hwithumalut

Worldbuilding is not a new artform, but it is finally really coming into its young adulthood. Now more than ever are people talking about building settings that are primary to a story set in them if any is set in them at all. Why is the story so important anyway? Is worldbuilding maybe older than story, because maybe initially the explanations for why things are the way they are that could be given is true worldbuilding. Though I may be mistaking worldfinding with worldbuilding. It still could be the case that in some way story and worldbuilding are part of a larger art form of non-abstract art that depicts things in time and space. Neither being primary to one another. Though I have only given a representational definition of this overgenre, and there is clearly room to create and depict in both story and Worldbuilding. Though I am asking if there is Realist worldbuilding? Fantastic and Sci-Fi worldbuilding is discussed often enough now.

What would it mean to be a realistic world? Can a Fantastic or Sci-Fi world be realistic? It must be the case that Star Wars’s Galaxy Far Far Away is unrealistic—but the world of Roshar within the Stormlight Archive is maybe a different case. In Star Wars there is The Force, a magical power that the Jedi can wield, but there is no economic function of this. The supposedly humble Jedi knights, who are also monks, use this power for war and not for the more humble end of making buildings happen. How do the ships fly? How, or why does Tatooine have life? These questions are rarely interesting, and asking them makes me feel bad. Non-realism is not a lack of care for realism, but a care for something else that is more important. Star Wars does not disregard Realism completely ofcourse, but a lack of square-circles does not make a world realist.

The more interesting example I used was Roshar. It should be understood that other elements of the Stormlight Archive are primary to Roshar, but not by as much as most fantasy. It is well understood that fantasy can be realistic. Often this realism is defined by how well the fantasy follows its own rules. The Stormlight Archive is an exceptional follower of rules, though it is a world richer with metaphor and non-literal ideas than I believe most people think, which needs entirely a different blog post. The Stormlight Archive has believable economy, society, language, and many more things. Though none of these things are fleshed out to the very depth of it, or at least we have access to only small pieces of the flesh. Even though all these features are present I am hesitant to call it realist. It is realistic, just it seems to me to maybe not be totally realist. When I think realism in worldbuilding I am more prone to imagine conlanging than subtle culture fragments which are buyable. For me Realism is almost scientific, like speculative evolutionary biology, worldbuilding, or planet building that uses actual astrophysics, and plate-tectonics geology.

Then immediately after calling Roshar non-realist I must reconsider. I feel that I am biasing scientific worldbuilding over whatever Roshar is, that maybe I am contradicting what my own understanding of reality is. I am an admirer of the Object-oriented-ontology of the philosopher Graham Harman. Harman understands that science is not the end of knowledge about an object. For Harman and I there is no such total and absolute knowledge of what something is. We cannot reduce a thing to a specific list of traits, pieces, qualities, or relations. For Harman we can only understand the essence non-literally. So the biasing of science over magic is strange for worldbuilding. I have no doubt that science is real, and true, but that in foreign and fictitious world we have no idea what laws of nature, or what things may break those laws on occasion may govern them. Maybe we could categorize conlanging, spec-bio, and planet building, ect under the category of naturalist worldbuilding, worldbuilding that obeys the natural laws of our real world. Though I have not read any naturalist literature or any other naturalist art, but the Wikipedia entry states that naturalism is “similar to literary realism in its rejection of Romanticism, but distinct in its embrace of determinism, detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary”. So it seems an appropriate term because of the use of science.

Still my question is what realism is? I must say that I think that in some sense Roshar is closer to it than many works of hard sci-fi which preserve their culture. Roshar is likely one of the closest thing we have yet reached, or the closest thing I have seen. Realism cannot be purism of one thing, it has to be a diversity. No one would state that what is called Realist literature is a total simulation of reality, or that this is its prime aim. You do not call Realism direct simulation, because many try to be real, and also have other elements that are prioritized on often equal grounds. Realism is complex and is not equivalent to reality.