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There is no better way to start a long and tedious science fiction fandom fight than by asking for a definition of the genre. But to keep things simple, lets go with the Oxford Dictionarys wording: Fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes, frequently portraying space or time travel and life on other planets.That future part is important, to the point where throughout the genres history it has anticipated and even inspired real technological developments. Star Trek: The Original Series gave us communicators that resembled the flip phones of the future (now the past), and then Star Trek: The Next Generations PADDs gave us our first glimpse of the iPad.Aside from how accurate or even plausible its predictions are, science fiction paints an image of a time that is not now, from Metropoliss vast art deco cityscapes to The Jetsonss all-mod-cons cloud cities. Whether it is a warning or something to aspire to, it acknowledges that the future will be as different from the present as the present is from the past.We are currently living through something of a boom in science fiction, particularly on television, and yet once you start to look at the shows that are being made, something strange is happening.Back For the FutureLets take one of, honestly, probably the best pieces of science fiction on telly today: Apple TVs Severance. It has a fantastic sci-fi premise, simultaneously simple yet with constantly unrolling implications. A brain implant makes you forget the outside world when you step into your workplace, and forget everything that happened at work when you leave to come home. It walks the line between speculative technology and allegory that the greats of the genre always have.But whats weird is what we find when you go into that workplace. CRT monitors with heavily pixelated black and green displays. Clunky keyboards. An aesthetic thats a mix of the videogame The Stanley Parable and all those the back rooms memes floating around the internet, but most of all, there is nothing inside the severed floor of the Lumon offices that would scare a time traveller from the 1980s.That retro aesthetic is justified by the story, as David Moore, Editorial Director at Rebellion Publishing points out, It is a satire of office life and so that slightly cold, late 20th-century corporate office environment is part of the mood.Its allowing us to look back at ourselves, says Bill Wolkoff, a writer on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds who has also worked on The Man Who Fell to Earth and Star Wars Rebels. The show strips away everything else and you are just looking at clacky keyboards, old screens, and that drab fluorescently lit environment with splashes of colour here and there. It elevates it to a different kind of science fiction. The idea is looking ahead but the aesthetic borrows from our past and looks at it in a way that inspires horror.That same retro aesthetic can be found in the gigantic underground survival bunker we see in Silo (also from Apple TV), while Primes Fallout series gives us a post-apocalyptic future that has spun off from an alternate 1950s, and has the technology and aesthetic to match, similar to that in Apples ironically titled Hello Tomorrow. Even Paradise, with its electric cars and digital ID bracelets, is set in a world orientated more towards nostalgia than the future.Going further afield, there are the multiple Star Wars series, which aside from being explicitly set a long time ago, are forever bound to a technological aesthetic established in the late 1970s.It is a fantasy rooted in space magic, and the aesthetic Ralph McQuarrie and George Lucas and his designers created so amazingly well, Wolkoff points out.Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!Meanwhile, there is still a lot we dont know about the upcoming Alien: Earth TV series, but based on recent franchise entries such as Alien: Romulus, we wont be surprised if it adopts a similar retrofuturist design philosophy almost as well-established as Star Wars.The grimy mechanical feel of Alien: Romulus, which is grounded in the whole series, is about social commentary, stories exploring capitalism, Moore says.For All Mankind, on the other hand, is not quite such a grimy used vision of outer space, but it isnt even retrofuturistic it is straight-up alternate history that hails back to an optimistic vision of the future.Even if we go to the flag bearer for optimistic visions of the future, were still left starved for visions of that actual future. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is as much a prequel to TOS as it is a show about the future, and it shows.Part of the appeal of Strange New Worlds is finding a way to make it feel even more real. With the state of television today we can realise things in a way we werent able to in the 60s and 90s, Wolkoff explains.When Den of Geek talked to Jonathan Lee, who worked on the set design for Strange New Worlds, he told us I spent a long time looking at architects like Eero Saarinen, Oscar Neymar, Carlo Scarpa, and Pier Luigi Nervi. These guys work was all percolating around the world at the time Star Trek was being conceived and I thought it would be great to bring all these influences into the set.Yet the Strange New Worlds writers are still trying to find ways to show us something new, not just in terms of aesthetics but also in terms of science.We strive, every season, to tell modern stories that honour the Star Trek framework, Wolkoff says. Its a tricky balancing act, telling modern science stories while sticking with the science reality that Star Trek has established, but we still strive as best as we can to show where were headed and find at least a couple of stories each season that focus on that.The makers of Star Trek: Lower Decks, meanwhile, had a rule that the show could not make any real-world references to anything post-1990s, to preserve that Star Trek: The Next Generation feel, balancing it out by having the crew using tablets and touch screens in a way more familiar to a 2020s audience.Strange New Worlds Akiva Goldsman has now announced a shared TV universe based on the sleek, retrofuturistic vibes of Irwin Allens TV shows Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants, suggesting that retrofuturistic streak is going nowhere.In each case, the aesthetic has a different reason, Moore tells us. I think the operative question is why, while were doing all those things, arent we also doing stories set forward from now?Reinventing the WheelWhen it comes to identifying a prevalent trend in television, a quick and easy answer to jump to is usually money.This is a very how the sausage is made type answer, but when youre writing something truly speculative, predicting things that havent been done or leaning into what we know today to look forward, what makes it challenging from a practical standpoint is that its really hard to design that on a TV schedule, Wolkoff says. Part of the advantage that we have with Star Trek is we are building off an existing aesthetic. It is really challenging to do something that you have never seen before.Faced with that challenge, from a time and budget perspective, looking back to go forward solves a lot of problems.Its why you see a lot of retrofuturism in television, and a lot of reboots and a lot of alternative histories, Wolkoff says. You can couch stories in something a little easier to produce. There are people who very badly want to reinvent the wheel, but you have to build that into your budget.Beyond budgetary and production concerns, however, is it possible that the future is simply harder to guess at now? The last big aesthetic leap we had in designing fictional future tech was to make phone and tablet screens transparent, a design innovation literally nobody wants.Initially I was going to say I dont know if thats true in fiction, because fiction and film do different things, Moore says. Im trying to think of a non-smug way to say this, but often film and TV feels like it lags a little behind fiction in terms of the complexity of the ideas. Going back a few years I loved the TV show Humans (2015). But it was a brilliant example of what Im talking about because it was right at the cutting edge of 1991 sci-fi.At the same time, Moore acknowledges that books often get their TV and film rights snapped up quickly Mickey 17 hit cinemas only three years after the book it was based on was published, and that was after a delayed release.Its always hard! Wolkoff says. Because youre making wild predictions. Youre writing about people at the end of the day and thats what brings us forward. The challenge is finding people to inhabit those worlds and the stories of how the future affects all of us.Hope for the Future?One issue is that increasingly, the way the future affects us is badly. We no longer have the cast iron sense of manifest destiny that informed the creation of Star Trek. The technologies that were supposed to make our world greater and more wondrous have been a disappointment. Radiation gives you cancer, not superpowers. Space is the playground of billionaires. AI is a mass content scraping exercise that creates images that raise the hairs on the back of your neck.Its really hard to escape the possibility that it is about hope, Moore says. Between the certainty that climate crisis is going to fuck us right up as a species, and the general horribleness of the political climate, most people cant see what our future is going to look like. They dont want to or cant imagine what the road from here looks like. So I wonder if were going to these stories because it feels safer or nicer.In talking about how the writers bring modern science into Star Trek, Wolkoff is keen to credit Erin Macdonald.Shes an astrophysicist and the science advisor for every modern Star Trek show and we owe the greatest debt to her. Shes very much a guide for us, Wolkoff says.But Macdonald has also spoken passionately on Jessie Earls YouTube channel about the damage that the corporatisation of space travel has done to our ability to imagine a brighter future in space. Still, while much has been written about the lack of utopian or even vaguely optimistic takes on our future, that has never stopped us before. Alien appears retrofuturistic now, but when it was released it was a used, battered, grim vision of the future, but undeniably high-tech. The 2006 film Children of Men is about as bleak a future as you can imagine (and it takes less imagination all the time) but it is a future clearly set in the day after its audiences tomorrow. Moore himself is a Gen X-er who grew up around Threads and When the Wind Blows, genuinely convinced that he would die in nuclear war. But that is also the era that gave birth to Cyberpunk not retrofuturistic cyberpunk about how cassette Walkmans are really cool, but subversive, cynical fiction about the endpoint of the prevailing politics of the time.And as Moore points out, we are hardly starved for material.Going into lockdown, a lot of people confidently predicted a flood of pandemic books, but they didnt come, Moore tells us. The term pandemic book just came to mean a book someone wrote because they were in lockdown and had always wanted to write a book, and there are loads of those.The failed boom in pandemic fiction has caused Moore to think back to the cultural impact of the last global pandemic.It prompted me to think back to the 1920s and how few bird flu stories there are, he says. It makes me wonder if people living through something like that just think I dont want to tell stories about that! I just finished doing it!Fiction about pandemics might be thin on the ground in any medium, but as we have already observed, the last year has seen three big-budget TV series about societies that have locked themselves in underground bunkers to escape apocalyptic catastrophes, under the leadership of untrustworthy governments.They speak to that experience about being locked in and locked down, having to deal with that claustrophobia but not wanting the actual horror of an epidemic to deal with, Moore says. We talk about fantasy as escapism and sci-fi as commentary, but theres a little bit of both going on. Its not quite the romantasy genre of Legends and Lattes but there is a lot of interesting weird sci-fi without really telling stories of our future.There is another factor as well, aside from the despair of it all. By now many of us are familiar with the Torment Nexus meme or the idea of cautionary science fiction inspiring the horror it warns against. Sometimes it can even function as unwitting propaganda for it, as weve seen with countless Weve Invented The Minority Report headlines (they have never invented the Minority Report).Theres this increasing knowledge that you cant do satire! It doesnt work! Moore says, pointing to fans of The Boys that took until season four or later to realise that the fascistic Homelander is the shows villain. It doesnt matter how outrageous a future or story you describe, the people whose attitudes youre attempting to puncture arent going to get it. What is the responsible way of doing that? How can we talk about what a post-Trump or post-Brexit world will look like without creating the harm were trying to warn against?New FuturesDespite the obstacles, in terms of budget, production, imagination and just how frightening the future is, people are still telling stories and creating visions of what the future could look like. Wolkoff is keen to see the visions of the future that come out of future seasons of Netflixs 3 Body Problem series, which adapts Liu Cixins novels.The books get truly wild and feel very rooted in what we know about astrophysics and physics today, he enthuses.He also recommends Kim Stanley Robinsons Ministry of the Future, which he hopes to see adapted for television, and How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. Both books are at least adjacent to the Cli-Fi subgenre, science fiction dealing with the consequences of climate change.Cli-Fi was much bigger a couple of years back and is getting more and more relevant all the time, Moore says, pointing to examples such as Adrian Tchaikovskys Saturation Point.Moore also believes that the time has come for a cyberpunk resurgence, and has been saying so for years.Its the same climate. Cyberpunk was a product of the eighties, of Thatcher and Reagan and runaway capitalist greed, and Im like How is that not relevant now? he argues.Moore has seen stories that are evolving in that niche, but wants them to get more attention.The new cyberpunk has never taken off and Im disappointed because I think this is about where it comes from, he says. It is coming from Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Africa and is written by marginalised people. Its about a future in collective action, people who look like them who have been systematically oppressed and disenfranchised by corporate greed and the legacy of Reagan and Thatcher, working out how to navigate those systems, exploit them and turn them around. Its not always about victory. They dont overthrow the corporation, but they defy them and carve out their own existence.As visions of the future go, we could do a lot worse.
