| 4. Survival after disaster/catastrophe plots
5. Revolution plots: "revolt in 2100" [successful] or "1984" [failure]
6. Paraosychology plots: "Demolished Man"
7. Death & Transfiguration plots: "the Paradox Men", "Childhood's End."
8. Mutant Plots: "Slan", "Telek", "The New Adam"
However, are these plots really *basic?* I'd say they were more them-
atic ideas than plots. F'rinstance: there's this wreck, see, with only one
or a few survivors. The basic plot is trying to survive off the environ-
ment through a serieds of realizations: a) appreciating predicament, b) find-
ing resources, c) adapting resources to needs, and d) finding or developing
some way out once survival is assured. This could be: _Robinson Crusoe_,
_Islands In The Sky_, or _The Moon Is Hell_. One our of three is SF, all
use basically the same *plot*. (Side issues like quarreling among the sur-
vivors doesn't alter the basic plotline.)
I'd opt we reclassify this as "themes" rather than "plots." As the
old joke goes, a standard plot os, "Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy
wins girl."; whereas in SF this can be altered to, "Boy meets girl. Boy
loses girl. Boy *builds* girl."
That's a plot; background/conditions is a theme.
regards,
Steve Kallis, Jr.
|
| re .7
The four plots:
>Man against God
>Man against Man
>Man against His Creations
>Man against Himself
>(substitute "One" for "Man", if you find the above sexist)
... hold only on an antagonistic level. "Boy meets Girl," surely a
basic plot, *could conceivably* br squeezed into "One against One" (to
remove sexist confusion) only under the most convoluted means. I'm not
quite sure how best (in a non-SF basis) to classify London's _Call of the
Wild_ using those four (items 2 and 4 could apply, in part, with a dol-
lop of item 1 thrown in for good measure). How does one simplify the
plot of _More Than Human_ among those four.
Many comedies and a lot of Medieval adventures are based on mis-
understandings (which *could* be twisted into "One against Its Creations"
-- but with difficuty).
Here we go again into whether this is a "plot" or a "concept" (I'd
say more the latter). Again, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" has
*elements* of 2 and 4 in it, but is something else. Indeed, _Le Morte
D'Arthur_ has *all* the above in it!
Steve Kallis, Jr.
|
| Joseph Campbell, in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" (a study of
mythology), puts forth an outline of what he calls the "Monomyth,"
the least-common-denominator plot of fairy tales, legends, and
heroic myths. However, it is not that different from the general
outline of plot used by novelists, critics, publishers, agents,
and literature teachers. It goes:
-----
Hero starts out in the mundane world.
Hero encounters the Guardian on the Threshold, a figure who breaks
into the mundane world and brings the hero into the world of adventure.
Hero encounters a series of helps and hindrances while struggling
toward the Goal.
Hero achieves Goal.
Hero is escorted or chased out of the world of adventure, back into
the mundane world, where the hero distributes the benefits of the
goal.
-----
This, as you can see, is not very different from the outline you
probably recall from high school English class, "Rising action,
crisis, resolution, denoument." The main differences are that the
Monomyth doesn't require the action to rise as you approach the
crisis, and the modern-novel outline doesn't make much of the barrier
between the mundane world and the world of adventure.
I think Campbell's outline is the more general-purpose one. Most
good stories and forms of plotted literature can be extracted from
it if you allow sub-cycles within the main cycle, or repeated cycles,
and occasional truncations and duplications of pieces.
In science fiction and fantasy, we have a couple of variations typical
of the genres. For instance, both often use a "mundane world" that
is not at all mundane by the reader's own standards. Thus the author
plays the role of Guardian at the Threshold as the reader plays
Hero, the whole work being a safely imaginative adventure for the
reader.
More reliably, each has characteristic features of the genre's "world
of adventure." In fact, most genres are characterized by the "world
of adventure" they use. In a romance, the world may be almost entirely
emotional and crossing the threshold is falling in love. In a mystery,
the world is "the case" or "the assignment" that the detective or
agent has to cope with.
In modern fantasy, the W of A is sometimes a truly distinct world,
as in Alice's Wonderland and Lookingglass Country, or Narnia, or
Oz. In other modern fantasies, and in most traditional myths and
fairy tales, the W of A has no name, but is that period occupying
most of the story, in which the hero is liable to meet giants, swan
maidens, dwarves with their beards caught in stumps, disguised gods,
and dragons of various species.
Science fiction is not that different, except that the author gives
the bizarre setting or events some quantity (often small) of scientific
plausibility.
I think SF has a rather short list of pet strangenesses that
characterize its various worlds of adventure:
Strange Characters:
Aliens (almost always extraterrestrial)
Mutants (human and non-human, but usuallu human)
Robots, androids, computers
Cyborgs (half-robots, so to speak)
Adepts (Witches of Karres, Jedi Knights,
Bene Gesserit, users of Null-A, etc.)
Strange animals & plants (largely obsolete)
Strange Settings:
Outer space
Other planets
Other times
Other histories (paratime)
Other dimensions (little used now, except to
relate fantasy worlds to our own)
Strange but earthly lands and seas (obsolete)
All of these are things that science has taken more or less trouble
to investigate. Paratime is perhaps the least exploited. Strange
but earthly places, people and organisms are so well-exploited,
there is little room left for fiction in them.
Earl Wajenberg
|