Who needs worldbuilding anyway?

This blog will mainly deal with worldbuilding and things that relate to this activity in any useful way, but what is worldbuilding at its core and who really needs it?

One answer to this question could be anyone who likes to dream up fictional places and worlds. I personally find it very entertaining to create a complex world with logical geography, an interesting history, and interdependent cultures.

Another answer could be that worldbuilding is relevant for anyone who needs a fictional place for a creative project, be it a book, comic or role-playing campaign. I think that a lot of creative people engage in worldbuilding without even thinking about it.

When discussing worldbuilding it is often more or less assumed that we are talking about the creation of large fantasy worlds in the style of J.R.R. Tolkien, M. A. R. Barker or George R. R. Martin, but this is definitely not the only time worldbuilding is needed.

 Family tree from Tolkien's early work.

Most forms of storytelling except maybe the purest realistic fiction, need worldbuilding to some degree. A large majority of authors that deal with the real world regularly invent purely fictional characters and places, and sometimes even whole towns, companies and organisations.

But the use of worldbuilding is a gradual scale. A few authors have taken it one step further and invent a whole fictional country such as Lilliput in "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift, Gilead in Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale", or Patusan in "Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad.

Map of Lilliput and Blefuscu from the 1726 edition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

At this point we come close to what most people think of when they hear the word worldbuilding. Even if the country is supposed to exists in an otherwise familiar world, or in some cases in the near future, it still needs a logical history, culture and political structure to be convincing to the reader.

Gulliver on the island of Lilliput.

The next logical level is the invention of complete fantasy worlds such as Tolkien's Arda and Barker's Tékumel, as we have already touched on. Although fantastic and strange in many ways, these worlds are still easily recognisable to us. Both share many basic concepts with our world and include humans as an important species. In the case of Arda and Tékumel, both even have a back story that at least briefly explains their place in our world.

Consequently it is possible to push worldbuilding even further than this and introduce truly alien forms of life and societies. Such worlds are most often found in science fiction and examples includes the three-gendered alien society in Isaac Asimov's "The Gods Themselves" and the oceanic planet in Stanisław Lem's "Solaris".

Cover of the first English edition of Stanisław Lem's Solaris.

As can be seen, worldbuilding span the whole range of creation from a single made up person or building in a world otherwise similar to our own, to a completely alien universe with it's own societies, history, biology and physical laws.