Fantasy series that are both character-driven and with great worldbuilding

[The Marquis de Leech]

3 minutes ago, Pilusmagnus said:

Well inventing history can be great worldbuilding just as well as inventing mythology, races and languages. I personnally consider that ASOIAF has the best worldbuilding of anything I ever read, maybe ex-aequo with Tolkien. I've never been more immersed when I read something than I am with Martin, because you can see all stratums of population, all the aspects of the society, what people read, what they eat, how they dress, what they sing, what games they play. And there's all these centuries of history as well, and a lot of foreign cultures and distant lands that you hear about but never see.

I don't know if that counts as great immersion or great worldbuilding, but it's really the best I've read.

So things like oak trees growing north of the Wall, and large animals surviving multi-year winters don't bother you? Or the fact that Dornish people and Wildings share a common language in a pseudo-medieval world? Or the North's incomprehensible lack of a navy (a naked plot device)? Or the idea that a family can rule for eight thousand years in a setting that prides itself on "realism"? Or the awkward orientalism of Essos? None of that can count as great worldbuilding.

Really, taking medieval Europe, (mostly) deleting religion, and adding ice zombies and dragons doesn't strike me as great worldbuilding. I don't read Martin for the world - I read him for character and plot, both of which he is excellent at. 

[Astromech]

7 minutes ago, Pilusmagnus said:

 

And when all of this has been published, then two years later they release the paperbacks, and in the case of ASOS, six years later they reworked them in Le Trône de Fer - Intégrale 3 saying "Look how nice we are, compiling volumes so you don't have to pay 8 euros for each" when it's actually what you should have had in the first place.

It really is a case of labelling fraud if you ask me.

 

 

Well inventing history can be great worldbuilding just as well as inventing mythology, races and languages. I personnally consider that ASOIAF has the best worldbuilding of anything I ever read, maybe ex-aequo with Tolkien. I've never been more immersed when I read something than I am with Martin, because you can see all stratums of population, all the aspects of the society, what people read, what they eat, how they dress, what they sing, what games they play. And there's all these centuries of history as well, and a lot of foreign cultures and distant lands that you hear about but never see.

I don't know if that counts as great immersion or great worldbuilding, but it's really the best I've read.

I am assuming this is simply French publishers. They love breaking up novels into several tomes. My copy of Les Miserables is 3 tomes and Le Rouge et le Noir is 2. Don't get me started on Dumas.

 

I agree with your sentiment regarding GRRM's world-building. There is a depth to his world, as you pointed out, with the detail GRRM includes. It is very fleshed out. It's that depth which attracts me to certain novels/series. I also find appropriate levels of depth in Bakker's world of Earwa, Rothfuss'  Kingkiller Chronicles and Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings.

[Pilusmagnus]

9 minutes ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

So things like oak trees growing north of the Wall, and large animals surviving multi-year winters don't bother you? Or the fact that Dornish people and Wildings share a common language in a pseudo-medieval world? Or the North's incomprehensible lack of a navy (a naked plot device)? Or the idea that a family can rule for eight thousand years in a setting that prides itself on "realism"? Or the awkward orientalism of Essos? None of that can count as great worldbuilding.

The only thing that bothers me among all of this is the wildlings speaking the same language as the people south of the wall. It is indeed stupid.

I explain the rest thanks to magic I guess.

[Darth Richard II]

I've read the first three Foreland books, they're pretty good if I recall correctly. I need to read the last two soon. Definitely more character than world building, very political.

[Darth Richard II]

You know I think Rothfuss does some very decent world building, I just want to punch most of his character sin the groin.

[Pilusmagnus]

1 minute ago, Darth Richard II said:

You know I think Rothfuss does some very decent world building, I just want to punch most of his character sin the groin.

I heard that his narrator was annoying due to his doing self-pity all the time.

[Darth Richard II]

Ha. That's a discussion for a different thread.

[The Marquis de Leech]

7 minutes ago, Pilusmagnus said:

I heard that his narrator was annoying due to his doing self-pity all the time.

It's not self-pity (well, not just self-pity). It's self-aggrandisement. Kvothe may or may not be the Best Man Ever(TM), but the story you have to read treats him as such, so from a practical point, it doesn't make much difference.

Rothfuss has some awesome worldbuilding (most notably the Evil Tree and the magic system), and his prose is a delight to read. Shame about the characters (which consist of a Gary Stu, some characters who exist to have sex with the Gary Stu, and half the cast of not!Hogwarts). And the all-too repetitive plot.

[Jo498]

2 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Really? Bakker? I can't even remember half the characters, and nothing they really do except Kellus seem to affect anything. Maybe we don;t agree on the same definition of character driven.

Not to mention Esmet is one of the worst written female characters in all of fantasy.

Worse than Serwe...?

I think characters like Akka and Cnaiur are interestingly done, even though they don't "drive" all that much of the plot.  I stopped somewhere in the 3rd book but I found Proyas a fairly interesting character as well (although not yet well developed).

FWIW, I think SF and fantasy usually work much better "plot"-driven (or sometimes "idea-driven" which might include strange worlds and/or social systems) than "character-driven"

[HairBearHero]

2 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

It's not self-pity (well, not just self-pity). It's self-aggrandisement. Kvothe may or may not be the Best Man Ever(TM), but the story you have to read treats him as such, so from a practical point, it doesn't make much difference.

Rothfuss has some awesome worldbuilding (most notably the Evil Tree and the magic system), and his prose is a delight to read. Shame about the characters (which consist of a Gary Stu, some characters who exist to have sex with the Gary Stu, and half the cast of not!Hogwarts). And the all-too repetitive plot.

I really enjoy the Kingkiller Chronicles and even I'll admit that this is a reasonably fair assessment. Rothfuss' strengths are his world and prose. The characters, with the exception of Kvothe, tend to be defined by a single characteristic (two or three at most) and aren't given an enormous amount of depth.

Recommendations that do both world and characters extremely well?

Daniel Abraham, in all his guises. Long Price Quartet, Dagger and Coin and The Expanse are all intriguing, coherently thought-out worlds and the characters are excellent - flawed, realistic, relatable. Geder in the Dagger and Coin in particular is one of the best-written characters I've come across in a long time.

Seconding the Gentleman Bastards - the world is sketched in broad strokes and relies heavily on show-don't-tell, so if you're looking for detailed histories or breakdowns of the politics of the world you'll be disappointed, but it's a fascinating place that draws you in. I like the characters, but the main ones are mostly variants on the hi-octane trickster. The supporting cast and villains tend to be more varied.

Hobb is brilliant.

Dresden Files does a superb job of worldbuilding (with incredible Chekhov's Gun usage and multi-book arcs and movements), but the characterisation isn't for everybody. Worth checking out and seeing if you like them though. Start from the third book, Grave Peril. 

[Richard Writhen]

13 hours ago, Pilusmagnus said:

In France, the concept of A Sword of Swords doesn't exist. What Martin intended as a single book is instead split into four volumes named respectively (French titles literally translated) : Intrigues at King's Landing, The Sword of Fire, The Red Wedding (nice spoiler btw) and The Kingslayer's Law (I have no idea what that refers to. Jaime? Tyrion? Why a law?)

And when all of this has been published, then two years later they release the paperbacks, and in the case of ASOS, six years later they reworked them in Le Trône de Fer - Intégrale 3 saying "Look how nice we are, compiling volumes so you don't have to pay 8 euros for each" when it's actually what you should have had in the first place.

It really is a case of labelling fraud if you ask me.

 

Why is it called integrale 3 if it's an omnibus / compendium / whatever of 4 volumes? Just wondering ...

[polishgenius]

10 hours ago, HairBearHero said:

 Start from the third book, Grave Peril. 

No, don't do that ffs. It is indeed where the series kicks up a notch and stronger than the first two but if you read it without the context, while most of the immediate stuff will make sense much of the background stuff and emotional impact will be lost.


Also: I loooooove Daniel Abraham's stuff but I don't think his worlds are particularly deep. They're very much built in the service of the characters and plot - what you see is engaging and wonderfully described but I never feel like there is, or has been, much going on outside the immediate frame of the story. Like, in Long Price, even Galt is barely sketched out as a nation, and it's a place pretty important to the plot. I guess it's what you see as good worldbuilding though.

[Iskaral Pust]

I'd like to echo RBPL and say that most "world building" in fantasy is anything but.  The genre is dominated by medieval-ish settings that conveniently drop many deeply embedded aspects of that period for convenience and modern perspectives, e.g. narrow mindsets that interpreted their world through a lens of religosity/dogma/superstition and strict convention, 90% of the populace were peasant serfs, riding horses was incredibly expensive and only available to a tiny minority, armies were mostly unarmed conscripted peasants or mercenary companies, it is prohibitively expensive to assemble (never mind carry) supplies for weeks or months of travel, it is similarly improbable to travel all day and then in an hour or two set up camp and hunt, prepare and cook fresh game, Malthusian cycles and collapses were common, literacy was extremely rare, the aristocracy was a brutal kleptocratic class who maintained armed retainers for the forcible extraction of produce as tax/tribute from their serfs.

Most "world-building" is actually some novel cultural addition, like a magic system or dragons, that is somewhat coherently merged into the medieval-ish setting while still ignoring the fundamental inconsistencies used by the author to make the setting more appealing or more supportive of archetypical hero's journeys or other plot devices.

[Darth Richard II]

I have a better idea. Don't read Dresden, because it's shit.

[williamjm]

 

1 hour ago, polishgenius said:

Also: I loooooove Daniel Abraham's stuff but I don't think his worlds are particularly deep. They're very much built in the service of the characters and plot - what you see is engaging and wonderfully described but I never feel like there is, or has been, much going on outside the immediate frame of the story. Like, in Long Price, even Galt is barely sketched out as a nation, and it's a place pretty important to the plot. I guess it's what you see as good worldbuilding though.

I think Abraham's books have an adequate amount of world-building but I agree there's a lack of depth to it. The Dagger and the Coin world doesn't have the same sense of there being a detailed history behind it as ASOIAF does, and the Thirteen Races of humanity often feel a bit irrelevant to the plot. I don't think that necessarily detracts from the series because I think it's more focused on characters and ideas.

For other series, I have quite a lot of nostalgic fondness for Julian May's Many-Coloured Land. The world-building has both a huge amount of imagination (while there are some familiar elements it's hardly another medieval Europe clone) and quite a lot of detail, but I'd say it was still a character-focused series.

I like Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series. Again, I probably wouldn't say it has quite the same feel of depth as ASOIAF, but unlike The Dagger and The Coin it's a series that really embraces the idea of different races and civilisations. Despite there being a lot of world-building, I'd say it mostly doesn't overwhelm the characters or the plot (there's maybe one book which gets a bit carried away with introducing new races).

[Mars447]

Rothfuss's prose is pretty shit.  Half the time it's overly purple, the other half its completely colloquial, and Rothfuss switches between those two tones abruptly enough to give you whiplash.  And everything is infused with pretentious 101 level college philosophy that's just cringeworthy.

[Darzin]

7 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I'd like to echo RBPL and say that most "world building" in fantasy is anything but.  The genre is dominated by medieval-ish settings that conveniently drop many deeply embedded aspects of that period for convenience and modern perspectives, e.g. narrow mindsets that interpreted their world through a lens of religosity/dogma/superstition and strict convention, 90% of the populace were peasant serfs, riding horses was incredibly expensive and only available to a tiny minority, armies were mostly unarmed conscripted peasants or mercenary companies, it is prohibitively expensive to assemble (never mind carry) supplies for weeks or months of travel, it is similarly improbable to travel all day and then in an hour or two set up camp and hunt, prepare and cook fresh game, Malthusian cycles and collapses were common, literacy was extremely rare, the aristocracy was a brutal kleptocratic class who maintained armed retainers for the forcible extraction of produce as tax/tribute from their serfs.

Most "world-building" is actually some novel cultural addition, like a magic system or dragons, that is somewhat coherently merged into the medieval-ish setting while still ignoring the fundamental inconsistencies used by the author to make the setting more appealing or more supportive of archetypical hero's journeys or other plot devices.

And that is why Bakker's world building is the best. 

[Darth Richard II]

You know Bakker is just the middle east during the first crusade right?

[Pilusmagnus]

I think that by "worldbuilding" what I actually mean is "immersion". I don't really ask that the world is profound and deeply developed to call it great worldbuilding. I just want it to feel real, that it's a real place I could live in. But I feel that somehow it is connected with worldbuilding.

Take Abercrombie (and I love Abercrombie but his strength is clearly the characters, not his world) his world is really not a place that you feel you could live in. There are no songs, no entertainment (except a play at the beginning but just because it serves the story), the structure of the countries is not explained more than you need to (who are the great lords of the Union? the only one you know is Brock because he's the traitor) and all characters and place names have fantasy names generator names, particularly in Styria.

So when you're not reading his books it doesn't feel like a real place with a real history. But even now I am not reading ASOIAF and I can still think about Planetos and wonder about what is West of Westeros and think how I would love to see the Jogos Nhai etc...

10 hours ago, W. Wrycthen said:

Why is it called integrale 3 if it's an omnibus / compendium / whatever of 4 volumes? Just wondering ...

Well there are five integrals which are basically the five original volumes, but the publisher doesn't tell you that, and you have to wait years after everything in it has been translated to finally have it.

Intégrale in French doesn't mean that everything is there, most compendiums of anything are called Intégrale 1, 2, 3...

[The Marquis de Leech]

2 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

You know Bakker is just the middle east during the first crusade right?

Yes, but

1. Fantasy based off the faux Middle East is much rarer than faux Medieval Europe, so I'm willing to be more forgiving.
2. The actual beauty of Bakker's worldbuilding is the mindset of the people. Unlike Martin, where the likes of Tyrion Lannister or Jon Snow could adapt quite happily to the twenty-first century, Bakker's characters are dealing with something truly alien. No warmed-over Enlightenment liberalism here.