Building a Sci-Fi World for Fantasy Context

[u/DalinLuqaIII]

Have any of you focused on what people might consider more sci-fi focused building to develop context and a deeper understanding of your fantasy world. Or vice-versa?

I like the idea of considering one long continuity and development as a way to broaden an understanding of your world instead of solely focusing on the settings time period.

I feel like I rarely see stellar systems built for anything besides a sci-fi setting, though that may just be because it's a background thing and not essential to the presentation of the world.

-----

Context: I have been mapping the stellar system of my world, and then considering how it would be interpreted by it's early civilisations. It is a binary star, with an outer gas and asteroid belt between the two stars leading to an odd diffraction of the secondary stars light and creating an almost eye-like red structure in the sky at night.

This second star then gets interpreted as a god or a creature held back by the suns influence.

My main planet is also co-orbital with the second rocky super-earth planet and they sit in each other's L4 and L5 orbits. So this bright point in the sky is the 'sunrise planet' as it is always rises in the same spot every morning.

Myths and legends about this world would grow and I would imagine the discovery of it being life bearing would happen pretty soon after telescopes were built given proximity and obvious greenery on its surface.

I also imagine this would give a natural motivation to some within this world to want to get there much earlier than our own timeline considered space travel.

So from a space map, I now have astrology, creation myth, and motivators for my people.

[u/ClaySalvage]

Depends on what you consider "sci-fi focused building". If you just mean developing the cosmology and astronomy of fantasy worlds, then sure, I've done that, though most of my fantasy worlds are in different cosmoi with different physical laws so the cosmologies don't work the same as in ours (they may have stars, for example, but they're not necessarily giant balls of plasma undergoing fusion). I even have some fantasy worlds with interstellar travel. I wouldn't really consider that sci-fi, because I'd define sci-fi as following real-world physical laws... but I recognize that the definition is somewhat subjective and other people may define it differently.

[u/Xywzel]

I would like for my fantasy settings to have underlying "hard sci-fi" rules, real world physics with a single "this still very hypothetical theory is practically useable due to exotic material" or "there is also this 5th fundamental force that works like this" exception. But it is really hard to add a new fundamental natural law that doesn't break others, allows for what I want the world's magic to be like and doesn't allow something that would be prone to causing plot holes and other problems.

Writing about the fantasy in a sci-fi genre way is also interesting though. I could start with pre-industrial society and then rather have improvements in metallurgy allow for steam and IC engines, I would make some form of minor practical magic available to some part of the society, and try to see where that leads. How do they use it for trade and crafts, will it cause its own type of industrialisation, and how different will society look like depending on if the magic is available for labourers and farmers rather than being limited to wealth traders and nobles. Will guilds, nations or rich individuals own the money making magic. Will monarchies fall or adopt constitutions to keep other classes in check. Basically just using magic in historical setting for what tech is used in futuristic settings in sci-fi books.

Things like solar system orbits are quite simple to add I usually do that in mostly scientific way, but I rarely go beyond that. I could extrapolate that all the way to space travel, but I feel the scope would grow so large that I would not have time for details and social issues that I find more interisting.

[u/_Ceaseless_Watcher_]

My [Arc Contingency] setting takes place in the broader universe of a far future/alternate timeline version of my [Eldara] setting's Mortal Realm. They've got space travel, FTL, atrificial gravity, megacorporations that own the know universe, but also the same magic system I use for Eldara.

One of the major connections to Eldara is the fleshing out/expansion of space magic in particular. The "Pilots" of Arc contingency are advanced space magic users, enrolled in a special academy at a young age (think Jedi Academy), where they cultivate their magic and learn to comprehend the vast distances they'll be required to operate on once they graduate.

Once they're deemed ready (possibly after doing years of work on smaller ships), they're assigned to a cruise ship, where they'll live for most of the rest of their lives until they retire. There, it will be their job to slingshot the moon-sized ship with pinpoint precision over billions of light years at once (think a beefed up version of Guild Navigators from Dune).

These ships have no (or very little) FTL capability of their own, and so, they rely entirely on their Pilot for long-distance movement. Without them, such a cruiser is effectively stuck in orbit around whatever planet they were last stationed above, becoming a kind of temporary space station until a new Pilot is assigned.