ASU to offer scaled-up ‘worldbuilding’ course this fall
Your story belongs here.
Got a sci-fi story brewing? Arizona State University’s popular “worldbuilding” course — where imagination meets innovation — is now easier to access than ever, thanks to a bigger classroom and a recent course catalog update.
Taught by Department of English Professor Matt Bell, the ever in-demand ENG 307: Writing Science Fiction meets during fall 2025 on Mondays and Wednesdays in ASU Tempe’s Discovery Hall. With room for more writers and a General Studies Gold “HUAD” designation, the class promises to “conjure dramatic new systems of magic, invent new technologies, and imagine how creatures with bodies unlike ours might live.”
Interested students still must have completed first-year composition courses but there are no other pre-requisites or requirements for registration.
Class participants will read science fiction and fantasy set in diverse worlds as well as write weekly exercises designed to build individual skills related to worldbuilding. They'll draw maps of planets, continents, or cities; create new languages—spoken or written; design alien landscapes and then seed them with wild ecosystems; and build towering architectures and urban spaces to populate with competing political factions and new forms of government.
Course instructor Bell is the director of the Worldbuilding Initiative in ASU’s Humanities Institute and author of speculative fiction. His most recent book is “Appleseed,” a cli-fi novel which takes place in three different American timelines. Students in Bell’s worldbuilding class benefit from his writing expertise as well as his mentoring ability; he’s also the author of a craft manual, “Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts.”
Interested? Visit ASU class search to enroll before Aug. 27.