Worldbuilding is a tough job to do well, and I have great respect for those who can pull it off. I had mentioned Alan Dean Foster earlier — I think he pulls off some great worldbuilding in his short stories.

I would like to point out something that may not jive entirely with other people’s impression of “worldbuilding”. That is, I consider creating characters part of worldbuilding. Maybe not main characters, as the world is built for their benefit, and the benefit of their story, but all the minor characters they encounter along the way. The gossipy bartender. The acolytes in the Holy House. The duke’s courtiers.

Regardless, I agree that worldbuilding should be inserted invisibly into prose, shown and not told whenever possible, and the occasional necessary infodump should be disguised as well as possible, that it might not appear as such to the casual observer.

But just because action and character drive a story, that does not excuse doing a slapdash job on the backdrop.

I think there’s a value in throwing something out there and leaving the explanation to the reader’s imagination; it can make for a more convincing and enveloping world than explaining the what and why of everything. Like the immersion method of learning a language.

I just read “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. It could easily have been bogged down with a lot of backstory about how the world turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland and details about what had happened since; the nerd in me kinda wanted to hear about that. Because he left almost all that stuff out, though, he was able to focus on what mattered: the story of the relationship between the two main characters. That was the engine that pulled the narrative train.

Anyway, because I just read that book, it was on my mind when I saw your post.

Leaving aside all the worldbuilding he obviously did to create the Bleed or the Snowflake Universe in Planetary, the comic writer still has the advantage of having an artist do all that detailed exploration for him. All Ellis needs to write is “Jakita Wagner breaks into the secret base of the Four” and then he can sit back and let the amazingly talented John Cassaday imagine that base and draw it in meticulous detail. Without that art, Ellis’ story would be flat and flavorless.

That said, I am a big believer in the iceberg theory of worldbuilding, meaning that the reader should only see the tip that breaks above the water (i.e. the part that affects the ship they’re on), and not the other 90% of the ice which is hidden beneath the waves.

But to make that TIP convincing, a good writer needs to think about the iceberg as a whole a great deal.