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!

“History is written by the victors” is a familiar adage, and it holds a lot of truth in it. But as an analysis of who specifically is writing the history, and what they’re out to do, it falls a bit short.

First of all, we should acknowledge that history — like many intellectual fields, and perhaps more than some — really does involve standing on the shoulders of, if not giants, then at least the ordinary-sized people who came before you. Until we invent time travel, there’s no way to go back and get fresh primary data on, say, the Battle of Marathon; we have a limited number of ancient sources on any particular topic, and some of those sources are probably based on their fellows, narrowing the pool even further. There are also histories we only know about because a later historian mentioned, summarized, or outright quoted those in the course of writing their own work. Archaeology can fill in some gaps, but not all of them, and not of all kinds. When we’re extremely lucky, a document turns up that contains a previously unknown fragment of somebody’s history, but that’s rare.

So who are the giants whose shoulders we’re standing on?

Some of them are, to put it bluntly, dilettantes. Some guy (it’s usually a guy) with time and money decides to write a history of his current era, a past one, or — if he’s feeling really ambitious — a sweeping account of everything up to the present moment, at least in his own land, or maybe the whole region. Or the whole history of the world! If he’s writing about the more distant past, he assembles all the previous histories he can gets his hands on and synthesizes them into one narrative, maybe with the aforementioned summaries and quotations. But what does he do when those sources disagree? If he’s a rigorous fellow, he’ll note the disagreements and perhaps offer his own judgment on which one is more reliable. If he’s not, then he’ll just choose and not tell you . . . or even make up his own answer, based on his philosophical convictions and what “makes sense.”

But while the dilettantes can be interesting, where I find this actually fruitful for worldbuilding is the more official end, where the Powers That Be get involved.

It’s not uncommon in history, but vanishingly rare in the fiction I’ve read, for there to be a royal chronicler of some sort whose job is to record the events of the monarch’s reign. This can be anywhere from a tool of governance (“let’s look up how we handled a similar situation before”) to an exercise in ego-stroking — with those two options not being mutually exclusive! It can also be a tool of legitimization, when the chronicler’s job extends past the current reign into the events that came before. A history of a dynasty burnishes the credentials of its current scion; if the dynasty is new, this may be even more important, as the chronicler lays out the arguments — genealogical, supernatural, or what have you — that justify why the current guy ought to be on the throne.

. . . and yes, this does sometimes mean that “history” ought to have sarcasm quotes around it. A chronicler’s job is not always to record fact, but rather to create a historical narrative that favors his employer. Someone who refuses will rapidly be out of a job, imprisoned, or even executed — and the latter two fates can also befall the dilettante who writes an unfavorable account.

But not always! While it’s often true, especially in older eras, that history is written to flatter those in power, there are some fascinating exceptions.

The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty from Korea are a truly astonishing historical resource, covering nearly five hundred years in nearly nineteen hundred volumes. But even more impressive than their scale is their completeness and integrity, thanks to a well-regulated system. There were eight historians tasked with recording current affairs; the king was always accompanied by at least one and forbidden to conduct official business without a historian present. Then, after he died, those daily records and other sources like administrative accounts were compiled into an official version whose drafting and revision were overseen by ministers and scholars.

What’s truly gobsmacking here is the information security they practiced. After the official account was finalized, all its sources were destroyed, to prevent information from leaking out via other routes. Sounds like a recipe for flattering revisionist history, right? Except that even the king himself was not permitted to read the official history. Only authorized historians could do so, and if they spilled anything about what it said — much less tried to change it — they faced serious punishment. They had so much editorial independence and legal protection that it led to a famous incident still remembered more than six hundred years later: when King Taejong fell off his horse and tried to order his accompanying historian not to record that event, not only did the historian note the fall, but he also included the order he ignored.

Furthermore, the Veritable Records existed in multiple copies held in different locations — a security measure that’s the only reason we still have the earlier volumes, since all but one copy were destroyed during the sixteenth-century Japanese invasion. Making those duplicates was of course aided by the existence of printing presses: by the time the Veritable Records began, Korea had movable type. Doing the same thing in, say, eighth-century Europe would have been wildly more difficult.

If similar security measures had been taken with the text known as the Secret History of the Mongols, we might not now have the massively frustrating gap left by someone literally cutting pages out of it. The last bit of text before the hole has Genghis Khan saying “Let us reward our female offspring” — and given that other records allow us to piece together the scale of power and influence his daughters wielded, it’s a tantalizing lacuna. I await someone with the proper Mongolian chops to give us the alternate history we deserve, about one of them rising to become khatun over her father’s mighty empire!

Given the interest right now in “dark academia” as a subgenre, I’m a little sad we don’t have more stories about this process of making history and all the tensions around it. Whether it’s the discovery of some fragmentary text that undermines the official narrative, a royal chronicler balancing a commitment to truth against the desire to keep his head on his shoulders, or a Joseon-style historian defending a priceless archive against political attack, I feel like there’s real potential there!

Up front, I should say that “the language of flowers” is mostly bogus.

That’s not to say there is no symbolism in flowers and other kinds of plants! There absolutely is; in fact, there must be, so long as human culture has a tendency to trot out particular species or colors in particular contexts, and nature has a tendency to make some things bloom or sprout or leaf out at certain times of year. We will build up associations, because that’s how our brains work.

Some of those associations will be based on color (whose symbolism was previously covered in Year Nine). Red is commonly linked with passion; therefore the floral-industrial complex has poured untold amounts of money into convincing us that only red roses are acceptable for romantic occasions like Valentine’s Day. But come wedding day, you’ll often see more white, because of the connection to innocence and virginity.

Other, less visible qualities can give also rise to certain associations. Notably, it’s extremely common for hallucinogens to evoke witchcraft and spirits — an easy linkage to understand! After all, hallucinogens are a great way to make you feel like you’re flying or otherwise experiencing magic. And, naturally, quite a few poisonous plants have dark connotations, thanks to their peril and the opportunity they afford for murder.

Or perhaps it’s the environment of the flowers. Orchids, which grow naturally in remote forests where people rarely go, are a Chinese emblem of the virtuous man, who ought to cultivate his finer qualities regardless of the approbation of others. Somewhat similarly, the lotus, rising out of muddy water to reveal its clean beauty, represents purity, enlightenment, and escape from the cycle of death and rebirth.

Behavior can play its part, too! Japanese camellias are linked with a variety of qualities like elegance and strength, but you’re not supposed to give them to a sick person, e.g. when bringing a bouquet to the hospital. Why? Because that species of camellia drops its entire flower at once, in a single piece, as if it’s been decapitated. Not a good omen. (In fact, some cultures feel it’s deeply inappropriate to give a bouquet of any kind to someone in the hospital, lest the wilting of the cut flowers symbolically imply the patient will continue to sicken and eventually die.)

Often, however, the symbolism is just . . . there? I’m not sure anybody has a good answer for why, in European culture, lilies are associated with funerals, other than “it’s been true for a very long time.” And even if we do have a potential answer — e.g. I’ve heard it said the soul is returning to a state of innocence, one of the qualities implied by lilies — that may be a retroactive explanation, rather than one backed up by historical evidence.

But you may have noticed me using phrases like “one of the qualities” or “a variety of qualities.” Symbolism is rarely a pure, one-to-one equation . . . and that brings us back to the language of flowers, and why it was probably never quite the thing the internet likes to claim.

The language of flowers is supposedly a form of cryptography, used to send coded messages through bouquets, boutonnières, and so on. If you try to research this, you will find elaborate claims for how it all worked — but those claims rarely cite primary sources, and they rarely hold water.

Starting with the fact that they frequently contradict each other. Do white carnations represent first love, or disdain? Do purple lilacs signify first love, or death? Any system of communication needs enough consistency for the sender and receiver to have reasonable certainty they’re working with the same message. I’ve seen websites claim this is why it was very important to be sure your recipient had the same dictionary of floriography as you do . . . but if that were true, we’d have a much more significant historical corpus of such dictionaries than we do. And were people really running around asking “Do you have Horton’s Glossary of Flowers? No, Murrow’s Floral Lexicon — drat, I don’t have that; I’ll have to go to the bookseller before I send you your bouquet tomorrow — just be sure not to use An A to Z of Floriography; I don’t want you thinking I’m telling you to die –” It seems unlikely.

Also, as systems of cryptography go, flowers are wildly insecure. Their message is right there, out in the open! If lovers were secretly communicating through bouquets, you can bet that Victorian mothers would have acquired dictionaries posthaste to vet anything their daughters received. Meanwhile, if a gentleman showed up to an event wearing an ambrosia boutonnière to signify that he returns a lady’s love, how many ladies there would think that message was meant for them? A bouquet sent as a gift can be targeted to the recipient, but any other display risks being broadcast to too many people. (This is also a major flaw in the supposed language of fans, though at least in that case, the signal is transient and could perhaps be “aimed” via eye contact. In reality, however, the language of fans was a nineteenth-century marketing gambit by fan manufacturers.)

Going back to that ambrosia boutonnière: just where did our gentleman get it? Kate Greenaway’s The Language of Flowers — an 1884 book that seems to be the main primary source of much writing on this topic — lists hundreds of flowers. Even with hothouses, I’m dubious that anybody would be able to get hold of, say, red balsam on demand, just so they could signal “touch me not.” On the receiving end, it assumes a high degree of botanical knowledge: could you tell the difference between marsh mallow, Syrian mallow, and Venetian mallow? Or recognize mesembryanthemum and myrobalan on sight? I know I couldn’t.

As usual, though, what’s realistic in history need not restrict what can fly in fiction. Thomas West’s City of Iron and Ivy takes this idea and runs for the end zone, with flowers grown by magic and carrying equally supernatural effects. That gets around the hothouse problem, and where flowers can do more than just communicate, it would absolutely be worth people’s time to learn the differences between various blooms. So despite the cynical objections above, I would love to see more of this in spec fic! I just appreciate it more when there’s attention paid to the practicalities, rather than swallowing hook, line, and sinker the accreted pile of internet claims about how all this supposedly worked in the past.

And, of course, nothing stops you from leaning into plant symbolism more broadly, letting go of the idea that it might be for coded communication. In fact, this is a good idea, because as I said at the start, all cultures have associations for many of the plants around them. Leaning into that, even with just a few words about how a yew tree in someone’s garden gives it a dark, funerary vibe, adds a tinge of realism and depth.

It’s possible, even in surprisingly ancient times, to have hugely sprawling cities — but they’re not quite the same type of sprawl we see today. The reason is simple: how are you going to get around?

A city that is a mile or so across can be traversed on foot in half an hour, give or take, depending on how fast the individual in question walks and how much traffic and crowding get in their way. Two miles, you can cross it in an hour, or get from the periphery to the center in half an hour. And when you look at historical cities in places like Europe, you frequently find that’s about how big they are. One to four square miles is a manageable size.

Cities with a larger footprint did exist, but they require you to change what you imagine when you think “city.” It’s more like the agrarian version of suburban sprawl — and, as Annalee Newitz mentions in Four Lost Cities when discussing Angkor, there’s some reason to think that pre-modern urbanism in tropical areas simply looks different than it does in temperate zones, due to differences in agriculture. Lidar surveys indicate that Angkor may have covered three hundred and ninety square miles! But that’s not a thousand square kilometers of densely packed buildings surrounded by a wall; that’s a complex patchwork of fields, houses, temples, and markets, connected by the complex works of irrigation infrastructure that were necessary to maintain it all.

That infrastructure points us toward one possible solution for getting around an enormous city: go by water. I’ve mentioned before that water transport is often more efficient than land until you get motorized options . . . but when it comes to cities, that’s far from a perfect answer.

See, odds are good that you’ll be more reliant on muscle power to move the boat, with a paddle, oars, or pole, rather than being able to benefit from natural forces. A river’s current will carry you downstream just fine — but going home? Now you have to fight that force. (Unless the river is tidal in that reach, but then you’re constrained to the timing of tides.) And within an urban context, you have much less space to maneuver about with wind. Don’t get me wrong; water is still often better. One or two people can operate a boat full of produce brought in from an outlying field, as opposed to needing to wrangle a draft animal for a cart or being limited to what they can carry on their own backs. But it’s not as dramatic of an improvement as being able to sail an entire ship or barge hundreds of miles for long-distance transport.

I’m talking about produce because that’s going to be the most common reason people in a large city need to move around. (Other goods, too, but food is the first ten items on the list of “what needs to be transported in or the city dies.” Water pretty much has to be there already or the city is dead to begin with.) Commuting of the sort that’s a dreary feature of daily life for many people in modern times was vastly less common in the past, because most people lived at or very near their places of work, i.e. within walking distance.

This starts to change with the Industrial Revolution — but not because we got motorized transport, not right away. Instead you started having factories that employed huge numbers of people in a very small area, and while some of them had associated lodgings nearby, the explosion of urban populations as people came thronging there for work meant that density became horrifically unmanageable. Cities had to spread outward, and somebody had to come up with a way to move people around faster.

Early on, the answer to this was the horse-drawn omnibus. (Which is where we get the word “bus” from; in older works, you see an apostrophe marking the bit we dropped, as ‘bus.) They were essentially the same idea as the hired coaches between cities, just repurposed for urban use and focused far more on moving passengers than luggage. They also didn’t require buying a ticket in advance, instead having the kind of hop-on, hop-off service we’re used to nowadays. As the nineteenth century progressed, many of them became double-decker buses, with passengers sitting on the roof as well as inside the carriage — though the top was usually only for men, as women would have more difficulty climbing the ladder in their dresses, and be exposing themselves to up-skirt ogling besides.

The earliest attempt at this was in the seventeenth century . . . so does that mean it could exist in any era? Perhaps, but I suspect the answer is that it’s unlikely. The challenge of the omnibus is making it sturdy and stable enough not to be a hazard to its passengers — at least, by the lax safety standards of the Victorian era — and also making the service profitable. Industrialization meant it was easier to produce steel for things like braces and wheel rims, and the sheer scale of demand for transportation allowed for entire networks of routes, rather than just one line that might or might not see enough use. Earlier eras are not going to offer the same favorable conditions.

Of course, we didn’t stop at horsebuses. Laying down metal rails in the street greatly increased the amount of weight the horses could pull (and gave passengers a smoother ride to boot); then we got engines that could move the trams in place of the horses; then we realized we could put the trams underground, where traffic wouldn’t slow them down, and we were off to the races with subways. Meanwhile, motorized water transport made regular large-scale ferry services possible, without having to worry as much about the vagaries of current, wind, or tide.

Expanding public transit made it easier to expand cities, because now people could live farther away from the noise and the stench, without spending half their day getting to work and the other half getting home again. Even now, though, it can often be an imperfect solution, because not all areas are equally served. If you look at a map of the London Underground, you’ll see that while the north side of the Thames has an abundance of lines, the southern bank — where there are fewer elites and important institutions — has vastly less. It isn’t always the case, though, that elite = access; where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the residents of wealthy Marin County to the north consistently oppose efforts to extend public transit up to their neighborhoods, because then the hoi polloi could get there more easily.

I should note in closing that public transit is not always mass transit. Our modern taxis and pedicabs are the descendants of horse-drawn hackney carriages and human-carried sedan chairs for hire, both of which became common long before we had omnibuses running regular services for large numbers of people. Those more individualized options really only require enough urban density for profit, and enough people with the money to pay for them — you’re not likely to see them hanging around slums waiting for passengers. (Even today, it can be notoriously difficult to get a taxi in a bad part of town.)

And, as usual, speculative fiction throws a few wrinkles into the mix! Science fiction often includes mass transit, because most of it assumes both the technology for such a thing and populations on a scale to make it necessary. Fantasy, by contrast, often leaves it out — but it doesn’t have to! Depending on how magic works, you could have self-propelled vehicles, animated constructs pulling them, even regular flying carpet service from the suburbs to the urban core . . . or no magic at all, beyond the straightforward ingenuity of past invention.

Suburbs are such a characteristic feature of the twentieth century, especially here in the United States, that you’d be forgiven for assuming they’re a wholly modern phenomenon. In fact, the general concept of “not quite in the city, but very much associated with it” is very old; it’s just the scale and to some extent the organization of it that changes.

And it isn’t hard to see why. Cities are, by nature, going to be noisier, smellier, and more crowded than the countryside; because of that, it’s practically a universal law that rich people will want to get away from them — but not too far away. They’ll maintain villas or equivalent just outside the city walls, within easy distance so they can go in for an afternoon or a day, then retire to more comfortable surroundings at night. They get all the economic and political benefits of being close to where the action is, without subjecting themselves to too many of the downsides.

Living outside the city isn’t only for the rich, though. Most pre-modern cities are going to have vegetable gardens and/or dairy farms outside their walls, which means they’ll probably also have the houses of the people tending those gardens and farms, and it isn’t uncommon for those to nucleate slightly into villages. After all, you don’t want to have to walk into the city for everything; much more convenient to have your parish church and local alehouse (or regional equivalents) closer at hand.

These things don’t form evenly. If you look at early modern maps — which are usually the first point at which we can see anything like accurate visual representation — they very much tend to string out along the major roads leading to and from the city. That’s because they also serve the function of catering to travelers, who might prefer to lodge just outside the city rather than in its (noisy, smelly, crowded) heart. Or the outskirts are where those travelers leave their horses and carriages, rather than trying to wrangle such things in tighter confines. Or they pause to eat and freshen up, then continue on in. The city winds up looking like an octopus, with legs stretching in all directions.

But that’s the thin end of the suburban wedge — the sort of thing called a fauborg in French, with the English “fore-town” being a less common equivalent. (A “suburb” is “below the city,” and reflects the tendency to build fortified towns on hilltops, meaning that their outlying settlements are literally below them.) So long as urban populations remain small, so will their penumbra.

As soon as something causes the city to boom, though, it’s going to have growing pains. Maybe the capital shifts there, or a war causes refugees to flood in, or famine and economic disaster hit the countryside, or industrialization creates a huge new demand for labor. Suddenly you have a lot more people, and the very pressing question of where to put them. Are existing sites in the city sufficient to take in these people? And even if the answer is “yes,” will they? Especially if the influx consists of refugees and penniless migrants, local establishments may not want to rent to them, or local government may forbid them to settle within the city’s bounds.

Since those people still want to be in or near the city, though, they’re going to crowd as close as they can get — and I do mean crowd. The kind of shanty town that springs up in these circumstances usually has an insanely high population density, not least because the kind of people shoved out to the margins don’t have a lot of money to spend on construction. The buildings may barely even merit the name, being a conglomeration of tents, lean-tos, and whatever makeshift materials can be pressed into service, or shoddy walls and roofs thrown up in a hurry that may come down even faster. There’s little to no infrastructure, and because these places are frequently outside the official authority of the city, there’s little to no governance. Disease and crime are extremely high — but the people who live there can’t just afford to pack up and go somewhere else. They have no choice but to cope.

Until, of course, something else intervenes. Quite frequently that is fire: all it takes is one spark and a place like this is liable to go up in flames. Then, since the people who lived there almost certainly have no legal title to the land, it’s easy for someone else to snap that up, or for whoever owned it in the first place to seize their chance to evict everyone en masse. The area is unlikely to revert to green field pastoralism, though, because by now you’re no longer looking at a modest little city supplied by its neighboring vegetable gardens. If the settlement has grown enough to have this kind of extramural slum, odds are very good that it will also grow straight into the space left behind: gentrification by fire.

Throw all of these factors into a pot together, and you get the process by which a city grows. I used the term “extramural” there very deliberately, because in any society without efficient artillery or equivalent, most cities are going to be walled, and these elite houses, neighboring villages, and suburban slums are outside that line. But walls aren’t a one-and-done affair; new ones may be built farther out, with or without demolishing the older version first. If you look at the historical geography of Constantinople, you’ll find a steady march up the peninsula on which the city sits, with the Severan Wall enclosing a modest area, the Constantinian Wall significantly farther out, and the famous Theodosian Walls farther still. You can track the growth of the city by how much later rulers felt needed to be protected.

Or cities can grow without moving their walls. London and Westminster were separate settlements about two miles (three kilometers) apart, but a lot of business was in London while much of the work of government was in Westminster. When an enterprising earl received a chunk of the land between them in the mid-sixteenth century, he deliberately constructed a fashionable area — now Covent Garden Square — to attract the kind of rich tenants who might be regularly visiting both places. It was the prototype of a later building spree that created the West End we see today, part and parcel of how for the last two or three hundred years, London has been steadily absorbing those and all the smaller towns around it. Nor is it the only one: many other cities worldwide have sprawled to an enormous footprint many times larger than their original cores.

What’s different about modern suburbs — especially in the U.S. — is that they’re often entirely new construction, along the lines of Covent Garden, with developers creating communities out of whole cloth. Or perhaps I shouldn’t say “communities,” because that implies a kind of social fabric that rarely exists there. Many of these places get referred to with phrases like “bedroom town,” pointing at the way residents are expected to sleep but not really live there. The worst of them have few if any local businesses, so that you have to conduct all your shopping, doctor’s visits, and outside entertainments somewhere else.

But to get that kind of suburb, you need something else in the mix: transportation. And that’s next week’s essay!

It may seem something of a non sequitur to swerve from talking about friendship to public baths, especially when that latter topic has come up before. But Year Four‘s essay focused on such baths as a place one goes to get clean, devoting only half a sentence to the notion that they might also be — often were, and are — a social nexus.

For this to make sense, you have to expand your mental image well past bathing as the modern goal-oriented shower at home (get in, get clean, get out), and think more in terms of a spa. Or the better comparison nowadays might be a beauty salon, the kind of place you go to get your hair cut, dyed, and/or styled, while somebody nearby is having their nails done. These tasks can take a while, and if your local salon has a clientele of regulars who know each other and the staff, of course people will fill the time with conversation. (Or we did, before people had smartphones to stare at instead.)

Public baths can be just a place to get clean, but that’s rarely all they are. As a result, going to one is less likely to be an errand you check off in the middle of your busy day and more likely to be a good chunk of the day all on its own, as you attend to a variety of bodily needs — at least if you’re sufficiently wealthy that you can afford the add-on services, not just quick scrub.

Haircuts are a perennial need, of course, with frequency depending on style, and some kinds of hairdos (especially for women) that take enough time to set up that once done, you leave it in place for a week or more. Those with facial hair may need it trimmed or shaved off, whatever’s the fashion; the same can be true of those who need a bald scalp for whatever reason, whether it’s status, religion, clearing the way for a wig, or getting rid of lice. Nails also need care, and polish or dyes for those go back thousands of years. Massages are a natural accompaniment when the muscles have been relaxed by warm water — and, yes, sometimes the “massages” are of the euphemistic kind; bathhouses are a notorious site of sexual activity, be that prostitution or unpaid hookups of an illicit (e.g. homosexual) type.

But massages in the therapeutic sense lead us toward more general medical services. And it turns out that the notion of going to a place of bathing for its “healing waters” is not be entirely bogus! Analysis of the waters in Bath, England — famed as a healing center since pre-Roman times — recently uncovered fifteen different species of beneficial bacteria that can help combat E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and other prime culprits for infection. Mind you, it’s also possible for the waters of a communal bathing place to become a filthy breeding ground for bacteria that are much less friendly . . .

(I should note, by the way, that concerns over hygiene have also been used as cover for less admirable impulses. Where bathing is communal, you have the question of who’s allowed in: not just gender segregation, but also class and racial. Just a bit to the north of me are the remains of the Sutro Baths, an indoor public swimming pool in San Francisco that in 1897 lost a legal battle over prohibiting a Black man from using their facilities. Racists absolutely couched their efforts at discrimination in health terms, casting minorities as inherently “dirty” spreaders of disease.)

The use of public baths for broader medical purposes means that going to such a place could be anything from a quick dip, to your entire afternoon, to several weeks of leisure while you “take the waters” in a suitably tony establishment. So let’s look at what kinds of social opportunity that affords!

If it’s a regular item on your schedule, odds are fairly good that you can expect to see certain friends (or people you emphatically do not consider friends) every time you visit. That gives you a chance to at least exchange greetings and maybe some quick news about what’s going on in your lives: not an in-depth conversation, but that isn’t needed when you see each other every week.

Should you be spending more time there, however, more possibilities open up. Steam baths, saunas, and soaking pools give you a reason to lounge around for a while, perhaps enjoying a snack or a drink, or reading a newspaper if your society has those. Now the bath is a place you might go specifically for the purpose of catching up on news and gossip — useful if a character is trying to investigate something! It can also be an unparalleled opportunity to schmooze, with a socially adept character inserting themself into a nearby conversation with an interesting tidbit or a clever bon mot. The more exclusive the establishment, the more likely it is that this is one of the places the old boys’ network (of whatever gender) operates, and gaining access is a great way to get a leg up.

And when it’s not just the local bath but a whole town like Bath, now you’re looking at sociability on the scale of tourism or a vacation. Whole families or groups of friends go there together, and being invited to join such an excursion signals a particular level of belonging. These trips might be seasonal — especially if the site is known for its mild climate — or maybe everybody with the money and freedom to do so decamps there in times of pestilence, hoping the healing waters may protect them. If enough people have gone at once, then this becomes the scenario you’ve seen in Regency romances: lots of maneuvering around courtship and marriage, with or without a side order of political intrigue.

I have to admit, though, that the core element here always feels a little odd to me. I grew up in a culture that’s fine with swimming pools but emphatically does not expect people to get naked around each other — which is kind of necessary if you’re trying to get clean! When I’ve been at an athletic club with a steam room or sauna, clients are expected to wear towels over key areas. So the notion of some key stages for socialization being clothing-optional is just weird.

But weird is fine. Weird is an opportunity for worldbuilding!

I say on a fairly regular basis that we are social primates. But there are limits to that; our brains are adapted for small groups, and cope much less well with hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of people. It’s therefore not surprising that we’ve developed tons of ways of dividing society into smaller, more manageable sets: families, neighborhoods, co-workers, etc. And clubs — which, for lack of a better umbrella term, I’m going to use for a whole swath of voluntary associations.

Because of the breadth of scope implied there, some types of club have already appeared in previous essays. The gangs of Year Six, for example, or the craft guilds of Year Seven, or the mystery cults of Year Eight, or the burial societies of Year Nine: all of these are examples of how people may club together for various purposes.

But if that were all, this wouldn’t merit an essay. So let’s talk about the fun end of things: secret societies and their ilk.

There are differing levels of secrecy in play here. The peak would be a society whose existence, membership, and activities are completely unsuspected by outsiders . . . but good luck pulling that off. In theory these absolutely exist, then and now, and I’m just not aware of them because they do such a flawless job of staying hidden. What we know of human behavior and security failures, however, means this is generally unlikely: sooner or later, word will get out. For this reason, I tend to side-eye such groups in stories — though if they have mind-control magic or similar methods available to them, then maybe they can indeed scrub all knowledge of themselves from the broader world.

More often, though, secrecy operates at a less restrictive level. The group is known to exist, but outsiders don’t know who’s a member. The membership is known, but they don’t speak of their business outside their ranks. The membership is known and engages in public activity, but rumors persist that that’s just the face they present to the world, and behind the scenes, they get up to all kinds of nefarious deeds.

This is, of course, the stuff of conspiracy theories. If you “know” a group exists, but there’s no proof of anybody being a member, it’s probably nothing more than rumor — but good luck disproving a rumor. If a group definitely exists, but they won’t talk about themselves, why not? What are they hiding? In the long run, this can become a form of corrosive distrust, either for one paranoid individual or for whole communities, where they wind up doubting all the available evidence and insisting that something else must be going on behind the scenes.

But for stories? This can be great, because it automatically introduces tension and intrigue to the narrative. And secret societies do genuinely exist, because if there’s one thing we love more than belonging to a group, it’s belonging to a special group, one where your membership means being inducted to privileges — including knowledge — that not everyone else gets. That heightens the feeling of social connection with your fellow members. Secret societies are also extremely prone to ritualizing their business, holding elaborate ceremonies for inducting new members or promoting someone within their ranks, and even dressing up their ordinary meetings with special robes and solemn formalities: measures that strengthen the bond between members, and help ensure that nobody will break ranks.

That helps explain why quite a few secret societies have no particular purpose beyond their own existence. The infamous Skull and Bones, a secret society for students at Yale, doesn’t carry out any public activities that I’m aware of, which differentiates it from the more ordinary student clubs organized around a certain mission or area of interest. It’s simply a way for a select group of individuals to join an elite tradition, forging connections with each other which may benefit them going forward. In this they are akin to the gentlemen’s clubs that began to form in Britain around the seventeenth century, although those latter often had some ostensible unifying theme: military service, political affiliation, or alumni of a certain university.

Unsurprisingly, it’s extremely common to find that members of such clubs and societies go on to careers in politics. These are the the “old boys’ networks” in action — very specifically boys, since many of them resisted or to this day resist admitting women to their ranks. (Though there are women’s secret societies as well, e.g. the Sande in West Africa.) To the extent that a group of this kind has a purpose, it’s the furtherance of its members’ power . . . which readily lends itself to conspiracy theories about a plan for world domination.

That last, of course, is the stuff of the Illuminati and the Freemasons — at least in folklore. The actual Bavarian Illuminati simply wanted to oppose superstition and monarchical abuses of power, but after their suppression in the eighteenth century, some people believed they continued in secret, blaming them for every kind of event and social movement imaginable, all around the world. (I say “blame” because usually people assume these later Illuminati to be nefarious, rather than crediting them with shifts the speaker thinks are desirable.) The facts that the Freemasons publicly exist, each Grand Lodge is independent without answering to a top authority, and (in the Anglo-American tradition) they explicitly prohibit discussions of religion or politics within their lodges, do not keep them from being the focus of similar rumors of machinations for a New World Order.

In some cases there may be real evidence of foul activities. The Ku Klux Klan has not just secretly but publicly and with pride carried out murder and acts of terror against Black people, explicitly to further a white supremacist agenda. Some instances of malicious groups, however, are very much a “handle with care” situation, as with the “leopard” or “human leopard” (sometimes also crocodile and chimpanzee) societies of late colonial West Africa: these do genuinely seem to have existed, may have committed murder, and in some cases possibly did engage in cannibalism . . . but given how much those became a stereotype of racist pulp fiction, I would proceed with a great deal of caution before trying to insert anything like that into a story.

Having dwelt a lot on the negative side, though, I’d like to note that isn’t the whole story of clubs. Fraternal orders like the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Knights of Columbus, or the Odd Fellows may have the ritual elements, but their purpose is often openly charitable or oriented toward aid. Groups like the burial societies I mentioned before fall under the header of “friendly societies” or “benefit societies,” which seek to help members support each other and/or outsiders like immigrants or the indigent poor; depending on their focus, these swing in the direction of cooperatives or volunteer organizations. Even groups with a primary focus like religion may take on such missions: the Catholic Trinitarian monastic order is officially the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and Captives, because the ransom of Christian captives held in other lands was a core principle upon which they were founded. (In modern times, where that’s a less common problem, they evangelize and help immigrants.)

What all these groups have in common is the use of social bonding to help further their purpose, whether that’s the advancement of members’ political careers, the spread of religion, or the protection of orphans. Probably all of us know that merely donating money to an organization creates a weak feeling of attachment at best. By contrast, face-to-face interaction with a small enough group of fellow members that you know them all as friends — at least in the loose sense of that word — is a far more powerful lever for motivation. We like to feel as if we belong, and once we do, we don’t want to let our fellows down.

In our increasingly digital, disconnected world, that’s a useful thing to keep in mind.

So far we’ve been talking about friendship in a one-to-one sense, as a relationship between only two people at a time. But of course, we all exist in a much larger social world — even during periods when that existence is best defined by a position firmly outside the circle. What does friendship look like when we open up our scope?

Well, for starters, “friendship” starts to be a word that maybe ought to have sarcasm quotes around it. We are social primates, and unfortunately, that entails some pretty nasty behavior alongside the nice stuff. As I said last week, depending on how you use the term, a friend might just be somebody you know and haven’t outright declared an enemy or dead to you. Or, depending on how you use the term . . . your “friend” might indeed be somebody you are out to hurt.

If that sounds like a particular negative feminine stereotype, you’re not wrong: in our society, teenaged girls in particular are proverbial for how horribly they may treat their so-called friends. This isn’t inherent to being adolescent and female, though; it tends to show up anywhere you foster the kind of hothouse atmosphere where a bunch of people are trapped together and can only rise socially by climbing over each other.

And that means it can describe a royal court every bit as much as a high school! Reading about the interpersonal dynamics of Elizabeth I’s nobles and ministers, I was struck by how much their behavior resembled the cliques and grudges of teenagers. The specifics differed — A offended B, so B arranged to have one of A’s political hangers-on denied the right of entry to the more exclusive precincts of the royal presence — but the vibes were much the same.

Associating this specifically with women is therefore not entirely true, because men can behave in similar ways. It’s also not entirely false, though, because control of social dynamics is a form of soft power, and in a patriarchal society where women are denied access to the formal levers of government, soft power is the only kind they can use. So now the question becomes: how do you acquire that power?

Some of it comes from obvious sources. If a person has some more formal type of authority — or, in the case of a woman, is associated with a man who has such authority — that tends to give their social presence more weight. After all, offending the prime minister or the wife of the Lord Treasurer might mean all kinds of political difficulties, whereas gaining their friendship could open new doors. This is true even at lower levels of society than a royal court; the wife of a town mayor or village headman probably has a certain amount of social cachet.

Similarly, wealth brings the ability to host more people more extravagantly, which is beneficial no matter what scale of party you’re looking at. Though in many cases, the power of wealth has to be evaluated in light of status: where commerce is scorned, then a woman from a merchant family, be she never so rich, will be seen as more déclassé than a noblewoman of more modest means. The former can still win social authority, but she’ll have to work harder for it.

What form that work takes depends on what’s admired in the society at hand. As we’ve discussed before, fashion can play a role here: exhibiting good aesthetic taste will bring approval, and if you can combine that with just the right amount of daring innovation, you might become the trendsetter everyone else looks to for guidance. That’s difficult to pull off if you’re a social nobody — your innovations are more likely to be sneered at as missteps — but one admiring comment from the right person might begin your rise to social influence.

For those of more modest financial means, it may be easier to aim for becoming known as a good conversationalist. Remember, this is a social world, so being someone people enjoy talking to is a major asset! Flatter the right people just the right amount, so you don’t sound too obsequious; tell rousing anecdotes about interesting situations; extemporize good poetry to commemorate the occasion at hand; exhibit whatever type of wit is most admired right now . . . which, yes, can include the back-biting type where you’re constantly tearing other people down, though it doesn’t have to. A lot depends on how vicious the local dynamic is.

Under the right circumstances — and this will be of interest to many people who enjoy reading SF/F — you can even win social influence through your book-learning and smarts. If you live in an environment of intellectual ferment and scientific exploration, then being au courant with the latest discoveries gives you fodder for attracting attention. You do still need to be a good conversationalist, so you can deliver what you know in an interesting fashion — otherwise you’ll have a reputation as a pedantic bore — but it isn’t always about jokes and empty gossip.

For women in Enlightenment-era Europe, in fact, social gatherings were a major part of how they kept up with the intellectual scene. The French salonnières of the early modern period famously established a model of social interaction that spread across the continent and into the British Isles. “Bluestocking,” the Victorian pejorative for an excessively bookish woman, was originally the name of an eighteenth-century “salon” or social circle focused on literary discussion — which, given the era, included philosophy, history, and scientific research, not just fiction. Their community included men, but it was led by women, and through the connections formed at their gatherings, they helped advance each others’ minds, laying the groundwork for the advances of feminism in the nineteenth century.

It’s not all so high-minded, of course. Like I said, these environments can also feature a ton of backstabbing and social climbing: witness all scenes set at Almack’s Assembly Rooms in Regency romances, where a single introduction from the right person might set an individual on a path to an advantageous marriage . . . while others with competing interests do their best to spike any such alliance. The Lady Patronesses of Almack’s, with their control over vouchers for admission, held a great deal of power over that scene.

In that case there was a group of women in control, but where a single queen bee rules over it all, she can be as capricious and arbitrary as any formal autocrat. She’s likely to be a central gathering-point for gossip, and whispered into the right ears, those juicy tidbits might become a scandal that brings down a minister. Even without such weapons at hand, declaring someone persona non grata at her own events can mean they find themself excluded elsewhere as well . . . and without the chance to rub shoulders with influential people, their chances of advancement, whether through marriage or political appointment, go into a steep decline.

So is the social scene occasionally petty and vicious? Absolutely — but that doesn’t make it trivial. Stylish ladies or sociable gentlemen can leverage this world as an alternative route to power, all without ever lifting anything more dangerous than a fan or a pen.

Friendship hardly seems like something that needs worldbuilding. It’s a basic human behavior, right? We all make friends?

Sure — but what friendship means does not stay the same.

Starting at: Who can you be friends with? Then and now, social divisions may complicate the answer to that. Can men and women be friends? If sex segregation means that women aren’t supposed to go out into society or interact with men who aren’t their relatives, then cross-gender friendship is pretty much restricted to a trusted cousin or two. (Even then, the relationship is likely to be spoken of in familial terms instead.) But a more egalitarian society may still be dubious of friendships between men and women, with many people assuming there will always, inevitably, be an undercurrent of sexual tension there: friendship as a consolation prize, or a barrier to head off escalation to something more.

What about friendship across class lines? That will often be awkward, even without formal hierarchies of status to get in the way; after all, if one person’s struggling to make rent and the other could buy their entire apartment building, you have some inherent inequality there. This gets particularly thorny when one person employs the other: however well they get along and enjoy each other’s company, their personal and their business relationships may wind up pulling in opposite directions, to the detriment of both bonds. In that light, it’s not surprising that many past societies would have said straight-out that such connections cannot be true friendship. That can only exist between equals.

Class also shares a quality with racial boundaries, which is that both of them are deeply interwoven with culture. People from different groups may have any number of cultural differences, creating significant contrasts in how they spend their free time, what they eat, and even how they converse. These things don’t prevent friendship — we have far too many real-world examples proving otherwise — but they can make it more difficult, with opportunities arising for misunderstanding or conflict.

But what does it mean to be friends, anyway? So far we’ve been glossing over that as if it can be taken for granted . . . but one look at an elementary school (where kids are very much learning the social ropes) shows that’s not the case.

The answer here isn’t just cultural but personal, too. One individual may refer to anybody they know in a positive, non-business capacity as their friend; to their neighbor, most of those people are “acquaintances” or “people they know,” with the term “friend” reserved for those who enjoy a deeper connection. Digital relationships particularly complicate this, with the rhetoric of “friending” someone on a social media network implying more connection than actually exists. And how many friends can you have? Most people don’t put a real cap on that, but they may feel you can have only one best friend at a time, and that to throw the superlative around more broadly cheapens its meaning.

Part of what muddies the waters here is that we rarely have formal markers for friendship, the way we have them for marriage. Friendship bracelets (which are said to have historical origins in Central America) started being shared in the ’70s or ’80s; however, they’re not universally used, and people can wear that style of bracelet without it signifying anything in particular. Children may declare “you’re my friend now” or ask “are we friends?”, but adults — at least in the societies I know — are more likely to leave it implicit, with all the social pitfalls that entails.

Because part of friendship is being able to share certain intimacies with the other person. That might mean dumping your troubles on them, knowing (or at least having good reason to hope) you’ll receive a sympathetic hearing; it might mean asking them to do things for you, without needing to negotiate some kind of explicit compensation or trade. If you try either of those things with someone you assume is a good enough friend for it, only to find they don’t see the two of you as being that close . . . oof. It can get very awkward, very fast.

And “intimacy” may go a lot farther than that. In much of the past, and in many parts of the world today, it’s entirely normal for friends to show a degree of physical affection that my fellow Americans generally reserve for significant others: hugging is okay, at least for some people in some circumstances, but holding hands as you walk down the street? Kissing, on the cheek or on the lips? Taking a bath together, or sharing a bed? Those things look romantic to us, not platonic.

The same goes for emotional intimacy, or rather, how it’s expressed. If you read the letters of same-sex English friends from the nineteenth century, they regularly speak of each other in terms so passionate, you could easily mistake them for lovers. And in some cases, we have reason to surmise that’s one hundred percent true; deep friendships could indeed be a cover for a type of relationship not sanctioned by society at the time. But that cover worked because friends did write to each other in such terms, without anybody assuming that “I long to kiss your lips again” carried sexual implications.

Which makes for interesting challenges when it comes to fiction. If you write such behavior into your invented society, then it’s likely that a high percentage of your readers are going to interpret that as shippy. In some ways that’s fine — a certain type of reader will ship all kinds of pairings you never intended — but in other cases, that may make your audience think you’re queer-baiting them, suggesting something and then not delivering. Even if they don’t feel cheated, the weight of association is going to shift how they read the characters’ behavior, adding sexual overtones where none were supposed to be.

Finally, there’s the question of how friendship ends. Again, children tend to make it more explicit: “I’m not going to be your friend anymore!” Social media gives us the passive-aggressive option of unfollowing somebody, which they may or may not even notice happening. If you have some of their belongings, or they have a key to your place, a sufficiently bad rift may entail a dramatic scene of shoving somebody’s stuff back at them or revoking their access. But mostly we just drift away, ending the relationship as ambiguously as we began it. . . with every bit as much room for uncertainty and misinterpretation.

Seen in that light, there’s frankly a lot to be said for worldbuilding more overt structures around the beginning, ending, and depth of friendship between your characters. Or maybe not: maybe crossed wires and hurt feelings are exactly what your story needs!

Ars longa, vita brevis — but even art doesn’t last forever. At least, not without a lot of help.

The ephemerality of art does, of course, depend on what you’re doing. Performing arts are fleeting by nature: there’s notation or (nowadays) recording, but when we talk about preserving something like music or dance, we tend to mean the art form as a whole, making sure there continue to be practitioners and audiences. In this sense it’s much like a craft, where you need an ongoing series of teachers and students to inherit their wisdom — which includes passing on the specific details of a song or a dance, an oral story or an epic poem, if you don’t have a way of committing those to a more permanent medium. If that chain of transmission gets broken, then skills or entire works of art may be lost.

Physical art is more fixed, but that doesn’t mean it’s lasting. I’ve talked before about how much literature was destroyed after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire cut down on the availability of papyrus: that stuff isn’t durable, and so anything written on it has to be copied and recopied, over and over again, as the original version decays. Many kinds of wood-pulp paper have a similar problem with acid; unless it’s specially treated (acid-free paper), it succumbs to what’s poetically known as “slow fire,” gradually turning the paper more and more brittle until the slightest touch causes it to disintegrate. Modern science has ways to stabilize and de-acidify the paper, but for these kinds of artworks, “preservation” usually consists of continually making new copies, so that the content survives even if the container does not.

Some things you might think don’t need conservation. Fired clay has survived for thousands of years; surely it’s perfectly fine, right? Not necessarily. Depending on how the clay was treated, it may still contain salts that can expand and crack the material, even to the point of it disintegrating into useless fragments. Salt and other chemicals can also attack stone, accumulating either through rain (which is rarely entirely pure), through wind, or through dampness rising from the ground. Heat and cold also create stress on the stone which can lead to cracks: microscopic ones at first, but as the strain continues, and especially if those cracks are infiltrated by substances that expand and contract at different rates, entire pieces can break off. This is why so many ancient statues are missing noses, hands, and other protruding bits.

Even if it’s less dramatic than that, weathering takes a gradual toll. Erosion from wind and water scrapes away infinitesimal layers of detail from the surface, year after year. Iron obviously rusts, but nearly any metal can corrode in one fashion or another — sometimes damaging not only itself, but everything around it. Wooden elements not only rot but warp, placing stress on anything they connect to. Pigments fade and discolor, perhaps from the mere touch of light; textiles combine the vulnerabilities of those pigments with the brittleness and decay of organic material. Insects may eat away at artworks or lay their eggs within them; moss and lichen, while picturesque in their own way, hasten the breakdown of whatever they’ve latched onto. The list of potential sources of damage is nearly endless.

The cruelest twist is that sometimes we ourselves are the cause of the very problems we’re trying to address. Our efforts to preserve great works of art go back for centuries, but our knowledge of how to do that well is much more recent. Past conservators have worked diligently to clean dirt and overgrowth off statues or paintings . . . not realizing that the cleansers they’re using are causing other kinds of damage, especially once the long term comes into play. Maybe it looks fine in the moment, but it’s actually dried out the paint so that later on it begins to crack and flake away from the canvas or panels beneath.

Our efforts to halt or reverse damage can likewise become part of the problem. Adding metal brackets to stabilize some work of stone may seem like a good idea, but their corrosion or warping can destroy what they were meant to protect. (This likely contributed to the collapse of Coventry Cathedral during the Blitz, as the fire heated the iron supports added by the Victorians.) And have you ever wondered why so many paintings by the Old Masters look dark and yellow? That’s because at some point, some well-meaning person gave them a coat of varnish to protect the paint beneath — and then, in the decades or centuries since then, the varnish has aged and collected dust, distorting the colors of the painting and obscuring finer details. You can see this in a video by Philip Mould that recently made the rounds of the internet, showing him cleaning away a thick layer of discolored varnish to reveal a startlingly vibrant portrait beneath.

And finally, conservation sometimes includes touching up the original — but where the line is between “touching up” and “adding your own ideas” may be in the eye of the beholder. Quite a few classical sculptures you might see in Italy nowadays were actually found as fragments, with Renaissance artists hired to “restore” the missing portions according to their own vision — look into the famous grouping Laocoön and His Sons to see the replacement right arm Laocoön was given, versus the one found later that seems to have been the original. A portrait of Isabella de’ Medici in the Pittsburgh Carnegie Museum of Art was so thoroughly overpainted that the curator actually thought it was a modern fake; only upon X-ray examination did she find the original was holding an urn and had a completely different face. And, most egregiously, the “restorers” Sir Arthur Evans hired for the frescos in the Minoan palace of Knossos exercised so much of their own creativity around the surviving fragments that they transformed what we now know was a depiction of a monkey into a young boy.

The key goals nowadays are prevention, stability, reversibility, and honesty. Prevention means producing art on durable materials like acid-free paper, keeping fragile materials in climate-controlled rooms, bundling up outdoor sculptures in wintertime to protect them from the cold, and otherwise trying to forestall problems from getting a foothold in the first place. Stability means leveraging our improved knowledge of chemistry to ensure that the materials we use to repair or protect works of art are less likely to cause damage later on. Reversibility means doing our best to guarantee that anything we add can be removed later on without harm: it’s fine to put protective varnish on a painting or a sculpture, so long as we can also wipe it away. And honesty means that, if we fill in the gaps on some fragmentary relic, we let the seams show, instead of trying to pass off our own additions as the genuine article.

Do we succeed at adhering to these goals all the time, in all circumstances? Of course not. And even when we try, we may miss the mark, such that later generations curse us for well-meaning interventions that accidentally made things worse. But we do the best we can with the knowledge and tools we have, which is all that anyone can promise.

Forgery: where art and crime intersect.

Not all kinds of forgery are art, of course. When my fourteen-year-old self forged my father’s signature on my practice records to assure my band director that yes, of course I practiced at home as much as I was supposed to, there was no art involved there. (Rather the opposite, in fact.) I suppose you could argue that mimicking someone’s handwriting is calligraphic forgery, but that feels to me like it’s stretching the point. Counterfeiting we’ve already talked about separately, in the first year of this Patreon; the manufacture of fake IDs or other legal documents, or of something like knockoff Gucci purses, are also not the focus of this essay.

No, here we’re concerned with the creation of fake objects of art, whether works attributed to a specific artist, or anonymous artifacts of a particular place and time. And this is a topic I find fascinatingly squirrelly.

The techniques necessary to pull this off have gotten increasingly sophisticated over time. Back in the day — or even now, if you’re selling to a credulous enough fool — anything that passed muster to a casual glance might suffice. Get yourself a fresh sheet of parchment, papyrus, or paper, write or draw on it, apply some physical and chemical stresses to make it look old, and you’re good to go. Fire a pot or clay figure, or carve something out of stone, then batter it around for that authentic chipped look. Maybe even stamp out an ancient coin or two, if it’s a piece rare enough to be worth substantially more than its metal content.

These days, it’s not nearly that simple. We have carbon dating, spectroscopic analysis, and other high-tech methods of determining whether some detail is out of place. Which doesn’t mean forgeries have gone away; it just means that talented forger needs to know a lot more than just what their proposed artifact should look like. There’s a thriving market in blank fragments of ancient papyrus — so the substrate will pass an age check even if what’s written on it is new — and who knows what texts have been scraped off bits of parchment, what paintings have been covered or rubbed away, so something more lucrative can be put in their place. The best forgers need to know the chemistry of inks and paints, how to make the right tools, the techniques used back then, so that only the closest analysis by the most skilled experts can spot the fake.

Nor is it only about the object itself. These days, we also pay a lot of attention to provenance: the history of an object’s ownership, which can help to prove that it wasn’t made last week. (A very similar term, provenience, is used in archaeology to refer to where the object was found: relevant to sifting out illegally looted objects from those excavated under legitimate conditions.) Of course, if you want to pass off a fake as the real thing, you also have to forge a provenance — hence the massive upswing after World War II in items that had been the property of an “anonymous Swiss collector,” a fig leaf to cover Nazi theft and forgeries alike.

That’s when you’re just trying to make a Twelfth Dynasty Egyptian ushabti or a bronze ornament from Sanxingdui: a plausible example of a type, but nothing more specific than that. When you’re trying to pass something off as a previously-unidentified Picasso or Rodin, then you can’t hide behind the expected variations between different nameless historical artisans; you have to mimic not just the materials but the ideas, composition, and execution of that specific person — well enough that it seems like it could have genuinely been their work.

And at that point, you very nearly have a Zen koan on your hands: if someone forges a Rembrandt so well it can’t be told from the real thing, is there a meaningful difference? Is the art itself what’s worthwhile, or the fact that it was made by a specific person?

The answer to that really depends on context. If I’m a layperson who likes Caravaggio’s style of painting, and somebody else comes along who paints just like Caravaggio (without claiming those are his works), I might be delighted to acquire things of the exact type I like for a fraction of the cost. Yay for pretty art! By contrast, if a forger lies to me and I pay Caravaggio prices for something that doesn’t suffer from the scarcity of the artist being dead for centuries, I’m probably going to be pissed. And if I’m an art historian trying to learn more about Caravaggio, that forger has actively poisoned the well of scholarship by introducing false data.

Some of our “forgery” problems now actual stem from situations more like that first example. You can buy a million and one plastic replicas of Michaelangelo’s David in Florence, and nobody thinks of those as forgeries . . . but rewind a few centuries or millennia, and those replicas had to be hand-crafted out of marble or bronze or whatever suited the sculpture being copied. That wasn’t forgery; it was just how art got replicated, and the best copyists were deploying a useful, legitimate skill. The same was true of paintings. Now, however, the interests of both scholarship and the aura of owning a verified-as-legitimate original mean we have to sort that historical wheat from the chaff.

Or take the workshop context in which many Renaissance artists operated. Apprentices were expected to mimic their master’s style, and if the result was good enough, the master was free to sell those works under his (or, more rarely, her) own name. Again, nowadays we strive to separate those out from the authentic works of the master — but that reflects a modern attitude where the individual genius is the most important thing, above whether it reflects their style or was made under their auspices.

Some forgeries are extremely famous. Han Van Meegeren had to out himself as a forger when he was accused of collaboration for selling a Vermeer to the Nazi Hermann Göring; to prove that he hadn’t hocked a piece of cultural patrimony, he painted another one while court-appointed witnesses stood and watched. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has spent quite a bit of money trying to prove the disputed authenticity of a kouros (a specific style of statue) they bought for seven million dollars, but the best they’ve been able to achieve is a label identifying it as “Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery.” The Boston Museum of Fine Arts similarly clings to the hope that their probably-fake “Minoan snake goddess” statuette might be the real thing.

One thing these forgeries have in common: the demand for the genuine article is high enough to make fakes worth the effort of their creation. Minoan snake goddesses got manufactured because Sir Arthur Evans’ excavations at Knossos attracted a ton of publicity, and he was not particularly discriminating in buying the “discoveries” people brought to him. Few criminals bothered forging Indigenous art until collectors turned their attention toward those parts of the world, thereby creating demand. This can in turn come full circle: van Meegeren’s post-trial fame made his paintings rise high enough in value that his own son wound up forging more of them.

Nobody knows for sure how many fakes are on display in museums, galleries, and private collections. Some estimates run very high, due to the way today’s plutocrats treat the acquisition of art as an investment strategy and display of status, while others say that improved methods of detection and the emphasis on authenticating an object before somebody forks over millions for it have greatly reduced the incidence. We’ll never really know for sure, because of the loss of face inherent in admitting you paid too much for a forgery — including the cratering in value for other works that might become suspect by association. But if you want to tell a story of trickery and sordid doings, the art world is rife with possibility!

Throughout the art sections of this Patreon, I’ve been grouping them into broad categories: visual arts, performing arts, literary arts, and so forth. But what about the arts that are kinda of . . . none of the above?

It’s a trick question, honestly, because just about everything can be classed under one of those categories. But I do want to take a moment to talk about a variety of arts that, while classifiable as painting or sculpture or what have you, don’t normally get included under those headers, because of how they’re used or what materials they involve. It’s not an exhaustive list, but it will serve as a reminder that our species is as much Homo creatrix as it is Homo sapiens: if we can use it for art, we probably have.

Let’s look at the “painting” side of things — I don’t know if there’s a good technical term that covers painting, drawing, and anything else involving the creation of images or designs on a two-dimensional surface. Some variations here are about technique, as in the case of frescoes: there you execute your work upon wet plaster, making the pigment far more durable. And those are usually murals, though not always, which differentiates them from both the more portable sort of art and the scale on which the average painter operates; a mural doesn’t have to be enormous, but it certainly lends itself to monumental work, far beyond what a canvas could reasonably support.

The question of what is being painted leads us toward some other interesting corners. Illumination, for example, is the art of decorating the pages of books, whether by fancifying the text itself (illuminated capital letters and the like) or by including images alongside. Other people have made art out of painting eggshells — or carving them, if the shell is thick enough; ostrich eggs are good for this, and one can imagine dragon eggs being the same way — or the insides of glass balls. Those also frequently involve working at a very tiny scale, and it’s worth noting that miniature painting is a whole field of its own, making a virtuoso display out of executing your work at a level where someone might need a magnifying glass to fully appreciate it.

(Er, “miniature painting” in the sense of “very small,” not “minis for Dungeons & Dragons or a similar game.” Though that’s its own popular art form, too!)

In other cases, it’s the medium of the decoration itself that becomes unusual. I’ve mentioned mosaics before, tessellating colored stones, ceramic, or glass to make an image, but you can grind even smaller than that with sandpainting. This doesn’t always involve actual sand — sometimes it’s crushed pigments instead — and some versions are more like carving in that they involve drawing in a sandy surface, but most specifically this involves pouring out sand or powder to create your designs. As you can imagine, this tends to be an ephemeral art . . . but that’s often the point, especially when it’s used in a ritual, religious context.

Some of these arts start rising above the two-dimensional surface in interesting ways. Beading can, when done thickly enough, become almost sculptural; it’s also massively labor-intensive, which is why it became popular for sartorial displays of wealth when industrialization made the production and dying of fabric much cheaper. Quillwork is a form of fabric decoration unique to Indigenous North America, using dyed and undyed porcupine quills to create designs; among the Cheyenne, joining the elite Quilling Society that crafted such things was itself a form of status. This is distinct, however, from quilling: a different art with a similar name that curls tiny slips of paper into coils, then glues them to a backing to create images from the coils.

Paper leads us onward toward more overtly sculptural uses of that medium. What is origami, after all, but a specific kind of paper-based sculpture? That one in its strict incarnation prohibits cutting or gluing the paper to create its forms, which puts it at the polar opposite end of the spectrum from papercutting: an art some of us may have tried in simple form as kids, but skilled practitioners can achieve astonishingly complex and beautiful pictures. One particular version of this, the silhouette, is traditionally done with black paper and used especially for portraiture.

Basketry maybe should have gone into the textiles essay, both because many of its techniques are close kin to weaving and sewing, and because it very much belongs among what I termed the “functional arts” — those which serve a utilitarian purpose while also including an aesthetic dimension. Anything pliable can potentially be used for basketry: most often plant materials like straw, willow, grass, and vines, but also animal hides or modern materials like strips of plastic. The resulting vessels are vitally important as storage containers and can even be made waterproof, especially if they’re coated in clay or bitumen, but by working patterns into their design, basket-makers can also make them beautiful.

Or perhaps you go in an entirely non-utilitarian direction. Flower arranging is about taking nature’s beauty — perhaps from a garden — and displaying it in an artificial way, knowing full well that soon the flowers will wilt. But where most of us stop at just sticking a few blooms in a vase, some artists go on to create full-blown sculptures of flowers and greenery, sometimes with complex internal structures that continue supplying water to the blooms to extend their life. There was even a competitive TV show about this, The Big Flower Fight!

I could keep going, of course. Baking is a functional art insofar as it makes something for you to eat, but it definitely has its elaborate end where the artistic value of the decoration or shaping is as much the point as the taste of the final product — if it’s edible at all, which it may not be! Amaury Guichon has made an entire TikTok phenomenon out of showcasing his monumental chocolate sculptures. I’m sure someone out there has devoted their life to the art of meat sculpture, but I’m not going to go looking for evidence of that. The point is made: if we can turn it into art, we probably will.

Which is honestly kind of amazing. Art is, after all, about doing more than the minimum required for our survival. It is a mark of our success as a species, that we have freed enough of our time from the work of acquiring food and shelter that art is possible. And it says something about our inner state, that when we have a spare moment available, we often want to spend it making something beautiful — out of whatever comes to hand.

I’ve been trying for some time now to get a landscaper not to ghost me, so we can redo the front and back yards of my house.

Am I trying to hire a contractor, or an artist?

Yes. Both. Year Nine’s discussion of how we’ve reshaped the land focused entirely on utilitarian aspects: draining wetlands, filling in shorelines, flattening land for agriculture and roads. We entirely skipped over the aesthetic angle — but that matters, too! The land and what grows atop it can become a medium for art.

A fairly elite art, though. At its core, landscaping for the purpose of a garden or a park is about setting aside ground that could have been productive and using it for pleasure instead. Not to say that there can’t be some overlap; vegetable gardens can be attractive, and parks might play home to game animals that will later grace the dinner table. But there’s a sort of conspicuous consumption in saying, not only do I have land, but I have enough of it to devote some to aesthetic enjoyment over survival.

We don’t know what the earliest gardens were like, but we know they’ve been with us probably about as long as stratified society has been, if not longer. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (named for their tiered structure) were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and those — if they ever existed — were a continuation of a well-documented Assyrian tradition of royal gardens, which included hydraulic engineering to supply them with water. So this was not a new art.

But when did it become an art? I’m not entirely sure. The boundary is fuzzy, of course; gardens can exist without being included in the discourse around Proper Art. (As we saw in Year Eight, with the shift toward recognizing textiles as a possible form of fine art.) Europe didn’t really elevate gardens to that stature until the sixteenth century, as part of the Renaissance return to classical ideals. The earliest Chinese book I’ve been able to find on the aesthetics of gardening, as opposed to botanical studies of plants, is from the seventeenth century, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were earlier works. I think that when you start getting specific aesthetic movements and individual designers famous for their work, you’re in the realm of Art instead of a functional thing that can also be pretty; I just don’t know when that began.

There definitely are aesthetic movements, though! In particular, gardens-as-art swing between the poles of “nature in her most idealized form” and “intentionally artificial.” Many Japanese gardens exemplify the former, while European gardens laid out in complex geometric beds demonstrate the latter. It’s not entirely a regional differentiation, though; Japanese dry (“Zen”) gardens, with their carefully raked seas of gravel, are obviously not trying to look natural, and Europeans have enjoyed a good meadow-style garden, too.

This is partly a question of how you’re supposed to interact with these spaces. Some — including many of those Japanese examples, dry or otherwise — are meant to be viewed from the outside, e.g. while sitting on a veranda or looking down on it from an upstairs window. Others are meant to be walked through, so they’re designed with an eye toward what new images will greet you as you follow a path or come round a corner. Meanwhile, hedge mazes may purposefully try to confuse you, which means they benefit from walls of greenery as close to identical as you can get them — until you arrive at the center or some other node, where the intentional monotony breaks.

In pursuit of these effects, a garden can incorporate other forms of art and technology. Hydraulics may play a role not only in irrigating the garden, but in fueling fountains, waterfalls, artificial streams, and the like, which in turn may host fish, turtles, and other inhabitants. Architecture provides bridges over wet or dry courses and structures like walls, gazebos, arches, arbors, bowers, pergolas, and trellises, often supporting climbing plants. Statuary very commonly appears in pleasing spots; paintings are less common, since the weather will damage them faster, but mosaics work very well.

But the centerpiece is usually the plants themselves. As with zoos (Year Four) and the “cabinet of curiosities”-style museums (Year Nine), one purpose of a garden may be to show off plants and trees from far-distant lands, delighting the eye and possibly the nose with unfamiliar wonders. The earliest greenhouses seem to have been built to grow vegetables out of season, but later ones saw great use for cultivating tropical plants far outside their usual climes — especially once we figured out how to heat them reliably, circa the seventeenth century. In other cases, the appeal comes from carefully pruning the plants to a desired shape, whether that’s arching gracefully over a path or full-on sculpture into the shapes of animals or mythological figures.

One particularly clever trick involves accounting for the changing conditions inherent to an art based in nature. Many gardens go dead and boring in the winter — or in the summer, if you’re in a climate where rain only comes in the winter — but a skilled designer can create a “four seasons” garden that offers shifting sources of interest throughout the year. Similarly, they may use a combination of artificial lighting and night-blooming flowers to create a space whose experience is very different at night than during the day.

And gardens can even serve an intellectual purpose! Like a museum, its displays may be educational; you see this in botanical gardens and arboreta, with their signs identifying plants and perhaps telling you something about them. Many scholars over the centuries have also used gardens as the site of their experiments, studying their materials and tweaking how to best care for them. But this doesn’t stop with plain science, either. We often refer to dry rock gardens as “Zen gardens” because of their role in encouraging meditative contemplation, and actually, it goes deeper than that: the design of such a garden is often steeped in symbolism, with rocks representing mountains in general or specific important peaks. I don’t actually know, but I readily assume, that somebody in early modern Europe probably created a garden full of coded alchemical references. The design of the place can be as much a tool for the mind as it is a pleasure for the senses.

Which brings them back around to a functional purpose, I suppose. Gardens very much straddle the line between aesthetics and pragmatism!

Uprisings. Revolts. Insurgencies. Rebellions. Civil wars.

What are the differences between all these things?

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Last week I mentioned in passing that “castle” in the stricter sense refers to a type of fortified residence: not necessarily a single-family dwelling, of course, but a place belonging to and possibly occupied by an important family, with all their associated guards, servants, hangers-on, and so forth. That’s the sense that will be at the forefront of this essay, because life in a fortified military camp, an isolated watchtower, or a walled village is going to be very different from life in that more narrowly defined castle.

(more…)

Castles are a stereotypical feature of the fantasy genre, but for good reason: they’re a ubiquitous feature of nearly every non-nomadic society well into the gunpowder era, until artillery finally got powerful enough that “build a better wall” stopped being a useful method of defense.

But castles, like walls, sometimes get simplified and misunderstood. So let’s take a look at the many purposes they once served.

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There’s a pop-culture tendency to point at structures like Hadrian’s Wall or the Great Wall of China and laugh because “they didn’t keep invaders out.” But that betrays a very limited understanding of what a wall is for.

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A fictional world is potentially infinite in its detail, just like the real world. How do you decide when to say, that’s enough — I’m done worldbuilding?

This question is, among other things, a matter of taste, which means there’s no actual “right answer” apart from the one that suits your preferences. I think it’s pretty obvious from my essays here, my own novels, and the things I enjoy reading that I set the bar on the higher end: I like to feel immersed in a believable world, one that has enough texture for me to sink into the illusion of its reality. Other people would look at books I love and find them tediously over-detailed.

But I’d argue this isn’t purely driven by taste. Or rather, taste sets the upper and lower bounds for your preferences; within the resulting range, there are certain factors you can use to guide your decision-making.

The first is that I think it’s beneficial for a story to have at least a little more worldbuilding than the plot strictly requires. The word “strictly” is key to this equation, though; I am really and truly talking about what the plot absolutely has to mention in order to make the story go. This came to my attention when I tried reading a novel (which, unsurprisingly, I did not finish) that appeared to subscribe to the “only what is required and not an adjective more” school of thinking. Nothing was described unless it was load-bearing — for example, the first mention of anyone’s clothing was when a character showed up wearing the uniform of a dangerous organization. What did that uniform look like? Dunno, because that doesn’t matter. The factual content of “this is why the protagonist knows to be wary of him” was sufficient, and the visuals were treated like unnecessary padding. The story was so bare bones, even a skeleton would eye it askance. And the result was that I had a direct view of the plot machinery operating, without any skin of verisimilitude to make it feel more natural.

Of course, you don’t want to mention that which is entirely irrelevant. In the setting of the Rook and Rose trilogy, when Vraszenian settlements make war on one another, the victorious side raids the labyrinth (temple) of the losing side and steals all the Faces (representations of the benevolent aspects of the deities) as their trophies, leaving behind only the Masks (representations of the malevolent or wrathful aspects). You will find this detail nowhere in the books — admittedly because I thought it up after my co-author and I had finished writing them! But even if I’d come up with that detail sooner, it still wouldn’t be in the trilogy, for the simple reason that nowhere in our story do we have one Vraszenian settlement making war on another. Any reference to that practice would be air-dropped in from the stratosphere, disrupting the story we’re actually telling.

One solution to this, as I’ve mentioned before, is to make your cool idea relevant. We’d have a hard time doing that with internecine warfare, but we could have worked it in as a side note: we do have a conflict between street gangs, and maybe they do something metaphorically similar, which would be reason for someone to mention the larger-scale practice in passing. In this case it’s still a reach, but it serves to illustrate how, if you already have a super-shiny idea, you can look for ways to integrate it with your narrative. From the perspective of “where do you stop worldbuilding,” though, the answer is “before you reach this point, unless the idea comes to you of its own accord” (as this one did). There would be no purpose in me asking “okay, so what does warfare look like in the rest of Vraszan, when city-states or neighboring villages get into conflicts?” when that’s entirely tangential to the actual plot.

You also have to keep an eye on your pacing. Let’s say your protagonist is writing a letter in cipher: should you spend time figuring out what type of cipher their society uses? It’s a relevant question . . . but the details could potentially bog down your scene, stalling the reader with minutiae that distract from the content of the message itself. Personally, I’d be more likely to go in-depth on that question if the character was trying to crack a cipher, because now it’s a challenge they’re trying to overcome — automatically more interesting thanks to the unknown contents of the letter. If you start to research or brainstorm on something, then realize it’s drawing you away from the forward momentum of the story, limit it to a line or two of description at most, or just let the reader supply whatever default lives in their brain.

Finally, is your worldbuilding stopping you from writing the story? It’s one thing if you genuinely need to know something in order to move forward. That happened recently with me getting some distance into the draft of an upcoming novel about a monk going on a pilgrimage, then stopping because I needed to do a lot more development of both my map and my calendar if I didn’t want the pilgrims to be floating in a vague, timeless void. That’s one I maybe should have seen coming and taken care of sooner . . . but there’s a lot of worldbuilding stuff you don’t know you’re going to need until you sit down to write a given scene.

So the notion that you will do all your worldbuilding first and then, when that’s complete, write your story? That’s a trap, one that can keep you forever in the planning stages and never in the execution. Some things you have to know in advance: I couldn’t have started the novel without a basic sense of the religion my monk protagonist follows. It’s entirely legitimate to lay some groundwork before you begin. Much of your setting, though, can and probably should grow with the characters and the narrative, shaping and being shaped by the specifics of the tale. You’ll get a more organic, real-feeling result that way than if you lay down a bunch of shiny ideas in advance and then shoehorn everything in around them.

When Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth, he was thinking in terms of a hollow planet. There’s another sense in which we can think about the center of the earth, though — a more spiritual one. (more…)