During my first job interview as a graduate archaeologist, I was presented with an assortment of broken rocks and asked how I would separate the natural stones from the knapped cultural artefacts. Eager to impress my prospective employers I dove into the bag, examining each object carefully and placing them in either pile, describing to the interviewer which clues I found to discern their natures.
‘That’s all correct,’ the interviewer said afterwards, sweeping the rocks she’d taken from the car park into the bin. ‘Though it would probably have been easier if you’d just asked me the context they were found in.’
In archaeology, context is everything. It’s the key to understanding how artefacts and sites were used or developed through time. While exploring how fantasy worlds are built as part of my Master’s thesis over a decade later, I realised how similar in this regard an imaginary world is to an archaeological site. A reader might start with an idea, a suggestion of what they’re going to find: but they never really know what lies within until they’ve broken through the surface and put the elements they find into context.
Archaeological context is broadly defined as the interrelation between the elements of a site or artefact, and how that relationship has developed through time. The classic example is the stratigraphic sequence—the layering of soil units to create a ‘depositional context’ within which an object might be interpreted: elements in the lower layers are usually older than those in the layers above. Likewise, the interrelating systems within a created world are laid down for the reader as they move through the story, with each subsequent layer dependent on the foundational elements which have come before.
In fantasy and science fiction, the importance of context is foremost: we need to be introduced to a magic system early in a Fantasy world, for example, to see it in action multiple times throughout the story and to feel like we understand the possibilities and the limits of the particular rules at play if we’re to be satisfied by the protagonist’s clever use of the system to defeat the villain at the novel’s climax. Similarly, the repeated failure of the Millenium Falcon’s Hyperdrive in The Empire Strikes Back establishes the technological context which makes the final sabotage, then escape from Bespin all the more compelling.
As a story unfolds, it necessarily fills in the context of the imaginary world. This can be quite literal—as the characters move from one place to the next, the scenery around them changes, and the author must decide whether they’re walking past trees, or deserts, or if you’re George Lucas, what single characteristics the current planet is going to have. But context is also built around the character’s interactions with each other, the world, and the events which play out in the story around them. An object’s importance, for example, is contextualised by the way characters react to it—is that a flaming sword?—or by the way they understand it—’Why are you carrying around a soul reliquary’ ‘Huh? You mean my mother’s amulet?’ In the same way, character development must be contextualised. The lowly pig farmer can’t go straight to magic-duelling the Evil Lord of All Chaos; the reader needs to see layers of progression laid down one by one to understand how, in context, the pig farmer’s victory makes sense. If the context around the character’s development is established correctly, through their interactions with the world and their accumulation of competency over time, this will seem like a logical progression of the narrative—if not, it will look like the characters, and the author, somehow cheated an impossible win.
The establishing of context like this is particularly crucial when it comes to using magic or tech systems to solve the problems of the narrative. If you’ve set up a magic system, but haven’t properly contextualised the rules of how it operates, then using it for any major resolution of the plot will seem exactly like that: magic. If Rowling, for example, hadn’t spent seven books contextualising the importance of the boy who lived, constantly referring back to the uniqueness of surviving the Killing Curse, then the revelation of the final Horcrux would have seemed invented for that final story, a convenient solution appearing out of nowhere—not particularly satisfactory for the readers who’d invested so much time waiting to see how it all ended.
Context, then, is more than Chekhov’s Gun—the idea that a gun shown on the mantle in Act One must be fired in Act Three—a contextual approach to worldbuilding treats every element of the world as a significant element. A reader understands the world which has been built because the world’s context has been laid down for them, layer by layer. It’s what keeps the reader looking for clues to solving the narrative’s conflict throughout the story, and their understanding of the context of the world is what makes the final climax so impactful—they know why The Hero has been victorious because they understand how the Hero got there. When it works, the climax of a contextualised story is impactful and satisfying—when a story fails to establish the proper context leading towards a narrative conclusion… well, you get The Matrix: Revolutions.
And that kind of storytelling really should stay buried.
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