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The real history of the world and the many Alternate Histories which might have replaced it are extensively featured in sf stories of Time Travel and Parallel Worlds, but sf writers have also drawn much inspiration from history in designing hypothetical futures. Sometimes, like Charles L Harness in Flight into Yesterday (May 1949 Startling; exp 1953; vt The Paradox Men) and James Blish in Cities in Flight (1950-1962 var mags; omni 1970), they have made use of actual theories – from Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) in the former case, Oswald Spengler in the latter – which have claimed to detect authentic cyclic patterns in history; more commonly, though, they have simply borrowed the past as a convenient template. Thus Miles J Breuer and Jack Williamson replayed the story of the American Revolution as the story of the revolt of the Moon's colony against its Earthly masters in The Birth of a New Republic (Winter 1931 Amazing Stories Quarterly; 1981 chap); Robert A Heinlein later did this more convincingly in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (December 1965-April 1966 If; 1966). Isaac Asimov gave to this process of borrowing a new gloss of sophistication in the first phase of his Foundation series (stories May 1942-January 1950 Astounding; 1951-1953 3vols; as The Foundation Trilogy omni 1963) by inventing his own futuristic science of Psychohistory, by which Edward Gibbon's retrospective analysis of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is transmuted into Hari Seldon's prophetic analysis of the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire. Seldon's Plan, however, can change these deterministic prophecies by social engineering. Interestingly, a later novel by Asimov, The End of Eternity (1955), argues as strongly against social engineering as the Foundation series argued for it.

Toynbee eventually recanted the cyclic theory outlined in A Study of History (1934-1961 12vols), and the earlier quasideterministic theories of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) and Spengler's Decline of the West (1918-1922) never quite attained academic respectability, but the attractions of such theories to sf writers are obvious. Blish's fascination with Spengler became deep, respectful and altogether serious, and A E van Vogt drew inspiration from Spengler in The Voyage of the Space Beagle (stories July 1939-August 1943 Astounding, May 1950 Other Worlds; fixup 1950; vt Mission: Interplanetary 1952). Toynbeean ideas continued to echo various writers' works, including Frederik Pohl's and C M Kornbluth's "Critical Mass" (February 1962 Galaxy), in which they are quoted directly, Frank Herbert's Dune (fixup 1965), which seems to draw on Toynbee's picture of the Janissary-supported Turkish courts of the later Middle Ages, and Larry Niven's A World Out of Time (fixup 1976), which uses the Toynbee-derived notion of "water-monopoly empires" – i.e., empires founded on irrigation control. Philosophers of history who dealt in Near-Future climaxes rather than recurrent cycles – G W F Hegel (1770-1831) and Karl Marx (1818-1883) are the most obvious examples – have naturally been of less interest to sf writers.

The Pulp magazines inherited from the dime novels (see Dime-Novel SF) two striking "mythologized" versions nineteenth century history: the first, of the USA's western expansion, which glorified the "frontier spirit", and the second, of Europe's exploration and colonization of foreign lands. These myths (see also Social Darwinism) were transferred to sf, where they became the animating forces of countless stories about the exploration of the Solar System and the Colonization of Other Worlds. "Out from Rigel" (December 1931 Astounding) by Robert H Wilson, which dramatizes the conflict between two spacemen on the "sandy plain" of a strange planet for the love of a girl back home, may be taken as a characteristic example of the former, while Brigands of the Moon (March-June 1930 Astounding; 1931) by Ray Cummings, with its competition between the imperial powers of Earth and Mars (representatives of the former evidently all-white; those of the latter somewhat – confusingly – less so) to exploit the resources of unexplored worlds, illustrates the latter. The reflection of these mythical versions of recent history has maintained a tenacious hold over the images of the future contained in Genre SF, and has been elaborated in various ways, sometimes painfully naive and sometimes quite extraordinary. (The phenomenon is not, of course, restricted to fiction; the idea of space as a "high frontier" requiring conquest by bold pioneers informs much actual political rhetoric, and may be regarded as NASA's guiding myth.) It is not only US history per se which is reflected in stories of space pioneering; US writers have been perfectly willing to adapt "relevant" bits of more distant history, producing not only a subgenre of Medieval Futurism but such images as those in Poul Anderson's The High Crusade (July-September 1960 Astounding/Analog; 1960), H Beam Piper's Space Viking (1963) and Ben Bova's Privateers (1985). Anderson has been a particularly prolific and artful borrower of entrepreneurial models from the past, taking in explorers, privateers, merchant princes and all manner of military empire-builders.

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Me:

Here is an example for you to stretch your authorial muscles a bit. First, read this entertaining account by a historian who goes by the internet handle of John Bull:

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John Bull:

     Let's talk about the point after WW2 where the Knights Hospitaller, of medieval crusading fame, 'accidentally' became a major European air power.
     I sh*tteth ye not.
     So, if I asked you to imagine the Knights Hospitaller you probably picture:

1. Angry Christians on armoured horses
2. Them being wiped out long ago like the Templars
3. Some Dan Brown bullsh*t

     And you would be (mostly) wrong about all three. Which is sort of how this happened.

     From the beginning (1113 or so), the Hospitallers were never quite as committed to the angry, horsey thing as the Templars. They had always (ostensibly) been more about protecting pilgrims and healthcare. They also quite liked boats. Which were useful for both.
     Over the next 150 years (or so), as the Christian grip on the Holy Lands waned, both military orders got more involved in their other hobbies — banking for the Templars, mucking around in boats for the Hospitaller. This proved to be a surprisingly wise decision on the Hospitaller part. By 1290ish, both Orders were homeless and weakened.

     As the Templars fatally discovered, being weak AND having the King of France owe you money is a bad combo.

     Being a useful NAVY, however, wins you friends.

     And this is why your first vision of the Hospitallers is wrong. Because they spent the next 500 YEARS, backed by France and Spain, as one of the most powerful naval forces in the Mediterranean, blocking efforts by the Ottomans to expand westwards by sea. To give you an idea of the trouble they caused: in 1480 Mehmet II sent 70,000 men (against the Knights 4000) to try and boot them out of Rhodes. He failed. Suleiman the Magnificent FINALLY managed it in 1522 with 200,000 men. But even he had to agree to let the survivors leave.

     The surviving Hospitallers hopped on their ships (again) and sailed away. After some vigorous lobbying, in 1530 the King of Spain agreed to rent them Malta, in return for a single maltese falcon every year. Because that's how good rents were pre-housing crisis in Europe.

     The Knights turned Malta into ANOTHER fortified island. For the next 200 years 'the Pope's own navy' waged a war of piracy, slavery and (occasionally) pitched sea battles against the Ottomans. From Malta, they blocked Ottoman strategic access to the western med. A point that was not lost on the Ottomans, who sent 40,000 men to try and take the island in 1565 — the 'Great Siege of Malta'. The Knights, fighting almost to the last man, held out and won.

     Now the important thing here is the CONTINUED EXISTENCE AS A SOVEREIGN STATE of the Knights Hospitaller. They held Malta right up until 1798, when Napoleon finally managed to boot them out on his way to Egypt (Partly because the French contingent of the Knights swapped sides). The British turned up about three months later and the French were sent packing, but, well, it was the British so:

THE KNIGHTS: Can we have our strategically important island back please?
THE BRITISH: What island?
THE KNIGHT: That island
THE BRITISH: Nope. Can't see an island

     After the Napoleonic wars no one really wanted to bring up the whole Malta thing with the British (the Putin's Russia of the era) so the European powers fudged it. They said the Knights were still a sovereign state and they tried to sort them out with a new country. But never did. The Russian Emperor let them hang out in St Petersburg for a while, but that was awkward (Catholicism vs Orthodox). Then the Swedes were persuaded to offer them Gotland. But every offer was conditional on the Knights dropping their claim to Malta. Which they REFUSED to do.

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John Bull:

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     It's the 1900s. The Knights are still a stateless state complaining about Malta. What that means legally is a can of worms NO ONE wants to open in international law but they've also rediscovered their original mission (healthcare) so everyone kinda ignores them. The Knights become a pseudo-Red Cross organisation. In WW1 they run ambulance trains and have medical battalions, loosely affiliated with the Italian army (still do). In WW2 they do it too.
     Italy surrenders. The allies move on then...
     Oh dear.
     Who wrote this peace deal again?

     It turns out the Treaty of Peace with Italy should go FIRMLY into the category of 'things that seemed a good idea at the time'. This is because it presupposes that relations between the west and the Soviets will be good, and so limits Italy's MILITARY.

     This is a problem.

     Because as the early Cold War ramps up, the US needs to build up its Euro allies ASAP. But the treaty limits the Italians to 400 airframes, and bans them from owning ANYTHING that might be a bomber. This can be changed, but not QUICKLY.

     Then someone remembers about the Knights.

     The Knights might not have any GEOGRAPHY, but because everyone avoided dealing with the tricky international law problem it can be argued — with a straight face — that they are still TECHNICALLY A EUROPEAN SOVEREIGN STATE.
     And they're not bound by the WW2 peace treaty.
     Italy (with US/UK/French blessing) approaches the Knights and explains the problem. The Knights reasonably point out that they're not in the business of fighting wars anymore, but anything that could be called a SUPPORT aircraft is another matter.
     So, in the aftermath of WW2, this is the ballet that happens:

     The Italians transfer all of their support and training aircraft to the Knights. This then frees up the 'cap room' to allow the US to boost Italy's warfighting ability WITHOUT breaking the WW2 peace treaty.
     This is why, in the late forties/fifties, a good chunk of the 'Italian' air force is flying with a Maltese Cross Roundel. Because they were not TECHNICALLY Italian. They were the air force of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

     And that's how the Knights Hospitaller ended up becoming a major air power. Eventually the treaties were reworked, and everything was quietly transferred back. I suspect it's a reason why the sovereign status of the Knights remains unchallenged still today though.
     And that's why today, even thought they are now fully committed to the Red-Cross-esque stuff, they can still issue passports, are a permanent observer at the UN, have a currency...
     ..,and even have a tiny bit of Malta back.

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Me:

OK science fiction authors, ready to become creative? Start with the history you have just read.

Change the timeline from the past into the future. Change the location from Europe and the Mediterranean to a spiral arm of our galaxy. Replace sea-going ships and airplanes with combat starships. Replace fortified islands with orbital fortresses. Change the names of the various factions to new names that sound futuristic.

Voila! Instant bizarre, but real, background for your next novel. And most of the background historical events as well. Start customizing it to your novel's needs and quite quickly you will have something special.

Further material can be easily found by simple Google searches, or from historical texts. There is even a TV Tropes page.

And I'm sure if you ask around among historians, they can point you at other equally bizzare but entertaining historical events that you can mine for your story backgrounds.

      For some reason, possibly because of the awful title, for which I emphatically disclaim responsibility, “Black Friar of the Flame” is taken as the quintessence of my early incompetence. At least, fans who come across a copy think they can embarrass me by referring to it.

     Well, it isn’t good, I admit, but it has its interesting points. For one thing, it is an obvious precursor to my successful “Foundation” series. In “Black Friar of the Flame,” as in the “Foundation” series, human beings occupy many planets; and two worlds mentioned in the former, Trantor and Santanni, also play important roles in the latter. (Indeed, the first of the “Foundation” series was to appear only a couple of months after “Black Friar of the Flame,” thanks to the delay in selling the latter.)

     Furthermore, there is also a strong suggestion in “Black Friar of the Flame” of my first book-length novel. Pebble in the Sky, which was to appear eight years later. In both, the situation I pictured on Earth was inspired by that of Judea under the Romans.

     The climactic battle in “Black Friar of the Flame,” however, was inspired by that of the Battle of Salamis, the great victory of the Greeks over the Persians. (In telling future-history I always felt it wisest to be guided by past-history. This was true in the “Foundation” series, too.)

The Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the 3rd century bc was a very complex region. The three empires founded by the successors of Alexander the Great were collapsing. They were locally powerful, but none was a superpower. Usurpers and secessionists complicated their politics.

Leagues of city states—the Achaeans and Aetolians in Greece proper, others in Asia Minor—had their own interests. New kingdoms, particularly that of Pergamum, were growing at the expense of their neighbors, and barbarians—both Celtic and Illyrian—were becoming regional powers instead of merely raiding and moving on.

Rome was still in the wings but the violent morass would shortly draw her in, ending both the chaos and her own status as a republic. (The region's enormous wealth and complexity, in my opinion, inexorably turned Rome into an empire.)

I adapted this setting for Paying the Piper. The general background is that of the war between Rhodes and Byzantium, ostensibly over freedom of navigation. It was about as stupid a conflict as you're likely to find, during which the real principals licked their lips and chuckled while well-meaning idealists wrecked their own societies in pursuit of unobtainable goals by improper means. Much of the military detail is drawn from the campaigns of Phillip the Fifth and his allies against the Aetolian League, particularly the campaign of 219 bc which culminated in Phillip's capture of Psophis.

I guess it isn't out of place to add one comment about the study of history. Knowing a good deal about how cultures interacted in the past allows one to predict how they will interact in the present, so I'm rarely surprised by the daily news. But I regret to say that this understanding doesn't appear to make me happier.

Star Trek uses a system of warping space to make their ships fly faster than light. Warping space is a long time tradition in SF, and the ensuing battles bear a striking resemblance to the battles between warships. This is no accident. Many space battles are written as though they were sea battles because the readers are familiar with the form, and besides, it's less work for the writers.

In fact, in the original Star Trek series. the episode that introduced the Romulans was written exactly like a duel between a destroyer and a submarine (the cloaked Romulan ship being the submarine). I know that because I recognized the movie from which they were cribbing their plot. It was The Enemy Below, with Robert Mitchum as the American destroyer captain and Curt Jurgens as the German U-boat captain.

So: in the ongoing investigation of space opera, I've looked at cliches, I've tried to come up with a rough definitional general rule ... but I've avoided what's possibly the largest elephant in the room, namely, plot structures.

A key aspect of space opera is that it's about epochal events and larger-than-life characters. Most genres can be written to work in a variety of modes; for example, consider the difference in the level of melodrama in spy thrillers betwee James Bond and Graham Greene's The Human Factor. Similarly, high fantasy can be quietly introspective and pastoral, or focus on the clash of kings and dark lords, and horror can run the scale/focus gamut from The Yellow Wallpaper to The Stand.

But space opera is different: it's almost impossible to conceive of a space opera with a plot that revolves around the eqivalent of a middle-aged English professor's mid-life crisis as he carries on a furtive affair with one of his female students under the nose of his long-suffering wife (the somewhat cruel stereotype of the MFA-approved Great American Novel). I mean, you could do it, but your professor would have had to have invented a new type of FTL drive that threatens to revolutionize interstellar travel, the student is a spy from a cartel of space traders and is trying to get the blueprints out of him before she stabs him in the kidneys (because: lecherous middle-aged prof, ew), and his wife—the professor of political science at Galactic U—is actually a retired assassin (and just wait 'til she finds out about the student). Into the middle of this quiet literary novel of academic infidelity and domestic lies, we then add an evil religious cult of alien space bat worshipers who want to steal the new space drive to equip their battle fleet when they sweep in from the Orion Arm to bring fire, the blaster, and the holy spacebat inquisition to the Federation, and when they kidnap the professor his wife and his grad student have to work out their differences to get him back before he cracks under (well-deserved) torture and gives the fanatics the ultimate weapon ...

(Huh. Actually, that'd make a cracking space opera; just not one of mine. Anyone want to borrow it?)

I stand by my point: you can't write space opera without ramping up the stakes to melodramatic levels. (Well, maybe you could if you were Iain M. Banks, but he was special that way.) The need for romanticist drama is one of the pillars of the sub-genre. And one of the recurring core tropes of the genre, which is so fundamental you can hardly call it a cliche (any more than boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-girl is a "cliche" in genre romance) is the Campbellian Hero's Journey.

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If you are reading this blog you are familiar with the Hero's Journey monomyth because it's ubiquitous in our mythology and entertainment. Campbell derived it from studies of myths in many cultures, publishing his exposition The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949: his theory was that major myths from various world cultures can be traced back thousands of years and share a common cyclic template (with roughly 17 stages). Since then, it's been used repeatedly by entertainers as a construction template; for example, Christopher Vogler more or less codified it as a recipe while working for Disney studios. The plot of the original Star Wars trilogy was an explicit appropriation of the HJ cycle by to George Lucas (to be fair, before Vogler's codification); it's no accident that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father (Vader is Dutch for "Father") or that the fight between Skywalker and Vader in The Empire Strikes back is one that Skywalker loses—but survives to re-fight more successfully later. A key feature of the monomyth is that the hero leaves home on a quest, faces challenges, confronts and is struck down by his father/the darkness, then rises again, atones/achieves enlightenment/excellence, and triumphs in a final struggle that represents maturation.

Campbell's work isn't uncritically or universally accepted, to say the least, and there are variants on it: for example, Valerie Frenkel critiched him for focussing exclusively on the male variant of the Hero's Journey. It turns out that there are plenty of recurring myths where a version of the monomyth applies to women, with similar but distinctively different recurring stages focussing on the heroine's progress from girl to mother. Rather than fighting to defeat/overturn the parent, the heroine's struggle is to become the parent: rather than returning to the original home but as master (the male branch of the monomyth) the female version has her joining a new household as its mistress and new mother or goddess/priestess.

Yes, this is all horribly gender-stereotyped. But I'll take a stab in the dark at diagnosing its origin: the stages in the monomyth echo the mammalian K-selective reproductive cycle—on hitting puberty the young adult leaves the nest/parents, goes looking for a mate, meets and overcomes obstacles (competitors and predators), finds a mate, forms a new mated pair. In the case of humans or other primates there may also be issues about troupe/pack hierarchy to be resolved. Yes, there are problems with this: it doesn't map onto social structures once established settlements and agriculture become the norm and the young adults are expected to stay home and plough the fields. But the monomyth remains deeply appealing because the mythic framework it builds on has very deep roots that go all the way down to primate reproductive biology.

The monomyth doesn't have to be melodramatic: you can, at a pinch, apply it to that stereotypical MFA lit-fic novel of lecherous middle-aged academics without too much trouble. (The journey is one of internal psychological discovery, the threats are the protagonist's inner demons, the allies are the psychiatrist, the crisis/conflict is one of understanding ...) But as often as not, it's a structure for heroism: melodrama acts as a spice, raising the stakes and giving us a reason to pay attention to the protagonists, for their deeds are significant and implicitly may affect us (or the proxy the author has provided for our viewpoint).

So: Space Opera. Take the monomyth as a framework for how the action unfolds, and mix it up with melodrama. Then add space ships, ray guns, and wide-scale travel backdrops. Arguably the monomyth comes first, before the background: although some of the more skilled authors of the sub-genre spin their plots within the constrains of a background world, and sometimes manage to avoid the monomyth completely. (I'd go so far as to say that "Matter" by Iain M. Banks is an almost complete rejection of the form, as is "Look to Windward" ... actually, I suspect IMB had his own different idea of a story structure in mind for the Culture novels: as often as not they're epic tragedies ("Consider Phlebas") or illustrations of the limits of heroism.)

But if you're trying to spin a space opera, and you're reaching for a plot skeleton that works, the monomyth is your friend. Here's an exercise for the involved reader: take my dysfunctional Galactic U professorial marriage from the beginning of this essay and use the monomyth structure to come up with a plot, climax, and ending that delivers a satisfactory sense of closure. You might first want to consider who you are focussing on—the lecherous male prof, his spouse the academic with a dead-and-buried past (she thought) as an assassin, or the grad student with the secret mission. Then you need to consider what stage of the Hero's Journey you are joining them at—for there's no reason to assume the story starts at the beginning, rather than in media res. Next, work out what challenges and allies they might encounter on their way to the climax and resolution, and what role the other characters play in their quest. Finally: what is the prize they're seeking, how do they achieve it, and at what cost? For added points, see if you can find a way to twist the standard Hero's Journey cycle to apply a surprise climax to it—for example, by spinning this steamy menage-a-trois with added murderhate and alien space bats so that it appears at first to be one protagonist's journey but then switches track and turns out to be about one of the others (your classic example of this would be IMB's "Use of Weapons") ...

      "Lights are off because relays opened when the crash short circuited them." Morey and the entire group were suddenly shaking.
     "Nervous shock," commented Zezdon Afthen. "It will be an hour or more before we will be in condition to work."
     "Can't wait," replied Arcot testily, his nerves on edge, too.
     "Morey, make some good strong coffee if you can, and we'll waste a little air on some smokes."
     Morey turned and went to the galley.
     Five minutes later they returned to the corridor, where Arcot stood still, looking fixedly at the engine room. They were carrying small plastic balloons with coffee in them.
     They drank the coffee and returned to the control room, and sat about, the terrestrians smoking peacefully, the Ortolian and the Talsonian satisfying themselves with some form of mild narcotic from Ortol, which Zezdon Afthen introduced.
     "Well, we have a lot more to do," Arcot said. "The air-apparatus stopped working a while back, and I don't want to sit around doing nothing while the air in the storage tanks is used up."

      'All systems functioning normally,' said Hal. 'Two minutes to ignition.'

     Strange, thought Floyd, how terminology often survives long after the technology that gave it birth. Only chemical rockets were capable of ignition; even if the hydrogen in a nuclear or plasma drive did come into contact with oxygen, it would be far too hot to burn. At such temperatures, all compounds were stripped back into their elements.

     His mind wandered, seeking other examples. People — particularly older ones — still spoke of putting film into a camera (today digital cameras are standard), or gas into a car (soon electric cars will be standard). Even the phrase 'cutting a tape' was still sometimes heard in recording studios — though that embraced two generations of obsolete technologies.

I am once again stunned at the insistence that Star Trek has to be allegorically relevant, but if it must, I'd prefer it take on more scientific/ethical issues, like a justification for banning genetic enhancement. or how a society with FTL, molecular replication, and teleportation has managed to sidestep a technological singularity.

Star Trek is considered by many to be the public face of SF, it's flagship. I hold by my belief that to retain that title it needs to take it up a level: travel out into some heretofore unexplored quadrant and find that it is heavily populated by Type II Kardashev cultures, Lovecraftian ancients, Kirby-esque star gods, Matrioshka brain AIs trying to tap reality's source-code, post-singularity societies like Banks Culture, Wright's Oecumene, or Hamilton's Edenists, etc.

In short, Trek needs to catch up with the rest of science fiction.

“Call a Rabbit a Smeerp“

A cheap technique for false exoticism, in which common elements of the real world are re-named for a fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior. “Smeerps” are especially common in fantasy worlds, where people often ride exotic steeds that look and act just like horses. (Attributed to James Blish.)

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(ed note: This is the origin for the insult that a hack scifi author is writing a "Bat Durston". This is when a lazy scifi writer is trying to create a space western by taking an existing cowboy western and frantically calling a rabbit a smeerp on every story element in a desperate attempt to convince the reader that they are at Alpha Centauri instead of the O.K. Corral)

Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing...and at that point, a tall lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand.

"Get back from those controls, Bat Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last space trip."

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Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony 400 miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhange of rim-rock...and at that point a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high bolder, six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand.

"Rear back and dismount, Bat Durton," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts."

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Sound alike? They should — one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science fiction, you're welcome to it! YOU'LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY!

What you will find in GALAXY is the finest science fiction...authentic, plausible, thoughtful...written by authors who do not automaticallly switch over from crime waves to Earth invasions; by people who know and love science fiction...for people who also know and love it.

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One of the central features of SF after John W. Campbell's reinvention of the field in the late 1930s has been an expository style in which, rather than being directly told the important features of a fictional world, the reader is encouraged to half-consciously deduce them from clues dropped by the writer. Thus, for example, a writer who wishes to establish that most people are telepaths in his future might make his viewpoint character's first line "What would it be like to wake up in the morning and be unable to read minds?". Or (to cite a well-known example due to Samuel Delany) a writer wishing the reader to imagine with him a future of intense space industrialization might throw in a casual reference to "the monopole mines in the asteroid belt".

Reading SF is, accordingly, a learned skill of some complexity. First, one has to learn to actually see sentences like "What would it be like to wake up in the morning and be unable to read minds?" rather than editing "unable" into "able" and missing the point. Then, one has to develop at least casual, imagistic knowledge about things like the asteroid belt and magnetic monopoles, in order to be able to interpret "the monopole mines in the asteroid belt" as something more meaningful than (as Delany puts it) a gaudy purple word-noise.

It is thus clear that the process of reading SF involves merging the stream of prose presented by the writer with a rather large amount of special context. To some extent, of course, this is true of any genre of fiction or art not set in the reader's everyday world — readers of Westerns (for example) need to know what a Peacemaker is, and why a vaquero might throw a lariat, and what he throws it at. But the context an SF reader (and writer) needs is unusual in some important respects.

First, there's a lot more of it. To fully decode "the monopole mines in the asteroid belt" it's not sufficient merely to know what the asteroid belt is and what a monopole is (a theoretically possible but not yet observed particle with an isolated "north pole" or "south pole" charge). You need to have a fair idea why people might want them enough to mine them (for use in tiny but very powerful motors, as it happens). You need to know something about the history and economics of extractive industries in frontier areas, enough to predict that Belt miners are going to be a pretty rough-necked crowd to be playing around with all that space technology, and that there's likely to be something not totally unlike the wild and wooly Nevada mining camps of the late nineteenth century going on out there among the flying mountains.

Second, a lot of that context is about things that don't exist yet. A novice reader of Westerns has a fair chance of having enough knowledge about the American West to read a Louis L'Amour novel without tripping over unknown concepts. The American West existed — perhaps not as dramatically and mythically portrayed, but it existed. There's lots of implicit and explicit knowledge about it floating around in the general culture. You can go into any hat store and buy at least a reasonable imitation of a ten-gallon hat.

A reader of post-Campbellian SF has none of these advantages. It's not sufficient to understand a single history; one needs to have a working grasp of a large number of possible futures — to be able to draw inferences from the text of an SF work that are roughly parallel to the author's intended ones, even though both author and reader are imagining a world that has never existed!

So stated, the task before writer and reader seems well-nigh impossible. And yet, SF writers do successfully communicate with their readers (if perhaps only with their readers...). And experienced SF readers show every sign of being able typically to synchronize with a writer's world vision without even mental effort significant enough to be noticeable. How can this be?

The answer, almost never stated as such but implicitly understood by all SF fans, is that the SF genre over the last fifty years has evolved a sophisticated code of shared signifiers for describing counterfactual worlds. The gravamen of this essay is that these signifiers (the jargon of SF) function not merely as a set of isolated signs but as descriptions of a stock set of prototype worlds which they logically and conventionally imply, and which permit writers to specify mainly what (if anything) is unique about their world vision rather than what is shared with the rest of SF.

Critics unfamiliar with the field (and even some familiar with it) frequently miss this point. To see why, we need to take a look at the different ways a reader or critic may respond to SF jargon.

In looking at an SF-jargon term like, say, "groundcar", or "warp drive" there is a spectrum of increasingly sophisticated possible decodings. The most naive is to see a meaningless, uninterpretable wordlike noise and stop there.

The next level up is to recognize that uttering the word "groundcar" or "warp drive" actually signifies something that's important for the story, but to lack the experience to know what that is. The motivated beginning reader of SF is in this position; he must, accordingly, consciously puzzle out the meaning of the term from the context provided by the individual work in which it appears.

The third level is to recognize that "ground car" and "warp drive" are signifiers shared, with a consistent and known meaning, by many works of SF — but to treat them as isolated stereotypical signs, devoid of meaning save inasmuch as they permit the writer to ratchet forward the plot without requiring imaginative effort from the reader.

Viewed this way, these signs emphasize those respects in which the work in which they appear is merely derivative from previous works in the genre. Many critics (whether through laziness or malice) stop here. As a result they write off all SF, for all its pretensions to imaginative vigor, as a tired jumble of shopworn cliches.

The fourth level, typical of a moderately experienced SF reader, is to recognize that these signifiers function by permitting the writer to quickly establish shared imaginative territory with the reader, so that both parties can concentrate on what is unique about their communication without having to generate or process huge expository lumps. Thus these "stereotypes" actually operate in an anti-stereotypical way — they permit both writer and reader to focus on novelty.

At this level the reader begins to develop quite analytical habits of reading; to become accustomed to searching the writer's terminology for what is implied (by reference to previous works using the same signifiers) and what kinds of exceptions and novelties convey information about the world and the likely plot twists.

It is at this level, for example, that the reader learns to rely on "groundcar" as a tip-off that the normal transport mode in the writer's world is by personal flyer. At this level, also, the reader begins to analytically compare the author's description of his world with other SFnal worlds featuring personal flyers, and to recognize that different kinds of flyers have very different implications for the rest of the world.

For example, the moderately experienced reader will know that worlds in which the personal fliers use wings or helicopter-like rotors are probably slightly less advanced in other technological ways than worlds in which they use ducted fans — and way behind any world in which the flyers use antigravity! Once he sees "groundcar" he will be watching for these clues.

The very experienced SF reader, at the fifth level, can see entire worlds in a grain of jargon. When he sees "groundcar" he associates to not only technical questions about flyer propulsion but socio-symbolic ones but about why the culture still uses groundcars at all (and he has a reportoire of possible answers ready to check against the author's reporting). He is automatically aware of a huge range of consequences in areas as apparently far afield as (to name two at random) the architectural style of private buildings, and the ecological consequences of accelerated exploitation of wilderness areas not readily accessible by ground transport.

The better an SF writer is, the more subtly and effectively he will play off against the experienced reader's analytical skills. At the highest levels, SFnal exposition takes on the nature of a delicate, powerful intellectual dance or game between writer and reader, requiring much from both and rewarding both very richly.

Indeed, to true aficionados of the genre this game is the whole point of SF, the unique quality which elevates it above other fictional forms. This attitude explains much about the genre that outsiders find obscure and annoying — the intimacy between fans and writers; the indifference or outright hostility to conventional "literary values"; the pervasive SF-fan complaint that outsiders "just don't get it" and (when they deign to approve of SF at all) like all the wrong books for all the wrong reasons.

It is not, however, the purpose of this essay to issue a general apologia for SF and the attitudes of its fans. Rather, we are concerned here with the rules of the game — the ways in which the shared context which makes SF intelligible evolved, is represented in the minds of writers and readers, and is communicated to new readers and writers.

SF readers and writers have only finite memory and processing time to spend on the genre. Therefore they can have only a finite set of templates or archetypes to use as references in the game of communicating constructed worlds with each other. How (one may reasonably ask) can one particular finite set of prototypes have become established as the references that hold the genre together?

The set of possible prototypes is, first, strongly constrained by the way the universe works. No SF fan would, for example, believe without a lot of explicit convincing argument in a culture that uses both laser cannons and stone-throwing catapults as war weapons. Techno-logic says this doesn't happen, and the central constraint of the SF game is that the author gets only a very limited number of implausible premises before the suspension bridge of disbelief collapses.

To the extent we understand a "logic" in history and social structures, that constrains prototype worlds as well. A writer can erect a Galactic Emperor, or can describe by implication a relatively un-coercive interstellar society with secure property rights, unrestricted travel, a free press, etc; but if they're both going to be in the same world at the same time, the Emperor had better be a consitutional monarch rather than a bloody-handed despot casually shipping people off to the thorium mines.

At this point we must explicitly admit that to speak of prototype worlds is a bit of an oversimplification. Prototype worlds do exist (and there are reasons we'll discuss in a bit to cast the discussion in terms of them) but there are many possible-world templates of less than whole-world size. An excellent example, taking off from the previous discussion of "groundcar", is the template for "flitter technology", which we can express partly as the following series of statements and implications:

• Flitters have roughly the speed and altitude limits of a light plane but are capable of vertical or very-short-field operation.
• Flitters have about the cost range of a present-day automobile.
• Flitters effectively never fall out of the sky. (Otherwise they would be deemed too dangerous for widespread personal use.)
• For the previous statement to be true, flitters probably use some unknown form of no-moving-parts antigravity technology or reactionless drive. Be unsurprised if the world features other possible applications of exotic physics and force field technology, such as force shields, exotic energy weapons, and a faster-than-light drive
• If ground transport is still used at all, either the reasons are ceremonial and sentimental (as with horse transport today) or something about flitter technology makes it uneconomic for long hauls of large payloads.
• Roads no longer exist, except possibly as isolated museum pieces for groundcar fanciers.
• Urban architecture is no longer structured by a street grid; expect lots of parks and pedestrian malls instead.
• There is virtually no habitable untouched wilderness left on Earth.
• Sub-planetary governments probably no longer exist. If they do, they somehow manage it despite being effectively unable to control cross-border transit.
• And more...

Notice that this prototype has both a defining logical consistency and hooks to other prototypes — for example, the fourth item implies the existence of a "force field" or "exotic physics" template that groups together antigravity, energy weapons, and a faster-than-light drive.

When enough of these prototypes hook together, one has a prototype world. And this is in fact often what happens in an SF reader's head as he comprehends the clues a writer has scattered about in a work of SF. But previous discussion has centered on the idea of a prototype world because those, too are entities recognized by readers — and, in fact, every prototype of less than whole-world size started out life as a fragment of a prototype world!

Thus, for example, one of the prototype dystopias in SF looks like this:

• The society is rigidly stratified along birth-caste lines.
• Birth castes are produced by technological manipulation in creches.
• Either caste is obvious from physical appearance, or people wear uniform-like clothes which display their caste affiliation.
• Having a child outside the creche system is highly illegal.
• Conformity is maintained by inculcation of a a religious or quasi-religious ideology in which the mythic founders of the society play a central role, with an effective secret police as backstop.

This prototype dystopia may be set on a starship, in a hivelike fortress-city, or on an ecologically devastated future Earth. The background technology may be nearly that of present-time Earth or include interstellar travel and nanotechnology. Nevertheless, it's hard for anyone who has read the original to miss that this prototype is essentially a fragment of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1934) running around loose.

In some cases (like this one), most SF fans can instantly name the source story of a prototype world or fragment in some seminal work of the genre. Indeed, perhaps the best single-sentence definition of a seminal work in SF would be this:one that originated a still-recognized template world or major fragment.

In other cases, the prototype world becomes sufficiently detached from its original source(s) that they are no longer readily identifiable. For example, here is a prototype world that has been extremely widespread in SF since at least the early 1950s. One might call it the "Galactic Federation" template:

• Earth humanity has faster-than-light interstellar travel and has spread to dozens or hundreds of extra-solar planets (transit times on the order of weeks).
• Key technologies include FTL, personal flyers, and energy weapons; may include forcefields; do not generally include advanced biological manipulation, matter transmission, or nanotechnology (or there may be taboos that prevent application of these to humans).
• Human space is dominated by a single political unit with a democratic federal structure, with individual planetary governments sending representatives to a galactic senate.
• The federation government has a military monopoly. but lacks either the capability or authority (or both) to routinely interfere in events below planetary level.
• Planetary law varies, but most worlds share a common legal framework including property rights, freedom of speech and assembly, and unrestricted travel.
• The older worlds, closer to Earth (the "core" or "core worlds") are wealthy, heavily urbanized, and (for story purposes) boring.
• The frontier (the "fringe") is a rough, challenging environment (most stories are set there). New worlds are constantly being scouted and opened to colonization. There is usually a specialist service of the federation government, quasi-military in structure but distinct from the military, dedicated to exploring new worlds.
• The economic structure is a relatively laissez-faire capitalism. In the core regions, planetary governments are more powerful than corporations. On the fringe the reverse is occasionally true.
• The federation may be in occasional or regular contact with nonhuman aliens beyond its frontiers. If so, relations are generally peaceful (otherwise the federation's political structure would become more centralized and militarized than in the standard prototype) though there may be tension, occasional minor flare-ups and may have been a significant war within historical memory.
• And more...

All these implications are present, to an experienced SF reader, the instant a writer says "the Federation" or anything recognizably similar. Among other instances, this is the prototype of the Star Trek universe's "United Federation of Planets".

From E.E. "Doc" Smith's space operas in the 1930s through William Gibson's original cyberpunk novels in the early 1980s, the most important works in SF have been those that created or solidified new prototype worlds — and with them, new jargon, new signifiers that eventually became signatures of the prototypes as they drifted free of their sources to be used and transformed and re-worked in new works of SFnal imagination.

This is why the shared jargon of SF is so important to understanding the field as a whole. It maps in miniature the structure of the prototype worlds that readers and writers hold in common.

• 

Some of you might remember the Evil Overlord's List, a list of all the generic cliche mistakes that Evil Overlords tend to make in fiction (16: I will never utter the sentence "But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know."). I think that it might be a good idea to begin bolting together a similar list of the cliches to which Space Opera is prone, purely as an exercise in making sure that once I get under way I only make new and original mistakes, rather than recycling the same-old same-old.

This is not an exhaustive list—it's merely a start, the tip of a very large iceberg glimpsed on the horizon. And note that I'm specifically excluding the big media franchise products—Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, and similar—from consideration: any one of them could provide a huge cliche list in its own right, but I'm interested in the substance of the literary genre rather than in what TV and film have built using the borrowed furniture of the field.

1. Planetary civilizations

   This subheading covers common cliches/mistakes made in discussing inhabited (Earthlike) planets and the people who live on them.

   • Planets are small and easily explored
   • All the land masses on a planet are easily accessible
   • You can fly anywhere on a planet in a short time without leaving the atmosphere
   • You can fly anywhere at Mach 2.2+ without experiencing hull heating due to atmospheric friction
   • You can fly anywhere at Mach 2.2+ without worrying about Air Traffic Control and NOTAMs
   • Everywhere on a planet shares a common climate and the same weather patterns
   • The same plants and animals can be found everywhere on a given planet
   • Coriolis force, trade winds, cyclones, what are those?
   • Oceans are small, land-locked, and mainly useful for fishing
   • Plate tectonics is easily ignored, unless the plot requires a Volcano/Earthquake
   • Deep carbon cycle, subduction, ionosphere UV splitting of water, long-term terraforming stability: why worry about little things like that?
   • Ice ages are inevitably global
   • Some planets have a breathable atmosphere but no water

2. Space and cosmology

   Common blunders in cosmology, planetography, orbital mechanics, and related.

   • Moons are good, the more the better!
   • Suns are good, too, the more the better!
   • ... Especially if one of them is a giant. (Those never explode or flare messily.)
   • Planetary ring systems are picturesque, not dangerous
   • Planets have a diurnal period precisely 86,400 Earth seconds long
   • Planets rotate east-to-west
   • Planets have magnetic poles that approximate their rotational axis
   • Planetary gravity can be approximated to a point source for purposes of calculating orbital dynamics
   • All satellites orbit the equator
   • You can change orbital inclination easily
   • Stuff in orbit doesn't change orbital inclination spontaneously
   • Geosynchronous orbit is easy to get to
   • If you are in geosynchronous orbit away from the equator you still hover over the same spot on the planetary surface all the time
   • Planets are close together
   • Concentric planets orbit the same distance apart
   • The flight time between planets in an inner star system is the same as between planets in the outer system
   • Asteroids are so close together that you can hide between them
   • ... but they never clump into planets
   • Asteroidal dust makes an irritating ping as it bounces off a ship's hull
   • ... for some reason you never run into it at multiple km/sec
   • Actually, hitting a space rock or other spaceship is no big deal, a bit like being in a minor car accident
   • ... Even though the kinetic energy released by an impact increases with the square of the velocity, and you're travelling hundreds to millions of time faster
   • Gas giants are good for mining volatiles
   • ... Because dealing with Mach 6 wind shear, 10,000 Bar pressure, and a lethally deep gravity well is trivial
   • ... Because we need volatiles such as 3He, to fuel our aneutronic fusion reactors (hint: Boron is cheaper and much less scarce)
   • All comets have tails
   • ... they're sort of hairless and scaly, like a [sarcasm limit exceeded - Ed.]
   • Rocky planets are either airless or shirt-sleeves worlds with breathable air
   • Pay no attention to Venus, runaway greenhouse worlds are imaginary
   • Big stars are as long-lived and likely to have planets as dwarf stars
   • Supernovae happen routinely and are no big deal
   • Interstellar space is totally empty
   • ... You can fly as fast as you like without worrying about dust particles
   • You don't have to worry about interstellar gas, either
   • ... Except when there's not enough of it to keep your ramscoop accelerating
   • Incidentally? Ramscoops totally work! (Larry Niven said so in 1968.)
   • You can go fast enough to experience relativistic time dilation without worrying about the pesky cosmic background radiation blue-shifting into hard X-rays and frying you
   • You can forget all about hitting the occasional interstellar 4He nucleus with some multiple of the energy of an alpha particle, several million times a second
   • ... Don't worry about hitting the electrons bound to the neutral hydrogen either, gamma photons totally aren't a thing
   • You can use handy black holes and neutron stars to make handbrake turns in space
   • You an also use gas giants to make handbrake turns, at high relativistic speeds
   • Don't let the fact the space is full of exciting high energy physics put you off going there, squishy meatsack-persons!

3. Biology

   Biology is complicated—so much so that many SF authors suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome in approaching the design of life-supporting planets.

   • All planets harbour a single apex predator that eats people
   • All planets harbour is a single venomous insect/reptile analog that poisons people
   • The native flora and fauna use a biochemistry that we can derive sustenance from
   • ... This includes weird-ass micronutrients
   • Pay no attention to the native microbiota, they're harmless
   • ... You won't even suffer from hay fever! Much less systemic anaphylaxis.
   • Ecosystems are robust; why not let your ship's cat stretch her legs whenever you land?
   • ... This goes for your ship's rats, too
   • Planets only have one class of plant-analog and one class of animal-analog
   • ... Only Earth has reptiles, amphibia, fish, birds, insects, mammals, fungi, etc.
   • Terraforming is really simple; you can do it with algae capsules delivered from orbit
   • There are no native parasites that might eat Maize, so we can turn the entire largest continent into a robot-run plantation
   • ... Soil exhaustion isn't a thing
   • ... Terrestrial constraints on agriculture don't apply on other planets
   • You can keep a starship crew healthy and sane indefinitely using a life support system running on blue-green algae, tilapia, and maybe the odd soy bean plant
   • Life support systems are simple, stable, and self-managing
   • It is safe to put bleach down the toilet on a starship; your algae/tilapia/soy will totally deal with it it when it comes out of the recycler
   • Vitamins? Naah, we'll just genetically modify the crew to make their own
   • If you implant humans with the gene for chlorophyl they can magically become photosynthetic
   • ... Okay, if you add the genes for RuBiSCO and the C3 pathway they can magically become photosynthetic
   • ... Because of course two square meters of skin is enough surface area to photosynthetically capture enough energy for a high-metabolic-rate mammal to live off
   • Humans can too hibernate/deep sleep between star systems! All you need is a cold enough chest freezer
   • ... Just as long as their intestinal flora go into cold sleep at the same time
   • ... and so do the low metabolic rate arctic pseudofungi spores they picked up at the last planetary stop

4. Economics

   Fingernails-on-blackboard time for me. (See also: Neptune's Brood)

   • New Colonies may be either agricultural or mining colonies; rarely, resort colonies
   • Everyone uses Money to mediate exchanges of value
   • Money is always denominated in uniform ratios divisible by 10
   • Money is made out of shiny bits of metal, OR pieces of green paper, OR credit stored in a computer network
   • There is only one kind of Money on any given planet, or one credit network
   • The same kind of Money is accepted everywhere as payment for all debts
   • Visitors are always equipped to interface with the planet-wide credit network
   • Planetary credit networks are incredibly secure except when the visitor needs to hack into someone else's bank account
   • Barter is a sign of primitive people who haven't invented money
   • People who rely on Barter are simple, trusting folks (and a bit stupid on the side)
   • Inflation? What is this, I don't even ...
   • Deflation? What will they think of next?
   • Sales tax? What's that?
   • Income tax? What's that?
   • Import duty? What's ... (rinse, spin, repeat)
   • You can get a loan from your friendly bank manager whenever you need one
   • Bank loans accrue interest
   • If you fail to replay a bank loan you may be arrested and held in debtor's prison
   • ... Or sold into slavery
   • ... Or your organs can be seized
   • ... Because your body is just one of your fungible assets, right?
   • ... And harvesting organs for transplant surgery is a universal practice
   • People on planets have not heard of Ponzi Schemes
   • People on planets have not heard of Credit Default Swaps or the Black-Scholes equation
   • If money is made of shiny bits of metal or green paper, banks have vaults where they store lots of money
   • Money sitting in a bank vault is worth something
   • Visitors to a Colony can print fake currency without fear of consequences
   • Visitors to a Colony can leave their money with a bank between infrequent visits without fear of consequences
   • Banks are stable, because ...
   • ... The planetary government will never let a bank go bust, because ...
   • ... The galactic emperor will never let a planetary government go bust, because ...
   • Traders on starships land on planets to load and unload cargo
   • ... Or they carry their own orbit-to-surface shuttle
   • ... Which is as easy and safe to operate as a fork-lift truck
   • Cargo is bought and sold in starports
   • It is profitable to ship crude break-bulk cargo like timber or foodstuffs between star systems because starships are cheap and easy to repair and operate
   • Break-bulk shipping in open cargo holds has never been improved upon
   • Multimodal freight containers, EDI/EDIFACT standards for commerce, bar codes, bourses, and RFID technologies are just inferior and unnecessarily complicated alternatives to a bazaar or indoor market
   • Insurance underwriting? Arbitrage? What's that? (rinse, spin, repeat)
   • All cargo starships need plenty of unskilled deck hands to help load and unload cargo
   • All cargo starships need gun turrets to fight off swarms of space pirates
   • ... Cargo starships with guns can fight off space pirates
   • Cargo starship crews can fix battle damage
   • ... All it takes is enough duct tape and determination
   • ... Because space pirate weapons are as deadly as shotguns, not H-bombs
   • ... And starships cost no more to build and operate than a 1920s tramp steamer
   • Space pirates will happily open fire on a cargo ship to damage it before boarding
   • Space pirates need to board cargo ships in order to steal their cargo
   • ... And impress/conscript/enslave their crew
   • Piracy is a huge problem for space traders
   • You can tell the difference between a pirate and a space trader with a glance
   • A cargo captain in a hole might easily turn to smuggling to improve their bottom line
   • Navies are a lesser threat to smugglers than random encounters with pirates
   • Nobody has ever heard of end-user certificates or bonded cargo
   • Nobody ever thinks to ship their high-tax cargo via a free port or use complex financial arrangements to avoid customs duty without having to hire a dodgy armed ship with a poor credit rating

5. Politics

   • Planets have a single unitary government (or none at all)
   • Planetary governance is no more complex than running a village or small township
   • ... This is because the planetary capital is a village or small township, not, say, Beijing or Mexico City
   • If there are two or more ethnicities represented on a planet their collective politics are simple and easily understood by analogy to 20th century US race relations
   • All planetary natives everywhere speak Galactic Standard English, or Trade Pidgin
   • New Colonies can't afford police, detectives, customs inspectors, or the FBI
   • New Colonies don't require visting spacers to conform to local dress codes or laws
   • New Colonies don't have gun control laws
   • New Colonies don't have laws, or if they do they were written by a mad libertarian
   • Despite the lack of laws, nobody underage drinks in the saloon
   • ... Nobody underage works in the saloon rooms you rent by the hour, either
   • ... Nor is there an extensive school truancy problem or much illiteracy
   • On reaching pensionable age, all colonists are forced to retire and deported to the Planet of the Pensioners
   • There is no unemployment because happy smiley frontier needs cowboys or something
   • If the planetary government is a democracy, the new Mayor will be elected by a town meeting
   • If the planetary government is an oligarchy, the new Patrician will be elected by a town meeting (of oligarchs, in the back room of the saloon)
   • If the planetary government is a theocracy, there will be only one sect of the planetary religion and no awkward long-standing heresies that are too strong/embedded to suppress
   • ... And there will be direct rule by Clergy, along the lines of an oligarchy: no Committees of Guardians of the Faith, no separation of executive and legislature, none of the complexity and internal rivalries of Terrestrial theocracies (e.g. Iran, Saudi Arabia)
   • If the planet is a colony of the Galactic Empire, the new Planetary Governor will be appointed by the local Sector Governor
   • ... It's Governors all the way up (until you hit the Emperor)
   • Monarchy is the natural and perfectly ideal form of government
   • Only an Imperial Monarchy can ensure the good local governance of a myriad of inhabited planets scattered across the vast reaches of deep space
   • Monarchies are never a Single Point Of [Galactic] Failure
   • Monarchs are never stupid, mad, ill, or distracted by a secret ambition to be a house painter instead
   • Viziers are Always (a) Grand and (b) Evil. (At this point, let's just #include the regular Evil Overlord list, m'kay?)
   • Democracies are always corrupt
   • You can always bribe your way out of sticky situation if you're from off-world
   • All planetary legal systems work the same way (some remix of Common Law, constitutional governance, and trial by jury).
   • The standard punishments for a crime range from a small fine, to slavery in the uranium mines for life (about 18 months), to an excruciating death
   • Trials are swift and punishments are simple and easy to understand
   • Justice is always punitive/retributive/exemplary, never compensatory/preventative/rehabilitative, much less poetic/cryptic/incomprehensible
   • ... If the Author disapproves of the death penalty, substitute mind-wipe for the death penalty (like, there's a difference?)

6. Culture

   • There is usually only one culture per planet
   • ... Sometimes there are two, to provide for an oppositional plot dynamic
   • ... Pay no attention to the blank spots on the map
   • ... And especially don't go looking for the unmarked mass graves
   • Planetary natives are either Colonists or Indigenous
   • Indigenous peoples are either Primitive or Advanced (and Decadent)
   • Advanced Indigines either don't have space travel or gave it up (see: Decadent)
   • Primitive Indigines are either Tribal or Mediaeval
   • Mediaeval Indigines invariably recapitulate the politics of the Hundred Years War
   • Visits to Mediaeval Indigenous Colonies can be approximated to a side-quest into Fantasyland
   • If the planet is a Colony it is either a Lost Colony or a New Colony
   • Lost Colonies may resemble Primitive Indigines but never Advanced
   • New Colonies resemble Tombstone, AZ, circa 1880
   • New Colonists live in log cabins, ride mules/horses and carry ~six-guns~ blasters
   • ... You can find logs (cabins, for the construction of) everywhere on planets
   • ... They're like abandoned crates in first-person shooters
   • Psychologically speaking, everybody is either WEIRD or Primitive
   • Primitive (non-WEIRD) people are stupid and unimaginative
   • WEIRD people accept and embrace change and innovation; non-WEIRD people reject both
   • Colonies are usually modelled on WEIRD 1950s cultural norms
   • Colony People come in two genders
   • The Women on New Colonies are either:
   • ... Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen (because colonies need babies)
   • ... Dungaree-wearing two-fisted starship-engineering-obsessed lesbians desperate to get off-world
   • The Men on New Colonies are either:
   • ... Manly plaid-shirt-wearing heterosexual farmers breaking sod in the ~west~ new world
   • ... Dastardly drunken muggers waiting behind the spaceport saloon for an unwary spacer
   • QUILTBAG: huh? Who are those people and why doesn't somebody cure them?
   • ... (Alternatively: everybody is QUILTBAG, pale patriarchal heterosexual penis people are extinct)
   • Clothing invariably obeys some regional dress code that has been observed on Earth in the past thousand years; in extreme cases 1950s business attire will serve to avoid attracting undue attention
   • You can recognize someone's gender on any planet because:
   • ... Women wear dresses or skirts with make-up and long hair
   • ... Men wear pants (or occasionally suits of armour)
   • ... Hijra? Hermaphrodites? Transgender? Asexual? What are those?
   • On some planets people go naked, except for body paint
   • ... This causes no problems, whether social or practical
   • Colony Planets are invariably a Crapsack World that people are desperate to escape from, unless they're the planetary governor or some species of NPC
   • The only place worse than a Colony World is Old Earth
   • Old Earth is
   • ... An over-crowded overpopulated hell-hole
   • ... An over-regulated bureaucratic hell-hole
   • ... A poverty-stricken backwater and hell-hole
   • ... Destroyed
   • ... Lost (because everyone in the galaxy somehow forgot the way home)
   • ... Mythical (and many people think it never existed)
   • ... Somewhere to run away from
   • ... (Rarely) Somewhere to run to
   • Slavery is
   • ... Ubiquitous
   • ... No big deal
   • ... Illegal but all the bad guys do it
   • "the best thing we ever did for them; they're much happier now"
   • Humans are free; aliens are slaves
   • Humans are slaves; aliens are free

7. Technology - space travel

   • Running a nuclear power plant is kid's business; even a drunken college drop-out can be a ship's engineer
   • Rocket motors are simple to maintain and operate, too—they never break
   • Reaction mass is incredibly dense, cheap, and easy to stash away in a spare corner
   • ... It never runs out
   • ... It doesn't require special handling procedures
   • ... It's never toxic, cryogenic, teratogenic, radioactive, or corrosive
   • Oxygen is freely available in space
   • You can go as fast as you like if you just accelerate in a straight line
   • Spaceships accelerate at right angles to the direction the occupants experience gravity in
   • Spaceships are:
   • ... bilaterally symmetrical
   • ... rugged and able to survive impacts with other objects
   • ... easily maintained by semi-skilled labour/shade tree mechanics
   • ... about as complex as a 1920s tramp steamer, or maybe a deep-sea fishing trawler
   • ... easily piloted
   • ... can stop on a dime
   • ... available second-hand in good working order from scrapyards
   • ... have wings and an undercarriage, like a biplane
   • ... You can hear them coming a parsec away
   • Generating electricity aboard a spaceship without solar panels is easy
   • ... So is getting rid of waste heat
   • ... The bigger the spaceship, the easier it gets (because the square-cube law doesn't exist)
   • ... The Death Star would totally not melt itself with its waste heat whenever it fired its planet-zapper!
   • Faster than light travel is easy
   • ... But the jump drive is fuelled by unobtainium
   • Causality violation: what's that?
   • There are no regulatory frameworks or licensing regimes for starships
   • Nobody would ever think to run a starship up to 50% of light-speed and ram a planet
   • ... Even if they did that, the effect wouldn't be significantly worse than a 1940s atom bomb
   • There's no regulatory framework for shuttlecraft, either
   • ... Because nobody has heard of Kessler syndrome
   • ... Also, a space shuttle in-falling from low earth orbit totally doesn't arrive at ground level with kinetic energy equal to about ten times it's own mass in TNT, because if it did it would be a field-expedient weapon of mass destruction
   • Flying a spaceship is not only easy, it's easier than flying a Cessna
   • Spaceship life support systems are simple to maintain and repair and very forgiving
   • Spaceships communicate across interplanetary or interstellar distances by radio
   • ... Interplanetary radio works instantaneously
   • ... Interplanetary radio communications are as easy to operate as tuning your car stereo to a new AM channel
   • GPS works in space beyond low earth orbit: who needs navigation skills these days?

8. Technology - Pew! Pew! Pew!

   • Radar gives us an instantaneously updated map of everything in a star system
   • ... But stealth technology is totally a thing!
   • We can't detect spaceships by looking for their infrared emissions against the 2.7 kelvin cosmic background temperature
   • Also, spaceships can hide behind planets or asteroids indefinitely without using their engines or knowing the bearing of the enemy they're hiding from
   • Laser beams are instantaneous, don't spread or disperse, and can melt anything
   • ... Except a force field that somehow refracts/bends/absorbs the confused photons
   • Missiles, with a constrained (small) propulsion system, can overhaul a much bigger/less constrained spaceship at great range
   • Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties don't bother to count Free Trader Beowulf's point-defense nuclear missile battery for treaty purposes—only naval nukes count
   • Gun turrets have to have a glassed-in canopy and a gunner inside or they won't work
   • Also, human gunners can totally draw a bead on a hostile pirate ship maneuvering a few light seconds away. Fire control computers, not so much
   • Boarding actions have mysteriously made a come-back from the 1850s.
   • Guns are still bang-sticks that require a human to point them at a target
   • Stun-guns have no unpleasant after-effects
   • Bullets are brainless
   • You can dodge laser beams
   • Fisticuffs are universally considered to be the optimal way to resolve a sincere difference of opinion over complex commercial interactions
   • All starships need to carry armed guards, or at least a gun locker full of blasters for the crew when they're visiting a Colony planet
   • Knife missiles—who ordered that?

9. Aliens

   • Aliens are multicellular organisms with nervous systems and musculoskeletal systems
   • Aliens communicate in language
   • ... Using noises
   • ... Emitted by their mouths
   • ... At frequency ranges we can perceive
   • Aliens are individuals
   • Aliens are eusocial hive organisms
   • Spacefaring aliens are conscious
   • Aliens are WEIRD people with latex face paint or funny haircuts
   • ... Because primates are a universal deterministic outcome of evolution on all worlds
   • Wittgenstein was wrong about talking lions. (If they could speak we'd find what they can say fascinating—mostly because we'd be waiting for them to mutter, "I wonder what those bipeds taste like?")
   • Aliens build starships sort-of like humans, but with wonky furniture
   • Aliens are interested in us (see Wittgenstein above)
   • Aliens want to trade with us
   • Aliens want to exchange bodily fluids with us (ewww ...)
   • Aliens want to induct us into their civilizational-level fraternity/sorority and make contact in order to teach us the house rules
   • Alien species only have one dominant culture
   • Alien species are noteworthy for their universally applicable stereotypy, utterly unlike us complicated and divergent human beings
   • Aliens have a much longer history of spaceflight than humans, but unaccountably failed to stumble upon and domesticate us during the 11th century
   • Aliens have religious beliefs because they have the same theory of mind as human beings and attribute intentionality to natural phenomena (see also: Daniel Dennett)
   • Alien religion resembles those of a human culture that thrived prior to 1000 CE and is now considered quaintly obsolescent by most humans
   • Aliens can't control themselves
   • Aliens are unconditionally hostile
   • Aliens are robots
   • ... Robot-aliens are just like alien-aliens, only more alien, because robots
   • Aliens are incomprehensible
   • Aliens have no sense of humor
   • Aliens have a human sense of humor
   • Aliens have been extinct for millions of years, but:
   • ... have left treasures behind in their death-trap-riddled tombs
   • ... their ephemeral technologies still work flawlessly
   • ... If humans trip the burglar alarm, they're coming back—and they'll be mad
   • ... they're extinct because they Sublimed
   • ... they're extinct because they became Decadent
   • ... they're extinct because they suicided
   • ... (robot-alien remix): they're extinct because they tripped over the Halting Problem
   • ... they're extinct because (insert dodgy social darwinist argument here)

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Luke Campbell: re: "Planets rotate east-to-west".

     While this might be a cliche, it is also the definition of east and west.

     You have two poles of rotation on a planet. Looking down at one, the planet spins clockwise, looking down at the other, the planet spins counter-clockwise. You choose the one where the planet is spinning counter-clockwise as the north pole, and the other as the south. Since west is defined by the direction 90 degrees counter-clockwise from north (and 90 degrees clockwise from south), and east in the opposite direction, this means that planets always "rotate east-to-west" and celestial objects always rise in the east and set in the west (with rare exceptions, such as moons orbiting faster than a planetary rotation period).

      As I mentioned in my last entry, I've been watching Babylon 5 lately. It's not a perfect show, but it has one big advantage: it's consistent and believable.

     Contrast this with Doctor Who. Doctor Who is fun to watch, but if you think about it for more than two seconds you notice it's full of plot holes and contradictions. Things that cause time travel paradoxes that threaten to destroy the universe one episode go without a hitch the next. And the TARDIS, the sonic screwdriver, and the Doctor's biology gain completely different powers no one's ever alluded to depending on the situation. The aliens are hysterically unlikely, often without motives or believable science, the characters will do any old insane thing when it makes the plot slightly more interesting, and everything has either a self-destruct button or an easily findable secret weakness that it takes no efforts to defend against.
     But I guess I'm not complaining. If the show was believable, the Doctor would have gotten killed the first time he decided to take on a massive superadvanced alien invasion force by walking right up to them openly with no weapons and no plan. And then they would have had to cancel the show, and then I would lose my chance to look at the pretty actress who plays Amy Pond.
     So Doctor Who is not a complete loss. But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning.

     I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".

     Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.
     I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

     Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

     So it's pretty standard "shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong" versus "evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide" stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics. The actual strategy of the war is barely any better. Just to give one example, in the Battle of the Bulge, a vastly larger force of Germans surround a small Allied battalion and demand they surrender or be killed. The Allied general sends back a single-word reply: "Nuts!". The Germans attack, and, miraculously, the tiny Allied force holds them off long enough for reinforcements to arrive and turn the tide of battle. Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military.

     Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy - the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin' play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.

     Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.
     So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?
     ...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

     I'm not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named "Enigma", because the writers couldn't spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means "Man of Steel" in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman "Man of Steel" and the Frenchman "de Gaulle", whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

     So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don't even try to make their stuff believable.