#116 Sun (10/16/22) - M. John Harrison about why storytelling must take precedence over worldbuilding

When I use the term “worldbuilding fiction” I refer to immersive fiction, in any medium, in which an attempt is made to rationalise the fiction by exhaustive grounding, or by making it “logical in its own terms”, so that it becomes less an act of imagination than the literalisation of one.

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.  

 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.

Writing does something else. It not only invites but relies upon reader-participation. Writing and reading are complementary aspects of the same process; much of what appears to be the work of writing is in fact done by the reader in the act of reading.  

The transaction we talk about when we talk about reading goes on not between the writer & the reader but between the reader & the text.

 This aspect of the contemporary relationship between readers & fiction is complicated further by the fact that, prior to any act of reading, we already live in a fantasy world constructed by advertising, branding, news media, politics and the built or prosthetic environment (in EO Wilson’s sense). The act of narcissistic fantasy represented by the wor(l)d “L’Oreal” already exists well upstream of any written or performed act of fantasy. JK Rowling & JRR Tolkien have done well for themselves, but–be honest!–neither of them is anywhere near as successful at worldbuilding as the geniuses who devised “Coke”, or “The Catholic Church”.

The originally vertiginous and politically exciting notion of relativism that underlies the idea of “worlds” is now only one of the day-to-day huckstering mechanisms of neoliberalism. 

 At the moment, the fossilised remains of the postmodern paradigm (which encourages us to believe three stupid things before breakfast: firstly that we can change the real world into a fully prosthetic environment without loss or effort; secondly that there are no facts, only competing stories about the world; & thirdly that it’s possible to meaningfully write the words “a world” outside the domains of imagination or metaphor, a solecism which allows us to feel safely distant from the consequences of our actions) are in the way of that.

at reddit 

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“Presentism is a proclivity to analyze contemporary culture and politics using only contemporary texts, theories, and methods. The problem is that these texts, theories, and methods often mirror the society they are studying. While we can learn much from looking into a mirror, if we look in it too much and for too long, our activity becomes a kind of narcissism. Thus we need distant mirrors that are premodern texts, unpopular theories, peculiar locutions, and political or cultural non sequiturs to better map the outlines of the contemporary. Presentism is also a belief or assumption that what is new is best, most self-reflexive, least subject to false consciousness. Too many believe that we here and now are the culmination of history; that what came before was aiming to be what we are, and that our sophistication dwarfs that of our more gullible, less modern or postmodern predecessors. The demand that courses, issues, or books be relevant to me or us presumes that education is and should be defined by what I am or we are now, rather than by what we might become. It ignores how much of education is serendipitous, and how often we learn most from texts and ideas that were initially alien and alienating. When students insist that The Republic is boring—something I also thought the first time I read it—I ask them whose problem that is. I ask this not to belittle their intelligence but to insist on their responsibilities as readers.” (J. Peter Euben’s Platonic Noise, pp. 7-8)