Theoretically, can this be done? - Page 2 - Writers Forum

Non Serviam · 08-13-2007, 12:50 PM

Don't try to make it believable! Just do it, a completely bare-faced "this is the premise of the story" approach.

Major sci-fi authors do this. There's Niven's stories like "Flight of the Horse" where dragons and unicorns and whatnot just show up, and a lot of weird Ursula Le Guin stuff like the society where four out of five births are women, and goodness knows what else. Major horror and fantasy authors do it all the time.

Interestingly, early in his career Stephen King did try to explain some of his weird story setups. He abandoned that when he realised he was weakening his own stories and now advises against it (this is from the author's notes in Nightmares and Dreamscapes if I recall correctly).

lin · 08-13-2007, 04:27 PM

Oh, I wouldn't have thought of it like that.
Solves the problem.
Make your character somebody who can do anything, then let them do whatever they want.

Non Serviam · 08-13-2007, 04:50 PM

Did you ever read the Kafka story, Metamorphosis? It's about a guy who wakes up and discovers he's a bug.

Kafka doesn't bother with "why". He just explores the consequences and comes out with a great story.

Hodge · 08-13-2007, 05:01 PM

That's because the fact that he turned into a bug wasn't the point of the story.

Non Serviam · 08-13-2007, 05:06 PM

Same here, though, isn't it? It's a premise rather than a plot.

Mike C · 08-14-2007, 02:14 AM

If you can make it work, it'll work.

Consider: the moon is probably a chunk of earth. It may have already happened once.

lin · 08-14-2007, 11:08 AM

So you're throwing that right in the face of the much longer established green cheese school of thought?

jamesdemann · 08-19-2007, 01:05 PM

you could try holding the earth together if you had some sort of forewarning with a electro magnetic stablizer thingy...hey it works for star trek!

Jeff Colburn · 08-19-2007, 02:31 PM

Anything that would hit the Earth with enough force to "split it in half" would actually break it into billions of pieces. The pieces would superheat from the energy of the impact, the atmosphere would be sent into space and it would take billions of years for the local pieces of Earth to form a planet again. After this happens life would have to start again from scratch, or through panspermia.

Have Fun,
Jeff

Mike C · 08-19-2007, 02:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Colburn

Anything that would hit the Earth with enough force to "split it in half" would actually break it into billions of pieces. The pieces would superheat from the energy of the impact, the atmosphere would be sent into space and it would take billions of years for the local pieces of Earth to form a planet again. After this happens life would have to start again from scratch, or through panspermia.

Have Fun,
Jeff

Sez you.

I can think of a couple of reasonably believeable premises whereby the earth might split and go off in different directions. Whether you take the readers with you or not depends on how well you write it.

Mike C · 08-19-2007, 02:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lin

So you're throwing that right in the face of the much longer established green cheese school of thought?

It's SF. if I want to pretend it's rock, it's rock.

preposterous as that may be to the fuddy-duddies.

Jolly McJollyson · 08-19-2007, 07:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hodge

It's believable if Superman does it because Superman can do anything. Duh.

I like to think of myself as Superman.

Without the tights.

WriterDude · 08-20-2007, 07:20 AM

Maybe you are all looking at this from the wrong perspective. If a meteor or something smashed into the Earth and blew up half of it (literally), I'd say the other half would blow up as well. If it somehow survived, it would gradually be destroyed, the ozone layer would be gone, the magnetic field would disappear and so on.

But think of it from a different perspective. What if the people learned that a big disaster was going to happen soon, and a large part of the Earth would be destroyed. As result, the top scientists from all over the world worked togeher and came up with a solution. They destroyed half the Earth, changing it's orbit enough for the meteorite to miss. Along the way, they come up with a way to prevent the core from being destroyed, and the new magnetic field (mostly artificial) is reduced enough to keep gravity the way it was.

All in all, we make the solution first, artificially blow up the Earth and everything seems a lot more believeable for the reader. Just a tip.

jamesdemann · 08-20-2007, 07:38 AM

but isn't the whole point of science FICTION to write things that are not real, and in fact may possibly never happen. Take a look at several holywood movies, they defy conventional wisdom but still provide a resonably entertaining movie.

The Core is one example, another would be Volcano, and don't even egt started with Star Trek, Stargate and any other major sci-fi series around. We can go on forever how ships will NOT BLOW UP IN SPACE, how we would never hear sound in space, yet we do it anyway. Let the man do what he wants to do, encourage him, don't bully him into submission. Sci-Fi is what it is, if we go back in the past one of the earliest sci-fi movies was about a pig that went into a machine one end and came out as meat products the other. It came from the authors deranged mind, at the time it could never happen it should have been impossible let alone incredible. Yet now it seems backwards and tame.

WriterDude · 08-20-2007, 08:37 AM

Yes and no. Personally, I think there are three different types of sci-fi. Believeable, semi-believeable and pure fantasy.

The Core is a big example of pure fantasy. Not because it's a horrible movie, but mostly because I don't believe it for a second.

Dune is great example of great sci-fi. It takes place on another world with fictional technology, fictional monsters (sandworms) and all that, but even so it feels very much real and believeable. A world like that could very well exist somewhere in the universe.

Star Wars, Star Trek and so on are semi-believeable sci-fi. They focus mainly on the story, and adapt the world to fit afterwards. I really don't believe worlds like that can exist, but in their respectable movies, they work anyway. For instance, if there had been a Force, we should have known about it here. Lightsabers? Proved they can't exist. Hyperdrive? Seriously doubt it. Star Trek isn't much better. Phasers, beaming people around, living holograms and all that doesn't work in reality, but it does in Star Trek.

If he were to write the story about half the world blowing up and that, I'd say he's somewhere between pure fantasy and semi-believeable. It depends on how he does it.

And for the record, anyone read Superman vs Aliens? Basically Superman finds a trace of something that appear to be kryptonian, and ends up on a part of Krypton that survived when the planet blew up. It's basically just a big island or something (like throwing Manhattan into space), but they covered it in a big "bubble" to keep the atmosphere. It's kinda hillarious, with Superman refusing to kill anything living, battling a few million ultimate killer machines. (and as for Superman doing anything, it's true. At one point he's attacke by a face hugger and get an alien in his stomach, but he literally throws it up. Go Supes!)