Middle-Earth still have to borrow some of their coherency from the reader’s acquaintance with the actual world. The worlds in which planetary romances and Secondary World fantasies are set may have an entirely invented geography and an entirely imaginary history but their basic physical conditions are usually transferred without any elaborate commentary from our world. Magic may defy scientific laws but it has to work within the framework of the laws which it violates, as a series of exceptions. Even in the boldest fantasies it is taken for granted that without magic to hold them up, the castles in the clouds would fall, and that, without magic to aid her, the heroine who is deprived of oxygen will asphyxiate.
Science fiction writers sometimes test the limits of borrowed coherency almost to destruction. Stories have been written about the inhabitants of the surfaces of living worlds or neutron stars, two-dimensional or four-dimensional worlds, and worlds entirely contained within the mind of a dreamer or the software of a computer. The whole point of such exercises is, however, to extrapolate coherently from the accepted laws of physics and the known phenomena of chemistry. Even those very rare stories which deliberately alter one of the laws of physics do so in order to examine the logical consequence of making one such change while holding all the other laws constant.
Extrapolation is the key to establishing the coherency of your imaginary worlds. The artistry of fantasy and science fiction stories depends on your ability to figure out what the logical consequences of introducing particular novums may be. This applies just as much to fantasy as to science fiction; magic may be invoked to give your hero three wishes, but you must then figure out how he might choose to use those wishes and what the consequence of each wish would be. The appeal of your story to its readers will depend on your cleverness in figuring out exactly how the wishes are to be fulfilled; such tales usually thrive on the irony of consequences that are wholly logical but unforeseen by the user of the wishes.
You may, if you wish, imagine that there is a contract between yourself and your readers whereby the readers grant you a license to establish any novum you wish in your story, provided that you promise to look after it properly. Looking after it is exactly what you will have to do; in constructing your story you will be continually asking yourself what would follow, logically, from the situation as it presently stands.
You might think that the simplest and most obvious novums would soon be used up, as writers calculated all the likely outcomes of their use, but this is not so. There are any number of ways in which a person granted three wishes might choose to use them, and any number of ways in which their choices might go wrong. The same is true of invisibility, identity exchanges, time machines and all the other staples of playful “what if?” stories.
When novums are introduced in sets rather than singly—as they have to be in any story of the distant future or any story set in a wholly imaginary world—the possibilities of extrapolation are infinite. Making a future society or an alien world seem coherent can be difficult, because of the hard intellectual labor you have to put into the examination of possible consequences, but it can also be exciting. Some writers become addicted to the business of extrapolation, treating it as a kind of game.
Creating an entire imaginary world can be a lifetime’s work, and there are writers who have spent lifetimes doing it. At least some readers felt, as J. R. R. Tolkien did, that they wanted to know a great deal more about Middle-Earth than was revealed in The Lord of the Rings, and the supplementary information he assembled now fills a dozen further volumes. It is not unknown for fans of a particular story-series to become so interested in the world of the story that they long to take part in the extrapolation of its history and imaginary societies; Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Darkover” series generated the Friends of Darkover, whose members were licensed by the author to set stories of their own there, and it is nowadays common practice for groups of fantasy or science fiction writers to produce “shared world” story series.
Mercifully, there is a world of difference between coherency and completeness. The exhaustive creative work done by Tolkien in support of Middle-Earth is not compulsory. You do not have to fill in every detail of every world you invent for the purposes of a story; provided that you can maintain the appearance of coherency you can operate on a “need to know” basis. The artistry of designing plausible imaginary worlds is as much a matter of leaving things out as putting things in; as long as you can convince your reader that everything you actually mention is part of a coherent whole, the whole itself may remain vague.
The minimum that your reader needs to know is everything that is essential to the workings of your plot, plus as much additional information as may be required to bind that information into a satisfactory set. You need to reassure your reader that the various elements of your imaginary world do fit together—that the world makes sense—but that can usually be achieved simply by making sure that there are no glaring inconsistencies.
The longer your story is, the more detail you will need to fill in if you are to maintain the illusion that the world of the story really is a plausible world, and the more work you will have to do to make sure that the details do fit together in a logical and pleasing fashion. In many short stories, however, it is only necessary to provide a “slice of life,” which does not have to get to grips with ponderous matters of history, ecology and so on. As long as you can include a few significant details that are cleverly linked together you will do enough to captivate your readers.
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Plausibility and Probability
Readers who object to the use of anything explicitly supernatural in stories often overlook the fact that supposedly realistic plots are often so wildly improbable as to be absurd. We are all used to seeing characters in stories defy the calculus of probability with casual ease. We know perfectly well when we get to the end of a story that if the heroine is hanging from a window-ledge by her fingertips it will not even matter if she lets go; the hero will still contrive to grab her and haul her to safety. Whenever the hero of a story says that “it’s a million-to-one chance but it just might work” the move is virtually certain to succeed. In stories—especially in the climaxes of stories—heroes can always do what needs to be done, no matter how unlikely it seems.
There is, in fact, no “probability” at all within the world of a text. There are no matters of chance and no coincidences. A character in a story may throw a pair of dice or draw a card from a pack, but the outcome of any such action is decided by the writer. If the writer decides that the character will throw double six or draw the ace of spades that is what will happen. It is, of course, open to you to throw dice or draw a card in order to determine what you will write next, but that is a calculated abdication of choice, not a matter of chance—and the chances are that the story produced by the dice or the cards will be lousy. The nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine cases in which the million-to-one shot didn’t work remained unrecorded because they had no value as stories.
This observation puts the quest for plausibility into a slightly different light. Your readers are participants in your story and they have an active interest in its construction and continuity. They want the story to make sense and to form a satisfactory whole, and will welcome anything you do towards that end—but they also want the story to be exciting, and will be sympathetic to any device you use to enhance its excitement. Because readers like stories to keep moving, and eventually to arrive somewhere interesting, you have a license to engineer all kinds of opportunities and coincidences without regard to matters of probability. In the worlds within texts every decaying rope-bridge is certain to hold together just long enough—or, if it breaks, will allow the hero to clamber up the limp remnant to safety—and every honeymooning couple whose car breaks down at night is sure to find that the one lighted window they can see in the distance belongs to a haunted house. The unlikelihood of such occurrences is no threat to plausibility.
The readers’ willingness to accept improbabilities that serve to keep the plot moving is more than matched by their willingness to accept improbabilities that make a contribution to the integrity of the story, binding its parts into a whole. For instance, literary dreams usually serve this sort of purpose.
If real dreams serve any purpose at all, we have no idea what it is; in spite of our perennial tendency to search them for insights and omens, their meanings remain stubbornly