Green Tree, Blue Tree, Who Gives a Frack? Is it Real Worldbuilding or Simply Changing the Names?

[marycatelli]

From the program description:

When is it real worldbuilding and when is it simply making the trees blue, the sky green, and calling coffee “glerp?” The panel looks at good and not so good examples of world building.

Blue trees -- I ought to try that some day.  World-building needs local color, random little facts that have no particular significance in the story.  And I am hard pressed to think of a way blue trees and green sky could be significant in the story.  Trees, wild animals, flowers -- I think Diana Wynne Jones overdid it in

Which is where, perhaps, your "glerp" comes in.  Tolkien, after all, admitted that pipeweed was unquestionably a form of tobacco.  The name change was, no doubt, to make it homogeneous with hobbit culture.  Then again, Tolkien was a linguistic genius such that he could construct worlds in language and make us believe them.

I find in world-building that the big issues are the ones that really make the world stand out.  The magic system, or at least the appearance of system -- I find that a controlling metaphor for the magic works almost as well as real rule for making it hold togther, and shape the world about it.  The society that forms from such a magic in such a world. 

Peopling it sounds like a good principle, but in practice, I find that many fantasy writers especially resort to elves and other races as substitutes for world-building.  I did it myself in my younger days, and finally trained myself out with the question of "Is this elf necessary?"  I wish there were more cultural variations among humans -- and something most works are particularly weak on is their racial divisions.  Most, if they use races at all, regard modern divisions as the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not.  Which is not even remotely true.  Many operated on the basis of us, a nationality/racial group, and them, who are not us, despite wide divergences in appearance among them.

And social structure and all the rest -- many writers would benefit from reading widely in primary source not so much to gain info as to get their block knocked off and realize how wide the world has been.

part of bittercon

Comments

[mythusmage.livejournal.com]

I would say that to be good world building it also needs to provide a way for the reader to connect with the world. Perhaps those blue trees are an off-world import, from a world where the sunlight is strongest in the blue. (A green sky is another matter entirely, perhaps a substance in the air not found in Earth's atmosphere.)

[marycatelli]

one would wonder why it reflects the strongest light -- until you remember that our leaves also reflect green, in which sunlight is particualry well endowed, rather than photosynthesize with it.

Green sky is easy: tweak the size of the particulate matter in the atmosphere.

[mythusmage.livejournal.com]

Particulates heh? That could be the plot of the story, get the smog cleared up. :)

[marycatelli]

By capping the volcanoes perhaps? Ah, the hubris of humanity, thinking it shapes the world.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

There are also definitely actual earth-plants that head towards the blue end of the spectrum (blue spruce, for instance, and lots of desert plants) and earth-languages that don't make any distinction between green and blue, so even seeing the same light wavelengths as an English-speaker, the sky & the trees could be described as the same color. Which leads back into world-building through cultural differences.

[marycatelli]

Now there's a challenge: one character's culture uses grue* instead of distinguishing between blue and green. Make this plot-relevant.

*no, nothing to do with

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

There was some good discussion of the 'smeerp' issue at the Linguaphiles community not long ago.

Imo Pullman used smeerps very well in the AU of THE GOLDEN COMPASS. His 'chocolatl' and 'anbaric' MAY have been the same as our 'chocolate' and 'electric', but it sure felt not in Kansas.

I agree that there should be some reason why things are different, or why the words are different. But that reason doesn't have to be spelled out. Lovely if there's a consistent pattern to be seen, dimly....

[marycatelli]

Of course that takes knowing enough linguistically to pull it off.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Pullman may have been drawing on word roots that could have been used for 'anbaric' and such. 'Chocolatl' made me think of a world where South American langauges had more influence than in ours. (I also imagined chocolatl as spicier, maybe with some chili or mate in it; which would suggest different trade patterns.)

But actually the dim pattern would not have to be in common-to-us linguistic word roots, but might tell us about how the culture currently thinks. For example, they might class and name all animals by use instead of by shape and family.

[marycatelli]

Such classification schemes are very hard to pull off, because it's very hard to make it less than overt.