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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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.
“Humane Treatment”, " Human rights", “I’m doing this for the good of humanity”. When there are heaps of non human species but the writers keep reffering to “human” traits everyone else clearly has.
Azetbur was right.
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’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.
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.
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.
Becky Chambers wrote 4 books that did a really good job of exploring different species getting by with their differences not just in culture, but also in things like how they speak (one species has 5 vocal chords, so you literally cannot speak their language) or ‘how does publich transit account for different butt shapes?’
But on to your question on pet peeves:
- throwing science-y words out there that make no sense is probably my biggest.
- deus ex-machina - getting saved at the knick of time by something showing up without warning, but that’s just bad writing. I actually like how the Orville series removed transporters as a tech. It’s actually a bad plot device.
- but yeah, like you said, things that are obvious but are removed from the show, like cameras
Yeah, big shout-out to Becky Chambers, the wayfarer series is truly excellent. I think the second book was my favorite, raising a teenager is frustrating and scary, and it seems that doesn’t really change when they’re an AI. It also remains a constant when the teen is human and parent is an AI. Brilliant.
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.
Sounds and non-newtonian physics in space flight. You wouldn’t hear rumbling engines or lasers shooting in space. You also wouldn’t need to keep burning your thrusters after you’ve accelerated towards your destination.
The thrusters thing is subverted in Battlestar Galactica, The Expanse, and Babylon 5. The first two also do an excellent job with sound in space.
You would hear the engines inside the ship. I always imagine the sound is from the point of view of the crew.
Yeah, it makes sense in interior shots. But exterior shots in space should be dead silent. Just doesn’t make any sense.
I understand why they do this with language but when it happens for the first time in a show I can’t help but get distracted by it. I don’t have a better solution though…
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.
If you read books, check out Embassytown by China Mieville. As far as I could tell the point of that book was to envision a truly alien species and how diplomacy would work with them. Super interesting book and unlike anything else I’ve read in scifi
Since Stargate is my go-to scifi I’m kinda offended at the “doesn’t take itself too seriously”. Sure it’s not as hard on the science as The Expanse (you know, except for the magic portals to other stars), but it feels like it takes itself pretty seriously. There are obvious bottle episodes that were probably written for other shows and shoe-horned in because they were cheap to buy and produce.
For #2, I think this would get pretty old pretty fast, not to mention that they have to fit everything into runtime constraints. Every new planet the team spends months researching the new language. Sure, you could handwave it (we found a Goa’uld translator just laying around), but that would be back to just one language. Since the Stargate presents an instant transportation rather than the days/months/years of starship travel it would make sense that languages stay fairly consistent as people move from planet to planet.
For #3, they pretty much handwave this in SG-1 as the majority of planets in the Milky Way were repopulated by the ancients in their image, and others were transferred from Earth.
In a more realistic Stargate, they wouldn’t need a different language for every planet. Just a different dialect of Egyptian or Goa’uld. Which is something that I would expect the SGC to be able to create an effective automatic translator to bridge.
I really appreciate a lack of ansible tech. Having to account for the speed of light in communication makes for better story telling, IMHO
My favorite examples of limited communication speed are the Lost Fleet books by John G. Hemry writing as Jack Campbell, and the Battletech franchise.
In the Lost Fleet, they are limited to realistic communications. When they jump into a star system, they gather Intel but it’s often pointed out that what their telescopes see and radios hear is X hours old based on the distance. There’s a lot of talk in battles about predicting where something will be at a certain time or trying to device the enemy by pulling fake maneuvers. When they want to communicate back home, they need to send picket ships to carry the message.
In Battletech, there is a common method of FTL communication between worlds, but not at smaller scales. When the writers remember it, we hear about the same kind of delays in Intel as in the Lost Fleet. The FTL comms are monitored by a sometimes hostile polity, so top secret stuff will be communicated by spacecraft pony express, and there have been some attempts to come up with other comm methods.
There’s a part where comstar shuts down the whole network of ftl communication too
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
Star Trek also seems to lack any form of video surveillance.
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation series premiere 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.
Making a second comment to answer your actual question:
For me it’s when technology is very uniformly high tech. So for example in the real world technology advances but it doesn’t advance everywhere at the same speed. There might be high tech versions of things in cities while you still find old or ancient equivalents out in the countryside (or just both types existing alongside each other all over). I really like it when SciFi can capture this nonlinear pace of technological advancement.
That goes for history as well. In films with nice period-acurate costumes and sets, you rarely see anything old-looking with design from the previous periods.
This may sound like a weird mention, but I really liked how cowboy bebop did that.
Yes, laser guns exist, but gunpowder firearms still work and lots of people still use them.
There are high tech space stations and hyperspace gates between planets… But you still take a simple gas powered ferry to cross a bay down on earth.
There are futuristic Martian cities with holographic advertisements that jump out at you, but Tijuana still looks like Tijuana.
That’s a good point. Or even poorer parts of the population not being able to afford the newest tech.
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.
