One of the key things that has halted so much progress of my worldbuilding project is trying to get the "science" or "foundational physics" of it right.
I don't want to spoil too much, but it's a vaguely SCP-style project, so if you know what SCP is, you might know a little bit about my project, but only a bit, because I'm trying to solve a lot of my perceived criticisms with SCP in my own project.
At first, it was generic multiverse stuff. I said, "The reason anomalous things exist is because they came through a multiversal portal and they infested the earth." Looking back on it now, it was not only atrocious and trope-y from a writing perspective, but it was also racist as fuck.
A lot of my old writing was pretty bad, in a thousand ways, but at least I put shit out back then. Now I can barely put shit out with how much I feel like I need to tweak and change.
I keep on revising and revising and revising. At least I'm abandoning the "multiverse" thing and trying to integrate dialectical materialist philosophy into it, not solely due to the fact that it's based, but because it might actually enhance my project's quality a bit, in my opinion.
My basic premise is "a sub-quantum layer of reality exists, it's chaotic, but sometimes it can become stable, and this is when reality is formed, but reality dissolves when it reverts back to being chaotic, in an endless cycle." But, that's really just the basic premise, and I still feel like it'll need a lot of tweaks / specifications before it becomes solid enough to base my entire project around.
It's just such a headache, 'cause I don't think I can ever get a final draft, I just keep revising. I'm balancing entertainment value, dialectical materialism, and possibility, and it's a headache.
Any advice / discussion welcome.
i have to or my brain explodes. i love combining fantasy tropes with sci-fi. i have a hard time just accepting things as they are because "magic", even if I find those kinds of universes fascinating to me.
cool thing is I've learned a lot about physics. bad thing is I can't just let it go
obviously you need rules, even SCP has "rules". but if actual scientists are involved they are going to study stuff and classify it and come up with their own theories. so you at least need what they think is happening to fill out your project, even if it's incorrect.
another bad thing is I tend to lean on quantum stuff and Planck-scale weirdness to do anything weird.
or what I call "resolution errors" where stuff not of this world basically has no physical structure below certain scales. so it has properties that can be measured (mass, hardness, etc) but it's like the material is made of a single atom. electron microscope would just see a blank, featureless plane of "matter".
i do stick with energy and matter can be neither created nor destroyed as a foundation to even my weirdest shit. it's got to come from somewhere (multiverse, foam, wormholes, dark energy).
i also love leaning on "dark energy is actually consciousness and the very act of thinking and sapience is taking up physical space and making the universe expand faster". this allows the concept of primordial consciousness, maybe it came about during the Inflationary Epoch. there's your "gods".
the above requires your universe to have a quantum theory of consciousness. but it means somehow (somehow) thought itself can access the energy of space-time itself (zero-point or whatever). collapse a tiny volume of space, free up energy, do stuff with it (magic!) (but also you are collapsing space-time, that's bad)
the SCP approach though is just to say reality itself is a shared delusion by all sapient perceiving entities and anything goes