Sci-Fi Pet peeves

SciFi Pet peeve #2: "A life form based on _ instead of carbon".

The basic flaw of this sort of discussion is that life on earth is not 'based on carbon' for any explanation I've heard.  A common way this trope is used is to move to an adjacent element in the periodic table, most frequently silicon.  This makes sense to a junior high level of chemistry knowledge, after all, silicon has the same number of available electron orbitals, and therefore aught to be a reasonable substitute.

Interestingly, there's plenty of silicon on earth, making up more than 1/4 of the earth's crust (by weight).  Carbon, by comparison, represents a mere 0.03%, nearly 1000 times more rare, and yet silicon is essentially not a part of life on earth.  The reason is actually pretty strait forward, the chemical reactions involving silicon are not useful to metabolism.  Just looking at the most obvious compound involving each element, you can see obvious differences, Carbon dioxide is a water soluble gas that can be easily made to react with other chemicals, Silicon dioxide is a hard ionic crystal (quartz) which requires a tremendous amount of energy to decompose.

Other substitutions are even more ridiculous, like 'nitrogen based life'.  Life on earth is made predominantly of four elements, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, with other elements in smaller percentages according to their usefulness in chemical reactions.

(posted here because it was too long to post on facebook.  so what was pet peeve #1?)

SciFi Pet peeve #1: "Show, don't tell"

It's interesting how you can encounter something, some uncertain distaste, and then, some time later, discover that this unspecific feeling actually has a particular name.  Just the act of naming it changes the character from uneasy distaste to sharp hatred.  It's not the object that has changed, but your ability to identify it.  Like knowing that weird, licoricy flavor you tolerated in the herbal tea given to you as a holiday gift is actually anise, and whenever you taste it now you immediately spit it out in revulsion.

In my case that spice is known as Expospeak, and it's certainly not exclusive to science fiction, but is seen rather commonly there.  It's characterized by long spans of exposition, detailing the history, science or politics of a setting in ways that just simply do not move the plot.

I'm sure the perpetrators of this crime feel that by explaining themselves as the do, they help the reader with suspension of disbelief.  I will tell all you writers now that nothing could be further from the truth.  What you are doing instead is wasting the readers' time, because either they have already suspended our disbelief, and instead of giving us plot, you're making us skim over unimportant details, or if we doubt the setting you've composed, it's because we know more about it than you do.  Imagination is a funny thing, the less information it has to go on, the better it works.  A physicist who works on linear accelerators might be reading your work, and I assure you, he can invent reasons he believes to be plausible far better than you can.

Science fiction, or any fiction for that matter, is engaging because the consequences are interesting.  If you really want to write about the causes, try popular mechanics.

It would be a *shame* for me to continue in any semblance of order, so here's Sci Fi Pet Peeve #3

Sci Fi Pet Peeve #3!  The mischaracterization of researchers.

Very often a Sci-Fi Villian will be some mad scientist type who loses track of right and wrong in pursuit of science.  Cackling away in the night, the deranged researcher commits some terrible crime, alone in his tower.

Most researchers are about a million miles away from this.  For one thing, a good percentage of research just doesn't have any impact on the day to day lives of the people not in the lab.  In the cases that it does, like medical science or high energy physics, there are numerous checks and balances to ensure proper safety, and on top of that, the researchers involved are usually acutely interested in the common good their research may bring.

There have been some notable historical counterexamples for when this breaks down, but there are a number of features that must happen for any kind of harm to follow.

1. A non research agenda is more important to the researcher than the outcome of the research.  This is pretty important here, because objectivity is the root of good science. 
2. Supporters.  The normal checks and balances that prevent unjust actions must be willfully disabled, and that means everyone involved has to basically agree with the non-research agenda.

The most common way fictional scientists go wrong is by means of perverting the scientific method, attributing progress with action.  "Lets go chop up some dudes and make medical progress".  This kind of cavalier research method is sure to make very little progress indeed, and an experienced researcher will know that.

The most horrifying historical experiments were cases where the scientific method was applied with callous integrity and brutal efficiency.  There was no one scientist performing unlikely tests to the horror of his peers, rather, it was a collaborative effort of many, with the intent of harming a whole group of people, with the mask of scientific research.  Fringe science would have been too unreliable, instead well known toxins or pathogens were employed, and only the details of their already expected success could be extracted as new experimental evidence.