The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés/Section II: Overused Settings and Characterizations

Section II: Overused Settings and Characterizations

"Nonetheless, the society manages to remain at a high technological level."
 * 1) Aliens whose thinking is so different from ours that no communication is possible.
 * 2) Alien races that find our women attractive, while we find theirs to be repulsive.
 * 3) Alien races who differ from us only in skin color and/or facial features.
 * 4) Extra breasts on the alien women.
 * 5) Aliens that are incomprehensible to humans but understand humans perfectly.
 * 6) Alien species depicted as having no ethnic, religious, cultural, philosophical or political variance, especially:
 * 7) Wise mystics
 * 8) Stoic warriors
 * 9) Pastoral innocents
 * 10) Cowardly sneaks
 * 11) Amazon babes
 * 12) Alien species with personality traits or cultural mores that are treated as invariable laws of nature.
 * 13) Alien races whose names all have lots of hard consonants. Alien women whose names coincidentally end in 'a' or 'ia'.
 * 14) Lots of apostrophes are packed into alien words and phrases for no apparent reason.
 * 15) Humans of the future have no ethnic, religious, cultural, philosophical or political variance.
 * 16) Cities of future are depicted as though sanitation workers have been on strike from now until then.
 * 17) The entire story setting is dominated by huge impersonal business conglomerates.
 * 18) Planets with the same exact climate planet-wide (planets without atmosphere excepted).
 * 19) Super-intelligent AIs that speak, behave, and act in a manner indistinguishable from the human characters.
 * 20) The incredibly competent man-of-action with more skills/degrees than you can shake a blaster at.
 * 21) The incredibly competent woman-of-action with large breasts, no sexual inhibitions, and more skills/degrees than you can shake a blaster at.
 * 22) Shadowy malevolent Pentagon officials.
 * 23) Each and every character has a tainted history.
 * 24) A society consists of:
 * 25) A handful of ultra-powerful ultra-rich;
 * 26) Criminal lords who control everything not controlled by the ultra-rich;
 * 27) Police whose only principle of operation is maintenance of the status quo;
 * 28) Hordes of poor people starving in the streets;
 * 29) Absolutely no middle class whatsoever.


 * 1) Societies where all technology has been destroyed except automobiles and their equivalents, which are still running yet there are no mechanics, workshops, or gas stations.
 * 2) Heroes who are so emotionally stunted that they don't care about close friends/relatives that die as long as they complete some mission.
 * 3) Any character with a perpetual two-day growth of beard.
 * 4) Futuristic societies where only the ultra-rich can afford quality healthcare, and everyone else is reduced to selling their bodily organs.
 * 5) Beings of pure energy.
 * 6) A society in which everyone is required to die on his or her Nth birthday.
 * 7) Creatures from our mythology (e.g., centaurs, dragons) occur among the wildlife native to an alien planet.
 * 8) Aliens whose sociology, values and beliefs are indistinguishable from those of an Earth culture, e.g., feudal Japan.
 * 9) Eccentric scientists.
 * 10) The assistant to the scientist who is either deformed or dating the scientist's daughter.
 * 11) Future societies that have relapsed into feudalism.
 * 12) Alternative Earths where society is just like some society of the past, with some technodoodads added.
 * 13) Palace guards who are ineffectual due to ineptitude or inattentiveness.
 * 14) Fantastic but non-viable creatures (men with tortoiseshell backs, gigantic insects) made possible by high levels of radiation, and which don't suffer any ill effects from it.
 * 15) Aliens that speak human languages without error, having taken no pains to learn how.
 * 16) An alien tongue is translated into perfect English; that is, except for profanity and units of measurement.
 * 17) Aliens whose vocal apparatus is just like ours, so that they can speak human languages with only a slight accent.
 * 18) Omnipotent pacifist aliens who impose their philosophy on us without bothering to protect us from the races they have left alone.
 * 19) Men and women live in separate societies (and we're not talking Mars and Venus, either).
 * 20) Clones are inexplicably different from regular people in a particular manner (mentally unstable, don't mind being used as cannon fodder, etc.).
 * 21) The vast majority of alien races consider 20 °C to be room temperature.
 * 22) Societies that are utopian in every regard except for one serious drawback that completely outweighs the utopian aspects, such as having the death penalty for some really minor offence.
 * 23) Disembodied live brains living in tanks.
 * 24) Eyes that glow (sometimes accompanied by minor-key chords in TV and film).
 * 25) Sentient artificial intelligences that wish to eliminate the human race.
 * 26) Sentient artificial intelligences that select a human figure to holographically represent themselves.
 * 27) Computers with voice synthesizers either use a sensuous female contralto, a threatening male baritone, or a nasally tinny neutral voice.
 * 28) Bad guys who miss everything they shoot at.
 * 29) Beginning warriors who hit everything they shoot at.
 * 30) Characters who are always ready for intimate relations.
 * 31) All genetically superior humans have an innate drive to rule, conquer, or kill everyone else.
 * 32) Alien vampires that feed on brainwaves/life-force/exotic biochemicals/psychic energies that can only be obtained from sentient life forms.
 * 33) Post-cataclysmic societies that treat items of the Lost Technology as holy relics.
 * 34) Alien monsters that find humans edible, tasty, and non-toxic.
 * 35) The evil duplicate of the hero, sidekick, universe, etc.
 * 36) The grammatical differences between the languages used by humans and aliens are cited as conclusive proof of radically different ways of thinking.
 * 37) Sentient AIs that communicate with other sentient AIs via their voice synthesizer.
 * 38) The intelligent and confident woman who can be bribed with a dress.
 * 39) Androids with intelligence equal to an IQ of around 1000 who can't seem to figure out human emotions, humor, or verbal contractions.
 * 40) Everyone in the post-catastrophic future dresses like heavy metal musicians.
 * 41) A common proverb gets "translated" into more generic terms, resulting in obfuscation of the meaning.
 * 42) An alien race has a trait that greatly complicates interacting with them, but even after centuries of contact with humans they still manage to keep it secret.
 * 43) The ancient spacefaring alien race that:
 * 44) Has existed for zillions of years;
 * 45) Went into hiding, left this universe/dimension, or went extinct so long ago that no current spacefaring race has ever met them;
 * 46) Is known solely through legends, ancient artifacts of amazing technological advancement, and/or evidence that they created one or more (sometimes all) currently living races.
 * 47) Aliens whose language is not pronounceable by humans, but who can still speak human languages with relative ease.
 * 48) The villain who can infallibly predict how the protagonists will react to a given turn of events.
 * 49) All religious figures are:
 * 50) Intolerant hatemongers who make Hitler look like Jesus;
 * 51) All-tolerant lovemongers who make Jesus look like Hitler;
 * 52) Ignorant, unwashed rabble.
 * 53) A society of aliens and/or villains that are amazingly similar to an infamous human political movement.
 * 54) Societies wherein gender roles and attitudes are completely reversed.
 * 55) Whiz kids.
 * 56) Most aliens breathe oxygen, just like humans do.
 * 57) Bored, omnipotent, immortal beings.
 * 58) An immortal being that wants to die.
 * 59) People with cyborg implants will needlessly exhibit the benefits of this hardware just to relieve boredom or show off.
 * 60) Children with access to the highest levels of military planning, scientific research, and governmental decision-making.
 * 61) A smart, courageous, gorgeously attractive woman who is rarely if ever asked out.
 * 62) Every planet seems to have a surface gravity of 9.8 meters per second squared and rotates around its axis in about 24 hours, just like Earth.
 * 63) All of the spacefaring races have roughly the same level of technology.
 * 64) Aliens that transform into a colorful puddle when they die.
 * 65) The Free Love Utopia, populated only by fabulously good-looking people, that somehow remains free of sexually transmitted diseases, has no relationship turmoil, and is not inundated with hordes of people looking for easy sex.
 * 66) The untrained, average Joe who can take on and defeat highly trained and well-equipped operatives.
 * 67) The Wise Race of Ancients who do nothing for the protagonists except offer advice.
 * 68) The Wise Race of Ancients that secretly supports the protagonists.
 * 69) The former Great Man of Action who is now just a washed-up drunk.
 * 70) An interstellar realm is ruled by a handful of powerful families, each scheming to eliminate the rest, instead of forming alliances.
 * 71) Except for the distinguishing marks on aliens and bad guys, everyone has perfect skin.
 * 72) Upon arrival in a distant epoch, the time travelers can speak the local language without accent.
 * 73) The city's main computer can be accessed from any of a number of public-access terminals located conveniently throughout the city.
 * 74) The less technologically advanced a culture is, the more spiritually advanced it is.
 * 75) The modification of one custom, law, or common belief would transform Western society into Utopia.
 * 76) All female scientists are good-looking; male scientists are average-looking.
 * 77) Except for full-blown dictatorships, government officials of the future never abuse their powers.
 * 78) Not even the soldiers or marines make vulgar jokes.
 * 79) In the future, everyone's taste in music and literature extends solely to the classics.
 * 80) Immortals who assume many identities over the course of human history.
 * 81) Everyone's counterpart in the parallel universe has, as his/her associates, the counterparts of the same people that the primary knows in this universe.
 * 82) Whenever The Captain walks onto The Bridge, the same people are always on duty.
 * 83) Superheroes wear primary colors (red, blue, and yellow).
 * 84) Supervillains wear secondary colors (green, purple, and orange).
 * 85) Only bad guys have goatees.
 * 86) In the future, everyone is good in bed.
 * 87) Entire cities whose buildings use the same architectural design.
 * 88) World governments are enlightened and efficient; nation-states are backward and primitive.
 * 89) In the future, everyone either supports their government fully, or is engaged in a terrorist campaign to overthrow it.
 * 90) In the future, government corruption has been eradicated.
 * 91) The tribal chieftain's eldest child is a defiant free-spirited youth, and if female is the sexiest member of the tribe.
 * 92) The alien's superpowers become manifest when he/she/it is exposed to Terran conditions.
 * 93) All alien females, galaxy-wide, use cosmetics the same way that Western women do.
 * 94) Although humans still have multiple languages, each alien race has only one language.
 * 95) Kindly enlightened races are native to beautiful planets with congenial climate; cruel, benighted races arise on ugly planets with brutal weather.
 * 96) The ship's computer is programmed to track the location of each and every person aboard, but is never programmed to report personnel in unauthorized areas, or those who suddenly disappear.
 * 97) Among the intelligent creatures, man-sized beings predominate.
 * 98) The token black guy is the muscular scion of a Noble Warrior culture.
 * 99) The entire population of the planet lives in one city.
 * 100) The Energy Being takes the form of a mass of flickering lights.
 * 101) Military spacecraft have a light-colored exterior, making them easy to see. Only the Bad Guys ever appreciate the danger of this.
 * 102) The time traveler meets an ancestor who looks so much like him that the same actor can play both characters.
 * 103) In the future, all that remains of Earth's flora is a small garden, or even just one plant.
 * 104) All girlfriends are hotties.
 * 105) Regardless of who else is in the room, the scientist will give the explanation of what happened/will happen as though talking to kindergarteners, even though everybody else listening are also scientists. If they are actually talking to kindergarteners/mooks/Phillip J. Fry, they will use an easily understood metaphor, usually involving balloons.
 * 106) To trigger the childish explanation, one character will always say, "In English, Doc."
 * 107) Regardless of how advanced the civilization is, the assistant or the scientist will carry a clipboard and/or wear a lab coat. To show rank, the lead scientist will sign something on the clipboard.
 * 108) A male wearing glasses always indicates intelligence.
 * 109) A female wearing glasses will usually result in a dramatic and/or sexual scene later that involves taking them off.
 * 110) Spaceships that are always named after what they are used for or what they look like, instead of people or places like seagoing vessels are.
 * 111) Having any experience, ever, of being "a pilot" means you can fly any spaceship ever made, but you have to say, "It's just like my " first.
 * 112) The proper response to "Let's use the X Maneuver!" is "Like we did at the Battle/Planet of Y?"
 * 113) All climactic space battles must have more ships involved than previous battles.
 * 114) If the situation appears hopeless, fire a beam at it. Frequency adjustment might be necessary.
 * 115) Aliens with a Hive Mind are exempt from the "no genocide" rule.
 * 116) Flashing, unlabeled buttons on a flat console always indicate a more advanced technology. Conversely, anything made out of dirt, wood or stone indicate a primitive technology. Computers inside caves indicate a lost civilization.