I was just rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four and was struck by the fact that I find it even more powerful now than I did when I first read it decades ago. Some of that increased power comes from the fact that I am actually reading it in a different way and some is, I think, due to the fact that changes in politics and technology have answered many of the "technological" questions. One is no longer distracted with the question as to whether/how people would allow themselves to become residents of the Panopticon or whether technology / government would ever be able to effectively rewrite the past. And once one moves past those issues one can see that the book is about the nature of human beings and human societies and power relationships among human beings and the way in which the very consciousness of people arises from their ways of communicating.


Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book "without hope" and more than that a book that leaves no room for "noble heroics." Winston is doomed from that very first sentence and more than that, Winston knows he is doomed. Winston knows not only that he will be "discovered" but that he will be written out of the past. And since it will be as if Winston never existed then, O'Brien would argue, Winston never did exist.

Orwell does not give the reader the enjoyment of feeling that what they are reading about matters. One doesn't reach the end of the book and feel "well Winston and Julia failed but they have paved the way for the next brave revolutionaries" nor does one feel "this time Big Brother won but each rebellion wears the powers that be down."

Orwell also doesn't allow the reader to wallow in angst. There is such a straightforward matter-of-factness in the writing that the reader is dissuaded from getting distracted. This is what the world is like. What would have to happen to the character of the "normal" human being for this world to come into being and this is the type of character a world such as this would breed
 

That's interesting; it's a very different way of reading from the way I approached it.

As I read it, Orwell wasn't really creating an 'imaginary future', any more than he was really talking about animals in Animal Farm. He was pointing to things he saw in the real world - brutality, authoritarianism, surveillance and lies - and simply creating a setting in which he could make his points about them. To me, 'How could this have happened?' was never a question: the fundamentals of it had already happened in places like Soviet Russia and could happen again anywhere else.

Which is to say, I didn't read Orwell as talking about the future, but about the present.

Would I be right in saying you were reading it more from the perspective of a genre adventure and I was reading more from a literary viewpoint, would you say?
 

You would be totally right to say that I (and I think many people of my generation) read it initially from a genre viewpoint. Consequently we got sidetracked into arguments as to "whether they could have setup such a state in the period of time that seems to have elapsed between WWII and the novel" and "well, if there really had been an atom bomb dropped on parts of England there would be more obvious radiation side effects."

In other words, we were focusing on the world building almost to the exclusion of everything else.

To the exclusion of what I think, having read all of Orwell's other works, was his actual point:
He was pointing to things he saw in the real world - brutality, authoritarianism, surveillance and lies - and simply creating a setting in which he could make his points about them. To me, 'How could this have happened?' was never a question: the fundamentals of it had already happened in places like Soviet Russia and could happen again anywhere else.

Exactly. Rereading the book I see that Orwell had made a world in order to make his points about the nature of authoritarianism and the limits of human character.

One forgets that Orwell himself fought in a war. He had seen the reality of how human beings really do respond to such circumstances. And, as I read him now, he makes the point from the beginning that Winston is doomed, in an attempt to turn the attention of the reader away from any world-building and vicarious heroics in order to focus on the authoritarians, less and brutality.
 

See, that's one reason why I hate the word 'worldbuilding'! I think work of fiction needs some kind of internal consistency, but it can be thematic consistency just as much as literal - and to be honest, to my ears there's something aggressively consumerist about the word. It smacks of saying, 'Right, carpenter, build me a world and then bugger off, and don't forget to doff your cap on the way out.' Building something for other people to live in can be a noble pursuit - I have nothing against actual builders - but in the case of Orwell, it feels like condemning a sculpture because it wouldn't make a comfortable dwelling. You're kind of missing the point. Sculpture and houses serve different purposes, and it does neither any favours to treat one like the other.
 

Possibly worth bearing in mind that quite a lot of the bureaucracy is said to come directly from Orwell's time at the BBC - particularly his experience coming in to find that someone had been sacked, his desk had been moved away and the others shuffled up to close the gap, and nobody would mention his name.
 

@Kit: As a longtime fan of science fiction/fantasy I do enjoy reading a good "world building" from time to time -- but many of "those" stories are actually not about human beings. I know we are told that they are by the author but they act unlike any human being outside of a book. They are cardboard characters who are simply moved from one place to another.

To put it a different way, the author doesn't describe a street because PERSON X needs to move from point A to point B and encounter circumstance C on the way in order for the reader to realize what that tells one about the character of PERSON X and the way they may respond to certain pressures/constraints in life and whether they will grow / change in response to life.

In a "word building" novel PERSON X moves from point A to point B so that the author can describe those two places. PERSON X's "character" will be whatever makes them move from one point to another.

So it can be fun saying "I wonder what the world would be like if magic actually worked" or "I wonder what the world would be like if there really were Dragons"[1] but those are closer to "public planning fantasies" than they are novels.

In my own experience reading a book as and exercise in world building gets in the way of seeing other aspects of the book. At least if one is of the "geek" persuasion one is easily distracted by the shiny bauble of "world building" away from the serious project of the author.

Now, I think it is reasonable to criticize authors when lack of internal consistency leads to "glitches" when reading [for example, if the character 'goes upstairs' in what has previously been described as a single-story house] but I think that signals a lack of care and concern by the writer that is more akin to forgetting the names of their own characters than "faulty worldbuilding."



[1] I actually own a charming book [Dragons: The Modern Infestation by Pamela Wharton Blanpied Boydell Press (1997),] which is written as if it were an academic history of dragon infestations. It makes no pretensions to being a novel.
 

See, I'm pretty much the other way: if nothing interesting is happening to interesting characters in the book, I really don't care about the world. More than that, I tend to see it as a fault of the world: to me, a world that does not sustain life is not a good habitat. Or, to put it another way, character and situation interconnect in an intimate and complex way, and to me, a world needs to be communicated through the psychology of its inhabitants as much as through any external descriptions. People shape environments and environments shape people, and if a book doesn't show the interplay between the two, I'm just not convinced.
 

@Kit Whitfield: See, I'm pretty much the other way: if nothing interesting is happening to interesting characters in the book, I really don't care about the world.

I can enjoy it but I find it wear very, very thin. And I don't find the books convincing, just what I refer to as "mind candy."

The thing that I find disturbing is how the approach to reading "thinking of this as worldbuilding" can actually stand in the way of the actual book that is there.

I my own experience it has stopped me from fully enjoying / appreciating a number of books -- until I went back and reread them consciously bracketing off the tendency to "judge on the basis of world building."
 

Where does it come from, this approach? Is it something you've always had, or is it a learned habit? If so, learned how?
 

The learned approach? It actually applies only to books of science fiction/fantasy. I never read other books that way (I never did read other books that way.)

When I started reading science fiction / fantasy almost everyone else I knew who wrote about it approached it in that way.

Which means that if I first approached a book and thought of it as "literature" or "fiction" or "mystery" I read it much as I think you are advocating. But when I picked up a book that I thought belonged to the world of science fiction I did something equivalent to "code switching."

I think that this is a phenomenon common enough to make writers work hard to elude that categorization.

And now, looking back over our conversations I don't think I have ever made it clear about that distinction--that it has only been a particular "genre" of books which I every approached that way.

And yes, I would say it was a learned habit.