Pointed Worldbuilding

John Harrison has an essay out this week on his blog about worldbuilding. Cory Doctorow has written that the essay is "like a bucket of cold water in the face. Shocking, refreshing and altogether unexpected." I'm not entirely sure why.

Harrison seems to be addressing the annoying practice of worldbuilding while the reader watches, not worldbuilding in general. And worldbuilding is absolutely essential if you're going to make a story that hangs together.

One of the lessons you hear over and over again about writing is that you should have character sheets. Your character's actions should begin and end as expressions of his or her fundamentals. A character can be motivated from first principles; may have public and private faces; or may just be a collection of impulses bound together in a peculiar personality. But the character must be a whole person, someone with whom the audience can identify, if not empathize.

The world is a character. It has wants, most of which involve stymieing the reader. It has a personality, it has impulses, and it has principles. You don't need to get everything absolutely right; you simply need to not get anything wrong. Sometimes, yes, that means that in the writer's bible for a story or a series, we make details about the biochemistry.

Harrison's essay doesn't seem to be "Worldbuilding is a pointless exercise." If it were, David Weber would be out of a job. Harrison's essay seems instead to say that the writer should never worldbuild while the reader is watching. Even if I know about the biochemistry, I don't have to tell the reader about it. I do know I want the reader to get the impression that I care how fast a starship can travel; I want the reader to believe that I have a grip on the first principles by which facists, moralists, or anarchists come to run a world.

Harrison's essay is nothing more than an overblown restatement of Vonnegut's First Rule of Writing: "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted," (which Cory had posted the day previous) or Twain's "The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it."

It's a nice reminder, poorly stated. My time was wasted considering it. To paraphrase Orwell, Harrison used a big idea when a much smaller one would have served.

So foody.

It never ceases to amaze me how this household can go from "We don't have anything to cook and we have less than half an hour to cook it all" to having a full and healthy meal. Last night, fallenpegasus escaped from his current high-pressure assignment to wander over and Omaha cooked lemon basil shrimp over pasta and baby spinach. It was astoundingly delicious.

Tonight, when faced with the same problem, I tossed two frozen chicken breasts into the microwave while Omaha prepped our new rice cooker (I hate gadgets that take up counterspace; I love my rice cooker. I don't think Omaha and I could live without one). It took four minutes to defrost the chicken, one to slice them thin, three to brown the outsides, and ten to simmer them in a half-cup of water and our taco mix. While they simmered I prepped the lettuce, tomato, and chedder cheese.

We ran a lot of errands. The kids got haircuts. I weeded out part of the garden bed and made pointless war on the dandelions. Omaha thinks we should just nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure. We kicked the kids out of the house to get some vitamin D, and Yamaraashi-chan bundled herself in her coat and read a book while Kouryou-chan tore through the backyard with her friends playing with their pony toys.

I'm tempted to try cooking naan tomorrow. I could always just mix the batch together and if I didn't feel like the trouble time came, I could just do it all on the cooking stone. Or I could make a peasant bread again. And I so want to make Rump roast with scallion-caper green sauce. I think I can talk Omaha into letting me cook that tomorrow with garlic baby reds and pan-roasted asparagus.

Nailed.

Okay, I confess, FallenPegasus nailed me perfectly yesterday:

"You've got the chops to be as good as Egan or Vinge, but you'd rather write erotic romances set on Moonbase Alpha."