Too Real, Too Fake

In a previous post I wrote about the fantasy worlds of TV shows, Books, and Movies, that we like to immerse ourselves within.  While the idea of getting lost in a fantasy world and forgetting the real one can be appealing at times, it can be difficult to suspend belief and go along with things that just aren't possible.  When I first read The Da Vinci Code, I loved the story and the mixture of reality and fiction.  Now I know some people will argue about that last part but let's just skip over the debate for now and assume it's just meant to be fiction that is presented in a believable manner as most people would assume.  The reason I liked the Da Vinci Code was because it told a story that mixed in elements of reality and made the fictional world that much more believable.

Later that same year I read another book by Dan Brown, this time Digital Fortress.  I've mentioned before I found this book incredibly hard to read and I left it at many points, returning at a later date to finish the story out of determination to simply finish what I started.  The vision you can imagine is not unlike Joe Fox in You've Got Mail played by Tom Hanks, sitting with a bottle of beer needing to get drunk in order to make it through Pride and Prejudice.

The reason Digital Fortress was so hard for me to progress through and finish was because the subject matter was centred around something I knew a lot about - Encryption.  I wrote my thesis on Encryption and created an algorithm that provided greater security than the AES - this sounds more impressive than it actually is, with encryption it's relatively easy to extend algorithms for example increasing key length can increase computation time which provides marginal gains in security, this combined with other tweaks can scale existing algorithms in some cases indefinitely, limited only in practice by your computational hardware but not by the actual theory behind it. 

When you know about a subject matter, or when you have even a basic understanding of it, those irreconcilable details in the story begin to stick out.  Plot-holes appear to you which become harder to dismiss over time, or in some cases outright impossibilities are carried through the work that irritate like you like a thorn in your side. 

I find this easier to ignore with TV shows more than books.  As for Movies those depend entirely on the nature of the movie and whether it's intended to be realistic - animated movies are the easiest to accommodate impossibilities and inaccuracies.  To give an example of a TV show where this sort of plot-hole nags at you if you spend too much time thinking about it, I would use Stargate.  SG-1, Atlantis, or Universe, any of the three really as they all share a common element in how the stargates actually work. 

Throughout the series you are told that gates rely on constellations to be used to represent points in space, and that a gate address is determined by 6 symbols representing a constellation which allow you to plot a point in 3D space and a seventh symbol to denote the point of origin.  In order to input these symbols you use a pedestal with in essence a keyboard showing these symbols representing the constellations - this is called a dial-home-device [DHD].  We're told that in the Milky Way Galaxy every DHD contains 38 common symbols and a 39th symbol which varies from planet to planet used to denote the point of origin which changes from planet to planet.

The problem with this system is that it presents the idea that a constellation such as Orion will be the same throughout our entire galaxy.  Except in reality it would not be.  Orion would only look like "Orion" from Earth.  What we see in the night sky is a two-dimensional observation of a three-dimensional space.  When you leave Earth and travel to another point in our galaxy your view of the stars that make up Orion would change, to the point where it would look nothing like the constellation we know.  There are of course ways to explain these irritations and plausible explanations that can at least give you something to hold onto each time you meet this plot-point.

Similarly you have problems in many sci-fi shows which depict alien races that arises from the question "Why does everyone speak English?" - something which is very unlikely to happen, and in practice is something that most sci-fi shows never make any attempt to address.

So the question is, exactly how believable do you have to make an unbelievable story for people to be able to ignore the plot-holes and run with the main story?  As a writer this fascinates.  When I write, I feel most liberated when I write in one of two styles - complete fantasy or completely believable.  I find it hard to find the middle ground.  With complete fantasy you know the reader has no expectation of reality at all, and with completely believable stories you can easily write and ask yourself as you progress "Would I believe this?"

Mixing the two is an art which I still practice and I hope I am improving upon; but I still find it easy to get bogged down in the details as I begin to question everything more and more - successively asking "How" or "Why" - unfortunately this often ends up killing a story if I can't think of an answer.