Spoiler Alert: Most readers don’t prefer complex world building. Those that do tell their own stories within those worlds: tabletop gamers.
The more complex the world, the more page space is required to explicate it and the less tight the emotional narrative density is. The lower this density vis a vis exposition, the lower impact the cathartic moments are necessarily due to their sparsity. The Dunbar Number likely has an organization or tribal equivalent that nobody has yet named that’s far less than the 250 individuals humans can normally track without losing their sense of place and social importance into anonymity. I’ll can it the Reed Number and estimate that it’s four to six.
This is why the most complex seeming worlds only give us the illusion of complexity. Herbert gave us a massive seemingly complex universe in Dune, but only a handful of political entities actually duking (sorry!) it out on the page. Martin had five books and really only a dozen different political entities in play in SOIAF--which only began to sell in huge numbers after HBO laid it all bare (literally). I don’t think the mass audience came for the complexity there. Asimov and others, especially in sci-fi, do lay down bigger complexity and unintentionally shrink their audiences when there’s “too much” to track. Family saga novels and series (which you would expect to have high complexity) sell inversely proportional to their actual complexity in my anecdotal observation--not my usual jam, so I’ll admit that’s speculation.
Everyone else gives us four different houses, clans, tribes, species, factions, or whatever. Or the names or numbers of about a dozen states, with only two or three actually being visited or involved in the plot.
I’m sure some aspiring literary academic could make a thesis out of this. And maybe prove me wrong.
You talk about the time it takes to create a new world, but what about the time it takes to explore it?
Stories are always shorts compare to our human life. One human cant write the story of humanity since the beginnings of time. And one would die before finishing to read it.
Especially because we also took time to read about the fictional worlds. Some of us know the maps of video games better than the maps of our own town.
What is it with fiction that make us love it so much? Is it the simplicity? The neutrality? The concentration in short period of high emotions without the boring moment?
Inevitable pedantic comment: in the Song of Ice and Fire books, if you pay attention to the descriptions of environments and fauna, Westeros is definitely based on North America, not Europe. (Exhibit A: dire wolves, North American prehistoric megafauna.)
I think geat worldbuilding starts with creating dynamic, flexible, realistic _rules_, then riffing on what could happen given those rules. It doesn't require filling out all the details — just creating "what-ifs" that proceed from a ruleset. It's why some of the most popular fictional universes (Star Wars, Star Trek, Warhammer, Cthulhu) have hundreds of published works from so many different authors.
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.
are you familiar with the video game disco elysium by any chance? it’s by far the most complex fictional world i’ve ever encountered, and i think the writers do it very well: they understand they can’t replicate the complexity of the real world, so there’s the obvious inspiration (like you mentioned in the article), and also they remove the “boring ordinary stuff” and instead magnify both the beauty and the horror of our everyday lives to communicate a message about the human condition. i don’t think i’ve had a piece of media impact me as much as that game has; i hope you check it out!
It's been a while since I've read him, but I remember Jack Vance doing a fantastic job of building worlds in his science fiction stories especially. One device I really liked was his use of footnotes to digress on the cultural or political mores of alien societies.
One of the worldbuilding strategies that I enjoy the most is when authors allude to something that’s happened in their world but offload a lot of the intermediate steps to the reader. In “Infinite Jest”, DFW drops little tidbits about how the US is catapulting all our garbage into Canada (sorry!) or how companies can buy the naming rights to calendar years. And the reader kinda has to try to interpolate how we would’ve gotten from here to that point. William Gibson does this too in some of his near future books. It seems to me like a way to “borrow from the real world’s complexity,” as you say, while being careful to not trigger the reader’s awareness of all the missing details.
The magic of LOTR and its siblings is that the world Tolkien built is just far enough from ours to be an absorbing alien landscape but at the same completely relatable. It’s a brilliant balance
Your point about the limits of intelligent design versus evolution echoes something I read today about Daoist thinking. The Daoists believed deliberate thought cannot supersede or keep up with natural intelligence
The first part about Europe interacting with the rest of the world and not being isolated made me think that for a long time they were very much isolated from the Americas. There are many fictional universe where there is a vast sea to the west with rumors of unknown lands, or maybe a precipice!
I remembered sailing west Golden Sun. I googled up the map of Golden Sun, got a little nostalgia rush, then continued reading the article. I was a bit confused when I saw the next image. What are the odds?
Spoiler Alert: Most readers don’t prefer complex world building. Those that do tell their own stories within those worlds: tabletop gamers.
The more complex the world, the more page space is required to explicate it and the less tight the emotional narrative density is. The lower this density vis a vis exposition, the lower impact the cathartic moments are necessarily due to their sparsity. The Dunbar Number likely has an organization or tribal equivalent that nobody has yet named that’s far less than the 250 individuals humans can normally track without losing their sense of place and social importance into anonymity. I’ll can it the Reed Number and estimate that it’s four to six.
This is why the most complex seeming worlds only give us the illusion of complexity. Herbert gave us a massive seemingly complex universe in Dune, but only a handful of political entities actually duking (sorry!) it out on the page. Martin had five books and really only a dozen different political entities in play in SOIAF--which only began to sell in huge numbers after HBO laid it all bare (literally). I don’t think the mass audience came for the complexity there. Asimov and others, especially in sci-fi, do lay down bigger complexity and unintentionally shrink their audiences when there’s “too much” to track. Family saga novels and series (which you would expect to have high complexity) sell inversely proportional to their actual complexity in my anecdotal observation--not my usual jam, so I’ll admit that’s speculation.
Everyone else gives us four different houses, clans, tribes, species, factions, or whatever. Or the names or numbers of about a dozen states, with only two or three actually being visited or involved in the plot.
I’m sure some aspiring literary academic could make a thesis out of this. And maybe prove me wrong.
You talk about the time it takes to create a new world, but what about the time it takes to explore it?
Stories are always shorts compare to our human life. One human cant write the story of humanity since the beginnings of time. And one would die before finishing to read it.
Especially because we also took time to read about the fictional worlds. Some of us know the maps of video games better than the maps of our own town.
What is it with fiction that make us love it so much? Is it the simplicity? The neutrality? The concentration in short period of high emotions without the boring moment?
Inevitable pedantic comment: in the Song of Ice and Fire books, if you pay attention to the descriptions of environments and fauna, Westeros is definitely based on North America, not Europe. (Exhibit A: dire wolves, North American prehistoric megafauna.)
I think geat worldbuilding starts with creating dynamic, flexible, realistic _rules_, then riffing on what could happen given those rules. It doesn't require filling out all the details — just creating "what-ifs" that proceed from a ruleset. It's why some of the most popular fictional universes (Star Wars, Star Trek, Warhammer, Cthulhu) have hundreds of published works from so many different authors.
This post got quite a lot visibility and comments on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175981
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.
are you familiar with the video game disco elysium by any chance? it’s by far the most complex fictional world i’ve ever encountered, and i think the writers do it very well: they understand they can’t replicate the complexity of the real world, so there’s the obvious inspiration (like you mentioned in the article), and also they remove the “boring ordinary stuff” and instead magnify both the beauty and the horror of our everyday lives to communicate a message about the human condition. i don’t think i’ve had a piece of media impact me as much as that game has; i hope you check it out!
It's been a while since I've read him, but I remember Jack Vance doing a fantastic job of building worlds in his science fiction stories especially. One device I really liked was his use of footnotes to digress on the cultural or political mores of alien societies.
One of the worldbuilding strategies that I enjoy the most is when authors allude to something that’s happened in their world but offload a lot of the intermediate steps to the reader. In “Infinite Jest”, DFW drops little tidbits about how the US is catapulting all our garbage into Canada (sorry!) or how companies can buy the naming rights to calendar years. And the reader kinda has to try to interpolate how we would’ve gotten from here to that point. William Gibson does this too in some of his near future books. It seems to me like a way to “borrow from the real world’s complexity,” as you say, while being careful to not trigger the reader’s awareness of all the missing details.
The magic of LOTR and its siblings is that the world Tolkien built is just far enough from ours to be an absorbing alien landscape but at the same completely relatable. It’s a brilliant balance
Your point about the limits of intelligent design versus evolution echoes something I read today about Daoist thinking. The Daoists believed deliberate thought cannot supersede or keep up with natural intelligence
From Zhuangzhi (basically second to the Tao Te Ching): https://iep.utm.edu/zhuangzi-chuang-tzu-chinese-philosopher/#SH3d
The first part about Europe interacting with the rest of the world and not being isolated made me think that for a long time they were very much isolated from the Americas. There are many fictional universe where there is a vast sea to the west with rumors of unknown lands, or maybe a precipice!
I remembered sailing west Golden Sun. I googled up the map of Golden Sun, got a little nostalgia rush, then continued reading the article. I was a bit confused when I saw the next image. What are the odds?