What are your favorite explanations for why characters regularly use melee weapons in a setting with firearms?
I’ve always had a soft spot for Dune’s Holtzman shields, purely for the source material’s utterly unhinged rationale for why nobody takes advantage of the laser loophole.
For the unfamiliar, a Holtzman field in Dune is a kind of force field which can be tuned to selectively block or permit the passage of objects based on their velocity. This feature is what allows them to be used for personal defence; by tuning them to permit only very low-velocity objects to pass through, a person can “wear” a Holtzman shield without impeding their own movements of suffocating due to blockage of atmospheric gasses. This in turn is what produces the Dune universe’s duelling culture: a bullet – or any solid-projectile weapon – is too fast to pass through a personal Holtzman shield, but the thrust of a dagger is below the velocity threshold where blocking it would render the shield impracticable to wear. So far, so good.
Now we come to the laser loophole. This is a problem with personal force fields as depicted in many works of science fiction, not just Dune, and it goes something like this: because the text explicitly establishes that one can see both into and out of a personal force field, clearly it’s permeable to visible light. Why don’t attackers just shoot the wearer with a laser? Does the setting somehow have the technology to produce human-portable force field generators, but not human-portable weaponisable lasers? Did it simply never occur to anyone to try?
Some works of fiction address the laser loophole by proposing that the force fields can selectively become impermeable to visible light, and incorporate the implications of that – e.g., perhaps it’s possible to immobilise shield-wearers by using a laser to force their shields to constantly run at maximum intensity – into their plots, while others propose that the shields block laser weapons but not other kinds of visible light because it’s magic and they’re not obliged to explain shit.
Dune takes a different approach.
In Dune (the novel, at least; I haven’t seen the most recent film adaptation in its entirety yet), the reason that nobody shoots Holtzman shield wearers with lasers is because doing so causes a nuclear explosion. The locus of the explosion is apparently entirely random, with a roughly even chance of originating within the target’s shield generator or within the shooter’s weapon. On paper, this is a huge liability and should mean that no sane person would ever wear a Holtzman shield; the text justifies their widespread use in practice by establishing that a. if anyone actually takes advantage of this phenomenon, the Emperor will nuke them from orbit, and b. the noble houses are fucking insane.
(Why lone assassins who are more than happy to blow themselves up for ideological reasons and thus have no reason to care about the resulting political backlash don’t take advantage of the effect is, as far as I’m aware, never adequately addressed.)
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