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Riffing on Sherwood's worldbuilding article and the linked Lev Grossman's suggestion of things fantasy novels should do more often...
...what little details, to you, make good worldbuilding? What makes worldbuilding unbelievable?
For the purposes of this question, by "good worldbuilding," I mean "interesting, and also consistent and believable within the parameters set up by the book itself."
("I can't believe in giant bugs because they break the square-cube law" is more a comment about the reader than about the plausibility of the specific giant bugs in any given fantasy novel. I'd believe in the bugs if they're in an environment where they could plausibly have something to eat when they don't have hobbit, or if it's explained that they were created by someone and then released just to harass the questers.)
One of the things which makes worldbuilding believable to me, in certain settings, is inconsistency. I don't believe in one planet with a single culture. In many settings, I find it implausible for a town to have a single culture. Often a mixture of levels of technology is much more believable and likely than, say, everything being done by sophisticated nanotech.
Along similar lines, I like extraneous elements (bricolage) without plot relevance, and things going wrong. If it's a rural or wilderness setting, there should be bugs, animals, and birds. Machinery should break down. Plans shouldn't work perfectly. People should screw up. The only item I really liked on Lev Grossman's list, which appears to be exclusively based on a perusal of epic fantasy from the 1980s, is people forgetting to do things. (My issue with his list: many items would not improve a book, but merely be blinking "I'm so smart and meta!" lights, and most of the rest are things which are already a matter of course since the eighties.)
I don't need to see peeing (please! my vote is for less bodily waste on-page, not more) but I do like to know if this is a society with or without indoor plumbing. On that note, I would like to see more low-tech societies with comparatively high sophistication. Low-tech does not necessarily mean disgusting and sordid. Mohenjo-daro had indoor plumbing.
Also, food is very telling. I don't think I have ever believed in a society where everyone eats protein pills or mystery mush every day. Hardscrabble societies are just as likely to evolve clever means of making whatever they have tasty as they do of despairingly mashing the one tuber that still grows after the apocalypse. A lot of Chinese cuisine, for instance, is clearly derived from people who really needed to investigate the edibility of absolutely everything... and then made it delicious.
...what little details, to you, make good worldbuilding? What makes worldbuilding unbelievable?
For the purposes of this question, by "good worldbuilding," I mean "interesting, and also consistent and believable within the parameters set up by the book itself."
("I can't believe in giant bugs because they break the square-cube law" is more a comment about the reader than about the plausibility of the specific giant bugs in any given fantasy novel. I'd believe in the bugs if they're in an environment where they could plausibly have something to eat when they don't have hobbit, or if it's explained that they were created by someone and then released just to harass the questers.)
One of the things which makes worldbuilding believable to me, in certain settings, is inconsistency. I don't believe in one planet with a single culture. In many settings, I find it implausible for a town to have a single culture. Often a mixture of levels of technology is much more believable and likely than, say, everything being done by sophisticated nanotech.
Along similar lines, I like extraneous elements (bricolage) without plot relevance, and things going wrong. If it's a rural or wilderness setting, there should be bugs, animals, and birds. Machinery should break down. Plans shouldn't work perfectly. People should screw up. The only item I really liked on Lev Grossman's list, which appears to be exclusively based on a perusal of epic fantasy from the 1980s, is people forgetting to do things. (My issue with his list: many items would not improve a book, but merely be blinking "I'm so smart and meta!" lights, and most of the rest are things which are already a matter of course since the eighties.)
I don't need to see peeing (please! my vote is for less bodily waste on-page, not more) but I do like to know if this is a society with or without indoor plumbing. On that note, I would like to see more low-tech societies with comparatively high sophistication. Low-tech does not necessarily mean disgusting and sordid. Mohenjo-daro had indoor plumbing.
Also, food is very telling. I don't think I have ever believed in a society where everyone eats protein pills or mystery mush every day. Hardscrabble societies are just as likely to evolve clever means of making whatever they have tasty as they do of despairingly mashing the one tuber that still grows after the apocalypse. A lot of Chinese cuisine, for instance, is clearly derived from people who really needed to investigate the edibility of absolutely everything... and then made it delicious.
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It's the everyday details -- not everything described completely, but what the character does and doesn't take for granted: how is food prepared? what do you wear on your feet? does hair style or earring design have symbolic meaning within that culture? how do people deal with weather? How does their clothing fit, and what works and what doesn't? And only after that do I get to the issues of giant bugs and so on. I have no real problem with the concept of giant bugs -- because I imagine that they're hollow inside, not gushy, and being hollow are lighter-weight, which makes it possible for them to move faster and not violate cube-square and so on. (Hollow bugs, just as birds have hollow bones...)
A lot depends on whether we are dropped inside the culture and hearing about it from someone who grew up in it or has lived there a long time or from someone who is a newcomer. The comparisons are different, the contexts are different.
ETA: Re the planet with one culture -- no. Just no. We don't have countries with one culture. We don't have *cities* with one culture -- there are different cultures, different lifestyles, different opinions and ways of cooking and everything, based on where people's ancestors came from and when and how, on whether they're keeping the old ways or modifying them, on what they believe is important and why, and on how long people have actually lived together in a specific place during recent memory -- and I'm pretty sure that extends down to the village level in a lot of places. There could be a lot of intersecting small cultures that have enough similarities to get along and meld in a few places, but it's not all the same thing. The older an area is, the deeper the culture and, if they're fortunate, the deeper the cultural memory. I cannot remember the name of it, but there was a BBC show some time back that looked at the history of much of Britain through archeological digs within one small village, which found such things as weaponry of different styles going all the way back to Rome, medieval pottery, some small bits and pieces of things that the Iceni had left during a battle with Rome or earlier, and the way that the fields were divided up for families and how that changed over time...
The other thing that sticks in my mind is a naturalist's study of hedgerows in Britain (and I think elsewhere in Europe also?) that noticed that it was possible to date the age of the hedgerow by the number of different species growing there -- at something like 100 species per century, so that the very oldest hedgerows, the ones in fields that had been cultivated back to the medieval era, could be distinguished from newer ones by the number of food-bearing plants grown to maturity in them (like berry bushes).
Sorry, my mind is wandering this morning but I hope this helps?
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I mean mostly this just boils down to the fact I just get really excited when I see worldbuilding that is not just based around one high-concept key Thing That Is Unique Or Different, but a bunch of different ideas playing against each other. Frances Hardinge is really great at this, which is one of the reasons I love her so much.
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It's not like I can't conceive of a future in which is the case, but I damn well want an explanation.
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Also, humor; absurdity. You can spend years developing every aspect of your culture, but the things that make it really come alive, I think, are those little touches of the silly, unexpected or absurd that make it feel like people really live in the world -- the hero dropping his fork in the soup at a state dinner, the heroine unpacking and realizing that she's left all her underwear at home. The kids' pet goat that won't keep butting into the kitchen; the pen that keeps dribbling ink; the culturally specific joke that doesn't translate ... Those stupid little things that happen in life. I think most of Grossman's list are really just variations on this theme - people's lives are messy and often absurd, and conveying that (without getting bogged down in self-conscious absurdity, as in most of Grossman's examples IMHO) is one of the things that makes a world feel real and alive.
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- And for one thing, nearly everything in the top ten of his stupid list, except for "read fantasy novels," happens in Le Guin's work. Wheel of Time indeed.
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What else? Class. Too much fantasy has three basic classes -- aristocracy, townspeople (often shifty) and peasants (poor but honest). That's not only lazy writing, it's thoughtless and it's unrealistic: all societies, all communities have gradations of status. Even that tiny rural hamlet will have people who are considered better or worse than others.
Oh, and Euro-fantasies, but which I mean any book which assumes a sort of Hollywood Middle Ages, with names and geography loosely adapted (Angleland; Francescia; Espanica and so on) but no real sense of how varied and different those countries are, and with only the most simplistic distinctions -- Anglelanders being all mystic and Celtic in Tartan, Espanicans with castanets...
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There are things I delight in but cannot predict I will delight in. When Daniel Abraham was coming out with a book with banking, I went, "EEEEE, banking!", and then it didn't have enough banking and I hope the sequel has more banking. What I want is for people to think about stuff in history like that, stuff that excites them and will be tidbit-y. Whether it's social implications of skiing (there are some! lots!) or of brass instrument manufacture, I like the author having some bits of nerdery popping up, and if I make my list, it'll be my nerdery; I want theirs.
I agree with you on monocultures, though, sigh. And I knew that a particular writing group was not the writing group for me when they objected to my future-people making salads, because, "I dunno, maybe they could have food pills or something? Something more futurey?" People in the past ate salads. People in the future will eat salads. Salads are good.
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Heee!
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I get dubious about economics and environmental habitat stuff a lot, but I've never really studied either, so those often get a pass as "Well, maybe it makes sense to someone who understands it better" unless it's absolutely ludicrous.
Worldbuilding that's suspiciously close to Ye Faux Medieval England in culture--or 1950s Midwestern America middle-class--in mores and family structure make my eyebrows go up if they're paired with a setting that's otherwise more novel and complex. There were--and are--an awful lot of cultures where it's not "live at home until adulthood, then move out to a new residence, marry exactly one person of the opposite gender, wife takes husband's last name and does childcare while husband does The Work, and the culture assigns much more value to the male work than female work." Especially across every single economic level. But an awful lot of complex! fantasy! settings! seem to fall right back into that anyway, with maybe an arranged marriage and dowry to make it more "unusual."
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There was also hot and cold water and toilets with running water on Kallista (that became Thera after the blow) that Plato I think referred to.
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1. In one of my published novels, in an early draft, I wrote a vivid food-poisoning scene. I think I'd been thinking about the fact that no one in books ever gets food poisoning, despite the fact that occasional food poisoning is a fact of life in our own culture and sure as HECK is a problem in places that lack refrigerators and well-understood germ theory. My writers' group told me I'd done a very good job, so good that I made all of them nauseated. I took out the scene. (And then re-used it in greatly-toned-down form in a later book.) Sometimes when you never see something in books, there's a really good reason for it.
2. My unpublished middle grade science fictional shipwreck novel includes an explicit bathroom scene, because "how do people pee without gravity" is actually a subject of INTENSE INTEREST among most people (adults AND children) and given that the characters were stuck on the escape pod for days, they were totally going to have to use the facilities. It's SF so I created some plausible improvements over current technology. (Having read "Packing for Mars" since writing, if I sold the novel I'd go back and add a bit more detail.) I read that scene at readings a few times and it was WILDLY POPULAR so while I don't necessarily think literature desperately needs more bathroom scenes, if your characters are in a situation where going to the bathroom would be complicated, difficult, unpleasant, or interesting, you should at least consider having them do it.
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One thing I like: little worldbuilding details which don't turn out to be important. Details which DO turn out to be important are fine (and if none of the details are important, one could argue the book has no business being fantasy or SF), but if every last unusual thing mentioned turns out to be critical to the plot it feels more like a puzzle than a book. I like puzzles, but a puzzle and a novel are not the same thing.
One thing I don't like: when the author has clearly not put enough thought into those critical worldbuilding bits. While I like to see details of food and clothing and so on, if an author punts on some of those I will probably not notice unless a)they really screw it up (e.g., food pills), b)there is nothing else interesting going on, or c)the plot relies heavily on one of the bad areas. This is the main thing that annoyed me about Libyrinth - the author clearly did not think seriously about language or libraries, and pretty much everything relates to those in the end.
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Monoculture does not actually bother me much in sci-fi, but in fantasy it can get grating quickly.
I think there's a fine line, when world-building and writing sf/f, between social criticism and polemics. I'm bored without the former; I can't take the latter seriously.
I also vote for less bodily fluids, but I take more issue with masturbating scenes than urinating ones. Seriously, guys, if I never read another jerking-off scene in my life (outside of erotica), I'll be okay. I promise.
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i could swear there was another this year, but i may have blocked it from my memory.
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I'm also really interested in clothes and food and architecture and how everything is manufactured, but I don't need to know everything as long as what we do see makes some kind of sense.
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It wasn't any sillier than the magic thingamabob that takes him to Mars, the fact that he could breathe the Martian air, and the fact that there were human(like) people living on Mars. If you were going to worry about that sort of thing you really needed to go see a different movie. I was there for the Nifty Cool Space Stuff so once we got there (it took too long) I was happy.
Sorenlundi, have you read Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion books? It's definitely not a linguistic monoculture. The characters mostly speak several languages but there are good reasons for every language they speak (and when someone doesn't speak something, they have an interpreter present.)
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Of course, I can think of exactly one protagonist of mine who isn't at least bilingual for just this reason.
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Everyday purposes is stuff like, "How much is...?" "Where is the...?" "I like..."
Getting from there to stuff like (opening random novel on desk), "How do you know it's not right on the point of collapsing?" or "Would you like to hear my most perverse secret sexual fantasy?" would take at least six months, and probably years.
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It might also depend, though, if the language is related to yours and the culture not too wildly off. With my English and my not-fluent-but-know-some French and a willing teacher, in an immersion situation like living there and working with people, I could probably get to better than "just getting by" in Spanish or Italian. Not great, but enough to have some conversations outside necessity. That's the scenario I tend to picture. But all this flies out the window if, say, you're talking the equivalent of a Japanese person trying to learn Italian.
I admit, too, that I always allow for, and have stopped blinking at, fictional compression at work. What takes 5 years in the real world takes 6 months in a book and about 3 weeks (or one montage) in a film. So people learning the whole language in a few weeks in fiction rarely trips me up too badly.
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Quite a lot of writers just don't think that stuff through, the same way that they don't remember that horses have to eat and drink regularly.
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Even more important was providing food for the horses -- not just for the cavalry, but to haul all the wagons that carried the tents, the baggage, the tools, the bread, the gunpowder, the cannons (it might take 24 horses to pull just one of the big guns). Horses eat a lot. Lots of horses eat a whole heck of a lot. And it can't be all grass. Food for the men was provided or at least paid for by the military administration, but food for the horses had to be improvised locally via the army's own foraging parties, i.e. brigade-sized bands fanning across the countryside with scythes to harvest anything edible they could take before the local population hid it away. An army that didn't forage effectively would quickly find itself in real trouble, so foraging parties not only had to know what they were doing, but be able to defend themselves against the inevitable ambushes & attacks by the other side (which might be in competition for the same precious resource). And it was the need to forage that generally kept armies out of the field in winter.
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I totally agree. Nor does low-tech correlate with forthrightness or "passionate natures" or whatever. I notice an unconscious assumption that more material technology means more frilliness and decorousness and so on, and that less material technology is associated with declarative statements of the "Me Tarzan, You Jane" variety and powerful, raw emotion. But hunter-gatherer societies can have extremely complicated kinship networks and very careful etiquette for who you address how, and so on. Just because you're not wearing a powdered wig doesn't mean that you don't care about social niceties.
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Yes, this! My go-to favourite worldbuilders (and all-time favourite authors since my teenage years) are Diana Wynne Jones, Kate Elliott, Karin Lowachee and Sean Stewart. They immerse you in worlds where there are multiple cultures, and even within a culture, individual characters have different viewpoints, desires and traditions. There is cooperating or clashing or both. A world or setting where all the people were the same or all wanted and believed the same things would feel very thin to me. (Lois Lowry played off this idea very effectively in her excellent 'The Giver!')
I love what you say about things going wrong and people screwing up, and about food. Yes!! Along those lines, also: clothes, and music or dance, and language, and mythology and spirituality and history!
These are a few of my favourite things! ;)
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Grossman's list definitely spoke to 80s epic fantasy but 14. Make accurate change at a bar rather than just fling down a handful of gold coins and walk away made me giggle out loud. YES. I READ THAT BOOK, OKAY? SOMETHING LIKE THIRTY TIMES.
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(I am also the kind of writer who finds that a bit of off-hand detail (the kippers were soaked in vinegar, not salted! or whatever) has an alarming tendency to take over the entire plot, but that's another story.)
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2. This isn't really "good worldbuilding" but it just occurred to me that no one is ever nearsighted In A World Without Eyeglasses (to be lost or crushed at a convenient time). Statistically speaking, low-tech worlds should involve a lot of squinting.