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Examples
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TOLKIEN calls this process 'subcreation' and it is now, probably, the default fantasy mode and an extremely potent literary approach, whether you denigrate or praise it.
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TOLKIEN calls this process 'subcreation' and it is now, probably, the default fantasy mode and an extremely potent literary approach, whether you denigrate or praise it.
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Worldbuilding: The ambiguity in the term "worldbuilding" resides in the fact that it was coined for the craft of creating ordinate realities in the manner of Tolkien's highly methodical "subcreation," largely a matter of blocking, bolstering, gilding and bumphing, but has come to be applied not just to worldscapes generated by worldblazing but to any sufficiently foreign and/or complex fictive milieu, even to milieus that are largely mimetic.
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Worldbuilding: The ambiguity in the term "worldbuilding" resides in the fact that it was coined for the craft of creating ordinate realities in the manner of Tolkien's highly methodical "subcreation," largely a matter of blocking, bolstering, gilding and bumphing, but has come to be applied not just to worldscapes generated by worldblazing but to any sufficiently foreign and/or complex fictive milieu, even to milieus that are largely mimetic.
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Being a writer means you're not just trying to project your own inner self onto the page, but that you have to imaging =other= selves, distinct from yourself or your fictional surrogate, to whose inner lives you have to devote as much time and effort as any other subcreation.
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"By daring to destroy his subcreation, Abraham regenerates an entire mode of fantasy."
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Three-quarters of the way through The Long Price Quartet, a journey that began with A Shadow in Summer (2006) and continued through A Betrayal in Winter (2007), Daniel Abraham tosses a spanner into his carefully and lovingly contrived subcreation which ensures that readers will be perched on the edges of their seats for an unfathomable resolution in next year's The Price of Spring . . .
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"By daring to destroy his subcreation, Abraham regenerates an entire mode of fantasy."
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Three-quarters of the way through The Long Price Quartet, a journey that began with A Shadow in Summer (2006) and continued through A Betrayal in Winter (2007), Daniel Abraham tosses a spanner into his carefully and lovingly contrived subcreation which ensures that readers will be perched on the edges of their seats for an unfathomable resolution in next year's The Price of Spring . . .
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A few keep going over to the Titans every day, in their striving subcreation (how can flesh tumble and flow so, and never be any less beautiful?), into the rests of the folksong Death (empty stone rooms), out, and through, and down under the net, down down to the uprising.
mollusque commented on the word subcreation
In subcreation, by telling stories or inventing worlds the artist effectively imitates the "Primary Creator."
--Michael D. C. Drout, 2006, J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, p. 176
April 11, 2009