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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure I get the point of the article. It spends forever saying how Tolkien's world is "simple" as compared to reality (which is "infinitely complex and still growing"), and seems to conclude on "reality is too simple, we need to go to Mars if we want to add complexity to story-telling".

Then, to me, complaining about the world (as described) not being complex enough is a bit like complaining that "You see, there are tens of thousands of people in the books, participating to wars and all. But the story-telling is very simplistic because it only follows a handful of characters, instead of describing the life of everybody in the world".

I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life.

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Tolkien hides much of the complexity. For example, what happened to the Entwives? What happened that created the Brown Lands, and where did the Entwives go? That could be a whole book, but it's only referred to in a comment by Treebeard, the meat of which is less than a paragraph.

That kind of thing happens all over the place. Who were the Ringwraiths before they became wraiths? (Yeah, they were human kings, but who were they?) How did things go down in the war that destroyed Eregion? How did Arwen's mother escape from being held captive by the orcs? What's the detailed backstory on hobbits? And on and on and on. There's all this stuff that is briefly referred to, but never fleshed out in detail.

This is useful for authors, by the way. You can be creating a fractal, and you have to cut off detail somewhere. But if you leave hints that there's more detail, the world feels bigger. It doesn't feel amputated or limited.

Agreed.

I'd believe Tolkien deliberately chose a "small" world precisely so that he could make things coherent and consistent to _some_ aspects of reality (some because it is, after all, a world with magic). It is apparent that Tolkien focused on the aspects he cared for and understood best - language and military stuff^1;

And because he quite literally wanted to described how the world started and how it got there, he had a few options: he could either make a small world, or hand-waive a lot, 99.99% of detail of a larger world, or just don't finish writing the equivalent of a 1-year period in his fiction's timeline during his lifetime, I guess?

Another thing - as the author points out, George Martin strives actively to make the world in A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones 'larger'. He doesn't care that much about realistic coherence, though, and that is why he can copy-paste and mash historical elements.

1^ We all know about Tolkien and languages, but I, at least, was surprised by the 'coherence' in military stuff in Lord of the Rings (https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm...)

I think the silliest part of complaining Middle Earth is based on Earth, is the fact that Middle Earth IS Earth, explicitly. Tolkien states that LoTR is a "prequel" of real world history of sorts.

Ditto for Wheel of Time, that instead is set in a distant future. It is obvious it will be based on RL cultures, because... it is.

Ditto for people that complained that Fremen in Dune are too much like middle eastern people. Seriously, their religion is literally called "Zensunni" and they are settlers that explicitly came from middle east cultures of Earth.

> Ditto for Wheel of Time, that instead is set in a distant future.

Wheel of Time is explicitly set in both the future and the past. That's why it's a "wheel".

(If you need an example, consider that Arthur Pendragon is, in the setting, a historical person who existed a couple thousand (?) years in the past, while at one point Egwene finds a much older Mercedes-Benz hood ornament in a museum.)

In the second book, The Great Hunt, the concept of a multiverse of alternative realities (that interact with each other!) is also introduced, which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us. It is necessarily in a related world, where it's not clear what "related" means.

> which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us

That's not quite true, interestingly! Yes, there are alternate timelines available through the portal stones, but they are explicitly described as only sort of secondary reverberations, inherently not quite fully real, but just pale echoes of the true timeline that most of the books take place in. So it's pretty unlikely that, according to the metaphysical rules of the wheel of time, we are not living in the main timeline. In fact, it's later explained that Tel'aran'rhiod (spelled it first try!) Is the sort of semi-real limbo it is because it's a similar phenomenon to the portal stone worlds, just cross-secting all alternate realities instead of parallel to them. Maybe you're talking about the world's through the Twisted door frames, where the snakes and foxes live, but it's unclear exactly what relation they have to our world, and I'm inclined to suspect that we aren't intended to think that our world might be one of those, since those worlds seem to operate by very different laws even regarding basic spacetime.

Who said we live in the real universe? Maybe Mosk really was a giant with a spear of fire, and a capital city armed with missiles was as close as we could come.

One of Brandon Sanderson's recent books invoked the concept of alternate realities in which it could be objectively determined that some were more real than others. (None could be found that were more real than "our" world, but also, it was impossible for objects from less-real worlds to move into, or presumably perceive, more-real worlds, so no conclusion could be drawn.)

The book is set in a world where magic and gods exist. The gods are the same ones we know from our own, realer world, except that they exist and have the powers attributed to them in our own myths. The end of the book gives us a divine point of view, and we learn that the gods are moving "upstream", in the direction of reality, but that this is difficult or painful for them.

This seems to conflict with the premise that the characteristics of less-real worlds are derived from the more-real worlds on which they are based. The possibilities are that our (real) mythology derives from the gods approaching us, which is the wrong direction of causality (but of course, they are moving upstream, which is also supposed to be impossible), or that the gods take on the characteristics that are attributed to them in whatever world they enter (but... who is who?).

The "real" world of the book is set in the cyberpunk future, which I think is unfortunate - I'd be all over a series showing the progression of the gods into the real present or past, but a cyberpunk future is less interesting to me. (There's still room to show them progressing through the past, though!)

> (spelled it first try!)

I believe that tel'aran'rhiod is required to be set in italics, subject to the normal rules of things that are italicized. ;p

I don't think that's really relevant. It doesn't matter if, diagetically, the world is rooted in Earth or not.

Fundamentally, all cultures are going to be based on real-world human culture, because that is all we know. Even if we try to imagine what a non-human culture looks like, we still construct it with the composite elements we know are common to human cultures. Even the most alien and inhuman cultures any author has ever imagined are still defined by how not like human culture they are. They're a negation of what human culture is, which is to say they're still a reflection of it.

We cannot do otherwise. We have never seen a non-human culture equivalent to human culture.

Further, all aliens and all fantasy creatures are analogs for humans or analogs for animals. Because that's all we know.

Even if we could create a truly alien culture, we could only understand it in terms and concepts that we already have because we do not understand concepts and ideas that we cannot conceive ourselves. Because those are the only concepts and ideas we have ever had exposure to.

It's like asking what color infrared or ultraviolet would be. We don't know. We don't have that experience. Or like asking what oranges tastes like if you've only ever had apples, cherries, grapes, and so on. How can we conceptualize something we have no conception for?

While you are not wrong, you can derive a lot of human culture from first principals based on constraints that are universal. We have to eat for energy: a lot of culture is really built around meals. We grew denser than hunter gathers could find food so we had to start farming, and that density forces a lot of culture on us (you can't just kill each other when someone makes you mad). We expanded to places where we cannot live nude: we have to make and wear clothing - a lot of culture is around clothing (dance and music is different in places where clothing makes movement uncomfortable).

Of course there is a lot of variety possible within those, and that is not an exhaustive list. However just those constraints force a lot of culture and while the result for aliens can be different, they will face those same constraints and thus you can develop a lot of similar culture around them.

Eating is essential to life (as we know it) but I don't think that really creates a significant indicator for whether or not you will develop culture. After all, all creatures have a need for the energy required to survive. Not all of them develop a culture, even if they live in communal groups. Bacteria, I suppose, if you don't mind some equivocation.

The causes of the agricultural revolution, OTOH, are debated. I'm not clear that it was simply a solution to population density. It came after animal husbandry. We know that. But the reasons that have been claimed have been anything from "population pressure" to "we discovered how to make alcohol" to "it was the only way to make enough food for our animals" to "climate changes." It's almost certainly more complex than any one factor because you need a lot of knowledge and technology to make settlment a feasible means of surviving year over year. Food preservation is a major hurdle. It doesn't really matter if you can grow more food than you can eat if you only have that food for six weeks during the fall and then it all rots.

Clothing however? There are plenty of creatures we know of that don't require body protection beyond what they natively possess. Why would every sapient creature do so?

The truth is that we don't know how another culture might develop into a civilization because we've only ever seen ours. The number of unknown priors that might allow the creation of a different way of advancement is the core problem. Ours is fundamentally built on working together. Is that necessary? Ours is built around the temporal nature of human life. Is that universal to all life? The only reason we assume so in our literature is because there's no real way to tell a story about something unknown, unimaginable, or incomprehensible. Until we experience it, it will simply lack verisimilitude.

> The causes of the agricultural revolution, OTOH, are debated.

True, but that doesn't change the point that it is a great influence on culture. And also you are unlikely to reach an advanced stage without the productivity improvements it provides at scale. (People who have to get their own food every day don't have time to think about physics)

> There are plenty of creatures we know of that don't require body protection beyond what they natively possess.

Again, only in the specific climate their body is "designed" for. All of them need some form of shelter (which could be AC) to survive elsewhere.

Note that we are really only interested in advanced civilization. Lions have an interesting culture, but they don't make for interesting stories.

Also, it might be expected for technological change to happen extremely slowly when you have such disconnected states and small communities. He recognizes there are very poor transport and communication networks. How exactly would he expect information to flourish and where would he expect innovation to come from?

I think in the real world, the hunter-gatherer culture lasted about 2 million years. Obviously middle-earth isn't hunter-gatherer but its some point of reference. From some very quick searching it seems like the start of agrarian society through the middle ages was about 6000 years. And again, as the author notes, there was a much high population density and network of people in the europe/middle east/western asia in the real world. The 12000 years without significant technological advancement seems entirely plausible even in real terms.

With the low apparent population though, most of Middle Earth probably should have been hunter gatherers. Cities don't really make sense at all, but if you want to add them they can be 100 miles of farms and villages to support the city (the cities being on a river or sea port for trade, thus justifying building them at all), but gradually tapering off to hunter gathers who sometimes get something from the distant city that they couldn't make themselves. As population gets denser farming and cities make sense, but at low density hunter gathers have an easier life.

> I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life.

Best avoid Malazan Book of the Fallen, then. It's a fantasy series written by an anthropologist and archeologist that's also based on the events in a GURPS tabletop roleplaying campaign. It's a replay (at least in part) written like it's a history. It's got over 600 named characters.

Malazan is great. It burnt me out a bit because it's often difficult reading, so I'm struggling to get up the energy to finish the last two books, but damn is it good. For anyone seeing this who might read it, don't let the fact that it's based off a tabletop campaign scare you off, I honestly couldn't tell whatsoever. It really doesn't feel like your standard tabletop role-playing game campaign at all, it feels like something very unique and different and it has an incredible amount of artistic merit. In fact, if you like the kind of books where there's always some deeper secret to be unveiled that entirely recontextualizes all of the previous World building in some flash of horrifying revelation, definitely check the series out, because that kind of thing happens a lot. Also, if you want a fantasy series that has a very active Pantheon of gods that feel like real old school mythology, not even the sort of Bowdlerized Percy Jackson version, also check it out. It also does an incredible job doing very interesting and unique things with its fantasy races and cultures. The Jaghut are my favorite.

I understand the argument in the following way:

- Fictional worlds have are shallow compared to reality. They have to be, because an author or a collective of authors can never get to a depth comparable to reality.

- The only world with a deep "worldbuilding" is the real one we inhabit – Earth.

- Once we colonize space and let millenia of history go by, we will be able to take a look back and read about many complex "deep" worlds - because all of them will be real.

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I think the argument is already falling apart today thanks to AI writing, that could perhaps generate the blanks to make any fictional world feel arbitrarily deep. We might also eventually simulate entire complex fictional worlds.

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As for whether it's even worthwhile:

> I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life.

I believe the author is not talking about writing a fiction book with millions of boring pages that you would read in parallel. It is more about having access to Wikipedia on deep, complex and internally consistent alternative history/fictional world. I think it sounds fun. It's also fun to read about the actual world history, after all.

> It is more about having access to Wikipedia on deep, complex and internally consistent alternative history/fictional world

Reading wiki pages of videogames and TV shows feels quite like that.

> thanks to AI writing, that could perhaps generate the blanks to make any fictional world feel arbitrarily deep.

You may find "Chirper" interesting, some people making a twitter-like website where AI agents interact. I do find however that our clever clever human brains can atm anticipate quite easily how most things will turn out after a short amount of time, and people quickly become bored by it. Then again, a lot of history is very boring, its only interesting paired with a great storyteller who picks up the pieces. Right now AIs aren't really there yet (i've tried, with very deliberate prompting you can get somewhere but each story follows predictable tropes no matter how you prompt it, the tropes themselves change but its hard to get the AI to surprise you), but I can see it happening someday

War and Peace has roughly 600 characters and that's already famous for its length, now I'm trying to imagine if Tolstoy tried to describe every single Russian participant in the Napoleonic Wars.

> I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life.

A lot of people would want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of historical people and what happened in their lives, if the information was somehow correct. They wouldn't read all of it -- that would be impossible -- but they'd read some of it.

Yup, imagination is infinite, you're paying writers to filter it.

I don't think that's true at all?

I certainly don't have ideas for infinite stories in my mind. And I don't read a book to discover a good idea that I already had.

You can imagine pi for one trivial example. It has infinite details but it's not infinitely interesting. You can map it to infinite boring story (let's say John moves west/east depending on the next binary digit :) ).

Kolmogorov complexity is the formalism around that distinction.

EDIT now that I think about it - if you take PI in binary and interprete it as utf-8 - every single book every written (or that will ever be written) is in there somewhere :) And there are algorithm to calculate PI to arbitrary digit that are pretty simple.

Fascinating observation. How would you calculate at what point of pi converted to utf-8 contains a certain string?

That idea can be taken further to every digital file ever. You might both be interested in checking the pi file system.

https://github.com/philipl/pifs

Very cool, FFS For Fucks Sake, another file system!

Interesting 424242 is located at position 242423.

This is totally off-topic though.

The ability to write an infinite number of strings using some system has no relation to human imagination. That's not how human imagination works.

> That's not how human imagination works.

Where do you think I got that idea from? Do you think I couldn't execute it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl

> take PI in binary and interprete it as utf-8 - every single book every written (or that will ever be written) is in there somewhere

It isn’t proven that pi is normal. Also, even if you were to find a book in the sequence of pi, the index of where it starts would (generally) be vastly larger than the book itself.

Imagination is the tool, not the storage space. The tool has boundless potential to create things in your mind. In other words, the tool is boundless or "infinite" in its ability. Given a mind that lasts forever there's no reason to believe there's a cap on what is possible for a mind to imagine and there are biological creatures that are immortal (e.g. hammerhead worms) so there's at least some reason to believe our minds could one day become immortal (at least in the sense of immune to decay).

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