Behind the Book: Collision with Andromeda
August 14, 2026
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.
Tag: Worldbuilding (Page 3)
Fiction WritingWhat a Mars Colony Will Actually Look Like
June 16, 2026
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
June 16, 2026
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
June 14, 2026
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.
Character DevelopmentHobbit Day
June 14, 2026
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.
AdaptationNational Tolkien Reading Day
June 14, 2026
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.
Book ReviewsThe Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
June 3, 2026
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
June 3, 2026
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
May 29, 2026
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
May 29, 2026
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…
Book ReviewsThe Road to Middle-earth
May 29, 2026
Shippey, a philologist who held Tolkien's own academic post, answers the question every Middle-earth lover eventually asks: how did he actually do it? He reverse-engineers the deepest world in fantasy into method, build names first, let the world grow to…
Book ReviewsDune
May 29, 2026
A desert planet where water is currency, giant worms guard a drug that bends space, and a betrayed heir becomes something more. The gold standard of integrated world-building, where ecology, religion, and politics interlock. The first hundred pages punish, and…