This week I want people to again look at the science fiction genre. This time instead of trying to define the genre I want to examine common plots and tropes. Take some time to think about it. Then answer the two questions below:

• What are your favorite science fiction plots/tropes?
  
• What are your least favorite science fiction plots/tropes?
  

Example:

• What are your favorite sci-fi plots/tropes? I am a big fan of time travel and alternate realities. I find the brain-breakingness of causality loops quite fun. Like in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure when when Ted decides he'll steal his dad's keys tomorrow, then go back in time and leave them in the bushes. So he reaches down and picks the keys out of the bushes. I also like the sort of juxtaposition of different eras that time travel can lead to, like the armored knight walking down a quiet suburban street or pretty much the entirety of Star Trek IV. Alternate realities are cool because you can often see the same characters and places you're used to, but everything is shifted slightly. This can be a fun dynamic and lead to seeing different aspects to the characters or places than are usually emphasized. For example, I quite like the Star Trek mirror universe episodes, or the variations on events in Run Lola Run (although the latter is not exactly a sci-fi movie).
  
• What are your least favorite sci-fi plots/tropes? I'll call this trope “the Captain knows best.” But basically the trope is that whenever there is a disagreement among the bridge crew or maybe between the captain/station commander and an admiral or something, the captain always ends up being right. You see this all the time in later Star Trek, Babylon 5 and in Firefly. I want to say it bugs me because it's unrealistic and that in real life everyone's sometimes wrong (and I do think it's unrealistic). But in actuality I think it bugs me mostly because I have a cognitive bias against the sort of “trust the people at the top to be right about things” attitude that it implies.
  

beholdsa
I'll call this trope “the Captain knows best.” But basically the trope is that whenever there is a disagreement among the bridge crew or maybe between the captain/station commander and an admiral or something, the captain always ends up being right. You see this all the time in later Star Trek, Babylon 5 and in Firefly. I want to say it bugs me because it's unrealistic and that in real life everyone's sometimes wrong (and I do think it's unrealistic). But in actuality I think it bugs me mostly because I have a cognitive bias against the sort of “trust the people at the top to be right about things” attitude that it implies.

Reminds me of a discussion–I think it was the two of us–were having about early TNG seasons, where admirals only ever showed up in person if they were corrupt. If an admiral was visiting the Enterprise, you knew he was the bad guy.

Favorite Trope
Frontierism. I love the idea of the fringes of civilization. Settling new planets. Encountering strange life and coming to an understanding with it. The morality choices that have to be made in a place where legal authority is distant or even non-existent.

What I Hate
Tired, over-used archetypes. The noble scoundrel. The noble captain (who is often also a scoundrel). The bad ass rough and gray-area-but-over-all-good gun bunny. The woman (who is usually some sort of fighting expert, often an assassin. But always sexy). The nerd. The new guy. The archetypes get really, really tired. Sometime's they're done extremely well. Firefly, for example, did a great job with them. But I just kind of get tired of seeing them all the time.

And again, as with Fantasy, I think scifi has a very hard time with women. Often, their job is to be the boobs on the show. They're fan service. Very often not interesting characters in their own right, but their job is to be sexy.

I admit that I don't like Sci-fi as much as fantasy (and even a lot of the sci fi I like tends to have strong fantasy influence, like Star Wars). So I have fewer tropes to draw on here.

What are your favorite science fiction plots/tropes?

Space Westerns. Actually might basically just be the frontierism mentioned above. Because it doesn't have to be too literal (Firefly is quite literally Space-Western, to the point where they are actually herding cattle at one point). I'm not talking about that, about hats and cows - although firefly was pretty darn good. I mean the whole ethos of a Western movie. The themes of freedom, wide open spaces and making hard choices in a land where there's no law to come save you or tell you what the right thing to do is.

Runner up is 80s Cyberpunk, with literally all the tropes attached to that. I have this weird soft spot in my heart for it. Forget wifi and smart phones: I want a character who plugs a big physical plug into a jack in his neck, and then another jack in a computer terminal in order to connect his nervous system directly to the net. And I want that net to be a big, slightly hokey virtual world that's somewhere between the Matrix and Tron, where I can hack through ICE that's like big overly literal personifications of security software. All of this in a big urban-suburban-sprawl hellscape that simultaneously confirms all our worst fears about corporate oligarchy and yet is somehow completely awesome.


What are your least favorite science fiction plots/tropes?

The one-hat planet or society. You know, the ones where everyone on the whole damn planet is a warrior, or a scientist, or a mobster? This is completely suspension of disbelief breaking. Star Wars is really awful about this, especially in the Extended Universe. Greedo was a bounty hunter, so suddenly Rodia is a planet full of bounty hunters and every single Rodian you meet is also a bounty hunter. Planet-spanning (or glactic empire-spanning!) monocultures are almost as bad.

Brian
The one-hat planet or society

Oh, you're absolutely right about that.

What are your favorite science fiction plots/tropes?

I also enjoy time travel and alternate realities. I would not mind another Infinite Worlds game. I think this comes from really liking the question “what-if?”

I enjoy cyberpunk as well: implanted tech, hacking, living off the grid to avoid megacorporate overseers, etc. It does lead to a pretty narrow number of campaign options, but it can be interesting.

I enjoy technobabble, questionable technology, and the issues brought up by this. I do like the “just becauase you can do something, doesn't mean you should do something.” Jurassic Park is an example from fandom, and our biogenic plague we spent a session making but didn't use is an example from tabletop.

What are your least favorite sci-fi plots/tropes?

Years ago, I wrote a random game supplement for some failing RPG company about a dystopic future. There was some miscommunication, so my first draft parodied some of the dystopic future tropes (cyborgs run amok, science makes zombies and psionics, drones patrols, everything falls apart just because, brains in jars). I think a lot of sci-fi tropes get pretty terrible if taken to extremes or done poorly. People remember the good episodes of their favorite space opera, but there are a lot of terrible terrible episodes. Still I'll go over a few.

Space-Monster-of-the-Week. While these can be sometimes interesting, it can get repetitive and dull when random beasties from across the sector show up to attack. The final season of Earth:Final Conflict, for example, went from a show about intrique against an alien “ally” to a show about space vampires. It sucked.

The Even-More Ancient Ancients from Ancient-ville and their Equally Ancient Ancient Enemy. So many settings have them, so many settings do them poorly. When they were trying to bring B5 back with “Legend of the Rangers,” it was pretty bad. It can be summed up as: “You remember that really powerful ancient race you won a war against mostly through luck? The bully that used to take their lunch money is even worse…” I do think settings can do the “ancient” species well. Original B5 did it well, and Stargate, for example, had “the Ancients” who for every good idea (stargates) had several spectacularly bad ideas (unstable energy sources, replicators, a weapon that blew up their own gates, bomb tumors).

One trope I also hate from television Sci-Fi that doesn't easily show up in a tabletop game is the “you are actually just crazy” episode. I know DS9 and at least one of the Stargates did this one. I will often just skip these episodes during a rewatch.

What are your favorite science fiction plots/tropes?

First contact stories. Being a biologist, I especially love stories about encountering other organic life that varies wildly from life on Earth in ways that are interesting and at least vaguely plausible; this is one of the reasons I liked Speaker for the Dead so much. But I also love the joy of learning to understand and interact with cultures that are very different, and while this can show up in fantasy also, I think sci-fi does it best. Home Soil and Darmok are among my favorite TNG epsidoes for this reason, and it had a lot to do with why Januk jumped so eagerly into learning to talk to the Underciv in our Trystell game. One of the things I like most about the Mass Effect games is how much thought goes into the biology and culture of each alien race you encounter. I even think Mass Effect did the whole Ancients thing quite well, even though like Micah I find the “Super Ancient Race” to be a tiresome and often poorly-executed trope.

What are your least favorite sci-fi plots/tropes?

Sorry, guys, I don't like time travel. Well, I am totally down with alternate-timeline time travel, where you can jump to a new timeline and change stuff there but it doesn't affect your original timeline (obviously, since I love Infinite Worlds). But I find the brain-breakingness of causality loops just brain-breaking, and not fun. Also being a comics fan, time travel has been so casually used in that medium to bludgeon marketing-inspired plot twists into being that I now automatically give any sort of one-timeline time travel the side-eye. This only really applies to time travel into the past; time travel into the future can be interesting and fun as long as it's one-way.

I also hate the one-hat planet or society, as Brian says. Relatedly, I am not a fan of its ecological equivalent, the Single Biome Planet. Sometimes, it makes sense - if you're as far from your Sol-equivalent star as Pluto is and have no or little native atmosphere, then your planet is going to be an ice planet. But, like…“jungle world”? “Forest moon”? No.

Edited Mkamm (August 26, 2014 13:54:46)

Looking at one of the worst offenders of one-hat culture, I saw the original Star Trek as Cold War allegory. Taken that way, it gave me a very interesting view of the mindset of the people living in that period of history, but it also means the species and personalities are caricatures of the times.

I think the one-hat society or single biome planet is a symptom of trying to reduce exposition as part of lazy storytelling 101. It is amusing to consider how our Earth would get treated with such:

Earth would get reduced to “an ocean planet” (70% covered by an ocean that supports 50% of the species). Earth culture would get greatly simplified to some weird mix of what the majority are. 70% of the world is part of three religions (33% Christian, 23% Muslim, 14% Hindu), and 40% of the world lives in the three countries (19% China, 17% India, 4% US).