Fictional Worlds As Systems: 1 Worlds As Systems In Fiction

Building on the insights of Worlds After Meaning, this series turns to a different kind of laboratory: fictional worlds. These are not thought experiments or metaphors alone; they are fully realised systems, each with its own constraints, phenomena, and internal intelligibility. By examining them, we can see relational ontology in action outside physics, biology, or language — in the playful, intricate, and performative worlds of imagination.

Worlds as enacted systems

A fictional world is a system because it enacts a set of constraints that define what can appear, what distinctions matter, and how phenomena relate. Characters, events, rules, and narrative arcs are not merely storytelling devices; they are components of the system that make the world intelligible.

For example, a talking cat is not anomalous in a world where talking animals are permitted by systemic constraints. A ritual, however bizarre, may hold a community together precisely because it stabilises patterns of behaviour and expectation.

The world exists not because the story describes it, but because its constraints allow phenomena to emerge coherently and consistently for participants — be they readers, viewers, or players.

Fictional worlds as lenses for relational ontology

By studying fictional worlds, we gain several advantages:

1. Illustration of constraint: Worlds like Wonderland or Gormenghast make visible the rules that systems must enact to sustain intelligibility.

2. Multiplicity and collision: Contrasting worlds highlight how different constraint systems generate incommensurability and partial alignment.

3. Perception and participation: Readers encounter worlds relationally, experiencing phenomena as effects of systemic cuts rather than discovering pre-given truths.

Fictional worlds thus offer a controlled, imaginative environment in which the principles of relational ontology — systems, constraints, cuts, and actualisation — can be observed, played with, and analysed.

Methodological note

This series does not treat fiction as a source of moral or metaphysical truth. Nor does it aim to reduce fictional worlds to real ones. Each world is treated as a self-contained system, whose study illuminates the dynamics of constraint and world-making. Lessons drawn are analytic, not prescriptive: they reveal patterns, structures, and dynamics that echo those found in natural, linguistic, and symbolic worlds.

Looking ahead

Subsequent posts will examine three distinct fictional worlds:

• Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) – a world of flexible, paradoxical constraints.

• Gormenghast (Mervyn Peake) – a world of architectural, ritualised constraints.

• Prospero’s Books (Peter Greenaway) – a world of performative, codified constraints.

Through these examples, we will explore how worlds emerge, hold, and interact under differing constraints, and how these insights illuminate relational ontology in a new, imaginative register.

Fictional worlds are systems.

They hold phenomena.

And they show us, vividly, how worlds — of any kind — come to be.