The Four Most Annoying S-Words In Popular Science Fiction
To be completely honest, I don’t think it would be fair to describe myself as a fan of sci-fi today. Growing up in the late sixties and early seventies I was most definitely wrapped up in the real-world dramas of NASA, being allowed stay up extremely late to watch Neil Armstrong bobble down the ladder in a grainy monochrome that was more a result of our lousy TV set than the fact that the images were coming live from the moon.
My father and I — mostly him as a result of my poor glue handling skills — built the Saturn V model, and in later years we watched space shuttle adventures together — both the good and the bad.
I read Asimov and Zalezny, watched Star Trek and Star Wars with roughly equal levels of zeal, and was fastened to the TV each week to watch episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, while listening on enormous headphones to the space-age-inspiring bleeps and bloops of Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis.
In short — because the full story would take up reams — I believe I paid my dues when it comes to popular sci-fi in my youth, but as time went by I started to bore of the pseudo-science and blatant sciencelessness of much of the content, even from major franchises, and drifted weightlessly into the less specific genre of speculative fiction, where I found more compelling subject matter and a little more leeway for my disbelief to be suspended.
For a long while it was easy to be a selective consumer, simply avoiding the genre-specific TV channels and being picky about which movies I went to see, but Netflix, Amazon Prime and the other mainstreamers have made that a lot more difficult, particularly when their algorithms start filling my screen with undesirable — and to some extent, unavoidable — suggestions each time I make even the slightest abortive foray into the sci-fi content of archives.
That — and two weeks enforced isolation due to COVID quarantine — is how I came to stumble upon a whole plethora of questionable space-themed offerings, and was reminded — as if reminders were required — of why I’d abandoned this genre in the first place.
I suppose the range of bland and unchallenging life-experience themes that constitute mainstream TV these days outside of box set territory do need new backdrops now and then, and although the real-world space exploration scene is not all that active, there are still headline-grabbing exploits going on, with exciting characters like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (Branson is hardly what I’d describe as exciting, but he’s done something too…). All that press has pushed Space back into the field of view of the public of late, and I’m not just referring to the metaphorically bespectacled portion of the population who might have been associated with sci-fi in the past.
Special effects and CGI have also got to the point where it isn’t so impossible to make a space video on a tight budget that doesn’t look like a 1972 episode of Thunderbirds. Location shots for any kind of show cost a fortune these days, and with the production restrictions of the pandemic making logistics a serious issue, you might as well shoot everything in front of a green screen and choose your setting in post. Soap opera in down-town NY? Why not set it in Mongolia or relocate the plot line to Moon Base Epsilon? Timeless? Maybe not, but weightless, at least.
The story lines of these new age sci-fi serials always seem to be about something else anyway. One of the things I loved about my favourite genre novels when I was younger was the way in which they set normal-looking characters in everyday situations against fantastic backdrops on another world or another time, and so you’d think this sort of thing would be right up my wormhole, but the clichés and absence of credible science just seem to get in the way of everything, and I’m left gawking instead at all the the nonsense that the producers probably hoped could be brushed under the gravity mat.
There are too many instances to get into in this brief summary, but these four specific things just keep coming up over and over, and invariably activate my remote control’s tractor beam to haul my thumb out of geostationary orbit and plant it firmly on the exit button.
Simultaneous-conversations
Where would modern fictional TV and movie making be without the ability to connect locations, characters and story fragments using mobile communications? Every cliffhanger is made even more suspenseful by having the reveal right there, just on the opposite side of a phone connection. With the advent of the smartphone and all of the wonders the internet has to offer, this handy little device has become as much of a plot-hole fixer and lazy writing device as the Sonic Screwdriver once was in Doctor Who.
Of course there’s still room for disconnected parallel action at a distance, or for one scene drama and single camera comedy, but those are rarities, more often found outside of the mainstream, where constant diversion and somewhat implausible connections are more enthralling — and more likely to be mistaken for clues of cleverness by an audience desperate to find Tweetable nuggets concealed around every corner.
But in space, nobody hears you scream (into your mobile phone), or not straightaway, anyway. While I realise that there’s an awful lot of things we don’t fully understand for certain about the fundamental fabric of the universe, and I am very much of a mind that our perception of it all — along with the physical principles we’ve developed to accurately describe how the parts of it we can see behave — is simply our perspective on something quite different. Kind of like how interference patterns become a thing, but don’t necessarily describe the incidents that caused the effects that resulted in the opportunities for interference to happen and create the patterns we perceive…kinda…
If you want to tell exciting stories in space then you need to let things move really fast, because the scenes within which the action can take place are really far apart. This speed issue has to apply to modes of communication too, but when you start doing the math it’s clear that for simultaneous conversations to take place over the distances we’re talking about, the signals themselves would need to be moving way faster than the speed of light, and that makes things really tricky.
Like I said, I am not going to challenge the concept of faster than light physics, but I am going to point out that when there are some things in our human sphere of influence that can move around faster than light and some things that cannot, our storylines get thoroughly fucked up very quickly. Ultimately, we’re talking about a real life manifestation of time travel at the heart of the soap opera. Start drawing that head-wreck of a topic into the middle of prime-time conversation and you’ll lose audiences faster than you can say Make It So, Number One.
Slingshots
Why does the conclusion to every problem of navigation always seem to be to slingshot around a handy planet, star, black-hole or whatever else happens to look dangerous and gravitational? Gravity is useful stuff. In fact, there are many physiological reasons why our species is totally unsuited to a life without it, and if we plan to have a future in which groups of individuals are planning to flit back and forth between space and Earth with lengthy period of time up in the sky, we’re probably going to need to come up with a workable artificial gravity solution. Without that, our space-fearers are rapidly going to transcend into a new state in which they won’t be much use as gravity dwellers any more — that’s if they manage to survive all the other physical rigours of the emptiness beyond our atmosphere.
All that radiation is going to be a problem, obviously — and one that’s not spoken about a great deal in the genre. But that’s somewhat excusable, because I imagine that we’ll find some technical solution to that problem — however, I am fairly sure that unlike every other problem up there in space, it won’t involve slingshotting ourselves off the nearest super-nova (probably under manual control and with at least one engine down, or a dwindling oxygen supply, or something like that…).
Sports-bras
Is Walt Disney really cryogenically frozen in a tube somewhere awaiting the development of a cure for lung cancer? Well if he is, then they’ll also need to find a cure for all the cellular damage and degenerative effects of being cryogenically frozen in a tube for half a century.
We can’t do that. We haven’t worked out if it’s even possible.
We also cannot put people into any form of life-preserving endless slumber other than pure sedation, which has no significant ability to stop your body aging at exactly the same rate as it would if you were awake. Sedating astronauts on long journeys would certainly help deal with their boredom and remove the opportunity for the sorts of interpersonal and psychological issues that might develop during extended space journeys, so that’s a good reason to put space travellers to sleep. You could also do a much more efficient job of transporting the nutrients you’d need to keep the crew alive if you could just bring along tanks of multivitamins to pipe through the sleeping bodies rather than having to bring interesting and palatable real food substitutes along instead.
Energy efficiency could probably be improved too if you could keep the bodies literally in the dark about what was going on around them. Wrap them in some insulating materials and then moderate their individual temperatures within that closed envelope. Pipe the nutrients in and the waste products out for recycling. That would be relatively self sustaining in a couple of ways…
Perhaps it’s the thought of how much of their own excrement each astronaut has consumed during their time in stasis that makes sci-fi travellers invariably want to throw up each time they emerge from hibernation. Perhaps it’s the first glimpse of their own bodies, all withered and pale from lightless, motionless incarceration, and dressed — for some unexplained reason — in skin tight sports bras and pants?
Shameful Submissions
Now and then we see in the media calls for people who might be interested in taking part in a space exploration related study, or even volunteering to be crew on some future speculative mission. They’re interesting. There’s a little part in the back of my consciousness that always wants to apply.
Then I think to myself “hold on…no matter how much I might decide that I’d like to do this thing, how on Earth would I ever be able to survive with a bunch of the sort of a-holes who would want to volunteer for this?” I know my limitations. I would be disabling the overrides on the air-lock door within a week and watching us all turn to vapour in the cold vacuum of eternity…
During my career I have met a lot of military people from a lot of different countries around the world. They’ve ranged from literally the foot soldiers to the commanding officers, from pilots and sea captains to special forces operatives and electronic warfare geeks. There have been some absolute psychopaths and some of the most meek people I’ve ever encountered. I’m not sure that there was a common thread that ran through them all, but if there was anything that made them all similar it was the understanding of hierarchy. Some of them might ignore it or despise it, or even abuse it, but they all understood it and took their appropriate place within it, and as a result of that, these groups of individuals would accomplish a shared goal more often than not.
There simply was never any place for the maverick who chose not to be a part of the collective.
In a century’s time, if the space travel sector is seeing the quantity of mutinous endeavours we see in popular sci-fi, it must mean that we’re abandoning the inclusion of the military in this arena and going with the private sector exclusively.
No more than a few episodes into any space-located show (involving an impossibly long journey in a ludicrously short amount of time), some last-minute substitute commander will emerge from their slumber-pod, clad in little more than a sports bra and with a sick bag clasped between perfectly bronzed and manicured fingers, only to challenge the reckless abandon of a years-long trained star captain, only to escape the worst possible nightmare scenario via a quick planetary slingshot — all under manual control — thereby demonstrating who is the rightful Alpha and establishing a tension between factions of the crew built on shame, that will provide at least two seasons worth of opportunities for revenge (if the focus groups react well to the pilot).
Merton Barracks lives in Hong Kong after a life literally and metaphorically on the road.
He is a security technology expert, an autonomous vehicle expert, a counter-terrorism expert, a writer of fiction, a father, a ranter and an exposer of bullshit.
He is also a victim of childhood sexual abuse, who took half a century to face up to what that did to him and also what it made him. You don’t recover. You don’t repair.
You can find some of his work published on Illumination.
Take a look at some of his fiction
Or read about the process of coping
