Conversation

A storytelling technique some SF writers seem to use is narrative-only world-building. Everything is either an unexplained atom or has minimum viable narrative structure (conflict, climax, ascent/descent). Even if it is nominally pure exposition like encyclopedia entries.
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Douglas Adams makes a little unnecessary story out of say the babel fish causing wars. He’s narrative-only. By contrast, Frank Herbert too has encyclopedia outtakes as chapter heads but they read like history excerpts without stories always attached.
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Culture novels often have little lectures and stuff. Neal Stephenson has entire random riffs on stuff. Ursula Le Guin inserts little polemics into places. Narrative-only world-building is a fairly rare technique.
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I actually can’t think of anyone besides Adams who is nearly pure NOWB. I think because he is the most nihilist among people I’m thinking of. No constructive aims. Just destructive satire.
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Terry Pratchett is interesting. The stories are mostly NOWB, but he has several opinionated characters who preach what is basically neoliberalism to establish their motivations. But that ends up stealthily building a non-narrative world.
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A non-narrative world is the Gaussian residue of what’s not ephemerally explained away by the stories as transient events. It’s a sort of overall moral-doctrinal subtext of the world rather than the explicit moral of the story.
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I’m not a purist. I like both NOWB and non-NOWB stories. I’m just curious about the technical structure. It reminds me of crash-only programming.
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Fox-hedgehog angle too. Discworld and Culture are about one big thing. HHG is about a million little things.
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I suspect NOWB stories are easier to write and pantser friendly once you get going. Non-NOWB is harder to do well ad requires more plotting. You can easily get heavy-handed with conveying the “theory” of the world otherwise. In the worst case you get Ayn Rand type didactic dreck.
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A bit like project-only making/tinkering, where you never do a thing just to learn a skill or tool but only in the context of a build. There’s an entry tax into the world. An object only enters the world via a story conflict. A tool or skill only enters the lab via a project.
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Also like consulting practices where all work hours must be billed to a client project. There can be no internally funded/unbilled hours.
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