Still very intrigued by a post I saw recently postulating that the key to creating worldbuilding that feels coherent is to, rather than start with the premise and let it spread out to its natural conclusion, figure out what barest requirements need to exist so the premise arises to begin with, and let that scaffolding spill over everything without flinching away from its implications
There's just a lot to chew on there... First you have the friction between "narrative" and "setting" - where you want the story to go vs. where it can be believed to get to based on the premise alone, but there is also the reader's lingering feeling that the premise itself is "rigged", that it is a prime mover of sorts. You wind it up and watch it go, but you also decide where it is when you set it loose, so the logical solution is to find out how you get to the plot hook. Of course, that's not necessary for a "good" narrative, but I guess there's something to be said for the author's heavy hand intruding jarringly into the tapestry they themself are trying to weave and how a reader feels in response
Secondly, you can see here the idea works that came to be labeled as "deconstructions" were at least driving at: there are always very grim implications branching out from the simplest what-ifs, and a reader can sometimes feel themself bumping against the author's imposed limitations on what the story is allowed to let exist, like a big cardboard background that isn't fooling anyone. Horror (genrewise or otherwise) itself is often emphasized, and you can certainly invert that (or flip-flop between both, which is its own brand of realism) for another kind of twist, but the real meat of it is simply that a premise is not the same thing as a tone or a motif; once the genie is out of the narrative bottle, everything spills into the monstrous multiplicity of the world. If something that is morally agnostic in and of itself can be used for good, then it can be used for evil and it can be used for whatever exists on the grimy-looking corners neither can reach. There can be something satisfying in bursting through the paper screen surrounding the story into what must be happening elsewhere, where the author's fingers can't block your way like the Buddha's palm
In the foreword for The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin discusses the perception of science fiction as being about "extrapolation", stating that "almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic", hence why so much sci-fi follows its premise into the death of human liberty or the death of inteligent life. There's a lot of good that can come out of something different, but it's only natural that what is not all that good becomes a focus of attention - that is, I think, the simple nature of what a "problem" is, beyond the question of optimism or pessimism. It can often feel as if our own world, barbed and contradictory as it is, is nevertheless nested in its own anthropic principle - we know it can survive it own premise enough that we are here to witness it, but every hypothetical is a lightless enigma
(Le Guin, of course, is also famous for Omelas, the short story-cum-thought experiment that too many SFF writers twist themselves into knots trying to logistically solve - and yet the narration itself intrudes, like the aforementioned cardboard walls, and straight up tells you that the premise is the premise and nothing else matters for these purposes. The nitty-gritty of cause and effect has fled the building; youre going where the text is guiding you, but interpretation is your job. The story, of course, pointedly asks you whether a downside or trade-off of its utopia might make it more believable, which itself is germane to this very topic of what you, the reader, can infer - or accept - to exist in any world. I don't have a very solid schema for connecting these disparate dots, but I think it's relevant that both of them exist)
Veering into more...profitable storytelling, Big 2 comics - DC and Marvel - are (in)famously unable to let their settings be thematically or aesthetically coherent; no story can just exist in its own universe (often literally) without an inevitable crossover. It's the Tommy Westphal Hypothesis all the way down. The Punisher is hanging out with the X-Men, the Riddler is running into the Martian Manhunter. Everything can and will happen. In fact, Astro City embraces this absurd melange to create its own amalgamated yet consistent patchwork quilt of a setting. And it's something that just doesn't work for me, but, on further analysis, I can kind of see the appeal? Because our world - especially when we can know so much about it through global communication - often feels not simply big but ontologically disparate, this huge mosaic of tragedy and comedy, violence and peace and both and neither. There are mass graves beneath beautiful cloudy skies
All these asides, uh, aside, thirdly, we do not live in the narrative, so there may be a natural "suspicion" from ourselves towards its very shape. We are visitors of our own fantasies, but we cannot inhabit them fully, even for a moment, because we are what they gyrate around. We can sometimes feel a strange envy for the nature of a fictional character, who can simply be A Device, its interiority beautifully manufactured without the need for all the existential bits and bobs we have to deal with at the end of the day - much like we can envy the seeming nonsapience of most animals, or even the people we know of, that can simply be our incomplete image of them inside our minds. It can feel very weird when the world-space of a story seems too tailored for not simply its world-stage but also for its thematic texture. It feels uncanny. It feels deceitful - though all of fiction is by definition a fabrication. It feels like the world is too unlike our own, too clean, too smooth, too tourist-y. I don't think this is simply, like, some innate love we have for imperfection, but rather a feeling that our own separates us fundamentally from a setting wherein causality doesn't spread into each nook and cranny in a relentless disregard for its own surface tension. We can have our daydreams, but we cannot be them. Even if we loathe the world, we bring it with us wherever we roam
An interesting detail the post that led to all this included was the notion that "theme is exhaust, not fuel", which itself feels (fittingly) like the ultimate byproduct of this philosophy. While it's simply one approach to storytelling and doesn't present what it's going for as one-size-fits-all, it feels very much like it touches upon something very fundamental about these sorts of narratives, right? An author of fiction makes specific decisions, by definition, in order to show their audience a bunch of made-up happenings - it's a curated cut of a presumed broader existence that in fact exists largely as scaffolding for said cut, SFF or not. What you create - what you pick to show everyone - is always about something, whether you want it to be or not, but our world itself isn't; it exists in an of itself, as far as we can tell
I've mulled over telos and narrative before (a post which itself was, IIRC, inspired by the very same poster talking about their own capepunk web serial) and the way you eventually end up digging down right into the absurdity of everything when you start asking "why" this or that is so; if anything can be deemed arbitrary when you get down to brass tacks, wouldn't a made-up world feel "real" if you made it just as arbitrary? If you just put in a bunch of stuff you like, figure out how i got there and what else probably came along, and the story itself was simply a snapshot of that unholy mess? You then can photograph whatever you like, but the lens cannot cut out the rubble and blood and ash crawling across the corners of the rectangle
Because all this spillage is thematically incidental, it feels real. The existence we inhabit is a cramped vastness, the combined density of every hue and volume filling your lungs in a lush horror vacui; interpretation and the occasional attempt to imbue beauty is a job we were left with thanks to our capacity for abstraction - "meaning" as exhaust, not fuel
Even thinking all this, I'm not sure how I myself feel about that particular advice, but I can definitely see the ideas it's touching upon. If you can feel the world outside your purview scratching the door, at least you can feel satisfied that it's there, in all its monstrosity
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