{"id":8072,"date":"2013-02-12T17:47:31","date_gmt":"2013-02-13T00:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=8072"},"modified":"2013-02-12T17:48:11","modified_gmt":"2013-02-13T00:48:11","slug":"trope-tuesday-planetville-aka-adventure-planets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/trope-tuesday-planetville-aka-adventure-planets\/","title":{"rendered":"Trope Tuesday: Planetville (aka Adventure Planets)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"swmapsmall\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Adventure towns<\/a>…IN SPAAACE!!!<\/a><\/p>\n

Seriously, that’s the best way to describe it.\u00a0 In Westerns and TV serials, the heroes travel from town to town<\/a>, with a new adventure<\/a> in each place.\u00a0 Well, in science fiction, we don’t hop towns, we hop planets<\/a>.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because we can<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, since planets and towns are actually pretty different kinds of places, there’s a lot of room to do things poorly and turn this trope into a cliche.\u00a0 Any story that doesn’t consider (or at least lampshade<\/a>) the implications of space travel<\/a> and planetary colonization<\/a> is in danger of becoming over-the-top campy–although, to be fair, there is an audience for that.<\/p>\n

That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for this trope in fiction that takes itself a little more seriously.\u00a0 In fact, I take issue with some of the descriptions on the Planetville<\/a> page.\u00a0 From tvtropes:<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, because Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale<\/a>, stories about Planetville<\/a> make no sense. Nobody seems to realize how BIG a planet is \u2014 everything in Planetville<\/a> takes the same amount of time as stories set in towns or countries. In the updated Wild West<\/a> story, the outlaws are “exiled from the planet” just like they’d be exiled from Dodge City, and have to quietly leave… instead of flat out challenging the authorities to find them when they have an entire planet<\/em> in which to hide. When the space Nazis invade, they seem to need the same number of soldiers and time as the Earth Nazis needed to invade Europe. And when the crew of the Cool Starship<\/a> finds the cure for the alien plague, the logistical issues of distributing it to an entire planet rarely get mentioned at all. These considerations are minimized<\/a> or left out entirely<\/a> in many stories.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To address these criticisms point by point:<\/p>\n

1) Scale is relative to technology and the predominant modes of transportation.\u00a0 When my ancestors crossed the plains to settle in modern-day Utah, they had to walk.\u00a0 It took them months to get here and many of their family members died along the way.\u00a0 Today, I can make the same trip by car in a day or two.\u00a0 As technology changes, so does the sense of scale.<\/p>\n

2) Unlike what some tropes would have you believe<\/a>, not all planets are Earth-like.\u00a0 In fact, it appears that most planets outside our solar system are wildly different.\u00a0 In practical story terms, this means that any part of the world that’s remotely habitable is probably going to be immediately around the colony. Consequently, the local authorities probably will<\/em> have the power to exile trouble makers from an entire planet, since exile from the colony would mean de facto exile from the planet as well.<\/p>\n

3) Anyone venturing outside of the dome<\/a> would have to carry just about everything necessary for life, including air, water, food, etc.\u00a0 You might as well try to hide in Antarctica as hide on an alien planet.\u00a0 It can be done, of course, but to do all that and stay hidden, that’s going to be tough.\u00a0 You might as well set up a rival colony for all the effort–but at that point, the story is about a lot more than just hiding from the authorities.<\/p>\n

4) If your planetary colonies are only as populous as an average WWII era city\/town, then yeah, you’ll only need as many soldiers as it took to conquer them.\u00a0 The biggest difference is that they’ll fly a really cool starship<\/a>.<\/p>\n

5) Again, if the planet isn’t habitable and the population is contained within a handful of relatively small colonies, then distribution shouldn’t be too much of a problem.<\/p>\n

However, the tvtropes page does make this valid point:<\/p>\n

A side effect of this is that the characters never realize that things can happen in parts of planets. You will never see aliens trying to capture a planet’s equator, or its polar caps \u2014 it’s the whole planet or bust.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the end, I think the key to doing this trope well is to know your setting well enough to fit the story to it.\u00a0 Tropes are tools<\/a>, and when done well, this trope can accomplish everything it sets out to do while making perfect sense within the context of the story.<\/p>\n

In my own work, this trope is most prevalent in the Star Wanderers<\/strong> series.\u00a0 Every novella takes place at a different planet or space station<\/a>, sometimes multiple planets per station.\u00a0 Because most of the stars in this universe have only recently been settled, the colonies are small and terraforming is quite limited.\u00a0 In Desert Stars<\/strong>, I used a similar concept, except with large domed areas of a single planet, instead of multiple planets (Adventure towns<\/a>…UNDER THE DOME!!!<\/a>).\u00a0 In cases where the planets are Earth-like, however, or where travel between planets is costly and difficult, this trope doesn’t really ever come into play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adventure towns…IN SPAAACE!!! Seriously, that’s the best way to describe it.\u00a0 In Westerns and TV serials, the heroes travel from town to town, with a new adventure in each place.\u00a0 Well, in science fiction, we don’t hop towns, we hop planets.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because we can. Unfortunately, since planets and towns are actually pretty different kinds… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Planetville (aka Adventure Planets)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"This week's trope: Adventure towns...IN SPAAACE!!!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[44,857],"tags":[172,629,842,713,306,641,565,626],"class_list":["post-8072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ds","category-sw","tag-interplanetary-colonization","tag-outer-space","tag-sw-ix","tag-serials","tag-star-wars","tag-trope-tuesday","tag-tropes-and-cliches","tag-tvtropes","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-26c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8072"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8078,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8072\/revisions\/8078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}