2025-09-04 1957h, Paracosms and secondary worlds

In paracosm, the term "paracosm" refers to psychological concept developed in the 1970s, after a paper by Robert Silvey LaRue and David Cohen. Reading about it, however, it seems like it is about endless variations on a theme, speaking to fiction where my understanding of "paracosm" was semi-organically emerged secondary worlds, of the sort Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft made, with geographic overlap and timeline continuity.

From what I can get (the paper isn't open-access), LaRue and Cohen are more concerned with the method, and when the method results in one big world or many little ones, that isn't important to them so much as how the people developing and expressing them are being affected.

Whereas I'm more specifically interested in using the approach to make a big world, which, structured by the instructions of a LaRue or Cohen paracosm (interlinked and developing properties), results in what J.R.R. Tolkien likely would've called a secondary world.

Notably, both paracosm and secondary worlds as hermeneutical concepts emerged from psychological and literary theory, as a way of explaining the repeated patterns noted by the disciplines. So it seems... sensible, to suggest that studying how people make paracosms probably would be good for learning strategies for developing secondary worlds.

Worlds like Teraum and the Okagana seem like they might fit the definition of "paracosm" and "secondary world," both. My repeated caveat is that the paracosm for me is not a refuge from the world (though it sometimes is an escape), it's a way of describing the world which, in the very complicated paracosm space, has itself come to take on breadth and detail.

Which makes me realize that something like the emsean paracosm is actually more like what critical theory might be talking about when they used "worlds," i.e. "world-making" of a critical cosmology.

In this usage, the world isn't a necessary place, it's sort of like... a projecting out of what such a place, over time, interacting with its inhabitants, might have been like. The interlocutor in such a world space doesn't have to understand how it relates to their practitioner - so Tolkein can argue that Middle Earth isn't really his British mythology - but the "world" is always, unlike planets, constrained by the extent of the collection of understandings of its inhabitants demanded by its creator.

You can add to such a world, but its roots will always be in its creator. (Or the creator, or creators, of its creators... etc.)

In a way, this framing of worlds and world-making complements paracosm well. A paracosm is "a detailed imaginary world," the literature says: a paracosmic way of seeing a world is one that has theoretical reach, universe-building depth, resultant determinism.

There's also notion of secondary worlds.

Paracosm is used to discuss the phenomenology (psychology, specifically) of the worlds. Secondary worlds describes what happens in those worlds.

That's how I feel comforatble using it. All the casual overlapping worlds I've made over the years - Teraum, Sonder V Lexicon, Where the River Rises - those comprise the emsean paracosm, which is a world, or possibly, world cluster, structurally.

Collectively they're a world more than they are individual worlds - that is, if properly implemented, so that things like the intrigue between retarius Varissk and their target articulation can be shown as one of the paracosm's ways of seeing.

Teraum, specifically, and those others through worldbuilding and literary work, become secondary worlds.

Anyway, that's how I'm going to aim to write about it.

And having written all this, I feel more confident saying the emsean paracosm is the literary paracosmics in which, or through which, those things can be seen.

The emsiverse, then, the paracosm through those lenses. The emsean paracosm is a world, the emsiverse, the totality of lensing on that world.

Notably, Brian Attebery with Strategies of Fantasy (1992ce) holds the secondary world as a key marker of the fantasy literary genre, and Farah Mendlesohn makes it part of a taxonomy of relations between reader and secondary world, in Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008ce).

And Mark Wolf takes that even further with /Building Imaginary Worlds/, which looks at literary narrative as an emergent phenomenon of the secondary world.

This is pretty in line with how I feel about my own secondary world and its stories - and is why I think I've been so able to use the world as a source of static stories and tabletop role-playing game session material too.

Mendlesohn and Edward James clarified that as the contemporary definition of the fantasy genre in Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, also in 2012:

Following Tolkien, we may say that fantasy is the literature of the secondary world: a self-consistent realm in which the impossible becomes normal.

Given those definitions, it seems most precise to say that there are secondary worlds and paracosmic secondary worlds, and that makes it clear that perhaps rather than "emsean paracosm," it shuold be "emsean worlds," but I am concerned that makes it sound like it is specific planets and not... worlds in the more modern critical theory sense. Which moves me back to toward paracosm, so it stands out as a concept. And, the world is still very much grounded in my own personal experiences and beliefs, including my ongoing ones, so the term does fit, even if my appraoch to paracosmosis is so heavily influenced by my research methodology that it cannot help but also be a secondary world.

So the emsean paracosm is my paracosm, and the emsiverse is the literary material, the secondary world, that is produced by selectively curating my paracosm.

And all those terms have been pretty decently described.

Somehow I've managed to almost completely avoid discussing the /content/ of the emsean paracosm, though, except for a passing mention to "Ack."

That'll have to be for another time, though.