How to not write trash sci-fi
It’s a pretty massive genre, but here are some definite rules
I am so, so bored of going to a film/book event and being forced to march through hours of predictable, sexist rubbish. So here are some rules:
1. Don’t call anyone Electron, Photon, Proton or any other science word you don’t understand
2. Don’t call your villain Blacksoul, Darkbreaker, Bloodstorm or anything else completely contrived and cringy
3. If you have to spend a paragraph describing a woman’s body in her costume, I hate you
4. Don’t put it in space because you are too lazy to invent a new environment
5. You really don’t need to include 43 pages on how your fictional city runs
6. Don’t you dare kill off your character’s parents just to make them have a sad backstory
7. Why is the villain evil: sort out that motive, guys
8. You better have a bloody good reason for sexing up every female soldier
9. Sticking ‘ia’ at the end of a google-latin search for hope is not a woman’s name
10. I don’t want to read/watch thirteen fight training scenes where people pose with knock off lightsabers
11. Dragons have never, ever been written well into a book aimed at anyone over 12
12. Spare me the flashbacks to a scene from chapter 3, please
13. Hybrids don’t make them idea clever. Spacesports. PoliticalTheatre on Mars. Yeah, it still sucks
14. The Hunger Games and that knock off one with the girl who had to join a faction are kind of overdone. Try something other than teen girl kills people in totalitarian state
15. You are working in a genre where time, space and history can be different. Why is your main character a white guy waging a war against badder white guys in a territorial disagreement?
