World building’s a critical part of every science fiction novel, and Descent: Death’s no different. What I’d like to do in this short post is briefly show you two aspects that feature heavily in the novel.

Admittedly, world building in Descent: Death is closer to world renovating. All the action takes place on Earth and in our solar system, so it’s not so much a case of building worlds as modifying them. In the second volume of my trilogy, Descent: Diaspora, the world building is exactly that.

A huge part of world building goes unnoticed by readers; and that’s how it should be. It forms the foundation of the story, and should only spring up into full view when there’s a clear and critical purpose for it to do so. If it’s a long, convoluted info dump speared into the reader all it will do is make sure they never pick up another novel by you, and that’s not something any author wants.

So, in Descent: Death, the events center around the few decades leading up to 2149. There’s always a risk with any prognostication, but readers are generally forgiving if one is not too outlandish (or, on the other hand, makes a damned good job of being totally outlandish, with style). The first element of my world building is geopolitics.

I nailed this down late in 2021 as I started plotting. The basic premise is that the trend to blocs of countries forming alliances, however loose, continues, and that the then current trends simply accelerate. Nothing too outlandish or brain taxing, but in the end resulted in this:

Looks sort of familiar? Should be, in some respects, but in others there’s some large assumptions being made. The key ones are (1) China’s risen, and like most world powers builds an empire. In this case it’s a colonial model and yes, you can see it, it’s across South East Asia and Australia. Which has some other implications [read on for those]; (2) the USofA’s withdrawn into itself a it, gone back to the isolationist policies of the early 1900’s; and (3) despite [or perhaps because] of the way things have progressed, the EU has stayed relatively intact and has grown in power.

What you can’t see is the walls between / across blocs, and how that drives a couple of my main character’s actions; and yes, you’ll have to read the book!

Second piece is sea level rise. Again, not too radical but critical in setting out one or more key scenes. With only a little more than 120 years to project, I took a rather hawkish view on it all (basically that our efforts to limit it will be useless or ineffectual for most of the time) to get what I needed.

As the crucial setting is Melbourne, Australia, I projected the worst case scenario to come up with the above; and, for the nuanced view of the Docklands area where the denouement (in one sense) for the novel occurs, the following micro view.

It’s a rise in the order of 5 meters plus in sea level, which for some probably isn’t quite hawkish enough; but without wanting to recreate Waterworld I kept it at this. Now, in all honesty, we can’t even agree to keep temperature rise to under 1.5 degrees celcius (remember that goal? Dead and buried now), so I could have gone for 10 or 20 meters and still been in the realms of believable speculation.

Now the final element. Two crucial parts of Descent: Death take place in Australia, the Arctic and the Antarctic. As part of the Chinese new possessions of Australia and New Zealand, they’ve also picked up all the Australian and New Zealander antarctic territories, which for the purposes of my novel is a lovely piece of serendipity. For, in the world of 2149, the shifting of the north and south magnetic poles take them into beautiful alignment – as far as predictions can be certain, anyway.

Why does that matter? You’ll have to buy Descent: Death to find out (typical response from an author, yes?), but the following rough drawing will give you a few hints.

It all looks simple on the face of it, but the actual mechanics of working out who aligns with who, how much sea level rise could occur (without destroying credibility), where the magnetic poles line up and how to fold in Arctic and Antarctic bases and possessions took weeks. Out of it all, there’ll be precious little for the reader to see; it’s all woven underneath and through the narrative in the majority of cases, with a few brief, overt mentions in a few places (out of 200,000 words). But underneath it all, if you look closely, it’s clear.

As that’s as it should be. In Descent: Death it’s a supporting structure, ready to be seen if the reader wants to dig beneath the facade of narrative and prose. It may not be the best example of it (I’d look to Ursula K Le Guin’s novels, Left Hand of Darkness and Tales from Earthsea for instance, for exemplars of both ends of the spectrum) but it’s there to be seen. Or not.

Now that the plotting’s over (sounds like a 1960’s Folk Song title) and my last line edit for Descent: Death has been done and sent off, I’ve made a start (a slow one I’ll admit) on Descent: Diaspora. So, now there’s ink on the page, I’ll get back into the monthly updates. Here’s the first one (branding font included); decided to add a few teasers into the graphics. Hope you like.

Finally, a quick word about my branding. As you’ve probably noticed, the website’s changed dramatically in the past few weeks in an attempt to bring it in line with the branding guidelines I’ve been given. It’s not been without it’s problems, more specifically in nearly killing the site off totally as I changed layouts. No long term harm done (except some hair loss), but I’ve let the WordPress engine shift my blog to the top of the structure rather than the ‘about me’ page. You’ll also notice my photo’s gone, together with the page about my non-writing interests. You’re not here because you’re interested in Ishmael the person, but as Ishmael the author and my books. If the social side of things actually does interest you, jump across to my Facebook or Twitter feeds, they should do the trick. So thank you for your patience and visits.