- * A worldbuilding critic who takes a negative view of some world might be told that they're not allowed to contradict authorial intent. If the narrator says the people of dath ilan are doing something because they're good and smart and cooperative, the critic has to accept that.
- * But what makes the medianworld exercise interesting is that it's about trying to portray a realistic world, given a shifted distribution of psychological traits. We take the text of the story as a given, but we don't have to take dath ilan's self-image literally, if we think a different world could "project" into the same text and explain it better.
- * Mathematicians are also in the business of creating imaginary worlds.
- * An ethnographer might note that Americans believe themselves to be "the land of the brave and the home of the free", without being obliged for their ethnography to agree with this description. I'm taking the same stance towards dath ilan: as a literary critic, I don't have to share its Society's beliefs about itself.
+Authors, of course, have much more wiggle room than mathematicians to try to salvage their cherished ideas. Rather than being forced back to the drawing board by an unwanted implication, a fiction writer finds it all too easy to simply add another sentence denying it.
+
+[TODO: but the rich freedom to specify whatever you want in text is counterbalanced by the rich detail of a real world that wasn't specified in your text; the text is given, but readers trying to imagine a self-consistent world that "projects into" your text are going to have to assume things about the world that you didn't write, in order to make their model add up]