This happens to be the one hundredth column in this series.  You might think that a milestone; but in fact, I’ll be talking about milestones in four weeks, when we wrap up two years.  This week, I’m reminded of something else:  the century.  A few years ago as a century ended, I wrote a piece in which I was decrying the over-hyped use of the claim that a particular event or individual was the outstanding example of something in the century.  I mentioned the Simpson trial, touted by the media as The Trial of the Century, when obviously it was no such thing.  Already it is mostly forgotten (except by the tabloids), while Nuremberg, Brown v. Board of Education, Scopes, Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Lindberg kidnapping, Miranda, and the Chicago Seven–just to name a few–are preserved in the history books as significant moments in justice and jurisprudence.  But then, it was characteristic of that decade to claim that whatever was important at that moment was the most important thing of its kind in a hundred years.  I think perhaps the passing of the century has put that particular fallacy behind us, at least for the next ninety years.

  Obviously, the idea of the century is that a hundred years have passed; and if you pay attention to our language and our literature, you will realize that we speak of centuries, at least of recent ones, as if they were each very different from all those which preceded them.  We speak of the twentieth century as modern (that will probably fall away as the twenty-first takes over).  Yet we also recognize characteristics that are the nineteenth century (the Industrial Revolution), the eighteenth century (the rise of democracy), the seventeenth century (the ascendancy of reason and science), and back through time.

  It is true that today we do this same sort of discriminating between generations and decades and even years (that is SO last year).  It is just as true that those points we recognize as characteristic of a particular century are frequently isolated to small areas geographically and more characteristic of part of the century than of the whole.  Yet with these caveats in place, it is clear that centuries do have characteristics that distinguish them.  These characteristics are in part the events that comprise their histories, but they are in even greater part the thoughts and mindsets that dominate the age.  To miss this is to miss a vital aspect of setting, even to be trapped into creating worlds that are all really here and now with different technology and funny looking people.

  C. S. Lewis (yeah, him again) expressed this idea in an essay entitled On the Reading of Old Books, originally as the preface to a translation of an ancient Latin work but which can be found reprinted in God in the Dock.  In it he makes the observation that as we read books from a particular period of the past, we can see mistakes that the writers all share, points of agreement which they have accepted as givens, even while they rage against each other in arguments in which, from their perspective, they share no common ground.  What is as interesting as the fact that these debaters fail to see their points of agreement, Lewis observes, is that it is often the case that we would not agree with those points.  It isn’t that as time has advanced we have gotten smarter and recognized those assumptions and corrected them.  It is clear that the mistakes of one century were not made in the previous century or the subsequent century–they were unique peccadilloes of the time, the fashion of the moment.  This should clue us to the fact that we, too, are caught up in the errors of our time, in complete agreement on some ideas which both our ancestors and our descendants would or will find completely insensible.

  In creating another time, it is important–perhaps vital–to attempt to capture the intellectual climate of the period.  Understanding the ideas that were controlling at that moment is, for us, more than just a brilliant illumination of a moment in history; it is the creation of a different world.  How much more important this is when creating an alien civilization, or a fantasy universe.  To truly capture the feel of a world, you need to understand what dominates its thought, and reproduce that in its very fiber.  You need to find its truths and its fallacies, the mistakes everyone shares that we see through so quickly and the truths they grasp that somehow seem to elude us.  You need to characterize the age, the place, the state of thought in the world, to truly make it somewhere different.

  So I give the same advice Lewis gave, for a different reason.  He said that to escape the errors of our age, we must immerse ourselves in the writings of all those who preceded us, seeing the mistakes they made but also recognizing that where they disagree with us it might be we who are mistaken.  I cannot say this is not a good reason for such reading; but for those of you who create game worlds I offer another.  To understand the world as it was, it is not enough to read modern historical analyses of those times.  You must read the books of the day–the fiction that reached the masses, the theological and philosophical tomes that challenged the intellectual elite, the science and technology as it was understood in its time, the debates that raged and the agreements that were reached.  You must discover how another moment in time truly differs from our own.  You must do this even if you have no wish to create historic (let alone historically accurate) settings, because you must come to understand how such worlds can be different in order to make yours different in the most essential ways.  Get out of your own corner of the universe, and explore the rest.  By truly seeing these other worlds, you will far better understand how to create your own.

  As Lewis says, there is no magic to the books of the past in themselves.  The books of the future would be just as effective, but unfortunately are not yet available to us.  It is that moment of stepping out of the prevailing thoughts of our own age that gives us the understanding not only of another world, but of our own.  From that understanding, we create.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.