What are you tired of in Science Fiction?

[Gramzamber]

So then what's the judgment on Babylon 5's technomages? Allegedly they rely on technology to fuel their powers, yet what they do is indistinguishable from magic even to other people in the same universe.

I don't see how Technomages are much different to advanced versions of modern day magicians. They purposefully shroud their knowledge under a veil of mysticism and fanfare that it becomes like magic.
While advanced races may know that technology fuels it, if the Technomages can keep a lid on just exactly how they do it, it is in a sense "magic".

[Junghalli]

As an aside, a brief discussion on Clarke's law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I see people mostly translating this to mean:

Anything magical can be done with sufficiently advanced technology.

When they should be getting the following out of it:

Any technology seems magical to a sufficiently primitive culture.

Although sometimes it is amusing to look at fantasy magic and try to see how much of it could be replicated with tech in a hard SF universe, or to look at soft SF tech and see if we could figure out hard SF devices that could perform the same basic function. You'd be surprised at what can be done without breaking physics as we know it if you put your mind to it.

When I talk about believability in the context of fiction I mean "I can actually see this happening to someone somewhere in the real world." Unfortunately, whenever (hard) sci-fi tech or magic is involved I cannot realistically make that claim so I have to default to skepticism until real world evidence comes along that says otherwise. So any speculative fiction story regardless of which side of the "science/magic" divide it rests is automatically unbelievable in this context. Luckily its perfectly acceptable to ignore breaks from reality for the sake of whatever is realistic about the story (like the characterization of the characters).

"I can actually see this happening to someone somewhere in the real world" is pretty much my first immediate definition of believability too, the difference is I don't recognize all "unbelievable" things as equally unbelievable. If I read a story with an AI in it I can say "yeah, I can pretty easily believe this could happen in the real world in the future" because in the real world the most plausible reason we don't have AI is simply that we're ignorant of how too create it. I don't even really have to "suspend disbelief" for it, because I'd be much more surprised if AI turned out the be impossible than if it turned out to be possible. On the other hand if I read a story with guys lifting fire trucks with their minds it scores much lower on the "I can actually see this happening in the real world" index because in the real world those kinds of powers are very implausible. It isn't simply that we're ignorant of the exact ways of going about such a thing like with AI, it's that the limits of the universe as we understand them do not permit it, hence it is much less believable to me. I can suspend disbelief about it on the assumption that I'm looking at an alternate universe where this kind of thing is actually possible, but it's an extra step beyond what I have to take for things that are actually plausible in the real world.

Now we're getting into extremely subjective territory though, so I really can't argue with your personal decision to hold everything that can't be done right now as de facto impossible. I can argue with the claim that there's essentially no difference between hard SF and soft SF and fantasy except presentation though.

Actually, a fantasy author does NOT have the option of playing all by his own rules. There are still certain rules that they cannot break if they do not want to lose their audience, such as the characterization of the people in the story, or the way human societies work, and so on.

Assuming they have human characters, of course.

The game is exactly the same in both genres: making the setting and plot flow logically from the theme and premises of the story. Your premises in "hard" sci-fi simply include "this is assumed to be earth and must conform to the rules the scientists tell me I must use."

That changes worldbuilding (and hence the setting) considerably though. With soft SF and fantasy you have much more freedom to design the rules around the kind of universe you want. With hard SF you have a set of rules given to you and you have to design your universe around them (or break with hardness and introduce soft elements).

For instance, say you wanted to have a setting that was like the Roman Empire, but IN SPACE. If you were writing soft SF the trick would be to set up your technology in such a way that something like that was actually plausible, and do it in such a way as to make it look like a natural universe and not blatantly contrived to achieve a desired end result. If you were writing hard SF you'd quickly run into the problem that many of the structures of the Roman Empire make zero sense for a hard SF space polity, and you'd have to start changing them so they make sense in a realistic universe. They're different challenges.

Of course, then there is fantasy and soft SF where you start out with a particular unrealistic rule-set that you think would be interesting and derive the rest of the universe from that. That is much closer to hard SF in terms of what it's like to write.

[Formless]

This is probably all just personal taste on my part, now that I think about it.

If you are willing to concede this, I think you understand where I'm coming from. Although I understand what you mean when you say that stories tend to gravitate to the powerful people who have access to the "magic": that's a lack of imagination on the part of the people who write sci-fi, rather than a problem with the idea of science fantasy. Fiction on a whole tends to gravitate towards the hero's journey, and a hero generally needs to be better than other people in some way. Unfortunately, a lot of writers decide on the most inane and literal interpretation of this imperative and just make the hero badass action hero #9580 who can kill hundreds of men with his bare hands. Magic is just one shortcut to doing this, and has been for a long time.

[Formless]

As an aside, a brief discussion on Clarke's law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I see people mostly translating this to mean:

Anything magical can be done with sufficiently advanced technology.

When they should be getting the following out of it:

Any technology seems magical to a sufficiently primitive culture.

Although sometimes it is amusing to look at fantasy magic and try to see how much of it could be replicated with tech in a hard SF universe, or to look at soft SF tech and see if we could figure out hard SF devices that could perform the same basic function. You'd be surprised at what can be done without breaking physics as we know it if you put your mind to it.

Why go to all the effort? Its still BS either way, why fight it?

When I talk about believability in the context of fiction I mean "I can actually see this happening to someone somewhere in the real world." Unfortunately, whenever (hard) sci-fi tech or magic is involved I cannot realistically make that claim so I have to default to skepticism until real world evidence comes along that says otherwise. So any speculative fiction story regardless of which side of the "science/magic" divide it rests is automatically unbelievable in this context. Luckily its perfectly acceptable to ignore breaks from reality for the sake of whatever is realistic about the story (like the characterization of the characters).

"I can actually see this happening to someone somewhere in the real world" is pretty much my first immediate definition of believability too, the difference is I don't recognize all "unbelievable" things as equally unbelievable. If I read a story with an AI in it I can say "yeah, I can pretty easily believe this could happen in the real world in the future" because in the real world the most plausible reason we don't have AI is simply that we're ignorant of how too create it. I don't even really have to "suspend disbelief" for it, because I'd be much more surprised if AI turned out the be impossible than if it turned out to be possible.

You still don't get it. Its not a matter of whether or not it is possible, its a problem with the way it is presented. In fiction, the mechanism given is inherently bullshit, because there is no example in real life that the writer can draw upon. How does the writer know that his people are interacting with the AI in a realistic manner? He doesn't, you can only assume for the sake of the story. How does the writer know what a society will look like when its reaching for the stars? He can't, he can only assume because the future is impossible to predict. That's what I mean, Jung. In that way, it doesn't matter whether or not one fantasy is more feasible than another, its still a fucking fantasy!

On the other hand if I read a story with guys lifting fire trucks with their minds it scores much lower on the "I can actually see this happening in the real world" index because in the real world those kinds of powers are very implausible. It isn't simply that we're ignorant of the exact ways of going about such a thing like with AI, it's that the limits of the universe as we understand them do not permit it, hence it is much less believable to me. I can suspend disbelief about it on the assumption that I'm looking at an alternate universe where this kind of thing is actually possible, but it's an extra step beyond what I have to take for things that are actually plausible in the real world.

But my problem is that that is entirely subjective. Again, you can only say that one fantasy is more plausible in relation to another, and I simply don't care because they are BOTH unrealistic and I can believe BOTH of them equally.They are fundamentally similar in their effect on the audience, and to a writer that is all that matters.

If anything, the one that is more honest about being a fantasy is more fun to read because the effort the hard science fiction goes into making a smokescreen to obscure its implausibility just feels pretentious, like the writer is just showing off what they can do and/or hobbyhorseing around. When its done right it can be thought provoking. When its not, and the story does not benefit from all that window dressing, it feels insulting.

Now we're getting into extremely subjective territory though, so I really can't argue with your personal decision to hold everything that can't be done right now as de facto impossible. I can argue with the claim that there's essentially no difference between hard SF and soft SF and fantasy except presentation though.

When you are not expecting anything more than a fantasy, it makes it easier to accept that the setting is baloney that will probably never happen. Fiction is like lying, its only different in that the audience knows its untrue and doesn't care because everyone wants to have a good time. You know someone is lying (or at least bullshitting) when their story revolves around something that you know does not, cannot, or will never exist like a ghost, a body double, a vast conspiracy, and so forth. You have to take things on their own merits; if a liar changed his story so that instead of a person being possesed by demons it was an AI that attempted a botched mind upload that drove a person insane, you still wouldn't believe him. Its no different in fiction, except that you don't care and aren't looking for these things anyway.

Actually, a fantasy author does NOT have the option of playing all by his own rules. There are still certain rules that they cannot break if they do not want to lose their audience, such as the characterization of the people in the story, or the way human societies work, and so on.

Assuming they have human characters, of course.

Name one that doesn't. Note: elves are about as "rubber forehead alien" as it gets, so they don't count. They still generally follow human psychology to a T.

The game is exactly the same in both genres: making the setting and plot flow logically from the theme and premises of the story. Your premises in "hard" sci-fi simply include "this is assumed to be earth and must conform to the rules the scientists tell me I must use."

That changes worldbuilding (and hence the setting) considerably though. With soft SF and fantasy you have much more freedom to design the rules around the kind of universe you want. With hard SF you have a set of rules given to you and you have to design your universe around them (or break with hardness and introduce soft elements).

For instance, say you wanted to have a setting that was like the Roman Empire, but IN SPACE. If you were writing soft SF the trick would be to set up your technology in such a way that something like that was actually plausible, and do it in such a way as to make it look like a natural universe and not blatantly contrived to achieve a desired end result. If you were writing hard SF you'd quickly run into the problem that many of the structures of the Roman Empire make zero sense for a hard SF space polity, and you'd have to start changing them so they make sense in a realistic universe. They're different challenges.

Of course, then there is fantasy and soft SF where you start out with a particular unrealistic rule-set that you think would be interesting and derive the rest of the universe from that. That is much closer to hard SF in terms of what it's like to write.

But the sci-fi writer chose that ruleset. He made a choice when he chose the genre. The basic idea is still the same: choose a ruleset, decide upon a desirable end result, and then see what you can do to tailor make the setting to achieve that result within those rules. Everything else is just nitpicking the details.

[Coyote]

Well, I knew this was my own opinion all along, and mentioned that, so I pretty much conceded that point out the gate. I don't know why, but I generally prefer science fiction to fantasy (I like fantasy, but SF is usually preferable, although there are always caveats for quality). For some reason it is easir for me to swallow the notion that someday, after years and years of research by hundreds of thousand sof people, an FTL drive ("flying carpet") might be made-- more so than right now, some guy will be born with a "mystical heritage" and he can wave his hand and levitate things, etc. Call me crazy.

I actually started this thread to ask what people were tired of in sci-fi, in particular, wondering if other people felt the same way I did about "the one special messiah hero" that everything hinges on, and other tropes. Not so much as a launchpad for griping about the differences between hard SF, space opera and science fantasy.

I suppose what was said about having the "hero" be "special" by some bizarre fiat advantage is writing laziness, which is what gets me, hence the "magic hero" thing just seems like a two-dimensional way out.

[Formless]

I actually started this thread to ask what people were tired of in sci-fi, in particular, wondering if other people felt the same way I did about "the one special messiah hero" that everything hinges on, and other tropes.

Hmmm... If it were me, I would think this would have played out better and more to the original intent if you had posted it in Fantasy, because the sci-fi board gets threads like "what are you tired of in sci-fi" (or alternatively "are you as tired of x as I am") threads all the time, and it always gets the same set of consistent gripes which you see here (like "get rid of the fucking forehead aliens!"). In Fantasy on the other hand, people are more... literary... minded than technically minded and would have been more inclined to talk about the subject from the perspective of what makes for better fiction. It would have made for a better, less redundant discussion, IMO.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

For everything having to do with fantasy laziness.

And really, who cares if the story features someone who can blow up planets with their mind, fly, or has a magic sword which makes lasers bounce off of it. The important thing is that 1: such objects and abilities do not become stand-ins for actual character development, and 2: even if the rules they operate under are utterly fantastic and incompatible with our universe, at the very least present them in their own universe in a consistent manner.

That aside, I don't really have any criticisms of sci-fi that couldn't be applied to fiction as a whole. Maybe a little more inhuman aliens.

[Junghalli]

Why go to all the effort? Its still BS either way, why fight it?

Because it's fun. I personally find trying to extrapolate how things might work from real physics more interesting than just handwaving stuff into existence.

I don't think we're going to get anywhere the fantasy plausibility debate, because at it's gotten down to subjective things. No particular setting is likely to look like the real future (let's ignore many worlds theory and assume there is one real future instead of gazillions ), but some are likely to look more like it than others, and I attach a certain believability bonus to the ones that are probably closer to it. You don't. It's a matter of personal taste.

Name one that doesn't. Note: elves are about as "rubber forehead alien" as it gets, so they don't count. They still generally follow human psychology to a T.

I can't think of any offhand (although I can remember a SF book I skimmed a page or two of that took place on a different world with no humans) but it's an option.

But the sci-fi writer chose that ruleset. He made a choice when he chose the genre. The basic idea is still the same: choose a ruleset, decide upon a desirable end result, and then see what you can do to tailor make the setting to achieve that result within those rules. Everything else is just nitpicking the details.

Not exactly. Like I said, with soft SF and fantasy you have much more freedom to tailor the rule-set to match the result you want. I think this is a meaningful difference; it changes the nature of the challenge you face as a writer (assuming you aren't picking an arbitrary rule-set before you design the setting and strictly "working forward" from that).

Of course, there are enormous grey areas. Most hard SF still has exceptions from maximal realism, and the amount of working forwards (rules first, then setting) vs working backwards (rules tailored to create setting you want) that goes on in both genres is hugely variable.

[Formless]

Not exactly. Like I said, with soft SF and fantasy you have much more freedom to tailor the rule-set to match the result you want. I think this is a meaningful difference; it changes the nature of the challenge you face as a writer (assuming you aren't picking an arbitrary rule-set before you design the setting and strictly "working forward" from that).

Its a trade off, but you only have as much flexibility as your audience will allow you. You always have the option of simply tailoring the rules to what you want, and that is how you end up getting the genre you want. Its only after the story has been published that it gets categorized into genre, but until that point its all up to the author. Its still all Speculative Fiction, and the game is still played the same way.

==============================

This is why I hate discussions about genre. If you go into the story thinking "I'm going to follow these conventions at all costs," you are doing it wrong, and your fiction is going to suck.

[Junghalli]

You always have the option of simply tailoring the rules to what you want, and that is how you end up getting the genre you want. Its only after the story has been published that it gets categorized into genre, but until that point its all up to the author.

Yes, you always have the option of mixing approaches and most authors do that, but that doesn't mean hard SF and fantasy aren't different approaches.

This is why I hate discussions about genre. If you go into the story thinking "I'm going to follow these conventions at all costs," you are doing it wrong, and your fiction is going to suck.

Definitely sticking to any particular approach with complete consistency is hard, but I'm not sure it's necessarily a recipe for suck. Real life manages to have stories that don't suck despite being 100% diamond hard, so I'm sure a good author could manage to produce a good story that's, say, 100% hard SF and is still good if he really tried. Some of Peter Watts's short stories like Bulk Food are good examples (of course, there we get into subjectivity again).

[Sarevok]

I am tired of one dimensional honor bound advanced alien races and the love they get from audience spreading the brain bug. Recently I came across a post in a Halo forum where the question was "should Elites get to use human weapons in situations where it is advantageous like shotguns against the flood ?". The universal consensus was Elites were too honor bound to do that. They would rather die than touch a human gun. Also the Covenant is so backward they can't fix their own ships. They solely exist to provide a shooting target to Spartans. They have no functioning economy,industry, scientific bases. Just like the Predators who solely exist to kill xenomorphs and humans. The Predators ships and gear appear out of dimension x instead of purchased by sport hunters who spend weekends hunting primitives after hard days work at hyperdrive manufacturing plant.

[Black Admiral]

Um, yeah, Elites are religious fanatics that, as a general rule (they've been observed sometimes, notably in the execrable The Flood, to use human weapons) don't use weapons that they've been told by their equivalent of the Pope are the works of blasphemers, and as such tainted to the touch. Would you expect a devout Muslim to be swigging beer constantly?

And the Covenant most certainly can repair their own ships; I don't know where you got the impression they can't.

[Junghalli]

Just like the Predators who solely exist to kill xenomorphs and humans. The Predators ships and gear appear out of dimension x instead of purchased by sport hunters who spend weekends hunting primitives after hard days work at hyperdrive manufacturing plant.

They could be an effective postscarcity society with AI doing all the real work. Predators as Honorable Warrior Race still drives me up the wall though. It's just the usual hack writer thinking taking a look at the tiny amount we know about them from the movies and with a spectacular lack of imagination going ZOMG THEIR ENTIRE CULTURE MUST BE DOMINATED BY THE STUFF WE SAW THEM DOING IN THE MOVIES! It's stupid and unimaginative. It would be so much more awesome if the Preds in the movies were just the equivalent of tourists going to Africa to shoot some big animal. Heck, we can even square this with the personal self-destruct and how they were willing to let the Pred get killed by that cop in the second movie; the Preds have mind uploading so if they get killed they just wait a little bit for their ship's AI to clone them a new body. Or for all we know they're really transhumans (err, transaliens) living in computers and their bodies are really nothing but remote-controlled avatars. Damn, that would have been so much cooler than making them Klingon rip-offs.

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.

You know, I'd actually like to see a villain like this. The Hannibal Lecter figure who's always holding the advantage until the very end and gets to toy with and act/feel superior to the good guys until he finally gets his comeuppance is probably even more over-used. It's easy to understand why writers do it (it rachets up tension if your villain is as big a threat as you can make him, and our culture encourages us to root for the underdog), but I think it'd be a nice change to see a villain who isn't a cool cucumber confident of victory but rather is worried he's in a little over his head going up against the good guys and is desperately trying not to screw up. The tricky part would be doing it in such a way that it doesn't make the villain seem non-threatening. In some ways you might actually be able to milk it to make the villain scarier: somebody who's worried he's in over his head is going to be scared and scared people do stupid things like blow up that bomb he planted in that building when a person who was thinking more clearly probably wouldn't do it.

[Sarevok]

Um, yeah, Elites are religious fanatics that, as a general rule (they've been observed sometimes, notably in the execrable The Flood, to use human weapons) don't use weapons that they've been told by their equivalent of the Pope are the works of blasphemers, and as such tainted to the touch. Would you expect a devout Muslim to be swigging beer constantly?

And the Covenant most certainly can repair their own ships; I don't know where you got the impression they can't.

The Covenant rely on a dedicated engineer species with genetic memory to perform maintainence work. The rest of the Covenant have no clue about how anything works. If they are such ignorant, medieval mentality fanatics they should not be able to run a starfleet of any kind.

[Gramzamber]

At least the Covenant have some excuse for maintaining their ships and tech. A very bad excuse but an excuse nontheless, unlike, say, Klingons who as portrayed in TNG/DS9 should still be clubbing each other with wooden sticks on their homeworld.

[adam_grif]

Y'all crazy. Predators are awesome.

... In the movie predator.

Every other depiction since then has been increasingly ridiculous. It's depressing when the best depictions outside the original movie comes from a Versus videogame. The AvP movies were shockingly bad. Working in the whole Predator uplift scenario was too much.

[aieeegrunt]

Um, yeah, Elites are religious fanatics that, as a general rule (they've been observed sometimes, notably in the execrable The Flood, to use human weapons) don't use weapons that they've been told by their equivalent of the Pope are the works of blasphemers, and as such tainted to the touch. Would you expect a devout Muslim to be swigging beer constantly?

And the Covenant most certainly can repair their own ships; I don't know where you got the impression they can't.

The rational behind introducing the carbine in Halo 2 was that the Elites observed how effective projectile weapons were, especially against the flood and jurry rigged their own. I'll bet they were sick and tired of being headshotted by pistols and sniper rifles well beyond their ability to respond

[Shroom Man 777]

Y'all crazy. Predators are awesome.

... In the movie predator.

Every other depiction since then has been increasingly ridiculous. It's depressing when the best depictions outside the original movie comes from a Versus videogame. The AvP movies were shockingly bad. Working in the whole Predator uplift scenario was too much.

Fuck yeah, it turned the Predators into a bunch of fucking Yatuja or whatever, basically pussy-faced SQUAWKs!

I think it would've been more awesome if the Predators were depicted as actually having a functional society that's normal, with pussy-faced bankers and factory workers and bakers and businessmen, with a bunch of yuppies going out into undeveloped planets and taking hunting gear with them and going around killing Green Berets and xenomorphs and coming back with skulls and talking trash with their co-workers and buddies over some Space Beer.

[The Grim Squeaker]

You know, I'd actually like to see a villain like this. The Hannibal Lecter figure who's always holding the advantage until the very end and gets to toy with and act/feel superior to the good guys until he finally gets his comeuppance is probably even more over-used. It's easy to understand why writers do it (it rachets up tension if your villain is as big a threat as you can make him, and our culture encourages us to root for the underdog), but I think it'd be a nice change to see a villain who isn't a cool cucumber confident of victory but rather is worried he's in a little over his head going up against the good guys and is desperately trying not to screw up. The tricky part would be doing it in such a way that it doesn't make the villain seem non-threatening. In some ways you might actually be able to milk it to make the villain scarier: somebody who's worried he's in over his head is going to be scared and scared people do stupid things like blow up that bomb he planted in that building when a person who was thinking more clearly probably wouldn't do it.

The book "Soon I will be Invincible" does this rather well with Dr Impossible.
He's a bit too arrogant/megalomaniacal to be actually scared, but he is aware of losing and that the people he's fighting have the government, public opinion and various herioc demigods behind them, and that most (including his archrival) can ignore any weapons he might build as well as being able to crack mountains. Spoiler

And he still kicks their ass ,

As for me? The list is long, but my pet peeve is writers going the way of regular fiction and focusing on the characters too much. Give me Asimov! Give me the shorts of Arthur C Clarke! (And give me more thinly veiled logic puzzles D:)

[Gramzamber]

I think it would've been more awesome if the Predators were depicted as actually having a functional society that's normal, with pussy-faced bankers and factory workers and bakers and businessmen, with a bunch of yuppies going out into undeveloped planets and taking hunting gear with them and going around killing Green Berets and xenomorphs and coming back with skulls and talking trash with their co-workers and buddies over some Space Beer.

If we were to have that, then I want Predator anti-hunt protestors picketing hunter spaceships in port with signs "STOP MURDERING HUNAMS" "XENOMORPHS ARE PEOPLE TOO" "STOP COLLECTING SKULLS YOU SICK FUCKS!" and so on.

[Coyote]

Oh, cool! "EARTH SHEPHERD" guys on scooters darting between the Preadtors and the hapless humans...!

[Blayne]

I am tired of one dimensional honor bound advanced alien races and the love they get from audience spreading the brain bug. Recently I came across a post in a Halo forum where the question was "should Elites get to use human weapons in situations where it is advantageous like shotguns against the flood ?". The universal consensus was Elites were too honor bound to do that. They would rather die than touch a human gun. Also the Covenant is so backward they can't fix their own ships. They solely exist to provide a shooting target to Spartans. They have no functioning economy,industry, scientific bases. Just like the Predators who solely exist to kill xenomorphs and humans. The Predators ships and gear appear out of dimension x instead of purchased by sport hunters who spend weekends hunting primitives after hard days work at hyperdrive manufacturing plant.

This is (aside from the shotgun question) directly contradicted by cannon, they have an economy however its somewhere between feudal and early Renaissance, they have industry as we see it and research facilities but their research is geared towards adapting and assimilating forerunner tech, anything else or inventing their own stuff is blasphemy.

Elites have their own fully functioning society with the elites depicted primarily being the warrior caste its implied they have factories and shipyards and farms just organized in an inefficient way. Its also implied Elites go on tours of duty and return home to mend to their clan and manor and farms and factories kinda like leaving a portion of the field to fallow on off seasons.

[Shroom Man 777]

Oh, cool! "EARTH SHEPHERD" guys on scooters darting between the Preadtors and the hapless humans...!

And the SUNSPOT WARRIOR which will probably piss off a whole load of people here because it'll use RAMMING TACTICS to stop the Predator hunting ships!

[Sarevok]

I would pay good money to see a Predator movie featuring their version of PETA.

[Junghalli]

Maybe the Predator hunts are their equivalent of a Reality TV show, like Survivor, or some sort of performance art. That would explain their showman-like behavior like getting into a macho mano-a-mano brawl with Ahnuld and scarring their foreheads with xenomorph juice.

Another idea that sort of intrigues me is the concept that the Predators might be superintelligent, so that the difference in brain capacity between them and us is similar to the difference in brain capacity between us and some of the animals we kill for sport, meat, or trophies (like elephants, pigs, or chimps). You could probably do this by suggesting they're distantly descended from some vaguely bird-like creature. IIRC bird brains are much more efficient than mammal brains, so a creature with a human-like braincase volume and a bird-like neurology could well be superintelligent. Granted, I doubt their actions are particularly in line with vast superhuman intellect, what with that Pred in the first movie never catching on when Ahnuld covered himself with mud and stuff like that.

There are tons of things you could have done with these guys that would have been way better than making them Klingon rip-offs.