Onyx
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Large submarines being all military vessels of high security, probably not. But look at all the aviation cases, including the kid that hid on a Zeppelin in 1928.
Common SF storylines that are unlikely
- Thread starter Onyx
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World wide thermonuclear war. After the surge of post-apocalyptic books and films of the late 70's through early 90's (A Boy and his Dog naturally exempt from that, pure genius 
), the whole WWIII thing got a little overplayed. Don't get me wrong, I get it as some folks were actually disappointed that they couldn't slip into their spiked leather thong and go rampaging across the wastelands, myself included... However, I always found it an all too easy excuse to force massive societal changes quickly.
We don't need world ending destruction to bring out the worst in men.
K2
), the whole WWIII thing got a little overplayed. Don't get me wrong, I get it as some folks were actually disappointed that they couldn't slip into their spiked leather thong and go rampaging across the wastelands, myself included... However, I always found it an all too easy excuse to force massive societal changes quickly.We don't need world ending destruction to bring out the worst in men.
K2
one common storyline that i think is unlikely is the suddenly aware supercomputer taking over the world. personally i think the first thing that will happen when we first make that self aware supercomputer is that it will become totally stupid because it has not already sorted all of it's thoughts out yet. like a baby it will have to run into a few figurative glass doors, and make horrible figurative contact with the equivalent of oven burners before it can get it's mind aware. so what if it is self aware, so is a child.
using FTL to me is the only way I've seen any empires work. How can a King or emperor live long enough for their plans and intentions for the empire ever come to fruition? Also if your sic-fi is a parody (Is that the word?) on America the world and foreign policy;are we supposed to believe it takes the Gerald Ford 6 months to get to a troubled spot. There has to be some suspension of disbelief.
Onyx
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Empires existed when voyages took half a year and people lived to be 50. Why not have people that lived indefinitely form something similar over longer time scales?
Vladd67
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Perhaps it helps if you think of it as being like the age of sail, back then a frigate Captain was really like Kirk.
Edit: Onyx had the same thought.
Interbreeding with Aliens
Yes I'm looking at you Spock, along with many other examples. We can't interbreed with any other forms of life natural to our own planet; what realistic chance is there of interbreeding with totally alien lifeforms? And yet it pops up in SF books time and again. And not just older ones; I recently read Sylvain Neuvel's Sleeping Giants which is presented as fairly hardish SF and yet there are half breeds between humanity and an alien species. Just no!
Deaf Aliens
Not quite so common this but I'm always astounded by the way so many authors, trying to come up with suitably alien aliens, often have them using weird and wonderful communications mechanisms like colour and scent etc. Whilst such things might enhance communications (we blush and go pale) they are just not realistic as the primary form of communication; Scent would be slow and massively affected by air movements like wind and with multiple people communicating it would just become a jumbled mess and totally useless if not in close proximity. Colour would be totally impractical unless you happened to be looking at the other person and would be interrupted by corners or anything non transparent between the communicators. And if, as is so often the case with these invented aliens, they consequently have no auditory sense then they would have been easy prey to any predators on their home worlds. Evolution just isn't that inefficient. Even in a medium where sound might be problematic, like water, most of the successful examples on Earth use sonar.
Yes I'm looking at you Spock, along with many other examples. We can't interbreed with any other forms of life natural to our own planet; what realistic chance is there of interbreeding with totally alien lifeforms? And yet it pops up in SF books time and again. And not just older ones; I recently read Sylvain Neuvel's Sleeping Giants which is presented as fairly hardish SF and yet there are half breeds between humanity and an alien species. Just no!
Deaf Aliens
Not quite so common this but I'm always astounded by the way so many authors, trying to come up with suitably alien aliens, often have them using weird and wonderful communications mechanisms like colour and scent etc. Whilst such things might enhance communications (we blush and go pale) they are just not realistic as the primary form of communication; Scent would be slow and massively affected by air movements like wind and with multiple people communicating it would just become a jumbled mess and totally useless if not in close proximity. Colour would be totally impractical unless you happened to be looking at the other person and would be interrupted by corners or anything non transparent between the communicators. And if, as is so often the case with these invented aliens, they consequently have no auditory sense then they would have been easy prey to any predators on their home worlds. Evolution just isn't that inefficient. Even in a medium where sound might be problematic, like water, most of the successful examples on Earth use sonar.
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Onyx
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This assumes that the aliens have directional eyes. But what if their entire skin was visual receptors that can change color. Like the alien in Blindsight?
I could imagine environments or predator behavior that results in an alien being deaf from a lack of need or a defense against a bombardment of misleading sonic information.
I could see smell used by aliens that don't move very quickly because they never evolved something like muscle, and move more like the way plants do.
But take away any auditory sense and it's trivial for a predator to stalk you. I don't know of any deaf animals above the level of insects on Earth (if there are any they are very few) and even insects, I believe can detect 'sound' with their antennae. Even if your entire skin was a visual receptor (don't know how that could focus on to an individual though) you would still be unable to communicate with anyone not in line of sight. Even if that line of sight is 360 degrees it's still not going to see through obstacles that sound easily travels around. There is a very good reason why sound is universally used by animals of land and air; evolution always favours mechanisms that work well.
Smell for immobile aliens maybe but I'm not convinced any such could ever evolve technology and all the examples I have come across in SF are absolutely not immobile, and the thread title does, after all, specify 'common storylines.' Most of the examples I have come across that use scent do so with insect-like creatures (which is it's own can of worms).
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Onyx
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One issue is that it is impossible to say what hearing is not. Most invertebrates do not have sound reception organs and are attuned to vibrations in the ground or pressure changes in water. Is a person that can't hear but can feel the train coming through their feet deaf or not?
But I haven't run into any stories about deaf creatures, except stories where the alien is living in a vacuum where there is no atmospheric sound to hear. Whether they are actually deaf or not didn't come up.
Vision through light reception skin organs could be as basic or complex as you wish. That's the way vision evolved. A creature covered in the equivalent of fly eye components could have a neural network built right into its skin that could locally process vision for things like camouflage while participating in a more conscious "looking" that shifts attention while retaining massive peripheral vision.
If you haven't read Blindsight, the aliens fit both deaf vacuum dwellers and multi-directional vision users.
dask
dark and stormy knight
Seems like I more time you spend trying to figure out why something shouldn't exist, the sooner you're going to find it. Or it's going find you.
Just for the record... Scent or sense of smell is vastly more important to large mammals to both hunt prey, and for prey to evade. In fact, by scent alone Whitetail Deer (which by no means have the keenest noses), can not only determine the direction but also the range of a predator.
K2
I agree but there's a vast difference between that and an effective communication mechanism. To my way of thinking any communication mechanism that fails if you are upwind of the communicator is fundamentally broken.
Your first point reinforces mine in that almost all animals have some sort of auditory sense. About the only exceptions I can think of might be some fish but they can sense movement of the water which is effectively the equivalent. Remember that just because we might be able to conceive of something that might work we also have to show that it will be competitive against any other mechanisms. If it isn't then evolution dictates that it must ultimately fail. So if an organism is living in an atmospheric environment and is missing a fundamental sense like hearing then it will me at a major evolutionary disadvantage and evolution is a ruthless mechanism. The only way I can see a sense being dispensed with my evolution is if it is useless in the living environment; eg sight in a lightless (subterranean maybe) environment or hearing in a vacuum environment (see below).
With regard to books that have deaf aliens, a recent, and much lauded, example is The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.
I can accept that, if an author can come up with a plausible evolution path to a vacuum dwelling organism, auditory sensors would be pretty useless to that organism and about the only communication mechanism would be something on the electromagnetic spectrum.
That is incorrect. Being downwind simply aids and enhances their ability. When conditions become unpredictable (high winds that keep scent away, make noise and cause things to move) they find a place where they can keep watch and bed-down.
That said, regarding hearing; Deer have excellent hearing and their ears pivot, rotate and angle to be able to not only focus on a sound, yet determine exact range and direction (same way our eyes work for depth perception)... However, I have routinely stalked up to within bow range of deer (60') so how are those ears now?
K2
@ K2 - you are a tool using predator and have an extended range over not tool using predators.
Going back to colonists having farms at Onyx's start of the the thread.
1. Lots of people do move from the cities to the countryside - myself included. Some people who move from countryside to city do so because they don't have a farm, have no chance of buying one, or generally want a higher income than they can earn in the country. So for some of them having a farm on a new planet would be really tempting.
2. I think for a lot of books there was a big semi-conscious following of how people settled this planet being projected on to how a new planet would be settled.
3. Interesting idea on densely populated habitats - for people who don't mind living in a densely populated habitats.
Thinking about these there are books such as Decision at Doona by Anne McCaffrey where potential colonists are used to living in very densely populated habitats and go to settle a planet where there is a big shock awaiting them because of the wide open spaces.
Would also say that getting out of this solar system to another one where the sun might be younger, or at least not to have all the human eggs in one basket is a driver in some books on colonising other worlds.
Going back to colonists having farms at Onyx's start of the the thread.
1. Lots of people do move from the cities to the countryside - myself included. Some people who move from countryside to city do so because they don't have a farm, have no chance of buying one, or generally want a higher income than they can earn in the country. So for some of them having a farm on a new planet would be really tempting.
2. I think for a lot of books there was a big semi-conscious following of how people settled this planet being projected on to how a new planet would be settled.
3. Interesting idea on densely populated habitats - for people who don't mind living in a densely populated habitats.
Thinking about these there are books such as Decision at Doona by Anne McCaffrey where potential colonists are used to living in very densely populated habitats and go to settle a planet where there is a big shock awaiting them because of the wide open spaces.
Would also say that getting out of this solar system to another one where the sun might be younger, or at least not to have all the human eggs in one basket is a driver in some books on colonising other worlds.
@Montero ;
Unless you're a bow-hunter this might be difficult to believe, yet after I had a deer sniff at my trembling broadhead (bow not drawn) for ten minutes, then was stepped on by a deer and had deer lay down no more that 10' from me; I began during the warmest months hunting them exclusively with a lance (7' with a spear tip used for thrusting) and have even been lucky enough to swat bare handed 'four' deer as they passed by... Naturally, in all cases I was still, concealed (as in behind a tree) or camouflaged, and most importantly the wind was strongly in my favor.
Nevertheless those instances aside, day in and day out I can position myself to be within 10-20' of deer when they pass. That's the hunting part... knowing your prey, their habits, the area, etc.. There is nothing exceptional about it. So much so, I rarely 'kill' any longer, though I do still enjoy hunting.
Wolves, Cougars, Lynx and so on are much better predators than I... and they constantly check the wind.
K2
Unless you're a bow-hunter this might be difficult to believe, yet after I had a deer sniff at my trembling broadhead (bow not drawn) for ten minutes, then was stepped on by a deer and had deer lay down no more that 10' from me; I began during the warmest months hunting them exclusively with a lance (7' with a spear tip used for thrusting) and have even been lucky enough to swat bare handed 'four' deer as they passed by... Naturally, in all cases I was still, concealed (as in behind a tree) or camouflaged, and most importantly the wind was strongly in my favor.
Nevertheless those instances aside, day in and day out I can position myself to be within 10-20' of deer when they pass. That's the hunting part... knowing your prey, their habits, the area, etc.. There is nothing exceptional about it. So much so, I rarely 'kill' any longer, though I do still enjoy hunting.
Wolves, Cougars, Lynx and so on are much better predators than I... and they constantly check the wind.
K2
What @Montero said and also I am specifically referring to technological aliens and their evolution. So hunkering down might be okay for a small insect, but imagine if we communicated like this and were a few metres upwind of the person we wish to communicate with. We simply wouldn't be able to. There's a good reason why evolution hasn't used scent for any kind of complex communications on a largeish scale. It might work fine in an ant nest, it might be great for marking your territorial boundaries but for anything much more it just wouldn't be effective for complex communication and so would be an evolutionary loser against sound.
You keep talking about Deer and Lynx etc. but they are not using scent for communication they're using it for detection of prey and predator. We are discussing it here for the purposes of complex communication. Imagine trying to discuss quantum mechanics using scent!
Onyx
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Maybe you don't smell like a predator?
