November Content Update: Modelling Scale (Patreon)

Sci-Fi and Fantasy writers, quite infamously, have no sense of scale. While the often arbitrary numbers we often throw out to quantify the size of an army, or a city's population may seem like the kind of thing you can simply toss out to make a given subject look impressive, any sort of narrative which relies on its worldbuilding to carry it has to keep a proper sense of scale in mind. This is because if you're using your worldbuilding to drive your story, that means your audience is constantly thinking about the worldbuilding as they engage with your narrative - looking through it for context, for clues as to the state of the conflicts within, and so on - and the more they think about the scale of the world you've created, the more likely they are to realise that the size you've given for an army or the population of a city, or the speed of a given vehicle is too great or too small to be realistic.

And that's a problem. Sci-fi and Fantasy are all about immersion, after all. The reason they're able to transport their audiences to worlds which are entirely different from our own is because they're able to create an internally consistent setting capable of holding up to at least the casual scrutiny which a person would hold up the real world to. While that does mean some people will be able to ignore inconsistencies of scale, or even remain entirely ignorant of them, that doesn't mean you won't be losing a lot of potential audience members who are turned off by the fact that the writer of a given story doesn't seem to understand the realities which underpin their work - and therefore is incapable of treating the themes and forces behind their story with the appropriate respect. The more niche you get with your fiction, the more scrutiny you're likely to get as well. If you write a sword-and-sandal heroic fantasy story about a small party of heroes, maybe only a small minority of potential readers would see inconsistent scale as a dealbreaker. On the other hand, if you're trying to write a grounded, detailed story about a quasi-late medieval mercenary company, then you better get the scale right - or else a pretty big chunk of the people who would normally read such a story might simply assume that the creator doesn't have the chops to live up to the promise of the premise.

So, why do we mess up with scale so often? My guess is, it has a lot to do with how humans are wired to think about big numbers.

Humans can pretty intuitively tell the difference between one and two, or two and four, or even ten and a hundred. However, where that intuitive ability breaks down is when we go beyond one or two hundred, and especially once we get past a thousand. While intellectually, we might know that a number with three zeros behind it is ten times that same number with two zeroes behind it, our mind finds it very hard to conceptualise the difference between say, 15 000 and 150 000. As far as our brains are concerned, both numbers qualify as "lots". When it comes to visual mediums, this effect is even more obvious - especially with big crowd scenes. Unless you stop to count up every figure shown on screen, people very rarely have an accurate idea of how big a crowd or an army really is. If you show a big mass of people filling the screen and say it's an arbitrarily big number - say 500 000 - the audience will have very little trouble believing that there are actually 500 000 people there.

But this works the other way around too, especially when we very rarely find ourselves experiencing big crowds in a way where we can actually count them up. Since our society tends to be one which gains most of its reference points from visual media, we tend to think of 50 000, or 500 000, or 5 000 000 people as "big enough to fill the screen". As a result, most of us don't really grasp how big a crowd that actually is - and perhaps more importantly for a worldbuilder, how much a crowd like that eats, how much space it takes to house and feed them, and how much of a hassle it is to get a crowd like that organised and moving.

This leads to a problem which is particularly prominent in fantasy, especially fantasy which involves a lot of moving armies and big cities. When creators want to show off to the audience the idea that someone's got a really big army, or that a city is really big, they often use arbitrary numbers based on our own reference points for what the size of a really big army or the population of a really big city ought to be. That's how we end up with settings which still maintain medieval standards of technology, logistics, and agriculture which supposedly support armies in the high tens or even the hundreds of thousands. That's how we get medieval fantasy cities which have populations over a million. While the casual observer might find these numbers impressive, anyone who's familiar with what it takes to recruit, equip, feed, and move those hundreds of thousands of soldiers will find their immersion broken as soon as they run into that number. Likewise with anyone familiar with the logistics of actually feeding and maintaining a city of over a million people with nothing but simple machines and muscle power.

Unfortunately, sometimes even using historical or quasi-historical sources for reference points will not help matters. Histories - even respected histories - from before the early modern period tend to embellish the numbers of people, especially the numbers of armies opposed to which ever side the historian in question is taking the side of. This is often done to either to excuse a defeat, or to embellish a victory. The Persians at Thermopylae probably didn't actually have 250 000 men in the field (the actual number was probably a tenth that), because the logistical demands for maintaining a single field army that size is probably beyond the means of pre-railroad infrastructure. For the same reason, the Kingdom of Cao Wei probably didn't deploy 2 000 000 men during the Chibi campaign. Yet those are the numbers that Herodotus and Luo Guanzhong use, to excuse the defeat of the Spartans (and Arcadians, and Thespians) in the first case, and to render the victory of the Shu-Wei coalition even more heroic and improbable in the latter case.

Science Fiction, on the other hand, tends to have the opposite problem. Where fantasy often goes too big, science fiction often goes too small. Used to thinking in terms of our own, very much terrestrial societies which each take up a chunk of a single planet, creators often have a lot of trouble scaling that up to societies which sprawl over multiple habitable worlds, stretched out over distances which, quite frankly, are almost impossible to wrap your head around. 400 000 troops might seem like an impressively sized army within our own frame of reference, but setting a force that size to take over an entire planet with an earthlike population becomes a ludicrous proposition when you remember that recent history has proven a force about that size has proven insufficient to hold down even a small portion of a single continent of our own world. Likewise, 500 km might seem a pretty long ways away, but in the context of interplanetary - let alone interstellar - geography, they are practically two molecules next to each other on the head of the same pin.

So, how do we avoid these pitfalls? The first is simply not to mention scale at all. This is certainly possible for certain kinds of stories, especially ones which don't rely on precise numbers to give a story a sense of place and scale. If you can tell your story just as well by saying an army is "big", a city is "smaller than the capital", or a road is "three weeks travel by foot", then that might be good enough. If the precise nature of the economics and politics of your setting doesn't really affect your story, and if your narrative never really needs to touch on logistical or geographical factors, then you might be able to get away without setting a scale at all. However, such stories will tend to restrict the kind of stories you'll be able to tell, and at some point, you might come to the conclusion that it's better to set that scale after all.

So, how do you set that scale? That depends on precisely the kind of setting you have. Ultimately, the number of people who a city can accommodate, the number of troops it can field at war time, even something as simple as its actual geographical size, all have to do with the technological, economic, and political infrastructure which underpins that society. That means the scale of the elements in your setting is the result of a complex interplay of other factors, all of which need to be settled first. The scale of your fictional setting's elements need to follow from the facts established by that interplay, or else you're going to risk citing numbers which your setting's characteristics will be unable to back up.

Needless to say, this is going to end up being a multi-part series. Next up, I'd be tackling three different aspects of this issue: the scaling of armies, the scaling of populations, and the scaling of societies. If that interests you, then all three aspects will be up for vote next month.