(1) PLAYING WITH REAL NUMBERS. Aaron tests the idea that EPH will not distort the results when there is no slate in a new post at Dreaming of Other Worlds. Find out what changed on the 2014 final Hugo ballot.
E Pluribus Hugo was passed largely in response to the results of the 2015 Hugo nomination process. I outlined the background leading up to this in my previous post about the 2016 E Pluribus Hugo Revised Hugo Finalists, and I’m not going to repeat myself here. Anyone who wants a summary of the Sad and Rabid Puppy campaigns, the responses from non-Puppy Hugo voters, and an outline of the mechanics of E Pluribus Hugo can go read about that there.
The E Pluribus Hugo system had several goals. One goal was to dampen the influence of bloc voting. A second goal was to create a system that presented a nominating voter with a means of voting that was substantially similar to the one that voter had under the old system. The third was to create a system that would return results that were as close to those that the old system did in a year in which there was no bloc voting. To test this third goal, the system was used on the 2014 Hugo ballots, which was a year in which there was a Sad Puppy campaign, but no slate in any meaningful sense, and therefore no real bloc voting….
(2) SUMMERTIME. Chapter 10 of T. Kingfisher’s Summer in Orcus has now been released.
When the witch Baba Yaga walks her house into the backyard, eleven-year-old Summer enters into a bargain for her heart’s desire. Her search will take her to the strange, surreal world of Orcus, where birds talk, women change their shape, and frogs sometimes grow on trees. But underneath the whimsy of Orcus lies a persistent darkness, and Summer finds herself hunted by the monstrous Houndbreaker, who serves the distant, mysterious Queen-in-Chains…
(3) RIDERS OF THE PURPLE PAGE. Max Florschutz enters the perpetual debate about “literary” vs. “genre” in “You Just Keep Pushing Me Away…” .
Granted, I could write a whole thing on how genre fiction can (and does) approach the tough questions, demands intelligent thought and reason, and present ideas (and when it comes down to it, most who disagree are either cherry picking their examples or of the mindset of “that doesn’t support the message and ideas I want,” which doesn’t help). I could talk about that, pull examples, etc. But I won’t. Not at this point.
No, instead, I’m going to tackle a different point. The idea that “literary” fiction is automatically intelligent and thought-provoking. Because this isn’t accurate. No, more accurate would be that it’s fiction that thinks it’s intelligent or thought provoking, written by someone who thinks they’re presenting something much more “intellectual” than it actually is. When it really isn’t … but they’re too “smart” to do the research to know otherwise.
… What’s sad about this is I could see myself enjoying more “literary” works. The writing is more tell, sure, and more purple, but sometimes that’s pretty good purple. Sometimes there’s some neat ideas buried in there.
But my issue is that they are buried in there. It’s like “literary” writers can’t be bothered to do the most basic of research. And that pushes me away. Back towards genre fiction, where, despite not being the “intelligent” fiction choice, the science is real, the facts are usually real (or pretty close), and even when I’m reading about fantasy kingdom of some kind, said kingdom is actually laid out like a real government and civilization would be. As opposed to the “literary” version, which comes off feeling like Disney-mythology in comparison.
It just keeps pushing me away. Especially with all the battles over how “literary” fiction is the “superior” fiction, or the more intelligent, or the more meaningful, etc. I just can’t take a story seriously that can’t grasp basic parts of life, like how a car works. Or a TV. Or science.
(4) ANOTHER MIDDLE-EARTH TALE ON WAY TO PRESS. “JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth love story to be published next year” reports The Guardian.
JRR Tolkien’s legend of the mortal man Beren and the immortal elf Lúthien – a story that meant so much to the Lord of the Rings author that the characters’ names are engraved on the headstone shared by him and his wife – is to be published next year.
The Middle-earth tale tells of the love between the mortal man and the immortal elf. Lúthien’s father, an Elvish lord, is against their relationship, and so gives Beren an impossible task to fulfil before the two can be married, said HarperCollins, which will publish Beren and Lúthien next May. The pair then go on to rob “the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, called Morgoth, the Black Enemy, of a Silmaril”, or jewel.
(5) PULITZER EXPANDS ELIGIBILITY. Crain’s New York Business reports print and online magazines are now eligible for Pulitzer Prizes in all journalism categories.
The Pulitzer Prize Board announced Wednesday that entries of work done in 2016 will be accepted beginning in December for the 2017 prizes.
The board says it made its decision after two years of experimentation.
New entry guidelines are posted at Pulitzer.org.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY VAMPIRE
- Born October 20, 1882 — Bela Lugosi.
(7) HORROR READING.Ellen Datlow’s photos of the “Children of Lovecraft Reading October 16, 2016” are on Flickr.
Laird Barron, John Langan, A. C. Wise, Siobhan Carroll, Richard Kadrey, and David Nickle all read wonderfully at the Lovecraft Bar on Avenue B in NYC’s east village.
(8) PLAYTIME. I got a kick from John Scalzi’s first line in one of his mallet-is-out warnings:
- Hey, two political posts in the same day! Can you tell I finished my book?
(9) TIME TO LEVEL UP YOUR ALIENS. Motherboard’s post “The Way We’ve Been Imagining Aliens Is All Wrong” sets us straight.
Why do we always picture aliens as distorted humans?
Science fiction has failed to creatively, or even accurately, imagine alien life, said British science writer Philip Ball in an article, “The Aeon Idea: Why our imagination for alien life is so impoverished.” Now Aeon, a digital ideas and culture magazine, just released a video called Stranger Aliens, adapted from Ball’s theory and narrated by Ball himself.
(10) DIVERSITY ON DISCOVERY. Otaku-kun at Haibane comments on the proposal: “A Muslim crew member on Star Trek: Discovery?”
I think including an explicit Muslim would be jarring since tehre is no other “real world” religion represented in Star Trek, at least for the Human society. It was Roddenberry’s world and he chose to eliminate religion from it. Adding a character who is explicitly Muslim complicates canon and introduces tension that undermines Star Trek’s appeal to all of humanity. Then you also need canon explanations for the status of Jews, Christians, Hindus, etc. This mess is exactly why religion was introduced to DS9 using the alien Bajoran society rather than picking one from our own.
The solution is to recognize that Islamophobia is not an intellectual reaction to a religion’s precepts, but rooted in racial and ethnic fears. Having a stand-in on the crew for a “Muslim-y” ethnic type would be great because that way when someone sees a Muslim on the street, they should be able to counter their knee-jerk stereotype by relating that person to this crewmember. Therefore, the ethnic choice of the actor is relevant to maximize that stereotype-defeating analogy. Which ethnicity works best for this purpose?
(11) WHO’S THE GEEZER? selenay articulates the cross-generational stresses affecting fanfic writers in “Regarding all the AO3 bashing” (AO3 = Archive of Our Own).
Us olds remember the old days. The days when you had to label all slash–even when it was just hand-holding–as NC17 and plaster it with warnings. The days when only certain archives accepted slash at all, and you could get your FFN account or LJ suspended if someone objected to your boy kissing fics, so everything was locked down under f-lock or posted to the adult slash-friendly archives with a thousand warning pop-ups. The days when RPF was never to be spoken of because almost no archive accepted it. The days when we all danced around carefully because at any moment, our favourite fics could be deleted and never seen again if a site advertiser threatened to withdraw funding….
Current fandom has splintered and seems to have broken into generational buckets. The youngest part of fandom is on Tumblr and Snapchat. The older part of fandom is on Tumblr a bit, but not much, and many of us have stepped a long way back from it because we’re made so unwelcome. We’re still here on LJ, DW, Twitter, and Imzy, where the youngs aren’t so much. Due to those divides, there isn’t that interaction and mutual learning, so the younger fanfolk don’t know the history. They don’t know why AO3 exists and why we’re so passionate about not censoring it. They’ve never had to creep around on the edges of fandom because they were slashers, or RPF-ers, or wrote explicit fics after FFN banned them.
The divide is also contributing to the feeling that anyone over thirty shouldn’t be fannish anymore, and I suspect that’s part of the AO3 wankery. There aren’t many people from that very young end of the fandom involved with the OTW or AO3, so it feels like the olds run it. We created it, we fundraised for it, we continue to work on it and we’re old, by their standards. We should have shuffled off to our graveyards or our adult lives or something.
Except we haven’t, because when we were the fandom babies, there were all these fans older than us who were still active and we learned we’ll never be too old for fandom. With the divide getting so sharp between the youngest and everyone else, they’re not getting that part of the fannish experience, either. They can’t imagine being thirty (or forty, or fifty), never mind being that age and still being in fandom.
You’ve also got the problem that Tumblr-style activism is very different from what we were doing five or ten years ago. It’s all about protecting young eyes not just from the content, but from knowing the content is even there. About removing it so it doesn’t need to be thought of. For them, “don’t like, don’t read” isn’t enough. They don’t want anyone to read it or see it or write it.
(12) A VISIT TO ANTIQUITY. James Davis Nicoll has posted his latest Young People Read Old SF, assigning them “Snowball Effect” by Katherine MacLean.
Although she won a Nebula Award for The Missing Man, Katherine MacLean is hardly a household name these days. Her most productive period ran from the 1950s to the 1970s. That Nebula was won in 1971; other honours (such as being a professional guest of honor at the very first WisCon in 1977) are almost all of a similar vintage. She was admired for her ability to combine character with plot, character being an element of fiction many of her contemporaries seemed willing to do without.
In her heyday, MacLean was one of the few high-profile women working in the field. In the specific context of these reviews, she is remarkable in a different way: the first author selected who is still with us: born in 1925, she is but 91. Her birthday is January 22: join me in raising a glass to this grand figure of science fiction.
(13) LARPING FOR PEACE. In a piece on Vimeo called “Bjarke Pedersen: Becoming the Story,” Danish LARPer Bjarke Pedersen explains what “Nordic LARP” is and how in Scandinavia, LARPers work together to come up with stories they wouldn’t be able to create on their own. Pedersen’s video was presented at the Future of Storytelling conference held in New York City two weeks ago.
As the Creative Director of Odyssé and one of the world’s experts on LARPing, Bjarke Pedersen has spent many years exploring the power of this collaborative form of storytelling. He’s observed that by getting a chance to engage with different characters, LARPers are also able to learn more about themselves. LARPing is also particularly powerful for the ways in which it relies on building trust among people. Many individuals are able to tell their own stories within a given framework, but it is the larger output of so many different stories being told at the same time that makes LARPing so unique and powerful.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Aziz Poonawalla, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Josh Jasper.]
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AUGH THERE IS A MISSING PERIOD.
I mean, inexplicably your version is missing a period while mine is not. Anymore.
James Davis Nicoll: So do you get a drink on the house when you correct your own blog?
My inability to see my own typos is quite vexing.
Ticky
E Pixebus Scrollum
I will read.
Did I miss yesterday’s scroll?
(5) PULITZER EXPANDS ELIGIBILITY
If this had happened a couple of years earlier, “The Compleat Litter of Puppy Roundup Titles” would have been a shoe-in.
I enjoyed this week’s Tor.com story, “Everything that Isn’t Winter” by Margaret Killjoy a whole lot. It’s a surprisingly touching gay love story in a post-apocalyptic world. Oh yes, and there’s tea. Because everything is better with tea.
Trigger warning for some violence.
My inability to see my own typos is quite vexing.
At least you didn’t leave out half a phrase like I did.
I mean, like Glyer did when he quoted my post. Right. That’s what happened.
tickin’ the box
@Bruce Baugh (I think), I got an Acceptance review up on Goodreads in addition to my mini-review in yesterday’s scroll. I really enjoyed it and thought it was a satisfying if sad ending.
My TBR is starting to overwhelm. I keep looking at 2016 novels and adding them to my queue/seeing if they’re at the local library. The next step is actually reading them. On deck: Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt.
James Davis Nicoll: inexplicably your version is missing a period while mine is not. Anymore.
Aaron: I mean, like Glyer did when he quoted my post. Right. That’s what happened.
File 770
making bloggers look bad by re-posting their typographical mistakes, since 2008
]tricky[
Okay, I have to admit that some of the Pixel Scroll titles make me go “meh” — but I laughed for about 5 minutes upon seeing today’s title.
I eagerly await the release of “Pounded in the Butt by File770’s Parody of My e-Book Titles”.
(1) Hmm, ties seem to be the main cause of changes again.
(1) Re-warmed pieces from Dave McCarty’s and Jamison Quinn’s EPH report for 2015 and 2014.
It’s not even that EPH is really more tie-aversive than the old system. (Technically, the current rules as written are more tie-aversive, but that’s because there now is an extra tie-breaking step in the rules, not EPH the algorithm.) EPH runs on different principles than FPTP that was used earlier. Instead of trying to select the works with the strongest support (ie nominators) it seeks to select a set of works that enjoy the most widespread support in the electorate.
(I can recommend my own Grokking E Pluribus Hugo until Nicolas Whyte gets a proper walkthrough done, hopefully based on the 1980 Timewarp project.)
(3) Florschutz reads “literary” books as if they were science fiction, and then complains that they are poor science fiction and poorly researched. Without considering the types of story they want to tell.
I believe I can safely posit that if approached as mysteries or as romances, most sf stories would fall flat on their faces too.
I myself is interested in the interaction between literary fiction and the genres, and consider literary fiction as one genre in itself, but one with the privileges of not being considered a genre, i.e. it’s the default, and another is that it has an institutional support structure that the readers of the genres have to build and support themselves. Literary fiction have the Nobel prize; science fiction have the Hugos. Literary fiction have Yale Review, science fiction had the fanzines. But (3) just makes the common sneer from literary fiction about poor characterisation and prose against science fiction in the other direction.
(11) This old geezer (for small values of old geezer) remembers Usenet and fanzines. Stop complaining that you’re old geezers!
Seriously, all this talk about “generations” just makes it harder to get a real dialogue between different ages and interest going. I just see some newer members of the greater fannish ecosystem having, due to eminently sensible reasons, a different outlook and set of priorities than some older members of the greater fannish ecosystem.
I also don’t see any links or references to the actual discussions on tumblr, just complaints about complaints on tumblr.
Karl-Johan Norén: I just see some newer members of the greater fannish ecosystem having, due to eminently sensible reasons, a different outlook and set of priorities than some older members of the greater fannish ecosystem.
I agree that dialogue is important. But what I see is not that the older fans are objecting to the younger fans’ outlook and priorities, but to the fact that the younger fans wish to impose their outlook and priorities on everyone else. And I think that’s a fair objection to make.
RE (9) TIME TO LEVEL UP YOUR ALIENS.
Wow, if only someone had previously realized that aliens can be really alien! Like, say, some really racist guy back in the 1920s might have written stories about aliens that are beyond our very ability to comprehend, and started a whole genre, which eventually spawned one of the best RPGs ever.
But no, I’m sure some guy whose entire knowledge of science fiction seems to be based on a few TV shows can educate us all on just how alien aliens might be. I mean, gosh, he’s a real scientist, and there certainly haven’t been any of those involved with science fiction before! Why, if enough people listen to him, maybe someone, someone will write a book about creatures living on the surface of a neutron star. And maybe, eventually, there’ll be enough examples of energy beings and other really alien aliens that TV Tropes can have a whole page about bizarre alien biology! Wouldn’t that be cool? I hope it happens soon!
(To be fair, Ball’s actual article isn’t as bad or as clueless as the Motherboard writeup suggests. It’s actually more a criticism of SETI for being overly influenced by mundane SF ideas than of SF itself.)
@JJ: Well, that’s what the “older fans” say about “younger fans”. Sadly, I have no idea what the “younger fans” say, just what the “older fans” say the “younger fans” say.
Which means that the “older fans” are not in dialogue, but simply are making complaints and acts as gatekeepers.
I am all for knowledge of history and knowing the reasons for why we ended up where we are, or for why a group takes the stances it does. But far too often it’s used as a club to beat new people on why things should remain as they are and that you need to pass our fannish knowledge test if you want to be here.
9) Has this guy heard of E.E. “Doc” Smith? Olaf Stapledon? Stanislaw Lem? To name but three.
Or is his concept of everyone else’s concept of “aliens” shaped, perhaps, by visual media – film and TV – where, well, aliens do tend to look like distorted humans, on account of there are very few actors who would look convincing as a Velantian or a Palainian or a sentient nebula or a world-spanning intelligent ocean?
@JJ: I shall add another cloud to yell at: not only do they want to impose their own views on everyone else, they do so from a position of tremendous ignorance about what it is oldsters do (and why). Which often leads to them imposing stuff we’ve been doing/saying for decades (for reasons so good most are forgotten), and doing so badly (because: reasons forgotten).
Cultural traditions can and should change to adapt their relevance to new generations, but it should be done with some familiarity of the hows and whys. (Puppies and the Hugos are a great example of traditions – good ones – being trampled through ignorance)
Same with Rocky, for example: Lighting a candle or a lighter (making FIRE!) during Light in the Darkness was a thing for early Rocky fans. Then fire marshalls intervened. Now people hold up phones. They may think they’re doing traditional audience response, but really, what all of them should be thinking is “this ought to be a lighter or a candle, I’m pissed because I have to follow rules at an event that is supposed to flaunt convention, this is really stupid”
No, they shouldn’t. They are there to have fun, not to get pissed off. If that is how they want to think, they should stay home instead of getting angry because they aren’t allowed to risk others lives.
(11) I poked around AO3 a few years ago and determined that it catered to the people who apparently walked out of the first Avengers movie saying “Wouldn’t it be great if Tony and Steve were having hot gay sex?” (Having read the link provided, I’m delighted to have my biases confirmed.)
More seriously, I find the idea of young fans wanting to protest the content of AO3 to be confusing–isn’t it old people (like me) who are supposed to be yelling “But think of the children!”?
Re Florshutz: … but copper does corrode
Best Pixel Scroll title ever.
Another Tolkien book I can ignore.
There’s a problem in that “Islam” has as many diversifications as “Christianity”.
Copper corrodes: it turns green and crumbles.
Florshutz is somebody who thinks people like Ancillary Justice because it’s ‘literary’. Yeah, no.
Also, he should probably go and read some more history if he thinks that the typical genre fantasy kingdom is in any way realistic.
@Karl-Johan Norén
The older fans in those discussions aren’t complaining about being old; they’re responding–somewhat tongue-in-cheek–to the Logan’s Run-esque attitudes expressed in Tumblr posts like these:
“sorry to tell you, but the majority of people in fandom are CHILDREN, not old crusty fucks like you, so yknow. if anyone should fuck off and go live in their own secluded corner, it’s you all
“who do you think is the main audience of fanworks? 25-30yo people? nah. fandom on sites like tumblr and ao3 is mainly for teenagers and people in their early twentie [sic]” (Source.)
and
“honestly like. i think once u reach ur early-mid twenties u really have to take a step back and evaluate your position in fandom, given that so much of it is full of kids… go schedule a bridge game or a pottery class or whatever, get off the internet and be around real people your own age for a while.” (Source.)
Happy Birthday Princess Leia: Carrie Fisher turns 60 today.
Yes, copper does corrode, but it doesn’t typically do so in a way that a device with copper wires will stop working in 6 years. I have many 7+ year old devices that use electricity.
Genre fiction breaks these all the time, but at least it explains it. You want copper to corrode? There’s probably a story in genre fiction for that … but it’ll have the explanation be nanites. Not just “That’s science?” with no research done.
See Stephen Gould, 7th Sigma. A really good YA novel.
3) Well, I read Florschutz’s piece, and my own opinions remain unchanged: there are good books and there are bad books, and neither “literary” nor “genre” fiction has a monopoly on either.
I’m uncertain of Florschutz’s virtues as a critic, but there is one thing I am quite certain about – I do not want him rewiring my house.
@Steve Wright: …there are very few actors who would look convincing as a Velantian or a Palainian or a sentient nebula or a world-spanning intelligent ocean
Clearly, someone’s never seen my headshots.
Beren and Luthien
Probably better than File 770: Home of missed periods.
@Sirignano: Copper corrodes: it turns green and crumbles. Green yes, crumbly no. It’s used for roofing because the layer of corrosion passivates, preventing the rest of the sheet from corroding.
Or at least it \was/ used for roofing. I remember trying to play softball at MIT just after Kresge Auditorium was reroofed (early 1980’s); whoever was unfortunate enough to be facing the building (in the year or so before it oxidized) was likely to be blinded by the roof reflecting the sun. (The roof is a section of a sphere, so the reflection was a hazard for some hours.) OTOH, the 1990’s development in Lechmere (downstream from MIT) used plastic dyed so it allegedly looked like oxidized copper; it was ugly — too blue, too bright, too uniform.
Egregiously bad science does not respect arbitrarily drawn literary/genre fiction boundaries.
Personally I’m not normally convinced by the rigorous scientific reasoning of “because nanotechnology” but I can still enjoy a story that relies on it, or other forms of handwavium.
Tumblr summed up.
@Ceev: welp, if that’s what they’re seeing in fandom, they’re not in fandom. They’re at some gate show designed to suck dollars out of pockets, so in that respect they aren’t wrong.
The thing I see there though is this: My Fandom was all about being open to anyone; their fandom is reserved for “kids”. That ain’t fandom.
@Hampus: no, they shouldn’t be “angry”, but they should be pissed that their opportunity to draw outside the lines has been curtailed by convention. It’s all about stepping over the line, flipping the bird to the powers that be, aiming to misbehave. Holding up a cell phone is a gesture of surrender.
Went to read “Everything That Isn’t Winter” and dropped it at the “you should sleep with my boyfriend” line.
It may be a touching love story but it ain’t gay.
Granted, I’m irritable this morning already but that’s a pet peeve of mine.
A few months back, The New Yorker had an interesting article about the signature green color of the Statue of Liberty and that of course is from copper which has oxidized.
steve davidson, there’s aiming to misbehave, and then there’s endangering others. In a situation with newspapers over heads, open flames can be… problematic. I wouldn’t trust the squirtguns to put out a conflagration.
Yes, my first experiences of RHPS used lighters. A few years later, however, everyone, much more sensibly, used small flashlights. The point is, it’s a LIGHT. How you get the light is irrelevant.
<edit> Should this be in the Rocky Horror thread….?
Re insufficiently alien aliens.
This brought to mind a TV Guide review of ALF by Isaac Asimov. Some googling got me the title (ALF, You’ve Got Some Explaining to Do), the issue (August 15, 1987), images of the cover, and sites where I could buy a copy of the issue, but no text of the article! Has Google failed me, or just my google-fu? Anyone have a copy of the text of the Asimov article?
I read “Everything That Isn’t Winter” yesterday and enjoyed it a great deal. The gender of the narrator wasn’t obvious to me, but I assume Aiden is a male name in the story.
@Steve Davidson
Most of us have adjusted to the change from lighters to phones in multiple venues because change is part of life and dealing with it is adulting.
Holding up a cell phone is a gesture of surrender.
That is the stupidest thing I have read this week, and I read the transcript of Trump’s statements at the recent Presidential debate.
all about stepping over the line, flipping the bird to the powers that be, aiming to misbehave
It gets complicated when older authority figures, like you, expect them to break the rules. Then the best way to rebel is to follow the rules. Possibly followed up by writing disapproving, moralistic tracks on how the past generation had no regard for safety:-)
In short science fiction, I do occasionally see sophisticated stories with terrible science, and I give them two stars (for inability to sustain suspension of disbelief). The commonest reason for this is failure to understand basic celestial mechanics. E.g. thinking that if a rocket stops firing, the space ship will immediately stop moving, or that if a spaceship gets too close to a planet it fill fall into its gravity well or having people suffocate for lack of nitrogen.
In my view, if you’re going to write SF, you should do your homework. Failure to do this amounts to disrespecting the audience. Not all reviewers agree with this, of course.
That said, I’d be surprised if this is a problem with more than about 5% of the stories I review or (say) 10% of all SF stories. (Half are fantasy.) Yes, it’s annoying when it happens (editors should reject these) but it’s not really an epidemic.
I do exclude stories where the counterfactual is part of the what-if. “What if copper started to corrode like iron does?” Even if no one knew why, that could make for an interesting story. For that matter, the arrangement of stars in Asimov’s “Nightfall” is impossible, but it makes the story go. These are deliberate, though; they’re not blunders.
I can also forgive one or two blunders. It’s a steady stream of them that (for me, at least) ruins a story.
Apropos of nothing on the thread, (a Meredith Moment) Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station is on sale at Amazon for $1.99. It’s from this year. I’ve read nothing by Tidhar, but this looks like it could be good.
Here’s a sea slug that looks a lot more alien than the usual alien in SF stories. Perhaps we should just accept that most aliens are Ruritanian people. 🙂
Absolutely. You should only be allowed to “get away” with breaking the rules if you know the rules that you are breaking. I have very little respect for writers who get basic physics and science wrong for no other reason that than they haven’t bothered to check to see if it is right.
One thing that I always notice/am annoyed by is how–even when trying to create non-human aliens–there is the tendency to cluster together animal traits that have no need whatsoever to be clustered together other than random evolutionary chance. For instance, if an alien is depicted as having scales, it is a good bet that it will also have slit pupils, a forked tongue, and possibly talk with a hiss. Or if it has feathers, it will likely have a beak and lay eggs. You get that especially often in media tie-in fiction, where creativity goes to die.