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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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Eight Science Fiction Tropes of Convenience
February 19th, 2013
There are a number of tropes that I see popping up over and over in science fiction, even though they are not very scientifically plausible and border on the impossible given our current understanding. They are used and will continue to be used, especially in movies and tv, because they’re very convenient. I find it more interesting not to adopt them usually, and maybe that’s why none of my work will be adapted into a screenplay (well, one of the reasons). Star Trek uses the majority of these, and is still popular today in its many manifestations, so what do I know?
Faster Than Light (FTL). Space is big, really big, as they say, and it takes a long time to get around at sublight speeds. Much more convenient to have short duration but not instantaneous travel. Personally I think relativistic effects are really cool, as are realistic starship technologies. You can also do interesting stories with generation ships, hibernation, etc., and certainly there has been a lot of good science fiction playing with those ideas.
Artificial Gravity. It’s inconvenient and expensive to shoot every scene in space in zero gee, and complicated to design ships with rotating sections. There are some nice instances of spin gravity in science fiction movies (e.g. 2001, Red Planet) or even magnetic boots (Destination Moon), but viewers are really comfortable seeing people walking around. Lots of science fiction just shows people walking around and it’s assumed there’s artificial gravity even though it’s an incredible technology and could be used in much more creative ways.
Humanoid Aliens. It’s challenging to create and film non-human aliens. Also hard to relate to them. I understand that in Avatar, a movie that tried hard to get the science right, original plans for non-human aliens were scrapped in the interest of audiences being not so likely to understand falling in love with a weird-looking critter. Much more convenient to slap on some forehead make-up or a mask and call it a wrap.
Universal Translator. Imagine if you had to invent an alien language for every new movie? And train actors to speak it. And add subtitles. Star Trek has a universal translator for convenience, although Vulcan, Klingon, and other languages were invented anyway because it’s fun. In Stargate SG-I, nearly everyone just spoke English for reasons I never understood (convenience!) and I’m not sure they ever explained…and they even had a linguist on the team when reading alien languages was required. In your face, logical consistency!
Force Fields. Why use steel bars or strong glass when you can have a magic force field? They also make great shields for space ships, apparently. I think they get used so much because the idea sounds cool and it’s easier to just have shields fail in a predictable way than to actually have to tear up your model spaceships or create realistic damage with CGI. How they work exactly was never clear to me, even when sometimes it’s clear it’s just supposed to be an electric field or something.
Mental Telepathy. I can only imagine this got grandfathered into science fiction since there were times in the past century ESP was taken seriously and studied, as well as a lot of charlatans running around claiming psychic powers. Okay, too many people still take it seriously today. Anyway, lots of mind reading and mind control going back to forever in science fiction. It has been used so much that little to no explanation is ever used. Audiences swallow it without much critical thought, and I almost never see it justified. Star Trek has Spock and Troi. Star Wars has the Force. Babylon 5 had telepaths. It’s harder to think of science fiction shows that didn’t go this route.
Super Sensors. Finding things in space, even though there’s not really anywhere to hide (despite Star Trek II‘s Motarin Nebula), is a pretty hard problem. As an astronomer, I know how hard it is to see every faint, small thing in the sky. It’s also hard to see everything on the surface of a planet from orbit. Sure, you can always see individual things you know where to find and focus on, but scanning the entire sky (or surface) deeply and at high resolution isn’t easy. Again, maybe this is an engineering problem we can solve with sufficient time, but I still find scanning for individual isotopes or lifeforms miles underground a pretty implausible problem.
Ray Guns. Conventional firearms are actually very efficient. Modern ammunition carries a lot of energy that can be quickly converted into kinetic energy and deposited where you want it to go. Lasers have the advantage of being faster (but when did the shot from a phaser or blaster ever appear to travel at light-speed?), but I have a hard time imagining a portable power source efficient enough and high energy enough to work for a laser gun. Maybe my imagination falls short here, since this is in principle engineering and not something at all theoretically impossible. In any event, it’s convenient to have portable weapons that don’t need ammunition and look cooler than conventional guns and can be set to ‘stun.’
I’ll stop here, wondering if I should include teleporters, time travel, or a few other things. I won’t include things like robots/androids, since they seem entirely reasonable extrapolations of current technology, and my list is about common things in science fiction that just don’t seem all that likely to me. Personally I think that using these is as lazy and often as boring as using for elves, dragons, and wizards in fantasy. Sure, you can do it, and audiences seem to love it, but why not do something a little more innovative?
What do you think?
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Oh dear. I’m using two of these in my latest book.
In my defence, the aliens need to be humanoid because they’re hiding on Earth and they’re deliberately disguising themselves to blend in (which lets me have them speaking English – does this mean I’m using three?).
The advantage of the ray gun is that it can double as a laser cutter if you need to break into something in a hurry. It also let me play with the idea of how it would recharge – something you can’t easily do with bullets.
The list is pretty solid except for the first one. I think FTL is fairly plausible. NASA is looking into it, after all:
I like rigor as much as the next nerd, but it’s mostly a question of balance. There’s a reason the mundane sci fi movement didn’t really take off, after all.
@Jessica, a good writer can write a good story about elves bearing ray guns, and I’m still mostly a Star Trek fan although the reboot gave me serious concerns. Hope the new movie is better.
@Nathanial, I read those new stories, too, and I’m still very skeptical until there’s proof of concept in the applied aspects. We have absolutely zero capability to engineer space at this stage, and no clear path how to do it in the future either in my opinion. Plus there’s a philosophical issue to consider, as FTL is time travel in principle, and that’s a whole other can of worms… It’d be huge fun if my skepticism were to be misplaced though!
If you’re writing near-future sf (say within 100 years) then those points of plausibility are reasonable. But a 110 years ago the concept of a smart phone, or maglev train would have seemed like the most ludicrous fantasy, and harnessing nuclear fusion about as likely as creating a wormhole is today.
I wonder if aliens are living among us (you could probably cite an example of a politician or two). It would make sense that they’d look like us by having altered their genetic makeup, not just to be inconspicuous but to adapt to our environment. But the question arises, is the humanoid form the pinnacle of adaptation for an Earth-like planet? Or is there something better to follow after the next global catastrophe?
Adrian, I’d probably extend your 100 years to “a few hundred” but agree that if we’re talking arbitrarily far future, improbable becomes a lot more likely. I still don’t believe in a universal translator that can work without having encountered another language before, although I would believe in a “universal translator” that could rapidly learn new languages (and perhaps other forms of communication) by careful observation over some extended time period.
And I should have explicitly said to Jessica above that for aliens trying to blend in here on Earth, I’d be shocked if they didn’t look human and speak human languages!
I would have thought Mental Telepathy could be justifiably engineered for sf purposes in the future, given some kind of brain-implant.
Ironically, while googling for something about this I came across the url http://www.synthetictelepathy.net/ ; on clicking it I got “Error establishing a database connection”, which doesn’t bode well for synthetic telepathy itself!
Narmitaj, I agree. Technology can definitely be used to create mental telepathy. I object to all the science fiction that assumes biological causes as being unsupported and too convenient to pass up. No reason a starship crew couldn’t all be chipped to communicate with each other without having to speak.
When I saw the heading “Super Sensors” I thought you’d hit on something that always makes me laugh when I see it in Star Trek. Someone will say, “Run a scan,” and somebody hits a few buttons and announces, “There’s a ship three light-years away.” I guess tacyons come in handy.
I think it’s reasonable to give artificial gravity, overly humanoid aliens and universal translators a pass in TV and to some degree movies. I’d rather have them invest a bit more in a good story rather than put half the budget into microgravity effects. And no, a blue human with a strange forehead isn’t too convincing, but cheap CGI isn’t either, and I like seeing good actors do their thing. And it helps to be able to understand what everyone is saying. Of course that is not to say that the gravity in 2001 or the language in Stargate (the movie) aren’t cool.
Generation ships and hypersleep (Aliens style) are very cool, and there are many books that tell interesting stories based on those. But you really can’t have stories like Star Wars or Star Trek without FTL, so it doesn’t bother me too much. With telepathy things start to go downhill fast, although it’s still possible to have good stories that have it, such as The Demolished Man. But often, especially on TV, it’s used as a crutch, and worse, in a boring way. (“You primitive apes still use sound to communicate, how quaint!”)
But there is no excuse for force fields, especially mystery ones that catch your ship somewhere in space, as well as super sensors and especially transporters. Also: metamorphs, insanely implausible to begin with, but it gets worse as they ignore conservation of mass/energy and can trick increasingly more advanced detection techniques, starting with X-rays and ending at DNA sequencing. And conspiracy theories. The earth is almost taken over by hostile aliens time and time again yet the public remains blissfully unaware, because of course governments’ first priority is to cover everything up, and they manage to do that successfully, too.
Ray guns: can be cool, can be severely misused. “Set phasers to stun”, come on! It’s a miracle that Star Trek managed to survive this massive set of strikes against it. It’s no accident that the best stories are the ones where somehow half the ship is out of commission so they can’t use their super technology to magically fix everything.
But on the other hand, there is certainly room for science fiction that has some lapses in scientific plausibility. Just don’t try to sell technobabble, magic or religion as science, please. On the third hand, a good story with good characters that is also scientifically rigorous after asking the kick-off “what if” question is what really makes the artificial valves in my cyborg heart pump faster.
Mike – when the non-humanoid aliens arrive in Earth orbit aboard their FTL ships (not suffering any physical effects due to artificial gravity), beam down to the planet while wearing their force-field protected space suits and zap our military forces with their ray guns, after which they will use their telepathic mind control to enslave the population, you are going to be one sorry science fiction writer! (Universal translator not needed – they’ve got no interest in ‘talking’ to us!)
I never fail to be fascinated by my microwave oven, definitely the most SFnal gadget I own. And I don’t think it showed up in SF until AFTER the thing was actually invented. Hmmm…
Also, it’s the Mutara Nebula, not Motarin.
@Chris, I wondered about the spelling. I found my version on the web, so I’m not the only one who thought it sounded like that. Nebulas don’t actually look like that, by the way, either. 😉
@Steve, hide your women!
@Stephen, yes, spotting enemy starships literally light years away seemed hopelessly stupid to me, too, and it’s hard to even know where to start or how to justify it.
@Ilijitsh, good story trumps everything. And I have to agree, shapeshifting aliens as often portrayed strikes me as impossible to unlikely. Camouflaging? Sure. Minor changes? Sure. Complete body size changes and changing skeletal structure in seconds? Please!
Mike-
I’m not saying that I’d bet my lunch money on the Alcubierre drive panning out (in my lifetime or ever), but restricting sci-fi to only technology that is already confirmed to work seems far too narrow.
Tropes like universal translators, force fields, and super sensors are absolute fantasy. FTL actually has real-live physicists working on it, and a budget at NASA. I think that puts it in a separate category.
I will readily grant, however, that the scientific basis for it and its presentation in books and film have nothing to do with each other. I guess I’d agree that it has been a trope as-used, but that it need not be. I think you can plot out realistic stories that use FTL, but you really can’t with some of the others.