I watched Guardians
of the Galaxy Vol 2 after it arrived on Netflix. Watching it vividly
brought to mind all the things that annoy me with science fiction.
And so, with all those annoying things in the movie in mind, I thought
it might be fun to rage at the sky, and list some of the things that annoy me when reading.
I should start by
stating that the flaws I’m going to highlight are my issues. You
can never please everyone, and shouldn’t try, so if I don’t like
something, it’s my problem, not the author’s. I’m not saying
anyone should do anything differently. Indeed, all the stories I’ll
cite are highly rated and very popular, far more popular than any of
my stories will ever be, so clearly the problems I encounter are of
my own making. I’ve just become too narrow and inflexible in my old
age, I guess.
The fundamental
problem with so many science fiction stories is that they fail to
engage me so I can’t simply roll over the flaws that I notice along
the way. If you like something enough you can overlook plot holes and
all sorts of little errors. But if you don’t and don’t expect to
like it any better if you continue reading, the flaws turn into deal
breakers. I’ve never been shy about quitting a book I'm not into once I
determine that it’s not going to get better, which is why library
books (or free books on Amazon) are my usual choice of books. To find
those books I will often read the free sample from Amazon. I usually
quit reading most stories without ever getting to the end of Amazon’s
free preview.
So what discourages
me from reading further? First, there's a sense of “been there, done
that.” The stories sound too familiar – minor variations of ones
I’ve read before. Now I’ve certainly borrow old ideas for my
stories, so it isn’t just that they they’re not completely
original, it’s that they seem to be generic examples of every other
story of their kind. There’s no promise of originality. The deck
chairs have simply been rearranged. This may well be by design, since most readers know what they
like, like what they know, and avid readers seem to enjoy familiar
stories that they can slip right into – hence the many, many series
books. Indeed, new writers are often encouraged to write series after reading the best of
their chosen genre and then imitate those books right down to their
covers.
A second sticking
point for me is what I see is carelessness in constructing the story.
For example using plots that are no more coherent or logical than
what’s used in the movies or TV show – stories that are basically used
to stitch together visual scenes and only work if you don’t think
too much about them. Another thing that annoys me is laziness in
imagining the future. Often the future – or what little glimpse we
are given of it in the story – seems very superficial, often it’s
just like today, except for a few futuristic items.
I’ll cite some
specific examples below, without naming the books or authors since I’m not
really reviewing their stories, and have read only the first chapter
or two for most, so it's hardly fair to judge them on what I have read. And well, they may have grown into their craft by
now, so I’ll leave them and their stories unnamed.
The first category
of stories that annoy me are thinly disguised fan fiction. Stories
that were clearly inspired by movies or TV show.
One such story opened
with ship emerging from a hyper-space gate of some sort. It describes the ship appearing through the game growing ever bigger as it emerges -- one vast ship. I could easily picture
the scene – I’d seen it as the opening sequence of the first Star
Wars movie. To make the connection even clearer, on the bridge of
this ship was a great hulking guy dressed in full space armor giving
the orders. And when one of the officers questioned the legality of
the great hulking guy’s orders, the great hulking guy went over and broke his neck.
Within a page or two, the story is both familiar and so over the top
that I couldn’t read it any further. I mean, who goes
around breaking subordinate's necks on a whim? (Except in the movies.) No wonder he has to
wear space armor all the time…
And then there are
the Star Trek knock-offs, which usually have the captain of the
warship seated on the bridge with his XO and other officers standing
around at their post waiting for him to bark out orders to them.
Sometimes, just to shake things up, the captain is an alcoholic, and
hung over, while facing the inevitable first crisis that the story
opens with as a hook.
And then there are
what I call the “UPS trucks in space” stories. Stories based on
the Millennium Falcon/Serenity type of ship. Beat up, down and out,
and yet they somehow eke out a living hauling a few boxes or crates
from planet to planet, star system to star system. Oh, maybe their "smugglers." The economics of
the premise boggle me. I read one story that had just such a ship
(owned by two down and out ex-military personal from the “Alliance” of
course) with its ramp down in a space port, waiting for a few
passengers to show. One passenger shows up, a doctor of some sort,
with a suitcase that he won’t let anyone else touch. Deja vu! No,
wait a moment… Ah yes… a scene lifted almost directly from
Firefly.
Apparently avid
readers, don’t mind these similarities. Indeed, it might well be
plus for readers since they can fill in all the blank spaces in the
story with images from the source materials. I really don’t need
bad imitations of TV shows and movies which never fail to annoy me in the first place with all their plot holes and stupidity needed to set up the cool
scene they want to shoot. One example comes quickly to mind from Firefly: a gun battle siege of a whore house in which people get killed, when they could’ve used the Serenity to chase away the bad guys,
which they did in the end, anyway.
Speaking of
stupidity, the Firefly clone story I mentioned above has an opening
scene set in a space ship junk yard. This space ship junkyard was, for
reasons that I can not for the life of me imagine, located in a pitch
black cave! A cave, mind you, inhabited by cannibal-rapist walking
around with flash lights. I don’t know how these cannibal-rapists
make their living in a pitch black space ship junkyard cave – maybe
it was a popular make-out place or something, but there they were.
Even more baffling is how they got all the space ships into the cave
– they had to fly them in (and out), I guess, which would seem to
suggest that the entrance to the cave would be rather large and let a
lot of light in, but WTF, maybe they’re all the size of UPS trucks.
Who knows? I guess the author just wanted a “scary” scene to
begin the story and didn’t care if it make sense or not. After all,
that’s what they do in the movies. And well, many thousands of
readers apparently didn’t care either. The very next scene in the
book is the space port scene I mentioned above. There is no mention
of how they got the ship out, nor any description of the space port
itself. World building not even on the scale of the original Star Trek series
plywood sets. Maybe that’s were Firefly comes in.
Just fill in the scene from the TV show.
Now, not all stories
could be traced back to their TV and Movie origins. Some just bugged
me because of their stereotyped heroes. Square jawed, six feet plus,
chick magnets. devil may care, contemptuous of authority. Jerks. Now
I might have enjoyed this type of story when I was 15, but not now.
Being old sucks. And some seemed to have been written by grouchy old
men with a chip on their shoulder. I don’t like those either.
Next up in list of
peeves is laziness in imaging the future.
For example, having
the hero going to a recruitment office in the local strip mall to
sign up to serve in the interstellar army. Really? Strip malls will
survive into the age of interstellar travel?
Or going to the
flying car rental agency to rent a flying car (and being turned down
as "looking" too young to be able to drive). The hero then had to rent a ground car
to drive around town to all the space ship junkyards to find a space
ship to buy. It seems that the distant future on distant worlds isn’t
all that much different than here and now.
Or cracking a joke
involving shag carpets and rec rooms (ca. 1981) in the distant future
on a distant planet. Or having your “brown-skinned man” say “…
just wait until you taste my barbecue...” Yikes. He makes his own
sauces and everything as well. Or having the “Mafia” as your
interstellar criminal organization.
Or having a story
line about a character getting to taste a real meat steak (or was it
a hamburger?) from a real cow when they arrived on a planet named…
Well, you guessed it, “New Texas”.
Or how likely is
earth to have a nuclear war, invent faster-than-light ships, colonize
70 planets, and fight a war with them in the next 140 years? Why
would anyone set a story like this in 2147? Or mention that “they’re
in a box traveling several times the speed of light...” and later
say that they’ve traveled 20 light years in 20 days, which, if my
math is correct, means that they would have to travel at 365 times the
speed of light.
Or have as story
where a strange ship (likely a pirate, but I didn’t read that far)
was sighted 10 miles away(!). When it closed to 7 miles, the captain
turned out all the guards to defend the ship. Those are sailing ships
on the ocean distances, for Jupiter’s sake!
And then there are
issues that simply revolve around writing style. I like first person
narratives, or if third person, a narration that follows only one
character closely. I don’t care to view the story from a god-like
height, following the characters that the author has set on their
collision course with destiny or death. I dislike stories that jump
back and forth in time or points of view. These seem to be very
popular these days, but for me, they raise a red flag – it’s as
if the author suspects the story would be boring if told straight, so
they slice and dice it to make it into a puzzle, and hopefully more
interesting. An extreme example of this was a story about a ship’s
representatives meeting some natives – but the author, like a bee
in a garden, flirts hither and yon, about the town, the marshes, with
perhaps some history thrown in, looking in on the meeting just every
now and again for a few words before flirting away again. Made me
dizzy.
Or starting every
story with a violent action scene, even it it comes from the middle
or end of the book, or is not even part of the story, just to have an action “hook” to get the reader into the story. But what the heck, I
guess it works.
You get the idea. If
the book engages you, you’d roll over these things without noticing
them. But since I’ve not bought into the story, they stick out like
sore thumbs. And since these thoughtless, clueless, or careless
mistakes are in the first couple of pages, they don’t seem to bode
well for the rest of the story. Oh, well. I’m not out any money, so
nothing’s lost.
As I said at the
beginning, it’s all my problem. My tastes in books have evolved and
grown too narrow, or too demanding, to enjoy wide swaths of
contemporary science fiction, despite the fact that there is an order
of magnitude more to read than there was in my youth. The upside of
this dilemma is that instead of reading, I spend my time daydreaming
stories of my own, which have none of these annoying features ;)
