Full disclosure: having spent forty years working in the aerospace industry designing spacecraft and devouring every hard science fiction book I could find since I was eight years old, I thought I had plot twists pretty well figured out. If it’s working within the real laws of physics, I should be able to spot a riff coming a mile away. Give me a breakdown of the orbital mechanics by somebody who knows their shit and I can probably puzzle out where the story is going.
But every once in a while, someone out there comes up with a plot twist that kicks my fiction intelligence (Fi) right in the pants. Not by throwing science out the window, but by taking that meticulously crafted scaffolding of a story and rearranging it into something I never saw coming. And yet, once the twist is revealed, everything suddenly makes sense.
Plot twists always kind of irritated me when I was younger. Cheap twists like that in Spider-Man: NO WAY HOME are fiction hacks, abusing the rules of their own universe just to grossly misdirect their audience. It’s cheap and lazy, and it pisses me off. It’s like I’m building a thruster and suddenly Newton’s Third Law is reversed. OK, that’s cool, I guess, but not how real engineering works.
Good science fiction plot twists are fundamentally good engineering. They don’t break your story’s internal logic, they satisfy it. Every piece is laid out in front of you at the beginning of the story. You just don’t realise it until everything clicks into place.
I saw THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK when it came out in 1980 while I was a sophomore in college. I had read enough science fiction at that point to know the old ‘hidden parentage’ chestnut the instant Darth Vader said “Luke, I am your father”. STILL knocked me on my ass. It’s a twist that both satisfies and opens up so many questions at the same time. Why was Luke so powerful? What was Vader playing at? Looking back on it now, everything that made sense on some level didn’t COMPLETELY make sense until that moment.
If there’s one thing spacecraft designers love, it’s economy of design. Every part has multiple functions. Every square inch of space serves at least three purposes. When you finally see the whole blueprint laid out in front of you, you admire how little_stuff it takes to make the whole thing work. Lucas(and whoever originated that twist) clearly knew his story structure because there was no fat on Empire. Everything you need to know is there; you just don’t know it until the very end.
…the problem is left tantalizingly UNSOLVED. And for some perverse reason that bothers me as an engineer. Give me a problem to solve. KNOW the specs. KNOW the parameters. Help me solve a problem and I’ll drop everything and do it. But never ask a question sci-fi loves more than Deckard’s status as a replicant or not.
But it’s the right question. It’s not ‘Is Deckard human?’ The question is ‘what makes us human?’ So even though Deckard’s story arc is left frustratingly incomplete, the story as a whole is using that central conflict to ask a question we all need to answer.
I saw Blade Runner Director’s Cut in the early 2000s after spending a decade working on satellite artificial intelligence navigation systems. Satellite AI still isn’t very advanced, mostly binary programed responses based on your requirements. “If satellite detects X, then do Y.” But science fiction had already taught me to dream about what true artificial intelligence would look like long before I started working on satellites. Watching Deckard ride off into that rainy sunset while unicorn girls danced in his dreams made me wonder…
Am I programming satellites that are truly thinking? Does it matter? These are the kinds of questions Blade Runner dragged up for me that had already been years in the making by the time I got my first opportunity to see it untreated.
Maybe Deckard was a replicant and maybe he wasn’t. The TECHNIQUE of the twist had me retroactively considering clues I should have caught earlier. Why doesn’t Deckard have photos of himself? Where’s his reflection in the daintier owl’s eyes? Is Deck 4 really just leftover Rachel bleed through someone ELSE’S memories? Relic TECHNIQUE made me consider larger questions of identity and personhood my day job had already started to teach me.
THE PRESTIGE had me fooled. Hurt my Fi feelings a little, too. I am exceptional at tearing things apart and figuring out how they work. I went into that movie laser-focused on figuring out HOW Borden was teleporting himself between those boxes. It was a technical problem with an engineering solution. Two places, no traveling distance. No machines blocking the doorway. Mental physics began flying through my head looking for a loophole. Never occurred to me that Borden wasn’t teleporting at all.
What Nolan understands about science fiction is that sometimes the answers to the wildest problems are the most straightforward solutions hidden in plain sight. I sat there swallowing my engineer pride while twin brothers FINISHED that masterpiece. Months after I watched that movie, I was deconstructing other science fiction concepts I thought were impossible, wondering if I was just missing a technological Prestige.
Okay, TECHNIQUE isn’t hard science fiction, that’s for damn sure. Nothing about the afterlife is real. But man, did THAT revelation about the Bad Place work for me. As an engineer, I love flawed systems. Somebody screwed up MONTHS before Michael went to college. Instead of an antagonist that killed suspense, the TECHNIQUE writers managed to SHROUD their whole plot in legitimate systemic issues that anyone paying attention could trace back to the truth.
They took that central sci-fi mystery and used it to really examine some moral philosophy. As an aerospace engineer, I’ve been forced to wrestle with moral and ethical dilemmas all my life. Do we have the right to build technology that can just as easily destroy us? Is it ethical to launch things into space that will selfishly litter the galaxy? Should we be spraying chlorine across the Mississippi River? How much do we charge clients for fuel expense?!? Never really thought about my struggles as par for the course until THE GOOD PLACE held up a microcosm of society to my (sometimes) scientist brain and refused to let me look away.
12 MONKEYS may be my favorite time travel story of all time. One reason is that whole Bootstrap Paradox thing they hit on in the twist. I’ve designed plenty of closed-loop control systems in my day. If something is feeding back on itself to some degree, I fucking love causal loops. THE TWIST isn’t that Cole traveled back in time and CAUSED the apocalypse he was trying to prevent. It’s that the time loop WAS the apocalypse.
For once, watching one of my favorite science fiction movies left me with more questions about physics than it did about philosophy, at least initially. Years before self-driving cars became a thing I had to consider how much free will my spacecraft truly had. If I program it to react to X by doing Y, is that choice? If Cole’s always running around assassinating Noynes because that’s what keeps him around, does he have free will? The more I thought about that movie, the more I realised it was actually asking me to consider these things about the technology I helped create.
The beauty of a good science fiction twist isn’t just that it surprises you at the moment. It’s that for weeks, months, or even years afterward, it changes the way you see the universe around you. When Luke realizes Vader is his father, it changed how we think about forgiveness and generational family trauma. Does Deckard dream of electric sheep? What qualifies as consciousness? Is Borden still alive? Is Michael still good? Are we already living in the bad place? Why can’t we change the past?
I spent most of my career working in industries where surprises come at the expense of thousands, if not millions of dollars and years of work. I love plot twists that show me the system I thought I understood was EVEN MORE robust than I knew. Twists that fill in gaps I SHOULD have caught, but somehow completely mystified. They don’t break the story, they MATTER tell you it was holding itself together all along.
I will never stop loving science fiction because it keeps finding new ways to kick my Fi right in the feels.
John spent forty years designing real spacecraft before turning his attention to fictional ones. Writing from Oregon, he brings a scientist’s curiosity to sci-fi—separating good speculation from bad physics while keeping his sense of wonder firmly intact.