Quotes About Worldbuilding

Having a world unfold in one's head is the fundamental SF experience. It's a lot of what I read for. Delany has a long passage about how your brain expands while reading the sentence "The red sun is high, the blue low"—how it fills in doubled purple shadows on the planet of a binary star. I think it goes beyond that, beyond the physical into the delight of reading about people who come from other societies and have different expectations.

I'm terribly particular about what I read: lush writing, secondary world or seriously far-out science fiction, strong worldbuilding, dynamic characters. I need to have it all for it to work for me.

Robin Hobb is the author of the Farseer Trilogy, the Liveship Traders Trilogy, the Tawny Man Trilogy, the Soldier Son Trilogy, the Rain Wilds Chronicles, and the Fitz and the Fool Trilogy. She has also written as Megan Lindholm.

Food is an excellent way to do very elegant worldbuilding - the kind that can make a fictional world seem real, like it extends way past the edges of the frame.

If you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it's really hard to do if you don't know a lot, at least in a basic way, about how the real world works.

I enjoy worldbuilding very much. I generally start with an approximation. With 'Flesh and Spirit' and 'Breath and Bone,' because I was thinking of a world on the brink of a dark age, I began with the sense of Roman Britain. But I purposely set the geography to match something other than Britain - which has been overdone.

Brandon Sanderson

Though in this genre we write about the fantastic, the stories work best when there is solid grounding in our world. Magic works best for me when it aligns with scientific principles. Worldbuilding works best when it draws from sources in our world. Characters work best when they're grounded in solid human emotion and experience.

My editor's main job is to cut down my worldbuilding. There's so much fun stuff in there, you know?

Guy Gavriel Kay's 'Tigana' is, in my opinion, one of the best, if not the best fantasy novel ever written. It's beautifully written, the characters are unforgettable, the worldbuilding is exquisite.

With 'Delirium,' I had to spend time thinking about the political, social and religious structure of a different world. But it was a fun challenge.

Fantasy allows for less rigorous worldbuilding and more vigorous exploration of moral questions. Sci-fi is opp.