Out Of This World Books for World Book Day

With World Book Day upon us, I thought it would be fun to look at books from completely other worlds. Not just in space or from the bottom of the sea, but completely other worlds. It is an incredible feeling to pick up a book and be transported to a whole new universe. This mainly happens in sci-fi and fantasy stories, and the secret behind this experience is called ‘worldbuilding’. Worldbuilding is the process whereby an author creates an entire new, fictional world. This frequently involves creating geography and ecology, language, society and culture – and everything in between.

The first step to building any new world is to create the actual world! I’m talking about geography, ecology, location, etc. Creating a whole new world, or even a new universe in some cases, can be hard work. Will it be based on the world that we see every day? Perhaps it reflects what the world would be like underwater, or in space, or in the past, or far in the future? Maybe you will create an entire universe simply based on a dream you had one night – the possibilities are endless. One of the best examples of geography in a fantasy novel would be in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. These novels are set in Middle-Earth which is a continent in Arda. J. R. R. Tolkien made Middle-Earth feel close to our world - he even said once that “Middle-Earth is not an imaginary world” - taking inspiration from North-West Europe and even parts of the Mediterranean. On the other side of worldbuilding, we could take a page out of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld - a completely fantastical universe. Here we see the Discworld, an entirely flat planet that is balanced on top of four elephants, who are then stood on the shell of a Giant Star Turtle, Great A’Tuin, that sails through space.

Now we have a physical world, next we need some life to populate it, and where there are people there is society and history. Society, culture and history are such impactful aspects of any book, especially when you’ve created them from scratch. One of the most famous dystopian novels of social science fiction is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four which takes place in a world of three superstates, all at war with each other. Oceania, where the story is set, only knows what their Party lets them know. Full of oppression, governmental control and the orderly removal of anyone who does not comply with the Party’s values, Oceania has been compared with Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Hitler’s Germany. The history of George R.R. Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire famously based its conflicts on The Wars of the Roses – he just added dragons, direwolves and white walkers! Another type of wondrous world full of history and civilization is in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. Within Mid-World, there is an order of people called the Gunslingers. This world shares features with the old American West with its societies and technology but is also full of magic. The story follows Roland, one of the Gunslingers, as he tries to find the Dark Tower – a legendary building that is said to be the centre of all universes. We read about The Great Old Ones in this series, who were an advanced human society who ruled over All-World and invented amazing technology before completely disappearing as a result of the Great Cataclysm – a devastating war that ended civilisation and left the whole world in utter ruins. This is a great example of really immersive worldbuilding, the first in this series (The Gunslinger) was first published in 1982, and the final book, The Wind Through the Keyhole, was published in 2012; the whole series is full of complex and intricate story lines and plots to follow.

As well as the history of your world, you may also want to look at language including, in some cases, some entertaining slang. Going back to A Song of Ice and Fire, we see characters speaking Dothraki and in the Harry Potter series we have characters speaking Parseltongue – there are so many fictional languages out there! One of my favourite examples of a fictional language in literature is Nadsat in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. It is a kind of Neo-English slang that is spoken in the novel with aspects of Cockney rhyming slang as well as heavy Russian-influences, among many others. Burgess, being a linguist, showed his interest in language when creating Nadset. Droogs was taken from the Welsh word “drwg”, which means bad or evil, and a Russian word meaning close friend was used to create a new word for Alex's friends. Burgess also took influences from childish speech to create words such as “eggiewegg” for egg, or “baddiwad” for bad, or “jammiwam” for jam. Another example of a story where the characters speak fluent English but with a sprinkling of fictional slang is the rabbits in Watership Down and their language ‘Lapine’. Richard Adams has said that some of his words are onomatopoeic, such as hrududu which is a motor vehicle, and other words just simply came to him whilst he was writing.

Another aspect of worldbuilding that really sets the scene is food and drink. If we are reading, for example, The Great Gatsby, we have fantastic descriptions of parties where people are drinking cocktails and champagne, and they eat caviar and hors d’oervres. Just from reading this in the book, we know that Gatsby and his friends are enjoying lavish lifestyles and the riches of the 1920s. Compare this to the eating habits of most of Dickens’ characters; Oliver was forced to eat Gruel, Tiny Tim and the rest of the Cratchits’ enjoyed their goose, apple sauce and mashed potatoes for Christmas dinner, and some lovely buttered bread was enjoyed by Pip in Great Expectations. Creating new food and drink for characters to experience (or characters lamenting the loss of a favourite) can also be a theme in fantastical worlds. In Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series Arthur Dent, with whom the reader experiences new and strange worlds, is always searching for a good cup of tea - something from Earth he very much misses.  Adam’s series also features one of the most infamous fictional beverages – the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. This alcoholic drink is considered in the series to be the “best drink in existence” and its effects are compared to “having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick”.

We hope you have enjoyed our brief tour of just a few of the amazing and intricate worlds created by talented and imaginative writers. Whatever world you choose to travel to (or create yourself) this World Book Day we hope you have a wonderful time – bon voyage! 

Kat, Content Selection Team