Why do we like science fiction? Fairy tales and fantasy make sense as we’re born into an unknown world of wonder, conditioned to believe fairy tales and religious myths from early childhood. Comedy makes sense as laughter is one of the natural human responses to a fundamental emotion we experience from birth. Horror is easy to explain because we have a natural fear of death, the genre allows us to explore death in a relatively safe space.
Science fiction is the one mainstream fictional genre that makes the least sense. The genre itself, the concept of sci fi is a relatively modern human invention. The earliest examples of works of fiction that could be marginally classified as science fiction didn’t even come into existence until shortly before the American Civil War. In the grand scheme of human history, that is barely a few seconds on the clock. All other genres have earlier examples of works that could be pointed to as primitive templates for what would develop in modern times. Yet sci fi, as it is affectionately referred to by fans, is extremely new by all accounts.
The rise of sci fi coencided with the rise of rapid technological advancements formally starting to take shape in to what we reconize it as today only after the start of the Industrial Revolution. The earliest examples of what we would come to call sci fi were more speculative fiction based on the newest scientific discoveries of the day mixed with supernatural elements rooted in older human myths and superstitions. There is much debate which early works properly count as sci fi, or fantasy. Even today the two are often intertwined. Yet while fans of one are more often than not also fans of the other, any dedicated sci fi or fantasy fan of any genre or sub genre will rather boldy and definitively affirm that they two genres are in fact completely distinct.
I don’t wanna explore how sci fi and fantasy are often lumped together. That’s a topic myself and others have complained about more than enough on this here interwebs. Rather what I wanna explore is what is it specifically about sci fi that appeals to us. Why is it so popular today when it was largely shunned and mocked for the first two thirds of the 20th Century. I also wanna explore what is so troubling about speculative fiction with a human technological element becoming so mainstream at the expense of more traditionally, human, stories.
I am not going to even attempt to provide a definitive definition of what even is science fiction. It is one of those things you know it when you see it, I suppose. I will say that regardless of how one defines sci fi and its countless subdivisions, one thing is clear. The vast majority of the most popular works of fiction over the past 45 years have largely been either sci fi, or at the very least, sci if adjacent. Of I am not even going to get into the nuances of the various sub categories of sci fi. I am not here to argue whether or not Star Trek is more sci fi than Star Wars. To me they are all under the larger sci fi umbrella, regardless how you further classify things.
I was born in 1982. I don’t have memories of a time when sci fi wasn’t the mainstream. To me I was born into a world where Transformers, Star Wars, Ghostbusters and the Terminator dominated the mainstream pop culture conversation. Even movies, cartoons, TV shows and video games that I grew up with more often than not had some sci fi elements in some capacity. Even a decidely fantasy Super Mario video game with nothing that could be mistaken for sci fi by any rational human being had a purely science fiction live action film adaptation when I was a kid.
I am also not going to discuss the merits of the quality of the sci fi works that garnered mainstream attraction or were relegated to cult status. I don’t see any point in trying to decipher what makes a quality sci fi work cross over into pop culture and which ones are only known by the inner circle of genre fans. Personally I can find just as much enjoyment from an undeniably low budget B movie as I can from a big budget Hollywood blockbusters.
I wanna pair this back down to the initial question I asked earlier. Of all the human storytelling methods, why has the one that centers on science and technology become the predominent category in recent decades? I mean the obvious answer is sci fi as we know it today really crossed over from a sub culture only nerds appreciated to the mainstream is following the massive and unexpected success of Star Wars from the late 70s. However I think there is more to it than just everyone trying to cash in on copying the success of that one film.
There was a lot more going on in the 70s leading up into the start of the 80s than just Star Wars changing the rules Hollywood plays by. If you pull out from just films and look at the broader human picture you see a convergence of factors that shaped the changing of the world happening all at once. These things were not all isolated. The creation of the worlds first RPG, Dungeons and Dragons, the invention and proliferation of home computers and video games, the rise of home media technology in the form of VCRs and LaserDisc players all happened at once. The Gen X children were witnessing new technologies, new inventions and new industries surrounding those things rise up overnight with seamingly no build up.
TSR introduced D&D in 1974. The first video games were beginning to reach the market in 1972. The home video player was coming to households by 1976. And yes, the first mass market home personal computers were introduced in 1977. All of these things were happening leading up to the release of Star Wars.
Cultural anthropologists and media historians have spent decades analyzing the perfect storm that made the world ripe for the monsoon that Star Wars was about to unleash. It was a culmination of angst over the Vietnam War, the Oil Crisis and the Watergate scandal. Sure, these are the sociopolitical pressures that were weighing down society that made them receptive to the rise of Star Wars and the technology driven science fiction wave that followed, except this doesn’t add up.
World War II was a far greater period of human turmoil than the late 70s. If what really made our species ready to receive Star Wars and the sci fi that it spawned why didn’t science fiction rise to mainstream prominence during the 40s when World War II was ravaging the planet? Or during the Roaring 20s when Prohibition was turning Americans against the US government? Or during the 30s of the Great Depression? Sure there were genre films around this time, more horror than sci fi if you really wanna get technical. The first massive wave of what we would call sci fi that broke into the mainstream was during the Atomic Age of the 1950s.
Yes we can talk about how the sci fi invasion films of the 50s were allegories of the Red Scare of Communism and the rise of Nuclear weapons. But the 50s were also one of the most notable periods of excessive economic expansion in human history. In the homes new technologies were also entering into modern homes around this time, too but more so appliances and utilities designed to make household chores easier and daily living more comfortable. The technologies of the 80s were largely entertainment based. Sure computers had a practical purpose but it was video games that drove their mass adoption so quickly.
So if the hardships of the 70s were what primed audiences to be more receptive of speculative fiction on a large scale, why were these genre films and their comic book counterparts so popular in the 50s and not the 40s? Why did they fall off a cliff in cinemas during the 60s while finding a new home on the small screen with Star Trek, Doctor Who and Lost in Space? And why did they become the predominent genre of comic books when westerns and horror stories had been the more popular stuff with only a few, very narrowly sci fi related superhero comics before then?
I don’t buy the narrative that Star Wars and the science fiction that followed became so pervasive in popculture because the 70s were some particularly dystopian period in human history. It doesn’t make sense when you consider the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s and the lasting impact WWII had on the global political matters had during those times. It is much easier to make a case that the people living in the 40s were far more distressed by global events than the relatively tame 70s by comparision. It just doesn’t make sense.
However if you consider the trials of the 70s, combined with the introduction of D&D, the worlds first table top role playing game that introduced massive numbers of nerds to the idea stretching their collective imaginations. All while new space age technologies like the VCR were bringing the cinema to the living room, video games were a brand new concept never before fathomed by humans prior to their sudden introduction. It also happened at the same time as the sudden meteoric rise of home personal computers, also used to mimic D&D and to play video games. Even the earliest massively successful video games largely had a sci fi element to them. Not all, mind you, but the most impactful ones were things like Space Invaders, Missile Command, Asteroids and the infamous E.T on Atari that led to a catastrophic collapse of the brand new budding gaming industry.
I would argue that the socioeconomic and political factors of the 70s were a factor at play in the success of Star Wars and its countless imitators, but not the whole story. Either way all of this only partially explains why sci fi took off at that time. It fails to explain why it remained popular nor how it became the predominat form of human storytelling. What we classify today as sci fi had some rocky ups and downs over the first 70 years of the century, then a sudden explosion in popularity with no meaningful dips ever since.
So why did sci fi take off at the same time fantasy lingered in relative obscurity? Sword and Sorcery, barbarian fiction, high fantasy and other forms of popular fantasy genres took much longer to cross over into the mainstream, really not until the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy of the early 2000s, and even then what we consider fantasy has had a much harder time breaking into the culture consciousness on the same level as sci fi.
Horror has had an easier time cuz it has roots in older storytelling traditions. Also there are a significant number of horror properties with a large sci fi twist. Movies like Alien, Terminator, Predator are all a mix of horror and sci fi. Countless other examples. While superntural horror and gothic horror has also continued to exist, the mainstream horror is more often a slasher or serial killer movie with barely a hint of the supernatural, if any at all, or more likely decidedly sci fi elements. Even the Walking Dead has a very subtle sci fi hint to it.
I think the unfathomable rise of sci fi to becoming the most popular form of fiction in the past 3 decades can largely be attributed to the combination of the end of the Cold War, the rise of computers and the Internet and the advancements in 3D technology that helped make video games more realistic and immersive than those Atari engineers of the 70s could have ever imagined. In the past 3 decades the most popular works of fiction, more often than not but certainly not exclusively, have been somewhere in the sci fi family. Especially since the comic book and superhero sub genre took over.
Some of the most popular video games are either undeniably sci fi or have strong sci fi elements in them. Even the most popular Call of Duty is the Modern Warfare and Black Ops, the two sub series with the most advanced technology and sci fi elements in them. Of course what we consider sci fi is also changing as technology advances so rapidly we can’t even keep up anymore.
Movies that were classified as sci fi in their day featured advanced technologies that would be considered primitive by todays standards. Even things we see today that our intincts would be to consider sci fi, heavily technology based fiction, are less sci fi and more things we see on a daily basis or are being told are in active development. It is getting harder to imaging advanced technologies we can’t see ourselves using in the near future as we are surronded by tech that would make the most hard sci fi of the early era look like stone tools in comparison.
Fiction has always had an element of escapism to it. What we are escpaing changes as does where we escape to, in the works of fiction we consume. What has changed is we’re not just soo enamored by sci fi on a purely escapism basis. Nor are we looking to it as a blueprint of speculative fiction to spark our imaginations as to what technologies we could see in the coming years as tech advances so rapidly that by the time a sci fi movies tech hits digital streaming platforms someone out there has already filed a patent for a prototype of it.
As I work my way through this topic I realize that I honestly don’t have a fully solid explanation for exactly why sci fi has risen to the level it has. I think the actual why is a combination of factors that happened all at once at the same time we were becoming accustomed to it. Earlier generations were skeptical of sci fi because they were more grounded in their every day lives. They didn’t live in a tech dominant world we do. They also didn’t have that same tech making the films we see look more believable either.
Sci fi in the 50s is mocked by modern audiences for how primitive it looks while the works of the 80s through today are often seen as holding up much better, all things considered. The earliest days of CGI went through some growing pains but today we just accept that if an artist or writer can imagine it, we have the tools today to make it look believable whether it be on the big screen, on our TV sets or in our video games. Sci fi rose to prominance at the same time our technology took over our lives.
In 1983 WarGames was seen as a sci fi tech thriller. Today there is nothing depicted in that film we’re not seeing used on a daily basis used in some capacity. I guess at the end of the day its not important why sci fi became so popular. I am just grateful that it has.