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)

9. 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
10. 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?
11. 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…

One of the funniest episodes of the Men In Black cartoon was J trying to adjust to MIB’s 37 hour day.

But it shows a problem; in most sci-fi not only are all the aliens 1.8 meters tall with five fingers and a larynx that can mimic human speech, they all come from world’s with a 24 hour day. Actually, to get nerdier, most cultures with a sun would probably have a 24 hour day based on them using circular sun dials. But the length of the hours would vary.

Another thing that annoys me is when an author comes up with a fantastic idea and uses it once. There’s a Poul Anderson story I read in high school that I always wanted to see developed. A group of time travelers from 3854 AD go back to meet da Vinci. They get captured by a baron who tortures them into revealing all their secrets.

The baron and his family set up an estate in 20,000 BC and maraud through time.

This story could run six seasons, easily.

In and of itself, I don’t mind it, but I’m mildly annoyed by most having some form of FTL travel. That’s why The Expanse was so refreshing for me.

Like, I get it. Having FTL drive (or comparable ways to go vast distances in short times) allows a larger universe for the characters. It’s also, I would imagine, easier to write since the writers wouldn’t have to deal with the vast scales, time dilation, and asynchronous events happening in different parts of the galaxy/story.

For comparison, The Expanse worked because it was all within our solar system. In the Revelation Space series (book), humans are doing interstellar travel, but they’re in cryo the whole trip, and the journey takes years. The author formerly worked for the ESA and pretty much had to show his work every step of the way to get all the characters together on the same planets at the same time.

So yeah, I get why we don’t see that more often (especially in TV series with less accredited writers), but it would be nice to see it once in a while nonetheless.

This is a common complaint, but it deserves to be mentioned frequently: exploding control panels. This is especially a problem in Star Trek. Are circuit breakers a lost technology?

Sounds and non-newtonian physics in space flight. You wouldn’t hear rumbling engines or lasers shooting in space. You also wouldn’t need to keep burning your thrusters after you’ve accelerated towards your destination.

Star Trek also seems to lack any form of video surveillance.

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation series premier Encounter at Farpoint, Riker comes aboard later on after several plot-relevant events. To bring him up to speed, he’s seated in front of a viewscreen and watches what has happened up to that point, basically the first part of the episode. Of course, this sort of thing is never used in the series again, but it’s kind of interesting.

Yeah I will say it’s fun to point out the plot holes whenever comparing it to the real world. But as you get older you realize. I don’t want writers to care about this stuff unless it is in service to the story. That’s the problem with a lot of new scifi. Is worrying about this stuff and always calling back to previous series is what bogs down storying telling. If your story is good I don’t care about the holes.

Language drives me nuts too. I believe in Star trek the badges translate in real time? Best explanation I ever saw (read) was hitchhikers guide. The babel fish “eats” language and poops out brainwaves or whatever to the receiver. I probably got the details wrong but it’s close enough and hilarious to boot.

Camera thing is another I hate. Obviously for the drama but I mean they can pull up video on the main window of the enterprise to the engineering room, captains room, even other ships but can’t see the biggest point of entry??

My main gripe is a lot of plots have too much high stake events solved by improbable happenings?

Why save the earth when one can save a meadow? I would love to see a story about a group of people trying to prevent nano technology from entering a park, and the social backlash when they try.

Why do nearly impossible things within a certain time, when one can have more humble happenings?

Space battles are cool but does the main character have to save the ship, fleet or day? Isn’t it enough to save one’s squad?

Becky Chambers wrote 4 books that did a really good job of exploring different species getting by with their differences not just in culture, but also in things like how they speak (one species has 5 vocal chords, so you literally cannot speak their language) or ‘how does publich transit account for different butt shapes?’

But on to your question on pet peeves:

• throwing science-y words out there that make no sense is probably my biggest.
• deus ex-machina - getting saved at the knick of time by something showing up without warning, but that’s just bad writing. I actually like how the Orville series removed transporters as a tech. It’s actually a bad plot device.
• but yeah, like you said, things that are obvious but are removed from the show, like cameras

Noisy space battles.

I can still enjoy far-future science fiction of the “humans in space” sort but I can’t take it seriously as a portrayal of what the future might be like unless there’s an explanation for why people haven’t been modified by technology to the point where they’re hardly recognizable as human. I really like Alpha Centauri (the video game) as a portrayal of a future where everyone is either a cyborg or a Luddite. The best part is that the game does this gradually until at the end the player realizes (or doesn’t) that the annoying Luddite faction (which usually gets eliminated early) had a point.

Making a second comment to answer your actual question:

For me it’s when technology is very uniformly high tech. So for example in the real world technology advances but it doesn’t advance everywhere at the same speed. There might be high tech versions of things in cities while you still find old or ancient equivalents out in the countryside (or just both types existing alongside each other all over). I really like it when SciFi can capture this nonlinear pace of technological advancement.

You might enjoy the book “Blindsight” by Peter Watts.

It does a phenomenal job telling a very unique first contact story. I can’t remember if cameras are much of a plot point (I think they use them occasionally), but one of the characters is a linguist, and the aliens are distinctly non-human.

Since Stargate is my go-to scifi I’m kinda offended at the “doesn’t take itself too seriously”. Sure it’s not as hard on the science as The Expanse (you know, except for the magic portals to other stars), but it feels like it takes itself pretty seriously. There are obvious bottle episodes that were probably written for other shows and shoe-horned in because they were cheap to buy and produce.

For #2, I think this would get pretty old pretty fast, not to mention that they have to fit everything into runtime constraints. Every new planet the team spends months researching the new language. Sure, you could handwave it (we found a Goa’uld translator just laying around), but that would be back to just one language. Since the Stargate presents an instant transportation rather than the days/months/years of starship travel it would make sense that languages stay fairly consistent as people move from planet to planet.

For #3, they pretty much handwave this in SG-1 as the majority of planets in the Milky Way were repopulated by the ancients in their image, and others were transferred from Earth.