I was reading one of those “Common mistakes newbie writers make” guides, and the author discussed my “personal favorite”: he called it “Failure to deal with consequences”.
If you write a story where they finally do shoot all the lawyers, who’ll try the cases when the guilty are brought to justice? Don’t just ask yourself what if once. After you get your answer, ask yourself what if about the answer, and then ask it about the answer to your answer.
Too often, Science Fiction writers fail to ask “what if” with enough tenacity. When I encounter such an oversight in a book/story/film, I call it a “don’t think” moment, because you either have to turn your brain off and go with it, or have the otherwise enjoyable story ruined.
For example:
I saw a movie a while ago where the climax involved the two protagonists having to share the last one-person stasis capsule (the others had been smashed in the course of the adventure) while their spaceship made a hyperspace jump away from a supernova, or something. This plot device highlighted a rather large plot hole. The ship originally had a crew of six, and it had six stasis pods, in which the crew had to stay during hyperspace travel. The funny part was that the ship was supposedly a rescue ship. How on earth could it possibly rescue anyone with no spare pods?
Even the “best show on TV”, Battlestar Galactica, suffers from this on occasion, and it’s all the worse for it because BSG aspires to realism. Part of the drama in the early seasons of that show was that the humans couldn’t tell who was a human and who was a Cylon sleeper agent. They tried for a while to make a “Cylon detector”, with mixed results. However, in the course of the show we find out that Cylons are vulnerable to a particular kind of radiation, and Cylons have abnormalities in their blood. I think I just thought of two fairly simple Cylon tests…
The worst “don’t think” moment I’ve ever seen was in M. Night Shyamalan’s movie about Mel Gibson and aliens in the cornfield. If you haven’t seen it, I’m about to spoil the worst ending in movie history, so be warned.
It turns out the invading chameleon-skinned aliens are vulnerable to water. Yep, contact with ordinary H20 from a facet melts their skin and burns their bodies.
Ask yourself this: if you were a powerful alien race, and you were going to invade a planet whose surface was 75% covered in a toxic substance, and where said substance routinely fell from the sky, would you invade naked? Had these aliens really not invented rain slickers? Come on. Even walking through wet grass would have been problematic for them (maybe they were smart enough to wear shoes?).
Even worse, towards the end of the film, a newscaster reports that the battle against the aliens has been turned do to some unknown “primitive technique”. Now, if you were fighting for the survival of your race, and you found a simple way to beat the invaders, would you tell the news people that you’d used a “primitive technique”? No, you’d yell “Take the garden hose to those slimy bastards!” as loud as you could, and the news people would broadcast that same message constantly. Completely ruined the movie. How did that laugher of an ending make it into production?
I thought Sci Fi was generally targeted at nerds, and I thought nerds were smart. How come this happens over and over? It breaks suspension of disbelief for everyone, but it especially alienates the target demographic.
the whole “Water kills them” thing pisses me off too. I mean, what if it fucking rained? Mel Gibson was growing corn, so there must have been some moisture somewhere….it looked like a bumper crop, afterall. Moreover, farms are notorious for being muddy….what is mud but water and dirt? from an alien perspective, mud must be something like napalm. it burns, and it sticks.