Fiction Friction: Rulemaking and Rule Breaking in Sci-Fi
- cepmurphywrites
- 3 hours ago
- 9 min read
By Thomas Anderson.
The fantasy author Brandon Sanderson has become well-known for his advocacy of what he calls “Sanderson’s First Law (of Magic)”; that is, that an author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. In one sense, this is a manifesto against deus ex machina and inventing new rules or powers on the fly to get your hero out of danger. If an author is guilty of the latter, the reader can feel cheated, and the perception of peril will disappear the next time our hero ends up in a scrape, because the reader knows it can be brushed off.
On the other hand, there has been criticism of the ‘Sandersonian’ approach when it bogs down a story in too detailed ‘worldbuilding’ or technical description of the rules of the setting. Sanderson himself has become somewhat notorious for allegedly ‘infodumping’ in his writing about the magic systems in his worlds so that the author has the understanding defined in his First Law. On the one hand, this means they are more likely to react with ‘oh, that’s clever’ rather than ‘huh, wha?’ or ‘that’s cheating!’ when he comes up with a cunning way to use the rules in an unexpected way to get the hero out of trouble at the climax. However, his critics argue that it also makes the writing offputtingly technical, ‘like a videogame manual’ and makes it less likely the reader will persist with that book to the climax in the first place. Your mileage may vary; in my opinion Sanderson himself, and his imitators, are not as consistently rigid about this as the critics allege, and often they come up with subtler ways of bringing in the rules rather than infodumping.
Nonetheless, it does raise an important question about this use of ‘the rules’. I think some critics dislike the ‘Sandersonian’ approach in fantasy specifically, as going into too much detail about ‘the rules of magic’ could be argued to rob a setting of its sense of wonder and mystery that is traditionally synonymous with the genre. By contrast, one could argue that ‘the rules’ of futuristic technology in a sci-fi setting are a more natural fit for an overly technical and rigid description, which a clever author can then find a way around to trick the audience. (Timothy Zahn is a master of this, among others). It also frequently shows up in superhero comics and their adaptations, albeit with cyclic trends: how many times has Superman destroyed all the Kryptonite on Earth because one writer thinks it’s an over-used plot device, only for the next one to bring it back?
Furthermore, this is not solely a science fiction and fantasy trope. A murder mystery writer writing a locked-room mystery will get little respect from their readers if they invent a secret passage (with no clues laid for the reader) as an explanation for their impossible murder – Agatha Christie alleged that this used to be a common and tiresome cliché. Or a legal thriller will generally require the audience to understand the law of the setting with respect to the matter in question, in order for the author to pull a twist with their protagonist brilliantly finding a loophole. It’s less satisfying if it just turns out there’s a facet of the law that was never brought up before. The pattern holds true in many areas of literature.
With that in mind, I want to examine a few cases of ‘the rules’ in well-known science fiction franchises in particular, when their consistency has been maintained and when it hasn’t. This is an open question to the reader – if you are familiar with these franchises, when and where do you feel failure to comply with these rules has undercut storytelling, and conversely where do you think it can be brushed off? Some readers tend to think about, and obsess over, these things more than others.
Let’s start with Star Trek. The original series from the 1960s established a few key rules that have been generally stuck to ever since: that one cannot ‘beam’ (i.e. use the transporter) through shields, that phaser weapons have a stun setting and a lethal one, that it is possible to time travel by accelerating around a large mass such as a star, and that the ship carries shuttlecraft as an alternative to the transporter.
We can be a little more forgiving of inconsistencies at the early stage; for example, the early episode “The Enemy Within” features an away team stranded on a planet and freezing to death because the transporter is broken, and no-one suggests using a shuttlecraft to rescue them. But this was for the rather important ‘Doylian’ (out-of-universe) reason that the shuttle model hadn’t been built yet!
Another issue arises from what TV Tropes calls ‘fridge logic’ – the realisation you have going to the fridge after watching the show and thinking about it. The Enterprise crew discover the acceleration-based time travel method mentioned above is possible in “The Naked Time”, use it accidentally in “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and then deliberately in “Assignment: Earth” (and the film “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”). Shouldn’t this open a big can of worms if time travel is so readily available – what if someone suggests using it to go back and avert a tragedy? What if the hostile Klingons or a rogue Starfleet captain decides to use it to change history?
Interestingly, the recent series Star Trek: Picard actually came up with an explanation for this: Kirk’s crews time travels were only possible because they had the unique genius of Spock to do all the calculations. It’s not the best explanation, but at least it is one. The even more recent Strange New Worlds show similarly came up recently with a tongue-in-cheek explanation for why Voyager has separate reactors to power her holodeck, which was originally an unconvincing explanation in turn for how this stranded ship crew that was rationing food could still afford to run a holodeck.
Star Trek, especially in its Next Generation incarnation in the 1980s and 90s, acquired a reputation for being pretty consistent about sticking to its rules. The ‘no beaming through shields’ one is a good example of this, with only one real error in the episode “Relics” where it’s seen happening. Conversely, in the episode “The Wounded” Miles O’Brien manages to beam through shields because he’s an expert on both transporters and the ship he’s beaming to, so knows how to take advantage of the shield refresh rate in a clever way. That’s a great example of the kind of satisfying storytelling that Sanderson is alluding to with his ‘First Law’.
However, scratch the surface and not every rule is so consistent. In “A Taste of Armageddon” Scotty says the Enterprise can’t fire full phasers while the shields are up, but he can fire photon torpedoes. This, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, is never mentioned again. And in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, Will Decker claims the redesigned ship now has phasers tied into warp power, so if the warp power goes down the phasers won’t fire. This is basically a plot device so he can get one over on Kirk for giving the wrong order and demonstrate he doesn’t know the ship as well as he claims. In the very next film, however, the main power goes down and the ship can still fire phasers.
The aforementioned scene in “The Motion Picture” also affords a more significant inconsistency: they end up in an unstable wormhole because Kirk, rushing to confront V’Ger, orders them to go to warp within a solar system, which is supposed to be dangerous. Except they did this all the time in the original series and go on to do it all the time in the Next Generation and onwards; even the very first human warp flight in “Star Trek: First Contact” is straight out of Earth orbit. Bizarrely, after not being mentioned at all for the next 18 years, this idea then reappears in the Deep Space Nine episode “By Inferno’s Light” when it is once again dangerous to warp within a solar system.
I can’t get across how weird this one is to anyone who doesn’t know Star Trek. It’s like if in two episodes of a hospital drama two decades apart, it’s confidently stated that using the MRI machine in daylight hours will probably blow up the hospital!
Star Trek’s great rival Star Wars also has a similar issue. Star Wars’ faster than light travel of choice, the hyperdrive, is quite different to Star Trek’s warp drive; in Trek, ships can pursue each other at warp and engage with weapons, whereas hyperdrive in Star Wars is treated as an escape into an untouchable realm. This naturally affects storytelling considerably. If you’re giving your characters an easy way to escape peril, there needs to be some kind of limitation involved.
In the original trilogy, this is achieved most crudely in The Empire Strikes Back by having the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive repeatedly break down as a plot device, but also a bit more subtly in the first two films by establishing a couple of (unspoken) rules. Firstly, hyperdrive requires navigation calculations to be made before the jump, which takes time, and secondly, a ship has to escape a planet’s gravity well first. The latter is never strictly stated (until the Expanded Universe which fleshed out the setting) but is implicit in that in both A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, we see the Falcon and other Rebel ships having to launch from a planet and dodge Imperial ships in orbit before they can make the jump. If you didn’t have this limitation, for example, then the Rebels wouldn’t need to paralyse the Star Destroyer Avenger with their ion cannon so their cargo ships can punch through the blockade.
The Expanded Universe novels (and games – much of this comes from the RPG sourcebooks) built on this idea further. Han Solo’s boast about the Kessel Run from the first film is framed in terms of dodging the complex gravity wells of a series of black holes. Interdictor technology, Imperial ships equipped with artificial gravity well generators to prevent other ships from entering hyperspace, is introduced. Timothy Zahn uses the idea to great effect in his original Thrawn Trilogy, as well as a gimmick to do with the aforementioned hyperdrive calculations. And so on, and so on.
Unfortunately, all of this is thrown out of the window when it comes to the post-Disney continuity which, while it gets a lot of undeserved hatred, also has some genuine serious writing flaws. In the otherwise excellent Rogue One, a ship escapes the shockwave from the Death Star’s destruction of the holy city on Jedha by jumping to hyperspace before the calculations are complete – which allows for some peril – but also while it’s well within the atmosphere. If this was possible, again, the Rebels wouldn’t have needed to break through the Imperial blockade in The Empire Strikes Back so it spoils the framing of the latter. This lack of respect for the gravity well rule shows up repeatedly again in subsequent films, not to mention the huge can of worms opened by the ‘Holdo Manoeuvre’ in The Last Jedi of which much ink has already been spent. This wouldn’t be as big a problem if Disney had just decided to throw out the idea altogether, except Interdictors and the gravity well rule still reappear in other Disney shows and media which were made more rigorously!
I will mention one more franchise, and that’s Stargate. There are a fair few inconsistencies between the original film and the excellent SG-1 TV continuation, but I won’t go into those. Stargate SG-1 was pretty consistent about establishing rules and keeping to them, in particular about the Stargate itself. I can’t go into full details without spoiling some excellent plots, but what was especially impressive was that the writers often didn’t even need to call attention to when they were making an effort to link to previously established rules. For example, one point addressed in the first episode is that the Stargates are supposed to be fitted with a nearby control station or ‘Dial Home Device’ which is missing from the Earth Stargate – the United States Air Force had to work for years to duplicate what it can do with three giant supercomputers to emulate the alien hardware. While this might seem like a disadvantage (notably, they have to manually apply stellar drift corrections which the DHDs do automatically), it also shows up in a few episodes where the Earth Stargate is immune to various negative effects that are dependent on the use of a DHD rather than the computer emulation. They can also disable safety protocols more easily to pull off clever plans: many of the latter fall into Sanderson’s sweet spot as well.
I always felt one inconsistency in Stargate was that transit was always described as being a one-way wormhole between two Stargates, but one later episode introduces the idea that the subject is disintegrated, their data stored on crystals in the Gate and then reassembled at the other end. However, on reflection, I don’t think this is actually an inconsistency, just me misunderstanding exactly how the wormholes work; the effects going back to the original film do imply a disintegration. So given that, Stargate’s consistency is rather impressive. Other than, perhaps, deciding to quietly ignore they said that three shots from the zat'nikitel gun disintegrates things after a writer decided it was silly. But you can’t have anything.
What examples of rulemaking and rule-breaking can you think of from other franchises? Where does rule-breaking become a deal-breaker for a story for you and where is it something you can shrug off? Discuss.
Tom Anderson is the author of multiple SLP books, including:
The Look to the West series
The Surly Bonds of Earth series
among others.