Science Fiction

While Planets of Hats definitely do exist, this one is more excusable for me because I think that it would be possible for the distinctions between individuals of an alien culture to be overwhelmed for the characters by the sheer unfamiliarity of the culture as a whole. And as far as national-scale distinctions, the characters may not interact with a very diverse range of people from the planet, maybe they have one or two crew members being from there, or maybe they visit once specific site on the planet rather than traveling widely across it.

I feel like you read my mind. I was just having this same thought the other day while driving. In the Star Trek universe humans are this very diverse group of people with all kinds of attributes and feelings and desires. Then you get to the Klingons or the Vulcans and somehow they are practically homogenous culturally, emotionally and in beliefs. I find that extremely unrealistic. There are different Klingon factions, but I can't even comprehend what their problems are with each other because they all believe the same things and have the same goals.

I still love Star Trek though. I just wish alien species were more than plot devices.

Are you referring to the series with Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky?

Oddly enough, an example from Star Wars of all places also pops to mind. The Ithorians had a culture that included deep reverence for the forests of their homeworld Ithor, and had a very communal society, so when they got technological they built huge "Herdships" that were basically flying cities. Initially they just hovered in the sky over their planet so as to not disturb the forests on the surface, but they eventually became spaceborne and became self-sufficient arks travelling the galaxy.

They still regularly returned to their homeworld, though. Until the Yuuzhan Vong destroyed it. The Herdships were unaffected, though and basically became nomads.

I recall a thread over on Reddit where I speculated at length about what the Star Wars galaxy would be like in the aftermath of the Rise of Skywalker and the fact that the tech now exists to build Star-Destroyer-sized planet-killer weapons and it apparently is pretty cheap to do so made me think that the galaxy might be forced to go post-planetary. A planet is basically indefensible but something like an Ithorian Herdship can just jump to hyperspace the moment a Xyston-class ship shows up in the neighborhood. It's hard to speculate with much confidence given the shoddy worldbuilding, though. Hyperspace tracking is apparently quite easy now too, so if someone really has it in for a particular Herdship it might still be screwed.

I enjoy well done religious themes in sci fi and fantasy. It can either be completely goofy, and that's enjoyable in one way, or it can give a moment of "i wonder what the journey between what we have now and what they have looks like". Take for example Neon Genesis Evangelion; what the hell happened?

I actually dropped it a few episodes in due to the extreme shaky-cam space battle scenes. Every once in a while I'd reconsider watching it but the things I kept hearing didn't seem compelling, and then after I heard how it ended I was very glad I'd made the choice to stay away.

I guess this leads to another "trope" (I don't know if it's really a trope so much as it is bad planning) where a series is advertised as having a grand story arc or deep mystery that's unfolding as the series progresses. I've been burned by these so often that even though I love that sort of thing I now take it as a signal to avoid the series until it's well and truly finished so I can find out whether the showrunners really did have that or if they were just lying through their teeth to keep viewers engaged.

My biggest peeve in this context is when the official "technical specs" for ships and other technologies have ludicrous numbers that make no sense with what we see on-screen. Star Wars is a big offender here, their ship weapons are often said to deliver shots with "kiloton" or "megaton" yields but when they actually show the shots hitting unshielded matter (such as a strafing run hitting the ground or shooting asteroids) there's just the equivalent of a few kilograms of TNT popping off. Yet people pull out those megaton numbers when "battleboarding" as if that's more relevant than what we actually see on screen.

They did a great job! It's one of the only other Sci-Fi stories I've seen that give a nod to the distances you'd encounter during ship to ship battles! I also loved the book series version of the Expanses take on ship to ship combat because they didn't have sci-fi ship shields. Going into combat meant, donning your vac-suit because the ship could very well get peppered with holes and lose pressure.

Oh yes, I worked through the audio books for The Expanse last year, they did a fantastic job too! I also love that they address the idea of "on the float", no artificial gravity except spin or thrust gravity. The Expanse tackled a bunch of thing more relaistic then 99% of sci-fi does.

It's been a minute since I've read the Foundation series, but I didn't recall Asimov saying that society was destabilizing just due to appliances, but because they had forgotten how to repair/produce pretty much all modern technology (which of course the book being a product of its time, is all powered by mini nuclear reactors).

Before 343i and Frank "the terminal guy" O'conner was placed at the head of writing, the Forerunners were ancient humans as the original trilogy implies and directly states.

It was a cool twist that the ancients that left technology behind were actually humans that just forgot their own history due to the flood and Halo solution, then 343 just retconned the whole thing because they couldn't figure out how to make a new story that's actually compelling.

Well... Their actual story isn't compelling either but whatever.

This concept drives me insane, because I also love it but my favorite example is one that both heavily plays with it, but also 85% of the book relies on you not knowing it's coming.

Like Earth All Along is almost always a spoiler, but this one just hits exactly right for me.

(Or, more simply -- "Where I come from, we call it a Faraday Cage.")