A Cemetary of Dead Ideas

Ideas that science fiction just needs to stop using. The title's from the (rather complex) Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno; he said it of science, "even though life may issue from them." No life, however, issues from these ideas in science fiction, though they are a fertile field for mildew.

• Freud. In case you're collecting reasons to hate the Aliens movies, the whole franchise is, by the admission of the actual staff, a Freudian-feminist (which is like Nazi-Jewish) allegory for men being raped by women (the xenomorphs, like most hive-insects, being female). Plus a little allegory in favor of abortion, by way of positing pregnancy-as-monster.
  
  More generally, science fiction in the US and UK is absolutely backward, in terms of psychology. See, Freud ruled virtually unquestioned in the Anglosphere pretty much through the 70s, and thus he was the "science" SF writers turned to when they wanted psychological elements for their stories. Hence all the phallic imagery, penis-envy, women-don't-enjoy-sex, id-ego-superego, and bullshit theories of how an infant's mind develops. Which is pathetic: Freud was as defunct by that time—as in, several years after the moon landing—as luminiferous aether. Mostly because he was a hack. The only one of his theories that hadn't been debunked to hell and back is projection, and that idea is hardly unique to Freud; I seem to recall Augustine talks about it. It's also, ironically, the basis of everything in Freud—e.g., he was molested by his father and had a crush on his (mother-figure) nursemaid, hence the Oedypus Complex.
  
  Science has abandoned Freud, it is long past time art did the same. At least join the 20th century and be Jungians—it may only be 40 years more recent (the 1920s rather than the 1880s), but it's also much less widely discredited. At least for artists: nearly every bad-rubber-suit monster movie is Freudian (yes, including Alien—the xenomorph in the first one isn't even particularly scary); Babylon 5—the closest thing to real science fiction ever shown on television—is based on Jung.


• Scientists being used by evil militarists or corporations. I hate the mad scientist, too, but since there actually have been those, it's not irredeemable. On the other hand, there never was a scientist, with the highly questionable exception of Werner von Braun, whose naivete was exploited by an evil military. And there never was one, period, who was exploited by an evil corporation—James Cameron can go right to hell.
  
  See, many scientists, after a few years of having to beg for grant money, become as uninhibited as the average crack-whore, and they're more than willing to look the other way, if their research is being used in unethical ways. At least their research is being funded, and they're willing to sacrifice anything for that, huge swaths of our civilization having made "Science" with a capital S into its own self-contained ideology. As Bertolt Brecht—who, as a Marxist, knew a thing or two about selling out for an ideology—put it, "Science knows only one commandment: contribute to science."
  
  Besides, most of the scientists who like to portray themselves as having been duped, are textbook mad scientists. Exhibit A would be Robert Oppenheimer; along with how he always got coeds for his lab assistants, just so he would have lots of young women around whose paychecks needed his signature, the atomic bomb itself was also a power-trip for him. That Hindu text he quoted? Yeah, it's the Bhagavad Gita, specifically a scene where Krshna shows his true form to the Pandavas and says he will destroy everyone else, but spare them, because they've pleased him. If you make a giant bomb, and you immediately quote a god who's in the mood for some infidel-smiting, you are not horrified by what you've done. Also, in his school days, he once tried to poison a TA who got on his nerves. That doesn't sound like "healthy scientist" or even "somewhat troubled scientist" to me, how about you?


• Dark ages. I have no problem, in principle, if you want to have your setting involve the breakup of some previous star-spanning, or smaller, civilization, like in Andromeda or some portions of the Traveler timeline. Obviously empires break up, and this is almost always unpleasant for quite some time.
  
  No, my problem is when things get better by reintroducing the system from before the breakup. It is, of course, the myth of the Renaissance. Only, the Romans were horrible people, and bringing back their system ruined Europe. E.g., the average war between, say, 1000 and 1300 involved about 300 guys and went on for two or three weeks, and noncombatants had a set of protections at least as good as the UN's (oh who are we kidding, almost certainly better). Roman wars lasted years, involved thousands, and stripped countrysides bare; plus, even after Christianity, massacring the enemy's people and enslaving the survivors was considered par for the course. Renaissance wars brought all that back, and the only improvement they offered in exchange was paintings that used three-point perspective.
  
  People don't just stop and wallow in dung for half a dozen centuries, after empires fall. They might take a while to get their shit together, but they do eventually do it—and unreflectively restoring things to their pre-fall condition may very well ruin something the post-fall people were actually doing better, more than likely by not having the preconceptions common to the fallen empire's culture. Say, protections for laborers, or women's rights—two things the Renaissance basically took a freaking axe to.


• Satires on America. Maybe—in theory, though almost certainly not in practice—there is an exception to this rule for American filmmakers, but Hollywood can't even portray the advertising industry correctly, and "Madison Avenue" is practically the same people as Hollywood. There is no exemption for Europeans, because newsflash, you weasels only know about us through your media and our movies, both of which are inveterate liars.
  
  Example: describe, please, a Vietnam-veteran US Marine. You said "a little unhinged from the horrors he saw in that war, and reflexively violent thanks to his training," didn't you? That's based on movies, dickweed. The correct answer is "stubborn beyond comprehension, and quite unashamed to have Trekkie-levels of geekiness where their favorite movies are concerned." That comes from the Brennan brothers, two friends of my dad's, because unlike you Eurotards I actually know some actual Marine Nam vets.
  
  Verhoeven's Detroit is as much a propaganda-caricature as Griffiths' Ku Klux Klan, only even less accurate (the KKK actually was formed because the Reconstruction authorities were letting ex-slaves get away with crimes...it's just that they chose to deal with it by the strategy of "terrorize all blacks we come across").


• Galactic federations. Conceivably, multiple species might have some sort of council, that represents them all, that they could come to to work out their grievances peaceably. Only, that's not even a confederation, let alone a federation. Those are governments; what you'd need, is just some kind of court—the only reason all parties would be represented is that whole "jury of your peers" idea. Which isn't even necessary—bench trials are often a better solution—except that a member of another species is highly unlikely to understand every relevant fact. E.g., you may not want to leave a liability settlement up to heavy-worlder judges who think 50 m/s² is a safe, reasonable acceleration.
  
  The thing is, just like the difficulties in that bench trial, there is no way multiple species should have a say in anything relating to each other's governments. There's a reason the UN's resolutions are completely non-binding: not a single member-nation trusts the others to legislate for them. Nor should they, because those other countries don't know dick about your life, or vice-versa.
  
  Now imagine that those other countries are populated by people who breathe chlorine, and who see ultraviolet along with red, blue, and green. Do you trust them to write your industrial-safety standards?


• Being British, and acting like it. Specifically, with their unjustifiably smug and condescending caricatures of religion, especially my religion. Whenever Arthur C. Clarke shot his stupid mouth off about religion or philosophy, you remembered why people invented the car-bomb.
  
  Okay, not really, because even his combination of stupidity with condescension wasn't as bad as raping every woman in a county, which, you will recall, is the other thing English people think passes for a rational position on other people's religions—especially, again, my religion. Either way, though, they have no right to do it and they need to stop.


• Historical allegories. The problem is, you are not smart enough to retell the history. Again, not even if you have a degree in it—tell Harry Turtledove's alternate version of Byzantium to any Greek, anywhere, and see if you aren't covered in incredulous laugh spittle, and possibly little bits of feta cheese, two seconds later. This is also partly related to the previous one, because the person making the allegory is virtually certain to say something he has no earthly right to say—like the aforementioned Turtledove, an American Jew who doesn't appear to know why the Greeks might have a problem with their church being portrayed as making Muhammad a saint. If you know anything about the Fall of Constantinople, or the subsequent treatment of Greeks by the Ottoman Empire, Turtledove's alternate history is basically a Holocaust joke.
  
  Or take District 9. Yes, apartheid was bad. Not as bad as the absolute shambles the post-apartheid governments made of that country in the ensuing decades, and nowhere near as bad as the genocide and child-soldiers the developed world completely ignored in favor of refusing to play Sun City, but sure, it was bad. But there you see the issue: historical allegories only work if you wrench them completely out of context. Would you use the same kind of aliens to represent the child-soldiers, or the Congolese (crazy-ass rapist) militias, or Idi Amin? What would be the "prawn" equivalent of AIDS, and would you mention that their second leader would make it illegal to mention the disease's true cause, thus greatly speeding its spread, to both species (leaving to one side the physical impossibility of two species being susceptible to the same disease)? What about the unfortunate implications of the "black people=aliens" premise, in the first place? Especially since humans (who in this allegory stand for "white people", which is just as troubling) can get a disease that turns them into black people aliens. Because that's not problematic imagery at all.


• Finally: impossible crap. I'm not talking FTL or artificial gravity. I mean terraforming, massive over-population, AI whose creation isn't an epic in itself, elevating animals to sapience, and so on. Most of those things are not only both impossible, and often, also, off-brand gnosticism, but also, several of them originated as excuses to keep the poor down.
  
  Terraforming comes from a series of climate-scares deliberately created from the 1960s on, mainly as a justification for crushing eco-regulations to impede third-world nations' rise from poverty—and also to hobble the economies of the free world, because the advocates were directly or indirectly allied to the Soviets. Over-population scares originated as an excuse to sterilize poor, usually brown, people in places like Asia and South America, and, before that, as a polemic against the very first liberals, about how if poor people were given conditions that didn't kill 80% of their children, they'd eat themselves and everyone else into starvation. And both AI-that's-not-freaking-magic and "uplifting" animals arise from a combination of materialism and gnosticism, Screwtape's pipe-dream—essentially, a combination of overweening hubris with a troglodytic ignorance of what consciousness is.