The Sword and Laser discussion

Tell me what is the best, most fully realized created universe or world in scifi and fantasy in your opinion.

Tell me WHY too. If you want to tell me the worst, do that too, just explain yourself. (I promise, last research based thread for a while)

Mass Effect, hands down. No sci-fi or fantasy world feels as real to me. The alien species are so thought out and their evolution and biology feel so realistic and natural. Everything about Mass Effect is basically my favorite.

Alex wrote: "The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson.

Easily the most epic world building ever created. "

Exactly that. Sometimes I'M impressed by authors, who have a very believeable history for the last 300-500 years, but Erikson is just mindboggling.

He lives this world. You can call him at 3 a.m. and ask him, what happened 20.000 years after the events from 300.000 years ago and he would have no problem answering that.
His world is complex, rich and therefore highly believable.
Imagine you have to tell an alien something about our world with it's hundreds of different countries, cultures and religions.
The Malaz world is every bit as complex as our own...or might be even bigger.

I agree Malazan has the most dense world building I have encountered in any fantasy or science fiction story and is developed by an anthropologist/archaeologist. Fans can read this multiple times and still have a new experience, unearthing new discoveries that may have had them baffled on previous reads.

Yeah, Malazan has pretty awesome world-building.

Almost on par with it though is the world of Earwa in R. Scott Bakker's Prince Of Nothing trilogy. The world-building in that series is rather intimidating. I mean, the guy has a 140-page encyclopedic glossary, as well as a six-page appendix of just languages and their dialects. Pretty intense.

Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms. It has books on economy, ecology, geography, and detailed histories going back thousands of years. Since it's the most popular of the D&D settings, it has the most detail.

Malazan has a similar history, the world being the product of a role playing game Erickson and some friends played in college.

If you want sheer world building detail, role playing games will win every time. Even most of the details in Star Wars were worked out for the role paying game.

For a single author, I would have to say Tolkien. It doesn't come out in the books, but when you start reading the letters and notes, you realize that he thought out almost all of that world.

I really enjoy the world building in Ilona Andrews's Katie Daniels series. It is set mostly in post-shift Atlanta, a time when the balance between magic and technology tipped drastically back toward magic. It is interesting and well-defined.

Malazan.

Hands down. No other fantasy or science fiction world can touch it.

Having spoken with both Steven Erikson and Ian C. Esslemont, the books have barely scratched the surface of the scope of what they have created for their world. They have several hundred thousand years of detailed history, econimics, and distinct culturals over five or six continents.

I love to see that, put all those notes out as a guide

Tekumel. It was created as a fictional setting by M.A.R. Barker back in the 1950s or 1960s, then turned into a game world when he was introduced to D&D back in the early 1970s. It's incredibly rich, alien & complex -- deliberately based on Asian, Middle Eastern and Mesoamerican cultures, with a history that stretches back tens of thousands of years. Plus some of the best & weirdest nonhuman races around.

Barker also wrote several novels -- The Man of Gold and Flamesong are the first two and are probably easiest to track down these days.

Daran wrote: "Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms. It has books on economy, ecology, geography, and detailed histories going back thousands of years. Since it's the most popular of the D&D settings, it has t..."

I felt exactly the opposite. Homeland was awesome but every book I read after that just didn't measure up. I am a subscriber to Sandersons rules of magic. The world was okay in most of it but the magic sucked imo. Some really good ideas hidden in there but really poorly done.

Also when the main characters are SOOO good you wanna puke and the barbarians are all 10 feet tall and as wide as a house.

a Malazan Encyclopedia would be the greatest thing ever.

Do you guys think there is any chance of another series in the same world as Malazan?

It is absolutely mind boggling how big and old that world is.

Whoops, did not realize Kharkanas is in the same world. Oh boy, I was growing sad because I only had 2 books left of Malazan and I did not want it to end. Guess I have more to look forward to!

Its great to see the book of the fallen bring realised. I am only on the 5th book now. But to say that the world is realised is an understatement. And that is in the term world. Because when compared to Tolkien or almost any other fiction in have read its a damned universe in comparison.
Eriksson has created a truly incredible universe and world, and what is the most significant accomplishment is that he has created the most massively epic universe, but inhabited it with a vast number of characters, from gods, to demi gods, to protagonists, the whole plethora of classic characters for a fiction are realised and then multiplied.
and i am just onto the 5th of his books.
please take this as a review by a true neutral, in currently reading Speaker of the dead' and am reading Dust' next. So i really do enjoy all GOOD science fiction and fantasy.

we need a petition to get the Malazan universe encyclopedia, I want to see it more and more now.

Question for your brain pans, you have two worlds, one basically medieval times and the other a little further along, more like early gunpowder age. The worlds are connected, people can travel between the two worlds, they always have been able to. They believe its magic and the Gods allowed it. Is there a plausible scientific explanation for this? Would something like a space elevator work?

Two worlds, as in two planets in the same universe? Is the travel instantaneous? I don't think a space elevator could connect two planets - they are both moving through space, probably at different speeds, and I think an elevator is stationary. So you'd need a transporter or a FTL spaceship, or a stable wormhole, or a fold in the fabric of the universe that you could make a little hole in - like a needle pulling thread through cloth, connecting the two pieces at the hole.

OR, if they were backwards science-wise, they could actually be on the same planet, opposite sides, and some Other is keeping them from realizing this, by drugging them or something and making them think they are travelling across worlds but in reality they just fly around the planet :)

They are in the same system, maybe some form of wormhole would work. The whole basic idea is they are colonies but in the begining the reader won't know that. The reason they are behind technology wise is they were founded long ago and failed, but some survived and rebuilt.

Kdawg91 wrote: "Question for your brain pans, you have two worlds, one basically medieval times and the other a little further along, more like early gunpowder age. The worlds are connected, people can travel..."

I'm not sure about the question here. Is there a plausible explanation for the difference in societies?

If two cultures interact, the more technologically advanced would either decimate the less advanced; or the less advanced would adapt to technological parity. Examples would be Mesoamerica ans Asia, respectively.

If your asking about the scientific plausibility of a gateway between worlds, then I don't know. My gut reaction is to say Stargate (worhole-ish thingy?). A space elevator gets you to orbit, but can't connect you to another world, because of orbital mechanics.

If your trying to tie two planets together physically, that would be one tough tether. And then, orbital mechanics would be a huge issue.

No, I don't have a plausible explanation yet LOL I have a bare bones idea and I am being a cheat and using the brain power in this group to help me flesh it out

there may have to be limited contact between the worlds

Hmm, if each planet was colonized by a group with a certain ideology, like one was very focused on communing with nature, while the other wanted to become a capitalist megapower, and if their decline into back asswardness was sudden, like a plague decimated both societies, then there would be plausible reasons for one to be more advanced.

And if everything went backwards/fell apart, why are they still able to operate this transporter or whatever? Is some isolated group on each planet hoarding tech knowledge like in Wool? Cleverly disguised as monkish magicians so they can use the Gods to cover this up?

Hmm, my imagination is rampaging through your story before it's even written.

Ooh what if both were still fairly dependant on the home world for important supplies and then the shipments just stopped coming and then starvation and chaos.

Ha I'll stop now.

Michele wrote: "Ooh what if both were still fairly dependant on the home world for important supplies and then the shipments just stopped coming and then starvation and chaos.

Ha I'll stop now."

Honestly, this feels a lot like the premise of the Stargate SG1 TV series. Many different worlds, with different levels of technology are all connected by a network of wormholes. The wormholes having been established by a long-lost race. Add evil Egyptian aliens and your done.

yeah well I'm sure I probably not very original. But I just decided to finally do something with my ideas as opposed to just sitting on them

Kdawg91 wrote: "They are in the same system, maybe some form of wormhole would work. The whole basic idea is they are colonies but in the begining the reader won't know that. The reason they are behind technol..."

If there is instantaneous travel, though, there's no way one would be technologically behind the other. The only way that could work is if there's something cultural keeping one society from utilizing the higher tech. Even then, you'd have slippage among different communities.

Here on our world the Amish are not universally against modern technology -- there are some sects who have cell phones, for example -- they just pick and choose which technologies would be either beneficial or harmful to the community as a whole, deciding on a case-by-case basis.

Yeah, I probably need to rethink the whole thing, It was pretty cool in my head though :)

Kdawg91 wrote: "yeah well I'm sure I probably not very original. But I just decided to finally do something with my ideas as opposed to just sitting on them"

My suggestion would be to seek out stories with similar premises.

Stargate was already mentioned, but the "Apprentice Adept" series by Piers Anthony has a Fantasy world connected to a Science Fictional one somehow. (It's been 30 years, so I forget the mechanism.)

Jack L. Chalker's Well World series largely takes place on a world that serves as an incubator/test bed for thousands of alien races, and each section of the planet (it's divided into a giant hexagonal grid, with each mini-world called a Hex) has a predetermined level of technology designed to replicate the conditions of the planet they will be seeded onto.

Paul Melko's The Walls of the Universe and sequel is like the TV series Sliders where there are infinite Earths, each with a different history and different level of technology.

There was just a movie released about two worlds locked together, with the "up" world being high society and the "down" world being the working class planet. It's obviously metaphorical fantasy rather than science fiction, but still. I forget the name.

There are others I'm blanking on at the moment. If you're going to do it, you should at least be familiar with the tropes of that kind of story, as well as the works already using them. Otherwise you'll likely repeat something that's already been done.

Ah, here's the movie, Upside Down: http://upsidedown-movie.com/

I think I figured it out. It is basically a group of heroes looking for a treasure on their world. I just rearranged some of it to make a bit more sense.

They won't discover the "link" between worlds until they get closer to the prize

Kdawg - Your question reminded of a trick that Roger Zelazny claimed he used in his books. He said that he always wrote an extra chapter or two that he then excised from the final draft of the book. He said that this gave the reader the feeling that the characters and world existed outside the confines of the story they were reading.

As for the door between worlds, if you want to borrow from some of the old SF classics, you could make each "world" a giant pod in an even larger generation ship traveling between the stars where the occupants have long since forgotten that they were in a spaceship (think Heinlein's Orphan Star, Ellison's Starlost, Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun, or Star Trek's For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky). There would be only one door between the worlds though.

Also, I just have to mention that all the love Malazan gets in this group is really making it rise up my "to read" pile.

I think I solved my problem, the trick is if I have the chops to make it make sense to anyone but me.

My first question would be about the assumptions. You say two worlds, and that implies two planets, but does it have to be two planets? If the second world were a tidally locked moon, a space elevator would still be insanely challenging, but more feasible than an elevator to another planet, I think.

I think maybe I fixed my problem, Gord. I was basically throwing stuff and seeing what stuck, but maybe I solved the issue, or made it more plausible anyway

maybe its because I was young when I read the books but no world has felt as real to me as the Harry Potter books, though I admit that it might be nostalgia talking

Ok, my solution is that the group on one world is trying to find a treasure, and it leads them to a portal to another world, the world(s) in my story are all colonized by a group that were really advanced and really old. The treasure they are looking for I hope at the end of my tale will be a group of "heroes" from several different worlds facing the group who created them for a prize. Easiest way to describe it is Borderlands the video game in a fantasy setting.

Yes, I am at the beginning of this idea, and I am sure there are tons of holes in it. Feel free to poke or grab loose threads, and point out any potential train wrecks you may see

Alan wrote: "As for the door between worlds, if you want to borrow from some of the old SF classics, you could make each "world" a giant pod in an even larger generation ship traveling between the stars where the occupants have long since forgotten that they were in a spaceship (think Heinlein's Orphan Star, Ellison's Starlost, Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun, or Star Trek's For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky). There would be only one door between the worlds though. "

oh no, why....why did you post that? now I wanna write about this >.<