It takes an extraordinary exercise of imagination to create a whole world, the kind of place that feels as fully delineated and described as fictional treatments of our own—more so, in some ways, since descriptions of our world can rely on common experience between writer and reader to fill in the gap between terse description and complex reality. In contemporary cinema and what we used to call television, “world-building” is a key watchword, a highly desirable achievement. A compelling enough world will entice viewers literally to settle in, not merely to follow a narrative but to dwell. The best of these fictional worlds may do even more; like Borges’s legendary land of Tlön, they project their fantastic creations into our reality, colonizing our world and making it more like theirs. In literature I think of Dante and Milton, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, L. Frank Baum and J. K. Rowling as having all achieved that kind of world-creation, however unequal their literary achievements may be in other dimensions. On the screen, Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas stand head and shoulders above anyone else; even the Marvel universe has no real equivalent to “Trekkies,” nor have James Cameron’s Na’vi quite approached the “reality” of the Jedi for those who believe.
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