A reflection of Harrison's Essay 'Very afraid'

 http://web.archive.org/web/20080410181840/http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/01/27/very-afraid/

An interesting essay I manage to dig from the author of Viriconium and I would like to reflect on some of his great points.

 "Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid."

As someone who only really takes writing as relief of stress and something to ponder as I study language and philosophies. I find the idea of people building entire set of world just funny, like every nook and cranny has to be satisfied to their audience. Harrison points out its root within a bastardized secular version of fundamental christian worldview and bad ideology of the world:

"But much of it is a matter of ideology. The whole idea of worldbuilding is a bad idea about the world as much as it is a bad idea about fiction. It’s a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world’s a watch & God’s the watchmaker. It reveals the bad old underpinnings of the humanist stance. It centralises the author, who hands down her mechanical toy to a complaisant audience (which rarely thinks to ask itself if language can deliver on any of the representational promises it is assumed to make), as a little god. And it flatters everyone further into the illusions of anthropocentric demiurgy which have already brought the real world to the edge of ecological disaster."

In some parts I am reminded of Blake, but Blake for all his invention is still rooted in the lenses of the real world even if it's all base on his ideals for it. He does immerse the reader with his word, but he also informs about the age of which he has written his work; we get an idea where Blake is coming from and what he wishes ultimately. 

Whereas at works like Lewis and Tolkien looks into the world, an idealized but a naive information of the world through their fundamentalist Christian worldview(Lewis from his Anglo-Catholic and Tolkien with his medieval Catholic) which make their work appear black and white, couple with the obsession to make sure that it satisfies their craving at making the audience transported to the world itself, what I like about their contemporary Eddison over them when it comes to inventing world is that Eddison doesn't shy from treating the work as literature and he for as much of it is going to pitfall for many that he quotes many classics, he doesn't pretend the world he is making a real living breath with a pulse of its own that has to be constantly be constructed to be made a human body. He use his love of literature to make something wholly his own and use those influence as to craft his work, and it shows very much that Zimiamvia is a reflection on works like Nietzsche, Spinoza, Homer, Webster, and Shakespeare among many other like Nordic Sagas and poets like Rossetti. I would like to call upon in note 3 of the essay that I find humorous that Tolkien and Rowling may done themselves well, but not quite to the reach of people who invented "Coke" and "Catholic church" and it's a great point that these type of institution make the world a secondary part, and these brands or organization success in selling a world which people cannot truly not be a part of, whereas as he points out their works as small subset contribution to these organization and brands. 

Overall I think he still speaks today when it comes to things like Epic fantasies, Gaming, and I would recommend his essay to be read by everyone, especially writers who felt pressured to "invent" world for their fantasy. They need not to worry about ideas as "worldbuilding" and pursue fantasy as an exploration of ideas within our world much like any other genre of fiction, and I say that's ultimately more rewarding than inventing an escapist type world.