worldbuilding with 10 gnomes

[truepenny]

I've expressed my admiration for the Polish artist, architect, graphic novelist, and game designer Mateusz Skutnik¹ before, in connection with his Submachine games. I'm pointing you to Mr. Skutnik again because I've been whiling away the hours of insomnia this week playing his 10 gnomes games. [ETA: as kate_nepveu points out, if you are prone to motion sickness, these games may not be your friend. otoh, 10 gnomes in bologna has a redesigned interface which may be less problematic.]

10 gnomes are a series of very simple games: find the ten gnomes in each . . . well, here it gets a little more complicated, and this is where the worldbuilding aspect creeps in. Each game isn't a single picture; it's a set of pictures, some connected in a linear panorama, some nested within the panorama like matroyshka dolls in a series of close-ups. Sometimes, you follow the path of clicks down and find one of Skutnik's odd little cartoon gnomes (or, in later games in the series, his even odder cartoon trolls), sometimes, all you get is an extreme close-up of a flowering bush, or a storm drain, or the tread of a tank.

The black-and-white photography is fabulous.

The subjects of the games are various sites in Poland, in states of greater or lesser decay, ranging from a shipyard to a city street to a Renaissance water forge. Each of them, by itself, is interesting, but what fascinates me is the synergy created by the visual richness of each game and the juxtaposition of the twelve games together. Skutnik treats each subject with the same attention, and thus he and his gnomes show that Poland is not just the nostalgic beauty of the city street in 10 gnomes 11: the remains, nor the twentieth century violence and oppression symbolized in 10 gnomes 12: the tank, nor the peaceful suburban shabbiness of 10 gnomes 3: early spring garden. It's AND, not OR. It's all the things the 10 gnomes series spotlights. Some of them are ugly; some of them are sad; some of them are beautiful. They are all true.

Now, obviously, a series of games about real places in Poland is not the same as writing about an imaginary world, but the richness of the 10 gnomes games and the incongruities and contradictions they capture are things that I think fantasy needs to learn how to do. The value of the richness is obvious, but it's the juxtaposition of incongruities that points to something we² tend to deny ourselves. We tend to want it all one or the other: if you have beautiful baroque architecture, you cannot have tanks. And vice versa. And I think a lot of us, because we imprinted so hard on Tolkien, have brought some unexamined assumptions to the fantasy table with us:

1. Progress--specifically technological progress--is bad.
2. Progress--again, specifically technological progress--can be prevented.

That's the lesson of the Scouring of the Shire: that if you try hard enough, you can keep industrialization from happening. And that this is obviously a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Now, I will be the first to agree that industrialization brings a lot of ugliness and destruction with it--or, at least, it certainly did in our timeline. And I'm as susceptible as anyone to the buccolic nostalgia Tolkien is peddling, especially as, please note, he has positioned his nostalgia very very carefully: we're seeing it from the land-owners' perspective, that is, from the viewpoint of the people (men) who most benefitted from the system. We see grateful and loyal tenants (Sam and the Gaffer), and those who aren't grateful and loyal are Bad People (Ted Sandyman). But we don't know what it's like if you aren't a Baggins of Bag End or a scion of one of the other powerful families--or one of their direct dependents. We don't know anything about, for just a single example, infant mortality rates in the Shire.

Yes, I'm picking on Tolkien here, but I'm picking on him because he's such a influential foundation of the fantasy genre and because his personal agenda has gotten taken up and codified by people who don't share his passionate feelings on the subject of Edwardian rural England. We imitate him because he's the one who showed us how to do it, and so we get stuck in this anti-technology rut--not helped by the romanticization of the Middle Ages, which just reinforces the idea that technology is bad and we were all much happier before the discovery of penicillin.

And--and this, I think, is truly my point--Tolkien on the one hand and the sort of Pre-Raphaelite cod-medieval nostalgia on the other encourage us to imagine that we can create a world in which progress does not happen. The elegiac quality of Mateusz Skutnik's photography, the decay and desolation he documents, makes it clear that the advance of technology isn't an unalloyed happiness. Humans are wasteful and careless, and the line that starts with the water forge ends with the tank. But the opposite of progress is not Utopia. It's stagnation, and it means that the backdrop of your story is the history of people (not just a society, because even the most brutal, repressive, reactionary society--which is not the sort of society fantasy writers create, except possibly for the villains--cannot entirely stamp out curiosity; you can kill it every time it shows up, if you are hypervigilant and fanatical, but you can't keep it from showing up at all) who are utterly incurious, utterly without imagination, who are content to do things they way their forebears did them, forever and ever, world without end. Who don't even have enough gumption to want to find a way to keep themselves and their loved ones from dying from--again, as a single example--chimney fires. Or to keep their livestock from being wiped out because they haven't developed a theory of medicine that allows for quarantine procedures. Those people don't exist--if they ever did exist, they'd be extinct now. And thus, writing your society with its thousands of years of history and yet no technological development is cheating. It's refusing to acknowledge the way human society and history works.

And your convenient cataclysm to serve as a technological reset button? No, I'm sorry. That's a cheap trick, and we can still see the man behind the curtain.

What I'm saying is, keeping fantasy perpetually pre-industrial is stifling it. There are whole wide worlds out there that we haven't even seen, much less explored, because we're too busy playing lord of the manor.

And one way to start thinking about those worlds is to visit Mateusz Skutnik's 10 gnomes and learn about what history, and living with history, really looks like.

---
¹I see from his blog that one of his graphic novels is now available internationally.
²My "we" here is not all fantasy writers, because there are exceptions (e.g., China Miéville). But the great rushing, roaring mainstream of secondary-world fantasy is still flowing down the channel Tolkien carved, and even those for whom Tolkien himself is not an influence--or who see him only as a pernicious one--have to deal with that weight of metaphorical water. ETA: It's also possible that I'm talking mainly about American writers, but I'm not sure of that.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

Two tangents:

1) The 10 Gnomes game should be avoided if one is prone visually-induced motion sickness.

2) Submachine fic in Yuletide: http://archiveofourown.org/works/31272

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

1) Ouch. Good point.

2) O.O

[kate_nepveu]

2) It's been too long since I played for me to evaluate the fic, but 10K words on a game that's way more obscure than Oregon Trail? I was impressed.

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

Dude, don't waste this stuff on us--save it for your Storytellers Unplugged columns! *g*

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Also, what is the point at which some technology becomes somehow naturalised and therefore non-eevil? Can rant for several minutes about a late Kurosawa film in which a guy goes to this village in which everyone is happy, living in harmony with NAYCHUR and surviving to a healthy great age in their simple way of life...

And in the background watermills, a major technological advance in their day, are churning picturesquely away (probably, sez I, generating electrical power for the computers stashed in those simple yet elegant dwelling places...)

Also see post in which I fulminated (http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1041509.html) about Germaine Greer getting all poncey about gasometers and the urban landscape.

[skull-bearer.livejournal.com]

This is in fact why Tolkien never worked for me. There was always a sense at the back of my mind that there was no way these people were going to win. They would be swept away by Progress (represented by Sauron) because That Was How Things Worked. Those who did not move fast enough would be crushed by those who did. it wasn't good, it was often bad, but that was how it Was. I loved the books up until Return of the King, where I felt that Tolkien had tacked on a completely unbelievable ending to a previously very believable story. It was unrealistic, it was Luddite, and in some obscure way it seemed to be somehow worse than if Sauron had won. Maybe because with progress there's always a chance you can move on to better things, while with stagnation you're just stuck forever.
Or maybe it was just because I was 15 when I read it ;)

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

To speak a little more to your two "unexamined assumptions", they're very similar to the notions that drove the Ming dynasty of China to destroy much of its ocean-going navy and turn inward, and were contributing factors to why the Tokugawa Shogunate closed Japan to all but the most strictly controlled forms of commerce and communication with the outside world.

Obviously there were other factors involved (Ming China's conviction that it was and would always be the only important and relevant world power, and the Tokugawa shogunate's conviction that the only way it could solidify and retain control of Japan was to turn back the clock - Nobunaga & Hideyoshi, who Tokugawa succeeded, conquered Japan using more advanced gunpowder weapons & tactics than were permitted under the Shogunate) but the key point is that there have been several historical attempts to hold back technological progress, many of which succeeded in the short term. That said, they also eventually resulted in disaster for those opposed to change (e.g. the opium wars & the Bakamatsu/Meiji revolution), due to the pace of change in the outside world.

So, yeah, we even have historical examples of why this sort of thing might occur within the borders of a strictly controlled nation, how it might be perpetuated, and what eventually happens to that nation (or at least that government) when the rest of the world comes knocking. It's just that a lot of people are either ignorant of or willfully blind to these sort of things, possibly because it doesn't match their (consolatory?) conception of the genre. It's a lot simpler - a lot *easier* - to imagine an archetypical/cod-medieval fairyland than it is to try to wrap your head around the complexities and implications of history.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the historical examples!

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Heh, you're welcome. It's a bit of a personal hobbyhorse (as if that wasn't obvious already).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

We tend to want it all one or the other: if you have beautiful baroque architecture, you cannot have tanks.

I think this is why I'm drawn to a certain kind of SF -- which drives other kinds of SF fans crazy -- where it's high-tech and futuristic but also baroque. Dune is the only example coming to mind at the moment, and my perception there is definitely influenced by the various media adaptations, but I kind of like SF where people wear sumptuous clothing and there's gilt carving and so on, rather than tech producing a utilitarian look. But we tend to see those kinds of markers as "old-fashioned," so some people feel that's out of place in SF.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Diana Wynne Jones' A Tale of Time City has some awesome riffs on that idea.

Jones also wrote the first secondary-world-fantasy-with-trains I ever encountered.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

<hearts DWJ>

She was the one who inspired me to say, I want to be a writer.

[marycatelli]

It would help if architects did not persist in coming up with things like Brutalist architecture. Are there any modern and beautiful archictures? And modern art tends to be the uglier the more avowedly "modern" it is.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

There was a library in my neighborhood in Pittsburgh that was modern and gorgeous. Soaring floor-to-ceiling glass walls on the second floor, with window seats set up against them. A brushed metal staircase/elevator area that glimmered in the afternoon sunlight. The entrance on the first floor was walled in glass, with quotes about literature etched into that glass, in all sorts of fonts and sizes. High ceilings, pillars... Absolutely gorgeous.

But then, I think that glass and steel are beautiful, a lot of the time. And my second favorite library architecture ever was an old library where the front doors were an enormous wooden tree, split down the middle where the doors opened, and all the spaces between branches and trunk and such were set with dark glass.

I think there's a lot of beautiful modern art and architecture. But it's seldom the chunky, squat, beige stuff that seems so popular for office buildings and the like.

[marycatelli]

OTOH, the world was pre-industrial for a long time. Discoveries can be very, very, very slow. In agriculture, for instance, something so simple as letting fields lie fallow was invented in the Middle Ages -- all the ancient world never came up with it.

Adoption can be even slower. For the obvious reason that it is always easy to make matters worse, and when you are very close to the edge, anything worse can push you over it. One driving force of the French Revolution was famine. And one reason there was famine was that the peasants stuck to their old crops and refused to adopt potatoes.

And there are other motives. The water mill was invented in China, and in the Roman Empire, and in India, and a few of them were actually built. Only when they appeared in medieval Europe did people go "OOOBOY!!!! Let's build lots of them and use them for lots of stuff!!!" I've heard two theories on it -- labor was more dear in medieval Europe, and the whole ethos of Europe changed to an attitude more open to improvements in labor -- but obviously there had to be some reason for the change, and some reason why no one before took it seriously.

[soho-iced.livejournal.com]

Something of a tangent, but when I recently re-read North and South one of the things I appreciated was that although the workers in the industrial north of England (during the Industrial Revolution) are presented as suffering terribly at times, Gaskell allows her heroine to develop the insight that no matter how nostalgic she is about the agricultural workers near where she grew up they are both poorer and much more limited in their thinking and ambitions, due to lack of education and opportunities. There's a telling if perhaps rather overdone bit towards the end where a family friend asks whether these farm workers really benefit from education, immediately before they meet a woman complaining that a neighbour has burned her cat alive to avert the evil eye, or something similar.

[disassembly_rsn]

You might like the Phoenix trilogy by M.K. Wren - the first volume is Sword of the Lamb. It is a Feudal Future, of sorts, but the author put some thought into it - the society is not stable, as a space-going civilization built on the backs of a huge serf population who are kept deliberately uneducated. (Riot in a space habitat with life support system = a lot of deaths, one way or another, that sort of thing.) That's *the* major plot point, that civilization is teetering right on the bring of a third dark age (you find out what dark age #2 was like, there are several essays of historical analysis by one of the major characters inserted between book sections) and that a handful of people are trying to bring about some changes before it's too late.

It's really a three-part novel rather than a series.

[disassembly_rsn]

RE Europe - did the technology get adopted after the Black Death? I have the impression that labor costs went up a lot, so that may have made the difference in making people think the technology was more cost effective than villein labor. (Disclaimer: I am heavily influenced by a favorite book which pretty much lays out Plague => Renaissance).

[marycatelli]

ROFLOL no.

Much, much, much earlier. In the Dark Ages. The times when they were also inventing crop rotation and new plows that opened up much of Europe to agriculture -- they didn't have powerful enough plows during the Roman empire.

[roisindubh211.livejournal.com]

ever read any Lois McMaster Bujold? Her Vorkosigan series is set on several worlds- the technologically and socially advanced Beta, with lots of freedom and social responsibility and still has problems, the socially backward -feudal, in fact- Barrayar, which has suddenly acquired up-to-date technology and has been resisting the social changes that might come with it (I need to mention that their vassal system often works REALLY well, despite the problems that they have). You get a cool mix of sumptuous clothes and traditions with, well, spaceships and laser-cannons. I suppose its technically sci-fi rather than fantasy, but its great.

[marycatelli]

What is really, really, really silly is when magic and "technology" don't mix.

Not alternate technology. When magic causes "technology" to go pzzzt and die. Your watermill would churn happily on under a spell, nevertheless.

[svalar-unnir.livejournal.com]

As a medievalist-in-training, I always twitch at the use of "progress" when applied to society, because there's typically that implication (whether it's intentional or not) that things later or more technologically advanced are "better"--but how do you measure that, and by whose standards? Which I admit is tied up with frustration at the average person's misconceptions about the middle ages (see: "the dark ages"). But your description of progress as basically curiosity, drive, hope has just given me a whole new perspective that I can't wait to follow up on. So thank you for that!

(semi-relatedly, I am fascinated by things like steampunk, which simultaneously celebrate technology and long for a throwback to some sort of golden era.)

[peoriapeoria.livejournal.com]

Related to this is how quickly people can learn new players and their products, such as the distinctions of trade goods the Europeans brought to North America, and how ignoring the agency this implies has been part of considering Other as Inferior.

And, there is something to be learned about Expression that red cloth for a time was mostly unwoven and used as the threads by the First Peoples (in this case I'm speaking roughly Upper Midwest Woodland)

But yes, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of technology and this has affected Fantasy (and often in obverse ways, Science Fiction.) Because, It's all technology. Good seams are technology. Proper tanning and piece cutting, technology. The Apollo mission spacesuits, for the particulars of their intended environment, are much like what is posited for Ice Age peeps, that is to say the vital defense of a delicate creature so very far from its 'natural habitat'.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

A good thought on why fantasy shouldn't always follow the middle ages, or 'good old days' path like Tolkien did.

As someone who has read a lot of history, I find myself staring at the person in front of me who moans about 'the good old days.' I get the urge to ask, what was so good about them? Slavery, tyranny, a couple of world wars, the Vietnam war, thousands of years worth of women repressed, oppressed, suppressed...and just about any kind of -essed you can put in there. Good old days my thoroughly white behind >.> But I've always written my fantasy in the modern world for a more simple reason; it's easier.

I don't have to try and remember all the details of how people must have lived back a few ages ago. Thinking about it though, I don't think I would come up with a plot situated so far back in time anyway. Firstly, because, reading history, I know how shitty it actually was, and secondly because I have personally had to deal with a President and a congress that tried to send us back to the early ages for a whole 8 years before Obama came along.

Science was smothered, people who were intellectual and tech savvy were sneered at, history was patently ignored. I hated the hell out of every minute of it so the idea of doing the same thing in my own books make me ill. So, in conclusion....

Not happening. Ever :]

[adrata.livejournal.com]

(I think I might be misunderstanding you, but...) In my opinion, that concept of Magic vs. Tech can actually work, as long as it doesn't ignore the omnipresent inventiveness and curiosity of mankind that truepenny mentioned. I consider Ilona Andrews' Kate Daniels series a very good example of that: There are "waves" of magic and tech, and when the magic's up, cars and lightbulbs go pzzzt and die, as you put it. However, people have adapted. Cartwheels may be back on the streets, but there are also cars running on enchanted water (which, in their turn, go pzzzt when the magic wave ends). Phones are an altogether unpredictable entity, sometimes working in spite of the magic and sometimes not.

If the necessity of a proper balance of this kind was your point all along, I apologize for chewing your ear off for nothing. :)

[marycatelli]

That sort of situation is exactly the silliness I was talking about. It's the mystical view of "technology".

[adrata.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether it'd have to be mystification. It depends on your definition of magic. "Some people can read thoughts and throw fireballs, but never while watching tv" is a concept that seems forced, arbitrary and nonsensical - no argument there. But if magic is defined as a strong and possibly almost self-aware natural force, or as the spiritual embodiment of nature, then I think it's not all that far fetched to consider it the opposite of artificiality. In that case, if complex man-made objects like computers are the first to give out, while simpler things like a watermill last longer but are eventually destroyed, too, that'd make sense. (I agree, though, that it does get stupid if some man-made things are "technology" and some are not.)

Sorry for being quarrelsome and nit-picky... I guess what I really mean to say is that I've seen many things that sounded grossly stupid in theory made into great stories.

[marycatelli]

I think you are exaggerating the "complexity" of "technology" as opposed to older technology. Especially as the writers do not, in fact, have the watermill break down in due course.

As for artificiality -- there are large stretchs of bog in Great Britain that were ruined and made bog by the farming practices of the Neolithic Age. Artificiality is more interwoven into your environment that you know.

BTW, why are human dams, made by humans for human purposes, artificial while beaver dams, made by beavers for beaver purposes, are natural?

[adrata.livejournal.com]

Well… the fact that I can remember only one story that made the concept work says something for your position, I guess, but I’ve got to point out Ilona Andrews again, who does follow through with breaking the watermill.
As to complexity, I’m not sure I get you – is it exaggeration to you if I consider a wall a million times more basic than a computer? A computer is not only more complex by the "more parts on the same area" kind of definition, but also takes a lot of other "technological" objects to assemble, to begin with. Building one from scratch by hand would be nearly impossible. And it needs to be constantly fed with electricity, which comes from even more machines. I think that puts it on a very different level of artificiality than "older technology", say, a piece of pottery or a spinning wheel.

And sure, artificiality is all around, even in the landscape. I don’t really see the contradiction, though – nature slowly reclaims abandoned terrain even without magic. The landscape may never look quite the same, but what is left of human meddling becomes absorbed. It's not like nature can’t adapt, and a forest growing on top of a waste dump is still a forest.

The beaver dams are a very good point. But if you wanted to keep the logic of the story, I suppose you could draw the line between instinct and not instinct. We humans don’t have an inner urge to build dams – or houses, or computers – it just makes our lives more comfortable.