Science Fiction is derivative… and that’s ok

A friend of mine told me once that they used to really adore the sci-fi genre but they stopped reading it after becoming burned out on how derivative it all was. To be honest, that’s probably a fair criticism for much of the genre. However, I’d like to offer a defense (or at least an explanation) in the face of that criticism. There are three main elements of the sci-fi genre that can make it seem derivative, but all three elements are intentional and not indicative of an unsophisticated writing style.

The first element of sci-fi that can make it seem more repetitive or derivative than classic literary novels is that the sci-fi genre is an ongoing conversation. Science fiction authors often aren’t writing books (or series) meant to stand alone in a vacuum, rather they are writing questions to be pondered by fellow authors and readers, and they are answering the questions of the authors before them. The “best” sci-fi authors are often the ones who’s skill lies mostly in engaging in this conversation. Isaac Asimov and Phillip K. Dick are legendary sci-fi authors because books like “I, Robot” and “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” ask important moral and social questions that we may likely have to face as a society. If Asimov asks the world how we are going to live with artificial intelligence, well it comes as little surprise that many of the answers to his question will be familiar sounding echos. A lot of the fun of reading (and writing) science fiction is exploring a deceptively simple question with an answer that takes the form of an 80,000 word long description of a speculative future. If people complain about philosophers being loquacious, they should see my bookshelves bow under the weight of all the contributions of sci-fi authors who are taking their shot at answering a few nuanced questions. Case in point: in 1920, Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote the first dystopian novel “We” in which he asks us to think about what if it all goes wrong and the future is bleak not bright. We’ve now spent a century answering that question, and our answers have changed every year since as the challenges we face as a society change. If you read dozens of answers to the same question, they might understandably start to sound derivative, but since they are answers to some of the most interesting moral questions of our society, I’m willing to give them a pass on this account.

The second element of sci-fi that makes it seem derivative is that it is a genre with a relatively tight format. Just as painting is often constrained by a rectangle of canvas in a 3:4 aspect ration bound by a frame, doesn’t mean that the art on that canvas isn’t worth looking at. Science fiction has it’s rectangular canvas and its boundary frames, but the content within that boundary is rich and imaginative. If someone chooses to write a song on the piano, it is called ‘piano music’ and it becomes part of that narrowly defined genre of music. If someone wants to write a song that is a duet for oboe and snare drum, that’s totally fine and legitimate art as well, it just isn’t called ‘piano music’. What defines the sci-fi genre is maybe more obvious than what defines other genres. Does it have space ships? Sci-fi. Does it have aliens fighting space marines? Sci-fi. Laser swords? Sci-fi. Just as the boundaries that delineate piano music are maybe more obvious than the boundaries that delineate something like performance art, doesn’t mean that piano music is an inferior art form. The contributions to the genre follow the conventions of the genre, and therefor could be seen as derivative. I’ll call this a tautology and leave it to the grammarians to argue about.

The last element of sci-fi that makes it seem derivative and repetitive is the convention of using tropes and archetypes. Science fiction worlds can be tremendously expansive, detailed and complex, but sometimes an author doesn’t want to indulge so much detail and would rather focus the reader on a small story of a character within a world. In such instances, a shorthand language of describing a world is understood and accepted as part of the sci-fi genre. If a protagonist lives their life under an authoritarian regime, but the details of that regime aren’t important to the story, then an author might circumvent a lot of unwanted detail by describing their regime as similar to earlier examples that are touchstones of the genre. In this technique, the author is expecting that the reader has enough shared antecedent experience with the sci-fi canon and culture that a brief allusion can be an adequate substitute for a complete description. For example, in “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” Han Solo rides an animal called a Tauntaun across the frozen planet of Hoth. It is an alien world, so it wouldn’t make sense to have horses or camels there, but the animal is saddled and ridden in a similar way to any Earthly beast of burden. The movie makes used the shorthand visual language of the saddle, bridle, and riding posture to very rapidly show the audience the relationship between Han Solo and this large alien animal. The details of the tauntaun as a species aren’t important to the plot, so they are intentionally ignored at a moment when the writers wanted to focus on driving the story forward. Science fiction authors have a unique problem of writing characters in situations that wouldn’t make sense to have the things we have in our everyday lives, so sometimes they include a generic sounding placeholder to substitute for a common thing (like a horse). If the placeholder is too far from the commonly understood version, the audience won’t know how the thing fits into the sci-fi world. Every low budget Sci-fi TV show has a knockoff of the Star Trek communicator, and that may be ‘derivative’ but not much more derivative than a telephone is of a two way radio. Our real world has dozens of types of devices that you hold in your hand or push a button on the wall to talk to someone somewhere else, the details of which we ignore all the time in our real world. The fact that sci-fi oftentimes uses generic ray guns, communicators, computer terminals, and aliens with oddly colored skin isn’t a flaw in the genre, in fact it’s pretty realistic to include those. The everyday objects in many science fiction works are often unimaginative and very similar to those in other works, and so people call sci-fi derivative. To that I say that Fords are a lot like Chevys, M-16s are a lot like AK-47s, and Android is a lot like iPhone, the details of all of them are usually glossed over in the real world too. The inclusion of common touchstones and generic placeholders doesn’t diminish the genre of sci-fi because ultimately it isn’t the communicator that Captain Kirk is holding that matters but what he is saying to Spock on the other end.