Worldbuilding in Literature

[Arthmail]

But the places do...with some additional cultural understandings (misunderstandings as well?) of what those places represent. I can visit either locale; I can't visit a fantasy world with my own two feet.

You can't visit Crusader Antioch either. Even if you were to stand in the place where it happened, time has moved on. It is no longer that place, because that place no longer exists. Only bits of it do, blurred memories and whispers of the past.

But it is not the same.

[Larry.]

You know what else exists?

Horses, Tobacco, swords, trees and most of the stuff present in LOTR. (to pick an example work) You can go see them, hold them, do whatever.

The New York of Sex and the City doesn't eixst. I can visit REAL New York, that the other New York was based on, but that's it. But then again, I can also visit rural England to see what the Shire was based on.

Sure, you can't go to Hobbiton, but I can't talk to Leopold Bloom. Nor can I visit HIS Dublin or the people he meets there.

At this point, your definition has become:

World Building is when you create a mostly fake place full of mostly real things and fake people. That's low brow.

Setting is when you create a fake place based loosely off a real place full of mostly real things and fake people. That's Literature.

Let me sum my reaction up in one word:

NO

You put words in my mouth that I wouldn't say. I'll put it in these terms and just leave it be, since I don't have time for circular rounds here:

The term "world building" was created as a specific subset of setting in the 1970s to help describe what secondary-world "creators" were doing. As a term for describing that subset of writing, it works.

But to take a term that was split off from the centuries-old "setting" and then try to argue that fictional works that do not revolve around a constructed setting (said "world", which not the same as the planet Terra/Earth/etc.) ought to have the same term applied to it defeats the original purpose of delineating what secondary-world fantasists were doing that was different from that of other fiction writers.

The idea that there's a "low brow" and "Literature" bit in my comments seems to be a manifestation of some inferiority complex, but I could be wrong. Doesn't matter in the end. My opinion remains unchanged. I'm not going to try and sway yours either.

[Larry.]

You can't visit Crusader Antioch either. Even if you were to stand in the place where it happened, time has moved on. It is no longer that place, because that place no longer exists. Only bits of it do, blurred memories and whispers of the past.

But it is not the same.

So we all live in a fantasy, is that your argument? Because if I take what you said at face value (which I don't), that would seem to be the implication behind your claims.

[Werthead]

Horses, Tobacco, swords, trees and most of the stuff present in LOTR. (to pick an example work) You can go see them, hold them, do whatever.

And of course you can also go to Casterly Rock and the Eyrie, or at least their real-world inspirations, the 'setting skeletons' on which a lot of worldbuilding skin was hung.

What I would still like to know, and note was not addressed earlier on, is where is a line drawn? The area where Sitka is located in The Yiddish Policemen's Union exists, but the city does not. What is 'worldbuilding' and what is 'setting' there? What about the New York City of Watchmen, with no pollution, different buildings, airships floating above the city and at one point a giant dead squid sitting in the middle of it? Not a 'setting' as it does not and never has existed, but the city is based on a real city. Does worldbuilding come into play there? What about historical fiction?

[Ser_not_appearing_yet]

All elements of fantasy originate from reality. They've just been deconstructed and reformed to appear different.

So essentially, yes you can step into them. At least in theory.

[fionwe1987]

I don't have much time for replying, unfortunately (not only do I need my rest, but I have a host of other matters to attend to in the morning and the coming week), so this will be relatively brief.

Your first example can be turned around to underscore a point I really haven't made explicit in related discussions but shall now. If a setting/place is "real" (has a shared history, some shared features of understanding, etc.) to a group and another group out of ignorance (neutral in this case; similar to a hypothetical case if I were to try and imagine life as a llama herder) believes otherwise, that doesn't change the possibility (or rather, probability in such cases) that the first locale exists.

I agree with this. But in what way or form does this prove that good worldbuilding does not require skilled writing?

After all, no one would disagree that Tolkien's Minas Tirith lives, breathes and resonates at an emotional level much better than Dan Brown's Rome. And the fact that the existence of Rome is much more probable in reality shouldn't make any difference to the critic.

Minas Tirith is a well drawn place that makes the reader invest in its (imaginary) existence. Rome, for all its actual colour and beauty, comes across as a drab gray backdrop in Brown's novel.

Which of course touches upon that slightly controversial topic of religion. I'm somewhat of a cultural relativist when it comes to popular religion and its manifestations in material cultures, so I'm not going to be one of those who go out and proclaim that [insert religion] is "fake" or a "fantasy" with its rules of "world building." That would be rather insulting to practitioners of [insert religion], especially those whose faiths have shaped their cultures, languages, histories, politics, and general world-views for thousands of years.

I wonder what your point is here? Are you saying that non-secondary world settings should be impervious to criticism because they are real, and thus criticizing their fictional representation can offend people who live in the real place? :blink:

To try to expropriate or usurp one set of definitions and apply it to another, (mostly, in this particular case) unrelated set of conditions is rather odd at best and insulting at worst. Take for instance realismo mágico (the Spanish word order fits better here than the English "Magic Realism"). Writers in this tradition, including Gabriel García Márquez, have resisted having the term "fantasy" applied to their work, in large part because the form and functions of their stories differ considerably from say secondary-world fictions. After all, in such stories, the metaphors embedded in the rains of Macondo are meant to be read first and foremost as metaphors for very real historical events (there was a massacre of striking banana plantation workers that was covered up by the Colombian government); they are not meant to be taken as literally as the anthropomorphizing of Evil in the form of a Dark Lord which occurs in several secondary-world fantasies. You bring up Rushdie, but in the Rushdie novels and stories that I've read, including Midnight's Children, don't such abnormalities serve to underscore very real concerns within modern Indian and Pakistani societies? Wouldn't Rushdie be quick to point out that the messages contained in his fictions are no "fantasies," especially in concern to a certain fatwah from over 20 years ago that apparently is still in effect?

Are you arguing that the message contained in secondary world fantasies is "fantastic"?

I'm sorry, but the message I took home from the Lord of the Rings was not "If you're forced to fight a Dark Lord, throw his ring into the nearest volcano". The message I got was that power can corrupt, that using your enemy's methods against him can make victory too costly, that anyone can overcome the most impossible of odds as long as they are determined, and so on.

In fact, I'd argue that secondary world fantasies, at least those that are moderately well done, serve as nothing but an elaborately constructed metaphor to flesh out and explore very human, very real themes. Heck, even totally shoddy creations like Goodkind's world (whatever it is called), are attempts at exploring human, if crazy, ideologies.

You bring up Rushdie and how the fatwa has influenced (and was influenced by) his work. Can the same not be said for Robert Jordan, whose experience at Vietnam coloured his writing quite strongly? You may have a different view on how effectively such human themes are brought out in secondary world fantasies like Jordan's, but that is a matter of specific criticism. What I want to know is why the setting in such novels (which we can call worldbuilding to avoid confusion) deserves derision no matter how well done and well integrated it is to the themes of the story. Why do statements like "Worldbuilding does not require writing skill" get support?

And as for the semantics behind all this, shibboleths are rather telling at times. Why else would I put "world building" in parentheses most, if not all, of the time? ;)

Dunno about this at all. To me, worldbuilding (especially used as one word) is pretty specific to sci-fi and fantasy, and usually secondary world, epic-style fantasy at that. You use the word to people who don't read a lot of fantasy I think it's pretty doubtful they'd know what you were talking about. The action of creating setting and atmosphere may be universal to any fiction, but I don't think the term is. Apart from anything else wordBUILDING seems to imply the creation of something new. To me it refers to that effort of creating a secondary world, of mapping, and cataloguing, and creating the cultures and languages and magic systems and creatures and all the rest of it, and then to the way in which that world is evoked on the page, the way in which that background material is communicated to the reader. James Ellroy creates a vivid feel of period LA, but would you really say Ellroy does some great worldbuilding? Or Tolstoy was a good worldbuilder? Probably there's a great grey area between worldbuilding and creation of setting just as there is between fantasy and anything else, but still, it just seems to render the term meaningless if you use it so widely.

Both of you seem to be saying that there is a difference of degree between "worldbuilding" and "setting". That isn't something I can get behind, because I think there is no neat line of separation that would allow us to say worldbuilding is for fantasy and setting is for real literature, which makes the whole point of the existence of the two words redundant.

Let me give an example. R.K.Narayan, an Indian author, wrote stories set in a fictional Indian town named Malgudi. He created a fictional history for it, having everyone from Rama to the Buddha passing through it. Certain features and people from this town are staples in his stories which deal with varying issues facing the people who live in this town.

He builds upon the readers knowledge/expectation of a small Indian town, but that does not change the fact that the existence of Malgudi is impossible. I suspect any literary critic would call Malgudi a part of the setting of the very literary works of RK Narayan.

Contrast that with Guy Gavriel Kay's Al Rassan. This is an unabashedly fantasy world, whose existence we know of as impossible. Yet, it doesn't take an Einstein to see that the treatment of the Kindath in the story is a commentary on anti-Semetism. But a critic wouldn't deign to call Al Rassan the setting of the story, right?

What I want to know is, exactly why are Malgudi and Al Rassan seen as inherently different? One is a town, the other is a peninsula. One is in a real country, the other mimics a real history. Do we need two words to describe them, though?

And Shryke... I was actually agreeing with you!

[Shryke]

The term "world building" was created as a specific subset of setting in the 1970s to help describe what secondary-world "creators" were doing. As a term for describing that subset of writing, it works.

But to take a term that was split off from the centuries-old "setting" and then try to argue that fictional works that do not revolve around a constructed setting (said "world", which not the same as the planet Terra/Earth/etc.) ought to have the same term applied to it defeats the original purpose of delineating what secondary-world fantasists were doing that was different from that of other fiction writers.

Why? What's the difference?

You keep trying to say it's different, but you've shown nothing substansive on that account. Just because a word was created for a reason doesn't mean it's right. And it doesn't mean word's definitions don't change. "World Building" may have been invented as a word, but that doesn't mean it actually means anything different from "Setting".

How is "Setting" really different from "World Building"?

[Juba]

Just curious . . .

I wrote a series of short stories set in the fictional city of Venice, Ohio--an analogous combination of the real world cities of Canton and Canal Fulton, Ohio, and various other Mid-Western rust belt communities.

Now these stories are not urban fantasy, but angsty New Yorker style fiction--i.e. Literary Fiction, you know, with serious human themes-- (they were written during my numerous university creative writing classes).

I constructed an area map, created a viable history, i.e. made the place seem as real as possible--the same sort of things I do in preparation when writing a "fantasy" novel.

Would this be an example of "worldbuilding" or "setting"?

[Erik of Hazelfield]

In doing setting, you can look things up. You still have to make many things up, but you can at least get the very basics from looking at reality (past or present).

In doing worldbuilding, you have to make up most things yourself. And when you do that, you can fail. Like for instance when you're making incredibly powerful magicians but cannot explain why they don't rule the world. This doesn't happen when you use a historical or contemporary setting (at least, not if you do your research well).

I think worldbuilding is essential in SFF literature. Because really, what's the point in choosing a fantasy setting for your story unless you put some effort into that setting? If only the story is important you could just as well have placed it in the real world, and thus not had to bother with consistency or credibility. Unless of course you're doing one of those poorly constructed stories where fantasy elements are used as a plot device, to get rid of problems caused by bad planning, or to arrange the world so that the hero's values will always be the ones leading to the right decisions (yes, mr. Goodkind, I'm looking at you.)

[Wastrel]

Juba:

Depends on a) which publisher you have, and B) what language you write in. Have the right publisher, and it's 'setting' (ie respectable literature); likewise, if you write in the right language (ideally Spanish), it's literature (and hence 'setting') by default. Otherwise, you're a contemptable little nerd who should be laughed at and exiled to the back of the bookshelves.

DF angelically attempts to claim that this isn't about literature/genre snobbishness... but of course it is. If the only difference between world-building and setting is that the former occurs in genre books and the latter occurs in literary books, then yes, clearly insisting on the difference (and associating insults like 'nerdism' to the former) is simply being snobbish about genre.

[And if we react resentfully like children, it's because DF and others have returned us to the level of playground popularity]

-----

Some specific points:

- No, stories do not 'take place in' New York. They take place in a fictional world of the author's creation. An illustration from Chesterton: in London, if you take the Tube, once you have passed Sloane Square, you know the next station "must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria." But when a character in a novel passes Sloane Square, the next station can be whatever the author wishes. Now, oftentimes the author will restrain themselves to the expected, allowing Victoria to arrive as it does in reality - but in reality, this arrival in necessary, and in the fictional world of the novel, the arrival is contingent upon authorial fiat. The same fact in the same world cannot be both contingent and necessary - therefore, the story, however mimetic in appearance, is not in reality occuring in London, anymore than the stories about the Shire in reality occur in the Home Counties. In one case, the author has chosen to follow more closely certain facets of reality; in the other, they have deviated more greatly into their imaginations. But the same occurs to some extent in every novel: we do not say a writer is 'a nerd' because they have deviated from historical characters, or even because they have added or subtracted events in a dramatised historical account. And as others have pointed out, even if we confine ourselves to 'the world' (the series of 'facts' regarding geography, society, culture and history presented by the story), there is no clear dividing line between you and us.

- DF is being disingenuous in his focus upon terminology. So the phrase 'world-building' was invented more recently than 'setting'? Fine - I don't really see why that means the former shouldn't replace the latter, but let's grant that it shouldn't. There still remains the fact that this is a confusion of "X is Y" with "X should be called Y". I can say quite easily that a certain animal is an avian without denying that it is a bird, and without saying that the term avian should replace the term "bird"; nobody cares whether you call it "setting" or "world-building", only that you don't falsely demarcate, for essentially political/social reasons, between the two.

- Nor is it honest to argue that this synonymy makes either term redundant: I think we are all away that a word may differ markedly in connotation, intension/comprehension, sense or Sinn (or insert alternative terminology here), while having exactly the same denotation, reference, extension or Bedeutung. [indeed, the words 'denotation', 'reference' and 'extension' all have approximately the same Bedeutung, interchangeable in most writers, yet all differ in connotation and sense). The words 'setting' and 'world-building' call attention to different elements and significations of the same activity (the former tends to call attention to the activity in passive form as the mirror or support of other narrative activities, while the latter tends to attract notice to the activity in active form as a work of art and effort and skill in its own right); I think this is an asset, compared to other activities in narration, such as "characterisation", where the one word must stand for both aspects; but since every work has setting/world-building, and whenever the activity exists it has both aspects, dividing the words between genres rather than aspects is impoverishing our language by taking away a useful distinction and wasting a perfectly serviceable word for no apparent other reason than social manoeuvreing...

- "setting/world-building" is only the name we give to the part of the narrative activity particularly concerned with certain elements of the story: imitations of geographical awareness, imitations of historical retellings, imitations of cultural nuances, imitations of social potentials; imitations of all those things that shape the plot and the character that cannot be described through the stream of consciousness. Why is it less legitimate to play with these potentialities than with the potentialities of conscious choice? "World-building" is interesting to me because it is a mirror on the fascinating portions of the world: culture, society, history. The fact that the modern Anglo-American "Analytic" tradition extols rational agent theories so greatly that any attempt to address the particularity of the character's moment as the fundament and touchstone of their historically-embodied conscious activity is a lamentable reflection on the close-mindedness of the ideology, and itself a moment in history that will no doubt pass away - a moment of striving for an ungraspable solidity.*

- DF makes the argument that in Literature, apparent 'fantasy' is really a reference to a disguised reality - Rushdie and Garcia Marquez are talking about the real world through a series of metaphors. Fair enough - but what do you think that fantasy is about? I don't just mean the obvious point, made already, that all the elements of a fantasy, like the elements of a dream, find their origin in our waking lives, but the more precise point, that authors classed as "fantastical" are just as interested in the world as any other authors - or at least there can be. Some, no doubt, are interested only in escape and delusion, as no doubt are certain writers of spy novels and historical romances; but it is a wrong to blackball fantasy as it is to blackball all novels that have elements of romance. Have you read the Book of the New Sun, and the Lord of the Rings, and Foundation, and A Canticle for Leibowitz - and if so, can you honestly, truthfully, honourably stand in public and say that their writers have no interest in real world themes, have no metaphors or messages in mind, have no desire to talk about reality through their works? If you can, I can only congratulate you on having achieved a simplicity in your views that must be the result of great personal effort, since no reader could be so tone-deaf as to fail to hear these harmonies purely by accident - only determination and grit could allow anybody to veer so far from reality without the slightest quaver of uncertainty.

- A fantasy is like a lucid dream that has been shared. It has the mechanics of a dream, and is no less useful for our psychology.

- If, returning to an earlier point, it is acknowledged that, for example, culture may have some influence upon the individual, and consequently that it might be interesting to examine culture - what other option is there but an experiment? A description of a single case is no examination, howeverso accurate. And in an experiment, for what reason must our tests be confined to the mundane, the 'real', the conventional, the known, the already-occured - no, there is some value to more ambitious, more problematic, analysis. And if it is to be allowed that we can indulge in fantasy - what, are we meant to suddenly eschew all reason? Some people seem to think that once we have abandoned the limits of reality (as paradoxically conceived for social purposes), we should abandon all limits - causality, coherency, consistency, continuity - and revel in our power of authorial fiat. Such chaos is exciting, but dull, and shows us little. The further we go from the sure ground of experience, the more care we should take with our footfalls - we should construct carefully in the wilderness if we are to create what is to last, because we are not sheltered by the lee of the surrounding buildings. Or to put it in a more naturalist way - when we experiment, we change one factor and keep the others all the same. No data derives from changing all of the conditions at once! I don't think world-building needs to be so rigid as to limit itself to only one dimension at a time (indeed, it is not possible - each change makes other changes), but the general aesthetic should (for this motivation, which is only one of several - but a legitimate one, and not one that is to be trivialised as a clomping foot of any description) be one of restraint. when we ask "how does X affect Y", we have to pay attention, greatly, to the details of X. [And this hold true both in 'expansive' fantasy, where the fantastic elements are themselves the protasis, and in 'permissive' fantasy, where the fantastic elements exist to allow the protasis to take effect more freely and clearly]

- it's a tangent, but philosophically I think DF is on extremely shaky ground. It's highly tendentious to claim that we can distinguish between "New York" as a 'real thing' and the "aspects" of New York that include all the facts about it (its geography, its freedom from werewolves, its history, and so forth). All these "aspects" can be taken away from an account of New York; all of them can be added to an account of Minas Tirith. When all the aspects have been transferred, what remains of "New York" to make it "real" and "setting", and what remains of Minas Tirith to mark it as fantasy and "world-building"? The name? But the name can be transferred as well; the name can be transferred even more easily; it is only a trivial accident of history, an aspect of an aspect, the work of a single plebiscite or mayoral decree to alter; it is far more trivial as an emblem of the real than the presence or absence of werewolves. There's an old philosophical analogy to theis view of "reality" as opposed to "aspects", but I can't remember who said it - Ramsay, perhaps? The "realist" in this sense is a man who tries to take the clothes off a stick-figure - when the skirt lines are rubbed out, we do not see the "real" woman beneath.

*[the literature/genre distinction is a pathology of a divided will - a will for truth expressed through naturalism and realism that scorns the fantastic and the problematising, and at the same time a will for truth through art that does not permit certain works to be entirely derided; consequently, that part of the undivided subject-matter that comes to the attention of the smaller, 'artistic' realisation of the social will is classed in one way, and made respectable (to the artistic, if not to the naturalist majority, who in general retain some respect for the artists themselves but very little for the work they praise), while that part that comes to the attention primarily of the larger, naturalistic realisation is classed in another, and derided]

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Incidentally, last time this came up, here's what I said. It takes a different approach entirely from this post, and is more personal; some of it may not be strictly compatible with what I've said here; blame this on rhetoric, complexity of personality, or the passage of time.

-----

Appropriate, I think, to end the post with a quote from a fantasy (he goes so far as to subtitle it "A Nightmare"), where the hero, Syme, stands up for a particular mentality against Another Mentality. Although it was originally talking about the real world (or the real world of the Nightmare, which, we must all admit, is so far from the world we inhabit that it is deceitful to even call it reality, though it fulfills all the criteria of Literature), I think it stands just as well for fantasy (just as things said in a fantastical setting have signficance for the real world):

"'It is you who are unpoetical,' replied the poet Syme. 'If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose, let me read a time-table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!'

'Must you go?' inquired Gregory sarcastically.

'I tell you,' went on Syme with passion, 'that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hair-breadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word "Victoria", it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed "Victoria"; it is the victory of Adam.' "

[AverageGuy]

How is "Setting" really different from "World Building"?

I think the argument's along the lines of "All frogs are amphibians, but not all amphibians are frogs," where frogs are worldbuilding and amphibians are setting.

I can see the argument, but I think you can run into some grey areas. Worldbuilding, when the term first came around in the 70's, was the creation of an entirely new, imaginary world. Said world would be the setting of the story. Worldbuilding referred specifically to the act of creating that setting, not to the setting itself.

...Crap. I had a point. Tired. Maybe I'll eventually remember what it was.

[Exa Inova]

He saw worldbuilding as completely pointless, and claims to be naturally averse to any writer known for using it.

I wouldnt say completely pointless but it can be a bit tedious. Sometimes 'worldbuilders' distract me from the story by making their world 'over' fantastic. Especially buildings, usually in a quasi medieval setting one more elaborate than the other, make me wonder how the f* they had the time, means and knowledge to build that.

On the other hand, a good worldbuilder should give me some clues on how his world looks like and my imagination does the rest.

Worldbuilding does not require writing skill.

I dont agree with this. At least in a sense that what you build needs to be feasible. Like I wrote above; dont go describing mile long towers build on a cliff or such and dont have the weather change drastically every 10 miles.

So basically, worldbuilding by itself cannot be used to knock an author.

Yes it can. if the world is constructed very poorly the story suffers greatly.

[Zoë Sumra]

[lots of interesting things]

I'm all out of + votes, so an :agree: from me. :)

If the world is constructed very poorly the story suffers greatly.

Agreed again, which is my basis for thinking the OP's friend has no real clue what he's talking about...

[Exa Inova]

Agreed again, which is my basis for thinking the OP's friend has no real clue what he's talking about...

Although Im happy you agree with me I should clarify.

...If the world is constructed very poorly the story suffers greatly IF the build world is an intricate part of the story. Im convinced there is brilliant proze out there where the world is not 'build' simply because its irrelevant to the story.

Never saw it outside SF/fantasy, but still.....

[Werthead]

In doing setting, you can look things up. You still have to make many things up, but you can at least get the very basics from looking at reality (past or present).

In doing worldbuilding, you have to make up most things yourself. And when you do that, you can fail. Like for instance when you're making incredibly powerful magicians but cannot explain why they don't rule the world. This doesn't happen when you use a historical or contemporary setting (at least, not if you do your research well).

But when doing worldbuilding you can look things up. Brian Aldiss got several departments from Oxford University to help him build the world of Helliconia, with reference to its climate, weather patterns, orbital parameters, how it moves in and out of ice ages, its flowers and fauna, how the natives differ from humans and so on. Fantasy writers usually have scorn poured on them if their maps are too divorced from real laws of geography. Terry Pratchett insisted that his and Stephen Briggs' map of the Discworld conform to reality, even moving a vast desert across the main continent because where they first put it should actually have been a giant swamp.

As for the latter point, if you, in a fantasy novel, invented a vast, powerful and ancient empire with a huge land army and a colossal fleet that dominated trade across half the globe down to some islands more than 2,000 miles to the south, then claimed that its empire not only failed to discover a large continent just a couple of hundred miles further south, but then said "You know what? Fuck it," burned their entire fleet and then became an isolationist power for the next half-millennium on a whim almost overnight, your readers would call you bonkers. But it happened to China in real life. And if you had a powerful and mighty empire that pretty much had all the theoretical and mechanical knowledge needed to build a steam engine but they just never bothered, readers might say that's bullshit, but again that's what happened with the Romans.

[Zoë Sumra]

Although Im happy you agree with me I should clarify.

...If the world is constructed very poorly the story suffers greatly IF the build world is an intricate part of the story. Im convinced there is brilliant proze out there where the world is not 'build' simply because its irrelevant to the story.

Never saw it outside SF/fantasy, but still.....

Mmm, not agreeing with this entirely. A book set in the real world can suffer a lot from poor worldbuilding (or poor setting, as DF would say).

I'm reminded of a few examples Neil Gaiman once used, illustrating how to mess up these things in relation to London: once where an author had written an intricate detective story plot dependent upon a character catching the last train home on the Northern Line, which just doesn't work to a reader from London, and once where an author wrote that if you walk down the Strand away from Trafalgar Square you have to turn right to get to Covent Garden, whereas actually you turn left. And upthread we had the example of books where "it's in Washington DC" is used instead of any setting work whatsoever. If something happens in a book like that relating to the setting, even something as simple as leaving a hotel and walking down the street to go somewhere else, there is nothing there already for the reader to use as reference - no foundation for the act. Even when the world isn't an "intricate" part of the story, it's almost always there in some degree

Sure, there are books that contain no setting whatsoever other than a blurry irrelevant mist. The questions then become: if these books had a setting, would it improve them? Are some of them currently unreadable highbrow capital-L Literature, and if they had a setting, would they therefore become just "ordinary fiction" and therefore overly commercialised? Is capital-L Literature's increasing divorce from anything other than strictly intellectual entertainment useful to anyone other than literature professors and masochists? Is this apparent similarity between capital-L Literature and certain very very lowbrow books actually troubling to anyone? Does anyone care? :P

Incidentally, I'm wondering if the OP's friend has read the Yeard's view on worldbuilding. It's distressingly similar.

[Poobah]

Awesome goes here

I wish I'd written that.

[Ser_not_appearing_yet]

Yes it can. if the world is constructed very poorly the story suffers greatly.

It depends on why you read, and what you mean by poorly constructed.

[Exa Inova]

Mmm, not agreeing with this entirely. A book set in the real world can suffer a lot from poor worldbuilding (or poor setting, as DF would say).

8snip* examples Neil Gaiman *snip*

Sure, there are books that contain no setting whatsoever other than a blurry irrelevant mist. The questions then become: if these books had a setting, would it improve them? *snip*

Incidentally, I'm wondering if the OP's friend has read the Yeard's view on worldbuilding. It's distressingly similar.

Your example proves my point. the setting is relevant to that story. I read a story once where the setting was fairly irrelevant (discribed as "he went to the bathroom", "bought groceries", "watched tv" etc because the point of the author was to discribe the way the main character was interacting with people wandering in and out of his life. The town was irrelevant, what was actually on the tube was irrelevant, what his bedroom or kitched looked like was irrelevant. In a way the author presumed we, the reader would know how a kitchen looks like and how a bedroom looks like.

If this is high brow literature I dont know I only know (in hindsight) it kept my focus on what was going on in the main characters head.

And the Yeard doesnt do weirdo cultural diversity. Thats why his non constructed world is full of man eating mudpeople, bau baka bana sword dancers, Harkens and their liberal/jewish overseers, hippies and other jibber jabber commies.

It depends on why you read, and what you mean by poorly constructed.

one word: Yeard

[Ser_not_appearing_yet]

I think the Goodkind novels would've been better served if he'd just done away with worldbuilding completely.

Worldbuilding should either be done properly or not at all.