Worldbuilding

1516 book by Thomas More

imaginary, typically self-consistent world with its own rules and characters, different from the real world; often used as a background or basis in story telling

Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world or setting, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. Developing the world with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, culture and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers. Worldbuilding often involves the creation of geography, a backstory, flora, fauna, inhabitants, technology, and often if writing speculative fiction, different peoples. This may include social customs as well as invented languages (often called conlangs) for the world.

Mythopoeia (, ), or mythopoesis, is a subgenre of speculative fiction, and a theme in modern literature and film, where an artificial or fictionalized mythology is created by a writer of prose, poetry, or other literary forms. The concept was widely popularised by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s, although it long predated him. The authors in this genre integrate traditional mythological themes and archetypes into fiction. Mythopoeia is also the act of creating a mythology.

thumb|250px|Manuscript by Emily Brontë that contains poems about Gondal, a paracosm