Science Fiction

Oh, I have the same gripes and more, so in my roleplaying campaign that has later turned into a book:

1. Characters have to conspire, mostly outside of their ship, just to have a chance at a secret away from the surveillance. Two characters that are no strangers to oppressive surveillance manage to maintain exactly one secret, but its hours are inherently numbered and it takes a lot to happen to make it last, what, an entire day?
2. Alien language is one of the central problems, despite it being phenomenally trivial (and following a decidedly indoeuropean sentence structure only because the readers also need to comprehend it). All characters not preselected for fluency in it outright don't speak it, there are just three of them on-screen, implied to be the best of the best. They then proceed to mess it up big time while messing it up, recursively, multi-track drifting style. Phonetics is mutually unpronounceable, but intelligible both ways, yet over the course of the entire story both sides attain only barely passable and generally unreliable listening proficiency. They mostly get by in alien writing. And alien writing isn't even exactly linear, because
3. Anatomically, aliens are lizard-like. Unless your world building justifies aliens being related to humans, humanoid aliens are utter cringe.
4. Allergies are, uh, let's just say one results in a pivotal plot point. Standard nutrient packs are a thing; people are shown to get creative with them on day two, yet not a single soul ever attempts munching any alien flora or fauna, lol. Not being utter morons about what they eat doesn't automatically mean they're safe either.
5. Translation is available, and the problem is not even studying the alien language, it's that it doesn't really help bridge the cultural mismatch; if anything, "knowing" the language is a bit of a disservice here because the inherent crudeness of the translation only compounds the misunderstandings pileup. Blue/orange morality doesn't help it either: the question of how does one translate what was originally mistaken for alienese for "good" is, uh, an annoyingly recurring one.
6. No technology available in abundance is used in an even remotely reasonable manner. The very idea of being rational about using Tech X makes no sense if Tech X ain't rationed. Abundant resources are gonna be used willy-nilly, period.
7. Competence is scarce, doubly so when anything goes off-script.
8. People are absurd. Groups of people are next-level absurd. Don't even get me started on societies. Fiction involving all three that isn't woven almost entirely from blunders upon blunders is, likely, bland competence porn. Now add a second species to the mix and there's no ceiling to the absurdity now. At this point, getting a point across the interspecies barrier, let alone cooperating on a thing, becomes unrealistic by default. Successful willful interspecies cooperation is, at the very least, a hard-earned success worth celebrating in-universe. And that's if the species are interested in said cooperation.

(non-sci-fi)

9. A story doesn't feature a villain that's a perfect mirror image of the hero, largely because 9a. it doesn't feature any villain. Villains are lame, and so is plot-mandated antagonism. While it's just lazy writing in general, it's particularly unrealistic because
10. People just don't care that much in general. Yes, I know people have interests and strong opinions on select few subjects, and sometimes these opinions even happen to clash. What are the chances though?
11. Things generally just don't happen as much as they do in most of the fiction. Real life doesn't have the ambient soundtrack that immediately conveys or foreshadows the importance of the unfolding events. Thus in real life, the perceived importance of events is almost always off. Fiction rhould have it the same: things happen, some might even feel important in the moment, but rarely the ones that mattered.

There's probably more, but such gripes don't usually spring to mind unprompted. Now, when you see them, then they do grind your gears...

You'd probably like Blake's 7 then, in regards to cameras.

Large ships that ply the stars at super luminal speeds. These ships are equipped with massive energy weapons capable of pulverizing planets. Powered by systems that use anti-matter, or ultra exotic inter-dimensional matter.

Yet, for some reason the ship is constrained on energy and is unable to keep all the lights on, or the crew has to conform to "energy conservation protocols" (ST TOS), or there isn't enough power available to keep the ship at a habitable temperature (BSG).

Life support would not even be a rounding error on the power output of some of the systems described in Sci fi.

"Humane Treatment", " Human rights", "I'm doing this for the good of humanity". When there are heaps of non human species but the writers keep reffering to "human" traits everyone else clearly has.

Azetbur was right.

Scale. Most sci fi notoriously sucks at doing large scale well. 40K, of all things, is one of the few that does.

Star Trek came up with some workarounds/explanations for things they did due to budget or teck limitations. The transporters so they didn't need to shuttle down, artificial gravity, universal translator and the the story line about the parent species that seeded humanoids on many planets (earth, vulcan, etc).

They would also show 'surveillance video' from time to time when the plot needed it, but it never looked like a surveillance cam took it.

I'm curious how everyone gets here about the languages in the original star wars trilogy?

Secondly, in one of the ex expanded universe series, leia and chewbacca go back to kashyyk and Leia can understand the wookie mayor much better than she can chewbacca.

It's explained that the mayor actually has a speech impediment, which makes him easier to understand than most wookies

To your second point, I think the Universal Translator in Star Trek is the best explanation. Not only does it make for more convenient television, but it seems like such a well thought-out invention that would actually exist in the future. Like why make everyone learn one language and wipe out all the history/culture behind the others when you can just let everyone do their own thing.

Can't believe no one has mentioned this yet but my big one is physics in microgravity. There are some that do it well (like obv Apollo 13 given how they filmed it, and The Expanse is usually pretty good about it too) and plenty that it doesn't really matter but there's a bunch of movies and tv shows that hang major plot points on poorly thought out physics. The worst offender imo was ironically the movie Gravity, where a major character dies because apparently when two people are tethered to each other in zero-g and the line goes taut they don't just bounce back towards each other, oh no, because there's an extra special force that keeps pulling on the futher person so he has to make some dramatic self sacrifice. I was so sad because that movie looked really amazing from a cinematography perspective and obviously a lot of people loved it regardless but i just couldn't get past how dumb that and a few other scenes were.

Artificial gravity not achieved through acceleration or rotation. That and people don’t explode or instantly freeze when exposed to vacuum.

That women can only be scientists or whatever if their father was. They can have no other reason or backstory.

What annoys me is that science fiction is that some of the biggest writers don't seem to know any women IRL. If Robert Heinlin or Cixin Lu had to write a believable woman character to bring them food and water, they'd be dead in three days.