Science-Fictional Shibboleths (antipope.org)

An anonymous reader writes: SF author Charlie Stross has put together a short list of what he considers to be shibboleths for implausible science fiction. (If you're unfamiliar with the term, read the Wikipedia entry first.) So, what tops his list? "Asteroidal gravel banging against the hull of a spaceship. Alternatively: spaceships sheltering from detection behind an asteroid, or dodging asteroids, or pretty much anything else involving asteroids that don't look like [a pock-marked potato]." Another big red flag for Stross is when authors fail to appreciate Newton's second law, having their characters undergo impacts or accelerations that would turn them into a thin, reddish paste on their starship's hull. Some interesting examples from commenters include: futuristic yet manually-aimed weapons, technobabble as a plot device, and science officers with Ph.D. levels of expertise in dozens of fields. One of mine: entire races or planets full of people who behave the same, often based on some keyword. What are yours? Stross's focus is on books, but feel free to bring up movies and TV shows as well.

Comments

Re:Missing a target with a laser weapon

[Culture20]

Your human target is 50 feet away and barely moving and yet SOMEHOW all of your crack Stormtroopers miss with a weapon that shoots at the speed of light.

Those are blasters, not lasers. If you can see a discreet glob of energy fly fast through the air, it's not made of photons, it's giving off photons as a side-effect.

Re:first

[Sique]

No, that's not what a shibboleth is for. A shibboleth is some kind of passwort or parole to differ between friend and foe, as told in the Book of Judges, 12, 5-6:

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;

Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

Charlie Stross meant to write about tell-tale signs for bad SF. And yes, the pronounciation of shibboleth was a tell-tale sign for being an Ephraimite instead of a Gileadite. But not every tell-tale sign is a shibboleth. For a shibboleth, you actually force the person in question to pronounce the word for you. But in bad SF, no one forced the author to put the tell-tale signs in there, he wrote them voluntarily, as he is a bad SF author.

Re:BLANK noun.

[crunchygranola]

Sorry, high fructose corn syrup != sugar.

You need to learn simple chemistry to understand that fact.

Umm... no. Just no.

High fructose corn syrup contains (in addition to water) fructose ("fruit sugar") and glucose ("grape sugar"). Both are "sugar".

They aren't sucrose, but that is not the only sugar.