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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 3466799" data-attributes="member: 3887">None of that neccessarily follows. It's a statement of something you (and I, as a matter of fact), enjoy, that isn't shared by the majority of readers (though it is by an overwhelming number of Tolkien readers).Worldbuilding, in the sense you mean it, engages readers who are looking for that out of literature, much in the same gay pornography engages those who enjoy it, and usually repels those who don't.Worldbuilding of this kind is particular to the literature of the fantastic. It's a categorically different enterprise from Joyce's or Dickens's, or any writers who's thrown open a window and trying to puzzle out what's outside and their relationship to it.Only if the reader cares to do so. If they're only in for "human drama", or, say for a more fetishistic engagment with genre tropes ("I like books with spaceman and dinosaurs!"), then all that careful considered worldcrafting amounts to a hill of beans, err words.And clearly, the longer the poem is, the better. It's like you've inverted the old addage about stories being like icebergs; only the tip is visible while the bulk lies unseen beneth the water. You prefer icebergs that have been hauled onto the land and dumped in your lap. Which is cool. I guess. But there's more going on there. It's not just a tourist map of Dublin, its also a map of Western civ. And there's decidely less going on here. There's so much missing from Middle Earth, so much basic human drama, human nature,so much of this world... while that doesn't diminish it as a triumph of the imagination, it places it in a whole other category than Ulysses, or the plays of Shakespeare, or even Grey's Anatomy, for Pete's sake. Gah... I'm going in circles.I find pleasure in the result of that kind of worldbuilding.Harrison doesn't think it's a worthwhile use of the novel.I don't agree, but I do note that its a very specific kind of enjoyment I get from immersing myself in the minutiae present  of genre fiction. While the though of a whaling treatise bores me to tears, I'll gladly learn the name of the various Gundam units, or elf runes, or the weapon systems used by the Federation and it's enemies. I'm curious as to why? It's not rightly, fiction. It's related to it, but outside... like Tolkien's hobbit toast-buttering songs.</blockquote>

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