Any "time" that time travel is introduced into a plot about halfway along, it's a sign the author is floundering, and knows it.
Ditto for prohibitions against common-sense precautions; like having a ban on purely physical attacks against a highly lethal enemy that is impervious to just about everything else.
Authors write themselves into corners like this all the time, usually for personal or philosophical reasons that have nothing to do with the actual story in question. And the results tend to make you go "Huh?"
My favorite example is H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" (1898). Wells had to use "the littlest things which G-d, in His wisdom, had put upon the Earth" (bacteria) to get rid of the Martians because about halfway through writing the story, he realized he'd written himself into a corner.
Wells had made the Martians so powerful that no human agency could defeat them. Sort of like He Who Must Not Be Named.
The punch lie in this case is that Wells was an agnostic. So appealing to the Almighty as a literal deus ex machina was, to put it mildly, not his preferred solution.
On the other hand, that last one was a pretty decent movie to watch with a group of middle-aged coworkers, most with Ph.D.s, and all drunk off their gourds.
Yeah, I was kind of hoping that mad science would involve more, you know, actual mad science, back when I was a wee proto-nerd trying to figure out what to do with myself.
3 comments:
Any "time" that time travel is introduced into a plot about halfway along, it's a sign the author is floundering, and knows it.
Ditto for prohibitions against common-sense precautions; like having a ban on purely physical attacks against a highly lethal enemy that is impervious to just about everything else.
Authors write themselves into corners like this all the time, usually for personal or philosophical reasons that have nothing to do with the actual story in question. And the results tend to make you go "Huh?"
My favorite example is H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" (1898). Wells had to use "the littlest things which G-d, in His wisdom, had put upon the Earth" (bacteria) to get rid of the Martians because about halfway through writing the story, he realized he'd written himself into a corner.
Wells had made the Martians so powerful that no human agency could defeat them. Sort of like He Who Must Not Be Named.
The punch lie in this case is that Wells was an agnostic. So appealing to the Almighty as a literal deus ex machina was, to put it mildly, not his preferred solution.
cheers
eon
On the other hand, that last one was a pretty decent movie to watch with a group of middle-aged coworkers, most with Ph.D.s, and all drunk off their gourds.
Yeah, I was kind of hoping that mad science would involve more, you know, actual mad science, back when I was a wee proto-nerd trying to figure out what to do with myself.
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