Don't Rock the Boat

Ancient Shores, Jack McDevitt

A bureaucrat abused Jack McDevitt when he was younger. Each of the books in which his characters interact with bureaucracies are case studies in the small-mindedness of people, which is amplified whenever they are embedded in a bureaucracy. No one is responsible for either failure or success. All that matters is that the waves are smoothed out so that the whole floating wreck keeps meandering along to the horizon.

McDevitt takes a terrific exception to the common cliched comedy of manners so often used to represent bureaucracy. The problem with making something a stock comic resort is that it ends up papering over and excusing the horrors that can be perpetrated in the service of bureaucracy. Sure, it can be funny (if not original), that someone gets shuttled from line to line at the DMV, university, hospital or bureaucracy de jour, finally ending up back at the initial window with the original indifferent and overworked office worker, but it's a story that masks the real dangers of bureaucracy. When no one is responsible, the only motivator for individuals from the top to bottom of an organization is what will cause them the least hassle. More to the point, individuals cannot be rewarded for productivity in such an environment because productivity is not a measurable entity in a vacuum of responsibility. Therefore the inverse quantity of caused hassle is the driving force for promotion, not productivity.

Bureaucracies combine the disdain of responsibility with another great flaw in the human psyche: the scantron subconscious. Our brains work on a multiple choice basis shoehorning everything into the predefined situational options, with no "fill in the blank" option provided. When you see a giant furry thing try to attack you in the middle of the night when you're out for a walk, your brain fits the existent evidence into either: a. a large dog, b. your asshole roommate in a gorilla suit or c. your imagination. Regardless of whether it is a full moon, or the thing runs away at the sight of your silver cross, a sane mind does not write in "d. a werewolf". Writing in one's own options is our best measure of both insanity and genius. A bureaucracy demands that the options be filled in with a rabid single mindedness. If your application to the DMV has some irregularity (like the fact that you don't already have a driver's license, but you can provide your Ugandan passport for proof of identity), it doesn't meet the easy options and the easiest way to keep from rocking the boat is just to casually drop your application overboard and into the shredder.

Now imagine a bureaucracy having to deal with something truly earth-moving, like the discovery of alien technology that will revolutionize everything about energy and manufacturing. That is essentially the question posed by McDevitt in Ancient Shores. A bureaucracy's response will be to shove that thing under the rug so fast that the rug gets rug burn. The horror is never caused by evil but by human mediocrity. The government doesn't try to destroy the most fantastic discovery in human history because of evil conspiracies or arcane power struggles, it does it because dealing with something so extraordinary is just a big hassle. The challenge to leaders is to break that attitude in bureaucracies, force accountability and vision.

Invasion of the Mediocre Bodysnatchers

Stargate Atlantis - Identity There always has to be that one episode where people switch bodies and hijinks ensue. Or more than one. I think this is about the third or fourth on Atlantis alone that had the premise.

The episode featured excellent characterization of the villain (Neeva) body-swapped into Keller. She was a layered and complicated character without resort to cliche. She was not tough but with a heart of gold, she was selfish and unprincipled. They provided her neither diabolical plans undertaken simply on principle nor hidden sympathetic reasons for her criminality. Most of all she was intelligent and self-sufficient. Her decisions held up to common sense scrutiny as consistent both with her character and with rationality.

Also, kudos for giving the villain a pair of loyal, capable, dumb and vicious sidekicks, instead of her being the sidekick. The inability of the sidekicks to wrap their minds around what was happening was a breath of fresh air. Sometimes some characters need to be stupid. Yet that doesn't necessarily make them incompetent. Both were clearly capable of strategy and effective violence. Intelligence is not the same thing as competence, and likewise it is possible to be an idiot whilst being absolutely competent at some things. Additionally, there was a genuine level of companionship between the villains. They were not going to just stab each other in the back, in fact, they risked everything just to come back for her.

Thankfully, there was no outbreak of Stockholm syndrome with either the band of thieves and Keller or the Atlantis team and Neeva. There was no arbitrarily developed loyalty on either side. A couple hours tramping through the forest does not make friends out of enemies. They do not develop a rapport with each other. Having one's life on the line makes one a manipulative bastard, not a lost kitten who latches onto the nearest nice group of people that don't immediately react with violence.

At the same time, it was disappointing that the solution to the problem was to just shoot the ancient terminal with Ronin's magic gun. There is an unfortunate laziness in storytelling that presents only two possible solutions to any problem: whack it or handwave it. Either somebody hits, blows up, shoots, throws into the heart of the sun or nukes the macguffin or somebody babbles a lot of nonsense while waving their hands and magically makes the macguffin work/break/stop mattering. Just because Indy shot the guy with the sword doesn't mean that it's clever in every story for somebody to solve a problem the same way. Equally, pretending to solve a problem with technobabble is just deus ex machina by thesaurus. It does not actually represent someone figuring something out. There's a tension here between reality and fiction. In reality, a genius programmer sitting down at the computer and hacking out a clever logical solution to the problem is feasible, but in a story it is very very difficult to transfer that logic into something that can be followed by the reader/watcher. It can certainly be done (Neal Stephenson excels in this type of writing).

To a degree, the problem is with the audience. Regardless of the intent of the writer, a sufficiently stupid audience will look blankly at him and will simply interpret any logical solution to hand waving magic. I.e. if the audience is not intelligent enough (or perhaps more accurately, experienced enough), a logical solution is indistinguishable from a deus ex machina solution. Still, this is the SciFi Channel, not the 700 club, so it wouldn't hurt to at least occasionally have a backbone of actual sensible logic to the handwaving.

There is a reason why lower tier science fiction is so enamored with the body-switch plot. Good stories, and more to the point at hand, good episodic television, are dynamic, not static. By the end of an episode of good television, things have changed, the plot had a point, we have moved from where we were and can never return there again. Bad stories (and exemplified by the paragon of bad episodic television, the sitcom) is fundamentally static. Oh sure there was sound and fury, but by the end of the episode everything is back where it started. Nothing ever changes. The core of the body-switch story is that the end of the story by definition is the restoration of the status quo ante. It epitomizes everything wrong with a bad story, and pops up all over lower tier sci-fi exactly because it's just shiny enough to be sci-fi and just dumb enough to fit in at the writer's meetings.