The supposed efficiency and effectiveness of fascism was always propaganda: in reality, fascist regimes were deeply inefficient, hobbled by interpersonal rivalry, had institutions weakened or totally subverted by the personalist nature of leadership, and were deeply corrupt and lawless.

So it really, really bugs me how so much speculative fiction and even casual discourse since has taken WW2 era propaganda about fascism at face value, and depicted authoritarianism generally and fascism in particular as an intrinsic tradeoff between the chaos and disorder of liberty and the order of repression. Fascism is not orderly! That was always a lie. There is a reason right-wing authoritarian regimes have mid performance at best and at worst collapse due to infighting and military defeat—they suck at running states!

Democracy is the ideology of order and stability. Democracy provides for stable succession and can sustain rule of law in ways personalist rule cannot. Democracy can create avenues of accountability to reduce corruption that authoritarian (or even one-party rule) could never contemplate. “Democracy is chaos” is a lie invented by fascists to try to discredit liberal principles, and the apparent “chaos” of interwar democracies was often caused by the fascists themselves because they did not believe in liberalism.

I think of this most often in the context of video games about politics where it is assumed that authoritarian governance gives you efficiency bonuses at some cost to happiness or freedom—but I think these mechanics are backward. Fascism and authoritarianism are good for the narrow ruling clique at the top, the people they personally enrich, but they make for brittle and weak states, and they often fuck over even the narrow ethnic group or core citizenry whose will they are supposed to be channeling. Starting World War II was very bad for almost all Germans and Italians!

By contrast political scientists debate if a consolidated liberal democracy has ever deconsolidated, and the biggest challenges to democratic systems of government have tended to come when those systems are illiberal (as before the American Civil War), or being sabotaged by most participants (as Weimar Germany, where neither the left nor the right were really interested in democracy).

The reason they seem that way is that they usually catastrophically implode before the money they stole from their own minorities runs out.

I like how Wolfenstein handles the Nazis. They're incompetent buffoons who only managed to win by cheating with magic (that they stole from Jews)

I mean this is the problem with Nazis-won-the-war dystopia in general, right? Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito were dumbasses who got themselves into an unwinnable war because their ideologies required them to do that, and the only way games like Hearts of Iron (for instance) can make them competitive in a military context is to ahistorically rebalance the stats—or, in the case of althist narratives like Wolfenstein, to give them magic weapons. Similar problem to Confederates-win-the-Civil-War actually.

Which is not necessarily a dig at alt history—in fact I think making the fudge obvious like Wolfenstein does is probably more honest, because you don’t have to bullshit your audience into thinking Germany could have somehow made Operation Sea Lion could have worked.

This is basically the explicit thesis of David Brin's "Thor Meets Captain America", right?

(The story is pretty good and you can read it here.)

---

On the video game balance thing: I think you can make this work if you interpret it as how many resources are available to the state. Fascism is much less efficient and has less industrial capacity, but it's better at mobilizing its whole society onto a war footing. (At gunpoint.) So by and large, democracies have happier citizens but fewer resources available for major state projects and total war.

Of course the issue is that sometimes you do provoke a democracy into total mobilization, and then you get stomped. So what you want is something like a deeper economy, but with penalties for engaging in combat, declaring wars, and prolonged mobilizations.

Oddly, original-flavor Civilization works along this track. (Or maybe not oddly, since it was concerned as much with simulation as with balance.) Democracy is better at producing absolutely everything; but you can't declare war, have to accept peace treaties when offered, and get major happiness penalties for all troops that are deployed. Clunkily-implemented (it was 1991), but on the right track!

if i were a politician, i would strongly support giving some small uninhabited island over to the seasteading crowd to set up their ancapistan on, and possibly even give them money to do it. exporting your hyperlibertarian chuds to the remote pacific seems like a win win to me.

I mean, this is kinda what governments actually do. From my POV it seems like it's not worth their time to care about libertarian steading projects until those projects start generating so much crime or other negative externalities that they can no longer be ignored, and only then do men with guns show up to close it all down. This was exactly what happened at e.g. Sealand, but also at things which were structurally if not ideologically similar, like the various weirdo religious communes in the United States. If you're off doing your own thing, in general the government won't care until you force them to care.

ah, but if you send them thousands of miles away, remote from any other inhabited land, you don’t have to worry about the negative externalities! they’re sufficiently external they’re not going to affect anybody else.

There's a riff in Time Enough for Love that

Well, okay. One of the premises (that Heinlein spent a lot of time worrying about) is that by the fifth or sixth millennium CE, it's well established that democracies are wildly unstable because the electorates are dysfunctional. This is not something I believe, but let's stipulate it as part of the premise of the speculative fictional work.

And so the leader of this planet has been taking all of the illegal democracy activists and deporting them to a planet of their own, where they can set up a democracy there. And another character explains to him that we know that won't work; people keep trying democracies and they always fail in the same way.

And planetary leader explains, I thought this was a valuable experiment because, while there are tons of failed democracies, we've never tried one composed entirely of people committed to the project that democracy is a good idea. So we should see if that's enough to make it work!

And I agree with essentially none of this but I think about it frequently.

I feel like "interplanetary society with almost no interplanetary travel" is underused as a Sci fi setting. It makes the most sense! Sending fragile mortal humans through space is hugely expensive. But you can't totally imagine a society that has established itself on multiple planets through extremely rare and slow generation ship maneuvers but still has profitable trade in very high value density materials, propelled at accelerations way too high for humans in ships that don't need to bother with life support. And of courses interplanetary communication of science, art, etc

Mark Rosenfelder's Incatena is sort of like this--all travel is relativistic and expensive, and there is interplanetary trade, but it's mostly in, like, information and very rare, valuable goods. Traveling in person is also very expensive (though I don't remember how common it is).

Another thing that would make sense in a setting like this is transmitting uploaded minds or autonomous AI agents. Much easier to travel if you can do it at lightspeed and be downloaded into a physical body on arrival.

You might find Passages in the Void interesting and compelling.

The population of Coruscant/Trantor makes no sense. If you put the entire population density as that of Monaco, you can fill the land area with one big city of population 13T. This is huge. Also, this is monaco

For comparison, this is Coruscant, allegedly an ecumenopolis of population 1-2T:

So there are two options. One is that Coruscant is actually, like, almost entirely ocean and "one big city" encompasses a continent about the size of Australia, letting the population density go 10x that of Monaco, or the objectively funnier option, which is that it's one giant suburban sprawl. The Earth's land area at the population of the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area (5300/km2) is about 1T people.

These pictures are suburbs of NYC:

A big part of this is flanderization, right?

In Zahn's original description of Coruscant, it plausibly is, like, the New York Metropolitan Area. We hang out in the central government district, which is super built up, but he describes distinct towers and such. And there do seem to be, like, vacation homes with nice lake views.

But as the property developed, people kept making Coruscant more and more epicly overbuilt. No, the entire city is covered in buildings! No, it has buildings on top of buildings, so in the lower levels you never see the sun! No, it has buildings on top of buildings on top of buildings, for centuries, so the city has five thousand stories and the bottom couple thousand haven't been inhabited for centuries!

And at every step it gets less plausible and less moored to how actual numbers work. But that's okay, because numbers never work in SF anyway.

Star Wars planets are just really small.

Good point. It's how you get single biome planets, and why there is only ever one or two towns, most.

Right like

If you take the lens that Star Wars is basically a reskinned fantasy western, then sure. Every planet is a town. And Coruscant isn't "the population density of Manhattan", it's just literally Manhattan.

But if you try to take it even vaguely seriously as SF, or believe the literal claims it makes, then the scale is all off by multiple orders of magnitude.

But like, most SF has scale off by multiple orders of magnitude, unless the author is literally doing the math.

The population of Coruscant/Trantor makes no sense. If you put the entire population density as that of Monaco, you can fill the land area with one big city of population 13T. This is huge. Also, this is monaco

For comparison, this is Coruscant, allegedly an ecumenopolis of population 1-2T:

So there are two options. One is that Coruscant is actually, like, almost entirely ocean and "one big city" encompasses a continent about the size of Australia, letting the population density go 10x that of Monaco, or the objectively funnier option, which is that it's one giant suburban sprawl. The Earth's land area at the population of the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area (5300/km2) is about 1T people.

These pictures are suburbs of NYC:

A big part of this is flanderization, right?

In Zahn's original description of Coruscant, it plausibly is, like, the New York Metropolitan Area. We hang out in the central government district, which is super built up, but he describes distinct towers and such. And there do seem to be, like, vacation homes with nice lake views.

But as the property developed, people kept making Coruscant more and more epicly overbuilt. No, the entire city is covered in buildings! No, it has buildings on top of buildings, so in the lower levels you never see the sun! No, it has buildings on top of buildings on top of buildings, for centuries, so the city has five thousand stories and the bottom couple thousand haven't been inhabited for centuries!

And at every step it gets less plausible and less moored to how actual numbers work. But that's okay, because numbers never work in SF anyway.

The power to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Narrative.

The more I think about it, the more I feel that Star Wars would be better if they called "the Force" instead "the Narrative." I'm not just making that same old claim that the Force is essentially a narrative tool that lets the writers handwave anything for any or no reason; I mean, literally, just find-and-replace "the Force" with "the Narrative" in the scripts. Here, let's look at the top Google hit for "star wars quotes about the Force":

Every once in a while we must reinvent "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" by Nick Lowe.

One genre idea I keep coming back to is, let’s call it “societal fantasy.”

To certain extent, societies evolving in certain counterfactual ways is more impossible than being able to fling fireballs at people (i.e. fantasy fantasy). Like, agriculture begets the end of hunter-gatherer life, which begets a ‘ruler class’, which begets various interactions between the powerful and powerless that eventually lead to feudalism, which leads to liberalism when the rulers overdo it, etc. According to some people the course of history was basically set back when we discovered wheat.

But what if things went differently? One setting I had in mind for a dieselpunk/20th-century-fantasia kind of world was one that took the background assumptions of modern demography and sociology and just…reversed them, to see what would happen. Cities are full of family-centric neighborhoods while suburbs are for unattached singles. Urbanites are conservative and traditionalist while the transgressive stuff happens out in the country. Social reform causes are dominated by the middle aged while young people are all about their careers and not rocking the boat.

Now, reality is the way it is for reasons. And if I actually tried to do this, I’d run into problems trying to come up with both Watsonian and Doylist justification almost immediately. At a certain point, I’m not just overriding the demographic trends of the modern industrial world but human psychology itself. Eventually, quicker than I think, the characters, regardless of if they themselves were human would not feel relatable to the human mind at all. But is that objectively “wronger” than breaking the actually-much-more-intractable rules of physics to have fireball-flinging wizards and house-sized flying animals in “traditional” fantasy?

This does not seem to be a genre that actually exists, which should be a hint that most people are not interested in it. The closest I can think of is an old webcomic called City of Reality, which had plenty of wacky sci-fi and magic stuff, but the fact that everyone in the titular city was nice and helpful and looked out for each other and the authorities were competent and a genuine force for good and such was treated as part of the fantasy, almost. It was enough to shock and surprise a character who came to the city from a more cynical “real” world where people acted like bastards in realistic ways. (It sounds like someone trying to revive the illusion of post-war innocence by enforcing it via authorial diktat, but all I can say is that it just worked, on more levels than that.)

Does this make any sense to anyone else or am I just babbling here?

I’ve had a bunch of thoughts about this from the other direction, actually.

Something like this comes up in a lot of near- to semi-near-future SF. You project future physical knowledge and technology, and that’s a black box that we don’t understand. But we’re used to technological black boxes we don’t understand; my car and computer both run even though I have only the vaguest idea how they work, and they don’t really seem like they should.

But you’d expect the future to also have improved social knowledge and technology. (And not be, say, the weirdly popular hierarchical space empire blessed by the (Catholic?) church.) And that’s much harder, because we mostly think we know how people work.

Sometimes the social tech really is just a black box toy, and then it’s not too bad. In Foundation, Hari Seldon has super advanced sociological tech, but it’s purely predictive. That has its own sort of implausibility, but it doesn’t really make specific claims about how people act.

But if you push beyond that—if you start describing the the sociological facts that your future society has discovered, and the systems they’ve based on them—you risk losing your reader who knows (or “knows”) that things don’t work that way. I stopped reading The Forever War when it started talking about how society had a shortage of labor and also massive widespread unemployment at the same time. (I’m not sure if Haldeman was disagreeing with me about economics or implying that this was deliberate misgovernment, but either way it was just too far a step for me to deal with.)

You see this all over the place. Heinlein often has his characters propose or accept a rigorous mathematical proof that modern-style democracy can’t work (notably, a central idea in Starship Troopers). The Fall of Doc Future webnovel has aliens visit and, among other things, share the proof of the theorem that high-frequency stock trading will always lead to global instability and utter stock market dyfunction.

You might believe one of these things. You might believe both of them. But they’re certainly not, like, mathematically proven. And enough people are skeptical of them that having them as Established Fact in your books comes across to a lot of people as weird and uncomfortable. (And as the author preaching to the audience in a context where you can’t really argue with him.)

My favorite take on this came from a short story I have not been able to find again. Set on a shortly post-first-contact earth, and narrated by one of the few Earthlings who’s been offworld. (Some of the aliens wanted to buy Earth animals, and he’s a biologist/zookeeper who was taken on their ship to teach their new owners how to care for them.)

The aliens are peaceful but neither humanitarian nor colonialist: they set up an embassy, open trade negotiations, and then aren’t too bothered about the state of Earth; so Earth finds itself part of a federation but without the currency or resources to get much in the way of this new exciting technology.

But crucial to the plot is the fact that the aliens’ social and government system is not only very different from ours, but much more sophisticated, to the point where the humans can’t really follow it. There’s a scene talking to the alien ambassador and the narrator comments that he’s visibly struggling to figure out how to explain things; he analogizes it to telling some first-contact Earth tribe about taxes being remitted to the crown, and them trying to figure out why we would give a bunch of metal to a piece of headgear.

The point being that if you really had a more advanced society, sociologically, it would probably look alien, hard to explain, different from anything we have. (Some other books, notably Accelerando, handle this pretty well; I hear that the Culture novels do too.) But it probably wouldn’t give clear answers to modern political questions—let alone ones that clearly vindicate any particular faction.

So to come back around to your question: this isn’t super common because it’s hard to do well, and because people will reject it. As you say, if your premise is “people in this world don’t act like people we know do”, eventually your readers will reject it.

To expand on your point about Heinlein–social facts within the community of SF writers and readers are a lot more politically contested than technological or physical facts! One person’s “this is just the way people work” is another person’s “left/right-wing propaganda.” I think that’s generally true outside of SF as well–social sciences are a lot more contested politically than physical sciences (although physical sciences are not politically *uncontested* by any means). They are also very much more primitive. We have general theories of the universe in the way we do not (yet) have general theories of human psychology; we are at that exuberant stage of sociology in SF that we were at a hundred years ago with physics, where you could postulate life on Venus, and atomic pistols, and sonic screwdrivers, and psychic powers in your science fiction, because a poorer ambient level of scientific understanding meant those felt more plausible.

(But also, to a degree speculative fiction is about exploring unreal societies in a what-if way in the same way it explores unreal physics or technology in a what-if way, so just like impossible ideas like FTL have stuck around for rule-of-cool reasons, socially impossible human societies might stick around in SF because authors find them sympathetic or interesting to explore.)

I agree that opinions on how societies/people in societies work are pretty much inherently political, but that also means this genre does exist: there used to be a lot of utopian fiction produced in the Eastern bloc. People traveling through time and arriving where the socialist world revolution has solved poverty, crime and suffering, worlds where it‘s the changes in society that made the changes in technology possible … I read a few short story compilations as a kid that all blend into each other in my memory that were all about explaining how the new world works not only in regards to space travel or nano tech, but also on a societal level.

As far as I can tell, this sort of story has basically disappeared and dystopias have been the genre du jour ever since.

Yeah, and it shows up as a background assumption in other Soviet SF, like in the Strugatskys’ Hard to Be a God, where the main characters are all from a post-scarcity, Culture-like communist utopia. “Marxism-Leninism is an ideological science that will solve human suffering for all time” was one of the essential premises on which Soviet legitimacy was founded; by that yardstick, few political doctrines have failed quite as badly.

While I agree that social facts are more contested than physical facts, I don't think that's actually what's going on.

Like, I can enjoy reading a book about a guy who swordfights giant green humans on Mars, despite my thorough awareness that none of those people exist. It's a much bigger stretch for me to adapt to how unthinkingly, violently impulsive John Carter is than to the idea that he can jump forty feet.

But first, a lot of stories that advance social facts are read as asserting that those are true. Sometimes because they're written that way—I don't think the Soviet sf was saying "heh, wouldn't it be interesting if Marxism-Leninism were true" so much as "we think it is true and this is what the consequences my look like."

People treat advocacy differently from fun what-if speculation. And they'll will mentally argue with and be offended by these deep ideological premises they think are wrong.

(I have seen people get upset, for instance, at sf that imagines creationism true. And think about the (entirely fair) reaction to the Left Behind books!)

And second, if the social facts hypothesized are too far from your image of how the world works, it starts breaking your sympathy with the characters. I mentioned John Carter earlier. The absurd astronomy was funny but didn't bother me at all. The fact that he was willing to run into situations and start throwing punches threw me out of the narrative repeatedly, because (in my sheltered experience) people just don't act like that!

It's hard to get people on board with stories where the characters act in "unrealistic ways". And what qualifies varies from person to person. But social science fiction almost necessarily pushes on those seams, and so can be a lot more jarring.

One genre idea I keep coming back to is, let’s call it “societal fantasy.”

To certain extent, societies evolving in certain counterfactual ways is more impossible than being able to fling fireballs at people (i.e. fantasy fantasy). Like, agriculture begets the end of hunter-gatherer life, which begets a ‘ruler class’, which begets various interactions between the powerful and powerless that eventually lead to feudalism, which leads to liberalism when the rulers overdo it, etc. According to some people the course of history was basically set back when we discovered wheat.

But what if things went differently? One setting I had in mind for a dieselpunk/20th-century-fantasia kind of world was one that took the background assumptions of modern demography and sociology and just…reversed them, to see what would happen. Cities are full of family-centric neighborhoods while suburbs are for unattached singles. Urbanites are conservative and traditionalist while the transgressive stuff happens out in the country. Social reform causes are dominated by the middle aged while young people are all about their careers and not rocking the boat.

Now, reality is the way it is for reasons. And if I actually tried to do this, I’d run into problems trying to come up with both Watsonian and Doylist justification almost immediately. At a certain point, I’m not just overriding the demographic trends of the modern industrial world but human psychology itself. Eventually, quicker than I think, the characters, regardless of if they themselves were human would not feel relatable to the human mind at all. But is that objectively “wronger” than breaking the actually-much-more-intractable rules of physics to have fireball-flinging wizards and house-sized flying animals in “traditional” fantasy?

This does not seem to be a genre that actually exists, which should be a hint that most people are not interested in it. The closest I can think of is an old webcomic called City of Reality, which had plenty of wacky sci-fi and magic stuff, but the fact that everyone in the titular city was nice and helpful and looked out for each other and the authorities were competent and a genuine force for good and such was treated as part of the fantasy, almost. It was enough to shock and surprise a character who came to the city from a more cynical “real” world where people acted like bastards in realistic ways. (It sounds like someone trying to revive the illusion of post-war innocence by enforcing it via authorial diktat, but all I can say is that it just worked, on more levels than that.)

Does this make any sense to anyone else or am I just babbling here?

I've had a bunch of thoughts about this from the other direction, actually.

Something like this comes up in a lot of near- to semi-near-future SF. You project future physical knowledge and technology, and that's a black box that we don't understand. But we're used to technological black boxes we don't understand; my car and computer both run even though I have only the vaguest idea how they work, and they don't really seem like they should.

But you'd expect the future to also have improved social knowledge and technology. (And not be, say, the weirdly popular hierarchical space empire blessed by the (Catholic?) church.) And that's much harder, because we mostly think we know how people work.

Sometimes the social tech really is just a black box toy, and then it's not too bad. In Foundation, Hari Seldon has super advanced sociological tech, but it's purely predictive. That has its own sort of implausibility, but it doesn't really make specific claims about how people act.

But if you push beyond that—if you start describing the the sociological facts that your future society has discovered, and the systems they've based on them—you risk losing your reader who knows (or "knows") that things don't work that way. I stopped reading The Forever War when it started talking about how society had a shortage of labor and also massive widespread unemployment at the same time. (I'm not sure if Haldeman was disagreeing with me about economics or implying that this was deliberate misgovernment, but either way it was just too far a step for me to deal with.)

You see this all over the place. Heinlein often has his characters propose or accept a rigorous mathematical proof that modern-style democracy can't work (notably, a central idea in Starship Troopers). The Fall of Doc Future webnovel has aliens visit and, among other things, share the proof of the theorem that high-frequency stock trading will always lead to global instability and utter stock market dyfunction.

You might believe one of these things. You might believe both of them. But they're certainly not, like, mathematically proven. And enough people are skeptical of them that having them as Established Fact in your books comes across to a lot of people as weird and uncomfortable. (And as the author preaching to the audience in a context where you can't really argue with him.)

My favorite take on this came from a short story I have not been able to find again. Set on a shortly post-first-contact earth, and narrated by one of the few Earthlings who's been offworld. (Some of the aliens wanted to buy Earth animals, and he's a biologist/zookeeper who was taken on their ship to teach their new owners how to care for them.)

The aliens are peaceful but neither humanitarian nor colonialist: they set up an embassy, open trade negotiations, and then aren't too bothered about the state of Earth; so Earth finds itself part of a federation but without the currency or resources to get much in the way of this new exciting technology.

But crucial to the plot is the fact that the aliens' social and government system is not only very different from ours, but much more sophisticated, to the point where the humans can't really follow it. There's a scene talking to the alien ambassador and the narrator comments that he's visibly struggling to figure out how to explain things; he analogizes it to telling some first-contact Earth tribe about taxes being remitted to the crown, and them trying to figure out why we would give a bunch of metal to a piece of headgear.

The point being that if you really had a more advanced society, sociologically, it would probably look alien, hard to explain, different from anything we have. (Some other books, notably Accelerando, handle this pretty well; I hear that the Culture novels do too.) But it probably wouldn't give clear answers to modern political questions—let alone ones that clearly vindicate any particular faction.

So to come back around to your question: this isn't super common because it's hard to do well, and because people will reject it. As you say, if your premise is "people in this world don't act like people we know do", eventually your readers will reject it.

Several of my friends (hi @necarion​ and @subsume-restlessness​!) are slightly mad at me that I just told them I won’t be ready to discuss Rhythm of War until Christmas break.

Yeah..so. I *would’ve* been miffed, except my ‘epic reread’ of the first three stalled out at “the early bits of oathbringer are way more difficult to get through than I remember and oh right I have fifty thousand other things to read that seem more important.” Warbreaker is just as fun as I remember though!

Warbreaker is fun! I don't remember the early bits of _Oathbringer_ being hard to get through, but then that's very consistent with them being harder to get through than I remember. :)

Several of my friends (hi @necarion​ and @subsume-restlessness​!) are slightly mad at me that I just told them I won’t be ready to discuss Rhythm of War until Christmas break.

Alright, Star Wars question, WRT the new trilogy,

Keep reading

you’re forgetting that nerds care too much about worldbuilding, so now the #woke thing to do is worldbuild like you’re fucking Akira Toriyama, and only assert things into being in your world the moment you need them without ever thinking for a second on how they fit into a coherent whole.

Broader cultural grumbles aside, it does seem clear that the makers of the new Star Wars trilogy were not thinking even for a moment about coherent worldbuilding.  They were thinking “above all things we don’t want people to hate our work like they hated the prequels,” which led to “we need to make 100% sure that our movies capture that Original Trilogy magic,” which led to “we need our movies to feel exactly like the Original Trilogy,” which led to “we need a gritty scrappy Rebellion and a shiny all-powerful Nazi-coded Empire and an Episode 7 that matches the plot of A New Hope beat-for-beat.”  And all else was sacrificed to this logic.

…in fairness, it’s not like the makers of Star Wars movies were ever thinking about coherent worldbuilding.  That was left to the nerds toiling away on the EU.

It turns out that people are terrible at thinking about logistics and scale. So almost all science fiction (and epic fantasy and any literature set in a made-up world) has terribly incoherent scale problems.

You can see this famously in Asimov’s Trantor, an entire planet covered in dense city skyscrapers, with a population of almost a billion people.

You can see this in Rowling’s Hogwarts, which just isn’t big enough to support the British wizarding community we see, and yet clearly states that almost all British wizards study at Hogwarts. (Let alone the idea that Rowling was thinking of Hogwarts as having nearly a thousand students, while setting a class size of forty).

You can see this in the Star Wars prequels, which announce a cloned Grand Army of the Galactic Republic which will have over a million troops.

You can see this in epic fantasy battle scenes of all sorts, where both the relative and absolute sizes of armies seem to change from scene to scene to justify whatever dramatic or narrative point the author wants to make at the time.

Now some authors mostly have a decent sense of scale. This tends to stem from authors who take this as a point of pride and actually literally crunch numbers for most of what they do. It rarely happens automatically.

(Sanderson is pretty good about this, probably partly because he has an assistant whose job is to check that sort of thing. A lot of the Serious Hard Sci-Fi is like that; A Mote in God’s Eye for instance seems pretty good to me. Howard Taylor of Schlock Mercenary is surprisingly solid at this for a light webcomic. But he also dismisses the implications of his scale sometimeswhen it makes for a better joke).

So yes. The logistical and strategic background of the new Star Wars movies makes no sense. The scale of the conflict makes no sense. But it’s not that much worse than everything fucking else.

So, two things on this thread.

Firstly, apparently it’s in the novels that the new republic broadly disarmed, and that Starkiller base taking out the capital system destroyed what was left, leaving them free to take over. Obviously this is multiple levels of horseshit, because a) don’t make me read bad novels to understand why your bad movie isn’t bad, but also b) see the post above me on why that doesn’t make sense anyway. And obviously c) Starkiller base is all kinds of stupid and still isn’t the worst part of The Force Awakens, which is actually just all of it at once. It’s a bad film.

Secondly, this continues to solve issues. 

I read your first couple of sentences and was about to make the points you immediately made.

I did enjoy both movies, though. But for Star Wars movies, I'm easy. I read fucking Darksaber like five times, I'm not going to be upset by a mediocre plot in a new movie.

But mainly reblogging because that last link is great.

Alright, Star Wars question, WRT the new trilogy,

Keep reading

you’re forgetting that nerds care too much about worldbuilding, so now the #woke thing to do is worldbuild like you’re fucking Akira Toriyama, and only assert things into being in your world the moment you need them without ever thinking for a second on how they fit into a coherent whole.

Broader cultural grumbles aside, it does seem clear that the makers of the new Star Wars trilogy were not thinking even for a moment about coherent worldbuilding.  They were thinking “above all things we don’t want people to hate our work like they hated the prequels,” which led to “we need to make 100% sure that our movies capture that Original Trilogy magic,” which led to “we need our movies to feel exactly like the Original Trilogy,” which led to “we need a gritty scrappy Rebellion and a shiny all-powerful Nazi-coded Empire and an Episode 7 that matches the plot of A New Hope beat-for-beat.”  And all else was sacrificed to this logic.

…in fairness, it’s not like the makers of Star Wars movies were ever thinking about coherent worldbuilding.  That was left to the nerds toiling away on the EU.

It turns out that people are terrible at thinking about logistics and scale. So almost all science fiction (and epic fantasy and any literature set in a made-up world) has terribly incoherent scale problems.

You can see this famously in Asimov's Trantor, an entire planet covered in dense city skyscrapers, with a population of almost a billion people.

You can see this in Rowling's Hogwarts, which just isn't big enough to support the British wizarding community we see, and yet clearly states that almost all British wizards study at Hogwarts. (Let alone the idea that Rowling was thinking of Hogwarts as having nearly a thousand students, while setting a class size of forty).

You can see this in the Star Wars prequels, which announce a cloned Grand Army of the Galactic Republic which will have over a million troops.

You can see this in epic fantasy battle scenes of all sorts, where both the relative and absolute sizes of armies seem to change from scene to scene to justify whatever dramatic or narrative point the author wants to make at the time.

Now some authors mostly have a decent sense of scale. This tends to stem from authors who take this as a point of pride and actually literally crunch numbers for most of what they do. It rarely happens automatically.

(Sanderson is pretty good about this, probably partly because he has an assistant whose job is to check that sort of thing. A lot of the Serious Hard Sci-Fi is like that; A Mote in God's Eye for instance seems pretty good to me. Howard Taylor of Schlock Mercenary is surprisingly solid at this for a light webcomic. But he also dismisses the implications of his scale sometimeswhen it makes for a better joke).

So yes. The logistical and strategic background of the new Star Wars movies makes no sense. The scale of the conflict makes no sense. But it's not that much worse than everything fucking else.

I think this phrasing reveals a lot about what rationalist authors think of romantic fantasy. And it’s at once both very intuitive, and if you think about it, utterly incomprehensible.

What the fuck does “take the easy way out” mean???

Sanderson means “I have set up a hard system so that the heroes have to think to figure out a solution that comes from those rules, instead of fiating a deus ex machina that took me no effort to puzzle out.” And that sure sounds like hard work by him, but how is the opposite easy?

If someone writes an unsatisfactory story where DeM magical solutions are used, and people dislike the ending and the entire set of characters and themes because of it, was that easy. I don’t think failing a math test counts as easy. If you wrote a bad story, that should be assessable from the story itself, and not only from how much effort the author used.

And if people do like the end? Is that a worse story than the hard systems? “What the hell she could have used her magic shoes to go home at any time? This whole ruby slippers and there’s no place like home is MAIL FRAUD.” Like, no, it’s still pretty good. There was real effort there by the hero (the emotional journey to reveal what you truly want) even if the system was metaphorical as hell.

I think the quote actually makes a lot of sense on a slightly different reading.  As I understand it, “taking the easy way out” is a description of an event in the writing process, not a property of the finished work.  It’s not that deus ex machina solutions never “work” in the finished product; instead, Sanderson and Moseman are pointing to a dynamic in the writing process which tends to produce the kind of deus ex machina solutions that don’t work.

Specifically, I think the point makes the most sense if we take “solving problems by magic” to mean solving the writer’s problems by magic: running into some plotting snafu with no obvious resolution that works in terms of character and theme and all that, and forcibly undoing the snafu with in-universe magic.  Sometimes, such a solution will “works in terms of character and theme and all that,” but the point is that it will be appealing whether or not it does.  Some di ex machina are there because a deus ex machina was really the right thing for the story at that moment, but many are there just because the writer wanted to resolve a plotting snafu.  The latter type can work artistically, but only by happy accident.

You can’t look at a story and say definitively whether the writer “took the easy way out” with some decision, but you can look at a story and say “this deus ex machina doesn’t work artistically.”  And if you ask why the author chose to put such a thing in their story, often the answer will be that they introduced it to solve a plotting problem without doing the hard work necessary to invent a solution that coheres artistically with the rest of the story.  That is, they took the easy way out.

So under your explanation, the model of writing is “I have brought the characters to a certain point. I know at the end of the story they need to be somewhere else. So I have a problem to solve, of how to get them from A to B.” And the low-effort way to solve this (a wizard appears and does it!) is “taking the easy way out.” Whereas a more praiseworthy author would have a consistent system in place or have figured out some in universe trick.

So serious question: does anyone do this? Not just the easy way out, but even that entire conception of writing. Like in The Northern Caves, did you know where you wanted to end up, but just didn’t know how you’d get there? Because TNC doesn’t read in the slightest like that.

This is my personal experience with writing, and of all the writers I have observed. The theme of the work works with the characters to take the narrative in certain directions, and that’s just where everything ends up. Or maybe you knew the end from the get go, so everything the character does has been like an arrow leading up to this point. But there’s never been a… puzzle to solve, of how to get this character to cross the final gap, whereby my choices are “magic!” or “hard work of coming up with a logical system.”

Like I really don’t think Frank Baum got 90% of the way through Oz and said “shit, how is Dorothy getting home.” It’s not a matter of how he answered that question, but I don’t think the question even came up. But, maybe other authors will say “yes, that is a gap we must frequently solve.”

In which case, a more interesting differentiation is not between authors who use hard versus easy methods of solving these “plotting problems” but authors who write such that a plot problem even comes up, versus those who don’t.

That's a thing I hear a lot from the authors I read writing about their writing. I think it depends a lot on the type of plot structure.

Most of my favorite fiction is of a sort of plot-driven "puzzle-solving" style. The protagonists have a set of skills and a set of problems, and the story is about how they overcome the problems using the skills.

And from what I hear, you really do wind up in situations where you say "Wait, I put them in this confrontation, and I need the heroes to escape; but with the abilities I've given the villain, that shouldn't be possible." And you have a few choices. You can restructure your plot so that the villain has fewer abilities, or the hero has more. You can introduce more elements into the scene so that the hero has more options---like if your hero is Magneto, you can come up with an excuse to set the confrontation in an area with more metal. Or you can have some semi-arbitrary magical effect occur that saves your heroes.

There's a really good collection of examples of this sort of thing in this article by Nick Lowe, but my favorite has to be:

And that's the sort of thing that Sanderson is militating against.