Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Modern Science fiction is a conversation about the future – technology, and social change. It began in the 19th Century with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). The novel chronicles the creation of the first industrially manufactured human. Mary Shelly followed this up with the world’s first post-apocalyptic novel, The Last Man (1824), which featured a mass extinction event due to a lethal plague pandemic.
While these two novels were speculative warnings about the future, writers like Jules Verne went on to popularise Science Fiction with his sci-fi travel fantasy novels. The Golden Age of Science Fiction (very loosely from the mid-1930s to the 1960s) reflected the optimism of modern America. International Modernism and rational science would bring wealth, health, and innovation. It would solve the world’s problems. The dream faded with the 1960s counter-culture, the Vietnam War, industrial pollution, the Three Mile Island nuclear leak, and the Thalidomide Disaster among many others. Science was no longer the savour of humanity. It was part of the problem. The optimistic Science Fiction future had been replace by the fear of a Future Shock (1970).
Broadly speaking, the post Golden Age of Science Fiction ties up with Post-Modernism, and like the post-Renaissance it has its own version of Mannerism. Stories took on a 1984-like warning tone, often featuring authoritarian dystopias, post-apocalyptic landscapes, and technology gone wrong. These dystopias are evident in films like THX1138 and The Terminator (1984). Blade Runner (1982) was a pivotal film because it brought the written Science Fiction story to life. Audiences no longer needed an imagination. The future was on the screen in front of them. It continued Shelly’s idea of the industrially manufactured human (now biologically cloned rather than assembled from corpse parts).
Another notable ‘Post-Modern’ Science Fiction success was Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977). It offered a return to the optimism of the Golden Age, albeit with a mythical and Fantasy feel, along with a younger target audience. In 1977, Star Wars was rated a ‘U’ certificate film in the UK and a ‘PG’ in the US.
In the 21st Century there’s been a steady supply of Science Fiction Films. Here’s a quick list of some notable examples (it excludes 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 at the end of 2026).
Looking at the above list, the quality has arguably declined. For example there’s Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), which is a much 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 massively better than Tenet (2020). Meanwhile the streaming platforms have continued to churn out cheap, low quality Science Fiction films (mosly post-apocalyptic and dystopian) that have given the Science Fiction genre a bad name. There have been some exceptions like Severance on Apple TV, but most of it is not ‘filler content’ rather than great storytelling.
Things have been even worse in book publishing. There’s been hardly any impactful new 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 he first self-published through Amazon). It was later adapted into the successful Apple TV series and picked up by a traditional publisher. Other writers have avoided the lack of interest in Science Fiction by calling their novels ‘speculative thrillers’, or ‘near future crime’.
While genre Science Fiction has 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. These works include Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, and The Second Sleep by Robert Harris. These writers are doing what Cormac McCarthy did to the Western when he wrote Blood Meridian - subverting established genre tropes with a newfound literary social realism.
Elsewhere in book publishing, Fantasy has reinvented itself with a new generation of writers like Bernard Sanderson. There’s been a rise in Romantasy, a Fantasy sub-genre. There’s been nothing like this in Science Fiction. The big question – is genre Science Fiction going through a lull or is it in terminal decline like the Western? The indications all point to a death spiral.
Why is this? In part, we live in a world in which science fiction has become science reality. Many of the classic sci-fi tropes like AI, robotics, bio-tech, space travel, and the internet, are no longer fantastic concepts but part of our world. The Covid pandemic felt like we were all living in a bad Science Fiction made for streaming movie.
The quality of the storytelling has done down. Most of the stories coming out are a rehash of existing ones and offer little that’s new. In parallel, there’s been a huge amount of cliché, low quality Science Fiction slop on the streaming platforms. All of this puts Science Fiction as a genre and a business bet into disrepute.
Genre Science Fiction (like the Western) is tied into the American story, often with notions of American exceptionalism. And, as America goes into something of a reputational dip, this association has become strained. If the genre does go the way of the Western, it would be ironic that a genre about the future could be a thing of the past.