World-Building

Apropos Dianna's review of the various manifestations of Dune, I thought I'd throw in a thought on my own tastes.

(Completely stupid tangent that you can safely skip: I can't use the word "Apropos" without thinking of the Three Musketeers. Aramis! Porthos! And Apropos, the musketeer who builds on the accomplishments of other musketeers!)

Dianna makes mention of Dune's extensive appendices. Its glorious appendices. I've read Dune a couple of times, but I've read its appendices dozens of times. This leads me to probably my favorite aspect of science fiction and, to a lesser extent, fantasy novels: world building. Plot, sure, vitally important, a force of nature and all that. Characters, great, fleshed out, the rounder the better. But what really wins me over is the world. I don't just mean a high concept (Howsabout a planet where apes evolved from man?). I mean books where we don't just get a place, we get the place's geography, its races, its ethnicities, its religions, its cultures, its political forces, and, most importantly, its history. I probably care more about how the world got to be the way it is than I do about how it is now.

In some ways, I feel like good world building expands the value of a novel beyond the confines of its particular circumstances. A well-made world is a playground for the imagination. You can read and appreciate the events of the novel, sure, and see them as a sort of starter adventure, but once it's done you're free to explore your own ideas for grand political intrigues and smaller personal dramas.

That's one of the reasons, moving on to lower-brow science fiction, that I love Star Wars. Not the movies, even the original trilogy, none of which are amazing. But there is an extensive secondary literature surrounding the Star Wars universe that fleshes out the important figures, the groups, the races, the planets, the history, etc. It's one of the most well-developed science fiction universes out there. My big disappointment with the prequel trilogy was that the history I'd constructed in my mind of the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire based on the robust secondary literature was so much grander than the tale of adolescent rebellion that George Lucas gave us. But who cares? I still have my Star Wars Encyclopedia and Ship Schematics Manual. I can make my own fun with that.

That's also why I tend to buy a lot of manuals for pen-and-paper role playing games, even though I hardly ever play them. I haven't really found a group to play with, but I can have hours of fun leafing through the supplemental books on regions and groups and deities.

I realize I'm pretty far out of the mainstream on this. Seldom do readers say, as I have, "I'm bored with this character! Tell me about the hats these people wear, along with the 500 year history behind their appearance and symbolic meaning. And, if you have time, include a Foucaldian analysis of the way in which the wearing of hats subtly reinforces the society's dominance structures." On the other hand, I feel like a well-built world can be useful even within the context of a single novel, without outside imaginative play coming into it.

For starters, a thoroughly imagined world has more immediacy and interest than one simply slapped together from stock cliches. You can certainly carry an adventure in a generic fantasy world on characterization, but they'd better be some damned lovable characters. It also makes the reader care a lot more about the plot. They come to know and care about a deeply sketched world a lot more, and will be more likely to throw their emotional weight into their reading. It also, I would imagine, helps the author in plotting to have a thoroughly planned world in which to work.

Obviously, though, this world building needs to be integrated smoothly into the plot. It doesn't matter if there's a fascinating story that you've developed about why all your elves have exactly nine toes and eleven fingers if it never gets mentioned in the book. At the same time, it can't be done ham handedly. "Lord Flostrand shook the elf's six-fingered hand. By the way, have I mentioned why elves have eleven fingers? It's a fascinating story... (Here follows six pages on the elves and their hands, before we finally get back to the beleagered Lord Flostrand, who by this point has gotten bored and gone home, taking the reader with him)." Appendices seem like a nice compromise for getting all of your favorite world-building points in that you couldn't fit into the actual novel, and they avoid burdening uncooperative readers with tedious exposition about matters not directly relevant to the plot. On the other hand, they are a bit of an awkward kludge, and it's obviously better to seamlessly integrate everything you want into the actual novel.

So, there you have it. Effective world-building is a strong positive, provided it is handled in a deft manner. I would argue it's important in both science fiction and fantasy, but even moreso in science fiction, given that much of the point of science fiction is to explore how our world would be/will be different if certain things develop in a certain manner. And even Science Fiction not of a speculative bent benefits (What if, in the future, we traveled through space by folding it in the minds of special humans mutated by a spice which only grows on one planet in the universe, and the universe were ordered along feudal lines, and also there's a cult of witches who have a great master plan to breed a messiah who can bend space and time without the spice? And also...). In fact, Dune is arguably a novel in which the speculative elements have been entirely thrown out in favor of world-building.

So that's it. Writing advice from someone who's never written a novel. Hope it helps!