In Defence of Science Fiction

The genre gets a lot of flack, but it's actually the highest form of popular culture.

Science fiction is good for us. Politically, morally, aesthetically, even cognitively. In plain language, it makes us think more critically about our world, to appreciate beauty in new ways, and to be better people. In that sense, science fiction is by far the best genre of pop culture, as it’s the only genre that consistently entertains and enlightens us at the same time.

“Quite the claim,” you might be thinking. Perhaps it comes from someone who has spent too much time dressing up like a Klingon and attending conventions full of fellow nerds? Sorry to disappoint: I’m not that type of SF fan. I come to the courtroom of public debate with a reasoned argument and lots of evidence. I’ll concentrate on SF television to keep things simple. Engage.

First, science fiction, unlike other genres of pop culture, is a container narrative. That means that SF contains within it other types of stories – war, adventure, crime, horror, romance. Flipping things around, these other forms of narrative are not likely to contain a SF (or any other) type of story: you won’t find aliens landing in front of Hugh Grant’s bookshop as Julia Roberts pops by to inform him she’s just a girl standing in front of a boy etc. etc., or Tom Hanks giving up on saving Private Ryan to travel back in time to kill Hitler and stop the Second World War. But you can find such a thing in SF films and TV shows.

A few for-instances. The romance between the American astronaut John Crichton (Ben Browder) and the humanoid alien Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black) in the Australian TV series Farscape (1999-2003) eclipses in breadth and depth anything in a Meg Ryan or Drew Barrymore flick. And Ridley’s Scott’s Alien (1979) isn’t just an impressive SF film, but a truly horrifying experience: that moment when John Hurt has heartburn is burned vividly into the memory of many viewers.

By being able to contain all these other types of narratives, SF has the huge advantage of being able to go boldly into pretty well any other genre of pop culture it sees fit to visit. Its vistas are almost limitless.

Second, over the last two decades many of the better SFTV series have presented us with the sort of extended story arcs impossible in movies and unlikely in television outside of soap operas. The best examples of this are Battlestar Galactica (2004-09), the story of a ragtag fleet of refugees fleeing their Cylon attackers in search of a new home that stretched over a miniseries, four regular seasons, two TV movies, and a handful of webisodes, and Babylon 5 (1994-98), the five-year tale of a huge space station that acts like a United Nations for about a dozen alien species who are constantly fighting with each other.

Babylon 5 is especially worth noting for it’s spending two whole years introducing characters and setting up the coming of the ominous Shadows in the third and fourth seasons. Creator J. Michael Straczynski actually envisaged B5 as a five-year story with a beginning and an end, though he jammed most of this into four years when his original network Prime Time self-destructed in 1997, adding a coda in the last season on TNT. No neatly tied up 45-minute blurbs for Straczynski.

Third, in SF we find a richness of characterization unusual in pop culture. While this isn’t inherent to SF, we find it there time and time again. From the tense dramaturgical triad of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on Star Trek (1966-69) to the feuding crew of the Liberator on Blake’s 7 (1978-81) to the nine-year exploration of the psyches of Agents Mulder and Scully on The X-Files (1993-2002), SFTV is especially effective in allowing characters to develop over time, exploring both their inner depths and their conflicts with others. In the best SF we meet characters who aren’t just cardboard cutout heroes and villains, but real people with real flaws. Gaius Baltar (James Callis) and Starbuck (Katee Sackoff) of Battlestar Galatica are such classically flawed SF characters.

The somewhat obscure BBC series Blake’s 7 (1978-81) stands out here: the cheapness of its special effects stands in stark contrast with the depth of its character conflicts. The first two seasons show us a crew of criminals on a stolen alien ship led by the idealistic revolutionary Roj Blake (Gareth Thomas). Blake constantly squabbles with the cold-and-calculating computer genius Kerr Avon (Paul Darrow) and the cowardly thief Vila Restal (Michael Keating), though he’s often aided by the pragmatic smuggler Jenna Stannis (Sally Knyvette) and the phlegmatic ship’s computer Zen.

The richness of characterization seen in Blake’s 7 is echoed in Joss Whedon’s short-lived western-in-space Firefly (2002), which once again features a ship with a crew of petty criminals who spend as much time on internal disputes as battling foes.