World Building, for science fiction

Science fiction novels are built twice: once as a story, and once as the place the story happens in. The second build is where a lot of books quietly stall. There is always another layer to work out, every layer opens onto three more, and it is entirely possible to spend a year on a world and never start chapter one.

So the new World Building tab is not a bigger notes field. It is a set of constraints.

The centre of it is a depth budget. You may hold a fixed number of things - six by default - at full research depth at once. Everything else is a single line that implies more. When the budget is full and you want to take something new deep, you have to let something else go. That refusal is the feature, not an obstruction: it is the moment you decide what your book is actually about.

Anything you do take deep has to answer one question - what does it change? Name the decision a character makes differently, or the thing that is harder because of it. An element that changes neither is decoration, however many hours went into it, and the tab will say so.

Every element also asks for something concrete: one signature detail, and what it is like to stand there. Readers will follow you into cosmology and orbital mechanics, but only after they have felt grit in their teeth. The abstract research is the part that may never reach the page at all - it is there so the surface has something to rest on.

The rest of it: an idea board where the value is in the pairings rather than the pile, because a novel usually comes from two ideas that improve each other; a naming workbench that keeps a group of names internally consistent and nags you to search each one before you use it; and a note of how the book is narrated, since viewpoint and tense are the two decisions that are most expensive to change late.

Worlds belong to a universe rather than to a book, so a trilogy shares one setting instead of keeping three copies that drift apart. A standalone novel gets a universe of its own and can adopt later books into it.

Turn it on from any book you have marked as science fiction. It is free for 90 days from the first time you open it, then $1.99 a month. If you decide it is not for you, nothing is deleted or hidden - your world stays readable either way. It is your work, not ours.

The framework behind the tools comes from Brandon Sanderson's lecture on world building. The ideas are his; the reading of them, and anything we got wrong in the translation to science fiction, is ours. Tell us below which part is wrong.