Ten Science Fiction Cliches to Love

December 7th, 2008

Cliches are a part of reality.   No matter how many times people have seen some things, they want to see more.   They like riffs on the familiar.   People like new things, but not too new.   Mass audiences never seem to tire of cliches.   They abound in fantasy and horror in particular: vampires, werewolves, wizards, elves, etc.   There seems to be at least one blockbuster vampire book or movie every year.   Editors issue guidelines stating that they will reject all vampire stories immediately, but someone is always buying vampires.

Well, what about science fiction?   I have my own weaknesses.   Here are some science fiction cliches to love.

1. Giant monsters.   Most of them make no scientific sense for a variety of good reasons.   Godzilla, King Kong, or even a giant space slug.   I love them all.

2. Giant robots.   More plausible than giant monsters, but not often implemented well.   I love it when they shoot rockets out of their fingers.   It’s so dumb, but I love it.

3. Ray guns.   Call them blasters or phasers, but they’re still ray guns.   For some reason, bullets aren’t cool in the future, or in space.   Aliens laugh off projectile weapons, and can only be harmed by energy beams.

4. Space babes and mating with aliens.   From Kirk and his harem of Orion slave girls to the more gruesome reproductive schemes of Alien or Species, this squishy subject has been done to death.   Like sex itself, people don’t seem to tire of it.

5. Space war.   It almost never makes sense economically or scientifically.   It’s almost got to be easier to just terraform than to travel light years to steal someone’s water and women.   Or it’s more likely that there’s such a great technological difference that the war would be so one-sided as to be over immediately.   Still, I love Ender’s Game, The Forever War, Starship Troopers, Armor, Halo novelizations, etc.

6. Transporters/teleporters.   Almost no one takes the technology seriously.   They’re either implausible or underutilized.   The Star Trek technology ought to make humans immortal, reproducing a back-up when anyone is killed, or just making infinite copies.   Why doesn’t every starship have a dozen Datas?   Why do people ever risk their lives at all?   Still, it’s just so damned convenient…

7.   Faster than light (FTL).   Speaking of convenient.   I don’t use FTL in my own books because I think it’s too problematic and unrealistic, but I don’t mind seeing anyone and everyone use it in their books.   Conditioned too early, I fear, to be a truly hardcore hard sf curmudgeon.

8. Artificial Intelligence.   From positronic brains to Hal, a staple of sf that will never vanish.   Good, evil, everything in between.   And people continue to argue about the nature of consciousness and if machines can ever think, or if they start acting like it, if we’ll be able to tell.

9. Superpowers.   I’m mainly thinking of Marvel and DC superheroes here, which I love, even though the science is almost always ridiculous, but more, too.   We have aliens with various forms of ESP, telekinesis, telepathy, mind control, healing powers, etc., most of which make about as much sense as they do in the comic books.

10.   Artificial gravity.   I’m not talking about spinning a spacecraft, but a button you press that magically provides gravity on board a starship.   I don’t know if gravity is so popular and acceptable to people because it’s natural to us here on Earth and not seeing it is too strange and distracting, or if decades of TV and movies, where it was difficult and expensive to shoot zero gee, simply raised us all to expect it.   Anyway, I barely bat an eyelash if an alien ship has gravity and I don’t see anything spinning.

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