She was telling me about her next book that she has just finished revising, and she was explaining stuff about it to me and how between X time and Y time in the novel (X time being when aliens sent a missive to Earth and Y time being when Earth actually responded), all the aliens died. The characters/story are taking place after Y time, when humans have come to this abandoned alien planet. And I said, “what happened to the aliens?” And she told me, "they all died from a war or disease or something it doesn't really matter to the story."
No, it matters. It matters a huge amount. So I told her that. I outright told her, “yes, yes it does matter, you should come up with what happened to them.” Even if only she knows it, even if it’s NEVER mentioned. Her reply was, "no, not really, because I'm not planning on putting it into the book so I don't have to come up with it, it's not relevant to the story itself."
Almost every time I talk with her about writing, it makes me want to write a blog post. I’m not saying she’s doing writing wrong, but she’s doing writing in a very juvenile, student-writer type way which ultimately produces flimsy stories with flimsy world building, flimsy characters, narratives where things happen just because the author could or felt like it would be cool, with no historical relevance. Even if that history is made up within the story’s own world, it can’t just be absent.
In her story, the way the aliens died is going to affect EVERYTHING.
If all the aliens died in war, the setting is going to look like the aftermath of a war. Even if it’s an abandoned/empty planet, the buildings will look destroyed, the landscape will look charred, the entire place will reflect exactly what happened to it. What did Europe look like after WWII? Completely fucking wasted. Even things TODAY are still visibly changed/damaged/unrestored by that war, and that’s after 60+ years of humans continuing to build and develop in those cities. If an alien planet destroys itself in a war (and clearly these are technologically advanced aliens with the power to build massively destructive weapons that could cause this sort of damage, because they already had spaceflight and large metropolitan centers; I know because my friend has told me this) and then the aliens are gone and can’t rebuild, the place is going to look like a fucking wreck when humans show up.
If the aliens didn’t die in a war, and just left the planet or they all died of disease, the place will look hauntingly untouched, just a creepy empty place with silent but perfectly intact buildings, maybe with some overgrowth from nature depending on how long ago it was. If there was a disease, maybe there are signs of the quarantine left over—closed off streets, buildings shut up, large fences enclosing entire parts of cities. Signs hung up warning of infection, even if they’re in an alien language. You will be getting a setting and a sense of history JUST from how the place looks. Even if the point of the story is not to find out how these aliens died, or what happened to them, the history of it is so massively important I can’t even stress it enough.
If you don’t make that history, your world building and your story is already a failure. Because the lack of it will reflect in a tiny million ways in the entire attitude and atmosphere in the book. It will make it read flat and lacking in realism if there is no history to your world, even one that is never explored in depth. If the author doesn't know what's going on 'backstage', it comes off as completely obvious to the reader. You just know that there are huge gaps that nobody bothered to fill in or didn’t even realize were there. Sometimes it even makes huge ridiculous plot holes or creates unbelievable things, because there would be no reason things in the setting should BE the way the author has them - because they are not there because of a believable, evolving history. They're just there to be there.
I have a huge timeline and practically an entire history book of events that happened in the past of the L&S series, to get the society and culture and world where it is currently. Beyond that, I have an entire history of their people, all the way back to basically ridiculous levels, back thousands of years, and it will NEVER. BE. MENTIONED. EVER. Because current-day people don’t often sit around discussing how the Roman empire is relevant to daily life. But just like the Roman empire, so many of our present day functions and culture and traditions and technologies are built and adapted from it, so much so that we don’t even know it sometimes or just don’t bother to think about where modern plumbing came from. But it all came from SOMEWHERE, and the history of that is a real, tangible, important thing that affects your fake sci-fi/fantasy world just as much as it affects real-life modern day 2012 world.
So, all my ridiculous world building shit. Is it in the story? No. It is ever going to be? No. Is anybody ever going to know about it besides me? Most likely not. Is it still important? YES. Because it is so unbelievable necessary. It matters to the physical appearance of the world, the way civilization grew or declined or evolved, and physical things that left behind (buildings, monuments, any sort of manmade change to the landscape). Characters and their social identity, culture, beliefs, behaviors mindsets, everything. Everything is built on everything else. If you create a culture or an alien planet or a situation just because; then honestly you are doing it wrong. Because nothing works like that. Even the story you are going to write is built on something! Your ideas and concepts were influenced and inspired, either consciously or subconsciously, by people who came before you. People who wrote before you and created things before you and before those people there were other people creating things and creating ideas and they were influenced by the people before them.
Basically, you have to build a story like an iceberg. This is what people read:
and this is what should be going on under it, the world building that supports what people are seeing and experiencing in the story:
To sum up, there's a reason we learn history in school! So there's a reason your alien planet should have history and an explanation for why everybody on it died.
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