Worldbuilding Genesis

            In an interview about her book Little Fires Everywhere (soon to be a Hulu mini-series), Celeste Ng talked about the “worldbuilding” she did to recreate 1990’s Shaker Heights, Ohio. I was in the audience, along with a few hundred other people, and happened to be in the middle of writing a paper about the use of the term worldbuilding in literary criticism. Part of that process was to trace the genesis of the term and it’s path from exclusive use as a craft term among speculative fiction writers, to a word Celeste Ng can use to describe her mainstream literary novel and expect everyone to know what she’s talking about.

            The term worldbuilding has progressed from the phrase “world building”, to a hyphenated form, to its current compound form, but has no entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. It has been a concept since J.R.R. Tolkien’s used the seemingly synonymous term “sub-creation” in his 1939 lecture on “Fairy Stories” and takes on its full meaning in Poul Anderson’s “The Creation of Imaginary Worlds: The World Builder’s Handbook and Pocket Companion” published in 1976.

            In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” based on his original lecture by the same name, Tolkien recognized the need for a term to describe this level of world creation. “The achievement of the expression, which gives (or seems to give) ‘the inner consistency of reality,’ is indeed another thing, or aspect, needing another name: Art, the operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation. For my present purpose I require a word which shall embrace both the Sub-creative Art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image: a quality essential to the fairy-story.”  In this essay, Tolkien settles on the term “fantasy,” but it is his term “sub-creation” that really sticks. Tolkien was limiting his discussion to sub-created worlds with a “quality of strangeness and wonder,” which may help explain the decades-long confinement of this term, and its successors, to discussions of speculative fiction.

            It was among the authors of these speculative genres, especially within the relatively new (at the time) science fiction craft books, that the term worldbuilding replaced sub-creation and took hold. Poul Anderson wrote the worldbuilding how-to guide referenced above. In “How to Build a Future, ” John Barnes narrows the use of the term to its most literal interpretation, the design of fictional planets, chastising authors who take a lazy approach to those creations. “Think about what most fictional planets are like. The writer who doesn’t worldbuild usually creates the familiar in drag: a single, excerpted environment. Jungle planets, ice planets, or desert worlds are usually just the Amazon, Antarctica, or the Kalahari without the research or detail a story actually set in those places requires.”

            Beyond the world of speculative fiction, there has been recognition that worldbuilding occurs, even if the specific term isn’t used. In his seminal book, The Theory of the Novel, Stevick Notes that “The idea that the novel contains its own world is encountered so frequently in phrases such as ‘the world of Dickens,’ or ‘the world of Evelyn Waugh’ that is it useful to find the idea stated forthrightly and passionately.” Here Stevick seems close to choosing or coining a term. Later, we see his explicit recognition of the task of worldbuilding: “After all, the creation of a world is not a small undertaking except perhaps to the divinely gifted. In truth, every novelist must begin by creating for himself a world, great or little, in which he can honestly believe.” The phrase “creation of a world” seems good enough for Stavik. Perhaps a dedicated term like worldbuilding might have helped state the idea more “forthrightly and passionately.”

            In his recent book, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, Mark J.P. Wolf revives Tolkien’s term “sub-creation” and uses it almost interchangeably with worldbuilding, even in the book’s title. He uses it when discussing Tolkien himself: “Arda, Tolkien’s subcreated world in which Middle-earth appears, is one of the largest and most detailed worlds ever made by a single author. It is amazing how consistent it is, given its expansiveness, fine level of detail, and span of more than 6,000 years.” In this, he justifiably identifies Tolkien’s creation as the prime example of worldbuilding.