How can I describe technology while avoiding problems with scaling?
Worldbuilding chat has pointed me to this stack because it's less about defining the technology and more about how to express these definitions in a relatable and realistic way.
A pretty frequent occurrence when working with fictional technology is that when describing what the tech does and how it works, the author messes up the scale of the underlying technology or what it is capable of. This can happen in multiple ways (all examples are purely fictional):
- The author describes near future technology with ludicrous numbers, which actually are on the other end of the power bell curve. the author may, in 2001 describe a computer in the 2050s whose power is actually closer to something from the 2020s. The opposite also happens: the components from the machine actually are much stronger than what's possible at the time.
- The author describes a machine that actually is woefully underpowered for what it is said to be capable of. For example, blowing up a meteor the size of Texas with a nuke buried 800 feet deep.
- The author describes a machine that actually has much more energy than needed for the job. They mention "a 1 Kt bomb, big enough to destroy the empire State building", but such a bomb would actually take out everything 5 blocks around the empire state building as well.
- The author has a concept that's scaled well at the time it's introduced to the story, but when used later on, it either scales poorly or not at all. An example would be a martial artist taking of weighted clothing as a powerup, but he keeps doing it even when he's not even hindered by the clothes anymore.
Note: I'm talking about purely numerical issues with scaling, not the technology itself becoming outdated because new tech is invented. I'm not talking about "cassete recorders in space", I'm talking about "A spaceship to the moon with the power of a bottle rocket".
Assuming you already have your technology worked out concerning what it has to do, how do you go about describing the tech to a reader without pulling potentially knowledgeable readers out of the story when your numbers don't add up?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/25994. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
You are accessing this answer with a direct link, so it's being shown above all other answers regardless of its score. You can return to the normal view.
If you've worked out the tech, why haven't you worked out the scale? Isn't that part of "working out the tech"?
Just coming up with the idea of "a rocket that goes to the moon" isn't sufficient. You have to come up with how it goes to the moon. If your story is meant to be realistic, then you have to do enough hard-science research to determine how a rocket could actually get to the moon. You need to understand thrust, weight, the layers of the atmosphere, velocity vs. vacuum, orbits, and so on.
If your story is fantasy (relying on magic, for example), then you still have to cover the mechanics of getting to the moon, and your magical system has to be logical to a certain extent. (This is what I call the Heroes Power Conundrum. The show Heroes had people developing abilities like being able to heal from any wound, or flying, or turning invisible. But those gifts never seemed to require power. If the cheerleader grew back a toe, the energy to create that toe had to come from somewhere. She should have been constantly eating cheeseburgers to fuel her healing.) So just "casting a spell to put the rocket on the moon" is insufficient. You have to establish how such a spell is learned or created, where the magic comes from, who can use it, if there's backlash, et cetera.
The short answer is, to avoid problems with scaling, figure out how the tech would really work, or as close to it as possible. If you put a bomb in a building, do research on how much C4 you need to take out a building of that size, or how much more damage your chosen amount of C4 would do. And so on.
0 comment threads
It doesn't matter. The tech is a McGuffin. It's a device to drive the story.
The entire plot of Casablanca revolves around a pair of passes that cannot be revoked by the local Nazi authorities. The passes are a McGuffin. They are absurd on the face of it. Of course any such passes could be cancelled by the local Nazi authorities. "Yes, Obergruppenfuhrer, I knew they were enemy spies wanted by the Reich, but they had magic tickets so of course I had to let them get on the plane." Right.
Tech in Star Trek? All technical problems are solved by reversing the polarity of blah blah blah.
Tech in Dr Who? Make it up as you go along and change your mind half way through.
It doesn't matter. What matters is that you tell a good story. What makes a good story is not that it is technically plausible. So many stories could be so much more easily and safely resolved by another quite obvious course of action, or simply by a character asking an obvious question. What makes a good story is that it is emotionally true and that it brings the protagonist to a point of moral or emotional crisis that is resolved in a satisfying way.
Yes, there will always be people who nitpick the details. There is a rather entertaining series on youtube that picks holes in every major movie. The point being that these are major movies that told compelling stories and made millions at the box office. Their tech, and often their plots, make no sense, and is utterly lacking in scale. No one cares. They want to watch men in capes bash each other while having deep philosophical discussions.
Nitpicking the details is a sport for some people. It is part of how they enjoy a story. If there were no nits to pick, they would enjoy it less, not more. (Think about Amy's deconstruction of one of the Indiana Jones movies on Big Bang Theory in which she showed that Indy's actions made no difference to the outcome of the plot. That was fun. I but a whole bunch of people went out and rented it again just to see if she was right. Ka-ching. "Thanks for the residuals" say the screenwriters. )
It doesn't matter. The tech is a McGuffin. Focus on telling a good story.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads