The Fictional Worlds as Systems series has examined how three distinct fictional universes — Wonderland, Gormenghast, and Prospero’s Books — exemplify different architectures of world-making. Each world enacts its own system of constraints, producing phenomena, intelligibility, and stability in ways that mirror the dynamics explored in Worlds After Meaning.
Key insights
Constraint as the locus of world-making: Across the series, it becomes clear that worlds hold not because of representation or foundation, but because their internal constraints allow phenomena to emerge coherently.
Multiplicity of modes: Wonderland demonstrates flexibility and paradox; Gormenghast shows architectural density and ritualised order; Prospero’s Books highlights performative and codified enactment. Each mode produces a different kind of intelligibility.
Perspective and coupling: In all three worlds, intelligibility is relational. Participants — readers, viewers, performers — navigate the constraints, attuning to rules, rituals, or performances. Coherence arises from alignment and coupling rather than an external arbiter.
Fiction as relational laboratory: Treating fictional worlds as systems allows us to experiment conceptually with world-making dynamics. They illuminate constraint, stability, incommensurability, and emergence in a controlled, imaginative context.
Connection to previous series
This series extends Worlds After Meaning by providing concrete, illustrative examples of systemic world-making. The relational ontology principles — systems, constraints, cuts, actualisation — are observed in practice within imaginative worlds, making abstract ideas tangible and vivid.
∞
Ultimately, the series demonstrates that whether worlds are living, physical, linguistic, or fictional, they are made and held by the systems that enact them. Fiction simply provides a particularly rich and illuminating lens through which to see this principle in action.
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