Anyone else bored by books with big, elaborate, well-drawn world building?

Cafe Society
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I was gonna post in the other thread, but I would be threadshitting, so I started a new one.

UGGGHHHH!!! I hate hate hate these books!!! Any fantasy novel that needs an appendix, genealogy, and/or map is always, ALWAYS boring as HELLL!!!

Seriously, I don’t give two fucks about Md’rqeaq the Honored Ancestor of Qrtn’brga’rg, who founded the Myfanwy empire 6,000 years ago. It doesn’t do anything except MAYBE give a little more character info on Qrtn’brga’rg, doesn’t advance the plot, and gives me another name with too few vowels to have to remember.

My rule of thumb: If a paperback fantasy novel is more than 1.5" thick, I am wary. Same if it has more than 3 direct sequels. If I open it up and see a map, I put it right back down again.

Yes, I’ve tried them. I’ve read the full Belgariad series (all sub-series of it, even), and the first three Shannara books. I tried to read the Wheel of Time but got about 10 pages into the first book and threw it against the wall. It dented the plaster. After that, I declared the entire genre of Tolkien-rip-offs to be anathema.

And no, since you asked, I never was able to read Tolkien, although I liked the movies. Why? BECAUSE IN THE MOVIES THERE WEREN’T TWELVE CHAPTERS ABOUT TREES AND SEVENTEEN CHAPTERS ABOUT THE POLITICS OF PEOPLE WHO HAD BEEN DEAD FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

Boring boring boring boring boring BOOOOOORRRRRIIIIIIIINNNNGGGGGGG.

I almost feel like this thread should be in the Pit, but eh.

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Yeah. I’ve never liked a book enough to be arsed to read any appendices or lexicons, to examine accompanying maps, or–and you didn’t mention this–to read any quoted poems or lyrics.

I found LOTR a hard slog. I enjoyed the Hobbit, though.

I do however enjoy a nice long book. Just make sure it’s long because there’s enough story to fill the space between the covers.

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I haven’t read Wheel of Time, but the Belgariad and Shannara books are not very good. And I LIKE big, elaborate fantasy with a ton of world-building.

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Stay the hell away from Dune.

Any book where you have to refer to the glossary every other page to figure out what the hell is going on in the story…I mean, yes, it’s twelve thousand years in the future, you have to figure that culture and language is going to change and evolve, but damn… :smack:

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I actually liked the first Dune book. But after that, it got to be too much.

I think that the problem is that authors get so caught up in their world-building that they neglect the rest of it.

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Lyonesse has a map at the front. Just sayin’…

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I’ve read the first Wheel of Time book, or at least the first 70 pages of it. That was more than enough.

World building is, for me, a neutral thing. I’m not especially interested in the glossary or appendix or whatever, and if I need to rely on it, your book is probably crap. But I don’t mind if it’s there. And some of the best fantasy I’ve read has had a fascinating world as a main character.

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No, you shouldn’t be complaining about appendices. The point of putting stuff in an appendix is so you don’t have to read that background material if you don’t want to, and it’s not slowing down the story.

And why you no like maps? I like books in which the characters visit interesting places and have interesting encounters, and I like seeing where all of those things are situated.

I’m sometimes turned off by “the politics of people who had been dead for thousands of years,” or even the political machinations of people in the present, but I don’t think Tolkien really has very much of that. Most of LOTR is told from the point of view of the hobbit characters, and hobbits just aren’t all that political.

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OT (sorry, OP): Have you read City of Stairs? I think it’s right up your alley.

Back to the OP because I really meant to put in more than one line earlier! I do feel like maps generally are pretty overused. I almost always skip them. And I guess I pretty much never refer to a glossary of terms. I find it true that if a person is essentially forcing you to learn a new vocabulary, that’s just silly.

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I haven’t, but I’ve read other things by that guy and enjoyed them, and now I have City of Stairs on hold at the library. Thanks!

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No, but they are hobbits, and therefore must die. They are close enough to ewoks to suffer the same fate.

Same as the OP - I found Tolkein to be a slog that just wasn’t worth it. Enjoyed the movies, though. World-building can be fascinating if it involves interesting physics (Niven’s Integral Trees) or interesting social constructs. But just another pseudo-medieval fantasy world? Boooring!

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I did complete Wheel of Time, but it took a long time to get going. Like it started off completely confusing but got much better and easy to follow fairly quickly, but I just couldn’t put the effort in for months because I was afraid it was going to be like its prologue the whole time.

Now, the world building is great on a reread and a 3rd, 4th, etc, but it’s a delicate balance between “here’s some background info so you know what’s going on” to “here’s three chapters with maybe 3 lines of dialog and two pages taking place RIGHT NOW.”

Harry Potter seems to get a lot of criticism from a lot of fantasy fanatics, but one of the ways it was so successful was that you entered the world as clueless as Harry so you learned as he learned. You never felt overwhelmed with important information that nonetheless makes your eyes glaze over in data overload.

I adore ASOIAF, but if I hadn’t watched S1 of GOT first, I’m not sure how I would have fared reading it first. So much info so fast and it makes no sense until later.

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I like big, involved worlds in science fiction.

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I think I agree although I tend to avoid those sorts of books in the first place. I didn’t find Lord of the Rings all that turgid but if there were appendices, I ignored them.

On the other hand, something like Perdido Street Station and some of China Mieville’s other novels include an awful lot of detail on the setting, inhabitants, technology and culture, much of it peripheral to the central storyline but I never feel bogged down by it. Maybe the difference is that it’s woven in to the narrative rather than detached, or maybe because the information is contemporary to the plot, not historical.

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Oh I do love maps! I have quite a collection.

But yeah, beyond LOTR/Hobbit, I got really sick of the rip offs.

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The cynic in me suspects that a lot of word-building in fantasy novels is just pandering to the nerd love of collecting things: novels with family trees must be better than those without, because there are more things to remember, and if you can remember who wielded which unpronounceable ancient blade to slay whom at what battle you win more fan points. At least China Mieville’s world-building has the virtue of being unusual rather than the usual fantasy ragbag of swords, dragons and ancient feuds, and is consequently fresher and more interesting. I also like Mervyn Peake’s *Gormenghast * novels {well, the first two of them} for having virtually no world-building at all: Gormanghast was just there, and he never bothered with the how or why. And Mieville loves Mervyn Peake’s work, and hates Tolkien’s:

And from the same essay, this quote about elaborate fantasy world-building is very apropos:

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Perhaps publishers should hire at pittance rates legions of geeks to do continuity checks (if only they could be trusted not to triumphantly leak online).

I feel the OP’s pain. I quite like complex-world plots where the complexity is driven fundamentally by the characteristics of the novel world rather than by ordinary human medieval politics simply transposed into a weird world.

So Niven’s Ringworld works for me, and the Lensman series (daggy and old school, but I can’t help but love it, hysterical hyper-adjectives and all. I’d offer a tip of the hat to Qadgop the Mercotan, but he’s probably slithering after Cynthia). But the stock saints and villains and improbable machinations of GoT isn’t ringing my bell. The dragons and all are nice, but they only illusorily seem to be plot drivers. From what little I’ve seen, they seem only to be incidental to the painful detail of power plays. For me, any series with an improbable mega-villain manipulating everyone without anyone spotting it is too cartoonish not to throw aside with great force.

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I love a big elaborate fantasy setting… IF it SERVES THE BOOK. THIS book, not the third book or something. Like, the Richard K. Morgan books that start with The Steel Remains, that’s a seriously complicated world and you get the feeling there are stacks and stacks of notebooks of background stuff… that the author felt no need to include. It felt rich but didn’t need to have ten appendices.