Back on my bullshit

[kitewithfish]

City of Stairs is again proving the problem - if it's a plot point that your country isn't producing steel, where are you getting your cars? Seriously, where is the steel for cars, roads, and infrastructure coming from?  

EDITED:
Okay, much is explained by this interview: The author does not in fact care about the stuff that's bugging the fuck out of me. 

from Bigger on the Inside: Talking with Robert Jackson Bennett about City of Stairs

Brian Slattery: To someone following your career, a move into fantasy doesn’t seem all that unlikely. So it’s interesting that you mentioned yourself that you would “never set anything in a second-story world, chiefly because I always felt these sorts of things were kind of, well, a big pain in the ass.” Then you went on to say that “I’ve never been happier to be proven wrong—I’m having a tremendous amount of fun.” Can you flesh this out a little bit? Why did you shy away from a book like this? What changed your mind? And once you dug into it, what did you discover that a fantasy book could let you do that you hadn’t been able to do before?

Robert Jackson Bennett: Well, to be fair, it is a big pain in the ass. To maintain this world, I have to carefully curate what is now an eleven-page Word document consisting of a 2,000 year timeline, along with varying names of the months, the days, the religious texts. This would be a pain in the ass to maintain even if it corresponded with a real-world history (imagine a Word document summing up the Tudors), but when the burden rests on me to provide the name of the book or town (or whatever), and make sure it’s consistent with all the other books and towns I’ve mentioned thus far, then suddenly I have to think very long and hard about this tossed-off mention of a thing in a single line of the book that has no long term consequences on the plot whatsoever.

But it actually is quite a bit of fun. What I’m describing are the most boring bits, the parts I like the least, but I also get to do all kinds of fun things, where the way the miracles work and the ways the cities are structured reflects what I feel to be the nature of our own real world, only distorted. Fantasy offers us the opportunity to take the limitless contradictions that confront us in our world and set them against one another, thus allowing us a rare peek into what makes these contradictions both so ridiculous and so desperately human.

Comments

[schneefink]

Oh no, an eleven-page Word document. For all his worldbuilding, for an entire trilogy of fantasy books? Oookay.

[kitewithfish]

I KNOW!

I am sorry, this got long, I am having trouble explaining why this is bothering me so much without the capacity to wave my arms around a lot, but, just...! SO MUCH ARM WAVING!

But, suffice it to say, I am generally pushing for the actual real world America to have fewer cars in it, more public transit, and waaaaay fewer car related deaths - both for immediate less care related deaths and for climate warming mitigation. I am probably paying more attention to the ways we just sort of have assumptions about how cars fit into culture and spaces and planning than your average reader. Which is fine!

And the history of cars in the United States is quite specific and unique and has had many tides pushing for and against the modern proliferation of private car ownership - nothing about how the world is now can really be taken for granted. It all is the result of people wanted and pushing for particular outcomes. Like, the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? where people are trying to destroy the public transit system? A thing that happened in US cities, on multiple occasions, to the detriment of all those who live there. Cars made money, so a huge push by car companies to make sure cars are important to Americans has become a constant cultural pressure for longer than I have been alive. The worldbuilding notebook for modern American culture would have LOTS to say about cars!

So, just...! To have someone just write a version of a different world without actually doing the deep interesting work of worldbuilding, and examining the world he's living in and figuring out if the world he's writing would have the same cultural baggage, and to publically say that he kind of resents having to do that work...? Kind of deflating!

Sigh. It's not a bad book at all. The mystery and the parts of the worldbuilding that he enjoyed are quite enjoyable! I'm down for the story!

He could have written this story in a version of the US, but he picked a bunch of non-American cultural markers that suggest the setting should be very unfriendly to cars, and then doesn't address it, and his whole attitude towards it is just making me cool towards the book.

[yourlibrarian]

He could have written this story in a version of the US, but he picked a bunch of non-American cultural markers that suggest the setting should be very unfriendly to cars, and then doesn't address it, and his whole attitude towards it is just making me cool towards the book.

I don't blame you. I suspect he started the whole thing with a very flip attitude and little experience with the genre -- otherwise he would have realized a long time ago the problem with casual asides in a wholly created world. There are plenty of fanfics with 11 page documents to keep things straight.

[kara_mckay]

His take on it just strikes me as lazy and preemptively defensive, and I'll admit I'm a lazy writer myself. That a story is fantasy isn't an excuse for inconsistencies that jar readers out of it. I'm reminded of something I read a long time ago in a creative writing textbook about how one can make people believe that Wonder Woman can deflect bullets with her bracelets, but not that she does it on the Arizona/Alabama border.

[kitewithfish]

Sigh. Yeah.
It's a quite a reasonable spy story, and I was enjoying that element of it a lot before my brain butted in, but when the basics of your world are build so shoddily ("How are you paving your roads?" is a fairly fundamental question), the rest of the high concept stuff that was praised as very interesting in reviews just sort of lacks a foundation.
I will probably limp along for another little bit and eventually dump it when the library calls to claims its own.

[kitewithfish]

Yup! That's basically how I'm feeling about it - using the fantasy element to handwave how he gets to his interesting spy plot.

(and also maybe like he's never lived anywhere where the main mode of transit wasn't a car...)

[solarbird]

Robert Jackson Bennett: Well, to be fair, it is a big pain in the ass. To maintain this world, I have to carefully curate what is now an eleven-page Word document

eleven page Word document

ELEVEN PAGE WORD DOCUMENT

reopens her 800-page Google doc full of Of Gods and Monsters notes and story fragments, then runs off into the distance, screaming

[kitewithfish]

YUUUUUUUP.
His sandbox, it is a salt shaker.

[jeriendhal]

Well bless his heart!

The world background appendix included in my The Complete Red Vixen Adventures tops out at thirteen pages, but that's only after winnowing out the chaff, RPG notes, and character profiles. Add those in and think it would be easily four times that many pages. And that's for a bog standard sci-fi background used for Light Romance.