Tolkien also created complete Languages for each race of his stories.
Sometimes I think he just liked world-building, and writing stories about his world came second.
From reading his biography, it seemed he mostly liked creating languages and then crafted stories and worlds based off them.
Tolkien’s the GOAT.
He was a philology teacher, so that’s indeed the case. You see it with how much details the language have, like real languages dialects and evolution. It was really his craft.
He only wanted to create languages, for fun… but he wanted to do it properly, so he needed full cultural backgrounds for his languages, including epic poetic sagas written in said languages… and to do that properly he needed a whole history of the world said languages and cultures had developed in… so the maniac built that. And then he wrote a children’s book set in that world, for his kids, as one does.
They are called Paracosms. He was writting languages during his teens long before he got to stories.
Middle earth is the first item on the list of examples on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracosm
Wish he was better at naming characters though. Not every son needs a name that starts with the same letter as his father’s.
What, you aren’t a fan of Aenor, son of Agenor, son of Agenar, son of Agenup, son of Ageflip, son of Agintur, Slayer of B’Thal’Muun?
Frank Herbert: Giant sandworms lol. /j
lol Herbert had some weird fantasy about a guy named Duncan from Idaho. Only explanation for some of that stuff.
Frank Herbert is what happens when a genius writer takes too much shrooms while studying dunes. Like that is literally what happened.
I also like to kidnap my entire family in my used hearse then do a shitload of amphetamines in the Mexican desert immediately after completing a formal education in the newly developed science of ecology that ended with learning about the inevitability of man made climate change continuing to accelerate the greatest and final planetary mass extinction event, the holocene era
Yeah I feel that shit in my soul bro, for sure
Whomst amongst us hasn’t done a Herbert once or twice
Calling him a genius writer is probably being a bit too generous, what with all the beefswellings and all that
Tolkien is clearly the best, but I don’t have a problem with Martin borrowing from real-life history. History is incredibly cool, and full of amazing stories. Stealing from other authors is bullshit, though.
Then you have the author of Twilight that started world building after the first book, created a number of characters with interesting background lore, then proceeded to do nothing with any of it.
It’s even worse than that - Twilight was originally fanfic for Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, so it’s all just Lestat with a fake mustache and sparkles.
And Interview with the Vampire was fanfic based on a cross between Blacula and the David Frost interview of Richard Nixon…
It’s really hard to criticize anything about Twilight after you learn it was literally self published fan fiction written by a Mormon house wife with ten kids that has never once in her life even seen a healthy or fulfilling relationship from a distance, or had a meal containing any form of seasoning, and will almost certainly die without having ever experienced even an aliquot of sexual pleasure
Also, normally when you write supernatural fiction that rips off indigenous mythology, you don’t name drop the tribe that you’re taking from and proceed to integrate their real-world reservation heavily into your setting.
I read that series out of spite when it was popular, and actually started getting interested in the lore and world when she started introducing fucking X-Men powers. Huge build up, huge hype, and then… fucking nothing. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but alas.
George Lucas: Let someone else handle it.
