SF don'ts

[Gullible Jones]

Because Darth Wong's page on brainbugs doesn't begin to cover it all. Feel free to add your own. For mine...

1. "Humans are special!"

In B&B era Trek, why do the Borg want to assimilate Earth? Because humans have some unique "sense of individuality" or something. And this is in a universe full of intelligent humanoid aliens with human-like modes of thought. How screwy is that? It sounds almost like something straight out of Mein Kampf, just updated for nonhumans instead of non-Aryans.

This is pure fantasy of the most insidious kind, and it doesn't belong in any halfway decent SF.

2. "Yes, we killed three billion people. But we only did what needed to be done."

At the heart of many a military SF story is a situation contrived beyond all reason to absolutely require a huge massacre. I should not need to tell anyone why this is execrably stupid.

If you must have a massacre, examine the consequences. Show what the soldiers who did it feel. Show how the families and friends of those killed are affected. Preaching is for idiots. Wanking is for sociopaths.

3. One very, very simple gripe: Most of us have learned to stop calling women "machines for producing babies". Now we can learn to stop calling men "machines for fighting and fucking."

(Richard K. Morgan, I judge thee guilty.)

And finally, something a bit less serious...

4. Introducing new elements with amazing properties. In particular, metallic elements lighter and stronger than steel. For those who hadn't noticed, the periodic table is full all the way up to Meitnerium, which means no more fucking transition metals. Nothing like a trinium dart to kill suspension of disbelief...

[Academia Nut]

1. "Humans are special!"

This is probably the only one on your list that is only somewhat justified in its existence, in that to a certain extent humans must be somehow special, simply because the audience and the author are by definition human. While avoiding subtle and not so subtle racist tones is a good thing, this is less a brain-bug than an archetype.

The massacre thing is a bit less so, but the dismissal of casualties is a way of demonstrating scale. Star Wars has Alderaan getting blown to pieces and the people who do it don't give a shit. There are more planets, and quadrillions to quintillions more people.

[Sidewinder]

A good start. Don't forget to include the bullshit depictions of future societies where the human race is no longer recognizable as the human race, e.g., societies without sex and/or violence.

[Gullible Jones]

1. "Humans are special!"

This is probably the only one on your list that is only somewhat justified in its existence, in that to a certain extent humans must be somehow special, simply because the audience and the author are by definition human. While avoiding subtle and not so subtle racist tones is a good thing, this is less a brain-bug than an archetype.

It's still crap, and I don't really see the need for special/superior humans just because the audience is by definition human. If people really need to have their SF expound upon the virtues of humanity over other species, they need to grow some brains.

The massacre thing is a bit less so, but the dismissal of casualties is a way of demonstrating scale. Star Wars has Alderaan getting blown to pieces and the people who do it don't give a shit. There are more planets, and quadrillions to quintillions more people.

Eh, I wasn't talking about massacres done by the bad guys. I'm talking about massacres and other acts of exceptional brutality committed by "good guys" - not antiheros, but characters who are displayed as sympathetic and moral.

[Junghalli]

What always annoys the hell out of me is when an SF/Fantasy author creates a society that's obviously completely modelled on their own political views and then wanks to how much better they are than us. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy and the Probability Broach are two great examples that pop into my mind immediately.

[PeZook]

Don't fucking preach should be a big one. Probability Broach is an archetypical offender: Half of the comic is spent preaching to the audience about how this new libertarian society is so awesome.

In fact, because of all that time spent preaching, there is practically no drama left. The Main Evil Plot is resolved in five minutes.

[Sarevok]

Halfway through Ender's Game I can barely visualize Ender or his siblings. I have zero clue about what the world they inhabit looks like. Being more descriptive is extremely helpful.

Also vast intergalactic conflicts, uber empires etc are merely backdrop for interesting characters. Too often writers forget that and we get drek like the Dahak books starring wood puppets as people. Which is quite sad since I wanted to like this series given it's very interesting premise. Far too many scifi authors fall into this trap of wanking their pet ships, weapons, nations etc while ignoring the human beings that live in their verses.

The big picture workscan work well too as a few scifi short stories demonstrate but it has to be written differently from exploits of captain sue in wankverse.

[Nyrath]

What always annoys the hell out of me is when an SF/Fantasy author creates a society that's obviously completely modelled on their own political views and then wanks to how much better they are than us. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy and the Probability Broach are two great examples that pop into my mind immediately.

From THE TOUGH GUIDE TO THE KNOW GALAXY:

FALL OF EMPIRE. This will happen to the FIRST EMPIRE, which may be either the TERRAN EMPIRE or GALACTIC EMPIRE. (Rarely both, since this would be rather duplicative.)

The cause given for the Fall of Empire should be noted, because it is usually a dead giveaway to the author's political and social biases. Authority, especially quasi-religious authority, became too stifling, choking off free thought. Or people ignored the old Imperial virtues, became decadent and hedonistic, and had far too much sex. Or the Imperial government choked the ECONOMY to death with exorbitant taxes. Or the rich got richer and arrogant, while the poor got poorer and desperate. These causes may be disguised by some TECHJARGON about Psychohistorical Dynamics or General Systems Collapse, but they are almost always there if you scope them out.

[Nyrath]

1. "Humans are special!"

I believe this dates back to when John W. Campbell, jr. was the editor at Astounding magazine. He put his stamp on an entire generation of SF authors.

Among other things, he would refuse to publish stories where humans were inferior to aliens. In the stories he would publish, humans always has some special superior ability that would allow them to triumph over those uppity aliens.

[K. A. Pital]

Copied cultures from the past ages of the Earth, without providing any solid mechanism as to how and why this culture, complete with attributes and names, was copied by an interstellar something.

Really, that is bad.

Space Russians? Space Germans? Space... whoever else? Please no.

Not to mean this is always bad, it provides for interesting possibilities, however, it means SoD flies out of the window and it's just a science-fantasy tale not a more strict sci-fi setting.

[Academia Nut]

It's still crap, and I don't really see the need for special/superior humans just because the audience is by definition human. If people really need to have their SF expound upon the virtues of humanity over other species, they need to grow some brains.

No, that bit probably comes under the psuedo-racist crap, I meant that humanity will tend to be in some way special simply because the main characters will tend to be human. Humans are "special" in Star Wars in that they seem to have a disproprtionate presence in the galaxy, for the simple fact that the audience is human and will relate better to them. Humans are special (and often presented as superior too) in Star Trek because they are somehow better than every other species.

What I am trying to say is that interesting stories tend to follow extraordinary characters, and since a lot of sci-fi is the exploration of the impact of various advancements on humanity, this will tend to have a bleed through affect to the entire species, in that somehow humans will be extraordinary just to get into the situations presented. Even if they are the underdogs or the bad guys, the humans will still somehow be different and those differences will tend to skew them towards the "better" end of things.

I agree that the endless human wanking of some stories is bad, but I was merely pointing out that the human thing is a bit stickier than you seemed to initially stated it.

[18-Till-I-Die]

One sci-fi brain bug that bothers me is the seeming fixation people have on adding inane jargon and slang to the story.

Take the RPG "Continuum" which has some of the most asinine slag ever. But Orion's Arm takes the cake for retarded slang, try reading the God damn site it seems like rambling nonsense.

They even created a new way to say "Him" or "Her", now it's "Ir".

What?

You know, i get it, in the future people talk funny. Ok. But the story is writen for people NOW not in some fucking fictional world 10,000,000 years from now where people DO talk like that. Write the story so it sounds like it makes sense NOW. How hard is that?

Thats what i like about Doc Smith's stories, is that basically it's just plain english.

[Zor]

What is so wrong with linguistic evolution? I doub't people in the year 4000 will be speaking English. Sure, you don't have to translate every word into the combination of Chinese, Russian, German and English that replaces said launguages by the 27th century, but what is so damn wrong with adding a bit to the vernacular.

Besides, in the French Revolution, you did not adress one as Madame or Monsieur, it you adressed them as citoyen. So gender neutral pronouns are not so odd.

Zor

[Zor]

Ghetto Edit-To go along with number one, humans are praticularly creative.

Zor

[CaptainChewbacca]

What always annoys the hell out of me is when an SF/Fantasy author creates a society that's obviously completely modelled on their own political views and then wanks to how much better they are than us. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy and the Probability Broach are two great examples that pop into my mind immediately.

I have a feeling you and I have agreed abuot the Neanderthal Parallax before. I want to write my own alt-hist where Neanderthals inhabit the new world, and Colombus and his pals encounter a near-rennaissance civilization full of people that can take a musket-shot to the chest and not die easily.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Edit: hit post too soon.

What I'd like to see is a scifi where humans have an actual ADVANTAGE. Like, we're stronger (earth has higher than average gravity) or we're more vicious (most worlds don't have such varied climates). Something that makes sense. I think that's why I like John Ringo's book. Humans are the terror of the galaxy.

[[R_H]]

There's limits to that too. It's fairly certain that they wouldn't be speaking English, but in the interests of readability they don't write the whole book in the setting's language. It would be like reading a WH40K about inquisitors (for example) written in High Gothic, instead of the "translation" that the English used by the author is. I communicated my point adequately, I have a feeling that the above wasn't all too coherent.

[18-Till-I-Die]

There's limits to that too. It's fairly certain that they wouldn't be speaking English, but in the interests of readability they don't write the whole book in the setting's language. It would be like reading a WH40K about inquisitors (for example) written in High Gothic, instead of the "translation" that the English used by the author is. I communicated my point adequately, I have a feeling that the above wasn't all too coherent.

Precisely.

Just because it's another language doesnt mean you cant "translate" it. In fact, one scifi novel actually mentions this, saying in effect "We're presuming you're speaking English so this has been re-writen in your native language".

I mean, they do that to books all the time. A book written in French is translated into English. Why not a book written in High Gothic.

And as for the gender neutral words, it is a bit jarring if you dont know what it means in the first place. At first i thought it was a typo, then i realized it was the actual word they use in "the future". That is my problem, to understand all this crap you practically need a seperate dictionary, and when your story actually needs a seperate dictionary just to be readable then you have a fucking problem.

[Rye]

Because Darth Wong's page on brainbugs doesn't begin to cover it all. Feel free to add your own. For mine...

1. "Humans are special!"

In B&B era Trek, why do the Borg want to assimilate Earth? Because humans have some unique "sense of individuality" or something. And this is in a universe full of intelligent humanoid aliens with human-like modes of thought. How screwy is that? It sounds almost like something straight out of Mein Kampf, just updated for nonhumans instead of non-Aryans.

That one can be justified if their evolutionary path to intelligence was different. If they're like us in other ways, yeah, fair point.

2. "Yes, we killed three billion people. But we only did what needed to be done."

At the heart of many a military SF story is a situation contrived beyond all reason to absolutely require a huge massacre. I should not need to tell anyone why this is execrably stupid.

If you must have a massacre, examine the consequences. Show what the soldiers who did it feel. Show how the families and friends of those killed are affected. Preaching is for idiots. Wanking is for sociopaths.

I don't know, people generally don't give that much of a shit in situations where the numbers are so unfeasibly beyond our sphere of acquaintances (going by human cranium size and the size of most communes throughout history, about 150), especially if they had some wider need to do it. Those kind of numbers are unlikely to be killed close enough to truly empathise with. You're not going to think of some kid grasping a teddy bear if you're launching torpedoes to level a Chaos-tainted continent.

4. Introducing new elements with amazing properties. In particular, metallic elements lighter and stronger than steel. For those who hadn't noticed, the periodic table is full all the way up to Meitnerium, which means no more fucking transition metals. Nothing like a trinium dart to kill suspension of disbelief...

New elements don't bother me so much, maybe they're the products of exotic particles rather than just the normal ones like protons, electrons and neutrons and thus behave differently for other relative properties like mass.

I also agree with the preaching thing.

Another thing that bugs me is one-note sapient alien societies, like how Predators were turned into Yautja whose only real culture is hunting other species.

[Coalition]

One sci-fi brain bug that bothers me is the seeming fixation people have on adding inane jargon and slang to the story.

You know, i get it, in the future people talk funny. Ok. But the story is writen for people NOW not in some fucking fictional world 10,000,000 years from now where people DO talk like that. Write the story so it sounds like it makes sense NOW. How hard is that?

I'd argue for the story being written in current modes of speech, but pieces designed for sociology would have some of the jargon present. It lets you understand the background, while the new words allow for interesting twists.

I.e. a porn plot: Superheroine is wanting Guy is translating Egyptian tablets, to defeat the new Bad Girl. The Bad Girl manages to capture heroine, and begins the ritual for the sacrifice. According to her knowledge, it is a virgin sacrifice (from the passage translated directly into English). She is looking around, trying to escape. Guy arrives, offers to take her place, so she can get help (police, other heroines, etc). He tells her to only return in 4 hours, due to some weakness in the ritual.

She returns at the right time, and he and the Bad Girl have obviously had fun. He explains that the virgin was actually a description of the sacrifice, and the virginity is what was to be sacrificed, not the person.


Or the French language "Je suis plein" translated directly means "I am full", but in French means "I am pregnant".

[Imperial Overlord]

Edit: hit post too soon.

What I'd like to see is a scifi where humans have an actual ADVANTAGE. Like, we're stronger (earth has higher than average gravity) or we're more vicious (most worlds don't have such varied climates). Something that makes sense. I think that's why I like John Ringo's book. Humans are the terror of the galaxy.

Alan Dean Fosterand Tanya Huff have done the "humans are stronger/faster (compared to some other species) and more vicious" without dragging along the rest of Ringo's garbage. Huff did it better by having a more likable character and humans not being the only species with those traits (we're one of three violent, backwards species recruited to help fight a war against really nasty enemies. Main character is a Marine Gunnery sergeant in a multispecies unit).

[Teleros]

Thats what i like about Doc Smith's stories, is that basically it's just plain english.

Well, except for the fact that one of his sentences has more adjectives than the pages on most books .

What I'd like to see is a scifi where humans have an actual ADVANTAGE. Like, we're stronger (earth has higher than average gravity) or we're more vicious (most worlds don't have such varied climates). Something that makes sense. I think that's why I like John Ringo's book. Humans are the terror of the galaxy.

Alan Dean Foster's "The Damned" trilogy does this, especially in the first book when aliens and humans first meet. Basically all the other known species have a natural tendency to get along better and use diplomacy rather than violence, to the point where most are poor fighters (compared to humans) even when they have to fight. The stupid bit is where the humans have an innate (and unexplained ) immunity to the bad guys' mind control, but I guess you can't have everything .

[Darth Ruinus]

The stupid bit is where the humans have an innate (and unexplained ) immunity to the bad guys' mind control, but I guess you can't have everything .

Since most of the other aliens are peaceful, they may be more open to those "suggestions the Amplitur give em, while humans, being more aggressive can resist those suggestions?

[Zixinus]

A super-important "don't": for the love of all that is holy, do not re-explain the origins of humanity.
Creationism brain-bug aside, it makes no point to begin with. Either you are breaking the first rule already mentioned, or its sheer pointless idiocy.

What else, what else... oh yes.

Unless the travel method makes it so, think in terms of solar systems and not planets as islands. Inhabited or terraformed planets aren't the only thing in the universe.

[Teleros]

Since most of the other aliens are peaceful, they may be more open to those "suggestions the Amplitur give em, while humans, being more aggressive can resist those suggestions?

No, it's not like that - it's a completely unconscious reaction.
There's a part of the human brain that, when telepathic contact is made, causes a sort of feedback effect. Think of all the basest parts of the human psyche - rage, anger, all that sort of thing, in an unconscious and overwhelming mental assault. The humans aren't even aware of this effect - it's all in the subconscious. No explanation as to why we developed this thing in our brains, although later in the series the Amplitur design a way around it, which then leads to telepathic humans...