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

[julianyap.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I read a ton of science fiction and I am not sure that I'd characterize myself of idealizing rationality. (Saneness, sure, but I'm not sure that's the same as rationality). I do agree that there are books which take this to the extreme, but in my experience they're rather few and far between.

I guess my only points are a) I have not found that I have a harder time sympathizing with books where the people act irationally to the degree that most people act irrationally all the time b) I'm not certain its as common as Blish says, at least in good writing. c) I'm not certain its more prevalent in Sci-Fi thanany other sort of fiction. I mean there are some great works of literature where the plot essenitally turns on people completely and constantly failing to understand other people's motivations.