My last two columns have been devoted to a basic aspect of writing science fiction: the designing of planets. In the first column I talked about ways to achieve scientific plausibility; in the second, I described how I had conceived and developed the specs for my own best-known world, the Majipoor of Lord Valentine’s Castle. I want to go on now to discuss how I invented my characters and the social matrix in which their lives would be lived.

I told last time of how Majipoor was ruled by a dual monarchy: a senior king, the Pontifex, and his junior companion, the Coronal. Upon the death of a Pontifex his Coronal succeeds to that title and chooses a new Coronal of his own. Thus the monarchy is an adoptive one, rather like what evolved in Rome in the time of the Emperors Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius.

The protagonist of the book I was constructing would be the Coronal Lord Valentine, cast from his throne by a usurper, robbed of his memory, and set loose to wander. A useful archetype: I find in my files a note that reads, “Valentine as Grail Knight—Perfect Fool—born ignorant and learns gradually.” And again: “A hero suffers, comes to power as the regenerator of the world.” And my own final comment: “Valentine is an amiable & sunny man, though no simpleton, and people are naturally drawn to him.”

Suddenly I had a name for my planet: Majipoor, “maji” providing a subliminal hint of the romantic word “magic” and the Hindi-sounding suffix “-poor” to remind me that my geographic model was the subcontinent of India blown up to superplanetary size.

Next in the gradually cohering plot came this: “Since Valentine is adopted, who is his true mother? Is she capable of detecting the impostor? (Or identifying the concealed ruler?)—She is a priestess on an island in a remote sea.” And I put a large island between the two main continents and made it a ritual center where the Great Mother rules.

But there was still no hint of the conflict that every novel needs, other than the as yet unexplained usurpation that had sent Valentine into exile. Some sort of sinister player was needed. I jotted down this: “The King of Dreams is the dark adversary of the Emperor.” A second telepathic force, this one far more stern and ominous than the benevolent Lady of the Isle: a sender of bad dreams, a planetary superego ferociously chastising those who get out of line, but also—so I realized—capable of getting out of line himself. The King of Dreams would turn out, in fact, to be connected in some way with the mysterious usurpation that thrusts Valentine from his throne. I put his headquarters on an inhospitable desert continent and made him an equal partner in the government with the Pontifex, the Coronal, and the Lady.

My sheets of preliminary notes now fill up with all manner of archetypical references out of our own history, literature, and myth: “Falstaff . . . the Malcontent figure . . . Tiberius . . . Caligula . . . Aeneas and the descent into hell . . . Merlin/Hermes . . . Shapeshifters . . . Jonah in the Whale . . . Darth Vader . . . Jason and the Fleece . . .” All of these, and many more, would find their way in transmuted form into the plot of Lord Valentine’s Castle.

After a few weeks I was ready to set down a formal sketch of the book. It began with a statement of the general background:

This long picaresque adventure—the manuscript will probably run six hundred pages—takes place on the huge world of Majipoor, a planet enormously bigger than Earth, but lacking most of the heavier elements, so that the gravity is only about three-fourths that of Earth. All is airy and light on Majipoor: it is a cheerful and playful place in general, although highly urbanized, bearing a population of many billions. Food is abundant, the air is fresh, the streams and oceans are clean. Majipoor was settled by colonists from Earth some fourteen thousand years ago, but also is occupied peacefully by representatives of six or seven of the galaxy’s other intelligent species, as well as the descendants of Majipoor’s own native race, humanoid in form, capble of physical changes of shape. These last beings are regarded with some uneasiness by the others, and this uneasiness is reciprocated.

Across the vastness of Majipoor’s three colossal continents is spread an incredible diversity of cities, glittering and majestic, separated by parks, agricultural territories, forest preserves, wastelands kept deliberately barren as boundaries, and holy districts occupied by religious devotees. Such a gigantic cosmos of a planet can hardly be efficiently governed by one central authority, and yet a central authority does exist, to which all local governors do indeed pay lip-service and on occasion direct homage. This central authority is the Pontifex, an imperial figure, aloof and virtually unknowable. . . .

The outline goes on to sketch the plot—Valentine’s amnesia, and his attempt to regain his throne—and announces that “the form of the novel is a gigantic odyssey, divided into five ‘books’ of thirty-five to forty thousand words each, during which the deposed Lord Valentine learns of his true identity, gradually and at first reluctantly resolves to regain his power, seeks successfully to obtain access to his original personality and memories, and crosses all of immense Majipoor, enlisting allies as he goes, engaging in strange and colorful adventures, finally to confront the usurper at the Castle.”

Now the main structure was in place, and I knew from past experience that I would be able to fill in necessary connective matter—minor characters, sub-plots, internal surprises—as I went along. What remained was to move Valentine across Majipoor from the west coast of the secondary continent to the heart of the primary one and up the slopes of thirty-mile-high Castle Mount, inventing the details of the terrain as I went. And it was those details that I hoped would set my novel apart from its predecessors in the genre.

In designing Majipoor I wanted it to be as realistic, in its fantastic way, as I could make it. Here I drew on my strong suits: my knowledge of geography, archaeology, and natural history. Beginning with the city of Pidruid on the wilder continent’s northwest coast and going eastward, I invented an appropriate climate, a cuisine, an assortment of native wildlife, and—a matter of particular interest and amusement for me—a botanical background. All of these were, of course, derived in one fashion or another from terrestrial models; I don’t believe that we science fictionists can ever really invent anything from scratch, but only make modifications of existing prototypes. The more familiar you are with a broad array of prototypes, the richer the variations you can ring on them; but true invention, I think, is Nature’s own prerogative, and variations on existing themes is the best we can manage.

I managed pretty well, I feel. In my garden are many of the plants known as bromeliads, which usually have rosettes with a cup in the center to hold a reservoir of water. Insects and plant matter fall into the cup and decay to provide nutrients for the bromeliad. Fine: I brought Valentine into a grove of “mouthplants,” stemless plants much like my bromeliads, except that their leaves are nine feet long and the central cups have paired grinders equipped with blades. The mouthplants are, in fact, carnivorous, grabbing their prey with hidden tendrils and conveying it to the cups to be chewed. There are, praise be, no such lovelies on our own world; but it was easy enough for me to dream them up for Majipoor.

So I populated the forests and waters of Majipoor: with sea-dragons like great plesiosaurs, with balloon-shaped submarine monsters, with glassy-fronded ferns that emitted piercing discordant sounds, and—one of my favorites—trees whose trunks begin to atrophy with age and whose limbs inflate, until eventually their trunks are mere guy-ropes that break at maturity, setting the limbs adrift like balloons to drift off and start new colonies elsewhere. All these things have models in real natural history, but I think I did a pretty fair job of extending and transforming those models to produce the distinctive flora and fauna of Majipoor.

The terrain, too—forests and jungles, mountains, rivers, a formidable desert, the mighty thrust of Castle Mount—came alive because I was working from life, depicting with appropriate variations things I had seen myself, altering colors, shapes, forms, greatly expanding the scale of everything, making it all more magical (though the originals are magical enough!) to yield the strange and extraordinarily rich landscape of my invented world. The cities were magnified versions of cities I had visited in Europe or Asia; the ruins of the prehistoric Shapeshifter capital were inspired by Roman ruins I had clambered through in North Africa; the geology was Earth-plus geology, everything writ large.

The grand scale of everything was the most important point. It would not have been enough simply to tell the old story of the disinherited prince yet again. It would not have been enough just to set a pack of wanderers loose on a gaudy hodgepodge of a planet. It would not have been enough to flange together a governmental system for that planet out of bits of Roman history and medieval archetypes. It would not have been enough merely to make up a bunch of funny animals and peculiar plants. I had to create, out of available parts, something plausible, something internally consistent, and something that was entirely new, which by virtue of its size, its splendor, and the richness of detail with which I envisioned everything, would provide my readers with an experience they could not have had before and would never forget.

For that I needed six months of planning and research, six intense months of day-by-day writing, and some additional months of revision. But the result was successful, a big, popular book that won me an audience far larger than I had ever had before.

What I learned from the Majipoor experience is:

—Make it big. Scope counts, if you want a multi-book concept. (I wasn’t looking for one, but very quickly realized that I had one anyway.)

—Make it ancient. Plenty of history is useful in the novel of scope, and in order to invent plenty of history, you need to know plenty yourself.

—See it and feel it from within: birds and bugs and plants, critters large and small, the cuisine, the landscape, the smell of the air, the taste of the water, the color of the sky. Make it real for yourself and it will be real for your readers. Call on all the physics, chemistry, and biology at your command, and make sure that no inherently contradictory scientific aspects get yoked together because you think your plot requires them. (“What the hell, it’s only science fiction” is not a sufficient justification for having a planet’s population of carnivorous animals outnumber the herbivores or the atmosphere of one occupied by humans to have the nice bracing tingle of sulfur trioxide.) Get to know textures, detail, color, shape, above all the purpose of each component part of the entire invention. Nothing should be there just because it amuses you to toss it in. Everything should fit into a logical ecological structure. If your invented world is a place you know extremely well, but nevertheless would like to return to again and again, your readers will feel the same way about it.