I’ve been trying for some time now to get a landscaper not to ghost me, so we can redo the front and back yards of my house.

Am I trying to hire a contractor, or an artist?

Yes. Both. Year Nine’s discussion of how we’ve reshaped the land focused entirely on utilitarian aspects: draining wetlands, filling in shorelines, flattening land for agriculture and roads. We entirely skipped over the aesthetic angle — but that matters, too! The land and what grows atop it can become a medium for art.

A fairly elite art, though. At its core, landscaping for the purpose of a garden or a park is about setting aside ground that could have been productive and using it for pleasure instead. Not to say that there can’t be some overlap; vegetable gardens can be attractive, and parks might play home to game animals that will later grace the dinner table. But there’s a sort of conspicuous consumption in saying, not only do I have land, but I have enough of it to devote some to aesthetic enjoyment over survival.

We don’t know what the earliest gardens were like, but we know they’ve been with us probably about as long as stratified society has been, if not longer. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (named for their tiered structure) were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and those — if they ever existed — were a continuation of a well-documented Assyrian tradition of royal gardens, which included hydraulic engineering to supply them with water. So this was not a new art.

But when did it become an art? I’m not entirely sure. The boundary is fuzzy, of course; gardens can exist without being included in the discourse around Proper Art. (As we saw in Year Eight, with the shift toward recognizing textiles as a possible form of fine art.) Europe didn’t really elevate gardens to that stature until the sixteenth century, as part of the Renaissance return to classical ideals. The earliest Chinese book I’ve been able to find on the aesthetics of gardening, as opposed to botanical studies of plants, is from the seventeenth century, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were earlier works. I think that when you start getting specific aesthetic movements and individual designers famous for their work, you’re in the realm of Art instead of a functional thing that can also be pretty; I just don’t know when that began.

There definitely are aesthetic movements, though! In particular, gardens-as-art swing between the poles of “nature in her most idealized form” and “intentionally artificial.” Many Japanese gardens exemplify the former, while European gardens laid out in complex geometric beds demonstrate the latter. It’s not entirely a regional differentiation, though; Japanese dry (“Zen”) gardens, with their carefully raked seas of gravel, are obviously not trying to look natural, and Europeans have enjoyed a good meadow-style garden, too.

This is partly a question of how you’re supposed to interact with these spaces. Some — including many of those Japanese examples, dry or otherwise — are meant to be viewed from the outside, e.g. while sitting on a veranda or looking down on it from an upstairs window. Others are meant to be walked through, so they’re designed with an eye toward what new images will greet you as you follow a path or come round a corner. Meanwhile, hedge mazes may purposefully try to confuse you, which means they benefit from walls of greenery as close to identical as you can get them — until you arrive at the center or some other node, where the intentional monotony breaks.

In pursuit of these effects, a garden can incorporate other forms of art and technology. Hydraulics may play a role not only in irrigating the garden, but in fueling fountains, waterfalls, artificial streams, and the like, which in turn may host fish, turtles, and other inhabitants. Architecture provides bridges over wet or dry courses and structures like walls, gazebos, arches, arbors, bowers, pergolas, and trellises, often supporting climbing plants. Statuary very commonly appears in pleasing spots; paintings are less common, since the weather will damage them faster, but mosaics work very well.

But the centerpiece is usually the plants themselves. As with zoos (Year Four) and the “cabinet of curiosities”-style museums (Year Nine), one purpose of a garden may be to show off plants and trees from far-distant lands, delighting the eye and possibly the nose with unfamiliar wonders. The earliest greenhouses seem to have been built to grow vegetables out of season, but later ones saw great use for cultivating tropical plants far outside their usual climes — especially once we figured out how to heat them reliably, circa the seventeenth century. In other cases, the appeal comes from carefully pruning the plants to a desired shape, whether that’s arching gracefully over a path or full-on sculpture into the shapes of animals or mythological figures.

One particularly clever trick involves accounting for the changing conditions inherent to an art based in nature. Many gardens go dead and boring in the winter — or in the summer, if you’re in a climate where rain only comes in the winter — but a skilled designer can create a “four seasons” garden that offers shifting sources of interest throughout the year. Similarly, they may use a combination of artificial lighting and night-blooming flowers to create a space whose experience is very different at night than during the day.

And gardens can even serve an intellectual purpose! Like a museum, its displays may be educational; you see this in botanical gardens and arboreta, with their signs identifying plants and perhaps telling you something about them. Many scholars over the centuries have also used gardens as the site of their experiments, studying their materials and tweaking how to best care for them. But this doesn’t stop with plain science, either. We often refer to dry rock gardens as “Zen gardens” because of their role in encouraging meditative contemplation, and actually, it goes deeper than that: the design of such a garden is often steeped in symbolism, with rocks representing mountains in general or specific important peaks. I don’t actually know, but I readily assume, that somebody in early modern Europe probably created a garden full of coded alchemical references. The design of the place can be as much a tool for the mind as it is a pleasure for the senses.

Which brings them back around to a functional purpose, I suppose. Gardens very much straddle the line between aesthetics and pragmatism!

Uprisings. Revolts. Insurgencies. Rebellions. Civil wars.

What are the differences between all these things?

(more…)

Last week I mentioned in passing that “castle” in the stricter sense refers to a type of fortified residence: not necessarily a single-family dwelling, of course, but a place belonging to and possibly occupied by an important family, with all their associated guards, servants, hangers-on, and so forth. That’s the sense that will be at the forefront of this essay, because life in a fortified military camp, an isolated watchtower, or a walled village is going to be very different from life in that more narrowly defined castle.

(more…)

Castles are a stereotypical feature of the fantasy genre, but for good reason: they’re a ubiquitous feature of nearly every non-nomadic society well into the gunpowder era, until artillery finally got powerful enough that “build a better wall” stopped being a useful method of defense.

But castles, like walls, sometimes get simplified and misunderstood. So let’s take a look at the many purposes they once served.

(more…)

There’s a pop-culture tendency to point at structures like Hadrian’s Wall or the Great Wall of China and laugh because “they didn’t keep invaders out.” But that betrays a very limited understanding of what a wall is for.

(more…)

A fictional world is potentially infinite in its detail, just like the real world. How do you decide when to say, that’s enough — I’m done worldbuilding?

This question is, among other things, a matter of taste, which means there’s no actual “right answer” apart from the one that suits your preferences. I think it’s pretty obvious from my essays here, my own novels, and the things I enjoy reading that I set the bar on the higher end: I like to feel immersed in a believable world, one that has enough texture for me to sink into the illusion of its reality. Other people would look at books I love and find them tediously over-detailed.

But I’d argue this isn’t purely driven by taste. Or rather, taste sets the upper and lower bounds for your preferences; within the resulting range, there are certain factors you can use to guide your decision-making.

The first is that I think it’s beneficial for a story to have at least a little more worldbuilding than the plot strictly requires. The word “strictly” is key to this equation, though; I am really and truly talking about what the plot absolutely has to mention in order to make the story go. This came to my attention when I tried reading a novel (which, unsurprisingly, I did not finish) that appeared to subscribe to the “only what is required and not an adjective more” school of thinking. Nothing was described unless it was load-bearing — for example, the first mention of anyone’s clothing was when a character showed up wearing the uniform of a dangerous organization. What did that uniform look like? Dunno, because that doesn’t matter. The factual content of “this is why the protagonist knows to be wary of him” was sufficient, and the visuals were treated like unnecessary padding. The story was so bare bones, even a skeleton would eye it askance. And the result was that I had a direct view of the plot machinery operating, without any skin of verisimilitude to make it feel more natural.

Of course, you don’t want to mention that which is entirely irrelevant. In the setting of the Rook and Rose trilogy, when Vraszenian settlements make war on one another, the victorious side raids the labyrinth (temple) of the losing side and steals all the Faces (representations of the benevolent aspects of the deities) as their trophies, leaving behind only the Masks (representations of the malevolent or wrathful aspects). You will find this detail nowhere in the books — admittedly because I thought it up after my co-author and I had finished writing them! But even if I’d come up with that detail sooner, it still wouldn’t be in the trilogy, for the simple reason that nowhere in our story do we have one Vraszenian settlement making war on another. Any reference to that practice would be air-dropped in from the stratosphere, disrupting the story we’re actually telling.

One solution to this, as I’ve mentioned before, is to make your cool idea relevant. We’d have a hard time doing that with internecine warfare, but we could have worked it in as a side note: we do have a conflict between street gangs, and maybe they do something metaphorically similar, which would be reason for someone to mention the larger-scale practice in passing. In this case it’s still a reach, but it serves to illustrate how, if you already have a super-shiny idea, you can look for ways to integrate it with your narrative. From the perspective of “where do you stop worldbuilding,” though, the answer is “before you reach this point, unless the idea comes to you of its own accord” (as this one did). There would be no purpose in me asking “okay, so what does warfare look like in the rest of Vraszan, when city-states or neighboring villages get into conflicts?” when that’s entirely tangential to the actual plot.

You also have to keep an eye on your pacing. Let’s say your protagonist is writing a letter in cipher: should you spend time figuring out what type of cipher their society uses? It’s a relevant question . . . but the details could potentially bog down your scene, stalling the reader with minutiae that distract from the content of the message itself. Personally, I’d be more likely to go in-depth on that question if the character was trying to crack a cipher, because now it’s a challenge they’re trying to overcome — automatically more interesting thanks to the unknown contents of the letter. If you start to research or brainstorm on something, then realize it’s drawing you away from the forward momentum of the story, limit it to a line or two of description at most, or just let the reader supply whatever default lives in their brain.

Finally, is your worldbuilding stopping you from writing the story? It’s one thing if you genuinely need to know something in order to move forward. That happened recently with me getting some distance into the draft of an upcoming novel about a monk going on a pilgrimage, then stopping because I needed to do a lot more development of both my map and my calendar if I didn’t want the pilgrims to be floating in a vague, timeless void. That’s one I maybe should have seen coming and taken care of sooner . . . but there’s a lot of worldbuilding stuff you don’t know you’re going to need until you sit down to write a given scene.

So the notion that you will do all your worldbuilding first and then, when that’s complete, write your story? That’s a trap, one that can keep you forever in the planning stages and never in the execution. Some things you have to know in advance: I couldn’t have started the novel without a basic sense of the religion my monk protagonist follows. It’s entirely legitimate to lay some groundwork before you begin. Much of your setting, though, can and probably should grow with the characters and the narrative, shaping and being shaped by the specifics of the tale. You’ll get a more organic, real-feeling result that way than if you lay down a bunch of shiny ideas in advance and then shoehorn everything in around them.

When Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth, he was thinking in terms of a hollow planet. There’s another sense in which we can think about the center of the earth, though — a more spiritual one. (more…)

In these days of climate change, the notion of coastal areas going underwater is a familiar fear. But it’s not a new one; we have stories of drowned lands going back for thousands of years. (more…)

You probably don’t much like thinking about death. It’s understandable: death is sad and scary, and few of us look forward to it coming for us or anybody we love. But believe it or not, reminders of death have not infrequently been baked in as a cultural practice — in a couple of cases I’m going to discuss, literally baked! (more…)

We’ve touched on sacred objects before, as they’re often integrated with other aspects of religion, but we haven’t looked at them directly. We’re going to do that now not only because it’s a key element of practically every religion, but because these turn out to be the hook upon which cultures have hung some fascinating behaviors! (more…)

I’ve been talking about the preservation of history as a matter of written records, but as a trained archaeologist, I am obliged to note that history also inheres in the materials we leave behind, from the grand — elaborate sarcophagi and ruined temples — to the humble — potsherds, post holes, and the bones of our meals.

(more…)

Thanks to my research for the upcoming Sea Beyond duology, I became aware of something called the “Alexander Romance.” (more…)

Philosophy is one of those topics where, if you’re intending to explore it in detail in your fiction, you probably already know more about it than I do.

(more…)

In the beginning, there was the list.

(more…)

It may seem odd that I’m following up a discussion of segregation on the basis of sex with one on pornography, but bear with me: they’re not as unrelated as they seem. (more…)

Segueing on from eunuchs and the notion of them guarding harems, let’s talk about contexts in which people tend to get separated on the basis of sex. (more…)

As you can imagine, this essay will continue with a frank discussion of genitalia and modifications to same.

(more…)