Sci-fi needs to evolve.
I’ll start with Mass Effect, the game. This trilogy is among my favourite pieces of Art of all time, certainly on my top of games too, great atmosphere, fun mechanics, awesome visuals and everything. However, the entire trilogy of games and even the books have that piece of “fact” in them that takes me out of the immersion and makes me think “really?”, and that is the fact that all planets are portraited as a monotonous, non-changing, homogenous, single environment.
You descend into a planet expecting that, like on earth, the landscape, the vegetation, the cities, the temperature would be different every few hundred kilometres or so, but no, the entire planet is covered by the same exact landscape, the same copy-pasted buildings, the same 1 type of tree, the same couple of colours.
Some times it is kind of understandable, if you take a Mars like planet for example, ok, we’d assume that on its equator the environment and colours would be similar across the entire planet, but even so things should change at least as you get closer to the poles, I mean, even a “dead” planet like Mars have differences when you move from its equator to south or north hemispheres, it has frozen and colder poles!
And constructions for God’s sake! Every time it is the same copy-pasted building all over the planet! Again, some of the times it is understandable, and again with Mars, if we assume we just colonized Mars and all settlements are across its equator, ok, for the first few decades most likely a single company will monopolize everything, all buildings are going to look similar, there will be a pattern, but this pattern will not last for long! Most of the movies/series/games/books are portrayed several hundred years, sometimes millions of years ahead of our time. You cannot expect that all buildings are still the same, you cannot expect the the same company with the same mindset, with the same necessities (human or business) were kept immutable through generations. You cannot expect that the humans living on these planets kept their culture and tastes and necessities exactly the same, for several generations. You cannot expect that the technology stayed the same for those hundreds or so years!
I used Mass Effect as my primary example because, as mentioned before, it is one of my top pieces of art, but it has its flaws, and for me the biggest one is how it only have boring planets (seconded by my wish for more interactions, more things to do, more things to see). But of course there are plenty of examples, some people will say Start Wars or Dune first, popular movies with single environment planets, or Doctor Who even for the Series lovers, but books and movies are not the only ones abusing this single-environment-planet trope, we also have plenty of examples with games, and for me it is even worse with games because you can interact, often times you can go around and at least look at the facilities, landscape or even enjoy the view from a low orbit, but games like Mass Effect, No Man Sky, StarCraft, Halo, Destiny and some others makes the “enjoy” part difficult with their monotonous planets.
Sci-fi creators, please do better.
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