Making Places

Mystery in video games

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 18:41:41 -0400

Some very smart worldbuilding-related musing in these two articles by Tevis Thompson. This one is about mystery in video games and storytelling, building on this earlier essay which pretty extensively discusses the lack of same in the Legend of Zelda franchise.

Mystery does not arise from the vague, the convoluted, the simply confusing. It’s not a fog, some atmospheric condition. Mystery is about something. It has content. Though not videogame ‘content’.

Mystery is not a style. It’s not wallpaper or mood lighting or a gravel-voiced narrator. It can’t be added in post-production. It can’t be sprayed on, like a tan.

Tevis and David Hellman have a very cool graphic novel project currently up on Kickstarter.

Looper interview

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:32:12 -0400

Great interview with Rian Johnson, the director of Looper, which is great and in theaters now.

The minute you say “science fiction,” the question of world creation comes up. Was that something you were thinking about when you were writing?

No, that was the production designer. When I was writing I was really just disciplining myself to focus on getting the narrative as tight as possible. To tighten the screws on everything, and to make sure that it ticked and that it ran from start to finish and that it had a solid spine.

And so I was focused on that and I wasn’t even thinking about the world-building elements at all. Which I think was good because it meant the designers and I just worked together. Every design decision, it wasn’t preconceived, it came out of the needs of the story. And so making the world seem like such a desperate place was a way of accentuating that feeling of “you better hold on to your slice of the pie, or else it’s destitution,” you know?

Reblogging an answer from my art blog. Q: Hey, I’ve got a world building question for you....

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 12:24:04 -0400

Reblogging an answer from my art blog.

Q: Hey, I’ve got a world building question for you. How does one properly name a city, in either a fantasy or non-fantasy context? How do you avoid the trap of trying to sound oh so clever about your naming scheme? How do you make it feel real and authentic without sounding like a load of gibberish and gobbledigook? Should a cities name define its character or should the character define its name in fiction? I have so many questions but I have no idea where to start!

A: If you’re going the invented-language route for naming things, study language. Look at how different languages are written (I mean, how they’re transliterated into latin letters) and how they sound, and how you can tell them apart aesthetically. Keeping a series of names confined to a limited number of sounds suggests they’re linguistically related, and generally feels more believable: even if the number of sounds is limited far more than any real language’s phonetic scope. Hence, in Vattu: Sahta, Calirus, Morrian, Arrius, Tarria, Dorranos all sort of “match.” And Junti, Surin, Kurina, Timín, and Orti likewise.

Worry less about how the name defines the character of the city, and more about the city’s role in your narrative, and how it’s important that the reader/viewer/player begin his/her understanding of that city, and work with that. With a lot of these sorts of questions, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking that you’re actually making a Real World, when actually you’re making a complicated storytelling tool that looks enough like a Real World to suspend disbelief.

Clarion 2012 writing advice

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:03:37 -0400

Let’s try to get this thing started up again with some quick links and question-answering. I just found this great roundup of unattributed advice on writing from the Clarion Writing Workshop, much of which is invented-world-related. Some relevant excerpts:

“In-cluing, AKA Heinleining, is when you don’t infodump, you just show the tech or whatever working.”

“When we don’t understand what’s happening, or the world we’re reading, we fill in the blanks from what we already know—some other fictional world that seems pretty close. This can be dangerous, so you have to give people enough information to convince them otherwise.”

“A nice way to make me “buy” complex technology and a rich world is to just give me a great character whose dilemma shapes and filters the world, and focus on that.”

Some questions

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:41:00 -0500

Answered some questions for Mark Penman for his dissertation. Some excerpts here will have to suffice for the Only Thing I’ve added to this blog in over a month.

Q-In the about section of your site you say that the website is a home to comics about your world Overside. Was that the intention evolve as you wrote Rice-Boy?

When I started Rice Boy I didn’t have much of a conception of the overall world, and I didn’t think I would do anything else with it. But going through that story, and kind of assuming a deep history was there and playing with it, led me to start thinking of the world as something bigger than one story: a sort of aesthetic, metaphorical tool I could use in other stories. And now I’ve done a lot of stuff in this setting, but even then I’m kind of rebuilding it each time: starting with an outline of the world and its history as I’ve set it up, and tweaking the details and the overall aesthetic to work better with the particular story I’m telling.

Q-Your stories include very well defined cultures and religions. Do you draw much inspiration from cultures of our world?

I definitely do; I try to get ideas from wherever I can take them. Often this means being inspired by somebody else’s fantasy culture, setting, or idea, and then following that into the real-world historical inspirations for it. But yeah I’m very interested in how culture and religion and mythology work, and the roles they play in human life. Vattu is sort of about that, and about how these elements work to build a person’s sense of identity.

Q-How much consideration do you put into the art and symbolisms of the cultures you create? Would you say that the artworks of a culture are important in defining the look of their settlements and fashions?

I do think a lot about the art and architectural styles of different cultures I’m making. Particularly in Vattu, there will be several different cultures that I need to keep distinct and clear. This, to me, is usually a question of emphasis: how can I stylize the visual style of this culture to isolate and emphasize the central ideas that I want to communicate about it? This includes representational art, buildings, furniture, clothing, everything. I’ve just gotten to the part in Vattu where they get to the city Sahta. There is a definite “Sahtan style” which emphasizes austerity, sturdiness, boldness, and spare, geometric ornamentation. I think you can see this in much of the design of the place.

Q-Your stories often centre on conflicts, be it between characters or from environmental influences or disasters. Do you see conflict as an important part of creating a world or would you say that it only aids storytelling?

Here is the secret: worldbuilding is just a convoluted sort of storytelling. There’s a tendency to look at it as actually literally building a world, but I think a more valuable approach is to look at it as developing a tool for storytelling. You aren’t making a static, detailed substrate to put stories on top of; you’re making a dynamic setting which is part of the story itself.

Show and Tell: Embassytown

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:44:00 -0400

By Evan Dahm.

Read the rest of the Show and Tell series here. Read the introduction to the series here.

Just finished Embassytown, China Miéville’s newest novel. It’s pretty significantly different from Perdido Street Station (about which I’ve written another Show and Tell article here) and The Scar, the only others of Miéville’s books I’ve read, and is another great example of solid worldbuilding. I promise this is the last I’ll be raving about how great this guy’s work is for a while; I’ve been on a kick…

As usual I’ll try to avoid spoilers! But the way in which the details of the setting are conveyed is a very important part of the book, so it will be impossible to avoid spoilers!

What it is. Embassytown is Miéville’s first novel that could be clearly categorized as science fiction: unlike the more scattershot, magic-and-industry setting of Bas-Lag, Embassytown leans heavily on tropes that are familiar to science fiction readers. Extraterrestrial contact, human colonization of other planets, interstellar empire, hyperspace (called here “Immer”). However, as in the Bas-Lag books, the repercussions of these elements are dealt with more thoroughly and creatively than is often seen in science fiction literature. As Miéville says, “Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd.”

Embassytown is chiefly about Embassytown: a human enclave on an alien planet, surrounded by a city of ineffable alien creatures called (by native humans) Hosts, or (by outsiders) Ariekei. Embassytown is a member of a massive interstellar civilization of human-populated worlds connected by the Immer, and is on kind of a frontier planet.

Hosts and how they communicate and are communicated with are of primary importance in this story. Some great examples of Miéville’s “taking ridiculous ideas very seriously”: Hosts talk with two mouths simultaneously, so humans can only communicate with them if they are in pairs of two acting as a single entity. As such, they are thought to not even recognize an individual human as a whole entity. Hosts can only understand Language (Host Language is capitalized) if it’s spoken by one entity, meaning human speakers of Language must undergo genetic engineering and lifelong training to be convincing as two halves of a psychic whole. Hosts cannot lie; they can’t say what they don’t believe to be true… meaning that their Language is not language as such, and is not truly symbolic: it is the literal stuff of thought. They can’t refer to anything that they don’t believe exists, so they must physically create referents to act as similes. And so on.

This is a kind of metaphorical parable on language. The setting is focused around the issue of communication between Ariekei and humans, as a kind of metaphorical framework to explore ideas of linguistics and semantics.

How it is conveyed. The exposition of the setting is vague and initially disorienting, from a first-person point of view which is believably “embedded.” It’s written as if it were a memoir of Avice, a character at the center of Embassytown’s upheaval.

Certain elements are never outright explained, as they’d be familiar within the world of the story (the overall political climate of human space, the history of human contact with alien species…), and certain elements are explained, as they would be more specialized (specifics of Immer travel, Embassytown culture…). I think this makes the setting and Avice’s position in it believable in an immediate, subliminal way, at the expense of some clarity and ease of entry. You have to work for a few tens of pages to get a sense of the setting, but as a result, the understanding you get is pretty deep and intuitive. In terms of setting, Embassytown is very far on the Show side of the spectrum.

We learn how the setting works and holds itself together conceptually, abstractly, and thematically: it’s only important that we see how human and Ariekei civilizations and cultures contrast, not that we have a clear, concrete mental map of Embassytown and the planet that hosts it. We need to know the awe and strangeness the Ariekei seem to exude more than we need to know the specificities of their appearance.

The development from Miéville’s Bas-Lag books is apparent: the settings of the Bas-Lag books are held together by strong overall tones and themes, with a ton of fiddly details and concrete, physical description thrown in for cement. Embassytown plays faster and looser, dispensing with much of the detail, resulting in a much more personal, memoir-ish voice to the story. In a way Embassytown’s approach has more finesse and real believability—and in another, more personal way, it disappoints my overly concrete, visual-oriented way of thinking and understanding media. In this and other respects I think Embassytown is technically way better than the Bas-Lag books, though I might not like it as much.

In summary: This book deals with setting in a loose, world-internal way. It believably sets up a point of view within the setting, and explains the rules of the setting obliquely and with little outright explanation. As a result, the reader gains a strong intuitive sense of how it all fits together, at the cost of some confusion at the start of the book. Considering how unusual and inventive this setting is, it’s a remarkable achievement to have conveyed it so clearly with so little explanation!

weeklywritingchallenges: weeklywritingchallenges: Weekly...

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:04:32 -0400

weeklywritingchallenges:

weeklywritingchallenges:

Weekly Writing Challenge #4 (Oct 3rd - Oct 8th): Worldbuilding Challenge Part 1: The Setting

Pick any color you like and think up a world or place of that color or similar to what the color makes you feel.

You can make it as descriptive as you like. Give your world a history. How does the place look? Tell us what lives there. What the climate is like. Do our laws of physics apply?

You can mention the people that live there, but keep in mind that they will also be part of next week’s challenge. So if you can, wait until then to create the inhabitants of your world.

Once you are done, go to submit your works. And as always, questions and suggestions are always welcome.

Have fun.

-Yasim

Reblog to tell you that the deadline shifted to the 9th of October due to my schedule opening up considerably. Nevertheless, that’s not long until this challenge ends!

Just saw this two days before the due date! Thought you folks might be interested!

The Big Read: A Wizard of Earthsea

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 01:16:59 -0400

There’s a month-long event going on in New York City in celebration of Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantastic fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea. A full schedule is here.

Show and Tell in Game of Thrones, Way of Kings.

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:30:00 -0400

By Evan Dahm.

George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones and Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings both take place in settings with seasons that work very differently from reality. With that convenient point of comparison, let’s look at how the two books go about introducing this item to the reader.

A Game of Thrones:

“You are a young man, Tyrion,” Mormont said. “How many winters have you seen?”

He shrugged. “Eight, nine. I misremember.”

“And all of them short.”

“As you say, my lord.” He had been born in the dead of winter, a terrible cruel one that the maesters said had lasted near three years, but Tyrion’s first memories were of spring.

“When I was a boy, it was said that a long summer always meant a long winter to come. This summer has lasted nine years, Tyrion, and a tenth will soon be upon us. Think on that.”

“When I was a boy,” Tyrion replied, “my wet nurse told me that one day, if men were good, the gods would give the world a summer without ending. Perhaps we’ve been better than we thought, and the Great Summer is finally at hand.” He grinned.

The Way of Kings:

“The others cry at night,” she said. “But you don’t.”

“Why cry?” he said, leaning his head back against the bars. “What would it change?”

“I don’t know. Why do men cry?”

He smiled, closing his eyes. “Ask the Almighty why men cry, little spren. Not me.” His forehead dripped with sweat from the Eastern humidity, and it stung as it seeped into his wound. Hopefully, they’d have some weeks of spring again soon. Weather and seasons were unpredictable. You never knew how long they would go on, though typically each would last a few weeks.

The wagon rolled on …

I am hesitant to put forth or support ANY absolute rules in storytelling or art, but I think it is obvious that Martin’s introduction of this variance in setting is elegant, story-embedded, and clear, while Sanderson’s is clunky, distracting, and unsubtle.

In the first excerpt, we get a huge amount of information about the setting’s seasons: they last varying amounts of time. They are thought to be predictable by maesters, but there’s contention on that point. Nine years is considered a very long time for a summer to last. The characters of Tyrion and Mormont and their relationship are developed throughout this conversation, as is a bit of more textural, background stuff regarding cultural ideas surrounding the seasons. This is all within the text of the story and within the events of the story. We are taught this information without really even being taught it.

In the second excerpt, we are given a brief aside explaining outright how seasons work. The characters are not really seen to interact with this information, and it’s not as “embedded” in the text as the previous excerpt, making it seem less relevant to what’s going on in the story, and therefore much more easily forgotten by the reader, and much less conducive to immersion in the story. This is an attempt to teach the reader an important fact about the setting, but it’s an attempt made so straightforwardly and overtly that it is far less successful than Martin’s.

This is a point I’ve been trying to make: no matter how gorgeous, elaborate, and inspiring your SETTING is (and Sanderson’s is definitely all of those things!), it all really comes down to how it is CONVEYED.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 23:25:00 -0400

Google’s logo was changed today for Jorge Luis Borges’ birthday. He is one of my favorite writers and has a story which might be of interest to worldbuilders, called Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. The entire text is online here (y en el español original aquí), but if you are rather inclined to buy a book of his short stories, not a single one will disappoint.

Maps, Fantasy, Culture, and Boundaries

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:22:16 -0400

Excellent article by Kate Elliott on a seminar by Russell Kirkpatrick.

The map is an expression of your intimate contact with the world you know. It’s not the map you need to get right; it’s the expression you need to see right.

Daniel Everett on Endangered Languages

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 12:39:48 -0400

By Evan Dahm.

Just watched this video. Not directly worldbuilding-related, but this is an excellent 90-minute talk on linguistics and worldviews. Keeping in mind the variation in human experience and understandings of the world is of vital importance if you’re trying to make up cultures of your own. And the philosophical underpinnings of a language, of which Everett gives several examples, are as important as the nuts-and-bolts of grammar, phonetic structure, etc. MORE important, probably, from a storytelling perspective.

Thwart the Idea of Bad and Good

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:05:13 -0400

By Ross Kugman.

In the history of things that I have seen, usually in world-making (myself being a lore maker), is destroying the very concept of “bad vs. good”, and making a more “dangerous vs. balanced” or even “balance vs. too conservative”. In any case, it is removing the idea that there are those who are pure evil and fundamentally backward.

When you look at Lord of the Rings, for example, you’ll notice that the orcs were not “EVIL, BOO, I SCARE AND KILL YOU”, but were, “We’ve been locked in the mud for far too long! It is our turn to prosper!”

In my lore (of which probably no-one has heard of) there is a Demon capitol city. This does not mean that it is a place of shadow and gloom. In fact, the city and nation itself is a democracy, and in fact more advanced than the races and other alliances that seem to be “good”.

The humans, who you see mostly as being good, are really desperate missionaries trying to claim the lands in the name of their holy-God’s. They do this by force, whereas the demons try to convert by rallies and invitation to events.

Even when you look at present day events in OUR world. The terrorists (from an American standpoint) who threaten our everyday livelihoods aren’t doing it because they’re EVIL, they do it because they believe in it. Just as to them, we are the evil terrorists bombarding their land with bombs and such.

So, in this, you must have every nation or faction (etc.) as not good, bad or neutral, but as a nation striving for what they believe in. Because good and evil are ideas, not natural happenings.

Epic Fantasy panel

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:09:41 -0400

SDCC last weekend had a panel called “Putting the ‘Epic’ in ‘Epic Fantasy.’” Tor.com and io9.com put up some summaries. Here’s an excerpt relevant to the topic at hand:

Michael Spradlin: This is the chicken or the egg question – when you are writing, is it the world that is then populated, or the character that populates the world?

George R. R. Martin: Both are valid. Tolkien began with world building, but his characters are what we remember as much as anything else; Strider, Gandalf, and Samwise will always be with us. The story begins and ends with the character. I try the world building, but I don’t think I’m as good. I got a letter about the languages in my books once, with one person asking if I could send him the syntax and vocabulary for the Dothraki language. I’ve invented seven words of the language, and I’ll make an eighth when I need to (the language was fleshed out for the HBO series). The world isn’t as fleshed out as Tolkien’s world.

With A Song of Ice and Fire, I started with a vision of a scene of wolf pups with their mother dying in the snow. I didn’t know where it was going, but when I finished writing that chapter I had an idea for the second for the second chapter, and at the end of 50-60 pages I figured I needed to start drawings maps.

Kevin J. Anderson (Terra Incognita): When I write, I’m building a world, developing the cultures and the economics and the religions and so on. You need people to do the interesting parts of the cultures, so you get the characters and they move the plot forward.

Peter Orullian (The Unremembered): Both. I start with characters. I love drawing maps and world building, but I take away characters. That’s where most of my energy lies. Having a large scale is one of the best ways to define epic fantasy – it is not a bar brawl, but nations warring against each other. It resonates when a father holds his dead son on a battlefield though. The battle is great, but when I can write down what is heartbreaking for the individual is what matters most to me.

Also included in io9’s summary are some of the writers’ responses to categorization of their work as “epic,” which I love— there are few words more overused and misapplied. I would love to hear a recording of the whole thing!

Le Guin on Plausibility in Fantasy

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 22:06:11 -0400

Linking to that excellent article by Ursula K. Le Guin on plot reminded me to look through some more stuff on her site. Here is an open letter relevant to worldbuilders, called Plausibility in Fantasy. An excerpt:

For example, Tolkien’s references to places, people, events (often of long ago) that are not part of the immediate story: these give the reader a conviction of the reality of the immediate scene — because it is shown to be part of a much greater landscape, a long history, a whole world of which it is only a glimpse. This is a strong technique for making an imagined world plausible. This is a technique which one can imitate, performing it in one’s own way.

Now, with Tolkien, that history and geography already existed in his writings before The Lord of the Rings. But in my fantasies, I have often mentioned events or places which I didn’t yet know anything about — for example, some of the later exploits of Ged mentioned early in A Wizard of Earthsea. These were, when I wrote them, merely words — “empty” nouns. I knew that if my story took me to them, I would find out who and what they were. And this indeed happened…

Show and Tell: Perdido Street Station

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:32:00 -0400

Above: painting from the UK edition cover by Edward Miller.

By Evan Dahm.

This one has been a very long time coming. Perdido Street Station is the first of China Miéville’s books set in Bas-Lag, and I really loved it and can’t recommend it enough. I’ve avoided plot-related spoilers in this article, BUT I have revealed many significant details of the setting which might lessen the impact of their revelation in a reading of the book. Keep that in mind.

I recently finished The Scar, which is the sort-of sequel to this book, and which forms an interesting point of comparison in terms of worldbuilding. So hopefully I can get an article on that out soon! ALSO did you see this bit of fanart I did for Perdido Street Station a few months ago?

Rest of the huge article behind the cut.

What it is. Perdido Street Station is set in a city called New Crobuzon, in a gorgeously and thoroughly invented world called Bas-Lag. It’s a book about a city, as much as it’s about the people in it. Miéville’s understanding of how cities work (aesthetically, culturally, structurally, etc) is striking and well-communicated. I’ve only read two of his books, but most (all?) of them seem to have things to say about cities and urban life.

New Crobuzon is a sprawling, baroque city-state; something like victorian London, maybe. It surrounds the confluence of the rivers Tar and Canker as they become the Gross Tar. It’s grimy and smoggy and cluttered. I’ve heard it called a “steampunk” setting, but this is misleading: there are airships, impossible clockwork machines, and general Victorian technological aesthetic, but they, like every genre trope in this book, are used intelligently and critically.

The city is also full of a bunch of different species: the Vodyanoi (amphibious frog-people), the Khepri (women with scarabs for heads), the Cactacae (cactus-people), and the Garuda (predatory-bird-people) are focal. These, like the Elves and Dwarves and Trolls of Middle-Earth, are drawn from real mythology (except maybe the Cactacae?). A key difference is that they, and other elements of the setting, are drawn from widely variant mythologies, as opposed to the purely western-European slant of the Tolkien lineage of fantasy lit. The Vodyanoi are based on a Polish mythological creature, the Khepri on an Egyptian god. There are many more creatures and concepts that are completely invented.

This obviously sounds like a conceptually cluttered setting, and could easily fall into a trap of being disorganized and lacking in a sense of internal consistency. This is avoided by a pretty tight adherence, by both the setting and the story, to a unified theme… But that fits better into the second part of this article:

How it is conveyed. Specificities of history of Bas-Lag and anal-retentive details are there if you look for them, but aren’t focused on at length in the body of the story, and aren’t found in any LOTR-ish appendices. The map of New Crobuzon at the front of the book is an almost unique concession to what I see as the detail-oriented approach (which is basically what Harrison was bitching about). In this book, the setting is held together more by TONE and THEME than by rigorous detail.

Paradoxically, the central theme that unifies all of this is about whole things being composed of jumbled, disparate fragments. The city is a patchwork of divergent and contradictory districts. Some of the characters themselves are grotesque amalgams of creatures, or gestalt beings cobbled-together out of machinery. Making this concept central to the story, and central to several characters’ experiences of the world, helps lend a conceptual unity to the setting which is practically a necessity, and which does more for its believability than any number of made-up historical and geographical details could.

The plot structure of this book is unusual: there is a long “exposition” sequence at the start of the book. It’s a kind of narrative section that lays the groundwork for what turns out to be the more traditional “plot,” but is also very concerned with showing us the characters, their lives, and their city. I’ve heard complaints about this, but bear in mind that there are many ways stories can work! (Please read this article on that subject by Ursula K. Le Guin as soon as possible.) And this exposition sequence does a good job of giving us a sense of New Crobuzon and all of its social and political complexities, an understanding of which is vital for the rest of the book. Also it doesn’t hurt that this sequence is extremely well-written, full of bizarre and fascinating ideas, and never boring. I can see how easy it could have been to mess this up.

We see New Crobuzon through several native characters intimately familiar with it, in a third-person point of view that oscillates between being limited to a character and being omniscient. There’s one character to whom New Crobuzon is a “new world,” from whose first-person point of view we get a few passages… but on the whole, we learn about the setting through its natives.

The focus on bizarre elements of the setting is modulated accordingly: we are presented with strange things, but they’re treated as fairly ordinary and the repercussions of their existence are believable and well-developed. There’s more overt explanation than there is in, say, A Game of Thrones, but that explanation isn’t concerned with WHY the world has these strange things, only with what the world would be like if we take these things as a given.

For example: the khepri are women with scarabs for heads. We’re given fairly thorough explanations of what this looks like, and what it’s like to have a scarab for a head. Questions of how khepri would communicate, how they would interface with the other species of New Crobuzon, what their perception of the world would be like, how they would reproduce, and what their aesthetic sense would be like are all clearly addressed. But we’re never told WHY there are people with scarabs for heads, because that question is exterior to the demands of the story, and to the concerns of the central characters. Any desire to know WHY in the reader’s mind soon dissolves in the face of this.

This last point is probably the thing that will stick with me most from those of Miéville’s books. Fantastical things can be made believable if they’re followed to their conclusions and treated as if they are not fantastical.

Read the rest of the Show and Tell articles here. The “thesis statement” for the series is here.

"Part of the attraction of the L.R. [The Lord of the Rings] is, I think, due to the glimpses of a..."

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 01:49:43 -0400

“Part of the attraction of the L.R. [The Lord of the Rings] is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien

Show and Tell: A Game of Thrones

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:43:00 -0400

An excerpt from a map of Westeros in the book.

By Evan Dahm.

I haven’t written one of these in a while! A Game of Thrones is the first book in George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. I’m on the second book, but this post deals mostly with the first, and I’ve made an effort to avoid major spoilers, and YOU SHOULD TOO in the comments. I might have a few relevant things to say at a later date about the HBO adaptation, which just ended.

What it is. Most of A Game of Thrones takes place in a continent called Westeros, and jumps between a few places and interconnected storylines there and in another continent to the east. Westeros is based in large part on medieval Europe, and presents a varied landscape stretching from far South to “the Wall” in the extreme North. There’s a dense political backdrop involving the histories of several competing Houses, and the union of Seven Kingdoms, etc… The politics and history of the setting are central to the story.

There are knights, castles, and a hundred other tropes that seem now to belong as much to modern fantasy as to actual medieval Europe. The setting of Westeros isn’t unprecedented as far as fantasy goes, but that’s perfectly fine because the physical stuff of the setting isn’t the star here. But there are some striking and gorgeous places in the story: the Wall, the Eyrie, and the city of King’s Landing all struck me as unique… Building a setting around a single striking, dramatic physical feature is something Martin does well. In this way the places become visually iconic and memorable, which, even in prose, is important when there’s so many of them to keep track of.

The fundamental element of what makes this setting unique, of course, is how seasons work. Winter and Summer here can last for years or decades and are difficult to predict. This is a really basic, enormous idea, and it’s handled very intelligently, with all of its implications and repercussions dealt with. All of the setting stems from or relates to this core idea; it lends to a conceptual tightness that I just love.

How it is conveyed. This book and series is focused more singlemindedly on its characters and its story than is most fantasy literature. It’s about families competing for political power, and the people caught in the middle of those struggles. The world is present, consistent, and believable, but little time is spent showing it to us.

Descriptions of places are concise and essential. To me, this seems to lend a kind of reality to the places that is fundamentally different from the thorough, wordy descriptions of Tolkien et al: we see the settings of A Game of Thrones through the eyes of its characters, and no more time is spent dwelling on their specifics than the characters would themselves dwell on them. The story pushes the reader along so smoothly and consistently that the setting starts to feel real for the very reason that it isn’t focused upon. I hope that’s clear, anyway. This lack of overt explanation, and the brutality and unpredictability of the story, suggest an unusual reality… It’s presented like historical fiction, almost.

We glean an understanding of the peculiarities of the setting subtly around the edges of the narrative, through the familiarity with which the characters deal with them and know them. Also, the sheer size of this series allows for the reader’s understanding of these elements to come gradually, over the course of thousands of pages. There might be a tradeoff here, though: it would be difficult to work this way with a setting more fundamentally strange or unprecedented.

sciencefiction: The simplest and most radical thing that Ridley...

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:58:21 -0400

sciencefiction:

The simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did with Blade Runner was to put urban archeology in the frame. I hadn’t been obvious to mainstream American science fiction that cities are like compost heaps — just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent. In Europe, that’s just life — it’s not science fiction, it’s not fantasy. But in American science fiction, the city in the future was always brand-new, every square inch of it.

William Gibson, on Blade Runner

William Gibson on "Cyberspace"

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:03:00 -0400

There’s an excerpt from an interview with William Gibson up on io9, where he talks about the impetus of his idea of “cyberspace.” The Cyberpunk genre, which Gibson helped invent with Neuromancer, is pretty worldbuilding-intensive: it’s very dependent on atmosphere, setting, and an understanding of technology and communication that seems specific and dated now.

I was painfully aware that I lacked an arena for my science fiction. The spaceship had been where science fiction had happened for a very long time, even in the writing of much hipper practitioners like Samuel Delany. The spaceship didn’t work for me, viscerally. I know from some interviews of Ballard’s that it didn’t work for him either. His solution was to treat Earth as the alien planet and perhaps to treat one’s fellow humans as though they were aliens. But that didn’t work for me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to function in a purely Ballardian universe. So I needed something to replace outer space and the spaceship.

I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them-it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.