Program structure
What you'll go through
- What Makes a World BelievableInternal consistency, reader trust, and the limits of explanation
- Technology as Narrative DriverHow invented systems create story problems worth solving
- Society and ConflictUsing speculative sociology to generate plot and theme
- Exposition TechniquesIceberg method, dialogue embedding, and environmental storytelling
- Subgenre ConventionsCyberpunk, space opera, cli-fi, and biopunk compared
- Draft WorkshopBuilding a world document and writing from inside it
About this program
Full overview
Science fiction has a worldbuilding problem that no other genre faces quite as sharply: the setting itself is a character. A future city, a generation ship, a post-scarcity economy all require internal logic that readers can trust even when they cannot verify it.
This course focuses on how that logic gets built and deployed. You will study how writers decide what to explain and what to leave implicit, how technology shapes social structure in fiction, and why some invented worlds feel lived-in while others feel like set dressing.
- Exposition without information dumps
- The relationship between technology and conflict
- Sociological imagination in speculative fiction
- Hard SF versus soft SF conventions
Ready to read between the lines?
Fiction isn't just stories — it's a structured way of thinking about character, tension, and world-building. Getting started with a trial means zero pressure to decide right away.