Okay, first example in, and he's already wrong. Spock never wanted to be human.

I'm reading through the comments on the first page, and they're more interesting than the article itself.

Heh. Some of those I agree with:

Sci-fi writers love to treat “planet” as if it’s a single location. “Let’s land on the planet, where we’ll meet the one settlement of the one culture, and have the one adventure the planet can afford us.” Planets are entire WORLDS. Even with advanced technology, it will take a space exploration crew YEARS to explore and survey a single planet. Even an uninhabited one.

That's always bugged me, but I deal. Because it sure would take a lot of work to come up with entire WORLDS for every single planet you might want to come across.

I'd like to see what his perfect world of SF looks like.

Apparently, a NASA space exploration documentary.

I love the SG1 episode where Sam deduces they're on an ice planet.

Turns out they're in the Arctic.

Antarctic.

I will say that Stargate is among the worst at that. So many of the planets they visit seem to be just a single tiny village that has maintained the exact same population level for thousands of years. It ain't natural.

I had to stop reading the little snot. It's fiction. Deal with it. SF isn't the only genre that is rife with cliches (or maybe he hasn't noticed that cops always get blown away the day before they're supposed to retire).

Yeah, you also have to love his theory that CGI is cheap now, so all aliens can be non-humanoid. That wouldn't pose any difficulties in terms of a story's emotional impact or anything. It's a huge challenge for actors in prosthetics to convey emotions past all of that latex or makeup. Now you want me to care about something CGI'd?

Well, I'm sure he'll come up with a "cop movie cliches" list tomorrow.

I love the SG1 episode where Sam deduces they're on an ice planet.

Turns out they're in the Arctic.

Hee. Exactly! I mean, the way these things work...think of the many, many places one could land on Earth. It's a diverse planet!

Really, the worst is when someone is marooned on A Planet and then a search party just LANDS ON THE PLANET IN THE SAME AREA. (And, no, they didn't do any sort of "scans" or anything. They just...landed. And voila!)

At least on the BSG episode where Kara gets stranded on the planet/asteroid, they spend days looking for her. And then they note how little of the asteroid's surface they've covered. And they never actually find her (she finds them).

Antarctic! Thanks. I tried to google, and it was not useful.

I think the guy forgets that humans are the ones consuming the stories, and that fiction has...mechanisms. Sometimes emotional impact is the point, not equations.

Yeah, there are lazy writers. But there are also writers whose goal wasn't what this guy thinks their goal should have been--and that's not his call.

His thing about spaceships all having a top and botton is annoying. OK, lets say a spaceship is a sphere or a cylinder. You'd constantly be seeing people with different vertical orientations, and/or people making the transition from one vertical orientation to another. It would be a big PITA to write, produce and direct, and it'd have little or no dramatic benefit.

eta: The Death Star is a sphere, but it's big enough that they never have to show these issues.