Yet Another Vacuum Story

If you are writing stories about near term space operations, there are some well known hazards that drive a lot of stories. It can be almost formulaic:

• Someone's in space. 
• Something goes wrong. 
• Survival situation ensues. 
• Someone bodges together something.
• Some, maybe not all, survive.

My friend Martin Shoemaker calls these "vacuum stories." And he laments the fact that the grand masters of science fiction have written all of them. I counter that you can probably recycle the basic plot and have a ripping good yarn by insinuating fresh characters into the story.

But Martin has a second complaint in these stories and it bears on that second step "Something goes wrong." Too often the thing that goes wrong is really lame:

• Someone does something stupid
• Someone evil throws a spanner in the works
• Something easily anticipated is overlooked.

I have recently complained that stories with smart characters risk having them do something stupid that the reader can see is stupid, but the story requires him/her to do it.

The premise here is that if you've got people going into space, they're going to be smart people. Ignoramuses don't go into space. They stay in North Dakota and plot to kidnapping schemes that go wrong.

Now, I have had smart characters do stupid things for the sake of the story, but I justified the stupidity and used the character's awareness that he was compelled to do something wrong to increase tension.

But in a vacuum story, astronauts aren't stupid and you ought not make them do something stupid just to create an inciting incident.

However, they can do something that should be OK, but cascades into something very wrong. Imagine a really complicated piece of equipment that has a little fan that's not used very often. In the times before when it's been used there's been no problem. Nobody's stupid. In fact the smartest engineers in the world have made this system. But the fan is inside an oxygen tank. Though the fan is insulated, this time it sparks and the tank explodes. The explosion takes out the equipment bay.

As we saw in Apollo 13 a trivial malfunction can easily escalate into a survival situation.

Here's a great way to show the reader how smart the characters are in your story. Really smart characters will plan for failure. They'll eliminate opportunities for trivial mistakes and have contingencies ready when things go wrong.

But there are limits for what can be anticipated and planned for. When an airliner crashes the investigators generally learn that no one thing brought the plane down, but a perfect storm of multiple malfunctions.

Devising these perfect storms of interlocking failures may tax the ingenuity of the writer, but it's a lot more original than having some crazed snake handling fundamentalist release a bunch of snakes on a spaceship.

Failure IS an Option

I've always been a believer in positive thinking. When I get started on a project, I hope everything will go well and I expect things to work out. Most people feel the same, and that's a problem.

A friend told me about how he went into business with a partner. They planned to bid on jobs, do the work, then get paid. This worked for a while, but then there was a problem. The problem was that they bid a job at a fixed rate, but the work turned out to be more than was expected.

They could respond to this problem by either reneging on the deal, or incurring additional expense to finish the work. They disagreed. As a result the partnership and the friendship ended.

The real problem is that they didn't expect a problem. They hadn't had a chance to think through the negative possibilities. Failure is always an option. If you think failure is not an option, you'll be caught flat-footed should failure occur.

Murphy's Law was named after an engineer named Ed Murphy. He noticed that when it was wired backwards it would be ruined, but was annoyed when he discovered someone had wired up 20 consecutive gauges backwards. He then had the idea that the strain gauge could be made so that it was physically impossible to wire them backwards.

Because Murphy recognized that Failure was an option, he could think through ways to make it harder to fail.

When you sign up for a Kickstarter project, you have to enumerate the risks that you foresee. Failure is not an option, it is many options. And you have to write them all down.

You can think positive, but if you do, you may overlook the fact that a supplier might raise prices, someone might get sick, you might underestimate the cost of shipping, or something else. When enumerating risks, you want to think defensively.

Had my friend considered the possibility that he'd disagree with his partner and planned for that disagreement up front, he could have avoided the partnership and kept a friend, or he could have agreed up front how they'd work it out. If they'd considered the possibility that the work could exceed estimates, they'd put in place contingencies to get paid more or to back out of the contract gracefully.

There is a difference between planning to fail and planning for failure. Sometimes success comes after overcoming one or more reversals. You should expect to succeed and you should expect to use one or more of the contingencies you've put in place for the parts that go wrong.