Knowing When to Let Go

I was working on an outline today, and I had to stop and work out some world-building. And I got stuck. Which sucked up my day.

If you’re reading this, and you don’t know what world-building is, this is the part where you stop reading. But if you don’t, let me sum up: in fiction writing, world-building is just that; creating the world. In SF, we’re writing in a world that is not our own. Maybe it has spaceships. Maybe it has magic. Maybe the Red Sox have won every World Series for 100 years. Something is different.

The secret, then, is defining the different. Because nothing exists in a vacuum. So the Red Sox are winners; what does that do to baseball? What does that do to Boston? Do little boys in Ohio grow up emulating that Boston accent because that’s what champions sound like? These are the kinds of questions you have to answer. Maybe the answers don’t make it into the story, but you–the writer you–has to know.

I was working on a series idea for a military-SF series. I was thinking battlesuits–walking combat armor. And I was trying to reason out, “Okay–assume we find the power source; assume we find a way to carry the ammo; inertia remains in effect, so it’s not going to be all anime and walking into tank rounds. Iron Man is cool as hell on the screen but Tony Stark would be strawberry paste on the inside of that hotrod-red suit.” Unless you can dampen inertia (which means, more or less, antigravity, in which case the whole scheme of economics changes) it’s just better body armor and load-bearing equipment. Which means it’s just a really, really expensive alternative to roles a basic infantryman fulfills all by himself.

Long story short, I’d argued myself right out of the conceit of my what-if. If it can’t turn an infantryman into a tank, why bother with the expense? How do you get a Defense Department to fund a F-22 cost scale battlesuit for a role a dime-a-dozen infantry platoon can fill for a fraction of the cost? I still don’t have the answer to that.

Now, some of you are undoubtedly going “Oh, you dumbshit, it’s a story. Worse, it’s a sci-fi story. Why are you worrying about this?” And the answer is, verisimilitude. And the reality that written science fiction is not Star Trek. You cannot explain away reality and physics with special effects. Readers will abandon you.  Which means, I spent an afternoon weighing personal protection against shock and awe and finding niche rolls where a battlesuit (really just impenetrable armor with no superpowers) would be useful. Maybe urban combat? Crowd control? If we can make it fast without beating the literal hell out of the dude inside, penetrations?

An example: “Okay, let’s make them fast. Rocket-assisted jumps. Sixty kph ground speed. Oh, wait–you can’t move a man’s legs that fast. And even if you train them to relax and let their legs be moved, they’ll still get sprains and bruises and bed sores. Okay, so move them into a seat in the body–make them taller–and then–shit. If I do that, why bother? Wheels are probably better in that situation… DAMMIT.”

When I finally gave up, I’m leaning toward using the “there’s no financial reason” as a story plot. I mean, we no longer need $2 billion Stealth bombers.  We pay fucktons of money for prestige. This might work.

Now comes the fun part. I get to think about how to kill them. And where to send them. And tactics. And deployment. And service (I like Marines, ooh-rah).

But it took me too many hours to get here.

First-world problems. I has them.

January 22, 2012 | Categories: Original, Writing | Tags: damn-in-all-to-hell, dumbassedness, Rants, world-building, Writing | Leave A Comment »