Unravelling Worlds

[steepholm]

I've been thinking quite a bit about worldbuilding recently. First, because I've just written a chapter about Tolkien's worldbuilding, which will (all being well) appear next year in a Palgrave Casebook. Then, because of this post, which is a hilariously snarky critique of the worldbuilding in The Hunger Games.

Worldbuilding isn't easy, of course. Even Tolkien nods, for all sorts of reasons, and not least because (as he wrote in a letter to Naomi Mitchison) "even a committee of experts in different branches could not complete the overall picture": it's just really, really complicated. There are considerations of genre, too, which means that we demand different degrees and kinds of plausibility from different kinds of writings. This doesn't of course mean that writers should be able to play faster and looser with the possibilities because a book is for children (the reverse is true, if anything), but the plane of satire, for example, lies at an oblique angle to that of our own reality. To complain that some of the things More wrote about in Utopia don't add up may be to miss his point.

To be honest, though, I'm not too sure about the worldbuilding in this universe, either. For example, like most apes, I find that without training my brain doesn't work well with very large numbers. What about yours? How far away is Saturn? Is it about a) 14,000,000,000 km b) 1,400,000,000 km or c) 140,000,000 km? Without looking that up, I would just have to take a wild guess.

One of the last conversations I had with Diana Wynne Jones before she became ill for the final time turned into a series of mutual confessions of our ignorance about this kind of thing. It began with tarmac, I think. Considering all the thousands - millions? - of miles of tarmac road on this planet, and the fact that new tarmac has to be laid every few years, how come we haven't run out? For all the worry about oil and gas reserves, no one ever mentions that tarmac too is a non-renewable resource. And where does it all come from, anyway? It's not that I couldn't find out if I really tried, but there'd be plenty more questions of the same sort to take that one's place.

Then there was the question of war, and strategic objectives. We didn't get that either. If you're in a Mordor-like landscape where there are only one or two passes through otherwise-impenetrable mountain ranges, then sure - the one who controls the passes controls travel from one side of the mountains to the other. But in a country like England, with its gentle slopes and reasonably-sized rivers, what does it mean to say that City X or Hill Y or Ford Z is a strategically vital objective that allows you to control the country for miles around? Neither of us could really understand why an opposing army wouldn't just go round another way. (Actually, quite possibly she did understand this and was humouring me.)

I think for many of us, living in this world is a bit like using a car. For most purposes we're happy to accept that it works, without looking too hard at what goes on under the bonnet. Once you start to write, though, you not only have to be prepared to take an intensive course in engineering, you also have to understand the process of manufacture, how all the various components were sourced, how the metal was refined, where the ore was mined and how it was transported (along with the accompanying economics), to say nothing of the geology of its formation.

Only then, my friend, you will you be able to write about that trip to the shop to buy Pot Noodles, and thus win the Booker Prize.

Comments

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

World Building is easy. Its character that's difficult.

If by Tarmac you mean asphalt, its approximately what is left over after they take the gasoline out of oil.

You're using the wrong units. Try AUs.

The last one is the most difficult. Armies have to constantly have supplies moving up transportation lines behind them, so they generally can't leave unmasked strong-points in their rear. Even in the most primitive conditions with medieval armies essentially plundering as they go, you can't have the garrison leave the fortress and start harassing you while you're maneuveraing with another enemy force. Small force can be ignored if you're going to bring the enemy to battle quickly, but most medieval commanders did not understand warfare well enough to realize this.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Character is difficult, certainly, but so is worldbuilding - witness the fact that even the greats screw it up on such a regular basis.

I was using tarmac as a generic to cover all tar/bitumen-based surfacing materials, including asphalt. So, are we being profligate in its use? Should we be worried about that (along with everything else)?

I don't think using AUs would have made my point about the difficulty people have with large numbers. Rather, it would simply have hidden the large number in a different place (viz - "How many kilometres in an AU?").

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

WIth my mediaeval history hat on, in fact the compulsion of landscape is everywhere in England, in our boundaries and sub-cultures. It isn't just the hills and rivers, it's how that land was used. What looks like a way round now may well not have been with older technologies -- marsh, rough going, forest, scrub. If you look at a topological map, too, you can see how, for instance, Wales never held on to unity -- the ways the Welsh lands are linked work against a central single Welsh authority. Same with large parts of England.
This has fascinated me for years, I have to say.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I love that phrase, "the compulsion of landscape"!

And you're right, of course. I mentioned England specifically (and to be honest I had southern England mostly in mind) because even I could see that with Wales and Scotland things the land might intervene rather brutally. Whereas, where I come from in Hampshire the worst thing you have to deal with is a rather nasty undulation. But forest and marsh, those we had in plenty.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I love that phrase, too. It's my very own, and I have to own to being extremely proud of it :-).

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Hunger Games yet but based on the linked article, the world building is almost Tolkienesque in its detail and complexity compared to the world building in Monsters of Men (which was last year's Carnegie prize winner). There was so much that made no sense that the only way I could retain my sanity as I read was by making snarky notes as I went along. And yet obviously that story worked for lots of people, including the prize judges.

Whereas with Mortal Engines, which probably could be nitpicked to death too if the story didn't appeal and sweep you along, I just kept thinking, "Moving cities! Cool! Airships! Cool!" :)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I quite agree about the Ness books (or at least the first, which is the only one I've read). In fact it was annoying in all kinds of ways, but the worldbuilding was certainly one.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

The one that still makes me snort with laughter every time I think of it is one I haven't even read, that a friend of mine pointed out to me: a book about an island in the sea that has a river bisecting it. Like, ALL THE WAY ACROSS. Fresh water.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Now that's a neat trick. And wouldn't that make it two islands?

Worldbuilding

[l. lee lowe (from livejournal.com)]

Worldbuilding: say as little as possible and let the readers build it themselves?

Re: Worldbuilding

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I think that's often very good advice. In some books it can't be done, because the plot demands that the established order of society be overthrown (or something similar), which in turn demands a relatively detailed account of what it is that's being overthrown, as well as why and how. But as a rule I agree: less is definitely more. As a matter of fact, DWJ said something similar in interview, back in 2001:

I think you have to know enough about it to be able to show things in the foreground that bring the background with them. You must have it firmly enough in your mind so that it all hangs together. You don’t have to say that there are wild beasts in the wood, so long as you have got the right set-up where there might be.

Re: Worldbuilding

[l. lee lowe (from livejournal.com)]

I wish I'd known DWJ - and I say that about damn few writers. (You wouldn't catch me at a conference, for example. Not ever.) And this is spot on, and precisely where I've gone wrong in my own worldbuilding (aside from all sorts of logical flaws and irrelevancies, that is): 'You must have it firmly enough in your mind so that it all hangs together.'

[gair.livejournal.com]

I'm not too sure about the worldbuilding in this universe, either

I know this isn't quite your point, but certainly I think the worldbuilding in David Nicholls' One Day, and in quite a lot of realist chicklit in general, and actually in Ruth Rendell, is completely fucked, too. As Geoff Ryman says in the afterword to Was, all fiction takes place in an alternative universe to some extent (at the very least, most realist novels take place in a universe where that novel does not exist), so all writers have to worldbuild.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. In fact we made that point in our history book, too - that the differences between history, historical fiction and alternative history are ones of degree, at best.

[l. lee lowe (from livejournal.com)]

Look at what I've just stumbled across:

http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions/

Arrgh, I'm going to give up ...