4h ago

What are things that mildly annoy you in SciFi?

So I am currently rewatching Stargate SG1 and thinking about certain things that always rub me the wrong way when watching or reading SciFi. Now, I know that Stargate in particular doesn't really take itself too seriously and shouldn't be scrutinized too much. It's also a bit older. But there are still some things that even modern SciFi-Worlds featuring outer space and aliens have or lack, that always slightly rub me the wrong way. I would love to hear your opinion.

Lack of any form of camera surveillance technology

I mean, come on, the Goa'uld couldn't figure out a way to install their equivalent of cameras all over their battle ships in order to monitor it? They have forms of video/picture transmitting technology. Star Trek also seems to lack any form of video surveillance. (I'm not up to date with the newest series.) Yes, I get that having a crew member physically go to a cargo bay and check out the situation is better for dramatic purposes. But it always rubs me the wrong way that they have to do that. I would just love to see a SciFi-Series set in space where all space ships are equipped with proper camera technology. Not just some vague "sensor" that tells the crew "something is wrong, but you will still have to physically go there and see it for yourself". I want the captain of a space ship to have access to the 200,000 cameras strategically placed all over the ship to monitor it.

Languages

I have studied linguistics, learned several foreign languages and lived in a foreign country for a while, so my perspective is influenced by that. I always find it weird when everybody "just talks English". Yes, I get that it's easier to write stories in which all characters can just freely interact with each other. But it's always so weird to me when an explorer comes to a foreign planet and everybody just talks their language. At least make up an explanation for it! "We found this translator device in the space ship that crashed on earth". There you go. I love the Stargate Movie where Daniel Jackson figures out how to communicate with the people on Abydos. During the series most worlds will just speak English, with some random words in other languages thrown in. As someone interested in linguistics I love Stargate for how much it features deciphering languages, though I still find it weird when they go to another world and everybody just speaks English.

Humanoid aliens

Especially with modern CGI I would just love to shows get more creative when it comes to alien races. We don't need a person in a costume anymore. Every once in a while you will have that weird alien pop up, but all in all I feel like there's still a lot of potential. Also changes in Human physiology due to different environmental conditions on foreign planets.

That being said, I would also like to mention some SciFi-titles that in my mind stand out for being very creative in this regard:

The writing of Julie Czerneda is very creative when it comes to alien species. She was a biologist and uses her knowledge to create a wide variety of alien life forms
The forever war (Without spoiling the end, so I'll leave it at that. Just liked it as a creative take on an alien race so different it's incomprehensible to us)
I very much appreciate Douglas Adams for the babel fish.
I also liked The expanse for including the development of a Belter language and changes in human physiology due to different gravity.

What do you think? Do you know any good examples of SciFi-Worldbuilding, that solve some common inconsistencies?

(Edited because it looked weird :P) Also, I rembered one more thing: I have two serious food allergies and I always cringe when I see characters take some random food from an alien civilisation and eat. It's especially bad right now while rewatching Stargate. SG1 just keeps happily eating and drinking anything that is offered and there are so many scenes of them eating without asking much. Maybe it's just because I can't even do that in my own society and am so used to always asking "What is in it? Can I eat it?" Although some shows have good solutions like standard nutrient packs in a military context or food replicators that create any food you want.

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The camera thing drives me nuts, because we all know it's generally just going to be what's drives the plot for this story. Which is okay.
But as a privacy nerd, my brain immediately concocts some deeply weird privacy law to explain why main engineering is monitored 24/7 and the front door is somehow not. Then my brain starts trying to come up with the relevant moments in the fictional history why the laws are so broken...
- And even if, for example, the Federation had such privacy laws, it should be pretty much impossible to hide on a Cardassian ship because you know they're all about that surveillance state.

My main gripe is a lot of plots have too much high stake events solved by improbable happenings?
Why save the earth when one can save a meadow? I would love to see a story about a group of people trying to prevent nano technology from entering a park, and the social backlash when they try.
Why do nearly impossible things within a certain time, when one can have more humble happenings?
Space battles are cool but does the main character have to save the ship, fleet or day? Isn’t it enough to save one’s squad?

Noisy space battles.

Yeah I will say it's fun to point out the plot holes whenever comparing it to the real world. But as you get older you realize. I don't want writers to care about this stuff unless it is in service to the story. That's the problem with a lot of new scifi. Is worrying about this stuff and always calling back to previous series is what bogs down storying telling. If your story is good I don't care about the holes.
- The "cinema-sins-ification" of media criticism has been a fucking disaster for our collective media literacy.
  If your story is good enough, no one gives a fuck about plot holes.
- yeah, you want viewers to be subject to fridge logic because the alternative is that they realise while watching because the plot isn't grabbing them.
  
  Yeah also I thought we all agreed to call out tv tropes links as I have to work and can't go down a rabbit hole for the next 8 hours. 😉

This is a common complaint, but it deserves to be mentioned frequently: exploding control panels. This is especially a problem in Star Trek. Are circuit breakers a lost technology?

Star Trek also seems to lack any form of video surveillance.
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation series premier Encounter at Farpoint, Riker comes aboard later on after several plot-relevant events. To bring him up to speed, he's seated in front of a viewscreen and watches what has happened up to that point, basically the first part of the episode. Of course, this sort of thing is never used in the series again, but it's kind of interesting.

I am mildly annoyed when an action scene essentially pauses so the heroes can have a small dialog scene.
I always find myself wondering: isn’t that bad guy, hull breach, detonation timer etc still there?

We live in a time where live action adaptations of classic sci-fi literature are now possible - both technically and financially. But now TBH I find most of it super boring. Been trying to plow through that Foundation series and got to say it just doesn't hold my attention. Same with the William Gibson adaptation the Peripheral. I liked the books but just can't hang with the vids.
There is stuff I like but its rare. Arrival, Raised by Wolves, the Dune movies, a few others.
- I do generally enjoy animated adaptations more, and agree with your list.
  Arrival - we were rewatching this one evening when my teenager came home with some friends - for reference these are a group who have been watching the "evil bong" movies together, not people I think of as film geeks at all. But Arrival held their interest despite being a slower paced story and 2 of them came back to watch it in full because it just didn't let them go. It's such a good movie.

This is why Darmok is peak sci-fi. It discusses what happens when species can’t communicate with one another. It even works within the in-show explanation of the universal translator: the Tamarians don’t just use different vocabulary and syntax. They have an entirely different language model.

What do you think? Do you know any good examples of SciFi-Worldbuilding, that solve some common inconsistencies?
There's some good stuff in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series about non-human intelligence and societies that I found compelling and very thoughtfully composed. It comes from a grounded place, and especially the first two books do a great job of building up concepts of civilizations that feel truly foreign but make a lot of sense in the universe. The difficulties in cross-species communication are addressed and made to be a focus and feel realistic. I'm being deliberately vague because part of the fun of the books is seeing how far things go.

One of the funniest episodes of the Men In Black cartoon was J trying to adjust to MIB's 37 hour day.
But it shows a problem; in most sci-fi not only are all the aliens 1.8 meters tall with five fingers and a larynx that can mimic human speech, they all come from world's with a 24 hour day. Actually, to get nerdier, most cultures with a sun would probably have a 24 hour day based on them using circular sun dials. But the length of the hours would vary.
Another thing that annoys me is when an author comes up with a fantastic idea and uses it once. There's a Poul Anderson story I read in high school that I always wanted to see developed. A group of time travelers from 3854 AD go back to meet da Vinci. They get captured by a baron who tortures them into revealing all their secrets.
The baron and his family set up an estate in 20,000 BC and maraud through time.
This story could run six seasons, easily.
- But it shows a problem; in most sci-fi not only are all the aliens 1.8 meters tall with five fingers and a larynx that can mimic human speech, they all come from world's with a 24 hour day.
  Yeah! Lamp-shading this trend is one of the ways that Farscape shines.
  While Farscape is still frequently guilty of this trope, it's fun that at least the human main character is often scolded by peers for his human-anayomy-centric biases.
- most cultures with a sun would probably have a 24 hour day based on them using circular sun dials
  The use of 24 (really its 2 12 part divisions of day and night) is arbitrary. They could really use any numbering system.
  The reason we use 12 and 60 is from the babylonians. We think they used base 12 and 60 because of body part counting. Each digit of the hand minus the thumb is divided into 3 parts. That gives you 12 then each finger on the opposite hand gives you 5 of each 12 count giving you base 60. If an alien has different parts, which they will, they wouldn't necessarily use the same numbers.
  
  https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-are-the-advantages-of-base-twelve-over-other-number-bases.33887/
  There are many reasons why other races would use base 12.

In and of itself, I don't mind it, but I'm mildly annoyed by most having some form of FTL travel. That's why The Expanse was so refreshing for me.
Like, I get it. Having FTL drive (or comparable ways to go vast distances in short times) allows a larger universe for the characters. It's also, I would imagine, easier to write since the writers wouldn't have to deal with the vast scales, time dilation, and asynchronous events happening in different parts of the galaxy/story.
For comparison, The Expanse worked because it was all within our solar system. In the Revelation Space series (book), humans are doing interstellar travel, but they're in cryo the whole trip, and the journey takes years. The author formerly worked for the ESA and pretty much had to show his work every step of the way to get all the characters together on the same planets at the same time.
So yeah, I get why we don't see that more often (especially in TV series with less accredited writers), but it would be nice to see it once in a while nonetheless.
- I'll never forget the Expanse audiobooks pronouncing gimbal as "gym ball"...
  
  Only for the first 6 books or so, was listening to Persepolis a few weeks ago and had to do a double take when the reader finally pronounced it with the hard g ("gim ball").
  I figured it couldn't be any worse than the Black Prism reader absolutely butchering javelina (ordinarily the J makes an H sound) a few books in

Sounds and non-newtonian physics in space flight. You wouldn't hear rumbling engines or lasers shooting in space. You also wouldn't need to keep burning your thrusters after you've accelerated towards your destination.
- You would hear the engines inside the ship. I always imagine the sound is from the point of view of the crew.
- The thrusters thing is subverted in Battlestar Galactica, The Expanse, and Babylon 5. The first two also do an excellent job with sound in space.
- https://youtu.be/PIHSxLYzc6Q

Making a second comment to answer your actual question:
For me it's when technology is very uniformly high tech. So for example in the real world technology advances but it doesn't advance everywhere at the same speed. There might be high tech versions of things in cities while you still find old or ancient equivalents out in the countryside (or just both types existing alongside each other all over). I really like it when SciFi can capture this nonlinear pace of technological advancement.
- That goes for history as well. In films with nice period-acurate costumes and sets, you rarely see anything old-looking with design from the previous periods.

Language drives me nuts too. I believe in Star trek the badges translate in real time? Best explanation I ever saw (read) was hitchhikers guide. The babel fish "eats" language and poops out brainwaves or whatever to the receiver. I probably got the details wrong but it's close enough and hilarious to boot.
Camera thing is another I hate. Obviously for the drama but I mean they can pull up video on the main window of the enterprise to the engineering room, captains room, even other ships but can't see the biggest point of entry??

Becky Chambers wrote 4 books that did a really good job of exploring different species getting by with their differences not just in culture, but also in things like how they speak (one species has 5 vocal chords, so you literally cannot speak their language) or 'how does publich transit account for different butt shapes?'
But on to your question on pet peeves:
throwing science-y words out there that make no sense is probably my biggest.
deus ex-machina - getting saved at the knick of time by something showing up without warning, but that's just bad writing. I actually like how the Orville series removed transporters as a tech. It's actually a bad plot device.
but yeah, like you said, things that are obvious but are removed from the show, like cameras

Since Stargate is my go-to scifi I'm kinda offended at the "doesn't take itself too seriously". Sure it's not as hard on the science as The Expanse (you know, except for the magic portals to other stars), but it feels like it takes itself pretty seriously. There are obvious bottle episodes that were probably written for other shows and shoe-horned in because they were cheap to buy and produce.
For #2, I think this would get pretty old pretty fast, not to mention that they have to fit everything into runtime constraints. Every new planet the team spends months researching the new language. Sure, you could handwave it (we found a Goa'uld translator just laying around), but that would be back to just one language. Since the Stargate presents an instant transportation rather than the days/months/years of starship travel it would make sense that languages stay fairly consistent as people move from planet to planet.
For #3, they pretty much handwave this in SG-1 as the majority of planets in the Milky Way were repopulated by the ancients in their image, and others were transferred from Earth.
- In a more realistic Stargate, they wouldn't need a different language for every planet. Just a different dialect of Egyptian or Goa'uld. Which is something that I would expect the SGC to be able to create an effective automatic translator to bridge.

You might enjoy the book "Blindsight" by Peter Watts.
It does a phenomenal job telling a very unique first contact story. I can't remember if cameras are much of a plot point (I think they use them occasionally), but one of the characters is a linguist, and the aliens are distinctly non-human.
- That’s part of the reason I liked Arrival.

I can still enjoy far-future science fiction of the "humans in space" sort but I can't take it seriously as a portrayal of what the future might be like unless there's an explanation for why people haven't been modified by technology to the point where they're hardly recognizable as human. I really like Alpha Centauri (the video game) as a portrayal of a future where everyone is either a cyborg or a Luddite. The best part is that the game does this gradually until at the end the player realizes (or doesn't) that the annoying Luddite faction (which usually gets eliminated early) had a point.
- I am quite fascinated by the TTRPG Eclipse Phase's depiction of humans in an extremely high-tech future. Why physically travel between planets when you could just email over a copy of your mind, have it stuck in a rented body, and then download the copy's memories once it has done whatever you needed done? There's absolutely no requirement for your new body to be a human-shaped one either, provided you can maintain your composure while being in such a different physical form. Some people get really weird with it, others think that it's abominable. There's a mobster who puts her enemies' minds into fish and keeps them in a tank.
  I'm not so keen on everything about the setting, and I've never gotten a chance to play a game of it so I have no idea how the mechanics are, but there are cool ideas in there

If you read books, check out Embassytown by China Mieville. As far as I could tell the point of that book was to envision a truly alien species and how diplomacy would work with them. Super interesting book and unlike anything else I've read in scifi

I really appreciate a lack of ansible tech. Having to account for the speed of light in communication makes for better story telling, IMHO
My favorite examples of limited communication speed are the Lost Fleet books by John G. Hemry writing as Jack Campbell, and the Battletech franchise.
In the Lost Fleet, they are limited to realistic communications. When they jump into a star system, they gather Intel but it's often pointed out that what their telescopes see and radios hear is X hours old based on the distance. There's a lot of talk in battles about predicting where something will be at a certain time or trying to device the enemy by pulling fake maneuvers. When they want to communicate back home, they need to send picket ships to carry the message.
In Battletech, there is a common method of FTL communication between worlds, but not at smaller scales. When the writers remember it, we hear about the same kind of delays in Intel as in the Lost Fleet. The FTL comms are monitored by a sometimes hostile polity, so top secret stuff will be communicated by spacecraft pony express, and there have been some attempts to some up with other comm methods.

The writing of Julie Czerneda is very creative when it comes to alien species.
I haven't read anything by her, where do you recommend I start?

Translator Microbes
I understand why they do this with language but when it happens for the first time in a show I can't help but get distracted by it. I don't have a better solution though...

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