The Ebonheim Chronicle

I read an extremely excellent blog post by the extremely exceptional Dr Holly Nielsen about her work in the upcoming Amberspire and I do just keep thinking about it a lot.

In the piece, she describes a setting in the game of a moon-sized ancient mausoleum with a contemporary city built on the surface. Holly suggests that the creators and construction of the superstructure are so far removed from the memory and knowledge of the people currently living on it that it's effectively a natural occurrence; fitting into the lives and culture of the city's people the way an ocean or mountain did in early Earth civilizations.

This is of course fascinating and you should just go read the whole post! The part that has me thinking a lot is her talking about this being an example of tension between macro and micro histories. I often think of micro history directly informing macro history and I was surprised to think about this as the tension between two different scales of history that aren't really temporally correlated. In this case, the history responsible for the existence of the superstructure are vastly disconnected from the lives of the inhabitants, which allows it to exist as this sort of effectively-natural environmental fixture.

It's got me all sorts of in my head about a lot of opinions I've had for a while while working on the world and lore for Chronicles. I really want to get some of those thoughts down on paper in the context of this excellent point and so this post is about the hierarchical causation graph of the micro-histories that ultimately directly result in macro-history events, the two scales being tightly-coupled.

The Timeline

I think a lot of worldbuilding and lore is really preoccupied with the timeline. There's the big list of years where major events happened and you can run the history back to creation or there's a map where the regions are painted different colors depending on the year. I'm not a historian but I did play a lot of Crusader Kings II and I read a lot of Wikipedia so I'm qualified to parrot what a lot of really brilliant people have said which is that maps aren't people.

The Graph

The human body is an incomprehensibly complex biosphere of independent organisms going about their lives serving their functions and reacting to their environments. White blood cells and gut flora and toe fungus are all living, breathing, dying in various pathways and recesses as they always have. We attribute the words and movements of the macro-organism human to a single intelligent actor but these are still the result of countless micro-interactions by a vast interworking ecosystem that happens to produce an understandable output.

So is it with human macro-history. We learn and/or memorize the big beats of wars, regimes, notable individuals, and reforms. We recite timelines or we coalesce ranges of years into easily-digestible “attitudes” that we then prescribe to entire populaces. It's easy, I think, when working from a timeline of major events, to draw conclusions, or find little stories to tell. Once you've smoothed over all the trite detail into a list of memorable highlights, we can naturally play with the blocks.

But once you begin to drill down into the how's and why's of a macro-scale event, the ground opens up under you. It's an infinitely-recursive graph of causations and relations with vanishingly smaller events precipitating, extinguishing, or contributing to each other. The smaller events have their own universe of who's and how's beneath them and so it goes all the way down to the atomic level. It's the whole chaos theory butterfly flapping its wings thing but with the understanding that there are so, so many butterflies, and they're all just doing their own little butterfly things.

Now obviously, being human, we can't just keep the whole graph in our heads, it's unknowable and too big. We have to categorize and generalize and coalesce and organize. It's important to remember, however, that the graph still exists. When learning new facts and getting new little blocks to inform our personal understanding of the world, it's easy to take the simplified view and draw simplified conclusions. This I believe is where we so often run into trouble.

One of the most problematic results of this in my experience is inaccurate assumptions of power. The extreme version of this would be conspiracy theories where the timeline clearly points to evidence of an illuminati-like guiding hand running everything. The simpler and more common version is assuming that all evil actors know what they're doing, have full control over the system, and will invariably succeed in their evil plans.

But can one human, or a thousand humans in perfect unison, directly affect macro-history? It would be a powerful feat, and has rarely or perhaps never happened. Under and astride that human are more humans, with their own wants and desires, and within those humans are biospheres of microorganisms thwarting or boosting them at random. Against that graph of actors is an array of resistant and oppositional graphs that all conflict inward and out.

When an event happens, one big enough to be remembered, and placed on the timeline, and recited for school tests, it is the final comprehensible output of an incomprehensible system that could have gone a whole different way with just a few tweaks circumstanced.

It is, I think, an error, to predict future macro-events from the surface-reading of the previous macro-events.

Uuuh, Videogames?

Oh, right. Sorry. What I'm spattering on about and trying to tug at is two things:

Macro-history is a direct result of vast numbers of micro-histories

There are no gods. There is no divine plan. The King is an idiot. The interconnected graph of individual actors making decisions against their own judgement systems versus an unchangeable state of the universe eventually produces comprehensible events we can remember and grapple with.

Macro-history is effectively uncontrollable

The graph of daily life is so intricate that it produces effectively random results. Like the building of the moon-sized mausoleum, macro events are much like naturally occurring environmental events. The further removed the living individuals are from the history that produced that event, the more like a mountain, or ocean, it will seem. It becomes another state of the world to content with and try to survive around.

The macro is meaningless without the micro

It's very common in fantasy to treat the world like a timeline, to orchestrate the list of events into a convenient and narratively-satisfying plot. But who were the people? What part of the graph did they affect?

It's discordant to our brains to hear a history when there's no concept of what almost happened instead, or what could have happened. That's because the event written into the textbook is just the final snapshot of an immense system that was vying for something different.

The Wikipedia hole is something I love to fall into. You can always go deeper and deeper into the graph and try to tussle out a better feeling of the why or how of what you started with.

This is because real history didn't start with the timeline working backward to fill in details.

All of this considerable talking is to say that I hope that any world I ultimately end up creating feels like a place where things happened, small things, in vast number. I hope I focus very little on the big chapter headers of the world's history.

They are just mountains and oceans; fixtures of the world you inhabit and traverse.

Wishlist Chronicles IV: Ebonheim! | 🌐 | | | 🙋‍ |