How World Building Infuses Every Part of the Story

It’s funny, when I started writing Invasion I had much of the world building already done (secret: I do some world building on the fly as something unexpected comes up. I think a lot of authors do.) and it had been done for the better part of my life. I started this setting back in sixth grade with my closest friend. It started out as two bored kids with no interest in class figuring out cool alien societies so we had something to do. Over time I spent a lot of time ‘day dreaming’ and synching ideas up with my friend until we had a coherent setting with characters and everything.

Low and behold of course what you design in sixth grade isn’t exactly adult. I’ve gone back over everything a couple of times in the last several years, bringing things in line with an adult perspective, changing some names and conventions where they honestly needed it, discarding ideas that didn’t work, and so on. I wish Mike was still around to help. During this process I started writing Invasion and came to the one issue I’d not actually encountered in all the years of role-playing and figuring things out.

It turns out anti-matter is highly explosive. Obvious, I know, but it’s a fact that literally changes everything about warfare when one side is running around with rifles that generate tiny fractions of antimatter and spit them at the enemy. Staying alive as a soldier requires finding cover, hiding behind things, and blocking enemy line of sight. So what do you do when you hide behind a car and the enemy just shoots the car and turns your cover into a horrifying rain of white hot shrapnel?

In real war bullets will impact the car and be deflected, stick in the metal, and otherwise not hit you. In a world where someone has antimatter, they can just turn the car into a bomb and move on. Even hiding in a building isn’t all that safe. Depending on the size of the building and the morality of the people fighting you, they could just opt to shoot the building until it collapses on your head. Oh and by the way, the aliens can see through the car.

You can’t use cover, you can’t block line of sight, and you can’t get hit because there’s no such thing as a minor wound from antimatter. Even a near miss might be fatal, depending on what it hits.

It turns out this was a great problem, because I was able to weave those questions into the story itself. James Mason and friends have to deal with this. This is warfare and warfare is constant adaptation. James has to discard the playbook and figure out how to fight people that can always see you and turn your cover against you. It’s not as hopeless as it sounds but it’s not easy and from a writing perspective it was awesome. What more can you ask for than the challenges presented by your world building also becoming challenges for the character?

There’s more to it than James’s perspective though. The antimatter weapons are great in a pitched conflict, capable of destroying armored foes and vehicles alike with brutal consequences. It is not, however, good at city fighting. In cities there’s a lot of crap in your way, the ranges of combat get cut in half and now your weapon is as much a problem for you as your human enemy. At range it’s still a good weapon with some great advantages. What happens if the enemy pops out from running through a building and is now ten feet away from you? Do you want to fire antimatter at a target ten feet away? I don’t. What about five?

Reverse the problem, what if the enemy is at long range with say, an anti-material sniper rifle (rifles capable of punching holes in armored cars) from almost a mile away? Antimatter rifles have limited range before the magnetic containment field holding the antimatter “bolt” together collapses and the antimatter explodes in mid air. Switch weapons, grab a plasma rifle, or a fusion carbine. Except oh wait, you don’t have those, because the powers that be didn’t think about what happens when you try to fight people at close range in a city with antimatter.

So you have on one hand James and his allies having to figure out how to survive, while on the other hand the aliens are trying to deal with the limitations their opponents will eventually figure out. This is also something that happens in real war. When the US was still heavily involved in Iraq and IEDs were first making the news it turned out our troops lacked a lot of what they needed, because no one had planned for fighting irregular troops with explosives in a city.

The US army eventually armored up the Humvees, then replaced them entirely with the MRAP. Soldiers were given additional armor in their vests and other parts of the body and IEDS fell out of the news. So I found I had this awesome ‘problem’ trying to write these scenes that in reality gave me awesome and realistic situations my characters had to deal with. The aliens need to constantly harass their superiors for better gear for their situation, the humans have to figure out how to fight the new threat. One piece of world building weaves a big part of how the world and characters interplay, it’s great.

I still find myself sometimes pausing and re-writing a scene because “oh yeah they could just shoot the car.” There is one other problem James will discover along the way. There is such a thing as too close to a Reptonian, because they’re stronger and faster than humans.

Don’t fight them in close combat, don’t stay in one place for too long, don’t rely on line of sight blocking, put stuff between you and the antimatter but with distance, and carry a lot of ammo.