Ursula Le Guin’s anthropologist heritage shows through in the Earthsea books, which you get the sense are only the tip of the iceberg for the world.
However, it is her Always Coming Home that is really a good example - a “future history” of North California replete with songs, poetry, maps, recipes, mythology, religion, scientific observations, biographies… I love delving into it.
I’d swuggest George R.R. Martin’s *Dance of Ice and Fir * series, although his focus is somewhat different. While he has the requisite ancient legends, detailed far-away lands and cultures, snippets of ancient tongues, and numerous religions - and their various mythologies and rituals - he’s unique in the degree in which he focuses on a single country, its geography, its society and its vast, interlocked networks of personal relationships. You really get a feeling of how virtually every inhabitant is connected to everyone else. Beyond that, I’ve never seen a fantasy writer invent such a full *recent * history for his creation - every king, war, conflict and other important event of the previous 300 years or so is worked into the narrative and, often enough, is influential to the plot.
That way, events in the books don’t seen isolated or arbitrary: they’re the direct consequence of the events that preceded them. To me that seems to be the real reason why a deep “subcreation” is so crucial.
This is going to be a little out-there but I can recommend Dave Sim’s comic book series ‘Cerebus the Aardvark’. Sim spent 300 issues (more than 25 years) telling the tale of the lead character in the fictional continent of Estarcion. There are many religions, cultures, politics etc though he borrows the languages from Europe (the Lower Feldans speak French, the New Seprans speak Italian, and so forth).
While producing more than 6000 pages of material over the course of it all Sim has always maintained that there were multiples of that amount in background and research material he’d put together so Estarcion would appear and function as an actual place that existed prior to Cerebus (there’s hundreds of millions of years of history we hear about) and would continue to do so after he died. There’s even, like Tolkein, a certain amount of evidence that downstream Estarcion turns into our world.
And that fact that Sim went, no foolin’, batshit insane towards the end only adds to the joy of it all.
For sure. I came into the thread to mention them. Again, he’s still holding most of the cards close to his chest, but the Malazan books are obviously working on a MASSIVE amount of world-building and creation.
I’m going to go a bit outfield and mention Greg Stafford’s Glorantha. This isn’t a series of novels, but rather became a setting for the role-playing game RuneQuest. And as such it has the added advantage of hundreds of contributors adding to the setting.
But Prax, the Lunar Empire, Dragon Pass, the detailed mythology of the God time, the intricate details of the religious systems and cultures, are just amazing.
Since Avalon Hill went tits up there’s no more RuneQuest any more, but Glorantha lives on in Hero Wars. See www.glorantha.com.
Nitpick: It’s Song of Ice and Fire. It’s good, and has lots of stuff going on, but I don’t know that it has the same level of subcreation that Qadgop is looking for.
(George R.R. Martin didn’t invent any languages.)
Katharine Kerr’s Deverry has a lot of subtsance. Not as much as Tolkien, but more than most
You know, after the sixth time or so I’ve read the series, you’d think I’d get the name right.
Anyway… Martin’s work is different from that of Tolkien. While JRRT focused on the macro - full languages, 10,000 years of history - Martin takes more of a micro approach. Tolkien’s world, for all its spendours, often feels empty, almost sterile; you don’t get the sense that people actually live in the places the story passes by, nor do we feel that people have much their own individual narratives beyond the demands of the “big” story. The exception to this is Tolkien’s description of the Shire - with its various clans, petty feuds, customs, traditions and so forth, it’s a lot more “alive” than the rest of Middle Earth.
In a way, Martin’s Seven Kingdoms are like the Shire. Only with a LOT more sex.
Auel? Won’t go there anymore!
Martin? Probably one of the top two or three fantasists writing today, but he’s making it up as he goes along!
Star TreK? I’m leery of subcreations by many different authors.
But I will look into some of those suggested above. I’ve heard good things about Leguin’s stuff, but haven’t read much by her since “The Dispossessed”.
Anybody know about any failed subcreations out there? Some doddery eccentric professor who wrote reams and reams about his fantasy universe, only to die and leave it all locked up in a trunk for his heirs to ponder? (Which would have been the fate for JRRT’s works if he hadn’t fallin into fame via “Hobbit” and “LOTR”)
Understandable, which is why I’m suggesting the works of a specific author.
Harry Darger’s The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion is a 19,000 page epic fantasy novel with over 300 illustrations by the author.
‘Course, Darger was completely off his rocker, and the book is apparently unreadable, but damn, that’s a lot of writin’.
You may not be happy with it, but there is one SF/fantasy series that takes place in a similarly detailed and complex “subcreation”: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover. The problem is that she began with juvenilia (her first published story was written at age 17, on the train from Alexandria Bay to Utica, NY, and modelled on a Leigh Brackett sword-and-sorcery extravaganza) – and, rather than rewriting or retaining juvenile concepts for the sake of consistency, she simply allowed things to be inconsistent from story to story. If a character can ride from Thendara to Mount Nevarsin in a day, but his grandfather took six days to make the same trip in another story, well, that’s how it happened, in both cases.
With that disclaimer, however, she’s created a culture – and one that evolved over time, complete with its own mythology and literature, languages, non-human races with which humans interact, geography, politics, cultural taboos, “magic” skills, etc., all logically interplaying in the same continental area on another planet.
Darkover is an acquired taste, and changes with her writing skills. But emphatically worth exploring, IMO.
“Zermatism” is the creation that ties together many of the works of the mad-genius artist Stanislav Szukalski. It’s a pseudoscience/religion that ties together the Deluge, languages, humans, and yetis. I have no idea if the full set of Szukalski’s notebooks are still in existence–by the time of his death, he was up to around 40 volumes.
I’ve got one. Wait a minute… (puts flame-proof suit on).
Stephen King
In The Dark Tower series and several of his other books over the last decade or so, he has basically come up with a “mythology” that ties together virtually all of his previous novels.
YMMV–though there were always some similarities among his novels and their themes of a Bigger Bad lurking behind any particular villain, he sometimes goes to extreme and ludicrous lengths to try to retroactively fit them into a single world, like
(spoiler for the last couple of Dark Tower books)
including himself as a central character in the mythology.
On the other hand, many of his novels obviously were written with the idea that the same undercurrent of Evil is taking different forms in different stories. And many of them do fit together very well and were apparently intended to from the start. And the sheer volume of his published work gives him a vast and rich source of material to draw from in creating the overarching mythology.
Whatever you think of his talents as a writer, I think he fits the OP pretty well.
Tangent, I agree that King’s DT stuff is better than many other subcreations (and I enjoyed reading and re-reading it immensely), but it still doesn’t rise to the level of complexity I’m looking for.
He’s definitely worth a mention, though.
That’s the one I was going to mention. It is obvious that quite a bit of background work has gone into her work, before the writing began. Different from, for example MZB’s Darkover or Zelazny’s Amber series, where the development came in the books as they were being written.
Gene Wolfe and C.J. Cherryh are also pretty good at having intricately detailed backgrounds, of which the reader only sees hints of the deeper details when they occasionally surface into the story.
I know that Steven Brust’s Jhereg stories have a bunch of background material that has never before seen print… but that’s because it used to be his D&D (or GURPS?) campaign notes, not because he was obsessive about the fiddly bits like Tolkien was.
Come to think, MAR Baker has to have metric tons of background information, not only for his gaming campaign, but for the few books he’s written – “Man of Gold” and another few I’m blanking on right now.
Tolkein wasn’t making all that to be a successful writer though, right? It was for some other motive. Plus he had a long time to write all that and his son has been dribbling it out for decades after his death.
Anyway one that comes to mind is Katherine Kurtz. From early on she had worked out genealogies and time lines. She spent a lot of energy figuring out the way the magic worked. She uses Latin a lot so I don’t think she ever worked out another language. But traveling around in the early books there definitely a sense that there were old buildings and stories out there that few if any knew.
Unfortuantely I think she lost her touch about 10 years ago. Yet I wouldn’t be surprised if she has a tons of notes and entries on the history of her land. If she’s every worked them into a short story though she’s probably published it. I bet that when she dies if another author wants to write the story of Halbert the Dane there will be a basic outline to work with.
Maybe a glimmer yet, but I heard Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell talking about her work, and that’s basically what she’s been doing and is trying to do, create a consistent reality out of which any tales that happen to be published are plucked. Which reminds me, I bought The Ladies of Grace, Adieu, which is supposed to be stories from that reality, and I really must read it soon.
But you know, I’d give it a while before I judged whether or not she’s going as deep as the master.
Lawrence Watt-Evans started his Ethshar world as a game setting. Probably not as complex as you want it, but as a gamer, I find it interesting. At least he’s put his backgrounds online for the readers.
He’s not a Literary writer, but he does deliver a solid story, IMO. I frequently reread his books.