Worldbuilding vital to sci-fi and fantasy

SCIENCE fiction and fantasy have a unique way of reshaping reality, often in surprising and striking manners.

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Authors in these genres frequently refer to “worldbuilding” which involves creating settings that blend the familiar with the extraordinary or entirely new worlds governed by different rules.

As these new books prove, you can’t tell a great speculative fiction story without a compelling world.

WAKE THE WILD CREATURES

Nova Ren Suma

At a ruined Catskills hotel called the Neves, a supernatural mist protects a women-only community from interlopers. The women, refugees from domestic violence and other dangerous situations, lived together in uneasy harmony - until three years ago, when Pola was arrested for double homicide and her daughter Talia was taken to live with Pola's sister.

Suma’s prose is spare, but she shapes it into sentences that cut like diamond shards, interspersing two timelines: Talia’s childhood at the hotel and her adolescent years with her aunt. The hotel's fallen grandeur seeps into everything - in one still moment, the narrator says that “time seemed to dangle over me like a chandelier”.

Wake the Wild Creatures vibrates with rage but also reveals a scorching tenderness as it muses on the power and problems of community. What do we owe to one another? How do we care for our own? Pola is a terrible mother, but it’s impossible to hate her, especially when we come to understand the injustice she was fleeing.