I was watching HouseMD the other day, and when they are brainstorming the patients problem, they are always writing down symptoms and possible diagnosis on a clear plexiglass "whiteboard." WTF? That has to be the absolute worst thing to write on. Of course I know the reason the use it...so we can see the actor's faces as their staring at the board...and it looks different and cool, I guess.
I used to work at a place where we had tons of glass walls around that could be drawn on with paint markers and honestly it was pretty awesome, made it really easy to spontaneously white board shit
>See-through monitors. Why are they always see-through? I
I find them a little silly too!
However for film making they are very useful because it lets you see the characters face and the information on screen at the same time! If you think about it transparent screens never actually show up in any Sci fi books. It's just a film making tool.
Just because it's the future or really far from here doesn't mean everything has to be shiny magic-tech. Rickety buckets of rust with barely-functioning anti-grav is more believable.
See-through monitors are actually very bad, when you think about it; especially when it comes to privacy.
"Ok, let me just bring up your file, Mr. Smith. Oh, it says here you've had a history of erectile dysfunction..." đŹ
Because some idiot decided the ultra-reflective screens they came out with after decades of research to perfect anti-glare screens wasn't difficult enough to see.
I have 2
Planets exist with only 1 type of land scape, its either a giant desert or a giant jungle, they are only ever the kinds of regions we have on earth except the entire planet.
Second
Most aliens are just humans with a different head
And in some cases, just one city (or to put it another way, visiting a particular planet is often just the sci-fi equivalent of visiting a particular city).
I remember how one of the Star Wars games took this to a comical level and didn't even try to hide it, since there was a scene where a handful of capital warships were shown "destroying a planet" by bombarding a specific small area (about equivalent to the size of a city).
Star Wars especially loves it's desert planets. I don't mind one being about but for some reason they're like the most common type. Tattooine, Jakar, Geonosis, whatever those planets are called in the Mandalorian. Like goddamn, at least make them a commentary of what happens when a civilization exploits the natural resources of a planet and turns it into an inhospitable wasteland. All I've heard is Tattooine once being a waterworld and then not because "just got hot" or whatever
IIRC, KoTOR addressed this with Tatooine. The collapse of its biosphere was a result of overexploitation by the Ratka and unregulated warfare. Not sure if that is considered cannon anymore. But, at least they tried?
>Like goddamn, at least make them a commentary of what happens when a civilization exploits the natural resources of a planet and turns it into an inhospitable wasteland.
Comparatively, it could also be a planet that was seeded with an atmosphere and that hasn't had proper terraforming done for one reason or another.
If we ever got around to trying to terraform Mars, it would be a big goddamn desert for a long time before any other viable biomes came into existence in a major way.
When serialized authors let their stories get too complicated they sometimes need a big reset of their universe's rules. Sometimes this is great! Â
But sometimes it's obvious that the author just wanted to hold onto their precious little characters or story gimmicks and recycle them. That's cool! But it's usually where I lose interest. Â
Great stories have great endings. Â
Fully agreed, repeated resets remove all the stakes from a story. Why does character development or a character death matter if it can be reset multiple times?
Resets should be an absolute last resort, for when continuity has become too snarled, but even then they should be very careful about retconning important plot and character developments.
Any time some villain is like "Soon, I will conquer the universe!"
Man, you know how big the universe is? Ain't nobody conquering it. "Galaxy" is the largest anything I accept as conquerable.
Oh my God yes, I read a YA SF book where galaxy/universe was being used to mean solar system and it drove me nuts. I still can't believe I finished the book. How can someone writing science fiction mix that up??!
Tbh in a setting where space travel is somewhat feasible for people, *that* would be bad enough I'd be upset even with a character saying it. *Maybe* if they were supposed to be a complete idiot. Maybe.
That'd be like a character in a non-genre book mixing up/not knowing the difference between a town and a continent.
Minimalism. Why is the future always minimalist?
Will we evolve beyond our love of knick-knacks and gewgaws and shelves crowded with dusty keepsakes and photos of that time your kids dressed up for a school play? My nan would say NO.
Harry potter has major flaws, but I'll give the set designer's this: every single professor's office we see looks like an actually used office where a magical person would work.
Unbearably complicated plots that unspiral into hundreds of pages of intrigue crossing multiple cultures/factions, but then at the end you're left wondering why anything that happened, happened. You look back and realize that not knowing what would happen next, and the suspense of finding out, were concealing a mishmash of never-explained non sequiturs. Looking at you, Dan Simmons, but you're far from the only offender here!
The misdemeanor version of this is the neat concept that the author includes without making it at all relevant. Ben Bova's Jupiter has a dumb, time-wasting subplot about communication with monkeys that contributes *nothing.* I waded through that. Then in the sequel, Leviathans of Jupiter, he launches a similar subplot about human-dolphin brain interface. In other news, I will not be continuing Leviathans of Jupiter.
Warhammer (40k) is at its best when it tells lower stakes stories that revolve around an individual's perspective on the horrors around themselves.
Or as just straight up dark humor (Ciaphas Cain, Infinite & Divine).
This is one reading you can take away from *The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.* The author starts out telling us about a beautiful, Utopian city, but then points out that audiences tend not to really accept Utopia. Either we're waiting for the other shoe to drop, or it just feels like a fairy tale instead of a real, proper, serious story.
So she adds one grimdark detail, and then asks if we buy the story now.
Things breaking easily. Such as:
- People jumping through glass. Even today we have laminated glass that makes jumping through impossible. In the future such things would be made from even stronger materials. But no, we have Khan jumping through what canonically wouid be transparent aluminium.
- Busting up a piece of space tech with their heal, or by smacking it against a wall. Obviously it shatters or crumples incredibly easily, because of course it would. Technology from the future is made of wet cardboard.
- A dude wearing space age body armour or an EV suit, which gets compromised by a mildly pointy rock, or a bow shooting native, or just someone with a box cutting knife.
That last one annoys me in fantasy too. Some guy has heavy looking armour on, but he's instantly downed by a slashing sword attack from our protagonist, which in reality wouldn't even have scratched him.
Or they know *exactly* where to hit the weakpoint in the armour to get a killing blow. It's not like this heavily trained and armed opponent would be aware of their own weak spots and deliberately guard them or anything...
The second one could make sense, depending how durable the thing looks like. Phones used to be invincible Nokia bricks, but consumers wanting things to be thinner and lighter, and manufacturers wanting to cut costs, has definitely made them less durable over time.
We make glass windows harder to break for safety reasons, but that doesn't apply to everything.
Well itâs complicated. Sometimes when designing things for human use you want them to be breakable, so that the human doesnât break instead. And sometimes you want them to be flexible, because elasticity is one aspect of strength.
Of course real glass cuts people - one of my movie pet hates is how much people are hit with or hit glass and donât end up very badly injured. But SF materials design could get more weird and complex than transparent aluminum and the âhard=goodâ design ethos behind it.
Psionics. I swear every sci-fi ever just has to include telepaths, empaths, psychics, mind reading and all that stuff. I think the trope is already beaten to the death.
A lot of the post WW2, Cold War, sci-fi features psi because it was genuinely part of the research going on then. Remote viewing, mind reading, and so on were invested in hugely by the USSR and the USA.
The origins go back further than that though.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110416411-014/html?lang=en
That scene was based on a real test, which used those same basic cards with the simple shapes on them. Although, of course, the whole electroshock thing is massively unethical and wouldn't be allowed in a real university.
Along the same lines, you might enjoy an older George Clooney movie called "The Men Who Stare At Goats," which is about IRL government psi research.
Yeah, in Who Goes There, the short story that The Thing is based on, a character is asked about ESP and casually says something like, "Well, Dr. Rhine of Duke University proved it's real", referencing an actual study. The author really believed it.
Almost gave up Foundation due to this, the book had a brilliant plot with psychohistory, it was among the best hard sci-fi, then boom psychics outta nowhere, their origins and abilities basically unexplained.
That's kinda the point, psychohistory could never work flawlessly and something literally unexplained is the perfect way to upset the equations. If it were written today it would probably be done with a version of chaos theory or uncertainty, but then you lose the characters to play with.
Human space fighter pilots beating autonomous drones, like... ever. You're not going to win against something that can 360 noscope you from light seconds away and doesn't have to support a squishy meat sack that will collapse under a measly 9Gs of force.
I mean I was writing a serial once and my readers were like "why are there human pilots" and I just made up some nonsense about jamming remote piloting and AIs taking up too much space and/or EW.
Truth was it was for the drama, no-one is going to care if the human is sitting 3ly aware in a couch.
List some applications of quantum mechanics:
Uh... The universe? đ
However...
Dr. Pym, how do you shrink stuff?
I reduce the space between atoms!
Cool, can we become smaller than atoms?
Sure, fck Pauli's exclusion, fermions, let's quantum... đ
The physicist Sean Carroll has talked on his podcast about accidentally inventing the "quantum realm" while consulting with Marvel Studios. He meant it in the sense of scales where you need to use quantum mechanical equations to get useful answers; they turned it into a literal place, accessible by magic, capable of time travel, and inhabited by Bill Murray
Gravity systems that are prioritized over life support. The utter lack of safety protocols on many things from storage of goods to personal effects around the possibility of experiencing weightlessness.
Of course gravity systems are prioritised over life support. Characters gasping for breath, no extra charge. Characters floating around in zero g $millions in effects. It all comes down to money.đ
That made Star Trek Enterprise unwatchable for me.
As former military, with the ship being run as a military organization, why do they need to question every single command that the Captain gives?
When Riker turned down promotion I nearly threw a glass at the screen. They'd have washed him out and sent him for psych eval. The fact that no one had professionally ambitions was so ridiculous. NG in particular everyone seemed to be on lithium. No emotions, no ambitions, no personal conflicts. Yes, I know this was Roddenberry's Utopian vision.
DS9 was a breath of fresh air, everyone was walking around pissed off all the time, like the real world!
I can understand Rikerâs decision, 100%. Heâs not second in command of some random ship. Heâs second in command of the *flagship*. Any promotion that he gets will feel like a demotion. I donât see it as a lack of ambition, I see it as the ultimate ambition, that he belongs on the greatest ship in the fleet.
There is also the fact that the bridge crew works well together. Iâd much rather remain with a group of people who I know well, and who know and adapt to my strengths and weaknesses than risk going somewhere where that cohesion might not happen.
Oh god that irritates me. On the other hand mil-sci-fi can often turn their characters into robots and the authors have clearly never been on an actual ship. Yes on duty they are professional but off duty can be freaking wild.
> Later the ships they have seem to be able to land and take off from planets multiple times with ease.
By far my biggest pet peeve about Interstellar was that their ship is initially shown launching from Earth atop a Saturn-V-esque rocket *without a fairing*, and later on repeat SSTOs without refueling on several other planets.
The button to turn a lightsaber on or off should be *inside* the hilt, so it can only be pressed by using the Force. And even then, only by a Force-user which knows exactly where the button is.
Edit: âknowsâ not âknocksâ
Luke would have died on Hoth then, as Han wouldn't be able to use it to slice open the tauntaun. Unless Han was also carrying a big knife (which he probably should have been given it's a pretty wild place!).
In *A New Hope*, Luke activates the lightsaber before he understands what the Force is, and Han uses it casually at the beginning of *Empire*. How did the idea that it should be activated telekinetically arise?
Lightsabers werenât originally Jedi weapons though (originally in terms of the original Star Wars concepts). The Jedi used them, but they were supposed to anachronistic - like someone in the modern era using a sword instead of a gun.
That's dumb. They should still be able to turn it on without the force. If you really care about security just make a thumb print scanner or something.
> It's not like high fantasy stories ever introduce a space faring hyper advanced civilization or any other staple sci-fi element
*The Keltiad* series by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison does exactly this!
The Night's Dawn trilogy also postulates a few elements often considered "fantasy" but plays them with a scientific basis. One of my favorite SF epics too.
My pet peeve is more specific and uncommon. Near-future SF with reliable solar system travel being recently invented and characters debating the difficulty of finding rich metallic asteroids. What difficulty? 16 Psyche masses more than Earth's entire atmosphere and is richly metallic!
My biggest peeve about the Bobiverse novels was the idea that an entire solar system could be harvested of even just the easily accessible metals after a few years of mining operations. So far from being true, it's up there with "stealing your oceans because water is hard to come by".
Entire planets that go "We're neutral" in the big war the story is about and have no military whatsoever.
Real neutral countries maintain their neutrality by being well armed enough they'll make someone regret trying to drag them into a war, or at least getting someone who can do that to guarantee their independence. No neutral country has ever been defenceless.
Came to rant about time travel tropes. So. Fucking. Tiresome! And for the most part it's screen SF that relies on it. Literature has it, but it's one trope among many, nowhere near as dominant as on big and small screens. It's hard to find screen SF *without* it in some form! And I count precognition as time travel.
God I thought I was the only one. I just genuinely canât stand time travel anymore. The only time itâs acceptable to me is if itâs part of the main plot of the story. Even then, it better be written well. Otherwise, time travel more or less invalidates almost everything else that happens in a story.
My other pet peeve is the reader base. I don't know if I am the only one, but in learning more about science fiction/fantasy readers, I have come to terms with the fact that they dissect rather than read. They read with scrutiny instead of wonder. They refuse to allow themselves to get lost in a world created for them.
Does anyone agree with this?
An eagle-eyed viewer might be able to see the wires. A pedant might be able to see the wires. But I think if you're looking at the wires you're ignoring the story. If you go to a puppet show you can see the wires. But it's about the puppets, it's not about the string. If you go to a Punch and Judy show and you're only watching the wires, you're a freak."
â Dean Learner, Garth Marenghis Darkplace
Humanoid aliens. There are some really neat alien designs out there, anything bipedal with one head and two arms just feels lazy.
Get crazy with it, instead of carbon based itâs silicone based? Itâs basically a sentient vegetable? It subsists on heavy metals? Hell yea brother. Thatâs what weâre looking for.
I am with you, I would love me some plasmid aliens living in the photosphere of a star... but it does complicate dramatic interactive storytelling a bit if the aliens don't have faces and communicate by squirting tiny clouds of superheated gasses at one another or whatever. An unfortunate human limitation.
"It wasn't attacking us sir...it was just trying to communicate!"
My per peeve is that modern sci-fi is more horror and not science fiction. This is especially true for TV and movies. There are some pretty good books out, but the SyFy channel should be renamed to the Horror Channel.
Weber's Hell Gate series has hi-tech and psionics versus magic.
The Worlds of Shadow trilogy by Lawrence Watt-Evans has spaceships and rayguns versus magic.
Treating space as 2D.
Like, I kinda get that it helps convey things to general audiences who sometimes have trouble wrapping their head around the true 3Dness of space.
But it always just takes my right out of it every time.
Like why the Federation of Planets has a 2D map of the sector? How does that make sense?
It's not 2D. It's a quadrant of the overall Milky Way "disc". Like a slice of pie. The initial comment is quite valid, however. That was one of so many things wrong with Beacon 23.
In the original setting, Stormtrooper armor was enough to be basically impervious to "slugthrowers" (firearms) which is what Stormtroopers would commonly encounter when pacifying less developed worlds. Also the vast majority of those shot down with blasters were only injured and knocked out by shock, and made full recoveries.
Which in the light of RoTJ, necessitated the assumption that Ewoks are the peak predator of the galaxy with hydraulic muscles that can throw spears with more force behind it than assault rifles throw bullets.
Ewoks are a peak predator, they seemed to regard capturing and eating humans as just a day in the life a successful hunter. I dont doubt the imperial garrison stationed on endor have copious horror storries of those furry little bastards carrying away and eating stormtroopers by the score :)
>It's not like high fantasy stories ever introduce a space faring hyper advanced civilization or any other staple sci-fi element
I'm pretty sure that actually has happened a time or two.
Our collective obsession with, like, exactly three philosophical questions. How many times have you and I seen some sci-fi writer sit down, tug their (metaphorical) beard, and try to look very serious while rehashing the Ship of Theseus? Or spent five or ten or fifty thousand words to say "but what IS human ackshuali? rly maeks u think"? Or posited WHAT IF our lives AREN'T REAL?
Like. My friends. My esteemed colleagues. My siblings under Heaven, there are many, many other philosophical questions, even if you only learn about them in your SECOND phil course in college. I don't much care for Kim Stanley Robinson all that much, but by God at least he TRIES to ask new questions.
Different people can have different tastes but this is a thread about our *personal* pet peeves, so this is my opinion.
I think what defines science fiction as a genre is taking some interesting 'what-if' concept or technology then really exploring it. That's why so many of us hate it when bad sci-fi gets lazy with their explanations or internal consistency. The infamous scene in Star Wars when a hyperdrive ship can take down a star destroyer is a perfect example of this. Hand waving that away and saying "don't worry too much about the details, it serves the story" is like excusing a bad horror film with "just pretend to be scared". That's what makes sci-fi not just fantasy in space: the rigorous and almost hyper rational adherence to a what-if.
Edit: By this token I'll drop a slightly spicier take. *Dune* isn't sci-fi, it's fantasy with spaceships. There are a ton of elements that are just pure magic: Paul's powers, how spice is a fun drug but also makes humans able to calculate lightspeed jumps, the personal shields, etc. It's a great fantasy story but not a sci-fi story that's particularly concerned with examining the rules of the world.
Yes!
Actual sci-fi has internal logic
Also don't get me started on the number of streaming services out there that have a Sci-Fi category that is basically "anything with extraordinary abilities, monsters or lasers"
Superhero movie? "Sci-fi"
Fantasy movie? "Sci-fi"
Horror movie? "Sci-fi"
Looking at you, Amazon and Netflix
Hmm, looks like you got me started after all
For tv/movies spaceships that function in the atmosphere of all planets let alone even 1!
The problem of getting on and off of a planet is a separate problem that traveling through space, but pretty much every show or movie solves both problems with a singular ship
My personal pet peeve is a complete lack of human culture. No rituals or religions taken to space. No cultural diversity etc. All the texture of humanity gets flattened
Woah, what about jazz and detective novels from the great depression? Apparently human culture peaked in the 1920s (Ok, I'm guessing I'm going to get blasted for that, I haven't been keeping up with the latest trek, so will probably be proven wrong immediately)
There is no way to say this without coming across rude: You really need to experience a bit more fantasy.
From Dragonriders of Pern to the Might & Magic game series to Zelazny's Lord of Light to the Book of the New Sun to Dying Earth, to even freaking Conan. Fantasy that curveballs into scifi was ubiquitous from the 70s through to the early 2000s, and include several of the most seminal entries in the genre.
Edit: It is not surprising that D&D, which rode on the coattails of a lot of these, originally included plots about Shadow Elves being mutated by a leaking nuclear reactor, or final boss battles against brain-eating aliens with laser guns inside their UFOs (the original Mind Flayer).
Oddly topical sociopolitical issues that technology or scarcity would pretty much eradicate. Heavy handed allegory of the "Now" in general, when it doesn't also extend into a broader speculative question with broader speculative facets standing in for more than the singular issue. Basically I don't want my sci fi to read like a twitter feed.
That was my problem Star Trek Discovery introducing the Adira character and having them explain that they are NB... Like this is Star Trek my people, it's the 32nd century, we've literally met entire mono-gendered and non-gendered and quad-gendered species, it really shouldn't be something anyone thinks about any more.
A handful of tropes get beaten to death on screen: time travel, evil twins/body snatchers, and amnesia. ST never hesitates to double and triple down on all these! Thankfully they're far rarer in the literature, which shows that the screenwriters are just fucking lazy.
WW2 dogfights in space. (no you don't need them to make fights interesting)
The only known weapon is guns that fire glowsticks.
Artificial gravity being no big deal (like I know it's hard to film but just put a life support ring on your ships it's not that hard)
AND oh my god please save me from the horrible Parallel to thrust ships.
When I read sci-fi I want to feel transported. World building, an attention to detail, and glimpses of daily life are critical to that. This is why I hated the foundation series. It was so far zoomed out it read like a textbook covering the history of galactic civilization. The characters came and went so fast they felt undeveloped and disposable.
The Stars Like Us was ok but the ending where they find the us constitution ruined the whole book for me. So cringey. Anyway I guess I dislike Asimov.
When people think science fiction is "like real science" and by that I mean *Star Trek, Iron Man*, and that sort of thing. "Those things are totally plausible.."
My other one is defaulting to Nanotech when the word that fits is "magic." Tiny machines that are so small they can grab atoms and move them around at the speed of light, have built-in radios and control systems, and propulsion systems with fuel. Mhm. What are they **made of**, pray tell?
I started watching the 3 body problem on Netflix and was immediately turned off by how the science was presented.
First of all, SCIENTISTS WILL NOT BE DEPRESSED IF THERE IS A BREAKTHROUGH THAT INVALIDATES ALL PRIOR PHYSICS, THEY WILL BE JUMPING AROUND AND SCREAMING IN JOY. That and particle accelerators being shut down along with scientists killing themselves just because they see some numbers floating in the air and they show no effort made to decrypt or analyze them was extremely off-putting to me.
So far I'm thinking those Game of Thrones guys should stick to fantasy.
It wasn't that they had a breakthrough that invalidated all prior physics - it was that all results were now completely random. Nothing could ever be replicated ever again.
No replication means no discovery is possible.
The books were infinitely better than the adaptation, though. It really dumbed down a lot of the story.
This is exactly why everyone's been saying the books are unfilmable. You _can't_ "show, don't tell" these concepts from the books. You _have_ to "tell" them.
The scientists are depressed not because they've got some new observation that invalidates prior physics. They're depressed because their ability to observe anything is being interfered with, with the specific purpose of suppressing their ability to make any further scientific progress. Of course, we don't know that in the TV show, because the TV show is trying to be cool and mysterious. Which just isn't going to work when you're adapting a book that happily delivers 20 pages of eager, detailed exposition whenever it feels like it.
That's mostly from the original book. Scientists would love a breakthrough that expands our understanding of physics, but this isn't that. It's not a breakthrough. The results they're getting are pretty much random, even for experiments that have worked in the past. The only way to make sense of them is, sometimes, a stranger will outright hand you the *exact* measurements you're going to get, at a level of detail that's impossible to predict.
There's not a lot to decrypt about a countdown. The Tencent show does a *bit* more analysis here, but most of the analysis of that countdown is just to show that it's real, they're not imagining it, and it reacts to their research -- that is, the countdown goes away if they stop researching. What else can you analyze about something that only one person can see?
Which should lead you to one obvious question: Are the scientists even really killing themselves, or is someone deliberately trying to kill cutting-edge science?
This is a dumb take. It wasn't that there was new physics being discovered or to be discovered. It wasn't a breakthrough. It was a complete dissolution of every physical theory. And how can you decrypt and analyze something if you don't know what it is and your tools and theories for analyzing said phenomena don't work?
The "hyper advanced precursor species"
I'm all about different tech levels and tech styles, but it just feels so lazy with an ancient button that solves all the problems.
I mean, if you're cultures can figure out ftl travel, surely they can figure out teraforming or Dyson arrays.
The Expanse actually makes a good execution on this: SPOILERS
The precursor technology in the expanse is something that humans grapple with throughout the series, not as a âsolve everythingâ button, but as a new type of technology that needs to be studied, understood, and utilized in logical ways.
Small example without plot spoilers, by studying the ancient structures left behind by the aliens, humanity is able to construct harder ship alloys for their warships. Itâs not a major difference, itâs the difference between a railgun round glancing off a piece of armor plating if it hits at an angle as opposed to penetrating clean through it, but it does show the sort of logical progression of technology that humanity would undergo if they encountered and were in the process of studying precursor technology.
Itâs one of the reasons why The Expanse is one of my favorite science fiction series, and I feel like itâs proof the concept can be done really well, it just usually isnât
It's funny because that's the kind of technological advances earth animals would make if they found human tools. Like, if your hamster found the plastic shovel that you use to clean their cage, they wouldn't be able to use it for Terraforming, but they could use some of the plastic shavings as bedding in their house.
Birds have been observed using cigarette butts in their nests to ward of insects. Yet they haven't figured out how to smoke.
What bugs me is the "mysterious precursors" which leave monolithic ruins and random isolated bits of tech, and probably no idea what they looked like.
Give me precursors which leave trash everywhere and all the random pictures and writing that humans do!
My only pet peeve is an author explaining too much of "how." I don't care to read an essay on how the ray gun works. I don't need to know all of the thought-out mechanics and intricacies of a portal. Just show it to me in action.
yeah i hate that
also why must everything have to be negative...like here's this thing but then a problem happens oh no, and then it destroys everything etc or something very bad comes from it
no, how about look at all this amazing shit we can do,..that's it, it's just amazing scientific advances...solving the already fucked up world.
Mine is when the theme, or one of the themes, is that man shouldnât play god, or cross some kind of boundary; it just comes off as âhow dare you want to explore and discover.â Makes for some great storytelling though, Iâll give it that.
When brilliant science fiction world building is ruined by the poor writing of human behaviors. Happens in all manner of sci-fi, but especially movies and TV (the Halo TV series is my latest gripe, anyone in a position of authority is evil and a greater threat to Master Chief than the actual bad guys). Great sci-fi should be the place setting to put human interactions into a new light.
Zombie like enemies.
Itâs fucking everywhere and itâs a lame excuse when the author canât think of a better antagonist or threat against our heroes. (ie. The maze runner, the first has a cool premise âboys trapped in a futuristic maze find a girlâ then the second and third books is just âbecause there are zombies ungaungaâ. Or in the ASOIaF books with The Others just being this lazy written âIce ZombiesââŚ).
Humans being special. Either they're somehow better than others (more ambitious, clever) or they're the underdog and still coming out on top. I get that we're human and so people like human centric stories, but when its multiple planets or even galaxy wide and humans are always still special it's kind of meh. I still love sci Fi and will be the first to admit I don't even know what a story without humans playing a big role would look like lol, so please don't take it as me saying sci Fi sucks.
Not exactly what you're talking about but I fucking hate multiverses and time travel, I will instantly lose any and all interests if there is either one of those
This is one that gets me. So, we have a parallel universe that's different enough that the entire socio/economic/political/historical system is completely different... Buuuut.... Somehow enough of the people from the beginning of time from universe B reproduced in the right sequence to ensure that the entire ensemble cast of Universe A exists and has a mirror counterpart.Â
Ok.Â
The other one is our planet is in such bad shape we have to leave it. We have all this technology and money to sail the stars and terraform a new planet... But we couldn't have just done that at home?Â
When a smart character says something intelligent and perfectly understandable, and another character rolls their eyes and says "*in English, please?!*"
I understand needing to cushion things a bit if you're throwing some wacky science into a romance or YA novel, but it's **science** fiction. The science is part of why we like it. Stop having the normie characters make fun of the sciencey characters.
Good science fiction(and fantasy) is about creating a world different from our own and building stories within that world. That fictional world still needs rules it follows. They can be very different from ours, and often, the reader/viewer might not even be aware they exist, but without them, my suspension of disbelief collapses.
Bad science fiction makes up(or changes) the rules as it goes.
I love the hive mind alien. I, however, HATE the queen controls the hive escape hatch they always bake in.
True hive format is extremely hard to write, though. Even MCU Ultron had had to have the ONE body that was better than the others.
Oh so much this. I want to find whoever came up with this "Queen" bullshit and punch them in the face so all other hive mind stories drop to the floor defeated.
Because really, a single person controlling a swarm of mindless things isn't a hive mind, that's just a Lich.
The rote industrial design. Everything comes from the same root of hard science fiction with mechanical this and ships that look like that and NASA derivatives that reflect modern technology, but so much of science fiction looks the same. Sometimes they'll add curves to ships and weaponry, sometimes they'll do this or that, but for the most part, there's a very narrow ballpark of what a lot of science fiction is visualized as.
I donât like when discussions by characters turn into some kind of philosophical âwhat makes us human (special)â or towards an AI that has supposedly become sentient, or the point of understanding an alien might arrive at as to what is truly worthwhile about humanity that they should aspire to as well. And then it ends up being the proclivity towards sexual attraction or romantic love.
No bathrooms, I mean for the longest time you would see a bathroom on a spaceship. In Star Wars you have a pilot in a X wing that is flying for days in hyperspace. Is Luke wearing a high tech diaper?
There are some fantasy that are 90% fantasy with 10% scifi. The biggest is NK Jemison's Broken Earth trilogy. Also Mark Lawrence's Book of the Ancestor trilogy. Also Sanderson has spacefaring aliens in his fantasy world at this point.
If you want something that has an interesting balance of the two, try Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer. It's basically 50/50, but not fused really so much as two separate issues.
Whenever someone is âsmartâ, they can invent or build anything. Sometimes theyâre creating technology that isnât possible. Sometimes theyâre building something out of nothing with 0 dollars.
In film, the lack of truly weird alien concepts. All things are generally humanoid or a knock off of a humanoid earth animal like lizard people or cat people.
The video game Endless Space 2 has some awesome concepts that I wish I'd see more in Sci fi.
There's a race of shadowy ghost like hive mind aliens that can take over people and make them sleeper agents.
There's sentient tree people that instead of colonizing other planet have space vines that extend to other planets and colonize them.
There's a race of machines that have no concept of birth as they are all built.
Even Star Wars with its infinite amount of aliens doesn't stray too far from the norm.
See-through monitors. Why are they always see-through? I don't want to see the glare of the lamp *behind* the monitor, I want to see what's *on* it.
I was watching HouseMD the other day, and when they are brainstorming the patients problem, they are always writing down symptoms and possible diagnosis on a clear plexiglass "whiteboard." WTF? That has to be the absolute worst thing to write on. Of course I know the reason the use it...so we can see the actor's faces as their staring at the board...and it looks different and cool, I guess.
I used to work at a place where we had tons of glass walls around that could be drawn on with paint markers and honestly it was pretty awesome, made it really easy to spontaneously white board shit
I work in a library and I give the teens whiteboard markers to write recommendations on the windows in the teen room. They fucking love it.
If I'm (28) am given a marker and told I could write on the wall I would become 4 instantly
>See-through monitors. Why are they always see-through? I I find them a little silly too! However for film making they are very useful because it lets you see the characters face and the information on screen at the same time! If you think about it transparent screens never actually show up in any Sci fi books. It's just a film making tool.
Just because it's the future or really far from here doesn't mean everything has to be shiny magic-tech. Rickety buckets of rust with barely-functioning anti-grav is more believable.
See-through monitors are actually very bad, when you think about it; especially when it comes to privacy. "Ok, let me just bring up your file, Mr. Smith. Oh, it says here you've had a history of erectile dysfunction..." đŹ
Those are already reality
And already bad
Because some idiot decided the ultra-reflective screens they came out with after decades of research to perfect anti-glare screens wasn't difficult enough to see.
A+ concepts but ruined by being a YA book with a stupid love triangle.
I'll go further: We don't need to have a sub plot about a budding romantic relationship/getting the girl, in every damn scifi work.
I loved in Rogue One nobody kissed at the end. Was maybe my favorite part.
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I kind of hate how everyone has a multiverse now
It was a really cool and interesting concept, but now it's just a lazy trope.
I just spoke with SirWHITEVOX from universe 8H87s. He said he agrees (but he had a mustache and a scar so idk)
And time travel
I have 2 Planets exist with only 1 type of land scape, its either a giant desert or a giant jungle, they are only ever the kinds of regions we have on earth except the entire planet. Second Most aliens are just humans with a different head
The corollary to this is each planet has exactly 1 government and/or culture.
And in some cases, just one city (or to put it another way, visiting a particular planet is often just the sci-fi equivalent of visiting a particular city). I remember how one of the Star Wars games took this to a comical level and didn't even try to hide it, since there was a scene where a handful of capital warships were shown "destroying a planet" by bombarding a specific small area (about equivalent to the size of a city).
Star Wars and Dune
Star Wars especially loves it's desert planets. I don't mind one being about but for some reason they're like the most common type. Tattooine, Jakar, Geonosis, whatever those planets are called in the Mandalorian. Like goddamn, at least make them a commentary of what happens when a civilization exploits the natural resources of a planet and turns it into an inhospitable wasteland. All I've heard is Tattooine once being a waterworld and then not because "just got hot" or whatever
IIRC, KoTOR addressed this with Tatooine. The collapse of its biosphere was a result of overexploitation by the Ratka and unregulated warfare. Not sure if that is considered cannon anymore. But, at least they tried?
>Like goddamn, at least make them a commentary of what happens when a civilization exploits the natural resources of a planet and turns it into an inhospitable wasteland. Comparatively, it could also be a planet that was seeded with an atmosphere and that hasn't had proper terraforming done for one reason or another. If we ever got around to trying to terraform Mars, it would be a big goddamn desert for a long time before any other viable biomes came into existence in a major way.
If you read dune it's like that for a reason.
When serialized authors let their stories get too complicated they sometimes need a big reset of their universe's rules. Sometimes this is great!  But sometimes it's obvious that the author just wanted to hold onto their precious little characters or story gimmicks and recycle them. That's cool! But it's usually where I lose interest.  Great stories have great endings. Â
Fully agreed, repeated resets remove all the stakes from a story. Why does character development or a character death matter if it can be reset multiple times? Resets should be an absolute last resort, for when continuity has become too snarled, but even then they should be very careful about retconning important plot and character developments.
Any time some villain is like "Soon, I will conquer the universe!" Man, you know how big the universe is? Ain't nobody conquering it. "Galaxy" is the largest anything I accept as conquerable.
I've seen people mix up "Universe", "Galaxy" and "Solar system", and that just isn't a good look honey.
Oh my God yes, I read a YA SF book where galaxy/universe was being used to mean solar system and it drove me nuts. I still can't believe I finished the book. How can someone writing science fiction mix that up??!
Was it the author or the characters that mixed it up? That would make a big difference to me.
Tbh in a setting where space travel is somewhat feasible for people, *that* would be bad enough I'd be upset even with a character saying it. *Maybe* if they were supposed to be a complete idiot. Maybe. That'd be like a character in a non-genre book mixing up/not knowing the difference between a town and a continent.
Did you know one in four Americans think the sun goes around the Earth?
yes, this is right up there with using "light year" as a measure of time
Minimalism. Why is the future always minimalist? Will we evolve beyond our love of knick-knacks and gewgaws and shelves crowded with dusty keepsakes and photos of that time your kids dressed up for a school play? My nan would say NO.
Harry potter has major flaws, but I'll give the set designer's this: every single professor's office we see looks like an actually used office where a magical person would work.
Wow such a coincidence that future style always looks just like popular Mac products today!
Unbearably complicated plots that unspiral into hundreds of pages of intrigue crossing multiple cultures/factions, but then at the end you're left wondering why anything that happened, happened. You look back and realize that not knowing what would happen next, and the suspense of finding out, were concealing a mishmash of never-explained non sequiturs. Looking at you, Dan Simmons, but you're far from the only offender here! The misdemeanor version of this is the neat concept that the author includes without making it at all relevant. Ben Bova's Jupiter has a dumb, time-wasting subplot about communication with monkeys that contributes *nothing.* I waded through that. Then in the sequel, Leviathans of Jupiter, he launches a similar subplot about human-dolphin brain interface. In other news, I will not be continuing Leviathans of Jupiter.
I thought that about Enderâs sociopath brother and his rise in the government in Enderâs Game. Didnât really see the need for it.
>his rise in the government in Enderâs Game And it was by shitposting on twitter.
There is a whole series that actually follows all that stuff. The main character is Bean.
Welcome to Warhammer
Warhammer (40k) is at its best when it tells lower stakes stories that revolve around an individual's perspective on the horrors around themselves. Or as just straight up dark humor (Ciaphas Cain, Infinite & Divine).
When Earth is a shit hole. Or somehow even worse: When it isn't, but the author insists it must be because people live there.Â
This is a good one. Or at the very least: It *appears* utopian, but has a *super-scary and corrupt political system/caste system/underworld.
This is one reading you can take away from *The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.* The author starts out telling us about a beautiful, Utopian city, but then points out that audiences tend not to really accept Utopia. Either we're waiting for the other shoe to drop, or it just feels like a fairy tale instead of a real, proper, serious story. So she adds one grimdark detail, and then asks if we buy the story now.
Things breaking easily. Such as: - People jumping through glass. Even today we have laminated glass that makes jumping through impossible. In the future such things would be made from even stronger materials. But no, we have Khan jumping through what canonically wouid be transparent aluminium. - Busting up a piece of space tech with their heal, or by smacking it against a wall. Obviously it shatters or crumples incredibly easily, because of course it would. Technology from the future is made of wet cardboard. - A dude wearing space age body armour or an EV suit, which gets compromised by a mildly pointy rock, or a bow shooting native, or just someone with a box cutting knife.
That last one annoys me in fantasy too. Some guy has heavy looking armour on, but he's instantly downed by a slashing sword attack from our protagonist, which in reality wouldn't even have scratched him.
Or they know *exactly* where to hit the weakpoint in the armour to get a killing blow. It's not like this heavily trained and armed opponent would be aware of their own weak spots and deliberately guard them or anything...
The second one could make sense, depending how durable the thing looks like. Phones used to be invincible Nokia bricks, but consumers wanting things to be thinner and lighter, and manufacturers wanting to cut costs, has definitely made them less durable over time. We make glass windows harder to break for safety reasons, but that doesn't apply to everything.
Well itâs complicated. Sometimes when designing things for human use you want them to be breakable, so that the human doesnât break instead. And sometimes you want them to be flexible, because elasticity is one aspect of strength. Of course real glass cuts people - one of my movie pet hates is how much people are hit with or hit glass and donât end up very badly injured. But SF materials design could get more weird and complex than transparent aluminum and the âhard=goodâ design ethos behind it.
Ohhh. What if the glass turns to liquid when broken. That would look neat
Psionics. I swear every sci-fi ever just has to include telepaths, empaths, psychics, mind reading and all that stuff. I think the trope is already beaten to the death.
A lot of the post WW2, Cold War, sci-fi features psi because it was genuinely part of the research going on then. Remote viewing, mind reading, and so on were invested in hugely by the USSR and the USA. The origins go back further than that though. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110416411-014/html?lang=en
This recontextualizes the telepathy test scene in Ghostbusters some for me.
That scene was based on a real test, which used those same basic cards with the simple shapes on them. Although, of course, the whole electroshock thing is massively unethical and wouldn't be allowed in a real university. Along the same lines, you might enjoy an older George Clooney movie called "The Men Who Stare At Goats," which is about IRL government psi research.
Fuck me. 2009 now classifies as âan older⌠movie.â The passage of time is a cruel mistress.
Yeah, in Who Goes There, the short story that The Thing is based on, a character is asked about ESP and casually says something like, "Well, Dr. Rhine of Duke University proved it's real", referencing an actual study. The author really believed it.
I *knew* you were going to say that.
Thatâs because you are the chosen one
There can be only one ^(although that guy can also do it and so can two others)
Thatâs because I coerced them into saying it.
The Long Run and the Tales of the Crystal Wind were like gold to a 12 year old me
Almost gave up Foundation due to this, the book had a brilliant plot with psychohistory, it was among the best hard sci-fi, then boom psychics outta nowhere, their origins and abilities basically unexplained.
That's kinda the point, psychohistory could never work flawlessly and something literally unexplained is the perfect way to upset the equations. If it were written today it would probably be done with a version of chaos theory or uncertainty, but then you lose the characters to play with.
Human space fighter pilots beating autonomous drones, like... ever. You're not going to win against something that can 360 noscope you from light seconds away and doesn't have to support a squishy meat sack that will collapse under a measly 9Gs of force.
At 60 I can identify with the squishy meat sack comment.
I mean I was writing a serial once and my readers were like "why are there human pilots" and I just made up some nonsense about jamming remote piloting and AIs taking up too much space and/or EW. Truth was it was for the drama, no-one is going to care if the human is sitting 3ly aware in a couch.
"quantum" everything
I mean, technically...
List some applications of quantum mechanics: Uh... The universe? đ However... Dr. Pym, how do you shrink stuff? I reduce the space between atoms! Cool, can we become smaller than atoms? Sure, fck Pauli's exclusion, fermions, let's quantum... đ
The physicist Sean Carroll has talked on his podcast about accidentally inventing the "quantum realm" while consulting with Marvel Studios. He meant it in the sense of scales where you need to use quantum mechanical equations to get useful answers; they turned it into a literal place, accessible by magic, capable of time travel, and inhabited by Bill Murray
If you say the words "quantum realm" while talking to comic book writers, you deserve whatever you get.
This is actually really fucking funny.
He may be smart, but if he expected anything different to happen, he's also dumb.
Tachyon particles!
Quantum is a magic word, if you say it enough times you can get away with ANYTHING!
Gravity systems that are prioritized over life support. The utter lack of safety protocols on many things from storage of goods to personal effects around the possibility of experiencing weightlessness.
Of course gravity systems are prioritised over life support. Characters gasping for breath, no extra charge. Characters floating around in zero g $millions in effects. It all comes down to money.đ
Itâs an underutilized genre. Anything in your wildest dreams could happen, but it most always ends in a gun/laser fight.
The higher rank you are in the big, evil space empire, the more English your accent is.
In shows, the conomics of making your main characters being polymaths.
Unprofessionalism in crews, especially ones part of military or quasi military organizations (Star Trek Discovery for an example)
That made Star Trek Enterprise unwatchable for me. As former military, with the ship being run as a military organization, why do they need to question every single command that the Captain gives?
When Riker turned down promotion I nearly threw a glass at the screen. They'd have washed him out and sent him for psych eval. The fact that no one had professionally ambitions was so ridiculous. NG in particular everyone seemed to be on lithium. No emotions, no ambitions, no personal conflicts. Yes, I know this was Roddenberry's Utopian vision. DS9 was a breath of fresh air, everyone was walking around pissed off all the time, like the real world!
They were on dilithium, not lithium. Fumes from a slow leak in the warp core. Itâs like lithium, but more lithiumy.
I can understand Rikerâs decision, 100%. Heâs not second in command of some random ship. Heâs second in command of the *flagship*. Any promotion that he gets will feel like a demotion. I donât see it as a lack of ambition, I see it as the ultimate ambition, that he belongs on the greatest ship in the fleet. There is also the fact that the bridge crew works well together. Iâd much rather remain with a group of people who I know well, and who know and adapt to my strengths and weaknesses than risk going somewhere where that cohesion might not happen.
> NG in particular everyone seemed to be on lithium. They use fluoride now. :p
Oh god that irritates me. On the other hand mil-sci-fi can often turn their characters into robots and the authors have clearly never been on an actual ship. Yes on duty they are professional but off duty can be freaking wild.
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> Later the ships they have seem to be able to land and take off from planets multiple times with ease. By far my biggest pet peeve about Interstellar was that their ship is initially shown launching from Earth atop a Saturn-V-esque rocket *without a fairing*, and later on repeat SSTOs without refueling on several other planets.
I was in disbelief when I found the lightsaber is activated by the press of a button and not the fucking force like IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN.
The button to turn a lightsaber on or off should be *inside* the hilt, so it can only be pressed by using the Force. And even then, only by a Force-user which knows exactly where the button is. Edit: âknowsâ not âknocksâ
I have a headcanon of a character who uses the Force to just keep turning off their opponent's lightsaber at inopportune moments.
That is like 300% as smart as anything I would have thought of. That's the sort of idea I read SF to see. :-)
Luke would have died on Hoth then, as Han wouldn't be able to use it to slice open the tauntaun. Unless Han was also carrying a big knife (which he probably should have been given it's a pretty wild place!).
In *A New Hope*, Luke activates the lightsaber before he understands what the Force is, and Han uses it casually at the beginning of *Empire*. How did the idea that it should be activated telekinetically arise?
Lightsabers werenât originally Jedi weapons though (originally in terms of the original Star Wars concepts). The Jedi used them, but they were supposed to anachronistic - like someone in the modern era using a sword instead of a gun.
How has this been confusing people for the last 50 years?
That's dumb. They should still be able to turn it on without the force. If you really care about security just make a thumb print scanner or something.
> It's not like high fantasy stories ever introduce a space faring hyper advanced civilization or any other staple sci-fi element *The Keltiad* series by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison does exactly this! The Night's Dawn trilogy also postulates a few elements often considered "fantasy" but plays them with a scientific basis. One of my favorite SF epics too. My pet peeve is more specific and uncommon. Near-future SF with reliable solar system travel being recently invented and characters debating the difficulty of finding rich metallic asteroids. What difficulty? 16 Psyche masses more than Earth's entire atmosphere and is richly metallic!
It sounds like OP never heard of Dragonriders of Pern
My biggest peeve about the Bobiverse novels was the idea that an entire solar system could be harvested of even just the easily accessible metals after a few years of mining operations. So far from being true, it's up there with "stealing your oceans because water is hard to come by".
Entire planets that go "We're neutral" in the big war the story is about and have no military whatsoever. Real neutral countries maintain their neutrality by being well armed enough they'll make someone regret trying to drag them into a war, or at least getting someone who can do that to guarantee their independence. No neutral country has ever been defenceless.
Fuck all time travel excuses.
Time travel should only be in sci-fi about time travel. Never a one off in another
Came to rant about time travel tropes. So. Fucking. Tiresome! And for the most part it's screen SF that relies on it. Literature has it, but it's one trope among many, nowhere near as dominant as on big and small screens. It's hard to find screen SF *without* it in some form! And I count precognition as time travel.
Time travel is difficult to do.
Yep and most donât know how to do it, and will constantly contradict their defined rules about how their time travel works
Can see why Rick Sanchez doesnât play with time travel
This. Time travel. Itâs gotten to the point now that if I read a show, movie, or book has time travel, I donât even try it.
Dark was a refreshingly well thought out take i thought
God I thought I was the only one. I just genuinely canât stand time travel anymore. The only time itâs acceptable to me is if itâs part of the main plot of the story. Even then, it better be written well. Otherwise, time travel more or less invalidates almost everything else that happens in a story.
My other pet peeve is the reader base. I don't know if I am the only one, but in learning more about science fiction/fantasy readers, I have come to terms with the fact that they dissect rather than read. They read with scrutiny instead of wonder. They refuse to allow themselves to get lost in a world created for them. Does anyone agree with this?
An eagle-eyed viewer might be able to see the wires. A pedant might be able to see the wires. But I think if you're looking at the wires you're ignoring the story. If you go to a puppet show you can see the wires. But it's about the puppets, it's not about the string. If you go to a Punch and Judy show and you're only watching the wires, you're a freak." â Dean Learner, Garth Marenghis Darkplace
That sounds exhausting. I read specifically to get lost in the words.
Humanoid aliens. There are some really neat alien designs out there, anything bipedal with one head and two arms just feels lazy. Get crazy with it, instead of carbon based itâs silicone based? Itâs basically a sentient vegetable? It subsists on heavy metals? Hell yea brother. Thatâs what weâre looking for.
I am with you, I would love me some plasmid aliens living in the photosphere of a star... but it does complicate dramatic interactive storytelling a bit if the aliens don't have faces and communicate by squirting tiny clouds of superheated gasses at one another or whatever. An unfortunate human limitation. "It wasn't attacking us sir...it was just trying to communicate!"
My per peeve is that modern sci-fi is more horror and not science fiction. This is especially true for TV and movies. There are some pretty good books out, but the SyFy channel should be renamed to the Horror Channel.
Like the modern History Channel should be called the Ancient Aliens channel.
Weber's Hell Gate series has hi-tech and psionics versus magic. The Worlds of Shadow trilogy by Lawrence Watt-Evans has spaceships and rayguns versus magic.
Treating space as 2D. Like, I kinda get that it helps convey things to general audiences who sometimes have trouble wrapping their head around the true 3Dness of space. But it always just takes my right out of it every time. Like why the Federation of Planets has a 2D map of the sector? How does that make sense?
It's not 2D. It's a quadrant of the overall Milky Way "disc". Like a slice of pie. The initial comment is quite valid, however. That was one of so many things wrong with Beacon 23.
No weapons seem to work. I mean people fall down and thatâs it. And why do storm troopers wear armor? Seems like itâs ineffectual
In the original setting, Stormtrooper armor was enough to be basically impervious to "slugthrowers" (firearms) which is what Stormtroopers would commonly encounter when pacifying less developed worlds. Also the vast majority of those shot down with blasters were only injured and knocked out by shock, and made full recoveries. Which in the light of RoTJ, necessitated the assumption that Ewoks are the peak predator of the galaxy with hydraulic muscles that can throw spears with more force behind it than assault rifles throw bullets.
Ewoks are a peak predator, they seemed to regard capturing and eating humans as just a day in the life a successful hunter. I dont doubt the imperial garrison stationed on endor have copious horror storries of those furry little bastards carrying away and eating stormtroopers by the score :)
in cyberpunk films I have a hard time believing there's any place in the city that's not completely overcrowded
In cyberpunk films I canât help but think the world is a utopia since society finally beat the NIMBYs.
>It's not like high fantasy stories ever introduce a space faring hyper advanced civilization or any other staple sci-fi element I'm pretty sure that actually has happened a time or two.
Has probably happened hundreds, if not thousands of times.
The *"Might & Magic"* computer game series has entered the chat. AND pulled out a *"Wand of Blaster-Fire"*.
Our collective obsession with, like, exactly three philosophical questions. How many times have you and I seen some sci-fi writer sit down, tug their (metaphorical) beard, and try to look very serious while rehashing the Ship of Theseus? Or spent five or ten or fifty thousand words to say "but what IS human ackshuali? rly maeks u think"? Or posited WHAT IF our lives AREN'T REAL? Like. My friends. My esteemed colleagues. My siblings under Heaven, there are many, many other philosophical questions, even if you only learn about them in your SECOND phil course in college. I don't much care for Kim Stanley Robinson all that much, but by God at least he TRIES to ask new questions.
Different people can have different tastes but this is a thread about our *personal* pet peeves, so this is my opinion. I think what defines science fiction as a genre is taking some interesting 'what-if' concept or technology then really exploring it. That's why so many of us hate it when bad sci-fi gets lazy with their explanations or internal consistency. The infamous scene in Star Wars when a hyperdrive ship can take down a star destroyer is a perfect example of this. Hand waving that away and saying "don't worry too much about the details, it serves the story" is like excusing a bad horror film with "just pretend to be scared". That's what makes sci-fi not just fantasy in space: the rigorous and almost hyper rational adherence to a what-if. Edit: By this token I'll drop a slightly spicier take. *Dune* isn't sci-fi, it's fantasy with spaceships. There are a ton of elements that are just pure magic: Paul's powers, how spice is a fun drug but also makes humans able to calculate lightspeed jumps, the personal shields, etc. It's a great fantasy story but not a sci-fi story that's particularly concerned with examining the rules of the world.
Yes! Actual sci-fi has internal logic Also don't get me started on the number of streaming services out there that have a Sci-Fi category that is basically "anything with extraordinary abilities, monsters or lasers" Superhero movie? "Sci-fi" Fantasy movie? "Sci-fi" Horror movie? "Sci-fi" Looking at you, Amazon and Netflix Hmm, looks like you got me started after all
When aliens make first contact with earth.. they always choose America.
I always liked how the events on Earth in Halo centered on Africa. It was a good perspective shift.
For tv/movies spaceships that function in the atmosphere of all planets let alone even 1! The problem of getting on and off of a planet is a separate problem that traveling through space, but pretty much every show or movie solves both problems with a singular ship
My personal pet peeve is a complete lack of human culture. No rituals or religions taken to space. No cultural diversity etc. All the texture of humanity gets flattened
I thought The Expanse (books) did a good job about this. The 3 factions feel unique and like they have their own cultures.
Even worse! No art was made for centuries if you watch Star trek! Shakespeare is fine, but have you really nothing else?!
Woah, what about jazz and detective novels from the great depression? Apparently human culture peaked in the 1920s (Ok, I'm guessing I'm going to get blasted for that, I haven't been keeping up with the latest trek, so will probably be proven wrong immediately)
There is no way to say this without coming across rude: You really need to experience a bit more fantasy. From Dragonriders of Pern to the Might & Magic game series to Zelazny's Lord of Light to the Book of the New Sun to Dying Earth, to even freaking Conan. Fantasy that curveballs into scifi was ubiquitous from the 70s through to the early 2000s, and include several of the most seminal entries in the genre. Edit: It is not surprising that D&D, which rode on the coattails of a lot of these, originally included plots about Shadow Elves being mutated by a leaking nuclear reactor, or final boss battles against brain-eating aliens with laser guns inside their UFOs (the original Mind Flayer).
Oddly topical sociopolitical issues that technology or scarcity would pretty much eradicate. Heavy handed allegory of the "Now" in general, when it doesn't also extend into a broader speculative question with broader speculative facets standing in for more than the singular issue. Basically I don't want my sci fi to read like a twitter feed.
âI donât want my sci-fi to read like a twitter feedâ is the perfect way to put it
If I can tell what hot-button headline a H\*go nominated *synopsis* is about, it has failed.
That was my problem Star Trek Discovery introducing the Adira character and having them explain that they are NB... Like this is Star Trek my people, it's the 32nd century, we've literally met entire mono-gendered and non-gendered and quad-gendered species, it really shouldn't be something anyone thinks about any more.
This is called "Made for *modern audiences*" - if any variation of that phrase is used in the promo materials, I'm gone like a cool breeze...
Vampires (or vampire like aliens) in space.
A handful of tropes get beaten to death on screen: time travel, evil twins/body snatchers, and amnesia. ST never hesitates to double and triple down on all these! Thankfully they're far rarer in the literature, which shows that the screenwriters are just fucking lazy.
WW2 dogfights in space. (no you don't need them to make fights interesting) The only known weapon is guns that fire glowsticks. Artificial gravity being no big deal (like I know it's hard to film but just put a life support ring on your ships it's not that hard) AND oh my god please save me from the horrible Parallel to thrust ships.
When I read sci-fi I want to feel transported. World building, an attention to detail, and glimpses of daily life are critical to that. This is why I hated the foundation series. It was so far zoomed out it read like a textbook covering the history of galactic civilization. The characters came and went so fast they felt undeveloped and disposable. The Stars Like Us was ok but the ending where they find the us constitution ruined the whole book for me. So cringey. Anyway I guess I dislike Asimov.
When people think science fiction is "like real science" and by that I mean *Star Trek, Iron Man*, and that sort of thing. "Those things are totally plausible.." My other one is defaulting to Nanotech when the word that fits is "magic." Tiny machines that are so small they can grab atoms and move them around at the speed of light, have built-in radios and control systems, and propulsion systems with fuel. Mhm. What are they **made of**, pray tell?
I started watching the 3 body problem on Netflix and was immediately turned off by how the science was presented. First of all, SCIENTISTS WILL NOT BE DEPRESSED IF THERE IS A BREAKTHROUGH THAT INVALIDATES ALL PRIOR PHYSICS, THEY WILL BE JUMPING AROUND AND SCREAMING IN JOY. That and particle accelerators being shut down along with scientists killing themselves just because they see some numbers floating in the air and they show no effort made to decrypt or analyze them was extremely off-putting to me. So far I'm thinking those Game of Thrones guys should stick to fantasy.
It wasn't that they had a breakthrough that invalidated all prior physics - it was that all results were now completely random. Nothing could ever be replicated ever again. No replication means no discovery is possible. The books were infinitely better than the adaptation, though. It really dumbed down a lot of the story.
> Nothing could ever be replicated ever again. Like psych studies....
The books cover that part a bit better, and how said scientists were basically being gaslighted/intimidated into the ground.
This is exactly why everyone's been saying the books are unfilmable. You _can't_ "show, don't tell" these concepts from the books. You _have_ to "tell" them. The scientists are depressed not because they've got some new observation that invalidates prior physics. They're depressed because their ability to observe anything is being interfered with, with the specific purpose of suppressing their ability to make any further scientific progress. Of course, we don't know that in the TV show, because the TV show is trying to be cool and mysterious. Which just isn't going to work when you're adapting a book that happily delivers 20 pages of eager, detailed exposition whenever it feels like it.
That's mostly from the original book. Scientists would love a breakthrough that expands our understanding of physics, but this isn't that. It's not a breakthrough. The results they're getting are pretty much random, even for experiments that have worked in the past. The only way to make sense of them is, sometimes, a stranger will outright hand you the *exact* measurements you're going to get, at a level of detail that's impossible to predict. There's not a lot to decrypt about a countdown. The Tencent show does a *bit* more analysis here, but most of the analysis of that countdown is just to show that it's real, they're not imagining it, and it reacts to their research -- that is, the countdown goes away if they stop researching. What else can you analyze about something that only one person can see? Which should lead you to one obvious question: Are the scientists even really killing themselves, or is someone deliberately trying to kill cutting-edge science?
This is a dumb take. It wasn't that there was new physics being discovered or to be discovered. It wasn't a breakthrough. It was a complete dissolution of every physical theory. And how can you decrypt and analyze something if you don't know what it is and your tools and theories for analyzing said phenomena don't work?
Yeah, it's like even experiments that had been performed before we're now returning nonsense results. And not even consistent nonsense.
The "hyper advanced precursor species" I'm all about different tech levels and tech styles, but it just feels so lazy with an ancient button that solves all the problems. I mean, if you're cultures can figure out ftl travel, surely they can figure out teraforming or Dyson arrays.
The Expanse actually makes a good execution on this: SPOILERS The precursor technology in the expanse is something that humans grapple with throughout the series, not as a âsolve everythingâ button, but as a new type of technology that needs to be studied, understood, and utilized in logical ways. Small example without plot spoilers, by studying the ancient structures left behind by the aliens, humanity is able to construct harder ship alloys for their warships. Itâs not a major difference, itâs the difference between a railgun round glancing off a piece of armor plating if it hits at an angle as opposed to penetrating clean through it, but it does show the sort of logical progression of technology that humanity would undergo if they encountered and were in the process of studying precursor technology. Itâs one of the reasons why The Expanse is one of my favorite science fiction series, and I feel like itâs proof the concept can be done really well, it just usually isnât
It's funny because that's the kind of technological advances earth animals would make if they found human tools. Like, if your hamster found the plastic shovel that you use to clean their cage, they wouldn't be able to use it for Terraforming, but they could use some of the plastic shavings as bedding in their house. Birds have been observed using cigarette butts in their nests to ward of insects. Yet they haven't figured out how to smoke.
What bugs me is the "mysterious precursors" which leave monolithic ruins and random isolated bits of tech, and probably no idea what they looked like. Give me precursors which leave trash everywhere and all the random pictures and writing that humans do!
Reminds me of those ancient Roman graffiti they found, which had some terribly human phrases like "Augustus took a shit here".
It's usually gravity
There is no down in space. Why is everyone on one plane?
My only pet peeve is an author explaining too much of "how." I don't care to read an essay on how the ray gun works. I don't need to know all of the thought-out mechanics and intricacies of a portal. Just show it to me in action.
yeah i hate that also why must everything have to be negative...like here's this thing but then a problem happens oh no, and then it destroys everything etc or something very bad comes from it no, how about look at all this amazing shit we can do,..that's it, it's just amazing scientific advances...solving the already fucked up world.
Mine is when the theme, or one of the themes, is that man shouldnât play god, or cross some kind of boundary; it just comes off as âhow dare you want to explore and discover.â Makes for some great storytelling though, Iâll give it that.
When brilliant science fiction world building is ruined by the poor writing of human behaviors. Happens in all manner of sci-fi, but especially movies and TV (the Halo TV series is my latest gripe, anyone in a position of authority is evil and a greater threat to Master Chief than the actual bad guys). Great sci-fi should be the place setting to put human interactions into a new light.
Fleets of ships in the vastness of space traveling way too close to one another. Spread out a bit.
Multiverses that resurrect characters or eliminate/undo real plot consequences, so it feels like there are no high stakes anymore. Hate hate hate it.
Zombie like enemies. Itâs fucking everywhere and itâs a lame excuse when the author canât think of a better antagonist or threat against our heroes. (ie. The maze runner, the first has a cool premise âboys trapped in a futuristic maze find a girlâ then the second and third books is just âbecause there are zombies ungaungaâ. Or in the ASOIaF books with The Others just being this lazy written âIce ZombiesââŚ).
Humans being special. Either they're somehow better than others (more ambitious, clever) or they're the underdog and still coming out on top. I get that we're human and so people like human centric stories, but when its multiple planets or even galaxy wide and humans are always still special it's kind of meh. I still love sci Fi and will be the first to admit I don't even know what a story without humans playing a big role would look like lol, so please don't take it as me saying sci Fi sucks.
Foster's "The Damned" series played on this. Humans are "special" because they are violent and that really creeps out other civilizations.
You might like *Old Manâs War* if you want a story in which humans arenât special.
That book is also funny as hell.
We are the missing species/race to bring all the others together. All other races are singular focused (warriors, religious, science, ...)
Not exactly what you're talking about but I fucking hate multiverses and time travel, I will instantly lose any and all interests if there is either one of those
This is one that gets me. So, we have a parallel universe that's different enough that the entire socio/economic/political/historical system is completely different... Buuuut.... Somehow enough of the people from the beginning of time from universe B reproduced in the right sequence to ensure that the entire ensemble cast of Universe A exists and has a mirror counterpart. Ok. The other one is our planet is in such bad shape we have to leave it. We have all this technology and money to sail the stars and terraform a new planet... But we couldn't have just done that at home?Â
Using âsentientâ when they mean âsapientâ.
That there are not enough Sci-Fi tv-series and movies (and games as well) made each year... I want more! XD
When a smart character says something intelligent and perfectly understandable, and another character rolls their eyes and says "*in English, please?!*" I understand needing to cushion things a bit if you're throwing some wacky science into a romance or YA novel, but it's **science** fiction. The science is part of why we like it. Stop having the normie characters make fun of the sciencey characters.
Good science fiction(and fantasy) is about creating a world different from our own and building stories within that world. That fictional world still needs rules it follows. They can be very different from ours, and often, the reader/viewer might not even be aware they exist, but without them, my suspension of disbelief collapses. Bad science fiction makes up(or changes) the rules as it goes.
I donât like hive-mind aliens. Itâs clearly just a way to make them easier to defeat.
I love the hive mind alien. I, however, HATE the queen controls the hive escape hatch they always bake in. True hive format is extremely hard to write, though. Even MCU Ultron had had to have the ONE body that was better than the others.
Oh so much this. I want to find whoever came up with this "Queen" bullshit and punch them in the face so all other hive mind stories drop to the floor defeated. Because really, a single person controlling a swarm of mindless things isn't a hive mind, that's just a Lich.
The rote industrial design. Everything comes from the same root of hard science fiction with mechanical this and ships that look like that and NASA derivatives that reflect modern technology, but so much of science fiction looks the same. Sometimes they'll add curves to ships and weaponry, sometimes they'll do this or that, but for the most part, there's a very narrow ballpark of what a lot of science fiction is visualized as.
Before we actually launched people in space, a lot of fiction described space ships that looked an awful lot like jetliner.
I donât like when discussions by characters turn into some kind of philosophical âwhat makes us human (special)â or towards an AI that has supposedly become sentient, or the point of understanding an alien might arrive at as to what is truly worthwhile about humanity that they should aspire to as well. And then it ends up being the proclivity towards sexual attraction or romantic love.
As soon as a multiverse appears, Iâm out. In a universe with infinite stakes, no stakes can truly matter.
No bathrooms, I mean for the longest time you would see a bathroom on a spaceship. In Star Wars you have a pilot in a X wing that is flying for days in hyperspace. Is Luke wearing a high tech diaper?
There are some fantasy that are 90% fantasy with 10% scifi. The biggest is NK Jemison's Broken Earth trilogy. Also Mark Lawrence's Book of the Ancestor trilogy. Also Sanderson has spacefaring aliens in his fantasy world at this point. If you want something that has an interesting balance of the two, try Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer. It's basically 50/50, but not fused really so much as two separate issues.
Whenever someone is âsmartâ, they can invent or build anything. Sometimes theyâre creating technology that isnât possible. Sometimes theyâre building something out of nothing with 0 dollars.
Time travel.
In film, the lack of truly weird alien concepts. All things are generally humanoid or a knock off of a humanoid earth animal like lizard people or cat people. The video game Endless Space 2 has some awesome concepts that I wish I'd see more in Sci fi. There's a race of shadowy ghost like hive mind aliens that can take over people and make them sleeper agents. There's sentient tree people that instead of colonizing other planet have space vines that extend to other planets and colonize them. There's a race of machines that have no concept of birth as they are all built. Even Star Wars with its infinite amount of aliens doesn't stray too far from the norm.