Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink

Some shows love playing genre conventions, a Fantasy Kitchen Sink will have everything in the mythological handbook and then some, Trope Overdosed works will keep adding tropes so long as they run, and then there are even shows that make new tropes.

These are not those shows. (Or can they be?)

A Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink is for all intents and purposes the playground of Science Fiction Tropes and everything associated with them. Have an Artificial Intelligence construct able to run the Cool Starship? It makes you coffee in the morning. Humongous Mecha? You walked by several on the way to work. Faster-Than-Light Travel? Totally mastered to the point where even Joe Penniless can get a ride to the stars. Laser and particle beams as weapons? Everybody and their dog has one. The list of possible areas seems to be endless.

A good way to tell if a work is a Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink, is ask three questions. Is it in the Sci-Fi genre? Is it softer than reality by a wide margin according to the scale? Does it use all or much of the stuff in the genre of Sci-Fi and not Hang A Lampshade on it? Answer yes to all three and you likely are dealing with a Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink.

Popular in Space Opera. Also popular in Mega Crossover fanfic. Naturally compare Fantasy Kitchen Sink; when both sinks are combined, it becomes Science Fantasy. See also Standard Sci Fi Setting, a particularly popular instance of Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Film 

    Literature 

    Live-Action TV 
  • Doctor Who, by virtue of being an extreme Long Runner with a massive expanded universe, ranges through the entirety of time and space. After 50+ years of stories, that's a lot of sci-fi ideas - you've got high-tech military forces battling witches and ancient astral demons, mixed in with genocidal robots and sentient nanoswarms.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Warhammer 40,000 - sometimes it is like each army is there to be a representative of a different sort of science fiction. Your Space Marines are your, unsurprisingly, post-Heinleinian Space Marines infused with knights and religious fervor, the Imperium fields big BattleTech-style mechs, the Imperial Guard are essentially Star Wars' stormtroopers (which are even referenced by name!) with several different flavors, ranging from World War I trench warfare (the Death Korps of Krieg) to Vietnam-style survivalists (Catachans), Tyranids are books are about Bug War, Tau are animesque mecha and firepower and The Federation, Eldar are Clark's Third Law Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that lean heavily towards ninja-style weapons (everything they fire are shurikens), rely on psychic powers, and take the traditional Japanese leaning, spaceship battles feel like they come out of the Honor Harrington universe, Necrons are Terminator and so on. If anybody want to write about or parody a certain type of science fiction, then they can.
  • Traveller is the first RPG to truly mix every science fiction trope into one setting. The subgenre can change depending on where your character is located in the galaxy. If they're constantly traveling through space by ship, it's a Space Opera (which is what the game was originally advertised as). If your character is stranded on a primitive world, far away from civilized space, it's a Planetary Romance. If you're on a high-tech planet where everything is connected to the internet, it becomes Cyberpunk. When you go out into the Spinward territories, you're in a Space Western. Even a Post-Apocalyptic setting is possible if it's set between the Second and Third Imperium eras.
  • Trinity was launched as one of these as well. You want Cyberpunk? America's corporate-owned and full of technopaths. You want wasteland? Paris and a huge chunk of the surrounding land got nuked. You want Space Opera? Mankind's made first contact and is currently involved in political dealings with at least three different species. You want Psychic Powers? What flavor do you want them in?
  • Infinity is much the same - Cyberpunk tropes happily contained in PanOceania's warring hypercorps and corporate troops alongside Space Knights, European troopers in armor heavily inspired by Appleseed's E-SWAT, and soldiers that are heavily based on the film version of Starship Troopers (down to the "Would you like to know more?" Catch-Phrase), space Samurai, ninja, and sprawling animeesque and East Asian sci-fi in Yu Jing, a Used Future in the Ariadnans (who are mostly military-fiction, unchanged 20th/21st century units wielding rifles that wouldn't be out of place in a modern setting) and the Nomads (who experiment with bioengineering, giving us Space Catgirls and put the punk in cyberpunk with anarchist sci-fi tropes and punk-inspired designs, with futuristic Roller Derby gals as a unit), Dune-esque Haqqislam units who literally control the Spice flow, Halo-esque Morats hired by an insane conglomerate of AIs, bio-tech, organic Tohaa - all watched by a Tron Lines-and-Apple-esque faction, ALEPH, who attempt to bring order to the human factions. A nanoswarm devastated America, leaving the rest of it a Mad Max-esque apocalypse wasteland, while bozusoku fight cops on the neon-drenched streets of Yu Jing.

    Video Games 

    Webcomics 
  • Axe Cop uses a wide variety of sci-fi tropes in creative (and frequently ridiculous) ways.

    Western Animation 


Alternative Title(s): Science Fiction Kitchen Sink

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiKitchenSink
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiKitchenSink
tvtropes.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-51
113767
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:DDKGJFTQMA5M7KGD5W454GJB3MR2TKSZ
<urn:uuid:f7ebd503-3f6a-4fb2-9822-1a055fc06e97>
2017-12-13T00:05:36Z
209.15.34.67
text/html
sha1:XSFEGNCN6ZL4QJHVPKA6V5D6HRCIJVSH
<urn:uuid:93217f22-3cc7-45bd-8cbf-1156f859433b>
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiKitchenSink
length
response
<urn:uuid:5f774082-1766-427a-8a5f-7605b73bb79b>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-156-45-70.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-51
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for December 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf