Time keeps on slipping

The subject of time travel tropes as central to narrative has been explored in depth by David Wittenberg in Time Travel. Much of what he says about time travel narratives applies to other forms of narrative, too, as we’ve seen: ‘time travel’ of a sort is a part of all narratives, so time travel stories are, in part, explorations of narrative.

Time travel is often part of sci-fi, but sci-fi otherwise doesn’t always provide straightforward examples that fit into my framework of elements of narrative logic being absorbed into in-universe. What it does do is to privilege events over character. In War of the Worlds, the narrator is barely a character at all. He just wanders around as aliens invade, telling us what happens as they land and begin their conquest then abruptly die. The narrators’ identity is more or less irrelevant.

Later works of sci-fi introduce more fully realised characters, but the core usually remains what is happening, rather than who it’s happening to. This is why there have been so many different main series of Star Trek: you can make any number of successful seasons of Star Trek (and also Enterprise) without Kirk, Spock and Bones, because, as in War of the Worlds, the characters are secondary to the concepts explored by the series. You can imagine Star Trek without the Enterprise or any of its crew, but you cannot imagine Star Trek without interstellar travel and the other various sci-fi paraphernalia that the franchise has made its own. It ceases to make sense.

This is partly why the rebooted ‘Kelvin timeline’ is so rubbish: it trades on reimagining characters that were never the point of the show, while turning Trek into an action movie. The trademarks are all there: the Enterprise, Spock calling everything illogical, Bones saying ‘Dammit, man, I’m an X not a Y’, as well as transporters, tractor beams and the rest, but all this seems like so much boxticking. The trappings of the genre and the franchise are all there, but weirdly out of context.

Again, this isn’t to say that character-driven genre fiction is impossible or that characterisation is irrelevant, it’s just that the characters aren’t the point. To return to an earlier example, try to imagine endless new series ‘set in the universe’ of To the Lighthouse. It simply doesn’t make sense.

What does God need with a spaceship?

While sci-fi doesn’t routinely take a feature of narrative (like character arcs) and turn it into a feature of the universe (like fate/destiny), it does borrow this type of technique from other genres. For example, why does Q, an omnipotent trickster, decide that, of all the ships and captains in Starfleet, he’s going to pick on the Enterprise-D and Jean-Luc Picard? Q doesn’t adequately explain his choice, because the real answer is: ‘because that’s who the show’s about’. Later, he decides instead to get involved with Voyager and Captain Kathryn Janeway. Why the shift in focus? Obviously, because by this point, Voyager was the flagship Trek show. After an in-universe absence of three decades, he’s now coming to season 2 of Picard to annoy Jean-Luc again, because now the former captain has his own show he is therefore once again worthy of Q’s attention. As far as we know, no one else in the history of the galaxy has hung out with Q.

Note that literary fiction doesn’t get itself into this kind of problem, because characters’ arcs are assumed to just happen, without any special intervention from the universe. The Ramsays are not compelled to visit the eponymous lighthouse by divine intervention and no one expects this type of explanation.

Sci-fi often relies on a systematic or schematic approach to fiction. Certain rules are laid down, and then the author explores the implications of those rules at length. Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels are the classic example of this. The three laws of robotics are set out at the beginning of the first novel, which proceeds episodically through numerous iterations of the rules. Like Star Trek, the actual characters are secondary to the exploration of the rules of the novel.

I think the earliest example of this rule-based or schematised fiction is found in Ovid’s Metamorhposes, where the rule is that the gods can do almost anything, but they can’t undo anything done by another god. So, when Tiresias is blinded by Juno, Jove can’t give him back his vision and instead gives him the gift of prophecy as compensation. This rule is striking as an example of a just-so story incorporated into the myth, much like Bilbo’s discovery of the ring in Lord of the Rings. It’s easy to imagine how this happened: after hearing about the powers of the gods, an audience member asks, why don’t the gods just bring people back from the dead, raise sunken ships, quiet storms or anything else? Well, answers the rhapsode, it’s against the rules.

Adding this type of rule is necessary in sci-fi because the narrative frequently deals with technology that is impossible. In Star Trek, why don’t they just teleport everywhere using their matter transporters? What’s the point of spaceships at all? The writers are constantly having to come up with things like ion storms or temporal anomalies that mean the characters have to take a shuttle down to the surface of a planet (so that they can then get stranded and the plot can happen). So, transporters don’t work with shields, or while ships are travelling at warp speeds, or over too great a distance (exactly what distance is never clearly defined). These rules are clever and they generally work within the narrative, because they resemble real technological limitations but are actually real narrative limitations.

Transporters were actually added to Star Trek to save time and money: it meant they didn’t need any special FX shots or new props, unlike when the characters used a shuttle. But it clearly became apparent to the writers that the transporters were actually too useful. So, a set of rules was developed to allow the narratives to unfold as desired, while also showcasing the 23rd century’s amazing technology and saving production costs.

When these narrative rules are poorly defined or broken, something interesting happens: the audience gets annoyed. The best example of this can be seen in Star Wars. What can a force ghost do? Who can become a force ghost? If Luke’s ghost can catch a lightsaber and Obi Wan’s ghost can sit down on a log (because his ghost legs are tired, presumably?), what’s to stop them just teaming up and stabbing Kylo Ren? Answer: nothing, except the narrative.

The audience, understandably, hate this. We need a better answer but we’re not going to get one. The concept of force ghosts is nonsensical but no more so than the narratively satisfying rules concerning lightsabers (you can hold one in your hand with no shielding, but they’re also so hot that they instantly cauterise any wounds they cause). Part of the problem is that Star Wars, in terms of its deployment of tropes, is a kind of fantasy masquerading as sci-fi, with magical technology instead of magical magic. Fantasy is perfectly capable of deploying consistent rules in the same way sci-fi does, but in the specific case of Star Wars, the authors and audience confuse the two genres in frustrating ways. Most of us were perfectly happy viewing the Force as just space magic. George Lucas clearly disliked this, so he gave us the entirely unnecessary concept of midichlorians. This added a science-fiction style explanation for the Force, but to no narrative end. Before midichlorians, we had the concept of the Force, which we all understood perfectly well as a type of magic, i.e., a made-up thing that doesn’t, really, make any sense. After midichlorians, we have the concept of the Force being mediated by these things called midichlorians which… also make no sense.

Because Star Wars isn’t sci-fi, narratively speaking, the only thing midichlorians achieved was to highlight the ways in which the Force, like magic, makes no sense. We were given an explanation, which wasn’t really an explanation, wasn’t at all necessary narratively speaking, and was also from completely the wrong genre.

Force ghosts have the exact same problem. We’re okay with them, at first, because we all know what a ghost is and there’s a long held set of tropes or rules governing how these things behave. Audiences are perfectly happy with ghosts walking through walls to deliver messages to loved ones. They’re also happy with iterations of this concept, as long as they’re clearly set out by the author: is a ghost a conscious being, or a kind of echo or recording, acting out the same scenes again and again? It’s fine to pick either of these ideas or none of them, but if you settle on one, then abruptly switch to the other, your audience is bound to feel cheated.

Successful sci-fi and fantasy plays with the audience’s understanding of in-universe concepts, like teleporters or the laws of robotics, and also with our broader understanding of both genre and narrative tropes. They turn sets of rules into a kind of game. This can play out as a high-concept narrative, like I, Robot or as a more general narrative, where the rules play a secondary role. Equally, narratives in these genres can use familiar concepts, like magic or robots, relying on the audience’s understanding of how these things work, or introduce specific in-universe rules governing them.