Thinking aloud about Idiot Plots.

[randomness]

"James Blish has said that much of sci-fi relies on Idiot Plots, defined as stories 'kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody involved is an idiot.'"

(Gregg Easterbrook, two-thirds of the way down the very long page http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/060425)

It occurs to me that it might be more plausible to have characters do unfathomably dumb things because they're crazy.

But maybe it's hard to write fictional characters who are both sympathetic and insane? Wait, I guess that's Bridget Jones.

Okay, maybe the readers and viewers of SF don't identify very well with people who act irrationally? Or at least not as well as the readers of some other genres?

Comments

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I didn't quote any of his Galactica comments because they weren't relevant.

I don't agree or disagree with him about Galactica; I don't watch the show, so I have no opinion on it. But I didn't want the distraction of a debate on the merits of Galactica or lack thereof, so I completely left it out of my excerpt. It was his quote of James Blish that provided the jumping-off point for my ramble.

[orichalcum.livejournal.com]

Sorry - it's just that that was the context, so i thought I'd mention it, as it can be very easy to generate an "Idiot Plot Theory" based on a lack of full understanding of motivations. Take Midsummer Night's Dream as an example. It seems like Puck is behaving like a total idiot, but in fact he's just been given bad orders, and can't tell young human men apart from each other in the dark.