This has pretty much fallen out of style to the point you have a filn like The Island which concerns to a large part the idea of freewill of clones. However in old sci fi you often see clones as robots, unfeeling and inhuman. A Hawkwind song from 1977 shows what an odd idea of clones people used to have:
Robots gaining humanity-
This was a common trope in the past, metal and circuits robots gaining humanity and emotions. It has died to the point in the recent Battlestar Galactica remake at the end the metal robot centurions leave the human fleet to find their own course. Recognizing that robots are never going to think like a human.
The Bermuda Triangle as some sort of inter-dimensional gateway.
Finding the ruins of an ancient civilization on Mars. (The upcoming “John Carter” movie, for example, conspicuously removes the “Warlord of Mars” subtitle from the original series. It’s likely set on a whole other world entirely.)
Disembodied brains preserved in giant vats of liquid.
Open spoilers for Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) below. I’ve never seen the 2010 film version, but unless it deviates from the novel a lot then spoilers for that too.
I recently read Never Let Me Go, where it’s clear from pretty early on that the main characters are clones who were created to provide organ transplants. They know this themselves since childhood – they grow up in a sort of boarding school for clones – but are unaware how the outside world thinks of them. Late in the novel, the protagonist learns that clones are not considered fully human and are commonly thought of as not having souls.
This struck me as a weirdly outdated attitude towards clones, to the point where I wondered if the whole novel was really meant to be an anti-abortion metaphor or something. It seemed really odd to me that in a book set in more or less the present day (although it is an alternate world where human cloning has been going on since at least the '70s) the general public would think of clones any differently than, say, children conceived via IVF. The clones weren’t lobotomized or engineered to make them less intelligent or anything; they all seemed to be of average intelligence and with normal language abilities. A big part of the revelation is that the public preferred to believe clones weren’t human because this was the only way to justify using them for spare parts, and that once people got used to having these life-saving medical treatments made possible through cloning no one wanted to go back, but I had a hard time believing things had reached that point to begin with.
I did enjoy the book, which is more a coming-of-age story with science fiction elements than a story about cloning, but the big revelation was a let-down for me.
A.I had human like robots in 2001. Moon in 2009 had GERTY, which seemed to have a human-like relationship with Sam Rockwell’s character. The Doctor on ST:Voyager wasn’t exactly a robot, but was close enough and wanted to become more human. Sonny, from 2004’s I Robot was shown as being humanesque.
I never got the idea from the robot in Moon that it had a “human epiphany” and now understood human emotions. It was just programmed to relate to humans.
Advanced alien civilizations inhabiting planets in our solar system. Old scifi abounded with Martians, Venusians, Plutonians, etc. Sure, modern scifi will still sometimes give us exotic creatures in the atmosphere of Jupiter or some such but no Martian Princesses now.
I still love the 1950s movie trope about all thing Atomic. No matter what happens - good, bad, incredible - it’s all because something or other is “atomic”.
Lampshaded amusingly in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.
One I was just thinking of a few days ago; the idea that aliens would converge on the human form because it is some kind of ideal shape for a tool user. A fair amount of old sci-fi used that, you don’t see it anymore. They either use a different explanation or just ignore the problem these days when they want “bumpy forehead aliens”.
Computers with large spinning tape drives, laboratory widgets with electrical arcs.
The All Token Team, where you’d have the Black Guy, the Indian Guy, the Asian Guy, the Girl, etc.
“Housewives and secretaries in space”; the idea that In The Future women will be stuck in the same roles they were supposed to be in the 50s. Seldom see that these days either.
“The future will be a constant sex crazed drug orgy”; you saw that in some of the old 60s sci-fi.
“Space” was another. Space this, Space that. “Turn on the Space Radio!”
One showed up in City of Lost Children (1995 – still more recent than T2), and I think Monsieur Mallah is still carting around The Brain ijn the Brotherhood of Evil:
There’s also been a recent film version of Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness. It’s a film version of one of the foumnders of the trope, true, but it’s just been made:
I don’t know if it counts as sci-fi, but there’s also the Clockwork King from the game City of Heroes, who is a psychic brain in a jar on top of a mechanical body.
Actually, I’m not sure that so many SF tropes avtyually get retired. They usually get revived, dusted off, and given a new coat of paint. There have been countless revbivals of John Carteresque adntures, ages after its time – what else can you call John Norman’s Gor series (especially at first, before it became a vehicle for bondage fantasies). Alan Moore re-revived it for the opening of the second volume of his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the current John Carter movie is yet another revival.
Taking stories originally set in our solar system and simply moving them to worlds further away has been common for a long time now. Robert Sheckley rewrote his short story The Humours, originally set on Earth, Mar, and Venus, into the novel Crompton Divided, in which the other worlds were now extra-terrestrial. Leigh Brackett returned to her originally Mars-based Skaith/Eric John Stark tories and wrote new onres in which the action was all based on extra-solar worlds (without a word of explanation, as if it had always been that way) As The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, in a slightly different context, once put it “Pulp can always be recycled.”
