They’re wizards. They are generally intelligent, commonsensical and seek to accomplish their goals, but they’re a little crazy.
I find a lot of the ‘Alternate Earth History’ stuff like that. There’s far too much ‘everything goes right for X’ and totally unbelievable developments outside of the even remotely theoretically possible.
Ok, how about Earth in Harry Harrison’s “West of Eden”?
i’d go for tolkein. loved his stuff as a teen.
Maybe. But never ever in the biggest match of the year when it is still very close.
Then you have absolutely no understanding of any sport whatsoever. You may hate the sports, but they make sense unlike Quidditch.
The setting of the Ice and Fire books is so detailed and laid out it starts to feel suffocating, I mean you can literally build family trees for characters going back generations! There are even “oh right duh” moments to be gleaned from this, like realizing people are actually related.
I don’t know how to describe it but this felt like the opposite to poor world building, this felt too thought out and constricting.
An AH where no extinction-level event ever wiped out the dinos, and yet *H. sapiens *evolved, on the same planet, in a form undistinguishable from us?
Pretty much any Ursula K. LeGuin world feels well-thought-out. Earthsea has already been mentioned, and the cultures in Left Hand of Darkenss feels very genuine to me. Lots of nice detail, like they have never built flying machines because nothing bigger than an insect has evolved on this planet, so no looking at a bird and imagining what it must be like to fly. I always thought that throwaway bit, along with countless others make the society feel completely real and logical.
I’m a big fan of Ursula LeGuin’s stories, especially the Hainish cycle.
However my favourite scene from The Dispossessed would be quite unlikely to occur in reality. LeGuin described the twin world Annares rising in the sky of Urras; but in a real double planet the two worlds would almost certainly be tidally locked to each other, assuming they were nearly the same mass, and more than a billion years old or so.
So no moonrises.
That’s not what Shalmanese is saying, though. He’s not saying that interest in the sport makes no sense, he’s saying that how the sport is designed makes no sense. Just as there are “rules” for, say, writing effective fiction, there are “rules” for making a good game. Quidditch is the sporting equivalent of having a gun in the first act that never goes off.
Good thread. I recently watched Contact. I had no problem swallowing the story line as a possibility.
Jack Vance excelled at creating worlds which don’t seem to survive scrutiny…but then papering over the problems with elegant explanations.
His “Tschai: Planet of Adventure” quadrology is, by and large, an updating of Burroughs’ Barsoom stories, but with just enough justification bolted on to make it not blatantly absurd.
The same for the “Oikumene” in his “Demon Princes” quintology (sf, not fantasy, even given the title.) At first glance, the level of scientific knowledge seems to contradict the sociological depiction. But he introduces “The Institute,” a powerful anti-knowledge element in that society, and, with a twist and a wriggle and a wrench and a writhe, things kind of make sense again.
Bad fiction and bad games both exist in the real world. It does not strain my suspension of disbelief to accept that they might also exist in a fictional world. And as pleasant as it would be to believe that something I think is bad, stupid, or boring could never become popular, reality once again provides plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Point us to a sport as poorly designed as Quidditch that is any kind of success. You really don’t understand what you’re talking about.
And yet you keep trying to get me to talk about it, even though I don’t want to. I’m not sure what I’ve done to give three different posters the impression that I was interested in discussing Quidditch, but whatever it was I deeply regret it. When I said I considered all real sports to be a stupid waste of time, I did not mean that I preferred imaginary sports.
There is a current thread about harry potter stuff that bothers you, so I’d suggest going there if you want to talk about how much Quidditch bothers you.
Does Middle Earth survive close scrutiny? I’d sure say so. JRRT’s world-building is one of the things that makes LOTR an enduring classic. Is this so obvious we don’t need to mention it or are there folks who would like to disagree?
I would say that Tolkien’s Middle Earth, alas, does not survive very close scrutiny.
It’s good. Very good, just about the best example of world-building ever performed. But… There are still problems.
Bombadil and the Old Forest are a problem. Treebeard is a problem. Perhaps more to the point, these two entities have remained hidden, unknown, absolutely reclusive, for aeons, but when just a handful of Hobbits pop up, bang, they reveal themselves to the world openly, even blatantly.
Middle Earth is constructed rather as a whole bunch of mouse-traps, all set and waiting to be sprung. The lightest touch, and—SNAP! The Watcher in the Water; the Balrog; Rivendell and Lorien; the Wood-Woses; the Dead. Heck, the One Ring!
In a “real world” kind of world, a lot of these traps would have been sprung long ago…or would simply have rusted shut and wouldn’t snap if you whacked 'em with Gimli’s axe.
For dramatic reasons (and damn fine ones, I will say!) every one of these traps is snapped during a very short period of time. It’s superlative storytelling…but it just isn’t all that defensible in terms of “reality.”
Niven’s The Smoke Ring stories.
Also, I’m sorry to say that it’s highly unlikely that 2 hobbits with no military experience could penetrate Tyrannia (ok, Mordor) and destroy their superweapon. I don’t think there are any dramatic problems in the book: Tolkein explains the preceding by saying that the good guys use a decoy strategy. But realistically, I’m sorry to say that Frodo and Sam would have either been executed or died of exposure on the way to Orodruin. So no, although Middle Earth is believable and credible, it does not survive close scrutiny.
I partly had that example in mind, though admittedly I pitched the OP as referring to world-building and not specific plot developments. The other motivation is that every time I construct fiction in mind (albeit casually) I tend to address realism problems that quite frankly would make for dull story telling. Dull as in, “Who cares?” That in turn leads me to question whether fiction provides anything other than light entertainment, and that its ennobling abilities are largely illusory. Even with the good stuff. Backing up further, while I sense an underlying set of principles and structures of good and bad fiction (and oh yes Tolkein is definitely part of the first category), I can’t quite grasp them.