Yesterday I wrote about my first steps into building a whole world. One of the reasons for doing that was that I wanted to set the stage for talking about worldbuilding as an endeavor.
Worldbuilding can mean a variety of things. For instance, Brandon Sanderson is well-known for his take on worldbuilding where specific things, like magic, are concerned. There is a workshop given by N. K. Jemisin where the focus is on developing cultures. Both these approaches are interesting and fruitful, but I’d like to start at the more primeval level of mapmaking and world construction.
There is a lot of advice on the internet about how to develop a fantasy world. Most of that advice focuses on making a “believable” world, which means one that is recognizable to those living on our planet. There should be continents, oceans, continental drift. Mountains should be near the coast, and rivers should flow from higher ground to lower. Weather patterns should mimic the weather patterns we have here on earth, and should produce climates and biomes we are familiar with.
As a poet, I’m familiar with the principle. I always try to ground abstract ideas in what are called concrete details. Details which have a solid reference in reality, and which earn you the right to invoke more abstract concepts about which we often have little agreement (ie. love, faith, justice and the like). And in some ways, these familiar geological processes on which we build worlds can form a concrete reality that permits the existence with things that have no reference to our lived experience (magic, dragons, etc.).
After building a few of these worlds, I felt a sense of dissatisfaction set in. If we follow the excellent advice on worldbuilding, don’t we just end up with worlds that are like earth, over which we lay our fantastical ideas? What about a world still dominated by dinosaurs, where dragons are the most highly developed species of great lizards? Or a world where nation states are controlled by beholders or mind flayers or some other group of grotesque creatures? Do these require different biomes, a different geological history?
The problem, of course, is that we ourselves are dominated by what is popular, and in general terms its the familiar that is popular. Complete flights of fancy seem out of the question.. And yet we have this game where some outlandish things have been created, often borrowing form the literature of the past.
I’d like to propose the building of worlds that don’t just represent a different flavor of what we already have. Worlds that have things in them that we aren’t familiar with, to go along with the things that are.
Note: The names of the creatures mind flayers and beholders are the intellectual property of Wizards of the Coast, and are used here in reference to the Dungeons and Dragons game.
Nimirien Books 