What makes great fantasy novels go is not the thud and blunder of battles. You can find that in any MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game). What makes great fantasy novels is the characters and their development.
Characters belong to cultures and civilizations. They belong to nations, kingdoms, tribes, and other social and political groupings. Worlds generally have more than one social or political grouping. One subplot you can develop is how your characters interact with other cultures and with characters from groups other than their own.
Their cultures and geographies mold your characters. Customs, names, where and how they live, and how they make their living are all shaped by the geography they live in and by how their culture interacts with it.
The world you are building and the characters who inhabit it must be internally consistent. You cannot have a farmer or a fisherman suddenly turn into a great warrior or even a decent magician. You need to organically develop the character so we can see their arc of growth. For example, in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, White has Merlin put Wart through many bodily and species changes so he can have a broad view of life, morality, and love, automatically generating and showing the growth arc of Wart’s character as he gets ready to pull the sword from the stone.
This is true whether you are writing fantasy or science fiction.
Stories like The Riddlemaster of Hed by Patricia McKillip make use of a clear but very understated world. McKillip’s worldbuilding is understated, seems simple, although it is not, and is internally consistent.
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin describes a world composed entirely of archipelagos and islands. Her characters live close to the water, so LeGuin has designed a novel magic system that requires the wizard to learn all the true names of things in order to make magic happen. In The Magic Goes Away, Larry Niven describes the way magic works as mana, and if the wizard does too much magic in a particular place, the magic goes away.
The key to understanding their worldbuilding is to see how complete and comfortable the characters are in the world’s milieu—even the ones who aren’t happy and are trying to change how the world works.
The price of failing to create an internally consistent world is the danger of throwing the reader flat out of their trance, which is very great. S. M. Stirling flirted with this in the Dies the Fire series when “alien space bats” monkey with physical laws and constants while not changing others. I had a very good friend, a fan of Stirling, who literally tossed the book against the wall and never picked up another Stirling book. Of course, the changes in the laws of physics and physical constants were explained as the series progressed, becoming a major trope.
Everything in your world must be internally consistent. This is what makes Alternate History possible. You start with a “change point” like William the Conqueror dies at Hastings in 1066 and Harald remains King, but every action and character after the change point must act more or less in the way they would have in the Original Time Line.
It is easier to world-build for a short story than for a novel. You can paint your “backgrounds” impressionistically in a short story, but they need to be done with considerably more detail in longer works.
When you are designing your characters, you need to make clear, first to yourself, and then to us, what their constraints are. You will not suddenly have one of your characters go behind a tree and come out wearing a superhero suit, or even just a set of armor.
Midworld and The Word for World is Forest are examples of how overpowering a milieu can be. In Alan Dean Foster’s Midworld, the entire world consists of a vast, dense forest where his primitive humans live. They even bury their dead in trees. In both books, the conflict centers on more-or-less evil expeditions from Earth that do not understand the planet, its ecology, or how humans have learned to live with it. In Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, her characters see themselves changing with the environment even as they win the struggle and expel the Terrans from the planet. If you see echoes of these books in the plots of James Cameron’s Avatar films, you’d be right.
The way you handle sex and sexuality in your world also needs to be internally consistent. You may have beings with multiple sexualities, as we find in L. Neil Smith’s Their Majesties’ Bucketeers, which posits three sexes in characters very similar to giant land crabs. From the days when Robert A. Heinlein designed an entire religion around sexuality in Stranger in a Strange Land, to the way sex is handled in Sarah Monette (writing as Katherine Addison)’s The Goblin Emperor, and everywhere in between, sex and sexuality are great plot points. Heinlein’s world-building was so concrete that there still exists a “Church of All Worlds” based on Stranger in a Strange Land.
Sex and sexuality are extremely bound up with custom in your world. See the way Steve Miller and Sharon Lee handle pansexuality, and show (not tell) poly and other sexual styles that are very different from our own. Sex is the driver of the plot in LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, too. Lois McMaster Bujold, Steve Miller, and Sharon Lee have created worlds where monogamy and our consideration of what love is are treated extremely differently.
Walt’s been an author and editor for fiction and nonfiction for more than thirty years. He was Editor in Chief of Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire Press and Editor of the Grantville Gazette magazine.
Currently, he’s an acquisitions editor for Misti Media LLC and editor of their Nazca Press imprint. He’s edited over fifty novels and hundreds of short stories, and before that, he was an avid reader and fan.
Reach him at waltboyes@gmail.com
