Worldbuilding Dichotomy

As a blog-world farewell, M. John Harrison posted some of his final thoughts on the evils of worldbuilding as he saw them. Or, at least, his final blogged thoughts. I doubt that this is all he has to say on the matter.

It’s been almost a year since I took on the topic, so it seems like a fitting wait to rejoin it.

My opinion is largely unchanged, but I think MJH has solidified my skepticism for his position. See, it looks like he’s building an intentional and, as such things always are, false dichotomy. Worldbuilding, or unbridled invention. Pick one. No gradients. And I gather, from his post, that if one thinks about the rationality of, say, politics in one’s wholly invented universe, that’s too much worldbuilding. Too much. It’s all got to be invention, or it’s garbage.

Which of course I disagree on.

Now, personally, I like invention. I’ve said as much before. When I was writing a fantasy novel last year, I set out with the premise of running in the opposite direction of a lot of the standard fantasy tropes, while trying to remain earnestly in an “otherworld fantasy” milieu. What was fun for me was throwing in something from off the top of my head, watching it bend the story around it, take the story in new directions, and then finding the ways that all this disparate stuff works together in the same world.

But that’s worldbuilding. Not the exhaustive stuff, that has you setting down to map out the various evolutionary lineages of one’s non-human sentient creatures, or working out the histories and family trees and wars and whatnot. But you know? That stuff is cool too. If you want to jump into a book the way you jump into a video game world like WoW or something, more power to you. And if you can get the reader to have that same feeling of exploring a fully-realized world by holding a book instead of sitting in the dark at their PC, then you’re doing a hell of a job.

And there’s room for MJH’s pure inventiveness, too, if that’s what he’s really into. In that way, he also stands in opposition to the Mundane SF Manifesto, which I roundly applaud. Again, while I dig Mundane SF on its own merits, I can’t abide by the attitude that says that only their vision of SF heralds anything good for the genre and society as a whole. But then, in that way, the Mundanians and MJH are kissing cousins–they have a vision, and denigrate anything that doesn’t conform to it.

Anyway, it’s too bad MJH decided to hang up his blog. I’d otherwise look forward to further refinement of his own manifesto.

Crossposted with klech.net