Common Sci-Fi tropes that annoy you!

[Zeras]

Easily my biggest is when you are told you are dealing with something like a UN in space, but what you get is 'murica in space (I'm looking at you Halo).

You'd probably see more of how the UNSC works beauracratically if humanity hadn't been embroiled in a civil war and then a war with a group of aliens bent on wiping them all out - and then encoutering the very organism that led the mythical race of beings whose technological artifacts everyone seems to find killing themselves to stop.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I just wish we'd get some of the more optimistic sci-fi back.
Nowadays it's always about horrible monsters, terrorism, classism enforced by stereotypical "evil" people, post-apocalypse, war crimes, revenge for war crimes, you name it.
Sure these elements can be present in a story, a story even needs a certain amount of conflict, but does the future always have to be so grim?

Yep. Seems like modern sci-fi can be one of two things: grimdark, or a soap opera. You can have both, but you can't have neither without giving up the sci-fi elements entirely. I just don't get the idea of taking a genre that is uniquely suited to escapist fantasies and focusing on the absolute worst aspects of the modern day, at least not in the "well we do it because things are shitty right now so nobody would believe a happy future!" way that it keeps being excused with. Dystopian fiction has its place, but that's not the reason for it.

Futuristic laser or energy weapons that are less effective than a normal gun like what we have on Earth today, Star Trek is a big culprit of this, especially Voyager. Meanwhile on DS9 someone takes a shot in to the leg and loses the leg.

I dunno, I kinda liked how effective the Tommy Gun Picard used on the Borg was. They're adaptive and eventually immune to certain lasers due to their unique armor and what not, armor that's obviously not designed for kinetic damage.

It kind of makes you wonder how dumb Starfleet were, they never adopted any kind of projectile weapons after their encounters with the Borg despite their effectiveness and them already having a gun that could beam a bullet through walls and kill someone without even being in the same room as them.

Admittidly though it would probabally do little to their ships as they seemed originally at least to be able to adapt to ship based kinetic weapons like photon torpedos as well. Though post the best of both worlds Starfleet apparently got around that.

I think the Klingons have the right idea, Bat'leths seem to be far more reliable of a way of killing someone than a energy weapon.

I've seen people arguing about this before. The usual explanation is that if the borg were routinely facing off against projectile and bladed weapons, they'd adapt to them just as easily as they do energy weapons. They're only effective because they almost never run into them, if that makes sense. Kind of like antibiotic resistant bacteria.

 

[Mr Mystery Guest]

People in the future not watching television. Star Trek was the worst for this, (I know not Enterprise as it was closer to our time) but when you have worked for twelve hours scrubbing jefferies tubes i refuse to belive you will have the energy to run around a Holodeck. I don't even turn my Wii on.

 

[Zontar]

People in the future not watching television. Star Trek was the worst for this, (I know not Enterprise as it was closer to our time) but when you have worked for twelve hours scrubbing jefferies tubes i refuse to belive you will have the energy to run around a Holodeck. I don't even turn my Wii on.

Funny thing, for all it's odd decisions and the whole "being the worst of all 5 shows, even Voyager", Enterprise did come off as the most realistic of the shows (if you ignore the incompetent crew and ineffective Starfleet). They use money, they have to wright and rewrite protocol on a daily basis since no one has written it for them, they have the crew watch movies and recorded sports in their free time (including having screenings in the mess hall, complete with popcorn) and I think there may have been a moment where someone caught cabin fever (or it could have been something else).

By comparison: TOS has a mess hall and a bowling ally (not even joking), and that's about it.
Next Gen is a military research base with an engine, and all it has for crew and civilian downtime is Holodecks, a small indoor park and a bar.
Voyager has the amenities of Next Gen (except the park), yet despite the fact they are trapped in nowhere, they still waste energy and food rations in both like they where on patrol at home. The only one who even does anything else is Tom, who on rare occasion in later seasons can be seen watching TV (though he STILL uses the holodeck).
Then there's DS9, which admittedly is better then others at it. There's gambling (with money), shopping, the holodecks are used for their logical purpose (adventures and sex, usually both). Still no TV, but also admits there's more to life then work and holodecks.

 

[PirateRose]

1. Judeo-Christian mythology. Example: Planets called Eden, Adam and Eve characters, chosen one Jesus Christ type characters.

2. Technology is bad, if we go back to the stone age and start riding bikes( which apparently isn't technology), things will be better(as in better for healthy people who never ever get sick or ever have accidents disabling them or grow old or have children or had to grow food).

3. War with aliens, because they just attacked humans out of the blue for either a mysterious reason or they are just pure evil and they screwed up their own planet. It seems like people take examples of colonialism/imperialism as what will happen with meeting aliens, instead of the times groups of humans met on friendlier terms and started trades both of goods and culture, like between Egypt, Rome and Greece for a while.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

People in the future not watching television. Star Trek was the worst for this, (I know not Enterprise as it was closer to our time) but when you have worked for twelve hours scrubbing jefferies tubes i refuse to belive you will have the energy to run around a Holodeck. I don't even turn my Wii on.

Funny thing, for all it's odd decisions and the whole "being the worst of all 5 shows, even Voyager", Enterprise did come off as the most realistic of the shows (if you ignore the incompetent crew and ineffective Starfleet). They use money, they have to wright and rewrite protocol on a daily basis since no one has written it for them, they have the crew watch movies and recorded sports in their free time (including having screenings in the mess hall, complete with popcorn) and I think there may have been a moment where someone caught cabin fever (or it could have been something else).

By comparison: TOS has a mess hall and a bowling ally (not even joking), and that's about it.
Next Gen is a military research base with an engine, and all it has for crew and civilian downtime is Holodecks, a small indoor park and a bar.
Voyager has the amenities of Next Gen (except the park), yet despite the fact they are trapped in nowhere, they still waste energy and food rations in both like they where on patrol at home. The only one who even does anything else is Tom, who on rare occasion in later seasons can be seen watching TV (though he STILL uses the holodeck).
Then there's DS9, which admittedly is better then others at it. There's gambling (with money), shopping, the holodecks are used for their logical purpose (adventures and sex, usually both). Still no TV, but also admits there's more to life then work and holodecks.

In Voyager's defense, they rationed use of the holodeck and the replicators. Crew members, including the officers, were limited to a certain amount of energy to use on them. The units could be saved up, but you had to have them to make use of the facilities. They even had Neelix cooking real food picked up along the way, instead of replicating/whatever you call what the food machines in TOS did everything like on the other shows, because at the end of the day it wasted less energy to store and prepare real food than it did to make it out of energy.

 

[K12]

Human-alien half breeds annoy me a bit. There is no way for this to be biologically feasible. Why would we even assume that aliens would produce sexually like we do? They could have 9 different genders as far as we know.

Pretty much all the scientifically implausible stuff that is just assumed for no real reason(e.g. sound and explosions in space) irritates me a bit. I'm fine with this stuff if it's for story reasons (I'm not going to begrudge faster than light travel in an intergalactic show) or if it's cool enough but I'd like a little nod towards the fact that they know this is wrong otherwise I just feel like I'm celebrating ignorance.

The general assumption that "we will be psychic in the future" I find rather baffling as well. Why does this seem to be such a standard idea? So much so that it can be a tiny little background (oh by the way psychics) kind of deal rather than the main focus of the story.

Does it really matter? And why? Removing those two situations would seriously limit the scope of the genre. We've got some really nice stories based on the possibility of breeding aliens and telepathy which actually do mirror relevant issues today. On the other hand, removing anything that is 'impossible' in sci-fi based on the grounds that our current science cannot foresee the possibility only serves to restrict the potential creativity of the genre. As far as I can see, the basis for such an argument can only be that the purpose of science fiction is to discuss life as we think it will be lived in the future and the issues we might have then. While I don't doubt that such sci-fi exists, it's a rather pointless type of fiction - I mean why write such fiction at all, why not make it non-fiction? Good sci-fi is interesting because it's relevant to our immediate circumstances, not some far off future life when we're dead.

And anyway, if you want to talk about (the completely boring topic of) scientific possibilities, it's not impossible that similar conditions give rise to sexually compatible life on two different planets. Very unlikely, but then so is FTL travel.

First of all I would protest extremely strongly that looking at scientific possibilities and plausibilities is boring in any sense of the word. Many fantastic hard science-fiction stories exist and speculation about the future in an honest way has produced a list of brilliant stories far too long to contain here.

I also don't really appreciate you removing the middle paragraph of my comment which clearly shows exactly what it is that I don't like. It is when these things are both incidental and uninteresting used and completely unexplained that I get annoyed. I don't like the fact that too many science fiction writers seem to be ignorant of many very simple scientific facts. I feel that Science fiction as a speculative genre, as opposed to fantasy which happens to look futuristic, should actually be written by people who have an appreciation of science. People who are inspired by scientific possibilities rather than see them only as things to ignore or randomly stick the word quantum in front of to make it sound cool.

I wouldn't care if these weren't almost omnipresent tropes. Whenever there's an alien race cohabiting with humans there will always be a half human/half alien character somewhere and there is never even a single little line of dialogue that nods to the fact that this is a surprising occurrence. You could easily make the inability of a inter-galactic couple to conceive an interesting plot point if you wanted to. You could make the inability to conceive be used as ammo for the anti-inter-species relationships proponents that their will inevitably be.

If a sci-fi show has spaceships travelling faster than light and simply say they are powered by "faster than light" travel technology then that's actually all I'd want as a nod towards scientific knowledge.

We know this is impossible except... is preferable to complete ignorance of what even is or isn't possible. Unless of course you simply want to make future fantasy and in that case be more inventive. Why have laser guns when there's no reason why you can't have magic powered flying metal space golems!

I think too many science fiction writers are getting their ideas from other science fiction stories and not enough of them are getting inspired by actual real scientific ideas (even discredited ones). I'd like more of a balance is all.

 

[K12]

double post sorry

 

[Zontar]

People in the future not watching television. Star Trek was the worst for this, (I know not Enterprise as it was closer to our time) but when you have worked for twelve hours scrubbing jefferies tubes i refuse to belive you will have the energy to run around a Holodeck. I don't even turn my Wii on.

Funny thing, for all it's odd decisions and the whole "being the worst of all 5 shows, even Voyager", Enterprise did come off as the most realistic of the shows (if you ignore the incompetent crew and ineffective Starfleet). They use money, they have to wright and rewrite protocol on a daily basis since no one has written it for them, they have the crew watch movies and recorded sports in their free time (including having screenings in the mess hall, complete with popcorn) and I think there may have been a moment where someone caught cabin fever (or it could have been something else).

By comparison: TOS has a mess hall and a bowling ally (not even joking), and that's about it.
Next Gen is a military research base with an engine, and all it has for crew and civilian downtime is Holodecks, a small indoor park and a bar.
Voyager has the amenities of Next Gen (except the park), yet despite the fact they are trapped in nowhere, they still waste energy and food rations in both like they where on patrol at home. The only one who even does anything else is Tom, who on rare occasion in later seasons can be seen watching TV (though he STILL uses the holodeck).
Then there's DS9, which admittedly is better then others at it. There's gambling (with money), shopping, the holodecks are used for their logical purpose (adventures and sex, usually both). Still no TV, but also admits there's more to life then work and holodecks.

In Voyager's defense, they rationed use of the holodeck and the replicators. Crew members, including the officers, were limited to a certain amount of energy to use on them. The units could be saved up, but you had to have them to make use of the facilities. They even had Neelix cooking real food picked up along the way, instead of replicating/whatever you call what the food machines in TOS did everything like on the other shows, because at the end of the day it wasted less energy to store and prepare real food than it did to make it out of energy.

Oh god, Neelix's cooking, a fate worst then death. Say what you will about Voyager, the idea that the power for the holodecks is incompatible with the rest of the ship (despite the rest of the universe being compatible, and that all other series with holodecks show that they ARE connected to the ship's main power source) is laughable in how hard of a copout it is for a reason to use the holodecks in a situation where they should be off-limits completely. And sure, have a cook, but for god sake why couldn't they make him a character that was at least neutral? Voyager had no sense of direction and never had a clue what it wanted to do with itself. They never should have had the ship leave the Alpha Quadrant in the first place and just stick to it being Next Gen with a new crew and ship.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

People in the future not watching television. Star Trek was the worst for this, (I know not Enterprise as it was closer to our time) but when you have worked for twelve hours scrubbing jefferies tubes i refuse to belive you will have the energy to run around a Holodeck. I don't even turn my Wii on.

Funny thing, for all it's odd decisions and the whole "being the worst of all 5 shows, even Voyager", Enterprise did come off as the most realistic of the shows (if you ignore the incompetent crew and ineffective Starfleet). They use money, they have to wright and rewrite protocol on a daily basis since no one has written it for them, they have the crew watch movies and recorded sports in their free time (including having screenings in the mess hall, complete with popcorn) and I think there may have been a moment where someone caught cabin fever (or it could have been something else).

By comparison: TOS has a mess hall and a bowling ally (not even joking), and that's about it.
Next Gen is a military research base with an engine, and all it has for crew and civilian downtime is Holodecks, a small indoor park and a bar.
Voyager has the amenities of Next Gen (except the park), yet despite the fact they are trapped in nowhere, they still waste energy and food rations in both like they where on patrol at home. The only one who even does anything else is Tom, who on rare occasion in later seasons can be seen watching TV (though he STILL uses the holodeck).
Then there's DS9, which admittedly is better then others at it. There's gambling (with money), shopping, the holodecks are used for their logical purpose (adventures and sex, usually both). Still no TV, but also admits there's more to life then work and holodecks.

In Voyager's defense, they rationed use of the holodeck and the replicators. Crew members, including the officers, were limited to a certain amount of energy to use on them. The units could be saved up, but you had to have them to make use of the facilities. They even had Neelix cooking real food picked up along the way, instead of replicating/whatever you call what the food machines in TOS did everything like on the other shows, because at the end of the day it wasted less energy to store and prepare real food than it did to make it out of energy.

Oh god, Neelix's cooking, a fate worst then death. Say what you will about Voyager, the idea that the power for the holodecks is incompatible with the rest of the ship (despite the rest of the universe being compatible, and that all other series with holodecks show that they ARE connected to the ship's main power source) is laughable in how hard of a copout it is for a reason to use the holodecks in a situation where they should be off-limits completely. And sure, have a cook, but for god sake why couldn't they make him a character that was at least neutral? Voyager had no sense of direction and never had a clue what it wanted to do with itself. They never should have had the ship leave the Alpha Quadrant in the first place and just stick to it being Next Gen with a new crew and ship.

I thought the point was more that the power /was/ all coming from the same source, and the holodeck and replicators used so much of it that they had to limit crew access to it, not that it was some separate power source that randomly spit out tokens.

I agree with most of the rest, though. Neelix was obnoxious, and the only episode I can remember enjoying was the Year of Hell two parter.

 

[Zontar]

I thought the point was more that the power /was/ all coming from the same source, and the holodeck and replicators used so much of it that they had to limit crew access to it, not that it was some separate power source that randomly spit out tokens.

I agree with most of the rest, though. Neelix was obnoxious, and the only episode I can remember enjoying was the Year of Hell two parter.

Nope, right from the start all the way to the end they repeatedly state that the power is incompatible. Though one thing that upsets me is that Year of Hell was intended to be a whole season, not a 2 parter. That would have been great.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I thought the point was more that the power /was/ all coming from the same source, and the holodeck and replicators used so much of it that they had to limit crew access to it, not that it was some separate power source that randomly spit out tokens.

I agree with most of the rest, though. Neelix was obnoxious, and the only episode I can remember enjoying was the Year of Hell two parter.

Nope, right from the start all the way to the end they repeatedly state that the power is incompatible. Though one thing that upsets me is that Year of Hell was intended to be a whole season, not a 2 parter. That would have been great.

That's... disappointing, on both counts. And it makes the holodeck rationing, which I always thought was one of the most realistic parts of the show, really silly. I wouldn't want it to be this way (because I'm just not a fan of grimdark fiction) but Year of Hell, minus the reset at the end, was the way you'd think the whole series would have played out, if they'd gone full realism with it. It's crazy how everywhere else the ship could be half destroyed and then back to normal next week, and it's nice to see that being averted for that episode. Would have been awesome as a season.

Also, Voyager had promise, but not as a continuation of TNG so much as TOS. The Voyager was about the size of a Constitution class, and it was meant to be an isolated explorer, not the flagship of the federation fleet that tended to stay close to home. That was also the other direction you'd expect them to have gone with the whole being stranded in the Delta quadrant thing, aside from what we got a glimpse of in Year of Hell, and in that one episode with another stranded Federation ship whose captain... took a different path than Janeway, let's say. Unfortunately it never really did either, or even a very good impression of TNG, which still could have been awesome (I mean, I grew up on TNG probably moreso than TOS, I'm not a TOS purist or anything, it just makes more sense as to what the plan for Voyager was than TNG).

 

[spwatkins]

One thing I've always noticed is that everyone in the future always wears the exact same clothing. If one person is wearing shiny silver pants, *everyone* wears exactly the same pants (sometimes all the women wear shiny silver skirts). Or the crew goes on shore leave to the Pleasure Planet and everyone has exactly the same toga and sandals. Doesn't anyone have a personal sense of style? Aren't there any Goths or Punks or Preppies or whatever?

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Humans are special because of their diversity, while all the alien races are monocultures of stereotypes.

Even worse when humans solve alien problems thanks to their diverse nature.

I was so happy when Wrex made fun of that notion in Mass Effect.

Also: humans are the only race with intuitiveness, inventiveness and freedom and are the only race that evolve over time.

That gets on my nerves so badly about Doctor Who in particular. You get the impression that The Doctor absolutely worships humanity, and it's kind of offputting. I'm okay with some line about humans having "great potential" or whatever, but if you're gonna go that route, at least make it so it's something they're striving to achieve and maybe doing more quickly than normal despite starting out behind the other races (hence: potential), not some magical inherent quality that makes them better than everyone else. Even early Star Trek, for all it talked about humanity having solved all of its problems, doesn't make humans out to be above all the other species because of it, it shows them (or at least the core Federation races) as equals.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

In this regard, Mass Effect stands out as a rare example of something that actually realizes the magnitude of the weapons in the universe as it includes bits pointing out that, because of the power of dreadnought guns, planetary battles around an occupied planet gave tremendous advantage to the defenders simply because the attackers didn't want to be responsible for throwing hundreds of multiple kiloton charges on the planet should they miss.

Ironically, they completely forget about Sir Isacc Newton Destroyer of Worlds in Mass Effect 3. If the main gun on an Everest class Dreadnought slings mass driver shells with an explosive force three times that of the Hiroshima Bomb, you'd think they'd be more careful where they aim it.

And then at the end of Mass Effect 3, we see several thousand such ships firing a gigantic volley of such slugs at the Reaper fleet between them an Earth. Just how many of those shots actually hit, and how many missed the Reaper fleet and leveled half a continent on Earth?

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

And then at the end of Mass Effect 3, we see several thousand such ships firing a gigantic volley of such slugs at the Reaper fleet between them an Earth. Just how many of those shots actually hit, and how many missed the Reaper fleet and leveled half a continent on Earth?

That particular battle took place at point blank range according to the game's own codex as the range between the two fleets was measured in a handful of kilometers when firing started. At those ranges, it is reasonable to assume the fleet dreadnoughts were capable of perfect accuracy against opposing dreadnoughts.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

And then at the end of Mass Effect 3, we see several thousand such ships firing a gigantic volley of such slugs at the Reaper fleet between them an Earth. Just how many of those shots actually hit, and how many missed the Reaper fleet and leveled half a continent on Earth?

That particular battle took place at point blank range according to the game's own codex as the range between the two fleets was measured in a handful of kilometers when firing started. At those ranges, it is reasonable to assume the fleet dreadnoughts were capable of perfect accuracy against opposing dreadnoughts.

And yet we still see dozens of shots flying right past the Reapers. It's right there in the cutscene.

God knows how much damage that did.

Another sci-fi trope that annoys me. Single Species Aliens.

Humans are an interesting bunch, in that we are the last surviving members of our Genus. All other subspecies of humans either died out or were slowly integrated into our own species. There are hundreds of different types of dogs and cats, all belonging to their own genus. Why aren't there multiple subspecies of aliens?

I actually really liked how, in the movie Predators, we saw that there are more than one subspecies of Yautja. There were the traditional Yautja from the earlier films, and a more aggressive subspecies of Super Predator that actively attacked their cousins.

 

[romxxii]

I hate those set in the near future that don't adhere to or properly explain away the lack of contemporary regulations in place that would have prevented their scientific catastrophe from happening. See Rise of the Planet of the Apes for its multiple violations; see Jurassic Park for an example of how it should be done instead.

 

[DrOswald]

The one that bothers me the most is "technology/science is magic."

The problem is not when highly advanced technology can do seemingly impossible things, but when that technology is inconsistent in the seemingly impossible things it can do. Then it stops being technology and becomes magic.

Also, planet of hats is super annoying, but only when taken to extremes. I understand that most often the crew of our sci fi show is going to deal with the dominant aspects of the culture of the worlds they visit. But when it goes from dominance to complete cultural obsession it is a problem. For example, the klingons. They are awesome when handled right, but they are totally stupid most of the time because their culture is so obsessed with warriors. What is wrong with being an administrator? Or a scientist? Or any of a thousand other non combatant jobs that every warmachine needs to be effective? I mean, without file clerks how the hell do klingons pay wages properly?