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The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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Ten Things I Hate About Science Fiction
September 5th, 2008
First off, I love science fiction, but when it’s bad, oh boy, there’s little worse. As a writer and scientist, I’m probably more sensitive to some of the bad things than the average person, but there are plenty of things that happen too often that we can probably agree to share for a good two-minute hate. With me so far?
1. Bad science. AKA technobabble or just plain getting things wrong. You know, reverse the polarization and charge this doohickey and wham bam thank you ma’am the aliens are toast! There are a million examples out there. Star Trek, though I love it, is a prime offender. There are a lot of sub-categories, but I’ll try to keep them lumped together except for a few cases that need their own number.
2. Bad writing. This happens less, I think, than in decades past, but it still happens. The President of Earth can still be heard slamming his fist on his desk and ordering that Space Commander Sparky Jones and his sidekick Space Babe Sally do something about the alien menace. OK, there’s probably very little this bad out there any more (Galaxy 666, how I miss you), but some of the sci-fi channel movies have echoes. I recall the first-season intro to Babylon 5 being pretty badly written, for instance, and happily noticing it was later revised.
3. Bad aliens. Aliens who are exactly like humans except for their skin color or nose shape. Aliens with biologies that make no sense with ridiculously simple ecosystems.
4. Inconsistent or illogical time travel. It seems like writers just make up rules for time travel that make no sense a lot more often than other types of stories. I mean, WTF was with that fading photograph in Back to the Future? Don’t try to make too much sense of it, please, or your brain will hurt. And while I’m talking about this, bad history or irrational projection of today’s morals/beliefs on other peoples.
5. Blatant politics or moralizing. Science fiction isn’t a good medium for overt polemics. Covert ones, sure, when you can’t come right out and say what you mean because your government will disappear you, or a topic that is too hot socially, ok. But if you can be blatant, sf is not needed. Be clever, be subtle, otherwise use a posterboard and stand by the roadside.
6. The singularity. Every sf story that takes place in the future doesn’t have to be about the singularity, or even address it. If it ever happens, I doubt people will be looking around and saying, “Hey, did you see that singularity happen?” It won’t be like that.
7. Small universes. The universe is big. Really big. Just acknowledging hyperspace or FTL to avoid this issue is usually not enough. The dang Vipers on Battlestar Galactica, with rocket power alone and not too much fuel, still manage to let pilots zip around entire solar systems without having bathrooms.
8. Monocultures and monoworlds. While arguably plausible in some cases, those cases are rarely made. Instead, worldbuilding is given short-shrift and entire planets are reduced to single simple settings. And Waterworld really wasn’t that good.
9. Dark futures. I like the occasional cautionary tale, but at some point dark became cool and all too prevalent. Despite our problems and challenges, technology and the quality of life has been improving dramatically for the majority of people on Earth. Don’t think about this year compared to last or even this decade compared to the last. Think about your grandparents’ experience at the doctor or the dentist, or shopping by catalog vs. internet, or the outhouse. And who remembers dial-up?
10. Heart/faith/determination triumphing over intellect. This happens all the damn time and it drives me nuts. I like my heroes as smart as my villains, and in a technological world being smart is important. Too often, however, writers seem to like to put all sorts of qualities ahead of intelligence and education. It’s probably thought to be reassuring to mass audiences to put down elites and play up traditional values, but I’m tired of that message, especially during election season. A recent example is the movie Armageddon, where the roughnecks are so much better than the idiots NASA’s been training for months. Ugh!
What am I wrong to hate, and what is even more hateable that I didn’t list?
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Over on my livejournal mirror, I got a couple of very worthy additions:
11. “Things man wasn’t meant to know.” I hate this too. Says who? Says the writer who things people are children or worse and aren’t intrinsically capable of doing the right thing, and that learning things isn’t always good.
12. Dumb clothes. A silver jumpsuit does not sf make. Clothes should not make sense and just be arbitrarily different or strange.
The Doppleganger Gambit (from the 1970s) has a fairly striking cover.
It shows a tall blonde woman whose hair is oddly matted, chewing out a tall skinny black man. She is wearing a blue top and miniskirt with matching go-go boots and he is wearing a shirt with horizontal green and purple stripes with green overalls. The overalls have the flexi-ribbing one sees on flexi-straws at the knees and his shoes look like low top Doc Martins with bright red soles. He is carrying a pistol in one hand. She has one stuffed down the front of her miniskirt; if it’s the same model pistol as the man’s, it’s almost long enough to peek out the bottom of her miniskirt.
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/sf/books/k/covers/bchaos1.jpg
Except for the lack of holsters, that’s straight out of the book. The author imagined an era when fashions were even uglier than the late ’70s.
Good one, James! Or bad one, rather. And your post early this week about things that annoy you in sf inspired this post, so glad to see you here.
Insert what appears to be a conditioned reflex that involves quoting the end of Alice’s Restaurant.
Did you see the Jetse de Vries post where during an optimism rant, the happy future proposed for the midwest involved making cities no longer economically viable? And not in “better lifestyles became cheap enough to afford” sense.
Mind you, the person who steered the conversation in that direction was S. F. Murphy, one of the people who has made the Asimov’s forums the sewers that they currently are.
I actually liked Killough’s SF a lot and I thought it was a good sign that she thought about fashions at all. She also remembered to have the skeevy parks named after forgotten Presidents named after Presidents who have yet to be elected. SF where nothing of note seems to have happened between the year the book was written and distant period when it is set is annoying.
That last one is a good one, too. The one where there’s no future history. I guess there could be a general category of “bad worldbuilding” that would encompass a few of these points.
Back to the Future is SciFi now? I always thought it was a comedy.
I think of Back to the Future as a science fiction action comedy blockbuster Michael J. Fox vehicle.
#1, 2, 5 and 8 are my biggest peeves, but I can tolerate more bad science than blatant moralizing. The former makes me rant (and blog) but the latter makes me put down the book or change the channel.
SF where nothing of note seems to have happened between the year the book was written and distant period when it is set is annoying.
Yes. Along with futures where mid-20th century America is the pinnacle of culture. That’s mostly seen in the Star Trek universe, where the characters – even the non-humans – all seem to love either jazz or old time rock n’ roll.
Yeah, well. Old music is safe because someone else already did the job of sorting the crap from the good stuff.
I want to write a story where some ancient relic keeps grumbling that nobody has written decent music since Marilyn Manson retired, then go on to comment negatively on the fashions and morals of the young.
I think you’re wrong about nonsense science. I view Voltaire as one of the first action/SF authors. He wrote stories, fun ones, to illustrate philosophical points. He had aliens, genies, and even a Tarzan character in the 1700s. The details of how things worked in his stories weren’t important, they were just a medium to introduce you to the theme, which was always something about life on Earth.
Star Trek was exactly the same way. It doesn’t matter if a transporter can work, but rather how the humans work. Then you the viewer/reader can extrapolate that information and use it in your life.
Science fiction about science is like masturbation when a philosophical theme isn’t more more important. The same goes for ultra violent stories. One is science porn and the other violence porn.
While the film Armageddon has many faults, training roughnecks as payload specialist rather than training astronauts to run the drills is not one of them.
Remember that the roughnecks weren’t semi-skilled labourers, but experienced drillers and geologists. This isn’t a case of “heart over mind”, but of which specialist skillset is quicker to become good enough at to do the job.
The Alderian — science porn….shudder…in a good way. If something doesn’t try to be scientifically accurate, it’s fantasy in my book and should be clearly written as such and outside my boundary.
Pick Pikul — my friends who have worked as roughnecks (I do live in Wyoming after all) tell me the movie got all that stuff wrong, too. And with all the screw-ups in space caused by these “experienced” rough-necks, I don’t think the movie makes your case. Armageddon goes way out of their way to make the NASA astronauts look incompetent, when they’re really highly trained people and likely would have included several PhD-level geologists. The highly “experienced” drillers rely on, intentionally and in a highlighted way, their intuition rather than their reason. Michael Bay plays it exactly as I’ve described it. It’s not about facts or information…feelings and determination are more important. And I hate that message being consistently made in movie after movie, especially when it’s about technological and scientific issues.
As I said: The film does have many faults, and not just on the space side. Consider it a stopped clock effect.
Fair enough, Rick. Fair enough.
13. Mirror Universe. It’s Been Done. It was reasonably innovative when ST: TOS presented it in the mid sixties but it has been beaten to death. Although… I would be interested in a Movie/TV treatment where *we* are the Evil Universe and the Mirrorverse is some sort of Norman Rockwellian idealized version of earth. You know, blacks and whites more or less get along, less sexism, the rich actually give a damn how their actions impact the community, that sort of thing.
I think that was called Zot! by Scott McCloud.
Steven Rogers: been done. Maybe by Scott McCloud, as James David Nicoll says. At any rate, the story I recall has an author drinking beer with fellow authors, telling about how he created a world, and felt an odd kind of *click* every time he decided a major detail. “It was a lot like our world *click*, only stupider *click*, more violent *click*, more short-sighted *click*. And then I imagined myself in that world and *click* there I was.” “So what’d you do?” “Nothing. *sip beer* I’m still here.”
[…] Brotherton talks about Ten Things I Hate About Science Fiction. Not ten things I hate about sci-fi. I personally love sci-fi, but evidently, Brotherton’s […]
Mike, I agree with the concepts you discussed on your list. However, I have to say that “Armageddon” was not the best example you could have chosen for point #10. The whole point of “Armageddon” was not to put down intellect and men of science, but to highlight that sometimes, despite our best technology, BF&I along with guts will see you through the day when all else fails.
Second, you did realize that Harry Stamper’s (Bruce Willis) crew were trained professionals and technical experts, right? Steve Buscemi’s character was a geologist. Most of these men were not any less intelligent than the NASA experts; in fact they were top flight experts in their field, which is why they were called in to do the job.
There have been countless times where “technical experts” have gotten so caught up in the minutia surrounding the technology that they forget that the ultimate goal of any project is to complete it, regardless of the technical nature of the tools involved in said project.
A better example escapes me at the time of this reply, but when I have more time, I’ll post back….
kragshot, while I appreciate this concept in theory, it wasn’t what was portrayed in the film. Buschemi’s character gets the irrational “space madness” for no apparent reason, for instance, and Harry Stamper succeeds, but not through reason but only through faith. “Guts” as you put it, is exactly what I’m complaining about. The message is that trained professionals (NASA) is not the best to succeeed, but someone who is going to rely on guts rather than training and education. While this could be true once in a long while, this is the message of one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, and many others as well.
I want to see the bookworm, Hermoine from Harry Potter, or the James Spader character in Stargate, consistently be the hero. But no, it’s Harry Potter, Kirk Russel, and Bruce Willis. About 99% of the time. That is my peeve. The roughnecks may have known their geology/drilling (although there wasn’t a lot of evidence in the movie that was right), but they couldn’t be trusted to sit quietly in their seats when that was the smart thing to do.
Sorry if I’m belaboring this point, but I really do think I picked a great example in this case. Harry intentionally ignores rational advice over and over again because of his gut, and succeeds because the screenwriter has his back, not because it makes sense. That was really clear if you’ll watch the film again.
A better example is very welcome, however. I’m confident that they are out there.
Excessive details. Where the author goes on for 10 pages about the turbo-light-jump engines, or the effects of zero G travel on the subjects.
The author doesn’t know any of this as fact – they’re just supposing and it doesn’t help the story.
I agree with the author on Armegeddon. I hated the concept of the “screwups” being the heros that I have yet to finish actually viewing the entire film.
—
Regarding no. 10: ver intellect: I suspect that having heart win out over intellect is not so much a conscious choice of the author as it is taking the easy way out – it doesn’t require a writer to actually have a strong understanding of science, and as a bonus they can wax poetic about grand crowd-pleasing themes such as faith/conviction/morality/purity/*insert fluffy character trait here* ….
To which I say, ‘boooo’….
tweeks, good addition. I have more tolerance for the “infodump” than many, and am probably guilty of them in my own novels once in a while. My editor had me trim a few for the last book, but actually made me add some in the first. I love SNOW CRASH by Neal Stephenson, but he’s several pages about Babylonian mythology that aren’t as fascinating as he seemed to think they were.
ps – is there actually a serious argument going on here about the validity of the movie Armageddon? o.0
…ok, nevermind, I guess that since most of us still enjoy a bit of Star Trek every now and then (despite it fulfilling almost all the above-listed hates), serious debate over Armageddon is ok… in which case I’d like to add that the best part of that movie was Steve Buscemi dry-humping a nuke – there’s your take home message
While I agree with you on some points, I’ll have to disagree on n.4, the time travel bit. Claiming that time travel can be inconsistent or illogical in some stories strikes me as absurd on its own, since the entire concept, with its many paradoxes, is already inconsistent in the first place. Every sci-fi story that involves time travel will turn out to be inconsistent if you try hard to make sense out of it. In Terminator, Kyle Reese is John Connor’s father, but wouldn’t exist if John Connor had never been born – it’s a paradox which makes it inconsistent, but it’s what sci-fi is all about.
Which brings me back to n.1: Writers aren’t scientists. Even if they were, and could provide a valid scientific explanation on how stuff like hyperspace, laser guns, force fields or terraforming work, that would mean they’d actually be able to conceive them, but they can’t, thus the “fiction” bit of “science fiction”.
“Stories that involve time travel devices and technologies that take people backwards and forwards in time and space are considered part of the science fiction genre, whereas stories that involve time travel through supernatural, magical, or unexplained means are considered part of the fantasy genre.
The genre of science fiction is often characterized by incorporating technology either as “a driving force of the story, or merely the setting for drama.†[1] Therefore, it is this key component—technology—that can be used to distinguish between time travel of the science fiction and fantasy realms.
Isaac Asimov, when asked to explain the difference between science fiction and fantasy, once explained that science fiction, given its grounding in science, is possible; fantasy, which has no grounding in reality, is not.†[2] Any story involving time travel may be considered to include an element of science fiction. However, novels and short stories from the science fiction genre usually feature time travel via technology (a ‘time machine’) rather than time travel by supernatural means, and often play with the possibility of time paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_in_fiction
While I may not agree with everything he says, I do agree Steven Dutch of the University of Wisconsin Green Bay when he says that people today, far from needing to get “in touch with their feelings”, actually need to get OUT of touch with them to an extent. The standard view in Hollywood seems to be that rationality is not a “natural” mode of behaviour, and even when characters are portrayed as reacting to stressful situations in a rational fashion they are perceived as “one dimensional” and unbelievable, whereas characters reacting emotionally are seen to be more rounded and believable. While it naturally makes for better drama, it’s not necessarily the optimum survival strategy, nor does it make one a cold fish or any less “normal”.
Psychic or telepathic powers, particularly when justified as a part of human evolution. This is just a wild card for the author avoiding any real explanation by effectively saying “it’s magic, lol”. It’s a horrible cliche that just keeps popping up everywhere.
Try Gundam 00
1. For the most part things make sense, they just have this one uber source of energy
2. Suffers from it on a few instances, but good overall
3. No aliens (or NewTypes) just human vs human. Or enhanced humans in a controlled environment.
4. No time travel, even the travel times are slow
5. Some politics, not too blatant, but you can derive from it what you will.
6. Nope nothing really
7. No FTL everything happens in our solar system.
8. Just Earth, nothing really united, even within the power blocs there are still infighting
9. Only dark things in there is the fact that sociopaths still exist.
10. Unfortunately this is one thing that happens still. However, never underestimate blind luck.
In my opinion the only way time travel can “work” is with the many universes/multiple histories theory, this is used, several times, in Stargate SG-1 and SGA without introducing any paradoxes.
What about computer programs in science fiction? I recently read a book where the heroine wrote a C++ program with GOTOs.
That’s a good one, too, Ivan. I’ve seen a lot of computer abuse in science fiction, movies and tv in particular, but in print as well. I remember one Star Trek episode, or was it three or four of them, in which Kirk defeats a computer by hitting it with a logical paradox. Do they teach that in Starfleet?
I could enjoy a story with bad aliens, obvious themes and FTL drives spanning a million galaxies. Bad can be a good device to a writer who knows what he wants to write about. Rather, pick three and infringe the rest, I say, but make the bad stuff fun.
RE: #5- [remember the top of the page?] Sit through “Enemy Mine”, and see if the blatancy doesn’t smack you in the face between 3/4 and the end. Very good movie with a message for all of us.
From where i’m standing you have a great list, but i’ve one more thing to add. It’s the same thing which pissed me off in fantasy, horror, and other genres, but is most prelevant in SF.
RECYCLING. just because a long dead author made a heap of cash by cooking up the concept of *tractor beams/laser swords/laser shields/plasma rays (dragons, elves, trolls in fantasy) and so on and so forth* does not mean every single author after that has to use the exact same concepts!!!! Your whole freaking purpose is to bring me something new! I hate literary recycling >:P
Computer abuse drives me crazy as well. I can’t count the number of times I wanted to throw my remote at the screen during Star Trek:TNG. They’ve got a virtual AI with what has to be zettaFLOPs of capacity, and they can’t write a freaking macro that pings the captain when someone leaves the ship without authorization? And don’t get me started on the bad engineering decisions that went into the deathtrap known as the Holodeck.
But my initial impetus to comment had to do with list item #7. Oh, sweet Firefly. How I loved thee. But nearly every damned episode they’d do something to make space feel like a foggy crowded backyard where you couldn’t see more than 100 yards off. They were completely unable to “sense” another ship until it was right on top of them when it could be seen with the naked eye when it was miles away. Believe me, I could make a sensor right now that would easily pick out a ship that emits or reflects visible light at a range of 10 miles and probably much further with the addition of some lenses. And that’s just a passive optical sensor, where the hell is the radar?
I hate: All aliens look the same as each other, the people are always jaded and boring as hell, you can tell if an alien is good or bad just by looking at him, robots are inferior fighters, humans pilot space craft and control weapons rather than their vastly superior computers, and artificial intelligence doesn’t get human jokes or emotions, despite them obviously being programmed with it.
10 Miles?
Try a couple light-minutes for current off the shelf hardware to pick up the waste heat from a ship. Turn any kind of reaction drive on, (like, say, a photon drive), and well… those off the shelf sensors can pick up the Space Shuttle’s _manoeuvring thrusters_ from the asteroid belt, and the main engines from Pluto. What’s more, in general the better the drive, the farther away you can see it.
For the Serenity, assuming the description given on the Wikipedia page is accurate and the drive is 90% efficient, you could see it over 230 AU away when it was poking along at 0.1G.
As the line goes: There ain’t no stealth in space.
(Cue the “Haw can we get stealth in space? discussion”)
And one man, one bare-faced Messiah, managed to commit most of these crimes in just one book, or at least points 1,2,3,5,7,8,9 & 10.
I give you L Ron Hubbard & Battlefield Earth. Yes I read it. While I’m not proud it helps sometimes in conversation to have read the worst SF book ever written. 25 years ago and my brain still hurts.
As I recall…he expressed a desire in the preface to use “real science”…so he used an alternative periodic table of unknown elements. His aliens are like big rednecks but with 11 fingers, and therefore use a Base 11 number system. His hero is a caveman who topples an intergalactic empire.
Another good thing was that after that book I almost gave up SF and started reading the classics of english literature, educating myself to good writing, characterization & plotting. Now my Sf reading is light but skewed exclusively towards very good writers (Gibson, Wolfe etc).
To Rick:
Yeah, I was quite certain it could be done better, but I was just thinking of stuff that I could personally design off the top of my head with very little thought. Limited to the visible spectrum, no less.
Regardless, it’s still crap. I recall one episode where they were sitting less than 300 meters from a ship 100 times the size of theirs before “realizing” it. Makes me hurt inside as the writing quality of that show was generally quite high.
I normaly don’t like top 10 lists, but the comments here made it a good one.
As for that some says that writers are not scientist is like saying a writer is not a history professor when doing a film about a historic thing.
I just say ->Research<- as you can hire a geek (like me for example) for $10/h (or many for free) to tell you the obvious crap in your stupid ideas (like time travel paradoxes). I mean geeks must be the absolutely cheapest expert consultant for a film or book you can get. And if a true geek think it ´s ok, 99.9% of the rest of the world will too.
And no, they don ´t have to explain how stuff work as long as it possible (or at least plausible) by our understanding of the universe today, otherwise it ´s in the category Fantasy, that I like too but it still isn’t SciFi.
One of the (in my opinion ofc) best SciFi writers is David Brin, as he is indeed a scientist that writes, and he never explain too deep how stuff work, just what they do.
I’m going to do something dangerous and defend a show from a point made. 😛 You made a criticism about no bathrooms on Vipers. But, currently the USAF flies up to 17hr trans-atlantic flights without bathrooms in their fighters. Surely in BSG the pilot’s flight suits would incorporate a system like the USAF’s “Advanced Mission Extender Device”. A bigger glaring question when it comes to Vipers is WTH would you build a fighter with artificial gravity in cockpit?
David Brin has a PhD, yes, in Physics, and I like his work, too, very much. And me, I have a PhD (astronomy) and an a science fiction writer. And Gregory Benford, Alastair Reynolds, Vernor Vinge, and a bunch more. Well, several more, anyway. It’s not too uncommon.
And you’re right, Khenke, that all kinds of geeks are available to consult and the smart writers do it.
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Sorry if didn’t read all the comments and repeated something.
What about human superiority? Too many sci-fi stories, either written or on TV, have the human race being so so very special -and the aliens continuously saying so-. The aliens are fundamentally flawed and keep learning lessons from the humans. Either this superiority complex is based on intelligence, emotions -this one is the worst-, culture, or a certain “uniqueness”, it’s always unbearable.
Baalcebub: I must recomend that you read David Brins uplift series as it is realy fun for once to see humans as small and tiny ants compared to most other aliens. Ok, the humans are special (for a GOOD reason) but far far from superior, except in the area of getting in trouble.
I realy like the uplift universe and if anyone would make a TV serie or movie in the uplift universe I put up my preorder of the Blueray collectors edition right now.
Khenke: Yes, the Uplift Saga is on my to read shelf… it’s a very long shelf
. I’ve so far read Sundiver, and I liked it. The funny thing about that book was, it had an error I had never seen before or after; the entire third chapter was a chapter from a book about sexual dysfunction on the elderly… really, first I was furious -and couldn’t return the book since I had bought it in a book fair-, now I found it amusing really. Still, that chapter I haven’t read to this day.
Enjoyed the list. The explanations with each point made it more interesting than such things usually are.
Not to disagree, but just to add a bit, I think the photo thing in Back To The Future was just a dramatic device, a way of showing in a few seconds what would otherwise take pages of “Tell me, Professor” explanations about the nature of time and paradoxes. As you say, the photos are not something we should think too hard about.
I like Star Trek, but I didn’t like the way Kirk’s leaps of logic often weren’t connected with anything known by the characters in the story at that point.
As for unsound science in time travel stories, I’m under the impression that, scientifically, there couldn’t be time travel, so once a writer is using it, as with fantasy, they can make up their own rules.
The problem with aliens is making them alien to some extent, but able to interact with Humans so as to produce a story. This means, able to share some sort of environment, communicate, share goals. True, that leads to a lot of lazy and sloppy writing which I don’t bother reading.
Which leads me to my biggest beef, which sort of combines your points 5, 8 and 10 : The simplicity of moral constructs. White hats versus black hats. There is no examination of the nature of good and evil, they just basically hate the color of the other guy’s hat.