Works of fiction with wonderfully detailed histories/backstories

Cafe Society
1

In the Snowpiercer thread, levdrakon made the following statement:

I had this response ready to go.

[Quote=Alternate Timeline Johnny Bravo]

Lord of the Rings makes perfect sense within the context of its own world and, in point of fact, Tolkien’s world probably still has the most thoroughly researched and consistent fictional background and history of any piece of fiction.
[/quote]

Instead of posting it, though, I thought it would make a better of thread of its own.

Two days ago, a previously unknown annotated map of Middle Earth was found. Tolkien wrote pages upon pages of backstory and notes for his books, much of which was never intended for publication.

Tolkien: great fictional historian or greatest fictional historian? Thoughts?

2

My thoughts, unfortunately, would be “no”.

My problem with Tolkein’s fictional history was that it was too static. There was no sense of the change which you get with real history.

We see this in the film versions. The Fellowship of the Ring depicts the Battle of Dagorlad where Isildur kills Sauron. The soldiers in this prologue are using the same type of weapons we see in the rest of the trilogy - even though this battle takes place three thousand years earlier. So we apparently have a society in which there were no advances in military technology in three thousand years.

And this is consistent with everything else we see in Middle Earth. People are born and die, battles are fought, events occur - but there is no fundamental movement forward. Things happen but everything stays the same. It’s like The Simpsons.

3

But is it unfair to assume that the way it worked in our real world is the way it must work in an alternate world?

4

That’s sort of the point, though. The Lord of the Rings is, fundamentally, a story of the forces which drive change: the sequence of events that leads to the destruction of the One Ring, the last vestiges of magic in Middle Earth, and the beginning of the Age of Man.

5

Tolkien worked on his Middle Earth for YEARS before he wrote The Hobbit, and even longer before he wrote Lord of the Rings. He had loads of ersatz history to draw on. I suspect it helped his mythology to feel “old”.
Other people have gone to all this trouble, as well. All you have to do is open the back pages of the books of George R.R*. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire to see that he, too, has reams upon reams of background information on the kingdoms of his world.
James Branch Cabbell,too, had extensive biographies of the characters in his connected fantasy universe The Biography of the Life of Manuel. My copy of The Cream of the Jest has them.
For that matter, Robert E. Howard wrote an extensive essay about his “Hyborian Age”, and those maps printed in the various different editions of the Conan stories are based on a couple of maps he drew.

This kind of thing isn’t limited to fantasy. Any decent author imagines more background and backstory to his characters and settings than get printed. Although it sometimes gets printed, anyway. Look at the appendices in Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao. George Bernard Shaw, bristling at the idea that Eliza would end up with Professor Higgins at the end of Pygmalion (as in both the film version of the play, and in all versions of the musical Mt Fair Lady) that he wrote a very lengthy afterward to the printed edition of the play, telling how Eliza had married Freddie and opened that flower shop she spoke of, and what happened afterwards.

*Is there some rule that these guys have top have double middle initials “R.R.”?

6

I really dig the Song of Ice and Fire backstory. The whole thing is very immersive. A whole world, with continents, ancient civilizations, a variety of thriving cultures and all sorts of history. It’s the part I like best about the series, I think. The politics of Westeros is interesting and all, but I get the feeling it’s going to be mostly irrelevant by the end of the series.

7

Dune is an example of a very details backstory, both in history and ecology.

Hal Clement put a lot of effort into the science behind his worldbuilding. He spent a lot of time, for instance, working out the physics, chemistry, and other details of Mesklin. He was very accurate with his numbers (though they were shown to be incorrect when calculated years later, using a computer instead of a slide rule). This was essential to the book, which dealt with the problems in physics of a world with variable gravity.

Hal was known to do this for all his work, taking his assumptions and working out all the physics and chemistry beforehand.

8

Has anyone made up multiple languages and alphabets the way Tolkien did?

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Ironically, the one way in which Tolkien’s world does evolve is one in which it shouldn’t. The various Elvish languages originate from a common source, but diverge over the same sort of timescales as human languages… Except that these aren’t human languages. They’re languages spoken by a race of immortals, many of whom have been alive for that entire transition period. While there’s still going to be some linguistic shift within any speaker’s lifetime, it won’t be enough to split into two languages, because people still remember (directly, not through oral tradition or books) the original language.

10

It’s the only real history we have to judge Tolkein’s fictional history against. The fact that Tolkein’s fictional history lacks the sense of change that real history has makes his fictional history feel unrealistic to me.

11

The world of Glorantha, the setting for a few not-well-known RPGs and a slightly-better-known PC/tablet game, has a ridiculously detailed world, and it’s one of the few (Western) fantasy worlds where it doesn’t feel like huge chunks are Tolkein-descended.

It’s really interesting, because a lot of Tolkein’s Middle Earth was formulated around his love of linguistics, and the books are in some ways a means to play with those ideas (along with some introspection about his theological beliefs).

The setting of Glorantha, on the other hand, was written by an anthropologist trying to work out how cultures formed, and shifted and interacted, with a heavy focus on how those cultures tell stories and form myths and religions. The thing a lot of fantasy writers miss is, aside from a creation myth, there’s a lack of “just so” stories. Or the gods have too much agency, so it ends up not mattering who the “fertility god” is in the pantheon.

Glorantha is really, really good at writing its gods in that vague, fuzzy, metaphorical, self-contradictory way that most old myths are. It then has the audacity to assert that all of these different, contradictory things are true simultaneously in the confines of the world.

It also has, roughly, a culture for every different archetype of real-world religion. You have a lot of different animist and polytheist religions, some monotheists that are inspired from things to Zoroastrianism to Christianity. It’s really diverse and it does all of them well.

Even its original creatures are straight out of something weird an old culture trying to make sense of the world would come up with. There are creatures called Broos that rape everything, and whatever they rape becomes pregnant and produces more broos. Note that I said “everything”, this includes inanimate objects. But the key thing is that they also spread disease, so they serve purposes both as fantasy creatures, but also plague-metaphors, so if “broo are coming” it kind of metaphorically means people are getting sick (but also literally means goat demons are coming).

It avoids some of the stagnancy of Middle Earth, with the caveat that the setting is set up so that things are a bit tricky with regards to technology. The only metal better than bronze is iron and it’s extremely hard to get and both metaphorically and literally death. That said, there have been things as advanced as a sort of primitive robot in the setting, but it didn’t end well and in the current “age” in the setting things have backslid considerably because the last technologically advanced people tried to alter reality to their whim and it didn’t end well.

12

MAR Barker, for Tékumel, which is much (much) more obscure than Middle-Earth. Unsurprisingly, he was also a linguist, and professor of Urdu and South Asian Studies. Tékumel therefore derives more from South Asian and Mesoamerican culture and linguistics, just as Middle-Earth derives from Anglo-Saxon culture and linguistics. I’m pretty sure Barker detailed many more conlangs for Tékumel than Tolkien did for Middle-Earth, though.

13

Blizzard has a lot of backstory/history/lore for its Warcraft and Diablo franchises. I assume Starcraft as well, but I don’t play it. A lot of worldbuilding, creation stories, myths, legends, histories of wars, heroes and villains.

14

A fantasy milieu full of gods and demigods, permeated by completely inexplicable magical forces, monstrous physically-manifested evils including an actual flesh-and-blood Great Evil… twice… Dragons, talking magic weapons, undead in every variety… and you cite the lack of technological and social development as the reason it’s not realistic to you? :confused:

Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking indeed.

15

I… don’t entirely understand what you are looking for here? First off, let’s please throw away any “We see this in the films when…” because the films are more their own vision than anyone else’s, and there’s a bunch of stuff in them that makes absolutely no sense.

Are you really looking for technological advances? The interesting thing is that this is one of those places where you actually see ‘advancement’ going backwards - people (by which I mean ‘elves’) had impossible skill at crafting in the earlier ages of the world, but most of that has been lost. It’s probably worth noting, however, that Middle Earth is fundamentally historically unrealistic - take for example the population of Eriador. You’ve got a pretty large area of land… and basically no one lives there. There’s The Shire, which hasn’t expanded since Buckland was founded, you’ve got Bree-land, which is like, 5 villages of not especially large size… and then…nothing. This is not the sort of environment that persists for as long as it is supposed to have done so. Either these people should have died out, or they should have spread out, because that’s what humans do.

The obvious conclusion is that this is not history, but Mythology. Which has its own sorts of logic. You don’t nitpick the Odyssey.

16

I second this. I really enjoy the show, but it’s the immersive aspect of the world we see (in my experience of it) that draws me in.

There’s even a novel based around Westeros a good 100 years or so before the story begins - depicting life around some of the historical characters that are name dropped on the show.

Given that Game of Thrones is based on one continent and the portion of another, there has even been whispers of future stories based on other continents in that particular world.

17

My vote goes for Skyrealms of Jorune, an almost-forgotten role playing world that was briefly seen in the early 1980s. Richly (and peculiarly) detailed, with beautiful illustrations - it was utterly unique and deserves to be resurrected. If you can get hold of the second edition sourcebooks, you’ve struck gold. Type ‘Jorune’ into a search engine, however, and you’ll still find many of the gorgeous illustrations.

18

I’m not going to complain that a fictional universe is fictional. If you can’t accept those kinds of things, don’t read fantasy or science fiction.

Besides my problem isn’t with the way the dragons are portrayed. Or the elves or dwarves or hobbits or ents. These are fictional races and Tolkein can imagine them any way he wants. But he chose to put humans into his world and humans are real. So I think it’s fair to judge if he portrayed the way humans act realistically.

19

I can nitpick how believable it is as a fictional history in a thread on that topic.

That aside, I agree with your point on population growth. It’s another example of unrealistic stasis.

20

IANAL, but human languages have changed significantly in my short human life-time; is it really unlikely the Elvish languages would change over their significantly longer life times?