Drive-by Worldbuilding: Estrangement and Orthogonality

And yes, I did make one of those words up.

I was chatting to a friend last night and it got me thinking about estrangement.*

So, estrangement: if you read or write any kind of urban fantasy, the odds are this is a business you’re in – bringing oddness to the everyday, making your hometown feel vast and cool and unsympathetic, making it so to speak, feel like there’s something strange in the neighbourhood. Vampires in the attic, Garuda behind the till at Sainsbury’s, magic on the 137 bus, whatever you fancy. The Germans call it unheimlich -  ‘unhomeliness’, because they’re really good at naming things.

What’s currently baking my noodle is how this works in the context of a series. Because while your Vampire/ghast/scaffwolf/Mushroomkraken might have been super weird and freaky in the first book, before you can blink the reader’s subconscious will have processed it, packaged it, chewed and swallowed it, and be like: ‘Ok so you gave me like, a giant crane-fingered demolition god, but what have you done for me lately ?’

 

 

Of course, a lot fantasy writers make a virtue out of this. Think Harry Potter. The world becomes internally consistent, known and comfortable, but still awesome, right? And it reveals itself a little bit more at a time, and it becomes a really lovely place to spend some time, sink a few more butterbeers than is probably good for you and wind up drunk and in charge of a broomstick.

Fine. Splendid, but what if that’s not the game you’re in? What if you still crave the jolt of weird electricity you got when you read or wrote the first one? What can you do?

A couple of tactics spring to mind – first, in a technique technically known as MOARNOVUMZ you can just do more of the same: deluge the reader in new instances of the same kind of strangeness you were doing in the first volume. But diminishing returns sets in fast, and the initial crispness, the snap you got at beginning, might not be there for long.

Or you could try the ancient an honourable art of WEIRDANOVUMZ where, in an attempt to overcome early-onset jadedness you make each magical element exponentially more bonkers than the one before. “My new villain farts cobras”or “You liked Octopusman? Try *Dodecahedrapusman*” etc. This can work, only you risk losing the initial connection to reality, the delicious poise between the sacred and the mundane that made that initial unheimlich really sing.

The third way, and the one I’ve kind of been wrestling with, is orthogonality. You build the world of book one at right-angles to reality and you accept the fact that the reader will grow accustomed to your weirdness, in fact you rely on it. As of book two, book one is the status-quo, it is reality, and you build book two’s universe at right-angles to that, book three goes in at right-angles to book two (so at, er… right-angles to right-angles to right-angles to reality…) and so on.

In Our Lady of the Streets, the third Skyscraper Throne novel, there are Fever Streets that flash-heat to 1000 degrees, brick-glaucomas that seal up windows and doors trapping people inside their homes, and giant ophidian Serpent-terraces. I’m hoping they feel like a natural extension of, and twist and estrangement of, the logic that came in the series before.

We’ll have to wait and see if it works, but there are a couple of reasons the  principle appeals to me. Firstly it shows a certain amount of respect for the reader’s ability to keep up, and readers are always at least 1.5 times smarter than we are. But what I really like about it is this: in treating your made-up world like the real one, in distorting it and beating it up, you lend it credence, you make it feel big, and strange and robust and fascinating and impossible to fully grasp – just like the world we live in every day.

*not from the friend, we aren’t estranged at all.