I’ve been enjoying reading Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne, a book about a woman who adopts shapeshifting sea anemone child while trying to survive in a ruined city dominated by a giant flying bear. I’d previously read Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and something I’ve enjoyed in both that and Borne is how Vandermeer approaches worldbuilding.

I don’t know the etymology of “wordbuilding” and this is a short post, so I’ll just say that my understanding of the concept is that it encompasses all the stuff writers do to fill out the fictional settings of their work, including: maps, history, religion, systems of government, clothing, climate, and any number of other little details. I particularly associate it with fantasy writing that takes place in completely fictional settings, like George RR Martin’s Westeros or Tolkein’s Middle Earth.

In contrast to those authors, the output of the worldbuilding Vandermeer does is very minimalist (granted, he is not exactly a fantasy author). In Borne, the setting is dominated by a failed biotech company that is simply referred to as “The Company”. In Annihilation, the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, none of the characters are given names and are just referred to by their professions.

The effect is that you as the reader aren’t given any extraneous information; do you need to know the name of The Company, if no one in the story knows it? The name might clue you in to various information about The Company, like its national origin, or its governance structure, that Vandermeer has decided you don’t need to know. And it works! Borne has compelling characters and beautiful prose and you get to focus on those things instead.

To me this was a reminder that it’s nice when worldbuilding isn’t conspicuous. You can tell at various points that Borne is set in a world that’s been carefully thought out, but the “worldbuilding” you do get is carefully doled out in doses that maximize its impact on the story. It’s a neat aspect of Vandermeer’s writing that I wish was more influential in the sci-fi/fantasy world.