Science Fiction

Large ships that ply the stars at super luminal speeds. These ships are equipped with massive energy weapons capable of pulverizing planets. Powered by systems that use anti-matter, or ultra exotic inter-dimensional matter.

Yet, for some reason the ship is constrained on energy and is unable to keep all the lights on, or the crew has to conform to "energy conservation protocols" (ST TOS), or there isn't enough power available to keep the ship at a habitable temperature (BSG).

Life support would not even be a rounding error on the power output of some of the systems described in Sci fi.

"Humane Treatment", " Human rights", "I'm doing this for the good of humanity". When there are heaps of non human species but the writers keep reffering to "human" traits everyone else clearly has.

Azetbur was right.

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?

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.

That women can only be scientists or whatever if their father was. They can have no other reason or backstory.

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.

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.

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?

To your second point, I think the Universal Translator in Star Trek is the best explanation. Not only does it make for more convenient television, but it seems like such a well thought-out invention that would actually exist in the future. Like why make everyone learn one language and wipe out all the history/culture behind the others when you can just let everyone do their own thing.

What annoys me is that science fiction is that some of the biggest writers don't seem to know any women IRL. If Robert Heinlin or Cixin Lu had to write a believable woman character to bring them food and water, they'd be dead in three days.

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.

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.

Noisy space battles.

Scale. Most sci fi notoriously sucks at doing large scale well. 40K, of all things, is one of the few that does.

This is why Darmok is peak sci-fi. It discusses what happens when species can’t communicate with one another. It even works within the in-show explanation of the universal translator: the Tamarians don’t just use different vocabulary and syntax. They have an entirely different language model.

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

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??

I'm curious how everyone gets here about the languages in the original star wars trilogy?

Secondly, in one of the ex expanded universe series, leia and chewbacca go back to kashyyk and Leia can understand the wookie mayor much better than she can chewbacca.

It's explained that the mayor actually has a speech impediment, which makes him easier to understand than most wookies

Can't believe no one has mentioned this yet but my big one is physics in microgravity. There are some that do it well (like obv Apollo 13 given how they filmed it, and The Expanse is usually pretty good about it too) and plenty that it doesn't really matter but there's a bunch of movies and tv shows that hang major plot points on poorly thought out physics. The worst offender imo was ironically the movie Gravity, where a major character dies because apparently when two people are tethered to each other in zero-g and the line goes taut they don't just bounce back towards each other, oh no, because there's an extra special force that keeps pulling on the futher person so he has to make some dramatic self sacrifice. I was so sad because that movie looked really amazing from a cinematography perspective and obviously a lot of people loved it regardless but i just couldn't get past how dumb that and a few other scenes were.

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.

I am mildly annoyed when an action scene essentially pauses so the heroes can have a small dialog scene.

I always find myself wondering: isn’t that bad guy, hull breach, detonation timer etc still there?

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.

The camera thing drives me nuts, because we all know it's generally just going to be what's drives the plot for this story. Which is okay.

But as a privacy nerd, my brain immediately concocts some deeply weird privacy law to explain why main engineering is monitored 24/7 and the front door is somehow not. Then my brain starts trying to come up with the relevant moments in the fictional history why the laws are so broken...

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.

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.

I really appreciate a lack of ansible tech. Having to account for the speed of light in communication makes for better story telling, IMHO

My favorite examples of limited communication speed are the Lost Fleet books by John G. Hemry writing as Jack Campbell, and the Battletech franchise.

In the Lost Fleet, they are limited to realistic communications. When they jump into a star system, they gather Intel but it's often pointed out that what their telescopes see and radios hear is X hours old based on the distance. There's a lot of talk in battles about predicting where something will be at a certain time or trying to device the enemy by pulling fake maneuvers. When they want to communicate back home, they need to send picket ships to carry the message.

In Battletech, there is a common method of FTL communication between worlds, but not at smaller scales. When the writers remember it, we hear about the same kind of delays in Intel as in the Lost Fleet. The FTL comms are monitored by a sometimes hostile polity, so top secret stuff will be communicated by spacecraft pony express, and there have been some attempts to come up with other comm methods.

Artificial gravity not achieved through acceleration or rotation. That and people don’t explode or instantly freeze when exposed to vacuum.