Despite the fact that I’ve been trapped in a world-building exercise for the past 18 years, I completely agree with M John Harrison’s assessment that world-building is unnecessary in order to tell a good story, and that world-building is the pinnacle of uselessness: you are creating a literal description of a world that doesn’t even exist.

I immediately think of Borges’ masterful short story ”Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” which described the madness inherent in invented an imaginary world, and the vast, purposeless scope of such an undertaking which spans generations.

And obviously, there is J.R.R. Tolkien’s Arda, which is in fact an act of universe-building. For most world-building nerds, this is probably the gold standard of worldbuilding. An otaku demands this level of detail, no matter how unnecessary. These are the people who obsess about the lack of continuity in Star Trek or Star Wars, who show up at comic-cons and gainsay the actual creators of various works of fiction. Think of Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons” (Oh, I’ve wasted my life.)

The ironic thing is that what makes The Lord of the Rings seem to have so much historical depth is precisely because Tolkien didn’t spell out the whole damn thing. You only get faint glimpses of ruined Gondolin and lost Númenor, of drowned Beleriand and the doom of the Noldor. The tale of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren Erchamion and the story of Eärendil are mentioned only in brief, and are pretty much tangential to the story.

And Tolkien didn’t initially mean for The Hobbit (and by extension, The Lord of the Rings) to even be in the same world as The Silmarillion. It was just a good story he thought of one random day he got bored grading university test papers. Gildor Inglorion and Glorfindel were basically just names he randomly chose (and which continue to plague LotR otakus and continuity-nazis to this very day.) In many instances, he fit the mythology into the story and never really the other way around.

And I think what makes The Silmarillion interesting are the stories that Tolkien never finished writing, and which we get a better look at only by rifling through his notes which are now encompassed by the monolithic History of Middle Earth. I think the appeal in “The Fall of Gondolin” and The Children in Húrin lie in the fact that they’re good stories in and of themselves, and Tolkien didn’t necessarily have to invent the rest of Aman to make them so.

The bottom line is this: you may have an excellent and highly-detailed universe complete with a pantheon of gods and its own version of physics, but if your story sucks, no one will care and you’ve just pretty much wasted your life.