There Is No Planet B (For Worldbuilding)
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I think Tolkien was deliberate in not revealing how complex his world was. He told the story… and even then people complain about the amount of exposition. If it were any more detailed you would be overwhelmed.
What’s interesting is how he relied on linguistics and metaphor in literature to add layers. How the story of Aragorn is much like the story of The Wanderer. The cultural differences between Rohan and Gondor is in their language and architecture. Tolkien could have spelled it out for us but he didn’t. It wasn’t until Christopher started releasing the Silmarillion and supplementary backlog of stories that we get to see how deep Tolkien went and how little we actually saw.
Mind you, in the end, I still think the balance favors some very simple expansion over the course of thousands of years, but there really are an awful lot of forces inhibiting it.
Also, the movies made this solitude vastly worse. The books reveal that JRR Tolkien was aware that all the cities would be surrounded by farms and villages and be nations. The nations may be disconnected, harried by the aforementioned evil, and find it very difficult to expand, but he understood there would be infrastructure there. Movie Gondor is ludicrous nonsense; able to field a significant army and sustain a civilian population, but apparently the army and civilian population do not ever need to eat anything. Or the food just beams into their granaries from space. Or maybe their Numenorean background or Rohan's affinity with horses means they can eat grass. Because they don't have any farms or any other infrastructure. It's city, and then literally 100 feet outside of the city walls, you're in the wilderness, effectively as untamed as 100 miles away from the city. You might justify it on stylistic grounds, but it has no other justification.
In the end you have to grant all authors grace. Nobody can run a full world simulation in their head accurately. If this is all we have to grant to JRR Tolkien, he asks for less than many other authors. Net-net I still think the wildernesses in his world are unrealistically sparsely populated, but it's far from the worst idea I've swallowed to read a book.
How is that evil?
"But still she was there, who was there before Sauron, and before the first stone of Barad-dûr; and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness."
Now if you're interested in non-evil spiders I highly recommend deepness in the sky by Vernor Vinge.
We do exactly that.
Also we did enslaved our own, raped them, and killed them, pretending they were not intelligent and didn't have a soul.
We do eat octopus, which have demonstrated level of intelligence close to a human child.
Also, suffering is not proportional to intelligence, are you evil because you make life suffers, or because it understands how you do it ?
I don't think it's that clear cut. And I'm not sure we would stop to eat beef if tomorrow somebody proved they are quite smart.
The orgies of meat we bath into based on factories that turn chickens and cows existences into support to grow protein and nothing else does remind me of the spider.
You and I are also very much the descendant of mass murderers that waged wars, raped and tortured.
I don't consider myself evil, but because of this, I just think the spider is acting like a spider.
I don't see that being evil either.
> Intelligent spiders prevent expansion into Mirkwood.
Doesn't sound like targeting non-aggressive travelers.
You may have made some assumptions based on it, but those assumptions were wrong.
Furthermore, "preventing expansion" does not necessarily imply morally acceptable self defense.
Should be easy to find a quote then.
You can use a framework of moral relativism where intelligent spiders have no need to adhere to human-centric rules, and all, but I prefer the moral absolutism that no one who can understand I don't want to be eaten is morally permitted to eat me.
I think the "evil" concept is baked into the themes of the books. While men are capable of evil, Shelob, Morgoth, Sauron etc are basically the embodiment of sin and incapable of good. So the only way you can say they aren't evil is if you ignore the prose and judge them by their actions against the worst humanity can accomplish.
We just draw a line saying: this is ok, this is not, arbitrarily. Nobody, nothing, wants to suffer. That's one of the rare things life universally agrees on.
There is no need for words to express that.
And I think it's ok to do so, but if we can eat whales, octopus, and take cows and chickens and make their existence hell until we consume them, labeling a spider as "evil" because it likes eating humans is far fetched.
If the giant spiders were unintelligent, they'd not be moral actors, and then eating people might be a bad thing, but it wouldn't be a morally bad (evil) thing.
If their prey weren't intelligent, my moral framework doesn't (currently) include an absolute prohibition on killing and eating animals, so that would be morally acceptable.
But because both the spider and their prey were intelligent, my rules kick in and it is immoral for the spiders to eat people, or vice versa.
(Now, there may be a loophole in that killing people for the purposes of eating them is always unacceptable, but there are circumstances where it is at least forgivable to kill [eg, self defense], and also circumstances where it is likewise acceptable to eat already dead intelligent creatures, but you have to be careful not to create a moral hazard where the killing is done on a pretext.)
If you have a problem with that, feel free to headcanon it away. I don't care. But in terms of understanding the world of JRR Tolkien at least as written, they're evil. Not just misunderstood, but actively in the service of the outright destruction of the world, lacking only the agency to do so.
For example, the point of there being close to no technological advance in thousand of years is intentional:
1. Saruman's plan consists on mass industrialization. Beginning in Isengard, but at the end of the books projected even further: globalized. And he is one of the villains!
2. During the millenia that technology hasn't advanced, the elves did rule. Other than the disaster caused by the villains of the story, Tolkien intentionally made the elves not need such technological advance. They had no incentives to, they had enough. Same with the rest of the races.
Those are two are messages Tolkien is telling to the reader. Shallowly described by me, of course.
I also understand this as the reason for the worldbuilding to be so limited and sparse. The world that we find is enough for his vision and messages to get across, and adding anything more would make it repetitive or distracting.
We only get a hint in the stories that Middle-Earth is only one slice of the world at large. Mordor only seems to have diplomatic access to the states and countries outside of Middle-Earth. And he invites their armies to join with his to plunder this resource-rich and relatively undefended realm.
But there is scarcely any mention of these other countries even in the Silmarillion and the other short stories since. They didn't need much detail because the story takes place around the small people standing against the forces arrayed around them.
It's very intentional. Painfully so sometimes, which makes it a bit of a challenging work to enjoy.
When it comes to world-building for telling stories, it seems like "simulating," is a time consuming and possibly fruitless endeavour. Fiction is fiction. Coming up with the salient histories and facts to give your story a sense of time and place is an intentional, designed artifact... and you only need enough to get the point across!
The past cataclysm was very much a part of the current world in LotR in many ways.
"Middle-earth’s population seems to be living in random towns scattered throughout that terra nullius, with barely any roads or any sort of economic network between them"
The situation in the novel is basically analogous to western Europe in the dark ages. Which is not surprising since that was an era of Tolkien's interest and study. Western Europe after the fall of the (western) Roman empire was economically and politically very much "shrunken" from what it had been, and a bit of a backwater intellectually and economically. Infrastructure became poorly maintained for a couple centuries.
Tolkien just extended that out over a thousand years or so, and extended the lifespan of the characters involved and added multiple "falls" -- 2nd age Gondor, Numenor, 1st age Beleriand, and beyond even to the time of the Noldor in Valinor before the kin slaying.
But everyone always gets this wrong:
> It’s the most awe-inspiring work of worldbuilding ever done! He invented entire languages!
People have spent the last 70 years making snippets of conlang to add flavor to their fantasy worlds in emulation of Tolkien, but for Tolkien the conlangs were the whole damn point!
Tolkien was a language nerd first. Middle Earth exists primarily to add context to the evolution of his conlangs and to create subjects to write his conlang poetry about. He may have loved the story for itself, but his goal wasn't to create a coherent, fleshed out world as complex as our own. It was to make sweet conlangs and write epic conlang poems.
It's fair to judge the master craftsman on the quality of the jig he makes to craft his cabinets, but you shouldn't confuse the jig with the cabinets.
A lot of people, through no fault of theirs, miss the significance of Aragorn and the return of the king. They don’t understand the significance of the stories that are only mentioned by characters in passing. But I think some of that passes on unconsciously which gives the story and it’s world the lasting impact it has had.
If you study the Wanderer, the Arthurian epics, Finnish-Ugric mythology, Beowulf, etc you can see where he pulled a lot of his inspiration for the world he built from.
conlang = constructed language
That’s a nice little turn of phrase, I’ll have to remember that.
Then, to me, complaining about the world (as described) not being complex enough is a bit like complaining that "You see, there are tens of thousands of people in the books, participating to wars and all. But the story-telling is very simplistic because it only follows a handful of characters, instead of describing the life of everybody in the world".
I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life.
That kind of thing happens all over the place. Who were the Ringwraiths before they became wraiths? (Yeah, they were human kings, but who were they?) How did things go down in the war that destroyed Eregion? How did Arwen's mother escape from being held captive by the orcs? What's the detailed backstory on hobbits? And on and on and on. There's all this stuff that is briefly referred to, but never fleshed out in detail.
This is useful for authors, by the way. You can be creating a fractal, and you have to cut off detail somewhere. But if you leave hints that there's more detail, the world feels bigger. It doesn't feel amputated or limited.
I'd believe Tolkien deliberately chose a "small" world precisely so that he could make things coherent and consistent to _some_ aspects of reality (some because it is, after all, a world with magic). It is apparent that Tolkien focused on the aspects he cared for and understood best - language and military stuff^1;
And because he quite literally wanted to described how the world started and how it got there, he had a few options: he could either make a small world, or hand-waive a lot, 99.99% of detail of a larger world, or just don't finish writing the equivalent of a 1-year period in his fiction's timeline during his lifetime, I guess?
Another thing - as the author points out, George Martin strives actively to make the world in A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones 'larger'. He doesn't care that much about realistic coherence, though, and that is why he can copy-paste and mash historical elements.
1^ We all know about Tolkien and languages, but I, at least, was surprised by the 'coherence' in military stuff in Lord of the Rings (https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm...)
Ditto for Wheel of Time, that instead is set in a distant future. It is obvious it will be based on RL cultures, because... it is.
Ditto for people that complained that Fremen in Dune are too much like middle eastern people. Seriously, their religion is literally called "Zensunni" and they are settlers that explicitly came from middle east cultures of Earth.
Fundamentally, all cultures are going to be based on real-world human culture, because that is all we know. Even if we try to imagine what a non-human culture looks like, we still construct it with the composite elements we know are common to human cultures. Even the most alien and inhuman cultures any author has ever imagined are still defined by how not like human culture they are. They're a negation of what human culture is, which is to say they're still a reflection of it.
We cannot do otherwise. We have never seen a non-human culture equivalent to human culture.
Further, all aliens and all fantasy creatures are analogs for humans or analogs for animals. Because that's all we know.
Even if we could create a truly alien culture, we could only understand it in terms and concepts that we already have because we do not understand concepts and ideas that we cannot conceive ourselves. Because those are the only concepts and ideas we have ever had exposure to.
It's like asking what color infrared or ultraviolet would be. We don't know. We don't have that experience. Or like asking what oranges tastes like if you've only ever had apples, cherries, grapes, and so on. How can we conceptualize something we have no conception for?
Of course there is a lot of variety possible within those, and that is not an exhaustive list. However just those constraints force a lot of culture and while the result for aliens can be different, they will face those same constraints and thus you can develop a lot of similar culture around them.
The causes of the agricultural revolution, OTOH, are debated. I'm not clear that it was simply a solution to population density. It came after animal husbandry. We know that. But the reasons that have been claimed have been anything from "population pressure" to "we discovered how to make alcohol" to "it was the only way to make enough food for our animals" to "climate changes." It's almost certainly more complex than any one factor because you need a lot of knowledge and technology to make settlment a feasible means of surviving year over year. Food preservation is a major hurdle. It doesn't really matter if you can grow more food than you can eat if you only have that food for six weeks during the fall and then it all rots.
Clothing however? There are plenty of creatures we know of that don't require body protection beyond what they natively possess. Why would every sapient creature do so?
The truth is that we don't know how another culture might develop into a civilization because we've only ever seen ours. The number of unknown priors that might allow the creation of a different way of advancement is the core problem. Ours is fundamentally built on working together. Is that necessary? Ours is built around the temporal nature of human life. Is that universal to all life? The only reason we assume so in our literature is because there's no real way to tell a story about something unknown, unimaginable, or incomprehensible. Until we experience it, it will simply lack verisimilitude.
True, but that doesn't change the point that it is a great influence on culture. And also you are unlikely to reach an advanced stage without the productivity improvements it provides at scale. (People who have to get their own food every day don't have time to think about physics)
> There are plenty of creatures we know of that don't require body protection beyond what they natively possess.
Again, only in the specific climate their body is "designed" for. All of them need some form of shelter (which could be AC) to survive elsewhere.
Note that we are really only interested in advanced civilization. Lions have an interesting culture, but they don't make for interesting stories.
Wheel of Time is explicitly set in both the future and the past. That's why it's a "wheel".
(If you need an example, consider that Arthur Pendragon is, in the setting, a historical person who existed a couple thousand (?) years in the past, while at one point Egwene finds a much older Mercedes-Benz hood ornament in a museum.)
In the second book, The Great Hunt, the concept of a multiverse of alternative realities (that interact with each other!) is also introduced, which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us. It is necessarily in a related world, where it's not clear what "related" means.
That's not quite true, interestingly! Yes, there are alternate timelines available through the portal stones, but they are explicitly described as only sort of secondary reverberations, inherently not quite fully real, but just pale echoes of the true timeline that most of the books take place in. So it's pretty unlikely that, according to the metaphysical rules of the wheel of time, we are not living in the main timeline. In fact, it's later explained that Tel'aran'rhiod (spelled it first try!) Is the sort of semi-real limbo it is because it's a similar phenomenon to the portal stone worlds, just cross-secting all alternate realities instead of parallel to them. Maybe you're talking about the world's through the Twisted door frames, where the snakes and foxes live, but it's unclear exactly what relation they have to our world, and I'm inclined to suspect that we aren't intended to think that our world might be one of those, since those worlds seem to operate by very different laws even regarding basic spacetime.
One of Brandon Sanderson's recent books invoked the concept of alternate realities in which it could be objectively determined that some were more real than others. (None could be found that were more real than "our" world, but also, it was impossible for objects from less-real worlds to move into, or presumably perceive, more-real worlds, so no conclusion could be drawn.)
The book is set in a world where magic and gods exist. The gods are the same ones we know from our own, realer world, except that they exist and have the powers attributed to them in our own myths. The end of the book gives us a divine point of view, and we learn that the gods are moving "upstream", in the direction of reality, but that this is difficult or painful for them.
This seems to conflict with the premise that the characteristics of less-real worlds are derived from the more-real worlds on which they are based. The possibilities are that our (real) mythology derives from the gods approaching us, which is the wrong direction of causality (but of course, they are moving upstream, which is also supposed to be impossible), or that the gods take on the characteristics that are attributed to them in whatever world they enter (but... who is who?).
The "real" world of the book is set in the cyberpunk future, which I think is unfortunate - I'd be all over a series showing the progression of the gods into the real present or past, but a cyberpunk future is less interesting to me. (There's still room to show them progressing through the past, though!)
> (spelled it first try!)
I believe that tel'aran'rhiod is required to be set in italics, subject to the normal rules of things that are italicized. ;p
I think in the real world, the hunter-gatherer culture lasted about 2 million years. Obviously middle-earth isn't hunter-gatherer but its some point of reference. From some very quick searching it seems like the start of agrarian society through the middle ages was about 6000 years. And again, as the author notes, there was a much high population density and network of people in the europe/middle east/western asia in the real world. The 12000 years without significant technological advancement seems entirely plausible even in real terms.
Best avoid Malazan Book of the Fallen, then. It's a fantasy series written by an anthropologist and archeologist that's also based on the events in a GURPS tabletop roleplaying campaign. It's a replay (at least in part) written like it's a history. It's got over 600 named characters.
- Fictional worlds have are shallow compared to reality. They have to be, because an author or a collective of authors can never get to a depth comparable to reality.
- The only world with a deep "worldbuilding" is the real one we inhabit – Earth.
- Once we colonize space and let millenia of history go by, we will be able to take a look back and read about many complex "deep" worlds - because all of them will be real.
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I think the argument is already falling apart today thanks to AI writing, that could perhaps generate the blanks to make any fictional world feel arbitrarily deep. We might also eventually simulate entire complex fictional worlds.
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As for whether it's even worthwhile:
> I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life.
I believe the author is not talking about writing a fiction book with millions of boring pages that you would read in parallel. It is more about having access to Wikipedia on deep, complex and internally consistent alternative history/fictional world. I think it sounds fun. It's also fun to read about the actual world history, after all.
You may find "Chirper" interesting, some people making a twitter-like website where AI agents interact. I do find however that our clever clever human brains can atm anticipate quite easily how most things will turn out after a short amount of time, and people quickly become bored by it. Then again, a lot of history is very boring, its only interesting paired with a great storyteller who picks up the pieces. Right now AIs aren't really there yet (i've tried, with very deliberate prompting you can get somewhere but each story follows predictable tropes no matter how you prompt it, the tropes themselves change but its hard to get the AI to surprise you), but I can see it happening someday
Reading wiki pages of videogames and TV shows feels quite like that.
A lot of people would want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of historical people and what happened in their lives, if the information was somehow correct. They wouldn't read all of it -- that would be impossible -- but they'd read some of it.
I certainly don't have ideas for infinite stories in my mind. And I don't read a book to discover a good idea that I already had.
Kolmogorov complexity is the formalism around that distinction.
EDIT now that I think about it - if you take PI in binary and interprete it as utf-8 - every single book every written (or that will ever be written) is in there somewhere :) And there are algorithm to calculate PI to arbitrary digit that are pretty simple.
It isn’t proven that pi is normal. Also, even if you were to find a book in the sequence of pi, the index of where it starts would (generally) be vastly larger than the book itself.
The ability to write an infinite number of strings using some system has no relation to human imagination. That's not how human imagination works.
Where do you think I got that idea from? Do you think I couldn't execute it?
There are remenants of what were once powerful states floating around, but clearly much decayed.
The land is not so much terra nullius so much as the big states only recognize the other big states and the rest of the land mostly escapes their notice so to them it is not described as "owned"
People travel via horseback because how else would they travel?
Walk. Seriously, people walk in general, not ride horses. You use the horse to carry cargo, or haul a wagon (oxen would be better for pulling a wagon - they eat less so despite being slower they are more economical, plus the anatomy of oxen make a harness easier). The people though don't ride in the wagon they walk behind. Wagons without modern suspension are rough rides and you can walk farther than the horse or oxen can in a day, and just as fast. Thus horses were only rarely used for human transport through most of history.
The only time horse transport makes sense is when you have a regular system of change points and so the horses "run" (probably at a trot not a run, but I'm not an expert on horses so if details matters do your own research) faster than you can for an hour or two then you trade horses while the first horses rest until tomorrow. In this way you can travel a lot faster than you could by walking, but it depends on the whole system which is very expensive to setup/run. Anyone who needed to save money would walk even when that system existed. Thus such systems - where they even existed - were often used for mail where spread across thousands of letters the cost was cheap enough that you could afford the speed.
An averagely fit horse can travel maybe ten miles further than an averagely fit person in a day. But not as far if you expect them to maintain a pace faster than a person, with a person and belongings on their back.
At the limits of our endurance, human ultra-runners perform about as well as horses over very long distances in terms of simple endurance — carrying our own weight without stopping. It’s only over short distances that horses have such obvious advantages.
If you had a horse and you needed to cover great distance, you spent as much of that time as you could doing your own walking.
Logically when you then are creating media where cars don't exist, you're going to need to create an equivalent and it's "common knowledge" that horse carriages were the big thing cars replaced. So you instead get a horse, something that whilst obviously much slower than a car, still gives the impression of "this lets you move faster" than how a human would walk on foot.
There's also the image of the most famous start/stop horse network of all: the Pony Express, which probably played a part in setting up this imagery - for an onlooker, postal workers would travel from one side to the other on a single horse, permitting (for the time) very fast deliveries. In reality it was a series of well maintained stables and lots of start-stop segments to keep a horse in good condition, but that's not something you're going to notice if you're not a mailman.
(The Pony Express also wasn't sustainable and went bankrupt rather quickly, but it's legacy is pretty lasting.)
Horses work well for trips to town. When it isn't far to town a a horse really is faster, then the horse rests in town all day while you do your shopping. Town is also where the train station was, so if you were going on a long trip you would take the train which was faster than a horse, but you had to get to the train station.
That's actually an important point which gets skipped over frequently. Often these time/distance comparisons are done as if commoners are traveling across entire continents frequently. Except your normal commoner is maybe a couple miles from where they want to go. That leaving your local area makes you "unusual" at the very least.
Fantasy and recreationism often have that issue, where they're still looking at the situation from the prospective of humans who can "relatively" easily travel from America to Europe in a day, and where large portions of the population regularly travel 100's, perhaps 1000's of miles for Holidays or similar reasons.
Pilgrimage for 'holy-days' was moderately common in the Christian middle ages, and would frequently involve journeys of more than 100 miles (e.g. the Pilgrims Way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrims'_Way from Winchester to Canterbury) and be undertaken by a good cross section of society including commoners (see the Canterbury Tales). Less commonly, but still not unknown, a pilgrimage might involve journeys from England to Rome (maybe 1000 miles) or Jerusalem (more than 2500 miles, e.g. Margery Kempe).
This is very well put. It's a sort of category error with an associated conceptual leakage.
But I do know there's a guy currently training to run the London Marathon with a refrigerator (OK a British one, but a refrigerator) on his back.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy7wq4y9w5jo
We have a really distorted view of what humans are capable of!
The hobbits are mostly walking and they have a pony (Bill) to pull their stuff.
Major exception being shadowfax running all over the place, but that is not a normal horsey but a divine being.
But 1492 has a number of interesting events. It's the year that Spain got unified as the first modern state, with a centralized court. That's a crucial event to get over feudalism. Coincidentally it's the same year Columbus reached the Americas, so it's an event relevant to globalization.
Erasmus, also a central figure, was ordained that year.
In 717 CE, the Eastern Empire controlled most of modern day Turkey and some scattered enclaves in Greece and Italy.
If that's not a collapse, I don't understand the meaning of the word.
For example, by 1300 you have Kings of England with substantial documentary index.
In 600 you have ongoing Anglo-Saxon settlement, the written evidence is poor, but there seem to be tens or hundreds of independent political units.
There are reasons people refer to the early middle ages specifically as the "dark ages".
Whereas Tolkien makes a point of emphasising how depopulated areas are. It's not that he simply avoids mentioning settlements where nothing interesting happens, it's that he makes a point of the Fellowship being isolated for the majority of the journey, and mapping and naming settlements that were supposed to be tiny military outposts or a lone abandoned inn or completely irrelevant to the story.
Fiction is not meant to perfectly replicate the entire complexity of the real world - rather it takes a very particular subset of reality and distills into a story you can consume at your leisure. This is true for both fictional and non-fictional settings - no movie set during e.g. WW2 or the French Revolution actually conveys the whole complexity of the real world at the time. Can you imagine a version of LOTR that also had to convey the all the socio-economic intricacies of trade routes between Gondor and Brie? Do you think that movie would be more enjoyable, or better at telling the story it wanted to tell?
The best worldbuilding is that which doesn't get into the way of telling a good story. This is why "remixing" is actually a storytelling virtue - GRR can point at Dorne and vaguely motion "bizarro Moorish Spain" and the reader will instantly get a better idea of what he's dealing with without having to read a 800-pager on Dornish culture and history.
Transporting cheese, one would assume? (It’s “Bree”, by the way.)
From https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/04/wh...
Instead, I take the approach of creating discrete generators that build a single aspect of Reality, and model, mock, or handwave related concepts. For example, the planet generator generates only a handful of statistics and a pretty neat image, rather than billions of years of history, tectonics, etc.
A game like Dwarf Fortress goes farther, in attempting to simulate the evolution of a world. This leads to all kinds of interesting and weird phenomena in the "final" version of the world that the player starts in.
One of the difficulties with this approach is that people often expect a coherent and familiar world with enough differences that it feels novel. A simulated universe that has evolved from a random initial state is going to feel alien and more difficult to resonate with.
So, worldbuilding is a balancing act between detail and narrative. Too much of one makes the other feel stale or wrong.
Counterexample: Earthsea?
Ursula K. Le Guin made the bulk of her characters brown, and it’s possible to read it thinking about (unwritten?) fantasy written from the perspective of the Austronesian expansion into the island belts of south-east Asia, or indeed of the Melanesian or Polynesian island societies, or even pre-Mycenaean-collapse Aegean peoples. Their world centred on their island towns and the sea. Magic as self-evident and critical for seafarers and farmers.
Reading now about the archeological analysis of the settlement of New Zealand from Hawaiki, how the colonisation effort spanned many islands, and how the failure of pandanus plants - in the cooler climate - for sailcloth, meant that for most of the colonists and all of their descendants until modern times, it was a one way journey. So many questions and so much fantastic world-building material there…
Written in the 1970s, "The Land" in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Thomas_Coven...) shows no real advancement after modern-day Covenant returns (via portal) 4,000 years later. There is still a clear good/evil distinction, magic is manifested in different ways, and there is a new crisis that drives the plot:
Descending from the Watch, he also finds that a terrible change has transpired: four thousand years have passed, the Earthpower is gone, or nearly gone, and the people of the Land are out of touch with what remains of it. The Land is afflicted with the Sunbane, a disruption of the physical order which alternately causes rain, desert, pestilence and unnatural fertility to wreak havoc on humans, animals and nature.
> I am not a geologist, so I don’t know to which mysteries geologists are privy. But I find it very easy to imagine showing a geologist a pebble, and saying, “This pebble came from a beach at Half Moon Bay,” and the geologist immediately says, “I’m confused,” or even, “You liar.” Maybe it’s the wrong kind of rock, or the pebble isn’t worn enough to be from a beach—I don’t know pebbles well enough to guess the linkages and signatures by which I might be caught, which is the point.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-...
First, I recently reread LotR after decades and was impressed by it. At the same time, I also felt like LotR was sort of a literary dollhouse for Tolkien: although there's a lot of complexity in certain things, other things seemed to be lacking in depth to the point of being comical at times. This is probably inevitable with a world that broad but the geospatial shallowness probably goes along with it.
Second, to his credit, a lot of writing in general is sort of topologically simplified, and this probably reflects a certain cognitive mapping that goes on in reality. My sense of the world, for example, is vastly oversimplified, focused on my local environment and social network, and very blurry as you go outward. This is true of everybody. Maybe Tolkien made a mistake in reifying that a bit too much, in trying to fill in details of the world too much where other authors would have left it as "diagetically out of attentional scope" rather than "diagetically nonexistent". But psychologically people flow with it because it probably reflects human perception — probably especially when you are living through conflict and the world becomes even more focused. The article points out how unrealistic it is but it might not bother people because their internal maps probably aren't a lot different.
My take is that narratives are growing kind of exponentially. We see it in videogames, webtoons, fan fiction. Even literature has many more writers than twenty years ago (even if not “published authors”, but people writing on Wattpad, newsletters, creative writing workshops, etc).
More writers (amateur or professional), more fantasy writers in particular, means more interest in writing resources. And worldbuilding is a topic that it is not that much explored in other writing resources.
I would even guess that if Tolkien did not actually invent the concept itself, he was the one that made it a relevant discussion topic. So it is a relatively new topic.
For any of those activities, the need for doing coherent and good enough setting design becomes the tempting excuse to procrastinate on doing the actual thing (plot, character, gameplay design, whatever) and 'refine the worldbuilding', because while there is a necessary minimum of setting design, the line of when you have got enough setting design and are getting into diminishing returns is not bright.
Signed - I'd rather write the history of the steam dragons' colonization of the western marshes than finish my protagonist's character arc refinements today, don't worry, I'll get to him soon.
I'd imagine that an MMO with robust and numerous autonomous AI NPC's each with a sufficient context window could potentially achieve world building at a much higher resolution and fidelity.
Before a few centuries ago, societies mostly lived in a state of Malthusian stasis. They were at the limits of what their environment could support, with excess population dying to disease and malnutrition.
But in Middle Earth, there's plenty of room for these kernels of civilization to expand. They're not exploiting their environment fully. Population growth will go into swelling populations; there's plenty of space for people to move into to farm more. And this can happen very rapidly.
That's such an original take! I never thought of Saruman as the great builder that Middle Earth needed but didn't deserve.
Wouldn't you basically run in to the same problem? If the world you want your story to be based in happens to be our own Earth, you still have to change it, simplify it for whatever you're writing.
Thus a writer on earth doesn't need to simplify. Just referring to a location brings in a ton of complexity that doesn't need to be mentioned at all.
If I told you that Middle Earth Hobbits are hatched from eggs do you have enough evidence to say I'm wrong? Or I could say the dwarfs don't nurse their young and thus none of them have nipples (much less boobs), again there isn't enough evidence so say I'm wrong. That such evidence doesn't exist means the culture is less complex just because we cannot make assumptions. (Note, I haven't read the books in many years, so there might be evidence that I don't remember - however the larger point remains even if this detail is wrong)
That simply took me away from my immersion. The villains should not look too different than the heroes. Is it so that it makes murdering the villains palatable?
On the other hand, if the author doesn't do world-building, that often leads to illogical situations and issues with internal consistency. For example if you have people living on floating islands they obviously will prefer bows over swords; or sniper rifles over pistols. If they don't, there better be a good reason (that makes sense in the world).
Ann Arbor became Anaba, Michigan became Meshaga. Russymons are Rust Demons, automated hunter killer drones that sometimes come to life if disturbed.
Sorry, offtopic rambling. Cool to remember how much work I put in!
No it doesn't. The presence of the complex world can surface in subtle ways, without the need for extensive expository prose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_of_depth_in_The_Lor...
The lack of detail and explanation here does work that no amount of exposition could do.
As a child that bought and read dozens of RPG manuals, which I never played, there is obviously a market for both.
I read a lot of fiction, but the setting is usually my top interested, and the plot and characters are mainly a tool to explore it.
There is obviously a spectrum, and markets for different styles.
Only if the world-building is done for a book or a movie.
Exploration-based videogames, RPG settings and fictional world Wikis are just as valid use cases. I suspect such formats are going to grow more popular.
He compared a complex European map of 1444 showing a multitude of factions and proto-nation-states, and compared it to a 600 CE map...showing a rough distribution of ethnic groups?
These are not the same thing at all...It's like comparing a climate map to a topographic one.
I don't know if this is intentional, but the title led me to expect the opposite of the author's final sentance (kind of irrelevant to the rest of the piece) conclusion.
> Maybe that’s actually the most compelling reason to settle Mars and beyond. So that there is, actually, a planet B to draw inspiration from.
I hope everyone knows by now, the amount of investment it would take to make Mars at all liveable -- still far less comfortable than, say, antarctica -- by humans is enormous and would span generations, if it's possible at all which quite likely is not. Far far more resources, orders of magnitude, than the amount it would take to deal with climate change and keep the actual earth liveable, which we already seem to think is out of our means. Like even in our worst nightmares of climate change it's probably still easier to live on earth than on Mars no matter how much we put into Mars.
Here's just one the first thing found googling that looked reasonable explaining this: https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/Humans-Will-Neve...
There really is no plan(et) B for earth. Which is the argumetn I associated the "there is no planet b" title with, which perhaps the author was intending to play on?
To the extent that people's fantasies of it take away any urgency at all to trying to keep earth from getting less liveable, it's pretty infuriating.
Yes, absolubtely. The idea that mars is a hedge against climate change is ridiculous in the short term.
I do however deeply believe that its worthwhile to go there. It is definately possible to sustain there, that i'm relatively sure of. Theres a definate appeal to me of all these places - antarctica, underwater living, the desert, the ocean. The idea of a regimented life against the elements appeals to me. I feel sometimes like im grasping at straws to justify why. I think its wanderlust. Why go to antarctica? why study the jungle? why not stay at home and grow rice and live a simple life?