Worldbuilding: being faithful to the reader

[stacer]

So I'm reading along in this book, and it's normal medieval-era-style fantasy. The characters are traveling singers, going from town to town in a horse-pulled cart, and they use fire for heat, etc. Halfway through some bad guys come along, and they use swords. So I'm reading along, and come to the final scene, and out of NOWHERE, the bad guys start shooting. Bullets.

What? Where in the world did they get GUNS?

I mean, it's one thing if the author sets up a world in which, though you've got mainly medieval-ness going on, the gun has been invented. But she hadn't. What's up with that? And the final scene hinged upon the gunfire. Couldn't they have used arrows?

[fuzzyoctopus]

Dare I ask what book this is?

[stacer]

Cart and Cwidder, the first book of the Dalemark Quartet by Diana Wynne Jones. I really like her stuff, and it's all well-written. I just want to know where the guns came from. It just goes to show that when I'm writing I have to pay better attention to what I'm writing, I guess. Consistency.

[fuzzyoctopus]

Well..if it's Dianna Wynne Jones, maybe someone imported the guns from Wales?

[42]

Perhaps she left out mentioning guns so the reader would be as surprised as the characters.

[Tekiel]

Maybe their the cude machines that can shoot only one bullet at a time, using gunpowder that you have to load yourself.  Kinda like those things on Princess Mononoke.

[Spriggan]

Also don't forget that europe had gunpowder around the 12-13th century, china had had it from before the 10th centuary.  It was realy unstable but was used.

[EUOL]

I don't think that's what Stacer is arguing.  It's a matter of mood and expectations--if you craft a magnificent medieval fantasy, you can't just introduce gunpowder without having it be a major plot element.  Doing things like that throws the reader out of the setting, which is something you never want to do.

However--and this is nothing about the genre--I've noticed that YA is less strict with worldbuilding.  They're not careless; there's just more of a sense of fun to the genre.  Harry Potter is a good example.  It doesn't take itself quite as seriously as, say, a book like DUNE.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

yeah, it's not that it's BAD to have guns, it's just that the world shouldn't have built up such an exclusion of mentioning guns until the guns were actually used. The setting appeared not to have them until bam, suddenly it's convenient to have them in the hands of th enemy. It' appears inconsistant.

[stacer]

Well, now I'm into book 2 of the series, and guns are a major plot point. Maybe someone complained when it was first published in the late 70s. She says that they have guns, but only the earls and their family are allowed to use them. The earl's son uses one to go hunting.

Then the same earl's son gets in his father's good graces by suggesting that maybe, to get the better over the earl's rivals, they ought to allow the soldiers to have guns, too. What an odd world. That seems to be the first thing I'd think of if I was an evil despot--firearms on my lackeys to protect my interests.

This book appears to be written on a parallel timeline to the first, so perhaps it'll explain more about that issue than the first did. However, I still say that the first book should have been internally consistent. And I know that gunpowder has been around for a long time, but guns in the hands of everyday soldiers didn't come along till much later. Now I'm having to rethink the setting right in the middle of reading the series. That bugs me.

[EUOL]

Ah, well, if the book is that old, you have to give it a lot of leeway too.  Fantasy barely existed in the 70's.  Remember Brandon's official date of the genre's emergence:  1978.

[Entsuropi]

/me coughs politely

LotR?

And, indeed, the whole collection of fairy tales and legends from before that. I'd class most mythology as 'fantasy'. And I'd do it from my big, shiny, ivory tower. I always did like Ivory.

[EUOL]

One series doesn't constitute a genre.  Tolkien did something very important, but he's like Columbus discovering the new world--that didn't make the new world a nation, it just brought the place to people's attention.

Fantasy wasn't marketed as a separate genre until the late 70's.  Before that, it was just considered sf or general 'adventure' fiction.

78 marked the year when publishing companies released their first fantasy genre books targeted at an older market:  

Sword of Shannara
Thomas Covenant 1
The Silmarillion

(Oh, and 'Most' mythology cannot be termed fantasy.  Fantasy is a fiction genre.  If the stories were told to be fiction, not to have religious significance, then you might have a point.  However, it is very difficult to classify whether or not this was true for a lot of mythology.  Besides, they're definitely not high fantasy, since they occur in this world rather than a distant one.)

[The Jade Knight]

Well, it may be worth noting that a good deal of Middle English literature "Sir Orfeo", the Arthurian stuff, etc., and several others I have read, could easily be considered "Fantasy" by modern records.  Granted, this was stuff with generally contemporary settings, but it sure reads like Fantasy to me!  (And I've really got a soft spot for it.  Especially "Apollonius of Tyre".  That one was just excellent)

However, I wont argue that Tolkien invented the modern conception of Fantasy.

[Spriggan]

psh, shows what you know.  We all know that Tolkien didn't invent the modern fanatsy, Bilbo did.  And it was Bilbo that traveled in time (noticble becasue of the sombero he wore) to share his story when Tolkien stold it from him and published it under his own name.