And so, after a brief pause for conventions and virii, back to the report.

1) Setting as setting

The physical setting of a story — the gardens and architecture and skyline — is important in all novels, but the toolbox that epic (or second-world, since I haven’t gotten to the post about The Large Canvas) fantasy gets to use in evoking it is limited compared to other genres.

If a story is set in the world that the reader is familiar with — either by walking out into it every morning or vicariously through our shared knowledge of history and consumption of media — the writer has a very powerful technique available to bring the readers into the setting. You just say it. Watch this:

1930s Berlin.

Those words alone carry a weight — the ruin following the Great War, the rise of Nazism, that creepy guy who ran the club in Cabaret. It’s not a full image, but the sense of the place as drawn from the reader’s half-digested memories of reading the Diary of Ann Frank and anything by Alan Furst, watching that old documentary about Leni Riefenstahl that your ex-boyfriend liked so much, and on and on and on. Granted, the author can’t control exactly what image the words create, but simply by having existed and left a wake, the setting of 1930s Berlin is likely to mean something.

I expect some of you to be unconvinced at this point. To say (as that homunculus in my head) that just gesturing at a place and time might have some effect, but it ain’t much. So on with the experiment.

620s Parrinshall

Compare for a moment the difference between your own reaction to a setting with a shared cultural background and one that doesn’t have the weight of context behind it. If I haven’t convinced you with that, I’m not going to. Let’s move on.

The power of naming a setting and relying on the reader’s context doesn’t restrict itself to cities. Set a scene in “a college coffee shop” or “an old Louisiana junkyard” and you get a lot of the same effect whether the reader is sitting at a coffee shop when she’s reading your work or has never been to a junk yard in Louisiana. By drawing from the culturual context, you’re already ahead of the game.

Now, I lied up there at the top. I said that epic (or second-world) fantasy doesn’t have this tool. Of course it does. It’s just poisoned. Because what we can hark back to is other epic fantasies. Watch this:

A tavern

And like that, the experienced reader of fantasy knows everything. The doughty keeper, the thick brown stew, the bard sitting before the roaring fire, the man sitting alone in the shadows who isn’t what he seems. Probably with an orc-infested dungeon somewhere nearby, if they’ve played D&D.

It’s a fine, fine line between culturally ubiquitous context and straight-up cliche. That there crosses it.

So instead, epic fantasy requires us to build from first principles — vision, sound, touch, taste, scent — and make a physical place in which the action plays out that’s compelling and immersive. Oh, and do it fast enough that it doesn’t slow the plot down.

Tolkien, the touchstone of the genre whether we like it or not, didn’t suffer this. When Frodo and Sam walked into that ur-tavern in Bree with its doughty keeper and Strider lurking in the shadows, it hadn’t been done to death. Tolkien also wasn’t making his living writing fiction, and so could afford to take a very long time (commercially speaking) to refine his visions of the Mines of Moria and Rivendell and Mordor. You can find the proof of that in the reimaginings of his settings by visual artists since The Lord of the Rings first came out. Even more than the characters or the plot, the places in Tolkien are memorable.

Those of us who toil in Tolkien’s shadow have that to match, and it’s not a bad measure to judge second-world fantasy by whether you remember the places. I would go so far as to suggest that George’s success with A Song of Ice and Fire maps to the number of memorable places in the world. The Wall, Winterfell, the Aerie. When I think back to other fantasy series, I can remember characters and events, dramatic moments in the plot, and sometimes the general feel of the story even without specifics. I don’t think anyone has drawn as many powerful places as Tolkien and George, at least for me. Back when “novel” was closer to its original meaning, this was what it was all about — being someplace new and amazing through the collaboration of the author’s language and reader’s imagination.

Granted correlation isn’t causation. It’s possible that I remember the places because something else in the story was drawing my attention. Some equally wonderful city or valley may have been in another fantasy that I’ve overlooked because of this other thing being missing. But I can say that the deeply imagined, well-drawn specific places that I do remember give me a better connection to the land in which the story happens.

And it turns out that creating an identification with place is critical. Which takes us to the next issue.

2) Setting as Milieu

Consider for a moment Stephen R. Donaldson.

When I first met the man, his Thomas Covenant books were the second best-selling fantasy in the English language behind Tolkien.  (Third, in his words, if you also count the Bible.)  He owned the joint.  Then he finished the second chronicles.  I haven’t talked to him about this, so here I begin to project.  I imagine myself in his place, having written six (for the time) large books about the same character and theme.  Ready, perhaps, to do something else.

The new project didn’t fall far from the tree.  In it another character — a woman this time — was thrust into a world with a preindustrial economy, European window dressing, and magic. The two books of Mordant’s Need didn’t sell as well.  Donaldson’s next big project — the Gap Cycle — is reputed to have dropped in sales again.  The possibly apocryphal quote from Donaldson: “I thought I had a million Stephen Donaldson fans. It turns out I had a million Thomas Covenant fans.”

At the Symposium, we had a short thought experiment on the issue:  By show of hands, we voted whether the Harry Potter readers among us would be more likely to pick up 1) a new book by Rowling set in a new School of Magic universe unrelated to the Harry Potter series or 2) a new book by Rowling explicitly set at Durmstrang, but not related to the plot of the Harry Potter books.  Overwhelmingly, we opted for 2.  I suspect the public would do the same.

Setting is also milieu.  Stories set in the same fictional universe support one another, and generate a sense of the familiar in the readers — a sense of returning. There are several examples of authors who have found strategies to address this:  Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is large enough to accommodate almost any story and still be a “Discworld” story, Moorcock’s Eternal Champion cosmology puts an underlying setting to connect many of his books, Robin Hobb’s fantasy works have until recently all been tacitly connected by being in the same world.

This is more than a cynical way to increase sales.  The impulse to connect things also appears in writers with a sufficiently huge body of work and enough market power to do anything they damn well want:  Stephen King and Robert Heinlein.  Both of these men began explicitly drawing connections between thier earlier works later in their careers.  That can’t be because they were afraid of losing readers.  I think instead they were responding to the same thing the readers are — writers and readers aren’t really all that different.   And that brings me to the thesis of this setting-as-milieu section.  Ready?

There was a time when we read books for excitement.  The word itself — novel — is a give-away.  Reading was the way people could go places they couldn’t go, see things they’d never seen, experience things they would never do.  That role has been taken up by some other media and the relative ease of air travel.  For the most part, those of us who are still reading are doing it for comfort.

Settings in second-world fantasy are serving two masters.  On the one hand, it is someplace new, different, exciting, memorable, and huge.  On the other, what we’re creating isn’t a new frontier, but a new home.  Once we’ve made it — even if it’s as big as the universe or bigger — it’s a place we want to stay.

Stephen Donaldson knows this.  Fatal Revenant — the second volume of the new Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant — debuted at 12 on the New York Times Bestsellers list.  The Thomas Covenant fans are coming home.