Quantum Storytelling

In July my wife and I have a trip planned to my home state of Minnesota. I haven’t been back since 2003.

Each time back is both a refreshing and disturbing experience rolled into one. Refreshing for that feeling of safety and familiarity. It is disturbing because so much has changed in my hometown of Woodbury, that in many ways the place is alien to me.

The essence of the place truly resides in the mind alone, and thus we get to heart of the cliché, “You can never go home again.”

The place you grew up and the experiences you had significantly shaped your identity as an individual. As writers, many of those places, people, and sentiments will find their way into your stories.

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As I’ve been studying Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, I’ve been paying attention to how the episodes use story threads. It happens in one of two ways; The writers either create a new thread, or pick up where an old thread left off. Executive Producer Brad Wright in a GateWorld interview;

“That’s what Atlantis did well in that we created a universe wherein multiple storylines could be born and take place and spread and grow. Those are the lessons we learned building SG-1 in the first place. While it started with mythology at its root, very early on, by mid-way through Season Three and [the] beginning of Season Four, we had created enough of our own mythology that wasn’t rooted in the culture of “X.”"

One of the strengths of the series is its ability to remain fresh after so many seasons, and the best I can determine is that their ability to do this relies heavily upon those open threads. You can resolve a thread with a villain being killed… or so it appears. But maybe they are revived, cloned, take a new body, or found a way to escape at the last second that the hero didn’t know about. While this is standard fare, the more interesting type of open thread is when an episode features a new discovery: New technology, ancient artifact, riddles constructed out of alien languages. The characters never truly know the full story. A pillar inscribed with text may lead to certain discoveries in one episode, but the interpretation of that finding may change or evolve in drastic new ways in a later episode.

It is safe to say that the SG-1 writers did not have entire story arcs across multiple seasons planned out in advance. So then how did they make it seem like they did plan it? They left themselves enough open threads, and had confidence in their own abilities to deliver on those open threads when the time came. Making yourself seem like a master story arc planner is just a matter of leaving yourself enough opportunities to create that illusion through future stories.

On The Beach by Nevil Schute

After nuclear devastation across the globe, the remaining human survivors have congregated in Australia to spend their last months figuring out what to do before radiation poisoning sets in.

The best parts of the story for me were submarine missions a few of the characters embark upon, exploring radiated coastlines for signs of life and investigating the sources of mysterious radio signals in areas that are unfit for life. These were the only elements to truly capitalize on the strength of the post-apocalyptic setting, as the rest of the story involves the mundane everyday lives of the survivors in Australia.

As a whole I found the story entirely disappointing. The characters behave unrealistically and in ways which do not establish heroic qualities. When confronted with the possibility that everyone will die in a few months, one family sets about planting a garden they could never live to enjoy. Another fixes up cars and races them. The characters suffer from a collective denial of their fate. But instead of exploring their options and fighting for survival, they resign themselves to their fate and continue planting gardens, racing cars, etc.

This lack of action, and initiative, completely destroys the conflict in the story. How can you have conflict if the characters ignore the conflict? And the conflict is, I might add, one of the natural resources of the post-apocalyptic genre; Humans in conflict with their environment.

On The Beach may make a beautiful tragedy, and a work of art in that regard. But as a post-apocalyptic genre story, and a piece of fictive entertainment, it completely fails for having no heroes and no conflict.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

A father and son travel south to avoid cold temperatures brought on by a cataclysm which has destroyed the planet and left humanity on the brink of extinction. They follow a main road south, along the way searching for food and avoiding roving bands of cannibals.

I found it to be a really good story, and played the survival elements very well in ways that On The Beach didn’t. The father and son are at many times on the verge of starving, and their search of abandoned houses or destroyed towns often turns up little, and sometimes exposes them to the danger of cannibals. This is a natural conflict brought on by the post-apocalyptic setting, and Cormac McCarthy uses the setting to full effect.

As far as weaknesses, I would agree with Crawford Killian’s review. It’s a bit odd that there isn’t more social organization, and that the world, as far as the story is concerned, is boiled down to cannibals and lone surviving individuals. You would think that somebody, somewhere, is working together and although this is briefly mentioned a few times in the story, the reader is never given a glimpse of that aspect of McCarthy’s world.

The interaction of father and child is not only an interesting from a character standpoint, but is expertly used by McCarthy as a writer’s trick to consistently explain the state of the world and its inhabitants within the story.

The road itself, in addition to being the title of the story and almost another character in the plot, also serves as excellent symbolism of life journey and the paths we must all choose to face.

The Road is a great story of perseverence, and a prime example of masterful storytelling.