Imaginary worlds are fun. They give us the imaginative scope to explore our wildest ideas. They can be places of grand adventure like the galaxy of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, places of great quests like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, fantastic realms which embrace and revel in the impossible like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, or places of radical ideology such as the many worlds of Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. How we engage with imaginary worlds is as varied as their contents; we can either skim their surface or immerse ourselves fully in them. Some texts, like William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, are so intertwined with facts from our world that they force the reader to ponder the possibility that the imaginary world is not only real but overlaid onto our own.
With such variety, it is no wonder that Tolkien explored worldbuilding in his seminal text ‘On Fairy-stories’, or that Mark Wolf has taken up the critical challenge to explore them in Notes from Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation and in his edited collections Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology and The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds. It is a challenging and intriguing area of study; as Wolf points out:
“…an imaginary world can become a large entity which is experienced through various media windows; but quite often, no one window shows everything, and only an aggregate view combining a variety of these windows can give a complete sense of what the world is like and what has occurred there. Experiencing an imaginary world in its entirety, then, can sometimes be quite an undertaking.”[1]
Speaking of worldbuilding is, in a sense, like trying to see the wood for the trees; it is the creation of the background, the staging and setting for stories, and, when done well, is almost invisible to the audience, merely glimpsed behind the narrative. However, the skill in worldbuilding does not lie only in imagination, but in a dedication to rules. ‘Suspension of disbelief’ is a well-known phrase to anyone interested in literature, but it is important to remember that such willingness to embrace another world is an act of labour on the part of the audience. To convince them to enter a world, to dedicate their time and effort to exploring it, it is essential to create a set of consistent rules; Wolf sees this as a matter of making the imaginary world believable,[2] where Tolkien saw it as the potential for the rise of disbelief, where the spell between author and audience fails.[3] Thus, while a viewer can accept that faster than light travel is possible in Star Trek, the intergalactic transporter in 2013’s Star Trek: Into Darkness was less palatable, as it made no sense in the context of the larger Star Trek franchise. This brings us to an important element of worldbuilding, and in particular, enjoying imaginary worlds: rules need not be ours, but they must be consistent.
It is a fundamental error in understanding to attempt to judge an imagined world by the laws and rules of the real world. Those who rail against the impossibility of Star Trek‘s warp drive, the apparent galactic prevalence of English in Stargate SG-1 and the impossibility of travelling to the past in any time travel narrative are missing the point of speculative fiction. These worlds are not our worlds; they are not driven by laws of gravity, but by the mechanisms the story requires. Even more realistic genre fiction, such as crime fiction, arguably falls into this category of alternate worlds. While some may comment gently on the sheer amount of murders in St. Mary Mead in Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories, in general the phenomena is not treated as completely impossible; indeed, those who are certain that St Mary Mead must be lacking in murders are usually those who do not come from there. The denizens of the village are accustomed to their reality of frequent murders. This can be understood to signal the difference between and among fans of genre and realist fiction; what one likes could be defined by what rules one wishes to believe in, the types of worlds one is willing to explore.
However, I would argue that the value of imaginary worlds goes beyond simple entertainment. No matter what the trappings, the stories told in these worlds are stories by us, and are inevitably stories about us. This is not to say that we should read imaginary worlds as mere metaphor; to do so denies the richness and inventiveness many imaginary worlds display. Rather the alternate structures of the subcreation can enhance narratives far beyond realist fiction’s ability to do so. Perhaps the most intense example from recent years is 2017’s Logan, which follows the final days of the X-Men Charles Xavier and Logan/Wolverine, who are suffering from dementia and terminal illness respectively. This emotional narrative charting the end of these two men’s lives could be found in any realist fiction; however, the juxtaposition of Xavier’s disintegrating mind hurting those around him with the sharp, intelligent psychic whom audiences already knew, and the broken, failing Logan with the larger than life warrior protector of multiple movies, only enhances the tragedy. We expect humans to fade and die, but superheroes should live forever. This is the great strength of imaginary worlds; they not only show us parts of our own world, but they can magnify its smallest beauties and tragedies into epics.
So the next time you are entering an imaginary world, try to see if you can figure out the rules, and enjoy the larger than life surroundings. By doing so, by accepting the world on its own terms, and for what it can do, the journey through it will be all the richer.
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[1] Wolf, Mark. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, London: Routledge, 2012, p. 2.
[2] Wolf, Mark. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, London: Routledge, 2012, p. 22.
[3]Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy Stories.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983. 27-84, p. 37.
Suggested Reading:
Gerrold, David. Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. London: Titan, 2001.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy Stories.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983. 27-84.
Wolf, Mark J.P. Notes from Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. London: Routledge, 2012.
Wolf, Mark J.P. Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology. London: Routledge, 2016.
Wolf, Mark J.P. The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds. London: Routledge, 2018.