I bet this never happens to people who write LotR fic...

[edenfalling]

After long and serious thought, I have settled upon an idea for my NFE fic. I have my main character, I have my time period, I have my general plot.

But.

I am still in the middle of some canon research, because Lewis's statements on the subject in question are brief and scattered through several books in the series.

They also make no sense.

Ye gods, why was Lewis such a lousy, inconsistent, illogical, slapdash, incompetent world-builder? WHY?! Do you have any idea the kind of weird anti-scientific (and anti-common-sense!) contortions I will have to do to force his casual pronouncements into anything that even vaguely resembles a functional system? DO YOU???

I could just scream.

But no. I will persevere. Because the end product will be worth it, and also by this point I need to find some kind of handwave just for the sake of my own sanity -- the inconsistencies are starting to keep me up at night, they are that irritating.

*retroactively slaps Lewis upside the head*

-----

ETA: If you want some specifics about the issue that is driving me nuts, go read this comment here. Basically Lewis + astronomy = EPIC FAIL, but I need to systematize his idiocy because of Reasons even though it's not directly the subject of my fic. Argh.

Comments

[rthstewart]

We were just talking about this on Twitter today. There was a comment to the effect that Tolkien thought that a faun and a girl together would not have meant tea at all but something much more yucky, Greek myths being what they are and Fauns being what they are. "Your worldbuilding makes no sense, Jack! What does make sense, you took from me!"

[edenfalling]

Ha, yeah. Much as I love Mr. Tumnus, he is not very faithful to Greek mythology. *wry* Tolkien is immeasurably more internally consistent on the mythology front. His world also does a better job of feeling like a proper world rather than a single country with some other settings hastily tacked on later as window dressing.

But I am talking failure of a much more basic, physical, "the sun rises in the east" level. And inconsistently so -- as in, some aspects of the Narnian world work correctly, others don't, and the mismatch between those aspects is the worst failure of all. *headdesks repeatedly*

[branchandroot]

Judging from some of the correspondence, Lewis was kind of deliberately and philosophically wedded to being the opposite of Tolkien in a lot of ways when it came to world-building. Which, of course, means that he drives other writers crazy.

[edenfalling]

Which, of course, means that he drives other writers crazy.

You can say that again!

[lady_songsmith]

*sympathetically pours you a drink* Oh man, the things I do to make Lewis make sense... I've reached the point of throwing things out right and left. "No, see, that's just a metaphor." "That book is the way they tell the story a hundred years later." and so forth.

[edenfalling]

Unfortunately, I am dealing with literal, present-day, person-on-the-spot descriptions of the physical setup of the world, so I can't write them off as metaphors or mangled history. And the descriptions sometimes make no sense on their own, to say nothing of the ways they contradict each other when set side-by-side. *headdesk*

Some of this is probably a side-effect of Lewis tossing off a casual comment in one book and not bothering to remember and match what he said three books later, but there is at least one point where statements in the same book are completely incoherent when you try to mesh their logical consequences, and also some of the things he says are just Epic Fail from a pure common sense perspective. I get that the man was a medieval historian, not a scientist or even a historian of science (which is a pity, as the Middle Ages were not nearly as much of a scientific void as people tend to assume), but there is a basic "the sun rises in the east" level of knowledge that he explicitly breaks at one point. *headdesks some more*

[lady_songsmith]

well now I am very curious! (I basically wrote HHB off with the 'way they tell it later' excuse because characterizing Rabadash was driving me mad) Can you say more about what details you are working with?

[edenfalling]

This will probably give my fic away entirely, but whatever, I need to vent.

First, the part that is driving most completely bugfuck crazy is the way that, as the Dawn Treader sails east toward Ramandu's island, Lewis says: And every night they saw that there rose in the east new constellations which no one had ever seen in Narnia and perhaps, as Lucy thought with a mixture of joy and fear, no living eye had seen at all. Those new stars were big and bright and the nights were warm. Which is completely ludicrous because the stars rise in the east and set in the west, just like the sun -- Ramandu himself explicitly says, later on, that "And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth's eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance." -- so even though the world is flat, the visible constellations should only be different from north to south, not east to west. Basic logic! ARGH!!!

Second, the stars are also apparently different from summer to winter, since Coriakin shone in the southern winter sky according to Ramandu -- he specifically mentions the season -- though the Narnian world is flat and is circled by its sun rather than vice versa. But I can handwave that by positing that the stars cycle their rising and setting at a slightly different speed from the sun, so that over the course of the year they go from rising exactly with the sun (and thus traversing the sky invisibly) to rising just after the sun, to rising opposite the sun, to rising just before the sun, and so on. (But I shouldn't need to handwave it, grrr!)

Third, I am annoyed at the apparent existence of planets (as per Doctor Cornelius's lecture in PC) that are specifically brighter than and distinct from normal stars. If the world is flat, then what the fuck are spherical celestial bodies doing there at all, and if all the stars move around (since Ramandu mentions the constellations changing over the history of the world), then what makes planets different and why do they have a specific name, and also why are they not mentioned as being different when the stars are born in MN or come down to earth in TLB??? Nrgh. I mean, okay, the latter two annoyances I can kind of write off as myth-inconsistencies, but I swear to god, it's as if Lewis was thinking of Narnia as a spherical world in PC and only decided later that it was a flat world because that made for a cool gimmick in VDT. *thwaps him*

Fourth, the Narnian world has a North Star, which Lewis specifically mentions in TLB. It's called the Spear-Head and he points out that it's brighter than Polaris. Given that Narnia is a flat world rather than a round one, there shouldn't be a spot in the sky where the stars seem to stand still... unless that star just kind of permanently sits in place 24/7. But Jill can canonically work out the Spear-Head's position from the other constellations, which do move, so what exactly is going on there? Also the constellations of Narnia in TLB are apparently identical to the constellations of Ettinsmoor and points north in SC. There is no accounting for lattitude difference. Furthermore, they have not changed at all in the several hundred years between Rillian's day and Tirian's, which can match either Ramandu's canonical statement that the constellations have changed since his day or Lewis's extracanonical timeline, but not both. If both Ramandu's statement and Lewis's timeline are true, then the constellations ought to be changing noticeably over just a couple centuries, and also the Pevensies ought to have noticed the differences during PC... though again, that's probably Lewis having a neat idea while writing VDT and not bothering to think if it contradicted stuff from previous books.

Fifth, given the apparent size of the sun as the travellers approach the edge of the world in VDT, there is no way Father Time should have been able to reach it, let alone squeeze it in one hand at the end of TLB -- unless the sun actually and literally changes size rather than changes its distance from the earth as it travels through the daytime sky -- but I can kind of handwave that as Aslan directly and magically fucking around with the established order of things. The other stuff, not so much.

In summary, Lewis + astronomy = EPIC FAIL.

[sabriel]

I don't think Lewis was thinking too hard about worldbuilding when he was writing about Narnia? Not like Tolkien with his races and languages and so forth. It was pretty clear from book 1 he was making religious allegorical points and not thinking so much about 'am I contradicting myself?' and 'does this make sense AT ALL?'.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, Lewis contradicts himself ALL OVER THE PLACE. I don't mind so much when his mythology is nonsensical or his anthropology is suspect -- those are easy enough to write off as narrative bias or just Our Mythological Creatures Are Different (to steal a TV Tropes construction) -- but when his actual physical world-building is borked, that's harder to fix. And I need to fix some of it so the background setting of my fic will be consistent. *wails, gnashes teeth, curses his name*

[sabriel]

Good luck with it! I'm sure you can't do worse than he did!

[speaker_to_customers]

For a flat world to reproduce the conditions we experience, and the views of the heavens we see, on our round world requires epic re-jigging of the laws of physics. For Terry Pratchett's Discworld he's even had to chop the speed of light down to approximately the speed of sound - because otherwise dawn happens at exactly the same time all over the planet. And you don't get a latitude difference in the visible stars on a flat world.

Basically flat worlds are idiotic and only the most superficial of thinkers, or people with the scientific knowledge of a Neolithic hunter-gatherer (or of an American creationist), could think otherwise.

[lady_songsmith]

Oh, the stars in the east thing, argh. That drove me nuts even as a small child. I think you're probably right that he was thinking of a round world until VDT; everything is consistent with one until that book screws things up.

As for Father Time, though, I would totally go handwavium on it; world-destruction mythos doesn't need to follow the laws of physics (because really, giants squeezing balls of burning gas?)

[edenfalling]

Mmm, yeah, you're right -- you should always be able to see all the stars from north to south; they'd just be at slightly different angles depending on where you were standing. Well, and depending on how close you were to any particularly tall land features. Mountains will do nicely for creating a closed-in horizon whether the world makes a normal horizon or not.

I wonder whether the Narnian world is actually sort of lens-shaped, so that it has definite borders -- those damn mountains of Aslan's country -- but also mimics some of the physical characteristics of a round world, given that (aside from the "new, eastern stars" bullshit) things seem to act more or less the way they ought to on a round world. Of course that would make the distribution of water in the Eastern Ocean completely nonsensical, but... argh. *beats head against table*

Hell, maybe in the Narnian world there really IS a crystalline sphere of the heavens that spins around and has a fixed point somewhere just above the north horizon. Also, there seems to be winter and summer, and the southern lands are warmer than the northern ones, so clearly the sun is moving around somehow, and... and... Oh, it's a mess. But I will bash it into something vaguely approximating functionality somehow. (Or at least something a bit less dysfunctional than Lewis left it.)

[edenfalling]

The only way I can make any sense out of that eastern stars bullshit is to say that they are NOT, in fact, the stars of the Narnian world -- they are the stars of Aslan's country that are becoming visible as the ship draws near the sweet-water zone and the travellers are somehow seeing beyond the world's edge. Which is STILL nonsensical, but at least makes a vague nod in the direction of acknowledging that it's nonsensical and says "but magic!" instead of trying to pass itself off as functional astronomy.

Practically everything in the end of TLB (when I acknowledge that book at all, which I generally prefer not to) is Aslan magically handwaving (paw-waving?) physics, because yeah, not a single bit of that makes any sense at all otherwise. (Most of it doesn't make sense even with that stipulation, but that is me speaking as someone who abominates the religious points Lewis is trying to make in that book. YMMV, obviously!)

[speaker_to_customers]

Actually I've always felt that the silliest thing of all about the Narnia books was how, in TLTWATW, in Narnia under the rule of the White Witch it was 'always winter and never Christmas'. How could there be Christmas there anyway? Shouldn't it have been Aslanmas? And how could Santa Claus have turned up?

[edenfalling]

I assume Frank and Helen imported Christmas from England to Narnia back at the beginning of the world. I'm not sure why they didn't also import Easter, given that Frank was apparently religious enough that his first instinct, upon being stuck in darkness with a bunch of strangers, was to say that they ought to sing a hymn to pass the time (and he knew one off the top of his head), but either they couldn't explain it properly to the Talking Beasts (who had no context for it) or it fell by the wayside and/or turned into a generic spring festival over the years, just as Narnia's version of Christmas seems to have become a firmly secular celebration without overt religious significance.

As for why Father Christmas is in Narnia, I'd say that makes as much sense as Bacchus being in Narnia, which is firmly established as canon in Prince Caspian, so... mythology stew, anyone?

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

The answer to the Lewis question is: "take it on faith."

[edenfalling]

I can't. Because physics doesn't work like that. And I'm not even talking quantum physics. I'm talking strict Newtonian mechanics. Or hell, let's get even more basic -- I'm talking the sun rises in the east levels of common sense "this is how the world works" stuff.

Which Lewis has managed to fuck up. *headdesk*

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

Yes it does happen to people who write LotR fic! Tolkien was a crap world-builder too. Part of it is excusable; he was writing before the discovery of Plate Tectonics and so it must have seemed to him that geography was random and whimsical. However Newton discovered the laws governing the behaviour of light between 1666 and 1704 - he didn't get it completely right but he covered the basics - and Tolkien ignores this completely. And there is nothing in LotR that gives any clue as to how the economies of Gondor and Rohan functioned.

But I will concede that C S Lewis was worse.

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

Insert Clarke line about magic and science being interchangeable.

IT'S MAGIC.

*tugging your pigtails*

[edenfalling]

Where does the deliberate ignorance of the laws of light come into play? (I am genuinely curious here -- it's been years since I reread Tolkien so I can't think of any potential examples off the top of my head.)

I tend to figure that Rohan worked on a farming, herding, and raiding economy, but Gondor, yeah, no clue. Especially no clue how the Stewards financially supported the endless war against Mordor, which may have had lulls but never seemed to really stop chewing up their people and their land. And annoyingly, that complete lack of economic interest seems to have been one of the main things a lot of later fantasy writers picked up and carried over into their own works. :-/

[edenfalling]

Ahaha, but I have no pigtails to tug! In fact, I got a haircut today so there isn't any strand of hair on my head longer than about one inch!! Victory is mine!!! *evil laughter*

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

...and you think I can't get a grip on short hair?

I grew up with three brothers. As long as it's not a buzzcut, I can get a grip. Plus, ears make a great handhold.

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

The Light of the Trees - the whole world being illuminated by, effectively, two street lights thousands of miles from many of the populated areas. The light, apparently, evaporated from the trees and then fell like rain. And there is the instance where Legolas saw, and identified, Éomer and his Riders at a distance of forty-five miles! And he wasn't looking down from a mountain, either, but was on the plain. Either light travelled in a curve or else Middle Earth is enormously larger than this Earth but, somehow, still had pretty much the same gravity.

In some of his posthumous works there are mentions that he was thinking of scrapping the whole Trees thing and having Middle Earth always having been illuminated in the conventional fashion by the Sun - but the version of the Silmarillion that was published had the insane cosmology firmly entrenched in the plot.

[edenfalling]

Aaaaah, not the ears, not the ears!

[edenfalling]

Evaporated light. Evaporated light. Yeah, that is a glaring failure of physics. I think I didn't really notice that before since the general progression of the Silmarillion is from mythology through legends to history, so I wasn't expecting the earlier sections to be strictly literal... and/or I wrote it off as the world itself settling down into the normal rules of physics over time. I mean, Arda canonically starts out as a FLAT world and only becomes round after the fall of Numenor, and the sun and moon are fruits carted around by minor holy spirits, which is not much better than evaporated light. (I always did wonder how Tolkien made that cosmology square with the heliocentric solar system, not to mention the complete non-centrality of our sun to the galaxy, let alone to the universe at large.)

But Legolas's curved light vision is much less easy to handwave, since LotR itself ought to be firmly in the quasi-historical era of that world, not the poetic allegory era. That is just carelessness.

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

Just making a point. ;) You're one of the awesome people, so ear pulling is out.

[edenfalling]

My ears are grateful. ;-)

[pencildragon11.livejournal.com]

I ran across a neat book called The Science of Middle Earth that tried to work out actual rules for how Legolas could have seen and identified horsemen at such a distance, and as I recall it had something to do with (a) Elves having huge eyes and (b) handwave Elf brains do wacky cool things okay?.

[edenfalling]

(b) handwave Elf brains do wacky cool things okay?

Sounds about right to me. *wry* Or maybe more accurately, *handwave* "Inherent elf magic can warp physics in subtle ways, look, they can make magic rings, don't argue with me here!"

[akatsuki210.livejournal.com]

It could always just be magic. There's a lot of speculation in the ASOIAF fandom about what kind of solar system cosmology could lead to the wacky seasons that world has, but there's also a distinct possibility that it has nothing to do with physics at all. (Or, more accurately, that The Great Other and R'hllor are capable of smacking physics upside the head and telling it to sit down and shut up.) Maybe Narnia is like that too? It's been a long time since I read the series, but in an inherently magical world I wouldn't necessarily *expect* stuff like the constellations to make sense--for all we know, Aslan could have put the constellations in the sky the way the ancient Greeks believed their gods had done.

[edenfalling]

Even magic cannot reconcile the statement that stars rise in the east and moving from east to west with the statement that some stars are ONLY visible in the east. No. If they rise in the east and move to the west, they will be visible in the west by the time it's getting close to dawn... and in a flat world they ought to be visible everywhere all at once in any case, because there is no curvature of the earth to create a normal horizon.

Aslan did put constellations -- or rather, put stars -- in the sky. They are living beings, he sang them into existence in The Magician's Nephew, and according to Ramandu they have moved around over time, which is why constellations change. But that doesn't excuse his complete failure of elementary logic on the "eastern stars" thing.

[akatsuki210.livejournal.com]

Aslan did put constellations -- or rather, put stars -- in the sky. They are living beings, he sang them into existence in The Magician's Nephew

Ah, now I remember that! Gah, it's been so long since I read the Narnia books.