[800 Words] Comprehensive Guide to Writing Science Fiction

I like the content you included. You touch on all the canon "big topics of sci fi," particularly but it's a little brief for me to agree that it's "comprehensive." That's not to say what you have isn't valuable - it is, but there's so much more to worldbuilding a sci-fi setting that feels believable.

There are two areas where I'd like to see you develop this guide further: in cultural anthropology/ethnography, and in the evolution of technology.

Cultural anthropology and ethnography, it is my humble opinion the most important factor in making your world feel rich and convincing. Yes, big technology leaps like teleportation devices and faster-than-light engines are great in a sci-fi environment, but it's the little things that make a world feel immersive: everyday cultural custom like hand gestures and common greetings, beliefs about family and marriage, cuisine and diet, as well ordinary infrastructure, like agriculture and food production, how waste management and sewage is handled. People in a sci-fi world are likely to still have the same basic needs we have today, so I's essential not to gloss over how those needs are met, particularly in ways where they differ from us.

Have you seen Patricia C. Wrede's worldbuilding ethnography questionnaire? It was originally written for fantasy, but it's not hard at all to adapt it to any setting or genre. Now that's comprehensive.

While ethnography makes a world believable, it's technology that makes a sci-fi world fantastic. But technology doesn't just "appear." Science builds upon past knowledge, one discovery leading to another. To effectively suspend disbelief, I think a great approach to explaining advanced technologies is by modeling out a technology tree, like in the game Civilization. If the sci-fi world is an more-advanced version of our own, you can take all of the current body of scientific understanding as given, then progress through s series of steps until you get the inventions you need to make your sci-fi world work. Alternately, if the sci-fi world's history differs from our own, like, for example, electronics and machining were invented much earlier, leading to early revolutions in nanorobotics, build out a timeline of how that affected things. Even if it never actually appears in the book, that kind of rich understanding of "how the world got to the state it's in" is immensely valuable.

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