Avoiding space filling empires

What is your advice on avoiding this trope?

Personally the hardest part for me seems to be making a flag for all of them.

Make multiple smaller nations to stick in between, explain why countries are so big, if they are big, and make sure every country has some kind of characterization, if you will, and isn't just "there to take up space on the map."

Either that, or reduce the sizes of your landmasses, I suppose, but that's just laziness...

I think that you can actually justify these sometimes. For example, you could have your setting include a large empire that has xenophobic tendencies - for example, something like Tokugawa Japan, where foreigners are banned and trade is limited, or the Soviet Union, closed its doors to foreigners for a number of years. This trope doesn't have to be avoided so long as you come up with a decent justification for why the country doesn't get involved in the plot.

Or you could have large empires, but actually have them involved in the plot in some manner.

Oh, I had the wrong idea about what this trope meant (I thought it referred to large empires that are on the world map but never involve themselves in the plot, not large empires that often are involved in the plot but are impossibly large).

Well, the most obvious solution is to actually make sure to include several nations and give them a variety of different goals. Now, that can be a bit tedious, especially if some of those nations just aren't going to involve the story much, but one way to get around it is to try and include a token character from a nation that otherwise gets little attention in the story. For instance, you could have an expy of England, but the main characters happen to team up with one character from the expy of Belgium. So you are aware that the country is around, but might not see much more of a mention of it beyond that one character.

edited 16th Dec '11 6:48:22 PM by MyGodItsFullofStars

This is really only an Alternate History trope, isn't it? If so, I don't have much to say - it's not a genre I'm terribly familiar with.

But for the record, a courtesy link: Space-Filling Empire.

The obvious thing to do is to make a lot of smaller nations.

Turn your setting into an Expansion Pack World; make it clear that the nations that are featured are by no means the extent of the entire world, and add any other places as you develop your world further.

Or, you know, just make a bunch of smaller nations involve themselves in the plot somehow. It's your call.

Well in a big world war between the superpowers of my setting, entire small nations will either be resource targets and/or battlezones.

But I suppose having small nations around does give me some filler conflict in between the world wars.

I remember watching the movie version of The King And I once, and they showed a map of the world from that time period; either due to lack of knowledge or the constant instability in the area, Africa doesn't have any countries labelled on it; it's all just one color and labelled "Africa". Depending on who's making the map for your world, they might do something similar, lumping a bunch of seperate nations together under a single geographic label.

Wait - like I said earlier, I thought this was an alternate history trope. Where's all this about constructed worlds coming from?

An Alternate History is a kind of Constructed World, though much, much closer to Real Life than most other kinds.

A Space-Filling Empire is just where there's an empire where it's more plausible for there to be smaller nations, right? So if yours is a militaristic world where all the superpowers are conquering everyone else then the empires make sense, so it's not really the trope.

I still think it's likely for there to be some smaller nations though, either because the empires haven't got there yet, or they just don't have any resource or tactical value. Or they're maintaining neutrality by playing superpowers against each other.

edited 18th Dec '11 8:38:30 AM by Kesteven

You don't have to actually talk about all the other countries. You merely need to be sure to make the reader know they exist. After all, stories set in the real world don't talk about every single possible country, but the reader knows the real world and thus knows there are many other countries. In this case, you just need to be sure that the reader is somehow aware, in your alternate reality, that there is lots of other countries.

You could define the areas between the empires as unexplored territories (because they're dangerous), or small fiefdoms with little cohesion, or wastelands where nobody wants to live. Not every square mile has to have a flag on it somewhere.

Simple. Have lots of small, feuding countries in addition to your massive, impractical empires, like in the real world!

edited 19th Dec '11 6:13:28 PM by JHM

Seconded. I've got a lot of space-filling empires in my world, or rather, I have huge regions remote from the geographical locus of the main plot to which the people of my main characters' culture apply wide-ranging labels. This works partly because my world is Late Medieval/Renaissance and oceanic exploration hasn't really gotten off the ground yet. I mean, in situations like that, someone from a European-like culture is very likely to to bundle together far-off nations using non-precise terms like "the Orient" or "the Indies" or "Cathay" or whatever. With regard to the latter, it seems historically very common to misuse a label for a single nationality, often mispronounced, and just apply it willy-nilly to half a continent. Like calling all Africans "Moors" and so on. Of course, in an enlightened, technologically advanced world you're going to have to draw up long lists of countries and cities and their precise geopolitical status, at least if you're dealing with moderately well-educated characters. If you're world-building without a story and just for the fun of it, well, you'll be doing that anyway I reckon

If I can find my digital version I'll upload the world map of my main world showing national borders. It's got just shy of 200 nations.

Several of these are large empires.

Truthfully, I've skipped "space filling empire" in favor of "space filling balkanized region" but I try to put just enough story with each one that it at least makes sense.

Yeah, I know the topic is dead, but I'm throwing my two cents in anyway and ain't no one gonna stop me!

I think is important to note that a massive empire in and of itself is not at all a bad thing. If we wanted to "critique" the real world, I would call the Roman Empire "space filling", as I would many of the great empires of the middle east before and after Islam's rise, the Mongolian Empire, modern day America and Russia....you get the point. I'd even go so far as to say a world without at least one "space filling empire" is just as unrealistic as a world with nothing but.

Mostly, I'd consider geography before any other factors. Does the region you want to plunk your empire in support such a vast territory? A penisula full of mountains and islands is gonna be hard for one power to keep control over. A vast steppe, on the other hand, is relatively easy to patrol but difficult to defend from invasion (both for the same reason). Your empire will also need a source of food and water to support a presumably large population over a wide area, and other resources to build your cities, maintain your armies, and trade with other nations so that you can afford to keep such a powerful state united.

Technology in your world also matters. Big empires can't stay big if you don't have a way to get from point a to point b in time to put down rebellions and beat back invaders.

The thing is that there is such a thing as getting too big. The effort required to manage an empire rises exponentially with its size, and all-too-many historical empires fell when it turned out that they'd badly overextended their reach in their expansion (in fact, the only one that never did that was China after the end of its expansionist phase, and they kinda ran into the opposite problem...stagnation while the rest of the world advanced).

edited 10th May '14 9:48:42 AM by MattStriker

putting the implausability of overly large empires aside...

id think one way to deal with space filling empires would be to realise that large empires would be rather fractured, culturally, and subject to frequent change on the fringes of its territory. its pretty unlikely for a large continent spanning empire to be unified, and you get huge empires by it annexing smaller, neighboring territories, who have their own cultures and beliefs that arent necessarily going to gel with the rest of the empire.

you end up with actual space filling empires when you paint large strokes of a map with "factions a" "faction b" and "factions c" and then go "whelp, thats my job done". these empires arent just single regions; they're many and so long as you actually fill "faction _" with actual regions you theoretically shouldnt end up with an actual space filling empire.

although, a non-negative version of it would be to show the map-makers bias regarding certain parts...ala africa usually just being labeled africa.

edited 10th May '14 10:06:16 AM by Tarsen