Edmund Drury

Edmund Drury 1 On Other Worlds Edmund Drury WorldsOn Other An Investigation into Worldbuilding A Dissertation By Edmund Drury 2 3 On Other Worlds Edmund Drury Contents Introduction 7 Fictional Worlds in Real Place 12 Maps and Fiction 29 Translation 60 Conclusion 78 List of Illustrations 90 Bibliography 95 Printed and Bound by Edmund Drury 4 5 On Other Worlds Edmund Drury Introduction ‘Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. 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. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.’ (Harrison, 2007) So is worldbuilding just boring nerdism? Certainly not all aspects of worldbuilding appeal to everyone. According to many it was the lengthy detail of trade disputes and politics that made the new Star Wars trilogy such a disaster, and certain passages in Lord of the Rings, one of the key texts in fantasy worldbuilding, are not always the easiest to read. Of course M. John Harrison cannot be totally averse to worldbuilding (his best known work is set in the fi ctional city of Viriconium) but he believes that focusing on it as an activity in its own right risks putting the creative emphasis in the wrong place. Harrison suggests that the process of making things up for the purposes of fi ction does not need to be justifi ed by calling it worldbuilding. If there is one single purpose to worldbuilding it is 6 7 On Other Worlds Edmund Drury to allow the reader to suspend disbelief, and I agree with make-believe at all, and they became…fi ction writers!’ (Dryden, Harrison when he says that ‘The worst mistake a contemporary 2013). I did not become a fi ction writer; instead I became f/sf writer can make is to withhold or disrupt suspension of an architecture student, which seemed to me like a logical disbelief.’ (Harrison, 2007). When worldbuilding jolts the progression. Architecture is about designing new worlds, reader out of their reverie, either through the awkward or at least redesigning the one we have, and operates inclusion of detail or through sheer boredom, it has lost on all scales from master planning to individual human its purpose. This said, worldbuilding can be the reader’s interactions. The pleasure I had found in exploring other bridge in to the author’s world, and as such many fi nd people’s worlds became the pleasure of creating my own, worldbuilding to be a discipline in its own right. And this and my most common source of inspiration remained is the case in other creative fi elds too. Worldbuilding is those worlds I had visited through the pages of books. not just the writer’s prerogative. It can play an essential Although memories of these once familiar worlds part in architecture and, for fear of being branded a nerd, continued to provide inspiration, I have not revisited it is often my favorite part of a project. them since I began my studies in architecture. In this Growing up, I read a lot of books set in fi ctional dissertation I will re-examine a selection of the worlds I worlds. The vastness and the complexity of these worlds, explored as a child, to examine the techniques employed from the mountain ranges and cityscapes, to the smallest and the results their creators achieved. When considering objects, was mine to explore through the pages of a book. these worlds I hope to fi nd relevance for my own creative The compulsion to consume these stories could become processes within architecture, looking for similarities in almost irresistible, knowing that by simply following working methods and for ways to learn more from these a linear plot would allow further exploration of these fi ctional worlds. amazing creations, learning all there was to know about The fi rst chapter, entitled Fictional Worlds in Real each world before moving on to another. They become Places, briefl y explores the taxonomies of fi ctional worlds. part of my childhood, a world in which fantasy and It uses Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials as a case study reality are sometimes indistinguishable. As I got older to examine how fi ctional worlds can be based on our and moved on to ‘grown up books’ the discovery of new own. What makes a world fi ctional? How different does worlds becomes less frequent, books were more often set a world need to be before it is classed as fi ctional? As in realistic depictions of the actual world. As a result, I no Roger Schlobin claims ‘Setting does not determine the fantastic’ longer read with such intensity. (Schlobin, cited in Ekman, 2013, ch.1.). How do imaginary Despite the lapse in my reading I never forgot the worlds mutate and how much can a world change while worlds I visited as a child. In a recent article, Emma remaining consistent geographically? Dryden stated that ‘there are some people who don’t outgrow The second chapter, Maps and the Creative Process 8 9 On Other Worlds Edmund Drury looks at the map as an accompaniment to literary relinquish ownership of his world? Certainly an architect worldbuilding. In The Map Book, Peter Barber classifi es cannot claim to own a building once his design has been maps as ‘graphic representations that facilitate a spatial constructed. understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events…’ Finally, this paper is a personal investigation into (Barber, 2005, p.6). Maps are a versatile tool that can help worldbuilding, revisiting those worlds that have stayed to orientate the user, be they fi ctional maps or maps of with me since I fi rst read them, in the hope of fi nding out the real world. In an imaginary world, a map can guide what made them so successful and how I can apply this the author as well as his reader, helping the author to to worlds of my own. navigate through the intricate maze of worldbuilding. Using texts from interviews and biographies we can gain insights into the differing methods used by authors and perhaps by architects, ways in which they use graphic representations to facilitate the creation of new worlds. Translation, the third and fi nal chapter, examines the transformations that take place when fi ctional worlds are re-interpreted into other media, either by the original creator or through collaborators: Given the impossibility of representing the total reality, with all it’s complexity, on a fl at surface – be it of paper, parchment, gold or tapestry – hard decisions have to be taken as to what features to select for accurate representation or indeed for representation at all. (Barber, 2005, p.6) What affect can changing the medium of a construct have on the content? How does the end-user experience the original concept and what impact does his personal interpretation of the medium in question have on the end result? Consequently this chapter also considers the question of the ownership of an imaginary world. Once it is in the public realm, must the author 10 11 On Other Worlds Edmund Drury These categorisations might also apply to architectural projects. Until built, no projects can be said Fictional Worlds in Real to exist in the Actual world. Although most will start out as a creation designed to appear in a real setting, one that Places closely corresponds to our own (ie a Primary one), other, such as theoretical or student projects, are so are so far removed from the Actual world they could be said to exist in Secondary worlds. The location of a story has a signifi cant impact on However this is by no means a perfect taxonomy a book’s overall tone and style. It will even determine its with the term Secondary world covering a huge amount place in a bookshop. A novel set in our own world will be of variation. Some, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth fi t the classifi ed as fi ction but should the world itself be fi ctional classifi cation neatly, while others are more complicated. or perhaps just a signifi cantly altered version of our own, Narnia is a Secondary world accessed through a Primary the book will be shelved as fantasy or science-fi ction. So it world while the wizarding world in J.K. Rowling’s Harry seems that setting a narrative in an invented environment Potter series is a Secondary world located within a Primary shifts it from fi ction to ‘super-fi ction’ as if the term fi ction world. Some Secondary worlds are less distanced from ‘something that is invented or untrue’ (The Oxford Dictionary of the Primary world than others. These might include the English, 2005), from the Latin root ‘fi ngere’ meaning to divergent or near future world, such as Fatherland, in ‘form or contrive’ is not suffi cient. This distinction holds which Robert Harris imagines Europe in 1964 following true despite the fact that no work of fi ction can ever exist a Nazi victory in the Second World War or 1984, George entirely in the real world for to change nothing would be Orwell’s famously prophetic imagining of the world fi fty to write non-fi ction.

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