It shows SO much. The same is true of the characters: If the author has done the required thinking about who these characters are and what they’re about, you can always tell. It’s why I love Diana Wynne Jones so much. Even her minorest characters, she knows inside and out.

Hahaha, yeah, fair enough. I am probably less patient than you about a going-nowhere plot, but certainly some good worldbuilding can cover a lot of sins.

I do as well. I like it when an author trusts the reader enough to let her draw her own conclusions about what the world is like — IF, as you say, the author genuinely knows what she’s doing and what the world she’s building looks like.

Exactly, exactly! I give someone like Marisha Pessl a huge amount of benefit of the doubt, because I enjoyed Special Topics in Calamity Physics so much. If another author had written Night Film, I’d probably have had far less patience with it.

I think that’s a very good guideline. Shirley Jackson’s good at that.

Like what’s an example of that? It doesn’t sound awesome, but I can’t think of any examples where the authors do that, so I don’t know. My instinct is to say that if they dump all the background in the first chapter, I will immediately forget it. :p

Oh my God YES. I find it so frustrating in, particularly, dystopian books, when I can’t tell how the world came to be what it is in those books. It’s why I’m so fond of process dystopias when I come across them.

(Is there a better plural for dystopia? I never took Greek and have no idea how the root words would decline.)

And they really aren’t — I’d love it if there had seemed to be more going on under the surface, but it felt like it was ALL surface.

LOVE: “feathers of implication to float far on the breeze of the tale,”