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> > 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

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.

Iain M. Banks did a far better job with this concept in his Culture[1] novels. In short sure, if you just want to eat a lot of steak or be a god in your local reality simulating VR or something you're good to go, but if you want to be a galactic kingpin not so much. And on the scale where the real players are playing, it comes down to matter. There's plenty to go around, but don't get greedy.

[1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

Steak is so cheap these days, we've already more or less achieved that :-/

> then money becomes obsolete and people no longer use it for anything.

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?

Even with unlimited energy and matter conversion, but without money what motivates doctors, for example, to do their job?

And doctors might be on the more interesting end of job spectrum. What about dude whose job is to watch over the robots doing cleaning, of the sanitation system. Or other similar things, day after day looking at monitors with nothing new on them...

They probably have robots to watch over the robots doing the cleaning, and AI to watch monitors and stuff.

> Why doesn't anyone build their own fleet of starships, then? And why do the Ferengi exist?

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.

>> 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?

Indeed. Most non-SF stories set on earth ignore plate tectonics, because for most people it is not a factor in their daily lives.

I'm ignoring plate tectonics on a daily basis. Years pass without me worrying about it or even thinking about it. Not sure why fiction would have to be different.

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.

I think the deeper point is that sci-fi is often just X in space. So pirates or cowboys or Vietnam or cold war or colonialism or communism or murder-mystery in space.

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.

> Everyone uses Money

Even the communists gave up on a society without money. (The Soviet Politburo briefly considered it.)