So I am currently rewatching Stargate SG1 and thinking about certain things that always rub me the wrong way when watching or reading SciFi. Now, I know that Stargate in particular doesn’t really take itself too seriously and shouldn’t be scrutinized too much. It’s also a bit older. But there are still some things that even modern SciFi-Worlds featuring outer space and aliens have or lack, that always slightly rub me the wrong way. I would love to hear your opinion.
- Lack of any form of camera surveillance technology
I mean, come on, the Goa’uld couldn’t figure out a way to install their equivalent of cameras all over their battle ships in order to monitor it? They have forms of video/picture transmitting technology. Star Trek also seems to lack any form of video surveillance. (I’m not up to date with the newest series.) Yes, I get that having a crew member physically go to a cargo bay and check out the situation is better for dramatic purposes. But it always rubs me the wrong way that they have to do that. I would just love to see a SciFi-Series set in space where all space ships are equipped with proper camera technology. Not just some vague “sensor” that tells the crew “something is wrong, but you will still have to physically go there and see it for yourself”. I want the captain of a space ship to have access to the 200,000 cameras strategically placed all over the ship to monitor it.
- Languages
I have studied linguistics, learned several foreign languages and lived in a foreign country for a while, so my perspective is influenced by that. I always find it weird when everybody “just talks English”. Yes, I get that it’s easier to write stories in which all characters can just freely interact with each other. But it’s always so weird to me when an explorer comes to a foreign planet and everybody just talks their language. At least make up an explanation for it! “We found this translator device in the space ship that crashed on earth”. There you go. I love the Stargate Movie where Daniel Jackson figures out how to communicate with the people on Abydos. During the series most worlds will just speak English, with some random words in other languages thrown in. As someone interested in linguistics I love Stargate for how much it features deciphering languages, though I still find it weird when they go to another world and everybody just speaks English.
- Humanoid aliens
Especially with modern CGI I would just love to shows get more creative when it comes to alien races. We don’t need a person in a costume anymore. Every once in a while you will have that weird alien pop up, but all in all I feel like there’s still a lot of potential. Also changes in Human physiology due to different environmental conditions on foreign planets.
That being said, I would also like to mention some SciFi-titles that in my mind stand out for being very creative in this regard:
- The writing of Julie Czerneda is very creative when it comes to alien species. She was a biologist and uses her knowledge to create a wide variety of alien life forms
- The forever war (Without spoiling the end, so I’ll leave it at that. Just liked it as a creative take on an alien race so different it’s incomprehensible to us)
- I very much appreciate Douglas Adams for the babel fish.
- I also liked The expanse for including the development of a Belter language and changes in human physiology due to different gravity.
What do you think? Do you know any good examples of SciFi-Worldbuilding, that solve some common inconsistencies?
(Edited because it looked weird :P) Also, I rembered one more thing: I have two serious food allergies and I always cringe when I see characters take some random food from an alien civilisation and eat. It’s especially bad right now while rewatching Stargate. SG1 just keeps happily eating and drinking anything that is offered and there are so many scenes of them eating without asking much. Maybe it’s just because I can’t even do that in my own society and am so used to always asking “What is in it? Can I eat it?” Although some shows have good solutions like standard nutrient packs in a military context or food replicators that create any food you want.
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The writing of Julie Czerneda is very creative when it comes to alien species.
I haven’t read anything by her, where do you recommend I start?
The Webshifter Series might be a good start (Book 1 is Beholder’s eye). The main character is a shape shifter, so we get to see the world from the point of view of someone who can change her form between different alien races. The book has a lot of interesting descriptions about her changing senses, e.g. suddenly being able to perceive different colors or having an organ to feel the magnetic field etc.
Thanks, added to my to-read list.
Scale. Most sci fi notoriously sucks at doing large scale well. 40K, of all things, is one of the few that does.
In and of itself, I don’t mind it, but I’m mildly annoyed by most having some form of FTL travel. That’s why The Expanse was so refreshing for me.
Like, I get it. Having FTL drive (or comparable ways to go vast distances in short times) allows a larger universe for the characters. It’s also, I would imagine, easier to write since the writers wouldn’t have to deal with the vast scales, time dilation, and asynchronous events happening in different parts of the galaxy/story.
For comparison, The Expanse worked because it was all within our solar system. In the Revelation Space series (book), humans are doing interstellar travel, but they’re in cryo the whole trip, and the journey takes years. The author formerly worked for the ESA and pretty much had to show his work every step of the way to get all the characters together on the same planets at the same time.
So yeah, I get why we don’t see that more often (especially in TV series with less accredited writers), but it would be nice to see it once in a while nonetheless.
I can’t remember the name of the book.
Space travel takes years. One trick is to slow down the crews metabolism so that a five year voyage feels like five weeks. The ship’s AI ‘wakes up’ crew when an emergency occurs. If you were not ‘awoken’ you’d see your crewmate suddenly vanish and then reappear a moment later.
I’ll never forget the Expanse audiobooks pronouncing gimbal as “gym ball”…
Only for the first 6 books or so, was listening to Persepolis a few weeks ago and had to do a double take when the reader finally pronounced it with the hard g (“gim ball”).
I figured it couldn’t be any worse than the Black Prism reader absolutely butchering javelina (ordinarily the J makes an H sound) a few books in
I intuitively pronounce gimbal as gimble because of Jabberwocky. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe; all mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome wraths outgrabe."
Like even if it was wrong that is how it looks like it sounds.
For some reason, when Cibola Burns came out, Jefferson Mays was unavailable, so another person narrated it. I think it was Erik Davies, but cannot remember, the book has since been redone by Jefferson.
I stopped and returned the book when the narrator pronounced “cumin” as something a teenager does into a Kleenex. Which, to be fair, is actually an appropriate pronunciation of the word, per Webster’s dictionary, I’ve never heard anyone else pronounce it that way before. There were A LOT of other issues with the guy’s narration. His cadence, voicing, along with pronunciation was absolutely atrocious. By far the worst narrator I have personally encountered.
Jefferson Mays needs to have someone go through and coach him on pronunciation. Otherwise, his cadence, pacing, voicing are all pretty good. Certainly not an S tier narrator, but pretty solid and he gives “The Expanse” books the tone that they need.
Revelation Space series does not have FTL, but in its place, an engine that can produce 1G indefinitely (not manufactured anymore, powered by handwavium, it seems… but the secret is revealed in one of the short stories). There is further shenanigans with physics, but never FTL.
It definitely adds more nuance to the world, because now you can’t have interstellar empires if you cannot communicate over large distances.
Spoiler
I forget the exact hand-wavium, but something like a contained black hole kept in check by a child’s brain. A child who volunteered for the task.
There is further shenanigans with physics
Yeah, and I really liked that subplot, too. In Star Trek, inertial dampeners are just a handwave device. But in RS, they explored humanity’s experiments with manipulating inertia and the gruesome results when pushed too far. Probably one of my favorite chapters of Redemption Ark.
The camera thing drives me nuts, because we all know it’s generally just going to be what’s drives the plot for this story. Which is okay.
But as a privacy nerd, my brain immediately concocts some deeply weird privacy law to explain why main engineering is monitored 24/7 and the front door is somehow not. Then my brain starts trying to come up with the relevant moments in the fictional history why the laws are so broken…
And even if, for example, the Federation had such privacy laws, it should be pretty much impossible to hide on a Cardassian ship because you know they’re all about that surveillance state.
Yeah. The Cardassian cases are the most headache-inducing. My mind-canon for those is just “Gul Dukat thought it would be funny.”
Edit: With an occasional splash of “Garak the Simple Tailor messed with the system and no one was willing to admit they didn’t know how to fix it.” Which doesn’t hold up on DS9, where Odo would have, but works for various Cardassian locations.
I like that. They had a ton of cameras on all Star Trek ships - but then a scandal involving sex tapes and an illegal porn trade between Star Fleet officers happened and cameras in Star Fleet ships were completely outlawed.
I am mildly annoyed when an action scene essentially pauses so the heroes can have a small dialog scene.
I always find myself wondering: isn’t that bad guy, hull breach, detonation timer etc still there?
Beth rewatching a lot of anime lately and this is so painful everywhere
This is a common complaint, but it deserves to be mentioned frequently: exploding control panels. This is especially a problem in Star Trek. Are circuit breakers a lost technology?
Exploding anything I would say, though this seems to be a general TV problem. Your device got shaken up a tiny bit? EXPLOSION!
Not just circuit breakers, but why are high powered circuits being used in the habitable parts of the ship?
Even modern cars no longer run high amperage circuits to the driver’s controls. Back in the old days, you turn on the lights, the light switch carried a full 12v and a lot of current to control relays. Today, the light switch and turn signal stalk use a signal circuit to tell a body control module what to do.
The bridge of a Star Trek ship should have control panels running on the future equivalent of 5 volt signal circuits that tells a distant and well shielded control module to switch the ultra high powered circuits.
That leads me to the one thing that has always bothered me about Star Trek and its transporters and replicators. E=MC^2… When a replicator creates food or an object, it would take at least the same amount of energy to make, as it would if the same amount of mass were destroyed in a nuclear reaction. That DOES mean in areas where those devices are installed there ARE ultra high powered circuits (EPS conduits) in the wall. So high powered that they have the equivalent of multiple nuclear explosions flowing through them every second… YIKES.
“This is especially a problem in Star Trek”
It gets really bad in ST Discovery, especially in the last season. Any time the ship gets into trouble, a cascade of sparks starts falling down. It looks like a waterfall made of sparks. The bridge basically looks like a KISS concert.
The bridge basically looks like a KISS concert.
lol I’ve seen what you’re talking about. It’s a little much.
We live in a time where live action adaptations of classic sci-fi literature are now possible - both technically and financially. But now TBH I find most of it super boring. Been trying to plow through that Foundation series and got to say it just doesn’t hold my attention. Same with the William Gibson adaptation the Peripheral. I liked the books but just can’t hang with the vids.
There is stuff I like but its rare. Arrival, Raised by Wolves, the Dune movies, a few others.
I do generally enjoy animated adaptations more, and agree with your list.
Arrival - we were rewatching this one evening when my teenager came home with some friends - for reference these are a group who have been watching the “evil bong” movies together, not people I think of as film geeks at all. But Arrival held their interest despite being a slower paced story and 2 of them came back to watch it in full because it just didn’t let them go. It’s such a good movie.
You’d probably like Blake’s 7 then, in regards to cameras.
Star Trek also seems to lack any form of video surveillance.
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation series premier Encounter at Farpoint, Riker comes aboard later on after several plot-relevant events. To bring him up to speed, he’s seated in front of a viewscreen and watches what has happened up to that point, basically the first part of the episode. Of course, this sort of thing is never used in the series again, but it’s kind of interesting.
You might enjoy the book “Blindsight” by Peter Watts.
It does a phenomenal job telling a very unique first contact story. I can’t remember if cameras are much of a plot point (I think they use them occasionally), but one of the characters is a linguist, and the aliens are distinctly non-human.
That’s part of the reason I liked Arrival.
I can still enjoy far-future science fiction of the “humans in space” sort but I can’t take it seriously as a portrayal of what the future might be like unless there’s an explanation for why people haven’t been modified by technology to the point where they’re hardly recognizable as human. I really like Alpha Centauri (the video game) as a portrayal of a future where everyone is either a cyborg or a Luddite. The best part is that the game does this gradually until at the end the player realizes (or doesn’t) that the annoying Luddite faction (which usually gets eliminated early) had a point.
I am quite fascinated by the TTRPG Eclipse Phase’s depiction of humans in an extremely high-tech future. Why physically travel between planets when you could just email over a copy of your mind, have it stuck in a rented body, and then download the copy’s memories once it has done whatever you needed done? There’s absolutely no requirement for your new body to be a human-shaped one either, provided you can maintain your composure while being in such a different physical form. Some people get really weird with it, others think that it’s abominable. There’s a mobster who puts her enemies’ minds into fish and keeps them in a tank.
I’m not so keen on everything about the setting, and I’ve never gotten a chance to play a game of it so I have no idea how the mechanics are, but there are cool ideas in there
What annoys me is that science fiction is that some of the biggest writers don’t seem to know any women IRL. If Robert Heinlin or Cixin Lu had to write a believable woman character to bring them food and water, they’d be dead in three days.
That’s true. I already mentioned Julie E. Czerneda, her books have female main characters that are pretty well written. I’d recommend looking into her books.
I’m curious how everyone gets here about the languages in the original star wars trilogy?
Secondly, in one of the ex expanded universe series, leia and chewbacca go back to kashyyk and Leia can understand the wookie mayor much better than she can chewbacca.
It’s explained that the mayor actually has a speech impediment, which makes him easier to understand than most wookies
Large ships that ply the stars at super luminal speeds. These ships are equipped with massive energy weapons capable of pulverizing planets. Powered by systems that use anti-matter, or ultra exotic inter-dimensional matter.
Yet, for some reason the ship is constrained on energy and is unable to keep all the lights on, or the crew has to conform to “energy conservation protocols” (ST TOS), or there isn’t enough power available to keep the ship at a habitable temperature (BSG).
Life support would not even be a rounding error on the power output of some of the systems described in Sci fi.
Distance. Almost every SciFi completely fails to represent distance even remotely closely.
This isn’t a gripe about FTL, it’s a gripe about non-FTL! Fancy FTL avoids the problem.
Star trek does it quite well in most cases, it takes days at warp foo to get anywhere. Voyager took years.
New Star wars butchers it; e.g. The Mandalorian episode with the no lightspeed/hyperspace plot device: oh no it took hours/days to get between star systems. Days! Imagine taking days to travel unfathomable distances!
New Dune (KJA’s books) inexcusably get it wrong. Claiming that “slow” travel between systems took months.
The mote in God’s eye does it extremely well with its pairs of jump points (shoutout to Mass Effect here too). Sometimes it’s quicker to use a jump point to another system, crawl to another (nearer) jump point and then jump back to the first sytem rather than crawl directly across the original system.
It takes light very long time to travel across our solar system, let alone interstellar distances. It’s like these writers have never even considered how long a container ship on earth takes to travel and still be viable.
Starships in Star Trek have three systems for propulsion: thrusters, impulse, and warp. Oh, and in my head, nothing exists after Bakula’s Enterprise, the era of star ships dogfighting like fighter jets flooding the screen with beam spam “isn’t my father’s Star Trek” and isn’t mine either.
In TOS through ENT, we see;
Warp Drive is the FTL technology in this setting; when at warp the stars themselves seem to whiz by like signs on a highway. The exact details of what warp factor means what actual speed change over time; Warp 10 is and isn’t an absolute speed limit, trans-warp drive is a thing USS Excelsior has, and then something only the Borg have…generally the bigger the warp number, the more desperate the plot is. Urgent plot point! Helm, warp 8, engage! Episode is over and the status quo has resumed. Helm, set a course for somewhere, warp 2, engage.
Thrusters are barely able to move the ship and are used for docking maneuvers or when the ship has had the snot beat out of it and nothing works; the thrusters never break so they are always at least barely able to move.
Impluse power is also depicted inconsistently. In plot delivered by dialog, the ship can move at like a quarter of the speed of light under impulse power; they sometimes talk about doing short trips under impulse to the next planet or star system over; yet when we visually see ships maneuvering under impulse, they’re acting like watercraft chugging along at 10 or 20 knots, slowly hoving in and out of space dock as if “1/4 impulse power” meant “all ahead slow.” If full impulse power moves the ship at 0.25c, leaving space dock under 1/4 impulse should look more like THIS.
I love how the different special effects recontextualizes the actors’ performances.
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New topic: my favorite sci-fi mode of FTL travel is from the Battletech franchise. Jumpships are able to teleport anywhere within 30 light years of their present position in a matter of seconds, though they’re delicate and need to stay pretty far outside of a gravity well for safety, so they tend to hang out far outside the plane of the ecliptic above or below a star, recharging the engine via solar power. The trick is flying to and from the jumpship, which is done on a dropship which spends half the time accelerating at 1G, and half the time decelerating at 1G, because “fusion rockets” can do that.
A journey from Earth (called “Terra” in-universe) to some planet within 30 light years will take a week or so on the dropship on the way to the jumpship, a few seconds in hyperspace, and then a week or so on the dropship on the way down to the planet. Need to go farther than 30 light years? You either have to have set up a series of jumpships ready to do a relay race, or your jumpship has to take half a week to recharge its batteries to jump again.
They even treat communications semi-realistically; there are special space radios called HPGs which kind of use jump drive technology to instantly send a message to another HPG within 50 light years, or you can hand the message to someone who is getting on a dropship, or you have radio as we know it now complete with speed of light delay. And unless Michael Stackpole is writing, it’s depicted as pretty consistent. (In one of the Blood of Kerensky books, Stackpole has the Wolf’s Dragoons jump into low orbit of Luthien “inside the orbit of our nearest moon” which per established fiction shouldn’t have worked for a couple different reasons.)
That’s exactly the kind of scenario I can buy into.
Especially the communications: couriers become the norm again. In-system lightspeed comms are feasible, but interstellar? You’d better send a package that hard way.
I especially like the gravity constraint. Iain M. Banks’ novel The Algebraist works on a similar principle. Pairs of portals can be created, but you need to po physically tow the other portal to its destination in real space/time.
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Dirk Van den Boem “Sternkreuzer Proxima” (“Starcruiser Proxima”, couldn’t find the actual English titel on a quick search). He has some very good descriptions of the gruelingly long times any maneuver in space takes. Also being cramped in a small space ship with no fresh air, tasteless food rations and not knowing what is going to happen, while your ship and the enemy ship spend the next 50 hours getting in position for their attack.
