Whose Fault Is That

Chances are good you’ve never heard of world-building. Most of us are only exposed to the practice indirectly: by reading fiction with a constructed world as the backdrop. While Tolkien’s Middle-earth is the seminal example, Chris Wayan is more interested in planetary ecology than in narrative. Wayan’s characters are sea levels, air pressures, and indigenous species. This is world-building for its own sake.

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Whose Fault Is That: When did you first discover world-building?

Chris Wayan: Science fiction and fantasy. The term is common in sf circles, though of course they usually mean building a world entirely of words. On the physical side, I think I was most influenced by Poul Anderson and (more recently) Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars books; they showed how planetary-scale factors interact to shape quite local matters–even the shapes of bodies. On the sociological/cultural side (and also presentation and style!), Le Guin and Tolkien were my role models. They all kept it just words on a page, though.

Only Tolkien had decent maps–books like Red Mars, Green Mars and The Dispossessed disappointed me on that level. So imaginary maps were a logical step and I started doing that in my teens. Then in the seventies I saw an an art-magazine article on two Italian metalworkers who built a skeletal alien planet several meters across, with girders for meridians, seas of empty air, and continents of steel. I can’t remember their names now–one was Remo, I think, because they named a continent Remolia. What got me wasn’t their world’s features or plausibility, it was just that they built their imaginary world on such a big scale. It felt almost pornographic, dangerous to me–to parade your fantasies so openly, so solidly. Out of the closet!

Then in the nineties, in San Francisco, the California Academy of Sciences built a walk through time. Each geological era had a room of its own, with fossils and dioramas and a globe showing Earth as it had been in that era. They were terrible! Puffy continents colored battleship-gray, with vague mountain ranges–they looked like moldy bread dough or scabs or wet cement. No icecaps, river systems, or hints of climate or vegetation, so they didn’t give you any sense of the times–was the world hot, cold, wet, dry, covered in ice? Couldn’t tell by these suckers. But they were art, not mere maps–for they DID express emotion. INSTITUTIONAL emotion. They expressed fear. The fear of making a mistake, or offending someone’s pet theory, or suggesting knowledge where there’s only guesswork. The fear of looking unscientific! The result was more misleading than any opinionated speculation could ever be.

That was a deep lesson. I wanted to build a better planet, a vivid, specific, opinionated planet…

WFIT: When did you realize it was something you could do? What was your first planet like?

CW: Well… you didn’t ask for a whole history, but you got me curious. Never thought about the project historically, didn’t make many project-notes. I do keep a general journal, so I’ve reconstructed the history from casual mentions there.

One weekend in late 2001, I biked by a flea market behind Cellspace in the Mission District. I bought a globe for a few bucks. At home I started playing with it–pried it off its stand, tilted it so the tropics turned polar and poles turned tropical. Suddenly an intellectual problem snapped into focus: “We have one pole on land, one under the sea. So we have one cold pole–Antarctica–and one mild. Could Earth be tilted so we had two Antarcticas, or none? ARE there orientations where land or sea is under both poles? How would all that ice–or lack of it–affect sea level and climate?” It turned out there were a couple of solutions for each. So I got out my drill…

That first globe became Seapole. With no polar land to build up big icecaps, just sea ice, it was a warm place, almost a vision of Earth as it will likely be in a few centuries–yet the climate changed purely from geography, not from high CO2 levels! Surprised me.

Found an old globe in a thrift shop, and built Shiveria–land at both poles. These two were a paired study in contrasts. Done fast, with relatively simple painting and relief.

I was hooked. I did three more alternate Earths–Turnovia, Jaredia, and then Dubia, which took much longer since it’s by far the most accurate and detailed projection. I knew it had to be since it was so explicitly political, people would nit-pick if it wasn’t exact. It burned me out. By late 2002 I was ready for something different.

I’d just read Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy and wished it had a decent map… so I did Mars Reborn.

I thought Venus Unveiled would be similar. Wrong! A much harder project because NASA’s maps were relatively rough, its features were little-known and needed more explanation. Also, the terraforming was hell. Mars rolls over and begs; Venus spits acid in your eye, you know? But because I invested so much time in the research, I wanted to show it off with detailed, ground-level tours. It grew into the first true webmaze, the first novel-length site. Became the model for all the rest, really.

In 2004 I tried an imaginary landscape: Serrana. But I gave myself training wheels by making it a tribute to Le Guin’s anarchist world in The Dispossessed. Geologically and ecologically it’s different, but the coastline and general layout are recognizable–the Anarres that Le Guin might have conceived today, with thirty years of advances in planetology. Serrana focused more than Venus on evolution, species, culture; and I started drawing and tossing in way more sketches of landscapes and creatures. I have a lot of affection for that one. But then I’m an anarchist; they’re kindred spirits.

The first purely imaginary worlds were Lyr, Tharn and Pegasia, all conceived around the same time, but done gradually over several years. The detailed Venus-style tours took much longer, Lyr especially, where logistics were a problem: finding flightways that covered the planet but had sea-crossings tourists could handle. Pegasia of course is still in progress since it involves reader participation–design a species!

Xanadu was a little side project, a break from the immense complexity of Lyr. I did a burst of work on it as data about Titan poured in, but when we didn’t find ethane seas but just lakes I was disappointed and slacked off. I’m waiting until the poles are properly mapped and then I’ll go back to it, I think.

After painting that giant globe of Lyr, with oceans seven times the area of Earth’s, I was so getting really tired of blue. So I decided to sculpt a relief globe of Io for fun. Wow, those colors. Lilac, white, rich browns, black, mustard, brick red, even lemon-yellow (sulfur is weird chameleon stuff). The sculpting was fun too–mountains 11 miles high! Second only to Mars, and way steeper. Spectacular if you could stay alive long enough to see it. Io’s the first straight realism I’ve done. Well, Io lacks hi-res mapping in spots, so there’s some interpretive guesswork, but it’s basically scientific portraiture. I haven’t even photographed it yet since it’s not Planetocopian; no what-if premise, and no life. Just color.

The Caprice series (Siphonia, Abyssia and Inversia) are half-done and it’s hard to say what’ll happen there. I’m slaving away on Siphonia’s regional maps and tours at the moment, feeling a bit constrained because it’s just Earth 90,000 years from now, on the rebound from a surreal catastrophe. So the land’s fascinating–undersea formations–but the creatures and societies can’t be as fanciful. I keep feeling grumpy that I can’t change the gravity and make up exotic critters…

Abyssia will be next because I have the globe all ready for final painting–all the research and relief is done–and it’s a relatively easy world with fairly small landmasses to map and tour.

And I need an easy one before tackling Inversia, which will be a toughie. 2.5 Earths-worth of detailed landscape to describe, and my mental model of Earth leads me astray–on Inversia, mountains are valleys, lands are seas and so on. On the other hand both Abyssia and Inversia have counterfactual premises, so while the geography and the climate are constrained, their evolution is wide open. I get to invent species freely…

WFIT: It’s extremely impressive how complex these scenarios are, what kind of background do you have in the sciences?

CW: Spotty and mostly self-taught. Courses in anthro, botany, zoology, but I didn’t major in them. I constantly read ethology (animal behavior studies), but I ignore theory and just want stories from the leading fieldworkers so I can draw my own conclusions. I follow the exoplanet hunt with interest, but the astronomy is mostly extrapolating from our own planets and moons. Close study of their surfaces has really paid off–NASA has some good map sites; google “planetarynames”, all one word. I’m finally learning to consult Wikipedia on physical chemistry, where I’m weak. The math? Mostly by hand. Just a few dozen core facts let me estimate most parameters of other planets. Our atmosphere’s greenhouse effect is about 15 degrees Celsius, surface temp increases as about the fourth root of insolation, gravity by the cube root of a world’s mass (assuming the same density–fat chance!); air pressure on Mars Venus and Earth vary by 10,000:1 while gravity’s range is barely 2.6:1, so postulate way more atmospheric variation than gravity… And so on.

Academic courses don’t focus on what you need to build plausible planets; you have to glean these bits and apply them.

I did audit a lot of environmental science classes at UC Santa Cruz, not for credit, just because I was fascinated; though that was decades ago when the science was primitive.

A turning point for me was Ken Norris’s class on marine mammals. One day he described a couple of puzzles about sperm whales. Why such a gigantic “melon”–a huge chamber in the skull full of tons of oil. Yes, it’s an echo chamber, generating a long train of clicks, but why’s that better than single sonar pulses? And why do sperm whales have such long jaws they can open incredibly wide, at right angles to their bodies? Can’t get great leverage like that and it’s a hydrodynamic drag.

In a flash I saw that click-trains of that sort would be unique–each whale’s slightly different in size. If you had a directional antenna that was exactly the same length, it’d resonate preferentially to your own click-train; other click-trains, even slightly off, would damp out. The long jaw matched the length of the “melon”, the resonator, almost perfectly! The jaw may be a directional antenna! It wouldn’t amplify so much as tune out OTHER whales’ sonar. In a pitch-dark melee of whales and giant squid that could make all the difference…

I mentioned it to Ken in passing, but I was just a humanities student sitting in on his class after all. I realized if I wanted to prove it, I’d have to switch to environmental science, spend the next decade fighting to convince professors I was serious, struggle for grants, build models and/or get cold and wet for a few years, to test my solution. Or I could leave it for others to verify, and get on to the next puzzle! I was better at pattern recognition than follow-through and I suddenly knew it. I just didn’t have the patience for science. What I was, though I couldn’t articulate it then, was an artist whose raw material was science.

WFIT: On your website you state you’re not human. What effect does that have on the worlds you build?

CW: A lot. By that I meant that both my self-image and my orientation–sexual and nonsexual–are not (very) human. Such declarations are common among furries, and though I guess they sound extreme, there’s a lot of truth in it. I identify with other species more readily than most humans since I can’t see a gap between animals and me. I find it easy to imagine how I’d behave if I had to rely on sonar, or I had a light-triggered migration instinct, or a strong estrus cycle, and so on.

But I mean it in a non-furry way too. I’m mildly autistic–my own sensory and mental world is very different from the average human’s. For example, I recognize people mostly by their voices and movements not their faces–I can’t recognize friends or even relatives that way. Normal human brains have a subroutine dedicated to distinguishing and remembering faces. Not mine. On the other hand, patterns–music, art, even puzzles–leap out at me.

Temple Grandin describes the results very well in her book Thinking in Pictures, and to some extent in Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human. Not all autistics understand animals especially well but I happen to be more like Grandin than most–and she’s used her autism to help her build animal care facilities. My mentation seems a lot like animal thinking amped up–an animal that’s learned to use human language as a sort of pidgin, but who feels his way to solutions along very different lines. Even when I do math I don’t use formulae; I sniff all around it like an otter, hop all around it like a nervous raven. Lots of wasted motion in human terms but I need a feel for the whole situation.

I generally read and understand animal emotions better than human ones.

What it all means for world-building is that I don’t struggle to step outside my culture and species. I’m already half-outside. Sometimes I peer in the window enviously like Peter Pan, but not often. So crowded in there! I’d get claustrophobic.

WFIT: When developing a new planet you paint on the oceans, spin the globe and let your unconscious work out the complex systems like climate. What is that like? Can you describe what’s happening or simply how it feels?

CW: It’s strangely like interpreting a dream. Or the early phases of songwriting. This mental state, is not unique to the arts; it’s also how Darwin assembled his case for natural selection, I think. It’s not the “Aha!” phase but the slowly bubbling stew before it. Data collection in which you deliberately refrain from premature theorizing, coming up with a too-simple answer. In a complex system, there are so many variables interacting there’s no logical way to solve the equation–if you single out any thread you’ll lose the others. You have to suspend judgment and just sit with the whole, visualizing it all as vividly as possible. Slowly pieces of it, usually around the fringes, come clear. You feel your way into the center. It’s slow. Like untying a knot…

WFIT: How do you relate to your planets? Pride, love, something else? Which one are you most proud of/do you love the most, etc.?

CW: I imagine living on them, of course; I can’t build them if I don’t.

Love? I always love the one I’m working on the most. Or hate it. The obsession can get frustrating. I got tired of building Pegasia–all those empty continents crying out for species–but a few months ago I started adding some regional maps and better tours, and fell in love with it again. Now I’m doing the regional tours and maps for Siphonia, and fixing the globe (chipping and resculpting, I mean, not just theory); so I’m in love with it now, for its sheer scale and diversity (well over twice the land surface of Earth; by far the most ambitious world so far in that regard).

But over time I get perspective. What am I proudest of? Venus, Lyr, Tharn, Serrana perhaps. Not Dubia though I get so many comments on it. But anyone could have done Dubia; I’m puzzled they hadn’t already, since it’s such a persuasive shock, seeing in detail just how different Earth will be if we go on. Seeing your home town under water. But the more exotic ones are closer to my heart.

Love… where would I live, if I could? Oh, somewhere I could fly, with lots of different peoples–terraformed Venus, or Lyr, or the trenches and crater-oases of Tharn. Or Pegasia, if only some readers would submit some simpatico natives to inhabit it (Plenty of room still, hint hint! So far they’re all kinda lizardy… nobody I’d date.)

WFIT: What kind of responses do other people have to your worlds?

CW: What are the most common? Lemme think. In random order:

1: Enthused, clueless gamers. “Great maps! Where are the guns? You can’t kill hardly anybody! Your aliens need bigger breasts!” A minority ask to use the landscapes and maps to base (usually war-) games on. Kinda missing the whole point. But the truth is, if asked, I still say sure, go ahead. Why not? There’s a culture in David Brin that has glyphs for certain truisms–they have one word for “boys will be boys.” I won’t rain on anyone’s parade, even if it’s a military one.

2: Readers who resonate with one particular planet or species. Lots more closet centaurs out there than you’d think. I find their comments quite insightful–and I suspect it’s because they come from the same place my building the planets comes from. I’m not objective–I see myself there and feel my way into what my urges and loves and hates and habits of thought ARE as a tree-squid or taurlope or lebbird. It’s fun to talk with readers who do the same–experience it from the inside. Personally I think these people are the ones with the potential to become interesting f/sf writers; technical skills you can build, but empathy’s vital. Without it, you get stiff dead models, just a blueprint.

3: People who just find the orbital photos beautiful. They often want to know what computer program I use to generate them. Heh.

One curious quirk: quite a few of these readers find the planets lovely but a little unconvincing because I show so many coastal deserts. Don’t I know that rain comes off the sea and deserts are inland? I puzzled over this a long time. Earth has lots of coastal deserts, so why would so many people deny their existence? My best guess: because almost no one lives there. Southern California’s about the only heavily settled coast and the real desert’s to the south. I’m sure my Baja readers, all one of them, believe in coastal deserts! And gdye to y’all down in the Kimberly, and the Namib, and Western Sahara and Atacama… But city people really don’t live on Earth. They live on Human Earth–a much smaller world.

4: Requests for help from other planet-builders, or fantasy/sf writers wanting maps or help with existing lands that don’t feel right. I love these requests, they’re so interesting. But I’m slow to answer, cuz I often have to feel my way into the problem and that takes a while. So be patient, I WILL come through…

5: Suggestions I fix errors, about half of which I decide really are errors. The worst I’ve made was that on Tharn and Pegasia I extrapolated carelessly from Jupiter’s system (self-taught, remember?), got caught with my orbits down around my ankles, and had to rewrite whole tours… I still have doubts about nutation and tides there, though I think they’ll be far less that some physics-literate readers have warned; they forget that the warm rock of these giant, tectonically active moons is very flexible. Continents will bulge too. Tides will be only a fraction of the theoretical amounts–but those are huge, it’s true…

An error several readers want me to correct is my claim that the dim red light of small suns will tend to evolve bigger eyes. Wavelengths of visible light are so much smaller than retinal cells that readers assume this couldn’t possibly matter. But retinas are incredibly inefficient; in mammals only about 1% of working retinal cells send signals the optical system recognizes as useful! Lens problems, too, tend to make eyes blurrier than they should be for their size. It’s not easy making cameras from goo. So eyes are often about a hundred times larger than you’d think they need to be for a given “pixel resolution.” Strong evolutionary pressure–as in small birds, who need to keep their head-weight down–can force efficiency and shrink them some, so it’s debatable. But my assertion wasn’t idle.

Anyway, a lot of folks write in with comments and suggestions based on their specialty. They’re often pretty fascinating even if it’s really too late to rethink the whole thing, as is true with most of the older worlds. The ones still in progress are the ones you can affect the most.

6: Readers who either love or hate the furriness. Too pinuppy, too cute, or they like it, the sensuality feels welcoming… Maybe the split vote here has more to do with whether you like to mix sensuality and emotion with your intellectuality, or keep them separate. Or maybe it’s just a question of taste. Is your sexual orientation and identity strictly human, or not? The split has a long history, long before the word furry came up; before science fiction really addressed sex and sublimation at all. Golden Age sf was split between “A galaxy full of humans and humanoids”–the Star Trek model, though of course it was the make-up costs that limited them, not philosophy… versus “a galaxy of weird beasties with weird viewpoints. And rayguns. And tentacles. Lots and lots of tentacles. Oozing, slimy, dripping…”

I fall in between: I do “weird beasties you’d rather hang with than the jerks next door.” I disappoint the claw-and-tentacle fans, I’m afraid. My designs don’t go for novelty at any cost. I do appreciate that art, and there’s a lot of it out there; much thought goes into some of those designs. I know my limits; I can’t compete! They’re like race-car designers; at most, I’m modifying stock designs. But I’m not going for bizarre but viable organisms. What really turns me on is the behavior and worldview of my creatures, and daily life on my worlds–not exoticism per se.

7: Critiques on the evolution of other beings and societies. These can be fascinating. The most notable strand: readers (so far all male, interestingly) who feel my worlds are too peaceful, too cooperative, too nice to be true. (Maybe I’m repeating myself and these are just the smart end of #1, above). “Serrana” consciously argues my theories around this. How to summarize this debate?… Here goes.

Wishful thinking? Sure, Planetocopia’s partly that. But it’s an art project, not pure science. I build possible worlds I like; I don’t deny more dystopian worlds are possible. They are; we live on one. I just don’t think they’re stable; and in deep time, unstable things are rare.

Beyond the question of whether Planetocopia’s a representative sample, I just LIKE pacifism, feminism, animal rights, free love, low-tech utopias; I gravitate toward scenarios that interest me and that I don’t see much in science fiction today. Sf caters to a human audience raised in a monospecific culture that thinks violence is fun and machines are where it’s at. But building dog-eat-dog worlds is neither challenging nor original. I build hippie utopias partly because others don’t. (And I build deeply forking hypertexts, rather than write sf novels because webmazes lets me cover landscape and ecology in ways that are hard for commercial writers with their linear narratives.)

But I can’t deny that writers (of both books and games) building harsh worlds are perfectly justified in doing so; they have a model at hand. But… how many worlds-at-war or singularities up at their crest are we gonna see out there, really? They can’t last. Punctuated equilibrium makes more sense to me… and culturally, equilibrium has to be mostly cooperative or at least tolerably peaceful.

Anyway, this issue is one that comes up a lot, in various guises and flavors. The lack of violence bothers way more people than the sex. So I’ll probably keep creating make-love-not-war societies; it hits a nerve.

WFIT: Finally, what’s next for you? More Planetocopia? Other projects?

CW: Just finishing the planets on my plate now–populating and writing full tours for Pegasia, Siphonia, Abyssia, Inversia–will take a couple of years at least. Inversia’s so damn big…

I need to know more chemistry to do Xanadu (cold, methane/ethane world) and Blisteria (a hot but still water/carbon world) properly, so they may wait a few years.

Planetocopia still takes more time most days than any other creative project, but I’m also:

1: Songwriting and playing in a surrealist band, The Krelkins, as we slowly record our first full CD.

2: Building the World Dream Bank. Dream stories, poems, pictures, songs. I’m trying to contribute at least one piece a week myself, and edit and post others’ dreams as they come in. Send me your craziest dream!

3: Trying to figure out how to print and distribute a finished graphic novel, Dreamtales. About 250 pp of bizarre dreams–furry, pacifist, erotic, Planetocopia-like dreams. Full color. Better art and tighter writing than Planetocopia. Funnier, sexier, weirder. I’m proud of these stories and hope they’ll be out soon.

4: Drawing new post-Dreamtales comics, a few dreams but many not–my first non-dream comics. Slow, slow, slow. The world’s slowest cartoonist, grrr.

5: Doing a series of paintings straight out of my dreams. Razi and the Holy Wino of Shasta is a good example. In fact, I’m writing up this here interview to avoid emailing some JPGs to a local gallery to propose a show…

6: Mulling over a Planetocopia book. Frank Jacobs of the Strange Maps site is doing it now, and our sites have parallels. Suggestions anyone? What would you do like, how would you focus it–what’s in what’s out?

7: Sculpting a set of furry dream-figurines, including some Planetocopians, like a Tharnese lebbird. Currently finishing a wolf-ballerina made of (drumroll please) spackle.

Current non-art obsessions:

1: The San Francisco International Film Festival. Of planetocopian interest: I rather liked the world-building in BATTLE FOR TERRA despite its scientific silliness. Ooh, pwitty art nouveau pwanet! Wish they’d spent more time on Mala’s life, culture, town, world before starting the war. I’ve SEEN a war, thank you. Haven’t we all.

Also liked: NOMAD’S LAND. Weak start & end but the hour in the middle’s amazing. People like the Kalash are very much like the societies I’ve been portraying. They DO exist. And for most of history and all prehistory they were in the vast majority.

2: Getting solar panels up on our house. Already installed CF lightbulbs, efficient fridges and heaters, and I bike most places. When I have to drive I get 35-40 mpg. C’mon, people, at least insulate your house and switch to a scooter or an old Civic or something! Get outa that big ol’ oil barrel! Y’want a livable planet? Then act on it!

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David Cole interviewed Chris Wayan in May 2009. Spend a few hours getting lost at Planetocopia and the larger World Dream Bank project.