I’ve had some time to think about a few of the things I like recently. I’m not sure when the concept coalesced in my brain, but a lot of my interests can be explained by a love for invented ecologies.

I think that area — the invented ecology — best captures my fondness for the kind of source material that fill the pages of Dungeons & Dragons books. It’s not so much the content itself, which is diverting in its way, but the picture all the books attempt paint together of a coherent world. How else do you explain the sourcebooks on my shelf I may never actually put to use, but that I don’t regret owning for a second?

A well-developed invented ecology is the only reason I can bring myself to stick with most fantasy novels. Most sport average-to-bad prose, but their evocation of a total world is what makes me a fan when it’s done well. Sabriel is young-adult fiction, written below even the Harry Potter level style-wise. Its plot is decent, but its world is original and compelling. And for those few fantasy authors able to turn a phrase, there are cases like the fictional New Crobuzon of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, or Armada in The Scar feel as permanent, historied and tangible as the London of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Maps are like a real-world version of this. They describe real places that grew organically, but still have an element of invention to them. Obviously, maps of imaginary places are even better. Maybe the ultimate are imaginary maps of real places — an idea I can’t quite describe other than as something like remembered geography, or to link to sites like strange maps, or someone’s geographical map of internet communities, or a hand-drawn map of a videogame world. Basically, mixing up the objective and subjective on paper the same way they get mixed up in the brain.

World-creation may be my favorite art.