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Readercon 18: "Smooth and Lumpy Expanded Universes"
Here's the first of my panel reports from this year's Readercon. This was the first panel I made it to, starting at 1600 on Friday.
[These are reconstructions by memory based on notes. I apologize in advance for any mistakes, and nothing here (even if in quotes) should be assumed to be an exact or even inexact version of what someone said without checking it with them. Comments of the form [ckd: bracketed text] are my own glosses, comments, or snarky bits.]
[ckd: I didn't get my note-taking gear set up quickly enough to note all the introductions; the only two I managed to note down were JAG and RW.]
Gardner said that his "League of Peoples" books came about for the very simple reason that the publisher waved money at him. Expendable was written as a one-off, but when he was told that they'd pay him more money for a sequel than they would for another standalone, he took the obvious direction.
Wilber's universe started with a short story; later stories didn't use the same aliens (in form) but had essentially the same background (a "semi-benevolent mercantile empire"). When he put the later stories together into a fixup novel, he found a number of inconsistencies, some of which couldn't be reconciled. "Accidental worldbuilding."
Gardner said that he sees it as a case of building "worlds" instead of building "stories". SF and fantasy tend to build worlds, then place stories in those worlds; the episodic tales of antiquity (Hercules) were just adding on stories, not building a world to put them in.
Cisco: At age 8, reading The Hobbit, he saw the endpaper maps and thought "wow, you can make maps and all of this up!" Later, his reading of Lovecraft was that it was dealing with this world, but that "this world isn't what you think it is". The medieval world-view didn't include top-down maps; at best you had "what this area looks like from a high place", and for all you know, that forest really does go on forever. Inconsistencies in worldbuilding are more realistic, because views of the real world are also inconsistent. (My notes say "Writing about an empire, but you never saw the people in charge"; I think this means his writing, but can't guarantee that.) If you see the world from a series of different vantage points and superimpose them, you wind up with a very lumpy universe that was built up a little at a time.
Gardner: Even outright contradictions become fun to play with.
Meynard: We assume there's a way to reconcile them, if only we had a privileged viewpoint.
Cisco: An author can go down into the viewpoints instead of having a privileged viewpoint, then build the world and say "what have I done?"
Wilber: There are tightly constructed worlds; those are tightly constrained, and to lead readers in a new direction you will need good explanations (to avoid "why didn't you mention this huge thing earlier?", presumably).
Cisco: Alan Moore was the "master of the retcon" with the Swamp Thing origin story change. The old story "didn't happen; it was a mistake", which led to story ideas as the Swamp Thing had to deal with discovering "the truth" and what that meant to the character.
Meynard: You're still dealing with archetypes. Shari Tepper's King's Blood Four keeps pulling the focus back, and each time it dilutes the book. "Why would they have this, when the world is wide enough to include this other thing?" Chip Delany says "you can't have a planet of nothing but wheat", but when you are creating something artificial it has to be less complex than the real world. The real world has a built-in consistency check because it actually exists. People give writers too much credit, they can be lazy or forgetful or incompetent. The answer to "Why wasn't this mentioned before?" is often "I didn't think of it back then." [ckd: Bujold's Imperial Auditor being an obvious example, though the frame story in Borders of Infinity gives it some cover.]
Strock: J.K. Rowling has a child who doesn't know the world, so it can be built as it's presented to him. The Temeraire series starts out set in "our world, with dragons" but he's starting to see changes (in the 4th book, which we don't have yet). He's not sure how much of it is his own re-reading and noticing things, or the author keeping things interesting by changing the world to allow for more stories.
Gardner: Star Trek is a bad example; technology is invented that should change everything, but it's mysteriously forgotten about at the end of the episode.
Gardner: Point of view is a very important aspect of worldbuilding. Writers can get into trouble if they ignore things that will pop up later. Grand Unifications like Asimov's linkage of all his universes at the end is harder to do when you have an omniscient narrator.
Strock: Asimov did a good job of it; Heinlein's approach of just gluing it all together was more wish fulfillment and literary masturbation.
Wilber: What are the "tricks of the trade" for worldbuilding? If the readers see it as a trick, it loses its magic. The key is making things work for the reader. One aspect of this is making sure that books in a series each show enough of the world to stand alone. [ckd: This seemed like a bit of a side trip relative to the discussion, since I think that applies even to character-centered series set in our world.]
Cisco: [ckd: Cisco gets us back to the previous thread with:] Both Asimov and Heinlein did the "grand unification" at the end of their careers, but I don't think it's an aesthetic impulse. Some world building is more "attitudinal", Lovecraft being a primary example of this, being all about the idea of the world and man's place in it [ckd: yeah, "lunch"]. That is taking a more existential angle, and it has a certain "contagiousness" because of that. [ckd: not sure what this meant]. Star Trek is also an attitude, in this case Roddenberry's [ckd: just a bit more optimistic than Lovecraft's] and was also designed to be modular and allow for different authors, with mechanisms that let you extrapolate [ckd: different characters, different ships, etc].
Meynard: Agreed on Asimov and Heinlein. "Grand Unifications" may come from a combination of marketing forces and age. The latter because pulling it all together makes it more meaningful; the former for the "own the complete collection" [ckd: aka "Pokémon"] sales pitch.
Wilber: Couldn't you look at it as a writer growing?
Meynard: That would lead to thematic similarities, but not necessarily a direct linkage.
Gardner: But isn't it just cool to have everything connected?
Strock: A writer's a person, too; they may just do it to pay the family's bills after they're gone. [ckd: this struck me as an interesting combination of Meynard's two motivations.]
Cisco: A connection adds local coolness, but too much of it deforms the overall vision. Why make these connections?[ckd: and not others? at all? not sure what this was]
Audience: In essence, a writer's body of work is already connected by being written by the same person; is the real problem connecting things ineptly and not the connections themselves? Authors may get better at this technique later in their career.
Cisco: That's often a "no stray dots" pattern, and maybe I liked it better when it was more open.
Strock: They're all connected in expensive leather-bound volumes. Sometimes you can't make the connection easily because of changes in what we know about the universe; Asimov wrote Robots and Empire 40 years later, and it didn't quite fit because of that. Is J.K.Rowling going to write an eighth book somewhere down the line?
Gardner: Is it going to wind up being "Harry at 25"?
Wilber: Some authors plan everything out before they start: "book 1" on the cover and everything. [ckd: He gave an example, which had samplers on the freebie table in the Bookshop, but which I neither picked up nor noted the title of.] If this takes off, there will be research papers on what it was planned to be versus what actually developed, and how a series may grow and change. Tolkien had to reconcile the Hobbit with LOTR.
Gardner: Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time was originally planned as a five book series, with outline. Two books in, it was already too lucrative to end that soon.
Audience: What about continuations of the universe after a writer dies? Dune's the big example. There are also shared worlds like the Thieves' World series. What happens when someone new steps into a universe?
Cisco: Look at Star Trek. Writers will create a form that's loose enough for others to work with. Lovecraft created something almost a virtual need. Even Ursula Le Guin's response to Slate is Lovecraftian!
Strock: It depends on whether you set up someone as the "God" of that universe, or just let everyone play. What do the readers/fans want? A Star Trek novelist managed to enhance a main character's role, even with Paramount's heavy restrictions in place.
Wilber: "Why plow someone else's field?" 1. Money. 2. We're fans, too.
Audience: It's more like a backyard or sandbox, not a field; "come over and play!"
Cisco: It's not just homage, you're also contributing to the independent life of this thing.
Strock: You're also hooking yourself and your career to something that will outlast you, because it's already lasted.
Cisco: There's not just one Hamlet, different actors, directors bring their own sensibilities to it. Your version of Sherlock Holmes, or Dracula, is a specific take on the role as an actor might have.
Meynard: There's an aspect of fan fiction. People write within different contexts. There are forks within fan fiction, different ideas of the history of the Federation in Trekfic for example. Things become part of the larger culture.
Gardner: "The War of the Worlds" Martians land on R'lyeh. The rights issues mean it'd never be done, but it's so delightful an idea!
Cisco: WotW and the Cthulhu mythos have a thematic consistency, so it clicks.
Strock: Asimov's "Last Question" was "first asked in 2061"...wasn't that when Star Trek's first contact happened?
Audience: Playing in others' backyards is cross cultural, but does the knitting-it-all-together type of thing happen outside genre?
Cisco: Yes; the Bible.
Gardner: Children's stories, too.
Strock: You could imagine all Dr. Seuss stories in one universe.
Audience: If you write well enough, you can carry the reader with you through inconsistencies. Pratchett has developed Ankh-Morpork from a joke Lankhmar into a real city that uses historical aspects of London, but he does it so well that you are carried along. The newer books are so good that consistency doesn't matter, and he can say "alternate pasts" and get away with it.
Cisco: It's important not to trap yourself.
Gardner: John Varley, in Steel Beach, basically says "if it's inconsistent, too bad". [ckd: Emerson!]
Meynard mentioned an author who put deliberate inconsistencies in, but I didn't catch the name.
Strock: Allen Steele's "Coyote" universe isn't an "everything connected" sort of world, but he takes a single event in a previous trilogy and shows what led up to it. [ckd: reminds me of Ken MacLeod and The Sky Road]
Wilber mentioned the Amber books, and Gardner said that the original idea was one book for each prince, but Zelazny couldn't find the right voices so he went back to Corwin.
Fun panel. I was interested in the way the discussion hit both technique and what for lack of a better word I'll call "mode", the distinction between fact-based and tone-based worldviews. I'm a sucker for inter-book connections ( the cameo appearance of a couple of characters from Michael Flynn's In the Country of the Blind in his later Firestar, for example), so I was hoping for more examples and fewer tricks of the trade, not that I actually need more books on my to-be-read pile.
Smooth and Lumpy Expanded Universes.I generally enjoy the interconnections between books, whether they be major (closely linked but with different protagonists) or minor (a quick name-check or historical reference).
Michael Cisco, James Alan Gardner (L), Yves Meynard, Ian Randal Strock, Rick Wilber.
There are convincing and unconvincing ways for a writer to build on a created world. The introduction of the Bene Tleilax in Dune Messiah strikes many readers as an off-note, because it's inconceivable that the organization wouldn't have been mentioned in the original novel. In contrast, the Order of the Phoenix fit beautifully into J. K. Rowling's world. Isaac Asimov spent the last years of his career relentlessly expanding and merging his created universes, with controversial results. What other examples stand out? What are some of the tricks of the trade?
[These are reconstructions by memory based on notes. I apologize in advance for any mistakes, and nothing here (even if in quotes) should be assumed to be an exact or even inexact version of what someone said without checking it with them. Comments of the form [ckd: bracketed text] are my own glosses, comments, or snarky bits.]
[ckd: I didn't get my note-taking gear set up quickly enough to note all the introductions; the only two I managed to note down were JAG and RW.]
Gardner said that his "League of Peoples" books came about for the very simple reason that the publisher waved money at him. Expendable was written as a one-off, but when he was told that they'd pay him more money for a sequel than they would for another standalone, he took the obvious direction.
Wilber's universe started with a short story; later stories didn't use the same aliens (in form) but had essentially the same background (a "semi-benevolent mercantile empire"). When he put the later stories together into a fixup novel, he found a number of inconsistencies, some of which couldn't be reconciled. "Accidental worldbuilding."
Gardner said that he sees it as a case of building "worlds" instead of building "stories". SF and fantasy tend to build worlds, then place stories in those worlds; the episodic tales of antiquity (Hercules) were just adding on stories, not building a world to put them in.
Cisco: At age 8, reading The Hobbit, he saw the endpaper maps and thought "wow, you can make maps and all of this up!" Later, his reading of Lovecraft was that it was dealing with this world, but that "this world isn't what you think it is". The medieval world-view didn't include top-down maps; at best you had "what this area looks like from a high place", and for all you know, that forest really does go on forever. Inconsistencies in worldbuilding are more realistic, because views of the real world are also inconsistent. (My notes say "Writing about an empire, but you never saw the people in charge"; I think this means his writing, but can't guarantee that.) If you see the world from a series of different vantage points and superimpose them, you wind up with a very lumpy universe that was built up a little at a time.
Gardner: Even outright contradictions become fun to play with.
Meynard: We assume there's a way to reconcile them, if only we had a privileged viewpoint.
Cisco: An author can go down into the viewpoints instead of having a privileged viewpoint, then build the world and say "what have I done?"
Wilber: There are tightly constructed worlds; those are tightly constrained, and to lead readers in a new direction you will need good explanations (to avoid "why didn't you mention this huge thing earlier?", presumably).
Cisco: Alan Moore was the "master of the retcon" with the Swamp Thing origin story change. The old story "didn't happen; it was a mistake", which led to story ideas as the Swamp Thing had to deal with discovering "the truth" and what that meant to the character.
Meynard: You're still dealing with archetypes. Shari Tepper's King's Blood Four keeps pulling the focus back, and each time it dilutes the book. "Why would they have this, when the world is wide enough to include this other thing?" Chip Delany says "you can't have a planet of nothing but wheat", but when you are creating something artificial it has to be less complex than the real world. The real world has a built-in consistency check because it actually exists. People give writers too much credit, they can be lazy or forgetful or incompetent. The answer to "Why wasn't this mentioned before?" is often "I didn't think of it back then." [ckd: Bujold's Imperial Auditor being an obvious example, though the frame story in Borders of Infinity gives it some cover.]
Strock: J.K. Rowling has a child who doesn't know the world, so it can be built as it's presented to him. The Temeraire series starts out set in "our world, with dragons" but he's starting to see changes (in the 4th book, which we don't have yet). He's not sure how much of it is his own re-reading and noticing things, or the author keeping things interesting by changing the world to allow for more stories.
Gardner: Star Trek is a bad example; technology is invented that should change everything, but it's mysteriously forgotten about at the end of the episode.
Gardner: Point of view is a very important aspect of worldbuilding. Writers can get into trouble if they ignore things that will pop up later. Grand Unifications like Asimov's linkage of all his universes at the end is harder to do when you have an omniscient narrator.
Strock: Asimov did a good job of it; Heinlein's approach of just gluing it all together was more wish fulfillment and literary masturbation.
Wilber: What are the "tricks of the trade" for worldbuilding? If the readers see it as a trick, it loses its magic. The key is making things work for the reader. One aspect of this is making sure that books in a series each show enough of the world to stand alone. [ckd: This seemed like a bit of a side trip relative to the discussion, since I think that applies even to character-centered series set in our world.]
Cisco: [ckd: Cisco gets us back to the previous thread with:] Both Asimov and Heinlein did the "grand unification" at the end of their careers, but I don't think it's an aesthetic impulse. Some world building is more "attitudinal", Lovecraft being a primary example of this, being all about the idea of the world and man's place in it [ckd: yeah, "lunch"]. That is taking a more existential angle, and it has a certain "contagiousness" because of that. [ckd: not sure what this meant]. Star Trek is also an attitude, in this case Roddenberry's [ckd: just a bit more optimistic than Lovecraft's] and was also designed to be modular and allow for different authors, with mechanisms that let you extrapolate [ckd: different characters, different ships, etc].
Meynard: Agreed on Asimov and Heinlein. "Grand Unifications" may come from a combination of marketing forces and age. The latter because pulling it all together makes it more meaningful; the former for the "own the complete collection" [ckd: aka "Pokémon"] sales pitch.
Wilber: Couldn't you look at it as a writer growing?
Meynard: That would lead to thematic similarities, but not necessarily a direct linkage.
Gardner: But isn't it just cool to have everything connected?
Strock: A writer's a person, too; they may just do it to pay the family's bills after they're gone. [ckd: this struck me as an interesting combination of Meynard's two motivations.]
Cisco: A connection adds local coolness, but too much of it deforms the overall vision. Why make these connections?[ckd: and not others? at all? not sure what this was]
Audience: In essence, a writer's body of work is already connected by being written by the same person; is the real problem connecting things ineptly and not the connections themselves? Authors may get better at this technique later in their career.
Cisco: That's often a "no stray dots" pattern, and maybe I liked it better when it was more open.
Strock: They're all connected in expensive leather-bound volumes. Sometimes you can't make the connection easily because of changes in what we know about the universe; Asimov wrote Robots and Empire 40 years later, and it didn't quite fit because of that. Is J.K.Rowling going to write an eighth book somewhere down the line?
Gardner: Is it going to wind up being "Harry at 25"?
Wilber: Some authors plan everything out before they start: "book 1" on the cover and everything. [ckd: He gave an example, which had samplers on the freebie table in the Bookshop, but which I neither picked up nor noted the title of.] If this takes off, there will be research papers on what it was planned to be versus what actually developed, and how a series may grow and change. Tolkien had to reconcile the Hobbit with LOTR.
Gardner: Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time was originally planned as a five book series, with outline. Two books in, it was already too lucrative to end that soon.
Audience: What about continuations of the universe after a writer dies? Dune's the big example. There are also shared worlds like the Thieves' World series. What happens when someone new steps into a universe?
Cisco: Look at Star Trek. Writers will create a form that's loose enough for others to work with. Lovecraft created something almost a virtual need. Even Ursula Le Guin's response to Slate is Lovecraftian!
Strock: It depends on whether you set up someone as the "God" of that universe, or just let everyone play. What do the readers/fans want? A Star Trek novelist managed to enhance a main character's role, even with Paramount's heavy restrictions in place.
Wilber: "Why plow someone else's field?" 1. Money. 2. We're fans, too.
Audience: It's more like a backyard or sandbox, not a field; "come over and play!"
Cisco: It's not just homage, you're also contributing to the independent life of this thing.
Strock: You're also hooking yourself and your career to something that will outlast you, because it's already lasted.
Cisco: There's not just one Hamlet, different actors, directors bring their own sensibilities to it. Your version of Sherlock Holmes, or Dracula, is a specific take on the role as an actor might have.
Meynard: There's an aspect of fan fiction. People write within different contexts. There are forks within fan fiction, different ideas of the history of the Federation in Trekfic for example. Things become part of the larger culture.
Gardner: "The War of the Worlds" Martians land on R'lyeh. The rights issues mean it'd never be done, but it's so delightful an idea!
Cisco: WotW and the Cthulhu mythos have a thematic consistency, so it clicks.
Strock: Asimov's "Last Question" was "first asked in 2061"...wasn't that when Star Trek's first contact happened?
Audience: Playing in others' backyards is cross cultural, but does the knitting-it-all-together type of thing happen outside genre?
Cisco: Yes; the Bible.
Gardner: Children's stories, too.
Strock: You could imagine all Dr. Seuss stories in one universe.
Audience: If you write well enough, you can carry the reader with you through inconsistencies. Pratchett has developed Ankh-Morpork from a joke Lankhmar into a real city that uses historical aspects of London, but he does it so well that you are carried along. The newer books are so good that consistency doesn't matter, and he can say "alternate pasts" and get away with it.
Cisco: It's important not to trap yourself.
Gardner: John Varley, in Steel Beach, basically says "if it's inconsistent, too bad". [ckd: Emerson!]
Meynard mentioned an author who put deliberate inconsistencies in, but I didn't catch the name.
Strock: Allen Steele's "Coyote" universe isn't an "everything connected" sort of world, but he takes a single event in a previous trilogy and shows what led up to it. [ckd: reminds me of Ken MacLeod and The Sky Road]
Wilber mentioned the Amber books, and Gardner said that the original idea was one book for each prince, but Zelazny couldn't find the right voices so he went back to Corwin.
Fun panel. I was interested in the way the discussion hit both technique and what for lack of a better word I'll call "mode", the distinction between fact-based and tone-based worldviews. I'm a sucker for inter-book connections ( the cameo appearance of a couple of characters from Michael Flynn's In the Country of the Blind in his later Firestar, for example), so I was hoping for more examples and fewer tricks of the trade, not that I actually need more books on my to-be-read pile.