Science & Tech Quote by Margaret Weis

Fantasy lives or dies on its ability to feel seen, not just described, and Margaret Weis is blunt about where that illusion gets built: in collaboration. Her line reads like a practical preference, but it’s also a quiet manifesto against the lone-genius myth that still clings to genre writing. In fantasy and science fiction, “worldbuilding” isn’t only a stack of lore; it’s a shared visual grammar. If the reader can picture the city, the armor, the creature’s silhouette, the story gains friction and plausibility. If they can’t, the whole thing risks floating away into foggy adjectives.

Weis’s emphasis on “working closely” matters. She’s not talking about outsourcing a cover and calling it a day; she’s describing a feedback loop where image and text argue, refine, and sometimes correct each other. That’s especially resonant given her career in franchise-shaped storytelling (Dragonlance, Dungeons & Dragons-adjacent work), where characters often begin as archetypes and become real through consistent, recognizable design. Visual choices stabilize tone: a knight can look tragic or ridiculous depending on a single line of armor; a “world” can read as mythic, grimdark, or pulpy based on palette and texture.

The subtext is industry-savvy: in genre, art isn’t decoration, it’s infrastructure. Collaboration isn’t compromise; it’s a tool for coherence across media, editions, and fan imagination. Weis is naming what readers already do instinctively: they don’t just read these worlds. They inhabit them.