Villains are hard, Nazis are easy. Any writer who uses Nazis is too lazy to be a good writer.
A writer should use his experience and his imagination to develop characters. This is one of the ways to make truly believable characters and a believable character is the way to bring a reader or viewer into a story line. We must trust the writer to makes characters which can be recognized and understood by the readers. Developing characters is one of the three or four things that make writing hard, but good characters are one of the three or four things that make fiction good.
A writer who includes World War II Nazis in his story has given up trying to make a real character and has opted for the easy villain. In real life we are unlikely to meet Hitler and even if we did 50 years of justified vilification has removed any sense of whatever character and personality the man may have had. I can't begin to understand the mental illness which ruled the man and 50 years of well developed opinions prevent us from treating the madman as a real character. To put Hitler or a brown shirt or an SS officer in your story is pure laziness on your part. It is harder to put a realistic character, similar to someone you might normally meet, into your story and then do the work of character development to show that he is the villain.
In television there is pressure to save money and every studio has access to SS officer uniforms that are much cheaper than special effects or custom makeup. TV will always have Nazi episodes and depression episodes and knights of the round table episodes as long as the costume department has the producer's ear.
Corollary laws:
A. No serial murderers - who understands serial murderers? I don't and
the reader can't, so don't be lazy.
B. No Multiple personality disorders or other rare and stupid ways to
avoid real characters.
C. Jesus is not a good character for your story. Don't create and then
crucify alien saviors.
D. God should not appear in your stories as a character. No old men in
sheets or voices from the clouds, please. This doesn't mean that God or religion
can't be an influence on a character, but God himself would probably rather
avoid appearing in cheap science fiction movies (at least ones with William
Shatner.)
E. Prostitutes with Hearts of Gold are best if used sparingly. Real
prostitutes are drug addicts with major moral, ethical and hygiene
problems.
F. Don't ever use someone you know for a character, and just change their
name. Real people are very complex and can not to be captured in the short time it
takes to read a story or watch an episode on TV. If the person does recognize
themselves it will be because of characteristic that you have captured, but it
will be an injustice because of all of the qualities you have misunderstood or
left out. You will insult people and loose friends and probably get sued. Make
sure that any resemblance to persons living or dead is nothing more than coincidence.
In other words make sure your character has a mustache! You can always say to
your friend "You're crazy! It can't be you, you're clean shaven".
Writers who create humanoid aliens which look like us and speak using vocal chords are very lazy writers.
It is likely that we will meet aliens some day. It is unlikely that they will be anything like us. We can speculate that aliens may be bipedal and have two arms and a head. This is based on the fact that the dolphin looks like a fish even though it is much more closely related to a dog. They will almost certainly not have five fingers and toes. They may not have much of a recognizable face. They may communicate via sound, but it is unlikely that the sounds they make will be recognizable as language. The idea of words and sentences may be as alien as they are.
The main thing to avoid in creating humanoid aliens is that the females (if indeed they are bisexual) will not have breasts. I like to think, as I watch the lunch hour parade in front of my building, that breasts are a unique treasure of earth. If they don't have breasts they won't have lips (the reason we have lips is to enable suckling).
When postulating an alien for a story ask the following questions:
A. What is the environment that evolved the alien? What kind of air (or
lack)? What gravity? What temperature?
B. What size is the alien. Microscopic? As Big as a Planet?
C. How do they communicate? Vocal chords (probably rare)? Radio? Visual signs or
cues? Touch?
D. Do they have emotions? It is likely that emotions may promote survival, but
which ones? Love may be a requirement for a species to develop space travel as knowledge
must be taught and teachers don't teach because of the good pay.
E. Does Hive mentality or Distributed Intelligence contribute to individuality.
F. What are their senses? Can they see,
smell, touch, hear, taste? What is the order of importance?
If your alien has 2 arms, 2 legs and a head, is it really a man in a rubber alien suit?
As far as motivations go, we will have lots of trouble getting into an aliens head. What makes them tick? What motivates them? This is the challenge that a writer has. You can be sure that if an alien experiences greed, envy, hatred or fear that it will manifest differently and a writer had better prove to me that the alien is not a human in a rubber suit.
You must make sure that any alien you meet is not a force of nature to be overcome (like the movie "Alien" and all the early short stories of A. E. Van Vogt). You must make any alien you meet a character. You have the obligation to flesh out your alien character (even if it has no flesh) so that the reader can understand the alien's viewpoint. An alien must be aware of its own motives however weird. An alien character must act out of motivations that a reader can understand. We cannot accept aliens that do not have understandable motivations. (see no Nazis Law.)
Intelligence requires reflection. Make sure your alien thinks about what it is doing and has a reason for everything that it does. My cat is reflective. It plans and then it acts, but its motivations are alien to me. This does not mean that I can't figure out what motivates my cat. (You guessed it. The only reason my cat does anything is to get more tuna fish).
Corollary laws:
A. You will never meet an alien who speaks English like a native.
B. Aliens just like us, but with little squiggles on their noses only appear in
low budget TV shows.
C. We will never be able to have sex with aliens using the missionary position.
D. Aliens as far as they have personalities will be more likely to be aggressive
and pushy. There are not likely to be kindly, friendly and caring aliens because
they would not have the drive to explore space. (in this way they will be more
like us.)
E. Real aliens don't act anything like you'd expect them to. For instance, they
will not be Nazis.
You can't take the science out of Science Fiction. There is a quote somewhere which sort of goes "Advanced science will be indistinguishable from magic". This is so much crap. Magic means that there is no science. I am of the opinion that that if you can't understand first year college calculus and high school physics then you should not be writing science fiction. (It is not necessary that you actually passed these subjects. As a teacher I understand that passing a subject and understanding it are two separate things. Students pass who don't understand and the contra-positive.)
Science must be a part of science fiction. Your story must contain some aspect where science takes part. It can be future or advanced or primitive science, but it must be part of the story. Stories which take place on other planets or in space are almost always science fiction stories (except when you wind up on Barsoom by force of personality - then it might be fantasy.) The Pern novels are part SF and part fantasy. Some of them have no science whatsoever and are pure fantasy. They are based on an SF premise, but they if science does not play a part in the current plot it is not SF. Most future post holocaust stories don't have any science content and should be classified as fantasy. Both the Pern Novels and Alas Babylon are considered SF, though, if only because they are related so closely to SF.
Magical powers like telepathy are not really scientific. I don't care what studies you quote to me, there are no psi powers on earth. There is no impartially documented case of telekinesis, teleportation, clairvoyance or contact with the dead. These things don't belong in science fiction. Keep them in fantasy stories where there is no expectation of believability. A science fiction story needs to be scientifically plausible. There must be an element which leads the reader to think, "Yes, this might be possible".
The famous Western Writer, Louis Lamour, has an incredibly pointed introduction in one of his books where he describes the Western Landscape as an active character in a Western Novel. Westerns are not so much stories that take place in a certain place and time as stories about how human beings cope with the land. The desert and mountains and winters and summers all play an important part in Louis Lamour stories. It not enough that the stories take place in the West. His stories cannot succeed without some characteristic of the land playing an important role.
Just as the Western Landscape must be a kind of character in a Western or the sea is a major force in one of the Hornblower novels, so must Science be a character in a Science Fiction Story.
Raktajino is coffee. By giving it a Klingon name it sort of appears alien, but everyone drinks it like coffee. It looks like coffee. It is coffee. Don't think that by making cows into Dvigids and Horses into Pytkos that you are not writing a western. Pistols should not be a ray gun unless the difference between a pistol and a ray gun is important to your plot. You are writing about the future or an alien culture, don't make it full of aliases for things that belong in our time on earth - that's just lazy.
You can't make a western into SF by changing Texas to Alderan 7. You can't make humans into aliens by changing their appearance. A murder mystery set on a space station is just a murder mystery. A science fiction story must rely on the science as much as the fiction.
Having your hero die at the end is the worst possible kind of story. Your hero has to live. The rule for short fiction and movies is that you must have a sympathetic character who goes through a "sea change" and becomes a new person. Stories are only interesting if there is a character who becomes a better or worse person because of the experiences in the story. If this doesn't happen then the story is a joke, an anecdote, a flat description or (yuck) a mood piece.
You really need two characters to make a story. A longer story requires a third character. There must be the protagonist or hero. This is the guy (or gal) that the story is about. There must be someone who resists of complicates the change that the protagonist is going to go through. This is the foil or the bad guy or the love interest. There should also be a third party that triggers the change. It is best to have a third party do this because the two main characters should be in some kind of stressful situation of which the outcome is in doubt. The third party is the catalyst that causes the stress to suddenly reach a peak and then collapse into the resolution of the story. The only time this law is broken is in "man against Nature" stories where the struggle is against the sea or space or a mountain as well as an internal struggle in the main character. The third party in that case can be a force of nature and the villain can be an aspect of the protagonist.
I hate stories that are told "blind" - without descriptions of people and places. To fix this try to get all five senses into a story. Plots are meaningless without a little description. Be careful to give a short physical description of each character and each location. Don't forget to describe the narrator if the story is told in first person. Don't forget to have each character actually say something (you know, quoted dialog). Each page should have characters saying something. I will skip pages without dialog. I will skip pages with long explanations and no action. I will skip pages with long internal discussions of motives. Stop writing and show me something.
I love "Lord of the Rings" and I have read it over 100 times easily since 1968 when I first picked up the old Ace version. I liked "The Last Unicorn" and I liked the Narnia books, in fact "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" is on my top ten list. I like good fantasy. I like good sword and sorcery. BUT I WILL NEVER BUY A BOOK WITH A UNICORN ON THE COVER!!!!!!! It seems a few fantasy writers got their start playing D&D and recording the stupid plots in a book. For some reason this stuff is popular.
Using elements from popular mythology in a story shows a lack of creativity. The idea of unicorns, elves and dwarves, sorcerers and wizards comes down to us filtered by writers far better than we can ever be from very old stories that are dark and brooding and reflect bad times in the caves and lodges of the youth of mankind. If we use them, we assume knowledge of these tales (which it is not likely that you have) and attaches to the story the baggage stolen from others. They are not new or interesting. All the writer is doing is rearranging the plots of works that may be good, but are surely one of a kind. The writer is saving time by not having to describe a new type of being and can stereotype a character in a couple of words by calling him "A dark elf" or "An evil wizard". This is a variation on the No Nazis Law.
Star Trek and Star Wars are worlds unto themselves. They are beyond judgment and criticism. It doesn't matter how bad any individual scene or episode is, on the whole the worst Star Trek episode is better than anything else on television. But don't ever think that Star Trek and Star Wars are good Science Fiction. Rarely they have good moments where they approach good SF, but much more than 90% of it is crap. Do not bring elements of ST and SW into your short story. Don't use Phasers, teleporters, droids, Klingons, Wookies,the prime directive and especially never bring "The Force" into your story. This includes renaming things. The technology, philosophies and characters of ST and SW are so easily recognized that these elements, no matter how well disguised will instantly be recognized as being a bad imitation.
Non-real sequences are always disappointing. You can put anything into a dream. You can break any rule of reality in a dream. You can never have the line: "And then she woke up and realized it was just a dream" in your story. This is the worst kind of laziness. The only time you can have a dream is to show that a person didn't sleep well or to reveal (briefly) a person's own inner feelings, usually reservations, about a situation. A dream can be used in psychological context, but it cannot reveal facts that are part of plot beyond this. You could have a primitive person believe a dream, but in no instance can a part of you plot occur inside a dream. Nothing can be resolved by a dream sequence. Leave them out and your story will be much better.
This includes "Holo-decks" and virtual reality. When there are no rules to follow than the context of your story turns to mush. If you use VR as a story element, it's limitations and rules must be as clearly defined as any real world.
Never put beings into you stories who are so far superior to men that we cannot understand their motives or we cannot overcome their will or we cannot meet them face to face in a fair fight. It is not interesting that there is a being out there who can simply step on us like an ant.
In order for there to be interaction, or conflict, the protagonist has to have at least a chance of success. He has to out fight or out smart or out luck or out something in order to make an interesting plot resolution. Avoiding the superman is not real interesting. If you can avoid him, he may not be so super. All villains have to have a fault - the best, of course, is the time honored greek hubris. This fault is the best for the protagonist and the best for the villain and it helps if the pretty girl brought along by mistake has a little as well.
The hero's cause can look hopeless but we expect that. It is always interesting to see how someone gets out of a sticky situation, but it's no fun when the cause absolutely is hopeless.