There is a key division in fantasy (1) writing to do with the scale and scope of the world that the author is intent on creating. This is not just about the size of the map, but more to do with what happens just beyond the map’s edge, off the page. What happens? Well, in some books, nothing happens. In others, there is a great deal of invisible action going on. This is the key difference: does the road, indeed, go ever on and on, or does it just stop?

 

The first class of fantasy book is an all-inclusive package deal. There is a map, no matter how large, and the bold band of adventurers will probably visit each location on it once, in a meandering and rather aimless kind of a stroll. (2). There is a history and backstory, but it is a rather monosyllabic one. There was a great event (3), and that is essentially the be-all and end-all of history, and said great event will now power the plot of the book. Lord Black-Hat will return, or the Evil Priesthood has gathered its strength after the destruction of its ancient temple, or the last (dragon/wizard/dragon wizard/chosen/starchilde/prince of the one true blood/whateverthehell) is living obliviously as a stablehand in the king’s castle. And that’s your lot. You won’t find, for example, that history recalls an ancient, evil, all-dominating darklord, prophesied and fabled, who unaccountably fails to be on the cusp of a return as the book begins. You won’t hear tales and stories of strange people and lands that the heroes, from good sense or want of transport, fail to go to. What you see is what you get, and at the end of the series, however long that takes, no stone will remain unturned, every road is travelled and history has repeated itself and then been put out of its misery/restored to grandeur, delete as applicable. At the end of the series the world has, basically, been used up, we have met everyone of importance, answered all the riddles, and any further writing would be surplus to requirements. (4)

 

Your alternative to this is simple: there is more in the world than in the book. Instead of the work being a picture painted for a set size of frame, the book is a section hacked from a much larger tapestry, and it shows. The characters live in a world that goes beyond the map. Names and races, cultures and lands, are dropped into conversation without apology, and without the sense that it’s mere foreshadowing before the plot takes us there. The world goes on, and lives and breathes, and when the heroes have killed, rescued, conquered and double-crossed their way to their final reward/judgment, the world will still go on, with a thousand stories and questions left over. The further the book goes, the more the author reveals that the world is far more complicated and extensive than the reader had originally thought. Of course there is a danger in this: it would be very easy to lose the reader in a welter of in-jokes, asides and references. That is the art of constructing this kind of world: that the referencing and name-dropping should never get in the way of the plot, but only serve to provide a backdrop of distant horizons, rather than theatrical flats. You can find good examples of this in China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station and its sequels where, although the action of the first book takes place entirely within one city, the extent of the world is implicit in every word. Similarly Wolfe’s three Sun series (5), New, Long and Short (6), which sit the line between fantasy and science fiction, or, for the more overtly SF, Dune is a classic example (7)

 

Call them inclusive and exclusive, call them closed-world and open-world (8). And it’s not just books, either. Part of the charm of the original Star Wars trilogy (9) was that the world that Lucas put together manifestly extended beyond the edges of the screen. “That bounty-hunter we ran into on Ord Mantell…” Which bounty hunter? On where? And you realise (at age 9 or so this is quite a revelation) that the characters have been living since the end of the last film, without your knowledge or consent. They’ve been off doing stuff, and didn’t send you a postcard.

 

 Needless to say, from the above objective and non-judgmental summary, I favour the latter. It helps that, with Empire, I’ve had about fifteen years to live with the world, adding to it on and off, exploring it and reconstructing it. The first book barely scrapes the surface, the next two take us further and further out, but there is world enough and (hopefully) time, as the poet said, and there are places that I know exist, and people that I know live there, that will probably never even get a mention on the pages. 

Living worlds. Wild worlds, not caged. Worlds fierce and free.

 

(1)   Also science-fiction, and anywhere else that the writer must construct a world from raw materials, rather than taking the modern world and just bolting on a few names.

(2)   Dianne Wynne-Jones makes the point better in A Rough Guide to Fantasyland.

(3)   See earlier entries, but probably either a dark lord, an age of dark magic, or possibly an age of light magic, the last spark of which is in danger of being extinguished at the time the book begins.

(4)   Do not, for a moment, think that this will prevent another five thick volumes from being written in the ashes of the original series’ defunct plot, however.

(5)   I have never before had to consider what the plural of "series" is, and now I come to it I find I don't know.

(6)   Although Wolfe's writing, iceberg-like, has a vast subtext that can be mined layer by layer by the careful reader without any guarantee of ever reaching the end of it. He writes a lot more of his world than initially meets the eye.

(7)   Old Grandfather Tolkien himself is an interesting variant: Lord of the Rings taken in itself is clearly a book set in a much larger world. However, that entire world is itself exhaustively documented, making the overarching megaseries itself harder to classify. I am not for a moment attempting to claim that Tolkien wrote Dune, incidentally.

      (8)  Neither set of terminology fits. Exclusive sounds snobbish, and the open- and closed- world terms come  from Larp, where an open world is one that has no            absolute rules about what fits in, and therefore which tends  to accumulate a jumble of conflicting concepts from different sources, rather than having a coherent idea  behind it. 
      (9) As opposed to the trilogy that, somewhat perversely, preceded the original one.