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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3463450" data-attributes="member: 4937">Except none of this has anything at all to do with world building.  There are several ways to demonstrate this, but the easiest is to note that none of this requires a thought experiment of any sort.  I don't have to create a 'map' in order to detail endless travel across an imaginary landscape.  I don't have to think about agarian economics to describe endless meals of crusty bread.  I don't have to think about how much fertile land a nation has and what its birth rate is to have endless battles of seemingly endless hordes.  I don't have to compute actual travel times from Earth to Neptune assuming a constant .2g acceleration and the position of the planets in September of 2209, to have endless tedium in zero g.  I don't have to engage in world building at all in order to fill a book up with tedious detail.  The two things are completely unrelated.  I don't have to have a realistic or at least coherent technology to spend pages describing the various decks on a starship.  I don't have to have battles that actually reflect the technological assumptions I desribe.  I can engage in alot of world building and the vast majority of it might never appear directly within the story.  You may not notice that the fact that the date of departure from Earth and the date of arrival in Neptune is realistic for the stories assumptions about technology, and the hours of calculation and study of planetary physics might end up in the story as a single sentence.  Tedious detail has nothing to do with world building.  True, you can introduce tedious detail into a story with world building - for example, I could lay out precisely how you calculate the travel time between Earth and Neptune in the story although rarely have I ever seen that done in a published work - but you can introduce tedious detail into a story without it and most tedious detail in fiction never came from a world building process. Another way to note this is to look at a short story like the previously mentioned story by Joyce, 'The Death'.  Now, Joyce does do things much like world building in say Ulysses (he openly stated that among his goals was to detail Dublin in such detail that if the city were destroyed it could be reconstructed just from the text), but in the 'The Death' such world building elements are much less in evidence.  There is however alot of very fine grained detail that has nothing to do with world building - for example longish passages of small talk at the gathering that don't seem to directly advance the story but just set the stories scale and mood.  The detail here again doesn't involve any world building.World building is a very specific process that is largely external to the writing.  It isn't merely atmospherics and details, although hopefully, evocative, intriguing, and internally consistent details are the results of the process.  But, you can have all sorts of atmospherics and details that are unrelated to world building and which weren't created by a world building creative process and where just thrown in on a whim of the author's creativity without much apparent thought as to what they imply.  (China Meiville, I'm looking at you.)  An obvious example would be a story which contained in its numerous details inconsistancies and self-contridictions and the very sorts of things that world building is designed to avoid.  (Incidently, this is precisely why Star Trek is a horrible example of 'world building', because with the exception of Klingon language, almost nothing in the 'story' was created by a world building process.  Hense, all the various inconsistancies, retconns, unresolvable contridictions, abandoned story elements, and so forth.)So you aren't really complaining about world building at all; you are just complaining about tedious detail.And in that case, you've said nothing more interesting than 'boring stories are boring'.  Well, OK.  Thanks for that insight.</blockquote>

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