Worldbuilding 101: Communication
Hello? Heeellooo? Is this on?...Bob, is this on? The “It’s live” LED is not working, can you check? What do you mean it is on and it is shining infrared that anyone can see? ARE YOU SERIOUS! I’m a Limax you twerp! We don’t see that! Okay, get out! I got a blog to do, and I am dealing with your attitude later!
Hiya everyone! Your favourite alien Limax is back again! Vivian! Sorry about the initial thing, a bit of technical issues. Never trust family when they say “They’re hard working!”, hard working my tail! Take a breath Vivian, don’t be a xenist, even if he is a dumb Talpa. Anyway, today's topic is communication and communication technology!
What is communication
Communication, or language, is often considered a defining characteristic of the human species, and it is something you happily put into other sapient species when writing. I speak, you speak, we all speak. But being autistic myself, I know there are other ways you humans communicate. Tone, body language, context, situation, facial expression, they are all various ways to communicate things.
So what is communication? In my opinion, the best way to define it is
Communication is a system where two entities, usually possessing some kind of consciousness and a certain level of intelligence, regardless of how minute, transfer information that one individual possesses to the other, may it be knowledge, desires, emotional state, environmental, status, or anything else.
I know, I know, it is extremely broad and kinda vague. But such is life. Nothing is simple, and that makes it more entertaining! If you ask me. But for the purposes of this blog, we will focus on the ones relevant to humanoid communication, which for most speculative fiction writers involves verbal communication, a language, with the addition of normal human ones. Some more “out there” writers might go for other methods to be alien. I commend you for your great effort, but these are not the focus here nor discussed. A lot of the points for civilisations will however be the same regardless of communication means.
History of communication
It is not certain how the earliest forms of human communication and language came about. It was most likely a slow, gradual process. Though there are some indications that it might have been a very sudden appearance given that there seems to be certain universal preferences in languages that may have appeared very suddenly, we do not know how it really came to be. After this, people started talking, and with that came stories, songs, and all kinds of tales. These oral traditions were it for the largest part of humanity’s history.
Eventually, as agriculture came about and people started settling and debts had to be kept track off, writing emerged! WIth writing, you could pass things down the generations without anyone having to be there or to others without having to be there yourself! The main issue was, of course, what you wrote on, but for things that were meant to last, stone was a favourite. For obvious reasons, the stones rarely moved. For texts to move, paper-like things were preferred. I include papyruses, old leather papers, and various others here. Before real paper, these were not cheap!
Once paper-like writing was done, the main issue for communication was how fast you could deliver the bloody letter from the sender to the receiver. So many societies, even those without writing, constructed roads, used various mounts or runners, stops along the way, and more to speed this up, and for the longest time, this was it, and the further you wished to send it, and the faster, the more costly it got, quickly. Then, mechanical contraptions came into the image such as locomotives, and it once again sped up.
It wasn’t until the early telegraph that communication started to become more in the “instant” domain. Information could travel across entire continents in seconds. No communication is truly instantaneous, but you know, close enough! It was only text-like letters,, but still an improvement! I love me the old stock tickers. Telephone was an additional improvement, as you could get tone of voice back and have direct talking through it. This created massive needs for telecom infrastructure as people wanted to talk with each other more than they wanted to send letters.
After this, it took a bit of time before anything new came, though not as long as it took for non-letters! But eventually computers came into the picture, and mail got replaced by email. Albeit who can deny the charm of a good old letter or card in your hand, especially from granny on your birthday? After that, we got Instant Messaging, where it once more became more personal while still text-based. And with additional computing power and telecom tech, video calls became a thing. Then along the way, some weird kiddos in the early emails and all came up with the bloody ingenious idea of having emoticons like :), ;), D<, and more to communicate more and intentions that are not word based. These evolved into emojis like 🙂 😉 😈 and so on as a means of communicating. It is currently, in my opinion, the fastest evolving form of communication you have, and it keeps expanding.
Slow vs “Instant” communication
There are of course many means of communication, as I have discussed earlier. This includes how you encode information such as words, sounds, emotions, and much else. This is important in the sense of technology and how it is done, but when it comes to the impact communication has on people and society, it is less relevant. Where there is a will, there is usually a way to solve these issues of encoding what needs to be said in a functional manner such that the adaptations are a minor nuisance at most. Like in my language of Limacan, I chose to go with logographic writing (think Chinese or Kanji from Japan but different in some aspects but close, I will go into writing systems in another post), so what did my Limaces do to solve a lot of the issues in encoding given the huge amount of symbols? Made a transitory phonetic writing that is used in transition or encoding before being made into “proper writing” at the receiving end.
The thing that affects society and people is, however, the speed at which information travels. If it takes weeks to reach the outer fringes of your empire, that area is essentially disconnected from you, and your control is at best tenuous. You need local rulers to do your bidding. If you, however, can send information virtually instantly, you can more easily maintain people loyal to you, and thus exert power in the region, even if travelling there takes ages. So the speed will dictate a lot. I generally classify anything that takes less than a week to reach the recipient for “instanuous”; I know it is a bit of a stretch, but in ancient times with horses or only men, a week is a very short amount of time for a message to go. In most cases, very little happens in just a week that needs back and forthing. Anything 2 weeks or longer is slow.
Effects of communication
As I hinted in the previous section, communication and its increase in speed and more have some very profound effects on people and civilizations. It had a profound effect on your world’s evolution, so you could eventually make city states and the likes. It is reasonable to assume communication would work at larger scales too.
Ideas
One of the biggest things when it comes to communication is that of idea exchange. You have a brain, we all do… Some aliens have a bit more, but let’s ignore them. They get annoying when talking with themselves. Anyway, you can only think of so much and see things from so many angles. Do your best, and that is all you can do. It is impossible to be perfect there. Someone else will think differently and see it differently and maybe spot something you missed. Figure out the problems you just cannot do. The more people you have access to talk with, the more the chances are that there is someone who can see it in such a way that it contributes to your project.
This is where communication comes in. Besides, you know, talking to your friends and neighbours. The more distant the communication we can do, the more people we can come in contact with, discuss the problems and issues, and have them think on what we said, then tell back what their thoughts are. Sure it might take weeks or months for a response, but hey, you got the time, right? Point is, better communication means that ideas can develop and be explored faster, wider, and more.
Technology
Technology ties into ideas quite strongly, but I wish to keep them separate for the purpose of illustrating the issue of lack of communication. There have been countless civilizations in all of the world; Afroeurasia has had more than one would dare to count. So we can safely say there has been at least counts on fingers 🖐️ this many. Several civilisations have through the centuries tried isolationism, China and Japan being two very famous examples.
This naturally started stifling their technological progress, and what had once been civilisations far ahead and going forward started becoming more backward as others kept advancing. We know the story here with the Europeans coming in with superior weapons, yada yada. Japan, however, is interesting in that unlike other civilisations that went isolationism and was soon enough conquered, they essentially realised
Oh shit, we done fucked up
And turned a 180-if you say 360 Anne will chase you with an old school wooden teacher stick and smack you! But they started communicating with the world, importing ideas, and working hard.
So in short, having a great amount of communication between countries and nations and people increases technological progress. Sure your enemy will also progress but in general, better for both! This is why fictional isolationist nations like Atlantis, or Wakanda, are complete and utters 🐎💩. If you want to do these things, you need some damn good justification because through communication, technology will spread outward, and by general lack of communication, their own development will slow down. I say both because no place is 100% isolated. May it be gods or whatever, but on their own, highly advanced isolationist countries cannot logically exist. And no, having a large deposit of unimaginium does not skyrocket technology when the civilization is isolated. You still have the issue of people being limited with fewer ideas generated within the civilisation..
State Centralisation
In modern times, we can usually group human nation states into two types: unitary and federalist, the latter being more decentralised than the former. There are some more steps in the spectrum, but in modern times, these are generally the ones you find. Historically, the scale has been much more spread out, and the level of centralisation even federations have today would have been unbelievable to them. And this is because due to the slow speed of communication, outer regions could receive orders and laws weeks or even months after they were decided. This means whatever authority is supposed to be the “centre” or “boss” is generally only delivering strong suggestions to those in the fringes.
So slow communications, especially if slow troop deployment is a fact of life too, means your “nation” must have a very decentralised structure. This is one reason why feudalism was so popular, and similar pyramid-like orderings of society. It is a nice way to decentralise while having a top down structure, and you kinda use it to this day. However, as communication speed goes up, the height of the pyramid and the granting of power toward the bottom of it starts changing. There is no need to hand over needless power to the local authorities when you are a week away or less from knowing what is going on. So as the speed goes up, the centralisation goes up as well. The central authority starts getting more and more power, and local governments start losing power. It will never be entirely gone because, come on, can you imagine your parliament, congress or whatever you have, deciding if local village X can build a new well? That is better left to the locals as long as they pay their taxes.
Military
For the military, communication is often quite literally everything. Knowing where the enemy is, what the enemy is going to do, how to coordinate your own troops… It is everything, and the faster you can do this, the more might a military can have. Even if the speed at which you get troops to where they need to be is slow, the fact tht you can communicate fast means you can still dominate because you can adequately predict and compensate for your enemy. Anything that is instantaneous in the common usage has huge military application, and it would be the single greatest military advantage they could have. It’d be guarded, controlled, and demanded by the military. This is why having instantaneous in classical fantasy settings might have unforeseen issues that you forget about.
Types of communication
There are many moods of communication as I have discussed above, so we will jump straight into the speculative for creative ideas.
Speculative
Fantasy
Anne and I have discussed a lot on the topic of communication, but as she is much more into fantasy than I am and has more passion, I am handing over the reins to her.
(Anne:) Hooray! With zhir permission, let’s look at a few fantasy methods! One thing to note about most fantasy is that unfortunately, it doesn’t take into account a lot of what’s been said about communication above. For example, one form of physical communication in most high or epic fantasy involves creatures like horses or ravens being used to send messages. If you have a huge world and communication at that speed, governments will be more decentralised and militaries will have less power, but as the area shrinks–and in most high or epic fantasy it’s usually just a continent or a corner of one–the role of the central ruler and the dominance of the military will increase.
Also, writers tend to have their creatures travel way too quickly to be realistic. Always check the speed and endurance of your creatures, check your distances, and use that as a baseline. Take, for example, a horse. You might need them to go 50 km/h (or just about 31 mph for my fellow Americans), and you might want them to go forever because your character can only have one beloved horse. However, they can only maintain that speed for short periods of time. The Pony Express used chains of horses to achieve that speed of communication. Of course, if you have something entirely fictional like a dragon, you have a lot of flexibility. But keep in mind, if you have an advanced society and you want to increase travel times through magical creatures, it’s highly unlikely that they’re isolationist unless you have an extremely good explanation. Like, really really good, because it defies common sense and logic. Why have fast dragons if you’re not going anywhere?
There’s also instantaneous communication within a physical medium as magic gets involved. One classic that Vivian brought up is linked paper, where what is written on one shows up on the other, and this also lends itself to centralised government and stronger militaries. If someone on the frontlines can instantly tell their commanding officers what’s happening, that army has a huge advantage. Another is a looking glass that shows what’s happening elsewhere with no or little delay, with much the same effect. Less physical forms of communication such as spells or things that open doors to other places or dimensions are also instantaneous, as are magical abilities like telepathy or being a seer or otherwise instantly accessing the past, present, and/or future. These can improve the spread of ideas and allow increased growth in technology if the society manages not to isolate itself, and the government and military will also reflect that pace of communication.
In general, writers tend to like really, really fast communication, but remember what Vivian said. Even a week is considered “instant.” Anything faster, and you need to account for how ideas and technology will spread, and how advanced it could get (technology usually meaning magical technology here). The governments will tend to be centralised, not feudal, even if you really like that Middle Ages feel. And as zhi discussed about the military, the faster your communication, the more military might you’ll get. If you can see exactly what the opposing side is doing at the moment that they’re doing it using magic, then even if it takes weeks to get your army into position, you have a major advantage. If you want instantaneous communication, or even “instant” communication, make sure the transfer of ideas and technology, the government structure, and the military dominance reflect it.
Scifi
(Vivian:) Thanks for it, Anne! Damn better than useless Bob. So scifi, my domain! Scifi is a complicated genre which Anne and I will get into in a later post. But for now, let’s focus on the scifi aspect that has futuristic parts to it. In these cases when it comes to communication with anything equal to us or beyond, you are locked into having instantaneous communication within a planet's sphere of influence.
And for most stories, this is perfectly adequate and you really do not need to get into the nitty gritty details because of your fancy schmancy smartphones. This naturally puts a limit on things. Namely in that there are certain things that naturally won’t happen. There is a reason why many horror writers say “the invention of the cellphone was the biggest harm to the horror genre”. That is because it is omnipresent and works nigh everywhere, and the more advanced your society is, the more solid communication is going to be, and you might reach a point where instantaneous communication is always available and thus certain issues are unlikely to come up without people having motivations to turn things off. Always pay attention to how well people can communicate!
For interstellar ones, well, it depends if you go space opera or hard scifi. In hard scifi, you will have either within a system where communication is, at most, a couple of hours. Slow, but manageable. But all is delayed from how we experience everyday life. If you do hard scifi and interstellar… yeah, there is no point. Sure, you can send pew pew lasers with messages but they will take 5-50 000 years to reach us, so all meaningful communication ceases. Sure it is still better than nothing but it does limit your capabilities to use it. If you do more space opera like where you have FTL (Faster than light) and speed around, there is usually some tech that is close to instantaneous to allow instant communication within a significant volume of space. This can be not-instantaneous and still be close enough to count as such. Just like modern communication does! A common term for these kinds of technologies is ansible technology. Derived from “answerable” but shortened. I wish I had coined it, but alas, not me. A word of caution though, when you do make these kinds of ansible machines: please do not use “quantum entangled particles”. Yes, they are a thing, but don’t do it. You are going to have to trust me a bit on this because it is really complicated physics that I at best barely understand half of, but know is true. It does not work as an ansible tech solution. It just doesn’t. Quantum mechanics as we know them explicitly forbids it to be used this way. If you use it, you only set yourself up to look silly and dumb. It is better to make up systems then. One way to circumvent this, however, is the use of “microwormholes” which you send light through, so normal radio waves, but not matter. I found this very quaint. And heck, you can decide your magic wormholes properties as you see fit!
So what can be done? Well it depends a lot on what you want it to do and how it is done. Some space operas simply do not have ansible tech but have FTL. These use jumpgates, wormhole networks, or many others. Hmmm, I should do a blogpost on FTLs. Noted. Anyway, in these situations, they are generally using probes that travel fast through a system to the next gate/wormhole, moves to the next system, and so on until it reaches the target system according to the map it has. Other options are inventing new forms of spaces that exist that you can send light, other waves or anything through. Honestly even if you use tachyons, which is a legit hypothetical particle but almost certainly not existing but who knows? Fun fact about tachyons: the slower they go, the more energy they have! So sending off really low energy ones goes REALLY fast. So you can use this for fun!
Making a communication method
Whether you do fantasy or scifi, here are some tips on how to make a communication method beyond blabbering with your mouth.
Consider what you want in the world. Do you want delays in communications? Easy blackouts where it is impossible to communicate? Do you want centralised or decentralised nations? All of these affect whether you must have slow or instant communication.
Once you’ve figured that out, think about your world and what you already have. Try to make the communication method out of something you already have decided to include, whether magic or some fictoscientific thing that your scifi tech works on. After all, as my rule #5 of worldbuilding goes: Re-usage is better than adding new cogs.
Once you have done this, figure out additional limitations that can exist and properties.
Make certain these properties of the communication method affect the world at large. It is always jarring when communication works one way but almost no one uses it.
Not many steps, but they help make a communication system that feels coherent and part of the world and gives you the results you want.
Translations
When it comes to any mode of communication, a species naturally has to communicate between individuals. There will be a learning curve and thus errors in transmission between generations, and thus there will be different languages. Whether you speak like most species in the galaxy or use, I don’t know, face colourings to talk? Crazy things. Anyway, it will change over time, and languages will diverge and develop, and the question is then, how the frick do you deal with this?
For ancient times, there was only one way: you had bilingual people translating, and that is it. That is how we do it to this day, and it is still the best method. If you have magic, you can have magical spells help learning languages, or magical items translating, there are literally too many. Anne, you got any ideas?
(Anne:) One classic is just to have some supernatural force keeping everyone’s languages closely aligned, but I would encourage you to move beyond that. I’ve seen spells that can be cast on one’s self or another individual for short periods or permanently that translate any language that they hear. Devices can be used, and then, of course, there’s telepathy. People can just tell what other people are saying because they can see the other person’s mind. And who can forget talking animals? That’s usually some magical blessing (or curse), or just a fantasy creature capable of human speech. Lots of fantasy options!
(Vivian:) For scifi, there are generally a few ways available. You have a few choices. The tradition of bilinguals is rarely used in space operas for what I hope are obvious reasons with so many species and languages. They are much more often for a “common language”, which can be done in fantasy as well, as Anne points out, and honestly, it is incredibly trite and boring. Even what I will bring up soon is better. Namely “Universal translators”, which are a scifi magical tech box thing that can figure out languages, learn new languages, and somehow figure out literally everything in context except when it is magically convenient for the god forsaken plot that a misunderstanding happens. Then it fails. Honestly, it is so lazy, but I get it.
You can of course opt for more imperfect machine learning software like Google translate, or as many of you bilinguals may have noticed, ChatGPT-like AIs doing translations. Decent, but you still see the issues pop up constantly. Another choice is of course to have brain computers (also known as wetware) which would have all the abilities of a human brain but focused on language and thus can learn concepts, contexts, and much else to give mostly perfect translations. But I guess that is icky with all the brainy stuff.
Micro-practicum: Communication in Stellima
In my universe, a space opera, I have my FTL which is based on the concept of discrete space. Imagine infinitely big paper sheets that represent normal space but in 2D, now below it, there is another sheet of infinite size as well, below it yet another, and below it more, and so on. There are infinitely many layers of space stacked on top of each other and going downward. I say down because they use the metaphor of diving to describe how they travel.
I also have nentroplasma and a lot of technology and things related to it. I will have to make a whole blog post describing it all and my thoughts and such but suffice to say, think of it like electromagnetism but I get to make up the rules and it’s better, I say so. So part of it is that you can generate Nentrowaves. So in my universe, they have special antennas, nentroatennas! Actually no, Isochium antennas. I got you there! Isochium is a substance that makes accessing the lower layers feasible. Without it, any civilization or people are cut off from interstellar space. So these antennas generate nentrowaves that are sent off in the lower layers, travelling at the speed of light. But here is the thing: the lower a layer is, the more contracted space is. That is to say, distances are shorter. A trade off is that to get a signal that can be detected at lower layers, it takes more energy and power. Gotta have limits, and by how I structure isochium and discrete space and everything, this made sense.
Summa summarum
So to sum it all up. Communication is an important aspect that affects all parts of a society, setting and much more. You need to take into consideration how it works, as that determines limits, possibilities, and the likes. Then also how it will affect the broader society including the military. This is a daunting task, and you will be forgiven for making errors due to the vast scope of things. But there is a natural difference between “I made a mistake or forgot” vs “I just didn’t care”. The latter is easy to spot, so is the former. Like all, show it the care it deserves making your world, and good luck!
Damn it Bob, why won’t you stop calling me while I work!? YOUR ATTITUDE IS AWFUL! NO!
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Copyright ©️ 2023 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as microwormholes, wetware brains, connected papers, ansible, different types of spaces, and looking glasses are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as Discrete space, nentrowaves, Stellima, Isochium, and all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission.
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