HOW THE WORLD OF 2050’s NEW YORK WAS CREATED
While I love science fiction in all of its incarnations, I’ve always struggled with books that put descriptions of the world over character and plot. World building—the general term for everything to do with a fictional world, not just technology, but political systems, climate, etc—is vital to get right but long paragraphs of explanation leave me bored and wondering what alcohol I have in the house (usually never enough.)
These images show the basic development of the book’s flying cars (called ‘Hoppers.’)
Above is my very first ‘Hopper’ sketch, based way too clearly on the Bell 47-D1...
. . . which is a work of artistic genius and on display at MoMA . . .
I’ve always felt that future worlds should exist in the background as a day to day reality the characters don’t notice. But if that’s the case, how do you show that in a book?
The best way is to sprinkle this information throughout the work, sometimes taking center stage—the protagonist meets an AI for the first time and studies it in detail—but typically as normal part of their life.
As an author this leaves you with an interesting problem. I need to know what the world looks like, how it smells and feels, what noise aerial cars make etc. That detail, however, hinders the story, bogging it down in page long info-dumps.
... after my initial sketch I fell down a ‘Flash Gordon’ rabbit hole of sleek, spaceship looking Hoppers completely at odds with the reality of 2050’s NY ...
Maybe other authors don’t sweat this stuff so much, just say, “the flying car landed on its great wings then took off with a whirr” but I can’t write that way. Perhaps its the consequence of being an architect for twenty-five years, but I need to know what the environment looks like, but equally important, how everything works.
My first draft has a ton of information in it, from chair designs, to clothing, lighting, drones and so on. Thousands of unnecessary words and ideas that get cut when I edit. This Automatic Eden’s first draft was 130,000 words, the final draft 94,000 words. Almost all of the removed text was world building that helped me understand the culture and reality of 2050’s New York, but prevented the book’s conspiracy plot from flowing.
At first I just threw those words away, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about the designs. What was the revolutionary drive systems for aerial cars and how did it work? What smell does it make when running for hours on end?
I found myself sitting up late night reading science journals and websites. All day I would sketch buildings for architects, all evening I would draw New York 2050 until my eyes hurt.
Let’s take those flying cars as an example—they won’t have wings, that’s for sure. Below is a picture of the current ‘best in class’ flying car. It looks to me as if it would make for a bad car and a bad aircraft: a massive compromise in other words and not a mass market solution.
(this is the $1.2M Aeromobil flying car. Very nice I’m sure, but not great for a quick trip to the shops or being parked in a Brooklyn Street)
No wings means we need a new propulsion paradigm… something small, light and compact, yet powerful enough to allow cars to hover, climb and move without the noise and head chopping consequences of helicopter blades (in the books this system is called a ‘Dyson Engine.’ Why? found out here!)
So, if we have this propulsion system, what would the cars look like? That’s in PART 2 🚀: