world-building n.

The deemphasis of detailed world-building separates Niven from the writers with whom he is usually grouped, ‘hard-science’ writers like Poul Anderson or Arthur Clarke.

In The Wind’s Twelve Quarters Le Guin included two short stories which took place in a world, as yet unnamed, of islands, dragons, and wizardry. Using some of the techniques of science fiction world building and others learned from Tolkien, she showed us a few scenes, conjured up a few sensations, that suggested an entire Other World.

Vance…has a ‘supreme skill in world-building, the creation of alien societies completely imagined’.

I realized that this physics idea often arises in SF discussions in connection with black holes or space construction or ‘world building’ for story backgrounds.

Science fiction reviewers—and readers, too—tend to be finicky about ‘world building,’ fretting unduly, it always seems to me, over whether the fictional world could really exist given the writer’s scenario, worrying over the bits the writer hasn’t explicitly elucidated in the text.

There have been many space opera series over the past few decades that have served readers well, providing hours of immersive escapism and stellar world building.