Pageturners: World-building

Surely the whole point of science fiction is the ‘wow’ factor? We need to be astonished and all too often we’re not.

Welcome to Pageturners, a book I’m writing in which I share what I’ve learnt – and am still learning – about comic writing, film writing, novel writing and how new writers can sell their stories. I publish a chapter or a section per week, for free here on Iconoblast. And I welcome your feedback or questions, so do leave a comment below!

Missed the Pageturners intro? Read it here.

Last week I talked about story research.

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Illustration by David Broughton

Several readers have asked me about world-building and how I go about it. I guess this is because my stories in 2000AD and elsewhere are known for having fully realised worlds.

Judge Dredd was one of my first challenges. Carlos’s magical Mega-City One in its first visualisation in Prog 2 has never been beaten. I don’t know if anyone else feels the same way as me, but I think that’s a great pity. That city created a sense of mystery and wonder, which I don’t think has ever been repeated in subsequent stories.

Carlos Ezquerra’s unparalleled Mega-City One

In fact, progressively over the years his strange and alien starscrapers have been visually diluted by other artists into rational and traditional skyscrapers that would not be out of place in today’s New York or Dubai. Why? Surely the whole point of science fiction is the ‘wow’ factor? We need to be astonished and – all too often – we’re not. Clearly I’m in a minority, but to me they’re often quite disappointing, even dull on occasion and certainly lacking in science fiction intrigue. I wish I’d done more to ensure that original, joyously irrational Gaudiesque element was not dragged down to the sober and conservative reality many of us can find in our real world just by looking out our windows. 

The cops, too, needed a science fiction definition during those first critical episodes before John Wagner returned to his creation. I recall watching and reading every imaginable future cop story to inspire me. Death Race 2000, Logan’s Run and Flow My Tears the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick come to mind. But nothing clicked and, although I featured all the predictable Orwellian touches of a future police state, I couldn’t get an angle on Dredd that I was really happy with. That took Peter Harris, with his seminal episode one, to establish the whole justice system. Along with an addition by Kelvin Gosnell and myself that the villain should be marooned on ‘Devil’s Island’, a traffic island from which he could never escape. An insane future shock punishment rather than a sober and dull prison incarceration.   

The real science fiction magic appeared shortly afterwards with John Wagner’s crazy brainblooms that raised the imaginative benchmark further, and I pray will stop Dredd forever from being watered down into a staid and ‘sensible’ sf police procedure series that  a minority of conservative readers might like but which doesn’t have major box office appeal. Intuitively, and possibly without any conscious calculation about world-building, I think John realised the population of Mega-City had been driven mad, thanks to the President pressing the nuclear button and the despotism of the Judges who succeeded him. This is the key to the richest vein of Judge Dredd writing, for which John is still unequalled. Madness is Mega-City’s true hallmark, with dull rationalism rightly dragging its heels behind it. 

Once the justice system was in place, it left so many questions still unanswered.  How did these terrifying Judges come to power? So, at the first opportunity, in The Cursed Earth, I covered the origins of the Judges and the end of the American Presidency. But, once again, it doesn’t have to be portrayed with dreary rationalism. Further madness is required! I relished having three crazy-looking, vampiric robots keeping alive the President who pressed the nuclear button. They were giving him blood drawn from innocent victims. Of course there are many more sensible ways to keep the President alive, but they would lose sight of the theme that generates Dredd’s world: insanity. I gather there’s now a text version of the origins of the Judges, doubtless drawing on my foundation stones laid in The Cursed Earth. 

Kevin O’Neill didn’t like Boix’s abbatoir, which he said was too clean. So he came up with this gritty image.

Flesh was a particular challenge for world-building. Once I had the premise that time-travelling humans were farming dinosaurs for their flesh, it was so wild, it needed elaborate world-building to make it credible. It left endless questions.  What should their uniforms look like? Obviously western, but they needed to be futuristic at the same time. Boix did a great job visualising the cowboys, but they and their slaughter houses were a little too squeaky clean. It needed later artist Ramon Sola to make them look grubby, and Kevin O’Neill to redraw the abattoir into a foul smelling, heavily polluted factory. I used an Angus McKie sf cover to visualise the fleshdozers that picked up the dinosaurs and dispatched them. Art director Doug Church designed the container system where the flesh was then beamed up to the 23^rd century. I also needed lots of strange and cool vehicles, so I bought a book especially for the purpose, passing the references on to Boix as the basis for herding the dinosaurs.

This brings me to one of the principal dangers of world-building – the dreaded exposition that I talked about earlier. Exposition is particularly prevalent in science fiction. You build up an elaborate world and then write any number of episodes or chapters explaining your ingenious idea by having characters nattering to each other. I know lots of revered sf writers do this and sf buffs love it. Arthur C. Clarke with his Rama series and Larry Niven with Ringworld: both rightly regarded as classics. In film or comics however, the ‘travelogue’ approach won’t wash. I did the same thing on the early episodes of Flesh, explaining the involved set-up, and it was actually a mistake. The episodes were reasonably popular, but that’s not good enough. The world should be revealed through a drama featuring the main characters in conflict. Thus Flesh became really popular once Old One Eye (the T. Rex ‘heroine’) and Claw Carver (the human bad guy) were introduced.

I didn’t make the same mistake on Nemesis. I built the world up through drama. The main characters – Nemesis and Torquemada – are endlessly in conflict and their world is introduced a little piece at a time. I had no idea what Torquemada meant when he said, ‘Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave!’ But I finally had to make sense of them and start world-building. I recall going for a long, long walk in the park pondering on the Grand Master’s holy words. After several hours walking round and round in circles, muttering to myself, avoiding the eyes of dog walkers who were looking at me curiously, doubtless thinking, ‘Why hasn’t he got a dog with him like the rest of us? What a weirdo!’, I finally had my Eureka! moment.  Torquemada intends to cleanse the galaxy of all alien life!

Progressively, world-building has gotten easier for me. The Resurrection world of Requiem Vampire Knight is Earth ‘inside out’. So everything generates from that one principle. Time runs backwards. Evil is good. Smoking, gluttony and the other vices are positively encouraged. Where there is land on Earth, there is sea on Resurrection. And so on. I relished it so much, I even have the empire of Dystopia (based on Britain, of course) singing the Dystopian national anthem – ‘Rule Dystopia’ - as they go to war with Requiem’s vampires.

Welcome to Hell. Resurrection drawn by Olivier Ledroit.

Similarly, on Mars, in the ABC Warriors, the city of Mekana is designed as one eternal building site, a foul vista of endless cranes with buildings being constantly erected and demolished. This was probably inspired by seeing so much callous demolition and brutal reconstruction when I was growing up in the 1960s.

Clint Langley’s Mekana

But worse: in this city, speech is discouraged and even banned in city centres, because the authorities want to control us through our thoughts. So most communication is by thoughtmail and there’s little human interaction. A reflection of today’s society and possibly the most nightmarish world I’ve ever devised (brilliantly visualised by Clint Langley). Worse even than Termight, perhaps. Without an artist who has the same appetite and enthusiasm for world-building and designing hellish cities, there’s really not much point in a writer coming up with such lurid and outlandish ideas. They will invariably fall rather flat, as I’ve discovered elsewhere to my cost.

But nightmare worlds don’t have to be set in the future or in a fantasy past. In Charley’s War, I spent some time building up a complex map of the trenches with names straight out of a Monopoly board, like Old Kent Road and Mayfair. The peculiar zig-zag shape of the trenches – rarely, if ever, shown to full advantage in movies – and the strange, heavily-cratered, troglodyte world that goes with it, makes them a unique and visually post-apocalyptic ‘city’ all of their own, especially when it was brilliantly drawn by Joe Colquhoun. It’s easily a rival to any sf dystopia. 

Next week: the emotional journey