The Purposes of Worldbuilding
Cluster-Reading One, May 2023
Photo by Nareeta Martin on Unsplash
Welcome to Cluster-Reading, an experiment with the ‘links and recommendations blog’ inspired by Tyler Cowen’s advice to “read in clusters”.1 Instead of providing a list what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, etc. I’ve taken parts of various pieces I’ve read and arranged them in a collage to help answer a question. If you want to read the full thing that each fragment below is from, the work and the author are listed in footnotes below.
Question: What is the purpose of worldbuilding?
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‘For [China Mieville], then, a fantastic world does not offer escape from capitalist modernity. Fantasy mirrors it, but in doing so it interrogates the relationship between belief and reality. It allows its readers to see worlds as constructed and mediated; the better the world, the more plausibly constructed, the greater the potential for recognition of the complexity and artificiality of capitalist modernity’.2
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‘Imagination is also a powerful political force. It is a social practice and a means of world making. Imaginaries are not mere figments. They are both the product and the producer of real, material effects. Imaginaries “build on the world as it is, but they also project futures as they ought to be” (Jasanoff 2015, 323). In this sense, they are deeply normative—the power of imagination is linked with the politics of prefiguration. If material and intellectual power dialectically reinforce one another (Marx and Engels 1998 [1846]), then the power of imagination fortifies the power to produce the future as it is imagined. A dystopic imaginary in the time of climate change thus holds a great deal of political potency (Swyngedouw 2013a). It reflects the actually existing material realities of social and environmental dispossession, while it also prophesizes a catastrophic future collapse. This temporal ambiguity reflects a broader sense that elements of this dystopia may already exist. In its normative dimensions, a dystopic imaginary also projects an ideal alternative future. As it becomes increasingly embedded in actually existing social and material worlds, it actively shapes them. Today, this power of prefiguration in Bangladesh has coalesced into the adaptation regime, shaping ideas about the kinds of presents and futures that are seen as viable in a time of climate change. In many ways, it exacerbates the threats to which it claims to respond. The dystopic visions of a climate-changed future produced by this regime have radical implications for people who are seen as under threat. For people in rural Bangladesh, that means dispossession from communities and livelihoods that are already vulnerable.’3
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‘The whole idea of worldbuilding is a bad idea about the world as much as it is a bad idea about fiction. It’s a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world’s a watch & God’s the watchmaker. It reveals the bad old underpinnings of the humanist stance. It centralises the author, who hands down her mechanical toy to a complaisant audience (which rarely thinks to ask itself if language can deliver on any of the representational promises it is assumed to make), as a little god. And it flatters everyone further into the illusions of anthropocentric demiurgy which have already brought the real world to the edge of ecological disaster.
My feeling is that the reader performs most of the act of writing. A book spends a very short time being written into existence; it spends the rest of its life being read into existence. That’s why I find in many current uses of the term “active reading” such a deeply ironic tautology. Reading was always “active”; the text itself always demanded the reader’s interaction if the fiction was to be brought forth. There was always a game being played, between writers and readers (for that matter between oral storytellers & listeners), who knew they were gaming a system, & who were delighted to engage each other on those terms.
Worldbuilding is the province of people who, like Tolkien, actually resist the idea it’s a game, and have installed their “secondary creation” concept as an aggressive defense of that position.’
…and later on:
‘The writer–as opposed to the worldbuilder–must therefore rely on an audience which begins with the idea that reading is a game in itself. I don’t see this happening in worldbuilding fiction. When you read such obsessively-rationalised fiction you are not being invited to interpret, but to “see” and “share” a single world. As well as being based on a failure to understand the limitations of language as a communications tool (or indeed the limitations of a traditional idea of what communication can achieve), I think that kind of writing is patronising to the reader; and I’m surprised to find people talking about “actively reading” these texts when they seem to mean the very opposite of it. The issue is: do you receive–is it possible to receive–a fictional text as an operating manual? Or do you understand instead that your relationship with the very idea of text is already fraught with the most gameable difficulties & undependabilities? The latter seems to me to be the ludic point of reading: anything else rather resembles the–purely functional–act of following instructions on how to operate a vacuum cleaner.’4
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The podcast A More Civilised Age is, among other things, a podcast where four people read in Star Wars that the Jedi are an institution that, due to fundamental flaws in their foundational ideology, cannot properly care for people. As such the demise of the institution should be welcomed. The Sith are awful, but the Jedi, while obviously better, are not the ideal alternative.5
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The Black Panthers would read slogans from the Little Red Book out in political meetings, and get attendees to discuss what the slogan meant to them, which often involved putting it into their own language. In one instance ‘the revolution is not a dinner party’ became ‘pick up some guns and don’t be bullshitting’.6
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‘I find it helpful to think of this process of world-building in terms of what the philosopher John Rawls called “reflective equilibrium.” For Rawls, reflective equilibrium meant a slow, thinking process through which you bring your abstract intuitions about morality, ethics, and justice in line with your more concrete intuitions about specific issues (say, abortion, the death penalty, and so on). Through the process, as you think more and more, you may need to amend your intuitions at either of the two (or more) levels, until you achieve “reflective equilibrium.” Importantly, the process itself is never over – reflective equilibrium is a temporary and contingent state of mind, always open to being upset by new information, or even a change in intuitions.’7
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At its worst worldbuilding creates an unshakeable equilibrium. Certain intuitions are given a dominant power, and beneath their clomping feet all contradictory information and perspectives are either cast into oblivion, or mangled to fit the intuition. At its best though it offers new toys with which to play, and new terrains to play upon.
Tyler Cowen, ‘Reading and rabbit holes’, Marginal Revolution, 10th August 2019
Helen Marshall, ‘A flare of light or ‘the great clomping foot of nerdism?’: M John Harrison’s radical poetics of worldbuilding’, TEXT, Vol 24, No 2, October 2020
www.textjournal.scholasticahq.com
Kasia Paprocki, Threatening Dystopias, 2021, p.12
M. John Harrison, ‘Worldbuilding: Further Notes’, Uncle Zip’s Window, 21st December 2007
Rob Zacny, Natalie Watson, Ali Acampora, and Austin Walker, A More Civilised Age. Theme extends across all episodes
Julia Lovell and Jordan Schneider, ‘Little Red Book, Big Red Ideas, Part One/Part Two of a Global History of Maoism’, ChinaTalk
Ghautam Bhatia, ‘Weaving the Rainbow: Worldbuilding and Speculative Fiction’, The Bombay Literary Magazine