. Hartley), and of course our worldbuilding often draws inspiration from the past — at least until we gain the ability to peer into the future. But I’m referring more broadly to the worlds we make, and the difficulty of translating fictional cultural differences effectively to your audience.

We touched on this a couple of months ago with the discussion of friendship, and how same-sex bonds could be expressed in astonishingly passionate terms compared to our models of friendship today. If you write that into a story now, you can insist all you like that it doesn’t imply anything more; some readers, maybe even most of them, are likely to find romantic and sexual overtones in it anyway. Those characters never sleep together? Maybe they’re asexual. They sleep with opposite-sex partners? Maybe they’re closeted or bi, and just not acting on those particular impulses. Especially since representations of queer desire have still not caught up with the straight kind, people open to those interpretations may have a hard time accepting that those two characters really are “just friends.”

The same can go for gendered behavior in general. I can say all I want — in keeping with cultural standards elsewhere and elsewhen — that crying is a perfectly masculine behavior, an expression of the powerful emotions felt by a properly manly heart. My modern Western readers will still have a hard time shaking the modern Western assumption that men should not shed more than perhaps a single stoic tear. If my heroic male character breaks out sobbing for anything other than the climactic death of a beloved character (and maybe even then), it’s going to carry a whiff of weakness, regardless of what standards prevail within the setting.

I’ve also talked about this in the context of beauty. We’re constantly bombarded with images and videos showing us the current ideal and marketing the notion that anything else is unattractive. Some forms of this, I suspect, are more amenable than others to worldbuilding in a different direction: if my story sings the praises of dark skin and beautiful clouds of hair, it’s clear that I’m pushing back against the white default (and I like to think my readers would be on board). It’s going to be a lot harder to make them understand why it’s appealing for people to black out their teeth, so their mouths look like empty holes. Even with all my anthropological training mustered to help me understand it, I look at photos of people with blackened teeth and see something that evokes a horror movie, not beauty.

Humor is notoriously difficult to translate from one culture to another. Now imagine making it up! This can be an effective way to signal cultural difference; if the alien ambassador laughs uproariously at seeing someone use a fork or tells a joke about that hilarious time his friend used the wrong meter in his poem, the reader receives that as evidence of very different behaviors and expectations. Much more difficult is establishing a variant framework of humor for your protagonist, where they find things funny that the reader does not share but is invited to empathize with. The best you can likely hope for is, through persistent effort, to establish what that framework is. Then, by the end of the story, the reader may recognize that what just happened will be considered funny — but that’s not the same thing as the reader laughing.

Or maybe what you’re going for is the opposite of funny, and your challenge is not so much making it register as making it feel real. If you read history — or, alas, if you encounter certain problems in the world today — you’ll eventually hit instances of bigotry that seem howlingly cartoonish. Whether they have to do with race, gender, class, religion, or any other point of difference, you can find instances of people saying things and committing acts that come across as absolutely and incomprehensibly inhuman.

You can put these in a story, of course. But I know authors who have written their own real-life experiences into their fiction . . . then have looked at the result, shaken their heads, and taken them out again. Because even when it’s reproduced directly from reality, the actual effect feels not real; it doesn’t produce the emotional result the author was going for. It winds up being distancing.

I particularly think about this in the context of writing war. Military campaigns of the past often included atrocities that, while they may be smaller than the Holocaust on a raw scale, were so pervasive and appalling that to put them on the page would seem like absurd, mustache-twirling villainy. Vlad the Impaler is said not merely to have impaled people, but to have gathered up three hundred Saxon boys and executed them either by that method or by burning, entirely because the leaders of the towns of their homeland were supporting his opponent in a civil war. And that’s just one example! The routine cruelty of such rulers is so over-the-top — and trust me, ol’ Vlad was hardly the only one or even the worst — that reading too much of it winds up numbing rather than horrifying.

What all of this means in practice is that sometimes the most important question is not “is this realistic?” but “is this effective for my story?” Is your reader likely to get the intended emotional effect from it, or are you better served by changing tactics and taking a different route to your point? Sometimes the answer will be that you want to stand your ground; you want to put that detail on the page, whether it’s inspired by a historical factoid or your own personal experience, even if it means the reader may not receive it as you intended. That’s a valid choice! At other times, you may decide that you prefer an alternative approach. You choose one instance of wartime horror to focus on in detail, rather than subjecting the reader to the full litany of atrocities. You pick at the edges of our current beauty standards or assumptions about masculinity, chipping away at cracks in that edifice rather than running at it headfirst.

. . . but maybe don’t try to invent an alternate framework of humor the reader is supposed to find funny. I know we’re writing speculative fiction, but some mountains might just be too steep to climb!