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I was following some links from authors whose journals I read today and stumbled into this thread about popular vs. award winning type books. As is my usual habit when I think my intellectual wankage is out of the main stream of the conversation taking place, I dump it here instead.
I think that all books answer certain questions. The process by which, in my mind, they do this is called worldbuilding. The author builds certain moral, social, political, economic, or other values into their worldbuilding. These values then determine the cost/benefit of various actions for the characters.
So to my mind, all books start with a common question: What is the world like?
Then they answer that question in some manner. Example: The world is a hard unforgiving place where doing the right thing will cost you. Or, The world is a place where true love exists and what's more it's one per customer bucko so do anything you can to snag it, you'll never get another. Or, The world is a place where the gods will constantly interfere with your life because they're bored. Or whatever.
Another, more logically precise term for these worldbuilding answers would be axioms. For example, it is axiomatic in most romance novels that True Love exists. It is axiomatic in many but not quite all romance novels that ONLY ONE True Love will exist for any person in their whole life.
In noir stories, one of the axioms is that there is a dark underbelly beneath the civilized crust of the world, and that once you break through the civilized crust you can never return unchanged. Sometimes it's axiomatic to this type of novel that you can never return at all.
In many fantasy novels, it is axiomatic that a small group of determined individuals, acting together, can save the world.
An author's choice of worldbuilding axioms tends to take place in dialog with the axioms chosen by other works in the field. For a romance example (I've read a lot more current romance in the last 5 years than current fantasy/sf): when Nora Roberts wrote her Garden trilogy, the fact that all three women had had loving, sexually successful relationships with their previous husbands/partners before the series started was an important part of the story for me. That aspect was radically different from most romance stories, in that it consciously set out to show how a later life relationship might develop in a variety of women who had had previous relationships that had mattered to them a lot and had been loving. A reader who hadn't read enough romance to know about this 1 relationship per lifetime convention might not be aware that this theme was being explored.
For me, the questions that the narrative of a story poses (and may or may not answer) are logical problems that play out within the given axiomatic structure of the worldbuilding. I have enough formal logic training to know that the axioms you're given determine the range of answers you can come up with to certain questions. So the widely discussed idea of stories that "pose but don't answer" questions makes no sense to me. All books answer questions about the axiomatic nature of their worldview. The questions posed within the narrative then may be answered or not, but their set of possible answers has been constricted by the axioms chosen in worldbuilding.
There's lots of interesting interplay that happens in this for readers experienced in the field. For example, different waves of sf and fantasy seem, to me, to be distinguished greatly by reactive and responsive changes in axiom choice. When an author says about one of their works that it is written "in response to" or "in dialog with" another work, my expectation as a reader tends to be that the worldbuilding axioms of author 1 didn't work for author 2, and that author 2 has written a story that explores similar narrative territory to author 1's work, but from within a different axiomatic framework. If the axiom that "a small group of determined individuals, acting together, can save the world," is changed to "a small group of determined individuals, acting together, can save the world, but it's guaranteed to kill most of them", or "but it's guaranteed to require morally warping decisions" or what have you, then you send a group of characters on a standard quest arc, different things will happen to them before they can save the world.
I think that all books answer certain questions. The process by which, in my mind, they do this is called worldbuilding. The author builds certain moral, social, political, economic, or other values into their worldbuilding. These values then determine the cost/benefit of various actions for the characters.
So to my mind, all books start with a common question: What is the world like?
Then they answer that question in some manner. Example: The world is a hard unforgiving place where doing the right thing will cost you. Or, The world is a place where true love exists and what's more it's one per customer bucko so do anything you can to snag it, you'll never get another. Or, The world is a place where the gods will constantly interfere with your life because they're bored. Or whatever.
Another, more logically precise term for these worldbuilding answers would be axioms. For example, it is axiomatic in most romance novels that True Love exists. It is axiomatic in many but not quite all romance novels that ONLY ONE True Love will exist for any person in their whole life.
In noir stories, one of the axioms is that there is a dark underbelly beneath the civilized crust of the world, and that once you break through the civilized crust you can never return unchanged. Sometimes it's axiomatic to this type of novel that you can never return at all.
In many fantasy novels, it is axiomatic that a small group of determined individuals, acting together, can save the world.
An author's choice of worldbuilding axioms tends to take place in dialog with the axioms chosen by other works in the field. For a romance example (I've read a lot more current romance in the last 5 years than current fantasy/sf): when Nora Roberts wrote her Garden trilogy, the fact that all three women had had loving, sexually successful relationships with their previous husbands/partners before the series started was an important part of the story for me. That aspect was radically different from most romance stories, in that it consciously set out to show how a later life relationship might develop in a variety of women who had had previous relationships that had mattered to them a lot and had been loving. A reader who hadn't read enough romance to know about this 1 relationship per lifetime convention might not be aware that this theme was being explored.
For me, the questions that the narrative of a story poses (and may or may not answer) are logical problems that play out within the given axiomatic structure of the worldbuilding. I have enough formal logic training to know that the axioms you're given determine the range of answers you can come up with to certain questions. So the widely discussed idea of stories that "pose but don't answer" questions makes no sense to me. All books answer questions about the axiomatic nature of their worldview. The questions posed within the narrative then may be answered or not, but their set of possible answers has been constricted by the axioms chosen in worldbuilding.
There's lots of interesting interplay that happens in this for readers experienced in the field. For example, different waves of sf and fantasy seem, to me, to be distinguished greatly by reactive and responsive changes in axiom choice. When an author says about one of their works that it is written "in response to" or "in dialog with" another work, my expectation as a reader tends to be that the worldbuilding axioms of author 1 didn't work for author 2, and that author 2 has written a story that explores similar narrative territory to author 1's work, but from within a different axiomatic framework. If the axiom that "a small group of determined individuals, acting together, can save the world," is changed to "a small group of determined individuals, acting together, can save the world, but it's guaranteed to kill most of them", or "but it's guaranteed to require morally warping decisions" or what have you, then you send a group of characters on a standard quest arc, different things will happen to them before they can save the world.
