A lot of D&D settings have what you might call open historicity. (By 'historicity', I mean simply the quality of having a history.) They are thought, like our own world, to have an origin, and a timeline that begins some time in the distant past and may go on indefinitely into the future. The timeline, note, does not have to be detailed - it simply has to be the case that there is a sense that events in the world follow on from one another in a chain of causation. Faerun, Krynn, Eberron, etc., all tend to be like this, as do most 'fantasy heartbreaker' worlds and those in high fantasy novels (such as Westeros).
The classic world with closed historicity is Middle Earth. It has an origin and a timeline but also an end. Its historicity is not indefinite - there is a point at which Middle Earth as we know it ceases to exist. There are, I am sure, other example - Narnia? The Hyborian Age? Urth? Viriconium?
Then there are settings with absent historicity - which present themselves as having existed in the same form essentially forever, and generally without any indication that they have a history as such at all. Alice's Wonderland, Lovecraft's Dreamlands, Neverland, Oz and Fantastica are obvious examples.
It is not necessarily straightforward to deploy this taxonomy. Many settings which one would instinctively put in the 'open' camp turn out to be closed (Lyonesse, for example, or Zothique). And it is easy to fall into the trap of doing violence to a setting like Alice's Wonderland by falsely historicising it, as with the Tim Burton film and its sequels. There are also some interesting edge cases. Is China Mieville's Bas-Lag a setting of open, or absent, historicity? On the one hand, it gives the appearance of having historical depth. But on the other, it seems caught in a holding pattern - fast forward 10,000 years and once suspects that a lot of stuff will have happened, but that the same conditions will essentially prevail.
With "closed historicity," does the end have to be in the past or can it be depicted in the books as something that happens or does it matter? The example of Middle Earth is interesting - though it has been a while since I read the Silmarillion or some of Tolkien's other work, but as I recall I came away with the idea that as a setting it has both a definite beginning and an end, being sung into existence (I think) ang going through different Ages, one of which comes to an end (if I remember right) in the Silmarillion and another of which comes to an end in LoTR). Again it has been a while, and I may be misremembering!
ReplyDeleteDoes a setting only require an end to have a closed historicity or does it have to have both a definite beginning and a definite end?
I think it could be in the past or something to happens in the books' future. You're right about Tolkien's Middle Earth having different ages that themselves begin an end, but at various points in his writing it is also made explicit that it is all going to reach a climax, so to speak.
DeleteAbsent historicity is a useful sub-category but I'm not sure there's much value in categorization that can shift back and forth based on a few lines. I mean if you took some of those setting with closed historicity you could scrub a few sentences and turn them into open historicity without really changing anything about the story, themes or plots. So what's the point of that kind of category?
ReplyDeleteSame goes for defining "low fantasy" as "our world" and "high fantasy" as "another world." If you took Conan and scrubbed a few sentences in which it tells you that this is the distant past of our world then it'd swap from being "low" to "high" fantasy without any thing meaningful changing. As if nothing meaningful changes then what is the point of this kind of category?
The crucial clause in you comment is "without really changing anything abotu the story, themes or plots". It seems to me to be a big assumption that you could just "scrub a few sentences" in Tolkien's legendarium, or the Chronicles of Narnia, or the Book of the New Sun to give them "open historicity", and it wouldn't affect their story, themes or plots!
DeleteRight but in a lot of cases it doesn't. Hyborian Age being technically "closed" doesn't really affect fuck-all about the Conan stories. Nor does it technically taking place in the distant past of our own Earth and not in another world have any bearing on much of anything. You could easily scrub those ideas that were based on pseudo-historical nonsense that was in vogue at the time and not really change anything about the actual stories. Of course this isn't true across the board but it is for a lot of the examples you gave.
DeleteOK - sorry for having wasted your time, then.
DeleteNarnia is famously closed, which ties it to a similar analysis you could make of religious beliefs -- Christianity and the other Abrahamic faiths are closed; Hinduism open; Buddhism absent. There might be quibbles with the last two because they include beliefs about apocalypse and a new age, but as a point in a cycle. That takes us back to the tendency in fantasy worldmaking, especially in a serial story with a fanbase, to goose up excitement with threatened apocalypse after threatened apocalypse, until the apocalypse of the month is met with a collective groan as the heroes punch the apocalypse clock and save the world one more time (or don't). I'm thinking of Forgotten Realms, but also the Legend of the Five Rings storyline, and the well-known Marvel and DC rollercoasters. Maybe this cyclical history, hinted at in, among other places, Moorcock's Eternal Champion works, deserves a category of its own.
ReplyDeleteYes, I wondered about the Eternal Champion series, and other multiverses like Planescape. In a sense, they have a historicity, but a meaningless one - akin to what I said about China Mieville's Bas-Lag. Events do follow on from one another but things remain the same.
DeleteThe cyclical history idea is an interesting one. I've been re-examining Native and Mesoamerican myths recently and this reminds me a bit of the "five worlds" of Aztec myth or the Hopi Diné Bahaneʼ. These are incredibly rich cultures that I have not looked at in a long time. I have read some of Moorcock's work, but almost everything I know is his work on Melnibone, rather than the larger Eternal Champion stuff - perhaps I should look into it! I'm trying to think of other RPG settings or works of fiction that uses some of these types of ideas - maybe Dark Sun?
DeleteYes, although in my own very meagre understanding of Mesoamerican myth the cycles of history do themselves have a timeline and are building towards some sort of crescendo?
DeleteAt: Roger GS, How is Hinduism Open and Buddhism absent? Not that I disagree with you, but I can think of examples that show Hinduism as absent and Buddhism open, but that is because we're talking about incredibly old religions operating mostly in Asia, the largest continent in the world, so there have been many different ideas.
DeleteI originally misread your example "Middle Earth" as "Middle Ages" and assumed you were talking about the Medieval conception of history... which of course is a closed period going from Creation to Judgment Day, so I guess it's also an ur-example of "closed historicity"?
ReplyDeleteYou're right about the Dreamlands being a world of absent historicity. Lovecraft thought of the universe as an eternal machine with no beginning or end (of course, this was before Big Bang theory took hold, upending that notion), and it's always interested me that at the end of "Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" it's strongly implied that the universe is cyclical, existing "always and always, back to no first beginning".
So I took that angle in my Dreamlands RPG... *except* that I think the idea of "closed historicity" is such a big part of Medieval thinking that I also wrote in the idea that to Dreamlanders, there is indeed a beginning and fated ending of the universe (and maaaybe they're wrong? Or maybe not?). For sorta the same reason, I decided that Dreamlanders have a henotheistic rather than purely polytheistic view of the universe, because the idea "there's one supreme god, even if there are also other gods" seems to be so common throughout history, even in supposedly polytheistic systems like Greco-Roman religion, that it was too interesting not to include.
Yes, a big part of Medieval thinking, and Medieval Christianity is the example of "closed historicity" par excellence.
DeleteI like the idea of there being an "end" to the Dreamlands - it is what happens, surely, when the ultimate "dreamer" awakes! (Which itself makes me think of Lord Dunsany.)
This is fascinating and has got me thinking - albeit not thinking far enough to string two thoughts together - about the historicity of Behind Gently Smiling Jaws.
ReplyDeleteI would say it is open, but maybe there should be a separate category for post-apocalyptic settings which have a clear break between one timeline and another.
DeleteCoincidentally, earlier today a friend was pondering whether there were any RPGs that are set inside dreams. I don't know whether you know of any, but anyway I told him to check out BGSJ (for the saliva-producing idea of the project, obvs, rather than in the hope of finding anything currently gameable).
DeleteThere's much richness to be found when these modes are contrasted within a work or setting. Though the 40k setting isn't high art, it's a good example of this. The Imperium experiences a peculiar form of absent historicity, though most denizens believe they live in a closed history, and we, the readers, are intimately aware of the true, open history. All of this is juxtaposed against the closed (eldar), absent (orks and tyranids), and open (tau) histories of the xenos. Not to mention the insanity of the warp's quasi-absent history.
ReplyDeleteInteresting point - though I think Chaos is itself a kind of absent historicity given wings. Chaos obliterates history.
DeleteInteresting to see Viriconium described as having closed hostoricity. I can see why you put it there, but I would never (have dared) done so. I'd be inclined to put it in a new category of "chaos historicity" because it contains multitides. A very important - the most important - driver to Mike Harrison when he wrote the books (increasingly so as the series progressed) was that the city must NOT be mappable in any form, ever, either in time or in space. It's the books raison d'etre, even if what really appeals to them for me is the style of the prose and the baroque, sensory nature of the imagery.
ReplyDeleteYou can never step in the same Viriconium twice, and you stop long enough to try and study its history or geography then you will find that both its future past and present have not only gone and been replaced, they were never there in the first place. It's one reason why Mike was do discombobulated when he heart that there were folks whose roleplaying was inspired by Viriconium, he couldn't understand who a character could have agency in a world that rejected them so violently at every turn. While I can see how Vriko's styling has seeped quite wonderfully into the OSR in particular, the concept of something like a gazeteer of Uroconium would, I'm sure, make Mike cry into his beer.
You could certainly say though that, within each of the infinite possibilites, Urco is moving within an apparently closed univese. Almost in a Buddhist or Hindu way though. There is always an unreachable, SO much more sophisticated past, there is always unavoidable decay, there is always nostalgia for an age that will never come. And this declining and falling always reflects Mike's own understandably bleak worldview.
I sort of took the series to be implying that Viriconium was gradually disintegrating, but maybe I projected that onto the books.
DeleteNo, I think that's definitely the implication in the first book. In the second (which I must admit I've barely grappled with) the disintegration is still there - further advanced, even - but there are striking differences in names and other details compared to the history of the first novel. By the third it feels as though we're in another city entirely, the "Mammy Vooley" (a Cypher for Thatcher) has ruled the city for an eternity, and it is she who appears to be terminal while the city that she rules is certainly headed for destruction, but does not seem to know or care right now. The final volume, Viriconium Nights - which is where I first entered the sequence - is a fractured mirror of cities, some of which share nothing in common. The final story of the final volume is A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium (in later volumes renamed A Young Man's Journey to London) in which elderly men in 1980s England transpire to have wasted their lives looking for a city called Viriconium (or perhaps London?) which, some clues say may be entered through a mirror in the men's toilets at the back of a cafe in a second-hand bookshop somewhere in the vicinity of Huddersfield. They never find it. Something along these lines appears to be the subject of a great deal of Mike's writing, the inability of entering fantasy worlds, attempting to escape the limits of reality and failing.
Delete(Sidenote: my wife and I once dreamed up the wheeze of opening a private members' club called Viriconium, accessible only via the secret-door mirror in the men's toilets at the back of a cafe in a second-hand bookshop in Sheffield. We never did it, obviously, nor could we have - it's pure fantasy - but, fuck me, can you imagine the price hipsters would pay to be a part of it? In fact, I've been reminiscing on the play The Drowned Man in recent days, and the bar at the centre of it - the only place in the entire 5 stories of the warehouse in which the "immersive" play is set where the audience are allowed to take off their masks - has, for me, shades of that private members' club)
The final final Viroconium story Jack of Mercy's, published 4 or 5 years ago, appears to be a rather opinionated history of the poets of Viriconium and the things they have written. It is dense as fuck and I can't make head nor tail of it, but I'm certain it will turn out to be a work of genius if only I could put a little effort in.
I don't know whether you have any revisitations planned to follow Wolfe, Lewis & Vance, but Viriconium might be a fruitful one for 2023. If somewhat bleak.
I would consider Neverland to be one of the "edge cases" as well -- a bit of history important to its narrative is Peter's cutting off of Hook's hand, and Hook's subsequent pursuit by the crocodile. I gather there are similar historical fragments to be found in Oz as well.
ReplyDeleteYes, good point.
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