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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 3468523" data-attributes="member: 22779">M John Harrison is hardly "some hack".  This guy is a well respected author and winner of numerous literary awards for his fiction.  When authors like Iain Banks, Clive Barker and Catherine Kerr write good things about him, he's not just some random voice.  Just because you don't like what he says, doesn't make him a hack with unfounded opinions.You're right though, skipping world building parts is a sign of personal preference.  However, if you were to strip all of the extraneous world building elements out of the LOTR and focus on character, plot and setting, you'd have a novel about the length of The Hobbit.  Would it be worse than LOTR?  I don't think so.  I think it would be a heck of a lot better.I know that people have enshrined Tolkien as the second coming among writers, but, honestly, it does a real disservice to the genre to positively stake out claims that novels without significant world building are bad, bland, boring or any of the other perjorative statements made in this thread.  Numerous novels and stories don't engage in significant world building and are very, very good.  Conan is, IMO, a prime example.  While I know that RC disagrees and sees significant world building within the text, I don't think so.  So much of Hyboria is glossed over and most of the setting elements are left to the reader.  Here's another example from Conan.  Think of one of the most famous cities in the Conan stories - Shadrizar.  Shadrizar the wicked.  The wicked city.  Not once is it detailed in the stories.  Beyond Shadrizar the Wicked, we know nothing about this city.  IIRC, it isn't even marked on the maps.  It is left entirely to the reader to fill in the blanks and, as readers, we have done so.Is mentioning Shadrizar without any detail world building?  Not IMO.  It's simply a setting device - a means of telling the reader that the stories take place Somewhere Else.  The same is true for the details RC listed about Tatooine in Star Wars ANH.  None of the elements are explored in the movie.  Heck, we know nothing about the Hutt, other than a name and the fact that Solo owes him money, by the end of SW ANH.  Who or what is a Hutt?  We are never told within the story.  Even by the end of the original trilogy, all we know about the Hutt is that they are bad guys that look like slugs.  Crime lords?  Nope, that comes later in later novels.  Incredibly powerful group?  Nothing in the movies tells us that.  Heck, is Hutt a race or a title?  The movies are silent.  Again, it's left to the audience to determine.While it's not true that every book that engages in world building is bad. That is, of course, not true.  However, there are a large number of bad fantasy and SF novels that engage in excessive world building.</blockquote>

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