Amongst the more expected selections - Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Larry Niven's Ringworld and Frank Herbert's Dune all get shout-outs - Orson Scott Card manages to bring up a name that you probably didn't see coming:

For years, I have told my writing students that the best example of world-building in fiction is James Clavell's "Shogun." When you read this book, the world-creation is so thorough that you think you can speak Japanese. You can't - but it feels as if you can.

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., on the other hand, plays the role of the buzzkill:

I'm not going to be terribly enthusiastic about most world-building that I read, because my non-authorial background is rooted in analyzing the building blocks of societies, especially from environmental, political, economic, historic, and technical points of view. In this regard, few authors deal well with economics, fewer still with environmental or technical/engineering issues, and almost none with any sort of politics except copying feudalism, corrupted democratic systems, or monarchies.
That doesn't even take into account trade, climate, social history, disease, and a few dozen other items.

In the end, most so-called world building is the verbal equivalent of "Houdini-ism," where the reader tends to think more is there than is because of the distractions of a few well-placed details and props... and, for most readers, that's exactly what they want.

For those who like to see (extremely) minor controversy, you should also check out the comments section where a fan complains about the lack of non-white-male writers on the list and is promptly told to shoot themselves by Jeffrey Ford.

What are the Best Examples of SF/F Worldbuilding? [SF Signal]

One of the most infamous fake commercials from a scifi movie is this ad for Fruity Oaty Bars, a made-up product that appears in Firefly spinoff flick Serenity. Director Joss Whedon wanted to evoke the Asian-Western mashup culture of the far future in this ad, which looks like a mixture of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and North American iconography. In the film, it also contains a subliminal message that sets off government experiment River's "kill kill kill" programming — when this perky clip airs in a bar, she goes apeshit and murders everyone in the joint.

Another popular scifi ad is this one, for the soft drink Slurm that Fry loves so much in Futurama. It's pretty much a pitch-perfect parody of typical soft drink and beer ads, with the single futuristic addition that the company admits that the drink is literally addictive. Oh, and it's being sold by a mutant snail.

For sheer audacity in world-building, one of my favorites of the bunch is this ad, from Confederate States of America, for the Slave Shopping Network. The flick takes place in an alternate future where the Confederacy won the Civil War, and now slaves are sold on HSN-esque channels, and given Prozac to make them better workers. I just love the way the nice white lady says "You can have the whole family or break them up!" Creeptastic.

Then there are movies that simply update today's brands for tomorrow, to give you a sense of how familiar products might evolve. You may have noticed in 2001: A Space Odyssey that this happens quite a bit. There are references to the Hilton and Howard Johnsons hotel chains, Crest toothpaste, and these two shots showing that IBM will be making spacesuit and spaceship controls in the "far future" of 2001.

You can see more product placement from 2001 here.

Meanwhile, Pepsi actually worked with the Back to the Future creators to imagine a future branding strategy for Pepsi, including a product called "Pepsi Perfect." You can buy Pepsi Perfect bottles on eBay for way too much money.

5. Sun of Suns, by Karl Schroeder. Rebel, former pirate, and kickass airbike rider Hayden lives in Virga, a giant bag of air floating in space, built by a post-human society. The air is heated by high-tech suns dragged around by city-states that create their own gravity by building on the inside of vast, spinning tubes. Virga is a kind of eighteenth-century world of kings, despots and pirates, and many of the city-states horde sun power — they'll attack out any nation that tries to assert independence by building its own sun. Most people remain dependent on a few big sun-owning nations for their warmth; those who refuse to toe the line live in the cloud-draped sunless reaches of "winter." Hayden, whose mother was killed after she built a pirate sun, is out to change all that, even if it means killing the leader of Slipstream, one of Virga's most powerful nations. The characters may be a little two-dimensional, but you'll keep reading just to visit the vast, globular floating oceans, the strange cities, and bizarre barren outposts in Virga. Plus, pirate battles in zero gee! Sun of Suns is the first in a trilogy, and the second novel just came out in hardback.

4. Ringworld, by Larry Niven. A classic 1960s world-building epic about aliens on a quest to find out more about a vast artificial Dyson ring built around a dying sun. This is the novel that inspired the people who created the game Halo, which also takes place on a ring world. Expect strange weather, bizarre vistas from on and below the massive structure, and alien encounters that feel very Star Trek (but at a time when Star Trek was still the shit).

3. Lilith's Brood, by Octavia Butler. This trilogy of novels by MacArthur winner Octavia Butler is about what happens to humanity after earth is destroyed in some kind of nuclear apocalypse, and all the human survivors are rescued by powerful, mysterious aliens called the Oankali. Three-sexed, the Oankali reproduce via a third sex called the TK, which mixes genetic material inside its own body and creates offspring. All their technology is biological too. Lilith, one of the human survivors that the Oankali enlist to help them deal with the other human survivors, discovers that the Oankali recreate their species every few hundred years by merging their genetic material with other species. And the humans are next on their list of species to merge with. Set aboard vast biological ship-words and a newly geo-engineered Earth, Lilith's Brood traces three generations of humans and Oankali as they have children together — children who grow more alien to both species with each generation. Yes, it's a very complicated and subtle allegory about colonialism. And yes, it's an amazing tale of the unknown. Enjoy it for either, or for both.

2. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville. It's a world where bureaucrats raise demons with steam-driven machines, and "thaumaturgists" remold human bodies with their hands. A strange kind of species-transforming weather called The Torque occasionally rips through, converting humans into half-insects, half-birds, half-seamonsters. It's been years since a Torque came through, and all the different post-Torque human groups live separated into nineteenth-century style ghettos in a city whose polyglot heart is in a train station called Perdido Street. Everything is steaming along normally in the city — anarchists print subversive pamphlets, artists date across species lines, and scientists study winged creatures from around the globe. But trouble comes to town in the form of dream-eating moths who suck people's minds out, and the only creatures who can stop them are a mad scientist, his half-insect lover, a sentient garbage dump, and a trans-dimensional spider.

5. The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin. A classic novel by one of the supreme world-builders in SF, The Dispossessed is a tale of two planets: one is a lush, economic powerhouse ruled by greed, consumerism, and a rich elite; the other a desert planet full of the descendants of rebels who fled the first planet two centuries before. It has scant resources but is governed by a feminist-anarchist belief system that preaches collective ownership, gender equality, and sexual liberation. Shavek, a physicist from the anarchist planet, is one of the first to visit the home planet in many generations, and his experiences traveling between worlds reveal chinks in the Utopia he's left behind — and unexpected benefits on the corrupt home world, where scientific innovation flourishes in an atmosphere of capitalist competition. What's stunning about this novel is that LeGuin avoids simplistic judgments, and shows in honest detail how even the most progressive culture can be corrupt. And even the most corrupt culture can foster creative brilliance.