World building for my Modified Humans stories has been an evolutionary process. There have been so many elements to consider.
When I started the first novel, I was going with my gut, and not thinking about much beyond writing down whatever popped into my mind. I originally set the story on another planet. Then I moved the action back to Earth–specifically to Toronto, Canada (familiar territory for me), two hundred years from now. Quickly I realized there was no way I could imagine what the world might be like in two hundred years. So I finally settled on one hundred years in the future.
World Building for Modified Humans series: Climate Change
My first world-building consideration was climate change. Barring a catastrophic volcanic eruption, or a comet event such as the one postulated in the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the climate is likely to grow warmer. How much global warming would happen in the next hundred years? Too much warming would turn the world into an apocalyptic wasteland. While my stories are dystopias, I don’t envision the landscape as desolate. Yet warming is unlikely to stop. I ended up leaving the actual amount of warming vague, and allude to it in passing throughout the series: the weather experienced by my characters, comments about the sea walls in New York and the lower water levels in the Great Lakes.
Agriculture
There have been two reasons for incorporating agriculture into my world building. First, I’m familiar with the topic. My undergraduate degree was in agricultural science, and my career in the lab supported the agriculture industry. Second, civilization wouldn’t be possible without agriculture to support it. I wouldn’t choose to write about extreme global warming because of the devastating impact it would have on agriculture. One way to reflect what is being farmed in a warming world is in the food my characters eat. I have them eating rabbit-meat sandwiches and burgers, because rabbits are the most efficient domestic animal at producing protein. I have them snacking on cricket meal crackers. By inventing a plant disease that decimated cocoa trees, I’ve made chocolate a rarity in the future.
Fashion
Fashion was never remotely on my world-building radar. However one of my beta readers told me she cringed whenever I described my characters dressed in jeans. She pointed out that in the future, the fashion industry would have been forced into a more sustainable model. Clothing would be repaired and fabrics recycled far more than today. Fashion would adapt to these necessities. Therefore even a new pair of jeans every season would be out of the question for ordinary people. So I invented pants patched together from various fabrics and colours, and called them ‘patch pants’.
World Building for Modified Humans: Immunity Specialist as a Profession
How I chose my protagonist’s profession is an interesting story. One day in the mid-2010’s, I was having lunch with a friend who is an researcher and professor of immunology at the local university. She had recently won an award for her work on High Immune Response technology in cattle. ‘Immune response’ had a ring I liked, so I picked her brains on how to apply it to people. While we ate, she scribbled out this diagram of the immune system. (I have since taken an immunology course to make sense of it.) By the time we finished our lunch, my genetically modified human, an ‘immunity specialist’, was born.
Even before Covid, pandemics were a predicted outcome of global warming, so an ‘immunity specialist’ whose amazing immune cells could be harvested, packaged and sold for profit would be a valuable resource in terms of both public health and Big Profit.
Future Pandemics: Ideas from Recent Times
Having decided that my future Canada would be affected by pandemics and would use immunity specialists, I soon had the unprecedented opportunity to study the real-time evolution of a modern-day pandemic. During the CovidCrisis, it quickly became evident there were two versions of ‘Truth’ about the pandemic. The ‘non-mainstream’ version provided a wealth of ideas for my futuristic world:
- What if governments and the media deliberately frightened whole populations by focusing on and inflating the risks of a pandemic disease? What if terrified people willingly did things they wouldn’t normally do, such as adopt unproven and potentially dangerous medical interventions, surrender their rights, and scapegoat people who didn’t go along with the narrative? Who would benefit? Follow The Money. What if The Money had a motive beyond profit? For example, depopulation of an overpopulated world?
- What if the messaging strategies aimed to silence opposing views, and even silence the injured? What if this involved reviling those with opposing views, threatening them with loss of livelihood, and ostracizing them? In a story, how would the silenced react?
- What could go wrong? What unintended side-effects could occur–health, genetic, societal, and global? How far-reaching would the side-effects be? How long would they last?
Space Travel
Space travel isn’t isn’t important till Book 4 of the Modified Humans series. I just finished Book 3, so the pressure’s on to come up with a realistic mode of space travel. If only I were a physicist like author Catherine Asaro…
If this were space opera, I’d invent an X-flier, and that would solve the problem. But the stories are extensions of the present world, so my space travel should sound somewhat feasible.
- For travel into orbit
- What if I used a space elevator to get people and goods out of the Earth’s gravity well? It sounded good till I learned about the Van Allen Radiation Belts. An elevator would cross these belts too slowly, and would expose human passengers to dangerous radiation levels.
- Next idea: ‘anti-grav technology’. Pretty vague and not at all rooted in reality. But since I’ve already mentioned it in Immunity Bond, I’ve apparently decided to mix some fantasy with my science.
- For galactic space travel
- What if ancient space-travel technology were discovered on the far side of the moon? This could make the attainment of space travel in the next hundred years more believable.
World Building for Modified Humans: Miscellaneous Ideas
- Restriction of rights of Modifieds including denial of their personhood, i.e. legalized slavery. Because I need a social context in which ‘immunity specialists’ lead their lives.
- Widespread use of self-driving cars; widespread ride-sharing among the less privileged in society.
- Brainwashing/conditioning. This is really out of my realm, but having seen it performed at the societal level during Covid, I’m quite certain it’s do-able at the personal level.
- Surveillance. This is already becoming an uncomfortable reality. In my future version of Toronto, it’s everywhere. Making secret activities harder to pull off is a way of adding dramatic tension to my stories.
- Stitching a genome together from scratch. Somewhere in the Modified Humans series (I haven’t gone back to find the exact book) I claim this is how my genetically modified humans are created. Building a genome from scratch is pure fantasy. But it sounds scientific, so I’m going with it.
Final Words
I’ll stop here. World building sometimes makes my head fell like it’s cracking open. I don’t consider myself a ‘hard sci-fi’ person. My stories are about people. The technologies and scientific advances only need to be good enough to provide a believable backdrop.
In the end, success is in the eye of the beholder, so my readers will be the judges of whether I succeeded.
Note LM Spilsbury: this is a July 13, 2025 revision of the original post published on May 4, 2021.
