This interview with a current fantasy author (posted in another thread as well) about what his experiences growing up with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe started me thinking about world-building. Some fantasy authors spend a lot of time creating their alternative worlds--everything has to make sense. Others mainly focus on how their alternative world affects their characters, and some only care about not being obviously contradictory--e.g., in The Wind and the Willows, how exactly do the animals get their food, since none of them apparently work?
C.S. Lewis put relatively little emphasis on world-building as such in LWW. The world of Narnia became more complex in later stories, of course, but in general Lewis only described what he needed to for the story itself to make sense. He did not mind seemingly contradictory elements--e.g., throwing Father Christmas in with characters from Greek mythology, Norse mythology, and Scottish folklore.
J.R.R. Tolkien, on the other hand, couldn't stand that sort of thing. He became a pioneer of modern fantasy partly because his world-building in LotR was more detailed than any previous fantasy work. Tolkien was trying to create a unified mythology, and it showed. Later fantasy authors--who generally cared much less about mythology as such--copied Tolkien in drawing very detailed fantasy worlds. Most of today's adult fantasy shows Tolkien's influence, while some children's fantasy shows Lewis's (I'm looking at you, Philip Pullman).
The question is--who was right, Tolkien or Lewis? Or, if both writers' styles had their place, then have modern writers of epic fantasy sometimes gotten obsessive about world-building in a way that Tolkien was not? Is there a problem when people start discussing the way a fantasy world's meteorology works? or when they start trying to explain how magic would affect the energy levels in other parts of the same room?
In other words, how much is too much?
C.S. Lewis put relatively little emphasis on world-building as such in LWW. The world of Narnia became more complex in later stories, of course, but in general Lewis only described what he needed to for the story itself to make sense. He did not mind seemingly contradictory elements--e.g., throwing Father Christmas in with characters from Greek mythology, Norse mythology, and Scottish folklore.
J.R.R. Tolkien, on the other hand, couldn't stand that sort of thing. He became a pioneer of modern fantasy partly because his world-building in LotR was more detailed than any previous fantasy work. Tolkien was trying to create a unified mythology, and it showed. Later fantasy authors--who generally cared much less about mythology as such--copied Tolkien in drawing very detailed fantasy worlds. Most of today's adult fantasy shows Tolkien's influence, while some children's fantasy shows Lewis's (I'm looking at you, Philip Pullman).
The question is--who was right, Tolkien or Lewis? Or, if both writers' styles had their place, then have modern writers of epic fantasy sometimes gotten obsessive about world-building in a way that Tolkien was not? Is there a problem when people start discussing the way a fantasy world's meteorology works? or when they start trying to explain how magic would affect the energy levels in other parts of the same room?
In other words, how much is too much?
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