8 Speculative Fiction Authors Whose Books Are a Lesson in Worldbuilding

Victoria Schwab
Best-known for her A Darker Shade of Magic series, an adult fantasy trilogy that recently concluded with A Conjuring of Light, Schwab also writes equally compelling YA fantasy. No matter the category she’s writing in, her worlds are high-concept (a library of the dead, a magician who travels among parallel Londons, a city where acts of violence spawn literal monsters) and deeply character-driven. Schwab builds them with a healthy heft of realism that never diminishes the pleasure (or danger) of the magic.

Laini Taylor
From her beloved debut series to her recently released duology opener, Strange the Dreamer, Taylor is known for her intricate magical systems and worlds-spanning conflicts with deeply personal consequences. Taylor’s brand of fantasy is simultaneously dreamlike and high-stakes; wondrous and horrifying; magical and grounded in a world that breathes with the details of everyday life.

Roshani Chokshi
Arguably the best way to describe Chokshi’s worldbuilding is lush. Her worlds are dense with magic, fable, myth, mystery, destiny, secrets, and a sensuality (in the truest sense of the word) that suffuses every line. Chokshi’s greatest strength is her ability to create an atmosphere so thick it’s practically perfumed, and so lively you’ll almost believe you can enter the world yourself, if you can just find the right section of forest to wander into.

Renée Ahdieh
Ahdieh’s bestselling The Wrath and the Dawn series, a loose retelling of A Thousand and One Nights, features one of the richest, most sumptuous fantasy worlds you’ll come across. Ahdieh masterfully reinterprets a familiar story and places it in a world of her own making, one that feels as classic and timeless as the tale itself. And her new series starter, Flame in the Mist, is set in a richly realized Feudal Japan, laced with myth and magic.

Rin Chupeco
If you’re looking for tips on writing something a bit more macabre, look no further than Chupeco. Whether she’s writing horror, like The Girl in the Well, or high fantasy like her latest, The Bone Witch, Chupeco’s worlds never shy away from darkness. In fact, they embrace it and are all the more powerful—and powerfully engaging—for it.

Heidi Heilig
If you’re anything like me, “time-traveling lady pirate” is an automatic sell. But the concept alone wouldn’t mean much without exceptionally executed worldbuilding. Thankfully, as evidenced by The Girl From Everywhere and The Ship Beyond Time, Heilig is poised to join the worldbuilding greats. She mixes real-world history, various legends and fables (some already extant, some Heilig originals), and the complexities inherent in time travel to create a world that is both conceptually intriguing and flawlessly built.

Leigh Bardugo
Probably one of the first names to come to mind when you hear “worldbuilding,” Bardugo is a sheer powerhouse in this arena. Her Grisha world has already spawned five books across two series, a forthcoming story collection, and counting. What makes Bardugo’s world so generative is the detail that lives in the margins of each story; she weaves in mentions of other lands, other peoples, and other cultures so deftly that the world expands in your mind without you even noticing. Our world is big and complex and varied, and it’s those same qualities Bardugo uses to great effect in her own worlds.

Hannah Moskowitz
Moskowitz is possibly better known for her contemporary novels, but she also writes weird, fascinating fantasy. A History of Glitter and Blood in particular is an absolute masterclass in creating a world that’s both exceedingly strange and wholly believable. Even despite (or perhaps in part because of) its unreliable narrator and nontraditional structure, History’s world is easy to sink into and difficult to leave, two qualities essential to the best worldbuilding.