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SFFWRTCHT: How much effort do you put into worldbuilding before you sit down to write? Or do you just throw it together as its needed? RS: I began Lord Valentine’s Castle with the notion of Majipoor as a giant planet-sized city, divided into vast subcities. But as Majipoor evolved in my mind, I realized that it couldn’t all be covered by a single gigantic city, as I had originally thought. There had to be agricultural zones, forests and valleys, mountains and deserts, and such. Nevertheless I stuck to my basic notion of a huge planet that had a population of many billions, most of them living in enormous cities of great beauty and fascination. And from that came all the rest. In order for human beings to live comfortably on so big a planet, the gravitational pull would have to be something reasonably similar to that of Earth — which meant a light core for the planet, very little in the way of metals. Metal-poor Majipoor therefore could not be a high-technology planet, Since it exists some fifteen or twenty thousand years in our future, though, it is able to take advantage of technological breakthroughs that seem like sheer magic to us, and so there is enough in the way of transportation, communications, and sanitation to provide a comfortable existence for the billions of inhabitants. And so forth. Each step in the construction of the planet led to the next logical development, and it was all fairly carefully worked out before I began writing the book. |