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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Mr. Brotherton,( me again)
I don’t mean to rehash this post but I just had to say something about #9 on your list.
I agree completely! It seems like most of the SF stories these days are dystopian, I hate that! It’s completely boring to hear how everyone suffers and is in slavery. Machines take over; the earth is ruined (yawn).
I miss the late 19th century SF stories, the utopia’s that inspired people to achieve greatness. More people should write about how science helps.
-Zac
Zac, there was a recent anthology called SHINE of positive near-future science fiction stories. You might track that down.
(I was pleased to see a recent post so this thread isn’t completely dead…)
Someone (I have no idea who but it could have been Robert Sawyer) said – I paraphrase – pick your one or two ‘magic’ concepts, be consistent and keep the rest grounded in real science.
Thus in Star Trek – warp drive, transporters, phasers (okay so that is already three…) + the ‘special sauce’ for a given episode.
The last ST:TNG episode I watched had them beam to an asteroid with earth normal gravity on the inside(!) – okay so film budget comes into play – and a breathable atmosphere but no plant life(!). They find dead aliens who materialize from another dimension(!) at the moment of mortality and subsequently decompose into trans-uranic elements(!!!!!!) There was more but mercifully I have blocked it from memory. I stopped watching after that episode.
Oh, and the inability of people to learn from the past is a major irritant. How many conversations were there on ST:TNG that went as follows…
**********
Warf: Captain, I’m detecting an unknown sub-space disturbance.
Picard: What is it? (ref: ‘unknown’, you git…)
Warf: I (*still*) don’t know. Should I raise shields?
Picard: No.
Warf: A decloaking Romulan warbird! They are attacking, shields are offline, weapons are disabled and we are screwed. (You stupid git…)
Picard: Whoops. My bad. (Okay, he never actually says this but he should… Maybe at the court martial.)
************
Thanks, I’m done ranting now.
I agree with all of the above, but a couple of notes,
1. Science fiction on tv or movies is always fantasy.
2. I don’t mind reading some ‘bad’ science fiction if the something in the writing is entertaining, or keeps you engrossed. For example, if you do not like EE ‘Doc’ Smiths stories ie, the Lensmen series with intertialess spaceships, inexhaustable delameter ray guns and incorruptible heroes, you are missing the point of reading for entertainment.
I’m glad to say that I’ve managed to avoid most of those issues in my writing. That said, though, I’m afraid that the modern video game is still a victim to most of the problems mentioned above.
Even a big budget title like Starcraft 2 wound up with ludicrous technobabble, ham-fisted writing, planets dedicated to single industries (Why do you need an entire planet of farmers? If it’s economically vital, why does nobody care when it gets attacked?), and some bad aliens (like the Zerg, who are supposedly devoted to evolution but are remarkably bad at adapting to their environments).
This is a very interesting conversation. I think I’ll weigh in!
Nothing personal against Adam above, but he unwittingly articulated what i hate most about “Science Fiction”. Adam defined the distinction between Science Fiction and Fantasy Fiction as being little more than a window dressing with little distinction of substance (for instance, one genre shoots fireballs out of magic wands, and the other genre shoots fire balls out of plasma guns). I hate this attitude because it undermines what I love most about Science Fiction.
What I most love about Science Fiction, what Science Fiction at its best does better than any other genre, is that it makes me think deeply **and realistically** about the implications of science discovery.
When someone says: “you are missing the point of reading for entertainment”, I would say in response, I don’t miss that point. I don’t see any reason why I can’t have it all. I enjoy reading other fiction too, and I enjoy the trappings of the science fiction genre for it’s own sake too, but, it is for me it’s almost worse too see a great science fiction concept squandered in a lame, all surface and no substance treatment than it would be to see it never conceived at all (almost – I’m conflicted).
When I rate the quality of a Sci-Fi movie or book, the primary criteria I use is not the special effects or even the characters or dialog or plot of the story. The primary criteria I use is the quality that is most essential to what makes Science Fiction, Science Fiction (imho) and not possibly something else: a story that gets me to think deeply about the implications of science discovery.
Mike – re Heinlein and slide rules. I think the point one really needs to keep in mind there is: A: you could get the job done with a slide rule and
B: Heinlein’s competent man. Learn how to do the task manually and then if anything goes wrong with the (insert high tech here), you’re not dead, merely delayed.
If one thinks about it, the only time that humans in space will be calculating orbits for themselves will be when their high tech fails them. Anyone got a slide rule? Hand-held computer? Cell phone with calculator? No? Well, I guess we’ll be crashing into the sun about five weeks after we all die from hypoxia….
Bad writing is my biggest peeve-just about everything new published by Baen Books falls under this problem. Also refuse to read a book with aliens who look like cats(common to Baen book covers).
Hi Mike! My most hated thing is sort of a subset of your item 10: SF with an anti-science message. Movies are the worst offenders here, but some writers do it too, most notably (as you point out elsewhere) Michael Crichton. To me, commitment to the scientific method and the quest for knowledge is the heart and soul of good SF. When someone puts spaceships on the cover of a book in order to sucker me into reading a story that celebrates irrationality and ignorance, I just want to throw the damn thing across the room.
Also, I hate it when they put spaceships on the cover and there are no spaceships in the story. That’s just mean. Why would they want to make me cry?
Nice to see you here, Chris. Yeah, “things humans aren’t ready to know” irritates me. I think that theme is popular because writers lack imagination and/or are Luddites writing on typewriters and mailing hardcopies.
Covers that promise things not found within…that’s a pet peeve of mine too and a good idea for a whole new post. I’ll add it to my list for when I dig out of my current overly deep pile of work.
Actually there’s a different way to phrase “humans aren’t ready to know this.”
Make the entity take personal credit. “I don’t even know how to start explaining it. It feels like trying literature to a pine tree.”
The more advanced side is usually busy with whatever they’re doing in these settings anyway so it would be like if we took a break in the middle of a way to teach dogs the alphabet and numbers so they could understand addresses we wanted them to go to.
Not quite a one size fits all solution but it should work for a lot of it.
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i hate misleading articles they just vex me so example one nasa or cdc really did you actually talk too these governmental institutes and get there word’s first hand bye