Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Science fiction is a conversation about the future – how rapid technological change impacts on culture and humanity. The genre began in the 19th Century with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). The novel chronicles the creation of the first industrially manufactured human. Mary Shelley followed this up with the world’s first post-apocalyptic novel, The Last Man (1824), about a global pandemic.
While these two novels were speculative warnings about the future, writers like Jules Verne went on to popularise Science Fiction with fantastic adventure novels. The Golden Age of Science Fiction (very loosely from the mid-1930s to the 1960s) reflected the optimism of modern America. Modernism and science would create a new world that was healtheir and wealthier. But the idealism faded during the 1960s counter-culture. Science was no longer the savour of humanity. It was part of the problem. Optimism had been replaced by the fear of a Future Shock (1970), environmental disaster, and nuclear war.
The post Golden Age of Science Fiction ties up with Western deindustrialisation and Post-Modernism. In the same way that the Renaissance produced a weird ofshoot, Mannerism, Science Fiction took on a darker tone. Now it featured 1984-like authoritarian dystopias, post-apocalyptic landscapes, and hellish visions of technology gone wrong. These dystopias are evident in films like THX1138 (1971) and The Terminator (1984).
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was released at the end of the Golden Age. It’s notable for making space travel feel authentically real. Almost a decade later, Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977) offered a return to the adventure and optimism of earlier Science Fiction like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. In 1982, Blade Runner brought the future to life in a visual way that only can can do. Every since, films and TV have overtaken the novel as the primary vehicle for genre Science Fiction. Blade Runner continued Shelley’s idea of an industrially manufactured human (now biologically cloned rather than assembled from corpse parts).
In the 21st Century there’s been a continued flow of genre Science Fiction films. Here’s a quick list (without the Superhero movies): A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Vanilla Sky (2001), I, Robot (2004), I Am Legend (2007), WALL-E (2008), Avatar (2009), District 9 (2009), The Book of Eli (2010), Inception (2010), Source Code (2011), The Hunger Games (2012), Gravity (2013), Oblivion (2013), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Interstellar (2014), The Maze Runner (2014), Mad Max: Fury Road (2014), The Martian (2014), Alien: Covenant (2017), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Tenet (2020), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Prey (2022), The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023), M3GAN (2023), Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), 28 Years Later (2025), Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025), Predator: Badlands (2025), Tron: Ares (2025), Disclosure Day (2026), The Dog Stars (2026), The End of Oak Street (2026), Dune: Part Three (coming soon, 2026).
Looking at this list, the quality has arguably declined. For example there’s Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), which is a more impressive film than Disclosure Day (2026). James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) is better than Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025). Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) is better than Tenet (2020). Meanwhile the streaming platforms have churned out cheap, low quality slopocaliptic sci-fi that’s given genre Science Fiction a bad name. There have been exceptions like Severance, but most of it has been ‘filler content’ clogging up platforms like Netflix and Amazon with garbage content.
Things have been even worse in book publishing. There’s been hardly any impactful new genre Science Fiction published. Agents openly state that they are no longer taking Science Fiction. The only significant new novels that comes to mind are the Silo series by Hugh Howey (which was originally self-published on Amazon). Since then, it’s been adapted into the successful Apple TV series and picked up by a traditional publisher. Elsewhere, writers have avoided labelling themselves Science Fiction writers by calling their work ‘speculative thrillers’, or ‘near future crime novels’.
While genre Science Fiction novels have pretty much disappeared, literary Science Fiction has been on a mini-Renaissance with established and respected authors incorporating classic sc-fi tropes into their work. This includes novels like Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, The Second Sleep by Robert Harris, and Juice by Tim Winton. These writers are doing what Cormac McCarthy did with the Western when he wrote Blood Meridian - subverting established genre tropes with a newfound literary social realism.*
Classic genre Science Fiction tropes cover AI, robotics, bio-tech, space travel, and mass communication. Apart from time travel, most of these are no longer fantastic concepts. They are part of our ordinary world. The communicator in Star Trek is the iPhone in our pocket. We have self-driving cars. People talk to AI. The Covid pandemic felt like we were living through a bad Science Fiction made-for-streaming movie. We exist in a Science Fiction reality. This makes classic sci-fi tropes less compelling. Some writers differentiate their future set novels, which are more about society and culture than tech, by calling their work Speculative Fiction. But, there’s no Speculative Fiction section in bookshops, so these novels live as Literary Fiction in the General Fiction A-Z section or in the Crime Fiction section. Novels set in the past are called Historical Fiction, but there’s equivalent for novels set in the future, no such thing as ‘Future Fiction’.
So, genre Science Fiction has been impacted by a lack of big new ideas, the decline in overall storytelling quality, and the plethora of low cost ‘filler content’ on the streaming networks. It’s also been affected by its tropes becoming normalised in ordinary life, and real issues surrounding the American story itself (which are tied into notions of American exceptionalism). There used to be sections in bookshops for Westerns and Mysteries. Will genre Science Fiction join them? And, if it does, what will we call stories that are set in the future?
* Update 10/11/26: The End of Everything (2026), a Literary Science fiction novel by M John Harrison won the 2026 Booker Prize.