What Sci-Fi clichés do you resent?

[Vanadium 50]

Why do the chiefs of aggressive alien cultures always dress in Greco-Roman aristocracy style.
Why not Atilla the Hun style?

They like the breeze.

 

[Bystander]

equivalent of bulimia;

Actually, "gorging to/beyond the point of puking" is a far more common behavior among predatory species than one might suppose. Case in point, "cats." I have to feed mine literally one tablespoon at a time, fifteen minutes to digest, then another tablespoon.

 

[rootone]

They like the breeze.

Worst band ever.

 

[Battlemage!]

(1) Noise in space. STOP IT!

(2) Not setting your plot far enough in the future to allow for the massive technology advance in the story, and not taking into account market realities when hypothesizing such technology. This happens way too much for my taste. 30 years in the future is not enough time for humans to be driving flying cars, or for us to be traveling to the distant stars at warp speed, or for modern medicine to be completely replaced with kiosks (or food being formed by kiosks, and so on). People always assume that technology will continue to increase at an exponential level, but that is just madness. It takes sideways turns all the time. The market has a massive influence. Not to mention, the simply fact that diminishing returns on energy investment, and the general limits reality puts on us, and politics will always be there to slow advancement down.

Flying cars? No way. Pocket computers? Yep. People forget the market influence. Sometimes there is no reason to replace something that works, which is why land cars are not going anywhere in the next 100 years (except the possibility of being replaced by public transport), but virtual reality may end up really catching on and expanding (like in Tad Williams' Otherland novels: people want an escape from reality, and VR will provide that much better than flying cars).(3) Aliens that look like humans wearing makeup/masks. Come on, man... bipedal bodies are a good adaptation for land dwelling, tool using animals, but evolution works on what is there. If semi-aquatic animals become the ancestors of intelligent creatures, maybe an 8 limb creature would be the dominant intelligent species? Maybe on land some of those limbs atrophy and become vestigial, but there should still be signs of their previous existence. However, presumably such a creature would need more than 2 legs to stand on since its original design was for the relatively weightless environment of water, so maybe it has only six obvious limbs (two for tools, four to walk with).

The point is, not only is there very little imagination with aliens, it is quite implausible that they'd look exactly like humans but with minor facial structural differences, or minor color differences.

Not unless they were actually the descendants of humans (and why hasn't this really been done? You could have your traditional "grey" aliens, but have them as descendants of humans from a few million years in the future).
(4- a minor annoyance) Why don't space crews look like they are military personnel? What do our soldiers wear today? Military uniforms are either camouflage or they are very conservative looking. Star Trek, the only real place to look, has rather artsy, flamboyant uniforms for their soldiers. In hundreds of years military apparel has hardly changed at all in the sense that everything is conservative and uniform looking. Women soldiers are not suddenly going to be wearing short skirts 200 years from now. They'll be in pants, like the men. Also, where are all the badges to signify rank? Sure, Star Trek uses color, but I doubt that would ever happen. It's just not as efficient as badges, nor does it foster the homogeneity of the military, which is a very key element.

You can see how little uniforms change:

(from Encyclopaedia-Britannica, via wikipedia)

The first and last still have the bottom up overcoat, the pants, and the boots. Today's uniforms are merely modification of that: now the colors are more practical for today's warfare, where being hard to see is more important than being able to determine who friend and foe is, since we're not standing up and shooting at each other anymore, but rather engaging in long distance battles or more secretive operations. But it's still button up shirt, pants, boots, with badges signifying rank (unless in battle, in which case such things are less prominently displayed).

But for space? It's true color won't matter as much in terms of camouflage, but the military is notoriously conservative, and has been for hundreds of years in the West, probably much longer. They are not going to replace button down shirts and pants with colorful spandex.

Depends on how you use them.
I ll also portray a 'chosen one' scientist, he discovers alien technology.
I ll write a dogfight like thing, with a distance of 100.000 km light lag 2/3 sec with acceleration of 2g that means 5m from last detected position, with 10km/s overall delta-V a fighter can maintain 2g for a while (since they mostly drones, they don't neccesary care about bring them back)

What i dislike when all aliens are barely different from humans.

Me too. Worse, when it gets explained by "we are all descended from some previous empire/civilization" ... aaargh that might have been a cool idea the first time it was used but now... it's just a lazy explanation for lazy imagination. I'd rather read about some aliens that are truly alien - with different emotions, motivations, needs, etc.

This one irks me. I was watching Falling Skies, and was very happy the aliens communicated with radio frequencies and had all those limbs. And then... and THEN... the freaking tall humanoid "overlord" aliens appeared. At that point I stopped watching.

 

[gleem]

The solution of totally unfamiliar problems or building huge systems in a matter of days, weeks or even months needed to save humanity from total extinction.

 

[UsableThought]

Aside from outside bloopers, the proper term for much of what has been brought up so far isn't "cliche," but "trope". Two differences: 1) "cliche" is usually reserved for non-narrative elements; specifically, figures of speech that are elaborate enough and recent enough to notice as such (as opposed to bottom-level metaphor that is either so old it is idiomatic rather than figurative, or so necessary it goes unnoticed, e.g. the borrowing of descriptions from the physical world (motion, temperature, etc.) to describe internal emotional states; and 2) "cliche" implies something that has truly worn out its welcome, whereas many narrative devices are re-used again and again precisely because they don't wear out their welcome; they continue to be effective. And so, tropes.

There are some wonderful compilations of these; for example: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Tropes

And for the sci-fi/fantasy sub-branch: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpeculativeFictionTropes
- full of delicious minutiae. See for example "Absurdly Sharp Claws," http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AbsurdlySharpClaws

Beyond that I will only say, it's damn hate to write stories, and past attempts to have these hew utterly to realistic constraints have been, well, boring.

 

[dkotschessaa]

I believe one reason we don't have truly convincing aliens is that most sci-fi drama doesn't occur on truly convincingly alien worlds. The reason is likely because the type of drama people are expecting has to do with relationships; politics, war, communication, romance even. It's much faster and easier to make everyone sorta-human, stick a translator in somewhere and have a space opera.

These worlds are usually some type of mirror of ours. Land with some plants (make them look more alien) and then some water (with fish, but you know, alien fish) and an oxygen environment.

I'm not really literate in chemistry, biology and so forth, but I imagine that there are planets capable of sustaining life that would be significantly weirder, perhaps without so much the solid divisions between the 'land' part and the 'liquid' part and the 'sky part.' if you get my meaning. More "soupy" worlds with thick atmospheres, lots of liquid that isn't necessarily water, air that isn't necessarily breathable for us. etc. Basically something that would be extremely unpleasant for us, but to its inhabitants would be as comfortable as our green Earth with its blue sky. THEN we can talk about aliens.

-Dave K

 

[gleem]

You would think that even if alien life required oxygen and water that writers could think outside the box and come up with a story that does not so much mirror our own environment and cultures. Any ideas to seed a new tack? Are reptiles or insects possibly candidates for eventual intelligence? I figure you have to be able to manipulate your environment as an aid to developing intelligence so you need some sort of "hand" and an ability to communicate effectively with your fellow species.

 

[fresh_42]

Any ideas to seed a new tack? Are reptiles or insects possibly candidates for eventual intelligence?

Has been done.

 

[gleem]

I seem to remember that the protagonists in the series "V" were reptilian although I did not follow it.. They looked on humanity as a form of nutrition challenging our philosopy that you do not consume cognoscente beings.

 

[fresh_42]

... our philosopy that you do not consume cognoscente beings.

Which species do you belong to? I cannot claim this for mine, which are dry-nosed primates.

 

[gleem]

Generally speaking we revile consumption of recognized intelligent life at least I think so, although there are aberrations around the world.

 

[Battlemage!]

Is it trope or cliche? => Noise in space. Whatever it is, I instantly turn off the film or show when this occurs.

 

[UsableThought]

Is it trope or cliche? => Noise in space.

Maybe invent a category of "deliberate blooper" . . . unpacking this: 1) deliberate, since even Hollywood knows space is silent; 2) absolute requirement for sci-fi adolescent action pics is lots of loud explosions & powerful machinery (e.g. monster rocket engines); hence, 3) the deliberate blooper. See for example the "Lewis & Clark" rescue ship when first introduced in Event Horizon:



One reason 2001: A Space Odyssey continues to live on for many of us (me, certainly) is its violation of this genre requirement. Many scenes w/ silence in the void - the most dramatic perhaps being when Bowman has to make an emergency re-entry into the "Discovery" - check out the last 30 seconds of the clip:

 

[UsableThought]

More on 'noise in space' and why this sort of blooper is done all the time w/out any of us really minding - so long as the story is a good one:

There are many, many violations in the name of story-telling; the ones most people complain of are ones that violate story logic, not real world logic. We don't usually object to 'noise in space' because we want excitement more than we want absolute flat realism - at least, most of the time. Certainly for sci-fi action we generally accept this. But if the film were not action sci-fi, but something more like Solaris - an art film with a serious atmosphere - we might not like noise in space at all; it might violate the rules & tone of that particular story world. (Actually I guessed about Solaris not having noise in space - I haven't seen the Russian version at all; but I just found a review that supports that guess, which in turn supports my thesis about story worlds following their own logic.) Likewise when 2001 shows space as silent, and ships as not having artificial gravity, that helps create the the particular story world that Kubrick was after - a sort of anti-genre story world, with the pseudo-realism increasing the feeling of suspense; which in turn helps us stick with what otherwise might seem a rather puzzling sequence of unexplained events.

We can widen this point out to cover all of story-telling in any genre. When we read a novel or watch a film, we enter into a social contract. Clause 1(b) of this contract stipulates that there is the story world, and then there is the "real" world; and although the two are related to each other in various ways, they are not the same & so consistency is not required to be absolute; it can be made manipulated. And in terms of allowable events, absolutely anything goes in the story world provided that a) it serves the story, and b) it does not violate the plausibility or logic of the story world. As I've mentioned, the key element governing consistency is genre; but I won't go into that further here.

Interestingly, there are many, many quite blatant real-world "violations" that are required to tell almost any story; but these have been in place since we were all sitting around the campfire 40,000 plus years ago, and are learned very quickly even by toddlers; and therefore they are so engrained in our social selves that we don't even consider them violations - even though they clearly are, if considered for even a moment. Here is just one of them: the dilation or compression of time, such that story time can selectively pass much more quickly or slowly than time in "the real world." This is not too big a violation since our subjective time sense also seems to speed up and slow down; but still, when hours, days, months, or years pass in a flash in a move or novel, we all know this isn't "real"; yet none of us object. What's really cool about such conventions is when a filmmaker deliberately violates or reverses one of them - e.g., expands and slows down 'story time' to match 'real world time' for a scene. For example in La Belle Noiseuse, a wonderful French movie about painters & painting, adapted from a really cool & bizarre Balzac short story, there are several long scenes of an elderly painter painting a nude model that take place in real time and last for many, many long minutes. Here's just a short clip of that:



By contrast, when a convention of any sort is violated too clumsily, then we tend to object; the clumsiness spoils the illusion & we can no longer suspend disbelief. It's sort of like Stephen King's metaphor of a movie scene that clumsily let's us see the zipper in the back of the monster suit. Example: There's a Next Generation episode in which the ship is caught in a repeating time & causality loop, each time ending in (guess what) the ship exploding with a big noise in space; in the final scene, Data finally realizes how to save the ship by choosing a different evasive maneuver than the one they've tried in every loop up until now. He speaks his decision out loud & then does it; time slows down from the 1 or 2 seconds they've had in every scene of this part of the loop until now, so that we have time to hear him say what he's about to do; but the slowing down is done so clumsily that I expect most people watching it wince.

Another mistake that filmmakers don't make too often - but it does happen - is when a film is supposed to have a 'symbolic' level as well as a 'story' level, and the two levels get mixed up - i.e. something happens that would make sense at the symbolic level, but it's not plausible in the particular genre that has been drawn upon to create the story world. A prime example of this is the Guy Ritchie psychological thriller Revolver, 2005. The movie got widely panned, and this problem w/ symbolic events not working as story events was a big reason for that.

 

[Battlemage!]

Well, any film that seriously takes space travel that has noise in space grinds my gears. As much as the ending to Interstellar seems incredulous, the fact that the spaceship didn't make noise from the reference frame of outside the craft made it worth it to me (I'm sure there were various physics errors to boot, but I've never seen a film that actually explored the effects of the twin paradox, so I thought that was neat). But what made me stay to finish it was the thrusters only made sound from inside the ship. When the camera showed outside, it was silent as the grave.

Just my sci-fi pet peeve, I guess.

 

[UsableThought]

When the camera showed outside, it was silent as the grave.

Maybe a movie poster? "In space, no one can hear you rev your engine."

Speaking of Interstellar, that filmmaker, Chris Nolan, made such a hash of the story world of Inception that I stopped going to his movies. I won't go into it here; but he made many mistakes at the meta-level I discussed in my previous post. Total turn-off.

 

[Battlemage!]

Maybe a movie poster? "In space, no one can hear you rev your engine."

Speaking of Interstellar, that filmmaker, Chris Nolan, made such a hash of the story world of Inception that I stopped going to his movies. I won't go into it here; but he made many mistakes at the meta-level I discussed in my previous post. Total turn-off.

Regardless I enjoyed Interstellar. There was some mumbo jumbo at the end, but I really liked the way Nolan did the emotional results of the twin paradox.

As for Inception, I'd love for you to point out the flaws in another thread whenever you feel like it. I'm sure I missed a bunch, being distracted by the excellent actors, including my favorite Japanese actor, Ken Watanabe.

 

[UsableThought]

As for Inception, I'd love for you to point out the flaws in another thread whenever you feel like it. I'm sure I missed a bunch, being distracted by the excellent actors, including my favorite Japanese actor, Ken Watanabe.

Yeah, not here in this thread. I will say that I did enjoy a lot of the actors (though not Leo, though I've liked him elsewhere); many of the ideas about dream technology; & some of the setup scenes - my favorite is the sequence where the new girl on the block is being taught dream architecture & gets to walk on an Escher staircase among other cool things. I also liked early on where Leo & his chair are dumped into a bathtub to wake him up, and in his dream the huge hall he's in fills violently w/ water as if it's been hit by a tsunami.

 

[fresh_42]

I want to add a different view on "noise in space". Often this noise can be heard by firing the gun or from the impact on the target. Both usually have an atmosphere, but even if not, the structures themselves can serve as propagation medium - or an open communication port. So it's not a complete nonsense.

 

[dkotschessaa]

Funny, no mention of black holes in this thread. Is that just a "don't even get us started" topic?

 

[fresh_42]

Funny, no mention of black holes in this thread. Is that just a "don't even get us started" topic?

"Don't mention the war!"

 

[pixel]

How about when the aliens are approaching and there's a military person who wants the president to launch a pre-emptive attack, while the scientist argues against it.

 

[Battlemage!]

How about when the aliens are approaching and there's a military person who wants the president to launch a pre-emptive attack, while the scientist argues against it.

Ian Malcolm says hi.

 

[GTOM]

Is it trope or cliche? => Noise in space. Whatever it is, I instantly turn off the film or show when this occurs.

Many people don't like too much silence in a film, also it might be justified, that radar signals translated into sounds.

 

[GTOM]

Whatching Dark Matter 2nd season. It is a great series, but i find something irritating, maybe it is not SF but general cliche: why is it that in majority of cases, strong female character means that she has a fist of iron? There are a dozen other things that could make someone strong. I like Killjoys partially because it showed good examples in that matter, like it showed that a simple mother can be strong.
Generally i think many SF would need more good and realistic characters.

 

[dkotschessaa]

Whatching Dark Matter 2nd season.

I don't know how you made it that far into the series. I found the series so trope-laden (tropey?) that I felt like I was just watching reruns of something else.

-Dave K

 

[dkotschessaa]

We forgot this one:

::time travel happens::

Person A: "Where are we?"

Person B: "No. The question isn't "where are we." The question is WHEN are we?"

Just once I want to see person B punched in the mouth for saying this. I'm not a fan of unnecessary violence, but in this case I believe it is strongly warranted.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'm not a fan of unnecessary violence,

This is necessary violence.

 

[Battlemage!]

^^ Good stuff lol.Here's one that annoys me: colorful large computers and machines complete with unexplained flashing lights. Even data centers don't have those ridiculous flashing lights (although some have "hip" c, so why would more advanced computers and systems be bigger and more 1960s looking?Also, humanoid robots. Just seems unrealistic. The robots in Interstellar were perfect: completely not-human shaped, and instead shaped entirely for utility.

(or at least that was the image they wanted to project... I'm sure having block legs might not be the most efficient mode of transportation, but at least it wasn't a bi-pedal human looking thing. Yuck)

 

[GTOM]

I don't know how you made it that far into the series. I found the series so trope-laden (tropey?) that I felt like I was just watching reruns of something else.

-Dave K

Oh, how i love this mentality... Based on this, most chapters of most books are similar to something, that someone made already...

 

[dkotschessaa]

Oh, how i love this mentality... Based on this, most chapters of most books are similar to something, that someone made already...

Huh?

 

[rkolter]

I dislike the reverse, where aliens are all the same and only humans are diverse. I bet the Klingons have plumbers.

YESSSS.

Also, why hasn't this one been mentioned: STEAM. The use of steam in science fiction to denote "damage" to whatever structure you are in. Related to that are the twin ideas of breaking a nearby steam pipe to blind or distract your enemy and walking into or disappearing into a hallway obscured by steam.

 

[GTOM]

YESSSS.

Also, why hasn't this one been mentioned: STEAM. The use of steam in science fiction to denote "damage" to whatever structure you are in. Related to that are the twin ideas of breaking a nearby steam pipe to blind or distract your enemy and walking into or disappearing into a hallway obscured by steam.

If they use nuclear reactors, then they are ultimately still working with steam.

 

[sanman]

I hate the computer hacker stereotypes, as well as the nerdy-looking scientists.

Seriously, when's the last time you saw Hollywood portray a scientist who looked normal? Instead they're always socially retarded dweebs.