Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera (2016)
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Also, remember, the point of a good book is an interesting story. Since we are already talking about aliens and space travel, we are already assuming some scientific facts are at least bent to serve the story.
Some examples:
> Plate tectonics is easily ignored, unless the plot requires a Volcano/Earthquake
Most planets do not have plate tectonics. And even if it does, why is it important to not ignore it when your story is about something completely different?
> Planetary ring systems are picturesque, not dangerous
They are not dangerous. It is not like it will go out of its way to kill you. Entire mass of the ring system is usually in very thin, small bands. Just avoid crossing those and you are fine.
> You can change orbital inclination easily
Of course you can. If you can easily travel to other stars, changing inclination should not be a problem.
> New Colonies may be either agricultural or mining colonies; rarely, resort colonies
Maybe resort colonies are not fun to write about. Actually... Star Trek TNG has a bunch of episodes about Risa, which is a whole fricking fully climate-controlled resort planet.
Why are you expecting parity on everything? Do you think there should be more fiction about garbage men than private detectives? After all, there is many more of them.
> Everyone uses Money to mediate exchanges of value
Actually, I feel like most of stories do not have anything about money. A writer makes a choice. If everybody made choice to create world without money, would you be nitpicking about it, too?
> Inflation? What is this, I don't even ...
> Deflation? What will they think of next?
> Sales tax? What's that?
> Income tax? What's that?
Now you are being silly. Are we still talking about science fiction or would you rather make every author include thousands of pages of explanations on every topic from physics to biology to economics to whatever else you are bitchin is not included there.
And why do you assume economy can't exist without any or all of these things? At some time in the past we had thriving economy without inflation/deflation or sales or income taxes.
The Star Trek TNG formulation for this is that scarcity of everything was eliminated with the invention of matter-energy conversion technology, along with limitless energy-generation tech like matter-antimatter reactors.
In a universe where all advanced civilizations can convert energy into food, clothes, equipment, etc, and energy is effectively limitless, at least relative to human needs, then money becomes obsolete and people no longer use it for anything.
At least one episode covers it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg
I've always assumed any other post-scarcity sci-fi adapts the same premise - unlimited energy + matter-energy conversion = money is non-existent.
Why doesn't anyone build their own fleet of starships, then? And why do the Ferengi exist?
Then again, why do anything at all since the Holodeck could dial up any experience you wanted?
Because you get to human relationships, there's a very strong push towards not allowing you to do that if it could endanger a lot of others in the wrong hands.
> Maybe resort colonies are not fun to write about. Actually... Star Trek TNG has a bunch of episodes about Risa, which is a whole fricking fully climate-controlled resort planet.
I think one was more about the fact that entire planets are "just" colonies: farming, mining, or resort. It's far more likely that it's a planet with lots of different things going on.
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More generally, I think each item can be categorised by what type of shortcut is being taken by authors of huge universes.
- This physical problem will be easily solved by technology
- Yes this system is complex, let's not worry about the details
- It's easier to treat an entire planet like a single town, as our protaginist's journey becomes easily relatable to other story forms we are familiar with
I think audiences are ok with shortcuts a lot of the time, and often the really glaring holes in a world aren't even obvious unless pointed out (like his example where there is no law enforcement, but also no one underage in the bar).
Some things are just not believeable at all, and by reaching for a shortcut to make the story relatable introduces huge conceptual issues. So for example, it's fine to think that there may be some technological advancement that means spaceships don't have to worry about orbital mechanics, but if there is then that technology would be used everywhere as it's essentially vast amounts of energy or gravity generation.
Scifi in the near future gets to borrow the complexity of our world. So things like black mirror can ask "what would happen if we had a social credit score" and explore that in a very complex environment that it gets mostly for free.
The more alien your setting the less you can borrow from your audience's own experience. If you introduce some 'magic' (cryosleep, faster than light travel, fast travel between planets, etc) it is your responsibility to explain why it is only used for the one specific plot device you want it used for. This is one of the reasons why world building is hard, and even worse when you have hundreds of worlds to build. It's easier to just pretend the universe is made up of little towns that correspond directly to stereotypes from whatever culture you are from.
Seems realistic to me. Mining towns rarely have a thriving tourist business. Extrapolating from human history of colonies and new settlements, usually they are focused on some core business + bare neccesities to survive. I dont see why planets would be different.
> It's easier to treat an entire planet like a single town, as our protaginist's journey becomes easily relatable to other story forms we are familiar with
Why wouldn't a frontier planet be a single town? In a scenario where there are lots of planets that we can travel to with at most moderate difficultly, i would assume the ones in outlying areas might well be empty except for a single settlment based around resource extraction.
Even the communists gave up on a society without money. (The Soviet Politburo briefly considered it.)
A deeper point, I think, is that perhaps Charles Stross shouldn't be writing space opera if he feels this way about it. Perhaps we would all be better off if he just stuck to whatever it is he likes writing about, instead of cynically hacking his way into a genre he clearly has very little love for.
We already have stories and/or history that fit that model, and you can reference back to those to understand what's going on.
But that inevitably leads to absurdity at the edges of the metaphor. And those clichéd bits of absurdity become the standard tropes that you can either go along with and celebrate and/or rebel against.
Personally once I get into a genre, I then gravitate to the examples that play with or subvert the form. Doesn't make them better or worse, but since I've already read a lot of the other stuff I'm ready for that next step to keep things interesting.
> Most planets do not have plate tectonics. And even if it does, why is it important to not ignore it when your story is about something completely different?
Indeed. Most non-SF stories set on earth ignore plate tectonics, because for most people it is not a factor in their daily lives.
Imagine a close-up on a door-knob. It begins to turn. The door creaks....
What do you feel? Portent? Eagerness? Fear? What about a door-knob turning is unique?
It's like human faces. They (mostly) have eyes, a mouth, nose, lips, etc. But a few are extraordinarily nice to look at, even though they really only have those same things. Stories are like that. They've got to have plots, characters, (and in SF) presumptions about the world, but the extraordinary ones don't need a new kind of orifice, a new kind of sensor. They present something extraordinary with the thingies we already have. No-one ever said about a super-model, "Oh her? She's just got eyes and a nose and lips. Nothing new..."
For science fiction you need enough familiarity for people to care without becoming stale. Which generally means copying from other science fiction to the point where people just accept things like planets with uniform weather and ecosystems.
Some stories are. But others, especially SF, are about ideas, not people. There is really no point in setting your story in the future, or in space, or whatever if you are just going to write about people. You can set them in the here and now like most literary fiction does.
Of course, that's why all of these genre clichés build up - because in a stereotypical Fantasyland that readers will be familiar with, you can write your character drama.
Oops, I meant Star Trek!
For example, take (the excellent) "The Expanse". Does the existence of that story mean that all near-future, in-solar-system, politically complex SF is done now? No, of course not! It's like saying that the Beatles "Hear Comes the Sun" was written in D, so now no-one can write in that key anymore.
My point is, even if all you see SF as is a vector for new ideas, there's still infinite (well, combinatorial explostion) variation in how that idea plays out. To take one last example: is "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" the last word in the SF meteor-gonna-kill-Earth sub-genre? Heck no! What if there's a robot civilization rooting around in the asteroid belt for resources, and it becomes aware of the threat first, and has to figure out a way to avert the threat (and a sub-faction doesn't want to avert it)? What if you focused on "preppers" on Earth who want to make a sustainable human colony underground?
I'm just sayin', even if you're idea driven and not character driven, literally every idea could stand to be treated again.
I would say most of the better scifi is about people or society, and not the framing used. Interstellar isn't actually about space travel, the left hand of darkness isn't actually about intergalactic diplomacy, etc.
This might be a controversial view, but I would argue all storytelling is ultimately an exercise in examining yourself and the context you live in.
Whether the author is aware that that is what they are doing is another matter...
Which is fine for fiction stories generally, they're just fiction after all, but hard SF likes to pretend it's somehow purer or more rational than other kinds of stories.
> This is most especially true for the "soft" sciences that the hard SF engineering types so often sneer at.
Sneering is always inappropriate, whether it is being done by hard scifi fans looking down at soft sciences or by literary types who don't see the point of ever engaging with realism. These feed each other, of course.
To the hard scifi fan, the entire point of tangling with realism -- which is guaranteed to be difficult, involve sacrifices, and have limited scope -- is because it helps us understand humanity. Specifically, in the context of hypothetical technology. It's always frustrating when literary types stomp in and act like they have a monopoly on this type of thing, when really we ought to be on the same team. Ah well.
On the movie side, interstellar spends a lot of time on making things scientifically accurate, but also examines humanity much more than most sf movies.
So i don't think they're at odds.
Lots of writers care about their craft, and are not pursuing the minimum that their audience will let them get away with, but rather have specific things or innovations they are looking to achieve.
> The hand waving is almost a component of the genre.
I take this post as asking "but what if it weren't".
Seems odd to call that a blunder, surely that's just a matter of convention?
Venus actually rotates west to east, very slowly. Its year is shorter than its day.
Uranus rotates nearly 90 degrees in relation to the ecliptic.
Mercury rotates east to west, but has a special orbital resonance with Earth. Because its so close to the sun, for decades we could only see it well enough at certain points in its orbit. Because of the resonance, we basically always see the same face which made it appear to be tidally locked. It rotates quite fine, but it wasn't until the last couple of decades of sending probes by Mercury that its rotation could actually be detected.
There's just 3 examples in our own real solar system that disprove the "convention". Not even to mention the hundreds to thousands of other smaller bodies that are unique in their own ways.
Given that: how do you define what rotational-pole is "north", to derive east/west? Or is it not based on a planet's qualities, in which case it's likely something solar, and then what would Uranus' "north" (or east) be?
edit: perhaps from directly above the equator you would still consider the spin to be clockwise or anticlockwise -- but which one would depend on your orientation.
Using the elliptic plane is a fine answer, but is just a convention.
For relatively perpendicular though, yeah - that largely works I think. But then we should expect most to be "sun rises in the east" as, as far as I'm aware, most solar system bodies orbit and rotate in the same direction as their star does.
Is there a different definition of determining a planet’s east/west side?
The "spaceport in the middle of a desert with a lot of ship traffic" is something of a cliche. Why are they there? What are they hauling? Why is there no groundside freight operation and ground transportation? This also comes in the "space station in the middle of nowhere" form.
There's also organizational scale. Problems which would be dealt with at some low level make it up to Emperor level when they involve the protagonist. This applies to both businesses and governments.
This is tied to the "chosen one" mindset. Star Wars was way too influential in this area. Disney/Pixar is way too into that. You don't see "worked their way up through the ranks" much.
Which is almost tautological.
It's very difficult to do free-form SF that isn't rooted in familiar cultural tropes because readers need something relatable to stand on.
Something like Dune is probably as far as you can go without falling off the edge of the world.
It has exotic elements - drug-producing giant worms, drug-induced space navigation, and so on - but it's really just a novel about colonisation and imperial politics. Everything - including the worms, the spice, the fremen, and the BG - is a metaphor for different vectors of power.
If you wrote a novel where humans were a kind of cancerous fruiting body evolved by an intelligent forest - not too far from the truth, in a very lateral way - it would be far too weird for most readers because it would be too distant from familiar experience.
Carping about hard SF details is beside the point, even when the points are valid. It's trying to turn fiction into engineering, which is not what fiction is for.
Most readers don't give extra points for build-ability in SF, and if they did writers would be left with a very small imaginative space to explore - the one we have now, where everything is chemical rockets and budgeting.
In all fairness, if you think of the constraints required for a species to become space-faring, you're going to be hard-pressed to make it work with an organism which isn't at least a bit like us.
1. You can't be a marine organism, because developing advanced technology requires combustion, and water isn't something you want to be carting into space with you.
2. You need a musculoskeletal system which can support a large brain. For non-marine organisms, this implies something with a big head on top of an upright stance.
3. Having a surplus of limbs is contraindicated for large organisms. Large limbs are expensive to build, and larger organisms are more constrained by gravity than surface tension, which makes multiple limbs less useful.
4. You need appendages for manipulating tools, and voices to debate and share ideas.
5. To develop non-trivial intelligence, you need to be multicellular, and multicellular organisms need to be able to reproduce. So, there is probably going to be sex involved, along with all the complexity that goes along with that, such as sexual competition and selection, caring for the young, and all the politics that arise from these kinds of interactions.
Putting these constraints together, you don't have too many options for aliens which are both realistic and interesting enough to build a story around. Your aliens are either:
* Bipedal politickers.
* Robots.
* Not capable of building something we would recognize as technology or civilization.
Our combustion-based technology is rather a fluke of having a huge amount of one-time crude oil reserves. Other planets won't necessarily have that.
As for combustion, indeed, other planets may not have it. So how do you propose that they would start to develop a technology which would lead to building spaceships?
Some stories very much are about aliens who use tech or have civilizations that are very very alien to us.
Having a large brain is also expensive to build. It's always a questions of trade-offs.
I can easily imagine how a hexapod like a centaur (four legs and two arms) can combine the speed of a horse and dexterity of a human and make up for the metabolic overhead.
> 4. You need appendages for manipulating tools, and voices to debate and share ideas.
You don't need sound. Sign language exists even in humans.
That wouldn't even require large appendages. The "talking" could be done by photophores, or 1cm long flexible vermiform appendages, or controlling the pattern of fur movement.
> 1. You can't be a marine organism, because developing advanced technology requires combustion, and water isn't something you want to be carting into space with you.
Humans cart water into space with them; an 80kg human contains about 50kg of water. It hardly matters whether that water is all inside your skin or partly outside your skin but inside your spacesuit.
The combustion question is more interesting: can you develop advanced technology without being able to burn things in your native environment? I think there are three reasons that the answer is "yes":
A. There are lots of other ways to manipulate material properties other than changing the material's temperature. The humans use fire because it's easy, but that doesn't mean it's the only way. Electrolysis can be rather surprisingly effective, and there's also manipulation of pressure rather than temperature, which is how the humans finally produced a room-temperature superconductor a couple of years ago, and of course crucial to the Haber-Bosch process. Manipulating pressure is very hard in a gaseous environment; being underwater makes it a lot easier, especially if, like a sperm whale, you can dive from 1 atmosphere down to 2 km of depth (200 atmospheres), or if, like a mantis shrimp, you can create cavitation bubbles that create plasma hotter than the surface of the sun when they collapse. Organisms like electric eels might be able to do electrolysis intrinsically, without tools, if they were intelligent, but you can also pound native copper into wires to make windings for electrical machines like generators.
B. The humans do a lot of material manipulations in environments they can't live in: the hard vacuum of an electron microscope, the interior of a furnace itself, the freezer in your house, the sulfuric acid of a car battery, the violently water-reactive environment of a Grignard reaction, the boiling airless interior of a soup pot, even the room-temperature airless interior of a water bath. Intelligent marine organisms could do their hot material processing in a trapped bubble of air as easily as the humans do their solvated material processing in a trapped flask of water.
C. A fish is a far more complex, delicately balanced, and robust system than an Audi, and yet genes are able to construct a fish entirely underwater, without using any fire. If genes can do it, obviously it can be done, even if the humans haven't had to figure out how to do it themselves.
I do think doing without fire in your native environment on Earth would be a lot more difficult, though.
But what about environments that are radically different from Earth? Venus's atmosphere at the surface consists of mostly supercritical carbon dioxide, where the familiar solid/liquid distinction ceases to make sense, and it's warm enough for phosphoric acid to polymerize into polyphosphates that are soft and yielding like carbon chains are on Earth. On Venus's surface, carbon chains are unstable because the temperature is 500 degrees, much as many compounds that are stable in dry ice are unstable at Earth's surface temperature. So think about Titan's atmosphere, which is mostly nitrogen with methane in liquid, solid, and gaseous forms at the surface, at a temperature of 94 K. Think about what it's like inside the sulfur volcanoes of Io, or the water ocean under Enceladus's shell of ice, or the catastrophically periodic environment on Halley's Comet, with ice exposed to vacuum most of the time.
> 2. You need a musculoskeletal system which can support a large brain. For non-marine organisms, this implies something with a big head on top of an upright stance.
You might not need a large brain at all; Alex the African grey parrot had a brain the size of a walnut and was capable of answering questions like "Which color bigger?" or "How many green cubes?" --- up to three or four, anyway. Corvids, about the same size, construct and use tools. If you do need a large brain, you could still be aquatic, or the brain could be located in the middle of your body instead of at one end as it is for octopodes (who can walk around on land without a skeletal system at all, just not breathe there the way some other mollusks like land snails do), or distributed in smaller brains around your body as it is for corporations or anthills.
Where does the "upright stance" thing come from? I don't see that you've made an argument for that at all.
Organisms floating around the atmosphere of a gas giant don't have to worry about supporting anything, just like marine organisms. And there are many other strange places self-reproducing patterns could arise and become intelligent: the magnetic fields and convection cells of a star, the nuclear reactions in a neutron star, the plasma winds of a nebula, the deep subsurface which on Earth is largely populated by ferric-ion-reducing archaea.
> 3. Having a surplus of limbs is contraindicated for large organisms. Large limbs are expensive to build, and larger organisms are more constrained by gravity than surface tension, which makes multiple limbs less useful.
Yet humans have four limbs and only need two or three, and giant squids reach 12 meters in length and hundreds of kilograms in weight while having ten tentacles and arms. (The colossal squid weighs more but is a bit shorter.) Pando is a much larger organism than any human, and has thousands of "arms"; they're just called "trunks". Coconut crabs, who can live their entire life on land (as adults they lose their gills and can no longer survive underwater), weigh 4 kg, about ten times bigger than an African grey parrot or crow (300-600 g); their ten legs (including their claws) span over 90 cm.
> 4. You need appendages for manipulating tools, and voices to debate and share ideas.
You probably need some kind of way to manipulate tools, but you could use the sucker-covered arm of an octopus or starfish, the beak of a crow (obviously enough), the claw of a crab, the trunk of an elephant, the ephemeral pseudopod of a slime mold, or the tails dolphins use to send one toroidal vortex bubble through the middle of another. There's no reason the appendages have to look much like human hands; even if they do, they could be attached somewhere else, like the hind feet of chimpanzees or the trunks of elephants. If you can reflect or refract light, you might be able to manipulate tools by focusing light. You probably need some way to communicate, but it doesn't have to be a voice; octopuses can create moving patterns on their skin that other octopuses can see by expanding and contracting their chromophores, and Deaf humans constantly debate and share ideas without using voices. Most fish can sense electrical fields in the water, and some fish like the electric eels mentioned above can generate them as well.
And of course if you have manipulating appendages of any kind, you can manipulate things in the world into symbols that others can observe, as I am doing now with my manipulating appendages.
> 5. To develop non-trivial intelligence, you need to be multicellular, and multicellular organisms need to be able to reproduce. So, there is probably going to be sex involved, along with all the complexity that goes along with that, such as sexual competition and selection, caring for the young, and all the politics that arise from these kinds of interactions.
Slime molds aren't multicellular, but they can learn to run mazes, but the whole multicellular thing is a red herring; organisms are defined in part by being able to reproduce, and slime molds, as well as many other single-celled organisms including the remarkable foraminifera, have sex. (Slime molds have many more than two sexes.) Moreover, many organisms reproduce without sex, and many organisms that have sex don't care for the young. So I think your argument in this point is so weak as to be incoherent.
Overall, I think you've entirely failed to make the argument for bipedalism.
Regarding the upright stance things, how do you see Alex the African Grey Parrot evolving towards becoming a spacefaring species without going towards an upright stance? He's smart, but he'll need to get smarter.
Regarding the upright stance thing, if you read again you'll notice that I qualified my assertion with "non-marine". Once we already ruled out the idea of marine organisms becoming spacefaring, there's no point arguing about things like whether giant squids can be spacefaring.
Naturally, I haven't answered your every point, because you made some valid points.
How would an upright stance help him get smarter?
My comment about the squids was just meant to rebut the claim that large organisms will invariably have four limbs. Yes, they'll probably have fewer limbs than a centipede or isopod, because the square-cube ratio makes limbs thicker, but maybe not as few as four. Now that I think about this, though, this only applies to land organisms like the coconut crab, the goliath bird-eating spider, or Pando (who has many more limbs than any centipede!), so the squid wasn't really relevant. A lion's mane jellyfish might be 30 meters in length and have 1200 tentacles, because there's no issue of them buckling under compressive stress; they're floating in the water.
Alex was already bipedal, as it happens, being a bird; I was just saying that evidently hundreds of grams of brain mass aren't necessary to be able to count, use symbols, and draw comparisons between objects. African greys also use tools to scratch the backs of their heads, pass down oral culture from generation to generation, live long enough to remember it for decades, live in large flocks, and drive around in tiny cars with joysticks. If I were somehow revived from suspended animation two million years in the future and humans were extinct but African greys were a spacefaring species, and I had to guess how it happened, I might guess:
1. They became pack hunters, feeding on birds such as pigeons, creating stronger evolutionary pressures to outwit their prey and to coordinate for hunting, as well as to learn to make weapons and traps. This enabled them to increase their nutrient intake.
2. They started living in smaller flocks, perhaps due to the necessity to escape from humans trying to capture them as pets, or perhaps because they adopted a less herbivorous mode of life which couldn't support such high population densities. This enabled their culture to innovate more rapidly.
3. They started making tools rather than just using them. Some stone-age equivalent of Lawn Darts would be totally adequate for hunting non-avian prey, perhaps incrementally developed from a practice of just dropping rocks on its heads; a wattle-and-daub birdhouse with a door would greatly diminish the threat from somewhat larger but dumber nocturnal predators; twine enables snares for smaller prey; nalbinding sweaters might enable the colonization of cooler areas;
4. They grew a little larger, perhaps after the humans went extinct and the forests grew back. Grey parrots don't normally get bigger than 600 g, but female harpy eagles can reach 9 kg, and eat prey in the 2.5-9 kg range, mostly sloths, while remaining entirely capable of flight. Being larger might give the parrots a little more body-weight budget for a brain, though it doesn't seem to have helped the poor eagles that much, but also a little more body-weight budget for clothing (like a hermit crab's shell) and tools. It's totally plausible that some populations of grey parrots might have evolved into formidable 2.5-kg pack apex predators, then started engaging in territorial warfare.
5. Pastoralism and agriculture developed, since once you have a territory you can securely hunt within, you can muster more warrior parrots to defend it if the territory is full of productive, easily edible animals like sheep, allowing you to feed more warriors; and this goes double if you can supplement your meat with lots of calories from things like grains.
6. Fire use developed for warfare purposes before being redirected to other purposes such as cooking and smelting. Fire is incredibly dangerous to birds, not only because of their easily-burned feathers but also because of their delicate respiratory systems; which means that whichever flock can somehow work out a way to drop hotshots on their enemies without dying in the process can become the parrot equivalent of Mongols (or Bantus, Conquistadores, or Indo-Aryans).
Honestly, though, the humans have no idea what is or isn't necessary for the development of intelligence. They've only seen it happen once, and they forgot what that was like.
The best creativity tends to come from restricted/limited choices. By making a general list of stereotypes and tropes ahead of time, it will help to come up with unique ideas or to selectively pick the trope of choice to advance the story.
1. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien...
EDIT: Having not heard of Neptune’s Brood, I looked it up after posting only to find out it was also written by the author. Oops.
> Common blunders
> many SF authors suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome
Referring to deliberate artistic choices as "mistakes" or "blunders" is in extremely poor taste. It's equivalent to attacking a stick figure comic for not adhering to rigorous details of human anatomy, and it makes me want to avoid any of Stross's work in the future.