So, then, it was with obvious, pride-threathening trepidation that I accepted a challenge from Sam Sykes, author of Tome of the Undergates, to tackle Harrison’s work. I turned up my nose at Harrison, shrugged off his fiction because of (what I considered) off-base comments made on his blog. Whether in agreement or disagreement with Harrison, shouts were raised and batllelines drawn, all in the name of world-building and its importance to the genre.Īnd I’ll admit, I was one of those angry trolls. Or, ‘ he probably realised he could never come close to Tolkien in worldbuilding and decided it was just unnecessary crap.‘. He is an ‘ utter, arrogant asshole.‘ they yelled. Tolkien, Robert Jordan and Stephen Donaldson.

It was the quote heard ’round the Nerddoom it set the blogosphere aflame and rose the hackles of readers brought up on the likes of J.R.R. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism.

Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.Ībove all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

The pastel city m john harrison