Science Fiction and Fantasy Clichés (AllThatStuff.Info)

A cliché is an idea that is overused. Science fiction and fantasy stories, books, movies, and television shows (especially science fiction ones) are often full of clichés. Clichés aren't always bad; overused plot devices may often be easier for the reader or viewer to understand, and a variation on a common plot may not be a bad thing if it provides something new to the reader or viewer. However, one of the problems with clichés are that they are often the easy way out; instead of telling a real story about realistic difficulties that the protagonists would have to face, clichés are often used to bypass these difficulties. Too many of these and the resulting story is less real, seems more contrived, and doesn't resonate with readers or viewers. Here is a list of around 200 common clichés, arranged by category.

Bad Science

Clones as a whole are different in some innate way from regular people for no apparent reason.
A clone acts and speaks in the exact same manner as the person who has been cloned.
The appearance of a clone, including non-genetic features such as scars, memories, and haircuts, is the exact same as that of the person who was cloned.
When an adult is cloned, as soon as the clone walks out of the cloning vat it is the same age as the person who was cloned, but thereafter it ages at the same rate as the person who was cloned.
A matter duplicator that can easily duplicate any object at all in perfect detail, but which does not consume an enormous amount of energy or require constant restocking with large quantities of every type of element.
The matter duplicator, while it can perfectly duplicate non-living matter, cannot duplicate living organisms.
Someone becomes completely invisible; light passes right through. Somehow, he or she can still see, even though light passes right through his or her eyes and is not absorbed by them.
A planet that sustains life while orbiting multiple suns, without any explanation of how the planet manages to stay in a stable orbit that is suitable for life.
A medical treatment goes from wild idea to life-saving treatment in 15 minutes instead of 15 years.
A planet has an atmosphere consisting of volatile chemicals, yet the atmosphere never seems to combust or react with itself or anything else.
Aliens come from someplace like Mars or Venus that has been so well explored that everyone now knows there can't possibly be intelligent life living there.
Creatures hundreds of feet tall or more can wander around Earth as quickly and easily as humans, and are never crushed by Earth's gravity.
Even though aliens would likely be incredibly different from any life-forms on Earth, they find humans to taste really good and are able to consume them safely.
Even though humans are unable to interbreed with any other species on Earth, even those most closely related to them, they are easily able to interbreed with aliens.
Einstein's Theory of Relativity notwithstanding, people who frequently travel at high velocities through space age at the same rate as their friends back on earth.
Need to go faster than light? No problem, just step on the gas enough and you can go as fast as you want, Einstein's Theory of Relativity notwithstanding.
Very basic mathematical errors are made regarding the velocity, duration, and distance of trips in outer space.
Laser beams appear to travel much slower than the speed of light, and characters are able to dodge them.
In the vacuum of outer space, laser beams are visible.
In the vacuum of outer space, spaceships make "whooshing" noises.
The hull of a spaceship is breached, but don't panic; it'll take a long time for the ship's atmosphere to leak out.
Side effects of radiation exposure are mostly positive and include super powers.
The effects of genetic mutations caused by exposure to radiation manifest themselves fully in the person exposed to radiation; there is no need to wait for them to be passed onto the next generation.
Sentient alien life native to planets orbiting huge blue supergiant stars that have such short lifespans that there could not possibly have been enough time for sentient life to evolve.
The shapeshifter can alter his/her mass or the types of elements in his/her body.
When a disease or some other cause results in a character aging prematurely, their hair that had previously grown turns white. When they are cured, their hair resumes its previous colour.
When a ship is damaged, it immediately falls out of orbit.
When someone dies in virtual reality, they die in real life.
When two ships meet in the depths of space, light-years from any light source, each ship is still easily visible to the crew of the other ship.
Whenever something is shot, it explodes as if it were made out of pure gasoline and located in an atmosphere of pure hydrogen.
There is exactly one living descendant of a certain person who lived many hundreds or thousands of years ago, not either zero or thousands.

Technical Problems

A manned spaceship is sent out on a long, dangerous, and risky mission that could be accomplished just as easily and much more cheaply and safely with an unmanned mission.
Artificial intelligences communicate with each other by voice communication, instead of using one of many faster methods.
Artificial intelligences transmit binary data between each other using voice communication.
In the future, everyone will immediately be able to proficiently use any computer system.
Computers can be reprogrammed by people who are not programmers and who are completely unfamiliar with the operating system.
Voice-operated computers are deployed in environments where humans frequently converse with each other.
People in the future will easily be able to use computer systems of the 21st century, exactly unlike how 21st century people all know how to use PDP-10s.
In a society with teleportation devices, no deep philosophical questions are ever raised about what happens to one's consciousness or "self" when using such a device.
Consciousness seems to be manifested in a non-material form, because characters seem to be able to take over other people's bodies without any physical action. However, no deep philosophical questions are still ever raised about teleportation devices.
In the future, everyone will talk at great length about the inner workings and history of all of their technologies, in the exact manner in which present-day people do not talk about present-day technologies such as computers or cars.
The story is set a number of years in the future greater than the number of years between the invention of the computer and today, but future computers are less advanced than state-of-the-art computers today.
In the future, spaceships, space stations, cities, or other large installations will have one central computer, just like in the 1960s.
The central computer can be accessed via one of many unsecured access ports scattered conveniently across the spaceship, station, or city.
In the future, computer displays will only display three or four large lines of text.
Shooting the computer monitor destroys the computer's central processing unit.
Intelligent computers can be made to crash by presenting them with a logical paradox.
Passwords and override codes are entered into the computer by speaking them out loud.
The computer explodes when a computer program crashes.
Spaceship engines can be fixed by hitting them, by throwing a paper clip into them, or by similar means.
The ship's main computer can keep tabs on where everyone is, but is entirely unable to detect suspicious or unusual activity.
Spaceships contain features based on those from ocean-going ships for no apparent practical reason.
Surge protectors and circuit breakers are never used in the future, so that a minor malfunction in a spaceship results in a chain reaction affecting distant areas of the ship.
The soldier or the spaceship that is invincible except for a very small Achilles' heel that is easy to exploit once you know about it. No protection or shielding is ever devised to shield this one small problem spot.
The time machine is also a "space machine", but people still persist in using slow-moving spaceships to get from one place to another.
On a spaceship, even though all of the systems have failed, the artificial gravity system always seems to remain on.
Robots that are little more than remote-control devices that can be disabled by destroying the mothership.
Robots are designed to look exactly like humans regardless of what they are used for.
Robots can fix spaceship engines in less than ten seconds without touching any of the mechanical parts.
Explorers who make contact with a previously unknown civilization are able to communicate instantly with them, even though the civilization's languages, communication protocols, and the like couldn't possibly be known to the explorers.

Movies and Television

High school is over, but, even though all of the characters have been complaining for the better part of four years about how full of monsters or otherwise awful their hometown is, no-one ever leaves town to go to college or for any other reason. They all go to the local community college, or maybe they just start doing nothing at all.
The Time Travellers can travel to any year they choose; they choose the year in which the show is released.
Someone accidentally travels back in time; they wind up in the year the show is released
The Disembodied Evil Force, which can manifest itself as anything or anyone, manifests itself as an incredibly beautiful woman, complete with high heels and other impractical items of clothing that hinder escape.
The small town has multiple killings every week, which would give it the highest per-capita murder rate on Earth; however, no-one at all ever seems to notice.
The members of the bridge crew are on duty continuously, or at least that's how it appears.
Previously, supernatural powers could only be accessed in a very limited number of ways, but all of a sudden, all kinds of different types of supernatural powers start appearing, without any change in the nature of the universe that would have created new methods of accessing power.
Timers on bombs tick down only a few seconds while several minutes of action takes place.
The heroine is outgoing, fun, and highly attractive, but she can never find a date, except perhaps with a really lame guy.
During a Red Alert, the lights actually flash red.
As the series progresses, the characters wear increasingly darker clothing and hang around increasingly darker places.

Overused Plots

The young Hero, who has lived in a backwater his entire life, meets an old wizard, who tells him about a great evil that is being perpetrated, and that the Hero is the only one who can stop it, by undertaking some long and dangerous quest. After travelling to many different places, over the course of which others join the quest and the old wizard is killed in order to save the rest of the band, the Hero becomes stronger, reaches his destination, and stops the evil.
The Hero is "The Chosen (or Anointed, or another choice adjective) One" who is the only one who can Save The World. Possibly he or she has to die to do so.
A culture forgets about reproduction and either becomes extinct or remembers about it just in time to save themselves.
A magic wish comes true in a way that destroys or devastates the person who made it, or would do so were it not reversed just in the nick of time.
A couple applies for state permission to have a baby.
The story revolves around a magical artifact that can destroy the world.
A man and woman flee from a dying civilization and settle on a planet orbiting a medium-sized yellow-white star. The man's name is Adam. The woman's, Eve.
A man wanders and wanders around after a nuclear apocalypse. He finds a woman, alive, in the rubble. "I'm Adam," the man says. "Eve," the woman replies.
A manned mission is launched to prevent a large asteroid from hitting Earth.
People confuse a virtual reality simulation with reality.
An individual applies for state permission to live another year.
An inventor or CEO with a tenuous grip on reality creates some invention that allows him (almost never her) to play God. Even though others point out how bad the idea is, he refuses to acknowledge this. The invention causes him to lose whatever grip on reality he had, and he is overtaken and killed by the unexpected consequences of the invention.
It was all just a dream, hallucination, video game, or virtual reality simulation.
We all thought it was all just a dream, hallucination, video game, or virtual reality simulation, but it was all real.
Someone travels back in time to attempt something highly paradoxical, such as kill his/her grandfather when the grandfather was a youth.
Someone travels back in time to kill his/her nemesis when the nemesis was still a youth.
Someone travels back in time to observe Jesus Christ or another great historical figure. Through various circumstances, the time traveller becomes that great historical figure.
Someone travels back in time to observe some historic event, such as the crucifixion of Jesus. What the observer does not observe are billions of other time travellers who must also be interested in observing the event.
The Time Agency, which travels back in time to cause famous historical events.
The Hero travels back in time to prevent something bad from happening, but ends up causing something worse to happen.
The Hero travels back in time to prevent something bad from happening, but ends up causing whatever they were trying to prevent.
Surprise! The aliens weren't really kind and desirous of helping humanity.
Technologically advanced aliens enslave humans, even though it would be much easier and cheaper for them to build robots to perform slave labour.
The Good Guys visit some unknown culture, only to land in hot water when they discover that the culture punishes incredibly minor, insignificant mistakes with the death penalty or some other punishment that is way out of proportion to the crime.
The Hero completely destroys the social structure of the alien civilization; all of the members of the alien civilization see this as being a good thing.
The Hero has an evil twin or duplicate.
The events of the Bible, Greek mythology or folklore are the result of alien visits to Earth.
The technological advances of ancient civilizations are the results of alien visits to Earth.
Aliens are evaluating Earth or humanity as a candidate for extermination, admission to the galactic community, or the like.
The former Hero is now a washed-up drunk and needs to sober up in order to save the day.
One of the characters, although willing and able to provide information to the Hero that will help him/her, does not, apparently for the sole purpose of not giving away the plot to the reader.
The main characters hide the truth from each other; this is used as a plot device. Eventually, after many misunderstandings that could have been easily averted, everyone comes clean and the day is saved.
Explorers visit a planet with very unusual flora and fauna or highly self-destructive inhabitants. It is revealed at the end that the planet is really Earth.
The cryogenically-preserved person wakes up in the far future.
Someone gets abducted by a UFO.
The plot is completely incomprehensible until the very end, when it is discovered that the entire plot has been contrived to set up a complex pun or punch line.

Lack of Imagination

All colonies are named for cities or countries on Earth, preceded by the word "New."
An Earth-centric name for a planet, such as Sigma Orionis IV, is the same name that the planet's indigenous inhabitants use for the planet.
All alien races speak English as their mother tongue, or at least appear to.
Each alien race speaks only one language, even though humans speak thousands of languages.
People in the future has an IQ in the thousands; exactly how such an IQ is measured is never explained, nor the reason why the IQ scale has never been normalized to the future society's norms.
In the future, all humans have the exact same beliefs, skills, personality traits, and motivations.
In the future, government will take some form that has been tried and discarded hundreds or thousands of years ago.
The future society is exactly like some well-known society of the past.
In the future, people wear the same clothes worn by those of primitive Earth civilizations of the past.
In the far future, people only enjoy music, art, literature, games, and other entertainments that were already hundreds of years old in the 21st century.
Space explorers in the far future will be organized in the exact same way that 21st century navies are.
In the far future, humans speak perfect 21st century English, with only a handful of new words to describe new technologies.
The vocal mechanisms of aliens are so similar to those of humans that they can converse with humans in perfect English.
A stereotypical totalitarian society.
The language of the alien race is completely unpronounceable by humans, but the alien race can speak perfect English.
The parallel universe is wildly different from the real universe, but the exact same people exist in each universe and each has the exact same colleagues.
The story is set a number of years in the future greater than the number of years between the invention of agriculture and today, but humanity has made very little if any social, scientific, technological, or other progress.
There is no cost to casting a magic spell, but magic users never seem to use magic to provide for their daily needs, enhance their personal appearance, or anything of that nature.
Time travellers who meet each other multiple times always meet in the same order in both travellers' lives.
A spaceship engine is described as a "warp drive".

Characters and Characterizations

Aliens or foreigners have names that are packed full of hard consonants.
Aliens look the exact same as humans except for various protrusions in various places on their heads.
The aliens are hostile, but it's completely unclear why.
All aliens are comfortable in environments with similar atmosphere, temperature, and gravity as that of Earth.
Aliens or foreigners have hyphens, apostrophes or other punctuation in their names for no apparent reason.
Aliens have names that are gibberish and/or completely unpronounceable.
All intelligent races are at the exact same phase of technological development.
All members of an a non-human race have the exact same beliefs, skills, personality traits, and motivations.
Ancient, immortal beings that are no more intelligent or mature than young, mortal humans.
Immortal beings who are bored or want to die.
All characters have a name that fits their occupation or role in the story, as if their parents were granted some sort of prescience at the time of their christening.
Hard-boiled private eyes.
Everyone's first name seems to be "The."
Bad guys can be recognized by the goatees they sport; no-one else ever has one.
The names of the Good Guy and the Bad Guy are almost identical.
The Hero is heir to the throne but is unaware of that fact.
Glowing eyes.
One major character is actually another major character in disguise.
One of the characters is a god in disguise.
Supernatural powers start manifesting themselves at puberty.
The Good Guys wear white; the Bad Guys wear black.
The Hero has no emotions whatsoever; his sole interest is in completing missions.
No-one has family, pursues relationships, has an ordinary career, or personal goals. Everyone is just interested in exploring and completing missions.
The Hero is a young farmer whose true parents are obscure or unknown.
The guards who guard the inner palace are the most incompetent of all.
The teenaged whiz kid who builds advanced devices in his bedroom.
Absent-minded wizards or scientists.
Wizards or scientists who are eccentric and/or somewhat unhinged.
Wizards or scientists with long, grey beards.

Similar Settings

The post-apocalyptic society, populated mainly with people who spend most of their time whining about how awful their life is, and how it is all the fault of 21st-century humanity.
Cities of the future will be built like labyrinths.
Every building in the city looks the exact same.
Every planet has an atmosphere so similar to that of Earth that humans can breathe it.
Every planet has similar gravity to that of Earth.
Every planet rotates around its axis once every 24 hours or so.
There is only one city on the entire planet.
Unlike Earth, which has a wide variety of climates, alien planets have only one climate.
Humans have been away from Earth for so long that they have forgotten about it, although occasional cryptic references to the planet are found in ancient texts.
Mythological creatures are native to alien planets.
Flying saucers above the White House.
Sensitive areas of ships, cities, or castles can easily be accessed by travelling through the ventilation, waste, or other systems.
The Free Love Planet is a utopia, and no-one ever has to deal with the sort of problems related to sex that residents of Earth have to deal with (STDs, unexpected pregnancies, relationship difficulties, and so on) and has surprisingly few people considering the attractions.
A bar or other social setting frequented by beings of every race.
The spaceship is a living creature.
There is a Big Secret. It has been known for hundreds or thousands of years and dozens or hundreds of people in every generation have known about it, but no member of the general public has ever found out about the secret; no insider has ever let the secret slip nor has any outsider ever stumbled upon it.
When two ships meet in outer space, they are always oriented with the front of the ship facing each other and with "up" in the same direction.

Nothing New Under the Suns: Events

The artifact that can destroy the world was not destroyed, just hidden somewhere where it will never be found. Naturally, someone manages to find it.
After a great catastrophe, the civilization manages to remain at a high technological level even though there are no longer any facilities to create or maintain the technology.
Aliens travel large distances at enormous expense to Earth and fight humans at significant expense to acquire some resource that could undoubtedly be found much closer to their home planet or made with significantly less expense.
An alien apparently magically heals a person with a terminal illness or injury or genetic defect. Possibly they get it slightly wrong.
People vital to the running of the kingdom regularly travel unescorted through hostile regions of the kingdom.
Away teams sent to dangerous and potentially hostile planets are comprised of the highest-ranking people on the ship.
Don't know the combination to open the door? Just shoot the keypad.
Highly expensive spaceships are sent on dangerous journeys, but they are not being used to transport anything of sufficient value in sufficient quantity to reasonably justify their use.
Humans can defeat vastly more intelligent and advanced alien races without any trouble at all.
A robot falls in love with a human, or a human with a robot.
Some ancient technological civilization, now long extinct and known only by mysterious artifacts, seeded many planets, thus creating all intelligent races currently in existence.
The Evil Overlord punishes trivial miscalculations with death.
When the Evil Overlord captures the Hero, the latter is never killed instantly; rather, the Evil Overlord natters on and on about the Hero's impending death, the Evil Overlord's plans, or anything else until the Hero's sidekicks arrive and foil the plot.
The Evil Overlord's death is caused by a long fall.
When the Evil Overlord dies, his empire simply collapses; none of his lieutenants attempt to seize power.
The Hero can't remember which of the two wires to cut in order to defuse the bomb. If he decides to guess, he's always right.
The bomb is defused with one second left until it explodes.
The entire scientific community is completely baffled by a problem. An untrained person manages to solve that problem quickly.
The lowest-ranking member of an away team is always doomed.
When minor characters are shot, they die. When major characters are shot, they're just slightly wounded (if at all) and carry on.
When minor characters die, they die instantly. In the rare event that major characters die, they linger long enough to give a final speech.
A character makes a deal with the Devil.
As a result of long days, weeks, or months of research, a Big Secret is discovered about something that happened a few years ago and that no-one knows about; however, the secret is something that should have been patently obvious to everyone who was alive at the time.

Weird Warfare

At the end of a battle, when everything seems hopeless, some spell, weapon, or strategy is used to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, which could just as easily have been used with the same victorious result at the start of the battle.
In the future, guns are abandoned in favour of laser weapons, even though the latter are more costly, more prone to malfunctions, less lethal, less accurate, and provide no other apparent advantages compared with 21st century guns.
A large army that is attacking the Hero attacks using only one soldier at a time.
Soldiers on patrol travel alone, making them easy to sneak up on and dispatch. When their disappearance is noted, the soldiers sent to investigate the disappearance also travel alone.
Elite troops miss everything they shoot at; the poorly-trained rag-tag force hits everything they shoot at.
The Evil Overlord's legions of "elite" troops are soundly defeated by a small, poorly armed, rag-tag force.
In the future, everyone fights with swords while more powerful ranged weapons are abandoned.
Laser guns of the future are never swept across a target; they are only fired in a single direction.
Mission-critical systems are built without backup power supplies or redundant systems, turning a minor power cut or malfunction into a complete disaster.
No training will be required to use weapons of the future perfectly.
Ships' lasers are mounted only on the front of the ship and cannot be rotated, requiring a ship wanting to return fire on a trailing ship to turn around.
The targeting systems of a spaceship are less advanced than those used by present-day armies.
The Wizard casts an incredibly complex and costly spell that alters the nature of space and time for a purpose that could also be accomplished through a very simple spell.
Two groups are fighting an expensive war for no apparent purpose, but no effort is ever made to diplomatically resolve the conflict.
Wizards are able to detect the use of small amounts of magic from great distances, but are completely unable to detect the Bad Guy using large amounts of magic.

Political Incorrectness

Even though clones are indistinguishable from regular people, they are used solely for slave labour, organ donations, or other purposes for which it would be illegal or immoral to use regular people.
The crew of the spaceship is less ethnically diverse than most places on 21st century Earth, with the possible exception of the token black guy.
The token black guy is the first person to be killed.
The token black guy on the crew is the only one constantly bumbling into various troubles.
The female characters do very little except getting captured and then rescued.
The female member of the enemy forces can be made to defect and join the Hero's side via sexual relations.
The nymphomaniac who wants to have sex with the alien, or the nymphomaniac alien who wants to have sex with human men.

Sources and Credits

The majority of these clichés are a result of my experience reading, listening to, and viewing science fiction and fantasy, although I have been inspired by the following sources:

The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés (no longer online)
Science Fiction Writing: Ten Cliches to Avoid
The Evil Overlord List
The Fantasy Novelist's Exam
Dozois, Gardner et al. (ed.). Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy: 20 Dynamic Essays by Today's Top Professionals. (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1991).
Nielsen, Jakob. "Usability in the Movies—Top 10 Bloopers". <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/film-ui-bloopers.html>.