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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
My friends and I discuss this issue a lot... it seems most television and movie dramas these days depend on nothing but lack of communication. Nobody's really a good or bad guy... they're just all afraid to share, and as a result, all Hell breaks loose. Lack of communication creates conflict. (Maybe we should add that to the Rules of SF thread... or maybe not.)
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An awful lot of stories revolve around lack off communication, and the lack can result from an assortment of causes.
One old friend was writing an SF novel where the plot revolved around financial skulduggery. The first suggestion I made revolved around the time required for communications. We're used to instant communication in the financial markets. We can know about changes in values to securities listed on the Hong Kong Bourse as they happen. When you have interplanetary or interstellar distances involved, you can't, and the better model might be the age of sail, where the banking house back home wouldn't know for 6 months what had taken place somewhere they had an investment, and had to rely on local factors with broad discretion to handle their affairs given general guidelines about what the banking house wanted to do.
In David Weber's Honor Harrington series, most of it takes place in the context of a war with the neighboring Republic of Haven, where the folks working in Manticore's War Room are basing decisions on information that is weeks old by the time it reaches them, and the ships (or even entire fleets) affected by the information may not even exist by the time the planners hear of it. They are all uncomfortably aware of it, and it's yet another stress factor.
In another instance in the same series, peace talks collapse because someone was deliberately altering diplomatic communications, so what one side saw wasn't what the other side sent, and decisions to resume hostilities were made on the basis of false data.
But "Nobody's really a good or bad guy" can be a strength. A lot of the books I like have folks on both sides who are fine, admirable people, who simply happen to be on opposite sides. I may root for them to
lose, because I'm against their
side, but I'll want
them to come out of it alive.
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Look at the TV show Lost... simple honest communication between all parties would have ended that show in about nine episodes. I think it's a telling statement about our society today, unfortunately.
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A friend got the entire run of Lost on DVDs, and sat down recently to watch it all straight through. I
never watched the show, and had no desire to, so I didn't care about spoilers. What I got from his comments was that seeing it all back to back like that made it more comprehensible, but what was there to comprehend screamed Second Order Idiot Plot.
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Dennis