Two names define modern genre fiction:
Tolkien and Herbert. The Golden Age of science fiction brought sci-fi out of the world of the pulps,
but it's these two figures that first treated genre work as high art. As something is rich and layered as any
classical text. Something to be thought about and something that reveals new things to think about with each reading.
Tolkien and Herbert. They are the world builders who taught us all how to make a place feel real.
So, why do these two writers get an entire season of extra sci-fi? Because they're often considered the greatest of all time in the genre?
Well, yeah.
But it's so easy just to accept that, to take that as a given, that
sometimes we forget to ask what made Tolkien and Herbert so special. It comes down to two things:
worldbuilding and intentionality.
Before Dune and Lord of the Rings, the type of rigorous, almost mythic, worldbuilding that we now associate with fantasy and science fiction series
just didn't exist. For instance, look at the Foundation series or the Future History of Heinlein. For all their concern with history,
they don't feel alive or vibrant. They don't feel like things are going on continuously outside of what's written on the page.
They have history and plot, but they don't have societies, cultures, religions, languages.
They don't have customs or superstitions, myths or legends.
They don't have the things that make our world feel layered,
vivid, and vital. But Herbert and Tolkien's worlds do.
Because their works are written with an intentionality that few pieces of genre fiction before them achieved, that few do even today.
The reason that Dune and Lord of the Rings still stand up isn't merely because they came out at the right time,
offering worldbuilding before anyone else, but rather because they took the care to truly do it well.
If you ever wonder why all the cheap knockoffs of these tales sometimes feel stilted and almost hokey,
it's because their writers only grasped the surface level of why the world-building in these books worked.
Herbert and Tolkien were meticulous in their craft,
spending years honing these books in a time when even the greatest Golden Age authors often put out a book or more a year.
They researched and studied, because they understood to create a holistic world,
you would have to create so much more than what's on the page.
So, we're going to start off this monumental series with the simplest, smallest of things:
names.
Names may not seem to matter. They may seem to be interchangeable.
Lothlorien might as well be called something else, right? Not if you want to build a world.
For that, you have to use everything you have. And so, we're going to start here, showing how to the minutest detail,
Tolkien and Herbert built their worlds with intentionality.
If you've ever wondered why in so many science fiction works you'll find devices, empires, or people with
ridiculous science-fiction names, or why some fantasy names pulled you out of the book and made you roll your eyes or just laughs instead of
getting you deeper into the world,
what they were missing was meaning. Either within our larger world or within their world and their culture.
Tolkien and Herbert, each in their own way,
understood this and imbued every place person or thing in their worlds with something deeper than an arbitrary name. Easy example,
Frodo Baggins.
Did you know that Frodo Baggins was named Bingo for years in Tolkien's drafts, and actually Pippin was named Frodo at the time.
The Lord of the Rings would not be the same book if it was the epic adventures of Bingo.
But his name got changed because Tolkien's spent the time to fully craft languages for their cultures
he wrote about. And in doing so,
came up with naming schema much like real cultures have, to make all the characters names from a particular culture fit together and feel
like that culture. Hobbit names are simple and childlike, while elvish names are flowing and multisyllabic
Or take Rivendell you'll hear characters refer to it as Imladris.
But, that just means cleft valley in the original elvish or a riven-dell.
By choosing this name, he gives us a sense of the place itself.
A picture built out of the name alone. At the same time,
he also creates a sense of wonder by giving us the English version of the name and then it's mysterious sounding elven counterpart.
Christopher Tolkien said of his father's process of building names - hem -
He did not after all invent new words and named them arbitrarily. In principle,
he devised from within the historical structure,
proceeding from the basis or primitive stems, adding suffix or prefix or forming compounds,
deciding, or, as he would have said, finding out, when the word came into the language, following it through the regular changes
in form that it would have thus undergone, and
observing the possibilities of formal or semantic influence from other words in the course of its history.
That may sound pretentious, and not just because I used my pretentious voice.
But it is why there's never a jarring moment where a name in elvish
doesn't feel like it fits in with other names or a place that doesn't have a sense of history.
Perhaps most importantly to this process though, the techniques he used came from our real world.
They come from the way we really build languages and this may not seem important,
but our brains are great at sensing patterns and meaning, even if we don't always know it's doing it on a conscious level.
So all this work that Tolkien put in to make his names tie back to something rooted in our very human world
makes us accept them and not be drawn out of the fiction by them. And Herbert, though
he doesn't get as much credit on this front, was perhaps even more of a master of this technique.
Many of the names for groups or ideas in the world of Dune come directly from the Earth
we live on now. This makes them feel exotic yet familiar. And in fiction,
subconsciously reminds the reader that they have a connection to these characters. That
though Dune is set in the far, far future all of these people are the distant descendants of Earth.
For example the Kwisatz Haderach is an ancient Hebrew term for the shortening of the way.
It's used to describe when characters in the Old Testament can make two places one or
instantly move vast distances. And if you've read Dune,
that should make a lot of sense. And the Bene Gesserit is literally Latin for "well-governed,"
telling us both what their order is about and how they think of themselves. The Atreides
themselves draw their noble lineage from the house of Atreus.
The very first person referred to as Atreides, or son of Atreus, is actually
Agamemnon and if you remember his story he had to sacrifice
the thing most precious to him before he could go to war. And we all know what that war cost to those around him.
I could go on and on. Chakobsa is the name of a real secret hunting language used in the Caucasus.
The Padishah Emperor is a title taken from Persian and Ottoman rulers. Carthag,
the Harkonnen capital on Arrakis, is supposed to be reminiscent of Carthage of old.
And Muad'dib maybe the name of a mouse on Dune, but it also means teacher, preceptor, or one who educates in Arabic.
Almost every name or word that sounds foreign in Dune has a root here in our world.
Nothing is unconsidered. Nothing is just made up or left a chance.
It all serves to create a world that is both alien and familiar. Exotic but always reminding us of the world we come from.
Tolkien and Herbert show this care every step of the way.
Dune and Lord of the Rings are great works of fiction simply on the surface level,
but it's all the things they're doing underneath that surface, which makes them living worlds.
Which lit the way for all world buildings that came later.
And now that I've hopefully convinced you of that, of the intentionality and the craftsmanship with which these works were written,
now, we can begin.
Next week.