Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-25266931-20151213225959/@comment-24891101-20151215031856

Yes. Because otherwise you'd have to write dozens of history books, invent dozens of languages, devise millions of years of evolutionary history, and write dozens of physics books, and so on, all so you can tell a story, which needs only a subset of that. All this is assumed to exist in the world, but an author cannot do all that themself, so they leave it to the imagination and to extrapolation.

They're not holes. They're parts of the sprawling canvas that are lightly sketched, because one person, or even several cannot hope to fill the whole canvas in their lifetime.