Sometimes there are things in the Sci Fi genre, especially the Spacefaring ones, that just makes ticks me off to no end. I will highlight 2 of the most egregious ones.
1. Why do they make "Very Human" looking Aliens? Star Trek is extremely guilty of this, I mean yes they did apply good make up like the Klingons and the Vulcans ears is enough to distinguish them but they are still just Human aliens. And then they make these aliens:
That is an non human alien, I mean just put some bumps in their nose and some markings on the side of their heads and BOOM alien. The Turians and the Prawns and the Salarians are more alien than this.
2.They never treat Planets like Planets, I mean in Planets tend to be I don't know FREAKIN HUGE!!! With Continants upon Continants. And the also applies to criticism with Aliens, apperently only one Alien Race ruled by one culture rules the entire planet, with no other Alien factions and cultures.
Just looking at our own Earth and Human history that is not the case.
I'd have to one hundred percent agree on that. This is why I can never take settings like this very serious. It's easier for me to buy into a Fantasy setting, like Lord of the Rings or Berserk, than Star Trek. Things like Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy work fine for me though, since they're obviously not going for hard sci-fi; they're basically Fantasy in space.
This is what ticked me off the most about Tali's reveal in Mass Effect 3 (beyond it being really lazy). They could've given her a weird no-nose fish face, or something else weird and alien, but nope, it's just another standard human face with hair and everything. But look, lines on her face, so alien I guess.
The whole 'alien planets feel like countries rather than planets' is something I don't think you can avoid though. Can you imagine having to come up for an entire collection of cultures and races for just one planet, let alone fifty?
Yeah, sci-fi writers often have a strange grasp about how big things are. Lots of things are really big, and work on totally different scales of bigness. The Earth is big, but not compared to Jupiter. Jupiter is big, but not compared to the distance between the Earth and Jupiter, which is big, but not compared to the distance between us and the nearest star.
Far too often "sci-f" is basically a hamfisted copy of the real world or a fantasy setting, except with lasers and robots thrown in to make it "Sciencey".
Mind you, human looking aliens are easy for the make up people, so I can understand that...only they just aren't alien if you do that.
First, an episode of Star Trek TNG explains that that universe basically goes off of the "Chariot of the Gods" origin where 1 sentient life form lived by itself in the vastness of space never finding any other signs of life. Then when their race was dying out due to mysterious reasons (plot device disease probably), they imprinted different versions of their DNA on other planets and created new life. So all life in Star Trek actually is variations of a sort of "Promethean" race who were, as you can guess, humanoid in appearance. (Season 6 Episode 20: The chase)
2. A very loose defense but I always consider thast in order for a planet to support the means of interstellar travel (warp drive) they need to have brought their race and planet under a solitary rule of some kind. Sure rebelions may exist or even minor factions but mostly, the planet pools its resources. Very loose, I know. However...
3. It IS fiction and they are working on a small budget.Some Sci-Fi goes off the deep end with alien races, some don't. I actually like the nuanced commonality of Star Trek myself. But I can also get behind Guardians of the Galaxy too. Neither one seems particularly "too far fetched" for me considering I am watching a show interstellar travel that ignores physics as a whole with "subspace communications" that have no delay. Plus, the fact that we know practically nothing about the universe and life within it and I am watching a fictional show about people able to go from one galaxy to the next like Driving to a different city. Its hard to get worked up over why most aliens look the same on the show or why most planets seem to be ruled by 1 race and 1 government. (Especially givren that most planets are metaphors for pop culture.
1. Two words: FX budget. The example you provided is from Star Trek, the origin of which basically had a budget of shoestring and lint for props and costumes. While budget increased with future iterations, most alien looks inevitably draw from the same well as the simple Spock ears or Klingon foreheads. You can't suddenly change those two races' appearance after so long.
I liked some of the more extensive makeup jobs shown in DS9 and Voyager, such as the Cardassians, Bolians, Malon and Hirogen... but they're all still recognisably bipedal humanoid configuration. Other sci-fi shows like Babylon 5 follow the beat of that drum because it's easier and that's what people are comfortable with. As shown with the Undine, the other way is to go full CGI, which a) is more costly b) people say looks fake.
Since we have yet to encounter any actual alien life, one could argue that bipedal would be the most common set for a race capable of space travel anyway, but that's just conjecture.
2. I'm not quite sure what you mean. I don't think any sci-fi show has ever had characters announce they've explored an entire planet onscreen. If characters beam or shuttle down to a planet, it will probably be to a city or base, just going where the mission requires them to be, getting only a small sample of that planet. Sure, Earth has a diverse collection of biomes, but as we've seen in our own star system, most planets are limited to one or two.
To add to the Human like alien complaints, how come in games like Mass Effect Shepard's only romance options are Humans and the most Human like aliens? Why can't my Shepard romance a Salarian or a Krogan or best of all an Elcor. Is it just because of the lack of available sex scenes? That's not good enough.
Mass Effect did well with its diverse alien life, but then it stuck to the predictable romance options, I'm sure Garrus was only an option from the second game due to fan outcry for more diversity in their options.
There's a strong chance that alien life will resemble human life. That isn't to say it'll be the only forms it takes, but its likely you'll see everything from fish, to birds to lizards and reptiles out there. We've found microbes that can survive in space for a 'very' long time. So some scientists theorise that life began off of Earth and just sort of got dropped off here. You may even see entirely different chains of evolution due to cosmic events in the region. If the dinosaurs on Earth were wiped out do to an asteroid, assuming their evolution is par for the course, there could be worlds full of them because that asteroid never came and they may even have evolved a sort of sentience we might understand.
A lot of what you see in terms of aliens in Star Trek - particularly the television production - is a matter of makeup expense and time. Michael Dorn spent a hell of a lot of time, hours, in makeup before his takes and usually had to come in hours ahead of the other cast members. For movies that's not such a big deal, but years? It wares on a cast and crew.
A problem in writing - particularly for film - is the allowable scope. There were political divides through out TNG but you won't see much of that translated to a three hour movie. Klingon houses rose and fell, all sorts of stuff went on. It should also be noted that to join the Federation you required a global government, at least as of TNG. That made it difficult to demonstrate any other alternative on Federation worlds. There were worlds with out such governments though, they were just often very unpleasant. TNG also sought to define and present a sort of utopia.
For a look a good hard SF rather then space opera I recommend Niven. He delved more into the societal ramifications of technology from the indestructible hull to transporters. He nick named the transporter the alibi machine. He envisioned a far future Earth where theft was no longer a crime because the alibi machine made it impossible to police. He had flash mobs of thieves. It was quite amusing.
Yeah what WhiteFang said, it's mostly budget when it comes to alien designs. Though you have to keep in mind that Star Trek has progressed a lot since the original series. You think Klingons now look too human? The old Klingons were just guys with fake tan and funny eyebrows. These days you can have very alien-looking creatures that can "perform" on screen (Gollum, the aliens from District 9, the aliens from Avatar, etc) but they're extremely expensive and for a TV show it's simply unfeasible at this point in time.
Stuff like Star Trek and Mass Effect are about space politics, how people of different races interact. They're not really interested in going into very specific detail, it's mostly about the drama and characters. The same with Star Wars though Star Wars is more about swashbuckling adventure.
Hard sci-fi is simply too difficult to translate to the screen, you risk alienating a big chunk of your audience. Pretty much every sci-fi franchise that's had mainstream success has taken a lot of liberties in order to make it easier to digest. As a result aliens are mostly humanoid, planets are mostly similar to Earth and the drama relates to issues we deal with here in the real world. It's not "realistic" at all, but it's entertaining and doesn't take a gigantic budget to produce. While I'd love to have more stuff out there with the visual depth of Avatar, it's simply too expensive.
1. There's an interesting thing I read about how, if there are space faring aliens, their looking "humanish" might be evolutionarry justified (though on the other hand several centuries of space faring will probably change humans to look much different then modern day ones) as evolution will see most benefit for using tools in the human form. As for them just being straight up humans with special features... probably to increase empathy.
2. Always was weird to me in WH40k was that "a space marine chapter can level planets" for that reason.
Just a few centuries of evolution won't change humans much, but then they could have been at it for hundreds of thousands of years. And...humanish isn't the same as human, the excuse only goes so far.
As for chapters destroying planets..well, depends what you mean by "destroy". Some authors will make some mention about attacking important targets and messing the infrastructure up. Any Imperial warship has weapons capable of making a mess of cities from orbit. Now, taking and holding the planet, marines just cannot do that.
1 is an issue of props. Star Trek did it because...budget and tech.
2 We only have humans who rule earth. While fantasy settings have elves and orcs and dwarves, in reality only humans rule.
That said, if I ever do a Sci-Fi DnD game, I intend on having multiple races on habited planets, but in that realty elves and orcs and dwarves exist, so...
Sometimes there are things in the Sci Fi genre, especially the Spacefaring ones, that just makes ticks me off to no end. I will highlight 2 of the most egregious ones.
1. Why do they make "Very Human" looking Aliens? Star Trek is extremely guilty of this, I mean yes they did apply good make up like the Klingons and the Vulcans ears is enough to distinguish them but they are still just Human aliens. And then they make these aliens:
That is an non human alien, I mean just put some bumps in their nose and some markings on the side of their heads and BOOM alien. The Turians and the Prawns and the Salarians are more alien than this.
Well this is an issue that's more or less restricted to visual media, but especially to movies. There are three reasons that this tends to happen. 1) Limited budget tends to limit the practical effects you can use, a puppet alien that people can interact with is going to need a special stage, just for example. Animatronics are insanely expensive, prone to breaking down, and require a huge support structure. There simply isn't a lot you can do to a human actor to make them look alien and the more complicated the costume, the more expensive. On the animated and CGI side of things, those are difficult to deal with because you don't have a physical actor, not to mention that those effects only really started working well recently. 2) Frankly a lot of people lack creativity when attempting to design aliens and are going to default to humanoids. 3) It's hard to make an audience sympathize with an alien creature that we can't relate to on a basic level.
Video Game and Book series like Mass Effect, Halo, Honor Harrington, The Lost Fleet, and Larry Niven's Known Space are all good examples of people being more creative with extraterrestrial aliens. While Star Wars is one of the few examples in television and film to make really diverse alien, most of which were basically Muppets early on and they cost a fortune to do.
Some of the more interesting ones from books are:
Samtemdo8 said:
2.They never treat Planets like Planets, I mean in Planets tend to be I don't know FREAKIN HUGE!!! With Continants upon Continants. And the also applies to criticism with Aliens, apperently only one Alien Race ruled by one culture rules the entire planet, with no other Alien factions and cultures.
Just looking at our own Earth and Human history that is not the case.
Well there several issues with doing things this way. As you pointed out, planets are huge, which means the scope of anything covering them is also going to be huge. For example, Sphinx in the Honor Harrington universe is described in great detail over the course of the three Star Kingdom books: A Beautiful Friendship, Fire Season, and Treecat Wars, not to mention a nice description in The Short Victorious War among others. That's just one example mind you. When we get to visit an alien world in science fiction, we usually only get to visit one building, or town. Where as a discription of a planet and the cultures on it can easily dominate a book, like with the Medusans in On Basilisk Station tend to, and humans have barely scratched the surface with them and their homeworld of Medusa.
Simply put, if you wanted to focus on a single planet, it's factions, and cultures, it easily can eat up an entire Video Game, Movie, season of a TV show, or an entire book. There's also the tendency to believe that any species that can travel interplanetary distances will have dealt with most of the cultural issues on it's homeworld and have unified it's government. Because once you're a space faring race, it's pretty easy to see how factional conflicts could lead to one's homeworld being destroyed, just by domestic warfare.
There's a strong chance that alien life will resemble human life. That isn't to say it'll be the only forms it takes, but its likely you'll see everything from fish, to birds to lizards and reptiles out there. We've found microbes that can survive in space for a 'very' long time. So some scientists theorise that life began off of Earth and just sort of got dropped off here. You may even see entirely different chains of evolution due to cosmic events in the region. If the dinosaurs on Earth were wiped out do to an asteroid, assuming their evolution is par for the course, there could be worlds full of them because that asteroid never came and they may even have evolved a sort of sentience we might understand.
A lot of what you see in terms of aliens in Star Trek - particularly the television production - is a matter of makeup expense and time. Michael Dorn spent a hell of a lot of time, hours, in makeup before his takes and usually had to come in hours ahead of the other cast members. For movies that's not such a big deal, but years? It wares on a cast and crew.
A problem in writing - particularly for film - is the allowable scope. There were political divides through out TNG but you won't see much of that translated to a three hour movie. Klingon houses rose and fell, all sorts of stuff went on. It should also be noted that to join the Federation you required a global government, at least as of TNG. That made it difficult to demonstrate any other alternative on Federation worlds. There were worlds with out such governments though, they were just often very unpleasant. TNG also sought to define and present a sort of utopia.
For a look a good hard SF rather then space opera I recommend Niven. He delved more into the societal ramifications of technology from the indestructible hull to transporters. He nick named the transporter the alibi machine. He envisioned a far future Earth where theft was no longer a crime because the alibi machine made it impossible to police. He had flash mobs of thieves. It was quite amusing.
thats such a goo dpoint about the make up issue. hell even terry farrel who played a trill in ds9. basically it was just spots. still took an hour in makeup every single day
Because it's cheaper and they probably think humans are easier to sympathize and communicate with for the audience.
I kind of wish they'd do more human conflicts in space, like Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It doesn't have any aliens. Aliens are probably far rarer than the likes of Star Trek would have us believe.
Well that's very much like the Honorverse, although there are extraterrestrial, sentient, non-human aliens, none of them are advanced enough to be space faring. There are plenty of worlds capable of supporting life, each with it's own unique biosphere, many at various stages of development of complexity, depending on local conditions. Same with Battletech. While there might be plenty enough worlds with life, they're unlikely to have anything as advanced as us, or that we'd consider to be intelligent.
Because most science fiction with rubber forehead aliens is not about the aliens themselves, but as a reflection on our own cultures. The aliens, the spaceships, the technology, are all shorthands that allow the real stories to be told: stories about people. Klingons or Bajorans are not meant to be fully realized alien cultures as much as they are foils for humans to contrast against our own culture.
This question also supposes the misconception that nearly all aliens would be able to live in the same atmosphere and gravity as us. It's just more practical to assume humans are like us for the stories they want to tell.
That's a good point, also we'd need to take into consideration aliens who would have incompatible immune systems to ours, who our pathogens could be lethal to. Regardless of weather their pathogens are lethal to us. Good example of the what you mentioned would be the Volus and Leviathans from Mass Effect, where the Quarians as an example of what I mentioned. More good examples would be like the Silicoids, Gnolams, Psilons, Burathi, Meklars, Trilarians, and Antarans along with many other races from the Master of Orion franchise.
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