The Three Plots of Science Fiction

Science is as endless as human potential. While there are endless topics in science, there are only three basic plots in science fiction. That’s true because Science Fiction isn’t about science; it’s about fiction, and fiction is an avenue by which we discuss and transmit culture.

More than ninety percent of Science Fiction can fit into one of three simple categories. They are Stories about aliens, stories about robots, and stories about weapons we can’t control. There are some significant sub-categories, like stories about time travel and stories about trips to impossible places, but they usually fit into the other categories.

H. G. Wells invented the Time Machine and used it to tell a story about weapons we can’t control. Back to the Future and Time After Time includes time travel, but ultimately, they are about human relationships. The 1969 film Marooned is one of the best hard science Science Fiction films ever made, but how many of you have seen it? Ultimately, it also fits in the Weapons We Can’t Control category.

Stories about aliens are almost always metaphors for cultures here on Earth. Gene Roddenberry was one of the most notable welders of this particular tool. In Star Trek, he introduced Klingons to represent the Russians and Romulans to represent the Chinese. He had aliens whose faces were half-white and half-black to represent the racial strife in the American South. His helmsman was Japanese; his weapons specialist was Russian with a Beatles haircut. His communications specialist and one ship’s doctor were Africans.

The other ship’s doctor was a white man from Atlanta who attended medical school at the University of Mississippi School of Medicine. Even though he never said it, writing Star Trek in 1965 and 1966, Roddenberry could not have escaped thoughts about the events at the University of Mississippi just three years earlier or the death of Medgar Evers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. While Roddenberry offered hope that Mississippi would eventually work through these issues, he also suggested it would take three hundred years to do it. The jury is still out on how long it will actually take.

Gene Roddenberry never meant for the character of Spock to represent Jews, but Leonard Nimoy did. Writing for Star Trek, D. C. Fontana picked up on what Nimoy was doing and gave him a backstory reminiscent of the Jews she knew growing up in New Jersey and then moving to Los Angeles. She decided that Spock would come from a mixed family. His life among non-Vulcans created problems with his Vulcan girlfriend, and he struggled to fit in among his white, Christian shipmates.

A cursory look at Star Wars might suggest that George Lucas only included aliens to make his film seem more exotic. Some of that is true. Looking at what he had in the can for the cantina sequence, Lucas called guys like Rick Baker and asked how many aliens he could deliver in two weeks. Fortunately, Baker had been making masks since he was thirteen and had quite a few just sitting around.

That’s not the end of the story, though. Lucas was the same guy who wrote American Graffiti and THX 1138. He was acutely aware of and interested in cultural issues. The Wookie Race represents the Viet Cong in his early scripts and notes. Changing his mind about Wookies but wanting to keep the Viet Cong element, he later made the Ewoks the Viet Cong and had them kick some imperial white ass. It doesn’t end there. The Sand People represent Arabs. The Jawas represent Jews. Lucas used a gentler hammer than Roddenberry, but the message was the same.

There were efforts to represent aliens as they might actually be, should we ever encounter them. Forbidden Planet mentions the Krel but never shows them. All we know about the Krel is their machines and the doors we assume conform to their bodies. Everything else, the robot and the id monster are all artifacts of a man’s mind, augmented by Krel technology.

Developing 2001, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke spent months trying to discover how to represent aliens infinitely more advanced than us. Artists worked up scores of drawings of how the aliens might be depicted, but Kubrick rejected them all, choosing instead to represent the aliens with a featureless black slab. If Stanley Kubrick decides it’s too complicated to represent something visually—it probably is.

I have two favorite films about aliens. One is Andromeda Strain. Written by Michael Crichton, it depicts a returning space probe that carries with it an alien life form. An infectious microbe that kills everyone but an old wino and a colicky baby.

The other is the 1972 Soviet film Solaris, which tells the story of humanity’s first encounter with alien intelligence. It deals with the proposal put forward by Arthur C Clarke and others that truly intelligent aliens would probably be so alien that we wouldn’t recognize them as intelligent.

Human astronauts discover an alien planet covered by a methane ocean that they slowly understand is intelligent. The rest of the film discusses the alien's attempts to communicate with the human astronauts and their impact on them.

They say the first Science Fiction novel was written by an eighteen-year-old English girl upset with her unfaithful husband. Mary Shelly invents Science Fiction’s first Robot in her 1818 novel, Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus. By invoking Prometheus, Shelly admits she didn’t create the idea. The Greeks had Pygmalion; the Jews had Rabbi Loew. This idea that men can create men extends to nearly every culture. It begins with the idea that if God can make man from dust and Prometheus can make men from clay, why can’t we discover that secret?

Robots aren’t machines; they’re men made from machines, men making men. The best of these stories invoke the question of what it means to be human. If we can create men, then why can’t they create men? Where does the cycle begin, and where does it end? Are we robots?

Probably the best example of this genre is Blade Runner. By the end, you’re utterly confused about who is a robot, who is human, and whose side to be on. Another example of this line of thinking is the television series Battlestar Galactica (2004), where, by the end, you’re confused about who created who and where the cycle ends.

Stories about weapons we can’t control have always existed but became one of the most prominent subgenres of Science Fiction in the fifties because in 1945, the United States dropped atomic weapons on the people of Japan.

Stories about the effects of atomic radiation were ubiquitous in the fifties and sixties. Science made ants that were fifteen feet long and tarantulas that were seventy feet wide.

Borrowing story elements from his childhood friend Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen wrote about runaway science waking up a frozen dinosaur that attacks New York. Producers at Toho Studios in Japan saw the success of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and commissioned Ishirō Honda to create something similar but less expensive. Honda took that modest budget and made a film about the effects of American Science on Japan. It produced Gojira in 1954, which was retitled Godzilla for American audiences the following year.

Japanese nationalistic feelings about the American Bomb were lessened in the many sequels to Gojira but returned in full force in 2023 in the film Godzilla, Minus One.

Science fiction isn’t science. It uses science as a tool to tell stories about ourselves. It’s possible, even likely, that science fiction in the future will develop genres and ideas we can’t imagine now, but I think it might take a while.