Inkless

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 them so much so I was probably one of the only people who could really suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy the Ewoks in Star Wars, Return of the Jedi. Of course, I was eight at the time, and mostly I’m still able to enjoy them due to a combination of nostalgia and contrarianism against the Empire Strikes Back crowd…

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 required 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…). Role-playing games have even quantified the mental effort: a wizard has only a certain number of points of magical power which must be replenished after using magical abilities.

Other popular controls on magic are to make casting it involve inescapable vulnerabilities, or require devilish bargains, great sacrifices, virtuoso precision, vast amounts of time, or rare materials.

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 future population will have centuries of improvement, advancement, and strengthing, and increasing of longevity behind it.

In such a battle against more recognizably “human” opponents (which would be the likely be the “good guys”, because empathizing with an inhumanly advanced group would be much more difficult), 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.

(images: walker, ewok)

Hitting Above Weight Class

Of course there are lots of tropes in science fiction that stretch believability: that’s part of the fun. So of course stories of pluck certainly can have a place in science fiction. 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 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.

1. if your advanced opponents are divided, a minority of them may either tip the balance by joining the heroes weakening the primary opponents
2. 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
3. technology at the fringes of an advanced society may be sufficiently up-to-date to pose a reasonable challenge to superior opponent technology (provided you set the stage with sufficient communications to keep the fringes sufficiently “in the loop”)
4. 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 them vulnerabilities (an example of this would be in Larry Niven’s Ringworld, when humans defeat more militarily capable opponents by improvising a weapon out of spaceship thrusters)
5. 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
6. 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 the eighth and final category in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements.

The story elements at this level are the most broad, and often require the most out of story planning time to execute. Some of them are so broad they rarely apply in short stories, both because elements which receive only a few sentences of attention don’t need to be flushed out as much in the writer’s mind, and because writers simply don’t have the time and resources to exhaustively research a short (and not terribly lucrative) story.

Elements at this level include the creation of story maps and other larger visual diagrams to help make sure all the pieces of the story can and do go together they way then need to. It also includes world-building, an elements that speculative fiction writers are particularly enamored of but include the reoccuring props and backdrops in non-speculative writing as well.

Finally, this group also includes elements like series arc (into which novel-length arcs must fit), and the relentless need to find new challenges for old characters.