A Wolf with Feathers

This week's review is another book published by writer's digest, but unlike the last review, this book actually lives up to the title. It's part of the Science Fiction Writing Series and is called World-Building by Stephen L Gillett.


First, a warning. This is not the kind of book you can curl up in front of a warm fire with and just read, not unless you're a hard-core scientist (and then you might be disagreeing with it). The book is designed to help you design a world from the moment of creation onwards. It's heavy going as far as reading goes, but it seems to be incredibly useful. I think the best way to use it is to read each chapter or part of a chapter as and when it becomes necessary rather than trying to read it from start to finish. Handily he separates the formulae into sidebars so that you can just plug your own variables into them and see what it does to your planet.

The book covers gravity and orbit and then shows how those will affect the life on the planet and the climate and seasons. It also covers things like plate-tectonics and how a planet ages through time. It lets you speculate on things like 'if I want my planet to have two moons how will that affect gravity?' or 'if I want to make the year twice as long as Earth's what effect will that have on the climate and seasons?'. The author is a scientist and is clearly trying to explain these concepts as clearly as he can, but I must admit some of it went straight over my head the first time I read it. Some sections definitely need reading more than once to get them to make sense, but all in all I think it's a fantastic reference guide and it really does exactly what it says on the tin. No false advertising with this book.

If you're planning to write about alien worlds (and not just alien earth-like planets which are alien in name only) then I would strongly recommend you buy this book.

And now for some links about world-building that should complement this volume -

Ecology for World Builders - once you have your planet, you'll need to create an ecosystem.
Religion - if you have people, of any species, then you'll have to think about religion.
Magic - obviously this is more for fantasy authors.
More Magic
Law and justice - again as soon as you have people you'll have crime.
City building part 1 and part 2 - just as important as building your world, is building your city.
Multiple worlds - how they interact and so on.
Thoughts on disease - this is aimed at the post-apocalyptic world but works for a pre-industrial one just as well (or really pre-20th century and/or anywhere but Europe and North America)
Resources for world builders - a whole archive of great resources.
More resources - another archive of links.