Troperville
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"When you live on a planet the size of a town
You can't get your kicks by getting around"
—Richard Hell and the Voidoids, "The Kid With the Replaceable Head"
[Ransom] became vividly conscious that his knowledge of Malacandra was minute, local, parochial. It was as if a sorn had journeyed forty million miles to the Earth and spent his stay there between Worthing and Brighton.
Most Space Opera stories are lifted from other genres, then transposed into outer space. And the most obvious way to do it is to make everything take place on a planet. Not just any planet, but Planetville, the planet that serves the same function in space that towns and countries do in Earth-based stories.
If a Wild West story is about outlaws going from town to town, the Wagon Train To The Stars will be about outlaws going from planet to planet. If the Nazis conquer a dozen small countries, the space Nazis will conquer a dozen planets. If a plague broke out in a Third World country, the alien plague will fill an entire planet.
By extension, if a planet represents a country, an alien race represents an ethnic group, and an empire that spans Earth becomes a multi-planet empire.
Unfortunately, because Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale, stories about Planetville make no sense. Nobody seems to realize how BIG a planet is — everything in Planetville takes the same amount of time as stories set in towns or countries. In the updated Wild West story, the outlaws are "exiled from the planet" just like they'd be exiled from Dodgeville, and the outlaws have to leave...instead of challenging the authorities to find them when they have an entire planet to hide in. When the space Nazis invade, they seem to need the same number of soldiers as the Earth Nazis needed to invade Europe. And they can make a planet surrender by capturing its capital. Back on Earth, capturing New York or Washington D.C. won't give you the whole planet (or even the whole U.S.), but on Planetville, one city is all you need.
This would work if technology was really advanced — so much so that crossing a planet took as much time as crossing an Earth country does today. But that almost never happens.
A side effect of this is that the characters never realize that things can happen in parts of planets. You will never see aliens trying to capture a planet's equator, or its polar caps — it's the whole planet or bust.
Planetville instantly explains these Speculative Fiction Tropes:
This trope is sometimes extended further still, with each star system apparently only having a single planet in it... every body in the system aside from Planetville itself is merely decoration if it is considered at all.
Examples:
- Star Trek is a constant offender here, where everybody on a planet is the same and nothing happens on a smaller scale, ever. When a low-tech planet isn't united, Starfleet considers it in civil war. Earth in 2000 BC was presumably in civil war, and (except for some arguable periods of peace) continued to be at least into the nineteenth century. Possibly the only exception is the depiction of Bajor in Star Trek Deep Space Nine as its proximity to the show's main setting meant that the writers were able to focus on the planet in greater depth than any other planet depicted in Star Trek's history before or since.
- Particularly conspicuous in The Next Generation episode "Reunification", in which the Romulans planned to seize control of the entire planet Vulcan with just a few thousand ground troops.
- The Star Wars films are just as bad. Luke is supposed to find Yoda by being told he's on a certain planet, which turns out to be good directions, not like saying "you can find Bob — he's somewhere on Mars." (Yoda even turns out to live in sight of where Luke's ship crashes.) And several times, we see what looks like a single Earth battle deciding the fate of a whole planet.
- To be fair, it's somewhat hinted that Yoda guided him there. Note how he doesn't seem to have any navigational trouble the second time he makes the trip.
- Lampshade is hung in the expanded universe, as Luke practically says he thinks that's the case.
- Also, once he'd been there, the navicomputer would store the coordinates, which is what he tells Artoo to coordinate to in Return of the Jedi.
- Justified on Hoth, Endor, etc., those planets had one area inhabited by the P Cs, and the rest uninhabited/other Ewok tribes. Who really gives a crad about those areas?
- To say nothing of the fact that Ben didn't say "the planet Dagobah", but "the Dagobah system".
- This happens in the prequels as well. Where's General Greivous? The Utapau system. These directions are so good, they get near instant results.
- Obi Wan only had trouble finding the Kaminoans because their planet was erased from the archive memory. Aside from the fact that this was probably the easiest mystery to figure out (der Obi Wan, if you can't find it, and you know it exists, what else could've happened to it?), he seems to have very little trouble finding the small cloning facility.
- Used literally for Coruscant. "The whole planet is one big city." (a very flawed concept to some people)
- Knights Of The Old Republic features this. In order to find the Star Maps, all the group need to learn is what planet it's on. The sequel subverts this, you land on Telos which is a planet recovering from war. The main first part you land on is forest and tropical, and then you fly to the polar ice caps.
- Justified in Halo. The Covenant have battles in space above the planet, and usually seem to land on one city/country, ignoring the rest of the planet. However, the only reason the ground assault exists is to recover Forerunner artifacts, which are only on whatever part of the planet they land on. Once finished, they fly back into space and glass the entire planet, assuming they won the space battle. Which they almost always do, given how much more advanced they are compared to humanity. In the third installment, a character specifically noted that Truth could've landed his forces anywhere, but specifically chose the ruins of New Mombasa, Africa.
- This trope is throroughly averted when on the titular Halo rings. They're about the size of Earth, and they have a very diverse ecosystem.
- A rare exception: Dune is set on a real planet, not Planetville. The fight for control of Arrakis feels as big as a fight for control of Earth, and the multi-planet empire feels as big as a multi-planet empire should.
- The planet Arrakis is a justified example of its trope that later evolves into a subversion: the entire planet is a desert planet, but this is an environmental change specifically caused by the sandworms. Later, Muad'Dib institutes a program of environmental change, and there is specific mention of the differences between the desert areas of the planet, the ice caps, and the more verdant regions.
- Both averted and played straight in the tabletop wargame Warhammer 40000, where the background fiction suggests that capturing a planet can involve tens of millions of soldiers and require weeks or months in order to wrest control of strategic locations, and afterwards the occupation forces might have to wage a low-intensity campaign for years in order to root out the remaining resistance... but in gameplay terms, world- or system-spanning campaigns may be decided by small-scale battles held by players around the world.
- Played straight with the Space Marines, as less than a thousand of them can crush entire rebellions and purge whole worlds. Than again, most citizens think of Space Marines as literally angels, believing them to be divine agents of the God-Emperor. One imagines that on most worlds, having a few hundred Space Marines wipe out a few armies might be enough to convince the rest to give up, or stir the civilians to hunt down the traitors to spare themselves.
- Of course, the Space Marines are extremely powerful SuperSoldiers. Having even a few hundred of them attack you is a problem because, according to Warhammer fluff, every one of them is a superhuman commando who's already demonstrated "legendary war hero" levels of skill and courage. Oh, and their personal weapons can fry tanks. It might be nearly impossible to fight a war effectively with a few hundred troops like that running around and blasting things.
- Also justified in some locations in the fluff, such as Holy Terra, which is indeed a planet-wide city.
- The animated series Bravestarr by Filmation is a major offender in this regard. It features an entire futuristic western-styled planet with exactly one -1!- village-sized settling by the name of Fort Kerium. Especially mind-blogging considering that the planet is said to be rich with the rare and valuable element Kerium. However, considering that one episode had the local star stolen and buried in the desert, that might be the least of the show's logical problems. Yes, that's "star" as in "celestial body".
- Freelancer is a major offender too: every single planet is a Planetville. Without exception. Pittsburgh, for example, appears to be an entire planet with just one little mining site. And on top of that, planets usually offer the same services as a "tiny little" battleship. This is rather justified, though, because due to The Law Of Conservation Of Detail, Freelancer has hundreds of planets and space stations within its own world.
- Like most sci-fi tropes related to planets, The Five Star Stories largely averts this one, as most planets have several different countries with different customs & styles of architecture & national dress. Even the series' lone One World Order planet is made up of a handful of different cultures ruled by a single God-King. This takes a while to become evident, though, as we usually only get to see a bit of a planet at a time, usually where the main characters happen to be. Also, most planets seem to have a very low population density, with huge tracts of apparently uninhabited desert of forest between population centres & it seems most countries only have one or two major cities.
- The main setting for Loonatics Unleashed is Acmetropolis, a city that's literally the size of a planet.
- Lucifer: The birth of a new "creation"—explictly described as a new "multiverse"—seems to consist of approximately one region the size of Europe being made.
- Murray Leinster several times used this trope, justified strongly by the worlds in question being new, young colonies with only one settlement established, or exotic worlds with very little human-habitable land.
- Generally avoided in Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War books. Planets generally have climates that vary by latitude, seasons, and some ethnic/cultural diversity in their populations. While a single star system frequently has a system-wide government, various lower levels of government seem to exist. One-Hat planets tend to have been originally colonized by racists or religious extremists.
- Justified in Firefly, as all the planets there are colonies of varying sizes, usually initially settled by a cohesive group of people in just one area.
- Averted in Sector General, where a medical team can usually develop a solution to the environmental problems or plagues on a planet, but only make a good start at implementing it. If a world government is present they can get more done after a prolonged diplomatic and bureaucratic hassle. The lone exception was a world with a population of ten thousand and falling. It's further stated that invading a planet is a complete logistical impossibility. Unfortunately, scouring one is not.
- Justified in Stargate SG 1 and Stargate Atlantis. Why would anyone have any reason to move to an area not within walking distance of the stargate?
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