Against Lore

Something that increasingly strikes me about worldbuilding discourse is how little respect it has for the writers who actually teach you how to think historically. There is a constant obsession, almost fetishization, with being current, with having the newest scholarship, the freshest consensus, the most up-to-date correction to some older grand narrative. There's a place for that. If you're trying to describe the real world accurately, it matters a great deal whether a claim is true. But building a fictional world is not quite the same task. Factual correctness matters, but so does the possession of frameworks: ways of seeing, ways of organizing causation, ways of understanding what pressures a society and what illusions it tells itself. And for that, the old historians and the great system-builders, even the wrong ones (perhaps especially the wrong ones) are indispensable.

I've said Hans Delbrück is required reading for worldbuilders, and I mean it. Yes, he is out of date in all sorts of particulars. Yes, scholarship has moved on. Yes, his politics were... very much of his time. I do not care. Delbrück teaches the reader how to think. He is constantly asking the right questions. How big could an army actually have been? How was it supplied? What kind of command structure could hold together under real conditions? What terrain makes a tactic plausible and what terrain makes it absurd? What sort of political society produces what sort of military society? Those are worldbuilding questions at the deepest level. They are not questions of decoration. They are questions of structure.

And that is the great divide. Most fictional history is decorative. It is additive. Someone invents a kingdom, then another kingdom, then a war, then a dynasty, then a religion, then an emperor, then an ancient ruin, then a migration. The result may be very rich, even charming, but it rarely feels inevitable. Necessary. It feels accumulated. It feels like lore. Real history does not feel like lore. It feels like pressure. It is the long afterlife of dead solutions. It is people trapped inside inherited circumstances, making choices within systems they did not build, producing outcomes they did not intend. If a fictional world is going to feel genuinely historical, it cannot merely contain a lot of past events. It has to possess a logic by which those events flow.

That is where the older writers are so useful. They attempted something most newer specialists avoid. They were trying to explain the whole machine. Bloch, Delbrück, Gibbon, Herodotus, Xenophon, Ibn Khaldun are not just repositories of information; they are models of historical thought. Bloch teaches you about survivals, about how institutions and habits persist beyond the conditions that created them. Delbrück forces you out of martial romance and back into material reality. Gibbon teaches civilizational irony—the way success curdles into fragility, the way systems are destroyed not by the absence of their virtues but by the corruption of them. Herodotus teaches you to delight in customs, rumor, local explanation, the stories a people tells about itself, because societies act through self-misunderstanding all the time. Xenophon teaches the practical inner life of command: ambition, discipline, self-justification, the way power feels from within. And Ibn Khaldun—al-Muqaddimah in general—is almost a worldbuilding engine unto itself: frontier cohesion and imperial luxury, the hard men who found states and the soft systems those states inevitably produce.

Are these writers always right? Obviously not. Sometimes they are wildly wrong, trapped by their own assumptions, reducing too much and moralizing too much. But that's no a reason to discard them. Quite the opposite. A theory does not need to be true in some final scientific sense in order to be generative. It needs to be structurally useful. It needs to provide tension, to force questions, to suggest a way events might unfold so that you can then test it, complicate it, or destroy it. I've often found the most useful theories are precisely the ones I don't believe. Disagreeing with them forces you to invent the history they leave out. And an older, more synthetic, more arrogant writer will often hand you a whole broken map of the world. A broken map is sometimes exactly what you need, because it reveals what a total explanation even looks like. You can follow it, steal from it, or spend ten years proving it wrong; in any case it gives you a form to organize reality into. For fiction, that is priceless.

This is something worldbuilders often miss. They imagine that to use a theory is to believe it. But that is not how creation works. Sometimes the most useful theories are the ones you think are wrong, and some of the best worldbuilding comes from staging an argument with a theory you do not accept.

That is true for me with Strauss-Howe and Jared Diamond. I do not believe in either of them in their hard form. Strauss-Howe, taken literally, is astrology for people who like history. The History Channel is more rigorous. Diamond is so often reductive that one begins to feel entire civilizations protesting from beyond the grave. Both explain far too much with one clean conceptual lever. And yet both have been enormously important to the construction of my own fictional setting. Not because they are correct. They're not. But because they are wrong in ways so clear and so tempting that refuting them becomes productive.

There is the key. Once you decide a theory is too neat, too monocausal, too pleased with itself, you are forced to generate the historical density it leaves out. If a civilizational crisis cannot be explained by generation alone, then what else is in play? Institutional inertia, class conflict, theological reform, military humiliation, trade reorientation, ecological strain, disease, prestige systems, myth, memory, bad luck, the ambitions and the stupidity of specific people. If ecology is not destiny, then what mediates it? Culture, law, kinship, religion, technology, conquest, taboo. The moment you push back against reduction, you are forced to invent more history, and because you are inventing it in response to a specific explanatory pressure, it comes out more causal, more focused, and more necessary than if you were simply piling up lore. This is the difference between good worldbuilding and worldbuilding.

It helps to see this in motion. Suppose a society founds its legitimacy on a single sacred lie: that it proclaimed all its people free and equal at its origin, while in fact built itself on the bonded labor of a class it has quietly reduced to property. That is not a fact you file away. It is a pressure, and it begins to deform everything downstream. Reforms that would dignify the laboring class become unthinkable, because to dignify them is to admit the founding equality was always a fiction, so reform energy is displaced sideways into ritual and charity that change nothing. The priesthood that guards the founding proclamation accrues a veto over law it was never meant to hold, because it alone is trusted to say what the sacred equality “really” meant. A generation arrives that inherits the proclamation as holy truth without the cynical memory of its inversion, and they enforce the order more rigidly than their ancestors ever did, because they mistake the script for the world. When the system finally cracks, it cracks precisely along the seam between what it claims and what it does, not because that would be dramatic, but because that is where the load was always concentrated. None of that had to be invented event by event. It fell out of one contradiction, pursued honestly.

There is a real objection to all of this, and it deserves more than a wave. If wrong theories are so generative, am I not just laundering bad ideas into fiction? Dressing up Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical fatalism or Diamond’s flattening determinism in narrative clothes and letting readers absorb them as though a story had proven them? The danger is genuine, because fiction is persuasive in exactly the way argument is not; a world that runs on a theory can make that theory feel inevitable, and inevitability is precisely the lie most bad history tells. But this is an argument for using theories as antagonists, not oracles. The safeguard is the same thing that made them useful in the first place: you are arguing with them. When I built my own world’s great plague to test whether a society’s decline could be read as a single moral judgment—the sort of clean providential story its survivors desperately wanted—the point was never to vindicate that reading. It was to let the world produce it, believe it, legislate on the basis of it, and be wrong. The theory becomes something the characters are imprisoned inside, not something the author endorses. A world that merely enacts a theory launders it. A world that puts a theory on trial—that lets its people stake everything on an explanation and then shows the explanation buckling—inoculates against it. The difference is whether the fiction believes its own thesis. Mine is built so that it cannot.

That is why the history of my own world feels, I think, unusually directed. Not because I am imitating reality in some neutral documentary way, and not because I have stumbled onto a secret formula. It feels directed because I am arguing. The history is not there merely to exist. It is there to test explanations—to ask whether this model of decline holds, whether this account of empire holds, whether this idea of generational change survives contact with a fuller, messier human reality. The history therefore has a purpose beyond ornament. It is not backstory. It is inquiry.

And once you work that way long enough, the world begins to write itself. Not in the mystical sense, but in the logical one. If you know what pressures are in play, what institutions exist, what myths legitimize them, what contradictions they conceal, and what theories you are trying to vindicate or refute, then consequences follow. Events arise not because they would be cool, but because they are what this world, under these conditions, would plausibly produce next. That is how you get fictional history that feels causal rather than curated.

This is also why so much fantasy feels thin to me even when it is beautifully detailed. It has the outputs of history without the arguments of history. It knows what happened but not why it had to happen in roughly that order. It has dynasties without institutions, battles without supply, religions without reform, collapses without memory, customs without social logic. It mistakes accumulation for depth. But depth is not volume. Depth comes from tension, from contradictory truths grinding against each other over time. The alternative is chronological set dressing.

So I would urge worldbuilders to read old historians and grand theorists, even the outdated ones, even the embarrassing ones, even the ones whose politics make you wince, and whose evidence is shaky. Read them not as authorities but as minds. Read them not to obey them but to steal their problems. Read Delbrück for the habit of asking what is materially possible. Read Gibbon for the habit of seeing irony in power. Read Bloch for the habit of tracing survivals. Read Herodotus for the habit of observing how peoples explain themselves. Read Xenophon for the habit of taking institutions and command seriously. Read Ibn Khaldun for the habit of seeing cohesion and decadence as historical forces. Read Strauss-Howe and Diamond, if you like, in order to be annoyed into specificity. A specialist historian may save you from error. A grand theorist may teach you how to build a world, because spectacular failure is far more useful to an artist than timid correctness.

Because that is what these writers provide at their best: not facts but frameworks, not answers but forms of pressure. And a fictional world, if it is going to feel alive, must be subjected to pressure. It must be built around ideas in tension—ideas the world itself is testing. Some will prove true, some false, some only true locally or briefly or at terrible cost. That is precisely the point. A world should not merely contain a history. It should think historically.

If I have any real advice for other worldbuilders, it is this: stop asking only what your world contains and start asking what it argues. What theory of society is it enacting? What theory is it dismantling? What ideas are its people living inside? What explanations of history does the world appear to endorse, and which does it quietly expose as nonsense? The moment you begin building that way, everything tightens. The past becomes usable. Events begin to follow from pressures rather than preference. And the world stops feeling like a scrapbook and starts feeling like a civilization.