Suvudu Universe

If you've read 1984 why did you care about the story? And Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World and Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? Really, what was it about these most disturbed you?

For a lot of these stories you might say it was the ideas about societies, about governments, about the individual in the face of the vast and overpowering mass forces insisting on the protagonists's surrender to a stifling conformity. And you would be right. However, besides the sort of big picture, intellectual aspects to these stories there is something else going on as well; for any story to be really engaging, there is key element that probably needs to be in place for any story to work, and that is a strong emotional connection to at least one of the characters, probably the protagonist. The emotional connection to a character has to be strong for the reader even though the reader is also being transported to a strange and distant world, so that the reader has a part of the story they can allow to get deep into their consciousness.

This way even though the reader is being take to a place they've never been and may not really be able to understand, they still feel like they are in that world in an intense way. I as the reader may not be able to comprehend the way the technology in a science fiction story works, or how the society being presented became the way that it did. But seeing a universal human story is something I can comprehend whatever the setting it is portrayed in. It's been shown that reading books and empathizing with the characters not only is an artistic experience, but one that actually helps us form empathy for others more in real life (See story from The Guardian). This suggests that there's something quite profound about the ways in which books can make us empathize characters. Something deep going on.

In a sense the genius of Star Wars (I'm talking about the old ones, Episode IV - VI) is the way in which the films presented really archetypal ideas in a setting 'a long time ago in a galaxy far far away'. Luke Skywalker looks out on two sunsets that are a metaphor for having to choose between two paths in life, Han Solo has troubles with adversaries that could almost exist in a story by Mark Twain, Luke and Leia are siblings and don't even know it, Luke learns from an older and wiser man a new way to be, and Luke has the ultimate Oedipal confrontation with the father he never knew. The way in which these universal themes were seamlessly embedded into a world of spaceships and aliens and laser guns and laser swords and telepathy are a big part of why the films became so iconic.

Or take the emotional connection readers can find to Winston Smith in 1984. I like to talk about this example of an emotional connection to a dystopian protagonist because I think it's not talked about enough in the many conversations this seminal book has created. (Spoiler alerts but stop this and go read the damn thing if you haven't) What we see so much in the book is not just Winston Smith, the defenseless victim of a monstrous government; we also get to know Winston Smith, the vulnerable man with hopes and dreams. Winston's vulnerability is on display several times, whether it's his inability to have a private moment, to make his own decisions about when to awake, about what to read, or who to have a relationship with. We see Winston is terrified of rats, but that his girlfriend is brave in the face of them, underscoring the vulnerability of his phobia by comparison. We see Winston the man who is tricked by O'Brien, Winston who can't even try to escape from the soldiers who come after him or resist when they savagely beat him in prison. We hear about Winston the oft-suffering child who just wanted the simple pleasure of playing a game to forget about his famine for a while.  And finally Winston who will give up anything and give in to Big Brother when pressed against his deepest fears. By the end of the story how can you not feel deeply connected to Winston, and also more depressed than you've been in years?

Vulnerability or impotence or social disadvantage or some sort of outsider status is one of the things I notice in a lot of these stories. Some form of weakness or downcast position, most especially in the way the protagonist views their self. Winston Smith, Guy Montag and Bernard Marx are all weak men in certain ways, or at least weak in comparison to the forces much larger than themselves, which their questioning minds inevitably bring them into a confrontation with. In a sense they show that a weak character is an interesting one, or at least a partially weak character, a character who has at least some serious disadvantages they work against. When a character is all strength and ability and success and triumph it gets boring pretty fast.

In my own writing this is what I was tending towards on some level; it just made sense to have my protagonist have some serious lack of control over a lot of his life. I wanted him to be partly a rational thinker, but partly a person often distracted by his intuitive emotional reactions to things, whose rationality is not always perfect and who faces a situation where the 'rational' answer isn't so obvious.

What are some of your emotional connections to dystopian or Sci Fi or other fictional characters? These ones and/or those in other works? I know there are many examples of this.