Ursula K. Le Guin on Autocosmology

Excerpts from her essay "Do-It-Yourself Cosmology," the first text on record in which "Autocosmology" was coined

Do-It-Yourself Cosmology 1977

It would seem that the writer who composes a universe, invents a planet, or even populates a drawing room, is playing God. The creation of people, of worlds, of galaxies—since it all comes out of one's head, surely it must also go to one's head?

Some years ago, in the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers Association, Paul Anderson published an article called (if I remember rightly) "How To Create a World." Taking it for granted that any reader of the publication would understand the pleasures of autocosmology, he warned gently of the dangers of carelessness, and then got down to the groundwork. Which kind of star is likely to have planets? What size of planet is likely to have life aboard it? At what distance from what size sun? Is the moon's role functional or decorative? And so on, and on.

People ignorant of science or science fiction are usually convinced that "sci fi writers just make all that up," but of course any halfway serious science fiction writer has to have studied such topics, and to keep reference books handy. Imagination is the essence; but it is controlled, exactly as the profuse strains of unpremeditated Art are controlled by the requirements of fixed or free rhythm and rhyme. As soon as you, the writer, have said, "The green sun had already set, but the red one was hanging like a bloated salami above the mountains," you had better have a pretty fair idea in your head concerning the type and size of green suns and red suns—especially green ones, which are not the commonest sort—and the arguments concerning the existence of planets in a binary system, and the probable effects of a double primary on orbit, tides, seasons and biological rhythms; and then of course the mass of your planet and the nature of its atmosphere will tell you a good deal about the height and shape of those mountains, and so on, and on. You may even feel impelled to make a cursory study of the effect of senility upon salamis. None of this background work may actually get into the story. But if you are ignorant of these multiple implications of your pretty red and green suns, you'll make ugly errors, which every fourteen-year-old reading your story will wince at; and if you're bored by the labor of figuring them out, then surely you shouldn't be writing science fiction. A great part of the pleasure of the genre, for both writer and reader, lies in the solidity and precision, the logical elegance, of fantasy stimulated by and extrapolated from scientific fact…

The more one thinks about it the more one sees the usefulness of Do-It-Yourself cosmology as a device for teaching the general principles, mechanics and history of the cosmos, of the solar system and the planet Earth…

This kind of world-making is a thoughtful, experimental, performed with the caution and the controlled, receptive spirit of experiment. Scientist and science-fictioner invent worlds in order to reflect and so to clarify, perhaps to glorify, the "real world," the objective Creation. The more closely their work resembles and so illuminates the solidity, complexity, amazingness and coherence of the original, the happier they are…

—Ursula K. Le Guin