What series/book has your favorite world building?
I am reading the second in Mila Vane’s A Gathering of Dragons series. As was true in book one, A Heart of Blood and Ashes, the world building in A Touch of Stone and Snow is amazing. It got to wondering about other books with great world building. I thought the spy world in Joanna Bourne’s books, the Viking paradise in Larissa Brown’s A Beautiful Wreck, and the post-apocalyptic water soaked world in Megan Crane’s Edge series.
How about you? What book or series has world-building that blows you away?
The futuristic Celta series by Robin D. Owens came immediately to mind. Travelers crashed on the planet 400 years ago from earth. There are Heart Mates, Fam Animals that converse with and are fun companions, houses that have personalities and hearts.
—Janie
Psy/Changeling by Nalini Singh immediately came to mind. I wouldn’t mind living in that reality.
Green Creek by TJ Klune too.
Both with paranormal elements but such an amazing world!
However, the very best has to be Ilona Andrews! All her/their series are so well thought, so detailed, so evocative!
For memory sake, I’d love to visit some of the communities/places in which my favorite Nora Roberts’ books were set in.
I also would love to meet the characters and share some of the little gifts of the Waverley family in Sarah Addison Allen’s book Garden Spells. This book is why I like magical realism.
Sonia I just finished a reread of Nora Roberts Chesapeake series. So nice to visit the Quinn’s again. I love Singh’s Psy-changelings and also her Guild Hunters and also her Hard Play series.
I liked that series by Nora Roberts too but if I really could “travel” to one of her trilogies, it would be the Key trilogy because all three books had people and situations I would like to belong or be part of the close circle they created. In all her other trilogies there’s usually one book whose main couple I don’t tend to care as much about as with the other two.
:D
We migrated servers yesterday and, for some reason, doing so lost all the comments here. Ugh.
Oh, I wondered what happened!! Just for the record, I don’t read fantasy, steampunk, time travel, sci-fi, etc. but when it comes to world-building, for me, Rachel Lee’s Conard County was terrific! I loved it and read all of the books.
Conard County is terrific. I like Carla Negger’s version of Maine And the northeast, too.
I read a lot of Regencies. With them, it is almost like I have built my own Regency era. It’s as if I expect Wulfric Bedwyn and Devil Cynster to occasionally hang out at the gambling club with Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, runs, or to call on Lady Agnes Westerfield once in a while, or for all three to lend a hand when one of Carla Kelly’s naval heroes calls on Captain Lacey for assistance and some ducal power is needed. Do any of them know Mr. Darcy? And so on…
Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels are also one of my big favorites. I also read a lot of her other work, and the Brain-and-Brawn ships and the Talents books, starting with To Ride Pegasus, also stuck in my mind.
The Darkover books by Marion Zimmer Bradley also occupied a large part of my imagination when I read the books. It did seem to me that the world building evolved, so the inconsistencies bothered me. I also found Mists of Avalon riveting at the time. Then came the revelations about her private life. The books just weren’t the same after that.
Jayne Ann Krentz’s books in the Arcane series were also favorites of mine. I think Krentz did a good job with making up Arcane. I enjoyed the futuristic novels in that series, but the Arcane books in the Ghost Hunters series were fun reads despite being really lame sf/fantasy/whatever. Like, when we got cellphones, somehow they got cellphones. It was the paranormal stuff that interested her as a writer, and it showed. The lesson I take from Krentz and McCaffrey is that I like imagining paranormal powers even if I disbelieve such powers exist.
The best? Ursula LeGuin. So much of her work takes me places that I never would have imagined, and those places seem perfectly plausible.
pity, there were some super suggestions there.
Oh well, hope it stabilizes now, good luck!!
I am trying to get them back!
Everything has been wonky for me for a while. Either it doesn’t post or it posts a couple of times and you all must suffer through my posts twice, lol.
It should all be better now. We were having a terrible time with our hosting service, Bluehost. We have switched and things appear to be working again now.
Something happened either with the site or with my browsers, so I can’t see or reply directly under most of the posts I saw earlier.
On steampunk, it has been around for years. The earliest steampunk I recall was the TV show The Wild, Wild West (back in the 1960s or 1970s).
On F&SF, being all about fights & explosions (or whatever the description was that I can’t see now), that looks like the way non-readers of romances talk about that genre. While stories of bigger & bigger battles are a sub-genre or subset of F&SF, they are far from of complete picture of all F&SF. The Liaden Universe stories I mentioned earlier are a great example of SF that is all about the people, not the technology.
There is a special subset of SF (or romances using SF ideas) that I left out in my first post: altering history by introducing a time-traveler. These stories start with history as we know it and introduce changes.
The biggest current example I know about is the 1632verse started by the book 1632 (published 2000) by Eric Flint, which has grown to over 100 books (if you count the Grantville Gazette) by many authors. There is a web site and databases writers fact-check against.
The Island in the Sea of Time trilogy (1998-2000) by S. M. Stirling is another relatively recent example.
Lest Darkness Fall (1941) by L. Sprague de Camp is one of the earliest.
A close relative is alternate history, which creates settings by imagining histories that diverged from ours at specific times and places.
Piper’s Paratime stories are about people from one timeline who can travel to all timelines.
In Romances we have the Royal . . . trilogy by MaryJanice Davidson.
A step farther is alternate history + reality.
The Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett are set in a world where laws of magic were codified rather than laws of science, and western European history diverged from ours.
One more step from the world as we believe we know it is altered reality.
The Heirs of Alexandria series by Eric Flint, Dave Freer, & Mercedes Lackey is a great example.
I also place the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik here.
In Romances, the Psy-Changeling universe by Nalini Singh fits here.
Mark,
Did you read Chung Kuo or the Time trilogy by David Wingrove?
I started both and loved the world building ideas, but I never got far, the investment seemed big and I was not sure of the payoff. In fact, Chung Kuo is still unfinished as far as I can make out.
piling on about the Liaden Universe.
Also CL Wilson’s stories of the Fading Lands, and her Weathermages of Mystral series. She writes tomes, but the worlds are so fully imagined I always wish they were even longer.
And for a very immersive sense of time, place, and character, any one of Sara Donati’s Wilderness books. Usually takes me a couple days to remember what century I’m in after one of those.
You reminded me of CS Friedman – her mages are awesome, and In Conquest Born is such a harsh well done world.
Also Catherine Asaro, who always has romance too, in her Skolia books. I wish she would wrap that up somehow, it feels so “hanging there”….