As an extreme casual with regard to science fiction, some tropes work for me and others fall flat. I won’t necessarily stop reading a book when I encounter one of these, but I’ll deduct points.
1. Psionics
Back in the ‘70s, people thought science would eventually give us a way to do telepathy and telekinesis and empathy and other kinds of sidhi magic like the yogis wrote about. Didn’t pan out, although it inspired some of Stephen King’s first books.
Psionics are pretty firmly entrenched in speculative fiction though. Especially the superhero genre, but they also turn up in classic works like Dune. Sometimes this leads to my number one speculative fiction red flag: “character grunts and strains as if they are pooping while trying real hard to do a psionic thing.”
Or my number two -- some psi bully forces their way into a character’s internal narrative because they have a great big strong muscular psi, while their victim’s feeble psi is too weak to resist them despite lots of histrionics, and requests for the bully to “get out of my head!”
Or number three – there really are voices in my head who are responsible for all those crimes I did!
If I rejected everything with psionics I wouldn’t have much to read. Even Carl relies on them occasionally, and it makes perfect sense for people to use a communication platform that doesn’t exist, like telepathy, while talking to a being that doesn’t exist, like a demigod.
I have rejected books over psionics though. I tend to view it as a metaphor for schizophrenia, because sometimes people with that are a bit “leaky” with respect to attributing the source of their thoughts. Which helps them with things like creativity but sometimes gets in their way when they’re trying to focus. So it depends if the psionic metaphor has to do with decent folks dealing with scrambled signals … or if it’s got a few judgmental layers mixed in, like demonic possession, evil mind controlling entities, or elements that seem to equate hearing voices with misconduct.
2. The Preciousing
Writer reached out to tentatively touch the Writing Surface. It was like a million toothless mosquito bites. Writer opened its mouth in awe. Gaping wide. Stupefied. The Writing Surface undulated in its bare blankness. Petulantly. The Writer drifted in its mindless gape, compostulating about how “whoa” this all was. The empty blank Writing Surface writhed in silent scorn.
This “stoned on weed for the first time” type prose where some not-quite-lucid thinker assigns Capitalized Nouns to various things and people while their internal monologue suddenly becomes festooned with decorative verbiage is not a style exclusive to science fiction, but science fiction tends to intensify the cringe. Older readers might recall the novelization of the film E.T., which adds a plot arc about the extraterrestrial giving these precious little infodumps about crushing on Elliot’s mom, whom he calls Willow Creature. That was the point where I personally decided I’d had enough of The Preciousing, which hasn’t kept me from running into it over and over again. Although I’m getting better at tapping out the instant I see it.
3. Clone Arrangers
Crappy writer: “So my character lost a leg and then he went to the clone vats and got a new one, from a clone.”
Me: “So your futuristic society has two classes of humans, and one class is enslaved or something and can be suddenly deprived of their legs. Shouldn’t the story be about that? How do they keep the second class humans down? Does everyone get a second class human of their own automatically, when they’re born? What about twins and other multiple births? Or do they just assign the first one born as the original and all the other siblings get sentenced to grow up in the ‘no civil rights’ class? Speaking of classes, do they get their own segregated schools?
Crappy writer: “Ummm … so he goes to a clone vat and says ‘one leg please’ and they go ‘yes sir that will be thirty credits’ and then they put the leg on…”
Jodi Picoult wrote a domestic drama called My Sister’s Keeper about a kid conceived to be a donor for her older sibling that goes deeper into this issue than many crappy writers. People used to feel similarly about “test tube babies” – how they are automatically somehow less human, with less rights, and there’s something sinister and manufactured about them, and that they’d somehow be a second, special, less natural kind of being. These days, people born via assisted reproduction are all over the place and nobody gives it a second thought.
4. Bodies Are Turntables And Minds Are Vinyl
Body swapping is a science fiction staple, and it’s also popular with actors who enjoy pretending to be possessed by some other actor. A very literal twist on Cartesian dualism, these stories feature people effortlessly repositioning their consciousness in someone else’s flesh, and they never ever run into bodily complications like neurodiversity, or food allergies, or even the dreaded lack of internal monologue (a concept which upsets lots of people who post on Reddit). Or constantly thinking about food, which is something people report losing when they start taking GLP-1 drugs. Or even attraction, which is a largely physical thing involving subtle hormone scents and various innate predispositions. You hardly ever read about body swappers suddenly falling in love though, or zapping themselves into a body with different desires, or even one that constantly nags you for sweets. Let alone one with a brain that is fantastic at math and terrible at small talk.
There are reasons for this, which come in many flavors such as good, bad, and well-intended. Lots of people think that being able to detect qualities based on physical criteria would lead to selective abortions and other eugenics-related measures, and it's preferable to have a fundamentalist body/mind separation worldview, in which flesh is merely a vehicle, and variation is all attributable to conditioning and trauma, and people can swap bodies effortlessly, without even dealing with headaches, or bellies that’ll keep you up all night if you feed them the wrong dinner. In this vision, bodies are just like cars that all have the same instrument panel – interchangeable, with zero concerns about adjusting to a manual transmission or a right-side driver’s seat or a fussy engine that needs to warm up for a couple minutes.
This trope is such a staple that it’s difficult to avoid, and occasionally these days I’m spotting maverick writers who deal with it in creative ways, considering the possibility one’s new body might be quirkier than the last one they were wearing, and that brains might actually physically store memories as well as personality details. I’ll give that sort of speculation a chance. Not if it’s yet another lazy story about someone choosing between their authentic self and their DNA though. Gedoudaheah widatshit.
5. Simplistic Backstory as Exposition
This is another one not exclusive to science fiction, it happens in all the genres. Character X is obsessed with dogs, because they were bitten by one as a child. Or character X is terrified by spiders, also due to a single instance of juvenile exposure. Or maybe they were dominated by their mean dentist dad, which inspired them to grow up and buy a chocolate factory. Sometimes the main character must investigate the simplistic backstory, which ends up being the big reveal which then frees Character X from their mysterious compulsion. Yet another one I’m not buying.
6. Bougie Soldiers
I have zero firsthand military experience but I’ve known a lot of current and former soldiers, worked with them in lawsuits, played videogames with them and the like, and I’ve found them to be a lot like medical people, or responder people – they sometimes have a rather dark sense of humor that helps them deal with the disgusting stuff they deal with at work. Lots of them are working class, and some of the ones who aren’t tend to affect working class slang and mannerisms to fit in. One of the things that strikes me as accurate about DC Carl is the idea he used to be in the Coast Guard and is familiar with enlisted men.
Then there are fictional troops who act more like middle-class office workers. Polite and cooperative. Customer service mode. They don’t get emo over sports. They don’t posture and play-fight over status. Often they don’t even talk in slang, or lose their temper, or quarrel. They would never, ever think of drawing a penis on the face of a passed-out colleague because that would be just wrong.
The Alien movies tend to get it right, with bickering wage slaves trading barbs in space. Even Chrisp Ratt’s character in Guardian of the Galaxies feels authentically soldier-like, with his ability to balance wildly disparate personalities, dumb tension-defusing jokes, and love for dopey rock and roll.
Other times storytellers expect me to accept a pack of clean-living well-behaved humor-free citizens as working folks whose job involves gross, dangerous, and highly unpleasant things. But I’m not buying it.
7. One Personality Planet
I’m not down with this type of OPP, where all the Vulcans are INTJs, and all the Venusians are great dancers while the Martians are obsessed with conquest. It’s even kind of weird in fantasy where all the dwarves are stubborn, and all the orcs are violent – we invented D&D specifically to get past those types of stereotypes. It reminds me of Victorians pontificating about whether the Spaniards’ average head shape influences their national character to be different from that of the Portuguese. But I’ll buy it in the context of lots of neighboring kingdoms in close proximity where the people are genetically distinct and probably do a lot of cheerleading about what makes a person truly part of their society. A whole planet of jocks/nerds/people who never lie in contrast with the people from a neighboring planet who always tell the truth? Great big nope.
8. Genre Dysphoria
Science fiction stories are about ideas. Romance stories are about two people experiencing attraction. Mysteries are about trying to find out who did something, and the answer is revealed at the end for those who couldn’t figure out all the clues. Westerns are about cowboys and horror is about scary things. Genre stories can incorporate thousands of other elements as long as they at least give a nod to their genre, otherwise they’re just generic stories that will probably get lost out there in the big bad world without a support group.
So don’t go telling me “this is a western” and then proceed to discuss your last relationship and several of your favorite recipes while including a sentence like “my uncle was a cowboy” somewhere on the last page. Too much of a fraudulence vibe.
9. Excessive Grooviness
Stranger In A Strange Land is probably the biggest example, checking off bingo card categories like “hippie cult,” “polycule,” and “hero who gets lots of sex” and “surrealism that might be influenced by drugs.” If Austin Powers would dig the book in question, or if Philip K. Dick wrote it, or if it throws in hipster references to people like Jack Parsons, it is way too groovy for me and I’ll have to pass, with Roger Zelazny and Michael Moorcock standing guard at the border.
10. Excessive Fascism
I don’t like the other polarity very much either. I’m not going to sympathize with some racist sexist asshole of a character, unless it’s Harry Flashman, and the author is a genius with regard to the fictional portrayal of assholes who occasionally experience a flash of moral clarity in between lots of stumbling around in their customary assholian fog. I don’t object to the presence of characters like that as long as I can snicker when they get their painful comeuppance, but I’m sure not going to fangirl over them.
No comments:
Post a Comment