The other day the wife and I went to Zellers because they were having a sale on their paperback novels. The selection there isn't great but there's always a chance you'll find something interesting. The only book that really caught my eye was The Dark Crusade by Walter Hunt. I figured I'd give it a try. What the hell.
It's not badly written. It does, however, make herculean efforts to include every single tired cliche of science fiction that I can think of. Every single one of these are like a nail scraping across a chalkboard. The actual characters and plot could be Shakespeare and I would find it hard to tell, so distracting is this gleeful escapade through the bounding hills of poorly thought out cliche.
Here's a short list of the things that I find in certain kinds of science fiction novels that really piss me off.
Yes, this is geeky. Get over it.
The Emperor Has No Clothes
The past five hundred years has seen a revolution in human affairs. The embrace of liberal humanism has led to a social and political enlightenment in which the place of the citizen has become paramount. For a government to be considered legitimate it has had to clearly define its responsibilities and accountability to those whom it governs, respect the rule of law and subordinate military power to civilian control. This has led to the rise of great democracies of the west and all that they have achieved. It has created some of the most prosperous, stable and advanced societies in the history of the world.
Clearly, a passing fad.
For some reason, certain types of SF novels embrace the idea that governing territory encompassing more than one planetary body will necessarily require a massive regression in political thought to a far more crude, less efficient, and less justifiable system of government. The world, it seems, is teeming with imperialists and monarchists who can't wait to corrupt the space program into a tool to undermine society and place someone -- anyone, really -- into a position of hereditary absolutism. Hence the plethora of SF novels featuring Empires and Emperors, only a handful of centuries from now, ruling over quiescent billions who clearly all flunked high school civics.
I'm not sure why we'd skip over kings and go straight to emperors, personally. Why not go all the way back to shamanic priest-kings? We could build pyramids and everything. It'd be cool.
You All Look The Same To Me
When you're writing for a TV show, you're necessarily constrained by the limitations of budget, and the desire of actors to be visible and recognizeable in their roles. These requirements have led to the 'latex forehead' school of alien life, in which every alien race is basically human but for a handful (if that) of fairly superficial variations. Written SF has no such requirement. So why are all the aliens still humanoid?
Even better are humanoid alien races which bear a striking resemblance to an evolved form of a common terrestrial animal. The odds of something remotely like a cat or a canary evolving in a completely foreign biosphere is fairly slim. The odds of every alien race to be seen looking like the descendant of something I could buy at PetsMart are astronomical.
David Brin's Uplift books are an example of how to do this right, filled with a menagerie of extraordinarily strange and, well, alien lifeforms. Falling back on a collection of sophonts which would be outdone in originality by the Doctor Who makeup department is embarassing.
One World, One Coke
The world has well over two hundred countries in it. It has orders of magnitude more languages than that, and even if you limit the definition of religion to include only the largest and most affluent of cults, you still have a great variety from which to choose. Humankind has a much more limited range of genetic variation than most species and we still have a number of very visibly different kinds of people.
Apparently, this is apparently all going to change, because by the time we're zipping around space running into aliens, there will be one world government, at most two religions (if that) and basically just one culture. Personally, I'm on board with the death of religion, but the rest of it I find hard to swallow.
Fortunately we'll be in good company, as any alien race we encounter has likewise got one government, one culture, one language, one religion and no genetic variation worth mentioning. They call home a planet which is entirely composed of terrain exactly like one sub-region of Earth; Canada all by herself has more terrain and climate variation than some universes being written about. Whereas we have mountains and prairie, lakes and tundra and forests, they are stuck with an entire world of just Newfoundland, or an entire world just of British Columbia. (Dear God, I hope I don't ever have to see an entire world of just Saskatchewan.)
Find Something Positive
Fortunately, there are piles of good work out there which avoids these failings. David Brin has been mentioned. Iain M Banks is top notch. You can't go wrong with the classics.
There's a lot of good stuff out there. It's just unfortunate that there is also so much crap.
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