Spider Star
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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-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
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Ten Science Fiction Cliches to Love
December 7th, 2008
Cliches are a part of reality. No matter how many times people have seen some things, they want to see more. They like riffs on the familiar. People like new things, but not too new. Mass audiences never seem to tire of cliches. They abound in fantasy and horror in particular: vampires, werewolves, wizards, elves, etc. There seems to be at least one blockbuster vampire book or movie every year. Editors issue guidelines stating that they will reject all vampire stories immediately, but someone is always buying vampires.
Well, what about science fiction? I have my own weaknesses. Here are some science fiction cliches to love.
1. Giant monsters. Most of them make no scientific sense for a variety of good reasons. Godzilla, King Kong, or even a giant space slug. I love them all.
2. Giant robots. More plausible than giant monsters, but not often implemented well. I love it when they shoot rockets out of their fingers. It’s so dumb, but I love it.
3. Ray guns. Call them blasters or phasers, but they’re still ray guns. For some reason, bullets aren’t cool in the future, or in space. Aliens laugh off projectile weapons, and can only be harmed by energy beams.
4. Space babes and mating with aliens. From Kirk and his harem of Orion slave girls to the more gruesome reproductive schemes of Alien or Species, this squishy subject has been done to death. Like sex itself, people don’t seem to tire of it.
5. Space war. It almost never makes sense economically or scientifically. It’s almost got to be easier to just terraform than to travel light years to steal someone’s water and women. Or it’s more likely that there’s such a great technological difference that the war would be so one-sided as to be over immediately. Still, I love Ender’s Game, The Forever War, Starship Troopers, Armor, Halo novelizations, etc.
6. Transporters/teleporters. Almost no one takes the technology seriously. They’re either implausible or underutilized. The Star Trek technology ought to make humans immortal, reproducing a back-up when anyone is killed, or just making infinite copies. Why doesn’t every starship have a dozen Datas? Why do people ever risk their lives at all? Still, it’s just so damned convenient…
7. Faster than light (FTL). Speaking of convenient. I don’t use FTL in my own books because I think it’s too problematic and unrealistic, but I don’t mind seeing anyone and everyone use it in their books. Conditioned too early, I fear, to be a truly hardcore hard sf curmudgeon.
8. Artificial Intelligence. From positronic brains to Hal, a staple of sf that will never vanish. Good, evil, everything in between. And people continue to argue about the nature of consciousness and if machines can ever think, or if they start acting like it, if we’ll be able to tell.
9. Superpowers. I’m mainly thinking of Marvel and DC superheroes here, which I love, even though the science is almost always ridiculous, but more, too. We have aliens with various forms of ESP, telekinesis, telepathy, mind control, healing powers, etc., most of which make about as much sense as they do in the comic books.
10. Artificial gravity. I’m not talking about spinning a spacecraft, but a button you press that magically provides gravity on board a starship. I don’t know if gravity is so popular and acceptable to people because it’s natural to us here on Earth and not seeing it is too strange and distracting, or if decades of TV and movies, where it was difficult and expensive to shoot zero gee, simply raised us all to expect it. Anyway, I barely bat an eyelash if an alien ship has gravity and I don’t see anything spinning.
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The Queendom of Sol setting has “faxes” that are very powerful scanner/duplicators that people use to get from place to place. They also use them to edit themselves when needed.
on the super hero token, the coolest semi-space fiction/super hero comic i’ve read in several years is the invincible line. it’s really good. starts out as sort of a superman parody, but then turns into its own dramatic piece with very creative ideas. get it. it’s good.
[…] Ten Science Fiction Cliches to Love — Mike Brotherton is funny. […]
Fun post, Mike!
I like some of the cliches associated with science fiction/fantasy/horror movies.
– Monster vision: at some point, the camera will show you how the monster sees the action. Often time it’s in a different color or the proportions are wrong. Think of the last scene of the George Pal’s War of the Worlds.
– Girl falls down while running: It’s inevitable that in a running scene with a man and woman, the woman will fall. Think of the getaway scene in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
– Authority figures deny that anything is happening, but the kids know: Think of The Blob and all those 50s monster movies, but you see echoes of it in ET and The Transformers.
– Bad guys destroyed by their own weapons: Most James Bond films, but also a lot of mad scientist stories.
There’s also the odds pattern in many monster movies that the monsters (or robots or whatever) only move at a slow walk but can still overtake sprinting humans.
I try not to think about the consequences of some of the core technologies because it generally makes the book unreadable. Teleporters are usually the worst because the author fails to include a blocking mechanism, which would make theft trivial and privacy impossible according to most of the scenarios.
I still like E.E. Smith’s heavy-duty blasters and shields in the lensman series, and Joe Haldeman’s forever war bobblers. Albeit my first thought with those was that some moron would inevitably start sending nuclear waste into the future with them.
Oh, and you forgot the ground-to-orbit non-rockets that mysteriously propel so many craft. How *exactly* does something the size of a car get into geosync and back on a tank of fuel? Too often “it just does”.
Also, note how rarely one of the energy storage devices explodes. Heinlein’s shipstones, for example, could just about be dropped into the sun without damage, but realistically a briefcase than can power a city for a month will make a pretty boom if something goes wrong.
Oh, yeah, Moz. Those easy to orbit ships drive me nuts, too. No problem for the Moon, and maybe not Mars, but chemical rockets are going to have to look a lot like we’ve already seen with our existing programs. And are you thinking of Vinge’s bobblers from the Peace War, rather than Haldeman?
Love “monster vision” for sure, Jim!
James, I do not love the shamblers. I am now a convert to “fast zombies” that are a lot scarier.
[…] author, Mike Brotherton, has an interesting list involving Ten Science Fiction Cliches to Love. It’s kind of amusing, I noticed a couple of cliches on the list that often show in up in […]
Again, you do not understand Science Fiction.
It’s a genre about humanity and how it would behave in different situations and is about philosophical exploration, not plausible facts.
Things like giant monsters and superpowers ask questions about what we will do against something which seems unstoppable, like death, or how we should handle personal power.
The Hulk, for instance is about the folly of being an angry young man, it’s not about “gamma radiation,” or any scientific facts.
Being literal is not creative.
TheAlderian, I beg to differ. It sounds like you understand fantasy very well, but not science fiction. 😉
I remember being very bothered when I first read Gateway back in the days of the Carter Administration that the landers (not the starships, which use ALIEN SCIENCE!) the humans used were conventional chemical rockets that nevertheless did not seem to have anything like the mass ratio of a chemical rocket.
Oops, yeah, Forever War was what I was thinking of. I’m bad with names, that’s my excuse.
Um, yeah, it’s *science* fiction… there’s all this observable reality to deal with. For that matter, most fiction is “hard” in the sense that it’s located on a recognisable Earth that obeys all the usual rules and guidelines. It’s the characters who are fictional.
Yeah, for zipping around a solar system, slowly, chemical rockets are fine and don’t require huge mass ratios. Sustaining the kinds of burns required to be landers is a different story all together. Then there are the Vipers and Raptors of Battlestar Galactica that seem to be chemical powered rockets, have essentially no fuel, zip around a solar system quickly, and have the capability to be landers, too.
I tend to tolerate it, however.
Even nuclear thermal helps the mass ratios a lot without getting into systems that are unlikely to generate enough thust to get them off of Enceladus, let along a planet like Earth.
The reference to Haldeman above reminds me that he was pretty much the only author to use tachyons as reaction mass for a rocket back when tachyons were in vogue (Many authors used tachyons + handwavium to produce FTL rockets but I mean something else). A rocket that emits tachyons can have an arbitrarily low mass ratio, which means they can be used in 10 m/s/s Forever rockets, which in some frames of reference allows one to traverse the universe in decades (Unless you hit something at 0.9999999999999999 C, in which case you get to be an anomolous source of high energy cosmic rays for a nearby civilization).
Tachyons do have a number of drawbacks. There are proofs that you cannot use them to transmit information at FTL and also that universes that have tachyons in are unstable and doomed. Still, the time scale for utter destruction might be acceptable on a human scale: people would get upset if the universe has 50/50 change of spontaneously rolling over into a higher entropy state every six months but they would be ok if it was 50/50 over a billion years.
I dont understand why so many people think AI can become “evil”.
Why would any AI struggle to survive? Humans want to survive due to evolution. In fact, the only reason complex life forms exist is that only genes that made it possible to survive, including the capability to FEAR DEATH, got to replicate more.
Most logical reasoning that we humans imagine would create dangerous AI are in fact very specific to life forms adapted by billions of years of evolution.
Perhaps most AIs would not struggle to survive but the ones that did would in some cases survive because of their efforts, giving a reproductive advance to a desire to stay alive.
[…] (maybe). When it comes to the latter group, some people hate the classic sci-fi tropes, some people love goofy movie science. Whatever your position, here are the top 12 sci-fi plot devices geeks love to […]
This post was extremely interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last week.