World-Building in a Post-Geographic Age
This is a corollary to my novel writing post this week–specifically, in regards to how the novel can perhaps adjust to historical and cultural circumstances. In a field and a mode of writing (whether speculative or fabulist) that prides itself on world-building, how does one respond to the appalling lack of basic geographical knowledge among American citizens?
After more than three years of combat and nearly 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study released Tuesday showed.
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The study, which surveyed 510 young Americans from December 17 to January 20, showed that 88 percent of those questioned could not find Afghanistan on a map of Asia despite widespread coverage of the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and the political rebirth of the country.
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In the Middle East, 63 percent could not find Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map, and 75 percent could not point out Iran or Israel. Forty-four percent couldn’t find any one of those four countries.
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[this one is my favorite]
Fewer than three in 10 think it important to know the locations of countries in the news and just 14 percent believe speaking another language is a necessary skill.
(This study was done for 18-24 year-olds, but they’re the ones who are going to be the reading constituency in upcoming years, more and more–it’s only going to get worse.)
A cheery set of statistics, is it not? And this in a time when America is, well, more publicly expressing its global power all over the world–in the Middle East, of course, but also Central Asia and the Horn of Africa.
Does this ignorance have any bearing on the way we write worlds? Should it? I think that it does; or at least, presents differing strategies. None of which should be a default or normative.
The most common is to create a surplus of geographical information, to supersaturate a text with significant detail and places, as a kind of counterweight to the prevailing ignorance of the ascendant cultural mores and emphases. The textures of an imaginary place, in other words (or imaginary events superimposed on real places), can provide an excitement about spaces where a narrative unfolds.
The other is trickier–it involves riding the crazy train that is our American society until it drops and buckling one’s narrative to the ignorance. This lack of basic knowledge, in other words, is the story, and can’t be ignored or written-off (“oh, well, those people aren’t going to be my readers anyway”), and its structural underpinnings need to be the story. I don’t mean as a kind of Jonathan Kozol fanfic, but A narrative strategy along these lines might involve deliberately obfuscating geography. This would be the mimesis–sort of a mimesis about everyone’s lack of realism. Letting the ignorance bleed into the narrative, as a way to hold it up to the light. The lack of geographical knowledge, in turn, is a lens into a host of other issues: the stresses of a service-based economy, the inchoate qualities of our entertainment circuses, and the nature of those who do know their geography.
(I’m sure most 18 to 24-year-old evangelicals know exactly where Israel is.)
Either way, all of these issues aren’t necessarily going to be tackled literally in SF/F–but can be the foundations for whatever crazy-ass antics (and metaphoric conceits) happen to be going on in a narrative anyway. It comes down to the characters, and how the characters perceive themselves and the world around them, however inconsistently.
Maybe the characters–even the protagonists–don’t care about the nuances of the world around them.
It certainly wouldn’t be a stretch. But however world-building is approached, it has to be recognized…as an approach and not written in stone. Sometimes significant parsing of a world through writing, an accumulation of details that all hang together, is just a distraction from what’s really happening underneath the novel’s skin. Sometimes the world shouldn’t be built, and as the characters wander through the shambles of their own perceptions, they can take you, possibly, where you don’t want to go–but where the novel needs to go.
But, dammit, this leaves no room for me to get paid simply for writing imaginary gazetteers, not having to bother with all that annoying narrative and characterization!
I think plenty of geographically disinterested fiction is being written — largely, I suppose, by geographically disinterested writers — but perhaps that’s merely the lack of worldbuilding; it seems like you’re calling for something else, for a kind of worldbuilding that explicitly deals with geographically disinterested characters, and perhaps with geographically disinterested readers — for the irrepressible map-salters among us to try to see through the eyes of that great majority who never look at maps, salted or unsalted.
It also seems like there’s a distinction to be drawn between world-building considered as something that happens in the writer’s head, and world-building considered as an effect the text has on the reader. And another one between a lack of interest in geography on the grand scale and a lack of interest in the exotic (or merely complex) details right in front of you. Who cares less about the nuances of the world around them — someone who can find Afghanistan on the map but can’t tell you the color of the carpet in their own living room, or someone who doesn’t know Iran from Iraq but knows every cat and dog they see on their morning jog?
It also seems like maybe I should go get some lunch.
On a side note: Sometimes I wonder, is knowledge of geography really that important to good citizenship, or do we just feel that way because we’ve got it? Might there not be other areas of public policy, equally as important, that we’re not only ignorant of, but totally blind to?
Actually, I’d say that, yes, a knowlege of geography really is important to good citizenship. How can I be upset about deforrestation if I don’t know where the forrest is being destroyed? If we’re fighting in Iraq over oil, shouldn’t I know where that is and who their neighbors are and what other resources are, or are not, in that geographic area?
As to the original post… Well, I can easily imagine a world with a MMPORG “overlay” that invalidates actual, physical geography. A world where hated enemies, from technically foreign countries, are living geographically next door to each other and don’t even know it. And, I can see how that could be both commentary on current events and a compelling world design that drives a story.
Hmm… how do you distinguish between “actual” geography and whatever… non-actual geography it is that makes them appear (to one another) to be separated?
As for the what we should know question: as good citizens, shouldn’t we also have a knowledge of, for instance, macroeconomics (monetary policy, tax policy, labor policy, immigration), petroleum geology (energy policy), physics (energy policy again), biology (health policy, science policy), nutrition, art history, psychology, demography, ethical philosophy, criminology, constitutional law?
The latest (and probably last) Emerald City has a review of Jan Morris’ Hav, which — being a fictional travelogue rather than a conventional novel — sounds in some ways like an extreme example of the “surplus of geographical information” approach. It’s at a bit of an angle, maybe, since it’s an imaginary place embedded in the real world and real history, rather than an imaginary world and imaginary history, but it still strikes me as a useful counterexample. What would the opposite of Hav look like?
Well, yes, David, now that you mention it, we should know at least something about all those things to be good citizens. Oh, and also? We should actually VOTE. The voting turnout is horrendous in our amazingly democratic nation. As a country, we should be ashamed of ourselves.
Hav sounds absolutely fascinating… *sigh* I guess I’ll add it to my ever growing list of Things To Read.