The deliberate shifting depiction of his most famous fantasy world Viriconium – the Pastel City – across a sequence of novels and short stories exemplifies how he translates his radical poetics into practice. This paper provides a counterpoint, arguing for the importance of M John Harrison in developing a poetics of scepticism toward worldbuilding, which he calls ‘the great clomping foot of nerdism’ (Harrison 2007b). Following early fantasists George MacDonald and JRR Tolkien, much advice focuses on invention, completeness and internal consistency. Over the last forty years, as Mark JP Wolf argues, worldbuilding has become central to the art of writing science fiction and fantasy books, as market conditions prioritise fictional worlds that are encyclopaedic, extendible, franchisable, consumable and which generate new forms of cultural pleasure.
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