Tolkien and world-building

[truepenny]

The comments to yesterday's post have started to drift from travel narrative to world-building (thanks, kamilaa and heres_luck), so I thought I'd hit the metaphorical carriage return and start a new paragraph.

Tolkien is one of the genre's great masters of world-building. Of course, he was also a crazy genius philologist who devoted his entire damn life to working out all the details of Middle-Earth. Not all people who write fantasy can do this, because we aren't all crazy genius philologists, and really, that's probably for the best.

The issue, then, is how well you create the illusion of that level of obsessive secondary reality. Some authors do it extraordinarily well (Gene Wolfe springs to my mind here); others not so much.

I know I tend to do it by making up weird little historical gothic curlicues; I've also gotten very interested in making my secondary world have secondary worlds of its own (tertiary worlds?), so my characters read romances (Philip Sidney sense, as in precursor of the modern novel, not Harlequins or bodice-rippers. Please!) and attend plays and devour all the poetry they can get their hands on. And I do my best to think things through--thus my moaning about theoretical thaumaturgy several posts ago.

J. K. Rowling does that very badly, btw. Once you start thinking about the Potterverse ... well, the list of inconsistencies and implausibilities and so on and so forth can go on from here to Doomsday.

But that's just my method. I don't have the first fucking clue how other people do it. And I can't tell you why sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesn't, why some authors' backgrounds just feel like stage scenery and others really do give the impression that you could wander beyond the borders of the page and find the rest of their secondary world waiting for you.

I think part of it, rereading that last sentence, is that the least convincing worlds are the ones that make you feel like you'd really want to live there. Since most fantasies are quasi-medieval, the truth of the matter is no, you really really wouldn't. It's like the difference between Firefly and Star Trek, to refer back to another post. Assuming you weren't Bejoran (sp? too damn long since I was watching DS9) at the wrong time, or you know, a member of one of the Bad Guy races (in which case it's your own fault, isn't it?), the ST universe would be perfectly pleasant to live in. Everything's clean and bright and they can fix most any medical problem you might have. With Firefly, on the other hand, it's pretty clear that--much like our own world--there's a lot more Have Nots than Haves, and most of the world is really pretty damn unpleasant. Same thing with Rowling. Aside from Voldemort, being a wizard is a damn good gig. Thus it's fun but monumentally unconvincing.

Or maybe that's just because I'm a cynical pessimistic bitch. I don't know.

Comments

[rusty76.livejournal.com]

Have you read _Curse of Chalion_ by Bujold? It is, admittedly, set in a generalized medieval world, but those details are sketched in only to give shape to the emotional and phsyical journeys of the characters. It's rather profoundly different from her other books, which I tend to classfy as Heyer-ish sci-fi, but equally good.

Chapters 1-8 are available here : http://www.harpercollins.com/hc/features/eos/curse.asp

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yes. The Curse of Chalion is quite good with the world-building. Of course, she's deliberately building off Spanish history--but hey, that's a good way to do it, and does give Chalion a distinctive flavor.

From a strictly world-building perspective (as opposed to just reading the novel, which is one of my favorite Bujolds), I find her theology a little too tidy to be convincing, but I think that's a personal quirk.

[rusty76.livejournal.com]

*nod*

I'm a little iffy on the theology myself, but love her style. It's the way she weaves the world in, instead of huge building blocks of info-dumps. That's what throws me off about most fantasy writers.

[rusty76.livejournal.com]

Belated novel recommendations - The Golden Key. Same sort of semi-Spanish background, but fantastically detailed. One of my fave books.