Gene Roddenberry may have been the first to pitch his television show as a “wagon train to the stars” (Worland, 20), but subsequent series such as Firefly have shown us that there’s more than one way to write a space western. While Roddenberry’s final frontier is explored by members of a utopian society intent on [...]
It began with: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Star Trek: The Original Series only made it through three of those five years, but [...]
For the characters in Ursula Le Guin’s novella Paradises Lost, life on Earth is unimaginable. Life on any planet, for that matter, is beyond their comprehension. Five generations into the two-hundred year journey to reach a habitable planet, the story’s ship-born inhabitants have no concept of dirt, sky, or open space. This isn’t the first [...]
I would describe science fiction as stories that extend the boundaries of the possible. While fantasy requires us to suspend our disbelief entirely, science fiction asks only that we consider what could happen within a tenable, even if potentially different, reality. From this broad description of what science fiction does, the distinction between it and [...]
