I love setting. It’s why I’m always writing science fiction instead of setting things in my hometown. I don’t get to invent my hometown, and I do get to invent future terraformed Mars.

When we’re inventing our own settings, we don’t have to just set up a couple of cardboard standees in the background. Instead, setting can rise to the importance of a character or a plotline, because of everything the setting is doing in the book. You can flesh your world out as much or as little as you like. But if you choose to do it a lot, there are plenty of rewards.

Here are a few things setting can do for you.

Character background

There’s a tendency in fiction to give our characters a defining trauma or two. What’s unique about this character is that they have been through this or that event (handed out in a flashback). And there’s nothing wrong with this approach.

But you can also consider setting itself to be a formative influence in a character’s life. What if there’s actually nothing special about Bob at all, except that he comes from a society in which friendship isn’t allowed? That sure is going to give him a lot to work with over the course of the book and affect his interactions with other characters from other places.

Ethan of Athos is a great example of this. There is nothing special at all about Ethan on his homeworld. He’s a regular guy who’s an obstetrician and has an ordinary family. But when he leaves home, now he’s the guy from the planet with no women. It’s the first thing anybody notices about him, it affects how he experiences everything. We don’t even spend much time on Athos; we don’t have to. We’ve met Ethan, and what he finds weird about the larger galaxy is the perfect inverse of what we would find weird about Athos.

Language quirks

Letting the setting affect the language is one of my favorite things to do. How do these characters talk, based on where they’re from? What metaphors do they use? How do they break the universe down into categories?

Gender is a big one—a culture you’ve invented will have its own ways of thinking of gender, which will affect your language. But you can also consider when characters use last names, first names, nicknames, or any other names they have. Or what titles and honorifics they use for each other. Do they have slang terms for things or people they deal with? What slurs are used, and which ones really sting your main characters?

It’s not just a matter of dialogue, either. Your narration itself can reflect the social milieu of the characters. For instance, the Imperial Mars books, especially Lucy’s chapters, use a half-archaic style which reflects the formality of their society. Invasive, on the other hand, has a much flatter, more casual society, and that shows as well.

You may have to make up words to cover concepts in your setting. I believe in keeping them to a minimum necessary (because the reader can only remember so much), but if your concept is substantially different from any English word, then it does make sense to make up your own—either a compound of an existing word, or a full-on invented word.

If you find yourself inventing an entire conlang for your setting—I salute you. And also please let me look at your grammar document.

Patching plot holes

Very often, readers will come up with some obvious solution that would make everything easy for your characters and destroy the whole plot. “Why don’t they just—?” Comments like this are the bane of authors; obviously there would be no story if it was that easy.

But the setting can easily provide answers to these questions, and it doesn’t even have to seem like you’re trying to get ahead of criticism. Instead, you’re just fleshing out the setting, and it happens to patch the plot holes at the same time.

There’s a bit in Fugitive Telemetry where station security is dealing with a dead body and the first step, of course, is to identify the victim. It would be a little boring to have them just look the guy up and tell us, and it’s way more fun to have Murderbot tramp all over the station sleuthing. But why would it be so hard to identify a body with all the tech these people have?

Well, simple. Preservation is a hippie-dippie utopian polity. That is, it’s a nice place to live, and that tends to be the opposite of a nice place to do police work in. (For good reasons!) They don’t collect DNA, that would be invasive. They do collect body scans, but the only machine that can do it is busy because it’s Public Health Day and it’s scanning the school children for their annual exams. Because of course that’s what the government mostly does, not policing.

Simple: the plot hole is patched, and it doesn’t even feel like it’s patched, because instead we’re getting more info about the ways in which Preservation is different from the privacy-free Corporation Rim.

Solving your characters’ problems

I have a neat little trick which probably every author knows. Every time I need a character to whip out a tool or solution, I go back and put it earlier in the book so it’s not a convenient coincidence, it’s something I’ve already set up. You put the keys in their pocket in chapter ten, offhand, so that when they need them in chapter twenty, it gives that nice click of satisfaction you get when something has been set up and paid off.

You can do the same with setting. When your characters are stuck on a plot problem you’ve invented and can’t solve, try asking yourself what could exist in this setting to solve it for them. Maybe there’s a trick you can do with the lightspeed drive which all pilots know not to do because it’s too dangerous. 

And then you go back and add that in your early setting exposition. It can be flavor text in a bar conversation, the story of that one guy who did the dumb trick and his atoms were scattered clear across the sector. Now it’s available for your characters to use in the crisis situation, and it’s not out of the blue anymore because the reader knew it was an option from the beginning. Maybe they’re already thinking of it—that means you’ve set it up perfectly.

Let setting be your all-purpose solution

In any speculative work, setting is going to loom a lot larger than in most other genres. That means it’s a useful tool for any job; your literary duct tape to fasten together whatever needs fastening. Use it to develop your characters, echo your theme, and connect your plot.

Take your characters on a tour of some part of your setting when you need them to have a key conversation. Let a common problem of the setting beat them up and steal their lunch money. There is nothing setting can’t do, because if you build it carefully enough, it’s a fully-fleshed world for your characters to play in.