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N.K. JEMISIN Differences are observable in every species

on our planet.

The question becomes whether our culture ascribes any meaning

to those differences.

Now that we've got our macro world set up in our environment

and we've chosen the place where this culture is going

to develop, micro world building is

where we begin the process of actually creating the people

who will populate this world.

We create the culture, we create the power dynamics,

and then we can go from there on creating a character.

So with macro world building, you started with the planet,

and with micro world building, you also

start at sort of the most macro scale, which is

the development of the species.

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You can decide whether you want to deal with humans

or nonhumans, but for the sake of the exercise,

we're going to talk about humans because I just

want to make it clear that even small changes in the way

that these humans interact with their world

is going to create a wildly different culture from anything

that you've ever seen on this planet.

So we'll start with species.

The human species, we kind of know what humans are like.

We're still figuring out things about ourselves,

but for the most part, we pretty much understand

how the human species operates.

There's no reason why you can't tweak

that a little bit, though, because the morphology

of the human species, the ways in which our bodies work

and are developed, are constantly changing with time,

i.e.

evolution, and are constantly changing

in response to our environment as we

try to adapt to the things that change around us.

So there's no reason why you can't, for example, create,

as I did in "The Broken Earth" series, a human species that

is adapted for life on a very seismic planet.

All the people in "The Broken Earth" trilogy

have an organ in their brains that we don't in our world,

or at least not that we know of.

But they have an organ in their brain that is reacting to

or is able to kind of give them a little bit of advance

warning about seismic activity that's about to happen.

And in creating that particular variation on the human species,

I literally just looked at other species

on our planet which do react early

when they perceive an earthquake or something coming.

And when you look at birds and other animals that

react to those seismic vibrations,

they do have a little organ in their brain

or they've got senses or abilities

that kind of warn them in advance that this is coming.

So I just transferred that into people.

So even though you're dealing with the human species,

it doesn't have to be exactly humans like us.

But then when you're dealing with their morphology, the ways

in which their body is developed that's different from ours,

you need to think about whether these people are

aware of those differences.

Human beings are endlessly curious.

Our own species learned rapidly what our bodies were like

and how they worked.

We can see evidence in the earliest cultures

of people kind of figuring out where

the organs are, how the organs operate, and things like that.

So these people would be aware of the particular uniqueness

of their morphology.

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Then we start getting into the more subtle breakdowns

of humanity.

We can get into raciation.

In our own planet, for example, one

of the morphological changes that we've

developed to respond to our environment

is that we've developed different skin coloration based

on the amount of UV exposure that we've got.

People who are from cultures that developed at the equator

where they get a lot more sunlight or a lot more intense

sunlight tend to have darker skin

so that they are more protected against UV rays, whereas people

who developed in cultures further

from the equator, closer to polar regions and things

like that, developed lighter skin because they needed

to get more light through their skin

in order to develop Vitamin D.

So that's an example of a nonsignificant difference.

We're still the same species.

We can still have children together.

There's absolutely no real difference

between lighter skinned and darker skinned people.

These differences are observable in every species on our planet.

We see melanistic jaguars and jaguars with rossettes.

We see elephants come in different colorations,

and different head shapes, and so forth.

These are natural differences that exist just

simply because of evolution.

The question becomes whether our culture ascribes any meaning

to those differences.

And then we're starting to get into what

we call acculturation.

That's where the culture begins to decide

whether these minor, insignificant differences

between the ways that our species develops are important

or not.

To go back to the example of skin color,

there was a time in our world when skin color meant--

or skin color differences just simply meant

that those people were from far away

and they probably had interesting stuff to trade.

So we didn't have the kinds of negative associations

with dark skin that we do now.

If you go to the Cloisters here in New York,

a great medieval art museum, you can see art

from the 1200s or the 1000s where

you see that different people or people from Africa

were treated as kind of welcome guests

because they showed up with gold and they showed up

kind of styling with interesting colors or interesting clothing

that we didn't see--

or that Europeans didn't see at that point.

So you can see an example of how that cultural difference was

not what we consider it to be right now.

And then that culture or those differences or those

values that we ascribed to those skin colors began to change,

and these are things that can change again.

So one of the things that you need to decide at this point

is how is your human species constructed.

Are they the same as in our world

or are they wildly different from in our world,

and what values do the people in this world ascribe to those

differences?

You can make up stuff completely.

It doesn't have to be the same kinds of differences

that exist in our species.

Again, an example from "The Broken Earth" series,

I created a people that has hair that

is naturally air filtering, what they call ashblow hair.

They can draw a piece of their hair across their face

and it can work as a kind of respiratory mask.

But-- so that's an example of a way

that you can create a completely human species,

minor cosmetic differences, but wildly different

from our own world.

You also have to consider the fact that these differences are

essentially arbitrary and the meanings that we

choose to ascribe to them are essentially arbitrary.

In our own world, for example, we

know that there are people who can digest lactose

and those who can't, like me, and we

know that this difference makes a difference in what

those people can eat, and how much nutrition they're

able to get, or what kinds of nutrition they're able to get,

but we don't seem to ascribe any real value to it beyond that.

We don't treat it as people who don't digest lactose

are superior to people who can because those people grew up

with cows.

They're terrible people.

You know, we don't do that.

And we don't ascribe differences to face shape or configuration

in general.

So you need to decide whether the people in your world

are going to ascribe any kind of value

to the normal, minor differences that exist in their species.

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So as an example of raciation, again,

from "The Broken Earth" series, let's look

at the difference between Orogenes and the Guardians

or people that become Guardians.

It turns out that when Orogenes have children with people

who aren't Oregenes, the result is

a child that isn't necessarily an Oregene,

but they still have a little bit of the morphological difference

that makes them slightly different from regular people.

In this world, you've got Orogenes,

who have a very highly developed organ

in the back of their brains that allows them to affect

seismology, and then you've got regular people that

have the same organ, but it's much less developed.

Guardians are somewhere in between those two.

And because they are just different enough

and because they can pass on the trait of orogeny

to their own children, the societal value

that they've ascribed to Guardians

is that you need to be kept out of the gene pool

and we also need to put you to good use.

So, for various reasons that are elucidated in the book,

for various reasons, the Guardians

are sequestered or taken away early

and brought to a place where they are modified mechanically

in order to suppress their ability or potential ability

to develop any kind of orogenic powers,

and they can actually then suppress orogenic powers

in any Orogenes that they encounter.

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So now that we've created our culture

and we've created the location in which this culture develops,

we need to figure out the ways in which this culture will

be wildly different from our own world.

And so for the sake of our exercise,

I want you to select one characteristic

of a culture that's going to be drastically

different from anything in our own world.

This can be its religion, its economy,

its ways of thinking about how human beings were created,

so its cosmogony.

Cosmogony is another significant way

that cultures develop differently.

Cosmology is determining where we came from

or figuring out how the world and the universe was created.

And in a lot of cases, each culture

is going to develop its own creation

mythos and its own religion kind of as a result of that,

so that's one big difference between different cultures.

You have to think about the fact that, in our world,

there are similar cultures that develop in similar environments

and yet they're still wildly different.

Why?

This is because human beings tend

to react in sort of predictable ways

to the presence of other human beings

and there are predictable sociological things

that happen when two cultures are close to each other.

One of the things that affects how a society develops

is syncretism, is basically building

on what has come before.

All societies do that to some degree or another,

but it's a question of how much they

choose to forget or leave behind whatever

it was that they used to do.

Differentiation is important.

From those people over there, lots of people

don't want to be like the culture that's nearby

because that's their rival.

They're competing for the same resources and in some cases,

they may have had conflict at some point in the past

or potentially in the future, so they

want to be wildly different from each other just

to kind of develop that whole us versus them dynamic

that human beings tend to do.

If you've decided to set your culture, for example,

in a desert and there's a swamp area nearby,

these people are going to be the anti swamp people.

They may have decided to develop their culture in such a way

that swamps are evil, mud is bad,

where they venerate sand over mud, something to that effect.

So this is one of the ways in which culture develops.

And then there's the economy.

How do they get resources?

How do they distribute and disseminate those resources?

How do they trade resources with organizations or groups nearby?

All of these things have an impact

on the culture that develops.

If you just change one cultural aspect of any society

relative to the societies on Earth,

you're going to see pretty substantial differences.

So right now, select one characteristic

that you're going to run with as the drastic difference

between that world and our world.

If it helps, here's a graphic of different characteristics,

societal characteristics, that you can choose.

Pick one of these and then write down how drastically different

or how different it's going to be from our world.

It can be a subtle difference, but you're

going to see the ways in which it affects the society as you

start to work with it.

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Some examples of ways that the social or sociological factors

will change in your world.

Let's run through the idea of water people living

on a world that was mostly desert or a world

where there was very little water.

You're going to have--

let's say that you want to try and play with what kind

of language they would develop.

They might develop a language that centers and venerates

words having to do with water, or humidity, or moisture.

They might develop negative language or curse

words centered around the sun, or sand, or burning to death,

or dying of thirst.

So this is a society where, instead of F bombs,

they might drop thirst bombs or something.

Let's say that the same society decided to--

or developed a religion that was centered

around venerating water or venerating this one

particular lake or small inland ocean that is kind

of like their main environment.

They might talk about it as a sacred place.

It might be that only certain people get

to travel to the middle or the bottom of the lake

and everybody else has to kind of, like,

make do on the edges of the lake.

Or they may gather all on the edges of the lake

to pray every evening, and this is a factor

that you've got build into the story.

Let's say that these water-bound people developed

a different sense of gender compared to humans

or compared to the cultures that you

might be most familiar with.

So let's say that they--

well, if they're water people on a desert planet,

they may not be human.

If they are amphibious or something

and they probably lay eggs at the water's edge,

they might be intersex or, as we call with animals,

hermaphroditic.

With people, we don't use that word.

So depending on what kind of environment you've got,

that's going to make a huge difference

in how those sociological characteristics are expressed.

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Here's an example of a way in which element X can affect

pretty much everything from that tier of the world building

process on down at the micro level or the macro level.

Micro level or the macro level.

So with my "Inheritance" trilogy,

the element X actually intrudes at the universal level,

at the level of the laws of physics,

in the way that I constructed the gods of this universe

and their decision to create the universe or the way

that they created the universe.

They formed out of effectively nothingness created

by a kind of giant whirlpool called the Maelstrom,

and then they decided from there that they

were going to fight with each other,

and the fighting created the universe.

And the gods continue to interact with this universe,

so you see their intervention.

You see their involvement in the universe

at pretty much multiple levels of the story.

There's one part of the story that's

told from the perspective of a god who talks about the fact

that he likes to steal planets and suns.

He's got a pet son that he has named that he carries around

on a little chain, or he rides around as a little ball,

or he plays with all the time.

He has an orrery of planets that he's

stolen from actual solar systems that's floating around.

They're miniaturized a little bit

and they float around his chosen son

and he just does this for fun because that's what he does.

The culture on this world has developed around the idea

that the gods are real.

They're not in question.

You have no choice but to believe

that they exist because you see the evidence of it all around.

However, this world does actually have atheists

and I had to do a lot of thinking

about how a world with confirmed, present, visible

gods could possibly have atheism.

Well, I mean, these are people who've

decided that they know that the gods exist,

they just don't care.

It doesn't matter.

They're not important.

They've decided that people are more important than gods

or they want to focus their energy on understanding how

people work, and they'll just leave

the gods do their own thing.

So that's how atheism works in that world

and that's the way that element X can be incorporated

at multiple levels.