The best novels that engage in world-building

I love how Naomi Alderman flips the mirror on our reality, building a world in which women possess great physical power over men.

Men are sometimes belittled and oppressed by women, but they’re always aware of the imbalance in power. Boys are told not to go out alone at night—and yet Alderman renders this dark satire with many laugh-out-loud moments that illuminate the hypocrisies and dysfunction of our current power dynamics.

For me, it was a reminder and a lesson in how even when you’re building a chillingly unpleasant (although plausible) world, you can still use humor to help readers understand it. By using subtle humor, Alderman makes the case that power—regardless of who holds it—is corrosive.

As a writer who’s interested in what comes next—after climate change, after fascism—I love how Diane Cook uses broad brush strokes to show us the future, without going into too much history or detail.

Instead of hyper-focusing on what the future holds for us, Cook directs our attention to one small, outlier community that’s doing weird things. This is a great technique: she paints a picture of a future world by painting a picture of a fringe group that’s trying desperately to be different from the main one.

A mother-daughter drama drives the plot forward, and we learn about the rules and ruminations of the fringe group as the characters sort out their power struggles.

In Severance, Ma creates a creepy, disturbing world after a fungus has turned most humans into zombified, non-functioning blobs, some of whom need to be exterminated as an act of mercy.

But the drama does not revolve around the zombies; instead, it revolves around the interpersonal stress felt by a small group of non-zombies who have decided to travel together. In this world, as in the pre-zombie world, humans are petty, insecure, delusional, and narcissistic.

Ma also does an amazing job showing us the pre-zombie world at the moments that it transitions into this new reality. Reading it, I had the feeling of “It’s happening right now,” as I traveled with the protagonist, trying to outrun the fungus. 

The speculative world that Mandel builds in Sea of Tranquility involves populations of humans who live in colonies on the moon.

But this is not really a novel about life on the moon. This is a time travel story that had to be set a couple hundred years in the future, and the moon colonies are, naturally, a part of human life in that time period.

The characters’ experience of life in a moon colony is ancillary to the time travel story; Mandel gives us just enough to make it seem real and true.

I love how George Saunders creates really weird alternate realities, but doesn’t make a big deal about it.

In Liberation Day, we learn about the inner lives of people who seem to be enslaved by being “pinioned” to a wall after they’ve been programmed to perform as storytellers for their owners. Because we’re learning about this world from the pinioned narrator, we are not subjected to any lecturing or moralizing about the situation.

Instead, we hear about his romantic yearning for his owner’s wife, and that’s the tension around which the story is built. He only gives us the details that are necessary for us to understand his yearning, giving the reader just enough information to suss out the scenario in which he finds himself captive.