world-building n.

It might seem that this kind of fantastic world-building can have little to do with practical problems.

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

Glory Season, is an example of modern world-building, in which all aspects of an alien world…have been conceptualized.

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.