13 ms·

There Is No Planet B (For Worldbuilding)

97 points by herbertl 3y ago

palata 3y ago
I am not sure I get the point of the article. It spends forever saying how Tolkien's world is "simple" as compared to reality (which is "infinitely complex and still growing"), and seems to conclude on "reality is too simple, we need to go to Mars if we want to add complexity to story-telling". Then, to me, complaining about the world (as described) not being complex enough is a bit like complaining that "You see, there are tens of thousands of people in the books, participating to wars and all. But the story-telling is very simplistic because it only follows a handful of characters, instead of describing the life of everybody in the world". I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life.
- ajuc 3y ago
  Yup, imagination is infinite, you're paying writers to filter it.
  - yreg 3y ago
    I don't think that's true at all? I certainly don't have ideas for infinite stories in my mind. And I don't read a book to discover a good idea that I already had.
    - ajuc 3y ago
      You can imagine pi for one trivial example. It has infinite details but it's not infinitely interesting. You can map it to infinite boring story (let's say John moves west/east depending on the next binary digit :) ). Kolmogorov complexity is the formalism around that distinction. EDIT now that I think about it - if you take PI in binary and interprete it as utf-8 - every single book every written (or that will ever be written) is in there somewhere :) And there are algorithm to calculate PI to arbitrary digit that are pretty simple.
      - spacebacon 3y ago
        Fascinating observation. How would you calculate at what point of pi converted to utf-8 contains a certain string?
        latexr 3y ago
        That idea can be taken further to every digital file ever. You might both be interested in checking the pi file system. https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
        spacebacon 3y ago
        Interesting 424242 is located at position 242423.
        spacebacon 3y ago
        Very cool, FFS For Fucks Sake, another file system!
      - yreg 3y ago
        This is totally off-topic though. The ability to write an infinite number of strings using some system has no relation to human imagination. That's not how human imagination works.
        ajuc 3y ago
        > That's not how human imagination works. Where do you think I got that idea from? Do you think I couldn't execute it?
      - fsflover 3y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl
      - jon_richards 3y ago
        > take PI in binary and interprete it as utf-8 - every single book every written (or that will ever be written) is in there somewhere It isn’t proven that pi is normal. Also, even if you were to find a book in the sequence of pi, the index of where it starts would (generally) be vastly larger than the book itself.
    - toolz 3y ago
      Imagination is the tool, not the storage space. The tool has boundless potential to create things in your mind. In other words, the tool is boundless or "infinite" in its ability. Given a mind that lasts forever there's no reason to believe there's a cap on what is possible for a mind to imagine and there are biological creatures that are immortal (e.g. hammerhead worms) so there's at least some reason to believe our minds could one day become immortal (at least in the sense of immune to decay).
- gota 3y ago
  Agreed. I'd believe Tolkien deliberately chose a "small" world precisely so that he could make things coherent and consistent to _some_ aspects of reality (some because it is, after all, a world with magic). It is apparent that Tolkien focused on the aspects he cared for and understood best - language and military stuff^1; And because he quite literally wanted to described how the world started and how it got there, he had a few options: he could either make a small world, or hand-waive a lot, 99.99% of detail of a larger world, or just don't finish writing the equivalent of a 1-year period in his fiction's timeline during his lifetime, I guess? Another thing - as the author points out, George Martin strives actively to make the world in A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones 'larger'. He doesn't care that much about realistic coherence, though, and that is why he can copy-paste and mash historical elements. 1^ We all know about Tolkien and languages, but I, at least, was surprised by the 'coherence' in military stuff in Lord of the Rings (https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/ https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm...)
- yreg 3y ago
  I understand the argument in the following way: - Fictional worlds have are shallow compared to reality. They have to be, because an author or a collective of authors can never get to a depth comparable to reality. - The only world with a deep "worldbuilding" is the real one we inhabit – Earth. - Once we colonize space and let millenia of history go by, we will be able to take a look back and read about many complex "deep" worlds - because all of them will be real. --- I think the argument is already falling apart today thanks to AI writing, that could perhaps generate the blanks to make any fictional world feel arbitrarily deep. We might also eventually simulate entire complex fictional worlds. --- As for whether it's even worthwhile: > I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life. I believe the author is not talking about writing a fiction book with millions of boring pages that you would read in parallel. It is more about having access to Wikipedia on deep, complex and internally consistent alternative history/fictional world. I think it sounds fun. It's also fun to read about the actual world history, after all.
  - Gooblebrai 3y ago
    > It is more about having access to Wikipedia on deep, complex and internally consistent alternative history/fictional world Reading wiki pages of videogames and TV shows feels quite like that.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    > thanks to AI writing, that could perhaps generate the blanks to make any fictional world feel arbitrarily deep. You may find "Chirper" interesting, some people making a twitter-like website where AI agents interact. I do find however that our clever clever human brains can atm anticipate quite easily how most things will turn out after a short amount of time, and people quickly become bored by it. Then again, a lot of history is very boring, its only interesting paired with a great storyteller who picks up the pieces. Right now AIs aren't really there yet (i've tried, with very deliberate prompting you can get somewhere but each story follows predictable tropes no matter how you prompt it, the tropes themselves change but its hard to get the AI to surprise you), but I can see it happening someday
- speeder 3y ago
  I think the silliest part of complaining Middle Earth is based on Earth, is the fact that Middle Earth IS Earth, explicitly. Tolkien states that LoTR is a "prequel" of real world history of sorts. Ditto for Wheel of Time, that instead is set in a distant future. It is obvious it will be based on RL cultures, because... it is. Ditto for people that complained that Fremen in Dune are too much like middle eastern people. Seriously, their religion is literally called "Zensunni" and they are settlers that explicitly came from middle east cultures of Earth.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > Ditto for Wheel of Time, that instead is set in a distant future. Wheel of Time is explicitly set in both the future and the past. That's why it's a "wheel". (If you need an example, consider that Arthur Pendragon is, in the setting, a historical person who existed a couple thousand (?) years in the past, while at one point Egwene finds a much older Mercedes-Benz hood ornament in a museum.) In the second book, The Great Hunt, the concept of a multiverse of alternative realities (that interact with each other!) is also introduced, which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us. It is necessarily in a related world, where it's not clear what "related" means.
    - logicprog 3y ago
      > which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us That's not quite true, interestingly! Yes, there are alternate timelines available through the portal stones, but they are explicitly described as only sort of secondary reverberations, inherently not quite fully real, but just pale echoes of the true timeline that most of the books take place in. So it's pretty unlikely that, according to the metaphysical rules of the wheel of time, we are not living in the main timeline. In fact, it's later explained that Tel'aran'rhiod (spelled it first try!) Is the sort of semi-real limbo it is because it's a similar phenomenon to the portal stone worlds, just cross-secting all alternate realities instead of parallel to them. Maybe you're talking about the world's through the Twisted door frames, where the snakes and foxes live, but it's unclear exactly what relation they have to our world, and I'm inclined to suspect that we aren't intended to think that our world might be one of those, since those worlds seem to operate by very different laws even regarding basic spacetime.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  War and Peace has roughly 600 characters and that's already famous for its length, now I'm trying to imagine if Tolstoy tried to describe every single Russian participant in the Napoleonic Wars.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life. A lot of people would want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of historical people and what happened in their lives, if the information was somehow correct. They wouldn't read all of it -- that would be impossible -- but they'd read some of it.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Also, it might be expected for technological change to happen extremely slowly when you have such disconnected states and small communities. He recognizes there are very poor transport and communication networks. How exactly would he expect information to flourish and where would he expect innovation to come from? I think in the real world, the hunter-gatherer culture lasted about 2 million years. Obviously middle-earth isn't hunter-gatherer but its some point of reference. From some very quick searching it seems like the start of agrarian society through the middle ages was about 6000 years. And again, as the author notes, there was a much high population density and network of people in the europe/middle east/western asia in the real world. The 12000 years without significant technological advancement seems entirely plausible even in real terms.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    With the low apparent population though, most of Middle Earth probably should have been hunter gatherers. Cities don't really make sense at all, but if you want to add them they can be 100 miles of farms and villages to support the city (the cities being on a river or sea port for trade, thus justifying building them at all), but gradually tapering off to hunter gathers who sometimes get something from the distant city that they couldn't make themselves. As population gets denser farming and cities make sense, but at low density hunter gathers have an easier life.
- da_chicken 3y ago
  > I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life. Best avoid Malazan Book of the Fallen, then. It's a fantasy series written by an anthropologist and archeologist that's also based on the events in a GURPS tabletop roleplaying campaign. It's a replay (at least in part) written like it's a history. It's got over 600 named characters.
  - logicprog 3y ago
    Malazan is great. It burnt me out a bit because it's often difficult reading, so I'm struggling to get up the energy to finish the last two books, but damn is it good. For anyone seeing this who might read it, don't let the fact that it's based off a tabletop campaign scare you off, I honestly couldn't tell whatsoever. It really doesn't feel like your standard tabletop role-playing game campaign at all, it feels like something very unique and different and it has an incredible amount of artistic merit. In fact, if you like the kind of books where there's always some deeper secret to be unveiled that entirely recontextualizes all of the previous World building in some flash of horrifying revelation, definitely check the series out, because that kind of thing happens a lot. Also, if you want a fantasy series that has a very active Pantheon of gods that feel like real old school mythology, not even the sort of Bowdlerized Percy Jackson version, also check it out. It also does an incredible job doing very interesting and unique things with its fantasy races and cultures. The Jaghut are my favorite.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Tolkien hides much of the complexity. For example, what happened to the Entwives? What happened that created the Brown Lands, and where did the Entwives go? That could be a whole book, but it's only referred to in a comment by Treebeard, the meat of which is less than a paragraph. That kind of thing happens all over the place. Who were the Ringwraiths before they became wraiths? (Yeah, they were human kings, but who were they?) How did things go down in the war that destroyed Eregion? How did Arwen's mother escape from being held captive by the orcs? What's the detailed backstory on hobbits? And on and on and on. There's all this stuff that is briefly referred to, but never fleshed out in detail. This is useful for authors, by the way. You can be creating a fractal, and you have to cut off detail somewhere. But if you leave hints that there's more detail, the world feels bigger. It doesn't feel amputated or limited.
reaperman 3y ago
> In a way that’s not s super surprising observation: obviously a world created through the work of a single author (or a few) will not be as complex as one created through the interaction of 8 billions of humans, plus billions of past humans, plus natural phenomena. Naïvely we might even expect a fictional world to be at least 8 billion times less complex than the real world, whatever that means. Maybe Tolkien got 0.000000000125% of the way there, and all other authors who tried got 0.0000000001% or less. I'd imagine that an MMO with robust and numerous autonomous AI NPC's each with a sufficient context window could potentially achieve world building at a much higher resolution and fidelity.
- gota 3y ago
  Expand that concept just a bit and we're back at The Matrix and our world being a simulation
- brightball 3y ago
  Dungeon Crawler Carl books do a pretty great job.
- halfmatthalfcat 3y ago
  AI nondeterminism breaks this idea as each interaction can and probably will differ between iterations, breaking any long term continuity.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    I think you could tune things to generally settle into stable, repeatable "themes" if not deterministic input vs. final state. That way you can script parts of the story / experiences / themes / "canon-events" of a game while still allowing players' actions to have true natural effects on the world.
  - devnullbrain 3y ago
    Is it not non-deterministic by choice? A random factor added to prevent it from just choosing the deterministic most-likely next token.
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iterati 3y ago
Overly complicated world-building requires mountains of expository prose to expose the complexity. No one wants that. They want characters and drama and entertainment. If you want world-building over a good story, read an RPG manual.
- bartvk 3y ago
  And then marvel at how many people it took, to work on the RPG manual. I've been the DM for a Forgotten Realms campaign and wow, is that a lot of material.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  The obvious advise of "show; don't tell" still applies. If you have a complicated world and try to show that off to the reader/viewer/player with lots of exposition most people will hate that. But many beloved works of fiction manage to have complex worlds that you naturally experience through the story. On the other hand, if the author doesn't do world-building, that often leads to illogical situations and issues with internal consistency. For example if you have people living on floating islands they obviously will prefer bows over swords; or sniper rifles over pistols. If they don't, there better be a good reason (that makes sense in the world).
  - bloopernova 3y ago
    Yeah exactly. I wrote a rough draft of a several centuries post collapse great lakes area, after a writing prompt on Reddit. It was something like "tribal people find mount Rushmore", and I ran with it mentally for a few months. I adored removing as much "tell" as I could without making things incomprehensible. Ann Arbor became Anaba, Michigan became Meshaga. Russymons are Rust Demons, automated hunter killer drones that sometimes come to life if disturbed. Sorry, offtopic rambling. Cool to remember how much work I put in!
  - iterati 3y ago
    the article is critiquing Tolkien's world-building as too simple. I'm struggling to see how his vision of complexity would in any way not require exposition dumps constantly so as not to gloss over something and be too "simple" for him.
mmahemoff 3y ago
I keep seeing "worldbuilding" like it's a new kind of hobby and Google Trends has the search query consistently growing over past two decades (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=worldbuilding https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=worldbui...). Not sure what triggered it to became so popular in recent years.
- soneca 3y ago
  That’s a very interesting observation and it would be nice to see people chiming in to speculate what could have been the trigger. My take is that narratives are growing kind of exponentially. We see it in videogames, webtoons, fan fiction. Even literature has many more writers than twenty years ago (even if not “published authors”, but people writing on Wattpad, newsletters, creative writing workshops, etc). More writers (amateur or professional), more fantasy writers in particular, means more interest in writing resources. And worldbuilding is a topic that it is not that much explored in other writing resources. I would even guess that if Tolkien did not actually invent the concept itself, he was the one that made it a relevant discussion topic. So it is a relatively new topic.
  - Multicomp 3y ago
    Worldbuilding sits at the procrastination nexus of multiple hobbies. Fiction writers, RPG GM campaign designers, video game designers, etc. For any of those activities, the need for doing coherent and good enough setting design becomes the tempting excuse to procrastinate on doing the actual thing (plot, character, gameplay design, whatever) and 'refine the worldbuilding', because while there is a necessary minimum of setting design, the line of when you have got enough setting design and are getting into diminishing returns is not bright. Signed - I'd rather write the history of the steam dragons' colonization of the western marshes than finish my protagonist's character arc refinements today, don't worry, I'll get to him soon.
    - Tao3300 3y ago
      Nailed it. We should all be so lucky as to get big enough fanbases that a subset of mega nerds can find all the holes.
agentultra 3y ago
The world we see in the LotR and The Hobbit is what’s left over after a cataclysm wiped out the advanced civilizations. There are hardly any maintained roads but there are plenty of ruins suggesting a more advanced civilization once occupied and developed the land. I think Tolkien was deliberate in not revealing how complex his world was. He told the story… and even then people complain about the amount of exposition. If it were any more detailed you would be overwhelmed. What’s interesting is how he relied on linguistics and metaphor in literature to add layers. How the story of Aragorn is much like the story of The Wanderer. The cultural differences between Rohan and Gondor is in their language and architecture. Tolkien could have spelled it out for us but he didn’t. It wasn’t until Christopher started releasing the Silmarillion and supplementary backlog of stories that we get to see how deep Tolkien went and how little we actually saw.
- Kalium 3y ago
  It's also worth remembering that the world of LotR has people in it who were there for the advanced civilization. It's not beyond living memory. A number of those people are important minor characters, and the sense of loss helps form the backdrop for the ever-present grief of much of elven culture. The past cataclysm was very much a part of the current world in LotR in many ways.
- BonitaPersona 3y ago
  Also, the intentionality of it being a designed world. Some implicit features are intentionally designed to be messages themselves. For example, the point of there being close to no technological advance in thousand of years is intentional: 1. Saruman's plan consists on mass industrialization. Beginning in Isengard, but at the end of the books projected even further: globalized. And he is one of the villains! 2. During the millenia that technology hasn't advanced, the elves did rule. Other than the disaster caused by the villains of the story, Tolkien intentionally made the elves not need such technological advance. They had no incentives to, they had enough. Same with the rest of the races. Those are two are messages Tolkien is telling to the reader. Shallowly described by me, of course. I also understand this as the reason for the worldbuilding to be so limited and sparse. The world that we find is enough for his vision and messages to get across, and adding anything more would make it repetitive or distracting.
bawolff 3y ago
I'm confused why the technology level that is being compared with is medieval europe. To me it seems like lord of the rings fits much more into post-roman empire collapsing europe. There are remenants of what were once powerful states floating around, but clearly much decayed. The land is not so much terra nullius so much as the big states only recognize the other big states and the rest of the land mostly escapes their notice so to them it is not described as "owned" People travel via horseback because how else would they travel?
- d--b 3y ago
  "Post roman empire collapsing europe" is the textbook definition of the Middle Ages (from 476 to 1492).
  - arethuza 3y ago
    Shouldn't that be post Western empire collapsing - the Eastern Empire lasted almost another thousand years?
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      It's weird to think that the Eastern Roman Empire only fell 39 years before Columbus discovered America. (At least, it's weird for me. I expect that the Roman Empire - even the eastern version - was a long time earlier.)
      - kuchenbecker 3y ago
        And the Russian empire is arguably a continuation of Byzantium / third Roman Empire with a Czar (Caesar) until the Russian Revolution.
        AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        The first czar was crowned in 1547 (104 years after the end of the Eastern Empire), so I'm not sure that it's a "continuation" in any real way. It may be a continuation in peoples' minds, but it's not a continuation in the way the Eastern Empire was.
justanotherjoe 3y ago
its not as hard as the author thinks. Take a book set in real world, let' say a book written by an adventurer like marco polo, or like, any settler or historian. The goal of fantasy worldbuilding is to mimic the richness of that book, not mimic the richness of the actual place (you'll need so many books, and pictures, and videos).
aaron695 3y ago
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ilamont 3y ago
Tolkien's approach is common in fantasy, or perhaps is the model that so many have aspired to. Written in the 1970s, "The Land" in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Thomas_Covenant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Thomas_Coven...) shows no real advancement after modern-day Covenant returns (via portal) 4,000 years later. There is still a clear good/evil distinction, magic is manifested in different ways, and there is a new crisis that drives the plot: Descending from the Watch, he also finds that a terrible change has transpired: four thousand years have passed, the Earthpower is gone, or nearly gone, and the people of the Land are out of touch with what remains of it. The Land is afflicted with the Sunbane, a disruption of the physical order which alternately causes rain, desert, pestilence and unnatural fertility to wreak havoc on humans, animals and nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wounded_Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wounded_Land
SeanLuke 3y ago
> If we like fictional worlds but can’t make them complex enough to be believable, the obvious workaround — in fact the only workaround — is to “borrow” the real world’s complexity.... The most transparent way to do this is to make a world map that isn’t the actual Earth, but also kind of is the actual Earth. Counterexample: Earthsea?
- com 3y ago
  Earthsea is so interesting! Ursula K. Le Guin made the bulk of her characters brown, and it’s possible to read it thinking about (unwritten?) fantasy written from the perspective of the Austronesian expansion into the island belts of south-east Asia, or indeed of the Melanesian or Polynesian island societies, or even pre-Mycenaean-collapse Aegean peoples. Their world centred on their island towns and the sea. Magic as self-evident and critical for seafarers and farmers. Reading now about the archeological analysis of the settlement of New Zealand from Hawaiki, how the colonisation effort spanned many islands, and how the failure of pandanus plants - in the cooler climate - for sailcloth, meant that for most of the colonists and all of their descendants until modern times, it was a one way journey. So many questions and so much fantastic world-building material there…
antisthenes 3y ago
The author doesn't understand how to read maps also, apparently. He compared a complex European map of 1444 showing a multitude of factions and proto-nation-states, and compared it to a 600 CE map...showing a rough distribution of ethnic groups? These are not the same thing at all...It's like comparing a climate map to a topographic one.
bovermyer 3y ago
One reason I created Iron Arachne is because I'm fascinated with all of the aspects of worldbuilding. There are so many facets of this, though, that attempting to build One Generator to Rule Them All is impossible. Instead, I take the approach of creating discrete generators that build a single aspect of Reality, and model, mock, or handwave related concepts. For example, the planet generator generates only a handful of statistics and a pretty neat image, rather than billions of years of history, tectonics, etc. A game like Dwarf Fortress goes farther, in attempting to simulate the evolution of a world. This leads to all kinds of interesting and weird phenomena in the "final" version of the world that the player starts in. One of the difficulties with this approach is that people often expect a coherent and familiar world with enough differences that it feels novel. A simulated universe that has evolved from a random initial state is going to feel alien and more difficult to resonate with. So, worldbuilding is a balancing act between detail and narrative. Too much of one makes the other feel stale or wrong.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  absolubtely. You can't have an entirely alien narrative, because reading it will feel like a slog. Thats exactly why people say that reading lotr or especially the silmarillion is a heavy read - all the digressions about poetry or ancient history are difficult to get through. You have to swing between worldbuilding and the familliar (often characters with familliar motivations experiencing the world)
saalweachter 3y ago
Now, obviously, Tolkien loved his characters and his stories and his world. But everyone always gets this wrong: > It’s the most awe-inspiring work of worldbuilding ever done! He invented entire languages! People have spent the last 70 years making snippets of conlang to add flavor to their fantasy worlds in emulation of Tolkien, but for Tolkien the conlangs were the whole damn point! Tolkien was a language nerd first. Middle Earth exists primarily to add context to the evolution of his conlangs and to create subjects to write his conlang poetry about. He may have loved the story for itself, but his goal wasn't to create a coherent, fleshed out world as complex as our own. It was to make sweet conlangs and write epic conlang poems. It's fair to judge the master craftsman on the quality of the jig he makes to craft his cabinets, but you shouldn't confuse the jig with the cabinets.
- agentultra 3y ago
  I think this is one of the central ways to really enjoy the work. He was trying to create a linguistic tradition in English that was as strong and rooted as those found in Finnish, Saxon, etc cultures. Hence the use of language to “fill in the details,” of the world building. A lot of people, through no fault of theirs, miss the significance of Aragorn and the return of the king. They don’t understand the significance of the stories that are only mentioned by characters in passing. But I think some of that passes on unconsciously which gives the story and it’s world the lasting impact it has had. If you study the Wanderer, the Arthurian epics, Finnish-Ugric mythology, Beowulf, etc you can see where he pulled a lot of his inspiration for the world he built from.
- nacs 3y ago
  For those like me who didn't know what "conlang" meant: conlang = constructed language
  - a1o 3y ago
    That is definitely not where my mind went when reading "conlang". Thanks for the clarification.
    - 3y ago
herculity275 3y ago
This is a really meandering piece and the author seemingly never internalized the distinction between the map and the territory. Fiction is not meant to perfectly replicate the entire complexity of the real world - rather it takes a very particular subset of reality and distills into a story you can consume at your leisure. This is true for both fictional and non-fictional settings - no movie set during e.g. WW2 or the French Revolution actually conveys the whole complexity of the real world at the time. Can you imagine a version of LOTR that also had to convey the all the socio-economic intricacies of trade routes between Gondor and Brie? Do you think that movie would be more enjoyable, or better at telling the story it wanted to tell? The best worldbuilding is that which doesn't get into the way of telling a good story. This is why "remixing" is actually a storytelling virtue - GRR can point at Dorne and vaguely motion "bizarro Moorish Spain" and the reader will instantly get a better idea of what he's dealing with without having to read a 800-pager on Dornish culture and history.
- teddyh 3y ago
  > trade routes between Gondor and Brie Transporting cheese, one would assume? (It’s “Bree”, by the way.)
- endominus 3y ago
  Which makes GRRM's criticism of Tolkien's world-building even more bizarre. "Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?" From https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/04/what-was-aragorns-tax-policy.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/04/wh...
derbOac 3y ago
Interesting fun read. A couple of reactions. First, I recently reread LotR after decades and was impressed by it. At the same time, I also felt like LotR was sort of a literary dollhouse for Tolkien: although there's a lot of complexity in certain things, other things seemed to be lacking in depth to the point of being comical at times. This is probably inevitable with a world that broad but the geospatial shallowness probably goes along with it. Second, to his credit, a lot of writing in general is sort of topologically simplified, and this probably reflects a certain cognitive mapping that goes on in reality. My sense of the world, for example, is vastly oversimplified, focused on my local environment and social network, and very blurry as you go outward. This is true of everybody. Maybe Tolkien made a mistake in reifying that a bit too much, in trying to fill in details of the world too much where other authors would have left it as "diagetically out of attentional scope" rather than "diagetically nonexistent". But psychologically people flow with it because it probably reflects human perception — probably especially when you are living through conflict and the world becomes even more focused. The article points out how unrealistic it is but it might not bother people because their internal maps probably aren't a lot different.
skerit 3y ago
> It is only later that I decided it was more interesting to write stories set in our good, old, complicated Earth than to try to reinvent it. Wouldn't you basically run in to the same problem? If the world you want your story to be based in happens to be our own Earth, you still have to change it, simplify it for whatever you're writing.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Sort of, but that the setting is in a real place that means you can assume the culture. You don't have to invent it all. If you sit someone down to eat in China the readers will automatically know they are eating a rice based meal with chopsticks (rice based would not apply to all cultures, but most people don't know China that well) and so you can just allow that backdrop without having to say what they are eating or what utensils they are using yet it is assumed. By contrast if I write a book where someone is in the city "lanorami" country "hullima" you have no idea what they would eat there unless I spend time telling you. Eating is only part of culture (an important part). In China you have an idea what the dominate religion is, how relationships are handled, and all those other details that make a culture complex (you might be wrong, but you have an idea). Thus a writer on earth doesn't need to simplify. Just referring to a location brings in a ton of complexity that doesn't need to be mentioned at all. If I told you that Middle Earth Hobbits are hatched from eggs do you have enough evidence to say I'm wrong? Or I could say the dwarfs don't nurse their young and thus none of them have nipples (much less boobs), again there isn't enough evidence so say I'm wrong. That such evidence doesn't exist means the culture is less complex just because we cannot make assumptions. (Note, I haven't read the books in many years, so there might be evidence that I don't remember - however the larger point remains even if this detail is wrong)
avgcorrection 3y ago
Might and Magic has multiple planets. I think the humans and others have been scattered to different planets because of some cataclysmic events. So now they live in Medieval times. (With the occasional computer (oracle) and laser gun.) And sometimes a planet might blow up.
pfdietz 3y ago
The issue with all the disconnected small habitations is it's completely unstable. Before a few centuries ago, societies mostly lived in a state of Malthusian stasis. They were at the limits of what their environment could support, with excess population dying to disease and malnutrition. But in Middle Earth, there's plenty of room for these kernels of civilization to expand. They're not exploiting their environment fully. Population growth will go into swelling populations; there's plenty of space for people to move into to farm more. And this can happen very rapidly.
supdudesupdude 3y ago
Open your eyes and see!
jrochkind1 3y ago
Actually an interesting essay I liked, and not what I expected from the title. I don't know if this is intentional, but the title led me to expect the opposite of the author's final sentance (kind of irrelevant to the rest of the piece) conclusion. > Maybe that’s actually the most compelling reason to settle Mars and beyond. So that there is, actually, a planet B to draw inspiration from. I hope everyone knows by now, the amount of investment it would take to make Mars at all liveable -- still far less comfortable than, say, antarctica -- by humans is enormous and would span generations, if it's possible at all which quite likely is not. Far far more resources, orders of magnitude, than the amount it would take to deal with climate change and keep the actual earth liveable, which we already seem to think is out of our means. Like even in our worst nightmares of climate change it's probably still easier to live on earth than on Mars no matter how much we put into Mars. Here's just one the first thing found googling that looked reasonable explaining this: https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/Humans-Will-Never-Colonize-Mars.pdf https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/Humans-Will-Neve... There really is no plan(et) B for earth. Which is the argumetn I associated the "there is no planet b" title with, which perhaps the author was intending to play on? To the extent that people's fantasies of it take away any urgency at all to trying to keep earth from getting less liveable, it's pretty infuriating.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  > Like even in our worst nightmares of climate change it's probably still easier to live on earth than on Mars no matter how much we put into Mars. Yes, absolubtely. The idea that mars is a hedge against climate change is ridiculous in the short term. I do however deeply believe that its worthwhile to go there. It is definately possible to sustain there, that i'm relatively sure of. Theres a definate appeal to me of all these places - antarctica, underwater living, the desert, the ocean. The idea of a regimented life against the elements appeals to me. I feel sometimes like im grasping at straws to justify why. I think its wanderlust. Why go to antarctica? why study the jungle? why not stay at home and grow rice and live a simple life?
  - deleted 3y ago
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Symmetry 3y ago
> From the study of that single pebble you could see the laws of physics and all they imply. Thinking about those laws of physics, you can see that planets will form, and you can guess that the pebble came from such a planet. The internal crystals and molecular formations of the pebble developed under gravity, which tells you something about the planet’s mass; the mix of elements in the pebble tells you something about the planet’s formation. > I am not a geologist, so I don’t know to which mysteries geologists are privy. But I find it very easy to imagine showing a geologist a pebble, and saying, “This pebble came from a beach at Half Moon Bay,” and the geologist immediately says, “I’m confused,” or even, “You liar.” Maybe it’s the wrong kind of rock, or the pebble isn’t worn enough to be from a beach—I don’t know pebbles well enough to guess the linkages and signatures by which I might be caught, which is the point. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-...
aledalgrande 3y ago
I disagree that a more intricate world means more entertainment. With Game of Thrones I hardly knew whatever was happening where. Even in Elden Ring, which I loved, I could not keep up with all the side character stories, I would have had to compile a series of notes.
empath-nirvana 3y ago
They're right about what the scale of Middle Earth is _supposed to be_, but really, it should be thought of as about the scale of England and Denmark. It's closer to a Norse Saga like Beowulf in scale than anything else.
tgv 3y ago
There once was a slogan: There is no planet B. It was a clever pun, meant to drive home the message that we can't escape from whatever we afflict upon the Earth. And now it gets used as a joke, for clicks. How sad.
hannofcart 3y ago
> Whereas Middle-earth is fairly static: over about 12,000 years, civilization seems to have been stuck at the same level of development. (Maybe because the one guy who tries to industrialize, in addition to being the only one to use telecommunications, is swiftly defeated by an army of slow-moving talking trees.) That's such an original take! I never thought of Saruman as the great builder that Middle Earth needed but didn't deserve.
didip 3y ago
While talking about world building, 1 pet peeve I have is that the villain is always described as comically villainous with spikes all over their body. That simply took me away from my immersion. The villains should not look too different than the heroes. Is it so that it makes murdering the villains palatable?
- matusp 3y ago
  Yeah, or villains building really edgy decor on their fortresses. Who was Sauron's decorator? They surely loved their spiky walls.

97 points by herbertl 3y ago

I am not sure I get the point of the article. It spends forever saying how Tolkien's world is "simple" as compared to reality (which is "infinitely complex and still growing"), and seems to conclude on "reality is too simple, we need to go to Mars if we want to add complexity to story-telling". Then, to me, complaining about the world (as described) not being complex enough is a bit like complaining that "You see, there are tens of thousands of people in the books, participating to wars and all. But the story-telling is very simplistic because it only follows a handful of characters, instead of describing the life of everybody in the world". I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life.

ajuc 3y ago
Yup, imagination is infinite, you're paying writers to filter it.
- yreg 3y ago
  I don't think that's true at all? I certainly don't have ideas for infinite stories in my mind. And I don't read a book to discover a good idea that I already had.
  - ajuc 3y ago
    You can imagine pi for one trivial example. It has infinite details but it's not infinitely interesting. You can map it to infinite boring story (let's say John moves west/east depending on the next binary digit :) ). Kolmogorov complexity is the formalism around that distinction. EDIT now that I think about it - if you take PI in binary and interprete it as utf-8 - every single book every written (or that will ever be written) is in there somewhere :) And there are algorithm to calculate PI to arbitrary digit that are pretty simple.
    - spacebacon 3y ago
      Fascinating observation. How would you calculate at what point of pi converted to utf-8 contains a certain string?
      - latexr 3y ago
        That idea can be taken further to every digital file ever. You might both be interested in checking the pi file system. https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
        spacebacon 3y ago
        Interesting 424242 is located at position 242423.
        spacebacon 3y ago
        Very cool, FFS For Fucks Sake, another file system!
    - yreg 3y ago
      This is totally off-topic though. The ability to write an infinite number of strings using some system has no relation to human imagination. That's not how human imagination works.
      - ajuc 3y ago
        > That's not how human imagination works. Where do you think I got that idea from? Do you think I couldn't execute it?
    - fsflover 3y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl
    - jon_richards 3y ago
      > take PI in binary and interprete it as utf-8 - every single book every written (or that will ever be written) is in there somewhere It isn’t proven that pi is normal. Also, even if you were to find a book in the sequence of pi, the index of where it starts would (generally) be vastly larger than the book itself.
  - toolz 3y ago
    Imagination is the tool, not the storage space. The tool has boundless potential to create things in your mind. In other words, the tool is boundless or "infinite" in its ability. Given a mind that lasts forever there's no reason to believe there's a cap on what is possible for a mind to imagine and there are biological creatures that are immortal (e.g. hammerhead worms) so there's at least some reason to believe our minds could one day become immortal (at least in the sense of immune to decay).
gota 3y ago
Agreed. I'd believe Tolkien deliberately chose a "small" world precisely so that he could make things coherent and consistent to _some_ aspects of reality (some because it is, after all, a world with magic). It is apparent that Tolkien focused on the aspects he cared for and understood best - language and military stuff^1; And because he quite literally wanted to described how the world started and how it got there, he had a few options: he could either make a small world, or hand-waive a lot, 99.99% of detail of a larger world, or just don't finish writing the equivalent of a 1-year period in his fiction's timeline during his lifetime, I guess? Another thing - as the author points out, George Martin strives actively to make the world in A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones 'larger'. He doesn't care that much about realistic coherence, though, and that is why he can copy-paste and mash historical elements. 1^ We all know about Tolkien and languages, but I, at least, was surprised by the 'coherence' in military stuff in Lord of the Rings (https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/ https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm...)
yreg 3y ago
I understand the argument in the following way: - Fictional worlds have are shallow compared to reality. They have to be, because an author or a collective of authors can never get to a depth comparable to reality. - The only world with a deep "worldbuilding" is the real one we inhabit – Earth. - Once we colonize space and let millenia of history go by, we will be able to take a look back and read about many complex "deep" worlds - because all of them will be real. --- I think the argument is already falling apart today thanks to AI writing, that could perhaps generate the blanks to make any fictional world feel arbitrarily deep. We might also eventually simulate entire complex fictional worlds. --- As for whether it's even worthwhile: > I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life. I believe the author is not talking about writing a fiction book with millions of boring pages that you would read in parallel. It is more about having access to Wikipedia on deep, complex and internally consistent alternative history/fictional world. I think it sounds fun. It's also fun to read about the actual world history, after all.
- Gooblebrai 3y ago
  > It is more about having access to Wikipedia on deep, complex and internally consistent alternative history/fictional world Reading wiki pages of videogames and TV shows feels quite like that.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  > thanks to AI writing, that could perhaps generate the blanks to make any fictional world feel arbitrarily deep. You may find "Chirper" interesting, some people making a twitter-like website where AI agents interact. I do find however that our clever clever human brains can atm anticipate quite easily how most things will turn out after a short amount of time, and people quickly become bored by it. Then again, a lot of history is very boring, its only interesting paired with a great storyteller who picks up the pieces. Right now AIs aren't really there yet (i've tried, with very deliberate prompting you can get somewhere but each story follows predictable tropes no matter how you prompt it, the tropes themselves change but its hard to get the AI to surprise you), but I can see it happening someday
speeder 3y ago
I think the silliest part of complaining Middle Earth is based on Earth, is the fact that Middle Earth IS Earth, explicitly. Tolkien states that LoTR is a "prequel" of real world history of sorts. Ditto for Wheel of Time, that instead is set in a distant future. It is obvious it will be based on RL cultures, because... it is. Ditto for people that complained that Fremen in Dune are too much like middle eastern people. Seriously, their religion is literally called "Zensunni" and they are settlers that explicitly came from middle east cultures of Earth.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Ditto for Wheel of Time, that instead is set in a distant future. Wheel of Time is explicitly set in both the future and the past. That's why it's a "wheel". (If you need an example, consider that Arthur Pendragon is, in the setting, a historical person who existed a couple thousand (?) years in the past, while at one point Egwene finds a much older Mercedes-Benz hood ornament in a museum.) In the second book, The Great Hunt, the concept of a multiverse of alternative realities (that interact with each other!) is also introduced, which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us. It is necessarily in a related world, where it's not clear what "related" means.
  - logicprog 3y ago
    > which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us That's not quite true, interestingly! Yes, there are alternate timelines available through the portal stones, but they are explicitly described as only sort of secondary reverberations, inherently not quite fully real, but just pale echoes of the true timeline that most of the books take place in. So it's pretty unlikely that, according to the metaphysical rules of the wheel of time, we are not living in the main timeline. In fact, it's later explained that Tel'aran'rhiod (spelled it first try!) Is the sort of semi-real limbo it is because it's a similar phenomenon to the portal stone worlds, just cross-secting all alternate realities instead of parallel to them. Maybe you're talking about the world's through the Twisted door frames, where the snakes and foxes live, but it's unclear exactly what relation they have to our world, and I'm inclined to suspect that we aren't intended to think that our world might be one of those, since those worlds seem to operate by very different laws even regarding basic spacetime.
HideousKojima 3y ago
War and Peace has roughly 600 characters and that's already famous for its length, now I'm trying to imagine if Tolstoy tried to describe every single Russian participant in the Napoleonic Wars.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life. A lot of people would want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of historical people and what happened in their lives, if the information was somehow correct. They wouldn't read all of it -- that would be impossible -- but they'd read some of it.
nonethewiser 3y ago
Also, it might be expected for technological change to happen extremely slowly when you have such disconnected states and small communities. He recognizes there are very poor transport and communication networks. How exactly would he expect information to flourish and where would he expect innovation to come from? I think in the real world, the hunter-gatherer culture lasted about 2 million years. Obviously middle-earth isn't hunter-gatherer but its some point of reference. From some very quick searching it seems like the start of agrarian society through the middle ages was about 6000 years. And again, as the author notes, there was a much high population density and network of people in the europe/middle east/western asia in the real world. The 12000 years without significant technological advancement seems entirely plausible even in real terms.
- bluGill 3y ago
  With the low apparent population though, most of Middle Earth probably should have been hunter gatherers. Cities don't really make sense at all, but if you want to add them they can be 100 miles of farms and villages to support the city (the cities being on a river or sea port for trade, thus justifying building them at all), but gradually tapering off to hunter gathers who sometimes get something from the distant city that they couldn't make themselves. As population gets denser farming and cities make sense, but at low density hunter gathers have an easier life.
da_chicken 3y ago
> I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life. Best avoid Malazan Book of the Fallen, then. It's a fantasy series written by an anthropologist and archeologist that's also based on the events in a GURPS tabletop roleplaying campaign. It's a replay (at least in part) written like it's a history. It's got over 600 named characters.
- logicprog 3y ago
  Malazan is great. It burnt me out a bit because it's often difficult reading, so I'm struggling to get up the energy to finish the last two books, but damn is it good. For anyone seeing this who might read it, don't let the fact that it's based off a tabletop campaign scare you off, I honestly couldn't tell whatsoever. It really doesn't feel like your standard tabletop role-playing game campaign at all, it feels like something very unique and different and it has an incredible amount of artistic merit. In fact, if you like the kind of books where there's always some deeper secret to be unveiled that entirely recontextualizes all of the previous World building in some flash of horrifying revelation, definitely check the series out, because that kind of thing happens a lot. Also, if you want a fantasy series that has a very active Pantheon of gods that feel like real old school mythology, not even the sort of Bowdlerized Percy Jackson version, also check it out. It also does an incredible job doing very interesting and unique things with its fantasy races and cultures. The Jaghut are my favorite.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Tolkien hides much of the complexity. For example, what happened to the Entwives? What happened that created the Brown Lands, and where did the Entwives go? That could be a whole book, but it's only referred to in a comment by Treebeard, the meat of which is less than a paragraph. That kind of thing happens all over the place. Who were the Ringwraiths before they became wraiths? (Yeah, they were human kings, but who were they?) How did things go down in the war that destroyed Eregion? How did Arwen's mother escape from being held captive by the orcs? What's the detailed backstory on hobbits? And on and on and on. There's all this stuff that is briefly referred to, but never fleshed out in detail. This is useful for authors, by the way. You can be creating a fractal, and you have to cut off detail somewhere. But if you leave hints that there's more detail, the world feels bigger. It doesn't feel amputated or limited.

reaperman 3y ago

> In a way that’s not s super surprising observation: obviously a world created through the work of a single author (or a few) will not be as complex as one created through the interaction of 8 billions of humans, plus billions of past humans, plus natural phenomena. Naïvely we might even expect a fictional world to be at least 8 billion times less complex than the real world, whatever that means. Maybe Tolkien got 0.000000000125% of the way there, and all other authors who tried got 0.0000000001% or less. I'd imagine that an MMO with robust and numerous autonomous AI NPC's each with a sufficient context window could potentially achieve world building at a much higher resolution and fidelity.

gota 3y ago
Expand that concept just a bit and we're back at The Matrix and our world being a simulation
brightball 3y ago
Dungeon Crawler Carl books do a pretty great job.
halfmatthalfcat 3y ago
AI nondeterminism breaks this idea as each interaction can and probably will differ between iterations, breaking any long term continuity.
- reaperman 3y ago
  I think you could tune things to generally settle into stable, repeatable "themes" if not deterministic input vs. final state. That way you can script parts of the story / experiences / themes / "canon-events" of a game while still allowing players' actions to have true natural effects on the world.
- devnullbrain 3y ago
  Is it not non-deterministic by choice? A random factor added to prevent it from just choosing the deterministic most-likely next token.
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iterati 3y ago

Overly complicated world-building requires mountains of expository prose to expose the complexity. No one wants that. They want characters and drama and entertainment. If you want world-building over a good story, read an RPG manual.

bartvk 3y ago
And then marvel at how many people it took, to work on the RPG manual. I've been the DM for a Forgotten Realms campaign and wow, is that a lot of material.
wongarsu 3y ago
The obvious advise of "show; don't tell" still applies. If you have a complicated world and try to show that off to the reader/viewer/player with lots of exposition most people will hate that. But many beloved works of fiction manage to have complex worlds that you naturally experience through the story. On the other hand, if the author doesn't do world-building, that often leads to illogical situations and issues with internal consistency. For example if you have people living on floating islands they obviously will prefer bows over swords; or sniper rifles over pistols. If they don't, there better be a good reason (that makes sense in the world).
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Yeah exactly. I wrote a rough draft of a several centuries post collapse great lakes area, after a writing prompt on Reddit. It was something like "tribal people find mount Rushmore", and I ran with it mentally for a few months. I adored removing as much "tell" as I could without making things incomprehensible. Ann Arbor became Anaba, Michigan became Meshaga. Russymons are Rust Demons, automated hunter killer drones that sometimes come to life if disturbed. Sorry, offtopic rambling. Cool to remember how much work I put in!
- iterati 3y ago
  the article is critiquing Tolkien's world-building as too simple. I'm struggling to see how his vision of complexity would in any way not require exposition dumps constantly so as not to gloss over something and be too "simple" for him.

mmahemoff 3y ago

I keep seeing "worldbuilding" like it's a new kind of hobby and Google Trends has the search query consistently growing over past two decades (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=worldbuilding https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=worldbui...). Not sure what triggered it to became so popular in recent years.

soneca 3y ago
That’s a very interesting observation and it would be nice to see people chiming in to speculate what could have been the trigger. My take is that narratives are growing kind of exponentially. We see it in videogames, webtoons, fan fiction. Even literature has many more writers than twenty years ago (even if not “published authors”, but people writing on Wattpad, newsletters, creative writing workshops, etc). More writers (amateur or professional), more fantasy writers in particular, means more interest in writing resources. And worldbuilding is a topic that it is not that much explored in other writing resources. I would even guess that if Tolkien did not actually invent the concept itself, he was the one that made it a relevant discussion topic. So it is a relatively new topic.
- Multicomp 3y ago
  Worldbuilding sits at the procrastination nexus of multiple hobbies. Fiction writers, RPG GM campaign designers, video game designers, etc. For any of those activities, the need for doing coherent and good enough setting design becomes the tempting excuse to procrastinate on doing the actual thing (plot, character, gameplay design, whatever) and 'refine the worldbuilding', because while there is a necessary minimum of setting design, the line of when you have got enough setting design and are getting into diminishing returns is not bright. Signed - I'd rather write the history of the steam dragons' colonization of the western marshes than finish my protagonist's character arc refinements today, don't worry, I'll get to him soon.
  - Tao3300 3y ago
    Nailed it. We should all be so lucky as to get big enough fanbases that a subset of mega nerds can find all the holes.

agentultra 3y ago

The world we see in the LotR and The Hobbit is what’s left over after a cataclysm wiped out the advanced civilizations. There are hardly any maintained roads but there are plenty of ruins suggesting a more advanced civilization once occupied and developed the land. I think Tolkien was deliberate in not revealing how complex his world was. He told the story… and even then people complain about the amount of exposition. If it were any more detailed you would be overwhelmed. What’s interesting is how he relied on linguistics and metaphor in literature to add layers. How the story of Aragorn is much like the story of The Wanderer. The cultural differences between Rohan and Gondor is in their language and architecture. Tolkien could have spelled it out for us but he didn’t. It wasn’t until Christopher started releasing the Silmarillion and supplementary backlog of stories that we get to see how deep Tolkien went and how little we actually saw.

Kalium 3y ago
It's also worth remembering that the world of LotR has people in it who were there for the advanced civilization. It's not beyond living memory. A number of those people are important minor characters, and the sense of loss helps form the backdrop for the ever-present grief of much of elven culture. The past cataclysm was very much a part of the current world in LotR in many ways.
BonitaPersona 3y ago
Also, the intentionality of it being a designed world. Some implicit features are intentionally designed to be messages themselves. For example, the point of there being close to no technological advance in thousand of years is intentional: 1. Saruman's plan consists on mass industrialization. Beginning in Isengard, but at the end of the books projected even further: globalized. And he is one of the villains! 2. During the millenia that technology hasn't advanced, the elves did rule. Other than the disaster caused by the villains of the story, Tolkien intentionally made the elves not need such technological advance. They had no incentives to, they had enough. Same with the rest of the races. Those are two are messages Tolkien is telling to the reader. Shallowly described by me, of course. I also understand this as the reason for the worldbuilding to be so limited and sparse. The world that we find is enough for his vision and messages to get across, and adding anything more would make it repetitive or distracting.

bawolff 3y ago

I'm confused why the technology level that is being compared with is medieval europe. To me it seems like lord of the rings fits much more into post-roman empire collapsing europe. There are remenants of what were once powerful states floating around, but clearly much decayed. The land is not so much terra nullius so much as the big states only recognize the other big states and the rest of the land mostly escapes their notice so to them it is not described as "owned" People travel via horseback because how else would they travel?

d--b 3y ago
"Post roman empire collapsing europe" is the textbook definition of the Middle Ages (from 476 to 1492).
- arethuza 3y ago
  Shouldn't that be post Western empire collapsing - the Eastern Empire lasted almost another thousand years?
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    It's weird to think that the Eastern Roman Empire only fell 39 years before Columbus discovered America. (At least, it's weird for me. I expect that the Roman Empire - even the eastern version - was a long time earlier.)
    - kuchenbecker 3y ago
      And the Russian empire is arguably a continuation of Byzantium / third Roman Empire with a Czar (Caesar) until the Russian Revolution.
      - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        The first czar was crowned in 1547 (104 years after the end of the Eastern Empire), so I'm not sure that it's a "continuation" in any real way. It may be a continuation in peoples' minds, but it's not a continuation in the way the Eastern Empire was.

justanotherjoe 3y ago

its not as hard as the author thinks. Take a book set in real world, let' say a book written by an adventurer like marco polo, or like, any settler or historian. The goal of fantasy worldbuilding is to mimic the richness of that book, not mimic the richness of the actual place (you'll need so many books, and pictures, and videos).

aaron695 3y ago

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ilamont 3y ago

Tolkien's approach is common in fantasy, or perhaps is the model that so many have aspired to. Written in the 1970s, "The Land" in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Thomas_Covenant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Thomas_Coven...) shows no real advancement after modern-day Covenant returns (via portal) 4,000 years later. There is still a clear good/evil distinction, magic is manifested in different ways, and there is a new crisis that drives the plot: Descending from the Watch, he also finds that a terrible change has transpired: four thousand years have passed, the Earthpower is gone, or nearly gone, and the people of the Land are out of touch with what remains of it. The Land is afflicted with the Sunbane, a disruption of the physical order which alternately causes rain, desert, pestilence and unnatural fertility to wreak havoc on humans, animals and nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wounded_Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wounded_Land

SeanLuke 3y ago

> If we like fictional worlds but can’t make them complex enough to be believable, the obvious workaround — in fact the only workaround — is to “borrow” the real world’s complexity.... The most transparent way to do this is to make a world map that isn’t the actual Earth, but also kind of is the actual Earth. Counterexample: Earthsea?

com 3y ago
Earthsea is so interesting! Ursula K. Le Guin made the bulk of her characters brown, and it’s possible to read it thinking about (unwritten?) fantasy written from the perspective of the Austronesian expansion into the island belts of south-east Asia, or indeed of the Melanesian or Polynesian island societies, or even pre-Mycenaean-collapse Aegean peoples. Their world centred on their island towns and the sea. Magic as self-evident and critical for seafarers and farmers. Reading now about the archeological analysis of the settlement of New Zealand from Hawaiki, how the colonisation effort spanned many islands, and how the failure of pandanus plants - in the cooler climate - for sailcloth, meant that for most of the colonists and all of their descendants until modern times, it was a one way journey. So many questions and so much fantastic world-building material there…

antisthenes 3y ago

The author doesn't understand how to read maps also, apparently. He compared a complex European map of 1444 showing a multitude of factions and proto-nation-states, and compared it to a 600 CE map...showing a rough distribution of ethnic groups? These are not the same thing at all...It's like comparing a climate map to a topographic one.

bovermyer 3y ago

One reason I created Iron Arachne is because I'm fascinated with all of the aspects of worldbuilding. There are so many facets of this, though, that attempting to build One Generator to Rule Them All is impossible. Instead, I take the approach of creating discrete generators that build a single aspect of Reality, and model, mock, or handwave related concepts. For example, the planet generator generates only a handful of statistics and a pretty neat image, rather than billions of years of history, tectonics, etc. A game like Dwarf Fortress goes farther, in attempting to simulate the evolution of a world. This leads to all kinds of interesting and weird phenomena in the "final" version of the world that the player starts in. One of the difficulties with this approach is that people often expect a coherent and familiar world with enough differences that it feels novel. A simulated universe that has evolved from a random initial state is going to feel alien and more difficult to resonate with. So, worldbuilding is a balancing act between detail and narrative. Too much of one makes the other feel stale or wrong.

RugnirViking 3y ago
absolubtely. You can't have an entirely alien narrative, because reading it will feel like a slog. Thats exactly why people say that reading lotr or especially the silmarillion is a heavy read - all the digressions about poetry or ancient history are difficult to get through. You have to swing between worldbuilding and the familliar (often characters with familliar motivations experiencing the world)

saalweachter 3y ago

Now, obviously, Tolkien loved his characters and his stories and his world. But everyone always gets this wrong: > It’s the most awe-inspiring work of worldbuilding ever done! He invented entire languages! People have spent the last 70 years making snippets of conlang to add flavor to their fantasy worlds in emulation of Tolkien, but for Tolkien the conlangs were the whole damn point! Tolkien was a language nerd first. Middle Earth exists primarily to add context to the evolution of his conlangs and to create subjects to write his conlang poetry about. He may have loved the story for itself, but his goal wasn't to create a coherent, fleshed out world as complex as our own. It was to make sweet conlangs and write epic conlang poems. It's fair to judge the master craftsman on the quality of the jig he makes to craft his cabinets, but you shouldn't confuse the jig with the cabinets.

agentultra 3y ago
I think this is one of the central ways to really enjoy the work. He was trying to create a linguistic tradition in English that was as strong and rooted as those found in Finnish, Saxon, etc cultures. Hence the use of language to “fill in the details,” of the world building. A lot of people, through no fault of theirs, miss the significance of Aragorn and the return of the king. They don’t understand the significance of the stories that are only mentioned by characters in passing. But I think some of that passes on unconsciously which gives the story and it’s world the lasting impact it has had. If you study the Wanderer, the Arthurian epics, Finnish-Ugric mythology, Beowulf, etc you can see where he pulled a lot of his inspiration for the world he built from.
nacs 3y ago
For those like me who didn't know what "conlang" meant: conlang = constructed language
- a1o 3y ago
  That is definitely not where my mind went when reading "conlang". Thanks for the clarification.
  - 3y ago

herculity275 3y ago

This is a really meandering piece and the author seemingly never internalized the distinction between the map and the territory. Fiction is not meant to perfectly replicate the entire complexity of the real world - rather it takes a very particular subset of reality and distills into a story you can consume at your leisure. This is true for both fictional and non-fictional settings - no movie set during e.g. WW2 or the French Revolution actually conveys the whole complexity of the real world at the time. Can you imagine a version of LOTR that also had to convey the all the socio-economic intricacies of trade routes between Gondor and Brie? Do you think that movie would be more enjoyable, or better at telling the story it wanted to tell? The best worldbuilding is that which doesn't get into the way of telling a good story. This is why "remixing" is actually a storytelling virtue - GRR can point at Dorne and vaguely motion "bizarro Moorish Spain" and the reader will instantly get a better idea of what he's dealing with without having to read a 800-pager on Dornish culture and history.

teddyh 3y ago
> trade routes between Gondor and Brie Transporting cheese, one would assume? (It’s “Bree”, by the way.)
endominus 3y ago
Which makes GRRM's criticism of Tolkien's world-building even more bizarre. "Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?" From https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/04/what-was-aragorns-tax-policy.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/04/wh...

derbOac 3y ago

Interesting fun read. A couple of reactions. First, I recently reread LotR after decades and was impressed by it. At the same time, I also felt like LotR was sort of a literary dollhouse for Tolkien: although there's a lot of complexity in certain things, other things seemed to be lacking in depth to the point of being comical at times. This is probably inevitable with a world that broad but the geospatial shallowness probably goes along with it. Second, to his credit, a lot of writing in general is sort of topologically simplified, and this probably reflects a certain cognitive mapping that goes on in reality. My sense of the world, for example, is vastly oversimplified, focused on my local environment and social network, and very blurry as you go outward. This is true of everybody. Maybe Tolkien made a mistake in reifying that a bit too much, in trying to fill in details of the world too much where other authors would have left it as "diagetically out of attentional scope" rather than "diagetically nonexistent". But psychologically people flow with it because it probably reflects human perception — probably especially when you are living through conflict and the world becomes even more focused. The article points out how unrealistic it is but it might not bother people because their internal maps probably aren't a lot different.

skerit 3y ago

> It is only later that I decided it was more interesting to write stories set in our good, old, complicated Earth than to try to reinvent it. Wouldn't you basically run in to the same problem? If the world you want your story to be based in happens to be our own Earth, you still have to change it, simplify it for whatever you're writing.

bluGill 3y ago
Sort of, but that the setting is in a real place that means you can assume the culture. You don't have to invent it all. If you sit someone down to eat in China the readers will automatically know they are eating a rice based meal with chopsticks (rice based would not apply to all cultures, but most people don't know China that well) and so you can just allow that backdrop without having to say what they are eating or what utensils they are using yet it is assumed. By contrast if I write a book where someone is in the city "lanorami" country "hullima" you have no idea what they would eat there unless I spend time telling you. Eating is only part of culture (an important part). In China you have an idea what the dominate religion is, how relationships are handled, and all those other details that make a culture complex (you might be wrong, but you have an idea). Thus a writer on earth doesn't need to simplify. Just referring to a location brings in a ton of complexity that doesn't need to be mentioned at all. If I told you that Middle Earth Hobbits are hatched from eggs do you have enough evidence to say I'm wrong? Or I could say the dwarfs don't nurse their young and thus none of them have nipples (much less boobs), again there isn't enough evidence so say I'm wrong. That such evidence doesn't exist means the culture is less complex just because we cannot make assumptions. (Note, I haven't read the books in many years, so there might be evidence that I don't remember - however the larger point remains even if this detail is wrong)

avgcorrection 3y ago

Might and Magic has multiple planets. I think the humans and others have been scattered to different planets because of some cataclysmic events. So now they live in Medieval times. (With the occasional computer (oracle) and laser gun.) And sometimes a planet might blow up.

pfdietz 3y ago

The issue with all the disconnected small habitations is it's completely unstable. Before a few centuries ago, societies mostly lived in a state of Malthusian stasis. They were at the limits of what their environment could support, with excess population dying to disease and malnutrition. But in Middle Earth, there's plenty of room for these kernels of civilization to expand. They're not exploiting their environment fully. Population growth will go into swelling populations; there's plenty of space for people to move into to farm more. And this can happen very rapidly.

supdudesupdude 3y ago

Open your eyes and see!

jrochkind1 3y ago

Actually an interesting essay I liked, and not what I expected from the title. I don't know if this is intentional, but the title led me to expect the opposite of the author's final sentance (kind of irrelevant to the rest of the piece) conclusion. > Maybe that’s actually the most compelling reason to settle Mars and beyond. So that there is, actually, a planet B to draw inspiration from. I hope everyone knows by now, the amount of investment it would take to make Mars at all liveable -- still far less comfortable than, say, antarctica -- by humans is enormous and would span generations, if it's possible at all which quite likely is not. Far far more resources, orders of magnitude, than the amount it would take to deal with climate change and keep the actual earth liveable, which we already seem to think is out of our means. Like even in our worst nightmares of climate change it's probably still easier to live on earth than on Mars no matter how much we put into Mars. Here's just one the first thing found googling that looked reasonable explaining this: https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/Humans-Will-Never-Colonize-Mars.pdf https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/Humans-Will-Neve... There really is no plan(et) B for earth. Which is the argumetn I associated the "there is no planet b" title with, which perhaps the author was intending to play on? To the extent that people's fantasies of it take away any urgency at all to trying to keep earth from getting less liveable, it's pretty infuriating.

RugnirViking 3y ago
> Like even in our worst nightmares of climate change it's probably still easier to live on earth than on Mars no matter how much we put into Mars. Yes, absolubtely. The idea that mars is a hedge against climate change is ridiculous in the short term. I do however deeply believe that its worthwhile to go there. It is definately possible to sustain there, that i'm relatively sure of. Theres a definate appeal to me of all these places - antarctica, underwater living, the desert, the ocean. The idea of a regimented life against the elements appeals to me. I feel sometimes like im grasping at straws to justify why. I think its wanderlust. Why go to antarctica? why study the jungle? why not stay at home and grow rice and live a simple life?
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Symmetry 3y ago

> From the study of that single pebble you could see the laws of physics and all they imply. Thinking about those laws of physics, you can see that planets will form, and you can guess that the pebble came from such a planet. The internal crystals and molecular formations of the pebble developed under gravity, which tells you something about the planet’s mass; the mix of elements in the pebble tells you something about the planet’s formation. > I am not a geologist, so I don’t know to which mysteries geologists are privy. But I find it very easy to imagine showing a geologist a pebble, and saying, “This pebble came from a beach at Half Moon Bay,” and the geologist immediately says, “I’m confused,” or even, “You liar.” Maybe it’s the wrong kind of rock, or the pebble isn’t worn enough to be from a beach—I don’t know pebbles well enough to guess the linkages and signatures by which I might be caught, which is the point. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-...

aledalgrande 3y ago

I disagree that a more intricate world means more entertainment. With Game of Thrones I hardly knew whatever was happening where. Even in Elden Ring, which I loved, I could not keep up with all the side character stories, I would have had to compile a series of notes.

empath-nirvana 3y ago

They're right about what the scale of Middle Earth is _supposed to be_, but really, it should be thought of as about the scale of England and Denmark. It's closer to a Norse Saga like Beowulf in scale than anything else.

tgv 3y ago

There once was a slogan: There is no planet B. It was a clever pun, meant to drive home the message that we can't escape from whatever we afflict upon the Earth. And now it gets used as a joke, for clicks. How sad.

hannofcart 3y ago

> Whereas Middle-earth is fairly static: over about 12,000 years, civilization seems to have been stuck at the same level of development. (Maybe because the one guy who tries to industrialize, in addition to being the only one to use telecommunications, is swiftly defeated by an army of slow-moving talking trees.) That's such an original take! I never thought of Saruman as the great builder that Middle Earth needed but didn't deserve.

didip 3y ago

While talking about world building, 1 pet peeve I have is that the villain is always described as comically villainous with spikes all over their body. That simply took me away from my immersion. The villains should not look too different than the heroes. Is it so that it makes murdering the villains palatable?

matusp 3y ago
Yeah, or villains building really edgy decor on their fortresses. Who was Sauron's decorator? They surely loved their spiky walls.