by Pete Wood
Pete Wood returns to Asimov’s for the fifteenth time in our November/December issue with the story “Nothing I Like to Do Pays Well”! Here he discusses how the behavior of characters in The Count of Monte Cristo as well as those from some classic SF tales has inspired him to forge a unique path in his own writing
The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) by Alexander Dumas is not a quick read. It’s over 1300 pages. The audiobook is 54 hours. I read it a few months ago because three very different friends—a Baptist minister, a schoolteacher, and a criminal defense lawyer- had all read it in the past year and strongly recommended I check it out.
The book is consistently engaging and somehow does not feel padded. Not an easy accomplishment for an author. I started to think about how Dumos pulled it off.
It’s got a great premise. A young and idealistic French sailor is railroaded and imprisoned for years. He escapes and seeks revenge on the four men who stole his life and his girl. It’s a long circuitous ride with many side stories and characters. But not a word is wasted, and Dumas ties it all up nice and neat.
But how?
Let me get to that in my own circuitous way.
I think that many good stories are sunk by padding and inconsistent characters. When a story reaches a logical stopping point and the character makes a bad decision just to keep the story going, the author is just wasting our time. Even worse is when some plot point falls out of the sky to give the characters one more thing to worry about. Sort of like an Deus ex machina except it doesn’t resolve a conflict, it creates one. Like in Aliens and Alien 3 when the alien queen somehow gets on board the ship and kills two characters we’ve been rooting for the entire movie, just so we can have a sequel.
My story, Nothing I Like to Do Pays Well, presents some science fiction tropes that may seem familiar. Plot crossroads lifted from movies and fiction. I tried to think what would happen if my character thought logically and not just in a way to drag out the plot. It’s something I also did in The Apocalypse and the Lake Mattamuskeet Gnat (Asimov’s September/October 2021) where I explored what might happen after the Apocalypse if everybody didn’t act like a psychotic jackass. The Anti-Mad Max.
Who Goes There? by John Campbell (1938) is a tight little short story about an Antarctic base that is overtaken by a shapeshifting alien. John Carpenter 1982 take dispenses with any common sense. The scientists in the short story respond logically to the threat and come up with a solution. The scientists in the movie are great somewhat fleshed out folks who keep doing really stupid crap like gun down the two Norwegians who are trying to kill the Thing (disguised as a dog) and put the dog with their other animals. Then at a crucial plot crossroads, lifted from the short story, the scientists come up with a foolproof plan to root out the Thing, but abandon it for reasons unexplained. In the short story, they defeated the alien. I can only surmise that the trick that unmasked the aliens in the story fails so Carpenter could add another forty five minutes of film.
Same with the besieged humans in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The movies and Jack Finney’s 1955 novella, The Body Snatchers, start out with the humans getting cold cocked by the aliens until they figure out what is going on. Then they come up with a plan. In the movies, at that plot crossroads, they learn nothing and keep getting hammered by the invaders.
I know what you’re thinking. People make bad decisions all the time. True, but good story tellers give them a reason. The hero in Monte Cristo makes a number of poor decisions at the start of the book that contribute to his imprisonment. He’s a naive youth and trusts people a little too much. And this leads to the growth and perhaps regression as a character later in the book. By the time the naive sailor becomes the rich and powerful Count, he’s seasoned and cynical. He gets his revenge, but at what cost? It’s the central point of the book.
Characters who exist only to keep the story alive through bad decisions learn nothing. I can’t say there is any growth of any character in John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Don’t get me wrong a story doesn’t need fleshed out characters if it doesn’t wear out its welcome. Plenty of great science fiction stories lack anyone who we really get to know—like Who Goes There?—but those stories are short for a reason. They wouldn’t survive as novels without an infusion of depth.
Then there are characters who have no control over their own fates. The imprisoned sailor in The Count of Monte Cristo has no agency over his life for the first third of the book. Yet he grows as a person. The improbable series of events that end with the sailor’s imprisonment are made all that more believable because the first part of the book takes place in the chaos of Napoleon’s exile, subsequent return to power, and second exile.
Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale has zero control over her horrific circumstances, but she reacts and learns and grows. It helps that the political events seem all too plausible. Not so much with Atwood’s flawed MaddAdam Trilogy. I can buy the end of the world from a pandemic, but the threats from the bad guys after the population is decimated just seemed way too implausible. The good guys don’t really try to stop them and the bad guys are just interchangeable goons who got away with a lot because the government shielded them. Their continued survival when they are dumb as dirt ultimately made me stop reading.
The Count of Monte Cristo didn’t seem padded in contrast because its bad guys weren’t all bad. Sure, what they did to the protagonist was unforgivable, but they had depth and nuance, and I got sucked into their stories. I found myself wondering if the hero had gone too far and maybe slipped into villainy.
Padded books don’t prompt such questions because the bad guys have all the nuance and depth of the monsters in the video game Space Invaders.
The novella The Body Snatchers works, unlike the movies, because the bad guys are actually somewhat reasonable. In the movies they are just unrelentingly bad. The aliens in the novella act with logic and self-preservation. The aliens in the novella realize their plan needs some adjusting after the humans discover what is happening. The aliens stop the invasion and reconsider their options.
The bottom line is that a writer should stop work on a story or novel when they have nothing else to say.
Next time a book becomes a little bit frustrating, ask yourself what would you do in that situation? Would you try to keep the conflict going or would you get out of Dodge? If you find yourself thinking consistently that you would act differently you might want to pick up another book.
Like The Count of Monte Cristo.
