Setting

A setting (or backdrop) "is the time and geographic location within a narrative, either non-fiction or fiction." Setting "initiates the main backdrop and mood for a story," and its elements "include culture, historical period, geography, and hour"; broader senses call it the story world or milieu. The article sorts it into three basic forms: the natural world of landscape, weather and seasons; the cultural and historical background against which the characters move; and built or inhabited places, "a house, a park, a street, a school, etc."

Setting is atmosphere first, but for the working novelist it is also a continuity surface. Every established place, era, season and social rule becomes canon that later chapters are read against, and a contradiction reads as an error, which is why those details belong in the story bible. In speculative fiction the setting hardens into worldbuilding, where the rules must not only be recorded but must hold under pressure.