Worldbuilding and guiding readers

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The line between excellent worldbuilding on the one hand, and implausibility and inconsistency on the other, can sometimes be simply a question of Author Points and/or Editor Points—that is, of how much the reader trusts the presenters.

If something weird happens in a story and nobody reacts as if it's weird, there are (at least) two possible options:

  1. The author made a mistake and the editor didn't catch it.
  2. It was intentional, and it's a clue about what the world of the story is like.

I find myself more and more interested lately in stories set in worlds that don't fit comfortably into traditional categories of sfnal worldbuilding: stories where the characters aren't aliens, or future humans, or past humans, or alternate-universe humans, or traditional created-Europeanesque-fantasy-world humans. This comes back to the translation problem; how do you convey the similarity and the alienness? How do you tell readers "This isn't any of the kinds of worlds you're expecting, so stop trying to fit it into your pigeonholes"?

For me, often the success of such a venture relies on getting me to the right set of expectations (or lack thereof) fairly early on. I'm a victim of my expectations, which are founded on many years of reading genre fiction; as soon as I start reading a story, part of my brain is working away at trying to fit it into one of the dozens of familiar slots. In most cases, I'll fit it into the right slot fairly early, and then I can relax into the story. If I fit it into the wrong slot early on, that may ruin my enjoyment of the story, because it sets my expectations wrong. But if the story can convince me early enough to set aside my expectations entirely, it can be really magical.

6 Responses to “Worldbuilding and guiding readers”

  1. Tempest

    I’m confused (stop snickering!). If they’re not aliens and not humans of some sort then they’re… what? Animals?

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  2. Jed

    They’re not humans of the standard sorts; that doesn’t mean they’re not some kind of humans. I should also have qualified the aliens part—I would include some stories that are completely about aliens (as opposed to alien stories that are all about aliens interacting with humans) in this vague category I’m vaguely defining.

    For an example of humans of a non-standard sort, see Beth Bernobich’s Poison, published at SH a year ago. I’m hesitant to talk too much about my own reactions to stories we’ve published, but I’ll note that I read this story as fantasy set in a created world based loosely on parts of Southeast Asia, a world where there’s roughly modern-level technology. Since that’s not one of the standard sfnal settings, I suspect a fair number of readers read it as definitely science fiction set on an alien world (which wouldn’t explain why there are Earthlike flora mixed in with the monsters and the shapeshifting “aliens,” or why those “aliens” are so human-like) or set on Earth (which wouldn’t explain the monsters or the protagonists, who I read as being from an island in the sea and brought to the city on oceangoing ships, rather than being from another world and brought to the city in starships, or the two moons). If you take the world on its own terms instead of trying to fit it into one of the standard models, it’s pretty unusual worldbuilding. But judging by some readers’ reactions, it may not give enough clues early on that it’s not one of the standard settings.

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  3. David Moles

    Speaking as a post-modern curmudgeon, I’m not sure there’s any such thing as taking a world on its own terms. But maybe authors should think about whether there’s any readings they want to discourage, and about how to do that.

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  4. Jed

    Two more examples: Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass and Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters.” Completely original invented worlds, with similarities to the real world but with no single point of historical divergence: instead, the underlying cosmology of the universe is different.

    The kind of thing I’m talking about is pretty similar to created high-fantasy worlds; the only reason I’m excluding most standard fantasy worlds is that so many of them are so standardized, with the Manichean (?) forces of Good and Evil waging epic-scale war across a faux-medieval-European landscape and set of societies.

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  5. David Moles

    By completely original, I presume, you’re referring not to the contents of those invented worlds but to their metaphysics and social structures — as opposed to those “standard fantasy worlds” that invent all the names and the shapes of the coastlines but get everything else off the shelf. (I’m tempted to drag in Russian Formalism here, but I have trouble remembering which is the fabula and which is the suzhet.)

    I think part of it just comes from the fact that the reader can assimilate only so many new things at a time. If authors don’t make the tradeoff you describe, often they get into territory that I think can be just as bad — losing readers in new geographies and new metaphysics and expecting readers to take sides before they have their bearings. The reasons why we should support Jarelerog against Kogivilia may be clear to the author, but a lot of authors don’t seem to realize that they have to make those reasons clear to the reader.

    Of course, good writers try to get you on the side of — or at least interested in — characters, usually, rather than nations, but the pitfall’s always there.

    What I found after reading The Golden Compass was that I became much more skeptical about invented surfaces (names, geographies, languages) — that I started to demand that authors justify the choice to make those things up — and that the choice did not often seem to be sufficiently justified. In early drafts of “Theo’s Girl” the city was not called Taxila and the king was not called Alexander. 🙂

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  6. Jed

    Aha! Thanks, David; I’m feeling my way through this, and your distinction between invented surfaces and invented metaphysics helps a lot. And in fact I think that one of the things I specifically like is the tension between a more or less familiar surface and an invented metaphysics; I think I’m not quite as interested in unusual metaphysics overlaid on a completely alien landscape.

    Wish I’d thought to add that “Theo’s Girl” is another good example—though it’s a case where I didn’t recognize it as a familiar surface at first because I didn’t recognize Taxila. The combination of Alexander the Undying (?) and the airships (and their crews) eventually made pretty clear that this was not ordinary historical fantasy, nor even ordinary alternate history, but I was missing some clues about that due to lack of familiarity with the real-world history.

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