So I am currently rewatching Stargate SG1 and thinking about certain things that always rub me the wrong way when watching or reading SciFi. Now, I know that Stargate in particular doesn’t really take itself too seriously and shouldn’t be scrutinized too much. It’s also a bit older. But there are still some things that even modern SciFi-Worlds featuring outer space and aliens have or lack, that always slightly rub me the wrong way. I would love to hear your opinion.
- Lack of any form of camera surveillance technology
I mean, come on, the Goa’uld couldn’t figure out a way to install their equivalent of cameras all over their battle ships in order to monitor it? They have forms of video/picture transmitting technology. Star Trek also seems to lack any form of video surveillance. (I’m not up to date with the newest series.) Yes, I get that having a crew member physically go to a cargo bay and check out the situation is better for dramatic purposes. But it always rubs me the wrong way that they have to do that. I would just love to see a SciFi-Series set in space where all space ships are equipped with proper camera technology. Not just some vague “sensor” that tells the crew “something is wrong, but you will still have to physically go there and see it for yourself”. I want the captain of a space ship to have access to the 200,000 cameras strategically placed all over the ship to monitor it.
- Languages
I have studied linguistics, learned several foreign languages and lived in a foreign country for a while, so my perspective is influenced by that. I always find it weird when everybody “just talks English”. Yes, I get that it’s easier to write stories in which all characters can just freely interact with each other. But it’s always so weird to me when an explorer comes to a foreign planet and everybody just talks their language. At least make up an explanation for it! “We found this translator device in the space ship that crashed on earth”. There you go. I love the Stargate Movie where Daniel Jackson figures out how to communicate with the people on Abydos. During the series most worlds will just speak English, with some random words in other languages thrown in. As someone interested in linguistics I love Stargate for how much it features deciphering languages, though I still find it weird when they go to another world and everybody just speaks English.
- Humanoid aliens
Especially with modern CGI I would just love to shows get more creative when it comes to alien races. We don’t need a person in a costume anymore. Every once in a while you will have that weird alien pop up, but all in all I feel like there’s still a lot of potential. Also changes in Human physiology due to different environmental conditions on foreign planets.
That being said, I would also like to mention some SciFi-titles that in my mind stand out for being very creative in this regard:
- The writing of Julie Czerneda is very creative when it comes to alien species. She was a biologist and uses her knowledge to create a wide variety of alien life forms
- The forever war (Without spoiling the end, so I’ll leave it at that. Just liked it as a creative take on an alien race so different it’s incomprehensible to us)
- I very much appreciate Douglas Adams for the babel fish.
- I also liked The expanse for including the development of a Belter language and changes in human physiology due to different gravity.
What do you think? Do you know any good examples of SciFi-Worldbuilding, that solve some common inconsistencies?
(Edited because it looked weird :P) Also, I rembered one more thing: I have two serious food allergies and I always cringe when I see characters take some random food from an alien civilisation and eat. It’s especially bad right now while rewatching Stargate. SG1 just keeps happily eating and drinking anything that is offered and there are so many scenes of them eating without asking much. Maybe it’s just because I can’t even do that in my own society and am so used to always asking “What is in it? Can I eat it?” Although some shows have good solutions like standard nutrient packs in a military context or food replicators that create any food you want.
Distance. Almost every SciFi completely fails to represent distance even remotely closely.
This isn’t a gripe about FTL, it’s a gripe about non-FTL! Fancy FTL avoids the problem.
Star trek does it quite well in most cases, it takes days at warp foo to get anywhere. Voyager took years.
New Star wars butchers it; e.g. The Mandalorian episode with the no lightspeed/hyperspace plot device: oh no it took hours/days to get between star systems. Days! Imagine taking days to travel unfathomable distances!
New Dune (KJA’s books) inexcusably get it wrong. Claiming that “slow” travel between systems took months.
The mote in God’s eye does it extremely well with its pairs of jump points (shoutout to Mass Effect here too). Sometimes it’s quicker to use a jump point to another system, crawl to another (nearer) jump point and then jump back to the first sytem rather than crawl directly across the original system.
It takes light very long time to travel across our solar system, let alone interstellar distances. It’s like these writers have never even considered how long a container ship on earth takes to travel and still be viable.
Starships in Star Trek have three systems for propulsion: thrusters, impulse, and warp. Oh, and in my head, nothing exists after Bakula’s Enterprise, the era of star ships dogfighting like fighter jets flooding the screen with beam spam “isn’t my father’s Star Trek” and isn’t mine either.
In TOS through ENT, we see;
Warp Drive is the FTL technology in this setting; when at warp the stars themselves seem to whiz by like signs on a highway. The exact details of what warp factor means what actual speed change over time; Warp 10 is and isn’t an absolute speed limit, trans-warp drive is a thing USS Excelsior has, and then something only the Borg have…generally the bigger the warp number, the more desperate the plot is. Urgent plot point! Helm, warp 8, engage! Episode is over and the status quo has resumed. Helm, set a course for somewhere, warp 2, engage.
Thrusters are barely able to move the ship and are used for docking maneuvers or when the ship has had the snot beat out of it and nothing works; the thrusters never break so they are always at least barely able to move.
Impluse power is also depicted inconsistently. In plot delivered by dialog, the ship can move at like a quarter of the speed of light under impulse power; they sometimes talk about doing short trips under impulse to the next planet or star system over; yet when we visually see ships maneuvering under impulse, they’re acting like watercraft chugging along at 10 or 20 knots, slowly hoving in and out of space dock as if “1/4 impulse power” meant “all ahead slow.” If full impulse power moves the ship at 0.25c, leaving space dock under 1/4 impulse should look more like THIS.
I love how the different special effects recontextualizes the actors’ performances.
=====
New topic: my favorite sci-fi mode of FTL travel is from the Battletech franchise. Jumpships are able to teleport anywhere within 30 light years of their present position in a matter of seconds, though they’re delicate and need to stay pretty far outside of a gravity well for safety, so they tend to hang out far outside the plane of the ecliptic above or below a star, recharging the engine via solar power. The trick is flying to and from the jumpship, which is done on a dropship which spends half the time accelerating at 1G, and half the time decelerating at 1G, because “fusion rockets” can do that.
A journey from Earth (called “Terra” in-universe) to some planet within 30 light years will take a week or so on the dropship on the way to the jumpship, a few seconds in hyperspace, and then a week or so on the dropship on the way down to the planet. Need to go farther than 30 light years? You either have to have set up a series of jumpships ready to do a relay race, or your jumpship has to take half a week to recharge its batteries to jump again.
They even treat communications semi-realistically; there are special space radios called HPGs which kind of use jump drive technology to instantly send a message to another HPG within 50 light years, or you can hand the message to someone who is getting on a dropship, or you have radio as we know it now complete with speed of light delay. And unless Michael Stackpole is writing, it’s depicted as pretty consistent. (In one of the Blood of Kerensky books, Stackpole has the Wolf’s Dragoons jump into low orbit of Luthien “inside the orbit of our nearest moon” which per established fiction shouldn’t have worked for a couple different reasons.)
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Dirk Van den Boem “Sternkreuzer Proxima” (“Starcruiser Proxima”, couldn’t find the actual English titel on a quick search). He has some very good descriptions of the gruelingly long times any maneuver in space takes. Also being cramped in a small space ship with no fresh air, tasteless food rations and not knowing what is going to happen, while your ship and the enemy ship spend the next 50 hours getting in position for their attack.