Lore, exposition & world building

Is ‘lore’ something which excites you or provokes a roll of the eyes? If you’re not a regular reader or viewer of genre fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, you may not even have heard the term in this context.

lore
/lɔː/
noun
a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth.

The ‘particular group’ relevant to this conversation is, of course, geeks. I’ve spent countless hours, especially when I was younger, poring over the fine details of Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Babylon 5. In this context, lore is the background detail of the world, the large and small details which help make a fictional setting feel real.

While literary fiction attracts obsessive analysis from readers, critics and academics, the focus tends to be on character, theme and language appreciation. Those of us who enjoy ‘lore’ are focused less on the literary merits of a text (be it movie, comic, novel, game etc) and more on the fictional gaps in-between the core text. Luke Skywalker’s motivations are less important than what Dr Evazan did before arriving at the Mos Eisley cantina. There’s a good chance a lot of people reading this article have no idea who Dr Evazan is — the before and after of the bit-part character has almost no bearing on the main Star Wars story…