Most / Least Favorite Tropes
Most / Least Favorite Tropes
Love them or hate them there are a lot of common tropes across the science fiction genre. What are some of your favorite and least favorite tropes?
I think it goes without saying that one of the least favorite tropes is Deux ex Machina. I couldn't quite put my finger on it at first, but after watching the German TV show "Dark" I was utterly dissatisfied with it. The entire series up until the very last episode is about this inescapable time loop and alternative universes which is pretty cool while watching it, but then you get closer and closer to the end wondering how they are going to solve this impossible problem. Then surprise they just do it instantly in the last episode.
Another trope I am not very fond of is nanotechnology where there are trillions of tiny robots that can effectively act as magic. It just feels like a lazy way to write science fiction because you really want a fantasy.
A trope I do actually like despite how overdone it is, is the idea of a precursor or forerunner. It often brings to light the absolutely massive scale of the universe which I find fun to think about.
A trope that I hate is that every alien planet or moon has the same gravity as Earth. Yes, I love The Expanse.
Bonus round: planets with one biome: ice planets, forest planets, storm planets. I left out desert planets, praise the maker.
Also, every alien culture being uniform! Why does every Klingon have the same customs? Where are the equivalent of Russian Klingons and American Klingons and Chinese Klingons, etc?
While Planets of Hats definitely do exist, this one is more excusable for me because I think that it would be possible for the distinctions between individuals of an alien culture to be overwhelmed for the characters by the sheer unfamiliarity of the culture as a whole. And as far as national-scale distinctions, the characters may not interact with a very diverse range of people from the planet, maybe they have one or two crew members being from there, or maybe they visit once specific site on the planet rather than traveling widely across it.
I feel like you read my mind. I was just having this same thought the other day while driving. In the Star Trek universe humans are this very diverse group of people with all kinds of attributes and feelings and desires. Then you get to the Klingons or the Vulcans and somehow they are practically homogenous culturally, emotionally and in beliefs. I find that extremely unrealistic. There are different Klingon factions, but I can't even comprehend what their problems are with each other because they all believe the same things and have the same goals.
I still love Star Trek though. I just wish alien species were more than plot devices.
This is maybe only tangentially related, but my most hated recent trend in genre fiction is "Your Fantasy story is actually Sci-Fi".
Numenara/The Ninth World is probably the most popular example (and I almost give it a pass for ingenuity), but it seems to be the go-to for trashy low-budget fantasy and webcomics; and it's also really popular in fan theories (Game of Thrones and AtlA being big examples). And there's always media that sort of straddles the line between the two (the new She-Ra: Princesses of Power show being an example; fantasy themes, sci-fi setting).
Of course, you could say the same thing about Star Wars. But I guess the difference, to me, is that Star Wars is unabashedly Sci-Fi. She-Ra tries to hide its Science Fiction behind of veneer of Princesses and pseudo-magical superpowers.
Another trope I am not very fond of is nanotechnology where there are trillions of tiny robots that can effectively act as magic. It just feels like a lazy way to write science fiction because you really want a fantasy.
Agreed completely.
A trope that's bothered me more and more over the years is planetary chauvinism. So many science fiction settings make the assumption that people will only ever live on planets - and usually specifically Earthlike planets - and anything else is just something for a mining ship to visit, when it's even thought of at all.
A somewhat related issue is the grand importance that Earth always seems to be given. I can understand it from the perspective of writing stuff for the general audience, it's super easy to make them care about whatever's going on by saying "oh no, Earth might be destroyed" but once we're a couple of centuries or millennia into being a spacefaring civilization with colonies all over the place Earth is going to be just one planet out of many. Star Trek is a particularly bad offender here since not only should there be plenty of human colonies just as big and important as Earth at this point but there are dozens of nonhuman Federation members too. The Federation didn't end when Vulcan got destroyed, it shouldn't end if Earth gets destroyed.
Necroposting to suggest the The Culture books by Ian M. Banks. The vast vast majority of people live on big space habitats like ring worlds, O'Neil cylinders, and Stanford Torii. Also some of the hugest ships carry basically a whole planet of people.
For the second concern i like the two Hainish Circle books i have read, "The dispossessed" and "The left hand of darkness". They mention that something like earth exists, but it's not even a plot point, it's just another planet. But then again these books are social commentar / thought experiment first and foremost, they just happen to be in a Sci-Fi setting.
One of the worst examples of the Deus Ex Machina has to be Battlestar Galactica.
That almost every alien species is bipedal and hominoid in shape.