Worldbuilding: Give It Structure

What’s your world built out of? Physically. As in, what do characters and cultures in your world consider construction materials for ordinary surroundings?

Note, this is going to depend partly on your tech level, partly on what’s readily available, and partly (note, partly, humans being humans and sometimes nuts) on what’s good architectural sense of how to put things together. Also note that humans tend to add materials to “what we can use” over time, and rarely abandon anything completely. There are still people building sod cabins!

And sometimes even the best efforts to build something sound fail due to the builders not considering one piece of info that should be obvious. For example, a certain well-known university in the Northeast had a library built, moved stuff in… and the nice brick façade promptly starting cracking off, creating a hazard to all students and many purely innocent passersby.

Any of you with even a modest book collection at home is probably facepalming right about now. Yep. The architect planned with the weight of the structure and human occupants stressing the façade… and totally failed to account for the tons of books.

Ahem. Now that we’ve absorbed that example of utter fail, let’s look at some common building materials.

Stone. Sometimes thought of as the oldest building material, likely due to the association with the Stone Age and the megalithic structures that exist to this day. But there’s good evidence that people learned to build these massive structures in more perishable substances first. See Woodhenge. Stone takes skills and muscle power, or at the very least a lot of hands, time, levers, and ropes.

On the upside stone is available just about anywhere humans choose to live. Including space, if you snag the right asteroids. Downside is that not all stones are the best for building with, and it takes skill to read the signs of a hidden flaw that means a solid-looking piece of granite will actually snap like a matchstick under the wrong bit of stress.

Wood. It has some of the same problems as stone, with the additional Weird Trick of being flammable.

(Not usually a problem with stone, unless you’re trying to build with phosphates, coal, or fissile materials. In which case, why.)

Wood does have the advantage of being lighter, somewhat bendable, and usually buoyant. If you’re planning to live somewhere with a shortage of available stone – say, taking to sea – wood works very well. It also is a renewable resource, if you treat it right. But it doesn’t grow everywhere. And in places it doesn’t, humans get scarily creative. Some building materials include: sod, compressed earth, bricks (earth done up fancy with ingredients), concrete, leather, felt, and bones.

(Yes, bones, especially when we had mastodons and mammoths roaming around. Yikes.)

Concrete has been around millennia; we have concrete floors in Greek palaces dating to about 1300 BC. Steel, glass, and polymers are comparative newcomers to the building game. I have no doubt that SF and fantasy environments will come up with new and exotic materials for building. What about treehouses spun of stiffened spiderweb, or living buildings of bioengineered bamboo, or a crystal palace of frozen starlight?

If you’re going to build a world, build one that’s amazing. Make it so, like Howard Carter peering into the past, we all see “wonderful things!”

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