Slashdot Mirror
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.
Earthican ale. Yeah it sounds cute but Earth does not produce just one type of ale.
Earthican coffee. See Earthican ale.
I'm looking at you, Star Wars.
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.
A gigantic weapons platform (the Deathstar) with virtually NO point defense, virtually NO fighter screen, and practically no close-in, anti-attacker weapon mount points. WTF??
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The whole idea of themed planets or themed races largely turned me off of reading SF, and one of the reasons I won't go near StarWars with a 10 foot pole.
Trying to define an entire race or culture or planet with a 3 word phrase is asinine. Doing that for every race or culture or planet in a galaxy just makes me cringe. I can't read or watch it.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I was unaware of this new definition of shibboleth that essentially mean cliché or trope.
Why does it seem that most "alien" planets have a single climate everywhere? That doesn't even seem possible in any real (~spherical) world. In our solar system, not even Mars has the same climate everywhere; it has ice caps, and plateaus with visibly different weather than the lowlands. Actual aliens that are physically compatible with humans would be expected to live on planets with variability similar to ours, with visible climate changes every few hundred km or so. Granted, you might expect a single climate if only one spot on a planet is involved in the plot. But usually there's travel on the planet, and usually it's about the same (usually desert or jungle) in all the scenes. Of course, there are few exceptions that are more realistics.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Two of those actually seem reasonable...
(1) The manually aimed weapons.
Especially in the event that there is some probability effect that the gunner is able to take advantage from, which a computer can not; for example: the gunner may be a main character, in which case, they can't die, which means if a preternatural aim is necessary to their survival, they will of necessity have a preternatural aim. But there's actually no reason to step past the fourth wall in this case, if we posit psychic capabilities, or very long distances relative to the speed of light vs. the speed of the craft: you will need to shoot where the enemy will be when the weapon passes through their location, rather than where the enemy currently is, and you can't depend on them to not be taking bridge-lurching evasive maneuvers.
(2) Science officers with Ph.D. levels of expertise in dozens of fields.
This isn't that unbelievable, although most of the people I know in the "science officer" range tend to be struggling somewhere early in their second dozen...
This is actually a pretty good shibboleth. It can be used to identify trolling assholes with almost 100% certainty.
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
The GP is definitely an example of a shibboleth.
Given the summary, however, it appears that Charllie Stross doesn't know how to use the word "shibboleth" correctly.
In particular, a shibboleth is simply an expression or signal used by someone that helps other members of the in group recognize the signaler's (shibboleth user) membership in that in group. It's not used as a pejorative.
While certainly people (in or out) can react negatively to a shibboleth (like judging people who, for example, "high five" each other), shibboleths are not negative in and of themselves. Designating improbable science fictional mechanisms "shibboleths" really doesn't make sense.
At all.
blog
My biggest cringe is when something changes size - like when Dracula changes to a bat or someone (as for instance Hugh Jackman in Van Helsing) changes into a werewolf of 2x volume. (Or Odo changing into a mouse, or when his full human size fits in a bucket.)
My second biggest is when the bullets hit everything except the person - such as running along a waist-high cast iron fence and the bullets hit the vertical bars but not the person. (I don't so much mind the "spark" that a bullet makes when it hits concrete in the movies - that's a good visual cue.) Also, someone outrunning the swept arc of machine gun bullets. Also, someone behind a couch being shielded from bullets.
My third biggest cringe is people hanging on by their hands for more than 30 seconds. People in *really* good shape can hold on for 60 seconds (try it some time), but unless you are an elite climber you won't get past the minute mark. Viz: the scientists in the 1997 movie "Batman and Robin".
And the elite all speak with British accents, so you know they're elite.
A British accent is usually a sure sign that they are evil too. That and well groomed beards, favoured by bad guys everywhere. I guess they need something to stroke, and cats are never around when you need them.
In my science fiction universe, everyone speaks with a working class Scottish accent.
When the crew meets a new alien race for the first time and transmits a universal greeting in all known languages, does that include Welsh?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They were clearly trained by the forensics investigators from cop shows, who can also enlarge any photograph by a factor of 1000 with perfect detail.
"Hold on, go back to that photo they took with a point-and-shoot on the International Space Station.
Enlarge.
Enlarge.
Zoom in on that dot.
Magnify 1000x.... can you clean that up?"
[Exchanging knowing looks]
"We've got the son of a bitch now. Notice the rotation of the screws on the main shoulder plate? This is Iron Man right after he got clipped by a Navy fighter jet, clearly violating Newton's 2nd Law. He should have been turned into a reddish paste on the inside of that suit, but this photo clearly shows the only serious damage was to the realistic depiction of physics."
"And fachrissakes would someone tell me what the word 'shibboleth' means!?"
Nothing posted to
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.
You're assuming that just because the author didn't consciously intend to include a theme that it's not there. Other's aren't restricted by that assumption, myself included. I believe that many artists that won't answer questions about their intent basically agree--they are not the authority on the subtext of their work.