I wondered if this particular edit was going to be the smallest, or the largest.
The thing is, I like worldbuilding. My first response to hearing the optimist's creed 'we live in the best of all possible worlds' was 'hold my extra paper'. Not only do you get to create something out of nothing, but if you have a philosophical bend you get to use it to examine your reality from a new angle.
None of this was what I intended when I made up the world along with the story during NaNoWriMo. So at the time, the world barely existed beyond what Clarissa could see at the time. What we had was a bubble of air roughly the size of Neptune, held together in a roughly spherical nebula by moon-sized islands. And not our moon, that thing's huge.
Basically, the project was begun by deciding on a few parameters. And the goals were basically 'write a novel in a month', and 'get a short story to those guys at Tevun-Krus' (Wattpad's longest running sci-fi ezine, worth a look if you have some time) who were doing an issue on something called 'skypunk'.
So the plan was to write something roughly resembling a hard science-fiction skypunk version of Firefly. Basically, cram some of the respect the Expanse pays to physics by not having artificial gravity, and put that in airships with islands that are basically meteors and tiny moons surrounded in green vegetation with an atmosphere.
Now the plot for the story actually came about by treating the world as hard science fiction. You see, the idea of a nebula of semi-breathable air isn't physically impossible. And it being both really big and having more than one centre point of gravity also wasn't impossible. But the whole reason earth has an atmosphere is it has a magnetosphere that protects all that air from solar winds, or else we'd have barely a skiff of slightly airy dust like Mars does. So in order for this world to exist, it needs an artificial magnetosphere. And that means it needs people to keep it running, and a power source.
And that's where ferrying a box full of antimatter across the sky to power a massive electromagnet came from. In this case, worldbuilding created the plot.
But the challenge of world building is that if the world isn't cemented when the story is written, the world changes without the book. And that has definitely happened.
I'm actually impressed by how much of it stuck. Point one was pretty easy, though. It's not like anything dramatic has happened in physics to make me reassess gravity or how dangerous antimatter could be.
The idea of the Endless Sky being Canada wasn't wholly unexpected.
You see, Canada is weird. And a lot of that is by design. Canada was born from a deliberate effort by a political party (much more loosely associated, compared to what parties are like today) called the Reformers to avoid allowing Lower Canada (the original name of Quebec) to be subsumed by Upper Canada (Eventually Ontario), while keeping both from being subsumed by British administration. The Reformers were an alliance of both English and French, Catholic and Protestant, meant to give themselves responsible government that was accountable principally to them.
In a lot of ways, Canada wouldn't exist if Robert Baldwin in English Canada hadn't become such a good friend to Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine in French Canada. To the point where when a mob kept Lafontaine from being elected in his own riding, the English reformers had him run in one of their ridings to ensure he made it to Parliament.
More to the point, a view of Canadian history I ascribe to is that there are three founding cultural pillars to the country. English, French, and the First Nations. (Strangely, our laws need to work in both English and French, and First Nations oral history is now legally admissible as evidence)
And a lot of building the Endless Sky was trying to work through my own impressions of my home. Volante is English Canada, Olencia is French Canada, the Wayfarers are the First Nations. Much like Canada itself, the Endless Sky is heavily defined by its geography, and accepting the place you live in is a defining part of both First Nations history, and the history of everyone else who came here up until the twentieth century. The Hudsons Bay Company sat itself on the Hudsons bay because the trade routes were all the rivers that ran around the Canadian Shield. The first Europeans to make lives here were the courier du bois. Right up until the 1800s, Canada would not have survived without people who were genuinely allies.
And adapting to the realities of the world you live in is an essential part of the Endless Sky. The Wayfarers regularly travel through thin air, and build clans and communities on ships that lack the strong pull of an island. Much like how the geography of the far north shaped the Inuit differently than the Haida on BC's west coast.
Much was made of the arctic expeditions, and looking for a Northwest passage. But from a genuinely Canadian perspective, it was a long series of failures caused by people refusing to learn from the answer the Inuit represented. If eating raw meat was going to kill you, the Inuit wouldn't be there.
Even building the Ravens' Child required collaboration. Mercy had to convince Tai'ik to help, and Vincent had to bargain with the Monastery.
And the Sky itself is a tense equilibrium. And I use equilibrium rather than balance deliberately. Balance is where things are equal on both sides. Equilibrium is the working relationship of things as they are, even when they're very different.
An orbit is an equilibrium. Our Earth and the Sun are both in equilibrium, despite the fact that the sun is 330,000 times more massive. And at its best, Canada works when it understands the need for that equilibrium, between individuals and societies, between different peoples, newcomers and old. When it doesn't work, it's usually when it forgets that, or deliberately tries to remove it.
And I'm only just brushing the surface of how deeply I could go with all of this. But like worldbuilding in general, if I take too fine a brush to this part of the edit I could be doing it until they nail my coffin shut. Not a great plan if I ever want to finish this story.
But on a casual glance through the story again, there's a couple of issues with my current worldbuilding that need to be addressed. One in particular.
The Ruins. Remember that story?
It's not in Beyond the Endless Sky.
The Vicar. The Ruins being created by the box's containment failing, the implications of it for both the Monastery and Tai'ik, none of that is in the story.
That needs to be fixed. And I'll probably keep the worldbuilding edit to fixing that issue. Because there is no end to the abyss of worldbuilding I could throw myself into. And I might not ever get around to finishing the story otherwise.