Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
In many stories, the plot only works because the protagonist lacks a crucial bit of information. An awful lot of stories fall on their faces because she could have found out by simply talking to someone. If she knows she's missing critical data, and doesn't ask, well, she's an idiot.
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Yes, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle mentioned this in an essay about writing their novel THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE.
In the novel, everybody has what we would now call iPhones, complete with a species of Google. Therefore, they could not have first level idiots as characters, since they could easily Google any missing critical data. This was a rather impressive piece of foresight on the part of authors living in 1974.
They actually had the presence of a pocket computer as a critical part of the climactic final scene.