Black Dog Blog

A conversation partner was telling me she hates worldbuilding. Not shoddy worldbuilding, the sort of stuff that contains Wiccan utopias and Aryan elves, in other words the sort of things that can muck up your average penny dreadful fantasy book (in my view, of course). No, she hates the very idea that writers make up worlds and tell you about them. The adjective used was "arrogant".

Well, the solution to that is simple: stay out of science fiction and fantasy, an area that tends to contain an awful lot of people who feel the other way.

I thought it was a bit insensitive to rant about this to someone who, she's very well aware, is a second-rate worldbuilding writer of fant-shamelessly-mixed-with-SF. But I didn't comment on this, I sat through it and did my best to understand exactly what she was talking about.

Pratchett is OK because his tongue's in his cheek and what he's really writing about (Discworld, world and mirror of worlds) is our world in disguise. Pullman is fine because he sets things in our world or nearly (except when he doesn't, i.e. most of the second and third Dark Materials novels, but apparently that's OK; I didn't manage to get enough clarification as to why). Watership Down on the other hand was hated (I can't comment; I've only seen the film, and thought it was just lame: not worth my time, but certainly not a life-marring experience I'd rail against on numerous occasions in the following years. It seems to have scarred my conversation partner deeply). And Tolkien is detested. Not because of any of the criticisms I'd level at him; simply because he had the "arrogance" to build a world and run an example story or two on it by way of demonstration.

"You can almost hear the geeky little minds ticking over as they decide 'this magic works like this, this species can do this, the limit of this is that'." Said in a rather contemptuous tone.

She's read The Hobbit and gave up a short way into LOTR. (I thrashed the whole way through Hobbit and the trilogy but skipped the appendices and never had any urge to read the prequels.) Other than that, I believe the only SFF she's read has been by the other authors mentioned, barring classics (ie possibly Frankenstein, 20KLUTS, etc).

She finished up by talking about some film she'd seen, set in the real world, in which the premise involved a departure from reality, but nothing was explained because the film itself was all about the reactions of the characters to this event. This was approved of precisely because nothing was explained so there was nothing to "nitpick" (I suspect, didn't have a chance to ask, that a stickling for consistency or realistic fictional rules is also looked down upon).

Now, personally I don't like the attitude that things are inherently superior if they're about Real People or The Real World. I think that's arrogant in itself (edit: and possibly based on a misunderstanding of the point of a large chunk of SFF lit). That aside, the film she described doesn't sound like the sort of film I'd like, because nothing significant in my view seemed to have happened. That's fine and, following my own advice, I simply won't watch any film billed as (for example) "coming-of-age" or "an intimate portrait of" or other helpful warning labels.

But when I said the film sounded boring, which I intended as shorthand for "the sort of thing I'd find boring" because I can't speak perfectly precisely when I'm trying to fit in with a conversation with someone who talks faster than me but nevertheless I hoped it would be perfectly comprehensible that that's what I meant, I got "omg why did you have to say that, that was completely unnecessary, you don't even know anything about it, omg omg".

The hypocrisy hurts. And I was already a little shaken to have sat through someone who has read Mews (which is set in a fictional world, and goes some way to explaining the rules of magic in said world) and said it was great, saying my chosen sphere of writing is arrogant and geeky-in-an-unmitigatedly-pejorative-sense.

I'd also ventured to say that things that completely refuse to explain their premises annoy me, because "it's basically religion; if there's no testable hypothesis, how can you make up your mind?" I should've known better. That won me some contempt. "How ridiculous, it [the film]'s not an experiment!" (Um, yes, it is. Putting Real People characters in a situation and seeing how they react is a thought experiment. Just of a different sort.)

Oh, and then I was accused of being contemptuous of her because I didn't like the sound of some film she liked. This conversation ended with a door being shut in my face. I do not mean this figuratively.

I'm trying to understand the viewpoint that something set on Earth, even if it's warped to the extent of the alternative Earth in Northern Lights, is potentially OK, but something in a fictional setting is damned (at least, if the narrative requires explanation of how the setting works differently from Earth). I'm trying to understand this, because it's so very out of whack with my view.

My view's this, and I tell it to you because I didn't get much chance to express it to her. A barely-fictionalised Real World and a fictional completely alien planet can both be equally ridiculous if used to push a moral. If the entirety of the setup exists to prove that the author's right, then whether your straw men are orcs or record executives (potentially both, in the sort of thing I'd write) and whether your Ethically Compatible Hero saves the day by plucky use of a buttonhole camera or plucky use of the Ancient Macguffin of Kru, I don't think I'll love your writing. 'Course I may like the book if I'm too young to know who the lion is and am enticed by talking dogs, but when I grow up, I'll feel annoyed. Point is, Writer On Board isn't just a fant thing. Nevertheless, still, given the choice of good Real World writing and good fictional world writing, I will take the fictional world. Not only does the Real World grind me down sufficiently all day while I live in it, but fictional worlds have more likelihood of teaching me about those aspects of the real universe that are important to me.

Now I am going off to worry about whether having my villain protagonist agree with much of his author's worldview while being an utter bastard is sufficient recourse to prevent me being tarred with my own 'moralisation' brush. I won't, however, lose too much sleep about whether or not it's arrogant to make up a happy fun playworld. There's no answer to that, except the obvious: don't you urinate in my pool, and I'll stay off your jungle gym. Which, incidentally, somebody built.