This Has Become Something Of A Critical Issue For Sf/f Writers In The Past Few Decades. Way Back In The
This has become something of a critical issue for sf/f writers in the past few decades. Way back in the early 2000s, when blogs were still a thing, the British author M. John Harrison caused something of a tempest in the online genre community criticizing the concept of “worldbuilding” as detrimental to the creation of literature. The original posts are long gone, but there is a Reddit post copying Harrison’s final summation of his thoughts on the matter.
Even though I’m not a “proper” writer yet, this is an issue I’ve worried about over the years. While I don’t have the philosophical background of Mr. Harrison, my own objections to the primacy of worldbuilding stem from a key complaint Harrison makes: the idea that worldbuilding “literalizes the act of creation.” The essay talks about Harrison’s interpretation of the matter, but here I’ll quickly over my own.
The problem with believing that worldbuilding is all is that it changes the reader’s relationship to the text. If a reader believes that the mechanics and details of a setting are the most important part of a story, they will end up seeing stories not as stories, ambiguous creatures of metaphor and meaning, but as documentaries of alternate worlds. When this happens, the reader both forgoes the suspension of disbelief required to make any story work and unknowingly imposes their own worldview on the story under the guise of “objective reality.” Rather than developing a symbiotic relationship with the story wherein the story is accepted on its own terms, the reader instead becomes an anthropologist in a duck blind scanning the story from afar, compiling a list of points observed. This is how you end up with situations where people complain that characters don’t act “logically” without considering the thematic reasons for their motivations. Obviously no one will ever be able to suspend their disbelief for every part of every story, but some level of acceptance is always required. Without it, the forest just becomes a big bunch of trees.
This attitude also poses problems for the writer, who is no longer expected to be a storyteller, but a God who dreams up and fashions every aspect of their creation from the wings of an aphid to the greatest supergiant stars. Needless to say, this is an awful attitude to have as a writer. Rather than having the reader accept your story and go along for the ride, the entire burden of creating the world falls on you, and the sad fact of the matter is that most of us aren’t God. A few of us out there are polymaths and Renaissance men that can shoulder the burden, but most of us, myself included, aren’t. What happens with most of us is that we develop the belief that we must understand everything before we can create something, which often leads to writers putting their stories off to research things they don’t really need. I’ve been guilty of this myself with things like starting work on a fantasy novel by working out the layout of the solar system and worrying about getting myself up to speed on introductory economics (so much economics in fiction these days...I’m sick of it). Some of this would have been important thematically, but my problem was that I was doing in first instead of figuring out what I actually wanted to tell a story about. I’m sure many of you have similar stories to share.
In short, if you’re the sort of person who loves creating all this intricate background for their fantasy settings, knock yourself out, but just remember that for the sake of both you and you reader that they can’t be everything.
(As a final note, I have actually seen some people drop traditional narrative entirely and write what are essentially fictional textbooks. It’s something you tend to see in the online alternate history community, where the primary attraction is seeing the raw mechanics of historical change play out over centuries across nations filled with millions upon millions of people, the scale of which the human-focused modern novel has some difficulty capturing. They rarely appear on bookshelves because they don’t fit in with the publishing industry’s classifications of genre, but you sometimes get odd anomalies like Robert Sobel’s 1973 work For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga.)
I think the best writing tip I can give (this is untrue, I can probably give many writing tips, but this is the writing tip foremost in my mind at the moment and I needed a good hook to start this post) is that not everything that is read as Lore needs to be important or explicable to what you’re writing. Often times you need a detail or a character to appear to make another detail or character sound more convincing or to appropriately place it in the world, people will latch on, but maybe that’s not the story you’re telling or what’s actually important to you. For me, for example, it’s not important to detail say, the histories of Nochtish tank design bureaus. It’s enough to know that they exist and what they’re making, but the staff and position of Rescholdt-Kolt are not actually crucial to the story.
I think because of wiki culture and general curiosity we want every capital letter noun to be drawn out to us, but some things just exist solely to be a cool name.
More Posts from Nesterov81 and Others
Oh my god @wyattsalazar, I was just bouncing through deviantArt and I found this amazing piece by glucosefiction. I don’t know if you commissioned this or it was just fanart but I had to show it to you. Consider it a belated birthday present of a kind. ;)
Madiha, the truth is...you never stopped watching Betterman. You’ve been watching Betterman this whole time. You’ve been in your room since March watching Betterman. Your family misses you. Please wake up. Please.
im reading a light novel literally called gaogaigar vs betterman. idk whether im blessed or deeply cursed by this
In Nagle’s defense, Kill All Normies was going to the publishers just as Milo’s star was starting to fall. Personally, I found that Nagle’s discussion of combined with the events surrounding his fall from grace suggested to me that he was ultimately an unknowing “useful idiot” for two parties at once. More traditional conservatives (or at least the more utilitarian ones focused on campaign strategy) saw him as a way to drum up support from a younger, traditionally anti-conservative cohort and get them to vote Republican. Meanwhile, people with genuine racist, white supremacist, or hard-right views wanted to use him both to drum up support from a new younger demographic and to use him as a Trojan horse to inject “alt-right” arguments into the political mainstream. After the election and he had served his purpose, neither of these groups had any more use or fondness for him, so away he went. (I may be speaking beyond the evidence, but I feel like part of the mainstream conservative turn against Milo was due to the fact that, for all their many sins, conservatives actually didn’t want to let potential neo-Nazis into the Republican Party.) As for your main point, I sometimes feel that modern American leftism has a problem with knowing how to criticize but not knowing how to rule. Even in places where leftists are in positions of authority, there is still a tendency to see themselves as rebels pushing against a white patriarchal conservative Other, even when the Other in question is far smaller and less influential than they are. It leads to situations where people are fighting battles that have already been fought and won, or in attacking people rather than trying to persuade or cajole them. (These are very fragmentary thoughts that I haven’t put much concerted effort into articulating, so take everything in this last paragraph with a grain of salt.)
Those who claim that the new right-wing sensibility online today is just more of the same old right, undeserving of attention of differentiation, are wrong. Although it is constantly changing, in this important early stage of its appeal, it’s ability to assume the aesthetics of counterculture transgression and nonconformity tells us many things about its appeal. It has more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan, “It is forbidden to forbid” than it does anything most recognize as part of any traditionalist right. – Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies
Thought it was a good idea to revisit this book. Even though it’s only a couple years old, some of it – the idea of Milo sustaining any sort of status or influence – seems quaint now, but this is what is most disorienting for older leftists. If the right is the underground, the cultural renegades, then we are its moral police, and we don’t do moral policing well. We lose too much by tightening the reigns and saying, “no, you can’t say this… you can’t THINK this.” I lived through the 90s version of political correctness (watch the movie PCU – I swear it’s documentary), and it was customary for even those on the far left to mock it. The left being any kind of moral majority is laughable.
“GREETINGS CITIZENS. THE DATE IS SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 1974: CIVIL RESURRECTION DAY. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE LAGOMORPHIC DISPENSIARY IN BLOCK 5 BETWEEN 1000 HOURS AND 1630 HOURS TO RECEIVE YOUR SUPPLEMENTARY DIETARY ALLOTMENT COURTESY OF THE GLORIOUS STATE. BE WARNED THAT NONCOMPLIANCE MAY RESULT IN DEMERITS ON YOUR FAMILY RATION ACCOUNT. WE THANK THE LEADER FOR THIS GIFT; MAY SHE LIVE FOREVERMORE. MESSAGE ENDS.”
The SOS Brutalism Team wishes you Happy Easter!
RT @BrutalHouse Behold! The Brutal Easter Bunny Returns — (Jyväskylä, Finland 1982) https://twitter.com/BrutalHouse/status/979631924586172416
Okay, let me see here: 1. The Mummy (1999)
2. Pride and Prejudice (2005)
3. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
4. Frozen (2013)
5. Star Wars Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)
6. Gladiator (2000) 7. One of the Lord of the Rings movies...I’m gonna guess Return of the King? 8. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) The gif was vague enough that I couldn’t place the movie at first, but your comment gave the game away. ;) 9. Jurassic Park (1993) 10. Star Wars Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017) Tag me in and I’ll see what I can do! (Assuming, of course, that Tumblr has any gifs for the movies I like.)
10 Movies Meme
Post ten gifs from ten favorite movies without naming them, then tag ten people.
@skybound2 tagged me for this meme, and it was a lot harder than I expected! I think aside from a significant few, movies tend not to stick in my head as much as TV shows and video games do.
I’ll tag anyone who’d like to do this!
Now that’s interesting: Su rebuilt the domes of Zaofu. I always thought Kuvira’s order to dismantle the domes was a very important symbolic act. While her order was a practical directive to acquire enough refined platinum to build her mech, it also illustrated a fundamental difference between Suyin and Kuvira. Su’s concern was always to maintain Zaofu as a personal fiefdom separate from the Earth Kingdom. The city was built in a valley and each district had its own dome to isolate it from both the outside world and its neighbors. By contrast, Kuvira saw Zaofu as a model for how the EK could become a modern multinational "nation” that Su kept for herself. By dismantling the domes, Kuvira not only asserted her ownership of Zaofu, she also broke down the barriers that Su had erected to isolate Zaofu from the EK. To spread the gospel of Zaofu to the rest of the EK, Zaofu needed to come out of its shell and join the EK as a city like Omashu or Ba Sing Se. Seeing the domes rebuilt makes me feel that Su ultimately didn’t learn anything from her experiences in Book 4, and her main concern after returning home was to put everything back to the way it was and pretend the last four years never happened...which is a very Su thing to do. Unless, of course, this is a flash back, in which case disregard all that I have written. (Gonna tag @coppermarigolds and @the-moon-avatar in this post for funsies.)
The metalbending city of Zaofu, from The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire Part Two.
I’m not gonna lie; I got a little caught up when I saw that Picard had kept that banner in the Picard trailer.
Me too, Madiha, me too.
i feel like my tastes are so bizarre and inhuman that i can never share things with anyone or be part of a fandom without feeling like the biggest weirdo
Esther, speaking as a big ol’ Star Trek fan, your friends were right. Season 1 was rough. A lot of the time it comes off as an attempt to make a 1960s-era Trek show in the 1980s, and it does not work at. all. Production was also a nightmare, to the point where the TNG writers’ room gained the reputation as one of the worst places a writer in Hollywood could work at. There’s a documentary called Chaos on the Bridge that discusses some of what went on, but it has its own biases and axes to grind. Still, Season 1 TNG did give us this incredible moment. (cw: more gore than you’d ever expect to see on an episode of Star Trek) If you ever want to give the show another shot, I’d recommend just watching any episode whose summary sounds cool. TNG was made with an eye to syndication, so the writers were discouraged from any heavy serialization. Anyway, great podcast, and I hope Madiha has recovered from finally seeing the Super Best Friends stumble their way into one of the worst (in all senses of the word) endings for Detroit: Become Human.
Please do not listen to this episode on full blast volume earbuds, there’s A Thing.
Topics include: Heart to heart about being depressed all the time; Madiha reads HAKAIOU ~ GAOGAIGAR VS. BETTERMAN; 2017, a year of closure for Betterman; the story of GGG vs Betterman; a brief, confused summary of GaoGaiGar; combining the tones of GaoGaiGar and Betterman; Linker Gel Dyalisis; THE POWER; Esther is back into Shin Megami Tensei Apocalypse; masters of reusing assets; god’s toilet; sexy nun; it all sounds like a doom level; SMT Mobile, why the fuck would I play that; did you get the dick chariot; CAN’T ESCAPE FROM CROSSING FATE; BACK IN to Honkai Impact; but first the masocore gacha hell of Bang Dream!; 29:00 warning for volume; this is like hell; NOT EVEN A FREE ROLL; thank you Honkai Impact; Sakura Samsara, the open world content; Theresa, the old small nun; Mihoyo storytelling; FGO is a demon monster gacha game; PUT HONKAI ON STEAM MIHOYO; honkai impact is warframe for lesbians; warframe anxiety; impossible to progress; FUCK DAVID CAGE. Send us timestamped suggestions for the Transmediacrity podcast sampler for newbies!!!
Outro theme is “Ashura-Kai Authorized Shop” from the Shin Megami Tensei IV OST.
Email us at transmediacrity@gmail.com! Check out our TUMBLR and TWITTER.
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Special thanks to Velt for our cover art! Check her art here. (Not worksafe.)
You can find us at:
Madiha: Twitter, Tumblr, The Solstice War. Esther: Twitter, Tumblr.
Hmm...if this is real, it looks a lot like the old New Orleans class from the Wolf 359 graveyard in TNG, or sort of a halfway point between the N’awlins class and the Lafayette, the 2410 update of the N’awlins from *Star Trek Online*.
It’s a good design for a smaller destroyer/light cruiser type of ship...but it raises the obvious question of why they didn’t just use the N’awlins instead. :/ (If it’s just fanart, I retract all my complaints.)
U.S.S Cerritos by Simon Marino
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Hello there! I'm nesterov81, and this tumblr is a dumping ground for my fandom stuff. Feel free to root through it and find something you like.
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