What's important to Pat? Stuff like that never comes through in his books.
From what I've read of Gate Crashers there's some things that jump out at me, unless you mean specifically sci-fi concepts. I'm trying to think of how to word them in response to how you phrased the question but it's kind of tricky for some of them so I'll just throw them out in the manner that makes it most easy to discuss them instead but hopefully you'll get what I'm getting at for the answers
Probably the most immediately apparent thing is that he's a male feminist. The captain is a woman and therefore great. The genderless consciousness is great therefore it's earned the right to assert and assign itself as female. Nameless men are bad and say bad things that are so bad that they're not even worth the text of detailing what they actually said.
He wants to seem clever and technically articulate. Sci-Fi
isn't important to him, rather being perceived as intelligent is his focus. This leads to him repeatedly, incessantly, fucking endlessly, making errors in his writing because he knows a thing and wants you to know that he knows a thing but unfortunately for him he doesn't know that there's an exception to the thing that he knows because he looked up the technical way that it would be handled in reality that most people wouldn't think about (because it doesn't matter 99% of the time), but he's handling a fictional concept that doesn't (yet) exist and just trying to hammer in that he knows the thing without any regard for how miserable it makes it to read for the audience and how technically inarticulate it actually makes him
Finally: Alcohol. He casually and frequently makes comparisons to it. Not just in simple ways that I think most people could relate to, like a cold beer on a hot afternoon, a three drink buzz, a hangover, one or two drinks too many, reasonable things that anyone who partakes of alcohol in moderation might be able to relate to. Instead he just assumes that the reader knows what it's like to not a moment's sobriety for days at a time. That you know what it's like to have a hangover so bad that you have body aches to the point your body can barely support itself while standing upright. It'd be one thing if he was writing an alcoholic character and he didn't feel like going into depth on the sensations and symptoms of those states of being because they weren't actually the important part, but it's situations that are wholly unrelated to alcohol and he just says "Yeah it felt like that" and expects you to know what he means
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