Internal consistency is...what exactly?

Indeed. It means laying out the laws of your world, and not breaking them. If your starships can't go faster than Warp 10, you don't flip a couple of switches and push your ship to Warp 11 in an emergency. If your sorcerer must make hand gestures to cast his spell, you don't "forget" later and have him cast things while both of his hands are encased in a block of concrete. If your Pernese blue dragons only bond with men, you don't have one bond with a woman just because. (Glares at Todd McCaffrey.)

WildScribe said:

If your Pernese blue dragons only bond with men, you don't have one bond with a woman just because. (Glares at Todd McCaffrey.)

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Haha--now as a Pern reader I was always wondering why, if males could impress greens, women couldn't impress blues at least. It always seemed terribly unfair to me. It was strongly implied that the men impressing greens were gay (at least in the later Pern books), so I always assumed that lesbian women weren't impressing blues for the same reason that straight women weren't impressing greens for a long time in the stories (barring an occasional accidental impression)--namely they weren't put on the sands as candidates because of the sexism of the society. I don't remember it ever saying anywhere in the books that women were any more incapable of cross gender impressions than males were.

It was interesting that Pernese society was fairly accepting of male/male unions (at least in the weyrs), but lesbian women were pretty invisible for most of the series. Remember that McCaffrey wrote those books over decades, and no doubt her own sensibilities evolved during that time (as did reader expectations). I am pretty sure green dragons were referred to as "he" in the first part of the first edition of Dragonflight I had (and dead Larth was originally referred to as a green and then became a Brown later in the series), and suddenly they all became female halfway later on.

My thought is that if you have a "rule" or norm in your world that will later be broken, it's a good idea to foreshadow it first and have a plausible reason for said rule to be breakable.

It's cheating if your wizard with his hands in concrete can suddenly cast spells without his hands if it's totally out of nowhere. But if it's been hinted and implied that people could do this at some time in the misty past and that very same wizard was trying (even unsuccessfully) to learn how to do it, then having the ability come to him in a moment of extreme desperation makes more sense.

Very true on the wizard front. Foreshadowing or special rules for exceptions count are okay if not overdone.

As for Pern... there are a LOT of reasons I hate Todd McCaffrey's additions to the series, not the least of which is his complete shredding of the internal consistency of the stories. (I've noticed some of her older books stepping outside of her own rules as well, I think before she had a very firmly established world in mind, but her later books very closely follow the rules she's decided on. Whereas Todd just looks at those rules and goes "meh", and does his own thing. Plus his writing is crap, anyway. ) /rant

I haven't read any of Todd's efforts. Though I loved her dearly, the last books from Anne were painful enough.

Yes, indeedy. You can make up anything you want, but what you make up has to remain solid throughout the books. So you were right.

You can't say in one chapter that Green Platypi only eat very sexually experienced young men and then suddenly change your mind just so they can threaten a virginal female for the sake of DRAMA.

Likewise, you can't say that magic costs physical energy to cast, forcing magic users to eat a lot in one book and suddenly change your mind in a second.

At least, not without foreshadowing or explaining the change. Maybe this Green Platypus is maddened by fear or drugged in some way, and maybe this magic user has found a way to channel other peoples energy for her spells. Even then, the change would have to make sense within the rules the writer has laid down.

I think there is also an internal consistency to the amount of explanation and detail you have. If you give detailed/logic-sounding explanations for an element, readers will expect similar for everything. If you just ignore the matter for one thing, then ignore it for all.

So in SciFi, you can't give a realistic explanation of how the warp drive works and then just wave your hands an say we also have time travel. Or in fantasy, if you explain how magic is derived from a connection to the land, you can't just have imps that fly about for no reason. Your level of description and rationalization should be consistent for all the different speculative elements.

One thing on this.

I do agree that "FOR THE MOST PART" you should totally maintain internal consistency. However, I disagree on this notion on a single front. Sometimes the story is about a hero doing something that should be impossible.

The story could boil down to your MC being on mind altering drugs and still having to use her powers to save the day. I think the important thing to do in this instance is to lay a ground work for it. Almost like a secondary internal consistency.

It does mean once a rule is set you don't randomly break it for plot convenience, but it's also bigger than that. Let's say I set my story in the far future, where advanced genetic engineering can do all sorts of things and make hybrids and clones. I have a character with a genetic disease, but there's no cure for this disease. I've just hit a consistency error, because based on all the other genetic engineering I've shown, a cure for the disease would be easy in comparison.

A fix for my issue is to say there is a cure, but that the character can't get it because they're too poor, or people of their caste don't get medical care or something like that. Now I'm being consistent.

Consistency can be thinking through all the changes that would occur based on a condition you've set.

Polenth said:

It does mean once a rule is set you don't randomly break it for plot convenience, but it's also bigger than that. Let's say I set my story in the far future, where advanced genetic engineering can do all sorts of things and make hybrids and clones. I have a character with a genetic disease, but there's no cure for this disease. I've just hit a consistency error, because based on all the other genetic engineering I've shown, a cure for the disease would be easy in comparison.

A fix for my issue is to say there is a cure, but that the character can't get it because they're too poor, or people of their caste don't get medical care or something like that. Now I'm being consistent.

Consistency can be thinking through all the changes that would occur based on a condition you've set.

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Not necessarily, I can think of one specific instance to contradict you: The Asgard in Stargate SG-1. As a species they advanced themselves through the use of cloning and genetic engineering. They got to the point that they were effectively immortal, transferring their consciousnesses from one body to the next, but they began to experience diminished returns from their clones.

This was essentially their hubris. The idea that they, as a species, got too arrogant and that would eventually spell their demise.

Also, in the universe depicted by John Scalzi in Old Man's War and its sequels they talk about how a race was exterminated because it relied too heavily on cloning. Essentially, another species developed a virus that lay dormant for a long period. When the virus became active, it would quickly ravage the infected person. Interestingly, the disease was somehow designed to attack cloned/engineered DNA rather than natural DNA. I don't know how the disease would know the difference, but it did. During the long dormancy, the disease spread throughout almost the entire clone army and then it activated and: bam, no more army.

I seem to remember one of the dragons--maybe it was Larth, the one who goes to the Red Planet?--changing colour between books, but I think some latitude should be given to a series that develops out of a story that probably wasn't intended to be more than a one-off.

Often here on AW I see writers being advised not to write the second book in a series before the first book is sold, and I can see how from a career point of view this is sound advice. However, I do think writing a second book can enable you to give more depth to the first one. Often first books in a series seem to me a bit 'thin' and then the following books feel like they're trying to break out of the rules laid down in the original world-building, but can't.

Internal consistency means making up your rules and sticking to them.

This reminds me of something my family and I noticed watching one of the Harry Potter movies the other day. According to Rowling's rules, you can't get into Hogwarts through apparating or any form of magical transport. You'd think this would make it a very safe place. However, Sirius can use the floo network to make his face appear in Gryffindor tower. If his face can appear, so can the rest of him. Doesn't seem like Hogwarts is too safe to me.

Just my random Harry Potter tangent. If you look at it closely, she has a number of internal consistency problems, but I still love the books.

One thing you must understand is that there are several levels of internal consistence, one stemming from a universal truth and one from what the characters understand.

You must NEVER break the universal truth style of internal consistence, but it's okay to break the "what the characters understand." What I mean is, Frank the wizard "knows" that you can't use red and blue magic together. Yet, later on someone does just that. Does this mean you have broken the consistence of your world? Not necessarily. It just means that Frank didn't understand how magic works as well as he thought. Now, it's really easy to overstep this and make the reader angry, since most stories are told from a viewpoint that isn't all-knowing. What the characters know is generally what the readers know. If you do break a rule that the characters think is true, it should be foreshadowed somehow(other wizards arguing about how magic mixes or such) so the reader won't be completely taken by surprise or angry for being deceived. Or the characters themselves should be completely taken by surprise at the situation, even disbelieving it. If Frank thinks that it's just a trick since it's impossible to his knowledge, it makes it more okay than if Frank just was "Lol, no one just ever bothered to do it." So, if characters react to breaking the "soft" internal consistency, it makes it more okay.

rwm4768 said:

Internal consistency means making up your rules and sticking to them.

This reminds me of something my family and I noticed watching one of the Harry Potter movies the other day. According to Rowling's rules, you can't get into Hogwarts through apparating or any form of magical transport. You'd think this would make it a very safe place. However, Sirius can use the floo network to make his face appear in Gryffindor tower. If his face can appear, so can the rest of him. Doesn't seem like Hogwarts is too safe to me.

Just my random Harry Potter tangent. If you look at it closely, she has a number of internal consistency problems, but I still love the books.

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Huh. Now I have to watch that scene again. I'd thought he was using some other spell to make just an image of his face appear in the flames.

Another thing is you should be careful not to have people regularly forget about technology that commonly exists in their world.

As an example: If someone's cut the phone lines in my house, they're crashing around, I need to call the police...wouldn't I reach for my cell phone rather than just sit there, waiting for them?

You can get around some of this by finding ways to make your super technology no longer exist. (i.e. I left my phone in my car. It ran out of batteries. I'm a weird technophobe who only has a landline.) But readers do tend to get a bit annoyed when there's this super death ray out that can destroy planets...but there's still this huge energy crisis out there because whatever's powering the death ray apparently can't power a power plant.

You get a lot of this in bad space opera, where people capable of colonizing galaxies still can't somehow manage to make modern day technology work out for them.

WildScribe said:

As for Pern... there are a LOT of reasons I hate Todd McCaffrey's additions to the series, not the least of which is his complete shredding of the internal consistency of the stories.

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I haven't read Todd McCaffery. As mentioned above, the later Anne McCafferey books were painful enough.

But I practically threw the first Brian Herbert Dune book against a wall because he ignored his father's past. Frank Herbert was very careful about how he built that universe--at least in the earlier books. One shouldn't be writing in someone else's universe if one is just going to ignore the past.

ULTRAAARGH

ULTRAGOTHA said:

...One shouldn't be writing in someone else's universe if one is just going to ignore the past.

ULTRAAARGH

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Which could be shorten into one shouldn't write in some else's universe.

I can certainly see why Brian Herbert and Todd McCaffery would do so. Alas, they didn't do a good job. Neither has Jill Paton Walsh, also alas. But some authors do a good job.

Every story establishes its own individual "rules" or "constraints" from the beginning. Internal consistency means working within those constraints. When you violate them, a bad moon rises in the reader's experience.

caw

Really it all comes down to fulfilling your promises to the readers. If you tell them that something works a certain way, and then you change it up without any foreshadowing you basically lied to them. It feels like cheating to the reader's mind. And not in a good way.