I’m used to dodging around inconvenient limitations in my favorite genres (SFF), what with faster-than-light difficulties, time travel, dragons, wizards, and other commonplace wishful thinking elements, necessary to make certain kinds of tales convenient. I can give all those sorts of things a pass (from a real-world perspective), in the interests of telling an efficient story — and, besides, they’re some of the incidental pleasures of the genre.
But there are other story elements which need to be more realistic for a story to have any bite, any claim on reasonability. I’m thinking, in particular, of the damage that wishful thinking can do, making a story dependent on the benevolent hand of the author rather than earning the rewards that come to a protagonist who struggles and grows.
For example, in a recent SFF book, we find our young hero rooting through a ship he encounters that turns out to be an ancient technology from a vanished alien species, run by an AI that is delighted to find a new owner. Hey, I’ll take that as an opening position — the story has to start somewhere.
But then he stumbles across a woman whose wealthy family needs rescue, and then he discovers his new alien ship can rescue them, and retrieve or generate lots of incidental resources in the process, and then he reveals he is himself the last heir to another fortune, so he can hire and train his own army for revenge, and… etc., etc., etc.
I mean, it’s all very pleasant, but whenever he wants something, well (blink) and the resources are at hand. It’s much too convenient and painless, and there’s no sense at all of the work of earning his good fortune. It’s rather like magic — aliens ex machina, bearing rewards are very little different from genies.
This is much more like a daydream than a well-structured tale.
These are unearned resources. You can make an exception for the startup position, but this story proceeds as if he profits by gifts from the gods, not by his own earned merit.
It’s like magic. You can conjure up anything you want. And where’s the tension and suspense (and satisfaction) in a story like that?
I have occasionally caught myself doing something similar, and I’ve learned to watch for that nagging sense of having wandered into the tepid swamp of too little effort. Then I have to drain that swamp and backup to let a rethink of the plot re-establish an appropriate preparation of protagonist work so that the progress can be properly earned.
What about you? Ever have to rip things back in similar circumstances?
Mad Genius Club 
18 responses to “Unearned Resources”
I’m writing a story about how an ordinary guy randomly stumbles across a woman who appeared from nowhere with advanced super-science technology and no memory of who she is or where she came from.
That’s the only advantage I intend to give them. From there, they have to figure out how to use her technology before they can benefit from it.
The first application he comes up with is assembling industrial diamonds out of charcoal to pay for the damage done when she appeared. She could make big diamonds for jewelry, to get money faster, but he tells her that (a) the diamond cartels would have a cow, and (b) industrial diamonds are much more useful in a practical sense.
She does have some sort of neurally-linked supercomputer with a Universal Translator program, which allows her to learn English in one day — but she’s forgotten how to use that, too. Only its simplest, incidental functions are available, like the translation. I didn’t want to write a story about the two main characters being stuck at a ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ level of communication for weeks or months.
Indeed, story-telling practicality always matters (c.f., faster than light travel, linguistic communication issues), but no story is satisfying without a series of try/fail (“hey, this is hard”) components.
Hmm. Depends on what you’re writing. If it’s low comedy sometimes straying into slapstick – it can be perfect. Think of the old sitcoms “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Bewitched.” The resources may be not quite the right thing, or there is far too much of them, or they draw the wrong kind of attention to the protagonist.
Actually, the last can serve as the “kick off” for more serious works. But, as noted, it can’t keep on happening every time the protagonist hits a wall.
So what’s the name of the book?
And yeah, I call those type of stories “author’s pet characters,” and it makes me despise them as much as the author apparently loves them. A variant of the Mary Sue trope, but in Mary Sue stories the reality of the story bends around the character.
Don’t want to dump on a live (and possibly indie) author by name publicly just because I use a book as a negative example of technique. Now, if I found it deliberately offensive, I might change my mind, but it doesn’t seem fair otherwise.
If you really want to know, drop me a line privately. (Karen.L.Myers@usa.net).
I believe I may have read that book and dumped it for offenses against science fiction. Is this the same book where he’s in orbit around a planet, he opens the airlock (which is on the side of the ship facing the planet), and suddenly he’s having to fight against being pulled out the airlock by the planet’s gravity? (Which wasn’t pulling on him until the airlock opened).
Yeah. Orbits do not work that way. Airlocks do not work that way. GRAVITY does not work that way!
Not naming the book either, because I haven’t checked which one it was and I don’t want to slander the author if I’m wrong about it. But that plot element about the AI delighted to find a new owner sounded very familiar, and so did quite a bit of the rest.
There were feline-form aliens (mother $ child) as an early encounter in the one I mentioned.
Left a reply that went into the spam bin.
TXRed as Mod: You are unleashed, deSpammed, whatever it is.
Yeah, I can understand that issue. In one of the reviews for ‘Texas in the Med’ the reviewer mentioned that they were surprised that the Texans had an airplane equivalent to the B-29 so soon (before the B-29 flew in OTL). So in the WIP there is a throwaway line about how the things that are starting to show up have been in development for years.
This is not even remotely a new problem.
From “The Camp-Fire, a meeting place of Readers, Writers, and Adventurers” section of Adventure magazine from December 1921:
All of that (and quite a bit more) to explain how they came to publish The Bare-Handed Castaways by J. Allan Dunn. Which at some point I shall read and publish my own self. 🙂
It’s hard not to chuckle at The Mysterious Island, where the castaways end up with a telegraph line, nitroglycerine, and a pet orangutan. I mean, granted they have help, but…
Also, that was Jules Verne giving himself permission to play with ideas he wanted to play with, not an attempt at a realistic castaways story.
Very true!
Unearned resources only work if they get you into trouble.
Yeah, a bit like Brandon Sanderson’s thesis that you can only use soft magic to get the characters into a tight spot, not to get out of it.
I don’t have a problem with video games and tabletop RPGs as their own forms of fiction, but I sometimes feel like they’re a not-great influence on novel-shaped fiction – I see a fair amount of indie-published genre stuff that’s just “generic action setpiece hero/ine handles competently”->”pile of treasure, cool toys, or a new harem mate”->”use fun new acquisitions”->”repeat cycle.”
They only seem to intersect with novel-fiction for “serial adventure story headed to big prize”, which leaves an awful lot of other fiction plots out. And even then, when you read those in book form, they’re only tolerable if the characters are an amusing ensemble, not for their “plots”, such as they are.