Senses of place as character

[magistrate]

One thing I enjoy is fictional spaces – especially those limited, self-contained and set-aside-from-public-life spaces – that have a distinct sense of character and life to them. The Hub in Torchwood, for example, or the SID Headquarters from 镇魂 | Guardian. (Or even, if I think about it, the Taskmaster House and caravan from Taskmaster. Always check the shed.*) In computer games, too, I often gravitate toward places where I can create and maintain a self-contained but complex and multifunctional space: building elaborate solar-powered scavenger havens in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or a walled garden rife with advanced automation in the Minecraft: Crash Landing modpack. And some games come with those complex, palpable places premade: the gang hideouts from Red Dead Redemption II come to mind, with their individual quirks and personalities and the implied stories in how they're organized and arranged.

*To be said to the tone of Always Read The Plaque.

My sense is that this is something easier to do richly and immersively in visual media like TV shows and video games, because so much of how we interact with a space is visual and movement-based. (And tactile, but I don't consume that much tactile media. I suppose I could start going to escape rooms?) But I'm sure it can and has been done in prose fiction.

In trying to think of examples in fiction, I didn't, initially, come up with any – but, to be fair, it's not something I'm in the habit of reading for. Thinking a bit longer on the topic, I thought of Redwall Abbey from the Redwall series, and the rabbits' warren from Watership Down, both of which I read a long time ago.

Does anyone have examples in books or short stories that they've found particularly effective? I'd love to see how people approach the task.

Comments

[sholio]

Oh yessss, I love this! An immersive sense of place is one of my favorite things in fiction.

I actually feel that a lot of books have this, though part of it might just be because I'm a very visual reader so I'm bringing a lot of my own context to what I read. But I agree about Watership Down, and in general, I think I see it most of all in detective/mystery/thriller fiction, which leans heavily into extremely vivid and mood-setting descriptions of the places where the action takes place - a city, town, or a more limited space (a boat, a train, an underground hideout, etc). It's pronounced enough that I've ended up considering this kind of vivid setting description as one of the pillars of the genre if you're trying to nail what readers in that genre want.

Oddly, I can't think of all that many SFF-nal examples, even though you would think spec fic about imaginary worlds would be loaded with it. I can think of a number of examples of extremely striking and memorable visuals (e.g. the crystal bridge in Ancillary Justice) but not so many SFF places that are really well-developed as a place. Perhaps the created-from-whole-cloth aspect of SFF is working against it, because you need to have an author who can build a convincing setting from the ground up, as well as describing it with suitable vividness - whereas writers writing about real cities only have to describe the actual place (I mean, not that it's easy! But if you need a detail, you can look it up rather than having to make it up). And visual media doesn't need to have quite as much background setting-building if the visuals are convincing.

[magistrate]

[in general, I think I see it most of all in detective/mystery/thriller fiction, which leans heavily into extremely vivid and mood-setting descriptions of the places where the action takes place]

Ooh, interesting! It's not a genre I've read widely in, so it's not surprising I've not run into it in those contexts. Do any books or stories come to mind that you'd recommend, on strength of place?

...though now I'm recalling the game Disco Elysium, which I understand was born out of a novel that didn't do well. DE is in a lot of ways a love letter to a broken city in a crapsack world, which isn't an angle I see a lot and which the game delivered in a way that really worked for me. It's also a kind of zany but also very dark detective story, and probably the work of that genre I've engaged with most deeply, recently. Maybe I should hunt down the original story, if it's available anywhere.

*EDIT: Apparently it was written in Estonian and, while an English translation has been promised for years, it has yet to materialize. I'm now wondering how much work it would be to learn Estonian.


[Oddly, I can't think of all that many SFF-nal examples, even though you would think spec fic about imaginary worlds would be loaded with it.]

You'd think so! And it does seem to crop up in SF works in other media: the Hub, the TARDIS. But I think even in the stories I've read where the setting is a huge part of the story and its structure and conflicts – The Martian, or An Unkindness of Ghosts – it doesn't quite hit those notes for me.

(The Martian is especially strange, now that I think about it, because the main character has such an intense and intimate relationship with his habitat, and it hits a ton of the fiction kinks that are usually bundled with place-as-character for me: tons of interconnected systems, systems which provide for the character in some way, a sense of safety set against a hostile or othering or othered world. But it doesn't feel alive to me in the sense that I'm looking for.)

[sholio]

Do any books or stories come to mind that you'd recommend, on strength of place?

The ones that jump out for me, just thinking about it, are all murder mystery series. There's Tony Hillerman's Southwest murder mysteries set in the New Mexico desert, although with the caveat that I haven't read any since I was in my teens or early 20s, so I don't know how well it would hold up; and Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series (historical murder mysteries set in 1830s New Orleans; I talk about them a lot on DW), in which the city itself, or an imagined version of the historical city, is so clearly delineated that it feels like another character. There's a mystery series set in Ancient Rome by Lindsey Davis that has a stunningly vivid ancient classical world, and Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael books take you into his 13th-century Welsh monastery.

You know what I do have trouble thinking of, though, are really clear-cut examples of the kind of smaller-scale examples you have above, like the Hub. Just about everything else I can think of that really lands is more on the scale of a city, a town, or a part of the country. I can certainly think of books that made a smaller setting vivid and believable - in fact, I just got done reading, or rather rereading, Night Over Water by Ken Follett, a book set on a Pan Am Clipper flying boat in the 1930s, with excellent descriptions of the sights and sounds and feelings of that voyage. But the Clipper doesn't feel like a character; it's just a place where things happen - an interesting and unusual place, but not a place you really develop an emotional connection to. The characters just don't stay there long enough. It's a very interesting place to visit for the length of a book, but it doesn't have a soul.

.... oh, you know, this is an incredibly random example, but I think that for all their much-discussed flaws and ahistoricity, Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear books do actually have this, not just the broader Pleistocene setting, but also some of the individual places, and especially the valley where Ayla lives by herself in the second book, which had an immense presence in my head when I read the book as a kid. It is possible that it's much easier for fictional places to take up residence that way when you're really young, though.

I'll keep thinking about it! It's really interesting now that I'm thinking along these lines.

[magistrate]

Awesome! I'll check some of these out. I think I actually did pick up at least one of the Benjamin January books following your rec a while ago; it's been languishing in my (large and growing) TBR pile ever since. And a monastery sounds like it might hit some of the same self-contained notes; I'll defnitely have to try that.


[for all their much-discussed flaws and ahistoricity, Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear books do actually have this, not just the broader Pleistocene setting, but also some of the individual places]

Hah! I actually read these books, probably when I was far too young for them. (I also had a bizarrely comprehensive sex ed, through church, of all places. And yet I still turned out asexual...) I have a vague memory of some bits of them. Like the vision quest where there was Sudden Airplane, which I think in some strange way was actually one of my first experience of genre-tweaking. (Speculative elements? In my historical fiction? It's more likely than you think!)

Now I'm trying to remember whether or not I got those sense-of-place vibes from survival stories I read Back Then; Island of the Blue Dolphins or My Side of the Mountain. It's been so long that I can't recall.


[It is possible that it's much easier for fictional places to take up residence that way when you're really young, though.]

I cannot remember where I ran into this, but I recall reading an essay about some aspect of writing, and it talked about the dislocation you could have when returning to old works: how there would be that sequence where the characters have to infiltrate the castle by going underwater through the moat or something, and you remember the breathless claustrophobia and the dark and how the water clung to their clothes and dragged them down, and then you get to the section in the book and what's actually on the page is, "They went in at dawn by the water gate."

And, yeah. That, sometimes.

(In looking for the essay in question, I did rediscover the "Cathedrals made of fire" essay on translation and imperfection by Michael Cunningham, so that was neat.)

[sholio]

I cannot remember where I ran into this, but I recall reading an essay about some aspect of writing, and it talked about the dislocation you could have when returning to old works: how there would be that sequence where the characters have to infiltrate the castle by going underwater through the moat or something, and you remember the breathless claustrophobia and the dark and how the water clung to their clothes and dragged them down, and then you get to the section in the book and what's actually on the page is, "They went in at dawn by the water gate."

Yes!! That! I've had that happen to me so many times. In a way it's not surprising, I guess, because so much of reading is making it come to life in your head, so having it achieve a life that it never had on the page is just the words working as intended! But it's still very disconcerting to run into it and realize how much of what you remembered just isn't there.

... and maybe that's also part of why we're having so much more trouble coming up with good examples of this kind of thing from written media, since a huge part of the visuals and the emotional context are supplied by the reader, so one person's vivid setting is another person's "meh, I hardly noticed it."

[magistrate]

something something started this comment far too early in the morning, something something I feel like part of the challenge is that while there are a lot of examples of people interacting with their environment closely (especially when survival is concerned), part of what makes a character is the relationship between characters, and often – even in a world of lush visuals and atmosphere – you don't get a sense of reciprocity from settings, in prose fiction? A character interacts, and the setting is interacted with. Elements of the setting may challenge the character, as with the accidents and malfunctions in The Martian or any aspect of survival in survival fiction, but challenge isn't give-and-take. Which doesn't really bear up in examinations of TV media, where people are mostly just inhabiting their space.

Is it easier to convey a sense of feeling at home in visual media? It's definitely easier to convey a preponderance of visual detail and all its attendant implied backstory; in prose, it's harder to stock all the nooks and crannies without getting bogged down. You don't get to utilize a glance in that way.

Pings off a concept that Kyle Tran Myhre has brought up in a couple of contexts; that part of what makes poetry work is bringing big overwhelming ideas down to very concrete things. So you don't write about War; you write about the first time you walk into your brother's empty room. I think there's a similar philosophy about the overwhelming complexity of a visual space; you have to dial it in to a few details that will carry the most weight, or else it's just a laundry list. So the question becomes, what details do the most work and allow the reader to fill in all the rest of it?

Which, yeah, will probably vary from reader to reader, because so much of the context is mental associations, and that's something that you as an author can't control. Unless, I suppose, you're bringing in the place-as-character at the end of a long spear, and you've spent a lot of previous story on seeding in the details you're going to reference.

And not I have to scurry to work.

[sholio]

Oooooh, I think you're onto something with the relationship aspect! I think in every example that comes to mind where it really works, there is a relationship there between the protagonist and the place - it might be love or more ambiguous feelings (I don't think the Torchwood characters really love the Hub, or working there, but there are strong feelings regardless), and in turn the place, while it might not have feelings about them per se, acts on them and shapes them. In Watership Down, they designed and built the warren, so it feels more meaningful than if it was just there, and good set design incorporates a bunch of personal touches from the characters. And in a bigger setting, characters in something like the Red Dead Redemption frontier are going to have a very different relationship with their environment (and feel like very different people) than if they're in, say, a seedy noir city or a small town.

I can totally see this subconsciously affecting the way the reader feels about the place in the same way that relationships between characters do.

[magistrate]

The Hub does a lot of work with visual complexity and idiosyncrasy and curiosity, and they have a lot of fun with the camera angles, but I think a lot of what makes it work is also... like, the moments where characters are inhabiting the place in a way that makes it clear that they know it blindfolded. Playing PteranodonBall, or when they're tossing tools or guns or whatever across the space while they're moving. (Now I think of the pedeconferences in The West Wing, and am amused.) So, yeah, they might not love the Hub, but... it does feel like the Hub is part of the family. XD

I'm also wondering if there's an aspect of moodiness that can be played with to make a place feel more alive. Not just mood as an inherent quality, but changeable mood. If sometimes a space feels more welcoming or more threatening or more sullen. One of the things that lends the TARDIS to being characterized as a person in so much DW fic (or, at least, so much of the DW fic in the extremely narrow slice of fandom I ever engaged with) is how it sometimes just decides "No, this is where we're going today," and then bits stop working until you coax and coddle and argue with it for a while.

So there's a fun thing. How do environments have agency?

(And now I feel like I'm back at the kuai kuai culture thing I know I've linked you to before, which I'm mostly linking here in case Future Me comes by and wants the context back. ...we have all sorts of weird things at work which stop working on their own capricious schedules, and we definitely do have our own little superstitions about how to deal with them, and the building does feel capricious and slightly haunted. Maybe I should start working some of those details into my fics.)

[sholio]

(Also, can I just say that I've missed having these long conversations about writing process! ♥)

So there's a fun thing. How do environments have agency?

I actually feel like something like the TARDIS, which does have some sense of free will, agency, and motivation in a way that most environments don't, falls into a different category for me - like an AI or a magically sentient tree, it (she?) is more of an actual character than an environment that doesn't have that quality. I think I would put it more in the same category as spaceships that are represented to the viewer by an actual AI ... though YMMV, it's obviously not a clear-cut line.

Now that I think about it, though, even though the Hub isn't self-aware in the same way as the TARDIS seems to be, it does act on the characters with the random Rift incursions. And you also often get that sense of the environment pushing back in a lot of settings - maybe most settings where it's really dealt with and taken into account as a factor, e.g. animal attacks, snowstorms, red lights halting a getaway, etc: the sense that the setting has a life apart from the characters, and it does its own thing even when they're not there.

This makes me think about how one thing that readers really like is a (semi) random encounter aspect to the plot - that is, anything that's not wholly predictable from the setup, but still draws from a limited set of options, the kind of thing that would be determined with dice in a tabletop game. It might be "which card will they flip over" or "will a creature attack" or "will this bridge break under the strain" or "will the engines hold out for the trip" or "what weird thing will the Rift spit out THIS time?" - lots of different kinds of things, but basically, it's extremely riveting when you know something might happen, but not for sure that it will. So maybe this is another way that an environment can have a sort of agency in acting on the characters who are interacting with it.

[rachelmanija]

I agree about Watership Down. Other books with an immersive sense of place:

Lord of the Rings, especially the Shire.

Tai-Tastigon in Godstalk.

The woods in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

Yorkshire in James Herriot's books.

The garden in Anita Desai's The Peacock Garden.

Dune.

[magistrate]

Thank you! I'll check some of these out.

I read Dune a few years ago because I have a lot of friends who are very into it, and found aspects neat but it didn't really stick with me. I bounced off The Lord of the Rings when I tried to read it, but that was very long ago; I should probably give it another try.

(My weird Watership Down anecdote is that when I first tried to read it – sometime in highschool, if I recall correctly – I did do on the basis of a lot of great reccing, but I could not get past the first sentence. "The primroses were over.", I believe. I was so desperately uninterested in primroses and, by the halo effect, anything which could be framed in the context of primroses, that I spent something like a year picking up the book, reading the first sentence, and then dropping it for weeks or months. When I finally got past my bizarre and unreasoning primrose aversion, I loved to book! But it did take me a very long time to get there.)

(I got further in LOTR. I remember tapping out around Tom Bombadil. But I think I was, at that time, specifically approaching LOTR because I heard it was good on linguistics; it'll be interesting to come at it from a new angle.)

[zeeth_kyrah]

Tom Bombadil didn't really "sink in" at first with me. That part was simply "Oh, the hobbits have met a strange new character who is saying weird things and has power over foresty evils, but he's really nice."

Thinking in more of a mythic context, the main characters have literally run face-first into an Old God who is very much an echo of the old myths. They've walked off the page of Ordinary Town and into legend, and here it is in living form (on the page). So Tom sings and rhymes all the time, walks pretty much anywhere he wants, can hold anything and not be bound by it, and so on, because he's a Forest Lord (literally a faery prince) and they can simply do that.

And that's really the most obvious time that The Lord of the Rings openly breaks from "grim heroic journey" to say "oh, no, we're actually part of a myth cycle now". Tolkein did that in The Hobbit, though, with Beorn and his sons, so it's not out of nowhere; it comes from his love of folk tales and the figures who pass through them, and his conscious intent to create a myth cycle when he wrote these books.

[magistrate]

Oh, how interesting! My familiarity with LOTR comes from that abandoned early foray, a good chunk of cultural osmosis, and "Watched the movies," so it's hardly what you'd call an in-depth or critical awareness of the stories or their meta. So I'd been accustomed to thinking of it as kind of the ur-example of high fantasy / epic fantasy, and not as an exploration of mythic fantasy. It'll be doubly interesting to go back and look at things from that angle.

(My knowledge of fae lore is similarly scattershot and random, so it's probably not surprising that I didn't pick up on Bombadil as a faery prince. I read through all, I think, of Andrew Lang's many-colored fairy books as an even younger magi, but they were never where I hung my hat.)