Jump to content

M. John Harrison on Worldbuilding


Larry.

Recommended Posts

Rakov,

An author may imbue his or her text (this is where the art comes in) with the potential for a variety of interpretations, meanings . . . but he or she ultimately knows what he or she meant, has a central meaning to his or her self-created text.

They may certainly know that they began with an aim, and they may evaluate for themselves how well they succeeded in that aim. They know what the work meant to them, and no one can question that.

However, what they believe their aims are and what they believe their success is in achieving those aims and how the reader evaluates and understands it is very different. This strikes me as being about control, and I don't see as the author has the ability to control the capital-t Text, because the Text is ever-shifting, a product as much of the reader as of the writer. This isn't relativism, I think, merely a recognition that anything that communicates through creative means is ultimately subjective in both inception and reception.

To boil it down: I may set out to communicate something, I may produce something that ends up communicating something else (possibly without my realizing it) more than what I had originally intended to communicate, and the reader may end up taking something else entirely from what I produce. They cannot speak with authority as to the author's self-conscious intentions (they aren't mind readers, though it's true that some academics think they are), but they may be equally capable (or even more capable, in some cases) of pointing out the subconscious results, and they are supreme in determining their own reading and interpretation.

If readers of Viriconium come away from Harrison's story wanting to know more about the Pastel City and how it functions, well, is there anyone or anything at "fault"? I don't think so.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Rakov;

So you don't believe in subtext? Authors may be read completely against their conscious intention both because of sub-conscious subtext and because the readers with their sometimes utterly different experiences and worldviews simply see different things in their books.

DF;

Could you please define "escapism" since I honestly don't understand what you mean by it?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Calibandar: Yep, I'm the same Nerdanel, although I haven't been on TORC for ages now. (And you're the Mithfânion who used to be Gil-Galad.)

More on-topic: Have the people here read Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon (republished in the SF Masterworks series)? It's one of my favorite books. It's also almost completely pure worldbuilding. The plot that there is, is the imaginary future history of the human race and their descendants. I would like to hear the opinion of the "worldbuilding-sucks" people about that book.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So you don't believe in subtext? Authors may be read completely against their conscious intention both because of sub-conscious subtext and because the readers with their sometimes utterly different experiences and worldviews simply see different things in their books.
Bastard (!!!!) my point is that any writer worth his or her salt will weave subtext and the springboard for that play in his or her work, as well as at another level having a clear thrusting intent. What rankles with me is the notion that some lazy-arsed reader's view of the work is just as valid as the original author's avowed vision and intent of blood sweat and tears. It's relativism of the worst kind and leads to dumbing down that does the pursuit of excellence no good whatsoever. The two can co-exist (in my book far from peacefully) but I know where the first hand authoratative perspective resides. Actually ascertaining that as well as possible is part of the fun of the reading process.

As Howard Jacobson put it in the context of something else (Jade Goody and Big Brother!):

There is a vindictiveness in dumbing down. It aims to dethrone not only intelligence but the means by which we rate one thing above another. Dumbing down is an assault upon the very concept of value. Thus Jade, though she wouldn't know what I am talking about, is the child of that nihilism which gave us postmodernism and the Turner prize. A celebrity for being nobody, a belcher and a farter with her own perfume, she is an ironic reference to the unmeaningness of meaning.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hey Pat,

You're being attacked on Gabe Chouinard's blog.

Yeah, I know.

Can't fault the guy for not agreeing with me. I wrote my piece and he did the same. My objective was not to start a war of words with anyone, so hopefully this will not turn into a mud-slinging scrap between people who enjoy/hate worldbuilding. I respect Gabe and I've been reading his blog for quite some time, even though we don't see eye to eye on several issues.

Like many people, I found Harrison's post to be insulting. I'm not losing any sleep on this matter, nor should anybody else! ;) I'm not saying I'm the Voice of Reason here. That's just my take on what Harrison said. But if I go by the amount of emails that was waiting in my inbox this morning, it looks as though few disagree with what I wrote...

Patrick

P. S. Stego, did Daw Books contact you for that Rothfuss ARC?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Rakov;

I don't see why readers have to be lazy and listening to their voice must equal dumbing down. You know, some readers can be quite insightful and be capable to see in the text things author didn't see there. My point is that once the book is released it starts to live indepedendently and author no longer has decisive voice about how it should to be read.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This guy Choinard is odd. Whilst Pratchett is Britain's biggest-selling living author whose name isn't Rowling, he's not the biggest selling British author of all time (what about Agatha Christie with her 2 billion sales?) and certainly hasn't sold as much as Tolkien. There's also obviously Rowling to consider, who outstrips both. That said, the idea that Lord of the Rings has outsold The Bible is a bit of a stretch, Pat, unless as Stego said you mean that it outsold The Bible in just one year.

Made a comment on your blog and on this guy's as well, Pat.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It was in the papers about two years ago over here. I kept the article, but I can't find it in my clutter at the moment.

But it did state that (if I remember correctly), since Bookscan or another similar program which allowed publishers to know exactly how many books were sold around the world, the various translations of LotR outsold the Bible.

I should have made this clearer, sorry. My bad. But the essence of my post has nothing to do with that, in any event...

Patrick

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dammit - I let myself get sucked into this one as well. I posted a tangental response this morning on my blog.

It's always fun to get attacked by Gabe - he's the type that can have a very heated discussion with you without it getting personal (too bad that can be a rarity).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This guy Choinard is a surrealist. Rather that use, say, publisher's figures for backing up his argument that Pratchett is the biggest-selling UK author of all time, he insists on using some arcane system that measures how many books an author gets into the top 10, which clearly Pratchett with over 30 books to his name in the time period (1976-2001) is going to win hands down and authors who published before this time (like Christie and Tolkien for that matter) get ignored. The fact that each Pratchett book has sold perhaps 1 million copies is kind of irrelevant which each Rowling book has sold 50-60 million copies and LotR has sold 250 million copies by itself. Has this guy not heard of mathmatics? :huh:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nerdanel,

just gotta say, awesome posts!!!!!!

I emphatically agree with this bit,

Being forced to study stuff like James Joyce would have made me hate literature, so I went for engineering instead, which has also the benefit of giving a more useful degree while I can keep reading fiction for fun

what's TORC?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

www.theonering.com, pretty much the best Tolkien discussion forum on the net ( adn along with theonering.net, which is much more of a movie fansite, also the biggest).

What I'd find interesting to know is what Harrison thinks about New Weird writers like Mieville, Swainston, Vandermeer, or what about authors like Moorcock or Wolfe, authors I believe he respects and sees as examples of good Fantasy.

Say what you want about Moorcock, but he's a worldbuilder. Not to mention Mieville! Wolfe's New Sun or Wizardknight?

Are these excluded from his "worldbuilding is dull and for nerds" judgement because they do a different type of worldbuilding?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

:lol: This is turning into a hilarious "blog vs blog" play-by-play.

I haven't read Harrison's work and, from his posts, am not sure I'm missing anything. Is Viriconium a city [reading the post on Fantastic Metropolis]? How can you have a city which is never the same twice? Do the streets move around? The landmarks? Because that's just goofy; actually, not just goofy, it smacks of poor editing. Harrison's prose may be the bee's knees, cat's meow, etc., but when I look out my window, the cars may change but the tree is still standing on the boulevard and there's still three f&cking feet of snow outside. Sorry... a little bitter about the weather right now.

As for worldbuilding: Dear Author, if you are creating a new SFF world for your characters, you'd better give it some depth. I can find a map of the London underground easily enough, but your imaginary city needs good description and, if possible, a decent map. Which you should pay attention to while writing, because if you get lost by mistake, so does the reader. Which brings me to -

Consistency. Characters should behave in character unless driven by an overwhelming force, which, dear Author, you should at some point explain well enough for me, your reader, to buy the change. Hills and trees should stay in the same place short of earthquakes and axes [hoping Happy Ent isn't reading this!], or you'd better have a good reason why. And the famous eye colour issue should be either not brought up, or resolved appropriately.

Under the right circumstances, I am prepared to suspend disbelief, which is a demand that any good SFF should make of me; and if it's good enough, it'll stay suspended till the end of the book. That's not nerdishness: that's any reader's response to a good story.

And as for this "fun" business - no offense, Dylanfanatic, but I don't think "reading for fun" needs a lot of explaining. Some people ride rollercoasters, I read books.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

He sounds like the kind of pretentious, literature-degree-having blowhard that ruins the study of literature for everyone. I stopped taking English classes as soon as I could for a reason. Funnily enough, I read far more and a more diverse selection then anyone I've ever met who takes one of those classes. I guess most books aren't Literature with the capital L (meaning pretentious crap).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Are you a writer, Ran? If so, you will know those moments when, to paraphrase Suzanne Vega: 'these words mean what I meant, they say what I said'.

And it's all very nice that the reader can put his or her own spin and turn upon it, doodle along the highways and by-ways of inception and reception, but to the author, it really doesn't matter much at all, when he or she has attained to that moment when the words mean what he or she meant and say what he or she said.

It's not about control, it's about freedom. Reading is a doddle compared with writing a novel that actually works and can hold up. It isn't an equal partnership, it isn't all relative because of those highways and by-ways along inception and reception. The author has the freedom and the authority to have the last word (whether he or she decides to do so or just keeps shtum, is entirely the author's prerogative), because you see, he or she knows. Let the reader have his own interpretation as a result of all those synaptic crackles along the highways and byways between inception and reception, all well and good.

It's the difference between Nikola Tesla being a pioneer with innovations and discoveries in electricity and someone benefitting from it by having the nonce to flick the resulting light switch and bask in the safe illumination all over, from near and far, provided by polyphase alternating current.

It rankles with me when the process of reading is put at the same level as the writing of what is being read. There is no comparison when all's said and done. Few authors will admit to this because it would smack of biting the hand that feeds them.

Not only are they the most attentive of readers, but they can write the stuff as well. There may be something that smacks of 'partnership' and incorporeal 'collaboration' but the partnership/collboration will never be an equal one until the reader can pen sutff of like quality to read. As a reader, up the author, I say!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't see why readers have to be lazy and listening to their voice must equal dumbing down. You know, some readers can be quite insightful and be capable to see in the text things author didn't see there. My point is that once the book is released it starts to live indepedendently and author no longer has decisive voice about how it should to be read.

Godsgrace, My beef isn't so much with that (entirely! see above!), it's with relativism primarily and I suppose I've gone off at a tangent to the post that orginally pushed my button in that respect. Relativism is just a sloppy segue away from dumbing down, because there is little intellectual rigor required in the cop-out that is relativism.

Anyway, button having been pushed earlier and going off at a tangent, I've calmed down now! :read:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Rakov,

Are you a writer, Ran? If so, you will know those moments when, to paraphrase Suzanne Vega: 'these words mean what I meant, they say what I said'.
No, but I suppose Neil Gaiman is, and he just had a post which, I think, answers this:

Talking about unintentional consequences, I recently spent an interested couple of hours browsing through my complementary copy of The Neil Gaiman Reader, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Essays on things I've written, by a dozen different very smart people. I think it's probably a very good book of essays, but I am undoubtedly the last person on earth who can usefully comment on it, being, as I am, the least competent critic alive of the author in question.

Emphasis mine. He goes on to cite a couple of bits where the essayists poined out very clever things which he may not have realized were quite so clever at the time, and things where they thought were very clever but that he felt weren't particularly clever for some particular reason. Why the variability? Because the author, as he says, is not the most competent critic of his own work. He is too close. What he saw as mundane might well have been clever to the audience, and what he saw as clever may well have been mundane to the audience.

I don't know that I put the act of reading a work as superior to the act of writing it. But the fact that the author is the creator does not mean that he is also the interpreter. An author's intentions are not the same as the final product, after all. Writing is not some weird science where an idea can be transmitted from the writer's brain to the page with 100% involiable clarity, and then like a bolt of lightning leap off the page, through a reader's eye, and into the brain with that 100% involiable clarity as if through some telepathy, as if the person has no self and is merely a vessel for the author's knowledge.

So this being manifestly the case with -- basically -- every kind of art, why should the writer have the "the last word?" What exactly is "free" about something like "the last word", even?

The last word for a writer is, "Fin," or "The End." Once it's out there, once it has flown the coop, he has no "freedom" to determine how his creation is perceived. He has the freedom to express himself, but the expression ends with the writing. He then has the freedom to then give his perspective on what he was attempting -- or what he thought he was attempting -- but that seems to me to be about it. His freedom cannot impinge on the freedom of his readers to read his work and to make of it what they will. By what possible coercion could a writer "have the last word"?

I'll again emphasize that I don't see reading and interpreting as being _equal_ to writing or creating. Creation creates the stuff that others interpret. It is the cause, and the interpretation is the effect. It has an important place. But it grants the author no special right to dictate how it is to be read. The minds of others are not their property, and they can be too close to the trees to see the forest.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Reading is a doddle compared with writing a novel that actually works and can hold up. It isn't an equal partnership, it isn't all relative because of those highways and by-ways along inception and reception.
Hmm. There was an interesting article by Zadie Smith that suggest otherwise in the guardian, recently.

10. Note to readers: a novel is a two-way street

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing - I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.

This is a conception of "reading" we rarely hear now. And yet, when you practise reading, when you spend time with a book, the old moral of effort and reward is undeniable. Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you. To respond to the ideal writer takes an ideal reader, the type of reader who is open enough to allow into their own mind a picture of human consciousness so radically different from their own as to be almost offensive to reason. The ideal reader steps up to the plate of the writer's style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park.

What I'm saying is, a reader must have talent. Quite a lot of talent, actually, because even the most talented reader will find much of the land of literature tricky terrain. For how many of us feel the world to be as Kafka felt it, too impossibly foreshortened to ride from one village to the next? Or can imagine a world without nouns, as Borges did? How many are willing to be as emotionally generous as Dickens, or to take religious faith as seriously as did Graham Greene? Who among us have Zora Neale Hurston's capacity for joy or Douglas Coupland's strong stomach for the future? Who has the delicacy to tease out Flaubert's faintest nuance, or the patience and the will to follow David Foster Wallace down his intricate recursive spirals of thought? The skills that it takes to write it are required to read it. Readers fail writers just as often as writers fail readers. Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe the old mantra that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced. That is certainly one of the many things fiction can do, but it's a conjurer's trick within a far deeper magic. To become better readers and writers we have to ask of each other a little bit more.

sorry..thats quite a big chunk of it. I'll give the link too and you can edit out if you think it's too much, ran

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/ge...1989004,00.html

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree with Rakov. The relationship is far from an equal partnership.

A reader can do a half-arsed job and still have an enjoyable experience if the author is skilled enough. But if the author is unskilled or phoning it in, no amount of effort on the part of the reader can save the work.

One can read GRRM ignorning the complexity of the relationships, the genuine motivations to characters major and minor, and simply focus on quippy language or well-described battles and still have a positive experience. They may be missing a lot, but it still can be positive.

But no amount of thought, effort or skill on the reader's side will make a bad book anything but a bad book.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...