>The world itself is a backdrop and should remain
>in the background. If an element of the world
>is not relevant to the story, it has no business
>existing in the first place, and elaborating on
> it anyway will wrongfully bring the world into
>the foreground. This is where I think Tolkien
>made his one single mistake with Lord of the
>Rings.

Hrm. Although I think I agree with what you're *trying* to say, I'm not entirely certain I agree with how you've said it, at least in this paragraph.

Setting, especially in fantasy or SF, is of utmost importance. The setting must be "real", internally self-consistent, and have its own internal logic. In a mainstream novel or story, you don't generally have to pause to describe how when the heroine dropped her purse, gravity caused it to plummet to the ground under a constant acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2. However, in an SF story, this might be exactly what you *must* do, especially if you are going to show a place later where that particular piece of information doesn't apply, or is a different value.

In this case, you *must* have the world fleshed out beforehand, at least the particulars that are going to apply to your story. What I think you're saying, though, and what I whole-heartedly agree with, is that if a particular detail of your world has no bearing on the story you're writing at that moment, you leave it out of the story. For instance, the fact that the world Darius Longshore lives on has no moon (or at least, no large moon like ours) has no direct influence on the story at hand in the novel I wrote about him and his adventures. So I never go out of my way to say "Hey look all you Earthlings, no moon!" I just make sure that all outdoor scenes at night are lit only by the light of the stars and whatever other light source the characters might have with them. It's a minor detail, has no real influence on the story, and really just adds flavor.

The hard part, and the real test of any fantasy or SF writer, is making up all those details so *you* can get a handle on your world and the people in it, but then keeping all but the most important ones to yourself while writing your story.

Of course, that all being said, there are *some* types of stories in which the setting *is* the story. My favorite example is Arthur C. Clarke's classic SF novel, "Rendezvous with Rama". If you've ever read that, you know what I'm talking about. The setting *is* the story. No doubt about it. The characters, the 'plot'--such as it is--are secondary to Rama itself. The ending of that story really irks a lot of people, precisely because they never realize what the true meaning of the story is, and what the story is all about. It irked me the first time I read it, too. And the reason the rest of the novels in that series are not nearly as good as the original is because *they* fail to remember the lessons of the first book. They go about trying to explain what was intentionally and necessarily unexplainable in the first story. The setting *was* the story, and the *point* of the story was that if we were to ever meet aliens, or find artifacts of theirs, we would in all likelyhood *never* be able to understand them, their motives, their language, their way of life, or just about anything about them. They're *alien*. They're the product of a completely different evolutionary track than ourselves. A cat would have an easier time understanding the mind of a human than a human would understanding the mind of an alien.

I had a point here, and now I think I've come back to it in my own round-about way. The setting in the first Rama novel was the expression of that theme. The vessel was completely incomprehensible to the Earth people. They knew just as much about its purpose and reason for being when they entered it as they did when they left. In that case, as I said about five jillion words ago, the setting *was* the story.

-- Dave