Saving the World....

Love your avatar.

LOTR had smaller goals. Frodo only set out on the quest to save the shire. Sam went with Frodo so that Frodo wouldn't be alone. Sam had no real desire to leave the shire at all.

Okay so I mostly got that from the movie but I did suffer through the first book. You do need small reasons I think to keep the reader grounded. But do whatever works.

Not a Tolkien fan,
rosemerry

I think SFF falls into two categories. It either shows us the "best" of mankind - saving the world or universe or heroics of some kind or another - or it shines a light on us as individuals, either by poking fun at us remotely or by using an alien/fantasy-being to represent our darker side.*

How this answers your question (since I know you're wondering at this point) is that I think the small goals you talk about can be excellent for the latter type of SFF - showing us about ourselves and how we act/react as individuals.



*There's a third type too, of course, which is purely escapism, but maybe not so relevant to the original question.

The problem with saving the world is one of escalation. If you want to follow up saving the world, you have to save two worlds. Then a solar system. Then a galaxy. Then a universe. Then the multiverse.

It gets silly, very quickly.

I find goals work best when they are personal. Saving the whole world is boring, because we don't know each and every person out of the whole eight billion. We can watch planets blown up and go "Oh well". There's no emotional core to saving a whole world.

I have a friend who writes over and over again about world-threatening bad guys and world-saving good guys, and I have a devil of a time trying to explain to him that it just gets dull!

certainly if you don't write about saving the world, the next guy will. and if his story is better than your's, he'll sell his before you do. i think it's about that simple. if you don't like save-the-world stories, just don't write them, but if you want to get into that no one here is going to talk you out of it, lol.

as far as being cliche, just about what isn't? i can hear someone out there say, 'but, preyer, my man in a special suit is different!' yeah, sure it is. not saying those can't be great stories, but let's not kid each other, either, eh?

is saving the world too abstract? no, i don't think so. it's abstract if you make it that way, imo, and you do that by not making the reader connect with the place. this is where your world-building skillz come into play.

your story sounds to me as if it revolves around one battle that needs to be fought as part of the whole, not the whole itself? one piece of the puzzle, as it were.

i think there is an emotional core to saving the world. your characters live on that world, don't they? if you want to see them live, they'd better figure things out. most 'emotional cores' in sci-fi revolve around a scare factor, frightening the reader into believing it's very possible 'disease x' can reach you in your home, or that those facts your scientist gives are actual facts about earth-destroying meteors. rampaging goblins, well, that's harder, i guess, lol. but, that's why so many fantasies start off with the MC's village being burned to the ground.

too abstract? nah. too hard for people to wrap their minds around? after there's been so many save-the-world stories, why would you think that? if you think about it, quite a few if not most sci-fi has at least world-destruction implications because sci-fi writers often don't know how to do things small, lol. that is, heaven help us if those mecha-vampyres ever decide to go big time and make outright slaves of us all with vast areas of human cattle mooin' about. or if anyone ever finally figures out that they can see into the future by changing the date on their computer, well, that can easily lead to our destruction, can't it?, even if that's not the idea of the story. in sci-fi, whatever is there can get out of control and threaten the world, though that's not what you're specifically writing about. even in 'small' sci-fi, doesn't a lot of it depend on the implications of how bad things could potentially get?

troo, i don't think we should accuse world-saving stories as being dull: if they're dull to you, either you just don't like them or your friend isn't writing it well enough to make it entertaining. does he looove prologues and heaps of exposition? maybe he needs to bop over to SYW ~ i promise to be brutal but cruel.

it's funny, but i can't remember the last sci-fi movie i watched that didn't have the planet hanging in the balance, lol. maybe 'zathura,' if you consider that sci-fi. hm, 'monster house'?

i agree, though, none of it matters if the characters are crap.

none of this still explains sci-fi channel movies, though, which tend to be incomprehensibly stoopid. and not just, 'oops, i just bet my 401(k) on the cleveland browns to win the stanley cup next year' stoopid, but uwe boll dumb.

Good things about saving the World

BiggerBoat said:

But, when we're talking about high stakes, is "saving the world" just too much, too abstract?

Click to expand...

When you put it abstractly, it sounds too abstract, but there are a lot of good things about the "save the world" type plot.

1) it is quite ancient (Enoch in some apocryphal texts from 200 BC negotiates with God and the Rebel Angels to save the world)
2) there is a vaguely comic and ironical feel to such overblown motivations
3) the MC can drift into his cosmic position as world savior (full of comic possibilities)
4) you can look into the motivation of the MC as he moves from trying to save this and that to trying to save everything (a good match of plot and motivation and directing the reader's interest)
5) you can examine the puzzle of why somebody is trying to unsave the world (what is it that antagonists want? As long as they aren't just "pure evil"...that can be interesting)
6) the structure of the world is revealed along with the strategies for saving it (good expository, motivation, plot matchup)

Well, I don't know about Science Fiction, but in Fantasy, you have two types, Epic and Swords-and-Sorcery. Epic Fantasy usually features a global threat, and Swords-and-Sorcerey is usually just about the Hero, and the challenges he, (or she), faces. In both, it depends. If I was writing Swords-and-Sorcery, I would use an average person, like a farmer as the main character, and then on Epic Fantsay, I would probably use a superhuman being.

preyer said:

but uwe boll dumb.

Click to expand...

Are you sure Preyer? That's really scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to stupidity.

Some of my favored sci-fi/fantasy books have very small goals. In the one I just finished, most of the main characters goals are to get thorough the war without getting shot. That's a pretty important goal and kept me hooked through six books. And what's weird is, I was a surprised and shocked as the characters were when the war ended. I like...put the book down and said, "Whoa...it's...over...weird!"

In fact, MOST of my Sci-fi/fantasy books have very "personal" plot lines:

Hominid (Robert J. Sawyer): Get man from other dimension back to his home

Flatlander (Larry Niven): Solve several organlegging cases and not get killed in the process.

Chasem City (Alaster Reynolds): Revenge!

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (Grant Naylor): Get back to Earth, while not getting killed in the process

And so on and so on.

Now of course I have novels in my library that have "Save the word/universe" plot line. Are they any less emotionally grabbing? Nah, not at all. So this basically boils down to the simple fact that BOTH plot types work.

I do believe that "We've got to save the world!" is definitely an abstract plotline. It's too big. You cannot make someone feel concern and terror over the fate of six billion people. Sorry. We barely do that in real life.

But then again, facing a natural disaster, facing a great flaming eye, facing the evil Empire, facing whatever is also too abstract.

That's why you have characters and, done well, people. After all, in Lord of the Rings, you don't just have Frodo VS. Sauron, you have the Fellowship and their fight against Orcs, a Balrog, Denethor's lunacy, goblins, Gollum's treachery (and redemption, and then failure), Sauruman's betrayal, Wormtongue.......all smaller subjects and all, without fail, people stories.

It's Sam VS. Gollum with Frodo at stake. It's Gandalf VS. Denethor with Gondor with Minas Tirith at stake.

Because these aren't abstract. You write an epic story by writing about the bits that happen along the way. It's one of the first rules of writing a horror story (you're not going to scare anyone just by saying "and there was a murder," you scare them by showing the murder and making him step out of the page and say gotcha, and you show the character that the reader identifies with in peril.)

In my WIP, the abstract is "save the world." An "Ancient Evil" is resurrected and plans to re-enslave all mankind (you see, we were his servants way back when).

So that is the overall general thing going on.

But in the concrete, my MC keeps getting his ass kicked and I think the readers can relate to that. And while he's getting his ass kicked, he's also having relationship problems, and family problems. Other things the readers can relate to.

Shadow_Ferret said:

In my WIP, the abstract is "save the world." An "Ancient Evil" is resurrected and plans to re-enslave all mankind (you see, we were his servants way back when).

So that is the overall general thing going on.

But in the concrete, my MC keeps getting his ass kicked and I think the readers can relate to that. And while he's getting his ass kicked, he's also having relationship problems, and family problems. Other things the readers can relate to.

Click to expand...

Exactly. The "ancient evil," is the wallpaper of the room, but the reader needs people and furniture inside the room in order to really appreciate it.

So long as there are worlds, they will need saving. And might I point out that "save the world" stories are pretty revolutionary: Christianity is based on the story of a man saving the world, and medical school graduates go out ready to save the world--single-handedly no less.

The cliches come in the form of how the world is under threat, and why the hero saves the world. How about a hero that couldn't give a rat's ass about the world, but just want to save himself, and knows if the world is blown, then he will be too. Or how about a hero that saves the world by accident? Say he flips a switch thinking he's turning on some Christmas lights or something, but in reality he just deactivated the Mothership?

Troo said:

The problem with saving the world is one of escalation. If you want to follow up saving the world, you have to save two worlds. Then a solar system. Then a galaxy. Then a universe. Then the multiverse.

It gets silly, very quickly.

I find goals work best when they are personal. Saving the whole world is boring, because we don't know each and every person out of the whole eight billion. We can watch planets blown up and go "Oh well". There's no emotional core to saving a whole world.

I have a friend who writes over and over again about world-threatening bad guys and world-saving good guys, and I have a devil of a time trying to explain to him that it just gets dull!

Click to expand...

Unless you're part of SG-1 and do that many times over

Melanie

preyer said:

troo, i don't think we should accuse world-saving stories as being dull: if they're dull to you, either you just don't like them or your friend isn't writing it well enough to make it entertaining. does he looove prologues and heaps of exposition? maybe he needs to bop over to SYW ~ i promise to be brutal but cruel.

Click to expand...

It's dull because he does it again and again. And again. And a few more times. Then some more. And again.

Melanie Nilles said:

Unless you're part of SG-1 and do that many times over

Melanie

Click to expand...

And even the SG-1 writers admit it got tired

Both my WIPs feature world-threatening problems, but in one of them nobody ever thinks about how the problem might escalate--they're too worried about how it's affecting them and their town. In the other WIP, the main character isn't at any point trying to save the world. He's trying to help some strangers get home, he's trying to find his mother's killers, and he's trying not to die along the way.

I think when something world-ending comes up, it's important to keep your heroes from getting too high and mighty. "Oh, the world's in danger? I guess I better fix things up before someone gets hurt ..."

What PeeDee said about preserving the smaller conflicts is dead on.

It may be cliche when abstracted as 'saving the world', but I think saving the world can be done in non-cliche ways. You can certainly use it if you have enough in the rest of it that's original.

Oddsocks said:

It may be cliche when abstracted as 'saving the world', but I think saving the world can be done in non-cliche ways. You can certainly use it if you have enough in the rest of it that's original.

Click to expand...

Very true, Oddsocks, and I do agree. But I think that even if the peril the world is in, and the method in which you save it are completely original, it still abstracts in the reader's mind. Not because it's cliche, but because it's too big to comprehend. It's like having a passage where you convey the collective emotions of six billion people. The reader will read and understand and appreciate, but not truly 'get it,' but the human mind cannot comprehend six billion thoghts all at once.

Whereas, if you show one man in mortal terror and assuming you do it right, you can have the reader edging back in his seat and getting jumpy when the cat walks by.

This is not to say I don't like world-in-danger stories. I really do. I'm all for 'em.

Troo said:

The problem with saving the world is one of escalation. If you want to follow up saving the world, you have to save two worlds. Then a solar system. Then a galaxy. Then a universe. Then the multiverse.

It gets silly, very quickly.

I find goals work best when they are personal. Saving the whole world is boring, because we don't know each and every person out of the whole eight billion. We can watch planets blown up and go "Oh well". There's no emotional core to saving a whole world.

I have a friend who writes over and over again about world-threatening bad guys and world-saving good guys, and I have a devil of a time trying to explain to him that it just gets dull!

Click to expand...

Just look at Buffy. In the last few seasons they actually start making jokes about yet another Apocalypse coming.

You shouldn't play the 'save the world' card until it's absolutely necessary.

Try to see if you can downgrade the scope a bit. There's plenty of steps to take before you get to world-spanning problems: a village, a major city, a state or small country, several small countries or a large country, an ocean.

"I find myself needing to know the plural of Apocolypse." Giles

My protagonist is trying to save the U.S.A. from a despotic leader bent on censorship and totalitarian control under the guise of social responsibility.

Imelda said:

If it's a good story, then why should saving the world be abstract? Who (reader, author, or character) thinks 'I need to save these 6 billion people!'? You don't--you think of friends and famliy and how they can't be dead and gone along with familiar places and everything else. That's very personal and comprehendable.

Click to expand...

That's the point.

I think the idea of saveing the world si more about pulling everyone into the same catagory. In this cruddy reality we live in we need heroes to look up to and when it's the hero who saved the world it adds an equality point. He/She saved everyone cause everyone is important.

Usually saving the world is an after affect. Small things brought the character to that point without their realizing it.

Just my opinion though I dont think I answered question....

I personally am not a huge fan of the "save the entire world" kind of stories. At the same time however I thik they can work. You have too place more emphasis on the characters than the conflict. As long as you have internal conflicts among the characters I think it works. Or have mankind itself divided and fighting amonst itself while this all goes on.