How Many Worlds…?
This post was spawned from a question my husband posed. He asked, “How many worlds have you created so far?” one morning as we were getting ready for work. I didn’t have an immediate answer, other than to say, “A lot.”
But it got me thinking…
How many worlds have I created as part of my writing? And does an alternate version of Earth count as one?
To answer the first question, I need to consider all of the stories I’ve written (both published and in-progress. I’m going to leave out worlds featured in stories I’ll never publish for the sake of brevity. I think this is going to be a long enough post as-is.)
The answer to the second question is yes. I’m going to count them, since there aren’t many.
The published worlds
Hunted is set on an alternate version of modern-day Earth. World Count: 1.
The Relics of War series is set on a fictional world governed by twelve gods (13 if you count the Nameless.) I am a bad author and never named this world. World Count: 2.
The Caein Legacy series is set on a world governed mostly by humans, but there are a couple other species who inhabit it… Though it’s never mentioned anywhere in the books (yet), the world is named Kailaris. World Count: 3.
A fun fact about the dragons of The Caein Legacy: Kailaris is not the first world they settled on, and it wasn’t the last they traveled to. Those other worlds haven’t yet been explored by yours truly, so we’ll leave the total count at 3 for now.
The soon-to-be-published worlds
This brings us to the upcoming sci-fi space opera, Wraith and the Revolution. And here’s where the world count goes up significantly…
It begins on a future version of Earth (1), a colonized Mars is mentioned early on (2), and then our main character travels to a city-world with artificial rings called Megatropolis (3). But I didn’t stop there.
The moon Titan is visited briefly (4). There are a few chapters set on Botanaar, a verdant world in the habitable zone of a binary star system (5). There’s a desolate planet ravaged by sand storms that makes an appearance called Primordia-1 (6), and a colonized asteroid (7). There’s also an artificial, planet-sized structure featured in one chapter. It isn’t a real planet, but it could be considered its own world, so I’ll count it (8).
Okay, there were more worlds in this book than I realized. Now we’re up to a total World Count of 11.
Another fun fact: All of the worlds featured in Wraith and the Revolution correspond to real exoplanets. NASA has a really detailed public database listing all the known exoplanets, information about the star system, if they’re within the star’s habitable zone, and more. I used it a lot when writing this book. You can browse the Exoplanet Catalog here.
The unpublished worlds that will see print eventually
There’s at least one I can mention, and that’s the world featured in The Fontayne Company. It’s a modern-ish world, with technology similar to what we have on Earth right now. But rather than everything being powered by electricity or fossil fuels, it’s powered by what they refer to as “dragon tech.” Basically, the dragon inventors learned how to harness magical energy to power things like cars, cameras, and their version of the internet.
Based on my notes, I also haven’t named this world yet (Oops.)
The Mage War Chronicles series is set on Kailaris (the same world as The Caein Legacy, just at a different point in time.) I’ll mention it here for the simple fact that I post randomly about this series since it’s what I’m currently writing, but it doesn’t add to the world count.
And there we have it. The answer to “How many worlds have you created so far?” is an even dozen.