Exploring New Worlds: Imagination’s the Limit

Something I find amazing with the fantasy genre is all the different unique worlds that are created in every single series. It is amazing how authors can design such compelling realistic worlds that also hold so much more potential and adventure than our own. These stories pick us up and transfer us to a whole new place. It is a place we could never experience or know about otherwise.

In high or epic fantasy, the authors make a whole new world that has completely new rules, cultures, peoples, environments, and creatures. It is a world that no one has ever experienced before and can only be experienced within the pages of that particular series. Even if two worlds have similarities, each author imagines those elements, creatures, cultures, etc. differently and puts the elements together differently to create something unique and new. Some authors, like Tolkien, even create completely new languages, histories, and lore that takes additional reading to grasp the extent of the world and its possibilities. The amount of science or technology can vary and often magic is real and changes the way the characters and people interact with the world around them.

Even urban fantasy, which stems from our own world, has endless possibilities. The authors manipulate and change our world to whatever they want it to be. We, as readers, recognize it as our world by the familiar points they put in it, but we also recognize how different the world is with all of its new possibilities. These stories keep the technology and knowledge we have accumulated, and seek to blend magic, creatures, myth, and legends into the world that we know. But, the results of this blending is infinite since we don’t know how our world would change or in what way magic would work. The author decides that and makes our world, their own unique world open to adventures never seen before.

Just think, the world and its possibilities and its inhabitants are one of the most defining features for any fantasy of any kind. Without a good and interesting world, what point is it to read the adventure? If there aren’t any new possibilities or potential for the unknown, it probably isn’t even a fantasy novel. For many readers, how rich and exciting the world is, will determine if a reader will continue reading past the first book, or even to finish the first book. Setting is so essential, because without a place for something to happen, nothing can happen.

 Most fantasy readers, myself included, love the surprises, the impossibilities, and the adventure of these worlds where anything can happen. Of course, we still want there to be boundaries and difficulties. A story would be pointless without that. But, the possibilities exceed far beyond what we know and is simply pure imagination. 

If you want dragons to be real, there are worlds with them alive and well hoarding their treasure and soaring the skies. On any particular day where you want a little magic to make your world easier, then there are plenty of worlds with characters that can manipulate the world with a flick of their wrist. Even if you want to speak to a god and ask your questions of the universe, there is a world where you can do that and be amazed.

To be honest, it is an amazing experience to live in another person’s world. It is incredible to experience things that could never happen in the one we currently live in. To walk through the imagination and experience the lessons of this life through the eyes of another life, it can really hit home more than any example in our own world. There are truly endless possibilities with the endless number of books to read, worlds to explore, and imagination to use.

Personally, it’s hard to verbally describe what I love about experiencing a fantasy world or what generally makes me think ‘that’s so cool’. Reading a book and loving it is truly an experience to me. As any experience, somethings are super easy to express in words, and others are not. I know I like magic. I find it interesting when authors really make a system to the magic that is tangible with rules and limits, and explanations that the reader gets to learn and experience and become knowledgeable about. I love new mythologies with gods and goddesses that interact with the characters or with the readers themselves. I’m often hook on unique cultures of peoples (human or otherwise). Obviously more details and development are always going to reach a reader more intensely. However, some authors don’t give you all the details and just let you experience being in this place they have made with the people the populated it with, and that can be just as powerful, to me, as having all the details.

What is your favorite part of experiencing so many unique worlds? What makes you like one world over another?