Two Kinds of Worldbuilding

[steepholm]

Inspired by my recent Two Kinds of Badness post, I thought I might make an occasional series.

Today, I'm thinking about worldbuilding, and once again it occurs to me that there are two kinds of it, which we might call Static and Dynamic.

Tolkien can stand in as my example of the ultimate Static world builder. By this I don't mean, of course, that he didn't develop and revise his world over time, but that, by and large, his aim was to have a world that, as a sub-creator, he could survey and find good: full of detail, self-consistent, multi-faceted. A good static world is one which you can draw maps and write histories of, a landscape you can wander all day, confident that you won't tumble into a bottomless lacuna or fall prey to a contradiction.

The Dynamic world is a zoetrope that has to be kept continually spinning to maintain the illusion of reality. The builder of such worlds is a rhetorician, a magician, a sculptor in ice. They must continually weave new threads to replace the old, which start to fade at the touch of sunlight, and their concern is not the finished product but the performance. J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy is perhaps the ultimate example in its virtuoso mercuriality, but you can find elements of it in much less obviously flamboyant writers. Kenneth Grahame's riverbank world makes no sense when you think about it, especially in its interactions with the human (just how big is Toad?), but the pleasure lies in being persuaded not to think about it, or only when the author chooses to prompt awareness, as one astringent element in a highly complex flavour. (If the contradictions become the main point, then of course you have entered the world of metafiction, which is a different fish kettle.)

Comments

[landingtree]

I just finished reading Le Guin's Always Coming Home, which is the best example of Static worldbuilding I've come across in a long while. I've recently been building a world myself, and thinking, "So where do I draw the line at working out things like the geography, so I can get at the bits of story I'm most interested in?" and this is a book where Le Guin doesn't draw the line, where the thing she's most interested in is, or emerges from, the building of the place -- so she collaborates with a geologist, musicians, etc. to get it right. At the same time, she puts a great deal outside the scope of the book, deliberately; and she's a presence in the book herself, in dialogue with the people she's invented, so it's in the metafiction fish kettle too -- modified by the fact that the people in the book have different ideas about the imagined than we do.

I'm trying to think of books which occupy both camps, or which fail because they alternate incoherently. Catherine Valente's Palimpsest? But it's too long since I've read that to know which thing I think it's an example of.

[steepholm]

Perhaps Pullman's Dark Materials world might qualify as a hybrid? It has a kind of seeming solidity to it, but when you kick the tyres you realise that you've been persuaded to let a lot of dodgy ideas through on the nod, just because they're cool.

[landingtree]

I've never yet read beyond the first of those, partly because I was warned it became didactic (perhaps that's where one notices the need to kick the tires?) -- but also because the first one ends so well and I've been used to that as the ending for so long.