The rise of sci-fi

With metaphors for real-life problems and the need for escapism, here’s why this genre is taking over our screens right now

Circa 1971, over a decade before E.T. took over Hollywood, the list of the 10 highest grossing films of all time featured not even one science fiction story. Today, that same list features just two films that are not science fiction (admittedly, this is a broad category that subsumes every superhero movie ever, for instance). Of those two, Titanic may soon bow out, leaving us with… Gone with the Wind .

Science fiction, especially when dished out in conjunction with high-octane chase sequences and elaborately choreographed combat, is one of the safest ways to make a killing at the box office. This much is evident in the way Netflix et al are investing — out of the glut of new TV shows over the last year or so, science fiction is by and far the most saleable genre, the one with the most generous budgets, to say nothing of the hype machine. The Handmaid’s Tale , Altered Carbon , Bright , the rebooted Lost in Space , and David Goyer’s upcoming Foundation are just some of these big-ticket releases. Shows like Black Mirror and Stranger Things have achieved scary levels of popularity, becoming cultural landmarks in a relatively short span of time.

 

From the ’80s

It was not always this way, though. Spielberg’s

E.T. opened the decade with a bang, of course, but equally important were the films of James Cameron. Science fiction as a genre made rapid strides in the ’80s, both critically and commercially, with films like The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986) still regarded as classics, with good reason. The former’s sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), pushed the envelope for Hollywood when it came to visual effects — and was, in a way, a medium of vocalising society’s anxieties about how quickly technology was changing the world. Earlier this year, Cameron himself turned his gaze towards the history of the genre, in a documentary series called Story of Science Fiction (his interviewees included Spielberg). The Cameron-Spielberg conversation was every bit as fun as it sounds, and the two acknowledged their debts to Stanley Kubrick, among others.

To the fore

Today, when the network between megalomaniacal tech firms and our governments has never been more apparent, it makes sense that science fiction is dominant once again. And while the end products have been somewhat uneven of late, the themes employed by recent SF shows and films are indicative of issues like data sharing, name-and-shame culture, cyberbullying and so on.

 

The 2017 Netflix film iBoy , for instance, had the protagonist exercising smartphone-like powers; shrapnel from his handheld device enters his brain after he is shot and left for dead. Significantly, his vigilantism manifests itself in ways that speak for the worst of the Internet era: he outs an evil classmate’s private, embarrassing videos to all of their classmates. Several Black Mirror episodes, including the very first one starring Rory Kinnear as the British Prime Minister, also engage with name-and-shame culture and cyberbullying.

Science fiction, like most other genres, has also reaped the benefits of post-colonial theories and the ‘rewriting’ project. Black Panther basically rewrites (white) history by making Wakanda, a covert African kingdom, the unrivalled technological and military superpower of the world. This has always been one of science fiction’s greatest strengths: the license it gives practitioners to make up the rules as they go along. For certain creators like Margaret Atwood (who, thanks to The Handmaid’s Tale adaptation, is enjoying a period of unprecedented popularity, even by the standards of Booker-winning novelists), this often means a direct commentary on contemporary realpolitik. In Atwood’s 2015 novel The Heart Goes Last , for example, the central plot device collars the American prison industrial complex. At the heart of the story is a government scheme called Consilience, wherein couples are awarded staggering tax benefits — if they agree to spend every alternate month in prison.

Closer home

Indian audiences, too, will not have to wait for too long to see a believable homegrown dystopia. Netflix India is developing Prayaag Akbar’s harrowing novel Leila into a TV series. It is not set too far ahead in the future: it is close enough to be visceral, urgent in its impact. Structured as a thriller centred around the search for a lost child, the series is every bit a novel of ideas, a stylish, sure-footed critique of contemporary India: the relentless polarisation along caste and religious lines, the shocking misogyny, the unsustainable cesspits that are our metros, and a lot more. Urmi Juvekar (who wrote the screenplays for Shanghai , Oye Lucky Lucky Oye , and Byomkesh Bakshy ) is writer and executive producer on this project, and it will be exciting to see what someone with her sensibilities can make of Leila .