Problems I have with the Sci Fi genre (perticularly Spacefaring ones)

[Canadamus Prime]

A lot of these issues have to do with time and budget constraints. Also I think they figure it's easier for the audience to identify with an alien race that at least somewhat looks human. A lot of the time, esp. within the format of television show, writers just don't have the time to come up with multiple cultures and races for a single species, never mind multiple species; so it's just easier to have monocultured aliens.

 

[Vigormortis]

Money.

There. Your every complaint answered in one word. We done?

Probably not. OP feels more like a "fantasy is inherently better than sci-fi!" sort of argument than any sort of legitimate criticism.

That and the OP clearly doesn't have much experience with sci-fi stories. One of the complaints is of a lack of varied cultures within an alien species, yet even Star Trek tackled that in numerous episodes.

:/

 

[Vigormortis]

snip

Or how about the 'sentient palm trees' from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep? The ones that attain locomotion via these deceptively archaic looking wheeled skiffs? Or another of Vinge's alien creatures: pale, dog-like beings that live as psychically linked 'packs', with each grouping acting and thinking like a single mind?

It seems to me that the OP needs to delve deeper into science fiction.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

Money.

There. Your every complaint answered in one word. We done?

Probably not. OP feels more like a "fantasy is inherently better than sci-fi!" sort of argument than any sort of legitimate criticism.

That and the OP clearly doesn't have much experience with sci-fi stories. One of the complaints is of a lack of varied cultures within an alien species, yet even Star Trek tackled that in numerous episodes.

:/

Not once have I made any reference to the Fantasy Genre and I have had my fair share of Sci Fi related products.

 

[veloper]

The budget excuses can only apply to live-action shows.
Animations and productions that are more CGI than real footage(like Avatar), don't apply.

What producers think their audiences want, is easily relatable characters, so the aliens are mostly human. Go for the lowest common denominator and all that.

 

[LostCrusader]

My issue is when every alien race speaks English for no reason. Also when aliens have strangely similar weapons to each, such as AK47s.

And yes they are obviously all the results of budget/time constraints, but that doesn't take away from them breaking immersion.

 

[Gennadios]

1) Make-up and budget constraits. Nose, ear, and forehead molds cost less than CGI. And audience engagement. Would anybody watch a show where half the cast look like Prawns from District 9?

2) For the record, Star Trek had a few episodes that deal pre-warp fractured/factioned civilizations, but due to the Prime Directive, the majority of their experience was in dealing with early warp capable civilizations. The idea being that a species would have to be unified and cooperative in order to develop the technology necessary to reach the stars.

 

[Silvanus]

1. Why do they make "Very Human" looking Aliens? [...]

2.They never treat Planets like Planets [...]

I agree absolutely with both of these complaints. They're both examples of (admittedly minor) laziness of imagination-- but the genre of sci-fi is supposed to be about boundless imagination, complexity and world-building should be its bread-and-butter. Flesh it out!

 

[Gennadios]

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. It's less evolution and more effects of being centuries on a spaceship with lower exposure to sunlight and weaker gravitation (though those things might be overcome) and humanish is about 1.5 to 2.5 meters tall, hands and legs in some number and the brain in the head.

2. What bothered me was along the lines of 10000 word bearers (and some arnaments) (nearly) completely taking over a solar system.

First thing to keep in mind is that WH40k isn't really SciFi, although I have no idea what to call it. A single Space marine in the lore can take on 50 Orks, and a single guardsman is no match for a single Ork.

In a more realistic setting, all they'd need to do is send a few companies capture and hold the orbital defense batteries and the battle barges can then wreak havoc from orbit. Can you imagine living in a city with a few million people and then having the local power and water treatment plants being bombed? Then all the major highways leading to and from the city? That's enough to force a surrender right there.

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

2) For the record, Star Trek had a few episodes that deal pre-warp fractured/factioned civilizations, but due to the Prime Directive, the majority of their experience was in dealing with early warp capable civilizations. The idea being that a species would have to be unified and cooperative in order to develop the technology necessary to reach the stars.

You mean like how humans developed interstellar travel? One guy working alone in Montana, 10 years after a nuclear world war?

Not being a dick, just saying. You're right, that is the rationale, but I think it's funny how the apparent glaring exception to that idea is the very species who came up with the Federation in the first place.

 

[Gennadios]

2) For the record, Star Trek had a few episodes that deal pre-warp fractured/factioned civilizations, but due to the Prime Directive, the majority of their experience was in dealing with early warp capable civilizations. The idea being that a species would have to be unified and cooperative in order to develop the technology necessary to reach the stars.

You mean like how humans developed interstellar travel? One guy working alone in Montana, 10 years after a nuclear world war?

Not being a dick, just saying. You're right, that is the rationale, but I think it's funny how the apparent glaring exception to that idea is the very species who came up with the Federation in the first place.

It wasn't a defense, just an explanation of the Trek Writer's thought process. I was thinking of getting a little more critical of writing myself, not particularly find of most of it out side of TNG (season 3+) and DS9 myself, but this isn't a Trek topic per se, so didn't want to go into specifics.

 

[Redryhno]

The budget excuses can only apply to live-action shows.
Animations and productions that are more CGI than real footage(like Avatar), don't apply.

What producers think their audiences want, is easily relatable characters, so the aliens are mostly human. Go for the lowest common denominator and all that.

I'd argue it's just easier to work with what we've got from budget and time constraints than LCD being a major thing.

My issue is when every alien race speaks English for no reason. Also when aliens have strangely similar weapons to each, such as AK47s.

And yes they are obviously all the results of budget/time constraints, but that doesn't take away from them breaking immersion.

The majority of the time, they aren't speaking English even when they're speaking "English". Most of the time it's either through some universal translator or there's a common language that we perceive as English because we're the ones watching it in the majority of Sci-Fi.

Also why wouldn't aliens have similar weapons? Similar physicality, similar states of technological advancement, why wouldn't they have basic designs and shapes?

I mean, it only becomes immersion breaking if you are actually looking for them to be immersion breaking.

 

[Neverhoodian]

As others have already mentioned, budgetary constraints. Sci-fi was the red-headed stepchild of TV and movie budget allocations for decades because it wasn't a "serious" genre, so the makeup and prop departments tended to be extremely limited in scope. There's also the issue of "familiar=sympathetic." Humans tend to be more receptive to things that look like ourselves, as it's easier to relate on a visual level.

My issue is when every alien race speaks English for no reason. Also when aliens have strangely similar weapons to each, such as AK47s.

And yes they are obviously all the results of budget/time constraints, but that doesn't take away from them breaking immersion.

The explanation in Star Trek is universal translators. They're not actually speaking English.

Indeed. The implied assumption is that the viewer is hearing dialogue through this filter as well. The episode "Little Green Men" was a clever subversion of this. I particularly liked how they made human speech sound completely alien to the Ferengi. It makes perfect sense given different ear structure and lack of experience (why bother learning hu-mon English when your universal translator does it for you?)

There was also the episode "Darmok" from TNG, which toyed with the idea that, even if you understood individual words, grammatical structure may be so radically different between species that it still doesn't make any sense without learning the context behind it.

 

[Derekloffin]

For the 1st issue:
in real life this is mostly for budget and practical reasons. Non-human aliens are MUCH more expensive to do properly. It is also much harder to get a good performance out of them.
in sci fi terms though, although they are still too human, there actually is pretty good reason to believe that humanoid form would dominate. To summarize: intelligent life obviously needs a big brain, and optimally this will be situated near all the major senses (so sight, smell, taste, sound). They'll also want stereoscopic vision and sound, but not to spend lots of energy on redundancy, so 2 eyes and 2 ears. You'll also want your vision situated high up, so as the head. So already we have a head, in the same general place as ours, featuring 2 ears, 2 eyes, their digestion intake (aka mouth), and likely the respiratory intake for smell (aka nose). As to the rest of the body, you need locomotion and ability to manipulate objects, but you again don't want to waste time on extra limbs. Bipedal locomotion works perfectly fine, so 2 legs is likely which will likely be stronger due to needing to carry the body mass all the time. Up to this point everything is in twos, so symmetry makes it highly likely you'd have 2 manipulating limbs as well and this is just more useful in general anyway. Then you get into other things. Also, sound is a very useful form of communication so it is likely they will speak in some form. So, you end up with a pretty humanoid creature. Now of course all of this is just conjecture from what we know, but we do lead pretty close to human like.
And keep in mind, particularly star wars, shows a fair chunk of variation (probably due to better budget for the most part or being animated), but even star trek often showed non humanoid intelligent aliens too, they just weren't common. And of course in star trek they even threw in the explanation that an ancient alien raced seeded the galaxy with their genes so that drove similar evolution, but that was mostly a retcon explanation.

For the 2nd issue:
The depends a lot on the series whether this is a good critique or not. For Star Trek for instance, they are dealing nearly universally with deep space faring societies due to the prime directive and 1st contact rules so yeah, they've gotten globally united most the time, and even in Star Trek they showed often this wasn't perfect and there was split planets between factions. Same holds pretty true for Star Wars where there has been galactic civilization for millennia. Babylon 5 from what I recall rarely dealt with anyone but the main races who were all stellar empires at that point. Firefly I suppose you could argue this pretty well though as the idea of nations was more inter-planetary rather than with a planet but I didn't watch much firefly to be sure.

Edit: I should note though if the issue is more just size, yeah, space faring Sci Fi always seems to seriously under use the size of planets. Seems everything always happens within the same areas and such. And going down to a planet it always seems they are just where the weird thing is going to happen. Now, often they do explain this adequately, but rarely do they actually deal with the size of the planet. Instead they work around it.

 

[CaitSeith]

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.

Speaking of that, what I loved from Mass Effect 2 was how Mordin preemptively friend-zones female Shepard, if she has no romance with other member of the crew. And he can even tell you which alien races have found him attractive (that included some Krogans).

 

[Vigormortis]

Not once have I made any reference to the Fantasy Genre

Fair enough. It's just that this sort of criticism tends to come from people making that sort of argument, so I suppose I assumed it was the same here. My apologies.

and I have had my fair share of Sci Fi related products.

Then...I'm very confused by your criticisms. Science fiction is filled with a variety of alien creatures that look nothing like humans, and worlds filled with as much variety in environments and cultures as a person could imagine.

Sure, some sci-fi stories and series have little variety in those areas, but the few are hardly indicative of the whole.

Your OP sounds more like an indictment of a few specific series rather than the genre as a whole.

 

[Thaluikhain]

1. It's less evolution and more effects of being centuries on a spaceship with lower exposure to sunlight and weaker gravitation (though those things might be overcome) and humanish is about 1.5 to 2.5 meters tall, hands and legs in some number and the brain in the head.

Ah, ok, yeah, but if they had kids who grew up on Earth, you'd not spot them in a crowd.

Also why wouldn't aliens have similar weapons? Similar physicality, similar states of technological advancement, why wouldn't they have basic designs and shapes?

There's been an impressive variety of different looking weapons created by humans on Earth, mind.

First thing to keep in mind is that WH40k isn't really SciFi, although I have no idea what to call it. A single Space marine in the lore can take on 50 Orks, and a single guardsman is no match for a single Ork.

The term "space fantasy" gets used. Though guard can take on orks, under certain circumstances, the fighting styles differ.

In a more realistic setting, all they'd need to do is send a few companies capture and hold the orbital defense batteries and the battle barges can then wreak havoc from orbit. Can you imagine living in a city with a few million people and then having the local power and water treatment plants being bombed? Then all the major highways leading to and from the city? That's enough to force a surrender right there.

If you can take the orbital defences (and destroy any on the planet), sure...but being a marine doesn't help you much in ship to ship actions unless boarding is involved.

And while you can nominally deal with the armed forces of the planet, the way that the US did to the armed forces of Iraq or Afghanistan, holding it is another issue altogether.

 

[Catnip1024]

Well, for 1, partly because it's easier to get human shaped actors, and the genre kicked off before we had CGI. But partly because there needs to be some commonality for communication to be possible. If the aliens are insectoids with a hive mind, a) how do you go about communicating and b) how do you understand what they want? Which is why you wind up with most non-humanoid aliens just being "the enemy".

For 2, most of those shows are also guilty of claiming that the Earth is one unified whole by that point (which suggests they have executed anyone who disagrees). Outside homeworlds, the argument could be that any dissenting factions would just find their own planet, I suppose, rather than go to a planet full of people they despise.

Although you do often get dissenting factions amongst the alien species (the Geth spring to mind)