You can't write a novel of contemporary life in the UK today without acknowledging that almost everybody is clutching a softly-glowing fondleslab that grants instant access to the sum total of human knowledge, provides an easy avenue for school bullies to get at their victims out-of-hours, tracks and quantifies their relationships (badly), and taunts them constantly with the prospect of the abolition of privacy in return for endless emotionally inappropriate cat videos. And technology and environment inextricably dictate large parts of that context. We exist in a context provided by our culture and history and relationships, and if we're going to write a fiction about people who live in circumstances other than our own, we need to understand our protagonists' social context-otherwise, we're looking at perspective-free cardboard cut-outs. Storytelling is about humanity and its endless introspective quest to understand its own existence and meaning. Without worldbuilding, the galactic emperor has no underpants to wear with his new suit, and runs the risk of leaving skidmarks on his story. Worldbuilding is the scaffolding that supports the costume to which our attention is directed. Worldbuilding is like underwear: it needs to be there, but it shouldn't be on display, unless you're performing burlesque. It's an alternative type of underpinning to actually-existing reality, which is generally more substantial (and less plausible-reality is under no compulsion to make sense). The implicit construction of an artificial but plausible world is what distinguishes a work of science fiction from any other form of literature. I recognize the point he's putting in play here: but I (conditionally) disagree. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. Worldbuilding numbs the reader's ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.Ībove all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. John Harrison (whose stories and novels you should totally read, if you haven't already) wrote on his blog:Įvery moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding. And in the here and now, I find it really difficult to suspend my disbelief in the sorts of worlds other science fiction writers are depicting.Ībout a decade ago, M. Meanwhile, the world in which I interpret a work of fiction has changed. I've changed over the years as I've lived through changing times, and what I focus on in a work of fiction has gradually shifted. Like everyone else, I'm a work in progress. Including works that I knew were going to be huge runaway successes, both popular and commercially successful-but that I simply couldn't stomach.
But about a decade ago I stopped reading SF short stories, and this past decade I've found very few SF novels that I didn't feel the urge to bail on within pages (or a chapter or two at most). While I'm an autodidact-there are holes in my background-I've read most of the classics of the field, at least prior to the 1990s. This isn't to say that I haven't read a lot of SF over the past several decades. But over the past decade I've found myself increasingly reluctant to read the stuff they send me: I have a vague sense of dyspepsia, as if I've just eaten a seven course banquet and the waiter is approaching me with a wafer-thin mint. Similarly, marketing folks keep sending me SF novels in the hope I'll read them and volunteer a cover quote.
8BIT DRUMMER GALAXY COLLAPSE DRIVER
(This is a little like expecting a bus driver to have an informed opinion on every other form of four-wheeled road-going transport.) Being a guy who writes science fiction, people expect me to be well-informed about the current state of the field-as if I'm a book reviewer who reads everything published in my own approximate area.