fictional worlds
Made-up story settings
Fictional worlds are imaginary settings created for stories, games, or other narratives—complete with their own geography, history, rules, and inhabitants.
Tolkien's Middle-earth and the Star Wars galaxy are elaborately developed fictional worlds.
Writers speak of worldbuilding as the craft of making these invented realities feel coherent and lived-in.
A well-constructed fictional world has internal logic that readers or players can explore beyond what any single story reveals.
- imaginationFaculty for forming ideas
- fantasyImaginative mental wandering
- magical realismFiction blending miraculous and mundane
- parallel universeHypothetical coexisting separate reality
- video gamesInteractive electronic entertainment
shared universe · extended universe · mythology · utopia · Narnia · setting · metafiction · Middle-earth · allegory · escapism · alternate history · novels · magic systems · hero's quest · films · plot device · graphic novels · invented
- fictional mapsfantasy maps, treasure maps, Neverland, Atlantis, enchanted lands
- literary settingssetting, narrative setting, Hogwarts, Narnia, Middle-earth
- mimesisimitation, mimicry, verisimilitude
fictional worldsreality
What actually exists
the here and now · physical reality · nonfiction · objective reality · real life
fictional worldsdocumentaries
Films depicting real events
historical accounts · journalism · eyewitness testimony · news coverage · biographies
fictional worldslived experience
Knowledge from personal participation
here · everyday life · direct experience · sensory experience · direct observation