The difficulties thriller writers have been having, isolating their protagonists from rescue in the age of cell phones, mirrors a problem faced by the writers of the original STAR TREK. How do you get Kirk and Spock in trouble when they can always just whip out a communicator and get beamed out of whatever sticky spot theyre in? Well, you can have the natives take away their communicators. Or you can gin up some atmospheric disturbance or suppression field that keeps signals from getting through. Or you can have them under such close surveillance that they cant do anything without blowing their cover. But it has to be one of those three things, most of the time. In three seasons of STAR TREK, this became horrendously repetitive. Guess what. Fifty years later, thats now a plot problem all writers of contemporary thrillers are having. Everybodys become a STAR TREK writer, now.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 13:28:41 +0000
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