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 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?
The Webshifter Series might be a good start (Book 1 is Beholder’s eye). The main character is a shape shifter, so we get to see the world from the point of view of someone who can change her form between different alien races. The book has a lot of interesting descriptions about her changing senses, e.g. suddenly being able to perceive different colors or having an organ to feel the magnetic field etc.
Thanks, added to my to-read list.
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.
Yeah, it makes sense in interior shots. But exterior shots in space should be dead silent. Just doesn’t make any sense.
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.
To your second point, I think the Universal Translator in Star Trek is the best explanation. Not only does it make for more convenient television, but it seems like such a well thought-out invention that would actually exist in the future. Like why make everyone learn one language and wipe out all the history/culture behind the others when you can just let everyone do their own thing.
Best explanation was in Fargate tv shows.
When MC find himself to other side of galaxy in alien spaceships with prisoners escaping he is injected by a little icon robot with nanobot (or something like that) enabling him to understand any language.
Just before he is injected other characters are speaking alien and you don’t understand them and gradually (but in a matter of 15/30 secs) after injection you start to hear aliens speaking English. I believe they even specifically speak about the technology.Look at Species of Farscape #8 – Translator Microbes it is explained better and there is a short video. Too bad you don’t see him injected/shot but you got alien explaining how it works.
Like the Babel fish in H2G2
I’m curious how everyone gets here about the languages in the original star wars trilogy?
Secondly, in one of the ex expanded universe series, leia and chewbacca go back to kashyyk and Leia can understand the wookie mayor much better than she can chewbacca.
It’s explained that the mayor actually has a speech impediment, which makes him easier to understand than most wookies
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.
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
Can’t believe no one has mentioned this yet but my big one is physics in microgravity. There are some that do it well (like obv Apollo 13 given how they filmed it, and The Expanse is usually pretty good about it too) and plenty that it doesn’t really matter but there’s a bunch of movies and tv shows that hang major plot points on poorly thought out physics. The worst offender imo was ironically the movie Gravity, where a major character dies because apparently when two people are tethered to each other in zero-g and the line goes taut they don’t just bounce back towards each other, oh no, because there’s an extra special force that keeps pulling on the futher person so he has to make some dramatic self sacrifice. I was so sad because that movie looked really amazing from a cinematography perspective and obviously a lot of people loved it regardless but i just couldn’t get past how dumb that and a few other scenes were.
Definitely agree about Gravity. Beautiful to watch, completely unrealistic (which wouldn’t have been such a problem if they weren’t pitching it as ultra-realistic!)
What annoys me is that science fiction is that some of the biggest writers don’t seem to know any women IRL. If Robert Heinlin or Cixin Lu had to write a believable woman character to bring them food and water, they’d be dead in three days.
That’s true. I already mentioned Julie E. Czerneda, her books have female main characters that are pretty well written. I’d recommend looking into her books.
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?
“This is especially a problem in Star Trek”
It gets really bad in ST Discovery, especially in the last season. Any time the ship gets into trouble, a cascade of sparks starts falling down. It looks like a waterfall made of sparks. The bridge basically looks like a KISS concert.
The bridge basically looks like a KISS concert.
lol I’ve seen what you’re talking about. It’s a little much.
Not just circuit breakers, but why are high powered circuits being used in the habitable parts of the ship?
Even modern cars no longer run high amperage circuits to the driver’s controls. Back in the old days, you turn on the lights, the light switch carried a full 12v and a lot of current to control relays. Today, the light switch and turn signal stalk use a signal circuit to tell a body control module what to do.
The bridge of a Star Trek ship should have control panels running on the future equivalent of 5 volt signal circuits that tells a distant and well shielded control module to switch the ultra high powered circuits.
That leads me to the one thing that has always bothered me about Star Trek and its transporters and replicators. E=MC^2… When a replicator creates food or an object, it would take at least the same amount of energy to make, as it would if the same amount of mass were destroyed in a nuclear reaction. That DOES mean in areas where those devices are installed there ARE ultra high powered circuits (EPS conduits) in the wall. So high powered that they have the equivalent of multiple nuclear explosions flowing through them every second… YIKES.
Exploding anything I would say, though this seems to be a general TV problem. Your device got shaken up a tiny bit? EXPLOSION!
“Humane Treatment”, " Human rights", “I’m doing this for the good of humanity”. When there are heaps of non human species but the writers keep reffering to “human” traits everyone else clearly has.
Azetbur was right.
Large ships that ply the stars at super luminal speeds. These ships are equipped with massive energy weapons capable of pulverizing planets. Powered by systems that use anti-matter, or ultra exotic inter-dimensional matter.
Yet, for some reason the ship is constrained on energy and is unable to keep all the lights on, or the crew has to conform to “energy conservation protocols” (ST TOS), or there isn’t enough power available to keep the ship at a habitable temperature (BSG).
Life support would not even be a rounding error on the power output of some of the systems described in Sci fi.
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.
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??
Star Trek has a common language in the federation or not? It would be cool if they encountered a new species and get out their communicators, record for a bit and have an AI figure out the new language. Wouldn’t take up a lot of screen time and explain the communication.
There’s a couple of scenes I think in enterprise that shows the linguistics person programming something like that actually. Been many years since I watched it (it’s been a long road lol) but I recall that scene.
Star Trek came up with some workarounds/explanations for things they did due to budget or teck limitations. The transporters so they didn’t need to shuttle down, artificial gravity, universal translator and the the story line about the parent species that seeded humanoids on many planets (earth, vulcan, etc).
They would also show ‘surveillance video’ from time to time when the plot needed it, but it never looked like a surveillance cam took it.
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?
Beth rewatching a lot of anime lately and this is so painful everywhere
