Raymond E. Feist on Building a World from Scratch | Hacker News Reader

Raymond E. Feist on Building a World from Scratch

unboundworlds.com

81 pointsDanBC24 comments

>"Many thousand years of hunting and gathering gets tedious, so as soon as humans figured out beasts of burden and basic agriculture, they put down roots, in both senses. It saved a lot of walking. It was also the start of the concept of “after work,” which history teaches us is a thing most humans strive to increase in any way possible. That is, leisure, time off, vacations and every other use of time that isn’t working, hunting, fighting, and of course sleeping."

I recently read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, where he thoroughly debunks this notion that a transition from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural life-style brought more leisure time. I found it compelling, but don't have the arguments at hand at the moment.

The common wisdom that I've heard was the opposite of that: hunter-gatherer societies had a wealth of free time. It's with agriculture, permanence, and the optimization that they allow that we start to lose it. Similarly though, no real citations here.

If you read Guns, Germs and Steel you will find the same information, with citations of anthropological research supporting it.

This is supported for example by Richard B Lee's work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Borshay_Lee)

There's a hint of truth in there. Farming increased the productivity of the land such that it could support more people. Some of the new people supported by the land weren't working it, such as bureaucrats and nobles. I'm don't know if the total calories per man hour went up or down, but the distribution of those man hours definitely became less uniform. Some people worked less, while most people probably worked more.

You should check out the article "The Case Against Civilization: Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-again...

And the book it cites "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States".

Few quotes to whet your appetite:

> The first is that, for thousands of years, the agricultural revolution was, for most of the people living through it, a disaster. The fossil record shows that life for agriculturalists was harder than it had been for hunter-gatherers.

> there is a crucial, direct link between the cultivation of cereal crops and the birth of the first states. It’s not that cereal grains were humankind’s only staples; it’s just that they were the only ones that encouraged the formation of states... Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ” Other crops have some of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became “the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar.”

> War, slavery, rule by élites—all were made easier by another new technology of control: writing... writing was used exclusively for bookkeeping: “the massive effort through a system of notation to make a society, its manpower, and its production legible to its rulers and temple officials, and to extract grain and labor from it.”

The domestication of man.

Raymond Feist built Midkemia around a RPG campaign. So did a lot of other Fantasy authors of his generation, Elizabeth Moon (Paksenarrion), and Robert Asprin (Thieves World) are two. Might be obvious but I'd say those games are partly behind the explosion of fantasy starting in the late 1970s. It made world building a lot easier, but there was a landmine. Feist either accidentally or on purpose included elements of the game Empire of the Petal Throne without acknowledgement or renumeration. He apparently wasn't the GM and claims he didn't know where it came from.

> Feist either accidentally or on purpose included elements of the game Empire of the Petal Throne without acknowledgement or renumeration.

What sort of elements? RPGs and fantasy novels have always borrowed liberally from each other; unless it's particularly blatant/wholesale, I'm not sure it's a major issue.

There's a not-bad summary of the controversy in this review: http://ferretbrain.com/articles/article-134.html

There are a lot of genre works built off roleplaying campaigns, including but surely not limited to:

Steven Brust's Dragaera

George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards

Steven Erikson and Ian Esslemont's Malazan

Daniel Abraham and Ty Bank's Expanse

Dragonlance too

Enh, the Dragonlance novels were RPG tie-ins published by an RPG company. I'm not sure that counts.

The first three were based on the authors’ personal D&D game

They were based on a series of published modules that Hickman developed while working at TSR. He developed the world through a D&D campaign he ran for other TSR staffers, but it was still an official D&D product from the beginning.

I didn’t realize it was for TSR but does that count less or more?

I'm submitting this because it's an interesting article, but also because UnboundWorlds has a lot of great content that I think people on HN would find interesting.

This series was my first experience with, some books I read as a kid are better left alone. I have REALLY fond memories of the magician apprentice. And it was really good at the time. But I've changed so much that when I went back to re-read it I didn't enjoy it at all. I had to stop so that I didn't change my perception of the rest of the series.

All that said this was an interesting article that puts a lot of the series in perspective. Thanks for sharing. I might pick up his new world and see how that one plays out.

I've re-read the Magician trilogy a few times and read a lot of his other work. There are things to criticize for sure (eg, there's a specific coming-of-age pattern he uses for all his young male heroes), but of all the Tolkien imitators, I think Feist is easily one of the best story-tellers and world-builders.

The first rule of fantasy fiction: never reread what you liked when you were 13.

Well, Tolkien holds up alright.

It just feels so slow. It actually made me understand the need for the modern updates

I still love it :-). Sure it's not very complicated or deep, but it's wonderfully consistent and just makes me happy. I'll be passing it down to my own children soon.

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