Episode: 2439
Title: HPR2439: Internal Logic of Stories
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2439/hpr2439.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 03:06:33

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This is HPR Episode 2439 entitled Internal Logic on Tourism.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and is about 19 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is Lost in Drunks talks about Tourism and Touric Consistency.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support Universal Access to All Knowledge by heading over to archive.org
forward slash donate.
Support Universal Access to All Knowledge by heading over to archive.org.
Hello, this is Lost in Drunks and you'll have to forgive the audio quality
I'm in the car right now but hopefully you'll be able to hear it no matter what.
Today I'd like to talk about internal logic and storytelling and the reason I think this
might have some appeal to a hacker type crowd is because lately there have been several
episodes I've contributed a little bit on HPR about role-playing games.
Now I'm a writer and I've also played role-playing games for a really long time.
I also like movies and audio drama and television and certainly reading.
And all of these things fiction-wise, all of these things have a particular storytelling
device involved called internal logic.
I mean I think we're all fairly familiar with the concept but in brief it's simply a
fairly arbitrary set of rules that apply only to this story or story world.
It might also only apply to a particular character within a world but these are nonetheless
hard and fast rules and the story has to reflect that as if they were laws or laws of physics
or something like that.
Within the context of a story, internal logic is something that matters.
It's something that the story must reflect and must respect.
Now the reason I want to talk about it is that when storytellers and I include role-playing
games in this because that's a form of collaborative storytelling, people go wrong a lot of times
with internal logic and that's where we get this sort of dissonance in the story.
It's when you pick up plot holes or things that just don't seem to make any sense and it
pulls you out of the story.
It's a problem and I think it's one that can be addressed.
The biggest issue with internal logic is not necessarily, like say we'll do an example.
In my science fiction series Star Drifter, I use a thing called Star Jump.
Now it's a very common conceit in space opera stories like mine.
It's not original to me, it's not original to probably any one person.
It's a very, very common device.
The idea is just that when they turn on the Star Jump engine, the ship goes into another
sort of pocket dimension where time and space aren't quite the same and can be controlled
through the power of the engine and therefore they can travel great distances in the real
universe while traveling much smaller distances in the pocket dimension, very, very common.
They pop out of this place and they reappear in another place, many light years away, very
common, very common.
But it's important because it is a space opera world, it's important to get the details
of this right and every single story that revolves around a concept like this, it's
applied a little differently.
So regarding Star Trek, they have the warp engine and there have been entire stories throughout
the Star Trek franchise revolving around the warp engine and the warp engine working
right, the warp engine going wrong, damaged to it, misalignment to it, or some kind of
new improvement to the warp technology that drives the plot forward.
And all of it, all of these things revolve around the internal logic of the Star Trek universe
where warp engines can exist.
Now I think, as I said, I think people go wrong, not necessarily in the application of
the tech.
So in my case, I can say that they turned down the Star Jump engine and popped they were
gone.
That's an application of the tech within the story and the internal logic of the story
supported because I have said that Star Jump works that way.
But if I start saying that Star Jump works some other way, I have got to explain why
I chose the first way, right, why I talked about it in a certain way the first time.
So you may say that that's the normal way it works, but this time there was a mistake,
there was a misjump, there was a mistake, and now there are problems and it doesn't
work the same way suddenly.
That's one way to explain it.
The other one is that there is technological improvement and now it works this other way.
What are the rules of this other way?
Now I have to establish that.
All of this is internal logic of the story and these are technical details.
This is actually a surprisingly large subject because if I start talking about a particular
character, the internal logic of the character, that really is another conversation entirely.
But we'll just stay focused on detail.
This is not plot, unless of course your plot revolves around Star Jump.
But this is a technical detail of the story.
And it is important simply because if you screw this up, people get pulled out of the story
and they don't believe it as much anymore.
Maybe not at all.
Suddenly it's like, ah, I screwed up.
They're not hearing your story anymore.
They're not playing the game anymore.
They're criticizing the game.
You don't want that.
That's not what you're after.
And you're telling your story, either you're writing it, you're playing it, whatever.
You don't want people doing anything but experience the story.
You want them enjoying the story.
You don't want them thinking about the mistakes you made.
You want your mistakes to be invisible.
Certainly you're going to make some, but you don't want them visible.
At least not on the first pass.
Not while they're actively engaged and maybe later on when they have a separate approach
to it.
They go back maybe to read the book again or they talk in detail about what happened
in the role-playing game session, whatever, then yeah, then they're going to find your
mistakes and they can pull them apart then.
But that won't take away their enjoyment, not that first time, right?
That won't touch that first time.
And that first time is what we're trying to keep preserved.
So you make your mistake in your internal logic, in your star jump engine.
You make a mistake there.
That's going to pull people out of it.
But you know what?
It's easy to get the technical details of something like this, in this case star jump,
star trek's case warp.
It's easy to get the technical details correct regarding the story you're telling, right?
So in star trek's case, if they have a story where they have damage to the warp engine
and they're trying to escape and the damage occurs and they have to drop out of warp, right?
That's a small detail.
But within the internal logic of star trek, if that happens, it can be a real big deal
because now you can have a warp core breach and the ship's gone, right?
So that's a big deal and it can bring up all sorts of drama.
All sorts of conflicted drama and tension can come up just from that small detail because
the internal logic of star trek supports that.
Now if it didn't, you would have a very different story, right?
Say the internal logic of star trek was any damage to a warp engine shuts it down
cold and it drops out of warp and you're stuck in the middle of nowhere, right?
That's a different sort of drama.
That's a different sort of story and you can write your story to support that.
But as I say, you can go wrong elsewhere and I don't think it mostly happens there
when you're telling that story.
It happens when you fail to consider the wider implications of these details in your entire
universe, right?
So in star trek's case, you have to stop and think and different writers have dealt
with this in different ways.
Some of them quite well, some of them not so much, but that's the nature of a really
sprawling franchise.
In my case, everything that happens is on me.
So if there's a mistake anywhere in this storyline in my Star Drifter universe, it's
on me.
But for something like star trek, where it's a massive thing, someone could deal with warp
technology in a really sort of backhanded sort of way.
They don't really think about it, they just sort of end.
And suddenly, this thing isn't making much sense.
And if you poke around the Star Trek franchise and the different materials that were produced,
the TV shows, the movies, the books, the comic books, all sorts of materials, there was
even some audio stuff that was done for Star Trek.
If you poke around there deeply enough, you'll find some real gaffs, you'll find some
real mistakes.
Warp is easy.
It's fairly easy because you can just sort of say it does this and it does that and it
doesn't do this.
And it doesn't do that.
And it's sort of wave your hand and it's good enough.
But there are other aspects of Star Trek where boy oh boy, it's really divisive.
People have handled these things well or not, depending on who you ask.
And they've caused an awful lot of conflict among fans, clingsons for one.
I don't even have to go into that.
If you're a Star Trek fan, you know exactly what I mean.
Over the years, certain things have been handled well and not.
But the biggest problem I think is in this sort of thing is failing to understand how the
implications of your details affect the wider universe.
So we'll go back to Warp, right?
Thinking about it in terms of Star Trek and what the Warp engine really does.
Why is there a quote-unquote Federation space?
Why is there a cling on space?
Why is there a Romulan space?
I can understand borders because when you come up against somebody, yeah, I can start seeing
political borders being thrown up.
But you cross into that border, yeah, you're in their space, right?
But when you think about something like a Warp engine, space is open to you and despite
how they, I mean, in a lot of ways, it doesn't make a lot of sense the way they've explored
Warp in the storylines, right?
Because they still kind of limit how far these engines can go.
It's a pretty artificial barrier.
How fast and how far these engines can take a ship.
And so in order to have drama, in order to still have some degree of realism regarding aliens
coming from a long way away, you still have to say that, oh, yeah, even a maximum warp,
or bait, or whatever, it's still going to take 80 years to get to the other side of
the galaxy.
And okay, fair enough, but you know what, that isn't the way these things work.
There would be exploration in all directions at all times.
Federation space would be expanding at an exponential rate because as one ship goes
out and they establish colonies, you'd have 10 ships go out.
And from each of those ships, 10 more and 10 more and 10 more.
You would be exploring the galaxy so quickly with that kind of technology because it isn't
just one person going out in one direction once.
It's not Voyager getting lost and then having to fly home.
It doesn't work that way in real life.
But within the internal logic of Star Trek, it does.
So you can stand and point at Star Trek and say, it's not realistic, but realistic is
a term that you have to understand.
Realistic doesn't mean real.
Real is real.
Realistic is something that can appear real.
Within the context of your story, it can seem real.
And that's where internal logic comes into play.
Because if you can keep that consistent, then everything is realistic.
So in terms of Star Trek, something that could do what they say this thing does, it still
makes sense within the internal logic of the show.
If you buy into Star Trek and you buy into warp engine technology, then all of this seems
to make sense, right?
Now again, some people have not necessarily adhered to the internal logic or have tried
to play with it or tried to change it with varying degrees of success.
But when it's done correctly, you can buy into a lot of stuff that in the real world
doesn't make any sense at all.
And I'm not even talking about fairy tale technology.
This magic warp engine, this magic star jump engine, these things that allow these fantastic
stories to take place, I'm not talking about that.
I'm just talking about the fact that they're applying these fake rules.
These totally made up rules and still making the story play out without breaking the illusion.
That is what internal logic is supposed to do for you.
Now again, as I say, you start talking about characters, you start talking about social
behavior in a nation or some sort of community.
It becomes a very complex topic, very rapidly, right?
Because these things are not always consistent.
People are not always consistent.
If you meet someone and they're kind of a stick in the mud, they're kind of the sort
of person that does the same thing all the time, if they do something that seems really
weird to you, you can say that that seems out of character for them.
Well, seems is the operative word here because this is reality, and I'm talking about the
real world, in the real world, there's no such thing as out of character, right?
If a person does it, then it is in character.
That is part of them.
Even if they were under extreme stress when it happened, even if they were ill, if they
were under some sort of duress, whatever, if they do it, then it is them.
That is the person.
There's no such thing as out of character.
Now, there is misbehavior, there is negative behavior, there is less than optimum behavior
in the real world, but if a person does it, that is the person.
Not so in story, not so in fiction, right?
In fiction, you can establish these rules and breaking them can seem really, really weird.
It can pull the reader, can pull the player, it can pull the viewer, whatever, whatever
the medium happens to be, it can pull your audience out.
So internal logic absolutely matters in storytelling.
It absolutely matters because if you don't respect it, you end up breaking your story.
You literally end up breaking your story, maybe not terribly, right?
Maybe it's just a momentary thing and you go on, well, that's not too bad, right?
That really isn't so bad, but if you can recognize it, why have it there at all?
The more seamless this thing is, the more everybody enjoys it.
And I think that's the ultimate goal.
So my opinion about this is that you need to look at internal logic and you need to
look at the wider picture of internal logic, not just how it plays out in your story,
the story you're telling right there, but how it would play out on a much larger scale.
If you take this one detail that you have to work out, you know, your start jump engine,
you've got how that works and you expand that out to your entire universe.
If this is true, what would somebody else do with this?
If this is true, if this tech actually existed, what would happen to it if a bad player
got a hold of it?
If a good player got a hold of it, if everybody got a hold of it, what would happen?
And I think your story ends up taking a different direction than you might have initially
considered.
I have a spaceship and I get to fly and I go exploring.
Well, what does exploring really mean when everybody could go exploring?
Think about it.
Now I live in the United States and I can go exploring in my car.
It's a Sunday.
It's nice.
I get in the car and I go.
Beautiful.
I'm going to go exploring.
What's that really mean?
I'm going to go look for things that are new to me, but not new because everybody has a car
and this entire area, the entire contiguous United States and Canada and Mexico and down
in the South America except for parts of the Amazon maybe have all been thoroughly explored.
Not by me, but by other people.
And that's because everybody has the means to do it now.
So if everybody has the means to do it and an otherwise endless galaxy or endless universe,
what does that look like?
How far do you have to go if you're going to explore?
How far do you have to go before you're somewhere where no one's ever been before?
And if they're sending you out, why doesn't everybody have this capability?
And if not everybody has this capability, why are they wasting this capability?
Just going out and looking at new stuff when there are planets that could be settled
right next door.
So you know, I'm not saying that that's a mistake or that it can't work.
What I'm saying is that you have to decide why it's that way.
How does it work?
And what does that mean for your entire story?
The story you're telling, but the whole picture.
At any rate, I think I made my point or I hope I did.
And if not, please feel free to put something in the comments or better yet, do your own
episode of Hacker Public Radio.
This is your community and there's always a need to hear your voice.
This has been Lost in Bronx.
Take care.
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