By Joshua Pantalleresco
Once upon a time science fiction imagined the future. Idealistic futures like Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry, harder edged cyberpunk futures like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, or post apocalyptic futures like Frank Herbert’s Dune. Science fiction was the fiction of both human pitfalls and human possibilities.
Today, science fiction has a competitor it never expected: reality. Each new tech-fueled depravity is worse than the next. AI-generated nude deepfakes created with ease are tearing teenage lives apart. The emergency room is spying on you. So is the school bus. We didn’t get the world of The Jetsons with sassy housemaid robots and flying cars. We got the world where Pikachu maps the entire world for lethal military drones. Reality is a sci fi novel, belabored references to The Torment Nexus aside.
However, the current horrors haven’t made all sci-fi obsolete. Military science fiction with faster than light travel, planet-leveling torpedoes, and civilizations wider and more diverse than any thought possible today. The genre still feels safe, although books like Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros indicate the genre could be in danger. Because if romance novelists can merge military science fiction's concepts with the idea of flying dragons ala Anne McCaffery and add compelling characters and new situations not imagined before, military science fiction may have to reinvent its own axis to keep up. That said, beyond the laser-laden walls of the military sci-fi classics or the latest relaunch of Star Trek, the future is now (and it’s bad). What’s science fiction to do?
Typebar Magazine has explored this problem on more than one occasion. In Issue 1 back in 2024, Simon McNeil presented the case for the death of science fiction as we once knew it. Earlier this year in Issue 8, Matthew Claxton proposed the “post-science fiction novel” as the herald for the genre’s future. But what if the best bet for sci-fi’s future is actually in the past?
Science fiction started out as pulp. Writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, HG Wells and Jules Verne tended to have adventures infused with the elements of science like the common cold dealing with alien invaders in The War of the Worlds, or just imagined worlds like the The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle that were foreign to us and yet, somehow familiar. John Carter of Mars paved the way for Doc Savage, which paved the way for Superman, until writers like Asimov, Clarke, Norton and Heinlein took those ideas and morphed them into exploring science, literature, and humanity itself.
It’s these rich realms of pulp that often blend science with mythology, romance, and heroism, where the genre can find new life.
Giant Robots and Cthulhu
Science fiction has never been shy from dealing with myth or religion. The aforementioned Dune or Hyperion by Dan Simmons both excel at exploring the intersection of the technological and the supernatural. However, in contemporary SF, mythology increasingly feels more like a topping to add to the proverbial ice cream rather than a scoop of ice cream in and of itself. Beyond Dune’s whole idea of the Messiah, and Simmons exploring the idea of the chosen one and its demons in Hyperion, there are books such as Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, the aliens coming to earth looked like the devils described in the bible, with the idea that our expectations of what these beings are and the reality may not be what it seems.
But when expectations are in doubt, there’s always giant robots. Ask Sylvain Neuvel who wrote a whole trilogy about them. The Themis Files is a brilliant take on Giant Robots, as a team finds pieces of one. The information they uncover is, of course, classified. Neuvel wrote the whole book as interview transcripts with the main characters. My take when reading it? A brilliant story and a unique way to explore the characters in the series. Piecing together personalities, motivations, throughout all the interviews made The Themis Files both challenging, rewarding, and creatively stimulating. But I promised giant robots and ultimately the series does deliver on that front, too. There’s also fun, bonkers stuff with contacting aliens. It’s mostly a rip roaring good time elevated by experimentation with form. And if that’s too avant-garde, there’s still the awesome robot fights.
Science fiction often plays with myths and fantasy. In 2020, prominent fantasy writer and author of The Inheritance Cycle series Christopher Paolini jumped into Science Fiction with To Sleep In A Sea of Stars. In It Kira, a xenobiologist finds herself forcibly bound to an ancient technology that gives her superpowers and enhanced abilities. Together they have to protect the earth. Nothing new here in the grand scheme of science fiction. What made this stand out is that the big bad guy has a bit of a resemblance to HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. Space Cthulhu is as fun as it sounds and is a wild fun ride. As Kira has to use her suit to deal with this version of the end of all things. Only this time in outer space instead of the haunted dimensions the monsters dwelled in, waiting to be summoned.
Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian horrors have been adapted into other forms of fiction in recent years, most recently in the recent Minions movie. What once was a vast and unknowable horror has somehow morphed into something cuddly and cute. Whether it’s a boss to battle with in a game like Arkham Horror, or a cuddly little monster named Goomi, (short for Gary Orkam Oliver Magma Ichabod the Deceiver, if you’re not his friend that is.) The monsters of have yesterday have been mined into something more homogenized and more friendly and fun for the whole family.
Fun is the common theme here. Science fiction used to explore new concepts that would challenge the moral and ethical constructs of how we live today, or provide us with really tough problems that don’t have clean solutions. But the dystopia of ages past is now just our mundane reality. Everything will get worse and nobody’s coming to save you. In that context, what can we expect science fiction to do? How can we expect it to “sound the warning” about a world that’s already here and that we’re already, sadly, quite familiar with and materially aggrieved by. What’s wrong with using science fiction for a quick trot away from reality every now and then?
That’s what books like To Sleep in a Sea of Stars excel at. They may not have the heavy intellectual foundations of past sci-fi, true. However, leaning into the genre’s soaring sense of imagination, curiosity, and stunning set pieces can create reading experiences worth having–even if it’s not on the intellectual level of Asimov, Clarke, Butler, Le Guin, etc.
Time Travelling Still Has Punch
If there’s ever a place where science fiction is going right into the past, it’s time travel. Gone are the days where sci-fi time travelers see the future or have some wonderful statements about our lives or human civilization. Ted Chiang delivers one of the great stories of our time with “Story of Your Life,” a non linear time travel story about Dr. Louise Banks, who while interacting with aliens relives the life of her daughter in a non linear way as she experiences raising her daughter in one moment at three years old, and the next she is a teenager, breaking up with her first boyfriend. All of this has happened at once, and the doctor is both reliving it, and experiencing it again for the first time in a whole new way. This story is brilliant, and easily the best time travel story I’ve read.
Now, comparing “Story of Your Life” to a middle grade series I admit is grossly unfair. I’m going to do it anyway, but that’s because it’s hard to find anything in adult science fiction on the book stores that even comes close to the thrills and gravity of Westfallen by Ann and Ben Brashares. This brother/sister duo imagined a fantastic time travel premise: kids from the year 2024 find a radio that allows them to communicate with kids from the 1940s just weeks before D-Day. By saving a candy store for two more days in the past, the future is now an America overrun by Nazis.
The kids from the present, Henry, Frances, and Lukas come to very different points in life in this new world. The character beats are damn near perfect, and you can see the kids from both points do everything they can to subvert disaster, but this in some ways is retreading old paths. World War Two has been written about a lot and in such a way that there’s almost nothing new said about it. The butterfly effect the authors create, while not necessarily groundbreaking, is an entertaining ride filled with satisfying character moments. And isn’t that all a story needs to be sometimes?
Staying in Conscious(ness)
Consciousness is one of the few areas in which science fiction engages with possibilities about what tomorrow may bring. Robert J. Sawyer has made a career doing it with novels like The Terminal Experiment, Mindscan, and The Downloaded, which all revolve around consciousness and asks questions about it in interesting ways. And as far as cognitive sci-fi goes, there’s more than just books. Famed movies like The Matrix and Inception also explore the mind and reality.
The light novel series Sword Art Online by Reki Kawahara is a romance story at its core, but the backdrop is a video game. The game’s creator locks people in a virtual world akin to World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV, and if they die in the game, they die for good. The premise itself isn’t terribly new but, Kawahara uses the familiar to ask intriguing questions about how consciousness relates to video game creation and artificial intelligence.
Can a gamebot come to life? Have its own dreams and fears and wonders? Kawahara asks those questions and more. This series inhabits a lot of what made science fiction great in the past: big stakes, bigger ideas, and even bigger questions about morality.
There’s also the 2015 survival-horror game SOMA that Leonardo Andrade covered extensively in Typebar Magazine Issue 8. SOMA exists in a world where a consciousness can be digitized, placed on a computer chip, and put into a synthetic head attached to a decapitated body. Both the setting and narrative ask deep questions about the relationship between technology and flesh, between cyberpunk and cognitive science.
The realm of consciousness is indeed a place where authors play hard and still ask some hard science fiction questions. All one has to do is take a look at a quote by Magos Mecanicus Faustinius in Warhammer 40k (or read about it here) to see just how hard the game is played.
Facing the Future
I get why science fiction writers may want to avoid realistic prognostications about the future: it would be bleak and deeply dystopian. And who wants to read dystopia when, in many ways, we’re currently living in one. The “A Boring Dystopia” subreddit boasts nearly 800k followers, a 75% uptick since 2020. It’s understandable why readers wouldn’t necessarily want the terrifying socioeconomic perils of the world to infiltrate their reading material. Besides, dystopia is the realm of Young Adult books now with prominent series like The Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard, Divergent by Veronica Roth, and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (I think we all know that one by heart).
As the two previous Typebar Magazine essays on the topic have said: We have reached one of the futures proposed in classical science fiction, resulting in a genre identity crisis. Will the optimism of subgenres like solarpunk prevail? Maybe, maybe not. But perhaps the best way forward for science fiction is to embrace the core elements that made people fall in love with it in the first place. Pulp, when done right, feels almost celebratory. And in 2026, there’s not much left to celebrate, especially where technology is concerned. If a piece of tech isn’t spying on you, it’s convincing you to gamble. Pulpy worlds and narratives may be the way forward for sci-fi. Unless of course, we turn outward, and face the future together. It may be possible to create a better one together. I hope for that.
