Building Worlds

I’ve been thinking about worldbuilding a lot of late, as I’m on a panel about the subject at the Fantasy and Sci-Fi Spotlight event in Shrewsbury in a couple of weeks.

That panel is specifically about worldbuilding in science fiction – although I’m of the view that every work of fiction requires some amount of world construction. Even in the most realist of novels, you have to select which parts of the world you want to use, and you have to set up the action, the problem, the stakes you’re interested in. You have to invent situations and events.

The need to worldbuild is generally bigger and more obvious in speculative fiction, though. In a space opera or a second-world fantasy book, you literally have to create a whole new world (or many worlds, or a whole galaxy) – or at least give the impression of having done so. That “impression” is the crux of it. For the author, there’s isn’t enough time to really explore and catalogue a whole world with all its variance and nuance. We’ve been working on doing that for our world since the dawn of history and still haven’t managed it.

For the reader, it’s no good if a book is packed with world-building notes. A novel is not a travel-guide. A writer can spend a little time providing a wide-angle view, setting the scene, but that rapidly gets dull. Story is about character. The worlds we build need to be revealed from the point of view of the person or people we’re following who inhabit that world: the strange things they encounter, the problems they face, the weirdness, the normality.

The writer, then, is creating an illusion. The reader needs to believe that all of the worked-out detail of the world is there, even if only some of it is revealed. They have to believe that the story could reveal what’s happening in every building, every head, every palace, every starship if that happened to be relevant.

For the writer this creates interesting problems and challenges. The sheer scale of the task is one obvious one. Another – something I’ve discovered of late – is that of becoming lost in your own worldbuilding. About a year ago I started creating the milieu for an entire second-world fantasy series. It’s been a lot of fun creating characters, realms, magicks, dangers and wonders – but to date, I’ve barely written any of the actual books. It’ll pay off in the end because I have lots of source-material to draw on as I need, even if some of it never reaches the page. The danger is that I get so lost in the fun of worldbuilding that I don’t get round to the actual writing…