Thinking out loud: toward a praxis of world-building.

(I know, geekerific subject line. But I love the word praxis and there really just aren't enough opportunities to use it.)

matociquala's brilliant post on setting, voice, and grounding caused me to start thinking about world-building, what it is, what it's for, and what I think about how it ought to be done (which, please notice is subjective as all get-out, ymmv, contents may shift in transit).

So what the heck is world-building, anyway?

As a concept in literary craft, world-building is an artifact of the sf/f genre (and I'm cavalierly lumping science fiction and fantasy together for the moment, although there are ways in which the world-building each genre requires is quite different). You can talk about world-building in Georgette Heyer's books and Gone With the Wind and any other book in which the setting is not supposed to be a faithful mimesis of the experience and expectations of the author's dominant culture. It's not about what the reader does and does not know--we can read Tom Jones and have an experience similar to the experience of reading a book with careful and extensive world-building, but that's not because that's what Fielding was doing. That's the baggage we bring to the text, not part of the text's intended functionality. Otoh, contemporary novels that deal with the experiences of minorities may have world-building, if the intended audience is the literary mainstream, i.e., not people to whom the customs and cosmology of the depicted society are natural and familiar.

I think about world-building in those cases because I have been trained as a sf/f reader and because it's a very useful concept to be able to extrapolate outwards. But world-building, in its fullest sense, belongs to texts which feature as part of their fundamental nature the building of worlds.

Although not, I think, books that are about the building of worlds. It would be nonsense to try to talk about world-building in The Republic or Utopia, although both those works are focused on the description of an entirely imaginary society. Utopia describes its imaginary society, but it does not build it.

So what on earth do I mean by that?

World-building, to my mind, is something that a text does AS WELL AS telling a story. In the interstices of telling a story. In the background, in the margins, in the odd shadowed corners. Which isn't to say that the narrative can't stop for a while and settle down to explaining things, as, for example, the narrative of The Left Hand of Darkness is wont to do. But the reason world-building is clever and difficult, and the reason that sf/f writers talk about it ad infinitum (the last three conventions I've been to, I've been on panels about world-building), is that it's there in service of the story, not for its own further aggrandizement. The world-building in The Left Hand of Darkness is part of the story. The world-building in (random example) C. J. Cherryh's Rider at the Gate isn't, although the story is predicated on the world-building, and so Cherryh's world-building is always backgrounded, always oblique. Not getting in the way, so that there are a whole host of marvellous things that you see only out of the corner of your eye.

Roger Ebert said about Return of the Jedi: "The camera in 'Jedi' slides casually past forms of life that would provide the centerpiece for lesser movies." And while goodness knows I wouldn't cite the Star Wars movies as a great example of profound and brilliant world-building, it is absolutely true that one of the things the first trilogy does exceptionally well (I didn't notice this happening much in The Phantom Menace and I have refused categorically to see Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith) is that sense of what you might call depth of weirdness. In The Empire Strikes Back, Our Heroes reach the cloud city of Bespin. Why is there a city in the clouds? How does it stay up there? We don't need to know, and so we aren't told. The important thing is whether Lando is going to betray Han, and that's what we focus on. But in the meantime, we're in a city in the clouds! Dude, most excellent!

And that's the kind of world-building I love. The kind that's built out of throwaway lines and marginalia. Because that's the kind of world-building, paradoxically by its very ellipticality, that can most convincingly create a sense of a secondary world as existing in four dimensions, as having heft and breadth and history.

Infodumps are authorial intrusion, because they mark a point where the author has decided there's something readers Need To Be Told. They can be camouflaged well, and they can certainly serve their narrative valiantly if done correctly (which may or may not involve camouflage). But world-building by minimalism (what papersky calls incluing) is what I strive for because it allows the story and the sheer brilliant joy of the world-building to co-exist.

And, of course, it makes sf/f look more like mainstream literature, because the plot doesn't stop dead for three pages while the Mad Scientist explains his Hyperdrone Frappinator to his Beautiful Daughter. Whether or not it's a good thing for sf/f to imitate mainstream literature is a question I actually don't have an answer to. I am certainly highly suspicious of mainstream literature's claim to be superior to all forms of genre fiction, and I would hate for sf/f to bind its feet in order to fit into mainstream literature's glass slippers. But at the same time, I also believe passionately in the supremacy of story, and I do think that story is better served by the inclue than the infodump.

Also, please note, that 'infodump' and 'exposition' arre not the same thing. Beginning writers are told that infodumps are a terrible sin, and this makes them afraid of exposition and description. But exposition is not infodump, and infodump is not exposition. The Left Hand of Darkness is again my shining example. There's lots of exposition in TLHoD, but no infodumping, and that is because the exposition is also the story. Because story is not the same as plot.

This is confusing, and I think I'm way out at the limits of what I have vocabulary to talk about. But in sf/f, the world is always part of the story, because the story couldn't happen if the world weren't the way it were. And that's why world-building is so important, and that's why it needs to be so carefully integrated into the story as a whole.

I've said elsewhere that it's a slight misnomer to describe sf/f as a genre (or genres), because what they really are is modes of storytelling defined by their setting. But what I've just explained to myself--and to any of y'all who are still with me--is the fact that, yes, they are a genre, because setting in sf/f isn't setting. It's world. And the world is part and parcel of the stories that are told and the manner of their telling. If you can transplant a science fiction or fantasy story into a mainstream setting, it isn't speculative fiction. That isn't to say it's a bad story, simply to say that the marker of the specfic genre is that the setting and the plot are codependent on each other.

And that is why sf writers spend so much time talking about world-building.