Yes, worldbuilding was my second major (three cheers for my super-cool undergrad institution!). My initial impression of Eliezer’s skills in this regard from his fiction overall are not good, but that could be because he tends not to provide very much detail. It’s not impossible that the gaps could be filled in with perfectly reasonable content, so the fact that these gaps are so prevalent, distracting, and difficult to fill in might be a matter of storytelling prowess or taste rather than worldbuilding abilities. (It’s certainly possible to create a great world and then do a bad job of showcasing it.) I should be able to weigh in on this one in more detail if and when I get an answer to the above question, which is a particularly good example of a distracting and difficult-to-fill-in gap.
If I understand EY’s philosophy of predicting the future correctly, the gaps in the world are intentional.
Suppose that you are a futurist, and you know how hard it is to predict the future, but you’re convinced that the future will be large, complicated, weird, and hard to connect directly to the present. How can you provide the reader with the sensation of a large, complicated, weird, and hard-to-connect-to-the-present future?
Note that as a futurist, the conjunction fallacy (more complete predictions are less likely to be correct) is extremely salient in your thinking.
You put deliberate gaps into your stories, any resolution of which would require a large complicated explanation—that way the reader has the desired (distracting and difficult-to-fill-in) sensation, without committing the author to any particular resolution.
The author still has to know what’s inside the gaps. Also, the gaps have to look coherent—they can’t appear to the reader as noise, or it simply won’t create the right impression, no matter what.
You may be overanalyzing here. I’ve never published anything that I would’ve considered sending in to a science fiction magazine—maybe I’m holding myself to too-high standards, but still, it’s not like I’m outlining the plot and building character sheets. My goal in writing online fiction is to write it quickly so it doesn’t suck up too much time (and I quite failed at this w/r/t Three Worlds Collide, but I never had the spare days to work only on the novella, which apparently comes with a really large productivity penalty).
I think Alicorn is certainly not overanalizing in the sense that fiction is always fiction and usual methods of analysis apply regardless of the author’s proclaimed intentions or the amount of resources spent at writing. On the other hand I think Eliezer’s fictions are perfectly good enough for their purpose, and while the flaws pointed out by Alicorn are certainly there I think it’s unreasonable to expect Eliezer to be like a professional fiction writer.
Maybe he’s a good futurist. That does not make him a good worldbuilder, even if he’s worldbuilding about the future. Does it come as any surprise that the skills needed to write good fiction in well-thought-out settings aren’t the exact same skills needed to make people confused about large, complicated, weird, disconnected things?
Taking your question as rhetorical, with the presumed answer “no”, I agree with you—of course the skills are different. However, I hear an implication (and correct me if I’m wrong) that good fiction requires a well-thought-out setting. Surely you can think of good writers who write in badly-constructed or deeply incomplete worlds.
Good fiction does not strictly require a well-built setting. A lot of fiction takes place in a setting so very like reality that the skill necessary to provide a good backdrop isn’t worldbuilding, but research. Some fiction that isn’t set in “the real world” still works with little to no sense of place, history, culture, or context, although this works mostly in stories that are very simple, very short, or (more typically) both. Eliezer writes speculative fiction (eliminating the first excuse), and his stories typically depend heavily on backdrop elements (eliminating the second excuse, except when he’s writing fanficiton and can rely on prior reading of others’ works to do this job for him).
I agree with you regarding the quality of his writing, but your generalizations regarding worldbuilding’s relationship to quality may be overbroad or overstrong. Worldbuilding is fun and interesting and I like it in my books, but lack of worldbuilding, or deep difficult holes in the world are not killing flaws. Almost nothing cannot be rescued by a sufficient quality in other areas. Consider Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad.
The only one of the books you mention that I’ve read is Wrinkle in Time, so I’ll address that one. It isn’t world-driven! It’s a strongly character-driven story. The planets she invents, the species she imagines, the settings she dreams up—these do not supply the thrust of the story. The people populating the book do that, and pretty, emotionally-charged prose does most of the rest. Further, L’Engle’s worldbuilding isn’t awful, and moreover, its weaknesses aren’t distracting. It has an element of whimsy to it and it’s colored by her background values, but there’s nothing much in there that is outrageous and important and unexplained.
Eliezer’s stories, meanwhile—I’d have to dislike them even more if I were interpreting them as being character-driven. His characters tend to be ciphers with flat voices, clothed in cliché and propped up by premise. And it’s often okay to populate your stories with such characters if they aren’t the point—if the point is world or premise/conceit or plot or even just raw beautiful writing. I actually think that Eliezer’s fiction tends to be premise/conceit driven, not setting driven, but he backs up his premises with setting, and his settings do not appear to be up to the task. So to summarize:
A bad story element (such as setting, characterization, plot, or writing quality) may be forgivable, and not preclude the work it’s found in from being good, if:
The bad element is not the point of the story
The bad element isn’t indispensable to help support whatever element is the point of the story (for instance, you might get away with bad writing in a character-driven story only if you don’t depend on your character’s written voice to convey their personality)
And it is not so bad as to distract from the point of the story.
Eliezer’s subpar worldbuilding slips by according to the first criterion. I don’t think his stories are truly setting-driven. But it fails the second two. His settings are indispensably necessary to back up his premises. (“Three Worlds Collide” could not have been plausibly set during some encounter between three boats full of humans on Earth.) And—this one is a matter of taste to some extent, I’ll grant—the settings are poor enough to be distracting. (The non-consensual sex thing is just a particularly easy target. It’s hardly the only bizarre, unexplained thing he’s ever dropped in.)
Yes, worldbuilding was my second major (three cheers for my super-cool undergrad institution!). My initial impression of Eliezer’s skills in this regard from his fiction overall are not good, but that could be because he tends not to provide very much detail. It’s not impossible that the gaps could be filled in with perfectly reasonable content, so the fact that these gaps are so prevalent, distracting, and difficult to fill in might be a matter of storytelling prowess or taste rather than worldbuilding abilities. (It’s certainly possible to create a great world and then do a bad job of showcasing it.) I should be able to weigh in on this one in more detail if and when I get an answer to the above question, which is a particularly good example of a distracting and difficult-to-fill-in gap.
If I understand EY’s philosophy of predicting the future correctly, the gaps in the world are intentional.
Suppose that you are a futurist, and you know how hard it is to predict the future, but you’re convinced that the future will be large, complicated, weird, and hard to connect directly to the present. How can you provide the reader with the sensation of a large, complicated, weird, and hard-to-connect-to-the-present future?
Note that as a futurist, the conjunction fallacy (more complete predictions are less likely to be correct) is extremely salient in your thinking.
You put deliberate gaps into your stories, any resolution of which would require a large complicated explanation—that way the reader has the desired (distracting and difficult-to-fill-in) sensation, without committing the author to any particular resolution.
The author still has to know what’s inside the gaps. Also, the gaps have to look coherent—they can’t appear to the reader as noise, or it simply won’t create the right impression, no matter what.
You may be overanalyzing here. I’ve never published anything that I would’ve considered sending in to a science fiction magazine—maybe I’m holding myself to too-high standards, but still, it’s not like I’m outlining the plot and building character sheets. My goal in writing online fiction is to write it quickly so it doesn’t suck up too much time (and I quite failed at this w/r/t Three Worlds Collide, but I never had the spare days to work only on the novella, which apparently comes with a really large productivity penalty).
I think Alicorn is certainly not overanalizing in the sense that fiction is always fiction and usual methods of analysis apply regardless of the author’s proclaimed intentions or the amount of resources spent at writing. On the other hand I think Eliezer’s fictions are perfectly good enough for their purpose, and while the flaws pointed out by Alicorn are certainly there I think it’s unreasonable to expect Eliezer to be like a professional fiction writer.
Maybe he’s a good futurist. That does not make him a good worldbuilder, even if he’s worldbuilding about the future. Does it come as any surprise that the skills needed to write good fiction in well-thought-out settings aren’t the exact same skills needed to make people confused about large, complicated, weird, disconnected things?
Taking your question as rhetorical, with the presumed answer “no”, I agree with you—of course the skills are different. However, I hear an implication (and correct me if I’m wrong) that good fiction requires a well-thought-out setting. Surely you can think of good writers who write in badly-constructed or deeply incomplete worlds.
Good fiction does not strictly require a well-built setting. A lot of fiction takes place in a setting so very like reality that the skill necessary to provide a good backdrop isn’t worldbuilding, but research. Some fiction that isn’t set in “the real world” still works with little to no sense of place, history, culture, or context, although this works mostly in stories that are very simple, very short, or (more typically) both. Eliezer writes speculative fiction (eliminating the first excuse), and his stories typically depend heavily on backdrop elements (eliminating the second excuse, except when he’s writing fanficiton and can rely on prior reading of others’ works to do this job for him).
I agree with you regarding the quality of his writing, but your generalizations regarding worldbuilding’s relationship to quality may be overbroad or overstrong. Worldbuilding is fun and interesting and I like it in my books, but lack of worldbuilding, or deep difficult holes in the world are not killing flaws. Almost nothing cannot be rescued by a sufficient quality in other areas. Consider Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad.
The only one of the books you mention that I’ve read is Wrinkle in Time, so I’ll address that one. It isn’t world-driven! It’s a strongly character-driven story. The planets she invents, the species she imagines, the settings she dreams up—these do not supply the thrust of the story. The people populating the book do that, and pretty, emotionally-charged prose does most of the rest. Further, L’Engle’s worldbuilding isn’t awful, and moreover, its weaknesses aren’t distracting. It has an element of whimsy to it and it’s colored by her background values, but there’s nothing much in there that is outrageous and important and unexplained.
Eliezer’s stories, meanwhile—I’d have to dislike them even more if I were interpreting them as being character-driven. His characters tend to be ciphers with flat voices, clothed in cliché and propped up by premise. And it’s often okay to populate your stories with such characters if they aren’t the point—if the point is world or premise/conceit or plot or even just raw beautiful writing. I actually think that Eliezer’s fiction tends to be premise/conceit driven, not setting driven, but he backs up his premises with setting, and his settings do not appear to be up to the task. So to summarize:
A bad story element (such as setting, characterization, plot, or writing quality) may be forgivable, and not preclude the work it’s found in from being good, if:
The bad element is not the point of the story
The bad element isn’t indispensable to help support whatever element is the point of the story (for instance, you might get away with bad writing in a character-driven story only if you don’t depend on your character’s written voice to convey their personality)
And it is not so bad as to distract from the point of the story.
Eliezer’s subpar worldbuilding slips by according to the first criterion. I don’t think his stories are truly setting-driven. But it fails the second two. His settings are indispensably necessary to back up his premises. (“Three Worlds Collide” could not have been plausibly set during some encounter between three boats full of humans on Earth.) And—this one is a matter of taste to some extent, I’ll grant—the settings are poor enough to be distracting. (The non-consensual sex thing is just a particularly easy target. It’s hardly the only bizarre, unexplained thing he’s ever dropped in.)