Had this argument with my neighbor Janet last month that’s been bugging me ever since. She was going on about how Star Wars isn’t real science fiction because of all the Force nonsense and lightsabers that make no physical sense. I tried explaining that she was missing the point entirely, but you know how these conversations go – nobody changes their mind about anything. Still got me thinking though, after forty years in aerospace and probably twice as many years reading sci-fi, about what actually separates good science fiction from just regular fiction with robots thrown in.
Here’s the thing people don’t understand: it’s not about the gadgets. Never has been. I learned this back at MIT when I was taking a literature elective (needed the humanities credits) and tried writing my first sci-fi story. Spent weeks working out the physics of my time machine – quantum tunneling effects, exotic matter requirements, the whole nine yards. Even ran the math past my thermodynamics professor to make sure I wasn’t completely off base.
The story was garbage. Absolute garbage. My TA wrote “technically interesting but dramatically inert” across the top, which stung because I’d put so much work into getting the science right. But she was absolutely correct – I’d built this elaborate time travel mechanism and then had nothing meaningful for my characters to do with it except go “wow, look, dinosaurs!”
That’s when I started paying attention to how the masters actually did it. Take Philip K. Dick – guy barely understood basic physics, but “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is brilliant sci-fi because it uses artificial people as a way to examine what makes us human in the first place. The replicants aren’t just cool robots; they’re a philosophical thought experiment with legs. Dick’s asking whether consciousness and empathy are what define humanity, and if so, what happens when we can manufacture those things artificially.
I mean, that’s the real test of science fiction right there – the “so what?” factor. You can have all the scientifically plausible technology you want, but if you’re not using it to explore something meaningful about human nature or society, you’re just writing a technical manual with dialogue.
Been thinking about this a lot lately because of all the space opera stuff that’s popular now. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good starship battle as much as anyone (probably more, given that I spent decades designing actual spacecraft propulsion systems), but most of it completely misses what made the genre interesting in the first place. It’s all spectacle and no speculation.
Real sci-fi has to pass what I call the “could be true” test. Not “is true” – obviously we don’t have faster-than-light travel or sentient AI yet – but “could be true” given what we know about physics and technology. Fantasy asks you to accept magic because magic exists in that world. Sci-fi asks you to accept something because it might exist in our world, someday, maybe, if we’re clever enough.
This is where my engineering background actually helps with reading comprehension. When Kim Stanley Robinson writes about terraforming Mars, I can follow his reasoning about atmospheric composition and orbital mechanics. But the science isn’t really the point – it’s the foundation that lets him explore questions about environmentalism and political idealism and what happens when corporate interests clash with scientific necessity. The terraforming is just the stage; the human drama is the play.
Ursula K. Le Guin understood this perfectly in “The Left Hand of Darkness.” She didn’t just create aliens with interesting biology and call it a day. She thought through every implication of ambisexual humans – how it would affect family structures, politics, language, even architecture. That’s what separates brilliant sci-fi from the lazy stuff where authors just slap tentacles on humans and figure they’ve done their job.
World-building in sci-fi has to serve the larger purpose. Can’t just throw in purple grass and three moons because it looks cool. Why is the grass purple? What evolutionary pressures led to that? How do those three moons affect tidal patterns and seasonal cycles? How did the local civilization adapt to having weird irregular nights? Every detail should connect back to your central premise somehow.
The conflict in good sci-fi usually comes from this same source – the collision between human nature and the implications of the speculative premise. What happens to family structures when people can live for centuries? How do you maintain democracy when AI can predict voting patterns with perfect accuracy? What does identity mean when you can upload consciousness and make copies?
These aren’t action movie problems you solve by shooting the right computer. They’re fundamental questions about existence that don’t have easy answers, which is exactly why they make good fiction. The best sci-fi stories leave you arguing with yourself about the moral implications long after you’ve finished reading.
This is probably why I get so frustrated with most modern sci-fi movies and shows. They treat technology like magic – push the right button and the problem goes away. But real technology always creates new problems even as it solves old ones. Every aerospace engineer knows this. You solve the propulsion problem and discover you’ve created a heat dissipation problem. You solve that and realize you’ve got structural integrity issues. Progress is always messier and more complicated than it looks from the outside.
The genre works best when it balances wonder with worry. We want to feel excited about the possibilities – the diseases we might cure, the distances we might travel, the mysteries we might solve. But we also need to grapple honestly with the costs and complications. Nothing comes free, especially not in engineering, and good sci-fi remembers that.
That’s what keeps me coming back to it, honestly. At sixty-eight, I’ve seen enough technological change to know that the future never looks like what we expected. We don’t have flying cars or moon bases, but everyone carries supercomputers in their pockets. Sci-fi isn’t really about predicting the future anyway – it’s about using imagined futures to examine present concerns. Always has been.
Maybe that’s what I should have told Janet. Science fiction works when it uses tomorrow’s possibilities to illuminate today’s questions. The science is just the vehicle; the human story is the destination. Though knowing Janet, she probably would have just rolled her eyes and changed the subject to something safer, like the weather.
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