Your Sci-Fi Pet Peeves

[SpiderClops]

Transparent screens. What kind of utter stupidity is that? If I'm doing anything on my phone or tablet, the last thing I want is other people to see it. And wouldn't transparent screens be really annoying and distracting to work with anyway?

Touch-screen/holographic keyboards. This is one those things that just looks cool and futuristic, but actually would be much less efficient. Mechanical keyboards would be way faster and efficient, if you know how to type systematically.

Why is half the times everything is so blue? What is up with that?

[Arfguy]

Trickle metal. I cannot think of the actual technology, but the idea of metal coming out a small storage space is annoying. It was annoying during Age of Extinction when little bubbles would form robots. It got annoying when Black Panther's suit changed from a solid suit made out of a magic metal to the magic metal forming the suit using little bubbles and now it is annoying to watch the bleeding suit from Infinity War.

I have no issues with magic metal. I dislike how it trickles like water to form something solid.

[AJBopp]

Subspace communication. I understand why it's necessary from a narrative viewpoint, but the idea that people dozens or hundreds or thousands of light years apart can speak to each other in real time always kind of takes me out of the story.

[DrNewGod]

Artificial gravity without a viable mechanical explanation (rotating ship sections/continuous acceleration, etc.). That's a frequent one, but I have to wonder why the ship's dorsal surface isn't cluttered with every bit of dust and junk that the ship passes near.

Manned fighters and human infantry. I know we want people doing in the fighting for drama's sake, but if we're advanced enough for interstellar travel, we'll probably let the drones do the rough stuff. ETA: the exceptions being scenarios like Dune's, whose backstory makes it clear why they don't want machines getting too smart.

US/British Naval Ranks. It's been done to death since Forbidden Planet; there are other authority structures available that wouldn't require too much exposition.

[Huntsman Spider]

Trickle metal. I cannot think of the actual technology, but the idea of metal coming out a small storage space is annoying. It was annoying during Age of Extinction when little bubbles would form robots. It got annoying when Black Panther's suit changed from a solid suit made out of a magic metal to the magic metal forming the suit using little bubbles and now it is annoying to watch the bleeding suit from Infinity War.

I have no issues with magic metal. I dislike how it trickles like water to form something solid.

Not a fan of nanomachines, then? Because that sounds like the kind of tech you're describing.

My personal sci-fi pet peeve is humans being depicted as almost uniformly ignorant, belligerent, and pathologically bigoted toward other sapient/sentient life. Yes, it's supposed to mirror how humans have treated each other for relatively minor cosmetic differences, but it does get tiresome to see humanity nearly constantly represented in sci-fi as blatant supremacists and xenophobes toward anything or anyone "not human."

[Carabas]

Blood having metallic iron in it.

Overly human-centric universes.

[Gray Lensman]

Not a fan of nanomachines, then? Because that sounds like the kind of tech you're describing.

I'm not a big fan of nanotech either, but that is mainly because it all too often devolves into magic trying to look like science fiction. Keep it on the level of other tech in the universe and I'm fine, but when it becomes 'instant anything needed handwavium' I keep hearing some kind of mystical chant in the back of my head.

[Totoro Man]

although I wouldn't call Cameron's "Avatar" science fiction:
"unobtainium"
still makes me cringe. LOL

[Gray Lensman]

although I wouldn't call Cameron's "Avatar" science fiction:
"unobtainium"
still makes me cringe. LOL

That one is an actual term that has been in use in engineering circles since the 1950's. It was initially coined as a joke, but has seen serious use as shorthand for anything needed that doesn't exist because we either can't get it or haven't invented it yet.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index....eal-substance/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium

[XPac]

Not really a peeve ... but I always thought it was weird whenever 2 save ships met one was never sideways or upside down. It's like there some universal sense of upright in space.

[Powerboy]

Subspace communication. I understand why it's necessary from a narrative viewpoint, but the idea that people dozens or hundreds or thousands of light years apart can speak to each other in real time always kind of takes me out of the story.

Unless it interferes with the plot. Then it will take days or weeks to send or receive a subspace message.

It wouldn't take me out of the story if it was consistent.

Although this subject makes me suddenly have this image of a pioneer reading a story set in the 20th century and saying, "I don't know. This stuff of people using these telephones that can communicate in real time over hundred or thousands of miles really takes me out of the story." I think the lack of consistency is the issue.

A pet peeve for me is shapeshifters. Not the shapeshifting itself but that they turn into a purse and weigh as much as a purse or into an elephant and weigh as much as an elephant, changing their mass. That's fine for Fantasy but not science fiction.

[Powerboy]

This is not a sci fi complaint but a general on-screen complaint. In movies and television, anyone who is upsidedown sees the sky as being down and the ground as being up. I remember in grade school a teacher having us stand on our heads and asking where the sky was. We pointed up. Then where the floor was. We pointed down. But on television and in the movies, it doesn't work that way. Worse, I've known people in real life who insist it works the way the movies show it when it obviously and demonstrably f****n doesn't.

Reminds me of a teacher friend of mine back in the 1980s when "Young Einstein" came out and he asked his high school class what nationality Einstein was and they all said "Tasmanian" to which he replied, "WRONG! Once again, Hollywood has messed you up."

[Jokerz79]

This is mostly an JJ Abrams thing and while I like Star Trek 2009 and Force Awakens it annoys me how he treats Warp Speed and Light Speed as almost Instantaneous space travel. Oh same with Turbo lifts.

[DrNewGod]

Inconsistency of the rules. When you set how something works, stick with it. Superhero example: Ant-Man explicitly said Pym Particles compress matter, making a shrunken person a bullet, but then ignored the shrunken objects' weight. Star Trek established that transporters disassemble and reassemble matter, but then plot-double-talk ways of doubling the output and creating identical twins.

[RikWriter]

Manned fighters and human infantry. I know we want people doing in the fighting for drama's sake, but if we're advanced enough for interstellar travel, we'll probably let the drones do the rough stuff. ETA: the exceptions being scenarios like Dune's, whose backstory makes it clear why they don't want machines getting too smart.

There are a lot of reasons people might not want armed drones. In the SF novels I write, I've come up with three or four different reasons. First of all, if the drones are remotely piloted, you run into the possibility of your signal being jammed or the drones taken over by someone who hacks your system. Second, if they're independent AI, you run into the possibility of them being fooled by enemy maskirovka and not firing on legitimate targets or possibly going rogue and shooting your own troops, or even just running off and doing nothing. Third, it might be declared illegal for AI to be armed because of the moral problems with allowing computers to engage in lethal force on living beings. Fourth, there might have been bad experiences in the past where autonomous drones killed innocent people, which would lead to fear and mistrust of them. There are more, but that's just off the top of my head.