About BioFiction: A World-Builder’s Field Guide for Writers of Fiction by Ingrid Moon:

Craft plausible, exciting, amazing, and unique settings, characters, creatures, scenes, and more with this handy field guide to the life sciences.
Fiction writers are incredible founts of imagination and extrapolation. As difficult as it is to sometimes get words onto the page, a fiction writer’s mind is teeming with unexplored worlds and emerging characters and creatures all the time. It’s often a good challenge to come up with something entirely unique and fanciful, whether that’s in the setting, the characters, or the plot.
So why does a writer need science?
The easy answer is: We, as human beings, are sense-making machines. From the beginning, our brains are designed to find meaning and sense in the world around us. Yes, they are also designed to create and imagine. The human brain is an incredible problem-solver and engineer.
It is absolutely acceptable to make up everything in your world. You can create magic that is so unique and fascinating that you’ll have millions of fans writing fan-fic using your magic system. I might be one of them.
You could also create alien worlds and creatures that make no sense whatsoever to the reality of science, such as Star Trek’s crystalline entity, and you will have millions of fans debating its plausibility and sussing out the science behind it. That’s all good, too.
But what you’ll be creating, however unique in its expression, is ALREADY BASED on the systems of understanding you carry deep in your own subconsciousness. As a toddler banging spoons on the table, your brain was experimenting and collecting data and drawing conclusions about your world without the abstraction of the “discipline” of science.
As a human being, both you and your audience use scientific processes to imagine and create systems of living worlds, living magic, living beings, even if you never “learned science” in school.
Without those systems, things fall apart.
What I’m trying to say here is that you already know science. You already use “sense-making” abilities in your brain to build worlds. What you might need, then, is a boost or a detail. You probably don’t know everything about everything. This and my other books are here to help you fill some of those gaps.
ENTER BIOFICTION (and its companion books, ASTROFICTION and ROBOFICTION).
Science-based imagination isn’t just about little facts, but knowing the systems of life, their functions, and the consequences of “playing god”—or simply the knowledge of how much blood leaks out of a gunshot wound to the chest—can make your worlds rich, immersive, relatable, and plausible. It helps readers, gamers, viewers, and players feel more connected to the story, because on a subconscious level, the facts you choose will make sense to them.
So whether you’re creating an alien species based on non-carbon biochemistry, crafting a magical medical remedy to counter the vacuum of space, or building a world in which life has evolved as biohacked cybernetic organisms, this book will help you find the right terminology, the scientific principles, and the ethical dilemmas that stem from biological solutions to fantastical problems.
Everything you need to craft fantastical worlds and amazing creatures all in one brief biology reference.
This book gives you helpful details at your fingertips, from how much blood a person will lose when stabbed in the gut with a sword, to what biochemicals scientists search for on other planets to detect life. Makes a handy biology study guide for students, too!
A Reference Guide for:
– Astrobiology
– Natural selection
– Genetic diversity
– Microbial ecology
– Biochemical interactions
– Biopunk and biohacking
– DNA & mutation rates
– Symbiosis and parasitism
– Biological bases for magic
… and the many other biological factors that could be incorporated into your fantasy and alien worldbuilding!
Be sure to check out AstroFiction and RoboFiction, too!

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