I know it's an important literary device in sci-fi but it always bugs me that whole planets are mostly mono-cultural with usually only up to 3 different governments.
this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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Wait you read sci-fi where a planet has THREE governments?
Maybe I'm reading bargain bin material but the stories I see is a mono-culture, with a mono-religion and if I'm extra blessed, a single ecosystem like frost planet, or sand planet.
This is why I could not get through Xenocide. I absolutely loved Ender’s Game and Speaker For The Dead, two of the all time greatest, but xenocide was so flawed I just couldn’t keep going with the series. Also, fuck Orson Scott Card in general.
The US, Japan, China, India and Europe all watch the same major block buster movies. We can talk to each other about the MCU and at least have some idea what each other is talking about. There are only a hand full of religions left in the world unless you want to counter obscure ones and each sect and even then three of those big ones are basically branches of the same religion. the most common language in the world is spoken by a large variety of people all over the planet while the second is pretty regional.
An advanced society would probably end up being monocultured going by the one model we have. Though it could depend on if they are a space fairing race and how long it takes to travel between 'settlements.'
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Star Trek crew arrives at a planet. Meets a group of aliens. Meets another group of different aliens. Both aliens are literal opposites of each other. Doesn't agree about one issue. Crew fixes issue. Star Trek ship leaves.
But what if the species is genetically/psychologically inclined to a single form of governance?
How convenient for a lazy writer
I love this idea so much. The Predators we see in movies are literally trophy hunters, and maybe their home society views them the same way the majority of humans view human trophy hunters.
Think about how much infrastructure and support it would take to bring a civilization up to the level of "interstellar exploration."
It takes an UNGODLY amount of logistics and technologies and resources moving around and compiling and colliding with other technologies, just to make [ONE SINGLE TECHNOLOGICAL MACHINE], and it takes all of that times a thousand to make a spaceship. Now lets talk about the people who work in each of those industries, the people who drive the boats or trains to get the stuff to the place. The people who manage those machines that drive to the place, the people who manage the factory that makes the fuel that powers the machine that drives the stuff to the place, and the countless people who keep the floors clean in those factories, and so on.
I scream at the screen (internally) every time I see some really stereotyped "space species" being portrayed as homogeneous and identical in their values and goals, particularly if it's some kind of "honorbound violent tribal" species. I appreciate the work that went into overhauling the Klingons a little. I love how Space Orks are explained. But there's been some other really goofball aliens that remind me that our species is kinda... you know, racist. (1-dimensional perspectives of different cultures.)
People screaming about "DEI" remind me of this all the time. We simply do not progress without a vast, diverse population who have all degrees of values and motivations.
That was the original idea for alien. The aliens are actually this advanced cultured race. But they get crazy in childhood and puberty.
That's also kinda the explanation for the velociraptor behaviour in the second Jurassic Park book. They were a social species and the lab-grown ones grew up to be absolute sociopaths.
That seems more like a retcon when the author of the book found out they didn't actually behave like they do in the movie 😅
This idea is somewhat present in the ending of the first book already, the second one just spells it out, but the second book has a character shitting on Alan Grant for his ridiculous idea that a predator wouldn't see you if you're not moving, speculating the T-Rex was probably fed at that moment (which is accurate). And the whole idea of there being a second island for growing the dinos is treated as obvious by the same character, since the small lab they were shown in the first one is obviously just theatre for the visitors. So yeah, Crichton was not above correcting his earlier mistakes.
I highly recommend both books. They're awesome, and they diverge from the movie in many ways - notably not all survivors from the movie make it and vice versa, so it's still very suspenseful even if you know the movies.
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Predators are just extreme doomsday preppers, setting up on their own planets and killing any trespassers. The rest live in a post-scarcity society and have no interest in convincing those weirdos to come home.
Predators are like humans going to Africa for big game hunting.
They're mostly dentists, Fortune 500 CEOs, and children of dignitaries. Every time we kill a predator, their planet's stock market is affected or a bunch of parents have to negotiate a new provider with their insurance.
They literally use the phrase 'on Safari' in the second predator movie.
The Predator version of the Office would be pretty funny.
Predator Jim pranking Dwight by leaving a xenomorph egg in his bottom drawer.
In jello
Like those hunters in the USA that go out in the wild and get attacked by grizzly bears and almost nobody with any sense has sympathy for them because at the end of the day the hunters put themselves into the bear's habitat and then weren't savvy, educated, vigilant, or concerned enough to stay the fuck away from the apex predators with knives built into their mouths and feet.
Or the assholes like Jimmy John who go out and shoot Elephants.
“Who would win, me or an Austrian with plot armor and a hyper myostatin disorder that makes them naturally huge?”
“I mean, the Austrian, obviously. Don’t they usually travel in packs?”
“I don’t know, man, I’m built different. Plus I just got that new load out from space cabellas’s that makes me invisible and shit. I’m not saying it would be easy, but I could do it, I just know I could.”
“Sir, this is a space Wendy’s.”
“Alright, what if it’s normal non-Austrians, like a tribe of some sort? Hear me out…”
This is a well known concept in sci-fi where civilizations massing in the tens of billions will have all kind of weird outliers. But at such a scale, even the really weird ones can form groups of tens of thousands or even larger. In sci-fi storytelling this is often used to explain weird behavior that probably wouldn't make a lot of sense otherwise.
It also comes up in the fermi paradox a lot. For example aliens always want to stay at home and not be noticed or interact with anyone. But at a certain scale of civilization that doesn't hold water. Even if 99.99% of a given alien species think that way, there would stil be at least a million of them that think otherwise and would be willing and able to act on it.
So it makes perfect sense for all the Predator people to be really normal and the hunting cult is a hobby that got out of hand.
Yeah I’m gonna need examples. I read a shit ton of science fiction and can’t recall having encountered this.
Check out the works of Alastair Reynolds, he loves to apply this principle in his books. Great on world building and describing the weirdest parts of large civilizations.
For more a meta/review/fermi paradox talk point of view check out the content from Isaac Arthur, he also likes to point out this when discussing things like the fermi paradox and sci-fi in general.
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The Dark Templar in Starcraft are outliers.
...and they are not even the edgy dark ones any more.
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I've read a lot of sci fi but I'm not familiar with that concept, but it makes more sense than thinking of a whole culture as weirdly sadistic etc.
I also listen to Isaac Arthur.
“Oh, that guy? He’s just a douchebag failson of the third richest asshole on the planet.”
Those predators are just the offspring of the predator oligarchs.
Every "big game hunter" ever.
Nothing screams baby dick energy like killing an animal from a distance, using advanced weapons designed and engineered by people far more intelligent than you are.
It's like their version of guys who spend a fortune on gear and tactical everything to go weekend paintball shooting in the woods.
What's the yautja word for "ammosexual?"
Oh, I say!
Weekend warriors on a men’s retreat. Anything to avoid going to therapy.
I want to see a romantic comedy, where in the background the TV is playing a news report about how Tokyo is being attacked by Godzilla again. No one in the foreground acknowledges it, probably because it's so common you may not comment on it. Still some people in the background are looking concerned. Maybe a poster for donating to rebuild Japan.
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I thought they established in the the movie before Prey that the predators are really autistic.
What does that even mean in this context? I haven't seen the movie.
I tried to find the answer and I'm not sure if this is what they're referencing but in the 2018 movie, the Predator is hunting a kid who exhibits every stereotypically-positive aspect of autism...so he can incorporate it into its own genome? The movie supposedly includes the quote, "autism is the next stage of evolution"
The implication is that what we call "autism" is actually a collection of net-positive traits (our society simply is ill-equipped for it) and those traits were sought out by a predator. So, the "lesson" is to stop viewing autism as something icky, and instead ask how we can adjust our society to adapt to it, rather than asking autistics to adapt to our society.
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Looked that up and realized I've never seen it. Any good?
How did they develop space travel for real? These ugly motherfuckas can't be smart enough to develop star drives!
I like that SciFi concept that manipulating gravity/space/time is actually not that hard, and some civilizations discover that a lot earlier and go down a different technological evolutionary tree
So you have like wooden spaceships operated by aliens wielding swords, and they show up to earth to conquer us assuming they're way more advanced than us, but realize we have hella advanced weapons, infrastructure, and communications technologies
https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove
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That's heavily implied in Defending Elysium. A phone company accidentally develops FTL communication and as a result an ambassador's ship shows up but is easily shot down by our modern fighter jets when it enters our airspace. The diplomatic fuck up Is fixed by the phone company, which in turn becomes an extra governmental liaison between humanity and the rest of galactic civilization.
The best twist on that, and the best twist as to how FTL-capable aliens don't smash us flat is Footfall. Also shows the most practical way for aliens to attack a planetary surface. Think I'll read again it for the fourth time!
SPOILER
They roll up and start throwing rocks from orbit.
The aliens didn't actually invent their tech and are using a ship, weapons, etc. from a far more advanced, and extinct, species. Also, realizing that they're herd animals goes a long way towards winning in the end, making the title take on more than one meaning.
Favorite part was where they nuke Kansas and the aliens go into a frenzy. "They nuked their own breadbasket just to get one small base?! Are they fucking nuts?!"
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