M. John Harrison on worldbuilding

He doesn't like it.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Harrison practices what he preaches. In his series of tales about the city of Viriconium, he purposefully frustrates the reader's expectations on worldbuilding by eschewing continuity both in setting and in character. The city is a little different each time (even the name changes). The characters are permutations of a few archetypes, and don't carry over from tale to tale.

And yet, I think that technique is not completely successful in frustrating the cult of the imaginary world. Character archetypes and their variations are a staple of role-playing games. Dungeon Masters routinely modify existing settings to suit their whims. The changing nature of reality is a feature of settings like Planescape or Mage: The Ascension. One could say that Harrison has actually made it easier to become obsessed with Viriconium, in a more interactive way.

There's a similarity with videogames here. Videogame makers also hate worldbuilding. Not for aesthetic or moral reasons, but for economic ones. Each little detail in a gameworld must be put there by some guy. Paying that guy costs money. Waiting for him to finish costs time. That's why some designers resort to procedural content generation, an approach through which a new gameworld is created every time you start a game, by arranging a few basic building blocks in a random (to some degree) fashion. This approach could be considered the gaming analogue of Harrison's technique. If The Lord of the Rings is Final Fantasy, then Viriconium is Dwarf Fortress.

By the way, I think Borges' short story The Aleph is a very fitting literary illustration of Harrison's concerns:

As in many of Borges's short stories, the protagonist is a fictionalized version of the author. At the beginning of the story, he is mourning the recent death of a woman whom he loved, named Beatriz Viterbo, and resolves to stop by the house of her family to pay his respects. Over time, he comes to know her first cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri, a mediocre poet with a vastly exaggerated view of his own talent who has made it his lifelong quest to write an epic poem that describes every single location on the planet in excruciatingly fine detail.

(Wikipedia entry for The Aleph)

Not to mention that Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is actually about the dangers of becoming too obsessed with worldbuilding.