What breaks suspension of disbelief?
So much of Sci-Fi and Fantasy requires the viewer (or reader) to suspend their disbelief: The speed of light can be circumvented, magic works, vampires are real (and may or may not sparkle), etc.
What sort of things break suspension of disbelief? What do good works do to maintain it?
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Basically, anything that the reader considers implausible when he's already suspending disbelief, can spoil the illusion and break that suspension. The key issue to understand is that up to a certain point, your story is exposing the world of the story, and explaining what's allowed and what isn't. Anything you establish clearly, the reader will be willing to accept, and suspend disbelief over. Anything implausible that you don't explain, or suggest can be explained (perhaps later), is not "protected", and can prompt readers to feel that the story is nonsensical or contrived - not in the agreed-upon, "protected" premise, but in the reasonable flow of events and consequences from that premise.
What, precisely, seems implausible may be highly individual. Here are major issues in my experience.
- Setting rules are inconsistent or unclear: An SF/F reader will generally be willing to accept bizarre and impossible world constructions, as long as they are internally consistent. But if your stardates don't match up with each other, or if something impossible turns out to be possible with no real justification, then the reader senses that your rules are arbitrary and that the author does not feel bound by his own rules. The same thing happens if he can't figure out what your rules are meant to be to begin with. It's like playing a game somebody invented where he gets to change the rules all the time, and then declare himself the winner if he's losing anyway.
Excessive and/or unacknowledged inconsistency with the real world: In the real world, time travel is almost certainly objectively impossible; that doesn't mean you can't write time travel stories. But if you do something that's impossible in the real world without explaining it, or making it clear that this is an interesting difference from real-life, and you-the-author are aware of this, then you come across as ignorant. The reader has difficulty trusting in your story. This could be scientific knowledge ("you couldn't really do that"), local knowledge ("that city doesn't really look like that"), social knowledge ("people don't _really act that way"), etc., etc.
Coincidence as a plot development: If anything immensely unlikely happens, it's best for it to happen at the beginning - as part of the premise. Using coincidence as a plot development can feel contrived - since it's not really a coincidence, but fiat on the author's side, the reader can sense that the author is deliberately manipulating the story in implausible, artificial directions, and he loses faith in the plot as being plausible, natural, and thus significant.
Unjustified references to real-world elements: In fantasy and science fiction, direct references to the real world can be very distracting. They have no more reason to dwell on, say, 21st century politics than we have to dwell on 13th century politics. It's unlikely that 2000 years from now, all spaceships will be named for current SF writers (and no future ones...). Even things that are similar can provoke this reaction - e.g. you don't want to name your fantasy princess "Diana" even if "Diana" is a perfectly fine name and it makes perfect sense for there to be a "Princess Diana" in your world. References to the real world, our world, throw the reader out of the story world.
Most of these issues can be solved by sufficient set-up - if you establish the unbelievable premise in a clear and plausible manner, it ceases to be unbelievable. But if you don't need something that's tough to justify, then avoiding it to begin with is often wise.
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Lack of research will often break the artificial realism. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between insufficient research and the author didn't care.
Case in point: The Crystal Singer by Anne MacAffrey. Central to the universe is the idea of a natural mineral on one planet that responds to "perfect pitch". Except "perfect pitch" is a furphy created by human history. Nature will create octaves, perfect fourths and fifths (and maybe a few more), but the western even tempered scale is entirely artificial. when I learnt about that, it quite broke my enjoyment of the novel.
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The creation of the universe is where suspension of disbelief is allowed. Violating the rules/laws/physics of an already created world breaks the suspension of disbelief.
For example, most of what James Bond does in the movies is just not possible in real life. However, because it is a James Bond movie and the world created around the character allows for it, we are willing to suspend our disbelief. However, if THOSE rules are broken, say if James Bond suddenly flies without using a specialized gadget, then that breaks the spell.
Another way to look at it is, we accept that Luke can use the Force, but we will not accept that James Bond can use the Force, because it is a "real" thing in the Star Wars world, but it is not a "real" thing in the James Bond world.
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