Little things that get to you in terms of beleivability

[Broomstick]

No. It is hardly a secret that communication is the key to a better relationship.

Not if the two parties can lie and deceive. Why the assumption that brain to brain communication won't involve that capability?

I need no such assumption. Even if you can continue to lie and deceive psychically, you can still communicate more clearly. Most of our communication problems in relationships do not stem from an outright intent to lie, but from the clumsiness of our communication methods. We have trouble expressing how we feel, what's really on our minds, etc.

That's a little like saying that using a telephone will invariably be clearer than shouting across a backyard. As anyone who has used a telephone knows, sometimes there's interference or a bad connection or whatever, in which case you might be better off yelling out the bad door to communicate with a neighbor than phoning that person. Again, why the assumption that telepathy will always be clearer than verbal communication? What if anything more than the most very basic of concepts required extensive training to communicate mind to mind, and for most people verbal communication remained the medium of choice for communicating?

Adults have complex communication skills, but that doesn't mean emotions are meaningless or incomprehensible to them. It would be nice to know what a baby's cries mean, for example. That doesn't mean I'm expecting him to communicate complex thoughts, for fuck's sake. It means I want to know whether he's in pain, whether he's just lonely, etc. The ability to interpret communication would be immensely enhanced with psychic abilities.

And if the extent of a baby's psychic abilities (by which you apparently mean just telepathy) is simply a deafening/overpowering carrier wave with no meaning attached? The equivalent of a feedback squeal on a microphone? What good is it then? Just as language doesn't emerge fully developed why would telepathy? Is it inconceivable that such a person would go through a developmental stage where they could make psychic noise but not actually be able to communicate meaning?

I don't care how long ago you read it. Your assumptions are based on the conventions of woo-woo fiction and do not in any way follow logically from the situation being discussed. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to leap from "psychic" to telekinetic except that both of them tend to coincide in woo-woo fiction.

Mike, I am not making that assumption, the AUTHOR is! These are not MY books. It would be dishonest to describe them in false terms, yet you are blaming me for the flaws in someone else's works IF you're going to take a shit on the ideas - which you are certainly allowed to do - have the decency to say THE AUTHOR'S assumptions are shit, as they are not mine.

As for the evolutionary science, no. The idea that this trait would spring up as an on/off trait is absurd. If it's possible, it would be present in varying degrees. You wouldn't have infants who suddenly have monstrously powerful psychic abilities whereas no one in their family line prior to them had such abilities.

In the books they actually do not do this - psychic abilities exist in varying degrees and the reason these people are so powerful is due to an artificial breeding program spanning generations. The traits crop up randomly in the population and, when weak, do not overly interfere with producing children. When they are concentrated through multiple generations to deliberately strengthen the traits THEN you have the problems, and the stronger the psychic the worse the problems.

The author put in all the other stuff, not me. Would her books have been better if she hadn't? I don't know, it would make for very different stories

The subject of this thread is believability, remember?

If it doesn't work for you then it doesn't work for you. I just thought it was a different twist on the problem.

So, on the basis of three books of fiction you're making personal assumptions about the author, such as "she has a problem with children"? She wrote a lot of books, and they certainly aren't all "kid-hating" books. Don't mistake the story for the author.

I don't give a fuck about the author; I'm only going by what you said about these stories, particularly the bit about how multiple generations can't live under the same roof, as if that isn't common in real life in many cultures right now.

Yes, for the particular people in the story they can't live in multi-generation households. The normal humans in the books can. One of the points is that these psychic people are different than the rest of humanity.

And while many human societies live in multi-generational households it's by no means a human universal. You can argue that an inability or unwillingness to live in such households is anti-survival, but again one of the features of the books is that these people have trouble successfully reproducing.

Again, based on this "instant-on" appearance of fantastic new evolutionary traits which is, itself, an idiotic fiction cliche and butchery of biology.

Not "instant-on" - the traits appear randomly in the general population, too, but not in their strongest form. It's only inbreeding that creates the really powerful individuals. A small dose of some of these abilities might have some survival value after all, although that is not explored in the books.

Again, that sounds more like irritating fiction cliche than realism. It's like saying that a person with a sense of smell wouldn't be able to distinguish between his own smells and the smells emanating from others, until he gets trained or something.

Well, like I said, Mike, if you don't like it blame the author, not me.

It's like a person with no sense of smell imagining that people with a sense of smell would never be able to live together because they would occasionally smell each others' bowel movements, flatulence, or body odour.

Well, let's think about that for a minute, Mike.

What if human offspring involuntarily emitted nauseating odors until maturity?

They do. Haven't you ever had a baby around you?

Yes, Mike, I have. While babies certainly can generate a horrible stench at times they do not do so continuously, and most of time I wouldn't even call it nauseating. Sure, shit filled diapers smell bad, but they don't (usually) make me retch. I was thinking more along the lines of children randomly and frequently, even constantly, emitting odors that make an adult dry-heave or actually puke. It would certainly complicate child care, don't you think?

Unless this "different twist" is somehow useful when discussing whether certain fiction cliches are believable or not, then it's irrelevant.

Well, I thought the notion that "makes it difficult to reproduce" as an explanation for why psychics aren't more common was a nod at trying to explain why they're so rare that makes some sense. You may not agree with the proposed mechanism of why that's so, but it having a trait that is beneficial to the individual yet decreases reproductive fitness is a real-world explanation for why a trait might be rare in a population. It's believable to me. There's a lot of other stuff in those books that are pure fantasy, sure, but that part struck me as a better attempt to explain why psychics don't dominate the planet than most.

[Junghalli]

Our forms of selective pressure is less like that of the old fashioned "natural selection weeds out bad genes because of environmental adversities that kill animals" darwinian survival-of-the-fittest stuff and is more of a social/cultural selection in that people have to be sexy to have sex. I think psychics would be very good at being sexy to have sex.

That is the most plausible mechanism, but something to consider is that the way present human society is set up works to reduce sexual selection:

(1) Present society (and to a lesser extent human societies in general) generally encourage people to mate by exclusive male-female pair bonding. As long as the sex ratio is fairly even this tends to reduce sexual competition, as simple math says unless you're so repulsive that everybody would prefer to not pair up at all than pair up with you you'll probably be able to find somebody willing to pair up with you, if for no other reason than because everybody more desirable is already taken.

(2) In a society with ubiquitous birth control most pregnancies are likely to be planned. It's generally harder to be a single parent (that's probably why human pair-bonding evolved in the first place), so people will generally tend to avoid having children outside the context of pair-bonding relationships. This works to re-inforce the effect of #1; having sex with large numbers of partners tends to not translate into having more children if most or all those couplings are unlikely to actually result in pregnancy. Of course, there is cuckoldry to consider, but even there there's some pressure to use birth control in that context because of the risk that your mate discovering the child is not theirs - and this pressure is likely to get stronger as DNA testing becomes more ubiquitous.

This isn't to say that sexual selection doesn't exist in humans (I'd be really surprised if it didn't exist to some extent - I mean shit, doesn't some appreciable fraction of the world's population have DNA from Genghis Khan?), but to point out that it's probably less strong in us than it is in animals that don't practice pair-bonding. Psychics might tend to reproduce more than other people because their abilities translate to more social and sexual success, but I doubt this would be a rapid process.

It's actually somewhat interesting to realize how much cultural institutions like monogamy seem almost deliberately designed to reduce sexual competition. I have a strong suspicion it's actually part of the reason they evolved in the first place. A society where all the females are the "wives" of the most successful males, and said successful males cockblock all the others, and most males were angry resentful permavirgins who spent a bunch of their time trying to find ways around the powerful males cockblocking them or stewing in resentment at being constantly cockblocked, would probably be a lot less harmonious than ours.

[adam_grif]

Our forms of selective pressure is less like that of the old fashioned "natural selection weeds out bad genes because of environmental adversities that kill animals" darwinian survival-of-the-fittest stuff and is more of a social/cultural selection in that people have to be sexy to have sex. I think psychics would be very good at being sexy to have sex.

Of course. I even mentioned sexual selection in my previous post, to which Adam responded by snipping that part out and saying that it could only be natural selection, artificial selection, or deliberate intervention, as if sexual selection does not even exist as an option.

Oh, you want a response to that? Ok.

Even the incredibly sexually successful people have approximately the same number of children as all but the most hideously deformed or disadvantaged people. Tiger "thirteen hot chicks" Woods has a progeny of exactly 2. At this point in our history, being Catholic (Ungh, I know like 3 of those huge catholic 7+ Children families) is more likely to make you "reproductively successful" than being Psychic is, because success at having sex hasn't translated to success at having children since the widespread introduction of contraceptives.

And that's once we've bought the silliness involved in the bizarre, binary "psychic or not" one gene functionality. As thought there were no intermediary steps to being psychic, you go from zero to accurate mind reader in one generation.

[Sam Or I]

Outdoor Flying Scenes- Let me go further in detail and say flying motorcycles, jetpacks, broomsticks, ridding on flying creatures, other cockpitless machines, and people flying (aka superman.) For some reason it just does not click in my brain. I know some are actually possible in real life. Maybe it is shoddy greenscreens or bad CGI. But it breaks my suspension of disbelief. On the other hand I do not mind hovering items. (Speederbikes, Jetpacks that make "Jumps" vs flying.) I limit this to movies and TV as well, I am able to accept it in comic books, literature and video game.

[Big Orange]

The little kid genius. I want to scratch my eyes out. Little kids in general are bad, but if writen correctly they can be made acceptable. (Newt from Aliens)

We had that in the Jurassic Parl movie franchise; it was more tolerable and credible in the first movie of course, but the resourceful/genius kid archetype got worst in the progressively lamer sequels.

Random stuff pulled out of a magic satchel to help out move along the plot. Like batmans utility belt from the 60's. This includes expanded functions of items to fill plot of the week. (Tricorders anyone) Other examples, the T850's exploding battery, Mal's moved nerve cluster, Qui Gon's breathing device, ect... ect...

Or James Bond's gadgets from the Q Branch. Or the Doctor's blasted Sonic Screwdriver (that can even repair barbed wire).

And while Star Trek and related TV space opera usually have space "aliens" who are pretty much homo-sapien-sapien homonids from Earth in virtually every way with the exception of foreheads, skin tone, noses and ears, you do get fairly alien aliens now and again even in 1990s/2000s Trek: the Prophets from DS9 seem to be energy/silicone based creatures with a rather abstract way of thinking and perceiving things, the Villains of the Week from VOY known as the Think Tank were a fairly varied bunch (with a inscrutable AI and a whale alien in a tank), and then you had the Xindi races from ENT (with dolphin aliens and more animal looking homonids). The Stargate franchise has the pretty alien Gou'ald but the Asgard are fairly generic Grey people and they messed up with the banal Ancients with their unconvincing backstory.

[adam_grif]

Replicators too, aka the only competent civilization in the galaxy aside from humans.

[Sam Or I]

We had that in the Jurassic Parl movie franchise; it was more tolerable and credible in the first movie of course, but the resourceful/genius kid archetype got worst in the progressively lamer sequels.

I agree. If done correctly, I can tolerate them, but when kids become able to do things the adults cannot it becomes very annoying. O

[Eleas]

I agree. If done correctly, I can tolerate them, but when kids become able to do things the adults cannot it becomes very annoying. O

As long as the reactions to a lot of these phenomena are believable, I can tolerate quite a lot of things. The genius kid should be mentally ill or at least invite negative reactions, have an overinflated ego which results in severe problems, or be unable to work with "lesser people". Same with flying cars - they should exist for a reason, and people should thing about them in ways that made sense and use them only because it made sense for them to do so.

[Batman]

The Stargate Asgard look like your stereotypical Grey Aliens BY INTENTION because in the SG universe they ARE the Grey Aliens from all those 'I got abducted by aliens! Honestly!' stories.
As for the Bond gadgets while those just HAPPEN to be exactly the gadgets he needs to eventually come out a) alive and b) the victor, they're ALSO almost inevitably showcased beforehand so the audience will know he DOES have them, unlike my 'Hey, look! There just HAPPENS to be Anti-sharks with laser beams spray in it!' utility belt from the 60s.

[Sam Or I]

The Stargate Asgard look like your stereotypical Grey Aliens BY INTENTION because in the SG universe they ARE the Grey Aliens from all those 'I got abducted by aliens! Honestly!' stories.
As for the Bond gadgets while those just HAPPEN to be exactly the gadgets he needs to eventually come out a) alive and b) the victor, they're ALSO almost inevitably showcased beforehand so the audience will know he DOES have them, unlike my 'Hey, look! There just HAPPENS to be Anti-sharks with laser beams spray in it!' utility belt from the 60s.

I do not mind when they are showcased before hand and how they work. Its is actually good when a character uses them for purposes they were NOT designed for, as long as the function of the device stays the same. But when a devices has an unseen feature that the audience was not introduced to is where I role my eyes. It is as if the device is breaking already established rules.

[Bakustra]

Of course, the idea of inventing dozens of different cultures is fairly daunting, but there are ways around that as well.

Could you elaborate a little ?

While I'm not Bakustra, I think I'll take a stab at it. I've found, during my years of role playing and world-building to that end, that creating alien cultures (whether in Fantasy or SF) out of whole cloth almost never works. Devising a culture ex nihilo, with no preexisting referents, will inevitably be a study in micromanagement, and you'll end up with something that utterly lacks plausibility. It will not, to use a poetic turn of phrase, appear to be smoothed and moulded into its current shape by history; it will be obviously artificial.

However, you can steal. Every good author has done it, and will continue to do it. The key is to steal well. You have to be unobtrusive, and you have to borrow elements that go far deeper than the surface, then string together those bits and pieces into a coherent framework. To do this, you have to understand the culture to a certain degree, or it will not work.

A poor writer looks at the katana, the naginata, the Samurai's topknot, and the nightingale floors, and imports them into his fantasy or Scifi world, and keep the rest as it is. A better author might look at the production of rice in a given century and note how Japan organised its society to ensure a smooth flow, and then copy the whole structure they used there. Then, he might change the type of food grown into something decidedly different, give them a modern industry base (hopefully taking into account the way this would change things), add some aesthetics mixed together from from Aztec and Inuit and Moulin Rouge (I'm only partly exaggerating here for effect), and he'd end up with a culture that's logically far more sound, but which would superficially look quite alien.

The point is, however, that the good author uses this framework and extrapolates things from it, rather than just plopping down little drops of "alien" into a bog-standard fantasy or sci-fi world. Tekumél, while a bit too alien and pulp for my tastes, is at the very least a good start.

This is exactly what I was talking about. If I may elaborate further, most writers are not anthropologists. Most anthropologists, I believe, do not spend their time creating fictional cultures either. Ultimately, creating a culture out of whole cloth results in inferior products, simply because they lack the backbone of real-world cultures, which you can appropriate for yourself, as Eleas noted. However, full-scale appropriation, on the scale of Space Japan or Fantasy Aztecs, results in comedy foremost. Blending ideas from different cultures is an excellent way to produce alien yet recognizable cultures. Ultimately, you must work backward, and start with the role the culture will play.

Let us use an example. Say we wish to create a group of tyrannical conquerors and raiders to serve as villains for our space opera. Further, we want them to have a justification for their conquests and plundering beyond the economic. Well, we first go to the history books and the depths of our memory and dredge up conquerors and raiders from throughout history. We have the Norse, the Aztecs, the Navajo and Apache, the Mongols, the Spanish, and more. Looking at these, we see common characteristics amongst many of them. Many were recent migrants (Aztecs, Mongols, Spanish, Navajo). Many consisted of a number of smaller groups that fought each other (Norse, Navajo/Apache, Mongols eventually). Many had religious reasons for their raids and conquests (Norse, Aztecs, Mongols, Spanish). There are more characteristics, but with just these we can see that our justification for our conquerors will be religious. The ultimate flavor of the religion is something else entirely, but there we have missionary justifications with the Mongols and Spanish, while the Aztecs and Norse raided for other religious reasons, which we can adapt as well. Choosing religion opens up borrowing from theocracies like Lamaist Tibet, Egypt before the Hellenic period, and so on. You can see where this is going, I trust. Though we may use a modified Mongol justification, we would then include a specific priesthood to differentiate our tyrants. By mixing different cultures together while using a common basis, you can produce alien cultures from familiar elements.

[Swindle1984]

I can accept a zombie apocalypse, but I cannot accept the main character having an M-16 that fires hundreds of rounds without reloading and then goes CLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICK when it runs dry. They don't work that way!

Shit, the CSI shows (Miami being the worst offender) are almost totally unwatchable for me because of all the stupid things they have that destroy my suspension of disbelief.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Back to everyone speaking English. It's somewhat necessary for a long running show. Either there's an effective in-universe explanation, eg. universal translator, babelfish, translator microbes, etc., or it just gets completely ignored (perhaps ignored because the in-universe explanation is so reliable and ubiquitous). But what totally ruined my (limited) appreciation for Stargate: Atlantis was the scene (I believe in the episode where they found the culture that was developing an anti-Wraith feeding vaccine) where one of the natives noticed that the doctor spoke with a Scottish accent. Yes, not only does everyone in the universe speak American English, but only in Scotland is it spoken differently that someone in another galaxy who has never heard of Earth would notice the difference. Bringing up a minor communications issue like a mild accent just highlights the language issue without offering any explanation whatsoever.

Not to mention its totally Earth-centric (we're the only human planet with diversity), but also white/Eurocentric (we're the only racial group among humans whose internal ethnic differences are important enough to warrant attention, compared to say Chinese vs. Thai, or Iranian vs. Iraqi.) Of course the target audience is mostly white Americans, so that's understandable, but once the suspension of disbelief is broken that sharply, all the other criticisms start aggregating around the break.

[Batman]

Yeah. I mean it's totally not like SG-1's initial offworld human cultures were based off ancient Egypt. Or how they totally never introduced asian mythology. Oh wait.
If anything what got me about at the latest post-season 2 SG-1 was the security personell NOT being armed with Zats. Being able to shoot first, say 'Sorry' later when it turns out you shouldn't have shot to begin with, even when at the time you had no clue you shouldn't, is something that ESPECIALLY the SGC should appreciate.

[Junghalli]

What is the in-universe explanation for SG? Everybody in the SG teams knows how to speak Ancient Egyptian (i.e. Goa'uld) and this is a decent lingua franca when getting around the SG-verse? If so, different people's accents would logically influence the way they pronounce the language.

[Batman]

There ISN'T one. SG-1 DOES generally blithely assume that everybody speaks english, usually despite being nabbed off Earth a long time before the language as we know it today was established. That's one of the things I liked about SG-1.

[Darth Hoth]

Stargate just assumes that all aliens speak American English. Even the Ori Galaxy humans, who have never even heard of the Milky Way, much less Earth.

Hilariously, the only people (that I can recall offhand) whose language they did NOT understand were the real bonafide ancient Egyptians on Earth in the Season 8 time travel story; there they needed Dr. Jackson to translate for them.

[adam_grif]

Yeah, they lamp-shaded it in "200".

[Gramzamber]

I believe the stock excuse used early on at least by the producers of SG-1 was that Daniel Jackson was doing a hell of a lot of translating and teaching offscreen. Because he's just that good.

[aieeegrunt]

I recall a clever short story that went into the whole "if psychic powers exist why aren't they more widespread" thing. The premise was that psychic powers tended to plateau at reasonable levels; you could start bonfires with your mind but you couldn't blow up a continent. So the societies that went down the mechanical tool using route rapidly outstripped the mentalist ones; you might be able to set a bowmen's face on fire with a few seconds of concentration, but by then he's nailed you with an arrow. The use of mind powers thus couldn't compete with engineer powers, and psychic powers are latent in a lot of people but atrophied since there isn't a society that instructs you in their useage as you grow up. People might get small hints in the form of "intuition" or such things, but because we have a machine based society that works quite well nobody follows up on or really cares about these little throwback hints and twitches.

[Nyrath]

I recall a clever short story that went into the whole "if psychic powers exist why aren't they more widespread" thing. The premise was that psychic powers tended to plateau at reasonable levels; you could start bonfires with your mind but you couldn't blow up a continent. So the societies that went down the mechanical tool using route rapidly outstripped the mentalist ones; you might be able to set a bowmen's face on fire with a few seconds of concentration, but by then he's nailed you with an arrow. The use of mind powers thus couldn't compete with engineer powers, and psychic powers are latent in a lot of people but atrophied since there isn't a society that instructs you in their useage as you grow up. People might get small hints in the form of "intuition" or such things, but because we have a machine based society that works quite well nobody follows up on or really cares about these little throwback hints and twitches.

I'm pretty sure that is "Limiting Factor" by Theodore Cogswell.
In the story, the few who have psychic powers like levitation, telepathy, and so forth think they will eventually be Homo Superior.
But they forgot something.

We have legs, so we have the power of walking. But if we want to go anywhere, we use a car or a plane, because a machine will always be more powerful and have superior endurance. So the psychics can levitate, but in a race with an airplane, they will tire out first.

[Big Orange]

Replicators too, aka the only competent civilization in the galaxy aside from humans.

How can I forget them? But it seem like they've been played to death like the Borg and Daleks, plus their origin story is a little naff.

I actually like the Asgard as race, they're a logical race depicted more consistantly than the rather anger/ceremony prone Vulcans, and they're supposed to be the Greys, the Stargate franchise is based on actual alien legends on Earth that became fashionable amongst nerds and cranks in the 1970s, but Stargate should've branched out more past the planets full of Midwestern evergreen forests and North American extras (however in earlier SG-1 seasons when the writing and production was much sharper, they put more effort in human cultures on alien planets).

We had that in the Jurassic Parl movie franchise; it was more tolerable and credible in the first movie of course, but the resourceful/genius kid archetype got worst in the progressively lamer sequels.

I agree. If done correctly, I can tolerate them, but when kids become able to do things the adults cannot it becomes very annoying. O

Perhaps the worst example of a resourceful kid that could do anything was Nikko from the horrid, 12 rating friendly RoboCop 3 (where she smugly defangs a mighty ED-209 guard with her dated laptop).

[Gramzamber]

Perhaps the worst example of a resourceful kid that could do anything was Nikko from the horrid, 12 rating friendly RoboCop 3 (where she smugly defangs a mighty ED-209 guard with her dated laptop).

To be fair ED-209s had all the programming robustness of Windows 3.1 from the very beginning.

[sirocco]

There ISN'T one. SG-1 DOES generally blithely assume that everybody speaks english, usually despite being nabbed off Earth a long time before the language as we know it today was established. That's one of the things I liked about SG-1.

About SG-1, the plots around the Replicators.
I liked the first Bug models which looked more alien to me than the later humanized versions. I do understand that human actors are cheaper than CGI but it really bugs me (pun intended) that once again humanoid form is the pinnacle of their evolution!
Note : Asuran Replicators on SG Atlantis were just too dumb to live exist

[Sarevok]

Heh. The human form being the ultimate perfection always struck me as nonsensical. Has there been a reverse of BSG in scifi stories so far? Where man becomes the machine and is both happy and not evil about it ?