EXPLORING IMAGINARY WORLDS

From The Brothers Karamazov to Star Trek to Twin Peaks, this collection
explores a variety of different imaginary worlds both historic and
contemporary.
Featuring contributions from an interdisciplinary and international group
of scholars, each essay looks at a particular imaginary world in-depth, and
world-building issues associated with that world. Together, the essays
explore the relationship between the worlds and the media in which they
appear as they examine imaginary worlds in literature, television, film,
computer games, and theatre, with many existing across multiple media
simultaneously. The book argues that the media incarnation of a world
affects world structure and poses unique obstacles to the act of world-
building. The worlds discussed include Nazar, Barsetshire,
Skotopogonievsk, the Vorkosigan Universe, Grover’s Corners,
Gormenghast, Collinsport, Daventry, Dune, the Death Gate Cycle universe,
Twin Peaks, and the Star Trek galaxy.
A follow-up to Mark J. P. Wolf’s field-defining book Building Imaginary
Worlds, this collection will be of critical interest to students and scholars of
popular culture, subcreation studies, transmedia studies, literature, and
beyond.

Mark J. P. Wolf is Professor in the Communication Department at

Concordia University, Wisconsin. His 23 books include The Video Game
Theory Reader 1 and 2 (2003, 2008), The Video Game Explosion (2007),
Myst & Riven: The World of the D’ni (2011), Before the Crash: An
Anthology of Early Video Game History (2012), Encyclopedia of Video
Games (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds (2012), The Routledge
Companion to Video Game Studies (2014), LEGO Studies (2014), Video
Games Around the World (2015), Revisiting Imaginary Worlds (2016),
Video Games FAQ (2017), The World of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
(2017), The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds (2018), and The
Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence (2018),
which won the SCMS 2020 award for Best Edited Collection.
EXPLORING IMAGINARY
WORLDS
Essays on Media, Structure, and Subcreation

Edited by Mark J. P. Wolf

First published 2021
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2021 Taylor & Francis

The right of Mark J. P. Wolf to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors
for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
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A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-19730-8 (hbk)

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A. M. D. G.
CONTENTS

List of Contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Mark J. P. Wolf

Worlds of Words

1 The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground by Ludvig

Holberg: Subcreation and Social Criticism
Lars Konzack

2 ‘A Little Bit of England Which I Have Myself Created’: Creating

Barsetshire across Forms, Genres, Time, and Authors
Helen Conrad O’Briain

3 Mythopoetic Suspense, Eschatology and Misterium: World-Building

Lessons from Dostoevsky
Lily Alexander

4 Building the Vorkosigan Universe

Edward James
Audiovisual Worlds

5 Our World: World-Building in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town

Mark J. P. Wolf

6 “Suckled on Shadows”: States of Decay in Mervyn Peake’s

Gormenghast Novels
Edward O’Hare

7 The Gothic World-Building of Dark Shadows

Andrew Higgins

8 Daventry and the Worlds of King’s Quest

Christopher Hanson

Transmedia Worlds

9 The Softer Side of Dune: The Impact of the Social Sciences on World-
Building
Kara Kennedy

10 Earth, Air, Fire, and Water: Balance and Interconnectivity in the

Fractured Worlds of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s The Death
Gate Cycle
Jennifer Harwood-Smith

11 Welcome to the “Second-stage” Lynchverse—Twin Peaks: The Return

and the Impossibility of Return Vs. Getting a Return
Matt Hills

12 The Fault in Our Star Trek: (Dis)Continuity Mapping, Textual

Conservationism, and the Perils of Prequelization
William Proctor
Appendix: On Measuring and Comparing Imaginary Worlds
Mark J. P. Wolf

Index
CONTRIBUTORS

Scott Adams was born in Miami, Florida, and is now living in Platteville,
Wisconsin. Scott was the first person known to create the first commercial
adventure-style game for personal computers with his first game,
Adventureland (1978). His company, Adventure International, released
games for many major computer platforms throughout the 1980s. Adams
worked as a senior programmer for AVISTA in Platteville until 2016. Scott
founded Clopas, the “PLAY the game! LIVE the adventure! CREATE your
story!” company in 2017, with his wife of 30 years, Roxanne. Scott and
Team Clopas are currently working on Adventureland XL, a Conversational
Adventure™ game, in celebration of the original’s 40th anniversary, with a
holiday 2019 release. [[email protected]]

Lily Alexander, PhD, has taught in New York since 2003, including at
NYU and Hunter College, CUNY. She has a Master’s degree in Drama and
Film, and a dual doctorate in Anthropology and Comparative Cultural
Studies. Her research interests include symbolic anthropology, semiotics of
culture, creative algorithms, and evolution of consciousness. She has taught
world mythology, history and theory of narrative media, comparative
literature, genre studies, science fiction, comedy, story structure,
screenwriting, interactive storytelling, and world-building. She has
presented at 40+ conferences, including the MIT Media in Transition series
and the forum Cognitive Futures. She wrote for the History Channel,
henryjenkins.org, The Journal of Narrative Theory, Cinema Journal, and
Cinema Art. Her publications also appeared in Italy, France, the
Netherlands, Canada, Russia, and Israel. She contributed to book
collections Filmbuilding (2001), Revisiting Imaginary Worlds (2017), and
The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds (2017). Lily Alexander
authored a book set, Fictional Worlds: Traditions in Narrative and the Age
of Visual Culture (2013/2014). Her website is: storytellingonscreen.com.
[[email protected]]

Helen Conrad O’Briain was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, but has
lived most of her adult life in Dublin where she is adjunct Professor of Old
English and Old Norse at Trinity College. She has published on
Augustinian theology in early insular Latin literature, the Middle English
“Breton” Lais, and Trinity Vergil incunabula, as well as on the works of M.
R. James, Dorothy Sayers, and Phyllis McGinley. She is the author, with
Laura Cleaver, of the forthcoming catalog of Trinity and Chester Beatty
Psalter manuscripts. [[email protected]]

Christopher Hanson is an Associate Professor in the English Department

at Syracuse University, where he teaches courses in games studies, digital
media, television, and film. His book Game Time: Understanding
Temporality in Video Games was published by Indiana University Press in
spring 2018 and his next book project is on game designer Roberta
Williams. He previously worked for a number of years in video game and
software development. His work has appeared in the Quarterly Review of
Film and Video, Film Quarterly, the Routledge Companion to Video Game
Studies (2014), and LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a
Transmedial Phenomenon (2014). [[email protected]]

Jennifer Harwood-Smith has a PhD from Trinity College Dublin, and is

researching world-building in science fiction. She has contributed two
chapters to Battlestar Galactica: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked
Up?, “I Frak, Therefore I Am”, and “Dreamers in the Night”. She has also
co-authored “‘Doing it in style’: The Narrative Rules of Time Travel in the
Back to the Future Trilogy” with Frank Ludlow, published in The Worlds of
Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films. Her essay “Fractured
Cities: The Twinning of Tolkien’s Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul with
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis” has been published in J.R.R. Tolkien: The Forest
and the City. She is the 2006 winner of the James White Award and has
published fiction in Interzone and with Ether Books. [[email protected]]
Andrew Higgins is a Tolkien scholar who specializes in exploring the role
of language invention in fiction. His thesis “The Genesis of Tolkien’s
Mythology” (which he is currently preparing for publication) explored the
interrelated nature of myth and language in Tolkien’s earliest work. He is
also the co-editor with Dr. Dimitra Fimi of A Secret Vice: Tolkien on
Invented Languages (HarperCollins, 2016). Recently he has had papers
published in A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honour or Verlyn Flieger
(Gabbro Head Press, 2018) and Sub-creating Arda (Walking Tree
Publishers, 2019). He has also taught an on-line course on language
invention for Signum University/Mythgard Institute and is a Trustee of
Signum University and the UK Tolkien Society. He is also Director of
Fundraising at Glyndebourne Opera in East Sussex England.
[[email protected]]

Matt Hills is Professor of Film & TV Studies at Aberystwyth University.

He is the author of Fan Cultures (2002) and Triumph of a Time Lord (2010)
among other titles. His work has been published in the Journal of Fandom
Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Science Fiction Film and
Television, Participations: The Journal of Audience & Reception Studies,
and the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures. His latest book is
the edited collection New Dimensions of Doctor Who (2013), and he’s
currently working on a new monograph, Sherlock — Detecting Quality
Television. [[email protected]]

Edward James is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at University

College Dublin, working on early medieval European history. A long-term
SF fan, he began writing about science fiction in the 1980s, and for fourteen
years was editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science
Fiction. He has won many of the awards in the field, including the Eaton
Award (for Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century), the Pilgrim Award,
the Hugo Award (for The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, co-
edited with Farah Mendlesohn), the BSFA Award for Non-Fiction (for his
website on Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers in the Great War), and most
recently the IAFA’s Distinguished Scholarship Award. His most recent book
is on Lois McMaster Bujold. [[email protected]]
Kara Kennedy is a PhD candidate in English at the University of
Canterbury studying the representation of women in Frank Herbert’s Dune
series. She has published on the significant role that names play in the
world-building in Dune. She also researches in the field of Digital
Humanities and is looking to analyze 20th-century science fiction in new
ways through digital technology. [[email protected]]

Lars Konzack is an Associate Professor at The Royal School of Library

and Information Science in Denmark. He has an MA degree in information
science and a PhD degree in Multimedia. He is working with subjects such
as ludology, game analysis and design, geek culture, and subcreation. He
has, among others things, published “Computer Game Criticism: A Method
for Computer Game Analysis” (2002), “Rhetorics of Computer and Video
Game Research” (2007), “Video Games in Europe” (2007), and
“Philosophical Game Design” (2008). [[email protected]]

Edward O’Hare is a PhD student at Trinity College Dublin. After studying

for a Degree in Philosophy, he completed anMPhil in Popular Literature in
2009. Since 2012 he has been working on a thesis on Antarctic Gothic
Literature, focusing on the Polar Fictions of writers including Edgar Allan
Poe, Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, and John W. Campbell Jr. A regular
contributor to The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, he has
published articles and reviews on a range of subjects. His research interests
include Victorian Gothic Fiction, Imaginary Voyage Narratives, Ghost
Stories and other Supernatural Fiction, the Weird Tale, British and
American Horror and Science-Fiction of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and Cult
Cinema and Television of the past and present. [[email protected]]

William Proctor is a lecturer at the University of Sunderland, UK, where

he teaches in Film, Media, and Cultural Studies. His PhD thesis examines
the reboot phenomenon in comics and film and was published by New York
University Press in 2015. William has published articles and book chapters
on The Walking Dead, Batman, and the fan reaction to the Lucasfilm
takeover by Disney alongside a number of articles on the reboot
phenomenon. His next pursuit is an audience research project focusing on
fantasy fans in collaboration with Martin Barker and an edited collection
which explores the impact of Nordic Noir. [[email protected]]
Mark J. P. Wolf is a Professor in the Communication Department at
Concordia University Wisconsin. His books include Abstracting Reality:
Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age (2000), The Medium
of the Video Game (2001), Virtual Morality: Morals, Ethics, and New
Media (2003), The Video Game Theory Reader (2003), The Video Game
Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond (2007), The
Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2008), Myst and Riven: The World of the
D’ni (2011), Before the Crash: Early Video Game History (2012),
Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming
(two-volume First Edition, 2012; three-volume Second Edition,
forthcoming), Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of
Subcreation (2012), The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies
(2014), LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial
Phenomenon (2014), Video Games Around the World (2015), the four-
volume Video Games and Gaming Cultures (2016), Revisiting Imaginary
Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology (2017), Video Games FAQ (2017),
The World of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (2017), The Routledge
Companion to Imaginary Worlds (2017), The Routledge Companion to
Media History and Obsolescence (2018), 101 Enigmatic Puzzles: Fractal
Mazes, Quantum Chess, Anagram Sudoku, and More (2020), World-
Builders on World-Building: An Exploration of Subcreation (2020), and two
novels for which he is looking for a publisher. He is also founder and co-
editor of the Landmark Video Game book series from the University of
Michigan Press and the founder of the Video Game Studies Scholarly
Interest Group within the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. He has
been invited to speak in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and
Second Life; has had work published in journals including Compar(a)ison,
Convergence, Film Quarterly, Games and Culture, New Review of Film and
Television Studies, Projections, Religions, and The Velvet Light Trap; is on
the advisory boards of Videotopia, the International Arcade Museum
Library, and the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated
Simulations; and is on several editorial boards including those of Games
and Culture and The Journal of E-media Studies. He lives in Wisconsin
with his wife Diane and his sons Michael, Christian, and Francis.
[[email protected]]
FOREWORD

The original world-building, according to some of the most ancient texts

that are still available to us today, is said to have taken place long ago when
God spoke everything into existence.
It seems that this Creator was not wanting to just create a sterile puppet
world that would only follow a preset program. There must have been a
much deeper plan at work, since along with the Universe, He also created
humans, and more importantly, as the ancient texts report, He made the
latter in His own Image.
A very odd turn of phrase indeed. Many may take that to mean this
Creator is an anthropomorphic being that exists in a state similar to our own
and his shape is that which mankind owes its physical appearance.
There seems to be many issues with that idea. Perhaps instead it meant
giving humans something very special. A piece of Himself in their very
nature, so they could then truly reflect His ultimate Image.
If so, that piece may be Free Will with its very important offshoot of
Creativity. Ultimately, though He was in overall control, His creation could
do things as they desired within the reality He had created for them.
The articles in this treatise all have an underlying theme. They all look at
the works of people creating worlds that did not previously exist, but even
more interesting is they all look at works that were originally created for the
entertainment of others.
The importance of the latter shows the very deep-seated desire that exists
in people to not only be entertained but also for many the desire to create
things that have never existed before, even if that creation itself is only
imaginary with just tenuous roots in our reality.
 Mankind has an innate drive to both create and to also be entertained by
new creations. Speaking from my own experiences, nothing brings more
joy to a world creator than seeing others also enjoy that creation. One
without the other is useless. A creator wants an audience and audiences
need creators. Perhaps that’s why Humankind is even here?
Let’s go ahead now and look at some of the more notable world-builders
and their creations, along with how they touched the diverse audiences that
interacted with them.
Scott Adams
December 16, 2019

Scott Adams is author of the Scott Adams series of adventure games and
co-founder of Adventure International and Clopas LLC. Born in Miami,
Florida, and now living in Platteville, Wisconsin, Adams was the first
person known to create an adventure-style game for personal computers
with his first game, Adventureland. His company, Adventure International,
released games for many major computer platforms throughout the 1980s.
Adams worked as a senior programmer for AVISTA in Platteville until
2016. Scott founded Clopas, the “PLAY the game! LIVE the adventure!
CREATE your story!” company in 2017, with his wife of 30 years,
Roxanne. Scott and Team Clopas are currently working on Adventureland
XL, a Conversational Adventure™ game, in celebration of the original’s
40th anniversary, aiming for a holiday release 2019. Adams’s works include
the classic Adventure game series of 14 games: Adventure #1 —
Adventureland (1978), Adventure #2 — Pirate Adventure (1979), Adventure
#3 — Secret Mission (1979), Adventure #4 — Voodoo Castle (1979),
Adventure #5 — The Count (1979), Adventure #6 — Strange Odyssey
(1979), Adventure #7 — Mystery Fun House (1979), Adventure #8 —
Pyramid of Doom (1979), Adventure #9 — Ghost Town (1980), Adventure
#10 — Savage Island, Part I (1980), Adventure #11 — Savage Island, Part
II (1981), Adventure #12 — Golden Voyage (1981), Adventure #13 —
Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle (1984), and Adventure #14 — Return to
Pirate’s Isle (1984), as well as Return To Pirate Island 2 (2001), The
Inheritance (2013), and Escape the Gloomer (2018), a game set in the
Redwall Universe of Brian Jacques.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An anthology like this is only possible because of all the people who enjoy
writing and reading about imaginary worlds, and I am grateful to see this
interdisciplinary area of study increasing in academia over the years. I
would like to thank video game designer Scott Adams for his Foreword,
and for all the work he has done to advance world-building in text
adventure games. A hearty thanks go to all the contributors, Lily Alexander,
Helen Conrad-O’Briain, Christopher Hanson, Andrew Higgins, Jennifer
Harwood-Smith, Matt Hills, Edward James, Kara Kennedy, Lars Konzack,
Edward O’Hare, and William Proctor for their participation and great
essays, and for the on-line conversations we have had regarding imaginary
worlds. I am also grateful for the enthusiasm and encouragement of Erica
Wetter at Routledge, and the anonymous book proposal reviewers for their
thoughtful and thorough reviews. Thanks also to my wife Diane and my
sons Michael, Christian, and Francis, who put up with me during the time
while I was working on this book. And, as always, thanks be to God, the
Creator of all subcreators.
INTRODUCTION
Mark J. P. Wolf

I find it amusing, and secretly pleasing, that I have so many fans who
are interested in the history. I’m not sure if they would so eagerly
study real history, you know? In school perhaps they’re bored with all
the Henrys in English history, but they’ll gladly follow the Targaryen
dynasty.
—George R. R. Martin1

It is probably true that there are fans in a number of fandoms — those of the
worlds of Tolkien, Star Wars, Star Trek, and others — who know the
histories of their favorite imaginary worlds better than that of the real-world
country they live in. Of course, one of the major differences between the
history of a secondary world versus the history of the Primary World is that
the former is always finite, and thus there exists the possibility of knowing
it all; a mastery that is simply not possible when it comes to real-world
history. The bigger the world, the greater the challenge, perhaps, but an
imaginary world is always finite, despite all the gaps and missing pieces
that allow fans to endlessly speculate and extrapolate a world. Rather than
create a feeling of being unfinished, gaps and missing pieces invite
participation and speculation, examination of a world’s many details, and
many return visits.
Our ability to explore an imaginary world varies greatly from author to
author, medium to medium, and world to world. Some authors, particularly
in the area of literature, see the world in which their story is set as merely
the background for it; we are given only as much of the background world
as is needed to advance the story, and no more. Indeed, this kind of
narrative-centric outlook is even often taught to authors, who are told to
keep moving the story along, like a horse with blinders being driven at full
gallop. Others are more leisurely and give their readers a little time to look
around and experience their worlds, building more of it than what is strictly
needed just for the story. Some, like Austin Tappan Wright, enjoy world-
building so much that their worlds are arguably just as important as the
stories set in them, which, of course, are often inseparable, as it should be.
In fact, Wright so enjoyed world-building that his original draft of Islandia
(1942) was around 2,300 pages or so when he died in 1931, not including
another 135,000-word document about the world’s history, and more
appendices as well. It was Wright’s widow who transcribed her husband’s
novel, cutting it down by about a third of its length, before finally getting it
published 11 years after his death. Plenty of fantasy and science fiction
authors have included appendices, glossaries, timelines, maps, and so forth
with their novels, enriching the experience of the visitors who wish to visit
them.
The medium used to represent a world also has a great impact on the
visitor’s experience. In audiovisual media, we often get to see a wealth of
detail, some only tantalizing glimpses of wide and distant vistas that only
hint at all the things that lay beyond the scope of the story being told; paths
untrodden and places unseen which give rise to speculation as to what we
may find there if we are ever allowed to return for further exploration.
Some fans, unwilling to wait or frustrated at the limits of their visits, turn to
fan fiction, exploring the potential offered by a world. Interactive media,
like video games or virtual reality, go one step further than film and
television, by allowing the audience to navigate the world themselves, often
not without goals, challenges, obstacles, and nemeses. These vicarious
experiences may explain why video games have displaced more traditional
media like film and television, though they both have certainly continued to
flourish as well.
Finally, some worlds are made with exploration in mind, regardless of
the media in which they appear; plenty of world data detail is available, in
every imaginable form, narrative and nonnarrative, through word, image,
sound, object, and interaction, and every kind of object and experience one
can offer (and often sell) to an audience. Naturally, it is these kinds of
worlds, going beyond the stories set in them, which are most enjoyably and
fruitfully explored, and are thus the kind to be examined in detail in an
anthology like this one.
As a follow-up to my book Revisiting Imaginary Worlds (itself a follow-
up to Building Imaginary Worlds), Exploring Imaginary Worlds is not only
the exploration of imaginary worlds in general, but also the exploration of
particular, individual worlds, a different one for each essay in this
collection. Nazar, Barsetshire, Skotoprigonyevsk, the Vorkosigan universe,
Grover’s Corners, Gormenghast, Collinsport, Daventry, Arrakis, Chelestra,
Twin Peaks, and the Star Trek universe are a wide range of locales, but they
all share one thing in common; they began in someone’s imagination and
grew from there. Together, these essays explore the relationship between
these worlds and the media in which they appear. Some are made entirely of
words, while others are designed to appear in audiovisual form, whether on
stage, movie screen, television screen, computer monitor (with
interactivity), or across multiple media venues simultaneously. Different
media incarnations also affect world structures, posing different obstacles to
further world-building of the world due to the varying requirement of
different media venues, and the capabilities of different time periods during
which the world-building occurred.
The essays present in this collection are each about a particular
imaginary world, ranging in time from Ludvig Holberg’s novel of 1741 to
the Star Trek of 2019. After the Introduction, which examines what it means
to explore an imaginary worlds, and the various pleasures and lessons it can
provide, we have 15 essays arranged in 3 sections, each with a different
focus. The first section, “Worlds of Words”, looks at the earliest form of
world experiences, literary worlds, which arose out of books, each written
by authors who had to rely on words alone for the building of their worlds.
The worlds examined here include Nazar, the world of Ludvig Holberg’s
Niels Klim’s Underground Travels (1741) which is the subject of Lars
Konzack’s essay. This is followed by Helen Conrad O’Briain’s study of
Barsetshire, the imaginary British county which was invented by Anthony
Trollope, and has been added to by other authors over the next hundred
years or so, placing it among the early transauthorial worlds. Next, Lily
Alexander looks at what she refers to as the “Journeyworld” of
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), the symbolic, mythological
world through which the characters travel. Finally, Edward James looks at
the creation of the Vorkosigan Universe in the novels of Lois McMaster
Bujold, who has continued adding planets to her world over her long career.
The second section, “Worlds across Media”, expands out to worlds
which are depicted in audiovisual form; my own essay looks at world-
building on the theatrical stage and particularly in Thornton Wilder’s Our
Town (1938), examining the difficulties of world-building on the stage and
how Wilder succeeds in producing an immersive world. Edward O’Hare’s
essay on Mervin Peake’s Gormenghast examines its world, which has been
adapted into various media, relating it to the themes of tradition and
disintegration, and the desire to escape from history. Next, Andrew Higgins
writes about the television series Dark Shadows (1966–1971) which was
remade as a feature film of the same name in 2012, and the Gothic world-
building taking place in it. The last essay of the section is on Daventry, a
video game world from the King’s Quest series of computer games (1980–
2016), which Christopher Hanson examines.
The third section, “Transmedia Worlds”, begins with Kara Kennedy’s
examination of the impact of the social sciences on world-building in Frank
Herbert’s Dune universe, followed by Jennifer Harwood-Smith’s take on
the topic of balance and interconnectivity in the worlds of Margaret Weis
and Tracy Hickman’s The Death Gate Cycle. The last two essays examine
the recent extension of two long-running television franchises, which began
on television and spread to other media; Matt Hills explores the
continuation of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks franchise, after a
hiatus of nearly a quarter century, while William Proctor looks at the
problems faced by the new reboot of Star Trek, and their solutions and
repositioning of the franchise and the perils of prequelization. Finally, the
Appendix, “On Measuring and Comparing Imaginary Worlds”, is a
reflection on the attempt to compare subcreated worlds with each other,
how one might go about doing it, the problems encountered, and what may
be possible.
Of course, the essays presented here have many overlapping concerns
and together they provide the reader an exploration of world-building
examples that extend over several hundred years, and through multiple
media incarnations, including literature, plays, movies, television shows,
video games, comics, trading cards, and more. Together, the essays
demonstrate a wide yet related range of approaches and concerns found
within Subcreation Studies, providing the reader analyses of worlds and the
world-building used to create them. As their contributor biographies reveal,
the distinguished set of contributors whose work is collected here come
from interdisciplinary backgrounds which include the theory, history, and
practice of world-building, the variety of which further enriches the
explorations found in this volume.
While these essays may function like travelogues, introducing the worlds
they survey, they naturally cannot convey more than a glimpse of the
worlds they discuss, so they should be seen as invitations encouraging
readers to make their own excursions into these worlds, perhaps enjoying
them from a new perspective if they are already familiar with them, or
enjoying them entirely as first-time visitors. Either way, it is hoped that
these essays will not only aid readers in the exploration of imaginary
worlds, but will perhaps even inspire them to explore other worlds, or even
the potential of imaginary worlds, through attempts at building their own.

Note
1 As quoted in Gilmore, M., “George R. R. Martin: The Rolling Stone Interview”, Rolling Stone,
April 23, 2014, available at https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/george-r-r-
martin-the-rolling-stone-interview-242487/.
Worlds of Words
1
THE JOURNEY OF NIELS KLIM TO
THE WORLD UNDERGROUND BY
LUDVIG HOLBERG
Subcreation and Social Criticism

Lars Konzack

Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) is the father of both Danish and Norwegian

literature. Inspired by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Holberg,
sometimes referred to as Lewis Holberg, wrote The Journey of Niels Klim
to the World Underground (original Latin: Nicolai Klimii Iter
Subterraneum) concerning a journey into the Hollow Earth, published in
1741, and a second edition in 1745 adding the Apologetic Preface as the
noteworthy change. While Ludvig Holberg, as playwright, wrote in Danish,
he wrote The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground in Latin and
published it in Leipzig in order to reach a larger audience and avoid
reprisals in Denmark. The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground
was Ludvig Holberg’s breakthrough novel among the scholarly public of
18th-century Europe.
It is a strange work in the sense that apart from being a traveler’s tale,
science fiction, and contemporary satire, it is a work of high style and light
comedy at the same time. It is the story of Niels Klim, returning to his
native Bergen in Norway after ten years of study at the University of
Copenhagen in Denmark. One must keep in mind that Denmark-Norway
was a dual Monarchy at the time. Inside the Hollow Earth, Klim meets the
sentient and philosophical trees from the planet Nazar orbiting around a sun
in the middle of the Earth. Holberg reveals a utopian society of sentient
trees as well as many different sentient minor tree societies. Eventually, the
government exiles Klim to the inner rim of the Earth’s crust. Here he meets
a sentient monkey society, becomes a slave, and ends up as a conqueror and
a malevolent tyrant before returning to his home in Norway. His journey
there and back again took 12 years.
What makes Hoberg’s The Journey of Niels Klim to the World
Underground interesting or even remarkable? How does it relate other
literary genres like satire, utopian fiction, fantasy, and science fiction? What
themes and content makes it distinct and why is it mostly unknown to the
public?

Summary
The novel has autobiographical inclinations because the author, Ludvig
Holberg, just like Niels Klim, grew up in Bergen and came to Denmark to
study at the University of Copenhagen. However, the similarities stop there.
In the year 1664, Klim examines a cave in a mountain. With a rope around
his waist, he is slowly descending into the unknown until the rope breaks
(Figure 1.1).
FIGURE 1.1 Map of the underground world.

Klim falls, but suddenly comes to a halt. He does not crash down on the
planet Nazar orbiting the sun at the center of the Earth. Instead, he finds
himself floating between Earth’s crust and the planet. The gravitational
forces catch Klim and he finds himself orbiting the planet. A griffin attacks
him and after a fight, they plunge down onto the planet Nazar. He ends up
in the land of Potu (Utop(ia) backwards). Attacked by an ox, he climbs up a
tree, which to his surprise, is able to speak and even move around. They are
sentient tree-like beings with faces right below the braches and with up to
six arms. Klim is taken into custody accused attempted rape of the mayor’s
wife. It becomes apparent that it has been a misunderstanding and Klim is
sentenced to learn the native language.
Potu is the land of reason, a realm of sentient and very sensible trees, and
comes closest to a perfect state in the eyes of Holberg. It is also the part of
the novel with the most coherent subcreation, introducing the reader to how
the Potuan society and the planet Nazar work. The subcreation of Nazar
presents a planet with one language of which the reader only gets a small
sample of words and phrases, geographical knowledge, education, the laws
of Potu, and the Potuans’ relationship to religion.
The planet is scarcely 600 miles all around the globe. The roads have
milestones with clear markings of distances. We also learn that there are
different kinds of tree inhabitants on the planet such as oak, lime, poplar,
thorn, and pine trees.
 Before his banishment, Klim comes to be the messenger for the King
and Queen and is later asked to visit the whole planet because he has the
ability move much faster than the trees. Although, they also think he is too
hasty and he gets the nickname “Skabba” that means “overhasty”. The
Potuans’ value measured consideration rather than rushed decisions and
project making. Klim visits 27 provinces of different species of sentient
trees, turning his explorations into a book. The book becomes popular and
Klim hopes to advance in society. Following his success, he becomes
ambitious and proposes that women should become second-class citizens.
The Potuans reject his suggestion and exile him from Nazar to the
firmament, the underside of the Earth’s interior.
Klim arrives at the City of Martinia, the habitants of which are
intelligent monkeys. Again, he learns the native language. Contrary to the
Potuans, the Martinians are quick-witted and superficial. They view him as
dimwitted and sluggish and name him “Kakidoran” meaning “slow” or
“hebetated”. Nevertheless, Klim becomes an instant success when he
introduces the French fashion of wigs. Now a respectable nobleman, Klim
lives in luxury among High Society. His luck, however, changes after a
couple of years when the president’s wife falls in love with him. He rejects
her and she accuses him of trying to seduce her. In order to save his life
Klim pleads guilty and subsequently sentenced to become a galley slave on
a trading voyage to the Mezendorian islands.
On this journey as a galley slave, he encounters Music-land in which
everyone is a musical instrument and then arrives shortly at Pyglossia,
where the Pyglossians disgustingly communicate by breaking wind. During
this voyage, Klim come across a range of other peculiar beings and
wondrous civilizations.
Following a disastrous shipwreck, Klim ends up among a savage human
tribe named Quama (the only savages mentioned in the entire book) and
turns them into his army. He introduces guns and gunpowder into the
underworld and sets out to conquer the entire firmament, and in the course
of this empire building, he marries a deceased emperors’ daughter and
becomes a tyrannical ruler. During his campaign he rejects the offer of
marrying an emperor’s daughter, a beautiful lioness, because he is already
married. Finally, the people rebel against him and he flees into a cavern and
returns to Norway where he originally came from.
 Niels Klim has been away for 12 years. An old friend of Klim’s listens to
his story and advises him not to go public with his adventures in the wake
of religious persecution. He therefore decides to keep quiet about his
exploits and settles down as a custodian, marries a merchant’s daughter,
Magdalena, and has three sons, Christian, Jesper, and Caspar. His friend
later publishes Klim’s manuscript posthumously.

The Question of Genre

The question of the genre of The Journey of Niels Klim to the World
Underground has been a matter of debate. There is a long tradition of
fictional travel narratives going back to at the very least The Tale of the
Shipwrecked Sailor (The Middle Kingdom, 2000–1500 BC) and The
Odyssey (8th century BC). Lucian of Samosata’s True History (125 AD),
The Book of Sir John Mandeville (1357), Margaret Cavendish’s The
Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World (1666), and
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) are noteworthy examples of this
genre. Often these stories present a glimpse into a world of wonder but also
a world of satire and social criticism. In many cases, this kind of social
criticism is necessary because it is unwise and even dangerous to criticize a
contemporary power structure directly. Holberg was aware of this long
tradition and knew as playwright how satire happened to be useful as social
criticism, too (Paludan, 1878).
Peter Fitting recognizes three genres in the work of Ludvig Holberg: (1)
utopia, (2) satire, and (3) fantasy (Fitting, 1996, 2018). Potu is of course
Holberg’s utopia. Here, Holberg introduces the reader to a world in which
men and women are equal and the laws of the land are rational. The satire
begins when Niels Klim leaves Potu and journeys to the Nazar provinces
and continues on the firmament up until Klim becomes a galley slave. It
then turns into almost entirely fantasy when Klim fights his way from
galley slave to become a conqueror and sinister tyrant.
It is, however, possible to comprehend the entire novel as the genre of
fantasy fiction. From this perspective, the novel is a fictional chronicle
complete with an epic travel adventure, strange lands, a map of the fantasy
world, fragments of fictional history books, and fantasy races with their
own languages like the tree-people of Nazar, the Monkey-people of
Martinia, and many others. Particularly, the tree-people causes a modern
fantasy reader to think of Tolkien’s Ents and it has even been suggested that
Tolkien was in fact inspired by The Journey of Niels Klim to the World
Underground (McNelis, 2006). Surely, Holberg found inspiration for some
of his races in Plinius (Paludan, 1878). The entrance to the fantasy world is
also an often-used trope in fantasy fiction.
Klim falls through a hole like Alice does in Lewis Carroll’s fantasy
novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), although she fell through a
smaller hole. C. S. Lewis in his fantasy novel The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe (1950) likewise uses this trope of suddenly entering a fantasy
world through a passage when Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy walk into a
wardrobe and reach the world of Narnia. This is different from other books
like The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of The Rings (1955) by J. R. R.
Tolkien, where the subcreation is not only just a backdrop for a visit to a
fantasy world, but also exists in its entirety and totality as fully fledged as
possible. The problem with visiting a fantasy world and returning to the
Primary World is that the people from the Primary World do not necessarily
believe the returning visitor’s account of the experienced events. This
applies to Lucy returning from Narnia as well as Niels Klim, risking
religious persecution if he goes public with his story. Tzvetan Todorov
terms an accepted supernatural world as “the Marvelous”, while uncertainty
of the supernatural world is termed “the Fantastic-Marvelous” (Todorov,
1975). Within this terminology, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World
Underground is reckoned as Fantastic-Marvelous. Even so, the Marvelous
and the Fantastic-Marvelous are both considered instances of fantasy
fiction.
Furthermore, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground
presents magic and references to myth and folklore. In the introduction, we
are being told that in Norway many superstitious people believe in fairies
and supernatural spirits coming from under the mountains. Fittingly,
Norwegian folklore is bursting with mountain dwellers like trolls and
goblins who spellbind and enthrall humans, replacing human babies with
changelings (Holbek and Piø, 1967). In addition, a Finnish shaman
portrayed in the Apologetic Preface to The Journey of Niels Klim to the
World Underground practices witchcraft to turn himself into an eagle. When
Klim enters the fantasy world, he encounters a griffin — a classical
mythical creature. Even so, it is unclear if the fantasy races are magical
beings. The fantasy world, it seems, does not really use magic at all. There
are no wizards or magical items. The shaman appeared in Norway (the
normal world), not in the Nazar or the firmament. This gives one the
impression that Holberg is playing wittingly with our prejudices.
The lack of magic in the fantasy world leaves us with another option that
Holberg’s novel could be considered science fiction. Depending on one’s
perspective, science fiction began when Hugo Gernsback coined the term in
1926, or when Jules Verne published Journey to the Center of the Earth
(1864), or when Mary Shelley Published Frankenstein: A Modern
Prometheus (1818). Works before that are often considered proto-science
fiction, although scholars do not agree and some accept any work of fiction
with science fiction tropes to be more-or-less science fiction regardless of
age. Accordingly, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground is
either proto-science fiction or plain science fiction. If we accept Holberg’s
novel as science fiction, then it is one of the first science fiction novels in
history along with Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634), Cyrano de
Bergerac’s Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1656),
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Voltaire’s Micromégas
(1752) (Kincaid, 2011; de Sousa, 2015; Keen, 2015; Roberts, 2016).
From a science fiction perspective, the novel is a fictional exploration of
the Hollow Earth theory and describes a voyage to another planet and the
inner rim of Earth. The sentient beings from the planet Nazar and the
firmament are alien life forms, each with their own civilization. The main
character, Niels Klim, is a graduated academic in Theology and Philosophy
from the University of Copenhagen and even though this is a digression
from the typical scientist or engineer in modern science fiction, he still has
an academic background. His academic curiosity makes him wonder about
the mysterious phenomenon of a mountain chasm that seems to breathe.
This means that scientific exploration prompts the journey into the abyss. In
addition, his intelligence makes him able to learn new languages and write
books. Another digression from modern science fiction is that Klim tumbles
down into the abyss rather than building a machine or other scientific
means of travel. From a modern science fiction perspective, it appears to be
lazy storytelling, though bear in mind Holberg did not have any ambition of
creating a modern science fiction story.
Another well-known trope in science fiction is the invention of new
technology. The canals in Potu have self-moving boats with quiet machine-
propelled oars. Holberg writes:

There are also seas and rivers which bear vessels, whose oars seem to
be moved by a kind of magic impulse, for they are not worked by the
labour of the arm, but by machines like our clockwork. The nature of
this device I cannot explain, as being not well versed in mechanics;
and besides these trees contrive everything with such subtlety, that no
mortal without the eyes of Argus or the power of divination can arrive
at the secret.
(Holberg, 2004 (original: 1741/1745), p. 48)

This would, of course, not be science fiction in the world of today, since
boat and ship technology have moved far beyond what Klim describes.
Nevertheless, it was science fiction back in the 18th century. The
mechanical boat is a way to present the Potuans as a highly sophisticated
race, but it does not become a central artifact of the story and as such, it is
merely a prop (Lewis, 1966; Wolfe, 2011). Then again, the technology is
described as if it seems to be some kind of magic, no mortal may grasp its
secret, and the power of divination is needed to understand it. Do these
descriptions indicate wizardry rather than technology? Now, it is unclear
how this vessel actually functions but the important thing is that it works
like a clockwork and therefore probably some kind of automaton or
mechanical device (Fitting, 2017). The technology is so advanced that Klim
fails to fully realize its nature. As Arthur C. Clarke once stated, “Any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (Clarke,
1984, p. 36). In this sense, this technology is not wizardry, but to Klim it
almost seems like magic and accordingly, he applies supernatural
metaphors in order to fathom these underworld wonders.
Another technology in The Journey of Niels Klim to the World
Underground is guns and gunpowder. This technology has the opposite
quality. While it was, and still is, a fairly common technology in Europe
where Klim comes from, it is a weird and almost magical technology to the
inhabitants of the firmament. Subsequently, it is not science fiction to Klim,
Holberg, or the reader, yet the introduction of guns and gunpowder is like
science fiction to the underworld. Such a what-if-scenario is also used in
Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) in
which guns and gunpowder similarly are brought in by the fictional
character Hank Morgan coming from the United States in the 19th century
where guns and gunpowder do exist, to 6th-century England where it
certainly does not.
Still, the griffin, a mythical creature, ought not to fit into science fiction;
one would think that would be a trope of sheer fantasy. On the contrary, the
encounter with the griffin works as a proof that the griffin was in fact not a
mythical creature, because there was a scientific and not a supernatural
explanation to its existence. The real reason behind the myth, according to
Klim, was that it actually existed in the underground of Earth. Of course,
this only works within the parameters of the imaginary world, but then
again, that is true of any science fiction, presenting new astonishing ideas.
There are two reasons as to why Holberg’s novel is uniquely interesting
in science fiction history. The first reason is that it is a journey to another
planet with sentient life, which was still at the time a rare theme in
literature. Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) had only a few decades earlier
written a treatise, Cosmotheoros (1698), about the possibility of life on
other planets. The second and most important reason is that it is the first
significant novel exploring the concept of a Hollow Earth as suggested by
the English astronomer Edmond Halley (1656–1742) in 1692 (Fara, 2007).
This kind of science fiction is what C. S. Lewis refers to as “scientific, but
speculative” (Lewis, 1966, p. 63) rather than the fiction of Engineers.
So what genre is The Journey of Niels Klim? To Holberg it was a
fictional travel narrative in the tradition of satirical utopian fiction. To Peter
Fitting it is threefold, subsequently as utopia, satire, and fantasy. In
addition, it is equally conceivable to interpret the novel as fantasy fiction
and, in retrospect, as early science fiction. Rather than choosing one of the
above as the true genre, different perspectives on Holberg’s novel open up
the work in different ways, although depending on the purpose, some
interpretations may be more or less useful. One more way to open up this
work is to take a closer look at its social criticism and satire.

Social and Religious Utopia

Ludvig Holberg was a part of the rising Enlightenment movement of the
18th century. While Holberg, as playwright, composed his didactic plays for
a Danish audience in Copenhagen, he wrote The Journey of Niels Klim to
the World Underground in Latin for a much larger European public and
published the novel outside of Denmark-Norway in Leipzig, Electorate of
Saxony. The subsequent year, translations into English, German, French,
Danish, and Dutch occurred, and were later followed by Russian, Swedish,
and Hungarian versions (Holm, 2018). Holberg’s novel was not just an
innocent fairytale. It had the potential to revolutionize the foundation of
European governments, structured for the most part around Kings and
Nobles, and offered a radically different world-view.
It is not that Holberg was a republican or a democrat (that would have
been lèse-majesté and treason); quite the opposite, he was a devout royalist.
He was against project-makers and disapproved of commoners taking
power without a traditional powerbase. Holberg demonstrates this
philosophical view in his novel. In one instance, a philosopher named
Rabaku ruled Potu. This did not go well because the society could not
respect him since he had the most miserable upbringing and now reached
the pinnacle of power. Thus, even though he was excellent at the art of
governing, this alone could not ensure the dignity and admiration needed to
rule the state. His equals and minions simply refused to obey his orders.
First, he tried to rule with charm, and then brutality. Potu plunged into a
rebellion. Rabaku abdicated so peace and prosperity could return, realizing
that only a prince with birthright to the throne could in fact rule the state.
Hence, ruling power is hereditary, in a straight line, with only a few
necessary exceptions.
This part is not in the least revolutionary. Holberg rejects Plato’s idea
that the philosopher-kings ought to rule the state. Plato argued that
philosopher-kings would be the finest rulers of society because they were
able to recognize genuine virtuousness and righteousness since they were
better educated and as a result, they could make better decisions (Takala,
1998; Plato, 2008 (original, circa 380 BC)). In Holberg’s utopia, the
nobility rule because they were born to do so, and this condition alone
renders the king able to uphold the veneration needed to govern the state.
Nevertheless, other parts of his utopia are far more progressive. Holberg
pleads for a state based on rationality and meritocracy, thinking those
people who can work the hardest should get the most respect. There is no
difference between nobles and commoners and as such, it is a classless
society, although dissimilarity between rich and poor exists. The Potuans
judge only by character and employment. As trees, the only kind of
advantage children have from birth consists in the number of branches they
are born with, the more the better because they will become superior craft
workers. Workers earn respect for their labor. Furthermore, people with
many children should be the most respected, even though they did not have
to work as hard. Having many children freed Potuans from duties so they
could take care of their offspring. People with many children should not
work as hard, since they are working harder in order to support their family.
Moreover, if a person had more than six children, then that individual did
not have to pay tax at all. This means court officials should show respect to
the hardworking people and people with many children. Peasants rank
higher than merchants and courtiers. The more state benefits you take
pleasure in, the more humble you should be. The richest bowed to the
poorest. Holberg had radical humanist ideas of social justice without any
Marxist influence, written a century earlier than Karl Marx made his mark
in history. Holberg’s ideas are still revolutionary beliefs today.
Another humanist idea clearly presents in Holberg’s portrayal of gender
equality. This alone makes the novel stand out. While Jonathan Swift
addressed misogyny in Gulliver’s Travels (Hawes, 1991), Holberg takes it a
long step further and puts forward unreserved gender equality in his utopia.
The Potuans pay no regard to gender in appointment to office and only elect
those who prove most worthy after a meticulous examination. There is no
glass ceiling, and women may climb the career ladder to the highest level of
society based on their skills and personality. Consequently, there are equal
rights for boys and girls, and men and women, to get an education as well.
Again, the Potuans exclusively observe the students’ capabilities, not their
social position nor their gender. Holberg had exceptionally liberal views in
his lifetime because strict gender equality was certainly not the rule in the
18th century.
Holberg had strong views on religion as well. Potuans view God as the
creator of all things. God shall be loved and honored, and there is an
afterlife in which virtues are rewarded and vices punished. However, they
do not study theology. It is forbidden to comment on the Holy books. None
shall debate the presence and attributes of God, or the characteristics of soul
and the spirits. If they do, they are declared insane and locked up.
Ironically, Holberg did not think of this as religious persecution. The
Potuans do not pray pointlessly because they are convinced that piety and
true worship are primarily to abide the law of God, and they certainly did
not praise God for winning a war. On the contrary, they let some days go by
in mournful silence as if they were ashamed to have won a bloody victory.
These religious views were not popular in Denmark. Especially among
the Pietists who were not pleased with Holberg’s unconventional ideas. His
views were born out of the Thirty Years’ War from 1618 to 1648 in which
Catholics and Protestants fought against one another, Christians in battle
against Christians, fighting for the right interpretation of the Holy Bible. If
only they had not studied theology but loved God and followed His
commands, then they might not have gone to war. This appears to be
Holberg’s solution to the problem. Besides, Holberg had troubles with the
Pietists earlier in life. Pietism was a French idea then-recently introduced to
Denmark-Norway and famous for its condemnation of theater, dance,
games, etc. (Sand, 1994). In 1722, Lille Grønnegade Theatre in
Copenhagen premiered with a play by Molière. Holberg followed up by
writing new Danish plays for the theater such as The Political Tinker (1722,
Den politiske kandestøber), Jeppe on the Hill (1722, Jeppe på bjerget), and
Erasmus Montanus (1747). During a great fire in Copenhagen in 1728,
which ravaged a third of the city, the theater was saved. However, Pietists
blamed this disaster on the miserable morals of the citizens of Copenhagen,
and demanded the theater be closed. When the Pietist King Christian VI
(1699–1746) came to power in the 1730s, the political climate did not
promote a reopening of the theater and it has never again been revived
(Jensen, 1972; Holm, 2018). This explains why The Journey of Niels Klim
to the World Underground was a subtle criticism of Pietism, and why
Holberg decided to print it anonymously in Latin in the Electorate of
Saxony, trying to elude government reprisal and censorship (Rossel, 1994).
Holberg tells us that in Potu it is better to employ citizens in plays and
other diversions than let them stay idle, and that nobody should be
considered useless. All people have qualities that may be useful to society
in some way. He also warns against false humility. Knowing Holberg’s
views on Pietism, it becomes obvious that indeed, this social and religious
criticism could potentially be explosive. Consequently, when the Danish
translation of The Journey of Niels Klim had been published in 1742, it did
not take long to figure out who wrote it. The Pietists in Denmark were
furious. That is why the 1745 edition added the Apologetic Preface, which
is not apologetic at all, but provokes even more by creating a fiction to
declare the work an authentic testimony.
 The utopia Holberg exhibits is a world of social justice, gender equality,
and enlightened religious views that were not the norms and values of
Denmark-Norway and the rest of Europe in the middle of the 18th century,
and he created these revolutionary ideas a century earlier than the origins of
Marxism.

Social Satire
There is plenty of social satire in The Journey of Niels Klim to the World
Underground. Holberg satirizes so extensively that it would be too much to
try and cover (and uncover) all of it. This, then, is a look at the social satire
of Denmark and France, misogyny, and scholars.
To begin with the scholars, Niels Klim is ridiculed for being too
conceited about his academic credentials. His dreams of quick career
progress are questioned. First, by the Potuans who think he is overhasty,
then by the Martinians who find him too slow and dimwitted, and finally,
when he ends up as a malevolent tyrant. All of these are examples of how
his ambitions are too huge for his own good.
In the Philosophical Region, they are supposed to value science and
philosophy, but they are out of this world. A man absorbed in his own
thoughts beats Niels Klim up because he took him for a pillar. He is nearly
dissected out of curiosity, had he not been helped by a woman who wants to
have sex with him because the philosophers are no good when it comes to
the needs of a woman. These are just some of the many accounts of
ridiculing scholars and academics.
There is a recurring motif of Niels Klim meeting women. At first, he
climbs up in a tree that turns out to be female, only later to be judged by
another female tree. In the Kingdom of Kokleku, Niels Klim encounters a
tree society in which gender roles are reversed and the males cook and
perform all the domestic duties, if they are not prostitutes for women. He
hears about the Queen’s harem with 300 attractive young fellows locked up
for life. He hurries away, and later he flees the woman that saved him from
being dissected by the philosophers. In Martinia, the wife of the President
tries to seduce him; after he rejects her, she turns against him and tells
everyone the lie that he tried to seduce her. Later, he marries a deceased
emperor’s daughter, denies marrying another daughter of an emperor, but
ends up remarrying Magdalena back in Norway anyway. As what should
now be obvious, Niels Klim has many encounters with women. Of course,
the most central is his hubris when, in Nazar, he turns against women and
wants them to be second-class citizens, a change from gender equality to a
Patriarchal society, and for this he receives the punishment of banishment to
the firmament, the inner surface of Earth.
Niels Klim tries his best but mostly fail in the end. Even his dream
scenario of becoming an emperor fails. A Napoleonic figure before
Napoleon, he is an anti-hero, a tragedy, a failed scholar that ends up as a
custodian without the courage to tell the public about his greatest
adventures.
Holberg satirizes Denmark as well. The Mardak Province is inhabited by
the narrow-minded and stubborn cypresses who would rather insist on
deceitful orthodoxy than learn anything new. Neophytes without
qualifications, other than the trait of being obstinate, get high-ranking
positions. The name “Mardak” bears a strong resemblance to (and is almost
an anagram of) Denmark (Danish: Danmark), and is accordingly considered
a criticism of Denmark in the 18th century (Bredsdorff and Kjældgaard,
2010).
The most unusual thing about the inhabitants of Mardak is that they all
have very special eyes. Some have oblong eyes and to them everything
appear oblong; some have square eyes, or very small eyes, some have two
eyes turned in opposite directions, there are even some with three eyes, four
eyes, and eyes that occupy the whole forehead, and finally some have only
a single eye in the neck. The symbolism is clear; the Danes do not see
anything clearly.
Martinia on the firmament, inhabited by the monkey-people, is an
allegory of France in the 18th century (Paludan, 1878). They are the
opposite of the utopian Potuans. The Martinians are superficial and are far
too hasty. Klim think of them as fools because they make rash decisions.
Their state is a great council selected from an old nobility. Their religion
has more than 200 speculations concerning the form and being of God, and
almost 400 speculations as to the nature and qualities of the soul, and many
theological seminars and preachers. There are many project-makers coming
up with foolish ideas, praised for their boldness even though they cannot
deliver. This is Holberg’s nightmarish dystopia, satirizing hurried decision-
making, irrationality, nobility, project-makers, and theologians such as the
French Pietists.

Adaptation
When one thinks of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, there are plenty of
movies going back to Georges Méliès’s Gulliver’s Travels among the
Lilliputians and the Giants from 1902. The same cannot be said for Niels
Klim; Hollywood has overlooked Holberg’s novel. In 1984, DR (Danish
television) produced a Danish three-part television adaptation Niels Klims
underjordiske rejse (Niels Klim’s Underworld Journey). The television
series was theatrical and amateurish. No other film or television series has
been produced based on The Journey of Niels Klim to the World
Underground.

Conclusion
Ludvig Holberg’s The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground
from 1741 acts both as an allegorical social criticism of 18th-century
kingdoms and as a subcreated world in its own right, depicting an
interesting journey to a fantastic Hollow Earth world. Originally written in
Latin and published in Saxony, the work was part of the European
Enlightenment, and Holberg presents a harsh criticism of misogyny, social
injustice, and religion in 18th-century Europe.
The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground is interesting
because it is a travel narrative in the satirical utopian genre, like Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels. The novel is important because it is an example of either
proto-science fiction or early science fiction, depending on one’s science
fiction perspective. It is an even more important work because it has a rare
18th-century journey to another planet, and because it is the most
significant work presenting an imaginative subcreation of a Hollow Earth. It
may also have included the inspiration for Tolkien’s Ents.
As if this was not enough, the book represents an Enlightenment-age
social reformation based on a radical notion of social justice, a century
before Karl Marx, and it was a counteraction to 18th-century Pietism in
Denmark. Holberg’s utopia, built upon rationality and meritocracy, has far-
reaching consequences, with the notion that society is fundamentally
different without nobility, with a progressive respect for workers and
families, and, on top of that, with a depiction of true gender equality, too.
For all of the above reasons Ludvig Holberg’s The Journey of Niels Klim
to the World Underground is a remarkable literary work, but because there
are no Hollywood movies nor popular television series adapted from it, the
Scandinavian novel is mostly forgotten.

Bibliography
Bredsdorff, Thomas; and Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, Tolerance: Eller hvordan man lærer at leve med
dem man hader, Copenhagen, Denmark: Gyldendal, 2010.
Clarke, Arthur C., Profiles of the Future, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984.
de Sousa, Elisabete M., “Niels Klim: Project Makers in a World Upside Down” in Katalin Nun and
Jon Stewart, editors, Volume 16, Tome II: Kierkegaard’s Literary Figures and Motifs: Gulliver to
Zerlina, New York: Routledge, 2015, pages 65–72.
Fara, Patricia, “Hidden Depths: Halley, Hell and Other People”, Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science, Volume 38, Issue 3, September 2007, pages 570–583.
Fitting, Peter, “Buried Treasures: Reconsidering Holberg’s Niels Klim in the World Underground”,
Utopian Studies, Volume 7, Issue 2, 1996, pages 93–112.
Fitting, Peter, “Holberg’s Nazar and the Firmament” in Mark J. P. Wolf, editor, The Routledge
Companion to Imaginary Worlds, New York: Routledge, 2017, pages 339–343.
Hawes, Clement, “Three Times Round the Globe: Gulliver and Colonial Discourse”, Cultural
Critique, No. 18, Spring 1991, pages 187–214.
Holbek, Bengt; and Jørn Piø, Fabeldyr og Sagnfolk, Copenhagen, Denmark: Politikens Forlag, 1967.
Holberg, Ludvig, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground, Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2004 (original: 1741/1745).
Holm, Bent; and Ludvig Holberg, A Danish Playwright on the European Stage: Masquerade,
Comedy, Satire, Vienna, Austria: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, 2018.
Jensen, Anne E., Teatret i Lille Grønnegade 1722–1728, Copenhagen, Denmark: Arnold Busck,
1972.
Keen, Antony, “Mr Lucian in Suburbia, or Do the True History and The First Men in the Moon have
Anything in Common?” in Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens, editors, Classical
Traditions in Science Fiction, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2015, pages 105–120.
Kincaid, Paul, “Through Time and Space: A Brief History of Science Fiction” in Andy Sawyer and
Peter Wright, editors, Teaching Science Fiction, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011,
pages 21–37.
Lewis, C. S., “On Science Fiction” in Walter Hooper, editor, Of Other Worlds, London, England:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966, pages 59–73.
McNelis, James Ignatius, “‘The tree took me up from ground and carried me off’: A Source for
Tolkien’s Ents in Ludvig Holberg’s Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground”, Tolkien
 Studies, Volume 3, 2006, pages 153–156.
Paludan, J., Om Holbergs Niels Klim, med særligt Hensyn til til tidligere Satirer i Form af opdigtede
og vidunderlige Reiser. Et Bidrag til Kundskab om fremmed Indvirkning på det attende
Aarhundredes Litteratur, Copenhagen, Denmark: Wilhelm Priors Hof-Boghandel, 1878.
Plato, The Republic, Digireads.com Publishing, 2008 (original: c. 380 BC).
Roberts, Adam, The History of Science, Second Edition, London, England: Palgrave Macmillan,
2016.
Rossel, Sven Hakon, Ludvig Holberg: A European Writer: A Study in Influence and Reception,
Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 1994.
Sand, Erik Reenberg, “Ludvig Holbergs religionssyn som udtrykt i Niels Klim”,
Religionsvidenskabeligt tidskrift , No. 25, 1994, pages 61–81.
Takala, T., “Plato on Leadership”, Journal of Business Ethics, Volume 17, Issue 7, May 1998, pages
785–798.
Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1975.
Wolfe, Gary K., Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature, Middletown, Connecticut:
Wesleyan University Press, 2011.
2
‘A LITTLE BIT OF ENGLAND
WHICH I HAVE MYSELF
CREATED’
Creating Barsetshire across Forms, Genres, Time,
and Authors

Helen Conrad O’Briain

Today Barsetshire and its cathedral town of Barchester are best known as
the setting of a much-loved BBC costume drama, The Barchester
Chronicles (1982) starring, among others, Susan Hampshire and a young
Alan Rickman near the beginning of his career. The two novels the series
dramatized, The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857) are,
however, much more than the first in a series of interconnected novels by
the prolific Anthony Trollope. They delineated with real depth the
landscape and society of a more than what-if corner of England. Barsetshire
was so well and surely drawn, so suited to narratives revolving around the
tensions between preservation and change, it became, on a certain level, as
material and authentic as any real-world English region, and as popular a
setting for such narratives, as any of them.
 Trollope was followed across genres and succeeding decades by M. R.
James, Ronald Knox, and, most prolifically, Angela Thirkell, and, lest we
think no train still runs to Barchester (on a Sunday or otherwise, and
leaving aside the distinct possibility that that noteworthy preparatory school
for young ladies, Saint Trinian’s, lies within striking distance), in the 21st
century by American author, Charlie Lovett, who re-imagines Barsetshire in
an almost fantasy mode.

The Relative Neglect of Literary World-Building

Outside the So-called Popular Genres
A consideration of Trollope’s Barchester novels in terms of world-building
opens up not only an important departure from novelistic narrative focus
and character development, but also offers engagement with the economics
of literature, the active engagement of a readership both as readers and as
writers, and the development of world-building across the genres of the
novels in general. We must acknowledge, among other things, the
overwhelming influence of the essentially realistic novel of the mid-to-late
19th century on all other contemporary narrative forms. No narrative genre
was spared its influence on characterization, plotting, or world-building.
With the exception of Balzac’s Commedie Humaine,1 whose influence was
early recognized and accepted by Trollope himself,2 Trollope’s Barchester
novels, followed by the later Palliser novels, stand very close to the
beginning of a continuing and lively subgroup of literary narratives. With
them, possibly influenced by multi-volume historical narratives
(particularly, perhaps, Thomas Babington MacCaulay’s History of England
from the Accession of James the Second (1848–1861),3 with its inclusion of
the social setting as well as the political setting4), arise a progeny of similar
fictional narratives stretching across the lives of generations. Such an
authorial approach has become so commonplace, from Anthony Powell’s A
Dance to the Music of Time (1951–1975) to L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of
Green Gables (1908) and its sequels (including short stories in which Anne
is mentioned or takes a minor role), that it is difficult now to realize the
novelty multi-volume stories once had, or even the authorial concerns for
their readers’ ability to appreciate it. To quote Trollope himself: “the
carrying on of a character from one book to another is very pleasant to the
author; but I am not sure that all readers will participate in that pleasure”.5
Similarly, the current omnipresence of such continuing stories can lead
reader and critic to simply and subconsciously accept, rather than
appreciate, the particular possibilities offered by the interlocking of
narratives of place and society into an overarching narrative carried within,
and supported by, the construction of an overarching, containing world.
All narrative requires a setting, but the creative methods and purposes of
narrative worlds have not received the same specific attention across all
genres and forms. The study of literary world-building, in readers’ and in
critics’ minds, has been almost exclusively associated with fantasy and
science fiction. It is not so much that there is no scholarly interest in the
material which forms the basis for its criticism, but rather that it is not
necessarily approached as such. With the notable exception of Ellen
Moody’s brief but insightful “Mapping Trollope; or the Geographies of
Power,”6 in reference to Trollope and many other novelists of the mundane,
it is elided into other aspects of a work. Critical analysis of what might be
called the constituent elements of world-building is by no means non-
existent, as, for example, in Mieke Bal’s treatment of description, space,
and location in Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative7
particularly when Bal insists

Description is a privileged site of focalization, and as such it has great

impact on the ideological and aesthetic effect of the text. But it is also
a particular textual, indispensable, indeed, omnipresent in narrative.8

There has been considerable critical work on the “Irish Great House” and
on Virginia Woolf, who wrote both as a novelist and as a critic, dissecting
the creation of meaning and atmosphere, which is at the heart of the act of
world-building.9 But such studies are not consciously situated within world-
building. One might suggest the more overtly artificial nature of the setting,
and the artifice generating it, in Science Fiction and Fantasy, even the
selection of reality upon which that artifice works, blunt the reader’s and
critic’s alertness to the less obvious, apparently less selective or
manipulative approach of other narrative modes. This, in turn, flattens its
recognition in those other narratives and their settings in an assumption of a
high level of fidelity to the mundane10 instead of seeing in them first and
foremost, as worlds of artifice in a necessarily symbiotic relationship with
character and action. This is despite the recognition, even in the sciences,
that

Sound observation consists of much more than an acute sensory

ability, involving choices in both selection of and assignment of
signification to what is seen.11

This is, perhaps, particularly true of the “realistic” novel, even though
Gaston Bachelard laid the groundwork for such a study, across both poetry
and prose, as long ago as 1958 in his La poétique de l’espace.12
Nevertheless, it is obvious that the aims and methods of world-building
criticism have growing relevance outside of popular literature as in J. P.
Mallory’s reference to it in the magisterial summation of his In Search of
the Irish Dreamtime (2016)13:

In the end the early Irish literati created a Secondary World that they
passed off as the Irish Iron Age. That they did a superb job is evident
in the centuries of scholars who have argued whether this imagined
world was a real document from Ireland’s prehistoric past.14

Much, then, has been recognized, but not, perhaps, its full implication as
integrated into a lively conceptualization of world-building. Where the
setting is clearly non-mundane or where the circumstances or needs of the
narrative require elements which the audience will identify as not of the
mundane, even when the setting ostensibly is our own world, the critical
arena is situated within a discussion of world-building. The closer it is
perceived that the narrative exists in an environment and in social
categories and mores within the writer’s and reader’s experience, then the
less likely it is to be consciously read within the distinct critical approach
given to world-building, the less likely its construction and implications for
the text as a whole are given their due.
Such scholarly disinterest, although culturally comprehensible, simply
by its apparent lack of engagement with world-building in other modes and
genres, skews and blunts our understanding of all fictional worlds. If we do
not approach all narratives with a sensitivity toward setting as integral to
the author’s purpose, we arguably misread all of them since they exist in a
continuum whether their connection is made and perceived consciously or
not. The art and influence of narrative placement, consciously or
unconsciously, flows, from one narrative to another across time, genre, and
mode directly, indirectly, rediscovered and recapitulated. Tempe is
everywhere, in every time15 and the walls of windy Troy rise in unexpected
places. We may even suggest that a greater sensitivity to setting,
particularly in the realistic novel, is perhaps an ethical necessity. A reader’s
acceptance of the reality and meaningfulness of a book’s internal world
does not stay within the book’s covers. We bring back to the mundane
souvenirs from each journey, however brief, to secondary creations. Our
time in such worlds almost invariably spills over into expectations of the
mundane realities of time, place, and society. At times, insidious
expectations based on the internalizing of literary world-building can have
potency in the real world, as has been demonstrated of Western
Orientalizing texts. The use of literary texts as primary sources for social
historians and others (and we may suggest a pertinent example in Scotland’s
reference to Barchester Towers16) will profit from a sophisticated
explication of such texts as invented within the original and present sense of
the word, however closely their originators strove to make them mirrors of
the mundane. The very act of verbalizing, of seizing on what to the author
is most salient to his or her purpose, is no different in its aims — or even, it
may be argued, in its essential techniques to high fantasy or the most outré
science fiction.
By widening the remit of world-building analysis, the reader and scholar
become more sensitive to the effect of a text retreating in time from its
present audience as compared to that of its original one. This is a constant
practice among scholars of older literatures who strive to rescue the text
from anachronistic readings and misinterpretation. Scotland’s reference to
Barchester, as mentioned above, for example, considerably sharpens and
underscores the relevance of Trollope’s ecclesiastical politics in the
Barchester series by insisting on the importance of radical changes in the
Anglican episcopacy during the period of The Warden (1855) and
Barchester Towers (1857); changes, as it happened, through what we may
heartlessly call “natural wastage” so sweeping, that the New York Times in
November, 1863, republished a contemporary English article on the
subject.17 Temporal distance seems to cast an afterglow of the romantic,
even of the quaint, on circumstances and situations which scorched hearts
and destroyed lives when those narratives were written. What was once the
harsh reality of the marriage mart in Austen’s England, or the bitter battles
of the ecclesiastical and secular, the Evangelicals and the Oxford
movement, in Trollope’s time, become, for those who have experienced
neither, merely charming chaffing, much ado about nothing. As the 19th
century retreats deeper into the past, readers, too, lose the sense of their
original, sometimes extreme, modernity for their original audience. Railway
timetables and the telegraph would have given the original readers a sense
of the frenetic activity invading the slow episcopal calm of Barchester. The
combined power of telegraph and newspaper,18 the new speed of
communication which may not be clearly communication in any real sense
to the characters living with them, is woven into the setting of characters
who find it difficult to communicate, who misunderstand and in their turn
are misunderstood at every turn.19 Rather than the quaint, the original
reader would have recognized the playing out of exasperation and
dislocation, and at times, apparently mindless energy. The world Trollope
builds is one moving at different speeds, socially and regionally, in a
country and society that had convinced at least a part of itself, as societies
usually do, that there was an orderly past social world, where change came
slowly with time to assimilate and transmute every change into a stable and
traditional society. Thirkell, Trollope’s most prolific and arguably most
sympathetic continuator, herself, however sentimentalized her world-
building might be, creates from the mundane a similar world in flux, albeit
ironically one looking back to the dreaded future of the Trollope novels.
She, the daughter of a classicist, must have written with Aeneid, Book 1,
line 462: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent (there are tears in
all that is and mortality touches thought)20 constantly before her.

Trollope’s Barsetshire in Its Time and through

Time
The following, then, is a brief attempt, and no more than a brief attempt, to
open up the study of world-building to include texts which lie outside of its
usual purview. This is done in the belief that all narratives of whatever
genre, crossing even from fiction into history itself, can only be properly
understood when their created or excavated settings are understood, when a
reading of the action and of the characters recognizes the powerful
exegetical tool of setting.
Trollope’s Barsetshire is offered as an entry into such texts because it
offers: (1) an insight into an important formal development in world-
building, the serial novel;21 (2) a light on the negotiation of the boundaries
between real-world settings and realistic world settings;22 and finally (3) a
new angle on the often overlooked impetus which lies behind world-
building across all narratives, for readers to become writers in a desire to
inhabit again another’s invented world — or shire.23 Introducing
Barsetshire into the critical discussion thus offers connective pathways
which may be pursued both individually and in combination with one
another, elucidating Trollope’s own practice, his influence on later writers,
and the echo, indeed, the ripples, of practice and purpose across narrative
generally. What follows, however, is again, merely an introduction to the
possibilities.
Barsetshire is pivotal in the development of the serial novel and
therefore of the possibility of a major shift in the dynamics of world-
building. It is now difficult to remember, but at least as regards the
relatively recent forms taken by the narrative,24 that the idea of the
continuing narratives across a number of short stories or novels only begins
to take hold of authorial and readerly imagination in the 1850s although
Balzac’s La Comedie humaine (1830) and Poe’s three short stories (1841–
1844) of C. Auguste Dupin had earlier shown the way. Still as a novelty, its
appearance in the English language novel must be connected first and
foremost with Trollope himself in his Barsetshire novels. Oddly, the reality
of the innovation apparently did not strike the author himself until Framley
Parsonage (1860)25 and as we have suggested above, he was not certain its
full interest and possibilities were not lost upon his first readers.
Nevertheless, readers of all tastes quickly accustomed themselves to it.
Hence, Tom Sawyer (1876) was followed by Huckleberry Finn (1884), and
The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) by Rupert of Hentzau (1898). Poovey, writing
in the Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope (2010), insists it is only
with The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866–1867) that the series, beginning in
1855 with The Warden, became effectively a single creation. Poovey’s
analysis of the creation of Barsetshire in Trollope’s original series becomes
focused, however, as to a great extent in their own contemporary critical
reception, on Trollope’s habit of sharing with his reader the realities of
authorial creation of setting, character, and plot.26
Still, the richness of Barsetshire, as it provides a locus across genres,
authors, and centuries, is a case study not merely of the multi-volume
narrative of one place by one author, but of the spin-off. The Barsetshire
novels are the first or nearly the first of their kind: both the multi-volume
novel of one place with a recurring cast of characters and the subject of
eventual re-incarnation in multi-author spin-offs (M. R. James (1910);
Angela Thirkell (1933–1960); Ronald Knox (1935), Charlie Lovett (2017)).
It would appear the traditional narrative curve of the novel, by the middle of
the 19th century, no longer always answered the needs or interests of the
writer or of his or her audience. The increasing economic concerns of
publishing, with the bankable author embraced, perhaps more slowly than
expected, but nevertheless surely, provided the added impetus for the
bankable series. To this must be added the sense of reality, of in-ness, the
fuller experience of human life, and social development. Trollope’s novels
provide in an unfolding series of deeply interlocked narratives, directed by
a single artistic understanding, comparable to the panoramic painting
popular in the 19th century,27 as much about the time and place in which a
society lives, as the individual characters that live in that society.28 In them,
as Poovey writes of The Last Chronicles of Barset, “the novel carries over
and completes the stories from other novels without changing these
characters’ natures”.29 Poovey’s assessment of the power of the series novel
in the creation of character is worth quotation:

By shifting the relative prominence of characters from novel to novel

and by putting the character traits he has already established to various
uses, Trollope was able both to create the impressions that the lives of
these characters continued even when narratives stopped and to
capitalize on information that readers had already gained from other
novels.30

As we shall see, much of the same strategies apply to the creation of the
place, which she calls at the end of her essay “the most vital novelistic
‘organism’ British readers had ever seen”,31 that these characters inhabit.
 Creating a multiple-volume Barsetshire, or working within that already-
created literary reality, offers not just a general form, but one as large as a
shire’s topography32 and society, offering at the same time places as
particular and specific as St. Ewold’s parsonage in Barchester Towers,33
created more by the Grantlys’s reaction to it than by any specific details,
except the miserable proportions of a dining room of 16 by 15 feet.34
Trollope himself wrote in his autobiography:

In the course of the job I visited Salisbury, and whilst wandering there
one midsummer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral I
conceived the story of The Warden, — from whence came that series
of novels of which Barchester, with its bishops, deans, and
archdeacon, was the central site.35

This approach places setting at the heart of narrative. It allows the

landscape and built environment to be viewed from multiple perspectives,
through different eyes each with their differently nuanced power of seeing
and understanding and all in individual circumstances. It empowers the
writer to look closely at one house, one room, one hill tract, one wood with
attention to detail and meaning, knowing that there is a place in the literary
world of Barsetshire in which it is situated and that immediately directs and
contains its further definition. This gives that teller of tales a landscape with
both the foundation of place similar to that immediately given to narrative
in a mundane place, like London, Paris, New York, or Dublin, while adding
the greater freedom of the invented. Any teller of tales of whatever sort,
knowing and accepting that Barsetshire exists in some sort of symbiotic
relationship with Wiltshire with its downs and chalk soil,36 can, if they
require it for their narrative or simply hanker after it for completeness, sit
down with a geological survey and introduce what features they will, but
selectively and not without whatever adaptations or adjustments they might
need.
Deeply imbued with the power of a particular and carefully constructed
setting, with some strong but intentionally vague connections to the
mundane,37 Barsetshire, ecclesiastical and below the Thames valley, would
be, for its readers then (perhaps even now), more slowly paced, more
deliberate, and naturally conservative. The county, the sum of all its parts,
across the authors, across time, from M. R. James’s short story, “The Stalls
of Barchester Cathedral” (1910)38 to Charlie Lovett’s The Lost Book of the
Grail (2017),39 ruminates like Bede’s clean beast, slowly enlarging its
sympathies, as it can and will for Thirkell’s Sam Adams,40 digesting or
ignoring change. And it must be admitted that, by and large, change is
rarely unequivocally good in the Barchester stories — with the notable
exception of Lovett’s The Lost Book of the Grail where change is
transmuted into a glorious, salvific return to the past.41 There is little to
suggest that the Jupiter or the Proudies, with their new and self-serving
impulses toward reform, made Barchester in any appreciable way a better
place. It is in individuals meeting what life brings to them and feeling their
way through those things by the light of their own consciences that
Barchester is left a better place, or at least a differently better place.
Trollope could burlesque an extreme antiquarian conservatism as
exemplified by Miss Thorne of Ullathorne in Barchester Towers,42 whose
garden party with its archaic impulses leads to anarchic impulses among all
the classes present, but his satire there is kindly. It has none of the distaste
with which he creates Mrs. Proudie. Barsetshire as an authorial invention,
however, reflects both Trollope’s own political and social views, sharpened,
it has been suggested, by the effect of his reengaging with his own
landscape on his return from Ireland to England in 1849. Whether aware or
not, he would have returned as that most puzzling and puzzled of observers,
the returned expatriate. The world which he creates in Barchester is
arguably the result of a bifocular vision of one who is both an insider and
outsider in his own country.
At least some of the characteristics of Barsetshire must be a reaction to
what must have seemed to him a deeply dystopic and largely
incomprehensible Ireland.43 A reaction to Ireland, and nostalgia for the
England Trollope had left, are further influenced by his reengagement with
the England to which he had returned, an England which at midcentury was
undergoing phenomenal change, for better or worse. It is on this point
today’s readers must remember that the events that seem, at our temporal
distance, slow and largely benign, did not necessarily feel either slow or
benign to those who lived through them. If a writer should wish to present
in a fictional narrative, a deep, albeit constructed, historical English
conservatism, Barsetshire as a setting will aid and abet him/her, aid, abet,
and admonish.
 Trollope’s followers have found just such places in the text to situate
narratives. This is certainly true of James’s “The Stalls of Barchester
Cathedral” (1910). Its world-building is entirely integrated, as it must be, in
the short story whose length dictates its other characteristics to create the
desired genre-defining effect. Its intensity, however, for the reader familiar
with Barchester Towers, is grounded within that larger act of subcreation.
The Barchester setting is not a bland allusion. It draws the reader back to
perhaps the true opening salvo of the Slopites against the Grantleyites.
James, a parson’s son, addresses, but covertly, the problems of ceremony, in
a deeply schizoid church caught in the not-always-happy marriage of
preservers and reformers exemplified by music. Overtly, he like Trollope,
circles the problems of the temporalities of the established Church, the
moral dilemmas set in motion by old men in high office dying too slowly.
The stalls of Barchester Cathedral see much the same dilemmas in both
works because the source of the dilemmas is not, and cannot be, addressed
without radically changing the church’s nature and denying its history.
Trollope’s Barchester, like James’s, must contain these tensions or cease to
command the reader’s interest and sense of reality. A more perfect church,
like Mr. Arabin’s musings on “a church with a head” (but not the Church of
Rome)44 would not be the Anglican Church, and the writers would have
departed too far from the mundane. In a similar (though freer and more
expansive) manner, Lovett’s The Lost Book of the Grail, integrating into the
life and history of Barchester a century and a half of Arthurian studies and
popular modern adaptations of the Matter of Britain (both of which are
thriving industries), has taken the possibilities presented by Trollope at St.
Ewold’s and by a certain conflation and change of sex (Ewold becomes
Ewolda), created a full history where before there was only a sacred lady,
and a well:

There was, he said, in days of yore, an illustrious priestess of St.

Ewold, famed through the whole country for curing all manner of
diseases. She had a well, as all priestesses have ever had, which well
was extant to this day and shared in the minds of many of the people
the sanctity which belonged to the consecrated ground of the parish.45

Trollope begins The Warden with an intellectually daring insight into his
creative process:
 The Revd Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed
clergyman residing in the cathedral town of — , let us call it
Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter Hereford or
Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was
intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries
of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be
suspected. Let us presume that Barchester is a quiet town in the West
of England, more remarkable for the beauty of its cathedral and the
antiquity of its monuments, than for any commercial prosperity, that
the west end is the cathedral close, and that the aristocracy of
Barchester are the bishop, dean, and canons, with their respective
wives and daughters.46

From this opening paragraph, Trollope focuses on what he sees as the heart
of the invention in which he is engaging and expects his readers to
recognize and engage with its artifice. That invention is not merely of
human characters, but of society and environment. It is important to
recognize here Trollope begins his fiction with exactly the attitude of which
his contemporary critics complained. His unabashed recognition, his
drawing attention to the fictive nature, even if it suggests it is only fictive
for a certain meaning of fictive, is focused on Barsetshire — on his world-
building, his setting as much as his character. It is in such terms that
Hawthorne appreciated Trollope, writing it was, “as if some giant had hewn
a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its
inhabitants going about their daily business”.47
Barsetshire is announced essentially as being in a symbiotic relationship,
in all its elements, with the mundane. It is itself the totality of the characters
which exist within it, social creatures moving through a socio-political and
natural geography. They constitute a society which is above all dominated
by an ecclesiastical hierarchy, not by merchants or by squires, not by
industrialists or noblemen. Although couched in terms of real people who
might be discommoded by a fully “real” setting, it is clear it is also insisting
on the exemplary (as well as fictive) nature of his characters and narrative.
Trollope is asking his readers to work with him, to integrate their
experience of the mundane with his, in a shared act of creation. He expects
his readers to bring a certain knowledge of places like Barchester, some of
which he names, and, in fact, to bring certain attitudes and assumptions
concerning such places to the story he is about to tell them. It is not an
economic powerhouse, like the cities of the north of England, with their
rapid growth and constant innovation in every aspect of human life. It is,
frankly, quaint. Barchester could only exist in the south and west of
London. It could never be several train stops from the town of Dicken’s
Hard Times (1854).48 It is a world characterized best in the opening
landscape of the hospital, the road, and the river, a passage which equally
exemplifies the movement of good prose which he knew was as important
as in poetry:49

Hiram’s Hospital, as the retreat is called, is a picturesque building

enough, and shows the correct taste with which the ecclesiastical
architects of those days were imbued. It stands on the banks of the
little river, which flows nearly around the cathedral close, being on the
furthest side of the town. The London Road crosses the river by a
pretty one-arched bridge, and looking from this bridge, the stranger
will see the windows of the old men’s rooms, each pair of windows
separated by a small buttress. A broad gravel walk runs between the
building and the river, which is always trim and cared for; and at the
end of the walk is a large and well-worn seat, on which, in mild
weather, three or four of Hiram’s beadsmen are sure to be seen seated.
Beyond this row of buttresses, and further from the bridge, and also
further from the water which here suddenly bends, are the pretty oriel
windows of Mr. Harding’s house, and his well-mown lawn. The
entrance to the hospital is from the London road, and is made through
a ponderous gateway under a heavy stone arch, unnecessary, one
would suppose, at any time for the protection of twelve old men,
greatly conducive to the good appearance of Hiram’s charity.50

The problem in approaching this description at the onset of the reader’s

sojourn in Barsetshire is the richness of meaning latent in it, particularly
should the reader return to it from the end of The Last Chronicles of
Barchester. It almost asks to be dangerously over-read, but it should by no
means be under-read. Here all that is stable is juxtaposed to all that is
fleeting, all the mutability inherent in the human condition: the foundation,
the river, and the road. Yet is it possible to be certain what is the mutable
and what is not? The Hospital will, despite buttresses and gateway, change
radically. The river is there as nothing else is, even the London road, yet it
changes continuously. The London road is the gateway to the world which
is dragging Barchester into the modernity of mid-Victorian England, but as
a representative of change, it is a constant, as even hyper-conservative Miss
Thorne would know from her favorite poet, Spenser; “. . . Right true it is,
that these, / And all things else that under heaven dwell, / Are chaung’d of
Time, who doth them all disseise”51 until we shall pass over Jordan.52 The
built environment itself will strike up a sympathetic resonance even beyond
Trollope’s Barchester: Angela Thirkell will constantly employ correct
architectural taste, for Trollope the 15th century, for her own novels, the
long 18th century, as a shorthand for aesthetic values almost
indistinguishable in her novels from ethical values.53
In Trollope’s description (which leaves the reader to imagine specifics
from their own experience), the solid cathedral, the close hospital, and the
significantly one-arched bridge are not merely set against the fluidity of
river and road. The details given, the buttresses, the apparently
unnecessarily “ponderous gateway under a heavy stone arch”, even the
single arch of the bridge, all comment in retrospect on the ecclesiastical
polity which must weather the storms of the narrative through six books.
And when the reader reaches the last pages, all these structures will appear
in a different light, less substantial, and less established; and the ever-
moving, always-present river, recalling perhaps the Jordan and baptism,
may seem, if it is meant so, the only true wall between the sacred and the
secular, between change and eternity; as Spenser wrote:

Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,

Of that same time when no more change shall be,
But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd
Upon the pillours of eternity,
That is contrayr to Mutabilitie:
For all that moveth doth in change delight:
But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight:
O that great Sabbaoth God graunt me that Sabaoths sight!54

The physical geography of Barsetshire, as suggested above, relies on the

unspoken connection with Wiltshire, but its reliance results in neither the
sketchy nor the slavish in Thirkell’s world as it grows across her novels.
The county emerges in the narrative in many ways, all of them carefully
crafted to participate in the creation of physical and built reality and the
people who inhabit it, furthering the narrative at every appearance. All of
these often complex, hard-working passages have their purpose, from the
description of walks, to the vistas included in those walks, to the use of
landscape features, as a “Chekov’s gun”, best exemplified by Harefield
Park’s lake with its spring, introduced with Mrs. Belton’s worried “I was
only wondering if the children would be allowed to skate on the lake this
winter if they get leave.”55 to the amusing, but pointed repetition of a single
landscape within the work of kind, clueless, jobbing watercolorist Mr.
Scatcherd.56 Each of these descriptions participates in, and recalls to its
readers, the shadows of other books as well as the mundane, assuming as
Thirkell did, a certain cultural awareness. Thirkell is not, as one would
expect, above the use of pathetic fallacy,57 but it is only one, and arguably
not the most important, of her methods.
In Angela Thirkel’s Peace Breaks Out (1946), a sister and brother,
appropriately named George and Sylvia Halliday, home on leave as the war
in Europe slowly comes to its end in the spring of 1945,

prepared to go for a walk by the sunken lane which represents what is

left of Gundric’s Fossway in those parts, under the steep escarpment
of Freshdown, once Frey’s Down, and so to the bold eminence of
Bolder’s Knob where no tree has ever grown since St. Ewold, in an
access of slum-clearance, caused the sacred oak grove to be cut
down.58

Although the walk is never taken, the thought of such a walk says much
about the characters, but even more about their world and the audience’s
approach to their own. This is a description whose most salient features —
fosse, place names, and saint — would be almost unimaginable in Trollope,
although St. Ewold, as the titular saint of Mr. Arabin’s first parish, figures at
least as a name in Barchester Towers. This is the world of the English
Place-Name Society, of the renewed interest in Anglo-Saxon saints founded
on emergence of medieval studies and philology, fostered by the Anglo-
Catholic wing of the Anglican Church. It is Trollope’s Barchester, but it is
one now seen, at least here, through the lens of works like Alfred Watkins’s
The Old Straight Track (1925),59 and Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906)
and Rewards and Fairies (1910), two books which had an enormous
influence on readerly expectations of presentations of the English
countryside in the generations immediately following their publication.
Countryside rambles, pivoting at significant vistas, are a mainstay of
Thirkell’s positioning of buildings, characterization, and motivation within
her invented ecumene. It is not a question of where she employs them but
where she does not. She does not, however, use only the traditional walk to
introduce her vistas of land and life. In The Headmistress (1944), Elsa
Belton and Captain Hornby, sorting through family history by way of a very
full attic, see from the roof of Alcot House the Saturday world of Harefield
and, led by the sound of bells, walk around the roof widdershins to the west
side of the house, to the sight of Elsa’s not quite irredeemably lost home:

And away up on the hill beyond was Elsa’s home, almost a silhouette
now with the sun behind it, its great front like a screen of stone. On a
piece of level ground at one side some girls were playing netball.60

This is a world and its social history in miniature: the distance and elevation
reduced by a setting sun to a featureless outline, its wall now only a screen,
and the heedless and innocent usurpers there “at one side” because they can
never truly be in that world as it was. That Elsa moves, leading her Scots
lover widdershins, anticlockwise,61 around this panorama, through her
world, is telling. It is unlucky and wrongheaded, but it is also, in English
and Scottish tradition, the direction into Fairie. Captain Hornby, falling in
love, is another Childe Rowland.62
In Barsetshire, the land and the people are not only one, the land and the
built environment are one in that, again and again, houses are the shape or
shaping of the people who inhabit them. While never reaching the pitch of
John Buchan’s “little wicked house” in Fullcircle (1920)63 houses do define
and mold people. They can even be locked in a reciprocal, reinforcing
relationship with their inhabitants. Although it is possible for houses,
particularly houses that are truly homes, to be “though hideous . . . warm
and comfortable”,64 that is usually not the case.
The most obvious example of unfortunate house design, deriving from
and intensifying the faults of its inhabitants, must be the Tebbens’s Lamb’s
Piece.65 Mrs. Tebben is an academic without being a scholar. This house,
“altogether Mrs. Tebben’s doing”,66 “who in some ways had never
developed spiritually since the days of cocoa-parties in a bed-sitting-room
at college”67 is, along with the Tebbens’ home life, first introduced in
August Folly (1936) with an extended discussion of the non-provision of a
proper study for her truly scholarly medievalist/civil servant husband:

Mr. Tebben would have preferred the lower story, from which he
could escape straight into the garden and away down the valley into
the woods, if pressed by enemies, but Mrs. Tebben, who liked to have
her household under her eye, decided to take a piece off the dining
room. The result was two rooms, both too small for human
habitation.68

The Trollope reader coming to Thirkell, as many must have done in the
1930s, must have recalled the unfortunate dining room at St Ewold’s
parsonage, and been thankful Archdeacon Grantly had been gathered to his
fathers before there was any possibility he would be invited to dine with the
Tebbens.
The description of Gilbert Tebben’s misery over the effect his wife’s
architectural notions have on his bookish life is perhaps the surest, albeit
ironic, sign of the depth of his love for Mrs. Tebben, particularly as her idea
of a good meal seems to be one which will provide left-overs. Mrs.
Tebben’s self-designed summer house is a projection of her own ramshackle
life and character, re-enforcing the very things in her personality and
behavior which makes a happy integration into the life to which she aspires
difficult.
Unfortunate architecture is not, however, always the modern and
inconvenient, although again it is a sad, but honest reflection on the
personality for whom it was built. The Garden House, which would today
probably be the only part of the Belton’s Harefield Park in which the
National Trust would be interested, has an escapable wrongness extending
over the generations, built in folly and maintained in folly:

A species of pleasure house or folly, built by the Nabob in his old age
under the influence (we regret to say) of a French lady of great charm
and beauty who was no better than she should be. . . It had also
 afforded scope for the undoubted gifts of the French architect and
decorator . . . An exotic among dog violets and daisies, a bird of
paradise among barndoor fowls, its delicate rococo graces had looked
homesick and out of place from the very beginning. Now heavily
overshadowed, by two drooping willows; a cottage orne with a
pagoda roof . . . Mr Belton’s grandfather had spent a good deal of
money in putting it into repair in the last flare of gaiety at the end of
the nineteenth century, but he would have done better to put his
money back into the estate[.]69

Just such decisions bring their descendants from Harefield Park to Arcot
house. James Thurber called his home in Cornwall, Connecticut, “The
Great Good Place”. Thirkell would have recognized him as a kindred spirit
in understanding the importance of the house in which one elects to live. It
is a characteristic of her novels that houses are not merely signs or
exemplifications of an ethical/aesthetic sense, but can become characters in
their own right. This empowerment of the built environment is perhaps
most powerful in The Headmistress (1944). Miss Sparling and Arcot House
are arguably the two most beautifully drawn, most sympathetic characters
in The Headmistress, perhaps in all of Thirkell’s novels. Miss Sparling, the
headmistress of the Hosiers Girls Foundation School, is the antithesis of
Mrs. Tebben. She is very much the true scholar, a classicist who will
eventually win more than the grudging admiration of that near-caricature of
an Oxford don, Mr. Caron. She also demonstrates her innate delicacy in
terms of a house and the meaning of home:

And to Mr. Belton she had shown that not only did she realize that
lady’s prior claim, in the eyes of abstract justice, to her own drawing
room, but at the same time apologized to her for usurping it and
thanked her for her friendly and generous attitude.70

And she is almost as quietly perfect as Arcot House on the south side of the
High Street in Harefield,

a small but handsome house in the village belonging to Mr. Belton

which fortuitously fell vacant about this time, owing to the death of
Old Mrs. Ellangowan-Hornby. That lady . . . had a taste for white
 walls, good furniture and ferocious cleanliness, . . . In the drawing-
room which commanded the village street in the front and the garden
with a distant view of Harefield Park at the back, a bright fire was
burning, the furniture caught the gleam of the flames, Mrs. Admiral
Ellangowan-Hornby’s Scotch ancestors and ancestresses looked down
with immense character from the walls, and tea was laid.71
Little perhaps it was after the great rooms at Harefield Parkwith
their finely decorated ceilings and furlongs of carpet, but large in its
proportions and Mrs. Admiral Ellangowan Hornby’s taste breathing an
ordered peace which was infinitely soothing to the shipwrecked
voyagers in their temporary harbour.72

Her “heir, a nephew who didn’t in the least want to live there”73 is the
human counterpart of the house, a sensibly sized, warm, aesthetically
pleasing 18th-century house at the heart of the community. Captain Hornby
will have much the same effect on the Belton’s daughter, Elsa, as the house
has on her parents. The Beltons themselves, however much they have
intermarried into the upper levels of county society, are still the descendants
of a late 18th-century nabob whose Harfield Park, “a plain-faced Palladian
house”,74 is a hopeless, uncomfortable money pit, even though it represents
their place in society. Hornby and Arcot House seem to bring the Beltons,
simply by their balance and sense, house and man’s participation somehow
in a Georgian apogee of England, into a proper understanding of
themselves, their essential love not so much of the house as of the land, and
a strengthened sense of being in the right place.
It would require a far longer and more detailed study than this to
properly define and appreciate the balance between world-building,
character description, and speech acts (including internal monologs) in
Thirkell’s novels. Their interaction is fundamental to Thirkell’s creation of
the narrative artifact. The impression the reader will probably bring from a
Thirkell narrative is that of a rough equivalency among them. Whether
there is truth in this approximation, whether it differs (and for what reasons)
from novel to novel, or if we can speak of a real change in them over time,
these questions require more than an intuitive response. Is there a difference
in presentation of the natural and built world between the pre-World War II
novels and those written during World War II, or indeed, is there yet another
change between their war and postwar presentation portraits? Thirkell
brought Barsetshire through the 1930s and 1940s into the postwar world,
leaving it superficially in flux, but still profoundly conservative in its
outlooks and methods of accommodating change and assimilating new
blood into its society with men and women like Sam and Heather Adams.
This conservatism is alive in the characters’ behavior, conversations, and
internal musings, within a built environment within a natural, largely
agrarian one. But from the curving embrace of the river from the opening
pages of The Warden to the long lost, but now rediscovered spring in the
Cathedral Close of The Lost Book of the Grail, it is from the Earth, always
threatened, always defended, that its essential continuity derives. It is only
through an act of sustained world-building, not derivative in a negative
sense, but reflective and deepened, that such a world and its activities are
created. This is perhaps what has given the authors following Trollope into
Barsetshire their desire to continue its life, this desire to demonstrate, in a
sustaining environment, not the pettiness, but the small heroisms of fighting
“the long defeat”. Having once recognized, with them, what lies behind
such an act and its importance to the narrative as a whole, it may be
possible to recognize and read other novelistic lands, both on and off the
map.

Notes
The quote in the essay’s title is from M. Sadleir, Trollope, (London, 1945),
p. 417.
1 The last volume of Balzac’s series appeared five years before the publication of The Warden. The
following essay will not address the possibility of the influence of the Medieval and Renaissance
development of the so-called “Matters of Britain” or the fictional and historical influence of the
Troy legend across European literatures, although the phenomenon has much in common with
present-day sequels, prequels, and continuations both in and out of fan fiction.
2 See the opening of Ellen Moody, “Mapping Trollope; or the Geographies of Power”, posted
2013/05 from the Victorian Web, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/trollope/moody3.html
3 Thomas Babington MacCaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second,
5 volumes, London, England: Longmans, published between 1848 and 1861. The first volume
gives a condensed history of England to 1685: MacCauley’s History of England from the
Accession of James II, 4 volumes, Introduction by Douglas Jerrold Dent: London and New York:
Dutton, 1953, vol. 1, pp. 1–208.
4 MacCaulay, vol. 1, pp. 209–320. The growing broadening of historical narrative has followed to
some extent the broadening of focus available in the novel while the novel has absorbed some of
the methods of the history in its extended observation.
 5 Richard, Mullen, Trollope: A Victorian in his World, Savannah, Georgia: Frederic C. Bell, 1990,
p. 177.
6 Ellen Moody, “Mapping Trollope; or the Geographies of Power”, posted 2013/05 from the
Victorian Web, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/trollope/moody3.html
7 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 3rd edition, Toronto, New
York, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp. 35–48; 133–145; 219–224.
8 Op cit. p. 35.
9 Adele Cassigneul, “Virginia Woolf’s Ruined House, A Literary Complex” in Etudes
Britanniques Contemporaines, vol. 55 (2018), pp. 13–26, available at
https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1315
10 For the purposes of this study, mundane shall be taken to mean the daily perception of the Earth
as it is experienced by the greater part of its human inhabitants, together with scientific
descriptions of its physical appearance and processes.
11 Kenneth L. Taylor, “The Beginnings of a Geological Naturalist: Desmarest, the Printed Word,
and Nature”, Earth Sciences History 20, 2001, pp. 44–61, reprinted in The Earth Sciences in the
Enlightenment: Studies on the Early Development of Geology, Variorum Collected Series 883,
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, p. 2.
12 Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace, Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France,
1958.
13 J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Irish Dreamtime: Archaeology and Early Irish Literature, Thames
and Hudson: London, 2016, pp. 288–289, referencing Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary
Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, New York and London: Routledge, 2012. I
would like to thank Dr. Padraig S. O’Briain for drawing this passage to my attention.
14 Mallory, In Search of the Irish Dreamtime, p. 289.
15 William Empson, Some Versions of the Pastoral, 1935.
16 Nigel Scotland, Good and Proper Me: Lord Palmerston and the Bench of Bishops, Cambridge:
James Clarke & Co. LTD, 2000, see in particular p. 21.
17 “The Episcopal Appointments of Lord Palmerston” (from an English paper), The New York
Times, Nov. 15, 1863, available at https://www.nytimes.com/1863/11/15/archives/the-episcopal-
appointments-of-lord-palmerston.html
18 See Mr. Arabin to Mrs. Bold, Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, with an afterword by Ned
Halley, Collector’s Library, London, 2013, pp. 260–261
19 See, in particular, the conversations which take place at Plumstead in Barchester Towers.
20 P. Vergili Maronis Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1969, p. 117;
the translation (somewhat free) is my own.
21 I use the term “serial novel” not as it is often used to denote a novel, usually 19th century, which
appeared first in parts, usually in a magazine, but rather a series of novels which share a setting
and a cast of characters who move in and out of prominence in the continuing narrative of that
place. Pratchett’s Discworld series is an example.
22 Discussed briefly in Bal, Narratology, p. 139.
23 The use of “shire” here is doubly purposeful. Obviously, Trollope and his followers invent and
develop a shire, but it may also be illuminating to compare particularly Thirkell’s development
of Barsetshire with Tolkien’s Shire, as developed through The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the
Rings (1954–1955).
24 It could be argued that this linking of narrative and setting is an active element in the medieval
Matter of Britain and to a lesser extent in the Icelandic sagas. The extent to which either may
have influenced Trollope may be assumed to be negligible. It is more likely he might have been
influenced by multi-volume histories, such as Thomas Babungton Macaulay’s The History of
England from the Accession of James the Second (1848), of which his biographer wrote of “the
 famous third chapter of the History, which may be said to have introduced the study of social
history”, G. R. Potter, Macaulay (London, England: Longmans, Green & Co., 1959), p. 29.
25 Mary Poovey, “Trollope’s Barsetshire series” in Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles, editors, The
Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,
2011, p. 31.
26 Poovey, “Trollope’s Barsetshire series”, pp. 33–38.
27 See Stephen Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997, available at http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/frith-the-
derby-day-n00615.
28 Compare this to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.
29 Poovey, “Trollope’s Barsetshire series”, p. 37.
30 Poovey, “Trollope’s Barsetshire series”, p. 39.
31 Poovey, “Trollope’s Barsetshire series”, p. 43.
32 The importance of this created topography is the subject of much of Moody’s study, see above,
footnote 7.
33 Trollope, Barchester Towers, pp. 256–265.
34 Trollope, Barchester Towers, p. 263.
35 Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, Chapter 5, available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5978/5978-h/5978-h.htm.
36 Cynthia Snowden, Going to Barsetshire: A Companion to the Barsetshire Novels of Angel
Thirkell, privately published, 2000, p. xi.
37 Its location is perhaps best approached through the times of railway journeys to London.
38 M. R. James, editor, Collected Ghost Stories, with introduction and notes by Daryl Jones,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 165–178.
39 Charlie Lovett, The Lost Book of the Grail or A Visitor’s Guide to Barchester Cathedral, New
York: Viking, 2017.
40 See the thumbnail sketch of Adams in Snowden, Going to Barsetshire, pp. 3, 4.
41 Lovett, The Lost Book of the Grail, pp. 316, 317.
42 Trollope, Barchester Towers, pp. 273–277.
43 Robert Tracy, “Trollope Redux: the Later Novels” in Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles, eds., The
Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,
2011, pp. 58–70, at p. 58.
44 Trollope, Barchester Towers, pp. 258, 259.
45 Trollope, Barchester Towers, p. 255.
46 Anthony Trollope, The Warden, London, England: Collector’s Library, CRW Publishing Ltd.,
2013, p. 9.
47 (Cowley, M. (Editor) (1978). The Portable Hawthorne. p. 688.) Hawthorne asks his publisher,
James T. Fields, in February 1860; The Victorian Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology:
Conventions and Ideology, Audrey Jaffe, Oxford, 2016, p. 27. It should be noted, however, this is
still an American’s assessment. On the American construction of a largely literary England, see
Helen, Conrad-O’Briain, “Bookland: Building England in a Time Travel Universe in Connie
Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Door”in Mark, J. P. Wolf, ed., Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A
Subcreation Studies Anthology, New York and London: Routledge, 2017,pp. 310–330.
48 First published as a serial in Household from April 1, 1854–August 12, 1854. Published as a
book by LondonEngland: Bradbury and Evans, 1854.
49 Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, Chapter 12, available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5978/5978-h/5978-h.htm, June 2, 2018.
50 Trollope, The Warden, pp. 14–15.
51 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen, Book 7, Canto 6, stanza 48. Lines 424–426.
52 Trollope, Barchester Towers, p. 273.
53 See Penelope Fritzer, Aesthetics and Nostalgia in the Barsetshire Novels of Angela Thirkell, The
Angela Thirkell Society of America, SanDiego, 2009.
54 Spenser, The Faerie Queen, Book 7, Canto 7, stanza 2, ll 541–549.
55 Angela Thirkell, The Headmistress, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1944, p. 11; they will go skating,
of course, with most of the village and girl’s school now in Harefield Park, and someone will go
through the ice and someone will save them, and everyone, almost, will be the better for it.
56 Angela Thirkell, Peace Breaks Out, London, England: Hamish Hamilton, 1946, pp. 17, 18, 26,
27. Mr. Scatcherd and his landscape, however, run in and out of the novel.
57 See. In particular Thirkell, Peace Breaks Out, p. 13.
58 Thirkell, Peace Breaks Out, pp. 11, 12.
59 Alfred Watkins, The Od Straight Track: Is Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones,
London, England: Abacus, 1974.
60 Thirkell, The Headmistress, pp. 119–121, quotation from p. 121.
61 Thirkell, The Headmistress, 119.
62 Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore, Oxford University Press:
Oxford, 2003, p. 389. See also Joseph Jacobs, “Childe Rowland”, Folklore, vol. 2, 1892, pp.
183–197; in particular, p. 193.
63 John Buchan, The Complete Short Stories, edited by Andrew Lownie, 3 volumes, London,
England: Thistle Publishing, 1996–1997, vol. 3, pp. 344–58.
64 Angela Thirkell, Growing Up, London, England: Hamish Hamilton, 1943, reprinted in 1947, p.
41.
65 Angela Thirkell, August Folly, North Dakota: Penguin, 1949, p. 19. Originally published by
Hamish Hamilton in London, 1936
66 Thirkell, August Folly, p. 10.
67 Thirkell, August Folly, p. 14.
68 Thirkell, August Folly, pp. 10, 11.
69 Thirkell, The Headmistress, pp. 112–114.
70 Thirkell, The Headmistress,p. 147.
71 Thirkell, The Headmistress, p. 7.
72 Thirkell, The Headmistress,p. 20.
73 Thirkell, The Headmistress, p. 7.
74 Thirkell, The Headmistress, p. 5.
3
MYTHOPOETIC SUSPENSE,
ESCHATOLOGY AND MISTERIUM
World-Building Lessons from Dostoevsky

Lily Alexander

Transparent things, through which the past shines! A thin veneer of

immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and
whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now,
should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced
miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but
descending upright among staring fish.
Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things

Nobody can understand Dostoevsky, even Dostoevsky himself.

Dmitry Bykov, Who Killed Fyodor Pavlovich

The Brothers Karamazov (Братья Карамазовы) by Fyodor Dostoevsky

has grown in popularity over time, becoming a “cult classic”. Written in
1880, the novel has served as an inspiration for the media industry, and its
thriller and crime fiction writers. The international film and TV adaptations
of The Brothers Karamazov count stands at 32 (on imdb.com).
Dostoevsky’s body of work has generated hundreds of cinematic versions
around the world, creating a universe of references and resonances. (They
include such screen landmarks as The Idiot (1951) by Akira Kurosawa; Taxi
Driver (1976) by Martin Scorsese; and Fight Club (1999) by David Fincher,
to name a few.) One of the top mystery books of world culture, The
Brothers Karamazov (TBK), can be examined within a spectrum of
contexts. This essay offers the mythopoetic, anthropological, and
narratological perspectives on the novel, particularly relevant to world-
building theory and practice. It is the first part of a larger work intended to
continue the exploration of mythopoesis, the novel as a cultural form, and
the works by Dostoevsky in the contexts of world-building and interactive
storytelling.
In a nutshell, the story unfolds through the suspense of inevitable
murder, with too many potential suspects to count. The psychological
framing of the unpredictable cast is meant to intrigue: the character
portrayals exceed the complexity levels required for a whodunit. When the
unthinkable happens — but not the way one would expect — it leaves
everybody puzzled, and the truth may never be revealed. Readers are left on
their own to solve the story-riddle, unsure whom to trust. Implicitly but
forcefully, Dostoevsky propels the themes of moral choice and conscience.
Despite the tragic irony of the situation, the author shows faith in his
readers, respects their dignity, and encourages them to search for the truth.
Even if a detective novel was not Dostoevsky’s ultimate goal, the deep-
seated layers of hidden content should be examined. Only by tracing the
clashes among socio-cultural codes in this novel, can its meaning-making
processes be revealed. The Brothers Karamazov, 19th-century opus of
Shakespearean scale, is a recognized masterpiece of Psychological Realism
and Critical Realism, accurately depicting its era, hence, a high point of the
historical fiction. An influential work of Fantastic Realism, this novel is a
prototype of the cultural construct we term “imaginary world”. This concept
belongs to the recently evolving field of knowledge, stimulated by its
immense impact on media culture. Dostoevsky’s masterpiece remains a
subject of heated debates and conflicting interpretations. Just like any myth,
the writer’s last work — his testament — was designed to provoke
discussions and encourage the decoding of its concealed messages.
This essay addresses the riddles of TBK and elucidates the ways of
creating imaginary worlds. A part of the scholarly network for the fictional
worlds-exploration, this study is meant to enrich the theory and practice of
storytelling media by examining the pivotal narrative-symbolic logic which
propelled TBK to worldwide fame. This goal is approached by interleaving
several analytical methods. Dostoevsky studies, including the vast
scholarship on TBK, envelopes the widest range of contexts possible. Yet,
unlike the typically applied foci of religion, politics, and narratology, this
author’s goal is to examine the powerful ways mythology is integrated into
the novel’s imaginary world. Examined even overanalyzed in endless
milieu, TBK is rarely explored within the realms of anthropology or
folklore, and never that of fictional world-building. Yet, its locale, figures,
and their actions are more than fictional: bluntly symbolic, they are a
dynamic part of the (neo)mythological discourse. This essay explores the
organizational principles of the imaginary world employed by Fyodor
Dostoevsky, the effectiveness of mythic-symbolic codes the writer selected
for his storyworld (in which historicity borders with the fantastic), and the
functions of mythological references in creating the content and the far-
reaching message of TBK.
In this volume, TBK serves as a case study for emerging world-building
theory, a new field of knowledge this book is meant to advance. The main
focus is on mythopoesis, understood as the engagement of the modern
narrative media with myth. Mythology is defined here as a narrative system
rooted in the worldviews, beliefs, and (proto-)religious semantics of the
ancient people, expressed through a set of stories (myths). Different
mythologies aligned with particular geographies and historical timelines
generated distinct symbolic systems, infused with the embedded imagery
and values. We don’t employ here the term mythology in the context of
ideology studies (initiated by the Frankfurt School). Yet we should not
overlook that traditional mythologies and political neo-mythologies of mass
societies may clash through the system of storyworld dissonances, carefully
orchestrated and highlighted by the mythopoetic authors of the last
centuries. In short, the old mythic beings are summoned to resolve the
dead-ends of our political debates, when we don’t have enough wisdom to
achieve it ourselves.
This essay highlights the building blocks, narrative codes, and
algorithms of mythopoesis employable in our era. Among them are the
notions of mytheme (mythic theme), a recurrent transcultural theme in
world myths, and mythologeme (the logic of plot development). Each
mytheme has typically two to four transcultural patterns of story premise
unfolding, or a mythologeme, which is to a mytheme what is a verb to a
noun. Mythologemes activate and examine the possible ways each
mytheme may unfold in culture. For example, “the brotherhood” is a
mytheme, encompassing twin brothers and other brotherly ties; including
such offshoots/spinoffs of Modernity and Romanticism as the
Doppelgangers, or the (paradoxical/mystical) doubles portrayed by
Dostoevsky’s contemporaries Robert Stevenson in Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1890). The resulting set of mythologemes sprouting from the inquiry “Am
I my brother’s keeper?” may range from “one sibling giving his life to save
another” to “a brother killing a brother”. While related to the functionality
of cultural algorithms, the mythemes, nevertheless, may merge within new
narrative traditions, while mythologemes may be bent or inverted by
authors. No doubt, Dostoevsky employed the mythopoetic elements
thoughtfully, yet creatively and often astonishingly.
Mythopoesis is a vital subject for the success of contemporary world-
building practices. Hence, this article examines the mythopoetic depths and
engines of the novel, paying special attention to Dostoevsky’s mythopoetic
resources, tactics, and strategies. Mythopoetic tactics help to skillfully
organize a storyworld, while mythopoetic strategies are meant to influence
the larger cultural (and political!) discourse. The writer was exceptionally
well-read in world literature. Mythological resources available to
Dostoevsky in the late 19th century include the world myths and fairytales,
the Hellenic and European narrative traditions, Slavic mythologies and
Russian folklore, as well as the neo-mythologies emerging in the European
Modernity and the literature of his time. The mythic motifs he selected may
have been employed either subliminally or intentionally. We need to
examine the plausible sources to understand his strategic choices. From
what cultural depths did the mythopoetic tropes emerge; which ones, when,
and why? What unsolved historical problems prompted specific elements to
surface, in response to the call of our cultural needs?
This essay is meant to stimulate world-building theory and practice by
drawing attention to three mythopoetic cultural mechanisms as essential and
instrumental. The highlighted notions include the proposed concept of
mythopoetic suspense, and the nearly forgotten but valuable concepts of
mythological eschatology and misterium (or mysterium). Mythopoetic
suspense, while bestowing the aesthetic pleasure of “story magic”, creates
sudden perception shifts, instrumental in building dramatic, semantic, and
axiological tensions. It aligns with Aristotle’s emphasis on astonishment
and the Formalists’ making strange. Mythological eschatology is
instrumental is clarifying and resolving those tensions, while tracing each
story figure’s moral steps through the revelations of consequential logic.
Misterium provides the unique conditions for these processes to take place
and climax to (cathartic) resolutions. These concepts-blueprints arise as the
instrumental symbolic frameworks or operating systems, which are vital for
the compelling world-building.
The above-highlighted useful notions will serve to solve the riddles of
TBK and outline the potential of mythopoesis as the meaning-making
mechanism of culture. The proposed interdisciplinary approach is hoped to
illuminate the “hidden corners” of the novel and its symbolic discourse,
perceptible only within the realms of mythology. The world narrative
heritage represents a colossal and powerful resource for emerging
storytelling media. Hence, learning from the classical writer how to employ
this treasured cultural reserve is important. It is from this perspective that
we will attempt to “understand” Dostoevsky, the brothers Karamazov, and
the role of myth in Fantastic Realism and fictional world-building.
A magnum opus of 800-plus pages, The Brothers Karamazov includes
12 books, an Epilogue, and a promise of a sequence, embodying a
consequential imaginary world with a provocative fusion of the real and the
fantastic. The novel, often viewed as a narrative maze and animated riddle,
was indeed designed as a multi-layered mystery, enigmatic on many
(symbolic) levels. The puzzling and dynamic world of TBK keeps
“spinning”, forcing manifold characters to toss and turn, revealing their
conflicting sides. Some storyworld edges are polygonal and see-through,
opening (into) new startling depths and emerging into “other realms”. To
this day, the commenters argue why the God and the Devil “visit” this crime
scene, and disagree on whether the supernatural encounters “really” occur
in the storyworld or if they are fruits of characters’ imaginations.
Rooted in the ritual riddle, all mystery genres operate by means of
“secret codes”. Narration in TBK is channeled via a nameless figure with a
mysterious identity, a mediator between the Author and the readers. The
action takes place in the imaginary provincial town; but its name is so ill-
omened that the enigmatic Narrator admits to fear to even utter it. The
location of TBK is a metaphor of a town in 19th-century Russia, as well as a
typical “transnational” settlement of any repressive unfair society, the ill-
fated “any town” of the humankind. The name of this locale is
Skotopogonievsk, which represents a sort of (intentionally) awkward-by-
design verbal construction, bleeding with the author’s spiteful sarcasm.
Such name cannot exist in its language, exposing the impossible, insulting,
humiliating place the semantic abyss. The town name literally means “the
place where the cattle is chased toward. . . (slaughter)”. Clearly, by “the
cattle” the writer means men, “all of us”, the people. This locale is his
dystopian metaphor for the “place of hell”.1 Each story character even when
confessing hidden feelings, troubling thoughts, or shameful deeds reveals
alternative identities, never being “equal to Self” (resonating with
Dostoevsky’s most notorious protagonist Raskolnikov, the Split Man of
Crime & Punishment (1866)). When introduced to a crowded social
storyworld, we observe the imaginary psychological projections of living-
breathing humans, throwing goliath mythic shadows. To deepen the poetic
mystery of TBK, some storyworld inhabitants unveil (a presence of)
fantastic silhouettes behind them.
The threads of mythology are naturally woven into the mythopoesis of
the modern novel. Mythic characters in Fantastic/Magic Realism preside
over the dramatic action from Great Time, the timeless Olympus of sorts.2
This powerful team does not promise to debate Keynesian economics or
solve our socio-political problems. Alert and supportive, the mythic beings
watch from the cloud-balcony to calmly remind the humans that our
challenges, dictators, and seeming “dead-ends” are temporal; but we should
continue looking for answers ourselves.
The mythic contours of this novel channel a whole world of influences.
The mythological circuit to be utilized in the studies of Dostoevsky
encompasses the three symbolic orbits: Slavic mythology (native to
Dostoevsky), pagan beliefs, and Russian fairy tales; the mythic pantheon of
Hellenism promoted to a transcultural code that buoyed Renaissance and
Classicism; and the cultural-political neo-mythology of European post-
Enlightenment. Through multiple sources, mythopoesis affects reality by re-
creating the symbolic community in unimaginable fusions and odd political
alliances. Magic Realism plays with our expectations by invoking
resonances and dissonances of mythic images, which unexpectedly sync or
clash, yet inciting our compassion toward the afflicted fictional populace.
Mythopoesis astonishes by re-aligning the storyworld groupings, untangling
friends from foes, and revealing which characters cannot be forgiven and
which ones should be saved.
TBK is famous for its symbolic and paradigmatic value: it has the
transcultural, proverbial significance, addressing issues topical for all
generations and eras. The pivotal theme of fathers and sons is manifest in
the title, referencing the influential novel Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan
Turgenev.3 TBK may be viewed as a modern take on King Oedipus’s
familial problem, aligned with the themes of murder and guilty conscience.
All brothers, in some way, find the figure of their patriarch intolerable.
What would they do?
The mythic tale of Oedipus is rooted in the conflict between cultural
codes. This is the central idea in the first structural study on the subject,
Vladimir Propp’s “Oedipus in Light of Folklore” (1944).4 As Propp notes,
the Oedipus tale’s dramatic trigger was the crisis in the ancient world,
which represents the clash of two social orders: the matrilineal and
patrilineal. As will be shown in this essay, TBK reveals a clash of several
cultural codes, although different from those of Oedipus’s mythic era. Let
us extend Propp’s idea by suggesting that any culture clash, that is, between
influential cultural codes, which deeply affect societies, is first tested and
symbolically “resolved” (in hypothetical ways) within a narrative. Only
later the conflicts are approached by logic and law, while their resolutions
in reality may follow the proposals from the fiction.
The crisis of Oedipus was triggered by the social condition in which the
father was not recognized; in a sense, the male parent’s identity was largely
unknown to his offspring, and if known, it meant little in all matters of
legacy, heritage, and succession. For emerging civil society, this “mystery”
had many consequences, both predictable and tragically unforeseen. The
Riddle of the Sphinx, therefore, “challenged” the evolving civilization to
define the (life-asserting) essence of manhood. One assumes that social
harmony needs fathers to take full moral responsibility for their children.
The mythological, historical, ethical, political, and philosophical meaning
of fatherhood (the fathers’ impact on the world) was at the heart of the
classic tale (The Odyssey and its referential framework addressed the same
theme, but from a different narrative perspective). What kind of world do
fathers leave for the new generation? Predictably, this story signified the
birth of tragedy. The myth of Oedipus foresees and “projects” the
imaginary, long-term, catastrophic “butterfly effects” of existential memory
gaps between generations and within the family, a keystone of society.
The two epigraphs for this essay, chosen for setting up a discussion,
highlight the clash of opinions represented by contemporary literary critic
Dmitry Bykov (b. 1967) and renowned novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899–
1977). Their aesthetic views diverge on whether we should simplify the
approach to such a puzzling, multifaceted narrative as TBK. Nabokov is a
writer whose imagery and sentence structure are more than metaphorical;
they overflow and burst with the sprouting seeds of mythopoesis. The apt
image-concept “transparent things”, envisioned by Nabokov, implies that
the modern novel serves as a veil, concealing yet vaguely revealing the rich
symbolic imagery of myth, while its deep-seated codes and values transpire
through the literary text. Employing the metaphor of transparent things, this
essay highlights the mythological undercurrents of the novel and show that
TBK transcends the crime fiction genre, opening for us the transpiring
contours of myth, with its immense depth of field and “forgotten” value
systems, which have “something to say” about Modernity. Regardless of
how subliminal the flow of images was in the author’s mind, the mythic
themes are instrumental, playing a dynamic role in the meaning-making of
TBK.
A narrative puzzle, the novel is designed to be complicated. Should the
tactics of a simplified analysis of TBK’s multifaceted nature prevail?
Nabokov favors embracing the poetic complexity. Conversely, Bykov
reduces Dostoevsky to a postmodernist, while concluding that TBK is
essentially just an early “whodunit” and imitation of Dickens.5 However,
the crime investigation with multiple suspects emerged as a cultural form
rooted in the 19th-century socio-economic reality.6 The genre’s
dissemination was not due to one writer’s influence on another. Bykov
insists that there is no answer: we will never know who the killer is because
none of the characters, even while confessing, is a “reliable narrator”. This
is a neo-postmodernist interpretation of TBK. (The postmodernist era lasted
from the 1960s to 1990s, and was replaced by new aesthetic paradigms.) To
some extent, it may be true: Dostoevsky’s humans are not equal to
themselves; they all are the “underground” and “split” types (as per The
Double (1846), Notes from the Underground (1864), and Crime and
Punishment (1866), where the antihero’s surname means “split”).
 Yet, essentially to Dostoevsky, each personality is shaped by one’s
precious deeper truth, which channels his whole worldview, held up by the
gravity of a person’s sacred faith based on individual values. Dostoevsky’s
characters take their beliefs seriously and argue about them fiercely. A
mischievous provocateur and performance artist, Bykov half-jokingly
exclaims that Dostoevsky may have been unaware of the content he himself
created: “Even Dostoevsky does not understand Dostoevsky”, Bykov says.
The idea that much of the imagery may emerge from the artist’s
subconscious is neither new nor lessening his creative achievement.
Mythological consciousness has a capacity of facilitating understanding of
complexities, according to Lev Vygotsky (a founding father of modern
psychology who commented on Primitive Mentality (1922) by Lucien
Levy-Bruhl). Hence, we will undertake a journey away from
postmodernism and toward mythopoesis, into the realms where mythology
nurtures the artist’s imagination and his search for the higher truth.
When 19th-century mythopoesis met the novel, two influential cultural
forms merged to create the complex storyworlds of Fantastic Realism. (This
encounter had already happened before, with the similar poetic tour-de-
force in the post-Hellenic era of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses and the post-
Medieval era of Rabelais’s Gargantua & Pantagruel, as explored by
Bakhtin.) What is revelatory in Dostoevsky’s experimentations with the
novel and today’s world-building is the idea of poetic persuasion through
structure. In Modernity, matters of social significance increasingly come to
light via the novel, a cultural form suitable for investigating behavioral
puzzles and multiple points of view. While skillfully designed as a murder
investigation, TBK is also a mockery of crime fiction genres. In other
words, Dostoevsky builds his Temple, yet not without self-irony,
decompressing his authorial self-importance, as suitable to the witty
modern man. Layered upon his pathos and aspiration toward tragedy, self-
parody and hidden laughter are essential to his fictional world-building.7
Bakhtin also insisted that world mythology is revealed in his interpretation,
via carnivalesque humor, and intrinsically present in the structure of
Dostoevsky’s novels. Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony (his theoretical
metaphor means the integral sum of politically diverse points of view
embedded within a storyworld) remains the most influential in Dostoevsky
studies and among the theories of the novel. Thus, the real and the fantastic,
pathos and irony, all converged in a dynamic fusion in TBK.
 Astonishingly (as per Aristotle, who emphasized perception shift as a
poetic necessity), in Dostoevsky, irony does not take away from pathos, but
also from mystery. Much of the implicit “clever” irony comes from the
novel’s world-model, in which what transpires for readers is that each
(clueless) fictional character cannot see what his storyworld neighbor is
doing, behind a story corner, even if only a few pages away. For such an
“all-round” vision, narrative culture would employ the prying-everywhere
Private Investigators and… supernatural beings. The present essay is meant
to supplement Bakhtin’s model of the novel as a political chorus. The active
voices from multifaceted world mythology transpiring though the text and
illuminating with their “truths” should be added to the Bakhtinian
polyphony of social voices, while assembling a panorama of multiple
perspectives on reality within a fictional world.
This essay also initiates an inquiry into the diversity of cultural codes
which are both set to clash and synchronized in TBK. How do disparate
modeling systems, such as ritual, myth, storyworld, genre, polyphony, and
spiritual quest, become coordinated and “work in concert” while generating
this influential novel with a strong spiritual center? The imaginative
modalities, to be references, include several types and levels of mythology:
the transnational, explored by structural studies of myth; the classical
European, with the roots in the Greek tradition; the post-Enlightenment
European; and the poorly studied Russian folklore informed by early man’s
ritual-mythological practices and pagan religions. This layering allows one
to discover the stratification and hierarchical organization of diverse
symbolic elements, employed for ontological timeless inquiries and for a
candid appeal to the contemporaries via fictional world-building.

Secret Codes, Ritual Riddles, and Symbolic

Resonances
The massive text is roughly structured by the arc of three mythologemes
(types of action, recurrent in myth and narrative): (1) The abusive Father-
Tyrant is asking for trouble: he is almost “a dead man walking”; (2)
Tensions rise, and the family is entangled in the knots of greed, hubris, and
lust; emotions reach a boiling point and the Father is killed; and (3) One of
the brothers, presumably innocent but framed, is arrested and put on trial.
All participants of the murder investigation and court proceedings,
including authorities, remain clueless, never coming close to solving the
mystery. Formally, plot development encompasses the author’s designated
12 volumes, defined as separate “books”, with the 13th titled “Epilogue”.
The novel’s 800-plus page length, many books in one, and a promise of a
sequel, makes this work a precursor to a serial drama, linked by one original
storyworld. Recent adaptations of TBK explicitly took the shape of a film
series.
The Brothers Karamazov remains a mystery on many symbolic and
diegetic levels: those of mythological consciousness, the ritual riddles, the
embedded openness to variable interpretations and hermeneutics, the
mastery of suspense, a craftsmanship of genre-writing of the murder
mystery, and crime investigation (although they are “secretly” parodied).
TBK represents, employs, and mocks, for all intents and purposes, the
formula of the “whodunit”. The myth of the City-Jungle, emerging in the
19th century, laid the foundation for the helpless anticipation that neighbors
won’t be their brother’s keepers. This abysmal fear that “anyone might have
a motive” in the crowded yet anonymous urban space became a cultural
premise for the rise of crime fiction with its embedded social riddles. Yet,
Dostoevsky implies the nascent “whodunit” recipe and also challenges it.
The Brothers Karamazov is also a skillful thriller: its storyworld is clouded
by feverish anticipation. The narrative suspense occurs when the audience
knows about the looming dangers, yet the characters don’t (as Hitchcock
famously said). To rephrase, Dostoevsky amasses information on tacit
malicious thoughts and sinful plans which is so excessive that the heads
began to spin, not only those of the wary characters, but also those of the
readers. The audience is gradually burdened by knowing “too much”.
Suspense in this novel is manifold, transpiring on levels from zoological
fear to philosophical angst.
The world-building of Modernity (including our own era of
globalization) operates on the level of cultural codes, which are braided
together, demonstrating multiple perspectives on, and conflicting
interpretation of, the same story events, often creating both: defamiliarizing
effects and stunning revelations. The codes’ fusions, conflicts, and counter-
influences implicitly work on grand levels, redefining cultures. Yet these
codes also work on the explicit levels of the plot, prompting characters to
“disagree with themselves” and “suddenly” commit acts, confusing even to
Self. This tragicomedy of errors helps in the uncovering of macro-cultural
and social changes. Via story structure, the author comments on how the
world is organized, yet also reveals how it is falling to pieces. In TBK, the
symbolic codes are aligned with the margins and centers: the image-
symbols are set to move in two defining trajectories: decentralizing and
pivoting or focalizing. The centrifugal force launches into narrative orbit a
startling and lavish variety of mythic imagery. The centripetal force
tirelessly rearranges symbols, while building what we will call here the
axiological axis mundi. (While tautological, this phrase highlights how both
meanings, the system of values and the pillar of the world, are essentially
the same thing.) Applying symbolic anthropology, this essay discloses
several “hidden” codes and story forces, facilitating access to obscured
layers of content.
Hitchcock defined suspense as the effect when the reader/audience’s
knowledge exceeds that of those characters on-screen or “on-stage” (and in
danger). Conversely, the (proposed here) mythopoetic suspense
accompanies guests from the realms of mythology, who see infinitely more
than the (mortal) story characters, and similarly naïve readers. We know
that the visitors know what we don’t and cannot know, and it is frightening.
We are in awe about the inevitable shift in perception and meaning, our
incompatible scales of space-time, and how a mythic character would
choose to act in our questionable social reality. Besides, the fictional
“sightseers” are on the otherworldly side of life and death, hence, possess
supernatural might we can’t imagine. When the Devil arrives in the world
brutally oppressed by the tyrant-Stalin, what would he do? The Devil
“would be shocked”! (As per Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master &
Margarita (1967), banned for thirty years (1937–1967), a direct reference to
The Brothers Karamazov). Incomparable realms, values, and powers create
mythopoetic suspense, in which the audience’s thrill, excitement, thirst for
magic, hope for liberation and catharsis, but also the infernal fear, are all
fused together.
How do writers find and employ deep-seated mythological codes? To
what extent are artists and audiences aware of the archaic symbolism
employed in the media of modernity? Mythologies penetrate and empower
modern texts through the artistic efforts, both conscious and subconscious.
Some of us extensively research mythologies, yet many motifs penetrate
our minds subliminally, via the local or transcultural layers we absorb.
Readers/audiences may recognize mythological codes in artistic structure.
When they don’t, the gaps in understanding trigger the adventurous
experience and stimulate imagination, via mythopoetic suspense. Such
codes may manifest in portions by explicit or implicit mythic imagery,
effects of estrangement or defamiliarization, or a story’s mysteries, riddles,
and twists. Overall, the cultural codes of mythological or religious symbolic
frameworks effectively function through artistic structure, influencing
readers with strategically imbedded puzzles or revelations, all of which
subliminally enhance the total impact. Unlike in Hitchcockian suspense,
where the readers notice dangers but characters remain perilously clueless,
in mythopoetic suspense of Dostoevsky, Joyce, Bulgakov, Borges, Marques,
or Tolkien, the readers are astonished and enchanted, but don’t grasp with
cognitive lucidity all the symbolic meanings, which may appear illogical to
the modern mind. Conversely, the many-faced Janus characters (part-
mythic) are privileged to the secret/sacred knowledge of archaic
mythological systems and values, to be gradually revealed through
storyworld structure, or transpire.
For example, a sum of money continually surfaces and disappears in the
character communications in The Brothers Karamazov. The figures in the
storyworld, related or distant, crave, steal, bribe, tease, plan murder,
frighten, or attempt to buy love by means of notorious money. So many
memorable situations and passions are attached to these fiercely emotional
interactions that a reader may miss the point (or notice it!) that the amount
remains the same in various scenes: about 3,000 rubles. It is with tragic
irony that Dostoevsky makes a reference to the 30 pieces of silver, an
ominous fetish employed among humans, while they betray or enslave each
other.
This money, which everyone needs and thinks would save him, echoes
the Golden Calf’s symbolism of the “wrong god”. This “talisman” is also
reminiscent of magic coins from folktales, which cannot be lost or
exchanged, always returning to its owner (presumably moved around by a
dark spirit of sorts or a “laughing demon”). Yet, nothing (good) can be
bought using it. While seldom this recovering coin may help “deserving
characters”, more often this (cursed?) money plays tricks with naïve but
obsessively greedy humans. Flowing through many lives, but avoiding all
eager hands, this money brings luck to none of the undeserving. The
wishing coin in folklore is acting differentially, rewarding or punishing
based on the hidden truth of each person’s moral essence. This symbol is
instrumental in TBK’s story development, performing diverse yet
dramatically important roles, and always drastically shifting a social
situation. This is only one example of how Dostoevsky plays with the
visibility/obscurity of his symbolic images, hiding them in plain view. This
sum of money with the ill-omened number becomes an agent of change,
although nobody seems to notice this infernal entity’s persistent presence
and a menacing role in the storyworld.
Researchers infer that the books by Dostoevsky have layers of hidden
symbolism. For example, in Yuri Marmeladov’s Dostoevsky’s Secret Code:
The Allegory of Elijah the Prophet (1987), Marmeladov is correct in tracing
the connections between Ilya the Prophet and characters in Dostoevsky’s
fiction.8 It has been a well-known conclusion (as per the Chicago School of
Religious Studies of the 1960s–1980s) that in various cultures, mythic
figures of the pagan gods of Thunder, such as the Slavic Perun, were
gradually converted into the Elijah the Prophet within the evolving
Christian contexts. Yet, there are many more mythological connotations or
“secret codes” to be discovered in The Brothers Karamazov.

Vital Interpretations: Decoding Nature’s Tests

Why so many secrets? And why are we enthralled with storytelling full of
riddles and puzzles? Early man’s interactions with his habitat were defined
by the need for deciphering or “cracking the codes” of his natural
environment. Secret signs and symbols “emitted” by his surroundings were
believed to transpire and come to light, to be decoded (deciphered); and
relied on for survival. Since the dawn of the “mythological mind”, it was
assumed that the very interpretation of reality must include decrypting
Mother Nature’s subtle signifiers and passing her implicit tests. The
ancients depended on the faith that reality continuously speaks to them in
many “natural languages”. Early man viewed these communications as
“organically” obscured, because they were channeled through the inborn
manifestations of nature, its sounds, movements, touches, colors, and
shapes.9 Even before reading between the lines (of books), people had
hopes of getting a whiff of change from Nature’s many communication
channels. These subtle “micro-messages” which the Nature-gods and Spirits
leave for the humans to grasp, encompass the sudden thunder, the flood,
birds’ love songs, the raining toads, or the advent of the apple-clasping
snake. Only through these signs, the “marks of gods”, could predictions be
deemed reliable, while hidden truths about reality were revealed (or so our
ancestors believed). Thus, the need for learning biosemantic
communication with Nature later extended to mythology and narrative
culture.
Various deities (initially, the animal-sprits) spoke different “natural”
languages, and their dissonant chorus “had to” be synchronized. It is with
the idea of the world governed by these diverse and “mysterious” semantics
hence, in need of translation that a special deity was appointed (in the
Hellenic tradition) to perform the clarification function, for both his fellow
deities and the subordinate humans. The Olympus assigned the god Hermes
a mission to launch hermeneutics, the activity of interpretation, endowed
with “divine” revelatory power. Just as mythological image-concepts had
formed a symbolic framework for the people at the dawn of culture, mythic
subtexts function as a connecting tissue in much of modern storytelling.
To complicate things further (on purpose!), some spirits-deities, the
entities of supernatural power, intentionally clouded their communication.
They had to establish boundaries of understanding for humans, because the
gods belong to the highest realm of powers set in Nature; while the mortals
were expected to have a limited access to the (sacred) knowledge, unless
they were “initiated”.10 Hence, the natural “hard to decode” languages and
the “intentionally obscured” communications (symbolic, metaphorical, and
proverbial) had set the foundations for the ritual riddles, a framework
which shaped the ensuing mystery genres and the (metaphorical) language
of art per se. Looking at the roots of mythological consciousness, which
define its semantics, we can better grasp its functionality within narrative
contexts. Everything appears to be (and is expected to be) a dynamic “sign”
a signifier in the operational system of mythology; the more important and
vital whenever it enables “survival”. The Renaissance, Baroque Art, and
Romanticism facilitated interest in myth, which then soared during
Modernism. Among the programmatic goals of emerging Modernism in the
late 19th century was that of learning and employing various organic
(expressive) and intentional (metaphorical) languages of the natural world,
also mediated by ancient art. Dostoevsky lived and worked in the age
spanning from Romanticism to Modernism. Unsurprisingly, cultural codes
were on his mind.

What’s in a Name?
The inquisitive reader, who suspects that the word karma resonates with the
title, is right. A careful examiner of Dostoevsky’s fictional worlds notices
his numerous tale-telling signs in naming. The ritual origin of naming is in
the “mystical” linking of a person to powerful natural forces or spirits, with
the purpose of establishing rewarding and safeguarding identification (as in
naming European cities Berlin and Bern to ensure their citizens’ protection
and ritual empowerment expected in the Bear-totem era). Authors often use
a name to (subliminally) reveal a hidden truth about its bearer.
Karamazov, Karamzin, and Karamazin are real Russian surnames (of the
Turkic linguistic roots). Yet, the writer chose a family name with a
revelatory message about his protagonists. The surname Karamazov
unsurprisingly shares etymological roots with the concept of karma (via
Indo-European linguistic connections). The Russian noun kara means the
(deserved) punishment from the higher powers (pagan gods, God, or fate)
for committed sins and crimes. The verb mazat means to paint, draw, chart,
and also to stain or pollute. The family name Karamazov, therefore, may be
interpreted as “the fate is drawn or tarnished” or possibly “to draw/taint
one’s fate with this person’s choices or actions”. The name explicitly points
to the “karmic” meaning and the spiritual purpose of the novel. The
protagonists are the brothers whose futures are being determined and drawn
(on the scrolls of their timeless legacy, on some invisible tablets of
Providence). Hence, the novel’s title is linked to such notions as Fortune,
also highlighting that it is our life choices that shape our futures. “Fate is
predetermined” is echoed in the family name Karamazov. Yet the novel
implies that by means of decisions and actions people draw their own
destiny; while the gods are watching.
Just by naming the family and casting his characters, Dostoevsky lets the
air and shadows from mythological realms into his storyworld. His cast of
characters, entangled in tragedy and mystery, includes the antihero father;
his sons; the four women who fatefully influenced the lives of the
Karamazov men; the town’s spiritual mentor; the locals and officials;
several “weird” enigmatic types; as well as God and the Devil. Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s arch-villain is Fyodor Karamazov. The story’s villain and the
author teasingly “exchange masks”: they wear the same name, which in this
context sounds tragic-ironic: the “gift from God” Theodoros (Fyodor in
Russian). It is hard to overlook the fact that of all possible names, the
author gave his antagonist his own name, with a whiff of self-irony (“How
far is Everyman from society’s antiheroes?” is a lingering question).11
A few more tale-telling names have a Greek origin (Zosima, Dmitry,
Katerina, Grusha, Alexei, and Ilya). In other novels, many names and
surnames are symbolic. In Crime and Punishment, Rodion Raskolnikov’s
given name means “he is born” while his surname means “split man”;
Sonya, Sophia the Wise, Razymikhin means “sensible”); in Poor Folk
(1846), there is Devyshkin (“girlish, gentle like a girl”); in The Idiot (1869),
there is Myshkin (“little mouse”), Nastasia (“eternally growing”), and
Rogozhin (“cheap rug”). Let’s look at other connotations with the potential
symbolism bursting forth into the TBK plot functionality. Zosima, spiritual
mentor, means life and the living (Forever?). Dmitry, the brother to be
framed and sentenced, is the Earthly Man, the offspring of the Nature-
goddess Demetra, and his love Agrafena “feet first”, the walking, wanderer
on the earth. Ivan is symbolic of the Russian Everyman and the folktales’
Ivan the Fool. Alexei is the defender of man (a short version of Alexander).
Katerina the Pure (vs. the Impure) connotes purification and catharsis (as in
Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo (1966)). Ilya is from the Hebrew Eliah, the son of God.
It is worthwhile to further analyze what significance, if any, naming may
have in this novel; and how names abet the storyworld’s complex system of
meanings. Through nearly all the names in his novels, Dostoevsky adds
some symbolically elevated perspective on a character’s nature or path in
the world. Importantly, the novel generates its own narrative hermeneutics,
which is grounded, implicitly, in the deep layers of existing symbolic
systems, ascending from mythologies and religions. The game of decoding
and meaning-making in TBK goes much deeper than the “whodunit?”.

Who is Who? The “Threshold” Characters:

Between Myth and Literature
The cast of characters consists of a very elaborate system of contrasting and
resonating figures; almost like a chess set, ready for battle; and with
carefully set traps. The inner circle is the Karamazov family, with the
Father-tyrant, the main cause of the plot disequilibrium and a man
impossible not to hate. This emotion is craftily provoked for readers to feel,
which the younger generation of the Karamazov family predictably shares.
The (folktale’s) three sons are of course at life’s crossroads, as mythic,
journeying heroes should be. The oldest, Dmitri, is the Passionate one. The
middle brother, Ivan, is the Smart and Educated one. The youngest, Alexei,
is the Truth-seeker and a Kind Soul. The heart, the mind, and the soul. So
far, good-old reliable clichés and unashamedly blunt symbolism. The
devilish math of “How many brothers are in the novel?” is designated to be
a separate puzzle to solve. There will transpire, through the storyworld
folds, an yet unknown brother, Pavel, unrecognized on many symbolic
levels. Part of the transcultural mytheme of the lost relative, returned to the
family in a fateful manner (or by Fate with a karmic intension), this “secret”
brother will play a pivotal role in the novel. His storyline was developed a
century later into a separate work, and likewise “more-than-whodunit”,
revolving around the tragic “bastard” figure (or the despised son-servant,
who may explode one day), in Gosford Park (2001), directed by Robert
Altman and written by Julian Fellowes.
The Karamazov men are involved with four women, who cannot be
more different from each other. Two of them oddly have the same name,
Liza. Of these Karamazovs’s “significant others” (for the men and for the
plot), two are rich, two are poor, two are healthy, two are sick, two are
loved, while two barely tolerated; traits come in unexpected sets. The math
is getting more ominously playful. Three of the four femmes fatale would
be “fatefully” involved with more than one of the Karamazov men, in
various unforeseen combinations, but ensuring the chaos and fury of
passions. Cherchez la femme, that is, ironically invoked by Dostoevsky.
The mythic and (near) supernatural figures include the God, the Devil,
the Holy Sage, the chilling Grand Inquisitor, and the few Holy Fools,
believed in Russia being “the children of God”. The strange, threshold
silhouette the ghostly Narrator is neither here nor there, and is neither the
author, nor a story character, despite his claim of living in the same town
and being a neighbor, an “eyewitness” of sorts. While he conveys his
cheeky comments on the story events, he is strapped in the limbo of the
proscenium, between the real writer-Dostoevsky and generations of his
infinite readers. Any liminal personae, residing in the mysterious place of
betwixt and between, according to the founder of symbolic anthropology
Victor Turner, transpires as a figure of ritual influence, sparking magic-
infernal expectations.
Most ancillary figures fittingly for the novel step on the stage precisely
to ricochet. The Brownian Motion they cause is one of accidental
influences, in which one chance encounter or an explosive secret may have
a long, fateful impact on this fictional world. The storyworld’s external
circle consists of local residents of all ranks, and the officials, who enter the
stage for the murder investigation and the court hearings. The townsfolk
and administrators are mostly clueless and apathetic regarding God and the
Divine perspective. The background social circles are painfully unaware,
being deaf and blind, of the signs of Fate, meanings of the events, and
higher truth. Some are confused about even basic facts of life and its social
foundations. (Examples include the monks’ expectations that their devout
peers’ bodies after death would not decay, or the spoiled rich girl’s belief
that the Jews steal babies to drink their blood.)
Among the townspeople, a special place is allocated to one family, who
are marginal in every way; the poor, suffering yet honorable father and his
little son. Their surname, “Snegirev”, means of the bullfinch kind, a tiny
snowbird, a vulnerable cold-weather survivor. The deep bond between the
Snegirevs is a striking contrast to the toxic relations of the father and sons
in the wealthy Karamazov family. Snegirev is a retired army officer: his
social identity belongs to the transcultural narrative type of the “war
veteran”, ascending to a heroic scale. This symbolism transpires through the
pantheon of powerful, near-shamanistic old warriors of world mythology,
which include the humble old soldier, invincible and wise, who can solve
any problem in the Russian folklore. (Warriors who survived many battles
are believed to have had many lives, or to be sort of “immortal”.) The
veteran’s mythic-symbolic status would be even more elevated in the
subsequent literature, from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865) (with
Platon Karataev), to the novels by Erich Maria Remark. All the diverse
characters of TBK are brought, or thrown, together to take part in the story’s
intrigue and action, to express unique voices (the Bakhtinian polyphony or
multiple point of view of reality), and via mythological eschatology: to be
compared, to stand the tests, to measure up, to be assessed, and to be judged
before gods.

Of Conscience and Shame: Mythological

Eschatology Becomes “NarratoLogical”
The story characters act, hence, claim a position on life, and must be
evaluated. One of the core paradigms of mythology is its innate
eschatology, Mother Nature’s habit of keeping records and scoreboards of
human deeds. The social connection with the members of the tribe in the
presence of the worshipped anthropomorphic natural environment was the
starting point of the “moral record keeping”. The concept of eschatology is
rooted in the ritual paradigm of death-rebirth, a key concept in symbolic
anthropology. Eschatology, initially, a human response to the crises of
survival, which unleashed fears, began to grow into a moral framework, as
vivid in the late Hellenic orphic tradition. Yet, the micro-elements of moral
self-assessment could be traced back to the dawn of mythological
consciousness. Humans were trying, desperately, to guess what Mother
Nature considers “right and wrong”. The scholarly concept of mythological
eschatology was developed by classicist and structuralist Olga Freidenberg
in the 1930s to highlight that within all mythological frameworks, the idea
of “keeping score” has always been implicitly embedded, and regulated by
native moral systems. (It is tragic-ironic that in the darkest hours of Stalin’s
purges, the scholar who would soon be ostracized, banned from visiting the
university library, and fired for being Jewish (or “cosmopolitan” in Stalinist
terms) developed the idea that even in the worlds of tyrants someone is
watching).12
Mythological consciousness embraces the belief that someone is always
watching be it a tree, a cloud, a sacred animal, the divine light, or
anthropomorphic deity. This Observing Mind (Nature’s integral multi-
source POV) keeps track of everyone’s deeds on the moral grid; with the
counts to be announced when the mortal pleads for the afterlife. Christian
eschatology would make this threshold even more rigid: one way or the
other; heaven or hell. Yet, in the world of early religions, this accumulation
of decrees and penalties/rewards prevails as the subtle yet omnipresent
buildup (i.e., karma). The outcomes may vary for one’s afterlife; and the
“informers” may similarly diverge Nature’s eyewitnesses, the multiple
evidence sources for the verdict.
These silent witnesses may contribute from the manifold mythological
layers of culture. In sum, the whole world of mythologies in the moral
symbolic ecosystem of humanity may “judge” any character in the plot.
(This is exactly the point in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–
1955) and Spirited Away (2002).) Mythological eschatology is the bridge to
understanding how ethics gradually evolved, connecting the logic of living
Nature, the emerging mythological consciousness and the perceived
“narrative justice”. An intriguing detail about the evermore symbolic
expression of mythological eschatology in the narratives of Modernity,
particularly in the novel, is its manifestation by means of Fate. This
“goddess” no longer reveals her face or persona, transpiring only through
the turns of the story. Story twists, in the disguise of chance no more the
explicit agent of the divine Nature or Fate, come to represent a narrative
function.13 Story twists expose the limited partial truths the storyworld
mortals are doomed to possess. Narrative peripeteias and accidents also
symbolize the continual tests by reality, which Fate forces characters to
take, entailing the “score keeping” for the records.
Mythological eschatology (derived by Freidenberg from her studies of
the Classics) is not too distant from the notion of karma, devised by the
religious consciousness of India. This multifaceted stream of cultural
meaning-making in the global mythology grew over time, and multiple
semantic streams established that the worlds of supernatural beings (even
before monotheism) have implicit, invisible to the human eye, mechanisms
of judging all living beings in respect to the morality of their actions and
organic responsibility for the world. Mythology makes it clear that these
Irrational Forces (as Bakhtin called them, to fit in with the anti-religion
phase in Stalinist discourse) would carry out justice, without hesitation or
delay, through various “accidental” and natural-looking occurrences. In
sum, mythological eschatology means that “Nature is watching” and the
verdict will be quickly executed. The “Nature-Judge” has infinite means to
implement her sentence.
The early representation of this eschatological effect is the “accidental”
death by the falling wall in the proverbial tale of Cain and Abel (according
to the Book of Jubilees 4:31). God specifically banned anyone’s interference
with the destiny of the brother-killer (the theologians debate “why” to this
day); perhaps to check if there is indeed karma in the natural course of the
universe. Dealing with the archetypal moral dilemma of being one’s
brother’s keeper, the tale implies the spectrum of possible relations between
the symbolic brothers, expanding from the familial to the social scale. Cain
kills his brother. Yet, the divine punishment was intentionally “postponed”.
It was the narratological consequential punishment that eventually
transpired: Cain oops was accidentally killed by the wall, which he,
himself, erected. Already in the (mind behind) the Bible, we see how the
mythological eschatology morphs into the religious eschatology and into
the cultural logic of narrative justice.
Dostoevsky was a devoted Christian; however, he was curious about
many diverse belief systems. Admittedly, he was also pochvennik (deeply
rooted in the native soil), a member of the intellectual movement which
treasured the “organic” growth of cultures and civilizations as well as all
transhistorical values of the native land, including ancient beliefs, myths,
and folklore. In 19th-century Russia, there was no sharp contradiction, as
typical for the Slavic world, between the pagan and Christian faiths,
particularly, among the peasants and the intelligentsia. Conversely, the
major rift emerged between the believers-Slavophiles, and their opposition,
the Westerners, those who aligned only with the European values,
rationality and science. Hence, the traditional mythologies and
mythological consciousness were part of Dostoevsky’s interests as a writer
and thinker.
The intrinsic logic of myth, with its keen attention to the Nature’s
balance and the tendency of harmony-restoration mythological justice was
gradually replaced by the composite reasoning embedded in the complexity
of fictional worlds, termed here “narratological”. This dynamic type of
model, called “novel”, traced the restoration of justice through the social
knots of long-winded trajectories, which were impossible for a single pair
of eyes to see. Dostoevsky, along with the novel-writing giants of the 19th
and 20th centuries, was one of the creators of this vital moral framework at
the dawn of mass society.
The Brothers Karamazov adheres to the mytheme of the lost brother: the
accepted/alienated and the brother known/unknown. Brought up separately
and finally meeting, each young Karamazov tries to explain himself to his
siblings, yet remaining unsure what really is on the other brother’s mind.
The dilemma of one’s brother being recognized/unrecognized (in every
sense, also syncing with the unrecognized father of Oedipus) has the
eschatological implications. In TBK, readers are positioned to wait-and-
guess which of the brothers would kill their father, and on what page
(already!). But their predictions may fail because it might be an (unknown)
brother (they don’t know) who kills his father and frames his (known)
brother for this crime. The plot distraction, or the red herring (the author-
planted false assumption) is the Father-Son’s ruthless and known rivalry for
the same woman. And while they are a step away from killing each other,
there is the foreshadowing of the even deeper hatred that would erupt into a
crime. Just as Nature used to observe everything, a new agency, the mind of
the novel, now keeps the scoreboards of all brothers’ actions, intentions,
and hidden thoughts.
Moving from Mother Nature’s woodland into the City-Jungle, the
characters in the novel are now tested by, and seek “vital signs” for survival
in the grimaces of urban environment. The revelatory semantics are emitted
here by the crossroads, chances, accidents, the Many-Faced Janus’s nature
of humans, hypocritical “masks”, role-playing, eavesdropping, ominous
anonymity, and all other hidden corners and folds of the city, from where
anyone could “suddenly” attack.14 Therefore, it is in the nature of the novel
to oversaturate the mythologized city narrative with the tale-telling and
warning signs. Such is the imaginary world of TBK. In the emerging
cultural form of the novel and its essential variety, the crime novel,
eschatology and score-keeping are manifest in the investigation (where the
clues, red herrings, accidents, chases, and confessions encompass the zigzag
streams of revelatory information, essentially, all the helpful “vital” signs).
The enigmatic contours of the City-myth already transpire from the
geometrical uncertainty of the Baroque and Piranesi’s ominous fantastic
prisons; this distinct aesthetics later extends through the daunting urban
tales of French Naturalism and Film Noir. The fogged city-image not only
warns of looming dangers but also of the difficulties in moral judgment and
finding the truth. How to correctly assign the “guilt” to the wrongdoers?
They may include the accidental criminals or those fighting back to survive;
the uncaring or empathetic witnesses; and even the victims, those vicious
whom “anyone could kill”. The Whodunit story pattern, when many have a
motive, serves as a backward mirror, showing the victim’s own crimes, in
reverse. The readers are given tiny bits of the puzzle through hints and
clues, so they may begin to explore the hidden realms of the storyworld.
Intuition is engaged as an important mode of perception in this ritual riddle-
cracking, so the keen reader/audience would exclaim with excitement “I
knew it!” — before the characters do. Therefore, a super-novel like TBK
would have to stockpile an enormous quantity of the subtle tale-telling
signs, from all realms of mythology and contemporaneity, and gradually
release them, making the storyworld-decoding a tough yet thrilling
experience.
Eschatology, as mentioned earlier, is a moral grid by which one’s life is
assessed at the threshold, as per mythologies and religions. In crime fiction,
eschatology is both simplified and complicated. It becomes more
straightforward since the goal is to catch the criminal and put him in jail,
using the reliable legal apparatus of our civilization. Conversely, the good
fiction tends to problematize the clichés, and add the “it’s not that simple”
perspective, continuing the inquiry beyond the letter of the law. What if it is
unclear who is to blame? Where the limits are in (life-long) self-defense?
And how do misdeeds accumulate, unchecked in life, in the family, and in
social reality?

Misterium as a Genre and Beyond

The Brothers Karamazov, clearly “more than crime fiction”, may be viewed
as a multi-genre enterprise. It has elements of crime drama, detective novel,
coming of age, Bildungsroman, or the novel of education, romance, thriller,
tragedy, confessional prose, and even farce or the “tragicomedy of errors”.
Recognized as a psychological, philosophical, political, and historical
novel, TBK is also a diatribe against social injustice, intact with its era’s
Critical Realism. Yet, while pondering on the nature of The Brothers
Karamazov’s genre, and acknowledging its experimental aspirations, we
must invoke a notion of misterium, a near-forgotten yet enduring cultural
form that has always remained timely.
The umbrella concept, central paradigm, and pivotal force which ties
diverse elements together is misterium. The Brothers Karamazov cannot be
understood without clarifying this notion, in both the historical and
theoretical contexts, including an anthropological angle. This essay
proposes restoring the Latin spelling misterium for the theoretical term
referring to the phenomenon, which signifies the related cultural paradigm,
while transcending chronologies. The word’s original Latin spelling helps
to distinguish this important notion from the word mystery, recently
overused, and a subject of heteroglossia: it conveys too many different
meanings to remain a useful and clear term. Misterium (plural misteria,
adjective misterial; from the Greek mist to squint, “shut”, or “eyes shut”)
connotes the phenomenon both historical and timeless / transcultural, also
meaningful for creating imaginary worlds.
What is misterium? Why did Dostoevsky need it, and how can world-
building benefit from this forgotten cultural form? From the perspective of
misterium, it does not matter whether the mythic beings visit the storyworld
“for real” or as the ghosts of characters’ imagination. In misterium, which
affords a sort of (religious) trance, the eyes are shut (this is what the word
means, as its original Greek language etymology alludes). By its nature, one
experiences the world that transpires through the eyes “wide shut”. In this
“betwixt and between” liminal world,15 the characters bare their souls and
conscience for judgment, before the diverse (newly assorted) gallery of
mythic deities. Hence, their presence in the (modern) novel is justified.
They oversee the court of divine justice, which unlike trial by humans,
mocked in TBK by Dostoevsky, can determine what the truth “really is”.
Historically, misterium refers to the ancient Greek and Roman public
celebrations, performances and festivals, devoted to the local gods; the most
well-known are the Eleusinian and Dionysian mysteries. (Classicists
continue using the term “mystery” in respect to the public rituals of
Antiquity/ancient Greece and Rome.) The established postulate of the
anthropology of performance traces the origin of theater to ritual. But there
was something else, in between, astonishingly poorly studied, yet of
foundational significance. The transitional historic phase between ritual and
theater, which lasted centuries, was misterium (ranging about a millennium
BC and two centuries AD). Yet even with the emergence of stage arts, as
we know them, misteria did not disappear from the realms of culture and
religion, still influencing art, media, and narrative culture in many
predictable and unexpected ways. Misterium has emerged as a media
construct and a profound (timeless, rather than displaced from the historical
arena) cultural paradigm, particularly revelatory for world-building theory
and practice.
 Ritual as a predecessor of theater art (and its heirs, film, television, and
video games) is a well-established postulate of symbolic anthropology and
performance studies.16 The influence of the initiation rituals on culture has
been thoroughly studied. Named by Joseph Campbell, the “hero’s journey”
has had a far-reaching impact on media culture. Less-known is the
significance of the later phenomenon, misterium, which still overlaps with
ritual, and therefore, was predictable, while already adding a specifically
urban dimension to its essence. Emerged as a form of collective rituals in
the settings of the first towns, misteria were devoted to synchronizing
individual ritual actions of diverse participants in the growing settlements
they all called home. A single-hero’s lonely journey of the earlier ritual
culture was followed by socializing procedures, which took forms of
coming together as a group in celebration of the native gods, the patrons of
the settlement, and the surrounding nurturing fields.
The key features of misterium include: the simultaneous and parallel
“journeys” of many participants who seek the acceptance through initiation;
and the expression of loyalty to specific, locally valued gods, chosen with
expectations of domestic benefits from the richly populated and diverse
pantheon of Hellenic polytheism. There was also the invocation with
invitation: the chorus of neighbors calling for the deity to arrive (in earlier
rituals, the higher powers arrive when they see fit). The revelers also
opened themselves to judgment in the effort to purify their souls and match
the moral requirements from the beyond to ensure the “good life” in the
afterlife. The moment of increasingly active participation of the community
in relations with the patron deity was a subtle yet vital new aspect in the
emerging town-culture misteria.
Gradually, transforming from the calendar-linked or the harvest-focused
celebrations intended to ensure plentiful food supplies, misteria began to
develop dramaturgy, at first re-playing key moments in the worshipped
deity’s biography, and later presenting various human social situations to be
examined and judged before gods. This branch evolved into man-authored
drama and comedy (resolvable by human efforts, including laughing at
oneself) and tragedy (typically unresolvable without the involvement of the
gods from the machines, and their cathartic enlightening of human minds).
We may say that the “eschatological” impulse (to be judged and corrected
before too late) was now coming from the humans themselves.
 The eyes were supposed to be shut as a mark/device of entering the other
dimension, stepping from the profane/ordinary world through the portal of
misterium into the sacred/divine realm, where the two kinds the gods and
mortals can meet and resolve looming problems. With (symbolically)
closed eyes in a mysterious mood the magic action of stepping across the
threshold was expected to occur. We now employ for this purpose the
“magic moments” of rising theater curtains, screens lighting up, and books
opening. The key defining features of misteria include group participation;
concern for the local home environment; the addressing of the pressing
issues of social life; the human initiative in appealing to, and bringing in,
the higher powers; readiness for moral judgment; and choosing the ever-
increasing pantheon of gods (when civilization expanded) to be addressed
from all realm/resources of the world mythologies and religions, to whom
these newly re-elected individual deities the people would plead allegiance.
This is what we observe in The Brothers Karamasov and perhaps what
contemporary world-building aspires to achieve. In TBK, the author and his
multiple characters (including his alter egos) cross the textual threshold
(enhanced by multiple stories-within-stories) and invoke various higher
powers, while seeking help in addressing the pressing social questions (in
this case, Russia’s unresolvable political problems of undying Feudalism
before the dawn of the 20th century).
Certainly, not all historically performed misteria were of the spiritual
quality, as designated. There were different traditions and the bad apples,
such as the violent or criminal Roman bacchanalias, “which were
periodically banned, whether for their excessive violence or politically
subversive messages.” (It is important to mention that the “corrupt” or the
exploitative use of the powerful misterial form, governed by flawed moral
or political aims, may happen in any century). Yet the fruitful traditions
flourished around ancient Greece and the Mediterranean of late Antiquity,
as described in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses and his biographies, depicting
the writer’s real-life journeys and explorations of diverse deities’ cults,
popular around the Mediterranean in the 2nd century AD. In essence,
misteria have never left the realm of art entirely. Consider, for example, the
key dramatic functions of the Ghost, the fertility god’s offspring Queen
Hecuba, the Goddess Hecate, the Thunderstorm, and the array of mythic
beings in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1609), Macbeth (1606), King Lear (1606),
and Midsummer Night’s Dream (1605), respectively. Add to this the
movement to restore ritual in the theater, pioneered in the 20th century by
Artaud, Meyerhold, Grotowsky, and Brook; and the new tradition of screen
passions (misteria!), directed by Dreyer, Pasolini, and Tarkovsky. The rise
of Fantastic Realism, following European Romanticism and the vestiges of
Modernism (the looming aesthetic revolution), encouraged
experimentations with reality, myth, and fantasy.
It is important to add the notion of the misterial, as an adjective (as per
the French and Italian roots). It applies to the quality proven to remain
transhistorical and transcultural that has transpired in multiple cultural
phenomena since the rise of the town-cultures of the Mediterranean before
Hellenism, to modern-day media. The elements of the misterial beyond the
Antiquity were later manifest in a variety of cultural expressions. They
include the adventuristic novel, Medieval Cathedrals (some with their
sentinels-gargoyles), church passion plays, Renaissance paintings,
Cervantes’s self-ironic quest for the ideal Self in Don Quixote (1605), and
Vermeer’s challenge to bend geometry for peeking into the other
dimensions.
The mysteriousness of the Baroque and Gothic art was also part of this
avenue, making a shift from the pathos of sacred mystery to the pragmatism
of crime fiction in the narrative discourse. Initially, the dangerous, mythic
shadows appeared invincible; later, the story efforts focused on finding and
destroying the foes of society, however natural or supernatural they turn out
to be. As emphasized by Bakhtin and Deleuze, it was the Baroque era
which gave birth to crime fiction.17
The City-culture, with its overwhelming mosaic and multiple vistas,
simply was in need of the spiritual centers. Therefore, misterium returns in
Modernity not merely an aesthetic (theatrical, narrative), but a cultural
phenomenon. And it is not authored or pioneered by individuals but
represents the spiritual modality that aspires to find an embodiment in
response to our cultural needs. Urban growth is overwhelmed with its rag-
bag of the newly arriving townsfolk; hence, the sundry set of multifarious
mythic deities is a proper match to the diversity of the city-culture. Just as
in the turbulent Hellenic world of late Antiquity, strange types from the
neighboring religions/cults may end up in the revised collections of active
gods, mythopoesis of Magic and Fantastic Realism may parade the peculiar,
quirky, offbeat, weird, and eccentric mythic powers/beings, encompassing
the walking Nose, the giant talking black cat, the jailed god, and the
omnipresent inquisitor.
The influence of the (macro) cultural form of misterium on Dostoevsky,
an avid reader of world literature, reveals a long-term trajectory, via
European heritage implicitly, but also via a short arc, explicitly, in the
1880s. When he was working on the novel, emerging French Symbolism
was raising a question of the intrinsic religiosity of theater, or stage art as
ritual.18 The echo of Symbolism profoundly influenced the Russian and
Scandinavian dramatic art; as demonstrated by the Modernist theater
experiments, and writings on the philosophy of art by Henrik Ibsen, August
Strindberg, Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdyaev, Nikolai Evreinov, Pavel
Florensky, Marc Chagall, Pavel Filonov, and later Antonin Artaud and
Sergei Eisenstein.
The Baroque, Romanticism, and French Symbolism implicitly placed the
stories in realms observable by the supernatural figures. These were
metaphorical constructs, yet ones preserving the religious impulse, as is
typical for any ritual process overlapping with art. In the decades preceding
the 20th-century threshold, the cultural agenda of the misterium restoration
was already explicitly discussed by artists and philosophers of the late 19th
century, particularly in France and Russia. The restoration of misteria was
one of the explicit core projects of Symbolism and Modernism, widely
discussed in the theater and aesthetic circles. Symbolism, while not being
explicitly religious, sought the understanding of the profound and
meaningful symbolic (spiritual) processes of reality, through art.
The Modernists sought to weave trance-inducing experiences by
invoking cosmic image-signs from the entirety of nature and culture to
convey, via artistic mosaics, subliminal messages of revival and rebirth.
These discussions were part of the public discourse among the artists,
writers, cultural philosophers, and, of course, religious thinkers seeking to
find innovative ways to restore religion in view of the dangerous trends of
mass society. Russian thinkers and artists eagerly supported this movement
(leading to the prominent Russian Symbolism of the Silver Age and also its
forerunner, Fyodor Dostoevsky).19 The desired syncretism of the Arts
proposed to fuse poetry, theater, literature, music, visual arts, and other
multi-sensory experiences of synesthetic stimulation and total immersion.
The motives behind this movement encompassed the concerns of the
aesthetic, spiritual, and political nature, at the dawn of the 20th century.
 Originating as a religious-performative experience, misterium evolved as
the paradigmatic and transhistorical cultural form. It branched away from
ritual, with its syncretic unity of “art-religion-knowledge” into the realms of
narrative and theater, developing as a symbolic algorithm of culture. This
split could be dated to the Renaissance, when misteria’s secular aspirations
began to sprout in many artistic directions. Yet, while the religious impulse
may take metaphorical expressions in the Arts, by its ritual nature, the
axiological perspective of the gods, watching. . . can never be eliminated
from the story framed by misterium (even if these higher beings take the
identities of mythic entities or aliens). Misterium was repeatedly activated
as a cultural tour-de-force by geo-political changes, associated with rapid
expansions. When distant populations had to become one people under the
umbrella of new ideas or governments, their beliefs and values were set to
fuse or clash. “The wisdom of synchronization – the solution effective in
both nature and culture – in its optimal forms leads to the advancements of
individuals and groups.” The necessary mutual sharing and absorption of
foundational myths led to the new empowerment of misteria, caused by the
cultural need. Such eras include the late Antiquity, the Renaissance, the
19th-century threshold between the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
Wars, and the dawn of the 20th century, with the looming shadows of world
wars. Our era of globalization is certainly part of this historical chain of
expansions. Unsurprisingly, the modern-day world-building movement
(already) has invoked the misterial elements in its media language and
practice.
The joy of the locals for coming together in a communal event of
spiritual unity (something Dostoevsky cared for deeply) morphed into the
forms of virtual collectivity and collaboration on-line. Yet, there are also the
real-world fan movements, carnivals, and conventions. Global media
encourages sharing favorite stories and adopting the foreign-born magic
friends from other cultures (or planets, or species). In place of the gods, any
authority figures from the world mythologies may come into play; and we
see many spectacular, influential characters from the fantasylands who
teach us good lessons about humanity. Dramas, thrillers, and mysteries do
not let us forget about our human flaws and unpredictability of the natural
world. And here transpires the mechanism of mythopoetic suspense:
elucidating the dark corners of respective cultures with hidden biases, envy,
hubris, delusions, and dangerous ambitions. Mythological eschatology that
insists on karmic revelations transforms into savvy narratological
scoreboards, while the entire foundation of interactive storytelling is based
on (moral) choices, social pathfinding, and consequential logic. Aspiring
media artists and game designers may fantasize freely, engaging the
treasures of world myths. The axiological framework and operating system
of symbolic misterium will keep them grounded in moral values, which we
continually reassess as an evolving global community.

Notes
1 This imaginary dystopian locale resonates with the Glupov-town of Mikhail Saltykov-
Shchedrin’s The History of a Town (1870), a grotesque satire, politically risky novel relating the
tragic-farcical chronicles of the fictitious Foolsville or Stupid Town, a caricature of the Russian
Empire, with its sequence of monstrous rulers tormenting their hapless populations. This neo-
mytheme also connotes Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969).
2 In his body of work, Bakhtin proposed and employed a notion of Great Time (Bolshoe vremya).
This (metaphorical) concept implies symbolic-axiological eternity. The enormous, infinite realm
of time is conceived by Bakhtin as populated by archetypal mythic figures and serving as a
precious reserve of the most important values and perspectives on the world. What is interesting
for the study of mythopoesis is that Bakhtin alludes that this enigmatic realm of Great Time is
implicitly but actively present in all (best) narratives of humankind as a latent, deeply embedded
POV. A philosophical anthropologist and predecessor of the semiotics of culture Bakhtin
developed his own conceptual apparatus which integrates a poetic and a philosophical language.
His conceptual system was enthusiastically reemployed by “the Bakhtin industry” in the
humanities of the 1990s, particularly, in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. See:
M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1968; M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays,
edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, Texas,
and London, England: University of Texas Press, 1981.
3 Ivan Turgenev’s classical novel Fathers and Sons (1862) had initially shaped the public
discussion on intergenerational ideological tensions in Russia; shortly thereafter Dostoevsky
began to write TBK.
4 For the seminal international collection, Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook (1995), on the archetypal
myth, its co-editor, Alan Dundes, the leading American theorist of folklore, commissioned the
translation of the influential work by Propp, the founding father of narratology and the structural
studies of plot. See Allan Dundes and Lowell Edmunds, editors, Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook.
Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
5 See Dmitry Bykov, Who Killed Fyodor Pavlovich, Audiobook lecture, Moscow, Russia: Litres,
2019. Bykov suggests that TBK was largely inspired by Charles Dickens’s similarly unfinished
experiment, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).
6 See Lily Alexander, Fictional Worlds: Traditions in Narrative and the Age of Visual Culture,
Charleston, South Carolina: CreateSpace, 2013, and Lily Alexander, “The Hero’s Journey” and
“Mythology” in The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, New
York, New York: Routledge, 2017, pages 11–20 and 115–126.
 7 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson,
Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. This now-classical work on
polyphony in Dostoevsky and its anti-totalitarian ideas, first published in 1928, landed Bakhtin
in the exile under Stalin, after he miraculously escaped a concentration camp sentence in 1928,
with secret help from the Minister of Culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky. While Bakhtin spent 30
years behind the Ural Mountains (in Kazakhstan and Mordovia), banned from entering the
European part of the Soviet Union, Dostoevsky, his subject and mentor, was largely banned from
educational institutions during the Soviet era, with the exception of Crime and Punishment,
taught as a moralizing parable.
8 Yuri Marmeladov, Dostoevsky’s Secret Code: The Allegory of Elijah the Prophet, Coronado,
California: Coronar Press, 1987.
9 Lucien Levy-Bruhl was the first explorer of mythological consciousness. While at the brink of
World War II, the anthropologist admitted having regret for employed “politically incorrect”
terminology; his rich and original theoretical heritage is currently being effectively reevaluated
in view of recent studies on the diverse forms of cognition and consciousness. See his book
Primitive Mentality (1922).
10 The pioneer of initiation studies, and the first to discover “the hero’s journey” ritual paradigm,
was Arnold Van Gennep, with his book Rites of Passage (1909), Chicago, Illinois: University of
Chicago Press, 2nd edition, 2019.
11 It is another example of Dostoevsky’s “carnivalesque” humor, as outlined by Bakhtin (1928)
1984. The book “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics” by Mikhail Bakhtin was first published in
1928; translated into English in 1984.
12 Olga Fridenberg, Image & Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature, London and New York:
Routledge, (1955) 1997.
13 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated
by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, Texas, and London, England: University of
Texas Press, 1981.
14 See Vladimir Toporov, Myth, Ritual, Symbol, Image, (in Russian), Moscow, Russia: Progress,
1995. While Toporov was not the first to discover that Dostoevsky used the word “vdrug”
(suddenly) hundreds of times throughout his fictional worlds, he does a comprehensive overview
of this discovery and its significance.
15 Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969), Piscataway, New
Jersey: Aldine Transaction, 1995 paperback; and Victor W. Turner, The Forest of Symbols:
Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, (1967) 1970.
16 See: Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of Folk Tale, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, (1928) 1984; Victor W. Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, New York,
New York: PAJ Publications, 1987; Victor W. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human
Seriousness of Play, New York, New York: PAJ Books, 1982. Also see Lily Alexander, “The
Hero’s Journey” in The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds. Specifically, on Greco-
Roman mysteries, see the works from Classical Studies, for example: Walter Burkert, Ancient
Mystery Cults, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987; Jaime Alvar
Ezquerra, Romanising Oriental Gods: Myth, Salvation, and Ethics in the Cults of Cybele, Isis,
and Mithras, Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2008; and Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults
of the Ancient World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
17 The Baroque generated crime fiction, as per Bakhtin (1981) and Gilles Deleuze, The Fold:
Leibniz and the Baroque, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
18 The 19th-century literary group known as Symbolists include Belgian/Flemish writer Maurice
Maeterlinck, and the French authors Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
19 One such misterium-experiment, Vespers or The All-Night Virgil (1915) by Sergei Rakhmaninov
(Mass for Unaccompanied Chorus) was recently performed in New York in St. Paul the Apostle
Church, in February 2018.
4
BUILDING THE VORKOSIGAN
UNIVERSE
Edward James

Lois McMaster Bujold is one of the most popular writers in the world of
science fiction and fantasy. The Hugo Award for Best Novel, based on a
popular vote among science fiction fans, has been won by her four times,
more than anyone else apart from Robert A. Heinlein; three of the wins
were for novels in the Vorkosigan sequence. The Hugo Award for Best
Series was created recently, and she won it in the first two years it ran: in
2017 for the Vorkosigan Saga and in 2018 for The World of Five Gods.
Apart from her early novel The Spirit Ring (1992), which was set in a
fantasy version of Renaissance Italy, all her published books have been set
in one of three created universes. The World of Five Gods books,
sometimes called the Chalion series, so far consists of three novels and six
novellas, set in a secondary fantasy world, which features not only magic
but also the active participation of gods. The Sharing Knife sequence,
which Bujold calls the “Wide Green World”, currently consists of four
novels (or one long novel in four parts), and one long novella (or short
novel). This is mostly interpreted as a fantasy set in a version of the
American Midwest; I have argued elsewhere that it fits just as well in the
long American tradition of post-apocalyptic science fiction, in which people
live in a rural post-industrial world where “wild talents” such as telekinesis
develop.1 And, finally, the series with which she made her name, the
Vorkosigan Saga, whose first novels were published in 1986 and the most
recent addition (the novella The Flowers of Vashnoi) in 2018: currently it
runs to 16 novels and five short stories or novellas. It is set in a future in
which humans from Old Earth have colonized numerous planets, and in
which control of the wormholes which allow interstellar travel is crucial for
ambitious planetary governments. The Vorkosigans are a leading family on
one of those ambitious planets: Barrayar.
After the first few novels in the series it was generally categorized as
“space opera”, because of its affinity with the science-fictional subgenre
known for its “colourful action-adventure stories of interplanetary or
interstellar conflict”.2 However, with Mirror Dance (1994) and Memory
(1996), the books had started transforming into something much more
interesting. Miles Vorkosigan, whose adventures as a self-styled Admiral
had occupied much of the attention in the earlier books, reconciled himself
to abandoning his career commanding a space fleet, and in the rest of the
books a spaceship became just a convenient way to travel rather than a
locale for action. The later books vary between political thrillers, comedies
of manners (A Civil Campaign (1999) was even subtitled A Comedy of
Biology and Manners) and detective novels. Miles Vorkosigan’s new career
as Imperial Auditor — essentially a plenipotentiary investigator — allowed
the series to escape the label “space opera”, but also to add a new
dimension of plotting and character development. The appeal of the
Vorkosigan novels to its fans is largely the result of Bujold’s attention to
character, and of her ability to place them in interesting ethical dilemmas.
Before considering world-building in the Vorkosigan series, it is worth
taking a brief look at how she did it in the Chalion books, as it is both a
contrast and an interesting comparison. In both cases, the building blocks
were to be found in our world. In the case of Chalion, the inspiration was a
university course on medieval Spanish history which Bujold attended
several years before she began writing the series. Chalion is a deliberately
distorted and distorting image of the kingdom of Castile, in the generation
before the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon paved
the way for the creation of modern Spain. There is systematic distortion.
The points of the compass have been reversed, to begin with: the Roknari
princedoms to the north correspond to the Muslim kingdoms in the south of
Spain or North Africa, with a dash of Viking. Darthaca in the south
corresponds to France. Bujold’s own map, at www.dendarii.com, shows
clearly that Chalion itself lies within an upside-down Spain, to its south,
with a mountain frontier separating it from Darthaca. Other forms of
disorientation were applied, such as using the word roya instead of “king”
or royesse instead of “princess”. Some of the characters in the first two
novels, The Curse of Chalion (2001) and Paladin of Souls (2003) clearly
have their parallels in 15th-century Spain: Ferdinand and Isabella become
Bergon of Ibra (Aragon) and Iselle of Chalion (Castile). The counterpart to
Juan’s favorite Alvaro de Luna is Arvol dy Lutez, and Juana la Loca,
Joanna the Mad, has two incarnations in Chalion, either Ista or Catillara.
The world seems well-planned compared to the Vorkosigan universe, which
seems to have gradually accreted, but Bujold remarked that stealing it from
history wholesale “saves a lot of steps”.3 The really original part, which
makes Chalion special, is the creation of the polytheistic theology; and
there Bujold owes nothing to medieval Spain. With the Vorkosigan
sequence, of course, Bujold is mostly dealing with alien planets (though in
Brothers in Arms (1989) we do visit an Old Earth which has been seriously
affected by climate change and a rise in sea level). There are some nods in
the direction of the scientific details with which science fiction writers
traditionally dealt with imaginary planets. Thus, the Barrayaran day is 26.7
Old Earth hours long; Sergyar has slightly less gravity than Beta Colony;
Beta Colony has an atmosphere too poisonous and solar output too extreme
for people to live on the largely desert surface for long; you need breathing
apparatus to leave the domed cities of Komarr. Bujold is not particularly
interested in alien zoology; her first novel introduced us to vicious six-
legged crab-like predators and vampire balloons, but such exotica are not
found again, although their presence in great numbers is mentioned in
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2015). There we briefly visit the
Department of Biology at the University of Kareenberg (on Sergyar), which
has a team that classifies and catalogs about 2,000 new species a year. Jole
ventures to remark that it sounds impressive. “Does it?” is the response. “At
this rate, we should have Sergyar’s entire biome mapped in about, oh,
roughly five thousand years” (p. 206).
Bujold does recognize that environments can have a direct impact on the
way those human societies develop, however. Beta Colony, for instance,
had a high level of social cohesion in part because it was settled by slower-
than-light generation ships, meaning that the colonists had a long time to
develop cooperative systems in a closed environment. And once the planet
was settled, that tendency was strengthened. Because the surface is so
hostile, Betans live underground, and continue to restrict reproduction just
as they had done in the even more cramped conditions of the generation
ships. A desire to be protected from the environment was in part responsible
for the near-universal use of the uterine replicator — an ideal environment
for the development of a fetus during its first nine months of growth. But on
the whole, environments do not play a large role in Bujold’s narratives,
particularly for Barrayar, where the majority of plots unfold: to all intents
and purposes, the landscape of Barrayar is indistinguishable from that of
North America. On the whole, Bujold is much more interested in
constructing imaginary societies than in imagining exotic planetary
environments.
I am going to split my discussion of Bujold’s creation of the Vorkosigan
Universe into two. First, I am going to look at the historical inspirations for
her planetary cultures; and second, I will examine the way in which she
slowly creates these cultures over multiple novels, or, at least, slowly
reveals them to her readers. John Lennard, who has written on Bujold,
suggests that there are two types of imaginative writers: the icebergs and the
searchlights. Tolkien was an iceberg, in that much of what he wrote about
Middle Earth — the languages, the history — did not appear in The Lord of
the Rings (1954–1955) at all, but remained beneath the surface, in his notes
and his memory. Much of this work was completed even before the
publication of The Hobbit (1937). Bujold is a searchlight: “imagining only
what necessarily fell within protagonists’ experience.”4 The Vorkosigan
Universe (or Vorkosiverse, as some fans with no feeling for the English
language call it) was created over several decades, with new parts being
created when needed.
There are multiple forms of world-building involved. Our first
protagonist is from Beta Colony, and in the first novel, Shards of Honor
(1986), she meets her future husband, who is from Barrayar; they meet on
the newly discovered planet that is later named Sergyar. In the very first
novel, therefore, we are introduced, however superficially, to three different
planets. In the sequence as a whole we get to know — again, sometimes
superficially — some nine planets (including Old Earth) and three space
stations. Three of the novels — Barrayar (1991), Cetaganda (1995), and
Komarr (1998) — are named after the planet on which the action takes
place. Beta Colony and Barrayar are exceptions in Bujold’s world-building,
in that the Vorkosigan family members who are the protagonists of most of
the early novels are so intimately connected with them: all our focalizing
characters are either Barrayaran or Betan. (The exceptions are Ethan of
Athos (1986) and Falling Free (1988), which is set at least 200 years before
all the others.) The first novel, Shards of Honor (1986), which establishes
the narrative background for what follows, is focalized through Cordelia
Naismith, a Betan, and the next few novels are focalized through her son
Miles, whose parentage is mixed and who is portrayed as a Barrayaran who
often sees things through Betan eyes. He has spent some time on Beta
Colony as a teenager, and even manages to maintain the Betan side of his
personality by masquerading as a Betan, Admiral Miles Naismith. This
masquerade lasts for six books, and it is only in Memory (1996) that he
finally gives up his Betan persona and resigns himself to taking up his
father’s role as a Barrayaran aristocrat. Even so, he has imbibed enough of
his mother’s attitudes, and traveled enough, to be very different in his views
from the average Barrayaran.
I have suggested that the differences between Beta Colony and Barrayar
might be seen as representing different facets of American society, “which
may very loosely be regarded as its progressive, egalitarian, and democratic
aspects faced with the conservative and hierarchical”.5 But it is more
helpful to think of all the varying cultures of the Vorkosigan Universe as
having elements of applicability to contemporary Earth cultures; there is no
direct relationship to any one of them. Bujold’s cultural creations are
intended to force us to think about our own world, which is why I called the
chapter in my book on Bujold which discussed her various cultures
“Cultural Critique”.
Beta Colony is, in fact, the only extraterrestrial planet to be colonized
directly from the United States. It is technologically predominant within the
Vorkosigan Universe, both in military and medical technology, which is
why the Betan dollar — and that is the word Bujold uses — is the strongest
currency in the Vorkosigan universe. Like America too, or like America’s
vision of itself, Beta Colony is very egalitarian. One of its earliest
appearances in the narrative is when the Barrayaran Aral Vorkosigan makes
fun of the Betan military’s tendency to argue rather than to obey: “You are
no better trained than children at a picnic. If your ranks denote anything but
pay scale, it’s not apparent to me” (Shards of Honor, p. 11).6 There is no
hereditary aristocracy, and an elected president, though “I didn’t vote for
him” becomes almost a catch phrase in Cordelia’s mind. The egalitarianism
brings with it a political transparency unknown on Barrayar: Betan public
ceremonies are all seen on “holovid” (3D television), and commented on at
length. And with egalitarianism also comes a lack of deference. Miles, in
his Betan guise, is instructed by a Barrayaran officer on the respect owed to
a Barrayaran count: with the Betan half of his mind, Miles translates this
into “Call him sir, don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve, and none of your
damned Betan egalitarian backchat, either” (The Vor Game, p. 320;
Bujold’s italics).
Along with egalitarianism came universal civil rights. An important
element in the Vorkosigan family is the equal rights given to clones, thanks
to which Mark, Miles’s clone, becomes recognized as his legal brother.
Hermaphrodites, created by Betan science, have civil rights too; to Bel
Thorne, who becomes a significant character in the Vorkosigan Saga, Miles
reveals that he is not pure Betan by showing unconscious inability to accept
hermaphrodites as naturally as Betans do. Criminals have civil rights too:
crime is a disease, to be treated as such, by therapy. Aral gives the
Barrayaran response: “at least we kill a man cleanly, all at once, instead of
in bits, over years. . . Beheading. It’s supposed to be almost painless.”
“How do they know?” asks the Betan Cordelia (Barrayar, p. 122). Betan
medical technology gave the Vorkosigan Universe the uterine replicator, but
also gave its citizens much longer lives: “all Betans expect to live to be 120.
. . they think it’s one of their civil rights” (Warrior’s Apprentice, p. 47).
Betans have a right to live without poverty, and with proper medical care.
For Cordelia, the definition of poverty is “not owning a comconsole” (a
personal computer with Internet access); and is horrified that for
Barrayarans poverty may mean having no access to shelter, food, clothing
or medical care.
Betan sexual customs are more relaxed than those elsewhere in the
Universe. Sexual availability is advertised by clothing, or lack of it, or, for
girls and women, the wearing of earrings. Cordelia is fitted with a
contraceptive device at the age of 14, at the same time that her hymen was
cut and her ears pierced; the event was celebrated by a coming-out party
(Barrayar, p. 154). Because of the general permissiveness (and an aversion
toward exploitation of any kind), the sexual role of prostitutes in fulfilled by
Licenses Practical Sexuality Therapists (LPSTs)— men, women, and
hermaphrodites who have gained licenses after a period of training.
To some Barrayarans, particularly women, Beta Colony appears almost
utopian. Women seem to be treated as real equals, unlike the subordinated
women of Barrayar. Cordelia becomes a role model for Elena Bothari — a
Barrayaran daughter of a soldier forbidden by Barrayaran custom from
going into the military — not just because Cordelia had chosen to go into
the military, but because she had choice. However, Bujold has exercised her
own choice to show Beta Colony as falling short of any utopian ideals. As
early as Shards of Honor, we see that Betan security forces can be as
amoral and ruthless as their Barrayaran or Cetagandan equivalents. Elena
Bothari, on the point of visiting Beta Colony, is enchanted by the notion of
“Betan freedom”. Miles has to correct her. Betans do not have “freedom” in
the abstract. They cannot have children without applying for a license first.
And because they live on a planet with a hostile planetary environment,
Betans “‘put up with rules we’d never tolerate at home. You should see
everyone fall into place during a power outage drill, or a sandstorm alarm.
They have no margin for — I don’t know how to put it. Social failures?’”
(Warrior’s Apprentice, p. 53). Despite the caveats, Betans stand for a level
of freedom which has been aspired to, but never attained, by American
radicals or utopians. In the two early books, with Cordelia as focalizer, we
are inclined toward her evaluation of the levels of Betan civility and
Barrayaran barbarism. And then, with some shock, the non-vegetarian
reader realizes that Cordelia finds Barrayaran primitive cooking procedures,
which involve taking protein “from the bodies of real dead animals”, really
disgusting (Barrayar, p. 79); and all of a sudden we realize we are
barbarians too.
Beta Colony seems to reflect many of the ideals of the United States, in
however distorted a fashion. One might then presume that Barrayar reflects
European ideals, or at least the attitudes common in Europe in the 19th
century, since most of its colonists were of Russian, Greek, French, or
British origin. One of the main themes underlying the whole Vorkosigan
Saga, however, is that these attitudes are changing quite fast, under the
influence of Beta Colony and other galactic powers. There is an historical
event that was largely responsible for Barrayaran backwardness: the Time
of Isolation. It is a reference to the historical event that was largely
responsible for this backwardness. After the first 50,000 colonists had
arrived on Barrayar — the Firsters — the wormhole through which they
had come closed down. Their easy route to the rest of the human-settled
Galaxy had disappeared, and the Firsters had to fend for themselves. The
emergent terraforming program collapsed; imported Earth species broke
loose, and largely wiped out native flora and fauna; and the Barrayarans did
not share in Galactic scientific advances for 700 years. The Time of
Isolation only ended just over a hundred years before the birth of Miles
Vorkosigan, and revival and recovery was then set back by the
Cetagandans, who invaded and attempted to colonize Barrayar, taking
advantage of the newly opened wormhole. There is tangible evidence
remaining on Barrayar of the wars fought with the Cetagandans, in the
shape of areas devastated by nuclear attacks, whose radiation levels still
exclude human habitation. In the past, mutations were a direct result of this
pollution, and mutants were ruthlessly eliminated; now, in Vorkosigan time,
the problem is rather how to stop people killing mutants, as we see in the
novella The Mountains of Mourning (1989). The latest novella in the
sequence, The Flowers of Vashnoi (2018), shows the attempt to cleanse
affected areas of their radiation.
The Firsters had been drawn from various ethnic groups on Earth.
Russians seem the predominant group, and many of the aristocrats have
surnames derived from Russian. The name Vorkosigan was inspired by the
name of Alexei Kosygin, a leading Soviet politician in the post-Khrushchev
era. All aristocratic families have names preceded by the Vor suffix: when
devising the Vor system for Barrayar, Bujold had not known that Vor was
Russian for thief, although now she finds it strangely appropriate. Although
most of the Vor names recall Russian origins, there are Vorsmythes,
Vormuirs, Vorgustafsons, and Vorvilles. Most of these appear in the
background, but two aristocrats presumably from a French tradition appear
in the narrative: Etienne Vorsoisson and René Vorbretten. Other than the
Russians, the group that maintains its sense of identity the most are Greeks,
mostly associated with rural areas. Lady Alys Vorpatril diplomatically
remarks that a particular custom has died out “except in some of the
backcountry districts in certain language groups”, and frowns when her son
Ivan adds “she means the Greekie hicks” (A Civil Campaign, p. 41).
Crucial to the story arc of the Vorkosigan Saga as a whole is the role of
Cordelia in importing Betan ideas to Barrayar and thus bringing about a
change in Barrayaran society. One of the sub-plots of later Vorkosigan
novels concerns the impact of uterine replicators on Barrayaran society, as a
direct result of Cordelia’s decision to import them: indeed, her son Miles
would never have survived as a fetus without the uterine replicator. But the
uterine replicator is just a symbol of the scientific and other advances which
could be made on Barrayar with the judicious introduction of scientific
techniques and social change. Aral is not averse to such changes, and
change is greatly facilitated by Emperor Gregor, who as a child saw a lot of
Aral and Cordelia, the Regent and Regent-consort. There are several
rebellions led by conservatives when Aral as Regent tried to push through
reforms; but the rebellions fail, and slow progressive reform does take
place. One example: he makes it easier for ordinary Barrayarans to switch
their oaths to a different district count, thus giving incentives to counts to
actually attract new residents, by offering lower taxes, for instance. And the
reforms continue after Aral resigns as Regent. In CryoBurn (2010), the
novel which in terms of internal chronology is the penultimate one, Miles
Vorkosigan is in charge of a committee designed to make the laws on
reproductive technology as up-to-date as those in the rest of the Galaxy.
Barrayar appears so European in its make-up that it is a slight shock to
realize that the inspiration for Barrayaran society comes actually from
Japan. The clue was in the phrase Time of Isolation. “Isolation” is a word
frequently used for the period in Japanese history between the 1630s and
1853: in that year four American warships arrived off Edo/Tokyo in order to
force an ending to the maritime restrictions that had largely isolated Japan
from the rest of the world. Bujold has explained that although the
Barrayarans have the European culture inherited from the first settlers, in
terms of history and “the shape of their culture”, it was Meiji Japan which
provided the inspiration. She wrote: “It had its own time of isolation; it had
its development of a military caste; and it had its very traumatic re-opening
to the outside world.”7 She added that Japan did not almost immediately
suffer an invasion (as Barrayar did from Cetaganda); but Russia has been
invaded many times. “It is a blending of these two histories, of Japan and of
Russia, with various and sometimes logical results — not always salutary
results, but always logical results.”8 The young Emperor Gregor, then,
stands in for the young Emperor Meiji, who in his long reign between 1868
and 1912 introduced reforms, many of which involved implanting in
Western ideas in Japan, and built up the Western-style military forces that
inflicted stunning defeats on China in 1894–1895 and above all on Russia
in 1904–1905.
The second major culture in the Vorkosigan universe that owes
something to Japanese culture and history is that of Cetaganda. We learn
about this mostly in Cetaganda (1996), which recounts the visit of the
young Miles Vorkosigan and his cousin Ivan Vorpatril to the Imperial
Palace on Eta Ceta IV, from which the Empire’s eight major worlds, and
various other dependent planets, are governed. We learn nothing about
ordinary Cetagandans: only about the two different levels of the aristocracy,
and about the ba, who are the neuter servants of the upper aristocracy. The
lower-level aristocrats are the only ones whom most outsiders encounter:
the ghem, whose men form the core of the armies that established the
Empire, but who have, in recent years, met with a number of political
reverses. Ghem warriors are distinguished from each other by bizarre and
colorful patterns painted on their faces, which relate to their status and/or
their grouping within the armed forces. The ghem are to be found in
security positions on Eta Ceta IV itself: Miles finds Ghem-Colonel Benin,
who interviews Miles in connection with a murder, to be not unlike a senior
security man on Barrayar — in other words, a type that Miles had met many
times before, and whom he therefore found both congenial and predictable.
Benin wears face paint that indicates his Imperial allegiance rather than his
clan: “a white base with intricate black curves and red accents that Miles
thought of as the bleeding-zebra look” (Cetaganda, p. 116). Miles predicts,
correctly, a promotion in Benin’s future; and thinks that perhaps Benin
would be rewarded by having his genes taken up for inclusion in the
genome of the upper aristocracy.
Genetic manipulation is at the heart of the Cetagandan system. Ghem
ladies vie against each other in producing exotic creations, though using
genetic material from animals and plants rather than humans. Miles and
Ivan attend an exhibition of these creations (Cetaganda pp. 164–166), and
Ivan is attacked by a hyperactive climbing rose. When he encounters a tree
from which small kittens hang in pods, he assumes that they are glued in,
and rashly attempts to rescue one: it dies in his hand as soon as he picks it.
More fundamental, but equally questionable, genetic engineering is carried
on by the haut, the upper level of the aristocracy, who seem to be invisible
most of the time as far as ordinary Cetagandans are concerned. The haut are
themselves the result of a program of genetic improvement — of eugenics
— over several centuries. There is a question as to whether they are actually
human any longer, but their long-term goal is certainly to create a post-
human species. It was already flagged in Ethan of Athos, and alluded to in
Cetaganda, that the Cetagandans might experiment with the importation of
genes for telepathy into the genome. The genetic work is carried on by the
Star Crèche, an all-female and all-haut group of scientists, ultimately under
the control of the Emperor, but in practice under the direct control of the
mother of the Emperor, or the mother of his heir. The Star Crèche controls
the genome of the haut very strictly, allowing it to develop in part by the
insertion of promising ghem genes. Each year, the Star Crèche on Eta Ceta
IV send out haut fetuses to the eight planetary governors and their consorts
(who are all themselves haut women closely associated with the Star
Crèche). The story behind Cetaganda is the plan to decentralize this system,
and to allow the consorts to take charge of genetic developments on their
planet; however, one of the planetary governors wants to subvert this plan,
and centralize matters on himself, with the help of senior ghem; Diplomatic
Immunity (2002) revolves around a different attempt to subvert the genetic
plans of the Star Crèche.
Cetaganda is immediately reminiscent of traditional Japanese culture:
there is an Emperor; there is an apparently rigid aristocratic or caste system,
and a military class; ceremony is an important part of aristocratic life; and
there is high respect given (by aristocrats at least) to every aspect of art and
aesthetics. Bujold has said that it was partly the Japan of Lady Murasaki
Shikibu, who wrote the Tale of Genji in the early 11th century which lay
behind Cetaganda (which might explain the importance of haut women in
Cetagandan culture), but some elements were taken from Imperial China of
the late Manchu period. There are no apparent clues from Cetagandan
names, however. If the name of Ruyst Millisor, the first Cetagandan we
meet in the Vorkosigan saga, has any ethnic origins it would appear to be
European rather than Asian. Other names we encounter (in Cetaganda) are
Fletchir Giaja, the Emperor; Lisbet Degtiar, his mother; Ilsum Kety; Dag
Benin; and so on. They look very much like the made-up names of people
in a Jack Vance space opera. If there is a specific Earth culture from which
Cetagandans are intended to derive, it is concealed in points of detail.
Indeed, that may be the purpose: after all, it is the policy of the Cetagandan
Empire to develop and indeed evolve away from its primitive Earth roots, in
the direction of the post-human.
 There are other cultures that Bujold creates, for Komarr such as the
Kibou-daini (another culture heavily influenced by Japanese culture), but
perhaps one more is worth mentioning in detail here: Jackson’s Whole.
Bujold’s cultural worlds frequently force us to think about our own world
by taking facets of it and exaggerating or extrapolating them to extremes.
Jackson’s Whole is a nightmare world in which free-market capitalism has
been allowed to develop without any legal restraints. Bujold has
commented: “Everybody says they want a world with no government.
Here’s a world with no government. How do you like it?”9 It is run, if at all,
by a relatively small number of desperately competing Great Houses, most
of whose fortune is based on what other worlds would probably regard as
criminal activities. A century or two before Miles’s time it was little better
than a base for space pirates. Since then it has “senesced”, as Miles puts it,
into a collection of syndicates which are “almost as structured and staid as
little governments”, and Miles wonders whether one day they will all
succumb to “the creeping tide of integrity”. Miles lists the main houses,
when he first comes across them, in the story “Labyrinth”:

House Dyne, detergent banking — launder your money on Jackson’s

Whole. House Fell, weapons deals with no questions asked. House
Bharaputra, illegal genetics. Worse, House Ryoval, whose motto was
“Dreams Made Flesh,” surely the damndest — Miles used the
adjective precisely — procurer in history. House Hargraves, the
galactic fence, prim-faced middlemen for ransom deals — you had to
give them credit, hostages exchanged through their good offices came
back alive, mostly.
(Borders of Infinity, pp. 103–104)

While Miles’s clone brother Mark was himself being grown on Jackson’s
Whole, he learns about House Bharaputra’s life extension business,
whereby wealthy people have their brains, with their personalities and
memories, transplanted into the bodies of young clones in order to extend
their lives. The operation is not always successful, as a certain percentage
of the patients die: “Yeah, thought Miles, starting with 100% of the clones,
whose brains are flushed to make room. . .” (Borders of Infinity, pp. 116–
117). Jackson’s Whole is, of course, very useful to the rest of the galaxy,
because it does offer services and products that are unavailable elsewhere.
Jackson’s Whole has many skills; it is merely that those do not include any
sense of corporate or medical ethics. Bio-engineering is particularly
advanced on the planet, and in the course of the Vorkosigan books we meet
a number of its products. Miles’s clone-double Mark heads the list, but
there is also Sergeant Taura, who is constructed to be the ultimate warrior:
when she dies, she says that she wants her ashes to be buried anywhere in
the universe — anywhere except Jackson’s Whole. Gupta, whom we meet
in Diplomatic Immunity, is an amphibian human, with gills and webbed
extremities, created by House Dyan on Jackson’s Whole. Jackson’s Whole
also creates slaves, either by conditioning or by genetic manipulation: they
are called jeeveses (possibly Bujold’s only direct Wodehouse reference).
“They’re said to pine if they are separated from their master or mistress,
and sometimes even die if he or she dies” (Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, p.
41). The jeeves is a symbol of the creative, yet totally exploitative and
immoral, spirit of uncontrolled capitalism on Jackson’s Whole.
For the second part of this paper I want to look at the way in which
Bujold introduces her planetary cultures. She does not use some of the
familiar methods: brief extracts from a text-book or scientific manual or
long expositions within the text (the “as-you-know-Bob” technique which
used to be common in early science fiction). She drops slow hints, and
misdirections, and then (usually by visiting the planet in question) fills in
the details. It allows her to invent the details as she goes along, of course,
but also enables readers to find out about other cultures in a slow and
natural way. I shall take examples from the way in which she builds up the
readers’ knowledge of Beta Colony, Barrayar, and Cetaganda.
The first three Vorkosigan books all appeared in 1986: Shards of Honor
(June), The Warrior’s Apprentice (August), and Ethan of Athos (December).
None are direct sequels. The first deals with the meeting of Cordelia
Naismith, from Beta Colony, and Lord Aral Vorkosigan, from Barrayar, and
ends shortly after their marriage. The Warrior’s Apprentice describes the
early years of their son Miles (the main protagonist for eight of the novels),
and the origins of his career in space. Ethan of Athos has Elli Quinn, one of
Miles’s officers sent on a mission to Kline Station; as the book’s title
suggests, she is not the main protagonist, and Miles does not appear at all.
Ethan of Athos is an interesting book, and deals in passing with Athos,
possibly the only planet in popular science fiction inhabited solely by gay
males, but in terms of the building of the Vorkosigan Universe, the other
two are much more significant, and introduce us to the two most important
characters in the whole saga — Cordelia Naismith and her son Miles
Vorkosigan — and to the worlds they inhabit.
Shards of Honor begins with Cordelia Naismith on the surface of an
unnamed planet, with just one comparative detail: “the gravity of this planet
was slightly lower than their home world of Beta Colony” (p. 3). They are
in the mountains. There is forest, and dense vegetation; beyond rocky
mountains with a central peak “crowned by glittering ice” (p. 4). The sun
shone in a turquoise sky, onto banks of white clouds below the mountains
and onto the grasses and flowers. So far there is little that could not be a
description of Earth (Bujold is in fact not good at visual descriptions of
otherness). They discover that their camp has been destroyed while they
were away. “Aliens?” (p. 5), queries Cordelia. And then “Multiple choice,
take your pick — Nuovo Brasilians, Barrayarans, Cetagandans, could be
any of that crowd” (p. 6). There are actually no intelligent aliens in the
Vorkosigan Universe, and no further reference to them throughout the
Vorkosigan Saga; indeed, as far as I can see Nuovo Brasilians are not
mentioned again either. But we have learned for the first time that there are
rival political groups in space (two of these are going to be important later
in the series). Before the end of Chapter One, Cordelia realizes that the
aggressors are Barrayarans, has met Captain Aral Vorkosigan, and
discovered that he commands a Barrayaran war cruiser, and we learn that
she is in command of a scientific team under the auspices of the Betan
Astronomical Survey. From the beginning, Betans are categorized as
peaceful, and Barrayarans as aggressive; and Cordelia and Aral have a
conversation that shows the contempt of the Barrayaran military officer for
the lack of discipline and military training of the Betans. Before the end of
the chapter, we have discovered that Betans are sympathetic to the injured
or disabled; the Barrayaran suggests putting the wounded Betan out of his
misery. Another crucial piece of information comes in Chapter Two. Aral
has been talking about his family. His maternal grandmother turns out to be
Betan; the grandfather met her while serving as Barrayaran ambassador on
Beta Colony. “‘Outsiders — you Betans particularly — have this odd vision
of Barrayar as some monolith, but we are a fundamentally divided society.
My government is always fighting these centrifugal tendencies’” (p. 33).
Aral is addressing Cordelia, of course; but Bujold might well be addressing
her readers. It had long been one of the failings of space opera to imagine
that each planet, if inhabited by an intelligent species, had one language and
one culture. Star Trek was a major offender, and Bujold had been an
enthusiastic fan as a teenager (she was co-founder of a fanzine, StarDate,
which was possibly only the second fanzine in the United States to be
devoted to a single TV show).10
The world-building of the two main planets of Beta Colony and Barrayar
is conducted mainly in terms of comparisons and contrasts between the two,
and above all in Shards of Honor. Much of it is stems from conversations
between Cordelia and Aral, although we do also see the inner thoughts of
Cordelia, on whom the narrative focalizes in both Shards of Honor and its
immediate sequel Barrayar. Sometimes we learn about Barrayar from odd
facts that Cordelia dredges up from her memory. Interestingly, the dialog
between Beta Colony and Barrayar does not end when, with The Warrior’s
Apprentice, Miles Vorkosigan takes on the focalizing role, because, as we
have seen, he belongs in both cultural worlds.
In terms of world-building, however, it is a slow build-up of information,
which continues throughout the series. One crucial fact about Beta Colony,
for instance, is as far as I can see, not mentioned until the most recently
published Vorkosigan novel, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2015): it
is revealed that on Beta Colony, unlike Barrayar, there are no clearly
distinguished ethnic groups: “the Betans had been using gene cleaning and
rearranging for generations, which meant anyone’s ancestors could be
anything” (p. 25).
Our knowledge of Barrayar increases once Cordelia actually arrives
there, which does not happen until two chapters before the end of Shards of
Honor. There are some verbal descriptions of the countryside and of the
capital city, but, as before, much of what we learn about Barrayarans comes
through Cordelia’s reaction to them when she meets them: first Sergeant
Bothari and Aral’s father, Count Piotr, and then Prime Minister Vortala and
Emperor Ezar. This increased density of reality continues in the novel
which is the direct sequel, Barrayar. But that sequel (really the second half
of one long novel) did not arrive until 1991, by which time the
conscientious reader has already learned a lot more about Barrayar through
Miles’s eyes, in the four Miles-centered novels which intervened.
Part of the learning process is through the device of a travelog: that is, as
the protagonist travels about the planet, we learn more. Although Cordelia
ventures into the countryside in Barrayar (thanks to a revolt which causes
her to go into hiding), we had already seen something of the countryside
beyond the boundaries of aristocratic villas through the eyes of Miles. The
true state of Barrayaran backwardness, for instance, is not really apparent
until Miles is sent, for his own education as much as anything else, on a
mission deep into the countryside, in “The Mountains of Mourning”, a
novella in the Vorkosigan sequence.11 He is sent as “the Voice” of his
father, Count Aral Vorkosigan, to Silvy Vale, to investigate the murder of an
infant with a hare-lip. That he himself is a cripple, whose growth was
stunted by being poisoned in the womb, is very relevant. Country people
regarded him with horror as a “mutie”, a mutant. (Disability and people’s
reaction to disability are major themes throughout Bujold’s work.) He, in
his turn, is horrified at the poverty, and at the absence of an electrical
supply, but above all at the backward attitudes of these people from the
“backbeyond”. The dead baby was “only a mutie” (p. 55). Miles sees the
ignorance of the hill-folk not as their fault, but as shaming the Vorkosigans.
It is an event crucial to his own education, and for his preparation as the
future Count.
Cetaganda has been introduced slowly too. As we have seen, in Shards
of Honor, Cordelia at first wonders whether her encampment had been
destroyed by Cetagandans. Later in that novel, we learn two further things
about the Cetagandans: that Aral’s grandfather was an ambassador to Beta
Colony before the First Cetagandan War (p. 32), and that the old Emperor
Ezar had fought in the war as the military apprentice to Aral’s father (p.
234). The Warrior’s Apprentice adds more details, with Miles’s grandfather
reminiscing about fighting the Cetagandans in the Dendarii mountains, in
Vorkosigan territory (p. 14), and Aral himself remembering the Third
Cetagandan War. The city of Vorkosigan Vashnoi was destroyed by a
Cetagandan nuclear bomb (p. 67); Miles pledges the worthless real estate to
a Betan in return for a spaceship. And, much later in the same novel,
“Admiral” Miles Naismith discovers that he has recruited into his
mercenary force “two dozen Cetagandan ghem-fighters, variously dressed,
but all with full formal face paint freshly applied, looking like an array of
Chinese temple demons” (p. 212). A certain amount of tension follows, but
no more information, and no explanation of that word ghem.
This slow drip of information reaches a different level in the third novel
published in the Vorkosigan Universe, Ethan of Athos. The action takes
place almost entirely on Kline Station, a space station, and the protagonist
Ethan is being chased by a Cetagandan counter-intelligence team led by
ghem-colonel Millisor. And it is here, at the very end, that Commander Elli
Quinn, acting for Miles Vorkosigan, shows us that Miles has an interest in
Cetaganda. (It is not for another ten years that Bujold would publish
Cetaganda, revealing that Miles had visited Cetaganda on a diplomatic
mission before the events of Ethan of Athos.) Quinn refers to Cetaganda as
“a typical male-dominated totalitarian state, only slightly mitigated by their
rather peculiar artistic cultural peculiarities” (p. 65), which is because Miles
has not told the details of his mission, or (more likely) because Bujold had
not yet worked out the complexities of Cetagandan society. But we do learn
a crucial fact about Cetaganda here, that Cetaganda only reinforces: that
they have a serious interest in genetic engineering. Millisor was in charge of
security for a military-sponsored genetics project, and “Millisor and his
merry men have been chasing something around the galaxy ever since,
blowing people away with the careless abandon of either homicidal
lunatics, or men scared out of their wits” (p. 65).
We learn little about Cetagandans in subsequent books, except that they
are clearly the villains who can be blamed for anything, such as the
kidnapping of Miles, and his subsequent cloning (in Mirror Dance [1994]).
In 1987 Bujold published “The Borders of Infinity”, in which Miles
organizes an escape from a brutal Cetagandan prison; in Brothers in Arms
(1989) Miles has to dodge Cetagandans in London (of all places); and in
The Vor Game (1990) he foils a Cetagandan invasion of Vervain. Cetaganda
only comes to the forefront in Cetaganda (1996). This contains a scene
which retrofits the action very carefully in relation to the previous novels.
Miles overhears a mysterious communication from ghem-colonel Millisor,
who is in pursuit of some very important missing genetic material (p. 153).
Clearly this is before the events of Ethan of Athos, but only just before:
Miles has time to send Commander Quinn to follow Millisor as far as Kline
Station to discover what has been lost, and thus to meet Ethan of Athos.
Miles is 22 when he and his cousin Ivan Vorpatril are sent to a state funeral
on Cetaganda to represent Emperor Gregor. He already shows the talents
for which he was a few years later appointed as Imperial Auditor, solving a
murder and getting mixed up in Cetaganda’s internal politics, and coming
out of it, to his embarrassment, with a Cetagandan Imperial Order of Merit.
When, ten years later in Vorkosigan time, Miles, his wife Ekaterin, and the
Betan hermaphrodite Bel Thorne, all help save Cetaganda’s bacon for them
a second time, in Diplomatic Immunity (2002), only Ekaterin and Bel get
the Imperial Order of Merit; Miles is asked to donate a genetic sample to
the banks of the Star Crèche, the highest honor that Cetagandan can
conceive. That Miles is aiding the traditional enemies of Barrayar is certain;
that he does it for reasons of Barrayaran policy is also clear. Miles’s main
worry is that the haut would lose control over the ghem in this struggle for
genetic power. The ghem have an aggressive expansionist past, while the
haut were much more concerned with their genetic project than with
extending the Cetagandan Empire.
We began by seeing Cetaganda as yet a rather brutal militaristic society
intent upon expanding across the Galaxy, and ended by realizing it is a
complex, tiered society, devoted to artistic and scientific endeavors, which
is ultimately under the control of a secretive group of aristocratic women.
Bujold has worked this sort of switch before: Barrayar initially appeared as
similarly brutal and militaristic, and it was only gradually that it was
revealed to be a complex and many-layered society with much to admire.
Do not judge people or societies until you have grown to know them might
be one of the lessons of the Vorkosigan Universe.

First Publications of the Vorkosigan Saga, in

Order of Internal Chronology
“Dreamweaver’s Dilemma”, in Bujold, Dreamweaver’s Dilemma:
Short Stories and Essays, edited by Suford Lewis (Framingham, MA:
NESFA Press, 1996), pp. 69–103.
Falling Free (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1988). Previously serialized in
Analog, December 1987-February 1988.
Shards of Honor (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1986).
Barrayar (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1991). Previously serialized in
Analog July–October 1991.
The Warrior’s Apprentice (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1986).
“The Mountains of Mourning” (novella), Analog May 1989, pp.
14–74.
“Weatherman” (novella), Analog February 1990, 12–75.
 The Vor Game (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1990), incorporating “The
Weatherman”.
Cetaganda (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1996). Previously serialized in
Analog October-mid-December 1995.
Ethan of Athos (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1986).
“Labyrinth” (novella), Analog August 1989, pp. 2–84
“The Borders of Infinity” (novella), in Free Lancers, edited by
Elizabeth Mitchell (Riverdale NY: Baen, 1987).
Brothers in Arms (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1989).
Borders of Infinity (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1989), incorporating “The
Mountains of Mourning”, “Labyrinth” and “The Borders of Infinity”.
Mirror Dance (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1994).
Memory (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1996).
Komarr (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1998).
A Civil Campaign (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1999).
“Winterfair Gifts” (novella), in Irresistible Forces, edited by
Catherine Asaro (New York, New York: New American Library,
2004), pp. 1–71.
Diplomatic Immunity (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2002).
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2012).
The Flowers of Vashnoi (novella) (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2018).
CryoBurn (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2010).
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2015).

Notes
1 Edward James, Lois McMaster Bujold (Modern Masters of Science Fiction), Chicago and
Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 62–72. Parts of this chapter are drawn and
repurposed from this book, with permission of the publisher.
2 Brian M. Stableford and David Langford, “Space Opera” in The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction. edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 21
May 2019, available at http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/space_opera.
3 James, Bujold, p. 53.
4 J. Lennard, “(Absent) Gods and Sharing Knives: The Purposes of Lois McMaster Bujold’s
Fantastic Ir/Religions” in Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master on Science Fiction
and Fantasy (Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy, p. 37), edited by Janet
Brennan Croft (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), pp. 172–194, at 176.
5 James, Bujold, p. 75.
6 All quotations come from the first editions listed above.
 7 Bujold, Dreamweaver’s Dilemma: Short Stories and Essays, edited by Suford Lewis
(Framingham, MA: NESFA Press, 1995), p. 210.
8 Bujold, Dreamweaver’s Dilemma, p. 211.
9 Dreamweaver’s Dilemma, p. 212.
10 James, Bujold, p. 6.
11 Published in Analog May 1989, and later forming part of Borders of Infinity (also 1989). It won
both the main science fiction awards, for Best Novella, in 1990: it was the first of her seven
Hugo Awards, and the second of her three Nebula Awards.
Audiovisual Worlds
5
OUR WORLD
World-Building in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town

Mark J. P. Wolf

Imaginary worlds have been around as long as storytelling itself, and have
appeared in every medium that stories have, though the possibilities and
peculiarities of each medium directly affect what kind of world-building
can be done in it. While literature, film, television, and video games have
evolved greatly over time and have increased their capabilities as venues for
imaginary worlds, the theater stage has remained a more difficult place to
world-build, especially when compared to other audiovisual media. Popular
worlds from other media have been adapted to the stage, but far fewer
worlds have originated onstage, without pre-existing incarnations of them
in other media to carry the burden of exposition and introduce worlds that
will already be well known to the audience by the time they appear in the
theater. Thus, plays which are the origin of new, detailed worlds are few and
far between.
Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Our Town (1938), arguably
one of the greatest plays of the 20th century, presents a fictional town, and
perhaps no stage play attempts as much world-building as Our Town does.
Nor does any play depend on world-building so much for the exploration of
its theme and its philosophical outlook; the fictional town of Grover’s
Corners itself is the play’s main character, as the title indicates. Though
loosely based on Peterborough, New Hampshire, where Wilder wrote part
of the play as a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat center,
Grover’s Corners is a place all its own, with its own geography, history, and
families of residents, all described and built up in the imagination of the
audience during the course of the play’s performance which is usually
between two and three hours on average. Before examining the world-
building present in the play itself, however, we should consider the
relationship between world-building and theater in general.

World-Building and Theater

A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action
involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can
be made upon it.
—Thornton Wilder, Writers at Work Interview, 19581

Imaginary worlds have appeared on stage since ancient times, such as

Nephelokokkygia (Νεφελοκοκκυγία) or Cloudcuckooland from
Aristophanes’s The Birds (414 bc), and throughout history, including
Prospero’s Island from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), Barrie’s
Neverland from Peter Pan (1904), the island in Karel Čapek’s R. U. R.
(1920), and others, as well as stage versions of imaginary worlds
originating in other media, like the adapted stage plays of The Wizard of Oz
(1902), The Hobbit (1953, 1967, 1968, and more), and even The Lord of the
Rings (1981, 1988, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2006, and more). But world-building
faces several challenges on the stage; the size of the stage and the sets built
on it, the life-size nature of the performers, the real-time nature of the live
performance, and the fixed point of view of the audience. While the
liveness and actual presence of the actors are the advantages of the stage
(the “pure event” that Wilder speaks of in the above quotation), the
disadvantages limiting storytelling and world-building are usually
compensated for by the theatrical conventions understood by the audience
that allow certain things to be implied and inferred.
World-building in literature is accomplished through description, while
an audiovisual medium like theater can present sets, costumes, and props
which can be seen directly by the audience, but these are limited in scope
due to the limitations of the size of the stage. While some stages and sets
can be very large, like the venues used for the Passion Plays at
Oberammergau, Germany; Greenville, North Carolina; Eureka Springs,
Arkansas; and formerly at Spearfish, South Dakota, the distance between
the audience and performers still limits the scope of the presentation, and
thus the size of the visible portion of the diegetic world of the story being
presented. This can be expanded, however, through the use of a narrator (a
stage convention going back at least to the Greek chorus in early theater),
who can, as in literature, verbally describe as large a world as is needed.
The possibility of description means even a small stage can be used, or a
nearly empty one, leaving the world to be almost completely described by a
narrator. This occurs frequently in shows with only one performer, who acts
out the parts and narrates the rest to the audience, as found in stage plays
like Don Berrigan’s St. John in Exile (1986), William Luce’s The Belle of
Amherst (1976), and Rob Inglis’s one-man stage adaptations of The Lord of
the Rings (1981). Such performances are more reliant on verbal description
than stage sets, making them arguably more like radio plays or audio books;
but they are able to evoke larger worlds as a result.
Likewise, the timeframe of the play’s action is not necessarily limited to
the real-time length of the performance itself, since scenes can be set at
different times, and span; however many years are needed, though such
information must also be conveyed to the audience in some way. Thus,
world-building to any degree in theater will likely depend on metatheatrical
devices such as direct address, the acknowledgment of conventions, and
other self-reflexive gestures that risk diminishing the very immersion that
world-building strives to achieve. The incorporation and effacement of
these devices, then, becomes another obstacle for the playwright who
wishes to engage in world-building.

World-Building in Our Town

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) takes place in Grover’s Corners, New
Hampshire, a fictional though typical American small town, so it is not an
imaginary world with an enormous size or scope or great depth of
invention; it is meant to be ordinary and relatable, and relies heavily on
real-world defaults, audience imagination (due to its minimalistic set and
lack of scenery), and a narrator, the character of the Stage Manager. Wilder
had used a Stage Manager character in his earlier, one-act plays The Happy
Journey to Trenton and Camden (1931) and Pullman Car Hiawatha (1932).
These plays also had minimal sets, the latter used direct address as well, and
at the beginning of both Pullman Car Hiawatha and Our Town, the Stage
Manager gives the audience a verbal tour of the location, indicating where
everything is in relation to everything else. According to Takuji Nosé,

The Stage Manager in Pullman is given both pseudo-narrator-like and

pseudo-director-like status on the stage, which indicates that he carries
out not only a functional role in the mediating communication system
but also has one in creating a dual time scheme in the play. Whereas in
one time scheme, the characters within/around “Hiawatha” convey the
events on stage through their actions, in the other time scheme the
Stage Manager directs the entire story through his explanations about
the plot to the audience and also through his instructions to the other
characters about such matters as entering/exiting and starting/stopping
their performances.2

The Stage Manager of Our Town guides us through the play, tying the
infrastructures together into a world, and acting as the author’s onstage
world-building alter ego, even to the extent of setting out the furniture as
the play opens, before he says anything. In his opening lines, he sets up the
two of the three main infrastructures of the play’s imaginary world,
geography (space), and history (time): “The name of the town is Grover’s
Corners, New Hampshire, just across the Massachusetts line: latitude 42
degrees 40 minutes; longitude 70 degrees 37 minutes. The First Act shows a
day in our town. The day is May 7, 1901. The time is just before dawn”.
Both of these facts, locating us precisely in space and time, turn out to have
something curious and contradictory about them, as we shall see. The
sections that follow will examine these two infrastructures, along with the
third one, genealogy (characters), separately, so as to be able to show how
each of them is used to build the world of the play.3

Geography (Space)
While most authors are vague as to the precise locations of their imaginary
worlds, in order to keep them inaccessible, Wilder begins with what appears
to be great precision: Grover’s Corners is in New Hampshire, “just across
the Massachusetts line” at the coordinates “latitude 42 degrees 40 minutes;
longitude 70 degrees 37 minutes”. These coordinates, however, are not even
in the United States, but in rural Kazakhstan, in the Zhualy district in the
southern part of the country. For a location in North America, the longitude
coordinate should be −70° (not positive 70); but even then, 42° 40′, −70°
37′ is not on land but in the Atlantic Ocean, in Sandy Bay just north of the
coast off of Rockport, Massachusetts. The precision of these coordinates
gives the location the concreteness of a real place, and at the same time the
coordinates could not have been checked by the audience as they sat in the
theater, at least in 1938, when the play debuted. The Stage Manager then
goes on to lay out the whole town for the audience, with stage directions
indicating where he points:

The sky is beginning to show some streaks of light over in the East
there, behind our mount’in. The morning star always gets wonderful
bright the minute before it has to go, — doesn’t it? [He stares at it for
a moment, then goes upstage.] Well, I’d better show you how our
town lies. Up here — [That is: parallel with the back wall.] is Main
Street. Way back there is the railway station; tracks go that way.
Polish Town’s across the tracks, and some Canuck families. [Toward
the left.] Over there is the Congregational Church; across the street’s
the Presbyterian. Methodist and Unitarian are over there. Baptist is
down in the holla’ by the river. Catholic Church is over beyond the
tracks. Here’s the Town Hall and Post Office combined; jail’s in the
basement. Bryan once made a speech from these very steps here.
Along here’s a row of stores. Hitching posts and horse blocks in front
of them. First automobile’s going to come along in about five years —
belonged to Banker Cartwright, our richest citizen. . . lives in the big
white house up on the hill. Here’s the grocery store and here’s Mr.
Morgan’s drugstore. Most everybody in town manages to look into
those two stores once a day. Public School’s over yonder. High
School’s still farther over. Quarter of nine mornings, noontimes, and
three o’clock afternoons, the hull town can hear the yelling and
screaming from those schoolyards. [He approaches the table and
 chairs downstage right.] This is our doctor’s house, Doc Gibbs’. This
is the back door.

At this point, before the action begins, the town’s geography is laid out in a
series of tightening concentric circles, beginning with the coordinates
situating it in the world overall, with each location or set of locations
providing the context surrounding the next one presented, with the level of
detail also increasing, The quote above begins with the distant mountain as
a backdrop beyond everything, then moves closer to the outskirts of town
“across the tracks”, gradually drawing into the more central part of town
(the Town Hall and Post Office). After this description, he indicates the
Gibbs’s house and yard, and the Webbs’s house and yard. After this quote,
we are told what is growing in Mrs. Gibbs’s garden, “This is Mrs. Gibbs’
garden. Corn . . . peas . . . beans . . . hollyhocks . . . heliotrope . . . and a lot
of burdock”, and Mrs. Webb’s garden, which is “Just like Mrs. Gibbs’, only
it’s got a lot of sunflowers, too”. The concentric circles of description,
growing in detail as we approach the center, focuses the audience on the
area of the town being represented onstage, after we are able to imagine
what lies beyond it.
After the scene at the Gibbs’s house, the Stage Manager brings out
Professor Willard, who gives more geographic detail, beyond what we
might expect to get about the town. Professor Willard: “Grover’s Corners
lies on the old Pleistocene granite of the Appalachian range. I may say it’s
some of the oldest land in the world. We’re very proud of that. A shelf of
Devonian basalt crosses it with vestiges of Mesozoic shale, and some
sandstone outcroppings; but that’s all more recent: two hundred, three
hundred million years old. Some highly interesting fossils have been found .
. . I may say: unique fossils . . . two miles out of town, in Silas Peckham’s
cow pasture”. We learn about the literal bedrock upon which the town was
built, giving it a figurative and literal foundation within the play.
At the beginning of Act Three, we are in the graveyard at the top of a
hill, and once again the Stage Manager gives us a situating description,
which builds the world around us:

You come up here, on a fine afternoon and you can see range on range
of hills awful blue they are up there by Lake Sunapee and Lake
Winnipesaukee . . . and way up, if you’ve got a glass, you can see the
 White Mountains and Mt. Washington — where North Conway and
Conway is. And, of course, our favorite mountain, Mt. Monadnock, ‘s
right here — and all these towns that lie around it: Jaffrey, ‘n East
Jaffrey, ‘n Peterborough, ‘n Dublin; and [Then pointing down in the
audience] there, quite a ways down, is Grover’s Corners.

While no stage directions are given for all the other locations (several of
which are real), the only one given is for Grover’s Corners, which is
literally where the audience is sitting. At this point, then, the audience can
be said to be in Grover’s Corners, viewing the graveyard from the point of
view of the town (although the Stage Manager also says the graveyard is
“an important part of Grover’s Corners”, which would seem to include it in
the town as well). Later during Act Three, the left half of the stage will
become Main Street and the Webbs’s home in the scene in which Emily
goes back to her 12th birthday, but the initial positioning which brings the
audience’s own location into the town adds to the immersion already
established in other ways.
All these details — and Our Town is constantly giving us concrete
details and instances that represent universal, general things, and concepts
for which we substitute our own lives’ specific details — together present a
rich, full world onstage and in our imagination, which overlaps our own
Primary World situation. The way these details are presented, using the
concentric circles described above, along with positioning just described,
has the overall effect of locating us in the center of the world, even as we
are viewing it, just as Jane Crofut’s letter is addressed to The Crofut Farm;
Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; the United States;
Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar
System; the Universe; the Mind of God.4 The play also uses similar world-
building strategies when it comes to history and time.

History (Time)
On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that
razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential
character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in
immediate spontaneity.
 —Thornton Wilder, Writers at Work Interview, 19585

Just as the beginning of Act One situates us precisely with geographical

coordinates (albeit specious ones), the same opening statement does so with
time, telling us “The First Act shows a day in our town. The day is May 7,
1901. The time is just before dawn”. This day, however, turns out to be
problematic later; on the evening of that day, characters are commenting on
how “terrible” and “wonderful” the moonlight is, at 8:30 pm; but moonrise
on May 7, 1901, at latitude 42.6666, longitude −70.6166, was actually at
10:23 pm; which means the moon would not rise for almost two hours after
the characters’ statements about the moonlight were made.6
Despite this error, almost all of the events of the play do fit into a
coherent time structure, to the point that one can generate a timeline from
all the lines which attribute specific years or even dates to events which
occur or are discussed in the play. Compared to other plays, Our Town has
an unusually high number of statements regarding events and their times,
which is necessary here for the temporal world-building that gives Grover’s
Corners its detailed history within the confines of the play’s dialog. Some of
this is done very directly, as when the Stage Manager gives us a capsule
history, for example, in Act One, that of Joe Crowell, Jr.: “Joe was awful
bright—graduated from high school here, head of his class. So he got a
scholarship to Massachusetts Tech. Graduated head of his class there, too. It
was all wrote up in the Boston paper at the time. Goin’ to be a great
engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France”. Most of
the time, however, years and dates are casually given in character dialog, or
inferred from references to ages and past years. Putting all these references
together, we can generate the following timeline of events:

200–300 million years BC = Pleistocene granite forms with shelf of

Devonian basalt and Mesozoic shale and some sandstone
outcroppings.
10th century AD = Earliest evidence of the Cotahotchee tribes in the
area.
17th century AD = Migration occurred near the end of this century.
1670–1680 = Earliest tombstones in cemetery on the mountain are
Grovers, Cartwrights, Gibbses, and Herseys.
1864 = Myrtle Webb begins cooking three meals a day for 40 years.
1871 = Howie Newsome is born around this time (he is said to be
“about thirty” in 1901).
1884 = Julia Gibbs begins cooking three meals a day for 20 years.
Hank Todd is on the baseball team.
1884 = George Gibbs is born.
1884 = Bessie, Howie Newsome’s horse, is born.
1887, February 11 = Emily is born.
1890 = Rebecca Gibbs and Wally Webb are born.
1899, February 11 = Emily’s 12th birthday.
7:00 am = The Webbs have breakfast.
1900, June = Emily likes George a lot, but then George starts spending
all his time at baseball.
1900 = Sam Craig goes out East, ends up in Buffalo.
1901, May 7, (Day seen in Act One)
1:30 am = Frank Gibbs gets a call to come deliver the
Goruslawski twins.
“just before dawn” (sunrise was 4:29 am that day7) = Frank Gibbs
returns home after delivering the twins.
5:45 am = Shorty Hawkins takes the train to Boston
7:00 am = Emily and Wally Webb are called to breakfast.
10:00 am = Wally has a test on Canada.
11:00 am = Mrs. Wentworth comes over.
“late afternoon” = Children return home from school.
“evening” = Children are doing their homework. Choir practice is
going on.
8:30 pm = Frank and George Gibbs have a talk, and choir practice
ends. George says he is “almost 17”.
1901, June = George and Emily are juniors in high school and elected
to school government positions.
1904, July 7, (Day of the wedding in Act Two)
“early morning” = It is raining.
5:45 am = Whistle heard from train to Boston. Mrs. Gibbs and
Mrs. Webb make breakfast.
7:00 am = George goes to call on Emily.
12:00 pm = The wedding of George Gibbs and Emily Webb.
 1906 = First automobile, belonging to banker Cartwright, comes to
town.
1909 = George and Emily Gibbs’s son is born.
1910 or 1911, summer = Julia Gibbs dies.
1913, summer = (Day of the funeral in Act Three)
“afternoon” = The burial of Emily Gibbs is held in the cemetery.
1930 = Frank Gibbs dies. (At an unspecified time later, the hospital is
named after him.)
2901 = The time capsule in the cornerstone of the Cartwright Bank is
expected to be dug up.

Before we examine the timeline as a whole, there are a few interesting

things to note about these entries. To begin with, there is an inconsistency
regarding Emily’s age. In Act Three, we are given the actual date of Emily’s
birthday; she was born on February 11, 1887. This agrees with the
statement made on July 7, 1904, Emily’s wedding day, when Mrs. Webb
says: “It came over me at breakfast this morning; there was Emily eating
her breakfast as she’s done for seventeen years and now she’s going off to
eat it in someone else’s house”. Both figures would imply that Emily is 17
at the time of the wedding, on July 7, 1904. George, who is in the same
class in high school with Emily, says during Act One, in a scene occurring
on May 7, 1901, that he is “almost 17”; thus his 17th birthday is most likely
during 1901, which would mean that the year of his birth would around
mid-1884, making him between two or three years older than Emily.
Contradicting this, a stage direction in Act One (on the same day of May 7,
1901) says “Right, george, about sixteen, and rebecca, eleven. Left, emily
and wally, same ages”. This means Emily would have been born in 1884,
like George; yet in Act Three we are specifically given February 11, 1887
as Emily’s birthday. Since the date in Act Three is so precise (and matches
the comment made in 1904), it seems like it would take precedence over
more vague (“about sixteen”) information given only in a stage direction. If
we go with the latter year of 1887 for Emily’s birthday, then this would
mean, since George and Emily are juniors in high school and elected to
school government positions in June of 1901, that Emily is a high school
junior at the age of 14, which would put her three grades ahead of her
contemporaries. In Act One, Emily does say “I’m the brightest girl in
school for my age. I have a wonderful memory”, but it also seems unlikely
that she is actually three grades ahead of others her age. Due to the stage
direction that says “same ages” and the fact they are in the same class
together, one does get the impression that Wilder intended George and
Emily to be the same age, but the information he gives us implies
otherwise, or is simply inconsistent.
The years of two other events are implied in the dialog; Sam Craig must
have went out east in 1900 before ending up in Buffalo, because in Act
Three, which is summer of 1913, he says he has been gone “over 12 years”;
if he had been gone longer, one would expect him to say “over 13 years” or
something like that; so it is likely that 1900 is the year he left. Likewise, Joe
Stoddard says “Yes, Doc Gibbs lost his wife two-three years ago . . . about
this time”, so her death must have been summer of either 1910 or 1911.
Finally, there is an error in what the Stage Manager says; he claims that
Emily’s 12th birthday, February 11, 1899, was a Tuesday, when in fact it
was actually a Saturday.
As a whole, this collection of events, stretching across millions of years,
with events ranging from the geological to the mundane, may remind one of
the book-length expansion of Richard McGuire’s Here (original six-page
comic strip, 1989; book, 2014), which imagines all the events to take place
on a small section of land throughout the history of the world.8 Just like the
concentric circles of geography are increasingly detailed as we move
toward their center, the events on Our Town’s timeline extend from the
prehistoric to the futuristic, with the majority of the events falling between
1899 and 1913, and especially on the days of the wedding, the funeral, and
May 7, 1901, the last of which can even be laid out in a timeline on an
hourly basis. Professor Willard’s description of the land is followed by
other details of the Native American tribes, the first humans in the area, the
migrations of later immigrants, and the tombstones of the oldest families
(all of which still have descendants in town, as we discover), and so on,
leading up to the turn of the 20th century, the present time of the play. We
also move forward in time, with the changes the Stage Manager mentions at
the start of Act Three:

This time nine years have gone by, friends — summer, 1913. Gradual
changes in Grover’s Corners. Horses are getting rarer. Farmers coming
into town in Fords. Everybody locks their house doors now at night.
Ain’t been any burglars in town yet, but everybody’s heard about ‘em.
 You’d be surprised, though — on the whole, things don’t change
much around here.

Of course, the play appeared in 1938, when much turn-of-the-century life

was already gone, and the worsening situation in Europe threatened to
change things even further. And three out of four of the last items on the
timeline also involve change; the deaths of Julia Gibbs, Emily Gibbs, and
Frank Gibbs. All of the details and events referred to beyond the events of
the main storyline are necessary for world-building and context, especially
since the town itself is the play’s main character.
Finally, the last event on the timeline, set far ahead in the year 2901, is
the expected digging up of the time capsule, which will be buried in the
cornerstone of the Cartwrights’s new bank in Grover’s Corners. The Stage
Manager tells us about the preparations for the future discovery:

And they’ve asked a friend of mine what they should put in the
cornerstone for people to dig up. . . a thousand years from now. . . . Of
course, they’ve put in a copy of the New York Times and a copy of Mr.
Webb’s Sentinel. . . . We're kind of interested in this because some
scientific fellas have found a way of painting all that reading matter
with a glue — a silicate glue — that’ll make it keep a thousand — two
thousand years.

The discussion of the silicate glue that will preserve the paper, keeping it
intact for perhaps as long as 2,000 years, could be seen as implying that the
capsule’s contents could remain on display in a museum for another 1,000
years, bringing the timeline to an end as late as the year 3901. Finally, there
is the last item mentioned that will be put into the time capsule; according
to the Stage Manager, in Act One:

And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the
people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the
comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.
So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and
the people a thousand years from now'll know a few simple facts
about us — more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh
flight.
See what I mean?
 So — people a thousand years from now — this is the way we were
in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth
century. — This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our
marrying and in our living and in our dying.

A copy of the very play being “performed for (or read by) the audience.” is
one of the written works being placed in the time capsule; interestingly,
written works are the only things mentioned as the capsule’s contents. That
Our Town itself will be included means that the last remaining vestiges of
Grover’s Corners, apart from the time capsule itself, as an object, will be
the very play the audience has now; we are, in a way, like that future
audience, since that is all we presently have to represent the town. Finally,
the people mentioned by the Stage Manager brings us to the third main
infrastructure of imaginary worlds, which is that of characters, and the webs
of relationships which give them their context.

Genealogy (Characters)
Just as the play gives us a broad but limited background geographically and
historically, we likewise get similar information on the background of the
people of Grover’s Corners. Again, it is Professor Willard who establishes
the deep background in Act One:

Yes . . . anthropological data: Early Amerindian stock. Cotahatchee

tribes. . . no evidence before the tenth century of this era. . . hm . . .
now entirely disappeared . . . possible traces in three families.
Migration toward the end of the seventeenth century of English
brachiocephalic blue-eyed stock. . . for the most part. Since then some
Slav and Mediterranean —

We are also told that the earliest tombstones in cemetery on the mountain,
from 1670 to 1680, contain the names of Grovers, Cartwrights, Gibbses,
and Herseys. The first surname, Grover, provides a possible origin of the
town’s own name, tying it closer to its inhabitants. The last three names are
names which reappear in the present-day portions of the play, showing that
the families have remained in the area; the Cartwrights are said to have had
the first automobile in town, and it is also their new bank building which
will contain the time capsule, so they are expected to be around for some
time.
The Gibbs and Hersey families, of course, have intermarried; we find out
that Hersey is the maiden name of Frank Gibbs’s wife Julia. Julia’s
grandmother is mentioned as Grandma Wentworth, and another Wentworth,
no doubt a descendent or relative, is said to be coming to visit the Gibbs’s
house at 11:00 am on May 7, 1901. We also discover more genealogical
connections throughout the play; Julia’s cousin is Hester Wilcox, Julia’s
sister is Carey, and Carey’s son is Samuel Craig. Frank and Julia Gibbs, of
course, have a son, George, and a daughter, Rebecca. George has an Uncle
Luke, who is mentioned four times, along with the fact that George wants to
work on his farm and that his uncle may one day give it over to him.
The other major family of the play is the Webb family; Charles and
Myrtle Webb, who have a daughter, Emily, and a son, Wally. We are told
Emily and Wally have an Aunt Carrie and an Aunt Norah, though through
which of their parents they are related is not indicated. George and Emily
marry, uniting the play’s main two families, and have two children of their
own, neither of which is named; Emily dies after giving birth to the second
one, and the first is a boy who is born four years earlier. Thus we have
traced three generations of family, and a number of collateral relations as
well. Apart from that, there are other indications of relationships, even to
characters we may not meet; for example, Mrs. Soames mentions Mr.
Soames, Mrs. Goruslawski is the mother of twins, and Joe Crowell, Jr. and
his brother Si Crowell must be the sons of Joe Crowell, Sr. Likewise, the
play is rich in background detail as well; over the course of the three acts,
we are given no less than three dozen surnames of the town’s inhabitants:
Carter, Cartwright, Corcoran, Craig, Crofut, Crowell, Ellis, Fairchild,
Ferguson, Forrest, Foster, Gibbs, Goruslawski, Greenough, Grover, Gruber,
Hawkins, Hersey, Huckins, Lockhart, McCarty, Morgan, Newsome,
Peckham, Slocum, Soames, Stimson, Stoddard, Todd, Trowbridge, Warren,
Webb, Wentworth, Wilcox, Wilkins, and Willard.9
The genealogical background places the characters in the context of
families from which they have descended; George and Emily’s children can
trace their roots to the Gibbs, Webb, and Hersey families, perhaps even
back to those whose graves are marked by the early tombstones. The
background details, and events we have witnessed, give us a familiarity that
the play encourages; not only does the Stage Manager speak to us directly,
but occasionally characters address the audience, including Professor
Willard, Charles Webb when he answers questions posed by the faux
audience members during the question-and-answer session in Act One, and
Mrs. Soames at George and Emily’s wedding in Act Two, as her chatter
(addressing us and her neighbors) drowns out the clergyman. By Act Three,
we are seeing the graveyard from the point of view of Grover’s Corners (as
mentioned earlier), and the Stage Manager shows us various graves and
says “Here’s your friend, Mrs. Gibbs” and “And Mrs. Soames who enjoyed
the wedding so — you remember?”, the first comment casually supposing
familiarity and a relationship, while the second comment suggests a
nostalgic recollection of an event from the past, both comments
encouraging our emotional involvement with the play’s characters and
history.
And through the intimate knowledge of the characters, along with the
town’s geography and history, by the end of the play the audience will
likely have established a close connection and familiarity with the town
itself; indeed, it is not just “their town”, but “Our Town”. After that, it is
merely another step to consider our own hometown, its history, layout, and
inhabitants, the comparisons causing us to reflect on the universal and
eternal qualities that the play is discussing.

Transmedial Adaptations of Our Town

Our Town was first performed January 22, 1938, it later found success on
Broadway, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Thornton Wilder also had
a hand in the transmedial expansion of the play and its world into film, and
recognized the peculiarities of that particular medium. Audiences may be
surprised to find that the 1940 film adaptation differs from the play; apart
from a number of other changes, perhaps the greatest one is that Emily lives
at the end. At first this may seem like typical Hollywood meddling to bring
about a happy ending, but Wilder himself approved the idea. Producer Sol
Lesser and Wilder discussed the film adaptation of Our Town in a series of
letters. As Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo write in an edited collection of
those letters,
 Wilder was consulted by Lesser about the film script. Their letters
concern problems faced in transforming a play into a film. On the
major change of the added happy ending, Wilder commented to Lesser
on Easter Night 1940, “In the first place, I think Emily should live.
I’ve always thought so. In a movie you see the people so close that a
different relation is established. In the theatre they are halfway
abstractions in an allegory; in the movie they are very concrete. So
insofar as the play is a generalized allegory, she dies — we die — they
die; insofar as it’s concrete happening it’s not important that she die;
it’s even disproportionately cruel that she die.
Let her live — the idea will be imparted anyway.”10 The changed
ending still has Emily undergoing a near-death experience, allowing
the graveyard scene in the play to occur, before Emily returns to the
living. As Donna Kornhaber writes,
Wilder’s argument, is, in essence, based on the different properties
of film and theater, on a belief that the intimacy and proximity of film
forces it into the status of a “Concrete Happening” that does not offer
the same allegorical possibilities as the stage. The changes to which he
consented were an attempt to render Our Town anew in a manner
appropriate to cinema. Wilder’s concessions did not mean he was
entirely satisfied with Wood’s adaptation, although it was well
received at the time and was nominated for six Academy Awards. But
the playwright took from the experience a deeper appreciation of the
specific strengths and capacities of filmic storytelling and a
willingness to adjust his working methods to the demands of the
screen, even if that meant reversing some of his most closely held
principals. Wilder learned that film is a medium that must tell its
stories differently and that, contra the theater, must find its power in
the particular.11

The adaptation of Our Town raises other questions and issues pertaining to
the adaptation of an imaginary world originating on the theatrical stage to
various media; for example, the interaction with the faux audience
members, which helps bring the audience into closer connection with the
town, will likely be lost. So far, Our Town has been adapted to radio in 1939
and 1940; film in 1940; television in 1955, 1977, and 2003; ballet in 1994;
and opera in 2009. The operatic version of the play, the 1955 television
adaptation, and the stage adaptation called Grover’s Corners (1987) were
all musical adaptations of the play, demonstrating its flexibility and
continuing durability. The play itself continues to appear onstage, and in
1989 it won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival and Tony
Award for Best Revival. In 2017, Our Town was even performed in
American Sign Language and English, by the Deaf West Theater and
Pasadena Playhouse in California.
While theater places its own limitations on world-building, it also
provides an immediacy and presence which other media do not. Perhaps
playwrights have still not fully made use of the unique world-building
possibilities that the live theater stage can provide, although Our Town has
arguably made the best use of them so far.12 By cleverly managing to
include a large amount of world data which, while perhaps not immediately
pertinent to the advancement of the storyline, is still necessary to the world-
building needed to give Grover’s Corners its detail and verisimilitude, Our
Town demonstrates that the stage can deliver unique imaginary worlds that
become our world as we attend the performances occurring there.

Notes
1 Malcolm Cowley, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, New York, New York: Penguin
Books, 1958, page 108.
2 Takuji Nosé, “Speech System of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Pullman Car
Hiawatha”, On-line Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics
Association (PALA), 2008, available at
https://www.pala.ac.uk/uploads/2/5/1/0/25105678/nose2008.pdf.
3 Elsewhere I have written extensively about the infrastructures of imaginary worlds; see Mark J.
P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, New York:
Routledge, 2012.
4 There is no “Sutton County” in New Hampshire; Sutton is a town in Merrimack County, New
Hampshire, which is made up of the villages of Sutton Mills, North Sutton, South Sutton, and
East Sutton; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton,_New_Hampshire.
5 Malcolm Cowley, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, New York: Penguin Books,
1958, page 108.
6 Moonrise on May 7, 1901, according to the Keisan Online Calculator, available at
https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1224689365.
7 Sunrise on May 7, 1901, according to the Keisan Online Calculator, available at
https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1224686065.
8 Richard McGuire’s “Here” began as a six-page comic strip in Raw, Volume 2, #1, in 1989, and
was expanded to the book-length work Here from Pantheon Books in 2014.
 9 Assuming that Professor Willard and Professor Gruber, who have researched Grover’s Corners,
are also residents; but the play does not specify exactly one way or the other.
10 From The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, edited by Edward Burns and Ulla E.
Dydo, with William Rice, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, page 256.
Available at https://books.google.com/books?
id=SHOPenESaHQC&pg=PA256&lpg=PA256&dq=%22different+relation+is+established.+In+t
he+theatre,+they+are+halfway+abstractions+in+an+allegory,%22&source=bl&ots=ctEokyiIXa&
sig= b8Cd7b0Bm1cMTMItawIFeeuCwnc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi7-
_iStpzeAhXM7VMKHctGBdsQ6AEwAXoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22different%20relatio
n%20is%20established.%20In%20the%20theatre%2C%20they%20are%20halfway%20abstracti
ons%20in%20an%20allegory%2C%22&f=false.
11 From Donna Kornhaber, Hitchcock’s Diegetic Imagination: Thornton Wilder, Shadow of a Doubt,
and Hitchcock’s Mise-en-Scène, November 2, 2015, e-book, available at
https://books.google.com/books?id=z-
vZCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT12&dq=the+idea+will+be+imparted+anyway&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahU
KEwiGy5-RubjeAh
Wuc98KHYxDBwEQ6AEIMzAC#v=onepage&q=turns%20pivotally&f=false.
12 Due to the errors regarding the chronology, it would appear Wilder did not lay out all of his
events on a consistent timeline, the way world-builders would do today. Still, the timeline is
fairly detailed compared to the existing imaginary world chronologies of its time, especially in
theater, and holds together well enough for the purpose of the story.
6
“SUCKLED ON SHADOWS”
States of Decay in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast
Novels

Edward O’Hare

What was I after anyway? I suppose, to create a world of my own in

which those who belong to it and move in it come to life and never
step outside into either this world of bus queues, ration-books, or even
the Upper Ganges — or into another imaginative world.
—Mervyn Peake, in a letter to Gordon Smith1

In the autumn of 1943 Mervyn Peake sent a manuscript to Graham Greene

for his appraisal. When Greene, by then not only a famous novelist but also
an influential figure in British publishing, wrote back, his “mercilessly
frank”2 comments must have been the very opposite of what Peake had
hoped to hear. Even though he had been intrigued by the opening sections
of the work, which the young author had entitled Titus Groan, Greene found
it marred by extreme laziness and awash with “really bad writing,
redundant adjectives, [and] a kind of facetiousness, a terrible prolixity in the
dialogue”.3 For everything that he considered to be “immensely good”4
about the book, Greene complained that there was an equal amount that was
“trite, unrealized [and] novelettish”.5 Weighed down by “about 10,000
words of adjectives”6 which he felt were entirely superfluous, he regarded
Titus Groan’s prospect of publication as doubtful, to say the very least.
Having labored enthusiastically on the novel for almost four years,
Peake must have been particularly stung by the initially well-disposed
Greene’s devastating verdict and by the series of rejections the book
subsequently received from leading publishing houses. For Peake, the novel
was not merely another of the many projects that became the focus of his
multifaceted creative talent; it was his first sustained attempt to represent
the world of his richly strange and gloriously macabre imagination in
words. Thankfully for modern literature Peake persevered, and Titus Groan
was published three years later in March 1946 and was later followed by
two sequels. Although the book received some glowing accolades, Peake
must have been dismayed that even after his substantial revisions many
reviewers voiced opinions strongly reminiscent of Greene’s, often in
similarly trenchant terms. The Irish writer Kate O’Brien called it “a large,
haphazard, Gothic mess”,7 while the British playwright Charles Morgan
argued that although Peake’s novel was undoubtedly an astonishing display
of the “forces of dream, vision and language”8 its overall effect was
weakened by his indulgence in “shocking affectations and sudden
pedestrian vulgarisms”.9
Of all the critics who reviewed Titus Groan upon its original publication,
the renowned novelist Elizabeth Bowen came closest to identifying the true
nature of Peake’s accomplishment. Bowen observed that Titus Groan was
“one of those works of pure, self-sufficient imagination that are from time
to time thrown out”,10 and she correctly predicted that in the decades to
come this highly unusual new author would enjoy “a smallish but fervent
public, composed of those whose imaginations are complementary to Mr
Peake’s”.11 Over the years the ranks of this deeply devoted and continually
expanding group has included an eclectic assortment of cultural luminaries
such as C. S. Lewis, Orson Welles, John Betjeman, Peter Sellers, Anthony
Burgess, Michael Moorcock, Sting, Terry Pratchett, Joanne Harris, and Neil
Gaiman,12 all of whom have praised the marvelous idiosyncrasy and
deliciously dark wit of Peake’s creation.
Following Bowen’s example, many of Peake’s admirers have tried to
define exactly what kind of text Titus Groan and the other novels which
form the Gormenghast sequence are. To do this, they have consistently tried
to bundle them into the genres of Gothic fiction and Fantasy literature, often
implicitly assuming that there exists some critical consensus as to what
those terms signify. This has proven especially misleading in the case of
Peake, since his books contain none of the uncanny or preternatural
elements traditionally thought of as intrinsic to the Gothic genre, nor do
they feature any of the wizards, dragons, or invented languages which
readers commonly associate with Fantasy novels. Another frequent
approach to the Gormenghast sequence has seen critics interpret it simply
as Peake’s nightmarish depiction of the events of his own age, a period of
history characterized by unparalleled destruction, violence, and social
upheaval. An otherworldly creative figure who discovered the extent of
mankind’s barbarity while traveling through Europe in the immediate
aftermath of World War II, there has been a tendency to conclude that the
Gormenghast sequence is really Peake’s cathartic bid to transmute the
incomprehensible monstrousness of this conflict into a work of art.
If neither of these conventional forms of analysis has succeeded in
capturing the artistry of these most wildly overdetermined and uproariously
eccentric of texts, an alternative critical strategy is needed for examining
the Gormenghast books. The objective of this essay is to formulate such a
strategy in order to explore the many sides of Peake’s imaginative vision. It
aims to trace the origins of the Groan family saga in Peake’s varied artistic
and literary influences, as well as in the details of his extraordinary
upbringing; to examine the grotesque style and ornate sensibility which are
unique to his fiction; to assess Peake’s ability to defy the constraints of
genre and create characters who are both utterly alien and yet curiously
familiar; ultimately, I intend to demonstrate how the land of Gormenghast
occupies a singular place in 20th-century fiction.
The Gormenghast sequence comprises the three original novels
published in Peake’s lifetime, Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950),
Titus Alone (1959), the short narrative Boy in Darkness (1956),13 and (in the
view of a select group of critics and aficionados) Titus Awakes (2011), a
novel written in the years after Peake’s untimely death by his widow Maeve
Gilmore and based upon his notes. The first two novels are set in an
imaginary realm dominated by Gormenghast Castle, an impossibly vast
edifice which has been in a state of decay as far back as anyone can
remember. The castle is home to Sepulchrave, the morose 76th Earl of
Gormenghast, his formidable wife Lady Gertrude, their petulant daughter
Fuschia, the Earl’s cretinous, doll-like twin sisters Clarice and Cora, and a
rigidly stratified society made up of different classes of servant. Daily
existence for the Groans and their legion of loyal retainers consists of an
endless series of interminable and esoteric ceremonies, since tradition must
be fastidiously adhered to at all costs. Everything that happens in this
dreary, cloistered place, from hour to hour, month to month, and year to
year, is completely dictated by these stultifying rituals, the meanings of
which (presuming that they ever actually had any) have long since been lost
to time.
For an age nothing new at all has occurred within the walls of
Gormenghast, but in the opening pages of Titus Groan the castle is shaken
by not one but two dramatic developments. The Earl and Lady Gertrude
have at last produced a son, Titus, who is destined to one day assume his
hereditary title and rule over this gloomy land. With the birth of an heir it
seems that the crucial stability and continuity of life in this stagnant domain
is ensured, but something else now transpires which throws this into terrible
jeopardy. This is the appearance of Steerpike, a supremely devious young
man consumed by a vengeful desire to overthrow the Groan household once
and forever. No sooner has Steerpike emerged from the lowest depths of the
castle than he uses his abundant charm and ruthless intelligence to set in
motion his scheme to secretly usurp control of Gormenghast. A brief
summary cannot convey the intricacy of Peake’s plotting, but in the first
two books of the sequence he chronicles the deceptions, manipulations, and
murders which Steerpike commits in order to advance his position within
the castle’s hierarchy and the brutal struggle to prevent him from fulfilling
his plan.
Perhaps the best way to commence this examination of the Gormenghast
sequence is to return to the accusation still occasionally made against
Peake’s books, specifically that they are spectacular examples of
overwriting. Graham Greene has certainly not been alone in condemning
Peake as a writer too much in love with the magic of words and lacking the
skill and restraint to use them effectively.14 Indeed, readers new to the
author are likely to find themselves daunted by his sometimes page-long
passages of description and his tendency to fixate lavishly on what might
seem to be minor aspects of his secondary world. However, all of this
Baroque extravagance is not so much a part of Peake’s world-building
technique as the very key to it. To depict an alternate reality buckling under
the weight of centuries of ruination and clogged to capacity with obscure
rites and obsolete customs, Peake deliberately utilizes this vast
accumulation of detail. What this intentionally stifling excess of adjectives
generates in the reader is the sense that they too, like the inhabitants of the
castle, are powerless prisoners in this strange world whose Byzantine
workings are now largely unfathomable.
Verisimilitude, or imbuing the unreal with the appearance of authenticity
through the inclusion of plausible detail, is of course an intrinsic aspect of
all fiction, and one arguably even more vital to works of the fantastic. In the
Gormenghast sequence, Peake pushes this literary technique to its absolute
extreme. As Peake’s biographer G. Peter Winnington has written, these
books contain such an extraordinary “proliferation of images”15 that the
difficulty “lies not so much in interpreting them, as in choosing among the
plethora of possible meanings”.16 By cramming his narrative with a
quantity of detail far greater than their mind is accustomed to processing,
Peake leaves the reader so overwhelmed that they have little choice but to
accept the reality of his imaginary world and all that it contains.
Farah Mendlesohn has rightfully cited the Gormenghast sequence as a
prime instance of what she terms an “immersive” work of fantasy, one
which is “set in a world built so that it functions on all levels as a complete
world”.17 She writes that an immersive fantasy solicits belief by acting as if
we “must share the assumptions of the world”18: in this kind of work the
reader “must sit in the heads of the protagonists, accepting what they know
as the world, interpreting it through what they notice, and through what
they do not”.19 Surrounded by a multitude of details whose significance we
don’t even half understand, we nonetheless gradually find ourselves
regarding this constructed place as normal just like the denizens of the
castle do.
As Mendlesohn points out, in the Gormenghast sequence “the fantastic
is embedded in the linguistic excesses of the text”20 and this is how it
compels the reader to believe in it. One of the most impressive examples of
Peake’s use of this technique occurs early on in Titus Groan when Steerpike
escapes confinement and inches his way agonizingly across a rooftop
before he finally beholds Gormenghast in all its vast, ruinous glory. Piece
by piece, the enormous cityscape unfolds, and Steerpike’s awestruck
reaction to this panorama is much the same as that of the reader. Peake’s
feat of description is one of his finest:

Steerpike, when he had reached the spine of the roof, sat astride it and
regained his breath for the second time. He was surrounded by lakes
of fading daylight.
He could see how the ridge on which he sat led in a wide curve to
where in the west it was broken by the first of four towers. Beyond
them the swoop of a roof continued to complete a half circle far to his
right. This was ended by a high lateral wall. Stone steps led from the
ridge to the top of the wall, from which might be approached, along a
cat-walk, an area the size of a field, surrounding which, though at a
lower level, were the heavy, rotting structures of adjacent roofs and
towers, and between these could be seen other roofs far away, and
other towers.
Steerpike’s eyes, following the rooftops, came at last to the parapet
surrounding this area. He could not, of course, from where he was
guess at the stone sky-field itself, lying as it did a league away and
well above his eye level, but as the main massing of Gormenghast
arose to the west, he began to crawl in that direction along the sweep
of the ridge.
It was over an hour before Steerpike came to where only the
surrounding parapet obstructed his view of the stone sky-field. As he
climbed this parapet with tired, tenacious limbs he was unaware that
only a few seconds of time and a few blocks of vertical stone divided
him from seeing what had not been seen for over four hundred years.
Scrabbling one knee over the topmost stones he heaved himself over
the rough wall. When he lifted his head wearily to see what his next
obstacle might be, he saw before him, spreading over an area of four
square acres, a desert of grey stone slabs. The parapet on which he
was now sitting bolt upright surrounded the whole area, and swinging
his legs over he dropped the four odd feet to the ground. As he
dropped and then leaned back to support himself against the wall, a
crane arose at a far corner of the stone field and, with a slow beating
of its wings, drifted over the distant battlements and dropped out of
sight. The sun was beginning to set in a violet haze and the stone field,
save for the tiny figure of Steerpike, spread out emptily, the cold slabs
 catching the prevailing tint of the sky. Between the slabs there was
dark moss and the long, coarse necks of seedling grasses. Steerpike’s
greedy eyes devoured the arena. What use could it be put to?21

This dizzying, dazzling image of a patchwork of glittering rooftops

stretching to the very limits of perception perfectly demonstrates Peake’s
astonishing ability to depict something utterly wondrous and yet entirely
credible. So meticulous and dynamic are his descriptions that it never even
occurs to the reader to consider whether these things could actually exist.
Once again, the source of their power lies in the denseness of their detail.
As China Miéville has observed, “Asserting the specificity of a part,
[Peake] better takes as given the whole — of which, of course, we are in
awe”.22 Although what he describes may be fantastic and outrageously
exaggerated, the absolute precision he applies to its representation makes its
reality seem incontestable. In the words of Miéville, “Peake acts as if the
totality of his invented place could not be in dispute. The dislocation and
fascination we feel, the intoxication, is testimony to the success of his
simple certainty”.23
The stunning visuality of Peake’s prose is certainly one of its most
remarkable qualities. John Clute and John Grant overstate nothing when
they make the claim that the Gormenghast sequence is “perhaps the most
intensely visual fantasy ever written”24 and that its author stands as “the
most potent visionary the field has yet witnessed”.25 The vivid people and
vistas which emerge from the pages of these books inhabit the imagination
with a force which makes them unforgettable. It is therefore easy to believe
that the man who created them was also the most acclaimed and sought-
after British illustrator of his generation. Peake was already producing
superb drawings by the age of ten, and he later became equally adept as an
oil painter. His accomplishment as a draughtsman brought him work as a
teacher at the Westminster School of Art, but Peake also turned his versatile
hand to theater costume designs, commercial graphics (his famous logo for
Pan Books was used for decades), and even cartoons for magazines. As a
book illustrator he scored major triumphs with his exquisite pen and ink
drawings for editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) (widely
considered as even more exuberant and true to the manic spirit of Lewis
Carroll than Tenniel’s) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner” (1798), which surpass those of Doré in their ghastly,
numinous beauty.
As much as he excelled at it, Peake was never content with simply
providing visual interpretations of other author’s worlds. From his earliest
years he produced skillful combinations of drawings and narrative, in which
the pictures and text complimented one another and formed a unified
whole. As an adult, Peake’s literary experiments were often accompanied
by sketches of their various characters, scenes and settings, and these
helped him to form a better understanding of what he was creating. The
Gormenghast sequence was conceived in this fashion. While the original
editions of these novels regrettably featured only a handful of his drawings,
Peake was constantly fleshing out his secondary world and its denizens in
sketch pads, on canvas, and even in the margins of his manuscripts. In 2011,
to mark the centenary of his birth, a lavish new edition of the Gormenghast
sequence containing all of the artwork relating to the story was published,
allowing readers to finally experience these texts in the way that Peake
himself had probably always envisaged.
In his own modest way, Peake saw himself as following in the tradition
of unclassifiable figures like William Blake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
William Morris, whose drawings and oils are inseparable from their
writings. Just as Peake considered his visual art and fiction as two aspects
of a single creative endeavor, the Gormenghast books are informed as much
by his artistic influences as his literary ones. What Winnington describes as
his “richly figurative language [. . .] his wide range of vocabulary, including
unusual and obsolete words, and his use of self-consciously ‘poetic’
terms”26 must be perceived as his attempt to devise a prose style as opulent
and vibrant as the imagery of El Greco, Velasquez, Goya and Van Gogh, the
painters whom Peake cited as his most enduring inspirations. The collection
of writers he credited as contributing to Gormenghast’s heady brew was no
less diverse and illustrious: Christopher Marlowe, John Bunyan, the
Brothers Grimm, Robert Louis Stevenson and above all Charles Dickens
remained favorites from his childhood until the very end of his life.
What primarily distinguishes Peake’s art, both visual and literary, is what
Winnington terms his “eye for the grotesque”.27 Whether it was the unusual
profile of a stranger who passed him on the street or some strikingly
incongruous tableaux he stumbled upon, his memory recorded these things
exactly and they became the raw material for his art. He possessed an innate
appreciation of the bizarre and the outré, as well as an extraordinary gift for
exaggerating and distorting natural phenomena. As with Coleridge, Poe,
and Wilde (other authors who brought out the best in him as an artist),
Peake’s extravagant and decadent aesthetic seems not to have been the
result of conscious choice. Instead, it derived purely from his way of seeing
things.
Peake’s use of the grotesque is particularly noteworthy for its tendency
to deconstruct the subject into a set of components which share an uneasy
co-existence but also seem to have independent lives of their own. Rather
than providing general images of his characters, he fragments them to the
point where a definite overall impression is difficult to obtain. In this
regard, none of his descriptions are more memorable than those devoted to
Mr. Swelter, the enormously gross and bloodthirsty head chef of
Gormenghast’s Great Kitchen and the arch-nemesis of Lord Sepulchrave’s
spindly and cadaverous manservant Mr. Flay. When we are introduced to
the loquacious Swelter in his hellish lair, Peake describes him thus:

The long beams of sunlight, which were reflected from the moist walls
in a shimmering haze, had pranked the chef’s body with patches of
ghost-light. The effect from below was that of a dappled volume of
warm vague whiteness and of a grey that dissolved into swamps of
midnight — of a volume that towered and dissolved among the rafters.
As occasion merited he supported himself against the stone pillar at
his side and as he did so patches of light shifted across the degraded
whiteness of the stretched uniform he wore. When Mr Flay had first
eyed him, the cook’s head had been entirely in shadow. Upon it the
tall cap of office rose coldly, a vague topsail half lost in a fitful sky. In
the total effect there was indeed something of the galleon.28

At the ceremonial breakfast to celebrate the birth of Titus, Swelter peers

through a door to inspect his gastronomic handiwork, and Peake
reemphasizes this suggestion of a corporeal bulk so obscenely massive it
cannot be considered by itself, only as a mass of individually animated
constituent parts;

Doubling his body he opens the door the merest fraction of an inch
and applies his eye to the fissure. As he bends, the shimmering folds
 of the silk about his belly hiss and whisper like the voice of far and
sinister waters or like some vast, earthless ghost-cat sucking its own
breath. His eye, moving around the panel of the door, is like
something detached, self-sufficient, and having no need of the
voluminous head that follows it nor for that matter of the mountainous
masses undulating to the crutch, and the soft, trunk-like legs. So alive
is it, this eye, quick as an adder, veined like a blood-alley. What need
is there for all the cumulus of dull, surrounding clay — the slow white
hinterland that weighs behind it as it swivels among the doughy,
circumscribing wodges like a marble of raddled ice?29

What is immediately noticeable from these passages is the gorgeously

elegant manner in which Peake portrays this intensely loathsome figure. He
sees fit to imbue the repellent Swelter with a curious variety of majesty and
splendor, and this same ambiguity is evident in his descriptions of all of the
inhabitants of Gormenghast. Even the more outwardly attractive of them are
marked by some kind of oddness or peculiarity, while those who are
monstrously ugly are so to such a complete and total degree that this quality
in itself becomes something strangely exquisite. In other words, the real
brilliance of Peake’s grotesquerie lies in the way he constantly traverses the
line which traditionally divides the beautiful from the hideous, blurring it to
the extent that we are no longer certain that anything truly separates them at
all. In his fantastically ornate vision of things, these aesthetic categories are
inverted to the point where they have no actual value: there is only what
exists and how it appears to us at any one moment.
As a writer and an artist, Peake’s sensibility veered instinctively toward
the weird and disturbing, which could make publishers wary of employing
him. His first set of illustrations for a treasury of nursery rhymes entitled
Ride-a-Cock-Horse (1940), produced at the age of 29, were criticized for
being “nightmarish”,30 with one reviewer insisting that even though they
possessed “a certain sort of horrible beauty”31 they were definitely not for
children. The poet Walter de la Mare more astutely characterized Peake’s
work as exhibiting “a rare layer of imagination, and a touch now and then,
and more than a touch, of the genuinely sinister”,32 and he half-jokingly
warned his friend that the parents of traumatized children would start
sending him their psychiatrist’s bills. However, this darkness is the very
essence of Peake’s creative talent and the quality which elevates the
Gormenghast sequence to the status of a true work of art.
In setting out to write what he called the “Titus” books, Peake explained
that it was his ambition “to create between two covers a world, the
movements of which — in action, atmosphere and speech — enthral and
excite the imagination”.33 However, one of the great ironies of these novels
is that Peake invests such energy and visionary intensity in depicting a
fictional world which has succumbed to paralysis and ossification long ago.
Within Gormenghast’s labyrinth of dank and shadowy passageways,
winding staircases, and candlelit corridors, time, insofar as we understand
it, does not exist. There is only the ceaseless repetition of set patterns of
behavior, which recur over and over again, differing only in what would
seem to be the most inconsequential of their details. Peake’s imaginary
world is an ageless mixture of ancient and modern. At various points in the
sequence, it seems to be home to a medieval society, a late 18th-century
one, a mid-19th-century one, and is even enlarged to incorporate elements
of the 20th century. Nevertheless, it is a place without any concept of
development or growth, only mindless and remorseless continuation.
At the heart of the Gormenghast sequence is a paradox which also
constitutes an intriguing artistic challenge: how is it possible to represent
life in a realm caught in stasis, a land where change of any kind is not just
feared with a kind of paranoid mania but where the inhabitants struggle to
even imagine the intrusion of anything unexpected? One of the reasons
Peake’s imaginary world seems so strange lies in the reader’s difficulty in
finding significance in the behavior of his characters. This is because
Gormenghast is not merely the setting of his story; it is the very foundation
of their identities.34 They have no notion of belonging to this place because
they cannot conceive the idea of ever belonging anywhere else. The very
concept of existence outside of its environs is simply devoid of all
meaning.35 Even when the superannuated Mr. Flay is banished from court
and Titus boldly ventures into the unknown places beyond his home,
Gormenghast is still the vital center of their beings and continues to define
their every thought and action. In this way, it makes perfect sense that
Peake’s central characters are known as “Castles” since each of them is a
living component of this place, as integral a part of its fabric as its bricks,
beams, and flagstones, and their fates are inextricably bound up with the
endurance of its routines and rituals.
 If the “Castles’” unthinking obedience to the inviolable traditions of
Gormenghast has any real literary antecedent, it can be found in Charles
Dickens’s Bleak House (1853). In this work (which Peake knew well and
for which he once produced an unpublished series of illustrations), all of
Dickens’s extensive cast of characters are enmired to varying degrees in the
crushingly tedious and seemingly unending court case of Jarndyce and
Jarndyce. Their free will is subservient to the maddening convolutions of
this fantastically complex legal dispute, and like Peake’s characters many of
them are now demented or even insane. The ghoulish, twilight world
Dickens conjures up in this great work is one which has become hopelessly
moribund as a result of mankind’s twisted machinations, its vitality and
creativity wasted away to nothing long ago. The exhausted, crumbling
world of the Gormenghast sequence is fundamentally the same. The
“Castles” are so preoccupied with maintaining the Earldom’s ludicrous laws
and customs they are unaware that everything that surrounds them has
grown rotten and verges upon collapse. This is what the calculating
Steerpike is quick to recognize, and turn to his advantage.
Most critical and biographical studies of Peake and his work have
assumed that the sprawling, dreamlike landscape of the Gormenghast
sequence was heavily inspired by his childhood experiences of life in
China. There is much truth in this: the son of an intrepid missionary doctor,
Peake was born among the hills of Kuling, Kiang-Hsi Province, in Central
Southern China in 1911, but his home for a large portion of his first 12
years was Tientsin, a Treaty Port in Northern China to the south-east of
Peking. Better known today as Tianjin, the city of Tientsin was occupied by
a shifting conglomeration of British, Japanese, Russian, French, German,
and Austro-Hungarian forces. An unruly architectural mishmash marked by
a myriad cultural influences, in this respect Tientsin closely reflected the
bewildering heterogeneous quality Peake would later bring to his
descriptions of the citadel of Gormenghast. Encircling Tientsin was, to
quote Clute and Grant, “a territory as alien to [Peake’s] world as the land
surrounding Gormenghast seems alien”36 to the Groan family and their
courtiers. During his formative years Peake made occasional journeys into
these regions, and his imagination was set alight by such magnificent sights
as the Old Chinese Road and its royal guard of giant sculpted warriors, a
colossal stone path named “The Thousand Steps”, the massive expanse of
the Yangtze River, and the sublime palaces of Kublai Khan’s Forbidden
City.
None of these left an impression quite as indelible as the country’s
elaborate traditions, which formed an inescapable part of everyday life.
Discussing his father’s memories of China, Peake’s son Sebastian observed
how he was captivated by the role these complicated rituals played. What
particularly fascinated him was the fact that in all of them “[t]here was a
historical numerical order, [and] that for example things had to be
performed in the tenth month after the previous emperor had died, for the
sustaining of the momentum of the historical progress of China”.37 Strictly
observed by everyone from the aristocratic elite to the most lowly peasant
menial workers, Peake came to realize that these rituals “were very much
part of the upper-class Chinese imperative, to seek discipline and order
within historical facts”.38 As he would later recreate in his own fictional
land, in Tientsin the meaning of each thing was entirely contingent on the
meaning of everything else, forming one huge semantic mosaic. The great
tomes of Gormenghast’s rituals include a “list of the activities to be
performed hour by hour during the day by his Lordship”39 as well as the
archaic regulations stipulating the “exact times; the garments to be worn for
each occasion and the symbolic gestures to be used”,40 and together these
amount to a “complex system”41 which cannot be deviated from.
At the same time, tradition might never have acquired the specific role it
plays in the Gormenghast sequence had it not been for Peake’s return to
Britain in 1923. Winnington has argued that the writer’s sudden uprooting
from China and its ancient culture gave rise to “a sense of dissociation”42
which lasted for the rest of his life. As an adult, Peake was conscious that
he had occupied these two distant worlds, but found he could establish “no
thread, no link between them”,43 and as a result “[h]is memories seemed not
to be part of him”.44 China’s mysterious, age-old way of life appeared even
more fabulous compared to the grimness and mundanity of Interwar Britain.
Nevertheless, in the Gormenghast sequence the exotic codes of conduct he
encountered in China are reconfigured to reflect the very British
preoccupations with preserving the heredity caste system and maintaining
self-control. Transplanted into Peake’s imaginary realm, these rituals no
longer constitute a precious, orderly link to a glorious past but a pointless
and irrational system which no-one can break free from. Just like the
corrupt Court of Chancery in the London of Bleak House, this is an insane
world where madness has become so all-pervasive it has assumed the form
of law.
In his introduction to Titus Groan, which remains one of the most
illuminating pieces of criticism ever written on Peake’s fiction and was
instrumental in reviving his reputation, Anthony Burgess identifies the
distinctive qualities of Peake’s approach to world-building. He argues that
the secondary reality Peake created differs from that of other authors insofar
as it was never his intention to construct a utopia or dystopia. Instead, the
world we enter “is neither better nor worse than this one: it is merely
different”.45 Rather than offering the reader “a central sermon or warning”46
which will drastically transform their view of the reality they inhabit,
Burgess contends that the Gormenghast sequence is “essentially a work of
the closed imagination”.47 By this he means that Peake presents us with “a
world parallel to ours”48 which shares many similarities with our own, but
it is one which “has absorbed our history, culture, rituals and then stopped
dead, refusing to move, self-feeding, self-motivating, [and] self-
enclosed”.49 Gormenghast is a myopic realm which has lost sight of all the
meaningful things that history and tradition are supposed to preserve and
yet cannot envisage any form of future without ritual. Like a once-
magnificent machine which keeps operating long after it has outlived its
purpose, this is a world perpetually doomed to continue going absolutely
nowhere.
Burgess observes that for all its exuberant strangeness Peake’s secondary
reality is a place in which “[n]obody flies from a centre of normality”50 and
“everybody belongs to a system built on very rigid rules”.51 At the heart of
this system is the foreboding structure of Gormenghast Castle itself. Several
critics52 have made the argument that Peake gives the castle such a distinct
presence and personality that it can be considered the central character of
the narrative. He certainly describes the rhythms of its sterile activity as one
would the shifting moods of a deeply complex individual. It also requires
little imagination to go about mapping a psycho-physiological structure
onto the castle: the library housing Lord Groan’s collection of precious
tomes forms its brain, while the Hall of Bright Carvings (the attic in which
the most magnificent pieces created over the centuries by the foremost
craftsmen of Gormenghast lie all but forgotten) can be read as its
unconscious; the infernal Great Kitchen, perpetually in a state of feverish
and needless overproduction, forms Gormenghast’s stomach and genitals,
while the countless narrow stone lanes which riddle the entire edifice are
akin to veins and arteries. Peake himself deliberately represents the castle in
terms of some collapsed or even decomposing corporeal form many times
throughout the books, most directly in the first paragraph of Titus Groan,
where its topmost pinnacle the Tower of Flints (home to a parliament of
vicious, flesh-eating owls) is described as rising upward “like a mutilated
finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry”.53
If Gormenghast’s inhabitants are akin to tiny insects crawling around the
innards of a gigantic festering cadaver, the need to escape from the horror
of their predicament is the reason why they must create realms of their own:
Sepulchrave lives more in the world of his beloved books than in waking
reality, and the Master of Ritual Sourdust and his almost equally ancient
and wizened son Barquentine are similarly obsessed with the minutia of the
traditions they enforce; the Countess spends most of her time in a room full
of cats and birds with whom she shares a more intimate bond than she does
with her own children, while her sisters-in-law Clarice and Cora lie
motionless dreaming of a great power they wouldn’t know what to do with
even if they possessed it. As we have seen, Flay and Swelter are consumed
by their pathological hatred for one another, which culminates in a duel that
is both gruesome and ludicrous; the marvelously jovial and valiant court
physician Dr. Prunesquallor delights in linguistic absurdities, conundrums,
and verbal play, while his nearly blind and chronically neurotic sister Irma
is besotted with romantic fantasies about men she scarcely knows. As much
as they are necessary, Peake portrays these fragile imaginary worlds as
points of vulnerability each of which Steerpike exploits, in turn.
It is this rich interior life and desire for a private domain to avoid the
harshness and frustrations of reality, which makes Peake’s creations so
compelling. Since the Gormenghast books are very often magnificently
funny,54 critics have tended to reinforce the impression that their characters
are the sort of over-the-top and cartoonish eccentrics found in the novels of
P. G. Wodehouse or even in Monty Python sketches. However, it is a
complete misconception to think of them as mere comic figures. For all of
their exaggerated qualities and beguiling oddnesses, they remain real people
with natural reactions, thoughts, and feelings and Peake successfully
encourages us to share his interest in their fates. We feel for them far more
often than we laugh at them. Compared to the grandiose mythic archetypes
of Tolkien or the broadly Judeo-Christian analogs of C. S. Lewis, Peake can
be credited with inventing characters who are much more fully realized and
whose often tragic plights are genuinely affecting. Among its many
interpretations, the Gormenghast sequence can be read as a brilliant study
of how people try, and fail, to maintain their identities in an unbearably
overfamiliar environment which is progressively destroying their sanity.
Anyone who doubts Peake’s ability to create enigmatic characters need
only consider his depiction of his most disturbing creation, Steerpike. Like
so many of Peake’s characters Steerpike seems to owe a debt to earlier
figures from literature, and yet on reflection the reader discovers that they
have never encountered anyone quite like him elsewhere in the history of
fiction. Embodying the text’s perpetual openness, Steerpike can be read as
any one of a range of vastly different figures, from an aspiring totalitarian
dictator, a radical political ideologue bent on bringing down the old order
they hate so that they can take control, a conniving Machiavellian who plots
to seize power from within using any and all means to achieve this end, and
an Iago-like malefactor who does terrible things simply because they can.
Indeed, for much of the first novel he is more like an actor adopting a series
of guises (an image Peake reinforces by describing him as having a face
that is “pale like clay and, save for his eyes, masklike”55) than an actual
person,56 and it is only as the second volume unfolds that we are made
aware of the true extent of his malignancy. What makes Steerpike so
dangerous and yet so alluring is the ease with which Peake could have
turned him into the hero of his narrative rather than its villain. After all, he
is proud, charismatic, resourceful, and relentless in his pursuit of his goal
and has many other traits we would consider admirable if only they were
used to further good and not evil ends.
Like many of the finest villains in literature, Steerpike is all the more
fascinating because he has no clearly stated origins. When we originally
encounter him he is merely the wretched kitchen scullion Swelter singles
out for special cruelty and abuse because he refuses to flatter the bloated
chef’s vanity, but we never learn anything of his past prior to this. He
simply seems to have come into being, almost as though self-created. Peake
deliberately portrays Steerpike as sympathetic in the early pages of the
sequence, a victim of its draconian organizational structure, and this makes
it all the more unsettling when his diabolical true nature is gradually
revealed to us. One of the major strengths of the first two books is the
consummate skill with which Peake juxtaposes the dual narratives of
Steerpike and Titus. The kitchen urchin escapes his servitude to Swelter the
same day that Titus is born and uses the gatherings which mark his
transition from infancy to maturity to stage his grabs for greater and greater
glory. Steerpike is at his most self-assured and unstoppable while Titus
remains vague and unformed as a person, but his dreams of total mastery
begin to fall apart as Titus develops an identity of his own and becomes
conscious of his duty to protect his homeland. It is no coincidence that, in
the end, it is Titus who dispatches Steerpike, finally ridding Gormenghast
of the influence of his malevolent shadow-self.
So much about Peake’s text cries out for interpretation that it is easy to
overlook a pivotal question: what is Steerpike’s ultimate goal? Although he
makes a show of expressing his outrage on behalf of the castle’s lowly and
downtrodden, Steerpike’s concerns about inequality are mostly superficial.
He is a fiendish trickster who eliminates those who stand in his way by
means of lethal practical jokes, but he seems to derive no great personal
pleasure from what he does. Instead, he sees himself as an arch-rationalist
and supreme pragmatist, the only one capable of re-organizing
Gormenghast along what he sees as sane and efficient lines. Asked what he
aspires to be by Dr. Prunesquallor, he responds that “In my less ambitious
moments it is as a research scientist that I see myself”.57 This is precisely
what he becomes, with all of Gormenghast for his experimental subject. He
is animated not by any genuine desire to improve things but by a fanatical
mania to reshape the world around him into the grim, mechanized system
he believes it should be. In this respect, the most profound statement which
arises from the Gormenghast sequence is that we must be very wary of our
longing for change since the new age we create may prove to be far worse
than the ones which went before it. After all, as Steerpike conjectures,
“haven’t all ambitious people something of the monstrous about them?”58
Steerpike despises the antiquated farce of tradition, but in another of
Peake’s brilliant ironies he has enough cunning to know that the most
effective way of making Gormenghast bend to his will is to assume the role
of Master of Ritual himself. Rather than a liberating force to sweep away
the injustices and oppressions of the past, the regime Steerpike introduces is
even more repressive and tyrannical. In an episode which evokes the Nazi
book burnings of the early 1930s, he uses fire to decimate Lord Groan’s
magnificent library and purge the castle of any ideas which do not fit with
his worldview. Steerpike’s obsession with order and perfection is so all-
consuming that he becomes deluded into believing that emotions are
unnecessary and people must be made to act like automata. He is too much
the unfeeling intellectual to understand that human behavior is
fundamentally messy and chaotic and can never be otherwise. In this way,
in spite of his fixation with logic and reason in actuality Steerpike is the
most completely deranged of all of Peake’s characters.
Steerpike is defeated at the climax of Gormenghast, but it transpires that
the modern world he was determined to bring about already exists outside
of the castle. Having forsaken his ancestral home, in the third volume of the
sequence, Titus Alone (1959), the young Earl enters into wild, unmapped
regions which could not be further removed from the ones he has known all
his life. This book, published after a hiatus of almost ten years, has
generated some remarkably ambivalent attitudes, ranging from enchanted
bemusement to outright dismissal. Many critics favorably inclined toward
Titus Groan and Gormenghast regard it as a muddled failure and a steep
decline from the majestic heights of those works.59 Even some of the most
ardent enthusiasts of Peake’s fiction admit to its inferiority, and have
attempted to excuse its perceived weaknesses on the grounds that the author
was already being overtaken by symptoms of the neurodegenerative
disease60 that would eventually rob him of his talent and his mind, and end
his life several decades prematurely in 1968. As ever with Peake’s work,
the reality is an altogether different story.
There is no denying that Titus Alone is a very strange beast, a great deal
stranger in many respects than the books which preceded it. Other than its
impetuous protagonist, it seems to share no fundamental connection with
the earlier novels in the sequence. Whereas their action was confined to a
single, horribly suffocating space, Titus Alone has a picaresque narrative
which rambles with what appears to be erratic abandon through a variety of
surreal and hallucinatory landscapes. Gone is Peake’s grand, stately
orchestration of plot and incident. So is his phenomenal attention to detail.
In their place we have situations and characters sketched out only in their
essential outlines, and a storyline which follows no single trajectory but
undergoes constant metamorphosis. The entire work is less than half the
length of its predecessors, with chapters running to an average of two
pages. It is therefore understandable why many critics have concluded that,
either due to illness or not, in the intervening years Peake had grown unsure
of his abilities and possibly lacked any clear design for the book he was
writing.
On the basis of its stylistic and structural differences, Titus Alone would
obviously seem to support these assumptions. A more careful assessment of
the text suggests that Peake knew exactly what he was doing, and that he
made these artistic choices for specific reasons. For a start, the novel is set
not in Gormenghast but in remote realms Titus has never seen before. They
appear so alien to him that Peake quite rightly cannot find words for them,
and the brief descriptions he does provide can be interpreted as representing
the young traveler’s total uncertainty about where he is and where he may
be headed. Second, Titus is now cut off from the controlling influence of
ritual and free to experience life at its most random and unpredictable. We
receive only the most fleeting glimpses of the people and places he
encounters, and it can be argued that it was Peake’s deliberate intention to
present the reader with a much more impressionistic view of reality than the
one we had become accustomed to from his earlier books. It is as if we too
are on this disorientating, kaleidoscopic journey with Titus, and no more
able to make sense of it all than he is.
Peake’s minimalist, episodic approach does not make Titus Alone any
less of an achievement than his previous books. Although smaller, the
novel’s cast of characters is equally as bizarre and colorful. During the
course of his wanderings Titus becomes entangled with such richly
imaginative figures as the mercurial zookeeper Muzzlehatch, his beautiful
former lover Juno, and the seductive but deadly Cheeta. In terms of theme,
it can be argued that Titus Alone deals with even weightier subjects than its
predecessors and confronts the reader with a much darker vision of things.
Its core images were undoubtedly formed during one of the most significant
episodes of Peake’s life. Shortly after the end of World War II61 he accepted
an assignment to travel to the devastated ruins of Germany and record what
he found there. After visiting a succession of bombed-out cities, Peake
entered the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. There he
sketched the former prisoners as they lay dying as well as some of their
captors who were awaiting execution, and the harrowing drawings he
produced are easily his most important artworks. What Peake witnessed in
Bergen-Belsen never left him, and those who knew him felt that the trauma
of it robbed him of his simple joy in being alive.62
 The specter of the Holocaust hangs over Titus Alone, and the book is
pervaded by the sense that terrible violence is happening everywhere only
just out of sight. Titus’s journey from innocence to experience is a
transmogrified version of Peake’s own pilgrimage through a world in ruins,
but it is also a more universal exploration of how the very worst aspects of
human nature have followed mankind into modernity. Titus discovers an
unnamed city whose impossibly vast glass and steel towers are the
antithesis of Gormenghast’s degraded masonry, and its architecture
summons to mind the futuristic metropolises which the Third Reich had
vowed to build. Then there are the haunting chapters where Cheeta tries to
impress Titus by bringing him to see a huge modern factory. Like the death-
camp Peake visited, this sinister structure has slender chimneys continually
belching foul smoke and the surrounding area reeks of a vile sickly smell.
As he approaches the building Titus hears a dreadful, inhuman sound
emanating from within, and in each of its windows he sees identical human
faces which stare back at him helplessly before disappearing at the blast of
a whistle. Earlier on Titus meets the inhabitants of the Under-River, a
subterranean space where the city’s vagabonds, nonconformists and
refugees have been banished, and these figures closely resemble the social
outcasts the Nazis had rounded up for extermination.
As well as trying to find meaning in the horrors of the Holocaust, in
Titus Alone Peake once again plays upon the fear of the future and
speculates whether there will be any room for human freedom in it. The
great city is a frighteningly credible dystopia: it has no government or
individual rights, and there is also no art, music, entertainment, or any other
kind of self-expression. A cabal of scientists has established an all-powerful
technocracy, and those who interfere with their plans are hunted down and
disposed of by faceless secret police. So far, the scientist’s most prized
inventions are a death ray (which they callously test on Muzzlehatch’s
beloved zoo animals) and a floating surveillance device (Peake had clearly
envisaged the drone half a century before its invention) which can think for
itself, but the heartless Cheeta (who is the chief scientist’s daughter)
suggests that the outcome of whatever unthinkable experiments are being
conducted in the factory will be their greatest achievement. It is exactly the
sort of world Steerpike would have marveled at and felt at home in.
The conclusion of Titus Alone, a work which reads like the offspring of
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine
(1968), is certainly proof that even at this late stage Peake’s imagination
was anything but exhausted and that he had further adventures in mind for
his young exile. Realizing that he has accidentally arrived home in the
novel’s final pages, Titus boldly decides not to return to the safety of
Gormenghast but to set off in another direction and discover what lies in
wait for him there. Tragically Peake’s health had soon deteriorated beyond
the point where he could continue to tell his story, but his legacy is a
sequence of books which demonstrate in every possible way the boundless
potential of fiction. His everlasting gift to readers is a world of dreams and
nightmares that is entirely and magnificently his own.

Notes
The essay’s title, “Suckled on Shadows” comes from Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast in The
Gormenghast Trilogy, London, England: Vintage, 1999, p. 373.

1 Quoted in Estelle Daniel, The Art of Gormenghast: The Making of a Television Fantasy, London,
England: HarperCollins, 2000, page 41.
2 Quoted in G. Peter Winnington, Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake, London,
England: Peter Owen Publishers, 2000, page 168.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid, page 185.
8 Ibid, page 186.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 In August 2019 it was announced that Neil Gaiman would be one of the executive producers of a
major new adaptation of all five Gormenghast texts to be made by the American television
network Showtime.
13 Originally published alongside novellas by William Golding and John Wyndham in the
anthology Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination, London, England: Eyre and
Spottiswoode, 1956.
14 Kingsley Amis was most disparaging about Peake’s work. In his critical monograph New Maps
of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, London, England: Penguin, 2012, page 153, he dismisses
him in his typically pugnacious and unsupported fashion as “a bad fantasy writer of maverick
status”.
15 G. Peter Winnington, “Inside the Mind of Mervyn Peake” in Etudes de Lettres, Lausanne,
Switzerland: University of Lausanne Press, Series VI, Vol. 2, No. 1, January–March, 1979, page
3.
16 Ibid.
17 Mendlesohn, Farah, Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press,
2008, page 59.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid, page xxi.
21 Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan in The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 91.
22 Miéville, China, Introduction to The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy, London, England:
Vintage, 2011, page ix.
23 Ibid.
24 John Clute and John Grant, editors, The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy, available at http://sf-
encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=peake_mervyn.
25 Ibid.
26 Vast Alchemies, page 98.
27 Ibid, page 59.
28 The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 20.
29 Ibid, page 262.
30 Quoted in John Watney, Mervyn Peake, London, England: Michael Joseph, 1976, page 106.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Quoted in The Art of Gormenghast, page 42.
34 Peake also observed how human identity could be interconnected with a sense of place when he
lived as part of an artists’ colony on the Channel Island of Sark for three years. The island’s tiny
population, which had almost no interaction with the outside world, resembles the isolated
existence of the inhabitants of Gormenghast. Peake’s years on the island, spent amidst the
rugged, windswept majesty of its landscape, were some of the happiest of his life.
35 Peake provides a terrific metaphor for the Groan’s peculiar form of attachment to Gormenghast
in Titus Groan, when the Earl ponders the question “How could he love this place? He was part
of it. He could not imagine a world outside it; and the idea of loving Gormenghast would have
shocked him. To have asked him of his feelings for his hereditary home would be like asking a
man what his feelings were towards his own hand or his own throat”, The Gormenghast Trilogy,
page 42.
36 The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy.
37 Quoted in The Art of Gormenghast, page 29.
38 Ibid.
39 The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 44.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid, page 45.
42 Vast Alchemies, page 43.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Anthony Burgess, Introduction to Titus Groan, London, England: Penguin, 1968, page 9.
Burgess’s reverence for Peake’s novel remained undiminished since he included it in his personal
selection of the most important works of fiction in English of the past half century almost 20
years later in his book 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, London, England: Summit
Books, 1985.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid, page 13.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid, page 9.
50 Ibid, page 11.
51 Ibid.
52 Among them Miéville, Mendlesohn, and Winnington, who all propose that Gormenghast Castle
has so many distinctive qualities that it rightfully constitutes the main character of the sequence.
53 The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 7.
54 Peake’s novels abound with wicked black humor. Especially hilarious are the chapters of
Gormenghast set in the academy run by the benevolent but ineffectual Professor Bellgrove and
his cadre of freakish oddballs. In this school, Titus meets such characters as the ancient
Headmaster Deadyawn, who is catapulted to his demise from his own mobile high chair, and the
venerable Idealist philosopher “The Leader”, whose Berkeleyan theory that material reality and
physical sensations are illusory is disproven when his beard goes up in flames and he perishes.
The comedic highlight of the sequence, however, is Bellgrove’s courtship of Irma Prunesquallor
at her disastrous garden party.
55 The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 89.
56 This chameleonic aspect of the character was captured tremendously in actor Jonathan Rhys
Meyer’s performance in the BBC miniseries based on Peake’s novels broadcast in 2000. His
startling physical resemblance to Peake’s drawings of Steerpike was also uncanny.
57 The Gormenghast Trilogy, page 127.
58 Ibid.
59 Fortunately, if belatedly, this view has begun to alter in recent years. Roger Luckhurst in Science
Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), David Louis Edelman in his Introduction to Titus Alone
(New York: The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, 2011) and Michael Moorcock in
“Breaking Free: An Introduction to Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone” in Michael Moorcock and Allan
Kausch, editors, London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction (London: PM Press, 2012) offer much
more perceptive and sympathetic readings of this text.
60 The exact nature of the medical condition which killed Peake over ten years and left the
Gormenghast sequence incomplete remains the subject of speculation. It has variously been
diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and different forms of encephalitis, but
contemporary research has postulated that Peake may have suffered from dementia with Lewy
bodies, an extreme form of premature aging. His mental and physical deterioration was only
accelerated by the medications, electroconvulsive therapy, and brain surgery he was prescribed.
Peake was 57 when he died, but the last photographs of him show a man who looks thirty years
older. Maeve Gilmore wrote a poignant account of her last years with her husband’s entitled A
World Away (London: Gollancz, 1970).
61 At the outbreak of the conflict Peake volunteered his services as a war artist. Despite being
refused, he developed a project of his own, The Works of Adolf Hitler, a series of intensely
horrific paintings supposedly by the Nazi leader showing scenes of carnage, misery, and anguish.
These were purchased by the Ministry of Information for propaganda purposes but, no doubt due
to their macabre content, were never used.
62 Winnington states that although there were 30,000 living prisoners of various nationalities in
Bergen-Belsen when it was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945, approximately one
hundred survivors were still dying each day from typhus and the effects of starvation when Peake
reached the camp a month later; see Vast Alchemies, page 179. Peake’s son Sebastian movingly
summed up the effect of this experience on his father when he eloquently wrote that he “suffered
and later died as a result of seeing manifest the antithesis of joy, love, and beauty. How can his
experience of the camp not have created an eternal helplessness of the soul?” Quoted in The Art
of Gormenghast, page 28.
7
THE GOTHIC WORLD-BUILDING
OF DARK SHADOWS
Andrew Higgins

In 1966, American television saw the birth of two very different worlds.
The more well-known of these was first seen on September 6, 1966 when
the episode “The Man Trap” of the original series of Star Trek (1966–1968)
appeared on the NBC television network; introducing a world that has
grown into one of the most popular transmedial science fiction franchises.
However, slightly earlier that summer — on June 27, 1966 — daytime
television was introduced to a very different world with the first episode of
the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows (1966–1971). Like its science fiction
counterpart, the unique story-world of Dark Shadows was initially created
through over one thousand daily television episodes and then added to and
expanded by several motion pictures, novelizations, comic books, games,
original music compositions, television and film reboots, audio dramas, and
even bubble gum trading cards. All of these texts, in their broadest sense,
were received, interacted with and, in some cases, creatively developed by a
multi-generational group of viewers and an active fan base. Therefore, the
gothic world-building of Dark Shadows typifies Henry Jenkins’s concept of
transmedia storytelling as “narrative material spread across works
appearing in different media, resulting in a narrative that spans multiple
media” (2006, pp. 95–96). In this essay, I will explore how the gothic story-
world of Dark Shadows came and continues to exist, by focusing on three
key phases of its development, concluding with how this world, like the
Star Trek story-world, continues to endure and grow today over 55 years
after its first broadcast.

Phase 1: The Birth of the Dark Shadows Story-

world
In 1965, a young TV executive named Dan Curtis, who was up to then best
known for producing sports shows like CBS Golf Classics, awoke one night
after having a very vivid dream about a young woman on a train. Curtis
would later recount the details of this dream:

She was about 19, and she was on a train reading a letter that stopped
in a dark, isolated town. She got off the train and started walking and
walking. Finally, she came to a huge, forbidding house. She turned
and slowly walked up the long path towards the house. At the door,
she lifted a huge brass knocker and gently tapped it three times. I
heard a dog howl, then just as the door creaked open — I woke up!
(Benshoff, 2011, p. 11)

The following day, Curtis told his wife Norma about the dream and she
thought it would make a good basis for a new television show pointing out
that it had a gothic feeling — “something eerie and threatening”
(Thompson, 2009, p. 56). Curtis pitched the idea as a television series to
ABC Network officials who green-lit it for production. At the time, the
ABC Network was considered the third network in terms of ratings and
perceived quality of shows (Benshoff, 2011, p. 8). This network was
looking for interesting shows that would attract new and different audiences
from the two rival networks of CBS and NBC. One strategy that ABC
development executive Harve Bennett, who would later go on to write and
produce several of the Star Trek franchise films, employed was to
commission and develop television shows with supernatural themes such as
One Step Beyond (1959–1961) and The Outer Limits (1963–1965) and
especially one of their biggest hits of this era, Bewitched (1964–1972), a
comedy in which a mortal man marries a good witch played by Elizabeth
Montgomery. Another commissioning success by ABC at this time was
Batman (1966–1968), featuring Adam West and Burt Ward as the dynamic
duo fighting a host of celebrity criminals. Therefore, ABC’s green-lighting
of Curtis’s eerie show concept was in line with Bennett’s strategy. Curtis
assembled a group of writers led by Art Wallace, Sam Hall, and Gordon
Russell to come up with a narrative outline for this new television show
which was initially to be called “Shadows on the Wall” (Scott, 2000, p. 18).
For the narrative, Wallace drew heavily from a teleplay he had worked on
entitled The House which had appeared as an episode in the television
anthology show GoodYear Playhouse in 1957. The House was about a
reclusive woman living in an old house set in New England fishing village
(ibid). The name of this new show went through several phases, with other
suggested names of “The House on Widow’s Hill” and “Terror at
Collinwood”, until Curtis stumbled upon the name “Dark Shadows” when
he told a technician developing the lighting for the show to “go out to a
museum and film some dark shadows” (44).
The show would be set in the fictional seaside village of Collinsport in
the real state of Maine. The main focal point of this town was the brooding
mansion high a top Widow’s Hill (Curtis’s huge forbidding house), which
was initially called “Collins House” but was changed to the more gothic-
sounding name of “Collinwood”, ancestral home to the Collins family.
Unlike Batman and Bewitched, Dark Shadows was conceived and
broadcast as a daytime soap opera. The “soap opera” television format had
been introduced to this new medium in the 1950s; coming from the radio
soap operas of the 1930s and 1940s (Benshoff, 2011, p. 10). These early
radio dramas were actually produced and owned by soap manufactures
(hence the name “soap opera”), such as Lux and Proctor & Gamble, and
were used to sell soap and washing products to the housewives who would
tune into the shows on a daily basis while doing the housework. At the start
of its development, Dark Shadows was very much targeted to a similar
audience but, as will be explored, as the tone of the narrative changed from
just eerie and suggestive of the gothic to actual supernatural and horror, the
audience target would change to younger viewers (including students and
the counterculture hippies of the late 1960s and early 1970s). A
characteristic of the narrative structure of the soap opera (or daytime drama)
that makes it an important candidate for in-depth world-building is the
opportunity to offer open-ended diegetically braided narratives developed
over a long period of time. For the viewer, the overall story-world unfolds
almost in real-time on a daily basis and therefore the depth and complexity
of the narrative arc of key storylines are enriched through the actual time
the narrative is given to develop and grow. For the Dark Shadows story-
world, this narrative richness would be enhanced with the eventual
introduction of such fantastic elements as time travel (to the past and the
future of the then-present time) and, later in the series, parallel time (in the
past, present, and future of alternative Dark Shadow worlds). This
combination of the traditional daytime drama narrative structure as well as
the addition of fantastical and supernatural elements into the story-world
resulted in “a unique diegetic world, one that allowed for gothic and
romantic frissons as well as more specialized meta-textual pleasures based
on performance, character, and narrative” (Benshoff, 2011, p. 68).
Collinwood and its collection of gothic characters was introduced to
television audiences through the eyes of an orphaned young woman
inspired by Curtis’s initial dream vision as well as such characters from
traditional gothic literature as Jane Eyre. In the first episode, we learn that
the reason this character is on a train is due to her being invited to
Collinwood from the orphanage she had been left in as child in New York
City. This invitation has come from the reclusive matriarch of Collinwood,
Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (played by the Hollywood screen actress Joan
Bennett) to work as a governess for young David Collins, son of Elizabeth’s
brother Roger Collins. An early storyline of the show, never resolved in the
original television series, was whether Elizabeth was really the estranged
mother of the young governess. In the original “Shadows on the Wall”
treatment, the name of the governesses was Sheila March but this was
changed to the much more regal and older sounding name of Victoria
Winters (Scott, 1995, p. 15).
Starting with the first episode, Curtis subverted the traditional opening
narration of past radio and television soap operas in which the voice of the
sponsor would attempt to sell the soap or cleaning product to the listeners
before the episode began. In the case of Dark Shadows, an actor from the
episode would deliver a voice-over narration as a teaser for the episode to
follow. This would position the Dark Shadows world-building narrative as a
tale being told — the television equivalent of the Gothic text trope of the
entry into a journal or chronicle; as in the entries made by Jonathan Harker
in his journal at the beginning of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). For the
first years of the show, the opening narrator would be spoken by the
focalizing portal character of the governess Victoria Winters who, like the
viewing audience, was being introduced to this strange eerie world of the
Collins family. This opening narration from the first episode typifies what
Benshoff characterizes as “set[ting] the gothic [sic] mood, as she often
describes ongoing events in sinister and foreboding terms” (2011, p. 38).

My name is Victoria Winters. My journey is beginning, a journey that

I hope will open the doors of life to me. . . a journey to link my past
with my future. . . to darkness and strangeness. . . A journey to people
I’ve never met, who, tonight are still only shadows in my mind, but
who will soon fill the days and nights of my tomorrows.
(Dark Shadows, Episode 1 (1966))

As introduced above, the story-world of Dark Shadows was located in a

fictional place, Collinsport. Wolf (2012) states that in order to qualify
something as a secondary world it requires a fictional place (that is, one that
does not appear in the Primary World) (25). Wolf further notes that the term
“world”, as applied to world-building, is not “simply geographical but
experiential, that is, everything that is experienced by the characters
involved” (ibid). “A single city or town can qualify as a world unto itself if
it is secluded enough from its own surroundings so as to contain most of its
inhabitant’s experiences” (26). However, Collinsport itself was set in the
real-world state of Maine, and therefore like other similar towns — such as
Stephen King’s Castle Rock, John Updike’s Eastwick, and Sunnydale
California of the Buffyverse — it is much closer to the Primary World
geographically and conceptually.
However, from the start there was a sense that this “world” was separate
from the real world. For example, the overall narrative, which initially was
set in contemporary time, did not overtly engage with any of the current
political, social, or cultural issues of the turbulent era of the late 1960s and
early 1970s in America. Down at the local Blue Whale tavern in
Collinsport, people danced to modern music from a jukebox and some
characters, such as Elizabeth’s daughter Carolyn Stoddard’s reprobate (and
thankfully short-lived) biker boyfriend Buzz, used the lingo of the hippies
of the late 1960s. However, the conversation at the Blue Whale never
overtly mentioned such current topics as the Civil Rights movement or the
Vietnam War, which was raging during the time of the original broadcast of
the show. This sense that the world of Dark Shadows was a world onto
itself was noted by Dan Curtis himself in an interview he gave looking back
on the show, “Dark Shadows is its own unique fairyland. It doesn’t exist in
the reality of today, and it doesn’t care about war and other problems. Dark
Shadows is like nothing else” (Thompson, 2009, p. 11). Further to this, one
of the actors on the show, evoking another fantasy world, called it “a dark
Brigadoon, because the world outside of Collinsport did not seem to exist”
(ibid).
In terms of Wolf’s spectrum of the “secondariness” of a world (2012, pp.
26–27), the initial story-world of Dark Shadows was very much like the
example Wolf gives of “overlaid worlds” in which there are fictional
elements overlaid into a real-world setting (28). However, as the texture of
the story’s narratives started to change, the world of Dark Shadows would
move further along Wolf’s spectrum of “secondariness”. This transition
occurred several months into the show when in the face of plummeting
daytime ratings Curtis and his writers decided to turn the narrative focus of
the story-world from being just eerie and suggestive of the gothic to
becoming one that would include the intrusion of supernatural and
ultimately horror elements. There were three key storylines in the early
history of the television show that marked this change and caused the story-
world of Dark Shadows to become much more “secondary” through the
introduction into the world of the first (of many!) ghosts, a supernatural
being and finally, and most significantly, a vampire.

Ghost — At the end of Episode 70 (broadcast on September 30, 1966)

viewers saw the ghost of a long-dead relative, Josette Collins, clearly
emerge from her portrait, and dance around the grounds of the great
estate. This ghost was played by the actress Kathryn Leigh Scott, who in
addition to playing Maggie Evans on the show, would later play the real-
life Josette Du Pres (Collins) in a prequel sequence discussed below.
The Phoenix — In Episode 123, a new character was introduced who
was to be David Collins’s estranged mother Laura Murdoch Collins
(played by Diana Millay). In the original plans, Laura was to be Roger
Collins’s alcoholic wife who came back to Collinwood to get custody of
David and was to die in mysterious circumstances leading Victoria
Winters to be tried for her murder. However, this was changed to Laura
being slowly revealed to be a supernatural creature called “The Phoenix”
who, like the mythical bird, was reborn through being consumed in fire
every hundred years. With a twist to the original plot, the storyline now
focused on Laura attempting to get David to join her in the consuming
fire that would give her and her son eternal life. Thanks to Victoria
Winters, she does not succeed and ultimately Laura is consumed by
flames. Later in the series, when the plot point of time travel was
introduced, Laura would reappear (played again by Diana Millay) in
different time periods in the Collins history again as the Phoenix reborn.
Vampire — The ultimate intrusion of the supernatural into the Dark
Shadows story-world, which would become the element that would turn
the show’s low ratings around and make it one of the most watched
daytime dramas of all time, was the introduction of a vampire, Barnabas
Collins. At the end of Episode 207 (broadcast on April 17, 1967),
viewers witnessed the grave robber Willie Loomis, attracted by the
potential of finding the legendary Collins family jewels, discover a
secret room in the Collins mausoleum in Eagle Hill Cemetery and in it a
chained coffin. Thinking that the jewels must be in the coffin, Willie
opens it and immediately a hand with a black onyx ring reaches out and
grabs him by the throat as the episode ends. In the next episode a new
character appears at Collinwood, bearing an incredible resemblance to a
portrait that hangs in the entry foyer in Collinwood, of Barnabas Collins
who lived in the 18th century. Surprisingly, this stranger introduces
himself to the Collins family as the descendent of Barnabas Collins who
has come from England. The inhabitants of Collinwood are shocked at
how similar this Barnabas is to the portrait down to the black onyx ring
on his hand. Of course, as viewers would learn first, and the characters
later, there was only one Barnabas Collins — a vampire released from
his chained coffin by Willie Loomis and now set to resume his “life”; in
the late 1960s. The use of the portrait as a plot device in this storyline
suggests inspiration from the 19th-century penny-dreadful Varney the
Vampire or The Feast of Blood attributed to James Malcom Rymer and
Thomas Pickett Priest (published from 1845 to 1847) in which a portrait
of Marmaduke Bannerworth hanging in the family’s mansion betrays the
true identity of Francis Varney the Vampire.
Originally, the writers only intended for this character to be on the show for
a couple of months and wreak havoc as an evil vampire. However, given the
focused acting of Canadian stage actor Jonathan Frid who played Barnabas
throughout the series, viewers became intrigued by him. Frid was a
Shakespearean trained actor who was not used to acting on television. This
caused him to appear nervous and he at times had problems remembering
his lines and reading from the teleprompter. This nervousness played right
into the character of Barnabas who was a man out of his time hiding a great
secret. Frid also played Barnabas as one of the first in a now-long line of
reluctant vampires — cursed to live this life and hating himself for what he
had to do to exist.
The introduction and success in the ratings of the vampire Barnabas
would open the door for Curtis and the writers to introduce other tropes
from the horror genre into the plots of the show. In addition, the show
moved further along the spectrum of Wolf’s “secondariness” with the
introduction of the science fiction theme of time-travel. Given the
popularity of the Barnabas character, viewers eventually wanted to know
how he had become a vampire and been chained in that coffin. In order to
answer this, the writers developed a fantastic storyline that had Victoria
Winters, through a séance, be sent back into the past to relive an extended
prequel sequence set in 1795 that showed how Barnabas become a vampire.
At the start of this narrative sequence, Barnabas is human, and due to a
night of indiscretion during his time in Martinique, he becomes involved in
a love triangle with his fiancé Josette DuPres (later to be Josette Collins,
who appeared as the first ghost played both times by Kathryn Leigh Scott)
and her scheming maid and practicing witch Angelique Bouchard (played
by Lara Parker). In the time transference, Victoria Winters takes the place
of the original governess at Collinwood in 1795, Phyllis Wick (who is
transported to the present) and again serves as the focalizing point-of-view
character for the events that led to Barnabas being doomed with the
vampire curse by the scorned witch Angelique. Given the always-limited
budget of the show, characters for the 1795 storyline were played by the
actors and actresses from the modern story (so, for example, in this
sequence Joan Bennett played Barnabas’s ill-fated mother Naomi Collins).
This gave viewers a familiar feeling to the show but now set in a different
time with the actors in period costumes. To create a stronger sense of this
strangeness for the viewer, the writers initially had Victoria react to the new
characters in the past as if they were the characters she knew from the
present. For example, Victoria meets a good friend from the present Joe
Haskell (played by Joel Crothers) but now he is the villain and rake
Lieutenant Nathan Forbes. Victoria’s confusion would match the viewers’
confusion as they became reoriented to the same company of actors, for the
first of several times, playing different roles in this new element of the Dark
Shadows story-world. However, Victoria would not just be an observer in
this prequel sequence, she also became an active character in the past, and
became convicted of being a witch herself by the evil witch-finder
Reverend Trask (modeled on real-world witch-finders such as Matthew
Hopkins). When Victoria is hanged as a witch the writers ended this story
sequence by having Victoria transferred back to the present, with Phyllis
Wick transferred to the gallows.
For the narratives that followed, the writers used the characters and
storylines they developed from the 1795 sequence as new storylines in the
present. Angelique comes to the present day in the guise of the aptly named
Cassandra Collins to torment Barnabas (who was temporarily cured of
vampirism by a mad doctor engaged in creating his own Frankenstein-like
monster). When she comes into the present, the blonde-haired witch
Angelique disguises herself as Cassandra with a black wig; a similar device
that Elizabeth Montgomery used on Bewitched when she wanted to portray
Samantha’s mischievous sister Serena (and to hide the actress’ identity; the
role of Serena was credited as being played by Pandora Spocks!). Time
travel was used again, this time through the use of ancient Chinese I-Ching
wands that allowed Barnabas this time to astral project back to 1895 to
learn the history of the second-most popular character on the show, Quentin
Collins (played by David Selby) who had been introduced in the present as
a Henry James Turn of the Screw-like ghost (his name comes from James’s
“ghost”, Peter Quint) who terrorizes David Collins. The way the I-Ching
wands are used in the story sequence strongly suggests that in addition to
drawing from classic horror tropes, the writers of the show also found
inspiration in the supernatural fiction published in such pulp magazines as
Weird Fiction and Amazing Stories. The use of “Yai Ching” wands to go
back into time through a door is a key plot point in Seabury Quinn’s “The
Door Without A Key”, first published in Weird Tales in September 1939.
The dialog in this short story almost matches what the learned Professor
Stokes says to Barnabas Collins on how to use the I-Ching sticks to travel
back in time by throwing them on a table, forming a hexagram and
visualizing a door with this marking that opens into the past.

“And now observe”, Professor Hulling continued. “One lays the six
wands parallel and brings them close together. Then he sees, formed
by the markings on their sides interspersed with blanks, one of the
sixty-four possible Chinese geometric hexagrams.” Drawing the
flattened wands together he pointed to the figure they described…. To
get the best result one makes his mind a perfect blank, and
concentrating on the door which has no lock or key or latch, and opens
only of its own accord.
(Quinn, 1939, p. 36)1

Another example of the writer’s use of supernatural fiction was the sudden
intrusion at the end of the 1895 time-travel sequence of a race of
supernatural creatures called “Leviathans”; evil beings who ruled the earth
before humans came into existence. In this sequence, the Leviathans seize
the mind of Barnabas Collins in the past and put him under their power, so
that he travels back to the present with the “naga box” which contains the
essence of a new Leviathan creature who will be born in the present and
through rapid growth become a new leader for the Leviathans. Their
ultimate goal is to repopulate the world with new Leviathan creatures. This
creature has two essences, one a horrific monster that is never seen on
camera — presented to the viewers as very heavy evil breathing — and the
other a human boy who quickly grows through several manifestations into
the Leviathan leader Jeb Hawkes. Jeb Hawkes is to marry and have a child
with Elizabeth Collins’s daughter Carolyn Stoddard, whose estranged father
pledged her to the Leviathans in the past. The Leviathans are clearly based
on the works of the writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), especially his tale
The Dunwich Horror (1929) which also first appeared in Weird Tales and
forms part of the cycle of Lovecraft’s Chthulu mythos. The Dunwich
Horror is set in the fictional town of Dunwich, Massachusetts (not far from
Maine) and tells how the Old One cosmic entity Yog-Sothoth invaded earth
through a portal and impregnated a woman, Lavinia Whateley. From this
unnatural union, she gives birth to twins, one of whom is William Whateley,
who looks human but grows at an astonishing rate. The other is an invisible
monster who is kept hidden in the Whateley farmhouse. In the Dark
Shadows world, the character of Jeb Hawkes was modeled on both these
sons with the writers meshing the human and monster state into one
character.
While inventive with lots of twists and turns, the “Leviathan” sequence
was not all together popular with Dark Shadows fans and when ratings
started to slip, the storyline was quickly modified to a new sequence that
moved the world of Collinwood even further along the spectrum of Wolf’s
“secondariness”. In his attempt to escape the vengeance of the Leviathans,
Barnabas Collins finds a room in the abandoned East Wing of Collinwood
that at times through a time warp would become a portal to another
alternate time-band (actually multiple time-bands) where familiar characters
living in the present and past had made different choices in their lives and
thus led different lives than the ones they had in the “Primary” one.
The concept of “parallel time” and “alternative universes” had been
depicted in science fiction starting with the works of Francis Stevens
(1883–1948) and Murray Leinster (1896–1975); especially in his short story
“Sidewise in Time” which first appeared in the pulp publication Astounding
Stories in June 1934 and continued to be depicted in stories by such authors
as L. Sprague de Camp, Larry Niven, and Frederik Pohl. Although a more
probable influence may have come from Star Trek (1966–1968) with the
broadcast in October 1967 of the now-iconic episode “Mirror Mirror”, in
which, through a transporter malfunction, the crew of the Enterprise are
switched with their evil counterparts from a parallel universe (a storyline
that continues into the more recent Star Trek text, Star Trek: Discovery
(2017-present) with the Terran World). In the case of Dark Shadows, it is
now Barnabas Collins who becomes the focalizing character and first sees
these counterparts in this parallel version of Collinwood and then
eventually becomes a part of it. This new narrative device opened up Dark
Shadows narratives to new storylines and formed new relationships among
the familiar characters. Parallel-time storylines would include a recasting of
Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) with the witch Angelique cast in the
role of the first Mrs. de Winter, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde (1886), Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1948), and for the last six
months of the show, set in a parallel 19th century, Emily Bronte’s
Wuthering Heights (1847). This would be the only sequence in which
Jonathan Frid would play a different character than Barnabas Collins. In
this ending sequence of the original television series, Frid would play the
Heathcliff-like character of Bramwell Collins, the son of a parallel-time
Barnabas Collins, who in this time-band never became a vampire, married
Josette, and had a son played by Frid himself.
While the narrative texts of the 1,225 episodes established the core of the
first phase of the Dark Shadows story-world, the world gestalt was also
built through a series of paratextual elements over several types of media.
One of the earliest of these was a series of thirty-three Dark Shadows
novelizations written by William Edward Daniel Ross under the female
pen-name Marilyn Ross. These gothic texts were published by the
Paperback Library starting several months after the premiere of the
television show in December, 1966 through to 1972. Almost all of these
novels were part of a shared continuity separate from the history supplied in
the original television series, offering the reader a combination of known
places and characters and new ones. Given the popularity of Barnabas
Collins on the television show, a majority of these novels became focused
on him (with images from the show of Jonathan Frid appearing on the
covers) and several of them followed the formula of a heroine arriving at
Collinwood and falling in love with Barnabas not realizing he is a vampire.
The heroine is plunged into some supernatural danger (usually evident from
the title of each novel) from which Barnabas has to rescue her and is
subsequently forced to leave her due to his vampire curse. Quentin Collins
was introduced in Barnabas Collins and Quentin’s Demon (published in
February 1970). Like the television show, Ross used Gothic and horror
tropes for some of these stories. In Barnabas Collins vs The Warlock
(1969), Ross also drew upon Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (1898), as
the writers of the television show did to introduce Quentin Collins. In
Barnabas, Quentin and The Mummy’s Curse (April 1970), Ross drew upon
the horror mummy trope which had not been used in the television show.
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Premature Burial (1844) was re-told in
Barnabas, Quentin and The Crystal Coffin (July 1970). In Barnabas,
Quentin and the Body Snatchers (February 1971), Ross paid homage to
Jack Finney’s science fiction novel The Body Snatchers (1955). The last
volume in this series, Barnabas, Quentin and the Vampire Beauty (March
1972), was about a woman wanting to become a vampire to keep her
beauty; suggesting shades of the 15th-century Hungarian noblewoman and
serial killer Elizabeth Bathory.
 The story-world was also extended through a line of comics. From 1969
to 1976, Gold Key comics released a series of thirty-five comics which
were later republished in 2010 as collections through Hermes Press. Like
the books, many of these early comics focused on the popular character of
Barnabas Collins (with, again, a picture of Jonathan Frid as Barnabas on the
cover). In May 1971, Issue 9, “Creatures in Torment”, the other popular
character of Quentin Collins, who suffered the curse of the werewolf, was
added. In the June 1973 issue “Quentin the Vampire” (Issue 20), Quentin
Collins mistakenly takes a serum that turns him into a vampire (which
never happened on the television show). As with the Ross novelizations, the
writers of the comic series took the characters and story situations into new
scenarios, thus expanding the story-world of Dark Shadows through these
imaginative texts. Probably one of the most interesting of these is Issue 31,
“The Doom of Hellgi Kolnisson” (April 1975), in which Barnabas becomes
part of a Norse saga and fights fiendish wizards. The cover art for this issue
shows a large wizard zapping Barnabas with some mystical force and
Viking warriors attacking him.
There were also two board games that invited interaction and
participation with the world of Dark Shadows. The first one of these came
out in 1966, the first year of the television show and was a fairly typical
board game with players drawing cards from two coffin spaces to move
around the board made up of a drawn image of the exterior of Collinwood.
While the board and the pieces suggest Gothic and horror elements from the
Dark Shadows world (e.g., bats, wolves, spiders, gravestones), there are no
images of characters from the show in the game. Therefore this game
recreates some of the narrative elements of the world without any specific
reference to characters (or actors) from the television show. The second
game, brought out by Milton Bradley in 1968, was much more focused on
the character of Barnabas Collins with a picture of Jonathan Frid on the
cover. To promote this game, Milton Bradley produced a special television
commercial (https://youtu.be/rvzwVpV8yRM) featuring Frid with a group
of kids playing this game in the drawing room set. The goal of this game is
to assemble glow-in-the-dark pieces of a skeleton on a gallows. Included
with the game was a very early example of how fans could interact with the
Dark Shadows world — a set of glow-in-the-dark Barnabas vampire fangs.
The inside box of the game cautioned “the toy fangs are not part of the
game. They are placed over the teeth of a player to play the role of
Barnabas Collins. They should be washed before a player uses them” (cited
from Benshoff, 2011, p. 87). The television commercial also featured a boy
becoming a vampire like Barnabas with these fangs.
Another key aural world-building element that became very popular
during the show’s original run was its music and the themes that came out
of Robert Cobert’s haunting scores. An album Original Music from Dark
Shadows was released in 1969 and made it to number 18 on the Billboard
record charts (Benshoff, 2011, p. 89). Included in this collection was the
instrumental piece known as “Quentin’s Theme” — first heard in the
diegetic world to signify the appearance of Quentin as a ghost and would go
on in the show to become his leitmotiv. This theme became a hit single
reaching number 13 on Billboard’s “Hot One Hundred Singles” chart (ibid).
Later, this theme was re-released with a haunting, sexually charged
narration by the actor David Selby as Quentin (“Shadows of the night /
Falling silently / Echoes of the past / Calling me to you”). A similar
instrumental with narrative, “I Barnabas”, was released soon after with
Jonathan Frid’s narration of Barnabas from his coffin opining “I feel your
yearning, I know that you want me, I know that you need me” (Benshoff,
2011, p. 89). In both these cases, the theme of the narration was an
invitation for the listener to engage with the Gothic romantic characters of
Quentin and Barnabas, a paratext that not only helped build the story-world
but also invited interaction and engagement with its listeners.
Other paratextual items that added to the world gestalt of the first phase
of the Dark Shadows world included lunch boxes with images from the
television show and two lines of Dark Shadows bubble gum trading cards.
These cards were first manufactured in 1968 by the Philadelphia Gum
Corporation and featured all the actors and actresses from the show,
sometimes with an autograph from them, and on the backs of the cards,
pieces of a puzzle picture from the show that encouraged users to find the
other pieces to make the overall image.
While the television show was still on the air, MGM produced the first
major motion picture set in the story-world of Dark Shadows. House of
Dark Shadows directed by Dan Curtis was released in September 1970 and
revisited the introduction of the Barnabas Collins storyline, this time in a
more self-contained form with Barnabas being very much the evil vampire
who after turning practically everyone in the cast into vampires (including
Roger Collins) is killed off at the end of the film. Although, in the final
moment of the film, a bat suddenly appears in the shot and flies away
(HODS script, p. 118), thus keeping the door open for another cinematic
appearance by Barnabas. Victoria Winters does not appear, as she had been
written out of the television show, and certain actors, such as Laura Parker
as Angelique, did not appear as she was busy at the time the movie was
being shot with her own storylines for the television show. Indeed, the
writers had to come up with a way to have Barnabas re-chained in his coffin
in parallel time on the television show so Jonathan Frid could be free to do
the filming for the movie. The follow-up to House of Dark Shadows was
Night of Dark Shadows (1971), which is more of an original self-contained
story featuring the characters of Quentin and Angelique (Frid did not want
to appear in the second film as Barnabas and by this time was portraying his
non-vampire son Bramwell). Like the television series, the storyline draws
from some key Gothic sources including Rebecca and Poe’s The Fall of the
House of Usher (1839). Other actors from the television series appeared in
new roles, so, like the use of time travel and parallel time on the television
show, viewers would be familiar with the faces on the screen in new
character roles set in the story-world. The plot around the possession of
Quentin by the ghost of the witch Angelique was, unfortunately, heavily
edited by MGM from Curtis’s original version (Curtis was forced to excise
32 minutes of footage from the original 129 minutes and then another 4
minutes of graphic scenes for the film to be given a PG rating) and there
have been efforts over the years by the Dark Shadows fandom to find and
restore the original “director’s cut” of this film.

Phase 2: Re-runs, Reboots, and the Importance of

Fans
On April 2, 1971 the original series of Dark Shadows came to an end. The
final show would be the only time a voiceover narrator would be used, for
the last haunting words heard on the television series: “And for as long as
they lived, the dark shadows at Collinwood were but a memory of the
distant past” (Dark Shadows, Episode 1245 (season 12, episode 45) (1971)).
Dan Curtis very shrewdly had insured that he, through the ubiquitous extra-
diegetic “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis Production”, seen and announced
on the end credits of every show, would be the sole owner of the original
prints of each episode and therefore could syndicate them for re-runs.
Shortly after the end of the series, he had episodes dubbed into Spanish and
broadcast in South America. To promote this run, Jonathan Frid went on a
promotional tour of South America. In 1975, the first syndicated reruns
were shown in the United States, starting with the introduction of Barnabas
Collins, and continued to be shown in through the 1980s and 1990s — with
a full run on the Sci-Fi Channel starting in 1992.
The popularity of the original broadcast, and an even wider viewership
in re-runs, developed a strong fan base for the world of Dark Shadows, as
well as opportunities for fans to interact and build the story-world through
fan-produced materials and conventions. In Textual Poachers: Television
Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), Henry Jenkins maintains that
fandom allows for “the translation of program material into new texts that
more perfectly serve fan interests, the sense of possession that the fan feels
towards favored media products, and the celebration of intense emotional
commitments” (53). This interaction was clear in the growth of Dark
Shadows fandom and how fans interacted with and built the story-world
through fan fiction in fanzines, cosplay, and at conventions. In 1975, as re-
runs started being broadcast, the first fanzine, The World of Dark Shadows,
was published which included interviews, artwork, articles about the world
including “The Collinsport Debating Society”, and original fan fiction such
as the long-running fiction serial Journey through the Shadows and The
Stranger in the Mirror. A key element of this fan work was the
development of Dark Shadows Concordances which outlined each episode
in incredible detail (the forerunner of today’s Dark Shadows Wiki Powered
by Fans, at https://darkshadows.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Shadows_Wiki).
As Jenkins further states, “The fan, while recognizing the story’s
connectedness, treats it as if its narrative world were a real place that can be
inhabited and explored as if the characters maintained a life beyond what
was represented on the screen; fans draw close to that world in order to
enjoy more fully the pleasures it offers them” (53). The world-building
impulse of fans is characterized by Kathleen Resch in Dark Shadows in the
Afternoon (1991);

Back in the 1960s, for 30 minutes a day, we [fans] had the chance to
share the lives of the Collins family and their friends and enemies.
Those small, daily segments of time infiltrated our minds. Characters
 and situations seeped into our consciousness, giving us insights which
developed into fan-written stories and novels, that filled blanks,
answered questions, rationalized plot discrepancies, and created back-
stories concerning major and often minor characters in the Dark
Shadows universe. (54)

In 1983 the first fan-organized Dark Shadows festival was held in Newark,
New Jersey, which included panels and Q&A with members of the original
cast and production team. These annual festivals would continue (to this
present day) in Los Angeles and New York City. In 1988, a stage play based
on the 1795 timeline of Dark Shadows was presented by Dance Theatre
Workshop in New York City. In 1989, MPI Home Video started releasing
the television episodes on VHS followed in 2002 with their release on DVD
which included for the first time the pre-Barnabas episodes not seen since
the first broadcasts in 1966–1967. These releases also included new footage
of interviews with the actors and teams who put together the original series
offering new insights into the creation of the first phase of the world of
Dark Shadows and an introduction to a new generation of the shows’
original storylines.
In 1990, NBC, one of the original rival networks of ABC, produced the
first reboot to Dark Shadows again directed by Dan Curtis. This was a
slicker re-telling of the Barnabas storyline, now played by English actor
Ben Cross, for a prime-time audience used to dramas like Dallas (1978–
1991) and Dynasty (1981–1989). It again used the character of Victoria
Winters as the focalizing point and followed the original television storyline
fairly loyally — although the character of the witch Angelique was
introduced a lot earlier as the story of the curse of Barnabas Collins was
now known (as opposed to in the original series, when it was being
developed through the creation of the Barnabas/Josette/Angelique 1795
storyline). The timing of the revival series (as it came to become known)
was not ideal as the events of the First Gulf War caused constant
interruptions and rescheduling. Twelve episodes of the show were aired and
then it was canceled. There were plans to introduce the character of Quentin
Collins in the second season. In conjunction with this reboot, a new series
of comics were published by Innovation for eight issues from 1992 to 1993,
which used the familiar “My name is Victoria Winters” introductory
opening in the first panel of each issue.
Phase 3: The Return to Collinwood
In 2004, there was another attempt to reboot Dark Shadows for prime-time
television on the WB Network, and a one-hour pilot featuring Alec
Newman, as Barnabas was commissioned and shot. However, the pilot was
not picked up and the show was never publicly broadcast.
More significantly for the actual world-building of Dark Shadows, in
that same year, a dozen of the original actors for the television series
performed a new audio sequel, Return to Collinwood (2004) onstage at the
Dark Shadows Festival in Brooklyn, New York, and then agreed to record it
for distribution. The script was written by Jamison Selby, the son of David
Selby (Quentin Collins) who himself was named from a character in Dark
Shadows. This was released by MPI Video and, instead of rebooting old
storylines, added a new narrative layer to the story-world; resuming the
television show’s narrative after the death of Elisabeth Collins Stoddard
(the actress Joan Bennett passed away in 1990) with the main focus of the
story being characters coming back to Collinwood to hear the reading of her
last will and testament. It was only in Return to Collinwood that we learn
that Victoria Winters was indeed Elizabeth’s estranged daughter out of
wedlock. The success of the sales of this audio recording suggested there
was a market for new Dark Shadows stories which could be acted out by
original members of the cast. After working with Dan Curtis Productions on
the copyright and licensing in 2006, Big Finish Productions in the United
Kingdom (known for their continuing line of Dr. Who audio dramas using
some of this extended story-world’s original actors) started producing these
audio dramas featuring original and new cast members in new stories set in
the world of Dark Shadows. With the drama The House of Despair, an
entire new storyline set after the television series began. Two sequences
were produced from 2004 to 2010, and then in 2016 to celebrate the 50th
anniversary of the show, a third full audio drama (“Blood and Fire”) was
issued again using many members of the original cast and the revival series.
Concurrent to this another series of “Dramatic Readings” were issued that
usually involved two to three cast members (either actors from the original
series with new ones) in one-off dramas around some of main storylines of
the original show (e.g., The Leviathans, the Trask story arc, etc.). In 2010,
Jonathan Frid was persuaded to reprise his role as Barnabas Collins in a
special audio drama The Night Whispers, where he teamed up with John
Karlen as his servant Willie Loomis. These audio dramas which continue to
expand the Dark Shadows world also feature the pairing of characters in
new situations. For example, starting with episode “The Vodoo Amulet”,
the private detective Tony Peterson joins forces with the witch Cassandra
Collins to solve a murder mystery in New Orleans. This X-Files-like pairing
would be repeated in “The Phantom Bride” (May 2013, where they posed
as husband and wife!) and “The Devil Cat” (May 2014, set in England) and
has gone on to create three seasons of The Tony and Cassandra Mysteries
with 12 episodes so far. Two characters, practically adversaries in the
original series, have now come together in new roles in the story-world.
There has also been a 13-part original series called Bloodlust, which
introduced a new story arc to Collinwood and will be followed up in 2019
with another series called Bloodline. Dark Shadows fans have worked to
join all these narratives braids together in a world-building Dark Shadows
consistent chronology on the Dark Shadows Fandom Wiki, at
https://darkshadows.fandom.com/wiki/Chronology_(audio_dramas).
In addition to performing in the Dark Shadows Big Finish audio dramas,
Lara Parker, who played the witch Angelique on the original television
series, has gone on to expand the world through another series of novels
published first by HarperCollins and then Tor Books set in the story-world.
In Angelique’s Descent (1998), she told her own character’s backstory and
added more narrative depth and insight into Angelique’s initial relationship
with Barnabas Collins. We learn that Angelique was raised in the
mysterious world of voodoo witchcraft and pledged her soul to the devil to
become immortal. There is also a stunning story twist about who
Angelique’s parents were, which changes the dynamic between her and her
rival for Barnabas’s love Josette. In The Salem Branch (2006), Parker
returns to the present of the end of the television series, 1971, when
Barnabas has been cured of his vampirism and is about to marry his curer,
Dr. Julia Hoffman. A mysterious woman comes to Collinwood with a
daughter who proves to be a reincarnation of the form Angelique took in
Salem during the notorious witch trials. Like the television series, this novel
uses time travel as one of its key plot devices. In Wolf Moon Rising (2013),
Parker added more depth and story elements to the Quentin Collins
narrative and again set part of it in the late 1920s, expanding the timeline
for the story-world. In her most recent novel, Heiress of Collinwood (2016),
Parker adds more narrative depth to the story of Victoria Winters and her
true link to the Collins family. In addition to Lara Parker, authors Steven
Mark Rainey and Elizabeth Massie wrote Dreams of the Dark (1999),
another original story which introduced a rival vampire Thomas Rathburn
who was made a vampire during the American Civil War and comes to
Collinwood and becomes attracted to Victoria Winters, making him the
enemy of Barnabas Collins. Another veteran actress of the show, Kathryn
Leigh Scott, is both an author and publisher, and in addition to writing
books about the history of the Dark Shadows broadcasts, also wrote the
intertextual novel Dark Passages (2012) about a female vampire who
comes to New York in the 1960s to become an actress on the cult television
series Dark Passages, only to face her nemesis, a three-hundred-year-old
witch bent on destroying her. In addition to being a brilliant inventive story,
Scott also used it to relay her experience with some of the actors and
actresses on the original television show through the lens of fictional
characters.
From 2011 to 2013, Dynamite Comics began publishing a new line of
Dark Shadows using continuity from the original series for twenty-three
issues. As before, these stories focused on the Barnabas character who in
this narrative becomes a very dark, evil character, who amasses a vampire
army to take over Collinwood and in the last issue, causes the residents of
Collinwood to flee forever. In 2012, Dynamite started a second line of
comics, this time with a crossover with the “Vampirella” franchise.
Vampirella is a super-heroine created by Forrest J. Ackerman and costume
designer Trina Robins. In this narrative, Barnabas goes to New York and
meets the sexy Vampirella in a seedy underworld of clubs. Barnabas and
Vampirella join forces to find the “Big Apple Butcher” who turns out to be
the interestingly named Lady Bathory, who herself has teamed up with Jack
the Ripper to wreak havoc on New York City. In issue 2 of this series,
Quentin Collins, still suffering the werewolf curse, joins in on the search. In
2013, Dynamite published a new series focusing on the origins of Barnabas
Collins and revisiting the 1795 storyline from the show — marketed as “a
retelling of the classic Dark Shadows history”.
In 2012, two dedicated fans of the original television series — the actor
Johnny Depp and film director Tim Burton — set out to tell the story of
Dark Shadows reimagined again for the big screen. While this new highly
anticipated cinematic adaptation was not all together favorably received and
tended to treat the familiar Barnabas being unchained now in the 21st
century for laughs (more Love at First Bite (1979) than Dark Shadows!) it
did pay homage to the original series by having four of the original cast,
including the last appearance of Jonathan Frid, appear with Depp in
Collinwood as cameos in the film. On the set at Pinewood Studios, Johnny
Depp turned to Frid and said “We would not be here without you” (Scott,
2012, p. 30).

Conclusion
In the documentary Master of Shadows: The Gothic World of Dan Curtis
(2019) by MPI Video, the actress Whoopi Goldberg, one of the many fans
who grew up with the show, characterized the Dark Shadows story-world
narrative as “it wasn’t your Mom’s gothic romance, it was your gothic
romance”. Through its imaginative re-use of tropes drawn from Gothic and
horror stories as well as weird literature and pulp fiction, Dark Shadows
created an engaging and interactive story-world that appeared on many
different media platforms, and was consumed by a multi-generational fan
base with a desire to both learn more and engage in their own building of
the world through fan interaction and original story-making. Current Dark
Shadows writer Stuart Maning believes that it is the strength of the
narratives in concert with the continuing soap opera format that has built,
and continues to expand, this story-world;

Dark Shadows has endured because of its characters and that original,
brilliant cast of actors. The soap opera format will always be about
worlds without end, and with the right stories, any character’s journey
can be infinite. Five decades on, those personalities still burn brightly,
and it’s a privilege to guide them through new adventures.
(Scott, 2012, p. 195)

And like the Star Trek universe that was created in the same year, the
world- building of Dark Shadows continues with more planned audio
dramas from Big Finish, a new line of unabridged audio books from
Audible of the original Marilyn Ross novelizations read by Kathryn Leigh
Scott and through social media and the dedication of a fan base that
continues to actively engage with this world and introduce new people into
it — over fifty years after Dan Curtis had his dream of a young woman on a
train heading to a huge, forbidding house — into the eerie and gothic world
of Dark Shadows.

Note
1 The author is grateful to writer and scholar Douglas A. Anderson for finding this Weird Tale for
him.

Bibliography
Benshoff, Harry M (2011), Dark Shadows: TV Milestone Series. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State
University Press.
Hall, Sam and Russell Gordon (1970), House of Dark Shadows HODS (Shooting Script).
Hamrick, Craig (2003), Barnabas and Company: The Cast of the TV Classic Dark Shadows. New
York: I Universe Star.
Jenkins, Henry (1992), Textural Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York:
Routledge
Jenkins, Henry (2006), Convergence Culture: When Old and Media Collide. New York: New York
University Press.
Quinn, Seabury, “The Door Without a Key”, Weird Tales, September 1939, pages 33–54.
Resch, Kathleen (1991), Dark Shadows in the Afternoon. New York: Image Pub.
Scott, Kathryn Leigh (1986), My Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows. Los Angeles, California:
Pomegranate Press.
Scott, Kathryn Leigh (ed.) (1990), The Dark Shadows Companion. Universal City, California:
Pomegranate Press.
Scott, Kathryn Leigh and Pierson, Jim (2000), The Dark Shadows Almanac. Beverly Hills,
California: Pomegranate Press.
Scott, Kathryn Leigh and Pierson, Jim (2012), Dark Shadows: Return to Collinwood. Beverly Hills,
California: Pomegranate Press.
Thompson, Jeff (2009), The Television Horrors of Dan Curtis. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.
Wolf, Mark J.P. (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. New
York: Routledge.
8
DAVENTRY AND THE WORLDS OF
KING’S QUEST
Christopher Hanson

First indirectly introduced in the On-Line Systems’s early graphical

adventure game Wizard and the Princess (1980), the mythical world of
Daventry is perhaps best known as the place in which the original King’s
Quest (1984) (later titled King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown in a 1987 re-
release) and its subsequent series were set. As discussed below, the name
“Daventry” is not used in Wizard and the Princess, but the game takes place
in Serenia, a land that later becomes part of the world of Daventry.
Daventry was constructed by Roberta Williams and is populated by original
elements and familiar fairy-tale characters alike, weaving a rich and
charming tapestry that transcends simple pastiche. Since 1980, it has served
as the location for eight games in the original King’s Quest series, as well as
in its 2015 reboot as an episodic adventure game series by the Odd
Gentlemen.
Daventry has also served as the setting for a number of spin-offs. These
include the appearance of Daventry’s world in other Sierra games and the
re-imagining of Daventry numerous fan-produced games. These fan games
are comprised of straight remakes with enhanced graphics, re-imagined
versions of games. Multiple published novels and other works have also
taken place in the imaginary world of Daventry, in addition to new
numerous accompanying paratexts and other written content created by
authorized authors and dedicated fans alike. At various times, “Daventry”
has functioned as shorthand for several bounded areas in this fictional
world: from the entire world to a continent to a kingdom to a town to a
castle.
In this essay, I explore the world of Daventry through a number of its
iterations to better understand its construction. I examine the complexities
of its development through multiple versions and its expansion by multiple
authors. Daventry exists across numerous articulations, including the games
designed by Roberta Williams, the paratextual materials released in
conjunction with these games, fan works, and the reboot of the game in
2015. As I reveal, this collective authorship reveals the fissures of a
singular and coherent notion of “Daventry” by laying bare contradictions
and inconsistencies. Building from its remediation and combination of a
variety of fables, myths, and fairy tales, I argue that while Daventry’s
multiple authors help to build and enrich its imaginary world, they also
simultaneously reveal the limits of canonicity.

Roberta Williams, Sierra, and King’s Quest

Raised in LaVerne, California, Roberta Williams recollects being an avid
teller of tales from an early age. She recalls that as a child, she was,
“interested in anything that had to do with magic, or fantasy, like the Wizard
of Oz or Alice in Wonderland. I always read a lot and fantasized a lot. I was
always a story-teller. I used to tell my friends and my cousins stories, and I
used to get in trouble for it”.1 In high school, she met Ken Williams, whom
she married.
Roberta Williams then co-founded Sierra On-Line (founded as On-Line
Systems, and later commonly known as Sierra) with Ken in 1979.
According to their recollections, Ken was programming an income-tax
program in that year from home on a mainframe computer. He stumbled
across a program called Adventure, which quickly captured his and
Roberta’s imagination: “Within minutes I was calling over to Roberta to
show her my discovery. No work got done that night”.2 The game to which
Ken refers is the influential Adventure or ADVENT, released in 1977 after
Don Woods expanded upon Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure
(1976). In Ken’s account, he recalls his and Roberta’s fascination with the
game, which led them to more text adventure games developed by Scott and
Alexis Adams and released by their company Adventure, International.3 He
recalls that, “Roberta loved the games but wondered if they wouldn’t be
better if, instead of a textual description, there would be a picture”.4 They
subsequently purchased an Apple II in late 1979 and began working on
Roberta’s vision for an adventure game which added graphics set in a
mansion in which a murderer lurks among seven other guests.
In 1980, On-Line Systems released Hi-Res Adventure #1: Mystery House
(commonly known just as Mystery House). The game proved popular and
sold over 10,000 copies, and the company made several more games in the
Hi-Res Adventure series, including Wizard and the Princess.5 However, On-
Line Systems floundered somewhat before it partnered with IBM as that
company launched its IBM PCjr, a version of its popular business computer
designed for the home. IBM sought a game to showcase the technical
abilities of the PCjr, and helped to fund the development of Roberta
Williams’s vision of King’s Quest as an animated graphic adventure game
that was released as a launch title for the PCjr in 1984.
While the IBM PCjr proved to be unsuccessful, King’s Quest was
enormously popular — thanks to it being ported to multiple other home
computers at the time including the Apple II, Amiga, and the Macintosh.
The game spawned numerous sequels through the 1980s and 1990s and
Sierra concurrently released other graphic adventure games which also
eventually became their own series including the Space Quest, Police
Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry series. As a result of these and other titles,
Sierra became a highly successful game software company during the
1980s and the early 1990s and was sold in 1996 for around $1.5 billion
(USD). In the year or two following its sale, however, both Roberta and
Ken Williams left the company. Sierra was downsized and restructured
multiple times and eventually dissolved in 2004, before resurfacing first as
a Vivendi brand in 2005 and then later as an Activision brand in 2014.
The King’s Quest games take place in the world of Daventry, a mythical
world that compiles elements from fairy tales, folklore, mythology, and
popular culture. In the first King’s Quest, the player guides the animated
avatar of the knight Sir Graham, who has been tasked with locating and
recovering three treasures critical to the kingdom of Daventry and its ruler,
King Edward. Graham becomes king at the conclusion of the first game
after recovering the treasures and the sudden death of King Edward. The
next game in the series, King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne (1985)
follows King Graham as he travels in search of a bride to Kolyma, located
on another continent in the world of Daventry. Subsequent games expand
upon Graham’s family and further build out their imaginary world, or both.
The world of Daventry is constituted of multiple fictional lands, which
grow, shift, and morph across the series and paratexts such as
accompanying materials packaged with the games, related games, and
works published separately from the games. Even within the main games
themselves, certain ambiguities and apparent inconsistencies complicate
getting a clear idea of the boundaries and dimensions of Daventry. For
example, the manual for King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity (1998) describes
the seven “Lands” of the game, which include physical locations such as the
“Kingdom of Daventry” and “The Swamp” but also mystical realms such as
“The Dimension of Death” and “The Realm of the Sun”.6 This is
compounded by paratextual materials which add to the world of Daventry
while also introducing internal contradictions.

Serenia and “Daventry”

Strangely enough, Daventry was introduced in an earlier Roberta Williams
game but was not actually called Daventry at the time. As noted above, the
imaginary world of Serenia was first introduced in Wizard and the Princess
(1980), the second in the On-Line Systems’s Hi-Res Adventures series.7
Later in the King’s Quest games, it is revealed that Serenia is part of the
world of Daventry.
However, the packaging and instruction manual for Wizard and the
Princess offer scant initial description of Serenia, setting up the player as a
“happy wanderer passing through a village in the land of Serenia” who
learns that kingdom’s King George is offering half of his lands to anyone
who can rescue his daughter, Princess Priscilla, from the evil wizard
Harlin.8 Priscilla is said to be held captive “beyond the great mountains”
that are so distant that they are not visible, but lie north of this village,
beyond a “vast desert that seems never to end”.9 The game starts in the
village described in the packaging, with a static color image of the town and
a text description at the bottom of the screen (Figure 8.1).
FIGURE 8.1 Start screen of Wizard and the Princess (1980).

As is common in text adventures, the player enters one- or two-word

phrases via the text parser at the bottom of the screen to navigate and
interact with the game space. Movement is in discrete steps, with each
location presenting another image in the top of the screen and a text
description at the bottom. As the player must venture into the desert and
other subsequent locations, these images may repeat with only minor
variation and emulate the repetitive features of the area. This can be
disorienting for the player and effect a maze-like experience which all but
requires the player to draw a map as they play to help navigate the game
world — a standard game mechanic in text adventures.
As the player explores Serenia, they discover numerous items and
puzzles which must be solved in order to explore further. For example, the
player encounters multiple instances of snakes with which must be dealt in
different manners. The first snake that blocks the way must be killed by
throwing a rock found elsewhere in the desert. The player may then
encounter rattlesnakes which require a stick to scatter. Finally, aiding
another snake trapped by a rock will reward the player with the means to
transform themselves into a snake to traverse a small opening found later.
As Henry Jenkins has argued, the “narrative architecture” of the adventure
game is designed around spatial navigation in that solving puzzles opens up
more areas to explore and reveals more narrative — and more puzzles.10
The imaginary world of Serenia expands far beyond the village and
desert of the opening screens. Past the desert lies a chasm which can only
be traversed using a magic word, allowing access to a house on the other
side and labyrinthine woods inhabited by mischievous gnome, a parrot, and
a lion. At the edge of the woods lies an ocean which must be navigated via
rowboat to locate a desert island to explore, complete with jungle, a pirate,
and buried treasure. Using more magic, the player flies to a distant
mainland and finally reaches foothills that lead to the mountains which
must be successfully navigated. In the foothills on the other side of the
mountains, the player reaches the evil wizard’s castle, which is encircled by
a crocodile-infested moat.
Inside the castle, the player then must negotiate an actual maze, beyond
which lies the titular wizard and princess — albeit in animal forms. Upon
transforming the princess, the player can then magically transport both of
them back to the starting village with its familiar accompanying graphic.
Curiously, this is identified in the game’s text as “YOU ARE
TRANSPORTED TO SERENIA. . . .YOU ARE IN THE VILLAGE OF
SERENIA”. This final text suggests that only the initial portion of the game
involves the actual kingdom of Serenia, with the other areas belonging to
some other realm.
Wizard and the Princess is acknowledged in a 1994 article in Sierra’s
magazine InterAction as a “prequel” to King’s Quest games.11 However, the
events of Wizard and the Princess were later established to take place
sometime before the events of 1990’s King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the
Heart Go Yonder!, and both games take place in Serenia. The Serenia in
Absence Makes shares some similar geographical features with the Serenia
represented in Wizard and the Princess, and the later game even recycles
some puzzles from the earlier game.

World of Daventry & The Companion

The “world of Daventry” is generally used by fans to describe the
imaginary world in which the games and canonical paratexts take place.
One essential work in this process is Peter Spear’s The King’s Quest
Companion (1989). This book performs critical work in world-building for
the game series beyond the short stories that it offers based on each of the
games in the series. First published in 1989, The Companion initially
included material for the series up to King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella
(1988). Four editions of The Companion were released, with each
subsequent iteration including material from the most recently released
game in the series. The fourth edition, published in 1997, covers the series
up to King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride (1994).
However, only the first and second (1991) editions of the book include
the “Encyclopedia of Daventry (Abridged)” section, which collects
information from the games and other sources on key characters and other
elements and links them to myths and fairy tales. For example, the entry for
the beanstalk found in the first King’s Quest notes that, “In our world, we
have the story of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’”, and provides a synopsis of the
fairy tale as well as the story “Jack the Giant-Killer”.12 The Companion
functions primarily as an authorized hint book to the series, and content
from the “Encyclopedia” serves to provide greater context to in-game
elements, such as in the entry for “Castle Daventry”, which references
elements from multiple games in the series.13 The disparate influences for
the games are made apparent in this encyclopedia, which includes entries
for “Castle Dracula”, “chicken soup”, “Cupid”, “Merlin’s Mirror”, “Riding
Hood”, and “Seven Dwarfs”.14
The Companion’s encyclopedia supplies information about the different
kingdoms and continents of the world of Daventry while also evincing the
sometimes-confusing and contradictory nature of such information. For
example, the entry on Serenia notes that the name refers to “three distinct
places”, namely that of a continent, kingdom, and also a town.15 The entry
for Daventry states that the name is given to a kingdom and a continent, but
also that, “the name is sometimes used as a generic name for the universe
that contains [the] kingdom”, before noting the existence of multiple towns
named Daventry in the real world.16
Earlier in The Companion, it is explicitly stated that Serenia is actually a
continent, in which the Kingdom of Daventry is located.17 The continent
was named for the “Sovereignty of Serenia”, another area which borders
Daventry.18 But further compounding this confusion is that the Daventry
encyclopedia entry states that this is “the name of the continent of which the
kingdom [of Daventry] is part”.19 However, the entry for Serenia declares
that the continent of Serenia, “is broken up into many kingdoms and
principalities, with two of the most significant ones being the Kingdom of
Daventry and the Sovereignty of Serenia”.20 The Kingdom of Daventry
thus is identified as being in two different continents. Contradictions and
inconsistencies can thus be found between texts which contribute to this
imaginary world, but even within single texts such as the Companion. Fan
culture notes that the continent of Daventry is “also known as Serenia at
times”, indicating a recognition and tacit acceptance of such variability.21

Size, Mapping, & “Wrap Around”

After establishing the diegetic world of Daventry in the first couple of
games, subsequent games gradually expanded its fictional boundaries,
sometimes in quite literal fashion. As technological and storage capacities
increased, so did the scope of the games. Larger-capacity storage media
such as higher-density floppy disks and then CD-ROMs facilitated the
capability to grow the games and allowed for larger maps. Roberta
Williams had previously pushed the proverbial (disk) envelope in creating
large games that spanned a number of disks. For example, her earlier Time
Zone (1982) featured over 1,400 color images and shipped on six double-
sided floppy disks (the equivalent of 12 single-sided floppy disks) for the
Apple II.22 Games were almost exclusively shipped on a single disk at the
time, including larger-scale games such as role-playing games (RPGs).23
The size of Time Zone was highlighted in the game’s promotional
materials.24
Correspondingly, Daventry’s geography shifts and grows throughout the
King’s Quest series. With the exception of the 3D Mask of Eternity, players
traverse the game by navigating an animated avatar through a series of
“screens”. Each screen represents a distinct location in the game and tends
to connect logically and visually to adjoining screens. For example, the first
King’s Quest begins the player outside of Castle Daventry, located on one
side of the front of the castle (see Figure 8.2, top). By moving the avatar
across the bridge of the crocodile-infested moat and exiting to the left on
this screen, the player’s avatar moves to the next screen. Here, the player
appears on the right side of a screen depicting the continued front side of
the castle and its front door (see Figure 8.2, center). There, the player can
exit via the side of the screen or gain access to the castle by approaching the
door and typing “open door” into the text parser. Entering the castle leads to
a depiction of an interior hallway of the castle, rendered in a linear
perspective that shows the hallway leading away from this front door (see
Figure 8.2, bottom). Each “screen” is connected to other screens, with some
screens limiting navigation in particular directions via impassable barriers.
The perspective of the standard screen of outdoor spaces in the King’s Quest
games generally corresponds to the compass in that the edges of the screen
correlate to directions so that the left side of the screen is west and the right
side is east, while the top and bottom are equivalent to north and south
respectively.
FIGURE 8.2 Start screen of King’s Quest (top); screen to left of the other
side of the castle with the front door (center); and screen of interior hall of
castle (bottom).

This construction facilitates coherently mapping the space using paper, a

practice which the game manuals explicitly encourage and even visually
model. The manual for the first King’s Quest suggests that the player,
“Create a map showing objects and landmarks you see along the way.
You’ll want to note dangerous areas, in particular”.25 The manual then
provides a sample map of how different screens connect. Hintbooks and
guides for the games often emphasize this mapping and provide maps of
each game. Donald B. Trivette’s The Official Book of King’s Quest:
Daventry and Beyond (1988) supplies maps and hints for several games in
the series. This book divides the first game’s map into quadrants and
describes its layout: “The Kingdom of Daventry is small and compact; it is
just eight screens from east to west (left to right) and six screens from north
to south (top to bottom)”.26 As Trivette explains in his book, each quadrant
of Daventry in his book is composed of four screens east to west and three
north to south. Maps for each quadrant can thus be clearly rendered on a
page and hints for the different quadrants are described in subsections. As
technology progressed in subsequent games in the series, the size of these
virtual worlds would grow substantially over time; for example, the main
area of King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne (1985) expands to a map of
seven screens by seven screens and later games grow to dozens of screens.
Trivette describes a curious way in which the totality of Daventry is
modeled in the first King’s Quest game. He states, “In almost every case,
Daventry, like the real world, wraps around itself: If you go east (right)
from Edward’s Castle, which appears [in the top right] on the northeast
[quadrant] map, you’ll end up at the beautiful lake shown [in the top left] of
the northwest [quadrant] map”.27 In other words, it is possible to move in
one direction long enough (i.e., six screens north or south) that one will
eventually return to the same screen at which one started. Some barriers in
the world such as a river or the castle’s moat may require one to
circumnavigate the obstacles or solve puzzles, but the underlying circularly
connected grid-like structure remains. Daventry, then, mimics a globe in
that it is possible to travel in one direction far enough to return to the
starting point. Echoing The Official Book, this effect is also described in
The Companion as “wrap around”.28 Players of earlier arcade games such
as Asteroids (1979) and Pac-Man (1980), or even the pioneering computer
game Spacewar! (1962), which utilize a single-screen wraparound
mechanism, would already be familiar with it.
This “wrap around” game mechanic is directly addressed in the manual
for the original 1984 release for the first game, which suggests that the
world of Daventry is actually shaped in this way. The IBM PCJr manual
states “Daventry’s world has a three-dimensional quality about it. Places
‘wrap around’ like countries on a globe. Imagine Daventry as a country so
large that it bends around the world. Remember this when drawing your
map”.29 This manual then provides two suggested methods of mapping the
game, one of which places a grid of locations around a three-dimensional
globe.30
Within the tales of Daventry found in The Companion, the “wrap
around” is explained by a narrative conceit. This is referred to as a magical
law of “containment”, wherein kingdoms in the world of Daventry (e.g., the
settings for the first four games in the series) loop in peculiar ways. King’s
Quest II transports King Graham to the continent of Tanalore and begins in
the kingdom of Kolyma on a beach on the western shores. In the
Companion’s narrativizing of these events, it is stated that, “the magical law
of ‘containment’ operated in this western part of the continent. For reasons
now forgotten — or perhaps it was whimsey on the part of the multiverse
— movement to both the north and south in this part of Kolyma eventually
turned back upon itself, contained as if inside some transparent cosmic
doughnut”.31 This diegetic principle apparently operates in describing
significant parts of game worlds as in the Daventry found in the earlier
games in the series before King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go
Yonder! (1990).32
Adding to confusion about this imaginary world are questions about
where Daventry is actually located. In the instruction manual for the first
King’s Quest, it is suggested that the kingdom of Daventry existed “a long,
long time ago, when unicorns still roamed in the forests and the merfolk
still dwelt in the shallow waters frequented by men”.33 And in the manual
for King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne, the manual is more explicit in
describing the location of Daventry as being on Earth: “A long, long time
ago, when creatures of myth and magic walked the earth openly with lesser
mortals, there dwelt in the kingdom of Daventry a King named Graham”.34
It should be noted, however, that this mention of “earth” in the instruction
manual is complicated by the fact that the story in which it is mentioned is
attributed to Annette Childs. Even relatively early in series, the complicated
function of paratexts created by other authors — in this case, an
introductory story written in the game’s instruction manual — is clearly
indicated. However, other references to Daventry’s location on earth can be
found in the games and have been confirmed by Roberta Williams herself.
In a 1998 interview, she describes Daventry as being “somewhere on
Earth”, and that Daventry is a “very old, very old city. . . from a long time
ago”.35 Her tongue-in-cheek claim that Daventry is located on Earth in an
unknown location intimates that Daventry exists in a mythical past rather
than an actual past.

Multiples of Daventry
It is difficult to construct a definitive and singular map of Daventry, due to
the inconsistencies in, and resulting incoherence of, the various versions of
it. One reason for this is a result of Sierra’s own practices in updating its
games. Several titles within the original King’s Quest series were released in
multiple versions. These iterations extend beyond ports to different
platforms, and include versions which incorporated newer technologies.
Both the systems used by the game developers and the capabilities of the
platforms themselves changed significantly over the course of the game
series. And, as the success of the series grew, interest in the earlier games
was rekindled. As a result of these and other factors, there exist multiple
versions of the earlier games, with varying differences between each in their
representations of Daventry.
Sierra’s earlier adventure games were made using a development tool
called AGI, the acronym for Adventure Game Interpreter. AGI was
developed in conjunction with IBM in creating the 1984 IBM PCJr version
of the original King’s Quest game, and it facilitated the porting of the game
to similar platforms of the time such as the Apple II, the Amiga, the Atari
ST, the Macintosh, and other IBM PCs. Used by Sierra from 1984 to 1989,
AGI-based versions of each of the games appeared in the series up to King’s
Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (1988). However, as newer computers,
higher resolution graphics, and improved sound capabilities emerged during
the 1980s, the limitations of AGI’s underlying technologies (such as its
absence of mouse support) became increasingly apparent. Sierra developed
SCI, the Sierra Creative Interpreter, as a replacement for AGI. SCI allowed
for games with significantly increased graphical resolution and the use of
other emergent multimedia technologies such as sound cards. Two versions
of King’s Quest IV were developed, one in AGI for older machines and one
in SCI which featured significant visual and aural improvements.
The original King’s Quest has been released multiple times with notable
differences between some versions. In the original 1984 version, the game
manual spells the protagonist’s name as “Grahame” and provides a
cartoonish representation of this protagonist and other characters in the
game.36 Sierra released multiple versions of this game between 1984 and
1987, and then released a new version of the game made using SCI in 1990
called King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown. This later version changed
aspects of the game including puzzles, character dialog, and some layout
aspects of in-game elements.
Different versions of these games range from minor improvements to
graphics and sounds to the development of more complex backstory and
other narrative alterations. The changes made to 1990 SCI remake of the
first game were substantial enough to the point that fans do not necessarily
consider it part of the world of Daventry’s canon.37 Fans have also remade
this first game as Tierra Entertainment’s King’s Quest I: Quest for the
Crown VGA (2001). This unofficial remake was then improved upon and
re-released in a licensed version in 2009 by AGD Interactive (formerly
Tierra), adding Enhanced Edition to the title. Notably, these fan remakes
also update the graphics, sound, and other elements but stay closer to the
original game than Sierra’s 1990 SCI remake. Other fan games such as
AGD Interactive’s King’s Quest II: Romancing the Stones (2002) and King’s
Quest III Redux: To Heir is Human (2011) are based on the original games,
but are positioned as “retelling” and re-imagining the events of the original
games while also updating them to use a graphical interface.

Daventry’s Author(s)
Among the numerous complexities in mapping the space of the fictional
world(s) of King’s Quest are those that relate to issues of authorship and
ownership. On the one hand, Roberta Williams can clearly be considered
the primary creator of these imaginary worlds. Her King’s Quest games
established the world of Daventry and its characters, just as her earlier
Wizard and the Princess created the world of Serenia. On the other hand,
however, numerous others are involved in building the world of Daventry,
including those associated with the development of the main series games,
the writers of supplementary materials that accompanied the games, authors
of commissioned “official” paratexts such as game guides, and fans who
play roles in the compiling of these sources and the building of Daventry.
Beyond these fictional worlds, the early original King’s Quest games
established other key components for the franchise and broader adventure
game genre, including thematic tendencies, and the interrelated domains of
play mechanics and the incorporation of technological advancements.38
That is, while the characters and settings spawn multiple games and
transmedia articulations, the various texts that build and expand upon these
worlds also share narrational tropes and themes, and even occasionally
recycle puzzles from earlier Sierra games. Furthermore, games within the
series iteratively build upon the first games’ text parser interface to
integrate technologies such as color, sound, higher-definition graphics, and
mouse-driven control schemes. In a sense, these games build their
imaginary worlds both in content and in form.
Although Roberta Williams can be considered the primary designer of
the King’s Quest series, several industrial and cultural factors must be
recognized in the authorship of these games and the world of Daventry. As
with the vast majority of digital games, the creation of any single title in the
King’s Quest series was the result of a collaborative process between
multiple people. Roberta Williams is unmistakably the driving force behind
the series, but the actual implementation of each game inevitably required
multiple developers to supplement Williams’s design, including
programmers, artists, and so on. Furthermore, technological capacities of
personal computers developed rapidly in the series’ initial years of
development (1980–1998), spanning from the “prequel” Wizard and the
Princess to the ninth game, King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, evolving from
monochrome terminals to multimedia computers capable of playing
complex sound effects, music, and video. Attendant to these expanding
expressive capabilities was the growth of development teams, adding
composers, animators, and actors.
The closest to single authorship in the series may well be the earliest
game, Wizard and the Princess, in which only Roberta and Ken Williams
are credited. In describing the development process for Hi-Res Adventure
#1: Mystery House (1980), Ken Williams recounts, “Roberta wanted
pictures of every room in the house and would write the story and draw the
pictures, write the program”.39 Using an Apple II with a monochrome
monitor, the Williamses created the first text adventure to include
supplemental graphics.40 Wizard and the Princess, the second game in the
Hi-Res Adventure series, had the same development team of two, but added
color to the in-game illustrations. The development team size would grow
considerably by the first official game of King’s Quest I for the IBM PCJr,
which features a development team of five identified in the in-game credits:
Roberta Williams, Charles Tingley and Ken MacNeill (programming), and
Doug MacNeill and Greg Rowland (artwork). These development teams
would grow considerably over time and eventually, mushrooming to dozens
of people in the credits for Mask of Eternity.
Furthermore, multiple designers and writers were involved in the
creation of some of the games. While King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the
Heart Go Yonder! (1990) credits only Roberta Williams as its designer, later
games in the series list multiple designers and writers.41 King’s Quest VI:
Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992) credits Roberta Williams and Jane
Jensen as writing and designing the game.42 Furthering this trend, King’s
Quest VII: The Princeless Bride (1994) lists Lorelei Shannon before
Roberta Williams under “Designed [b]y”, and credits only Shannon as its
writer.43 The final official sequel in this series, King’s Quest: Mask of
Eternity (1998) once again credits Roberta Williams first, under
“Designer/Writer”, but next lists Mark Seibert as “Producer/Director/Co-
Designer”.44
The original games were supplemented by other paratexts, including
materials supplied with the games and guides such as The Official Book of
King’s Quest and The King’s Quest Companion, as discussed above. Three
“official” novels were also released from 1995 to 1996, ostensibly taking
place within the world of Daventry: The Floating Castle (1995) by Craig
Mills, and The Kingdom of Sorrow (1996) and See No Weevil (1996), both
by Kenyon Morr. However, Roberta Williams was not directly involved in
these licensed works, which take place in between the events of the games
but also introduce confusing elements to the world of Daventry.
In 2015, the series was “rebooted” by game developers The Odd
Gentlemen as King’s Quest: Adventures of Graham. The reboot was initially
released episodically, with separate six separate “Chapters”, concluding in
2016. These games take many elements such as characters and settings
from the original games’ world of Daventry, but stray considerably from the
original series. Fans thus refer to this iteration of Daventry as “reboot
canon” or “TOG canon” (an acronym for the development team).”

Fan Works
There is clear evidence that fan engagement with Daventry began shortly
after the original games reached players’ hands. Sierra On-Line published
its own magazine, which began as the Sierra Newsletter and changed its
name upon the acquisition of Dynamix, Inc., before eventually being
renamed InterAction. Fan art inspired by the King’s Quest games can be
found in the earliest issues of the newsletter, in particular in the “Sierra
Cartoon Corner”, which invited readers to submit cartoons about Sierra
products. This includes a cartoon by a fan in which a television is shut off in
favor of King’s Quest in the second issue of the Newsletter. Active fan
engagement in the imaginary worlds of King’s Quest can be found in the
next issue, in which a cartoon by Adam Paul depicts Gwydion, the player-
controlled protagonist of King’s Quest III: To Heir is Human (1986), and
jokingly imagines the hero contemplating the game’s “flying spell” puzzle
after brushing away a dead fly.45 Fan re-imaginings of the characters and
settings of King’s Quest became regular features in the pages of later issues
of the Newsletter.
Fan participation in Daventry has expanded far beyond these
contributions, however. In addition to fan-driven remakes and re-
imaginings of the original games by Tierra Entertainment/AGD Interactive
above, fans have produced wholly original games such as Interactive
Fantasies King’s Quest ZZT (1997). These fan engagements illustrate
multiple aspects of the world-building that these games perform, and clearly
demonstrate the existence of a committed fanbase eager to participate in the
worlds of Daventry, Serenia, and the other fictional lands of King’s Quest
beyond merely the games themselves. The fan cartoons and art also riff off
the King’s Quest games’ uses of characters from fables, fairy tales, and
other works of literature, as well as the tendency of other Sierra games to
utilize characters from the King’s Quest games via cameos or joking
references. Such playful intertextual references play a critical part in this
aspect of world-building, as they provide numerous points of entry for fans
to re-imagine and build upon the worlds of the games.

Parallel Universes
The multiplicities of Daventry may be contradictory, but they also mesh
well with the suggestions made in the original games and paratexts that
Daventry operates in a “parallel universe”. This positioning of Daventry
acknowledges its function within a “multiverse” of numerous parallel
universes, which intersect with and inform one another. This suggestion is
posited by The Companion, which offers “novelizations” (actually more the
length of book chapters or short stories) of the games of the series and
further builds out the fictional backgrounds of the games’ imaginary
worlds. These stories are dramatic accounts of the events of the games and
themselves are positioned as artifacts from the diegetic world of the games.
The story “The Eye Between the Worlds” introduces “Derek
Karlavaegen”, the fictional narrator of this and other stories in The
Companion. The epigraph suggests that the story was “Compiled from
Messages to this World from the World of Daventry, as Sent by Derek
Karlavaegen”.46 Karlavaegen describes himself as “a writer here [in
Daventry], scribing stories about the current events of the day, which are
then published for the information and amusement of whoever cares to read
them”.47 The character of Karlavaegen was introduced in the paratext of the
Companion, but then becomes a character in King’s Quest VI: Heir Today,
Gone Tomorrow (1992) and also the fictional narrator of the short book
Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles, which was written by Jane Jensen
and packaged with the game. While some of the included materials
packaged with the games and other licensed material stray from the world
of Daventry represented in the games, other materials such as Jensen’s
Guidebook function to bridge the game between paratexts and the games
themselves.
In The Companion, Karlavaegen explains how he discovered the “Eye
Between the Worlds”, which allows him to communicate directly to the
reader, outside of Daventry and in the real world. Karlavaegen notes that
the world of Daventry intersects with the real world through a structure of
“multiverses”, in which Daventry exists as a “fantasy adventure — a made-
up story intended as entertainment for people”.48 The implication is that the
magical imaginary world of Daventry is akin to a dream in the real world
but is actually a real place. Furthermore, Daventry is realized in the real
world via imagination and other mechanisms. Karlavaegen states, “our
worlds touch together in a place shared by the head in this study and in
certain of your machines”, obliquely referring to the computers upon which
the King’s Quest games run.49
As in many Sierra games, King’s Quest would also break the fourth wall
with some frequency. Intertextual references are abundant in Sierra games,
with characters, locations, and other elements from what might appear to be
entirely separate worlds intersecting. For example, a Daventry-themed
virtual pinball board can be found in Dynamix’s Take a Break! Pinball
(1993).50 In some versions of King’s Quest II, looking into a hole in a rock
would let the avatar see elements from either the Space Quest games or a
preview of King’s Quest III. Al Lowe, the designer of Sierra’s Leisure Suit
Larry series also conducts a fictional interview with Daventy’s character of
Rosella in The Official Book of Leisure Suit Larry.51 Such intertextual
references support the fan theory of a Sierra multiverse, which allows for
character crossovers (often in the form of hidden Easter eggs).52

Conclusion
While the King’s Quest series unmistakably draws from a number of
influences in myth and popular culture, Roberta Williams has
acknowledged Andrew Lang’s Fairy Book series as being among the most
prominent.53 Lang was a literary critic and pioneer in cultural anthropology,
helped to legitimize folklore studies as a discipline, and is credited with
compiling a number of folklore works.54 Among the most influential works
of his oeuvre are a subset of a dozen volumes of these which became
known as the “Color[ed]” Fairy Books, as each were named for a different
color, and were published between 1889 and 1910. These books collected
folk tales and myths from a myriad of sources, publishing many for the first
time in the English language. While the books clearly sought to profit from
the contemporary British interest in fairy tales, they simultaneously helped
to concretize the cultural function of fairy tales and folklore.55
Notably, Lang’s books were largely compiled from other sources, taking
their source material from the myths of a number of different countries.
Furthermore, as Andrea Day demonstrates, most of the work of collecting,
editing, and translating the majority of Fairy Books was actually performed
by his wife, Leonora Blanche “Nora” (Alleyne) Lang, but were instead
attributed to Andrew Lang himself.56 Day observes that while Andrew
Lang acknowledges that much of the series was “wholly” the result of
Lang’s wife’s labor in the preface to The Lilac Fairy Book (1910), Lang
endeavored to minimize Nora’s work as being done under his supervision,
“subordinating his wife’s intellect to his own”.57
It seems fitting that Roberta Williams was influenced so heavily by these
books in her storytelling, and in the recombinant nature of the world of
Daventry. As Molly Clark Hillard argues in her analysis of Lang’s work,
“All authorship is, of course, a collective endeavor between forms and
across time”.58 The remediation of these fairy tales is evident across all of
the King’s Quest games, and is apparent in the ways in which players were
encouraged to play. The instruction manual for one of the 1984 versions
commands the player to “Look to the fables and fairy tales of yore for
clues”.59 When recounting the influence of Lang’s Fairy Books on her,
Roberta Williams responds to a question about whether these stories and
books were written by different authors: “I don’t even remember. Probably
a lot of them are the same old fairy tales, just rewritten”.60 Like the fairy
tales from which it draws, the palimpsestic world of Daventry is one which
has been — and remains — prone to revision.

Notes
1 DeWitt, “Wizard and the Princess: Computer Fantasy Comes True,” 23.
 2 Williams, “Introduction,” 3.
3 Williams, 4.
4 Williams, 4.
5 Trivette, The Official Book of King’s Quest: Daventry and Beyond, 6.
6 King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity Instruction Manual, 28, 29.
7 In a subsequent 1982 port for the IBM PC, the game was retitled Adventure in Serenia.
8 Williams and Williams, Wizard and the Princess: Hi-Res Adventure #2 Instruction Manual, 4.
9 Williams and Williams, 4.
10 Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” 121, 122.
11 “Then and Now (Sierra’s 15th Anniversary),” 45.
12 Spear, The King’s Quest Companion, 1991, 442, 443.
13 Spear, 448.
14 Spear, 435–524.
15 Spear, 506.
16 Spear, 455, 456.
17 Spear, The King’s Quest Companion, 1997, 32.
18 Spear, 33.
19 Spear, The King’s Quest Companion, 1991, 455.
20 Spear, 506.
21 “Daventry Continent”.
22 Clark and Williams, “The Coinless Arcade — Rediscovered,” 87.
23 Jimmy Maher notes this includes games such as Ultima (Richard Garriott/Origin Systems, 1981)
and Wizardy: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Sir-Tech, 1981), which began to use the
second side of a double-sided floppy disk. For more, see Maher, “Time Zone The Digital
Antiquarian”.
24 These advertised the game as “Multi-Disk Hi-Res Adventure by On-Line Productions” and aped
the style of film poster down to the rating of “UA: Ultimate Adventure” several decades before
the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) instituted game ratings in the United States.
25 King’s Quest Instruction Manual, 11.
26 Trivette, The Official Book of King’s Quest: Daventry and Beyond, 41.
27 Trivette, 41.
28 Spear, The King’s Quest Companion, 1991, 324.
29 King’s Quest IBM PCJr Instruction Manual, 22.
30 It should be noted that this four-directional wraparound would actually not be a globe, but would
actually be more akin to a non-Euclidean shape. See Wolf, “Theorizing Navigable Space in
Video Games”.
31 Spear, The King’s Quest Companion, 1991, 62, 63.
32 Spear, 400.
33 King’s Quest Instruction Manual, 1.
34 Childs, King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne Instruction Manual, 1.
35 Wilson, Roberta Williams interview.
36 King’s Quest IBM PCJr Instruction Manual.
37 “King’s Quest I”.
38 Anastasia Salter has argued for the consideration of adventure games in relationship to
interactive books: see Salter, What Is Your Quest? Laine Nooney, however, has suggested the
utility removing the notion of “genre” in analyzing Sierra’s adventure games; see Nooney, “Let’s
Begin Again: Sierra On-Line and the Origins of the Graphical Adventure Game”.
39 Williams, “Introduction,” 5.
40 At the time, the development team and the staff of On-Line Systems consisted of the same two
people. The Williamses thus also served as their own distributors, personally delivering copies of
the game, packaged in plastic bags, to software stores on US West Coast.
41 King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! Instruction Manual, 1.
42 Jensen, Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles, 52.
43 King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride Instruction Manual, 11.
44 King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity Instruction Manual, 39.
45 “Sierra Cartoon Contest”.
46 Spear, The King’s Quest Companion, 1997, 1.
47 Spear, 2.
48 Spear, 5.
49 Spear, 5.
50 Sierra acquired Dynamix in 1990, so this game was released under Sierra’s ownership.
51 Roberts and Lowe, The Official Book of Leisure Suit Larry.
52 “Multiverse”.
53 DeWitt, “Wizard and the Princess: Computer Fantasy Comes True,” 23.
54 Hensley, “What Is a Network? (And Who Is Andrew Lang?),” 8.
55 Hillard, “Trysting Genres: Andrew Lang’s Fairy Tale Methodologies,” 9–13.
56 Day, “‘Almost Wholly the Work of Mrs. Lang’: Nora Lang, Literary Labour, and the Fairy
Books”.
57 Day, 401.
58 Hillard, “Trysting Genres: Andrew Lang’s Fairy Tale Methodologies,” 7.
59 King’s Quest Instruction Manual, 10.
60 DeWitt, “Wizard and the Princess: Computer Fantasy Comes True,” 23.

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Childs, Annette, King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne Instruction Manual, Coarsegold, CA: Sierra
On-Line, 1985.
Clark, Pamela, and Gregg Williams, “The Coinless Arcade – Rediscovered”, Byte Magazine,
December 1982.
“Daventry Continent” in King’s Quest Omnipedia. Fandom/Wikia, March 5, 2019, available at
https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Daventry_continent.
Day, Andrea. “‘Almost Wholly the Work of Mrs. Lang’: Nora Lang, Literary Labour, and the Fairy
Books”, Women’s Writing, 26, No. 4 (2019), pages 400–420, available at
https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2017.1371938.
DeWitt, Robert. “Wizard and the Princess: Computer Fantasy Comes True”, Antic, Vol 9, No. 2
(November 1983) pages 23–25.
Hensley, Nathan. “What Is A Network? (And Who Is Andrew Lang?).” Romanticism and
Victorianism on the Net, No. 64 (2013), available at https://doi.org/10.7202/1025668ar.
Hillard, Molly Clark. “Trysting Genres: Andrew Lang’s Fairy Tale Methodologies”, Romanticism
and Victorianism on the Net, No. 64 (2013), available at https://doi.org/10.7202/1025670ar.
Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” in First Person: New Media as Story,
Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, pages 118–30.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
Jensen, Jane. Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles. Coarsegold, CA: Sierra On-Line, 1992.
“King’s Quest I: Quest for the Crown” in King’s Quest Omnipedia. Fandom/Wikia, April 18, 2019,
available at https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/King%27s_Quest_ I:_Quest_for_the_Crown.
King’s Quest IBM PCJr Instruction Manual. Boca Raton, FL: IBM Corporation, 1984.
King’s Quest Instruction Manual. Coarsegold, CA: Sierra On-Line, 1984.
King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity Instruction Manual. Sierra Studios, 1998.
King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! Instruction Manual. Coarsegold, CA: Sierra
On-Line, 1990.
King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride Instruction Manual. Bellevue, WA: Sierra On-Line, 1994.
Maher, Jimmy. “Time Zone.” The Digital Antiquarian, available at
https://www.filfre.net/2012/06/time-zone/.
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https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Multiverse.
Nooney, Laine. “Let’s Begin Again: Sierra On-Line and the Origins of the Graphical Adventure
Game.” American Journal of Play, 10, No. 1 (Fall 2017), pages 71–98.
Roberts, Ralph, and Al Lowe. The Official Book of Leisure Suit Larry. Radnor, PA: Compute! Books,
1990.
Salter, Anastasia Marie. What Is Your Quest?: From Adventure Games to Interactive Books. Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2014.
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1991.
Spear, Peter. The King’s Quest Companion. Fourth Edition. Berkeley, CA: Osborne McGraw-Hill,
1997.
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Williams, Ken. “Introduction” in The Roberta Williams Anthology Manual , pages 3–8. Sierra On-
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Transmedia Worlds
9
THE SOFTER SIDE OF DUNE
The Impact of the Social Sciences on World-Building

Kara Kennedy

The success of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) as a world-building novel

challenges the idea that there is a preferable type of science fiction within
the much-debated “hard” to “soft” spectrum. Instead, it suggests that a
variety of sciences can be blended to become the bedrock for an interesting
and believable world. Science fiction scholar James Gunn postulates that
Dune is difficult for the reader to categorize because it is a mixture of hard
and soft sciences — “the ecology is hard, the anthropology and the psychic
abilities are soft” — but that “[t]his may be the reason for its success”
because readers can enjoy different kinds of richness (Gunn, 1986, p. 79).
Yet the relative lack of criticism on the novel’s world-building features has
left the complexities of its categorization largely unexplored. The breadth of
sciences present in the novel attests to an extended process of study on the
part of the author, who, according to his biographers Timothy O’Reilly and
son Brian Herbert, spent years researching “works of history [. . . ], religion,
psychology, ESP, dry land ecology, geology, linguistics, anthropology,
botany, [and] navigation” (Herbert, 2003, p. 164). Unlike science fiction
writers who focus on exploring a single science in detail, Herbert brings a
wide range “together in one consistent and entertaining fictional world”
while still pursuing a high level of verisimilitude (O’Reilly, 1981, p. 13).
Although he uses a mixture of sciences, Herbert relies heavily on the social
sciences to create a world focused on the development of the human mind
and body rather than technology. He positions the fictional historical
context of the Butlerian Jihad — when humans revolted against machines
after having been enslaved by them — as justification for the necessity of
new orders of enhanced humans. Such orders include the Spacing Guild,
with its navigators who guide spaceships; Mentats, with their logical,
computer-like functions; and the Bene Gesserit, with its women skilled in
perception, nerve and muscle control, and hand-to-hand combat. Herbert
draws on real-world history to help maintain plausibility, placing all of
these orders in a familiar feudal governing structure with emperors and
family clans. Ultimately, by extrapolating from contemporary
understandings of various social sciences to develop the world in Dune,
Herbert proves that a focus on the human offers a tremendous opportunity
for building an interesting and believable universe.
The classification of science fiction as either “hard” or “soft” can be a
point of contention, but these categories represent a useful way in which to
view Dune as a bridge between them that showcases the value in focusing
on sciences concerned with the human. The terms “hard” and “soft” reflect
a division in the real-world scientific community, which then appears in
criticism and valuation of texts in the science fiction genre as well.
Although the value judgments regarding these categories may vary, on the
whole, the so-called hard-pure knowledge in fields like physics “tends to
carry high prestige” and have more privileged status than the soft or applied
knowledge in the social sciences and humanities, which are more concerned
with human society and culture (Becher and Trowler, 2001, pp. 177, 192).
In Gunn’s definition, hard science fiction involves a story turning “around a
change in the environment that can be understood only scientifically and
generally through what are known as the hard sciences, usually the
laboratory sciences such as chemistry, physics, and biology, and the
observational sciences such as astronomy, geology, and geography” (Gunn,
1986, p. 74). In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1999), Peter Nicholls
includes computers, physics, space flight, spaceships, and technology in the
category of hard science fiction, noting that it should not ignore known
scientific principles but that leeway is given for some aspects like ESP and
faster-than-light travel (“Hard SF”). He classifies soft science fiction as
stories that deal primarily with social sciences including anthropology,
ecology, linguistics, perception, psychology, and sociology (“Hard SF”,
“Soft Sciences”). In Dune, there are noticeable aspects of hard science,
particularly the attempt to realistically portray a desert planet and the
creatures that might live there, as well as the adaptations humans might
undergo for it to be inhabitable. Spaceships and space flight are also
features of this universe, along with smaller pieces of technology like the
stillsuit, though they are not explained in great detail. However, the
backdrop is a ban on thinking machines and similar advanced technology,
which gives Herbert the space to focus on social sciences like psychology,
linguistics, and sociology in relation to how the human mind and body
might develop in such a world.
The contribution that the social sciences make is crucial to Dune’s
success as a world-building novel. As Mark J. P. Wolf explains in
Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (2012),
constructing an imaginary world requires making changes to the real world,
or Primary World, in one or more distinct realms: nominal, cultural, natural,
and ontological (pp. 35–36). But most changes appear in the cultural realm,
“which consists of all things made by humans (or other creatures), and in
which new objects, artifacts, technologies, customs, institutions, ideas, and
so forth appear” (Wolf, 2012, p. 35). This realm also includes “new
countries and cultures, [and] new institutions and orders”, and Wolf
specifically cites the Jedi and Bene Gesserit as examples of such invented
orders (Wolf, 2012, p. 35). What is key to making a world interesting and
believable, though, is making changes while avoiding implausibilities:
“Even though audiences know something is not real, Secondary Belief is
easier to generate if the proposed inventions fit in with what the audience
knows (or does not know) about the Primary World” (Wolf, 2012, pp. 37–
38). If an author can make changes that the reader will readily accept based
on the reader’s current knowledge, the reader is more likely to accept the
“world logic” that governs these changes and stay immersed in the
imaginary world (Wolf, 2012, p. 53). In Dune, Herbert makes use of his
audience’s knowledge by drawing on 20th-century scientific explorations
into concepts in both established and emerging social science fields,
especially psychology. He also subtly justifies a focus on such sciences by
hinting at a past revolt against technological advancement which would
lead people to turn toward the development of the human mind and body. In
this way, the focus on the human rather than technology is able to
contribute to successful world-building by making new orders such as the
Spacing Guild, Mentats, and Bene Gesserit and their enhancements seem
not only necessary but natural. It facilitates the believability of a science
fictional world wherein characters possess extraordinary skills without
requiring technological assistance.
The novel sets up the justification for characters having a suspicious
attitude toward technology by developing a historical background of a war
against thinking machines that resulted in an edict against their creation.
Rather than include a lengthy history lesson, though, the novel establishes
the historical context through several lines of dialog between the young
protagonist, Paul Atreides, and one of the senior members of the Bene
Gesserit, Reverend Mother Mohiam, after he has survived the test to
determine whether or not he is human — that is, if he can override his
instincts:

“Why do you test for humans?” he asked.

“To set you free.”
“Free?”
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that
this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with
machines to enslave them.”
“‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’”
Paul quoted.
“Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible,”
she said. “But what the O. C. Bible should’ve said is: ‘Thou shalt not
make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.’ Have you studied the
Mentat in your service?”
“I’ve studied with Thufir Hawat.”
“The Great Revolt took away a crutch,” she said. “It forced human
minds to develop. Schools were started to train human talents.” (Dune,
pp. 11–12)

Within the space of a mere few lines, the novel sets out several important
aspects of the universe: there was some kind of holy war related to a
commandment against certain machines, this engendered a focus on
developing humans, there exist training schools with this focus, and
Mentats represent an example of trained humans. Though terms are left
unexplained, the name Great Revolt immediately suggests a reaction
against something that was strong enough to cause humans to no longer
value machines so highly. By presenting Mohiam’s responses as matter-of-
fact and logical, the novel prompts the reader to absorb the brief history
lesson as an adequate explanation for why a universe would have both
space travel and an injunction on advanced machinery. Since there is no
reason given to doubt the information, it quickly becomes part of the history
of this universe (even though a discerning reader might question the extent
to which Mohiam’s bias as a member of the Bene Gesserit affects her
understanding of the order’s origins).
The inclusion of further information about the Butlerian Jihad and the
Great Revolt only in the appendices adds to the sense that this historical
context is factual data that can sit outside of the main narrative. If the reader
wishes to know more about the struggle between humans and machines that
Mohiam alludes to, they are required to consult the appendices and use their
imagination to expand upon the limited information given there. The
placing of this information in the appendices can constitute a technique of
effective world-building, since “[s]uch additional information can change
the audience’s experience, understanding, and immersion in a story, giving
a deeper significance to characters, events, and details” (Wolf, 2012, p. 2).
In “Appendix II: The Religion of Dune”, the Butlerian Jihad is described as
two generations of chaos and violence during which the “god of machine-
logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised:
‘Man may not be replaced’” (Dune, p. 502). In Terminology of the
Imperium, it is defined as “the crusade against computers, thinking
machines, and conscious robots”, also known as the Great Revolt, and its
chief commandment is the one found in the Orange Catholic Bible: “Thou
shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” (Dune, p. 521).
Based on these descriptions, the Butlerian Jihad and the Great Revolt
appear to be synonymous terms for a campaign of at least several decades
against anything that replicated the workings of the human mind. The
presentation of the material in a short, encyclopedic-like format gives the
illusion of it consisting of historical facts and prompts the reader to imagine
what the crusade involved and how advanced societies had become before
destroying their technology. In addition, for the reader familiar with Samuel
Butler’s Erewhon (1872), the name “Butlerian Jihad” itself hints at an
intertextual connection between the destruction of inventions in Butler’s
satirical novel and similar occurrences in Dune. Yet none of this
information interrupts the main storyline, as if it consists of facts that only
the reader needs to be educated about. There is no need for characters to
discuss it, because it is part of the fabric of their lives. In this way, the lack
of emphasis on the history plays a role in normalizing historical events and
enables the reader to immerse themselves in an alternative universe.
The fictional historical context is critical to setting up one of the
foundational themes underlying the novel: that humans should be
prioritized over machines and other technologies. Mohiam’s explanation
clearly connects the aversion to machines with the development of groups
that specialize in training humans to gain extraordinary abilities. Her
insistence on the importance of the human, emphasized by the continual
italicization of the word in this scene, justifies why so many characters are
“highly trained”, as C. N. Manlove notes (p. 87). It appears that humans
would rather rely on their own enhancements than risk going down the path
of enslavement, chaos, and death again. Just as when someone loses or
damages one of their five senses and the others must adapt and strengthen,
so too the characters in this universe have compensated for the loss of
thinking machines by strengthening their own abilities. Mohiam later notes
that the training schools that survive are those of the Bene Gesserit and the
Spacing Guild, implying that their ranks are composed of humans with
extra-developed minds and special talents. This establishes these groups as
both long-lived and the ones most concerned with developing human
potential. This pro-human, anti-technology theme gives Herbert space to
extrapolate from the social sciences in order to develop new orders whose
skills are plausible without technological assistance.
The lack of advanced technology makes the Spacing Guild a necessary
part of the Imperium as the only means by which travel between planets is
possible. Based on Mohiam’s limited descriptions of the Guild, the reader
knows that it is a “secretive” group that “emphasizes pure mathematics”
and maintains a “monopoly on interstellar transport” (Dune, pp. 12, 23). It
appears to have focused on training humans to pilot ships and enable
planetary travel without computational assistance. This is logical and
understandable given the historical context provided, for without interstellar
travel humans would be cut off from one another. The implication is that the
Guild has capitalized on a gap left by the war against machines, which is
supported by the appendix’s description of it as “the second mental-physical
training school [. . . .] after the Butlerian Jihad” whose “monopoly on space
travel and transport and upon international banking is taken as the
beginning point of the Imperial Calendar” (Dune, p. 520). Specially trained
pilots constitute a necessity in a universe averse to auto-pilot capabilities,
and it is likely that they would leverage the demand for their services to
extend their control to other areas as well.
Although the enhancements that the Guild cultivates are kept secret from
other characters and thus the reader, the text implies that they are gained
naturally through tapping into the potential of the human psyche with the
aid of the spice known as melange. Melange is an addictive substance
“chiefly noted for its geriatric properties” that can also provide access to
new forms of consciousness and “prophetic powers” (Dune, p. 523). A
conversation between Duke Leto and Paul reveals that a possible reason for
the Guild’s secrecy is that their navigators are more than ordinary pilots —
that “they’ve mutated and don’t look. … human anymore” (Dune, p. 46). As
Paul himself begins to change and reach a higher plane of consciousness
when exposed to higher concentrations of the spice on Dune, he realizes
that his strangeness is like that of the navigators and prescience is indeed
possible. Here the connection between piloting and mutations becomes
clearer: Guild navigators appear able to guide spaceships due to prescient
abilities unlocked by the spice, in essence a powerful drug. The reader is
left to fill in the gaps while wondering how humans discovered these
abilities and how they were able to become skilled enough to safely pilot
entire ships through space.
The indication that a drug is an integral part of the Guildsmen’s
operations signals that access to expanded consciousness may one day lead
the human psyche to new, previously unbelievable achievements. Herbert
was writing at the beginning of a period that would become known for a
heightened interest and experimentation in drugs. As discussed in Robert C.
Cottrell’s Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Rise of America’s 1960s
Counterculture (2015), college students were leaving school to join LSD
cults, Timothy Leary at the Harvard Psychedelic Project was studying
whether psilocybin might be used for psychiatric disorder treatment, and the
CIA was conducting experiments on hallucinogens in relation to gaining an
advantage over foreign adversaries. Herbert himself had a few experiences
with hallucinogenic drugs, and though he did not advocate their use, he was
comfortable with using them in the novel as a means to heightened
awareness and perception (O’Reilly, 1981, pp. 82–83). Without having to
go into detail, Herbert relied on popular conceptions of drugs being a way
to facilitate a person’s access to different levels of consciousness in order to
develop his world. Thus, he hints at an explanation for how Guild pilots can
eschew technology and rely on themselves to guide spaceships through the
universe by suggesting that it is part of the mysterious abilities related to the
spice. In this way, the characterization of the Guild demonstrates how an
aspect relating to psychological study can be utilized and enable an author
to bypass the need to include hard scientific explanations.
The ban on thinking machines, computers, and robots makes the order of
Mentats another necessary component of the Imperium, one that fulfills the
need for the computational processing of data and other feats of logic. As
with the Spacing Guild, Mohiam’s brief mention of the Mentats serves to
both introduce them and prompt the reader to imagine how they might have
developed enough skills to fill the gap left in the wake of the Butlerian
Jihad. Presumably, without the ability to rely on machines with data
processing capabilities, humans had to learn how to memorize and process
information in a way that resulted in useful, reliable predictions and
calculations. With such skills, the Mentats would then be in a position to
assist others with decision-making and other data-driven tasks. Indeed, the
reader sees both the Atreides and Harkonnen families employing Mentats
who can store seemingly large amounts of data and use it to make
projections. Although Baron Harkonnen describes his Mentat, Piter de
Vries, to his nephew in an almost dehumanizing way — “This is a Mentat,
Feyd. It has been trained and conditioned to perform certain duties” — he
still clearly values de Vries’s skills (Dune, p. 18). After the Baron
commands him to “[f]unction as a Mentat”, de Vries outlines possible
scenarios and probabilities relating to enemy movements and provides an
analysis of the plan to displace the Atreides family (Dune, p. 18). Duke
Leto is also shown consulting with his Mentat, Thufir Hawat, as they
strategize about how to manage finances, outmaneuver their enemies, and
consolidate their power. As David Miller writes, “All the major power
brokers need a Mentat to guide their machinations” (p. 19). There is every
indication that these leaders rely on this assistance and that it is normal that
humans are performing the work of computers. Although little information
is given about Mentat training or motivations, such detail is unnecessary
because the reason why humans would need to adapt themselves to fulfill
the role of a computer has already been established.
Viewed within the context of the so-called cognitive revolution begun in
the 1950s, Mentats’ abilities reflect an extrapolation of then-contemporary
psychological research into the capabilities of the human brain. The 1950s
saw an increasing interest in theories of the mind, with topics such as
artificial intelligence, perception, and information theory being discussed
by experimental psychologists who were dissatisfied with the limitations of
behaviorism (Miller, 2003, p. 142). Earlier work was revived, such as the
theories of perception developed by Gestalt psychologists, who had
theorized that “the way the parts are seen is determined by the configuration
of the whole, rather than vice versa” (Gardner, 1985, p. 112). In their view,
people who could look at the whole picture and have the “capacity to grasp
the basic fundamental relations” were partaking in more intelligent
processes than those making piecemeal associations (Gardner, 1985, p.
113). The cognitive revolution led to cognitive scientists theorizing about
the mind and how memory works. In part, this was spurred by
advancements in computing. As Howard Gardner explains in The Mind’s
New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (1985), “There is little
doubt that the invention of computers in the 1930s and 1940s, and
demonstrations of ‘thinking’ in the computer in the 1950s, were powerfully
liberating to scholars concerned with explaining the human mind” (Gardner,
1985, p. 40). The significance to psychology was that psychologists became
more willing to consider how the mind processed and represented
information, since the brain could be considered a powerful computer based
on its operation via the principles of logic (Gardner, 1985, p. 19). This
involved a recognition of the human mind as being more complex with
more capabilities than had previously been thought. Such recognition, as it
permeated into society’s understanding of human potential, would serve to
make the abilities of the Mentats seem potentially realizable.
Thus, rather than depict the outsourcing of logical functions, Dune keeps
dominion over computational thinking in the minds of humans in a
plausible way. Herbert’s grandmother, Mary Herbert, apparently provided
the inspiration for this type of human whiz with computation, being an
uneducated woman who nevertheless had an aptitude for figures and a
remarkable memory (O’Reilly, 1981, p. 12; Herbert, 2003, p. 34). Indeed,
the original computers were people, with the term referring to a human who
solved equations; it was only after 1945 that it began to refer to machines
that could solve complex mathematical problems (Ceruzzi, 2003, p. 1). It
should also be noted that not only were computers still in the early stages of
development at the time Herbert was researching for and writing Dune, but
there was an increasing level of exasperation in the United States regarding
automation and the related alienation of workers consigned to attending
machines (Lepore, 2018, pp. 558–559). It is significant, then, that the
Mentats’ skills highlight the strength of the mind and show that society can
function without relying on external computers. Their characterization as
being capable of great feats of logic flows on from the emphasis in the
novel on human over technological development. They appear to have
abilities that a human could develop in the future, allowing them to
contribute to the reader’s understanding of a world where cognitive
development has improved to the point where humans are relied upon to act
as computers.
However, in an environment full of skepticism about anything
reminiscent of thinking machines, the Mentats are at times critiqued and
even dehumanized for their logical thinking patterns. Both the Bene
Gesserit and Baron Harkonnen harbor an attitude of caution toward
Mentats, indicated by the language they use in dialog with and about
Mentats. As shown in the passage above, Mohiam suggests to Paul that the
Atreides’ Mentat is an object worth studying — a human who fills some of
the gap left by the destruction of computers. Another Bene Gesserit woman,
Jessica, who is Paul’s mother, tells Hawat directly that his “projections of
logic onto all affairs is unnatural, but suffered to continue for its usefulness”
(Dune, p. 153). Although she seems to question his very humanity with this
choice of the words “suffered” and “unnatural”, she clearly does see value
in Mentat training because she has permitted Paul to undergo the training in
the hope that he might gain an additional skill. The notion that Mentats are
constrained by their adherence to logic also appears in the descriptions of
the Baron’s Mentat performing his duties. While functioning as a Mentat,
de Vries proceeds to straighten his body and “assum[es] an odd attitude of
dignity — as though it were another mask, but this time clothing his entire
body” (Dune, p. 18). His posture and demonstration of detailed analysis
signal that he is a special type of human — one trained to be more than a
mere calculator. Yet he is shown disconnected from his body while in the
Mentat trance, indicating that the Mentats embrace a mind-body split to the
point that they lose some of their humanity. The clearest indication that a
critical attitude toward Mentats is justifiable comes through the dramatic
irony that Hawat is completely wrong about the identity of the traitor to the
Atreides family, yet smugly believes until the very end of the novel that he
knows best: “‘I’ve always prided myself on seeing things the way they truly
are,’ Thufir Hawat said. ‘That’s the curse of being a Mentat. You can’t stop
analyzing your data’” (Dune, p. 207). More so than other enhanced groups,
Mentats reflect the problems with technology insofar as they are similar to
computers in their reliance on data and quantifiable measurements. The
presence of this group both reinforces the fictional historical context and
enables an examination of potential consequences of humans becoming
more like machines.
The emphasis on the development of the human is also noticeably
illustrated in the all-female order of the Bene Gesserit, whose members
showcase an impressive array of abilities that seem to fill a natural void left
in the absence of advanced technology. The Bene Gesserit are considerably
better developed characters than those in the other enhanced groups, largely
because Jessica is such a prominent figure with a wide skillset displayed
throughout the novel. However, there is little elaboration on their training,
prompting the reader to imagine the kind of intense education likely
required for women to gain their abilities. Like the Mentats, the Bene
Gesserit act as close advisors, but they also possess a special ability to
truthsay, or detect whether or not people are lying based on their speech.
Especially in a world without lie-detector technology, such truthsaying is a
valuable skill, particularly in the realm of politics. Its effectiveness is shown
through several examples of the Baron Harkonnen and others ensuring they
do not take any action that would entail them being revealed as liars by a
Truthsayer. Another role the Bene Gesserit hold is that of administrators of
the test for humanness, which appears necessary to ensure that people can
rise above their animal instincts as thinking creatures and never again be
enslaved by machines. One of the most mysterious items in the novel is the
black box that Mohiam uses for Paul’s test: a box which stimulates nerves
to feel pain but does no physical damage to the body. What might seem like
an extreme measure — her holding a poisoned needle known as a gom
jabbar at his neck and forcing him to endure the nerve pain or else die —
fits within the reader’s emerging understanding of the precautions humans
must take against falling back into letting their instincts or machines
override their own reasoning. Yet the Bene Gesserit themselves have
exploited the existence of human weakness by mastering the ability to
control others via two main mechanisms: the religious propaganda of the
Missionaria Protectiva and the controlling intonations of the Voice, which
adds additional complexity to their characterization. The Bene Gesserit also
have developed precise control over their bodily functions, to the point that
they can manipulate reproduction, tap into the memories of their female
ancestors, and engage in hand-to-hand combat on a level unparalleled in the
Imperium. In an environment without artificial reproduction, computer
memory, or advanced weaponry, women have taken it upon themselves to
expand their abilities to excel at virtually everything they do.
The above examples demonstrate that the Bene Gesserit are primarily
concerned with control: control of their own minds and bodies as well as
those of others around them. What makes them function well as characters
in the world of Dune is that this control seems achievable based on an
extrapolation from contemporary explorations into the social sciences of
psychology, linguistics, and sociology.
Dune is permeated by ideas and concepts from psychology, and the
incorporation of elements from this field in the characterization of the Bene
Gesserit facilitates the reader’s belief in these women being able to perceive
and respond to their environment in extraordinary ways. Psychology was a
burgeoning field in the 20th century, containing a variety of theories about
how the mind and body function and how much control a person can
exercise over their thoughts and behaviors. In fact, Herbert took a keen
interest in psychology and was influenced by his friendship with two
psychologists, Ralph and Irene Slattery, “who gave a crucial boost to his
thinking” regarding Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis (O’Reilly, 1981,
p. 18). Although psychology is considered a social science, more than other
disciplines it “self-consciously modelled itself upon successful sciences
such as physics, chemistry, and biology” (Greenwood, 2015, p. 6). In this
way, psychologists attempted to gain legitimacy for their investigations into
the often-subjective realm of human cognition, emotion, and behavior,
including the study of “sensation, perception, emotion, memory, dreaming,
learning, language, and thought” (Greenwood, 2015, p. 16). Looking at the
Bene Gesserit, the reader sees a group that has created a whole training
system to bring order to these seemingly instinctive and uncontrollable
aspects.
 The Bene Gesserit’s training system and approach to life, known as the
Bene Gesserit Way, is an amalgamation of elements from psychology and
Eastern traditions as well as the Jesuit religious order, which their name
signals (Kennedy, 2016, p. 101). The term “Way” signals a link with the
Way in Taoism and a striving for balance in life. Following the Way
involves the Bene Gesserit gaining skills in Gestalt psychology and the
“minutiae of observation”, to the point of being able to perceive the
slightest details and analyze their significance as a whole (Dune, p. 5). Like
the Mentats, the Bene Gesserit appear to be able to take a big-picture view
based on their gathering of small bits of data. But they also learn to gain
control of every muscle and nerve in the body through training in prana-
bindu, prana standing for “prana-musculature” and bindu for “bindu-
nervature” (Dune, pp. 526, 514). It is implied that this training is what
enables Jessica to best the armed Fremen leader Stilgar in hand-to-hand
combat, which makes her superior fighting abilities believable not only for
herself as an individual, but also for the Bene Gesserit as the group who
trained her. Use of the Sanskrit words prana and bindu reinforces the link
with Eastern philosophic traditions and suggests the possibility that some of
these abilities may already have been achieved in a land unfamiliar to the
reader. There is also a link with Eastern traditions in the appearance of
biofeedback, the technique whereby a person can self-regulate or control
functions normally regulated by the body’s autonomic nervous system at an
unconscious level (“Biofeedback”). Although biofeedback was named and
recognized in the United States in the 20th century, there are thousands of
years of yogic practice that demonstrate a similar autonomic control (Peper
and Shaffer, 2010, pp. 142–143). Biofeedback appears to be an important
aspect of the Bene Gesserit’s prana-bindu skillset, as demonstrated by
Jessica when she is shown “compos[ing] herself in bindu suspension to
reduce her oxygen needs” after being covered in a sandslide (Dune, p. 249).
This establishes that a woman’s control of her nerves and muscles extends
to their unconscious movements as well and becomes significant to
explaining how a woman is able to manipulate fertilization and choose
whether to become pregnant and what the sex of her fetus will be. Thus,
rather than the reader dismissing the Bene Gesserit’s reproductive control
(and breeding program) as fantastical, they are more likely to instead
speculate about the details and make connections to advancements in
reproductive control and technology in the real world.
 A more obvious element from psychology in the characterization of the
Bene Gesserit is that of the collective unconscious, a concept from Jungian
psychology that provides at least a layer of plausibility to the presence of
Other Memory. In a world without computer memory, it follows that
humans must rely on themselves to remember their histories and pass on
stories and ideas to their community, whether through oral or written
means. But the Bene Gesserit have gone one step further and discovered a
way to make a psychic connection with their ancestors and thus gain access
to their own bank of ancestral memory. In Dune, this concept is described
through Jessica’s point of view when she ingests the Fremen’s poisonous
Water of Life as part of the ceremony to become a Reverend Mother.
Somehow going inside her own psyche, she encounters the psyche of the
dying Reverend Mother Ramallo, whom she is physically touching, and
Ramallo transfers her memories and those of her Fremen ancestors into
Jessica’s mind: “The experiences poured in on Jessica — birth, life, death
— important matters and unimportant, an outpouring of single-view time”;
“And the memory-mind encapsulated within her opened itself to Jessica,
permitting a view down a wide corridor to other Reverend Mothers until
there seemed no end to them” (Dune, pp. 357–358). Both individually and
as a group, the Bene Gesserit benefit from the guidance of Reverend
Mothers “who have, through poison, joined the collective memory of all
their female ancestors” (Miller, 1980, p. 20). Although Herbert keeps the
descriptions surrounding Other Memory opaque and at times inconsistent,
there remains a clear parallel with the collective unconscious and the
relevancy of genetics. In Jung’s view, the collective unconscious is a part of
the unconscious that contains memories, instincts, and experiences that are
shared among humans (Colman, 2015). Such racial memory is distinct from
the personal unconscious and presumably inherited through genetics
(Kellerman, 2009, p. 9). By drawing on Jungian concepts in his
characterization of Other Memory, Herbert places it on a psychoanalytical
foundation such that even if readers disagree with the tenets, they are likely
to be familiar with it as a potentially believable idea with some adherents.
The exercising of control over the unconscious is also a critical factor in
the Bene Gesserit’s roles as Truthsayers and users of the Voice, whose
techniques combine ideas from psychology and linguistics into a
conceivable way of influencing others. In an interview, Herbert once
explained that a low level of vocal control was already possible by knowing
a few details about someone and altering one’s language and tone, so it was
not too far of an extrapolation for him to show that greater vocal control
might be achievable in the future (O’Reilly, 1981, p. 61). One of the key
influences on Herbert was the pseudo-scientific field of general semantics,
what O’Reilly describes as “a philosophy and training method developed in
the 1930s by Alfred Korzybski” that revolves around problems with
people’s use of language and the unconscious assumptions built into it
(O’Reilly, 1981, p. 59). By incorporating it into Dune through the Bene
Gesserit’s “technology of consciousness”, Herbert speculates that people
can train themselves into new linguistic habits and even use their new
perception of verbal and nonverbal cues to influence others (O’Reilly, 1981,
p. 62). The Bene Gesserit’s truthsaying ability relies on their skill at
perceiving a variety of small vocal cues in others’ speech to determine
whether others believe what they are saying. Any reader familiar with
someone who is highly perceptive and hard to deceive can see this ability as
realistic for a group with an advanced understanding of the psyche and its
connections with language. The Bene Gesserit’s ability to use the Voice is
more complex, demanding that they first register others’ speech patterns
and then speak back to them in a customized tone that commands them to
obey. The Voice appears to work on an unconscious level since most
subjects are unaware when it is used on them and obey instinctively. Like
Other Memory, the Voice is never fully explained, but there is enough detail
to enable the reader to see that it is a kind of psychological trick that plays
on the unconscious and would require a sophisticated level of linguistic
skill. This leads to a measure of irony wherein the Bene Gesserit are
administrators of the test for humanness, which rewards humans for rising
above their instincts, yet also users of the Voice, which manipulates humans
at a level below their conscious control.
The test for humanness illustrates an aspect of Herbert’s concern with
sociology, the study of societies and how they develop and function. This
test appears to be a critical component of the world of the novel because it
acts as a gatekeeper for people who are unable to control their bodily urges
and instincts. Paul must endure intense pain in order to prove he is human:
“It mounted slowly: heat upon heat upon heat. … upon heat. [ … ] His
world emptied of everything except that hand immersed in agony [ … ]. He
thought he could feel skin curling black on that agonized hand, the flesh
crisping and dropping away until only charred bones remained” (Dune, p.
9). Yet although the first key conflict in the novel revolves around this test,
there is very little information given about how it functions in the society at
large. Through Jessica’s mentioning of it to Stilgar, the reader knows it is a
part of the Fremen’s society as well, but they are left to speculate beyond
this about whether it is mandatory for everyone in the Imperium, how many
people fail, and when the Bene Gesserit developed the nerve induction box.
What is clear is that the Bene Gesserit use the test as part of their shaping of
society. Both Jessica and Paul are shown as never forgetting their memories
of that test, reminding the reader, in turn, why society has had to develop in
such a way as to have a test for humanness, namely because of the Butlerian
Jihad. Presumably, people who fail the test are more susceptible to letting
themselves be enslaved by machines and therefore must be removed from
society at an early age. Without this historical context present, the test
might seem nonsensical or depraved; instead, it follows on from the
reader’s understanding of this world and appears to be a way of determining
a person’s likelihood of resisting their baser instincts should the need arise.
The careful attention to crafting a society which could reasonably be
expected to have accepted such a test as a necessary precaution enhances
the world-building of Dune and demonstrates the usefulness of drawing on
sociological understandings in such an endeavor.
Overall, the lack of emphasis on aspects from traditionally “hard”
scientific fields such as physics and mathematics makes it believable that an
all-female group that largely eschews technology could maintain such a
powerful hold over society. As can be seen, the Bene Gesserit’s control
often is exerted behind the scenes. However, the portrayal of their wide-
ranging influence and authority demonstrates that they possess a great deal
of “soft” power, having responded to, and taken advantage of, the suspicion
around technology to develop themselves into extraordinary humans. In
part through their mastery of psychology and linguistics, they are shown
having found a niche in manipulating politics, running a secret breeding
program, acting as lie detectors and banks of ancestral memory, and
engaging in hand-to-hand combat, without these abilities seeming
fantastical or illogical in their world.
Complementary to the historical context of the Butlerian Jihad is the
medieval, feudal-like setting, which reinforces that this world is one lacking
in advanced technology. From the first few pages the reader becomes aware
of the existence of the Padishah Emperor, Castle Caladan, Jessica as a Bene
Gesserit Lady, and Duke Leto as the leader of one of the Great Houses of
the Landsraad. These proper nouns provide a strong signal that the
characters live under some kind of feudal regime with a hierarchy of rulers,
titles for nobility, fiefs, and medieval castles as residences. Castle Caladan
is described as an “ancient pile of stones” that has been in the Atreides
family for twenty-six generations, evoking an image of a European fortress
built on a hill whose ownership is safeguarded through long dynastic
lineages (Dune, p. 3). When the term “faufreluches class system” appears, it
also indicates that there is an old but familiar political system in play, rather
than a heretofore unknown new one. Even without checking the appendices
for the definition — “the rigid rule of class distinction enforced by the
Imperium. ‘A place for every man and every man in his place’” — the
reader can imagine people being part of an imperial system where their role
in the order is largely pre-determined (Dune, p. 518). Although such a
system would not necessarily need to be lacking in technology, it makes for
a more comfortable fit to have societies eschewing technology set in an
environment reminiscent of a medieval period during which feudalism was
prominent. The setting invokes a feeling of technological simplicity and
court intrigue, as well as allowing all of the stereotypes about this historical
period to surface. The Middle Ages are still popularly considered to be a
period of “ignorance, superstition” and stifled development, despite
challenges to this narrative by more recent historians (Power, 2006, p. 16).
Therefore, the evocation of this period is important to the relatively quick
establishment of a world in which it is believable that technological
advancement has been halted and humans have had to develop themselves
to have a functional society.
By placing all of these new orders — Spacing Guild, Mentats, Bene
Gesserit — in this setting, Herbert successfully maintains a link with real-
world institutions and enables the reader’s expectations to adjust to a
framework different from the futuristic, “hard”, high-tech one available in
other science fiction narratives. Skills valuable in popular conceptions of
the period of feudalism are valuable in this world as well. The reader sees
Paul being trained in swordfighting and both Paul and Jessica defeating
enemies in hand-to-hand combat with abilities gained through their prana-
bindu training. Although body shield technology does exist, because of the
potential for shields to attract sandworms or explode if they are hit by a
lasgun, they are less useful on Dune and so those who can attack or defend
themselves competently without them have a distinct advantage. At one
point, Paul must defeat an assassination weapon, a hunter-seeker, by relying
on his wits and honed reflexes when his shield is out of reach (Dune, pp.
67–68). Atomic weapons also exist and the major houses have their own
personal stores, but there is an injunction against their use: as Paul states,
“The language of the Great Convention is clear enough: ‘Use of atomics
against humans shall be cause for planetary obliteration’” (Dune, p. 450).
When Paul decides to use them against a planetary feature instead, the
explosion is given little narrative description, which serves to deemphasize
the technology. Indeed, after the explosion, the focus turns to the Fremen
riding the sandworms, reminiscent of knights charging into battle: “Out of
the sand haze came an orderly mass of flashing shapes — great rising
curves with crystal spokes that resolved into the gaping mouths of
sandworms, a massed wall of them, each with troops of Fremen riding to
the attack. They came in a hissing wedge, robes whipping in the wind as
they cut through the melee on the plain” (Dune, p. 464). The reader
continually sees that it is the development and strengthening of humans’
own abilities that are beneficial in this world, more so than even powerful
technological instruments. The choice of this historic setting, then, as
opposed to something based on more modern conceptions of federations of
states or democratic structures, makes it more likely that readers will accept
the novel’s focus on the human.

References
Becher, Tony; and Paul R. Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the
Culture of Disciplines, The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University
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“Biofeedback” in Robert Hine and Elizabeth Martin, editors, A Dictionary of Biology, Oxford,
England: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Butler, Samuel, Erewhon: or, Over the Range, London, England: Trübner & Co., 1872.
Ceruzzi, Paul, A History of Modern Computers, 2nd edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT
Press, 2003.
Colman, Andrew M., “Collective unconscious”, A Dictionary of Psychology, 4th edition, Oxford,
England: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Cottrell, Robert C., Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Rise of America’s 1960s Counterculture,
Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015.
Gardner, Howard, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution, New York, New
York: Basic Books, 1985.
Greenwood, John D., A Conceptual History of Psychology, Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 2015.
Gunn, James, “The Readers of Hard Science Fiction” in George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin,
editors, Hard Science Fiction, Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986, pp.
70–81.
Herbert, Brian, Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert, New York, New York: Tom
Doherty Associates, 2003.
Herbert, Frank, Dune, 1965, New York, New York: Penguin Random House, 1984.
Kellerman, Henry, “Collective unconscious”, Dictionary of Psychopathology, New York, New York:
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pp. 99–108.
Lepore, Jill, These Truths: A History of the United States, New York, New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2018.
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10
EARTH, AIR, FIRE, AND WATER
Balance and Interconnectivity in the Fractured
Worlds of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s The
Death Gate Cycle

Jennifer Harwood-Smith

Centuries ago, the Sartan thought to defeat our ambition by sundering

the world that was ours by rights and throwing us into their prison. As
you well know, the way out of the Labyrinth is long and tortuous. It
took centuries to solve the twisting puzzle of our land. The old books
say the Sartan devised this punishment in hopes that our bounding
ambition and our cruel and selfish natures would be softened by time
and suffering.
You must always remember their plan, Haplo. It will give you the
strength you’ll need to do what I ask of you. The Sartan had dared to
assume that, when we emerged into this world, we would be fit to take
our places in any of the four realms we chose to enter.
Something went wrong. Perhaps you’ll discover what it was when
you enter Death Gate. It seems from what I have been able to decipher
in the old books, that the Sartan were to have monitored the Labyrinth
and kept its magic in check. But, either through malicious intent or for
 some other reason, they forsook their responsibility as caretakers of
our prison. The prison gained a life of its own - a life that knew only
one thing, survival. And so, the Labyrinth, our prison, came to see us,
its prisoners, as a threat. After the Sartan abandoned us, the Labyrinth,
driven by its fear and hatred of us, turned deadly.
When at last I found my way out, I discovered the Nexus, this
beautiful land the Sartan had established for our occupation. And I
came across the books. Unable to read them at first, I worked and
taught myself and soon learned their secrets. I read of the Sartan and
their ‘hopes’ for us and I laughed aloud - the first and only time in my
life I have ever laughed. You understand me, Haplo. There is no joy in
the Labyrinth.
But I will laugh again, when my plans are complete. When the four
separate worlds - Fire, Water, Stone, and Sky - are again one. Then I
will laugh long and loudly.1

The opening prologue of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Death Gate
Cycle series, published from 1990 to 1994, is entirely in the voice of an as-
yet unnamed leader of an as-yet unnamed people, plotting to send a man
named Haplo to the “Realm of the Sky”, with orders to find their ancient
enemies and not to betray their people.2 There is a great deal to unpack in
only three pages; the language suggests that the speaker is from a race that
was imprisoned by ancient enemies, that the jailers —and, indeed, anyone
who can confirm the prisoners’ crimes— are long gone or dead, and
perhaps most chilling of all, that vengeance will soon fall upon the other
worlds. However, more questions are raised than answered, as is the case
with the maps that precede the prologue,3 which make sense only once the
reader learns in Chapter One that Arianus, the Realm of the Sky, is a series
of floating islands. It is this strange and mysterious beginning, with its
difficult to interpret maps, that introduces the reader to the sundered worlds,
the Sartan who created it, and the Patryn who are seeking their revenge.
Over seven books,4 the reader learns how a catastrophe on Earth sparked
the appearance of elves, dwarves, and two races of demi-gods, first the
Sartan and then the Patryn, the animosity between the demi-gods, the
Sundering of the Earth into four elemental worlds by the Sartan to prevent
the Patryn taking power, and the consequences that followed, including the
near-extinction of the Sartan race and the trapping of the Patryn people in a
semi-sentient prison gone mad. It is also a story of the Patryn Haplo and the
Sartan Alfred forming a friendship as a direct result of exploring the various
worlds and their own history, finding the balance between their peoples that
could have prevented the Sundering. (Haplo is originally a spy sent by the
Patryn leader Xar to learn about the other worlds, report back on the Sartan,
and help Xar in his plan to recreate the Earth. He is accompanied for much
of the narrative by a dog which is actually a portion of his soul he
subconsciously partitioned to keep himself alive. Alfred is one of the Sartan
who were sent to Arianus to guide the humans, elves, and dwarves who live
there. He was the only survivor of a mysterious event that killed all other
Sartan on Arianus, and so spent centuries pretending to be a clumsy
human).
Running through the narrative is a deep interest in interconnectivity,
balance, and the consequences of disrupting such a balance. In fact,
interconnectivity is considered to be the foundation of the universe, as
explained in the first Appendix of the series in Dragon Wing (1990), where
reality is defined as the point where two waves of possibility meet.5 The
runic magic used by the Sartan and the Patryn is the manipulation of the
waves of possibility to alter reality.6 In Elven Star (1990), Patryn magic is
further explained as the ability to understand an object, represent it with a
rune, and how even poorly drawn runes will balance themselves (though
not always behaving as expected), and the difficulty in exerting too much
control through runic magic.7 While both these Appendices are quite
technical —as is fitting with documents which are meant to represent
archival evidence, as will be discussed later— they can be ultimately
understood to describe a system where a user of magic, understanding the
structure of an item and its associated rune, can choose from all possibilities
a new reality, and bring it into being for the duration of a spell. Consider the
battle in Serpent Mage (1992), where Haplo’s “steel chain still hung in the
air. Haplo instantly rearranged the magic, altered the sigla’s form into that
of a spear, and hurled it straight at Samah’s breast. A shield appeared in
Samah’s left hand. The spear struck the shield; the chain of Haplo’s magic
began to fall apart”.8 This battle shows both the extent and the limits of
possibility magic; while Haplo can change a chain into a spear, he must
rewrite the spell first. However, he cannot have the spear act any differently
from a real spear, thus a shield is sufficient to stop it. This exchange further
shows the balance between the performance of magic; for the Sartan, runes
are sung or signed, where for the Patryn, they must be spoken and written,
and so Samah can create a shield out of thin air, where Haplo’s chain
originally came from the runes tattooed all over his body.9 However, despite
their differences, both forms of rune magic are actually complementary,
strengthening each other when used together, as seen when Haplo and
Alfred finally use their magic together.10 This is reinforced by the
explanation of the Wave provided at the end of the series:

‘All of us, drops in the ocean, forming the Wave. Usually we keep the
Wave in balance - water lapping gently on the shoreline, hula girls
swaying in the sand,’ said Zifnab dreamily. ‘But sometimes we throw
the Wave out of kilter. Tsunami. Tidal disturbances. Hula girls washed
out to sea. But the Wave will always act to correct itself.
Unfortunately’ - he sighed - ‘that sometimes sends water foaming up
in the opposite direction’.11

For the Death Gate universe, balance is not merely a desire but an
inevitability, and chaos and order are mere tools to ensure this. The rise of
the Sartan necessitated the rise of the Patryn, and, as will be seen
throughout this essay, this secondary creation will not allow for imbalance
or disconnection for long. The need for interconnectivity is also highlighted
by the use of portals; the worlds of Air, Fire, Earth, and Water are reached
by a portal called Death’s Gate, which also reaches both the Nexus and the
Labyrinth. In the Labyrinth, gates are not only physical structures for
escaping, but also temporal markers, as they are used to tell time, albeit
unevenly at first.12 However, Weis and Hickman do not only use balance
and interconnectivity in the narrative of The Death Gate Cycle, but also in
their use of four discrete world-building techniques: textual world-building,
footnotes, Appendices, and maps. To fully appreciate just how much
balance permeates this subcreation, it is necessary to explore the balance
Weis and Hickman have created in how the reader engages with the
subcreation. However, it is first necessary to discuss the core of The Death
Gate Cycle, the very thing that allows its various worlds to be explored, and
that which both disrupts and restores balance: the portal.
When a speculative fiction text introduces a portal, that device often
becomes the driving force of the subcreation. From the rabbit hole in Lewis
Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) to the free standing
portal doors in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, the portal becomes
the linchpin of the series, driving the narrative and either assisting or
hindering the characters. In The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
(1987), portal doors along a beach are used to find and extract the
companions Roland Deschain will need on his quest to the Dark Tower, but
they also serve as signifiers in other texts. In the Haven (2010–2015)
episode “Lost and Found”, the appearance of a free standing portal door
acts as an indicator to an audience familiar with King’s other works that
Haven is not just a King text, but also a Dark Tower text.13 Farah
Mendlesohn describes the portal fantasy as being “about entry, transition,
and exploration. . . it denies the taken for granted and positions both
protagonist and reader as naïve”.14 Rarely is such denial of the reader’s
expectations of reality more extreme than in The Death Gate Cycle. The
history of the Earth in the Death Gate Cycle already crosses into fantasy, as
a world that, after a nuclear catastrophe, saw the rise (or return, as some
claimed) of elves and dwarves, and the Sartan and the Patryn.15 However,
when Weis and Hickman introduced the series (with Lord Xar’s words
above), this Earth is long gone, sundered and replaced by four primary
realms, along with the Patryns’ prison the Labyrinth, and the Nexus. What
each of these worlds shares is Death’s Gate, designed to allow two-way
travel between the various worlds (this differs from the one-way conduits in
the series, which are intended for the transport of energy, supplies, and
perhaps prisoners).16
Death’s Gate itself is barred when the series begins, shut down by the
Sartan leader Samah when he became afraid of the dragon-snakes which
appeared on the world of water, Chelestra after the Sundering.17 Passage
through Death’s Gate is an experience that is at first difficult to understand;
in Fire Sea (1991), Haplo’s journal entry informs the reader that, in each
journey through Death’s Gate, he has lost consciousness: “One moment I
was awake, looking forward to entering the small dark hole that seemed far
too tiny to contain my ship. The next moment I was safely in the Nexus”.18
Indeed, it is only when Haplo is accompanied by Alfred that he actually
experiences the interior of Death’s Gate. At the heart of the portal which
links all the worlds, Weis and Hickman built in interconnectivity and
balance; both Alfred the Sartan and Haplo the Patryn lose consciousness
when travelling through Death’s Gate alone, but together they remain
awake, to experience the dichotomies of it together, from moving too
slowly and too fast at once, to their bodies exploding and imploding at the
same time, and hearing screams when deaf, among other experiences:
“‘Death’s Gate. A place that exists and yet does not exist. It has substance
and is ephemeral. Time is measured marching ahead going backward. Its
light is so bright that I am plunged into darkness’”.19 Death’s Gate, then,
exists in a quantum state and appears to respond in some way to the
animosity and polarity between the ancient enemies, as their journey
through Death’s Gate forces both men to swap consciousness for a short
time, with each seeing the most traumatic event in the other’s life.20 While
Death’s Gate itself does not appear to be sentient, it would appear that it
abhors extremes and sought to balance how each saw the other; from then
on in the series, Haplo did not see Alfred merely as his jailor, and in
Serpent Mage, Alfred gives a moving speech about the love and loyalty the
Patryn have for each other.21
However, as with all elements in The Death Gate Cycle, Death’s Gate is
also balanced by the Seventh Gate, the physical/magical location which
allowed the Sartan to cast the spells for the Sundering of the worlds. It is
also the place where a higher power can be felt, the one which controls the
Wave and brings balance where it is needed.22 Where Death’s Gate is a
corridor where all possibilities exist at once, the Seventh Gate is room
which is “a hole in the fabric of magic wherein the possibility exists that no
possibilities exist”.23 Where Death’s Gate is a maelstrom of chaos, the
Seventh Gate is calm, “a room with seven marble walls, covered by a
domed ceiling. A globe suspended from the ceiling cast a soft, white glow. .
. the words of warning remained inscribed on the walls: Any who bring
violence into this chamber will find it visited upon themselves”.24 The
Seventh Gate is a null place, with doors leading to each of the worlds of
Air, Water, Fire, and Stone, the Labyrinth, the Nexus, and finally, Death’s
Gate itself.25 While Samah, the architect of the Sundering, claimed to have
created Death’s Gate, it could be surmised that he did not design the chaos
of it, but that it was instead the Wave correcting itself; in this universe of
balance, the null possibility of the Seventh Gate could not exist without its
counterpart. However, these two portals created the greatest imbalance in
the series, between the living and the dead, as the existence of Death’s Gate
prevents the souls of the dead from leaving. This led to the Kenkari elves of
Arianus storing the souls of their dead, and the necromancy which trapped
the Sartan dead on Abarrach. Indeed, the trapping of souls by Death’s Gate
could be seen as the counteraction to the Sartans’ violence against Earth in
the Seventh Gate, as the raising of the dead on Abarrach likely killed Sartan
on all the other worlds. (Even Alfred is not sure that this was the cause of
the death of his fellow Sartan on Arianus, but it seems a likely explanation).
By closing Death’s Gate at the end of the series, the gate to the afterlife is
opened.26 The sacrifice for this spiritual travel is that the four worlds of Air,
Water, Fire, and Stone are no longer physically accessible; however, this too
is a restoration of balance, as will be explored later in this essay.
Having understood the groundwork of how magic and movement work
in The Death Gate Cycle, it is important to understand how Weis and
Hickman use the techniques of world-building to facilitate the reader’s
understanding of this world. It is telling that much of the information on
how magic and Death’s Gate operate does not come from the text, but
rather from the Appendices. This is related to the structure of the novels; in
The Seventh Gate (1991), Appendix I reveals that the series has not been
written for a human reader, but rather is a history for the Sartan and the
Patryn who now live together in the Nexus and the Labyrinth.27 The text is
intended to be structured as an historical account, and so the means Weis
and Hickman use to engage the reader become part of the subcreation itself,
beginning with textual world-building.
Textual world-building is perhaps most common across all fiction which
engages in world-building. The first line of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower
I: The Gunslinger reads: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the
gunslinger followed”.28 This is narrative, but it is also the reader’s first
glimpse of End-world, of a desert and a world where gunslingers still
existed. At this point, the reader is unaware of who the villains and heroes
are, or why one is chasing the other. It is not until The Dark Tower IV:
Wizard and Glass (1997) that the relationship is fully understood; in fact,
King halts the quest narrative for an entire book to fully explain the nature
of the man in black’s betrayal of the gunslinger.29 This is perhaps the
greatest weakness of textual world-building; as Mark J. P. Wolf points out:

One of the cardinal rules often given to new writers has to do with
narrative economy; they are told to pare down their prose and remove
anything that does not actively advance the story. World-building,
 however, often results in data, exposition, and digressions that provide
information about a world, slowing down narrative or even bringing it
to a halt temporarily, yet much of the excess detail and descriptive
richness can be an important part of the audience’s experience.30

It is the disruption of narrative pacing that is the greatest risk in textual

world-building, particularly in the “infodump”, defined by Jeff Prucher as
“a large amount of background information inserted into a story all at
once”.31 The long quote at the beginning of this essay is something of an
infodump; it is explained away by Lord Xar of the Patryn claiming that he
is rambling, which is likely the result of his sharing a drink with Haplo.32
However, the reader cannot rely on the potentially tipsy ramblings of
characters to describe these worlds, and although Haplo is the logical
conduit for world-building as an Innocent Abroad, acting as the kind of
guide Farah Mendlesohn describes,33 Weis and Hickman do not introduce
him again until Chapter 17, page 120, when he is rescued by the dwarf
revolutionary leader, Limbeck. However, where Haplo differs from an
Innocent Abroad is that his apprehension of Arianus is not overt; rather he
listens in to the conversations around him before speaking up to join the
revolution.34 This denial of Haplo’s role as a potential Innocent Abroad is
in keeping with his intended role as the harbinger of Patryn sovereignty
over the realms; he is in essence a spy, intended to understand the sundered
worlds so that Xar may reunite and conquer them.
In lieu of an Innocent Abroad and their associated guide, and in order to
avoid infodumps, Weis and Hickman instead opt for using footnotes to
enhance their world-building and give the reader needed context, and, in the
later books, reminders. It is also in keeping with what we finally discover to
be the historical nature of the series. According to Mendlesohn, the
“experienced reader is conditioned to see footnotes as dry, as a way of
grounding the text in reality. But footnotes are also an intervention, or
intrusion into the flow of the text”.35 It can also be argued that footnotes can
prevent world-building from being too intrusive in texts. Perhaps the two
best known recent examples of footnotes are Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
series (1983–2015) and Susanna Clarke’s Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrell
(2004), which use footnotes for different primary purposes, but both of
which have the secondary purpose of ensuring the integrity of the secondary
world. Pratchett’s footnotes are for the purpose of expanding on a joke:
 She still wasn’t sure about Maladict, but Igor had to be a boy, with
those stitches around the head and that face that could only be called
homely.⋆
⋆And even then it was the kind of home that has a burned-out
vehicle on the lawn.36

Pratchett’s footnotes function as a jocular wink, an almost Shakespearian

aside to the reader, inviting them into a joke, but more importantly they
prevent the expanded joke from interfering with the narrative, particularly
in the case of this example, where the footnote is more evocative of the
Primary World rather than the Discworld. Clarke’s footnotes are more
focussed on world-building, in two ways. The first is in providing
verisimilitude to the text, with the first footnote acting as an academic
reference to an in-world text following a quote: “The History and Practice
of English Magic, by Jonathan Strange, Vol. I, Chap. 2, pub. John Murray,
London, 1816”.37 However, Clarke’s footnotes also serve an important
world-building function, as demonstrated by footnote 6 which follows this
line: “Mr Segundus took down The Instructions of Jacques Belasis and,
despite Mr Norrell’s poor opinion of it, instantly hit upon two extraordinary
passages”.38 The footnote then proceeds to take up over three quarters of
the page, describing the two passages, which also give the reader
information about the past of Clarke’s world, as well as some details about
fairies.39 While this footnote is interesting, it is too much information to be
included without disrupting the narrative. So for Clarke, footnotes are for
the information which help construct her secondary creation, but which has
no place in the narrative. It is, in fact, a way to present an infodump without
boring the reader.
Weis and Hickman’s use of footnotes is similar to Clarke’s, though they
have several variants and make interesting uses of them. The first footnote
is in the first chapter of Dragon Wing and is used to explain what a tier is.
What is unusual about this is that the footnote is not introduced until the
fifth use of the word “tier” to explain that the tier is a large, mostly useless
bird with powerful legs, used as a beast of burden by humans.40 This
footnote also gives the reader one of their first impressions of the cultural
differences in Arianus, as it specifies that elves consider tiers “unclean”,
with strong implications that this view might extend to humans.41 Weis and
Hickman’s use of the footnotes also allows them to give explanations for
phenomena like Arianus’s water-based currency42 and floating islands43
without interrupting the flow of Hugh the Hand’s attempted execution.44 As
the Sartan and Patryn who are the intended readers for the series have no
way of travelling to the other worlds, these footnotes give them the
information they need to understand the text, without the need to refer to
other documents.
Weis and Hickman also use their footnotes for more than just pure
world-building. In Dragon Wing, there are 25 footnotes, with one in the
Appendices, and all are dedicated to world-building. However, as the series
progresses, footnotes become more referential for the series, as The Seventh
Gate contains nine footnotes in the main text, with six in the Appendices.
Of the nine footnotes in the text, eight engage in world-building, and one
refers to the book’s Appendix. Of the footnotes in the Appendices, the first
is an explanatory note from the “author” of the Appendices, while the rest
are references to other books in the series. In addition to providing new
information, Weis and Hickman also reinforce their existing world-building.
The 35th footnote in The Hand of Chaos (1993)45 revisits the living stone
coralite, which is explained in the third footnote of Dragon Wing,46 giving
new information and refreshing the reader’s memory of what the substance
is, particularly as it has not been mentioned for the intervening three books.
Footnotes are also used to refer to the next technique Weis and Hickman
use: Appendices, with Chapters 26 and 27 of The Hand of Chaos containing
three footnotes to refer the reader to the first Appendix of the book, which
explains the assassin’s society called The Brotherhood of the Hand.47 This
is where Weis and Hickman’s ability to balance their world-building
techniques is at its height; the encounters with The Brotherhood of the
Hand are tense, filled with intrigue, and to interrupt them to explain the
assassins’ society, even in a footnote, would interrupt the narrative flow.
Instead the Appendices are designed to enhance the world-building and
engage the reader once the action has finished. The Appendices of The
Death Gate Cycle are prolific, encompassing 12 distinct Appendices, and
eight songs, and ranging from treatises on Sartan and Patryn magic to
discussions of the nature of the living islands on Chelestra, to explanations
of the workings of the great machine, the Kicksey-winsey, on Arianus.
However, like Clarke’s first footnote, the Appendices of The Death Gate
Cycle seek to insert verisimilitude in the text by having different authors,
ranging from unknown Sartan and Patryn to reports from Alfred and Haplo,
and even a sales brochure for the submersibles of Chelestra, with
explanatory footnotes by Alfred.48 It is the Appendices which serve to
demystify Sartan and Patryn magic, with in-depth and highly technical
descriptions of the possibility magic which both use. This complements the
in-text references to drawing runes with magical effects, as the technical
detail has no place in the narrative. In Chapter 54 of Dragon Wing, Sartan
magic is described as follows:

Slowly, gently thrusting aside the dog, Alfred rose to his feet. Walking
to the center of the room, he lifted his arms into the air and began to
move in a solemn and strangely graceful —for his ungainly body—
dance. . .
The air around him began to shimmer as his dancing continued. He
was tracing the runes in the air with his hands and drawing them on
the floor with his feet.49

In comparison, the Appendices of Dragon Wing has the following

description:

The key to rune (or runic) magic is that the harmonic wave that
weaves a possibility into existence must be created with as much
simultaneity as possible. This means that the various motions, signs,
words, thoughts and elements that go into making up the harmonic
wave must be completed as close together as possible.50

The difference is stark. The in-text description of magic is almost lyrical at

times, whereas the Appendix is scientific. This is easily explained by the
nature of the intended Sartan and Patryn audience, who, from a young age,
must be educated in possibility magic. The technical details are meant to
assist them in understanding their world, using language that they would be
immediately familiar with. This reinforces the role of the Appendices as
being for further edification and information, and not immediately
necessary for the reader to understand the narrative. This is what
differentiates Appendices from footnotes; footnotes are what the authors
feel the reader needs to know immediately, while Appendices are meant to
be engaged with after the action, with both serving to bolster and enrich the
existing textual world-building.
The final world-building technique is that of maps. Mendlesohn
describes how in the quest narrative, “the portal is not encoded solely in the
travelogue discovery of what lies ahead, but in the insistence that there is
past and place behind, and that what lies behind must be thoroughly known
and unquestioned before the journey begins”.51 However, this sense of
history, of people creating and naming places in a map, is thrown over in
The Death Gate Cycle by the fact that the maps are fairly incomprehensible
on their own. The expected roads, rivers, mountains, towns, and oceans the
fantasy reader expects are often absent. Arianus is a series of floating
islands divided into areas called High Realm, Mid Realm, and Low Realm,
all contained within an ovoid shell, with a sun at the top and a maelstrom
just above a smaller ovoid labelled “Death Gate”. The other two maps of
Arianus show Mid Realm in greater detail, and the Volkaran Isles, a small
archipelago in Mid Realm, where most of the action of Dragon Wing takes
place. The second and third maps also include something not normally seen
in fantasy maps: orbit lines. However, these maps do not make sense until
the reader has begun reading Dragon Wing, particularly its footnote on page
14, which explains how the islands float. The maps are more than
something for the reader to refer to during the quest journey, but rather
something for the reader to interpret and understand in conjunction with the
narrative, and a great machine, the Kicksey-winsey, which is meant to bring
the islands into alignment and turn the world into a manufacturing base.
However, the Kicksey-winsey is not working as it should, and the islands
are out of alignment. So not only is the map of Arianus difficult to read
without the text, but it is also a map of a failed system; when the islands
come into alignment in Into the Labyrinth (1993), there is no map of how
they were always meant to look. Like the intended Sartan and Patryn
audience, the reader is left to imagine what a balanced and functioning
Arianus looks like.
In contrast to the complete map of all of Arianus, Pryan, the world of
fire, is only a partial map, of the known world of Equilan. This is because
Pryan is so large —a fantasy Dyson sphere with four suns in its center and
life covering the inside of the sphere— that Weis and Hickman chose not to
attempt to show it. And even though Equilan has elements familiar to the
reader, such as seas and what appears to be landmasses, the text undermines
this: the seas of Equilan are actually on the top of a massive canopy of trees
so deep that no one on Pryan has seen the ground. Even more confusing are
the maps of the dwarven Kingdoms of Equilan, until the reader learns that
this is a map of a quasi-cave system, which, while closer to the ground, is
still within the trees. As with Arianus, the reader must engage with the text
before understanding truly comes about.
Abarrach, the world of stone, and Chelestra, the world of water, are both
slightly more traditionally represented, in that both are shown in whole in
the void. Abarrach is the only world of the four which is spherical, but
unlike traditional globes, it is the cross section of the immense cave
structure which is shown. From the information he had access to before he
left the Nexus, Haplo’s expectations are that of “a world of tunnels and
caves, a world of cool and earthy-smelling darkness”, but instead he finds
himself on a river of fire.52 This leads the reader to the realization that “fire
sea” on the map is a literal description of the sea. So the reader realizes,
along with Haplo, that the rivers and lakes on the map are filled with
magma, not water. There is also an historical element to Abarrach’s maps
which is not seen in the other maps; namely, sections with the words “Here
the fire sea once flowed” and “Ancient Home of the Little People”.53 After
two other books, the reader is aware that the “Little People” were the
dwarves, and it is clear that some ecological catastrophe is underway.
Chelestra is an ovoid which is divided into four sections: Longnight,
Goodsea, Barrens, and Newbirth, all of which are meaningless to the reader,
as is the term Seasun. Throughout the novel, the reader learns that the sun
of Chelestra is within the water, and warms certain areas as it moves. As a
result, the four sections of Chelestra, of which Goodsea is the most
habitable region, are constantly in flux. At this stage, however, the reader
can expect to need guidance from the text to understand the maps.
The final map is found in The Hand of Chaos and shows the Nexus at
the center of the four elemental worlds, as well as diagrams indicating the
movement of materials and energy. The reader will be familiar with these
connections, however, as with the technical descriptions of magic, there is
more to the map than meets the eye. In Appendix II of The Hand of Chaos,
a technical report from Haplo on Death’s Gate and the conduits reveal that
all of the realms do not orbit each other, but actually occupy the same
space, “harmonically shifted into several different realities. These harmonic
realities manifest themselves into the various partitioned realities that we
perceive as fire, water, earth, and sky, as well as special subrealities we
know as the Nexus and the Labyrinth”.54 In a single Appendices, Weis and
Hickman rewrite everything the reader knows about the subcreation they
have been engaging with. As subrealities, the Nexus and the Labyrinth are
essentially less real than the elemental worlds, and so the trapping of the
Sartan and Patryn within them is essential for the final act of balance in The
Death Gate Cycle: the sociocultural balance.
As a portal text, it is important to understand how the portal affects the
sociocultural makeup of each of the worlds, whether or not the characters
are aware of the portal. For Arianus, the portal is unwittingly the center of
their world, as it is meant to power the very machine that keeps them alive
by providing water. However, as the power is not being drawn from Pryan,
the effect of the portal is to create a tiered society of vast injustices,
bolstered by the inherent racism of the elves. When Dragon Wing begins,
the humans have only recently won freedom from their Elvish occupiers,
and the dwarves remain in thrall to the elves, who they see as gods.
However, in Alfred’s final summation of the events of the series in the
Appendix to The Seventh Gate, the reader learns that this was intentional;
the Sartan had given the elves instructions on the proper operation of the
Kicksey-winsey, which would unite the floating islands of the elves and
humans, and give the dwarves control of the machine, and therefore the
water supply.55 This serves to underscore a recurring theme in the series,
which is the Sartans’ misunderstanding of the relationships between
humans, elves, and dwarves, referred to as “mensch” races, and the effects
of their own treatment of them. In Serpent Mage, Samah refers to the
mensch races as children and is insistent that they needed Sartan guidance,
and that the Patryn were trying to corrupt them.56 And although Alfred,
who has spent years among the mensch pretending to be one, tries to defend
them, the other Sartan are similarly convinced that the mensch need
guidance. Even Haplo’s original mission, to sow discord and to find a
disciple to help the Patryn control the mensch, makes a presumption that
they are lesser beings. Indeed, it is notable that the work of Arianus,
particularly of maintaining the Kicksey-winsey, falls to the mensch.
Whether they are willing to describe them as such, the Sartan are using the
mensch as a form of slave labor, allowing themselves to be worshipped and
served. In general, the mensch are not aware of the Sundering, and do not
realize that their long-lost gods killed most of their populations simply to
maintain their own control. The divisions seen on Arianus can also be seen
on Pryan in Elven Star, and given the favoritism shown to elves on
Arianus,57 it can be presumed that this was in play on the other worlds.
While there are indications that other areas of Pryan have found peace
between the races, the only world where mensch are fully described as
living in harmony, despite their differences, is Chelestra, where the Sartan
had the least amount of influence on their civilization, as the Sartan
banished them from the comfortable Chalice structure once they began to
quarrel among themselves. After thousands of years without Sartan
interference, and forced to live together in relatively close quarters, the
princesses of the humans, elves, and dwarves “became closer than most
sisters”, with the dwarven princess appreciating her Human friend’s hurry
as a sign of her mortality, and her Elven friend’s leisure as a sign of her long
life. The importance of the absence of demi-gods to the mensch relations is
best seen when their rulers first encounter Samah and the Sartan Council, a
group used to the wonder of the mensch, and to their squabbling.58 Samah’s
attempt to show favor by using human language falls flat, as the mensch
have long understood each other’s languages as a sign of respect and
kinship, as does his attempt to impress them by materializing golden
chairs.59 The meeting devolves further as Samah is unable to understand
that the squabbling “children” have evolved socially, to the point where
they offer to negotiate peace between the Sartan and the Patryn, much as
they did for themselves.60 When the Sartan offer to let them stay on their
lands, and that they will govern and educate themselves, the mensch are
offended at the presumption of their inability.61 When the mensch offer to
make the Sartan an equal partner in their alliance, Samah becomes
outraged, reminding them that they had once worshipped the Sartan, which
serves only to confuse the mensch, who now worship one god, the one who
controls the Wave, bringing balance.62 This interaction demonstrates the
vast imbalance between the self-declared demi-gods and the mensch. The
Sartan could never respect the mensch enough to trust them to govern
themselves, to eventually resolve their differences and come together. As
such, there could never be balance between the races as long as the Sartan
and the Patryn were present to exert a controlling influence.
It is no coincidence that the only group of mensch who interact
peacefully worship this power; the Sartan encountered the power before
they sundered the world, and learned that they could have lived in peace
with the Patryn without the Sundering.63 However, fear and doubt as to
their experience of the higher power did not allow them to try another path.
This fear and doubt combined with the violence of the Sundering to create
another imbalance, as the “evil that had always existed in the world prior to
the Sundering had now gained the power to take on physical shape and
form. Evil was manifested in the serpents or dragon-snakes”.64 The Wave
attempted to correct this by the creation of the good dragons of Pryan, but
this was prevented by Samah’s fear of the serpents, as he closed Death’s
Gate and sent the Seventh Gate away.65 The Wave corrected itself by
Chelestra’s sun moving away from the Sartan and the serpents, both of
whom were frozen for thousands of years.
It is at this point that it is necessary to presume some higher plan by the
Wave in the series, as Chelestra’s sun’s return to awaken the Sartan and the
serpents happens just as the unlikely friendship between a Sartan and a
Patryn has sprung up between Alfred and Haplo. Both men are
quintessential archetypes of their people, arrogant in their own way,
mistrusting each other, each convinced that their own way is the right way.
Alfred is convinced of the rightness of the Sartans actions, where Haplo has
experienced first-hand just how cruel the results became. It could be
surmised that the swapping of consciousness experienced in Death’s Gate
was more than just the swapping of memories as a temporary, but
intentional, sharing of soul and consciousness to bring them together to
destroy the Seventh Gate and Death’s Gate. When Lord Xar attempts to
ensure Haplo’s loyalty through emotional and physical torture, the dog, a
part of Haplo’s soul, disappears.66 However, it reappears next to Alfred later
in the novel, at a point where he defended the mensch’s good qualities
against their bad, by saying “I found that it all balanced itself out,
somehow”.67 The dog’s appearance is an indicator of their linked souls,
reinforced by Alfred recounting Haplo’s experiences in the Labyrinth as if
he were Haplo, and becomes the balance between their souls, emblematic of
the loyalty they feel toward each other.68 The dog’s existence and link to
Alfred later prevents Lord Xar from raising Haplo as a lazar, 69 but
disappears once it enters the Seventh Gate, as Haplo’s soul is made whole
in order to be revived and help Alfred to restore the balance. The disruption
to the plan to restore balance is the presence of the serpents, feeding off
hate, strife, and chaos, who seek to not only create a war between the Sartan
and Patryn in the Nexus and the Labyrinth, but who also try to ensure that
Lord Xar would attempt to reform the Earth and fail:

‘Thank you, Lord of the Nexus, for casting the spell to tear down the
worlds,’ said the serpent, its head rearing upward. ‘It was, I admit, a
plan we had not considered. But it will work out well for us. We will
feed off the turmoil and chaos for eons to come. And your people,
trapped forever in the Labyrinth.’70

However, the serpent does not realize that the Seventh Gate is a place of
equilibrium, so its attempts to unbalance the world cannot succeed there.71
Once the green dragons of Pryan enter the Labyrinth, they act as the counter
to the serpents they were meant to be, with the battle between the Sartan
and Patryn ending with a truce between a necromancer Sartan and a half-
Sartan, half-Patryn resident of the Labyrinth. Therefore, by their actions in
sealing the Sartan, Patryn, serpents, and dragons into the Nexus and the
Labyrinth, Alfred and Haplo not only create the potential for balance
between their own peoples, but also give this potential to the mensch. With
no demi-gods to claim their right to rule over them, the mensch have the
opportunity to find their own balance.
The exploration of the worlds of The Death Gate Cycle is ultimately an
exploration of hope; the Wave is both a force for good, and a preserver of
free will; it gave the Sartan the choice to fight for balance, but the freedom
not to, a choice which they themselves denied the mensch. However, the
Wave also used both a Sartan and a Patryn to begin the process of restoring
balance; the dead would be free to move on, the mensch could solve their
own problems, and the Sartan and Patryn found peace at last, by joining
each other in their magics. The four elemental worlds remained connected
by conduits that would allow them to function, because no one element
could survive on its own. As with the peoples and magic of the series, the
worlds functioned best when they worked together, even if it took
thousands of years to create the balance between them.

Notes
 1 Weis, W., and Hickman, T., The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, New York: Bantam
Spectra, 1990, page 2.
2 Ibid., pages 1–3.
3 Ibid., pages vii–x.
4 The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing (1990), The Death Gate Cycle Volume 2: Elven
Star (1990), The Death Gate Cycle Volume 3: Fire Sea (1991), The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4:
Serpent Mage (1992), The Death Gate Cycle Volume 5: The Hand of Chaos (1993), The Death
Gate Cycle Volume 6: Into the Labyrinth (1993), and The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The
Seventh Gate (1994), New York: Bantam Spectra.
5 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, pages 418–419.
6 Ibid., page 419.
7 Weis, W., and Hickman, T., The Death Gate Cycle Volume 2: Elven Star, New York: Bantam
Spectra, 1990, pages 361–367.
8 Weis , W., and Hickman, T., The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, New York: Bantam
Spectra, 1992, page 377.
9 Ibid.
10 Weis, W., and Hickman, T., The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, New York:
Bantam Spectra, 1994, pages 300–301.
11 Ibid., page 308.
12 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, page 142.
13 “Lost and Found”, Haven, Season 4, Episode 5, 2013, Syfy channel.
14 Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press,
2008, page 2.
15 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, page 296.
16 Weis, W., and Hickman, T., The Death Gate Cycle Volume 5: The Hand of Chaos, New York:
Bantam Spectra, 1993, pages 454–456.
17 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, pages 325–326.
18 Weis, W., and Hickman, T., The Death Gate Cycle Volume 3: Fire Sea, New York: Bantam
Spectra, 1991, pages 1–2.
19 Ibid., pages 62–64.
20 Ibid., pages 64–69.
21 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, pages 228–229.
22 Ibid., page 239.
23 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, page 321.
24 Ibid., page 233.
25 Ibid., page 238.
26 Ibid., page 306.
27 Ibid., page 334.
28 King, Stephen, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger, Hampton Falls, New Hampshire: Donald M.
Grant, 1982.
29 King, Stephen, The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, Hampton Falls, New Hampshire: Donald
M. Grant, 1997.
30 Wolf, Mark J. P., Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, New York:
Routledge, 2012. page 29.
31 Prucher, J., Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, Oxford, England:
Oxford University Press, 2007, page 98.
32 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, pages 1–2.
33 Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, page 13.
34 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, page 147.
35 Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, page 167.
36 Pratchett, Terry, Monstrous Regiment: A Discworld Novel, London, England: Doubleday, 2003,
page 181.
37 Clarke, S., Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, London, England: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004,
page 3.
38 Ibid., page 14.
39 Ibid.
40 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, page 7.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., page 8.
43 Ibid., page 14.
44 Ibid., pages 4–17.
45 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 5: The Hand of Chaos, page 189.
46 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, page 14.
47 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 5: The Hand of Chaos, pages 268–288.
48 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, pages 427–436.
49 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, page 397.
50 Ibid., page 422.
51 Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, page 14.
52 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 3: Fire Sea. New York: Bantam Spectra. p.
71–72.
53 Ibid. p. vi–vii.
54 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 5: The Hand of Chaos, page 453.
55 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, page 330.
56 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, pages 297–298.
57 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, page 330.
58 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, pages 338–342.
59 Ibid., pages 338–340.
60 Ibid., page 340.
61 Ibid., page 341.
62 Ibid., pages 341–342.
63 Ibid., page 239.
64 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, page 326.
65 Ibid., page 326-328
66 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, pages 9–11.
67 Ibid., page 127.
68 Ibid., pages 228–229.
69 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, page 100.
70 Ibid., pages 274–275.
71 Ibid., page 285.
11
WELCOME TO THE “SECOND-
STAGE” LYNCHVERSE
Twin Peaks: The Return and the Impossibility of
Return Vs. Getting a Return

Matt Hills

Despite being relatively short-lived as an ABC television series in the 1990s

(1990–1991), and returning as a one-off film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With
Me in 1992, Twin Peaks has continued to cast a long cultural shadow. It has
been positioned as both “classic” and “cult” television (Garner, 2016), and
as Mark J. P. Wolf argues in Building Imaginary Worlds (2012), even
“smaller-scale series… began franchises; Twin Peaks, for example, inspired
a feature film, several books, an audio book, and a set of trading cards”
(2012, p. 124). More than this, however, the enduring fandom for Twin
Peaks (Halskov, 2015, p. 214) made it a show that remained ripe for
reinvention long after its cancellation (Williams, 2015, p. 178), and fans
were duly rewarded when Twin Peaks: The Return was formally announced
as a Showtime project on October 6, 2014. After a troubled pre-production
process, when co-creator and proto-showrunner (Newman and Levine,
2012, pp. 26–27) David Lynch’s involvement became unclear (Williams,
2016), The Return eventually premiered on May 21, 2017. With Lynch
asserting in pre-publicity that he viewed the production as one lengthy
“film” that just happened to be divided up into arbitrary “Parts” for
transmission (rather than “episodes” of a television serial; see Biderman et
al., 2019, p. 179), and with Lynch also directing every one of the 18
“Parts”, it was perhaps inevitable that this third season of Twin Peaks would
be viewed as a strong re-assertion of Lynchian ownership and auteurism.
Martha Nochimson’s study of the imaginary worlds realized across
Lynch’s oeuvre characterizes these as sharing specific qualities. Indeed,
Nochimson goes so far as to refer to a “Lynchverse” (2013, p. 163), arguing
that multiple imaginary worlds can be explored as linked, not diegetically
but rather “omnidiegetically” via authorial statements and strategies
(Atkinson, 2014, p. 7). With this in mind, Nochimson divides Lynch’s
works into “first-stage” and “second-stage” phases, suggesting that in
“Lynch’s first-stage cinema, he creates some fascinating representations of
parallel worlds, but nothing as disturbing to the traditional worldview as
what emerges in his later work” (2013, p. 13). This stage includes the
original Twin Peaks (Nochimson, 2013, p. 167), whilst the second-stage is
identified as running from Lost Highway (1997) to Inland Empire (2006)
(Nochimson, 2013, pp. 1 and 11), and would also presumably include The
Return. Rather than presenting ontologically multiple but stable parallel
worlds, e.g., the town of Twin Peaks interacting with the otherworldly
realms of the Black Lodge and Red Room in 1990s Twin Peaks, Nochimson
argues that “second-stage” Lynch adopts a more quantum-mechanics-
indebted perspective, instead representing “the dissolution of the external
world” (2013, p. 8) in his films in favor of a poeticized “many worlds”
orientation (2013, p. 13). Rather than parallel but intersecting worlds being
narratively focused upon, there is a more pluralistic, multiversal set of
possibilities, and a more radically destabilized sense of diegetic ontology on
show. These are not primary/secondary or even tertiary worlds, but “n+1”
worlds where the imaginary is seemingly multiplied into diverse fractions
and fragments. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher makes a similar argument in
The Weird and the Eerie (2016), observing that 1990s Twin Peaks was
constructed around a “division between worlds. . . often marked by one of
Lynch’s frequently recurring visual motifs, curtains”, whereas by the time
of Mulholland Drive, “the stability of the opposition which has structured. .
. Twin Peaks begins to collapse” (2016, p. 53). In place of the “superficial
coherence” of a “real” versus a “fantastical” narrative world, this later
Lynchian approach instead “proliferates embedded worlds” (ibid).
In this essay, I want to follow Nochimson (2013) and Fisher (2016),
considering how Twin Peaks: The Return can be explored as part of this
“second-stage” Lynchverse. I will begin by analyzing how the show’s
reinvention suggests that there can be no nostalgic and “fan service” return
to the established franchise of 1990s Twin Peaks ―it is not simply that the
past is a different country, but rather that the latest version of the series
allegedly refuses to stabilize into a singular narrative ontology, instead
offering what, in Mark Fisher’s terms, can be identified as a mode of
“world-haemorrhaging. . . [resulting in] a terrain subject to ontological
subsidence” (Fisher, 2016, p. 58). However, I will then move on to argue
that The Return cannot simply be characterized as a multiversal evasion of
fan service and any stable imaginary world. In fact, it also offers a “return”
or pay-off on fans’ long-term affective investments by setting out a new
“backstory” (Metz, 2017), or even an “origin story” (Hallam, 2018, p. 118),
for evil supernatural forces such as BOB which have populated its
storyworld. As such, The Return may seem to problematize the relative or
“superficial” coherence of 1990s Twin Peaks, but it also constitutes a new
exploration of the franchise, revising and reshaping its prior imaginary
world in terms of a renovated (and no less coherent) mythos. This iteration
of “second-stage” Lynch, then, very much rewards enduring fans at the
same time as frustrating what Lynch imagines and projects throughout the
text as a normative type of “fan service” (Hills, 2018, p. 317). But if the
brand’s reimagining frustrates and fascinates by design, I will begin with its
frustration of fan expectations and world-building hopes.

World-Hemorrhaging and the Impossibility of

Return: “What Year Is This?”
Where the original Twin Peaks had been accompanied by The Secret Diary
of Laura Palmer (1990) (see Hallam, 2018, p. 103), The Return is book-
ended by two official tie-in books written by series co-creator Mark Frost;
The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016) and The Final Dossier (2017).
However, these books seem to work in a highly distinctive way. For
example, The Secret History contains a number of continuity “variations”.
Given that Mark Frost produced this title, and was both “the co-creator and
co-showrunner of Twin Peaks, these inaccuracies do not seem to be the
result of shoddy research” (2019, p. 171), as Donald McCarthy has
observed. Why else might a by-now standard mode of transmedia world-
building and narrative expansion present continuity “errors”? McCarthy
notes how

For instance, Norma Jennings’ mother is described as having died in

1984 when, in fact, she appeared alive and well in the television
series. The novel also has an excerpt that describes how Ed and
Nadine (Wendy Robie) became a couple, which involves Ed going to
Vietnam, an aspect of their relationship that is never discussed in the
television series. The specifics of how Nadine lost her eye are also at
odds with a monologue Ed gives in the second season premiere of the
program.
(2019, p. 171)

Such details are not central to Twin Peaks’s established meanings and
mythology, perhaps, but they nevertheless challenge the fan cultural capital
and knowledge amassed by attentive fans over the years, threatening to
undermine the “epistemological economy” (Hastie, 2007, p. 81) of Twin
Peaks’s fan-created guides and wikis. Rather than reinforcing a sense of one
coherent or canonical imaginary world which can be mapped by its fandom,
and iterated by its creators, Twin Peaks starts to dissolve here into multiple
versions. In fact, this “world-haemorrhaging” (Fisher, 2016, p. 58) is even
more starkly portrayed in The Return, which sent

Agent Cooper back to February 23, 1989… in Part 17 to ensure that

the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) never occurred. This act of
unraveling—which placed present-day Dale Cooper in familiar 25-
year-old scenes with Laura Palmer and reused footage from the series
pilot from which the plastic-sheathed corpse had been removed—
epitomizes the way The Return both revives and undermines the
original show’s established patterns.
(Fallis and King, 2019, pp. 55–56)

Nor does The Final Dossier restore any sense of final narrative determinacy
after the cliffhanger ending of Part 18. As McCarthy concludes, “in keeping
with the spirit of Twin Peaks, Frost. . . manages to retain mysteries that
audiences were hoping would be solved. Whether Cooper changed the
timeline when he went back in time to rescue Laura Palmer or just changed
people’s memories is still an open question” (2019, p. 180). Insofar as The
Return and its transmedia tie-in fictions fit together, then, it is through a
mode of “ontological subsidence” (Fisher, 2016, p. 58) where reader-
viewers apparently cannot be sure of the settled events of Twin Peaks’s
narrative, and where the ontological status of different timelines or
multiversal possibilities also cannot be definitively confirmed. As Daniel
Neofetou suggests in Good Day Today: David Lynch Destabilizes the
Spectator (2012), “Lynch’s films. . . could often be said to have syuzhets
without fabulas, with their scenes composed in a manner which would
appear to elucidate a diegetic reality, but which never does so to a
satisfactorily coherent degree” (2012, pp. 11–12). By contrast, in 1990s
Twin Peaks

the Black Lodge is framed as a supernatural space and thereby. . .

while Cooper’s traversal of it certainly disorients the spectator. . . it
does not necessarily leave the spectator destabilised on a fundamental
level. . . Far more profound spectatorial destabilisation is cultivated,
however, when the timespace of locales which have hitherto been
established as coherent and quotidian in terms of the films’ diegeses
are problematized.
(Neofetou, 2012: 24)

And yet The Return does problematize the “coherent and quotidian”
timespaces of Twin Peaks the town, both by suggesting that Laura Palmer
was never murdered after all, and by returning an older, adult Laura
―known as Carrie Page in what seems to be an alternative reality― to
what had been the Palmer’s house. In a stunning final cliffhanger,
Carrie/Laura hears Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) calling her and responds
with a terrified scream. Elsewhere, The Return has implied that Sarah is
herself possessed by a dark elemental force, known as Judy, which is
opposed to the light and life-force represented by Laura (Lowry, 2019, p.
46; Hallam, 2018, p. 118), all of which contextualizes this enigmatic ending
as part of a recurrent supernatural struggle. But this reading remains
fragmentary and ambiguous, just as it remains unclear how the different
timelines and versions of “quotidian” Twin Peaks relate to one another,
given that the events of 1990s Twin Peaks seem to be somehow bleeding
over into the “Carrie Page” version of this reality. When Agent
Cooper/Richard asks “what year is this?” then he is expressing a level of
doubt about the ontology of the timespace he has entered. Pondering when
he is also raises the associated, unspoken question of just where he is,
leaving the fabula ―or what should be an objectively agreed-upon or
derivable sequence of narrative events― opaque at best. Rebecca Williams
also notes that Lynch has form in this regard, arguing that “Brand Lynch”
(Todd, 2012, p. 108) means that

Lynch’s involvement [in The Return] does not necessarily provide the
reassurance and security that we may expect; given his authorial status
as someone who provides shock and surprise, as a creator of forms of
cinematic ontological insecurity, fans cannot necessarily expect
anything certain. As [Linda Ruth] Williams notes, Lynch’s “marketing
catchphrase is Expect the Unexpected” (2005: 40). Twin Peaks’
predilection for mystery and uncertainty ―for representing the
uncanny and often attempting to shock and disorient the viewer― is
well-known.
(Williams, 2016, p. 59)

Rather than guaranteeing an auteurist sense of “ontological security”,

reinforcing fans’ level of basic trust in the coherence and integrity of the
imaginary world, Lynch’s “trickster” authorial identity (Jenkins, 1995)
instead consistently threatens to undermine any such certainty.
At the same time, The Return also recurrently undermines any notion of
a nostalgic “return” to much-loved, familiar, and franchised fan pleasures.
Although Kyle MacLachlan again plays Agent Dale Cooper, the denotative
restoration of this character is delayed until Part 16 of 18. In place of fans’
expected pleasures, MacLachlan plays Dougie Jones and Mr. C ―these are
fantastical refractions of Cooper, one an evil doppelgänger and the other an
amnesiac, embodied imprisonment of Agent Cooper’s true consciousness.
As critics have observed, this slow-paced obstruction of Dale Cooper’s
actual narrative return self-reflexively engages with fans’ “[a]nticipation,
nostalgia, and the pleasures linked with these. . . [T]he discomfort of
waiting produces a conscious viewer aware of the mechanics of
storytelling” (Anderson, 2019, p. 190). Ironically, The Return is intensely
pitched at original series fans, reuniting as many original cast members as
possible, centrally involving co-creators Mark Frost and David Lynch, and
liberally drawing on the brand “icons” of the original show such as its red
curtains and distinctive chevron designs (Ryan, 2017). Yet it also
“acknowledges that this is no time for nostalgia” (Lim, 2018, online), and
sets out to frustrate fans’ expectations. The same thing occurs around the
character of Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), whose much-loved dance
sequence (Gillan, 2016) is re-activated, only to terminate in an
ontologically uncertain fate for the character, where it is radically unclear
how her storyline does (or doesn’t) relate to the rest of the third season.
Indeed, she almost seems to feature in a different pocket universe or
“world” to the rest of the characters (Anderson, 2019, p. 191; Hawkes,
2019, p. 158). Returning to beloved fan favorites seems to only be possible
on the basis that fans accept that familiar figures of Twin Peaks will be
refracted, reflected, and distorted in unexpected ways —the final, jolting
appearance of Audrey Horne shows her starkly confronting her puzzled,
unmade-up face in a mirror. The imaginary world of the series is not
additively accumulated here, instead breaking up into disconnected
fragments of narrative non-sense and ambiguity.
David McAvoy argues that with The Return, Lynch’s investment in a
mode of artistic television that’s coterminous with his “second-stage” and
multiversal films results in the director actively trolling fans:

[D]esigned to upset the kinds of Peak TV expectations about narrative

‘payoff’ created by the online fandom of Twin Peaks’s original run,
The Return instead validates the patience it takes to simply sit,
marking time’s passage as its own fulfilling aesthetic experience…
But beyond simply a television auteur setting out to upset our
expectations, Lynch is more aggressively trollish in his disdain for
what fans want from a Peak TV version of Twin Peaks. Lynch has a
habit of taking his aggression with the system of television out on the
fans who love him most: lest we forget, he opened his theatrical film
expansion of this universe in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
with a television set smashed with a sledgehammer.
(McAvoy, 2019, p. 98)
If Fire Walk With Me represents a world-building continuation of Twin
Peaks which is also a partial reset in favor of Lynch’s vision for the show,
then The Return represents further revisionism via Lynch’s asserted artistic
vision — elements from Season Two, disliked by Lynch, are blatantly
ignored (Fallis and King, 2019, pp. 55–56). Continuity with Fire Walk With
Me is instead emphasized in a series of ways, most especially via a focus on
Agent Jeffries (David Bowie) and the Blue Rose agents’ investigation into
the mysterious “Judy” (Hallam, 2018, pp. 107 and 114–115).
But much of The Return quite simply refuses to cohere into a familiar
revisiting of the show’s imaginary world. As McAvoy argues (2019, p. 91),
the latest run of episodes offers an internalized image of its attentive fans
via the character of Sam (Ben Rosenfield) being instructed to watch an
intensely technologically monitored glass box. For long periods of time
nothing at all happens, and it is only when Sam is distracted, and not paying
proper attention, that a violent supernatural force blinks into existence in
the box, promptly escapes its confines, and savages the hapless watcher.
Consequently, the figure of Sam has been read as coding “forensic fandom”
(Garner, 2017, online), where

The entire tableau is a warning to fans: be sure to watch the glass box
extremely carefully, using all of the tools at your disposal, even when
it appears that nothing is happening… or you will miss the most
important, indelible, and unique images that the show has to offer.
This premiere episode allegory tells us that not adopting the kind of
online forensic fandom that characterized only the most ardent
viewers of the original run is the way of narrative death… And yet,
that metaphor builds into it the antagonism and tricksterism fans had
already come to know and love: watch closely, Lynch seems to say,
but also prepare to be bored for long stretches of time.
(McAvoy, 2019, p. 91; see also Hawkes, 2019, p. 153)

However, by stressing a lack of narrative pay-off and ontological

coherence, this approach fails to focus on the ways in which The Return
does reward long-term fans. That is to say, the series does not collapse
entirely into boredom, deferral, and world-hemorrhaging or ontological
fracture, despite much of it being preoccupied with such frustrations, and
hence with the performative cultural capital of sophisticated “art television”
(Thompson, 2003; Polan, 2007). In the next section, I want to mount a
counter-argument to the almost critical orthodoxy which has replayed David
Lynch’s auteurist discourses of “trickster” TV, instead considering how
long-term fan investments are, in actuality, offered specific “returns” on
their accumulated (fan) cultural capital.

World-Reshaping and Getting a Return: “Gotta

Light?”
Though it has been tempting for critics and scholars to (re)produce a
narrative of The Return’s “ontological subsidence” (Fisher, 2016, p. 58) via
its dispersal into discontinuity and multiple timelines, or what I’ve
previously called the “fan disservice” of character dislocation and deferral
(Hills, 2018, p. 317), it is important to consider how Twin Peaks’ imaginary
world is not simply destabilized or multiplied in the third season. At the
very moment that The Return most clearly indicates Lynch’s bid for cultural
distinction via art discourses — namely the black-and-white
experimentalism of Part 8, “Gotta Light?”— it is also marked by
conventional franchise world-building. This same episode, as Walter Metz
has noted, “reveals the hidden backstory of Twin Peaks: The murder of
Laura Palmer has its roots in the creation of American evil, the
development of atomic weapons” (2017, online). The supernatural, demonic
force known as BOB, which has constituted Twin Peaks’s major antagonist,
is shown to enter the diegetic world in relation to America’s 1945 “Trinity”
testing of the atomic bomb.
Whilst unexpectedly stepping back in narrative time, this Part also shows
a young woman going on a date in 1956; we witness her being attacked by a
bizarre frog-moth hybrid which crawls into her open mouth while she’s
asleep. Fans immediately speculated that this woman was Sarah Palmer,
who would go on to become Laura’s mother (Joyce, 2019, p. 24), and this
theory was indeed confirmed in Mark Frost’s 2017 Final Dossier book
(McCarthy, 2019, p. 180). The implication of this cryptic scene is that an
otherworldly entity has taken up residence within Sarah Palmer —
something that is narratively affirmed by her supernatural, murderous
powers in Part 14— implying that she has been commandeered as a vehicle
for “Judy”, a female counterpart to BOB which The Return establishes as a
new narrative threat.
Part 8 therefore introduces both BOB and Judy as players in the
ontological reality of Twin Peaks “ordinary” world, but it also features an
entirely new backstory for Laura Palmer. As Lindsay Hallam puts it,

In Part 8, a truly ground-breaking episode of television that seems to

play out a possible origin story for the larger forces that emanate from
beyond the world, both positive and negative, there is a moment
where a golden orb is formed, and inside it is the image of Laura
Palmer from her Homecoming photograph.
(2018, p. 118)

This golden orb fits into a pattern established in other moments of The
Return, where “light signaling love typically turns to gold. . . For instance,
when Carl joins the grieving mother at the side of the road he watches her
child’s spirit, a yellow light, float into the air (Season 3, Ep. 6). The same
golden orb is seen when Dido and the Fireman ostensibly send Laura down
to earth—a golden orb of light” (Lowry, 2019, p. 46). The representation of
BOB and Laura as cast into Twin Peaks’s everyday world in this way
suggests that they are part of an ongoing epic struggle between elemental
forces of light and dark, or good and evil, which long predates the events of
Twin Peaks Season One, and possibly even predates the atomic bomb’s
testing (Ewins, 2018, p. 36). As Ashlee Joyce notes, this calls into question
any cultural-political reading of Part 8 which sees

the idea of the bomb as the birth of evil. . . [N]uclear war might not in
fact be a starting point for evil but, instead, merely its latest iteration. .
. . [T]he idea of BOB/Judy as ancient entities that connect the evil of
the bomb to something much older. . . reinforces. . . [an] “apolitical”
posture that. . . downplays the specific politics of nuclear armament.
(Joyce, 2019, p. 25)

By moving back to 1945 and 1956, and moving far outside the town of
Twin Peaks, The Return is able to open up a new set of storyworld
questions and answers. Joyce argues that, in fact, Part 8’s “visuals offer a
key to the entire Twin Peaks mythology (or at least as close to a key as fans
of David Lynch can ever hope to expect). For audiences of Lynch’s work,
this is what we crave” (2019, p. 13). This is not so different from the
narrative maneuvers of Twin Peaks Season Two where, as Marc Dolan has
pointed out,

plots. . . moved forward by moving backward, filling in more and

more of the enigmatic “backstory” of the series in order to advance
from the previously established narrative lines into fresh areas. This
“backward, then forward” movement of the plot. . . is. . . [an]
inventive solution to the standard continuous-serial problem of how to
stimulate interest in the plotlines of future episodes in a way that is
consistent with the raw material of previous ones.
(1995, p. 42)

And likewise, by opening out its account of BOB and Laura, The Return is
able to reshape its imaginary world into a seemingly timeless and
potentially recurrent battle between elemental forces —with another cycle
of struggles between Judy and Laura (in the guise of Carrie Page)
apparently beginning at the end of Part 18. Yet this also preserves the
series’ prior narrative events and fan cultural capital or accumulated
knowledge regarding established Lynchian continuity. Adding Judy
centrally into the imaginary world, and showing Sarah Palmer as possessed
by this entity, supplements the paternal evil of Leland Palmer/BOB with a
maternal demonic presence, suggesting a particularly dark, twisted version
of gender inclusivity and enhanced female agency. The fact that Sarah
Palmer kills a vile, misogynistic male in Part 14 also fuels this reading. In
any case, this new “backstory” (Metz, 2017, online) or “origin story”
(Hallam, 2018, p. 118) sets out new ontological rules for the imaginary
world of Twin Peaks rather than merely disrupting its previous incarnation.
Writing in the Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds, Benjamin J.
Robertson rightly observes that any “discussion of backstory requires not
only recognition of its importance to what takes place in a given world in
the form of narrative, but the underlying conditions of that narrative, the
ontology and epistemology of the world itself” (2018, pp. 38–39). To this
end, he argues that “backstory” and “origin story” should be run together
for imaginary worlds with fantastical aspects, representing “parts of the
stories that explain “where they come from” not only in a psychological or
sociological sense [as backstory does], but in an ontological one. That is,
origin stories make clear that subsequent stories are authorized. . . because
the world. . . operates in such a way” (Robertson, 2017, p. 39). It may thus
be no accident that scholars have hesitated over describing Part 8 as
“backstory” or “origin story”, since it offers up both new narrative
background and a reshaped ontology for Twin Peaks as a whole. Although
The Return has already established that the Black Lodge can intersect with
“ordinary” life, as “Black Lodge residents roam America” (Hawkes, 2019,
p. 156) in a more thorough-going encroachment than that shown across
Seasons One and Two, Part 8 goes beyond this by setting out one possible
“birth of the Black Lodge” (Ewins, 2018, p. 36), as well as depicting a
realm where “the Fireman and Dido reside somewhere in the heavens,
above Blue Pine mountain, and are able both to ascend (and pull other
people up) to their domain, and to descend (and send others down) to earth”
(Lowry, 2019, p. 42). And as the cliffhanger to Part 18 also reveals, via
Sarah Palmer’s/Judy’s distorted cry of “Laura”, this battle between forces,
apparently overseen by the Fireman and Dido, can bleed between and
across alternative realities. Consequently, Lindsay Hallam’s analysis of this
conclusion argues that “Carrie’s scream is her realisation of her true
identity, but also the realisation of her role as ‘the one’ to defeat Judy. . .
.The fight will continue” (2018, p. 119). Whether the ending of The Return
is interpreted as a matter of tragic eternal recurrence, or as an ongoing and
open-ended struggle, it nevertheless implies that the imaginary world of
Twin Peaks has not been entirely dissolved into ambiguity and multiplicity.
Rather, a female-centered battle between Judy/Sarah and Laura, or mother-
spirit and daughter-energy, has shifted into narrative centrality, with the
issue of paternal abuse/BOB’s presence seemingly being brought to a halt
via the showdown between Freddie Sykes (Jake Wardle) and BOB in Part
17 (Fradley and Riley, 2019, p. 207).
On this account, Twin Peaks fandom is neither univocally trolled
(McAvoy, 2019, p. 97), targeted for fan disservice (Hills, 2018, p. 317), nor
punished (Anderson, 2019, p. 189) by The Return. Although elements of the
season may feature lengthy detours, fan knowledge and attentive viewing
are ultimately rewarded by Lynch and Frost. The show’s imaginary world is
explored afresh, and by going backwards to go forwards, The Return is able
to layer in newly identified supernatural forces and new character
backstories —that is, a reshaped world ontology— which nonetheless
remain continuous and coherent with established lore. For example,
“Diane” moves from being an off-screen, unseen figure implied in the
narrative world, to becoming not only a flesh-and-blood character (played
by Laura Dern), but also a “tulpa” or un-natural doppelganger of the same
ontological order as “Mr. C”, Cooper’s evil double. The Return consistently
plays with, and across, a broader canvas than either Seasons One and Two,
or even Fire Walk With Me, straying far beyond the boundaries of Twin
Peaks the town, and placing the Black Lodge and “ordinary” reality into a
longer timeframe and a multidimensional (yet policed or overseen) array of
timelines.
Lynch’s use of film/TV “art” discourses (Thompson, 2003, p. 115) are
also intensified by Part 8, which has been described as “by far the weirdest
episode of television ever made. . . and unmistakably a work of arthouse
storytelling. No one will ever try to make an episode like this ever again,
and rightly so. It’s a masterpiece” (Heritage, 2019). But rather than viewing
“second-stage” Lynch as opposed to franchise world-building via notions of
artistic status, I would argue that both franchise-based and “TV art” aspects
of The Return work together to affirm fans’ cultural capital.
Dana Polan has argued that television art and its reception are precisely
“a sociological phenomenon” (2007, p. 261). Polan emphasizes how
television shows positioned and lauded as “masterpieces” involve tapping
“into an audience that has been trained (through, for example, years of high
school and college courses in literary study as theme-hunting) to understand
cultural work as hermeneutic – as meaning-making” (2007, p. 265). The
artistic distinction of shows such as The Return is thus simultaneously a
marketing strategy aimed at reaching a specific audience/consumer
demographic. As a result, a “class of viewers comes to constitute itself as
veritable cultural mediators between the show itself and a broader public
that, it is felt, need to be instructed about the true –and deeper– meaning
within that show” (Polan, 2007, p. 267).
Expanding Twin Peaks’ imaginary world via an ever more intensive
“art” discourse and through reshaping its hyperdiegetic ontology (Hills,
2002, pp. 137–138) means opening that world into “ever more complex bits
of background information, . . . [that] turn. . . the narrative space of the
series into a game. . . in which there are always new permutations” (Polan,
2007, p. 277). But the game of treating The Return as a puzzle to be
translated into “philosophical meaning” (Polan, 2007, p. 280) strives to
align fan cultural capital (knowledge of the imaginary world’s details which
has value within fandom) with cultural capital itself (knowledge recognized
more widely as having cultural status). As Hadas Weiss has recently argued,
the accumulation of such “capital is even more recognizable a component
of the middle-class ideology than property in its material incarnation,
because it resonates so well with the spirit of investment” (Weiss, 2019, p.
95). The “art” of The Return, vividly figured through Part 8, but also keenly
and recurrently coded through the figures of Dougie Jones and Audrey
Horne, and introduced partly through the glass box of Part 1, thus positions
viewers in a powerfully middle-class “ideology” which “describes our
proclivity. . . to . . .identify as self-determining investors of work, time, as
resources”, and where “human capital is its most intimate manifestation”
(Weiss, 2019, p. 118). Indeed, only “by continuing to watch, listen, read and
learn –that is, by reinvesting– can we hope to nod knowingly at the next
cultural reference” (Weiss, 2019, pp. 104–105).
Fan knowledge, on this account, is a form of classed investment in
television- as-culture; the knowing fan imagines herself to be a self-
determining investor in the imaginary world, which promises a return in
terms of (fan-)cultural recognition. As Beverley Skeggs has suggested,
“sub-cultural capital could be seen as a form of mis-recognition of a version
of middle-class. . . distinction-making” (2004, p. 150), and the same might
be said for Twin Peaks’s fan cultural capital. If the show languished for
nearly three decades as a “dusty” and largely inactive franchise (Johnson,
2013, p. 28), then bringing it back as a “second-stage” Lynchian artwork
made the newly expanded imaginary world, retooled via “backstory” and
ontological “origin story”, a rich source of cultural capital for long-term
fans.
Twin Peaks: The Return may well have frustrated certain
imagined/projected versions of narrative fan service and franchised
nostalgia, but at the level of world-building, it gave fans a clear return on
their long-accumulated and perhaps dormant fan cultural capital. This was
(re)shaped as the once more industrially/critically recognized cultural
capital of a media artwork —that is, David Lynch’s latest “film”. Here,
exploring an imaginary world all over again meant going backwards to go
forwards, in Marc Dolan’s terms (1995, p. 42), allowing Lynch and Frost to
make a performative show of not delivering a standardized, franchised
product whilst still respecting fans’ (classed) investments in the artistic
world of Twin Peaks, and hence revising and expanding its ontological
scope without wholly displacing prior fan knowledge. Part 8 remains the
most visible blending of these protocols, since it is both the apotheosis of
Lynchian and aestheticized/experimental Twin Peaks, at the same time as
coherently expanding the imaginary world in a manner that could be
subsequently affirmed by commodity tie-ins such as The Final Dossier
(Frost, 2017), and which proffered a canonical return on fans’ speculations
about BOB and the Black Lodge. By seeming not to serve fans, Part 8 could
self-reflexively adopt a position as art and hence as a space of “emerging”
cultural capital (Savage, 2015, p. 113) rather than target-marketed
commerce. Yet by representing a newly epic struggle between hyperdiegetic
forces of light and dark, Laura and BOB, it also fused cultural capital with
fan cultural capital, recognizing and rewarding fan theorizations which may
have run over many years. Parts 17 and 18, taken together, also make
visible this interplay between the cultural capital of “TV art” (e.g., Part 18’s
cliffhanger and multiversal ambiguities) and the fan cultural capital of
world-based expectations (e.g., the showdown with BOB in Part 17).
Analyzing the successful return of Twin Peaks means highlighting how
its imaginary world became acutely twinned, providing enough “backstory”
and “origin story” to reassure fans that the storyworld they’d wrestled with
over time remained canonically validated, and also providing just enough
“trolling” to reassure followers of the Lynchverse that Lynch was pursuing
his own artworld vision —with co-creator Mark Frost— rather than
commercially reviving a franchise. If it makes sense, therefore, to discuss
“Brand Lynch” (Todd, 2012, p. 108) then this is surely an anti-brand brand,
overseeing an anti-franchise franchise, and an approach to world-building
that fuses subversive world-hemorrhaging with more conventional world-
(re)shaping.

References
Anderson, Donald L., (2019), “‘There is no return’: Twin Peaks and the horror of pleasure” in
Victoria McCollum, editor, Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of
Fear, London, England: Routledge, 2019, pp. 177–194.
Atkinson, Sarah, (2014), Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences, London,
England and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Biderman, Shai; Gil, Ronen; and Lewit, Ido, (2019), Life in the Black Lodge: The Twin Challenge of
Lanham, Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, pp. 177–191.
Dolan, Marc, (1995), “The Peaks and Valleys of Serial Creativity: What Happened to/on Twin Peaks”
in David Lavery, editor, Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, Detroit, Michigan;
Wayne State University Press, pp. 30–50.
Ewins, Michael, (2018), “The Stars Turn and a Time Presents Itself” in Sight and Sound, January,
Volume 28, Issue 1, 2018, pp. 33–36.
Fallis, Jeffrey; and King, T. Kyle, (2019), “Lucy Finally Understands How Cellphones Work:
Ambiguous Digital Technologies in Twin Peaks: The Return and Its Fan Communities” in
Antonio Sanna, editor, Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return, London, England: Palgrave
Macmillan, pp. 53–68.
Fisher, Mark, (2016), The Weird and the Eerie, London, England: Repeater Books.
Fradley, Martin; and Riley, John A., (2019), “‘I don’t understand how this keeps happening. . . over
and over again’: Trumpism, Uncanny Repetition, and Twin Peaks: The Return” in Victoria
McCollum, editor, Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear,
London, England: Routledge, pp. 195–210.
Frost, Mark, (2016), The Secret History of Twin Peaks, Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Frost, Mark, (2017), Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Garner, Ross, (2016), “‘The Series That Changed Television’? Twin Peaks, ‘Classic’ Status, and
Temporal Capital” in Cinema Journal, Volume 55, Issue 3, 2016, pp. 137–142.
Garner, Ross, (2017), “What We Learnt from Sam And Tracey: Does The New Twin Peaks Differ To
Contemporary ‘Quality TV’?”, CST Online, May 27, 2017, available online at
http://cstonline.net/what-we-learnt-from-sam-and-tracey-new-twin-peaks-and-contemporary-
quality-tv/.
Gillan, Jennifer, (2016), “Textural Poaching Twin Peaks: The Audrey Horne Sweater Girl GIFs”,
Series: International Journal of TV Serial Narratives, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2016, pp. 9–24.
Hallam, Lindsay, (2018), Devil’s Advocates – Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Leighton Buzzard,
England: Auteur Publishing.
Halskov, Andreas, (2015), TV Peaks: Twin Peaks and Modern Television Drama, Odense, Denmark:
University Press of Southern Denmark.
Hastie, Amelie, (2007), “The Epistemological Stakes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Television
Criticism and Marketing Demands” in Elana Levine and Lisa Parks, editors, Undead TV: Essays
on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, pp. 74–95.
Hawkes, Joel, (2019), “Movement in the Box: The Production of Surreal Social Space and the
Alienated Body” in Antonio Sanna, editor, Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return, London,
England: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 149–168.
Heritage, Stuart, (2019), “‘No one will ever try this again’: The most daring hours of TV ever”, The
Guardian, November 5, 2019, available at https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2019/nov/05/no-one-will-ever-try-this-again-the-most-daring-hours-of-tv-ever-twin-peaks-
mr-robot.
Hills, Matt, (2002), Fan Cultures, London, England: Routledge.
Hills, Matt, (2018), “Cult TV Revival: Generational Seriality, Recap Culture, and the ‘Brand Gap’ of
Twin Peaks: The Return”, Television & New Media, Volume 19, Issue 4, 2018, pp. 310–327.
Jenkins, Henry, (1995), “‘Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?’: alt.tv.twinpeaks, the
Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery” in David Lavery, editor, Full of Secrets: Critical
Approaches to Twin Peaks, Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, pp. 51–69.
Johnson, Derek, (2013), Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture
Industries, New York and London, England: New York University Press.
Joyce, Ashlee, (2019), “The Nuclear Anxiety of Twin Peaks: The Return” in Amanda DiPaolo and
Jamie Gillies, editors, The Politics of Twin Peaks, Lanham, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, pp.
13–34.
Lim, Dennis, (2018), “Donald Trump’s America and the Visions of David Lynch”, The New Yorker,
June 29, 2018, available at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/donald-trumps-
america-and-the-visions-of-david-lynch.
Lowry, Elizabeth, (2019), “Extraterrestrial Intelligences in the Atomic Age: Exploring the Rhetorical
Function of Aliens and the ‘Alien’ in the Twin Peaks Universe” in Antonio Sanna, editor, Critical
Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return, London, England: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 37–51.
McAvoy, David, (2019), “‘Is It About the Bunny? No, It’s Not About the Bunny!’: David Lynch’s
Fandom and Trolling of Peak TV Audiences” in Antonio Sanna, editor, Critical Essays on Twin
Peaks: The Return, London, England: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 85–103.
McCarthy, Donald, (2019), “How Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks Books Clarify and Confound the Nature
of Reality” in Antonio Sanna, editor, Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return, London,
England: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 169–181.
Metz, Walter, (2017), “The Atomic Gambit of Twin Peaks: The Return”, Film Criticism, Volume 41,
Issue 3, 2017, available at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/fc/13761232.0041.324/--atomic-gambit-of-
twin-peaks-the-return?rgn=main;view=fulltext.
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England: Zero Books.
Newman, Michael Z.; and Levine, Elana, (2012), Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and
Cultural Status, New York and London, England: Routledge.
Nochimson, Martha P., (2013), David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland
Empire, Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
Polan, Dana, (2007), “Cable Watching: HBO, The Sopranos, and Discourses of Distinction” in Sarah
Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas, editors, Cable Visions: Television Beyond
Broadcasting, New York: New York University Press, pp. 261–283.
Robertson, Benjamin J., (2017), “Backstory” in Mark J.P. Wolf, editor, The Routledge Companion to
Imaginary Worlds Routledge, New York: Routledge, pp. 37–44.
Ryan, Scott, (2017), “Credit to the Credits”, The Blue Rose Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 2, 2017, p. 3.
Savage, Mike, (2015), Social Class in the 21st Century, London, England: Pelican.
Skeggs, Beverley, (2004), Class, Self, Culture, London, England: Routledge.
Thompson, Kristin, (2003), Storytelling in Film and Television, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press.
Todd, Antony, (2012), Authorship and the Films of David Lynch, London, England and New York:
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London, England: Verso.
Williams, Rebecca, (2015), Post-Object Fandom: Television, Identity and Self-narrative, London,
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Volume II, No 2, 2016, pp. 55–65.
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York and London, England: Routledge.
12
THE FAULT IN OUR STAR TREK
(Dis)Continuity Mapping, Textual Conservationism,
and the Perils of Prequelization

William Proctor

You want to explore this universe because it’s remarkably coherent.

Fans are always going on about canon, but when you really look at it,
it’s pretty amazing that in hundreds and hundreds of episodes, this
universe is so coherent and well-plotted out.
—Manny Coto (showrunner on Enterprise Season Four)

What I have absolutely no respect for however, is their complete lack

of effort to ensure that the story and every other detail remained
canon.
—Stephen Willets (Star Trek fan and blogger)

As an imaginary world, the Star Trek universe is a vast narrative system

“more internally complex than that of any other American television
show”.1 Yet Star Trek is also much more than the sum of its televisual parts;
rather, as of 2020, it is an expansive transmedia empire, 7 comprising 7 TV
series, including an animated series (with more in the pipeline), 13 feature
films, countless video games, hundreds of novels and comics, and a library
of reference books and encyclopedias that have each augmented the world’s
fictional architecture considerably over the past five decades. That being
said, it is certainly the various television series that form the core, canonical
“mothership” of the Star Trek “hyperdiegesis”,2 the narrative station from
which other textual shuttles have been launched across the transmedia
frontier. With so much content scaffolding the imaginary world, however, it
becomes more difficult for writers to fulfill narrative logics of continuity in
order to ensure that coherence between texts is successfully achieved and
maintained by editorial oversight. As Mark J. P. Wolf argues, “[t]he
likelihood of inconsistencies occurring increases as a world grows in size
and complexity”.3 As a consequence, “inconsistencies in the storyline
distract and disrupt the audiences’ mental image of the story as they follow
it, especially if they occur in the main storyline driving the work”.4
Although meticulous devotion to continuity seeks to furnish the
imaginary world with narrative coherence, to make the image of the world
appear to function as if “real”, continuity also imposes creative limitations
on writers who are required to stay within the borderlines established by
official canon policy, and not “depict events that would conflict with
established [Star Trek] history”.5 In other words, the concepts of continuity
and canon effectively dictate which stories count as “fact”, and which are to
be understood as “fiction”. As a general rule of thumb, the official Star Trek
canon is comprised of the live-action television and film series, which
essentially contracts the imaginary world by indicating that hundreds of tie-
in novels and comics “never really happened”. Although “the dominant
attitude in STAR TREK fandom is that spin-off material does not truly
“count” as canon at all; the film and television series are always primary”, 6
the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes “official” canon is usually “some
agent of the intellectual property holder”.7 It is true that some fans construct
their own versions of canon —often defined as “fanon” or “head canon”—
through individual processes of selection, acceptance, and rejection. The
fact remains, however, that the term emphasizes that canonicity is strictly
determined by corporate authorities rather than fan audiences; by creators
and “deliverers”, not consumers and “receivers”.
In 2001, following the conclusion of fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager
(1994–2001) the next televisual incarnation would go where no Star Trek
series had gone before: into the future history’s past. Yet the decision to
create a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) (1966–1969) with
Star Trek: Enterprise (2001–2005) would lead to all sorts of issues with
established continuity, leading fans to confront producers Brannon Braga
and Rick Berman on a nascent Internet. As Enterprise became the first Star
Trek series to be cancelled since TOS in 1969, and the first not to reach the
seven-year milestone achieved by Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)
(1987–1994), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9) (1993–1999), and
Voyager, the series signified the dying gasp of a franchise that had
commanded the science fiction genre on television for 18 consecutive years,
accumulating an impressive 25 seasons totaling 624 episodes. It would be
12 years between the cancellation of Enterprise and the launch of Star Trek:
Discovery in 2017 on the new streaming service, CBS All Access.
In the meantime, Star Trek’s next regeneration would occur not on
television, but in cinema. As if recognizing the challenges of navigating
Trek’s dense and baroque narrative continuity, director J. J. Abrams, and co-
writers Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci, orchestrated a new narrative
direction for the franchise with 2009’s Star Trek (Trek ’09). Rather than risk
contradicting and contaminating extant continuity, the events depicted in
the opening of Trek ’09 installs the film not within the “Prime” universe —
the universe inhabited by TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, and the
canon films from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) through to Star
Trek: Nemesis (2002)— but in a new parallel universe, one inaugurated by
events within the story itself. In essence, Trek ’09 mobilizes metafictional
devices in order to create a new branch of the imaginary world that
ostensibly does not interfere with established continuity, effectively
bracketing off the “Prime” universe from what has since become known as
“the Kelvin Timeline”, resulting in a new branch of Star Trek continuity, or
what Matt Hills terms “neo-canon”.8 In doing so, Abrams and company
orchestrated a narrative space whereby canonical “facts” could be either
revised or cast aside entirely, a prophylactic strategy that addressed the
concerns of continuity acolytes. While also targeting a new audience for
whom the franchise had become far too complex to jump into without the
need for expertise. In essence, Abrams’s ploy suggests “the extent to which
the runners of the STAR TREK franchise both fear and revile the core Star
Trek fandom”,9 many of whom possess “an often-intimidating grasp of the
source material”.10 Although this narrative sleight-of-hand did not
necessarily satisfy older fans, many of whom saw the Kelvin films as “Trek
in Name Only”, box-office revenues generated by Abrams’s Trek ’09 and
sequel, Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013), demonstrated that regenerating the
franchise had been successful, at least commercially. However, the third
(and final at the time of writing) Kelvin film, Star Trek: Beyond (2016),
struggled at the box office, failing to recoup its combined production and
marketing budget despite receiving many positive reviews.
With the release of Star Trek: Discovery in 2017, the first Trek TV series
since 2005 and the first series released on subscription-only streaming
channels, the decision to situate the narrative prior to TOS risked tampering
with canonical continuity like Enterprise before it. Despite Discovery’s
showrunners insisting that the series is set in the “Prime universe”, and not
The Kelvin Universe or another parallel rift, ardent Trekkers began flooding
discussion boards on the Internet to scrutinize whether or not the imaginary
world has become burdened and undermined by “snarls” in continuity.
Additionally, numerous entertainment articles focused on potential breaches
in canon caused by Discovery’s close proximity to TOS —the show is set a
decade prior to Kirk and Spock’s tenure on the Enterprise— indicating that
the imaginary world is not only managed by writers, producers, and
showrunners, but is also expertly policed by “textual conservationists”, fan
audiences for whom adherence to established imaginary history functions to
accumulate subcultural capital via displays of expertise, as well as being a
key resource for pleasure, play, and critique, each of which support the
construction of fannish social identities.
In this essay, I explore both Enterprise and Discovery to demonstrate the
perils associated with prequelization, considering the way in which textual
conservationists respond to and criticize producers for introducing new
story elements that are not supported by the official history of the Star Trek
hyperdiegesis. As textual conservationists “expect adherence to established
tenets, characterisations, and narrative “back stories,” which production
teams thus revise at their peril, disrupting the trust which is placed in the
continuity of a detailed narrative world”,11 producers who fail to understand
the importance of canonical governance and coherence thus run the risk of
instigating new discursive conflicts, just as they threaten to destabilize Star
Trek’s “ontological realm”, that which “determines the parameters of a
world’s existence”.12 From such a vantage point, textual conservationists
may see producers less as world-builders than as world-destroyers. In an
age where fans are increasingly courted, exploited, and harnessed by
corporate entities as “attention-attractor[s], buzz-generator[s], as brand-
enricher[s], as community-builder[s]”,13 it is equally as likely that fans
behave in ways that work against corporate logics, not as attractors,
generators, and enrichers, but as buzz-killers and brand-assassins. Such a
slipshod approach to established canonical continuity not only sabotages
hyperdiegetic coherence, but also endangers the critical and economic
health of the property if fan audiences cry havoc and let slips the dogs of
war. For textual conservationists, de-coherence and dis-continuity are
viewed as problems to be fixed, rationalized, or for the purposes of this
essay, exposed, catalogued, and critiqued. Although there are a number of
academic studies that have provided important, substantive work on
sequels, especially in film, 14 there has been much less focus on prequels,
especially concerning the creative difficulties that go along with ensuring
that new stories do not conflict with “later” ones. Just as writers of tie-in
fiction find themselves constrained by the “creatively crippling strictures”15
of official canon, the same constraints are certainly at work with prequels.
As we shall see, the principles of canonical continuity function to guide
authors and producers to ensure, at least theoretically, that the good ship
Star Trek should not always boldly go where no one has gone before.
Methodologically, I draw from discourses related to continuity and
canon articulated within and across on-line territories: in discussion threads
located on websites like Quora and Reddit; in fan-oriented entertainment
journalism; and on fan wikis such as Memory Alpha —which is dedicated
to cataloguing the Trek canon— and Memory Beta, the non-canon
apocryphon. Although at times I directly quote from fannish “canon
discourses”, I anonymize both author and platform for ethical reasons. I
begin with Enterprise before turning to the re-emergence of Star Trek on
television with Discovery.

“It was Always Going to be Hard Doing a Prequel

when Considering Continuity”
From the late-1990s to the early 2000s, fan cultures became newly
invigorated and emboldened by the affordances of cyberspace, leading to a
steady increase in fan-producer conflicts across the on-line frontier. Yet this
heightened activity, this “mainstreaming” of fan practices, behaviors, and
discourses, did not first emerge with Enterprise, but four years or so earlier
with Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin (1997), “perhaps the first film to
fully incur the wrath of the digitally connected fan-base”.16 By the time
Enterprise was launched in 2001, however, the on-line population
continued to rise significantly in numbers due to the introduction of
broadband technology, a massive (300x) increase in bandwidth that
stimulated the development of social media platforms, fan wikis, and other
participatory portals. As Sam Ford argues, “the ability a much wider portion
of society now has to share, discuss, debate, and critique texts with various
communities constitutes the greatest shift in the media ecology in a digital
age”,17 a shift that has led to producer/fan —and fan-on-fan— conflicts
becoming common place.
As showrunner and “torchbearer” on Enterprise, Brannon Braga fueled
the flames of “fantagonism”18 by not heeding nor taking seriously
criticisms regarding several issues, including what was viewed as a
reactionary flouting of Gene Roddenberry’s liberal-humanist ethos;19 a lack
of “visual fidelity” with TOS as the “next” series in the timeline; a
retrograde shift in gender and sexual politics,20 and breaches in canonical
continuity. As such, “Enterprise was. . . at odds with Star Trek’s narrative
universe” from the start, as “the executive producers didn’t seem to care
about the show, its fans, or the legacy it drew upon, despite their prior
involvement in the franchise”.21 Rather than placating fans, however, Braga
ended up courting “producer/fan wrangling over accurate continuity” by
vilifying seasoned textual conservationists as “continuity pornographers”.22
Prior to the first episode’s broadcast, the two-part pilot “Broken Bow”,
Braga and Rick Berman emphasized that “changes had to be made to the
historical canon”, which immediately set in motion “a growing tension
between producers and fans over what is considered important in the Star
Trek canon”.23 This is not to suggest that Star Trek was canonically “pure”
before Enterprise wrecked it. As Canavan emphasizes, “there is simply too
much material produced across too many decades by too many production
teams in too many divergent media environments for it to truly cohere in a
single, unitary “whole”” (2017, 167). Star Trek has been “famously riddled
with inconsistencies”24 since inception, mainly due to the fact that “none of
the writers could have anticipated that they were laying the foundations for
an entertainment franchise that would come to span decades and grow to
encompass hundreds of episodes and [over] a dozen films”.25 As George
Kovacs states, “[w]riters were only loosely concerned with standards of
continuity and consistency of detail — the obsessive examination of the
series’ fans had not yet manifested”.26
In many ways, Braga and Berman’s frustration is understandable:
prequels always-already run the risk of contaminating pre-established
narrative facts unless editorially managed with either a modicum of
expertise at the helm, or the creative will to do so. On the one hand, it is
entirely possible for prequels to follow, obey, and ultimately shore up,
extant chronologies, whereas on the other, it becomes difficult to innovate
when canonical governance imposes “a limited degree of creative
license”,27 to create new worlds and new civilizations that are not supported
by future events; or as the case may be, by actively contradicting what has
already been established. As prequels are defined by a “narrative sequence
element that comes before an already-existing narrative sequence”,28
production teams may feel creatively constrained by canonicity, and as a
result, end up in a situation whereby generic and narrative innovation might
lead to established facts, histories, and back-stories being contradicted,
suggesting that there are perils associated with prequelization. Indeed,
prequels like Enterprise may operate to provide backstory and augment the
imaginary world, but situating texts before an already-existing narrative
sequence suggests that care should be taken by producers to align with what
we might describe as a variation on backstory, which in the case of prequels
becomes the “frontstory”, that is, narrative data that occurs in Enterprise’s
future —in this case, TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, and the feature film series.
This is not solely the turf of Star Trek, however. George Lucas received a
lion’s share of scorn for the Star Wars prequels for a number of reasons,29
one being the introduction of elements not supported by the original trilogy.
Likewise, Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels, Prometheus (2011) and Alien:
Covenant (2016) have become grist for the fannish mill, most notably
regarding the evolution of the xenomorph, and the way in which the films
struggle to build “transfictional bridges” between franchise installments.30
Among other criticisms, J. K. Rowling has come under fire for the Fantastic
Beasts films, especially second installment, The Crimes of Grindelwald
(2018), for revising elements first articulated in the Harry Potter novels and
film series. Fans understand these kinds of revisions as forms of
“retroactive continuity” (or “retcon”), a concept derived from superhero
comic books, which refers to

a narrative process wherein the creator(s) and/ or producer(s) of a

fictional narrative/ world… deliberately alter the history of that
narrative/ world such that, going forward, future stories reflect this
new history, completely ignoring the old as if it never happened.31

Unlike rebooting, which wipes the slate clean of continuity in order to

“begin again” with a new narrative sequence,32 ret-conning occurs “in
continuity”. Whether or not fans accept revisionism of this type depends in
large on the narrative rationale explained within the imaginary world itself.
For instance, J. R. R. Tolkien seemed to be

well aware of this kind of reaction when he retconned The Hobbit to

bring it in line with The Lord of the Rings, doing so quietly, and even
finding a way to cleverly make both versions canonical; the older
version is said to be the story Bilbo told, but a distortion of the truth,
while the “newer” corrected version tells the story as it really was.33

Conversely, should retconning occur because of editorial mismanagement,

whereby extant continuity is ignored or viewed as a constraint to be
circumnavigated, then fan audiences have been shown to respond unkindly,
and at times vehemently. After almost two decades of broadband speeds
and band-widths, and with the introduction of even speedier systems like
fiber-optic technologies, fan discourses related to what I have termed
elsewhere as “canonical fidelity”34 have become quotidian. Besides the
participatory affordances of social media platforms, where producer/fan
conflicts are played out publicly, other fans, usually continuity acolytes,
mobilize textual conservationist discourses by cataloguing, archiving,
essaying, and ultimately policing, the ontological health of the imaginary
world. As with debates about canon —and by extension, other fannish
discourses— on-line “narractivity”35 indicates that displays of expertise are
also bids for “subcultural capital”, bids that seek to develop and shore up
one’s status as connoisseur and cognoscenti, as the “good” fan in possession
of knowledge as a form of symbolic-currency. Policing violations in
continuity not by correcting them through transformative works like fan
fiction, but through indexical labor that doesn’t seek to repair, but rather, to
expose and criticize such violations becomes one of the ways that fans
deploy their expertise.
Consider Trek fan Bernd Schneider’s website, Ex Astris Scientia, which
frequently publishes forensic indexes of the Star Trek universe: from the
“Treknology” Encyclopedia to Starship Databases; from episode synopses
and analyses to extensive commentaries centered on matters of canon and
continuity (and more besides).36 In a page titled “Enterprise Continuity
Problems”, Luther Root exposes significant issues with the first Star Trek
prequel TV series, focusing on two episodes that introduce elements not
supported by the imaginary world’s ontological index.37 In “Acquisition”,
for example, the Ferengi are introduced, an alien race that Starfleet did not
encounter until over two centuries later, according to TNG. “This is a major
problem”, complains Root, “regardless of the lame trick not to mention the
word “Ferengi” in the whole episode”.38 In the article, Root mobilizes
evidence gleaned from other canonical Trek series and films, most notably
TNG, DS9, and the film Generations (1995), to emphasize the temporal
anomaly set in motion by the episode. By expertly mounting a scholarly
rejection of the episode as a “continuity blunder”, much in the same way
that academics draw upon textual evidence to support their critical exegesis,
Root deploys his expertise by performing indexical labor, by patrolling the
hyperdiegesis as textual conservationist and continuity cop, thus bidding for
subcultural wages to deposit into his symbolic “bank”. What Root does not
do, however, is offer resolutions and hypotheses as to why and how the
Ferengi could have logically appeared at this point in the timeline. Instead,
Root argues that this is more about roughshod storytelling, which actively
works against the fannish tendency to proffer ontological repairs through
fan fiction, etc.:

Of course, we may always make up chains of coincidences and

oddities to explain inconsistencies, but not mentioning “Ferengi” to
the TV viewer does anything but help. Aside from their name, Earth
Starfleet and the Vulcan High Command should have at least some
basic knowledge about the Ferengi about this incident [depicted in
“Acquisition”].
At the heart of Root’s argument is the idea that “Acquisition” fails to meet
narrative criteria pertaining to continuity and canon, and consequently, the
episode’s status is queried and criticized, regardless of whether or not
Enterprise as a whole is considered fully canonical according to standard
rules of qualification.
Textual conservationists, like Root, shine a light on continuity snarls
through close narrative analysis and archiving without seeking to provide
rationale explanations for “continuity blunders”; whereas the latter can be
understood as authors of transformative works that offer solutions
articulated in fan fiction, fan films, etc. in order to rationalize and repair
ontological fractures in continuity and canon. For continuity acolytes such
as Root, however, “conserving” the Star Trek canon arguably means
identifying temporal ruptures not as a problem to be fixed, but as a criticism
levelled at producers for lacking the necessary expertise to protect
canonical continuity from contamination. Fans might very well “do more
than merely reproduce official textual material, but instead reorder narrative
information to produce expert chronologies, continuities, and encyclopedic
fan wikis”,39 but others perform their subcultural expertise by spotlighting
continuity glitches, and by critiquing and shaming showrunners for editorial
mishaps and/or mismanagement. Fan practices of this kind do not seem to
align with either “transformational” or “affirmational” fandom, both of
which are essentially celebratory,40 but an associated, parallel mode of
engagement and participation. Naturally, fans tend to occupy multiple
performative and discursive identities, but textual conservationists of the
type I am interested in here tend to focus less on unabashedly celebrating
the fan-object than they are in exposing errors in continuity to indicate that
their expertise is more advanced than the people making the series; and in
many cases, this may in fact be accurate.
Perhaps one way of understanding fans of this “expose-and-criticize”
bent is to recognize that the binary “fan/anti-fan” is not explicitly an
either/or situation, but implies a complex mode of affective shifting
vacillating between different poles, a performative spectrum that exhibits
the complexities of love and hate, passion and indifference, without
negating the middle ground between such polarities. Fans can occupy
multiple affective positions simultaneously, such as displaying and
possessing characteristics of anti-fandom while also maintaining a positive
relationship with the fan-object in general terms, what Vivi
Theodoropoulou describes as “the anti-fan within the fan” (2007, 316).41
Ultimately, “fandom is a precondition of anti-fandom”.42 As Henry Jenkins
reminds us, fandom “is born of fascination and frustration”, not fascination
or frustration.43 For instance, anti-fans of Enterprise are often already
dedicated Trek fans, and their fascination with the core principles of the
fan-object can provoke frustration with the way that the franchise is handled
by corporate showrunners. In this light, textual conservationists might also
be transformational and affirmational fans at one and the same time, but
those who deploy their expertise to expose fault-lines in canonical
continuity without proffering resolutions, can be viewed as, for want of a
better term, a specific type of derogative fandom, meaning that they
discursively hold producers to account for what they see as negligent
storytelling. By defaming and shaming producers, showrunners, and
writers, fans that bid for subcultural capital through displays and discourses
of expertise and connoisseurship implies a conflict whereby textual
conservationists jockey for authority by demonstrating that producers’
knowledge is eclipsed by “fandom’s epistemological economy”.44
One might be tempted to blame this apparent lackadaisical approach to
canon for Enterprise’s cancellation. While it certainly didn’t help endear the
series to veteran Trekkers, it is more likely that a confluence of forces and
factors led to its demise. Executive Producer Rick Berman blamed
“franchise fatigue” for Enterprise’s ratings decline, suggesting that
audiences had had enough of Star Trek after 18 consecutive years on
network TV and in syndication.45 However, such a stance seems to react
against claims that the series was simply not good enough. Many fans
opined that Berman and Braga were to blame for “the sharp decline in the
quality of Trek television”,46 for “urinating on Roddenberry’s grave and
fornicating with his corpse”.47 Roberta Pearson and Marie-Messenger
Davies argue that Enterprise “failed artistically, just as it failed
commercially”.48 Braga himself has more recently articulated his
repentance about the fact that early episodes fell short of the quality
expected by audiences for whom TNG, DS9, and Voyager are exemplars of
“Golden Age” Trek (with the caveat that each series performed less well in
ratings compared to their antecedents, suggesting that the series’ popularity
also declined respectively with each iteration).
 By the time that Braga was replaced as showrunner by Trek aficionado
Manny Coto for Season Four, the writing was on the wall. Although Coto
was praised for at least aiming to connect the series with TOS by
establishing transfictional bridges between the two programs (and by
extension, the rest of the imaginary world), he admitted that “we were
mostly gearing episodes towards people who knew the “Star Trek”
universe. We were not worried about people who didn’t. They were gone
anyway”.49 What is striking about Coto’s remarks here is that Enterprise’s
declining ratings could not reasonably have been about continuity issues in
the main; continuity is hardly the dominion of casual viewers, but of ardent
Trekkers (“people who knew the “Star Trek” universe”). Ultimately, then,
Enterprise failed to capture the imaginations of “floating voters”, indicating
that fans are a minor cluster within the broader “coalition audience”, and as
a result, do not generate enough of a viewership to capture healthy enough
ratings that would ensure survival in the brutal TV marketplace. It would be
four years before the Enterprise would fly again in J. J. Abrams’s Trek ’09,
but televisual Star Trek languished in the cultural wilderness for 12 years.
Yet as Michael Burnham of the USS Discovery sparked war with the
Klingons in a new prequel series, fans once again turned to the affordances
of cyberspace to make their frustrations known.

“It's all the Changes to the Existing Timeline that

have a lot of People Mad”
Over the past decade or so, continuity has increasingly become part and
parcel of corporate logic, one that can be largely accredited to the critical
and commercial success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet the fact
remains that producer/fan quarrels over canonical alignment have continued
to accelerate, indicating that corporate logics often fall short of the fannish
demand for canonical consistency, especially where prequels are concerned.
As Aaron Taylor argues, contemporary transmedia franchises are
symptomatic of a shift in corporate logic, one being “the appropriation of
the economics of continuity”.50 Although continuity is essentially a
narrative conceit, one that directly services textual conservationist/cultish
tendencies, it is also dialectically intertwined with commercial impulses, a
type of “commodity braiding”51 that establishes signposts, or
“entertainment stepping stones”, that lead toward other texts within the
hyperdiegesis. In a sense, fan investment and corporate logics become
intrinsically aligned insofar as the principle of continuity is concerned.52
Given the array of “user-generated discontent”53 that circulated Enterprise,
the lessons imparted at the time to Berman and Braga, and the “new”
corporate logics that place a high emphasis on continuity, one would
imagine that any new Star Trek series would involve producers learning
from historic producer/fan conflicts in order to defend against similar
criticisms in the future. When writing Trek ’09, it is plausible that Abrams,
Orci, and Kurtzman were intimately aware that tampering with established
continuity could potentially spark new confrontations from textual
conservationists; hence the quantum trickery that narrativized an alternative
(Kelvin) timeline within the film itself as a way to strategically protect the
Prime universe from contamination, permitting a heightened degree of
creative license. Yet this temporal panacea did not necessarily convince fans
of its canonical legitimacy, nor did it resolve fannish queries regarding
hyperdiegetic “fact”.
In November 2015, CBS announced that a new Star Trek TV series,
titled Discovery, would be entering production. Guided at first by veteran
Trek writer Bryan Fuller, it later emerged that Discovery would not be set in
the Kelvin Timeline, but would return to the Prime Universe for the first
time since the cancellation of Enterprise, insofar as live-action Trek is
concerned. Although Discovery’s producers were initially secretive about
when the series would be set, fans began marshalling theories based on
early promotional images of the USS Discovery that were shown at a San
Diego Comic-Con panel in 2016. Most notably, fans forensically analyzed
the images, theorizing that the series would be yet another prequel because
of the ship’s registry number —NCC-1031— which as one fan argued,
“would suggest it is set after Enterprise but before The Original Series”. As
Discovery’s status as prequel was confirmed, some fans turned to social
media to discuss, debate, and defame the decision, often by invoking
Enterprise as short-hand for canon/prequel contamination:

The show will have many of the same problems Enterprise had —
trying to create a show for modern sensibilities that can act as a
plausible predecessor to something made in the 60s. This affects
 everything from aesthetics to storylines to characterization [. . .] But
this show, fitting into the prime universe just ten years before Shatner-
Kirk turns up, is going to be a real head-scratcher if it doesn’t align
neatly with the blinking lights and space Nazis of the original series.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a mistake?

For some fans, the notion that a new Trek series would again function
retroactively —looking backwards rather than into the future— became
cause for concern.

I’m not a fan of the decision to go pre TOS either and I just want them
to move forward. Many people including myself wanted the series to
pick up 50–100 years post Nemesis and go from there, but we all
know that’s not happening now. I’m a lot less excited now that pre
TOS is official, but I’m still happy for a new show. We’ll see what
happens. . .

It is worth noting that the emergence of textual conservationist discourses

centered on Discovery’s status as prequel occurred well in advance of the
series premiere. “The writers will definitely have to be even more careful
than the folks on ENT [Enterprise] to avoid causing major backstory
problems”, explained one fan.
These anxieties would eventually be realized as additional information
came to light, in particular the news that series’ protagonist Michael
Burnham, played by Sonequa Martin-Green, would in fact be Spock’s
adopted sister, a new “fact” that isn’t supported by the universe’s
“frontstory”. From a textual conservationist stance, this newly established
familial relationship is little more than a cheap, hackneyed retcon, a
transparent attempt to address older Trekkers’ nostalgia by attempting to
shoehorn transfictional bridges between TOS and Discovery, regardless of
whether or not such a maneuver is narratively and canonically warranted.
Some textual conservationists drew from established canon to criticize the
Spock/Burnham dyad, especially concerning Spock’s half-brother, Sybok,
who features in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, but has yet to be mentioned
in Discovery even though they were “raised as brothers”. (A discussion
thread on Quora titled “Where is Sybok in Star Trek Discovery?” captures
the debate well.)54
 As the series premiered in November 2017, textual conservationist
discourses continued apace, not only on social media platforms, but also
across fannish entertainment journalism websites that were not yet active
during Enterprise’s original broadcast. Although the inception of
broadband/fiber optic speeds and bandwidths certainly led to fan practices
and behaviors becoming publicly visible, the participatory affordances of
so-called Web 2.0 also created space for an armada of websites dedicated to
fan journalism to emerge, such as Den of Geek, i09, and The Mary Sue, etc.
It is within this discursive universe that producers have also sought to
paratextually respond to the complaints of textual conservationists. For
example, Aaron Haberts, one of two showrunners on the first season,
claimed that: “[t]he aim is not to violate things that are very important to
people [and] I think that so far we’ve found a way to balance it. If we sat
there and worried about it and studied it every single hour, it’s easy to
choke. You have to push through”.55 Much to the consternation of Trek ’09
anti-fans, Alex Kurtzman took over as showrunner for season two (although
he has been involved as executive producer and co-creator with Fuller from
the start). Like Haberts and Goldsman, Kurtzman has attempted to
paratextually rehabilitate the series regarding canon complaints by asking
fans to “be patient with us”, implying that the series will eventually align
with the rest of the Trek hyperdiegesis.56 Said Kurtzman: “[t]he show has
been made by people who are trying to protect that [canonical] legacy. . . so
it’s a constant debate about where the line is in terms of canon violation,
there’s a supreme court of debate that allows us to stay true to canon and
also stretches the boundaries of it”.57 In the Supreme Court of on-line fan
opinion, however, Discovery has not only stretched the boundaries of
canon, but snapped it irreparably. The criticisms have been varied and
multiple: from the design of the Klingons to the lack of visual, costumal,
and technological fidelity with TOS onwards; from Sarek’s newfound
ability to converse with Burnham across great distances; to the implications
of spore-drive technology; from Burnham’s status as mutineer to Spock’s
comment in TOS episode “The Tholian Web”, that there has never been a
mutiny in Starfleet (“absolutely no record of such an occurrence”); from
advanced hologram and holodeck technology to the temporal coordinates of
the Klingon War.
That being said, however, I reject the notion that continuity blunders are
part of a nefarious scheme to upset the Trek faithful. In fact, Discovery’s
relationship to canonical continuity is more ambivalent than the majority of
textual conservationist discourses have allowed. Rather, it seems that 21-
century Star Trek—or at least Star Trek that followed in the wake of
Enterprise’s cancellation— has been hitherto reluctant to explore new
regions of future history in a post-TNG/DS9/Voyager temporal locale.
Hence, Discovery’s status as prequel —or as the case may be, an
“interquel”58— could be perhaps recognized as “safe harbor” for the
producers. Despite seeming to violate the principles of canonical continuity,
Discovery has also invoked multiple linkages with the imaginary world’s
“frontstory”, by establishing connections with canonical events, locations,
and characters. From this perspective, the idea that Burnham is Spock’s
adopted sister may be strategic for the producers as it immediately pulls one
of Trek’s formative and famous characters into the orbit of the new series,
perhaps in an attempt to justify Discovery’s existence as an authentic branch
of the hyperdiegesis. Likewise, the inclusion and insertion of Harry
“Harcourt Fenton” Mudd—from TOS episodes “Mudd’s Women” (1966)
and “I, Mudd” (1967)— establishes a canonical relationship between TOS
and Discovery, just as the “Mirror Universe” arc midway through
Discovery’s first season ricochets across TOS, Enterprise, and DS9, each of
which include episodes that feature trips to the alternative universe.
Moreover, the appearance of Captain Pike’s Enterprise at the close of
Season One aims to further weave interconnective tissue between various
canonical threads. By the same token, the introduction of Spock himself in
Season Two —played by Ethan Peck, the third actor to play the character
after Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto— as well as Pike taking
command of the Discovery, there is an argument to be made that the
producers have been anxious to cultivate a canonical “aura” by consistently
threading “narrative braids”59 onto Star Trek’s frontstory, especially TOS.
Arguably, there doesn’t seem to be a solid rationale for situating Discovery
before TOS rather than after the final TNG film, Nemesis. In fact, some fans
have expressed that they’d be more than satisfied with Discovery if it was
located in post-TNG narrative space. I would argue that the series’ close
proximity to TOS, and to Kirk and Spock, implies that the producers were
not yet confident that Star Trek’s televisual renaissance could successfully
launch without at least some support from canonical characters and events.
Yet instead of servicing fans, Discovery seems to promote ““fan
disservice,” where continuity is pointedly ignored, revised, or discarded”.60
 On the one hand, perhaps one could extrapolate that Discovery’s
showrunners have not yet learned from textual conservationist discourses
that surrounded Enterprise. On the other hand, however, it seems that the
producers’ various attempts to construct canonical linkages between
Discovery and TOS are viewed as arbitrary by some fans, and lacking the
necessary textual support to bulk up the world’s infrastructure, mainly
based on the use of retroactive continuity principles that disassemble the
imaginary world rather than support its augmentation and extension.
Writing for Screen Rant, John Orquiloa explained that “many fans just
couldn’t reconcile how Star Trek: Discovery could come before the hokier-
looking The Original Series”;61 or as one fan put it, “c’mon can’t anybody
here be bothered to research and keep true to history?”
It is possible to infer that Discovery’s producers might well be observing
the concerns of textual conservationists, at least to some extent, by seeking
to further develop substantive bridges between series. The introduction of
Pike, the USS Enterprise, and Spock in Season Two aims to promote such
bridge-building, regardless of a lack of visual, narrative and/or generic
fidelity with frontstory, with the episode “If Memory Serves” (2019)
proffering a continuation of the original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage” (1965,
but unaired until 1988), which did not yet feature William Shatner as
Captain Kirk, but Jeremy Hunt as Pike). Although “The Cage” was Gene
Roddenberry’s first but unsuccessful attempt at launching a Star Trek TV
series —critics thought the episode was “too cerebral” for 1960s audiences
— it was canonized in TOS episode “The Menagerie” (1966), an episode
that depicted Pike sharing his memories of the episode with Kirk and Spock
before his death. Furthermore, “If Memory Serves” opens with a
“Previously on Star Trek” lead-in, which summarizes “The Cage” by
reusing footage from the original pilot, and by extension, “The Menagerie”.
In the episode itself, Pike and the Discovery return to Talos IV, the planet
from “The Cage”, where Pike experiences a vision of the future and learns
of his ultimate fate. In essence, “If Memory Serves” operates as a direct
sequel to “The Cage”, although visual fidelity between the episodes is
sorely lacking, as summed up by one fan’s criticisms:

That “previously on Star Trek” with clips from “The Cage” (1965)
and the MTV-like transitions, then the cut to Pike’s face — like,
WHUHHH? How are we meant to process the different film quality,
 costumes, Talosian makeup, and the actors? I mean, audiences are
already complaining that we’re supposed to take the aesthetic change
on faith, and now it’s rubbed in our collective faces. It would’ve been
more consistent (additional cost, but cheap relative to DSC’s movie-
quality expenses) to re-shoot with new-Pike, new-Spock and new-
Number One in new-quarry.

This commenter’s critical perspective rehearses the perils associated with

prequelization related to visual congruence, which we can understand
conceptually as being in concert with technological and narrative
consistency as sub-elements of canonical fidelity. It seems as if some
textual conservationists expect Discovery to channel TOS’s dated aesthetic,
or in this case, to “remake” elements of “The Cage” with “new-Pike, new-
Spock”, etc., as a way to avoid juxtaposing radically different televisual
contexts.
Based on production discourses for Season One, the introduction of
Spock did not seem to be planned for the series’ future. Akiva Goldsman
explained that “we are trying to be very gentle about any kind of direct
intersection with what we would consider hero components of “TOS” [. . .]
It’s certainly mentioned, but it’s not explored”.62 When asked if audiences
would eventually find out what Spock thinks of Burnham’s mutiny,
Goldsman stated simply: “Nope”. Although Goldsman departed the series
as executive producer once the first season ended, there is nothing “gentle”
about Season Two’s “intersections” with TOS’s “hero components”, with
the arrival of the Enterprise, Captain Pike, Number One, and Spock being
front-and-center. It may be that the inclusion of so many elements pulled
from TOS and into Discovery’s ambit is a direct response to textual
conservationist discourses pertaining to the series’ ambivalent relationship
to canonical continuity.
As Kurtzman took over as showrunner for Season Two, several changes
were made based on fan responses, the largest being the kerfuffle over the
design of the Klingons (signified by the Twitter hashtag #NotMyKlingon).
But perhaps the most interesting shift comes in the two-part season finale,
which ends with the Discovery hurtled from the 23rd century and into the
29th. Spock seems to speak directly (and metafictionally) to Discovery’s
textual conservationist critics, stating that “the very existence of Discovery
is a problem”. Spock also explains to Starfleet Command that the Discovery
and its spore-drive technology should be strictly “classified”, and not to be
discussed “under penalty of treason”. In doing so, the Season Two finale
arguably conducts a kind of continuity patching that works to redress
narrative “blunders” in one fell swoop: first, by demonstrating that
Discovery’s “very existence” is not necessarily contradicted by pre-existing
“frontstory” should it be henceforth contained within the classified vaults;
and second, that the series’ temporal leap into the 29th century frees the
narrative from the constraints of canon; although it would still need to
comply with what will now be backstory (as opposed to frontstory).
For some fans, however, this was nothing less than “a kind of sweeping-
under-the-carpet move”, “a cheap move”, and “lazy writing to fix lazy
writing”:

This “solution” is not credible. It also doesn’t fix lots of stuff, like the
wrong insignia, holographic communications, beyond-weird Klingons,
non-pregnant tribbles, and an unrecognizable NCC-1701 [the USS
Enterprise]. Glad they’re outa’ here though. Here’s hoping they’ve
traveled into the future just a minute before the sun goes supernova.

For many textual conservationists, Discovery simply does not meet the
criteria as far as world-building goes, not only related to continuity as a
mode of logical and structured storytelling, but also regarding canonical
fidelity in its various forms and guises: from the series’ aesthetic,
technological, and visual designs (uniforms, Starships, spore-drive) to
generic and narrative incongruities (“beyond-weird Klingons”, ship-to-ship
transporting, no “blinking lights and space Nazis”).
Conversely, some fans believe that Discovery is “obsessed with canon”,
as one fan put it. “Discovery is trying to tie in as much old Trek stuff as
possible, e.g., Mirror Universe, Spock’s family, the Enterprise and Pike and
Number One, Talos IV, Section 31, the Borg (probably) and time travel. Too
much!” We could also include the way that Discovery’s opening theme
music begins and ends with samples lifted from the TOS theme, as well as
the mobilization of other audio cues and sound effects from TOS. We could
describe such audio linkages as examples of sonic fidelity, a faithfulness
that has been tested with the use of audio signifiers from both TNG and the
Kelvin films (TNG is set over a century after Discovery, the Kelvin films
are located in a parallel universe). “There’s absolutely no continuity in this
dang show”, complained one fan, “and they’re just using sonic iconography
without any care”.
From both positions, then, Discovery’s relationship to canonical
continuity is troublesome. Although this essay has focused on textual
conservationists’ response to canonical continuity, many fans appear to be
satisfied with the series, and embrace it is a welcome addition to the fifty-
plus year franchise, illustrating that Star Trek fandom, as with other media
fan cultures, is neither a “coherent culture or community”, but “a network
of networks, or a loose affiliation of sub-subcultures, all specializing in
different modes of fan activity”, activities that bring different modes of
engagement and affective nodes and nuances.63

Final Thoughts: Prequel Rights?

Unlike Enterprise, Discovery seems to be in rude health for the time being,
with a third season in production as of this writing. Despite mixed reviews,
many of which praised the series’ “cinematic” production values while
criticizing the quality of writing, Discovery’s maiden voyage captured over
9 million viewers in November 2017.64 Although these figures did not
generate the same quantity as Enterprise’s premiere, which garnered over
12 million before steadily declining, in this era of narrowcasting and
streaming, 9 million is a respectful number indeed. More than this, the first
two episodes of Discovery “drove a significant number of single-day sign-
ups”65 for the subscription-only service, CBS All Access (although the fact
that the series was not first aired on network TV or in syndication was also
heavily criticized by Trekkers). Perhaps the most profound indicator of
CBS’s newfound faith in the Star Trek television branch and brand lies with
the news that Kurtzman had signed a five-year deal with the studio in 2018
to spearhead the creation of several new series, and expand the franchise
considerably. At the Las Vegas Star Trek convention, it was announced that
Patrick Stewart would be reprising his role as Captain Jean Luc Picard for
the first time in almost two decades, legitimating those fans who
complained that the franchise should be trekking into uncharted future
territories rather than looking backwards like Enterprise, the Kelvin films,
and Discovery before it. Other projects include two animated series, a
comedy titled Lower Decks —created, written, and co-produced by Mike
McMahan, the head writer on the popular animated series Rick and Morty
(2013-present)— and an animated series for children to be aired on
Nickelodeon.
This does not mean, however, that prequels are no longer on the
production roster. Kurtzman has since green-lit a new series focused on
“Section 31”, Starfleet’s “Black Ops” branch, which is set to feature
Michelle Yeoh as the alternative Phillipa Georgia from the Mirror Universe;
as well as a potential trilogy of TV films featuring classic villain Khan,
which may be helmed by Trek alumni Nicolas Meyer, who directed Star
Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1983), a film that many fans consider to be
Trek at its finest. (Meyer also served on the production team for Discovery’s
first season.) In a surprise twist in Star Trek prequel discourse, fans
petitioned CBS in 2019 to produce a series based on the adventures of
Christopher Pike’s Enterprise, with Anson Mount from Discovery in the
Captain’s Chair, indicating that prequels are not necessarily out-of-bounds
for the Trek fan-base per se, but that prequels should be approached with
caution and diligence, especially where canon and continuity are concerned.
“The fans have been heard”, stated Kurtzman, “Anything is possible in the
world of Trek [and] I would love to bring back that crew more than
anything”.66

Notes
1 Roberta Pearson and Máire Messenger Davies, Star Trek and American Television, Berkeley,
California: California University Press, 2014, page 5.
2 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures, London, England: Routledge, 2002.
3 Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, New York
and London, England: Routledge, 2012, page 43.
4 Ibid.
5 Mark Clark, Star Trek FAQ 2.0, Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books,
2013, page 375.
6 Gerry Canavan, “Hokey Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots”,
Extrapolation,58(2–3), 2017, page 167.
7 Adam Kotsko, “The Inertia of Tradition in Star Trek: Case Studies in Neglected Corners of the
‘Canon’”, Science Fiction and Television, 9(3), 2016, page 347.
8 Matt Hills, “From ‘Multiverse’ to ‘Abramsverse’: Blade Runner, Star Trek, Multiplicity, and the
Authorizing of Cult//SF Worlds” in J. P. Telotte and Gerard Duchovnay, editors, Science Fiction
Double-Feature: The Science Fiction Film as Cult Text, Liverpool, England: Liverpool
University Press, 2017, page 32.
 9 Canavan, “Hokey Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots”, page 167.
10 Kotsko, “The Inertia of Tradition in Star Trek: Case Studies in Neglected Corners of the
‘Canon’”, page 349.
11 Hills, Fan Cultures, page 28.
12 Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, page 36.
13 Jack Braitch, “User-Generated Discontent”, Cultural Studies, 25(4–5), 2011, page 624.
14 For example, see Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Film Sequels: Theory and Practice from Hollywood to
Bollywood, Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2009; Stuart Henderson, The
Hollywood Sequel: History and Form, 1911-2010, London, England: BFI/ Palgrave, 2010.
15 M. J. Clarke, “The Strict Maze of Media Tie-In Novels”, Communication, Culture and Critique,
2, 2009, page 435.
16 Liam Burke, The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre,
Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, page 163.
17 Sam Ford, “Fan Studies: Grappling with an Undisciplined’ Discipline”, Journal of Fandom
Studies, 2(1), 2014, page 65.
18 Derek Johnson, “Fan-tagonisms: Factions, Institutions, and Constitutive Hegemonies of
Fandom” in Jonathan Gray, Cornell Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, editors, Fandom:
Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, New York, New York: New York University
Press.
19 David Greven, “The Twilight of Identity: Enterprise, Neoconservatism, and the Death of Star
Trek”, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 50, available at
https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/StarTrekEnt/.
20 Duncan Barrett and Michèlle Barrett, Star Trek: The Human Frontier, London, England:
Routledge, 2016, page 261.
21 Sue Short, Cult Telefantasy Series, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarlane & Company, page 181.
22 Hills, “From ‘Multiverse’ to ‘Abramsverse’: Blade Runner, Star Trek, Multiplicity, and the
Authorizing of Cult//SF Worlds”, page 30.
23 Lincoln Geraghty, Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe, London,
England: I. B. Taurus, 2007, page 37.
24 Kotsko, “The Inertia of Tradition in Star Trek: Case Studies in Neglected Corners of the
‘Canon’”, page 348.
25 Ibid., page 352.
26 George Kovacs, “Moral and Mortal in Star Trek: The Original Series” in B. M. Rogers and B. E.
Stevens, editors, Classical Traditions in Science Fiction, New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015, page 202 (my italics).
27 Sue Short, Cult Telefantasy Series, page 181.
28 Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, page 380.
29 Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community, and Star Wars Fans, London, England:
Continuum, 2002.
30 William Proctor, “Trans-Worldbuilding in the Stephen King Universe” in Matthew Freeman and
William Proctor, editors, Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth, 2018, London,
England: Routledge.
31 Andrew Friedenthal, Retcon Game: Retroactive Continuity and the Hyperlinking of America,
Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2017, Kindle Edition.
32 William Proctor, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia, London, England: Palgrave,
forthcoming.
33 Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, page 273.
34 William Proctor, “‘I’ve seen a lot of talk about the #blackstormtrooper outrage, but not a single
example of anyone complaining’: The Force Awakens, Canonical Fidelity, and Non-Toxic Fan
Practices”, Participations: International Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 15(1),
2018, available at https://www.participations.org/Volume%2015/Issue%201/10.pdf
35 Paul Booth, Digital Fandom: New Media Studies, New York: Peter Lang, 2010, pages 103–127.
36 See http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/.
37 See http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/enterprise_continuity.htm.
38 Ibid.
39 Matt Hills, “The expertise of a digital fandom as a ‘community of practice’: Exploring the
narrative universe of Doctor Who”, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into
New Media Technologies, 21(3), page 361.
40 See https://obsession-inc.dreamwidth.org/82589.html.
41 Vivi Theodoropoulou, “The Anti-Fan Within the Fan: Awe and Envy in Sport Fandom” in
Jonathan Gray, Cornell Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, editors, Fandom: Identities and
Communities in a Mediated World, New York: New York University Press, pages 316–328.
42 Ibid., 316.
43 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, New York, New York: New York University Press, 2008,
page 258.
44 Matt Hills, “The expertise of a digital fandom as a ‘community of practice’”, pages 360–374.
45 See https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/star_trek_producer_reveal.
46 Ina Rae Hark, “Franchise Fatigue?: The Marginalization of the Television Series After The Next
Generation” in Lincoln Geraghty, editor, The Influence of Star Trek on Television, Film and
Culture, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarlane & Company, 2007, page 31.
47 Karen Anijar, “A Very Trek Christmas: Goodbye” in Lincoln Geraghty, editor, The Influence of
Star Trek on Television, Film and Culture, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarlane & Company,
2007, page 231.
48 Pearson and Davies, Star Trek and American Television, page 81.
49 See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/arts/television/01itzk.html?_r=0.
50 Aaron Taylor, “Avengers disassemble! Transmedia superhero franchises and cultic
management”, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, 7:2, 2014, page 182, author’s
italics.
51 Matthew Freeman, “The Wonderful Game of Oz and Tarzan Jigsaws: Commodifying Transmedia
in Early Twentieth Century Culture”, Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media, 7, 2014, page 44–
54.
52 Kotsko, “The Inertia of Star Trek”, page 347.
53 Briatch, “User Generated Discontent”.
54 See https://www.quora.com/Where-is-Sybok-in-Star-Trek-Discovery.
55 See https://screencrush.com/star-trek-discovery-canon-movies-books/.
56 See https://www.inverse.com/article/37357-star-trek-discovery-canon-changes-tos-tng.
57 See https://uk.ign.com/articles/2017/08/02/whats-canon-and-whats-not-in-star-trek-discovery.
58 According to Wolf, an ‘interquel’ is a “narrative sequence element that fits chronologically in
between two already-existing narrative elements in the same sequence.” Wolf, Building
Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, page 377.
59 Ibid.
60 Hills, “From ‘Multiverse’ to ‘Abramsverse’”, page 32.
61 See https://screenrant.com/star-trek-discovery-franchise-future-no-prequels/.
62 See https://variety.com/2017/tv/news/star-trek-discovery-akiva-goldsman-1202569789/.
63 Matt Hills, “From Fan Culture/ Community to the Fan World: Possible Pathways and Ways of
Having Done Fandom”, Palabra Clave, 20 (4), 2017, page 860.
64 See https://deadline.com/2017/09/star-trek-discovery-draws-9-6-million-viewers-sunday-
premiere-1202176478/.
65 See https://deadline.com/2017/09/star-trek-discovery-cbs-all-access-record-sign-ups-
1202176110/.
66 See https://comicbook.com/startrek/2019/04/21/star-trek-discovery-captain-pike-spinoff-alex-
kurtzman/.
APPENDIX
ON MEASURING AND
COMPARING IMAGINARY
WORLDS
Mark J. P. Wolf

Looking at the collection of essays in this volume, each exploring a single,

particular imaginary world, it is natural to consider to what degree it is
possible to compare worlds, and, in order to do so, to measure them in some
useful way, so that worlds, described by their measurements, can then be
quantitatively compared. These measurements should allow one to compare
and contrast examples, perhaps even to locate them along a spectrum or
within a phase space (which is really a multidimensional spectrum), where
one can plot the points representing a collection of entities for comparison,
and immediately see how similar or different they are, and what kinds of
distributions occur.1 Such tools are helpful even in areas which are more
typically studied qualitatively; for example, in Film Studies, one can
compare the lengths of films, the number of shots per film, film budgets,
cast sizes, number of lines of dialogue, and so on. Similarly, a study of
literature could compare short stories, novellas, and novels, looking at the
number of words used, the number of characters, story events, and so on.
Conceiving of entities as sets of interrelated parts is the basis of
structuralism, and mythemes, narremes, and lexemes are examples of
attempts to reduce something to individual units (in mythology, narratology,
and lexical meaning, respectively). The term “narreme”, defined as the
basic unit of narrative, was first coined by Eugene Dorfman in 1969, and
was further refined as a concept by Henri Wittman in 1974. Roland Barthes
attempted to examine the codes and units of narrative in S/Z (1970), and
others since then have tried to precisely define what constitutes an
individual unit of narrative. So far, however, no proposed unit has
succeeded to the point of being widely accepted, apart from larger divisions
like chapters, episodes, or scenes. Imaginary worlds, then, are even more
difficult to divide into basic units (mundemes?), due to all the possible types
of world data that can be used in the construction of a world.
Imaginary worlds are notoriously hard to quantify precisely, making
measurements and comparisons difficult. First, there is the problem of form;
the transmedial nature of many worlds means that they can be made up of
words, images, sounds, moving images, and so on, and such elements are
difficult, if not impossible, to translate from one form to the other. Too
often, no amount of ekphrasis is sufficient to convey an image in verbal
form (a picture is often worth more than a 1000 words), and likewise,
verbal descriptions can be written that are impossible to concretely
visualize. Second, there is the problem of content; even within a particular
medium, world elements can be depicted with varying degrees of narrative
density and resolution. A decades-long world war with millions of
participants can be summarized in a page of text, while two characters
conversing during a single dinner involving could take dozens of pages to
describe fully. Finally, there are the related questions of cohesion and
coherence. Cohesion is how well world data sticks together or works well
together, whereas coherence is the ability of a collection of world data to
form a coherent whole, a world that makes sense and seems feasible or
plausible. Coherence, which has to do with meaning, differs from
consistency insofar as it underlies the potential for consistency; without
coherence, there is no way to consider whether or not a set of world data is
consistent or inconsistent. The worlds of Tolkien’s Arda and Wright’s
Islandia are both very coherent, and thus we can judge how consistent they
are, whereas the collection of world data found in the Codex Seraphinianus
(1981) has some aesthetic or stylistic cohesion, but there is little or no
coherence binding everything into meaningful infrastructures, much less a
coherent whole, and without such relationships, notions of consistency and
inconsistency cannot be meaningfully applied.
At first glance, it may seem like there are some good places to start an
attempt at measuring and comparing worlds, such as spatiotemporal size,
the number of world data present, or the amount of time needed for a user
to experience the whole world. So let us examine each approach, and the
resulting promises, perils, and pitfalls they contain.

Spatiotemporal Size
The most common way to compare locations in the empirical, Primary
World is by size; the geographic sizes of countries, in square miles or
kilometers; the surface areas and circumferences of planets, population
numbers, and so on. Imaginary worlds, however, cannot be compared as
easily, however, because they are often not described statistically by their
authors; for example, Tolkien never specified the population nor the exact
square mileage of Gondor (though cartographer Karen Wynn Fonstad has
estimated it at 716,426 square miles).2 Beyond that, there is also the
question of how much of a world is actually used, with story events
occurring in it. A world can have vast deserts and seas, but few or no
inhabitants, and likewise little or no narrative activity; or, on the other hand,
one could have a very small area (like Barsetshire or Lake Wobegon) which
has a rich geography and history, and events covered by multiple works.
The world of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978) is only an
apartment block in Paris at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, but it is described in
hundreds of page of exhaustive detail; and although the descriptions all
occur frozen in time on June 23, 1975, shortly before 8:00 pm, the events
discussed in flashbacks span over a 100 years, with around 100 interwoven
subplots based on the apartment building’s many residents. Likewise,
Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here (2014) takes place all in one
location, a small plot of land on which a room of a house is built, but covers
the events happening there from millions of years before humans appeared
on earth to thousands of years after the present day, with all of its hundreds
of individual moments presented out of order and often visually
overlapping each other. Both Perec and McGuire present worlds which are
very small spatially, but which contain a great degree of detail and history,
whereas other worlds might be vast, stretching across galaxies, but still only
be the settings for short stories of science fiction.
And then, in the medium of video games, there are procedurally
generated worlds, like those of Minecraft (2009) and No Man’s Sky (2016),
which are so large that a player could not even hope to explore them within
multiple human lifetimes. It has been claimed that a Minecraft world can be
made of up to “Two hundred sixty-two quadrillion, one hundred and forty-
four trillion blocks”3 and that if each block is said to be a cubic meter, that
the surface area of a Minecraft world is around four billion square
kilometers (compared to the Earth’s approximately 510 million square-
kilometer surface).4 No Man’s Sky is even bigger, with
18,446,744,073,709,551,616 procedurally generated planets that you can
actually fly to, land on, and explore (meaning that if you visited one per
second, it would take you 585 billion years to see them all). If we were to
measure the land area of all these worlds, we would have to conclude that
No Man’s Sky has the largest world, at least geographically; but the vast
majority of these worlds also have no history or narrative associated with
them, either. Dwarf Fortress (2006), on the other hand, procedurally
generates landscapes along with characters who live there, generating
histories for each of them which include such things as who they battled
and where they traveled.
Compared to hand-crafted worlds, procedurally generated worlds are
often criticized for being too repetitive, with world elements that are
oversimplified, and little more than recombinations of the same elements.
They reveal the value of hand-crafted worlds, where a human author makes
things that have meaning and are interrelated with other objects and events.
Authors write histories that are driven by causality, as opposed to being
merely lists of disconnected events. While procedural-generation methods
are ever-improving, it is still difficult even for human beings to create
interesting stories and characters consistently over time; so it seems
unlikely that such things will ever be automated well. And there is only so
much that a given author can create within a given timeframe. That brings
us to our next method of comparison, that of counting world data.

Number of World Data

Procedurally generated worlds demonstrate that mere numbers of world
data usually reveal little or nothing about a world. In a few kilobytes of
memory, one could write a short program to generate random character
names, and leave it running for weeks, generating a long list of a world’s
inhabitants, but even with billions of names, there is really no world created
as a result. Limiting our discussion to world data hand-crafted by humans
does not help much, since humans can also employ mindless methods of
procedural generation.
And what exactly is a world datum? A name, an object, a design, a
location, a character, an event; world elements can be as varied as we like,
and of course, any given imaginary world will have to have a finite number
of them, however we define them. Sometimes it is obvious which worlds
have more data, without making a count; we can all agree that the worlds of
Star Wars or Star Trek are larger and more detailed than the world of
Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris (1961), or that the worlds of Myst (1993) and
Grand Theft Auto V (2013) are larger than the worlds of Asteroids (1979) or
PONG (1972), but not all comparisons are so obvious (for example, which
is bigger, the world of Star Wars or Star Trek?).
No matter how we even try to define a world datum, or divide a world
into individual data, we will run into problems; it would seem world data
cannot be completely quantized. How many world data are there in an
image of a dense cityscape? Or a multi-layered soundtrack of a location’s
ambience? Where do we draw the line when considering what counts as
world data? John Williams’s musical scores are an integral part of
experience Star Wars films, but while some of the music is diegetic (like the
Cantina Band music), much of it is not, so should we not include anything
that the characters of a world could not see or hear, even if the audience is
aware of it? Trying to actually count the world data of a world of any size
or complexity quickly reveals the shortcomings, if not the impossibility, of
applying such a method. But questions regarding the experiences of the
audience who is vicariously exploring the world brings us to the next
method of measuring user experience time.

User Experience Time

The amount of time needed to experience an entire world seems like a good
place to start, particularly when you consider media usage. We can compare
the numbers of hours of TV shows and movies which depict a world, or the
numbers of pages of novels, or hours needed to complete the narratives
found in video games, and all of these figures are usually used when
describing various media experiences of worlds. Of course, reading speeds
vary, and not all players will advance through a game at the same rate.
Audiovisual media like movies, radio, and television may seem to provide
the most similar and standardized experience for all audience members, as
they have a set running time, so counting the hours and minutes would
seem to be a good way to compare them. But all these media, especially the
visual ones, can be more or less dense with detail; soundtracks can be more
layered, and images more intricate, and packed with enough detail to
require multiple screenings in order for all the detail to be noticed. Home
viewing media also allows freeze-framing and re-viewing so that audiences
can spend greatly varying amounts of time with the same movies or
television show episodes.
User experience time also can vary based on the conditions surrounding
the experience; watching something in a darkened movie theater is of
course different than watching something on a cell phone screen in a noisy,
busy public environment in daylight (can any horror movie be as effective
in the latter environment as in the former?). Watching with distractions
means interruptions, and possibly more re-playings, changing viewing time,
as well as the whole experience itself. Also, a user’s experience of a world
will depend much on the amount of time allotted for the completion of
world gestalten, which may require some contemplation of the world data,
allowing connections between them to be recognized by the user. Some
presentations of world data, and the media in which they appear, promote
reflection time, while others do not.
In any event, user experience time is still too variable and even more
difficult to measure when it comes to transmedia worlds appearing across a
variety of media.

So What Comparisons Can Be Made?

Can worlds be compared in any useful way, or is the point of this essay
merely to abandon any hope of finding a way to discuss worlds in relation
to each other in some systematized way?
To some degree, we can still compare various aspects of imaginary
worlds, such as invention (the degree to which a secondary world relies on
Primary World defaults), completeness (how fully imagined a world is),
consistency (the degree to which the parts of a world are in agreement),
cohesion (how well the parts of a world are connected together), coherence
(how well the parts of a world form a coherent whole), and the various
amounts of media (words, images, moving images, sounds, etc.) that are
used to convey all the world’s data to an audience. But can we compare the
entire worlds themselves with each other? Or derive some statistical
measures of them for the purpose of comparison?
Maybe… if we carefully build our conceptions of the worlds being
measured from several different sources. Instead of trying to consider whole
worlds all at once, we can first look at the individual infrastructures that
make them up, but in an abstracted way.5 For example, starting with maps
and locations, rather than thinking in terms of square mileage, we could
consider what we might refer to as “salient locations”, regardless of their
size, each of these being a place, treated as a single location, where some
narrative event occurs, and the number of narrative events occurring at each
location. To use an example familiar to a wide audience, consider the planet
Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back (1980). While Hoth is an entire planet, the
number of salient locations on it is rather small; there is Echo Base (which
is made up mainly of the control room, the hallway, and the garage where
the Millennium Falcon is parked), the Wampa’s cave where Luke is held
prisoner, the generator (seen at a distance), the trenches where the rebels
await the Empire’s troops, and the open, featureless land where much action
occurs (the ATAT attack, the shooting of the probe droid, Han Solo opening
the dead Tauntaun with a lightsaber, and so on). From an extradiegetic
standpoint, this is like making a list of the sets needed for the Hoth
sequence of the film. While the entire planet of Hoth has a relatively small
number of salient locations, other places might have a large number of
them, even in a much smaller geographic area, such as the towns of Twin
Peaks or Wayward Pines found on the eponymous television shows. Thus, a
small town may have more salient locations than an entire planet, and
perhaps even seem more expansive, at least narratively speaking. The
concept of salience applied to locations also allows one to deemphasize
places which are only seen on a map but never used, or merely referred to
but never visited; and likewise, salience itself could be seen as a spectrum,
since some locations may contain a majority of a story’s action while others
are only visited momentarily (thus, one still has to set a bound as to what
will count as “salient”).
The notion of salience can be applied to other infrastructures as well,
usually using narrative importance to determine their salience (admittedly,
nonnarrative worlds may not work as well, though they may have other
ways of indicating salience). Once the salient elements are identified, we
can determine the overall shape of each infrastructure, and the connections
between them. This, of course, still becomes more difficult the larger a
world is, but we could compensate by simplifying our scales, by selecting
only those elements with a higher degree of salience, or by chunking
elements together into larger groups (for example, considering Hoth’s Echo
Base as a single location, rather than dividing it into control room, hallway,
and garage, or even, at a still broader scale, considering Hoth as one
location among many other planets). Naturally, changing the scope and
scale used to measure a world means parsing a world at different
resolutions, some more coarse than others, but we may want a lower-
resolution conception for the purpose of a comparison, especially for larger
or more complex worlds.
There are, however, two main problems with the method of comparing
interconnected infrastructures; the subjective process of dividing
infrastructures into elements, and the reliance on narrative for the
determination of salience. The first problem is one that is encountered in
any kind of structuralist venture; defining boundaries between individual
elements and precisely defining what constitutes an element. For example,
in regard to spatial locations: one might have a chase which passes through
an ever-changing landscape on a planet’s surface. The chase scene, which
could be done in a single take with moving camera, could pass seamlessly
through a variety of different environments, giving us two possibilities: we
could try to determine some criteria for deciding where one location ends
and the chase crosses over into another one (for example, using bridges or
changes in terrain as boundaries), or we could consider the entire chase
route as a single location, since the action is continuous and no part of the
route seems more salient than the rest of it (if that is the case). No matter
how you slice it, it is a subjective decision, and one which will likely
depend on the scale of the world and the purpose of the comparison.
Although it is subjective, a useful comparison can still result as long as the
same method of division is applied to all the worlds involved in the
comparison.
The other problem, the reliance on narrative for salience, becomes a
problem when the worlds being compared differ in regard to their own
reliance on narrative. Some worlds contain a straightforward narrative,
others a branching or multi-threaded narrative, some (like video game
worlds) may even rely on user input for narrative to emerge. Some may
contain little or no narrative at all. Even if we consider only worlds with a
single, linear narrative line in them, there can still be a varying relationship
between story and world; in some cases, there is just enough world to
support the story, while in others there may be much world data and
material beyond what is needed for the story.6 In worlds with multiple
storylines, something that is salient in one storyline may not be salient in
another, although some things may be salient in multiple storylines.
Storylines themselves can also vary in salience in regard to the world in
which they appear (to use another Star Wars example, Anakin Skywalker’s
storyline is far more salient than that of Greedo or Tion Medon). Overall
salience, then, may depend on a combination of things, though it should not
be difficult to determine what the main storyline is, and how important
something is in relation to it; especially when narrative fabric is itself one of
the infrastructures being considered.
I am aware that the preceding suggestions do not solve all the problems
involved in measuring and comparing worlds, nor do they completely
remove the subjective element that seems an inevitable part of such an
activity. Worlds may take on many shapes and forms, and may even differ
as to which infrastructures they rely upon, but these infrastructures, and
even their presence and absence, do give some starting ground upon which
measurement and comparison can be built. Still, comparisons of worlds will
mostly likely be made using criteria specific to each comparison, on a case-
by-case basis, while an objective standard of measurement applicable to any
secondary world seems unlikely to be found. But the more worlds we
examine, and the greater the variety of those worlds, the more we may able
to discern what is essential to all imaginary worlds, and more firmly ground
the basis by which we are able to measure and compare them. If anything,
this essay was intended to at least raise some of the issues involved in the
measurement and comparison of worlds as entities, and suggest directions
for further work in his area. In the same way that David Hilbert’s famous
list of unsolved problems in Mathematics inspired attempts to find their
solutions, perhaps the difficult nature of these problems will attract more
interest in them; but for now, an objective standard for the measurement of
imaginary worlds remains one of the great unsolved problems in
Subcreation Studies.

Notes
1 Websites like Gapminder.org are particularly good at visualizing data in this manner.
2 See Karen Wynn Fonstad, The Atlas of Middle-earth, Revised Edition, Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, page 191.
3 See Jeremy Peel, “Just how big is a Minecraft world? Big, as it turns out”, PCGamesN.com,
February 3, 2013, available at https://www.pcgamesn.com/minecraft/just-how-big-minecraft-
world-big-it-turns-out.
4 See Sarah Fallon, “How Big is Minecraft? Really, Really, Really Big”, WIRED.com, May 27,
2015, available at https://www.wired.com/2015/05/data-effect-minecraft/.
5 For a list of world infrastructures and their descriptions, see chapter three of Mark J. P. Wolf,
Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, New York, Routledge,
2012.
6 This would itself be an interesting thing to try to measure along a spectrum, though it is beyond
the scope of this essay.
INDEX

Abarrach 179, 184; see also world of stone

ABC Television Network 120
Abrams, J. J. 207, 214–215
Academy Awards 97
Ackerman, Forrest J. 134
“Acquisition” (TV episode) 212–213
Adams, Scott xvi
Adventure #1 — Adventureland xvi
Adventure #2 — Pirate Adventure xvi
Adventure #3 — Secret Mission xvi
Adventure #4 — Voodoo Castle xvi
Adventure #5 — The Count xvi
Adventure #6 — Strange Odyssey xvi
Adventure #7 — Mystery Fun House xvi
Adventure #8 — Pyramid of Doom xvi
Adventure #9 — Ghost Town xvi
Adventure #10 — Savage Island, Part I xvi
Adventure #11 — Savage Island, Part II xvi
Adventure #12 — Golden Voyage xvi
Adventure #13 — Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle xvi
Adventure #14 — Return to Pirate’s Isle xvi
Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) 146–147
Adventure International xvi, 138
Adventure/ADVENT 138
Adventureland xvi
Adventureland XL xvi
aesthetics 58
aesthetic pleasure 43
circles 63
nature 63
paradigms 46
phenomenon 62
revolution 61
views 45
affective shifting 213
afterlife as theme 56, 60
AGD Interactive 147, 150
Alfred (Sartan) 176–179, 182–183, 185, 187–188
algorithm as narrative 42, 63
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 10, 105, 178
Alien: Covenant 211
Alien series 211
Altman, Robert 54
Amazing Stories 126
American Sign Language 98
Amiga 139, 146
Angelique’s Descent (novel) 133–134
antihero 46, 52–53
antiquity 60–63
appendices see world-building techniques
Apple II 138–139, 143, 146
Apple Macintosh 139, 146
Apuleius 46, 61
architecture 27, 30–31, 33–35
archival evidence 176
Arda 226
Arianus 176, 179–180, 182–186; see also world of air world of sky
Aristophanes 86
Aristotle 43, 47
Arrakis 2
Artaud, Antonin 61–62
Asteroids 228
astonishment 43; see also estrangement, defamiliarization
Astounding Stories 127
Atari ST 146
Atlantic Ocean 88
Atlas of Middle-earth 232
audio books 86
authorship 147, 151–152
author’s craft or strategy 41–44, 46–48, 52–53, 58, 60–62, 64, 66
multiple authors 137, 146, 147–150, 151–152
axiology 43, 49, 63, 64; see also value systems

Bachelard, Gaston 23
backstory 197–199, 202, 204, 208, 211
Baggins, Bilbo 211
Bakhtin, Mikhail 46–47, 55–56, 62, 64–66
Bal, Mieke 22
ballet 98
Balzac, Honoré 22, 26
Bannerworth, Marmaduke 124
Barnabas Collins and Quentin’s Demon (novel) 128
Barnabas Collins vs. The Warlock (novel) 128
Barnabas, Quentin and the Body Snatchers (novel) 128
Barnabas, Quentin and The Crystal Coffin (novel) 128
Barnabas, Quentin and The Mummy’s Curse (novel) 128
Barnabas, Quentin and the Vampire Beauty (novel) 128
baroque 52, 58, 62, 66
Barquentine 111
Barrayar 67, 70–74, 76–79
Barrie, James M. 86
Barsetshire 2–3, 227
Barthes, Roland 225
Bathory, Elisabeth 128, 134
Batman (TV series) 120–121
Batman and Robin 209
Belle of Amherst, The 86
Bennett, Joan 121, 125, 133
Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp 115
de Bergerac, Cyrano 11
Berman, Rick 207, 210, 214–215
Berrigan, Don 86
Bessie (cow) 91
Beta Colony 69, 70–72, 76–77
Betjeman J. 101
Bewitched (TV series) 120–121, 125
Big Finish Audio Dramas 133
Birds, The (play) 86
Black Lodge (Twin Peaks) 192, 194, 199, 200, 202, 203
Black Ops 222
Blake, W. 106
Bleak House 108–110
Blue Whale 122
BOB (Twin Peaks) 192, 197–200, 202
body 159–161, 167–168
Body Snatchers, The (novel) 128
Book of Sir John Mandeville, The 10
Borges, Jorge Luis 50
Boston, Massachusetts 91
Bouchard, Angelique 125, 127, 130, 132–134
Bowen, E. 101
Boy in Darkness 102
Braga, Brannon 207, 210, 214–215
Broadway 96
Bronte, Emily 127
Brook, Peter 61
brother as theme, motif, symbolism 42, 45, 48, 52–54, 57–58
Brothers Karamazov, The 3, 40–66
Buchan, John 33
Buffalo, New York 91, 93
Building Imaginary Worlds 2, 98
Bujold, Lois McMaster 3, 67–82
Bunyan, John 106
Burgess, Anthony 101, 110, 111
Burnham, Michael 215–219
Burns, Edward 97–98
Burton, Tim 135
Butler, Samuel 163
Butlerian Jihad 159–165, 171
Bykov, Dmitry 40, 45, 46, 65

“Cage, The” (TV episode) 219

California 98
Canavan, Gerry 210, 222
canonicity 206–207, 209–222
Cantina Band 228
Čapek, Karel 86
carnival, carnivalesque 47, 63, 65
Carroll, Lewis 10, 105, 178
Cartwright family 88, 91–92, 94–96
catharsis 43, 49, 53, 60
Cavendish, Margaret 10
CBS 215, 221–222
CBS All Access 207, 221
Cervantes, Miguel de 62
Cetaganda 74–75, 77, 79–81
Chagall, Marc 62
Chalion series 67, 68
change, rate of 24–25
character (in narrative) 41, 43–44, 46–50, 52–56, 58–59, 61, 64
chase scene 231
Cheeta 115–116
Chelestra 2, 178, 182, 184–187; see also world of water
Childs, Annette 146
China 74–75, 109–110
Christian VI 16
Christian faith, contexts 50, 56–57
Church of England 24, 28, 30
civil rights 71
Clarice and Cora 102, 111
Clarke, Arthur C. 12
Clarke, Susanna 181–182
Classicism 44
clones 76
Cloudcuckooland 86
Clute, John 105, 109
Cobert, Robert 129
code: codes clashing or synchronized 47
cultural code 45, 47–48
narrative code and algorithm 42
secret and hidden code 43, 47, 49
socio-cultural code 41
symbolic code 48
transcultural code 44
Codex Seraphinianus 226
cognitive revolution 165
coherence 206, 209, 221, 226
cohesion 226
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 105–106
collective unconscious 169–170
Collins, Barnabas 124–134
Collins, Bramwell 127
Collins, Carolyn Stoddard 122, 126
Collins, David 121, 123
Collins, Elizabeth Stoddard 121, 126, 133
Collins House 121
Collins, Josette (DuPres) 123, 125, 127, 132, 134
Collins, Laura Murdoch 123–124
Collins, Quentin 126, 128–130, 132, 134
Collins, Roger 121, 123, 130
Collinsport 2, 120, 122–123, 131
Collinwood 120–121, 123–125, 127–136
Colossal Cave Adventure 138
comedy 48, 59–60
Comic Con 215
Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon 11
comics 206
commodity brading 215
community 44, 60, 64
comparing worlds 225–232
completeness 229
Concrete Happening 97
confession 44, 46, 59
conflict 41, 43, 45, 48
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 13
conscience 41, 45, 55, 59
consistency 226, 229
continuity 206–210, 212–215, 217, 220–222
Conway, Massachusetts 89
Cotahatchee tribe 95
Coto, Manny 206, 214
Craig family 91, 93, 95
creativity xv
Crime and Punishment 46
crime fiction and genre 40, 45, 47–48, 58–59, 62, 66
crime investigation 46, 48
crime theme 43, 44, 48, 52–53, 58–59, 65
crime scene 43
Crimes of Grindelwald, The 211
Crofut, Jane 90
Crowell family 91, 96
cultural capital 197, 201, 202
Curtis, Dan 119, 122–123, 130–133, 135–136

Dark Passages (novel) 134

Dark Shadows 3, 119–135
games 129
origins 119–120
original TV series 119–127
novels 127–128, 133–134
Dark Tower Series 178
The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger 180
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three 178
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass 180
Daventry 2–3, 137–155
Davies, Marie-Messenger 214
Day, Andrea 151
De Camp, L. Sprague 127
de la Mare, W. 108
Deaf West Theater 98
Death Gate Cycle Series 3, 175–179, 182–183, 185, 188
death-rebirth 55, 63
Death’s Gate 177–179, 185, 187
Death Gate 175, 183
decoding 41, 51, 53, 58
defamiliarization 48–49
Deleuze, Gilles 62
Den of Geek 217
Depp, Johnny 135
Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, The 10
destiny 52, 57
detective novel 41, 59
Dickens, Charles 30, 46, 106, 108–110
direct address 87
disability 79
Discworld 181
Discworld Series 181
Doestoevsky, Fyodor 3
dog 176, 183, 187
Dolan, Marc 199, 202–203
Don Quixote 62
Doppelganger 42
Doré, G. 105
Dorfman, Eugene 225
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 40–66
Double, The 46
Dracula (novel) 122
Dragon Wing 176, 181–185
dragons of Pryan see Pryan
dragon-snakes 178, 187–188
Drama Desk Award 98
Dreams of the Dark (novel) 134
Dreyer, Carl Theodor 61
drugs 164
Du Maurier, Daphne 127
Dublin, Massachusetts 89
Dune 3, 159–160, 166
“Dunwich Horror, The” (short story) 126
Dwarf Fortress 227
Dwarves 176, 178, 184–186
dwarf 180
Dwarven 184
Dydo, Ulla E. 97–98
Dynamite Comics 134
Dyson sphere 184
dystopia 18, 44, 64, 110

Earth 227
East Jaffrey, Massachusetts 89
East Sutton, Massachusetts 98
Echo Base 230
egalitarianism 70–71
Eisenstein, Sergei 62
ekphrasis 226
El Greco 106
11 rue Simon-Crubellier 227
Elven Star 176, 186
Elves 176, 178, 182, 185–186
Elvish 185
Elven 186
Kenkari Elves 179
Empire Strikes Back, The 230
enigma, as content and form 43–44, 52, 58, 64
Enlightenment 13, 18
“Enterprise Continuity Problems” (webpage) 212
entertainment stepping stones 215
Equilan 184
Escape the Gloomer xvi
eschatology, eschatological 40, 43, 55–59, 60–61, 64
estrangement, making strange 43, 49; see also astonishment
ethics 45, 56, 65
Eureka Springs, Arkansas 86
Europe 93
Evreinov, Nikolai 62
Ex Astris Scienta 212

Fairy Books 151–152

fairy tales 142, 150–152
“Fall of the House of Usher, The” (short story) 130
Fallon, Sarah 232
family 45, 48, 52–55, 59
fan cultural capital 193, 197, 199, 201–202
fan disservice 197, 200
fan fiction 25, 137, 147, 149–150, 212
fan service 192–193, 202
fandom 191–193, 195–205, 208, 210–214, 218–219, 221–222
fanon 207, 215
fantagonism 210
Fantastic Beasts 211
Fantastic or Magic Realism 41, 43–44, 46, 61–62
fantasy, fantastic 7, 10–11, 13, 41, 43–44, 47, 58, 61, 64
farce 59, 64
Fate as theme, agency 44, 52, 54, 56
father as theme, motif, symbolism 44–48, 52–53, 55, 57–58, 64
Fathers and Sons 44
fear 44, 48, 50, 55
Fellowes, Julian 54
femme fatale 54
Ferengi 212–213
fetish 50
feudal system 172
film 2, 85, 96–98, 206–207, 211, 229
film noir 58
Film Studies 225
Filonov, Pavel 62
Finney, Jack 128
Fire Sea 178, 184
Fisher, Mark 192–194, 197, 203
Fitting, Peter 10, 13
Flay 106, 108, 111
Florensky, Pavel 62
folklore 41–42, 45, 47, 50, 57, 64
Fonstad, Karen Wynn 226, 232
footnotes see world-building techniques
Ford, Sam 210, 222
forgiveness 44
France 91
franchises 191–192, 195, 197, 200–202, 211, 213–214
Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus 11
free will xv
freedoms 72
Freidenberg, Olga 55–56
Frid, Jonathan 124, 127–131, 133, 135
frontstory 211, 216, 218, 220
Frost, Mark 3, 193–195, 198, 200, 202–204
Fuchsia 102
Fuller, Bryan 215, 217

Gaiman, Neil 101

Gapminder 232
Gargantua & Pantagruel 46
Garner, Ross 191, 196, 203
gate(s) 177, 179
gender 15–18
genealogy 88, 95
general semantics 170
genre 43, 45–48, 51, 59
geography 42, 85, 87–88, 227
Georgia, Phillipia 222
Gernsback, Hugo 11
Gertrude, Countess 102, 111
gestalt 127
ghost 123, 125–126, 129–130
Gibbs family 89, 91–96
globalization 48, 56, 63, 64
God xv, 90
Gold Key Comics 128
Goldberg, Whoopi 135
Goldman, Akiva 217, 219
Gondor 226
Good Year Playhouse 120
Gormenghast 2–3, 100–116
Gosford Park 54
Grand Theft Auto V 228
Grant, John 105, 109
Great Time, as concept of Bakhtin 44, 64
Greece 94
Greedo 231
Greek chorus 86
Greene, Graham 100
Greenville, North Carolina 86
Griffin 8, 11, 13
Grimm, Brothers 106
grotesque 64
Grotowski, Jerzy 61
Grover’s Corners 2, 85, 87–91, 93–96, 98
Grover’s Corners (musical) 98
Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles 150
guilt 45, 58
Gulliver’s Travels 7, 10–11, 15, 18

Haberts, Aaron 217

Hall, Sam 120
Hallam, Lindsay 192–194, 196, 198–200, 203
Halley, Edmund 13
Hamlet 61
Hand of Chaos, The 182, 185
hand-crafted worlds 227–228
Hanson, Christopher 3
Haplo (Patryn) 175–180, 182, 184–185, 187–188
Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, The 87
hard sciences 159–160, 171
Harris, J. 101
Harwood-Smith, Jennifer 3
Haven (TV series) 178
“Lost and Found” 178
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 29
head canon 207
Heinlein, Robert A. 67
Heiress of Collinwood (novel) 134
Hellenism 44, 46, 62
Herbert, Frank 159, 164, 166, 168, 170
Here 93, 98, 227
hermeneutics 48, 51, 53
Hermes Press 128
Hersey family 95–96
Hickman, Tracy 3, 175–182, 184–185
Higgins, Andrew 3
Hilbert, David 232
Hillard, Molly Clark 152
Hills, Matt 3, 191–204, 208, 222–224
history, historic 1, 41–43, 45, 57, 59–61, 85, 88, 90, 227
History of a Town, The 64
Hitchcock’s Diegetic Imagination: Thornton Wilder, Shadow of a Doubt,
and Hitchcock’s Mise-en-Scéne 99
Hobbit, The 11, 86, 211
Hoffman, Julia (Dr.) 134
Holberg, Ludvig 3, 7–18
Hollow Earth 7, 12–13, 18
Hollywood 97
Holocaust 115
Hoth 230
House of Dark Shadows (film) 130
House, The (TV show) 120
Hugh the Hand 182
Hugo Award 67
Hula girls 177
Huygens, Christiaan 13
hyperdiegesis 206, 208–209, 215, 217–218
“I, Mudd” (TV episode) 218
i09 217
IBM 138, 146
IBM PCjr 138–139, 145–146, 148
Ibsen, Henrik 62
iceberg vs searchlight 69
I-Ching 125–126
identity 43–45, 52, 55, 63
ideology 42, 64
Idiot, The 40
“If Memory Serves” (TV episode) 219
imagery 42, 45, 49
imaginary world 41, 43–47, 49, 58–59, 64–65, 206–207, 211, 218
imbalance 177, 179, 186–187
inconsistency 206, 210
infodump 180–181
infratrsuctures see world infrastructures
Inglis, Rob 86
Inheritance, The xvi
Innocent Abroad 180–181
InterAction see Sierra Newsletter
Interactive Fantasies 150
interconnectivity 175–8
interpretation 41, 46–48, 51–52
interquel 217
Into the Labyrinth 184
invention 229
irony 41, 47, 50, 53–55, 62
Islandia 2, 226

Jackson, Shirley 127

Jackson’s Whole 75–76
Jacques, Brian xvi
Jaffrey, Massachusetts 89
James, Edward 3
James, Henry 126, 128
James, M. R. 26, 28
Jane Eyre (novel) 121
Japan 73–74
jeeveses 76
Jenkins, Henry 119, 131, 141, 213, 223
Jensen, Jane 149, 150
Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrell 181
Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground, The 7, 10–11, 13–14, 16,
18
Journey to the Center of the Earth 11
judge, judgement 55–56, 60–61
Juno 115

Karlavaegen, Derek 150–151

Karlen, John 133
karma 52, 56–57
Kazakhstan 88
Kelvin Timeline 208, 215, 221
Kennedy, Kara 3
Kepler, Johannes 11
Khan 222
Kicksey-winsey 182, 184–186
King, Stephen 178, 180
King Lear 61
King’s Quest (1984) 3, 137, 143, 147, 152
King’s Quest: Adventures of Graham 149
King’s Quest Companion, The 141–142, 145, 150
King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity 139, 143, 149
King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown 137, 146, 147
King’s Quest II: Romancing the Stones 147
King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne 139, 145, 146
King’s Quest III Redux: To Heir is Human 147, 149
King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella 141, 146
King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! 141, 145, 148
King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow 149, 150
King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride 141, 149
King’s Quest ZZT 150
Kipling, Rudyard 32
Kirk, James T. 208, 216, 218–219
Klingons 215, 217, 220
Knox, Ronald 26
Komarr 69
Kornhaber, Donna 97, 99
Kovacs, George 210, 223
Kuling 109
Kurosawa, Akira 40
Kurtzman, Alex 207, 215, 217, 220–222

Labyrinth 175, 177–180, 185, 187–188

Lake Sunapee 89
Lake Winnipesaukee 89
Lake Wobegon 227
Lang, Andrew 151–152
Lang, Leonora Blanche “Nora” 151–152
Las Vegas 221
Leinster, Murray 127
Lem, Stanisłaus 228
Lennard, John 69
Lesser, Sol 97
Letters of Gertrue Stein and Thornton Wilder, The 98
Leviathans 126–127, 133
Levy-Bruhl, Lucien 46
Lewis, C. S. 10, 13, 101, 112
Licensed Practical Sexuality Therapists (LPSTs) 71
licensing 149, 150
Life: A User’s Manual 227
Limbeck (dwarf) 180
Lindbergh, Charles 94
linguistics 168, 170–171
Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The 10
literature 85–86, 206, 225
liveness 86
Loomis, Willie 133
Lord of The Rings, The 11, 56, 86, 211
“Lottery, The” (short story) 127
love as theme 50, 51, 53–54
Lovecraft, H. P. 126
Lovett, Charlie 26, 27–28, 29, 36
Lowe, Al 151
Lucas, George 211
Luce, William 86
Lucian of Samosata 10
Lynch, David 3, 191–192, 194–205

Macbeth 61
MacCaulay, Thomas Babington 22
MacDowell County 85
magic 11–13, 175, 177, 179, 181, 183, 185, 188
Patryn 176, 182–183,
possibility magic 177, 183
rune/runic 176–177, 183
Sartan 183
Magic Realism 41, 43–44, 46, 61–62; see also Fantastic Realism
Mallory, J. P. 23
“Man Trap, The” (TV episode) 119
Maning, Stewart 135
maps see world-building techniques
March, Shelia 121
Marlowe, Christopher 106
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 50
Martin, George R. R. 1
Martin-Green, Sonequa 216
Marvel Cinematic Universe 215
Marx, Karl 15
Marxist/Marxism 15–16
Mary Sue, The 217
Massachusetts 88
Massachusetts Tech 91
Massie, Elizabeth 134
Master of Shadows: The Gothic World of Dan Curtis (documentary) 135
Mathematics 232
McAvoy, David 196, 197, 200, 204
McGuire, Richard 93, 98, 227
McMahan, Mike 221
measuring worlds 225–232
media, the 41–43, 49, 60, 62
Medon, Tion 231
Méliès, Georges 18
Memory Alpha 209
Memory Beta 209
“Menagerie, The” (TV episode) 219
Mendlesohn, Farah 103, 178, 180–181, 183
mensch 185–188
Merrimack County 98
Metamorphosis 46, 61
metaphor 44, 45, 47, 51, 52, 62–64
metatheatrical devices 87
Meyer, Nicolas 222
Meyerhold, Vsevolod 61
Micromégas 11
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 61
Miéville, China 105
Millay, Diana 123–124
Millennium Falcon 230
Mills, Craig 149
mind 159–161, 163, 165–168
Minecraft 227, 232
“Mirror, Mirror” (TV episode) 127
Mirror Universe 218, 220, 222
misterium 40, 43, 59–64, 66
modernism 52, 61, 63
Molière 15
Moody, Ellen 22
moonrise 90, 98
Moorcock, M. 101
morality 41, 43, 45, 50, 55–58, 60–61, 64–65
Morgan, C. 101
Morr, Kenyon 149
Morris, William 106
Mount, Anson 222
movies 130, 135
audio dramas 132–133
comics 128, 132, 134
fandom 130–133
reboots 130–131
MPI Video 132, 135
Mt. Monadnock 89
Mt. Washington 89
Mudd, Harry “Harcourt Fenton” 218
“Mudd’s Women” (TV episode) 218
multiple authors see authorship
multiverse 150–151
mundemes 225
murder mystery 45, 47–48, 50, 54
Muzzlehatch 115
Myst 228
mystery as book, genre 40, 43–45, 47–48, 51–52
Mystery House 138, 148
mytheme 42, 54, 57, 64
mythologeme 42, 47
mythopoesis 40, 42–46, 49, 62, 64

Nabokov, Vladimir 40, 45–46

Naismith, Cordelia 70–73, 77–79
name, naming 43–44, 46, 52–55
Narnia 11
narractivity 212
narremes 225
Nazar 2–3, 7–12, 17
NBC Television Network 119–120, 132
neo-canon 208
Nephelokokkygia 86
New York 94
New York Times, The 94
Newsome, Howie 91
Nexus 175, 177–180, 184–185, 187–188
Nickelodeon 221
Niels Klim’s Underground Travels 3
Night of Dark Shadows (film) 130
Nimoy, Leonard 218
Nineteen Eighty-Four 116
Niven, Larry 127
No Man’s Sky 227
Nochimson, Martha 191–192, 204
North America 88
North Conway, Massachusetts 89
North Sutton, Massachusetts 98
Nosé, Takuji 87, 98
Notes from the Underground 46
novel, as cultural form 40–49, 53–56, 58–59, 62, 64

Oberammergau, Germany 86
O’Brien, K. 101
Odd Gentlemen, The 137, 149
Odyssey, The 10, 45
Oedipus 45, 57, 64
Official Book of King’s Quest, The 143–145
One Step Beyond (TV Show) 120
On-Line Systems see Sierra
ontology 212
opera 98
Orci, Robert 207, 215
origin story 198–199, 202
Original Music from Dark Shadows (audio recording) 129
Orquiloa, John 218
Our Town 3, 85–99
Outer Limits, The (TV Show) 120
overlaid worlds 123

paganism 44, 47, 52, 57

Palmer, Laura (Twin Peaks) 193–194, 197–200, 202
parallel time 121, 127, 130
parallel universes see multiverse
paratexts 138–139, 142–151
Paris 227
Parker, Lara 125, 133–134
Pasadena Playhouse 98
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 61
Passion Plays 86
pathos 47, 62
Patryn 176–180, 182–188
Peake, Mervin 3, 100–116
Pearson, Roberta 214
Peck, Ethan 218
Peel, Jeremy 232
Perec, Georges 227
perspective as narrative, cultural 40, 43, 45, 47–48, 53–54, 59, 63–64
Peter Pan (play) 86
Petersborough, New Hampshire 85, 89
phase space 225
Phoenix 123–124
Picard, Jean-Luc 221
Picture of Dorian Gray, The 42
Pietism 15–16, 18
Pike, Christopher 218–220, 222
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 58
Plato 14
Poe, Edgar Allen 26, 106, 128, 130
Pohl, Frederik 127
politics 41–42, 44–45, 47, 59, 61, 63–65
PONG 228
portals 177–179, 183, 185
post-apocalyptic science fiction 67
Pratchett, Terry 101, 181
“Premature Burial, The” (short story) 128
prequels 209, 211–212, 215–216, 221–222
Priest, Thomas Pickett 124
Primary World 1, 181, 226
procedurally generated worlds 227–228
Professor Gruber 96, 98
Professor Willard 89, 93, 95–96, 98
Prometheus 211
Propp, Vladimir 45, 64, 65
Prospero’s Island 86
proto-science fiction 11, 18
Prucher, J. 180
Prunesquallor, Dr. 111, 113
Prunesquallor, Irma 111
Pryan 184–188
dragons of Pryan 187–188; see also world of fire
psychology 165–166, 168–171
Gestalt 165, 168
Jungian 168–170
Pulitzer Prize 85, 96
Pullman Car Hiawatha 87, 98
puzzle, as narrative form 41, 43, 45–46, 49, 51, 54, 58

quantum state 178

Quentin’s Theme 129
Quinn, Seabury 126
Quinto, Zachary 218
Quora 209, 217

R. U. R. (play) 86
Rabelais, François 46
radio 97, 229
radio plays 86
Rainey, Steven Mark 134
Raw (comics) 98
reader, framing perspective on narrative 41, 43, 47–50, 52–53
realism 41, 43–44, 46, 59, 61–62
Realm of the Sky 176; see also Arianus
Rebecca (novel) 127, 130
rebirth 55, 63
recognition 45, 49, 54, 57; see also anagnorisis
Reddit 209
Redwall Universe xvi
religion 41–42, 47, 49–50, 56
Remark, Erich Maria 55
Renaissance 44, 62, 63
resonance 40, 44, 47, 52–53, 64
retroactive continuity (retcon) 211–212, 216
Return to Collinwood 132–133, 136
Return To Pirate Island 2 xvi
revelation 43, 46, 51–52, 58, 60, 64
Revisiting Imaginary Worlds 2
Rick and Morty 221
riddle 41, 43, 45, 47–49, 51, 58
Ride-a-Cock-Horse 107
Rime of the Ancient Mariner 105
ritual 43, 47–48, 51–55, 58, 60–63, 65
rivers 30–31
Rockport, Massachusetts 88
Roddenberry, Gene 210, 214, 219
Romanticism 42, 52, 61, 62
Rome 94
Root, Luther 212–213
Ross, Marilyn (William Edward Daniel Ross) 128
Rossetti, D. G. 106
Rowling, J. K. 211
runes 176–177, 183
Russell, Gordon 120
Russia 72, 73, 74
Rymer, James Malcolm 124

S/Z 225
Salem Branch, The (novel) 134
salience 230–231
Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail 64
Samah (Sartan) 177–179, 185–187
Sandy Bay 88
Sarek 217
Sartan 175–180, 182–188
satire 7, 10, 13, 16
Schneider, Bernd 212
Schumacher, Joel 209
science fiction 7, 11–13, 18
Scorsese, Martin 40
Scott, Kathryn Leigh 123, 125, 134
Scott, Ridley 211
Screen Rant 218
secondariness 123–124, 127
secondary world 177, 181; see also subcreation
secret knowledge 43, 47, 48, 50–51, 54, 65
Section 31, 221
Selby, David 126, 129, 132
self-reflexivity 87
Sellers, Peter 101
semantics 42–44, 51, 56, 58
Sentinel 94
Sepulchrave, Lord 102, 106, 111
Sergyar 69–70
series novels 21–22
Serpent Mage 177, 179, 185
serpents 187–188; see also dragon snakes
Seventh Gate 179, 187–188
Seventh Gate, The 179, 182, 185
Shadows on the Wall 120–121
Shakespeare, William 41, 86
shame, as narrative theme 44, 54–55
Shannon, Lorelei 149
Sharing Knife series 67
Shatner, William 216
Shelley, Mary 11
showrunners 208, 210, 214, 217–218, 220
Sideways in Time (short story) 127
Sierra 137–139, 146–149
Sierra Creative Interpreter (SCI) 147, 149
Sierra Newsletter 149
Sierra On-Line see Sierra
sigla 177
Skotoprigonyevsk 2
Skywalker, Anakin 231
Skywalker, Luke 230
Slaughterhouse Five 64
slavery, slaves 76
Soames family 96
soap opera 121–122, 135
social justice 15–16, 18
social sciences 159–161, 163
sociology 168, 171
soft sciences see social sciences
Solaris 228
Solo, Han 230
Soloviev, Vladimir 62
Somnium 11
sonic fidelity 221
Sourdust 111
South Sutton 98
space opera 68
Spanish history 68
Spear, Peter 141
Spearfish, South Dakota 86
Spirited Away 56
spiritual: center 62
mentor 42–43
modality 62
nature 63
purpose 42
process 63
quality 61
spiritual quest 47
Spock 208, 216, 218–220
St. John in Exile 86
stage 2, 85
Stage Manager (character) 87–91, 93–95, 98
Star Trek 1–4, 206–224, 228
Star Trek (2009) 207–208, 215, 217
Star Trek (TV series) 119–120, 127, 135
Star Trek: Beyond 208
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 207, 211–212, 214, 217–218
Star Trek: Discovery 207–209, 215–222
Star Trek: Enterprise 207–211, 213–218, 220–221
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier 216
Star Trek: Generations 212
Star Trek: Into Darkness 208
Star Trek: Lower Decks 221
Star Trek: The Motion Picture 208
Star Trek: Nemesis 208, 216, 218
Star Trek: The Next Generation 207, 211–212, 214, 217–218
Star Trek: The Original Series 207–208, 210–211, 214, 216–221
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan 222
Star Trek: Voyager 207, 211, 214, 217
Star Wars 1, 211, 228, 231
Starfleet 213, 220, 222
Steerpike 102, 112–113, 116
Stevens, Frances 127
Stevenson, Robert Louis 42, 106, 127
Stewart, Patrick 221
Sting 101
Stoddard, Joe 93, 96
Stoker, Bram 122
storyworld 41–44, 46–48, 50, 52–54, 56, 58–59, 209
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The (novella) 42, 127
Strindberg, August 62
subcreation 177–178, 180, 185; see also secondary world
Subcreation Studies 4, 232
subcultural capital 212
submersible sales brochure 182
Sundering 176, 178–179, 186–187
suspense 40–41, 43, 48, 49, 64
Sutton County 98
Sutton Mills 98
Swelter 106–107, 112–113
Swift, Jonathan 7, 10–11, 15, 18
Sybok 216–217
symbolic anthropology 49, 54–55, 60
symbolic, the 50, 53–55
algorithm 63
community 44
discourse 43
elements 47
expression 56
frameworks 43, 49, 51
image 50
image-symbols 49
levels 43, 48, 54
logic 41
meaning 50
operating systems 43
orbits 44
process 63
resonances 47
resolution 45
systems 42
value 44
Symbolism, an artistic movement 62–64
symbolism: archaic 49
secret symbols 51
symbolic-axiological 64
symbolic brothers and twins 57
symbolic ecosystem 56
symbolic naming 53
syndication 131

Take a Break! Pinball 151

Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, The 10
Targaryen dynasty 1
Tarkovsky, Andrei 61
Taxi Driver 40
Taylor, Aaron 215, 224
technology 159–161, 163, 171–173
television 2, 85, 98, 206, 212, 214, 228–229
Tempest, The 86
Tenniel, John 105
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture 131
theater 2, 85–87, 97–98
Thirkel, Angela 25, 31
August Folly 33
The Headmistress 32–34
Peace Breaks Out 32, 34
“Tholian Web, The” (TV episode) 217
threshold 53–54, 56, 58, 61–63
thriller 40, 48, 59, 64
Tientsin (Tianjin) 109–110
Tierra Entertainment see AGD Interactive
time travel 119, 124–125
Time Zone 143
Titus 102, 107–108, 111–116
Titus Alone 102, 113–116
Titus Awakes 102
Titus Groan 100, 102, 103, 111
Todorov, Tzvetan 11
Tolkien, J. R. R. 1, 10–11, 18, 50, 56, 69, 112, 211, 226
Tolstoy, Leo 55
Tony Award 98
totem 52
tragic, the 45, 41, 47, 52, 54, 59, 60
tragic farce 64
tragic irony 41, 50, 53, 55
tragicomedy 48, 59
transmedia 96, 119, 193, 194, 206, 215
Travel Narrative 10, 13, 18
travelogues 4
Treaty of Versailles 94
Treknology Encyclopedia 212
Trivette, Donald B. 143–145
Trollope, Anthony 3, 21–22, 25, 26
Barchester Towers 27–29, 32, 33
 Framley Parsonage; The Last Chronicle of Barset 26
and Ireland 28
Parsonage 26
The Warden 26, 27, 29–31, 36
True History 10
trust 41
truth 41, 46–47, 50–52, 54, 56, 58–59
Turgenev, Ivan 44
Turn of the Screw, The (novella) 126, 128
Turner, Victor W. 65, 54
Twain, Mark 13
Twin Peaks 2–3, 191–205, 230
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me 191, 196, 200, 203
Twin Peaks: The Return 191–205
Twitter 220

Under-River 115
Underworld 9, 12–13
USA mirrored in fiction 70–71
user experience time 228–229
USS Discovery (spaceship) 215
USS Enterprise (spaceship) 208, 218–220, 222
uterine replicators 73
Utopia 7, 10, 13–18, 110

value systems 42, 44–46, 49–50, 55; see also axiology

vampire 123–125, 127–130, 134
Vampirella 134
Van Gogh, Vincent 106
Vance, Jack 75
Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood 124
Velázquez, Diego 106
Vermeer, Johannes 62
Verne, Jules 11
video games 2, 231
virtual reality 2
Voltaire 11
Vonnegut, Kurt 64
Vorkosigan, Aral 70, 71, 73, 77, 78, 79
Vorkosigan family 67, 68, 70
Vorkosigan, Miles 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80
Vorkosigan universe 2
Vorkosiverse 69–70
Vulcan High Command 213
Vygotsky, Lev 46

Wallace, Art 120

warrior as theme, symbolism 55
Watkins, Alfred 32
Wave 177, 179, 186–188
Wayward Pines 230
Webb family 89–93, 96
Weird Fiction 126
Weird Tales 126
Weis, Margaret 3, 175–182, 184–185
Welles, Orson 101
Wentworth family 91, 95–96
White Mountains 89
whodunit 41, 46, 48, 53–54, 58
Wide Green World series 67
Wilde, Oscar 42, 106
Wilder, Thornton 3, 85–86, 90, 93, 96–99
Willetts, Stephen 206
Williams, John 228
Williams, Ken 138, 148
Williams, Rebecca 191, 195, 205
Williams, Roberta 137–138, 139, 143, 147–149, 151–152
Winnington, G. P. 103, 106, 110
Winters, Victoria 121–123, 125, 130, 132–134
Wittman, Henri 225
Wizard and the Princess 137–141, 147, 149
Wizard of Oz, The 86
Wolf, Mark J. P. 122–124, 127, 180, 191, 204–206, 222–224
Wolf Moon Rising (novel) 134
Wood, Sam 97
Woolf, Virginia 22–23
world-building 24–25, 27, 29–30, 32, 40–43, 46–54, 177, 179–183, 193,
196–197, 200, 202, 209
appendices 176–177, 179, 182, 185
footnotes 177, 181–184
maps 140, 143–146, 176–177, 183–185
techniques 177, 179–185
textual 177, 180, 183
world data 228
world infrastructures 229–231
world of air 177, 179; see also Arianus
world of earth 177, 185; see also Abarrach world of stone
world of fire 175, 177, 179, 184–185; see also Pryan
World of Five Gods series 67
world of sky 175, 185; see also Arianus Realm of the Sky
world of stone 175, 179, 184; see also Abarrach
world of water 175, 177–179, 184–185; see also Chelestra
wrap around 143–145
Wright, Austin Tappan 2, 226
Writers at Work 86, 90, 98
Wuthering Heights (novel) 127

Xar (Patryn) 176, 178, 180, 187

Yangtze River 109

Yellow Submarine 116
Yeoh, Michelle 222

Zhualy district 88
Zifnab (Sartan) 177
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