Escapism: The Death Knell of Science Fiction

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

“Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.” That chilling quote is from 1984, a classic sci-fi novel which provides valuable critique about our contemporary society through a dystopian narrative. By contrast, we have a different takeaway from more recent media in the same genre, specifically the film Avatar. Avatar is about Americans colonizing the fictional planet Pandora, and their frequent conflicts with the indigenous population. The character Colonel Quaritch summarizes their approach: “There’s an aboriginal horde out there massing for an attack… Now the hostiles believe that this mountain stronghold of theirs is protected by their deity.” There is no critical analysis in the 2009 movie, which focuses on our past history of colonization rather than present or future society, to match 1984’s critique of the present. As seen through the differing examples above, the genre of science fiction has strayed from harsh critiques of society and the ways it  removes itself from the pursuit of knowledge. Instead, the genre shows technology, specifically space travel, in a positive light and focuses on society’s past of globalization and colonization. This change has come along with more representation for women and people of color, as authors and as characters, but has had the unfortunate side effect of commercialization in the sci-fi genre. Reading has always been meaningful to me as both an escape and a way to connect with others. My first words were “More Darby book.” I have read thousands of books from many (most) genres, but there is something special about science-fiction and its capacity to inspire conversation and thought. I wanted to explore how these conversations and ideas have changed as the genre has shifted overall, and perhaps what we’ve lost. I would also like to note that I am defining “classic” science fiction as works that were written before the nineteen-eighties, and “modern” science fiction as works written or filmed after that period, with an emphasis on media from the 21st century. Though nuances exist within these definitions and there are examples of media from both periods that could be used to support opposing arguments, for ease of comparison I’ve divided sci-fi works into these two general periods. 

A conscious society should always want media that critiques society, because it allows people to be aware and remain cautious of establishments and people in power. The genre of science fiction was an outlet for this criticism, and the sci-fi that came out of the 1950’s and 1960’s was the beginning of the genre as we know it today. However, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, written in 1818, is acknowledged as the first true sci-fi novel. There are many popular books and movies in the sci-fi canon that serve to educate and inform people about societal issues in a way that is easy to understand. Some of the most famous books from the Cold War era that fit this critical description are Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, 1984 by George Orwell, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. These works depict a future world where higher thinking and criticism of the government are both illegal and socially unacceptable; this happens through either constant surveillance or socially enforced compliance. By making a difficult topic easier to talk about, these novels function as a warning sign and reminder to stay critical. We can see this discussed in Fahrenheit 451: “With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.” Here we see the hyperbolic society represented in the novel, and we can draw an easy parallel to the growing trend of prioritizing sports over academics, with approximately one-sixth of American high school students taking Advanced Placement tests compared to the one-half of students participating in organized sports. The world predicted in Fahrenheit 451 has started to arrive, and thus it is necessary for schools to continue to produce thinkers and intellectuals; without them, our society lacks true meaning. Sports are excellent activities for schools to support, but they cannot come at the cost of no longer pushing students to their intellectual potential, and if they continue to be prioritized, the cost is steep: lack of true analysis and deeper thought in society. The main characters in these sci-fi novels all deviate from the standard path of constant entertainment and cheap thoughts. 

Brave New World shows how the main character understands the value of ethics, literature, and knowledge and asks us to do the same: “But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” In all three of these classic books, however, none of the characters have happy endings. They either leave society completely or are tortured into compliance and reintegration. It is not easy to read about; it is sad and uncomfortably familiar, but it makes you think. Classic science fiction has always offered a critical analysis of how our society responds to internal and external conflict. Science-fiction media allows people to understand conceptual threats and thus discuss and protect ourselves from them. The true meaning of sci-fi is slipping away as our culture demands more and more mass-produced entertainment whose only purpose is to distract us from our worries and concerns. However, we have always wanted fun things to distract from the drudgery of the everyday, which is why the cultural and historical reasons for classic sci-fi are unique and interesting. 

Many classic science-fiction novels were written during the tumultuous period of the Cold War. Media was frequently used as a weapon during this conflict, with many American films and novels reinforcing the idea of “us” versus “them,” often by using non-human enemies to depict Russians. In the novel 1984, the main character, Winston, lives in a country called Oceania, which is at constant war with either Eastasia or Eurasia; it changes periodically throughout the story, but it doesn’t matter who they’re fighting as long as there is an enemy to unite against. The clearest example of this unification is during the “Two Minutes Hate,” a daily period where all citizens are shown an enemy of the government and told to yell their hatred out: “He [enemy of government] was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought...people were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the top of their voices.” The Oceaniac government is telling their citizens to hate the freedoms that are codified in the American Constitution, but more importantly, they are uniting people against the ideology that the enemy of the government represents. Here we see one example of how the tensions of the Cold War trickled into all aspects of culture, and affected the way Americans viewed people perceived as “other.” 

A second unique feature of the classic science-fiction era was the prevalence of non-human enemies in literature and film, specifically aliens. The most famous example of this is the movie The War of the Worlds, based on the novel by H.G. Wells. The Martians are enemies that come to destroy England, an American ally, in this Cold War-era film. This lets American viewers draw the easy conclusion that Russians are evil aliens and American characters are just defending their assets and allies. The Martians land outside of London and wreak havoc, mostly because of their intelligence and advanced weaponry – two things Americans feared about the USSR during the Cold War. A gruesome scene in the movie adaptation of the novel reinforces this idea: “The extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes—were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous.” The language used both dehumanizes Russians and depicts their intelligence as cruel and inhuman. This portrayal has affected the depictions of the USSR in American media ever since. All of these novels were, consciously or unconsciously, repeating and reinforcing the ideal of America as heroic and the USSR as an evil country, an idea that left a unique fingerprint on the stories of the era. Additionally, in each of these stories there exists a deeper meaning, as every antagonist and villain represents someone, and every alien attack is a political statement, but that, too, has changed for the worse. 

This infamous genre has exploded in the past two decades, with extreme saturation of movies, books, and TV series now exploring space travel, aliens, and imaginative technology. This is the dream era for a lover of science fiction, but it has come at a cost. Because of the prevalence of sci-fi in our society today, science fiction works no longer deliver critical analysis of said society. The sci-fi media is about the “fun” parts of science fiction: strange species, people with otherworldly powers, crazy future societies. There are many examples of this, the most characteristic being the novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, the novel Red Rising by Pierce Brown, and the film Avatar, directed by James Cameron. All of these works fit into the science-fiction canon, but none of them deal with tropes commonly seen in classic science fiction. These tropes include: enemies of America; the lack of academic achievement being encouraged by society; or the “us” versus “them” narrative. Ender’s Game shows this shift clearly, because it has many of the aesthetic hallmarks of classic sci-fi such as space travel, advanced technology, and a very changed Earth culture, but its primary deeper meaning is how much colonization and globalization affect the species they are targeted towards. Ender’s Game is about a boy genius in a future US military academy who has to help kill an alien species that previously attacked Earth. This text can be analyzed through both a post-colonial and a white-savior lens. Post-colonial theory is defined by scholar J. Daniel Elam as “a body of thought primarily concerned with accounting for the political, aesthetic, economic, historical, and social impact of European colonial rule around the world.” This is similar to the concept of the white savior complex, which refers to White people who seek to bolster their own ego by helping non-White people. These two theories are similar in effect and outcome, and white saviorism is a result of colonialism and globalism. Both theories are ones which the aforementioned novel can be analyzed through. Specifically, Ender, the boy who kills the alien forces, shows regret for doing so; “All his crimes weighed heavy on him, the deaths of Stilson and Bonzo no heavier and no lighter than the rest.” Compounded with this colonizer complex is the savior storyline. This is exemplified by Ender saving the aliens: “He reached into the cavity and took out the cocoon [alien queen]. It was astonishingly light, to hold all the hope and future of a great race within it.” Having this opportunity to save the queen creates a narrative in which the killer, Ender, can be redeemed, and become the amazing hero who saves the whole race from annihilation. The storyline is problematic because the author, a White man, has no experience being a colonized person. Furthermore, this work only serves to critically examine our past, not our present or future like the science fiction genre did in the past. Critically looking at how our present society is acting is an important step in understanding how we need to change. While it is important to examine our past, science fiction should not be the outlet for this type of analysis. The film Avatar has a very similar structure of making the White “heroes” feel better after they cause the destruction and genocide of an alien species. The main character, Jake, assists in discovering the weakness of the indigenous people, the Na’vi, which leads to the destruction of their sacred tree and the death of their leader. After realizing his mistake, he later switches sides and fights alongside the Na’vi, which parallels the Ender’s Game storyline of unjustly killing members of an alien race, only to switch sides at the end and find redemption as the underdog and “hero.” Jake’s actions are textbook white saviorism, as he inserts himself into a situation where he is not wanted and proceeds to “help” by actually causing more pain. An article in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History reinforces this idea: “However well-intentioned Cameron's motives may have been, the Na'vi are portrayed as one-dimensional, environmentalist, noble savage caricatures that ironically only serve to reveal the continuous power of a colonialist mindset.” James Cameron’s film is not a true science-fiction narrative of critical cultural analysis, but a story about “savage” aliens played out to make society feel better about the problematic American relationship with the indigenous population in America. Even though there is value in the environmentalist analysis of Avatar, I argue that any actual critical analysis that it inspired in our society was subsequently destroyed by the mass commercialization of the franchise, specifically the Avatar-themed Disney World Animal Kingdom park. Although some could argue that a mainstream park makes the deforestation and environmental themes of the film more accessible, few people on the 3-Dimensional flying faux-dinosaur simulation ride are thinking about how we are destroying our environment and the genocide in our collective past. The prevalence of themes like environmentalism and race in new wave science fiction works is also connected with the modern trend of using technology as an ally, and the explosive genre of post-9/11 escapism media. 

Technology is one of the central tenets of science fiction. All media even remotely associated with the genre have some version of advanced artificial intelligence, surveillance, or space transportation. However, our culture’s relationship with technology has changed immensely in the past seventy years as advanced computers in the form of phones have become ubiquitous. 

How technology is represented in sci-fi has also changed, from being viewed with suspicion but also romanticized in the past, to presently being used as a friend or ally, and often being seen as “good.” To romanticize: our ability to see ideas and theories as their best selves. For example, how people in the fifties saw the wonderful possibilities of technology. Yet science fiction stories had layers and nuances showing the potential for destruction with these fantastic innovations, something we lack today because technology is seen as generally good. Characters in classic stories often viewed technology warily, including in the short story “All the Troubles of the World” as exemplified by the quote, “We’ve asked it [the computer, Multivac] to take all our secrets into itself; we’ve asked it to absorb our evil and guard us against it.” “All the Troubles of the World” is about an extremely advanced computer that knows everything and is used to predict crime. The people in this story acknowledge that they need this technology, but they can’t bring themselves to trust it. The Multivac is viewed as an omniscient, god-like presence, all-knowing but perhaps malevolent. Specifically the scene where the characters ask the Mulivac what it truly wants reinforces the claim that fifties science fiction writing drew attention to the dark potential of technology, “‘Multivac, what do you want more than anything else?’ And there was a clicking and a card popped out [of the Multivac]. It was a small card. On it in precise letters, was the answer: ‘I want to die.’” The computer holds all the answers for the fictional society, showing the cynicism the people of the 50’s and 60’s held towards the future. The wary attitude toward Multivac in the story parallels the wary attitude toward similar technology that existed in this time period. The most popular computer was the IBM operating system, which was very similar to the Multivac with a system of “punching in” questions and the computer printing out answers, albeit with very limited operations. Technology, AI, and computers are perceived more positively in the present day, and that is reflected in our media. The modern sci-fi novel, Red Rising, shows how ubiquitous technology is, both in everyday life and in writing. It is a story about a colony on Mars where people compete in a Hunger Games-esque competition to the death to win resources for their community. One example of the positive attitude towards technology is seen as the protagonist arrives in the main city for the first time, “HC videos run like liquid streams along parts of the Avenue in this high-tech sector of the city so most walk upon the moving Pathways or ride in public transportation with their heads crooked down like cane handles.” These fictional videos are only extensions of real-world wall-to-wall video ads on skyscrapers, like those in Times Square in NYC. They show how everyday science can be tweaked into future predictions and ideas, but also how it is accepted as beneficial and able to be controlled by humanity. Today, technology is completely integrated into society, and science-fiction media reflects that integration. We have accepted technology into our homes and our bodies with open arms, and the degree of suspicion that remains is shockingly reduced from just seventy years ago. There is a great dichotomy between our past and current relationship with technology and that change is particularly evident in how technology is portrayed in post-9/11 media. 

The explosion of post-9/11 escapism media shows modern science fiction’s embrace of technology. Specifically, this genre features technology as either an ally, a friend, a helper, or in the rare case, an AI supervillain. Moreover, sci-fi, and media in general, became significantly less willing to engage in meaningful social critique, a phenomenon described by author Lindsey Ellis,“The two-year period immediately following 9/11 was an era in which the media was defined both by its jingoism and patriotism and also by its aversion to images of violence and destruction.” People did not want to be reminded of the tragic events of September 11, and filmmakers quickly started to create media that was a welcome escape from tragedy. All of the modern sci-fi mentioned above, with the exception of Ender’s Game, were created after 9/11, and reflect the “escapist” era. I find that the past twenty years have seen science fiction media on a slippery slope—producing works with less and less meaningful messages. After 9/11 however, I have noticed the slope has steepened greatly and resulted in a freefall towards crude, pointless films and novels. The main aim of all this modern sci-fi media is to create a world to escape into, which has value, but escaping is not the point of true science fiction. Society has lost the once glorious and cynical and bitter and eye-opening books and films of classic sci-fi, and seen them replaced with cheap imitations that contain shallow meaning and value. However, the one thing all science-fiction media shares is the desire to create a utopia.

A perfect world, or utopia, is a supreme society free of strife and unhappiness. This term was first used by Sir Thomas More to describe the fictional perfect society in his novel Utopia. Alas, we are not there, but utopianism and utopias are central features of science fiction. Every work of sci-fi is consciously or unconsciously trying to create a perfect world. Their attempts are usually extremely misguided and only actually perfect for the ruling or elite class. Of course, these books have gained extreme popularity in the past decade, under the name dystopian fiction, dystopia being the opposite of a perfect world. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, the aforementioned novel Brave New World, and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins are all striving for this perfect world, to disastrous results. The closest thing to a perfect society in these stories is described in “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas,” which is about a place called Omelas where everyone is perfect, happy, and cheerful, and there are parades and joy everywhere; however, for everyone else to live peacefully, a child has to live in a tortuous cell with little food and water. The essential question, of course, is if life in a utopia is worth having if someone constantly suffers. The citizens are aware of this child, “Some of them have come to see it [the child], others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” However, there are people who are unable to live there with this knowledge, so they leave and become the ones who walk away from Omelas. The author is presenting readers with the following question: are utopias even possible? To guide the reader to answer the question for themselves, she provides the closest example of a utopia that she can imagine and leaves it to readers to decide if utopia has truly been achieved. On the one hand, only one person needs to suffer for thousands to thrive. However, can a utopia really be utopic if it depends entirely on suffering?

Brave New World, another work from the “classic” period of sci-fi, is also trying to create a perfect society. The author does this by giving everyone the option of taking the drug soma, which makes you happy, regardless of what is happening in your life. However, is blanket happiness worth the price of being deprived of choice and complex human creations like poetry and literature? Most of the people in Aldous Huxley’s novel agree that they just want to be happy, but the ones who dissent break the illusion of perfection. The novel is a soft horror story, again showing that this almost-utopia, where most people are happy, is not just or right. Here, the intellectuals are treated like token characters and cannot meaningfully contribute to their society. 

These classic almost-utopias create the facade of utopia through forced, staid happiness, while modern sci-fi has the opposite effect. The most famous dystopian novel series, The Hunger Games, shows this clearly. These modern novels are about a future America divided into twelve districts and a Capital. Each of the districts has to send two children into an arena to fight to the death every year, as punishment for a past rebellion against the Capital. The elite rulers are trying to create a perfect, compliant society, obviously through twisted and malevolent methods, but the Capital deceptively presents itself like a utopia nonetheless. One example of seemingly utopian luxuries is described: “Tables laden with delicacies line the walls. Everything you can think of, and things you've never dreamed of, lie in wait...all I can think of is the emancipated bodies of the children on our kitchen table as my mother prescribes them what the parents can't give. More food.” Katniss, the heroine of the trilogy, draws attention to a stark contrast between the perfect world of the Capital and her home in the ignored District 12. Again, the people of Panem, the country in the story, must make the decision: to live with how the Capital treats people, or join the rebellion and fight for freedom and equality. These stories reveal one difference between modern and classic utopian sci-fi: the dystopian books of today have a clear martyr figure who significantly impacts the plot; Katniss’ rebellion is very public and well-known. Martyrdom does not exist in classic dystopias, where the people who dissent are few and far apart. Classic sci-fi, especially of this utopian sub-genre, have societies with a uniquely hard-to-pin-down horribleness; you have to look hard to see how wrong the societies are, whilst modern dystopian media shows the terribleness very clearly and makes it easy to identify the problems. Again, this is because the science fiction stories from the modern canon have less meaning and take on society’s problems in a more shallow way. Here, meaning is defined as the depth to which society is measured and analyzed in a story. In summary, all science-fiction media is trying to create perfect worlds and societies, and what characters sacrifice to achieve utopias becomes key to the story. As this style, and especially the sub-genre dystopia, become more popular, there is more representation for both women and people of color as characters and more room for them as authors, but the price of this is steep. 

Every genre, subgenre, book, and movie needs to have representation of people of color and women. Science-fiction has been notorious for featuring mostly  straight, white men as characters, just as the dominating science fiction authors in the 1950’s and 1960’s were themselves straight, white men. In modern sci-fi, there is significantly more diversity in creators, and more women have been recognized for their writing; from 2019-2009, 58.6% of the Nebula Award Winners—a highly esteemed award for sci-fi and fantasy—were women, while from 1965-1975 only 14.9% of the winners were women. Women are finally being recognized for their creative, interesting contributions to sci-fi, as are authors of color. In the first ten years, 1965-1975, of the Nebula Award’s existence, there were zero people of color recognized, and from 2009-2019, only 20% of the winners were non-white. These statistics show the gross discrepancies in representation within the sci-fi genre, although it has improved since the classic era. This also applies to representation in media at large, where there will never be enough women authors or authors of color until they are the only winners and recognized authors. There are many examples of excellent classic sci-fi works written by people other than white men, notably the Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. All of these books offer a critical analysis of society and our culture. Unfortunately though, what joins greater representation in characterizing modern sci-fi is commercialization, a phenomenon which twists the messaging in books like The Hunger Games, making it  over-processed and stripping it  of useful criticism until it  loses all meaning. 

This commercialization and dilution is an unfortunate consequence of the sci-fi genre becoming more mainstream, with many series going straight from books to movies, like the aforementioned Hunger Games and the similar dystopian series, Divergent. These powerhouse series, both written by women, dominate the science-fiction space, drawing money and attention away from more meaningful critiques of society. Such a mass-commercialization has happened in this day and age because sci-fi, specifically dystopian sci-fi, has become mainstream and makes significant money in the box office. Again, this has the double consequence of leaving no space for valuable analysis or critique and removing meaning from mass-marketed media. One example of this is the song “The Hanging Tree” in The Hunger Games series. This song is revealed, in the prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, to have been originally composed and performed by Lucy Grey, the winner of the 10th Hunger Games and a tribute from Katniss’ home District 12. Lucy Grey won the competition using unconventional methods and continued to defy the Capital after her victory. Her song is used as a method of rebellion against the Capital and is not allowed to be sung by anyone, but Katniss performs it in propaganda reels for the rebellion. The song was studio recorded for the movie, Mockingjay Part 1. As this HuffPost article reinforces, “There are several parts in the book that suggest it is a rallying cry for rebellion against the Capitol’s oppression that has meaning even before Katniss uses it for the rebellion.” Yet through commercializing the song, “The Hanging Tree” has become stripped of all meaning and is now just another mildly inappropriate song to play at clubs and high school dances. The incredibly meaningful song about Lucy Grey’s dead lover was remixed into a danceable pop song with a quick beat and rearranged catchy lyrics, “Are you? (You, you, you, you, you, you)/Are you, are you coming to the tree? / Where a dead man called out for his love to flee.” The success of the remix is particularly ironic because one of the points of the rebellion was to prevent the Capital from using former victors as entertainment, and the remix is using a former victor as actual entertainment for our current society. Representation in science-fiction has improved immensely over the last few decades, but we have so much farther to go with the genre, as shown by the mass-commercialization of sci-fi media and decreased  meaning in stories correlating with box-office gains. However, our society now has other outlets for criticism and critique, through radical news companies and social media. 

The most well-known political satire website is The Onion, headquartered in Chicago, and founded in 1988. It publishes articles about international, national, and local news in a way that critiques current politics and society. For example, in regard to Amy Coney Barret becoming a Supreme Court Justice only days before the presidential election, an Onion article said: “Explaining that they were under a tight deadline, Senate Republicans told reporters Monday they were rushing to confirm six more Supreme Court justices before the election.” While this is obviously satirical, it shows the extreme injustice of letting the sitting president nominate a new Supreme Court Justice when the election is so close in a way that is easy to understand. This is exactly what classic science fiction does: it allows society to understand pressing issues through the lens of aliens. The social media platform, Twitter, is also an outlet for critique and criticism of today’s culture. For example, this Tweet refers to the company Amazon and how its current exploitation of workers could lead to increasingly extreme exploitation: “[30 years into the future]. me: you know netflix used to send films by post. my amazon smart watch: 0.3% Productivity loss detected. Hourly rate reduced to $1.12 for 7m21s. Please refrain from talking on the packing line. Please say "Productivity" to acknowledge. me: productivity” (@tef_ebooks). Although this is a comedic projection of how future workers will be treated, this reality may not be very far into the future with Amazon employees writing articles about their unreasonably strict schedules being dictated by algorithms. Already, can guns are used to measure productivity and wages could be docked if a loss in productivity is detected. Society still has satirical publications and social media to explain big issues and problems to the masses, but in a less meaningful and less marketable way than classic sci-fi novels. Sci-fi media is no longer the only outlet for societal critique, but it remains the most meaningful. As the genre has changed and evolved to feature media designed for audience’s enjoyment, there has not been a substantive replacement for the depth of criticism that sci-fi offered. Tweets and Onion articles are not the same; they provide analysis but with less depth of meaning. 

The genre of science-fiction has become escapism media that provides no real critique or analysis of our society and instead only analyzes our past, a stark change from the satirical 1950’s and 1960’s literature. Along with this has come more representation for women and people of color in the genre and subsequent mass-commercialization of the books and films. Yet there are other outlets for satire of our society. These changes are combined with a continuing trend of utopias in sci-fi and a change in the portrayal of technology in modern media. This is a very bleak future, but what can we do to rebel against this trend? The easiest way to fight against the societal pull towards the newest escapism movie or TV series is to read one of the classic science-fiction novels quoted above, which remain relevant to today’s society and have interesting visions of the future. They are not fun or easy to read, but that is the point: they force you to be critical. Another way to rebel is to remain critical and aware of mass-produced and commercialized sci-fi media, allowing yourself to see the flaws and still enjoy the book or movie. In close, our society needs to be critical and aware of what people in power are doing. Science-fiction is the metaphorical compass for the direction we are going, and we need to abide by it; otherwise we will be lost in a sea of misinformation and lack of understanding.