Things you wish authors would stop doing?

Sorry @Lifeline for the continuation, but apologies to @SapereAude for misreading CT's post, you're absolutely correct.

Back to our usual schedule.

 

Wait. Who the what now?

You mean the story where there's this corydceps fungus, and someone wants to cut up the little girl to make a vaccine? That one?

 

Yeah, the one where you play the dude with the daddy issues who thinks sacrificing one (feckin' annoying stop-running-when-I'm-sneaking-up-on-a-Clicker) girl to save the rest of the human race is bad.

 

I remember that one. They were planning to dissect her.

These chucklefucks were planning to kill the only hope there was for a cure. Newsflash: The cordyceps fungi is a fungi; it's a fungus with multiple nucleus, all of them joined together and working in tandem. You can certainly remove one or two of them, and culture them within a media. Not kill the last hope the human race ever has.

Do they even know how to even begin making a vaccine like this? To start with, you get a high end lab with working equipment. You get high quality pure chemicals, because you're going to need them. You need negative pressure to keep out contaminants and that damned fungus. You take blood tests and extractions of the cerebrospinal fluid (without killing the patient! Keyword, patient!). You take tissue samples, and begin culturing them to get a steady supply and to figure out what, precisely, causes this reaction to the cordyceps. You take blood tests and white blood cells and start figuring out wtf the immune system is doing to stop this. You get test subjects, and an entire medical team.

It might not be the fungus mutation. How the hell does the surgeon even know? I don't see a PCR machine and DNA reader. Yeah, he has an MRI scan. So what? It might simply be an antibody within the blood itself, that interferes with cell signalling, thereby preventing the fungi from turning aggressive. A protein or cell within Ellie's body might be causing the entire thing to turn quiscient and non-lethal. White blood cells might be isolating and forcing the fungus back, making it unable to take over Ellie's brain. The entire fungus area may be calcificed by Ellie's body, a hyper-fast formation of the calcified shell around the foreign body. You do not know.

You do not use this:



And you do not kill your last and only hope of the human race's survival.

What's their expertise on biotech, immunology, and vaccine production anyway?

This is what I hate. The Authors crudely and clumsily attempting to create drama and tough choices and pathos and failing utterly at it. Not just because of their ignorance of what they did, but also because of failed execution, or because their ideas weren't all that good and smart to begin with.

 

This is very common in sci-fi, unfortunately. "The Cold Equations", from way back in 1954, is maybe the archetypal example. This critical study of that story does a good job of describing how the author (and editor, who dictated the ending) basically set up a story which begs its own questions, carefully constructing its premises so that only one outcome is plausible--even if the premises themselves end up being not all that plausible, when examined. It is then received as "thought-provoking" and "brave" instead of, I dunno, "unnecessarily cruel and mean-spirited".

That whole article is worth reading but these lines from the conclusion sum it up for me. If you want to imagine a world where there are more opportunities to kill people without having to have it on your conscience, this is the kind of world you imagine:

"Why, then, is the story so popular and so enduring? Why are its faults ignored, nay, vehemently denied? An obvious reason is that it confirms attitudes and beliefs. That is no bad thing. One of the functions of myth is to create stories and settings in which beliefs are true. One of the things that the story propounds is that it is necessary and inevitable that people kill their fellow human beings."

 

Let me just first take a brief moment to clarify - before I inadvertently turn this into a war over a critically acclaimed videogame - that I did like the game. It's just the end of it that turned me off completely, exactly because of the forced good/bad equation.
I assume the crudeness of this specific example came to be because of the medium used. At some point in the game you'll want to get back to stabbing mushrooms and not debate the doctor on the whereabouts of his MRI machine.

The way you proceed to explain the scene in your post does an admirable job, and I say this without sarcasm, of swinging me right around to Joel's side. However, I recall the game leading me to believe that there will be a cure, but at the cost of the kid. Ellie, who at that point in the game had been so much of distraction with her shitty stealth-AI that I would have shanked her anyway, so it seemed like a reasonable price to pay to save humanity.
Ironically, a humanity which used the majority of the game to prove how much it didn't deserve to be saved.

 

He's not the only one to take a swing at that story. Cory Doctorow examines the broader social implications of that sort of thinking here.

 

I read maybe half of it and suddenly realized—if somebody had done a story like that and posted it here on the bard, but where somehow the girl doesn't have to die, there would have been an outcry that it wasn't realistic. Space missions carefully measure necessary fuel and don't have extra tanks.

This is a sci-fi version of the trolley tracks question. Some people will choose to kill the many to save the child, so,me the other way, and many will just freeze up and refuse to make any choice at all. I was on a message board years back where the majority said they simply wouldn't do anything, so whatever happens wasn't their fault. I said that was moral cowardice, that they had still made a choice (to do nothing). But they twisted and turned every which way to avoid the moral implications.

I haven't read the story, but it sounds like what he was at least trying to do was point out that sometimes reality is harsh and there's no solution that will make everybody happy. Sometimes innocents have to die. Are we not tough enough to face this fact anymore? It's a fact our settler ancestors were quite familiar with. Anyone who grew up on a farm knows sometimes cute baby animals die through no fault of their own or anyone's and you just have to learn to deal with it. It's the reality in 99.99 % of nature, it's only in modern civilization we have the illusion that things are different.

 

There's a rework of the story by a different author, can't remember who.

Spoiler

The pilot realizes that the mass is the problem, and that current medical tech will allow young people to regrow limbs. So he cuts off his own legs at the thigh (only needs hands to fly the ship) and all of the stowaway's limbs with a laser torch or some such, dropping the mass of the ship below the threshold. As a spacer, the pilot doesn't need legs.

 

Oops!! @Homer Potvin When I wrote this, I hadn't seen the response by @Iain Aschendale —I thought you were talking to me

What about oxygen, food and water? Also, even if the ship could auto-land, would she be able to administer the vaccines, and pilot it back?

AND... assuming all this could happen, would there be any kind of story there? Maybe, but it wouldn't be the story the author set out to write (though it sounds like he originally wrote it where the girl survived, and the editor sent it back and demanded he change it, several times? a little hard to tell from the way the article describes it).
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As for the revised version, I instantly think anaphylactic shock. But then it's sci-fi, I guess there's magic drugs for that.

 

Yeah, a kid weighs... quick google says a nine-year-old girl should average 57lbs. I have no idea if that's correct or where their data came from, but even if the spaceship weighs as little as a Toyota Camry (curb weight 3,310 lbs at the low end) that's some extremely fine fuel calculations.

I still liked the story. I can recognize the flaws and I think Doctorow has a point when he says you should examine who is trying to set your worldview, but sometimes people just do something they haven't thought through and the universe redirects their personal arc to a full stop.

 

Like, man.

"Oh wow, another trolley problem. How surprising."

Like, the reason why some people don't like the trolley problem is that rarely reality is that simple. The trolley problem, i.e. "The few must be sacrificed for the many." Has been used so many times in history that frankly speaking I just don't care for it anymore.

Also, authors just suck at it. When I read it, I don't think: "Oh god, how horrible." I look at the author and think: "Well screw you, you're the writer. Nothing here is out of your control."

Also, like, Marvel Civil war. I won't bore you all with the details you all already know, but suffice it to say that by the end of it I just wanted everyone to die. Trolley problems and authors attempting to be 'deep' and 'insightful' and have things to say about the human condition and reality run into the cold hard fact that most authors are terrible at it.

 

Lol well, Civil War... I just didn't care to see all the characters so grim and unhappy through the whole movie, and everything falling apart for them all. I definitely preferred seeing them on the upswing rather than the decline. It's one of those films they decided to make like a 'tone poem', meaning just one emotional tone through the entire thing. Kinda like Endgame until near the end.

But as for the trolley problem—it's not supposed to reflect all the subtleties of reality. It's a moral experiment, a thought experiment. It's deliberately boiled down to the bare essentials to serve as a useful philosophical or ethical test. It was also a pretty big part of one of the Dark Knight movies, whichever one where he had to choose which person to save, Two-Face or his girlfriend (whatever she was). I guess two-face was the right antagonist for that, he represents the 2 choices. And of course the people in the boats who had to decide whether to sacrifice themselves or kill people in the other boat.

As to whether those movies handled it well or not, that's a whole 'nuther problem.

 

Has anyone read Life as we Knew it? That's pretty logically messed up. So the an asteroid about to come near Earth, and not one person asks themselves what kind of danger the asteroid poses before it hits the moon. And then instead of resources becoming scarce and thus more valuable, for some reason the grocery store starts selling everything you can fit into a cart for $100. What bizarro world is this? Then there's the fact that none of them consider going south to a warmer climate, or farmer, or any form of self-sufficiency.

 

I haven't read it, but your description of the grocery store reminds me of a scene in On the Beach by Neville Shute.

Spoiler: Do I have to spoiler-wrap things after sixty years?

There's been a nuclear war that has killed off the Northern hemisphere, and the radiation is drifting south. Australians know they'll all be dead in a matter of weeks. One of the major characters is in denial and goes to buy a new lawnmower because he's worried about his yard looking bad after he's dead. He brings the mower up to an employee and asks if he can pay by check. The employee tells him "Pay by orange peel if you like, we're closing down tonight... After all, there's only about a fortnight left to go."

 

THANK YOU! I mean, I get the whole 'Joel sees Ellie as his surrogate daughter' thing, but for cryin' out loud there are ways of extracting the fungi cells without killing Ellie. Especially since it's established they've already managed to replicate the virus in her blood samples in petri dishes. Great, awesome. Collect some vials of her blood and cerebrospinal flued, wait for her to wake up, thank her for her service and send her on her merry way.

But no, they're all 'lolomfg cut her brain out!!!!1111' So then it ends up with them all dying and leading to the sequel that we'll not discuss here.

Basically, when authors posits questions/creates drama that doesn't even need to happen if literally everyone involved uses their damn brains.

 

"I know just what to do."

"What? What's the plan?"

"No time to explain, follow me while the POV shifts elsewhere for needless drama."

 

Yeah, I believe the story was intended to be exactly that, a corrective to the deus ex machina endings then (and maybe still) common. But IMHO the story as written isn't any more believable, it just delivers confirmation for a different set of biases.

 

Ah ok, gotcha. Yeah, that's no better. The point is to try to rise above the echo chambers, not jump to the one on the opposite side.

 

Did I mention "a terminal case of the stupids"?

Where the plot or solution is blatantly obvious to everyone except the characters.

"Mr. Alucard never comes out during the daytime, always wears an opera cloak, never has garlic on his pizza and hates crosses, says he's Jewish."
"That's interesting. Have we got any leads on those murders where people's blood has been drained through two puncture holes in their necks?"
"Nope, we're completely stumped."

 

^ Change Alucard to Millarca and you just described Carmilla. Quite literally, she changed her name by just mixing up the letters, and the father of a recent victim described her and her vampiristic tendencies to a T and nobody picked up on it.

 

I wish authors would stop mis-using commas, but that's a lost cause.

I often lose track of what's happening in a novel because I get so entrenched in critiquing a wrongly-placed comma. I guess I made a poor choice of career -- instead of becoming an architect I should have become a comma cop.

 

I was just skimming the thread and happened to catch the middle of your post. Thank you for the much-needed laugh!

I read that one. I thought the young cousin's arc was really contrived too. I kept thinking "there is no reason to devote this much time to a side character. She's going to end up stranded in the woods with the MC, isn't she?" Sure enough...