In today’s episode we give a comprehensive list of the sci-fi tropes that bother us the most. While not all science fiction has an obligation to be speculative, we would like to see more science fiction that avoids certain cliches when it comes to predicting the future. We discuss the following tropes:
- The Prometheus Problem
- The Boot-in-the-face Dystopia
- Societal Regression
- Super Now
- Isolated technological Advancement
- The Lone Inventor
- Human Specialness
- Primacy of the Real
- Unnecessary Anthropomorphism
- The Sofalarity
To find out what these terms mean, listen to the episode!
Related Links:
- Cory Doctorow on how science fiction reflects the present more than the future
- Julia Galef’s Straw Vulcan talk
- New Yorker article by Tim Wu that coined the term “sofalarity”
Full List of Referenced Science Fiction Works, Authors, Characters:
- Frankenstein
- Terminator
- Ex Machina
- Surrogates
- Super Sad True Love Story
- Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Brave New World
- Hunger Games
- Elysium
- Counting Heads
- Cloud Atlas
- Waterworld
- Mad Max
- The Jetsons
- Kurt Vonnegut
- WALL-E
- Minority Report
- Her
- Robot and Frank
- Total Recall (2012)
- WWW Trilogy
- Data from Star Trek
- Dark Matter (TV Series)
- Interstellar
- Ready Player One
- Philip K. Dick
- Idiocracy