World in Conflict

One element that is quite unique to science fiction, and other forms of speculative fiction, is the world-building process. I have to assume that any potential reader of my book is human, and from the planet Earth. So how do I write a novel that is set on a non-Earth planet and is occasionally told through the point of view of multiple non-Human sentient species, while engaging my Earth-bound reader in the story and maintaining a high level of plausibility? The first step (I think), is to build a rich, complex world in which to set the story. It needs to be fantastic but not overly so, alien but not completely outside the realm of familiarity, and most importantly, fun for the reader to imagine living in for as long as he reads the book.

This being my first experience with world-building, I'm learning as I go, and enjoying every minute of it. While I expect many details to to flesh themselves in as I continue to write, I've been settling my thoughts recently one key piece of the world-building puzzle: CONFLICT.

Some description of setting is necessary to understand all of the levels of conflict playing out in The Almoner, so here's a brief snapshot:

The people of the planet 'All' worship the moon as a symbol of their God, and fear the sun as the embodiment of evil. This profound religious idolatry has driven the entire society underground, where 40 billion people reside in 13 vast underground city-states, under the global theocracy of the Church. Those in good favor with the Church will live their entire lives underground, shielded from the malignant gaze of the Sun-devil Tuefel, but doomed to suffer obscene living conditions due to overpopulation. Those who commit crimes of heresy are forsaken by the Church, and are exiled to the surface to work in some manner of surface industry that provides for those in the 13 city-states: agriculture, water treatment, power generation, etc.

Given those conditions, some levels of conflict are quite obvious. The forsaken on the surface live their lives in toil to serve the city-dwellers below, which will obviously breed some insurmountable resentment. In the cities themselves, the age old struggle of the "Haves" vs. the "Have-nots" is running its course: the pipefitter for the waterworks, for example, who subsists on canned tomatos and a gallon of water per day, will naturally be at odds with the theocratic aristrocracy, who lead lives of excess.

You also have lots of potential resource conflict between the city-states. What if Eclipse, which controls fertile agricultural lands in an equatorial region, decides to cut production to artificially boost the costs of produce? And what if Selene, which processes and purifies billions of gallons of water from glaciers in a polar region decides to cut supply in response? The Church has some influence over global resource trade, but their control is tenuous, and things could boil over into open conflict at even slight and unpredictable provocations.

And on the smallest possible scale, each man is subject to his own inner conflict. When the Church teaches that mankind and their single lonely planet are alone in all the universe, what is a missionary to think when an alien lands in his soy field? Food for thought...

Of course, aside from all the ancillary conflict described above, you have the story's central conflict. Osiphus has been hunting Linegal for thousands of years, and is seeking to restore their ancient symbiosis. Linegal doesn't want to be found, and the people of All are but pawns in the struggle.

As I work all the angles and develop the conflict in my story, I want my readers to be constantly taking sides. What I don't want to do is to paint with a broad brush, or make things so black and white that every reader chooses the same side in every conflict.

Thats a challenge, and I'd be lying if I said it isn't fun.