My favorite books with world building so immersive you may never find your way back out

Don’t be dissuaded by the fact this awesome and thoroughly delightful novel is a distilled, updated, and generally card-sharp-reshuffled version of Sir Thomas Malory’s story Le Morte d’Arthur written in 1485. Basically, it’s a deftly imagined re-telling of the tale of the humble kid who would grow up to become King Arthur – yes, the stable boy who pulled the sword from the stone and went on kingly glory. Why notable for world building? Because: boy-educated-by-wizardly-morphing-into-all-sorts-of-animals. When Wart (the young Arthur) is bodily transformed into a fish, hawk, ant, goose, and badger, he gains first-person insight into how humans are like and/or unlike these various creatures and so gleans vital life lessons that will serve him well in his eventual rise to medieval leadership in the future – a future that, of course, is actually Merlin’s past. So, yeah, character’s-psychology-building is all part of powerful world-building.

This sci-fi series starts with A Princess of Mars and rambles on for like ten follow-up novels over the next 20 or so years. Is it pulp-y and sort of goofy and vaguely offensive in spots? Oh yes. If any of that bums you out, don’t dive in. But you’ll be missing a true classic from the Golden Age of Science Fiction and Fantasy, which laid the groundwork for all the epic SF & F to come. The Barsoom books are as much swash-and-buckle as ray-gun-and-aliens, which is just part of their charm. And Burroughs’ skill at conjuring up a believable-in-a-1940’s-way take on a Martian civilization is kind of wonderful as he builds up a vision of Mars as a resource-strapped planet where a bevy of unique alien races square off against each other with our oh-so-earnest Earth hero John Carter caught in the middle.  

The three books of His Dark Materials are a grand example of an author tweaking our existing world in such a way that the familiar becomes bewitching and the every day is magicked-up into a glittering alt-version of itself. Drawing readers into the coming-of-age adventures of two uniquely relatable kids, Lyra and Will, the trilogy makes immersive world building look deceptively easy as Pullman transports us from a slightly strange Brit-like reality to a somewhat stranger place to a wildly new realm across the course of the three books. So, if you’re ready to take flight with some wayward witches, converse with armored polar bears and find out what it’d be like to have your own personality-compatible critter-daemon ever at your side, Pullman’s skillfully wrought, multiple world dimensions are well worth visiting.

No list of this sort would be complete without the Hobbit-Meister himself and his astonishingly detailed, fine-grain-authentic realm of Middle Earth. The world building here is simply perfection itself. Part of the reason for that may be how the books draw on existing mythologies that already have narrative ecologies of their own that have been constructed, deconstructed, and then reassembled and buffed up again for literally thousands of years. From Norse legends to Greek and Christian myths to Teutonic epics, Tolkien’s lands are the stuff of dreams-made-real, somehow ancient beyond counting and yet as relatable, vital, and invigorating as a drink from ice-cold headwaters of the mighty river Anduin. Another major contributor to the credibility of Tolkien’s world is his ability as an academic linguist to have designed his own languages for his various Middle Earth inhabitants. All in all, an unparalleled demonstration of the world-builder’s art.

With recent feature film and TV mini-series adaptations, Dune is in no danger of being overlooked by any conscious human being with a fondness for big-budget cinematic spectaculars. But the books in the series offer a much more intimate, up-close-and-personal connection to the planets that Herbert has devised as the backdrop for his sweeping sci-fi melodrama. From the watery sumptuousness of Caladan to the heat-hammered wastelands of Arrakis, Herbert makes you feel, smell, hear and somehow physically absorb the elemental nature of each global environment he creates. Herbert picks up on the innate desert-ness of an Arabic-inflected personal- and place-naming technique to draw the reader away from their comfy existence on this planet and pull them into the exotic wonder-worlds of this wildly imaginative series of interplanetary adventures.