The Science Fiction Worldbuilder's Handbook

Kovitch Jennifer writes science fiction and teaches speculative worldbuilding at writing workshops across North America. Her short fiction has appeared in *Clarkesworld*, *Lightspeed*, and *Beneath Ceiling Tiles*, and her novella *The Last Hydrographer* was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She developed the systematic worldbuilding methodology taught in this handbook over a decade of teaching at the Odyssey Writing Workshop, the Viable Paradise workshop, and through her online Worldbuilding Intensive program, which has guided over two thousand writers through the process of constructing complete fictional worlds.

Her approach to worldbuilding is grounded in the conviction that speculative fiction's primary power lies not in escapism but in the unique pressure it applies to fundamental questions about human nature. She believes that a well-built world functions as an argument—a constructed environment designed to test ideas under conditions that do not exist on Earth, yielding insights that realistic fiction cannot reach.

She lives in Portland, Oregon, with a slowly expanding collection of telescopes, a set of topographic maps she keeps meaning to frame, and a cat named Kepler who has strong opinions about FTL drive systems. She is currently at work on a novel set in a system of tidally locked planets where the cultural divide between the dayside and nightside civilizations has reached its breaking point.

She can be reached through her website at kovitchjennifer dot com, where she maintains an ongoing blog about worldbuilding craft, reviews of speculative fiction, and occasional rants about the orbital mechanics in popular films.