What tropes in science fiction annoy you?

[The Borgified Corpse]

lets see:
West of the Rockies
Midwest and Plains
South
East Coast above Virginia
Texas

Close. "West of the Rockies" can be split into the Northwest & Southwest, probably drawing the line somewhere between San Luis Obispo & San Francisco, though it's not a straight line by any means.

Texas is a weird amalgamation. Some aspects of it are very Southwest. (Years ago, I took a cross country road trip from Arizona to New York and back again. It wasn't until we reached Dallas that I started to feel like I was anywhere near home again.) Yet there's also a lot of Dixie in Texas' soul, albeit immensely watered down from what you'd get just across the border in Arkansas or Louisiana.

Granted, this is all super subjective. But the fact that our maps are vaguely similar shows that I'm not the only one who's noticed this.

Heck, I once edited an entire anthology of science-fiction vampire stories, titled TOMORROW SUCKS.

There was a sequel, too: TOMORROW BITES.

I literally just added these to my Amazon wishlist. Thank you!

I have the opposite attitude. I love tearing down genre barriers and and mashing them together. Heck, most of the stuff I edit these days are mashups of one kind or another: horror-westerns, hard-boiled occult noir, superheroes vs. Gothic monsters, weird science vs. magic, etc. Never seen the point of trying to keep the chocolate out of the peanut better or vise versa. Sometimes two great tastes go great together.

Bring on the alien samurai werewolves!

Have you ever played a card game called "Smash Up"?...
https://www.amazon.com/AEG-5501-Sma...=UTF8&qid=1539818067&sr=1-1&keywords=Smash+Up

Heh. Super Friends is mainly remembered for its silliness, and this is sort of understandable given the target audience of young kids. They couldn't exactly have Dracula actually biting people, and the lasers seem a lot more efficient anyway. There was the one ep where an alien literally stuck Earth in his pocket and then got chased by Apache Chief, since his power was turning into a giant.

Considering that Warner Bros. doesn't really know what to do with the DCEU, I think they should just start tossing darts at a list of Super Friends episodes and start adapting those!

Says the guy who once novelized an epic battle between Wonder Woman and the Frankenstein monster.

Ahem! I can't add it to the list if you don't mention the title.

Star Trek had a salt vampire and a vampire cloud (neither of which annoyed me).

They weren't literally vampires as we tend to think of them. "Vampire" was used as a colloquial term for something which sucks out a precious bodily substance in order to survive. It wasn't the precise technical term that it is in instances like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It's not that I dislike blended Sci-Fi/Horror, the complain is more when there's a jarring transition. As in it's not laid out as horror in space, you had a straight up Sci-Fi story that just seemed to get lost in the 3rd act somewhere and couldn't figure out how to wrap up the premise, so someone went nuts. It's like the writer thought he had a good concept, but couldn't figure out the ending, or couldn't figure out how to make it exciting/challenging enough without a psycho loose on the ship towards the end. There are ways to do it without just having a boring conclusion or tossing it overboard for a slasher film.

it would be like towards the end of The Martian, where instead of working through technical challenges, they just tossed some Martian monsters out there for Matt Damon to have to fight/escape from. Not needed, and would have wrecked a good movie. Just seems some writers can't help themselves...

Event Horizon was always intended to be like that, so while it went a little over the top, it wasn't out of character. Aliens, same deal, it was a blended story the whole time. Sunshine just couldn't figure out where to go, so just had someone go nuts and stalk people for no reason to add 'drama'.

Reminds me of how Pitch Black was "grounded" sci-fi--basically an Aliens rip-off--but then The Chronicles of Riddick took a sharp turn when it added all of that Furyan chosen one stuff. Granted, nothing in the previous movie precluded anything that we learned in The Chronicles of Riddick but it was still odd to add such a fundamental new ingredient this late in the game.

What I don't like is when they create a complicated situation that gets you interested and they solve it in a matter of seconds at the end of the episode with nothing more than technobabble. Each time that happens I feel like I've been cheated.

There was a period during the 2nd & 3rd seasons of Stargate Atlantis where every episode seemed to just be waiting for Dr. McKay to pull another technobabble solution out of his ass. It seemed to give the rest of the cast little to do but stand around shouting, "Hurry up, Rodney!" Now, I don't mind technobabble every once in a while. Dr. McKay was such a great character that it made sense for more of the episodes to revolve around him but I still think that they overdid it. They needed more of a mix of McKay's technobabble solutions, Dr. Weir's diplomatic solutions, and Sheppard & Ronan just saving the day by shooting stuff.

Every other planet but Earth seems to have a system that allows random conjectural evidence to be treated as fact. At least in Matter of Perspective and Undiscovered Country.

Sorry, but, whenever someone mentions "A Matter of Perspective," I just have to say...

"YOU'RE A DEAD MAN, APGAR! A DEAD MAN!"

...Please carry on...

Or in American movies or series when they go to France or meet French people you hear old accordion music... as if that's all they ever played in France... You can hear it when Picard is walking to meet his brother's family.

Well, given that the Picard family all had British accents, how else are we supposed to remember that they're French?

 

[CorporalCaptain]

They weren't literally vampires as we tend to think of them. "Vampire" was used as a colloquial term for something which sucks out a precious bodily substance in order to survive. It wasn't the precise technical term that it is in instances like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Those weren't the on-screen names of the creatures. They are names that emerged in fan circles and became widely known because they were and still are clearly descriptive of how the creatures fed. People wouldn't have glommed onto the names otherwise.

@Gov Kodos and @Greg Cox have both addressed the lack of a uniform definition for what constitutes a "vampire," and the variety of mythical and fictional creatures that have been referred to as "vampires" throughout history, so there's no need for me to repeat what they've said about that.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Those weren't the on-screen names of the creatures. They are names that emerged in fan circles and became widely known because they were and still are clearly descriptive of how the creatures fed. People wouldn't have glommed onto the names otherwise.

@Gov Kodos and @Greg Cox have both addressed the lack of a uniform definition for what constitutes a "vampire," and the variety of mythical and fictional creatures that have been referred to as "vampires" throughout history, so there's no need for me to repeat what they've said about that.

That's even more to my point (which I guess I didn't state outright, but whatever). The inclusions of the "salt vampire" & the "vampire cloud" in Star Trek don't constitute instances of mixing fantasy into the Trek universe because they weren't literally vampires and were never even referred to on screen as such. (I couldn't remember whether or not they ever used the word "vampire" in those episodes, so thank you for clearing that up.) And while there are instances like Underworld where they try to give vampires a veneer of scientific legitimacy, I still consider vampires to be fantasy creatures. You'd be hard pressed to find many mainstream depictions of vampires in the last 80 years that don't use Dracula as some kind of starting point and that one is pure fantasy.

I don't object at all to mixing genres but I do think that the overall vibe & the overall stylistic intent of sci-fi and fantasy are different; similar but different. You can make something that mixes both elements but it is a mixture. Star Wars has made billions of dollars by striking the right balance there. (Come to think of it, Solo is the lowest grossing of the Star Wars movies and it's also the one that features absolutely zero fantasy-style Jedi mysticism. Coincidence?)

 

[CorporalCaptain]

That's even more to my point (which I guess I didn't state outright, but whatever). The inclusions of the "salt vampire" & the "vampire cloud" in Star Trek don't constitute instances of mixing fantasy into the Trek universe because they weren't literally vampires and were never even referred to on screen as such. (I couldn't remember whether or not they ever used the word "vampire" in those episodes, so thank you for clearing that up.) And while there are instances like Underworld where they try to give vampires a veneer of scientific legitimacy, I still consider vampires to be fantasy creatures. You'd be hard pressed to find many mainstream depictions of vampires in the last 80 years that don't use Dracula as some kind of starting point and that one is pure fantasy.

Mixing genres can be much more than either simply mashing up or crossing over. I wasn't claiming that the creatures in "The Man Trap" and "Obsession" were crossover-type vampires. But I think it's reasonably clear that borrowing from the horror genre occurred in the crafting of these episodes, even though the word "vampire" was not mentioned on screen in either. For some, like me, that's enough to establish a connection between genres. There hasn't always been a hard line between sci-fi and horror anyway.

"Wolf in the Fold," discussed upthread, goes even further and gives a historical figure with strong connections to the horror genre, Jack the Ripper, an in-universe explanation as a non-corporeal entity. It's not really an explanation on the hard end of the sci-fi scale, though, is it: a being that subsists on fear? That honestly sounds more typical of pure horror, but YMMV.

Look at Alien. On one level, it's pure sci-fi. But it employs horror tropes throughout the film so consistently that it can't help but be counted as a hybrid, sci-fi/horror. Similar remarks apply to Resident Evil, and while we're in this ballpark, to Ultraviolet, which gives its own sci-fi spin on vampirism.

I don't object at all to mixing genres but I do think that the overall vibe & the overall stylistic intent of sci-fi and fantasy are different; similar but different. You can make something that mixes both elements but it is a mixture. Star Wars has made billions of dollars by striking the right balance there. (Come to think of it, Solo is the lowest grossing of the Star Wars movies and it's also the one that features absolutely zero fantasy-style Jedi mysticism. Coincidence?)

Absolutely zero "fantasy-style Jedi mysticism"? No.

Spoiler

Darth Maul was in the film, and he used his dark side Force powers to telekinetically bring his lightsaber to himself.

But no, the low-to-insignificant degree of Force involvement wasn't why Solo flopped. There are a lot of opinions out there, some not very credible at all, for why it flopped. My opinion is that mass audiences had insufficient demand for a film recasting Solo and filling in his background, regardless of its content, so soon on the heels of the most recent Episode just five months earlier, to expect anything but low performance.

 

[Discofan]

...



Well, given that the Picard family all had British accents, how else are we supposed to remember that they're French?

That's a good point.

 

[stj]

It doesn't help the sf/fantasy are the same school when an example like "Wolf in the Fold" isn't very good.

Alien is SF because in the fictional universe the alien isn't supernatural. But Alien is all horror movie. SF is a style, not a genre. I've gotten fond of thinking of fantasy as looking in a mirror---the fantasy is always about yourself, however disguised, because your wishes are about yourself. SF on the other hand is like a window----it's about looking outward. It's true that if you're really ignorant, looking out is like looking through a window into darkness. All you really see is a poor reflection of yourself.

And for a newly remembered pet peeve, reminded of by the latest episode of The Gifted: The hero demonstrates the intensity of their desperation and need by mindlessly gobbling down pills, dry, at moments designed to display anguish. My limited experience with real addicts is that they are intensely aware of exactly how many pills they have, how many are left and exactly how many they might need to attain the desired effect. The ones who really don't pay any attention tend to overdose. But even if an overdose was simply vomiting, or merely an unexpected nap, instead of punctuating the plot with an anguish marker, the action would take a break.

 

[Discofan]

One thing that I find really annoying is the aliens that don't need to eat. We find it in Alien, for example, when the creature bursts through the man's ribcage it's very small, yet the next time we see it it's a lot bigger. What did it eat in the meantime?
The founders, the Jemadars, the former don't eat, the latter only need a small vial of white to keep them up and about.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

It doesn't help the sf/fantasy are the same school when an example like "Wolf in the Fold" isn't very good.

It doesn't hurt it, either.

SF is a style, not a genre.

Uh, what? Scratch that. SF is a genre.

 

[Discofan]

When a Sci. fi. writer is so ignorant of anything scientific that he writes things so stupid that it makes the story unwatchable.

 

[JD]

*Cough*OriginalLostinSpace*Cough*

One thing that I find really annoying is the aliens that don't need to eat. We find it in Alien, for example, when the creature bursts through the man's ribcage it's very small, yet the next time we see it it's a lot bigger. What did it eat in the meantime?
The founders, the Jemadars, the former don't eat, the latter only need a small vial of white to keep them up and about.

What's so bad about it? Not everything in the universe is necessarily going work exactly the way things on Earth do.
It's also worth keeping in mind that both the Jem'Hdar, and the Xenomorphs were genetically engineered, so they were specifically designed not to do things like eat.
I just remembered another example of a genre mashup, the upcoming YA book Mage Against the Machine. It's a post-apocalyptic story about mages fighting robots.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

One of the most underrated action movies of the last couple decades is Reign of Fire, which combines the traditional fantasy element of dragons with the traditional sci-fi element of a post-apocalyptic setting.

I think that the reason why sci-fi & horror are so often seen hand in hand is because they are 2 separate aspects of a story. Sci-fi and fantasy are both, to my way of defining them, primarily about setting. Sci-fi is about creating a world where things are different due to technology that we don't have now but could "potentially" invent in the future. Fantasy is about establishing a world where things that don't actually exist in the real world really do exist and have been there the whole time. This is true whether it's a completely made-up world like Middle Earth or a modern day Urban Fantasy where we find out that the elves & vampires have been living side-by-side with us.

Horror, on the other hand, is not about the setting. It's about the intent of the story, which is to frighten. But the source of that terror can range from sci-fi (Alien, Frankenstein) to fantasy (Dracula, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Paranormal Activity) to the real world (Halloween, Scream, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

Absolutely zero "fantasy-style Jedi mysticism"? No.

Spoiler

Darth Maul was in the film, and he used his dark side Force powers to telekinetically bring his lightsaber to himself.

Spoiler: Solo

OK, apart from a brief moment of telekinesis in a tacked-on Maul cameo, there is absolutely zero fantasy-style Jedi-mysticism in Solo. There's even less of it there than there was in Rogue One, which didn't have much apart from a couple brief Darth Vader scenes and Chirrut Imwe's religious mutterings.

But no, the low-to-insignificant degree of Force involvement wasn't why Solo flopped. There are a lot of opinions out there, some not very credible at all, for why it flopped. My opinion is that mass audiences had insufficient demand for a film recasting Solo and filling in his background, regardless of its content, so soon on the heels of the most recent Episode just five months earlier, to expect anything but low performance.

Without relitigating Solo's box office in this thread, I would agree with you. But the thought did occur to me and I think it's an interesting correlation.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I don’t mind genre cross pollination. I like genres more for the aesthetic and the worlds you can build within them. Not the storytelling restrictions they imply.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Sci-fi and fantasy are both, to my way of defining them, primarily about setting. Sci-fi is about creating a world where things are different due to technology that we don't have now but could "potentially" invent in the future. Fantasy is about establishing a world where things that don't actually exist in the real world really do exist and have been there the whole time. This is true whether it's a completely made-up world like Middle Earth or a modern day Urban Fantasy where we find out that the elves & vampires have been living side-by-side with us.

Horror, on the other hand, is not about the setting. It's about the intent of the story, which is to frighten. But the source of that terror can range from sci-fi (Alien, Frankenstein) to fantasy (Dracula, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Paranormal Activity) to the real world (Halloween, Scream, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

To my way of thinking, that's an accurate description of horror.

With respect to the distinction you've drawn between sci-fi and fantasy, that covers a lot of it, but there is much in literature and in TV & film that is difficult to tease into separate categories according to your criteria.

One important set of difficulties has to do with how extraterrestrials are represented. ETs aren't generally themselves manifestations of hypothetical technology. Generally, ETs are posited to have naturally evolved on alien worlds. On a show like Star Trek, many ETs are implausibly humanoid and can pass as human with relatively minimal disguises, and ridiculously from a purely science fiction perspective, human-alien interbreeding is a thing. All of this is much easier to justify in a pure fantasy setting, than in sci-fi, as you've defined the two genres.

Weird spatial anomalies or fantastic field effects, that do things like, say, provide access to a universe of evil duplicates of the main characters, are also similarly more on the level of pure fantasy than sci-fi, again as you've defined them.

I mean, you could frame the premise as what if technology like warp drive and the transporter were to provide access to such weird things, but again the weird things are assumed in-universe to be naturally occurring phenomena simply made accessible by the technology.

My personal take is to have sci-fi subsumed by fantasy, and really to regard all fiction as some or other kind of fantasy, but that doesn't help organize sections in a bookstore or library. By the way, my local library recently absorbed SF&F into general fiction. I found that annoying, because it makes it harder to browse for things I might want to read recreationally, but I also accepted it as taking my own medicine, i.e. living by the logical conclusion to what I stated above, if you see what I mean.

So, yeah, in summary, it's not easy to separate SF&F into sci-fi and fantasy according to prescribed criteria.

Without relitigating Solo's box office in this thread, I would agree with you. But the thought did occur to me and I think it's an interesting correlation.

In this case, I think it is a coincidence. In the 1977 film, Han was established as not believing in the Force and Jedi mumbo-jumbo. To do an origin story of Han and to stay true to that, it is a reasonable choice not to have the Jedi, Sith, and/or Force prominently figure into the plot, especially in any way that should have made Han a believer. On the other hand, I think it was possible to have adhered to that constraint and to have made a much better film. Timing the release to be so soon after EpVIII was a terrible idea. The reshoots ballooned the budget and moved the bar for success substantially upwards. So many things went wrong with the project that had nothing to do with the premise for it to have been a factor. Coincidence.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

*Cough*OriginalLostinSpace*Cough*

Oh bless you....... That was a childhood favourite growing up and even then I knew a lot of it was downright wrong and stupid yet it was fun so I kept watching.

I think the most famous bit of LIS stupid was the episode where a comet was moving toward the ship and everyone could feel excess heat coming from the comet and one of them was outside the ship on the hull and fainting from the heat, from a comet. Still was fun to watch but even as a kid I knew it was completely wrong.

 

[JD]

Don't forget about the giant talking carrot, and the medival knight who flew around in a rocket.
As for the whole Sci-Fi vs fantasy thing, for me if the genre elements are explained by magic it's fantasy, if they're explained by science, or "science", it's sci-fi. Sometime you will get magic explained with science, but I still consider fantasy, since it's still called magic and behaves like magic.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Don't forget about the giant talking carrot, and the medival knight who flew around in a rocket.
As for the whole Sci-Fi vs fantasy thing, for me if the genre elements are explained by magic it's fantasy, if they're explained by science, or "science", it's sci-fi. Sometime you will get magic explained with science, but I still consider fantasy, since it's still called magic and behaves like magic.

Aww hell no one can forget that talking carrot. By that time the writers had literally run out of ideas and that one episode killed the series for good. By then it should have been put out of its misery, but the final episode "Junkyard in space" still had to air. The Robinsons died of starvation off screen.


Cloning:

Cloning is not creating a duplicate of person A who becomes person B a clone is a copy in only the physical sense it has its own personality and traits. It's not a 1 to 1 copy. Scifi really needs to get over this trope. The only exceptions I find to this is if there is a 1 to 1 duplicate of a person like in Dark Matter or such and then it's the same person with their thoughts but in general it is not but it's been done so many times in science fiction.

 

[Discofan]

*Cough*OriginalLostinSpace*Cough*

What's so bad about it? Not everything in the universe is necessarily going work exactly the way things on Earth do.
It's also worth keeping in mind that both the Jem'Hdar, and the Xenomorphs were genetically engineered, so they were specifically designed not to do things like eat.
I just remembered another example of a genre mashup, the upcoming YA book Mage Against the Machine. It's a post-apocalyptic story about mages fighting robots.

Seriously? Everything in the universe that moves on its own has to consume energy in order to do it. If you don't eat then when do you get that energy from? Plus when things grow, they need to get that added matter somewhere, if they don't eat how do they get that matter inside of them? Even robots work with energy plus they usually don't grow because they are constructed in their definitive size.

 

[Grendelsbayne]

Seriously? Everything in the universe that moves on its own has to consume energy in order to do it. If you don't eat then when do you get that energy from? Plus when things grow, they need to get that added matter somewhere, if they don't eat how do they get that matter inside of them? Even robots work with energy plus they usually don't grow because they are constructed in their definitive size.

Eating isn't the only way of consuming energy. Plants don't eat. Maybe xenomorphs can convert background radiation into cellular energy or some such thing. Maybe they absorb trace materials from their surroundings to grow, just like plants absorb minerals from the ground.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Why couldn't the xenomorph have gotten into the Nostromo's stores?

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Eating isn't the only way of consuming energy. Plants don't eat. Maybe xenomorphs can convert background radiation into cellular energy or some such thing. Maybe they absorb trace materials from their surroundings to grow, just like plants absorb minerals from the ground.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/6282/in-the-aliens-movie-what-do-the-xenomorphs-eat

Maybe they ate the ship. Or parts of it since they have some kind of silicon makeup in their biology.