How can my story take place on Earth without referring to our existing cities and countries?
I come from worldbuilding.stackexchange because people suggested I post my question here:
My story shall take place on Earth with the human race as the dominant species. I imagine the technological and scientific progress to be 10 to 20 years in the future from now (our current real life state) but basically I want to build a world environment which is pretty much like ours.
However, I am struggling with the question whether or not I should use our real world cities and countries (e.g., US, UK, Russia, China, etc.) and their political situations, historical backgrounds and cultures.
Doing that would require me to stick to real historical facts which i want to avoid. I am aware that i need to develop my own politics, history and culture for the countries but i want to take our world just as an inspiration and create something new from it.
But now I can't think of a good way to convey that "alternative reality of humankind" to the readers without confusing them. For example, I feel like when writing about inventions, that happened in the near past, I shouldn't let these inventions happen in a totally different world with different city and country names.
Very basic example:
Thomas Edison invented the light bulb and was a US citizen. (true or not doesn't matter)
For me, it feels odd if I would say:
Keith Coleman, the inventor of the light bulb, was a citizen of the united nations of Quimbleton (names I just came up with)
In my opinion, this would confuse the reader.
I know that other writers have built these human worlds without referring to our 'real' Earth directly (especially in fantasy, e.g., Tolkien's Lord of the Rings). But I can only think of examples where the 'potential time gap' between our time and the time in the book is very large. For example, Lord of the Rings plays in medieval times.
Another thing is that I cannot limit the geographical area of the story (like Tolkien with Middle earth) because I will definitely address space travel at some point, which requires even more than a planet-sized area.
To bring it to a point, I want the technological progress, the state of science, the environment, and probably the cultural habits to be pretty much like ours nowadays. But I want to use different names for cities, countries, persons, etc., so that there is no real world connection via names.
My question is: What is a good way to convey the following to the reader:
"Yes this is Earth, this is pretty much your time and there are a lot things you already know about. But no, you don't know any of the countries, cities or persons and you know nothing about their politics, history and culture. I will explain this to you part by part."
EDIT:
I noticed that people are getting me wrong and think that i don't want to do any research on history and cultures in our real world, trying to go for a simple way. It's really just that i don't want to necessarily stick to our real world political systems and historical events. My world building would of course be highly affected (or call it inspired) by our real world events and systems but i just want the freedom to create something new from it. I am not trying to go the "easy" way.
EDIT 2:
Thank you very much for your comments, i read all of them. There are many good advices which will definitly help me with this issue, so thanks a lot.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/46191. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
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Suspension of disbelief is a powerful drug. It clouds the mind and prevent the reader from realizing that Quimbonia is not a real country. It's true that it looks and feels like the United Kingdom. Its inhabitants even speak British English, and each carry an umbrella. Fact is, it is called Quimbonia and has no coastline.
To achieve this result, you need to be the first to suspend your disbelief. Convince yourself that your world is real, and write your story in it with the same tone and ease as if you were writing about our Earth. If you are the first to find it hard to believe in your world, there is no reader that will fall for it.
The other important element is that you need to give the reader the cues of what they are seeing and feeling. Even the real world would feel fake if you don't show it to the reader. For instance, saying "they were in Paris" is not the same as describing the current season in Paris, how heavy their clothes are, how the wool scarf in pinching on the neck, and whether it is a murky day, with smog low over the city, and the Eiffel Tower piercing right through the grey clouds. Even a well known landmark like the Eiffel Tower could be left as a name, or showed to the reader as a slender elephant of steel, built for the vanity of mankind.
What if my world is like Earth, but different?
That's the easier thing to do. You won't need to give names to seasons, or show that the sky was neon green. You can directly use common things from our world to make your fantasy become believable. For instance:
Keith Coleman held his first prototype for a light bulb in his hand. It had been ten years now since Quimbleton had been the first town to fend off the darkness that creeps at night. The whole world envied them both, they envied the inventor for his skills, and they envied every single red brick of the small, industrial, greasy town for deserving one such great man.
The difference from your text is that I have tried to show you the man and the town, and place them in relation to their world. Now you have a mental image of it. On the contrary, recording some fact, which you may expect the reader to care about and perhaps even remember, is less likely to leave a trace. If you need to give a fact, do so in a dialogue
"Keith Coleman from Quimbleton! The world owes you, and not just for the invention of the light-bulb." cheered UnimportantCharacter
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Creating a world is a lot of work.
It doesn't matter if your world is a single town over the course of a year or an intercontinental saga over several generations. Either way, you need to map out the geography, features, characters and their genealogies, and history.
How detailed you get depends both on your approach to writing and the requirements of the story. I'm one who researches and plots out these things in detail, even when I don't have to. Because I do better having a foundation in place which I can draw on. You might do better with a minimum of this type of research.
Worldbuilding for a fully fictional world vs a partially fictional one vs a real one is still worldbuilding. It still requires research and thinking and writing stuff down. There are pros and cons to each of these and one is not easier than the other. They're just different.
If it feels right for you to set your story on Earth, but one that is completely different from our actual Earth in terms of how countries and technology developed, go for it. Only you can know which approach is the right one for you.
It will be odd though if you keep everything the same except for the names of countries and prominent people and some details about political and other history. Do this only if it makes the most sense for the story. Don't do this if you are trying to save yourself research time. Sometimes it's easier to draw on established histories (which you can find online in simplified form) than to create your own from scratch. You're not going to save yourself any work by choosing not to look up things like who invented such in such in what year and place.
But, if your goal is to build a world from scratch because it's "more fun" then give it a go. You might find the world exhilarating or you might abandon it after a while. But it's worth trying. There's nothing wrong with trying different approaches as a writer to see what works best for you. Ultimately though, choose the approach that works best for the book. That's the determining factor.
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