Medieval weapons and tactics. Sure, swordfights are cool. They also look ridiculous if you are going to transport * a space phalanx of space marines a thousand light years to fight with their space swords. Yes, you can “laser” them up a bit. But while a lightsaber might not be as “clumsy and random as a blaster”, warfare is not a contest of who is less clumsy and random.
Medieval government. Whether it’s thousands of years in the future or long ago in a galaxy far far away, you mean to tell me civilization landed on “hereditary feudal aristocracy” as the best way of governing the universe? I suppose the reason for that is just like in fantasy, it takes all the day to day politics out of their rule. The “king” essentially embodies the kingdom. Baron Harkonnen is evil therefore all Harkonnen are evil. Princess Leia is just and courageous so Alderaan are a just and courageous people.
No possibility that Vladimir Harkonnen is a controversial and polarizing leader (and former businessman and reality TV star) on Gedi Prime or that Alderaan has a long history of harboring leftist terrorists and anarchists.
Mono-climate or mono-industry planets. Desert planets. Ice planets. Jungle planets. Water planets. Planets that support life would tend to have a variety of climates. Similarly an entire planet would probably not JUST be used for agriculture, ship building, mining, so on and so forth.
Unless they are speaking Rigilian, which by coincidence sounds exactly like Earth English.
Persistence of gravity. I know there will sometimes be some “deus ex machina”, like gravity generators, to explain this. But often there is not even that fig leaf, it’s just assumed that you have gravity inside your spaceship. I get that historically there are some practical reasons for this, namely that sci-fi movies are not generally filmed in space. But in these CGI infused days it seems much more doable to make sci-fi films set in zero-G.
Stupid evil mega corporations. Not entirely a sci-fi only trope, but the worst examples are in sci-fi (I’m looking at you Umbrella Corporation.) I don’t have.a problem with big corporations being evil, they can be plenty evil, but it’s just a lazy trope to setup a powerful antagonist, if you don’t explain what the evil corporation hopes to gain from being evil, how they got so powerful, and how they hope to get away with it.
Spiders. Or mechanical things resembling spiders running all over the place. The heroes just manage to shut the door in front of the critters. It is the same scene every time.
Corporations start getting big on their own. As they get bigger, they get more influential (can buy off legislators) and bend the rules to favor them and get even bigger. Profits and more big-bucks compensation for the people running the corporation is what they hope to gain, and they’ll get away with it because they own the legislators.
I’m sure it’ll be the same story in the 23rd century, if global warming doesn’t kill us off first.
Pretty much any species that has evolved on a planet is likely to find extended periods of zero G uncomfortable. So unless we’re talking sci-fi set in the near future, I expect some kind of tech workaround, even if it’s just always accelerating at ~1g.
Or I guess another option is bioengineered humans that can live in zero G indefinitely. That would work too (you could even have humans with weird limbs better suited to floating around in all directions). But it would need to be critical to the story otherwise it’s too much effort and expense.
I think the point @griffin1977 was getting at, is that the evil corporations of sci fi often have motivations that make no sense on any level.
Umbrella corporation…get paid somehow to turn the world into a zombie apocalypse, then…hope that the French riviera is somehow unaffected so you have somewhere nice to spend your cash?
Since I was today days old when I first heard of the Umbrella Corporation, naming it didn’t really give me anything to go on. At least in the SF that I’ve read/watched, evil corporations’ motivations, when they weren’t made clear, seemed to fall into the usual oobleck of corporate evil.
In a way Science Fiction is one of the least original genres out there. Since we know so little about space and the future, writers almost always frame it in terms everybody understands. Relationships between planets are cobbled together (or flat out stolen) from World History, and spaceships work and operate just like sea vessels or airplanes. Nothing is more ridiculous than a space empire without a royal family and court intrigue except maybe space guns that make no sound or an aircraft that doesn’t “swoop”.
There’s a meme floating around poking fun at the Umbrella Corporation from the Resident Evil games.
Page 1: I crossbred a silverback gorilla with a praying mantis then gave it AK-47s for arms. Bob has been poking it with a stick non-stop for 80 hours now. Hopefully it doesn’t escape.
It’s worse than that. Every game / film seems to end with the mastermind injecting him/her self with an overdose of serum to become a giant squid monster thing.
Erm…winner?
I don’t mind crappy science. I mind implausible politics and unrealistic behavior.
The book I’m currently reading–The Splinter in the Sky–isn’t bad enough for me to stop reading, but it’s definitely inducing some eyerolls. Not over the swampish space station, nor over the FTL travel, nor over the healing bays that cure any illness, nor over the dissection guns; I’m fine with all that.
But–spoilers for a book I don’t recommend ahoy–
there’s a massive, generational conspiracy that controls the largest empire in human history. There are like five people in charge of it, and each one only knows one other member. But they vote on things. It’s forced emperors to do their bidding for decades or centuries, and the emperors have been unable to penetrate it. Over the course of a month, a woman who’s new to the empire and whose primary area of competence is making delicious tea is able to penetrate the conspiracy and unveil every single member. She also kills trained soldiers and assassins on multiple occasions, despite not having any military training.
The political setup is completely implausible, and the main character is a ridiculous Mary Sue, if Mary Sue is a ninja.
Yeah but your average sci-fi evil mega corporation has gone far far beyond that into doing stuff governments tend to get pretty protective about, even when big donors do it (e.g. in the case of Umbrella Corporation, actually wiping out the entire human race, no matter how big your campaign contribution is the feds are going to get mighty testy if you try that)
I get it, its sci-fi you can do stuff that is fantastical, but you have to explain it to me. If the explanation is “oh there’s an evil mega corporation”, and that’s it your antagonist can do whatever they want, to who ever they want, then that’s a lazy trope IMO.
As a counter example, I rewatched Robocop recently and while OCP is absolutely a cartoonishly evil megacorp, the film does attempt to explain how they got so powerful (by taking over running the police and military contracts from the government) and what they hope to achieve (a gentrified company-run city replacing Detroit), so while the film does have its plot holes, wondering how OCP got so powerful and what they are trying to acheive does not bug me.
It’s kind of funny what and when we’re willing to suspend our disbelief. I have a friend who absolutely won’t watch anything with undead zombies in it like Night of the Living Dead or The Walking Dead but is fine with a movie like Army of Darkness. And the reason is that he can accept walking undead created by magic but cannot accept a show where it isn’t explained.
I view things as you do. Except I like to think I’m fancy and call it verisimilitude which is just the appearance of being real. I can accept a fantastical premise so long as the rest of the fiction appears to be real.
Let’s take Batman for instance. I can suspend my disbelief long enough to think someone like Batman could operate in Gotham. But during the Hush storyline in the comic, Batman falls several stories, fractures his skull, undergoes emergency surgery to remove bits of his skull from his brain, and is back on his feet fighting crime not too long afterwards. I could live with this if Batman had some sort of superpower like Wolverine that allowed him to heal quickly, but it threw me out of the story completely. If the writers didn’t care, then why should I?
There is actually a closely related scifi trope that also bugs me its the “the evil megacorporation in charge of defense research somehow thinks that what a high tech military really needs to get ahead on the modern battlefield is a great big slobbering monster”. Yup that’s the ticket, on the modern battlefield dominated by high speed communication and incredibly powerful long range weapons, a big scary looking monster with big teeth will carry the day!
So this is why (apparently in opposition to most the Internet;) ) I like the Serenity film but not the Firefly series. The film does feel it’s set in a unique universe someone has come up with whereas the series is just “hey let’s move the late 1800s American Wild West to outer space”