20/10/2015 - Tension and Predictability

So I want to talk about tension and predictability using the Chronicles Of St Mary’s series as a set of examples.

For those that haven’t read it, Chronicles is a series of time travel novels. There are historians who go back in time and witness historical events. There are fun characters and cartoonish antagonists and a series of really strange sex scenes which make me think that either the author is kinky in a way I’ve never encountered before or that she’s only ever heard about sex from her friends describing it to her.

But anyway. It’s a good series. Sort of.

Book 1 is genuinely good.

Book 2 gets good a third of the way through. It’s absolutely bananas before that.

Book 3 is really bad for reasons I talked about on my Soundcloud

Book 4 brought things back somewhat.

Book 5 really wasn’t very good

Book 6 was legitimately terrible and killed my interest in any further books.

There are two problems that hound this series from about half way through the first book right up until book six.

The first problem is this:

Jodi Taylor, the author, is incapable of having some historians go back to the past, have them witness a historical event and then have them come home. Something always goes wrong. This usually means they are frantically scrambling around to get home before a volcano explodes or they get trampled to death by mammoths or something.

Now: Drama comes from tension. If the book was about historians going back in time, seeing some stuff and coming home with no sense of danger, that would be dull. It would lack any tension. It would lack any drama. The thing is, when the drama always comes from the same source, it gets really predictable. I’d find myself quite enjoying an extended historical section and wondering if maybe, just this once, Ms Taylor would break the pattern of having something contrived go wrong but no. Of course not.

I understand that there needs to be tension but this can come from any number of sources: It could be inherent in the historical scene, it could emerge from conflict between the characters or they could encounter an unforeseen issue.

The second problem I have with this series is directly caused by the first problem: The need for something to always go wrong causes the characters to act in some really stupid ways.

In one chapter, the historians are being chased by guards. They’ll be imprisoned or executed if caught. One of the characters needs to use the toilet. Instead of going: “I’ll wait” or “I’d rather wet myself than get my entire team imprisoned or killed” the character gets the team to wait whilst they nip behind a bush.

Of course, the team gets caught, because the entire function of the character needing the toilet was to get the rest of the team captured for the sake of drama.

There’s this fundamental conflict in the St Mary’s series. On the one hand, the characters are smart and capable. They’re unprofessional but always get the job done. On the other hand, they constantly make idiotic decisions (many of which are out of character. Or at least, in books 1-3 they’re out of character. By book 4 they’re more the norm than anything else) for no reason other than to create drama.

I just wish a little bit more time had been spent on scenes like the one described above. If you’re going to have the team get captured, at least come up with a faintly plausible way to have it happen.