Eric@ScreenLab

In ScreenLab’s audit of the Sci-Fi Prop Fallacy, I looked at how some creators spend their “Narrative Budget” on a foundation of science, while others just use it as wallpaper. There is perhaps no trope that exposes this “wallpaper” approach more than the Hive Mind. When you see an alien species that functions as a single, centralized collective, you aren’t usually looking at a breakthrough in speculative biology. You’re looking at a Narrative Shortcut.

Perhaps someone accidentally flipped on Douglas Adams’s Infinite Improbability Drive and, in a sudden burst of cosmic nonsense, a sentient species materialized on a planet orbiting three chaotic suns. It’s the only way to explain how the aliens of The Three-Body Problem managed to bypass the most basic requirement for life: environmental stability.

Cinematic science fiction has a bad habit: A recurring vision of the “perfect” AI: a gynoid with a silhouette so human, and so specifically curvaceous, that it bypasses our logic and speaks directly to our biology. From the hauntingly graceful Ava in Ex Machina to the high-gloss commercial “Sims” of Subservience, these designs make males, and perhaps many females stop and think, wait, “Should I be thinking this robot is hot?” They are framed as the pinnacle of human engineering; the ultimate convergence of machine intelligence, as we all know that being sleek, symmetrical, and shapely is biomechanical engineering 101.