Worldbuilding
#thoughts
I summarise and expand here a conversation I had with Inscript, with the goal of raising some (hopefully) interesting questions.
It started from a video discussing the differences between "hard" and "soft" worldbuilding. The video ends up defining "hard" worldbuilding as the kind of work that Tolkien does, where a hypothetical reality is made plausible through providing countless details. "Soft" worldbuilding, instead, is attributed to the likes of Miyazaki, where a world is not explained, but instead is defined through theme, symbology, and the emotions it elicits.
Providing explanations for soft-built worlds, the video argues, ends up being counterproductive. Detailed explanations detract from what makes soft-built worlds unique in the first place.
And this feature of soft-built worlds is what got me thinking. As a terribly inaccurate metaphor, we can look at soft-built worlds with a "quantum" perspective: they can be many things at once, and attempting to define them through detail makes them collapse into one. Providing details deprives them of what made them unique in the first place: their ability to be open to interpretation, and a serendipitous representation of the artist's thought. Even more than this, providing details usually makes the initial world seem far less interesting, as rich theme and emotion are replaced with relatively bland reason and logic.
Inscript then pointed me to a couple of papers, of which I was able to access one (it's in the references). The paper gives an overview of cosmology in the work of philosophers Deleuze, Derrida, Whitehead, and more. The article discusses how cosmology was historically seen as a spiritual exercise of self-discovery — by building worlds and defining the principles that rule them, we discover our own guiding principles. There is this idea of "chaosmos", of finding the minimal set of rules that can create order (cosmos) from chaos. Is soft worldbuilding exploring that world-maker's inner world?
So, there's an unexpected connection, the one between "worldbuilding" and the long-standing philosophical tradition of cosmology. I've always been fascinated by scientific cosmology as well, but never connected these dots.
Then, what about "soft" and "hard" cosmology? Is it yet another matter of subjectivism and objectivism, modernism and post-modernism? What fascinates me far beyond this, however, is another set of questions.
What does it mean to engage in "soft" cosmology? Once we created a world through "soft" principles, how can we keep exploring it without making it collapse into a bad mimicry of a work of "hard" cosmology? If we take the idea of cosmology as a spiritual exercise of discovery, what does it mean to explore a soft-built world?