I was a voracious reader when I was a child. I did watch TV too, and I suspect a lot of it, but my most striking memories of entertainment from that time are linked to books. I just loved reading, and I read everything and anything I could get my sticky paws on, good or bad. My parents had to devise a strategy to make sure that I wouldn’t read age-inappropriate books which consisted of hiding the most potentially traumatising stories at the very top of the bookshelves where I could not reach them. I eventually managed to get to them anyway by stacking encyclopaedias on top of a chair, which was dangerous on two counts: I could have broken my neck, and I read The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer at age 11.
The three books I remember most vividly reading were Frankenstein, which plunged me into an inexplicable melancholic phase that lasted for a couple of weeks, 1984, which definitely contributed to my lifelong anxiety about totalitarianism, and Brave New World, which, indirectly and unbeknownst to me introduced me to William Shakespeare. Of course, I loved many other books, from The Three Musketeers to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but I wasn’t obsessed with them as I was with those three.
So it didn’t make any sense when, twenty years later, I caught myself saying, “I don’t like science fiction” in the middle of a conversation—and believing it.
By the end of 2020, things were looking very dreary. We had put a brave front on the summer lockdowns and faced it all thanks to cautious optimism; it wouldn’t last long, would it? Just another couple of weeks and surely things would be back to normal. I’d grown a vegetable garden and perfected my sourdough technique. We had drinks over Skype and checked on each other as much as we could. But the terrifying numbers kept rising, the fear never subsided, and Christmas was just around the corner. Time had become extensible, with long hours to fill with nothing. Every day the same day as yesterday: wake up, check the news, work, have lunch, check the news, nap, work some more, have dinner, watch the news, watch a tv show, go to bed early with only the perspective of bad sleep and another day that would only be more of the same. An existence confined to four walls and whatever solace the Internet and streaming platforms could offer us.
It was all very dystopian. We lived in isolated pods, within the smallest social circles we had ever had, scared of an enemy that we could not see, of which we still knew very little, sewing homemade masks with scraps of fabric, and looking for philosophical meaning in the oddest places. If space had shrunk, time had expanded—and the world we had once known was gone.
I was anxious and tired. I needed something new, something that would distract me for some time, something that wouldn’t require me to think too much. Ideally, I needed a TV show with many episodes, so that my interest could be sustained for a while. “After all, why not? If I don’t like it, I’ll watch something else,” I thought as I pressed the play button on a grim December afternoon. 92 minutes later, I was hooked on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Why I had never watched any instalment of the Star Trek franchise is the consequence of multiple factors, including but not limited to the fact that as someone who grew up in a French-speaking country, I simply don’t have the same cultural background as someone who grew up watching English-speaking television. Most of what I watched when I was a child, and later a teenager, was contingent on network syndication, dubbing contracts, and rerun agreements; I saw a lot of Magnum P.I. growing up, but I only discovered Doctor Who in my twenties. It also had to do with watching television in the pre-streaming days when you watched what was on, and you didn’t hear of the latest American hit until at least a year later. It got marginally easier when we got the Internet and started downloading content illegally, but then again, in those days, your chances of accidentally downloading Czech porn instead of the latest episode of The Simpsons were never quite zero.
Maybe it wasn’t because of that. Maybe it was because it looked too specialised, too complicated. It felt like it required previous knowledge, some sort of effort to access the sibylline proficiency in all things pertaining to a universe that didn’t even speak my language. And as I said, I don’t like science fiction.
My all-time favourite TV show is The X-Files. That should have been my first clue that I didn’t dislike science fiction all that much. When it first came out on tv, it was modern—futuristic in technique and narrative, even—, and incredibly innovative; nowadays it is nostalgic and ironic in its prescience. It’s like finding your favourite teddy bear in a box in the attic after not seeing it for decades and deciding to keep it in your bedroom now that you’re old enough to value memories over appearances. It feels good because it is good, and with every rewatch, I discover something new to love about it. Sure, shoulder pads and crew cuts look a little dated nowadays, but the amazement at the mysteries of the universe, the conspiracy theories, the fear on behalf of the characters, the what-ifs that mirror a world of possibilities with every opening sequence — none of that has aged a day. Plus, from time to time there’s a completely insane standalone episode that makes you rethink everything you thought you knew about television.
At the time, my other favourite tv shows included Sliders, which some of you may remember because it starred Jonathan Rhys-Davies and Jerry O’Connell, Quantum Leap, which has probably aged horribly in the light of our 21st-century morales, seaQuest DSV, which I am now 100% sure belongs to the same universe as Star Trek and you’ll never convince me otherwise, and The Girl From Tomorrow, an Australian tv series which apparently no one remembers but me. I also had a healthy obsession with The Pretender, and I still shout “Miss Parker!” every time Andrea Parker appears on tv, as well as with those extremely weird episodes of McGyver about eternal youth and scientific experiments gone wrong. But I don’t like science fiction, as evidenced by the fact that I actually preferred Buffy The Vampire Slayer over all those shows, and as everybody knows, vampires belong to the realm of horror and not science fiction, regardless of how many robot-themed/underground lab episodes Joss Whedon managed to include in the series.
In terms of films too, I was in denial. Never mind that I’ve seen Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, and Alien a million times. It doesn’t matter that I know every single line of Back to The Future or Highlander by heart (ask me for my impression of the Kurgan, I dare you), or that I make references to Alien and The Matrix on a daily basis. Total Recall, Starship Troopers, Cocoon, Abyss, Stargate, and even Blade Runner did not count either because I did not actually like science fiction.
Even in the most recent years, I’ve caught myself re-watching Futurama for the ninth time, checking every week whether there was a new series of Love, Death and Robots, and boring my friends to death with my theory that Will Smith is as much of a science-fiction icon as Hugo Weaving, thanks to I, Robot, Men in Black, and Independence Day. That’s generally when the façade crumbles and people start to think that I might, in fact, enjoy science fiction. But I don’t.
I mean, not really.
It’s only the genre I watch the most, is all.
One could even say there’s hardly any other genre that I love as much as science fiction.
It doesn’t mean anything.
Maybe, just maybe, what I am saying when I say that I don’t like science fiction is “I don’t like Star Wars.” And maybe what I really mean by “I don’t like Star Wars” is “I don’t love Star Wars.” I definitely don’t like Dune. And I’m no fan of the Marvel universe, if it counts as science fiction, which I’m fairly sure it does. You see, I don’t like the right things, the thing that the Internet tells me I should like if I like science fiction.
Maybe it is the gatekeeping that I don’t like. I don’t want someone else to decide whether I am worthy of being called a fan. All the horrified “You’ve never seen Terminator?!?” and the sniffy ‘No, you do not understand, Dune is a masterpiece” make me want to never, ever mention anything related to science fiction to anyone ever again. I also do not love the idea that a dynamic, ongoing body of creative work might have a definitive canon of titles that are deemed good enough according to the tastes of people with whom I have very little in common, and that I should accept said canon without questioning how it was selected in the first place. I don’t like that it is suddenly ok to place under scrutiny something that is as subjective and as innocuous as what kind of entertainment we enjoy.
Above all, I really don’t like that every time it is announced that a new character is going to be played by a female actor, or by an actor of colour, or hints at maybe not being straight, thousands of bigots run to Twitter and Reddit to complain about it as if their entire way of life, beliefs, and worldview depended on strangers agreeing with their anger. I don’t like that if the industry doesn’t produce narratives that cater to those people’s opinions, it is putting its actors at risk of being harassed until they leave social networks and are made to accept being silenced. I hate that the loudest people win in the end, precisely because they are the loudest, the angriest, those that will use violence to maintain the status quo.
Which is the very thing science fiction is trying to warn us against.
While the definition of science fiction is disputed, which is more or less a sign that it is a healthy field of study in constant expansion, most interpretations draw on the aspect of exploration. Science fiction is the genre that asks “what if?” when faced with reality. What if, in the future, cars could fly? What if someday we lived on the moon? What if we could fly to the end of the universe? What if we could travel back in time? What if we kept doing things as we do now? What if totalitarianism won? Science fiction is, ultimately, an exploration of the human condition where scientific and technological progress are means to an end, some sorts of mirrors that we hold a little too high to look at ourselves from a different angle. It may purport to be the sandbox of our possible futures, but it is the reflection of and on our past and our present. It is inventive in the ways it cautions us against our flaws, and it is unbelievably entertaining—but as in all human production since the first drawings on the walls of caves by creatures that could barely stand on two legs, it is nothing more than us looking at ourselves and at our world.
And sometimes what we see is scary to the point of discomfort, and aside from the obvious ideas of death, catastrophe, and destruction, it turns out that we are not all afraid of the same things. I, for example, am scared of clowns and dictatorships, so obviously a dystopia that would take place in a clown-based authoritarian society would make me very uneasy. Some other people are comfortable with those concepts but are afraid of gender equality and of seeing gay people on tv. It’s not the science fiction that scares them; it’s the reality in which they live, and the potentiality of a world where they would neither be at the top of the social pyramid nor at the centre of the attention of the entertainment industry. Those are strange fears to have.
But what do I know? After all, I do not even like science fiction.
