I propose that worldbuilding is the primary distinguishing characteristic of SF and fantasy (at least at a superficial level). Get the worldbuilding wrong, and your readers won’t be able to get a grip on the story line or the motivation of your characters. Or worse — they’ll get a grip, and realize that your story is, at best, a western or an age-of-sail yarn with the serial numbers filed off: that the trappings of the fantastic are only there to add a spurious sense of exoticism to an everyday tale.

Charlie Stross via World building 101 – Charlie’s Diary.

Serial Orientations
from Jason Mittell. Here’s the accompanying description.

J.J. Abrams’ mystery box | Video on TED.com.

Greg’s Cable Map is an attempt to consolidate all the available information about the undersea communications infrastructure. The initial data was harvested from Wikipedia, and further information was gathere by simply googling and transcribing as much data as possible into a useful format, namely a rich geocoded format.

This article is not about literary canons of influential works of fiction, but about the concept of a canon that defines the world of a particular fictional series or franchise.

Miéville brings these quotidian practices into stark perspective. He uses slips of perception and movement back and forth between cities to highlight the contingency of many of the social aspects of the real world. The City & the City draws no hard distinction between the world of fantasy and our own. Instead, Miéville seems to suggest, the real world is composed of consensual fantasies of varying degrees of power. The slippage isn’t between the real world and the fantastic, but between different, equally valid, versions of the real.

Boston Review — Henry Farrell: Into the Breach (China Miéville).

In a lot of cases, though, I am creating characters in order to see these places—these times, these settings. But, from the very beginning, I’ve known what kinds of stories I’ve wanted to do—so it’s also a question of finding the character who belongs to that world, as an excuse to draw that world.

via BLDGBLOG: Ruin, Space, and Shadow: An Interview with Mike Mignola.

The city as social realm strongly refers to communication via images. Comics help turning these images into cultural narratives and aesthetics and to create outstanding icons of modern identity, landmarks of our self-understanding that are, by definition, not bound to specific cities or nations.

via Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: Comics and the City: An Interview with Jorn Ahrens.

[...] Tolkien’s most important contribution by far [...] was his construction of a systematic secondary world. There had been plenty of invented worlds in fantasy before, but they were vague and ad hoc, defined moment to moment by the needs of the story. Tolkien reversed that. He started with the world, plotted it obsessively, delineating its history, geography and mythology before writing the stories. He introduced an extraordinary element of rigour to the genre.

China Miéville – Tolkien – Middle Earth Meets Middle England

Visualization of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book [via]. You can download an annotated pdf file here.