Puzzle-book worldbuilding
What I call puzzle-book worldbuilding is one of my favorite things to read. It’s maddening, it’s challenging. It’s delightful. It’s a heady rush of satisfaction when the pieces start to click. It’s completely different from worldbuilding that stays dense, illogical, and nonsensical. A lazy author not even bothering to build a puzzle is detectable at first glance from the author you won’t be able to understand until the second read.
It takes trust. Trust from the author in the reader, and trust from the reader in the author. I won’t trust the author until I can tell they’ve put their trust in me.
Ada Palmer, puzzle-book writer extraordinaire, talks about this in her introduction to Shadow & Claw:
Reading for world-building is a skill. I have seen brilliant people, laureates, inventors, Ph.D.s, try to read fiction with deep world-building and fail completely, looping back, rereading, never following events, trapped in a sense of muddled wandering. Reading for world-building requires retaining information without context: a term, a place, a coin, a category comes up once and we know what that is—a puzzle piece—that our task is to gather up these pieces as the author drops them, and to slowly assemble the whole. This is not easy. Human memory needs hooks for facts: a mnemonic, a story, context, something; grueling textbook rote-learning fades quickly, but a story of the statesman or the king, that’s what makes knowledge stay.
Interestingly, she notes this is a skill kids seem to have naturally:
To retain puzzle pieces that don’t connect, dropped without context, is a skill that not all have. All had it once: it is how children read, every book, poster, and headline a stream of unknown terms, far too many to ask about them all, but the child retains them, trusting that they will connect to something someday. Kids collect Earth’s puzzle pieces every time they read, but as we move to grown-up books they all use the same picture, and define immediately those terms they fear a reader may not know. Thus the skill of keeping puzzle pieces fades, unless we read books set in other worlds, new puzzle pictures which make us retain the skill, as frogs sometimes retain their tadpole tails into adulthood. This—many have observed—is why most F&SF readers come to the genre young, it’s hard to start in adulthood when one’s puzzle-memory skill has sat atrophied.
She goes on to say that Gene Wolfe asks even more, and that like learning to swim before one swims for fun, in many ways one reads the Book of the New Sun only on the second pass.
No wonder my childlike puzzle-loving brain loves this kind of deep worldbuilding. Think Terra Ignota, The Locked Tomb, China Mountain Zhang, or even books like Among Others with their own internal logic and language. Most of Ursula K. Le Guin; everything by John M. Ford.
I wonder also how much this correlates with the bottom-up processing, pattern recognition, and associative thinking of autism, where you’re collecting details and sorting patterns all the time anyway.