Authors That Use Shared Universes in Their Books
Universe spanning media is on trend right now. I believe there are no less than 790 Marvel movies and TV shows, comics and books, stage musicals and porn parodies (so many porn parodies), that all share their own universes. But Marvel isn’t the only game in town. Many authors create media that shares a universe, even if they sometimes don’t share characters. Here’s a list of some of the authors I believe do it best. This list does not count crossovers (the merging of existing characters into a shared universe), or cameos by characters from other media.
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Brandon Sanderson may be the fantasy author with the steadiest output in the business. He puts out no less than four books a year and every single one is big enough to be a murder weapon. Nearly all his books take place in a shared universe called the Cosmere. If you take each book individually, you’ll notice they all have different religions and social classes and roots in magic. They have different races, geography, and politics. Yet studied on the macro level, you’ll notice subtle similarities. Minor characters drift in and out under different names. One world’s myths are another’s history. Taking it all in is an undertaking. Just the four currently existing books in The Stormlight Archive alone log in at 4,536 pages. And that is just a small fraction of the short stories, standalone novels, novellas, and series that make up the Cosmere, so if you want to see the matrix on this one, it’s a real time commitment. But Sanderson is one of the best in the business, so maybe that would be time well spent.
Author: Peter Clines
Clines is such an absolute genius at ever so subtly connecting his stand-alone novels you won’t realize they’re all parts of a single narrative spanning space and time. Characters will drift in and out of the background before you realize you recognize them. People that seemed so inconsequential in earlier books turn out to have incredible significance later. And all of them seem in some way tied to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos somehow. I love the mix of science, horror, and humor in his books and hopefully you will, too.
Author: Stephen King
I have an admission. I’ve never finished The Dark Tower series. I’m four books in and creeping along. I know that to some of you this means I’m not fit to talk about the tiny details of Steve’s genius. But I know how much of a lynchpin the tower is to the King Universe. There are signs of it in nearly every book King has ever leant his name to. Evil takes many names and many forms in the various books, yet almost all are grounded in the same wandering menace that roams the lands surrounding the tower. Perhaps one day I’ll finish the Tower saga and, like a well-oiled lock, so many things across the many King books I’ve read will click into place. This is another doozy of a library to fully conquer. The nice thing is that most King is stand-alone and requires no knowledge of the Tower to enjoy.
Author: David Mitchell
Mitchell’s most well-known work Cloud Atlas is a masterpiece in building a shared universe, seen in different spaces throughout different times, yet intricately woven together. If you look beyond his biggest hit, you’ll find cousins and lovers and children’s children’s children of characters you know and love meandering in and out of his other narratives. Mitchell is an incredible writer. His book (which is really five books in one) The Bone Clocks is one of my absolute favorites of the 2010s. It was my first Mitchell book and as I got further into his body of work, I started to find breadcrumbs here and there. A shared lover in Cloud Atlas. A magazine writer in Utopia Avenue. A morally questionable scientist in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Each breadcrumb was a satisfying scavenger hunt prize, carefully camouflaged in plain sight for the observant. I cannot recommend David Mitchell enough.
What are some of your favorite shared universes in pop culture? Let us know in the comments below and become part of our shared universe.
