His *Dying Earth *series seems very believable. There’s different types of governemt, religion, agriculture, general ignorance.
Pretty good
I wrote a story once in which a James Bond type spy sneaks in to a major U.S.A.F. Base. I used a lot of justifications to make it believable to the general readership – but my friends in the military all had a good laugh at my expense. However…they also all said that they liked the story!
So – yeah. What makes a decent story doesn’t always really work. (Thank goodness, eh?) And…it doesn’t always matter.
I think the key phrase is “suspension of disbelief.” If the reader knows, at a fundamental level, “No way this would ever work in a million years” but is provided with enough of a fig-leaf of justification to anaesthetize this dubiety, then he can keep turning the pages and be happy.
We know that “Hunt for Red October” is a dog-pile of impossibilities. But, damn, what a bloody good read it was!
The highest ennobling abilities of good fiction are those elements that speak to the unchanging universal verities. Frodo and Sam exemplified courage and endurance, and those will remain admirable until the end of time.
Except for his decisions about which cities thrive and which become “Death Zones.”
I want you to defend your claims.
I thought that pretty much every large city became a Death Zone, unless the majority of the population was driven away from it (as happened in Portland). The one I was wondering about was Des Moines (?), the large coal-powered city near the Mississippi. That struck me as being near the upper end of survivability, unless it had grown back since the Change?
Just as an aside, I am totally stealing the phrase “anesthetize this dubiety” from Trinopus.
I found Ms. Le Guin’s Earthsea to be very well thought out and internally consistent. As long as the rules of the Universe make sense then you can suspend disbelief much more easily.
I believe it was Book 7 where he introduced the Southsiders, a civilization that survived in the suburbs of Chicago.
And I also have a personal problem with it as Western New York was declared a Death Zone even though there are only a little over 2 million people here in 9,000 square miles.
No fair, you switched to the American spelling! 
I had a little trouble in my first reading of Tehanu. I felt LeGuin was trying too hard to introduce feminist reforms to the world, in ways that violate the social, economic, and technological conditions of the world. Feminism is largely an industrial-age reform, and is hard to reconcile with a bronze-age civilization.
It’s sad, but, well, Red Sonja is just fantasy. (Among my very favorite fantasy, to be sure, but…)
My objections lessened over the next four times I re-read the book, although it still strikes me that LeGuin was asking a little too much enlightenment from a civilization that isn’t really ready for it.
I was also sad, in the later books, how she “broke” her world, completely altering the role and place and arrangement of her afterlife. The vision in the original books – the low black stone wall, the changeless constellations, the people empty of their humanity – was compelling. I was sad when she threw that all away.
(Sorry, that’s not really relevant to the thread, just a personal preference.)
Yes, and while they can occasionally even be successful, they’re very rarely enduring. Quidditch has been played by wizards since time immemorial, and is generally held to be the very best sport, ever. Bad games, and bad fiction, do not generally enjoy that sort of long lasting popularity.
I dunno. Maybe the fact that you keep posting about it?
Look, people. JK Rowling deliberately invented a bizarre kooky wizard game that doesn’t make sense. You know, like Cricket. Obviously Quidditch doesn’t make any sense. It was a joke game, and it was a joke that all the wizards are obsessed over a joke game that doesn’t make any sense except as a joke.
JK Rowling doesn’t care about sports and doesn’t understand sports so she didn’t even try to make up a game that makes sense. Yes, it is a made up game, created as a sort of wish-fulfillment to give poor abused orphan Harry a chance to be Really Important.
I’m sure if Rowling had written all seven books in advance she would have gone back to her first book and revised it so elements introduced in the first book didn’t contradict the spirit and tone of the later books. But she didn’t. And so Quidditch doesn’t make sense.
Well, Lamia is in a bit of a bind: if she posts that she doesn’t really want to discuss it, she’s providing another post. Anyway Lamia’s claims are pretty clear: a person who finds all spectator sports to be idiotic won’t be particularly squicked by the wildly imbalanced Quidditch rules. Those with a passing familiarity of sports (like myself) will raise an eyebrow though. Normal American men who regularly view spectator sports (unlike myself) may have stronger opinions.
I couldn’t figure out what Rowling was up to, but the other thread presents an hypothesis:
At any rate for myself the 150 point award to the Snitch took me out of the story momentarily and I furthermore found the 30 page expositions on the game to be boring. I was surprised frankly, as Rowling was an otherwise adept writer. At any rate, methinks this discussion belongs in the Rowling thread: this is a jarring consideration IMHO (though hardly fatal), not requiring particularly close scrutiny.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=17074038#post17074038
ETA: Ninja’d by Lemur866
It’s hardly the biggest logic-hole in the Potterverse, that’s for sure!
Good grief, the other thread is already full of complaings about Quidditch. No need to fill up this thread with the same.
I don’t think that Middle-Earth survives close scrutiny in some particulars. Linguistically, of course, it’s the bee’s knees. But it makes little sense why Eriador, for example, is so desolately empty. We know it’s prime land for settlement since it used to be Arnor, and it’s been almost a thousand years since Angmar was a threat. Somebody should have expanded into the area in the meantime. Actually, there’s a whole lot of empty space on the map between Arnor and Gondor that should logically have been resettled (like, Enedwaith; previously forest, now perfectly good grasslands). I can’t imagine, for example, any comparable-sized areas of Europe remaining unsettled for ten centuries – no matter how slow Gondorians/Numenoreans are at reproducing.
Which makes the economy of Middle-Earth a bit of a puzzle. the Shire has the Blue Mountain dwarves and maybe the Grey Havens to trade with. Gondor has Rohan and a few allies; maybe Harad, too. Laketown has… Mirkwood, maybe the Iron Hills. All unconnected by trade routes to each other? There’s corsairs at Umbar, but apparently no sea trade for them to raid.
There’s also the question of “what do the elves and dwarves and goblins eat?” It can be handwaived – elvish super-gardening might get them through, dwarves can trade for food, although dunno what the Misty Mountain goblins do to feed their horde – but it is another thing that snaps at one’s suspenders of disbelief.
During my commute today I was thinking about Tim Powers, who’s written several novels that incorporate fantasy/horror elements into real historic settings, and I think his worlds hold up pretty well. I’m sure there are holes that could be poked in them, but he’s good at both doing his research and knowing when to gloss over the details or let certain things remain mysterious.
The Stress of Her Regard is set in the early 1800s and has several Romantic poets – Byron, Shelley, and to a lesser extent Keats – as significant characters. These are well-documented historic figures, and I think Powers did a good job of building his fictional (and supernatural) story around the actual travels and activities of these poets and their families. There are some points where the supernatural story actually makes these characters seem more rational or at least more sympathetic than their real-life counterparts. Byron’s insistence that his illegitimate daughter Allegra be raised in a convent rather than live with him, her mother, or the Shelleys doesn’t seem like such a jerk move if it was motivated by the desire to protect her from the vampires that had already killed most of the Shelley children!
Powers also provides what I consider to be one of the better quasi-scientific explanations for vampires and their strange vulnerabilities (what’s the deal with not being able to cross running water?), although I’m sure there are plenty of problems with it that would be obvious to an actual scientist. I won’t go into too much detail because it would spoil the book, but the short version is that legends about vampires and other supernatural humanoids are based on a race of silicon-based creatures. While these creatures are more powerful than humans in some ways, the earth’s environment is far from ideal for silicon-based life. For starters, silicon bonds don’t hold up well in water…holy or otherwise.
I mentioned this thread to a friend at dinner tonight, and his observation was that there is almost no travel in Middle Earth. The Rangers range, and the Dwarves wander a little, but, by and large, nobody ever goes anywhere. Gondor and Rohan, close neighbors, are all but strangers to each other. Just going from Hobbiton to Bree is a major adventure.
Yes, it’s true, in historical medieval Europe, most people lived their entire lives within twenty miles of where they were born. But, nevertheless, there was some commerce. Merchants went between England, France, Germany, Italy, and back. The gutsy ones went to Byzantium, Egypt, and Mesopotamia.
And where did Bilbo get his clock?
I think the popular writer of historic novels James Michener deserves a mention. They were apparently meticulously researched though I assume aspects are dated now. Think of it as a control insofar as world building is concerned and a laboratory for inserting fictional characters into an historic setting. Did he run into “WWII is unrealistic” problems? Many critics were dubious about the literary quality of his works. I have not read enough of him to form an opinion.
Powers’ “Declare” is also a great example of world-building. The Cold War conflict between the USSR and the West is reexamined in supernatural terms relating to the involvement of Arabic djinni in the conflict, with Kim Philby as a central character, and all Philby’s historical actions are reflected in the book, just with a different explanation. It’s a really brilliant bit of world-building, I think the publishers saw it as potentially Powers’ crossover novel into becoming a bestselling mainstream writer. Didn’t happen, but it’s still a great story.
It’s perhaps unfortunate for Powers that the reader has to know something about the history involved in order to fully appreciate how cleverly he’s constructed his alternate version of events. I haven’t read Declare, but Last Call has a lot of references to the history of Las Vegas and Bugsy Siegel…most of which went over my head. At the time I was only vaguely aware that there had even been a famous mobster named Bugsy Siegel. (I got the Arthurian references, though!) So while I enjoyed the story, the book didn’t impress me the same way it would have if I’d known a little more about Vegas history. I imagine The Stress of Her Regard probably doesn’t work as well for readers who don’t already know about things like the weird circumstances surrounding Percy Shelley’s death.
For Hobbits, yes, but not for Dwarves. Dwarves don’t just “wander a little”, they regularly schlep back and forth between the Blue Mountains in the far west and places as far east as the Iron Hills.
And it’s made clear that they and other voyagers used to travel much more freely. The setting of The Hobbit, and to a lesser extent that of Lord of the Rings, deliberately presents its contemporary cultures as unusually geographically constricted and dangerous, compared to what had been the norm for much of the history of Middle-earth.
Getting across the Misty Mountains and even through Mirkwood was easier before recent incursions by northern Orcs, the advent of Smaug, and the rise of Dol Guldur. And before that, back in the days of the North-kingdom there was a lot more North-South traffic between Gondor and Arnor: Bree used to be a more important commercial and travel hub than it is during most of the events of the books.
The growing parochialism of different regions during, say, the course of Bilbo’s lifetime is clearly not considered normal for Middle-earth. It’s partly the natural effect of the proliferation of evil beings, and partly a deliberate strategy on the part of their Master (since he’ll have an easier time conquering isolated and mutually mistrustful populations).
My guess is that one of his forebears acquired it at great expense from a merchant from the great artisan city of Dale. If it’s of more recent origin, it probably came from Dwarvish craftspeople in the Blue Mountains. Or possibly Hobbits themselves make clocks: we know that they can make a handloom and are “skillful with tools”, so perhaps a simple clock mechanism wouldn’t be beyond their powers or tastes, at least as a luxury item.