Do spec-fic readers expect more world building than contemp-fic readers?

If your novel takes place in a well known place in contemporary times, it would take less world building for the ready to understand it. New York 1982 needs less description than an inhabited moon orbiting a gas giant on the other side of the galaxy that's populated with blue aliens with technology based on magic.

A little more worldbuilding is probably required to establish the magic realism/"other" element, but if your world is fairly close to our own, a very light touch will do.

Mind you, I figure all stories need some manner of "worldbuilding," which is a fancier term for establishing the setting. Even contemporary novels take place somewhere, in some social sphere and geographic location, among characters with some manner of influences from outside themselves making them who they are and shaping who they can and cannot become in the course of a story.

Not sure it’s different? Vivid settings work on this world or others. I tend to read SF or fantasy, but if I’m reading something well-built set in contemporary rural Maine (Carolyn Chute’s “The Beans of Egypt, Maine”) or backwoods upper Michigan (Jim Harrison’s “Brown Dog” stories) it transports me to another world too.

I think this is a bit of a "how long is a piece of string?" question. You can't really assume the background of your readership. I'd need more worldbuilding in a contemporary novel set in NYC than I would in one set on a Star Trek-like starship.

Make the visual and functional details of your world clear as your characters need to understand them.

Patty said:

Would you think, "You know, she mostly reads contemporary. My SFF readers will actually want those sorts of details."

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Yes, I would think that.

I'd go farther: I'd be unlikely to ask someone to beta-read outside of genres they're familiar with.

When we read comments from beta readers, we have to put them in context. The context of that specific reader's experiences/preferences/expertise, and then decide what makes sense for our story.

SFF, I expect a fair amount of world building, spec fic--maybe a little less, depending on the story, magic realism is set in the real world, so the world building is the same as contemporary fiction--the reader still needs to get enough details to feel they're there, but you don't have to explain the moon (though you can give a description of full/crescent, bright, yellow-orange, clouds drifting across. etc), bc it's our moon.

Generally yes but only because in SFF there could be a lot of things which the reader would have no idea about. If you have a jaberwock that lives in Mooncity I'd very much like to know how a jaberwock looks like, where it lives, what they eat for breakfast etc but I may need less descriptions of your Mooncity because I can easily imagine it as an Earth city, with skyscrapers, roads, cafes etc. Maybe I'd need to know if it's covered by a dome or something, or if the skyscrapers are really high, or made of some special materials but if it's really like an Earth city I can do with very little worldbuilding. William Gibson is very sparse on worldbuilding and he still creates great sci-fi, it just works for his stories because that's his style and that's how his books are enjoyed by his fans. The worldbuilding doesn't feel lacking when I read his books.

Patty said:

I agree, but let's say you have a beta reader whose preferred genre is contemporary. She has never watched LOTR, etc. She is reading your novel as a favor and has various feedback some of which is very good.

Let's say you pick up a pattern in some of her feedback, though, that she strikes occasional sentences out, and you come to realize those sentences mostly all fall under the 'world building' category.

Take IR's moon, orbiting a gas giant, a few posts up, FREX, and let's say you have the line:

He clenched the breathing apparatus tighter in his teeth, wishing he was back on Earth,

^^ and your reader struck that sentence as being irrelevant.

Would you think, "You know, she mostly reads contemporary. My SFF readers will actually want those sorts of details."

???

(The original post is the short form of this question, sans context.)

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Readers read what they read because those genres offer what they're looking for, which is why we often think of beta readers in terms of their preferred genre. To kind of turn your example on its head, if you were writing a romance and a reader who primarily reads sci-fi highlighted a sentence describing the male lead's sick abs as irrelevant, then you'd naturally waive that complaint. Sci-fi readers don't read sci-fi for the heady description of how one character's sixpack makes another character tingle, just the same that romance readers don't read romance for intricate analyses of how technology influences our daily lives.

You're writing for your audience and readers outside that audience aren't going to help you capture the ones that you should be aiming for, no matter how well meaning they are.

amergina said:

For example, if you're setting a book in NYC and everyone on the page is white, you've failed at your worldbuilding and your research.

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And yet I see this all the time in books...

LJD said:

And yet I see this all the time in books...

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Failures can still succeed.

Introversion said:

Failures can still succeed.

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Oh, I know...

I know my above comment wasn't clear...I'm just regularly annoyed at romances set in NYC being entirely white, or the only POC is the maid or taxi driver.

Yup. Whitewashed world.

Patty said:

Take IR's moon, orbiting a gas giant, a few posts up, FREX, and let's say you have the line:

He clenched the breathing apparatus tighter in his teeth, wishing he was back on Earth,

^^ and your reader struck that sentence as being irrelevant.

Would you think, "You know, she mostly reads contemporary. My SFF readers will actually want those sorts of details."

???

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The thing is, that sample sentence doesn't strike me as being any different from, say, "That night, suffocating in the drippy sauna that was Houston in July, he wished he could return to the cool, dry air of Colorado."

Contemporary novels have world-building, too. These are the kinds of details that give the reader a sense of place, and insight into how a character feels about the place he's in. I'm surprised your reader thought that kind of thing was irrelevant.

BethS said:

I'm surprised your reader thought that kind of thing was irrelevant.

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Agreed, and it makes me think about one of the issues with betas. Something tweaked her about that sentence (or the section it was in), but she's probably not correctly identifying what bothered her. It's actually a hard thing to dissect prose that doesn't work for you, and even harder to explain to other people.

As a worldbuilding sentence, Patty, your example sounds fine, and rather nice. I wouldn't worry about it any more.

Patty said:

Take IR's moon, orbiting a gas giant, a few posts up, FREX, and let's say you have the line:

He clenched the breathing apparatus tighter in his teeth, wishing he was back on Earth,

^^ and your reader struck that sentence as being irrelevant.

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If the reader doesn't clarify the reason for objecting, I'd ignore it. That sentence is doing two, maybe three things at once, all of which contribute to the story.

Beta readings, crits, even editorial letters, are all opinions. You have to decide which ones are relevant, which ones you're willing to be flexible about, and which ones you either ignore or STET.

I think I would agree with you, especially if you focus on the 80% of contemporary stories and not the fringe ones that need extra detail.

I read sci-fi and even historical lit for the world building. I love to entire a different space and/or time... a big part of that lies on the strength and creativity of the author.

That said, I think there is a technique to build a world WHILE you are telling the story. I'm working on a novel set 20 years in the future, and I don't take the a paragraph to tell the reader what has changed, but I do give a bit of extra description to the reader so they feel as if they have specific detail to keep the story going. It is a balance.

That said, so many times I read books just for the world.

Like everything, this is one of those "write what your heart tells you to write."

Patty said:

Some of the invaluable feedback she provided picked up on blind spots in my writing, so that was great. Other feedback pointed to things that she felt got in the way of what she was hoping the story would be. And isn't. I needed to understand she wants a different story than what I wrote.

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I got some tremendous feedback once from a beta who gave me great notes on plotting and pacing, then spent four paragraphs explaining they'd been puzzled about how two of my characters - a man and a woman who'd worked together daily for seven years - could care about each other without being romantically involved.

My point being it's perfectly fine to take the good feedback and completely ignore the stuff that doesn't make a lick of sense.

Patty said:

As a postscript, though, Ive read all her feedback now and by the end of the novel she was simply writing 'confused' on the pages.

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Yikes! I think there are personality types that don't mesh with spec-fic--folks who are literal and concrete in a way that makes the mix of science and make-believe in SF troublesome.

I enjoy the worldbuilding parts of books I read, and I feel a tension in my own writing between filling out facets of my world that I find cool and avoiding info dumps. I'm a lot more forgiving of long world building passages in published fiction than I am as a beta reader. The easy justification for this is that the published writers have incorporated the world building skillfully or it is just so innovative in itself that I enjoy the journey. The bad justification is that I've ingested a truism that world building is a dangerous thing.

I think that bad worldbuilding exists in both spec-fic and contemp-fic genres.

In contemp-fic, it often takes the form of setting your story in a place you obviously have no clue about, such as putting distant things too close together, or getting details wrong about culture/festivals/traditions. But other times, bad worldbuilding takes the form of turning into a guidebook-- where you're overly anxious to show that you've done your research, and you want to put it to good use, even if it's jarring and takes the reader out of the story. In general, though, generic cities are accepted as generic cities, and if there's any local color that influences the plot, the important bits get sketched out, and everything else is assumed to be interchangeable with any other place.

In spec-fic, bad worldbuilding often takes the form of not setting things up ahead of time that x, y, and z is possible, and then having x, y, and z come out of nowhere and the reader wasn't prepared for it. For example, I remember one book I read (2005'ish? from the library?) that was about a sorceress who was hired on to protect a royal from a demon who was supposed to attack him in two weeks' time, or whatever. 95% of the book was a boring waste of time, where absolutely nothing happened, and the sorceress was just waiting for two weeks to pass. In the last chapter or two, it suddenly turned into a contest where the sorceress and demon were fighting each other, shapeshifting like maniacs, and chasing each other across dimensions. There had been absolutely nothing that indicated that kind of magic was possible-- the most she'd done up to that point was repel a mind-reader who was trying to access her thoughts.

So I think we expect more from spec-fic because, by its nature, it's specifically not-here, so we want to know what it is. Not, like, "What's their favorite kind of cake?" when cake has nothing to do with what's going on, but more like how we'd expect more worldbuilding in a historical piece set in Heian Japan or Montezuma's court or the Suri Dynasty. We know that it's clearly Something Different with the food, with the architecture, with etiquette/manners/social hierarchy, with what's taken for granted, with what's embraced and what's rejected. So just like I'd be unhappy reading about something set in a Ming-era Forbidden City populated entirely by Americans with 21st century opinions and sensibilities, I'd be unhappy reading about a bunch of aliens, elves, space stations, or fantasy kingdoms all mirroring 21st century America. I'd like to see more creativity, and be able to understand "it takes all kinds", even if I don't necessarily agree with the details of, say, Klingon culture, or Vulcan culture, or Barrayaran culture, or Betan culture, or whatever. And yet at the same time, you can use those worldbuilding elements to make commentary on modern culture.