Planetville: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|''"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"}}
[[Adventure Towns]] [[Recycled in Space|IN SPACE]]! 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
If a [[The Wild West|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 [[Scary Dogmatic Aliens|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.
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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
This might work if technology was really
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
* [[Ditto Aliens]]: To outsiders, most any human ethnic group looks alike.
* [[It's a Small World After All]]:
* [[One World Order]]: A country has one government except in civil wars.
* [[Planet of Hats]]: It's just like the wacky [[Adventure Towns]] of Earth.
* [[Scary Dogmatic Aliens]]: Nazis... [[Recycled in Space|In Spaaaaaace]]!
* [[Single Biome Planet]]: Do Earth towns have both a frozen and a jungle region?
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.
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Sometimes a result of the [[Law of Conservation of Detail]] in universes with dozens or hundreds of planets/star systems.
Not to be confused with planets that are ''literally'' covered by a single
{{examples}}
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* ''[[Lucifer (comics)|Lucifer]]'': The birth of a new "creation"
** That's just where all the interesting stuff happens (following in daddy's footsteps). Twenty six pages showing the inky blackness of space in order to demonstrate scale does not make for a fun story.
* Oddly inverted in a [[Marvel Comics]] miniseries, ''Captain Universe''. Gladiator, a [[Flying Brick]] alien flies to Earth from across the galaxy. That sort of travel is usually hand waved in comics as those characters being just that darn powerful. It gets odd when Gladiator has to fly from one part of the globe to another once he gets there and uses the Captain Universe [[Power-Up]] in order to grant himself enough speed to make the flight in time. So essentially, space is smaller than the planet Earth, according to this story.
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** Particularly conspicuous in ''The Next Generation'' episode "Reunification", in which the Romulans planned to seize control of the entire planet Vulcan with [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale|just a few thousand ground troops]].
** At least two separate stories have featured autonomous colonies with populations given as being in the ''hundreds'', acting (and recognised) as planetary governments. Several others come close.
* Both ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' and ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'' are very consistent with this. Nothing of interest happens more than a few kilometres from a Stargate, most planets seem to possess a few thousand people at most, and conquering/purging/eating an entire planet is apparently a very simple affair. The characters even seem to be aware of this, as one episode featured Carter and O'Neill trapped in a frozen cave and ''immediately'' thinking they were on an [[Single Biome Planet|ice planet]]
** At least for SG-1, they're walking through the gate, which severely limits the amount of the planet that they're capable of exploring. So, while each destination is essentially a "planet", the area of relevance to the SGC is only a few dozen square miles. But the excuse hardly works for their enemies, who are kind enough to place all their facilities within walking distance despite having spaceships and teleporters.
*** The teleporters are limited, and if the only methods of travel you had were by magic doorway, lear-jet and massive space-ship you'd probably spend a lot of time walking too, and you'd ensure that said magic doorways were as near to your current resource pile as possible.
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== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* Both averted and played straight in ''[[Warhammer 40000]]'', where the background fluff 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.
** Justified in the cases of Hive Worlds, where pollution forces the inhabitants into a few gigantic cities surrounded by endless ash wastes, and [[Death World
** Played straight with the Space Marines, as less than a thousand of them can crush entire rebellions and purge whole worlds. Than again, aside from being extremely powerful [[Super Soldier
** Also justified in some locations, such as Holy Terra, which is indeed a planet-wide city.
*** ...with the Emperor's palace complex taking up ''most of Europe''.
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