Posts in the "Favorite SF/F Worlds & Cultures" Category

• Write a Book About People Who Couldn’t Exist Anywhere Else

  Favorite SF/F Worlds & Cultures

  

  Don’t forget! There’s a giveaway this week for Courtney Shafer’s The Whitefire Crossing.You can read a short excerpt on Courtney’s website, or get the first 6 chapters for free in PDF form at the Night Shade Books site.

  And if you’d like to win a free copy, just comment on any post this week with the name of your favorite science fiction or fantasy world or culture. Comment on more than one post for a better chance of winning (but only one entry per post).

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  It should come as no surprise that I’m a sucker for a fantasy or SF book with great world building. Books about specific cities have been getting a lot of traction – Bas Lag, Ambergris, Veridon, Viljamer – and don’t get me wrong, Gormenghast is a cool place, but I love looking beyond one culture or one city and into the actual mechanics of the world. Gene Wolfe does powerful stuff with worldbuilding in his Long Sun books, as does Herbert in Dune (and his oft-overlooked The Green Brain), and LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. Martha Wells does some great stuff with worldbuilding in City of Bones and The Cloud Roads, and I still have a soft spot for KJ Bishop’s wasted world in The Etched City.

  But for my money, the world that stands out to me the most as fully thought-out and wonderfully weird – balancing on that fine wire between SF and F (which I love) – is the bizarre cultures and world of Paul Park’s Starbridge Chronicles.

  Never heard of it? (more…)

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• Favorite and Antifavorite Worlds

  Favorite SF/F Worlds & Cultures

  Congratulations to Courney, whose The Whitefire Crossing comes out this week! You can read a short excerpt on Courtney’s website, or get the first 6 chapters for free in PDF form at the Night Shade Books site.

  And if you’d like to win a free copy, just comment on any post this week with the name of your favorite science fiction or fantasy world or culture. Comment on more than one post for a better chance of winning (but only one entry per post).

  

  Favorite and Antifavorite Worlds

  Most of the science fiction and fantasy worlds I have loved over the years are not places I would want to live. In fact, many of them, I love precisely because they provide lots of challenges to the characters. I’ll refer to these as “antifavorites,” because it feels weird calling Elric’s or Conan’s savage worlds a “favorite,” nor would I want to go live in Mad Max’s world. But I still love it as far as fictional world-building goes.

  Just the same, you gotta draw the line somewhere. I won’t go so far as to label Orwell’s world in Nineteen Eighty-Four a “favorite” or an “antifavorite,” even though I feel it’s incredibly important and a gorgeously designed nightmare. It appears below, but just figure that one’s kind of an exception, because it’s too ghoulish and realistic to me to “enjoy” in anything like the usual sense. What it is is a case study in how to create a Hell for your characters to make a point, and that in itself is brilliant world-building.

  I also won’t differentiate the favorites from the antifavorites below. I feel like doing so would imply a belief that fantasy/science fiction is escapism….or that some SF/F is escapism. Or wish fulfillment — whatever you wanna call it. Sure, some is, some isn’t, but I’m not drawing the line. It would put up a fence between Narnia (where things are cool most of the time) and the Alien franchise (where everything sucks). I don’t really see things that way. Escapism is just travel under another name. Books are a vacation, but not all vacations are the same. You can travel to some sanitized resort and have margaritas delivered to your chaise lounge, or you can hack your way through the Amazon jungle and machete-fight with jaguar poachers.

  Either way, you’re still on vacation.

  Therefore, this list is limited to the places where I think the worldbuilding is kinda cool, for whatever reason, regardless of whether I’d want to hang out there. I also skipped most of the worlds that are close alternates of our own; if it wasn’t in the future or another planet/universe altogether, I more or less leapfrogged over it.

  There are a lot of them. So what you get is a list. These are just the ones that spring to mind, in somewhat random order.

  The Absolute F*#!#*in’ Coolest Worlds in SF and F:

  Anne McCaffrey’s Pern.

  Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover.

  Riverworld.

  Roger Zelazny’s Amber, Shadow, and the Courts of Chaos.

  The world of Dream in “The Season of Mists.”

  The World of the Tiers.

  Larry Niven’s Ringworld, and many of the other locales in his stories.

  The Whoniverse.

  Discworld.

  The “Jupiter” of floaters, sinkers and hunters as described by Carl Sagan in Cosmos. (more…)

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• Take Me Away

  Favorite SF/F Worlds & Cultures

  

  Remember, this is Courtney’s release week for her wonderful debut, The Whitefire Crossing. For a chance to win a copy of Courtney’s book, just comment on this post (or any other this week) with a culture from a novel that you enjoyed.

  When I read, I really like being swept away to a different world. I know exactly where it started, too. My best friend back in third grade, Jim Vogt, was reading The Hobbit, and he recommended it to me. I checked it out from the library (I can still remember the artwork on the cover), and I was absolutely hooked. And The Lord of the Rings? Fugetaboutit! It’s where so much of my writing originates—at least in terms of the richness I’m shooting for and the scope of the story. So, of course I’m going to list Middle Earth as on of my choices. That’s like asking whether or not I like pizza. OF COURSE I LIKE PIZZA!

  The better question is what other stories have impressed me in terms of their level of richness in the culture or the world.

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• Party like it’s 1984

  Favorite SF/F Worlds & Cultures

  One of the reason’s I’m looking forward to Courtney Schafer’s Whitefire Crossing is for the world-building. Courtney is an avid mountain climber in Colorado and she said this book is chockful of mountains. I’ve climbed a few myself so I know the joy of the up. Comment on any of the posts this week with your favorite sci-fi world and you might win a free copy! Below are a few of my favorite sci-fi worlds.  Just for fun, I had the lolcatz help me out.

  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I’m not going to say I liked his vision of the future.  It’s not exactly some place I want to build a summer cabin.  But I was instantly immersed in his dysfunctional society and fascinated by the sly stabs it makes at our modern culture.   I re-read it the other day and was surprised to discover how relevant the book continues to be, in a horribly depressing kind of way. (more…)

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• In Another World. In Another Time.

  Favorite SF/F Worlds & Cultures

  This week Courtney is giving away signed copies of The Whitefire Crossing, so comment on this post and list your own favorite SF/F worlds to get a chance to win.

  Sorry I’m late. Got wrapped up in rewrites for the second novel and well… lost track of what day it was, like I do. (It happens more frequently than I’d care to admit.) Anyway, this week we’re discussing our favorite SF/F worlds. I’m sure it’s no surprise that I’ve a long laundry list because well… I’m a big fan of world-buliding done well, but I’ll try to keep it short.

  C.J. Cherryh is particularly great at world-building. The Faded Sun series and Cyteen are good examples. In The Faded Sun she creates a facinating caste system. (Spiritual leader class, Warrior class, Everyone Else class) Re-read it last year, and in spite of the fact that it became obvious to me (this time) that her deeply spiritual culture was missing its religion (bushido depends upon Buddhism, you see) I still think it’s brilliant. As for Cyteen, I’ve always been attracted to the bio-sciences and genetics, and Cyteen‘s corporate science world is really nicely drawn.

  Jonathan Stroud did a wonderful job with the Bartimaeus trilogy. The Amulet of Samarkand is among my favorite books — not just because the character Bartimaeus is hilarious in a way only Brits seem capable of being but because I really enjoyed the idea that in his alternate U.K. the power base is magic and not money. It’s a Young Adult novel with very grown up themes surrounding ethics and class.

  The Sten series by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch is one of my favorites too. I’m a closet military SF fan, you see. (But I’m super picky because I’m not pro-war.) Anyway, I like the way they set up the Empire in the series, and how each planet has its own set of cultures, not just one like they originally did with Star Trek. (Ah, the confines of a low budget which brought us cookie-cutter aliens.) It’s been a while since I’ve re-read the books (I’ve done so twice) but I seem to recall the worlds were treated as worlds and not towns or fiefs with one personality.

  Anyway, I’ll stop here. What are some of your favorites?

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• Give Me The Wild Lands

  Favorite SF/F Worlds & Cultures

  Have I mentioned how ridiculously excited I am that The Whitefire Crossing is out in the world at last?  (Everyone Else: YES. Yes, you have. You can shut up about it now!)  But seriously, for any aspiring authors out there who are wondering if slogging along through all the rejections is worth it…don’t give up!  The moment when you first see your book on the shelf is truly as wonderful as people say.

  So this week we’re talking about our favorite SF/F worlds and cultures (and don’t forget, if you want to enter to win a signed copy of The Whitefire Crossing, just comment on this post to tell me one of your own favorites!).  I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s read my posts here that my favorite worlds tend to be untamed places, possessed of stark, wild beauty rather than gentle vistas.  Like Martha in her post yesterday, I’ve had a hard time narrowing it down…but here are a few of my favorites. (more…)

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