Without World - The White Review

More recently, the concept of “worldbuilding” has come to the fore. The term describes the creation of fictional worlds with unique settings, histories, aesthetics, and characters. Our franchise-dominated media environment is rife with worlds and extended universes, straddling the physical and the virtual, the fictional and the real. There is a pal... See more

In this decade, worldbuilding is not just an imaginative exercise with purely artistic aims. The writer-reader relationship has been supplanted by a creator-consumer dynamic. As a thinly veiled commercial endeavor, its purpose is to oil the wheels of major fan-favorite franchises. Worldbuilding provides grist for expansion. The wider the world, the... See more

What is a World?

We could say a World is something like a gated garden. A World has borders. A World has laws. A World has values. A World has dysfunction. A World can grow up. A World has members who live in it. A World gives its members permission to act differently than outside of it. A World incentivizes its members to keep it alive, often with ... See more

Artists excel at creating worlds. They do this first for themselves and then, when they share their work, for others. Of course, world-building means creating everything—not only making things inside the world but also the surrounding world itself—the language, style, rules, and architecture.

The story of a human retreat from this world, either to the stars above or the virtual realm within, can mask a disregard for or resignation about what is done with the world we do have, both in terms of the structures of human societies and the non-human world within which they are rooted. Put another way, we might say that imagining the digital s... See more