Are 4000 Characters In A Story Too Many?

[Cap'n Gravelock]

In a story where the heroes are on a vast warship or spaceship a la Star Trek, are 4000 characters on the ship too many?

[GloatingSwine]

Yes.

In an average length novel, each character would get one sentence.

Also, basically no author could come up with 4000 individual characters (Dunbar's number, the average number of other people a human can know and maintain any form of relationship with is 150).

[Calemyr]

In a story where the heroes are on a vast warship or spaceship a la Star Trek, are 4000 characters on the ship too many?

Yes and no. As main characters, hell yes, that's too much. Even the best of storytellers get bogged down after the first twenty. Unless you're working on a huge scale (like a hundred book series), you'll never have enough screen time to give 4000 characters an hour in the limelight.

That said, a cast of 4k where you've got maybe a half dozen main characters and a few dozen secondary and tertiary characters, with the rest being extras, that's perfectly viable.

[GloatingSwine]

Also, 4000 for the crew of a "vast" warship might be less than you think. The crew of a Nimitz class is 3000 (plus another 1800 aircrew), and they're positively dinky by average SF standards.

[An Enemy Spy]

Do all four thousand have names and dialogue? I don't know how you would do that. War and Peace is is over 1400 pages long and only has about 600 named characters. To even put all four thousand names in the book, you would have to devote between four to eight thousand words depending on whether you're giving them surnames or not, and that's not even taking into consideration any titles they'll have, and assuming each character is only named once, which of course isn't going to happen.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

4000, that is a nice ship. (Or fleet, if this is connected to that idea.)

As the others said, you'll end up using a lot of characters as "We didn't get a very good response from engineering, just screams", "the crew of the Marauder stood at attention as the flagship slowly pulled up alongside her" and "the second fleet lost a lot of good men out there".

In most movies there are up to about 6 or 8 main characters, if it's a sequel you can grow that number a bit, and you can stretch it further by making groups that are essentially a single character (Ron's two older brothers in Harry Potter, Team Rocket in Pokémon, all the dwarfs in The Hobbit except Thorin pretty much). I understand Naruto (never seen it though) has an interesting variation where in most episodes you'll be following a single group of a handful of characters, but there are times and places when several groups come together and each group functions as basically one character, with only the leader having any real text. All of it taken together in a long enough story you could probably have up to around 50 characters that someone somewhere will find memorable.

That's okay though, as you probably don't actually want to write out 4000 fully fledged characters. Some characters are better off just being the nearly in lieutenant Jackson's streak of nearly impossible victories, standing there slacking off as if they didn't just have to battle their way through two ships worth of enemy combatants, every last one of them an absolute badass.

[Anonymouswizard]

In a story where the heroes are on a vast warship or spaceship a la Star Trek, are 4000 characters on the ship too many?

As others have said, not as main characters. In a 3000 page series you might be able to get 20-40 main characters of you stretch yourself, more likely ~10 mains and 40-50 secondary characters.

For the crew of a vast spaceship, if we're going conventionally fiction-wise then it's a large ship, but not massive. If we're going realistic then it's far too massive for an in-system vessel (which are most likely to have a capacity of hundreds at most, due to remass requirements, most likely just a handful of crew), and probably too small by an order of magnitude for a starship.

[Kitten Champion]

No. To meet the minimum of what can reasonably defined as a character - even the barest bones one-dimensional ones - you can't insert that many and have anything intelligible. That isn't really relevant though, the way it works is that you can create the impression of a large population through descriptive language, their existences are an aspect of the setting as much as their physical environment .

the USS Enterprise for instance reportedly has a crew of around 900 members, most of which don't exists. On the basis of it being fiction and the viewer suspending disbelief however, that theoretical crew count is accepted as a reality. To justify this to the viewer however, the show needs to create the illusion of greater numbers largely through carefully staged extras -- though it's also an aspect of the characters and their dialogue that they act with the consideration for those lives when they're written.

[JoshL]

It would be an interesting challenge to make an experimental novel work with that many characters. Everyone gets a sentence that is a descriptive introduction, perhaps an action, and then a line of dialogue. Essentially a conversation that flows through the ship as a major event occurs, like discovering a new planet, gradually revealing more about the planet as people react to it, or the news of it. The characters are less characters than the mood and conversation of the ship. If done right, that could be pretty cool, but very difficult to make engaging, with no people for the reader to latch on to.

But if you were just talking about the size of the crew, as others have said, that's a good size for a big ship. In Star Wars terms, a Star Destroyer has a crew of around 40k, so a ship about 1/10th that size would still be pretty big

[Tvtyrant]

Possibly plausible for a series.

The first book would be the captain and the bridge officers.

Then the next few books would be the bridge officers and their immediate underlings, followed by a series of books on those underlings and their subordinates.

Working down the chain of command would let you show the same ship in different missions from different perspectives.

[Fawkes]

I wonder how many names appear in the Song of Ice and Fire series.

Bound to be in the thousands.

[An Enemy Spy]

I wonder how many names appear in the Song of Ice and Fire series.

Bound to be in the thousands.

Two thousand one hundred and two.

[GloatingSwine]

According to this (https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/115429/how-many-named-characters-are-there-in-a-song-of-ice-and-fire) 2032 characters have been named, but some of them are literally just names with nothing else.

Edit: That also includes prequel stories.

[Ibrinar]

You could make a grand experiment, one update of decent length a day, each day the viewpoint character changes in about eleven years you will have had each character as viewpoint character. I you somehow manage to tell an interesting story and setting that way it would be damn impressive. I guess picking a character mentioned on the last day as new view point would make sense. And you can't bother telling their backstories unless that is relevant to the story at the point giving hints about their wider character by thoughts and action is about all you can do.

Of course it would be a fools errand but it might be interesting.

[AMFV]

That's only about 500 words... That's not quite enough.

[Legato Endless]

I think probably the easiest way to cheat the conceit into a conventional format would be to center the action on a place, say the capital of a nation or a generation ship for OP's sci fi theme, and have a rotating cast of view points that still centers on the same general lineup of people for a story arc, then you can shift to another related area, or flash forward so many years. But that's still going a long way to hit something of a dramatically strange gimmick.

Beyond the difficulty of logistics, it is very hard to get a audience to get attached to that many people. Even stories with loads of characters only have a few dozen major figures and a few hundred minor ones at the heavier end.

[factotum]

Also, 4000 for the crew of a "vast" warship might be less than you think. The crew of a Nimitz class is 3000 (plus another 1800 aircrew), and they're positively dinky by average SF standards.

You would hope that a highly advanced starship would have better automation and computers than a Nimitz-class carrier (which is actually a pretty old design nowadays, being more than 40 years old). It's worth noting that a Gerald Ford class carrier only has about 2600 crew, so some efficiencies have been made over the years.

[Cap'n Gravelock]

4000, that is a nice ship. (Or fleet, if this is connected to that idea.)

As the others said, you'll end up using a lot of characters as "We didn't get a very good response from engineering, just screams", "the crew of the Marauder stood at attention as the flagship slowly pulled up alongside her" and "the second fleet lost a lot of good men out there".

In most movies there are up to about 6 or 8 main characters, if it's a sequel you can grow that number a bit, and you can stretch it further by making groups that are essentially a single character (Ron's two older brothers in Harry Potter, Team Rocket in Pokémon, all the dwarfs in The Hobbit except Thorin pretty much). I understand Naruto (never seen it though) has an interesting variation where in most episodes you'll be following a single group of a handful of characters, but there are times and places when several groups come together and each group functions as basically one character, with only the leader having any real text. All of it taken together in a long enough story you could probably have up to around 50 characters that someone somewhere will find memorable.

That's okay though, as you probably don't actually want to write out 4000 fully fledged characters. Some characters are better off just being the nearly in lieutenant Jackson's streak of nearly impossible victories, standing there slacking off as if they didn't just have to battle their way through two ships worth of enemy combatants, every last one of them an absolute badass.

Yep, it is. The original number was bigger, clocking in at 13,000. I had to shrink it to the size of a carrier's crew to make it more believable without sacrificing the epic nature of the story. 4000 does have kind of a ring to it, don't you think.


No. To meet the minimum of what can reasonably defined as a character - even the barest bones one-dimensional ones - you can't insert that many and have anything intelligible. That isn't really relevant though, the way it works is that you can create the impression of a large population through descriptive language, their existences are an aspect of the setting as much as their physical environment .

the USS Enterprise for instance reportedly has a crew of around 900 members, most of which don't exists. On the basis of it being fiction and the viewer suspending disbelief however, that theoretical crew count is accepted as a reality. To justify this to the viewer however, the show needs to create the illusion of greater numbers largely through carefully staged extras -- though it's also an aspect of the characters and their dialogue that they act with the consideration for those lives when they're written.


Possibly plausible for a series.

The first book would be the captain and the bridge officers.

Then the next few books would be the bridge officers and their immediate underlings, followed by a series of books on those underlings and their subordinates.

Working down the chain of command would let you show the same ship in different missions from different perspectives.


I think probably the easiest way to cheat the conceit into a conventional format would be to center the action on a place, say the capital of a nation or a generation ship for OP's sci fi theme, and have a rotating cast of view points that still centers on the same general lineup of people for a story arc, then you can shift to another related area, or flash forward so many years. But that's still going a long way to hit something of a dramatically strange gimmick.

Beyond the difficulty of logistics, it is very hard to get a audience to get attached to that many people. Even stories with loads of characters only have a few dozen major figures and a few hundred minor ones at the heavier end.

To the rest of you, this is how it goes:

4000 privateers, mercenaries and adventurers vs. one big pirate fleet of unknown size. Said privateers, mercenaries and adventurers ride aboard a MASSIVE turtle with a whole island on its back the size of a town or city. Said pirate fleet is led by a notorious lich pirate of incredible power and is believed to be plotting Armageddon with his cohorts.

The story however will focus on 4-5 individuals who serve as POV characters who serve as part of the 13th Legion (at least 300) soldiers out of that 4000 just mentioned.

[snowblizz]

The story however will focus on 4-5 individuals who serve as POV characters who serve as part of the 13th Legion (at least 300) soldiers out of that 4000 just mentioned.

Or in other words your story has 4-5 characters.

[Eldan]

Yeah, this is differing definitions of "character". When we speak of characters in a book, we usually mean people with a name and a function and maybe some dialogue. When a scene is about Aragorn leading ten thousand soldiers to the gates of Moria, there aren't ten thousand characters in that scene. There's Aragorn and maybe a few officers. If I write a scene where a character looks out over a crowd, I wouldn't call them all characters, either.

So yes, having thousands of people exist in your story is no problem whatsoever.

[Elanasaurus]

So yes, having thousands of people exist in your story is no problem whatsoever.Or millions. Or billions!
:elan:

[brian 333]

The Crew is one character. It can be composed of 40 or 40,000 members, but it is one character.

Star Trek uses large crew numbers to allow writers to create new experts, (and Red Shirts,) as needed. Battlestar Galactica uses large crews because they are all Cylons.

But even today we are replacing the thousand-crew cruisers with destroyers having 1/3 the crew while increasing the firepower. As automatic systems get better, crew size diminishes.

Look at the electromagnetic catapults on modern aircraft carriers and compare them to the original steam catapults of the 1950s. Far fewer crew needed for the same job. By the time we build interstellar warships they won't even need a damage control crew. Gun crews for 5" naval rifles required over a dozen men in WW2. The same barrel and projectile now uses automatic loading to fire far faster, with four crew whose role is mostly monitoring the automatics and serving as emergency backup in case of system failure. By Interstellar War times, such systems won't require any assistance from autonomous multi-purpose biological systems which require significant mass to maintain, and which only function one third of the time.

So, why do you have crew at all? They won't be needed, even on the largest warships. They must exist for a story purpose, and outside of that purpose, they are simply window dressing. I'm reminded of Original Trek where the Red Alert is sounded and the same twelve extras walk in front of the camera to demonstrate a crew efficiently going to battle stations. Those extras never appear anywhere else, (except Dos Equis advertisements.) They are simply "The Crew."

[Anonymouswizard]

The above post is why in my books, by about 2100ce large interplanetary ships have a crew of 20-30, whole by 2500ce they tend to have a crew of 5-10. As few crew a possible to keep the thing running, with 90% of ship operations being automatic. Large warships might have a crew of 100, but that's multiple redundancy covering multiple shifts.

In the Night's Dawn books interstellar craft seem to run at a rate of about 5-10 crew, with the smallest having one crew member. Large spheres, but most of that is cargo holds, remass tankage, and systems (including a lot of automation). In Revelation Space a 4km long ship can be crewed by five people, with the theoretical minimum being zero (as pretty much everything can run automatically, including self repair systems).

[GloatingSwine]

Or in other words your story has 4-5 characters.

Not quite.

A story with 4-5 point of view characters will probably have about two dozen reasonably developed individuals where you can answer questions like "What does this person want, what do they need, and what's stopping them getting it?" (The hallmarks of an actual character that can undergo an arc, to want something, to need something, and to have an obstacle between them and getting the thing they need, usually related to their pursuit of the thing they want instead)

Beyond that circle of sigificance, everyone else is extras whose wants and needs don't impinge on the story.

[GreatWyrmGold]

That's less than 30 tweets. 4,000 characters isn't enough for a chapter, let alone most stories. Maybe it would work for an extremely short short story, but—wait, which kind of character are we talking about again?

[factotum]

That's less than 30 tweets. 4,000 characters isn't enough for a chapter, let alone most stories.

There's a yearly competition for young people run by BBC Radio 2 in the UK called "500 words", which, needless to say, involves writing a story in 500 words or less. They typically get thousands of entries...

[Doorhandle]

Definitely, but you can still have a lot of characters: particularly if many are limited to just a name, just a description, or both if you're lucky.

Romance of the three kingdoms gave a name to every officer, for example: but many of their roles were limited to "This guy was here" or "He was then cut in half by Guan Yu."

[Yora]

Also, 4000 for the crew of a "vast" warship might be less than you think. The crew of a Nimitz class is 3000 (plus another 1800 aircrew), and they're positively dinky by average SF standards.

Sci-fi writers should never be allowed anywhere close to numbers. They only do stupid nonse with them.

[Anonymouswizard]

Sci-fi writers should never be allowed anywhere close to numbers. They only do stupid nonse with them.

Let's be fair, the handful that are scientists are generally very good in their areas of expertise, if still poor in others. For example Alistair Reynolds is very good at keeping time dilation, acceleration, velocities, distances, and similar things correct, but still makes mistakes with energy.

[GreatWyrmGold]

There's a yearly competition for young people run by BBC Radio 2 in the UK called "500 words", which, needless to say, involves writing a story in 500 words or less. They typically get thousands of entries...
Do you have any idea how many other stories are written in a year? I'm willing to bet at least tens of thousands, and that very few of them could be told in less than 4,000 characters.
"Most stories" != "All stories"



Sci-fi writers should never be allowed anywhere close to numbers. They only do stupid nonse with them.
There are two types of science fiction authors. The first does the research and gets decent numbers, which can help you understand the scale of space and potential futures. The second is very entertaining to run the numbers on.

[Elanasaurus]

Look at the electromagnetic catapults on modern aircraft carriers and compare them to the original steam catapults of the 1950s.Just being nitpicky but I think the electromagnetic catapults aren't in use yet.
:elan:

[Anonymouswizard]

Note: stories in 500 words are a thing called flash fiction (for those who have never heard of the term), and one I've never cared for. I find it hard to tell a story in less than five thousand because I'm very wordy, but I have occasionally managed it. I've meet some people who very much enjoy writing it.

[factotum]

Just being nitpicky but I think the electromagnetic catapults aren't in use yet.
:elan:

They must be, or else the Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrriers ain't launching any planes, and since the first one has been in commission for nearly a year now, I'm pretty sure its electromagnetic catapault must be operational.

[Mechalich]

Definitely, but you can still have a lot of characters: particularly if many are limited to just a name, just a description, or both if you're lucky.

Romance of the three kingdoms gave a name to every officer, for example: but many of their roles were limited to "This guy was here" or "He was then cut in half by Guan Yu."

Romance of the Three Kingdoms has only around 1000 named characters actually, but it does manage to have ~100 characters who have something resembling an arc (ie. are sufficiently developed for them to be in or to be asked for by the fans for Dynasty Warriors). However, that is a very unusual historical epic that has not only a distinctly terse style - the number of events per word is extremely high - and takes place over multiple generations, so that at no one point is the entire core cast even alive, never mind active.

The historical epic, especially in Asia, tends to have the largest total cast of any type of story - since they incorporate large numbers of actual historical figures who may show up for one significant moment or choice in accordance with the actual chaos of history rather than the more streamlined narrative structure of a traditional novel. Fantasy and science fiction in the vein of a historical epic - ASOIAF is the best example among recent works - are also likely to have very large casts. This, however, tends to make them very unwieldy and the narrative is likely to fray out into incoherence - a problem ASOIAF most assuredly has. Authors working from real history have the advantage that they can simply ignore events that appear as if they might be relevant but turn out not to be because they are working from an established path.