536 – Logical Worldbuilding

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Many of our favorite spec fic tropes don’t make much sense. Does that matter? How important is it for the masquerade to make sense, and is that different from other logical issues that aren’t so well established? This week, we discuss the importance of logic in worldbuilding, or perhaps the lack of importance. We’ll see how much it matters for different parts of the world to realistically affect others, when it’s most likely to bother people, and how you can get readers to let things slide. Also, why are blogs named like they are?

Show Notes

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Savannah Bard. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music].

Oren: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is−

Chris: Chris.

Oren: and−

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: So, I like things that are cool. Swords are cool. Jets are cool. So in my setting, I’m gonna tape swords to the front of jets so that they can run into the bad guys real fast. Ultimate stabbing.

Chris: So, is that two times the cool or is that cool squared?

Oren: I think it’s coolness times velocity, actually.

Chris: Oh, I see.

Oren: This is, of course, only a little more ridiculous than what you would see in your average Warhammer 40000 story. And honestly, I would not put it past them to introduce some kind of aircraft that rams things and then has reverse engines to un-ram itself so it can ram things again. I mean, Star Wars introduced the Hammerhead Corvette, which… I hate that thing.

Chris: You know, the thing that they use when they want to instant-win after a long hard fight. Turns out they could have won the whole time. All they needed to do is just use this Hammerhead to ram things, this Hammerhead spaceship,

Oren: I hate it so much. It’s a good movie. I love Rogue One, but that part is so bad.

Bunny: They called it the Hammerhead Corvette.

Oren: Its introduction is super conspicuous too. None of the other ships get a name, and this ship isn’t in the movie except for that one part. And it’s like, are you trying to sell a toy?

Chris: They make a big deal out of it.

Bunny: Here’s one on eBay I just found.

Oren: Were you expecting Hammerhead Corvette toys to really fly off the shelves? Maybe they did. I don’t know. Lots of little kids being like, “Mom and dad, I want a Hammerhead Corvette for Christmas.”

Bunny: Looks like Lego is in on it, so rest assured, lots of kids are getting their Hammerhead-flavored popsicles.

Chris: And then what is it they did in Last Jedi? Was it a light speed to−

Oren: Yeah, they did the Hyperspace Ram in Last Jedi.

Chris: It was a really nice special effect. It was.

Oren: Okay. It’s beautiful. Unlike the Rogue One scene, it at least looked good. It just didn’t make any sense, and was also dramatically bad because it seemed like the movie was over, but then the movie kept going, which happens two or three times in the Last Jedi.

Bunny: It doesn’t even look like a Hammerhead Shark. It looks like a really derpy fish.

Oren: It’s doing its best, okay?

Chris: And this is what happens, of course, with weapons all the time. If they were able to do that all along, why haven’t they done it before?

Oren: That is the obvious question.

Bunny: History. Who needs it?

Oren: We’re also like three minutes in. We haven’t introduced the topic yet. I was just complaining about how I don’t like podcasts that do this. So, that’s me now, apparently. That’s who I am.

Chris: I mean, we were talking about it. People can read the podcast title.

Oren: They can, but we know they don’t. Come on. No one reads podcast titles. You just get a little ding. Oh, there’s a podcast episode! And then you listen to it. Anyway, we’re talking about logical worldbuilding. That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently for various reasons. How important is it? Does it matter?

Chris: Sometimes? Depends.

Bunny: Implicitly, we care because there is a podcast episode about it.

Oren: I know I care!

Chris: You care when the nacelles are the wrong shape!

Oren: They can’t just make the nacelles the wrong shape, Chris!

Chris: Bet a bunch listeners don’t have any idea what the nacelles are. If you watch Star Trek, usually their ships have these two little glowy parts on either side of the main body of the ship. Sometimes they move up and down and they glow before the ship takes off into warp or whatever. Those are the nacelles, and Oren notices when they have nacelles of the wrong shape, when they change shape from shot to shot or episode to episode.

Oren: This happens a lot in Voyager, because Voyager went through several models of shuttle before they landed on the one they liked. At first they had the old TNG shuttles, which, okay, sure. And then they switched out the nacelles of the old TNG shuttle for a different kind of nacelle, which seems like an odd thing to be doing when you’re stranded on the opposite side of the Delta Quadrant. And then they changed the shuttle completely, but they kept the new nacelles. So they Ship-of-Theseus’ed these shuttles is what I’m saying.

Chris: I think this is a much smaller problem than the fact that they destroy countless shuttles in Voyager, and you assume that they’re replacing them in the background until they have a specific episode about making a new shuttle, and it takes them a huge collaborative effort to make one shuttle and then they immediately destroy that shuttle.

We even had a comic−Once Upon a Trope, Bunny and I had a comic about this−about taking inventory and discovering that there were negative shuttles.

Oren: The shuttles are breeding.

Bunny: Once you have a stable colony, you can just sit back and let ’em do their thing. Just don’t deplete them too quickly.

Chris: Star Trek technology is so wild, right? The thing about Voyager is it’s supposed to be having resource shortages because it’s all by itself on the other side of the galaxy, but we also know that they have replicators. If they have energy, they can just make anything they want.

Oren: Maybe. Sometimes. That did really confuse me, because with shuttles it’s like, “Okay, I guess the shuttle is too big to just replicate a whole shuttle.” But I was really confused by the idea that they could run out of torpedoes, which they make a big deal of in the first season. A torpedo is just a little package of antimatter on top of an engine.

Chris: Maybe the replicators can’t make antimatter.

Oren: They can though! They use it for the warp core.

Chris: Wait, do they actually replicate antimatter?

Oren: I don’t know if they replicate it, but we in real life can make antimatter. It’s just a very slow, very inefficient process. Presumably, they can do it a little better in Star Trek.

Chris: Anyway, logical worldbuilding. Which Star Trek is not known for.

Oren: But I like Star Trek. But I also like logical worldbuilding.

Bunny: It’s a complicated dilemma you find yourself in.

Chris: Now that we’re talking about Star Trek and logical worldbuilding−the Xenomorphs in Strange New Worlds. No! They’re supposed to be an intelligent species. They’re basically Xenomorphs. I mean, it’s the Gorn, which were completely different in the original series, but now the Gorn are Xenomorphs, and it just doesn’t fit the setting at all because there’s no reason for an intelligent species to do this. And all of the species are intelligent in Star Trek.

Bunny: Gone are the days when you could take your shirt off and wrestle one on a sandy dune.

Oren: We don’t do that anymore. The Gorn are now serious space-murder-torturers. We don’t do silly wrestle scenes with them anymore. So the Gorn episode of Strange New Worlds is interesting because it is a place where theming and logic meet, and theming and logical worldbuilding are not always the same thing. In fact, theming is often used to cover up logical inconsistencies.

Chris: Like katanas in a cyberpunk setting, for instance.

Oren: Exactly. Only katanas though. Bring out a broadsword in a cyberpunk setting, everyone’s gonna look at you weird, but it’s okay if it’s from Japan, I guess.

Chris: Because people are so used to katanas being in cyberpunk that it now feels like it’s in theme, but it’s not really logical for people to be using katanas in a high-tech setting.

Oren: Every time I play a cyberpunk campaign, I demand to use a glaive, like a big old bill hook. They’re like, “You can’t use those!” It’s like, “I can use melee weapons. There’re stats for it. You can’t tell me I can’t use them.”

Bunny: It does seem like most−maybe most is an overstatement, but many, many−illogical worldbuilding choices can slide because they’re genre expectations or tropes. You know, we want space battles, and we don’t want drones to do all of the battling. So we accept that you gotta go in and dog fight rather than launching missiles from a distance.

Oren: That’s the theming part. You want things that feel like they belong together, and theming often covers over logical inconsistencies. I mean, we see this in stuff like even The Expanse, which is famous for being more realistic than most popular sci-fi, but still has some pretty big logical inconsistencies that we gloss over.

Like, once you have the level of free fusion energy they describe in The Expanse, a lot of the problems they suffer from become kind of trivial. The problem of life support management, if you have infinite fusion energy, isn’t really that big an obstacle, but that’s not in theme with the setting. Right? The theme of the setting is that it’s grungy and everything’s hard and we’re constantly scrambling by, and the only reason we have the magical fusion drives is to explain how we can get around because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere and that wouldn’t work.

Chris: There’s also the settings-level of realism, which is technically different. That’s basically whether the story has an atmosphere that feels realistic, grounded, gritty, et cetera, et cetera−it doesn’t have to be dark necessarily−and the degree to which it seems to follow the same rules as the real world.

A lower realism setting would have characters easily jumping from rooftop to rooftop and lifting impossible things that are many times their size and weight. We just don’t expect there to be completely rigorous physics. Wile E. Coyote’s the ultimate example of low realism, right? Where he runs off of a cliff and then just keeps walking in the air for a while and doesn’t fall until he notices that he’s standing on air.

Bunny: What would a logical but not realistic version of Wile E. Coyote be?

Oren: It’s that movie that’s actually going to come out about Wile E. suing the Acme Corporation. We thought that movie was dead, but it’s coming out, and I’m gonna go see it.

Chris: Things can be high realism, but still have parts that are illogical. For instance, if you have a plague outbreak and no one is wearing a mask and there’s no comment on it, that could be something that feels realistic, but has illogical components.

Oren: Thinking of the one with the deer kid. I don’t remember what it’s called.

Bunny: Dragon Prince. They had horns, right?

Oren: Sweet Tooth, Sweet Tooth.

Chris: Oh, Sweet Tooth. That one is so funny because it has extremely low realism portions and really high realism portions, and they do not get along together. But we’re doing a very high realism plague outbreak, and this was during Covid−or right after Covid−that everybody saw this show. So we all know what it’s like to have a big pandemic, and yet everybody is just really careless about whether they’re transmitting it.

Oren: And of course there was the inevitable pointing out that there’s a whole segment of the population that acted that way. But the people doing it in Sweet Tooth do not have the “political motivation”, shall we say.

Chris: But there’s also a specific community that is so hypervigilant and violent about transmission that if anybody’s found to have it, they burn them down in their house. But they still visit people without masks and share some water.

Bunny: Oh, that’s how you get mono.

Chris: So there’s clearly some contradictions in the world there, even if everything kind of has a feel of high realism.

Oren: I want to rewind a little bit, because I mentioned that the Star Trek Xenomorph thing was an interesting combination of logical issues and theming issues. Logically, that makes no sense, right? They have all kinds of advanced technology that they have to come up with a bunch of excuses why none of it works.

And then sometimes they don’t even give excuses, like their phasers just don’t hurt the Gorn for some reason?

Chris: In the Alien movies, the characters do not have Star Trek level technology to defend themselves against the aliens.

Oren: They don’t have any guns at all. They have makeshift flame throwers in the first one, and then in the second one when they have guns, that’s why they introduce a swarm of Xenomorphs.

Bunny: Ah, but what about katanas?

Oren: They should have had some katanas, honestly. But then also theming-wise, it does not make sense, because−again−the theme of the first Alien movie is space truckers meet an alien, basically. They’re not trained for this. They’re here trying to do a job and get paid. They’re not professional explorers with crisis combat training. That’s why it feels like it works, but the Star Trek crew, they are professional danger explorers, so it feels weird that they’re suddenly so helpless. And so that’s where you have a combination of something that is both badly themed and just horribly unrealistic.

Chris: The Federation’s relatively utopian. Not that they don’t face dangers outside of the Federation, but the general idea is they go and they meet other intelligent alien species. In that context, Xenomorphs that purposely decide to plant their young where they will kill other sapien species, it just doesn’t make any sense. It’s not a logical thing.

Oren: Star Trek can have completely evil enemies, or at least enemies that you have to fight, that you can’t talk to.

Bunny: Wrestle them.

Oren: Yeah. The Borg, for example, but the Borg are a little more complicated than “we are evil because we evolved to be evil”. The Gorn feel like they’re from a fantasy series, which, I wouldn’t love them there either, but they would at least feel like they were not completely out of place. It doesn’t seem like this should be a thing here. Aliens are supposed to be at least a little more three dimensional than this. I’m still curious if in season three of Strange New Worlds we’re gonna pull a huge retcon and be like, “Oh, actually the Gorn are a normal species. Those ones you met were just jerks. You met the Gorn KKK. That’s why they were all assholes.”

Chris: I mean, that’s probably the best explanation they can come up with.

Oren: That doesn’t really make sense, but I’ll take it.

Chris: I’m afraid of them being, “Oh, we’re reasonable people except we have this cultural tradition!”

Oren: One thing that has been on my mind a lot has been this book that I read recently called The Sword of Kaigen, which more than most books that I have read, felt like the worldbuilding elements were thrown together in a pot with no real thought into whether or not they made sense together, and the book did very well. I’m not here to tell you that it was like a failure and you should never do what it does, but it did feel very weird that we have this modern setting and then also these magical samurai who hang out and everyone’s like, “Wow, you guys are a really big deal, you magical samurai.” And I’m here wondering, “Why did magical samurai matter when y’all have machine guns?” And then they have a brief fight where the magical samurai have to deal with modern weaponry, and they can’t. And then the story just keeps going as if that didn’t happen. It feels like most books would put in some effort to try to reconcile how the magical samurai work in a setting that has machine guns, and this book did not do that.

Chris: Look, I can take down a Black Hawk helicopter in hand-to-hand combat; it doesn’t even have hands!

Oren: That’s what I was expecting, right? I was expecting they would have some way to do that, and the answer “no, they don’t” is, I guess, realistic, but then raises the question why everyone thinks they’re so important.

Bunny: So I guess that’s realistic, but not logical and perhaps not on theme either.

Chris: I would say probably one of the number one sources of illogical conceits is just people not acting in their interest in the story. The example we gave of Sweet Tooth is one where it’s like, “Okay, well, if people don’t want the disease, why aren’t they taking X, Y, Z steps?”

This particularly applies when we’re not talking about single individuals but whole groups of people. If a whole group of people, like a society, for instance, appears to not be acting in their interest, generally that means you are misreading the situation. I love this example on the blog, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, discussing peasant farmers. People have looked at their farming practices and assumed they just didn’t know what they were doing and weren’t acting in their own interest. For instance, if they had a good year, they would spend all of their extra food feasting and giving it to their neighbors and then they would starve during lean years.

People could look at that and be like, “Well, why did they do that?” They should have saved in some way so that they could have that extra wealth or food or whatever for when times were hard. But if you actually understand the economy of the time and how things work, they just didn’t have any way to do that. And so their best bet was to invest in social capital and build a social safety net so that they would feast their neighbors and then their neighbors would help them if they had lean times. And that was actually the logical thing to do. So if you see some kind of weird historical behavior it’s a good idea to ask about what is the context for why people are doing this? If you wanna put that in your world replicating that context, in which case it actually makes sense and it’s efficient, and it benefits people to do that kind of weird thing.

Oren: What I find unrealistic is that a blog with such amazingly useful and well-written information about history would be called A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, which is a really hard thing to say when you’re trying to tell someone about this blog.

Bunny: Like calling your book The Mimicking of Known Successes. Very inconvenient.

Oren: Doesn’t have anything to do with the story. Why is it titled that? I’ve just started calling it Devereaux’s blog. I don’t have time to say that really long name every time, and it doesn’t communicate what the blog’s about anyway.

Chris: I could just say ACOUP.

Bunny: ACOUP!

Oren: No, I will never say ACOUP.

Chris: If you ever do it, I will know you’re an imposter.

Oren: If I ever do that, I’m acting unrealistically. Then I’ll say that the nacelles don’t actually matter. It’s fine.

Chris: I will say this whole question of self-interest, though, in some ways has gotten a lot harder because of recent politics. There’s been a lot of arguments about what is plausible for an evil overlord, especially when we’re talking about villains. People would be like, “Oh, it’s realistic for the villain to be incompetent, because politics.” Most of the time we’re not actually talking about realism. We’re talking about what’s good for the story, which is different. A lot of people don’t understand that it’s different, but it’s different.

In some cases, like when I looked at Quicksilver, there’s this elite queen’s guard that apparently is supposedly wearing plate armor made of pure gold. It’s supposed to be illogical, a sign the queen only cares about appearances. And it is kind of holding these guards back somewhat. I had to be like, okay, well this doesn’t make any sense, but I suppose if the evil queen is a clown…? At the same time, I still think that there is some limit there. How obvious is it working against their self-interest? If the guard can’t even move, the queen would probably change her mind at that point.

Oren: I would also question can even the most clownish of evil queens afford even one suit of solid gold plate mail? Plate mail on its own is already really expensive in any setting in which it is relevant. Gold is expensive, and there isn’t that much of it. Most gold things in history are gold plated. They’re not usually solid gold. That’s pretty rare. The amount of gold you would need to make a fully gold suit of armor is like… and these are supposed to be more than one! I question whether even a really clownish evil queen who is gutting all of her public services for money and is trying to sell them for parts, would be able to afford that many suits of golden armor.

Bunny: Wow, this is worse than nacelles.

Oren: Eventually, reality does come back to call. Clowns do a lot of clown stuff that it feels like they shouldn’t be allowed to do, but eventually it catches up with them.

Bunny: I also wanna say that this scenario of truth being stranger than fiction is something that’s been in actual nonfiction for a really long time. In nonfiction, you also still have to make the audience believe what you’re saying, especially narrative nonfiction, right? So, it’s true. These are facts about what happened that you’re putting together, but it still has to be believable, which is a weird thing to say when you’re putting together something that’s literally true. But I’ve been in classes where we talk about nonfiction and believability is still a huge matter.

Oren: You gotta give your readers the context to believe these things. If you just list weird facts and are like, “Yeah, that happened.” Readers are gonna be like, “Oh, if you say so, I guess.” Maybe if they really trust you, they’ll accept it.

Bunny: There’s some real weird crap. There are warships painted zigzag.

Oren: Yeah. Why are they painted like zebras? I could tell you, but we only have four minutes left. In that case, you want to ease them into it. You want to give them a way that they can understand it, not just be like, here’s a weird thing. Don’t question it because weird stuff happens.

Bunny: Another way to cover up illogical worldbuilding is to have characters in the story act like it’s normal. I think that actually goes further in some cases, like with the dangerous magic schools. The fact that the adults aren’t panicking constantly makes the reader not panic until it gets obviously absurd. Or until the author ties herself in knots trying to justify it.

Oren: The dangerous magic school is another one that is often covered by tropes. This doesn’t make any sense, but we are used to it. It’s a thing we’ve been seeing since the magic school genre blew up. So people will usually accept it as long as you don’t be weird with it. If you start calling a bunch of attention to it, you might have some trouble. Or you might not.

Again, Deadly Education did very well, so I can’t say for sure how much anyone cared. I can say that I know at least a significant number of people who read the book and had a hard time with all of the exposition, which is exactly what I would expect. It’s not really controversial to say that people don’t generally like reading huge blocks of exposition. An even bigger number of people did like the book enough to keep reading even though there was all this exposition, but to what extent the bizarre worldbuilding has any real effect, that’s harder to measure.

Bunny: It’s also worth mentioning stories that are intentionally illogical or at least present on their face as a bit absurdist or surrealist, because these exist, and it’s often stories with fairy tale logic or high comedy stories like Shaun the Sheep. Not very high in realism or logic. I watched an episode recently where the dog gets his chair attached to a drone and goes to space, and then falls back to Earth. We’re not supposed to be like, “Why isn’t he asphyxiating?” And The Butcher of the Forest being a good example of a fairy tale logic sort of world where you have to trust that it’s working on its own internal logic, even though it seems absurd.

Oren: I read The Other Valley recently, which is a kind of surrealist story, where the premise is that the entire world is one valley, but like to the east and west of this valley, there is an identical copy of that valley that is like 20 years before or ahead of it in time. You’re not asking, “Where do these people get their cars?” Because they have cars. Where do they get gasoline? Where do they grow their food? That is not the point of the story. As long as the story itself does not bring that up as a big plot point, as some kind of “gotcha”, sure. The point of the story is about what you would do to change your history, which I think is fine.

By the end of the story, if someone had been like, “Hey, didn’t you know it’s really weird that these valleys are able to survive despite being cut off from the outside world?” that doesn’t make sense. I spent this whole book suspending my disbelief over that. You don’t get to pull it as a gotcha now. Well with that, I think we are gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro music].

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