I Disbelieve, Help Me to Suspend My Disbelief...

Red Cardigan is having a hard time ginning up any appreciation for randy rocket men... or women. Or aliens;

Because I can suspend my disbelief, when I'm asked to believe that two ships moving forward at relativistic speeds can outrun each other or engage each other in battle; I can overlook the impossibility of the ring-pattern explosion and appreciate the coolness factor of it instead; I can pretend that some plan of God's might have permitted the evolutionary process on some planet or other to create an intelligent centipede that for some reason only walks on two oversized legs, waving the other 98 in rippling patterns which ought to warn our heroes that the creature is getting angry and might spit some highly implausible centipedesque poison at them any second; for the sake of a reasonably well-contrived and entertaining story I'm prepared to overlook whole series of impossible things. But when it comes to how men and women interact with each other, I'm getting awfully tired of having schlocky fiction-writers pretend that the real world operates like some teenage boy's fantasy, and that a man can be a hero and also treat women like disposable playthings--and that the women actually like being treated this way.

A well-written harangue like this is part of what makes these interwebs so much fun. Let 'em have it with both photon cannons, Red!

Comments

[Foxfier]

Can I get an AMEN?!?

Look, I have no problem with talking dragons; but if you make a talking dragon who, for no explained reason, is also able to make watches that are too small for gnomes to work on, I question.

All the folks we meet look like humans, but with funky ears, eyebrows, foreheads, noses or such? And can reproduce with each other? OK.
The only folks who can figure out money are a big-eared bunch of quasi-slavers? Uh, no.

Anytime you put something that violates the known rules, you have to have a reason.

Dragons can fly because they're dragons; star ships can violate the light barrier because technobabble allows it.

[freddy]

Yup, uhuh, what she said. Amen.

[J.R. Stoodley]

Any fantasy should follow it's own rules (however different those rules are from those of the real world), as well as the basic rules of logic (to use the classic Chestertonian example, if the ugly stepsisters are older than Cinderella then Cinderella must by necessity be younger than them).

This sort of science fiction stuff generally follows the second rule, but is often really bad at the first. Even aside from inner consistency, you get these senarios like what's mentioned above about male-female relations that just don't make sense. This is supposed to be in the future of our own universe, with humans. You can suspend disbelief regarding the space ships and so forth because the rules of this universe are different (on the basis of science not yet known to us) but human nature presumably remains the same in the fantasy, so unbelievable human behavior isn't any more plausible than in a fiction taking place in today's world.

A very different situation would be if it involved an alien race. In that case, any behavior is potentially believable, and perhaps the writer could use the behavior of alien races as a commentary on our own.

[J.R. Stoodley]

By the way, has anyone read the short story "Ministering Angels" by C.S. Lewis. This topic reminded me of that.

Here's the best link I could find:

http://books.google.com/books?id=sMl9MFWKuf0C&pg=PA25&lpg=PA25&dq=C.S.+Lewis+Ministering+Angels&source=web&ots=t6ivnMCzr8&sig=RvixFQAgIfWLbcCk8QJ7ChmnyGc&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=8&ct=result#PPA25,M1