Essentially, reading fantasy lit allows us a break from the everyday, the chance to go on a mental vacation, after which we return to the real world and see it anew. Tolkien defended this practice on practical grounds, claiming that it allowed us to refresh our perception of reality. Just as in the case of science fiction, these stories create realities other than our own, enchanted realms where the sun might be green instead of yellow. Tolkien, who celebrated the practice in his 1939 lecture “On Fairy-Stories.” There he defined and defended fantasy literature as being stories about other realms-“faerie,” or “Secondary Worlds”-via which authors and readers engage in imaginative and linguistic play. Prior to Lucas, the most famous world-builder was probably J.R.R. But it also imagines different dimensions in order to demonstrate concepts of space and time, telling the story of a square that inhabits a two-dimensional world (Flatland), but winds up visiting a one-dimensional world (Lineland), then meets a sphere from a three-dimensional world (Spaceland). That novel, first published in 1884, is many things, including a satire of Victorian social customs. Scientists since then have used world-building to see how natural laws might work, whether real or imaginary-for instance, what other planets might be like.īy the late 1850s, a fictionalized version of this practice had split off from philosophy and the sciences, becoming science fantasy, then modern science fiction literature, resulting in works like Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. In a famous example, he proposed that one has a moral obligation to repay loans, because if everyone chose not to repay, then the result would be a world where no one ever lent anyone money.
For instance, Immanuel Kant used world-building in the late 1700s to make ethical arguments. Long before Harry Potter, long before Star Wars, philosophers and scientists had already created the intellectual practice of world-building, a kind of thought experiment in which one invents a fictional world in order to test abstract concepts. World-building has become the essential foundation of geek artworks, so much so that in 2013, the science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders called it “an essential part of any work of fiction”(!), and “the lifeblood of storytelling.” In order to appeal to geeks, fantasy artists today are obliged to create not just movies, novels, or comics, but entire fictional cultures, languages, species, landscapes, histories, mythologies-sprawling alternative earths, strange other places that can be described so confidently and so thoroughly that their flora and fauna and machinery seem as solid and convincing as our own.īut world-building is hardly a new concept. For geeks, 40 years after Star Wars, it is no longer enough to make a world of fantasy one must make a world.