For some time now, there’s been a great deal of talk in SF/F circles about worldbuilding. My students ask about it all the time—tricks to make sure everything fits together, to make sure all the little details and bits of history they’ve created land perfectly with readers. I agree with them that establishing the place, time, and context for a story is important, but maybe the reason I don’t run myself ragged over worldbuilding is that I consider the activity a specific tool to be employed in service to a specific element of storytelling. To call it “setting” doesn’t draw a close enough bead on it. For me, that word is “whereness.” Whereness, the essential quality of being in a specific place is what makes Narnia, Camelot, Oz, and the Post-revolutionary United States of P. Djèlí Clark’s “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” such compelling settings. It’s also a quality I’ve been forced to acknowledge all my life.
My father entered the State Department through the Foreign Affairs Scholars program in the mid 1960s. At the time, African nations were rapidly gaining their independence, and they sought to conduct diplomatic relations with the United States through intermediaries who looked like them. For that reason, State began training, testing, and employing more Black Foreign Service Officers. My family was stationed in the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Botswana, Suriname, and Tunisia. We left for Paramaribo when I was twelve years old, and at that point, I had no memories of living anywhere but Columbia, MD. Before we left, when I tried to imagine what Suriname was like, the best I could do was to turn to movies and TV I’d seen depicting Hawaii and the Philippines. I knew Suriname was tropical, but I didn’t know much more about it.
It turned out that Suriname was like none of those places. In character, it’s more like a mash-up between Sub-Saharan Africa and various Caribbean and Central American nations. Its primary languages are Dutch and a pidgin dialect called Sranan Tongo. The culture shock was enormous. I felt as if I’d fallen through a portal into a fantasy land. Then, two years later, we did it all over again, and moved to Tunisia—a country as different from Suriname as Suriname was from the United States.
Culture shock is our reason for worldbuilding, it’s what necessitates the creation of whereness. Readers of speculative fiction want to be immersed in strange surroundings, to visit lands utterly foreign to their experience—partly because to be removed from one’s normal environment so suddenly and fully can teach a person a lot about who they are. In Suriname, I learned some Sranan Tongo and a smattering of Dutch, but I also learned that I was pretty good at “soccer” for an American, and I learned that for all the differences in Black life between the DC/Maryland/Virginia region and Paramaribo, Suriname, that history and circumstance create an inescapable cultural bond. In Tunis, I learned what it’s like to live under a dictatorial regime, how it feels to operate as a cultural and religious outsider, I learned what it’s like for a culture to function after thousands of years of occupations, invasions, and colonial oppression.
One invaluable thing this travel has taught me is that it’s possible for a world, a culture, a society to make too much sense. Our daily lives are influenced by customs and traditions it takes years to learn—and whose origins are mysterious. For example, elevator etiquette! How do we know we must all face the same direction? These unanswered questions, these customs we adopt without discussion, without conscious learning, add a sense of mess, a sense of randomness to our lives that make our world, our society seem both alive and lived-in. When creating a sense of whereness in my own work, I consider what seems natural to my characters, what aspects of their experience they simply take in stride. For example, as I write this, I am sitting in a café in New Orleans. As I approached the front door, I knew to say hello to anyone I passed on the street—not just because it’s polite and I’m feeling cheerful, but because encouraging strangers to think of you as a human being with manners rather than some easy mark from Away automatically makes it safer to walk the streets. In The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones sets most of the story in a time removed from our own—Wyoming in 1912, as well as decades previous, among the Blackfoot Sioux. He pays careful attention to the way his hunter character, Takes No Scalps, thinks and speaks. The changes to his language, the erosion and eradication of his culture under military and settler oppression. He is a product of his world, of his experience. His every movement and bit of speech infused with a deep sense of whereness.
Another thing travel helped me learn is how other cultures view my own from outside. Suriname was full of Black people—we were everywhere—but in Tunisia, we were rarer. Tunisia is mainly an Arab country, Muslim, even if, during the years I spent in Tunis, especially liberal. Black Americans were sometimes difficult to understand. Living there all through my high school years, I learned that while Tunisians know Black Americans exist that they mostly have only a few images and personages that represent us in their minds. Most of the Tunisians I met, if pressed, could have named ten or so Black Americans: Michael Jackson, James Brown, Michael Jordan, and Muhammad Ali were at the top of the list, and the other positions changed based on specific experience. Sometimes I heard “Will Smith!” or “Mr. T!” but never “Oprah Winfrey” or “Whoopi Goldberg!” I haven’t been back to Tunis since 1998, and I often wonder what the list would be now: LeBron James? Will Smith? Beyoncé?
These features are the bits that interest me most. They are the details that live and surprise. In conjuring fictional locales and societies, these are the bits of characterization that make me feel I’m reading a real world that doesn’t cease to exist the instant I look away from the page. Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword is an excellent example of this. A novel of Arthurian legend, it takes place in an England that could not exist. This is a land still recovering from Roman occupation, and yet, one of the Round Table’s knights is Muslim even though the faith could not yet have been founded. Instead of letting details like this one interrupt or derail the story, Grossman leans on emotional realism and political stakes to help even educated readers skate across the gaps in reality and maintain belief in the tale.
I’m not sure what method Lev Grossman uses for his worldbuilding, but the STEEPLE method is an excellent worldbuilding approach. Using that lens, the author adopts a specific departure from reality, such as “for millennia, the gods took an active hand in the affairs of mankind, but nobody has heard from them in 1,000 years.” Then, using that idea as a jumping-off point, follows the way it ripples through various elements of society, being sure to consider Societal, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legislative, and Ecological features of the world being described. Creating history, cultural memory, and fixations for imaginary societies is important—but it’s more important to create and capitalize on surprising specific details that make me feel I’m looking in on life in a time and place that exist independent of myself and my guide.
As an educator, I provide resources for my students and show them examples of whereness that work best, in my opinion, and help pick them apart. One author whose work I return to again and again is P. Djèlí Clark. As a historian, Clark understands worldbuilding in a deep and enduring way that always adds texture and verisimilitude to his worlds in whatever historical moment he chooses. For instance, “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” is set in a revolutionary America where magic, demons, lycanthropes, and hidden kingdoms are all widely known to be real. This allows for a situation where George Washington’s stolen teeth curse his life and make it impossible for General Washington to live with himself. This is a story I teach often, as it’s simply one of my very favorites.
It’s easy to lose oneself in the process of worldbuilding to the point where the actual writing becomes, at best, a secondary consideration. In the end, the key to worldbuilding and whereness is simple: make up enough of the world with enough detail that it seems real. There are many methods for going about this, but it’s important to remember that the purpose is to create whereness, to invent a world—even if it is largely similar to our own—where one’s characters can love, strive, fight, survive, and simply live. It’s also important to remember that many features and elements of our own society—now more than ever—do not make sense. Worldbuilding can be executed with too much logic, and readers of speculative fiction especially value surprise and culture shock. When I sit to type, what I’m always trying to conjure is the feeling I had when, at eleven years old, my family and I first arrived at the airport in Paramaribo. The place was small, run-down, with only a single runway. Doors and windows stood open, and the baggage carousel seemed to have stopped working years ago. White linoleum tiles with round black accent marks decorated the floor…except when I looked closely, those accent marks would move from time to time. After a while, I realized that they weren’t part of the tile pattern—they were large glossy-black beetles, attracted by the airport lights. When that fact occurred to me, I finally understood that this place—this country was nothing like I had expected. I was impossibly far from home, embarked on a tropical adventure.
Good luck on your own journeys, dear reader.
© 2025 Alex Jennings
