Tired Sci-Fi Tropes That Must Be Retired -- Part Deux

Read the first part of this blog post.

Continuing my study of tired science fiction clichés:

Explanations for Vampirism

Sci-fi writers like to find scientifical explanations for supernatural myths. Julian May suggests that fairies and dwarves are aliens. H.P. Lovecraft proposes that ghosts and goblins are aliens. Arthur C. Clarke writes that Christian devils are… aliens.

But the favorite supernatural-meets-sci-fi trope is to describe vampires as either aliens or victims of a disease. The classic example of the former is 1985’s “Lifeforce,” a great, underrated movie that everyone should see, if for nothing else than Mathilda May’s naked breasts. The best example of the latter might be 1971’s “The Omega Man,” which would be a classic film if it didn’t have Charlton Heston in it.

But now this has been waaaay over done. This idea even infected the “Matrix” movies. It was the main plot point of this year’s execrable “Ultraviolet” – and a movie really has to be bad if even Milla Jovovich can’t save it. And speaking of Milla, let’s stop explaining zombies as disease victims, too. If your zombie isn’t a shambling corpse created through evil Vodou magic, I don’t want to hear about it.


Nanotech as Magic

Any time nanotechnology comes up, someone quotes Arthur C. Clark; “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Well, it seems clear that the earliest advocates for nanotech very much overstated its potential as well as its dangers. Most likely, nanotech is not going to make us immortal. And the gray goo is not going to kill us all, either.

But it seems just as clear that nanotechnology, and related materials sciences, will completely change our world, and remake society as we know it.

Some authors have imagined these changes, and postulated in the impact they will have on humanity. Neil Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age” is my favorite of these; also the works of Rudy Rucker. And occasionally, a film will reference nanotech in an interesting way. The “mimetic polyalloy” in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” is the first thing that comes to mind.

But you can’t just throw nanotech in there every time you need out of a dead-end plot. Lazy sci-fi writers are just using “nano” to replace all the usual pseudo-scientific jargon. Look, if you want to explore the medical implications of nanotech, please, go right ahead. But if you injured your hero in scene 24, and want him fully healed in scene 25, don’t fall back on a “nanopatch.” It’s asinine. Nanotechnology is not a magic word that eliminates the need for plot, character, and milieu construction.

I’m talking to YOU, Berman and Braga.


The Ineffectual Crew

So, the U.S.S. Enterprise had a crew of 430. The Enterprise-D had a crew of over 1,000. Babylon 5 had a crew of 2500 (and a much larger population). The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica has 2800 crew. The SDF-1 had 50,000 people living inside of it. The Death Star had a crew complement of 1,226,000.

But only five people ever actually DO anything.

This is difficult to avoid; in fiction we have main protagonists, and we want to hear about what they’re doing, not about some lowly Photon Torpedo Loading Technician on Deck 23. Our heroes won’t be very interesting if all they do is bark orders all day.

One way to deal with this is a tiny crew. In “Firefly,” the Serenity had a crew of six, with three passengers (I’m counting the doctor, Simon, as crew). There was zero redundancy, so if someone got taken out, the ship was screwed. But at least everyone was busy.

The new “Battlestar Galactica” has faced this problem self-referentially. Apollo and Starbuck have both complained that they have to do all the heavy lifting. It’s a wink-and-a-nod to the audience.

To give “Star Trek” credit, the show did an excellent job from the very beginning of creating the illusion of a large ship with a large crew, through background sounds, the careful placement of extras, and dialogue. And “Next Generation” was pretty good about introducing supporting crew characters. Still, if someone was going to save the ship, it was most likely Wesley.

The message to sci-fi writers is this; if the life of a starship captain isn’t very interesting, because he or she doesn’t actually do very much on his or her own, then stop writing stories about starship captains. Or be more creative in inventing stories.


The Planet-as-Location

The planet Dagobah is jungle planet with roughly Earth gravity and with oceans over only 8% of the surface. If we assume that Dagobah is the same size as the Earth, then the land area of the planet is 469,260,352 km2, or 181,182,435 miles2. Give or take.

Good thing Dagobah is in fact about one acre in size, and contains a lake, a hut, and a Secret Grove of Confronting One’s Enemy and Learning It Is Oneself. Because Dagobah is only an acre, Luke has no problem locating Yoda’s home. Imagine if he had to search 181 million square miles! And all while Han & Leia are hiding in the asteroid field!

Sci-fi writers love to treat “planet” as if it’s a single location. “Let’s land on the planet, where we’ll meet the one settlement of the one culture, and have the one adventure the planet can afford us.” Planets are entire WORLDS. Even with advanced technology, it will take a space exploration crew YEARS to explore and survey a single planet. Even an uninhabited one.

Under the “Planet-as-Location” cliché, Mars is done. We sent a robot, it roamed around a few hundred yards. We saw it. DONE. Nothing more to see here.

It’s absurd, it’s an overused sci-fi trope, and it’s time to drop it.


The Theme Planet

The planet Dagobah is jungle planet with roughly Earth gravity and with oceans over only 8% of the surface. If we assume that Dagobah is the same size as the Earth, then the land area of the planet is 469,260,352 km2, or 181,182,435 miles2. Give or take.

That’s 181 million square miles of jungle. Jungle at the equator, jungle at the poles. Jungle in the plains, jungle on the mountains. Jungle on the ocean floor, I guess. No deserts, no tundra, no temperate grasslands. Just jungle, jungle, jungle.

Jungles occur at certain latitudes, and in specific geographic and climate conditions. Even if Johnny Jungleseed went all over the planet planting Kapok trees, it’s not going to create a single planetary biome.

Even Frank Herbert admitted that Arrakis – Dune – desert planet was not scientifically possible. Although he created a clever ecology for the planet, all of its unique (and impossible) features were due to a single creature, the sandworm. One wonders how such a destructive life form, that creates its own climate, ever evolved.

Some theme planets are possible (ocean worlds) or even probable (ice worlds). But they won’t have lovely, warm oxygen atmospheres. Look at the one “desert” planet of which we are aware – Mars. Not terribly hospitable to moisture farmers and their malcontent nephews who thirst for adventure. Scientists used to hypothesize that Venus was a jungle planet. Sulfur rain and 400Cº temperatures aren’t too conducive to rainforest conditions.

Enough with the theme planets. Again, planets are WORLDS, and should be treated as such.


Everything on Mars is Red

“Hey, let’s make this movie take place on Mars! We’ll just drive out to Topanga, and shoot everything with a red filter!”

Even movies as recent as Mission to Mars” and “Red Planet” have fallen into this lazy, non-scientific trap. Is everything on Earth blue? Should everything that takes place on Earth be shot with a blue filter?

Mars’ surface is covered largely by iron oxide rust. This gives the surface, and atmospheric dust, an orange hue. But the sky is blue during the day and black at night, and objects are the color they would be anywhere else, unless they are covered in orange dust. The surface albedo might give objects a slight orange cast – but that’s about it.

The planet has no magical red miasma. You can’t depict the planet’s surface on the cheap with a red filter. Sorry.


Alien-Human Hybrids/Babies

From Mr. Spock and Dana Sterling to Ripley Clone #8 and the Cylon Miracle Baby, sci-fi writers just love those alien-human hybrids.

Unfortunately, if you can’t get viable offspring from a human-chimpanzee coupling (and Lord knows I’ve tried!), what chances are there for two beings that evolved on different worlds?

Now the sticklers will point out, regarding the four examples given above, that (1) humans and Vulcans were both created by the Progenitors; (2) in some versions of the Macross back story, the Zentraedi are a human sub-species; (3) the Ripley clones weren’t created sexually, and were just Ripley with certain xenomorph genes spliced in; and (4) humanoid Cylons are almost completely human, and are designed to copulate with humans.

Excuses, excuses.

It’s funny, in 2001’s “Planet of the Apes,” director Tim Burton wasn’t allowed to show the human Mark Wahlberg get it on with the chimp Helena Bonham Carter. Yet James T. Kirk could get busy with any alien that had a shapely carcass and a hole.

When we finally encounter intelligent alien life, the social, psychological, and ethical challenges will be enormous. But the one thing we won’t have to worry about it alien-human babies. Time to give it up.


Sound In Space

Everyone knows there is no sound in a vacuum. Everyone but George Lucas.

Some sci-fi movies and films have tried to accurately portray what a spaceship occupant might hear, during a battle for instance; or at least use the occupant’s perspective as an excuse to sneak in some sound. The new “Battlestar Galactica” does a pretty good job of this. Engine sounds, collisions, passing through gas and debris clouds, and voices can provide a lot of audio “business” in a scene.

But there is something eerie and beautiful about an appropriately silent space scene. (As long as it’s not all done in slow motion, like “2001: A Space Odyssey.”) “Firefly” had some excellent “silent” space scenes, with nothing but twangy guitar over the action.

Science fiction authors need to remember, physics is our ally, not our enemy. Make friends with it.

Tired Sci-Fi Tropes That Must Be Retired!

This is a two-part post. Read Part 2 when you're done!

If you read or watch a lot of science fiction, you may begin to notice certain themes that constantly crop up. Some of these, like the ridiculously sexy female scientist/alien/robot/whatever, detract from the realism -- but no one is complaining about it. Not me, anyway. Hooray for Jeri Ryan!

But some of these overused cliches really need to go. I’ve collected a long list, which I have split into two parts. In no particular order, here are…

Tired Sci-Fi Tropes That Must Be Retired!


The Pinocchio Syndrome

This is the non-human – robot, artificial intelligence, alien, alien-hybrid, etc. -- that wants to be more human. This gives the lazy sci-fi writer an opportunity to explore that age-old chestnut, “what does it mean to be human?”

“Star Trek” has been the worst offender in the overuse of the Pinocchio Syndrome, giving us Mr. Data (the robot who wants to be human), The Doctor (the A.I. who wants to be human), Mr. Spock (the alien hybrid who wants to be human), Constable Odo (the alien raised by humans who wants to be human) and even Seven of Nine, the human (raised by aliens) who wants to be human.

And let’s not forget Roy Batty in “Blade Runner,” Andy the Android in “Bicentennial Man,” Boomer (and perhaps all the Cylons) from the new “Battlestar Galactica,” Annalee in “Alien Resurrection,” and the T-800 in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

And that’s just robots. For aliens, there’s the Starman from “Starman,” Kal-El from “Superman,” and all the characters from “Third Rock From the Sun.”

How about a robot who’s happy to be a robot, like Gigolo Joe in “A.I.,” or Bender from “Futurama?” I’d like to see more of that. And what about Valentine Michael Smith from “Stranger in a Strange Land,” the human (raised by Martians) who wanted to be more Martian? Or Agent Smith from the “Matrix” films, who was perfectly happy to exist only as a program and couldn’t stand the stench of humanity? Then there’s Marvin the Paranoid Android from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” who desired to become less human, if he could. Or at least less miserable.

I’m guessing that in this incomprehensibly vast universe, there are many things to be that are more interesting than “human.” Let’s give it a rest.


Ignoring the Butterfly Effect

There are people who don’t like chaos theory, but that’s just because they don’t understand it.

If Marty McFly goes back in time and prevents his parents from meeting, there is no way to fix it. Even if Marty gets George and Lorraine to kiss at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, and they get married, and buy the house in the Lyon Estates, and have three kids, and buy a 4x4, Marty and his siblings will still never be born. The sperm that makes Marty will never be joined with the egg that makes Marty – too many details have changed. No Universal Cosmic Force will ensure that Marty is born, and the McFlys will give birth to a different son, perhaps one with the good sense not to hang out with crazy old inventors.

If humanity founds the evil Terran Empire instead of the good and pacifistic United Federation of Planets, there would be no starship Enterprise, no evil Kirk, no goateed Spock. These people would never have been born, and a different Imperial starship with different officers would have encountered the Kirk, Spock et al from our universe (except that the two ships would not be conducting identical transports on the same spot at the same time). Contingency requires that as the histories of the “mirror” universes diverged, they would become increasingly different. People in one universe would not have “counterparts” in the other. It might be a cool plot device to see how beloved characters would behave if they were evil, but it makes no sense and it’s old and tired. Better that Kirk is split into good and evil halves by the transporter.

If you have a time travel story, feel free to experiment with immutable timelines (Michael Crichton’s awful “Timeline” springs to mind). But any change in a timeline has to produce universal change over time. “Fate” has no place in sci-fi.


The Wish-fulfilling Alien

What’s the name of that movie where a spaceship encounters an alien entity that grants the protagonists anything they want or desire, thereby demonstrating the dangers of getting what you wish for?

Oh yeah, it was “Forbidden Planet” (1956). And (“Solaris” (1972). And “Event Horizon” (1997) , “Sphere” (1998), and the other “Solaris” (2002). Then there are all the “Star Trek” episodes, most notably “Shore Leave.”

If we could have anything we wished for, we would have nothing to live for. Or it would be too much power. Yeah, we get it.


Humanoid Aliens

There are two reasons to make your space aliens humanoid. The first, common to both dramatic productions and literary fiction, is to make alien characters understandable and relatable. Some stories even have thoroughly alien characters transform themselves into humanoids, or create humanoid proxies, for the sake of communication (think the Tymbrimi from David Brin’s Uplift Universe, or the Starman in “Starman”).

The second reason, a plague upon film and TV sci-fi, is financial. It’s a lot cheaper to create a Bajoran by placing a lump of putty on the bridge of an actor’s nose, than it is to go with CGI or puppet-based aliens. Some TV aliens are less “alien” than perfectly real human beings with deformities. “Star Trek” didn’t invent the cheap-and-lazy alien, but it certainly perfected it.

I don’t have the space here to go into the reasons why an alien life form, even an intelligent one, is unlikely to be an upright bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical, four-limbed, endoskeletal, pentadactyl, binocular and binaural chordate.

Anyway, it’s lazy, it’s done to death, and we have cheap CGI now.

On a side note, if an alien can reproduce human speech, is mentally capable of doing so, and bothers to learn English, it’s going to speak in Received Pronunciation, aka the King’s English. Why would an alien learn a provincial dialect like American English? They’d speak it correctly. All aliens should sound like Hugh Grant.


Grey Aliens

Done, done, and done. Grey aliens were cool in 1977. By the end of the credits roll in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” they were over. Whitley Strieber needs to make up some original shit. Move on.


Gigeroid Aliens

This is the single most overused visual concept in all of science fiction; more played-out than alien grays, saucer-shaped UFOs, and office-building-style spaceship interiors combined. Aliens are about as likely to look like giant, acid-spewing, face-hugging, vaguely humanoid black cockroaches as they are to look like a TOS Klingon with the blackface and the bandito moustache.

When H.R. Giger’s “xenomorph” debuted in 1979’s “Alien,” it was absolutely brilliant, and maybe the scariest thing anyone had ever seen or imagined ever. And of course, the “Alien” sequels had every reason to repeat and improve on the same design. (Not that Giger saw a dime for it.)

But I remember when Marvel’s “The Uncanny X-Men” introduced The Brood, and even as a teenager I thought, “Oh come on – can’t you guys be original?” Since then about one gazillion TV shows, movies, comic books and novels have ripped off the xenomorph alien. Giger even ripped himself off in “Species.”

Enough already. If you can’t be original (and there are plenty of underused alien concepts out there – get a copy of “Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials”), then just use Ewoks. Imagine a cute little teddy bear bursting out of someone’s chest.


Vertical Spacecraft

There’s no up or down when you’re in free fall. No north or south, either. All directions are arbitrary. Objects don’t have a top or bottom unless you stamp “This End Up” on one of the sides.

Unless a spacecraft is designed to enter an atmosphere and land, there is no reason for it to have a top and bottom. It should be designed functionally, to take into account acceleration, or free fall, or whatever relativistic situations the crew will find themselves in. (And if there’s no crew, all bets are off.)

There are two reasons sci-fi spacecraft are often portrayed as flying office buildings, with a top, a bottom, elevators, and unnecessary bottomless pits down which Darth Vader can throw the Emperor. The first is financial; TV shows and movies can’t or won’t spend the money to portray space travel accurately. (Props to those that do, like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and… um… that’s it.)

The second reason is what I call “The Nautical Paradigm.” Space travel is represented as an allegorical equivalent to ocean travel. As with so many other things, “Star Trek” stretched this idea as far as it would go, to the point of presenting space travel and space combat as taking place on a 2-dimensional plane, as on the ocean’s surface. The movie “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn” even turned this trope into a critical plot point.

Vertical spacecraft always have universal Earth-like gravity. This is usually explained as “artificial gravity,” a fun idea with absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever. (No, gravitons do NOT work that way.) This is often coupled with Trek-style “inertial dampeners” that prevent the ship’s inhabitants from being flattened into goo against the hull, but inexplicably do not prevent them from being thrown about, or injured, or from falling to their deaths down unnecessary bottomless pits.

As science and technology progress, manned space flight becomes less likely, rather than more; the future of space exploration, for better or worse, belongs to the robots. But if we’re going to present images of biological humans exploring the stars, let’s try to do it marginally realistically. If you want “gravity,” at least spin the ship, or have it accelerating at one gee. And please, design spaceships like spaceships, and not like clipper ships or oil derricks.


Slow-Mo in Zero Gee

God, this pisses me off. Things do not happen more slowly in zero gravity or microgravity. How do we know this? First, there is no basis for it in physical law. Second, there’s tons of video out there of real astronauts in real microgravity. Unless you slow down the film, they’re moving at normal speed.

In fact, sometimes things move a bit faster in microgravity. This is because they don’t weigh anything, and aren’t rubbing against the ground. Of course, objects without weight still have mass, and it requires energy to get them going and to slow them down again. So motion in microgravity is different from motion at the Earth’s surface. But not slower.

A person who is unaccustomed to low or zero-gee might move more cautiously until they got the hang of it. One may freely assume that trained astronauts are not such people.

Remember the slow-mo free-fall battle on the underside of the hull in “Star Trek: First Contact?” It made me want to tear my hair out. (And does the Enterprise’s artificial gravity field stop right at the hull? Really? How does that work? And why not extend it?)


Now be sure to read ... Part 2!