World-building done well

[Vanadium 50]

I have grumped about people who focus way too much on the details of world-building, and how this can get cluttered in irrelevancies. So I am going to hold up an example of it done well. And for fun, I am going to pick on a kid's show: Sid and Marty Krofft's 1974 Land of the Lost.

Not the 1990's one, which was worse, or the Will Ferrell movie which was much worse. The original.

The storyline is that a family on a camping trip gets transported to a world populated by dinosaurs, aliens and visited by humans from the past and the future. The family tries to survive long enough to find their way home. It ran for 3 seasons, so maybe 50 half-hour episodes.

It had a number of "real" writers, many of whom came from Star Trek. Dabid Gerrold, DC Fontana and also people like Larry Niven.

Things they did right:

(1) They did not talk down to their audience.

(2) They did not explain everything - it was still a mysterious place after 3 seasons. This helped with...

(3) The world was largely consistent. If something happened in Episode N, it usually was still true in Episode N+1.

(4) For the most part, people and beings the protagonists interacted with were no purely good or purely evil ("the only good orc is a dead orc") but had their own motivations that may or may not be aligned with the protagonists.

(5) When they did tell the audience something, they let it out a little at a time. Clues in one episode weren't explained until later episodes, and in some cases not at all.

Was this the best show ever? No. But it shows how one can crearte a setting that provides a great backdrop to stories, in a way that writing a textbook on warp drive physics does not.

 

[Tazerfish]

I am very much reminded of the tasks of a "Game Master" (GM) in tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons.
Especially points (2) and (5) resonate with me.
There is some wisdom flying around that "players don't care about your setting".
If it doesn't contribute anything directly to the enjoyment of the reader/viewer/players, why bother with it?
Instead of hitting people with an infodump, you can dole it out bit by bit when it is actually relevant to the story, making them earn it.
Then the readers might actually care ^^

This approach would have certainly saved us a bit of quarreling on a recent post
Was life expectancy really a cornerstone of whatever fiction the OP was producing? I doubt it

PS: However, it can be fun to get inspired by what you've recently learned; vice versa, creative work can motivate you to study something.
Just be aware that you're mixing two things you should already enjoy independently and that the worldbuilding is doing little to further the plot.

 

[BWV]

yes, 'show, dont tell' is a fundamental principle of any good fiction writing, not just SF and Fantasy

 

[Vanadium 50]

show, dont tell

I got into trouble here for pointing out that Tolkein never shows us Sauron is eeeeeevillll. But, in Lord of the Rings, he doesn't show us much in the way of evil. Maybe in the appendices. People were so busy being offended than I would be critical of The Greatest Story Ever, they never thought it through: Sauron is not a character. Sauron is the setting.

The flip side of "show don't tell" is "it's OK to keep your moth shut". The audience does not need to know everything. Did Lady Macbeth have an unhappy childhood? And do we care?

 

[Vanadium 50]

show, dont tell

And even when people tell, they want to tell the wrong thing:

"Here...take this ray gun."
"How does it work?"

Wrong: "The tachyonic blibble-blabble disrupts the borinomial field".
Better: "Point it a the bad guy, pull the trigger here, and he explodes."

 

[Vanadium 50]

I have a moment so feel like hating on the Will Ferrel movie. It is an excellent example of "punching down" - the strong using comedy against the weak. Most people don't find this funny so much as mean-spirited.

The series spent around $6M for about 20 hours of television. The movie spent $100M for about 2 hours. So they had, 150x the resources of the thing they were parodying. Punching down.

 

[Strato Incendus]

"Here...take this ray gun."
"How does it work?"

Wrong: "The tachyonic blibble-blabble disrupts the borinomial field".
Better: "Point it a the bad guy, pull the trigger here, and he explodes."

Just saw this example and it prompted me to revive the thread (does half a year count as "reviving"?), since my story features such a gun demonstration. Keyword being "demonstration"; I think weapons are one of the things that are the easiest to show, rather than tell.

My guns have three lethal levels - one of which leads to muscle collapse (including the respiratory muscles), the second-highest leading to instant brain death, the highest level carbonising the target completely. The first two are difficult to demonstrate without an animate target, but the last one can easily be demonstrated on a plant. Thus, you don't need to tell another character, "point it at the bad guy, pull the trigger here, and he explodes" - you can show it off, even during the setup.

I mean, just imagine they had explained the Death Star in A New Hope that way, rather than sacrificing Alderan for "show, don't tell" purposes... That wouldn't have been anywhere near as effective.

 

[Algr]

My guns have three lethal levels - one of which leads to muscle collapse (including the respiratory muscles), the second-highest leading to instant brain death, the highest level carbonising the target completely.

Why?
Also, wouldn't the effect of any gun be wildly inconsistent based on range and what was hit? I mean if a hit to the foot is lethal, then you probably have a big hole in the floor and lots of injured bystanders.

For worldbuilding in general, I think "It was designed by idiots" is not given enough credibility in writing. Think of the Maginot Line, Fukushima, MS Windows, or the Nedelin catastrophe. These can take paragraphs to explain properly, and while authors should have such explanations written down somewhere, having them actually in the work is likely unnecessary. The Death Star's much criticized exhaust port is exactly the kind of screw-up that complex bureaucracies would make, and Vader keeping everyone scared stupid would not help this.

 

[Strato Incendus]

Why?
Also, wouldn't the effect of any gun be wildly inconsistent based on range and what was hit? I mean if a hit to the foot is lethal, then you probably have a big hole in the floor and lots of injured bystanders.

That's why this element is still one of the more "soft sci-fi" bits of my setting . And I'm still thinking about changing it to something else, since the ship overall is fairly "hard" worlbuilding - so a "soft sci-fi" element can easily feel inconsistent with the rest.

Spoiler

My anti-organic guns (inspired by a laser in the 1990s Spider-Man animated TV series, which could be adjusted in such a way that it only affects inorganic matter) are still very reminiscent of "phasers set to stun" or "phasers set to kill".

Standard projectile weapons like regular guns, however, will probably make the layman reader think of James Bond films in which guns were used on an aeroplane, and the damage a single bullet can cause if fired on board one. For the uninformed reader, using projectile weapons on board a spaceship will therefore probably have low "eyesight validity", and will consequently disrupt suspension of disbelief.

The friendly users on this forum convincingly explained to me how an interstellar spaceship would have to deal with a lot of much more forceful impacts from dust particles at much higher velocities. (Though the ship will mainly be protected against those from the front and back, so that it's equally protected when it turns around to brake - it won't necessarily have that much protection on the sides, or on one of the ring habitats, which is where the crew spend most of their time, and where a bullet would therefore be most likely to be fired.) But in the novel, I'd have to explain all that to the average reader first, too. And if the reader doesn't buy it, it may still feel like a handwave to them, just so that I can have normal guns in my story.

Then there's the issue of my crew having to protect each human life as much as possible, to maximise the likelihood of the mission's success. Non-lethal weapons like tasers and batons may therefore be a more suitable form of weaponry for my ship security, especially given that the worst thing that could happen to my characters isn't death, but one of those infamous "fates worse than death". That said, a few characters still need to die in the final battle, so someone has to be using weapons with lethal potential.