The Size and Scale of Plot

People often say that travel in SF and Fantasy in general, but FTL travel in SF in particular, move "at the speed of plot" - getting people from one destination to another in exactly the right amount of time for whatever the story requires in terms of pacing. Nothing is worked out on the basis of scientific principle or even plain common sense. It's all just what's necessary for what needs to happen in the plot. If it needs to take ages to get from X to Y, it takes ages. If it needs to happen quickly, it happens quickly. If the characters need to arrive just in time, they do. If they need to arrive just too late, that's what happens.

This is undoubtedly true, and you can also extend it across other dimensions: size and scale.

I was thinking about while reading The Founding by Dan Abnett, a Warhammer 40k novel. I pick this example not because it is particularly egregious or unusual but because it is the opposite - a very ordinary instance of the way in which size and scale operate at the level of story rather than what might be realistic.

The opening section sees the action unfold in a battle on a planet whose population, we are told, is in the tens of billions - the tens of billions - which makes sense given that it is a densely populated industrialized world in the far future. War has been going on here for some time, so one would expect a reduction in population, but later on we are explicitly told that a single region of hills still houses a billion people.

But the action takes place at a scale which is, in that context, absurdly small: the absolute fulcrum of not just the entire battle, but the war on that planet - its Kursk, its Midway, its Amiens, its Gettysburg - unfolds on the scale of a couple of thousand men and about a hundred armoured fighting vehicles. (And it's important to emphasise that this is not just because Our Heroes manage to achieve the destruction of some vital MacGuffin which the enemies are using; the entire conventional action itself - the exploitation of a gap in "the lines" by a single armoured column - is thought of by the top General in charge of the entire campaign as the moment that will win the war.)

It's necessary to do this, because it's really difficult to write an exciting action novel about adventurous derring-do in which the actions of the characters can be felt to be decisive in a war in which there are presumably billions of combatants, unless you treat scale as being what's necessary for the plot, rather than what makes actual sense given what we know. (Or if you simply abandon any design on the actions of the soldier characters meaning much beyond survival or, say, acting in some moral and limited way to rescue civilians or whatever.)

Another scene. Later on in the novel, an assault takes place against an entire planet which is described as being not much more than the size of a moon. Here, the whole invasion force is counted at 50,000 men and, once again, the major action is fought by a unit of about 2,000. For the conquest of an entire world this is - which, even if it is not much bigger than our Moon would still make it comfortably bigger in landmass than Australia. Again, this is necessary for the purposes of the plot, which requires the unit in question to be at the apex of the conquest for reasons I won't go into to avoid spoilers, but it does not really reflect what would surely be the case given the factual circumstances.

It would be entirely possible to write a novel which treated the size and scale of intergalactic war in a more realistic way, of course, but if seeking to do it would not be a book about a group of soldiers actually affecting much at all.

It's perhaps reasonable to point out that Warhammer 40k books are a special case, because there's a strong incentive for authors to scale down operations to fit the skirmish-scale of the actual wargame and make it seem possible for conflicts of that size to actually matter in the grand scheme of things. But SF in general tends to operate the same way - think of Star Wars, where the fate of the rebellion hangs on what seems to be in the region of a hundred space fighters on one side and just the Death Star on the other. (Return of the Jedi isn't all that much more realistic in terms of scale.) In those circumstances of course logistics plays a factor as well - the special effects budget could only stretch so far after all - but the same will be true for most warfare in any SF novel or film you could think of.

And it's not just warfare, of course. SF in general - visual SF more than literary, of course - is highly reductive of the kind of complexity which would surely be implied by the circumstances. Klingons all speak Klingon and there is one Klingon Empire. Romulans all speak Romulan and there is one Romulan Empire. Cardassians all speak Cardassian and there is one Cardassian Empire. There aren't different Klingon ethnicities, different Klingon languages, or different Klingon Empires. Diversity sometimes exists for the fun of it as in Mos Eisley or on Ten-Forward where there are guys with blue skin and four arms playing craps against women with snakes for hair or whatever. But that's the extent of it. The stories necessitate keeping things simple for the audience: the size of the interstellar space, with all that implies, has to be squeezed down to fit the demands of narrative. (This is even more true of geography: Hoth is an ice planet, Tatooine is a desert planet, Endor is a jungle planet: what's Earth - that rare water/desert/ice/jungle/mountains/tundra/forest planet?)

I wonder if it is possible for somebody to prove that this is received wisdom, and write a book about intergalactic war which takes seriously the finance and logistics of conflict across the stars - or a book about exploring the galaxy in which other planets are as culturally and geographically diverse as Earth. Those books might not work, but they would certainly be different.