Remember it with me!

The joys of good sci fi!

What is good sci fi? For many, there’s no such thing. So we must address that problem first.

For the sake of cheap thrills, Hollywood gives us thinly veiled fear of Other stories in the form of alien invasions, space battles with moustache-twirling, unredeemable villains, and an endless parade of space monsters and mad scientists playing god.

This has trained audiences to equate those hacks with sci fi itself.
Pitch Meeting!

But let me attempt to convince you otherwise.

In Hollywood renditions of sci fi, women are often portrayed rather weakly, to say the least, despite leaning on the ‘strong female character’ idea in gimmick form. That’s not sci fi’s fault. Sci fi has always been about pushing boundaries, whereas Hollywood and culture have always been about standing still and rehashing. Recall that audiences in Murrica’s bible belt boycotted and had removed from the air at least one episode of Star Trek because of its boundary-pushing. And that’s Star Trek we’re talking about, with those short skirts and shapely females mostly in the background, i.e. still very much constrained by the times. Sci fi does what it can. Trust me, the good stuff is good to everyone.

Linda Harrison in “Planet of the Apes” (1968), for example, easily could have convinced anyone that sci fi is just gimmicky, vulgar material appealing to the most base impulses. My base impulses are a big fan of her “Nova”, so I get that, believe me…

But the gimmick-minded studio executives have no idea what science fiction really is, what it can do, and why good sci fi can be so great. They’ve infected many viewers with that same vision.

Did the producers of 1968’s “Planet of the Apes” think of it as “white, Murrican tough guy rescues scantily clad babe who never talks [bonus] and fights off the most swarthy, backward enemies you’ve ever seen”? Maybe some of them did. Some viewers who think in terms of the “it’s in their nature” and toxic machismo fallacies might have, too. And the success of that movie and its sequels may have validated that perception. But seriously, is that what most people got out of that movie? I say no, despite Linda Harrison distracting me so.

IT’S NOT EITHER-OR, but that vision misses everything that matters.

You and I have seen VAST AMOUNTS of good science fiction that the more visionary creatives in Hollywood SLIP BY both the big wigs and audiences by not calling it sci fi.

Okay, so, the formula-minded in Hollywood see “sci fi” as a shorthand for a list of gimmicks that appeal to audiences at the base level. They can measure the popularity of gimmicks and exploit them. Just how many sequels or prequels do the "Alien" and "Terminator" I.P.s need?

And, unfortunately, from a validation standpoint, many viewers respond to gimmicks and partake on spec. Me, I stopped trusting Hollywood sci fi in 1990 with “Total Recall”. That movie starts off giving lip service to sci fi literature, then has a clear point where the executives said, “okay, that’s enough cerebral stuff, now switch to the vulgar crap”. It was so very disappointing, and the brief presence of smart, energetic, hot, young Sharon Stone wasn’t nearly enough to redeem it. I’ve learned to use professional reviews to calibrate my expectations and now I try never to give Hollywood money on spec, especially for sci fi. I can’t justify validating the wrong ideas about sci fi.

The thing is, Hollywood and audiences actually love genuine science fiction without realizing it!
Those who say, "I don't like science fiction" are actually saying "I don't like Hollywood's gimmicky exploitations they overtly label as sci fi.”

I guarantee that several of your favorite fiction products are science fiction or are improved because they make good use of science fiction elements, but you might not think of them as science fiction.

Here are just a few examples of sci fi many people enjoy without realizing it's sci fi:

-- House, M.D. (most of the real medical issues that serve the character conflicts have been science-fictionalized just enough for story purposes; this is probably true of most medical dramas, but I know House better than others)

-- Sherlock (Sherlock Holmes stories have always been sci fi. The principle science-fictionalization serving story is the idea that Sherlock's observations are as deterministic as presented. In real life, people are more complicated at the individual level. This SF-ized over-determinism is the basis of many other series, especially those focused on "geniuses", which is just more Sherlock Holmes.)

-- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Limitless, The Manchurian Candidate, etc. (any story about mental effects and experiences after brain alteration or mere genetic spectrum expression when based on real brain science, is sci fi; I guarantee you've seen and enjoyed many similar examples, and that's all science fiction)

-- NCIS, 24, James Bond movies, The Capture, and other similar products (these types of series science-fictionalize info-tech capabilities, from the now cliche "enhance" capability which impossibly adds pixel resolution to images, to instant city-wide location of people through facial recognition tech using street cameras [technically possible, but highly idealized in these products], to deep fake videos [which are impending, brace yourself], to superpower-esque fictionalization of biological capabilities of the perfect-shooting, injury-ignoring heroes, it's all sci fi that they don’t call sci fi.)

-- Most superhero stuff, especially from the standpoint of Clarke’s 3rd law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.“). 'Nuff said.

I've seen people who claim not to like sci fi go on to try "Firefly", for example, and then say "but that's not really sci fi" (Firefly takes place on a spaceship in another star system in the distant future…). Viewers who have this experience were trained by Hollywood to equate sci fi with empty gimmicks. That's a clear example of the distinction I'm making, and of the Hollywood training that needs to be unlearned. "Firefly" was genuine sci fi, not gimmick-based, exploitative sci fi. It uses a few simple science fiction story devices to set up a whole world that allows the writers to explore the human condition. [See my “Firefly” essays on my Free Ditties page here.]

Long ago Theodore Sturgeon coined Sturgeon's Law on this same topic: "90% of everything is crap." Everything, not just sci fi. He did this to point out that discarding sci fi as a whole because of that 90% is disingenuous. The gimmick-based, exploitative "sci fi" that Hollywood produces is usually in Sturgeon's 90%.

But the 10% is still available for your transformative enjoyment.

And the written word is almost always better than cinema. It's always deeper, for sure. There's a reason "the book was better" is such a well-known phrase, and is cliche. The tv rendition of "The Expanse" was awesome and I loved it, but the source books were a deeper experience.

Reading is telepathy.

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.“
— Carl Sagan

Reading good sci fi is a transformative and elevating experience, or at least interesting/fascinating in a way that the impatience of cinema tends to lose. Clarke and Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" is one of the rare exceptions.

Good sci fi can influence other authors to write more of it, can enrich their works. I've been enriched indirectly by sci fi that I've never read myself.

So have you.

When did all this start? Is sci fi a 20th century invention to be thought of as a fad? I encourage you to read about the history of sci fi, e.g. this wikipedia article.

You'll see that sci fi goes back THOUSANDS OF YEARS, or HUNDREDS if you're a stickler for certain academic criteria. Personally, I don't see how the ‘Vimana’ mentioned in the Ramayana (ca.500 BCE) could not be seen as sci fi.

From that article (emphasis added):
”
One of the earliest and most commonly-cited texts for those looking for early precursors to science fiction is the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, with the earliest text versions identified as being from about 2000 BCE. American science fiction author Lester del Rey was one such supporter of using Gilgamesh as an origin point, arguing that "science fiction is precisely as old as the first recorded fiction. That is The Epic of Gilgamesh." French science fiction writer Pierre Versins also argued that Gilgamesh was the first science fiction work due to its treatment of human reason and the quest for immortality.
”

So please don't say you don't like sci fi just because there are so many prominent examples of bad sci fi based on little more than gimmick, especially in cinema. That's like saying you don't like dramas or comedies, or stories.

Let’s recall together what it’s like.

I am NOT well read compared to well read people. But when I was young, my mind was rapidly and drastically expanded by reading and seeing a few very famous works of good sci fi. Early on I was expanded by cinematic renditions of some of these famous sci fi authors. I started reading later. I had never read children's books, jumping quickly from occasional exposure to "Highlights" type material to "Encyclopedia Brown" stories and "The Phantom Tollbooth", then on to Isaac Asimov, partly spurred by the tv and movies mentioned first in the list.

Imagine, if necessary, being 9 years old, 10, 11, or 12 years old and experiencing such expansions as these. Please indulge me as I recall them.

Feel it with me.

Rod Serling (1924-1975):
Who can argue with the sci fi goodness of “The Twilight Zone”? Serling found his niche in using speculative and science fiction to examine the human condition. The Twilight Zone tv series (1959-1964) has been on the tele ever since, with new renditions, including a recent one by Jordan Peele. Continuous good, mind-expanding sci fi.

Donald J. Sobol (1924-2012):
"Encyclopedia Brown" stories had an impact on young me, showing the value of intelligence and knowledge, helping me to focus on those tools. Formal education paled in comparison, from an engagement and imagination standpoint. No joke.

“Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.“
— Arthur C. Clarke

Jules Verne (1828-1905):
1950s movie renditions of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", "Journey to the Center of the Earth", and "Around the World in 80 Days". As a kid, these wake up the mind to the larger world -- in the sky, underground, and in the oceans — to technology and its limits, to a globe covered in different cultures. Around the time I saw these, I was also watching Jacques Cousteau's real world undersea explorations. Mind permanently expanded and intrigued.

H.G. Wells (1866-1946):
1950s movie renditions of "The War of the Worlds" and "The Time Machine". Talk about mind-expanding stuff. The first highlighted the idea of interplanetary biology being different enough that microbes matter more than weapons. The second showed how culture and biology change over time, and not necessarily for the better! Amazing!

Those were the start of my "hard sci fi" bent, and permanently expanded my mind across vast scales of space and time, and to an appreciation of different environments and the biologies *and cultures* that evolve into them. I saw these before I started routinely watching Star Trek.

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992):
Early on I tackled "Foundation". Its concept of "psychohistory" opens the mind to the ways in which individuals add up to form populations, which have behaviors and predictabilities OVER TIME distinct yet derived from the behaviors and stimulus-responses of all those individuals, i.e. to Groupthink. It's a vastly mind-expanding concept, and gave me an objectivity and an appreciation of history I might not have otherwise developed.
Later I read "The Caves of Steel" which also gets into behaviors via fascinating robots and "the three laws of robotics".

Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008):
At some point in childhood/tween years I read Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama", which cracks the pop sci fi idea that aliens would be like us. Nope. They might be *truly* alien in thoughts, behaviors, motivations, technologies in addition to biology. That brings one's mind to the questions of personhood and intelligence. My first novel is all about those topics.
Somehow I also saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" young. As with most of this "modern" sci fi, much of it was more than my newly sentient, autistic, stressed young brain could appreciate at the time. Now I do.
Decades later I read Clarke's "The Hammer of God", which holds up amazingly well and remains a wake up call on the topic of extinction level impactors. I also later learned that he was gay, a technical soldier in WW2, and that he was a bona fide undersea explorer who found a long lost sunken temple in Sri Lanka. He was a brilliant futurist. He was a hero.

”In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possibly have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy.”
— Arthur C. Clarke

Robert A.Heinlein (1907-1988):
A few years into reading, I read "Stranger in a Strange Land". That book is for adults, but it solidified the habit of cultural examination and pushed its boundaries. There's a reason it’s considered a work that influenced the 20th century.
Decades later I read his "Job: A Comedy of Justice", a sharp satire of organized religion and dogma, but by then such was nothing new to me. :)

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018):
"The Dispossessed" was also above my head at the time, but nevertheless also pushed the boundaries of critical thinking, self-examination, cultural objectivity, and ethics.

Joe Haldeman (1943):
"The Forever War" was a lesson in General Relativity as much as it was about the impacts of war. One does not come away from this book unchanged. That's the power of genuineness in writing, born of Haldeman's experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War. It's the opposite of vapid space opera, even though it's about war in space.

Into high school, I was already feeling the effects of my autistic isolation, and my reading took a back seat to survival. But without the expansion these works gave me, I would have been as a frog in slowly heating water.

Douglas Adams (1952-2001):
Through a friend (thanks, Chris!), I learned of the radio play called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which was brilliant and wonderfully playful with what had become the tropes of sci fi. In this case, I found the original radio play superior to the later novelization, which felt forced to me. As a radio play, though, it was pure fun, and showed that humor has a place in sci fi. My second and third novels are thusly influenced.

Orson Scott Card (1951):
In adulthood I enjoyed Card's ability to frame ethical dilemmas, but his "Speaker for the Dead" in particular had a huge impact on me. The moral of the story is heart-expanding to the extent "Foundation" is intellect-expanding, just so very well framed. Without “Speaker for the Dead” reminding me of what good sci fi can do, I might not have pursued my own writing.

Michael Crichton (1942-2008):
The movie rendition of Crichton's "The Andromeda Strain" is a smart and realistic favorite.
Crichton is one of those sci fi authors whose works have implanted sci fi into your life without you realizing it. While the Jurassic movies were terrible, they made you watch sci fi without realizing you were doing so. Another Pitch Meeting!

Carl Sagan (1934-1996):
Sagan’s novel “Contact” was a cool summary of the scientific ideas behind how different species might learn to communicate across interstellar space, and the movie was pretty good, too.
For me, though, Sagan’s science outreach series “Cosmos” (must see!) and his non-fiction book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark” (must read!) were phenomenal and deeply moving.

Of course there are others whose Sci Fi have left an impression of one kind or another. Kafka, Vonnegut, Sturgeon, Straczynski, etc. Not to mention other mind-expanding non-fiction, like that of Frans de Waal, Timothy Ferris, Pascal Boyer, etc.

I hope this review can help you recall (or imagine) what these expansive, intriguing experiences were like when they were new, and to appreciate how they change a person forever.

From "The Twilight Zone" to "The Expanse" to "Don't Look Up", good sci fi is deeply impactful as well as fun.

Rekindle this, if necessary. Kindle it in the children. Transform and elevate, like we've been doing with sci fi ever since The Epic of Gilgamesh!