[Fun fact: This is issue 1010, and in base 2 1010 is 10 in base 10. Math is delightful!]

[Note: I have opened up comments to everyone for this issue, given I think this topic is ripe for fun discussion. Please go ahead and leave your thoughts below! Just keep it PG or so, and be kind!]

I sometimes like to let my mind wander a bit, finding a topic to ponder deeply and trying to find meaning and relationships in the profundity.

One of my favorites: Does science fiction exist in a science fiction universe?

Aside: Now, I don’t want to get into the weeds about how to define science fiction. I don’t think you can, not rigidly. “Fiction involving science” is a bit too general, but delving into narrow categories is too descriptive. I think it’s more of a “I know it when I see it” kind of thing, and I’ll leave others to nerdgas about it.

So, again, does scifi exist in a scifi universe?

For example, Jules Verne is mentioned several times in Star Trek episodes. “The Day The Earth Stood Still” is a favorite movie for Captain Pike — as well it should be. So yes, there is scifi in that particular universe, but it’s old. Is there modern (meaning contemporary to the plot) science fiction in Star Trek? And if so, what would it be like?

After all, they have time travel, aliens, spaceships, robots, androids, alternate realities, telepathy, and basically every other topic of today’s scifi, but in-universe they’re real. So to the characters they’re not science fiction. Any stories featuring those topics would basically be adventure tales. 

It reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the TV show Firefly. They’re discussing if one of the characters has psychic powers, and there’s this exchange between Wash and his wife Zoe:

Wash: Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction.

Zoe: [a bit condescendingly] We live in a spaceship, dear.

Wash: [confused] So?

For them, living on a spaceship is their reality, so it’s not scifi. I’ll note that it’s never really established out loud that there’s faster-then-light travel in Firefly, so that kind of thing would still constitute scifi to them. We never see aliens or anything like that either, so those could technically be considered science fiction as well. 

But in Star Trek? Where there are actual incredibly powerful aliens indistinguishable from gods? What would constitute scifi there?

I actually don’t know. It’s fun to think about. At least for me it is; I don’t think Jean Luc Picard would agree. After all, he’s quoted as saying, “I never really cared for science fiction. I guess, I just didn’t get it.” [This is a meta-joke; Picard is known to prefer classics like “Moby Dick”, but also the actor Patrick Stewart is well known to have not been a big fan of Trek when he first took on the role.]

A fun spinoff of this is to wonder whether the science fiction show you’re watching existed in-universe in that show. It’s a bit meta, but the answer is usually no. For example the TV show Star Trek couldn’t have existed in the Star Trek universe because it wouldn’t make sense; it would involve too many paradoxes. They have some fun with the idea in the Strange New Worlds episode, “A Space Adventure Hour”, which was a bit silly but I still enjoyed it; the computer creates a holodeck story that is an obvious Original Series Trek parody. Other than that, though, I can’t think of any show set in the future where the TV show itself existed in the past. An argument could be made for the remake of Battlestar Galactica (“all this has happened before, and all this will happen again” is almost literally true in-universe) but even that’s a bit of a stretch.

There is a fan-fiction story called “Visit to a Weird Planet” where Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam into a parallel reality where Star Trek is being filmed, and have to pretend to be the actors for a short time. It’s a bit of fun, and does tackle the question humorously.

… and all this does make me wonder: Will scifi exist forever? We’ve seen it change considerably over the past century, both stylistically as well as in its content. A story written today where someone creates a submarine and goes on undersea adventures would not necessarily be considered scifi, but then again building a rocket and going to the moon probably would be, even though we can do that now (not to mention the first couple of seasons of For All Mankind, which takes place in an alternate history where the Soviets landed on the moon first). I suppose the line can be blurry, especially in a story about a currently evolving technology. 

I don’t know exactly what science fiction will look like in, say, 50 years, or a hundred. Once we start to explore the stars, or the microcosm, or alternate dimensions, what stories will be considered “far out”?

Will science fiction last? Perhaps it won’t, at least in a form we’d recognize today. After all, nobody sings The Poetic Edda anymore. Not all storytelling methods last forever.

But stories do. I might be a little melancholy pondering my favorite genre being made obsolete as reality catches up to it, but I can also be happy in my confidence that somehow, in some way, stories will still be told. They’re important, and they’re an essential part of what makes us human. As long as we can call ourselves that, we’ll still tell each other tales.

Don’t forget to leave any thoughts you have in the comments below!

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