What are you tired of in Science Fiction?

[Gramzamber]

I'm sick of sci-fi that idealises primitive life as somehow "better" or "purer" than our evil modern ways or the soulless future megalopolis and starship life.
It's always seemed a paradoxical element given the nature of sci-fi, but still prevalent in various books, Star Trek (Insurrection in particular) or the fucking ending to nBSG. In these situations modern technology is blamed as the root of all evil or in Insurrection's case actually looked down upon by the know-it-all space Amish.
I remember some story (I think it was an episode of The Outer Limits) justifying deliberate primitive life by saying "If you can make a car, what's to stop you from making a tank?" yeah well if you can make a horse-pulled cart what's to stop you making a crossbow and offing your neighbors, you dumbass.

[Oskuro]

Dehumanized futures. Sci-fi wirters try to be smart by playing the "bleak gray future" = "dehumanized technological world" card. What the fuck? Is the internet a gray wasteland with no trace of human creativity or charm? And you can't get more artificial than a purely virtual medium.

I think my aversion to that trope is one of the main factors of me liking The 5th Element so much. It had COLOR. It had LIFE. It had an annoying Chris Rock in an OUTRAGEOUS TOUPEE.
The bleakness was alright in Blade Runner, it really meshed with the movie's theme and message. But stop making all futuristic worlds grey sterile wastelands!

Well, you can't blame them. There are surprisingly few non-humans in the screen actors guild.

That depends on your definition of human. Or actor.

[Shroom Man 777]

Blade Runner wasn't bleak! It had bloody advertisements and bazaars full of saracens and Musslemen and sushi stands and noodle vendors and bigass billboards and futuristic petshops and advertisement zeppelins. It's about as soulless as any modern day metropolis, which isn't very, and is actually cooler.

[Oskuro]

Yeah, there was color, wich is why it was awesome, the bleakness came from the atmosphere of the film as a whole, not just from visual cues.

[Shroom Man 777]

It wasn't a grey and sterile wasteland. But yeah, it was bleak cause it was noir, man. Tech noir!

More movies should be like Blade Runner. Just steeped in atmosphere. Neon lights and so much 80s stuff. The closest thing recently was Watchmengs, but that movie was also kinda bleak and whacky.

[Gramzamber]

One thing I somewhat dislike from Blade Runner and it's ilk is the idea of the all-powerful corporation that runs everything and everyone.
It was alright in Blade Runner but since then it's become overused, especially in cases where the corporations are the government (why be the government when you can get away with shit from the sidelines?) and are eeeeeeevil ("ho ho ho we run a profitable colonial business, but let's get 300 people killed so we can collect giant space bugs!").

[Serafina]

There seem to be two takes on the future:
-it all gets better
-it all gets worse

Either it is a Star Trek-style near-utopia, or it is a cyberpunk-style gray&black morality thing.

Mix it. Technology is the main reason for our improvement. All the thinking of the greatest philosophers is useless, if it can not be applied to the people in general. I want realisitic people in an advanced society, with all that implies. Give me a setting that is as alien to our world than ours is to a medieval peasant.

That being said, i like good transhumanism, because it (at least parts of) this. And i despise that nearly all of main-stream sci-fi portrays transhumanistic elements as bad. AIs always go evil or are just better computers with a nice voice. Clones and genetic manipulated go evil. Cybernetic implants make you "less human". Space does not solve our current problems (overpopulation), but creates new ones. That list goes on and on and on.
I wish someone had the courage to do a mainstream project that portrais transhumanism as something positive.
Portray the conflict that it will benefit the richt first or similar things - but portray it as something worthwile.

[Bakustra]

Monoculture. This applies to aliens and humans alike, but having a single culture for an entire species, or in human cases an entire planet, is idiotic, overplayed, and at the point where the diversity of human cultures is a plot point. Take this out behind the chemical sheds and let it die. Human cultures also rarely diverge at all, leading to Scottish planets and Chinese planets and Shakespearean theater troupe planets. For that matter, the idea that colony planets would only be settled by one group is more than a bit implausible in my view, as well.

I have recently read a pile of E. E. Smith stories, and seriously I have no idea how he got his reputation. It's magic; it's Flash Gordon level pulp stuff. A smart guy and a chick with huge titties do totally impossible stuff to members of various racial stereotypes in a story with worse dialog than Lovecraft! Anyway, the 'magic' of science fiction is as old as the genre. Scifi and fantasy are essentially the same thing. The pretentious idea that science fiction is about 'describing future societies' or whatever was just invented by people in the chess club.

E. E. Smith got his reputation because, when he was writing, he was one of the better writers around. I've read Galactic Patrol, Skylark, and Skylark Duquesne and found each one of them hilarious in different ways, but Smith was actually one of the better writers in the days of the pulps. Part of his survival is that older people wax nostalgic and reminiscent about Lensman, and so younger readers pick it up when they're fourteen or so, and have very little taste, and so convince themselves that they like it, after which nostalgia kicks in.

As for magic in science fiction, well, in sci-fi they call it psychic powers, or "Clarketech" for the pretentious. Of course, you can write perfectly respectable fantasy without magic, though no-one's ever tried, save for perhaps the best of alternate history (hah).

[aieeegrunt]

I am tired of retarded aliens, like the ones that go SQUAWK, and really, retarded aliens. From Klingoffs to Covenant Gremlins to whatever, you hardly see sci-fi alien races that are wholly sensible and not fuck off retarded. If they aren't, then they're obscenely powerful (AND still retarded). This goes hand in hand with those aforementioned one-note aliens.

The Covenant at least have the excuse of being stupid for game balance reasons. The grunts are by far the most entertaining part of that whole franchise, which just became suck when it started taking itself too seriously.

[Lord of the Abyss]

For that matter, the idea that colony planets would only be settled by one group is more than a bit implausible in my view, as well.

Actually I find that quite plausible, judging from history. Culture/religion/whatever X wants to get away from their neighbors/rulers, so they head off for an unsettled far off territory; or in the case of sci-fi a far off unsettled planet. It's going too far when it's assumed that will always be the way it works, but its quite believable that various groups would head off for some planet to call their own.

Of course, you can write perfectly respectable fantasy without magic, though no-one's ever tried, save for perhaps the best of alternate history (hah).

Oh, it's been done. C.J. Cherryh's Paladin, for example; no magic anywhere.

[Bakustra]

For that matter, the idea that colony planets would only be settled by one group is more than a bit implausible in my view, as well.

Actually I find that quite plausible, judging from history. Culture/religion/whatever X wants to get away from their neighbors/rulers, so they head off for an unsettled far off territory; or in the case of sci-fi a far off unsettled planet. It's going too far when it's assumed that will always be the way it works, but its quite believable that various groups would head off for some planet to call their own.

Yet consider that such groups were quickly joined by others. Though, for example, the Pilgrims settled Plymouth, other parts of New England were settled by different groups, the Dutch settled New York, and so on. The idea that one group would settle a single planet and then nobody else would live there, save for some token minority groups to be oppressed by a villainous colonial government.

Of course, you can write perfectly respectable fantasy without magic, though no-one's ever tried, save for perhaps the best of alternate history (hah).

Oh, it's been done. C.J. Cherryh's Paladin, for example; no magic anywhere.

I might have to look that up, then.

[Ghost Rider]

It wasn't a grey and sterile wasteland. But yeah, it was bleak cause it was noir, man. Tech noir!

More movies should be like Blade Runner. Just steeped in atmosphere. Neon lights and so much 80s stuff. The closest thing recently was Watchmengs, but that movie was also kinda bleak and whacky.

What's funny is that Fifth Element had bright sunny days constantly. Even in the cityscape. Blade Runner was always raining.

It's why people associate Blade Runner from the onset as depressing and Fifth Element as not.

As for me? It'd be the less beings that want to be human. I know Lord mentioned above about androids wanting said ascension as they look at it, but I just hate is as much when an alien wants it as well.

[RedImperator]

I'm extremely bored with characters who are the best at whatever they do. Best soldier, best pilot, best scientist, blah. I'd like to see more characters who are struggling along half a step above their level of competence, desperately trying not to fuck everything up...you know, like how most people live their lives if they're not mired in some path-of-least-resistance dead-end job.

[Shroom Man 777]

John McClane should star in more science fiction movies.

Re: Wanting to Become Human, do we have any works where someone wants to be More Than Human? Like, where some person becomes greater than a mere fleshling by replacing his constituent parts with machinery or something and becomes greater (i.e. NOT insane or villainous) and we see this journey of greatness and stuff?

The closest we got to some great journey would be Gattaca, but that really doesn't depict any form of transhumanism whatsoever. What else is out there in popular sci-fi? Robocop?

[Zixinus]

Luddism. I shit on it.
I admit that modern technology is not an universal blessing and there are some elements missing in a modern person's lives that are more aboundant and clear in some primitive person's life.

But for fuck's sake, this is Western Civilization: we prospered by crushing all the other competiting civilizations under our heels and live really fucking rich lives, occasionally downright fucking decedant. A good deal of western population is struggling with trying to preventing obesity. We have that much food. A good deal of that is thanks to Western civilization.
Luddism was pretty stupid way back in the 19th century, it is no less stupid now.

We have more to learn and more to adapt, but anyone who honestly thinks that a hunter-gatherers that knew almost shit about modern medicine, long life expentancy, stalbe food supply, is living

Another thing: stop pretending that science fiction is not fantasy. It's not and unless you're an aeronatics engineer who features nothing in his story that he has not extensively designed (apply the same princible to whatever technology you wish), you will be using fantastic elements. The best you can do is not make grevious mistakes and make stories that are in-line with scientific ideas and conceptions.
We can set us really hard limits and reference tons of work, we can go even as far as making blueprints. Making your story according to the science and technology is OK. Just don't pretend that you are giving some prophetic vision of the future.
You are writing fiction. In a sense, all fiction is born of the imagination. If not, then we would be reading an autobiography.

Aliens that are human beings with forehead disease.

Real aliens are far more likely to resemble a cross between a tarantula and a jellyfish than resembling us. Or resembling a biped in general.

If we are talking about TV shows, you have th problem that the creators have to stay in the special effects budget. Even then, you need to create aliens with sufficiently human expression. Learning new expressions, while something to toy around with, is not something you can reasonably expect from a passive audience.
The same limit can be applied to movies too, although in less limited form. I mean, they are going to design an alien costume,

That said, there is no excuse of this for comics (is it that much harder to draw an alien?) or novels (I am sure this problem is far less prevalent when you don't have to design them to that specific level).

Like I said in another thread, human-with-fancy-forehead is less of a problem, the more of a problem is that they act the very fucking same as we do. Then its the case of the author not giving a fuck.

[Oskuro]

Re: Wanting to Become Human, do we have any works where someone wants to be More Than Human? Like, where some person becomes greater than a mere fleshling by replacing his constituent parts with machinery or something and becomes greater (i.e. NOT insane or villainous) and we see this journey of greatness and stuff?

Unfortunately, whenever there's transhumanism involved, it is depicted as evil, or at least as morally neutral (like the ascended in SG). Them dirty cyborgs can't beat a good old human, and all that.

But, in all fairness, I guess that's mostly to appease the audience. I have a lot of trouble discussing transhumanism with people, their knee-jerk reaction is to say it means to stop being human and that it is a horrible thing to do. They don't stop to consider the flaws inherent to the pile of flesh they are currently riding.

[Lord of the Abyss]

The closest we got to some great journey would be Gattaca, but that really doesn't depict any form of transhumanism whatsoever. What else is out there in popular sci-fi? Robocop?

The Heechee Saga? The Assassins, who are hostile to fleshy life are convinced to stop killing it using the argument that eventually, organic life will inevitably upload itself "because Storage is simply better." And the uploaded people seem perfectly happy being uploaded. I also don't recall the Ghost in the Shell universe as being anti-transhumanism; hardly a paradise, but it never came across as enhancement-is-bad to me. I'm not sure if either of those counts as "popular sci fi" though.

Robocop is if anything against it; but to be fair the technology was really clunky and the people subjected to it not at all volunteers.

[Zixinus]

But, in all fairness, I guess that's mostly to appease the audience. I have a lot of trouble discussing transhumanism with people, their knee-jerk reaction is to say it means to stop being human and that it is a horrible thing to do. They don't stop to consider the flaws inherent to the pile of flesh they are currently riding.

I think that is because of religion (god made us in our own image) but also because the thought is alien in people, as well as a bit frightening. People don't want to hear that they are weak and stupid, because that's one of the implications of transhumanism. They also have difficulty relating to anything more intelligent than them and more alien: as a transhuman would be.
But really, it could be a species thing to begin with: fear the competition. Fear of a form of existence beyond their own. People have a problem trying to think in a non-human way, because humans are optimized to think like humans.

Of course, transhumanism isn't bad when its done within religious or even pseudo-religious grounds. No, transcending reality is viewed as a nice thing when its done trough sheer effort of will, because then it would be looked upon as an achievement. The idea that you would have to join a new "tribe" and adopt to new "rules" is also frightening.

Because that's partly what transhumanism is: a new society with new rules that you have to adopt to. You no longer have the excuse of genes, because they can be changed, assuming you don't go the cyborg route. Your identity is reformed, expectations of you are also reformed.
The idea that you are no longer bound by human limitations, that you can live in a society more free and more comfortable than ever before doesn't quite catch people. People that are smarter and more rich than we can be are evil. Or at least, looked at with some nose-twiching dislike, murmuring under our breath about how they are missing something that you have. Or something. It's another human reaction.

But I am sure everyone has their own musings at why people are afraid of change or whatever.

[Gramzamber]

I recall that in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, transhumanism is generally regarded as A Good Thing. Given that technology aided ascension to the level of the planetary mind is the ultimate victory goal of the game. It tended to depict the intermediary steps, humans using gene therapy and implants to extend their lives and downloading themselves into digital avatars in a positive light too.

[Stark]

I'm more interested in drama than demanding scifi conform to my idea of 'true futurism' or whatever. I don't give a shit how backwards or stupid the future is so long as interesting things happen to meaningful people. Scifi writing about grandstanding one's hobby-horse is generally terrible.

[Shroom Man 777]

Oh, you mean something interesting and entertaining happening in a story rather than soapboxing or infodumping xyz-issue/technology/point/whatever?

[Stark]

Well, didn't Red say something hurtful about the kind of writing that boils down to 'I read a lot about tribophysical macrokinetic extrapolators and now I'm going to tell you all about it to show how HARD SCIFI I am'? I think it's worse when it's 'I personally think mankind is inevitably going to become ghosts/robots/memes and anyone who says otherwise will be pilloried in my story as obviously retarded or evil'. I don't want to read about an author telling me his personal nonsense; I want drama.

DRAMA!

[Zixinus]

Stark highlights a point that I already mentioned and I want to repeat (I apologize if I do it needlessly, but I think it bears some clarification): no matter how realistically one tries to implement the details of the technology, almost all science fiction will be fantasy. We shouldn't pretend otherwise.

It is a subset of fantasy and will always remain so. Oh, sure, you can make a story that is both entertaining and even technically feasible, but is that the point? You write fiction. You tell a story. A human Mars-landing will be fantasy, even if the technology is feasible. Even if you carefully craft your story to fit the science, and even if you make a better story as a result, you won't be writing "true" science-fiction: only a subgenre of it, called "hard", which again is only made to fit arbitrary definitions you may or may not fall into.
Like art in general, things get muddled and there are no hard lines, and perhaps there should not be.

I think that some people are confusing science-fiction tradition and actual definition. It is tradition to define science-fiction by using scientific issues, methodologies and knowledge as a point of inspiration. What it defines itself varies from author to author.
So are we demanding the continuation of a tradition?

In the end, we want a story.

With drama!

[Bakustra]

Well, didn't Red say something hurtful about the kind of writing that boils down to 'I read a lot about tribophysical macrokinetic extrapolators and now I'm going to tell you all about it to show how HARD SCIFI I am'? I think it's worse when it's 'I personally think mankind is inevitably going to become ghosts/robots/memes and anyone who says otherwise will be pilloried in my story as obviously retarded or evil'. I don't want to read about an author telling me his personal nonsense; I want drama.

DRAMA!

I think that whenever the author intrudes into the story, the story inevitably suffers for it. Didactic garbage about transhumanism and Luddism and pacifism and militarism and the love of ice-cream is only one of the purer examples. Any hobbyhorse weakens fiction for someone who doesn't share it. I must disagree with you, though. I'd settle for comedy in addition to drama. With that in mind, I really detest the presence of author's darlings. These individuals can do no wrong, or at least no wrong that prevents the author from living vicariously through them. They are always hypercompetent. They stop just short of full Mary Sue-dom, but push perilously close to the line. Like Red, I'd prefer reading about mere mortals rather than the demigods that inhabit much of fantasy/sci-fi. Of course, most authors who write said characters would insist that Dr. Kimball Seaton, who can develop a insta-pressor fifth-order doom ray-axe for destroying enemy warships on Monday and have it mass-produced by Thursday, to paraphrase Atomic Rockets, is a perfectly reasonable and ordinarily competent character.

Most literary genres are filled with toxic amounts of pretentiousness, to the point where it becomes a virtue in the warped minds of some people. It's more annoying in the fantastic genres mainly because I read them to get away from the conventions of mainstream works, but even there we find the poisonous presence of pretension, the worst of all transgressions the author can commit against the reader, namely because it can become infectious. Sci-fi looks down on fantasy, mainly because they've become infected with what I feel is the common delusion of fiction writers in general that fiction is of paramount importance to human society, shaping attitudes far more than anything else. As a result, they feel that sci-fi is more relevant than fantasy and more important, because they believe it to bear a closer resemblance to reality. Literature in general needs a Tom Lehrer, not that he destroyed the credibility of folk songs, but because he attacked them while being highly entertaining, and that's the best we're likely to get, as readers.

Of course, the other problems with sci-fi and fantasy in general are too many to be listed here. If I may, though, I detest the overabundance of authoritative futurism and the tendency to declare that if you do a 180 from something overused and potentially cliched, then it becomes automatically more valuable. See, for instance, the repeated insistence that aliens would be totally unlike humans. This relies, on the surface, on the assumption that the factors that drive intelligence and civilization are far more common than we can guess from our limited experience, and on the same factors that lead morons to declare that a water-breathing species could develop metal tools, but ultimately on the fact that aliens that are guys in a funny hat/latex forehead/makeup/lobster suit are far too overplayed, cliched, and only acceptable in TV and film, and so declaring that aliens would be magically unknowable and far closer to Cthulhu and his star-spawn (only more extreme) than, say, Chewbacca in motivations and thought processes.

[adam_grif]

For some people, the technobabbble is one of the draws. I don't really think it's fair to say that any intrusion on the story with it is necessarily bad - sometimes things happen in your story that will need some kind of explaining other than "The X Machine did it". Since we aren't familiar with the tech base of this far future society, if you just pull something out of your ass and treat the audience as you would a functioning member of that society with a working understanding of everything, then everything is going to seem like a Deux Ex Machina. You can only build tension if you know the possibilities involved, and you can't know the possibilities without some kind of explanation if we're setting it in a high tech society.

The trick is avoiding As You Know Bob exposition, but sometimes having a character briefly reflect on some technological aspect is not only not a bad thing, but completely necessary to avoid everything seeming like an asinine ass pull.