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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  • monkA
    1·
    7 hours ago

    Oh, I have the same gripes and more, so in my roleplaying campaign that has later turned into a book:

    1. Characters have to conspire, mostly outside of their ship, just to have a chance at a secret away from the surveillance. Two characters that are no strangers to oppressive surveillance manage to maintain exactly one secret, but its hours are inherently numbered and it takes a lot to happen to make it last, what, an entire day?
    2. Alien language is one of the central problems, despite it being phenomenally trivial (and following a decidedly indoeuropean sentence structure only because the readers also need to comprehend it). All characters not preselected for fluency in it outright don’t speak it, there are just three of them on-screen, implied to be the best of the best. They then proceed to mess it up big time while messing it up, recursively, multi-track drifting style. Phonetics is mutually unpronounceable, but intelligible both ways, yet over the course of the entire story both sides attain only barely passable and generally unreliable listening proficiency. They mostly get by in alien writing. And alien writing isn’t even exactly linear, because
    3. Anatomically, aliens are lizard-like. Unless your world building justifies aliens being related to humans, humanoid aliens are utter cringe.
    4. Allergies are, uh, let’s just say one results in a pivotal plot point. Standard nutrient packs are a thing; people are shown to get creative with them on day two, yet not a single soul ever attempts munching any alien flora or fauna, lol. Not being utter morons about what they eat doesn’t automatically mean they’re safe either.
    5. Translation is available, and the problem is not even studying the alien language, it’s that it doesn’t really help bridge the cultural mismatch; if anything, “knowing” the language is a bit of a disservice here because the inherent crudeness of the translation only compounds the misunderstandings pileup. Blue/orange morality doesn’t help it either: the question of how does one translate what was originally mistaken for alienese for “good” is, uh, an annoyingly recurring one.
    6. No technology available in abundance is used in an even remotely reasonable manner. The very idea of being rational about using Tech X makes no sense if Tech X ain’t rationed. Abundant resources are gonna be used willy-nilly, period.
    7. Competence is scarce, doubly so when anything goes off-script.
    8. People are absurd. Groups of people are next-level absurd. Don’t even get me started on societies. Fiction involving all three that isn’t woven almost entirely from blunders upon blunders is, likely, bland competence porn. Now add a second species to the mix and there’s no ceiling to the absurdity now. At this point, getting a point across the interspecies barrier, let alone cooperating on a thing, becomes unrealistic by default. Successful willful interspecies cooperation is, at the very least, a hard-earned success worth celebrating in-universe. And that’s if the species are interested in said cooperation.

    (non-sci-fi)

    1. A story doesn’t feature a villain that’s a perfect mirror image of the hero, largely because 9a. it doesn’t feature any villain. Villains are lame, and so is plot-mandated antagonism. While it’s just lazy writing in general, it’s particularly unrealistic because
    2. People just don’t care that much in general. Yes, I know people have interests and strong opinions on select few subjects, and sometimes these opinions even happen to clash. What are the chances though?
    3. Things generally just don’t happen as much as they do in most of the fiction. Real life doesn’t have the ambient soundtrack that immediately conveys or foreshadows the importance of the unfolding events. Thus in real life, the perceived importance of events is almost always off. Fiction rhould have it the same: things happen, some might even feel important in the moment, but rarely the ones that mattered.

    There’s probably more, but such gripes don’t usually spring to mind unprompted. Now, when you see them, then they do grind your gears…