When I reflect on the figures who initially shaped the genre of science fiction, I find myself thumbing through the brittle pulp magazines of the past and remembering the hazy serials that played on early television sets. There’s something a little too quaint about those bygone days, when we relied on gumball machines for our comics and onoughs for entertainment. The mantle of heroism lay squarely on the shoulders of figures like that funny bald guy who always found a way to lose his pants. The very first sci-fi hero to beam into my living room a generation ago was Flash Gordon, whose by-the-numbers adventures were already being served up in the 1930s as prototypes of the TV we would one day know.
The hero of the 1930s, Flash Gordon, was designed for an audience that was escaping the grim reality of the Great Depression and looking for pure entertainment. I remember catching reruns of his adventures and how he took on such terrible villains as Ming the Merciless with nothing but his good looks, charm, and a rock-solid moral compass. When watching, I was always in the mood to see an emblematic hero defeat some emblematic evil. Historically, I think the popularity of Flash and his ilk was that simple. They were not complex heroes. And even though their adventures seemed wildly improbable, they offered a certain amount of reassuring realism in a decently scaled world where the good just never lose.
These heroes give us an unmistakable sense of the affinities, hopes, and dreams of the era. Flash Gordon and characters like Buck Rogers epitomized our mid-century optimism that humanity could, if not should, conquer space in the near future, boldly and brashly, with a bit of intelligence thrown in. The practical effects of their serials—the model spacecraft swinging into camera view on concealed strings—added to their charm. But nothing was really at stake here, and it was all as harmless as classic Disney animation. Whether or not you remembered to wind up the projector, the living room was still your stage for a kind of (mostly) wholesome hero worship.
However, as time went on, the sci-fi hero also advanced. The optimism embodied in Flash Gordon’s world began to feel discordant with a society facing fresh uncertainties, an inharmoniousness that reflected the cultural and technological changes afoot in the late 20th century. With these changes came a move away from the simple, morally unambiguous champions of earlier decades toward the more nuanced and conflicted figures that inhabit today’s narratives.
The transition from the golden age of sci-fi protagonists, such as Flash Gordon, to the intricate characters of later decades wasn’t merely a storytelling evolution; it was a change born from a society delving into its own depth and darkness. By the late 1970s and 1980s, the world had set its sights on a more ambiguous and uncertain future. The once fervent optimism about humanity’s journey into space had been muted, if not replaced, by talks of and actual sightings of Cold War fallout shelters. And with that societal transformation of the hero’s wife into a talk show host’s basement came the inevitable evolution of the types of stories and characters that mixed science fiction and the darker side of human nature.
One of the most important moments in this evolution occurred with the release of Star Wars in 1977. I still clearly remember the first time I put a well-loved VHS of Star Wars: A New Hope into my VCR. The opening crawl followed by the looming Imperial Star Destroyer sweeping across the screen left me nearly speechless. But what really captured my imagination was Luke Skywalker. He felt like a real hero—someone who was not immediately certain of himself, who struggled with his place in the galaxy, and who had to grow into his role as a savior. There was no way he could have had the confident swagger of a “heroic” figure like Flash Gordon.
Indeed, I think Luke’s uncertainty, the mistakes he made, and the inner conflict that defined him as much as the outer conflict made his character both more endearing and more inspiring.
The story of Luke resonates because it reflects a fundamental change in the way the world was seen. It was no longer black and white, good and evil. The first “Star Wars” trilogy hinted at some clearer kind of morality; Luke’s journey, seen through the practical effects of “Star Wars,” made a profound statement about the human condition. Handcrafted sets and physical models gave the universe Luke inhabited a more solid appearance than anything seen in today’s CGI-laden blockbusters. Every struggle, every challenge Luke faced had an exceedingly real and weighty feel to it that made the obvious profundity of those moments in his journey all the more potent.
At the same time, an iconic figure was coming to life that would redefine the sci-fi hero—Ellen Ripley from Alien. I remember going to a midnight showing of Alien in a decrepit theater, where the worn film projected an oddly palpable sense of vulnerability. Ripley wasn’t a hero in the traditional sense. She didn’t fight off aliens because she was especially strong or skilled. She survived because she was a smart, ordinary working person in an extraordinary situation. Ripley wasn’t even the primary protagonist—a working-class woman straddling two realms was as close as the 1970s and 1980s could get to a sci-fi feminist utopia.
Yet, she somehow managed to make feminism a viable prospect in a genre that had long denied women anything but “your bodies, my canvas” servitude.
The aspect of Ripley that I find most captivating is the way she turns the hero stereotype on its head, particularly in a genre historically characterized by male leads. The gritty, lived-in universe of Alien was a sharp departure from the space operas of the earlier part of the century. In those stories, everything was shiny and perfect, and they presented an utterly unrealistic vision of what space travel and life in space would be like. On the other hand, Alien was set in a universe that seemed to reflect a more true-to-life, if not downright unappealing, vision of what humans could expect if they tried to inhabit space.
Indeed, it was so “realistic” that it gave birth to an entire subgenre—the space horror movie.
The reluctant and flawed hero image continues to progress into the 1980s. For example, consider Deckard in the 1982 film Blade Runner. His own humanity is questioned throughout the movie, and the movie itself poses the question of what humanity really is, or what it means to be a human, at various turns. Watching it in VHS quality in my basement felt like stepping onto the rain-soaked streets of a beautiful but broken city, just as Deckard is a hero who is not a hero and who is, more than anything else, a weary, morally ambiguous, and always unfriendly-to-the-heroic themes character trying to do what might be right—serving the very system that questions his worth.
In this period, the heroes of sci-fi, with all their doubts and intricacies, signaled a shift in the storytelling methods of the genre. They are a direct reflection of a society no longer convinced that technology was leading them to some bright, shiny future. Instead, technological advances were more and more seen as potential sources of anxiety and even dystopian outcomes. In films like Alien and Blade Runner, the practicality of the effects work led to a greater sense of immersion and immediacy when it came to the worlds these films inhabited.
These characters, who seemed so groundbreaking at the time, have paved the way for modern heroes. Luke, Ripley, and Deckard proved that heroism is not about being invulnerable or omniscient. They made it clear that being a hero is about showing vulnerability, facing direct and oblique threats, and just plain getting through it all. It’s a message that has carried forward, even as the kind of stories set in the kind of worlds they inhabit has continued to change.
The 1990s dawned with another shift in the science fiction landscape. No longer relegated to the distant future, technology had blossomed into an inseparable part of everyday life. The internet, personal computers, and a rapidly globalizing society had filled our physical existence with the digital. Following the neural pathways of our hopes and anxieties had led us, not just into outer space, but into cyberspace as well. In the midst of this new global and digital existence, a new icon emerged in our collective imagination: Neo, the hero of The Matrix (1999). The character felt perfectly in tune with the fears and dreams of the turn of the millennium.
The first time I laid eyes on The Matrix, I knew it was something special—one of those infrequent films when visuals, storytelling, and even the concepts that the story is built around achieve a kind of perfect equilibrium. And so, when we first meet Neo, played by the decidedly un-Jedi-like hero, Keanu Reeves, and watch as he bends backward in slow motion to Dodge bullets, it is, I think, safe to assume that we are witnessing a brand new chapter in the evolution of the sci-fi hero.
Neo is a different type of hero, exciting in overcoming not just physical challenges but also metaphorical ones. He sees through the Matrix—not just the illusion it serves to those in its grasp but also the real “world” of 2000 machines. Neo doesn’t just win; he wins because he’s an “awakened” being, with “hero” and “chosen one” somehow meaningful and not superficial (as so much in the movies we consume is). It’s the 1999 Matrix’s way of gesturing toward actual transcendence—that if you’re going to be a hero, you should at least embody values intimately connected to previous stories told about heroes.
The Matrix was a brilliant step forward in telling science fiction stories—and it did so visually. The spectacles of the film push the basic idea of the story into a new generation of thought. The central figure of neo was as unexciting as any of us might be at first. And when we see him early on in the movie, he lives out the life of a run-of-the-mill office drone, fired for being late. His not-so-fun work resembles the work of the not-so-fun people who made the not-so-fun 1995 high-budget, low-reward movie Johnny Mnemonic. It is the office life of a minimum-wage hamster wheel.
Yet there is something so human about his narrative arc. At first, he is drugged and programmed to perform the work of an office robot. Then he attains consciousness.
In numerous respects, Neo is the spiritual heir of those earlier, more straightforward sci-fi protagonists such as Deckard or Ripley. When they debated the indistinct boundaries between human and machine or the figured unknown, Neo was up against a world where reality was open to doubt. Yet, still, he was a long way from the clear-cut, confident roguery of Flash Gordon. The Matrix puts out for consideration some very unthinkable, unthinkable by earlier sci-fi’s simple optimism, questions: What if the world we see really is a world of appearances? What if everything we believe really is the sort of thing you control with a good but not too good, flashy, and high-tech remote?
Today’s science fiction heroes still seem to be learning from the legacies of characters such as Neo. Figures like The Mandalorian in the Star Wars universe blend the moral ambiguity of the Western antihero with themes of redemption and personal growth. Meanwhile, Rey from the recent Star Wars trilogy takes the quest for identity and belonging to a new, modern-level female space opera. Yet while Luke Skywalker seemed to bring a more straightforward “light side” role to the mix, Rey grapples with a much more complex male-female dynamic and a Force that’s no longer so easily separable into light and dark sides.
These contemporary heroes possess something much deeper than usual when it comes to hero’s journeys: they travel through the world of vulnerability and self-discovery, offering a modern take on the age-old idea of what makes a “hero.” Today, the very word “hero” is used to label anyone from an everyday citizen to an NFL quarterback. There’s an insatiable demand for our society to anoint folks with that title. But the kind of hero we’re now asked to revere is far stranger and more complex than the figures we used to worship for their on-field performances or off-field moral lives.
And yet, even as technology pushes forward, there is still a desire for the products of human hands, for the real and the practical. I’ve seen this nostalgia reflected in recent sci-fi and its renewed use of practical effects, like the return of real, physical sets and animatronic performances in The Mandalorian. It seems as if we’re searching for a return to balance between the digital argon laser wonders of The Matrix and the molded rubber charm of its forerunners. What I take from all this is a reminder that while the tools of storytelling may push ever onward, the essence of a great sci-fi hero remains a questioner of the status quo, an invitee to a different way of seeing the world.
When I think about the distance traveled from Flash Gordon to Neo, I am really just astounded by how each era’s heroes seem to so perfectly encapsulate their time’s hopes, fears, and dreams. In the telling, of course, I have to give at least a nod to the power of the penny dreadful, which footed the bill for more electrifying entertainments as science fiction became a power player in our culture. But the true story here is the story of us—how we’ve changed, how we’ve questioned, and how, despite everything, we’ve still reached for the stars, even as the nature of those stars has changed.
