What is Science Fiction REALLY about? | from a psychiatrist and fantasy author

What qualifies me to answer this question? I have been writing for most of my career on such topics as analytical psychology, mythology, dream interpretation, anthropology, spirituality and mental health, the neuroscience, code biology and genetics of the imagination, and even the philosophy of mind and the self. And when I say writing on these subjects, I mean published in peer-reviewed journals. Just so you know I’m serious about this stuff, and not just some internet rando. Well, not ONLY some internet rando. But all of these topics that I have published on play into the understanding of science fiction. So let’s get into it.

Part 1: What is Science Fiction Anyway?

So the first order of business is “what do I mean by the term science fiction?”. And how does sci-fi relate to fantasy and the psyche? Let’s tackle the second question first. Here I pretty much agree with both Ursula K Leguin and Terry Pratchett in saying that sci-fi is essentially a sub-genre of fantasy, and grew out of it. In other words, all sci-fi is specialized fantasy, but not all fantasy is sci-fi. 

That’s the easy question. The hard question is “what is sci-fi?” The question of when the earliest sci-fi story was written down is actually debatable, and opinions vary between the claim that it is really old to relatively recent–like the last 200 years or so. This is because there are ancient stories of flying machines that can go to the stars and planets, characters traveling through time, or in vessels that can go underwater, people using weapons that can destroy entire cities. Such written stories go as far back as the Rigveda, which dates to the 2nd Millennium BCE. Even in the oral mythologies of indigenous peoples, sometimes you can find stories of characters flying to the moon and meeting gods there and so on. So the argument goes, these stories might qualify as science fiction, even though they don’t refer to any technology that even remotely existed at the time. But you can see how it would be very difficult to differentiate that kind of story from just straight up fantasy. Some more examples from world folklore: Folktale type 471A “the Monk and the Bird”, for example, has a character who listens to a bird singing and comes home to realize 300 years have passed - sort of a time travel story. This tale has been documented by folklorists ranging from Mexico to Russia, to China. Tale 304 “the Dangerous Night Watch” has a character who stops time, and this story is found in folklore of peoples ranging from Europe to Africa to Mongolia. 

But does these features really differentiate fantasy from sci fi? Quite a few art critics do not think so. Rather, the other side of this debate argues that  even though these stories somewhat resemble science fiction, they might be more honestly described as proto-science fiction. This side of the argument claims that science fiction did not really come into its own as a fully identifiable genre until around the 18th-19th centuries, and mainly only in mainly Westernized contexts. This time period is of course the so-called “Age of Reason”, which saw an explosion of stories about going to the moon, having ‘mad scientists’ (obviously it’s only possible to have mad scientists if there are actual scientists around to create the trope with), culminating in 1818, down to a single author: Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley, it is argued, began the science fiction genre in earnest with her masterpiece Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. This story, of course, contains mad scientists, experiments gone awry, and various other proto-SF elements, and weaves them together seamlessly along with deep philosophical meditations on the ramifications of the technology devised by the titular character.

English, writer, editor, and artist Brian Aldiss credits Frankenstein as the “seminal work to which the label SF can be logically attached”, and I agree, but perhaps not for the reasons Aldiss invokes. I think Frankenstein is an identifiable point at which we can see a transition from proto-sci-fi to full sci-fi, but not because it aggregates mad scientists, mad science, and so forth into a ripping good yarn. Rather, I identify Frankenstein as the starting point because it has a key ingredient that had been missing in proto-sci-fi. This thematic element has been elaborated on endlessly since then, so much so that I would argue it is possibly the most important element that defines sci-fi, even if some sci-fi only deal with it tangentially.

Part 2: The Essential Element of Sci Fi

What is this key, missing ingredient, you ask? Well, it’s really a thematic question, moreso than an ingredient. And it’s a question that the sci-fi novel poses, and usually answers to one degree or another.  Like all well written stories, a well written sci-fi will be a narrative of images and symbols that deal with (often many) key questions and themes without necessarily explicitly stating them. What identifies a story as sci fi, then, I argue, is that it deals with the particular theme I will reveal in a moment often and in great depth. What do I mean by “deal with a particular question in depth”? Let’s use a non-sci-fi example first, so you can see what I mean. Let’s take the Lord of the Rings. This story poses the question “what is the nature of evil, and what is to be done about it?”. It argues it's answer through the actions of the characters. If it were easy to simply state the answer, of course, then you wouldn't need a long and complicated story to provide it. Nevertheless, Tolkien does answer the question he poses, and in great depth. I’ve done other videos on this subject, which I will link in the description. In any case, a well written story will pose a thematic question and answer it using the images, characters, actions, and metaphors of the story. This is powerful, and lasts generations because it speaks not just to the intellect, but because it uses characters and images, it touches our emotions, empathy, feeling, and images based on the body. In other words, a powerful story of any genre will speak to the entire being.

Moreover, good stories are not ones that just explore any old question. No, good stories are ones that tackle emotionally resonant themes. Stories that don’t do this aren’t necessarily bad, of course. They can still be fun romps where good guy fights bad guy and wins! Spiderman saves MJ from the Green Goblin! Superman defeats Lex Luthor! Such stories are fun, and I don’t mean to be a snob about them, but unless they tackle relevant questions, they will be forgettable and never stand the test of time the way folktales or works like Frankenstein have. 

Archetypal images are the bricks and mortar that are used in the construction of these stories. And by ‘archetypal’ I mean, universally understandable on a visceral level. Things like light and dark, hot and cold, etc., as symbols, are universal and potent because they use our common human inheritance and body to provide the emotional punch. That would probably be a good subject of another long form video, I suppose, but anyway.

So all of this beings me back to the central, maybe even necessary, question that sci Fi addresses. This central question is clearly present in Frankenstein and has been mutated, elaborated, and expanded on ever since. So what is it? Let me ask you this: let me list off some of the greatest sci-fi stories and see if you can tell me what the common thematic question they explore is: 2001, Solaris, Blade Runner, Neuromancer, Stalker, Foundation, I, Robot, Alien, Dune, Brave New World, 1984, A Clockwork Orange, The Left Hand of Darkness. Yes, it is true that these stories explore a lot of things. But the common element these stories all have at their core, which was perhaps first asked in its modern form in Frankenstein, is “what does it mean to be human?” I will heretofore refer to this as “The Frankenstein Question”. 

Part 3: Why the Frankenstein Question?

At its heart, Sci Fi asks this question, among other questions. And I don’t mean to imply that this is the ONLY question Sci Fi explores. Obviously that’s not true. Just look at the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink list of themes in Dune. But even there, particularly in the sequels, the central Frankenstein question is there. Another caveat: I am not saying that the Frankenstein Question was never broached by fantasy. Of course it did, largely in relation to not only some of the proto sci-fi stories we mentioned (particularly the time-travel ones), but also in our age-old struggle with mortality. The theme that death is an essential element of our humanity has been dealt with for thousands of years in folktales and myths - a good example being the Gilgamesh Epic, in which Gilgamesh seeks the key to immortality. 

Sci-fi, however, takes these ancient themes and questions, and zeroes in on them in tight focus, and an explosion of variations. In Frankenstein, it was “if we could assemble a human from parts, would it have a soul? Would it be deserving of love? Would it know God?” These are questions about the essence of humanity–what is it? What is non-essential? In 2001, we have the central question repeated in all three acts, each time with a new wrinkle, and linked to the tools that we use. Brave New World, Clockwork Orange, and 1984 explore the relationship of cultural technologies into this question, implicitly arguing that robbing one’s freedom via various cultural maneuvers is tantamount to undermining our humanity. The latest story in the Alien franchise, Alien: Earth, has no fewer than FOUR different versions of this question being explored. We have not only androids, but also cyborgs, and something called a “hybrid”, which is a human adolescent whose consciousness is transferred into an android body! And then, of course, you have the xenomorphs, which explores the relationship of other (bio-technology) organisms on the concept of humanity, all in service of how this stuff relates to an age-old fantasy question: what is the nature of death? Horror is of course another sub-genre of fantasy which I’ll have to get into in another video. 

Nevertheless, what I am proposing is that the essential ingredient that often differentiates sci-fi from fantasy is the depth and detail in which it tackles the Frankenstein question. But then, why did it emerge when it did? What is so special about 1818? Moreover, why does the Frankenstein question keep coming up now in new and even more elaborate iterations? Why do we keep revisiting it? Here is where it gets REALLY interesting. 

Part 4: Unspoken Assumptions

Jungians, such as myself, have recognized for a long time that some popular stories strike a nerve. Not just ones that make a lot of money, mind you, but ones which stir up the emotions of a particular generation, or even last across generations. And by ‘strike a nerve’, I mean they get at the heart of something that stirs a primordial response. Something that is on a lot of people’s minds, if only unconsciously at first. This is, of course,the way archetypes work. Briefly, an archetype is an internal, story-form response to a particular situation. When faced with becoming an adult, for example, something all humans have faced since the dawn of humanity, very commonly we will see “initiation” type dreams emerge, or dream narratives involving imagery of rebirth, renewal, transformation in caves, the Hero’s Journey, and so forth. These story-forms are encoded in our human inheritance. They are innate, just like, say, the diving reflex. When we dive, the water on our face triggers an innate response that shifts physiology such that we conserve oxygen better. This is how archetypes work, only instead of a physiological response, it is a psychological one (keeping in mind that there is no real division between body and mind). When faced with a powerfully emotional situation, we will respond with images and stories that try to make sense of them, and often these will have an innate structure to them. Evolution has deposited them there because we have a multi-million year primate inheritance that sets it up beforehand.

In terms of modern storytelling, the most powerful and clearly articulated story-responses to life will survive retellings and emerge as a cultural expression with tremendous staying power. The Beauty and the Beast story, and the Frog Princess story, for examples, are such responses to the terrifying challenge we all face in our innate drives to find a lover or mate. That is why these stories are thousands of years old and are found in every culture.  

So what are all these sci-fi stories that tackle the Frankenstein Question (along with other things also found in fantasy) responding to? Why did the early 19th century call for a honing of the Frankenstein Question into its more recent iterations? I think there are two main historical developments that are responsible for The Sci-fi response. These two developments are long-term shifts in culture that have, in themselves, triggered the very emotionally poignant and almost desperate archetypal response that is behind the most enduring sci-fi stories, at the center of which is a deep dive into the Frankenstein Question.

Part 5: Technology

We often think of technological developments as simply “infinite progress”, or nothing but an endless parade of otherwise innocuous gizmos being flung out by the capitalist super-system we have now. But the unconscious mind never takes anything for granted. And simple things like growing scientific understanding in multiple fields that was happening rapidly even back in Mary Shelley’s day did not go unnoticed by the storytelling impulses of her time. As soon as there were “scientists”, in other words, our unconscious minds–which have a universal core, mind you–recognized that there could be MAD scientists. Science was really getting rolling in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it’s easy to underestimate just how world-shaking this really was. Before the developments of biology, geology, mathematics and physics, the world was explained in largely biblical-literalist terms. The findings of 18th century science, however, undermined this simple worldview completely. This demanded a response from the storytelling psyche, and it is the inklings of this innate process we all have that resulted in the explosion of SF that has not stopped since. Technology triggered a powerful activation and tremendous elaboration of the Frankenstein Question.

This all means that, while fantasy itself (in the form of myths, folklore, and religious imagery) have always dealt with the deepest, most universal and timeless issues, NOW we had a whole host of not only new scientific worldviews (which I will get to in a moment), but new TECHNOLOGIES that had the ability to screw around with stuff that previously we had no ability to change. This meant a significant chunk of fantasy had all kinds of new toys to play with. Mary Shelley, being the artistic genius that she was–did you know she wrote Frankenstein when she was 18 years old? BRUH. Anyway, Frankenstein happened to be the vessel of one of the earliest expressions to tackle the central theme which was emerging. The emergence of new technology, in other words, was likely seen consciously as great and wonderful, but to the unconscious, core self that we all share, it was a full frontal assault on what it means to be human that demanded a meaning-making response to try to grasp its full significance.

Thus the old fantasy question of “what is the nature of human life?” became “what is the nature of human life, NOW that THIS and THAT have been discovered?” And it hasn’t stopped since. Artificial intelligence has been particularly “triggering”. But so has space travel, and the very real possibility of alien life. The emergence of these technologies caused a stirring within the universal storytelling inheritance we all have, and it manifested in artistically gifted individuals as powerfully resonant stories that really encapsulate the Frankenstein Question and all of its corollary themes: what does it truly mean to be human, given that technology XYZ now exist? 

It’s easy to see how desperately important this question is in these stories. They are depicted as life-or-death. Existence and annihilation. When Roy Batty gave his famous “tears in rain” speech at the end of Blade Runner, it became iconic because it was something universally human we could all relate to…but it was spoken by an artificial human. That’s not particularly noteworthy. What is noteworthy is that Phillip K Dick’s story and Hatcher and Peeble’s screenplay made it believable that Batty would ask such a question. That was the key to making this story so powerful. As such, it became haunting because that fact seriously seems to undermine the idea of humanness…does it even mean having a human body? 

See how this works? So, technology is the first major development that required the sci-fi response from our storytelling instincts, brought to life by Shelley and other brilliant artists. But I haven’t talked about the second development that was needed in order to produce Sci Fi: duality.

Part 6: Duality

It should be obvious at this point that sci-fi is clearly a Western phenomenon–at least in origins. It has, naturally, since spread from there to all corners of the globe. But then again, given that technology itself is required in order to pose the threats to our human essence, it makes sense that there is no need for it in, say, foraging societies. More on this in a moment. 

For now, I want to point out that another development during the time frame we’ve been discussing was not technological but philosophical. It was a gradual change of overall worldview that went unspoken, changing slowly, but affecting practically everything else, including our understanding of ourselves and our world. It’s a perspective that began with Galileo, who, in his early conceptualization of physics, developed an approach to the world that would profoundly influence Western thought for centuries. Galileo was basically the founder of Western science, and his formulation of how we should view the world in order to carry out science was incredibly influential. His view can be summarized into four main principles. First, Galileo argued that empirical observation is the only criterion for truth. Second, only scientific methods and discourse are appropriate to the world of things. Third, only the mathematical properties of things are primary. All other qualities are ‘secondary’ and ‘subjective’. And finally, most important for this analysis, is that the experience we receive from our senses is ‘illusory’. All this, of course, sounds pretty reasonable, particularly since Galileo was primarily concerned with planetary motion and the motions of, say, rocks rolling down inclines, and such.

From these seemingly innocuous principles, the whole edifice of scientific and philosophical thought was laid out, and underwent intense elaboration. After Galileo, for example, we saw the logical development of Rene Descartes, who erected an eternal barrier between the world of objects “out there” and the world of thoughts “in here”. Without getting too lost in the weeds here, you can oversimplify a huge amount of philosophical discourse on this into the result that followed from it all: advocating for a dualistic view of the universe. On one hand, you have a world of “objects” which operate via mechanistic, mathematical, and basically mindless rules, and the world of “subjective experience” which only happens “in your head”, separated irrevocably from the world, and is highly suspect. It’s difficult to underestimate how pervasive this worldview has become, right on down to the everyday person “on the street”. 

What do any of these philosophical developments have to do with SF? I believe everything. This duality influenced all the great Enlightenment thinkers, religious and otherwise, and worked its way into the everyday person’s thought as well, to this very day, when people say one’s symptoms are “all in your head”, or when internet edgelords and keyboard warriors fling comments from the peanut gallery that “everything is all subjective and shit”. But these (rather ill formed) opinions are not entirely to be blamed on their utterers–these kinds of obnoxious opinions are simply logical conclusions of the ontology set up by Galilleo and elaborated on to their logical conclusion by Descartes, Kant, Hume, and a whole host of other thinkers. It’s just that the common, colloquial invocation of them usually lacks any nuance whatsoever that was present in the philosopher’s original discussions.

But this dualistic worldview has not gone unchallenged. Not only is it quite different from many much more ancient worldviews, such as that of Hinduism, Taoism, or Neoplatonic philosophy in the West, it has also encountered some serious challenges within philosophy itself in the 20th century. Starting in the beginning of the last century, we’ve seen many thinkers, particularly from phenomenology, begin to question this dualistic way of looking at the world. That could be a whole video in itself, but what is important here is that the dualistic worldview, which sees the universe as a massive, clockwork machine devoid of soul and spirit, populated sparsely with subjective monads floating about with “representations” in their heads, is precisely the sort of hellscape that encouraged nightmarish horror and (for our purposes) sci fi responses. God, the gods, or the divine, however one sees it, is flung so far into the highest, most abstract and transcendent position (or it is denied completely) that he, she, or they are essentially argued out of any sort of relevance. In such a worldview, we are utterly alone, and that makes our human hearts scream in horror. Hence, sci fi often has very strong religious themes in it–but not in the sense of expressing a particular religion, but more often in expressing the desperate horror of a universe in which hardly any sort of overarching spirit exists. So, existential horror then becomes bread-and-butter in sci fi, even if it is only a disturbing undercurrent. Nevertheless, it is front-and-center of the Frankenstein Question. This you can find in 2001, Brave New World, 1984, Dune, and of course, the beginnings of it you can see in Frankenstein, for in that instance, the titular mad scientist is arrogating for himself that which was previously only thought to be the province of the Almighty. When science seemed to discover that creation wasn’t apparently in the sole hands of the Almighty, given the worldview discussed previously, it seemed that God had disappeared even further into abstraction. In that era, of course, we couldn’t (yet) just say there was no God at all - nevertheless, the Cartesian universe is essentially a godless one. God becomes something “in your head”. Atheism, nihilism, and reductionism, therefore, all play heavy roles in producing the horror and anxiety that underlies the question: what does it mean to be human, now that ALL THIS STUFF is going on?

Part 7: Final Thoughts

With each new technology, we no longer had to accept some of the limitations that we once did. This SEEMs like a great thing, and sometimes it is–like not having to accept a 50% infant mortality seen in some hunter gatherer societies. But the unconscious doesn’t look at things like the ego does. Nothing is “All good” or “all bad”. Nothing is taken for granted as a complete win with no problems. The unconscious imagines, explores, and asks, what does this mean now? But it speaks in images and symbols. It speaks in stories.

Moreover, with each new progression of the dualistic worldview, we saw more and more existential horror creeping into our stories. A world full of demons, spirits, and ghosts might seem like a hellscape, but funny enough it doesn’t compare at all to a world in which the universe is almost completely empty of anything except mindless chunks of dead matter, with each of us trapped in an illusory world of “representations” and suspicious “projections”. Such a worldview, combined with unstoppable technological innovations practically FORCES the unconscious to endlessly produce stories that tackle the Frankenstein Question.

Contrast these causes of the Frankenstein Question and all of its SF companions with a worldview that is much older, much more universal in the history of cultures. A typical indigenous worldview, for example, is that of animism, which is a kind of pantheism. In such a worldview, everything is infused with spirit. For the medieval alchemists, to use another example, we are not bodies with souls, but rather bodies within souls. In all non-dualistic worldviews, thoughts, feelings, and intentions don’t exist only within human skulls, but within animals, plants, rocks, trees, the sun and the moon. Spirituality in such a world is much easier because it exists in stuff that you can see right in front of you. There is no existential dread because we are never alone. Death loses much of its sting, too, though it still occupies much of our unconscious storytelling labor. The thousand foot iron wall between subject and object is simply not there, and we all find ourselves not Cartesian monads floating in a lifeless clockwork void, but densely interconnected with everything and everyone around us.

This view is not just one of indigenous tribes or hunter gatherers, however. It is also a philosophical worldview that has become more popular as a reaction to the previous dualistic one, in the works of phenomenologists, as well as more recent philosophers of mind who defend the ideas of panpsychism such as David Chalmers, Philip Goff, Bernard d’Espagnat, and many others. I myself have weighed in on this matter, when I published a paper in 2021 in the journal Synthese, a philosophy journal, where I defend the idea of cosmopsychism. Starting from the basic problems in philosophy of mind, I show how many of them resolve when we consider that the universe itself has a kind of consciousness and we have it because we are a part of it. Link in the description. Many classic problems in the philosophy of mind become more manageable when we dismiss the dualism that developed after Galileo, and return to a more ancient worldview of interconnectedness. 

Now, one could easily argue that this is all just “wishful thinking”. And of course, that is what many internet cringelords love to do–but just because a logically defended worldview is less horrifying does not mean it’s wrong. It doesn’t mean it’s right either. In fact, I feel like the people who advocate for the “isolated minds floating in the void” view sometimes do it mainly just to be contrarian and appear edgy and tough, rather than because it is actually more internally coherent than the non-dualistic ones. The fact of the matter, is the non-dualistic ones ARE more coherent. That’s why I defend it–the fact that it is also more comforting is just icing on the cake. 

Anyway, that’s my take on the origins and essence of SF as a subgenre of fantasy. It started with the Frankenstein Question, and has been endlessly elaborated on since. Question for you: do you like these kinds of deeper dives? Do you want more content like this? Because, like I said, it's time consuming and I have a day job. Nevertheless, if I get enough likes, views, subscribes, and so forth, I will be happy to create more stuff like this. Just let me know. One thing you can do to show your engagement is chime in to this conversation. Do you agree with me and my Frankenstein Question? If not, why? What do YOU think the essential features of SF are? What differentiates it from fantasy or horror? And, as always, don’t forget to pick up a copy of my new fantasy novel King of the Forgotten Darkness, first book in the Raven’s Tale series, and subscribe to get all my video shorts that will keep you posted on updates of my progress on book 2 and everything else going on “in my head”.

Later, gang.