Think about the past of your world. Who won the wars? Was it a tyrannical ideology that set up a dystopia, or a democratic ideology that eventually became economically and politically corrupt? Did they work together against something worse? 

Consider that you don't have to fine-tune every detail of your world's history. Just enough to where the events that matter are fresh in the back of your mind. You can always add more to your history later, and often, I have to in order to keep making the story interesting. In real history, certain events happened that you can take inspiration from. Maybe you're leading a medieval army and fighting a different one, like the Battle of Agincourt, or maybe it's a more modern story that takes inspiration from Stalingrad. Either way, like in real life, every historical event of your world shaped your world's present. The further back in time an event was, the more notable the change. 

In a post-apocalyptic story, people have this general gripe where people will spray paint the walls or carve "ALL HOPE IS LOST", or something along those lines to be melodramatic and deliver exposition to the viewer. While someone argued that they wouldn't even think about or have the time to do something like that, someone else argued that humanity can be melodramatic in events and that it makes sense to have this occur. With The Walking Dead, when Rick Grimes wakes up in the hospital, he sees plenty of graffitied signs that give him context clues about what to do, such as "aim for the head". Because an apocalypse story is usually explosive with its inciting incident, a ton of history happens all at once instead of gradually over centuries. It's the same with Fallout, when the world succumbs to a nuclear conflict that lasts only two hours and irrevocably changes the planet. Though Fallout isn't scientifically accurate (and neither is The Walking Dead, for that matter), the point isn't the accuracy of these stories, but what they represent.

In a fantasy story, you can often hide a greater civilization that came before in the guise of ruins. In real life, we know so little about our past before the agricultural revolution. Because humans who are anatomically the same as us have existed for hundreds of thousands of years and only about 1.5% of our history is civilization, many remain skeptical that every human was nomadic for most of our history. Some historians argue that because sea levels were much lower thousands of years ago and ships were one of humanity's earliest inventions for navigation, seafaring civilizations theoretically could've existed (like the Polynesians, but much earlier). While this has sparked a lot of historical debate in reality, the point isn't reality; it's what you're writing. Do you want to hide civilizations that used to explore your planet? After all, ships rot and sink to the bottom of the sea if abandoned after eons of time, and bones wouldn't be a common excavation site at the bottom of the ocean.

Alright, so what about a sci-fi space exploration story? Well, there are a lot of questions to ask. Did humanity unite? If so, what ideology ended up winning? If not, what nations are colonizing the stars? How do they stake their claims? Are there alien civilizations that are comparable? Maybe medieval or industrial-era technology compared to humanity? 

Even in the future, history will always be written, and we will always learn more and more about our history as time progresses. Even if completely unique, I think good fiction mimics life, whether or not we anticipate it as such. Honestly, I'd be equally impressed as surprised if you could create a world where all events are based in complete fiction, since it's hard to imagine what hasn't happened. Because every piece of fiction I've seen mimics real events in some way, whether it be something simple like a war declaration or a technology, it'd actually be an interesting change of pace.

Until we meet again,

Dustin.