I don't consider 'it's nerdy' as a reason not to do something. The last time I considered that relevant, I was a teenager. I'm an unashamed nerd. On the other hand I do understand talking in depth about some of my nerdier interests is more likely to make people's eyes glaze over than entertain them. I just thought of a nice Magic the Gathering based analogy for what I want to talk about next, but I'll spare you it. There's nothing wrong with world building. I don't even think there's anything wrong with setting a novel in a world you've built so that you can show it off to the rest of the world. But it shouldn't be the main reason for the novel existing and you should avoid giving information to the reader just to show off the world you've built. If you just reveal what the story needs, that can still end up bringing up a whole slew of details. I think a lot of fantasy readers actually like to feel like their story is set in a rich and varied world with a bit of history to it, but little things which happen to mention a crumb of history or geography give as much of a feeling of depth as a full blown info-dump. Instead of the reader getting bored, they assume that there's far more to the history than mentioned. If you're lucky they might even try imagining what it involves. It also means if you happen to write some sort of spin off story set in the same world, you've not got so much inconveniently set in stone just because you happened to already talk about it.
I view worldbuilding in the same manner that I view the foundation of a house: necessary for structural integrity, but relatively unseen to the casual viewer. However, that does not undermine the importance of a solid, well-crafted world. We all agree that it is important, but the general consensus also trends towards ensuring that what World-Building tidbits you reveal to the reader are relevant to the topic/issue at hand and serve to either move the plot forward or serve to reinforce the reader's understanding of the material. It should not be placed in the novel simply because, "Hey, I spent 7 years building this world, so I feel obligated to ramble about it every 2 pages."
Sometimes the world building is reflected by how it affects the character's actions and reactions. The hero walks down the street, and upon nearing a house with a green door frame he crosses to the other side of the street because the customers of restaurants serving Norvadian cuisine tend to toss or spit the bones out of the window. or, The hero bends his head when he enters a house in a particular city because it is the custom of those people to hang a heavy brass idol just behind the doorway to prevent the entry of evil spirits. If there is a detailed world behind the book, the author will not have to make it up as he goes along, nor will he have to remember that he said it the next time he encounters the same situation. It can also give the author's narration a greater air of authority because he already knows in general what the environment is like before the MC enters it. No data dump, but nevertheless it makes the world more real. Basically that is why writing flash fiction, or fiction in an existing fictional world (e.g. the Warhammer 40K universe) is easier. You know what a certain person will wear, how they will speak, who is superior to whom, what kind of weapons are going to be used and encountered, and so on.
I want to change my vote, and also apologize to all world builders. I've thought about it more, and it all goes back to high school. Let's divide people into "nerds," "geeks," and "jocks." The first two seem (superficially) interchangeable, as they both have an obsessive mind, whereas the jock, aka the man of action, sees things in terms of "what's this got to do with me?" The nerd and geek may start out the same, interested in space ships or lord of the rings, but whereas the nerd grows up to build rockets, the geek is more likely to be masturbating to some anime(there's a point to this, I swear) . The nerd, aka scientist, historian, or linguist, is going to world build from a specialist perspective. This is interesting and important. My favorite writer, Nabokov, in Pale Fire, is a world builder, but he does it with a mastery of language. Tolkien, who is considered the master, spent how many years researching mythology? I'm not going to name any geeks out of respect, but anyone who is spending an extravagant amount of time making up a world that isn't rooted in history or skilled speculation, or isn't bolstered by fabulous language, is going to feel unnecessary and weak. The geek will always fail to the men of action (jocks) like Bukowski or Hemmingway, who appear to just write the story from the guy.
This my take on this. I think Harrison is wrong. World-building is important. It serves a great purpose. To flesh out your fantasy world so that your characters and the environment that they are surrounded feel like they have some sense of history. I think what Harrison should argue is actually trying to cram every piece of world-building into your novel/book. As others have said, it's annoying when a character decides to go on monologue to explain some historical event that the author clearly wants to share. Use what you can from your world-building into the plot of your story that is the most important. But save the rest for a sequel or a side-book dedicated to lore. That's what I would do.
@jannert "...but then regurgitate..." Now, what a word. As far as my observations go, if the writer stands his grounds long enough to make a name for himself, literarily any language he uses -- however outlandish -- becomes worth reading. If anything, what I've learned from this forum (and from reading other books, comments, language hypotheses etc.) is that the language is a relative, highly slippery ground. The created, artificial universe penned by the writer is quite literarily a battleground for opposing thoughts. What one writer/reader deems crystal-clear in terms of clarity, the other may perceive as utterly baffling, perplexing. I've read Iron Council and though I respect Miéville as a true master of word, when I had tried to write in an akin style before I even read him, my prose was labelled as "idiotic". I was then taken aback to run into an author who's not slow to write in a far-fetched, convoluted style.
I think Harrison's perspective is probably better suited to the type of writing he is doing, which is not just science fiction but consists of stories where he doesn't have to get into extensive world-building to make it work. If you're writing an epic fantasy novel, the extent of world-building that you're going to want to include will probably be much greater.
I don't like today's fantasy being inextricably connected/associated with epicness. Ursula K. Le Guin has created an immense fantasy world with a lot of backstory to the main storyline while maintaining a clear, simple language, giving the impression of an almost low-key drama. Her language is kind of Exupery-like; under the surface of a simple language lie complex themes. I'm inclined to like this better than shallow, epic fantasy books with a lot of pompous world-building.
@Hwaigon I don't think the association is inextricable. I don't think it even makes up the majority of today's fantasy books. But the success of Game of Thrones and the Tolkien-based movies tends to make it look like that's what fantasy is about.
Harrison's stories are also possessed of a certain irrational strangeness that isn't aided by exhaustive rationalizing. Floods of black and white cats twice a day that disappear into nothing that are possibly a manifestation from another universe where the cats are a screensaver are not really rational. Data code that lives up in the rafters of old buildings, like ghosts, floating down to offer aid to a selected few are equally irrational. But in his work you accept them without having any of it tied into a system of techo-magic or, in the end, caring really where the cats come from and go to.
Yes, and even structurally they're a bit unusual. I think the comments Harrison makes about world-building are perfectly suited to the type of things he writes, but for writers working on different types of works they may not be applicable. I tend to limit world-building to the needs of the story, but for some works I think it is fine to go well beyond that to craft a more detailed world.
Agreed. Strangely, Mieville, who I have been using as counterpoint to Harrison's work, has a few stories where the world building is "incomplete", at least to the argument of exhaustive, detailed world building. In his The City and the City, the two interlaced cities have an arrangement that is completely irrational. He never explains how and/or why anyone would come up with, want, espouse, or engender this strange place where you learn to unsee and ignore those things that don't belong to your city. Its perfectly bizarre, utterly irrational, would never take place in the real world, and yet the whole point to the book is to buy into this idea so that certain concepts of social blindness can be discussed within the context of the story. In a way, Mieville creates a very detailed world so that the cost in suspended belief isn't so great outside this one, huge anomaly that you are asked to accept without any kind of explanation or reason. I think I'm rambling now... LOL
That's a really interesting take. I have gone way overboard on my word-building efforts, and it took trying to design 14 different planets in 12 different star systems. I even commissioned an astrophysicist to accurately calculate things like stellar class, orbital radius, orbital period, escape velocity, atmospheric composition, surface gravity, axial tilt, etc. I'm not even kidding. But I was also trying to make a codex along the lines of what you see in the Mass Effect video game series.
Yes, I remember reading that his main interest was the linguistic side of things. There are books out there that supposedly help you design your own language. I've actually tried doing this for an alien species in my story but gave up because it was simply way more involved than I wanted.
Yeah, and it's a trap, too. If you spend a lot of time creating a new language for characters, the temptation to use this language in the story will be hard to resist. Fine if it's just a taste here and there, to set characters apart from one another. But use it too much, and you may well lose your readers. While a makey-up language might be fascinating for the creator, it's likely to be a lot less fascinating to anybody else. Mind you, I've heard of geeks who have studied Tolkien's elven language to the extent that they can speak it. I mean... what?
Lol. People have studied Klingon to that extent as well, though I'm actually not sure how extensive that language is developed.
The trick is to spice up your prose with a carefully invented word here and there and talk about the invented language in rather general terms - this approach works remarkably well in the fantasy books I've read.
I wonder if the old Norse religion had an explanation for this phenomenon. It's so spectacular. I've seen a mild form of it a couple of times, and even then it's wonderful. But the stuff I saw wasn't highly coloured like this.
The sources I have several references to the aurora. Valkyries riding across the sky, Uller, the god of Winter and in Iceland, Gerda, the wife of Frey s the personification of the aurora, although there is disagreement about this.
There is something to be said for nonlinear storytelling. Footnotes are a step in the nonlinear direction, but they only add one layer. True nonlinear storytelling would be more like a wiki, where any substring of an article can be a hyperlink to any other article. e.g. you read a somewhat short book, told in a highly summarized manner. If you want to learn more about the context of a particular passage, then you click a hyperlink, which takes you to a page written in a more expositional style, which explains something about the fictional world. That page, itself, might have links to other pages about the fictional world. Before you know it, you are deep into some highly detailed encyclopedia pages that serve little purpose other than to build the fictional world. The thing is, you are very interested in those pages because you brought yourself there by clicking links that interested you. I would be very interested in reading a fictional book like that. I am convinced that the traditional linear format of a novel (where the reader is expected to read every single word in a predetermined order) is an unfortunate product of technological constraints and that it is not necessarily the best way to tell a story. Before you (the general "you") downplay the importance of worldbuilding, think about how your argument is tied to the assumption that the reader reads every single word in an order predetermined by the author. Can you make the same argument if the book is structured in a way that gives the reader freedom to pursue bits and pieces of information at his own pace?
I think it would depend a lot on the reader. For me, the way I like to experience stories? I wouldn't click on a single link. I'd keep going straight ahead, front to end, and ignore the extras. And if we're talking about a published story, every word costs money. Not in print costs, necessarily, but in author time and editor time and formatting costs, etc. So I agree that it would be interesting to see an experiment with the less-linear structure, mostly because it would be interesting to see how many people find the extra content to worth the extra expense.
