Worldbuilding: Shedding Light

How is your world lit? By sun, moon, stars and fire? Candles and lanterns? Neon electric, or oni balefire?

Lighting isn’t as easy to convey on the page as on the movie screen, but it adds atmosphere to your story. The hero facing a monster in broad daylight is a vastly different thing from facing it on a moonlit moor at midnight, or in a misty alleyway where even the sound of claws ticking closer is too muffled to predict where the monster is. Harsh bathroom fluorescents can add a stark emphasis when your character stares into the mirror and doesn’t like what he sees. The blazing tropical sun at noon can light a romance, or burn one to ashes. Flashlights bobbing in the night add a frantic note to searching for a lost child. And dawn breaking is the classic sign that the night of horror is over, and the cleanup can begin.

On a more practical level, lighting affects how your world works. Three big parts of society available lighting affects are reading, fires, and crime.

Reading is a big one. If you’ve tried reading by candlelight you know what a headache it can be. A steady source of light when it’s stormy or night gives you hours to read when the workday is done, making it much more plausible that your character could be self-taught in any number of subjects. How expensive that steady light is makes it more or less plausible that there are a lot of readers in your society, spawning a demand for technical manuals, self-help books, erotic literature, and the latest horoscopes. See the Ming Dynasty on in Asia, and the Renaissance on in Europe, for what happens when more and more people get hungry for the written word.

Fires, too, go hand in hand with how reliable your light sources are. If all you’ve got to light your way is flammable lamps, there are going to be a lot more fires in your society. Hence one of the reasons there was often a night watchman paid to walk the streets; calling the hours, reminding people to put out lights and candles, and there to raise the alarm if fires started. In societies where you have “colder” light available, by way of LEDs or even incandescent bulbs, the odds of accidental fire go down drastically.

Arson, of course, is another matter. And that leads us to crime, very much affected by light. On average, populated areas that are also well-lit by night have lower crime rates. Criminals don’t like to be seen committing their crimes. They might get caught. Also, more light means honest citizens have a chance to see suspicious types coming before they get close enough to commit a crime in the first place.

Just remember, no matter how much light there is, humans are still baseline diurnal creatures. We need a stable day/night cycle, a lot of us are pretty wiped a few hours after sunset, and most of us need it dark and quiet to sleep. Use light carefully!