Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3521507" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is one of those things where I disagree with the consensus position of both sides of this debate.  While I absolutely agree that Wolfe has some of the coolest invented worlds in fiction, there is very little evidence that Wolfe uses a world building process to create them.  I mean, there is some evidence.  In book of the Long Sun, Wolfe has obviously done some math on the population that is sustainable on his world using certain assumptions, and he does some enumeration within the story as part of the revealing of what is really going on because in context only the world's enumeration can meaningfully shift the reader's context.  But by and large, I see no evidence in Wolfe that he relies heavily on world building as I understand the term, because Wolfe seems to have relatively little desire in seeing his world 'hang together' in an orderly fashion.  If you scratch his story, I think you find his setting is only plot deep.  In this fashion, I disagree with both sides consensus position.  Yes, you can generate an elaborate setting without a world building process, but the mere fact that you can does not render world building useless, bad, or justify the claims Mr. Harrison made directly or indirectly.  I just have no reason to believe that that history actually exists.  Interestingly, Mr. Harrison also has this talent (for the record, I went down to the library to check some of Mr. Harrison's work out, and once I started reading it, realized that I'd already read 'Light'.  That's how much impact his work had on me the first time.)  Mr. Harrison is always dropping references to technology, or history, or setting.  It's just I've no reason to suspect that they actually mean anything, and in fact my understanding is that behind Mr. Harrison's work is the conviction that they cannot or should not mean anything.  For example, when Tolkien drops a reference to the 'cats of Queen Beruthiel' ability to find thier way home in the dark, he's just dropping an invented reference that has no depth behind it purely for the sake of having a non-anchronistic metaphor.  This is an entirely different sort of thing than when Tolkien drops a reference to Earendil the Mariner in Frodo and Sam's discussion of the meaning of stories in the central passage of the LotR.  In the former, Queen Beruthiel doesn't exist and the legend is created whole cloth for the purpose of creating color.  In the latter case, Tolkien's refering to an actually existing secondary creation myth which has been elaborated on both within and without the story, and which gives greater depth to Sam's insight about what stories mean.There is clearly some depth driving the story, but its not clear to me that its necessarily world building.   Like Tolkien, Wolfe's writing is being driven by some really deep philosophical thinking, some of which is obvious and some less so, but less like Tolkien Wolfe is not worried so much about the consistancy of the setting.  In fact, Wolfe is probably deliberately creating a vague setting to enhance the alienness of the setting.  Wolfe wouldn't expect you to understand a setting that occurs in that distant of a future time.</blockquote>

Verification