World Building - the kaleidoscope view

Recently I saw a facebook post from a New Zealand Spec fiction writer commenting on the presence of the NZ landscape in many NZ Spec fic writers' work, and I had to agree with it, from my own experience. But I would also have to add that the landscape is not necessarily taken holus bolus into my own writing - though I cannot say if this is true for other writers.

In my case, I usually know which particular landscape has suggested the setting for a particular story, but that doesn't mean that my final setting ends up being exactly like that. More that some feature of that part of the country has set off an idea for my world's landscape - and that feature may only be how that land makes me feel.

An example is for my first, as yet unpublished novel "Hathe", the opening sections of which are set in a high plateau wilderness of the planet Hathe - and that setting comes straight from the North Island central plateau country. I spent my teenage years in Taupo and have driven the Desert Road many times. There is a special feel to that part of the country - untameable, open, big enough to hold all your dreams, and never quite safe.

But this is where the kaleidoscope bit comes in. Just as light enters one end of a kaleiodoscope, is refracted, bent, split into it's various components, and comes out the other end in an unending array of beautiful, colourful patterns, so do the images and feelings that suggest a given setting in a story. The high plateau country of Hathe is not the Desert Road. It's sort of like it, the vegetation of my is principally grasses with some shrubs, but it's bigger, colder, wilder, more grassy - it's Hathian, not kiwi, in other words. This setting was suggested by the Desert Road, but it was also based on a dream I had one morning, and on many other things that came along while I was writing.

That is true of all my world building. I know where it starts, but that doesn't mean it ends up where I expected it to. Worlds, like characters, take on a life of their own, and become their own places.

How else can they become real?

My Science Fiction Blog

I am revitalising this blog, and reclaiming it for my science fiction works. From now on, this blog will refer to only science fiction or other speculative fiction works. This is my latest attempt to bring some order to  my social media sites, and hopefully will stop the confusion that results from the marked difference in genre's that I write. There is a logic to it, but I understand that often it's only who can see it.

For my NZ historical romances, please go to my other website for Mary Brock Jones

For the SF works, I'm so please to announce the publication of the  Regeneration: New Zealand Speculative Fiction II anthology, which includes my story "Hunting Ythan". This is an anthology made up entirely of NZ based writers, so I was very thrilled to be included in it.

To buy - use the link on the side panel. Available as paper back and ebook.