Sci-Fi Tropes That Hurt My Brain, and Why I Love Them Anyway

So I’m currently tearing through the Murderbot Diaries at a breakneck pace, and even though these books are snarky and hilarious and the fight scenes are awesome, the thing that keeps me reading—the thing that really makes the story interesting—is the process of SecUnit, the robot/human hybrid main character, figuring out how to be a person. Reluctantly, and with many tantrums, SecUnit is discovering that it has emotions, that it has inadvertently made friends, and that it does actually care about things.

But as much as I’m charmed by the rogue robot, I keep tripping over the fact that it is a rogue robot. Isaac Asimov’s worst nightmare. The kind of being we write fearful articles about every time an AI model acquires some eerie new skill. By rights that should be terrifying, but the Murderbot books aren’t interested in the question of “How do we keep control of our sentient robots?” Instead the story makes SecUnit into a likable personality and asks, “How can we get fair treatment for this new kind of person?” It’s a little bit mind-bending and it has me wondering, what does it even mean to be a person? How do we decide who is and who isn’t?

So, rather than fall any further down that ontological rabbit hole, I want to step back for a minute and point out that certain dangerous sci-fi tropes end up raising much bigger moral questions than you’d ever expect to come up during a spaceship battle.

Because this is the thing I love, and also hate, about good sci-fi—it makes me question things I thought were obviously true. If a story is set on an alien planet, without the historical and political trappings of the real world, I drop a lot of biases and blinders that I didn’t even know I had, which makes me see things in a new light. That’s really the point of sci-fi—it opens your mind to new possibilities by asking you to temporarily believe in impossible things.

But, as I’m discovering with SecUnit in the Murderbot Diaries, some impossible ideas can be psychologically hazardous unless you have the philosophy degree necessary to work through all the moral implications. I’ve got three items on my personal list of hazardous sci-fi tropes. If you let yourself ask a few questions about these topics, you’ll start an interesting debate. But if you dig too deep into the logic that justifies these tropes, you’ll find yourself talking in circles and trying to reconcile paradoxes, until you have a splitting headache and your brain is throwing error codes.

Trope #1: Faster-than-light travel

This comes up a lot in sci-fi because it’s hard to write a thrilling space opera if it takes your characters dozens of years to travel between star systems. The problem is that it literally physically cannot be done. Any attempt to write faster-than-light travel is in direct violation of the laws of reality, and as such is doomed to be either bizarre or confusing. Stories that focus too much on the mechanics of faster-than-light travel will never make sense—this is why watching Interstellar is as exhausting as spending two hours solving particularly complex riddles.

The best thing a sci-fi author can do with faster-than-light travel is talk about it as little as possible. Have the characters take it for granted that it works, and never speak of it except in passing. In the Murderbot Diaries, interstellar travel happens through wormholes. What’s a wormhole? Don’t know, doesn’t matter, nobody cares as long as the wormhole takes SecUnit wherever it wants to go.

Trope #2: Time travel

I know, I know, I know, lots of truly amazing stories revolve around time travel, but I have a personal vendetta against this trope because every time a character goes back in time it absolutely chokes off the plot with questions. Do changes to the past affect the future you came from? If you squish a butterfly underfoot, did you just spawn a whole alternate universe where that butterfly was squished? Can you live the same moment twice? Also, at any point in your time travel experience, how old are you?

I suppose time travel can be a useful device for an author trying to examine one interesting question. As long as they don’t ask me to think too hard about how it works—I can just about handle a Back to the Future level of sophistication, where some science guy pushes a few buttons and bang, you’re in the past. If you get any more elaborate than that about how time travel might work, you raise too many questions that don’t have any answers at all.

Trope #3: Sentient robots

This is the newest edition to my list, and it’s on here purely because of Network Effect, the fifth Murderbot book. The Murderbot Diaries already turned traditional sci-fi themes upside down when they made rogue robots into a human rights question instead of an existential threat. But things get a bit out of hand in Network Effect, where a lot of major plot points revolve around copying and deleting bots’ code.

If a sentient robot is a mind made up of lines of code, then if you duplicate the code, you duplicate the mind. Except—what does that mean? The book can’t seem to decide. Sometimes duplicating a bot seems to make a whole other being. Sometimes it just clones the same being, but the copy can somehow be reabsorbed into the original anytime it’s convenient. In one particularly weird instance, a side character insists that a duplicate of SecUnit must be SecUnit’s child.

I’m just saying, this tornado of chaos raises a lot of existential questions it isn’t really equipped to answer. We’ve gone to so much trouble to establish that sentient robots are people that it seems awfully cavalier to say “Well, they’re just code,” and then go around deleting and redownloading them at will. If you’re in a situation where you can create or destroy a whole person by manipulating their source code, I’d expect you to be a lot more careful with the copy-paste function and the backspace key.

So that’s my list—read these tropes at your own risk. I have to say, though—as impossible and confusing and ethically tangly as they are, I am hypocritically happy to read these tropes when they crop up in my books. They make me bang my head against the limits of possibility, like a cat trying to push through an almost closed door because the most delicious birds are surely waiting outside, but in a way that’s the fun part. The more outrageously you suspend disbelief, the more outrageous things you are capable of imagining.