We've found out this really simple rule, and maybe you all already know it but it took us a long time to learn. If the words "and then" belong between your beats, then you're fucked. You've got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat that you've written down is either the word "therefore" or "but." You come up with an idea: "This happens, AND THEN this happens." No. It should be "This happens, AND THEREFORE this happens." -- Trey Parker
Like a bracelet, a story's end must circle back around to its beginning. What goes up must at some point come down. The debt accrued by the setup must be paid off, and ideally, with interest.
Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible has a story less like a bracelet and more like a rainbow, in that it ends rather far from where it started. Also like a rainbow, I'm not sure if it has an end. It's a good lesson in how not to write. It takes a great premise and buries it under a mountain of ANDs: this happened, then this happened, then
The Invincible sets up a whydunit (space crew dies in a mysterious way — why?) and a monster in the house (there's an unstoppable cloud of mechanical bugs on the alien planet) that erases people's brains. Literally, the bugs swarm your head and their magnetic fields erase all the data in your brain and you walk around like a drooling baby.
The final act promises a big showdown. Rohan (hero) searches the outskirts of planet Regis III for four men whose brains the monster erased a few days prior. Now we have every reason to think that these men are already dead or are at best alive and totally brainless.
First flaw: despite his friends being either dead or brainless, Rohan still pushes forward with his search. The reason? "We leave no man behind, even if they're a big sloppy drooling baby with no memories."
So the only way this can really work is if Rohan finds something unexpected. Was one of the men saved? Did they have some special immunity to the monster, or discover a weakenss?
This is the second flaw: none of that happens. One by one he tracks down each person and confirms their brains are erased. The unstoppable monster marches forward, unstopped. The whole story reads like this happened and then this happened and then this other thing happened and then THE END.
It's a good time to have an interlude about what Trey Parker
So off goes Rohan. And guess what: yep, they're definitely dead, and super dead, with their eyeballs missing and their bodies decomposing. I guess I'm supposed to be shook, but since the start of this book I haven't really been able to tell the Jacks from the Johns. Like, who is Benings again? Is that even a character? Because I completely forgot. Meanwhile I'm looking for a fast-forward button on my Kindle, because I really can't get through this chapter fast enough. Such a disappointing way to end an otherwise exciting book!
I credit Lem for at least hooking me with the concept. I call these Trojan Horse stories. The story is just a cover for the real payload, which is the Cool Idea. (Lem's Cool Idea is abiotic evolution: mechanical machines evolving over time. Thoes are the "flies".) For the record, I think this is a perfectly fine way to start a story. Everyone does it. I do it. But the parts should work together. The horse-story has to become your story, otherwise, you're his-tory.
Here's what I wanted to know: what made the new crew's fate different from the old one's? Lem had a lot of chances there, and he ended it on a pointless 30-page desert march. He also castrated the monster by giving Rohan a superpowered helmet (magneus ex-machina?) that totally nullifies its brain-erasing threat. Why not give everyone one of those helmets? Once you do that, the evil monster cloud becomes a paper tiger. Who cares.
With his magic helmet, and an unkillable monster (explained in the novel) where was the suspense? He had the food (energy tablets), oxygen (tank), water (planet has rivers), and now an invisibility cloak (the monster can't feel his brain waves.) So what's the threat? Maybe, like... slipping and falling?
Luckily his boots had a sturdy grip, so he did not slip.
Oh, nevermind.
How would Lem's The Invincible had ended if he had written the story differently? What if it was written once more, with feeling?
Chapter 19 (reanimated)
By the stern of the ship Rohan crouched on the rear step of the third jeep, dressed in a jump suit, with no helmet or protective goggles, only a small oxygen mask over his mouth. His hands were clasping his knees, fingers interwoven, because in this position it was easier to watch the twitching second hand of his watch...
Rohan patted his suit. He counted: four ampules in the breast pocket; Geiger counter, compass, microphotograms of the terrain on the thigh. Oxygen full.
He stepped out of the jeep, and looked down. There it was. He didn't think he'd find it, and he was hoping he wouldn't. But it was there, and it stretched, as far as he could tell, to the horizon.
Always so damn quiet on this planet, he thought.
He touched it. He had hoped it might still be wet, but not a chance. Bone dry. A day old. Minimum.
That mind-wrenching kind of quiet. The distracting kind of quiet. Like putting your brain in a blender, he thought. And that made him remember. He lifted his eyes away from the ground for just a second, just long enough to catch a glimpse of the black, flamelike spires in the distance. He ran his fingers through his hair — as if to be sure that the wires were still there — and then flipped on the magnetic permeability shield.
If you want me, you'll have to really kill me, he thought. None of this zombie shit. And if it found a way through the shield and erased his brain anyway? Fuck it. Maybe I deserve it then...
His radio buzzed. "Come in, Rohan. Come in. It's Horpach."
"I know it's you," said Rohan. "Listen, I just spotted a positive from the jeep. Not looking good."
"At least it's something, Liutenant," said Horpach, "God help our boys. What are we talking exactly?"
"I'll radio you over a microphotogram. But later."
"Not the time for this. Send it now."
Rohan felt his salivary glands come online. "There's no point, Captain," he said.
"What's gotten into you, Rohan? We had a plan. Without proof..."
Rohan finished his sentence for him: without proof, we're not going home. "Fine," he said, "But you show this to absolutely nobody."
"It's not your call, Lieutenant."
Rohan inched closer to the white stone and, containing his revulsion, snapped a microphotogram of it. He fed the slip into the scanner. SIGNAL LOW blinked in red letters.
"I'm too far," said Rohan. He climbed up to a nearby rock and waved his arms around in the air until he saw the scanner blink: SENT. Followed by: RECEIVED BY: THE INVINCIBLE.
He waited, but the captain didn't say anything.
"Over?" asked Rohan.
"You can proceed, Rohan," said the captain, finally, "and I imagine — or at least I hope — that we're thinking the same thing."
"That he didn't suffer," said Rohan, putting the camera back in his pocket.
I hope, too.
Opening a flap on his jumpsuit, he pulled out an energy tablet and popped it into his mouth. Energy second, vomit suppression first. He took a last look at boulder, the one he had just taken the microphotograms of.
On the boulder were at least a dozen bloody faceprints were making a sinuous line along its flat surface. Someone — evidently human — had smashed their own face into it over and over and over. The prints got increasingly bloodier until the last one, which was punctuated, almost literally, with an ellipsis of teeth at the base of the rock, as if to say "to be continued..."
It's like he's trying to destroy itself. Erm, not he. It.
Was any of this intentional? Did the concept of intentionality even apply when your entire brain's been rm -rf'ed by the world's biggest microwave oven?
It's one or the other, said Rohan, clutching his magnetic impermeability shield, dead or alive. None of this in-between shit. I'm saying it now.
With that, he started walking over the boulders, following the dried blood on the boulders he had spotted from the jeep.
TO BE CONTINUED