“To retain puzzle pieces that don’t connect, dropped without context, is a skill that not all have.” This is the start of an incredible reflection on reading for world-building, as presented by author Ada Palmer on the foreword of The Book of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe.
Let get this idea undone.
Hello everyone, and welcome to Books Undone. I’m your host, Livia J. Elliot, and today I have another meta discussion, this time focused on reading for world-building—a theme which I believe is very specific to speculative fiction, and in particular, fantasy and sci-fi.
The idea for this episode came after I read Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolfe, and especially after I prepared that long episode on memory. In particular, my Tor Essentials edition has a Foreword written by Ada Palmer (author of the Terra Ignota series). In there, she discusses what reading for world-building is, how Gene Wolfe accomplished it in The Book of the New Sun, and the different levels of complexity that secondary world-building brings to speculative fiction.
This theme is something that I—as both reader and author—have also considered for quite a while… and after my previous meta discussion went so well, I decided to tackle this theme in a podcast episode.
Therefore, and before we get started, let me do some disclaimers. First, since we are not touching one particular book but many, I will try my best to keep this episode spoiler-lite, but will come back to Wolfe’s Shadow & Claw since it is the book that inspired this discussion. Second, what you will hear is my subjective opinion on this topic, and you may disagree with me—and that’s fine, we are allowed to have different opinions.
Into The Theme
Let’s try to define world-building. This is a concept somewhat specific to speculative fiction in any format—which includes books, TV shows and movies, videogames, tabletop games, and more. However, it can also feature in many other subgenres that imply a divergence from history… and one could say, to some extent, that even something like historical fiction depends on world-building.
But what is it?
We can define world-building as the process of constructing an imaginary world or setting, sometimes associated with a fictional universe… but that somehow falls short. The Merriam-Webster dictionary has an article on world-building1 where it explains that it “is most often used to describe a component of a work of fiction, much like plot or character; unlike the word setting, world-building emphasizes that the world being created is entirely new”. According to this definition, world-building is far more than just defining where a story happens; it implies creating an entirely new world, with its geography and biomes, with its cultures and languages, its remnants of past times, its social constructs, and even its magic systems.
It is not a small feat, and trying to convey that while keeping the story concise can be even more challenging. Author Charlie Jane Anders discussed what good world-building should feel for the reader; she wrote on her blog that “The purpose of world-building isn’t just to do a cool exercise, but to give a sense of place—and all of your thought experiments absolutely have to result in something vivid and alive.”
But how can a writer convey that vividness? How can a world become alive? And once they had achieved that… what does it mean to read in a way that allows the reader to, simultaneously, piece the plot together while learning about that secondary world?
Here comes that Foreword by Ada Palmer to guide us into some answers. She writes:
“Reading for World-building is a skill […]. Reading for world-building requires retaining information without context: a term, a place, a coin, a category comes up once and we know what that is—a puzzle piece—that our task is to gather up these pieced as the author drops them, and to slowly assemble the whole."
As I see it, Palmer is saying that authors (and in this case, Gene Wolfe), will often give information about the world without context. It is easy to ask, “Why would they do that?” yet the answer tripartite; a few things may be happening:
First, the characters may already know about those concepts and, therefore, do not feel the need to explain them… even when they are foreign to the reader.
Second, the characters may truly ignore what something is, just like a child may ignore something that they’ll later learn in school.
Or, third, perhaps the society has forgotten or misinterpreted its own history, just like our current world has. After all, history is, in itself, an interminable puzzle for which we will never have all the clues available. Because of that, historians and archeologists will often infer based on current knowledge. Just as we, readers, are often required to do.
The combination of these three types of omission adds a level of realism to the world-building. To me, those omissions make it feel intrinsic to the characters, to their society, to their history, and to their problems.
First, think of our society. How many times has the real-world forgotten an entire civilisation? How many times have we forgotten languages, only to be unable to translate any surviving records? How many times have we just not noticed something until we learned about it? Too many, if I may comment, and thus enough to know that a society knowing little of its past is realistic.
Second, think of yourself as you interact with the daily world; better yet, imagine a menial task—you unlock your smartphone, activate bluetooth, and sync your headphones. There are three concepts there: a smartphone, bluetooth, and headphones. You don’t actively define these concepts while using them because you already know what they are. You don’t need to explain them to yourself because, within your context, they are known.
This, alongside a combination of lost history, is the type of world-building Gene Wolfe, and many other authors, often leverage. Their characters may speak of in-book concepts in a way that feels natural and common, or they may encounter a legend or myth meant to explain their in-book unknown past… while, at the same time, leaving the reader puzzled about their true meaning.
An example relevant to the latter are Tolkien’s many songs about Middle Earth’s past. Another example is the Lackless poem presented very early in The Name of The Wind; as readers, we encounter that poem for the first time, laugh, and forget about it until–later on the second book (The Wise Man’s Fear)–we find out that the poem may hold some truth to it. That Lackless poem is just what Palmer says—a puzzle piece carefully dropped by Rothfuss for us readers to learn about his world’s myths.
However, requiring your readers to read and remember in this way has one glaring problem—it increases the complexity of the text. As Palmer says, “it requires retaining information without context: a term, a place […] and we know what that is—a puzzle piece”. Reading in this way may seem a simple task, but it is not; it actually demands a lot from the reader, so let me illustrate it with a simple example taken from Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolfe.
In Chapter 1 of the first book, Wolfe writes, “Still wet from the Gyoll we waited”. Two pages into the story, we are presented with this term for a world we know nothing about. So, of course, as readers we may ask, what is Gyoll? Because it is capitalised we can assume it’s a fancy name that the author assigned to something, and because the main character, Severian, says “Still wet from the Gyoll” we can puzzle together that Gyoll is either a river or a lake.
Notice what we just did. To discover what ‘Gyoll’ was, we had to notice the capitalisation, add our knowledge of how names are spelled, assume that only a body of water can get you wet, and consider the rest of the setting to arrive at a vague conclusion—it is a river or a lake. Those are a lot of thought-actions!
Granted, that train of inference may seem straightforward and natural to us, avid fantasy or sci-fi readers… but that’s only because we have practised it with every single book we have read. Whenever we pick up a new author, a new series, a new book we are going into it with the awareness that we will need to puzzle out a new secondary world—but that’s something that may not come as naturally to some people. Ada Palmer discusses it very clearly:
“Kids collect Earth’s puzzle pieces every time they read, but as we move to grown-up books they all use the same picture, and define immediately those terms they fear a reader may not know. Thus, the skill of keeping puzzle pieces fades, unless we read books set in other worlds […]. This—many have observed—is why most [fantasy and sci-fi] readers come to the genre young."
That power of inference, that ability to piece puzzle pieces together without questioning them is part of what reading for world-building actually is—an acquired skill that we must continue to practice. We all have it as children because, at that tender age, curiosity is highly rewarding to us… and as we grow up, the joy of discovering a new explanation fades out—but not to us, fantasy readers. We keep enjoying that additional activity of discovering a new world.
However, lacking such a skill (or, more accurately, not having practised it enough) can be a quote-on-quote “entry barrier” to the genre of fantasy and sci-fi, or to specific authors who, like Gene Wolfe, do not aid the reader by explaining concepts.
I personally think this is why some books, like Gene Wolfe’s, Rothfuss’ or Sanderson’s, get better when re-reading them—because we start looking at the bigger picture. We know the plot, we are aware of the events and twists, and so we focus (perhaps, unconsciously) on collecting these puzzle pieces that the author carefully sowed for us. We start finding out details that are otherwise not discovered, we start crafting in-book theories, and we get progressively more involved into the world the author created simply because (due to the re-reads) we are now able to see all the missing pieces of the puzzle—and those are the ones that make a made-up world to feel realistic.
As I mentioned briefly with regards to history, our own real-world lacks a lot of puzzle pieces. Our history may be well documented in parts, but it’s severely lacking in others; there are periods of history and regions we know very little about… yet that’s life, and conveying that is what makes great world-building. In my opinion, that knowledge the characters lack, those myths they blindly accept, those songs, those poems, those bits of incomprehensible history are what makes the world-building pop out of the page.
Nevertheless, I need to restate what I said before—expecting that much from a reader may make a text more difficult to get into. Palmer gave a beautiful metaphor for this with regards to Wolfe’s series; se wrote: “As one must learn to swim before one swims, so the first attempt is all laborious splashing before the second can be fun, in many ways, one reads the Book of the New Sun only on the second pass.”
Patrick Rothfuss said something similar of himself2; he wrote: “There’s a lot in the books you simply cannot understand until your second read. There’s a reason a lot of people read them more than once. […] That’s the way I wrote them very deliberately, and it makes for a very long-lasting reading experience. If you read my books only once, you kind of miss most of them.”
To me, that type of world-building definitely makes the books a long-lasting experience. It is not a read-and-forget, but more of a read-theorise-reread-theorise loop that results in an immersion few books can achieve. It makes the world complex, yet at the same time, builds an experience of discovery and understanding (or, perhaps, lack of thereof) of the author’s world.
Why am I saying this? Let me quote another part of Palmer’s foreword; she wrote:
“These puzzle pieces do not fit together—rather this puzzle-maker trusts that we are puzzle-masters and know the archetypes that must fill in between (a rise, an age, a destined king). So we spread our puzzle pieces out, […] looking not for direct connections but for fragments of arcs and colours, our 100 puzzle pieces let us glimpse an image so vast it would take 100,000."
We already established that this type of world-building: (a) is complex, (b) requires the reader to actively attempt to understand the world, and (c) also relies on what it is unknown about that world. Do you know what this means? That reading for world-building can be painfully frustrating.
Some readers may want all the puzzle pieces given to them in order to enjoy the story; some readers may not be comfortable with the reality of implied knowledge or, to the same extent, unknown knowledge about the world—and this is fine. There are also cases of the contrary—readers who do not want everything spelled out, and who actually enjoy reading that world of 100,000, never-to-be-found puzzle pieces.
So is a spelled-out approach better? Or is it Wolfe’s, with his million of disconnected clues and pieces of knowledge left for the readers to infer? Let me dare an answer: both are correct, none is correct. To me, the question should never be about ‘correctness’ because, at the end of the day, each writer is allowed to present their world however they wish. In turn, the question should be always personal of each reader; namely, what is better for me (or you) as a reader, given your specific literary preferences?
Ultimately, reading for world-building is a skill that can be learned and trained, but one that may not be enjoyable to every reader. Depending on your individual preferences, it can be extremely rewarding or obnoxiously frustrating, it can immerse you deeply into a world or push you away of it.
So “what is to read for world-building?” My answer is simple. To be comfortable knowing that we may never find out all the details and clues an author sowed in their books.
Conclusion & Outro
Let me say that this was quite a puzzling episode to prepare, and a topic that I’m keen on continuing discussing. I honestly love this type of world-building and, if you allow me to recommend you an extreme case of this type of world-building, then go ahead and read The Fifth Head of Cerberus, also by Gene Wolfe. You can read my review in GoodReads—that book actually requires the reader to actively sit down and puzzle out the world’s history.
That said, if you liked it, please like and subscribe, review the podcast if possible and let’s continue the discussion in the comments!
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Thanks for listening, and happy reading~
“What is ‘world-building’? And how do you spell it?” by Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-is-world-building As a note of colour, the word was added to the famous dictionary in April 2023.
“An Evening with Patrick Rothfuss” on New York Comic Con, 2018. Watch here:
