Oops, time machine
Apr. 2nd, 2021 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealReading an anthology of science fiction stories and trying to articulate why several don't work for me. This may turn into one of those overly-rambly posts where I try to construct a grand unifying theory of everything, bear with me.
Type I: the characters have too little agency, relative to the stakes at hand, so it doesn't feel like any interesting decisions are made. In some cases, in my opinion, this is because there is too much emphasis on the characters' emotions, rather than the events.
Example: "oh no, an asteroid will destroy the planet in an hour. Well, I will hug my children and tell them that I love them! The end." Hugging your children and telling them that you love them is always a good thing! But it doesn't really work (for me) as the moral or punch line of a story about an asteroid destroying the planet.
Some of the criticism of the Star Wars sequel trilogy has pointed out that both many of the characters and the galaxy as a whole would not be much worse off if the Empire had just stayed in power the whole time. Like, the Hosnian Prime system never gets destroyed, children are never kidnapped and enslaved to become First Order troopers, Luke and Leia and Han's deaths can't be much more pointless...Obviously this wasn't the deliberate goal of the original trilogy, but it can be interpreted that way.
Type II: there's no characterization beyond a cool "what-if?" and the rest of the plot is tacked on to try to make that compelling. Maybe the author just wanted to show you their learnings about how that technology or scenario would work.
Example: "what if I had an awesome space gun that could send stuff to the moon?" Okay? What if you had an awesome space gun? Who would use it? Why?
"The Martian" novel flirts with, but doesn't completely fall victim to, this trope. "What if Mark Watney was stuck on Mars?" "Okay, first thing, he would do this." "But what if he ran out of food?" "He finds out how to grow potatoes by doing that." "What if there was no power source?" "Then he would scavenge the plutonium reactor." Now, in most circumstances, scavenging a plutonium reactor has some obvious risks. However, Watney is in a position where he really has nothing to lose. There isn't, and there doesn't need to be, a lot of philosophical posturing about "hmm, can I accept the risk of radioactivity?" We're in it for the adventure. Some of the prose gets a little infodumpy (I think it works better as a movie), however, the conflict of "how will I survive being stuck on Mars" is enough for me to buy into all the problem-solving.
I know some of the stories I've had trouble writing gave me trouble because all I had was a what-if. "What if the reason most people can't hear ghosts is [redacted]. and our hero is a ghost trying to adjust to ghosthood?" Okay, but what do they do? "What if this scientific theory wasn't discovered in RL circumstances X, but instead in RL situation Y?" Okay, what if? Who are the people that would be affected by that? (The story I have in mind was inspired by "The Circle" by Cixin Liu, an adaptation of one of "The Three-Body Problem" chapters into a stand-alone short story, and I think the way he made a plot and characterization out of "What if this scientific theory wasn't discovered in RL circumstances X, but instead in RL situation Y?" is pretty darn brilliant--that might be a rambly post of its own someday. But my abilities are far below Cixin Liu's in that regard!!)
Corollary: the longer the work, the greater the risk that type I poses. There are lots of stories that are like "hey, I just accidentally invented a time machine!" "Well great, let's go kill Hitler!" "No, no, we can't actually do that, it's not one of the good time machines." If you're writing a relatively brief short story, "the time machine didn't actually let me change anything, but the real magic was the friends we made along the way" might work as a takeaway. (It still might not be to my tastes, but I think there are many people who would like it.) I really like "Transit of Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke, which is the opposite of "The Martian"--it's just, "the Mars mission didn't go right, guess I'll die." Because it's a short story, that works. But if we spent an entire book or movie following Watney only for him to be killed by a stray bolt 90% of the way through, I think I'd feel more cheated.
"Recursion" is a novel where the climax of the first act is "oops, I just accidentally invented a time machine." That comes as a neat twist because we'd been led to suspect other kinds of mad science were at play. And if it had ended there as a novella, I think I would have enjoyed it more. Instead, it turns into a novel where basically time travel is always a danger, and the only hope is to prevent it from being created in the first place. It feels like despite the characters' choices, nothing significant changes for them between the first page and the last except maybe for "hmm, this person could be my one true partner, I know everything about her from previous timelines, maybe she is the one!!" Which is kind of iffy.
"Primer," in contrast, does a better job of "oops, I just accidentally invented a time machine"--but the rules for using it are so narrowly defined (you can't go back to a time before the machine existed, so no killing Hitler) that its implications and use continue to expand to fill the movie, and beyond.
I think the "what if everybody dies??" speculation could be considered a special case of this--Level 3 from that post is Case II here. "What if Revelation was a literal depiction of future apocalyptic events?" Okay, what if it was? You still need characters to make interesting decisions in light of that, otherwise "look, I read Revelation!" isn't any better prose than "look, I know how a plutonium reactor works!" On the other hand, Level 2 from that post corresponds to Case I here. "Everybody dies, and there's definitely no afterlife! Good thing too, or this story would have to be a zillion times longer and I don't have the time or space to plot all that out. Anyway, hug your loved ones."
And yes, I have another ramble in me about time travel specifically and works that actually go for "serious changes," but that's probably another story too. :p
Type I: the characters have too little agency, relative to the stakes at hand, so it doesn't feel like any interesting decisions are made. In some cases, in my opinion, this is because there is too much emphasis on the characters' emotions, rather than the events.
Example: "oh no, an asteroid will destroy the planet in an hour. Well, I will hug my children and tell them that I love them! The end." Hugging your children and telling them that you love them is always a good thing! But it doesn't really work (for me) as the moral or punch line of a story about an asteroid destroying the planet.
Some of the criticism of the Star Wars sequel trilogy has pointed out that both many of the characters and the galaxy as a whole would not be much worse off if the Empire had just stayed in power the whole time. Like, the Hosnian Prime system never gets destroyed, children are never kidnapped and enslaved to become First Order troopers, Luke and Leia and Han's deaths can't be much more pointless...Obviously this wasn't the deliberate goal of the original trilogy, but it can be interpreted that way.
Type II: there's no characterization beyond a cool "what-if?" and the rest of the plot is tacked on to try to make that compelling. Maybe the author just wanted to show you their learnings about how that technology or scenario would work.
Example: "what if I had an awesome space gun that could send stuff to the moon?" Okay? What if you had an awesome space gun? Who would use it? Why?
"The Martian" novel flirts with, but doesn't completely fall victim to, this trope. "What if Mark Watney was stuck on Mars?" "Okay, first thing, he would do this." "But what if he ran out of food?" "He finds out how to grow potatoes by doing that." "What if there was no power source?" "Then he would scavenge the plutonium reactor." Now, in most circumstances, scavenging a plutonium reactor has some obvious risks. However, Watney is in a position where he really has nothing to lose. There isn't, and there doesn't need to be, a lot of philosophical posturing about "hmm, can I accept the risk of radioactivity?" We're in it for the adventure. Some of the prose gets a little infodumpy (I think it works better as a movie), however, the conflict of "how will I survive being stuck on Mars" is enough for me to buy into all the problem-solving.
I know some of the stories I've had trouble writing gave me trouble because all I had was a what-if. "What if the reason most people can't hear ghosts is [redacted]. and our hero is a ghost trying to adjust to ghosthood?" Okay, but what do they do? "What if this scientific theory wasn't discovered in RL circumstances X, but instead in RL situation Y?" Okay, what if? Who are the people that would be affected by that? (The story I have in mind was inspired by "The Circle" by Cixin Liu, an adaptation of one of "The Three-Body Problem" chapters into a stand-alone short story, and I think the way he made a plot and characterization out of "What if this scientific theory wasn't discovered in RL circumstances X, but instead in RL situation Y?" is pretty darn brilliant--that might be a rambly post of its own someday. But my abilities are far below Cixin Liu's in that regard!!)
Corollary: the longer the work, the greater the risk that type I poses. There are lots of stories that are like "hey, I just accidentally invented a time machine!" "Well great, let's go kill Hitler!" "No, no, we can't actually do that, it's not one of the good time machines." If you're writing a relatively brief short story, "the time machine didn't actually let me change anything, but the real magic was the friends we made along the way" might work as a takeaway. (It still might not be to my tastes, but I think there are many people who would like it.) I really like "Transit of Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke, which is the opposite of "The Martian"--it's just, "the Mars mission didn't go right, guess I'll die." Because it's a short story, that works. But if we spent an entire book or movie following Watney only for him to be killed by a stray bolt 90% of the way through, I think I'd feel more cheated.
"Recursion" is a novel where the climax of the first act is "oops, I just accidentally invented a time machine." That comes as a neat twist because we'd been led to suspect other kinds of mad science were at play. And if it had ended there as a novella, I think I would have enjoyed it more. Instead, it turns into a novel where basically time travel is always a danger, and the only hope is to prevent it from being created in the first place. It feels like despite the characters' choices, nothing significant changes for them between the first page and the last except maybe for "hmm, this person could be my one true partner, I know everything about her from previous timelines, maybe she is the one!!" Which is kind of iffy.
"Primer," in contrast, does a better job of "oops, I just accidentally invented a time machine"--but the rules for using it are so narrowly defined (you can't go back to a time before the machine existed, so no killing Hitler) that its implications and use continue to expand to fill the movie, and beyond.
I think the "what if everybody dies??" speculation could be considered a special case of this--Level 3 from that post is Case II here. "What if Revelation was a literal depiction of future apocalyptic events?" Okay, what if it was? You still need characters to make interesting decisions in light of that, otherwise "look, I read Revelation!" isn't any better prose than "look, I know how a plutonium reactor works!" On the other hand, Level 2 from that post corresponds to Case I here. "Everybody dies, and there's definitely no afterlife! Good thing too, or this story would have to be a zillion times longer and I don't have the time or space to plot all that out. Anyway, hug your loved ones."
And yes, I have another ramble in me about time travel specifically and works that actually go for "serious changes," but that's probably another story too. :p
