An atlas for collaborative worldbuilding
hared Worlds runs parallel to the sci-fi chart as a separate map of imagined places set among real stars and planets. We envision this as a place for community-driven worldbuilding, where users are handed a lightly seeded framework and given the freedom to upload stories, images, and narrative artifacts which bring the map to life.
The goal is to create an immersive and evolving narrative playground where worldbuilders can create an imagined version of our solar system and cosmic neighborhood.
What It Does
What Shared Worlds is for
This page exists alongside the sci-fi chart for a reason. The sci-fi atlas is largely meant to be a history and geography of published science fiction that has already entered the broader public record. If you want to know whether any Robert Silverberg stories were set around real stars, the extrasolar scifi chart should give you that answer. Shared Worlds is a more direct framework for site-native worldbuilding: still curated, but open to original contributions, experiments, and collaborative settings that begin here rather than arriving with an existing shelf presence.
- It will begin with a lightly seeded chart and grow denser as people add places, fragments, stories, and artifacts.
- It will start with text and leave room for images and other media as the project matures.
- It will let people build within the same systems, so worlds can accumulate multiple voices and recurring threads.
- Shared worlds will encourage continuity where it emerges without forcing every contribution into one rigid canon.
Grounded in the sky, open to invention
Shared Worlds will initially stay anchored to real stars and planets while leaving room for altered histories, imagined worlds, and diverging futures. We want the feature to feel exploratory and open-ended, but still legible as a map of places in our own cosmic neighborhood.
- We will pilot the feature in a map of our solar system, where the geography is already familiar and easy to inhabit.
- Later we will expand into a near-neighbors map that reaches out to 50 lightyears.
- Further out, the framework can widen to accommodate more altered systems, more ambitious collaborations, and fully invented worlds