 Spaceships? Androids? Computer hackers? Body modifications? Social commentary that becomes dated 10 years after the initial publication? Sounds like somebody's making a science fiction setting. Science fiction is an extremely broad genre containing everything from cyberpunk to atompunk to space opera and military sci-fi. In fact, when I said sci-fi, most of you probably imagine something different unlike fantasy where the generic template is just a world based on medieval Europe. And while we tend to think of them as separate, sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish sci-fi and fantasy. Is doom sci-fi because it has space travel, or is it fantasy because everyone fights with swords and because there's magic around? Where would the Final Fantasy games fit on here? How about things like Star Wars and Star Trek where the technology is so soft that it may as well be magic? There's really no clear line where one stops and the other begins. What I mean by that is that there's no one template for making a good science fiction setting. It all depends on what you're going for. And that's the key to any sort of world building, I think. Just know what you want to do with it. If you want it to be dark or light-hearted, that's fine. If you want it to be grounded or really weird, that's fine. The important part is that it all follows its own internal logic. With that out of the way, let's talk about how to do this. And I think the best way to show that is by constructing a setting myself and just showing you guys how I do it so you get an idea. Now, how you start depends on what your initial inspiration is. Some people start with a single idea and just build a whole setting around that. Others take a basic premise and then fill in the details from there. There's no wrong way to do it. Whatever works for you is fine. Don't just think that my way is the only way. Now, I'm a big fan of settings where space travel is common and humans are spread out all over the place. But at the same time, I want to keep some of that sense of danger and that feeling of the universe being unfathomably gigantic. So I'll make it so that the ships can't go faster than light. And it'll take weeks or even months just to go around a single solar system. From there, I have multiple options for justifying an extensive colony at work. I can keep it in a single system and have all the colonies be on like Mars and Saturn and stuff like in the expanse. Or I can have other colonies in other systems, but they take hundreds of years to get to which would make them extremely isolated. Or I can make it so that people travel using wormholes that occur naturally, making it possible to travel quicker and allowing colonies to create an actual community even if they're pretty far apart from one another. These are all great for different types of tones that you want to go for. If you want to remind the audience that humanity is very small and the universe is very big, then staying in our home system can help you do that. The second one could be useful for giving off a sense of isolation. And the third can work great to show off human tenacity and spirit while still keeping a little bit of those first two. I'm going with the last one for now because it's just less depressing. So cool. Humans travel through wormholes and set up colonies. Over the course of decades or centuries, hundreds of new worlds will be colonized. Now, while the Earth would be the center of civilization, over time its importance would start to decline. Now let's focus in on one specific colony for now. Any location with prominence should be fleshed out at least a little bit in your setting, and the primary location should be fleshed out the most. E.g. Coruscant in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. That's the capital of the Republic and it's the home of the Jedi Temple. So it was important for them to give them a lot of detail and make them feel very real. So the colony we'll focus on here is called Marluxia. Now we could make it close to Earth or far away. I'm going to have it be far away so we can maintain some of that frontier feeling. Now I could also put the colony on the surface of a habitable Earth-like planet, which would definitely make it easier to film if this were a movie or a TV show. But it's not and I want to be a little bit more original. So let's just have the colony be a massive space station that orbits a planet. We'll call the planet Bill. That's a little bit more of a unique idea that will help it stand out to other people. The space station does raise some issues though. Giant space stations aren't cheap to build, which means that not only would there need to be a reason that people live there and not on the planet Bill, but there would also need to be something valuable enough for them to justify coming all the way out here and building this giant-ass space station. A setting doesn't have to be realistic, like I said, but it does have to follow some sort of logic. Now let's justify the station first. This is pretty easy. Most planets that we know of in real life aren't habitable for humans. It could be too cold or too hot or just not have any water or the gravity could be too strong. And in this case, we'll just go with the atmosphere isn't breathable for humans, you know? So we'll just say that there are some people who live in very isolated, enclosed settlements, but most of them are stuck in Marlusha, the station. As for why they would be there in the first place, that's a much more open-ended question. Historically, colonialism has always been done for the sake of resources, so we have to ask what resources are valuable in this universe. Now, the easiest way to handle this would just be to make one up. Say all the spaceships are powered by hand-wavium and that Bill has large deposits of hand-wavium. Great. And you can also use that as an excuse for why they have all this crazy technology that we don't have in real life. If you want a grittier and somewhat more realistic setting, then just use real resources. Say that the planet has a bunch of helium and hydrogen. Those are both expensive. We use them for industrial purposes and the Earth is running out of them in real life. So coming all the way out there to get some would probably be worth the cost and it would make sense. In this case, I decided to work backwards. I wanted to make a location where people lived in a giant space station and then I came up with a reason to justify that. If you just made the planet uninhabitable with helium and hydrogen first and then deduced that the station would be necessary for people to live there, then that could work too. Or you could have come to a different conclusion altogether. We all have different styles. Now let's go in further. Marluxo will have its own culture, economy, and system of government that we can expand on. The colony sprang up due to mining so a lot of the initial settlers will be working in that industry. In fact, it's likely that the initial settlement will be funded by some sort of corporation. This happened plenty of times in real life. So in this case, we'll say that the corporation that funded the expedition is called, I don't know, PISCorp or something. Now once the mine is established, other businesses are going to pop up to deal with the wants and needs of the people who worked the mines. And some of them are going to bring their families as well which will increase the demand for things like housing, schools, food, and entertainment. It wouldn't be unusual for PISCorp to control everything and force the people there to buy everything from them. But this is the future and everyone has access to space travel so we'll just say that there are multiple other companies there. The Marluxo government is a trickier question though. If there wasn't one going out there then the only form of authority would be that of the various companies. This might sound like an ANCAP paradise but anyone who's played BioShock can tell you that this is a recipe for disaster. Alright, I used up my monthly chance to shit on ANCAPs. We can move on now. This situation could continue for a while and if you want to set your story slash campaign here then go for it. After some time though, some sort of state apparatus would likely spring up. Now the manner this takes can be legion. Seriously, there's so many different ways you could do this. And I've already done a whole video on government so I'll gloss over that. If you want to do something standard like a parliamentary democracy then that's perfectly fine. Don't make anyone think that you have to be super weird. It can be honest or it can be corrupt and you can still do stuff with that. However, I'd like to do something weird here so let's make Marluxa a full-on plutocracy. A plutocracy is just a form of government where everything is run by people with money. Of course, when I say it that way it kind of sounds like every government ever. But in this case it'll be on an official level so we'll just have to think of how that might be done. A possibility is that the station would have some sort of council or legislature that runs things but entry into that legislature is based on wealth. Gaining a seat could be based on your net worth or maybe how much stock you own in PISCorp or if you want to be especially blatant seats could just be bought outright. Now, would this be ineffective? Probably. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee it would be ineffective but it's interesting and it can be utilized for some neat conflicts. You know, between the upper classes and the others that want to make themselves heard or between the various factions that are all scrambling for both wealth and political power or between this bizarre inept government and some sort of outside force. You know, now that I'm saying this I really want to try a campaign here, that'd be fun. And then you're done. Well, not really. There's still about 35 different things you could go into more detail about like the languages that are spoken there, how education works, what sort of entertainment and other cultural commonalities these people have and what sort of relationship Marlusha has with other colonies. I mean, that's not even counting how this is just one colony in a setting with dozens or hundreds. You could spend weeks, months, you could spend years building this setting. I just wanted to give a few pointers for how to do the basics. Hell, I specifically left aliens out of this because once you add them in, everything gets exponentially more complex. There are a few more things you should be thinking about while world building, though. Like I said, you could spend years doing this but a huge part of doing it well is knowing when to stop, okay? If you're writing a book, then you can't spend 15 years working on the history of interpretive dance before you even start writing. If you're working on an RPG campaign for your friends and you tell them that they have to wait 10 years before they can play, they're gonna find somebody else to run the game for them. But how do you know when it's too much? Well, basically, once you've gone past what you need, that's a little bit too much. If it's for an RPG campaign, then you'll want things to be crazy deep and have all sorts of different groups and factions and locations that the players have flexibility in choosing things like their backgrounds or where they wanna go during the campaign. But if you're writing a military sci-fi novel, then really all you need is a detailed description of all the military hardware and how it's used. Despite the impression I give off, I do think it's possible to overdo this and spend all your time world-building instead of actually writing. The good news is that you can always tweak stuff while you're still working on it. You can change aspects of the setting right up until publication and until the audience experiences it. After that, if you change stuff, it becomes retconning, so just relax and get to work on the important stuff for now. Another aspect to keep in mind when building a sci-fi setting is how hard it is. For those unfamiliar, I'm referring to the spectrum of sci-fi hardness, which is where all these settings fall on. On one end is soft sci-fi, where the technology is not very realistic and it doesn't really follow real-world physics or reality. And on the other side is hard sci-fi, where things are much closer to real-world physics and much closer to real-world technology. Now, this doesn't mean that it is entirely real, but just means it's closer to real stuff. So, for example, the Martian is very hard sci-fi, Jurassic Park is somewhat hard sci-fi, Star Trek is soft sci-fi, and Star Wars is very, very soft sci-fi. Simple enough, but how much does it matter? Personally, I don't think it matters much at all. Some people are going to prefer one or the other, obviously, but it doesn't mean much to the sort of setting you want to create. It's more relevant to things like plots and character. And in this case, I think you should just go with what makes you happy and what you find interesting. Then there's the matter of deeper messages. A lot of people struggle with this idea that their creative work has to be making some sort of deep statement and carry thought-provoking themes. Science fiction is a very political genre as well, which seems to exacerbate the problem. Ever since Frankenstein made a statement on scientific progress, writers have been making points about society and its many ills. Now, I encourage everybody to try and make whatever makes them happy. I really do. If you want to create something that expresses something that's very important to you, then go right ahead. Don't let anybody stop you. Don't feel like you need to, though. Your setting isn't lesser because you don't make a deep statement on the nature of capitalism's relationship with democracy. It can just be a fun, cool place that you want to visit or that you want to tell a story, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's one last thing about science fiction that separates it from fantasy, and that's that the setting is usually just our world, but in the future. Things like the Expanse and Jurassic Park and most military sci-fi, those are very explicitly just our world with some new tech in in the future, and fantasy is just an entirely separate world. There are some settings that are science fiction, but also totally separate from our real world, but they're pretty rare. Star Wars is the most notable example, but even then, that has a lot of fantasy elements in it. Usually, science fiction settings use our current society as a foundation to build off of, which kind of ties into the social commentary aspects that I mentioned earlier. What I'm saying here is that it's entirely possible to make a world in this genre from scratch, and honestly, I think that's an area with untapped potential, so, you know, feel free to go down that route, somebody. You might have noticed that I didn't really talk much about sci-fi armed forces, and that's because I'll be releasing how to world-build sci-fi militaries in a few weeks. It's a complicated topic, and honestly, it deserves a proper amount of focus that I couldn't give it here. I don't want to give off the impression that this is the end-all-be-all of how to make science fiction settings. I really don't. Just think of it as a basic guide on how to get started, and a few things to remember when you get stuck. If this does well, I'll try and do more for different genres in the future, like I have one planned for alternate history, dystopia, you know, we'll see where it goes. 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