Denna artikel analyserar Jessica Schiefauers spekulativa roman Bärarna (2020) och diskuterar konsekvenserna av att bygga ett samhälle utifrån smittoprevention. Romanen skildrar en framtid där en rabiesliknande sjuk-dom hotat att utplåna mänskligheten. I denna dystopi har män, som spri-dare av smittan, och kvinnor separerats för att förhindra återkomsten av sjukdomen. Artikeln undersöker hur romanen belyser de problem och faror som uppstår när smittoprevention blir ett centralt samhällsideal. Den disku-terar hur Schiefauer genom spekulativ fiktion skapar ett tankeexperiment där prevention dras till sin spets, vilket resulterar i ett samhälle präglat av både utopisk omsorg om hälsa och miljö och en dystopisk avhumanisering av smittbärare. Artikeln visar hur romanen varnar för riskerna med att bygga samhällen på rädsla och uteslutning, samt betonar vikten av att kritiskt gran-ska smittopreventionens roll i samhällsbygget.

This article analyses Jessica Schiefauer’s speculative novel Bärarna (2020), and examines the consequences of building a society based on disease pre-vention. The novel depicts a future where a rabies-like disease has nearly wiped out humanity. In this dystopia, men, as carriers of the disease, are separated from women to prevent the resurgence of the illness. The article investigates how the novel illuminates the dangers of making disease pre-vention a central societal ideal. It discusses how Schiefauer, through spe-culative fiction, creates a thought experiment in which prevention is taken to its extreme, resulting in a society characterised by both utopian care and dystopian dehumanising. The article shows how the novel cautions against societies built on fear and exclusion, while stressing the need to critically as-sess the role of disease prevention.

This chapter examines how maps contribute to the building, understanding, and navigation of a tabletop role-playing game world. It begins by distinguishing between a role-playing game's source world and game world, the former being materials that inform the latter. A game world develops incrementally as the group agrees on its content. The chapter then examines the case of the 13 maps in the Dungeons & Dragons adventure The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021), chosen because they illustrate various ways in which maps contribute to building the game world. All maps share the implicit proposition that what they show exists and are thus powerful world-building tools. By analyzing the maps in terms of “props” – actual things that generate fictional truths – they reveal varying levels of authority in relation to the game world. They range from a map with nearly complete authority over the game world, through those that argue for authority in conjunction with the adventure's verbal text, those that undermine their own authority but highlight source world possibilities for the game master, to a map designed and introduced in a way that gives it minimal world authority. 

The force driving Anahit Behrooz’s Mapping Middle-earth is a desire todemonstrate that J. R. R. Tolkien’s work deserves to be taken (more) seriouslyin the field of literary studies. The author argues this case by relating maps,mapping, and cartography – within and outside the story world – to a handfulof critical perspectives that currently enjoy certain appeal both within themainstream and among fantasy scholars. And should the book fail to convincesome hobbitophobic critics out there, the fault does not seem to lie either withTolkien’s work or Behrooz discussions of it but with the fact that fantasy(including Tolkien) require more of its analytical tools than some mainstreamcritical perspectives offer when taken off the rack.

Urban fantasy, the genre of fantastic literature in which magic and monsters meet modern society, is fairly young but has old roots. Stefan Ekman’s book, Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic, examines the genre in depth, including its inherent social commentary, its historical development, and its interplay between modernity and the fantastic. The author draws on a wide range of urban fantasy texts from five decades, combining detailed analysis of dozens of novels and other media with broad discussions to provide a comprehensive understanding of the genre across three sections. The first section presents an overview of what the genre looks like today-both in terms of its common traits and its variety of settings-and how it has developed over time, including the history of urban fantasy scholarship. The second section examines urban fantasy’s core concern with the unseen, for example through a focus on unseen individuals overlooked by society or hiding within it, and on ignored urban spaces or labyrinthine undergrounds. The third section addresses how urban fantasy explores the relationship between the supernatural and modernity. Ekman offers readings of fiction by Ben Aaronovitch, Lauren Beukes, P. Djelí Clark, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Max Gladstone, Kim Harrison, N.K. Jemisin, and Megan Lindholm, among others. Urban Fantasy will appeal to teachers and students of the fantastic as well as to urban fantasy enthusiasts and literary scholars. Ekman illuminates the genre’s evolution and defining traits, inviting readers to rethink urban fantasy as a creative tool for using magic to explore modernity. 

In tabletop role-playing games, the game master and players in a group are encouraged to construct their own fictive world in which they can play. By using a critical world-building approach, we analyse the garments and accessories in the illustrations in Player’s Handbook (2014) for Dungeons & Dragons (5th edition) and find that clothes have four conspicuous functions in establishing a world of possibilities from which a group of players can build their game world. The four functions are: to convey that the world is one of action and magic, to provide a range of cultural and historical alternatives to the traditional pseudomedieval fantasy world, to communicate what is important about particular groups, and to maintain a difference between female wizards as physical and sexualised and male wizards as people of knowledge and military competence.

Den aktivitet som beskrivs i kapitlet bygger på uppgifter som flyttar fokus mellan enskilda exempel och jämförelse av exempel, vilket fördjupar och breddar förståelsen av det undersökta fenomenet. Vi illustrerar aktiviteten med hur kursdeltagarna i en uppdragsutbildning för yrkesverksamma arbetar med datatidskrifter, men den kan anpassas till olika situationer. Genom individuella förberedelser, klassrumsaktiviteter i tre grupperingar och ett skriftligt efterarbete undersöker och dokumenterar deltagarna tidskrifters likheter och särdrag.

The activity described in the chapter is based on exercises that shift focus between individual examples and comparison of examples, which provides a deeper and broader understanding of the phenomenon under examination. We illustrate the activity with work on data journals that was carried out by participants in a professional-development course, but it is adaptable to a range of situations. By individual preparations, classroom activities in three types of groups, and a written follow-up task, the participants explore and document the journals' differences and similarities.

Secondary worlds are constructed from a wide range of building blocks. In this article, epigraphs that refer to fictional sources in secondary worlds are analyzed in terms of their world-building characteristics. The analysis starts from the (implied) paratextual and intertextual properties of epigraphs that are part of and refer to a secondary world. Four functions of such world-intrinsic epigraphs are explored: the way in which they (1) set a mood that indicates the world’s dominant themes or ethos; (2) give details that extend, explain, and familiarize the fictional world; and (3) provide perspectives with complementary or conflicting worldviews. Finally, (4) how the double nature of fictional epigraphs, as fictional paratexts and as purported quotations from world-intrinsic sources, extends and solidifies the world is addressed. These four functions lead us to conclude that fictional epigraphs deserve thoughtful analysis in any critical world-building endeavor.

All works of fiction build imaginary worlds in which they set their stories. What makes genres such as science fiction and fantasy different is that their worlds are often created not as twins to our actual world but as cousins or even distant relatives to it. Some of these worlds are built to stage a particular narrative, others to house certain casts of characters, and yet others to offer exciting possibilities for exploration. They can be shaped by, for example, text, film, graphic novels, computer games, or combinations of these media. I find such worlds fascinating objects of study, not only as backdrops to particular stories but as aesthetic and cultural objects in themselves, and I am intrigued by how worlds can be built by elements that are not part of the narrative. Such non-narratival elements are often ignored in world-building analyses, while potentially being of great importance to the world to which they contribute. In this essay, I look exclusively at non-narratival world-building. My first example shows how a collection of “lore” in a computer game or (in my case) a graphic-novel app can offer material for a scholar who analyses the world of the story. Then I turn to a world without any explicit narrative, using the illustrations from a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook to demonstrate what they can say about the implied game world. Before that, however, I introduce the concept of critical world-building and outline my view of world-building as architecture. World-architecture provides the basis for my analysis of the examples.