Eccentric Flower:201004/On Not Explaining

Never explain. Your friends don't need it and your enemies won't believe it anyway.
- Elbert Hubbard

So the thing about the impulse to tell stories: We who indulge this filthy habit go about it in a vast variety of different ways, but we all start at the same point. All stories start with "What would happen if ___?"

And since all the basic stories have long since been told, we tend to search for ever-more exotic ways to say "What would happen if ___?" Sometimes we want things which don't really make any sense in the world as we know it. The question then is how we justify the strange things we need in order to tell this story.

I've always felt that the best way to explain things is not to explain any more than you absolutely have to. The more you try to explain, the higher the level of scrutiny people will bring to your explanation. As Mrissa comments, somewhere deep in this thread:

I had to consider the problem of dragons once for a large Story I Am Not Going To Write. It concerned the colonization of Venus, and that concerned, among other things, dragons (why it concerned dragons, I'm not going into, because then I'd be writing the story, see). Dragons were entirely genetically engineered, in this case, and the name "dragons" was only a tag of convenience, but they did nonetheless fly, and not only did they fly, but were capable of carrying a human rider, and even someone who tries to avoid physics as hard as I do knows that's just not gonna work unless we bend a rule or two.

As it happened, this was already a universe whose key rule-bending postulate was that some humans had Paranormal Abilities (they prefer "metahuman," as the abilities seem perfectly normal to them), and the dragons turned out to be the first non-human creature in which they had been able to produce some of these same abilities. So, the dragons are levitators - "autokinetics" - it turns out. They stay aloft because they want to stay aloft. The wings are, in essence, just to help steer.

Now, this approach would potentially piss a lot of people off (there was a commenter in the thread cited above who specifically disliked the "levitation spell" approach to dragons, because to him/her it just deferred the explanation and was therefore frustrating), but as far as I'm concerned it's okay here because it's tied into one of the main leaps-of-faith of the overall story. If you didn't want to invest in the idea of metahuman abilities in the first place, you'd never have gotten far enough into the book to get a chance to be offended by the autokinetic, lab-manufactured dragons.

I would like a covenant with the reader where I could just say outright, "Look, it needs to be this way or we don't have a story, so suck it up and stop asking questions." I'd like to not have to explain anything, so we could just get to the good stuff. Unfortunately, I exist and write in a community of peers who, in the majority, do not like for things to be completely unexplained. In fact it is possibly one of the biggest hidden divisions between myself and many of my friends. Particularly my friends in the sciences.

I like science okay. It has cool things in it. But what I like most about science is not its heavily rule-based nature, and I suspect at core that is what many of my friends do like most about it. I could be wrong. I like science because of those nifty things, but I'm not so enamored of its rules, because at heart I just don't care enough. It is not really my preferred playground.

(Whereas, because language is my metier, it pisses me off when you get the rules of language wrong, unless you're breaking the rules on purpose to make a point, and you have to have established you are fluent in the rules to begin with before you are given your permit to break them. But I digress.)

The point is, I do seem to be a liberal arts major surrounded by science types, and science types, as a broad rule of thumb, like to have things explained, and I like not explaining things unless I absolutely have to. To me, explanations often diminish the magic; they show how the trick is done. To many of my friends, explanations enhance the magic.

This is one of the two reasons why I do not sit comfortably with having the label "science fiction" applied to any of my intermittent fiction bursts. (The other reason is that I don't feel my stories contain any actual science. Ironically, the one time I put science into one of my stories, people asked me to cut it because they felt it hurt the rhythm, and I refused, because without the three blocks of quoted material in "The Vanishing Girl," one of the key parts of the story is gone.)

If I say I write SF, then I immediately expose my work to scrutiny from SF fans, who as a whole tend to be quite rule-based. I am not interested in having my stories picked to shreds in places where they were never intended to be bulletproof, and where usually the matter is not important to begin with. If you want to say that one of my characters is inconsistent, or her motives are not understandable, or she isn't sympathetic enough, or her actions simply don't make sense, that's fine; I'm willing to discuss that all day long. But don't quibble over how the sentient plant-woman in "Formal Gardens" is able to exist, because to quibble over that is to miss eating the cake because you believe the plate is the wrong shape. I don't care to explain how or why the plant-woman exists; just accept that she does, and get to what the story is really about*, which is two women who have evolved vastly different outlooks on sexuality and the way it affects their interactions with other humans, and why neither of them will ever understand each other's position.

(* Do you mind if we don't have the discussion on "Who gets to say what a story is really about?" today? Not that I object to having that discussion, but it is a major derailleur**. Thanks.)

(** Yes, I do mean "derailleur" and not "derailer". Thanks again.)

Now, all that said, I do insist that whatever set of premises you apply be consistently applied. You are allowed to have whatever set of rules or rule-loopholes you want, but you can't change the rules in mid-game without pissing off the reader, except by a Phenomenal Exertion of Authorial Skill (and I don't recommend trying it; most attempts fail).

Jean Kerr said it best (I will keep quoting this until I die):

I also insist that, way down at the level of the plumbing, at least one or two laws of thermodynamics be followed. My standards may be minimal but I do have them. The primary one that will annoy me if you don't attend to it is that work requires energy. If you are casting a spell, you are doing some work. If you create a brick wall out of nowhere then you have presumably done some sort of energy-to-matter conversion, unless you are forming the very air itself into a brick wall, in which case you have done a matter-to-matter conversion, which will require energy to facilitate, because the basic law of the universe is that No Work Happens For Free. Either way, some coin is being spent.

Now, I'm willing to accept that the conversion is unbelievably efficient. If you use magic to stop a Proverbial Juggernaut in its tracks, something which would normally take at least as much kinetic energy as the Juggernaut has to cancel out, and you finish up slightly winded and wipe a pristine bead of sweat from your brow ... well, I'm okay with that. But you must at least give that much lip service to the idea that energy is being expended, and if you do, I promise to ignore the fact that your physical energy reserves are obviously insufficient to the task.

The other reason to pay attention to this is that it avoids Supermen. (I capitalize that because I have a particular Kryptonian in mind.) Let's face it, the person who can do astonishing feats over and over without fatigue is not just boring, he destroys storylines. Everybody's got to have some limits, which is why the amount of Kryptonite that has somehow made its way to Earth over the years is far more than the total mass of the largest planet that's ever been discovered. (It's got to be a pain to write good Superman stories.)

Of course, I like magic best when it's handled so that the spell-caster is a vessel for energy transfer; that is, facilitating a connection between an energy source and a spell result. This solves the problem of our own relatively puny energy reserves. One of the few reasons to read Lyndon Hardy's Master of the Five Magics is that it follows these rules explicitly. At the beginning our hero is working in the relatively low-rent discipline of thaumaturgy. His energy source at the time is an enormous, heavy flywheel which he spends a lot of time cranking up before beginning his spell. As the spell is cast, the flywheel slows nearly to a crawl; the kinetic energy of the flywheel is being used to power the spell, and he is merely the conduit. And you don't get something for nothing; ten minutes of cranking the wheel up to speed is expended in ten seconds. The bigger the spell, the bigger the energy source needed, until the question becomes one of "how do we find/create an energy source big enough to power this?"

I happen to think that if J.K. Rowling had given just a wee bit more thought to the logic of her system of magic (even paying that lip service to having characters get consistently exhausted after performing spells would have been nice), her universe would have been a more interesting place. You may think I am calling her out for the same sin - not caring to explain - that I championed a few paragraphs back. Well, I'm not. I don't mind that she doesn't explain; I do mind that she's inconsistent about the way her universe works.

There's one more issue with trying to explain. Sometimes you end up getting entangled in your explanation.

Some time back I was working on a universe where it was fairly important to the setting that there not be firearms. The problem is, this was a universe where people were getting very near the cusp of steam power, and on the development tree, "gunpowder goes boom and can push things out of a tube" is far, far more basic than steam boilers. (Remember, the Chinese had firearms in the 1100s. Earliest definite proof of something that could be called a steam-powered piston is about 1690s.)

Some of it could be explained by simple resistance to technology, endemic in these people's psyches. These are a people who take technology very selectively; essentially medieval types who have accepted indoor plumbing and a few other frills, but are suspicious of most physical technology - partly because they have always had magic to do some of what we, in our timeline, would develop technology to do.

But gunpowder, I think, would be too militarily important for them to ignore, despite their misgivings. Not everyone in this world has the aptitude for magic; certainly you can't easily assemble a whole platoon who can use spells for purposes guns would normally serve. Yet battles in this world are still fought with swords, spears, lances, etc. while at the same time, their scientists (or equivalent) have long since learned from their alchemical laboratories how things blow up. That seems improbable.

When I started thinking about this, I started thinking about several other cases where they had embraced certain technologies but denied others, and so on and so forth, and the inconsistencies piled upon one another, until I realized: Wait. The reason this looks like a crazed conspiracy theory is that it is. Obviously, some powerful entity or organization - possibly even a higher power - is actively interfering in the technological progress of this world. Clever scientists have probably been disappeared, discoveries erased, laboratories mysteriously burned.

Unfortunately, as soon as I got this answer, I realized that was a far more interesting story than the one I had intended to tell, and so I abandoned the whole idea.

Someone else can have it if they want it.