THE PLANET

CONSTRUCTION KIT
by Mark Rosenfelder
www.yonagu.com • Chicago • 2010
© 2010 by Mark Rosenfelder.
All rights reserved, including the right
to reproduce this book or portions
thereof in any form whatsoever, except
for review purposes.

Ed. 1.1 — Kindle

Contents
Introduction 7
E-Z Fantasy World
15
Storytelling 21
Astronomy and
Geology 38
Biology 65
History 100
Culture 118
Daily life 152
Religion 189
Magic 218
Technology 224
War 243
Making maps 285
Illustrations 300
3-D Modeling 332
Further reading 351
Index 356
Introduction
What we’re going to do here is create
worlds. You want a world for your epic
novel, or a movie or video game, or an
RPG session, or as an artistic creation.
Or you are a mad scientist with an
army of nanites who will construct
your world from the atoms up.
Whatever, we’ll talk about how to
make a plausible, interesting
constructed world— a conworld.
The companion volume, The Language
Construction Kit, explained how to
create languages, so I won’t cover that
that here. This book covers everything
else:
 • Stars and planets
• Alien creatures
• Economics and history
• Daily life
• Religions
• Magic
• Technology and war
And more. We’ll also cover some of
the technical details of creation:
• Storytelling
• Drawing
• Making maps
• Making 3-D models
I’ve tried to answer all the immediate
questions you’ll have while
conworlding, from how to calculate the
year (p. 42) to how far a horse can run
in a day (p. 142) to how early you can
have iron weapons (p. 228).

Sources and extr

reading
The Language Construction Kit served
as an introduction to one subject,
linguistics. This book is an
introduction to all kinds of stuff, and
I’m not an expert in all of them. And in
some areas, no one is: magic or alien
biology, for instance.
On the bright side, one advantage of
conworlding is that everything is
source material. Anything in the
physical sciences could be relevant.
Anything historical or religious can go
into fantasy; anything you learn about
foreign cultures can help you create
new ones.
In some ways I should have written
five books instead of one. But it’s
useful, and a lot cheaper for you, to
have all of this material in one place.
Plus, if any subject interests you, you
can always pursue it more. I’ve
included an reading list at the end with
books I’ve found particularly helpful.
These will also supply the details and
nuances I haven’t had room for.
You can be inspired by fiction, of
course, but make sure you read real-
world sources as well. You may be able
to write a convincing battle scene
merely by reading Tolkien, but you’d
do better to read some military history.
Or join the army.
Websites: URLs rot too quickly to list
in a book. I’ll list some useful pages on
this page of my own site:
http://www.zompist.com/resources

The dire consequences

failure
What happens if you don’t follow the
recommendations in this book? Well,
not to be too alarming, but that could
well be part of a process which ends in
the heat death of the universe. But in
the short term, the advantages of the
book are these:
• More options. All too
often fantasy books are retreads
of medieval Europe, and s.f.
books of contemporary America.
It’s like a painter who’s
restricted to using yellow and
orange.
• Greater accuracy and
immersion. If you don’t know
much, you’re bound to write
vaguely. If you write about a
swordfight, you want to go
beyond just knowing that the
combatants swing pointy things
 at each other.
• Depth and allusion. As an
example, my novel In the Land of
Babblers occasionally quotes the
Cuzeian holy book, the Count of
Years. This isn’t just a made-up
name; this book exists and people
can go read it. Or people who’ve
read it as an aspect of my
conworld will recognize the
reference when they read
Babblers. This is part of
Tolkien’s secret; we sense while
reading that his world is larger
than the books before us.
• Memorability. A well
constructed world is fascinating
in its own right; we want to go
 there. The underground London
of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere,
for instance, is as much of an
enticement as the characters or
the plot.
• Avoidance of distractions
for the reader. You want the
reader following your story, not
snickering at the cheesy or
implausible bits.

Getting started
How do you start creating a culture?
There’s no obvious or necessary order,
but I’d suggest something like this:
• Choose the big picture
 elements, if any, that have the
biggest impact on the world. If
your people have three sexes, or
live on a gas giant, or all use
magic, or live a thousand years,
those things will affect
everything else you do.
• Look over the E-Z
Fantasy World chapter (p. 15) to
make some basic decisions. This
can give you a brief overview of
your culture.
• Make a map. Don’t worry
too much about names. It just
helps to know the geographical
situation for your people: is it an
island? is it big or small? is it
hemmed in by threatening
 neighbors?
• Write a culture test (p.
118). This is an easy way to
cover many aspects of what it’s
like, day to day, to live in your
invented culture, and how it’s
different from your own.
• Create a naming
language— for how, see the
Language Construction Kit.
You’re going to want names for
characters and places anyway.
• Write a biography of a
characteristic person from your
culture (p. 30)— not the
protagonist of your epic story or
game, but an ordinary shmo.
 You’ll have to think about their
childhood, what their village
looks like, how they make a
living, how families and
marriages work, what rites they
follow and what games they play.
If you created some unusual
Big Picture elements, this is your
chance to see how they actually
work. If they don’t really affect
the character’s story, they’re
either not so major after all, or
you didn’t fully work out their
consequences.
• Write an outline history.
Don’t worry about lists of kings.
Ideally, the place used to be quite
different, and there’s a story
about how it changed. E.g.
It used to be... and now i
a vast empire a motley
states
ruled by elves dominate
two separate nations united, w
remnants
independ
a rich and prosperous nearly de
planet
underwater reclaimed
a prosper
a nation of bold a bunch o
warriors bureaucra
full of magic mundane
exception
 mundane transform
• Read this book, applying
what you’ve learned chapter by
chapter. That is, systematically
cover the astronomy, geology,
biology, culture, and religion of
your culture.
Expect to have to revise as you work
out details. You may toss in a reference
to “the gods” in your culture test and
then discover that the people actually
worship ancestors and spirit animals.
Don’t worry if your first attempts are
crappy. It’s always good to get
something down, and revising is easier
than writing from scratch. Put the
crappy piece aside for awhile; then take
it out and identify specific problems—
not “it sucks” but “the king is talking
like a teenager” or “no reasons are
given for any of these events”. Then
address those.

How to present it
Creating a language, there’s an obvious
end product: a grammar. What do you
do with a conculture?
• One possible answer:
nothing, it’s all background
material for a story or game, and
once you’ve created that, you
have no further use for the
background materials.
• Or you write appendixes,
as in Lord of the Rings. These
days, you can post as much
supplementary material as you
want on the web.
• In some media you can use
it as supplementary creations.
The games made by Bethesda
(Oblivion, Fallout 3) and
Bioware (Jade Empire, Dragon
Age Origins, Mass Effect) are
great examples: they contain
quite a bit of material players can
find and explore if they like.
• A natural format for
concultures is the wiki. For my
conworld Almea I’ve created the
Almeopedia. You can post
 everything you’ve created in such
a format, and readers can explore
it as much as they like and in any
order. Wookieepedia, the fan-
created Star Wars wiki, has over
75,000 articles.
The web resources page
includes instructions on how to
set up a wiki.
• Conworld materials may
make a good RPG scenario,
especially if you have a strong
focus on specific locations. Add
some monsters and loot and it
becomes a playable game!
• You can publish your
material as a supplementary
 text. François Bourgeon and
Claude Lacroix, after creating
two s.f. graphic novels, Le cycle
de Cyann, released a third
volume which simply
documented the amazing world
they’d created. Star Wars has
generated a whole array of
reference works.
• Some authors have created
pseudo-nonfiction where a book
about the world is the main
event. One example is the Italian
artist Luigi Serafini’s Codex
Seraphinianus, a brilliant and
thoroughly weird encyclopedia
from an alien culture, profusely
illustrated, with a text in an
 unreadable alphabet. Another is
Dougal Dixon’s After Man, a
gallery of animals from 50
million years in the future.
• With modern tools it
doesn’t take a huge company to
make a video game. Zeno Clash,
a game that shows off an
impressively bizarre conworld,
was created by a team of ten
people. A quality mod for an
existing game can be made by a
single person.
One of the best ways of making a
culture come alive is visually. Maps,
character portraits, and 3-D models
help immensely in showing what your
culture is like. We’ll cover all of that
in later chapters.

When am I done?
This question is also harder to answer
for conworlds. Here too the most
honest answer is never. One individual
can never fully work out all the
cultures of a planet, much less a galaxy
full. There’s always more to do.
Or more usefully: you’re done when
you have just enough material for the
uses you’re going to put it to. If you’re
writing a short story, a brief sketch will
do. For a novel you might end up with
pages and pages of notes. For a series
of works, you may easily end up with a
book’s worth of supplementary
material.
A basic rule of thumb might be: you
have enough material when you can
answer all the questions that come up
when writing your story.
A warning: this stuff is addictive.
Especially if you have another main
goal in mind— like writing a novel—
you can overdo the conworlding.
Eventually you have to put aside the
royal genealogies and the table of
currency conversions and write the
damn story.

Skipping and faking

As with the LCK, you don’t have to
read everything, much less work out
everything I talk about. I hope it’s all
useful, but I realize that it can be
daunting.
Go back and forth between this book,
the LCK, your own background
materials, and your stories. It’s fine to
write a paragraph about your
conreligion now and flesh it out later.
Or let the demands of the story drive
the process. If a character dies, think
about your culture’s treatment of death.
Here and there I’ll give tips on faking
it. The biggest tip: if you refer to fine-
grained details, it looks like you’ve
worked everything out even if you
haven’t. Take the famous speech at the
end of Blade Runner:
 I've seen things you people
wouldn't believe. Attack ships on
fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've
watched C-beams glitter in the
dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in
time, like tears in the rain. Time
to die.
It’s specific and memorable even if
neither viewer nor screenwriter knows
what the fighting in Orion was about,
nor what C-beams are, nor where the
Tannhauser Gate leads to.

But I like it implausible!

I’m going to talk a lot about
plausibility— how to make realistic
planets, animals, aliens, cultures, and
religions. To save space, I’ll give you
blanket permission here to ignore all
the guidelines.
We’re making art here; art can take
liberties. And of course you can always
fall back on magic, or engineering by
highly advanced intelligences, or new
physical laws.
I talk about how things work on our
planet for two reasons. First, you might
want to keep things realistic. And
second, it broadens your options. The
real world is highly inventive.
Plus, if you know how things generally
go, you know what to change or reverse
to create strangeness and fantasy. Take
a general rule mentioned here— e.g.,
humans posit supernatural beings they
can ask favors of— then twist it
around. What about a culture where the
spirits ask favors of us? Even the rules
of drawing can be purposely violated in
order to create misshapen monsters (p.
302).

Date conventions
For brevity I often write 5C for “the
5th century AD”, i.e. the 400s, and
likewise -13C is “the 13th century BC”,
i.e. the 1200s BC.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to those who read and
made comments on drafts of this book:
James Miers, Samuel Lereah, Dave
Townsend, Benjamin Buckley, Geoff
Eddy, Richard Weatherby , Carlos
Verrecchia, Ugo Lachapelle, Michele
Moss, and Ian Samuels. Thanks to
Richard Seal for help on Almean
climates, to Ken Hite and Mike
Schiffer for a long alternate history
lunch, and to Samwise for the use of
his head. And to my wife Lida who has
been incredibly supportive.

Mark Rosenfelder
September 2010
E-Z Fantasy World
Fantasy worlds in particular often seem
all the same— usually, medieval
Europe minus Christianity plus magic.
Let’s take a pop quiz on your culture.
For each item, choose one option. As
each is independent of the others, there
are over 438 trillion possible cultures
— enough for every conworld to be
different, and for each to have a full set
of differing cultures.
And there’s even more, of course, if
you blend the options or come up with
new ones.
This alone isn’t enough to give a
country a strong character of its own,
of course. We’ll get to that later. But
the quiz is designed to break the habit
of always creating Standard Fantasy
Kingdoms.

Government
• Absolute monarch
• King and council
• Oligarchy
• Theocracy (for any belief
system)
• Elite democracy (a large
electorate but still a minority)
• Full democracy (universal
 electorate)
• Warlord
• Clan leaders only, perhaps
a king in wartime
• None at all
How is the leader chosen?
• Heredity
• By family council
• By the secondary powers
(council, priests, voters— see
previous item)
• By contests of skill,
strength, and/or intelligence
• By the military
• By divine powers
 • Randomly
• By a secret cabal
How unified is the country?
• Completely centralized
• Nobles govern their own
lands but king is powerful
• The center has few
uncontested powers
• No central power
How tolerant are people?
• No dissent allowed!
• Best to follow convention
• Eccentricity is mocked but
permitted
 • Do as you please
How do most people get their food?
• Hunting and gathering
• Fishing
• Garden agriculture (plots
cleared, cultivated awhile, then
abandoned)
• Rainfall agriculture
• Irrigation agriculture
• Animal herds
(pastoralism)
• Magic
• Algae vats and slabs of
mutant ever-growing chicken
meat
What’s the climate?
• Temperate
• Tropical
• Extreme— desert,
mountains, tundra
• Unusual— the sea, outer
space, the spirit realm
What kind of economy is there?
• Communities are self-
sufficient except for luxuries
• Command economy—
industry controlled by the state
• Nationwide market
economy
• The nation is part of a
 sophisticated international trade
network
How does the army work?
• Professional standing army
• The powers that be each
have their own army
• The citizens as a whole
form the army
• There’s nothing we’d call
an army
What’s the most-used weapon?
• Bow and arrow
• Sword
• Spears or pikes
• Guns
 • Antimatter propulsors
• One’s own body
• Magic
What’s the literacy level?
• Nearly universal
• Only the elite
• None
• Writing is superseded by
telepathy or high technology
How prevalent is magic?
• Almost everyone can use it
• Restricted to a small,
secretive class
• Rare— there are only a
 few wizards
• Nonexistent
What’s the essence of magic?
• A biological ability
• A natural power that can
be harnessed like technology
• A natural resource (e.g.
mana) which may be exhausted
• Communing with
supernatural beings
• Accessing a separate
dimension
• Special properties of some
herbs or minerals
• Superstition and chicanery
What’s the overall technology?
• Tribal
• Bronze age (looms, kilns,
chariots, spears)
• Classical (sailing ships,
aqueducts, water mills, swords)
• Renaissance (telescopes,
watches, windmills, artillery)
• Early modern (science,
rifles, sailing ships, factories)
• Age of steam
• Contemporary
• Futuristic
• Godlike
What do people worship or invoke?
 • God
• The gods
• Spirit animals
• Their ancestors
• Another species
• Minor spiritual beings
• Nothing
What is the most admired class? Or to
put it another way, whose values and
interests are paramount?
• Nobles and kings
• Priests and clerics
• The military
• Merchants or
 manufacturers
• Scholars or magicians
• Another species
What’s the lowest class?
• Slaves
• Serfs
• A motley collection of
poor people
• Castes devoted to
unpleasant jobs (e.g.
gravediggers)
• A foreign community or
racial minority
• Another species
How are women treated?
 • Equally with men
• Men are completely
dominant
• Men are usually the
leaders, but there are powerful
women and some female-run
institutions
• The sexes divide up work
and control different institutions
in society
• Women are in control
What’s the attitude toward sex?
• Restricted to marriage
• Marriage is one thing,
romance/sex is another
 • There are some accepted
outlets besides marriage
• Freely indulged
• Restricted to an elite
What are the major species?
• Just humans
• Just humanoid cats
• Several species, but
separated by region or habitat
• Several species, fairly
intermingled
• Several species, separated
by class or profession (e.g. one
forms the servant class)
What’s the most pressing problem?
• Other nations (barbarians
or civilized states)
• Demons
• Another species
• Rebellion or civil war
• Tyranny
• A dangerous secret cabal
• Ecological collapse
• Just ordinary cussedness
Storytelling
Many conworlds are intended to be
background for a story. So it’s worth
looking at how conworlding can serve
storytelling.

The basics of story

Stories involve conflict and failure.
As my improv-trained friend Michele
puts it, “Stories begin when things go
wrong. How I flew from Boston to
Chicago isn’t a story. How I got to
Chicago when the plane never took off
is a story.”
Once you get past the basics— this
planet is 1.04 Earth masses, the elves
have pointy ears and the elven kings
have pointy hair— conworlding is a
series of little stories too, and they
need conflict and failure.
Bad! Good!
Ervëa was the greatest Ervëa was
emperor of Caďinas, emperor of
who conquered the deposed as
ktuvok empire. usurping unc
was saved
garrison, wh
force Sevuria
him. The rea
civil war.
defeated Sev
 faced with a
by the ktuvok
Morgan is the greatest Morgan arri
agent of the Terran only to be
Incatena, who was agents of
responsible for ending posing as tou
the dictatorship on canny agent
Okura. began to orga
Just when the
out into all-o
was betrayed.

David Mamet has memorably

explained the basic formula for drama:
Someone has a problem. They take
action to solve it, and it’s going well.
At the last minute it fails. The bad guys
advance— they’re about to win!
They’re stopped just in time. Then the
pattern repeats.
Of course, we like heroes with
extraordinary abilities, and we like to
see them walloping mundane
challengers (muggers, tiny hunters with
speech impediments). But to keep the
story interesting, extraordinary heroes
need to encounter extraordinary
challengers.
You know this— it’s taught by every
blockbuster epic and movie. But it can
still be tempting to have your main
conculture the most advanced
civilization on the planet, happy and
well-ordered, united under their noble
monarch. If it’s that well ordered,
there’s few stories to be told there...
your heroes will have to light out for
the wilderness to have any adventures.
Nick Hornby stated it nicely: as a
reader, I want to read about the worst
time of your characters’ lives. If it’s
only the second worst time, I’m going
to feel cheated.
That isn’t to say that all stories must be
violent. A romance, like Pride and
Prejudice, is largely the story of
obstacles that must be overcome before
the match can proceed.

Overexplaining
The easiest vice for a conworlder to
fall into is overexplaining. You have
all this beautiful material to use; why
not put it in?
Now, I’m a huge fan of detailed
worldbuilding; but the best
practitioners are also great storytellers,
and they never let exposition get in the
way of the story. And they know when
not to explain things.
Tolkien is a good and bad example. A
huge amount of his worldbuilding is
only alluded to in LOTR— you have to
look elsewhere to understand what
exactly Gandalf is, how the
Númenoreans fell, even what happened
to God. At the same time he can’t resist
beginning with an explanatory
anthropological (hobbitological?)
sketch, and the first book is filled with
people explaining things to each other.
Science fiction can be much worse. I
wrote a little sketch to show what the
same approach would be like if applied
to the contemporary world:

If most stories were written li

s.f.
Roger and Ann needed to meet Sergey in San
Francisco.
“Should we take a train, or a steamship, or a
plane?” asked Ann.
“Trains are too slow, and the trip by
steamship through the Panama Canal would
take months,” replied Roger. “We’ll take a
plane.”
He logged onto the central network using his
personal computer, and waited while the
system verified his identity. With a few
keystrokes he entered an electronic ticketing
system, and entered the codes for his point of
departure and his destination. In moments the
computer displayed a list of possible flights,
and he picked the earliest one. Dollars were
automatically deducted from his personal
account to pay for the transaction.
The planes left from the city airport, which
they reached using the city bi-rail. Ann had
changed into her travelling outfit, which
consisted of a light shirt in polycarbon-
derived artificial fabric, which showed off
her pert figure, without genetic
enhancements, and dark blue pants made of
natural textiles. Her attractive brown hair
was uncovered.
At the airport Roger presented their
identification cards to a representative of the
airline company, who used her own computer
system to check his identity and retrieve his
itinerary. She entered a confirmation number,
and gave him two passes which gave them
access to the boarding area. They now
underwent a security inspection, which was
required for all airline flights. They handed
their luggage to another representative; it
would be transported in a separate,
unpressurized chamber on the aircraft.
“Do you think we’ll be flying on a propeller
plane? Or one of the newer jets?” asked Ann.
“I’m sure it will be a jet,” said Roger.
“Propeller planes are almost entirely out of
date, after all. On the other hand, rocket
engines are still experimental. It’s said that
when they’re in general use, trips like this
will take an hour at most. This one will take
up to four hours.”
After a short wait, they were ushered onto the
plane with the other passengers. The plane
was an enormous steel cylinder at least a
hundred meters long, with sleek backswept
wings on which four jet engines were
mounted. They glanced into the front cabin
and saw the two pilots, consulting a bank of
equipment needed to fly the plane. Roger
was glad that he did not need to fly the plane
himself; it was a difficult profession which
required years of training.
The surprisingly large passenger area was
equipped with soft benches, and windows
through which they could look down at the
countryside as they flew 11 km high at more
than 800 km/h. There were nozzles for the
pressurized air which kept the atmosphere in
the cabin warm and comfortable despite the
coldness of the stratosphere.
“I’m a little nervous,” Ann said, before the
plane took off.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he assured
her. “These flights are entirely routine.
You’re safer than you are in our ground
transport cars!”
Despite his calm words, Roger had to admit
to some anxiety as the pilot took off, and the
land dropped away below them. He and the
other passengers watched out the windows
for a long time. With difficulty, he could
make out houses and farms and moving
vehicles far below.
“There are more people going to San
Francisco today than I would have
expected,” he remarked.
“Some of them may in fact be going
elsewhere,” she answered. “As you know, it’s
expensive to provide airplane links between
all possible locations. We employ a hub
system, and people from smaller cities travel
first to the hub, and then to their final
destination. Fortunately, you found us a
flight that takes us straight to San Francisco.”
When they arrived at the San Francisco
airport, agents of the airline company helped
them out of their seats and retrieved their
luggage, checking the numeric tags to ensure
that they were given to the right people.
“I can hardly believe we’re already in
another city,” said Ann. “Just four hours ago
we were in Chicago.”
“We’re not quite there!” corrected Roger.
“We’re in the airport, which is some distance
from the city, since it requires a good deal of
space on the ground, and because of
occasional accidents. From here we’ll take a
smaller vehicle into the city.”
They selected one of the hydrocarbon-
powered ground transports from the queue
which waited outside the airport. The fee was
small enough that it was not paid
electronically, but using portable dollar
tokens. The driver conducted his car unit into
the city; though he drove only at 100 km/hr,
it felt much faster since they were only a
meter from the concrete road surface. He
looked over at Ann, concerned that the speed
might alarm her; but she seemed to be
enjoying the ride. A game girl, and intelligent
as well!
At last the driver stopped his car, and they
had arrived. Electronic self-opening doors
welcomed them to Sergey’s building. The
entire trip had taken less than seven hours.

Some rules of thumb

So what should you do and not do?
• The big no-no: characters
explaining things to each other
that they already know. You
have several alternatives:
° Show, don’t explain. Is
your transportation system
bus-sized angry yaks? Fine,
describe what they look like,
how big they are, show them
nearly biting someone’s head
off. If any aspect really
doesn’t affect the story, leave
it out.
° Have a viewpoint
character that’s not from the
culture. Then you have an
excuse to describe all the
things that are as novel to
 them as to the reader.
° Put all the fancy details
in an appendix or web page.
° If your ideas are highly
visual, illustrate them instead.
Comics, movies, and video
games can easily show off an
exotic world. You can’t spend
much time describing your
huge yaks, but in visual media
the reader can directly
experience them.
• If you have a really neat
bit of conworlding, tailor the
plot to show it off.
° This is the essence of
s.f.— the story is about the
 details of the setting as much
as it is about the characters
and their conflicts. Asimov’s
robot stories, for instance, are
explorations of robot nature
and the relationship between
robots and humans. If your
world is permeated by magic,
your story had better have
magician characters and plot
situations that can only be
solved by magic.
° The classic means of
exploring a world is a quest. It
just happens that to solve her
problems, your heroine needs
to visit a rogue in the slums, a
princess in the capital, a
 magician in the Purple Forest,
and the cultists in the elven
ruins.
° Another natural story
form for exploration, and one
that isn’t as exploited in
fantasy and s.f., is the
detective story. Again, you
have an excuse to visit many
locations and people of every
class.
• Use just a few telling
details. In an S.F. story, to get the
characters from point A to point
B as in the above passage, all we
need is “Roger and Ann took the
next shuttle to Lowell City.” But
you can certainly make it more
 flavorful:
Roger and Ann took the
first shuttle they saw. The
pilot was a huge and
malodorous Mollostoman,
whose tentacles seemed to
fill the cabin and had to
be constantly swatted
away. Even worse was his
conversation, a mumbled
rant about the
amoebizoids who’d forced
him to seek employment
among the mammals. It
was a relief to step out of
the shuttle in Lowell City.
• Just to please me, avoid
this pet peeve of mine: characters
 who face some aspect of their
daily reality unfamiliar to us as if
they’ve never seen it before. E.g.
a character in one of the Culture
novels spends multiple pages
trying to get useful, human-
tailored data out of a massive AI.
In this world humans and AIs
have interacted for centuries; this
would be an old solved problem.

Evil and Eeeevil

I blame Tolkien for one of the hoariest
clichés in fantasy and adventure
stories: the eeeevil warlord. Tolkien’s
heroes have their failings, but his
villains are pure evil. Sauron never has
any regrets, his agents never come
close to making you see their point of
view, you never see a cute orc or
wonder at the morality of slaughtering
them. They’re pure sword fodder.
This bugs me because the real world is
never like this. Take the most evil
leader you can think of, and I guarantee
he has his good points and could make
a case for himself. His supporters very
likely consider themselves good and
your side to be wrong.
Chris Livingston puts it well:
Question: if the monsters ever
did take over, what the hell would
they do then? Stand around
roaring? Do they have other
 marketable skills besides
stabbing villagers and operating
catapults? Can any of them grow
crops or improve roads or
manage an inn?
It’s always safe to write about these
dudes— all your readers can be
assumed to hate eeeevil. But it’s also a
huge missed opportunity. Moral
dilemmas are a lot more interesting
and involving than just fighting.
We can do better. A neat example is
the video game Bioshock, whose
villains are a twisted form of Ayn Rand
Objectivists. Using a recognizable real-
world philosophy allows the game to
serve as satire, and also allows the
main culprit, Andrew Ryan , to be a
charismatic figure who has a good deal
to say for himself. His philosophy is
dubious, but his determination and
creativity are admirable.
Bad luck for the Objectivists, of
course, who will have to console
themselves with their positive press in
Heinlein novels. No wonder most
writers choose eeeevil as a target:
eeeevil has no constituency that might
lose you sales or send hate mail.
Perhaps authors worry that if the
villain isn’t eeeevil, people might take
his side instead of the hero’s? But the
open secret is, people love villains
anyway. Who’s the most iconic
character from Star Wars ? Darth
Vader, of course, with his creepy mask
and elegant robes. Create the most evil
creatures you can think up, and I
guarantee you that teenage boys will be
naming themselves after them in online
games.
It’s probably a form of the escapism
that fuels much of literature: we like to
vicariously experience lives of greater
adventure than our own. Heroes get to
do things we can’t, but it’s villains who
have the ultimate freedom, the freedom
from morality. We can’t choke the
snotty guy in the suit using the power
of our minds— believe me, I’ve tried
— but Darth Vader can.
As an exercise in making rounded
beings, write a speech where your main
villain justifies himself as clearly as
possible. Why is he doing these terrible
things? No one is purely destructive for
the hell of it; even revenge is in service
to a virtue— justice or honor. If he
wants power, what does he want it for?
If he’s creating orcs, why does he
prefer them to humans?
A cute example from Rich Burlew’s
online comic The Order of the Stick: a
girl allied with the bad guys explains
why she hangs out with the undead:
Look, everyone knows that the
undead are the antithesis of life,
right? Except people are jerks.
Lying, untrustworthy jackasses,
every one of them. Everyone
knows this, too. So logically,
undead must be the opposite of
 that: caring, sensitive honest
souls who are oppressed by the
living majority and their negative
stereotypes.
It’s not deep— she is a comic strip
character— but she has a reasonable
motivation, something we can
sympathize with.

Really using your ideas

In Mary Gentle’s Rats and Gargoyles,
one of the characters has a tail. In most
fantasy books this would be noted and
then forgotten, much like the hobbits’
hairy feet. But Gentle tells us on
almost every page what the character is
doing with her tail. This is the
difference between world-building and
bringing a world alive.
Another example is the daemons in
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. I
confess I don’t understand the
connection to the idea of souls, but the
idea of a double consciousness, one
manifested in an animal companion, is
fascinating, and Pullman leverages our
knowledge of animals without making
the daemons into mere pets.

Know your genre

Before you get too far on your world
it’s good to know what the goals and
conventions of your genre are. Fantasy
isn’t just swords and dragons and
wizards; s.f. isn’t just robots and
spaceships and rayguns.
What both have in common is the
importance of the setting— that is, the
world we’re building, what this book is
about. Both are an excuse to explore a
very different world than the one we
live in. And both pay the price of
giving up the reader’s familiarity with
our own world; the easy realism and
recognition gained by setting the story
in contemporary times.
And in both cases, if there’s nothing
about the world that differs
interestingly from ours, why is it genre
at all? If you just want to write a novel
of intrigue among the “berons and dux”
of “Ferrance and Ingilland”, you’d
might as well write historical fiction.
In general science fiction plays with
the physical, fantasy with the
metaphysical. The quintessential s.f.
story is about a neat
idea—teleportation, first contact,
robotic intelligence, time travel,
psychohistory, telepathy, tesseracts—
and rings the changes on it. The
quintessential fantasy story is a
spiritual exploration: an everyman
stumbles into a strange and perilous
world and has to develop to meet its
challenges.
You can mix and match, of course. Star
Wars is essentially fantasy with s.f.
trappings. Many a fantasy game treats
magic exactly like technology, with
fixed and predictable rules.
Genre conventions are tools to use, not
rigid laws; but you need never
apologize for following them. For
instance, fantasy typically takes place
on earthlike worlds, with main
characters who are human. I emphasize
this because making a world more
realistic, as I’ve done with Almea,
sometimes raises questions: if it’s a
different planet, why are the humans
nearly identical to Earth’s?
The answer is that Almea is fantasy,
not s.f. It’s informed by astronomy and
biology but it’s not an attempt to create
a science-fictional planet with a
thoroughly alien flora and fauna. It’s
more like an alternative version of
Earth.
The genres have different attitudes
toward realism. Both can cheerfully
violate physical laws, but s.f. expects a
greater bow toward science. You can
invent a new physical law for each
short story or episode, but you’re
expected to treat it consistently. If
you’ve established that blasters can cut
through metal, you can never imprison
a blaster-wielding character in a metal
cell. It’s more acceptable in fantasy
that (say) a newly introduced villain
has previously unmentioned powers
that counteract the hero’s.
But even in fantasy, don’t cheat the
reader. Magic can be unreliable, but
don’t let it get out of hand. If you can
always invent a spell to get out of any
difficult situation, the reader’s
involvement drops, because there’s no
real danger. Supernatural powers
should be limited, and the reader
should generally know what those
limits are. There’s a reason Gandalf
casts fewer spells per day than the
lowest-level wizard in a D&D game.

Biography a
worldbuilding
A great way to help you figure out your
culture and make it come alive is to
write a biography of a typical resident.
In this case you’ll ignore some of the
usual restraints on stories: there’s no
character arc; the events don’t have to
be notable— indeed, quite the opposite,
since you’re telling everyone’s story:
the background condition in your
society.
Here’s the biography I wrote of a Lé
peasant named Múr.

Birth and infancy

Múr was born in the house belonging to her
jɔ (family): a large circular structure that was
mostly thatched roof, supported by wooden
beams. Hammocks were strung here and
there for sleeping; dried meat and other
stored food hung from the ceiling. She was
washed and handed to her mother in a
hammock for feeding.
The household seemed to ignore her for three
days, not even speaking of her; then it
exploded into a storm of activity,
culminating in a huge celebration with many
rituals, gifts, and blessings. The birth of a
daughter was a big event, but only once it
was clear she was healthy.
Her infancy was a sort modern
developmental psychologists can only dream
about: plenty of contact with everyone in the
family, nursing on demand, attention as soon
as she cried, almost no punishment. She
started receiving masticated food early, at six
months or so, and wasn’t fully weaned till
four.
She wore no clothes; she was taken outside
the house to relieve herself, and was able to
do this on her own before the age of two.

Childhood
When she was four her mother had another
child; this was a huge and unwelcome change
in Múr’s life, since she saw her mother much
less and wasn’t allowed to nurse. She was
hardly ignored, though; she was looked after
by almost the whole family, though most
often by her father, her older sister, and her
grandfather.
Her family farmed in a plot (brɔ̀ ŋ) cleared
from the jungle, adjoining a little stream. It
was a quarter hour’s walk to the nearest
neighbors— though this and longer walks
were routine; there were frequent visits for
business and pleasure, enough that she soon
had friends in other settlements. She learned
how the farm worked and began to help out
with cleaning, weeding, removing stripcorn
and tengbean husks, gathering eggs from the
gallenes, watching babies.
The whole family was about 20 people in all;
all the females were descendants of
Grandmother Lâ, who had died before Múr
was born. Her older daughter Prɛ̀n, Múr’s
grandmother, was the new matriarch (háɔ).
Prɛ̀n’s younger sister Trâo and her
descendants were still part of the jɔ as it
wasn’t large enough to split.
The family had a number of amusements:
music, dancing, storytelling, games played
with a wooden board and a set of tokens. The
children also had toys, often carved for them
by the adults: wooden animals, or small
representations of adult tools or weapons.
Múr still went about naked, except for
various decorations— earrings, beaded
necklaces or bracelets. She wore a braided
leather band around her waist that was useful
for hanging things from, such as her prized
possession, a knife. When she was eight, the
family dog had puppies, and for some time
she carried a puppy around in a sling, the
way women carried babies.
By this time she was trusted to go about in
the jungle by herself or with other children.
They explored quite a bit, sometimes finding
a clearing to create their own miniature brɔ̀ ŋ,
complete with a flimsy but serviceable
house; or they might walk to another
settlement and spend the night with friends.
They were safe so long as they didn’t stray
too far from established trails. Large animals
rarely came close to human settlements, and
the minor dangers of the jungle (from
poisonous slugs to stinging vines to army
ants) they had long ago learned to recognize
and avoid.

Adolescence
Múr’s life changed when she was eleven.
First, Prɛ̀n and Trâo decided it was time to
move. A brɔ̀ ŋ could only be cultivated for
ten years or so. This involved a lot of
exciting novelties: hiring a geomancer
(insùŋdlán) to consult on the right spot;
asking the neighboring families for help;
trips to the market town for supplies;
building the new house; hiring a pair of nawr
oxen— frighteningly large and fierce-
looking animals— to clear the land.
Secondly, this year marked Múr’s transition
from girl (rɛ̀) to maiden (dǎr). In part this
meant that she had to work a lot more. Unlike
her brothers and male cousins, she’d always
be part of this jɔ, so she had to know how to
do everything from midwifery to horticulture
to trading to knowing a hundred or more
local plants and what they were good for.
She also began to wear skirts, at first truca
fronds hung from her belt, and later a petay
loincloth. She continued to wear decorations:
bracelets, large earrings, flowers, bright
feathers.
There were also family traditions to learn and
genealogies and stories to memorize. There
were religious practices, so diverse that it’s
hard to consider them one thing:
• Various taboos, superstitions,
cantrips, and rituals, passed on
without much rationalization. Why
was it forbidden to eat brains? No one
really knew (though the practice
prevented the spread of certain
diseases, and preserved the supply of
brains for tanning).
• Stories about goddesses and
gods, as well as rituals of appeasement
or supplication. People mostly
 gravitated toward a deity whose
personality matched their own; Múr
chose the cheerful and helpful Ŋisú.
• Several times Múr was awakened
in the middle of the night, dressed in a
robe (an uncomfortable sensation),
blindfolded, and taken into the jungle,
where she was given secret instruction
(sârpáɔ) that she was not allowed to
repeat to males or children. Sometimes
this was cosmological tales, or
information about sex or the afterlife;
sometimes she was given drugs and
experienced strange visions.
• Shamans had access to the nɔŋǎ,
the spirit realm. They were consulted
on grave occasions, such as when
someone was sick and ordinary
herblore and rituals failed, or when it
 was necessary to speak to the late
Grandmother Lâ.
Múr and her friends indulged in some
amount of sexual play— generally when they
were alone, as adults discouraged it if they
saw it. It wasn’t considered very serious
before menstruation; once this began, when
Múr was about fifteen, she was strongly
discouraged from actually having sex. This
was the subject of one of the more
frightening sârpáɔ, and Múr was careful to
follow the prescription. (The boys she played
with were younger and followed her lead.)

Marriage
When she was eighteen, the family began to
seriously look around for a potential
husband. Everyone older than Múr had
advice or had a candidate to propose. There
were a number of rather awkward visits to
neighboring families or to the market town.
Múr knew many of the boys already, but it
was one thing to play or talk with them, quite
another to be evaluating them as husbands.
Nonetheless she made her opinions clear to
her family afterwards, especially negative
ones.
The final choice, after nearly a year of
looking, was a boy named Nàŋ— an old
playmate and a cheerful fellow who got
along well enough with the family. He was
about three years younger than Múr.
The marriage started with a big meal in Nàŋ’s
brɔ̀ ŋ. A priestess offered rituals and
blessings, and Múr’s family gave generous
gifts to Nàŋ’s. Then the whole party walked
to Múr’s brɔ̀ ŋ for another meal, lubricated
with plenty of heady bǎɔsa wine and milky
ŋássa. There were many embarrassing jokes,
till finally, at sunset— with the whole family
watching and laughing— the two newlyweds
removed their loincloths and got into a
hammock together.
Fortunately, they weren’t expected to
perform for the onlookers. Without lights,
people didn’t stay up long after dark; soon
most everyone was asleep except for Múr
and Nàŋ. Lying naked together in the
darkness, the couple found it not so difficult
to have sex for the first time.
The first few weeks were fun; it was like an
extended sleepover with the added novelty of
sex. Then it sank in that Nàŋ was here for
good; for a time he missed his family and she
missed her freedom. After a quarrel, Nàŋ set
up his own hammock.
She was upset to learn, a few months later,
that Nàŋ was sleeping with her cousin. Her
mother and her sister were sympathetic, but
pointed out that that was just how men were.
This alerted Múr to observe more carefully
what happened after dark, or who
disappeared into the bush during the day, and
she realized that almost no one stuck to their
spouse, though they did keep to their age
group. She looked at her own father with new
eyes, wondering if he was really her
biological father. She decided she’d rather
not know.
She was embarrassed now when the newer
men in the family— her sister’s and cousins’
husbands— looked at her frankly and even
flirted with her. But finally she realized that
nothing would happen unless she showed
interest back. Perhaps inevitably, she ended
up sleeping with her cousin’s husband— the
partner of the cousin Nàŋ had slept with. He
was older and stronger than Nàŋ and had a
beard, which fascinated her for some reason.
Just a week after this she found she was
pregnant. When she confessed her worries to
her mother, she asked for some details, then
laughed; the baby could only be Nàŋ’s. Even
if that weren’t the case, social custom
dictated that he was the father.
The pregnancy and birth repaired her
relationship with Nàŋ. He was a comfortable
presence and helpful with the baby, while her
cousin’s husband was clearly just a fling.

Adult life
Múr was now a lɔ, a married woman, a full
member of the family. It wasn’t appropriate
to wear flowers and feathers any more—
those were for unmarried girls. Instead she
wore jewelry, made of metals, gems, or shells
— all things that couldn’t be found locally
and had to be acquired in trade, thus
emblems of wealth.
She nursed her baby, often carried it around
in a sling, and slept with it, but in a short time
the baby spent more than half its time with
other people: Nàŋ, Múr’s sister and younger
brother, older relatives.
Múr welcomed this, as there was plenty to do.
Tending the plot wasn’t that laborious, but
preparing food was an endless chore, and
there were other things to make: pots,
baskets, rope, mats, hammocks, loincloths,
sandals, musical instruments, toys for the
children. The heaviest work, such as cutting
trees and erecting the pillars and beams for
houses, was done by the men.
Both sexes could go fishing, or hunting for
small game, using bow and arrow.
Occasionally there was a large predator
around— mostly boars or jaguars— and the
men gleefully took the lead in hunting these.
This could take a few days, and often more
jugs of ŋássa than animals were disposed of.
Periodically there were trips to the market
town, a welcome change of pace. There was
always something to sell— extra petay cloth,
yams, keng oil, ŋássa, dried fish, herbs and
spices, gallene eggs— and there were things
to buy as well, from leather to cheese to salt
to medicine to metal tools. There were people
to see, novelties to watch, sometimes
specialists to consult.
The major crops— sorghum, stripcorn, and
tengbeans— were sold here too, but this was
more complex, not only because they were
harder to transport (often a wagon had to be
hired), but because they were taxed. The
family’s land wasn’t their own; it belonged to
a jinlɔ or noblewoman, and she was entitled
to a tenth of the produce. She had a
representative at the grain merchant’s who
accepted this share and gave out tokens
indicating compliance.
In Múr’s region, the usual currencies were
salt, seashells, or glass beads— easily
transported and hoarded items not produced
locally. But many transactions were more
easily handled with barter.

Elderhood
Life wasn’t always calm; one year the łɛ̀ or
monsoon didn’t come and most of the crops
failed. The family subsisted mostly on dried
food and hardroot; half a dozen children and
two adults died.
Sometimes family life flared up as well.
While she was bearing children Múr mostly
stayed with Nàŋ, but in later years they
drifted apart; he bonded most closely with
the cousin he had slept with years ago. Múr
didn’t really replace him, but when she
wanted sex she often ended up with her
sister’s husband. But this was minor
compared to the problems of one of Trâo’s
daughters: her husband couldn’t get along
with her or with anyone and he ended up
leaving the family. That was traumatic
enough, but it also offended his birth family,
and that was a problem because it was their
nawr ox that Múr’s family usually hired.
Grandmother Prɛ̀n finally died, in her late
sixties. She was buried quickly— bodies
don’t last long in the jungle— and a few days
later there was a funeral service attended by
a large crowd.
After a decent interval, it was decided that
the jɔ should split. Prɛ̀n’s and Trâo’s
lineages felt a little more distant now that
Prɛ̀n was gone; and the acrimony over the
departed husband didn’t help. But the main
reason was the size of the family. There were
five women in Múr’s generation (Múr and
her sister, and Trâo’s three granddaughters),
and all had children— there were more than
thirty people in the family, more than the
house and plot could easily support.
The split was a major undertaking, as two
new brɔ̀ ŋs had to be established; it was also
necessary to get approval from the
goddesses, deceased Grandmother Lâ, and
the landlady. The family had to go into debt
to cover its expenses, though this was partly
offset by a gift from the jinlɔ.
It was difficult for Múr to move away from
people she had known all her life. Nàŋ faced
an even harder decision, whether to live with
Múr (and his children), or the cousin he had
bonded to. He ended up choosing the cousin;
fortunately, another cousin-in-law made the
opposite switch as he preferred Múr’s sister
to his original wife. The two new families
could easily visit— they were just a half-
hour’s walk away— but further sexual
mixing was discouraged.
Múr’s mother was now the háɔ of the new jɔ.
In some ways this was the most enjoyable
phase of Múr’s life. She and her sister were
respected elders and religious authorities; the
hard work could be left to younger people;
she could relax as much as she wanted, and
spend more time with the young children.
There was no retirement in Lé life: Múr
remained active, and grew only more
important with age, especially after her
mother died and she was the second-ranking
family member after her sister. She grew
arthritic, and hard of hearing, which simply
meant that she could give up tedious tasks
like husking tengbeans, and could
continually insist that the youngsters repeat
themselves.
She started to complain about pains in the
abdomen; some medicinal herbs helped with
the pain, but the blood in her stool showed
that she wasn’t cured. She died a few months
later, nearly sixty.
She was buried just outside the house, and
while the family lived there they would greet
her or leave small offerings for her; but after
the brɔ̀ ŋ was next moved she existed only in
memories.

Notes
A lot of things are covered here:
sustenance, clothing, sex, family life,
technological level, even something of
the larger society (the market town, the
local noblewoman).
It should be clear that the Lé live in the
rain forest, with a typical garden
agriculture system of clearing a plot,
cultivating it for awhile, then moving
on (see p. 89).
The most striking difference from
earthly societies is that Lé society is
female-dominant (for more see p. 158).
The Almeopedia contains a detailed
explanation of how this works; but
Múr’s story shows it in action.
Hopefully it gives an idea of what it’s
like to live in such a society.
As this is background material, it can
indulge in a certain amount of
exposition. Still, I tried to show rather
than tell as much as possible— e.g.
instead of saying “Lé marriages are
arranged by the family”, I describe how
Múr’s family found her a husband and
how it worked out for her.
You don’t have to stop with a typical
peasant’s lifestyle. To help work out
the continent of Arcél on Almea, where
the Lé live, I wrote biographies of an
isolated fisherman, an evangelistic
shaman, a barbarian lord, a grandiose
architect, a eunuch dictator, a magician
defending his land, a sleazy
entrepreneur, a tea merchant, a couple
of thief adventurers, a pirate queen, and
a princess who became a major
philosopher. These are more like
miniature short stories— they’re
individuals rather than generic types,
they make mistakes, they have
reverses, not all their stories end well.
(You can find them all on the
Almeopedia in the People category.)
This not only makes your planet feel
like a populated, interesting place, but
it’s great practice for writing longer
stories.
Astronomy an
Geology
Conphysics
Most of this chapter is going to be
about applying the known laws of
physics to your world. But of course
you can create your own physics.
My favorite example along these lines
is A.K. Dewdney’s The Planiverse, a
rigorous exploration of a two-
dimensional world, from its quantum
mechanics on up. Another example is
Stephen Baxter’s Raft, set in a universe
with a force of gravity far stronger than
ours. For teaching purposes George
Gamow wrote about a world where the
speed of light is just 15 km/h.
Sadly, much of the science in s.f. is
outmoded or unlikely: faster-than-light
travel, time travel, new types of
radiation. But these can still make
great worlds and stories. It’s tacky to
simply invent all the consequences as
in a comic book; the elegant approach
is to vary one or a few parameters and
work out the results consistently— a
feat that requires good knowledge of
existing science.
Another approach is to adopt some
previous level of science—
Aristotelian physics, for instance. The
definitive s.f. treatment of phlogiston
has perhaps yet to be written.

Stars
In a hurry? Your star is “sun-like”; see
you in the geology section. S.f. writers
may not be happy without a stellar
class— fine, the sun’s is G2; vary the
last digit if you like.

Stellar classifications
Stellar class is essentially a scale of
surface temperature. Here’s a table of
the classes, showing surface
temperature in kilokelvins (degrees
above absolute zero; for comparison
it’s 0.3 kK outside right now), color,
mass compared to the sun, and the
fraction of all main sequence stars.
Class Temperature Color Mass
O ≥ 33 blue ≥ 16+
B 10-30 blue-white 2.1-1
A 7.5-10 bluish white 1.4-2
F 6-7.5 white 1.04-
G 5.2-6 yellowish white
0.8-1
K 3.7-5.2 yellow orange 0.45-
M ≤ 3.7 orange red ≤ 0.4

As a G2 star, the sun is near the top of

the G class and its color is white. That
is, the range of colors it produces is
largely restricted to our visual
spectrum, without skewing to any one
color. This isn’t coincidence; our eyes
are adapted to the light from the sun.
The sun appears yellow from the
earth’s surface for the same reason the
sky is blue— blue light is scattered
more by the atmosphere; in space it
looks white.
You were probably told at some point
that the sun is an average,
unremarkable star. Not true; as you can
see from the chart, it’s hotter and
bigger than 90% of all stars. Of the 50
nearest stars, only one is hotter than the
sun— Sirius A. (Alpha Centauri A is
also a G2 star, very much like the sun.
The only other G star in the lot is Tau
Ceti, thus its popularity in science
fiction.)
Stars are also classed by luminosity
class, expressed as a Roman numeral;
these may be of any stellar class. The
vast majority of stars lie either along
the main sequence (V), like the sun, or
are giants (III).
ClassType Abs Lifetime
magnitude
0 hypergiants -8 millions
years
I supergiants -5 to -7 < 30 million
II bright giants-3 to -5
III normal giants
0 to -5
IV subgiants +3 to 0 billions
V main sequence +20 to -5 depends
mass
VI subdwarfs +10 to +5
VII white dwarfs+15 to +10billions
Absolute magnitude measures
brightness; negative is brighter. The
scale is logarithmic: each magnitude is
2.5 times brighter than the next higher
one.
Luminosity and hotness can be plotted
on a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram,
which allows us to see that the
luminosity classes are really clumps in
this two-dimensional space.
Suitability for life
So which are the good ones? You’re
welcome to imagine beings living in
Jupiter’s gases or the hell-hothouse of
Venus, but most of us would prefer an
earthlike planet, and the type of star
you choose affects that. Let’s look
through some relevant criteria.
• Stellar lifetime.
Intelligent life took 4.5 billion
years to evolve. If a star is more
than 1.4 times the sun’s mass—
that is, classes O, B, A— its
lifetime is likely to be measured
in millions of years; even F stars
only last two billion or so.
• Stars have a habitable
zone based on distance and
stellar mass. For the weakest and
commonest stars— M class—this
is so close to the star that the
planet is likely to be tidally
locked, and this would probably
destroy its atmosphere. Stellar
flares could also be a problem.
The habitable zone is where
water and a greenhouse effect
both exist. Closer to the star,
stellar radiation breaks water up
into hydrogen and oxygen;
farther from the star you lose the
greenhouse warming effect.
Venus and Mars are each just
outside the habitable zone.
Main sequence stars
 brighten as they age. It’s
expected that the earth may be
too hot for life in 500 to 900
million years— which means that
we evolved just in time, and
terrestrial real estate is not a
good long-term investment.
• Number of stars. More
than half of all stellar systems
are multiple, and this plays havoc
with planetary orbits. Dust disks
— regions where asteroids and
planets may form— have been
observed in binary systems, but
mostly when the stars are either
closer than 3 AU or farther than
50 AU. (1 AU is the distance
from the earth to the sun, 149.6 ×
 106 km.)
If the stars are far apart, it’s
best to have your planet orbit just
one of them (and just use that
star’s mass M for the calculations
below). If they’re very close it
might orbit both, and M should
be the total of both stellar
masses.
• Distance from the galactic
core. It may not be coincidence
that we’re 30,000 light years out:
if your star gets too close it may
be fried by supernovas, which are
more common toward the core.

Calculating the habitable zone

There are numerous formulas for
calculating the habitable zone; here’s a
simple one that depends merely on the
amount of light.
Start with the mass M relative to the
sun, which you can take from the
stellar classification (p. 38). Derive the
luminosity L (also relative to the sun)
with the formula

Now the orbit in AU (earth-sun

distances) where the luminosity is the
same as the earth receives is
The edges of the habitable zone may be
calculated as 95% to 137% of this
distance.

Calculating the year

While we’re at it, let’s calculate the
length of the year p, given the size of
the orbit d in AU. For planets orbiting
the sun, we use Kepler’s third law p2 =
d3 to derive the period:

(That’s easy to do on a calculator, but

may be easier to grasp.)
For instance, a planet at 1.524 AU has
an orbit of 1.5241.5 = 1.88 Earth year—
which in fact is the distance and year of
Mars.
The general formula for an orbiting

body is where M is the total

mass of the two bodies in solar masses.
This works for other stellar systems,
for binary stars, or for moons orbiting
planets; but the units are still Earth
years, AU, and solar masses; convert as
necessary.
Planetary orbits are actually ellipses.
The earth’s eccentricity is minimal
(0.0167); that of Mars is ten times
larger, so that its distance from the sun
varies from 1.38 to 1.67 AU. The
formula is where b is half
of the smaller axis and a is half the
larger axis.
All the planets orbit counter-clockwise,
as viewed from the Sun’s north pole,
and orbit in roughly the same plane— a
relic of their common origin in the
flattened spinning gas cloud of the
early solar system.

One planet to go, sid

order of moons
There’s a few basic decisions to make
about your planet:
• Size. The Earth has a
radius of 6371 km, and a
meridional circumference of
40,008 km. (The near-roundness
of this number is no accident; the
meter was supposed to be
1/10,000,000 of the distance from
the equator to the pole, but they
didn’t quite get it right.)
In case you’ve forgotten
basic geometry:
circumference = 2pr
area = 4pr2
volume = 4/3 pr3
The Earth is a little
flattened of course— the polar
 radius is 6357 km, the equatorial
radius 6378 km.
• Mass. The Earth’s is
5.9736 x 1024 kg. As a rough
estimate we may say that mass
varies with volume; comparing it
to Earth’s, this reduces to
comparing r3. For instance, for
Venus r = .9499, so its mass
should be (.94993) = .857 of
Earth’s. In fact it’s .815— Venus
is slightly less dense than Earth.
Given the mass you can
find the surface gravity
g = m/r2
where the values are again
 are proportions of Earth’s. E.g.
for Venus we get .815/(.9499 2) =
0.903 Earth gravity. To get an
absolute figure, multiply by the
value for Earth, 9.78 m/s2.
• Rotation, the time it takes
for the planet to turn on its axis
— this gets tricky, so I’ll come
back to it below.
• Magnetism. Earth is
unusual among the inner planets
in having a relatively strong
magnetic field. (The gas giants
have stronger ones than ours.)
The magnetic field deflects parts
of the solar wind, which is part of
why Earth has kept its oceans.
Some animals can sense the
magnetic field and use it for
navigation.
More importantly, the
magnetic field seems to be
associated with movements in the
Earth’s molten core that also
produce continental drift. Venus
and Mars therefore lack this
phenomenon.
The poles of the magnetic
field don’t quite align with the
axis of rotation, and moreover
move at up to 15 km per year.
For unknown reasons their
polarity sometimes switches, the
last reversal being 780,000 years
ago.
• Axial tilt. Earth’s is 23.5°
and produces a nice range of
seasons. This varies widely for
the other planets, from nearly 0°
for Mercury to 98° for Uranus,
which thus rolls on its side: at the
solstices, one pole or the other
faces the sun nearly head-on.
• Number of moons. Outer
planets are richly supplied with
moons; Jupiter has over 60.
Earth’s relatively large moon is
unusual— Mars just has a couple
piddly ex-asteroids orbiting it—
though Pluto also has a large
moon, Charon.
Our large moon (0.0123
 Earth mass) has a profound
effect. Earth’s day was once 6
hours long; it has lengthened to
24 through the moon’s tidal
effect. The slowing of the
planet’s rotation also affects its
wind patterns, allowing more
north/south winds as well as
east/west.
One consequence of all this is that
there are three ways to determine
north on your world:
• According to the planet’s
rotation: the pole that’s moving
counter-clockwise is north; the
sun rises in the east.
• According to the sun’s
 rotation. In our case there’s no
difference, but Venus rotates
clockwise compared to the sun.
• According to its magnetic
field: the magnetic pole that
attracts the north end of a magnet
is north. (But again, the polarity
can flip.)
Neil Comins’s What if the moon didn’t
exist? explores in much greater detail
the probable consequences of various
astronomical factors on an earthlike
planet: no moon, closer moons, a vastly
greater mass, and so on.

Rotation
The time it takes a planet to rotate with
respect to the stars— i.e. the time from
when a star is on the horizon to the
time it’s on the horizon again— is the
rotation period or sidereal day. The
rotation time with respect to the sun—
the time from sunrise to sunrise— is
the solar day.
Like most of the sun’s planets, the
earth rotates counter-clockwise,
matching its orbit (it’s prograde). As
the diagram shows, after it’s rotated
once with respect to the stars (thick
line), it has to rotate a bit more to line
up with the sun (thin line). Thus our
sidereal day is 23.93 hours, while the
solar day is 24 hours.
For a prograde planet, the lengths of
the sidereal day T, the solar day d, and
the year y are related as follows:

Mercury’s rotation period is 58.64

Earth days, its year 87.97 days, so its
solar day is 175.88 days— three times
its rotation period!
Venus rotates clockwise, opposite its
orbit— it’s retrograde. The sun rises
in the west on Venus. For such planets
the formulas are:

For Venus y = 224.70, T = 243.02, d =

116.75, all measured in Earth days.
Thus its solar day is half its year.
Close orbits tend to produce
synchronous rotation by tidal locking;
i.e. the rotation period is equal to the
year, as in our moon and in fact all the
major moons in the solar system. This
is also why Venus and Mercury have
such long rotation periods. Earth
escapes this effect, and Mars’s day is
very close to ours.
Some s.f. writers have exploited the
exotic worlds created by synchronous
rotation: the side of the planet facing
the sun being blistering hot, the
opposite side freezing cold, with a
habitable strip in between. But this
seems to presuppose an otherwise
Earthlike atmosphere, which is hard to
picture developing on such a world.

On the moons
For a moon, this formula takes the
orbit’s semi-major axis in kilometers
and the planet’s mass in kilograms, and
gives the period in Earth days. (The
constant is the result of changing the
units.)

E.g. for Callisto, with d = 1,882,700 km

and (Jupiter’s) m = 1.8986×1027 kg, we
get a period of 16.69 Earth days.
As noted, the known moons are tidally
locked to their planets. By moving
closer, you can get a fairly nice day—
e.g. Io, at 421,800 km, has a period of
1.77 Earth days.
Making a moon habitable may be
problematic— after all, our own is
firmly within the Sun’s habitable zone
and is lifeless and airless. On the other
hand, some moons are intriguing, if not
hospitable:
• Europa seems to have an
icy crust over 10 km thick, then a
liquid ocean 100 km deep,
containing twice the water of our
oceans. The water may be heated
by tidal forces.
• Titan is the only moon
with a dense atmosphere—
indeed, its surface pressure is
1.45 times that of the earth.
Don’t break your helmet, though;
it’s mostly nitrogen and methane.
Plus the surface temperature is
 -179 °C, and there’s methane
rain.

No planets for me, mater

Planets are so vulgar. Natural
alternatives are hard to come by—
stars and deep space are challenging
environments. But there are some
interesting engineered habitats:
• Ringworlds, memorably
explored by Larry Niven. These
are enormous rings with a radius
of 1 AU, rotating around the sun
to provide gravity, with an inner
ring of shadow squares producing
a day/night cycle and high walls
to contain an atmosphere.
Niven’s ring had a surface area of
 3 million earths.
There are technical
problems. There’s no known
material that can handle the
tensile forces to hold the ring
together, and the orbit isn’t
stable.
• A Dyson sphere is an
arrangement of structures that
capture all or most of a sun’s
energy. The simplest
conceptually is a single huge
sphere, but we run into the same
technical troubles as ringworlds
and don’t get gravity. A huge
number of satellites, or stationary
sails, would be more practical.
 • Or just build ships— either
huge asteroid-sized ones, as in
Iain M. Banks’s Culture, or an
enormous fleet, as in Mass Effect
or the French comic series
Sillage. These have the advantage
that you can travel the galaxy,
but they require some portable
source of energy.
Banks also posits Orbitals,
miniature ringworlds with a
radius of merely 2 million km or
so. They still require
unobtainium to hold together.

Plate tectonics
The Earth’s crust is broken into
tectonic plates, moving on top of the
semi-solid mantle. There are seven
major plates— North America,
Eurasia, Pacific, Australia, Africa,
South America, and Antarctica— plus
a number of smaller plates.
Oceanic crust is about 6 km thick,
continental crust about 35 km; oceanic
crust is denser, which is why it’s
submerged under the ocean. Beneath
the crust is a brittle layer of
lithospheric mantle at least 100 km
thick. A single plate will be a mixture
of oceanic and continental crust— The
Pacific plate is notable for being the
only one without a continent on it.
The plates are all moving with respect
to each other, which means there are
three basic types of boundaries:
• The plates are diverging.
New crust is created at the
boundary; in the oceans this
creates the mid-ocean ridges;
within continents it creates rift
valleys.
• The plates are colliding. In
this case one plate will slide
beneath the other— a subduction
zone. If there’s a continent
involved it’ll be pushed up by the
subducting plate, forming
mountains; in the ocean
volcanoes can form into island
chains. The Marianas and other
ocean trenches are sub-duction
zones.
 • The plates are sliding past
each other; the San Andreas fault
is an example.

As we’re talking about huge plates of

rock, the movement is really a matter
of increasing pressure punctuated by
earthquakes and volcanoes. As a
comparison, the Mid-Atlantic ridge
averages 2.5 cm of new crust per year,
while the 2010 earthquake in Chile
moved some areas 10 feet in a few
hours.
Volcanoes can also form from plumes
of molten rock anywhere in a plate; the
Hawaiian islands were formed by one
— as the plate moves the hot spot
creates new islands.
As we have only one planet to inspect
— a regrettable state of affairs that will
plague our conworlding in many ways
— we can’t say how much variation
there is in plate size and shape. Earth’s
plates seem to be a good deal less
irregular than its continents, and many
are roughly square; there are a couple
of odd protrusions though, such as the
salient of the Eurasian plate between
Kamchatka and Japan.
Our plates can be traced back in time to
a single super-continent Pangea, about
250 million years ago. But Pangea
wasn’t primeval; rather, there’s been a
cycle of continents forming
supercontinents and then breaking up,
at least three different times. Such
earlier events formed older mountain
ranges such as the Appalachians and
the Urals.
The underlying mechanisms of plate
tectonics— and why we don’t see it on
Venus and Mars— are controversial.
Possible culprits include the size and
composition of the Earth, its magnetic
field, its oceans, and the fact that we
have a large moon.
Creating your own plates
When a divergence zone pulls a
continental mass apart, the resulting
continental edges will retain a similar
shape; the usual example is the curve
of South America which fits neatly into
the bow of western Africa. Similarly
eastern North America fits the
northwestern coast of Africa. Note that
it’s the continental shelf, not the
shoreline, that actually has to match.
For Almea, I drew the continents on a
ball, which allowed me to create shapes
matching this process, without the
distortions caused by projecting the
spherical surface onto a flat map. Once
I had continental shapes I liked, I
copied them by eye onto a world map.
There’s a low-tech method for this you
may not be aware of: draw a grid on the
globe, and one on your paper. Then
look at the squares one by one and copy
what’s in them. Even if you can’t draw
well, it’s easy enough to draw the
simple blobs within a grid square— if
they’re still too complicated, make the
grid finer.
These days you might work instead
with a computer modeling program...
though I doubt it’ll be as direct or easy
as drawing on a ball! But see p. 293 for
how to create a CGI model of a globe.
If you’re ambitious, you could simulate
the last billion years or so of plate
tectonics and draw maps of the various
supercontinents and how they divided.
This would give you a very realistic set
of old and new mountains. I’ll be the
first to admire your perfectionism, but
it’s overkill for most conworlders.
Drawing your continents, think about
how separated they are. On continents
isolated for millions of years, like
Australia, evolution diverges from the
rest of the world. They may also be
take longer for humanoids to settle,
especially if a long sea voyage is
needed.
If you create an entire planet, you’ll
avoid the silliness noted by Not the
Net: “All fantasy worlds are roughly
square, i.e. the shape of the double
page of a paperback.” And that in turn
is because the author started with a
single sheet of paper, and drew just the
part of the world that interested him.
This isn’t the worst sin in the world,
but it’s going to distort your world if
you don’t know what’s beyond the edge
of the paper. The natural tendency is to
forget it and make the area of the map
implausibly self-contained.

Climate zones
Once you’ve got your continents,
you’ll want to know what the
prevailing climate is. These can be
divided in three overall regions:
• Tropical, near the equator
— the zone we evolved in
 • Temperate, farther from
the equator, not so hot in the
summer but experiencing
unpleasant winters
• Arctic, near the poles—
very inhospitable to humans and
thus the last region settled
Plants and animals that evolved within
each zone are unlikely to thrive in the
others, which creates ecological
boundaries between civilizations. This
is one reason Europeans preferred to
settle the temperate rather than the
tropical zones in each hemisphere.
For largely this reason, Jared Diamond
suggested that a continent extending
largely east-west, like Eurasia, is more
conducive to developing advanced
cultures: it provides a very large zone
where people can share crops and
domestic animals— and also acclimate
to each others’ diseases. The Americas,
by contrast, are oriented largely north-
south; crops that developed in Mexico
or Peru couldn’t as easily diffuse to the
other zone through the tropical areas in
between.
But such barriers are not absolute; e.g.
maize did diffuse from Mexico south
to Peru and north to Canada. Perhaps
the Old World did better just because it
was larger.
The “not enough planets” problem
rears its ugly head here as well.
Although I’ll suggest modifications for
earthlike worlds, like where you should
put your Mediterranean climates, the
details would certainly vary on other
planets, especially if you’ve chosen
any of the more dramatic options (such
as high axial tilt, much smaller world,
no moons).
Still, there’s reason to avoid one cheap
s.f. effect: assigning a single climate to
an entire world: a jungle planet, a
forest planet, a desert planet. Planets
should have a lot more diversity than
that.

The atmospheric engine

The tropical/temperate/arctic division
just deals with heat; we need to
consider rainfall as well. This also
depends on heat, but indirectly, by
means of the atmospheric engine.[1]
The lower atmosphere can be divided
into three convection cells between
equator and pole: the Hadley, Ferrel,
and polar cells.

• Hadley cell: Warm air

 rises at the equator (more
precisely, in between the equator
and where the sun is highest),
moves at a height of 12-15 km
toward the poles and eastward,
becomes cooler and turbulent and
sinks at a latitude of about 30°,
and returns along the surface
toward the equator and westward.
The air is very moist at the
equator and dry when it sinks
down— so the overall pattern is
rain forest on the equatorial side
of the cell and desert on the
poleward side.
• Ferrel cell: The overall
movement is opposite the Hadley
cell: poleward and eastward
 along the surface. This cell is
weaker and more turbulent: the
overall pattern is frequently
interrupted, leading to the fickle
winds and weather of the
temperate zone.
On either side of the cell
there are high-velocity eastward
winds high up— the jet streams.
At any one time these are not
straight but meander north and
south.
• Polar cell: relatively warm
air rises at about 60°, move
poleward and eastward at a
height of 8 km, sinks at the pole,
and moves equatorward and
westward along the surface. The
 air is dry so that the whole area
has little rainfall.
The 30°/60° values are not constants; a
faster-rotating planet, or a hotter one,
will have a larger Hadley cell. (Venus,
whose surface temperature is a balmy
467° C, has a Hadley cell reaching
60°.)
The bands of Jupiter’s atmosphere may
derive from a similar mechanism, with
light zones marking upwelling and dark
belts marking downwelling; there are
at least four cells.

Winds
The prevailing winds within the Hadley
cell— trade winds— blow towards the
west. To be precise, they also blow
somewhat toward the equator. You’re
likely to get a rainshadow on the west
side of continents if the wind is
blocked by mountains; thus the arid
west coasts of Mexico, Peru, and
Australia.
The surface winds in the Ferrel cell go
in the opposite direction— towards the
east. Winds are named for their origin,
so these are called westerlies. One
consequence is that there’s a natural
cycle in the North Atlantic: you can go
west from Europe in the southern
latitudes, and go home using a more
northern route. Winds are more
variable here, but there can be a
rainshadow on the eastern coast—
Patagonia is an example.
The black arrows show prevailing
surface winds in January; the grey
arrows, where different, indicate winds
in June.

There are some areas where the trade

winds reverse direction part of the
year; the best known are India and
Indonesia, where winds blow northeast
in the summer, bringing the monsoon.
They depend on the differing heat
capacity of oceans and continents; so
they’re likely where you have ocean at
the equator and a continent to the north
or south occupying the 30° line. The
only region in the southern hemisphere
that fits this configuration is the
northeast coast of Australia.

Currents
In the tropical and temperate zones,
each ocean largely has warm currents
(shown in black) flowing in a circle:
clockwise in the northern hemisphere
and counter-clockwise in the southern
hemisphere. The Gulf Stream is an
example, giving a pleasant warm bath
to northern Europe.
Cold water (shown in white) flows in
from the poles. In the southern
hemisphere, where there’s a lot more
ocean, the effect is important. Major
cold currents cool the western coasts of
South America, Africa, and Australia.
In the former two continents, the cold
current colludes with the coastal
mountains to reduce rainfall.
The great swirling currents in the
northern hemisphere turn cold in their
eastern portion, as cool northern waters
are pulled south and cold water is
drawn up from the depths. When these
hit the mountainous southwestern coast
of North America they create a similar
low-rainfall zone.
There’s not much room for big cold
currents in the north, though small ones
come down to say hello to New
England and Hokkaido.

Köppen classification
The Köppen climate classification
system is widely used; it has five
overall categories:
A Tropical moist 0 to 20° from equat
B Dry climates 15 to 35°
C Subtropical 20 to 55°
D Continental 40 to 70°
E Arctic climates70 to 90°

If you look at the climate maps below,

these areas make fairly nice bands in
the big low flat areas of continents, as
suggested by the last column.
There’s a color version of this map on
the web resources page.
The latitudes discussed here apply to
present-day Earth. On a warmer planet
(e.g. closer to the sun, or Earth when
it’s not in an ice age) the tropical and
dry bands will extend farther north; on
a colder one the continental and arctic
ones will extend farther south.
These zones are subdivided according
to their seasonal variation. Here’s an
overview:
Temp—Code—Temp—Rainfall—Typical flora
Prototype

Tropical
Rain forest—Af—27 °C—heavy all year—very
dense forest—Amazon
Monsoon—Am—20 - 27—long wet season—
dense forest—India
Savanna—Aw—24 - 28—short wet season—sc
—East Africa

Dry
Desert—Bwh—13 - 35—almost none—cactus,
shrubs—Sahara
Cold desert—Bwk—-6 - 28—almost none——
Gobi
Steppe—Bs—2 - 25—minimal—grassland—
Central Asia

Subtropical
Subtropical—Cfa—10 - 26—all seasons—
deciduous forest—southern US
Mediterranean—Cs—11 - 25—wet winters—
forest or shrubs—S Europe
Marine—Cfb—6 - 18—wet summers—deciduo
forest—NW Europe

Continental
Humid—Da/b—-4 - 24—all seasons—forest,
prairie—northern US
Taiga—Dc—-20 - 18—low—conifer forest—
Siberia

Arctic
Tundra—ET—-28 - 12—minimal—no trees—
Arctic fringe
Ice caps—EF—-80 - 15—almost none—almost
none—Antarctica

The temperature column gives the

seasonal variation; it was calculated by
averaging several different locations
within the region.
These finer distinctions aren’t the
ecological barriers of the major zones.
Mediterranean crops, for instance,
grow quite nicely in Marine or Humid
Continental climates. (On the other
hand, rice, which requires a good deal
of water to germinate, isn’t suited to
semi-arid climates.) The zones do help
determine what crops and animals are
available. Grains are characteristic of
grasslands or scrub; horses evolved on
the steppe; pigs in forests.
The map shows high mountains— the
Rockies and Andes, the Himalayas,
Ethiopia— as a separate zone; you can
take these as cold and arid in general,
but divided into a plethora of sub-
zones. High mountains are also
important because they block rain-
bearing winds.
Below I’ll give brief descriptions of
each zone and suggestions on where to
put it.
A – Tropical
These hot, largely wet climates occur
in the equatorward half of the Hadley
cell.
Rain forests (Af) have heavy rain all
year long, and little variation in
temperature. There’s not much
underbrush, and poor soil. These are
the areas of greatest biodiversity— no
one type of tree or animal
predominates.
Location: Low continental areas
along the equator, out to about
10°, excluding the monsoon zone.
Monsoon (Am) areas have a long wet
season and a short dry season; this is
determined by the reversing wind
pattern described above (p. 53). The
forest is not quite as dense, and there’s
more ground cover.
Location: Low continental areas
off equatorial ocean, out to about
20°.
Savannas (Aw) have a long dry season
and a short wet season. The typical
vegetation is scrub, with isolated trees.
This should sound homey, because it’s
our ancestral environment— we still
prefer its average temperature.
Location: Bands on either side of
the rain forests and monsoon
areas, out to 15 or 20°, or as far
as 30° on the east side of
 continents.

B – Dry
Deserts (Bwh) are areas of minimal
rainfall; plants are cactus, shrubs, and
ephemerals that bloom during rare
showers. Temperatures may become
quite cold at night.
Location: The poleward side of
the Hadley cell. Storms travel
west in this region and deposit
rain when they go from sea to
land, so the eastern coast of a
continent won’t be desert.
If the continent is thin at this
point (as in South America and
Africa), only the western coast
 will be desert, and of a milder
sort with fog.
Cold deserts (Bwk) are those in the
temperate zone; they’re not quite as hot
in the summer and can get very cold,
below freezing.
Location: In the temperate zone,
shielded from rain by high
mountains to the west or toward
the equator.
Steppes (Bs) receive a little more rain;
they’re usually grassland or scrub.
They really come in two variants, hot
(e.g. Damascus, Laredo, or Mogadishu)
and cold (e.g. Denver, Kabul, or
Zaragoza).
 Location: A thin transitional
band between tropical and desert
areas, and between cold deserts
and more temperate regions. Also
the eastern coast of continents in
the desert zone.

C – Subtropical
These are climates in the equatorward
portion of the Ferrel cell.
Subtropical (Cfa) areas have hot
muggy summers and cool winters. The
typical vegetation is forest with some
grasslands. The southern U.S. and
southern China are examples.
Location: On the eastern sides of
continents between about 30° and
 45°. They may also, as in eastern
Europe, form a transitional zone
between Mediterranean and
Continental.
Mediterranean (Cs) areas have dry
summers and mild, rainy winters. The
vegetation includes evergreens and
deciduous trees, fruit trees such as
olives and citrus, shrubs and grasses,
all adapted to survive summer
droughts. Large parts of the
southwestern US and southern
Australian coasts have Mediterranean
climates.
Mediterranean climates are particularly
important in the development of
agriculture; many of the world’s major
crops were developed in the Middle
East. These were crops adapted to the
summer drought: their seeds were
resistant, and thus easy to store, and
annuals, which meant they put their
energy into producing seeds rather than
inedible stalks.
In a wetter world— e.g. during the
Pleistocene— these regions had a
different climate, humid subtropical
or laurisilvan, without the summer
drought. The typical vegetation was
evergreen hardwoods. This climate is
still found on the Azores and Canary
Islands.
Location: On the western sides of
continents between about 30° and
45°.
Marine temperate (Cfb) areas have
mild and rainy summers and relatively
warm winters; they’re typically
covered by forest. Britain and Northern
Europe are the prototypical case,
though they’re so modified by
agriculture that only portions of the
primeval forest remain. The Pacific
Northwest is another example.
Next to strong polar currents, a
variation called Magellanic may occur,
with frigid winters; an example is the
southern tip of South America.
Location: On the western sides of
continents, poleward of the
Mediterranean climates to about
55°. On the eastern side as well,
 on continents too narrow for
Continental climates.
Some tropical highlands are cool
enough to fall into this zone; in
these areas (e.g. Mexico City)
winters are very dry.
Note that all of these areas are blocked
by high mountains, which is why the
examples from the Americas are
narrow, as opposed to Europe where
the region extends thousands of miles
inland.

D - Continental
Humid continental areas are
characterized by warm humid summers
and very cold winters. The vegetation
is largely deciduous forest, giving way
to grassland in some areas. The area
may be subdivided into hot summer
(Da) and warm summer (Db) regions.
Location: the eastern lowlands of
large continents, poleward of the
subtropical, up to about 55°; the
band trends a bit southward.
Taiga (Dc) has a brief mild muggy
summer and very cold winters. It’s
mostly covered by conifer forest,
though there are some deciduous trees
such as birch and aspen. Soils are poor
and there is little undergrowth.
Location: Between the humid
continental areas and the tundra.
Parts of Siberia are classified as Dd
with extremely severe winters, even
colder than the tundra; e.g. winter
temperatures in Verkhoyansk average
-46° C.
There’s no suitable areas for
continental climates in the southern
hemisphere on our planet. The only
area at about the right latitude is
Patagonia, which however is a desert
with little rainfall, perhaps due to the
cold currents offshore.

E - Polar
Tundra (ET) is defined by
permafrost— i.e. the soil is
permanently frozen— and by the
absence of trees. Vegetation consists of
shrubs, grasses, mosses, and lichens.
Winters are cold and dark; in the
summer the top layer of soil melts,
forming bogs and lakes.
Location: Along the poleward
coast of continents above 60°.
High mountains also have tundra
conditions.
Ice caps (EF) are areas covered
permanently by ice. Vegetation is
limited to lichens and mosses.
Location: Polar oceans and
continents, and the interior of
large islands above 60° (on our
planet that means Greenland).

Ice ages
Before you get too excited about the
descriptions and rules above,
remember that they’re quite wrong
about at least one earthlike planet...
namely ours, 20,000 years ago, during
the last glacial maximum.
At that time the continents were in
virtually the same position, but ice
sheets covered Canada and Northern
Europe as well as the Andes. The
southern US and central Europe were
taiga, like parts of Siberia today;
northern China was steppe; much of
today’s rain forest was arid grassland
instead.
Ice sheets have geological effects: they
depress the terrain, which takes
millennia to spring back during the
interglacial— Scandinavia is still
depressed, which is why it has those
lovely fjords, which are essentially
sunken river valleys. Retreating
glaciers leave moraines, rounded hills
formed from rocky debris carried by
the glacier. The larger lakes, such as
the Great Lakes, are also the results of
glaciation.
During a glaciation the amount of
water locked up in the ice sheets
greatly lowers sea level, exposing parts
of what is now continental shelf.
Technically we’re still in an ice age,
meaning an alternation of glaciations
and interglacials. It started about three
million years ago; before then the
planet was ice-free, with a
correspondingly different pattern of
climates— generally warmer and
wetter.
The distribution of continents may
affect ice ages, if they prevent the flow
of water from the equator to the poles
— e.g. a continent resting on the poles,
or a polar sea being land-locked, both
conditions that obtain today.

Land and sea imbalances

What if your planet is mostly ocean, or
mostly land?
A mostly oceanic planet should be,
well, awfully wet. You’re unlikely to
have very arid regions, unless you have
an island big enough and with
appropriately placed mountains to
produce a large rainshadow.
If there’s not much ocean, there’s also
not going to be much rainfall. Look at
your major bodies of water and follow
the prevailing winds to see where the
rain will go. Everything else will be
dry.

An example: Almea
Here’s a map of Almea which attempts
to follow the above rules, with one
major change: the planet is warmer
than Earth, so I extended the Hadley
cell to 35° and the Ferrel cell to 70°.
Almea doesn’t have much land above
55° north or south, so there’s little
room for continental zones. There’s not
a lot of land along the equator, and
what there is tends to be mountainous,
so rain forest is limited. There’s also a
good deal less desert; Almea doesn’t
have the large rain-blocking land
masses that produce the Sahara desert.
In the southern hemisphere, the east
coast of both Ereláe and Arcél proceeds
from subtropical to marine. Usually we
see marine climates on the west coast
in the Ferrel cell, but these are
relatively small continental regions
facing a large ocean; a terrestrial
analog is the east coast of Australia
which has the same progression. In the
far south of Ereláe we’d get Magellanic
climate.
The southern coast of Arcél would be
Mediterranean according to the rules
given, but since it’s next to ocean I’ve
made it Laurisilvan instead, largely
meaning that summers are dry rather
than parched.
I actually worked out the above map
while writing this book, and it differs
significantly from earlier versions of
Almea. That’s typical of conworlding:
as you learn more, you find things that
you want to redo. However, you need to
balance two opposing tendencies:
• Impatience— the urge to
get it all done in an hour. If this
describes you, slow down and
accept that good work takes time.
• Perfectionism— the urge
to tinker with it forever. If that’s
your besetting sin, learn to
recognize when you’re thrashing,
 making changes without
improvements. Instead of
remaking something, make a
variant: e.g. rather than redoing
your main language, make a
sister language.

Rivers
Rivers flow from the mountains
downward to the sea. You know that,
but I’ve seen plenty of amateur maps
where the water flow just doesn’t make
sense— rivers cross high regions,
there’s no high ground between
separate river basins, rivers wander
down the middle of a peninsula.
Let’s look at an actual example. Here’s
a map of Borneo, with rivers and relief
indicated; darker shades are higher.

Some things to note:

• There’s a lot more rivers
 than most conworlders would
care to supply. Rivers are roughly
10 km apart. You don’t need to
provide this level of detail, but
don’t assume that the only rivers
are the ones you’ve drawn.
• There’s 70 separate river
basins, though most of them are
quite small. Four basins (their
mouths are starred on the map)
are pretty large; the largest of
them, the Kapuas, is shown in
white. The largest rivers will
drain the largest area.
• The smallest rivers run
perpendicular to the mountains,
feeding into the big rivers that lie
along the valleys.
• If two river basins are
separate, the ground in between
must be higher.
Biology
Now that you’ve got a world, let’s
populate it.

Sapients
Sapients, the class to which so many of
my readers belong, are egotists— they
want to read about other sapients. Let’s
review your options.

Humans
Your default. You can stop right there
if you like.
If you add others, it’s fun to show what
humans look like to them. You can use
this in a backwards way to help define
the other species. E.g. the elves might
see us as volatile, bulky, terribly
serious, and pitifully short-lived. Many
alien races see us as dinner.
It’s a common trope of s.f. that humans
are special in some way— they
somehow disturb the interstellar order.
This strikes me as conceited or even
speciesist on the part of these human
authors… though we’re going to be
galactic noobs at first, and new
elements can trigger change.

Humanoids
These are humans with minor
changes... a somewhat cheesy way of
adding additional flavor. It’s
completely hopeless from a scientific
point of view; its respectability comes
entirely from convention, and that’s
mostly because it’s the easiest thing to
do for TV, especially before the CGI
era. A forehead prosthesis, pointy ears,
and body paint, and you’re in business.
But go ahead with it, if you like... how
your sapients look is only the least
important thing about them anyway.
Though could you perhaps avoid
another of my pet peeves: breasts on
non-mammals? Mammals at least have
the excuse of needing something to
nurse with, though no other mammals,
not even our relatives among the apes,
have human-like breasts. Reptiles and
birds don’t nurse.
There’s another reason humanoids are
popular: our visual systems,
understandably, are designed to react
strongly to other human beings. We
immediately understand their body
language and facial expressions; they
trigger our social and erotic responses.
If one of your characters is a gorgeous
female, for instance, it’s very hard to
show this visually except by making
her resemble a human girl.
For Almea, I enumerated a number of
little differences from terrestrial
humans— e.g. their lips don’t have a
philtrum, they have just four toes, they
have some odd skin and hair colors,
and they aren’t as tolerant of dry and
cold environments. These are really
just nods to the idea that Almea is not
Earth. I purposely kept their
psychology and physical powers the
same, figuring that special powers
would feel like a cheat— in a fantasy,
readers expect humans to act like
humans.
If your characters are furries, consider
giving some love to animals besides
foxes, cats, and wolves.

Elves and dwarves

If you like the Standard Fantasy Elves
and Dwarves, fine. After all, you’re
simply following the footsteps of
Tolkien. Or are you?
In many modern conworlds, elves are a
type of humanoid as I’ve described
them above— humans with pointy ears
and a Green Party membership. This
isn’t what Tolkien described at all.
Tolkien’s elves are literary descendents
of the longaevi, the near-immortal
spirits of medieval literature. The
longaevi or Fae are above all numinous
creatures— they should awaken awe
and a little fear. They are depicted as
living in splendor and luxury, with
immense vigor and lust for life (and
sometimes just lust; they might take
humans as lovers). Their theological
status varies but seems to decline with
the centuries; in the Renaissance
attitudes darkened and they were
classified as demonic.
For more on the character and history
of the longaevi see their chapter in C.S.
Lewis’s The Discarded Image.
You needn’t follow that tradition
either, of course. But it’s a reminder to
aim high. If you have humanoid races
at all, why make them nearly identical
to humans? What’s the point?

Orcs dark and dorky

The video game Oblivion has both
goblins and orcs. Both are green and
pig-faced, but the goblins are evil
monsters and the orcs are citizens of
the Empire— you can even play as an
orc if you like.
Orcs are just a logical extension of the
dubious fantasy trope that ugly = evil.
The evil counselor is bent and lame;
the future betrayer is sallow and eye-
shadowed; the dark lord’s minions are
slavering subhumans.
How do orclings become evil anyway?
Are they taught to be cruel and
murderous by their parents, and if so
doesn’t that make their teenage years
really rough? What happens if you take
an orc kid and have it raised by hippies
in Berkeley?
It’s all pretty stupid and if you’re
contributing to it, you should stop.
Following evil, or eeeevil, doesn’t
thicken your skin and make your teeth
grow.
What can you do instead? Here’s some
ideas:
• Follow human history.
There have been some pretty
scary people: the Huns, the
fascists, the Stalinists, the
Assassins of Alamut, the
medieval free companies of
pillagers, the Thuggee cult, the
Inquisition, the military juntas
and warlords of contemporary
Africa. Some of these were doing
what they thought was right;
others were pretty much villains
taking advantage of the
opportunities they saw.
• A variation of this is that
 orcs hate humans because
humans hate orcs. Perhaps
humans are the real villains here.
The orcs may treat other orcs
civilly... or try to; oppressed
people can take out their
grievances on each other. I know
this is sounding like an After-
School Special, but it’d sure beat
another set of Butt-Ugly
Badasses.
• Look at the animal
kingdom. Dogs, for instance. In
some ways their character is
highly admirable— they’re
affectionate, loyal, and brave.
But rats and squirrels sure
wouldn’t agree.
 Would sapient species treat
each other so badly? Well, look
at how humans historically
treated the apes. Till relatively
recently, humans had no problem
enslaving gorillas and
chimpanzees, crowding them out
of their forests, or even hunting
them.
• You can have recourse to
some sort of degenerative magic
or science. The classic zombie,
for instance, doesn’t need much
of a backstory. His brain is fried,
so all he wants to do is attack
others in order to spread the
infection.
• Use symbolic or mythic
 associations rather than
good/evil. For instance, species
based on the medieval humors
(sanguine, choleric, melancholic,
phlegmatic) could be interesting.
Or the five elements in Chinese
thought: wood, fire, earth, metal,
and water.

Is all this racist?

There may be a dark undercurrent to all
the traditional fantasy races. The same
genre which produced fantasy species,
and some of the same authors, also
talked about Africans and Asiatics in
almost the same terms: the other races
were ugly, primitive, perverse, and at
best cunning rather than intelligent.
There’s an echo of this in Tolkien’s
description of Sauron’s human allies.
You’re probably insulated by time
from doing the same, but please think
twice about making your elves look
like idealized Nordic fräuleins, and
your dwarves look and talk like
miniature Celts.
This doesn’t mean I think that
inventing humanoid species is forever
tainted. For some reason, humans seem
not to like to be alone in the universe.
All cultures have told stories about
other types of beings sharing the world
with us; in the scientific era we fill the
sky with aliens. It seems like an
innocent and rather charming trait.
Would multiple sapients wi
each other out?
Some people have suggested that
multiple sapient species are
implausible, because one species would
wipe out the others.
As with just about everything to do
with sapience, we just don’t know,
because we only have one example.
You can’t reliably extrapolate from a
sample size of one.
Our own history suggests contradictory
answers. It’s now believed that there
were multiple humanoid species on
Earth at once, for hundreds of
thousands, perhaps millions of years.
So coexistence is possible. Only maybe
not, since in fact only homo sapiens
sapiens survives today.
Species do tend to either crowd each
other out, or separate or specialize such
that they don’t compete. This could
work out several ways:
• Geographical separation. If
a continent is isolated enough, it
could develop its own sapient
species. (Though it’d better be
awfully isolated; there are
unusual animal species in
Australia or Hawaii, but the same
old humans.)
• Habitat specialization. On
Almea, there are separate sapient
 species that live in the seas and
on land. On land, there are
species adapted to the mountains,
to the forest, and to the plains.
• Niche specialization.
Species might be so different in
size and eating habits that they
largely don’t compete. Perhaps
one species lives as scavengers
among another; or one is diurnal
and vegetarian, the other
nocturnal and carnivorous. Less
benign forms of symbiosis are
possible: predator/prey,
master/slave, parasite/host.
Of course, once sapience evolved,
mixing might develop. At this point
you have to decide if your sapients are
separate species or not. That is, can
they have offspring together? If so one
would expect widespread
hybridization. (The D&D system where
only half-breeds exist seems short-
sighted. If interbreeding is possible,
someone could easily be 3/8 human,
1/16 elf, 5/16 dwarf, and 1/4 orc.)

What makes a goo

sapient?
Here’s a formula for you:
sapient species = culture +
biological differences
So most of the work is the same as
working out a particular culture (see p.
116).
But sapients get some physical
differences as well— hopefully not just
some tasks for the makeup department,
but something more substantial:
• size
• lifespan
• number of limbs, digits,
eyes, etc.
• senses: are there extra
things they can perceive? are
there human senses they lack?
what senses do they use for
communication? for art?
• food type: carnivore,
omnivore, vegetarian,
 photosynthetic
• habitat: plains, mountains,
forests, seas, outer space
• reproduction: number of
sexes; does one sex dominate;
how are offspring raised
• unusual physical abilities:
flight, probing tentacles, claws or
armor, infravision
• mental abilities, e.g. magic
use, telepathy, healing, greater
conscious control over their own
emotions or memories
Whatever you pick, think out how it
will affect their life and culture. A
culture test or biography, for instance,
should be very different than one for a
human... if not, either you didn’t pick a
very exciting physical difference, or
you didn’t think it through.
• Thousand-year lifespans,
for instance. How long does it
take to raise a child? Even if it
takes a hundred years, that leaves
800 years that an individual is
neither a child nor raising one;
what’s the effect on family
structure, on romance, on sex
roles? How does the society keep
from being so conservative it
never changes? Since they’re
likely to live with the
consequences of any major
mess-ups (pollution, global
 warming, imperial decline),
perhaps they deal with them
more responsibly.
• Or take flight. It’s not just
a way of getting to point B faster;
it’s a way of escape. How could a
dictator keep his subjects? There
wouldn’t be chokepoints where
merchants could be charged tolls
or armies could be kept at bay. If
flight is (say) five times faster
than walking, then settlements
might be five times less dense.
When do the children learn to
fly? This could greatly affect
how families work and what
houses look like.
Even for fantasy, my preference is for
plausible biologies. The dark elves are
said in some sources to live in caves.
Uh huh. Even if the cave systems are
far more extensive than ours, caves just
don’t contain much to live on, because
there’s no damn sun. I can buy them
building their cities there, but then I
expect them to possess the lands above
for hunting or farming or whatever.
Your goth spider-worshipping
underground warriors are just not going
to thrive on the occasional blind cave
fish.

Aliens
Aliens are really just sapient species
plus an ecosystem. That is, a fantasy
species can just be tossed in the
hominid bin— fantasy worlds are
unapologetically earthlike. But s.f.
worlds are supposed to be entirely
different planets with their own
evolutionary history. Instead of
sapience developing in the great ape
line, it occurred somewhere else.

What can I steal from human

Humanoid aliens are easier to identify
with and less of a casting hassle, but
they’re not biologically plausible. Look
at the range of vertebrates from whales
to lions to kangaroos to snakes to
velociraptors to owls to eagles. None of
them look remotely humanoid. And
animals that occupy similar ecological
niches need not look particularly alike:
compare kangaroos with cows.
It’s true that some environments do
produce convergent evolution.
Plesiosaurs, sharks, and dolphins
belong to entirely different classes of
animals, but share a streamlined shape,
heavy in the middle, due to the needs
of swimming long distances in the
ocean. Birds, bats, and pterosaurs have
some similarities due to the nature of
flight. But there’s no reason to believe
that sapience requires a body plan like
ours.
Or more precisely, a case may be made
that sapients could share some of our
features:
• Social structure. Animals
do need a certain intelligence to
hunt, so predators are among the
smarter animals... but they do
just fine without sentience. It’s
fair to say that we use most of
our own intelligence for dealing
with the most complicated actors
in our environment: each other.
(A puzzling partial
exception: the octopus is
extremely smart while not being
very social or even long-lived.)
• K rather than r strategy.
These are terms from
evolutionary biology;
prototypically r species
reproduce quickly and disperse
offspring widely, while K species
produce fewer offspring but
invest heavily in their care. These
terms are relative: compared to
humans, rabbits are r strategists,
but not compared to maple trees.
As intelligence implies
socialization and acculturation, it
seems more compatible with the
high parental investment of K
strategists. (Larry Niven’s
Moties, who reproduce so fast
that they’re a threat to the whole
galaxy, strike me as implausible,
especially as the Moties are said
to have a K-like refusal to tone
down their reproduction to avoid
problems with other species.)
• Neoteny, the retention of
juvenile characteristics in adults.
By great ape standards we’re
highly neotenous; or to put it
another way, we look and act a
lot more like baby than adult
chimps. Young animals are
exploratory and playful,
characteristics that seem to feed
into intelligence.
• Omnivorism might
correlate with high intelligence,
since it encourages quick
adaptation, exploration, and
extended local knowledge.
Carnivorism seems to require
more intelligence than
herbivorism.
 A corollary might be stereo
vision, which is associated with
omnivores and carnivores.
Hunting requires intense focus
and perhaps a more sophisticated
view of the world, while prey
animals instead need wide vision
to identify threats from all
directions.
• Mobility. Though it’s
certainly possible to imagine a
sedentary sapient— the Internet
is full of them.
• Manipulator organs, such
as hands. Dolphins may be smart,
but they’ll never get a
technological civilization going
with flippers.
• Since we live on land, we
can accumulate goods, find
shelter, grow crops, discover fire,
metallurgy, and chemistry. A
purely marine species might have
trouble with basic technology.
The sea also constrains body
plans more.
• It’s hard to imagine
sapience without language,
which allows us to organize our
thoughts and speak about the past
and future. We have (and the
apes don’t have) vocal tract
adaptations that facilitate speech.
Another species might not
communicate with modulated
sounds, but whatever medium it
 uses, its body will be adapted to
modulate the hell out of it.
• We need enough size to
support an elaborate, energy-
munching brain. During our
evolution from the other great
apes, our brain size increased
threefold. That suggests that we
passed the minimum threshold
for sapience somewhere in there,
and that in turn casts doubt on
sapients the size of dogs,
sparrows, or beetles.
Other human characteristics are, at
best, tangential to our sapience:
• Our lanky frame— our
long arms and legs— is shared
 with other primates and
developed for brachiation
(moving quickly through the
trees). There’s no reason for
canine or reptilian or insectoid
sapients to have our basic body
plan, unless they also went
through a stage of brachiation.
• Bipedalism developed
when we left the trees of the
savanna, and hunted by running
after game. (Fun fact: humans
aren’t the fastest of predators, but
they have awesome endurance—
their prey get away but can’t
sustain the pace.)
• Our reliance on vision is
also due to our primate heritage,
 as is our fondness for
vocalization. No reason another
sapient species couldn’t rely on
different senses... though vision
proved to be a fortuitous choice,
compatible with easy, permanent
recordkeeping (a.k.a. drawing
and writing).
None of this is very limiting. I see no
reason you couldn’t have sapient
creatures along the lines of large birds,
velociraptors, tuataras, or most
mammals.

Not really our planet

One justification for all those
humanoids is that some human-like
precursor race seeded the galaxy,
somehow, with this shape. Larry Niven
and Star Trek have both played with
the idea.
Though it adds an epic grandeur to
galactic history, it’s poor biology; it’s
essentially creationism without God, a
reflection of s.f. writers’ greater
interest in physics over biology. Our
DNA confirms that we are very closely
related to primates, and primates to all
other mammals; we’re clearly products
of this planet. Nor is there room to add
secret instructions in the mass of junk
DNA in our chromosomes: anything
not actually subject to evolutionary
pressure is thoroughly messed up by
mutations.
Entire ecosystems
Just as another planet shouldn’t have
hominids, it really shouldn’t have our
terrestrial classes of animals at all—
even something as broad as mammals.
Another planet’s life forms should be
at least as divergent as Australia’s.
So ideally, you’ll create an entirely
new tree of life, and populate it with
several thousand new species, working
out all their interactions.
Yeah, I haven’t done that either .
(Though I know a biologist conworlder
who’s come close.) The usual
expedient is to create a handful of
species that are compatible with your
sapient aliens.
Life is awfully variable on our planet.
At the same time, to an anatomist, the
similarities are striking. Limbs, for
instance. As Neil Shubin puts it in Your
Inner Fish, the limbs of everything
above the fish level— dinosaurs,
alligators, birds, bats, dogs, us— share
a pattern: one bone, followed by two
bones, then little blobs, then fingers or
toes. Such structural similarities can be
found all throughout the body.
And within those classes, the number
of limbs maxes out at four. For all the
variation among vertebrates, none has
six legs; none has even developed four
legs plus wings— wings have always
developed from the front limbs. None
of these classes developed a third eye,
either. All have about the same
digestive system, a linear track from
mouth to butt. All have brains, spines,
and blood.
So most of your non-dominant species
should have the same body plan as the
sapients. If you’ve got tentacled
monstrosities in charge, their domestic
and wild animals are probably similar,
with variations in size, color, and
proportion. Same story if your aliens
have six limbs, or trilateral symmetry,
or antlike segmented bodies.
Insects, arthropods, and worms are
different, of course— not everything
on the planet needs the same body plan.
An inspiring and informative
sourcebook on inventing entire
ecosystems is Dougal Dixon’s After
Man: A Zoology of the Future.
If you don’t believe in
evolution...
Don’t sweat it; we’re not going
to argue about it here. We’re
talking about conworlds, after
all; there’s no reason your
conworld couldn’t be created by
God, like Narnia.

Still, I’d suggest to you that God

doesn’t create randomly and
neither should you. Cats are
similar to lions, not just in
appearance but in their DNA. It’s
 a good idea to follow
evolutionary principles anyway;
just think of them as God’s
organizational system. Like an
ideal programmer, God re-uses
patterns in a systematic way.

The environment and the bod

Body details aren’t just arbitrary;
they’re exquisite responses to the
creature’s environment.
• The most striking physical
fact about us, compared with our
nearest relatives, is our lack of
fur. This is a clue to our origin in
the warm tropical savanna.
• Animals in cold climates
 tend to be large, with small ears,
adaptations to conserve heat.
Conversely, desert animals have
large ears to help radiate heat
away.
Heat exchange is a function
of surface area, not volume,
which is why the desert creatures
need very large ears.
• I’ve referred half-jocularly
to tentacles, but there’s a reason
these are largely limited to sea
creatures— they’re heavy. What
is essentially a long, unsupported
extra limb would be a liability on
land (unless they’re very light,
like a monkey’s tail, but these are
not going to be lifting a lot of
 weight).
• Carnivores’ teeth are
designed for attacking and
cutting— they’re little knives.
Herbivores’ teeth are designed
for grinding and chewing.
Omnivores, like ourselves, get a
little of both.
• As I’ve noted, predators
often have eyes looking forward,
to provide close focus and stereo
vision; prey have eyes facing
sideways, to provide near-360°
vision to defend against threats.
• Thickness of limbs
correlates quite rigidly with
absolute size. This is because
 weight increases by powers of
three, while limb strength
depends on its cross-section,
which varies by powers of two.
As you get heavier, the limb has
to get thicker.
Sadly, this means that the
creepy thin legs of insects are
due to their small size— you
can’t scale them up to elephant
size and keep the thin legs.
All these guidelines must be adapted
for exotic planets. For instance:
• A huge planet has higher
gravity; animals are going to be
bulkier, and very large ones may
not be able to exist. A tiny planet
 conversely will have spindlier
animals.
If you have sapients from
such planets, they may be quite
unable to visit Earth without
special suits.
• A dense atmosphere could
support larger flying creatures; a
very thin atmosphere might
support none.

Exotic biochemistries
If you’re ambitious— and savvy about
chemistry— you can consider changing
the molecular basis of life.
On Earth carbon is key. Silicon, right
below it in the periodic table, has some
similar properties. For instance, silanes
(hydrogen-silicon compounds) are
analogous to hydrocarbons, and
silicone (silicon-oxygen polymers) is
similar to carbon-based plastics and
proteins.
A carbon-based life form oxidizes
carbon, forming carbon dioxide as a
waste product— an easily dispersed
gas. The counterpart is silicon dioxide,
or silica— a solid at earthly
temperatures, and indeed the major
component of sand. Silica is a liquid
above 1650° C, so perhaps silicon life
is suited for conditions of extreme
temperature or pressure.
Silicon is the principal ingredient in
semiconductors… so AIs could be
considered a form of silicon-based life.
Or life could be based on a solvent
other than water. Ammonia (NH3) is a
possibility, though it’s a liquid only at
low temperatures or very high
pressures. There are lakes of liquid
methane (CH4) on Titan, which has led
to speculation about life that inhales
hydrogen in place of oxygen.
The extremophiles are thought-
provoking; these are organisms, mostly
microbes, that thrive in conditions of
high acidity or alkalinity, temperatures
below the freezing or above the boiling
point of water, etc. Hydrothermal vents
in deep ocean are an example, featuring
bacteria that rely on chemosynthesis
rather than photosynthesis. These in
turn support a chain of higher life
forms.

Sexual display
All this sounds dreadfully utilitarian...
isn’t there a place for pure flights of
whimsy? There is, in fact, approved by
Darwin himself: sexual selection.
Basically, males and females just like
certain species-specific body parts, and
those develop into sexual displays:
spectacular colors, crests, horns, long
tails. If females like long crests, crests
will get longer and longer. Human
breasts, so unlike that of our relatives
and quite useless to the baby, may have
evolved in this way... in effect, because
men liked them that way. (But there are
other theories. One is that the
protruding nipple is more convenient to
the baby, especially as it has no fur to
hold onto.)
There are theories that such displays
advertise fitness— if a male can spend
energy growing an impressive set of
antlers, he must be healthy. But this
doesn’t change the essentially arbitrary
nature of the signal.

Predators and parasites

If you’re populating a D&D dungeon,
or a horror level in a video game, you
throw in monsters by the boatload. This
maximizes the challenge for the player,
but it’s nonsense as biology.
Predators have a tiny fraction of the
population of their prey, and require a
larger territory. When humans were
hunter-gatherers, population density
might be as little as one human for 3 to
10 km2. We have a population of
billions because we largely support
ourselves on grains. A civilization of
pure predators would have a much
smaller population.
We often project our own morality on
predators— we picture them as cruel
and murderous, or as badass hunters.
But from their own point of view,
they’re just hungry for dinner. They’re
no more consumed by cruelty when
hunting than a man ordering a
hamburger. It’s in a predator’s interest
to kill its prey cleanly and quickly... it
can’t afford prolonged fights and the
inevitable injuries to itself. Likewise,
most predators prefer prey comfortably
smaller than themselves (e.g. cats vs.
mice); if they go after large prey they
do so in gangs. The biggest animals in
an ecosystem will be herbivores.
Many writers assume that predator
species would be particularly warlike
and aggressive. And they might well
dominate the galaxy— if interstellar
wars were fought with claws and teeth.
Technology equalizes individual
differences; just as a peasant with a
rifle can kill a highly trained samurai, a
sapient herbivore with a phaser can
blast a carnivore. The low numbers of
carnivores would be a disadvantage, if
it came to war.
Another model might be parasitism.
One can imagine sapients living inside
a huge beast or plant of some sort, but
something big enough to be sapient
isn’t likely to be an internal parasite.
More likely is something like the alien
of Aliens, which uses other creatures to
host its offspring. But note, such
behaviors have to evolve in a pre-
spaceflight context. Such parasitism
again implies a much larger population
of hosts; and parasites that entirely
destroy their host species are foolish,
since they will also wipe themselves
out. Parasites and hosts co-evolve to
make the infection less than
completely devastating.
(Of course, the parasite might be in
balance with its original host species,
but out of balance when it’s introduced
into a new environment without those
natural balances. So the Aliens species
might well be horribly dangerous off
its home planet. Our own history has
many examples of diseases that
devastated populations not adapted to
them.)
The take-home lesson is that monsters,
at least in s.f., should have a believable
backstory. The classic bad example is
the space slug in Star Wars ... how the
hell did these things get up there and
how can they sustain their bulk merely
on passing spaceships? Similarly silly
are the D&D creatures invented to let
game masters penalize the players for
ordinary behavior: animated chests that
eat people, worms that dive into the
ears of those who dare to listen at
doors.

A few neat ideas

Here’s some ideas that (I think)
haven’t been done to death yet.

Multiple sexes
You might be surprised to learn that we
have these on Earth. An example is
certain slime molds, which have over
500 sexes. There’s a type of mushroom
that has over 20,000.
Don’t expect the individuals to come in
500 varieties— slime molds all look
pretty much the same. To biologists
sex is determined by how many types
of reproductive cells (zygotes) there
are, and by which can mate with each
other. (Zygotes of the same sex can’t
mate.) Most species get by with two
sexes, but sometimes there are more.
Reproduction doesn’t require an orgy
of 500 zygotes— just as in humans, a
new individual requires just two. One
hypothesis about multiple sexes is that
they offer an advantage in low-density
species, as it’s more likely that the first
other individual a zygote meets is one
it can mate with.
Different sexes
Another possibility suggested by
biology: two sexes that aren’t male and
female.
What we consider male and female is
really a constellation of traits that need
not go together. Biologists use just one
of them to decide the sex of a zygote:
the really huge ones (eggs) are female,
the tiny ones (sperm) are male. But
some species have sex cells that are all
the same size, so this rule can’t apply.
There’s a type of green alga, for
instance, that have two sexes labeled
plus and minus.
There may be a reason we don’t see
such things at the macro level; but at
the least we see that aspects of sex—
zygote size, adult size, child-bearing,
nursing, child-rearing, aggression,
social dominance— need not be
allocated between the sexes according
to our own pattern.
We do see hermaphroditism among
higher animals— a single sex, where
each individual can mate with any
other. (This too might be a key
advantage for highly dispersed species,
as you don’t have to search for the
right sex to mate with.) Sometimes it’s
a spur to creativity to subtract common
features rather than invent exotic new
ones.
One hermaphroditic species has a
depraved, macho system: when two
individuals mate, they “penis-fence”...
attacking each other with dagger-like
penises. The winner is whoever stabs
the other first, injecting their sperm
into the loser, who will then bear the
young. Wouldn’t that be great for a
race of warriors? On Earth we’re
talking about flatworms, but you don’t
need to tell the warriors that.
A few species dispense with sex
entirely, including some higher
animals— the whiptail lizard, for
instance, reproduces by cloning.
(Curiously, the females mate with each
other; this seems to stimulate egg
production.) Reproduction without sex
has evolved many times, but it’s
considered risky behavior— the
exchange of genes during sex produces
more genetic diversity, which is
insurance against changes to the
environment.

Colony organisms
The quintessential colony organisms
are ants and bees, which in many ways
act like a single organism. Our bodies
are cooperative assemblages of cells
which have almost entirely given up
their struggle to reproduce—
delegating this to the zygotes.
Similarly an ant or bee colony
delegates reproduction to only a few
individuals, the queen and the drones.
But they’re an interesting model for
more than reproduction, because they
suggest distributed intelligence: the
colony as a whole is more intelligent
than its members. We can imagine a
species where one individual isn’t
sapient, but two, four, or a hundred are.
(I included such a species, the Rifters,
on Almea.)

Evolved humans
What would evolution come up with if
allowed to work on humans for a few
million years? Or what might
demented genetic engineers come up
with?
H.G. Wells was here first, projecting
English class divisions far into the
future with his Eloi and Morlocks; Olaf
Stapledon’s Last and First Men posits
no less than seventeen further human
species, while Dougal Dixon has been
here too with Man After Man.
The ideas of brutes and enormous
brains are easy satire. Subtler
variations are more interesting:
expanded memory, telepathy, greater
adaptability to other planets, greater
control over our own body. Those with
weak stomachs will appreciate Iain
Banks’ suggestion of a conscious
bypass of the digestive system.

Robots
By now robots are a hoary tradition in
s.f., and every few months there’s a
new video showing some cute little
robot mastering some new behavior.
It’s enough to paper over the fact that
the s.f. stories are predictable— almost
every one, starting with R.U.R.,
explores the basic theme of robots
rebelling against their inferior status—
and the basic idea is kind of barmy.
What’s the need for a general-purpose,
man-sized robot? After all, anything a
human-capable robot can do, a human
can do, at minimum wage. Humans
already are adaptable, self-
reproducing, easily mistreatable, and
rust-free.
What we need is more specific:
• Subintelligent robots—
that is, appliances. You don’t
need a computer or an industrial
robot that has full human
functionality and argues
metaphysics with you. You just
want it to be reasonably clever.
Many people want to talk to
their appliances, but I’ll put it to
you that speech is a marginal UI,
clunky and slow. I’m using a
word processor right now... I
don’t want to have to say out
loud “Move the cursor three lines
down” or “Count the pages”. I
want to be able to do it in an
instant using a UI gesture.
You’re never going to
program your appliances by
talking to them. Give emergency
instructions, maybe. But
determining day-to-day
operations— i.e. programming—
is an enormously complicated
process requiring special skills
and a particularly pedantic
mindset. The basic problem is
that our minds, and thus our
needs, are situational. We can
describe the general principles of
accounting or painting or
quantum teleportation, but there
are always hundreds of details
that we only remember when
they come up. Oh yeah, 501c
corporations need a different
form. I forgot, when the
wormhole is full of T quarks you
 gotta use leftward
denormalization. Programming
requires a mindset that
systematically seeks out these
situations and works them all out,
and a formalization that makes it
fast and easy to record them.
A subset of useful
appliances would be those that
we incorporate into our brains
and bodies, forming cyborgs.
You can probably think of all
sorts of useful applications,
though based on past experience
the major uses will be gamebots,
music bots, and sexbots.
• Specialist robots. An
example is the drones used in the
Middle East: robots make sense
here because they can go where
US soldiers— expensive and a
political liability— can’t. It’s
easy to imagine other
applications— deep-sea mining,
exploration of Venus or Jupiter,
radiation cleanup— though note
that complete autonomy isn’t
always needed here; a remote
human operator can supply the
intelligence.
What about child care or
education? Perhaps everyone, as
in Neal Stephenson’s The
Diamond Age, is supplied with an
electronic super-tutor? I can see
this as a niche product, based on
 a certain squeamishness about
hiring help. Older societies had
no such hang-up, and I doubt the
economics. Automation is only
cost-effective for high-wage jobs,
and if you eliminate enough of
those, humans become very
cheap.
• Massive minds. If you
need to run a government, a
starship, or an interstellar
megacorporation, you could use a
mighty electronic brain. But you
don’t want human-scaled brains
for that— you want minds with
far greater memory, reliability,
multi-tasking skills, and speed.
That raises the question of
who’s in charge. In Iain M.
Banks’s Culture novels, the
Minds are the masters— they
essentially keep the humans
around as pets, or because their
eccentricities occasionally offer
insights the ruthlessly logical
Minds would never consider.
Hans Moravec (in Mind
Children) seems decidedly eager
for AIs to replace us.
But though it could be in
particular humans’ interest to get
rid of most humans, it can never
be in the interests of the species
to eliminate itself. The CEO of
that interstellar megacorporation
isn’t interested in losing his job,
 either. Those massive Minds will
probably be designed as huge,
amazing tools, with no more
ability to supersede us than our
other grandiose projects, from
cathedrals to nuclear power
plants.
Of course you can have robots and
robot societies if you like. What would
be their essential characteristics?
These will depend on their original
purpose and subsequent history, as well
as their mechanical capabilities.
They’ll be different, mentally and
socially, if they developed from
military drones, domestic automata, or
sexbots. (Charles Stross’s delightful
Saturn’s Children follows all of these
in a world transformed by the loss of
the robots’ master, the human species.)
How are they produced? If they’re
made in factories, they’re ultimately
the thralls of the factory owners, and of
course they’ll have none of the
biological concern with reproduction.
If they’re individually crafted, they’ll
have more autonomy, but will probably
repair and upgrade themselves rather
than reproduce.
It might be interesting to set up some
form of sexual reproduction— not so
much for the sex, though they might
enjoy that, but to get the same
advantages biological life forms: the
fortuitous creation of new abilities by
recombining existing progams and
mechanisms.
It’s often assumed that robots will
easily master human speech, but will
remain forever baffled by human
emotion. This is quite backwards, so
far as I can see. Human language is
immensely complicated, and sixty
years of intense effort hasn’t gotten us
much closer to general purpose text
handling, much less speech handling.
Emotion, by contrast, is simple and
useful.
We’re enamored of reason , because it
seems to differentiate us from the
animals— just see if you can create an
industrial civilization, cat, without
knowing multiplication! But you have
to admit, reason doesn’t prevent people
from doing or believing absurd things.
If our basic needs— eating, making a
living, reproduction— could only be
met by proper reasoning, most people
would starve alone. Instinct, by
contrast, is single-minded and reliable.
Hunger makes you eat, lust makes you
want to reproduce, fear makes you save
your skin, no matter what damfool
notions you have.
Many emotions, positive and negative,
help us as social animals. Love and
pity move us to help out others,
especially the weak. Greed and envy
help keep the alphas from taking too
much. Embarrassment dissuades
behavior too far from the norm.
Gratitude reminds us to favor
benefactors, resentment raises the price
for unsocial behavior.
It makes sense that robots should be
built with deep, hard-to-alter urges and
failsafes that reinforce their purpose. If
they’re servants, that might be a
slavish but envy-free devotion to
human beings. If they’re military
androids, it might include a drive to
seek out whatever meatbags— or
enemy robots— they’ve been designed
to kill. If they’re corporation-running
Minds, they may feel pleasure from
maximizing the bottom line, irritation
at governments and rivals, and
benevolent concern for employees,
graded by rank. Sexbots— well, you
can figure that out.
Perhaps the neatest aspect of robots is
also less explored: they can incorporate
any technological ability. Here’s an
easy way to explore what it would be
like to be a sentient being with
computerlike memory, laser eyes,
wheels, telescopes, infrared cameras,
chainsaws, pepper grinders, whatever.
Robots might retain the mutability of
computers or early automobiles: a few
days in the shop and they’ve got a new
ability. They would presumably retain
the immortality of computer programs:
their data and software, everything that
composes their robotic personality,
could be backed up and restored if the
robot itself was destroyed. On the other
hand, perhaps they are also plagued by
the bugs and problems with
interoperability that software is prone
to. (To a programmer, the Hollywood
trope causing the most eye-rolling is
that any computer system, even an
alien one, can connect to any other.)
Robots may not be a great practical
idea, but they’re a powerful expression
of our age’s technophilia. We love—
and fear— our machines. Robots allow
us to merge with our machines, to
escape biological messiness, and at the
same time to worry about who’s in
charge.

Animals and monsters

Creating alien animals and monsters is
just like creating sapients, minus the
sapience.
For fantasy, no one will think twice if
you copy Earth creatures, though it’s
common to tweak them: change the
size or make them talk.
(Talking animals , from Aesop to
Chaunticleer to the Monkey King to
Narnia to lolcats, are a perennial
favorite. It’s an attractive notion if you
love animals, and also a great shortcut:
if you see a talking dog or bear you can
guess their personality. As
conworlding, it’s kind of incoherent...
the animals either live exactly as
humans do, which makes them little
more than humans in costume, or they
live exactly as non-talking animals,
which doesn’t take their new sentience
into account.)
For s.f., I’ve already discussed the
basic ideas: share body plans with the
sapients; don’t overdo the predators;
bodies are adaptations to particular
environments.
Think about how species interact.
Predators and prey co-evolve. To use a
silly example, if you give deer wings to
get away from coyotes, then the
coyotes probably need wings too.
Keep sizes in sync. If the main grazing
animal is size X, predators will either
be at least 2X in size, or they’ll hunt in
packs.
Fanasy/s.f. designers love huge
animals, but size is also affected by the
predominant vegetation: you’re not
going to get elephants or apatosaurs in
thick forest. And the commonest
animals will be small. Don’t forget to
create some vermin.

Sustenance
Peasants and nomads
Now that you have people, you need to
feed them. Again, you may choose to
just give them beer, wheat and pigs.
You can live on ham sandwiches
indefinitely.
Be aware that our crops are a mix of
Old and New World. It bugs me that
Tolkien’s hobbits, in a mythical
version of early Europe, are eating
potatoes and smoking tobacco, both
New World crops. (Hot peppers, maize,
squash, and tomatoes are also New
World and shouldn’t exist in a
medieval or classical European or
Asian context.)
Agriculture developed in several areas,
each with a distinctive package of
local crops. The Middle East started
with wheat, barley, and peas; China
with rice, millet, and soybeans;
Mesoamerica with corns, beans, and
squash; the eastern Amerindians with
sunflower, sumpweed, and goosefoot.
The individual crops are not always
nutritionally complete, but the package
is. Grains and beans each supply
nutrients the other does not.
Often plants need some changes to be
suitable for crops, and thus crop plants
differ from their wild ancestors. These
changes include:
• Increasing grain size: crop
grains are larger— in the case of
maize, spectacularly so
• Reducing bitterness— e.g.
wild almonds are poisonous
(which is often what bitter taste
signals)
• Increasing oil production
and the fruit-to-seed ratio
• Inhibition of seed dispersal
 (e.g. popping pods) to facilitate
gathering
• Thinning seed coats
• Switching to self-
fertilization, which allows plants
to breed true
Plant genomes differ in how easily
these adaptations are made. A single
mutation, for instance, prevents
peapods from shattering; another single
mutation removes bitter amygdalin
from wild almonds. The Middle
Eastern grains are particularly easy to
adapt to cultivation. By contrast it took
thousands of years to produce large
ears of maize, and oaks have never
been cultivated to remove the
bitterness of acorns, which depends on
a number of genes.
For Almea, I created a package for
each major climatic zone. For instance,
here are the packages for the continent
of Arcél and points east:
Region Climate Food crops Te
Belesao / Tropical stripcorn, sorghum,tr
Ȟaibalai teng bean
Kereminth Tropical streff,
hardroot, yam
Uytai Temperate millet, pell, co
ko bean, gram, hu
potato
Neinuoi / Temperate rye, meigrass, fl
Western Sea bigbean,
stoneroot, long yam
As you can see, these are all anglicized
names, as I might use them in a history
or a novel— they’re the names English
speakers might adopt if they reached
Almea. Sometimes they’re calques on
the native terms (e.g. ‘stripcorn’ for Lé
desú), otherwise loose phonetic
adaptations (e.g. ‘gram, pell’ are ħram
and phel in Uyseʔ). In other cases I just
used an English term for a similar crop
(e.g. ‘sorghum’ for Lé né).
Next I wrote a short description of each
item and drew a picture, like this:
Pell (Uyseʔ phel). A tall bra
large, rough seeds. The seeds
sun, which causes them to c
are then soaked, which c
 expand, shedding their shells
the surface and are removed.
porridge is cooked, or ferme
or added to millet bread. It’s
than millet, but grows only
areas, such as river valleys.
None of this is necessary, but it allows
at least as much realism as we’d expect
in a story about China or the Inca
Empire. You wouldn’t buy a
description of a Míng peasant sitting
down in his toga to eat fish and chips.
It should be just as jarring if your
conworlders look, act, and eat like
medieval Europeans.
For textiles see the section on clothing
(p. 169).
Which domestic animals you allow
can have a large impact on your
culture. The Americas lacked horses or
any large traction animals, which
impeded plowing, long-distance
communications and transport, and
warfare. They lacked cattle and pigs as
well, which reduced the opportunity to
develop the nomadic lifestyle.
Not all animals are domesticable—
Africans, for instance, didn’t
domesticate zebras, lions, hippos,
rhinos, hyenas, or apes. (Some of these
have been tamed but not domesticated:
domestication requires breeding in
captivity. Technically elephants have
never been domesticated; working
elephants are tamed from the wild.)
Jared Diamond notes the
characteristics needed for successful
domestication:
• Diet: carnivores have
never been domesticated for
meat; it’s prodigiously
inefficient. For one person fed on
a carnivore’s meat, you could
feed ten on the animals the
carnivore ate, or a hundred on the
plants they ate.
• Quick aging. Elephants,
for instance, take a dozen years
to mature; no wonder it’s faster
to tame wild ones.
• Easy breeding in
captivity. Tame cheetahs were
 prized by the Egyptians, but they
refuse to breed in cages.
• Docility. This rules out
obvious candidates such as the
bear and rhino, but also the
African buffalo, the onager, the
hippo, and the zebra.
• Herd structure. Most
large domesticated animals live
in herds, with a dominance
structure and overlapping ranges;
these all make it easy to keep
them together in close quarters.
Deer and antelope, for instance,
are fiercely territorial; males
can’t be kept together during the
breeding season.
Types of agriculture
Though it’s technically part of culture
or technology, it’s convenient to talk
about agriculture while we’re talking
about crops, so you can tailor your
conworld’s crops to your sapients’
needs.
There are three main types of
agriculture, which have profound
effects on culture.
• Garden or shifting
agriculture. A patch of land is
cleared, planted for a few
seasons, and abandoned once the
fertility goes down; the farmers
move to a new plot and nature
reclaims the old. This system is
 typical of tropical agriculture,
partly because the rain forest
tends to have poor soil. When
population is very high this leads
to desertification, but with
medium populations it’s a
sustainable, effective use of
resources.
• Irrigation agriculture
depends on diversion of water
from rivers. The classic examples
are the rice paddies of southern
China, and the intensive
cultivation along the Nile and in
Mesopotamia.
Karl Wittfogel argued that
such societies naturally led to
hydraulic empires with a high
level of state control, due to the
needs of maintaining extensive
water management systems.
Leaving the system is difficult as
the government controls the
entire ecosphere, and
overthrowing it will merely
change who’s at the top.
Wittfogel’s term “Oriental
despotism” is unfortunate; Táng
China (p. 238) was far less
despotic than contemporary
European states. And hydraulic
states are certainly not eternal;
China, for instance, hasn’t had a
dynasty that lasted more than 400
years. Ancient Egypt was
despotic not because the Nile was
 irrigated but because it was
compact and isolated, thus easy
to unify and defend. As well,
irrigation in such areas started
out small and local.
• Rainfall agriculture
depends mostly on rain rather
than on irrigation; Wittfogel
would argue that this encourages
local autonomy if not
individualism, as self-sufficient
settlements can easily be created
in new areas.
Agriculturalists are usually sedentary,
but not always. The Apaches, for
instance, would farm in the highlands
in the summer, and gather wild foods
in the lowlands in the winter.
Agriculture was preceded by the
exploitation of wild grain, which also
facilitated development of a number of
ancillary inventions: sickles with flint
blades, baskets, mortars and pestles,
storage pits. This is typical of
technological progress— an invention
can’t or won’t be exploited till
conditions are ripe.

Population
A major factor in the nature of society
is population density. A land-rich
society allows easy expansion. It’s
even argued that this correlates with
polygamy, as fertility can be
encouraged.
A high-density region is subject to
much higher stress— the genocide in
Rwanda was due not so much to ethnic
tension as to desperation over land,
with 10 million subsistence farmers in
a nation the size of Vermont. When
resources are limited, elites try to
preserve their wealth by keeping their
numbers down; fertility is discouraged,
leading to restrictions on women’s
rights. High population also of course
leads to environmental degradation—
the majority of the population is likely
to live barely above the starvation
level, and to be highly vulnerable to
drought and plague.
As Thomas Malthus pointed out, in
premodern societies increases in
productivity are soon eaten up by
increased population. The average
standard of living is nearly a flat line
from the earliest Neolithic to about
1800.
For reference, here are Colin
McEvedy’s estimates of the population
of Europe and the nearer Middle East
over the centuries.
9000 BC 250,000
5500 BC 1 million
2250 BC 10 million
1275 BC 25 million
415 BC 40 million
AD 362 65 million
1483 88 million
1648 100 million
 1715 118 million
1815 200 million
1910 425 million
2000 690 million

And here are some representative city si

and populations:

Calah, Assyria 879 BC 358 ha

Athens 415 BC 225 ha
Classical Rome1 AD 1380 ha
20C Rome 1931 6780 ha
Tokyo 2010 219,000 ha

(One hectare = 0.01 km2 or 2.471

acre.)
Take care in comparing these to other
sources, which are often inflated.
Bigger numbers sound good, after all.
Very few historical numbers are based
on actual counts— Calah is one of the
few that is.
Urbanism shouldn’t be exaggerated in
ancient times. McEvedy points out that
a very misleading picture of Greece
emerges if the name of a state, polis, is
translated as ‘city’ or even ‘city-state’.
A typical polis was Megara, just west
of Athens; it had a population of
24,000, of which just 3,000 lived in the
little city (asty), also called Megara,
that was its capital. That’s an
urbanization rate of just 12.5%.
(McEvedy’s estimate for Rome is
contested, but figures of a million or
more make no sense; they require
densities not seen anywhere on Earth,
not even in places like Calcutta.)

Nomadism
Eurasian society is dominated by the
clash between agriculturalists and
nomads— going back to 2250 B.C.,
even before the horse was used in
warfare, when the pastoralist Semitic
Akkadians conquered Sumer.
The Eurasian steppe, which extends
across the continent from Hungary to
Inner Mongolia, has long been the
power base for horse-riding nomads,
and for one empire after another:
Aryans, Scythians, Huns, Mongols,
Turks. At various times nomads
conquered the Middle East, Russia,
India, and China; one group, the
Mongols, created the largest empire
ever. (See p. 248 on nomadic warfare.)
Nomadism supports a much lower
population density than farming, but
the nomads had a great military
advantage: they were virtually nothing
but army. The entire adult male
population was mounted, and trained in
the bow and arrow from an early age.
Each man had several mounts, so fresh
horses were always available. It didn’t
hurt that everyone was accustomed to
butchering animals and to quickly
dispatching predators.
Peasant societies, by contrast, didn’t
produce a natural cavalry, and peasant
levies produced a barely competent
infantry. The medieval European
response was to turn its aristocracy into
a professional cavalry; the Chinese and
Roman response was to co-opt the
nomads— intimidate the nearer tribes
with raids, buy them off with tribute
and titles, and if all else failed hire
them to counter the tribes farther off.
The Chinese preoccupation with the
nomadic threat was a reason the capital
ended up at Beijing, close to the steppe,
and why China was much less
interested in the sea.
To the civilized states the nomads were
“barbarians”, with implications of
cruelty, alienness, and primitiveness.
Their fear and anger were not
misplaced; nomadic raids and
conquests were enormously
destructive. Central Asia, for instance,
never really recovered from the savage
conquest of Timur.
Civilized writers often fall into a
pretentious disdain of their own
society, so sometimes “barbarians”
have been idealized as everything
urban civilization is not— full of
manly warrior virtues, free of urban
luxury, corruption, and softness.
Creations like Conan tell much more
about their creator’s values, or dreams,
than about actual nomads.
In fact nomads were very appreciative
of urban luxury... after all, that’s what
they swept in on their horses to loot.
They were a good deal more open to
agriculturalists’ religion than vice
versa— Kublai Khan sent to the Pope
to invite scholars to explain
Christianity to him; his descendants
eventually settled upon another import,
Buddhism. And as conquerors, they
generally co-opted local elites and ran
each country according to its
customary laws.
As for machismo, it was urban and
agriculturalist cultures that tended to
show the greater sexism. Khitan
women, for instance, were quite
powerful, and even led armies; the
Manchu ruling class of Qīng China
didn’t practice the foot-binding of the
Chinese.
Nomads also co-opted the infantry and
artillery of conquered agriculturalists
— cavalry alone had no advantage in
siege warfare, which was needed to
conquer major nations. The Manchu
had a good deal of help from Chinese
warlords... there’s always someone
who prefers to be on the winning rather
than the ethnically correct side.
What ended the nomadic threat? Partly
this was due to stronger states, which
however was merely a return to the
efficiency of classical times.
Gunpowder was also key— peasant
levies could become effective with
guns much faster than swords or
spears.
The Arabs were not, as you might
expect, nomadic horselords.
Muhammad was an urban merchant.
Arabia produces excellent horses, but
not in Central Asian numbers. One of
their great advantages was camels,
which were used to travel great
distances across lands their enemies
considered impenetrable; but camels
are unwieldly in battle. At Qadisiyya,
the key battle in the defeat of the
Persians, their army of 30,000 included
a cavalry continent of about 7000.
Once the caliphate was established, it
did make extensive use of nomadic
horsemen, but these were almost
entirely Turks.
There is no steppe zone in the
Americas or Africa comparable to that
of Eurasia, so nomadism has been
much less important there. In addition,
of course, the Americas lacked the
horse until European colonization.
Subsequently the “horse Indians”
developed a horse-based nomadic
lifestyle.

Hunter-gatherers
Let’s have some respect for the hunter-
gatherers. They thrived for two million
years, without ever destroying or
overstressing the planet.
Moreover, they were taller, longer-
lived, healthier and happier than almost
any human society before our own.
They were lean and fit, had a varied
diet, and didn’t work all that hard.
Daniel Everett reports that the Pirahã,
an Amazonian tribe, work 15 to 20
hours a week— the men hunting and
fishing, the women gathering. Tool-
making adds some time, but tools last
for awhile. The rest of their time is
generally spent hanging around. Add in
Internet access and you’ve pretty much
got the perfect lifestyle.
Living in tiny bands without animals,
they avoid most of the diseases and
parasites of settled populations, and
their social structure is loose. There’s
simply no great reason to tolerate a
tyrant— he can’t provide greater
resources than anyone else, nor does he
have a security apparatus to harass
dissidents. He can’t even steal people’s
food, since it’s gathered as it’s needed.
There’s one great drawback, but not
one exclusive to hunter-gatherers:
warfare. Humans can be brutal to each
other— as can apes, for that matter.
Marvin Harris suggests that warfare, by
privileging the raising of fierce males,
degrades the status and lifestyle of
women. This seems to be true in some
tribes, such as the Yanomamö , but not
others, such as the Pirahã or Bushmen.
Hunter-gatherer women nurse their
babies for years, which seems to inhibit
conception; they bear babies about
once every four years, while farmers
may have children every other year.
The burden of child-rearing is thus
lower, too.
Hunter-gatherers know their
environment in extraordinary detail—
they know over a thousand plants and
their uses, and of course all the animal
life, and they notice things like where a
stand of melons is growing, so they can
go back to pick them when they’re ripe.
They understand that plants reproduce
via seeds; why then don’t they take up
agriculture?
The better question might be, why
should they? The species was doing
fine, at least back when there were no
agriculturalists to crowd hunter-
gatherers off their lands. Look again at
those work hours— far less than in any
agricultural society. As one Bushman
put it when asked why his people didn’t
grow crops, “Why should we, when
there are so many mongongo nuts in
the world?”
So why did agriculture eventually
develop? There are many theories,
none very satisfying. Climate change,
for instance— agriculture started only
a few thousand years into the current
interglacial. Hominids have gone
through at least five cycles of glacial
periods and interglacials in the last
half-million years; the previous
interglacial, the Sangamon, is dated
from 125,000 to 75,000 years ago—
well within the period of anatomically
modern humans.
On the other hand, about 50,000 years
ago— during the last glacial period—
we see a huge increase in tool
complexity, and not long after that
clear evidence of art: sculpted
figurines, cave paintings. So perhaps
human biology or culture reached some
tipping point— we just wanted to
tinker more.
Jared Diamond suggests that it was
increasing population that led to
agriculture. Perhaps because of the
general good times as the glaciers
retreated, populations started to rise. It
may be significant that agriculture first
developed in a relatively marginal area,
the Middle East, where a scarcity of
food might easily be felt.
Once the carrying capacity of the land
was reached, people had to either limit
growth or increase productivity.
Perhaps both strategies were tried; but
once agriculture started, it was
unstoppable: the agriculturalists might
be shorter, unhealthier, plagued by
diseases and kings, but there were more
and more of them. Fast forward 10,000
years, and the remaining hunter-
gatherers have been crowded into lands
useless for crops or herds.
Some environments are rich enough to
support a high density of hunter-
gatherers. The classic example is the
Indian tribes of the American
Northwest, supported by the region’s
highly fertile fishing.

Agribusiness
The Malthusian era, ironically, ended
just in Malthus’s own time. We live in
an historically aberrant bubble of
productivity growth, one that’s led
advanced nations to stabilize
populations. Modern medicine nearly
eliminates infant and child mortality,
while in other ways child-rearing is
much more expensive. (You can’t
make a profit off the little buggers, for
one.) So the increased productivity
translates into a higher standard of
living.
Technically, American society is a
mixture, with 70% of our protein
coming from animal sources. But food
production has become a minimal part
of our economy. Less than 2% of
Americans are farmers; most of us live
in or near large cities. Contrast this
with most premodern societies, where
90% or more of the people worked on
the farm.

Ecological disaster
Some of the most malevolent actors in
human history are not dictators but
diseases.
The most spectacular example is the
effect of European diseases—
smallpox, typhus, cholera, and measles
— on the New World. These spread
quickly from first contact and
facilitated conquest and colonization.
When Hernán Cortés reached
Tenochtitlán in 1519, half the
population was already sick of
smallpox; the same disease killed the
Inca emperor Huayna Capac and his
heir, leading to a civil war which
Francisco Pizarro was able to take
advantage of. When the Pilgrims
arrived in Plymouth in 1620, they
found the site depopulated by disease.
It’s been estimated that disease killed
90% of the inhabitants of the
Americas.
Why did Eurasia abound in diseases it
could pass to the New World? Jared
Diamond posits that it’s the continent’s
long association with domestic
animals, whose diseases can spread to
humans.
The Black Death, bubonic plague,
exploded out of the steppe in 1346, and
within ten years had killed 20 million
people— in many areas, a third of the
population. Worse yet, the plague
returned intermittently till the end of
the century. One effect was a labor
shortage and a rise in wages. The
general shakeup of institutions may
also have facilitated the innovations of
the Renaissance.
Epidemics tend to co-evolve to become
less virulent over time— after all, if a
microbe kills off all possible hosts, it’s
going to die out itself. The bubonic
plague is a grim exception, since its
primary host is rats— humans are
merely an alternative when there aren’t
enough rats.
There are other forms of ecological
collapse which humans bring on by
themselves. One is salinization of the
land caused by long-term agriculture.
If this continues long enough, the soil
becomes too salty to grow crops.
Another is deforestation, which not
only limits wood (a very useful
resource), but increases soil erosion;
again, this leads to lack of fertility, as
well as the silting up of rivers and
deltas The near total deforestation of
northern China and subsequent soil loss
resulted in the Yellow River frequently
shifting its course, causing major and
destructive floods.
It doesn’t take long for salinization to
become a problem. In 3500 BC the
main crops in Sumer were wheat and
barley; within 1500 years it was almost
all barley, which is more resistant to
salt. By 1800 BC crop yields were a
third of what they had once been; the
city-states of Sumer became marginal
and political power shifted to the north.
The area had recovered by the time of
the Islamic conquest— only to collapse
again centuries later, about the time of
the Mongols. In the 20C archeologists
digging in the Iraqi desert marveled at
the lush world depicted in the tablets
they were reading.
The picturesque landscape of the
Mediterranean lands, dominated by
olive trees, vines, low bushes and
herbs, is the result of deforestation—
there used to be plenty of forest. (The
“cedars of Lebanon” referred to in the
Bible are nearly gone.) As early as 590
BC the Athenian legislator Solon
proposed a ban on the cultivation of
steep slopes in order to prevent soil
loss.
The Maya, originally garden
agriculturalists, built an extensive
urban and agricultural civilization,
clearing the forest to build permanent
fields. But as the population increased,
crop yields dropped, silt damaged the
raised fields in the lowlands, and social
unrest grew. The civilization collapsed,
and its cities were reclaimed by the
jungle.
Salinization can be put off by leaving
fields fallow, and by manuring (this
was unavailable to the Maya who had
no large domestic animals). Terracing
helps reduce soil loss (but doesn’t
eliminate it; the Greeks and Maya were
both great terracers). When problems
start to occur, moreover, it becomes
harder and harder to do the right thing;
the perceived need is more land, and
people start to cultivate more and more
marginal soils, and reduce rather than
increase fallow periods, bringing the
disaster closer.
In a sense dark ages are nature’s way of
recovering after a too-intensive period
of human development.
Most of these ills are due to
agriculture, but hunter-gatherers can
cause devastation too, by overhunting.
The large animals of the Americas died
out at the same time as initial human
settlement.

Fantasy/s.f. food sources

Anthropology stops here, but we don’t
have to. Food could come from other
sources:
• hunting alone (for a
carnivorous species)
• photosynthesis (for a
plant-derived species)
• magic
• vats of algae formed into
food-like shapes, injected with
flavors and nutrients— yummy!
 • anything you want,
constructed molecule by
molecule using nanobots
• the less successful
members of society. Cannibalism
can’t be the primary food source,
however. Carnivores require
several times their biomass to
support their population— if a
species only ate conspecifics, it
would quickly die out.
Whatever exotic system you choose,
decide how much work it involves.
Does it take the whole population most
of their work week, as traditional
agriculture did? Is it a trivial economic
sector, as in our society? Or something
in between?
What sort of population density is
supported? One person in a square
mile, like some hunter-gatherer
lifestyles? Huge megacities?
What resources are needed, and who
controls those? Are they evenly
distributed through the land or
concentrated in easily defended
clumps? Are they sustainable? How
easy is it to create a new settlement,
especially for a dissident group?
What are the environmental effects,
especially as the population density
grows? How high a population could
the planet support this way?
History
History and culture determine each
other, so which do you do first? I’ll
suggest history, since you can write an
outline history without a detailed
understanding of your culture.

Filling in an outline
Earlier (p. 10) I suggested a narrative,
two-line summary of the course of your
culture, the sort of thing you could
pitch to a bored movie exec.
Let’s examine one of these and fill it
out more:
 It used to be... and now it’s...
two separate united, with cultu
nations of the former
countries
Create a table comparing our own
history with your conworld’s. This is
going to be fast and breezy— just a
dozen lines long, on a more or less
logarithmic scale. Put in the two events
we have somewhere.
BC/AD Earth Mil. New
-9000 Agriculture 0
-4000 Urbanization 5
-3000 Writing; kingdoms 6
-2000 law codes; chariots 7
-1000 cavalry; alphabet; 8
coins
-500 Greeks; rise of 8.5
Rome
1 height and fall of 9
Rome
500 Dark Ages; Táng; 9.5
Islam
1000 Medieval era 10 two s
1500 colonialism, 10.5
science
1750 Europe conquers 10.75
world
2000 Modern times 11 unite
remn
form
coun

There are two reasons to include the

précis of Earth history: to remind you
to outline the whole of your history,
and to serve as rough defaults. A blank
line can be assumed to be similar to
Earth’s development at that period.
So the current time in this world is
comparable to our present? Meh. Let’s
say we want a Renaissance-like world.
So let’s move the events back, and also
create some provisional names.
BC/AD Earth Mil. Nova
-9000 Agriculture 0
-4000 Urbanization 5
-3000 Writing; kingdoms 6
-2000 law codes; chariots 7
-1000 cavalry; alphabet; 8
coins
-500 Greeks; rise of 8.5
Rome
1 height and fall of 9 two
Rome and M
500 Dark Ages; Táng; 9.5
Islam
1000 Medieval era 10
1500 colonialism, 10.5 unite
science
1750 Europe conquers 10.75 —
world
2000 Modern times 11 —
I moved the component nations 1500
years back— the exact date can be
adjusted. So there’s a technological as
well as a political difference between
the two periods.
Trying to name the united land brings
us to the first of many questions about
making this history more specific:
which nation won? Or is the union
something so new it got a new name?
But a single change of state is boring.
Why not let both nations win, each in
turn? And only then, perhaps, a new
nation emerges.
9 two nations, Joausi and Mounia
9.5 Joausi conquers Mounia; ma
rebellions
10 Mounia re-emerges, takes ov
Joausi
10.5 formation of united Nae
Republic
10.75 —
11 —

How did we get from a revanchist

Mounia to a new republic, though?
Maybe another civil war, but we more
or less did that. Perhaps another nation,
Ombuto, invaded, and it was in pushing
out the invaders that a new national
identity was formed.
That’s a good start, but where did
Joausi and Mounia come from? Let’s
give them very different histories:
Joausi Mounia
6 first city-states along
great rivers
7 empire of Kinyr
8 nomad invasions: cities fo
 proto-Joausians
conquer Kinyr
8.5 a dark age— some diverse l
foreign or Kinyrian create m
rule republic
barbaria
9 Joausi nation unified M
9.5 Joausi empire Conque
many re
10 ruled by Mounia Mounia
takes ov
10.5 Ombuto invasion; formation
Republic
One nation derives from nomadic
conquerors; the other from maritime
city-states. We begin to get a picture of
how their values differ, and even what
they might fight about.

Map time
It’s hard to get much further without a
map. Note that some bits of the map
are already determined: Joausi must
adjoin a region suitable for nomads;
Mounia is littoral; there must be a fair
amount of room for Ombuto, a nation
that can threaten them both.
You’ll probably have a lot more world
than you have countries at this point. In
the example we have three nations.
Presumably Mounia and Joausi adjoin;
but what’s to the north, south, east, and
west? Ombuto is one of those
directions, but what’s beyond it?
So add some names to the map— you
can always change them later. While
you’re at it, name some of the major
regions within the two main nations—
these will be useful as you add further
history, as they may have been nations
themselves at certain periods.
The dark shading indicates
mountains,which partly protect the
southern nations from the steppe.

A historical chart
Now that we have multiple nations,
let’s expand the chart, one column per
region:
Zpatia Joausi Mounia
6 city states
along great
rivers
7 early empire of
kingdoms Kinyr
8 conquest by cities fo
Jouausi on coast
nomads
8.5 Vlapuyn dark age— littoral
unites rule by people
Zpatia, Zpatians; create
forms rebellion by mercant
empire Kinyrians republic
9 collapse; Joausi Mounia
dark age kingdom united
9.5 Joausi ruled by
empire Joausi
10 divided conquered Mounia
into small by Mounia emerges
states becomes
empire
10.5 eastern Ombuto Ombuto
states invasion; invasion
occupied Naeja Naeja
by Naeja republic republic

This sort of chart is easily converted

into a graphic. Keep the basic idea:
regions across the top, time down the
sides. But present the information
graphically. Color in each of the
nations; make the size proportionate to
how much of the region they control.
Here’s the above table turned into a
chart:
The graphics allow a lot more detail in
the same space. E.g. I was able to
suggest the back-and-forth of the
struggle to form Ombuto, rather than
just label this spot “three-way war”;
it’s also possible to see stages in the
conquest of Mounia and the emergence
of Naeja.
Avoid the pattern of “state emerges,
stays the same till it’s conquered”. E.g.
look at Souru and Mieje, two of the
city-states that formed the Republic of
Mounia: the scalloped border between
them indicates that they alternated
periods of dominance.
Also avoid kingdoms or city-states that
are all the same size. Some should be
much larger, some much smaller.
When you develop historical details, be
bold. A sort of psychological block can
develop— you’ve labeled a portion of
the map “Mounia” and you think of it
as always being one country. But few
nations have a simple history. Apply
the principle we started with at smaller
levels: this region is now X, but it used
to be Y.

Historical atlas
The historical chart can now be turned
into historical maps. As a boy I
discovered Colin McEvedy’s Penguin
Historical Atlases; in four slim
volumes he covers the whole of
European and Middle Eastern history,
with several maps per century, plus a
brisk, wry, and informative
commentary. Companion volumes treat
North America, Af rica, and the Pacific.
These books are invaluable for giving a
wide perspective on history, but
McEvedy is also a master at lapidary
character portraits that bring history to
life:
Fortune smiled on Spanish arms
but Ferdinand deserves his
traditional share of the credit.
Ever willing to compromise,
always offering to take the
smaller half, he usually ended up
with the whole bag.
You can draw horizontal lines across
your chart at key points and use these
as guides for making the map. The
main idea is that you are translating
diagrammatic conventions to
geographical facts— e.g. “half of
Mounia controlled by Joausi” must be
translated into an exact division of the
territory.

Formats
My historical atlas of Ereláe includes
maps for 43 dates, from the remote
paleolithic (-25,000) to Almea’s
present, Z.E. 3480, plus 13
supplementary maps covering things
like terrain, cities, and languages. And
this is still only about 1/4 as large as
McEvedy’s coverage of the West.
You can do far less than this, of course
— a couple of maps of “ancient times”
may be all you need. But the more
maps you have, the more story you
have in your history. You accumulate a
rich cultural lore and a set of past
heroes and villains.
Movements and borders are
constrained by geography. I
recommend including the major
mountain ranges on your base map.
These make natural boundaries— e.g.
the Pyrenees separate Spain from
France, the Alps protect Italy, the
Carpathians form a minor barrier
around Hungary. (Mountains
paralleling the coast, such as the Atlas
range in the Maghreb, are less
important for history).
Be aware of ecological boundaries
too. The most important are those
between climate zones, such as
tropical, temperate, and arctic. People
are unlikely to expand into areas where
their crops don’t grow— or where the
local diseases kill them off.
Just as important is the distinction
between areas suitable for cultivation,
and those best suited for nomadism—
the steppe. These boundaries are
somewhat permeable: a strong nomadic
nation can force the agriculturalists off
grassland, though not forest.
Know where your major rivers are;
these are natural transportation arteries
and sites for cities, and their basins
make a natural ecological zone. The
area separating river basins will be
higher ground and form a natural
boundary.
Another natural ecological zone is the
littoral, areas in close contact with the
sea. A very convoluted coastline, as in
Greece and western Anatolia, extends
the littoral zone. A littoral zone makes
a natural maritime nation, distinct from
the nations of the interior. The ancient
Greeks by preference colonized nearby
regions that also belonged to the
littoral zone: the Crimea, the
Mediterranean islands, the boot of
Italy. A relatively straight coastline
produces only a small littoral, less
likely to form a distinct nation.
A lesson from terrestrial history: few
regions belong to the same people
forever. Think in terms of population
movements. As a corollary, the
majority population of almost any
nation originally came from
somewhere else. (This is sometimes
reflected in the people’s mythology—
though a more prestigious place of
origin may be substituted, as the
Romans claimed to descend from
Troy.)
Movements trigger counter-
movements. E.g. the movement of the
Huns into Europe impelled a number of
Germanic peoples to try their luck in
the Roman Empire. Or the movement
may be a counter-invasion: the ancient
Persians’ attempt to conquer Greece
ultimately led to the Greek conquest of
Persia.

Methods
The first version of my historical atlas
was done on paper. I created a base
map with only oceans, rivers, and
mountains, and took it to a printer to
get a hundred pages printed in a light
blue color. That was enough to do the
atlas, then redo it better.
Now that color printers and
photocopiers are available, you can
easily make your own blank maps, and
with far better colors.
These days, though, you can get better
results entirely on the computer. You
can proceed in several ways, most but
not all of which involve handing
money to Adobe.
See the Maps chapter (p. 285) for how
to create the actual maps. Some
programs you can use for the atlas:
• A good paint program, or
to use the technical term,
anything but Microsoft Paint.
Create the base map— just the
geographical features, no
lettering. Start from this every
time you need to make a
historical or other kind of map.
• Photoshop, or GIMP—
any paint program which
supports layers. Now you can
 place the oceans, rivers, and
terrain on separate layers, and
each historical map on its own
layer above those. Each bit of
text gets its own layer— this can
quickly get out of hand, so this is
perhaps the best solution only if
you need a handful of maps,
rather than 50.
• Illustrator, or Inkscape.
Put the base map as a bitmap on
one layer. Everything you need
for one map— borders, towns,
text, transparent regions to color
in the countries— can live in a
separate layer. You can easily
switch between maps by setting
their layers’ visibility.
• Flash. I used this method
for the atlases of Arcél and
Skouras. Flash is two-
dimensional: it has layers and
frames. The layers will work like
Photoshop: one for oceans, one
for rivers, one for boundaries,
one for names, etc. The frames
correspond to each of your maps.
 Flash makes it easy to share
elements between maps. In the
example, the base map, terrain
colors, and rivers are shared
 between all maps. The
“nonhumans” layer contains only
a few different frames, as the
boundaries of the nonhuman
states change much less often
than those of the humans.
Best of all, the atlas can be
played as a movie, and you can
see your nations wax and wane
over time. You can also add
controls to hide or show the
layers; my Flash atlases allow the
viewer to step through the maps
with or without layers for the
terrain, cities, language colors, or
political colors.

Example: Novazema
Here are three rough maps of
Novazema, at three points within the
last row of the graph.
First, here’s the beginning of the
Ombutese invasion: Ombuto has
occupied the coast nearest its own
territory.
You can add new details at any point —
I’ve added some tribe names to the
steppe area. Adding names is a good
first step, but get into the habit of
thinking about the stories behind them:
what makes this place different from
that place over there? Terrain,
language, religion, what? If the
difference is cultural, when did it
arise?
The map below shows Ombuto in
control of both countries, but rebellions
have occurred in each. Perhaps these
almost fail before they overcome old
antagonisms and decide to work
together to expel the invaders.
Now that we’re looking at individual
maps, quirks of geography— or just
whim— can suggest additional stories.
The island of Akaerti is either another
rebellion, or was never conquered by
Ombuto.
Marginal areas should have changes
too. Here the Kašaeni have absorbed
their neighbors, the Sindri.
Here’s the present state of affairs, after
the Naeja Republic has not only kicked
the Ombutese out, but taken some
Ombutese territory, and conquered
Dviona to the west as well. Ombuto’s
weakness has allowed a buffer state,
Ndato, to form.
It looks like Akaerti did its bit in
fighting the Ombutese, but refused to
join the Naeja Republic.

Iterative development
Don’t try to rush through a project as
large as a historical atlas. The Atlas of
Almea I posted on my website is about
the fourth version I did, and by the
time you’re reading this I may have
revised it again. If you’re in a hurry, do
the historical table and just a few maps.
Your first map is likely to be breezy
and characterless... a bunch of similar-
sized kingdoms that bubble up into
empires and divide for no apparent
reason. That’s fine— inspiration can
flag. This is one reason to create rough
draft maps at first, so they’re easy to
go back and revise later, as you think
of new and better things to happen.
It’s also a good idea to stop after the
rough draft stage, and work on the
culture, religion, and technology, using
the following chapters. A rough history
is enough to inform your cultural
creation— if you want to say “Religion
X was invented in Y”, you have some
names for possible Y’s and your map
suggests propagation routes. You’ll
know what your main culture’s
neighbors are and something of what
makes them tick.
But for the polished version, especially
the commentary, the more you know
about the culture the better. You want
to know not just what happened, but
why. The meaningless unions and
divisions of the rough draft can take
significance as dynastic quarrels,
religious splits, the result of mercantile
success or military advances, the
consequences of corrupt emperors or
ecological crises.
If you’re working out languages at the
same time, think about what happens to
entire language families. An empire
normally imposes a standard language,
which then splits into daughter
languages over the course of a
millennium or two.
You’ll need a naming language for
each region of your map; some of them
should be related and look somewhat
alike. Working out the full culture,
religion, and history of your main
conculture is difficult without working
out its language, or at the least a
lexicon of a few hundred roots.
Example: What’s next f
Novazema?
For the maps of Novazema, the maps
suggest a story, but it needs to be
fleshed out. Why did the Mounian
empire fall so quickly to the Ombutese
— was it decadent, unpopular, or
simply technologically backward?
What allowed the rebellion to begin?
Was it merely an ethnic rebellion, or a
new ideology, as suggested by the new
name Naeja and the change from
empire to republic? Why wouldn’t
Akaerti join? Why did the republic,
founded to counter a foreign invasion,
turn around and occupy one of its
neighbors?
Think about who did these things—
who were the Ombutese kings; whose
idea was the republic?
Look at the more static areas of the
map— it’s not very realistic that pretty
much nothing has happened in Dneva
and Hrev for the last five centuries.
And perhaps because I didn’t put the
steppe into the historical chart, there’s
no interaction here between its
inhabitants and the lands to the south.

The reason why

Why did Ombuto invade?
• Arashne the Great, the
favored prince of Ombuto, after
 consolidating his power, sought
eternal glory, setting himself
against the canny and brave
empress Kiraeku of Mounia (the
Great Man theory)
• Trade, even Ombuto’s
internal commerce, was
dominated by Mounians; if they
were conquered this engine of
wealth would be Ombuto’s (the
economic explanation)
• Arashne’s line and
upbringing was Sito, disdained
by the Ombutese proper. He thus
had a burning urge to prove
himself and quash dissent (the
psychological explanation)
 • The Ombutese nobility
was feudal and war was their
raison d’être; the best way to
keep them from rebellion or
frivolity, and to strengthen the
state, was an external war (the
cultural explanation)
• Sithiswe, the god of Peace,
entered on his long cyclical
sleep, leaving Harana the goddess
of War as his regent. Men had no
choice but to fall into war (the
mythological explanation)
It could be all of these, of course. Your
history becomes more interesting, in
fact, the more reasons you add. You
can start, as we did above, with mere
statements of fact like “Ombuto
invades”, but the world starts to seem
real once you can explain why, on
several levels.

Who’s talking?
The commentary for my atlases takes a
pseudo-scholarly tone, but that’s only
one alternative.
Historians aren’t omniscient; for
Almean studies I allow my point of
view to be limited by native sources—
e.g. little archeological information is
available, and I describe conflicting
sources and historical mysteries. If you
prefer, of course, you can know
everything about your world.
Or you can take a native point of view:
e.g. the history of Novazema might be
relayed by a Mounian, with appropriate
biases and gaps in knowledge— this
can be a lot of fun to write. I’ve
mentioned the Count of Years , a native
Almean history. Oblivion and Skyrim ,
are filled with stories, poems, and bits
of history or ethnography all written by
natives.
Native writers might simply wish to
relate the facts as they know them; or
they might have an agenda. Perhaps our
Mounian wishes to glorify the old
empire, or justify the new republic, or
advance a religious revival. The
narrator might even be unreliable
— events can be narrated in a way that
suggests a different story or
interpretation to the reader.
Here’s the same event narrated in three
different styles:
Academic: Arashne spent two years
mustering his army, ferrying troops to
Paedha, the Mounian port his father
had captured. There were endless
delays due to the scale of the
operation; the force was not ready till
early fall. Eager to make use of the
remaining campaign season, he
ordered the attack to begin. But the
delay had allowed Kiraeku to move a
hastily raised army into position, and
as winter fell the invasion petered out
at the gates of Mieje, just 100 km into
Mounian territory.
Partisan: The alien despot launched a
sneak attack at harvest time, with over
200,000 death-pale Ombutese and
thousands of traitorous Paedhans.
Forewarned in time, our brave
Empress Kiraeku personally led the
loyallest of her troops, a bare 50,000
stalwalt fighters, to meet the invaders
with their cruel curved swords. The
horde was halted at the desperate
battle of Mieje, but the invaders
remained outside the city and were
rumored to be fetching cannons.
Reinforcements were few; fear led
many to desert Mounia at the hour of
her greatest need.
Religious: These were the dark times
of Harana into whose hands the world
of mortals was delivered; Lord
Arashne made sacrifice and drank
blood in Her worship. Possessed by
 the goddess, the Lord and his warriors
burned with wrath and they advanced
into the heathen lands causing great
devastation with sword and lance and
musket. They halted before Mieje as
even Harana must not act in the night
of the year, the season of the
Nameless God.

Cities
These maps— to say nothing of
modern politics and economics— give
the impression that history is all about
countries. This is highly misleading;
it’s all about the cities.
Why are cities important?
• They’re key military
 strongholds. A rural area can’t
resist an invading army; a city
can, and in fact conquering a
country, as opposed to ruling it,
can’t be done without taking the
cities— a formidable task before
cannons were invented.
• Because of this they’re the
safest place for rulers to hang
out, and thus they become centers
of administration.
• They’re economic
powerhouses, before modern
times the site of all
manufacturing and banking, the
endpoints of trade routes. They
generate wealth that rulers can
tap in its most convenient form,
 money.
In Europe town culture—
the literal meaning of
bourgeois— was the origin of the
middle class, and thus of
republicanism and capitalism.
• For all these reasons they
become cultural hubs, the home
of artists, writers, theaters, and
universities. Cities also become
the focus of language varieties; a
standard language is almost
always the speech of a
prestigious town.
• Most important, perhaps,
they’re the center of
innovation— even advances in
 agriculture such as mechanical
reapers and electricity begin in or
near cities. The Renaissance
began in the most urbanized parts
of Europe, northern Italy and
Flanders.
For many reasons (including high-
speed transportation and the fad for
nation-states) the 20C was a rough time
for cities; Americans may still feel that
cities are swamps of poverty and
crime. Historically it was quite the
opposite: the cities were rich and far
safer than the countryside.
(Unhealthier, though. Dense
populations breed disease, attract
vermin, and create loads of waste.)
For more on this I recommend the
books of Jane Jacobs, cited in the
reading list; also see the essay on cities
on my website.
What do you do with this in your
conworld? Well, create cities, for one.
That’s why I have a cities layer in my
atlases, so I can see where they are.
• In earliest times, kingdoms
are likely to be city-states. When
one gets strong enough to
conquer the rest, the empire stage
begins.
• If a nation is conquered in
stages, this corresponds to taking
one city after another.
• Some regions, such as
ancient Greece and medieval
 Italy, never really coalesce as
nations, but remain patchworks
of city-states.
Cities aren’t interchangeable; cities
and whole regions develop specialties
— e.g. the wool trade in medieval
Flanders, or the auto industry in 20C
Detroit. A specialty may develop by
accident, but once it exists it’s self-
reinforcing: support industries grow
up, skilled workers abound. It’s not
easy to bite into such an area’s market
share (but when it happens, it’s likely
to be a major economic event).
Cities can last thousands of years, but
they can be abandoned in a dark age or
a conquest, and not all are
reestablished. So don’t have the same
cities in every epoch.
See also p. 91 on city sizes, and p. 297
on city plans.

Cycles
Are there cycles to history? Nations
certainly have their ups and downs; so
do economies. The Chinese have long
noted a pattern of vigorous rulers at the
beginning of a dynasty and weak ones
later on. In the last few centuries
Western nations seem to alternate
between periods of revolution or
reform and reactionary cooldowns.
Attempts to set fixed years on apparent
cycles require a bit too much special
pleading. For conworlding, cycles are a
reminder to have stuff happen. Throw
in a major war, a revolution, a great
intellectual discovery, a plague, an
ecological disaster, a new religion, an
orc invasion.

Alternative histories
Instead of creating a world from
scratch, you can take ours and tweak it.
The usual method is to take a single
event and have it come out the other
way: e.g. Hitler won (Philip K. Dick,
The Man in the High Castle), or the
Reformation never happened (Kingsley
Amis, The Alteration), or a Jewish
homeland was set up in Alaska rather
than Palestine (Michael Chabon, The
Yiddish Policemen’s Union).
Or there may be an ongoing difference.
In Alan Moore’s Watchmen, the
difference is that superheroes are real
in the Watchmen world. Or your goal
may simply be to insert a fictional
country into the map of Europe.
The advantage is that you already have
your planet, with a full history and set
of cultures up to the point of
divergence. You’ll need good research
on the period of divergence, however,
to make your alternative history
plausible. Reversing the last battle of a
war is usually not convincing: you have
to address the reasons for the victory.
If Napoléon had won Waterloo he
would likely have lost the next battle,
perhaps when the Austrians or Russians
arrived. (As Ken Hite and Mike
Schiffer point out, the real divergence
in many an alternate history is “so-and-
so wasn’t as much of an idiot as in our
timeline”.)
If the divergence is quite early, you’ll
be doing quite a bit of conworlding.
E.g. if Persia had beat the Greeks, the
world would look very different 2000
years later. And even if you just make
the winning side last longer, as in the
ever-popular ongoing Roman Empire,
clothes and language and religions
won’t be the same as in the 1C.
The process is most impressive if you
think out second-order effects. For
instance, Amis has Martin Luther
becoming Pope; one result is that his
puritan ideals prevent Michelangelo
from designing St. Peter’s.
Four centuries later, Amis has Jean-
Paul Sartre becoming a Monsignor.
This sort of thing is hard to resist, and
of course it supplies you with ready-
made personalities, but I find it hard to
swallow. If the big picture is radically
different from our timeline, there’s no
reason the little details are the same
long after the point of divergence.
Don’t forget demographics. By
Hannibal’s time Rome had a 4-to-1
population advantage and was unlikely
to be conquered by Carthage. There are
similar problems with attempts to
make a successful Confederate States a
real rival to the USA.
Lost cause histories are the bread and
butter of alt history, but be careful if
you sympathize with the lost cause:
you may be tempted to write a utopia,
and utopias kill storytelling.
Culture
What’s a culture? Everything that’s not
biology nor individual choice. To be
specific, this chapter will cover things
at the level of the whole society:
culture tests, government, law, and the
economy. The next chapter will look at
things at the individual level: family
life, clothing, architecture, and other
aspects of daily life. Religion, magic,
technology, and war get their own
chapters.
Many things we imagine are universal–
how men and women relate, rules on
invitations and gifts, how negotiations
proceed, how much you can get from
your family, attitudes toward nudity or
fidelity— are really cultural.
You can also work backwards: take
what seems to be a commonplace of
human experience (e.g. “people prefer
girls to old women”) and imagine a
society where the opposite holds. It’ll
make your culture at least distinctive,
and at best fascinating.

Culture tests
A good way to begin describing a
country is to write a culture test. The
best way to explain these is to show
you one. There are a couple dozen
more available from my website, for
both real and imagined countries.
Skourene culture test
Skouras is a region on my conworld
Almea; it’s a maritime culture,
comparable to ancient Greece or
Phoenicia. The culture test is intended
to apply only to urban residents, as
these are the dominant and most
interesting class.

If you’re Skourene...
• You think the gods are important
— everyone should have one. But you
can’t imagine telling someone outside
your bsepa (your extended family)
who to worship. In some foreign
countries the rulers tell you who your
gods are. Crazy!
• You’re reverent to all gods—
who needs supernatural enemies?—
but you reserve your sacrifices and
requests for the two gods of your
bsepa, one male and one female.
• You can ask the gods for things
because that’s their job: they’re
helpers and guardians. Things can
become gods— some gods even used
to be human beings— and they can
cease to be gods. The world, including
its gods and people, was originally
created by Ksaragetor (who is
responsible for all good things) and
Gamagetor (who was not so good at
his job and created all the messed-up
things); but no one worships them or
knows much about them.
• You can read— how would you
 do business without it? You enjoy
reading stories, the convoluted history
of the Skourene states, sermons,
poems, satires, philosophy, treatises
about your trade, and much else.
• Games are simply training for
war: running, swimming, archery,
rowing, wrestling, spear-throwing,
sword-fighting. If you’re male, you
like to participate in these and watch
exhibitions by masters— or even
better, fights with captured prisoners.
If you’re female, you grew up playing
at these things too, and can pursue the
first three as an adult, if you care to.

Would you eat that? I’ll have

slice
• We’re here to work; if you get
 tired of doing one thing, do another; if
your feet hurt, do the accounting; if
you’re sick of the city, take to the sea.
This isn’t to say you can’t enjoy
yourself with food and drink and
amusements, but don’t tell me you
want to do that all day long.
• You like to eat a big meal in the
evening, at home with your family; but
you usually buy your lunch in the
market, or take some business
associates to an eatery (tnasali).
• There’s very little that you
wouldn’t eat. If you travel to faraway
places and see exotic animals, your
mouth waters.
• You don’t like to live far from
the water, and you take a morning bath
every day if possible— if you’re poor,
 right in the ocean or the river; if
you’re better off, in the heated city
baths.

Do I get paid for taking th

test?
• If you need a letter or package
sent to someone in the city, there are
messengers who will take it— you just
flag one down in the street. Barefoot,
shaggy fellows, but reliable. There are
services between cities, considerably
more well-heeled.
• You have no objection to
walking, but who has the time to walk
all the way across town? There’s
carriages for that; or you take a skiff
along the waterfront. To get to other
cities, of course, you take a ship.
• You’re proud to be part of a free
people, which is ruled by its own
bsepas, meeting in a Senate, and not
by “kings”, as the foreigners are.
• People can have lighter or darker
skin, or hair that ranges from black to
brown to straw color. It doesn’t mean
anything. You don’t entirely trust
someone from out of town, though.
• You think that most problems
can be solved if they’re thought about
long enough— and if you can be the
first to think of it, there’s probably
money in it.
• Disputes that can’t be solved any
other way can be taken to the courts—
a scary prospect, as the judges are
empowered to probe into every aspect
of your life. The better way is to talk
 to the higher-ups in the bsepa, and
they’ll work it out for you. You’ll owe
them a favor; but that’s better than the
courts getting their hands on you.

People and other people

• Humans aren’t the only people
on Almea. There’s the ṭailuadnir, who
live in the sea; you don’t want one as
an enemy, and you’re not sure if you
want one as your friend, either. Not
that they’ll harm you, no.
• Then there’s the atingetoro—
little, fierce, mostly friendly guys from
the mountains, who come round to sell
gems and minerals and metals they’ve
dug up, and beautiful things they’ve
made out of them. You’ve learned the
hard way not to play drinking games
 with them.
• Then there’s the geŋŋiaḷgirigi—
mischievous little devils who are an
excellent reason not to go into the
forest, where they live. Farms near the
forest will leave out food for them, to
appease them. There are other
monsters up in the mountains or the
steppe.
• You’re not the sort of hick who
only knows one language. You know
your own city’s language and that of a
few other Skourene cities. Possibly
Axunašin, Jeori, Mei, or Tžuro as well.

One of them said Almea

round, if you can believe it
• Each of the bsepas has a tax
 levied on it, which goes to pay for
defense, the courts, roads, public
entertainments, and the dole. You
grumble over it, but you pay your
share.
• You learned to read and write
and calculate at home, and you
learned morality and worship from the
bsepa’s priest. Some of the
philosophers offer lectures; it’s often
worth paying a few coins to hear what
they have to say. Sometimes you learn
something; sometimes you just laugh
at the crazy old greybeard’s ravings.
• Years are reckoned by the
groparam, the triennial Trucial
Councils between the three delta
cities. The three Senates meet
together, and there’s competitions and
 feasts and performances.
Complicating the chronology, they’re
not held if the cities are at war with
each other.
• You grow your own vegetables
in a plot by your house, and perhaps
raise chickens as well. Everything else
you buy at the market.
• There used to be a proverb that
“Skourenes don’t fight Skourenes”...
would that it were still true. Some city
will get too big for its breeches and
need taking down.
• Your own city has come out on
the wrong side of a war or two, and
perhaps lost a good deal of its colonial
empire. Skouras has never been
conquered by foreigners, however,
and it’s hard to see that it ever could
 be.

Why you’d better get alo

with your mother-in-law
• Marriage, like any business of
importance, is arranged between the
bsepas. It takes time to get used to
being married, but you end up loving
the person almost as much as your
own relatives.
• In the old days, a man joined his
wife’s bsepa. These days a firstborn
son may bring his wife into his own
bsepa instead— at least, if his is
richer.
• A man can only have one wife;
but some men— lucky bastards— can
support a mistress or two. In colonies,
 where the supply of women is low, a
woman is sometimes married to two
men.
• It’s not really right for men to
sleep with other men, outside of
special circumstances like a long
campaign or a trading expedition. But
it’s an impure world, and what
happens behind closed doors is the
least of our worries.
• You call a person by his name.
Foreigners make this complicated by
having multiple names and making
you guess which one to use.
• Nudity is best indulged at home
— except when bathing, of course.
Some women like to dress in the
shameless Axunemi fashion, showing
their breasts.
 • There are houses (rubnakalir)
that will rent a room to a stranger. It’s
better to stay with a friend or relative,
though; through the bsepa you’ll have
these anywhere in your city’s empire
and sometimes elsewhere in Skouras.
• Whatever sort of business you
have, gifts and meals will help it
along. But it’s going a little too far
when people expect to have their vices
satiated, or get rich at official posts.

Give me that old five-to

music
• The only money you entirely
trust is gold, but it’s more for saving
than for buying things. For that, you
use silver coins, or promissory notes
from a bank.
• The simplest way to run a
business is within your own family or
bsepa— there’s a tradition for it,
trustworthy workers, and financial
help. But you can have a family firm
with nonfamily employees, or work
for a large concern that has lost any
family character (though in many
ways it acts like a bsepa).
• If there’s no wine available,
you’ll consent to swig down some of
the westerners’ foul rye beer.
• Music is decaphonic and
polyrhythmic, based mostly on drums,
horns, wooden flutes, and sitars. But
there’s an undeniable charm to
country music, with its pentatonic
scale, simple rhythms, and reliance on
reeds and bagpipes.
 • If you’re sick, there are people
who will do disagreeable things to you
and charge you for it and leave you
just as sick. Better to go to a hermitage
for rest, steam and cold water baths,
and massage.
• As a citizen, you have the right
and obligation to serve in the army,
when your city is attacked or when
arrogant outside cities need to be
punished. Only a crazy person
actually likes it, but it’s got to be
done.

Barbarians and where to fi

them
• You may trade, you may farm or
fish, you may make things— it’s all
 business. If you’re not in charge, you
think you should be.
• Proper streets are paved, and the
major roads into the hinterland too.
• The people upriver— from
Miligenḍi and Papliopagimi and such
places— are not much better than
rustics or barbarians; they only feel
comfortable with despotic
governments and too much religion.
• The colonists— a term which
you apply to anyone who lives south
of the delta, even if their cities were
founded half a millennium ago — are
rough around the edges and a little too
excitable and full of themselves. The
Guṭḷeliki are the worst— proud and
vulgar.
 • The Axunemi and Jeori are
warlike, priest-ridden, and oppressed
by their ‘kings’ and ‘lords’— a fat,
idle class who are treated like gods.
• The only safe, civilized places in
the world are Skourene cities. There
are some places in them you wouldn’t
advise a stranger to go alone, of
course. Rural areas are unsafe and
depressing. Forests, mountains, and
deserts are nasty, dangerous places. If
you can’t smell the sea, it’s no place
for you.

“Can I take this road to t

city?”
“Reckon not. They already g
one”
• The ideal girl is a little pale, a
little thin, a little naive, and a little
fiery. Once married she loses the first
three qualities but makes up for it in
the last.
• The best jokes are told about the
guşourianda— the people of the
hinterland. Most are dimwits, but there
are also stories of clever guşourianda
teaching a lesson to a foolish city
slicker.
• Everyone knows that Skouras is
the richest land under the sun. Why
are things so expensive, then?
• The most important thing to
know about someone is what bsepa
they belong to.
• If you run a firm, you choose
 who will run it after you; it doesn’t
have to be one of your children, but if
it’s not, you’ll adopt them. They’ll get
the bulk of your personal wealth as
well. Land belongs to the families and
so it doesn’t change hands when
someone dies.

Mess with me and I’ll c

Grand-Uncle
• The biggest holiday of the year
is the celebration of the harvest
(Raḍḍoug); the most important is the
blessing of the spring planting
(Raḍḍinoum). At those times, and no
others, you feel great solidarity with
your rural brethren and your farmer
ancestors.
• You can name most of the
 bsepas in the delta cities and their
relation to your own, and you’re pretty
well informed about the other major
cities, too.
• If you run into trouble you
would turn first to your bsepa. If they
can’t help or you have no family, you
have to rely on the dole. The city will
give you food and a place to sleep, but
you have to wear special clothes and
do menial work, like street-cleaning.
You hope you never have to use it, or
if you do, that it won’t be long.
• There are some professions, such
as medicine, magic, architecture, and
the martial arts, that you can only
learn by apprenticing yourself to a
master. Others, like writing or the law,
are just talents which some people can
 do and others can’t.

Space and time

• It’s very rude to make an
appointment and not keep it. On the
other hand, you don’t expect to get
someone all to yourself— you join the
people hanging around with him, and
the amount of attention you get is
finely calibrated to your relative
importance.
• If you’re talking to someone,
you’re uncomfortable if you’re not
close enough to make a point by
grabbing their arm or tapping their
chest.
• You don’t haggle for cheap
things, but if it’s expensive, you make
a production out of it.
 • You can show up at a friend or
relative’s place uninvited. If they’re
really busy, though, you’ll only get a
glass of wine and some honey cakes,
not a meal.
• It’s extremely impolite to refuse
someone outright; also to boast about
your own abilities or wealth. On the
other hand, there’s no need to hide
your feelings just because of
someone’s rank.

How do you write one?

What are you doing as you write a
culture test for your culture? Making
decisions, mostly, and inventing details
that help show what it’s like to belong
to that culture. The points above are
selected to tackle a wide variety of
issues— marriage and sex, economic
life, attitudes toward the past and
foreign countries, values, religion,
government.
The idea is to make statements that are
true of 90% of the described
population. E.g. the American culture
test has “You are not a farmer”, since
farmers are a tiny percentage of the
population. “You’re a Christian”
wouldn’t quite make it, since under
80% of the population identifies as
Christian.
If you’re baffled, go point by point
through this culture test (or look at the
ones online at
http://www.zompist.com/amercult.html
and say to yourself, “Self, how would
this go in my country?” If you’re not
sure, go on to the next point. Or write
something tentative and go back to it
later.
You don’t have to make every point a
major difference from your own
culture, or the Standard Fantasy
Culture— but think of every point as
an opportunity to do so, or at least to
look at things from different eyes.
Reading the tests can help you realize
just how variable cultures are—
attitudes we’ve always taken as
universal turn out to be much more
parochial. And writing them is a good
first step in bringing a world alive, and
learning to speak for the natives.
Monoculture
It takes work to devise a culture, so it’s
understandable that many creators stop
at one. This is especially evident in s.f.,
where most alien races and human
colonies have precisely one civilization
per planet... sometimes just one
climate per planet, too.
On our own planet, culture is fractal—
there’s variation at every level. There
are major civilizations: European,
Islamic, Indian, Chinese, African,
Andean, Mesoamerican. Each of these
is divided into ethnic groups and
religions. The ethnic groups are
divided into provinces, the religions
into sects. Your province or state is far
from uniform; your city is divided into
neighborhoods each with its own
character; even a small school is
divided into factions and cliques.
Graham Robb’s The Discovery of
France is an eye-opening exploration
of just how diverse a premodern nation
is.
How do you simulate this without
working out a thousand cultures in full
detail? By incorporating diversity as
you design any culture.
• When considering aspects
of culture— or biology— you
should sometimes answer “all of
the above”. Whether it’s
hairstyle or form of government
or number of gods worshipped,
 this produces areas where
variation is to be expected.
• Ask yourself where
disagreements occur. What are
the controversies in your society?
What do people fight about?
(This is valuable for storytelling
too: people talk about their
disagreements far more than their
common values.)
When creating culture tests,
we look for things 90% of the
population would agree on.
Creating controversies, look for
things 40-60% of the population
believes. If just 10% believe
something, they’re likely to be
persecuted dissidents.
• Outline some subcultures.
Even within one nation, there
will be groups isolated or
organized enough to have their
own distinctive mores and
values. E.g.:
° Immigrants. Make sure
you have a story on why they
got there... are they
conquerors, traders, refugees,
job-seekers, former slaves, or
mercenaries?
° Remnants of an earlier
population— like the Celts in
Roman Gaul, the Indians in
the US, the Ainu in Japan.
° Religious minorities,
 like the Jews in Europe, the
Muslims (Huí) in China, the
Zoroastrians in India.
° Certain professions,
especially despised ones like
grave-diggers and thieves,
might band together,
providing the support system
they are denied by larger
society.
It’s worth considering why
these groups don’t assimilate.
This is less of an issue in
premodern societies, where
communities could easily keep to
their own neighborhoods under
their own laws, using their own
language. But reasons will vary:
 a despised minority may be kept
at bay by the larger society; a
conquering minority wishes to
maintain its monopoly on power;
a community of traders needs to
foster its relationship to the
outside world; a religious sect
has divine orders not to mix with
the world.
• Diversity may be
chronological. If there’s been a
major change— e.g. a foreign
conquest, the overthrow of a
king, evidence against the
prevailing religion— there will
be factions that liked the old
situation and are threatened by
the new. Almost any change can
 be opposed by somebody...
electric lights were surely
despised by the gaslight industry.
Try to get beyond single-adjective
cultures: e.g. “warlike”,
“commercial”, “spiritual”. It’s a good
place to start, but no culture is uniform.
The medieval aristocracy, for instance,
was as “warlike” as any Klingon, but
knights and lords were also obsessed
with courtly love, beautiful art and
clothes, and often religion. Some liked
fighting for its own sake, some
undertook war out of duty, some
avoided it. And a civilization needs
more than one skill to survive; the
most successful empires also have a
genius for administration, urban life,
agriculture, and engineering.

Rulers
It’s all about power. Who’s on top, and
what can they do to whoever’s on the
bottom? Any establishment will have a
self-myth where the people on top
deserve to be there— but, well, they
would, wouldn’t they? Things may
look very different from the bottom.
Take Jeff Alexander and Tom Bissell’s
hilarious piece from McSweeney’s,
imagining Howard Zinn and Noam
Chomsky watching The Lord of the
Rings:
ZINN: Well, you know, it would
be manifestly difficult to believe
 in magic rings unless everyone
was high on pipe-weed. So it is in
Gandalf’s interest to keep Middle
Earth hooked.
CHOMSKY: How do you think
these wizards build gigantic
towers and mighty fortresses?
Where do they get the money?
Keep in mind that I do not
especially regard anyone,
Saruman included, as an agent
for progressivism. But obviously
the pipe-weed operation that
exists is the dominant influence
in Middle Earth. It’s not some
ludicrous magic ring.
There’s an underlying optimism to
most s.f. and fantasy. We like the
occasional horror story, but we rarely
read an entire novel where the Evil
Overlord wins, or where technology
ends up destroying us all.
In history, however, the overlords do
often win. And after they do, they’re
the ones who hire the scholars or
troubadors and control the theologians,
so their version of events is what
comes down to us as history and even
as the judgment of the gods. (We never
hear the Carthaginian side of the
Rome-Carthage wars.)
That’s not to say that negative opinions
are suppressed. When the overlords
die, historians can be more honest—
especially if it’s convenient to their
successors. As well, what we consider
damning evidence was often no big
deal, and thus appears in the historical
record because no one bothered to
censor it.
There are limits to power, as well.
There are always ambitious men who
see a better ruler whenever they pass a
mirror. The peasants can always rebel.
And though the cruelty of ancient
rulers is striking, if rulers went too far
they made too many enemies, and
usually met a bad end.
So let’s take a look at rulers and what
they do.

Choosing rulers
One way of classifying governments is
by whether authority ultimately rests
with an individual, a small group, or a
wide base of society. The key word
here is “ultimately”: obviously power
can be shared, and monarchies can be
weakened or watered down to share
aspects of the other systems.

Autarchies
These are realms principally ruled by
one person, though they vary in how
absolute the ruler’s power is, and in
how the ruler is chosen.
• The ruler may be selected
by the leading clans, or nobles, or
even a wider collection of
stakeholders (e.g. the College of
 Cardinals). The advantage is that
you get the best guy; the
disadvantage is that the losing
candidates may beg to differ.
Arguably the golden age of
the Roman Empire was the 2C,
when emperors hand-picked a
competent successor. Marcus
Aurelius blew it by choosing his
idiot son.
• Rule may be hereditary,
which avoids contention, at the
cost of having a large number of
incompetents in charge.
Primogeniture isn’t always
the rule; sometimes the previous
monarch chooses; sometimes the
 royal family makes the choice. In
royal Uganda the chiefs chose a
new king from the old one’s sons.
• A general or warlord may
take over. From the 200s on, this
was essentially the Roman
system: a general would be
acclaimed by his troops as
emperor. Legions closer to the
capital had an advantage; on the
other hand troops on the frontiers
were more experienced. Rome’s
history is not a good
advertisement for this system,
which led to inflated soldier
salaries, near-constant civil war,
devastated civilian populations,
and declining military
 preparedness. Post-colonial
Africa has suffered from more
than its fair share of these bully
boys as well.
• Rulers may emerge from a
ideological movement: John
Calvin’s theocracy in Geneva;
the Supreme Leaders of the
Islamic Republic of Iran; the
General Secretaries of
communist regimes.
• The term dictator comes
from an earlier stage of Roman
history, in which rather than the
two consuls normally appointed
by the senate, a single ruler was
named to deal with an
emergency.
• Democracy was once
distrusted by political scientists
because it had a tendency to
produce tyrants— much of the
Federalist Papers is an argument
on why it wouldn’t happen this
time. Hitler received a plurality
of votes in an election, then used
all the power of the government
to stack a new election which he
‘won’ and used as a mandate for
seizing absolute power. Napoléon
became emperor out of the chaos
of the French Republic.
• Some writers (e.g. G.K.
Chesterton in The Napoleon of
Notting Hill) have suggested that
choosing a ruler randomly would
 produce as good or better results
than any of the above methods.

Oligarchies
These are ruled by a group— wider
than an individual, pointedly much
smaller than the general population.
The group may be defined in various
ways:
• the leaders of clans or
tribes
• the nobles as a group
• the top merchants in a
town; this is the natural
government for city-states
• a military class, such as
the Janissaries
 • pirates, bandits, or mafiosi
• a separate species
The ruling group may or may not be
defined as a formal council or
legislature. In some of the above cases
there may be a monarch, but one with
severely limited power.

Democracies
By this I mean states that are ruled by a
relatively large subpopulation—
thousands or even millions rather than
dozens or hundreds. (No state is run by
“the people” as a whole; children, at
least, are always excluded, and often
other large groups.)
There may be a property requirement,
as in ancient Athens. In England before
the 1832 Reform Bill, just one in eight
Englishmen could vote. This made the
British elitist and conservative in our
view, frightening populists by
continental standards.
Hunter-gatherers require little
government, often resisting anyone
who tries to set themselves up as an
autarch; they may thus be classified
here.

The standard class

Another way of grasping the values and
power roles of a society is to identify
the standard class— the group whose
interests are assumed to be those of the
nation as a whole. This is usually
broader than the ruling class; we might
say that these are the people the ruling
class had better not offend. Examples:
• In Ancient Greece, the
citizens— that is those who held
property, voted in the assembly,
and had the right and duty to
serve in the army.
• In the Roman Republic,
the knightly and senatorial class;
in the Empire, the army.
• In medieval Europe, the
noble class, including knights
and churchmen. (The urban
burghers were important because
their money was needed to
finance wars, but they were
 unable to translate this into more
than transitory political power.)
• In imperial China, the
scholars, those who had passed
the civil service examinations.
• In Tibet from the 1600s,
the monks— up to one third of
the male population; the country
was ruled by their leader, the
Dalai Lama.
• In modern America, the
businessman. “What’s good for
GM is good for America,” as the
president of General Motors said
in the 1950s.
• In Xurno, one of the
nations of Almea, it’s the artists,
 who took control during a
revolution.
• In communist countries, in
theory the “workers”, in practice
the Party.
The standard class may be evident
from a glance at a typical city: what are
the largest buildings? In the medieval
city it’d be the local lord’s castle and
the cathedral; in an American city, the
headquarters of corporations.

What do governments do?

This may seem obvious— just look at
existing governments. But the
activities of government were often
much more restricted in premodern
states— even as their pretensions were
higher. Adam Smith considered the
idea of a general sales tax completely
impossible.

Absolute power
In some cases the answer is Whatever
the sovereign wants. The early Roman
Emperors are an example; when a
nutter like Nero or Elagabalus donned
the purple, there was no institutional
bound on their power; they could only
be removed by coup d’état.
Some extracts from A.A.
Goldenweiser’s description of the
Baganda monarchy give the flavor of
absolute rule:
[The King] ate alone, served by
one of his wives, who, however,
was not permitted to see him
while he was engaged in eating.
“The Lion eats alone,” said the
people. If any one happened to
come in and overtake the King in
the process of eating, he was
promptly speared to death by the
latter, and the people said: “The
Lion when eating killed so and
so.”...
All the land belonged to the
King, excepting only the freehold
estates of the gentes, over which
the King had no direct control.
Contributions to the state in taxes
and labor were, however,
expected from these estates. The
king had the right to depose a
chief at will....
The king was expected to visit
the temple of his predecessor,
which was in charge of the
dowager queen. When about to
leave, the king would suddenly
give an order that all persons who
had not passed a certain spot
arbitrarily named by him, should
be seized. This order was at once
carried out by his bodyguard, and
the persons seized were bound
and gagged. Then they were
sacrificed to the ghost of the dead
king.
As society becomes more complex, and
as rulers show their fallibility, such
systems become hard to sustain.
Tyrants become targets; weak or very
young rulers tempt regents or generals
to take power. A council of nobles, the
bureaucracy, or even the palace
eunuchs may become important
counterweights.
Custom may make it harder for the
sovereign to do as he likes. The
officials of imperial China would
remonstrate with decrees they
disagreed with; though he might take
action against them, he couldn’t do
without them. The officials were all
trained in the ancient classics, which
had much to say about the character of
the ideal monarch.
Not infrequently an important official
becomes the real ruler, keeping the
monarch only as a puppet. The
Frankish Mayors of the Palace were
examples, till Pépin took the throne for
himself. Another is the shoguns of
Japan, who didn’t even bother to rule
from the city the emperor lived in.

Death
Perhaps the basic governmental power
is to wage war. Sometimes a monarch
only has significant power in wartime.
It takes a good deal of organization to
maintain a large standing army, at least
for a non-nomadic states. Huge
empires such as Rome and China might
have several hundred thousand soldiers
on hand, but only during periods of
strength; yet both had to hire barbarian
auxiliaries to meet foreign threats.
Civil war and barbarian invasions
sapped the strength of the western
empire; perhaps more importantly,
foederatii, barbarians settled within the
boundaries of the empire, removed
those regions from the tax base. A
mark of the decline in military
readiness is given by the size of the
army Justinian of the Eastern Empire
sent to reconquer Carthage and Italy:
less than 15,000 men. More than a
thousand years later, Europe had not
much advanced: in the 1630s Gustavus
Adolphus of Sweden was able to cut a
large swath through Germany with an
expeditionary force of just 20,000 men.
The benefits of keeping the peace over
a large area are great. Or to put it
another way, the alternative is that
economic life is sapped by the local
warlords or bandits, or by fear of the
next city-state over.

Taxes
The other universal power of
government is to maintain the elite in
sumptuous style. To modern eyes this
may look like nothing but stealing
resources from the producers, but in
older times taxation was considered the
obvious prerogative of those who
owned the land. As late as the 19C, a
rich man who had earned his wealth
was considered something of an
upstart; gentlemen collected rent.
Taxation in kind can be used to
stockpile against famine, a practice
noted in the Old Testament.
To regulate taxation, the state may
undertake censuses, draw maps, and
maintain archives of land ownership
and boundaries. (As a corollary, one of
the first priorities of a peasant
rebellion was to burn the local tax
records.)
It’s hard to cite typical levels of
taxation, because taxes were constantly
changing. The ruler’s boundless needs
drove him to devise new taxes; but this
was offset by the fact that one of his
most effective rewards was exemption
from taxation. Poor recordkeeping and
corruption made state revenues
unpredictable.
As a data point, in Táng China, free
peasants owed 3% of the harvest for
each adult male in the family, plus a
length of linen or silk for each woman;
men also owed three months a year of
labor.

Public works
Often only the state has the resources
for large-scale works: irrigation or
transport canals, aqueducts, paved
roads, sewers, forts, city walls, mines.
Some governments provided temples,
arenas, theaters, schools, libraries and
scriptoria, observatories, public baths,
fountains and parks, mills, shipyards.
Of course, they also constructed
palaces for the comfort of the rulers
and for official business.

The economy
In some early kingdoms, such as Egypt,
any economic activity above the level
of a single farm or workshop was
organized by the state— everything
from mining to metallurgy to issuing
money to lumber extraction to
armaments to shipbuilding to salt
panning.
The Anatolians of about 600 B.C.,
followed quickly by the Greeks, are
considered the pioneers of market
economies, and the inventors of
coinage. In these states many economic
functions were taken over by private
parties, though the state was likely to
keep a hand in. Much of Adam Smith’s
The Wealth of Nations (1776) is spent
arguing against the idea that the state
should closely regulate trade so as to
benefit its own producers and
manufacturers.
States may organize transportation and
communications networks. The
Romans are famous for their roads, the
Chinese for their canals (the empire
preferred these to trade by the open
ocean, which was much harder to
protect and regulate). The original
couriers unfazed by “rain, nor sleet, nor
gloom of night” were messengers of
the Persian empire. The Incas, lacking
pack animals, maintained a corps of
fast runners.
People have long recognized that some
industries are noxious or destructive;
these might be limited by the state, or
restricted to certain areas. As
mentioned, the Athenian Solon
proposed to prohibit farming practices
that fostered deforestation.

Religion
Few premodern states were entirely
untangled with religion. On the other
hand, not all belief systems are
centered around temples and
priesthoods, and some have no
organization above the level of a local
cleric. We’ll get back to this in the
chapter on religion.

Culture
The state may or may not intrude in
personal morality or marriage.
Marriage might be regulated instead by
families, ethnic communities, or
clerics.
Public education is a relatively new
development, though Hàn China had
schools to prepare students for the civil
service exams. Schools were mostly
private affairs, or run by religious
groups.
A relatively modern concern is the
codification of an official language,
such as the Accademia della Crusca for
Italian, founded in 1582.
In a fantasy culture, an area to explore
is the relationship between government
and magic, which would surely be as
complicated as that between rulers and
religion.

Future functions
Future societies will vary greatly in the
specifics, but some general principles
may be useful. Governments are likely
to be necessary, or impose themselves,
in certain areas:
• Projects too big for
 individuals or groups—
terraforming, building
ringworlds, establishing
hyperspace waypoints.
• Managing externalities,
i.e. effects of private activity
with no direct price, thus not
addressed by the feedback
mechanism provided by the
market. Almost any s.f.
technology could generate social
or environmental headaches. The
mother of all externalities is life
support on a space habitat; “do as
thou wilt” doesn’t work when
malice or accident can destroy
the whole ship.
• Arbitration between
 competing actors, a function that
becomes more important as
society becomes more complex.
Imagine the legal system of a
state consisting of predators from
a gas giant and herbivores from a
terrestrial one.
It’s easy to imagine governments
becoming more intrusive: spybots
could monitor everyone; songs might
monitor who listens to them, weapons
who fires them and who they’re fired
at, cars what damage they cause. Or
perhaps corporations assume this
power— or parents, or schools, or
religions.
On the other hand, the same power
could be used to increase citizen
involvement (crowdsource the
legislature!) or to reduce externalities
(e.g. if individual pallets can be
tracked, perhaps pollutants can be too).

Law
The idea of law has many sources:
monarchical decrees; morals preached
by the priests; custom; bureaucratic
precedent; rights granted to favored
nobles or demanded by obstreperous
ones; rules proclaimed by the founder
of a dynasty. Law need not be universal
— often it applies very differently to
different classes, and it may never be
fully applied to the king.
There isn’t always a court system—
laws may be enforced directly by the
monarch or by the bureaucracy. If there
are courts, private advocates may or
may not be tolerated.
The sovereign generally enforces a
level— perhaps a low one— of public
order. This is easiest to do in the cities,
which are the safest regions in
premodern societies: rural areas are
easily terrorized by gangs, and only a
strong state can prevent this. Bandits
on the road didn’t come in ones or
twos, but in swarms a few dozen
strong; when they were strong, traders
or pilgrims had to travel in caravans.

Custom and non-state law

This vague term covers “how we
always do things”, and it can be an
obstacle even to absolute rulers. The
Ugandan kings described above (p.
131) were given enormous power by
custom, but were also bound by
traditional rules.
Laws aren’t always enforced by the
state; guilds, clans, or temples may
take this role instead. In areas run by
gangs, gang leaders enjoy taking a
judicial role— everyone likes to
consider themselves as benefactors.

Babylonian law
The Code of Hammurabi, dated to 1790
B.C., shows a fairly sophisticated legal
system. Cases were decided in courts
by judges, who would interrogate the
parties to the case and witnesses; there
are no mentions of lawyers. There are
punishments for false accusations, and
an insistence on proof and evidence
(e.g. adultery could only be proved by
catching the participants in the act).
One law refers to a trial by ordeal:
2. If any one bring an accusation
against a man, and the accused go
to the river and leap into the
river, if he sink in the river his
accuser shall take possession of
his house. But if the river prove
that the accused is not guilty, and
he escape unhurt, then he who
had brought the accusation shall
be put to death, while he who
leaped into the river shall take
 possession of the house that had
belonged to his accuser.
It seems that the canny criminal would
make sure he learns how to swim. But
this is the only such law; everything
else relies on evidence, witnesses, and
oaths. Medieval European law was a lot
worse.
The law is often remembered for its
“eye for an eye” severity; but quite a
few severe infractions are simply
payable by fine, especially if
committed against the lower classes.
Women have substantial rights, and
freedmen and slaves have certain
protections. Some laws precisely
quantify the worth of the various
classes; e.g. if a man strikes a pregnant
woman and causes a miscarriage, the
fine varies by her class: 10 shekels for
a free-born woman, 5 for a
freedwoman, and 2 for a maidservant.
Intent was taken into account; some
penalties could be reduced if the
accused swore that the damage was
unintentional.
Topics include theft, the treatment of
slaves (including penalties for
runaways and those harboring them),
merchants and their agents, the
maintenance of irrigation works,
required military service, sexual
crimes (adultery, rape, incest), divorce,
dowries, inheritance, adoptions, and
violence between citizens. Certain
prices are set (e.g. hiring a ferryboat
costs 3 gerahs a day), and penalties are
set out for malfeasance by physicians,
wet-nurses, veterinaries, builders,
shipbuilders, tenant farmers and
herdsmen.

Roman law
Roman law was codified around 450
BC in the Twelve Tables ; it mostly
addressed private or civil law:
marriage, succession, wills, property,
the power of the paterfamilias. It was
supplemented by creative
interpretation as well as by new laws
issued by the Senate or the plebeian
assemblies.
A lawsuit was brought to a magistrate,
one of the higher republican officials,
who would conduct a preliminary
investigation. If he found the case had
merit, it would be assigned to a judge,
a private citizen agreeable to both
parties. The magistrate could issue
instructions to the judge, in effect
another source of law. In the provinces,
however, cases were heard by imperial
judges.
From the -3C a new profession
emerged, the jurisconsult— one who
gave advice on matters of law. These
were men of high rank, acting out of
civic duty— their services were free.
Their opinions were highly
authoritative, not least because
magistrates were politicians, not
jurists. They did not plead cases
themselves, and looked down on the
advocati who did— essentially
professional orators.
There were oddities by modern
standards. As Paul Veyne recounts, a
large landowner might invade a smaller
estate with an army of slaves. The
wronged estate owner could sue— but
it was his obligation, not the state’s, to
seize the defendant and bring him to
court, generally impossible unless one
had powerful friends.
The emperors gradually acquired a
monopoly on legislation, and also had
the right to dictate how a court should
rule— though they generally followed
precedent.
Justinian codified the entirety of
Roman law, incorporating Greek and
Christian ideas. His Corpus Iuris (534)
consists of four books forming a
general survey, 12 books of law proper,
and 50 books of excerpts from the
classical juriconsults— intended to
entirely supersede them. These 66
books suggest the elaboration of
Roman law in the millennium since the
Twelve Tables.

Chinese law
Different Chinese traditions have very
different attitudes toward the law.
• The Legalists believed that
humans were inherently evil and
 must be controlled with explicit
laws (fǎ) and harsh punishments.
They underlined state power and
disdained tradition. They were
strongly favored by the first
emperor, Shi Huangdi— but he
was widely regarded as a despot,
discrediting Legalism.
• The Daoists valued
individual liberty and minimal
government— the Dào Dé Jīng
advises non-action: “When the
Master governs, the people are
hardly aware that he exists.” It’s
a spiritual treasure but not much
of a legal system.
• The Confucians didn’t
trust law so much as ritual (lǐ),
 not just ceremony but the whole
ordering of society— inferiors
being deferential, superiors being
compassionate. The good
example of the Emperor was key.
Law was not transcendent; it was
purely a tool of government. Its only
source was the emperor’s command;
imperial China never developed any
tradition of consultative assemblies.
The emperor relied on the scholar-
officials to draft laws and
correspondence, though he was always
free to change them.
The local magistrates, also products of
the civil service exams, tried and
decided cases; there was no profession
of jurists. They had no time for small
disputes, and civil disputes could only
be heard if framed as criminal
complaints. Under these conditions the
peasants resorted to the arbitration of
community and clan leaders instead.
Cities did not have any separate legal
status— unlike in Europe, where the
bourgeois, literally the town dwellers,
gained freedom from feudal lords and
were granted self-government.
Under the Táng, punishments for
grievious crimes might apply to the
extended family as well. On the other
hand emperors were given to issuing
blanket pardons, so if you weren’t
actually killed your sentence might be
lifted after a few years.
Economy
The economy is, basically, work—
what we do to support ourselves.
In primitive societies, everyone does
the same work— hunting, fishing,
gathering, herding, farming— though
there may be sex or age specializations.
Even the chief or king lives pretty
much like everyone else. Though it
accounts for most of the species’
history, we hardly think of this as an
economy; it’s merely a lifestyle.
Economies kick in once you have
specialization and scarcity. No longer
is everyone doing the same thing; there
must therefore be mechanisms to share
the wealth... probably unequally.
Fantasy writers generally either copy
the modern American or medieval
English system... doesn’t every town
have a market and use coins? But these
things were once innovations.
It’s all too easy to introduce a major
distortion into the picture and not take
account of its economic effects. The
standard D&D world has an
astonishing amount of currency tied
down in dungeons, mined only by
adventurers... why don’t the kings, a
class habitually short on cash, send in
the army? For that matter how can the
mountains of Middle Earth support an
army of orcs far greater than that
wielded by human agricultural
societies?
Types of economies
The first level of intensification of
production is redistribution. We
might say that these are proto-states so
primitive that they haven’t learned how
to oppress. A “big man” or a chief
encourages the people to produce more
than they usually would; the excess is
then consumed or given away in
enormous feasts, leaving the Big Man
with nothing but prestige and the need
to do it all again.
These feasts serve to increase
production without central control,
creating a buffer for hard times and
redistributing goods from fortunate to
less fortunate areas. If you’ve had a
good year, you share; if not, you
benefit from the success of those who
did.
Once a ruling class has developed, we
find command economies, where
large-scale production is organized by
the state. In its most extreme form, all
production is centrally organized;
luxury goods are a perk of state; key
resources are state monopolies, perhaps
collected by state-run expeditions;
trade is negotiated with other rulers.
The prototypical example is ancient
Egypt. In our time communism
reverted to a command economy as a
radical reaction against capitalism.
The Mesopotamians had a class of
merchants, and their trading
expeditions might be financed by
private investors as well as by the
temples and the state. Without coins, it
was necessary to come up with a
package of goods that could be
bartered; e.g. a -19C Akkadian
expedition invested 2 minas of silver to
purchase 5 gur of oil and 30 garments,
traded in Bahrain for 4 minas of
copper.
The market economy was pioneered
by the Lydians of Anatolia and the
Greeks starting in the -7C, when
markets and coins first appear in the
archeological record. Markets allow
goods to be distributed efficiently,
without armies of bureaucrats, and
allow a looser social system. They also
adapt quickly to change, from new
technologies to natural disasters,
without anyone having to make explicit
decisions.
Nonetheless the state was always a
major economic actor. Romans might
grow rich and gift their towns with a
public building; but only the Roman
state could build those enormous
aqueducts, roads, and mill complexes.
States often maintained a monopoly on
important goods— e.g. half the Táng
state’s income derived from its
monopoly on salt.
Imperial China constructed networks of
canals, including the Grand Canal
which allowed the south’s agricultural
surplus to be shipped to Beijing... this
despite the fact that the country
bordered an ocean. The empire
preferred to focus trade on the canal,
which was safer and easier to control.
Anglo-American culture is mercantile;
we admire the man who buys low and
sells high. This attitude was generally
not shared in early societies. Warriors,
priests, and scholars were likely to
have higher prestige than merchants,
and there was often distrust or disdain
for people who merely carted
merchandise around for a profit,
seemingly adding no value. A medieval
mystic, Gerard Groote, declared that
“Labor is holy, but business is
dangerous.”
As late as 1776, Adam Smith declared
that only the landowners could be
trusted to increase the nation’s
prosperity; merchants and
manufacturers were too apt to create
cartels and artificial restraints on trade.
Trading may be closely tied to raiding
— the Vikings, for instance, would
seize goods by force if they could, and
trade only if the locals seemed able to
defend themselves. A mercantile nation
may handle trade between third parties,
and form a neighborhood in every port,
sometimes resented by the less
commercially gifted locals.
Trading posts easily become colonies
and then imperial enclaves, whether
Philistines in North Africa, Greeks all
over the Mediterranean, Arabs in East
Africa, the British in India, the
Portuguese and then the Dutch in
Indonesia.

Travel
A key characteristic of premodern
societies is slow transportation.
• Human walking speed is
about 5 km/h or 3 mph. The
winner of the 40 km marathon at
the 1896 Olympics took just
under 3 hours, probably a good
approximation of the maximum
long-distance speed before
modern training; this amounts to
13.3 km/h or 8.3 mph.
Neither pace can be
 sustained all day, of course. A
large army, marching 8 to 10
hours a day, might count on
making 30 km or 20 miles a day
— but a half or a quarter of that
if they were foraging (i.e.
plundering the areas passed
through to support themselves).
The Incas organized
runners (chaskikuna) in a relay
system, allowing messages to
travel at 250 km / 160 miles per
day. Quite impressive, but a
message from one end of the
empire to the center would still
take 12 days.
• Horses can gallop at 40-48
km/h (25 to 30 mph), but not for
 more than a couple miles. But
again a relay system helps. The
Pony Express averaged just 9
mph. In 1808 a noble rode across
Scotland at an average rate of 15
mph. The ancient Persian
messengers, the ones undeterred
by rain and sleet and dark of
night, could get a message across
the empire at 300 km (190 miles)
per day.
This heady clip of course
doesn’t apply to cargo transport.
Merchants plied the same Persian
route at about 30 km (18 miles) a
day.
• Camels walk at 3 mph,
though they can briefly gallop at
 12 mph. A camel caravan
traveled 25 miles a day. Oxen
travel at 2 mph.
• Tanks can travel at 70
km/h (43 mph) on good roads.
The speed of a blitzkrieg was 30
to 50 miles per day.
• Sailing ships can’t travel
as fast as a horse, but can go all
day and night. But more
importantly, they’re compact and
safe. A small sailing ship can
carry 60 tons of cargo, which
would take at least 20 horses to
haul; even this comparison is
misleading as such an expedition
would need a beefy security force
and food for them and the horses.
 In a premodern state, most long-
distance trading was thus done by
water— the waterways were its
transportation system.
Steamships can travel
faster than sailing ships, but
require a network of coaling
stations. The worldwide British
Empire had plenty of these but
the U.S. did not, so U.S.
oceangoing ships depended on
sail throughout the 19C.
Some average speeds and
cargo capacity for ships, given in
knots (1.8 km/h; 1.1 mph):
tons kn
Trireme not under sail
36 6
(-5C)
Caravel (15C explorer) 60 4
Carrack (16C cargo) 300 4
East Indiaman (17C cargo)
600+ 4-5
Clipper (19C) 800 16
First steamship (19C) 3000 11
Steamship c. 1900 22
Steamship c. 1950 35
Aircraft carrier (WWII) 21,000 14
Modern oil tanker 500,000 15
Nuclear submarine 350 20

One economic consequence of all this

is simply hassle— the logistics of
communications and travel made long-
distance trade difficult. In well-
organized states that maintained good
roads and kept bandits in check, staples
like grain and farm animals could be
exchanged; in troubled times these
could only be traded locally, and only
compact, high-value items were traded
long-distance.
Another is that prices and economic
conditions could vary wildly by region.
The price of wheat, or the ratio of gold
to silver, was quite different in
different countries.

Enterprises
How are large enterprises financed and
run? And who can you really trust to do
them?
The state has been a major economic
actor since the Sumerians: securing
resources, running factories, trading
with other nations. Many of the things
it does for its own use—building roads,
protecting against bandits and
invasions, running a postal service and
a court system— may be extended to
private actors as well. It’s a relatively
late development for the state to do
things for the benefit of private
enterprise, such as granting patents.
The state has already solved the
problem of getting people to do what it
wants. For everyone else, the problem
is trust: are you going to hand your
money or projects over to complete
strangers in a city three months’ travel
away?
Local resources can be combined in
interesting ways:
• A group of people can
contribute a certain sum each
month, distributed as a sum to
one member, who uses the capital
to start a business. This method
is used today within immigrant
communities who aren’t likely to
get a traditional loan.
• You can simply hang out
in a central location with people
in your line of work. The
insurance giant Lloyd’s of
London started out in 1688 in
Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse,
where sailors, merchants, and
ship owners met.
There are other ways to facilitate long-
distance projects:
• A family can operate as a
business; the early German and
Italian banks ran this way. You
can trust even remote family
members better than strangers.
• Temples or religious
orders may directly engage in
trade, facilitate money transfers,
or help travelers. Medieval
monasteries were often industrial
operations, as well as careful
landlords with an interest in
long-term development of their
property.
• An ethnic or religious
 minority may trust one another
more than strangers. In many
areas of the world some
displaced minority took on most
local commerce— e.g. Indians in
East Africa, Chinese in Southeast
Asia.
The corporation per se, which brings
together unrelated strangers and treats
them as a legal entity, depends on
many tools and conveniences:
insurance, banks, a strong court
system, an educated work force, a
culture that discourages corruption. But
above all it requires fast
communications; it’s no coincidence
that the golden age of the corporation
came soon after the invention of the
telegraph.
Once you have a banking system, banks
can create money. E.g. if Roger
deposits $1000 in the bank, he probably
doesn’t need the money right away; the
bank can lend it out to Ann. Ann
spends half of it but deposits $500 in
her own bank account. The bank
happily lends that out to Múr. The
money has more than doubled: Roger
still has $1000 in the bank, Ann has
$500 in the bank and $500 in goods,
and Múr has $500 in hand.
The bank is in trouble if everyone
wants their cash all at once (a bank
run); but this can be avoided by setting
a reserve requirement. The process is
rather disturbing to those who want to
think of money as a commodity, but
it’s the foundation of the immense
investment power of modern
economies.
Advances in finance as as important as
those in technology. Britain’s rise as a
naval power, for instance, was financed
by the Bank of England, and the
railroad boom in the US was largely
financed by British investors.

Scarcity
Without scarcity, there’s no trade and
really no economy. It worked for a
couple million years for our hunter-
gatherer ancestors, but since then,
there’s been goods that not everyone
can have.
This is hard to miss in a premodern
society, as many goods are produced
only in particular areas: fish in the sea;
horses in the steppe; furs in the forest;
gems and metals in the mountains.
Each crop has its best growing area—
e.g. rice needs waterlogged paddies,
olives and oranges need a warm
climate.
A new invention may suddenly change
the fortunes of its supply region—
when bronze was first used, for
instance, tin became a key resource.
The growing use of gunpowder made
the saltpeter deposits of the Atacama
desert valuable.
Manufactured goods depend on
expertise and a network of suppliers,
which may at first exist only in
particular areas. Silk was once
restricted to East Asia; wootz iron to
India; fine woolens to England.
Certain jobs, such as trading, software,
and moviemaking, are scaleable: sales
can be multiplied independently of the
work itself. It takes the same effort to
trade a hundred shares as a million; it’s
no harder to write a bestseller than a
niche book. Compare jobs like farming,
barbering, or dentistry, where more
customers means more work.
As Nassim Taleb points out in The
Black Swan, technology moves jobs
into the scaleable category. No matter
how fabulous he was, a premodern
musician could only satisfy a few
hundred people in one town. Today he
can sell millions of CDs, putting many
local musicians out of work. The
rewards in scaleable jobs are lopsided.
I emphasize this mostly for s.f. writers,
who sometimes like to create utopian
communities where everyone has
access to everything. Iain Banks
creates something like the ultimate
consumer paradise in his Culture
novels, largely by inventing an infinite
energy source, ‘gridfire’. But this
doesn’t address the inequalities
produced by scaleable jobs. E.g. one of
his characters designs space habitats
for a living— as each one can house
millions of people, few people can
aspire to such a job.
If you’re not so utopian, make sure you
think about what goods are scarce, who
controls them, and what happens when
people can’t get at them. We can live
without silk clothes; it’d be more dire
if someone got a monopoly on a space
habitat’s oxygen supply.

Money and prices

There may be a bewildering variety of
coins in use; in Shakespeare’s time, for
instance, there was the pound, the
angel, the noble, the crown, the
shilling, the sixpence, the groat, the
half-groat, and the penny. We might
have a similar list, of course, if we had
no paper money.
Note that the relative value of gold,
silver, and other metals is not fixed,
but varies according to their supply;
and that coins may circulate outside
their country of origin. (The American
currency is called the dollar because of
the prevalence of the Spanish dollar at
the time of independence.)
Here’s a table of prices in
Shakespeare’s time (from an edition of
the Major Plays edited by G.B.
Harrison, 1948, as well as Daily life in
Elizabethan England by Jeffrey L.
Singman, 1995). As few readers are
likely adept at handling
pounds/shillings/pence in their heads,
I’ve stated all prices in terms of pence
only.
The vertiginous scale of class
differences should be apparent; also the
relative expensiveness of food and
drink for urban laborers.
Wages
nobleman, income per d
skilled worker, without food and per d
drink
skilled worker, food and drink per d
supplied
boy per d
captain (of 200 men) per d
sergeant per d
common soldier per d
payment for a play

Food and drink

beer, good quality quart
butter poun
cheese poun
eggs dozen
beef, good quality poun
chicken whol
tallow candles poun
pepper poun
wine quart
tobacco ounce

Travel
meal at an inn
bed at an inn
horse, hiring per d
coach, hiring per d
Clothing
tailored suit
satin doublet (fitted jacket)
canvas doublet, officer’s
woman’s gown
woman’s working dress
shoes
white silk hose
satin cloth per y

Goods
soldier’s sword and dagger
soldier’s helmet
sackbut (a musical instrument)
knife
spectacles
Bible

horse
bed
theater admission

More data points, courtesy of Adam

Smith: in 1776, the wages for a
common laborer in London were 18
pence a day; in Edinburgh, 10 p, and in
rural areas, just 8. Rising productivity,
centering in the cities, was beginning
to raise the standard of living— even
more so than the wage figures indicate,
as the price of food and clothing was
lower than in Shakespeare’s time.
Future economies
I’ll happily make predictions about war
or religion, but predictions about future
economies are the one thing likely to
make me look ridiculous in five
hundred years. The nature of the
modern economy would be
incomprehensible to a man of the year
1500; Adam Smith with his long
disquisitions on wheat prices,
agricultural rents, and tariffs looks
quaintly out of date.
Capitalism keeps inventing new goods
and new markets. This is how it defeats
Malthus— we live in a bubble where
new ideas increase productivity faster
than we can reproduce. It’s also why
you can never just extrapolate current
trends— e.g. predict that the economy
will simply collapse when the oil runs
out. Not to make light of the
adjustment needed, but when it does
run out, the economy will look
different. A late 19C observer might
have predicted that cities would soon
be covered in horse manure to their
rooftops.
The previous revolution occupies a
smaller and smaller slice of the
economy. Agriculture is now less than
½% of the US economy; and
manufacturing is about 12%. The
service sector now predominates, at
80%. Whatever replaces it will start as
a fringe activity, grow to encompass a
huge fraction of GDP, and then shrink
in turn as it’s outmoded.
The products of capitalism get more
and more complicated: reinsurance,
derivatives, iPod covers, bagel slicers,
virtual world memberships, virus
checkers, low-sodium organic soy
sauce. I imagine half the economic
transactions from the year 2500 would
require a lengthy explanation before we
even understand what they are.
Over the last three centuries, the
overall trend has been toward
automation. Old sectors of the
economy don’t just shrink because
they’re old, but because ways were
found to do the work of hundreds with
one worker and a machine. When this
process isn’t balanced by the creation
of new products and services, it results
in mass unemployment rather than
prosperity.
For this reason I couldn’t quite buy the
society depicted in Ghost in the Shell.
Robots seem to do everything in
society... what do the people do? If the
answer is ‘not much’, doesn’t the price
of labor drop to near zero and thus
become competitive with the robots?
Taking a bird’s eye historical view,
current arguments over the size of
government are hair-splitting, like
controversies over the human and
divine nature of Christ. The main battle
is over: all precapitalist systems, as
well as totalitarian control over the
economy, were outperformed. Robber
baron capitalism didn’t work so great
either; government is needed to set the
basic framework for economic
competition and even out its rough
edges. Not that new systems can’t
emerge; it’s just unlikely that they’ll
be repeats of the old systems,
especially the absolutes (total or zero
government).
One area which might be transformed
in the future is management. Smith
thought that the corporation had little
future; a firm needed the strong hand
of an owner at the top. He was wrong,
but capitalism hasn’t been able to
decide if the best managers are
entrepreneurs, hired managers, or
major stockholders, nor whether the
best workers are mindless drones,
hands-on tinkerers, or empowered
decisionmakers. Personally I think that
the hierarchical top-down structure will
one day seem as inefficient and
antiquated as absolute monarchy.
Western culture has increasingly
emphasized individualism over
community; the American ideal seems
to be citizens without strong ties to
extended family, ethnic group,
location, or religion. Not
coincidentally, this sort of citizen
makes the best employee for
corporations. This could easily change,
especially as the US won’t be the top
nation forever. A swing of the
pendulum back toward stronger
communities seems likely. Charlie
Stross points out that robber baron
capitalism would be a recipe for
disaster on a small space habitat.
I also expect that our current heuristics
on government, management, and
economics will slowly be replaced by
science. Most political arguments are a
clash of morals and values, conducted
that way because we don’t have enough
solid data. I can’t imagine the world of
AD 3000 working that way. When you
don’t know how to cure a disease, it
can be blamed on bad air, or iniquity,
or the Jews; when you know how to
cure it you just do so.
Future society might also develop
different attitudes toward change and
toward technology itself. We’re still
half enraptured, half frightened at our
own headlong progress— both
tendencies being well manifested in s.f.
The google-eyed fascination should
damp down in the next thousand years.
On Almea, I have a sentient species,
the iliu, with 40,000 years of
civilization. They have very high
technology, but they’re no more
captivated by it than we are by fire.
Indeed, miniaturization and
specialization have developed to the
point where their technological
footprint is small, and they’ve
purposely moved to a lifestyle
reminiscent of their own ancestral
environment.

Apocalypse now!
Of course, maybe in your imagined
future everything collapses. I’m a
sucker for a good post-apocalypse
myself. One cheap error is to assume
that civilization will just revert to some
particular earlier period. Some
survivalists seem to assume that after
the collapse the world will look pretty
much like 1840 again.
But history doesn’t neatly repeat. A
collapsed society may simply
disappear, as the Norse Greenlanders
did. The fall of Rome didn’t make
people revert to Celtic and German
paganism or chieftancies. And for that
matter the mindset of 1840s America—
relatively unpolluted, thinking itself
with some reason to be the most
advanced nation on the planet— would
be very different from a 2140s America
devastated by social and economic
collapse, surrounded by enemies, out of
resources, and full of environmental
disaster areas. I’m afraid Fallout 3
would be a better model.
There can also be local declines. Jane
Jacobs describes a settlement where
her aunt was sent as a missionary. The
aunt wanted to build a church from the
large stones found in the riverbed; but
the locals patiently explained that this
was impossible. As everyone knew,
mortar could only hold small stones;
and even those could only be used for
small structures like chimneys,
certainly not a whole wall. This was
not the Third World; this was 1930s
North Carolina, and the people were
descendants of people with a long
tradition of stonemasonry. Such stories
are hard to imagine in today’s highly
interconnected world— but an
interstellar society might have such
isolated pockets.
Daily life
This is really a continuation of the
Culture chapter, but with the focus on
everyday life rather than entire
societies.

Sex and sexism

Humans are pervs... their laws, culture,
and religions are obsessed with sex.

Is sexism avoidable?
Let’s hop right into the maelstrom, or
(joke imminent) the femaelstrom:
sexism. For the most part our
ancestors’ views on sex are
unpalatable, even ludicrous. A realistic
portrayal of medieval sex roles would
be too.
One possible response: just ignore it. In
Oblivion, for instance, players, bandits,
fighters and magicians, pirates, and
orcs can all be male or female.
Beginning stats may be affected, but
they all balance out (e.g. Dunmer
females lose in Endurance what they
gain in Personality).
I’m not bothered by this— games and
even fantasy novels don’t have to be
realistic. There’s another approach,
though: try to understand the biological
and cultural bases for sexism, and
address those directly rather than
simply erase the problem.
Not all historical cultures were equally
sexist; it’s worthwhile to consider the
variation that existed. And there’s even
more variation found in other species,
which can be adopted for your
conworlds or aliens.

Historical sex roles

Here’s one mitigating factor, though
it’s a bit of a downer: life sucked for
everyone! Or more generally: for the
vast majority, life in agricultural and
early industrial society involved hard
work and plenty of it, for both sexes.
As a pioneer woman succintly put it:
“Everything on this farm is either
heavy or hungry.”
The upside of this is that class trumps
sex. In an egalitarian but sexist society
all men may feel that they outrank all
women— except for their mother— but
in a stratified society, upper class
women outrank lower class men.
Chaucer’s depiction of the Wife of
Bath shows how formidable a medieval
woman might be. In cultures from
ancient Rome to imperial China,
women might be regents for young
heirs and rule the country. Some
kingdoms could be ruled by queens in
their own right. In medieval times
there were monastic orders which were
entirely female-run; a large noble
household was often run by the
noblewoman.
Dorothy L. Sayers in Are Women
Human? points out that women’s work
was economically significant. In
hunter-gatherer societies women often
do the gathering, which produces half
or more of the tribe’s food.
Hammurabi’s law code describes
tavernkeeping as a female occupation.
Clothing is often a female industry—
stolen from women by the industrial
revolution. Women helped their
craftsmen husbands in medieval times
and could inherit the business upon
their death. Among California Indians,
artistic creation was a female
monopoly, as it consisted of basketry
(a category that included most
household goods).
The notion that women should only be
occupied with bearing children was a
conceit of the Victorian upper classes.
The position of women improved or
degraded over space and time,
sometimes in surprising ways. The
Spartans, those military juggernauts,
were noted for their proud, independent
women— this scandalized the
Athenians, who thought women should
stay at home. The Neo-Confucian
thinker Zhū Xī, writing in the 1100s,
pushed Chinese society in the direction
of rigid respect for authorities,
resulting in much greater restrictions
on women.
Women had more independence among
the nomads of the Eurasian steppe than
in China. They had property rights,
they could initiate divorce and remarry,
and elite women could hold high
office, even military office. They cared
for the herds along with the men, rode
horses, and defended their settlements
when the men were away.
Yingtian, wife of the Khitan emperor
Abaoji, accompanied her husband on
military campaigns and received
ambassadors with him. Abaoji died in
926. There was a tradition of wives
being sacrificed upon the king’s death,
but she stated that her sons were young
(they were in their twenties) and the
country needed her. However, she
insisted— over the Khitan nobles’
protests— on having her right hand cut
off to be buried with Abaoji. This did
nothing to lessen her power: she was
able to overrule her husband’s choice
of heir and impose what she considered
a better choice. And it ended forever
the custom of sacrificing the widows of
Khitan kings.
What factors are most important in
maintaining sexism?
• The male monopoly on
war. Marvin Harris argues that
this is the primary factor— that
the premium on raising warrior
boys makes girls less valuable.
Read enough history, and
it’s striking how every society
seems to have a few exceptional
warrior women: China’s Fù Hǎo,
Vietnam’s Trưng sisters,
France’s Joan of Arc, Arabia’s
Mavia, Artemisia of
Helicarnassus, India’s
Lakshmibai, the Hausas’ Amina,
the Apache Lozen, the Soviet
Lyudmila Pavličenko, and on and
on. For the curious I’ve provided
a fuller list on the web resources
page.
Though many of these
women were royalty, some
organized female armies as well,
and there are other peoples where
women routinely fought
alongside men. Weapons are
found buried with women in
 Scythian graves; the Romans
found women fighting among the
Teutonic tribes. In modern times
there are many stories of women
disguising as men in order to
fight— e.g. the first US woman
to receive a military pension,
Revolutionary War fighter
Deborah Sampson.
• Lack of birth control.
Hunter-gatherers have children at
intervals of about four years; for
agriculturalists it’s about two
years. Women are obviously not
restricted to only child-rearing,
but if there’s always young
children around, their options are
limited. As a corollary, women
 are freer when they can control
conception and birth.
• Authoritarian religions.
The Abrahamic religions were
harder on women than paganism;
the Confucians more so than
Daoists or Buddhists.
An obsession with virginity
is especially destructive for
women; it can cause men to
sequester women, to make their
lives miserable if they stray, and
in extreme cases even to mutilate
their bodies to prevent sexual
arousal.
• Limited land held by an
elite— such as the medieval
 European aristocracy. Such an
elite does not value fertility,
which in a primarily agricultural
society can only dilute its wealth.
You want to raise a son to inherit
the estate; daughters are
something of a liability, and you
actually pay someone to take
them off your hands.
In land-rich societies, by
contrast, fertility is welcome—
as is polygamy. Women are
valuable and a husband has to
pay a price to marry one.

Biological sex roles

Biology offers some generalizations on
male and female appearance and
behavior:
• Males tend to be larger;
the size discrepancy (sexual
dimorphism) correlates, we may
say, with the nastiness of the
males— e.g. male gorillas are 1.5
times the size of the females, and
a single male maintains a harem;
gibbon females are almost the
same size as males, have a
considerable degree of choice
over their mate, and live in long-
term monogamy.
Humans are on the low end
of the sexual dimorphism scale—
the male/female size ratio is 1.1.
If you think this means that
males do all the heavy work,
think again. An anecdote from
Jared Diamond:
Once [in New Guinea] I
offered to pay some villagers
to carry supplies from an
airstrip to my mountain camp.
The heaviest item was a 110-
pound bag of rice, which I
lashed to a pole and assigned a
team of four men to shoulder
together. When I eventually
caught up with the villagers,
the men were carrying light
loads, while one small woman
weighing less than the bag of
rice was bent under it,
supporting its weight by a
cord across her temples.
• Males expend little energy
in producing and distributing
sperm; females invest much
more in producing eggs and
bearing young. Their mate
selection strategy accordingly
varies: for males there is no cost
and much to gain by
inseminating as many females as
possible; females are more picky
as they’re making more of an
investment, and prefer
monogamy.
But it’s much more
complicated than that. Within the
same species, males may try
different strategies: e.g. some
male chimps bluster and cow the
females into submission; others
form friendships with females
and mate behind the alphas’
backs. Male parental
involvement is a good
evolutionary strategy: being a
strong caretaker and protector
makes it more likely the small
fry will thrive and reproduce.
And females even in pair-
bonding species play around—
getting the best of both worlds:
viable genes from the strongest
males, nurturing from the gentler
ones.
Some females are well
defended against male violence
— the porcupine, for instance,
 isn’t going to have sex unless she
feels like it. (Though this isn’t
without its kinky side... foreplay
consists of drenching the female
with urine.)
• There’s something of an
arms race between the sexes,
waged with changes to the
genitals. The very promiscuous
chimpanzees have evolved
enormous testicles, so as to
produce a huge amount of sperm
— the better to fertilize you with,
my dear. (Male gorillas, who
keep their harem sequestered,
have small testicles.)
When a drone mates with a
queen bee, his penis detaches,
acting as a genital plug to prevent
other drones from mating with
her. Male squirrels insert a gluey
“copulatory plug” with the same
purpose— though the female
may later remove or eat it.
The bedbug, perhaps in
response to such obstacles,
developed “traumatic
insemination”— the penis skips
the genitals entirely and pierces
the female’s carapace, inserting
the sperm close to the ovaries. In
some species the females have
evolved a swelling that guides
the penetration and is filled with
hemocytes that combat infection.
Or a male may kill a
 female’s offspring, to make sure
the next ones are his— a
behavior observed among lions
and chimpanzees among others.
Humans are unusual among
the great apes in that estrus (the
female’s most fertile period) is
hidden. Most likely this increases
pair-bonding by divorcing sex
from reproduction. The males
can’t be sure of reproducing by
focusing on the short period of
fertility, so they have to be
around all the time.
All that said, there’s immense variety
in the animal kingdom, and there’s all
sorts of wacky sexual behavior.
• Close to home, bonobo
females are nobody’s patsy.
Females don’t let themselves be
dominated by the males— in
captivity, they are even
dominant. The alpha male more
or less decides where the troop
moves... unless vetoed by the
alpha female.
Bonobos also use sex as a
form of social bonding and
conflict resolution; they don’t
pair-bond, and female-female
sexual contact is very common—
male-male contact also occurs,
though less frequently.
• It’s not always the female
that raises the young. After
 laying an egg, the female
emperor penguin (star of March
of the Penguins) skedaddles off,
leaving the male to brood the egg
— all the more of a sacrifice as
the penguins mate in a remote
area and the male has no food for
two months.
• Some species reverse the
amount of effort put into the
genetic package. Many species
(including species of firefly and
salamander) create and deposit a
huge sperm packet, which not
only provides a huge number of
sperm but a significant gift of
protein. I borrowed this idea for
one of the sapients of Almea, the
 ktuvoks.
• In some species, nature
seems to have decided that males
are just vehicles for sperm.
Beehives are almost entirely all-
female affairs; drones are raised
in small numbers for
reproduction only, and die after
mating. At least they’re not
eaten, as in many spiders and
mantises. (To be fair, among
bristle worms, it’s the female
that dies after laying her eggs,
and she is sometimes eaten.)
The male green spoon
worm is 200,000 times smaller
than the female; after finding his
mate he enters her body and takes
 up residence in a little sac in her
reproductive system.
• The spotted hyena has a
real matriarchy, and these dames
are tough. Their clitoris has
expanded into a pseudo-phallus,
and it’s not only used for mating
but for giving birth. Packs have a
dominant female, and all males
(except her cubs) rank under all
females. Normally cubs are born
in pairs— and one immediately
kills the other. A single spotted
hyena can kill a wildebeest three
times its size. They’re also able
to eat and digest bones.
For much more on unusual animal sex,
see Olivia Judson’s Dr. Tatiana’s Sex
Advice to All Creation.

Matriarchies
Part of the fun of fantasy and s.f. is that
you can explore neat ideas that human
history hasn’t bothered to try out. One
of these is matriarchy.
If you’d like to build your own:
• If you can play with the
biology, consider using some of
the ideas above, such as small or
reversed sexual dimorphism,
biological protection against
rape, and male care for the
young.
• At the cultural level, you
can supply reliable birth control,
 plenty of land, and of course an
ideology of feminine superiority.
• If you’re working with
humans, don’t just reverse
everything in premodern
societies. There are biological
differences after all: women are
still the ones to get pregnant and
nurse, which take far more of an
investment than insemination. At
least some of male violence and
female bonding is hormonal.
For Almea I created a female-
dominated civilization, the Bé. Here’s
a partial description of Beic mores; see
also the biography of Múr on p. 30.
The following description applies to the poor
— the majority of the people. Their life is not
that different from peasants, fisherfolk, and
craftsmen in any pre-modern society. Both
sexes work hard; marriages are arranged by
the family rather than by the participants;
women marry in their late teens and have
many more babies than survive to adulthood.
The major differences from most other
societies:
• Women are the acknowledged
leaders. They are usually older than
their husbands; they control the
family’s wealth; inheritance and
naming are matrilineal; husbands join
the wife’s family and take her name.
Women are considered smarter,
tougher, more even-tempered, more
virtuous (yet, when they are bad, more
evil). Men are recognized for their
strength, but the comparison is
 inevitably made to the even stronger
nawr ox. Men are considered the more
emotional sex, and the sexual
tempters.
• Society is organized into
extended family groups called bands
(jɔ), led by an elder woman (háɔ) and
consisting of her descendants, plus
males who have married into the
family. When the elder dies, the two
oldest daughters become the nucleus
of their own bands, unless the family
is too small. The optimum size for a
band is one to three dozen people.
Bands rather than marriages are
the basic economic unit: members
work for the band as a whole, and
wealth is pooled. Raising children is a
task of the entire band.
 At this level of society a band’s
wealth mostly means land, so splitting
the band means dividing up land.
However, bands don’t legally own
land— noble families do; poor bands
simply have the right to work
somewhere on the estate, and the
nobles don’t care how many bands
there are.
More importantly, the Bé are
relatively land-rich. The majority of
land at any one time is uncultivated.
When a band splits, it will abandon its
old fields and begin two new plots.
This practice helps maintain the
ecological health of the jungle.
• Since women are not the
property of men, there is no cult of
virginity, nor any concern that women
 be faithful to their men. Nonetheless a
woman is not supposed to have sex till
a few years after menarche. They’re
expected to devote themselves to
learning their band’s work and ways.
• Men technically do not marry a
woman; they marry into a band.
(Indeed, the word for marriage, jɔhù,
means ‘band entry’.) As marriage is
not the basic economic unit, marriages
are not accorded the importance they
have in our society— both parties are
free to terminate it. Men will not
lightly do this, however: since wealth
stays with the females of the band,
leaving the band will almost always be
a severe economic loss. Moreover,
bands are reluctant to accept older
males.
 Moralists spend much more effort
exhorting women to keep their men—
a clue that, often enough, they do not.
On the other hand, if a woman has
tired of a man, she can stop sleeping
with him without kicking him out of
her band (which is the elder’s
prerogative anyway). The band won’t
lightly give up an extra pair of hands.
A marriage is sought for a
particular girl in the family, when
she’s old enough. It’s not
inappropriate, then, to use the terms
‘husband’ and ‘wife’. Nonetheless,
sex between any band members of the
same generation is licit. To put it
bluntly, a man can and probably will
sleep with his wife’s sisters, and with
her cousins if they are part of the
band. His primary pair-bond may even
 shift to one of them. The Bé like to say
that their morality allows the male
(considered the randier, more
animalistic gender) to stray, but within
bounds.
Marriages are sought with allied
bands; these are often ultimately
related, but the rule is that one cannot
marry into bands which have split off
from one’s own within living memory.
(In our terms, you can’t marry your
cousins, because they’re probably in
your own band, nor your second
cousins, because their band split off
only a generation back; but your third
cousins are fair game.)
• Young women bear and nurse
babies, but that’s the extent of their
formal responsibility. Past infancy, the
primary caregivers are younger girls,
middle-aged women, and older men.
(This wide range is considered healthy
for the child.)
To put it another way, a young
girl is learning the skills needed for
her band’s lifestyle; that includes
raising children, so she helps out. A
healthy young woman, however, is
best used working at the band’s
primary economic activity. As she
ages, she has more time for leisure
pursuits— including caring for
children. When she becomes an elder
her primary responsibility is
governing the band.
Boys will help take care of
younger siblings, but it’s not so
important for boys to learn the band’s
ways— they’ll be leaving it when they
 marry. Thereafter, their primary task is
working to help support their new
family. Their working life is longer
mostly because of sexism. As old men,
however, they’re not expected to work
hard, and they have little role in
running the band, so they’re most
useful in taking care of the children.
This probably raises many questions;
you can read the Almeopedia for more.
You may think it would go a different
way— fine, on your planet it will.
The jɔ structure is partly based on the
largely female-dominant Moso culture
of East Asia. It’s also an attempt to
provide an extended family structure
that would free women from being
bound to child-rearing for most of their
lives.
Another interesting approach is Sheri
Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s
Country, in which women run the
towns. Men are allowed to live with
them, but most live in barracks just
outside the towns and engage in
frequent war. I can’t explain much
more without spoilers.

Marriage
There are several decisions to make
about marriage.
• Are marriages arranged?
In premodern agricultural
societies, arranged marriage was
generally the norm. Among the
 well-off, marriage cemented ties
between families or even nations,
and were far too important to
leave to the individuals involved.
For other classes, as among
Indians today, it was felt that
mature older people could make
a much better decision than rash
youngsters.
Among the medieval
European nobility, people still
fell in love, but this had little to
do with who they were married
to. Courtly literature offered a
complex standard of behavior for
such adulterous affairs.
• Who is out of bounds? In
our culture this is largely a
 matter of avoiding incest. But
many cultures divide people into
groups and specify complex rules
on which groups can and can’t
intermarry.
The simplest such system is
two moieties or halves. E.g. the
Tlingit are divided into Raven
(yéil) and Eagle (ch’aak’)
moieties (in some areas the latter
were Wolves instead). A Raven
could only marry an Eagle and
vice versa.
• Whose family does the
couple live with? In matrilocal
societies, the bride stays with or
near her parents; her husband
may or may not live with her.
Among the Moso, for instance, a
man visits a woman at night, and
helps little with child-rearing.
Matrilocality does not
mean matriarchy. Among the
Iroquois, a man was absent for
half the year raiding, trading, or
hunting; the rest of the year he
lived with his wife’s family.
Under these circumstances a
man’s wealth would pass to his
sister’s son or to his brother—
that is, to the nearest male
relative within his own clan; his
own children belonged to his
wife’s clan. (Given the social
mores, this also made genetic
sense: his heirs were certainly
 genetically related to him; his
wife’s children might not really
be.)
In patrilocal societies the
bride goes to live with her
husband’s family; this has
historically been the pattern for
about 70% of societies. Most
modern societies are neolocal,
meaning that the couple sets up a
new household separate from
both sets of families— a
consequence of highly mobile
societies where people routinely
move long distances to study or
work.
• Is the family line
matrilineal (inherited from the
mother) or patrilineal? Western
European culture is patrilineal, in
that names and titles are
inherited from the father.
Inheritance of ethnicity
may be more complicated. In
Arabic culture an Arab man’s
children are all Arab; this is why
(say) Egyptians consider
themselves Arabs. The Spanish in
the New World, however, didn’t
consider a man’s child Spanish if
the mother was Amerindian or
black. Traditionally one can only
be a Jew if one’s mother is
Jewish.
In the premodern world
wealth was not easily acquired,
and it would quickly be
subdivided into nothing if all
children inherited equally. In
Europe, the traditional rule for
the elite was primogeniture: the
eldest son inherited the estate.
Some cultures, including parts of
medieval Japan and England,
practiced ultimogeniture, where
the last son inherits the estate, or
a larger share, perhaps on the
theory that older sons already had
an estate, or to reward the
youngest son for taking care of
his elderly parents.
Cultures differ in whether women
inherit at all, and if so whether
they get a full or a half share.
• Is a payment required, and
who gets it? Does the man pay a
bride-price? This seems to be
associated with regions where
population density is relatively
low, land is cheap, and there is no
great social stratification, such as
traditional sub-Saharan Africa.
If the woman’s family must
pay a dowry, the implication is
that female fertility is something
of a negative; this suits areas
where population increase
threatens to reduce the standard
of living, and where elites don’t
want property to spread to lower
strata.
• How many wives? Having
 multiple wives is polygyny;
according to the Ethnographic
Atlas Codebook, 85% of the 1231
societies surveyed allowed
polygyny. Thus it’s monogamy
that seems to demand an
explanation.
Nonetheless, polygynous
societies can hardly supply
multiple wives to every man;
polygyny is a privilege of the
wealthy and powerful.
• How many husbands?
Polyandry is quite rare, but it’s
practiced among some Tibetans;
this is a difficult environment
where limiting population growth
is highly desirable.
Many of these choices are more male-
or female-centric, and it’s safe to say
that the more of the male-centric
choices are made, the more male-
dominant the society.

The family
In most premodern societies the
extended family is more important
than the nuclear family. You may live
with them, or next door to them.
They’re your social network, your
judges, your protectors and avengers,
your investors, your safety net in bad
times.
In ancient Roman society, for instance,
the paterfamilias, the head of the
family, not only retained authority over
his adult sons, they could not sign
contracts, free slaves, or make wills
without his consent, nor did their
money belong to them. (This was an
extreme, however; the Greeks were
surprised by such strictures.)
As a corollary, the modern idea of
teenage culture is a novelty. In most
cultures, a male adolescent simply
begins living and working as an adult,
though at a junior level, and is often
forbidden to marry till he is well
established.
In Rome, however, young elite males
were expected to be rowdy and
sexually indulgent— breaking into
shops, visiting prostitutes, getting into
fights.

Birth control
It’s no coincidence that sexual
liberation came on the heels of
effective birth control, nor that
moralists of all religions preach
fidelity. In premodern conditions,
chastity is the only sure way to avoid
disease, and since a woman could
hardly avoid pregnancy, it was best to
be married before having sex. Anna
Magdalena, second wife of Johann
Sebastian Bach, bore thirteen children
between 1723 and 1742, meaning that
she spent half her time pregnant.
!Kung hunter-gatherer women have
babies only about every four years.
They nurse their children till the next
child is born, which seems to inhibit
ovulation. On the other hand they live
in a desert and have a low fat intake, so
it’s not clear that this is truly
representative of the ancestral
environment.
There’s always been a strong demand
for birth control, and where any
demand exists it will generate a supply:
acidic vaginal suppositories, oiled
paper used as a cervical cap, herbal
concoctions. But these methods seem
to have been no more effective than
most of the premodern physician’s
toolbox— that is to say, variable at
best, fatal at worst. The condom,
originally made of animal intestine,
appeared only in the 17C.
In Roman times the herb silphium
apparently inhibited conception; it only
grew in Cyrenaica, was highly
expensive, and seems to have been
overharvested to extinction.
Abortifacients can be more effective—
but mostly because they’re poisons,
with a high risk of harming or killing
the woman.
The simplest premodern birth control
is infanticide— usually done soon after
birth before any bond can develop, but
there may also be a pattern of
preferential neglect. This is so
effective among the Yanomamö that
the sex ratio at puberty is 154 males to
100 females. But it’s by no means
limited to primitive societies; in the
18C poor women in England regularly
dropped unwanted babies in the river,
left them in trash barrels, or rolled over
them in a drunken slumber.
More benignly, you can try abstinence,
or non-reproductive sex. However,
many of these activities were
considerably less attractive with
premodern hygiene. Oral sex was once
considered highly perverted— the
premodern nose was accustomed to a
workout, but there were limits.
I go over all this grim history not to
encourage you to reproduce it, but to
suggest that you think about how to
avoid it. It’s not realistic to depict a
premodern society with modern
promiscuity and sexual equality with
no explanation; it’s like outfitting your
windy and stinky old castles with
jacuzzis.
The simplest though the least original
method is to posit a herbal mixture that
really works. It could be interesting to
place limits on this: where do the herbs
grow? are they rare or common? do the
religious authorities approve?
You can also tweak your biology.
Queen bees can determine whether an
egg is male or female, and it’s easy to
imagine a species with greater control
over ovulation or conception. (Though
the genes may have reason to distrust
the brain, as discussed above, p. 84.
They’ll be screwed if the brain decides
not to reproduce at all.)
Cultural norms may help— e.g. many
societies practice sexual abstinence
during nursing, perhaps accompanied
by rationalizations such as that semen
would poison the milk.

Homosexuality
So, there are two types of people,
people who love the opposite sex and
those that love the same sex, right?
Nah. It’s much more complicated than
that. Let’s look at a few examples.
• In ancient Greece and
Rome, men routinely took male
lovers as well as wives.
• In Latin America, only
bottoming is a sure token of
being gay— a man who
penetrates another man may
consider himself straight.
• Among the Azande of
central Africa, male warriors
would take on a younger male
lover, even paying his parents a
bride-price. The relationship
would end when the younger boy
reached maturity. Marriages were
polygamous, and lesbianism was
common among wives. The
Atanda of Australia and the
Keraki of New Guinea had
similar customs.
• Male homosexuality is
 required among the Etoro and the
Sambia of New Guinea— it’s
believed that young men must
ingest the semen of older men in
order to attain maturity and
impregnate women; there are
also severe time and place
restrictions on heterosexual sex.
These examples suggest that sexual
orientation is a continuum, not a binary
opposition, and can bend very far
depending on cultural mores. It can
also vary over an individual’s lifetime;
there may be a good deal of adolescent
exploration, and occasionally a
dramatic change in orientation in later
life.
I don’t mean that homosexuality is a
choice. As it’s found among animals,
it’s a part of biology. But it’s more
complex than a single binary
parameter.
For reference, I’d love to give you a
percentage for homosexuality, but the
numbers are all over the place. For the
U.S., on the low end, a Census study
found 0.5% of the population living in
a same-sex relationship; on the high
end, Alfred Kinsey found 37% of men
reporting at least one homosexual
experience.
So, how is homosexuality expressed in
your society?
• It’s considered wrong.
This is a minority view: an
anthropological database, the
Human Relations Area File,
reported that of 76 societies
where homosexuality had been
studied to some extent, only 36%
considered it unacceptable.
“Wrong” covers a lot of
ground, however. It could mean:
° Evil, and punishable by
death or imprisonment, as in
Leviticus or Victorian
England. This should be put
into perspective: Leviticus
also dictates the death penalty
for adultery, incest, spiritism,
and cursing one’s parents.
° Disreputable but not
 criminal, like being a Jew or
an actor in Elizabethan
England.
° A character failing,
like drunkenness.
Lesbianism may be treated
differently— or ignored;
Leviticus doesn’t even mention
it.
• It might be tolerated if
kept discreet. Note that societies
differ in how much any sexuality
can be expressed in the open, and
which sorts of things were
considered sexual. In the 19C
Japanese men and women bathed
together, but the Japanese were
 scandalized by Westerners
kissing in public.
• It may be regarded as a
private matter, so long as it
didn’t interfere with one’s duty
to beget children, as in
premodern China.
• It might be fully indulged,
as in Greek and Roman society.
The ceramics of the Moche, in
Peru, depict both gay and lesbian
acts.
• It might be allowed to a
certain subclass of people (see
the next section), or within sex-
segregated institutions such as
monasteries and the military (as
 in feudal Japan).
• It might be obligatory, as
for the Azande, Etoro, and
Sambia.
Though we might pride ourselves on
our openness to sex, many cultures
would complain that we
inappropriately sexualize everything.
Men holding hands or kissing may
have no sexual meaning; two people
setting up a house together (like
Holmes and Watson ) doesn’t imply a
sexual relationship.
All this can make it hard to know for
sure what’s going on in history.
Michelangelo, for instance, wrote love
poems to boys and created beautiful
images of male bodies, but a
contemporary biographer, Condivi,
describes him as “chaste”. Interpreting
Chinese sources is complicated by the
lack of gender-specific pronouns and
the use of highly allusive language
(e.g. “countenances of linked jade”).
(Of course there are plenty of clear
references too; what’s difficult is
getting an overall perspective.)

Cultural sexes
Biology says there are two sexes, but
cultures don’t have to agree.
Many North American Indian tribes
had a category, called “two-spirits”
(niizh manidoowag in Ojibwe), for
those with a mixed masculine and
feminine nature. These often took on
special roles within the tribe, e.g.
shamans, prophets, storytellers,
matchmakers. They might have either
heterosexual or homosexual
relationships.
In northern India, the hijra community
includes eunuchs, transvestites,
homosexuals, and hermaphrodites,
considered an alternate gender. They
too have a cultural role, though an
uncomfortable one: they sing and
dance at weddings and births— often
uninvited; they’ll offer their blessing
for a fee and a curse if none is given.
One of my Almean cultures, the
Ezičimi, considered that there were
three sexes: male, female, and ewemi
(literally, ‘middlers’):
The ewemi were those that didn’t fit
the fairly rigid sex roles of the Ezičimi
bands. It was said (usually by
outsiders; Ezičimi explanations tended
to the tautological) that these were the
unmanly men and the mannish women,
and when we learn that many of them
were homosexual, we may think we
have their number. But the Ezičimi
were using their own categories, not
ours.
The prototypical Ezičimi man was a
warrior, strong and hard; the
prototypical woman was a mother and
wife, hard-working and nurturing.
Men who were not good with
weapons, who messed around with
herbs or (later) books, were likely to
 be classified as ewemi. Same story
with women who resisted marriage, or
preferred books or bows to babies. A
fifth or more of the population was
considered ewemi. Only a fraction of
these were actually gay or lesbian; we
could equally call the ewemi ‘geeks’
or, more nicely, ‘intellectuals’.

Ewemi did not dress like women or

like men; rather, there were separate
dress styles for each sex. Ewemi
dressed in long robes and followed an
aesthetic that hid their biological sex;
they were expected to marry only
other ewemi (male or female).

Clothing
If you see a foreigner, the first thing to
strike you may be what they’re
wearing. In a visual medium, you
hardly need those place subtitles
(“Venice, 1690”)— the clothes on the
first person we see will do the job.
Alison Lurie wrote a book called The
Language of Clothes, and indeed, our
clothes have a lot to say about us: our
sex, our age, our wealth, often our
profession or our passing mood.
Ironically, it may be the last thing a
conworlder thinks about. And it’s not
as easy as devising a coinage system or
a list of gods; it requires us to think
visually, and know something about
how clothes are made.

Cloth and how to make it

Clothing starts with cloth, which in
turn goes back to the fauna and flora of
your world. Here’s a whirlwind tour of
types of cloth:
• Animal skins make good
clothing, once the animal is
removed. If you scrape off the fur
you get rawhide. Skins didn’t
become really useful till the
invention of the needle, some
40,000 years ago.
The minimum equipment
for preparing rawhide is a
scraper; later cultures used a dull
knife. The process can be
facilitated by soaking in a
solution of lye or lime.
• Skins are made into
leather by the process of tanning
(named for tannin, an acid
derived from oak bark). Tanning
makes the skin softer and allows
it to last indefinitely— rawhide
decomposes.
Tanning is a somewhat
unattractive process: the fur
might be limed with urine or lye;
then dung or animal brains were
pounded into the material. Even
in a society used to strong odors,
you didn’t want to live next to a
tannery.
• Textiles are cloth made
from fibers of various types:
° Plant fibers, which
range from the extremely
coarse (grasses and rushes,
mostly suitable for making
rope, mats, sacks, hammocks,
and very rough clothing) to
the very fine (such as the near-
transparent Egyptian linen).
° Wool, made from hair
(goats, sheep, camels, llamas,
rabbits). I’ve always thought
of wool as scratchy, but fine
wools such as cashmere and
vicuña are very soft.
° Silk, made from the
cocoons of the silkworm; silk
produces the finest and softest
natural fiber.
 ° Various synthetic
fibers, such as polyester and
nylon (polymers, a type of
plastic), or fiberglass.
Textiles start out as short loose fibers.
These can be mashed and rubbed
together, which is how you get felt;
this was the favorite fabric of the
Central Asian nomads.
You get a more durable fabric by
spinning and weaving. Spinning
aggregates fibers with a strong twist.
The easiest and earliest method was to
use a spindle, a simple device like a
top; it acts as a weight and spins the
thread, and the newly formed thread
can be wrapped around it. Hand-
spinning takes much more time than
weaving; women often kept their
spindle with them to do some spinning
at idle moments.
The spinning wheel greatly sped up the
process, though quality was low till the
foot treadle was invented to power the
wheel, allowing the spinner to use both
hands to control the fiber as it was
spun.
Weaving is the process of making
cloth on a loom. The simplest loom is a
framework to hold an array of parallel
threads, the warp; these could be
stretched tight with a backstrap. The
weaver then interweaves a thread at
right angles to them, forming the weft.
(Warp and weft may be of different
fabrics or colors, and for fancy effects
one can alternate colors, forming a
pattern.) Hand-threading is very slow;
an early improvement was the heddle,
a rod which lifted every other thread of
the warp.
A slightly more elaborate version is the
vertical loom, with the warp threads
attached to the framework at the top
and held taut by weights, or tied to a
bottom frame; this also had the
advantage of allowing a wider cloth to
be woven.
Even before steam power was applied
to clothmaking in the 1700s, the use of
spinning wheels and large frame looms
transformed clothmaking from a home
craft to an industry: cloth became
something you bought rather than
made.

Types of clothing
There’s a wide range of clothing that
doesn’t require much fitting or sewing:
• Loincloth: Put a short thin
cloth between your legs; tie it
tightly round your waist with a
cord. A variant is to use a long
enough cloth that the material
itself can be wrapped around the
waist, though a belt may still be a
good idea.
• Toga: Take a very long,
wide cloth; wrap it around the
waist, then throw the excess over
 one shoulder. The weight of the
toga would hold it in place, but it
wasn’t suitable for hard labor,
and thus was an indicator of elite
status.
• Poncho: Take two pieces
of cloth about six feet long; sew
them together except in the
middle; put it over your head. If
you sew the sides together
(leaving armholes) you’re on
your way to a tunic or shirt.
Make it longer and you’ve got
the long simple robe worn by
both sexes in early medieval
times.
• Kimono: The kimono is
made from a single bolt of cloth
with no waste. Follow the recipe
for the poncho, but use a longer
cloth so it comes down to the
feet. Add two more pieces of
cloth that drape over the
shoulders, forming sleeves.
 Kimono are properly sewn
together only very lightly, at
cleaning time, which makes them
easy to wash and to adapt to
changing figures.

• Skirt: Cut a length of cloth

so it wraps once around your
 waist, sew together. It can be
made longer and held up by
straps to form a basic dress.
• Cape: Take a large
squarish piece of cloth. Drape
over the shoulders; bring the
corners together and fasten with a
clasp, pin, or even a loop of
cloth.
Our clothes (pants, shirts, dresses) are
of course fitted, which involves
measuring, cutting complex shapes out
of bolts of cloth, and sewing together.
These can be made to fit the body
much better, but they are more
specialized work and do not use the
cloth as efficiently.
Infinite variation is possible: color;
type of fabric (coarse or fine, stiff or
soft); length and thus amount of
coverage; thickness of belts; amount of
decoration; accessories (hats,
headbands, collars, cravats, shawls,
veils). Sometimes hats, belts, sleeves,
or shoes grow long extensions, such as
the long pointed shoes and pointy hats
popular in the 15C, often mistaken as
typical medieval wear.
The basic templates can be combined
or layered, of course. A medieval
peasant might wear a light tunic, a
thicker cloak, and leggings. The
properly attired noblewoman of Heian
Japan wore no less than twelve layers
of kimono. Often you want to show off
the fine underlayers, so undergarments
peek out at the edges, or are glimpsed
through slashes or slits in the outer
layer.
The type of clothing interacts with
other aspects of lifestyle, such as
furniture. Liza Dalby points out that
kimono are impractical with chairs—
you have to perch on the edge; the obi
(stiff tied sash) doesn’t allow you to
lean back. The kimono was designed
for kneeling on the floor. In this
position Western clothing is highly
uncomfortable, but the kimono flatters
the figure and the obi offers back
support.

The language of clothing

A culture has not only a style of
clothing, but a set of variations that tell
much about the individual.
Unsurprisingly, the main signifier is
quality. The well-off wear better, softer
fabrics, more layers, and more
decoration. Dyes have been sought
after for millennia, and the strongest
colors are often expensive and thus
markers of high status. Tyrian purple,
for instance, is harvested from a type
of snail; as 12,000 snails are needed to
extract enough dye for a single
garment, it was restricted to royalty.
Cochineal, made from a scale insect,
was the most important export of
colonial Mexico after silver.
Sumptuary laws, which restrict certain
clothing to certain classes, are
common. In Táng China, for instance,
commoners were supposed to restrict
themselves to undyed hemp. Such laws
are repeated often enough that it’s clear
they were frequently violated.
It may be equally important to be
sophisticated. Geisha, for instance,
wear kimono in slightly more subdued
hues and a subtly more voluptuous line
than middle class women, and pride
themselves on matching kimono to the
season according to complicated
cultural conventions.
A perennial approach to sophistication
is to dress like prestigious foreigners—
elegant Romans dressed like Greeks,
Japanese like Chinese; today male
leaders around the world use Western
suits— essentially a version of 19C
British formalwear. Exotic dress can be
worn as a novelty (Mandarin collars,
harem dresses) or as a political
statement (Nehru jackets, Palestinian
keffiyehs).
It’s an oddity of recent Western culture
that men dress drably, while women
have a wide array of styles and colors.
Historically men were just as apt to
compete in the richness and color of
their clothes. Male and female outfits
may or may not be sharply
distinguished.
Clothes become associated with
professions, and these may become
markers of values or even intent. In
ancient Rome the toga was the dress of
the senatorial class, very different from
the armor and skirts of the soldier.
Emperors were often military men, and
whether they wore the toga or a
military outfit was a signal of which
class they intended to favor. Blue
jeans, originally a marker of the sturdy
working classes, became the uniform
of the young. The hip-hop style of
sagging pants originated in prison,
where belts were banned, and neatly
shows the reverse prestige operating in
a marginalized community.
Authority figures in the Middle Ages
wore long robes— as opposed to the
peasants’ short tunics— and this has
persisted in the robes worn by priests,
judges, and academics.
Children often wear simpler garments
than their elders. Roman children, for
instance, wore a simple tunic. In
Europe young boys wore dresses
similar to those of their sisters well
into the 20th century.
As Lurie points out, changes in fashion
reflect larger social trends. With the
French Revolution, the elaborate and
colorful dresses and coiffures of
noblewomen went out of style; the new
style was simple white gowns,
appropriate for the bourgeois
democratic era, and based on lingerie,
or the simpler outfits worn by children.
Male attire became far more restrained,
distinguished by fine tailoring rather
than striking color. (Styles don’t stay
simple for long; by the end of the
century women were wearing corsets
and long skirts with a ballooned-out
shape built out of whalebone.)

When to be nude
Another clothing option is to wear
none, or not much. Looking through a
history of clothing, it seems there’s
been a general tendency to wear more
over time. Some of it was climate, of
course— you don’t need to wear
anything at all near the Equator, and
not much in Egypt or Cambodia. But
you can also find bare breasts in early
Anatolia, Germany, and North
America.
Perhaps nudity goes out of style
because it’s associated with poverty or
low status. Slaves might go naked in
ancient Egypt; till relatively late poor
children went naked in many cultures,
saving the expense of clothing them.
Ascetics may wear simple clothing,
like Mahatma Gandhi’s loincloth; as a
further step the holy man may wear
nothing at all. Isaiah preached naked
for a time (Isaiah 20:2-4), and in a
religious ecstasy King Saul took off his
clothes and prophesied (1 Samuel
19:23-24). Traditionally Indian sages
often went naked.
In special circumstances nudity may be
a signal of elite status. Athletes
competed nude in ancient Greece, and a
marker of high status in modern
Europe is the freedom to fly to a warm
beach somewhere and wear as little as
possible.

The unfashionable human bod

That’s the title of a fascinating book by
Bernard Rudofsky, chronicling the
ways humans disfigure their bodies for
the sake of fashion.
Foot binding is the most infamous
example: for nearly a millennium,
Chinese girls had their feet broken—
all but the big toe crammed under the
foot. Then the arch was broken and the
heel and big toe pressed close together.
This caused enormous lifelong pain,
difficulty in walking, and malodorous
infections, but a tiny foot that looked
fetching in tiny shoes (though less so
when the shoes were removed), and a
cautious, swaying gait that men
considered highly erotic. Curiously the
Manchu rulers of the Qīng dynasty
forbade their own women from binding
their feet.
The Victorian corset was not quite as
cruel, but still painfully constricted the
waist and forced the internal organs
downward; no wonder women were
depicted as frail, fainting creatures.
We don’t do any of that anymore
though, do we? Look at your feet. The
big toe curves inward a bit; the little
toe may curve back the other way,
especially for women. This isn’t
natural; this is what shoes do to us. For
contrast, Rudofsky shows the foot of a
Roman sandal-clad foot with
completely straight toes. He also
mocks the designers of women’s shoes
for apparently believing that the big toe
is in the middle of the foot.

Architecture
Houses are almost as distinctive as
clothing. What does the architecture of
your people look like, what is it made
of, and how is it decorated?

How to make a hut

The dwellings of primitive peoples are
not arbitrary, but adapted to the
climate, rainfall, local materials, and
degree of nomadism.
• In the rain forest, there’s
no need to protect against the
temperature, so walls may
disappear. Instead there’s a
parasol-like thatched roof to
provide shade and protection
against the rain, and sometimes a
raised floor to protect against
vermin. Houses are made of the
most prevalent materials: trees
and leaves.
• The hot deserts feature
blistering daytime heat and cold
nights; clay and stone absorb heat
during the day and radiate it at
night, mitigating these extremes.
 Walls are massive; roofs in low-
rainfall areas can be flat.
• Nomads favor tents, with a
light framework covered by
skins, felt, cloth, or bark. The
diagonal willow framework of
Central Asian yurts folds up to a
compact bundle.
• The dome shape of the
igloo deflects winters storms and
efficiently encloses space. Snow
is a good insulator, and body heat
and an oil lamp create an inner
glazing of ice that seals the
surface and reflects heat. When
outside temperatures are -25 to
-35° C, the inside temperature
remains just above freezing.
Another factor is the number of
people per house. The Yanomamö
build a single house for an entire
village— really a large ring enclosing a
circular inner courtyard. The Plains
Indians built earth lodges 12 to 18
meters wide, large enough for an
extended family.

The problem of roofs

Architecture, as opposed to a dude
making himself a house, happens when
you’re building something big, and
facing the fundamental problem of how
to roof it over.
The simplest construction is
trabeated: a flat lintel rests on vertical
posts. The force on the posts is vertical
and entirely compressive. That on the
lintel is more complex: compressive on
the top, tensile on the bottom. Stone
and wood are strong only under
compression, thus aren’t suitable for
long trabeated spans.
In the third dimension, the pillars can
become walls; or you can stick with
pillars or columns for an airier
building.

Longer spans are possible by using a

truss, a structure composed of narrow
beams, strengthened with diagonals.
(Triangles add stability because they
can’t buckle.) A truss is stronger and
much lighter than a solid beam of the
same length.
Arcuated construction relies on the
arch; the Romans were the first to fully
exploit arches. The wedge-shaped
stones (voussoirs) are easier to handle
than lintels, and an arch can cover
longer spans.
The voussoirs eliminate tensile forces
and thus nicely fit stone and wood, but
the arch generates outward force,
requiring buttresses on the sides.
The arch need not be a half-circle;
variations add a particular character to
the building. Gothic arches have the
advantage that the two arcs need not be
the same height, while the parabolic
arch eliminates the need for side
buttresses.

A circular arch can be extruded into the

third dimension, forming a barrel vault,
or rotated to form a dome.
Walls don’t need to be solid; a set of
columns as in a Greek temple, or a row
of arches as in a Roman aqueduct, are
equivalent to a wall.

Materials
Architecture was transformed in the
19C by mass-produced iron, which is
not only stronger than wood and stone
but much better at resisting tensile
force. Iron frameworks, or steel-
reinforced concrete, can be much
lighter and taller than traditional
buildings.
Since iron rusts, it generally has to be
covered. This bothers some architects,
as the structure of the building is
hidden— indeed, a building can now
deceive the world, looking like it’s
made of brick or pure concrete when it
relies on a steel skeleton.
Steel beams support two structural
innovations:
• A lintel can be balanced on
just one pillar if a counterweight
is added on the other side,
forming a cantilever. As the
weight can be hidden, the visual
effect is of a large rectangle
extending into space without
visible support.
• A block can be suspended:
supported by cables, themselves
hung from larger cables attached
to huge pillars. The suspension
bridge is the most familiar
example, but roofs can be
 suspended as well.

Shapes
Primitive houses are often circular; the
circle encloses the most space per
length of wall, but it’s harder to
combine into larger structures. Large
buildings usually end up rectilinear.

Most architects start with a big

geometric shape and subdivide it.
An alternative is to add rooms as
discrete units, with an irregular
perimeter, a plan which may appeal to
more romantic tastes.

Somewhere in between, the building

can incorporate wings and courtyards,
inside and outside. Negative space is as
much a part of the design as positive
space.
Civilizations, epochs, and architects
differ in their appreciation for
symmetry, uniformity, and large-scale
order. An organic or haphazard plan
may have a retro charm, or a
modernistic edginess.
Similarly, some people like Zen
simplicity, some like extravagant
ornamentation. But things that look
arbitrary or decorative often are not.
The flying buttresses of a medieval
cathedral are functional, supporting the
outward pressure of the arcuated walls;
the beams of a truss or the columns of
a temple are similarly structural.
Function
How a house is built tells us much
about the values of the residents.
Which are the biggest, grandest rooms,
for instance— those intended to
receive guests, or those for the private
life of the family? Are there rooms for
servants? Is the kitchen a small mean
room or a luxurious status symbol? Is
the house decorated according to male
or female taste?
Do children get their own rooms? Do
the servants? Go back far enough and a
large household lived and slept in one
big room— if nothing else, because
that was the room with a fireplace.
Most premoderns would be amazed not
at the size of American McMansions
but at the fact that they house only
three to five people.
As a civilization becomes more
complex, both buildings and rooms
become more specialized. Before the
modern era no one needed a train
station, a missile silo, a computer
room, or a garage. On the other hand,
few houses today need a granary, a
stable, a music room (that is, for
making music), or a sickroom.
Architects also face new logistic
problems: they not only have to fit in
the rooms, corridors, and stairs, but
elevators, ventilation shafts, wiring,
plumbing, heating and a/c. An s.f.
house might need life support, robot
storage, teleport pods, and the central
A.I. core…

A Verdurian house
Here’s a house I designed for a middle-
class family in Verduria:
I used a number of features inspired by
Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern
Language:
 • An intimacy gradient
from public (the dining room at
lower left), to the kitchen/bath
area, to the private bedrooms.
• The use of negative space
to define areas such as the
garden.
• Light can enter all of the
rooms from two or three sides.
• Offset walls in the
bedroom area create semi-private
niches.
The focus of the house is the kitchen
and bath, where the family spends most
of its time. The latter includes a pool
that extends into the garden. For a poor
family, this would be the whole house
— beds would be fitted along the side
walls.

And more…
This section is a frank miscellany of
things that didn’t fit in anywhere else.

Politeness
I’ve covered the linguistic aspects of
politeness in the Language
Construction Kit (p. 145). Here I’ll
cover various nonverbal aspects.

Personal space
As noted in the culture test (p. 124),
cultures vary in how much personal
space people expect, with comical
effects when cultures mix. My high
school psychology class did a neat
exercise: the class was divided in pairs;
one half the students (unbeknownst to
the rest) were told to try to move just a
foot away from their conversational
partner. The others, quite
unconsciously, moved back. You could
see each pair constantly moving around
the room.
Americans expect to have their own
space— the nuclear family can come
in, but they’d be decidedly
uncomfortable with the lack of privacy
in a Yanomamö village, a Roman
senator’s house, or a Bedouin
chieftain’s tent.
Some s.f. writers, taking this attitude to
the extreme, have imagined worlds
with a positive horror of any direct
physical contact.

Loose and strict time

Many cultures are notoriously lax
about time: if you’re asked to come at
seven, you’re expected to show up a
couple hours later; if you have an
appointment with an official, you
might wait all day, then be told to
return tomorrow.
We’re used to clocks accurate to the
minute, and the strict schedules they
allow, as well as transportation that
matches this accuracy. Laxity over
time may be a holdover from the era
when time was measured in hours at
best, and a visit anywhere could be
expected to last days or weeks.

Requests and orders

Richard Feynman told a story about
going to a seminar in Japan; he wanted
to stay in a Japanese-style inn rather
than the Western-style hotel his fellow
physicists were staying in. But
somehow this proved to be an
enormous problem. The Japanese
organizer was polite but kept bringing
up one objection after another. It took
half an hour to get down to the real
objection: if Feynman was in another
hotel, the bus would have to make
another stop in the morning.
“No, no! In the morning, I’ll come to
this hotel, and get on the bus here,”
Feynman said.
And so it was settled. Only it wasn’t;
some new obstacle had come up. This
time it took fifteen minutes before it
was out in the open: the mail was
delivered to the other hotel. Feynman
promised to pick his mail up when he
walked to the other hotel, and the
problem was solved.
This sort of thing is insanely
frustrating to Americans less patient
than Feynman. Why don’t these people
say what they mean?
The key here is that in many cultures,
indirection is polite. Directly stating a
price, or a refusal, is disturbing, so
these are obscured. Japan is what’s
been called a Guess culture, rather than
an Ask culture. In an Ask culture, you
can ask directly for things— you
accept that the answer may be no. In a
Guess culture, you don’t ask directly
unless you’re sure the answer is yes.
You put out subtle feelers, in hopes
that the hints will be taken and you’ll
get an offer.
A Japanese person would have either
intuited the reason for the organizer’s
reticence (rather than, in effect, forcing
it out of him), or backed off when the
request ran into obstacles; one can also
be more direct once a personal
relationship is established. People
within a Guess culture get along fine;
it’s the conflict of cultures that causes
frustration.

Meals and drinks

We’ve already talked about the chief
crops (p. 86) and domestic animals.
But there are other questions to answer:
• What do you add for
flavor? The Romans, for
instance, were fond of fish sauce
(garum). The Chinese favored
pickled vegetables.
• When is the chief meal?
Laborers prefer to eat at noon;
urban sophisticates like to dine at
night.
• What’s a typical meal?
 The Verdurians of Almea , for
instance, like to wrap meat or
vegetables in a thin bread, much
like a tortilla.
Before modern sanitation alcoholic
drinks, apart from their amusement
value, were safer than water. Also note
that distillation wasn’t available in
ancient times.

Schooling
Mass education is a modern
phenomenon— literacy was
traditionally restricted to a minority,
sometimes a very small minority...
though since they’re the ones who
write the books, their point of view is
overemphasized.
Schools are ancient— there were
schools for scribes in Sumer— but they
were at first restricted to an elite.
Plato’s Academy was founded in 387
BC, though it was more of a scholars’
circle than a university. The Imperial
Academy was established by the Hàn
dynasty in China in the -2C, and
eventually had 30,000 students. Some
disciplines established their own
schools; medical schools existed in the
Islamic world by the 7C.
An Egyptian text used as a writing
exercise reminds the students of their
favored status:
Do you not consider how things
are with the farmer, when the
harvest is taxed? Grubs have
taken half the grain, the
hippopotamus has eaten from
what is left. There are mice in the
field and the locust swarm has
come… [The tax collectors] say
“Hand over grain!”… He is
stretched out and beaten… his
wife is bound in his presence....
Let me tell you how the soldier
fares… how he goes to Syria, and
how he marches over the
mountains, his bread and his
water carried on his shoulder like
the load of an ass… His drink is
foul water… If he gets back to
Egypt, he is like worm-eaten
wood, sick and bedridden.
Religions may take on educational
functions, whether it’s adolescents
being taught the ways of the world in
primitive tribes, or education in the
scriptures. Most of the European
universities started as religious
institutions.
Craftsmen took on apprentices to learn
the craft, a practice at least as old as
Babylon, as they are mentioned in
Hammurabi’s code— an apprentice
was considered an adopted son, and
could sue his master if he failed to
teach him his craft.

Medieval misery
I don’t think the medieval stink has
been expressed more memorably than
by Patrick Süskind, in Perfume,
speaking of 18C France:
The streets stank of manure, the
courtyards of urine, the stairwells
stank of moldering wood and rat
droppings, the kitchens of spoiled
cabbage and mutton fat; the
unaired parlors stank of stale
dust, the bedrooms of greasy
sheets, damp featherbeds, and the
pungently sweet aroma of
chamber pots. The stench of
sulfur rose from the chimneys,
the stench of caustic lyes from
the tanneries, and from the
slaughterhouses came the stench
of congealed blood. People stank
of sweat and unwashed clothes;
 from their mouths came the
stench of rotting teeth... even the
king himself stank, stank like a
rank lion, and the queen like an
old goat, summer and winter.
This is on Süskind’s first page, and it
masterfully tells us that the world he’s
describing is different from ours, in
some very unappealing ways.
The past is a foreign country. On the
other hand, it’s only the narrowest and
rudest sort of tourist who visits a
foreign country and complains
incessantly that things aren’t as good
as they are back home. These things
would all immediately assault our
nostrils, but the people of the time
certainly didn’t feel the same way
about them. (Or more precisely, they
made distinctions. Everyday sweat was
one thing, but please keep the tannery
on the outskirts of town.)
Rather than washing, people might rely
on hiding the stink with perfumes. A
Táng prince chewed on a mixture of
aloeswood and musk when with guests,
so that whenever he spoke they would
sense a pleasing fragrance.
Attitudes toward bathing have widely
varied. Bathing every five days was
good enough for the Táng; the
Cambodians and Koreans were
considered a little strange for bathing
daily. On the other hand Western
traders stank; but then this would be
hard to avoid after a six-month
journey.
Stench was only part of the general
misery. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant
Mirror is a vivid evocation of the
horrors of the 14C: in addition to the
general corruption of the clergy, the
oppression of the peasants, and the
irresponsibility of the nobles, there was
the Black Death that killed a third of
the population, vicious pogroms
against Jews, the Great Schism, and the
Hundred Years’ War. One of the worst
scourges was the free companies,
groups of mercenaries who simply
prolonged wartime pillaging into a
full-time occupation. Lacking a
standing army, the kings could not
suppress them, and indeed had reason
not to, as they could be hired for the
next war.
This isn’t to say that life was uniformly
awful, even for the poor. There were
islands of prosperity and beauty, and
the seeds of future progress. Nor were
all lands as disordered as medieval
Europe.
Again, you don’t need to dwell on this
— unless you want to; perhaps you like
grim conworlds. But some idealization
is fine; art need not be didactic.

Lords and slaves

A time traveler from a land where you
call the CEO by his first name— or a
hunter-gatherer— would be equally
nonplussed at the staggering hierarchy
of premodern states. Lords were
prickly and arrogant; only relatively
recently were the powerful expected to
treat their lessers with friendly
courtesy. Tuchman records some
blood-curdling diatribes against the
lower classes; one Duke not only called
the peasants dogs but liked to force
them to bark.
At the same time, their inferiors need
not be abject. As C.S. Lewis points out,
slaves in Greek and Roman comedy are
cheeky, knowing, full of tricks, and
highly self-interested— more like
Figaro than like Uriah Heep. St.
Augustine’s mother was berated by her
slave-girl for her drinking; Odysseus in
a play is insulted as never having a
“freeman’s thought”— meaning he is
always calculating, never acts freely
and generously.
Didn’t the lower orders ever rebel? Of
course they did; they could easily
storm the local keep and massacre the
inhabitants. Rebellions were usually
beaten down, but it took time to
organize a counter-force. Cities
rebelled too, and having more money,
plus walls, they were trickier to
subdue. Sometimes it was easier to
grant them certain liberties rather than
sack them.

Xenophobia
I’ve always been fascinated by the
foreign. I like learning languages,
reading about foreign and historical
cultures, meeting people from distant
lands. I’d love to have access to the
galactic Internet.
This has probably always been a
minority taste; most people don’t
cotton to strangers. Every group has
disparaging terms for non-members.
And many things create groups of
insiders and outsiders: race, religion,
class, customs, and above all language.
If you can talk at all, there’s some
chance of coming to terms.
But groups differ in their openness:
• A primitive tribe may have
 a very narrow world, without
much interest in or sympathy for
the tribe down the next jungle
trail. Jared Diamond describes
New Guineans from different
tribes meeting and exchanging
long lists of relatives. They were
trying to find a common relative
so they’d have reason not to kill
each other.
• Large empires,
amalgamating many peoples, end
up cosmopolitan in spirit: Persia,
Rome, the Islamic caliphate,
India, China, and the US were all
used to multiple religions, ideas,
and ethnic groups. But their
tolerance and interest may end at
 the border.
• A nation isolated by
natural barriers, like Japan or
Britain, may be open to foreign
ideas but decidedly
uncomfortable with foreign
people.
• A small unprotected nation
has a complicated relationship to
the outside world. It may have a
strong pride and sense of identity
— the ancient Jews, for instance,
refused to fall into the melting
pot of the Roman Empire. It may
also feel a sense of
precariousness and peripherality
alien to the citizens of empires:
they’ve been invaded many
 times, and too much happens
outside their borders to be
ignored.
Xenophobia may be tempered by the
hunger for novelty. A stranger can tell
you stories you’ve never heard before,
perhaps one reason why many cultures
preach courteous treatment of
outsiders.
Both fantasy and s.f. introduce separate
species into the equation. I would
expect these would generate a greater
sense of difference than any human
division. The happy melting pot
depicted in many works strikes me as
implausible, at least outside artificial
environments such as a university or
diplomatic compound. I like C.S.
Lewis’s description of Ransom’s first
meetings with the hrossa of Mars: it
was both like speaking to a human and
like being with an animal— sometimes
an uncanny and disagreeable sensation.

Amusements
What do your people do for fun?
Here’s some ideas and examples.
• Hang around and talk—
this seems to be the favorite
activity of the Pirahã.
Storytelling is surely almost as
ancient.
• Feasts; as we’ve seen (p.
140), this is the origin of
economic activity, as Big Men
 organized redistributive
bonanzas. Even when the flow of
goods became a steady stream
from peasant to king, canny
rulers still knew the power of
giving away food. The Roman
emperors issued a wheat ration to
almost the whole population of
Rome.
• Music, including song and
dance. You could make a living
doing this in medieval Provence
or the shogun’s Japan— geisha
originally meant ‘artist’.
• Vice: gambling,
intoxication (by drink or other
substances), and whoring are as
old as civilization.
• Theater, as for instance
among the ancient Greeks. The
medieval guilds put on mystery
plays, based on Biblical stories
but including a heavy helping of
verse and comedy. Acting was a
fairly disreputable profession in
Renaissance England— thus the
use of boys to play women’s
roles in Shakespeare’s time.
• Illusions have always been
popular; all the better if the
marks thought the trick was real.
If magic exists in your world,
maybe some magicians earn a
living as street performers.
Illusionists would likely still
exist… or even
 magician/illusionists whose act is
a mixture of real and fake.
• Athletics, an obsession of
Brits, Americans and ancient
Greeks.
• Baths, popular in ancient
Rome and in the Ottoman
Empire; still highly popular in
Japan.
• Board games: the ancestor
of go was played in China 2500
years ago; chess originated in
India 1500 years ago. The earliest
known board game is the
Egyptian senet; boards have been
found in burials of 3500 BC.
Religion
You want a rel igion for your
conculture. You can come up with half
a dozen god names and call it a day.
But let’s say you want to get beyond
that.
Religion is a misleading term, because
to many people it just means
Christianity. I prefer belief system,
since it covers things that act like
religions but don’t seem to fall under
the term, like Confucianism or
communism.
Everyone has a belief system, just like
everyone has a skeleton. It’s not a bad
thing, really. You don’t want to go
through life believing nothing, or
believing everything, any more than
you want to toss out your skeleton.
The best practice for creating a religion
is to have one of your own. It’s hard to
imagine what people get out of
worshipping and praying if you’ve
never done it— though I’ll do my best
to explain below.
For Christians: Is it OK to
create a religion?
It’s just as OK a creating a
fictional villain. A Christian
writer like G.K. Chesterton wrote
a lot about murderers and
thieves; he didn’t in the least
approve of murder or theft, nor
did he worry that his stories
would tempt his readers to these
sins. No one’s going to join your
fictional religion.

I hope you’ll approach your

fictional religions, like your
villains, with Christian
compassion. We’re all fallen, but
likewise there are glimpses of
the Light everywhere. A fictional
religion that simply worships
evil is as cheap and unconvincing
as a fictional villain that cackles
and curls his moustache.

The more interesting question

may be, how do you
convincingly put God into a
fantasy world? Clearly God
would want to save all fallen
worlds. C.S. Lewis answered this
question in two different but
equally valid ways: in Narnia, he
assumed that God would choose
another incarnation in order to
redeem that world’s sin; in
Perelandra he assumed that the
incarnation of Jesus was valid for
the whole universe.

Some Christian fantasy writers

have appealed to both Christians
and non-Christians by a certain
indirection. The name of God is
never mentioned in The Lord of
the Rings; you have to read
Tolkien’s other works to
understand the couple of
references to ‘the One’. Diane
Duane uses the same term, with
the ‘Lone Power’ standing in for
Satan. Of course there’s nothing
wrong with being direct, but you
may end up preaching only to the
converted.

I recommend Chesterton’s The

Everlasting Man as a overview
of religions from a Christian
perspective, full of unusual
insights, and Dorothy L. Sayers’
The Mind of the Maker as an
essential exploration of both the
Trinity and the nature of artistic
creation. J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay
“On Fairy Stories” is a spirited
defense both of fantasy and of
subcreation.

For atheists: How to create

something you despise
My advice to atheists is about the
same as for Christians: avoid
cheap caricatures. Religions are
not just cabals of nasty old men
plotting the enslavement of
others. I admire the amazing
invention and rip-roaring pace of
Philip Pullman’s fantasies, but
his Magisterium has a bit too
much of the James Bond Villain
about it. (On the other hand his
Marisa Coulter is a model for
how to create villains; she’s a
genuinely threatening character
but her relationship with the
main character, Lyra, is as much
love as antagonism.)

Beyond that, just read the

chapter, especially the next
section, which goes into much
more detail on what belief
systems are and addresses some
common misconceptions about
them.
What are they for?
Let’s start by looking at what belief
systems do. They go far beyond telling
stories about God or the gods.

Framework for thought a

action
Above all, a belief system is a mental
framework— that’s why I compared it
to a skeleton. It provides a model or
sketch of the universe we live in, sets
out the laws of that model, and
suggests how it affects us and how to
affect it back. It tells what our purpose
is, how people should treat each other,
when we’re messing up and what to do
about it.
It’s silly to say that atheism is a
religion, but an atheist has a belief
system. A commitment to “science” is
a value and requires a strong belief
(which any philosopher since Hume
could easily tear apart) in the
objectivity of the outside world and in
its freedom from meddling deities.
Very likely— indeed, hopefully— the
atheist also has moral values, some of
which are moral axioms which can’t be
reduced to any other moral principle.
Most belief systems go far beyond this,
of course. Think of a fundamentalist
Christian, or a Communist, or a talk
radio host. They have an answer for
everything, and everything can be put
in its place. Don’t think of belief
systems as extreme, however. Mild
Anglicanism, or a bemused
eclecticism, are also perfectly valid
belief systems, and more typical of
belief systems worldwide.
Why not have the minimum possible
framework and work out everything
else as you go? Well, this is like saying
everyone should build their own cars
and write their own operating systems.
Following an existing system—
especially the one that’s a norm in your
community— is an immense time-
saver. Most people don’t want their
metaphysics and morality up in the air.

Support for the social system

Belief systems provide a justification
for the prevailing social system—
indeed, the two are hard to disentangle.
In general, religions are going to be big
on obedience to authority, property
rights, respect for holy things, treating
people peacefully, not stealing other
people’s sex partners, not running with
scissors, etc.
If you have a dramatically different
society, its belief systems should
match. On Almea, for instance, I have
ktuvok empires, where one sapient
species, the ktuvoks, dominates a much
larger mass of humans. Naturally the
religions of these realms depict the
ktuvoks as holy and superior creatures,
preach obedience to them, and warn
about the dangerous lies of humans
who think they can govern themselves.
Less dramatically, if a culture
oppresses women or holds slaves, its
belief systems will explain why that is
just and true— just as most modern
belief systems explain why it’s not.
I should that add that a reflexive
conservativism isn’t an entirely bad
thing. Most new ideas are bad, and
sticking to the old ones saves the time
needed to prove them wrong or to try
them and have them fail.

Call for change

I must immediately add that belief
systems also justify change, and
sometimes rebellion. This can happen
in several ways:
• A society which has
drifted far from its ideals will
find its very belief system
exhorting reform, or even
revolution. Societies rarely live
up to their ideals; a religious case
can always be made for change.
• The belief systems started
in historical times all have origin
stories— they had to challenge
existing society. Jesus was
crucified, Muhammad was
chased out of Mecca, the Shi‘ites
began when the descendents of
Ali were denied power, the
Communists wished to sweep
away the bourgeois who had only
just elbowed their way into
 power themselves. All these
belief systems therefore have, not
far buried in their DNA, models
for rebellion.
• Society can change, and
the religion changes in response
— despite itself, perhaps, but
sincerely. Catholicism eventually
made its peace with Galileo (and
indeed with Darwin).
In the U.S., churches were at the
forefront of abolition and the civil
rights movement— Martin Luther King
Jr. was a pastor. When Britain threw
out its king, a hundred years before the
French Revolution, zealous Protestants
were the firebrands. Peasant rebellions
often coalesced around a charismatic
religious leader. The Messianic hopes
in 1st century Palestine, part of the
background of Christianity, were in
part driven by the desire for liberation
from Roman rule. The founder of the
Míng dynasty, Zhū Yuánzhāng,
belonged to a Buddhist secret society,
the White Lotus.
There can be retrogressive religious
movements too, of course. But before
modern times, if any group was
agitating for peace, justice, or national
liberation, it was more likely than not
to be a strong religious movement.

Difficult social values

Marvin Harris has argued that belief
systems provide support for difficult
social values— those that don’t come
naturally. Religions don’t have to urge
men to look at pretty girls, or to eat
chocolate. Examples:
• Hinduism urges poor
peasants to worship their cows.
This seems irrational to
Westerners, but in fact it’s quite
sensible: the cow is the basis for
the peasant’s prosperity— it
provides milk and butter, dung
for fuel and fertilizer, and bears
the oxen needed for plowing—
but all that is easy to forget if the
monsoons fail and there’s a
drought. It’s mighty tempting to
eat the cow then— but if he does
so, the peasant is ruined.
 Religious sanction helps reduce
the temptation.
• Judaism and Islam ban the
eating of pork. This doesn’t make
much sense in Europe, but it does
in the arid Middle East, where
pigs would compete directly with
human beings for food, and
where their instinct to keep their
skin wet assumes unsanitary
forms.
• Among the Bushmen of
the Kalahari, excessive ardor for
hunting is discouraged. “When a
young man kills much meat he
begins to think of himself as a
chief... we cannot accept this,”
one explains. “We refuse one
 who boasts, for someday his
pride will make him kill
somebody. So we always speak
of his meat as worthless.” The
reason for this cultural more is
not hard to find: the Kalahari is a
desert. Overhunting would
produce a short-term feast and
then starvation.
• Why do so many religions
have strictures about sex? There
are many answers, but some of
the best are the most obvious:
venereal disease and pregnancy.
Both are highly dangerous in a
premodern society and sufficient
justification for putting a lid on
our natural desire for free sex.
 It’s not coincidence that we’ve
rebelled against these strictures
precisely in a period where
antibiotics and birth control have
funda-mentally changed the
danger level.

Practical help
Much of this so far is abstract. People
want practical help too, in areas where
medicines or machines are of no use.
They want to cast or counter curses, to
get healed, to meet lovers, to have
babies, to have rain, to find lost
objects, to protect their homes, to hear
from the dead. And where needs exist,
providers will come.
No one likes disappointment, and
belief systems will go to great lengths
to deliver on what they promise. In
some American Indian religions, for
instance, all boys coming of age must
experience a spiritual vision. A matter
of such importance is hardly left to
chance; drugs, hunger, and physical
exhaustion help ensure that that vision
will come.
In a fantasy world, such beliefs may
not be illusory. This raises an
interesting question: would the
religions look any different? I suspect
the answer is, not much. Actual
believers don’t feel that they lack for
evidence or that their gods are
unresponsive.
The requested aid need not be
supernatural. In the slums of Brazil,
evangelical and charismatic churches
expand by addressing people’s
immediate needs— how to deal with
alcoholism or drug addiction, how to
get jobs and get along with their
families. Islamic fundamentalists build
support by running schools and
charities. Many universities and
hospitals in the West had their start as
religious projects.
More abstractly, the belief system
offers heuristics for mental and social
life. Richard Feynman gives an
example of a scientific heuristic:
distrust the first or last data point in a
series. If that data was better, there’d
be more points beyond it. It’s not a
physical law, it’s just a rule of thumb
backed by lots of experience. For
examples of moral heuristics, consider
the idea of forgiveness, or the notion
that hubris will lead to disaster, or the
idea that radical renunciation fosters
enlightenment.

Personal growth
On a more personal level, belief
systems can offer disciplines for
personal growth— meditation,
introspection, confession, prayer and
fasting, visions, the interpretation of
dreams, recovery from neurosis, the
perfection of virtues.
This shouldn’t be hard to understand,
as these are fascinations even today—
though traditional religions aren’t the
only suppliers in the market. If these
things still seem odd, think about it this
way:
• Mental peace really helps.
It’s useful to still that inner voice
that insists on worrying,
resenting, or replaying painful
memories. To put it bluntly, our
culture abounds in other ways to
relax. Premodern cultures didn’t
have iPods, DVDs, mystery
novels, TV, video games, and
sleep pills.
• We still believe in the
cultivation of will— if you want
to give up smoking, maintain an
exercise program, learn a
 language, or run a marathon, you
must learn discipline and a
certain acceptance of pain for
future good. “No pain, no gain”,
we say. Once you start down this
path, it’s not hard to feel that
with even more pain you’ll get
even more gain.

Worship and wonder

Belief systems in general satisfy the
sense of wonder— in religions per se,
this may take the form of worship. A
healthy religion appeals not merely to
the conscience but to the heart; it offers
marvels and poetry as well as duties
and laws; it stimulates love and
creativity. In cultures racked with
violence, pestilence, and injustice, it is
a refuge for contemplation, gentleness,
scholarship, and art.

Memetic effects
There’s very little to be said for
memes— for why, see the essay on my
site, zompist.com— but memetics
offers two genuine insights.
First, belief systems develop an
immune system. Among the beliefs
are a set designed to counter
backsliding and skepticism. There are
explanations why other beliefs are
wrong, warnings that temptations will
come, and predictions of unhappiness
outside the fold. Socially, the believers
have a tendency to isolate themselves,
avoid outside messages, and ostracize
heretics.
Thus Christianity explains that all
other gods are false. Atheism
simplifies further by deleting the word
‘other’. Communism posits the
dialectic, which elaborates ideologies
of greater and greater complexity—
ending in communism itself, where the
process stops. Movement conservatives
turn harshly on anyone who criticizes
any aspect of movement doctrine or its
most popular adherents. Bahaiism
more subtly declares that any truth
found in other religions is already
incorporated in itself.
Such doctrines are hardly intellectually
defensible; they exist to protect the
belief system from deterioration. A
religion just isn’t going to last very
long if it says “believe as you like, it’s
all good.”
Memes also offer an explanation for
zeal. Extreme beliefs have an
advantage, because they provide
motivation for propagating them. It’s
the zealots who look for converts and
punish apostates. Above all they
expend considerable effort to pass their
beliefs to their children.
A denomination can become moderate
and tolerant, and that may keep its
members happy. But their very
moderation makes them unlikely to
look for followers and diffident about
keeping wayward teenagers in the faith.
Thus the slow decline of moderate
denom-inations in the U.S.
At the same time, there are factors that
mitigate zealotry— the principal one
being the general cussedness of human
beings. Zealots can intimidate an entire
population (cf. Saudi Arabia, or
Stalinism); but most people are not
interested in being zealots. The normal
state of a religion is fervor on the part
of a few, quiet acceptance on the part
of the majority.

The evidence of narrative

Most belief systems, including non-
religious ones, do have one fatal flaw:
they’re not falsifiable. This is the
secret motor of science— scientists
ideally highlight contrary evidence,
and disdain a hypothesis that can’t be
tested. The crackpot, by contrast, only
looks for confirmation. He not only
ignores or denies evidence against his
theory, but modifies his theory such
that it can never be disproved.
Some beliefs in a belief system may be
derived and debated rationally. Others
can’t be, because they’re axiomatic—
basic morality can’t be derived from
logical propositions, for instance,
because no logical operation can turn
an is into an ought. But a large chunk
of a belief system isn’t designed to be
falsifiable.
Belief systems are evaluated by
another standard, which we may call
narrative coherency. Does it make a
good story? Does it hold together, does
it shed light on the world and inside
our heads, does it satisfy our sense of
wonder and our sense of justice?
Stories are still appreciated this way;
also much of politics, and even
philosophical arguments. No one can
prove that libertarianism or Buddhism
or free will are right or wrong— all we
can do is provide the best possible
narrative.
In some ways that’s what this book is
about: creating a conworld with
narrative coherency.
To a modern ear, myths are obviously
false because they’re made-up stories.
To their original hearers, I think they
seemed true for almost the same
reason: how can someone tell a story at
all unless it was dictated by a god?

Easy assumptions
Many conreligions are too closely
modeled on Christianity— whether as
it is or as it’s perceived by outsiders.

Religion = Catholicism
Catholicism makes a great model: a
powerful centralized organization,
gorgeous stone cathedrals, holy water,
incense and chanting, priests in
distinctive robes and funny hats. If you
like it, it’s solid, homey, and grand; if
you don’t, there’s a sinister
undercurrent to draw on, from self-
mortification to the Inquisition.
But just as fantasy writers again and
again end up with pseudo-European
monarchies, they keep imitating
Catholicism. The only religion that’s
like Catholicism is Catholicism;
religions don’t have to share any of its
attributes.

Exclusivity
The Abrahamic God is a jealous God;
his believers aren’t just prohibited
from worshipping other gods; they’re
not supposed to believe they even exist.
Mixing your religions is a decided no-
no.
The atmosphere is far different in East
Asia, where people have no trouble
following multiple religious traditions
at once. The approach of Chinese
intellectuals was to look over
everyone’s ideas, from all the major
schools, and select the best of each.
This should put into perspective
intriguing events such as Kublai Khan
asking for a hundred Christian scholars
to come explain their doctrines in Yuán
China. Christians hearing about this
regret the lost opportunity: China could
have become a Christian country! Not
likely; Kublai was simply inviting
more viewpoints to the table.
Ancient Greece and Rome were much
more like the East than like our culture.
There was always room for one more
cult.

The nature of faith

Unbelievers often misunderstand the
nature of faith. To admire faith as a
virtue seems repellent to them— it
sounds like a glorification of believing
things against the dictates of reason
and evidence. But this is a parody of
faith, and entirely irrelevant to the
premodern world.
Paul’s letters show some tension
between Greek rationalism and
Christian belief, but this was not a war
between “science and religion”, more a
reflection of a cultural gap: like the
Chinese, the ancient Greeks just didn’t
get the mindset of uncompromising,
exclusive declarations about God.
In the 13C, Thomas Aquinas devised a
brilliant synthesis of Christianity with
Aristotelian rationalism. Reason was a
godly virtue; its Greek name, logos,
was associated with Jesus. The
universities of the Middle Ages revived
ancient learning (much of it via Arab
intermediaries); the Scholastics’ use of
dialectical reasoning, heuristics such as
Occam’s Razor, and the empirical
focus of clerics like Albertus Magnus
and Roger Bacon, all prepared the
ground for modern science. (Academic
robes even derive from ecclesiastical
ones.)
It’s a commonplace that science makes
belief harder. But it doesn’t— for
believers. The believer has made his
peace with the apparent conflicts.
Some just deny them; some do their
best to accept scientific facts without
denying their faith; some have
elaborate answers; some just don’t
care. But what’s quite wrong is to
imagine that believers must constantly
beat down or suppress contrary
evidence. Quite the opposite: for a
believer, the world is full of
confirmations of their beliefs and
reminders of unbelievers’ foolishness.
Neil Gaiman explains this nicely:
I noticed a long time ago that the
Universe rewards belief systems.
It doesn't really matter what you
 believe— it'll be there and
waiting for you if you go and
look for it. Decide the universe
is, say, run by secret enormous
teddy bears, and I can guarantee
you'll immediately start running
across evidence that this is true.
It’s probably just confirmation bias;
but if you want to dismiss people’s
ideas because of that, remember that it
applies to whatever you believe, too.
C.S. Lewis gives us a good way to
think about faith: it’s the same thing
we offer our friends or lovers. Once
you decide to make a friend, or get
married, you don’t subject them to
careful laboratory tests, even if you’re
a positivist. You give them the benefit
of the doubt. You can take all the care
you want converting, but once you’ve
accepted your God or god, you give
them the same trust.
At the same time, Christianity tells us
that faith must be practiced, that if you
don’t make an effort to keep your
beliefs straight in your mind, you’ll
lose them. This is a heuristic, an
observation made from generations of
spiritual experience. Acquiring a belief
system is like learning a language: you
have to keep it up, not because it’s
inherently hard to swallow but because
it’s a complicated set of beliefs and
practices. Unbelief, by contrast,
requires no maintenance, just as if you
don’t know French you don’t have to
practice not knowing it.

Beliefs never change

Another commonplace, both among
believers and unbelievers, is that belief
systems never change. Believers are
proud of their constancy, unbelievers
disdainful of it. But they’re both
wrong: belief systems constantly
evolve, albeit slowly.
• Political changes are easily
swallowed. In 1776 the Anglican
church in America fairly
painlessly changed into the
Episcopal church, giving up its
allegiance to the Crown and
indeed its belief in crowns at all.
 Early Christianity went
from a sullen hostility to the
Roman Empire (which after all
had crucified its founder as a
rebel and periodically persecuted
it), to a thorough intertwining of
church and empire. No one
seemed to remember the “Rome
is Babylon” message once the
emperors were painting Christian
symbols on the army’s shields.
• Scientific challenges are
accepted, sooner or later.
Copernicus was at first accepted
as a methodological convenience,
then rejected as an offense
against scripture, and finally
quietly accepted— the fundiest
 fundamentalist doesn’t insist on
an unmoving Earth today.
• Social changes are
accepted too, though it may take
generations. Slavery was fully
accepted by every writer in the
Bible and by Christians for many
centuries; it’s been entirely
rejected. Racism used to be
justified by the story of Ham, son
of Noah, but racism is no longer
part of theology. In the last half
century or so, conservative
Christians have accepted things
their predecessors shuddered at:
female pastors, rock music,
makeup.
It goes deeper than that:
read the Mosaic Law, and it’s
striking how much of it
Christians don’t even dream of
applying. Even if they believe
it’s the Word of God, they’re not
going to stone adulterers, keep
kosher, worry about mixing
cloths, forbid interest, forgive all
debts in Jubilee years, sacrifice
animals, or check for leprous
walls. For that matter, not many
will follow the New Testament
and eschew violent retaliation,
never utter verbal abuse, avoid
marriage, have multiple elders in
a house church, keep their money
in common, give all they have to
the poor, or have women keep
 silent in church.
Don’t make the opposite error and
consider that belief systems are fickle
and quickly jettison anything
inconvenient. Many of these changes
occasioned much struggle and debate,
and were solved not so much by people
changing their mind as by the previous
generation dying off.

Beliefs = practice
I once read a book which asserted that
religious taboos against masturbation,
birth control, and oral sex led their
adherents to vaginal sex only and the
resulting high birth rates. The author
forgot that religious prohibitions aren’t
always obeyed, and that beliefs don’t
always translate into action.
Frequent and fervent admonitions, in
fact, are pretty good evidence that the
precept is frequently violated. We use
this in linguistics, in fact—
prescriptivists’ complaints about some
pronunciation or word misuse may be
the first evidence that the
pronunciation or the meaning has in
fact changed.
Sometimes an explicit rule has the
opposite of its intended effect. The
abortion rate is far higher among U.S.
Christians than among atheistic
Swedes. There are many reasons, but
one is that believers overemphasize the
easiness of following rules. In theory
they disapprove of abortion more than
fornication. But they get so hung up on
the “no sex” rule that they reject
attempts to reduce abortion by
providing information about sex and
birth control. They believe so firmly
that the abstinence message should
work that they can’t face why it
doesn’t.
Don’t just invent the rules of your
religion; think about which ones are
really followed. This can vary by sex
or class... often in eccentric ways.
Don’t assume the lower classes are
always laxer; sometimes they’re
shocked at the wild ways of their
betters.

The dustbin of history

S.f. is often written by technophiles
who think religion should have
disappeared long ago. But religion is
still hovering around. without making
any definitive move toward the exit.
It’s human nature, in part— we have a
spiritual side that keeps coming out. In
American society, strong forms of
Christianity are still with us, but there
are plenty of alternatives— Buddhism,
pagan revivals, reverence for the Earth,
crystals, aliens.
To a large extent, the destructive fervor
that once attached to religions now
attaches to politics. Fascism and
communism are the big examples and
the big killers. But the unrestrained
anger of contemporary politics shows
that belief systems are alive and well.
More respectably, it’s hard to picture a
prosperous and progressive society that
isn’t supported by a belief system— or
several of them. Consider the following
propositions:
• Human beings aren’t bags
of meat; they’re persons, with a
right to exist and be prosperous.
• Social systems should
produce prosperity and happiness
for their citizens.
• People should be free from
injustice, oppression, and
arbitrary interference. The
community may impose rules,
but greater intrusions require
 greater justifications.
• The common habitat— our
Earth, while we’re restricted to it
— must be preserved, both to
support the human population
and for its own sake.
• Truth should never be
feared, and we wish to know as
much as we can about the
universe. The scientific method
is the best guide to the physical
world.
These are all moral propositions,
completely unprovable by science. But
a society which explicitly rejected
them in belief or in practice would be
miserable and ultimately destructive.
And because humans can be
dunderheads, it would be better to go
beyond the minimal beliefs necessary.
These propositions should have a wide
margin of error: maximal definitions of
“human beings”, “happiness”,
“science”, etc. That’s why we have
things like burial customs. Humans
shouldn’t become bags of meat the
moment they die; that’s too close to
deciding that some of them are
meatbags while still alive.

Beliefs
To describe a belief system you’ll want
to describe its beliefs. This may be a
bit Christocentric: not all religions
have a systematic theology. What
teachings they do have might be given
only to an elite, or might not be very
important to the believer— arguably
paganism is more about what you do
than what you think.
Still, the belief system is likely to have
at least a strong opinion on the
following topics.

Cosmology
What’s the overall structure of the
universe? What are those bright lights
in the sky? What is under the ground
and behind the clouds? What other
planes are there?
Religions often feature at least one
‘other world’, close enough to our
world to affect it, with its own laws.
Christianity has heaven and hell. Some
Native American religions have a
series of worlds arranged vertically... at
some point humanity climbed out of
the previous world from a cave, and
when we die we ascend to the next one.
Speaking as a conworlder, the
visualization of these worlds is on the
whole unimpressive. They’re either
foggy (because spirit is a little like the
airiest visible substance we know,
smoke or fog), or a preternaturally
bright and summery copy of the natural
world.
Well, it’s hard to describe what we’ve
never seen. But here’s some different
approaches:
• Add a dimension. The
supernatural world should be
deeper and richer than our own,
as our 3-D world is richer than a
flat picture.
(The classic description of
2-D life is Edwin Abbott’s
Flatland; an excellent evocation
of the fourth dimension is Rudy
Rucker’s Spaceland.)
• Spirits are minds, so the
spiritual world should have the
attributes of mental thoughts and
images: infinitely malleable,
often wild and lawless, able to
switch locations instantly, easily
 lost. My dreams, at least, come
with meanings attached, with no
need of exposition: I just know
who everyone is, what the
shadowy threats are, what the
evil ones are after.
• Perhaps the imagery of a
spiritual world is based on
spirits’ recollections of the
natural world; but as spirits from
all worlds interact, they share
images, so the spiritual world has
aspects of highly alien worlds.
• Physics suggests that
energy is quantized, and possibly
time and space as well; I wonder
if the universe is a cellular
automaton run on a
 hyperdimensional supercomputer
by some bored grad student. If
we don’t generate some
interesting patterns soon he’s
going to turn it off.
Premodern religions’ attitudes toward
matter are generally negative. This
was not a matter of dour Christians and
carefree pagans; if anything orthodox
Christianity was unusually pro-matter,
asserting that as God created the world,
the physical world was good. More
typical was the Gnostic position that
matter is evil. The Hindu view that the
world is maya (illusion), and the
Buddhist rejection of desire, are along
the same lines.
This does much to explain why many
religions exalt ordeals, physical
deprivation, even self-harm: the
attachment to base matter must be
attacked.
Religions may also classify matter into
clean and unclean, and establish
elaborate rules for dealing with and
eliminating uncleanness, a concept
both physical and moral. Isabel
Fonseca’s description of Gypsy
customs is relevant here— Gypsies
have a very strong sense of cleanliness,
are obsessed with washing, and
disgusted with non-Gypsy customs like
keeping pets in the house. Yet their
horror of uncleanliness is not at all
triggered by squalid clothing.
Historicism
Cosmologies may extend over time as
well as space, giving an outline of the
history of the universe: how it was
created, what sort of times preceded
our own, what comes next, how
everything ends.
Creation myths face the metaphysical
question of how to make something out
of nothing; the usual expedient is that
something, probably something bland
and seemingly worthless, must have
already existed. (Modern science
achieves the neat trick of allowing
particle-antiparticle pairs to arise from
literally nothing; the vacuum boils with
detectable energy. The whole universe
may have arisen from one super-
expanded blip. But this only pushes the
question back one step: where did the
physical laws come from that allow
this?)
Many religions posited a Golden Age
at the beginning and a slow decline
afterward. This may sound depressing,
but C.S. Lewis thinks otherwise:
Historically as well as
cosmically, medieval man stood
at the foot of a stairway; looking
up, he felt delight. The backward,
like the upward, glance
exhilarated him with the
pleasures of admiration. ...The
saints looked down on one’s
spiritual life, the kings, sages,
 and warriors on one’s secular
life, the great lovers of old on
one’s amours, to foster,
encourage, and instruct... One
had one’s place, however modest,
in a great succession; one need be
neither proud nor lonely. (The
Discarded Image)
Our own belief systems assume
progress— a steady march from the
amoeba to the australopithecus to the
agnostic. Christians more than ever
seem fascinated by eschatology,
compiling prophecies and writing
fantasy about the end times.
Cyclical cosmologies have a certain
romantic appeal, though if the cycle is
long enough it’s hard to get any
narrative use out of it. E.R. Eddison’s
The Worm Ouroboros in effect presents
a four-year cycle.

The soul
Consider these two sets of phenomena:
organs and flesh thoughts and m
death, decay, and pain meaning
growing plants ideas, facts, and
preparing and eating foodlove
gravity anger, fear, and
weather stories
earth and water poetry

All of these are everyday human

experiences, yet the two columns are
like two different and incommensurate
worlds. Very little that we know about
the first column, even today, sheds any
light on the second, except by analogy.
Not surprisingly, many belief systems
separate these two aspects of our lives
as body and spirit. The soul or spirit is
usually judged to be superior, partly
because it seems to be us— we have a
picture of living in the body, which the
soul controls much as a driver controls
a vehicle. The native Germanic word
was ghost; which thus become the
name for the thing that sticks around
after death minus its body; also cf.
Holy Ghost, the older name for the
Holy Spirit.
Religions may elaborate this picture,
telling a story about where the spirit
comes from (if it’s separate from the
body, either it had to enter the body or
be created there between conception
and birth) and what happens to it after
death:
• it’s lost
• it stays around as a sad
little incorporeal thing— the
Greek ‘shades’
• it is transferred to a new
body (reincarnation)
• it hangs around till God
creates a new body in a new
perfect world (the Christian
Resurrection)
 • it moves on to another
plane, with or without a new
body to match; some spirits may
hang around our world to see to
unfinished business
• it’s reabsorbed into the
Universal Soul (the ultimate goal
in Buddhism)
• aliens capture it just before
death, keeping it in an enormous
library, or perhaps giving it a
virtual world to roam in
Once you have the idea of the spirit,
it’s easy to imagine purely spiritual
beings like angels, creatures who either
have no body or can temporarily
manufacture one when they must
interact with the physical world.
Medieval Christians actually
distinguished three levels of
immaterial soul:
• the Vegetative, which as
its name implies is shared with
plants; its powers include
nutrition, growth, and
propagation
• the Sensitive, which is
shared with animals; these add
the senses and the power of
movement
• the Rational, which man
alone among the animals has
A strict separation of body and soul—
dualism— is no longer respectable in
philosophy. It seems all too likely that
our minds are only a very strange
epiphenomenon of our brains. We can
largely blame this on science, which
has found most of life explainable
without recourse to spirits or creators.
It’s well to remember sometimes that
science can’t yet explain everything
about our minds. Its track record is
good; on the other hand, the feeling
that science already explains 99% of
phenomena and the rest will turn out to
be trivial was maintained by Victorian
physicists and turned out to be quite
wrong. That last 1% always proves
larger than it looks.
As a corollary, cultures without
modern science are less likely to have
materialistic or monistic philosophies.
Philosophy alone can’t convincingly
explain why a corpse is different from
a living animal.

Ethics
One of the major purposes of a belief
system is to provide a moral
framework... especially for those things
that get in the way of our baser desires.
We often evaluate belief systems
morally... but that only means that we
judge them according to our belief
system. If we find earlier systems
cruel, racist, sexist, authoritarian, and
superstitious, that’s because they
conflict with our own values. From
their own point of view, we’d seem to
be arrogant, libertine, appallingly
materialistic, full of disrespect and
blasphemy.
If you want to outline a moral system,
the most convincing method is
probably to give your own. You don’t
have to feign anything, and your
invented sages can speak with your
own passion. But obviously you can
make them disagree with you too—
even explore a set of positions you
abhor.
Marvin Harris makes a provocative
point about universal ethical
religions, such as Christianity,
Confucianism, and Buddhism: all
appeared and flourished in empires,
and made them function more
smoothly. Spiritualizing poverty— e.g.
Buddhism “convert[ing] the de facto
vegetarianism of the semi-starved
peasants into a spiritual blessing” as
Harris puts it— reduced demands to
actually improve living standards. At
the same time, a call for compassion
and mercy towards the weak would to
some extent reduce their grievances
and sense of oppression.
Don’t just list rules; think about how
they conflict. The ordering of rules can
have a large impact on the system.
George Lakoff (in Moral Politics) has
analyzed the disagreements between
liberals and conservatives as due in
part to a different ordering of the
virtues of compassion and obedience to
authority.
How much are your rules actually
followed? Which rules are insisted on
but widely violated? Which ones are
winked at?
Let’s look at some examples.

Confucian morality
Confucian morality can be organized
by three key concepts:
• Rén, compassion or
humaneness. It was specially
concerned with person-to-person
relationships, especially father to
son, elder to younger brother,
husband to wife, elder to junior,
 and ruler to subject. The junior
partner is expected to be
respectful and loyal; the senior to
be kind and benevolent.
• Lǐ, ritual or social norms.
A Ministry of Rites was one of
the six ministries of imperial
China, in charge of state
ceremonies, but the word also
applied to everyday behavior.
The basic idea was that training
the body to do things correctly
would also train the mind.
• Yì, righteousness or correct
action. Confucius recognized that
this might conflict with rén; he
gives the example of a man who
reported his thieving father to the
 authorities— correct according to
yì, but a violation of rén.

Endajué
In Endajué, a religion of Almea, the
vices are organized into opposing
pairs:
• theft (gonaudo) vs. avarice
(dusrosmeludo)
• perversion (payjuacudo)
vs. puritanism (xezidaudo)
• aggression (xwemeludo)
vs. cowardice (dzismelic)
• tyranny (jusudo) vs.
lawlessness (kuvetudo)
• servility (edemudo) vs.
 disrespect (xaušmelačudo)
• selfishness (dzuxešudo) vs.
conformity (dzurodudo)
• foolishness (bodusaudo)
vs. cynicism (ezešindudo)
Righteousness consists of navigating a
path between the errors on either side
— a more sophisticated attitude than
creating binary oppositions.

Jippirasti
In another Almean religion, Jippirasti,
the overriding concept is uncleanliness,
istuja, which is prototypically physical
dirt, but also includes spiritual or
moral dirt. The prophet Babur provided
35 categories of istuja:
• Blood
• Excrement
• Huj: phlegm, snot, vomit,
discharges from disease, etc.
• Contact with a corpse,
including its clothes; eating one,
of course, was right out
• Sleeping in a room where
animals are kept
• Eating the intestines,
bones, or feet of animals
• Eating insects, shellfish,
frogs, or animals which eat
carrion (e.g. crows, coyotes)
• Killing an animal or a
human “slowly enough to cause
pain” (the killing blow or stroke
must be quick and smooth)
• Malformed animals or
children (e.g. multiple limbs,
hermaphrodites)
• Indecent language
• Rudeness
• Ingratitude
• Attending a pagan
ceremony, or entering a pagan
temple
• Eating food sacrificed to
pagan gods
• Magic
• Tattoos, earrings, body
paint, and other bodily
modification (abominable
because the Munkhâshi favored
these)
• Betraying a comrade, or
 running away in battle
• Dropping one’s weapon
• Fighting with a fsava
member
• Theft
• Disinheriting one’s sister
• Drunkenness
• Rape (literally igejruda,
sex with a woman outside her
bed, thus, uninvited)
• Sex with children (defined
as under 12) or animals
• Sex with more than one
woman at once
• Sex with a woman in one’s
own fsava (clan)
• Sex between men, except
during war, or as part of an
 expiation
• Sex with a pagan
• Mixed-sex nudity, except
in the course of licit sex
• Bigamy
• Gossip
• Causing division in the tej
(the Jippirasti community)
• Violating a fast
• Blasphemy
• The entire period of
expiation (igosota)— that is, a
person undertaking an igosota is
unclean

Jippirasti was developed among

nomads, and therefore says little about
the sins of urban and agricultural
peoples. When it conquered such
people, theologians adapted the 35
categories to cover new offenses; e.g.
tax evasion fell under ‘causing
division’; commercial fraud under
‘rudeness’. There was also trouble with
strictures which were easy to follow on
the steppe but less so in the city (e.g.
keeping animals outside, avoiding
shellfish).

Supernatural beings
Most religions come with a roster of
supernatural beings. These can be
classified by accessibility.
• Remote father figures. In
some religions the creator is so
remote or so lofty that he’s
 effectively gone. People may
treat God or the gods like kings
— unlikely to be interested in
their problems.
• Benign helpers. These are
your go-to guys for requests,
because they’ve got time for you.
In traditional Catholicism this
role was fulfilled by the saints.
The Evangelical God is like a
friendly CEO with an open-door
policy.
People can get very
familiar with these— they can be
yelled at or cajoled; idols can be
punished for not coming through.
• Mercurial powers. These
 are beings with their own agenda,
like satyrs or the Fae. If you run
into them, the results are
unpredictable but rarely are
simply good.
• Antagonists. These are
hostile to humanity and to the
gods. At the same time there’s a
tradition of magicians being able
to control them.
Writers who don’t believe
in traditional devils and monsters
tend to move them into the
previous category, and tone down
the gods as well. Thus numinous
and alarming magical beings
become cute little fairies;
monstrous vampires become
 troubled romantics; brutal and
irredeemable orcs become gruff
tough guys.
Several writers have played with the
idea that belief creates gods— that
strong belief systems create powerful
deities, and as worshippers disappear,
the gods wane as well. I find the idea
rather annoying, partly because it
seems to both deny and accept the gods
(the gods are real, but somehow not
real in the traditional way), partly
because it trivializes them— Yemaya
no longer controls the sea, she’s merely
a sort of supernatural maritime MP for
Yorubas. But the idea has been done
very well by Neil Gaiman in American
Gods.
On the other hand, I rather like the idea
used by Georges Pichard and Jacques
Lob in their version of Ulysses, that the
Greek gods were extraterrestrials
whose wonders were all advanced
technology— e.g. when Aeolus gives
Odysseus the North Wind to propel his
ship, it’s actually a powerful jet engine.
It adds a nice sense of irony to the old
story. Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light
uses a similar idea based on Hinduism.
The Greek and Roman gods had strict
portfolios— e.g. Venus/ Aphrodite was
the goddess of love. But gods can be
characterized in other ways: types of
animals, the elements, stages of life,
planets. Or perhaps they simply have
different personalities, and you
worship the most compatible one.

Practice
What do people do following your
belief system? Here’s some
possibilities:
• Worship services. These
are the quintessential activities of
Christian churches, but not all
religions get their believers
regularly into a room.
• Sacrifice. These may be
public events; but descriptions of
ancient religions (including
ancient Judaism) indicate these
might be individual too, or
 provided as a service by priests.
• Prophecy. This was a
major function of the oracles of
Greece, and the prophets of
Israel.
• Healing. One of the most
useful powers of the gods.
• Festivals. These are more
freewheeling than a worship
service. They may be organized
around a meal, or games, or a
performance, or a procession; the
mood may be festive or repentant
or erotic.
• Ceremonies marking life
transitions: birth, puberty,
marriage, death. In Caďinorian
 paganism I posited that the major
celebration was of second
births... you didn’t want to draw
unneeded supernatural attention
to your first child.
• Discussion. People from
the Greek philosophers to Jewish
rabbis to Chinese scholars to
Quakers like to meet together to
talk or argue about their beliefs.
• Individual prayer—
personal communion with one’s
god, whether for worship,
thanksgiving, confession, or
supplication.
• Rituals of cleanliness.
Some religions seem obsessive
 about cleanliness— literally.
Robert Sapolsky suggests that
such rituals may have started
when some hand-washing
obsessive, normally ignored by
the tribe, was suddenly seen to be
proved right by some disaster.
• Spiritual disciplines:
special practices to train the body
or the mind— anything from
exercise to martial arts to
pilgrimages to meditation to self-
mortification.
• Education is often a
religious duty— after all, the
beliefs and practices must be
transmitted to the young, and you
might as well teach them other
 useful things while they’re at
your mercy.
• Renunciation. The easiest
way to distinguish yourself from
the greedy masses is to give up
something. This can range from
minor inconveniences to a simple
but comfortable life (à la Ben
Franklin) to a life of poverty.
• Evangelism, which is
characteristic of universalistic
religions, such as Christianity,
Islam, and Buddhism. Traditional
religions generally don’t see the
need.

Priests and monks

Don’t assume that all these functions
are performed by the priests. Families
often have built-in religious roles, so
rites can be performed at home. Kings
may have religious powers separate
from those of the official clerics. Other
functions might be performed by
isolated, self-selected hermits or
eccentrics.
Even if the larger nation follows your
religion, it can be useful to retire to a
small community dedicated to it. These
often begin with a particular holy
person and their followers, and can
grow into powerful and rich
institutions.
Religions may or may not be organized
above the level of a single holy place...
indeed, Christianity is unusual in
striving to keep its clerics and
doctrines under central control. Even
Islam has no such hierarchical
organization.
In perhaps all civilizations, holy people
inspire gifts from the rich and powerful
— which can lead to temples or
monasteries becoming wealthy
businesses and landowners. This may
in turn tempt the avarice of kings.

Scriptures
A religion in a civilized country will
generate an enormous and growing
body of literature. At some point it
becomes useful to distinguish one or
more works as canonical. These may be
the works of founder(s), or those works
considered earliest and most authentic.
Someone will disagree; indeed, the
need for a canon pretty much implies
disputation. The Christian canon
marked the victory of one faction of
the early church, and the rejection of
the other factions’ literature. The
Protestants rejected a large chunk of
the Catholic Old Testament.
Zhū Xī (d. 1200) codified the
Confucian canon (choosing four books
and deemphasizing the Book of
Changes) and wrote extensive
com-mentaries; in 1317 both became
the basis for the imperial examination
system and thus for scholarship and
government in China.
A new religion may accept all or part
of an existing canon and add new
works, as for instance Mormonism
does by adding the Book of Mormon to
the Christian Bible.
Ancient enough commentaries or other
literature may become important
enough to be ‘near-scripture’; e.g. the
Talmud in Judaism and the Hadith in
Islam.
The physical form of scriptures may
receive special veneration, and the very
language may become holy, and
believers of other lands expected to
learn it to properly study them.
Future belief systems
Future religions might of course
resemble past ones. But let’s look at
some of the ways they might not.
• From the French
Revolution on, we find mass
movements: political ideologies
with doctrines and foundational
works, proselytism, zeal, and
persecutions. Eric Hoffer’s The
True Believer is an excellent
survey. These have their
downsides— there’s that little
matter of World War II — but
they’re undeniably modern, and
are likely to be with us for a long
time.
• The least convincing s.f.
religions are those attached to
mundane things: atoms, rockets,
spaceways. Marvelous as they
are, we don’t worship our
refrigerators. But spiritual
feeling can attach to things out of
the ordinary, e.g. the recent fad
for crystals.
• There are always
unexplained things in life; and
probably because our brains
developed to understand social
interaction, we assign these to
actors. It used to be ghosts or fae;
now it’s aliens. When aliens are a
matter of everyday life it will be
something else— post-
 singularity essences?
• Religions affect culture,
but also broadly reflect it. God in
many ways resembles a king; the
Chinese pictured a Celestial
Bureaucracy. The individualism
of Western culture gives us
religious movements that
emphasize personal development.
Look at the overall nature of your
culture. A new colony on a
garden world might gravitate
toward a freewheeling
individualism; a tiny space
habitat might need strict
disciplines to preserve its fragile
ecosphere. But there’s likely to
be a lag, with interesting
 consequences during a time of
transition— e.g. the garden world
is settled from the space habitat.
• Westerners have seen so
many well-meaning systems lead
to catastrophe that an extreme
distrust for authority becomes
compelling. Perhaps this
becomes the prevailing ethos: a
punk rock culture. I’d imagine its
people quick to resist impositions
and ready to violence, but hard to
organize.
• Religious communities
sometimes withdraw from the
world. Space travel might let
them do so permanently: move to
an asteroid or a new colony and
 build a society in complete
conformance to their beliefs.
• From the beginning (e.g.
Wells’s Eloi; E.M. Forster’s
“The Machine Stops”) s.f. writers
have worried about humans
having it too good. Like Calvin’s
dad, they believe that adversity
builds character. This may be so;
but generally adversity just
creates misery. If we have a
deficit of character, should we
bring back the Black Death or
slavery?
I expect it’s a moot point,
though; if we eliminate one evil,
like slavery, we invent a new one,
like totalitarianism. If your
 fictional world is getting too soft,
throw a crisis at it.

Controversies
Your religion isn’t done till your
people can argue about it. Not even the
strictest religion can force agreement
on everything; and it gives a much
better idea of what people actually talk
about.
Here’s some ideas to get you started:
• Popular vs. scholarly
religion. The people are likely to
understand things differently
from the philosophers. They’re
less interested in fine theology
 and more likely to take things
literally. They may be more or
less lax than the clerics. They
may keenly resent lapses in the
clergy.
• Attitudes toward
authority. A religion is likely to
have a complicated relationship
with rulers. It might have been
persecuted once; the state’s aims
are likely to conflict with
religion at some point. Clerics
may expect the king to act as a
humble worshipper— a view the
kings will ultimately resist. The
Sunni-Shi‘a division in Islam
was originally a dynastic dispute;
the fact that the Shi‘ites lost has
 colored their attitude toward
authority ever since.
• Church vs. state. There’s
no conflict if the religion is state-
controlled or vice versa, and not
much more if the religion isn’t
organized. If church and state
have separate, powerful leaders,
there will be a fight for authority,
complicated by mutual
dependence. The situation may
dramatically change if one side is
removed (the church fragments,
the empire collapses).
• Religion vs. science— a
conflict which can really only
start when science starts
questioning key dogmas. And
 then it will probably go through
stages of wariness, furious
reaction, rear-guard
fundamentalism, and acceptance.
• Fundamentalism is not
the original state of a religion;
it’s a reaction against a
perception that people are
watering down the faith in
response to modern scholarship
or cultural laxity. Factions may
differ in what beliefs and
especially what practices are
considered fundamental.
• Attitudes toward novelties,
technological or cultural. Can
your prayer wheels be moved by
electric motors— or magic? Is
 electricity subject to rules about
fire? Are the novel foods of a
new continent clean or unclean?
Are new intoxicants allowed?
What happens if the ecological
reasons for a practice (p. 193)
change? What happens to
strictures on sex if an effective
condom is invented?
• Rivalries with other
religions. An older religion may
strive to adopt the attractive
characteristics of the new, as
paganism acquired a trinity (the
One, Mind, Soul) and an ethical
cast under the influence of
Christianity, or as Orthodox
Christianity rejected icons once it
 competed with icon-less Islam.
Confucianism and Daoism both
adopted some features of
Buddhism. Such changes can of
course cause a counter-reaction,
as the policy of iconoclasm did in
the West.
• Regions may develop
variant beliefs. This may be due
to difficulties of travel and
translation, as in the divergence
between Indian and Chinese
Buddhism; or to the popularity of
a local leader— e.g. Arius in the
4C. A region may seize upon a
religious difference to justify a
move toward independence.
• Pick a group condemned
 by the orthodox— anything from
pagan minorities to merchants to
wizards to women. Give them
some quill pens and parchment
and see what their reply is. Do
they eventually overcome the
condemnations, or at least
moderate their tone?
A cult is a dissenting faction large
enough to attract persecution.
Excessive behavior— free love, nudity,
raucous celebrations— may be enough
to invite repression, but there’s likely
to be some theoretical challenge to
orthodoxy, even if it’s as simple as
defying the existing authorities.
Magic
What’s a fantasy world without magic?
A relief, if you ask me. But fine, let’s
put some magic in.

Techno or spiritual?
In older fantasy, magic is a dread
discipline, pursued by creepy old men
in symbol-bedecked robes and
overgrown beards, and wild women
with wilder hair. They’re solitary and
distrusted— likely as not they cavort
with evil spirits and do their bidding—
and they richly return the disdain of the
masses.
Gandalf has the shadiness and the
facial foliage, but he’s on the side of
Good. But magic in LOTR is still a
spiritual force, not a type of
technology. We never really learn what
Gandalf can or can’t do. He sometimes
does some spectacular magic, but for
most problems, from trolls
immobilizing all his friends to opening
a locked dwarven gate, he relies only
on mundane cleverness.
In fact Gandalf is a maia, more or less
an angel, sent to oppose Sauron not by
the direct use of supernatural force, but
by stirring up men and elves. His
reticence to use great magic thus has a
spiritual point— opposing evil is
something men are supposed to do, not
something greater powers will do for
them.
It can be very effective in stories to
have magic be limited, and used more
by personal whim or urgent necessity
than rational calculation. If you’re after
the sense of wonder, it can be fatal to
explain too much. Neil Gaiman is very
good at getting this right; e.g.
Neverwhere is all the better for not
explaining its magical powers.
On Almea, magicians are those who
can speak with Powers, supernatural
beings— who however have no interest
in doing menial tasks for human
societies. Rather, they view the wizards
as amusing pets, or as useful servants
in otherworldly schemes of their own;
they are likely to drag the wizard into
their own world permanently sooner or
later. But a wizard of strong character
and diplomatic nature can get the
Powers to favor them with abilities of
use in the physical world.
Many writers prefer to take a more s.f.
approach, and treat magic as a form of
technology. J.K. Rowling’s Harry
Potter books are the best known
example: magic is something you learn
in school, by hard study and constant
practice; you can use it grandiosely and
routinely to light your halls, send
messages, fight your enemies, or just
get around.
In games, on tabletop or computer, it’s
hard to deal with magic in any other
way. If you’re going to use it in
combat, healing, and dungeon
exploration, it needs to work every
time and in set, specified ways.
There’s some room in between these
extremes. In sword & sorcery stories,
for instance, like Fritz Leiber’s, there
may be isolated mighty warlocks of
unpredictable power, but there are also
guilds of mages who presumably offer
their services as reliably as physicians
or assassins.

Magic systems
If you want magic as technology, I’d
urge a couple of things on you.
First, divide it into rationalized
subsystems. These might be based on
the elements (earth, air, fire, water), on
function (e.g. Oblivion’s Alteration,
Conjuration, Destruction, Illusion,
Mysticism, and Restoration), on
spiritual source (heaven, hell, chaos),
whatever.
This isn’t just because systematization
is neat; it’s to impose limits and
predictability on the system. A system
where you can do anything you want,
any time is not going to be challenging
— nor ultimately any fun. It’s better to
choose a narrower set of powers and
explore those.
Second, apply it consistently to
society. What will happen to a society
if such skills are commonplace? It
doesn’t make much sense if magic is
an everyday thing, and yet the rest of
the world is strictly 13C England. I’d
expect developments such as these:
• Light spells illuminate
private and public spaces; as a
corollary most people no longer
go to bed at dusk.
• Healing spells take the
place of medicine. (A corollary
might be a lack of anatomical
and medical knowledge: why
learn how the body functions if
the spell does all the work?)
• Magical fire supplies heat,
powers steam engines, clears
 forests.
• If you can create food, no
one needs to engage in
agriculture. Assuming magic
isn’t a new thing, that means
most people do something else:
craftwork, scholarship, war.
• If you can create or even
just purify water, many diseases
and plagues will be cured. Expect
a population explosion.
• Messaging spells allow
instant communication across the
realm— at least as much of a
revolution as telephones and the
Internet. Local lords, tiny
workshops, and weak kings
 would give way to modern states
and corporations.
• Telekinesis spells would
replace water and land transport,
enabling large-scale trade and
industry.
• War, of course, would be
waged by battlemages. In effect
armies all have cheap, powerful
ranged weapons; the results
should be comparable to the
gunpowder revolution.
• Spells affecting other
people would transform
interpersonal relationships and
government. Why argue with
people if you have a Persuade
 skill? You can toss away the rack
if you have Truthtelling.
Some writers have embraced all or
most of this, notably Rowling; also see
Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange
and Mr Norrell which finds fascinating
uses for magic in 19C England. If you
still want a medieval world, you’ll
need to limit magic in some way.
A couple ideas that don’t do the trick:
• Limit magical abilities to
5% of the population. That’s like
saying that you’ll limit the power
of airplanes by having no more
than 15 million pilots. Maybe
magic is no longer widespread
enough to replace agriculture, but
 how many mages do you need to
run a telegraph agency or a
transport firm?
• Mana is a nonrenewable
resource that can be used up in a
given area. Larry Niven got some
good stories out of this, but he
also depicted what would happen:
people would exploit the mana
fully till their magic-based
civilization collapsed.
Here’s some better ideas:
• Magicians can only be
highly exceptional individuals—
a handful in the entire kingdom,
rather than a pair in every
adventuring party. Of course, this
 idea pretty much makes all
wizards into valuable state
resources.
• Put a principled restriction
on what magic can do. For
Almea, I took an idea from
Ariosto: magic is like having a
legion of invisible, fast, yet
stupid trolls. So you can only do
what could be done with such a
tool. You can build a mansion,
search a town, or attack an army;
but you can’t create light, heal, or
persuade.
Or restrict magic to local
and temporary effects. This
would eliminate the most
society-changing spells— long-
 range communications and
transport— and prevent routine,
mechanical use of magic: you
can only light your street if the
magician stands there flicking his
wand every twenty seconds.
Or let’s say magic is a
largely energetic phenomena,
resisted by large masses. The
easiest things to affect, perhaps,
are minds and the air: illusions
and light shows are easy, but
powering a boat is a challenge,
and knocking down a castle wall
is quite impossible.
• Magic could have certain
vulnerabilities. The classic one is
that armor blocks magic, so the
 spellcaster is vulnerable to
physical force. Perhaps magical
communication and transport are
fairly easily diverted to other
destinations, making them
unreliable or benefitting the
wrong people. Maybe a skilled
battlemage can send magical
bolts back where they came
from... another reason to hedge
your bets and recruit traditional
pikemen and cavalry.
• Magic has a cost to it.
Perhaps to create the positive
energy to cast a spell, negative
energy is also released and
causes damage to the spellcaster
or to the environment. Perhaps it
 consumes ordinary resources or
requires energy that could be
devoted to other things. Perhaps
it ultimately reduces the
spellcaster’s lifespan. Maybe it
seeds the material world with
instabilities so that overuse of
magic degrades the environment.
• An extension of this:
maybe magic is tied to demonic
forces... perhaps one in a hundred
magicians becomes a monster.
The type and degree of danger
would determine whether it’s
viewed as a noxious but
necessary nuisance, like a
tanning factory, or a criminal
activity.
 • A goth extension of “no
pain no gain”: the power to do
magic comes from destruction.
Sacrificing an animal or
destroying a valuable object is
enough for everyday spells.
Harming a person— cutting off a
finger, for instance— generates
even more power, and the
strongest spells are powered by
murder.
You have something of a meta-
narrative excuse, of course, in that if
there are any magicians in the society,
your story can center on them. (The
James Bond stories don’t require that
every Englishman be a spy.) But it’s
the other details in your story or world
that really show how widely magic is
used. If you have magicians’ guilds,
magic shops, healers in every temple,
and magic items in every hidden chest,
then you have a magic-ridden world.

Magic, herblor
ancestors
Wizardry need not be the only type of
magic around. A premodern society
might have a number of disciplines and
people that aren’t even viewed as one
thing:
• Herblore— the use of
plants with special properties,
something everyone might know
something about, with more
accomplished practitioners to be
found in every village. It’s also
easy to imagine a few canny old
women and men who’ve pieced
together a few useful cantrips—
things that ease life a little
without greatly changing it.
Some very alarming
mixtures were used as cosmetics.
Táng manuals suggest bats’
brains to remove blackheads and
lead oxides to whiten the skin,
and powdered coral blown into
the nose to stop nosebleeds. (But
then, you may not want to learn
too much about the ingredients of
present-day personal hygiene
 products. It’s not all flowers.)
• Alchemy in our world was
just the early form of chemistry;
ideas like the transmutation of
elements followed the best
scientific theories of the time.
Things like distillation and the
ability to dissolve gold made it
seem like they were on the right
track, and playing around with
liquid mercury was always a
good party trick. No wonder
many fantasy worlds allow
alchemy to produce all sorts of
wonders. (In video games, there’s
something very satisfying about
being able to make use of bits of
defeated enemies— imp gall,
 troll fat.)
• Spiritual arts— martial
artists, hermits, mendicant
orders, wandering tinkerers. In
our world these have special
powers only in that they have
exceptional discipline, or
knowledge beyond the usual. But
in your milieu perhaps they attain
more spectacular powers. A
wuxia world where adepts dash
between arrows, defeat armored
opponents with bare hands, and
make hundred-foot leaps, is a
hell of a lot of fun.
(Tinkerers? For a
memorable portrait of such, see
Melquíades the Gypsy in Gabriel
 García Márquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude. If a community
is isolated enough, someone
coming from outside showing off
the latest mechanical marvels
may seem to have occult
powers.)
• Perhaps the dead don’t
wander too far from the world, at
least at first. They can be given
some interesting abilities through
not being tied to a body:
movement through solid objects,
invisibility if they choose, direct
effects on people’s minds (e.g.
fear).

See also…
Cosmology (p. 203), magic in warfare
(p. 272); and of course almost any
aspect of your world— creatures,
sustenance, economics, travel,
government— can include fantastic
and magical elements.
Technology
Wait, what? If you’re writing s.f., your
culture already includes all past
technology, and if you’re writing
fantasy, you hate technology anyway,
right? There’s still reason to work out
the tech.
First, consistency. Even if you’re just
doing one culture, it should have a
believable and coherent level of
technology. It doesn’t make a lot of
sense to add steam engines to ancient
Rome (which couldn’t produce cheap
strong steel), or throw a printing press
into a feudal society with no social
effects.
Second, accuracy. This is especially so
in military matters, such that I’ve
devoted a whole chapter to war (p.
243). But it comes up in other areas
too. A Roman atmosphere is impaired
by spinning wheels, spectacles, and
windmills; a medieval atmosphere by
ironclads, pendulum clocks, and gas
lighting.
If you want a complete world like
Almea, it shouldn’t be static. Many a
conworld doesn’t ever seem to
change... even Middle Earth doesn’t
seem to have any technological
development over the millennia, and
don’t get me started on Star Wars.
Once you look at technology, it’s
evident that human beings are
constantly modifying their culture and
environment. In dark times maybe
there’s only one major advance per
century, but things aren’t stagnant.
Medieval Europe was changing
constantly and spectacularly— 1400
was very different from 1100, which
was very different from 800.
Technological change didn’t begin in
the Renaissance.
Finally, even in s.f. you’re likely to
need some primitive cultures— for
aliens, or new colonies, or after the
apocalypse. For that matter, the
technology of the future should keep
changing; indeed, there should be a few
technological revolutions that
transform society.
A timeline
Here’s a fairly broad list of
technologies and discoveries, sorted by
the date they emerged on Earth.
I realize it may look intimidating, but
it’s intended to be detailed enough for
in-depth conworlding. The most
significant entries are bolded. There’s
also an interactive version of this chart
on the web resources page which may
be more approachable.
Round numbers for dates are intended
to signify uncertainty, and in the early
period should be taken as a lower
bound; e.g. -7000 indicates the entire
8th millennium B.C.
Archeology can be competitive, and
claims for primacy may be provisional
or disputed. I've preferred to cite fairly
sure dates; this may merely mean that
at the cited date the technique was
common enough to be preserved in the
archeological record.
Researching just about any bit of
technology, it’s striking the number of
steps involved in any advance. Lists
like this one can give the impression
that some inventor of genius, known or
unknown, created a revolution.
Sometimes they did, but more often
there was a dizzying array of early
suggestions and minor improvements.
I’ve tried to include some of these
below, but for each entry, imagine half
a dozen more not listed.
Many inventions or discoveries are
made simultaneously by different
people; classic examples include
calculus and the electric light. This is a
corollary of the previous point— a
number of people are working at the
state of the art, and several will be
poised to advance it.
-2.5M Stone tools, used mainly in
scavenging
-1.8M Hunting
-400K Fire
-200K Language
-200K Spears tipped with stone points
-90K Burial with evident ritual
meaning
-50K Clearly differentiated tools:
points, engravers, knives, drills,
piercers, needles
-50K Dogs domesticated (from
wolves)
-40K Australia settled
-33K Sculpted figurines
-30K Cave paintings
-25K Fired pottery figures
-15K Humans reach the Americas
-10K Pottery vessels
-9000 Agriculture
-9000 Copper (which appears naturally
as a pure metal) mined
-8000 Bow and arrow
-8000 Clay tokens (precursor to writing
and accounting)
-8000 Sheep, goats domesticated
-8000 Pig domesticated
-7000 Maize domesticated
-7000 Warp-weighted frame loom
-6000 Cattle domesticated
-6000 Rice domesticated
-5500 Irrigation
-5500 Copper smelting (refining from
compounds)
-5000 Chicken domesticated
-5000 Plow
-5000 Lacquer
-5000 Cotton domesticated
-4000 Barrel vault (like a long extende
arch)
-4000 Potter’s wheel
-4000 Urbanization (~1000 residents)
-4000 Wine
-4000 Donkey domesticated
-4000 Water buffalo domesticated
-3500 Beer
-3500 Horse domesticated
-3500 Alpaca domesticated
-3300 Gypsum (used as plaster)
-3200 Writing (logographic)
-3000 Kingdom
-3000 Arsenic bronze (copper alloyed
with arsenic, making it stronger
-3000 Crude distillation used for
perfumes
-3000 Silk
-3000 Wheeled vehicles
-2800 City-states (population reaches
5000)
-2800 Soap
-2600 Large-scale warfare between
cities
-2550 First structure over 100 m (a
pyramid)
-2500 Seagoing ship
-2500 Tin bronze (copper alloyed with
tin— stronger, easier to use, and
safer than arsenic)
-2500 Glass
-2500 Iron smelting; produces wrought
iron
-2500 Lime
-2500 Parchment (prepared animal
skins)
-2500 Camel domesticated
-2400 Rudder (adapted from a steering
oar)
-2400 Scaling ladder (for attacking
walled cities)
-2400 Beekeeping
-2250 First empire
-2000 Brass (alloy of copper and zinc)
-2000 Papyrus (made from cut strips o
the plant’s pith)
-2000 Quadratic equations
-2000 Written legal code
-2000 Grafting of fruit trees
-1900 “Pythagorean” theorem
-1900 Battering ram
-1800 Banks (referred to in
 Hammurabi's laws)
-1700 Consonantal alphabet
(drastically reduces symbol set
needed for writing)
-1700 Syllabary
-1600 Chariot
-1600 Water clock
-1500 Fresco painting
-1500 Glazing applied to pottery
-1500 Compound bow (made of
composite materials, much more
powerful than simple bow)
-1300 Bow lathe (turned with a rope; a
second worker cuts the wood)
-1000 Carburization (heating iron with
charcoal, which adds carbon,
then quenching in water, making
 the outer layer into steel,
allowing lasting iron weaponry
-1000 Tea
-900 Cities reach 10,000 population

-800 Letters of credit

-750 Alphabet
-700 Cavalry (effective fighting from
horseback)
-700 Ram (on ships)
-600 Coins; market economy
-510 Senatorial rule (without kings)
-500 Abacus
-500 Cast iron
-500 Stirrup
-450 Atomism
-450 Irrational numbers
-475 Crossbow (bow with mechanical
assistance to pull string)
-400 Torsion-powered catapult
-385 Academy
-300 Traction trebuchet (sling pulled
by men)
-300 Zero (used only between
symbols)
-250 Water mills (with waterwheel
and gears)
-200 Cam (translates between rotary
and linear motion)
-200 Moldboard plow (lifts and turns
a strip of soil— faster, and
moves more earth)
-200 Towns reach 100,000 size
-150 Astrolabe
-125 Precession of the equinoxes
-100 Lateen rigging
-100 Paper (first used for packing)
-100 Porcelain (pottery fired hot
enough to vitrify)

1 Glassblowing
1 Magnetic compass
10 Towns reach 250,000 size
50 Austronesians reach Polynesia
100 Clear glass
100 Groin vault (intersecting barrel
vaults; allows covering a wide
span)
100 Improved distillation apparatus
100 Treadwheel crane
100 Wheelbarrow
200 Crucible steel
400 Austronesians reach Madagascar
400 Padded horse collar (allowing
full strength of the horse)
400 Pure alcohol distilled from wine
500 Chess

500 Toilet paper

600 Windmill
600 Civil service examinations
700 Woodblock printing of text
800 Positional decimal numbering
system
800 Pure distillation
800 Three-field agriculture
820 Algebra systematized (many
specific methods date back far
 earlier)
900 Coke (purified coal used as fuel)
1000 Paper money
1000 Silkscreen printing
1040 Moveable type
1050 Gunpowder
1088 University

1100 Counterweight trebuchet

1100 Rib vaulting
1200 Nitric acid, sulfuric acid,
hydrochloric acid isolated
1200 Pole lathe loom (foot pedal
allows one-person use)
1200 Spinning wheel
1200 Wine press
1250 Joint stock company
1270 Eyeglasses
1290 Cannon
1300 Hourglass
1300 Weight-based clock
1350 Double-entry bookkeeping
1350 Arquebus (early rifle)
1375 Granular gunpowder (more
efficient and reliable)
1400 Coffee roasting and brewing
1400 Full plate armor
1400 Perspective
1400 Intercontinental exploration
1420 Patents
1430 Intaglio printing
1440 Printing press
1490 Cast cannon— far stronger than
 earlier forms, able to fire iron
balls, and above all mobile
1492 Transatlantic colony
1530 Footpedal for spinning wheel
1543 Heliocentrism mathematically
demonstrated
1550 Spring-powered watch
1590 Microscope
1600 Constancy of pendulum
1602 Stock exchange
1605 Printed newspaper
1609 Elliptical orbits of planets
1610 Telescope
1610 Jupiter's moons, phases of Venu
observed
1614 Logarithms
1620 Slide rule
1650 Air pump
1654 Pendulum clock
1654 Probability
1660 Royal Society
1663 Static electricity generator
1671 Hydrogen
1676 Microorganisms
1680 Ring bayonet
1682 Boiler safety valve
1684 Calculus
1687 Theory of gravity; laws of
motion
1700 Analysis of prisms and the
spectrum
1712 Steam engine
1730 Octant
1733 Flying shuttle
1735 Linnaean taxonomy
1740 Electric wire
1744 Leyden jar (capacitor jar; stores
static electricity)
1749 Lightning rod
1755 Carbon dioxide
1762 Marine chronometer
1764 Spinning jenny (multiple spindle
machine)
1767 Lightning shown to be electric
1772 Nitrogen
1772 Oxygen
1775 Separate condenser for steam
engine
1781 Iron bridge
1781 Uranus discovered
1783 Hot air balloon
1785 Non-blackening oil lamp
1785 Power loom
1789 Conservation of mass
1790 Chemical element theory
1790 Water understood to be hydroge
+ oxygen
1792 Gas lighting
1793 Cotton gin

1795 Dinosaur bones understood as

reptilian
1796 Smallpox vaccine
1800 Card-controlled loom
1800 Electric battery
1800 Towns reach 1,000,000 size
1801 Ceres discovered
1804 Canning
1807 Steamboat
1808 Self-loading cartridge, allowing
practical breech-loading rifles
1822 Photography
1825 Railroad
1830 Old earth theory in geology
1837 Telegraph
1843 Iron-hulled ships
1852 Elevator

1855 Mass industrial steel productio

1858 Theory of evolution
1859 Spectroscope
1861 Reconstruction of Proto-Indo-
European
1862 Machine gun
1865 Dominant and recessive genes
1866 Transatlantic cable
1867 Typewriter
1869 Periodic table
1873 Laws of electromagnetism
1876 Refrigerator
1876 Telephone
1877 Phonograph
1879 Electric light
1887 Mechanical adding machine
1888 Radio waves
1895 Automobile
1895 Motion picture
1895 X-rays
1897 Electron observed
1902 Air conditioning
1903 Airplane
1905 Relativity
1909 Plastic
1910 Antibiotics
1911 Proton
1912 Continental drift
1916 Tank
1925 Quantum mechanics
1929 Expanding universe
1929 Instrumented rocket
1930 Jet engine

1931 Electron microscope

1931 Incompleteness theorem (an
epistemological shocker)
1931 Radio astronomy
1932 Neutron
1939 Digital computer
1939 Helicopter
1945 Atomic bomb
1947 Holography
1948 Big Bang theory
1948 Programmable computer
1948 Transistor
1953 DNA decoded
1957 Laser
1957 Satellite launched
1958 Nuclear power plant
1959 Industrial robot
1961 First astronaut
1962 Communications satellite
1969 Landing on the moon
1973 Space station
1975 Personal computer
1982 Compact disk
1989 GPS
1990 World Wide Web
1997 Quantum entanglement
1997 Sheep cloned
2000 Human genome sequenced

How do I use this?

You can create a technological timeline
for your conworld, as I did for Almea.
If this sounds like work— and it is—
skip to the next section, where I
describe a simplified approach.
I included the region where each
discovery was made; note the rough
movement of the most advanced
region: roughly, the Middle East, then
China, then continental Europe, then
Britain, then the USA. That underlines
that you need at least an outline history
(p. 100) so you know where and when
to locate these pockets of innovation.
Civilizations can go backwards. Quite
a few Roman technologies— mills,
geared machinery, treadmill cranes,
stone houses, standing armies, large
cities, long-distance trade— were lost
after the fall of the western empire, and
were only slowly rediscovered.
Think about the geographical situation
of your cultures, who their neighbors
are, what resources they have. Some
inventions depend on animals: the
wheel and the moldboard plow could
only be exploited using traction
animals. The highly convoluted Greek
coastline encouraged maritime
exploration in a way that (say) the Nile
didn’t. Mining technology is likely to
start in nations with mountains. The
location of England, the Netherlands,
and Portugal on the seacoast,
obstructed from grand continental
ambitions, must have helped produce a
focus on exploration and trade. The
Islamic caliphate was a natural
crossroads, inheriting Greek knowledge
and coming into contact with India and
China.
Pure science is rarely a priority;
scientific insights in premodern times
are driven by practical concerns:
surveying, navigation, time-keeping,
ballistics, medicine. Adornment has
been a surprising driver for progress in
metallurgy, textiles, and long-distance
trade.
The order of developments may be
quite different even in terrestrial
civilizations. China had paper, silk,
porcelain, moldboard plows, the
compass, and cast iron a millennium
before Europe, while it lagged in other
areas, such as navigation, glass-
making, alphabetic writing,
jurisprudence, and republican
government. If you have several major
civilizations you may need a timeline
for each.
However, there’s a natural order to
certain discoveries. For instance:
• Gutenberg’s printing
press was an adaptation of the
agricultural screw press; the use
of moveable type required
knowledge of metal casting; the
idea of printing built on existing
woodblock and intaglio printing;
its commercial success depended
on a literate population hungry
for things to read.
• Progress in metallurgy
depends on reaching higher and
higher temperatures. Copper
melts at 1100° C; the timing of
the Bronze Age is tied to the fact
that a pottery kiln reaches about
 this heat. (Smelting copper ores
requires a lower temperature,
800° C. Even this is above the
heat generated by an open wood
fire.) Iron melts at over 1500° C,
which requires more advanced
methods— e.g. increasing the
heat using a bellows, or adding
carbon to lower the melting
point.
• Metallurgy is also driven
by the ease of purifying the
metal. Gold and silver are
unreactive, so they only have to
be chipped away from their
matrix. Most metals need to be
refined from ores. Moreover
some metals need to be alloyed
 together for strength— e.g.
copper is too soft to be used for
tools, and is alloyed with tin to
form bronze, or with zinc to form
brass. As many copper ores
contain arsenic, smiths were
subject to arsenic poisoning,
which may explain the
prevalence of lame smith-gods in
many mythologies.
• Europeans began to build
mills in large quantity around the
10C. These were great for large-
scale machinery; but new
advances in metalworking were
needed before smaller machines
such as the spinning jenny could
be created. Clockmaking was one
 of the missing links.
• Steam engines at first
only provided linear motion; this
was suitable for creating pumps
— their first major use was in
pumping water out of mines. The
key step in making them more
generally useful was to deliver
rotary motion, which allowed
them to power mills, lathes, and
railroads. Steam engines were
only made efficient with the
invention of the separate
condenser, and safe with that of
safety valves and steel boilers, all
reasons not to make too much of
the steam toys of 1C Alexandria.
Think about the social effects of any
advance.
• The printing press allowed
an enormous democratization of
knowledge, much as the Internet
has. The difference between a
library of a dozen books, all
chained to the shelf, and one of
thousands is more than just
quantity.
• Discoveries that disprove
the reigning cosmology may have
a profound disordering effect. In
technical areas, this may simply
remove roadblocks on the mind:
Lavoisier’s chemical theory
destroyed the last remnants of the
classical four elements; novas
and comets showed that the
 heavens were not changeless;
Jupiter’s moons showed that the
earth was not the center of all
rotation in the solar system. But
touch a sensitive enough spot and
the whole edifice shudders; the
theory of evolution is the obvious
example.
• The industrial revolution
in effect stole the clothing
industry from women.
Contrariwise, the traditional role
of Native American men as
warriors and shamans was
destroyed, with immense social
effect, by restricting Indians to
reservations and discouraging
Indian religion.
 • Wine and beer may be
more than a diversion. In large
towns, getting unpolluted water
becomes a problem, and the
easiest solution is to drink
alcoholic beverages instead.
There’s some evidence that
cultures which have been urban
for millennia have developed a
larger tolerance for alcohol.

Technological epochs
You can skip th e details of technology
by focusing on a particular
technological epoch— basically a
package of technologies.
For more information you can read up
on the particular cultures named, or
look in the timeline to see what had
been invented and what hadn’t.
I give a few models for each; I assume
you’re smart enough to understand that
fiction may or may not aim at
historical accuracy.

Babylon, 1200 B.C.

Agriculture, the domestication of
animals, and writing are already old
technologies. The denser agricultural
regions are ruled, and not with a light
hand, by kings and occasionally
empires. Economic enterprise is
largely under the control of the state—
there are no markets or coins, though
there are private merchants and even
banks. Towns reached about 7500
souls. Less populous areas are held by
farmers and peasants organized into
small tribes, sometimes precariously
free, sometimes controlled by the
nearest empire.
Priests were important figures, as
religion was an important prop of the
state.
Warriors are only lightly armored, and
wield swords, spears, and bows. Horses
could only be exploited in combat
using chariots— even the nomads
hadn’t learned how to fight from
horseback. Bronze was still widely
used for weapons, but states that could
afford it used wrought iron.
There were sophisticated pleasures:
fine jewelry and metalwork, decorative
pigments, perfume, incense, wine and
beer. The educated were already
advanced in astronomical observation
and geometry, and some claimed to
master mystical powers.
A few good models:
The Old Testament: the Israelites
were a marginal people in
between the major powers of
Egypt and Mesopotamia
Homer, The Iliad and The
Odyssey
My own In the Land of Babblers
is largely Bronze Age in
technology
 Robert Howard’s Conan stories
have a pre-Roman feel to them

Rome, 1st century A.D.

After centuries of struggle, the bulk of
the known world was united under one
empire. The empire had till recently
been a republic, and still contained a
senate of important (and rich) men,
often entrusted with governmental
tasks. The empire was a patchwork of
conquered states, each with their own
language, religion, and laws; those
outside it were considered no more
than barbarians.
Urban life was thriving— the capital
had more than 250,000 people, and
many other cities had several tens of
thousands. Urbanites enjoyed theaters
and baths, a wealth of literature,
arenas, philosophical academies, and
their choice of temples. Trade was
market-based and empire-wide, and
individuals could become very rich;
but there was no great barrier between
the state and the private sector. Rich
men would bestow public buildings on
their cities, and take office— a path to
further riches, as corruption was
normal. Very large enterprises, from
aqueducts to water mills, were imperial
concerns.
The empire maintained a huge standing
army; its pay was the major
government expense. Soldiers wore
banded metal armor, and were divided
into infantry, cavalry, and artillery
(ballistae as well as siege engineers).
Besides impressive buildings, road, and
fortifications, the empire boasted
fascinating novelties: blown glass, tiny
machines powered by steam,
alchemical apparatus.
A few good models:
The New Testament
Robert Graves’s I, Claudius
All those gladiator movies
A History of Private Life, vol. 1

Táng China, A.D. 750

At this time China was the most
advanced and prosperous civilization
on the planet. Perhaps its most
distinguishing feature was that its
aristocracy depended not on blood, but
on educational achievement:
advancement in government was based
on an elaborate nationwide
examination system. This concentrated
on the ancient classics, but there was a
constant debate serving to apply old
precepts to modern situations.
The classics defined the ancient
religion of the people, but there was an
openness to new and even foreign
ideas; the best thinkers rarely declared
for just one ideology, but reviewed all
the possibilities and chose the best
ideas from each. The monk Xuánzàng
had recently returned from India with
hundreds of Buddhist texts to enrich
Chinese Buddhism.
Compared to our previous models,
China was striking in its longetivity
and homogeneity— no regions
separated for long, and the system was
able to absorb several foreign
conquerors.
Warfare was principally infantry-
based, befitting a huge sedentary
agricultural population. The primary
military threat was nomads in the
northwestern steppe; these could often
be bought off with tribute, titles, and
princesses, or hired as mercenaries.
The system was secure enough that in
most of the country, large cities needed
no walls.
There was a steady stream of important
inventions: paper, porcelain, the
compass, the padded horse collar,
steel-making, woodblock printing. Silk
had long been an enormously profitable
export. Just past our period, the Sòng
continued the tradition, inventing paper
money, silkscreen printing, moveable
type, and gunpowder.
A few good models:
Journey to the West , a retelling
of Xuánzàng’s journey as fantasy
Wuxia movies such as Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon are set in
an idealized ancient China
Video games: Jade Empire
 Luó Guànzhōng, The Romance of
the Three Kingdoms
The Tale of Genji , from Japan,
often listed as the world’s first
novel

Medieval Europe, A.D. 1350.

We’ve all been down these cobbled
streets, seen the knights in plate armor
and the ladies in pointy hats. But
fantasy isn’t so much the West’s
nostalgia for its own past, as the
descendent of the Renaissance and
medieval epic— the medieval era’s
idealization of itself.
What did they leave out? The medieval
industrial revolution, for one. Medieval
society was as machine-oriented as we
are computer-oriented. The Clairvaux
abbey, for instance, was built to exploit
water power; the water was used for
milling wheat, sieving flour, fulling
cloth, and tanning; pipes carried water
to the kitchen and to the gardens, and
cleaned out the drains. There was an
explosion of mills: in the department
of the Aube in France, there were 14
water mills in the 11C, 60 in the 12C,
and over 200 in the 13C. The English
Domesday Book records 5,624 water
mills, one for about every 50
households.
The Romans had water mills, but
nothing on this scale. But the
Europeans also had windmills and tidal
mills; agricultural productivity soared
with the three-field system and the
wheeled moldboard plow; horses could
pull more with the padded collar;
Europeans mined gold and silver in
areas the Romans believed to have
none. The medievals sometimes
depicted God as an architect or
engineer, measuring the universe with
a compass.
I chose 1350 as being just before the
gunpowder era— the first cannons
(following Arab designs) were
appearing in Europe; the first arquebus
wouldn’t appear in Europe for another
century. The typical armor was
chainmail, but through the century it
developed in the direction of plate, to
counter new two-handed axes and
swords, thrusting swords, and the
longbow. At this stage the powerhouse
of an army was the heavily armored
mounted knight— though this concept,
like the knights, would be decimated at
the battle of Crécy (1346).
In intellectual life, great universities
had been founded—Bologna in 1088,
Paris in 1150, Oxford in 1167. At Paris,
Thomas Aquinas had recently
systematized the study of theology,
reconciling Christian teaching with the
reason of Aristotle. The mineral acids
had recently been isolated,
revolutionizing alchemy. There were
other novelties: the spinning wheel, the
wine press, eyeglasses, the hourglass,
weight-based clocks. New methods for
building were developed, less dark and
bulky than Roman architecture. The
explosion of European power and
knowledge at the Renaissance was only
the culmination of economic and social
forces that had been building
throughout the medieval period.
A modern (especially a European)
would probably be most struck by the
centrality of God. Everyone believed,
and no one saw a contradiction between
scholarship and science— quite the
reverse; Aquinas was canonized. Not
that this meant priests and monks were
treated with reverence; they were often
seen as corrupt and venal.
A few good models:
Geoffrey Chaucer, The
Canterbury Tales
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant
Mirror
Shakespeare is only a little later,
and was often writing about
earlier times anyway (though
with ships, pistols, and the
printing press his is already a
different world)
Tolkien’s The Lord of the
Rings— not strictly medieval,
but as all the glorious empires
were far in the past it feels more
medieval than classical
C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series
 Comics: Jeff Smith’s Bone, Hal
Foster’s Prince Valiant , François
Bourgeon’s Les compagnons du
crépuscule, Rosinski & Van
Hamme’s Thorgal
The post-medieval epics:
Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso,
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,
Malory’s La mort d’Arthur
Video games: Oblivion, Skyrim,
Dragon Age Origins, World of
Warcraft

The early steam era, A.D. 180

I personally find this era more
fascinating than medieval times, and
less overdone in fantasy. It was the
dawn of the modern world, when its
transformations were still largely
potential.
The overall theme was the questioning
of authority. The first dethroning was
of Ptolemy; the earth-centered universe
with its crystalline spheres, the
outermost pleasantly scattered with
stars, was replaced by the modern
concept of space. Newton and Galileo
had overthrown Aristotle’s
momentum-based physics; now
Lavoisier had systematized chemistry,
a new conception of dozens of
elements replacing the ancient
alchemical dogmas. Adam Smith’s
economics, like the new physics,
worked without a central decider,
without even any dependence on the
nation-state. Biology had micro-
organisms and the smallpox vaccine to
think about. The printing press had
revolutionized and democratized
information.
Most scholars still accepted God, but
the universe seemed more and more
like a clockwork he had made and set
in motion, not a series of miracles that
required his constant intervention.
Religious authority had fragmented,
and the ensuing Catholic-Protestant
wars led to the conviction that the state
could not impose a belief on the
people. (Not that religion was
moribund; freed from the sleepiness of
state control, fervent popular forms of
religion were springing up—
Methodism and Quakerism were
originally full of supernatural zeal, like
Pentecostalism today).
Kings also seemed less necessary than
before. France and the British North
American colonies had got rid of them;
even England had experimented with
being a Commonwealth. The sleepy
Iberian empires in the Americas would
soon be transformed by revolution.
And yet everyday life was not yet a
rush of novelties. The industrial
revolution was well underway, but few
had seen the new steam-powered
machines or worked in a factory. The
most striking change from medieval
times was in warfare: edged weapons
had almost entirely disappeared in
favor of muskets, pistols, and cannon.
Go a little further, of course, and you
can play with steampunk. There’s
something delicious about the massive
boilers and iron girders of Victorian
engineering, perhaps festooned with
Art Nouveau decoration, and it’s even
more fun to make them even larger, or
float them from enormous airships.
A few models:
Jane Austen’s novels evoke the
daily life of the period
Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two
Cities
James Boswell’s Life of Johnson
 C.S. Forester’s Horatio
Hornblower series, evocations of
the sailing ship as far-flung
agents of the British Empire, and
an inspiration for Star Trek
Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates
My own conworld Almea
Steampunk: Alan Moore and
Kevin O’Neill’s The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen; Hayao
Miyazaki’s Nausicäa

Modern times
There’s no reason you can’t set your
fantasy in a time like the present, or
develop your conworld to modern
times and beyond.
A few good models:
Most of Neil Gaiman, especially
Neverwhere and American Gods
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter
series
H.P. Lovecraft’s stories
R.A. Lafferty’s delightful short
stories
Star Wars is essentially near-
future fantasy
War
Most fantasy, and much s.f. too,
features war, or at least some deadly
fighting. This is probably one of the
biggest gaps between writers and the
people they describe— few of us are at
all expert at killing someone with a
sword. So there’s a lot to learn.
Most of this chapter is on historical
warfare. I’ll pretty much skip the
modern era— you know how wars are
conducted today anyhow, and detailed
material is readily available. At the
end, however, I’ll consider magical and
futuristic warfare.
The warrior
War is hell, but there is a temperament
that is not displeased to enter its gates.
In John Keegan’s words:
It is the admiration of other
soldiers that satisfies him— if he
can win it; most soldiers are
satisfied merely by the company
of others, by a shared contempt
for a softer world, by the
liberation from narrow
materiality brought by the camp
and the line of march, by the
rough comforts of the bivouac,
by competition in endurance, by
the prospect of le repos du
guerrier among their waiting
 womenfolk.
Our earliest ancestors were hunters,
close to the animals they hunted, their
senses highly trained, their bodies
tough and fit, highly skilled in the use
of weapons and in wilderness survival,
and able to kill quickly when necessary
— all qualities that must be cultivated
in the soldier, increasingly setting him
apart from the office workers around
him.
As a character the warrior comes with
that most attractive of narrative traits,
paradox. Perhaps the best character in
the Narnia series, one which survived
the disappointing transition to the
screen, is Reepicheep the warrior
mouse. The combination of courtesy,
politeness, and deadly skill remains its
interest in the modern age, all the more
so when most people no longer face
war themselves.

War cultures
As important as the tools of war is the
culture that surrounds it, as Keegan
demonstrates in A History of Warfare .
A war culture generally has limits that
inhibit excessive violence, much as
dominance fights between predators
include a signal of submission (e.g. a
dog baring his neck) that ends the fight
and allows the beaten animal to escape.
Primitive
Tribes vary in warlikeness. One
extreme is the hunter-gatherer
Bushmen, who avoid conflict; one
book about them is called The
Harmless People. But they live in a
highly marginal environment— the
Kalahari desert— and may not be
characteristic of early man.
Daniel Everett describes the Pirahã
(Amazonian hunter-gatherers) as
highly peaceful among themselves, as
well as rather sexually egalitarian; at
the same time they can be brutal with
outsiders they perceive as encroaching
on their land.
By contrast, the Yanomamö— garden
agriculturalists and hunters of
Venezuela— have been called “the
fierce people”; males are encouraged to
be violent, and horribly mistreat their
women— beatings and disfigurements
are common. Violence between men,
however, is highly ritualized. One form
is the chest-pounding duel. Two men
with a quarrel take hallucinogens to
foster aggression. One stands, chest
out, and lets the other hit him in the
chest as hard as he can. He bears as
many blows as he can, then it’s the
other man’s turn. The fight usually
ends with the two men making up and
swearing friendship.
Then there’s the club fight. A
challenger plants a ten-foot pole in the
ground; the man challenged takes it
and gives him a mighty blow to the
head, which can then be returned. Such
fights can quickly become a nasty
general brawl, and fatal wounds are
common; they’re ended when the
headman takes a bow and arrow and
threatens to shoot the participants if
they don’t stop.
Finally there’s the raid, where the men
of one village run to another, find some
defenseless victim, kill him, and run
away. The most deadly action however
is the treacherous feast: you get a third
village to invite your enemies to a
meal, then surprise them and kill as
many as possible.
There are two take-home points here:
 • Ritual. Aggression is
channeled into set patterns that
limit destructiveness; above all
there are conventions on when
the fight is over.
• Limiting risk. You’ll get
hurt in a duel— showing your
toughness is the main appeal—
but you’ll survive. The raids and
even the treacherous feast are by
‘civilized’ standards cowardly—
they avoid a general battle where
the defenders can fight back—
and kill— on equal terms.
Marvin Harris notes that the perceived
need for fierce male warriors leads to
widespread female infanticide, which
he views as an effective if brutal means
of controlling population. (Population
isn’t limited directly by war: no matter
how many men are killed, the
remainder can keep the women
pregnant. Only limiting the number of
women bearing children can restrict
population growth.)
The Maring of New Guinea are garden
agriculturalists who raise herds of pigs.
It takes about ten years for the animals
to grow to full size, at which point the
gardens are strained. The tribe then
slaughters the pigs, holds a huge feast,
and goes to war. War takes one of four
forms:
• ‘Nothing fights’, which
consist of an exchange of arrows.
 These usually end if anyone is
seriously wounded.
• ‘True fights’, which add a
front line where men duel with
stone axes and flint-tipped
wooden spears.
• Raids, similar to those of
the Yanomamö.
• Routs, usually an
outgrowth of a ‘true fight’, a
headlong rush at a settlement
with much killing of both sexes;
the defeated group abandons its
settlement entirely.
Again, note the ritual and the limitation
of risk. Fights were not always
escalated; they often ended in a peace
negotiated by allies. But even the routs
are not as final as they sound. The
defeated tribe’s territory is not
occupied, as it’s considered to have bad
magic. The survivors regroup in the
territory of allies.
Direct evidence for warfare in the vast
majority of human history is rather
slim. It’s fair to say that our ancestors
were neither brutal nor noble savages.
Their wars were likely to be limited
displays of aggression which allowed
the losers a dishonorable but life-
saving retreat.
Of course, there was the rare
possibility of a near-genocidal rout.
These are all the more striking to
Westerners because they’re the
opposite of our military mores, which
glorify facing a fully armed opponent;
when the enemy is fleeing in terror we
consider the battle won and pursuit to
the death an atrocity. But in many
military cultures it was simply good
sense to avoid a battle except under
conditions of overwhelming
superiority. Those pointy things can
kill you, after all.
In some areas and periods, such as the
Trojan War , early medieval Europe,
and China’s Spring and Autumn
Period, war was not much more
sophisticated; it was a matter of
aristocratic heroes whose battles were
more an array of individual duels than
a mass action. Their codes of honor
may greatly influence their culture’s
idea of what war should be, but for
wars that really change the map you
need something more.

East Asian
Classical Chinese military theory was
elucidated by Sun Tzu (properly Sūn
Zǐ) in the -4C. Armies at this time were
large (in the tens of thousands) and
well trained— maneuvers were
signalled using drums, bells, and
banners. Weapons included steel
swords, spears, and powerful and
accurate crossbows; horses were used
to pull chariots, though cavalry was
introduced soon after his time.
Sun Tzu’s major emphases:
• Calculation. If we picture
Alexander charging sword in
hand at the enemy’s strongest
point, Sun Tzu must be pictured
with an abacus, evaluating troop
strengths and dispositions,
terrain, supply, and morale.
• Professionalism. Sun Tzu
has to emphasize promotion
based on merit (rather than
nepotism), the use of experience
rather than omens, and the
freedom of commanders to
ignore the king’s orders once in
the field.
• Movement. Quick
movement allowed an attack
where the enemy was weakest.
 An army could be divided into
zhèng ‘orthodox’— big solid
battalions— and qí
‘extraordinary’, small élite
groups sent to attack the flanks
and rear.
• Deception. “When
capable, feign incapacity; when
active, inactivity… Offer the
enemy a bait to lure him; feign
disorder and strike him.”
• Intelligence. Use spies,
diplomats, and local guides to
understand and undermine the
enemy. He helpfully suggests
that disgruntled courtiers can
easily be recruited.
 • Avoidance of wasteful
battle: long wars, sieges, direct
confrontation with stronger
forces. “To subdue the enemy
without fighting is the acme of
skill.”
One could guide the battle rage of
soldiers, one’s own or the enemy’s.
The general Hán Xìn smashed his
cooking pots, burned his boats, and
fought with his back to a river, so his
army had to win or die. Another
general, after winning a battle, refused
to rush after the losers, as that would
provoke them to turn and fight; he
could do better moving slowly and
harrassing them.
Some of Sun Tzu’s precepts can be
seen in China’s perennial struggle with
the nomads to the northwest, which
emphasized defense (including
construction of the Great Wall ), co-
opting nearby tribes with Chinese
titles, bribes, and princesses, and using
them if possible against fiercer farther
tribes. Though there were great
Chinese generals, Chinese culture
tended to disdain military action,
especially after the military revolts in
the Táng period and the failure of a
forward policy in western Turkestan,
where Arab rather than Chinese
influence ended up predominating.
Perhaps the most spectacular
demonstration of Sun Tzu’s principles
was made by Mao Zedong in defeating
the Nationalists. He treated his soldiers
well, which helped induce large
numbers of the enemy to desert to him,
and mastered quick movement— he
joked that his army was the best in the
world at running away. But this
allowed him to attack weak points and
set traps.
Ho Chi Minh used similar methods in
Vietnam against the French and the
Americans. Guerrilla warfare proved to
be an effective way of countering the
material advantage of Western armies.
Japanese samurai warfare was based on
the skillful use of swords; but feudal
Japan was ended by the general Oda
Nobunaga at Nagashino in 1575 using
huge numbers of musketeers. This
might have led to an age of gunpowder
but once unity was achieved, the
shogunate made firearms a government
monopoly, effectively eliminating
them from use and preserving the
samurai as a class.
The samurai objected to the
indiscriminate nature of gunpowder
weapons— a peasant could mow down
a highly trained samurai. Similar
objections were made in Europe, but no
European state was unified or isolated
enough to ban firearms. Japan’s 250-
year renunciation of the gun is a
remarkable exception to the usual
quick acceptance of new military
technologies, of lasting relevance in
light of the destructiveness of nuclear
weapons.

Nomadic
As noted (p. 92), the nomads of Central
Asia were formidable fighters. The
entire adult male population was
available as a highly mobile cavalry,
all expert with the powerful compound
bow and, as Keegan points out, even
more experienced with dealing death
than hunters, due to the necessities of
controlling and culling herds and
protecting them from predators. Settled
states found them difficult to resist.
The usual expedient was to hire other
tribes to fight back; Europeans in
addition learned to cultivate their own
class of horse warriors.
Nomads were frightening and
frustrating enemies. One of their
favorite tactics was the false retreat,
which prompted an unwary infantry to
pursue, breaking up their line and
allowing a devastating counter-charge.
They felt no need to offer a firm
defensive line— the Persian emperor
Darius famously failed to defeat the
Scyths because they simply rode away,
refusing to face a battle. When they did
win a battle they could be notoriously
cruel, massacring the inhabitants of a
city to punish them for the temerity of
resistance, or chasing peasants off their
fields.
There were natural limits to their
empires, however. One was the
perennial difficulty of ruling the settled
states they conquered. If they simply
plundered and pillaged, like Timur,
there was nothing left to loot and they
could only seek new conquests. If they
settled down as rulers, the trick was to
assimilate enough to the
agriculturalists to rule effectively, but
not so much so that they lost the skills
expected back on the steppe.
Few nomadic empires could maintain
this balance for long: Attila’s empire
collapsed after his death; Kublai
Khan’s dynasty lasted less than three
quarters of a century after him. The
later Manchus retained power only at
the price of a conservativism that
became an immense liability in the
modern age. Perhaps the only lasting
success was the Ottoman Turks, who
long remained a formidable military
power, and who managed a successful
transition to a strong modern state.
Nomads can extend their grazing lands
into marginal agricultural areas, as
they did historically in Hungary and
Anatolia; but not into forests or rich
agricultural land, which don’t turn into
grassland just because the peasants are
dead.
Finally, horselords require, well, lots of
horses. Marco Polo reported that an
average Mongol warrior owned 18
horses. Extended campaigns off the
steppe killed horses profusely—
probably one reason Attila’s attacks on
Europe petered out.

Western
In 480 BC, the greatest empire the
world had yet produced was stymied by
a tiny coalition of city-states one-tenth
its size. This was big news and
rocketed the winners to the top of the
merc market.
What was the secret of the Greeks?
There are a few key points.
• Logistics. The Persian
force was huge, but it was at the
end of a very long supply line;
the full resources of the empire
could not be brought to bear.
• Naval advantages. The
 Greeks had fewer ships, but they
forced battle in a confined space,
the straits of Salamis, where the
Persian numbers were thwarted.
Persian ships were more
maneuverable but less heavily
crewed, so in a tight space the
Greeks had a great advantage.
• Armor and weapons.
Despite what you may have
picked up from 300, the Greeks
had heavier armor and longer
spears than the Persians.
• Terrain. Greece has few
open plains, rendering the
Persian cavalry nearly useless.
(In more open terrain, such as in
Anatolia, the Persians defeated
 the Greek counter-attacks.)
The army of a Greek city-state was
organized as a phalanx— an extended
rectangle of men, each man holding a
round shield and a spear, long enough
that those of first three rows pointed
out at the enemy. Tactics were simple,
as befit a soldiery whose main job was
farming: they consisted of charging
forward at a trot till the formation burst
against the enemy. A Roman observer
commented that the advance of a
phalanx was the most frightening thing
he’d ever seen. Once the armies had
collided, the individual soldier could
switch to a sword.
Compared with primitive or nomadic
tactics, this represented a major
change: a phalanx directly confronted
similarly armed opponents, with a high
risk of death. It’s been estimated that
15% of a losing force died in the battle
itself, either from wounds or from
being picked off by skirmishers as they
ran.
What made men willing to run directly
into line of enemies brandishing
spears? We can identify several
factors.
• The greater risk of running
away. Better to face a spearman
head on; showing him your side
or back was far more dangerous.
And the tight formation of the
phalanx meant that the front rows
literally had no place to go but
 forward.
• Fear of the shame of not
fighting. Your buddies were right
there next to you; you fought to
protect them and to retain their
approval.
• Spirits raised by drink, by
religious invocations, even by the
rituals of insults and shouting
that preceded combat.
• Victor Hanson suggests
that phalanx warfare allowed
battle to be brief and decisive, a
desirable attribute for part-time
soldiers. Like having your teeth
pulled, it was going to hurt, but
it’d soon be over.
In inter-Greek struggles, total victory
was not pursued— the losers were
allowed to run off. They would often
drop their armor, which allowed them
to outpace the victors. Once again we
see the theme of cultural limitation to
war. Often the wars were about revenge
or points of honor, which were satisfied
by victory; occupation of the enemy
city was rarely a goal.
Sparta was a partial exception, in that it
had enslaved its neighbors in the
southern Peloponnese, also in that its
army was composed of a professional
class of warriors. But even Sparta
never pursued an empire beyond its
little slice of Greece. It was left to
Athens to attempt to exploit the Greek
military superiority revealed by the
victory over Persia. This ultimately
stalemated: Athens’s little empire did
not have the resources to do much
harm to Persia. But all of Greece did if
it were united, as Alexander showed in
the -4C.
As time goes on, conventional limits to
war get stretched and broken. By
Alexander’s time the army was
professionalized; the short campaign
season had extended to nine months;
and of course the wars were fought for
conquest.
The Romans adapted the phalanx into
the legion, dividing it into smaller
sections (maniples) which allowed
greater maneuverability. Perhaps more
importantly, they added an ethos of
fighting to the end that none of their
enemies could match. Hannibal of
Carthage invaded Italy, soundly
thrashed the legions several times, and
won away a slew of Italian cities; by
the standards of the day the Romans
should have sued for peace. They did
not; they resisted for ten years,
defeated the Carthaginians in Spain and
then invaded Carthage itself, forcing
Hannibal to return to defend it. They
reduced the Carthaginian empire to a
remnant and, still not satisfied,
eliminated it fifty years later in another
war.
Even when they lost, they won: the
term “Pyrrhic victory” refers to their
wars with Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose
defeats of Roman armies were so
painful that he abandoned his war.
And this, through many a change in
military technology, largely remained
as the European idea of war: where
men and materials permit, squarely
engage the enemy, instill the discipline
required to throw soldiers into probable
death, and seek the total destruction of
the enemy’s army.
(The nuance is important; medieval
armies, for instance, were hamstrung
by the difficulty of raising a large
army. Armies were therefore small,
and wars rarely decisive.)
For all its brutality, Western culture
has its cultural limits— respecting
medical units, for instance. There’s
also the expectation that once your
army is defeated, you surrender. The
denial of this expectation in the Iraq
war was a huge and unwelcome
surprise to the Americans.
The ultimate expression of Western
military culture was World War II , a
conflict so brutal that it largely
discredited the very idea of war for the
Europeans, at least.

Weapons
For ease of exposition I’ll focus on one
weapon at a time, but be aware that
civilized states rely on combined arms;
relying entirely on one type of weapon
is generally a mistake.

Spear
If you play a fantasy game, what
weapon do you want? A spear? Of
course not; spears are for weenies. You
want a badass sword.
But primitive and classical warriors
preferred the spear. A 2.5-meter-long
spear, made of ash with an iron tip, was
the basic weapon of the Greek phalanx;
the Macedonian sarissa was twice as
long, which compensated for their
lighter armor. A spear can of course
reach farther than a sword; phalanx
tactics are also relatively simple,
suitable for part-time soldiers. Spears
are are also cheaper to make than either
swords or arrows.
A javelin is a lighter spear that is
thrown at the enemy; this was effective
to about 20 meters. Peltasts, light
infantry armed with javelins, would be
used to harrass the enemy. At
Lechaeum in 391 BC peltasts defeated
a small Spartan phalanx, repeatedly
advancing to throw their javelins and
then nimbly retreating when the
Spartans attacked. (Normally peltasts
were countered by other peltasts, but in
this battle the Spartans had none of
their own.)
Roman legions gave up the thrusting
spear in favor of the pilum or javelin;
they would throw this and then follow
up with the sword.
The medieval pike was three to six
meters long, and most useful against
cavalry charges. The cavalry
themselves often used the lance, a
stout, long spear whose thrusting power
was multiplied by the weight of a
charging horse. However, after the
initial charge, the horseman would
switch to sword or mace for melee.

Sword
Swords require metal, and bronze
doesn’t allow swords more than 60 cm
long, while spears can be far longer.
Wrought iron doesn’t hold an edge
well, but charcoal heating and water
quenching, mastered by 1000 BC,
produced a hard steel layer on the outer
edge.
Around 300 AD India was producing
wootz steel, a pure steel with high
carbon content and a characteristic
swirling grain pattern, which could be
used to make hard and tough blades. In
Europe, the best steel was produced by
heat-layering high-purity Swedish iron
with charcoal, until the invention of the
Bessemer process in 1858 allowed
cheap mass production of steel.
Set designers and video game players
love huge elaborate swords with extra
sharpened bits, like the Klingon betleH.
But heavy weapons are hard to control
and tire the user, and wacky
indentations and protrusions are
probably an invitation for the sword to
get caught on obstacles. In a rapier vs.
betleH battle, I rather imagine the
rapier would be spearing an internal
organ while Mr. Klingon was still
figuring out his grip.
The axe was the preferred weapon of
the Viking, not least because it was
also a useful tool in peacetime, at least
in the forested north. Metal tools are
expensive and time-consuming to forge
and maintain, so greater utility was a
real plus.

Swordfighting 101
The golden age of swordfighting, as
Arthur Wise points out, was due to the
invention of firearms. Plate armor
encouraged the use of weapons that
would crack it or induce injury despite
it: war hammers, maces, axes, flails.
Gunpowder eliminated the defense of
heavy armor, and personal combat fell
back on the sword.
In the 16C, swords were thick and
heavy, and often wielded with a mailed
gauntlet to protect the hand. The
swordsman circled his opponent, sword
held out, looking for an opening,
preferably on the opponent’s left side
(i.e. away from his sword arm). Attacks
could depend either on cutting or
thrusting.
In defense, he might use a small shield,
a mailed glove, or a cloak wrapped
round his hand: the cloak could be used
to brush a point aside, or to attempt to
catch it in the cloth, or could even
thrown at the opponent. The best
defense was a counter-attack: step
back, parry, or meet the opponent’s
blade with his own, in either case
making a counter-thrust. Bouts
required strength and endurance.
Tripping and kicking were not out of
bounds; one could also grasp the
opponent’s sword (by the blade or by
the guard) and wrest it away.

Rapier
The broadsword was replaced in
personal combat by the rapier, a thin
sword that emphasized dexterity and
ultimately the thrust rather than the
cut. A thrust was faster, the masters
taught, and put the attacker at less risk.
The rapier’s hilt also evolved curved
projections that protected the hand.
The usual defense became a dagger
held in the off hand, and eventually
nothing at all— the rapier itself could
be used for defense. The rapier is held
such that the opponent cannot hit
merely by thrusting forward, but must
move his weapon; and the typical
counter to a thrust is to parry rather
than counter-thrust.
There is an element of fashion to all
this— if your opponent has a rapier
that’s all you need as well— but the
rapier was also considered more
effective. “The short sword against the
Rapier is little better than a tobacco-
pipe,” as a royal weapons master wrote
in 1617. (On the 17C battlefield, of
course, the only edged weapons to be
seen were cavalrymen’s sabers and
anti-cavalry pike; the infantry used
muskets.)

Bow and arrow

The simple bow is made from a single
piece of wood; a sapling provided the
necessary elasticity. Nonetheless it
allowed attack at a hundred yards,
much longer than the hurled spear.
The composite bow is much more
complicated. It was made from five
pieces of wood— grip, two arms, two
tips— glued together and steamed into
a curve, opposite to its shape when
strung. Strips of horn were glued to the
inner side, tendons to the outer, then
left to cure for as much as a year.
Stringing the bow required bending it
against its natural shape, requiring
great strength but greatly increasing
the bow’s power. The bow’s effective
range was 250 to 300 yards.
Typically archers wore little or no
armor; their role was to use their speed
and range to harrass the opposing
force. The Persians relied on a standing
army of trained, fast archers wielding
composite bows.
The crossbow was introduced to
Europe in the 16C, though it was
known in China a millennium before. It
used a clockwork mechanism to store
and suddenly release energy; its bolts
could easily penetrate armor. It cost
more than the ordinary bow and fired
slower, but was easier to aim and did
more damage.

Horse and Pike

The first major use of the horse was for
food. The first animal used for traction
was the ox (i.e. a castrated and thus
more docile bull); the first riding
animal may have been the donkey or its
larger relative the onager. These
however are stubborn, resist spurs and
bits, and lack the wide range of gaits of
horses.
The first stage in the use of horses in
war was to pull chariots, developed
around 1700 BC in the borderlands
between the steppe (where the horses
were plentiful) and the civilized lands
(where the metal and wood necessary
to build chariots were found). Chariots
were not an item of mass warfare—
they were luxury items. At the battle of
Qadesh in 1294 BC, the victorious
Egyptian army had about 5000 men and
50 chariots.
There is some controversy about
exactly how chariots were used.
Pictures show teams of two or more,
one driving the horse, the others firing
arrows or throwing javelins. This
would seem to be awkward if driving
straight at the enemy; rather they must
have ridden along the enemy’s flank, or
better yet, come close and then dashed
back: the chariot is one of the few
military implements which fights most
effectively when retreating,
Horses were ridden in the 2nd
millennium, though at first the rider
was seated over the rump. By the 8th
century BC stronger horses had been
bred, and horsemanship had improved,
so that they were ridden in the forward
control position. The Scyths and
Cimmerians, both Iranian peoples,
learned to shoot from horseback; their
intervention in Mesopotamia led to the
downfall of the Assyrian empire.
Horses were the backbone of the
nomadic armies for the next two
millennia, forcing agricultural states to
invest resources in either developing or
buying horsemen of their own.
Cavalry forces can also be divided into
heavy and light, the latter relying on
missiles, the former on lances and
heavy armor; heavy cavalry was often
decisive in Alexander’s battles, a
lesson absorbed by the Persians’
successors, the Parthians.
In the post-Roman period, cavalry was
the most efficient use of scant
resources, and its power was reinforced
by the stirrup, which reached Europe in
the 8C. This greatly reduced the rider’s
risk of falling and increased the power
of charges with the lance.
An effective counter was the pike
shield; a barrier of pikes could stand up
to a cavalry charge if the pikemen
stayed steadfast. The Swiss excelled at
this; thus their value as mercenaries.
The English had their own counter: the
longbow, which being constructed from
heartwood and sapwood had many of
the advantages of the composite bow,
though it also required immense
strength and training.
Enemies who had never faced horses
could be decimated by even small
numbers. A typical encounter was the
battle of Vilcaconga in 1533, in which
Spanish forces numbering no more
than 300, including 110 horsemen,
routed an Inca army of more than
10,000. The power and the mobility of
the horses was of course multiplied by
the strength of Spanish steel (as against
Inca stone maces) and the near
invulnerability of steel armor
(compared to the Incas’ quilted cotton
armor).
The decimation of the Light Brigade at
Balaclava in 1854 under rifle and
artillery fire may be taken as the battle
horse’s last whinny. A military
historian, with heavy irony, notes that
the Polish cavalry of 1939 was perhaps
the finest such unit of its time. Horses
were nonetheless used in great numbers
in both World Wars for transport.
About the only other animal widely
used in battle was the elephant.
(Camels were used for transport, not
battle.) An elephant charge is
formidable, and not easily stopped by
pikemen— stepping aside and throwing
javelins is more effective. And the
extra height can be used as a platform
for archery. But they have
disadvantages too; they can panic in
battle, and cause as much harm to their
own lines as to the enemy. They were
used sporadically in classical warfare
and even less so in China; but they
were a mainstay of Indian armies as
late as the 19C; they couldn’t stand up
to cannonfire.

Gunpowder
Gunpowder is a mixture of crystalline
saltpeter, powdered charcoal, and
purified sulfur. Sulfur is readily
available as a bright yellow crystal
found in volcanic regions. Saltpeter,
potassium nitrate, can also be found
naturally as a white crystalline
encrustration on rocks (thus its name,
‘salt of stone’), but also produced from
a compost of manure, ash, earth, and
straw. Gunpowder was discovered by
the Chinese by 1050, and used for
rockets and cannon.
The first cannons don’t seem to have
been very effective, not least because
loose gunpowder was dangerous and
prone to separation. In the late 14C
Europeans learned how to add liquid to
make granular (“corned”) gunpowder,
which kept better, was safer to handle,
and above all burned more efficiently.
By the mid-15C cannon were highly
efficient at reducing fortification; the
French kings used them to burst
through English castles, and the Turks
finally destroyed the long-impregnable
walls of Constantinople.
Early barrels (made of banded strips
like their namesake) were liable to
burst; in the 1490s the French perfected
a long cast barrel that directed the
explosion better and allowed the
cannon to be attached to a mobile cart.
The earliest hand weapons required
touching a lit match cord by hand to
the firing pan, a tricky and dangerous
maneuver. In the 15C the matchlock
was devised— a little clip that held the
match and applied it to the touch hole.
It was superseded by mechanisms such
as the flintlock, which ignited the
powder with sparks.
Muskets had become reliable and
ubiquitous by the mid 16C, despite
their slow rate of fire (no more than
three rounds a minute). Their effective
range was about 100 meters. They were
further improved by rifling (spiral
grooves inside the barrel which impart
a spin to the bullet, making the
trajectory more accurate) and by
cartridges, allowing fast breech-
loading rather than muzzle-loading.
These were invented early but not
common till the 19C.
I’ve mentioned the samurai distaste for
the gun as an insult to their skill and
elite status (p. 248); Europeans had the
same attitude but being disunited had
to adapt to it. The gun made metal
armor useless and ultimately ended the
long domination of cavalry.
Pikemen were still important in the
17C as a counter to cavalry; but by the
end of the century they were largely
made obsolete by the invention of the
ring bayonet, which allowed
musketeers to perform their role.

Ships
The predominant warship before the
gunpowder era was the galley, rowed
by oarsmen. Sailing ships were better
for trading, but only oars provided the
quick maneuvering necessary for
battle. Battle galleys were long and
narrow (e.g. 24 by 3 meters), and
extremely short-drafted; this allowed
them to operate in very shallow water
and to be beached or even portaged.
They were not suitable for the open
ocean, however, and couldn’t store
food for more than a few days; as a
result most naval battles were fought
within sight of land. For the same
reason blockades were very difficult.
From about 700 BC the dominant naval
tactic was ramming, though after the
-3C it was more common to attempt to
board an enemy vessel and engage in
melee combat on deck.
Cannon were added to oared galleys in
the 15C; due to their narrow width,
these could only be added to the bow or
stern. In the 16C, however, the
advantage shifted to sailing ships with
side-mounted arrays of cannon. These
were deep-ocean ships which could
travel for half a year out of port and
arrive ready to fight.
The geography of your conworld will
influence what sort of ships are built.
The Mediterranean allows small, coast-
hugging ships to travel long distances
and encounter interesting trading
partners or enemies; the Chinese and
the Incas had long coastlines but
couldn’t easily reach states worth
trading with or conquering. (Zhèng
Hé’s expeditions are impressive but
underline that China didn’t find ocean
exploration very rewarding.)
In the 19C the sailing ship gave way to
the steamship— though these ships’
enormous hunger for coal meant that
only those powers which could
establish coaling stations worldwide
could depend entirely on them. Before
WWI ships switched to oil, which
being more efficient allowed a greater
range without refueling.

Other factors
Terrain
Large swaths of the earth’s surface
have never or rarely seen a battle.
Mountains, deserts, and jungle are bad
places for armies, suitable for little
more than expensive skirmishing.
(Mountain passes can be very
important, of course.) Almost all major
naval battles took place near the shore.
Commanders prefer large flat plains,
perhaps with nearby hills to funnel the
invader’s army, close to good roads or
rivers for their supply line. Men can
negotiate hills better than cavalry. A
river can serve as a trap, too,
preventing a smaller or beaten force
from retreating.
Few armies like to fight in the rain, or
at night, or in the winter. Peasant levies
can hardly be maintained at sowing or
harvest time.
The approaches to Moscow are not
only protected by generals January and
February, as Tsar Nicholas I said, but
by the rasputitsa, the spring snowmelt
and the autumn rains, which turns the
region into a morass for a month in
each season.
The geographical situation of a country
may have an enormous effect on its
military fortunes. Ancient Egypt was
isolated in the west by desert, in the
east by coastal ranges; this channeled
its military defenses into two regions,
the Nile delta and the cataracts upriver,
and probably contributed to its long
backwardness as a military power.
Japan was protected from the Mongols,
and Britain from most of the wars of
the last millennium, by their island
location. Very likely the many
peninsulas of the Mediterranean, each
protected by mountains, encouraged
the development of separate peoples
and nations, while the relative lack of
geographical barriers within China
encouraged a single administration.

Fortification
Until modern times, the most efficient
defense against an army was the wall.
Keegan describes three basic types of
fortification:
• The refuge, a place of
temporary safety, only strong
enough to deter immediate
 attack. The pre-contact Maori,
for instance, built hilltop
pallisades which sufficed to
protect a fleeing army, as the
attackers had no siege engines
and could not operate for long
away from their territory.
• The stronghold must be
able to withstand a siege; it thus
needs a water source, room for
stores, walls high enough to
discourage mounting with
ladders, fighting platforms for
firing at attackers, and gates for
counter-sallies.
• Strategic defenses—
large-scale fortifications such as
Hadrian’s Wall in Roman
 Britain, the Chinese Great Wall ,
the French Maginot Line, or the
series of forts that divided
ancient Egypt from Nubia.
(Multiple lines are the most
effective— raiders who pass one
line may be stopped by the next.)
Only a strong state can afford to
build and garrison these lines, but
they may save the expense of
garrisoning each city of the
interior.
A land dotted with castles, as in
medieval France, is associated with
weak central authority or endemic
raiding. A nation with a strong forward
defense, such as imperial Persia,
doesn’t need walls round its cities—
after breaking through the outer
defenses, Alexander conquered the
empire with three battles fought in
open country. Roman cities in pacified
provinces were also unwalled; as the
Western Empire declined the cities
fortified. (Early Sumerian cities
weren’t walled either, which may mean
that large-scale warfare had not yet
begun.)
Despite the impression created by the
movie of The Two Towers , catapults
were rarely decisive before the
gunpowder age. A well-built wall could
withstand the glancing blows from
hurled stones.
You don’t want people walking up to
the foundations, or knocking them with
battering rams; this could be
discouraged with an excavated moat,
filled with water if feasible. The moat
also provided an open space vulnerable
to fire from the defenders.
For their part, besiegers built counter-
fortifications as platforms to shoot
back at the defenders, prevent sallies,
and protect ramps for scaling the walls.
Battering rams were built inside
mobile wagons, with a steep roof to
deflect projectiles and rawhide
coverings to resist fire. Besiegers
might also tunnel under the walls
(mining)— though this could be foiled
by counter-mining. The surest
methods, however, were surprise,
treachery, and starvation.
Mobile cannons, from 1500, made
older fortifications spectacularly
obsolete. Their great advantage was
that they could be precisely aimed at
the walls’ weakest point, their
foundations; worse yet, the higher the
wall the greater the destruction. Within
fifty years new systems of fortification
were devised to resist the cannon.
Walls were short but immensely thick,
and backed with earth ramparts. They
incorporated wedge-shaped bastions
which could concentrate cannon and
musket fire on the attackers.
Cannons were devastating in open
battle as well. A single cannonball
could take out more than twenty men.
Naturally this focused attention on
capturing artillery pieces, or disabling
them.

Logistics
Every form of warfare is limited by
logistics. War is hell to organize.
A man can carry about 70 pounds of
gear— including clothes and armor,
weapons, and other equipment that will
amount to at least half of this. As a
day’s food weighs about 3 pounds, a
soldier on the march can only carry
about 10 days worth of food. As we’ve
seen that amounts to 200 miles (320
km), which wouldn’t get a Roman
soldier out of Italy.
You can try living off the land— i.e.
stealing from the civilians— but this
quickly exhausts the base of
operations, or slows the army down as
it spreads out to forage. A large cavalry
worsens the problem; a horse needs
about 20 pounds of fodder per day. A
large classical force, invading or
defending, can’t stay in the field
without supply for more than a few
weeks, a fact which an opposing
commander may use to force or avoid
battle.
That leaves bringing supplies with pack
animals or water transport... but of
course oxen have to be fed too, and
waterways don’t always lead nicely
toward the enemy. Few premodern
nations were provided with good road
systems.
Between armies of the same type (e.g.
heavy infantry), retreat is faster than
pursuit. For this reason, after
Hannibal’s initial victories, the
Romans under Fabius harrassed and
raided the Carthaginians while
avoiding battle, denying Hannibal
control over Italy. A war of attrition
tires the defenders as well; eventually
Rome replaced Fabius and sought
battle, leading to the disaster at Cannae
(p. 266).
The railway revolutionized both
logistics and mobilization. In the first
two weeks of World War I , Germany
mobilized 1.5 million men and
transported them ready to fight to the
western front. Of course, once at the
front mobility dropped to horse speed
and then, within the enemy’s artillery
range, to that of a man walking.
World War II , of course, was fought at
modern transportation speeds: Jeeps,
tanks, steamships, fighter planes. War
between modern advanced states is
generally won by the side with the
better manufacturing potential, which
in recent wars has meant the US.

Communications
Simple communication was an
immense hassle before the invention of
the telegraph. War suffered all the
disadvantages of normal travel (p. 142)
with the additional problem that
messengers could be attacked. As late
as 1815, a major battle of the US-
British war was fought two weeks after
the peace treaty had been signed.
On the battlefield itself, there was no
better communication than horses
through the 19C. WWI trenches were
equipped with telephones, but these
became useless as soon as troops
attempted forward movement. Radio
was a revolution.
Merely locating the enemy was not
straightforward. Scouts could be sent
out, or signal fires set; but not a few
battles were won or lost depending on
who stumbled onto who first, or who
could get their reserves to the battle in
time.
Death in another form
It’s hard to make this look cool in an
epic fantasy, but the biggest threat to
soldiers is disease and starvation. In
WWII, US army hospitals had 17
million admissions for illness or
accidents versus a million for combat
wounds. In the Civil War , 60% of the
Northern war dead succumbed to
disease— about half diarrhea and other
intestinal disorders, the rest pneumonia
and tuberculosis. Sword wounds often
killed indirectly, through peritonitis, or
by infections caused by forcing dirt
into the wounds.
Modern technology has been a double
agent, finding new ways to incapacitate
and just as quickly improving medical
skill. There’s been a similar two-step
in speed of care. Battles lengthened and
the killing zone grew immense—
someone felled in the WWI no man’s
land could lay there for days. But
advanced armies have concentrated on
quick medical care: in Vietnam
helicopters could get the wounded to a
field hospital in fifteen minutes.

Armor
Primitive warriors like the Maring
generally use no armor at all, a practice
maintained till quite late by the ancient
Egyptians.
The Greeks— those who could afford
it, at least— used bronze helmets,
breastplates, and greaves, as well as a
wooden shield reinforced with iron.
Their weapons were iron; they wore
bronze armor because it was not yet
possible to make iron plates of
sufficient malleability and strength.
The Persians by contrast wore light
iron scale armor.
Regular Roman legionaries wore
chainmail, or a cuirass made of
overlapping iron bands. Scale armor
was used, though more rarely. Greaves
were worn on the legs, and sometimes
arm guards. Helmets were iron. The
typical shield was rectangular, curved
to allow blows to glance off, and a
meter tall— large enough that
legionaries could protect against a rain
of arrows by holding their shields
together above their heads, a formation
called testudo (tortoise).
The armor of the medieval knight was
chainmail. After the mid 14C knights
switched to plate armor, the famous
suits of armor. Though these were not
as cumbersome as sometimes depicted,
the heaviest suits of armor were
intended only for tournaments, where
protection was more important than
mobility. Medieval states could only
fully arm a small army; if a larger
force was needed to meet an invasion,
much of it would be unarmored and
barely trained.
From the 18C, armor was largely
abandoned, except for the helmet—
due to the power of rifles, as well as
the expense of maintaining the era’s
larger armies.
Modern US soldiers wear lightweight
Kevlar helmets and vests.

Ideology
There’s nothing quite so dangerous as
an army with an idea. The armies that
poured out of Arabia on the death of
Muhammad were not appreciably
better armed or skilled than the
Byzantines and Persians they faced; but
they were on fire with a new religion.
Ironically, perhaps, once the Islamic
empire was divided and most conflicts
were between Muslims, religious
scruples made it difficult for Arabs to
fight wars; they created slave armies or
hired Turks instead.
The armies of the French Revolution
were just as fired up, first throwing out
the invaders who had thought to take
advantage of French troubles, then
conquering the continent as far as
Moscow— an achievement far beyond
the dreams of royal France. Similarly
Mao Zedong won China by combining
the strategic insight of Sun Tzu with
the fervor of a mass movement.

Types of armies
Where does an army come from? This
might be viewed as the intersection of
two choices, how much of the adult
male population serves, and how well
trained they are. Other things being
equal, a big army will defeat a small,
and a trained army will beat an
untrained one, but both choices are
expensive.
little much
training training
entire phalanx nomadic
population militia riders
raw experienced
conscripts conscripts
subpopulation standing
army

In the upper left square we require, or

allow, everyone to serve, as an
interruption to their ordinary life.
Examples include the classical phalanx
or the militia that Machiavelli
recommended to reduce the Italian
city-states’ dependance on
mercenaries. A part-time army may be
well motivated and may supply its own
gear, but it can’t follow very elaborate
tactics.
Conscripts are the male population
turned into soldiers; this was the source
of Napoléon’s million-man army and
the huge armies of the two World
Wars. These are fairly useless at first,
but after a year or so they become a
very effective force.
Alternatively you arm some fraction of
the population. (It doesn’t make much
sense to do so and not train them, so
I’ve left that cell blank.) Now the
question is the army’s standing in
society— and how you keep it from
assaulting the palace.
• The warriors may also be
the ruling class: the medieval
knights, the Japanese samurai,
the Spartans.
How do you make sure the
elite actually functions as an
army? One way is feudalism:
grant land to successful officers
on condition that they supply
soldiers on demand. The best that
can be said for this system is that
it was cheap to maintain; but the
vassals were often a threat to the
state, and neither they nor the
 kings could provide public
safety. The Islamic iqta system
was non-hereditary; this allowed
greater state control but
encouraged corruption.
• Regulars are soldiers as a
profession, as in the Roman or
Chinese empires, or today in the
US. This eliminates the fuss of
raising an army when you want to
make war, but at the cost of
maintaining the army in
peacetime.
You don’t want it to occur
to your soldiers that they’ve got
guns and the civilians don’t and
that they could take power— a
perennial problem in ancient
 Rome and the mid-20C Third
World, and only a bit less so in
imperial China. Sufficiently
prosperous democracies with
highly professionalized armies
seem to avoid the problem. In
premodern times canny rulers
kept armies under civilian
control and rotated their generals.
• Mercenaries fight for
money, land, or citizenship.
There have been periods when
these were key resources—
Alexander hired 50,000 of them,
and the Swiss infantry were
highly sought after in medieval
Europe; the Pope’s Swiss Guard
is a remnant. There are always
 questions about their loyalty and
reliability, so modern states
prefer regulars.
• Slaves— mamluks— were
the main military element in
many Islamic states from the 9C,
and persisted in some form till
the 19C. Early mamluks were
mostly Turkish, and raised to be
strict Muslims. Their sons were
not allowed to become mamluks;
rather, new recruits were found in
the Turkish lands. This system
allowed the Arabs to avoid
having to fight other Muslims;
just as importantly, the Turkic
mamluks had no local ties or
allies and thus were loyal. Until
 they weren’t; in the 1250s they
took over power for themselves.
Army sizes vary immensely. Here’s a
few representative samples:
• The Roman army under
Augustus: 250,000 total, across
the empire.
• The Byzantine
expeditionary force that
recovered North Africa and Italy
for the Eastern Empire: 15,000.
• Mongol army, at the death
of Genghis Khan— 130,000
(including some allies)
• Medieval standing armies,
16C: a few hundred in peacetime;
 15 to 30,000 in wartime.
• Sòng dynasty, 12C China:
1 million men, though this army
was considered bloated and
inefficient
• US, World War II : 12
million
• US, 2007: 1.37 million

Great battles
Military history is a slightly macabre
affair; aficionados pore over neat
diagrams which, after all, represent
enormous numbers of violent deaths.
Nonetheless it’s valuable to learn what
the generals are thinking. Let’s look at
some of the great battles of history.

Cannae, 216 BC
Carthage was the underdog in its
second war with Rome; Rome expected
to easily pick off its Spanish colony.
Instead the Carthaginian general
Hannibal advanced over the Alps and
took the war to Italy, beating several
Roman forces.
His masterpiece was the battle of
Cannae. The Romans, with 75,000
troops and a 2-to-1 advantage in
infantry, were drawn up in standard
formation: infantry in the center,
cavalry on the flanks. Hannibal placed
his weaker allies in the center, thrust
far forward to invite an attack; his best
infantry units were on their flank, and
cavalry farther out.

As the Romans advanced, the

Carthaginians gave way, moving
backwards. Hannibal sprung the trap by
having his flanking infantry move
forward, hitting the Romans’ flanks on
both sides.
Meanwhile the left half of the
Carthaginian cavalry routed the Roman
cavalry opposite them, rode behind the
Roman army, and attacked the Roman
left-side cavalry from behind. They
chased the Roman cavalry away, then
moved back to attack the trapped
Roman army from behind.
50,000 Romans fell, there was no
Roman army left, and southern Italy
went over to Carthage.

Tyre, 332 BC
Sieges are the complement of battles;
to conquer a nation its fortified cities
must be taken. When he besieged Tyre,
Alexander had already won two of the
three land battles that bested the
Persian Empire; but the Persian navy
had not been defeated, and threatened
his supply lines and even Greece. But
rowed galleys cannot maintain
themselves at sea for long; they would
be defeated if he captured their ports,
and Tyre was the chief of these.
It wouldn’t be easy. Tyre stood on an
island a thousand meters off the coast,
was entirely surrounded by walls 45 m
high, and had a strong garrison of
15,000. The usual expedients of mines,
rams, and siege towers looked
impossible, and starvation was out of
the question as the city could be
supplied by sea.
With typical bravado Alexander
determined to alter the facts. He had a
causeway built across the water, which
remains to this day. The forward end of
the work was protected by two
enormous siege towers, themselves
fighting platforms. The Tyrians sent a
fireship against them and burned them
down.
Ships from both sides fought nearby,
but Alexander had the better of the
battles. He mounted battering rams on
his ships; finding that underwater
blocks of stone kept them from
reaching the walls, he mounted cranes
on ships and hauled them up.
Finally, after seven months, the rams
were able to make a breach in the south
walls. Bridges were dropped from his
ships and troops poured in. The result
was a massacre (as frequently
happened when a city was stormed).

Chìbì, AD 208
In the 3C, the Hàn empire had divided
into Three Kingdoms (Sànguó). The
warlord Cáo Cāo controlled the north,
in the name of the Hàn; the southeast
was the kingdom of Wú ruled by Sūn
Quán, and the southwest was Shǔ Hàn,
ruled by Liú Bèi, a remote relative of
the Hàn.
To unify the country, Cáo Cāo had to
take the middle Yangtze — modern
Húběi province. He took a large army
south, estimated at 220,000 men; the
southern states, who formed an
alliance, had only about 50,000.
Early battles favored Cáo Cāo; he
captured the important naval base at
Jiangling and gave Liú Bèi a drubbing
at Changban. The warlord’s forces,
fatigued and suffering from a plague,
sailed down the Yangtze to Chìbì (Red
Cliffs). The ships were tied together,
perhaps to reduce seasickness among
the northern soldiers.
The warlord was approached by an
enemy commander offering surrender.
A squadron of defecting ships
appeared; but the surrender was a ruse
and the ships were filled with oil and
kindling. The sailors lit them on fire
and escaped in small boats, letting the
wind bear the fireships to Cáo Cāo’s
fleet, causing a conflagration.
The remnants of Cáo Cāo’s army fled
north, pursued and harrasssed by the
allies. For half a century China would
remain divided into Three Kingdoms.
The battle is a classic demonstration
that numbers are not enough, even
when technology is matched. Even
apart from the ruse, Cáo Cāo was
defeated by his own overconfidence,
stretched supply lines, and
unfamiliarity with marine warfare.
Chìbì is a major event in Luó
Guànzhōng’s 14C novel The Romance
of the Three Kingdoms and remains a
favorite in movies and games.

Hastings, AD 1066
This is one of the classic
confrontations of infantry and cavalry.
King Harold’s English army was
almost entirely infantry, wearing
chainmail armor and wielding spears
and battle axes (six feet long, a blow
from these could take down a horse).
Harold was a competent warrior; he
had just defeated the king of Norway
200 miles north. The Norman army
under Duke William was mixed:
archers, infantry, and heavy cavalry
armed with lances and swords. Neither
army had more than 8000 men.
The English line formed along a ridge,
and formed a shield wall that was able
to resist the initial volley of arrows, a
follow-on infantry charge, and a
cavalry charge.
By accident or design, a cavalry
division on the left fled away from the
shield wall. The English were unable to
resist the temptation: they broke ranks
and rushed after the fleeing Normans.
William was unhorsed and at first
thought dead.
But he was alive, and rallied resistance
and then a counter-attack. The English
had lost cohesion, and many of the
shield carriers were picked off; the
Norman archers were also ordered to
fire over the shield wall, devastating
the farther ranks— Harold was killed
by an arrow at this time. William’s
army attacked again, broke through the
shield wall, and finished off the
fragmented English.
The two take-home lessons: a
determined infantry line can hold off a
charge of the best cavalry— but it must
be careful in pursuing retreating riders.
The feigned retreat (also a favorite
nomadic tactic) is an invitation to the
infantry line to break, greatly
increasing its vulnerability.

Ain Jalut, AD 1260

In the 13C the Mongols exploded out
of their homelands, a threat to China,
Europe, and the Middle East alike.
They conquered Persia and
Mesopotamia and seemed poised to
conquer Syria, Palestine, and Egypt—
once they had sorted out the matter of
the succession; the Great Khan
Möngke’s death in 1259 required the
local leader Hulagu’s presence back in
Mongolia. He left Mongol forces under
the command of his Turkish general
Kitbuga, 10 to 20,000 troops.
Egypt was ruled by the Mamluk sultan
Qutuz. The Mamluks were themselves
Turks, maintained as a slave army by
the Egyptians, but had recently taken
power for themselves. Qutuz had
20,000 men, of which half were
Mamluk cavalry. The two sides met in
Galilee, not far from Acre.
Qutuz, knowing the local terrain, hid
the bulk of his forces in the highlands
while baiting the Mongols with a
smaller force under his commander
Baibars. Baibars used typical nomadic
tactics, advancing with his cavalry and
feigning retreat several times.
Eventually Kitbuga took the bait and
pursued Baibars into the hills where
Qutuz’s forces emerged from hiding
and attacked.
The Mongols fought fiercely on, but
the tide turned when Qutuz rushed into
battle calling “O Islam!”— appealing
to the ideological unity of the Mamluks
as against their religiously mixed
enemies. The Mongols were forced to
retreat, though Kitbuga fought to the
death.
The battle checked the momentum of
the Mongols; they were never able to
do more than raiding west of
Mesopotamia, while the Mamluks
retained control of Syria and Palestine.
Just as importantly, perhaps, it marked
the ability of a sedentary state to field a
cavalry strong and skilled enough to
resist the nomadic armies using their
own tactics.

Stalingrad, AD 1942
Stalingrad is perhaps the pinnacle of
European all-out war, and arguably the
turning point in the German-Soviet
struggle.
In 1942 Hitler decided that he needed
more oil, and made a drive for the
Caucasus. The operation started well—
the leading panzer division got halfway
to Baku— but stalled as the Germans
failed to take Stalingrad.
From August to November the
Germans continued to pour troops into
the city, fighting street to street and
sometimes floor to floor within a
building. This made little strategic
sense; the city could simply be
bypassed. But Hitler had a thing about
willpower and wouldn’t hear talk of
retreat.
The Soviets, at first overwhelmed by
German aircraft, built up their air
forces till they could serve as an
effective counter. In late November the
Soviets attacked the weaker Romanian
armies on either side of Stalingrad with
mechanized units. Three days later the
arms of the pincer met, trapping 22
German divisions (250,000 men) in the
city. Hitler was not worried; he had
supplied seven divisions in Demyansk
by air the previous winter and proposed
to do it again. But the logistics were
much more daunting this time, and the
Soviets inflicted heavy losses on the
Luftwaffe. Not enough supplies were
getting through.
In December the Soviets launched an
even larger pincer movement,
advancing from two points 300 miles
apart. Hitler had to admit defeat; the
armies in front of the city retreated, but
those inside were lost. Total deaths in
the campaign exceeded a million, one
of the deadliest in history.
The large-scale pincer movement was a
feature of World War II, enabled by
mechanized troops and radio
communications.

Fantasy war
You can have an earthlike planet with
earthlike war. Or you can mix it up a
bit— but follow the sorts of balances
and limitations of actual war. Some
general questions to ask about any
element you add:
• What skills are required?
Is this something all soldiers will
adopt, and if not why not?
• Does it require special
resources, and if so where do
 they come from and who controls
them?
• What are the limitations?
• How is it countered?
• How does it interact with
conventional elements?

Magic
Novelists don’t always have to make a
coherent, balanced system; video
games do. In Oblivion, magic works
like this:
• There are three basic types
of damage: fire, shock, and frost.
Some enemies are immune to one
of these; there are also element-
specific shield spells.
• Spells cost magicka to
cast; this regenerates fairly
quickly, but limits the rate of
fire. Your total magicka depends
on your skills; there is thus a
tradeoff between swords and
sorcery.
• Armor interferes with
spellcasting, which means that
magicians are vulnerable, and it’s
an option to go in and bash them
with a sword. There are Shield
spells, but as magicka is limited
there is a tradeoff between
offensive and defensive
spellcasting.
• There are also spells
specifically designed to interfere
 with spellcasting, such as
Silence, Paralysis, and Drain
Magicka.
• Spells to heal and rally and
to fortify skills and attributes
allow magicians to support other
fighters.
• Spells can be permanently
cast on armor or weapons,
creating magic items with those
properties. Magic weapons have
an inherent charge and thus a
limited number of uses. They can
be recharged via a somewhat
gruesome operation (it requires
killing other creatures).
Permanency has a huge
unbalancing effect, so it’s wise to
 put limits on it.
The net effect is that conventional
fighting complements magic. An army
would have a corps of battlemages,
which can be used for both offensive
and defensive purposes. Magic has
limits, and can be countered either by
traditional weaponry or by other
magicians.
In Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange
and Mr Norrell, the title magician
Strange accompanies the Duke of
Wellington on his campaign in Spain.
Asked what would most help the army,
the duke gives an answer which
resonates with military history: good
roads.
On Almea, one of the sapient species,
the iliu, has the power to gen-erate
visions or images in other people’s
minds. This is normally used for
communication and art, but it has
military applications: enemies can be
confused about where an iliu force is,
or made to imagine forces that aren’t
there. Their main enemy, the ktuvoks,
have a related mesmeric ability that
allows them to enslave other sapients
— though the iliu are immune to it.
The Force in the Star Wars universe is
essentially magic (molest me not with
talk about midichlorians); it doesn’t
transform warfare only because it’s
highly limited in numbers— fewer than
one Jedi per planet, it seems— and in
effects. Yoda can lift an entire X-wing,
but there’s no suggestion that he could
pull the Death Star down from the sky
with his mind. Jedi are thus something
like elite commandoes, not something
you’re going to deploy in regiments of
thousands.
Magic systems may have a
metaphorical basis— they’re
associated with divinity, or mind, or
life. This can produce narrative and
military restrictions: e.g. if magic is
tied to the gods, only holy men can use
it in battle; if it’s linked to femininity,
the battlemages are women.
Novelists’ magic systems have a
tendency to get out of hand. I admire
the inventiveness of J.K. Rowling’s
magic, but it seems to me to invent too
many powers, like Marvel superheroes
or D&D magic systems. They go down
smoothly enough while we’re reading,
but I think that’s because readers and
writers forget all the inventions already
made. Give your heroes too many
powers and they become boringly
invincible. For narrative balance the
writers start to create absurd
vulnerabilities (such as Superman’s
unhealthy reactions to bits of his home
planet) or increasingly campy
supervillains.
Again, the key to avoiding that path is
restraint. One good idea is better than
twenty. Take a lesson from s.f., which
usually concentrates on exploring one
idea at a time— teleportation, or time
travel, or robots. Instead of creating
long lists of spells, perhaps take one
idea, such as—
• healing spells
• the dead can be revived
and made into dull-witted but
relentless soldiers
• magic can make a soldier
invulnerable, but only for 10
seconds at a time
—and think out all the consequences.

Strange creatures
The example of the horse (p. 255)
shows how much warfare can be
transformed by a single suitable
animal. Fantasy animals could make a
similar impact.
Did you just think of dragons? You’re
not the first. But a large ridable bird or
pterosaur would create a very
distinctive form of aerial warfare. As
with airplanes, the beasts could be used
for communications, scouting,
infiltration, skirmishing, or bombing.
Walls wou ld no longer secure a city—
the only sure defense against a flying
creature would be a cavern or building.
Again, think about limitations.
Perhaps, like horses, the creatures only
thrive in certain habitats. They should
have limitations on how long or far
they can fly. It’s hardly fair to make
them invulnerable; defenders would
surely rain crossbows up at them, or
launch their own flying creatures.
Perhaps they can be confused by
smoke, loud noises, or the smell of
certain animals.
More ideas:
• Mole-like animals would
be useful for mining city walls,
or for reconnaissance.
• Our species hasn’t had
much luck militarizing predators,
but perhaps others have done
better. A lionlike mount could be
terrifying on the battlefield; even
more so a lionlike sapient.
• Sea creatures would be
effective allies against ships. If
 they’re large enough, they might
serve as mounts or transports.
• An ogre or golem could
serve some of the functions of a
tank: a massive, highly
destructive shock force. But
perhaps they’re easily confused,
or have a tendency to run amok
among their own lines.

Strange environments
Another approach is to create new
environments. This has been discussed
under alien species (p. 76), but it’s
worth reconsidering these from a
military perspective.
For instance, a marine sapient has great
inherent mobility— it doesn’t need
roads and isn’t impeded by vegetation
or mountains. (Venturing off the
continental shelf where most sea life
congregates might be risky, though,
like a human being venturing into the
desert.) It also adds a three-
dimensional aspect to fighting; a
common tactic would probably be to
rise suddenly from the inky depths.
On the other hand, ranged attacks
would be difficult, and metallurgy
would be nearly impossible, to say
nothing of gunpowder. Appendages for
manipulation might be necessary for
civilization, but it’s hard to imagine
them large enough to wield strong
weapons without impeding swimming;
most fighting might therefore come
down to natural weapons— teeth,
claws, tentacles. A battleground—
battlepool?— would soon be choked by
blood, reducing vision to a few feet and
inviting marine scavengers.
An entirely aerial species, or a very
small one, would similarly have its
own distinctive advantages and
disadvantages.

Future war
Nukes
As a future weapon nukes seem
decidedly retro. Nuclear weapons
haven’t been used in battle for fifty
years.
This is largely due to the overkill of the
Cold War : in 1967 the US had over
30,000 warheads. A war fought on this
scale wouldn’t be a war; it’d be
planetary suicide. For reference, the
bomb at Hiroshima killed over 100,000
people, perhaps a quarter of the
population; the blast was equivalent to
13 kilotons of TNT. An average
modern warhead is 100 times as
powerful.
Your typical rogue dictator has fairly
rationally concluded that nukes are the
best defense: Iraq was invaded, North
Korea was not. As offensive use of
nukes by a state would surely result in
devastating retaliation, this might lead
to a stasis where nuclear powers are
safe from invasion, but they fight
proxy wars among the nukeless.
That leaves non-state actors, the stuff
of many a thriller and CIA briefing.
It’s hard to be sanguine; on the other
hand it’s hard to picture nuclear
terrorism as very effective, as it would
invite a furious response and certainly
not lead to the perps’ demands being
met. (One million dollars, maybe;
ending capitalism, no.)
It might be far more militarily useful
to use nuclear weapons to generate an
electromagnetic pulse (EMP); a single
high-altitude detonation can disrupt
electromagnetics for hundreds of
miles. Live components are more
vulnerable, so one countermeasure may
simply be to keep spare parts on hand.
The story changes in interplanetary or
interstellar war. If you don’t have to
live on your enemy’s planet, you may
be happy to blow it away. Counter-
measures would include a screen of
space fighters and hiding industrial
facilities, perhaps in the asteroid belt.

Robots
Already in Iraq and Afghanistan we see
an increasing use of unmanned drones,
more than 10,000 of them. They can
disable roadside bombs, provide an
extra set of eyes, venture into areas
unsafe for soldiers, shoot down
incoming mortars, fly over enemy
terrain and shoot missiles, even succor
the wounded. Most can be controlled
from halfway around the world— a
way of economizing on expensive First
World soldiers. They’re also an
increasingly effective counter to
asymmetric insurgent tactics, and
allow operating in areas such as
northwestern Pakistan where outside
troops would be highly unwelcome.
It’s not hard to imagine future conflicts
largely fought with drones and robots,
in which case war would come down to
a nation’s industrial capacity.
Military robots obviously have no use
for Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.
They’re subservient to humans, though,
right? P.W. Singer offers a sobering
anecdote: in 1988 a cruiser patrolling
the Persian Gulf spotted something in
the air. The object was broadcasting
radar and radio signals showing it to be
a civilian flight. The cruiser’s Aegis
system, however— designed for
projected war with the Soviets, not for
observing in peacetime— insisted that
it was an F-14 fighter. The crew trusted
the computer system and authorized
fire. But the computer was wrong; it
was an civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight
655, and 290 people were killed.
Military technology triggers the
invention of counter-technology, and
then counter-counter-technology. The
Iraqi insurgents have been improving
their bombs and tactics, finding new
ways to trigger them and to hide them
from the robots or to jam their sensors;
at least once they co-opted a captured
robot.
The next level of technology may well
be swarms of tiny robots— if one extra
pair of eyes is good, a hundred or a
thousand is better, and much harder to
counter.

Lasers
Since the days of Buck Rogers at least,
writers have been eager to see energy
guns. The military agrees; in 2010 an
aircraft-mounted laser successfully
destroyed a ballistic missile travelling
at 4000 mph.
Laser beams travel at the speed of
light, have no recoil, and minimal
divergence— the beam is narrow even
at long distances. Laser sights make
use of the latter property.
Unfortunately, lasers consume
enormous amounts of energy and
generate huge amounts of heat, making
it difficult to create hand-held
weapons. Plus, human tissue is mostly
water and lasers do mostly heat
damage; the physics makes this a bad
combination. And if the target stays
still and you do vaporize some tissue,
the vapor will block the beam.
In the short run it’s more practical to
make weapons that dazzle or stun the
enemy, or explode their rockets. Or
stick with bullets, which use energy
efficiently and do lots of damage.
Plasma or antimatter are even more
speculative. They’ll probably require
enormous energy too.

Information
The World Wars were all about
applying industrial technology to war,
making armies and ships as massive
and powerful as our dams, factories,
and steamships. The next military
revolution may be the application of
information technology.
We’re starting to see this in the Iraq
war— e.g. the US often undertakes
major actions at night, when its forces
can use night goggles to see, and the
insurgents can’t.
In future wars, soldiers may have
heads-up displays that show
information about the enemy and the
environment, personal AIs to offer
advice and warnings, weapons that
offer targeting assistance, and radio
contact with buddies, robots,
neighboring divisions, and command.
War, in short might be like a video
game, with live fire.
This is more of a novelty than it
sounds; one of the universals of combat
has been the fog of war. The individual
combatant sees only a tiny fraction of
the battle. In the gunpowder era the
battleground was literally covered by
fog, by persistent clouds of gunpowder.
In WWI trench warfare, once a
battalion climbed out of the trenches to
advance into the no man’s land, they
were eerily cut off from all contact,
even if they were only a thousand yards
ahead. The fog only began to lift with
the widespread use of radio technology
in WWII.
It’ll be interesting to see if the classic
military hierarchy survives this change.
Your typical cannon -fodder had to
obey because he had little training but
drill, and saw only a tiny portion of the
battlefield. If every private is a highly
trained expert and has the same
information as the general, he can be a
good deal more autonomous.
Unobtainium weapons
There’s no need to restrict yourself to
cutting-edge or foreseeable weapons; if
you do you’d be like a Roman writer
inventing really fancy swords. You’d
might as well posit something
impossible.
The same questions apply as to fantasy
war (p. 271). Few weapons are
devastating for long. Think about what
happens when everyone has your
weapon. What are its limitations; what
are the counter-measures?
Alfred Bester is an excellent model for
how to think things out. In The Stars
My Destination, personal teleportation
is possible, but only to precisely known
and visualized locations; effective
counters include total darkness and
obscuring coordinates with mazes. The
book is full of implications neatly
drawn from the idea, such as
homesteads out in the middle of
nowhere and corporate tycoons who
express their status by maintaining pre-
teleport modes of transportation.
Quite a few s.f. themes have interesting
applications to war:
• Teleportation: appear in
ones and twos in enemy territory
to infiltrate, or in thousands to
invade
• Telepathy: track where all
the insurgents are and what their
 intentions are. On the other hand,
codes and surprise attacks
become impossible
• Time travel: go back a
week to disable the enemy’s
defenses before the war starts, or
back a century to stop his rise to
power
• Nanotechnology: flood the
enemy’s bodies and machines
with microscopic invaders
• Matter duplicators: finally
solve those pesky logistics
problems; easily duplicate the
enemy’s more advanced weapons
so long as they fit in the analyzer
bin
Future cultures of war
Beyond the technology of war, think
about future cultures of war. It’s
questionable whether the European
idea of massed battling armies will
continue to be useful. Large and
comfortable nations have much to lose
and little to gain by throwing
themselves at each other.
Perhaps new conventions will develop
for nearly symbolic combat between
advanced nations. A nuclear
tournament, for instance: set off some
bombs in space to show who has the
most effective weapons. Perhaps a
corps of volunteers is placed at the
detonation point to demonstrate that
the will to sacrifice still exists. The
side that demonstrates insufficient
courage and firepower concedes the
battle.
Asymmetric warfare can be expected to
continue. In a 2002 set of war games
preparatory to the Iraq war, Paul van
Riper, the commander of the “Red”
forces (those playing the enemy), used
a series of simple evasions that
discomfited the “Blue” troops planning
a high-tech offensive. To avoid Blue’s
electronic eavesdroppers, he use
motorcycle messengers; he sank
massive Blue battleships with suicide
bombers.
Saddam Hussein himself was not
nearly so clever. But as the insurgency
showed, though a high-tech military
can easily occupy a lower-tech country,
an insurgency can make it nearly
ungovernable for years on end.
Roadside bombs or suicide bombers
are cheap, and require the occupier to
stay in safe zones or venture out only
in highly militarized units, making the
occupation politically difficult.
This can also be thought of as a matter
of military culture: the insurgents do
not recognize the Western rule that an
occupation definitively ends the war.

Space imperialism
That people will form interstellar
empires and then have grand old battles
is a hoary old s.f. tradition, and
probably hooey.

Respecting Einstein
If you respect the speed of light— that
is, you stick with science that’s held up
for more than a century— then
interstellar states, empires, and wars
are nearly impossible.
Space is really, really big. There’s a
nice sunlike star four light years away,
but as we saw above (p. 40),
comfortable stellar systems are likely
to be rare— space is full of red dwarfs.
And we’re far from having anything
that can come anywhere near
lightspeed. A grand tour of the human
colonies near Sol could take several
lifetimes.
But suppose we have a workable STL
drive. Are you really going to pack up a
large fraction of your metals, use some
unimaginable amount of your energy
reserves to send them way out of
communications range, and have them
take on an enemy right next to his own
industrial base? Space imperialism is
the mother of all quartermasters’
nightmares.
And for what? Once we’ve got the
nanoduplicators set up, what material
goods could they send back that we
don’t have? Spices? You want to take a
chance on alien plant species? Kudzu is
bad enough.
Some people are convinced that we’ve
messed Earth up so badly that we need
to find a new planet. First, good luck
convincing the rest of the planet to
fund your departure. More importantly,
the skills needed to start a new colony
somewhere in space— long-term
economic and political stability,
sustainable industry, a light ecological
footprint— are precisely those that are
most lacking on Earth right now.
You’ve got to solve those anyway. And
once you do, you don’t need a lifeboat.
S.f. empires are an unwarranted
extrapolation from our Age of
Navigation. But planets are not oceans.
As Charlie Stross puts it, get back to
me on space colonization once we’ve
got burgeoning colonies in far easier
environments, such as Antarctica and
the bottom of the ocean.
This also explains why no aliens have
ever, to our knowledge, taken over this
prime bit of real estate. Anyone
advanced enough to get here is
advanced enough not to need the place
as Lebensraum. Personally I suspect
that galactic protocol is “hands off any
planet with an ecosphere.”
My own s.f. future, as used in Against
Peace and Freedom, addresses these
issues in this way:
• Human lifetimes are far
longer— well over 600 years.
This makes it practical to
undertake several space journeys
in one lifetime.
 • Human colonies are linked
in a loose confederation, the
Incatena. The Incatena has some
police powers— in effect, its
agents have extraterritoriality—
but has nowhere near the power
needed to conquer a member
planet. Its agents are free to use
diplomacy and espionage,
however.
• There’s little trade in
anything massive; instead, what’s
traded are ideas: databases,
information and entertainment,
franchises, patents.

Screw Einstein
OK, sigh, you want faster than light
travel.
Interstellar war is still a difficult
proposition, for the same reason that
it’s hard to take over a nation entirely
using ships or aircraft. You’re still
sending out a lot of metal way away
from home. You can only send a
fraction of your industrial output, while
the enemy has an entire planet. No
matter how magic you make your
supply lines, they’re still longer than
his.
Plus, you’re attacking from space;
though that gives you some advantages
(e.g. you can nuke the planet at no risk
to yourself), it also makes you highly
visible and highly vulnerable— rather
like a WWII aircraft carrier, an
impressive feat of engineering that
could be sunk by three torpedoes.
OK, think big— you have factories that
take up entire planets, you can fuse
metals out of gas giants, and every ship
can use minimal energy to go directly
anywhere in the galaxy from just
outside planetary orbit. (You still want
those lovely tracking shots of the
spaceship approaching or leaving the
planet.)
But you have to assume the enemy has
the same technology, if not the same
level of resources. So when your
megafleet arrives, his can just leave.
Space is big. Which of the hundred
billion stars in the galaxy did they
move to? If space travel and resources
are cheap, there can hardly be choke
points and fortifications.
As Arthur C. Clarke said, a sufficiently
high technology is indistinguishable
from magic. But that means that, like
magic, it should be defined in a
satisfying and plausible way. Magic
that make a character omnipotent is
uninteresting, since the character no
longer has any needs or limits. By all
means create superweapons and super-
travel, but give them interesting costs
and limitations.
The precise nature of the galactic
society you come up with, and the kind
of wars it fights, will depend on those
costs and limits. For instance:
• Spaceships are expensive
enough for a group of private
investors to build, and take a few
months between stars.
Then you essentially have the age
of sailing ships: spaceships can
be maintained by corporations,
colonies are distant but not
unimaginably so, most wars will
be local since only large states
can assemble a fleet in one place.
This is similar to some of
the universes created by Robert
Heinlein... as a libertarian, he
made sure to keep space
affordable for private citizens.
• FTL spaceships are huge
investments only states can
afford, and take a few weeks
between stars.
Now you have something like
WWII and its battleships and
aircraft carriers. A fleet of three
spaceships is an enormous
imposition of force (at least
against another fleet, not
necessarily a planet). Spaceships
might have a squadron of STL
fighters to deploy as protection,
or to land on a planet. Decoys
that imitate the radiation
signature of a spaceship might be
an important obstructive tactic.
This is largely the model of
Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica.
• Space travel is
instantaneous, but only along
particular wormholes.
In effect a large set of worlds
becomes closely interconnected
— and can have wars not much
more complex than those
between planets of a single
stellar system— but this may be
only a small part of the galaxy;
the rest remains nearly
inaccessible.
This is the setup for the
Mass Effect games.
• Space can be directly
travelled with little energy by
teleportation, perhaps directly by
individuals.
In essence, all planets are
connected, if only for foot traffic.
The same sort of wars can be
fought as within a planet; but you
can’t prevent the enemy from
taking the war to your doorstep.
A variation: only biological
entities can be teleported. That
means you can’t bring your space
scooters, factories, or guns...
though you could bring your war
horses and attack wolves. (Might
as well allow thin layers of dead
animal or plant material, so
people arrive with their clothes
on, to say nothing of their hair
and epidermis.)
• Individuals can travel
directly between planets— but
only a select, trained few.
Space travel becomes a form of
tourism or very restricted trade.
War is essentially limited to
espionage, or to expensive
conventional means.
One universe that follows
this idea is Le cycle de Cyann by
François Bourgeon and Claude
Lacroix.
Making maps
One of the primary tools for
visualizing your world is maps. In this
chapter we’ll go over how to make
beautiful maps that make you want to
go there.
See the Astronomy chapter (p. 47) for
how to create the geological elements
of the map: what continents should
look like, where the rivers go, where
mountains will appear. This chapter is
about drawing the actual maps.

Methods
Methods: Paper
My first maps were on paper, generally
made with pens and colored pencils.
Also, we lived in a paper bag in the
middle of the road and our Da killed us
every morning.
Paper maps are hard to modify, hard to
get right, and harder to show to the
world. Nonetheless they may be an
essential first step in creating a
computer illustration. Most of us can
draw better on paper than on the
computer; if that’s the case with you,
draw your map and then scan it.
Given that, you don’t need to worry too
much about all the art school
techniques— what paper to use, what
brush or pen. You’re basically doing a
clean rendering that you’ll finish up on
the computer.
If you do want maps as permanent
works of art— well, throw away the
ballpoint pens and get to know your
local art supply store. Calligraphic
pens offer a sensuous thick black line;
technical pens give a very black line of
uniform thickness.
Uniform coloring is very hard to do.
You may have luck with art markers. If
you have patience, there are color films
that you can cut into shapes with an X-
acto knife.
Clean-up on the computer can be
tedious, so for best results you want a
nice thick line on white paper. If you
have pencil sketch lines, erase them, or
draw very lightly and ink the final line
heavily, then turn up the contrast once
it’s scanned.

Methods: Computer
First: get a drawing tablet. Drawing
with a mouse, to say nothing of the
horrors that come with notebook
computers, is like trying to wrangle a
knife and fork with your feet. I use the
cheapest Wacom tablets, which have
hovered around $100 for years. Though
if enough people buy this book I’d love
to get a tablet-monitor. Those things
are sweet.
Tablets are not only easier to use— you
use a stylus, like a pen, rather than the
mouse— but they’re pressure-
sensitive, which is essential for nice-
looking lines and for airbrushing.
Second: forget all about Microsoft
Paint. There’s lots of great paint
programs out there. For drawing I like
Photoshop— though it’s an annoyance
that its brushes aren’t sharp enough.
Sometimes I use Painter for its better
brushes; or I just use the Sharpen filter
in Photoshop.
There’s a low-end alternative,
Photoshop Elements, which is
perfectly adequate; I got it free with
my Wacom tablet. Or use the free
Gimp.
The hand-eye coordination takes a little
getting used to. Or a lot. But you have
an Undo button; use it often.
As a map largely consists of sharp lines
and text, Adobe Illustrator is a natural
for them. You can import a shaded
bitmap for terrain. As Illustrator is
vector-based, it supports scaling much
better than Photoshop. Plus, you can
edit the path point-by-point, a boon for
drawing smooth curves.
There are programs specifically for
making maps; I’ll list some on the web
resources page,
http://www.zompist.com/resources/pck.h

Layers
Photoshop (and similar programs) have
a wonderful feature: layers. These are
like a stack of transparent acetate cels
you can draw on.
Here’s a representation of the layers of
a simple map of Arcél: text on top;
then borders; then rivers and coastline;
then terrain in grayscale; then the
ocean.
Layers don’t conflict with each other,
so you can move text around without
messing up the image below, or draw
the terrain without affecting your rivers
and coastlines.
Best of all, you can create multiple
maps with the same base: maps of
political states, languages, resources,
religions, sapient races, whatever. With
transparent colors, these can all share
the nice shaded terrain.

Overall tips
The first map you make, you’re likely
to be in a hurry, and draw big blobby
shapes and nearly-straight rivers and
mountain ranges. That’s fine, but go
back and refine it later. Natural shapes
(including coastlines, rivers, and
mountains) show a certain randomness
— learn to cultivate a jiggly line to
suggest detail.
Here’s an example of a region of
Almea, Nan, in an early and late form:
Most of the map should be in subdued
colors— at least halfway to white.
Otherwise the text on the map won’t be
readable. You don’t actually need a
coastline at all if you color in the
ocean, while shaded terrain means that
mountain ranges don’t need to be
indicated with lines.
Use subdued and harmonious colors all
over, in fact. Most amateur maps are
way too garish. Instead of a white
background, a light beige works well.
Color-code your text. I use red for
country names, blue for water features,
brown for mountains, black for cities.
This can’t be reproduced in a book, of
course, but it makes a map much more
readable.
Keep text small— just big enough to
read. Use the same font for everything
— nothing too fancy.
A little airbrushing can subtly
emphasize certain features. I like a
darker blue shade in the oceans near
shore, as seen in the Arcél map above.
If you’re making a political map, select
each colored region and airbrush a
darker color along the edges; this
creates a nice old-fashioned effect.
For a hand-drawn effect, explore some
of the Photoshop brushes and tools. I
like the watercolor brush, for instance,
which I used in this schematic map
from the Count of Years:
Plausible mountains
Here’s a step-by-step guide to drawing
a shaded relief layer.
We’d might as well look at what
mountains actually look like. Here’s a
Landsat image of Madrid (the city is
the white stain just right of center); the
mountains are the Sierra de
Guadarrama.
The problem is, this map is only about
200 km across. On the larger scales
you’re likely to be working with—
entire countries or continents—
mountains barely register. So what
we’re really after is a convincing
illusion.
I’ll illustrate with the northwestern
portion of Arcél, a region 2000 km
wide, ten times wider than the satellite
image above, though it’s only a portion
of the continental map a few pages
back.
Always draw at magnification— I used
anything from 200% to 600%. You
have a lot more control over your lines
that way. (But frequently go back to
100% to see how it looks.)
First, I used the airbrush tool (17-pixel
width), in a gray a few shades darker
than the neutral background, to draw
the shaded sides of the mountains. Note
that the mountains are basically
parallel sets of long ridges, not the
individual triangles you remember
from Tolkien's maps.
Remember that you’re drawing half of
the mountain at this point, the shaded
part. Which side is shaded? Pick a
direction for the light (mine is the
northwest) and be consistent. It may
help to use a sketching layer to draw
the continental divide— the highest
points of the mountains. Shade the side
of the mountains away from the light.
Don't overdo it... note that the river
valleys are left flat. You can draw
some low relief here in very light
colors, but there's no real need.
Now I used a white airbrush to draw
the other side of the mountains. Again,
remember where the light is coming
from.
I’ve also gone back and added some
smaller ridges (for instance, the spur
that divides the two river basins that
drain into the northern ocean).
For this whole process, by the way, I’m
working with the terrain area selected.
(The magic wand is useful for this.)
That way I don’t have to worry about
drawing outside the continental area. (I
don't draw over the rivers because
they’re on a separate layer.)
Now that the shading is more or less in
the right place, I switched to a smaller
airbrush (size 5 or 7) in a darker color,
and sharpened up the top of the
mountain ridges. I want the top ridge to
be fairly sharp, but the bottoms to be
fuzzy.
I’ve also taken the opportunity to make
the ridges a little more random. Natural
boundaries (coastlines, rivers,
mountain ridges) are fractal, with
plenty of detail at all levels.
In the northern peninsula, among other
areas, I’ve made the minor ranges meet
up with the main range, instead of
running parallel to it. It looks nicer that
way.
The mountains don’t look bad now, and
indeed if you use color overlays this is
about all you’ll see anyway. But to add
some final detail, I used a smaller
airbrush yet (3 pixels) and drew cross-
shading: white lines on the shaded
areas, dark lines on the bright areas.
Remember, Undo is your friend. Don’t
be afraid to draw some stuff just to see
how it looks. If it doesn’t look like you
want it to, undo and try again.
At this point I decided that the
mountains were a little too dark and
sharp-looking. So I used the blur tool
to soften up the edges, and also applied
a lightening filter. Now the mountains
don’t overwhelm the map.

Cheap mountains
An alternative to shading the
mountains is to draw a contour map.
You don’t have to go crazy with this—
three levels of shading (plains; low
moun-tains; high mountains) are about
all you need.
Here’s an example, a map of the island
of Apoyin on Almea. I made it as a
contour map because it was originally a
set of D&D hex maps which only
indicated two levels of terrain.
See also the map of Borneo on p. 64.
A CGI globe
Rectangular world maps will distort
your world horribly. But they have one
neat use: they can be used in a 3-D
modelling program to create a globe.
You need a cylindrical projection for
this— that is, a map whose height is
half its width, with the latitudes
equidistant, fortunately one of the
easiest maps to mark out. (Contrast
with the Mercator, where the latitude
lines get farther apart closer to the
poles.)
Load the map into your favorite 3-D
modelling program (p. 342), create a
sphere, and use your map to texture it:

Within the program, you can rotate the

globe to see what it looks like from
various angles.

A sinusoidal map
There is no projection that represents a
sphere on a flat surface without
distortion— and the better ones require
plenty of math and good technical
drawing skills. A good compromise is
the sinusoidal projection.

Let’s start with one spear, 45° in width.

(You can use any width, up to the
entire circumference of the planet.)
The globe will be made of eight of
these spears (because 45° is 1/8 of the
full 360°).
The drawing width is thus 1/8 of your
drawing size. If the equator is 10” long
(which will fit neatly onto a sheet of
typing paper), the eight spears are
1.25" wide.
The spear’s height is half the size of
the equator, thus 5".
If you’re using A4 paper, a spear width
of 3.5 cm and height of 14 cm will
work well.
Here’s the clever bit. The sides of the
spears aren’t straight, but curved, and
the curve obeys a simple rule: the
width at any degree of latitude x is cos
x times the width at the equator. Let’s
work that out for increments of 10° and
a spear width of 1.25":
x cos x width
0° 1.0 1.25"
10° .984 1.23"
20° .940 1.17"
30° .866 1.08"
40° .766 .96"
50° .643 .80"
60° .500 .63"
70° .342 .43"
80° .174 .22"
90° 0 0"
In Illustrator, you can click with the
Line tool selected and you’ll get a
dialog where you can enter the line
width. You can also let Illustrator
center the lines for you.
Now connect the edges of these lines
with a smooth curve.
I used Adobe Illustrator, drawing the
curve by eye, then lining up the anchor
points with the latitude lines and
smoothing out the curve.
This only needs to be done once; for
the other segments the curve can be
duplicated, moved, and reflected.

Duplicate this basic shape eight times,

and you have this bristly little map of
the world:

This map won’t be very easy to read

(it's hard for the eye to connect land
masses across spears), but it minimizes
distortion.
You can ev en make it into a physical
globe— many commercial globes are
made this way, in fact. Use a printout
of the map. Carefully cut around the
edges of the spears (leave them
connected at the equator). Tape the
edges and you have a little paper globe
of your planet. Or make a map whose
equator matches the circumference of a
ball; then you can paste the spears on
the ball, for a less delicate globe.
To show off your continents, you
simply combine spears as needed:
You can combine any number of spears
— even half-spears, as in the fifth
spear on the bottom. One longitude will
always be straight and thus distortion-
free; it need not be the one in the
middle. For the bottom left lobe I made
the longitude that passes through
Verduria straight.
If you’re drawing on the computer,
drawing the combined lobes is easy:
just take a half-spear and stretch it
horizontally. The middle top lobe, for
instance, is stretched 300%. (If you’re
drawing by hand, you’ll have to re-
measure.) Now you can draw the
continents:
You can combine all the spears, if you
like. The resulting map gets rid of the
orange-slice appearance, but the left
and right edges do end up pretty
stretched out. (Note Palthuknen in the
upper left.)
A city plan
A plan of your main city may be
useful. The easiest method is to draw
the walls, fill in the city area with one
color, then draw lines on top of it for
the streets.
Above is part of the plan of Verduria
city; since it’s entirely made of
geometric shapes and very text-heavy I
used Adobe Illustrator rather than
Photoshop.
What do you indicate on the city plan?
I took the same approach as a
guidebook: street names, parks,
government buildings, cultural and
recreational buildings, temples,
palaces, and the top-tier taverns and
stores.
Remember that premodern cities were
tiny by modern standards. Ancient
Nineveh, terror of ancient
Mesopotamia, had a population of
30,000 and a size of 720 hectares or
less than three square miles. Ancient
Rome had about 250,000 residents,
which would put it in the rank of
Buffalo; medieval cities were only half
of that. Verduria has about 600,000
residents, since it’s at the start of the
steam age.
Some cultures seem to like rectilinear
cities, others don’t. Seemingly
formless cities may have developed out
of smaller settlements and following
natural features— rivers and streams,
ridges and hills.
Whatever is most important to your
people will get the most space and the
grandest buildings. Roman cities were
dominated by public works: forums,
baths, theaters. The largest buildings in
medieval cities were the churches; in
modern cities, corporate offices.
City size correlates with the prevailing
mode of transportation. Cesare
Marchetti has pointed out that since
ancient times people have preferred a
commute of no more than one hour—
meaning that the radius of a city for
pedestrians is limited to about 5
kilometers. Trains, cars, teleportation,
and rideable dragons all change the
largest practical city size.
Illustrations
If all you do is write, you can skip this
chapter. But there’s nothing quite like
pictures at showing what your world is
like and how it differs from other
worlds.
You can also skip it if you’re a great
artist already. It’s aimed at the person
who thinks they can’t draw, or can
cartoon but would like to do better.

How to draw better tha

you could
Methods
Keep your drawing simple. Beginning
artists try to solve problems by adding
lines. Spend your time instead making
sure they’re in the right place.
If you work on the computer, you’ll
really need that graphics tablet. If you
don’t have one, draw on paper and then
scan.
We’ve already seen the use of layers
on maps (p. 286). For figure drawing
they have a number of uses:
• Put a simple colored
background on the lowest layer.
The color helps you choose detail
colors that harmonize with the
 overall tone of the picture.
• Use a layer for sketching:
draw roughly; then reduce the
opacity to 50%. Add a new layer
and draw more cleanly on that.
Repeat if necessary. Once you’ve
got the final drawing, hide or
discard the sketch layers.
• Draw background objects
or patterns on a layer above the
background, below the figures.
It’s a lot easier to draw even a
straight wall as a single object
rather than drawing it in pieces
behind the main character. All
the more so if the background
includes a tree or a desk.
• You can paste images onto
a layer and use them as models
for drawing.
• Use a separate layer for
colors and shading, under your
line drawing. This will produce a
more even coloration, without
having to get the drawing
perfectly clean.
• Layers can be used for
details— jewelry, beards, shiny
patches— that you’re not sure if
you want or not. You can easily
delete them.
• If your picture includes
multiple objects, draw each on a
separate layer— then you can
 easily move or resize them
without messing anything else
up.
Be prepared to break habits. You may
have some facility with cartooning—
you’ve drawn the same figures for
years and have quick ways of drawing
ears, eyes, hands, etc. These habits will
get in the way of accurate figure
drawing. Look at the models and
retrain yourself to draw something
more complicated but more accurate.

Proportion
If you only absorb one word from this
chapter, make it this one: proportion.
If a picture looks wrong, the
proportions are probably off. Don’t try
to fix it by adding shading or extra
detail. Get the proportions right in the
sketch. If you’ve gone further, you may
be able to save the drawing by
selecting parts of it and resizing them.
An example: this picture is well
rendered, but it still looks bad— the
proportions are off.
The girl’s eyes are too high on her head
and too far apart; her mouth is too low.
Also, her neck is too long, and her
shoulders are too broad.
Here’s the corrected version of the
same picture.
Or you can go the other way: purposely
violate the rules to create aliens and
monsters. For instance, a high eyeline,
tiny eyes, a big nose, and a massive
lower lip with overhanging teeth makes
a good orc.
If you’re copying a picture or drawing
from life, be aware of negative space:
the voids in the picture have a shape
too, and they make excellent
diagnostics of an error in proportion.
Even a sketchy drawing will look
pretty good if the proportions are
lifelike.

Zoom zoom zoom-a zoom

Do you find it hard to get control of the
stylus? No problem. Just zoom in.
For instance, this
hand needs work,
but it’s hard to do
anything with it at
the original size.

But blow it up
400%, and it’s a
lot more tractable.
I’ve redrawn the
 hand and then
shrunk it back to
its proper size.

I always make a drawing much larger

than its target size... the eventual
shrinking will hide plenty of sins.
While working on it, I zoom in as far
as possible.
But go back frequently to regular size
— in Photoshop this is a single
keystroke (Windows ctrl-alt-0; Mac
option-command-0). Don’t waste your
time making the zoomed-in part look
fabulous if the details will just get lost
at regular size.
Zooming, like shading, can’t fix a
drawing with bad proportions. If the
hand is too small for the arm, it doesn’t
matter how well drawn it is.

A female face
Drawing pretty girls is a useful skill,
and not an easy one. I’ve been working
on it for about thirty years.
Let’s start with the basics: a frontal
view of the face..
Draw an oval. For extra points, make it
more egg-shaped, narrow end down.
Now draw lines down the middle.

Divide the horizontal lines in half;

we’re going to put the eyes there.
(Slightly inward would be more
accurate.)
The eyes live on the middle line— not
above them. They are little almond
shapes, twice as long as they are high.

Draw a little curve for the nose, a little

less than halfway to the chin.
The ears run from the top of the eyes to
the bottom of the nose. Don’t give the
poor girl Dumbo ears; we’re not seeing
them from the side of the head.

If the ear shape scares you, a narrowed

C shape will do. Or cover the ears with
hair.
Eyebrows live pretty close to the eyes
— about an eye-height above, in fact.
They’re thicker closer to the nose.

The mouth is closer to the nose than to

the chin. The curve you draw here
largely determines the expression, so
get a line that satisfies you.
The top lip, with its double-bow shape,
is only about 1/3 the total height. The
bottom lip is half an ellipse.
If you draw an equilateral triangle with
two corners at the edges of the eyes,
the bottom of the triangle will touch
the bottom of the lip.

You can erase the cross-hairs now.

There’s a million hairstyles; here’s a

few simple examples:
The face and figure are timeless, but
hair immediately brings in a sense of
period. My favorite drawing book, Jack
Hamm’s Drawing the Head & Figure,
has extremely ’50s hairstyles.
Don’t overdo the lines— we know it’s
hair, you don’t have to draw every curl.
If you draw a jagged shape for the hair,
remember that the jags can’t cut into
the outline of the head.

Getting things symmetrical can be

tricky; on the computer you can cheat
— duplicate the eye or ear and flip it
horizontally.

Eyes
If you draw almonds for eyes you’re
ahead of many people who are under
the impression that eyes are circles.
But we can do better yet.
The eye bows in a bit toward the nose,
and the corner is curved. The lower
edge can be left out or lightly sketched.

Add some sweeping lashes to the side

opposite the nose, and some much
smaller lashes on the bottom edge.
In close-up only, add a line above for
the eyelid and one below for the rim of
the eye.

Add a big circle, and a smaller black

one for the pupil. The highlights are
actually reflections of the lights in the
room.

Shade the iris. If you’re drawing in

color, the color of the iris may not be
uniform.
For East Asians, draw a heavy dark
curve along the top of the eye, curving
down to hide the corner. Asians vary in
how much the epicanthic fold covers.

The face in profile

The head in profile isn’t egg shaped.
Who knew?
Start with a square, and divide it in
four.
Mark a point ¼ of the way up the left
top cell, and draw a smooth curve to
the top of the head.
From there draw a smooth curve down;
it hits the bottom of the cell ¼ of the
way in.
The final curve is a bow shape, hitting
halfway across the bottom of its cell.
These lines need not be perfect—
they’re usually covered by hair.
Draw the straight part of the nose, from
just above the center line outward. It
goes downward about ¼ of the cell.
The jaw is a smooth curve; it’s ¼ of the
way up the left of the cell and ½ of the
way up the right.
The eye is a diamond shape on its side,
a tad above the center line.
Draw the mouth a little bit below the
center of of its cell, not very far
inward.
Fill in the rest of the profile. It curves
inward at the level of the eye, and
again below the nose and under the
mouth.
This is probably the hardest part to get
right. Undo, or your eraser, is your
friend.
The nose is a bit upturned, which helps
it register as female.
The lips form a sideways heart shape;
the bottom lip is bigger.
The ear is a backwards C extending
from the top of the eyes to the bottom
of the nose.
I’ve added the eyebrow, nostril, and
details of the eye and ear.
The main line inside the ear is another
C, opposite the main C of the ear. Just
below that, and fitting inside it, is a a
sort of extended V.
The front of the neck hits ½ of the way
along the bottom of the cell.
Finally add hair. Don’t start too close
to the eyes.
Erase your guidelines so people think
you can do without them.

Race
How you draw the eyes, nose, and lips
will largely determine the apparent
race of the character. These differences
should be subtle— our brains are
highly sensitive to tiny facial details,
so there’s no need to exaggerate.
For an East Asian appearance, the main
factor is the epicanthic fold, which
hides one corner of the eye with a little
curve. The eyes are not slits; they
aren’t slanted either.
The nose is often blunter and a little
wider. The lips may be a bit more
prominent.
In profile, the cheeks and mouth may
be farther forward. Asian hair is
normally quite straight.

Africans are very varied— what

Americans think of as “black” is more
generally West African. Here the nose
is wider, the lips larger, and the jaw is
farther forward.
Natural African hair is frizzy; it can be
straightened, but rarely ends up as
fluffy as white folks’ hair.
Hispanics aren’t very uniform, but a
prominent nose and bigger features
will help. The nose can be a bit beaky.
Try a mixture of European and Asian,
or European and African.
Oblique views
Frontal and side views are boring; you
want to know how to do oblique
perspectives. Fine, but they’re harder;
don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The head is more or less an egg shape,
with an extension in the back.
The slash indicates the overall axis of
the head; it may help you draw the egg
shape.
Draw the vertical centerlines of the
face, the sides of the head, and the
horizontal equator.
These are all half-ellipses. The line
going up the face is a bit flattened.
Divide the horizonal line into thirds.
The eyes will live on the frontward of
these marks.
The nose and mouth are marked out as
when you’re drawing the front view.
The ear is drawn back of the cross-
hairs on the side, just as we did in the
side view, but a little foreshortened.
Eyes and mouth aren’t straight; they
follow the curve of the head.
The edge of the head bows inward at
the eyes.
It’s the nose that’s most distinctive in
this view; it’s kind of a soft L shape.
The nose and the left eyebrow (the one
on our right) form an extended smooth
S-like curve.
I added hair and a few more details.
Her eyes are narrow because she’s
looking downward.
Sometimes you’ll see the edge of the
cheek bow inward toward the mouth.
A common mistake with three-quarter
views is to draw the facial features too
far back. There’s a lot of space in
between the eyes and the ears.

Male faces
Male faces are a lot more forgiving.
Drawing girls, a line a few millimeters
off may ruin the drawing; you may not
even notice it drawing men.
Follow the same basic procedure as for
female faces, but note the differences:
a squarer jaw, a wider neck, more
emphasis on the nose.
The brow is a little lower as well.
If you’ve mostly drawn girls, your first
attempts at males may look too
feminine. Easy solution: add a beard.
Adding more lines will make your
character look older— but this may
improve the portrait of a man.
I added lines around the eyes and
forehead, creases by the side of the
nose, and a suggestion of jowls and
cleft chin.
Men have lips— go check!— but the
picture often looks better if the top lip
is removed and the bottom merely
suggested with a heavy line.
For the profile, note the blockier brow,
nose, and jaw and wider neck. The nose
is less upturned, the upper lip straight.
Again, some extra lines look good on a
man: beneath the eye, between nose
and mouth, along the upper brow and
the cheekbone.

A basic female body

Figures are often measured in heads—
after all, the person you’re drawing is
more likely to have a head than to be
holding a ruler.
Hamm recommends 7½ heads—
actually a tall frame; a petite girl may
be only 6 heads tall. Some artists like
to make their women 8 or 9 heads tall;
I guess they’re leg men.
Anyway, draw a line and mark it in
eighths.
You may draw vertical lines a head
away from the center— the body will
lie well within these lines.
Draw a skeleton figure, following these
guidelines:
Torso: a little less than 2 heads tall;
shoulders are about ¾ of the way to the
side vertical. Note the taper inward.
Hips taper the other way, and extend
from head 3 to 4. They’re wider than
the shoulders.
The knees live at head 5½, the feet at
7½.
For the extended arm, the elbow is
about at head 3, the hand reaches head
4½.
Some helpful landmarks:
• the nipples are one head down
• the navel is a head below that
• the crotch is one more head down
There’s a stagger at the knee: the lower
legs aren’t on the same line as the
thighs, they’re shifted outward a bit.
Draw the outline of the body. The
limbs are not parallel— they taper
inward as you go down. The neck
tapers outward.
The outside curve of the leg starts at
the hips and extends to the top of the
knee. The inner curve goes down
farther, below the knee. That is, the
bowed-in bit on the outside of the knee
is higher than on the inside.
In relaxed position, the thumb is closer
to the body and the elbow points away
from us.
Get your lines in the right place,
redrawing as necessary. When they
look right, redraw the whole thing on a
new layer to get a clean line. (And only
then. A bad drawing isn’t saved by re-
inking.)
The knees are suggested by a couple
parenthesis shapes.
You can draw the face as described
above, without of course worrying
about the tiny details.
A few more details, and of course hair.
Get to know the shape of the clavicles
and the depression in between.
At this angle, the feet form a kind of
triangle.... they don’t extend out
sideways, as I drew them years ago in
an otherwise fairly good picture of a
flaid.

Male bodies
Adaptations for male bodies:
• This figure is eight heads tall.
The knees are just above head 6.
• Shoulders wider than hips, as
much as two heads wide.
• The neck is thicker, and the
muscles on either side (the trapezius)
are convex rather than concave.
• The deltoid is more
prominent— there’s always a curve
at the top of the arm.
• Men have waists too, but
they’re not as indented.
• Without the breasts, it’s
easier to see how the chest muscles
hang from the shoulders. Look at his
left arm: the arm slots in under the
 pectoral muscle.
This dude is well-built but not a
superhero. If you’re drawing an
ordinary shmo, the neck and shoulders
will be closer to the female figure.

Shading
My favorite tool in Photoshop is the
airbrush. It’s amazing how much better
a drawing looks when it’s properly
shaded.

Shaded sphere
Let’s start with a very simple object—
a sphere.
Draw a circle and color it in.
Select the colored area, so the rest of
the drawing is restricted to the circle.
Take an airbrush a good fraction of the
sphere’s diameter— about 1/5 its size
will do. Open the color dialog and
select a somewhat darker version of the
overall color.
Then draw around the circumference,
so you get an even shading on all
edges. If it’s not quite even, add a few
more light strokes.
Select an even darker shade. Then draw
a sort of crescent moon shape well
within your sphere, at an angle.
The idea here is that the darkest part of
the sphere is well inside its boundaries
— the edge nearest to it is actually
lighter.
Now select a color lighter than the
original shade. (The upper left of the
sphere should still have that color, so
you can use the eyedropper to get back
to it.)
Draw another crescent moon shape, but
smaller, on the opposite of the sphere
from the dark one.
Select a yet lighter color, close to
white. Use this to create a highlight (n
the center of your crescent-shaped
lighter area.
The exact nature of this last shiny spot
will do a lot to suggest the surface
material. For instance, use a smaller
white airbrush to add a small, very
bright highlight, and the sphere will
look very shiny.
Experiment with Photoshop’s filters.
One of my favorite tricks is to use
Noise and then Blur, which suggests a
more textured material. (An example is
the arch pictures on the back cover.)
Pixelate / Crystallize suggests a lumpy
surface, Brush Strokes / Spatter a
rougher one.
The light here is coming from the top
left. This may suffice for your first few
years of drawing. Of course you can
reverse it if the light is coming from
the right. Other angles can be more
complicated, but the basic principle is
easy enough, innit? Areas facing the
light are brighter, and throw shadows
away from the light. The picture above
is cleverly designed so that the angle of
the light can be varied by rotating the
book.

Shaded face
One you can do a sphere, you can do a
face. Bodies are largely composed of
overlapping squishy spheroids.
Do the shading on a separate layer,
below your drawing. That way you can
change it easily, and the shading won’t
spoil your drawing. Plus selecting an
area won’t be as fiddly— the lines of
the drawing add a forgiveness factor.
First, select the area you want to shade.

I use the magic wand on the drawing,

non-contiguous, and select the face in
the drawing layer. The area probably
won’t reach to the edges. That’s fine;
use Select / Modify / Expand and
expand the selection by 2 or 3 pixels.
That’ll probably do it, but there may be
bits of the drawing that didn’t get
selected. Use the lasso to add them to
the selection.
Move to the drawing layer and use the
paint bucket to shade the whole face
region with your basic skin color.

Do the same to color in the hair, lips,

and clothes.

Now use the magic wand to select just

the skin, so you can airbrush merrily
away without affecting anything else.
Treat the face just like the sphere, and
shade it the same way, ignoring the
features.
The neck and the hair can be treated the
same way.
Use a smaller, darker brush, and add
shadows where something blocks the
light: under the nose, chin, and ear;
inside the ear; behind the clavicles.
The hair itself casts a shadow, so you
can darken just under the hairline.
Add light and dark shading to the
individual features: nose, forehead,
arms, neck.
The cheeks bulge out slightly, so they
get a highlight; you can also emphasize
the cheekbones with some shading.
The lips are squashed spheres, so they
get the usual dark shading toward the
bottom, plus an irregular highlight.
For the pupils, use a drawing brush (not
an airbrush); draw a solid black pupil,
leaving a rim of iris; then add very
small white highlights.
I’ve divided the hair into four regions,
each with its own highlight and dark
region. An irregular highlight looks
more natural— hair is rarely perfectly
combed.
Since this drawing is black and white,
the eyebrows are part of the base
drawing. In a color drawing, they
should be the same color as the hair.
Switch to a drawing brush, and add
dark lines over the highlights, and light
lines on top of that.
Avoid the temptation to scribble. You
want separate lines, nicely curved
following the lines of the hairstyle.
Some straggling hairs at the edges help
make it look like hair rather than a
helmet.

If the face starts to look clownish, undo

your last moves and switch to a smaller
brush or a color closer to the original
skin shade. Or just use a big airbrush
set to the original color and swipe it
over the whole face, which will reduce
all the contrasts.
For a female face, if you go much
beyond the above, she’ll start to look
old. For a male, signs of age tend to
add dignity: fleshy jowls, a cleft in the
chin, bags under the eyes.

Shaded body
Now let’s color in a full figure.
Again, start by applying a uniform base
color. The easiest way to choose a
color is to find a photograph and
sample the skin color (you can’t
copyright a pixel).
Apply the basic shading rules to each
body part: head, arms, torso, breasts,
legs: a darker shade on one side, a
lighter one on the other.
The arms are thin enough that you can
just lighten one side. With the legs, it
looks better if the lighter area is within
the leg rather than at the edge.
The armpits are a depressed area; also
the area just behind the clavicles.
The top of the pelvis— the iliac crest—
may be visible at the top of the hips.
More details, added with a finer
airbrush. Note the upside-down U of
the rib cage.
Often bones are close to the surface
and create visible lines. In the line
sketch these are indicated with ink, but
some of these have been removed since
they are better indicated with shading.
In more complicated poses, the arms
and legs are likely to shade other body
parts.

Clothing
Unless your people are nudists, you’re
going to want to put clothes on them.
See p. 169 for designing clothes.
Drawing fabric is a study in itself.
Here’s a picture of a towel draped over
my desk lamp.

The main thing to notice is how the

fabric drapes down from a protruding
point (the top of the lamp). It’ll do the
same thing from parts of the body,
usually bony points like shoulders,
knees, and the iliac crest (the top of the
pelvis).
The lamp has a snaky neck; the towel
follows it but is stiff enough to extend
past it on the right end.
Note the curtain folds in the middle;
you will see these also in draped skirts.
When starting out, it’s best to sketch
the nude figure first, then add clothes.
This will get the proportions right and
prevent many errors.
Very tight clothes may approximate the
lines of the body… just draw the edges
and you’ve got a swimsuit or superhero
outfit.
The drawing below is intended to
demonstrate common errors.
• No reference to the
underlying figure. This is an
impossible pose! E.g. the waist and
torso point in different directions,
and the left foot doesn’t fit the leg.
• No attempt at drapery. Cloth
folds over itself, especially in areas
like the armpit.
• Assuming that body features
(the breasts and crotch) look the
same in the clothed figure.
• The ends of sleeves and pants
legs aren’t straight once you put
them on. They curve around the
limb.
• In several areas (waist, left
 leg) the clothing is drawn inside the
line of the body.
• Blouses and shirts usually
billow out at the waist.
Sometimes you want a flatter, more
naïve look— e.g. you’re imitating
older styles of art.
Here’s the same outfit drawn from life.
• There will always be wrinkles
at the armpit.
• Note the twist in the fabric on
the left sleeve.
• Protrusions produce folds—
that, rather than its curve, is what
marks the bust here.
• The pants are of a bit stiffer
material; they try to retain their
cylindrical shape, producing
distinctive crush folds at the knee
and ankle.
If you use shading instead, you can get
rid of most of the little lines:
Another blouse. This one is tucked into
the pants; note how the material
bunches up at the waist.
The breasts produce folds, pointing at
the nipple. The breasts are not well
separated with most outfits.
The material wrinkles at the armpit and
elbows, and bunches up just above the
wrist.
About the simplest clothing item to
draw is a skirt. The fabric largely heads
straight down from the hips. The knees
can produce folds as well.
A lighter material, or more of it, will
produce more folds. Note the squarish
curtain folds at the bottom of the skirt.
Pants hide the line of the legs
somewhat; they mostly drape down
straight from the hips and knees.
The model here is extending her left
knee forward, which makes the knee
the focus of several folds.
The V-shape of the crotch disappears
under clothes. Tight pants tend to have
horizontal folds at the top.

Good books
Is that everything you need to know to
draw figures? Oh god no. Everything
looks different as soon as the pose
changes. But you can get a whole book
of hints: Jack Hamm’s Drawing the
Head & Figure.
Your friendly local bookstore will also
have books full of photos, which are
invaluable resources. A few I’ve used:
John Cody, Atlas of
Foreshortening (1984)
Erik A. Ruby, The Human
Figure: A photographic reference
for artists (1974)
Thomas Easley, The Figure in
Motion (1986)
Elte Shuppan, Pose File— a
series of books published in the
1990s
The Internet is full of pictures, clothed
and nude. Fashion catalogs are a great
resource too. You can teach yourself a
lot by using them as models. If you’re
going to publish your work, don’t copy
existing photos; I’ll show you a great
alternative in a moment.

Good models
You may or may not have a friend who
will be willing to pose for you, but you
do know at least one person: yourself.
It can take a long time to master full
frontal drawing— and then it turns out
people don’t stay in that position, and
each pose is a minefield of new things
to learn. Once you’re a fabulous artist,
you may be able to execute
complicated poses from memory. But
till then, your best friend is a digital
camera.
For instance, here’s a panel from a
comic of mine, and the photo I took for
reference, just for the position of the
arms and hands:

That’s not a bad reference shot for

drawing shirts, too.
A mirror can help too, but the camera
is even better. Very likely it has a
setting to take a picture on a timer,
which allows you to use both hands. Or
ask a friend to take the shot.
With some practice you can change
sex... here’s a panel of my character
Fuschia Chang, and the photo I based it
on. I could never get that pose right
without a model.
3-D Modeling
Fantasy illustration is no longer limited
to drawing and painting; you can now
create three-dimensional renderings,
and even wander around inside of
them. The cover illustration includes
part of such a rendering.
For me, this is most useful in
representing architecture. In theory you
can draw anything, and the top artists
(such as the French BD artists François
Schuiten, Moebius, François Bourgeon,
and Jean-Claude Mézières) create jaw-
dropping fantastic structures. But to
draw even a couple of houses in proper
perspective, to say nothing of adding
cultural flavor, is a dismaying task.
By contrast it’s a few seconds’ work to
make a building in a 3-D modeling
program, duplicating it is a snap, and
the program handles perspective,
shadows, and even beautiful water
reflections— see the example on the
back cover.
The ease is deceptive, however; to
make an attractive scene you’ll still
have to put in a lot of work.
I’ll describe the basics of modeling,
then list a few free modeling programs.

Prims
Whatever program you use, you’ll be
doing the same thing: creating simple
3-D shapes called prims, then shaping
and distorting them.
For instance, walls are just stretched-
out cubes. Or you can create a room by
making a big cube, then hollowing it
out. Doors and windows can be made
by carving out a space for them, or by
careful building: build the wall on
either side, then a smaller piece on top
between them (and one below, if it’s a
window).
Prims can be moved, stretched, rotated,
and often more complicated operations
can be performed— e.g. skewing a
cube into a slanted shape, or drawing
only part of a torus so you have a
curved arc, or extruding a flat shape
into a three-dimensional one along a
curve.
Prims can be connected together in
groups and manipulated as a unit.
The program doesn’t care if prims
interpenetrate. You can use this to
cheat fancier shapes. For instance, a
tool might be made with a hollow piece
fitting round a shaft— you don’t
actually have to hollow the thing out.

Textures
Prims can be textured; that is, a picture
is applied to the surface. Your
modeling program likely comes with a
bunch of textures— many varieties of
stone, brick, dirt, carpet, etc. Thus with
a few clicks a set of prims becomes a
stone wall.
Good texturing separates the ugly,
fake-looking model from the pros.
Slapping on a few canned textures may
create something workable, but all too
often the textures clash luridly, the
interfaces are sloppy (e.g. bricks don’t
look right at the edges), and the details
are unconvincing.
If you do much modeling, you’ll want
more than the canned textures.
• Google Images is your
friend. Try to use free or public
domain images, unless you’re
making something entirely for
 your own use.
• Take pictures. You’re
probably surrounded by usable
textures— a walk around town
will give you hundreds, and best
of all you can get multiple
variations— e.g. a solid wall, a
wall with window, a doorway,
interesting architectural details.
• You can draw your own
textures using Photoshop— or
take photo images and
manipulate them. Maybe those
red bricks would look better in
brown; or you can add in a
picture of a window, even adding
a drop shadow.
Seamless textures
Ideally you want a seamless texture—
one that can be tiled without the edges
being obvious. Let’s go over how to do
this in Photoshop.
First, here’s a picture I took of a wall
in town.
The image isn’t rectilinear; this is
easily fixed. Select the whole image,
then Edit > Transform > Skew. Move
the corners till the lines between the
bricks are parallel to the edges of the
picture.
Here you can see where I moved the
corners— I expanded the window so I
could move them outside the image
itself.
Here’s the image after skewing.
I increased the contrast, and also
lightened or darkened some of the
individual bricks, to add to the visual
interest. (This sort of thing is less
necessary if you’re working in color.)
I’ve cropped the image along the lines
of the mortar between the bricks, which
will make the rest of the work easier.
Modelling programs prefer textures in
powers of 2, so this would also be a
good time to resize the image to
something like 512x512 pixels.
Select Filter > Other > Offset; you’ll
get the dialog shown. Enter offsets half
the size of the image. (E.g. if the image
is 512x512, enter 256 for both offsets.)
Now you can see what the image looks
like tiled. There are a number of
problem areas.
Select the Clone Stamp tool and choose
an airbrush— for this image I used a 17
pixel brush. Alt-click (Mac: option-
click) in a suitable area of the image,
and apply it in one of the glitchy areas,
scrubbing over the border region.
Use Undo if you mess up.
Keep going till the image looks
smooth. In this image, I worked on the
bricks first, then the mortar lines
between them.
If there are too many variations in
texture and lightness, such that you
can’t find enough areas to clone from,
use another, more uniform image.
Use Filter > Other > Offset and again
enter values of half the image size into
the horizonal and vertical offsets.
Now we’re back to the original view,
but the edges have been modified.
One brick had a staggered edge; I
decided I didn’t like that and fixed it
with Clone Stamp.
Now we’ve got a seamless texture that
can be used to tile a wall of any shape.
With this image, the repetition is
noticeable. If that bugs you, use a more
uniform image, or a larger texture
(more bricks would make the repeat
stand out less).

Advanced texturing
The default texturing will apply a
single texture to the entire prim. You
can get a lot fancier than that, however.
Each surface can have its own texture.
You can use this for variety (e.g. some
walls have windows, some have none),
or for non-uniform objects, like a
fireplace with a wood mantel on top.
You can tile a seamless pattern on one
or more surfaces; this looks far better
than just stretching the image. The
tiling can be different horizontally and
vertically— e.g. a long brick wall
might tile just once vertically, and
many times horizontally.
The image can be cropped or offset.
For instance, perhaps a wall texture has
a baseboard at the bottom. But perhaps
you have a partial wall up above
somewhere. You can set a vertical
offset so the baseboard doesn’t appear.

Alpha textures
Here’s a mind-blowing tip: textures
can include transparent areas. So,
instead of messing with prims to make
a window, you can just create one or
more transparent areas in your wall
texture, apply the texture to a solid
wall, and behold, you have windows
you can see through!
You can use the same trick for
doorways if they’re just for show. It
doesn’t work for avatars though, since
transparency only affects appearance
— the prim is still solid. You can cheat
sometimes, though— e.g. if a short
wall is mostly doorway, you can make
the entire prim non-physical.
Another application is to make
irregularly shaped decals. For instance,
you could create a circular clock, or a
bloodstain, and apply it to a very thin
prim in front of a wall. This sort of
thing can add variety to the walls
without creating a load of textures.
Generally this involves creating an
alpha channel in Photoshop. Let’s
look at how to do this to create a
railing.
Create a layer for your alpha mask and
fill the whole window with white. The
idea here is that black areas are
transparent; white areas are opaque;
and grey is in between. That can be
useful for semi-opaque windows, or
special effects like a gauze curtain.
The screen cap shows the layer dialog
over the artwork. Copy the contents of
the alpha mask layer.
Select Channels in the Windows menu.
You’ll get the window shown. Don’t
worry about the color-oriented
channels it lists.
Click the arrow above the list of
channels and select New Channel...
from the menu. Accept the defaults.
That gives you an all-black window.
Paste in the contents of your alpha
mask layer.
(You can draw directly in the alpha
channel, but it’s easier to have a layer
corresponding to it, because it’s easier
to line it up with elements of the
image.)
Go back to the layers window and
select any layer to get the regular view
back. Hide the alpha mask layer.
The image just shows a wood texture
since that’s what we want for the bars
of the railing.
Save the image as a TGA file; make
sure alpha channels are saved.
Here’s the texture applied to a long
rectangular prim in the modelling
program, magically transparent.
The top of the railing gets a different,
solid texture. Or you can add a second
prim for the handrail, a little wider.

Prim or texture?
Often something can be handled either
by adding prims, or by adding to the
image.
It’s easy to overdo the prims at first.
E.g. you want a railing partway up the
wall, or a set of pipes in your spaceship
corridor; you add a bunch of prims. It
looks great, and texturing is simple—
e.g. a pipe just needs a generic metal
texture.
However, it may end up a lot less work,
and look just as good, if you add these
details to the texture. It’s remarkable
how much character is added by a good
texture. For instance, here’s a simple
spaceship corridor, with no textures
and with fancy drawn ones:

In general, use prims only where you

need to get the lines right (e.g. you can
see the edge of a building and it
shouldn’t be straight). If the model is
to be traversable, judicious use of
prims can increase the level of realism;
e.g. a low wall will look better with a
protruding cap.
Pay particular attention to transitions—
e.g. wall to roof. Look at the nearest
door: the wall doesn’t just end at a
particular spot; there’s usually a
protruding frame. That can make your
modeled door look better too.
Say, this is starting to sound like a lot
of work, isn’t it? Well, yes. Creating an
model for use as an illustration will
take a few evenings— longer than
drawing it, if you can draw architecture
at all. But the learning curve is easier.
Meshes
Some things can’t be nicely modeled
with a few prims, however distorted.
Instead they are modeled with meshes,
three-dimensional surfaces composed
of tiny polygons.
Character avatars are an obvious
example; they’re made from hundreds
or thousands of polygons. It’s quite an
art to make such complicated figures—
fortunately there are usually free figure
meshes you can use if you need them.
If you want to create your own
tentacled owlbear, though, you’re on
your own.
Prims are actually very simple meshes
— a cube has just six polygons.
Circular prims (spheres, donuts, pipes)
build the curved form out of multiple
polygons. Something like a pipe can
look surprisingly good with just six
outside polygons— that is, its cross-
section is really a hexagon, not a circle.
A large column may not look good
without several times that number.
An irregular surface, like terrain, can
be created by subdividing a large
simple prim— e.g. turning a single
face into an array of 32 triangles— and
then jiggling the vertices randomly. In
combination with a good texture, it
doesn’t take a whole lot of vertices to
make terrain look naturally irregular.
You could use the same technique to
make a stone wall where the wall
bulges out to match the texture. This is
usually overkill, but it’ll improve a
wall that’s supposed to look highly
three-dimensional, but instead looks
too much like a picture stretched over a
flat surface.
In general, the more polygons, the
more rendering time. If you actually
want to move around in your world,
you want to limit how fancy your
models get.

Designing a building
How do you actually go about
modeling a building?
It may help to draw a rough diagram of
the floor plan. I find it easier to just lay
it out using prims. If you’re using a
program that allows you to walk
around in the model, go do so; it’s the
best way to see what the sizes really
look like.
A huge square is a particularly
unexciting design; try some of these
instead. The interior rooms get more
windows, and the designs create
interesting exterior spaces as well—
courtyards or gardens. Also see the
section on Architecture (p. 175).
Once you have a design you like,
roughly lay out the walls, exterior and
interior. Vary the size of rooms— a
mansion, for instance, might have a
huge dining hall, a large kitchen,
relatively large bedrooms, and small
rooms for servants.
You probably need some corridors to
get from room to room— the servants
shouldn’t have to get to their
cubbyholes by tromping through
milady’s bedchamber. Rearrange the
walls as necessary. To allow easy
changes while you’re working it out, it
may be a good idea to make the walls
non-physical so you don’t have to add
the doors yet.
If you have multiple floors, you need to
leave room for stairs. Make sure you
like the location, because they’re going
to be hard to move as you firm up the
design, largely because they leave huge
holes in the floor. The upper floors
may be smaller, leaving nice balconies.
Once all the rooms look good, add the
doors. Depending on the program
you’re using, this may be a matter of
carving out the doorway, or rebuilding
the walls (e.g. turning a straight wall
into three pieces).
Roofs can be a pain. Flat roofs are easy
but will make your building look like
an office park. The traditional A-frame
looks good, though it’s tricky to make
it work between wings. A barrel vault
is pretty easy to make, though harder
for elaborate floor plans. You can make
also more elaborate shapes (e.g. a
fancy pediment) as meshes.
Now add textures and details (such as
door frames, columns, or larger corner
posts). It may only be at this point that
it’s clear whether your building is a
stone castle or a future space colony!

Some programs
These are just a few programs easily
accessible for beginners. (Some of the
high-end programs include Maya, 3ds
Max, Softimage, and Lightwave 3D.)
I’ve only briefly used Blender and thus
can’t say much about it, but it’s free
and open source.
Garry’s Mod is available cheap on
Steam and allows creating an
interactive environment with working
contraptions. To create buildings you’ll
need Hammer (covered below)
anyway.
Hammer is Valve’s map editor; many
other video games provide one too.
The Creation Kits for Fallout 3 and
Skyrim are very powerful. The Unity
game engine has a free version.

Second Life
Second Life is a virtual world created
by Linden Lab, with a strong nod to the
Metaverse described in Neal
Stephenson’s Snow Crash. From
Stephenson, perhaps, it takes its
relentless spatial metaphor: the entire
world is one huge two-dimensional
grid.
The grid is divided into “sims”, each
256 m on a side— that’s virtual meters,
of course. Presently (2010) there are
over 31,000 sims, for a total area of
more than 2000 km2. The content for
all these sims is almost entirely
generated by the users.
Access is free, but to do any serious
building you’ll need land, and that’s
where Linden makes its money. The
smallest plots (512 m2), barely large
enough for a house, cost about $5 a
month— and as a background you’ll
have your neighbors’ horrible
constructions. You can build in the sky,
however!
If you join the community, cheaper
opportunities may occur— that is, you
may be able to borrow someone else’s
land. I’ve created a castle, a couple
spaceships and space colonies, a
Chinese pavilion, and a steampunk
airship, some on my own land and
some on friends’. If you want a whole
cityscape, Second Life will be very
expensive.
Building is done within Second Life,
using the Build dialog. Here’s the
dialog, with a freshly created prim. To
create a prim, click the build button
(A), then click in the world.
Now hit the edit button (B). Basic
editing is done with the mouse; the
radio buttons at (C) determine what
you’re doing (rotating, stretching, or
moving). Click and drag the colored
arrows on the object to affect it.
The tabs at (D) and the options below
the tab menu allow you to do all sorts
of things. Right-click on the object and
pick Take a Copy to get a copy of the
prim in your inventory; don’t forget to
rename it.
The interface is pretty intuitive— just
play with the values and see what you
get. If you get lost, there’s a wiki
available on the Second Life website.
On the plus side,
• You can learn to create a
passable building in an afternoon,
and there are good textures
available for free in your
inventory; many more can be
cheaply purchased, or you can
upload images.
• You can torture prims in
interesting ways—add a twist,
hollow them out, remove part of
them— e.g. turn a sphere into a
half-dome, or a cube into an L
shape. Behind the scenes, what
you’re doing is defining simple
meshes.
• You can link a set of prims
into a single object, which can
then be manipulated either as a
 unit, or piece by piece.
• You can move around in
your build in real time. At the
least you can choose the perfect
spot to take a picture; at the
extreme you can organize a
roleplaying sim and go live in
your world.
• Avatars, yours or your
friends’, are available as human
figures. You can even design
skins and clothes to directly
represent your world.
• If you have access to
Linden water, it’s quite pretty,
with realistic reflections.
• You can use Second Life’s
 lighting model, even set the time
of day. You can simulate a space
environment, for instance, by
building far up in the sky and
setting the time to midnight. You
can specify light sources and give
items a nice glow effect.
• There’s a huge market in
clothes, furniture, plants, and all
sorts of toys— including fantasy
and s.f. variants. This can save a
huge amount of time in
decoration.
• You can import meshes
(complex 3-D models), which
can create some stunning effects.
However, these must be created
in another modeling program.
Some minuses:
• Prim counts are limited by
your land size— e.g. a 512 m2
plot comes with just 117 prims.
• There are some fiddly
limitations on prim size— e.g.
you normally can’t create things
larger than 10 m or smaller than
0.01 m. (You can acquire
megaprims but they’re not
resizeable.)
• Applying textures is prim-
oriented, though you can select
multiple surfaces at once. This
works best with simple textures
or prims.
 • There’s no orthographic
view available; this can make
alignment more difficult. Instead
of doing everything by eye, use
the Build dialog to input set
values— e.g. make all the walls
4.5 meters high and make sure
they start at 11.25 meters.
• You can only edit terrain
on land you own, and it’s pretty
low-res.
• You can’t get less ambient
light than the Midnight setting.
Second Life is great for creating an
environment you can walk around in;
but be aware of a subtle distortion
created by the camera angle. Normally
you see your avatar on screen, and the
camera is a few feet above your head.
The problem is, you’re likely to make
walls look good by eye— and your eye
is ten feet above the ground. As a result
you’re likely to overbuild. You’ll make
enormous buildings with 14-foot
ceilings, and the avatars will look like
dwarfs inside them.
If you scale the buildings to the
avatars, however, you’ll find that the
camera is messed up— it can’t fit in
the same room as the avatar!
Compromise a bit— make the walls
just high enough to allow the camera
in. (Or use mouselook, which takes the
perspective of your avatar.)
A newb mistake in Second Life is to
build vast barn-like spaces. These are
about as inviting as, well, barns, and
they’re hard to furnish. Think small!
The max size prim— 10 meters on a
side— makes a great room. To make an
interesting house, don’t tile your 10
meter prims; offset them.

Hammer
Hammer is the Valve map editor; it’s
used to make levels for Half-Life 2,
Team Fortress 2, Portal, Counter-
Strike, Left 4 Dead, and more. If you
own any of these games, you can
download Hammer for free— select
“Source SDK” from your Library >
Tools list.
Hammer looks more like most 3-D
modeling programs: you start with four
views, a 3-D render plus three
orthogonal wireframe views.
You create your map in Hammer, then
compile it and run it using the target
game.
A map consists of three types of things:
• “Brushes”, Hammer’s
name for prims. This is your
workhorse— your walls and
terrain will be made of brushes.
Each game comes with a set of
textures, or you can use your
own.
Terrain is created using
“displacements”, brushes that
have been subdivided into an
array of triangles; the vertices are
then moved to create an irregular
surface. The Chinese roof seen in
the screen cap above is a set of
displacements.
• Models— imported MDL
files. Basically these are fancy
objects that it’d be hard or
impossible to make with brushes.
Each game comes with a bunch
of canned models, and you can
create and import your own. (An
example is the ship in the front
cover illustration.)
• Entities— basically things
that tell the game how to behave.
At the very least you need an
info_player_start entity to tell the
map where the player gets
spawned, which you’ll need to
run the map. Entities are also
used for all sorts of special
effects— lighting, smoke, fog,
 fire— and of course to make
maps work as levels within a
game.
To make environments for fantasy/s.f.
illustrations— such as the one on the
cover— I’ve found it simplest to make
Half-Life 2 Episode 2 maps. The only
gameplay element you need is the
spawn point, and since the player
spawns by default with no weapons,
there’s no HUDs to obscure your view
as you walk around the map.
You need to enclose the whole map in a
huge hollow box, which you’ll apply a
sky texture to. Hammer gets very
unhappy if there are “leaks” which
would allow the player to see off into
the infinite void.
Positives:
• You can make huge
environments for free. No land
fees or prim limits, as in Second
Life.
• The maps are based on a
grid, and brushes snap to the
nearest point; the granularity is
changed with the [ ] keys. This,
plus the orthogonal views, makes
aligning objects a lot easier.
• Since the games are first
person, there’s no distortion
induced by the camera location.
On the other hand, you need to
refer to your spawn point (which
is a simplified avatar), or import
 a character model, to get the
scale right. (Dimensions are in
“Hammer Units”; the player is
about 83 units high, so a good
minimum height for walls is
100.)
• There are great tools for
applying textures across multiple
objects. For instance, you can
select a complex set of surfaces,
then apply a texture across them
all in one operation; no need to
manually adjust the textures at
boundaries.
• You have immense control
over lighting (and the lighting
effects are quite good). Light
sources include a bright diffuse
 light (i.e. the sun), point sources,
and flickering lights suitable for
candles or fires.
• You can put water where
you want it. (One limitation,
though: water doesn’t reflect
models, only brushes.)
• You can carve out doors
from a wall— much easier than
building the wall in pieces.
Negatives:
• It’s not as user-friendly as
Second Life. You have to get
used to the orthogonal views, and
things like adding water or lights
can take some careful reading of
the wiki pages.
• To get water and reflective
surfaces working right, you need
to add an env_cubemap entity,
compile and run the map, open
the console, and run
buildcubemaps.
• The compile process can
get bogged down. The compile
dialog has some options that
make some operations faster or
skip them entirely; use them if
the compilation is taking too
long.
What’s actually happening
is that the compiler is calculating
visibility and lighting ahead of
time, to save time when actually
playing the game. (If something
 isn’t visible to the player, you
don’t want to waste time
rendering it.) There are all sorts
of advanced tricks to optimize
the map to save on compiling and
rendering time— look them up if
you really need to. (The quick ‘n
dirty version: if you can see
everything at once, compiling
and rendering will take a hit. If
you’ve played Valve games, note
how you’re usually in a building
or a small street where you can’t
see the whole map.)
• Adding character models
is possible but not simple, though
you might get away with using
the game’s models from a
 distance. You can always keep
your architectural rendering
separate from your character
portraits.
• The playable area of a map
is about a half-mile square,
though this can be supplemented
by a ‘skybox’ for distant objects
you can see but not get to. If you
want really expansive scenery,
the Skyrim Creation Kit may be a
better bet.

Hammer basics
Here’s how to make your first map.
Use HL2:Ep2 as the game.
1. File > New to create a blank map.
2. Click the name of the top left view
(it should say camera); select 3-D
Textured.
3. Select the Block tool (the cube)
from the toolbar. Draw a square in
the top right view. (This is your
overhead view.) In one of the
lower views, extend it vertically
by dragging the white squares.
4. Hit Enter; this creates your first
brush. It’s a floor.
5. Select the Entity tool (the little
peg). The Object field in the lower
right should read
info_player_start. Click in the 3-D
view to place the player spawn on
top of the floor; it’ll be a blocky
 green figure.
6. Move to the Object field and type
light instead. Now click in the 3-D
view to place your light.
7. Select File > Run Map.
Hammer will compile the map and run
HL2:Ep2 loading your map. You’ll be
on the floor you created, lit by your
light, and can walk around. When
you’re bored, hit Esc and quit the game
to return to Hammer.
The sky will be crazy, so you need to
create a skybox. (The method below is
deprecated for making game levels, but
it’s fine for making architectural
vistas.)
1. Select the Block tool and create a
really large box around your
original one. Zoom the view back
using the mouse wheel so you can
make it immense— it’s going to
enclose the whole map.
2. Use one of the lower views to
make sure it’s huge upward and
downward as well.
3. The info bar on the upper right
shows the current teture. Hit the
Browse button. In the dialog that
comes up, type tools in the Filter
field; this will change what
textures are visible. Double-click
on the sky-blue tools/toolsskybox
texture to select it and leave the
dialog.
 4. Hit Enter to create the brush.
5. Select Tools > Make Hollow and
accept the default.
Run the map again; now you have a
nice sky.
You can import a large number of
premade models.
1. Change the Object field to
prop_static.
2. Select the Entity tool and click in
the 3-D view.
3. Press Alt-Enter to bring up the
properties dialog. Move to the
World Model field. Then hit the
Browse button.
 4. Browse through the available
models. You can look through
each directory, or enter a filter
(like box or tree or handrail) to
narrow the selection.
5. Hit OK, then Apply. Your model
is now visible in your map.
Hammer definitely doesn’t hold your
hand. Here’s some tips that may not be
obvious:
• Hold the spacebar and
move the mouse to move the
camera within a view (whether 2-
D or 3-D).
• It’s easiest to select
objects by clicking within the 3-
D view. It works in the other
 views too, but you have to click
exactly on the lines of the
wireframes.
• Ctrl-click to select
multiple objects.
• Hold shift while dragging
the mouse to duplicate an item.
• If you have an object
selected in the 3-D view, Ctrl-E
will center the other three views
on that object. (If you have an
object selected in a 2-D view,
Shift-Ctrl-E will center the 3-D
view on it.)
For more tips and tutorials, Google for
Valve Developer Community.
Autodesk Softimage Mod Too
This is a free version of the
professional 3-D modeling program
Audodesk Softimage; it was formerly
known as XSI Mod Tool. You can use
it to create models— basically, sets of
complicated meshes.
There is a free add-on available to
allow the Mod Tool to export models
for Hammer, and models can also be
exported to Second Life.
If Hammer is a bit advanced, Mod Tool
is downright arcane. There’s an
extensive manual included, and there
are online tutorials.
Further reading
Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern
Language (1977)
An exploration of the design
patterns of the “timeless way of
building”, principles for humane
and beautiful architecture.
Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds.,
A History of Private Life (1987)
A multi-volume anthology on
private life, or as we’d probably
say, everyday life, from Roman
to Victorian times. A treasure
trove of information; worth it for
the introductory essay on
 classical Roman life alone.
Neil Comins, What if the moon didn’t
exist? (1993)
What if the earth had two
moons? (2010)
An astronomer's exploration of
what would happen under various
physical scenarios: no moon, a
smaller earth, a bigger sun, etc.
Much better than just guessing!
Liza Dalby, Geisha (1983)
Not just a book about the history
and habits of geisha, but an
admirable exercise in participant
observation. Her Kimono is a
great follow-up.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and
Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(1998)
Why did Europeans, rather than
any other culture, take over the
world? A century ago the usual
answer was racist: white
Europeans are better. That's just
know-nothingism; but till
recently it was hard to come up
with a better explanation.
Diamond has done so, quite
convincingly, using principles
you can rip off for your
conworld.
Jared Diamond, Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
(2005)
Here Diamond focuses on
cultures that failed: the Easter
Islanders who chopped down all
the island’s trees; the failed
Norse colonies on Greenland; the
collapse of the Maya, and more.
A sobering rebuke to naive
optimism that we’ll always solve
our problems: it really is possible
for a society to destroy itself.
Dougal Dixon, After Man: A Zoology
of the Future (1981)
A delightful book which
painlessly introduces
evolutionary biology by
imagining what evolution might
 come up with given another 50
million years: rats evolved into
mighty predators, penguins
taking on the role of the whales,
an island where all the main
niches are filled by bats...
John King Fairbank, The Great
Chinese Revolution 1800-1985 (1987)
Everyone should read at least one
book on China; this is a good
choice. Though focused on the
last two centuries, it covers a
much broader ground, and
Fairbanks has an eye for the
arresting sensory detail.
Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine:
The Industrial Revolution of the Middle
Ages (1976)
What Tolkien never told you...
the Middle Ages were highly
mechanically oriented, a
blossoming of development in
milling, clockmaking, mining,
and more, all preparing the way
for the explosive transformations
of the Renaissance.
Jack Hamm, Drawing the Head &
Figure (1963)
The book that taught me to draw.
You can start from nothing, and
yet there’s a plethora of
information for the advanced
student.
Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and
Witches: The Riddles of Culture (1974)
A whirlwind tour of the puzzles
of material culture. The title
names some of them: why
Hindus love their cows, why Jews
and Muslims hate pigs, why
people fight, why people
persecuted witches. And there’s
more: cargo cults, messiahs,
potlatch.
Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism:
The Struggle for a Science of Culture
(1979)
The advanced course after you’ve
read the previous volume. Lots
more about how material factors
 affect culture, though there’s a
bit too much railing against
alternative theories.
Herodotus, The History (-5C)
An entertaining and wide-ranging
view of all the cultures known to
the Greeks, building up to a
history of the war with Persia.
Herodotus’s own biases and
assumptions are part of what
makes the book fascinating.
Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities
(1970)
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
(1984)
Two books which do nothing less
 than demolish and rebuild
macroeconomics. Jacobs thinks
economics went wrong with
Adam Smith, who built his
analysis around nations rather
than cities. Cities are the engine
of economic progress, and if you
don’t have healthy cities, you’re
hosed.
Archer Jones, The Art of War in the
Western World (1987)
A survey of war from ancient
times to the 20C, with plenty of
useful detail and attention to
strategy and tactics. Really, every
other page I was taking notes.
Olivia Judson, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex
Advice to All Creation (2002)
A witty tour of sexual behavior in
nature. Gimmicky in tone— it’s
framed as complaints and
questions about sex from animals
— it’s nonetheless great science,
and a treasury of models for
interesting aliens.
John Keegan, A History of Warfare
(1993)
Really a theoretical analysis of
war: the types of war culture, the
limitations on warmaking, the
key military inventions, the
impasse created by Clausewitz.
An excellent resource, as Keegan
is very interested in the same
 thing as writers: what it’s like to
be on the battlefield.
Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A
Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years
(1995)
Despite the title, it’s basically a
history of the Islamic Middle
East, from its origins through its
heady heyday to its current
dilemmas. Again, a great choice
for the one book on Islam you
should read.
C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An
introduction to medieval and
Renaissance literature (1964)
A masterly exposition of the
 medieval worldview— the order
of the cosmos, the components of
the body, the tripartite soul, and
how everything relates to God.
Full of surprises for anyone
whose understanding of the
Middle Ages derives from pop
culture.
Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes
(1981)
A witty introduction to the
history of fashion and what
clothes tell about us.
Scott McCloud, Making Comics (2006)
The bits on storytelling are good,
but I’ve included it here for the
 amazing section on facial
expressions.
Colin McEvedy, The New Penguin
Atlas of Ancient History (2002), etc.
As discussed in the Historical
Atlas section (p. 105). There’s a
sequence of four volumes
devoted to Europe, plus volumes
for North America, Africa, and
the Pacific Rim. Great for getting
the big picture, and enlivened by
McEvedy’s dry wit and lapidary
character portraits.
Jack Miles, God: A Biography (1995)
If you want to understand
religion, this is a great place to
 start. It’s a reading of the Old
Testament with fresh eyes, seeing
what’s there without theological
presuppositions.
F.W. Mote, Imperial China 900-1800
(1999)
Westerners are often pitifully
ignorant of Chinese history, but
how do you catch up? This book
will take you a long way there.
As a bonus, Mote examines the
Central Asian nomads in unusual
detail.
Claudia Müller, The Costume
Timeline: 5000 Years of Fashion
History (1992)
 A huge fold-out book showing
800 color pictures of costumes
from around the world— a great
reference for designing your own
clothing.
James F. O’Gorman, ABC of
Architecture (1998)
A short explanation of the basics
of architecture, focussing on the
Vitruvian trinity of utility,
structure, and beauty.
Mark Rosenfelder, The Language
Construction Kit (2010)
Advanced Language
Construction (2012)
The companions to this volume;
 everything you need to know
about creating languages and
writing systems.
Bernard Rudofsky, The Unfashionable
Human Body (1971)
An amusing survey of the most
user-hostile features of clothing
through the ages. Clothing
designers seem to have some
strange ideas about what the
human body looks like.
Index

!Kung, 164
3-D modelling, 332–50
3ds Max, 342
Abaoji, 154
Abbott, Edwin, 203
abortion, 165, 201
abstinence, 165, 201
Accademia della Crusca, 135
Acre, 270
Adobe. See Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash
adornment, 234
Aegis, 277
Afghanistan, 276
Africa, 67, 129
Africans, drawing, 311
Against Peace and Freedom, 281
Against Peace and Freedom, 21
aging, 88
agriculture, 58, 86–99, 149, 183, 236
AI, 77, 83, 278
Ain Jalut, 270
Ainu, 126
airbrushing, 288, 290, 318–25
aircraft, 271
aircraft carriers, 143, 282
airships, 242
Akkadians, 92, 141
Albertus Magnus, 198
alchemy, 223, 238, 240, 241
alcohol, 183, 236
Alexander, 246, 251, 256, 260, 265, 267
Alexander, Christopher, 180, 351
Alexander, Jeff, 127
Alexandria, 235
algae, 80, 98
aliens, 71–81, 78, 203, 214, 281, 353
Almea, 11, 29, 30–36, 49, 61, 66, 69, 87, 105,
110, 112, 118, 131, 150, 157, 158–61, 168,
183, 192, 208, 218, 221, 224, 233, 242,
273, 297
almonds, 86
Alpha Centauri, 39
alpha textures, 337
alternative history, 116
Americas, 50, 98, 241
Amerindians, 86, 194
Amis, Kingsley, 116
ammonia, 77
amusements, 187
Anatolia, 106, 134, 141, 174, 249, 250
ancestral environment, 57, 151
androids. See robots
anglicization, 87
animals, 85, 88
Ann and Roger, 23
Antarctica, 281
antibiotics, 194
antimatter, 278
antlers, 78
Apaches, 90, 154
apes, 68, 72, 88
apocalypse, 151
Apoyin, 293
appliances, 82
apprentices, 184
aqueducts, 237
Aquinas, Thomas, 198, 240
Arabs, 93, 142, 154, 162, 247, 264, 266
Arashne, 112, 113
Arcél, 36, 62, 87, 287, 290
arch, 177
architecture, 175–80, 332, 351, 355
arctic, 50, 60
arcuated, 177
area, 43
Ariès, Philippe, 351
Ariosto, Ludovico, 221, 241
Aristotle, 38, 198, 240
Arius, 217
armies, 243–84
armor, 237, 249, 256, 263, 269, 272
arquebus, 240
arsenic, 235
Art Nouveau, 242
Artemisia, 154
artists, 131
ash (tree), 252
Asians, drawing, 308, 311
Asimov, Isaac, 25, 277
ask culture, 182
Assassins of Alamut, 67
Assyria, 91, 256
astronomy, 237
Atanda, 166
atheism, 190, 191, 196
Athens, 91, 97, 130, 153, 251
athletics, 188
atmospheric engine, 51
Attila, 249
Augustine, St., 186
Augustus, 266
Austen, Jane, 22, 242
Australia, 69, 74
autarchy, 128
authority, 216, 241
Autodesk Softimage, 350
automation, 83, 149
avatars, 340, 344
axe, 253, 269
axial tilt, 44
Azande, 166
Babylon, 137, 184, 236
Bach, J.S., 164
Bacon, Roger, 198
Baganda, 131
Bahaiism, 196
Baibars, 270
Baku, 271
Balaclava, 256
ballistae, 238
bandits, 136
Bank of England, 145
banks, 114, 144, 236
Banks, Iain, 47, 81, 83, 146
barbarians, 92
barley, 86
barrel vault, 177
baths, 167, 188
bats, 71, 222
Battlestar Galactica, 283
Baxter, Stephen, 38
bayonet, 258
Bé, 158–61
bear, 89
bedbugs, 156
Bedouin, 181
beer, 236
bees, 157, 165
Beijing, 141
belief systems, 189–217
Bessemer process, 253
Bester, Alfred, 279
Bethesda, 11
betleH, 253
big man, 140, 187
binary stars, 41
biochemistry, 76
biography, 30–36
biology, 65–99
bipedalism, 73
birth control, 154, 164, 194, 201
Bissell, Tom, 127
Black Death, 96, 185, 215
Blade Runner, 13
Blender, 342
blockades, 258
bodies, drawing, 316–18, 324
body plan, 74, 85
Bologna, 240
Bond, James, 190, 222
bonobos, 157
Borneo, 63
Boswell, James, 242
Bourgeon, François, 12, 241, 284, 332
bow, 92, 248, 254
brachiation, 73
brass, 235
Brazil, 194
breasts, 65, 77, 174, 316
breeding, 88
bride-price, 155, 163
bristle worms, 158
Britain, 141, 143, 186, 192, 242, 259, 262
bronze, 146, 235, 237, 253, 263
brushes (Hammer), 346
bubonic plague, 96
Buddhism, 93, 155, 193, 204, 206, 207, 217,
238
buffalo, 89, 298
bugs in robots, 85
buildings, 175–80, 341
Burlew, Rich, 28
Bushmen, 94, 193, 244
buttresses, 177, 179
Byzantines, 264, 266
Caďinas, 21
Caďinorian paganism, 212
calligraphic pens, 285
Calvin (comics), 215
Calvin, John, 129
Cambodia, 174, 185
camels, 93, 143, 256
camera, 330, 333
canals, 134
Cannae, 262, 266
cannibalism, 98
cannons, 240, 242, 257, 258, 261
cantilever, 178
Cáo Cāo, 268
cape, 172
capitalism, 114, 149
caravel, 143
carbon, 77, 253
cardinals, 128
carnivorism, 72, 76, 88, 98
carrack, 143
cartels, 142
Carthage, 117, 128, 133, 251, 262, 266
cartridges, 258
cashmere, 170
castles, 260
catapults, 260
Catholicism, 192, 197, 210, 241
cattle, 88
Caucasus, 271
cavalry. See horses
caves, 71
Celestial Bureaucracy, 215
cellular automata, 203
Chabon, Michael, 116
chainmail, 240, 263, 269
Chang, Fuschia, 330
charcoal, 253, 257
chariots, 246, 255
charity, 194
Charon, 44
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 153, 240
cheetahs, 88
chemistry, 235, 241
Chesterton, G.K., 129, 189
chest-pounding duel, 244
Chìbì, 268
chimpanzees, 156
China, 68, 86, 89, 92, 131, 132, 134, 135,
139, 141, 153, 154, 167, 173, 175, 183,
188, 198, 208, 214, 215, 234, 238, 246,
255, 257, 258, 259, 264, 265, 266, 269,
352, 355
Chomsky, Noam, 127
Christianity, 93, 138, 189, 191, 193, 196,
198, 200, 203, 204, 206, 207, 213, 217, 240
church vs. state, 216
Cimmerians, 255
cities, 114–16, 139, 148, 237, 298, 353
city plan, 297
city-states, 91, 115, 264
civil service exams, 135, 139, 214, 238
Civil War, 263
Clairvaux, 239
Clarke, Arthur C., 282
Clarke, Susannah, 220, 273
class, 147
Claudius, 238
Clausewitz, Carl von, 353
cleanliness, 204, 212
climate, 50–63, 106
clipper, 143
cloak, 254
clock, 235, 240
cloning, 80
cloth, 169
clothing, 153, 169–75, 236, 355
clothing, drawing, 325–29
club fight, 244
coal, 259
cochineal, 173
Cody, John, 329
coins, 134, 141, 147
Cold War, 275
collar, horse, 239
colonies, 142
colony organisms, 80
coloring, 318–25
columns, 177, 179
combined arms, 252
Comins, Neil, 44, 351
command economy, 134, 140
communications, in wartime, 262
communism, 129, 131, 141, 191, 192, 196,
201
compass, 239
composite bow, 254
compressive, 176
Conan, 92, 237
condom, 164
Confederacy, 117
Confucians, 139, 155, 207, 214, 217
conphysics, 38
conscripts, 264
Constantinople, 257
continental drift, 47
controversies, 126, 215
convergent evolution, 71
cooking pots, smashing, 247
Copernicus, Nicholas, 200
copper, 234
copulatory plug, 156
coral, 222
corporations, 83, 84, 136, 145, 150
corruption, 145, 237
corsets, 174, 175
Cortés, Hernán, 96
cosmetics, 222
cosmology, 203, 235
cotton, 256
Count of Years, 9, 113, 288
courtly love, 161
courts, 136–39
courtyards, 179
cow love, 193, 352
crackpots, 196
cranes, 268
crappiness, 11
creating money, 145
creation, 204
creation of gods, 211
creationism, 74, 75
crossbows, 246, 255
crystals, 214
cults, 217
culture, 112, 116–88, 135
culture test, 118–25
Culture, the, 26, 47, 83, 146
cultures, military, 244–52
currents, 53
curses, 194
Cuzei, 9
cyborgs, 82
cycles, historic, 115
D&D, 69, 79, 140, 219, 273
dagger, 254
Dalai Lama, 131
Dalby, Liza, 172, 351
Daoism, 139, 155, 217
Darius, 248
dark ages, 98
dark elves, 71
Darth Vader, 27
Darwin, Charles, 77, 192
day, length, 44
dead, the, 223
Death Star, 273
deception, 247
declines, 151
deer, 89
deforestation, 97, 134
democracy, 130, 265
Demyansk, 271
desert, 56, 57, 76, 176, 244
desertification, 89
Detroit, 115
devils, 211
Dewdney, A.K., 38
Diamond, Jared, 50, 88, 95, 96, 155, 186, 351
diarrhea, 263
Dick, Philip K., 116
Dickens, Charles, 242
dilemmas, moral, 27
discipline, 195, 204, 212, 223
disease, 79, 94, 96, 114, 194, 262
displacements, 346
distillation, 183
diverging plates, 47
diversity, 125
Dixon, Dougal, 12, 75, 81, 352
DNA, 74
docility, 89
dogs, 67
dollar, 147
dolphins, 71, 73
dome, 177
domestication of animals, 88, 236
domestication of plants, 86
donkey, 255
dowry, 155, 163
Dragon Age Origins, 241
dragons, 274, 299
drawing, 300–331, 352
drawing tablet, 286, 300
dreams, 203
drones, insect, 81, 156
drones, robot, 82, 276
dualism, 206
Duane, Diane, 190
Duby, Georges, 351
Dunmer, 152
Dutch, 142, 234
dwarves, 66, 68
Dyson sphere, 46
ears, 75, See pointy ears
Earth, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48, 56
earthquakes, 48
Easley, Thomas, 329
Easter Island, 352
ecological barriers, 50, 56, 106
ecological disaster, 96
economies, 112, 114, 115, 134, 140–51
ecosystems, 74
Eddison, E.R., 205
Edinburgh, 148
education, 183, 212
eeeevil, 67, 127
eggs, 156
Egypt, 88, 90, 134, 141, 170, 174, 183, 188,
237, 255, 259, 260, 263, 270
Einstein, Albert, 280
Elagabalus, 131
electromagnetic pulse, 276
elements, 68, 235
elephants, 88, 256
ellipses, as orbits, 42
elves, 21, 65, 66, 68
embarrassment, 84
emotion, 84
empires, 186
Endajué, 208
England, 130, 146, 147, 167, 188, 234, 239,
241, 256, 257, 269
enterprises, 144
entities, 347
environmental degradation, 90
epicanthic fold, 308, 311
Epirus, 251
Ereláe, 62, 105
Ervëa, 21
estrus, 157
ethics, 207–10
Etoro, 166
Eurasia, 50
Europe, 131, 137, 155, 161, 174, 185, 224,
234, 239, 248, 251, 253, 255, 271, 351
Evangelicals, 210
evangelism, 213
Everett, Daniel, 94, 244
evolution, 72, 75, 236, 352
ewemi, 168
exclusive gods, 197
exile, 215
extended family, 163
externalities, 135
extremophiles, 77
eyeglasses, 240
eyes, drawing, 307
E-Z Fantasy test, 15
Ezičimi, 168
Fabius, 262
faces, drawing, 304–15, 320
fae, 66, 210, 214
Fairbank, John King, 352
faith, 198
Fallout 3, 11
false retreat, 248, 270
falsifiability, 196
families, 139, 161, 163, 213
family business, 144
fascism, 67, 201
feast, treacherous, 244
feasts, 140, 187
felt, 170, 176
female dominance, 36
Ferdinand of Aragon, 105
Ferrel cell, 51, 61
festivals, 212
feudalism, 265
Feynman, Richard, 182, 194
Figaro, 185
figure drawing, 316–18, 324, 329
finance, 145
firefly, 157
fireships, 268, 269
fitted clothing, 172
fjords, 61
flail, 253
Flanders, 115
Flash, 108
Flatland, 203
flatworms, 80
flight, 70, 71, 76, 275
flintlock, 257
foederatii, 133
fog of war, 278
Fonseca, Isabel, 204
foot binding, 175
foraging, 261
Force, the, 273
Forester, C.S., 242
Forster, E.M., 215
Foster, Hal, 241
frames, 108
France, 154, 184, 239, 241, 257, 260
Franklin, Benjamin, 213
Franks, 132
free companies, 67, 185
French Revolution, 174, 192, 214, 264
FTL travel, 151, 282, 283
fundamentalism, 191, 194, 216
fur, 75, 169
furries, 66
future religions, 214
G stars, 39
Gaiman, Neil, 9, 199, 211, 218, 242
galactic core, 41
Galilee, 270
Galileo, 192, 241
galleys, 258, 267
gambling, 187
games, 188, 219
Gamow, George, 38
Gandalf, 30, 127, 218
Gandhi, Mahatma, 174
gangs, 136
García Márquez, Gabriel, 223
garden agriculture, 89, 97, 244, 245
Garry’s Mod, 342
garum, 183
gauntlet, 253
geisha, 173, 187, 351
genetic engineering, 81
Genghis Khan, 266
genitals, 156
genocide, 246
genre, 28
Gentle, Mary, 28
geocentrism, 235, 241
Germany, 107, 174, 262, 271
ghosts, 214
giants (stars), 39
gibbons, 155
GIMP, 107, 286
Gimpel, Jean, 352
girls, drawing, 304–15
glaciation, 61, 95
glaciers, 61
gladiators, 238
glass, 238
globe, CGI, 293
globes, making, 49
Gnostics, 204
go, 188
goblins, 67
God, 75, 197, 210, 240, 241, 354
gods, 211
gold, 147, 235
Golden Ages, 204
Goldenweiser, A.A., 131
golems, 275
gorillas, 155
Gothic, 177
goths, 71
government, 89, 114, 127–36, 144, 149
grains, 56, 87, 90
Graves, Robert, 238
gravity, 38, 43
Great Man theory, 112
Great Wall, 247, 260
Greeks, 91, 106, 107, 115, 130, 134, 141,
142, 164, 166, 167, 173, 174, 177, 187,
198, 211, 234, 249, 252, 263, 353
Green Party, 66
Greenland, 60, 151, 352
gridfire, 146
Groote, Gerard, 141
guerrillas, 247
guess culture, 182
guilds, 136, 187
Gulf Stream, 53
gunpowder, 146, 239, 240, 248, 253, 257,
260, 278
Gustavus Adolphus, 133
Gutenberg, Johannes, 234
Gypsies, 204
habitable zone, 40
habitat, 70
Hadley cell, 51, 57, 61
Hadrian’s Wall, 260
hair, drawing, 306, 311, 323
Hamm, Jack, 307, 316, 329, 352
Hammer, 345–50
Hammurabi, 137, 153, 184
Hàn, 135, 183, 268
Hán Xìn, 247
Hannibal, 117, 251, 262, 266
Harold, 269
Harris, Marvin, 94, 154, 193, 207, 245, 352
Hastings, 269
Hausa, 154
Hawaii, 48, 69
heads-up displays, 278
heddle, 170
Heep, Uriah, 186
Heinlein, Robert, 27, 283
helicopters, 263
hemp, 173
herblore, 222
herds, 89
hermaphroditism, 80
Herodotus, 353
heroic warfare, 246
hierarchy, 185
hijra, 168
Hinduism, 193, 204, 211, 352
hints, 182
hip-hop, 173
hippos, 89
Hiroshima, 275
Hispanics, drawing, 312
historical atlas, 105, 354
historical chart, 103
historical fiction, 29
historicism, 204
history, 100–111
Hite, Kenneth, 116
Hitler, Adolf, 116, 129, 271
Ho Chi Minh, 247
hobbits, 22, 28, 86
Hoffer, Eric, 214
Holmes, Sherlock, 167
Homer, 237
homosexuality, 165–68
horn, 254
Hornblower, Horatio, 242
Hornby, Nick, 22
horse Indians, 93
horses, 56, 92, 142, 236, 246, 248, 253, 255,
259
horseshoe arch, 177
Howard, Robert, 237
Huayna Capac, 96
Húběi, 268
Hulagu, 270
humanoids, 65, 71
Hume, David, 191
humid continental, 56, 59
humors, 68
Hungary, 249
hunter-gatherers, 94, 130, 145, 153, 154, 243,
244
huts, 175
hybridization, 69
hydraulic empires, 89
hydrothermal vents, 77
hyenas, 88, 158
hyperspace, 135
ice ages, 60
ice caps, 56, 60
ideology, 129, 214, 264
igloo, 176
iliu, 150, 273
illusions, 188
illustrations, 300–331
Illustrator, 107, 286, 295, 298
impatience, 62
imperialism, 281
implausibility, 13
In the Land of Babblers, 9
Incas, 134, 142, 256, 258
Incatena, 21, 281
incest, 161
India, 142, 146, 154, 168, 174, 188, 238, 253,
257
indirection, 182
individualism, 150, 215
industrial revolution, 153, 236, 239, 242, 352
infanticide, 165, 245
information warfare, 278
infravision, 70
Inkscape, 107
innovation, 114
Inquisition, 67, 197
insects, 75
instinct, 84
insurgency, 280
intelligence, 72, 81
intelligence, military, 247
intelligent life, 65–85
interest, 200
interglacial, 60, 95
Internet, 235
interoperability, 85
intimacy gradient, 180
iqta, 265
Iran, 129, 277
Iraq, 252, 276, 278
iron, 146, 178, 235, 237, 252, 253, 263
irrigation, 89, 137
Isaiah, 174
Islam, 183, 193, 214, 234, 264, 265, 270, 352,
354
Israelites, 237
Italy, 115, 264
Jacobs, Jane, 114, 151, 353
Jade Empire, 11, 239
jade, countenances of linked, 168
Janissaries, 130
Japan, 132, 167, 172, 173, 182, 186, 187,
188, 239, 248, 259
javelin, 252, 255
jeans, 173
Jedi, 273
Jesus, 190, 192, 198
jet streams, 52
Jews, 126, 162, 167, 185, 187, 212, 352
Jiangling, 268
Jippirasti, 209
Joan of Arc, 154
Joausi, 100–111
Johnson, Samuel, 242
Jones, Archer, 353
Journey to the West, 239
Jubilee, 200
Judaism, 193, 214
Judson, Olivia, 158, 353
jungle planet, 51
Jupiter, 40, 52, 82, 235
jurisconsult, 138
Justinian, 133, 138
K strategy, 72
Keegan, John, 243, 248, 260, 353
Kepler, Johannes, 42
Keraki, 166
Kevlar, 264
Khan, 198
Khitans, 93, 154
kimono, 171, 172
King, Martin Luther, 192
Kinsey, Alfred, 166
Kiraeku, 112, 113
Kitbuga, 270
Klingons, 127, 253
knights, 240, 263
Köppen classification, 54–60
Koreans, 185
ktuvoks, 21, 157, 192, 273
Kublai Khan, 93, 249
Lacroix, Claude, 12, 284
Lafferty, R.A., 242
lakes, 61
Lakoff, George, 207
lance, 252, 269
language, 7, 73, 84, 111, 114, 135, 214, 355
lasers, 277
Latin America, 166
laurisilvan, 59, 62
Lavoisier, Antoine, 235, 241
law, 136–39, 200
Laws of Robotics, 277
layers, 107, 115, 286, 300
Lé, 30–36, 87, 158–61
lead, 222
leather, 169
Lebanon, 97
Lechaeum, 252
Legalists, 139
legion, 251, 252, 263
Leiber, Fritz, 219
leprosy, 200
lesbianism, 157, 165–68
Leviticus, 167
Lewis, Bernard, 354
Lewis, C.S., 66, 185, 187, 189, 199, 204, 241,
354
life support, 135, 180
lifespans, 70
lifetime, stellar, 40
Light Brigade, 256
Lightwave 3D, 342
limbs, 76
lime, 169
Linden Lab, 342
linen, 170
lintel, 176
lions, 88, 157, 274
literacy, 183, 234
littoral, 106
Liú Bèi, 268
Livingston, Chris, 26
lizards, 80
Lloyd’s of London, 144
Lob, Jacques, 211
logistics, 143, 249, 261
loincloth, 171
lolcats, 85
London, 148
longaevi, 66
longbow, 256
loom, 170
Lord of the Rings, 127, 190, 218, 240, 260
lost causes, 117
Lovecraft, H.P., 242
Lowell City, 26
Luftwaffe, 271
luminosity, 39
Luó Guànzhōng, 269
Lurie, Alison, 169, 354
Luther, Martin, 116
Lydia, 141
lye, 169
M stars, 40
mace, 253, 256
Macedon, 252
Machiavelli, 264
machismo, 93
Magellanic, 59, 62
magic, 135, 188, 218–23, 272, 282
Maginot Line, 260
magnetism, 43
magnitude, 39
maize, 50, 86
males, drawing, 314, 318
Malory, Thomas, 241
Malthus, Thomas, 90, 95, 149
Mamet, David, 22
mamluks, 266, 270
management, 150
Manchu, 93, 175, 249
manipulators, 73, 275
mantises, 158
manufacturing, 149
manure, 149
Mao Zedong, 247, 264
Maori, 260
maps, 49, 50, 102, 285–99
Marchetti, Cesare, 299
Marcus Aurelius, 128
marine climate, 59, 62
marine species, 73, 275
Maring, 245, 263
market economy, 141, 237
markets, 134
marriage, 161
Mars, 45, 187
Marvel, 273
Mass Effect, 11, 283
mass movements, 214
mass, planetary, 43
matchlock, 257
matriarchy, 158–61
matrilineality, 162
matrilocality, 162
matter duplicators, 279
matter, attitudes toward, 204
Maya, 97, 342, 352
McCloud, Scott, 354
McEvedy, Colin, 90, 105, 354
McMansions, 179
meals, 182
meatbags, 84, 202
meditation, 195
Mediterranean, 56, 58, 97, 258
mega-habitats, 46
Megara, 91
memes, 195
mercenaries, 265
Mercury, 45
meshes, 340
Mesoamerica, 86
Mesopotamia, 141, 237, 256, 270
messengers, 134, 142, 262
metallurgy, 234
Metaverse, 342
methane, 77
Methodism, 241
Mexico, 50, 173
Mézières, Jean-Claude, 332
Michelangelo, 116, 167
micro-organisms, 241
Microsoft Paint, 107, 286
Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 48
Middle Ages, 92, 131, 137, 145, 153, 161,
173, 184, 198, 205, 224, 239, 253, 269,
352, 354
Middle Earth, 140, 224
Miles, Jack, 354
military cultures, 244–52
militia, 264
millet, 86
mills, 235, 237, 239
Minds, 83, 84
mineral acids, 240
mines, 234, 235, 239
Míng, 193
mining walls, 261, 274
minorities, 126, 145
misery, 152, 184
Miyazaki, Hayao, 242
moat, 260
Moche, 167
modelling programs, 342
modelling, 3-D, 332–50
models, 329
models (Hammer), 346
Moebius, 332
moieties, 161
moles, 274
Möngke, 270
Mongols, 92, 97, 249, 259, 266, 270
mongongo nuts, 95
Monkey King, 85
monks, 213
monoculture, 125
monsoon, 53, 56, 57, 193
moons, 44, 45, 351
Moore, Alan, 116, 242
moraines, 61
morality, 27, 207–10
Moravec, Hans, 83
Morgan, 21
Mormonism, 214
Moscow, 259, 264
Moses, 200
Moso, 161, 162
Mote, F.W., 355
Moties, 72
Mounia, 100–111
mountains, 56, 64, 289
moveable type, 239
Muhammad, 93, 192, 264
Müller, Claudia, 355
multiple stars, 41
Múr, 30–36
muskets, 242, 248, 257
mythology, 112
myths, 197, 204
Nagashino, 248
naming language, 111
Nan, 287
nanobots, 98
nanoduplicators, 281
nanotechnology, 279
Napoléon, 116, 129, 265
Narnia, 75, 85, 189, 241, 243
Native Americans, 236
needle, 169
negative space, 180, 302
Neo-Confucians, 153
neolocality, 162
neoteny, 72
Nero, 131
Neverwhere, 9
New Guinea, 186, 245
New Testament, 200, 238
Newton, Isaac, 241
niche specialization, 69
Nicholas I, 259
night goggles, 278
Nineveh, 298
Niven, Larry, 46, 72, 74, 221
Nobunaga, Oda, 248
nomads, 92, 106, 153, 170, 176, 237, 238,
247, 248, 264, 270, 355
Normans, 269
north, 44
North Korea, 276
not enough planets, 48, 51, 69
Not the Net, 50
nothing fights, 245
Novazema, 100–111
Nubia, 260
nuclear weapons, 248, 275, 279
nudity, 174
nursing, 94, 158, 164, 165
nutrition, 86
O’Gorman, James F., 355
oaks, 87, 169
obi, 172
Objectivism, 27
oblique views, drawing, 312
Oblivion, 11, 67, 113, 152, 219, 241, 272
obsessive-compulsives, 212
Occam, William of, 198
oceanic planets, 61
Odysseus, 186, 211
officials, 132
ogee arch, 177
ogres, 275
oil, 149, 259, 271
oil tanker, 143
Ojibwe, 168
Okura, 21
Old Testament, 133, 213, 237, 354
oligarchy, 129
Ombuto, 100–111
omens, 246
omnivorism, 72
onager, 255
orbitals (habitats), 47
orbits, 42
orcs, 26, 67, 140, 211, 302
ordeals, 137, 204
Order of the Stick, 28
Ottomans, 188, 249
outline history, 10
overexplaining, 22
overhunting, 98
oxen, 143, 255, 261
Oxford, 240
Pakistan, 276
Palestine, 270
Pangea, 48
pants, 329
panzers, 271
paper, 239
paper money, 239
parabolic arch, 177
parasites, 78, 94
parental investment, 72
Paris, 240
Patagonia, 52, 60
paterfamilias, 164
patrilineality, 162
patrilocality, 162
Paul, St., 198
peas, 86
pell, 88
Peloponnese, 251
peltasts, 252
penguin, 157
penis fencing, 80
penis, detachable, 156
pens, 285
Pentecostals, 241
Pépin, 132
peppers, 86
perfectionism, 63
perfume, 185
permafrost, 60
Persians, 93, 107, 116, 134, 142, 248, 249,
255, 260, 263, 267, 353
personal space, 181
Peru, 50
pet peeve, 26, 51, 65
phalanx, 250, 252, 264
Philistines, 142
phlogiston, 38
Photoshop, 107, 286, 304, 320, 333, 337
photosynthesis, 98
Pichard, Georges, 211
pictures, 300–331
pigs, 56, 193, 245, 352
pike, 252, 256
Pilgrims, 96
pilum, 252
pincer movement, 271
pipe-weed, 127
Pirahã, 94, 187, 244
pistols, 242
Pizarro, Francisco, 96
plague, 90
Plains Indians, 176
planets, 42–50, 76
Planiverse, 38
plasma, 278
plate armor, 240, 253, 263
plate tectonics, 47
Plato, 183
plesiosaurs, 71
plow, 234, 239
Pluto, 44
Plymouth, 96
pneumonia, 263
pointy ears, 21, 65, 66
pointy hats, 172, 239
Poland, 256
polar cell, 51
polar region. See Arctic
polarity switches, 44
politeness, 181–82
Polo, Marco, 249
polyandry, 163
polygamy, 163
polygons, 340
polygyny, 163
poncho, 171
Pope, 265
population, 78, 90, 245
population density, 78, 92, 98
porcelain, 239
porcupine, 156
Portuguese, 142, 234
posts, 176
potatoes, 86
Potter, Harry, 219, 242
pottery, 234
Powers, Tim, 242
prayer, 212
precursor race, 74
predators, 78, 86, 244, 274
pregnancy, 164, 194, 245
prey, 78, 86
prices, 147
Pride and Prejudice, 22
priests, 213
primogeniture, 128, 162
prims, 332, 339, 340
printing, 234, 239, 241
productivity, 96, 148
profile, drawing, 308
prograde, 45
programming, 82
programs, for modelling, 342
prophecy, 212
proportion, 301
prostitution, 187
Protestants, 241
Provence, 187
proxy wars, 276
pseudo-phallus, 158
psychology, 112
pterosaurs, 71, 274
Ptolemy, 241
public works, 134
Pullman, Philip, 28, 190
punk rock, 215
Pyrrhus, 251
Qadesh, 255
Qadisiyya, 93
qí, 247
Qīng, 175
Quakers, 212, 241
quest, 25
Qutuz, 270
r strategy, 72
R.U.R., 81
races, drawing, 310
racism, 68, 200, 351
radio, 262, 271, 278
rage, 247
raids, 244, 245
railroads, 145, 262
rain forest, 56, 57, 60, 62, 175
rainfall agriculture, 90
rainshadow, 52, 61
ramming, 258
rams, battering, 260, 268
Rand, Ayn, 27
randomness, 129
rapier, 254
rasputitsa, 259
rats, 352
rawhide, 169
reading list, 351–55
realism, 29
reason, 84
rebellion, 186, 192
Red Cliffs, 268
red dwarfs, 280
redistribution, 140, 187
Reepicheep, 243
Reform Bill, 130
Reformation, 116
refuge, 260
regulars, 265
reincarnation, 206
religion, 135, 145, 155, 184, 189–217, 236–
42, 354
Renaissance, 114
renunciation, 213
republics, 114
reserves, 145
restraints on trade, 142
resurrection, 206
Revolutionary War, 154
rice, 56, 86, 89, 146
rifle, 257, 264
rift valley, 47
ringworlds, 46, 135
Riper, Paul van, 280
ritual, 208, 245, 250
rivers, 63, 106
roads, 134
roadside bombs, 276, 280
Robb, Graham, 125
robber barons, 150
robes, 173, 198
robots, 25, 81–85, 149, 276
Roger and Ann, 23
Romania, 271
Rome, 91, 107, 117, 128, 130, 133, 134, 138,
141, 151, 153, 164, 166, 167, 173, 177,
181, 183, 187, 193, 198, 200, 234, 237,
239, 250, 251, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265,
266, 298, 351
roofs, 176
Rosenfelder, Mark, 355
rotation, 44
routs, 245
Rowling, J.K., 219, 220, 242, 273
RPG, 11
Ruby, Erik A., 329
Rucker, Rudy, 203
Rudofsky, Bernard, 175, 355
Rwanda, 90
Ryan, Andrew, 27
sacrifice, 212
Saddam Hussein, 280
safety, 114
Sahara, 62
saints, 210
salamander, 157
Salamis, 249
salinization, 97
saltpeter, 146, 257
Sambia, 166
Sampson, Deborah, 154
samurai, 248, 258, 265
Samwise, 330
San Andreas fault, 47
sandal, 175
sapients, 65–85
Sapolsky, Robert, 212
sarissa, 252
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 116
Satan, 190
satyrs, 210
Saudi Arabia, 196
Saul, 174
Sauron, 68, 218
savanna, 56, 57, 73, 75
Sayers, Dorothy L., 153, 190
scaleable jobs, 146
scarcity, 95, 145
Schiffer, Michael, 116
schools, 135, 183
Schuiten, François, 332
science, 216, 234
scientific method, 202
Scotland, 142
scouts, 262
scriptures, 213
Scyths, 154, 248, 255
seamless textures, 334
Second Life, 342–45
senet, 188
senses, 70
Serafini, Luigi, 12
service sector, 149
sex, 140–68, 193, 201, 353
sexbots, 83
sexes, different, 80
sexes, multiple, 79
sexism, 152, 244
sexual dimorphism, 155
sexual selection, 77
shading, 318–25
Shakespeare, William, 147, 188, 240
sharks, 71
Shi‘a, 192, 216
shield, 250
ships, 143, 242, 249, 258, 268
Shirow, Masamune, 149
shoes, 175
Shǔ Hàn, 268
Shubin, Neil, 74
Shuppan, Elte, 329
Siberia, 60
sidereal day, 44
siege, 261, 267
silicon, 77
silk, 146, 170, 239
silphium, 164
silver, 147, 235
sims, 342
simultaneous inventions, 225
sin, 207–10
Singer, P.W., 277
single climate planets, 51
single-adjective cultures, 127
Singman, Jeffrey, 147
sinusoidal, 294–97
size, men vs. women, 155
size, of animals, 86
size, of armies, 246, 266
size, of cities, 91
size, of grains, 86
size, of legs, 76
size, of planets, 42
size, of sapients, 73
skins, 169, 176
skirt, 172, 328
Skouras, 118–25
Skyrim, 113, 241
slavery, 215
slaves, 137, 138, 174, 185, 192, 200, 266
slime molds, 79
slug, space, 79
smallpox, 241
Smith, Adam, 131, 134, 141, 148, 149, 150,
241, 353
Smith, Jeff, 241
snails, 173
Softimage, 342, 350
solar day, 45
soldiers, 243–84
Solon, 97, 134
Sòng, 266
soul, 205
Soviets, 271, 277
soybeans, 86
space colonization, 281
space habitats, 135, 146, 150, 215
spaceships, 47, 282
Spain, 273
Spanish, 162, 256
Sparta, 153, 251, 252, 265
spear, 249, 252, 269
speed of light, 280
speed of transport, 142–44
Spenser, Edmund, 241
sperm, 156
sperm packet, 157
sphere, drawing, 318
spiders, 158
spinning, 170, 240
spinning wheel, 170
spirits, 14, 203, 205
spoon worm, 158
spybots, 136
squash, 86
squirrels, 156
Stalingrad, 271
Stalinists, 67
standard class, 130
Standard Fantasy Kingdom, 15, 125
standing army, 264
Stapledon, Olaf, 81
Star Trek, 74, 283
Star Wars, 12, 79, 224, 242, 273
stars, 38–42
steam, 170, 235, 238, 241
steampunk, 242
steamships, 143, 259, 262
steel, 239, 253
stellar class, 38
stellar flares, 41
Stephenson, Neal, 82, 342
steppe, 56, 58, 60, 92, 153, 249, 255
stereo vision, 72
stink, 184
stirrup, 256
stone, 151, 176
storytelling, 21–37, 117, 126, 197
strategic defenses, 260
strongholds, 114, 260
Stross, Charlie, 150, 281
subcreation, 190
subcultures, 126
submarine, 143
subtropical, 56, 58
suicide bombers, 280
suits, 173
sulfur, 257
Sumer, 92, 97, 144, 183, 260
sumptuary laws, 173
Sūn Quán, 268
Sun Tzu, 246, 264
Sunni, 216
superheroes, 116, 326
Superman, 273
supernatural beings, 210, 218
Süskind, Patrick, 184
suspension, 178
sustenance, 86–99
Sweden, 133, 253
swimsuit, 326
Swiss, 256, 265
sword, 253–54, 263, 269
symmetry, 179
synchronous rotation, 45
synthetic fibers, 170
tablet. See drawing tablet
taiga, 56, 59, 60
Tale of Genji, 239
Taleb, Nassim, 146
taming, 88
Táng, 89, 134, 139, 141, 173, 185, 222, 238,
247
tanks, 143, 262
tannery, 184
Tannhauser Gate, 13
tanning, 169, 239
Tau Ceti, 39
taxes, 133
technical pens, 285
technology, 90, 219, 224–42
technophilia, 85, 150, 201
teddy bears, 199
teenagers, 164
telegraph, 145, 262
telekinesis, 220
telepathy, 279
telephones, 262
teleportation, 279, 299
temperate zone, 50, 87
Tenochtitlán, 96
tensile, 176
tentacles, 70, 75, 76
Tepper, Sheri, 161
terraforming, 135
terrain (for war), 259
terrain, drawing, 287
terrain, modelling, 340, 345, 346
testudo, 263
textures, 333–40
theater, 187
theocracy, 129
Third World, 265
Three Kingdoms, 268
Thuggee cult, 67
Tibet, 131
tidal locking, 41
time travel, 279
time, attitudes toward, 181
Timur, 92, 248
tin, 146, 235
Titan, 77
Tlingit, 161
tobacco, 86
toga, 171
Tokyo, 91
Tolkien, J.R.R., 9, 22, 26, 66, 68, 86, 127,
190, 240, 290
tomatoes, 86
totalitarianism, 149
tournaments, 263, 279
trabeated, 176
traction animals, 88
trade winds, 52
transparencies, 337
transportation, 114
traumatic insemination, 156
travel, 142–44
trench warfare, 262, 278
trireme, 143
Trojan War, 246
tropics, 50, 54, 57, 87, 89
Troy, 107
truss, 177, 179
tuataras, 74
tuberculosis, 263
Tuchman, Barbara, 185, 240
tundra, 56, 60
Turkestan, 247
Turks, 93, 257, 264, 266
Twelve Tables, 138
two-spirits, 168
Tyre, 267
Tyrian purple, 173
Uganda, 129, 131, 136
UI, 82
ultimogeniture, 162
universities, 184, 198, 240
unobtainium, 46, 278
Uranus, 44
urbanization, 91
urine hosing, 156
USA, 131, 141, 143, 145, 150, 151, 192, 199,
241, 252, 262, 266, 275
USSR, 154
utopia, 146
vaccines, 241
Vader, Darth, 27
Valve, 345
vampires, 211
velociraptors, 74
Venus, 41, 44, 45, 52, 82
Verduria, 180, 298
vermin, 86, 114, 176
Veyne, Paul, 138
Victorians, 153, 167, 175, 207, 242
vicuña, 170
video games, 12
Vietnam, 154, 247, 263
Vikings, 142, 253
Vilcaconga, 256
virginity, 155
vision, 72, 73, 76
Vitruvius, 355
volcanoes, 47
voussoirs, 177
Wacom, 286
wages, 147
war, 78, 92, 94, 114, 133, 183, 236–42, 243–
84, 353
warlike cultures, 127
warlords, 129
water, 77
Waterloo, 116
Watson, John, 167
weapon, 252–59
weaving, 170
Wellington, Duke of, 273
Wells, H.G., 81, 215
westerlies, 52
wheat, 86
Wife of Bath, 153
wikis, 11
William the Conqueror, 269
willow, 176
winds, 53, 61
wine, 236
Wise, Arthur, 253
witches, 353
Wittfogel, Karl, 89
wizards, 218
women, 137, 140–68
wonder, 195
wood, 176
Wookieepedia, 11
wool, 115, 170
work week, 94
World of Warcraft, 241
World War I, 262, 263, 278
World War II, 214, 252, 262, 266, 271, 278,
283
worship, 195, 212
writing, 236
Wú, 268
wuxia, 223, 239
xenophobia, 186
XSI Mod Tool, 350
Xuánzàng, 238
yaks, 25
Yangtze, 268
Yanomamö, 94, 165, 176, 181, 244
year, calculating, 42
Yellow River, 97
Yemaya, 211
Yingtian, 154
Yoda, 273
Yuán, 198
yurt, 176
zeal, 196, 214, 241, 251, 264
zebras, 88, 89
Zelazny, Roger, 211
zhèng, 247
Zhèng Hé, 258
Zhū Xī, 153, 214
Zhū Yuánzhāng, 193
zinc, 235
Zinn, Howard, 127
zombies, 68
zoom, 303
Zoroastrians, 126
zygotes, 79
[1] This section assumes that “north” is
the pole that revolves counter-
clockwise (p. 44), which makes “east”
where the sun rises.