In our world, we see events like the American Civil war that create effects that lasts for hundreds of years. Another event that we discussed was the Genpei war in Japan, which led to the move of the Japanese capital from Kyoto to Kamakura, and can be considered the reason why the current capital of Japan is in the east rather than the west.
LaShawn mentioned that she's working on a short story in a secondary world where people feel "we've always been this way" but the main character goes back and finds her own history and how it was influenced by events that impacted her people.
LaShawn described first sitting down and figuring out the history behind the story. She thought maybe she should set it on a spaceship, but then realized the character couldn't go to the kind of market she was thinking of if she was on a space ship. She observed disparities in how people lived (high tech vs horse and carriage) and thought about how that could happen. Something must have occurred that made it that way. She picked out a fun detail, opened up, and it it led to more.
Tonya told us about her novel in progress, which has links to her time in Trinidad. She told us about the book They Came Before Columbus by Ivan Van Sertima, which details evidence of Africans in the Caribbean before Columbus' arrival. A fleet disappeared from Mali might have landed in Brazil, for example. Tonya went through the book "with a fine-toothed comb" and used elements of it in her novel.
I talked about how the secondary world of Varin, which has humans but is unrelated to Earth, has an Earthlike environment but a completely different history. Part of this history I designed after looking at what I'd written and asking questions like, "Why would these people have such a uniform single religion?" I developed a lot of the history and details of Varin after studying anthropology and linguistics.
One way to approach the question of designing events is to look at a current-day situation in your world where you find social group A and social group B. Examine it. Is this an ethnic difference? Is it a racial difference? Are they people of the same race but different ethnicity? Then you can ask how this divide came about. Was it colonization that brought the two groups together? Was it invasion? Is one group faith-based and one not? Is there any group that treats science as a religion?
These questions are certainly not only relevant to secondary worlds. If you are working with alternate history, it's really critical to identify the divergence point (or points).
LaShawn told us about her story "Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good." It was alternate history because it introduced an element that hadn't happened in the past. LaShawn's research suggested that both singers had lived in Chicago, but that the real life Rosetta had moved to New York in the early 1920s. So she decided to change it so Rosetta stays in Chicago, and the means she used was a quarantine. Quarantine suggests an illness, so she asked what that would be like. The virus in the story causes people to look dead and also explode. These zombie-like beings are called "stumps." Singers with unique voices are able to get rid of the stumps, so the government conscripts singers.
If Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters were conscripted as exterminators, how would that affect history? LaShawn says that big bands would be more popular because singing was restricted. She was able to relate it to Prohibition history. It's our world, but it went down a different path. She got to ask how it would affect World War II.
It's always worth asking where the divergence points are in alternate history.
Tonya has designed a world in which everyone is born with a specific magical ability, but the world is a lot like our own and people's abilities are used for practical things, like rock manipulators being used for construction. She told us about a story where the main character can enter people's dreams and help them with trauma recovery or mental illness. She did ask a historical question in this world: what if Egypt had never stopped being a superpower? What if Egypt remained with its advanced culture and passed it to Greece and Rome? What would the consequences of that be?
I mentioned Beth Cato's trilogy that begins with the book Breath of Earth. That's an alternate history scenario that incorporates a lot of critical changes in geopolitics, and explores their consequences on the political level but also on the personal level.
Thank you to both LaShawn and Tonya for joining me for this discussion! If you are enjoying Dive into Worldbuilding, and would like a more extensive experience, support us on Patreon and join the Dive into Worldbuilding workshop: https://patreon.com/JulietteWade
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