Five SFF Stories Driven by Plot-Facilitating Ignorance

[james_davis_nicoll]

Knowledge is power, but cluelessness is a great way to kick off a story...

Five SFF Stories Driven by Plot-Facilitating Ignorance

Comments

[petrea_mitchell]

Attack on Titan, where what the viewpoint character doesn't know at the start of the story about himself, his world, and the genre he's inhabiting could fill volumes. (checks listing) About 34 of them.

Although you could argue in this case that his ignorance is for the best. Note that I said "viewpoint character" and not "protagonist"...

[sturgeonslawyer]

A great many novels -- SFF and other -- begin when an innocent protagonist wanders out into the great wide world of whose dangers and pitfalls s/he recks little. This is the basic plot of The Hobbit and much of Stranger in a Strange Land -- and, come to think of it, most of Heinlein's juveniles.

[davidgoldfarb]

In text adventure games, it's become a cliché to start with an amnesic protagonist, where the player-character's ignorance is a mirror of the player's own. Andrew Plotkin's Spider and Web makes a brilliant use of the tension between the player's ignorance and the player-character's knowledge — to say more would be a spoiler. If you haven't played it, and you don't hate text adventure games, I'd say go play it right now. (It's playable online, for example here.)

[(Anonymous)]

The Harry Potter series is a version of this theme. Harry starts off completely ignorant of all things wizardly, and Dumbledore seems to make sure Harry doesn't learn too much, too fast (for Dumbles' plans) as the series goes on. In one book the keep-information-from-Harry plan goes into high gear, with Dumbledore refusing to talk to Harry at all about anything, because he believes that Voldemort can read Harry's mind. Leaving Harry ignorant of the fact that Harry and Voldy share a mental connection leads to Harry falling for Voldy's trick of sending a vision to Harry and luring him into a trap.

-Awesome Aud

[james_davis_nicoll]

Tor dot com article 544, 2025 article 13

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