1: For me, it was personal names with too many of the letter "q", "z"

677 Pages·2017·2.08 MB·English

1:
For me, it was personal names with too many of the letter "q", "z", or "x". With apostrophes. Big
indicator of "call a rabbit a smeerp"; and generally, a given name turns up on page 1...
2:
Large scale conspiracies over large time scales that remain secret and don't fall apart. (This is not
*explicitly* limited to SF, but appears more often in branded-cyberpunk than one would hope for a
subgenre borne out of Bruce Sterling being politically realistic in a zine.)
Pretty much *any* form of large-scale space travel. Low earth orbit, not so much; but, human
beings in tin cans going to other planets within the solar system is an expensive multi-year endevour
that is unlikely to be done on a more regular basis than people went back and forth between Europe
and the americas prior to steam ships. Forget about interstellar travel.
Any variation on the old chestnut of "robots/ais can't be emotional/creative". On the one hand, this
is realistic because human beings have a tendency for othering other races with beliefs and
assumptions that don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny (see, for instance, the relatively common
belief in pre-1850 US that black people literally couldn't feel pain). On the other hand, we're
nowhere near AGI right now and it's already obvious to everyone with even limited experience that
AI can be creative (nothing is more creative than a PRNG) and emotional (since emotions are the
least complex and most mechanical part of human experience and thus are easy to simulate). Extra
bonus hate for robots who are clearly emotional and creative but insist that they aren't.
Designated villans. (Again, not strictly limited to SF, but something that breaks science fiction a lot
more than other genres -- it's not entirely unreasonable for a fantasy novel to contain EVIL as a
literally-and-materially-existing force in the universe. And, I've seen it ruin a lot of otherwise good
stuff: I had a hard time getting through John Shirley's A Song Called Youth because, up until quite
close to the end, the neo-nazi antagonists were just Evil People Doing Evil Things even when it
contradicted their ideology, before we finally got a good look into the mechanics of control and the
details of the ideology that made their behavior make a little more sense.)
Another thing that's prevented me from reading SF recently, that might not be as much an attribute
of the medium as an attribute of recent trends in SF publishing, is pointless/masturbatory
digressions. (I like Neal Stephenson's digressions because they're entertaining. I'm not talking about
that kind of digression.) I found that I was unable to finish The Unincorporated Man because of a
number of things that I can only associate with unprofessional habits/lack of skill, and the most
egregious was the fixation on extraneous details that fail to flesh out the world and appear to be
interesting only to the author (for instance, there are a couple pages about how the protagonist --
ostensibly an old man with his youth recently artificially returned but characterized like a fifteen
year old boy -- decides to name his computer Sebastian). To a lesser extent I saw these tendencies in
Daemon, even though that book is generally more competently written. Presumably this is related to
these books gaining their popularity prior to going through an established publisher, who would
have an interest in cutting out masturbatory passages like this before printing.
3:
1 megaJoule of thrust
Should be meganewton, no?
However, I admire your restraint in discussing the snake oil that goes under the name of 3He. For
me, it's long been a red flag that things, whether fictional or ostensibly serious, have gotten into
"walk away from this" territory.
4:
How about manually-aimed guns? Self-guided bullets exist in the lab and will be standard sniper
issue within a decade. You can currently buy rifles with with technology reminiscent of a
CounterStrike aimbot (it was too easy to detect cheaters whose reticules would lock onto the
enemy's head; much harder to detect one which automatically pulled the trigger at the exact moment
your wavering aim happened to coincide with the enemy). And that's just current-gen tech; we
could hypothesise a pistol with waterjet-based attitude & inclination control, twisting in your grip to
point at the naughty heat signatures in front of you.
And yet, so many SF characters are only as good as their own aim when they try to have a
shootout...
(I apologise in advance for potentially derailing this thread onto one of the strange attractors! I can
repost this in 100 comments' time if you prefer.)
5:
Faceless 80's style corporations ruling entire planets (hint: who handles the externalities?)
Wasn't part of the point with these that the companies would just ignore them and let the
externalities exist and make things terrible for the workers, until they packed up and left when it got
too much, all as a sign of their callousness? I mean it was always a very thin cover to criticize
global capital doing that.
For me it is aliens in almost any context. Very rare are the examples of the times where they are
portrayed in a truly alien way. Far too often they are somewhere between "gross oversimplification
of a society, racism-lite", and even more often it is scientific racism of the 20s gussied to slide under
the radar (like what The Iron Dream was calling out and most unfortunately, ignored). And that's
because they are meant to be that. Niven and Pournell get a lot of praise of the Moties that I've
never quite understood, because the society doesn't make sense and what they wrote weren't aliens,
they were a reskinned setup of their fears to criticize second wave feminism. Ringo, same, it is just
a mob so he can glory in slaughter of the political groups he hates. Even with nice aliens like E.T.
they are just McGuffins to trigger growth rather than an agent with their own agenda. Never mind
how all these run headlong into the apes/angels problem.
So yeah, aliens. I think Peter Watts is the only one I've read who does aliens really well, because he
set out to make them alien instead of a stand in for something else.
6:
1. Ignorance of the fact that FTL travel always implies time travel. Only very interesting human
stories can allow me to gloss over that. The Expanse series is my guilty pleasure in that regard. Still
they could just prevent the original plot by talking to their past selves with the time machine that
they have on board. I think you mentioned something similar while discussing Iron Sunrise.
2. "Let me fix that impossible problem with my space wrench" aka "the inverted tachyon reflector
beam closes the catastrophic singularity". Once an author resorts to that resolution, I have to close
the book.
3. Not limited to SciFi: Women suddenly lose all competence when a man is around. That's a subset
of your "out-of-character" trope.
4. Not limited to SciFi: Otherwise intelligent character suddenly sabotages himself or everybody
else so the story has a reason to go on. Even worse is the trope of "let me keep this vital information
a secret for no reason other than that it will create an excuse for drama"
and finally the worst offender:
5. Characters being prodigies in 15 scientific fields at once aka "the author is too much in love with
their hero" problem. So the master assassin is also a competent computer scientist, chemist, sniper,
electrical engineer, race driver and can impersonate accents in 10 languages? This is expanded into
the SciFi problem where a colony of 5 people maintain a nuclear reactor, but not as a stupid
appliance that they operate like a microwave, no, one of them repairs the machine that took
hundreds of professions to come together to make in an afternoon with a wrench.... I struggle to
give this one an easy name, but basically it's about any story that ignores that it takes a planet-wide
network of industry to make anything technologically advanced in today's age. In my previous job I
was asked why we didn't manufacture the mainboards for our appliances in Germany and the
answer is: "because there is nobody here who CAN". What makes some authors think that a space
station will have someone on hand who can even read the structural specs for the material your
antimatter generator is made out of let alone manufacture anything?
Unfortunately the above has made it completely impossible for me to enjoy Star Trek since my late
twenties. :( Thanks for letting me rant here though :)
7:
you are not going to get dust or gravel pinging off the hull ... unless you're insanely unlucky
But...but what if you're going through a ring system?
You know some of those asteroids in ESB were potatoes, and at least one shoe.
Seriously now, John Ohno and Mister_DK have brought up some of the reasons I can't stand MilSF
(along with what you've said wrt the physics), that the enemies generally stand in for racist/political
tropes. Admittedly, I haven't read much of it, mostly seen movies and TV shows, where they always
call the alien invaders something like Snakes or Bugs, which seem to be obvious racist epithet
replacements. I finally read "The Forever War" a few years ago, it was okay, but such a product of
its time that it was difficult to really enjoy.
Anyhow, I would be interested in your take on Nanotech.
8:
Curiously, I have absolutely no problem suspending my disbelief even at the most incoherent setups
(like having the guys watching the Millenium Falcon dock at the Death Star perpendicular to the -
admitedly probably weak - gravity field of a small moon-sized structure which, the next time you
see it, has spaceships that fly around it in the "proper" orientation for its gravity well).
The only thing that consistently throws me off is incoherent characterisations. When most of your
characters are obviously characters rather than people, you've usually lost me.
That and conspiracies. But using trains as the main interstellar transportation system? No problem,
steam away!
9:
fiction is an exploration of human interior spaces, and that sometimes a spaceship or a princess is
a metaphor
yes
A superb example was a re-telling by the still-missed Charles Sheffield of Orpheus/Euridice, with
the descent into Hades being the gravity-swing around a blue giant ...
A metaphor for an aspect of the human condition under the writer's examination.
"Go on, tell your story, it'll only be one of the Old Ones, anyway" _ U. K. le Guin.
But still new things can come from those old tales.
As for Rabbit/Smeerp, a much admired (by many) author did that, to my intense annoyance, & I
only found out after I'd bought the bloody book which I shall never, now, read.
Anathem.
Utter tripe - why couldn't he simply use the names?
10:
I absolutely agree with your argument on an intellectual level, but I can't let go of the conviction
that the asteroid-dodging chase in The Empire Strikes Back is the best 30 seconds of film in the
entire Star Wars canon (so far). The cavalier treatment of "light speed" in those movies is a different
issue, but never mind that for now.
More broadly, what bugs me is when I'm asked to willingly suspend my disbelief in too many
different things at once. I'm usually quite happy to accept hyper-space travel in a story, or
telekinesis... but usually not both.
11:
... or manually controlled flying (usually through the above asteroid fields). Trek has been really
bad about this, but it was always about the human superiority to the machine (Cmdr. Data the
notable exception, but he wanted to be a real boy...).
12:
Well, this is sort of tangential, but I'm remembering a discussion I had with another Steve Jackson
Games fan. We were talking about their Transhuman Space setting (which, to be sure, has some of
the stuff you're objecting to, such as a helium 3 economy), and they wanted to introduce some
added elements, and I objected that all of those elements said to me "previous generation SF" and
that, despite its imperfections, Transhuman Space was a fairly pure example of current generation
SF.
When I read SF with FTL; or with lots of solar systems with planets generally similar to our local
set and similarly distributed; or with FTL that doesn't equate to closed timelike lines; or with time
travel in general; or with any version of psionics; or with mutant superhumans (though that's mostly
relegated to the comics these days)—all that says to me "old paradigm SF." You know, the sort of
stuff that largely defined the Campbellian era, and that gave Star Trek most of its plots, and that
defines Traveller, probably the most widely played SFRPG. And that stuff can be enjoyable to read,
but it's a partly nostalgic pleasure; it's not remotely a credible "future" now. Yesterday's tomorrow,
to borrow Panshin's most memorable phrase.
In contrast, Transhuman Space has STL space travel; lots and lots of robotics and AI; genetically
modified organisms, and a major political split between Transhumanists who want more of them
and Preservationists who want them banned; and various other things that are projections of current
concerns, or actually of the concerns of ten or fifteen years ago, when it came out. It's not nearly as
hard as you're looking for (though it makes attempts at hardness) but it's a much more recent future.
Even if its global politics is starting to look wildly optimistic. . . .
13:
DOes it really imply Time Travel & therefore (I think) 2nd-Law of Thermodynamics violation?
Not necessarily.
I think there may be a "restricted curvature" get-out for that one.
Lets, suppose we travel at 10c to a star-system in a straight line or a good approximation, thereto.
Slow down, if not stop completely, then turn around & come back the way we went.
We will still arrive back on Earth, by Earth's clocks, after we left, won't we?
But, what may be impossible is a significantly curved path, travelling at same "speed" for the same
ship-clock time, aiming to return to Earth, which might break the Universe's causality, or
something.
Difficult question - if my hypothesis is correct, then where's the limit, since it should be possible to
write an equation for that one, if you were to sit down & think about it for a bit.
I.E. Closed-time-like loops that violate causality are forbidden by something (some equation)
written into the Universe's structure, involving a combination of radius of curvature & either/or the
angular velocity or speed along the course of said closed loop.
Um, err ....
14:
Farming planets don't ring my alarm bells until they say they're a monoculture. I don't have an issue
with farming planets in the same way many countries (currently) have agricultural areas and urban
areas. Nothing forces the farming planet to only grow crop x, it can produce a range of crops.
(interestingly a story I read where the planet only produced a monoculture turned out to have a deep
and interesting reason for it but it wasn't set up as a monoculture by the greedy human corporation,
it was discovered that way and they went ETF?)
If I'm reading a space opera and the like, I don't care enough about the bad physics if there's a good
enough story: I've willingly decided to read a space opera after all. I know they're not going to detail
accurate space travel, realistic physics and the like. If they're inconsistent about their own rules I'll
usually give up, but if their rules remain consistent I'll give them a pass. (The same applies to
fantasy for me - I don't care what their rules for magic are, as long as they don't break them,
although the characters can misunderstand them but that has to be carefully written.)
My shibboleths tend to the biological. Plagues that kill 100% of people. Viral infections you treat by
stopping bacterial ribosomes. (Yes, really happened. That was a paperback, I was on the bus. It
caused raised eyebrows when I swore and tore it half.) Ancient diseases to wipe us out - hint, we're
the descendants of the survivors, our immune systems are in a dramatic arms race every day.
Ancient alien diseases stand a chance though.
There are some tech ones too. People are awful at predicting how tech will change. I posted an
infographic a while ago about Moore's Law and what it really means. In 2000 the Bondi Blue iMac
was a snazzy, mid-level computer. In 2010 the then new iPhone cost ~1/3 of the price of the iMac,
had a slightly worse screen resolution and outperformed the the iMac on everything else. Oh, it
weighed <1% of the iMac and would make phone calls too of course and fit in your pocket. I don't
make a living making good guesses about what's to come. But there are some shockingly bad ones
out there. If you're going to ask me to believe in, say, Ai and cheap fusion power and so on, your
homes have got to do better than the 5 years ago model of US TV on a cable.
But bad characters and bad plot will do it more than these every time.
15:
Actually, I thought the trains were one of the few original, innovative, amusing, and redeeming
features of the Commonwealth saga. (I bailed on it 50 pages before the end of book 1, when I
realized there was another book the same size lying ahead of me if I persisted in banging my head
on that wall. As I'm a sucker for the sunk cost fallacy, you may consider this faint praise indeed (and
I finished the Reality Dysfunction trilogy).)
16:
Space colonization in the context of no-FTL SF is annoying. If you can spend 20 years in your
spaceship flying to another star system, then you can also spend 200 years in your spaceship. You
don't need planets anymore.
17:
>>My shibboleths tend to the biological. Plagues that kill 100% of people.
Very long incubation period?
>>Viral infections you treat by stopping bacterial ribosomes.
Maybe the virus reproduces inside bacteria?
>>Ancient diseases to wipe us out - hint, we're the descendants of the survivors, our immune
systems are in a dramatic arms race every day.
Genetic drift gradually destroys every adaptation you don't need. Ancient disease is kinda plausible.
>>Ancient alien diseases stand a chance though.
No, if something is utterly implausible, it is alien diseases infecting human being. It's less likely
than getting an infection of Pyrolobus fumarii (which thrives at 113 °C).
18:
Mmph. I disagree, conditionally; for 20 years you can just about conceive of carrying consumable
materials for -- at 8 tons/year/astronaut (NASA's old estimate for an open-loop Mars expedition)
that's 160 tons/person, which is heavy but not obviously more than the weight of a fault-tolerant
closed-loop support system for growing/recycling everything including micronutrients for a human-
apex food web ... especially if it's a one-way 1-3 astronaut recce expedition to, say, Alpha Centauri
(astronauts to die of old age before return).
200 years implies full sustainability. Which means a wholly different kind of LSS. It may need
periodic replenishment of raw materials harvested from comets/asteroids, but if you can last that
long then you're right, you probably don't need planets. But 20 years? Probably do-able while
remaining planet-centric.
19:
-Printers taking the place of nanotech assemblers. Actually, I may use the Smeerp-9000 brand
printer in a novel sometime (SmeerpCorp. We're good at branding).
-We live sustainably by depending on these magic boxes here...
...And these magic boxes run off solar power from the domes we live under. In fact, why would
anyone want to live in a city under a dome anyway? Is this just a tribute to Bucky Fuller, or what?
-All the biology I need to know I learned in High School. What was my teacher's name again?
-Oh, and, if I got it wrong, I'll just arrogantly tell the person who points it out that they're the only
person who noticed that I screwed up.
20:
Rubber forehead aliens are a big kick out, but truly alien aliens are a rarity. Iain Banks had some,
and C.J. Cherryh does well with the Atevi, but most aliens act like humans with speech impediment.
I have quite a well trained suspension of disbelief, so as long as the handwavium is consistent
within the setting, I don't mind.
Space Opera is a good example - if they make a setting and stick it, I'm quite happy - I'm reading
the SF version of an adventure novel after all.
Hard SF I'm more picky about, but I'll also give a pass for time it was written in. They tend to be
more a thin story wrapped around a cool science idea, so the idea needs to be good, even if later
proved impossible.
For MilSF I think the politics throws me out more than the implausible tactics and free flowing idiot
balls.
OTOH Tom Kratman makes John Ringo (no!) look like Tolstoy.
21:
I recall a short story where the new wormhole exit to a new colony was bouncing around all over
the place, and the protagonist has the job of trying to fly through it. By the end of the story, he's
realised the bouncing was random, and that tethering a balloon would be just as effective. Also, that
as the wormhole is tightened down, eventually people will be able to drive trucks through it.
As I see it, Hamilton's take on that is that you could get even better throughput if you had rails. Yes,
it's a delightful conceit. And yes, the rest of the story doesn't work for me either.
22:
Just in case you were wondering: an editor is inciting me to commit space opera (don't wait up,
even if I agree to do so it won't be published before 2018) so I'm updating my basket list of "213
things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in space opera", just in case I don't feel like writing #3 in
the Freyaverse (and do not ask for a third Eschaton novel, Or Else). Tentative idea is to ditch the
mundane SF straitjacket and go back to far-future wide screen SF, but to avoid cliches as I would
the plague. So think in terms of the space operatic equivalent of Stockhausen, or maybe a concept
album by Laibach.
23:
-Calling a 2 kilogram alien blue hexapodal herbivore with an abdominal furcula a rabbit, because
someone told you not to call it a smeerp. (cf koala bear)
--Setting the action on the moon of a gas giant, having the gas giant take up most of the sky (cf
Saturn and Jovian ring widths) and having the gas giant rise in the east and set in the west every day
(cf tidal locking). Didn't you take trigonometry?
--Alien starfarers who are anatomically incapable of lighting a campfire by friction.
24:
I was working out a pitch for one of the Elite:Dangerous SF novella slots until the setup of the
whole (Traveller-based) economy completely torpedoed my enthusiasm.
Seriously, you (and everyone else) have to blast your way through about 50 billion credits worth of
space pirate hardware to deliver your 20 tonnes of crisps?
Every? Single? Run?
Just play the game and don't think about it too much.
25:
--Alien starfarers who are anatomically incapable of lighting a campfire by friction.
I've discussed this previously, but this is basically the argument for rubber forehead aliens. It turns
out that the anatomical structure needed to light a fire through friction is far more restrictive than
most people realize. Since you need fire for basically all technologies that would lead to starflight,
an alien that builds ships but can't build a fire is a walking contradiction.
26:
I don't mind technologies not directly extrapolated from known: knowledge accumulates and I'm
perfectly willing to accept progress in technology sufficiently advanced as to appear to be magic, so
long as it isn't posited to be, say, tomorrow. Down the road a century or two is fine for me. This
includes potential advances in the physical sciences which appear to be ruled out based on current
knowledge. I would consider it a leap of faith to assume that what we know is in some fundamental
sense the ground truth of the universe yet when extraordinary advances come they tend to be
dazzling precisely because they overturn what 'everyone knows'.
So if someone wants to posit something that lets spaceships travel FTL, I'm fine with that, so long
as that's not what the story is about. So long as miracles remain in the background as stage dressing,
I'm fine with it. Sadly, one thing that SF may have taught us over the years is that miracles can be
rather dull from the viewpoint of ordinary individuals.
What makes me close the file I'm reading would be classical goofs such as poor characters,
uninteresting plots, situations. The classic faults of poorly written fiction, in other words. When
sales start to fall off the probable is more likely to lie in the classical reasons than in any failure of
extrapolation, I think. May our Good Host never be subjected to such!
Mike
27:
Heck Charlie, set the story 5,000 years from now on Earth, make it post-collapse, and have
undiscovered continents with strange human cultures on them. And do it with windjammers firing
broadsides for all I care. Most planetary SF is just ripped off from the Age of Colonial Empires,
replacing "colony" with "planet" and so forth. Spin the tropes back to their origins, set it on an Earth
that's become strange, and have some fun. Why use space marines when you can have real ones
who aren't wearing red coats?
28:
I was talking about colonization, remember, not just going there and back again. So, 20 years to get
to a nearby star, and them how many until you can produce food there? 20? 50? 200?
I guess it can work with a constant delivery of supply ships.
29:
Since you need fire for basically all technologies that would lead to starflight, an alien that builds
ships but can't build a fire is a walking contradiction.
Unless they can domesticate/train something else to do the dextrous work.
(Imagine an elephant-analog, with big brains, abstract reasoning, and language, that has managed to
domesticate and train a monkey-analog, with manipulator limbs and good binocular vision. Not
plausible in our biosphere, but not in and of itself implausible among aliens.)