The Existential Foundations for Science Fiction

It is no secret that modern genre of science fiction plays a major role in our culture’s mythological and memetic development. Much ink has been spent on litigating why Marvel and Star Wars movies stand at the heights of our culture’s emotional investment, with billions of dollars and the eyes of the movie-going public crowding to movie theaters each year to indulge the melodramatic trials of these non-existent heroes.

At the same time, more challenging and artistically complex cinema is still being made and wildly embraced. In the past decade, a number of surprisingly challenging and thematically complex works of science fiction have broken out into mainstream popularity in a manner that would seem surprising, were it not that this small wave of intelligent films seems to have momentarily crested.

This cluster is the subject of SUNY Polytechnic Institute associate professor Ryan Lizardi’s new book Existential Science Fiction, which offers a narrow but meaningful unpacking of this strange trend. As he argues, between 2012 and 2019, audiences received numerous high-budget science fiction films that managed to be both audience-pleasing spectacles and high-minded examinations of the nature of identity and human connection—these including Prometheus, Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, Annihilation, and Ad Astra.

Lizardi defines “existential” as “[what] it means to exist as a human being.” These films all come from different philosophical backgrounds, but what they share in common is a desire to muse on difficult questions about what it truly means to be human. These films, despite their science-fiction dress, are fundamentally about us, as human beings. As our author writes,

What is it about our current cultural landscape that fosters content dealing directly with questions about our identity, our memory, our continuity of self, but does so through the setting of science fiction and space exploration? These works seem to be leveraging the external trappings of the science fiction genre … to explore internal thematic ideas of reaching without and within ourselves to find a continuity of our individual and collective identities.

The trend doesn’t stop with cinema. He also identifies the video games Assassins Creed, Bioshock, Soma, and Death Stranding as high-concept science fiction games worthy of discussion and extends his study to include the television shows Legion and Westworld. Lizardi doesn’t necessarily thread the needle of this trend with any sort of theories as to why this trend happened. He acknowledges fully that Hollywood is a capitalist industry and that these trends are likely profit-driven more than intentional, particularly given the diversity of the artists and mediums behind this trend.

But the fact that the trend exists itself is notable. As Lizardi argues, science fiction as a genre has gone through multiple stages of intellectual development. The literary progenitors of the genre like Frankenstein were first published in the 19th century but did not begin to fully emerge until the early 20th century with films like A Trip To The Moon, Metropolis, and Destination Moon. The genre was initially only used as commercial fodder or as a way to cake in politically unpalatable messages, in the manner of a movie like Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.

The modern science fiction cluster only came about as a result of the genre reaching its fruition in the 1970s and producing considerably complicated and thoughtful films like 2001, Solaris, and Blade Runner, which took the genre trappings of decades of books and films and transformed them into thoughtful masterpieces on the nature of identity, resulting in subsequent masterpieces like AI: Artificial Intelligence and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. 

These films serve as a valuable background on the foundation that formed the modern cluster of existential science fiction films. Each one focuses on something very different. Gravity focused on the nature of grief and how it limits our ability to continue through life; Arrival focused on language’s ability to expand our understanding and love for one another; and Annihilation focused on showing us how our identities are refracted through ourselves and our environment, feeding cycles of self-destruction and personal growth.

Lizardi’s exegesis on all of the subjects is deeply valuable, but the overall scope of the study is somewhat narrow and too academic. Therefore, Existential Science Fiction is a valuable resource for those seeking to delve into the depths of these artistic works, but it is also an academic text with little handholding and meant for deep-thinking aficionados rather than a more public, easy-going, audience. Yet at the same time, the book does not provide more than a cursory explanation of the full trend, leaving the overall question of why this cluster of artworks emerged at the same time unanswered. The rise of science fiction filmography more-or-less just happened.

“It is my hope that when you take a look at the overarching history of science fiction media, and the existential potentials within, that you see a series of fascinating examples of previous eras where there existed some deep and influential philosophical content focuses on who we are as human,” Lizardi writes. He certainly succeeds in this, making the case that the science fiction genre can be a profound medium for storytelling, but leaves a lot of room for subsequent writers to carry the torch and scratch at deeper questions beyond those he asked. It is an open question why our modern society is so deeply infatuated with ideas of identity and meaning, and the profound musings of our greatest artists leave the door open for the hope that these questions can be meaningfully answered.

Existential Science Fiction
By Ryan Lizardi
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022, 2023; 170pp

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