A lush, well-crafted world is a lovely thing. But I think I mostly just subscribe to the cool stuff theory of world-building.* A writer will sit down, and say, “I’m going to tell you about a place that’s really cool…” I’ll like it or not to the extent that she and I agree on what’s really cool. Lately that’s been steampunkish and urban-fantasy settings, but there’s nothing rigorous about it.
*A corollary of Steven Brust’s cool stuff theory of literature.
I’m a big fan of Diana Wynne Jones. Most of her novels explore the concept of alternate worlds but in a different way every time unless the book is part of a series. She still has a distinct style but I’m amazed at her ability to not recycle her old ideas. Also her writing is fresh and often funny but I never have problems taking the story seriously.
Consistency.
The world, and the rules of the world, need to be the same on first page as they are on the last page. If they are not, there needs to be an in book explanation of how, when, and why things changed.
Your characters might be relying on an incorrect perception of the world and how it works - they might discover something new. But the author should know - or at least should have known about this all along. If a magic word works the first time a character says it - it needs to keep working, or there needs to be a reason why not. Just changing the rules because the way the story started off doesn’t advance the plotline is really, really annoying.
See “The Golden Compass” for an inconsistent wreck of a book (with a lot of other problems.)
Language is difficult. Unless the author is really good at it, it’s better not to bother.
It also helps if the author likes the world they’ve created. I just read a book where the world (future earth) was actually relatively decently put together, but the author hates where the earth has ended up. And she was fighting against it all throughout the book. It was subltly distracting.
For worldbuilding - I like originality. I like worlds that are clearly not influenced by the author’s college D’nD game. I like authors who can ditch the elves and dwarves and dragons - or make them into something different - I disagree that a goblin should always be a “gnarly little fellow that lives underground” (Sometimes, they can be David Bowie!). I like worlds that have a life beyond just our heroes. Snapshots of other people’s lives are great. I like worlds that include Faerie or some other dangerous wainscot or polder areas. Writers I’ve enjoyed for their worldbuilding, besides Middle Earth:
China Miéville’s Bas Lag
Stewart and Riddel’s Edgeworld
Swanwick’s Faerie in The Iron Dragon’s Daughter
Barker’s Abarat, Imajica and Weaveworld
Pratchet’s Carpet and Discworld
I found even Middle-Earth to be somewhat disappointing. It’s sort of a dumbed down Europe with Franco-Germanic Elves, British Hobbits, and Saracen Orcs. It lakes a certain cosmopolitan splendor that I’d like to see. In short, the world is too small for my tastes. But please don’t take this critique too far, I love the Lord of the Rings and this problem is one that most Fantasy has, one that Tolkien did a better job than most at addressing.
In reading the book ‘Shantaram’ which is not fantasy at all, it’s contemporary fiction about an Aussie Criminal on the run from the law in Bombay, I discovered what is missing from most fantasy books. It is a robust sense of multiple cultures. Usually there is an overwhelming mythology, or two or three if the conflict is driven by a clash of cultures as in Lord of the Rings.
In Shantaram there is a grandiose sense of culture. Even within his world of India, even within Bombay you get the sense that there are cultures of such complexity that they match the complexity of most fantasy worlds. Shantaram goes all over the world, and it displays the cultures from those places. The Author more or less lived the life he wrote about in the book so he has an advantage of not having to invent everything he talks about. The ‘Standing Babas’ who are essentially Monks that have made a vow to stand for the rest of their lives, present a more alien and mystical feeling than much that I have read in fantasy.
I am working on writing a fantasy novel, but what has held me back is my desire to create a robust world culture. In this I am going to take more cues from the book Shantaram than I would from even Tolkien. The problem that I run into is that I am not prepared, and lack the linguistic background to even attempt to address the foundation of culture, language. I only speak English, and I haven’t even mastered that.
For me it is the problem of culture that makes Fantasy novels often come off as seeming kind of thin. Even the masters such as Gene Wolfe fail to produce a heady culture at the level of say James Clavell due to the fact that James Clavell has all of history to draw from, and Gene Wolfe has to make it up. In ‘Urth of the New Sun’, there are basically two different cultures. He does a good job of making Nessus seem like a big cosmopolitan city, but the whole of the Autarch’s domain doesn’t give me the impression of the sprawl of a nation-state.
There are so many things that make up a culture. After the verbal/written language comes their symbolism and tastes. How do they react to color? Watching the films of Zhang Yimou, next to Mira Nair, next to Quentin Tarantino will show you some very different reactions to color. You can see this in Chinese and Japanese paintings versus European ones. How the artists use line to express themselves has meaning. The difference between transcendental theatre like Noh from Japan versus Western Narrative theatre, shows us some very different styles. We would think it was rather rude for someone to sleep through Othello, but in Noh its completely expected as the play is more about harmonics and mood than it is about the narrative.
In many fantasy worlds you bring in the extra complexity of alien species. Oftentimes these other species are treated as just another type of human. Very few authors cross the boundary into asking how the different physionomy of their creature might affect their culture.
This makes it difficult to write a story, because one must craft it in such a manner as to show that there is this huge world out there, but you are only catching a glimmer of it locally.
One of the most robust fantasy settings ever is the “Song of Ice and Fire”, which again seems to follow a fairly European/Middle-Eastern paradigm like Lord of the Rings. The main thrust of the action taking place on a nation-state island helps to narrow the focus.
We are often unaware of our own history in the perspective of interacting cultures. World Empire for the past 3000 years has seen multicultural trade bringing foreigners from all over the globe criss-crossing back and forth. Alexander conquered from Egypt to India. I can think of no fantasy novel that has captured the multicultural grandeur of Alexander’s Macedonian Empire.
So, what makes for a good fantasy setting for me, is how well they approximate this goal. It is very hard to achieve, and I do not let it ruin my love of fantasy. The most robust fantasy settings I think I have seen are the Dungeons and Dragons settings.
BTW, interesting mini-essay by M. John Harrison : What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium. I’ve never read the books about the eponymous city, and he comes across a bit PoMo, but makes a reasonable argument why expecting rules/consistency/realistic underpinnings can be a mistake.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was a terrible storyteller (he had only one story), but his setting was so rich & filled with detail that Barsoom would be a fascinating place to visit.
My favorite Fantasy world right now is Pratchett’s Discworld, and that is one that specifically has no world-building behind it. Pratchett does not hesitate to contradict something in a later book if it works in the story. Pratchett has said “There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; ocassionally, however, there are alternate pasts.” It is successful because the stuff he throws in is fun to read about. No-one was more surprised than Pratchett to find out that it was possible to create a map of Ahnk-Morpork that was consistent with everything in all the books–he had certainly not done anything like that before putting pen to paper.
Harry Potter is another quintessentially un-world-built world. Rowling evidently has no interest in the economics of the Wizarding world at all.
Barry Hughart’s “Ancient China that never was”, Cabell’s Poictesme, the world of The Elfin Ship with elves is submarines and magical coffepots–a *rich *world beats a *consistent *world hands down for me.
But if I’m 100 pages in and I’m still trying to figure out the world - its no good to me. Snow Crash is like that - I’ve gotten 100 pages in a few times and then decide I still don’t really “get” which way is up - and put the book down not regretting it. Which means the world can’t be truly innovative and has to leave plenty of clues to what it is.
Dark Materials does this really poorly. Alternative England - but when? Scholars and the Church - didn’t link like the Medieval Historian in me wanted them to.
On the other hand, Harry Potter did that very well. I knew the world was just like mine except for this little thing. And then that little thing grew over the course of the book without ME ever having to really spend time going “ummmm, that wasn’t what I expected.”
I hated The Sparrow for those reasons - the world didn’t leave me enough markers for what it was. Which was sort of the point of the book.
Well Snow Crash is barely in the future. We are sort of coming up on when it is supposed to take place. I guess they expect you to be familiar with the landscape of gated communities, and be able to make the leap to an entirely privatized society without any central government whatsoever. It is probably written with a specific audience in mind, one that has been inculturated toward that kind of mindset. For those of us familiar with Temporary Autonomous Zones, and Anarcho-Syndicalism, it’s not that much of a stretch.
When Hiro is on the internet I just imagine Tron with lots of popups. When he’s here on Earth, well it pretty much resembles the world I live in now, only slightly more chaotic.
GRRM’s song of ice and fire is the best I’ve read in the classic fantasy tradition - I’d struggle to put my finger on what he is doing right though. It’s probably the quality of the writing, but more in the artisan, nuts and bolts sense than in the artistic prose style. I don’t want to read a fantasy book where the writer tries to lay out high level, demanding prose - even if they can pull it off the results are all wrong for the genre - Samuel Delaney’s Neveryona books are a good example of this.
To handle the massive size of most world-building fantasy series, a writer needs to have really mastered the basics of the form - plot, characterisation, pacing, multiple POV etc. Nothing complicated - the type of stuff I imagine they teach at creative writing courses. A guy like GRRM can do this in his sleep, most cannot. The worldbuilding comes on top of this. GRRM is also very good at handling the fantastical bits of fantasy - really nuanced touch with magic for example which I like.
What I really like about GRRM’s world in A Song of Ice and Fire is that the people there do real things - which are often really bad things. Even characters you like often do really bad stuff. In a lot of less sophisticated fantasy worlds, the good guys have this unassailable sense of honor and always choose to do the right thing - plus, no one has bodily functions and the peasants are clean and well-fed, which is hilarious. Y’all should check out the teeth on some of the older people in my town, and we have running water. The best image of rural life in a fantasy book that I have come across, is, imho, in Cynthia Voigt’s YA novel Jackaroo.
But I think that’s really more writing and characterization than world-building.
What makes it for me is if the society is constructed convincingly. I majored in anthropology and it does bother me when it seems like every country has the same features, except for one wacky difference. Robert Jordan did this a lot. They wear their hair in braids in Tarabon! They wear see-through dresses in Arad Doman! Whatever.
For me, I want the world to be consistent. If there’s some amazing source of power, be it witchcraft or demonic magic or whatnot, somebody will try to use it, and not just one random evil villain. If the evil villain can get ahold of some mighty spell, other people can probably do so. What have they done with it in the past? Likewise, if there’s witches and wizards, how do they make a living? I don’t like it when they’re all mysterious hermits living in the woods. Doesn’t anybody sell their services? And even if common folk fear magic, kings and dukes will use it, and not their enemies will. So the setting needs to reflect the resources available to people.
Actually, the Saracens are the easterling (well, some of them are; there are many others). The orcs were almost totally invented from scratch, with only a hair of some mythological creature involved. Trolls, too, really. But remember, TOlkeing’s world invented the idea, so it was necessarily less flagrantly fanastic than others could become.
I’m not sure this is fair. There were notable differences in each society besides aesthetic appearances. Values, ideals, gender relations, caste relations and such were quite different. (Try putting an Andoran woman in a Domani dress and see what she says, just for starters. If only the clothing was the one wacky difference, Andoran women wouldn’t be nearly as prudish compared to Domani as they were in the books.) What similarities there were were no different than similarities between real-world nations that are born out of being human.
Heck, you could make the same simplification for real-world nations (before globalization occurred, anyway). Indian women have dots on their heads, Japanese women wear kimonos, etc.
Jordan’s method of writing was sometimes hamhanded, which might account for the perceived shallowness, but I do think he put a lot of effort into creating a believable world given the fictional parameters. It’s not necessarily a deep world, but it’s broad and internally consistent as far as I’ve been able to determine.
Well, this is what works for me - not that it isn’t much of a stretch for you - cyberpunk doesn’t work for me in general. I love Neil Stephenson writing as Stephen Bury - and can’t stand Neil Stephenson writing cyberpunk because I have to do too much work figuring out his world. (Not a huge fan of William Gibson’s worlds either).
I’ve said this before - books are driven by plot or character or place or even prose. I’m not someone for whom books that are primarily driven by place resonate. If you spend more time on your world than on your prose or your characters - it isn’t going to work for me. But that is me.
I think his problem was that he simply covered too much ground (sometimes literally, goven the amount of travel) to cover the different locales sufficiently. When your characters are spread out over all creation, and everywhere they go there’s differences, it tends to start feeling vague even if he did describe it well. We can’t get a clear mental picture of the landmarks, su8btle uses of color and style, and minor cultural ideas as easily. It’s just hard to keep everything in mind while reading. Of course, this is in its own way a good thing, that’s there’s a lot of material. It’s just maybe too much to comprehend.
Well, to start, they can’t screw up and make their elves too far from Tolkien’s version.
All I’m sayin’…
For me, it’s the feeling that there is an established background and history to the world that has a chain of events that has given rise to the current world. It doesn’t have to be rigorously detailed to the degree of Tolkien, but it has to be there in some way. Notables include Herbert’s Dune universe and Varley’s Luna. I feel that I’ve entered an established world in the first chapter before even being aware of any plot or theme.
Conversely, Rowling’s Harry Potter and Jordan’s Wheel of Time are highly complex and detailed, but are absent of the feel of history and age…they both feel to me like a highly detailed and referenced Wikipedia article but with all of the hyperlinks leading to “under construction” pages.
These are huge for me, too. I’d also add religion. It’s hard for modern folks to overestimate the importance of religion in medieval life. If your fantasy world is set in a faux medieval setting, but religion is not a hugely important part of society, that rings very false to me. That’s another thing that Song of Ice and Fire does well. I also really enjoyed Carol Berg’s Flesh and Spirit, which explores the interplay of politics, religion, and magic.
I dig strong female characters. However, waaaay too may fantasy (and historical fiction) writers think that there’s only one way for a female character to be strong. She’s young. She’s fiery. She sneaks off and learns swordplay with her brothers. She refuses to go into an arranged marriage. She runs away with the heroes–perhaps disguised as a boy. What a minx!
Yawn. That’s such a stock character by now. Lately, I find myself much more interested in female characters who find ways to be strong within traditional female roles, whatever those may be in that society. And defining gender roles is an interesting part of world-building.
It’s a very minor thing, but it also bugs me when people in fantasy novels don’t ever worry about getting pregnant. Especially the faux medieval ones.
Richard & Wendy Pini’s Elfquest Elves are about as far from Tolkien as you can get, & they’re great!