SF quote of the day

[roseembolism]

Nicked from rec.arts.sf.written:

        "One of the things SF has taught me is that in the future,
people will be frickin' morons when it comes to solving day to
day problems (In fact, they will forget things that we know now)
but this will not prevent them from building near-C or FTL starships."
- James Nicoll 

Given that this was a discussion that involved tho old "There's a water shortage because the space settlers have to get water from Earth?" cliche, this quote is especially appropriate.  But the sad thing is there's an entire subgenre of SF that involves leaping through hoops to solve A Major Thorny Problem, while the reader sits there and mutters "why don't they use (technology that's available now), or gripes "Given the technology they have in the setting, why don't they (obvious use of tech)". 

Does anyone want to bring up their favorite versions of SF stupidity?

Comments

[mithriltabby]

Most “alien invasion” scenarios. If you’ve got the ability to leave your native star system, why do you care about a little tiny planet?

[haamel.livejournal.com]

Alien invasion sci-fi turns on the quality of a) the explanation of what the aliens want on Earth, and b) the explanation of why they haven't taken it already. A classically bad example of both is War of the Worlds, where these "vast, cool intellects" can't figure out a) how to stake out some lebensraum that isn't already occupied, or b) spend all those jillions of planning years figuring out some antibiotics, or even decent hazmat gear. Not to mention, why spend all the effort to bury deadly mecha all over the place when they could have just USED THEM in the first place.

I'm deeply conflicted over _Signs_, which was *not* meant as a sci-fi movie but rather as a suspense film with a sci-fi idea initiating the tension. As a suspense film, Signs delivered some very good stuff. That said, the water-soluble aliens were so egregiously suck-ass from a sci-fi standpoint that must confess I've never tried to watch the film twice.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

I saw two possible explanations for how the aliens react in Signs:

1) It's actually a coming of age ritual: "You will not be a true adult until you go down to the Planet of Watery Death naked and barehanded, and return with the head of one of the Water Monsters"

2) They aren't actually aliens at all, they're DEMONS. After all, they never self-identify as aliens, and they don't act like technologically aware aliens. They do however, act like imps or demons. Which explains why splashing them with water works- it's actually sanctifying them.

[sakon76.livejournal.com]

Are we talking "War of the Worlds" the Tom Cruise debacle, or the older original version where the mecha are freshly-arrived from Mars? Because, really, yeah, the "let's bury the suckers on Earth for however long before activating them" change to the plot made no sense whatsoever. But, then, I like the original. And don't like the remake.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Probably the most egregious of those scenarios came from "V", where the aliens invade for that rarest of substances...water.

I tend to think that any reason for alien invasion would have to be fundamentally irrational, based on the equivalent of philosophical or religious motives. Something like "the aliens must be converted to our beliefs", combined with an equally irrational "Only a land owner is a true citizen" might work as a motivation.

Of course now I want to see an alien invasion that is actually a botched "This will take no effort at all- they will welcome us as liberators" operation.

[sakon76.livejournal.com]

Eh, "V" I'll give a half-pass to, on the basis that they came for water and food.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

IIRC, they once got some actual SF writers to do a "V" novel, and poor dears, they were frantically jumping through hoops to try to make the scenario make sense. They eventually explained the fact that the lizards could eat Terran meat (along with being reptilian bipeds) with the concept that the lizards weren't actually aliens, they were DINOSAURS, who had left Earth millions of years ago, and who had just now come back.

This is why you don't get SF authors to do TV novelizations: it leads to psychotic breaks.

[mithriltabby]

Charlie Stross’ Singularity Sky has something like that, though the invasion scenario is much more like some of the proposals I saw for airdropping Western convenience appliances onto the Soviet Union as a way to end the Cold War...

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Singularity sky is really kind of like a telephone repairman, gone horribly insane. "Never mind about wireless, I've got a REALLY COOL way to hook you to the internet!"

[yuusada.livejournal.com]

Funny, that's kinda how the Cardassian occupation of Bajor went down.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

I had forgotten that. Though there was a strong component of resource extraction too wasn't there? Which is why the station was there.

In any case, given all the various types of Unbelievablum in Star Trek, resource extraction of some bizarre substance might be a good justification for an invasion. "Look, they have pure bosons, just lying around on the surface waiting to be harvested!"

[haamel.livejournal.com]

Not sure if it's "stupid" to the extent that we haven't thoroughly solved the problem yet IRL, but C.J. Cherryh's masterwork Cyteen revolves around its protagonist prying crucial knowledge out of her mother's database by finding keywords. In other words, an extremely high-stakes game of "Name That Google". Given that a) Google is generally pretty easy to use, and b) our heroine is supposed to be one of the smartest people in existence, who c) has nearly unlimited time over years of her life to play with the computer, how likely is it _really_ that the important goodies would remain hidden until she is of the plot-requisite age. Cherryh tries to minimize this effect somewhat by the plot device of algorithmic lock-outs of certain pieces of data (until the protagonist has passed a certain aptitude test or whatnot), but it's still far less lustrous a setup in our data mining-o-centric world.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Did they even have Google or easy-to-use search databases back when Cyteen was written? I'm willing to give Cyteen a pass simply because computer tech has evolved so quickly. Hell, I'm willing to give most old stories that underestimate computer capabilities a pass.

Hmm. Cyteen is from 1988, Archie was created in 1990, and Gopher came about in '91. Back in 88, it may not have been so apparent how user friendly data mining would become.