There’s an obsession over world-building among a certain kind of SFF nerds. There’s a whole subreddit devoted to it. Much of what makes Tolkien so appealing to a certain kind of nerds is “world-building,” which is to say a bunch of useless made-up trivia. Because this, we should keep in perspective, is all it is. It is not culture, because it doesn’t contribute anything to any culture at large and generally relevant not even to all of SFF nerds, but to a select group: the specific fandom of a specific author or franchise. It is not useful, because it’s–well, a bunch of useless made-up trivia. It is not inherently valuable, because it is useless made-up trivia.
Let’s address this breed of nerds: geeks who identify as geeks with a capital G. They are people who make being a geek an essential part of their identities. It’s all they talk about upon meeting strangers. They make it their personalities. They integrate their fandom into themselves, rather than leaving it what it is: a hobby.
There are things that can be said for secondary worlds being useful for speculative experiments (socio-political, alt-historical, and many others), for imagination, for metaphor and allegory, but the obsession these geeks have with world-building is not so much for the imaginative, the speculative, or even the interesting: it is to do with sheer volume. It’s not that this world or that is unusual or exceptional in its imaginative qualities. It’s not even that all the little details cohere and make for a believable secondary world. No, it’s that there is a fucking lot of it. Ask a diehard Tolkien fan about “world-building.” Prepare to drown in a deluge of mindless praise for Tolkien’s Finnish copypasta, the maps, the letters, the unpublishable writing that gets published anyway because the Tolkien Estate is hungry for cash, the minutiae in the appendices and basically, the verbal vomit of his “legendarium” (and this word will crop up a lot: when you see it, run). There’s nothing much of quality in there, but there sure is a lot of quantity. This love of word vomit is the driving force behind nerds’ love of D&D and its many marketing campaigns–sorry, settings–and similar other franchises designed to sell merchandise. A similar admiration exists for one Ed Greenwood, a gross creepy old man and the creator of Forgotten Realms, not because he is a writer of great craft–he is a producer of the worst sort of verbal diarrhea, not that his fans will admit it–but because he’s churned out a vast amount of material related to his intellectual property, a fair portion of them having to do with fap-fodder (ctrl + f for “breasts”; as a bonus, take a minute out of your day to read this review of one of his self-insert books starring fantasy writer Rod Everlar who sells his fantasy out to a company named Hasbr–uhm, Holdencorp).
There’s nothing wrong per se with world-building, or even an enthusiasm for it, because as I said it could serve many useful purposes. But you’d be kidding yourself if you think the vast majority of the “world-building” that nerds like to do is imaginative or concerned with–say–how an ecosystem that can sustain giant flying lizards might really look like or how language affects thought. It’s not even about how certain kinds of technology appearing earlier than they do in our world might shape the course of history. Rather, the bulk of “world-building” nerds like to do is shit like this. In short it’s mostly gibberish, in long it’s identikit claptrap put together from a patchwork of sources that are themselves derivative. It’s a derivation of a derivation. Yet the practice of world-building is itself held up as inherently valuable, when it patently is not. The average SFF ape is just as liable to praise a book for its strong plot or characterization as for its astounding “world-building,” except who am I kidding? To many SFF fans (the type who identify as a fan, as part of their honest-to-goodness identity and personality) even strong plot or characterization–let alone such lofty a thing as the quality of prose–fades in importance next to that holy grail of nerdism: world-building. Fake geography. Fake “cultures” which are generally thinly-veiled copypasta of existing real-world ones. Terrible, terrible made-up names:
Arskrelthe the Old Guardsword
Elgorn Rhauligan, minor palace servant
Ganrahast, Royal Magician of Cormyr
Jhalikoe
Lord Rothglar Illance
Ill lance, I ask you. Arse-krel-the? The trouble with most people who do this is that they don’t know anything about anything, and their conlangs are often of the Mando’a variant–
Ke jorhaa’ir Mando’a!
Traat’aliit gar besbe’trayc
Ni su’cuyi, gar kyr’adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum
Ke narir haar’ke’gyce rol’eta resol!
It’s just so, so very embarrassing and so, so very obviously vomited up by someone who’s not only not a linguist but who has never even studied a foreign language. Such is the way of the SFF nerd: they learn not by research or education, but by absorbing tidbits from other nerds and pop culture, and in the case of conlangs or fantasy names what they’ve absorbed is “ADD APOSTROPHES TO ALL THE THINGS” and “unpronouncable idiocy” in the vague hope that it’ll come off as magical, majestic and enigmatic.
But these are the symptoms, not the disease. Just what is it that drives so many of these nerds–often from majority cultures, often white westerners–to take up such an abiding passion for useless made-up trivia? It’s, as I have already pointed out, certainly not evidence of an active imagination since the shit they love and the shit they produce is execrable dross.
The answer, it seems to me, is geek culture.
Many white western nerds have never experienced culture beyond one driven by popular media and mass marketing. Star Wars and Star Trek are their uniting forces, late-night D&D sessions their shared rituals, being the first in line to buy BlizzCon tickets–and cramming ten to a hotel room–their bonding experiences. Now of course these people absorb some “culture” in their odyssey toward mindless consumption of utter piss. It’s why there’s such a proliferation of Arthuriana, Norse gods reincarnating in high schools, and steampunk, which speaks for itself (mostly “we want to revel in the nostalgia of imperialism, aren’t corsets awesome?”). But it is all, again, absorbed via pop culture and possibly a glance at wikipedia, not research or even the source material. Geeks read Tolkien and American Gods; they don’t read Old English verses or the Eddas. Geeks watch Merlin, not read Malory. In fact many genre die-hards have a near-pathological fear of the western literary canon: and while, on one hand, there’s nothing wrong with that if said canon isn’t relevant to you anyway–say if you aren’t part of the white western cultural hegemony (in which case rejecting the western canon is only to the good)–it’s on the other remarkable that many members of said hegemony live in such terror of it. SFF readers break into hives at the very idea of reading anything on a respectable academic syllabus, and clamor for a class to study Stephen King instead and write theses on Harry Potter or George R. R. Martin, which they insist must be taken with deathly seriousness because god fucking damn it Harry Potter is universally relevant and Martin sold so many more copies than Hemingway didn’t you know and The Hunger Games is real literature just like The Bluest Eye in fact it’s BETTER literature because it gets kids to read and doesn’t have any of that ICKY RACIAL BAGGAGE!!!
(Please read that in a voice increasingly high-pitched as the genre reader in question loses their shit and works themselves up to a fit of unrestrained testeria. Incidentally, when anyone wants to talk about how awesome it is that Rue is black? Remember that she–a black girl–is fridged explicitly to motivate Katniss, who is so white she could pose in a motivational neo-nazi poster? Yes, she has “olive” skin. Lots of whites do. Katniss’ full-blooded sister Prim is a blue-eyed blonde, as is their mother.)
There’s a love-hate relationship genre fans have with culture–not even culture created, for instance, by women of color or queer people: SFF fans are scared even of canonized works by straight white males, recognized and recommended by other straight white males. Ask any genre-locked manchild if they’d sooner read Patrick Rothfuss or Paradise Lost and you can probably guess the answer. There are nerds who honestly believe Rothfuss is the height not only of the genre (no) but also the very apex of literary prowess (nope) who has at some point produced “beautifully written, exciting prose,” and who’d read George R. R. Martin–pink masts and all–before they’d so much as glance at Pale Fire. At the same time they flock to any part of canon they believe is sympathetic to their limited, narrow, and entirely boring interests–hence, as aforementioned, the fascination with certain parts of mythology, the clinging-for-dear-life of Arthuriana. But in all likelihood they’ll still not read the actual texts, because The Silmarillion is something they consider intellectually challenging reading, the end-all be-all of a difficult text to conquer after which they can ever after lord it over Harry Potter fans, because obviously Tolkien is the master of literature whereas Rowling is, like, mainstream lowest-common-denominator crap, man.
The other symptom of this disease (and frequently they are comorbid) is cultural appropriation. Again, the root cause is geek culture, geek pride (and also the white western hegemony, but that is a given): the tendency to latch onto “cool” stuff without delving any further than that. Liz Williams botches up Chinese mythology grandly and throws in some random bits of Japanese into the mix because hey East Asia is all the same, eh? Bacigalupi can’t even manage to get Thai right on the very first page of his manuscript. This is the plague of foreigners looking in, itself already prevalent among travelogues about Exotic Thirdworldia written by honky animals, but combine the geeky love of superficiality, the thoughtless impulse to seize on “awesome” things that look or sound cool, and what you get will always be a disaster of stereotypes, fucking awful research, and an absolute lack of giving-a-shit that they’re writing about a real culture lived by real people. The exotic and the cool and the neat take priority. Flavors and garnishes for their otherwise vapid “imagination” can be had mix-and-matched while ignoring their context, meaning and value. Isn’t “tsarpunk” cool? And if anyone calls you out for it, no worries; there are other mindless geek drones ready to spring to your defense! “It isn’t really Russia, it’s RAVKA, the made-up world!” Or it is not Thailand, but a futuristic imagining with random anachronisms mashed in (and Paolo Bacigalupi doesn’t even wait for a fan to do this; he preemptively says something in that vein in his own fucking afterword).
It’s like nothing so much as an instant fascination with lightsabers because lightsabers are shiny and loud, but instead of some shiny loud fictional thing geeks expand to matters that aren’t so fictional. When they’re done with the Tudors or Arthuriana or steampunk (and sometimes even when they are’t done; see comorbidity and Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone) they discover the rest of the world exists, and proceed to rifle through it looking for things that are as shiny as lightsabers in blithe regard of anything else.
It’s a desperate bid to seem less boring, an effort born of a realization deep down that if you make “I like these movies and those books” your entire personality what you will be is absolutely fucking dull. Geeks who make “geek” their personality rather than merely a hobby, who take pride in belonging to SFF fandom, who take pride in the act of mindless consumption and mindless replication seize onto bits of culture in a desperate bid to become less banal. They vomit up map after map, PDF after PDF of imaginary histories, and by both their simple existence and their quantity they want you to believe this dribble is inherently worth something. They are “proud” of the apostrophe-ridden conlang they made up. They are “proud” of watery excrement they cobbled together by looking up furred hats and vodka on wikipedia. Because this is all they have to take pride in.
PS. Before anyone reading this starts pitching a fit: yes, yes, there are secondary worlds which are interesting and imaginative, I’ve covered that. No, not all cultural appropriation happens because you’re a geek and some happens even when some dumb outsider has done tons of research. Blah blah blah. I’m sure someone will care about your outrage, how about your D&D group?
Emil Söderman
/ July 7, 2012I do kind of find worldbuilding interesting: Seeing how a world is built up and functions depending on how it’s created, doing “what-if social structures were like this how would that create…” Mind, I’m a historian not a lit. or biology person, so my kind of interests tends to veer in that direction. (Tolkien’s world-building never really impressed me in that way, and I’m not particularly interested in biology/ecosystems except insofar as they affect human societies)
It’s incredibly simplified and well… stupid of course. Partially because a world-builder gets to set his or her own rules and not worry about all the messy complexity that makes doing history or poli-sci actually y’know… DIFFICULT. (and yet everyone seems to think they can do history *sigh*) but there is a kind of pleasure in operating with these kinds of things.
So yeah, worldbuilding has no inherent value. But that’s kind of a given. What’s interesting is that you seem to imply that literature in other ways DOES have inherent value. (What would that be? I’m genuinely curious. I could see it being judged on positive social impact, but the number of books that can be said to have had that kind of impact is very small) What inherent value is there in characterization, or, especially, prose? I suppose the former has some value as in teaching people to empathize with others, and the latter is at least useful as a teaching aid for creating better/more beautiful language in your own writings, but those are pretty weak benefits itself I’d think.
braak
/ July 7, 2012I don’t know, I’d argue that empathy and compassion are basically the most important characteristics that can be fostered in human beings, which would put strong characterization (and by extension, strong storytelling, since in fiction there’s no such thing as character without plot) right at the top of the list of “things with inherent value.”
emilytherabidreader
/ July 8, 2012She said at one point that there are some valuable uses of world building, and the impression I got was when the world is built such that it supports the plot in its effort to actually do or say something. Parts of the world (and its history or whatever) haven’t been created just for the supposed value of the world-building independent of its relation to the story. One of the examples was, based on the brief glance, the impact someone had on an entire language. And that was going to be important to the plot of the book. It’s valuable in that instance, but if that was a part of the planet that we saw once in passing and didn’t really have much to do with the language of – what’s the point of knowing that?
And once you start to value the world to the extent of some of the people I’ve seen and Lord of the Rings, where is the importance of the actual story? I’ve always had a hard time with LotR, and never got through any of the auxiliary books and always felt like a terrible fantasy bookworm/geek (although never capitalized…but I went to an engineering research university) because everyone worth their salt LOVED those books and their world. But there was no story!
So, I think, at least, that a world can absolutely be fascinating, but it’s got to have some kind of connection to the story. Some reason for being there, some reason for being built.
braak
/ July 7, 2012Dang. I kind of like conlangs, insofar as they’re a sort of fun game to play (and considering the many different ways I could be wasting my time, “making up fake languages” is probably one of the least harmful), but on the real, Karen Traviss makes up “Mando’a” and says there’s enough to keep people busy for years? A language with only one tense, two verb conjugations, no noun cases, a regular SVO word order? There’s one diacritical mark that apparently indicates a glottal stop, but she routinely deploys it after consonants where…how is that even supposed to work? Is it a glottal T? Is that a glottal R? Not to mention the fact that all of the letters just correspond to English letters with all the same English sounds, despite the fact that even a cursory examination of just the languages of Western Europe (which even a badly-educated American might reasonably expected to have some familiarity with) reveals dozens of sounds that English doesn’t bother with but which are in regular use in say, German or Spanish.
I have to admit that I don’t get why, if you don’t think that languages are actually fun you’d bother making a simplified version of English with a bunch of fake letters; it makes it just seem like you weren’t really interested in doing the work.
lexaber
/ July 9, 2012In theory, I like the idea of con-langs, BUUUT… I often feel like the majority of con-lang creators are unaware that there’s more to languages than direct 1-1 correspondence between words.
If they’re beyond that, I usually feel as though they haven’t gone beyond a basic survey course understanding of linguistics (if that). It’s one thing to know what SOV or SVO word orders are and another thing entirely to understand what they mean in the context of an entire language.
They also tend to focus on the wrong aspects of con-lang construction for a story. Unless they’re planning to make their readership suffer through bad poetry that’s been “translated” from English to their con-lang, making up grammar is a largely pointless exercise. Even a basic understanding of how phonology works in languages is so much more useful — knowing how human languages put sounds together can at least reduce the number of bullshit fantasy names.
But instead you get weird situations in which the author is throwing glottal stops around without ever speaking, learning, or listening to a language in which glottal stops are a frequent consonant.
braak
/ July 9, 2012Well, if the argument is “I like con-langs in theory, but in practice most people do them badly,” I think that I agree with it, and also move to have it applied to basically everything that’s ever included in genre fiction.
There’s so much about language that’s interesting though, and of all the things, you’d expect writers to be the most interested in it. (You know what you don’t see a lot of in conlangs? The recognition that differently-shaped mouths — mouths with tusks or with bird-beaks or something — would have a different set of available phonemes, and probably just a different spectrum of likely phonemes. Like, if you’ve got a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth, isn’t your language going to probably lean away from dental fricatives?)
saajanpatel
/ July 9, 2012This reminds me when my sister and I would play RTS games. We’d spend hours with little to no strategy, because ultimately we liked seeing the armies of monsters in the game.
It seems like people are choosing to indulge in world building and conlanging at the amateur level. Is this different than someone who plays sports/chess/whatever for fun without a desire to push themselves to a professional level?
braak
/ July 10, 2012No, man, not principally, but a good sign of someone who’s got a healthy recognition of his hobbies and his relationship to them is that he can tell the difference between playing a pickup game of softball at the park on a weekend and playing baseball in the Major Leagues.
Thinking that it’s fun to play around with Mano’a and write little messages to your friends in its code isn’t even a thing remotely similar to spending even a small amount of time thinking about and understanding language, and if Karen Traviss is going to say, “Here’s a language that I invented and it is going to keep you busy for years”, and her fans are going to go along with that.
Well, look, you don’t have to like good food if you don’t want to. You can like whatever you want. You don’t have to only like things that are good; but it is kind of a problem if you can’t tell the difference.
saajanpatel
/ July 10, 2012@Brak: You don’t have to only like things that are good; but it is kind of a problem if you can’t tell the difference.
Oh, I’m not arguing that isn’t a problem, though it isn’t a problem in the way that perpetuation of prejudice is a problem.
It’s far less of a problem, IMO, than innumeracy or people not truly appreciating what goes into good engineering (software and physical) or good scientific research.
braak
/ July 12, 2012I don’t disagree, but I also am the first person in line to say that there’s a catastrophic failure in the US public school system to adequately teach students to interpret statistics.
(Though I do think that there’s a bit of a diminishing returns; I feel like I’m confident enough with my ability to read statistics and understand engineering that I don’t necessarily need to spend all of my remaining time studying the subjects in order to be both improved and a responsible citizen of a democratic society.)
Koby Itzhak
/ July 7, 2012You make very good points, and I agree with you that there is a problem in seeing it as a culture plus the appropriation. It’s actually really scary, because these people will become more defensive of these fictional worlds than their own countries – in fact, they may have no problem claiming their country (the real one, you know, which has complex real world problems?) is messed up, but that the fictional world is perfect. It’s even worse in culture appropriation, when they go ‘Of course everything Japanese is cool, because it was so amazing in [insert author's name here]‘ and totally disregard the fact that even if this was portrayal was accurate, it totally dodges the problems and history of the country.
On the other hand, I do think world-building is interesting when done right. And I liked Tolkien’s history, while being aware of the religious influence, racism, sexism and elitism. I think he actually created some things of quality, especially if you read the stuff not published during his lifetime as such (that is, it was unpublished because it was not yet fit to be published, and indicates a direction rather than solid worldbuilding). What I don’t like is that people took his example to mean that any worldbuilding (such as the others you mention) is a great idea of high quality, despite their skills at it being shit. And that if they base something on mythology or create a language it’s quality, because ‘Tolkien did it’. Fuck no. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon studies and English Language and Literature, and before he published Lord of the Rings he worked on stuff like Beowulf, Sir Gawain, A Middle English Vocabulary, Peral and Sir Orfeo, some of these becoming academic standard works for several decades. After you do that, then you can say you mythological influences and created language was done properly, and then it might actually be of quality.
Gourmet Neurovore
/ July 7, 2012See also, most of TV Tropes’s literary output.
phnxprmnt021
/ July 8, 2012TV Tropes has literary output?
Gourmet Neurovore
/ July 8, 2012OK, ‘literary’ may be an overstatement, but they do have a creative writing section that is even more prone to falling into the above problems than usual for Internet geekery.
Whilst they do often fall into the classic ‘geeks making fun of other geeks without sufficient self-awareness’ trap, Something Awful’s TV Tropes mock threads are quite a good resource on this.
Emil Söderman
/ July 7, 2012” don’t know, I’d argue that empathy and compassion are basically the most important characteristics that can be fostered in human beings, which would put strong characterization (and by extension, strong storytelling, since in fiction there’s no such thing as character without plot) right at the top of the list of “things with inherent value.””
I don’t neccessarily disagree with the value judgement per se, however I think there’s a big question mark whether or not fiction actually helps with compassion/empathy or not.
” in fact, they may have no problem claiming their country (the real one, you know, which has complex real world problems?) is messed up, but that the fictional world is perfect.”
Didn’t you just explain why this is the case? The real-world has to deal with complexities that fiction doesen’t. In fiction the author is in some sense a god, (which via andros-arachne makes the author ultimately responsible for whatever said author puts out…) The real world doesen’t work that way. It’s full of complexities, contradictions, historical baggage, etc. that makes any kind of sweeping judgement at best problematic and at worst completely and utterly wrong. (And the sucky thing is, we still have to judge, or we are moral cowards)
Arachne Jericho
/ July 8, 2012Fiction is how most people learn about the world: whether it’s from books or from games or from visual media or, frankly, from each other. It probably goes back to ancient times when stories were how people vicariously learned about other’s experiences—which tie back into social learnings and suchlike; so yes, compassion is learned through stories.
People generally love a good story over dry information dumps.
I can’t recall where I found the study (sigh) but apparently the brain doesn’t make a distinction between fiction and reality when you’re reading something that immerses you. Books are literally distilled experiences, whether non-fiction or fiction, and as we partake of them our brains even change.
Basically, whether it’s non-fiction or fiction, we learn when we read narratives. Fiction thus has the capability of being a great teaching tool, but sadly 90% or more of everything is crap. (I don’t think that narrative non-fiction is necessarily in a better boat.)
tigerpetals
/ July 8, 2012I saw it here: http://bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/13/11665205-you-are-what-you-read-study-suggests
braak
/ July 8, 2012I obviously can’t prove it right now and under these circumstances, but I’m willing to bet if we seriously asked the question of how fiction teaches us to empathize with others, we’d find it’s pretty influential.
Darius Wilkins
/ July 8, 2012Just an odd thanks for the link to the Liz Williams criticism. I liked the series very much, but I’m always interested in reading what the authors got wrong or how the perspective is skewed. The comment thread is deeply awesome (even though I chuckled at the Pons rec).
Contributing more directly to the thread, I have had similar issues with world building, especially how the perspective scrolls around like a travel guide or the Indiana Jones map sequences in the narration. I rarely ever do much more than a scroll-by whenever lame geography is mentioned. Exception to the rule seems to be really focused on books where sailing is a major feature, because the plot setting has compelling reasons to be where it is, in the world. For instance, Diana Pharoah Francis Crosspointe novel. Another example is Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series, especially in the third book. Geography can be a thrilling addition to tension in many ways that very few authors take advantage of, I think not least because few readers really care, and it’s much harder to write well without datadumping.
What’s definitely rarer than good geography is good linguistics. It’s really quite odd, when you really think about it, just how rare a readable and narratively important alternative elocution is in speculative fiction, rather than hard work for you to read while entertaining folks that don’t really care about much other than those people speak funny (and sounding out ever FX in their heads as they mentally speak the words). I mean, really, think about Yoda…Now, think about what a real writer like Samuel Clemons does with the people in Huckleberry Finn. Even if it’s not based on any actual dialect, it really should not be hard to do this in speculative fiction, and in a way, certain classes of science fiction, the most notable being 1984, brings this off spectacularly in terms of the social infrastructure, if not actual distinct social groups, whatever Goldstein might be. If it’s not bureaucratease, authors seem to have trouble stuffing any dialects and turn of phrase into any perspectives on that character’s umvelt, beyond the most obvious indicators of class or stranger or something like that…
acrackedmoon
/ July 8, 2012That’s what they generally are, probably because a lot of SFF writers so very badly want their books to be films and fantasize about film adaptations. Zoom out the camera and cinematically scroll, etc. Especially bad in prologues.
saajanpatel
/ July 8, 2012Outside of the perpetuation of stereotypes and faux-knowledge (due to things like fake-China & fake-Islam)….I guess I don’t see the problem. Is this any different than people who follow band tours religiously or even obsess over some time period in history?
What definition of culture are we working with? Because everyone has to have some culture around them, even White Westerners. These might be pocket cultures divided by region that you may not be aware of because you’re isolated from them, but I can’t see how they simply don’t exist?
I suspect the ability to connect over the Prey 2 trailer may actually help transcend some of the cultural barriers between people – I know I’ve used such things to connect to people of all sorts of religions/races as an ice-breaking method. As a culture the track record for Geek Culture seems better than most – no colonization, no caste system, no terrorism. Even if it perpetuates prejudice, it’ll likely never catch up to most cultures born from history.
To call it a disease seems to express too much concern over a non-problem?
Inverarity
/ July 8, 2012Hmm. I think you connect your points a little weakly here. Worldbuilding and conlanging is just another intellectual exercise, no more inherently useless or appropriative than any other mental activity (writing fiction, playing go, etc.). To the degree that it’s a “geek” thing, okay, it’s really popular in certain fandom circles with a high neckbeard quotient, but then, so are anime, gaming, costume-making, computer programming, and learning Japanese, all things that are likewise no more inherently offensive or problematic than anything else people do.
Sorry, I’m just… not seeing the point? “Neckbeards love this shit and often do it badly” just seems like a really broad qualification for problemitizing something.
the twisted spinster
/ July 8, 2012I think you’re actually missing the point. ACM already pointed out how this obsession over fantasy worlds and languages is often used as a substitute for reading the literature that most popular fantasy worlds were inspired by, and that the fake languages are done so badly by most people because they have little to no knowledge of languages and how they actually work. Tolkien at least was a philologist and someone who had studied the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian works that inspired his fantasy world and literature; few of his modern fanboys have dared to take a crack at a translation of Beowulf or any other of the background works, and as for studying another language, forget it — they can barely speak their own language if their internet discourse and tastes in reading are any indication.
Something like learning Japanese is in no way comparable to “learning” a conlang.One is learning a language a group of humans living on your own planet speaks so you can speak to them too; the other is futzing around with your fun hobby. The problem isn’t that useless hobbies are useless and we should all drop them and sit in towers reading the Elder Edda in the original Old Norse; the point is we shouldn’t make a hobby more than it is, and that popcult trash is no substitute for real culture.
There’s another side to this issue which is what happens when large groups of guys get interested in anything that they formerly disdained. What I am speaking of are “girl things” or “stuff women do” or “crafts” or whatever phrase men use to describe things women do that aren’t impressive and flashy and thus not “manly.” Take “crafts” like cooking, sewing, quilting. Women cook, sew, make quilts. Men are Professional Chefs, Fashion Designers, and some time last year there was an article I read on how men are getting into quilting because some dude decided that he could use Math! and Engineering Principles! to “build” quilts, and there was this (probably now called) Professional Quilter who had an exhibit (and whose quilts IIRC were boring, though I’m not really into quilts at all, they bore me). But anyway, there was all this burbling about how now that men were into quilting, it was suddenly important and a Proper Art Form That Men Can Do. I swear to Dog I read this on the internet in the 21st century. But that’s the attitude. Women just do a thing, until suddenly a Man comes along with his important Importance, and gets interested in doing it too, and then suddenly the thing has rules and titles and a hierarchy and special in-group privilege complete with decoder rings and hats.
What I’m getting at is that people used to think of fantasy as “fairy tales” about princes rescuing princesses in castles and killing dragons to protect the Fair Maiden and all that jazz — and as such it was for women and children only. Real Men did not read such much less obsess over it. They read Hemingway, if they read at all. But then Tolkien, and it was authorized. Yes this took a long time and for quite some while only hippies and women cared about Middle Earth. But these things go in cycles. The problem is they are such shallow cycles now. This year Rothfuss. Next year some Heinlein imitator. It’s not exactly Neo-Classicism vs. Romanticism, and the misogyny is if anything worse.
Inverarity
/ July 8, 2012Well, everything involved in fandom and a preoccupation with popular fantasy lends itself to obsession by people who have no appreciation for real culture and languages. I just don’t see how worldbuilding and conlanging is different. Yes, if geeks obsess over it and make it part of their identity while not bothering to do any hard academic study or intellectual work, then it’s embarrassing and it sucks, but…?
I mentioned learning Japanese specifically because, while learning another language is obviously a good and useful and even admirable thing in general, there are of course tons of weeaboos who “learn Japanese” to the extent that they can follow the dialog in their favorite anime and spout a bit of slang, but not actually carry on an adult conversation or read a Japanese newspaper.
I don’t think your interpretation of Tolkien in the history of fantasy and literature in general is correct. People who read fantasy (mostly men) were reading Robert E. Howard and Fritz Lieber and Jack Vance decades before Tolkien; Tolkien didn’t turn “fairy tales” into manly Swords & Sorcery. “Serious” readers were as likely to scorn Tolkien as any other fantasy. I’m not saying there isn’t a gender divide now (“girly” YA vs. “serious” Epic Fantasy), but I just don’t see Tolkien as representing “guys suddenly becoming interested in what women do” and thus legitimizing fantasy.
the twisted spinster
/ July 8, 2012I realize I did leave out the “respectability” angle which is important when it comes to talking about anything Westerners engaged in. Reading pulp fantasy (which is what the stories by writers like Howard, Lieber, and Vance were considered) was not seen as a respectable activity for men until the success of Star Wars, when Middle America discovered an SFF story that didn’t scare or confuse them (because it was your basic fairy tale Western dolled up in space ships). But Real Men — that is, men who wanted to be known by society as adult, mature, successful, masculine, etc. — didn’t go about bragging about their collection of Sword & Sorcery paperbacks, they bragged about their library of leather-bound Western classics, or is more common in the US, their cars, guns, fine cigars, boats, etc.
I suppose I should take a break and let you know I’m nearly fifty years old and have some perspective on this. Also I’m American and since the overwhelming bulk of fand00ds into these fantasy forums and conlang things seem to be American these days (we love group activities over here in the Land of the Free Individual) that’s the context I’m using.
Reading has also been traditionally considered an upper-class activity by Americans, and also a somewhat effeminate pastime unless you can “legitimately” prove you “have” to read because of your job (you’re a teacher, or something). But Real Men generally aren’t supposed to read “for pleasure” — they have to have some sort of activity surrounding it “legitimizing” it as something that means they’re successful, masculine, so on. On a lower level, when someone sees them reading a pulp fantasy paperback, they can show the Frazetta cover with the barely clad huge-boobed babe and the muscly armored dude and thus prove they weren’t reading no Disney princess crap. Later on, as SFF got more popular, the need for respectability and status to be attached to the hobby grew. (It’s not enough that your formerly sneered-at hobby be more popular: it has to also be admired by people with taste and discernment.) Thus Tolkien, whose books had always had sort of a cultish following (“of women and hippies” according to the general public), but now could be used as a sort of springboard for fantasy to move it up into higher planes of respectability. It wasn’t the books themselves per se, but the fact that the author was everything middle- to upper-middle-class Americans in the late Twentieth century admired as almost godlike: he was a British Oxford don.
So anyway, I didn’t say that Tolkien “turned fairy tales into manly Sword & Sorcery” but that his fans used him to legitimize their obsession with pulp fantasy: “Don’t laugh at my Conan the Barbarian paperbacks because Tolkien!!” And also guys could feel more secure in reading fantasy now because Important, uppercrust successful dudes wrote it. Obviously I have simplified what is a very complex issue, and haven’t really touched on the whole thing about where non-respectability feeds into fears of lost masculinity and rejection of anything seen as “feminine,” but this comment is already too long.
Inverarity
/ July 8, 2012Well, my context is similar to yours. Having been a bookish, nerdy kid myself (and I’m not much younger than you) the American anti-intellectual vein you refer to certainly contributed to my own participation in “geek pride” back before geek pride was a thing. Now I’ve got more perspective and awareness (I hope), but only because I am older.
So, I guess I can see Tolkien as “legitimizing fantasy” in that respect, but I’m still not seeing the connection between the “men invading women’s spaces” argument and the “nerd insecurity” argument. And I’m still a little baffled by the “worldbuilding is a disease of geek pride” argument. I think I’ve established that I have no problem with calling out fanboys and neckbeards, and that I do not take offense at ACM trashing things I happen to like. (Full disclosure: I am a linguist and have done a bit of conlanging.) But the argument that anything geeks like is therefore poisonous and suspect just seems lacking in depth to me. It’s kind of like saying wanting to learn to draw is misogynistic because lots of guys want to learn to draw big-breasted nekkid chicks.
acrackedmoon
/ July 8, 2012In very many respects though, geeks are some of the most anti-intellectual ones around. It’s why they hate the literary canon; they believe “analyzing just ruins everything” and “it’s just entertainment,” etc.
Not the one I made, though.
Gourmet Neurovore
/ July 8, 2012OK, now I’ve got to ask – ACM, have you been reading TV Tropes?
Because a whole lot of this is sounding really, horribly familiar.
acrackedmoon
/ July 8, 2012I don’t read TV Tropes other than the tropes pages.
Gourmet Neurovore
/ July 9, 2012Fair enough. It’s just that you may or may not have noticed that the trope descriptions at the tops of those pages can be a bit sparse and short of detail. This is because the site actively ghettoises analysis – discussions of how and why a trope is used are segregated to the barely-used Analysis namespace, in favour of long, detailed lists of examples on the main page. There’s a whole lot of ‘this happens’, and not much of ‘why this happens’, because the site’s administration actively discourages it.
Similarly, the site enforces a ‘no negativity’ rule – “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it.” This means that articles have to remain either neutral or positive, regardless of the merits of a work or trope, and has resulted in a considerable amount of extra-site mockery, several ad-suspensions from Google, and a remarkable number of pages being locked or outright deleted (including, briefly, the entire Rape Tropes index) because they were getting way too creepy and the site’s administration couldn’t be bothered to keep them clean any more.
In short, TV Tropes is quite astonishingly appropriate to this discussion.
Emil Söderman
/ July 8, 2012I’m not sure, but I think ACM meant was that Geek pride was a disease, and worldbuilding one of it’s symptoms?
“Also I’m American and since the overwhelming bulk of fand00ds into these fantasy forums and conlang things seem to be American these days (we love group activities over here in the Land of the Free Individual) that’s the context I’m using.”
I’m honestly not so certain. Most of the communities I’ve been/seen seems to have americans as a a plurality, and by far the largest group, but not the majority. (the anglosphere as a whole probably makes up a majority though)
I think there is an assumption that because people are communicating in english and unless specifically stated otherwise they’re americans, and I’m not sure that’s borne out.
I did a course in lit. (it’s actual title was “litteraturvetenskap” which roughly, but not exactly, translates to “literary science”) and one of the things that stood out was how unashamedly normative it was. The textbook could literally say about an author that “His later books aren’t any good” or “While he was popular at the time he didn’t produce anything of value.” It was also pretty schockingly teleological: Everything leads up to literary modernism and post-modernism which is the be-all-end-all of all good literature. It’s certainly a very different way of looking at the world than historians do (where every source is a source, it may be more or less reliable or more or less useful for what you’re trying to do, but there’s no inherent valuation going on)
That said I do find it problematic to extol the virtues of the canon, if only because the kind of people who tends to do that normally tends to be horrible people. (IE: Generally the worst kind of reactionaries, at best the kind of doddering nostalgics like Tolkien and at worst raging fascists) which is a bit of an association fallacy, I know, but still…
I think Plato is to blame somewhere (then again, I blame Plato for most things, he was a bit of a dick) this notion that what is aestethically pleasing is also somehow *morally* superior. (let’s put the entire subjectivity of aestethics as an aside) I suppose it’s the halo-effect (that we tend to ascribe positive traits to people who possess other positive traits) applied to books? If a book is well-written it MUST be politically progressive, and if it is badly written it most also be politically repellent? There’s this weird conflation of aestethics and ethics. (not just in geek-circles but in general, and this is an argument I think in favour of criticizing books for their political content and NOT just accepting their aestethics, funnily enough)
That said, I don’t think “geek culture” is new, or even that *interesting* (except perhaps insofar as it has used internet as a vehicle for expansion) these kinds of minor social cultures (following sports clubs, some kind of hobby etc.) has been around for oh… At least a century in relatively consistent forms. (and they’re probably much older than that) These kinds of associations, loosely knit groups, networks, and just individuals occasionally coming into contact (and forming cliques) is one that has repeated itself for a long time. Sometimes these kinds of organizations gets into more organized politics in some sense, sometimes more explicitly political organizations fall out of it. And yes, a lot of people build their identities around these things, it happens, and there are reasons for why it is attractive to do so (since at least it’s something that you presumably like and have a choice in participating: Unlike the job you’re forced to take in order to make ends meet, or the country you’re born into and in any case so is everyone else you know, so it’s not a very useful marker of identification in the first place)
Politically I don’t even think they are bad, these kinds of organizations functions as a bit of a school of practical politics: It gives people experience in argumentation, some degree of organizational skill (how to set up a meeting etc.) IE: Stuff that can be useful. (which isn’t to say everyone will use their newfound powers for the greater good, indeed it would surprise me of more than a tiny, tiny % did, but at least it’s something)
acrackedmoon
/ July 8, 2012Geeks do not run away screaming from the canon because it is reactionary, full of horrible people, etc. After all, the shit they consume and aspire to produce is just as reactionary, horrible, and bullshit (and often more terribly written). They run away screaming because they nurse this puerile persecution complex that they’ve been hard done by by the “mainstream,” of which academia they perceive to be a part–”ivory-tower elitists” who just won’t take Star Wars tie-ins or Patrick Rothfuss seriously and thus contribute to the dreaded oppression of geekdom. You might have a point if geeks reject the canon in favor of politically progressive works or whatever, but they patently don’t.
saajanpatel
/ July 9, 2012Great post Emil.
Yeah, I have hard time following (or believing) in the moral value of literature – it seems to be a Western conceit? There’s some talk about Bollywood culture is silly and worthless, but it only seems to crop up rarely and from what I’ve seen is usually due to Western influence. (At least that’s my Indian-American perspective. Perhaps the residential Indians could shed more light on this.)
In math, nobody I’ve met really judges people for using calculus without knowing the rigorous proofs that serve as its foundations. It seems odd literature has the conceit that advanced absorption of someone else’s material is a moral good, akin to attending religious services, when to me it’s appreciation is one more hobby specialization among many. At least in math you have to be able to write proofs as well, it isn’t a passive activity like reading.
I could see an argument for being able to understand what subset of characteristics defines literature and recognizing where it is lacking in any particular work, but again this seems to be a skill that isn’t any more or less important than other hobbies including making up languages or sports trivia or whatever.
In the past I’ve thought there was something to be said for artistic appreciation, a sense of “good taste”, but increasingly that seems more and more doubtful.
Emil Söderman
/ July 8, 2012“Geeks do not run away screaming from the canon because it is reactionary, full of horrible people, etc.”
Which wasn’t my point at all.
“fter all, the shit they consume and aspire to produce is just as reactionary, horrible, and bullshit (and often more terribly written). They run away screaming because they nurse this puerile persecution complex that they’ve been hard done by by the “mainstream,” of which academia they perceive to be a part–”ivory-tower elitists” who just won’t take Star Wars tie-ins or Patrick Rothfuss seriously and thus contribute to the dreaded oppression of geekdom. You might have a point if geeks reject the canon in favor of politically progressive works or whatever, but they patently don’t.”
I think that pop-culture needs to be taken seriously precisely because it is often reactionary. That’s why it needs to be analyzed, dissected and discussed. And in a lot of ways I think that kind of pop-culture analysis is *more* important and relevant for academics than yet another essay on 19th century post-romantics who no one except specialists read about. (much as I enjoy reading about obscure stuff)
I think there’s a kind of split within the various lit-disciplines in about what exactly they’re supposed to do. Codify a canon? Act as arbiters of aesthetic taste? Study the social impact of literature? The patterns of reading etc.? I think the former two are rather irrelevant, honestly. Aestethics are always ultimately subjective (or at least bound to a particular cultural milieu) the social impact of literature.
Which isn’t to say that there isn’t room for studying “high culture”, after all, it often has way more of an impact than pop-culture. (and often of course they’re not hermetically sealed off from each other)
What I object to is the conflating of aestethics and ethics: (which is not to say that there isn’t such a thing as a political aesthetic, or that you can dismiss a problematic work because “it’s just art”, that’s not what I’m saying at all) between morality and taste, politics and prose. A work that carries problematic social themes is just inherently a Worse Thing than one that is merely badly written but largely inoffensive. A badly written work is just a badly written work, it is not itself a sin against nature and humanity.
acrackedmoon
/ July 9, 2012You know which blog you’re reading, right? Is there some kind of weird disconnect here? Who are you even arguing with or preaching to? Did you… take a wrong turn?
Geeks’ horror of analysis is of all analyses. Especially political ones applied to their manchild toys: it’s why they keep quoting that dumb Tolkien letter where he hisses NO ALLEGORY PLZ because they don’t understand authorial intention is often worth fuck-all, and they see analyses other than of useless trivia (DO BALROGS HAVE WINGS???? HOW DO I QUENYA) as a product or reflection of “ivory-tower elitism,” of the same nightmare they feel they had to suffer through in high school English classes because close reading of language, metaphor and politics breaks their worthless little minds.
Alasdair Murray
/ July 9, 2012A couple of thoughts:
On worldbuilding: indeed, there’s ‘nothing wrong with worldbuilding per se’. But I have to wonder how different the world would be if all the time geeks spent creating their own fictional worlds, and studying each other’s, was spent learning about other *real-world* cultures instead. No fictional world, not even Tolkien’s, can possibly have as much depth or be as rewarding an object of study as any place in the real world. But for whatever reason, most of us prefer to read about the former and so are dreadfully ignorant about the latter. And that leads, as this blog demonstrates, to embarassing consequences when ill-informed Westerners try to write stories set in foreign countries (or their fantasy duplicates).
On the Western canon: I recognise in this post something I’ve seen in other writer’s blogs: a horrified/depressed realisation that if you’re at all familiar with the major works in Western literature, you’re automatically part of the elite, the literary 1%. If you’ve *ever* read one of those Great Works of your own free will (rather than as a school assignment), you’re better read than probably 99% of people in Western societies. Heck, a large percentage of people don’t read anything at all, and not necessarily because they’re illiterate, just because they don’t care. I’m not sure if it’s possible to change this: necessarily, due to its complexity and the effort required to appreciate it, great literature will never appeal to the majority of people. But that doesn’t make the situation any less depressing for the few who do read it and know what the rest are missing.
(To pre-empt accusations of snobbery: I’m putting myself in the 99% on this one. I’ve read virtually none of the Western canon, and I really should do something about it. But like most people, I prefer my reading to be more like lazy entertainment than work, and whenever I look at something serious the cheesy SF novel next to it always tempts me instead…)
acrackedmoon
/ July 9, 2012I think questioning the value of the canon is healthy and even necessary, not least because it’s imperialistic and very white/straight/male in the main–but so’s geek stuff, which performs much the same functions in that regard (albeit with somewhat less gatekeeping, in the sense that works by women/POC/queer people are likelier to get recognized among geeks before they are entered into the literary canon: which is sad, considering how predominantly neckbeard SFF continues to be… but having said all that, I get the impression litfic actually has a greater share of recognition for minority writers than SFF. “Litfic” not being the same thing as the canon). And of course if you’re not from the west, the canon’s not of much value to you anyway, in which case ignoring it–and the cachet of erudition it carries–is both a political gesture (rejecting cultural imperialism) and a practical one. As well, there’s much in the western canon that’s unmeritorious dross.
Much of SFF though is based in things that are part of the canon anyway (and it’s culturally informed by it), inheriting all the problematic politics but not much else due to the photocopy-of-a-photocopy nature.
Alasdair Murray
/ July 9, 2012A little expansion on that last thought: it would be easy to blame the Internet, with its endless sources of distraction, for turning people away from reading serious literature. But while it certainly doesn’t help, I think it would be wrong to do so; 50 years ago people were saying the same things about comics and television. Even back in the 19th century there was plenty of low-quality mass-market literature, like the penny dreadfuls, which most people were reading rather than the great novels which survive to this day.
There have always been ‘distractions’. No, I think perhaps what’s different these days is geek culture (or popular culture more broadly), which explicitly declares the classics ‘uncool’ and provides a vast alternative canon which it encourages people to explore instead. And these days you can spend all your time doing that, and talking to other people equally obsessed with it, and never read anything else. OK, I’m not saying “If there were no Star Trek or Superman, we’d all be reading James Joyce”, but there is some sort of link, isn’t there?
saajanpatel
/ July 9, 2012Why would the world be better if people read “real literature”? The value placed on this seems like a very Western phenomenon. A very “white” thing, if you will. ;-)
The world would arguably be better if most of us devoted free time to statistics/finance/economics/logic/politics/scripture/history, all read in lieu of fiction. I’m not convinced, but IMO it’s probably a better argument than the suggestion that some canon would make the world better.
The distractions from literature are, I suspect, real life. Outside non-STEM academia and the internet, this is considered a non-issue or at best a largely irrelevant one. If anything, it’s the more modern stuff that has the better chance of being progressive – why the positive reviews and critiques done here are so valuable.
Alasdair Murray
/ July 9, 2012Yeah, I suppose so. I was sounding a bit like a typical old white conservative there, lamenting that no one reads Latin any more. Just to be clear, I do agree with ACM that the ‘Western canon’ is deeply flawed, and should be criticised for its racist, sexist, colonialist etc tendencies. But I was just thinking how frustrating it must be to understand that these books aren’t Meant For You, yet you’re much better acquainted with them than the white people who they’re actually meant for. A bit like how atheists sometimes discover they know the Bible better than Christians do.
Maybe we should welcome the decline of the canon, as to an extent it’s been caused by the gradual rise in non-white/non-Western/queer literature. But the problem there is that I don’t think that stuff is actually being read by the people who need to read it most (i.e. straight white guys). It’s always struck me as somewhat ironic, for instance, how postcolonial literature seems to be mainly read by the descendants of the colonised, and rarely if ever by the descendants of the colonisers – but if anyone *should* be reading it, it’s us.
And there’s privilege again: as straight white guys, we simply don’t have to engage with the gradual shift in literature from the all-white canon of the past to the more multicultural, feminist, queer literature of today. We can go read fantasy stories about straight white guys in space instead.
Inverarity
/ July 9, 2012Eh, you can substitute “playing computer games,” “watching anime,” or “reading SFF” (or heck, “reading”) in the above statement and make a similar argument. There is always something “more valuable” people could be doing, and the world would be a very different place if we all spent more time and money trying to improve it than indulging in our hobbies.
I wouldn’t say that everything considered “real literature” is of enduring value, but I do think there is value in a lot of those books, a value that people who want to stay locked in a particular genre (whether it be SFF or romance or whatever) disdain because it requires thinking and thoughtful engagement with what they’re reading, and because it includes a lot of prose that isn’t easily accessible.
The point about it being largely a Western canon is true, but I think rather than throwing out the notion of reading great literature because it’s good for intellectual and cultural and historical awareness, we should add more non-Western literature into the canon, and not just in specialized grad school courses like “Survey of Southeast Asian Literature.”
Emil Söderman
/ July 9, 2012“You know which blog you’re reading, right? Is there some kind of weird disconnect here? Who are you even arguing with or preaching to? Did you… take a wrong turn?”
You just appeared to claim that wanting to analyze King academically was a bad thing, somehow. I was kind of confused by that given well, this blog.
“On the Western canon: I recognise in this post something I’ve seen in other writer’s blogs: a horrified/depressed realisation that if you’re at all familiar with the major works in Western literature, you’re automatically part of the elite, the literary 1%. ”
To some extent I’d argue that this is kind of the point of the canon. (Not just the Western one, but various others as well)
“Why would the world be better if people read “real literature”? The value placed on this seems like a very Western phenomenon. A very “white” thing, if you will. ;-)”
Honestly, it really isn’t. The particular genre that is considerd important to be conversant in ((post)modernist literary fiction) is, but pretty much all cultures with enough of a volume of written works has had a canon fo works it is considered important to be versed in, in order to be accepted into polite society. (and at least some cultures with little or no writing seems to have paid a similar bit of importance in being conversant in various oral stories/legends/poems)
It’s one of the many things that makes up “culture” in the ethnic/national sense. (but also connected with class, ofc.)
saajanpatel
/ July 9, 2012I do think fiction is valuable for giving us insight into someone’s mind in way that the character is you, as opposed to a non-fiction account where a person can engage in othering.
(Though, really, if one can read accounts of homeless LGBT youth kicked out of their homes and still not feel compassion there may be something sociopathic going on….)
Don’t get me wrong I think the more modern lit-fic is valuable, stuff like Morrison, Atwood, Rushdie. But I think it’s important to define the aspects of literature that are valuable in a progressive sense, which is why I’d tend to favor the new over the old no matter the country of origin.
gefnsdottir
/ July 9, 2012Full disclaimer: I am a self-proclaimed geek (small ‘G’), admitted lover of useless made up trivia, who has never read Tolkien or Rothfuss or most of the terrible authors you mention on your blog (tried to read R. Scott Bakker’s “The Prince of Nothing”, got about one page in, and wanted to puke) who likes to read really old texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh (in translation, with all the limitations translating a work entails) for fun.
As someone who is in the process of creating an entire world that she can mess with, I’ve found that, as I write I naturally start to question “Why is X like this?” or “If X is like this, what changes?” I dislike worlds that behave more like “set pieces”, particularly when it comes to religion (I majored in religious studies in university) if the most characters will do is say “Oh my gods!” and never really go anywhere with it, I kind of wonder why they would bother creating a fictional faith at all, but that’s my particular pet interest.
The section regarding cultural appropriation and language is a point I’m going to have to stew over as I write. I originally created this world as an attempt to challenge the “Standard Medieval Fantasy setting” deciding to base it (at least partially) off of pre-dynastic Sumer. Hopefully none of the linguists here will eat me alive, but right now what passes for the dominant language in the city-states where the story takes place is a collection of words, some directly taken from actual Sumerian, others I made up myself. It’s not my intent to create an actual language, with proper syntax, tenses, sentence structure, I honestly don’t know if I would have the mettle (and I certainly don’t have the know how) to tackle such a project, especially for an unpublished work that will probably remain on my computer’s hard drive.
Regarding naming conventions RANDOM APOSTROPHES MUST DIE NOW! I’ve tried to pick names for my story that are reasonably short and easy to pronounce (and apostrophe free unless to indicate possession) to avoid naming awkwardness. One of the worst offenders I’ve seen in this regard is the book “Living With Ghosts” by Kari Sperring, in which everyone (at minimum) has three syllable names, plus nicknames (people who are familiar with each other get to use shortened forms of their names), sometimes a couple nicknames. The setting is very “French” so that helps a bit with pronunciation, but it doesn’t change the fact that the names are just so awkward!
Emil Söderman
/ July 9, 2012I think there’s a lot of different ways “value” is used in this discussion, and I’m not sure we’re alking about the same thing.
For instance, I think there is value in being conversant in the canon (at least for a give cultural contet) that is only indirectly related to it’s quality. (because it acts as a connector, and basically explains things,and you can see how an important work influences others, etc. etc.)
There’s also the “literary school” way of reading the canon, IE: it gives you a bunch of methods of telling a story (and a bit of a testing ground for what works and what doesen’t)
Then there’s the Important Human Themes, the politico-social messages, the “learn to identify with others” bits, etc.
But note that none of these directly have anything to do with if the work is aestethically pleasing or not.
neonsuntan
/ July 10, 2012Just had this authors works recommended to me as a “really great world set up”…
http://josephrobertlewis.wordpress.com/books/the-dragon-and-the-lotus/
http://josephrobertlewis.wordpress.com/books/halcyon-1-the-burning-sky/
saajanpatel
/ July 10, 2012@Emil:
Good point on pinning down value. Those three definitions you mention are important to me. Beyond that, establishing hierarchies in entertainment has often seemed to be a cure in search of a problem. Or, worse, a tool of cultural imperialism.
I suppose my concern arises from the fact that you can point to real world things that would improve if people knew more about something like econ or stats. Or just were better informed about global politics. It’s hard to get a feel for what literary canon would change.
From the linked site:
Some of the countries in this world reflect the cultures and attitudes of the Renaissance while others reflect the Industrial Age. Historical figures from our world appear, though they too may be strange to you.
Don’t expect this world to conform to the history that you know. The people and places are different. The climate and wildlife are different.
This seems at least a bit problematic at first glance. It reads like an escape clause to blend real cultures with whatever the author desires.
gefnsdottir
/ July 10, 2012I couldn’t get past the covers….
saajanpatel
/ July 10, 2012Bit of an addendum: I was talking to Larry about the importance of reading overall, and seeing as we’ve discussed the more literary stuff like Bolano and Borges he seemed like a good guy to consult.
He’d brought up a related point that people also don’t appreciate things like plumbing and pest control, dismissing them as menial labors.
I agree with him that correcting this disparaging of varied professions is a big problem, especially as it ties into class and race and available opportunities, and at first glance it seems a bigger problem than that of entertainment hierarchies.
So perhaps it isn’t the 99% that’s the problem, but the 1% that needs to get over itself?
braak
/ July 11, 2012What? Who doesn’t appreciate plumbing?
saajanpatel
/ July 11, 2012Oh, people appreciate plumbing but don’t respect the profession along with others like mechanic or electrician.
But don’t get me wrong, I think when lit-fic intersects with real life concerns (Satanic Verses, God of Small Things, Invisible Man (the one by Ellison), Beloved, Bluest Eye, The Interpreter of Maladies) it is vital to the world.
And I do cringe when demonstrably weak books, often in their depiction of cultures or of minority or female characters, are held as good…Sadly It’s not even limited to non-American or non-European. Just look at the races of the gang members thrown into UF books, and how cartoonish the depictions are.
kalbear
/ July 13, 2012I have to say, this one hurt.
I love worldbuilding. Or at least good worldbuilding. I love the world of Bas-Lag with its inchmen and sussurators and time golems. I love the world of Mirror of Her Dreams where portals are used to summon demons and summon other fictional characters and also used in supply chain optimization for armies. I like Westeros and all its details (though for me the eastern side fucks it all up). I love Brin’s uplift universe and the various alien species he’s invented. I like magic systems that make sense, sociological and economical impacts on the world based on things like magic or demon invasions.
And when I read shitty worldbuilding it really bugs, too. It takes me out of the setting.
I think a lot of both of those things is simply that part of my pleasure in reading comes from the ordering of things, as Mieville put it. The cataloging. In fiction, things aren’t just guessed at, they’re known. We know for certain that King FuckFace did indeed order his daughter killed, and it isn’t just being argued by historians years later as a ‘maybe this happened’. With fictions we don’t have odd questions or wondering; we literally know the answers.
Another part is that I like thinking in the paradigm of that world. I like extrapolating and asking what if – and then seeing later if what I thought is what is actually there. I like it when authors do this too (the part in Mirror of her Dreams where mirrors which can be used to move through things like portals are used to feed the army is an example that’s stuck with me since I was 15). I like seeing the thought and investment in a story, where it’s not just magic ‘just because’ and you don’t have ultrapowerful blah as basically a big giant gun. I like sci-fi because it tends to do this sort of extrapolation a lot more, and my favorite scifi authors tend to entirely embrace this – Brin, Bear, Benford, Williams. They take one simple concept and then simply ask what if? How would we as humans react? How would we act? What would we do?
Those things are exciting to me to read about, to think about.
But you’re right; many of those things stem entirely from unhealthy desires to control. And knowing that hurts more than a bit.
acrackedmoon
/ July 13, 2012There are several secondary worlds I genuinely like but, for me anway, it’s not so much about the fine minutiae like just exactly how many children X monarch has or just what country borders Y region. I don’t feel that’s where imaginative or speculative qualities will be expressed, or politics for that matter. Mieville didn’t exactly sit down (that I know of) and craft a bunch of conlangs for Bas-Lag, whereas he did exactly that (more or less) for Embassytown, which is a book expressly about language. Essentially there’s trivia for a purpose, and trivia for the sake of trivia, which I find objectionable.
I’d say much of world-building for its own sake has more with escapism–rather than escape–than a desire to control, but that’s an interesting thought I’ll have to consider.
kalbear
/ July 14, 2012Control might not be exactly the right word. Or maybe ‘to’ is the wrong word; it might be better to say desire FOR control What you don’t want is necessarily control, it’s the notion that things are controlled, ordered, logical and predictable. That things make sense. Which is entirely a conservative value and thus fits in well with the Tolkien ‘everything made more sense back in those days’ worldview, but it’s more than that I think. I think this is why a lot of fairly antisocial people played the old RPGs and now video games – because they can reduce the world to a set of specific, measurable, quantifiable values and interact with it in a way that makes sense. They might get hosed by random numbers, but that’s a far cry from getting hosed by some random person choosing not to like them or not making friends despite ‘being nice’, whatever that means.
So in these books you also look for those mechanisms of how the world works, for those orderly bits that make things so easy to parse. And then you do get into debates about how the world works, of course, because establishing how the world works is more important than talking about how the world makes you feel. To them, it’s way more important that people don’t break the rules than it is why they break the rules in the first place.
And that’s a very easy trap to want to fall into. I love breaking down systems, figuring out what’s optimal and what isn’t, being able to state that someone’e opinion of why they’re doing something is objectively – not subjectively – wrong. But I’m also starting to realize that this stems entirely from a desire for that control and that ordered world that D&D provides and is not, by itself, particularly good or useful or fun.
saajanpatel
/ July 14, 2012You know, this might be why I was so surprised when internet forums came around and I realized there is a huge reactionary element in D&D. I liked Forgotten Realms & Dragonlance okay, just the novels, but my top settings were Dark Sun (so environmental and anti-establishment) and Planescape (intermix of cultures and beliefs, questioning idea of definitive fantasy “good” and “evil”).
In the old mailing-list days it was pretty clear, and still is that Planescape + White Wolf is a pretty liberal crowd.
MaseEscasi
/ July 14, 2012I find myself on both sides of the debate here.
Fellow geeks frequently express horror when I subject their discourse to any degree of political analysis. They feel I’m betraying them by doing so. Fellow white guys frequently express horror when I subject the fact of our being white to any degree of political analysis. They also feel I’m betraying them.
I’m both drawn to made-up worlds and disappointed by the lack of specificity found in – OK, let’s say it – more literate works that tend to concentrate on worlds contained within the one in which we all live. And yes, this is sometimes down to the laziness of the authors & their unwillingness to subject what they read & write to wider analysis.
There is another reason – the Money. The geeks are being drawn into the Money these days, just as the hippies once were, and the punks and the Japanese. Along with the approbation of their peers, the authors want the Money – the last great motivator (for escape?) our society represents.
We seem to be in a cultural phase where neither innovation nor a canonical register really pays – one has to hide inside the other to succeed materially. Hence great ponderous family-saga Fantasy ‘for adults’. (Actually for people who like a small-town mentality in fancy-dress.) Or, to flip it over and put it another way, in the words of Jacques Ranciere: “There is no conformist thought today that does not complacently proclaim itself the unprecedented upsetting of everything that everyone believes.”
Geeks going mainstream is the revenge of the bullied and the dispossessed, right? No. It’s Money’s fatal embrace. Exceptions to this are not very successful in terms of the market. I read widely, much as a magpie might, but I find it increasingly hard to read a work of SFF all the way through
I like to sit and drift and ‘hang out with the gang’ as much as the next person. I consider escapism to be a good and honourable reason to read. I just wish I was going somewhere other than ‘Tory Towers’ or (coded) small-town America.
I’m not trying to turn up my nose at SFF readers and writers – they’re preserving books as entertainment and I admire that. But as the Money brings ‘geeks’ closer to the ‘mainstream’ pressures on both sides to conform to the other’s (coded) worldviews is growing.
Many writers within SFF think working within the genre lets them off basic literary requirements like research and accuracy; just as many writers within what used to be more mainstream genres think their literary status lets them off what a good knowledge of SFF could bring to them when using elements of SFF in their work.
Emil Söderman
/ July 14, 2012“That things make sense. Which is entirely a conservative value”
Don’t think it neccessarily is a conservative value per se: Just look at Marx. Any attempt at analysis is also to some extent an attempt at control: To fit reality into some kind of workable set of parameters.
kalbear
/ July 15, 2012Well, that’s a figment of what I was saying, Emil. “Things making sense” is shorthand for ‘Things that I understand how they work before they were changed, and desiring going back to a prior iteration is a very conservative (or as sajaan put it, reactionary) viewpoint. Marx certainly never was desiring that outcome.
There is also a big difference in Marxian style of economics (where he uses current values to predict future outcomes that are not foreseen) and D&D style, where you use current values and assume that tomorrow those will stay just like they did today. Forecasting is not the equivalent of cataloging. Both do have some value in control (and I think a lot of geeks end up on that other side of the political spectrum) but in general that desire for things to fit into a perfectly understood, ordered paradigm is a big factor. It’s also one of the reasons that D&D folks like going back to the rules they started with instead of relearning all the new rules (even if those sucked).
In any case, this is pretty far off topic, but I do think that worldbuilding (and the desire for it) had quite a bit to do with that cataloging desire that some folks have.
Cave Johnson
/ August 13, 2012A scathing, stirring, timely critique.
Ed
/ December 4, 2012Hi there
I just stumbled upon this by accident. Can’t say I agree with you on everything (or even most things!) but I really enjoyed reading it – you haven’t a fantastic way with words. I was trying to find an RSS feed for your blog, but couldn’t see one – do you have one?
Ed