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New Worlds #2
New Worlds, Year Two: More Essays on the Art of Worldbuilding
Explore a world of your own . . .
Science fiction and fantasy are renowned for immersing their readers in rich, inventive settings. In this follow-up to the collection NEW WORLDS, YEAR ONE, award-winning fantasy author Marie Brennan guides you through new aspects of worldbuilding and how they can generate stories. From beauty to books, from tattoos to taboos, these essays delve into the complexity of different cultures, both real and imaginary, and provide invaluable advice on crafting a world of your very own.
This volume collects essays from the second year of the New Worlds Patreon.
Science fiction and fantasy are renowned for immersing their readers in rich, inventive settings. In this follow-up to the collection NEW WORLDS, YEAR ONE, award-winning fantasy author Marie Brennan guides you through new aspects of worldbuilding and how they can generate stories. From beauty to books, from tattoos to taboos, these essays delve into the complexity of different cultures, both real and imaginary, and provide invaluable advice on crafting a world of your very own.
This volume collects essays from the second year of the New Worlds Patreon.
- GenresNonfictionWriting
210 pages, Paperback
Published June 4, 2019
8 people are currently reading
94 people want to read
About the author
Marie Brennan
171 books3,279 followersMarie Brennan a.k.a. M.A. Carrick
Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material. She recently misapplied her professors' hard work to Turning Darkness Into Light, a sequel to the Hugo Award-nominated series The Memoirs of Lady Trent. As half of M.A. Carrick, she is also the author of The Mask of Mirrors, first in the Rook and Rose trilogy. For more information, visit swantower.com, Twitter @swan_tower, or her Patreon.
Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material. She recently misapplied her professors' hard work to Turning Darkness Into Light, a sequel to the Hugo Award-nominated series The Memoirs of Lady Trent. As half of M.A. Carrick, she is also the author of The Mask of Mirrors, first in the Rook and Rose trilogy. For more information, visit swantower.com, Twitter @swan_tower, or her Patreon.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 28, 2022
I was a bit underwhelmes at first (the subjects just didn't grab my interest as much as in year one) but those last 3~4 essays made it win one star easily. Those were super interesting. (Though it wasn't the only compelling section, just my personal favorite)
June 25, 2019
Pros: short essays are easy to read, covers a wide variety of topics
Cons: short essays don’t go into much detail
This is the second book of essays compiled from Brennan’s Patreon. There’s an introduction, 52 themed essays and an afterward. The themes from this book encompass weaponry, honor, cosmetics, clothing, wedding customs, literacy, time keeping, religious practices, superstitions, and some general worldbuilding tips.
I loved that there were a variety of topics, broken down into more specific essays. Each essay is only a few pages long so you can easy read one in a few minutes. Brennan gives several examples per essay showing how cultures differ, so as to get the reader thinking of applications beyond the common. The downside here is each essay is very basic and is more of a way to get you thinking about applications than showing you how to apply each aspect to your own world.
As with the first book, it’s a great collection and points out a lot of worthwhile tidbits for making your fictional worlds feel more lived in.
Cons: short essays don’t go into much detail
This is the second book of essays compiled from Brennan’s Patreon. There’s an introduction, 52 themed essays and an afterward. The themes from this book encompass weaponry, honor, cosmetics, clothing, wedding customs, literacy, time keeping, religious practices, superstitions, and some general worldbuilding tips.
I loved that there were a variety of topics, broken down into more specific essays. Each essay is only a few pages long so you can easy read one in a few minutes. Brennan gives several examples per essay showing how cultures differ, so as to get the reader thinking of applications beyond the common. The downside here is each essay is very basic and is more of a way to get you thinking about applications than showing you how to apply each aspect to your own world.
As with the first book, it’s a great collection and points out a lot of worthwhile tidbits for making your fictional worlds feel more lived in.
July 11, 2024
Better than the first one on terms of the variety of cultures referenced but still far from ideal
Loved the parts about religion and its practices though, and the extra chapters are always the most helpful in my opinion
Loved the parts about religion and its practices though, and the extra chapters are always the most helpful in my opinion
June 6, 2022
Another excellent little world-building volume - I really enjoy these, although this one expanded my thinking less than the first one.
September 27, 2024
Algunos estuvieron interesantes, pero con la mayoría me quedo con la sensación de que la autora podría hacer más que rascar el tema y ofrecer lecturas adicionales.
January 2, 2020
This collection was released at the two year mark of Marie Brennan's Patreon of the same name, which publishes an essay per week on topics of interest to speculative worldbuilding, challenging creators to think about aspects of their fantasy or science fiction worlds which might not have crossed their minds. While I'm not in a fiction writing stage of life myself, I enjoyed the first year of essays which incorporated everything from plate tectonics to cannibalism, and this second volume delivers the same experience on a similarly broad range of topics.
The essays are grouped into thematic areas, slightly separately from the Patreon itself, reflecting the experience of reading in a book rather than as week by week essays. It works well, and there's an impressive minimum of overlap even in those essays with similar subjects - its generally clear when a series has actually been written and posted in sequence, but there's no obvious drawbacks or unintentional skipping around even when it hasn't. Essays are bite-sized, running a couple of thousand words, and unpick both the technological and societal elements of each area being covered. That means that, for example, the series on weapons and armour which makes up the first few essays first looks at both the possible weapons one could use to do some duels, and the societal concepts of masculinity and honour that go into the culture of duelling, before looking at the historical contexts of duels themselves. Its all done in a way which draws mostly on Brennan's own areas of relative expertise (she did most of the work for a PhD in Anthropology before becoming a full-time writer): Japan and Europe come up a lot, as do the Pacific Islands, but there's an acknowledgement that this is far from the full range of real-world examples. Immediately after reading, I was torn on the question of whether guest entries from experts with different geographical or subject areas of expertise would improve the reading experience (either on Patreon or in book form), but regardless of the answer I don't think it detracts from what New Worlds is, which is effectively a series of writing prompts that challenge worldbuilders to go away and do their own research, rather than offering a full range of examples.
As well as weapons and duelling, the Year Two collection covers beauty and body modifications, clothing, weddings and courtship, writing and literacy, the societal concept of time (briefly discussed in book 1 but the subject of multiple essays here), religions, and superstitions and the supernatural. As in the previous collection, it closes with four more "meta" essays on the concept of worldbuilding itself which cover a little more of the "how" of what speculative worldbuilders might do with the prompts covered here. There's plenty to talk about under each of these concepts and a nice mix of "foundational" (clothes) and more "niche" (honeymoons, incense, "the social economy of clothing") topics - there's no sense that Brennan is at all running low on ideas or struggling to find topics of general relevance to write about. Perhaps because of their genesis on Patreon, the style is chatty and often quite informal, and there's no pretence to academic rigour on the historical examples; there's no citations here, and a few points where the text outright states something like "I know I've read an example of thing X, but I don't remember what it was". It doesn't affect the book's ability to do what it says in the tin, however, and as thought provoking elements the veracity of the examples given here (none of which stray into territory that I would consider particularly controversial or open to misinterpretation) isn't really the point.
The elephant in the room when reading these in ebook is whether this format adds to the reading experience - and, honestly, I don't think that ebook or Patreon lets these essays shine to their fullest extent. Patreon's system, while it has a lot of strengths and is linked to a monetary system that allows authors like Brennan to do this kind of work in the first place, isn't inherently great for archiving posts and allowing users to search for old content, and ebooks are similarly much harder than physical books to flip through and search for things rather than reading cover to cover. Luckily, Book View Cafe also has you covered if you want New Worlds in physical format - and I suspect that for people who really want this for its intended purpose, that's the version that is most going to allow its content and usefulness to shine.
The essays are grouped into thematic areas, slightly separately from the Patreon itself, reflecting the experience of reading in a book rather than as week by week essays. It works well, and there's an impressive minimum of overlap even in those essays with similar subjects - its generally clear when a series has actually been written and posted in sequence, but there's no obvious drawbacks or unintentional skipping around even when it hasn't. Essays are bite-sized, running a couple of thousand words, and unpick both the technological and societal elements of each area being covered. That means that, for example, the series on weapons and armour which makes up the first few essays first looks at both the possible weapons one could use to do some duels, and the societal concepts of masculinity and honour that go into the culture of duelling, before looking at the historical contexts of duels themselves. Its all done in a way which draws mostly on Brennan's own areas of relative expertise (she did most of the work for a PhD in Anthropology before becoming a full-time writer): Japan and Europe come up a lot, as do the Pacific Islands, but there's an acknowledgement that this is far from the full range of real-world examples. Immediately after reading, I was torn on the question of whether guest entries from experts with different geographical or subject areas of expertise would improve the reading experience (either on Patreon or in book form), but regardless of the answer I don't think it detracts from what New Worlds is, which is effectively a series of writing prompts that challenge worldbuilders to go away and do their own research, rather than offering a full range of examples.
As well as weapons and duelling, the Year Two collection covers beauty and body modifications, clothing, weddings and courtship, writing and literacy, the societal concept of time (briefly discussed in book 1 but the subject of multiple essays here), religions, and superstitions and the supernatural. As in the previous collection, it closes with four more "meta" essays on the concept of worldbuilding itself which cover a little more of the "how" of what speculative worldbuilders might do with the prompts covered here. There's plenty to talk about under each of these concepts and a nice mix of "foundational" (clothes) and more "niche" (honeymoons, incense, "the social economy of clothing") topics - there's no sense that Brennan is at all running low on ideas or struggling to find topics of general relevance to write about. Perhaps because of their genesis on Patreon, the style is chatty and often quite informal, and there's no pretence to academic rigour on the historical examples; there's no citations here, and a few points where the text outright states something like "I know I've read an example of thing X, but I don't remember what it was". It doesn't affect the book's ability to do what it says in the tin, however, and as thought provoking elements the veracity of the examples given here (none of which stray into territory that I would consider particularly controversial or open to misinterpretation) isn't really the point.
The elephant in the room when reading these in ebook is whether this format adds to the reading experience - and, honestly, I don't think that ebook or Patreon lets these essays shine to their fullest extent. Patreon's system, while it has a lot of strengths and is linked to a monetary system that allows authors like Brennan to do this kind of work in the first place, isn't inherently great for archiving posts and allowing users to search for old content, and ebooks are similarly much harder than physical books to flip through and search for things rather than reading cover to cover. Luckily, Book View Cafe also has you covered if you want New Worlds in physical format - and I suspect that for people who really want this for its intended purpose, that's the version that is most going to allow its content and usefulness to shine.
January 19, 2025
New Worlds, Year Two: More Essays on the Art of Worldbuilding - Marie Brennan
Rating: ★★★★
Award-winning fantasy author Marie Brennan continues to write a new essay per week for the New Worlds Patreon. These 52 essays were published between March 2018 and February 2019.
This collection of essays was a great follow-up to the first volume, but I am wondering how it would stand on its own. The topics varied greatly (weapons and armor, markers of beauty, writing, timekeeping, religion, supernatural creatures), with a few expanding upon topics from Year One (marriage and magic). The four “theory posts” about how writers can approach worldbuilding (Inventing Trees, Gratuitous Worldbuilding, Against Monoliths and World as Palimpsest) are the most memorable, but any essay might spark an idea in a writer’s brain (or lie dormant for a while and resurface as a fully-fleshed story later*).
* I might be talking from experience here.
Reading Journal Index: 2021-126
Rating: ★★★★
Award-winning fantasy author Marie Brennan continues to write a new essay per week for the New Worlds Patreon. These 52 essays were published between March 2018 and February 2019.
This collection of essays was a great follow-up to the first volume, but I am wondering how it would stand on its own. The topics varied greatly (weapons and armor, markers of beauty, writing, timekeeping, religion, supernatural creatures), with a few expanding upon topics from Year One (marriage and magic). The four “theory posts” about how writers can approach worldbuilding (Inventing Trees, Gratuitous Worldbuilding, Against Monoliths and World as Palimpsest) are the most memorable, but any essay might spark an idea in a writer’s brain (or lie dormant for a while and resurface as a fully-fleshed story later*).
* I might be talking from experience here.
Reading Journal Index: 2021-126
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews