Engaging in Fiction - World Building

“Sapiens rule the world, because we are the only animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. We can create mass cooperation networks, in which thousands and millions of complete strangers work together towards common goals. This mysterious glue is made of stories, not genes. We cooperate effectively with strangers because we believe in things like gods, nations, money and human rights. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money and no human rights—except in the common imagination of human beings. You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after he dies, he will get limitless bananas in chimpanzee Heaven. Only Sapiens can believe such stories. This is why we rule the world, and chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.”
— Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind

Yuval maintains that the human concept of reality is confined within the limits of stories that we have all agreed to believe are real. From this perspective, engaging in fiction can become the gateway to change - if we allow ourselves to imagine a world that is different, only then can we begin to identify what needs to change and what steps we can take to make those changes. Below is a list of questions that fantasy and science fiction writers consider when building their fictional worlds. Use them to create a Utopia in light of the dilemma we discussed today at the Falun Gong seminar. Avoid limiting your imagination to just a world in which illegal harvesting or prosecution on a religious basis does not exist - consider what drives these atrocities to occur and what replacements exist in your version of Utopia.


Please visit this link by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for an extensive list of World Building questions: http://bit.ly/NMHH-World-Building. Pick 5-10 questions to answer in detail to guide your writing.