suspension of disbelief

[cellio]

It's funny the things that do and don't trigger suspension-of-disbelief problems for me. I enjoy speculative fiction -- science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, etc. This means accepting some basic premises -- faster-than-light travel, teleportation, magic, time travel, or whatever. I'm totally cool with all that.

I had two recent experiences with other factors in such stories.

First, last night I finally saw Looper (Netflix: last year's movies this year, which is fine with me). I enjoyed it in general (the ending moved it from "ok" to "I liked that"), but some of the implementation details gave me pause. (Everything I'm about to say is revealed in the first ten minutes of the movie.) The basic idea is that "the mob" in the future sends people they want to kill back in time 30 years to have hired assassins do the deed and dispose of the bodies in the past -- easier to get away with. That's fine. But the assassins know that they aren't going to be allowed to live past that point in the future -- you get 30 years of high pay and then at some point the guy sent back is going to be you and you "close the loop" by killing him. Ok, I can work with that.

So...why does the future mob need assassins in the past? Why not just send bodies back? Or if the time-travel device only works with live people, then -- given that we've seen them land very precisely in geo-space and time -- why not send them into a live volcano? And if they need assassins, why not go back 100 years and then not have to worry about them catching up?

As I said, I enjoyed the movie -- but I couldn't help wondering about such obvious questions, which could have been addressed with a few sentences of dialogue but weren't, while at the same time accepting the time-travel premise just fine. Maybe I'm weird.

In a similar vein, I recently finished reading The Domesday Book by Connie Willis, which coincidentally also involves time-travel. In this case they're sending a historian back to the middle ages for direct observation. She's got an implanted recording device, something like a universal translator (also implanted)... and neither a homing beacon (should they need to rescue her) nor a beacon she can drop at the rendezvous point (matched up to an implanted detector). The history department has budget for a time-travel net but not homing beacons? Bummer. (I realize that this would totally mess up the plot of the book.) Also, apparently in the future they only have land-lines. I enjoyed the book (which I read because of the song (YouTube, lyrics)), but I couldn't help noticing.

I guess it's the little things that catch my eye.

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

This seems perfectly reasonable to me, that the author gets to set the basic premise but must then implement it rationally.

[cellio]

Yup. And when you're immersed in a premise maybe you miss things that outsiders spot? Or maybe I just notice things more? Were I to write this kind of fiction I'm sure I would miss big obvious things too, which got me wondering how one approaches the task to minimize such problems. Is this just a matter of "more beta readers", or are there analytical techniques you can use to look at your setting, or what?

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Not just writing sf. This is a basic issue of writing, and even more generally of communicating: not seeing things from outside the environment you're immersed in. Why bad tech support says "You're not supposed to do that!" (Well, then why did you let me do it?"

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I wonder how many of your problems weren't spotted by beta-readers / editors, and how many were spotted but were dismissed as too difficult to fix / the plot depends on this.

I wonder how much of the problem is not about spotting inconsistencies, but about evaluating how much or how little they will bother people?