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? 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
Anime & Manga
- One Piece has a Mad Scientist with a specialization in chemistry, cloning, time travel, cyborgs, robots, lazers, and more.
Film
- Star Wars is a kitchen sink of Military Science Fiction, Space Opera and High Fantasy tropes. Thousands of different races including several vampires, space velociraptors, insect hive minds, Energy Beings that might as well be ghosts, and three different zombie types. Everything from massive ship-to-ship battles, to space fighters, to Humongous Mecha. Hacking (called slicing) is on, AI and robots galore, there's time travel (albeit by accident), FTL, and so on.
- The Godzilla movies increasingly became this especially into the Heisei series, featuring aliens, space travel, giant robots, androids, time travel, and various other Sci-Fi shenanigans.
Literature
- Spectral Shadows could qualify for this. There's a Mad Scientist, a world in a time that takes place After the End, there's Time Travel, Funny Animals that evolved from genetic slag due to weaponized acid rain, there's an intergalactic empire of Space Pirates, android funny animals, a a virtual reality RPG where one can learn powers at the expense of feeling any and all pain, world warping powers, a space ship that can travel time and space, humongous mechas, and more.
- In the universe of Iain M. Banks's hyper-advanced people, The Culture, there's everything from dystopian ultra-capitalist planets, small debauched backwaters, "Sublimed" civilisations living in entire other dimensions, neglectful precursors, Proud Warrior Races, post-singularity communist civs...well, you get the idea. The fact that this is just a very incomplete list of some of the civilisation types should tip you off to the fact that this series mixes-and-matches an awful lot of sci-fi tropes. Tech levels vary right alongside the civilisations, although we rarely see a world a great deal less developed than present day Earth. Expect to see Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale stunningly averted, in both range and size of ships, drones, space battles, androids, sentient space-suits, conspiracies and counter-conspiracies.
- Perry Rhodan is running for over 50 years now and did start with The Space Race and then features things like Ancient Astronauts, Sufficiently Advanced Alien, Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, The Battlestar, Cosmic Chess Game, Lensman Arms Race, Order Versus Chaos, and and ... and we have not nearly covered everything in the first one hundred books.
- In Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate, there are cyborg dragons, Technoknights, computers, and nukes, oh my!
- The Captain Underpants books are a comedic example, featuring Superhumans, Mad Scientists, Robots, Time Travel, A Mirror Universe, Space Aliens, Powered Armor and Humongous Mecha.
Live-Action TV
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has become this, with androids, ancient aliens, AI and time travel. With the introduction of the Darkhold and Ghost Rider it's spilling into Fantasy kitchen sink territory as well.
- 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 nano swarms.
- Star Trek didn't invent alien races or teleporters or stories that examine the ethical implications of whatever theoretical technology the writers could dream up. But it deserves credit for mixing those elements together and codifying it. It's telling that "that extra who keeps showing up with different jobs is actually a series of clones" is an entirely plausible fan theory.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40,000 - sometimes it's 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 wants 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?" catchphrase), 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), an America left devastated by a nanoswarm, becoming a Mad Max-esque apocalyptic wasteland, 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.
- In addition to Lasers, Particle Beams, Plasma weapons of many kinds, Hover vehicles, Robot Drones, and a dizzying array of Powered Armor and Humongous Mecha, Rifts also features Psychic powers, Extra-dimensional refugees, Chemical Augmentation(which will kill you) Mental augmentation(which will drive you nuts), Bionic Augmentation(which can actually be handled pretty well, with a little counseling), Alien Invasions, temporal anomalies, and more Negative Space Wedgies than you can shake a stick at. And that' not getting into the Monsters, Magic, Dragons and Eldritch Abominations.
Video Games
- Defiance starts out with alien immigrants, who introduce us such nifty things as starships, terraforming, Nanomachines, cyborgs, artificial intelligence, energy weapons, Energy Beings, a plague that turns people into not-zombies, Mutants of both human and animal origin, genetic engineering enough to create Super Soldiers, and more.
- Fallout could be called either an post-apocalypse kitchen sink or a sink that focuses on sci-fi elements popular in The '50s. You've got radiation-warped mutants, immortal zombies that gradually turn feral as their minds break down, robots ranging from Robby of Forbidden Planet to Terminator-esque synths to Humongous Mecha, one or two Little Green Men, drugs that bestow psychic powers, disembodied living brains, Kill Sats, basically every conceivable variety of Ray Gun or Powered Armor, more than one Uplifted Animal, self-contained Matrix-style immersive VR simulations, multiple apparently unrelated people who bring justice to the wasteland by dressing up as ancient superheroes, and the occasional ghost, Artifact of Doom, or Reality Warping Eldritch Abomination from beyond spacetime.
- Half-Life and Portal, both games sharing the same universe, are collectively this, featuring aliens, zombies, robots, Artificial Intelligence, mad scientists, advanced technology, and even a multiverse.
- The Halo series, including its Expanded Universe. It has Humongous Mecha, Faster-Than-Light Travel, Artificial Intelligence, Space Marines, Precursors, etc. While the weirder aspects of Sci-Fi like Psychic Powers or various Negative Space Wedgies haven't show up in the games (although the Flood Hive Mind, Slipspace anomalies, and the Ur-Didact's gravity control powers come close), The Forerunner Saga dips into that territory by going the Cosmic Horror Story route, complete with Eldritch Starships, Genius Loci, and a Sentient Cosmic Force which allows technology to be made of thought.
- Starcraft: Everything can travel faster than light via Psychic Powers, science or biological creatures able to do so on their own! AI exists but is lower key, Starfighters abound as do Humongous Mecha and Tanks and more.
- Stellaris seems aiming to get every and all Sci-Fi tropes. There are faster-than-light engines in Hyperspace Lanes, Jump and Wormhole flavour as available means of travel. There are Artificial Intelligences, going wild and not, Ancient Star Empires, alive and not, Space Jellyfish, Eldritch Abominations, Hordes Of Alien Locusts, evil Energy Beings and the aforementioned AI going wild as crisis super factions... and that's just the core game.
- The expansions really ramp up the ante: Leviathans gives more Eldritch Abominations, including ghost-like things that come straight out of Pulsars, a giant Space Dragon (and with luck you can even hatch your own, smaller, Space Dragon), and a thing called a Dimensional Horror. You also get NPC Space Stations that variably act as advisors, artists or traders in space.
- Utopia adds megastructures, which includes making your own habitats, ring worlds and even Dyson Spheres. If that's not your thing, there is always genetic modification, cybernetics and Brain Uploading, or researching Psychic Powers.
- Synthetic Dawn allows you to play as an empire of Machines, either in Geth, Terminator, Borg or Minds flavour. You can even find a fallen machine empire, who may help you, or may turn crazy.
- Apocalypse adds super-ships called Titans and Planet Destroyers called Collossi. The latter come in regular Earth-Shattering Kaboom flavour, but variably also sealed-away shield, God Ray or forced cyborgisation.
- Mass Effect lovingly indulges in every trope common to TV Space Opera shows. Big starships, humanity exploring strange worlds and joining The Federation, Portal Network alongside FTL travel and the odd sleeper ship, precursors of the benevolent and abusive varieties, Psychic Powers (with enough thought behind how they work that the franchise is named after them), AI, cybernetic Horde of Alien Locusts...
- Metal Gear has clones, Cyborgs, Nanomachines, Psychic Powers, Humongous Mecha and artificial intelligence.
- Overwatch packs as many unique sci-fi tropes as you could possibly fit into the setting, regardless of how different they are from each other. Best reflected with the roster, it includes, but is not limited to: a cyber ninja, a hyper intelligent gorilla, a cyberpunk-like super hacker, a cowboy with a bionic arm, a Super-Soldier, a shadow-casting villain mutated by mad science, two junk-based scrappers who came from the Australian wasteland, a religious robot, a genetically modified Brainwashed and Crazy femme fatale sniper, a teenage mech pilot, a futuristic knight, and a mad scientist bent on improving the world. That still isn't all of them.
Webcomics
- Axe Cop uses a wide variety of sci-fi tropes in creative (and frequently ridiculous) ways.
Web Originals
- How to Hero features starships and giant robots and alien invasions and time travel shenanigans (which makes sense considering it parodies superheroes and their stories and staples).
- Orion's Arm is a scientifically-hard kitchen sink, featuring just about every theoretical concept under the sun, including megastructures, transhumans and computer gods.
Western Animation
- Futurama: Everything that exists in the Sci Fi Writer's Handbook exists here plus a heaping helping of Rule of Funny and It Runs on Nonsensoleum. Word of God says in the DVD Commentary that they realized just how far down this rabbit hole they'd gone when they agonized over whether it was okay to feature a wizard alongside everything else, they did, and nobody in the audience blinked.
- Phineas and Ferb: Given that the show is about boys building impossibly advanced technology, this is a given. It has had evil scientists, spy organizations, aliens, Time Travel, Ridiculously Human Robots, advanced nanotechnology, superheroes and villains (including from the Marvel Universe, which is a SFKS all its own), Teleportation, holograms, supercomputers, Another Dimension, and sentient A.I.s (good and bad), to name a few.
- Rick and Morty has aliens, a Interdimensional Travel Device, a Mad Scientist, Uplifted Animals, Artificial Intelligence, cloning and many many more.
- While magic does exist, The Venture Bros. mainly follows super-scientists, superheroes and supervillains who all have powers born from technology and "super-science".
