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Posts in the "Worldbuilding" Category

Smacks of Scholarship

Book Giveaway

So, as all of my other co-bloggers here at The Night Bazaar have mentioned (thanks guys!) I’m giving away a signed copy of Southern Gods this week to a randomly picked commenter. Comment on any blog entry this week and your name goes into the hat. It’s that easy.

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Research. In my mind there’s two types that come into play when you’re writing fiction, and I’ve dealt pretty extensively with both. But before we get into that, let’s define it, shall we?

Research (for ficiton): When an author must go to reference, source materials to provide verisimilitude in his or her prose, providing enough detail in the reader to trust the author and suspend their disbelief.

That’s my working definition, anyway.

I’ve had to do extensive research for my novels in two instances. The first was for Southern Gods. Because parts of SG are set in 1880 and 1951 and a few years in between, in Arkansas, and many possible readers would be alive during that time with some frame of reference. I knew I had to get things right, otherwise the book would be a big steaming pile. I strove for historical veracity. (more…)
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World Building in Fantasy

Worldbuilding

Congratulations to my esteemed colleague Katy Stauber for the release of her novel Revolution World, which comes out this week. Publisher’s Weekly chose it as one of their top 10 releases in fantasy & science fiction this spring. If you’d like a chance to win a free copy, comment on any of our posts this week and give us the name of a book you’re currently reading. You don’t get extra consideration if, like me, you’re in the middle of 20 books at a time. However, you can comment on more than one post to up your chances of winning. Visit this post for more details.

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I grew up on science fiction and fantasy, but my greatest love is fantasy. As a young reader, I reveled in the richly-textured worlds of fantasy, like Tolkien’s, C.S. Lewis’s, the worlds of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. I loved especially the fantasy-science fiction crossovers and the science fantasies that had a science fictional explanation for evocative fantasy elements, or utilized some science fiction tropes in an otherwise fantasy setting — Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover, Roger Zelazny’s Amber books, Michael Moorcock’s Runestaff series. To this day, I think the millieu of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern has some of the coolest ideas ever written that blend science fiction concepts and fantasy esthetics. (more…)
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Building the World from the Ground Up

Worldbuilding

Comment on this post about the latest book you’re reading, people, and you’ll enter to win a free book! It has fire-breathing cows. What other motivation do you need, seriously?

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I admit it. I’m a sucker for worldbuilding.

Not just my own, mind you, but the worldbuilding of others. I turn up my nose a lot these days at ill-built worlds, lazy pseudo-European settings, unnecessary made-up words for real-world objects (“cafeel,” “caf” and “caffe” is just, you know, coffee at the end of the day), and “hey, it’s just like the Wild West only with different names for the countries” handwaves. (more…)
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Come with me on this adventure

Worldbuilding

Yay! The book is out! We’re doing a giveaway of two books this week. Comment and maybe you’ll get free fiction!
I actually consider my world-building in Revolution World to be the height of laziness. I put it in a futuristic small town Texas which we all know will never change. The small towns of the world will not bend to trendy fads like the Internet, the big bang theory, the digital revolution or the coming oil apocalypse. I remember the day my own hometown got the Internet. I remember because it wasn’t that long ago. Before the cable company started selling it, you had to dial up long distance over a 1440 (if you were fancy like that) modem. I could add all the tech craziness to the book that I wanted, secure it the knowledge that the people, the way they would act and the choices they would make, wouldn’t change at all.

To create a futuristic science fiction world is to be a nerd kid in the penultimate candy shop. It’s so fun. And I freely confess that with this book, I went nuts. Seriously gutbuster nuts. If future tech was a buffet, I’d have gotten kicked out of the restaurant. So it has: hovercars, LOTS of genetic mutants, lasers, EMP bombs, and even fire-breathing (self-barbecuing) cows.

I think this is because I have way too many conversations that go like this:

Me: Wouldn’t it be cool if (computers ran the country, we ran away and started a mutant goat farm, you could order Iron Man suits off Amazon, etc etc etc)?

Other Person: Oh, that’s completely ridiculous and impossible. You could never do that because blah, blah, blaaaahhhhh

Far be it from me to deny someone else the basic human pleasure of raining on my parade, but that conversation gets old. Suspend the disbelief just for a second and embark on a conversational journey with me. Forget the dreary misery of modern life for five seconds and play the ‘What if’ game. When you create your own world, though, there’s nobody in there to say you can’t have hypercolor cats and ninja Pomeranians and burger joints on the moon. I control the horizontal and the vertical. It’s lovely. (more…)
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Worldbuilding is Research

Worldbuilding

This week, Katy Stauber‘s REVOLUTION WORLD is released into our regular old everyday world. We are all celebrating – congratulations Katy! And Katy is giving out two copies of REVOLUTION WORLD to folks who qualify. How do you qualify, you ask? You comment. Make yourself heard. For more info on Katy and REVOLUTION WORLD, go to her profile page here, and make clicky on her various links.

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The best books have MAPS.

Okay, so maybe your book isn’t high fantasy. It doesn’t matter – a map always makes it better. You know it’s true. The best books have maps at the front, appendices and glossaries in the back. If you’re anything like me, you poured over every inkstroke of Tolkien’s maps, over and over again, growing up. Discovered the whole of Aragorn and Arwen’s love story buried in the massive LotR appendices. (BTW, fuck the movies, okay? Fuck them right in the eyehole. I wish I never saw them and could reclaim my childhood memories of the novel and NOT see Elijah and Sean and Viggo and Liv. I wish I never watched those movies. They’re great, right. They’re TOO good. I want my childhood images back!) (more…)
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The Stuff of Creation

Worldbuilding

First off, congratulations to Katy on the release of Revolution World! Another one of our babies going out into the world. A reminder: Katy is giving away two copies of Revolution World. All you have to do to enter is add a comment to any of the posts this week and in the comment let us know one book you’re currently reading.

This is a fun topic for me. I like worldbuilding. I think it’s one of my strengths. When thinking about this post, I thought about what it was, exactly, that drew me to wanting to create new worlds. I have to go back to roughly seventh grade, which is about the time (I can’t precisely recall anymore) I was introduced to role playing games. The first was Dungeons and Dragons, but in the years that followed, I played a lot of games. A lot. Both as a GM (gamemaster) and as a player. (more…)
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I Never Drive Faster Than the Reader Can See

Worldbuilding

Besides, as Jack Burton said, it’s all in the reflexes.

Sort of.

First, congrats and good luck to Katy on her debut. May Revolution World find its perfect audience, and everything go smoothly and successfully on the launch. Katy is running a contest, by the way. Name a book you’re reading in the comments section below and win a copy of Revolution World.

As Courtney stated before, this week’s topic is World-building. World-building isn’t just for high epic fantasy. It’s a requirement for any novel with a setting. Thing is, most writers only notice the world-building aspects of a story when it isn’t based in reality. Why? Because we’re immersed in it every day of our lives and don’t really see it until we venture into unfamiliar territory like Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It’s then that writers are overwhelmed with the massive data required to make “reality” happen: geography, culture, language, religion, politics, economy, history, races, technology, ecology, physics, law, and weather patterns. These things are all required from any writer, and this is only the most cursory of lists. Writers also have to be careful how they convey all this information. Otherwise, the reader is drowned in a sea of boring facts. So it was that I was taught to think of world-building as an iceberg. The writer knows the whole gi-normous thing while the reader only sees the ickle bit that juts up above the surface of the water. But if the reader doesn’t see the stuff below the surface, why bother? Well, we all know that even the unseen bits of an iceberg have catastrophic effects on objects around them. Readers, whether they know it or not, expect it because that’s how reality operates. So, how does one shoe-horn an iceberg into the story without boring the reader to death?

We’ve all heard the expression “Less is more.” right?
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The Art of Playing God

Worldbuilding

This week we’re talking worldbuilding, a subject guaranteed to delight an epic fantasy freak like me. But first, huge congrats to Katy, whose sf novel Revolution world officially releases this week! She’s giving away two lovely copies, and all you’ve gotta do to enter is tell me the name of a book you’re reading. Doesn’t even have to be sf&f!

Okay, so: worldbuilding. It’s part of what makes sf&f so much fun, both to read and to write. Playing the “what if” game never gets old. But where do you start? How do you develop a world both fascinatingly unique and totally convincing? (more…)
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