Ez’s Comments (group member since Jul 29, 2013)

Ez’s comments from the Literally Geeky group.

I haven't had time this week, but I imagine I'll get them all done on Sunday.

Anyone finished yet?

Just a quick ICYMBI, the Fighting Fantasy series is being relaunched!

Got an opinion on Fated? Know how to pronounce the author's name? Here's the place to chat on all things Jacka.

I very vaguely remember having some Lone Wolf books!

@Vincent_SKP I quite like the idea of choose your own fatalist adventure as a means of introducing kids to the injustice of life.

Constantly died in CYOA. I remember one book, not a CYOA brand but a similar fantasy orientated product with a cash prize for the person who solved the book first....

My eyeballs were eaten by ravens.

I was also a big fan of the Masquerade puzzle book. Again not strickly a CYOA but an interactive art puzzle that lead the victors to a genuine jewelled golden hare. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masqu...

There was a pretty good documentary on Kit Williams, Masquerade, the hare and the filthy cheating swines who faked a victory.

I have seriously kicked arse and made the world a better happier and more scientific place. I am awesome at Hamlet.

They sound excellent. I'm going to pick those up regardless!

That should read I also veto Scalzi.

I also Scalzi, but very excited about the other options.

Got something to say about Dante, poets, gruesome murders, or magnificent beards, say it here.

The problems with the title - we touched on it briefly in the hangout. Pluralising an adjective is ... not done. Though, yes technically Incorruptibles isn't a pluralised adjective; it's transformed into a plural noun since Incorruptibles is kind of the nickname of Fisk and Shoe, much like the use of The Untouchables for Elliot Ness and co. I still don't like it.

Maybe I'd be happier if Fisk had told Shoestring "they bring a knife, you bring a gun! That's the Ruman way!!!"

I've read it!

... So, even if it's not a TV series (which by length alone it's well suited for), The Dark Tower is an ambitious endeavour fusing Steven King's many, many characters within a monomyth. There are gunslingers, Arthurianesque fallen courts, and an epic battle between good and evil.


Is it any good? Ah, well, it's Steven King. Take that as you will. The first book, The Gunslinger is also pretty unhurried. If you like his writing style, you're going to enjoy it. If you like his ideas but find yourself chafing at King's actual storytelling (cough, cough) it's a little more frustrating. Overall.... Eight books are a commitment, but it's not an uninteresting journey.

.... It's not as good as Salem's Lot though.

Possibly of interest: JK Rowling's handwritten spreadsheet for Order of the Phoenix. Just the plot point, ma'am.

https://t.co/hZ1CaoCpxK

World-building is a bit like having to 'show your workings' on a maths question. Here's the end result, here's how that result came about, and isn't it interesting! Sometimes maybe there's a problem in the workings... and that's quite interesting too. I'm a fan of John Sutherland's puzzles in Classic Fiction - how does Mrs Cratchit cook Scrooge's monster goose? It's not necessary to relate every single math class you ever sat in.

Comprehensiveness and continuity allows us to nit-pick, or to write immersive fanfic perhaps; to obsess and lose ourselves in different worlds, but the intense focus can make the reader myopic to the point of being (ironically) ill informed. Moreover if you need a book that comes with an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and an atlas, I imagine you're going to be pretty limited on choice. That's not to disparage authors who put in all that work, though forgive me if I mutter quality not quantity under my breath.

Like Mitchell, I'm not sure using world-building as the primary tool for analysis is particularly worthwhile.

"[W] hen students encounter a book outside of the modes of actual realism or faux world-building realism, they don’t know how to evaluate it. They believe that a different way of seeing reality aren’t invitations to see reality in a new way yourself, but simply failures of worldbuilding."

As with anything, a reader will get out what they put in. In a very roundabout way, I wonder if there's another problem at work here. That this expectancy of rules and structure that Mitchell describes is perhaps laziness on the part of the reader who doesn't want to do their own homework/ think laterally/be creative and would rather be spoonfed every bit of information that passes through the author's transom?

Maybe readers who employ such methods cast themselves as raggedylittle orphan Olivers, as they march to the front, bowl proffered asking for 'more'. The same readers might be quick to judge Terry Prachett's clever (and snarky) hand-waving of how dragons work. They demand to know to have it explained, because 'huge firebreathing dragons are bloody cool' isn't enough. There's no right way to properly evaluate a book but, if you're reading 'Guards! Guards!' and getting angry about wingspan ratios and tensile strength, I hate to tell you this, but, you're doing it wrong.

I like that idea; the burlesque show, all teasing and fan dances, and the "wham-bam thank you, mam" of a alleyway kneetrembler. GRRM'S Rogues Anthology is good for that; some of the stories are in well known worlds - Gaiman, Rothfuss (BLOODY ROTHFUSS), others plunge you into something new. Scott Lynch's ability to create a compelling fantasy setting and caper in twenty pages propelled me into his Gentleman Bastard Sequence.

I've struggled with steampunk novels where the author insists on telling me too much (The Difference Engine really is a cut above them all). I have some issues about imperialism that a lot of steampunk seems set on ignoring in favour of zeppelins and dashing fashions. Clever books address it, the less able ignore the darker side of the historical period in favour of adding more cogs.

Alt-history is a particular bugbear of mine though. The 'alt' can be great, but if the 'history' is badly researched - especially when famous figures are co-opted for window dressing and end up acting out of character I get pulled out of the world, and end up very aware that I'm about to throw things at the wall. Again, that's a case where less can be more.

The devil is in the detail. Read the Silmarillion backwards at a crossroads while a black cat sits on a broken mirror nursing a sore bum, and he will appear, horns and all. I love the details. I am utterly absorbed by them, the nit and grit, and textures of life inside stories (and games). However, Failbetter founder Alexis Kennedy, and sci-fi author Lincoln Mitchell have a point when they spit ‘world-building’ like a dirty word. Maybe our desire for fully fleshed out worlds needs to take a back seat.

Both Kennedy and Mitchell argue that the attention to detail demanded by obsessive little nerdlings like me comes at the expense of storytelling, and further more that it’s also detrimental to the reader’s imagination. It is a hindrance; narrowing the our focus until we end up bickering for days about plausibility (how did the orcish economy work, etc?*) while missing the point entirely. We could be star gazers gaping on a dark hill with all the riches of the sky spread before us. Instead we’re picking at lint, marvelling at its consistency, and congratulating our woollens for bobbling. NK Jemision’s Dreamblood series made me wonder. It was intricate and detailed, but unconfined too - comfortable to wander about in, sort of like a really posh dressing gown. There was room to make up your own answers.

What is world-building? It’s having the answers, or rather it’s having the details and structure from which answers may be plausibly conjured. Good world-building is beautiful bridge - or even a spiderweb. It supports the story, allowing the reader to travel along its path nodding at the tensile strength. It hold us, ad in some cases grabs us. How much of it do we really need? Have you seen those spider-webs when the spider is on crack or caffeine?

In his post Kennedy quotes extensively from Tolkien “Lord of the Metal Umlauts,” reminding us that while ol’ JRR might be held up as the Grand High Wizzard of World-building, even he understood the necessity of mystery and a bit of slack in magical realms. That bagginess provides room for imagination; it’s a fulcrum for storytelling. Authors who lose sight of that lose the mechanics of spinning a good yarn.Y'know what, why not go read Kennedy’s article:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles.... It’s a good un’. I’ll wait here…

My favourite bit of LotR provides a good example of both top notch world-building but also of knowing when less is more. It happens on Paths of the Dead….A dwarf, and elf and a human walk into a, well, I wish it were a bar (Pub of the Dead), but that sort of thing was four hobbits and two books back. The dwarf, elf and man walk along haunted paths to a haunted stone to summon an unseen army of ghosts. Everything is haunted because of course there’s a big backstory of angsty oathbreaking (oh the added heft of centuries old betrayal). Remember, I’m not arguing that all world-building is bad. Aragorn marches along (probably singing in his head, the bastard), while Gimli is busy being terrified, He notices a skeleton reaching for a closed door. And that’s it, the story goes on by and takes us somewhere else. My favourite bit in all of the Lord of the Rings. Skeleton, hand, door. Bit of weft to the ongoing epic’s weave.

You never find out in the main book what’s behind it. You don’t need to. And yes, there’s a wee paragraph of backstory in the appendices, and hasn’t Tolkien’s oft noted thoroughness totally undermined my point? No. You don’t need to read the appendices to wonder about that door or what’s behind it, and reading them won’t stop you from be troubled, like Gimli or from feeling sympathy for that stodgy little axe nibbler. You’re both out of your depth, and you’d be out of your depth whether there’s an explanation tucked away somewhere or not.

Maybe the learned reader gains something later on, by knowing that REDACTED lies mouldering there, but it doesn’t add anything to the story or the moment, and again, even in the appendices it’s only a quick sketch of a bigger story - one you’ll never know, because Tolkien isn’t going to tell you, Even this vast, historied world, is actually quite empty, full of pauses and held breaths.

Mitchell’s argument
(https://electricliterature.com/agains...), which prompted all this mulling, concerns laziness. Not any specific author, but ours. By shifting the focus from the story onto the minutiae, readers creative faculties are left untaxed and under nourished. Not everything has to be explained or planned out, he argues; let the reader work - engage them as something more than problem solvers (or nit pickers); turn their imagination into your own personal dancing monkey. World-building in overdrive can provide ample manure for the roses of pedantry, but little else of value will grow.

I’m not immune to sniffing those particular blooms. Sometimes it’s in appreciation of a wonderful world: I want to know more, I want to go beyond the story. Other times it really is a persnickety critical huff. I get very frustrated with Wizarding World’s cult of isolationism. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets we learn that Arthur Weasley, a grown man doesn’t understand electricity, or …. ahem, no… I’m sorry, I can’t help myself…. USE A BIRO! IT’S A LABOUR SAVING DEVICE! LEARN ABOUT ELECTRICITY! DO YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT THE ANIMAL CRUELTY USING QUILLS INVOLVES?!!!!!!!!!!!

… Ahem.

I quite agree with Mitchell that the longer a reader is asked to spend in a world the more structure that world requires, but that doesn’t mean that it necessarily needs lots of depth; sometimes a superficial structure will do… Think Camelot from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: it’s only a model. I often think of the Discworld as a old house (built on loam), with bits added on in different styles - clashing styles, with doors opening to reveal stairs that go nowhere, and that’s fine.

We regularly praise good world-building during Literally Geeky hangouts. Rightly so; skillfully evoking worlds, whether historical, fantastical or futuristic is artful (and, the cynic in me would add, lucrative). I’d argue it’s not limited to genre fiction, though genre fiction is primarily, though not exclusively, the stamping ground of in-depth world-building. All authors create a world with unique rules of some sort that you have to process and invest in. Warren Ellis is weird, wonderful and highly conceptual, Lolita plunges the reader into the tilted summers of Humbert Humbert, Joyce gives you a Dublin you can smell. Mary Shelley paints a chiaroscuro with shades of detail and withholding; the endless lists of Frankenstein’s university readings, his nocturnal trips; procuring, stitching, followed by a spot of misdirection. Bam. Life! ….How did he do it? How much detail is too much? Robert Jordan, I’m looking at you.

Did William Goldman have the right idea with his 'good bits’ Princess Bride? Maybe. AS Byatt built not one but two romantic poets from the ground up in Possession, and as good as that book is, oh my god, when you turn the page and see the beginnings of another six pages of meticulous pre-Raphaelite verse, well, it’s the same sinking feeling you get when Aragorn strikes up another sad Elvish song. There’s a point to the poems and the songs, and yes, the respective authors put a lot of hard work into their art, but battering me round the head with the cudgel of needless intricacy (+10 to over-complication) won’t stun me into loving a story. Excess baggage bogs the bloody thing down.

Detailed world-building can be a joy and I’ll hold my hand up; I fetishise the good stuff, I buy into the franchises and sequels and want more of the same beloved worlds. That sort of thing isn’t not always good for you. Less is more. Take Gaiman at his best.That cunning mop-haired fiend! He knows how to use just enough detail to make you believe. Just enough weirdness to make you want more (oh gods, more Neverwhere, please!). Just enough reality that the magic seems … right. Natural. Something that was always there but never articulated, lurking deep in your marrow. Then he ends and moves on.

Compare that ruthlessness and confidence in storytelling to a dull but meticulous world: an indulgence of detail, stifling in its tediousness; weighty and constricting. Slowing authors down, sidetracking them like a primrose path from their original purpose. In putting out faith in in the heaped bricks of world-building, we the reader (and perhaps publishing houses) are losing sight of the joys of the bigger, vaguer picture.

Thoughts?

*http://www.centives.net/S/2013/making...

Also a fan.

Fancy vampire cakes! Easypeasy donuts with M&M eyes and fangs in their holes! Victorian recipes for cakes in aspic!

Here's the place to go bats(enberg)with your baking related postings. Unless you're Aaron, who hates cake.