3 Sci-Fi Genres for Thinking
For the final three months of the year in my house, we celebrate Decemberween—October through December. We watch nothing but horror, sci-fi, and fantasy for the entire period each year, saving the “normie” stuff for the other nine months.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why we do this. Last week,
did a great little essay on why sci-fi is important. You can bookmark that for reading here. I endorse what Ale says in his piece, particularly that you can ask big questions that you might not otherwise be able to pose.I’m also thinking about the subgenres within sci-fi that I’m personally drawn to. While sci-fi has a lot of these classifications, from space opera to alien invasion, the ones that have always appealed to me have made it easy to ask those big questions.
Let’s talk about five genres of sci-fi today that encourage this sort of thinking, and I’ll be sure to make a few recommendations you can watch or read this week.
Sci-Fi Comedies
Comedies have always given a certain license to make some scathing commentary or bold observations about human nature. From ancient Greece to Shakespeare, great writers have used this device to point out anything they think is wrong with the world, but otherwise might not be able to say.
Here’s a piece I did explicitly on sci-fi comedies (with some recommendations):
Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors, used comedy a great deal, largely because he made a lot of those scathing observations. Jokes and humor can lighten a more serious mood, but I’m always more interested in the type of humor that says more about the world, and sci-fi does this as well as any genre.
We haven’t seen any comedy sci-fi so far this Decemberween, but I am on the lookout. Let me know in the comments if there’s a show or movie we should check out this year.
Dark Cautionary Tales
There are two subgenres that both fit into this category: apocalyptic and dystopian sci-fi. In apocalyptic films or books, whatever catastrophe has already happened, and it’s all about how to live in a completely different (probably much, much worse) world. Dystopian films and books, on the other hand, envision a future that is heading in a much worse direction, although perhaps it’s not quite yet the end of the world.
Robocop is an instantly recognizable example of dark, dystopian sci-fi on the big screen. You get to see a bleak world desperate to control crime (and maybe its population), making trade-offs for freedom that might not seem rational to us, the viewer. That’s the point of a cautionary tale, and these films do it quite well.
Occasionally, a brilliant film like Idiocracy will straddle the comedy and dark cautionary subgenres. If there’s ever been a cautionary dystopian tale, this is it, and it’s far easier to laugh than to cry at how close we’re getting to this future.
The apocalyptic corollaries allow writers to go even further: they get to recreate a sort of primordial world, examining human nature in an imaginary environment without social norms. The author gets to imagine how those rules formed in the first place, like with Stephen King’s The Stand.
Here’s a little bit about the history of apocalyptic sci-fi I wrote recently.
Time Travel
Lastly, time travel sci-fi films and books let us think about the very nature of reality, and to stretch our minds with those truly existential questions. Most particularly, the time travel paradox is of interest.
Time travel paradoxes let us think about truly deep things. Do we have any control over our actions, or are we predestined to perform our lives in only one precise way?
Do we have free will? Devs and Dark both dive into this question with a great deal of enthusiasm.
Sci-Friday
As is my Friday tradition here, this piece is a part of a celebration of all things science fiction we call Sci-Friday. Sometimes, I stretch the concept a little bit—last week, I wrote about nanotechnology (and how sci-fi introduced me to the concept). Today, I wanted to share some recommendations within a few specific subgenres.
As always, I want to call your attention to the other writers who are also doing something today. If you want to hear recommendations about what to watch or read, or learn a little something about sci-fi, these authors are your huckleberries.
Start with
, , and . These folks are churning out good writing on a regular basis, and they have contributed consistently to this festivity by way of writing or Notes. and often write about the juncture of horror and sci-fi, another subgenre I could have easily included today. , , and have all come up with clever plays off of this theme.Check out
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and —passionate sci-fi fans who also happen to be good writers. Odds are very good that they’ll be putting out a recommendation or two, or opining about sci-fi.
What I like about Sci-Fi is that you can explore hypercomplex and sensitive topics in ways you just can't in non-fiction. For example, I'm currently working on Book 2 of the Singularity Chronicles which is titled Integration. The simple synopsis is that there is a cognizant AGI that is working to figure out how to appropriately animate millions of unique human uploads and integrate them properly.
So what do you do about Race? Gender? Culture? Mate Pairing, etc.? Topics like what does it matter if you were a Black Man or a White Woman when your consciousness is now divorced from a corporal body. Do we integrate them away into something common? Is there something explicitly unique and valuable about the way we (or nature) categorize humans?
Clearly, these are topics that create firestorms if you were to discuss them in non-fiction. But with Sci-Fi, I almost HAVE to address them especially when the AIs are working to make themselves better.
Book one, where we learn what it means to be human and what risks exist with AGI can be found here:
https://amzn.to/46jIDiH
I like the main premise of exploring the what ifs in a context that is maybe plausible which Sci fi does. It's a really good genre that explores possibilities and the possible effects of such possibilities.