So I am currently rewatching Stargate SG1 and thinking about certain things that always rub me the wrong way when watching or reading SciFi. Now, I know that Stargate in particular doesn’t really take itself too seriously and shouldn’t be scrutinized too much. It’s also a bit older. But there are still some things that even modern SciFi-Worlds featuring outer space and aliens have or lack, that always slightly rub me the wrong way. I would love to hear your opinion.
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Lack of any form of camera surveillance technology I mean, come on, the Goa’uld couldn’t figure out a way to install their equivalent of cameras all over their battle ships in order to monitor it? They have forms of video/picture transmitting technology. Star Trek also seems to lack any form of video surveillance. (I’m not up to date with the newest series.) Yes, I get that having a crew member physically go to a cargo bay and check out the situation is better for dramatic purposes. But it always rubs me the wrong way that they have to do that. I would just love to see a SciFi-Series set in space where all space ships are equipped with proper camera technology. Not just some vague “sensor” that tells the crew “something is wrong, but you will still have to physically go there and see it for yourself”. I want the captain of a space ship to have access to the 200,000 cameras strategically placed all over the ship to monitor it.
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Languages I have studied linguistics, learned several foreign languages and lived in a foreign country for a while, so my perspective is influenced by that. I always find it weird when everybody “just talks English”. Yes, I get that it’s easier to write stories in which all characters can just freely interact with each other. But it’s always so weird to me when an explorer comes to a foreign planet and everybody just talks their language. At least make up an explanation for it! “We found this translator device in the space ship that crashed on earth”. There you go. I love the Stargate Movie where Daniel Jackson figures out how to communicate with the people on Abydos. During the series most worlds will just speak English, with some random words in other languages thrown in. As someone interested in linguistics I love Stargate for how much it features deciphering languages, though I still find it weird when they go to another world and everybody just speaks English.
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Humanoid aliens Especially with modern CGI I would just love to shows get more creative when it comes to alien races. We don’t need a person in a costume anymore. Every once in a while you will have that weird alien pop up, but all in all I feel like there’s still a lot of potential. Also changes in Human physiology due to different environmental conditions on foreign planets.
That being said, I would also like to mention some SciFi-titles that in my mind stand out for being very creative in this regard:
- The writing of Julie Czerneda is very creative when it comes to alien species. She was a biologist and uses her knowledge to create a wide variety of alien life forms
- The forever war (Without spoiling the end, so I’ll leave it at that. Just liked it as a creative take on an alien race so different it’s incomprehensible to us)
- I very much appreciate Douglas Adams for the babel fish.
- I also liked The expanse for including the development of a Belter language and changes in human physiology due to different gravity.
What do you think? Do you know any good examples of SciFi-Worldbuilding, that solve some common inconsistencies?
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Such a great topic, thanks for making this post!
I’ve heard a lot I agree with already (ditto on the Becky Chambers / Wayfarers rec for alien morphology and culture).
One thing I haven’t heard yet (maybe it’s not a perfect fit for the question) - poor characterization and an over reliance on world-building / technology. This is how later Neal Stephenson books (Reamde) have felt to me, where the characters feel like flat automotons but there will be pages and pages about some minute technological detail. Consider Phlebas is another offender, although I do think some of the latter Culture books do better. The final mention would be a number of Peter F Hamilton books.
Because this is all a matter of taste, I find this interesting on a more personal level. I’ve noticed my own preferences change as I get older, away from the neat tech aspects and more on the characters and their respective arcs. And even their arcs don’t need to be tied to external plot beats, but can be intensely personal (e.g. Sissex’s struggle to understand whether they want to be a parent in Wayfarers). I also really liked Amos’s arc in the expanse where we get an idea of where he comes from, and is able to find companionship with Clarissa (who has a pretty good arc herself as well).
It’s a very similar dynamic in my fantasy tastes these days as well - my favorite series is Realm of the Elderlings. Whether Sci-fi or Fantasy though, it has been relatively difficult to find books that better align with these tastes. Definitely open to any recs from others!
poor characterization and an over reliance on world-building / technology
Interesting, I think I’d completely disagree! A story can be rubbish at being a story but still be great sci-fi; I think the world-building and technology is generally what makes it sci-fi, the characters, plot etc are an independent thing. I guess needing to nail both of those makes writing really good sci-fi even harder.
Can’t believe no one has mentioned this yet but my big one is physics in microgravity. There are some that do it well (like obv Apollo 13 given how they filmed it, and The Expanse is usually pretty good about it too) and plenty that it doesn’t really matter but there’s a bunch of movies and tv shows that hang major plot points on poorly thought out physics. The worst offender imo was ironically the movie Gravity, where a major character dies because apparently when two people are tethered to each other in zero-g and the line goes taut they don’t just bounce back towards each other, oh no, because there’s an extra special force that keeps pulling on the futher person so he has to make some dramatic self sacrifice. I was so sad because that movie looked really amazing from a cinematography perspective and obviously a lot of people loved it regardless but i just couldn’t get past how dumb that and a few other scenes were.
Definitely agree about Gravity. Beautiful to watch, completely unrealistic (which wouldn’t have been such a problem if they weren’t pitching it as ultra-realistic!)
Artificial gravity not achieved through acceleration or rotation. That and people don’t explode or instantly freeze when exposed to vacuum.
That women can only be scientists or whatever if their father was. They can have no other reason or backstory.
What annoys me is that science fiction is that some of the biggest writers don’t seem to know any women IRL. If Robert Heinlin or Cixin Lu had to write a believable woman character to bring them food and water, they’d be dead in three days.
That’s true. I already mentioned Julie E. Czerneda, her books have female main characters that are pretty well written. I’d recommend looking into her books.
Distance. Almost every SciFi completely fails to represent distance even remotely closely.
This isn’t a gripe about FTL, it’s a gripe about non-FTL! Fancy FTL avoids the problem.
Star trek does it quite well in most cases, it takes days at warp foo to get anywhere. Voyager took years.
New Star wars butchers it; e.g. The Mandalorian episode with the no lightspeed/hyperspace plot device: oh no it took hours/days to get between star systems. Days! Imagine taking days to travel unfathomable distances!
New Dune (KJA’s books) inexcusably get it wrong. Claiming that “slow” travel between systems took months.
The mote in God’s eye does it extremely well with its pairs of jump points (shoutout to Mass Effect here too). Sometimes it’s quicker to use a jump point to another system, crawl to another (nearer) jump point and then jump back to the first sytem rather than crawl directly across the original system.
It takes light very long time to travel across our solar system, let alone interstellar distances. It’s like these writers have never even considered how long a container ship on earth takes to travel and still be viable.
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Dirk Van den Boem “Sternkreuzer Proxima” (“Starcruiser Proxima”, couldn’t find the actual English titel on a quick search). He has some very good descriptions of the gruelingly long times any maneuver in space takes. Also being cramped in a small space ship with no fresh air, tasteless food rations and not knowing what is going to happen, while your ship and the enemy ship spend the next 50 hours getting in position for their attack.
My main gripe is a lot of plots have too much high stake events solved by improbable happenings?
Why save the earth when one can save a meadow? I would love to see a story about a group of people trying to prevent nano technology from entering a park, and the social backlash when they try.
Why do nearly impossible things within a certain time, when one can have more humble happenings?
Space battles are cool but does the main character have to save the ship, fleet or day? Isn’t it enough to save one’s squad?
I’m saying this in the terms of the tabletop role playing game setting Transhuman Space but…
Your post reminded me that I’d like a series of either mysteries or maybe noire detective stories with infomorphs running in cybershells used for blue collar labor like janitorial services on a big belter trading port.
“From Russia, With Love” has, imho, the best script of any of the Bond movies. The McGuffin in the movie is a decoder. No A-bombs pointed at NYC, just a pretty routine Cold War assignment.
The camera thing drives me nuts, because we all know it’s generally just going to be what’s drives the plot for this story. Which is okay.
But as a privacy nerd, my brain immediately concocts some deeply weird privacy law to explain why main engineering is monitored 24/7 and the front door is somehow not. Then my brain starts trying to come up with the relevant moments in the fictional history why the laws are so broken…
I like that. They had a ton of cameras on all Star Trek ships - but then a scandal involving sex tapes and an illegal porn trade between Star Fleet officers happened and cameras in Star Fleet ships were completely outlawed.
And even if, for example, the Federation had such privacy laws, it should be pretty much impossible to hide on a Cardassian ship because you know they’re all about that surveillance state.
Yeah. The Cardassian cases are the most headache-inducing. My mind-canon for those is just “Gul Dukat thought it would be funny.”
Edit: With an occasional splash of “Garak the Simple Tailor messed with the system and no one was willing to admit they didn’t know how to fix it.” Which doesn’t hold up on DS9, where Odo would have, but works for various Cardassian locations.
We live in a time where live action adaptations of classic sci-fi literature are now possible - both technically and financially. But now TBH I find most of it super boring. Been trying to plow through that Foundation series and got to say it just doesn’t hold my attention. Same with the William Gibson adaptation the Peripheral. I liked the books but just can’t hang with the vids.
There is stuff I like but its rare. Arrival, Raised by Wolves, the Dune movies, a few others.
I do generally enjoy animated adaptations more, and agree with your list.
Arrival - we were rewatching this one evening when my teenager came home with some friends - for reference these are a group who have been watching the “evil bong” movies together, not people I think of as film geeks at all. But Arrival held their interest despite being a slower paced story and 2 of them came back to watch it in full because it just didn’t let them go. It’s such a good movie.
This is why Darmok is peak sci-fi. It discusses what happens when species can’t communicate with one another. It even works within the in-show explanation of the universal translator: the Tamarians don’t just use different vocabulary and syntax. They have an entirely different language model.
What do you think? Do you know any good examples of SciFi-Worldbuilding, that solve some common inconsistencies?
There’s some good stuff in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series about non-human intelligence and societies that I found compelling and very thoughtfully composed. It comes from a grounded place, and especially the first two books do a great job of building up concepts of civilizations that feel truly foreign but make a lot of sense in the universe. The difficulties in cross-species communication are addressed and made to be a focus and feel realistic. I’m being deliberately vague because part of the fun of the books is seeing how far things go.
I am mildly annoyed when an action scene essentially pauses so the heroes can have a small dialog scene.
I always find myself wondering: isn’t that bad guy, hull breach, detonation timer etc still there?
Noisy space battles.
Yeah I will say it’s fun to point out the plot holes whenever comparing it to the real world. But as you get older you realize. I don’t want writers to scare about this stuff unless it is in service to the story. That’s the problem with a lot of new scifi. Is worrying about this stuff and always calling back to previous series is what bogs down storying telling. If your story is good I don’t care about the holes.
I get what you mean, but on the other hand I want to be able to out myself into the story and relate to the characters. If the characters are behaving in a dumb way or the problems they face are too unrealistic, that takes away from the enjoyment. Let me put it like that: I can suspend my disbelieve to accept that an allien artifact can create a wormhole to another planet or that intelligent parasitic life forms exist. I find it hard to believe the US military would send poeple to alien planets without cautioning them about eating the local food. Because to me it is inconsistent with the premise: A military operation would at least address this problem in some form. As I said, it’s just a minor annoyance to me, not a big plot hole or anything. But I find it hard to enjoy media where part of the storytelling is based on the premise “let’s just assume this advanced human/alien civilisation hasn’t thought about an easy solution that we have been using for decades”.
“I find it hard to believe the US military would send poeple to alien planets without cautioning them about eating the local food.”
I laughed hard when I saw this sentence. I guess you have not been around the military much. The military puts solders, sailors , marines, and airmen through class after class to not do stupid shit when deployed or even state side and they still do stupid shit and get article 15s or worse arrested.
I would like to see someone re-do Star Trek from the ground up. Get rid of all existing alien races and story lines. Start with a brand new ship and a different confederation of races.
Kinda what orville did if they would have dropped the comedy sooner
The Orville sorta confused me about their focus. Having not read anything about it, at first I thought it was a show solely to poke fun at Star Trek tropes. Then it appeared to try to actually emulate ST.
The “cinema-sins-ification” of media criticism has been a fucking disaster for our collective media literacy.
If your story is good enough, no one gives a fuck about plot holes.
yeah, you want viewers to be subject to fridge logic because the alternative is that they realise while watching because the plot isn’t grabbing them.
Yeah also I thought we all agreed to call out tv tropes links as I have to work and can’t go down a rabbit hole for the next 8 hours. 😉
This is a common complaint, but it deserves to be mentioned frequently: exploding control panels. This is especially a problem in Star Trek. Are circuit breakers a lost technology?
“This is especially a problem in Star Trek”
It gets really bad in ST Discovery, especially in the last season. Any time the ship gets into trouble, a cascade of sparks starts falling down. It looks like a waterfall made of sparks. The bridge basically looks like a KISS concert.
The bridge basically looks like a KISS concert.
lol I’ve seen what you’re talking about. It’s a little much.
Exploding anything I would say, though this seems to be a general TV problem. Your device got shaken up a tiny bit? EXPLOSION!
