World-building done well

  • #1
Vanadium 50
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
Education Advisor
2023 Award
35,005
21,672
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.
 
  • Like
Likes Nik_2213, phinds and BWV
Physics news on Phys.org
  • #2
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 o0)
Was life expectancy really a cornerstone of whatever fiction the OP was producing? I doubt it :wink:

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.
 
  • #3
yes, 'show, dont tell' is a fundamental principle of any good fiction writing, not just SF and Fantasy
 
  • Like
Likes Vanadium 50
  • #4
BWV said:
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?
 
  • Like
Likes BWV
  • #5
BWV said:
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."
 
  • Haha
  • Like
Likes phinds and BWV
  • #6
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.
 

Similar threads

Replies
13
Views
4K
Replies
2
Views
2K
Back
Top