"Klingons and humans? Make babies they surely cannot!"

I love science fiction. I do. I’m a massive geek and could happily watch nowt but scifi for the rest of my life – but there’s just a few really stupid things that so much science fiction TV and movies get really up my nose.

1. “Jump to lightspeed”

Um... what?

You can’t go at lightspeed. Or faster than light. It causes all kinds of horrible time-travel paradoxes and causality violations, like arriving home before you left.

Worst offender: Star Wars. But then, Star Wars is arguably as much fantasy as science fiction.

Avoids the trap: In Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity, all travel seems to be slower-than light.

Honourable mention: Babylon 5 and Stargate use wormholes and hyperspace, which I figure must avoid some of the problems with time travel paradoxes, though my science isn’t quite good enough to be sure.

2. “Woman from Slough has ET’s baby”

In science fiction, this is what would happen if Hitler had sex with a cat

Considering it is impossible for man and chimp to procreate, despite using a DNA system that has evolved on the same planet and shows us to be close cousins, how on Earth (or Vulcan) can Mr Spock have a human mom and a Vulcan pop?

Star Trek: The Next Generation tried to do a science-retcon in the episode The Chase, which uses a version of the theory that life was seeded from outer space. But its too little too late for those of us wondering how it is plausible that B’Elanna Torres even has a suitable hole for Tom Paris to play hide the sausage in.

Worst offender: Any Star Trek. Seriously, we don’t get a boner every time we see a Tango-orange pygmy with giant ears, so why does Quark find human women attractive?

Avoids the trap: Star Wars and Stargate SG-1 both feature aliens who never try to copulate with humans. Although there is the whole Goa’uld thing in Stargate, but they do seem to be modified people.

Honourable mention: Babylon 5, where Delenn’s genetic-reprogramming and subsequent emergence as a half-human, half-Minbari is at least greeted with a suitable level of disgust.

3. The third dimension

There is an up!

Most people don’t think in three dimensions, they think in two and a half, being, as we are, stuck to this giant sphere of rock called Earth. It kind of limits our thinking, and as a result, spaceships usually end up fighting each other like two gunfighters facing off at the O.K. Coral, or two boxers nose to nose.

Worst offender: All Star Trek series, where spaceships meet each other the “right way up”, where maps and star-charts are all flat and where, in the original series, there was a “barrier” at the edge of the galaxy, like an interstellar electric fence keeping the cows in.

Avoids the trap: Babylon 5, where giant spaceships regularly pop out of hyperspace jump holes from all kinds of different angles and where it is at least basically accepted that the galaxy is not as flat as a pancake.

Dis-honourable mention: Firefly generally avoids this kind of trouble, not least because much of it takes place in atmospheres. But it does deserve being called on its spatial terms of reference for “the ‘verse”, where about 50-odd human-habitable planets and moons improbably exist within one star system.

4. Peeow-Peeow (aka “Nice shooting kid, but don’t get cocky”)

Gratuitous Christina Hendricks picture of the week. Hey, I mentioned Firefly, it's legit!

Semi-automatic targetting computers already exist, so it seems weird that hundreds of years from now people will be manually aiming their heavy space artillery.

Worst offender: Star Wars has some hokey moments, with military chaps sitting in gun turrets, and in Battlestar Galactica (both original and re-imagined) the human pilots repeatedly beat down many times their own number of Cylons, even though the Cylons have been bred/designed for space combat at high-Gs. But Star Trek: The Next Generation has to take the prize for the ridiculous delay between Riker or Picard telling Mr Worf to fire weapons, then him targetting and firing, and then sometimes even missing. What the fuck? Let Majel-Barret-voice do it, for crikey’s sake.

Avoids the trap: Firefly/Serenity neatly avoid this problem by having pretty much no space weapons at all, as does Farscape, where not only does Moya have no weapons, but she is a sentient ship in the first place. Hurrah!*

Semi-honourable mention: Babylon 5 does feature the human-piloted Starfury craft, which is daft, but they also have barrages of explicitly-automatic guns called, in the case of the eponymous space-station, the defence grid. Which is good.

* (Actually, Iain M Bank’s Culture novels are the best example of machine-controlled battles taking place in milliseconds, but as I’m only looking at TV and films they don’t count.)

5. A long time ago…

In the grand scheme of things, these guys might as well have lived yesterday

Seeing as the universe has been around for about 14 billion years, planets for at least 5 billion years and habitable, life-capable planets for at least 3.8 billion years, how does it happen that you go into space and all the aliens you meet are at approximately the same level of technology?

Worst offender: In Star Trek: Voyager, time travellers pop up from a few hundred years in the future and, to cut a long story short, end up giving the holographic doctor a mobile emitter. That’s fine. They needed to move the plot along. But it symbolises the Star Trek creators’ inability to comprehend the sheer magnitude of history.

Why would a device from 400 years in the future make a difference? In a galaxy of thousands of civilisations, surely one of them would have made it into the space age a few hundred years before the others, and have developed technology a few hundred years before the others. Yet this 29th Century tech is treated as if its ahead of anything else in the galaxy. This might seem like a finnicky point, but it makes me so mad I want to explode.

Avoids the trap: In Star Wars, the galaxy was conquered ages and bloody ages ago, so its no surprise that most people have the same level of technology.

Honourable mention: Babylon 5 does feature elder civilisations that have been around for perhaps millions of years, which is great. But then they come out to “kick  over the anthills” at the ricidulously short interval of every THOUSAND YEARS, which kind of ruins things. Close, but no Cuban.

6. …in a galaxy far, far away.

Our sun is huge, but it's also tiny

Space is big. There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. But in science fiction, space often seems rather small.

Worst offender: Yet again Star Trek takes the wooden spoon, because every single script is intentionally filled with technobabble that is clumsily inserted in later, with scant regard for any kind of common sense.

Avoids the trap: The Alien films make space seem bloody huge and desolately empty, which does feel a bit more convincing than your average.

Dis-honourable mention: Battlestar Galactica at first seems to exist in a suitably vast galaxy. So how on earth do the Humans and Cylons keep running into each other?

7. Speak English, dear boy

English, motherfucker, do you speak it?

And so I said to the Klingon chappie, “Do you speak English?” and he didn’t answer, so I said, “DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?” and he just looked confused, and I tried one more time, “Do-ey vous speak-o Englesiee?” and that time he seemed to get it because he punched me right in the chops.

Worst offender: In fact Stargate SG-1 is a far worse example of this than Star Trek. And it had all started out so well – in the original James Spader / Kurt Russell film, they were reduced to sign language to speak to humanities’ long-lost cousins, who all spoke a version of Ancient Egyptian. So, when they run into people descended from the Mongols, the Egyptians, the Vikings and so forth in the series, its a little weird to discover that all languages undergo some kind of serendipitous convergent evolution into English.

Avoids the trap: In Star Wars the aliens and even the robots speak in their own languages, and they even have strangely British bronze droids to interpret between them.

Honourable mention: Firefly/Serenity attempts to address the language question by having the future people speaking a mixture of Mandarin and English, though the Mandarin only gets conveniently used when they’re swearing.

8. Anyone got a Nokia charger?

Technologically superior... blah blah...

Consider the format wars just on our own planet; Betamax versus VHS, Firewire/IEEE 1394 versus USB, even Nintendo versus Sega. Technology doesn’t talk to each other unless you spend years locked in meeting rooms on international committees arguing about the relative merits of seven pins against nine, and even then you still have to convince Sony to accept the same format as Microsoft and so on.

So how is the Enterprise able to chat with the Ferengi on a video screen on their very first encounter?

Worst offender: Independence Day really takes the biscuit here. How do you write a computer virus that can take down an entire network when you don’t even know their written or spoken language, never mind their equivalent of C++ or machine code?

Avoids the trap: Star Wars, because as previously mentioned they conquered the galaxy ages ago. Sure, they’d still have had to work out a standard, but with a Sith Lord chairing the Intergalactic Institute of Electrical Engineers, the discussions presumably wouldn’t have dragged on so long.

Possible explanation: Star Trek geeks would no doubt tell us that in the crazy sci-fi future, the communications computers exchange some kind of format data at the beginning of each new conversation in order to facilitate the communication.

9. New World Order

Obligatory NWO picture to appease conspiracy theory loons

Even if humanity somehow manages to put aside its differences, why would every subsequent planet we explored have also managed the same feat?

Worst offender: Babylon 5’s wafer-thin allusion to the U.N. is virtually transparent on this front: every planet has a world-government, and all but Earth have whole-world-religions and languages.

Avoids the trap: I can’t think of a single one – prove me wrong in the comments!

Honourable mention: Stargate SG-1 has occasional episodes with multiple countries at war with each other on single planets.

10. Money, money, money

In a crazy sci-fi future where you can have anything you want whenever you want, why work? What happens to money? And who cleans the toilets?!

Worst offender: In Star Trek they all live in a socialist paradise. So why does anyone work when they can just sit in a replicator-driven, money-free utopia, stuffing their faces with food and booze and having holo-sex with holo-women way out of their league? And why don’t all the aliens who still use money, e.g. the Cardassians, all want to move to the Federation and sit on their asses playing XBOX 1080 and smoking consequence-free syntho-crack?

Avoids the trap: In Babylon 5 if you run out of cash then you’re fucked, and have to live as a tramp on the unused lower decks.

Dis-honourable mention: The creators of Battlestar Galactica know they have a point and give it to Tom Zarek: why are you all still going on with the facade of your old life when it no longer exists? It isn’t really addressed as much as it should be – at the end of this very episode, as they hold a party for Gaius Baltar’s election as Vice President, why are people still serving drinks rather than joining the party? And who is going to to clean the sick up in the toilets in the morning if they aren’t getting paid and there’s nothing to buy any more?

SERIOUSLY, WHO’S CLEANING THE FUCKING TOILETS?

Oh.