What are your favorite science fiction tropes?
I keep coming across lists of things readers don’t like. What about the elements which make the story work for you?
Maybe it’s FTL travel, hard limits to space flight, psychic cats, spaceships going broadsides with each other with dog fights between fighters, tech running amok, societal upheaval because of an invention, cyborgs and robots trying to fit in, aliens with ambiguous motives, first contact with said aliens, miscommunication causing a war with even more aliens, or hot dog spaceship pilots who shoot first and fly a ship held together with duct tape.
Perhaps it’s the tropes which span genres, like the found family, or the gang of misfits coming together to beat the big bad.
If you don’t have a trope which draws you, I’d like to know that too.
Often when we dislike a trope, it’s because it’s handled in a cliché manner. The secret sauce is when an author creates something which is the same, but different.
So what works for you? Please let me know in the comments!
The Capricious Narrator 
Here are four that I can’t seem to get enough of: 1) Ancient aliens (maybe they went extinct a million years ago, but now our spaceship crew must investigate the remnants of the lost alien civilization). 2) Time travel stories that do not degenerate into some endless time travel war. 3) Stories that involve duplicating people, by cloning, by matter transmitters or by copying a person’s mind pattern into an artificial life substrate. 4) Societies that are similar to what we now have on Earth, but altered to make room for some form of telepathic communication.
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I love a good “learn what happened to an extinct alien species’ story. Did you ever read Starfarers by Poul Anderson?
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No, I have not, but I’m amused by this description from Kirkus reviews: “An episodic, disconcerting mix of mind-boggling ideas, thrilling storytelling, dull padding, and characters-by-numbers, set forth in Anderson’s patented outlandish, antique prose: probably his best-ever full-length outing.”
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