Tired Sci-Fi Tropes That Must Be Retired!

POSTED BY: cljohnston108
UPDATED: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 16:47
VIEWED: 10267
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IMNOTHERE

Sunday, April 1, 2007 7:10 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Slowhand:
I had some problems with some of those comments. I've heard this a lot, and I always have the same arguement. It's science FICTION.

Pah! You passed up a brilliant opportunity for a Firefly quote:
(Approx. - from memory):
Wash: Psychic? Is that even possible? It sounds like science fiction!
Zoe: You live on a SPACESHIP, dear!
Wash: So?

Seriously, though - good science fiction tries to use suspension of disbelief sparingly. If you take an "anything is possible" attitude then its impossible to tell stories without inventing all sorts of technobabble to explain why the hero can't just use magic to resolve every problem.

E.g. how often did Star Trek need to come up with some bull about metaphasic particle fluxes in the upper ionosphere to explain why they couldn't use the transporter* to rescue the crew?

We don't know how artificial gravity would work if it were possible. Its there because it would be to o expensive to shoot a TV show with everybody on wires all the time (the excellent but short-lived 80s UK show "Star Cops" deserves an honourable mention for trying that).

We don't know how FTL would work, but we need it if we want to visit a new planet every week - still, a good show will decide what sort of speed and range it offers , and not have our heroes take a month to get to Sirius one week, but popping over to the Magellanic Clouds for lunch the next.

We DO know how a crossbow works, how an object moves in zero-g, whether an automatic rifle would fire in a vacuum or whether sound travels in space, whether lasers show up in a vacuum. We could model a solar system with "dozens of planets and hundreds of moons" and work out likely distances and travel times - or at least make it look less like they were all suspended stationary in space. So why not get these right?

(And if it features werewolves then its Fantasy, not SF... although that goes for most TV/Film "SF", hard SF tends to have too much exposition)

* The transporter was a clever (at the time) idea to get around 60s TVs dogma that to get someone from A to B you had to show every stage of their journey. Without it, the producers felt that they'd have to do an effects sequence of a shuttle landing every time to explain how characters got down. Trek was already much faster-cut than other shows - ever watched "Land of the giants" or "Voyage to the bottom of the sea" and noticed how slow moving they are c.f. Star Trek? TNG etc. was pretty much obliged to use the cursed transporter, but introducing it in Enterprise was just daft.

CRUITHNE3753

Sunday, April 1, 2007 7:25 PM

Please, no more CGI dinosaurs. Toy plastic ones are OK, though.

SLOWHAND

Sunday, April 1, 2007 7:46 PM

Yeah, I understand what you're saying about accepting ANYTHING. I guess what some people fail to realize is that when watching a show, there are a set of rules that are set by the shows creator. One of the rules for Joss was no aliens, no sound in space. Now, if George Lucas says, "My show will have aliens and it will have sound in space", then he just set the rules for his show. And that's fine. I think what gets to me is when people compare other shows and they say things like, "Well, this show did this right, why can;t this other show?" It's not a question of if it's right or wrong. It's a question of is this show playing by the rules that it set for itself.

Time travel movies each have their own idea of time travel. Is one right? No. Time travel isn't possible. It's fiction. That's one of the great things about being a story teller. You get to play god. You get to make the rules and you get to tell the story the way you want to.

That's not to say that there aren't some bad ideas. There are times that a writer will write themself into a corner and come up with a lazy way to get out. If my hero is backed into a corner and he shoots a fireball from his eyes to escape, and the rules I set for the story don't allow for that, then yeah, I would have crossed a line. But, if my story is about a guy that can do that, I don't want to hear that I shouldn't have done that because, "technically, the eyes can't produce heat, and if they could, that heat would cause brain damage. Maybe the writer should've read 'fireball eyes for dummies' to see the right way to do this!"

CRUITHNE3753

Sunday, April 1, 2007 7:59 PM

It's all a matter of sub-genre, hard SF, naturalistic SF, space opera, science fantasy... how about a swords & sorcery flick where at the end it turns out that the "sorcery" is in fact forgotten technology? Give it the wobbly hand-held camera treatment while your at it...

IMNOTHERE

Sunday, April 1, 2007 10:05 PM

Quote:

Now, if George Lucas says, "My show will have aliens and it will have sound in space"

Actually, I've thought about it, and the sound in space thing is a misconception.

You see, the theory is that sound can't travel in space, because sound is a vibration and there's no air in space to carry it.

However, we're talking about movie sound which is a totally different phenomenon. Its a well known factoid that, if you were standing (say) half a mile from a big explosion you'd see the explosion a couple of seconds before you heard the bang. This is because light travels at about a million times the speed of sound. Yet, if you put a movie camera where you were standing and filmed the explosion, the film would show the explosion and the bang at the same time. I can't be bothered to test this right now but you see it in all sorts of films, including ones about war and other stuff that is true, like Superman, so its not just a SF thing.

This is because movie cameras don't record sound as "air vibrations", they record audible photons which carry the same information as sound but otherwise behave like light. If you look up information on old movies, you'll see that they had an "optical soundtrack" (see http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/question413.htm) that recorded the audible photons directly, although this was replaced with a more efficient magnetic strip once video recording provided a way to record light on magnetic tape*. Since these are photons, they travel at the speed of light - so, even if you film an atom bomb going off 10 miles away and don't hear the bang for ages after the flash they'll both be together on film, just like in the movies.

The practical upshot of this is that, although sound can't travel in space, these audible photons can, so if you could use a movie camera in space you would get sound (at the same time as the explosion, too!).

* This wasn't used to record the picture because it was years before colour video tape was invented. But few people notice if sound is recorded in black and white (unless you suffer from a rare mental condition known as synaesthesia). Audio compression, like MP3, works by taking out the unecessary colour information from digital sound.

DONCOAT

Sunday, April 1, 2007 11:10 PM

Audible photons. Heehee.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm pointin' right at it!

CRUITHNE3753

Monday, April 2, 2007 12:18 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by ImNotHere:
However, we're talking about movie sound which is a totally different phenomenon. Its a well known factoid that, if you were standing (say) half a mile from a big explosion you'd see the explosion a couple of seconds before you heard the bang. This is because light travels at about a million times the speed of sound. Yet, if you put a movie camera where you were standing and filmed the explosion, the film would show the explosion and the bang at the same time.

Like it. Very Pratchett-esque. (Just been reading The Science of Discworld.)

ROCKETJOCK

Monday, April 2, 2007 2:52 AM

Having read the pages the link leads to, I have to say, for all he knows about science fiction, I don't think this guy likes it too much.

He's also very fast to express his own prejudices as scientific fact, as in his complaint about the butterfly effect. I'd suggest he read Larry Niven's classic essay Theory and Practice of Time Travel, where he discusses such concepts as temporal inertia and the law of conservation of history.

As for horizontally-oriented spacecraft, he's right in that they're not necessary but that's not the same thing as saying they're illogical. Guy, if you have non-spin type artificial gravity, you can lay out your ship any way you like, and horizontal layouts are extremely intuitive for planetborn humans to orient to.

He is dead on about a few dozen SF cliches, though--my own favorite is "The Deadly Cold of Space." Um, guys, space is a vacuum; it's nothing! Nothing doesn't have a temperature! It just insulates!

"She's tore up plenty. But she'll fly true." -- Zoë Washburn

ROCKETJOCK

Monday, April 2, 2007 3:01 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Slowhand:

I have a friend that doesn't like Van Helsing because he thought the crossbow worked in an unrealistic way. A GUY TURNS INTO A WEREWOLF AND HE'S COOL, but the crossbow doesn't work right and it ruins the movie for him.

My own problem with Van Helsing was the way they go out of their way to show a full moon in one scene, then have V.H. bitten by a werewolf no more than a day later, and then announce that the next full moon is in three days...

Wow. A seven-day lunar month. Interesting physics in this universe...

"She's tore up plenty. But she'll fly true." -- Zoë Washburn

SLOWHAND

Monday, April 2, 2007 3:50 AM

I've always been the kind of person that, if I have to, I'll make up an excuse to MAKE something work. For example, in the Van Helsing crossbow thing. To me, the fact that the bow recoiled looked cool, so I liked it. When it comes to movies, it's ok to take cool over real sometimes. But if someone is gonna use their knowledge to make something appear wrong, I'm gonna try to make it appear right. My friend said that if it was gas powered, the bow shouldn't recoil, so that was stupid and he didn't like it. Well, again, I didn't care cause it was cool, but rather than use what I know to disprove something in a movie, I would much rather say something like, "Well, the recoil wasn't firing the bolts. It would recoil back to draw in air that was needed to mix with the gas in order to fire the bolt. Kind of like a pump." It's crap, I know, but I would rather do that and then move on with the movie rather than cry and moan over something so trivial that it ruins the whole movie for me. I HATED the fact that Spider-Man had organic web shooters. But about 10 seconds later, I was over it. LOL!

Yes, there are certain things that are just wrong, like the full moon cycle that was mentioned. Some things are just mistakes. (Wash not having a steering wheel anyone?) But hey, it didn't ruin the show. It was a mistake. They're human. Move on.

I love a good discussion about how things work just as much as the next person, but I just think some people take it too far. If you want to bring out a mistake that was made in a movie, feel free. But don't go as far as saying that the movie sucks because of that one mistake. I was reading on a forum the other day about the Transformers movie. They showed a picture of Optimus Prime's head. There was a poster that said, "Everything looks great, except Prime's eyes! Couldn't they get this right!?!? This movie has no plot and it sucks so bad! What a failure!!!" Um.....dude......uh......someone needs to let you know that whatever you think you saw.........it wasn't Transformers. The reason I know this is because THE MOVIE ISN'T EVEN OUT YET!!! Yet this guy is aparently psycic or something. He can tell the movie is a bomb cause he didn't like Prime's eyes.

Some people need to open their front door every once in a while and remind themselves that there's a whole world out there.

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