Characters Through the Ages (Well, through 70 Years)

What is the M.I.C.E. Quotient?

Milieu- Story is centered on the setting.
Idea- Story is centered on an idea or a question. The story explores a What if scenario.
Character- Story is centered on a character and their growth over the course of the story.
Event- Story is centered on an event that disrupted the status quo in the lives of the characters.
For more information, you can listen to the Writing Excuses Podcast https://writingexcuses.com/2011/08/07/writing-excuses-6-10-scott-cards-m-i-c-e-quotient/
or
Read more here http://www.beatsheetcalculator.com/beginning.php

Even today many Science Fiction Novels are Idea-based stories, but will often have a Character Arc layer too. Asimov’s Foundation stories were pure Idea and Milieu. The main characters were merely lenses by which you could see his stories.

His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before. That is, not in real life. He had seen it many times on the hyper-video, and occasionally in tremendous three-dimensional newscasts covering an Imperial Coronation or the opening of a Galactic Council. Even though he had lived all his life on the world of Synnax, which circled a star at the edges of the Blue Drift, he was not cut off from civilization, you see. At that time, no place in the Galaxy was.
…

Travel through ordinary space could proceed at no rate more rapid than that of ordinary light (a bit of scientific knowledge that belonged among the items known since the forgotten dawn of human history), and that would have meant years of travel between even the nearest of inhabited systems. Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time.

Gaal had waited for the first of those jumps with a little dread curled gently in his stomach, and it ended in nothing more than a trifling jar, a little internal kick which ceased an instant before he could be sure he had felt it. That was all.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov p. 1

All we know about Gaal is that he is a country boy and a scholar. I’ll admit that is an interesting juxtaposition, but we get little of the boy’s desires that would create a character arc. After the first section, he becomes nothing more than history.

The whole series had me in its grip the whole way. His idea explored in this series was vast and brilliant!

I love that his writing is so clear and so lacking in fluff. It makes the reading fast and enjoyable.

The man was a genius, literally. He wrote non-fiction books in every section of the Dewey System except one.

Today’s stories are almost all character-based. They might have Idea elements but they almost always contain a character arc. Not many of us are as brilliant as people like Asimov to write a story based on such a compelling idea as his, but we authors tend to understand people and relationships quite well. This is merely a different way to connect with the reader through our writing. It happens to be my favorite kind of story.

Ursula K. LeGuin wrote character-based stories in 1968. The stories also explored ideas, as she did in The Left Hand of Darkness. This story is based on a society that was gender-fluid. I’ve not read this one yet but it is on my TBR because everything she wrote was amazing. I think this one was a character-based story because it is about the main character learning to deal with the culture clash of his society with the alien one. I’m curious to see if “gender-fluid” had the same meaning back when it was written as it does today.

What is your favorite kind of story?

Milieu, Idea, Character, or Event Stories?

Of course, as I said, these observations are based on my own experience. Your experience might be different.