vilakins | Tired old SF clichés

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Tired old SF clichés

Some further thoughts and a rant about the script of the Farscape episode Coup by Clam.

I was surprised to find this was written by a woman, Emily Skopov. There were some very good bits--the shellfish containing neurologically-linked bacteria which gave the people who ate them the same symptoms, and Crichton in drag which had me laughing out loud--but we had [rolls eyes] yet another society which oppresses women. Just what goes on here? Do writers think to themselves, "I know! I'll write about a culture in which woman don't count. That'll be original--it's only been done 5000 times, and it's not like it happens on this planet."

Bloody hell, why not write something really different, like a race with several sexes, all of which are needed for procreation, or one with a hive-mind? Or confound our expectations: I loved the garbage-collecting alien, Staanz, in The Flax who appeared male but was actually female, though he was cancelled out by the bloodhound couple Rorf and Rorg in Till the Blood Runs Clear who regarded females as inferior and owned by males. I think I've read only one or two stories in which females were dominant and usually this 'unnatural state' has been corrected by the end. Not that I approve of that sort of society either, but it would have been much more original, and also fun to see Aeryn and Sikozu in drag.

Sexist societies appear in every SF show I can think of. Hey, script-writers, how about a little more thought and invention and a lot less tired and offensive cliché?

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Oh, I know. It bugged the heck out of me, because up until that point we hadn't seen any systemic discrimination in the series. It's really very stupid for a one shot, because in the rest of the series the conflict comes from very different sources.

I mean, Chiana's society isn't sexist, just repressed.

Although it did mean that we got Chiana interacting with that darling tech, which was cute beyond words. (If I'm thinking of the right ep and not mixing two together.)

You've got the right one!

Oh, good. I hate thinking I'm just making things up. Especially when they were so dear.

Er, yes, I think I got too distracted by that bit to concentrate on the rest. Though it was a bit daft that we were supposed to believe no one had noticed the tech's gender.

I also got rather beguiled by Noranti and D'Argo's enforced skin contact. I wanted to hear what she wanted to talk to him about...

And I loved Scorpius solemnly eating the clams.

Though it was a bit daft that we were supposed to believe no one had noticed the tech's gender.

That bugged me at first -- I didn't even realize she was supposed to be passing for male until we were told! But, actually, it's not all that unrealistic. I've heard of studies which indicate that people from cultures where men and women wear markedly different clothes often have surprising difficulty telling the sexes apart when they're dressed alike. They learn to clue in on the clothing, you see, and miss the subtler physical cues that people who are used to distinguishing folks in unisex clothing catch. So it's not terribly implausible that the people on Planet Sexism missed what was immediately obvious to Chiana and the entire viewing audience.

I wanted to hear what she wanted to talk to him about...

So do I! Fic! Fic! :)

I didn't even realize she was supposed to be passing for male until we were told!

Me neither but you've come up with a very good explanation.

I liked those bits too. And oh, yes, Scorpy being altruistic, and no-one seemed at all concerned about him either.

Farscape features more body fluids than any other show I've watched. :-p

I loved the idea that [almost] the entire crew had to sit round touching Scorpy's skin for hours afterwards.

Did we ever see him undress?

I loved the idea that [almost] the entire crew had to sit round touching Scorpy's skin for hours afterwards.

I was hoping for that but I'm not sure they did, since we saw him vomit the clams back up. Maybe he knew he'd be all right because it's a Scarran talent?

Did we ever see him undress?

No, because I'm certain I'd remember that. I don't think he can because he has to stay cool.

Maybe he knew he'd be all right because it's a Scarran talent?

Oh, but then it's not nearly so big a gesture from him! Nor would it create such exquisite social embarrassment afterwards.

I don't think he can because he has to stay cool.

They all have to sit around touching Scorpy in a specially chilled room!

*G* Me too. Pretty! Chiana needs to meet girls to sympathize with and fuss over much, much more often. Much, much more often. Mmmm...

As to the tech's gender, I did get that she was passing - she moved wrong for someone who's just dressed in a unisex manner, too nervous - but I thought that the rest of the team was in on it and she was just nervous about Moya's crew.

Exactly. The bloodhounds annoyed me too, but I could have regarded them as a one-off.

Yeah. You know what I've always wanted to see? A society in the same stage of recovering from a destructive matriarchy that we are from a destructive patriarchy. Complete with assumptions about the nature of male intelligence and martial ability, and a reform movement being faced with a backlash and (in the context of Farscape) Aeryn going "Oh, please. Crichton's just an idiot, it has nothing to do with the fact he has a penis."

I love it! Yeah, that would be an excellent script idea.

*G* I can just see it - the "But... but... What!" from Crichton, and the general shock that Rygel was once in charge of people, and Chiana having serious trouble with a culture where women are not supposed to seduce people in manner she does, and I think it'd have to be the Stark and Zhaan both period.

Because it would be fun to watch Enlightened Men trying to wake Stark up to the gender issues inherent in him being romantically involved with his mentor.

Write it!

But I'd have to have a plot, you see, and these are things that often hide from me.

It would make a wonderful Farscape story. What she said: write it!

*adds voice to chorus of pleas* :)

*will try* :)

(points to icon)
It's obvious from above comments that you are already thinking of dialogue, which is the core of character, and character is the core of plot, so don't get hung up on it. What your goal for the story is, is to explore how all these interesting characters react to this recovering-from-a-destructive-matriarchy society.

Plot:
1. They go to the planet for supplies (they are always going to planets for supplies)
2. There is a misunderstanding, either because Aerin goes to get the supplies, or Rigel goes to negotiate for the supplies, or Crichton goes along with either one.
3. Crichton gets thrown in jail, and/or, Crichton gets accidentally involved with fringe reformers and gets thrown in jail
4. Aerin and Rigel try to get him out
5. Chiana tries to get him out
6. Various other characters get lost, stolen or strayed
7. Crichton gets out, having taught his fellow inmates and jailers something about equality. Or one of them, anyway.
8. They get the supplies, they leave.

There's your plot. The fun is in the dialogue. Go for it.

*G* Good point!

I'll have to work on it - the point would be the tension between legal equality (almost) and effective equality, which are not the same thing at all, but...

Oh, it would be fun. And Crichton does have an amazing ability to get himself into troublesome situations.

Have you ever read C.J. Cherryh? Her Chanur novels do a reasonably good job of showing a society very slowly making exactly that transition. Or so I recall. It's been a while since I read them.

There's a bit of it, to hop genres, in Mary Renault's The King Must Die!

[The exclamation mark was mine, not Ms Renault's.]

I've read some of Renault. Her books about Alexander, for the most part. I'll have to try that one. Thanks!

It's het, unlike Last of the Wine and the Alexander sequence, but none the worse for that. And the bull court is enthralling.

Sorry, Nico, we seem to have collapsed this thread.

Bull court! Yay! Dang, I love that period of art. So very pretty.

Oops. We have. Sorry, my fault!

Oh, no I haven't. People have recced her to me often, though. I really ought to quit getting sidetracked and actually check out the books people suggest to me. :D

I like Cherryh. Her books can be slow-going sometimes (she loves to pack as much information as possible into single lines of dialog, so you have to read her carefully), and some of them are a lot better than others, but her best stuff is definitely worth reading, IMHO. The Chanur books are mostly space-adventure stuff, but she did put a lot of thought into her alien cultures, and it shows.

Yay! Well thought out alien cultures! And space-adventure, yum.

And I love being forced to read closely. It's probably something to do with all the close textual criticism I read at an early age. Warped me badly.

TNG did it, and it was rather tedious; I'm afraid what's a bad cliche in one direction is just as bad a cliche in the other direction.

The TNG one was exceptionally bad, but then it was first season, when they were still playing Riker as a boring juvenile romantic lead rather than a quite interesting man with a beard. It could be done better. And I suppose I'm saying Renault did it better.

Well, part of the problem is that TNG was pretty much replaying a TOS episode that was as throughly not feminist as you could get. It ended up re-enforcing the idea that male superiority is right and natural, not pointing out the ridiculous nature of our prejudiced social structures.

Plus, you know, it was Riker. Riker has a terrible tendency to be a pompous, humorless tool, esp in the first season.

Babylon 5 wasn't that bad, was it?

I almost cited B5 as an exception but there's Centauri society. it's a lot better than any other shows I can think of though, so kudos to JMS.

I think sometimes even the writers of a show like Farscape just need a quick and dirty idea. Although come to think of it, a lot of their ideas were dirty... That show would've been very tough on a working writer, with the fast pacing, and whiplash changes of alliance.

That's no excuse. They could have had two cultures on the planet, or grades as in B7, slaves, political parties, or a suppressed religious group. There are lots of quick-and-easy ideas; they basically needed a disaffected group and a brothel belonging to it where the clams were kept.

I rather like "Coup by Clam," just because it's so funny in a way that, I admit, appeals to the 12-year-old buried inside of me. :)

I don't mind the sexist society per se. Yes, it is a cliche, and a rather tired one, but Farscape has used a lot of other tired cliches and done interesting new things with them, or used them as good springboards for humor or character drama, or whatever. (And it's not like an extremely sexist society is a really out-there SF plot device, sadly.) It really isn't very well-developed in that ep, though, so as anything but an excuse for some goofy humor, it's really not very satisfying. You know what actually bothered me about it? The "drag" thing. Because, yes, Crichton in drag is priceless, but my suspension of disbelief snaps painfully at being asked to believe that the standard of dresses, long hair, bright colors, and makeup for women vs. short hair, trousers, and sober colors for men are galactic universals.

Oh, yes. The men were even dressed rather like SS officers, hardly a style of dress that would occur to a lot of alien cultures (SG1's done that too, with military gear and business suits). Actually, women's clothing in Farscape can annoy me a lot. You usually get sensible or inventive clothes on most characters but the impractical and probably very uncomfortable hooker outfits Jool and Sikozu have to wear are obviously just for the drool-factor. Give me Aeryn's gear any day.

Well, I do understand that costuming in SF shows is aimed at evoking certain associations in human audiences, and black uniforms say "evil police-state society" pretty effectively to a contemporary human audience. I can forgive that, generally. But, y'know, the female dress thing was a plot point, which makes it much harder to shrug off. I think it's less the lack of alienness that bothers me, though, as the assumption it seems to make that 21st century American gender norms are, well, norms, period. But that's a bit of a pet peeve issue with me.

It does actually seem fairly in-character to me for Jool to wear ridiculously impractical high-fashion clothing. It makes slightly less sense for Sikozu, although I guess her leather gear, although scanty, is actually pretty serviceable. Aeryn, IMHO, tends to leave a bit too much skin showing for a soldier, but given that she's a Sebacean and probably tends to overheat easily, it's forgivable. :)

And having a different clothing design can do absolute wonders for a story, sometimes. The classic example of this is the Doctor Who story "Robots of Death", which, when you look at the bare plot, is another tired cliche -- the "robots run amok" story. But making the robots look like Art Deco creations and the humans all dressed up in confections that scream "decadent society" and it was transformed. If the humans had been wearing military uniforms it would have been deadly dull.

I wonder if book-SF is more daring than TV SF because (a) they don't have to budget for SFX and (b) they have fewer Suits to deal with.

I think that's definitely so.

Another problem with writing matriarchies is that they just try to make the women into female men -- that is, they blindly reverse the roles of men and women and plug the women into the patriarchal-man slot. That isn't really being very intelligent. I do think that men and women are different enough, psychologically, that a matriarchy, were it oppressive, would oppress in a different way than an oppressive patriarchy would. They would be more manipulative and less violent. Men would be oppressively stereotyped as dumb brutes, only good for menial labour and procreation.

I think the big problem with the way matriarchies are often written on SF shows is that they don't treat either men or women as people. The men become voiceless and blank, and the women become embodiments of the male fantasy/fear of strong women. It's complexities inherent in any relationship.

I mean, oppressive societal structures deform lives and relationships, but they don't erase the essential separate being of the people who form the society. Marginal people do not stop having hopes and dreams and individual relationships because they are marginal, any more than dominant people become mindless tools of domination because they are dominant. What often happens in fictional narrative about these things is that the people involved are only their roles, and not their being.

That's one reason I'm more than willing to accept JMS' portrayal of the Centauri. Yes, they live in a very patriarchal society, and the Centauri character's actions and ideas are formed by that society, but they're also still individual people, with individual goals, dreams, ethics, and enthusiasms. They are people, not roles.

And that you gotta love.

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Tired old SF clichés

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