I love weird settings but the tension-driving page-turning force should never be the weirdness or the “what’s going on?”-feeling. It should be what the people in the weird world choose to do.
Many of the best works of fiction, like Groundhog Day, use a weird framework to tell compelling stories.
These stories can use the weirdness to tell stories of themes that are difficult to get at otherwise, like infinity or effervescence, or how different choices or different behavior in a situation can cause different outcomes, or the weirdness can be a metaphor for something else, or it can be just a backdrop for introducing interrelated sub-stories of compelling characters.
All those usages of weirdness are different from each other but can all be great. Pretty much all my favorite fiction is on the “weird” shelf. Love it. The human experience made hyper-clear by going beyond the real.
Sometimes, though, fiction tries to make “what are the rules?” a mystery in its own right. “Why is there a smoke monster and a polar bear in the jungle? What are the exact workings of this time-traveling subway train? Why is there suddenly a mysterious golden key in your violin case? Why am I suddenly in a flooded house full of statues? Why is the strange VR game full of historical figures who suddenly dry up? Tune in next week on the same channel to find out the answer to this exciting cliffhanger!” and the answer is always the same: whatever meaningless dream logic the writing team feels like pulling straight out of their own hats.
Do not care it is not real.
When writing weird fiction, don’t have questions about how the weirdness works be the tension. Have a real story.
A Los Angeles Times review by Robert Lloyd applauded the season by stating, “It’s helpful to regard the series, especially in the whipsaw transitions of its beautiful last movements, as musical or poetic.”
I read a lot of poetry and listen to a lot of music. It’s awesome. The only possible reaction to the futility of human language.
But poetry and music don’t use their weirdness as if it itself were a pageturner.
“All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths… wow, they seem to actually be outgrabing!? Tune in next week to get some more clues about the mome raths!”
Aniara is a poem (with an SF premise) that works as a novella, because the tension is in how the characters are going to react and what they are going to do. The tension isn’t how mome the raths are.
I’m not arguing against weird and beautiful and trippy stuff or against dream logic. This page wouldn’t even exist if I blanket hated all weird settings. I’m all for it. I love it. It’s the best. That’s why I feel like works that try to make the exploration of the dream logic be a main tension driver are cheapening weird fiction. It’s as if a office romance would be all hyped up about its setting: “OMG, there was an actual water-cooler in here?! And turn in next week for the true significance of the Red Stapler!”
Like, I loved and still love Lost for the human element, definitively was one of my favorite TV-watching experiences of all time, but the mystery turned out to be complete pishposh. The writers had no idea and was actually using the fans’ theorycrafting wiki to make sure their future hatpulling was consistent (I mean, if you’re gonna hatpull, doing it that way is a good idea so you at least get consistency).
There can even be mysteries in a weird setting as long as it’s “Here are the puzzle pieces, here is what you can do, here’s how everything works. Yes, it’s completely weird! But given these tools, strange as they are, how will they handle the situations?” Early Death Note is a great example of this done right. Super weird framework laid out extremely clearly and put to great use in tense situations. Then later Death Note, they start springing new rules on you and it loses some of that charm, although to its credit, it still doesn’t use those rules as either a “wait, what’s this strange occurrance? Tune in next week to find out [it’s something lolrandom we can pull from a hat]” nor a “wait, how will they get out of this unsolvable situation? Tune in next etc [they’ll use a new power we’ve never told you about]”.