forum What should the description of your universe contain?
Started by @skullchecked group
tune

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This site asks for the name, description, genre, origin, history, laws of physics, magic system if there is one, and technology.

But it might help if you wrote a bit on a pencil-and-paper diary or typed in a private blog how you think about your world, first.

For example, I hadn't anticipated the origin of my setting's entire universe because the setting is only in one city on one planet that is "earth-like but is not earth" so that's what I wrote in the description. My main characters live in society in which mythology is mixed up with history, so what they think is the origin of the universe isn't actually what I decided the origin of their universe actually is going to be, and they don't have a word for a Universe let alone a name for their own Universe. So I thought up of one for organizational purposes only: "prismverse".

If you were writing something that had travels in outer space, like A Wrinkle in Time, or in a dimension in which instead of round planets there were Möbius loops or chunks of "planets" shaped like giant Calabi-Yau manifolds, then it might be useful to fill in those fields.

But if your story takes place in "basically earth" with only one sun in the sky that rises in the east and sets in the west, and recognizable geographic features, a familiar amount of gravity, etcetera…maybe not so much.

But I guess it can help to be a science nerd. I watched this BBC documentary about parallel universes and the creation of this one according to theoretical physicists, so I put the information that I believed from that documentary into a description of "prismverse on the planet of basically earth but not earth", along with some cool science stuff I'd read elsewhere about lumpy dust clouds coalescing into stars and balls that became planets, and how stars made small atoms stick together until the stars exploded and sent elements heavier than hydrogen out to spin into carbon planetary bodies or something because spacetime is curved and forms balls because of the way it curves. It's not very original or creative, but it fills the fields:

ORIGIN
The collision of multiple dimensions at multiple points created materials in a vacuum that began as a primordial lumpy cloud. These eventually formed stars and planets, along with other cosmic or galsctical formations, and at least one of those planets evolved atmosphere, continents, climates, and life forms.

LAWS OF PHYSICS
Gravity from curved spacetime, electromagnetism, sub-atomic particles, and waves as well as macro physics and physiology should all operate in ways that readers are familiar with from experience.

I hope this helps!