Top-down and bottom-up worldbuilding in Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

An immersive setting is one of the signature features of a novel; readers often select a novel based on a desire to sink into a specific world. So setting and worldbuilding are important skills for all authors to master. Fantasy and science-fiction authors, however, have a harder job: They often create entirely new worlds rather than describe a world readers already know. That makes their methods especially worth studying.

In this post, I’m going to focus on two early chapters from the sci-fi strand of Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, which rely on two different kinds of worldbuilding: top-down (expository, telling) and bottom-up (scenic, showing). Most writing advice favors bottom-up worldbuilding, immersing readers in the story world alongside characters. Bottom-up worldbuilding can also be more active, woven into the action and dialogue of a live scene, and the technique fits well with the limited, close narration style popular today. However, just like omniscient narration or passive voice, there is a time and place for using top-down, expository worldbuilding. Writers can choose between the two modes in order to control how close the reader stands to the story.

As I discussed in my post on the opening, Okorafor deliberately immerses us in Zelu’s story, marking it as the primary one, while at first keeping us a bit more distant from Ankara’s story. (I discuss the logic behind that choice in my post on the overall structure of the novel.) For example, the worldbuilding in chapter two, which introduces readers to Zelu, is bottom-up. We meet Zelu while she is at her sister’s wedding, a savvy choice that allows Okorafor to explore the family dynamics and the Nigerian cultural influences so important to her story thread. We learn about her mother’s royal Yoruba heritage when she brings out an enormous coral necklace for the bride, causing Zelu to roll her eyes. We learn that many Nigerians are suspicious of disabilities, along with abnormalities of any kind, when Zelu’s uncle makes a comment about her being “crippled,” which she shrugs off, knowing she’s not going to change his mind. We learn more about how Zelu navigates the world in her wheelchair by seeing what is easy and what is difficult as she moves through the variety of settings in this chapter.

What makes this worldbuilding bottom-up is that every single detail is delivered in the context of a live scene, featuring action and dialogue. The details are vivid and help establish the world, but they all arrive in service of the scene; they never seem to be its point.

In the two chapters from the sci-fi strand I’m going to examine here, Okorafor uses top-down worldbuilding in chapter three, heightening the contrast between our close-up introduction to Zelu and our more distanced introduction to Ankara. In chapter six, she shifts to bottom-up worldbuilding to bring us one step closer to Ankara, part of a gradual progression she makes across the course of the novel. As we’ll see in my post on structure, readers distracted by Zelu’s high-drama plot might not realize how closely Okorafor has brought us to Ankara by the end.

The two figures below provide a snapshot of the component breakdown of chapters three and six, so you can get a sense of the initial differences and which components Okorafor is relying on in each. Both chapters use backstory and character description as their primary components, but the balance is different.

In chapter three, the top-down worldbuilding means that nearly 90 percent of the scene is dominated by these two telling components, with no action or dialogue at all. In chapter six, which relies on bottom-up worldbuilding, backstory and character description are at 60 percent, and are layered under a live scene that includes the showing components action, dialogue, and setting. Let’s now take a closer look at how each chapter works.

Chapter three is largely exposition. Okorafor opens at maximum distance, zooming way out to cover millennia of the Earth’s history in one paragraph:

This is a world we recognize, although it is perhaps difficult to locate our exact place in this zoomed-out timeline. Are we in a fall before a reemergence? In the “oil and plastic” phase before the “flowers blooming” phase? Or are these phases concurrent?

Even when she grounds us, Okorafor does it sparingly. In the next paragraph we get a tiny bit of grounding in a detailed setting, one that is recognizable to us—a “crumbling parking lot”—and a glimpse of our so-far nameless first-person narrator, whose metal feet are being warmed by the hot concrete. We also get a possibly reassuring bit of interiority: our narrator is sure “the Earth [has] great things ahead of it, even still.” Another chunk of backstory reveals that humans have died out, but the remaining intelligences on Earth were programmed to help the planet heal, allowing some creatures to begin to flourish again.

Our narrator seems almost as saddened by the loss of humans as we might be, observing plaintively, “Our creators, our masters, our parents, our authors . . . gone” (ellipsis in the original). Readers on the hunt for the meaning of the title now have another possibility to consider: Perhaps the death of the author is a collective death of the human creators who authored the code that programmed our narrator and its fellow robots and AIs.

While we now have the hint of a setting and a hazy picture of our robot narrator, the scene is so far entirely static, without action or dialogue. A brief bit of summary encapsulates the current state of the robots and AIs: “We had reached the end of our programmed code. There was nothing more for us to do. And yet we were still here.” Summary then shades into character description as our narrator fills in our understanding of what kind of being it is and how it developed over generations. Our narrator is a “Hume robot,” originally created by humans “to be most like them.” The robots rust but do not die; if a part fails, “we simply replaced it.” Because emotions formed the language and therefore the Humes’ programming codes, they also have emotions as part of their “digital DNA.”

By this point, if not sooner, we believe that we are reading the novel we saw Zelu begin in the previous chapter, which she titles Rusted Robots. We assume that Zelu’s narrative is primary, which makes us more patient readers of this “extra” material—willing to swallow more exposition and worldbuilding than we would be if this chapter came first. We might even wonder if we will get the full story of Rusted Robots, if there is one, or if the “death of the author” will interrupt it, either literally or metaphorically.

The exposition also allows Okorafor to spend time on theme, which can easily be grafted on to any of the telling components, as it is in the following passage of character description:

This is a profound, nuanced, and prescient commentary on the topic of AI and creativity that is currently consuming the publishing industry, but it also brings us back to the meaning of the novel’s title. By the end of chapter two, we believe that Zelu’s Rusted Robots novel—the material we seem to be reading right now—has the power to lift her from pain and poverty to riches and fame, fulfilling Ankara’s description of stories as “the greatest currency.” What then does it mean that Ankara, our protagonist inside Rusted Robots, does not have access to this currency? Is this another metaphorical death of the author because humans created Humes without the one ability that would allow them to evolve?

Even when a plot finally flickers to life, Okorafor uses telling instead of showing to introduce it. Ankara has been slowly and steadily pursuing her vocation as a Scholar, gathering undiscovered stories humans left behind, when she is handed a high-stakes quest:

Summary, backstory, and interiority are the tools Okorafor uses to introduce the quest. It’s not until Ankara’s next POV chapter, which I’ll analyze in the following section, that we get to see the initial call to action via showing tools.

The figure below gives a good overall sense of the texture of a top-down, expository scene. You can see the imbalance in chapter three: a tiny flicker of blue setting and yellow interiority on a page of gray backstory, which shades into two pages of character description mixed with backstory, and finally the green summary chunk heralding the announcement of the quest in the yellow snippet of interiority that ends the chapter. This is the visual trace of a slower-paced chapter, one that pulls out to show us the whole history of the Earth before finally zooming in on a single character in a specific place and time, pursuing a concrete goal.

This chapter shows what you can accomplish with top-down worldbuilding: cover a vast swath of time, explain basics of the story world, and foreground theme. It’s the right tool for Okorafor’s purpose, but it won’t be the right tool for every chapter focused on worldbuilding. Let’s now look at chapter six, which uses more conventional worldbuilding strategies.

After teasing the “terrible information” at the end of chapter three, the phrase is given pride of place as the title of chapter six, leading us to believe that we are going to find out what it is. That suspense pulls us forward into the chapter, and though we don’t get the information immediately, what we do get is an active scene as Ankara tells us how the terrible information “found” her.

The figure below will show you right away how different this chapter is in texture and feel from chapter three. While there are big chunks of character description and backstory in the middle of the chapter, it opens and closes with bright red flares of action and blue rivers of setting, grounding us in a specific place and time in which something is happening.

As the chapter opens, Ankara is following directions to find a book titled The Most Important Data on Earth. In this section Okorafor uses bottom-up worldbuilding, revealing details about the world as Ankara moves through it. Here’s an example:

Each specific detail provides a visual that not only enriches the setting, but also teaches us what is generally true about this world. For example: Humans might have perished, but mangrove and palm trees and manatees remain. Ankara operates on solar energy. There are still traces of humans on the landscape. (Using a simile drawn from the natural world, the dead fish, to describe the decaying oil pipeline is a beautiful touch.) In your own worldbuilding, choose details that allow readers to make the jump from the specific to the general.

A journey is a natural way to pair action with exposition. Readers get the feeling of movement, even as you pause to linger on specific setting details. In this chapter, we continue to travel with Ankara as she reaches the remnants of Lagos, and we get to see what a city looks like in this far-future world:

These three sentences encapsulate the rhythm of specific showing—vines and buildings and wildlife—followed by generalized telling, a summary observation about what we’ve just been shown. Use microbeats of telling (via interiority or summary) in the midst of showing (via setting or character description) in order to guide readers’ attention and shape their interpretations.

Let’s look at one more passage from this section, in which Ankara enters the lair of Udide, a robot who has fashioned himself a body resembling a giant spider. A sentence of interiority shapes our expectations before we are given any concrete details. “I’ve yet to see anything more sublime,” Ankara tells us. Next, we get a series of setting details:

These setting details are then charged with further meaning when Ankara reveals via a chunk of interiority that she is afraid, noting that this tunnel could easily have been “designed to destroy intruders.” The lesson here is that even when you are primarily using a showing tool like setting description, you may need a telling tool like interiority to get the maximum effect.

As we’ve seen, top-down worldbuilding primarily relies on the telling components (summary, backstory, character description, and interiority), while bottom-up worldbuilding primarily relies on the showing components (action, dialogue, and setting). The well-worn piece of writing advice to show, don’t tell would then seem to imply that bottom-up worldbuilding is always better. However, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the telling components are in your craft toolbox for a reason. When applied to worldbuilding, they do things the showing tools cannot: for example, compressing vast time and scope, foregrounding themes and ideas, and controlling distance. So the right rule is a little more complex: Don’t tell when showing would serve you better. These two modes aren’t unique to worldbuilding. In my Wild Dark Shore scene study, we’ll see Charlotte McConaghy make the same top-down/bottom-up choice to deliver backstory.

The lesson here for authors is that you should be deliberate when choosing a style of worldbuilding and make sure it aligns with your narrative goals. How do you want readers to experience a scene?

Do you want to immerse them, to invest them fully in the desires and needs of the POV character? Then bottom-up (or scenic) worldbuilding is the best choice. Or do you want readers to engage with a certain scene in a more distanced or analytical way, perhaps because you want to spotlight themes or concepts? Then top-down (or expository) worldbuilding will be a better choice. While scenic worldbuilding might be your go-to approach, remember that expository worldbuilding remains a valuable tool in your author’s toolkit, ready to be deployed when your narrative strategy calls for it.

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