Megacorporations + War with Mars
What tropes in science fiction annoy you?
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
The alien species where killing the Queen causes every member of the species to fall down dead. Seriously, what the hell was evolution thinking?!
The weapons that vary hugely in power - like when in Trek, in one scene a photon torpedo hit does the damage of a small cannonball, but then in another it strips half the crust off a planet.
A specific Trek one - how DS9 was meant to be out on the distant frontier, but then the crew could seemingly nip back to Earth whenever they felt like, in a day or two. Similarly, how the NX-01 spent the better part of two years heading out into space and then got back to Earth in what seemed like a few days.
The scientist who comes up with an invention that nobody else ever can. See Data's positronic brain, for example. In real life science just doesn't work that way. If anybody comes up with some new scientific advance, you can bet that he or she just barely beat the other half dozen competitors who were close to achieving the same thing.
The weapons that vary hugely in power - like when in Trek, in one scene a photon torpedo hit does the damage of a small cannonball, but then in another it strips half the crust off a planet.
A specific Trek one - how DS9 was meant to be out on the distant frontier, but then the crew could seemingly nip back to Earth whenever they felt like, in a day or two. Similarly, how the NX-01 spent the better part of two years heading out into space and then got back to Earth in what seemed like a few days.
The scientist who comes up with an invention that nobody else ever can. See Data's positronic brain, for example. In real life science just doesn't work that way. If anybody comes up with some new scientific advance, you can bet that he or she just barely beat the other half dozen competitors who were close to achieving the same thing.
Another exception was Dollhouse which showed the bad future at the end of season 1 and stuck with it for the final episode of season 2 (which was the final episode of the show).
Or the related one where killing one inventor stops the invention from ever occurring. Same reason - if one guy's close it's only a matter of time before someone else gets there.
I'll turn that on its head - when a show or film features an apocalyptic future, and there is time travel involved, but they either don't even TRY to avert that future (12 Monkeys) or they keep trying and it never works (the Terminator franchise).
I thought 12 Monkeys was an attempt to alter the apocalyptic future. It just happened to be the case that their info on what caused it was so bad that their attempt to stop it actually caused it.
Huh I thought all the time travellers in that movie were loonies
Well, I mean, Willis was institutionalized in the past. Who wouldn't be if they went around telling people they were from the future and trying to stop a terrible thing from happening? It was a bit odd in that he was apparently untrained and only sent as some kind of prison release deal - he was in future prison at the start of the movie - but I guess that was because they had so little idea of how to do it that they were tired of sending their best people and never hearing from them again.
Yes, exactly. Or minutes when it comes to piloting alien craft.
Ace starfleet pilot enters a craft of unknown alien engineering from a species with a completely alien evolution and culture. A couple of obligatory lines like, "Okay, this must be the throttle" or "This appears to be impulse control" and we're good to go.
Oh - and scientists who know every field of science! Dana Scully was the big one for me. The woman is a medical doctor! She should know medicine - and likely only know one or two fields of medicine well, at that. She might have a decent general knowledge of biology and chemistry, but she would be no expert in either one. But she constantly makes pronouncements about every science - hell, her thesis was rewriting Einstein!
On similar lines, Doctors who can treat any alien. There's no such thing as a Doctor who even knows every field of Human medicine well, but in sci-fi Doctors usually not only know every field of Human medicine, but everything about dozens of alien species as well. You could spend a lifetime of studying and never cover a tenth of all that.
On similar lines, Doctors who can treat any alien. There's no such thing as a Doctor who even knows every field of Human medicine well, but in sci-fi Doctors usually not only know every field of Human medicine, but everything about dozens of alien species as well. You could spend a lifetime of studying and never cover a tenth of all that.
Monolithic cultures, aliens speak one language named after their planet but not one human speaks Earth.
This is why they joined Starfleet to escape paternity court and avoid alimony credits
I actually don't mind that one so much. Larry Niven made the point in Ringworld that once Earth had universal access to teleportation for everyone, cultural differences were gradually erased. There were no longer any barriers isolating one culture from another, people could mix so freely and easily that it all just blended together into one planet-wide culture. It took centuries to happen, but Earth did wind up one one monolithic culture where everyone spoke the same language, wore the same fashions, ate the same foods, etc. I think he's probably on the right track.
Sounds like hell on Earth and almost racist.
Actually the character who was thinking about it thought much the same thing.
Here's the quote if you're interested :
Ringworld said:
Actually I think we've already seen the very early beginnings of it. Think of how international trade and communication has changed the world already. People eat foods the wouldn't and couldn't have eaten even a hundred years ago, people on different continents watch the same TV shows, read the same news sources. You'll find many of the same goods in the shops in any western country.
I bet you have friends in other countries, right? I talk daily to a friend in America. Even twenty years ago that wasn't practical, and twenty years before that it wasn't possible.
Now add a world government so the laws are the same everywhere, and allow the free mixing of people with no impediments at all? I can easily believe that a century later there wouldn't be a lot of cultural difference left.
Not sure how you get to racist.
Take the EU as an example, the Germans and French share a common currency and border and yet the French are still French and the Germans still German. And that is the way it should stay. The only way humans become like fictional, monolithic Vulcans (whose motto is IDIC, what a contradiction) is if there is a genocidal World War that destroys everywhere on Earth except some small village in Cornwall, who are then left to populate the planet.
In order to abandon all cultural differences which cultures are abandoned and which culture ascends?
IIRC it wasn't that they were trying to prevent the catastrophe, they (the ones that sent the travellers back, that is) were trying to get a clean sample of the virus before it mutated so that they could design a cure for the future.
One assumes they didn't try to prevent it because they assumed it would cause a paradox...turns out, they were correct.
I also got the impression that those in power in the future were slightly inept and more than a little corrupt. So any use of time travel would be geared towards improving their lot, not humanity as a whole and certainly not some alternate timeline version of themselves. "Better to rule in hell" and all that...
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