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Developmental Editing: Sci-fi Worldbuilding

So. I'm writing a sci-fi, and one of the biggest things about sci-fi's is the worldbuilding. Yes, it's going to be grounded in reality, but there's going to be stuff that's hightened. This means there's probably going to be the impulse is to include anything and everything that you think of that seems cool. The problem with this is that it creates a bit of a mess of a world, where you have different things all serving the same purpose, oryou just have too much for a reader to reasonably be able to keep track of.

Since I believe strongly in helping with developmental edits (this one being a smaller dev edit), I figured I'd help break down a little bit about cleaning up that worldbuilding.

The first thing to do is read through your story and make a note of what sci-fi elements show up, where they show up, and what their purpose was. What you may discover is that you have some elements that show up a lot in the beginning and barely appear later in the story, or vice versa. You may also discover places where the function/abilities of things are inconsistant, or where you have two elements that serve almost the exact same purpose.

The main thing to consider is consistancy. If you've got worldbuilding elements that are inconsistant throughout your story, that opens up worlds of opportunity for plot holes to crop up. For places where you have the same thing that operates in different ways, figure out which version you're going to keep, or if you're going to cut the thing alltogether.

The next thing to look at are places where an element only shows up for a short time. If something only shows up when you need it to, it tends to come across as sloppy worldbuilding. For this, look at what would happen if you cut the element all together. Are there any other elements you could put in it's place? Would you be able to restructure the scene so that you wouldn't have to use it? If the answer is yes, it's often a good idea to go ahead and do that. It's easier for your worldbuilding to have more of an impact on your readers and be more impressive if they can actually remember what each thing is.

What to do if you can't feasibly cut a sci-fi element but it doesn't show up often? The first thing is to make sure it shows up more than once, either in dialogue/exposition, or even physically. If you get a situation where it's like "oh no! we're in trouble! Good thing we have this thing that's never even been mentioned before!" It will read as a deus ex machina, which is.... not ideal. Consider weaving the thing into more of the narrative, or if you can't - at least not much - introduce it relatively early on, even if it's just in passing, so that it's not coming out of the blue when it's used at its most intensive.

(A note: a lot of what I've described here for sci-fi can also be applied to different parts of worldbuilding)