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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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.
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.
Language drives me nuts too. I believe in Star trek the badges translate in real time? Best explanation I ever saw (read) was hitchhikers guide. The babel fish “eats” language and poops out brainwaves or whatever to the receiver. I probably got the details wrong but it’s close enough and hilarious to boot.
Camera thing is another I hate. Obviously for the drama but I mean they can pull up video on the main window of the enterprise to the engineering room, captains room, even other ships but can’t see the biggest point of entry??
Star Trek has a common language in the federation or not? It would be cool if they encountered a new species and get out their communicators, record for a bit and have an AI figure out the new language. Wouldn’t take up a lot of screen time and explain the communication.
There’s a couple of scenes I think in enterprise that shows the linguistics person programming something like that actually. Been many years since I watched it (it’s been a long road lol) but I recall that scene.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
That women can only be scientists or whatever if their father was. They can have no other reason or backstory.
This is why Darmok is peak sci-fi. It discusses what happens when species can’t communicate with one another. It even works within the in-show explanation of the universal translator: the Tamarians don’t just use different vocabulary and syntax. They have an entirely different language model.
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.)
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.
One of the funniest episodes of the Men In Black cartoon was J trying to adjust to MIB’s 37 hour day.
But it shows a problem; in most sci-fi not only are all the aliens 1.8 meters tall with five fingers and a larynx that can mimic human speech, they all come from world’s with a 24 hour day. Actually, to get nerdier, most cultures with a sun would probably have a 24 hour day based on them using circular sun dials. But the length of the hours would vary.
Another thing that annoys me is when an author comes up with a fantastic idea and uses it once. There’s a Poul Anderson story I read in high school that I always wanted to see developed. A group of time travelers from 3854 AD go back to meet da Vinci. They get captured by a baron who tortures them into revealing all their secrets.
The baron and his family set up an estate in 20,000 BC and maraud through time.
This story could run six seasons, easily.
most cultures with a sun would probably have a 24 hour day based on them using circular sun dials
The use of 24 (really its 2 12 part divisions of day and night) is arbitrary. They could really use any numbering system.
The reason we use 12 and 60 is from the babylonians. We think they used base 12 and 60 because of body part counting. Each digit of the hand minus the thumb is divided into 3 parts. That gives you 12 then each finger on the opposite hand gives you 5 of each 12 count giving you base 60. If an alien has different parts, which they will, they wouldn’t necessarily use the same numbers.
There are many reasons why other races would use base 12.
But it shows a problem; in most sci-fi not only are all the aliens 1.8 meters tall with five fingers and a larynx that can mimic human speech, they all come from world’s with a 24 hour day.
Yeah! Lamp-shading this trend is one of the ways that Farscape shines.
While Farscape is still frequently guilty of this trope, it’s fun that at least the human main character is often scolded by peers for his human-anatomy-centric biases.
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.
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.
“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.
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
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
