Science Fiction’s Future Past

Sci-fi’s best ideas are in the past. Wait! Before you barrage me with indignant objections, I’m going to claim this idea is way less impertinent—or defeatist—than it sounds.

Where do sci-fi plot concepts come from? From everywhere, you say, my sources of inspiration are varied and without bound! Okay, sure, the kernels have many sources, but I think we can agree on a few broad trends. Or agree to disagree. Or something. Here’s a few of them.

What ifs about Technology and Invention

What if someone created a time travel pill that also erased your memory? What if cell phones became sentient, and then got pissed off about all the cat videos and porn we watch?

Scientific Discovery

Octopi evolved from aliens who crash-landed in the Marianas trench, explaining their ability to edit their own RNA. A mutant form of rabies enhances its victims’ intelligence, turning them into mouth-frothing geniuses before they die.

Possible Futures and Alternate Pasts

Humans use selective breeding to eliminate violence and are then conquered by evolved gerbils. Rome never fell. Sucky dystopias. Post-apocalypse.

All three of these categories, especially the last one, provide opportunities to take humanity’s past and reimagine it in a way that sloughs off the burdens of our preconceptions. By harnessing the truth of what we are or have been, an author can fill the most fanciful yarn with a potent sense of the possible, or even the inevitable.

Deep as Wells

Early sci-fi authors were apt to embrace the first two categories rather than the third, but knew how to harness a societal trend. Consider the Morlocks and Eloi of The Time Machine. Wells took the cultural divisions of the industrial age and showed us a humanity that looked the part. The result is a what if that feels terrifying in its likelihood. Star Trek channeled geopolitical strife in the form of Soviet ETs (Klingons), an interstellar Korean DMZ (the Romulan Neutral Zone), and an extraterrestrial West Bank (Deep Space Nine’s Bajor). Even though the aliens are played by actors with bumpy noses or face-paint to signal their otherness, their stories play out in ways that are immediate and immersive and that damn well pull us in.

The Truths We Harness Needn’t Involve the Sweep of History.

We can draw on the more intimate truths of a specific person, fueled to inform a fictional character. There are Nicola Tesla’s appearances in Steampunk, as both himself and loosely based protagonists. Or the comic book hero Iron Man, aka Tony Stark—originally based on Howard Hughes (check out Iron Man’s early artwork if you have any doubt)—and repurposed for the Two-Thousand-Teens as a fantastical Elon Musk.

The Tony Stark example fascinates the hell out of me, because the fiction has essentially remained the same while the reality it’s stitched from has morphed. The wonderfully fluid way that we relate to sci-fi keeps me coming back—as a fan, a technologist, and an author. The future is past indeed.

Pillaging the Past

Have you ever immersed yourself in a compelling passage and realized that something completely different lurked beneath the surface? Maybe it wasn’t even sci-fi. Think of the way Alice in Wonderland darkly mirrors Victorian politics, or the way television’s M*A*S*H managed to be about the Korean war but about the Vietnam War. Have you harnessed these kinds of strategies in your own storytelling? If so, I’d love to hear about it.

 

Paul Toth is a native of Alaska and present denizen of Omaha by way of Silicon Valley. He’s a technologist by day, sci-fi author by night, and full-time seeker of truth and the perfect pizza. After attending numerous writing conferences, including Writer’s Digest, Muse, and the San Francisco Writers Conference, he’s more than a little certain that RMFW’s yearly con is the one to beat.

Paul is currently seeking representation for his debut novel, Beyond These Tattered Skies. You can read more about him on his website.