May 06 2008
Fightin’ Ewoks
Insurmountable Disadvantage in Science Fiction
Everybody loves to think that it’s the size of the fight in the dog, not the dog in the fight, that determines things. I like those underdogs so much, I was in the very small group of people who could suspend their disbelief enough to enjoy the Ewoks in Star Wars, Return of the Jedi. Of course, I was eight at the time, but…
The little two-foot teddy bears of Star Wars are the icons of Plucky Baseline characters: creatures or people that are hopelessly technologically backwards and yet still manage to overcome their hyper-advanced technologically- and sociologically-developed opponents (link is to the Orion’s Arm – a cooperative sci-fi universe project, a decent argument against the character type, though laced with the group’s own jargon).
Pluck in Action Movies and Fantasy Stories
For fiction set in our own world, plucky characters can usually get away with quite amazing upsets. Action heroes, especially, count on great indulgence from us in suspending our disbelief so they can win gunfights against dozens of opponents, jump vehicles over, around, and through bizarre obstacles, and generally act like one-man armies. Perhaps my favorite example of relatively believable pluck is when Sean Connery, playing Indiana Jones’ dad in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, manages to defeat a German WWII plane by scaring up a flock of geese to jam the plane’s propeller.
In fantasy stories as well, since the rules of the world are largely author-defined, writers can embed trade-offs in the rules of their universes that provide opportunities for Pluck. Usually the most powerful “technology” in a fantasy story will be magic, and thus the powers of wizards will need to be curtailed strongly in some way.
The default way to give non-wizards a chance is to make magic require extreme mental effort from wizards. I’ll mention I just finished Tim Power’s The Anubis Gate, and wizards in the story are limited both by the need to be close to “sources” of magic to perform greater feats, and the physical toll magic takes on them (pain and weakness, bleeding from the eyes, fatigue…).
Moreover, at the heart of almost all magical stories are human or human-like characters with strengths and weaknesses recognizably similar to our own.
Inhuman Perfection
The major difference in space-age science fiction is that there will be inhumanly advanced characters. We are already able to greatly increase the toughness of human beings, and may soon be able to significantly increase human intelligence, and this is in the 21st century. A casually spacefaring population will have had centuries to improve, advance, strengthen, and increase their longevity.
In such a battle against more recognizably “human” opponents (which would likely be the “good guys”, because nobody enjoys rooting for the overdog), the advanced race would win every time. Not most every time—absolutely every time, regardless of pluck. The battle wouldn’t be conceptually like Drake vs. the Spanish Armada, it would be like A Herd of Sheep vs. Boston, Massachusetts.
If a military dictatorship has access to mass genetic modification and cloning technologies, energy weapons, and super-advanced alloys, it will not lose to Ewoks. The dictatorship would not make the soldiers’ strength or reflexes, armor or equipment, susceptible to the sticks of little savages any more than it would create them with exposed brains.
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- this vehicle (6m tall), made of hyper-advanced metal alloys…
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- …is defeated by a bunch of these (1m tall) fuzzballs armed with log traps?
Hitting Above Weight Class
Of course there are lots of tropes in science fiction that stretch believability: that’s part of the fun. But to really draw in readers (less credulous than I was at eight) a science fiction writer will need to put together a force better than Fightin’ Ewoks. Readers are unlikely to believe your featherweight can take on a heavyweight in the ring, but they might believe a middleweight could do it.
Here are a few ideas for putting enough firepower in the hands of your overmatched heroes to make their upsets believable. If you can think of more, please respond with comments—I’m just improvising here.
- If your advanced opponents are divided, a minority of them may either tip the balance by joining the heroes weakening the primary opponents.
- In a more sinister twist, a high-level third party may actually be found to have manipulated the heroes, carefully guiding them to victory for its own purposes.
- Technology at the fringes of an advanced society may be sufficiently up-to-date to pose a reasonable challenge to superior opponent technology at the center (provided the fringes have sufficient communications to stay “in the loop”).
- Since some technologies are so advanced and as-yet scientifically unproven to be indistinguishable from magic (according to Arthur C. Clarkes old adage), you can use the fantasy tools such as trade-offs and critical weaknesses to give the antagonists vulnerabilities (an example of this would be in Larry Niven’s Ringworld, in which humans defeat more militarily capable opponents by improvising a weapon out of spaceship thrusters).
- Throttling back the technological advancement of your societies makes it easier for humans like us to compete—if you want less of a gap between us and frontrunners, set the story closer to the present.
- While it’s a recognizable sci-fi cliche, another way of making normal people important in the future is to have everyone live in the wake of the collapse of a superior civilization. Whatever destroyed that civilization or broke it up conveniently leaves some of the tools behind—allowing access to futuristic technologies without the insurmountable intellectual gulfs that would necessarily accompany them. As I said, though, this is a cliche and that means it would take more work to make a fresh story with this premise.
This is a really great article. You should read Footfall by Lary Niven. Technology isn’t always the “trump” card in a military victory. Sometimes, philosophy, culture or some other mental “blindsidedness” can create the element for a “plucky” victory.
In Footfall an advanced species of herd animals is defeated by humans due to they’re inability to understand the concepts of “ruse/stealth/ruthlesness” in war. Very relevant to your article and a great read.
cao
Hi, ANap! Thanks for the suggestion of Footfall. I have duly added it to my “to read” pile. The description of it you’ve given me reminds me of a short story I read recently.
And now I’ve made myself slightly crazy and spent a lot of time I REALLY needed to spend on work looking for a perfect short story to suggest to you. And I can’t find it! Argh. My book collection is a bit scattered at present, but if I hunt down that story again, I’ll mention it here. I believe I saw it in a collection. It is about a single guy traveling with a hive alien (and ambassador, I think) in an old world. A lot of it is about the guy trying to puzzle out this extreme racial guilt felt by his hive alien companion. One of the tricks of the story, the most obvious one, is that when the alien’s speech is represented directly, it consists of a vertical set of words and symbols, which looks more like a mathematical equation or computer code than speech.
Ah well. Back to work for me. Thanks again for the suggestion!
Your false assumption here is that the empire has competent designers. It really doesn’t.
I would agree, generally. But technology means potential, not ability; ceteris paribus, a technologically advanced society should defeat a technologically inferior one every time (barring extreme ill fortune) if they optimize their means to the task. However, high technology tends to be associated with long development times and specialization, mitigating the ability of the advanced society to prepare specifically for the less advanced. This provides an opportunity, if the specialization leaves vulnerabilities within the reach of the more primitive society.
Return again to the Ewoks. In the Star Wars Universe nearly all weapons are energy based, imparting EM energy rather than kinetic energy (save for particle beam weapons, which are nearly impossible to resist). This means that armor should focus on heat hardening, rather than structural strength. And since the momentum of EM weapons is trivial, walkers and similar unstable vehicle shapes are practical, while the high accuracy and velocity make small size and maneuverability of little use for avoiding fire from anything large enough to have a proper targeting system. Hence the AT-ST: the perfect weapon for attacking modern forces armed with energy weapons, with a vulnerability to swinging logs and tripwires.
Of course, this leaves two questions: why did the Empire not prepare for Endor, and why did others not turn to kinetic weapons? For the first, arrogance is a clear explanation: since the Empire was so superior, an attack would be unthinkable, and of course it would be easily suppressed (reasoning that has gotten many imperialists swarmed). For the second, creative blindness. Rarely will people return to a failed option, even if conditions have so changed that it has become viable again.
The issue of an AT-ATs vulnerability was addressed in one of the short story collections, I think it was Tales from Mos Eisley. A pilot lowered his AT-AT to the ground and his ranking officer (head of the AT-AT project) asked why. The pilot explained he saw a vulnerability to small craft flying under it. The officer had him reassigned to the stormtroopers b/c he didn’t want word of the design flaw reaching the Emperor, likely costing him his life. He also didn’t see the POTENTIAL for this issue to become reality. The re-assigned pilot ended up passing along his info to the Rebellion after the events on Tattooine.
So I guess the Empire doesn’t have competent designers AND is too arrogant for its own good.
Thank you very much Ian and Coldfireknight.
You both did a lot more thinking about this subject than my little article probably deserved, so I thank you deeply for your contributions. And I agree that arrogance can definitely cause a militarily more advanced power to lose to a militarily less-advanced one.
What things probably come down to here is a whole host of suspension of disbelief issues that people will probably either take as a group or reject as a group. I know that for friends of mine, the Ewok battle was the last straw, the final of a host of issues that make it impossible for them to continue to suspend disbelief. It didn’t break mine enough to make me reject the story, but that was partly to do with my age at the time.
One of the most important of those issues is: could a spacefaring collection of cultures develop into a political entity that so closely resembles a kind of colonialist fascist power? In other words, could societies so clearly more advanced than us technologically have a type of government that is so clearly a throwback. It’s an assumption for a lot of sci-fi, but something that Star Wars world always took to an extreme. (An elite class of knights, space battles that resemble sea battles–even including sound effects–and a military coup in a parliament that looks rather like Ancient Rome to me).
OK, so we accept that. But then, if you do accept that the Empire is analogous to empires from our history, there aren’t a lot of examples of technologically backwards opponents winning at the heart of enemy power in that history. At the fringes, yes, but at the heart, rarely. Do you know of good examples?
So, getting back to the article, what I was mostly advocating for was writers consciously considering the technological gulf they are trying to bridge with pluck and then considering if they could fill in/narrow that gulf a little more to achieve more believable stories.
You should watch/read the anime/manga Toppen Tengen Gurren Lagann! This series perfectly illustrates the principle of “pluck” beating “superior forces”. Of course, the reason for that is that “guts” or “pluck” is a literal power source and plot device of infinite potential in this world.