World-building is a cool part of fantasy, but one of the hardest things to get right.

I like realistic worlds in my fiction. By its very nature, a goodly part of fantasy eschews them. A big chunk of the genre tends to fairly simple settings the better to tell its stories. There’s a real art to writing books like that, and as a narrative style it has its advantages, but it sacrifices verisimilitude. Fair enough, not everyone wants reality in their fantasy. The clue, you may say, is in the name. Who wants realistic fantasy?

Well, I do. I do want reality in my fantasy, as counter-intuitive as that sounds. I’m firmly of the school that the stranger the world is, the more real it has to feel. Construct a real enough imaginary environment and anything seems possible. I love Sword and Sorcery, with its vertiginous sense of deep time and holy-cow weirdness. I like the less grand guignol end of grimdark, as it suggests grubby existences of high infant mortality rates and oppressive lives lived in suffocating cultures. I love worlds with real ecologies, societies, economies and geographies. All of the “ies” Bring me more, so that I might feast upon them! Michael Swanwick, Michael Moorcock, Gene Wolfe, Ursula Le Guin, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Richard Morgan, George R.R. Martin, Robert Silverberg and of course JRR Tolkien – these are writers whose works I love. Continue reading →