What's the Difference Between a Good Setting and Pointless World-Building?

Open Thread is where Waypoint staff talk about games and other things we find interesting. This is where you'll see us chat about games, music, movies, TV, and even sports, and welcome you to participate in the discussion.

I spent the weekend immersed in two bizarre, outlandish fictional worlds that, bit by bit, started to feel like home. They got me thinking about the difference between worldbuilding versus an actual setting.

China Miéville's The City and the City has one of the strangest conceits I’ve ever come across in a detective fiction: a city split between two distinct cultural and ethnic groups, located somewhere in Nonspecific Eastern Europe, is formally divided not on geographic lines but along phenomenological lines. Each city overlaps the other, with countless little borders down every street and sidewalk. The two cities share space, but are forbidden by law and custom from acknowledging each other. To be in one city is to ignore the presence of the other via countless acts of “unseeing”. To break these rules, to perceive or—God forbid—to interact with the other city across one of these borders, is to commit the extraordinary crime of Breach.

Naturally, The City and the City opens on a murder mystery that seems like a clear case of Breach. But what’s really striking is how its allegiance to genre convention only heightens the audacity and strangeness of its setting. A police procedural in the tradition of Michael Connelly or perhaps Martin Cruz Smith, Miéville's book depicts ordinary workaday cops and bureaucrats going about their business while making the endless negotiations and compromises that enable their split-consciousness reality. And somewhere in there, The City and the City avoids being a self-congratulatory thought experiment and becomes a great and thought-provoking detective story.

Oddly enough, I also started Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s Sex Criminals, a Coen-esque crime story about two young lovers who embark on a hapless, comical life of crime. The trick is that they have a superpower that should enable them to commit the perfect crimes: when they have orgasms, time freezes and they can move unseen through the world. Naturally, they decide to solve all their problems by becoming thieves.

Sex Criminals is having a lot more fun with itself than The City and the City but its focus is still on ordinary people, just in this case they are being introduced to something strange and bewildering. Their world is the same as ours, at first glance, so when protagonists Suzie and Jon discover that they can effectively pause it by beating-off, their reactions and decisions are incredibly relatable. They are amused, inquisitive, grandiose, and finally reckless about their powers.

Sex Criminals explains its conceit and the rules behind it by letting the characters themselves talk us through it, because it’s scarcely less puzzling to them than to us. They had the same questions and performed the same experiments that most readers would. The City and the City begins with ordinary people who have been living with an extraordinary situation for so long it has become a boring of fact of life, like rush hour traffic on the turnpike.

But both books stand as an implicit admonishment both to the “worldbuilding” I did in my D&D days, and to a lot of sci-fi and fantasy series I read and watch. A lot of genre fiction can feel like its characters exist to showcase an elaborately constructed world and a detailed fictional history—Netflix’s Altered Carbon seems to struggle with this. But this weekend, I really enjoyed diving into two really evocative and cleverly drawn fictional universes that, despite being polar opposites in terms of how each approached its conceit, had me utterly bought-in by the time the action really started.

What are your favorite examples of well-built fictional settings? How did they make themselves convincing to you?

Let me know in today’s open thread!