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Worldbuild With Me - Part 1: Scale
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Worldbuild With Me - Part 1: Scale

My new novel, Nightless, is set in the near future. It has to be a credible near future. Recent events have set me back to Square One, but you can help me get started again

Karl Schroeder's avatar
Karl Schroeder
Apr 03, 2025
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Worldbuild With Me - Part 1: Scale
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I started a new novel, Nightless, during Covid. To keep my mind off the unfolding global catastrophe, I looked for a story that would be so ambitious and absorbing that it could challenge my whole person. I found my focus when I realized that the Earth has been hiding an entire ocean and that global warming has revealed it to the worst possible people at the worst possible time. This threatened ocean is the ideal setting for geopolitical adventures, for personal struggle and the epic rise and fall of empires. The Arctic Ocean has a mythic past comparable Ullysses’ Mediterranean and a perilous present as complex as the South China Sea’s. It has boundless riches yet is so fragile that one industrial disaster could wipe out its remaining ecosystems.

This secret ocean is a microcosm of our world; in a sense, its changes are distorted mirror-images of processes unfolding everywhere else. It’s the perfect setting for a story that will explore all the upheavals and metamorphoses impacting our lives; but how to tell a story on such a vast canvas?

The plot of Nightless is straightforward (at least it starts that way): Frank Tanager is trying to keep his little Anchorage-based freight company afloat. That’s it. This frame lets me bring in a small cast of characters with relatable problems and dreams. I’m repeating a formula that’s worked for me in the past; as in Ventus, for instance, we begin with a tight focus on this team and their struggles, and then progressively widen the scope and perspective until the whole tangled complexity of Earth in 2050 is in play. I’ll talk more about how to do this in a future post.

Meanwhile, one obsevation we can start with is that this story is bounded by its setting, so getting that right is the hard part. It’s not so much describing the physical environment that’s daunting (I’m Canadian and am familiar with most of the landscapes)—but the geopolitics, technologies, economics and work lives of Alaskans and Inuit Canadians in the year 2050 are hard to imagine. I spent years building a believable model of that future.

I’ve had to throw it all out and start over in light of our new political reality.

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Everything Affects Everything

When you do strategic foresight, you generally restrict yourself to one level of analysis—economics, say. You use the typical scientific tool of isolating the subject of investigation. By researching trends and potential disruptors, you paint a plausible picture of the near future based on that metric.

This does not work when writing fiction.

When you’re telling a story, your scenes and settings have to take everything into account. Let’s say I’m writing a scene set on Wrangel Island (in the Chukchi Sea beween Alaska and Russia). Whether I can even put my characters there depends on how the Arctic ambitions of the US and China play out and how strong Russia is, militarily, in 2050. Is mining happening up here, and if so, what are they after? On-shore or ocean-bed? What’s of value on the floor of the Chukchi? With the Northern Route and Northwest Passage open, is a lot of shipping passing by? Have there been tanker accidents that polluted the shores? I also have to anticipate the polar bear threat and the local effects of the collapse of the permafrost. The normal Arctic ecosystem has been completely disrupted by a local rise in temperature of as much as 8 degrees C. What will places like Wrangel look like after decades of such collapse?

What are the politics of international travel? Has AI completely replaced human pilots for both air travel and shipping? Are the giant shipping container vessels shaving 50% off their travel time by using the Northwest Passage completely robotic? What about jobs in general, including Frank’s? All of this and much more has to be present, as foreground or background, in every scene.

I’ve written a draft of the novel that was based on certain grounding assumptions, but Trump has upended them. Bruised and regretful of all the time wasted, I nearly abandoned the project. But this story is too important; events will keep catching up to us, but as I’ve said before, we must dare to write stories that might instantly become obsolete because the horizon of radical change has moved from decades out to years and even months. We don’t get to give up on trying to imagine our futures.

So, I sat down to imagine a version of the secret ocean in 2050 that would take into account the craziness of the present moment. To deal with all the complexities in a worldbuilding exercise like this, it’s helpful to find the common frame through which we view it all—and then to change that frame in a startling and new way. I’ll show you how I did that to imagine a new North.

Luckily, the frame is obvious. I’ve started with what we imagine cannot change because it never has changed: the bedrock that shapes the shoreline of the secret ocean and the monstrous climate that overbears it. I’ll begin with the one fact about the North that has always made it unconquerable: its scale.

Most of America is Roadless

The North American Arctic is as vast and mysterious as the dark side of the moon to most of us, so this is where the story’s fun begins. I’ve talked before about strangemaking: the process of taking what’s tacit and taken for granted and deliberately making it alien, exciting, and full of provocative potential. Strangemaking is a key technique for worldbuilding in science fiction. Nightless will rely heavily on this technique.

For the American Arctic, this process starts by reminding ourselves that we know the implacable inhuman power of the North, where 31,000 lakes containing 20% of the world’s fresh water are speckled through a continent-spanning forest, all of it imprisoned in a tortured writhe of ancient granite and weary swampland so daunting that 85% of it has never been and never can be serviced by roads. I have a book about canoeing through Northern Manitoba, and it is the only book I have ever read that has the word “mosquito” on every page. Within this Cambrian labyrinth are vast mineral riches, but the only way to get at them is by air, and industry on the scale of the Oil Sands cannot just be plunked down anywhere.

Or can it?

The enemy of Western industrialization in the North is scale. Just to hint at it: Canada’s northernmost major city is Edmonton. 850 miles north of that is the fourth largest lake in North America. Great Bear has an area of 12,000 square miles, rich uranium deposits on its shores, and is sacred to the Dene people. This great lake is a short run from the Arctic Ocean, which in the 2050 of Nightless is navigable for much of the year. A little closer to Edmonton, only 500 miles away, is Great Slave Lake, the deepest lake in North America and the 10th largest in the world by area. Lake Huron, of comparable size, has a population of 3 million living along its shores.

If we haven’t been able to add this landscape to the story of Western development in 500 years, you could be forgiven for thinking we never will. These places are so remote and inaccessible and the -50C climate is so harsh, that they’ll always be marginalized. But when worldbuilding, “facts” like this are design challenges. In this case, it nagged at me: fourth largest lake in North America. The others sustain populations of millions.

The first phase of strangemaking is to recognize the default version of some reality. The grand forbidding landscape I’ve just described is the accepted North, still a place of exotic mystery to most of us yet familiar in its narrative of inaccessibility. Having recognized that familiar narrative, the next phase of strangemaking is to turn it on its head.

Imagine Great Bear Lake in the year 2050, with two million people living around it.

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