Edgar is heading out of town for a week, so the time I would normally have spend writing a post for today is eaten up by preparations for a number of things. As such, I’m going to be preparing a list of nonfiction resources for people engaged in world building.

Now, I’ve had a lot of thoughts on genre fiction in the past, and this list is going to be more useful for people interested in writing a secondary world story, with a particular (but not exclusive) eye towards fantasy fiction. As a result of a number of factors, there are going to be several works that I often make use of in my political thoughts, but this list isn’t primarily or solely focused on that.

We proceed from a very basic premise.

The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan

A book that’s going to appear in my next round-up, Frankopan writes about how fluctuations in the environment shape the course of human history, talking about how fluctuations in temperature and rainfall contribute to certain outcomes without determining them completely. The steady drumbeat of vulcanism, of solar radiation cycles, of temperature fluctuations and the falling of rain, all of it provides a backdrop for the events of history. Frankopan explores this, but is careful not to deny human agency.

It’s a solid book, and quite exhaustive in its approach to the topic, as many of the sources we have here are. Of course, it can be a bit of a bummer, given that it extends its view of history up to the present moment — so people who aren’t interested in political texts might be turned off by it or by Frankopan’s rather mainstream political opinions.

I’m going to go back over this in my review in a few weeks, but part of the book I found most interesting was the suggestion that certain diseases can be linked as secondary effects of volcanic eruptions — smallpox, for example, emerged around the same time as the eruption of the volcano at Thera, which is thought to have been a model for Atlantis.

Of course, some of the more outre claims require evidence I didn’t have access to — if there are footnotes, the version that I listened to didn’t feature them (and, frankly, footnotes in audio books are either hilarious or mind-numbingly boring. This book would have been the latter, and at 30 hours, I can definitely understand not being exhaustive.

Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden

(Reviewed by me here.)

A lot of magic in fantasy stories is derived, ultimately, from the way that it works in Dungeons & Dragons. This, however, ignores the real-world conventions of magic. The historical practices don’t tend to look like an old man in robes trying to throw a fireball with his hands, it looks like an ice-age potter making an effigy of an antelope or mastodon and then exploding it in his kiln.

Gosden traces things through the archaeological record and provides possible interpretations of things — the actions that we see as non-pragmatic but systemic could be characterized as magic, and this allows us to try to work backwards from the practice to the principle. Through this lens, Gosden identifies three general types of magic: transcendent (things that effect us, but which we cannot effect — think astrology and divination), transactional (where one thing is given as “payment” to a spirit, abstract force, or similar for some kind of favor or service), or transformational (where a being changes state from one form to another.

As a caveat, when I speak of modern magic, I’m not writing about witchcraft or similar practices that attempt to reconstruct a lost, enchanted past, but rather of the various odd beliefs about the world that have crept in. Contemporary magic, when you get down to it, is what we might characterize as “pseudo-nutrition” or “pseudo-fitness”. Looking at things through this lens, the whole set of practices becomes a lot more clear. magical thinking is still alive and still with us, you just have to reorient your perceptions a bit to make it clear.

Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga

(previously reviewed here.)

A book about the nature of play and why we do it. In many ways, I think that this could be read as a counterpart to Gosden, even if it is somewhat out of date for a variety of reasons. Ritual and magic is, after all, quite legible as a form of play even if we’re disinclined to see it that way.

However, there is also the issue that different cultures tend to have different sorts of games, and these inform us about the people who live in that culture. Consider the difference between the deep contemplative strategy of Chinese Go, and compare it to the Aztec game Patolli (previously referenced here) — one is entirely strategy, and one is nearly entirely chance. These different games evolved in different contexts, both environmental and cultural, and this shapes the ways that these two cultures engaged in play.

In addition, it’s also a fairly useful tool for thinking through other sets of ideas — somewhat surprisingly — as I can personally attest from my ongoing (but slowly) series that I’ve entitled “ludo-analysis” in tribute to this book. How much of what we do, from day to day, can actually be characterized as a species of play?

Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots by James Suzman

(Reviewed here.)

I will admit that — for me — James Suzman’s Work was a bit of a letdown after Seeing Like a State (the order, on this list, is somewhat inverted), but it’s still a perfectly fine book. He characterizes work as the province of all living things, but takes the time to examine the somewhat strange relationship that exists to work in post-hunter-gatherer societies: why is it that greater and greater labor-saving devices lead to a greater urge to work?

In many ways, he’s concerned with the development of work as a practice, and specifically with that transition point from hunter-gatherer societies to what came after. Was there an original affluence, or was life “nasty, brutish, and short”? The attitudes around labor are, of course, some of the more interesting parts of society — are those who work dullards, heroes, both, or neither? Suzman writes on this, and so it’s not a bad resource to bring in.

We can also look to this book for a useful survey of a number of cultures and their relationship to work. The most interesting of these, for me, are those found among colonized peoples, who have been forced out of hunter-gatherer patterns of life and into more settled patterns.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

(Reviewed here, and used extensively elsewhere)

Scott’s writing concerns efforts of state control, and the imposition of metropolitan knowledge on hinterlands of greater and greater removal from that core. Such technologies used for this include measurement, naming conventions, and language education — and he begins tracing this in the middle ages, with the actions of Île-de-France and various Italian city states. Much of this, Scott argues, is about making the people found in the hinterland “legible” or “visible” to the people in the metropole, who do not necessarily consider them as their equals or even potentially their equals. Things like the imposition of last names and standardized measures are largely there to allow for the assessment and collection of tax burdens.

Thinking of the form of civilization as an apparatus for making further and further areas legible and, thus, exploitable makes other aspects of history make more sense — the somewhat discontinuous nature of certain pre-modern states, for example, and the long-term success of the Persian empire due to its relative liberalism to local custom: it may have seemed, for example, as a preferable deal to pay tribute to a distant hegemon for the privilege of being left alone.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

(reviewed by me here and Edgar here and used so many other places on this site.)

Graeber’s history of economic activity is a powerful text — both of us read it and I wrote some things derived almost solely from it. However, his treatment of the civilizations of the “axial” age, the middle ages, and the modern ages is a necessary dislocation.

There is a mistaken belief, for example, that everything began as bartering, and evolved into the use of specie and then the use of credit. This is almost exactly backwards, an examination of the physical records shows. So if you’re going to write a story about a medieval village, perhaps don’t just have everyone pay for everything with coinage of gold, silver, and copper: this was an artifact of a later era, almost like imagining the modern world as featuring everyone paying every transaction with treasury bonds.

The examination of how people made their economies work is a fascinating journey, far more than the rather boring title might suggest.

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

(Previously reviewed here.)

Most fantasy worlds are glosses of the middle ages, but they’re largely built on an understanding of the middle ages that extends as a continuum from somewhere in the area of Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail to the neighborhood of The Lord of the Rings — if you’re lucky, you get the scenic route, but sometimes, unfortunately, the world builder is on a mission and is looking to get the job done quickly, leaving you with a group of swordsmen traveling from one collection of wauttle-and-daub houses occupied by farmers in homespun shirts to another, with no thinking of how any of that got there in the first place. In short, if you’re looking to build a world, you might want to understand the actual middle ages, because you shouldn’t just assume that you know how everything works.

The world of the middle ages is — in some ways — very similar to how we live now, and in others it is completely alien. Examining this difference is key to understanding a world that you build from the ground up in a way that prevents it from being just the exact same as every other work of fiction that might as well have a squire following every horseman clapping two coconut shells together.

As a later book — Medieval Vision — makes clear, while people are always people, it is helpful to understand that prior cultures drew categories differently from how we do so today. Perry and Gabriele present a very cogent, easily-digestible starting point.

I love the fact that the author fed this book to oyster mushrooms and then ate them. Profoundly chaotic energy.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

(Reviewed here)

This is the one work on here that is not specifically about cultural history. I include it because this list isn’t just about cultural history, it’s about adopting a different mindset. As such, it shares a space here with Cannibal Metaphysics, found further down: its presence on this list is meant, specifically, to encourage a certain dislocation from the standard, post-Enlightenment mindset.

Sheldrake discusses ecosystems from an unlikely point of view, casting as his protagonist fungi, an often overlooked branch on the tree of life. To hear Sheldrake tell it, fungi are the unsung heroes of the biosphere, the all-powerful Janitor of the living world. They transform base matter into something usable by other living creatures, serving as our interface between the animate and inanimate worlds.

Notably, if the politics elsewhere on display on this list make you feel uncomfortable, you can rest easy knowing that the heroes of Entangled Life can be read either as canny free-marketeers to put Gordon Gekko to shame or exemplars of mutual aid, depending on your own inclinations — there is evidence for both reads of the situation.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

(Reviewed by me here.)

Fundamentally, the thesis of The Dawn of Everything, previously reviewed here, is an important and fairly basic one, fundamental to everything else on this list: people are people, and people experiment. Why do we assume that, for the greater portion of the existence of the human species — not to mention the greater genus homo beyond it — that people lived in interchangable societies. One could not simply take a contemporary and drop them into the 1500s, expecting them to thrive, so why should we assume that someone going from 30,000 years before present would be able to recognize the world of someone living 80,000 years before present? The worlds on offer are fundamentally different, and the people living there — despite both being “paleolithic hunter-gatherers” — would have different ideas and assumptions about it.

We should not assume that any block of time in the past is 100% interchangeable with anything a hundred years away from it, much less 10,000 yearsa way from it. The idea that the past decade, century, or millennium has been one of accelerated or extreme change is just a form of presentism, a chauvinism that privileges the present over the past

People are always people. They experiment, they try things. Just because you live now doesn’t mean you’re smarter — it means that you have more stored cultural knowledge.

A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

(Reviewed previously here.)

Look, as other entries have put it, a big part of this is thinking about the world differently. If you think about things as Manaugh describes burglars doing, you’ll be well on your way there. He describes burglars as the mad geniuses and idiot savants of using architectural space: people who might get stuck in walls or pass, unseen, through floors and ceilings.

I posit that thinking differently about the world around you is a key step to building a world for a writing or other project, and Manaugh does a good job of training you to think differently about how you can interact with the built environment. Just because a construction encourages you to interact with it one way doesn’t mean that you are limited only to doing so in the way that it encourages you to: you can take control, and exercise agency over, the way that you interact with this environment that was constructed to shape your behavior.

How else might someone’s behavior be changed by the world that they live in? That’s the key question here. How might the architectural space that your characters live in be rethought and reused?

The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception by Carolly Erickson

(Previously reviewed here.)

See prior notes under Bright Ages. Erickson’s work is useful because she uses far more primary sources drawn from peasant experiences. It’s a fascinating read as a result. It can be somewhat dense, though. Much like the other works of medieval scholarship here — The Bright Ages, before, and Medieval Machine, immediatley subsequent to this entry — it describes a world very different from the one we imagine, with people engaged actively and consciously with the world around them, attempting to use the means available to them to achieve their goals and secure some sort of positive end for themselves.

Erickson’s basic idea is that the difference between the Medieval and Modern periods stems largely from the assumptions that people make about the world. She suggests that, based on these different assumptions, we can understand medieval people not as irrational or superstitious, but as exceptionally rational. Given the premises they had to work with — whether correct or incorrect — they were engaging thoughtfully and productively with the world on offer to them.

Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages by Jean Gimpel (Not available on Bookshop, apparently, link goes to bookfinder.)

A book I haven’t read in nearly a decade, but which I need to revisit. Gimpel is a Marxist historian, examining how people in the middle ages used the energy in their environment to do work that would have otherwise needed to be done by hand or by animal power.

In this book, he traces the use of mills, the way that machines are built, and looks at the strange, imagined technologies that they considered attempting to build (there’s a fascinating and confusing picture of a wind-powered chariot in the latter chapters, and several ideas for perpetual motion machines that suggest different understandings of the world.

For millennia, people worked under the understanding of the world that Aristotle created in his works on physics, and putting yourself in the headspace where you can try to understand the effects this had on mechanics is a fascinating exercise.

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel

A book that is, admittedly, still on my to-read list. Edgar reviewed it at the end of last year. However, the way that textiles in general are treated in fiction is, frankly, the result of not actually thinking about textiles. Oftentimes, it’s something that just sort of fades into the background, making up the odds and ends of a constructed world, but this is a mistake. What goes in to the clothes you wear, the tools you use, is important. Cloth, in all its forms, is important.

Medieval and early modern England built an empire largely on wool production, for example. Cotton and wool, and their various applications, were the height of Inca technology, and they managed to use it to nearly successfully turn back the Spanish. Understanding textiles gives a great insight into how to understand a civilization.

A major element of this, when you get down to it, is deciding what is worth focusing on and what can slide beneath the threshold of awareness — and the lesson for any person seeking to build a novel secondary world should be that your own threshold of awareness needs to be a few levels deeper than what you expect your readers’ to be: you need to know more about what’s going on than your reader does, and if you fail at this particular test your construction will fall apart.

Cannibal Metaphysics by Eduardo Viveros de Castro

(previously reviewed here and here.)

Okay, look: if you want to build a world from the ground up, you have to think about the world differently. You need to alienate yourself from everything that you think is normal. Cannibal Metaphysics is the best book I’ve found for that, because it’s the furthest I can get from the standard post-enlightenment western line of thinking. Considering the world as its given to you and then deciding to look at it completely differently — for example, as if everything presented to you is, in its own way, not just animate, not just conscious, but fundamentally as if it were human is a dislocating experience that will lead you to think differently about the world around you.

Beyond this, simply considering the possibility that you might draw lessons from a culture far removed from the post-Enlightenment one in which we all live is extremely important: you should not presume that the world — even a world that you build by hand — is one that will work like the one outside of your window.

※

If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Bluesky, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books we review and reference (while supporting a coalition of local bookshops all over the United States.) We are also restarting our Tumblr, which you can follow here.

The World Builder's Bookshelf, Part 1