- Will there be a religion, or an activity, or a set of beliefs, approximating to
a religion? Almost every society originally had a religious base. Human
societies have felt a need for religion as a way of organising their spiri-
tual needs in a formalised way, but religions have also led to wars,
conflict and repression. Religion is losing its centrality in contemporary
western society, and many people seek transcendence through alterna-
tives such as drugs or art. Will your world have a religion, an
anti-religion or a substitute religion? - What will be the political and economic organisation? The form of polit-
ical organisation will determine the power structures in your world,
which may be democratic, totalitarian or somewhere in between. You
may want to consider economic alternatives to capitalism (or its most
dire consequences), and also matters such as censorship, the legal
system and the role of the media. - How will gender roles be organised? There is the obvious issue here of
career paths and domestic duties taken up by men and women, and the
way that gender stereotypes might be inverted. But you might also want
to consider the forms that sexuality will take, and what is considered
socially acceptable. Will your society be organised into groups such as
families, or into other forms of grouping? Will it invert heterosexual
norms, or will there be more than two genders? - What will be the ethical basis of the society? Ethics are largely socially con-
structed; what is acceptable in one society or era may not be in another.
In medieval Britain a woman could be hanged for adultery, while the
massacre and colonisation of indigenous people was considered accept-
able by the majority of people all over the world in the eighteenth
century. In his film, The Ballad of Narayama (1983), Japanese director
Shohei Imamura envisages a completely different ethical basis to society
from the one he and his audience are used to. In this poverty-stricken
society, old people are taken up a mountain when they are 70 and left
there to die, thereby leaving more provisions for the needy: this is con-
sidered honourable behaviour, whereas prolonging the life of parents
and protecting them from death is considered dishonourable. Techno-
logical developments, such as genetic engineering, also raise new ethical
issues for the future.
Language
When you construct a new world, language is a fundamental issue. Another
world would not be likely to speak any of the same languages that we speak
in this one, various though those languages are. If you write the whole text
in a completely new language, it may be problematic because nobody will
150 The Writing Experiment