 I spent a long time trying to figure out how much weight Jack Sparrow and Will Turner would need to keep their rowboat diving bell from floating away. I guess I'm just a fan of sub-creation. There are few authors more famous for their attention to and affinity for detail and storytelling than J.R.R. Tolkien. He spent years inventing a dozen dialects with distinct grammar, syntax, and alphabets for elves and other such creatures, then developed so much mythology around those languages that four books in a fictional encyclopedia fell out. Writers who admire the cultural importance of the Lord of the Rings legendarium have tried to emulate Tolkien's precedent by creating encyclopedic references for their own fictional settings as part of their writing process, what Tolkien called sub-creation, but is now more commonly known as world building. Bestselling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson will spend years developing a historical, political, magical, and geographic landscape for a new setting, composing a world bible before he gets down to the business of telling a story there. Patrick Rothfuss hashed out 400 years of numismatic history to ground the use of currency in the Kingkiller Chronicles. If you search the internet for advice on how to start writing fiction, there are thousands upon thousands of articles, interviews, workshops, podcasts, and presentations from bestselling authors revealing their secrets for how to approach world building activities like designing a sufficiently specified magic system, creating a planet with realistic weather patterns and geography, or laying out the operation of an alien civilization that's consistent with their biology. Narrative consistency has been important for storytelling since well before the invention of writing, but the standard that writers are held to has changed significantly over the past few decades. Usenet groups dedicated to chronicling and comparing notes on factual or narrative oversights have existed on the internet since before I was born. Communities where eagle-eyed nitpickers might feel clever and earn kudos for pointing out errors the creators fail to notice. These days, massively popular YouTube channels like CinemaSense spend hundreds of hours cataloging every conceivable factual or self-referential misstep in films for their millions of subscribers, regardless of their importance, believability, or accuracy. This sort of fine-toothed nitpicking isn't limited to movies. Thanks to moviemistakes.com, which also happens to index books, I can absolutely ruin the Da Vinci Code for you. The pyramid over the Louvre actually has 673 glass squares, not 666. Can you believe how sloppy some authors are? With aggressive policing of media for the slightest inconsistency or factual error, it seems nigh impossible for authors to create anything that would withstand such widespread and intensive immersion-breaking scrutiny without obsessively detailed worldbuilding. Of course, the real world is often bizarre in ways that would set off any nitpickers BS detector. NASA taped over the original high-definition recordings of Humanity's first moonwalk. Tiffany was a popular name in 12th century Europe. After realizing that carbon emissions are causing havoc on a global scale, humanity is still scaling up oil production. Any writer who tried to pass off these factual events in a work of fiction would likely be accused of authorial malpractice, even if they're definitionally realistic. This suggests that there's something more interesting going on in the relationships between author, imagination, text, reader, and interpretation, charitable or otherwise, than simple realism. Science fiction author M. John Harrison's now-infamous piece, titled Very Afraid, is a smattering of ideas interrogating those relationships and the role worldbuilding plays, or should play, in them. It's written in a deliberately inflammatory style, and he's expanded its scope a great deal since first publication, with further commentary fueled by the many arguments and discussions it's prompted, but his primary thesis is succinctly summed up in the first line. Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding. Harrison argues there's a widespread mistaken assumption that the goal of writing is to create a near-perfect duplicate of the author's ideas in their reader's heads, as if the contents of their brain had been crisply photocopied there, but that whole notion is built on an utterly absurd philosophy of language. He says, you cannot replicate the world in some symbols, only imply it or allude to it. Even if you could encode the world into language, the reader would not be able to decode with enough precision for the results to be anything but luck. This line of thinking should be familiar to anyone who's encountered the death of the author, or similar philosophical arguments. For Harrison, an audience isn't an empty vessel into which the author's vision is poured. They're active participants in the process of creation, each constructing their own unique fictional worlds and representations of what happens in them, a process mediated but never perfectly defined by the text. Harrison thinks the magic of writing, that gripping sense of wonder you get from a really good sci-fi story, only really manifests in that interaction between the reader's imagination and the text, which he thinks calls this whole worldbuilding thing into question. No matter how meticulously an author plots out the nitty-gritty details of a setting, their imagination simply can't bridge that final gap. They must rely on the reader to build a wondrous world for themselves and furnish it with everything it needs to make for a compelling story. Even with infinite time to describe every pebble and blade of grass, the world invoked by the text is always going to diverge from the author's vision in important ways. For writers who might spend hours agonizing over the best word to convey a specific flavor of dread, it's understandable that this philosophy of authorship might be cause for dread. Sculpting a novel from nothing, word by meticulously chosen word, then placing it gingerly in the hands of your audience, hoping, praying that they'll take that last step and manifest your hard work into dreams of places, people, civilizations, magic swords, and robots that are every bit as powerful as you wanted them to be, that takes a lot of trust. It's easy to see why an anxious author might try to hold their reader's hand, so to speak, writing in as much minute detail as they can get away with to shepherd the audience toward a properly furnished destination. For Harrison, this approach isn't just doomed to failure, it's a self-reinforcing, self-destructive delusion. The world builder assumes, for anything good to come out of a reading of their text, they have to cover all basis, stamp out all ambiguity, leave no room for interpretation. But in the process, they're training their readers to avoid exercising the very imaginative muscle necessary to make text come alive in the first place. One can imagine a situation where that kind of anxious handholding would feed off of recreational nitpicking. A few uncharitable fans assemble some gripes with a story or the world where it takes place. The author responds defensively by doing more world building, trying to convince their audience that they've figured everything out for them in an attempt to head those criticisms off at the pass. Their less nitpicky audience members acclimate to this encyclopedic approach to fiction and start to complain whenever the text isn't excruciatingly specific. A vicious cycle driven to tragic extremes by a misunderstanding of how writing is supposed to work. Of course, the belief that one can somehow strong arm an audience into a proper sense of wonder isn't the only potential cause for an increasing emphasis on world building in genre fiction. Author and media theorist Helen Marshall pairs Harrison's ideas with observations about how the publishing industry incentivizes the creation of settings over compelling narratives. Okay, after that H-bomber guy video, I want to get this right, Marshall's paper on Harrison quotes a book by Henry Jenkins who's quoting a presumably anonymous experienced screenwriter who says, when I first started, you would pitch a story because without a good story you didn't really have a film. Later, once sequel started to take off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. And now you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media. Marshall argues that while a very lucky writer might be able to make it in a sea of competitors based on truly astounding talent, a writer who can flesh out and package a detailed setting that's easily farmed out to other writers for additional content, not just selling a uniquely brilliant writing style but a potential franchise opportunity, that's a much more attractive deal for publishers and studios, the institutions that really decide who makes it and who doesn't. The narrative might suffer but at least an author who world builds themselves out of the picture can get a paycheck. Now to be clear, neither Harrison's nor Marshall's critiques are aimed at world building as an activity in and of itself. They're science fiction writers, in dialogue with other science fiction writers about writing science fiction. I don't think anyone's fixing to bust down the door of a Conlin convention or a D&D rules discussion and yell at everyone for being too hung up on self-consistent narrative scaffolding to tell a good sci-fi story. Harrison points out that some sort of world building necessarily happens in all writing, even in purely representational non-fiction like travel guides or textbooks. You can't write a review of a sandwich shop without arranging your thoughts into a cohesive, self-consistent narrative. What they're reacting to is a growing trend in storytelling, a viral notion that if you haven't crafted at least a quarter of a somerillian for your setting's history, geography, languages and so on, if you're not continuously reassuring your audience that you've put in work behind the scenes to validate an appropriately robust explanation for why Andromedon weeks or 12 days long and Martians hadn't perfected small-scale fusion reactors, you might as well throw everything you've written in the garbage and start from scratch. I think their responses to that position, however inflammatory, highlight an important perspective for discussion about genre fiction of any sort. Consistency and detail are easy to compare and contrast without much experience. I can point to a long passage describing medieval horse tack and just about anyone can do a few seconds of googling to confirm whether or not it's accurate. When discussing a book with others, that sort of observation is safe, impersonal. It's harder to have a conversation about things my imagination has filled into the cracks in the text. The rich backstory I developed for a random character who appears and leaves without explanation. The resonance of this or that passage with my memory of being a five-year-old child. The parallels I find between the story and certain philosophical ideas that I'm not even sure the author intended. All of this amazing stuff is very personal, and sharing it with others requires both skill at expressing some part of myself and the vulnerability that can arise as a result. Similarly, when authors are giving writing advice, it's easy to talk about why you need your magic system to have this or that limitation if you don't want wizards to be all powerful. It's harder to talk about how to tell a story so funny that your readers will shake with silent laughter on the subway. Funnily enough, Tolkien himself acknowledged the necessary subversion of worldbuilding to storytelling. Tom Bombadil, the jolly side character who is inexplicably immune to the One Ring's influence, while even Gandalf and Galadriel struggle against its power, isn't mentioned once in the volumes of lore surrounding the Legendarium, and that's on purpose. In a letter, Tolkien explained, even in a mythical age, there must be some enigmas as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one. Maybe if the dude who wrote The Sumerillian thinks every story needs some undefined space for the audience to imagine and speculate, we don't really need midichlorians. Do you find Harrison's arguments compelling? Has any author's obsession with worldbuilding over narrative jarred you out of a story? Please, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe while I share, and don't stop dunking.