Science fiction pet hate
- Thread starter Deckerd
- Start date
I really feel SG-1 was a better show when it had a smaller budget. Before, they had to kind of imply a vast universe using dark warehouses and bizarre-looking scarpyard surplus with the occasional alien beach matte painting thrown in – as befit a series about a small team of explorers just starting to poke at the fringes of the universe. But once they got more money and actually started trying to show us shit like the Ancients and big alien villiages, it became really obvious that they bought one large sound stage, threw a lot of cash at at polyfoam stonework, then kept redressing it over and over and over. Bleh.
I think at a certain point, that's one of the things the audience just needs to accept, regardless of how unbelievable it is, in order for the story to move forward - probably more so in an ongoing TV series (especially one as relatively bubblegum as "Stargate Atlantis"). Unless the story you're going to tell is about the difficulties of learning to communicate with aliens (like the TNG episode "Darmok" for example). If the characters continually run into never being able to communicate without going through the arduous process of learning the local language with the people they come across, every episode would start getting really stale.
Of course, you could build story arcs around it, but that's just not the type of show "Atlantis" was ever going to be. I just think it's one of the situations where we have to sacrifice realism for the sake of the story.
On the flipside of that, at least "Star Trek" has the supposed 'universal translator' that is able to make aliens speak English with our characters even if it's never heard that particular language before. "Atlantis" doesn't even bother with even that flimsy justification.
PS, I also thought this episode was supposed to be about sci fi pets we hate.
Rii
Rear Admiral
Starship Troopers (movie):
Physically impossible (due to the square-cube law - the Bugs in the book might have just looked like insects without actually sharing their body structure, so I can forgive that) giant insects fire plasma out of their asses at the speed of a modern-day rocket that hit asteroids in their system tens of thousands of miles away with precision accuracy, launching those asteroids across the bulk of the galaxy at the same slow speeds to target individual cities on Earth in a period of months at most. They also use the same plasma to catapult their spore to other planets.
This issue could have easily been solved by making the "Bugs" a spacefaring technological species like they were in the book, introducing the "Skinnies" and having them make the attack on the Bugs' behalf, or forgetting about the Buenos Aries attack altogether and having humans attack without even that justification, thus reinforcing the Nazi allegory Verhoeven was going for.
Star Trek Generations:
In a similar vein to the Starship Troopers issue, the Nexus seems to travel at about a 100 miles per hour in comparison to planets, yet traverses vast interstellar distances in a loop every thirty years or so. It is also capable of reading minds and determining what those trapped inside desire most, and resumably tailoring the internal environment to their needs. The only way the Nexus makes sense is for it to be a massive spacefaring lifeform that can achieve warp yet slows down when it senses other lifeforms, and that this creature feeds off of endorphins or simply enjoys its occupants feeling pleasure and contentment. Maybe they're its "pets" and its a great caretaker.
From the same movie, the fact that apparent genius Soren can't seem to figure out that he doesn't need to destroy stars to return to the Nexus, and could have done so at any time by renting a shuttle and a spacesuit and spacewalking in front of the Nexus as it approaches and before it endangers the shuttle.
Physically impossible (due to the square-cube law - the Bugs in the book might have just looked like insects without actually sharing their body structure, so I can forgive that) giant insects fire plasma out of their asses at the speed of a modern-day rocket that hit asteroids in their system tens of thousands of miles away with precision accuracy, launching those asteroids across the bulk of the galaxy at the same slow speeds to target individual cities on Earth in a period of months at most. They also use the same plasma to catapult their spore to other planets.
This issue could have easily been solved by making the "Bugs" a spacefaring technological species like they were in the book, introducing the "Skinnies" and having them make the attack on the Bugs' behalf, or forgetting about the Buenos Aries attack altogether and having humans attack without even that justification, thus reinforcing the Nazi allegory Verhoeven was going for.
Star Trek Generations:
In a similar vein to the Starship Troopers issue, the Nexus seems to travel at about a 100 miles per hour in comparison to planets, yet traverses vast interstellar distances in a loop every thirty years or so. It is also capable of reading minds and determining what those trapped inside desire most, and resumably tailoring the internal environment to their needs. The only way the Nexus makes sense is for it to be a massive spacefaring lifeform that can achieve warp yet slows down when it senses other lifeforms, and that this creature feeds off of endorphins or simply enjoys its occupants feeling pleasure and contentment. Maybe they're its "pets" and its a great caretaker.
From the same movie, the fact that apparent genius Soren can't seem to figure out that he doesn't need to destroy stars to return to the Nexus, and could have done so at any time by renting a shuttle and a spacesuit and spacewalking in front of the Nexus as it approaches and before it endangers the shuttle.
darkwing_duck1
Vice Admiral
Not true:
Here's a good non-technical explanation of what really happens:
Another, more technical version:
http://www.damninteresting.com/outer-space-exposure
I really really hate all these "conspiracy/alien takeover"shows like "V" and that Roddenberry show from the 90's (whose name has just now fled my brain).
Cheap,dreary and so cliched.
Why is there always a computer geek(the geekier the better).And why does th villains hideout always have to have strange lighting effects?Light streaming up through the floor,through ducts and oddly placed vents.
Cheap,dreary and so cliched.
Why is there always a computer geek(the geekier the better).And why does th villains hideout always have to have strange lighting effects?Light streaming up through the floor,through ducts and oddly placed vents.
MeanJoePhaser
Admiral
They'd sooner a send a dozer out to push the wreckage than send a recovery vehicle to drag it inside. PILOTS AND SALVAGEABLE PARTS? WHO NEEDS THEM?
My exact thoughts when I watched that film! My god they were losing the war. Shouldn't they try to at least make an attempt to stay in the fight as long as possible??
Vons
There's sort of an unspoken behind-the-scenes producer theory that the Stargates provide everyone who passes through them with the ability to understand other languages. There's a tie-in novel set just before "Emancipation" (the first episode where the "aliens" were shown speaking English from the get-go) that depicts this happening -- at first SG-1 doesn't understand the alien language without Daniel interpreting, but then they step through a second Stargate, one on the standard network rather than the hacked one used by the SGC, and suddenly they're imbued with the ability to understand the language.
I don't remember the Reliant being any darker than the Enterprise in ST2. Klingon ships are known to be dreary places whether they are "good" or "bad", and in Nemesis there was an in-movie explanation for why a ship full of Remans would prefer a dark environment.
The new Trek movie does seem to follow this line of thinking though, the Enterprise looks like an Apple Store with neon lights and the mining vessel looks like it's a mile underground. Maybe that's a conscious choice given that it's supposed to be a mining vessel, but they don't work underground, they work on a space ship.
Besides the fact that they have "gravity plating" (whatever that is), we have no idea how artificial gravity works in Trek. It's obviously not centrifugal (the way we'd accomplish the same thing in real life).
I'll give them a pass, because if you wanted to be really strict about the influence of gravity outside the ship, parking a ship in orbit around a planet would be quite terrifying to the people who live there, what with the tidal effects of something with the influence of Earth suddenly parked a few thousand kilometres away. "Gravitons", or whatever they use, must be focused in some way in certain areas of the ship, and they must have a relatively short range. Enterprise showed that ships have certain "sweet spots" where gravity has less or no influence at all.
Yeah, but it's still silly to see something like "Minefield" where the characters are standing right on top of the hull and are not feeling the gravity that they'd be feeling if they were just three meters further down.
I rationalized it in one of my novels by saying that ST gravity generators produce virtual gravitons that are calibrated to decay after several meters so as not to interfere with the warp field and such. But it's an overcomplicated handwave for a silly conceit.
Not at all. Remember the inverse square law. We feel a pull of 1g at a distance of c. 6380 km from the center of mass of the planet. An occupant of a spaceship would only need to feel that pull at a distance of, at most, a couple hundred meters from the center of mass of the gravity source. If we call it 63.8 m, that's 1/100000 the distance (10^-5), so by the inverse square law, the gravitational field would only have to be one ten billionth as strong (10^-10) to induce the same 1g acceleration on the subject. That's far too weak a gravitational field to have any significant tidal effect on a planet being orbited.
Science fiction television's absolute refusal to deal with any subjects truly science-fictional. Usually, they're westerns in space - sometimes very good ones - but most of the time, these shows can just as easily have taken place in the past, with different props. Lost, for example, started to go all sci-fi, especially in its last season with the parallel universe, and then it pussied out and became Touched by an Angel.
Even a show like Caprica, which pretends to be about the birth of artificial intelligence (a good science-fiction premise) is really about religious zealotry and bureaucracy and all the other contemporary television subjects, and seems to almost deliberately (like Battlestar Galactica before it) avoid dealing with the real question of the nature artificial intelligence (the way a movie like A.I. or a book by Asimov might deal with it.) Why can't a science fiction show be more than just an allegory for current politics? Yes, that's one kind of science fiction, a perfectly valid kind, but it's not the only kind.
Why are most television writers afraid to write a series around the kinds of sci-fi themes that literary sci-fi has been writing about, very compellingly, for over a century?
Even a show like Caprica, which pretends to be about the birth of artificial intelligence (a good science-fiction premise) is really about religious zealotry and bureaucracy and all the other contemporary television subjects, and seems to almost deliberately (like Battlestar Galactica before it) avoid dealing with the real question of the nature artificial intelligence (the way a movie like A.I. or a book by Asimov might deal with it.) Why can't a science fiction show be more than just an allegory for current politics? Yes, that's one kind of science fiction, a perfectly valid kind, but it's not the only kind.
Why are most television writers afraid to write a series around the kinds of sci-fi themes that literary sci-fi has been writing about, very compellingly, for over a century?
I think Caprica's doing a good job of being science fiction, in terms of creating a culture that's genuinely exotic. They're polytheistic with monotheists as mistrusted zealots; they're okay with group marriages; and so forth. True science fiction can be sociological, not just technological. And I think they're doing a good job exploring the ramifications of AI too, though they're taking their time with it, as one would expect of an ongoing series.
Ubik; you're right. TV sci-fi mostly plays it safe and plays it dull. I'd like crazy tripped out series about bizarre cultures but that's the surest way imaginable to drive the audience the hell away. And TV shows need audiences, after all.
As a hook I don't think there's a lot to that. Colonial society in general and now Caprican society in particular has always been something of a thinly veiled United States; and the religuous equation is mostly one of religuous fanatics condemning and fighting against a society that is largely secular. On the one hand, sure, group marriages (in itself another obvious comment), but on the other hand, Jon Stewart.
The show's handling of other cultures, well, follow the 'America' pattern closely. The Taurons are a mixture of Italian Mafia and Latino immigrant influences.
Which isn't to say any of this is a bad thing (I like Caprica a lot), but at no point watching the series do I think 'wow, this is a really interesting theoretical society' nor is the sociology all that deep.
As a hook I don't think there's a lot to that. Colonial society in general and now Caprican society in particular has always been something of a thinly veiled United States; and the religuous equation is mostly one of religuous fanatics condemning and fighting against a society that is largely secular. On the one hand, sure, group marriages (in itself another obvious comment), but on the other hand, Jon Stewart.
The show's handling of other cultures, well, follow the 'America' pattern closely. The Taurons are a mixture of Italian Mafia and Latino immigrant influences.
Which isn't to say any of this is a bad thing (I like Caprica a lot), but at no point watching the series do I think 'wow, this is a really interesting theoretical society' nor is the sociology all that deep.
It can also be brainless pulp; that doesn't make it any more or less true.
SG1 didn't need to gift the aliens with English. It only needed to establish that everyone we hear as speaking English offworld is really speaking Go'a'uld, just like we hear English when, say, Nazis in a WWII action flick are speaking German. The ones who don't speak Go'a'uld need translating. Throw in an occasional remark about Daniel talking just as fast in either language or Jack not immediately understanding English when he comes back until he's got his coffee, and you're done. For Atlantis, sub modern Ancient (nice oxymoron!)
Star Trek could have rewritten the Universal Translator to be a data bank of subspace communications picked and analyzed by artificial intelligence. Cultures without previous communications need to be translated.
If you want to tell a serious story with aliens, don't make them comfortably English speaking.
Star Trek could have rewritten the Universal Translator to be a data bank of subspace communications picked and analyzed by artificial intelligence. Cultures without previous communications need to be translated.
If you want to tell a serious story with aliens, don't make them comfortably English speaking.
I figured something similar; imagined that there is something built into the inner hull - an energized mesh or something similar - that allows these custom particles to exist within its confines. Outside the mesh, the regular state of things reasserts itself, and "pop" no more gravity.
I'm sure that would present a major headache for structural engineers, but when you get right down to it, the concept of artificial gravity generation is pretty whacky no matter how you cut it.
Having said that, if somebody gave me a sci-fi television show I would totally use it, too; realistic weightlessness in every space scene would probably chew through the FX budget in a matter of months.
This thread is fascinating and I love it. I just feel frustrating that pretty much anything I could mention has already been mentioned. 
Oh, wait! There is one thing that really bugged the hell out of me when I saw it. In one of the recent Star Wars trilogy films we see a ship with definite artificial gravity change orientation while still in orbit...and everyone and everything starts sliding across the floor as if the ship were in a rough seas or something!
??? Hello! That wouldn't happen if you've got artificial gravity.
Oh, wait! There is one thing that really bugged the hell out of me when I saw it. In one of the recent Star Wars trilogy films we see a ship with definite artificial gravity change orientation while still in orbit...and everyone and everything starts sliding across the floor as if the ship were in a rough seas or something!
??? Hello! That wouldn't happen if you've got artificial gravity.
Similar threads
