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Eight Science Fiction Tropes of Convenience
February 19th, 2013
There are a number of tropes that I see popping up over and over in science fiction, even though they are not very scientifically plausible and border on the impossible given our current understanding. They are used and will continue to be used, especially in movies and tv, because they’re very convenient. I find it more interesting not to adopt them usually, and maybe that’s why none of my work will be adapted into a screenplay (well, one of the reasons). Star Trek uses the majority of these, and is still popular today in its many manifestations, so what do I know?
Faster Than Light (FTL). Space is big, really big, as they say, and it takes a long time to get around at sublight speeds. Much more convenient to have short duration but not instantaneous travel. Personally I think relativistic effects are really cool, as are realistic starship technologies. You can also do interesting stories with generation ships, hibernation, etc., and certainly there has been a lot of good science fiction playing with those ideas.
Artificial Gravity. It’s inconvenient and expensive to shoot every scene in space in zero gee, and complicated to design ships with rotating sections. There are some nice instances of spin gravity in science fiction movies (e.g. 2001, Red Planet) or even magnetic boots (Destination Moon), but viewers are really comfortable seeing people walking around. Lots of science fiction just shows people walking around and it’s assumed there’s artificial gravity even though it’s an incredible technology and could be used in much more creative ways.
Humanoid Aliens. It’s challenging to create and film non-human aliens. Also hard to relate to them. I understand that in Avatar, a movie that tried hard to get the science right, original plans for non-human aliens were scrapped in the interest of audiences being not so likely to understand falling in love with a weird-looking critter. Much more convenient to slap on some forehead make-up or a mask and call it a wrap.
Universal Translator. Imagine if you had to invent an alien language for every new movie? And train actors to speak it. And add subtitles. Star Trek has a universal translator for convenience, although Vulcan, Klingon, and other languages were invented anyway because it’s fun. In Stargate SG-I, nearly everyone just spoke English for reasons I never understood (convenience!) and I’m not sure they ever explained…and they even had a linguist on the team when reading alien languages was required. In your face, logical consistency!
Force Fields. Why use steel bars or strong glass when you can have a magic force field? They also make great shields for space ships, apparently. I think they get used so much because the idea sounds cool and it’s easier to just have shields fail in a predictable way than to actually have to tear up your model spaceships or create realistic damage with CGI. How they work exactly was never clear to me, even when sometimes it’s clear it’s just supposed to be an electric field or something.
Mental Telepathy. I can only imagine this got grandfathered into science fiction since there were times in the past century ESP was taken seriously and studied, as well as a lot of charlatans running around claiming psychic powers. Okay, too many people still take it seriously today. Anyway, lots of mind reading and mind control going back to forever in science fiction. It has been used so much that little to no explanation is ever used. Audiences swallow it without much critical thought, and I almost never see it justified. Star Trek has Spock and Troi. Star Wars has the Force. Babylon 5 had telepaths. It’s harder to think of science fiction shows that didn’t go this route.
Super Sensors. Finding things in space, even though there’s not really anywhere to hide (despite Star Trek II‘s Motarin Nebula), is a pretty hard problem. As an astronomer, I know how hard it is to see every faint, small thing in the sky. It’s also hard to see everything on the surface of a planet from orbit. Sure, you can always see individual things you know where to find and focus on, but scanning the entire sky (or surface) deeply and at high resolution isn’t easy. Again, maybe this is an engineering problem we can solve with sufficient time, but I still find scanning for individual isotopes or lifeforms miles underground a pretty implausible problem.
Ray Guns. Conventional firearms are actually very efficient. Modern ammunition carries a lot of energy that can be quickly converted into kinetic energy and deposited where you want it to go. Lasers have the advantage of being faster (but when did the shot from a phaser or blaster ever appear to travel at light-speed?), but I have a hard time imagining a portable power source efficient enough and high energy enough to work for a laser gun. Maybe my imagination falls short here, since this is in principle engineering and not something at all theoretically impossible. In any event, it’s convenient to have portable weapons that don’t need ammunition and look cooler than conventional guns and can be set to ‘stun.’
I’ll stop here, wondering if I should include teleporters, time travel, or a few other things. I won’t include things like robots/androids, since they seem entirely reasonable extrapolations of current technology, and my list is about common things in science fiction that just don’t seem all that likely to me. Personally I think that using these is as lazy and often as boring as using for elves, dragons, and wizards in fantasy. Sure, you can do it, and audiences seem to love it, but why not do something a little more innovative?
What do you think?
Tags: movies, Science, Science Fiction, tropes, tv
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Oh dear. I’m using two of these in my latest book.
In my defence, the aliens need to be humanoid because they’re hiding on Earth and they’re deliberately disguising themselves to blend in (which lets me have them speaking English – does this mean I’m using three?).
The advantage of the ray gun is that it can double as a laser cutter if you need to break into something in a hurry. It also let me play with the idea of how it would recharge – something you can’t easily do with bullets.
The list is pretty solid except for the first one. I think FTL is fairly plausible. NASA is looking into it, after all:
I like rigor as much as the next nerd, but it’s mostly a question of balance. There’s a reason the mundane sci fi movement didn’t really take off, after all.
@Jessica, a good writer can write a good story about elves bearing ray guns, and I’m still mostly a Star Trek fan although the reboot gave me serious concerns. Hope the new movie is better.
@Nathanial, I read those new stories, too, and I’m still very skeptical until there’s proof of concept in the applied aspects. We have absolutely zero capability to engineer space at this stage, and no clear path how to do it in the future either in my opinion. Plus there’s a philosophical issue to consider, as FTL is time travel in principle, and that’s a whole other can of worms… It’d be huge fun if my skepticism were to be misplaced though!
If you’re writing near-future sf (say within 100 years) then those points of plausibility are reasonable. But a 110 years ago the concept of a smart phone, or maglev train would have seemed like the most ludicrous fantasy, and harnessing nuclear fusion about as likely as creating a wormhole is today.
I wonder if aliens are living among us (you could probably cite an example of a politician or two). It would make sense that they’d look like us by having altered their genetic makeup, not just to be inconspicuous but to adapt to our environment. But the question arises, is the humanoid form the pinnacle of adaptation for an Earth-like planet? Or is there something better to follow after the next global catastrophe?
Adrian, I’d probably extend your 100 years to “a few hundred” but agree that if we’re talking arbitrarily far future, improbable becomes a lot more likely. I still don’t believe in a universal translator that can work without having encountered another language before, although I would believe in a “universal translator” that could rapidly learn new languages (and perhaps other forms of communication) by careful observation over some extended time period.
And I should have explicitly said to Jessica above that for aliens trying to blend in here on Earth, I’d be shocked if they didn’t look human and speak human languages!
I would have thought Mental Telepathy could be justifiably engineered for sf purposes in the future, given some kind of brain-implant.
Ironically, while googling for something about this I came across the url www.synthetictelepathy.net/ ; on clicking it I got “Error establishing a database connection”, which doesn’t bode well for synthetic telepathy itself!
Narmitaj, I agree. Technology can definitely be used to create mental telepathy. I object to all the science fiction that assumes biological causes as being unsupported and too convenient to pass up. No reason a starship crew couldn’t all be chipped to communicate with each other without having to speak.
When I saw the heading “Super Sensors” I thought you’d hit on something that always makes me laugh when I see it in Star Trek. Someone will say, “Run a scan,” and somebody hits a few buttons and announces, “There’s a ship three light-years away.” I guess tacyons come in handy.
I think it’s reasonable to give artificial gravity, overly humanoid aliens and universal translators a pass in TV and to some degree movies. I’d rather have them invest a bit more in a good story rather than put half the budget into microgravity effects. And no, a blue human with a strange forehead isn’t too convincing, but cheap CGI isn’t either, and I like seeing good actors do their thing. And it helps to be able to understand what everyone is saying. Of course that is not to say that the gravity in 2001 or the language in Stargate (the movie) aren’t cool.
Generation ships and hypersleep (Aliens style) are very cool, and there are many books that tell int