Universe

A brief history of the physical locations in the Brandon Sparks Universe – Joshua Fuld

Once I had created Brandon, Charlie and some of the other original characters, the next step was to create a world for them to exist in. The BSU started with a single bedroom, similar in size and shape to the one I grew up in. Not coincidentally, it was located in Plainview, NY, the town in which I was raised. Once I had established the bedroom as the center of Brandon’s world, things started expanding to the rest of his house and then to his school and so on.

At the outset, the Universe expanded as I needed it to, as opposed to creating locations in advance and then fitting the characters into them. With the exception of the introduction to Brandon Sparks and the Hidden Sun, the entire novel was written in the order it appears and all of the locations were created in the same order. I had no outline, or plan for the first novel. I wrote it as the ideas came into my head. It wasn’t until the second novel, Brandon Sparks and the Star Shadow that I started outlining portions of the story.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is, “When does the story take place?” This is an excellent question and I can see how a reader could ask this because I never explicitly answer it in the books. The story of Brandon Sparks takes place now, and is written in such a way that supposes the reader has already been exposed to enough sci-fi/fantasy that they are able to suspend disbelief enough to accept the fantastical parts of the story as fact. The when is not as important as the what.

One of the self-imposed restrictions I put on this project was to keep things as realistic as I possibly could, especially when it applied to physical limitations. Everything did not have to strictly adhere to the laws of physics, but it had to have a plausible explanation. For example, the Hidden Sun does not have wings. Wings look really cool, but in space they are unnecessary. This does not mean that other ships in the BSU don’t have wings, but it is definitely something that I consciously thought of while creating the ship.

Most of the inhabited worlds that exist in the BSU are similar to Earth; being partially covered in water, partially covered in land, and having an atmosphere rich in oxygen. This sort of flies in the face of traditional sci-fi, where planets are completely covered in sand or consist of flying islands. Again, this looks really cool, but it clashes with my idea that the more similar something is to the world the reader lives in, the more realistic it will feel, and the more likely they are to accept the sensational parts of the story. I do have to mention that I subverted this rule a bit with Harr, a planet that is completely covered in volcanoes, but I do explain that the waterways are beneath the surface. Harr probably looks a lot like Earth did in its early days.

In summation, the realism of the physical Universe and the way it supports the story is more important than the thrills a reader might get from a more unrealistic landscape.