Letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, c. 1951. In Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond. 2001. Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England. Revised edition. Lexington KY: The University Press of Kentucky.
I recently read a series of novels.1 I'm not going to name the author or the series. This isn't a work of literary criticism. It's more "meta" than that. What I want to talk about is worldbuilding.
Worldbuilding is usually thought of in terms of fantasy or science fiction (and to a lesser extent historical fiction). But all fiction involves worldbuilding:
"Whether your tale is set in a real place or an imagined one, you need to establish your characters’ world so that the reader can suspend disbelief and fully engage with their story" [Sambuchino 2014]
The series I've been reading focuses on a society of space traders and their spaceships (actually the word "focus" is a little weak -- they hardly ever leave their ships, and they hardly ever do anything but trade). There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Not every book needs to spend time at the beach or the farm or the sea, or hiking or biking or climbing tall mountains. One act plays set on a bare stage are perfectly valid.
The books in this series do an excellent job describing their circumscribed world -- sometimes in amazing detail, sometimes in well-crafted hand-waving and bafflegab -- and in the end you really do have a nice impression of how a trading spaceship might function. We see the crew, the officers, the dock personnel, and the bars and nightclubs and restaurants that the spacers visit. There's even a wisecracking waitress or two. We even get hints -- just hints -- that the worlds our spacers visit are very different -- there are ocean worlds, agricultural worlds, asteroid colonies, heavy gravity worlds. We never actually see them, but we're told they're really, really different.
Let's leave aside the fact that a planet -- an Earth-sized ball -- has a surface area of around 510 million square kilometers (about 197 million square miles). That's a lot of territory. On Earth we have environments that range from cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide or radon gas out of the atmosphere2 or hot enough to melt lead (327°C), zinc (420°C), antimony (630°C), or magnesium (639°C).3 The surface of the Earth has an enormous variety of environments, from immense pressure in the deep oceans to near-stratospheric vacuum, from arctic to tropical climates, from wet to dry, from mountain to shoreline to plains. The idea of an "agricultural world" seems ludicrous. But hey, Frank Herbert in Dune can have a "desert planet," and if that's okay with him, I guess we'll just let it slide.
What I'm appalled by is the culture. Not "cultures." Just culture. There's only the one.
Everywhere we go, on every ship, in every port, there are nightclubs and restaurants, shops and security officers, cooks and waitresses and (occasionally) cheerful countermen. There are flea markets, not souks, there are cafes, not teahouses. Everybody wears the same clothes. Everybody speaks the same language. Everybody is the same.
Everybody.
Before we continue talking about that impossibility, let's consider the food.
On every ship, in every port, there are places to eat. Aside from a few references to North African dishes, Chinese food, and a brief mention of curry (I'm guessing Indian, not Thai curry), the food in those places would have been considered bland in Des Moines in 1940.
For breakfast they eat bacon and eggs, toast, coffee, and frequently some form of fried potato. Once in a while you might get pancakes and sausage. Rarely cereal and milk. That's breakfast. Everywhere.
On Earth we eat dumplings for breakfast (parts of China); or fried bread and saltfish (Guyana); or miso soup (Japan); or vegetable stew with lentils (India); or white rice with dried fish (Philippines); or cornmeal and bean cakes (Nigeria); or congee4 (Vietnam), or Vegemite (Australia), or chilaquiles (Mexico), or kimchi (Korea). That's what people from Earth eat for breakfast.5
But out in the infinite vastness of space? Bacon. Eggs. Toast. Coffee.
Just where do the eggs come from? How about those pigs? Or the wheat? "Planets" is not much of an answer. That's like saying "the store." It shows a lack of knowledge. Or caring.
Does anybody mind eating bacon? Or meat in general? Apparently not. When they go out to eat in a fancy restaurant they order steak. In space no one can hear vegans scream.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence of religion. Any religion. Nobody prays. Not to Jesus, not to Lord Buddha, not to Allah, not to Aleister Crowley.6 Nobody bows toward Mecca or Jerusalem or Salt Lake City. A few people are superstitious. But nobody seems overly concerned about what Douglas Adam's fictional philosopher Oolon Colluphid in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy referred to as "this God person."7
Everybody speaks the same language. Nobody has a noticeable accent. Some people have quirky ways of talking, but there's never any evidence that anybody speaks anything other than English.8 Nobody even seems to speak English as a second language. And though there are "ethnic" names (African, Asian, Slavic), they don't seem to mean anything. People have families. They have mothers and fathers. They don't have tribes or nations. Conflicts are always over money or personal animosity; I can't find any evidence of ideology. Because everybody's beliefs are the same.
Even the technology seems the same. Nobody has a technological "edge." Nobody has any stunning breakthroughs. And the technology seems surprisingly dated. Yes, they're traveling between the stars,9 but they type on keyboards, mop floors, press buttons, and climb up and down ladders. Aside from visiting other planetary systems, nothing here seems particularly advanced over the early 2000s. And everybody uses the same stuff (it may not always be compatible -- you probably can't replace a door hinge from a 2015 Toyota with one from a 1995 Ford -- but they're not fundamentally different).
I could keep going, but there's no point. What we have here is an example of inadequate worldbuilding.
"You can spend hours and hours thinking about the history and culture and mores of your imaginary land, and how people interact and the ways that different religious and ethnic groups collide. But if you don't make me feel the dirt under my fingernails, then you still haven't created a real place. If the reader doesn't get a little lightheaded from the stench of the polluted river, or transported by the beauty of the geometric flower gardens, then something is missing" [Anders 2013]What Anders is referring to is "sense of place." It's what makes St. Petersburg Florida different from St. Peterburg Russia -- it's language and history and religion and food and weather and ethnicity and topography and how often people smile at strangers and everything else. To make a world, a world so real that a reader falls in and drowns in the delicious richness of it, you have to create it.
Building worlds isn't easy. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) has a very interesting -- and intimidating -- website that any worldbuilder ought to visit: "Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions: The World," by Patricia C. Wrede (http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions/). There are no less than 470 questions a worldbuilder (fantasy or science fiction) may need to consider. Questions like:
- How many people are there in this country? How does this compare with world population? What is considered a small town/large town/city in terms of number of people?
- How are the continents laid out? If there is more than one moon/sun, how does this affect winds, tides, and weather generally?
- When meeting someone, how are they greeted — wave, handshake, bow, some other gesture? How did the greeting gesture originate (example: shaking hands to prove one’s weapon hand was empty)?
- What things are considered normal and acceptable in this society that would not be considered normal or acceptable in yours? (Examples: dueling, drugs, open homosexuality, polygamy, infanticide.)
- How are treaties arranged? Are there any significant ones currently in force or coming up for signing?
- What inventions or advances have not been made that you would normally expect to see at this stage of technological development? Which ones are about to be made?
I don't want to imply that every writer invariably has to deal with all these questions (or the other 464 questions either). Sometimes an author isn't interested in exploring every aspect of a particular story. George Orwell, in his remarkable discussion of Charles Dickens, notes that:
"... Dickens hardly writes of war, even to denounce it. With all his marvellous powers of description, and of describing things he had never seen, he never describes a battle ... Probably the subject would not strike him as interesting, and in any case he would not regard a battlefield as a place where anything worth settling could be settled."10This "lack" certainly doesn't detract from Dickens. It wasn't his focus, it wasn't his purpose, and it wasn't the story he was trying to tell. As I said before, one act plays set on a bare stage are valid, if that's the kind of story you want to tell. But I've read far too many books recently that broke no new ground in terms of plot or character, and waved away any tedious questions about the structures of society -- about how and why things work -- in order to focus on some allegedly exciting space battles.
Creating a believable world is not a luxury. Without it the characters in a story, no matter how deeply they feel, no matter how clever their dialog, no matter how heroic (or cowardly) they are -- they won't live. They won't live because they have no place. And the reader is going to be disappointed. They may not know exactly why they're disappointed. But they'll know that something's wrong.
Notes
1 I'm lying; I'm only on book 5 of 6.
2 The coldest temperature ever recorded on the Earth's surface is -89.2° C (-128.6° F) at Vostok Station, Antarctica, on July 21, 1983. Carbon dioxide's freezing point is -78° C; radon's freezing point is -71.2° C.
3 Water temperatures in hydrothermal vents ("black smokers") can get up to 640° C; they don't flash into steam because of the immense pressure. Of course, lava gets even hotter (700°C to 1,200°C), but I don't think of that so much as an "environment" as a "calamity."
4 A kind of rice porridge. For a representative recipe see: http://www.pbs.org/food/recipes/vietnamese-chicken-rice-soup-congee/ ;
5 See: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ailbhemalone/breakfasts-around-the-world?utm_term=.kgO7PvKy2M#.caO830PQAp ; http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/what-people-eat-for-breakfast-around-the-world-a6730126.html ; http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/08/magazine/eaters-all-over.html?_r=1
6 Never heard of Crowley? Lucky you. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was a Satanist, a poet, and a bisexual, and he quite scandalized both Britain and Italy before World War II. Many of his works are available online. I'm not giving you any links.
7 Adams, Douglas. 1995 (2009 reissue edition). The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. New York: Del Rey Books. Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy-Douglas-Adams/dp/0345391802/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468536773&sr=1-5&keywords=douglas+adams ; Powell's Books: http://www.powells.com/book/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-book-1-9780345391803/1-4
8 Or whatever "standard language" they're supposedly speaking that renders into perfect, idiomatic early twenty-first century American English.
9 They use the "space-bending" method, a "discontinuous" method of effectively traveling faster than light. For a taxonomy of different methods of faster than light travel, see: http://www.projectrho.com/stardrv.txt .
10 Orwell, George (pseudonym of Eric Blair). 1940. "Charles Dickens," in Inside the Whale and Other Essays. London: Victor Golancz. Online: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html
References
Anders, Charlie Jane. 2013. 7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding. Online: http://io9.gizmodo.com/7-deadly-sins-of-worldbuilding-998817537
Bryant, Stephanie Cottrell. Magical World Builder's Guide. Online: http://www.web-writer.net/fantasy/days/
Malone, Ailbhe. 2015. This is what Breakfast Looks Like in 22 Countries Around the World. Online: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ailbhemalone/breakfasts-around-the-world?utm_term=.emzp73M1k#.bxdxdep0V
Sambuchino, Chuck. 2014. Tips on World Building for Writers -- How to Make Your Imaginary World Real. Online: http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/tips-on-world-building-for-writers-how-to-make-your-imaginary-world-real
Walloga, April. 2015. What people eat for breakfast around the world. Online: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/what-people-eat-for-breakfast-around-the-world-a6730126.html
Wendig, Chuck. 2013. 25 Things You Should Know About Worldbuilding. Online: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2013/09/17/25-things-you-should-know-about-worldbuilding/
Wollan, Malia. 2014. Rise and Shine: What kids around the world eat for breakfast. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/08/magazine/eaters-all-over.html?_r=0
Indeed yes, thank you. The many questions on the SFWA site will indeed bend your brain and make you think very hard about the imaginary places you're presenting. And possibly crawl back into bed and suck your thumb for awhile to come up with some response. Only twenty years, let's say.
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