Secondary worlds are fascinating.
It's no surprise that we're obsessed with them,
that we want to explore them, learn more about how they work.
Take a look at this app Google Chrome made
for the release of The Hobbit films.
It's a hyper-realistic rendering of Middle Earth—
far from the sketches of Tolkien himself,
farther still from the words he used to describe it.
The Chrome program can be considered an act of world building,
an extension of Tolkien's own world building in
"The Lord of the Rings" and, more intensely, in "The Silmarillion."
There's something so enchanting in the complexity of his vision,
in its completeness, in the completeness of the languages,
in the fact that they work.
It's impossible when reading Lord of the Rings not to to feel that Middle Earth is autonomous,
that it exists despite your reading about it.
These days we have our pick of dense secondary worlds.
Fantasy literature is filled with them.
Think of the Dune series, or Narnia, or the late Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.
Think of the race to fill in the histories of Star Wars in books, video games, and new films.
Or take the secondary world we're most obsessed with at the moment:
the world of Westeros in George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire."
None of these worlds are our own, but each is internally consistent,
and each has developed audiences that hunger for the author to fill in the margins:
the gaps, the geography, the backstories, the histories.
And if the author won't, they'll do it themselves.
Want to know more about Coruscant or Darth Sidious?
Visit Wookipedia—perhaps the most exhaustive catalogue of a secondary world ever made.
Why are we so consumed by built worlds, by the act of world-building?
Is this a generous obsession, or a dangerous one?
The great science fiction and fantasy writer M. John Harrison once famously called world-building
"the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there."
Harrison's point is that the world building of much fantastic fiction,
which takes Tolkien's legendarium as its archetype,
shifts the focus of literature away from the act which is most vital to its usefulness:
the act of reading.
World-building in this view assumes a passive reader.
It envisions a writer who photographs a secondary world—
encodes it into language—and a reader who receives this immersive experience like a film,
blissfully, and perhaps willingly, unaware that the world he experiences is a rhetorical construct.
The only problem is that all these assumptions are based on false premises.
You can't encode the world in language;
Readers are never passive—they create the text as much as a writer does;
and all texts are rhetorical constructs.
In other words, writing is always a game.
It's a transaction that emerges from a writer's implications and a reader's interpretive toolbox.
World-building fiction seems to deny this transaction, replace it with a cleaner one,
in which the story on offer is like a clock and the writer is like the clockmaker.
The problem is that this kind of fiction creates a dependency in the reader
to know more, to know everything.
I feel this way all the time when I'm watching Game of Thrones.
It's what sends me online looking for backstories.
Perhaps this is why Harrison's own take on the fantasy genre,
his Great Viroconium novels,
resist so forcefully this urge for dependency.
In Viroconium, nothing is ever the same twice.
From story to story, names change, histories change.
Characters recur, but it's never clear if they're the same people you met before.
"Like all books, Viriconium is just some words," says Harrison.
"There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to 'make real.'
You can't read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else."
"Everything else."
That's the bill of goods, the ideas and insights that spring forth
from the explosive act of reading.
Now, for the record, I think Tolkien did offer that bill of goods.
He offered a poetic utterance, a metaphor.
It was the attempt of those who came after to literalize that metaphor
and dilute its imagery by asking things like,
"But what did Sauron look like?" or
"Just how might an elf regiment organize itself?"
It's important to note that world building is not exclusive to fantastic fiction,
it's a staple of real world fiction as well,
and, indeed, the real world.
It's current popularity is unsurprising given our modern world,
which is its own kind of fantasy.
Indeed, this is what makes world building so potentially dangerous.
The world building of fiction only greases the wheels for
its much more insidious and terrifying cousin:
political world building, the constructed world presented to us by politics, marketing, and the media.
"The act of narcissistic fantasy represented by the word 'L'Oreal'
already exists well upstream of JK Rowling or JRR Tolkien.
Neither of them is anywhere near as successful at world-building
as the geniuses who devised Coke or 'The Catholic Church."
I am a huge fan of Tolkien, and "Game of Thrones," and "Star Wars," but
I'm also wary and worried about a strain of passivity in people that
world-building fiction seems to, at best, reflect,
and, at worst, encourage.
Who we are is already hugely, and powerfully managed
by interested parties all around us.
Maybe we ought, at least, to seek out fiction, fantastic or otherwise,
that's a bit more impish and challenging,
that demands our engagement,
that rattles our perspective and exposes the false fronts of the fantasy we were born into,
the world that was built without our consent.
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