What interests you more in a sci-fi short story, plot or characters?

Plot or characters? Neither. When I read an SF short, I wanted a gosh-wow cool scientific IDEA, something that makes me look at the world a little differently than I did before--something that I don't have to be a PhD to understand. That's what I'm really missing out of modern SF, honestly.

Both. I loved the House of Zeor, Unto Zeor Forever, etc. sci-fi series, which was more of a character-driven/conceptual thing than plot-driven series. (I can't even remember if it had a plot!) but I loved the idea. It was really creative and multi-sensory.

Ender's Game was plot-driven and character driven. I loved that book, and Speaker for the Dead.

It just depends on the book I guess.

Definitely both. If the plot rules, but the characters are flat, I stop caring. If I care about the characters, but the plot bores me, I stop reading.

When I was younger, I would always finish every book I started, no matter how much I disliked it. Lately, I've found myself putting more and more books aside. It kinda sucks, really. I never wanted to be that guy.

I'd say both, of course, with a bias toward character.

Depends on the characters. Depends on the plot. Hopefully a good balance of both. Generally I'm more interested in Soft Scifi.

In a short? Character.

DeleyanLee said:

Plot or characters? Neither. When I read an SF short, I wanted a gosh-wow cool scientific IDEA, something that makes me look at the world a little differently than I did before--

Click to expand...

Yeah, the "idea" is definitely (or should be, IMHO) stronger in SF than in most other genres. Perhaps mystery is and equivalent genre in that the reader is challenged to solve a problem (such as how someone is murdered, who did it and how they 'almost' get away with it) before the solution is revealed near the end of the story.

But that's hard SF, and the main example I think of is Larry Niven. And of course even with hard SF, plot and characters have their importance, and if either is too weak it's not a publishable story.

"Ender's Game" appears to me a novel where plot and characters are rather important, and more emphasized than the idea. Greg Bear's "Eon" is more hard SF and has a bigger "idea" and it seems to me that is more emphasized in that novel.

DeleyanLee said:

something that I don't have to be a PhD to understand. That's what I'm really missing out of modern SF, honestly.

Click to expand...

Are you saying you know of stories where you DO have to be a PhD to understand them? Please give titles, those are things I might like to read.

In shorts, I actually prefer big picture type stuff, the feeling you get when you walk away, that you experienced something or learned something, and that tends to come from story first and characters second.

For instance, I enjoyed The Veldt (Bradbury) not because of the characters or the plot or the tech, but because of what it managed to say, and how I walked away feeling. Same for The Nine Billion Names of God (Clarke). And even though it's not SF, one of my favorite short stories is A Rose For Emily (Faulkner) and once again it's from that cool chill I got at the very end.

Characters are what drive me to read a book. A book can have an awesome plot, but if it doesn't have at least decent characters I probably won't finish it. On the other hand, books like Watchmen that have great characters, if a not so great plot, I love.

For me it depends. I'm pretty flexible. With a short, I can tolerate the sacrifice of character for plot and vice versa. In a novel though, I want both plot and character development to keep me hooked. If the characters aren't sympathetic by like--chapter ten, I throw the book down. Same for novel plots. If it has big holes in it, or it's just a pathetic sketch of a plot, I won't finish reading.

Not that there's anything wrong with vrabinec's viewpoint, or anyone's for that matter, but I really do think character trumps, for me. It's the window by which we experience the world. That's why we have characters, rather than just describing all the "cool" stuff people have thought up.

In my experience (this may be uncommon, but), I disagree an author doesn't become attached to their short story characters. With drafting and all one author might take as long to draft a short story as another takes to draft a novel. The norm is that, yes, authors spend less time with shorter works. But there are those stories which the author perfects over years and years.

I find myself extremely attached to several of my characters who appear in shorter works, and I often wonder if I'm telling their stories credibly.

I've long found an attachment to Harrison Bergeron, despite the fact that he has less stage time than his folks in Vonnegut's story. His death affected me in the way one might after a book full of character development ends with tragedy. And I think that's a tip of my hat to Vonnegut as a writer, but without the humanity that story would, I believe, have been worthless.

Just my opinion. Like I said, no problem with enjoying a story for the author's insight into technology or world building or any of that. But to me character-driven stories will catch my attention in any genre.

*searches for an 'All Equal' button*


-Travis

Depends, but isn't science fiction more about the ideas than either?

DeleyanLee said:

Plot or characters? Neither. When I read an SF short, I wanted a gosh-wow cool scientific IDEA, something that makes me look at the world a little differently than I did before--something that I don't have to be a PhD to understand. That's what I'm really missing out of modern SF, honestly.

Click to expand...

Yes, me too.

benbradley said:

Yeah, the "idea" is definitely (or should be, IMHO) stronger in SF than in most other genres. Perhaps mystery is and equivalent genre in that the reader is challenged to solve a problem (such as how someone is murdered, who did it and how they 'almost' get away with it) before the solution is revealed near the end of the story.

But that's hard SF, and the main example I think of is Larry Niven. And of course even with hard SF, plot and characters have their importance, and if either is too weak it's not a publishable story.

"Ender's Game" appears to me a novel where plot and characters are rather important, and more emphasized than the idea. Greg Bear's "Eon" is more hard SF and has a bigger "idea" and it seems to me that is more emphasized in that novel.

Are you saying you know of stories where you DO have to be a PhD to understand them? Please give titles, those are things I might like to read.

Click to expand...

I read Ender's Game as a short story, and it had an idea that was gosh-wow in the pre-video-game era. Didn't like the books as much.

Setting, idea, characters and plot playing off each other. Take away one leg, the chair falls over.

-Derek

For me, the quintessential SF short takes a novel premise based on a scienctific or technological frontier, and finds a consumer or victim perspective to launch a treatment of that idea.

Strong character design gives us the intimate moral, social and psychological perspectives that make it a story, and strong character conflict also creates compelling plot (plots are simply not credible otherwise).

I feel that the hard part in SF short design isn't in coming up with interesting speculative premises -- trawl any science or technology magazine and you can find dozens of these -- but in grounding those premises in relevant psychological and social elements of character. For that you can't trawl mags -- you need a deep and agile understanding of mind and society.

vrabinec said:

Yeah, but the character can often simply be an observer. I don't remember the character's names in any of Asimov's robot short stories.

Click to expand...

Watson is an observer in Sherlock Holmes stories too, but that misses the point. The main character is Holmes, not the viewpoint character of Watson. We can tell because the character exposition focuses on Holmes. It is Holmes who drives the action, who faces the challenges, whose decisions shape outcomes.

There's no question that HAL, Andrew Martin and Wintermute are all characters. They have psychologies and social identities. Their physiologies just happen to be cybernetic. You can tell that they're characters because we develop sympathy and empathy for them.

Each is also a victim of its technological nature as well as being, in a sense, a customer of human technology, which supports my earlier point. It's not that the technology is a character in SF (the black monolith in 2001 certainly isn't); it's that technology can sometimes be realised as a character. But that shouldn't be too surprising: animals can be characters too, e.g. in Jack London stories. We can imbue anything with 'characterness' just by giving it psyche and social identity.

In SF as with all other dramatic fiction the interplay of reader sympathy and empathy for major characters is key to shaping the story; if we had no sympathy for the characters or empathy for their motives the stories would fail.

Literarily it's a bit odd that Asimov writes cybernetic characters better than most of his human characters, say. But that's true of quite a few SF authors of the period, and less true nowadays. I think that it's more a peculiarity of authorship than a sign of good SF design. Clarke, by comparison, wrote great human characters at times (e.g. in Citizen of the Galaxy), and Heinlein, Herbert and Niven say, are memorable for their characters.

Inevitably, character design in a short will be sketchier than in a novel -- there simply isn't the space to create depth and layering. But I can't think of a great short of any genre that has bad characters, or a short with bad characters that couldn't be improved by fixing 'em up. More to the point, hard SF attracts a lot of rational, objective types who sometimes overlook the importance of characterisation in fiction. All successful fiction -- even hard SF -- is an emotional journey. The emotions are embedded in your characters. My advice: if you don't want to write strong characters, write an essay.

In a short story I want a really interesting idea, with plot and character secondary. In a longer work I want both character and plot to be good and care less about the idea. Most importantly I want the writing style to be fluent and engaging. When I come across a book where the writing is a bit awkward but has interesting characters or plot I'll finish the book but it's unlikely that I'll read another by the same author.

Plot and ideas. Mindboggling, strange and interesting ideas are very important to me.

Um, when I read sf shorts, characters are by far the most important part of the story. I couldn't care less about some silly pseudoscientific idea that will soon be outdated and/or debunked (if it isn't already). My favorite sf shorts are about the effects of tech on characters, not about the tech itself.

I guess that's why I primarily write fantasy.

vrabinec said:

Yeah, but the character can often simply be an observer. I don't remember the character's names in any of Asimov's robot short stories. I don't even think he gave most of them any discernible personality other than being human and being the observer in the story. I do remember that, when the robot says he had a dream, she shuts him down. But I couldn't tell you what her goals were, whether she spoke or anything else about her (In that particular one). But the robot is vivid as can be. The scientific aspect takes on the role of the character and becomes the MC.

In 2001, Dave is drab. The technology is animated and carries the story.

Click to expand...

Haha, that's so true about Isaac Asimov! It's true about his Foundation series too if you've ever read it. It was about the tone he was setting and the events that would change humanity; the characters were basically vessels, there in time and space to report what was going on. I think that's why he never even bothered to describe what his characters looked like.

But that's just Asimov, there's other sci-fi writers who looked more into the character than plot, like Orwell's 1984, that was all character really.

But I agree, sci-fi tends to be more about the ideas presented and changing how we look at the world currently.