Fantasy Writer’s Handbook
Fantasy has to be wondrous and believable at once. Chase only wonder and the world collapses at the first hard question; chase only logic and nobody feels
Tag: Worldbuilding (Page 3)
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Collision with Andromeda
Collision with Andromeda sat unfinished for eight years. Here is the story behind a novel told partly from the point of view of a galaxy, and the lonely mind at its heart.
Fiction WritingWhat a Mars Colony Will Actually Look Like
The Mars colony in the movies, a gleaming glass dome with green gardens and sunset views, would kill everyone inside a week. The real thing will be buried under meters of red dirt, built by robots before anyone arrives, and…
Fiction WritingWhat Was the Big Bang, the First Nanosecond, and What Came Before
The Big Bang was not an explosion in space, it was the beginning of space, and the wildest events in cosmic history happened in the first sliver of a second. A plain-language tour of the first nanosecond, what the leftover…
OctoberFrank Herbert’s Birthday: Dune Day for Worldbuilders
Frank Herbert's Dune was rejected by 20+ publishers before an auto-repair-manual company printed it. On his birthday, a look at the worldbuilding that makes Dune the genre's gold standard, and what it teaches anyone building a universe.
AdaptationNational Tolkien Reading Day
National Tolkien Reading Day is March 25. The boxed set I saved for, the boring opening I almost quit, the eagles plot hole, and what Tolkien taught me.
Character DevelopmentHobbit Day
Hobbit Day is September 22. What Tolkien's hobbits teach about character and worldbuilding, an honest take from a writer who never read The Hobbit.
Book ReviewsThe Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
The leper Thomas Covenant is pulled into a magical Land he refuses to believe is real, in one of epic fantasy's most ambitious and uncompromising works. A radical inversion of the genre built on a deliberately unlikable hero: brilliant and…
Book ReviewsA Game of Thrones
The fight for the Iron Throne, woven through many viewpoints in a world where no character is safe. Sprawling, morally complex, and ruthlessly unsentimental, the first of A Song of Ice and Fire and the book that redefined modern epic…
Book ReviewsThe Dictionary of Imaginary Places
Over a thousand fictional lands, Middle-earth, Oz, Atlantis, described as if they were real geography, with genuine wit and scholarship. A pure pleasure for literature lovers and a real world-building study for writers at the same time. It does something…
Book ReviewsThe World of Shannara
A lovingly assembled companion to Terry Brooks's long-running Shannara world, gathering decades of geography, history, magic, and lineage into one illustrated reference. It shows what consistent world-building accumulates into over time, though its value is tied almost entirely to how…
AdaptationThe Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien did not just write Middle-earth; he drew it, mapped it, and lettered it, and this collects 180-plus of his own sketches, maps, and inscriptions. The writer's lesson is the cartography: he wrote against his maps to keep the world…