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Riffing on Sherwood's worldbuilding article and the linked Lev Grossman's suggestion of things fantasy novels should do more often...
...what little details, to you, make good worldbuilding? What makes worldbuilding unbelievable?
For the purposes of this question, by "good worldbuilding," I mean "interesting, and also consistent and believable within the parameters set up by the book itself."
("I can't believe in giant bugs because they break the square-cube law" is more a comment about the reader than about the plausibility of the specific giant bugs in any given fantasy novel. I'd believe in the bugs if they're in an environment where they could plausibly have something to eat when they don't have hobbit, or if it's explained that they were created by someone and then released just to harass the questers.)
One of the things which makes worldbuilding believable to me, in certain settings, is inconsistency. I don't believe in one planet with a single culture. In many settings, I find it implausible for a town to have a single culture. Often a mixture of levels of technology is much more believable and likely than, say, everything being done by sophisticated nanotech.
Along similar lines, I like extraneous elements (bricolage) without plot relevance, and things going wrong. If it's a rural or wilderness setting, there should be bugs, animals, and birds. Machinery should break down. Plans shouldn't work perfectly. People should screw up. The only item I really liked on Lev Grossman's list, which appears to be exclusively based on a perusal of epic fantasy from the 1980s, is people forgetting to do things. (My issue with his list: many items would not improve a book, but merely be blinking "I'm so smart and meta!" lights, and most of the rest are things which are already a matter of course since the eighties.)
I don't need to see peeing (please! my vote is for less bodily waste on-page, not more) but I do like to know if this is a society with or without indoor plumbing. On that note, I would like to see more low-tech societies with comparatively high sophistication. Low-tech does not necessarily mean disgusting and sordid. Mohenjo-daro had indoor plumbing.
Also, food is very telling. I don't think I have ever believed in a society where everyone eats protein pills or mystery mush every day. Hardscrabble societies are just as likely to evolve clever means of making whatever they have tasty as they do of despairingly mashing the one tuber that still grows after the apocalypse. A lot of Chinese cuisine, for instance, is clearly derived from people who really needed to investigate the edibility of absolutely everything... and then made it delicious.
...what little details, to you, make good worldbuilding? What makes worldbuilding unbelievable?
For the purposes of this question, by "good worldbuilding," I mean "interesting, and also consistent and believable within the parameters set up by the book itself."
("I can't believe in giant bugs because they break the square-cube law" is more a comment about the reader than about the plausibility of the specific giant bugs in any given fantasy novel. I'd believe in the bugs if they're in an environment where they could plausibly have something to eat when they don't have hobbit, or if it's explained that they were created by someone and then released just to harass the questers.)
One of the things which makes worldbuilding believable to me, in certain settings, is inconsistency. I don't believe in one planet with a single culture. In many settings, I find it implausible for a town to have a single culture. Often a mixture of levels of technology is much more believable and likely than, say, everything being done by sophisticated nanotech.
Along similar lines, I like extraneous elements (bricolage) without plot relevance, and things going wrong. If it's a rural or wilderness setting, there should be bugs, animals, and birds. Machinery should break down. Plans shouldn't work perfectly. People should screw up. The only item I really liked on Lev Grossman's list, which appears to be exclusively based on a perusal of epic fantasy from the 1980s, is people forgetting to do things. (My issue with his list: many items would not improve a book, but merely be blinking "I'm so smart and meta!" lights, and most of the rest are things which are already a matter of course since the eighties.)
I don't need to see peeing (please! my vote is for less bodily waste on-page, not more) but I do like to know if this is a society with or without indoor plumbing. On that note, I would like to see more low-tech societies with comparatively high sophistication. Low-tech does not necessarily mean disgusting and sordid. Mohenjo-daro had indoor plumbing.
Also, food is very telling. I don't think I have ever believed in a society where everyone eats protein pills or mystery mush every day. Hardscrabble societies are just as likely to evolve clever means of making whatever they have tasty as they do of despairingly mashing the one tuber that still grows after the apocalypse. A lot of Chinese cuisine, for instance, is clearly derived from people who really needed to investigate the edibility of absolutely everything... and then made it delicious.
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Of course, I can think of exactly one protagonist of mine who isn't at least bilingual for just this reason.
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Everyday purposes is stuff like, "How much is...?" "Where is the...?" "I like..."
Getting from there to stuff like (opening random novel on desk), "How do you know it's not right on the point of collapsing?" or "Would you like to hear my most perverse secret sexual fantasy?" would take at least six months, and probably years.
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It might also depend, though, if the language is related to yours and the culture not too wildly off. With my English and my not-fluent-but-know-some French and a willing teacher, in an immersion situation like living there and working with people, I could probably get to better than "just getting by" in Spanish or Italian. Not great, but enough to have some conversations outside necessity. That's the scenario I tend to picture. But all this flies out the window if, say, you're talking the equivalent of a Japanese person trying to learn Italian.
I admit, too, that I always allow for, and have stopped blinking at, fictional compression at work. What takes 5 years in the real world takes 6 months in a book and about 3 weeks (or one montage) in a film. So people learning the whole language in a few weeks in fiction rarely trips me up too badly.