![]() You can use its computer system to lower the force shields on the city-destroyers thousands of miles away and when Our Heroes deliver a single A-bomb to blow it up, all the other invader craft fail as well. The same device is used in Independence Day, where everything depends on the immense mother ship. The Wikipedia summary begins: “Herded into a confined area of space by the Cylons” -but confined by what? This is why space adventures typically turn on something other than geography.Ī more mobile fortress can be a plot bottleneck if it serves a critical function-say, power or control. In fact, it’s much harder to create a spatial choke point in featureless three-dimensional space-which is why the original Battlestar Galactica’s rip-off of Navarone (the double episode “Gun on Ice Planet Zero”) is so implausible. (Well, and about the characters involved-but that’s true of most good fiction.) The whole story is about destroying that one fortress. The World War II classic The Guns of Navarone turns on just such an installation. Terrestrial geography makes it even easier to position a crucial fortress or facility in a key spot. This kind of blow-it-up plot isn’t restricted to F&SF. ![]() And we can still get home from the theatre before bedtime. Once Our Heroes destroy the control ship, the droids all go dead. The irresistible invading army of droids is run from a single control ship in orbit. There’s another “single point of failure” in the first prequel, The Phantom Menace. Starkiller Base in The Force Awakens is a similarly crucial danger. The second Death Star’s destruction ( Return of the Jedi) has more far-reaching effects, because the Emperor is on board and dies as part of the same action. We’re given to believe that if the original Death Star is operational, the Rebellion is doomed destroying the Death Star doesn’t give the Rebellion a permanent victory, but at least the good guys can continue fighting. In three of the Star Wars movies (IV, VI, and VII), blowing up one Big Object forms the climax. Concentrating the whole burden of the plot into one critical event has an effect similar to that of Aristotle’s dramatic unities of time, place, and action. Whatever we call it, this is the action, almost always constituting the story’s climax, that solves the key conflict and lets everything wrap up neatly. Science fiction sometimes uses the term “ Jonbar hinge” (named after an old SF story) for a crucial point at which the past can be changed-but that’s in a time travel context, rather than in the story’s present. The military notion of a “ choke point”-a narrow passage through which an armed force must pass-is closer. I keep thinking of it as a “bottleneck,” or a gate that all the plot lines have to pass through-but “bottleneck” suggests a blockage, which isn’t the idea at all. I don’t know what the best term is for this kind of crux or turning point. If we can rig things so that everything turns on a single crucial event, we can enjoy the overall resolution and enhance the achievements of Our Heroes. To show the audience that climax, we need to focus the storyline so that the campaign can get resolved in a single concentrated set of actions, ideally carried out by a few individuals. But we don’t get the additional satisfaction of seeing the entire campaign come to a climax. We gain an appreciation of the whole through the experiences of a few people. This is the technique of Gone With the Wind or Titanic, and it works very well. One answer is to give up telling the whole story of the war or conflict, and just trace the tale of a few characters through the tapestry of events. ![]() ![]() How, then, can we give readers or viewers the satisfaction of seeing the overall conflict resolved? This is so even in a series of doorstopper novels it’s even more true of a two-hour movie. We can’t cover every fight and everyone’s contributions (though some authors seem determined to try). No single hero won the American Revolution.īut in a story, we focus on certain characters, and a limited series of events. No single battle won World War II, though one can while away enjoyable hours debating the importance of this or that engagement. The trouble with galaxy-spanning conflicts is that their resolution tends to be spread across years of time and vast regions of space, with armies of characters involved. Why is Star Wars so fond of Death Stars? What’s the mysterious attraction of this plot device? (And no, it isn’t a tractor beam.) Vast Plots and Concentrated Resolutions ![]()
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