That doesn't make much of a difference.
What tropes in science fiction annoy you?
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
That doesn't make much of a difference.
Not so much annoying but tropes...
the future is dystopian
AI is secretly planning world domination (true
)
sexbots (may be true soon)
time travel always has terrible repercussions (why couldn't it have good ones?)
pranu-bindu super secret skills
alien species are humanoids with latex appliances
the future is dystopian
AI is secretly planning world domination (true
)sexbots (may be true soon)
time travel always has terrible repercussions (why couldn't it have good ones?)
pranu-bindu super secret skills
alien species are humanoids with latex appliances
Just as an FYI: That's what defines a trope...
I don't know if I'd call dystopian stories a trope, they're more of a genre all their own.
We've gotten quite a few stories where people go back in time and improve things.
I don't know if it's really fair to hold this one against people, since until recently it was pretty much the only way to do aliens.
It started the infamous white corpuscle scene with Raquel Welch and everyone groping at her to get the stuff off her inside the submarine.
Because deep down, there's nothing people hate more than change. Ergo, if time travel exists, it can't help but terrify people (even if the results of it may seem theoretically better or else no worse than whatever timeline you're using for a baseline comparison).
I don't recall implying otherwise. I simply disagree that these tropes constitute any sort of "scientific illiteracy," because it is understood that they do not represent actual science.
They're couched in technobabble and that means that they are at the very least pretending to be science. When something that pretends to be science is so remotely linked to anything scientific, I find that annoying.
Like a writer for example who's annoyed by a plethora of misspellings...
An author pretends that his technobabble represents science in about the same way that a fan going to a sci-fi convention in a Superman costume pretends to be Superman. Everybody know that the fan isn't really Superman, nor is that fan trying convince people that he is, but people might judge him on how well executed his costume is. I don't think the word "pretend" even applies in that case; certainly there is no deception involved.
"Deception" is a strong word but I've seen people often confuse science with something they've seen or heard in one of these fictions. Plus sometimes they say things that are real, like when Jadzia talked about Wiles demonstration of the Fermat Theorem for example but in a way that doesn't make sense. Surely if an alien culture talked about Fermat's last theorem they wouldn't talk about it in those terms, nor notice that someone on Earth proved that theorem in the 20th century. The host Jadiza was talking to wouldn't even have heard of humans back then. Anyway, it would be less irritating if they tried not to say things that are absurd on an elementary level than to try somehow to gain legitimacy by referring to complex elements of reality, IOW learn to crawl before you pretend that you can run.
Yeah, there was literally no reason to mention Fermat's Last Theorem in either DS9 "Facets" or TNG "The Royale."
Neither case was an example of bad science, though, even in "The Royale," where the premise that it was still unsolved in the 24th century just dates the episode horribly.
Making Humanity the Center of Attention is a different trope altogether from anything pertaining to science or technobabble, and it's one I personally find annoying if overdone. Your example from "Facets" is overdoing it, and I agree with your reasoning there. They could have inserted a purely fictitious math problem instead and achieved a better overall effect.
Making Humanity the Center of Attention is completely appropriate when not overdone, though, because the audience is human after all. Drama is useless, if the audience cannot relate to it.
The moral stories... Why is it that Sci. Fi. authors think that it behooves them to teach us morality? As an example: Asimov's stories are rarely if ever moralistic yet most of them are very good! To give you an example of stories that are not moralistic in the least yet are classics of Asimov's literature:
In the Foundation saga, Lathan Devers is very virtuous and saves his friend's life while risking his own yet we learn later by one of his descendants that he spent the rest of his life in a labor camp. Ducem Bar dooms his entire family to know a horrible death just in the hopes that someday in a remote future the Foundation will prevail. All of this, while corrupt vile people spend their lives in luxury!!!
None of this could happen in modern movies: For example in the last "Jurassic Park" movie (2018), the people "on the side of good" ALL survive in spite of incredible odds against that survival! And all the bad guys die, without exceptions, mostly horrible deaths.
In the Foundation saga, Lathan Devers is very virtuous and saves his friend's life while risking his own yet we learn later by one of his descendants that he spent the rest of his life in a labor camp. Ducem Bar dooms his entire family to know a horrible death just in the hopes that someday in a remote future the Foundation will prevail. All of this, while corrupt vile people spend their lives in luxury!!!
None of this could happen in modern movies: For example in the last "Jurassic Park" movie (2018), the people "on the side of good" ALL survive in spite of incredible odds against that survival! And all the bad guys die, without exceptions, mostly horrible deaths.
HFY is a bad trope "Humanity Fuck Yeah" where humanity rules above all.
This one doesn't apply only to SFF, but it does pop up there from time to time. Whenever we are either in the past, or meeting someone from the past, they always talk with a British accent no matter where they are from. Same thing applies to low tech fantasy worlds, it kind of makes sense in worlds specifically based on England, but a lot of the time these are totally unique world with no connection to anything in the real world, so there's no reason everyone needs to be speaking with a British accent.
Moral stories come naturally to scifi. To me the great thing about scifi is that it takes the human race and puts it in made up extravagant hypothetical contexts to see how it behaves in those situations. The main reason to do that is to express your feelings about human nature and those naturally manifest as moral stories.
The other reason is to just tell adventure stories with space and aliens as your chosen aesthetic.
The other reason is to just tell adventure stories with space and aliens as your chosen aesthetic.
I think I've seen that before as one of the theories about what it's relationship is to modern day Earth.
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