(and why you shouldn’t do it)

It is said that one death is a tragedy, while one million deaths is a statistic.

As subjective as that is, it’s all the more true in fiction. No one is really thinking about the actual impact of the loss of each life in a story. We tend to care more about deaths that are given the proper lead-up and tragic treatment. When some nameless guy on a battlefield gets immediately felled by an arrow, your average reader doesn’t feel much about it. But if it’s the hero’s mentor, whom we’ve liked for the past 300 pages, the author will usually give us several pages of his tragic end and some poignant last words. And that, we’ll feel. It’s not like flipping past the obits page, it’s like losing a friend. We know that person by now.

A rookie mistake in both movies and books is to ignore this fact and imagine you can get a bigger impact by killing more people. Some movies do it by splashing lots of gore across the screen, which is affecting in a different way, but doesn’t pull the same heartstrings as losing a well-developed character.

Destroying a planet is the ultimate case of maximizing the death toll while minimizing the effect on the viewer. Nobody watching the movie has ever been to that planet. None of their friends live there. And there’s rarely time to give the audience time to get attached to it, or anybody on it. It’s just a big boom in space, and it’s probably next week that you’re lying in bed and you think, you know, it’s kind of funny, eight billion people died on screen and it didn’t make much of an impact.

In Star Wars episode IV, Alderaan is blown to bits on screen by the Death Star. I forgive you if you’ve forgotten that bit; it went by pretty fast. Billions of people “scream, and are suddenly silenced,” and that’s pretty much all we hear about it. Leia lost, in one moment, her parents, her childhood friends, her babysitter, her kindergarten teacher, presumably most of the people she had ever cared about in her life. But that’s okay, because a couple scenes later she can flirt with Han like nothing ever happened. We feel more for Uncle Owen, and we never even liked him! But at least we saw him.

The 2009 Star Trek movie makes the same mistake. We are primed a little for the loss of Vulcan by a couple of scenes on it. Only two characters get names, Sarek and Amanda. Other than that, it pretty much comes across as Planet of the Racists. So when it gets blown up, Amanda dies, which is kinda sad because we did see her on screen for about a minute and she seems like a nice mom. But literally no one else on the planet is of particular interest to an audience coming to it fresh.

Now, if you’re a lifelong Star Trek fan like I am, it’s different. I was thinking, what about T’Pau? What about T’Pring? What about Stonn? Was T’Pol there at the time? What about thousands of years of history, the teachings of Surak, Vulcan’s Forge, I-Chaya, plomeeks, the place of koon-ut-kalifee? What about the fact that this is one of the founding and most powerful members of the Federation? This is going to have cascading effects for years yet!

But none of this is shown on screen, so all we really lose is one named character. We are meant to absorb the meaning of this horrific tragedy from the reaction of other characters, but just as in Star Wars, we don’t get a whole lot. Spock is very upset, which we can tell, because he’s being all repressed. I certainly did feel for him at that moment. And yet, a few scenes (and some nice cathartic Kirk-choking) later and Spock is pretty much fine. He took some time sitting in the transporter room with his dad and he’s ready to get back to work. And the rest of the crew of the Enterprise? They don’t seem to care very much at all. Do they not have any Vulcan friends? Or is there just no time to explore the actual effects of losing an entire planet in two hours?

In my opinion, we could have had the exact same effect if nobody had died but Amanda. The other 5,999,999 deaths don’t really affect the viewer and aren’t treated with any seriousness by the movie. Just feels like a waste!

I’m not saying you can’t destroy a planet, ever. But if you’re writing something in which a planet blinks out, you have to ask yourself: does this make more of an impact than destroying a ship, a town, or perhaps even one named character? How can you show just how big a deal it is, how much it would affect the people from that planet to know that their home is forever gone—not just their house, but every single beloved thing they grew up with? What is the effect on the larger galaxy—will there be a refugee crisis for years to come? Will it shift the balance of power? This is a big event, it should have effects that go on long after the crisis is over!

One work that I think handles the destruction of the planet fairly well is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a humorous book and doesn’t lean too hard into tragedy. But it does make us feel, at least to some degree, what it would mean to lose your whole home.

Here’s Arthur Dent’s reaction to the destruction of his planet:

There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parents and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab—the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone. Nelson’s Column had gone! Nelson’s Column had gone and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry. From now on Nelson’s Column only existed in his mind—his mind, stuck here in this dank smelly steel-lined spaceship. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.

England no longer existed. He’d got that—somehow he’d got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk forever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger.

He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.

It’s too big of a tragedy for him to wrap his mind around. He can’t grasp the Earth, because he’s never seen it in context before. But when he thinks of the multiplicity of tiny things that will never be the same, it hits home. It’s played a little bit for laughs, but as he goes through the galaxy and is reminded that the flat where he went to a party once is gone, or that his telephone number doesn’t connect to anything, or that the worst poet in the universe is gone, we feel the aftershocks. It’s not a one-and-done thing. It’s a big, significant event for Arthur, even while the rest of the universe shrugs because they never thought of Earth as important.

Picking Earth as the planet destroyed is always going to be more poignant. We’ve all been there. If the Earth were destroyed, we would lose:

• maple trees
• the Statue of Liberty
• humpback whales
• the Mona Lisa
• Taylor Swift
• hummingbirds
• New England autumns
• dandelions
• the specific shade of blue the sky only ever gets in the place where you’re from
• Cajun food, Mexican food, French food, and your favorite breakfast cereal
• cows, meaning no more cheese or ice cream, not the kinds you remember anyway
• the house where you grew up
• your favorite jacket
• the Matterhorn
• the way that traffic lights reflect in the rain in the city you like best

These are things that are important to me because I live here. Stuff that’s had some kind of effect on me as I’ve grown up. Things that can’t be replaced by hasperat, plomeek soup, and Klingon opera. If I lost my planet, I’d be wandering among unfamiliar places and things for the rest of my life. It would take me a long time to even be functional again.

I’m not saying you should destroy the Earth, particularly. But if a character loses their planet, they’re simultaneously losing thousands of things as important to them as the sky of your hometown is to you. This is not something they’re going to shake off in order to get back to work that same afternoon. Or, if they do manage that, they’ll almost certainly break down later. They will have to mourn everything and everyone they knew. It’s hard to imagine a larger kind of loss.

So my advice is, don’t do it unless you are ready to give it the impact and the page space it takes. A book where a planet is destroyed is going to be a pretty sad book. Every character from that planet is going to be working through some serious grief. If you don’t want to write that kind of book, have the planet be destabilized, have a named character die, have some big disaster which takes time to fix. But don’t destroy a planet unless you can give it a planet-sized impact. Planets are not convenient little rocks in space—each one is as big as everything you have ever known. They don’t get smaller just because you’re writing in a larger universe.