Random Scifi Movies

What science fiction is actually about

People think science fiction is about the future, or about technology, or about space. It is about none of those things, or rather it uses all of them as tools for its real job, which is to change one thing about the world and then watch what happens to everything else.

Press Generate and it hands you one. A few of the films in here:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• The Matrix (1999)
• Alien (1979)
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
• Arrival (2016)

Every one of those takes a single impossible thing, an alien, a thinking machine, a body that can be replaced, and treats it with complete seriousness to see what it reveals. There is a name for that impossible thing, and a whole theory of the genre built on it.

Drawing a film

1. Press Generate for one film.
2. Ask for a few to pick from.
3. Type into Contains to search the titles.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where these titles come from

Science fiction films gathered and checked by hand, from the quiet and cerebral to the loud and spectacular. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

The one new thing

In 1979 a literary scholar named Darko Suvin wrote the book that still frames how critics think about the genre, and he gave its central device a Latin name: the novum. The new thing.

A novum is one element that does not exist in our world, introduced into a story that otherwise obeys the ordinary rules, and treated as though it were real. A machine that thinks. A drug that lets you relive memories. A signal from another star. A way to copy a human being. The novum is the single alteration, and everything else in the story is the consequence of taking it seriously.

Suvin's insight was that good science fiction changes as little as possible. It does not invent a whole new reality. It changes one thing, holds everything else steady, and then follows the logic outward with rigour. What would it actually mean if this were true? Who would gain, who would suffer, what would break, what would we discover about ourselves that we could not see before?

This is why the genre feels like an experiment rather than a fantasy. A scientist changes one variable and holds the rest constant, to see what that variable actually does. Science fiction changes one fact about the world and holds the rest of human nature constant, to see what that fact actually does to us. The novum is the variable. The film is the experiment.

Making the familiar strange enough to see it

Suvin paired the novum with a second idea, and this is the one that explains why the genre matters rather than merely how it works. He called it cognitive estrangement.

The problem with the world you live in is that you cannot see it. It is too close. The assumptions you were raised inside, about work, gender, death, money, what a person is, have become invisible to you precisely because they are everywhere. You cannot examine the water you have always swum in.

Science fiction solves this by moving you somewhere strange enough that you can finally look. Put a familiar human problem on an alien world, or into a machine, or a thousand years from now, and suddenly you can see it, because it has been lifted out of the setting that made it invisible. The estrangement is the distance. The cognition is what you understand once you are far enough away to look back.

A film about a machine that becomes conscious and is treated as property is not really about machines. It is about slavery, and personhood, and who we have decided does not count, and it can say those things with a clarity a film set on a plantation cannot, because it has slipped past your defences. You came for the robot. You left having thought about something you would have flinched from if it had been named directly.

That is the whole trick, and it is why the genre has always been a hiding place for ideas too dangerous to say plainly. When you cannot criticise the king, you write about a distant empire.

Why this is not fantasy, and why the line matters

People lump science fiction and fantasy together, and the industry shelves them side by side, but Suvin drew a hard line between them, and the line is worth understanding.

The difference is not spaceships versus dragons. It is the relationship the story asks you to have with its impossible element.

Fantasy asks you to accept its magic and stop asking how it works. The magic is a given, part of the furniture of a world that runs on different rules from ours, and prodding it too hard is beside the point. You are not meant to reason about how the wizard's spell obeys the conservation of energy. You are meant to be swept up.

Science fiction asks the opposite. Its novum is supposed to be, at least in principle, explicable. It presents itself as something that could follow from the world as we understand it, and it invites you to reason about it, to take it seriously as a possibility rather than a wonder. The pleasure is not surrender but extrapolation, the cool satisfaction of following an idea to its logical end.

This is why the two genres feel so different even when their surfaces look alike, and why a story can wear the costume of one while being the other underneath. A film full of technology that runs on pure wonder and asks no questions is fantasy in a spacesuit. A film about a genuinely magical world that reasons rigorously about how its magic would reshape a society is closer to science fiction than it looks.

Science fiction is never about the future

Here is the thing that follows from all of it, and it sounds like a paradox until you see why it is not.

A film set three hundred years from now is not a prediction. Nobody who made it believes the future will look like that, and the ones that tried hardest to predict accurately are the ones that age worst, stranded next to a future that arrived wearing different clothes. Prediction is not the point and never was.

The future in science fiction is a stage, chosen because it is empty. It is the one setting where a writer can build whatever conditions are needed to examine a present-day idea in isolation, without the clutter of the actual world getting in the way. Want to ask what makes a person a person? You cannot ask it cleanly here, where the answer is tangled up in bodies and history. So you build a machine that might qualify, in a future clean enough to run the test.

Which means the best way to read a science fiction film is to ask not what it predicts, but what it is worried about. The alien invasion made in the 1950s is about the fear of the enemy within. The film about surveillance is about the year it was made, not the year it is set in. The story of the machine that outgrows its makers is about whatever its makers were anxious they had built. Every future is a mirror held up to the moment that imagined it, and the strangeness is only there so you will look.

Questions people ask

What is the difference between hard and soft science fiction?

Roughly, how much the story cares about the plausibility of its science. Hard science fiction tries to keep its novum consistent with real physics and follows the rules strictly. Soft science fiction is more relaxed about the mechanism and more interested in people and society. Both are the genre; they simply weight the two halves of it differently.

Why does some science fiction age so badly?

Usually because it bet on a specific prediction, and the prediction lost. The films that age well are the ones whose novum was a device for examining something timeless about people, because people have not changed. The ones that age badly tried to guess the gadgets, and the real future turned up with different gadgets.

Does science fiction need big special effects?

No, and some of the most powerful examples have almost none. The genre lives in its idea, not its budget. A single room and one genuinely strange premise can do more than a hundred million dollars of spectacle, because the estrangement happens in your head, not on the screen.

Why is so much of it so bleak?

Because fear is easier to examine than hope, and a warning is a natural shape for a thought experiment. If you want to show what an idea might do to us, the fastest way is to follow it to somewhere frightening. The genre has plenty of hope in it too, but the cautionary tale is its most natural form, because it is fundamentally a way of asking what if, and what if is often a worry.

References

1. Suvin, D. (1979). Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, on cognitive estrangement and the novum. Reprinted at Strange Horizons. https://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/estrangement-and-cognition/
2. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, entry on the novum and its role in distinguishing the genre from fantasy. https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/novum