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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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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.