246. Against Worldbuilding

"Worldbuilding" has become a necessity for authors of genre fiction, but sci-fi author M. John Harrison thinks it's crippling both writers & their audiences.

- Links for the Curious -

- Marshall, H. A flare of light or ‘the great clomping foot of nerdism?’: M John Harrison’s radical poetics of worldbuilding. *TEXT* **24**, (2020).
- Nyilasy, G. Nitpickers: Uncritical critics of film and television fiction. in (2004).
- Moorcock, M. Epic Pooh. in *Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretation: JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings (2008)"* (2008).
- Jenkins, H. *Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide*. (NYU Press, 2006).

[sneasalmaster]

Thanks for this. This really lines up with what frustrates me about nerd conversations about media, especially as it pertains to the idea of "canon"

[KynaTiona]

As a person who's got herself neck-deep into writing a science fiction novel, I strongly agree. As much as I enjoy hashing out details and making sure the world fits together, it's still ultimately a story about characters having feelings and making decisions. There's a couple of world elements that I just do not have a satisfying answer to, and decided that the lack of a satisfying answer in-world was more than enough justification to not worry about it and focus on the important parts.

[crowonthepowerlines]

A well constructed fictional world will have many unexplained aspects because that is true to our lived experiences. The obsession some authors have with explaining every mystery away only makes the world seem more like a set on a stage because they make the world small enough to be understood by your average reader. The real world is a complicated and confusing place because it is inhabited by real people, so it is evidence of competent writing when some aspects of a fictional world remain unexplained.

[penand_paper]

Great video, am sharing with world building friends.

[Xob_Driesestig]

I think your observation that critiques focus on it because it's easier to 'proof' and be 'objective' is certainly right, but I think this is also one of the many examples of people assuming that we all get the same thing out of a story (mind projection fallacy).

Worldbuilding is always seen as supporting the story; "story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding". (An uncharitable reader might accuse Harrison of positing that worldbuilding isn't writing, but let's be charitable and assume that with "writing" he meant plot, themes, characters, prose, dialogue…) People like Plato think the purpose of stories is to instill desirable behaviors, while others like Faulkner think "The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself". In this common viewpoint the "writing" is indeed more important than the worldbuilding. The focus of stories then is psychological; what are the protagonists struggling with and can I take something away from it?

I like these stories, I really do, but there is so much more to write about. What about the sociological aspects? 'Great man histories' can be easily captured in this psychology focussed writing (see the popularity of biographies), but a more sociological vision doesn't have that luxury. Or what about biology? Or linguistics? Or any other lens to look at the world with? You can say, oh we have textbooks for that, but we have textbooks for psychology too! The reason to read it in a fiction format (apart from it being much more fun) is that we learn something from describing how things *aren't* whereas textbooks focus almost exclusively on how things *are*.

So with a socio-economic lens this will lead to an obvious “worldbuild a better world to build a better the world” speech, but even for less political things like biology this is true. There is a youtuber called "biblaridion" who publishes a story about the evolution of an alien biosphere. By all metrics and advise I've heard from actual writers, it is a terrible story. There are no characters, no themes, no dialogue, no plot...only worldbuilding. Yet it is one of the most wonderful stories I've ever watched. By exploring biology in a fictional setting I understand much better which attributes of life are incidental happenstance and which ones aren't. I wish there were more stories like it. Maybe you won't like it and that's okay, but please realize that we might not be trying to get the same thing out of a story and if a certain writer focusses more on worldbuilding over “writing”, that isn't necessarily a mistake.

[proxyprox]

This is why my stories always take place on present-day planet Earth. Worldbuilding seems like an endless nightmare to me.

[AkosKovacs.Author.Musician]

Sadly, with each generation we're straying farther and farther from the core of fantasy, that is not world build, but Romance, Poetry and Myth. From what I've observed, your world is only as interesting as the people who live it and the experience of passing through it.

[Discitus]

I think a lot of younger writers on the internet have it backwards. A great story isn't created through worldbuilding. Rather, most worldbuilding is created through writing stories! Consider Star Wars. Almost nothing was planned originally, beyond the steps of the plot and main cast. Most minor characters had no names, and no depth beyond their interactions with the main cast. Props were just props. They didn't have serial numbers and manufacturers for every ship. The "Clone Wars" was never explained. It was an important event from decades past, and that's all Lucas needed to say. And that's probably all he had written about it back in 1977. The mastery of Star Wars was creating an illusion of depth, and all the best authors do that. I'd define good worldbuilding as really just setting the stage for a narrative and maintaining consistency in the details. Fantasy encyclopedias are fun, and indeed I'm writing one! But they are not necessary, and can be counter-productive because mapping global weather patterns doesn't help with plot and characters and writing techniques and all the things that really make a good story.

[edwardkopp]

I am an old school D&D Dungeon Master who homebrews. I am a Worldbuilder and it's not necessarily for my players benefit. It's part of what makes it fun for me. I deserve to have fun while writing adventures and creating engaging plots and NPCs. But there is a limit, and it took me a few decades of overdoing it to find a happy place where I wasn't filling my time with content I would never use and subplots and symbolism that was too opaque for my players to latch onto.

I think Sanderson and Rothfuss will get there eventually. But I understand the allure.

[RainintheBrain]

Great video! I actually enjoy the worldbuilding. Mostly because I'm a historian who likes to travel. I find a natural draw to it for those reasons.
Worldbuilding for me is like going on vacation to a different world and learning about it.
I have to admit it does get in the way of creating good stories

[Infantry]

Speaking as someone building a sort of world for a TTRPG, I'm building a world because it's fun to do so. I think worldbuilding _can_ be done in a way that produces poorer art, and the influence of capital on how well funded art gets chosen is super relevant, but it's not necessarily a bad thing to do worldbuilding.

I think the actual underlying issue might just be anxious artists. Many authors of art are a little too afraid of their audience and are anxious, and this produces all sorts of self-defeating behavior. For example, in a serialized work, re-writing your good ending for a badly written but unexpected ending, because the author got self conscious about being predictable. Or, lampshading serious moments, because the author is anxious that sincere expressions of emotions will not be taken as serious, so they downplay them (the old, "well that just happened *wink and nod to the camera*" vice). A self conscious artist approaching world building also results in some bad art and self harm, as this video demonstrates.

It's certainly also the case that the world we live in exacerbates these anxieties. I abhor Cinema Sins and all people that behave like him--I sense no genuine love of art from that sort of commentary.

[meta]

Thank you for this. And happy new year! :)

[EricaCalman]

The last few years I've taken to writing science fiction that I've tried to make quite hard. That's largely because I have a bunch of ideas for relatively near term technologies and I like to think about how they might affect human life, but even speculating on timescales of less than a century the error bars on even the most grounded speculation are wider than the broadside of a barn. I've mostly been focusing on how to blend that all into the background so the actual story about human emotions and experience isn't interrupted by a mcguffin or dues ex machina that makes no sense. To me the truly good authors like Tolkien are the ones that will meticulously build a world that they could spend volumes just describing but then condensing it all down just to those elements that are actually relevant to the narrative.

[MadKingChristopher]

Thank you! We don't need Midi-chlorians!
... and the rest was good too

[OffyDGG]

Interesting and well said points. Imo, predicting a reader's reaction to the specific wording you use is too difficult, which waters down the usefulness of spending time on specific words, and indeed on committing to specific world building choices.

[tarvoc]

"What's with the turtles? They're an imperfection in the quilt." - Pat McHale

[tomholroyd]

When a publisher goes back to a successful author and says "we need you to write prequels in your universe" just say no

[michaelcherry]

I would say that Tolkien is kind of a special case. He did not go into such exhaustive detail because he thought it was necessary for the story. He did so because that was his style. I joke that the only reason he wrote The Lord Of The Rings was to have an excuse to invent languages, which was his real passion. I think people make a mistake using Tolkien as a template for their own writing and I sure as hell HATE the idea that you're not writing a story, you're creating some kind of franchise. Every creative person knows that they are going to leave little inconsistencies in the narrative, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately. Alfred Hitchcock called these "icebox scenes", illogical scenes which, in his words, "hit you after you've gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox". TV Tropes calls this "Fridge Logic". The idea behind these inconsistencies is to get the reader (or viewer in the case of Hitchcock) thinking about the story AFTER they have finished experiencing it. If your worldbuilding is too exact and precise, this doesn't happen. You might remember really well written (or acted) scenes, but you won't spend time puzzling about things like Tom Bombadil. I think a creator would much rather that people think about their work than have it as a "one and done".

[cdavie]

This could have something to do with Garth Nix replacing Brandon Sanderson as my literary candy. I don't mind a few inconsistencies from book to book when the unexplored possibilities are interesting enough. Internal consistency is all well and good but I get tired of what I guess you could call implied predictability.

[nickballin]

I think so too. My favorite franchises always have some room for the fictional world to breathe or expand. Like Star Wars originally The Force was an unrxplained thing that you could kind of tune in to and learn to channel rather than micrscopic animals in your blood. And even in the current run of Spiderman Dark Web therd's this character Hallows Eve who has magic Halloween .asks but we dont know if she's evil or if her masks are demon-magic powerred or what...and noe she has her own comicbook series.