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I'm reading a book! It's called City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett - it's pretty good so far, and I'm not going to spoil anything for folks (particularly since I have only read up to Chapter 6 "A Memory Engraved" myself at this point), BUT I'm going to complain about something kind of pedantic that I can't unsee - NO Spoilers beyond, like, the first 20 pages.
The book so far is pretty great - the main character is investigating a crime in a colonized city called Bulikov, semi based on (medieval? Imperial?) Russia, that has this really interesting history!
Bulikov used to be fundamentally constructed using some magical principles, including one that was fundamentally interwoven into its architecture and construction, so that when [historical, off-screen spoiler happened] the architecture of the medieval walled city of Bulikov was fundamentally broken and warped in a single instant.
Whole sections of the city snapped out of existence in The Blink, while other twisted and changed and started to overlap in unplanned ways. The city is characterized by hundred of sets of stairs that used to lead to buildings or paths that are just gone and now they just hang in the air, ominous and weird. In the intervening century or so, the city went from being the capital of an empire to being a completely screwed up backwater - there's very little trade, the climate got drastically colder and wetter, and the people who live there have resisted cooperating with their new ruling government so the infrastructure seems like it's very fucked. Very little has been done to make it a more livable place since the horrific disaster that befell it.
Now, this is all great and cool and makes sense! Interesting history and worldbuilding, totally fascinating stuff, really atmospheric and awesome - I'm honestly super into it.
What doesn't make is the cars.
The main character is driven everywhere in cars, and people drive in and get in and out of cars all the time. Cars are driven without commentary on the ride, the roads, the people driving them, who hires them, or the kind of vehicle it is. Again, I'm only six chapters in, maybe this gets fleshed out later, but for now, the cars are driving me up the walls.
Because cars in a medieval style walled city barely make sense if there has been a rich government pushing through funding for streets maintenance and repair on a regular basis for a century. Look at Europe - in older cities, that have had lots of money to rebuild and maintain roads, cars are still kind of poorly fitted into the structure of the really old parts of the city where the roads are narrow and twisty. I live in Boston, and cars just barely make sense here, where there's been a huge cultural push to make sure that there's always space for cars. The spacing of roads, buildings, intersections, all make for challenging conditions to drive in, and that's with basically constant attention to the roads and huge financial investment in their maintenance on a local and federal level.
If Bulikov's covered in staircases that go nowhere, never removed or maintained, aren't there a bunch of roads that similarly don't make any sense anymore? Roads that just end in weird places, or don't connect to any other roads at all, or end in cliffs or mountains where bridges or tunnels used to be? Or roads that are vastly wider in some places and narrow dramatically for no reason, so that you have to squeeze oddly down for no reason? Roads that connect with radically different historical paving methods, cobblestone here and asphalt over here?
How is this Bulikov navigable by car, if there are places where it's hardly navigable on foot due to the disruption caused by disaster and disrepair?
And the weather change would also make the existing roads awful! Roads constructed for a warm dry climate would not last over cold wet winters - one of the reason roads in Boston are so bad is that the freeze-thaw cycle of ice over each winter widens cracks and breaks thru the top layers into the substructure below. And that's with roads that were purpose built for cold hard winters - the remaining roads in Bulikov should be falling apart, even if they didn't poof out of existence all at once.
So, the answer to my feelings is, of course, that cars work because the author wants characters to travel and kind of didn't care about the roads and didn't actually invest a lot of time in figuring out if cars would work or not. Which is fine! Not all elements of a world need to be equally fleshed out - there needs to be space for story. Or, possibly, since I'm coming at this from the middle of the book, this is all fleshed out and there's some reason why cars are different or the roads are repaved, or something, and it's all explained.
But for now, every time I read a passage about how the character just gets into a car and then arrives someplace else, I want to tear my hair out and go, EXPLAIN.
Is this a thing for folks? Are there books out there you love that just have, like, ONE nitpicky little detail in the worldbuilding that feels off? Or that you love everything about it so much and the worldbuilding hiccups don't phase you?
The book so far is pretty great - the main character is investigating a crime in a colonized city called Bulikov, semi based on (medieval? Imperial?) Russia, that has this really interesting history!
Bulikov used to be fundamentally constructed using some magical principles, including one that was fundamentally interwoven into its architecture and construction, so that when [historical, off-screen spoiler happened] the architecture of the medieval walled city of Bulikov was fundamentally broken and warped in a single instant.
Whole sections of the city snapped out of existence in The Blink, while other twisted and changed and started to overlap in unplanned ways. The city is characterized by hundred of sets of stairs that used to lead to buildings or paths that are just gone and now they just hang in the air, ominous and weird. In the intervening century or so, the city went from being the capital of an empire to being a completely screwed up backwater - there's very little trade, the climate got drastically colder and wetter, and the people who live there have resisted cooperating with their new ruling government so the infrastructure seems like it's very fucked. Very little has been done to make it a more livable place since the horrific disaster that befell it.
Now, this is all great and cool and makes sense! Interesting history and worldbuilding, totally fascinating stuff, really atmospheric and awesome - I'm honestly super into it.
What doesn't make is the cars.
The main character is driven everywhere in cars, and people drive in and get in and out of cars all the time. Cars are driven without commentary on the ride, the roads, the people driving them, who hires them, or the kind of vehicle it is. Again, I'm only six chapters in, maybe this gets fleshed out later, but for now, the cars are driving me up the walls.
Because cars in a medieval style walled city barely make sense if there has been a rich government pushing through funding for streets maintenance and repair on a regular basis for a century. Look at Europe - in older cities, that have had lots of money to rebuild and maintain roads, cars are still kind of poorly fitted into the structure of the really old parts of the city where the roads are narrow and twisty. I live in Boston, and cars just barely make sense here, where there's been a huge cultural push to make sure that there's always space for cars. The spacing of roads, buildings, intersections, all make for challenging conditions to drive in, and that's with basically constant attention to the roads and huge financial investment in their maintenance on a local and federal level.
If Bulikov's covered in staircases that go nowhere, never removed or maintained, aren't there a bunch of roads that similarly don't make any sense anymore? Roads that just end in weird places, or don't connect to any other roads at all, or end in cliffs or mountains where bridges or tunnels used to be? Or roads that are vastly wider in some places and narrow dramatically for no reason, so that you have to squeeze oddly down for no reason? Roads that connect with radically different historical paving methods, cobblestone here and asphalt over here?
How is this Bulikov navigable by car, if there are places where it's hardly navigable on foot due to the disruption caused by disaster and disrepair?
And the weather change would also make the existing roads awful! Roads constructed for a warm dry climate would not last over cold wet winters - one of the reason roads in Boston are so bad is that the freeze-thaw cycle of ice over each winter widens cracks and breaks thru the top layers into the substructure below. And that's with roads that were purpose built for cold hard winters - the remaining roads in Bulikov should be falling apart, even if they didn't poof out of existence all at once.
So, the answer to my feelings is, of course, that cars work because the author wants characters to travel and kind of didn't care about the roads and didn't actually invest a lot of time in figuring out if cars would work or not. Which is fine! Not all elements of a world need to be equally fleshed out - there needs to be space for story. Or, possibly, since I'm coming at this from the middle of the book, this is all fleshed out and there's some reason why cars are different or the roads are repaved, or something, and it's all explained.
But for now, every time I read a passage about how the character just gets into a car and then arrives someplace else, I want to tear my hair out and go, EXPLAIN.
Is this a thing for folks? Are there books out there you love that just have, like, ONE nitpicky little detail in the worldbuilding that feels off? Or that you love everything about it so much and the worldbuilding hiccups don't phase you?
