Space Opera Fans discussion

What do I mean by this title? Simply put, it is the art of creating a believable world for the story—a detailed understanding of how everything works, including the coffee machine. Adding depth and detail to our worlds can be fun for the author and shows dedication to the craft, but also dangerous depending on the reader.

My perspective on this subject comes from being a Game Master (GM) for tabletop role-playing games. A GM aims to build a believable world full of exciting details and life that the other players find enjoyable to interact with. I believe this skill set also applies to novels and stories.

Info dumping upon the reader can backfire quickly, so how do we find the right balance? When is too much information boring? Some readers enjoy a science lesson and want the details explained, while others can’t stand real-life lectures and will skip that section altogether.
Just because the author has worked out the math for the delta-V requirements to get the hero off the high-gravity world does not denote the reader wants a lesson in orbital mechanics. Although including this information in the story, or at least the answer to the equation, will satisfy the hard-science fans and make the world believable.
Another example is, assume you have created a city or town the protagonist will visit and have every building and street labeled, down to where the bakery is located. How can it be used to enhance the story without bogging it down? Inference is how I used the information. I don’t tell the reader/players where everything on the street is located; instead, I tell them what the baked goods smell like. Their imagination will fill in the blanks better than I could describe the street anyway.
This is similar to when we want to tell our friends about what it was like visiting another country. Worldbuilding with minuet detail, even down to how the coffee machine works, is a helpful tool I use to facilitate this. It helps keep the world consistent and allows the author to visit these imaginary places as if they were real.

What places do you remember reading about that gave you a sense of being there?
When could you taste and feel the environment that was being described?
When did your skin crawl when the story described that dank tunnel where the monster hid?
As readers, how important is the coffee machine?

What places do you remember reading about that gave you a sense of being there?
When could you taste and feel the environment that was being described?
When did your skin crawl when the story described that dank tunnel where the monster hid?
As readers, how important is the coffee machine?

Real or imaginary I tend to remember places described in enough detail that I see it as I read. Hearing, smelling, etc. are not as important though I do tend to avoid cold weather settings when real life weather is very cold.

Nothing wrong with describing things in passing but there is such a thing as too much detail. Think of it as a movie. Do you need to see every rivet in the wing or just see the airplanes in the dogfight? Only if rivets giving way causes the plane to crash do you need to see them.

If the coffee machine is described it better be important or it could be annoying distraction. Too many distractions don't work for me even in mystery novels. If the shotgun in the gun safe is described in detail I expect it to be used at some point. If there's paragraph after paragraph describing a tree then trunk, branches, twigs and leaves better be important.

I tend to pay more attention to dialog and descriptions of gestures, but do appreciate getting a high level explanation of science/engineering. For example, mention in passing of grippy patches on seats of pants, to make it easier to stay put on the weightless shuttle between stations, or how they put a surplus naval artillery gun on a rover on the moon.

But then I don’t try to make pictures in my mind of scenes in a book usually. I was shocked the first time I found out that most people do.

L J wrote: "If there's paragraph after paragraph describing a tree then trunk, branches, twigs and leaves better be important."

Insert suspicious eye squint at JRR Tolkien.

L J wrote: "Nothing wrong with describing things in passing but there is such a thing as too much detail. Think of it as a movie. Do you need to see every rivet in the wing or just see the airplanes in the dogfight? Only if rivets giving way causes the plane to crash do you need to see them."

This! Exactly this.

I tend to visualize scenes as I read, but if you’re stuffing unnecessary geegaws like coffee machines into your scenery and describing them, then my eyes glaze over and I skip ahead… after which I deduct a star from my review.

My preference: Note that there’s a coffee machine, use it to show a character’s personality even, but don’t describe it in detail.

Obviously this isn’t how every person reacts. Women tend (tend! not a natural law) to prefer more detail than men do, but I know plenty of guys who are obsessive about those nitty-gritty details.

And clearly society celebrates writers who overstuff their prose with excessive or florid descriptions - Tolkien, Hugo and Dickens come to mind - and there are successful and celebrated writers who include extraneous-to-the-story details - Neal Stephenson is the poster child for this, but Melville stops the story of Moby-Dick dead in the water several times just to give technical details no one needs to know. (He has an entire chapter about the different kinds of rope, fer cry.)

People praise Greg Egan for the flood of ideas he pours into every book, but sometimes he goes overboard. (Continuing the water motif established in the previous paragraph.) One book of his I read was like 1/3 made-up math. Needless to say, I didn’t finish it.

Brandon Sanderson does similar things, which is why I haven’t pursued any of his series after trying the first one. He’s so in love with his worldbuilding that he explains it to you, over and over again. It’s fine once, but I don’t need it every time. I get it, Stormlight does X to Y but only if A unless J. Stop telling me every time it’s used.

Sometimes it's not the author but the publisher responsible for excessive detail.

When authors were paid by the word they used more words.

I met an author who completed a book according to contract only to be told the publisher had changed to publishing longer books. Given a short deadline to hand in a significantly longer book the author wrote an incident that required return to base then wrote return journey and then repeat of outbound journey with different details. Essentially they travelled same road three times instead of one just to add pages.

What places do you remember reading about that gave you a sense of being there? Dumai's Wells in Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan. I can still smell the flesh burning when the Asha'man shows their powers.

When could you taste and feel the environment that was being described?
Yes, from Rand al'Thor being trapped folded over in a box baking in the hot sun to his escape as the shields tied off break to the burning flesh of the Shiado as the Asha'Man slaughter them relentlessly until they eventually turn and run away. The worldbuilding of Robert Jordan is superior. However, his descriptive narrative of many common ordinary actions or repetitive actions is maddening. Winter's Heart - I almost didn't make it through this book in the Epic Wheel of Time Series - had I stopped there, I would have missed one hell of Epic half a dozen or so more books and an Epic fantasy ending.

When did your skin crawl when the story described that dank tunnel where the monster hid?
I can't recall reading anything recent like this - but I don't like reading about people traversing small spaces like a tunnel they can barely fit through or a crawl space - it gives me the heebie-jeebies, independently of any narrative description.

As readers, how important is the coffee machine?
I don't care about the coffee machine if it's ordinary. If it's a coffee machine that runs on some kind of fusion reactor and can suck water out of air and reconstruct ground coffee from its replication technology to brew me a fresh, hot perfect cup of coffee, then I want to know how the coffee machine works.


I read a great book called Showing & Telling: Learn How to Show & When to Tell for Powerful & Balanced Writing by Laurie Alberts - it applies to all writing, even worldbuilding.

I think balance is key to all things. However, some writers go over the top with details and info dump and are successful. I think I attribute the success less to over-the-top descriptive worldbuilding and more to the plots, subplots, and characters that are well-written and can sustain a reader through a slog of an overly descriptive narrative setting.

L J wrote: "Sometimes it's not the author but the publisher responsible for excessive detail.

When authors were paid by the word they used more words."

I’m aware. Reading Dickens, one can practically hear his creditors knocking at the door, so he packed in more and more words. Everyone quotes “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” as the opening line to A Tale of Two Cities, but he goes on for an entire paragraph in that vein.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

He’s just getting warmed up. Pretty soon he’s off to races with repetition and redoublement.

The coffee machine was an example of the level of detail a writer puts in their world-building notes, not necessarily what's in the story. A bit like a 'behind the scenes' type of information that the writer can pull from when describing something in the story.
When describing a real place, research is already available. When describing places or tech that do not exist, the writer has to create the resource to pull from.

So far, I agree with everything that has been said.
Sometimes the best descriptions only take a sentence to explain.

Michael wrote: "The coffee machine was an example of the level of detail a writer puts in their world-building notes, not necessarily what's in the story."

Yes, we get that. See above.