The 5,000-Year Foundation: Why Myth Requires Structural Engineering

I am on a quest to understand the whole of human history, in order to craft structurally sound universes for my original science fiction and fantasy. It started when I was watching the course on Mesoamerica on the Great Courses Plus, and it mentioned Mesoamerica being one of the world's six Cradles of Civilization (none of which are in Europe, by the way), which got me interested in exploring the question of what makes a Cradle of Civilization. 

So, I then - after watching the courses on ancient North and South America - watched the course on Mesopotamia provided on the Great Courses Plus. From there, I went onto learning about Egypt. But once I had gotten that far, I realized that it was no longer just Cradles of Civilization I was curious about. It was human civilization (whatever it is, since it can be a slippery thing to define) in general, and how every single one on Earth had interacted with all the others to create the world we live in now. Furthermore, I came to the understanding that, in order for my complex, nuanced original universes to function in a believable way, I had to gain an understanding of the entirety of human history thus far.

I dubbed it the Grand Tour, after the tradition in 18th century Europe where young European aristocratic men would go on Grand Tours of Europe to soak up the culture there. It's hard to say if this is on a greater or smaller scale, since on one hand, it's of all of our history but on the other, it is something I am doing purely online, from the (physical, at least) comfort of my parents' home. If I keep up a good pace with it, I could have it finished in nine months. If I fail to, it might end up lasting me three years - which is almost as long as it would take me to get a degree in something, if I did it at the expected pace.

So, why, you might wonder, am I doing this? Am I just being a perfectionist, wanting my worldbuilding to click together with what's real to an extent that is simply untenable? Or is what I'm creating genuinely so complex that I need to do this in order to make it work at all? And what relation does any of it have to the Irish myths about fairies that I am primarily drawing upon for my main original fiction project, the Changeling's Geas?

The simplest explanation is that, by studying the past of humanity, I can attain a level of internal consistency in my work that befits its (somewhat hard) science fiction/fantasy hybrid nature. I want to know how the systems have worked in real life, so that I can make them work in believable ways when I apply them to faeries, humans, wormhole Formorians, and bat-dolphin aliens in my fiction. I want to know what humans have believed in the past, what has driven them to their lowest lows and highest highs, so what they think in my fiction is the sort of thing that history supports them thinking. I want to know why societies are the way they are, so I can engineer fictional ones of my own.

Without this much care for internal consistency, even a skilled, practiced author like Suzanne Collins can create a messy universe. What does Panem think of queer people? Are they a non-issue? Hated? Completely accepted? I sure don't know because she's given three different answers in her books. Maybe that can be chalked up to each of those books taking place in different time periods but it could also be attributed to her not caring much about whether her answers were consistent or not, as long as all the Hunger Games books she published in the 2020s contained queer representation - an admirable goal but I aim for better, to answer questions like that for myself earlier in the worldbuilding process, before the story hits the page.

The next reason is that studying human beings is what I've done ever since I was small, and I realized two things: that neurotypicals believed I was naturally without a talent for socializing, and that socializing was a skill I could learn. It made human nature and society into a special interest I had to adopt for survival's sake - a fun one but still, I could have been a palaeontologist instead, if I hadn't had to focus all my energy on human beings. But I am what I am, there's no changing that now and I am not sure if I would even take a change, if I could. 

Now, however, I am reclaiming these skills and this interest for myself. I am studying humans in order to build up a fictional society in a science fiction/fantasy world and to know why the society I live in has treated me the way it has, not to socialize with people in meatspace. I already know plenty about how to interact with people there, and my knowledge of, say, the Persian Empire might prove more than a hindrance than a help in that. But in order to make the world in my head real and understand the source of the pain that fuels it, I do need to know about the empires of the past and how they formed the world of today.

This is also a protest against the flattening of the world, which is so prevalent nowadays. People want to see everything in black-and-white, and the Mandatory Social Skills Period tried to transform Smallville, the ten season long origin story of Superman, into a simplified narrative of teenage socialization. My pushback to it back then was shipping the Clark Kent and Lex Luthor of that series together - which might come as no surprise to those of you who have read my recent writing. I know what I like, and what I like is complexity. That's why I read the Hunger Games and Robert J. Sawyer and Adrian Tchaikovsky, and listen to Taylor Swift. They all have a respect for the deep, complicated nuances of the real world - whether in hard science fiction worldbuilding or in a beat of the heart.

The world exists in shades of grey, and it would be a betrayal of it not to portray them - particularly when the world of today is wracked by conflicts resulting from a refusal to accept them, like the one between Israel and Palestine. I am writing about fictional societies that are not straightforward allegories for any such current real life conflicts but I still am bound by the ethical physics of real life to tell stories where everyone involved is a person - no matter how awful their actions may be. We are both sinners and saints, Madonnas and Whores, and we forget that at our peril.

Lastly, the Changeling's Geas deals with some rather heavy themes - slavery, transition, misgendering and deadnaming, death, identity, neurodivergence in an unaccepting world - and I want, when I'm writing these themes in my own original universe, to have a deep understanding of how they work. In my original work, unlike in my fanworks, I cannot use a canon someone else has created as scaffolding for those ideas. I have to provide all the support I need to make them work. There's a big difference between moving the furniture around and building the foundation, after all. 

So, I am borrowing it from human history since it is dense and public domain, and has explored these themes innumerable times in innumerable ways, with innumerable people coming with their own answers to them when they've confronted them in their lives. That should, I believe, give me what I need to do it right, to make it so I can treat these themes with the gravity they deserve and provide honest answers to the questions they pose my characters.