Science Fiction; Setting versus Genre

Posted on Jan 6, 2010 | 0 comments

Science fiction has been around for a long time, in the 2nd century the first Science Fiction story Lucian‘s True History was written and in 1902 the second film ever made was Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon. Even with this long history, Science Fiction is generally misunderstood.

The most commonly misunderstood aspect of Sci-fi is the difference between Sci-fi the genre and Sci-fi the setting. Simply put, a setting is the place, time, and world where the story is set, while a genre is the purpose, intention, and raison d’être of a particular work.

I have had people on multiple occasions tell me that they don’t like Sci-fi because it is too scary. These people are confusing genre and setting; they’re talking about the Horror genre in a Sci-fi setting.  Another good example is Star Wars; Star Wars is obviously set in a Sci-Fi setting, but the genre is heroic sword and sorcery fantasy.

In Science Fiction setting can be defined by its list of tropes. You can be pretty sure something is a Sci-fi setting if it’s set in the future, different realities, other timelines, elsewhere in the galaxy, or uses nonexistent science and technology. No matter the background variation, the central requirement for the Science Fiction setting is that science or technology is a key aspect.

Science Fiction as a genre is historically difficult to define, but here is my attempt at defining the genre of Science Fiction:

Sci-fi is fundamentally a genre of scientific speculation, change, and tracing the results of theory to answer questions of “what if?”

This definition places works like Star Wars and Jason X outside the Sci-fi genre, but stories like those by Asimov and Bradbury, films and television like Star Trek and Blade Runner, and games like Rifts and Traveller squarely within it.

Sci-fi Warnings, Predictions, & Remembrance

A stalwart tradition of Sci-fi is to warn or predict the outcome of scientific progress or historic repetition; this tradition seems to stem from Science fiction’s tendency to teach, preach, or allegorise. Three classic examples:

1. Prediction; Jules Verne’s story of a journey to the moon in his, De la Terre à la Lune.
2. Warning; The Cyber Punk subgenre is a warning of the building powers of corporations and the merging of human and machines.
3. Remembrance; Nearly every sci-fi show has had at least one episode showing future Nazi’s, warning the audience that once forgotten the mistakes of the past will repeat.

Hard versus Soft Sci-fi

The major division in Science fiction is usually considered to be the Hard versus Soft Sci-fi. The core difference between hard and soft Sci-fi is the difference between hard (physical) and soft (social) sciences, but due to the simultaneous use of both in most contemporary Sci-fi; the difference between Hard and Soft is often cited as the degree of scientific rigor used.

Sci-fi & Space RPGs

Despite the rising popularity of Science Fiction, partially driven by visual effects, Sci-fi RPGs, especially Space RPGs, are a small part of the RPG community. In the world of Sci-fi RPGs there are only a few contenders:

1. Traveller; The original 1970s Space RPG, the newest version published by Mongoose.
2. Warhammer 40k RPGs; A long anticipated set of three RPGs(Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader,  and the upcoming Deathwatch)in the popular 40K war game Universe.
3. Star Wars; the current Star Wars RPG fits WotC’s semi-4^th edition fantasy rule set to a Tee.
4. TV & Movie Licensed Games; Made to allow players to experience the film or TV world, tend to be great source books that use a standardised rule set like D20 or the Cortex System.
5. Rifts & GURPS; These generic systems have space and sci-fi source books with settings and specific mechanics.
6. Indies; Indie Games and Homebrews are legion. They are abundant on the internet and are often only setting that work with a published game system such as D20 or Fudge.  Promoted by sites like The Forge, published on the internet on sites such as IPR or RPGNow, and through publishers such as Mongoose Publishing’s Flaming Cobra Imprint or Studio 2.

Science Fiction & Free Spacer

It is into this relatively small universe of Science Fiction RPGs that that my upcoming Space RPG, Free Spacer, embarks.  While designing Free Spacer I rigorously built game mechanics and setting on theoretical hard and a few soft sciences. I used this science as a base with several RPG design goals as guidelines. I projected the effects of these sciences on people and societies and allowed the world to evolve into the distant future creating an internally consistent galaxy with few artificial constraints. My hope is that Technological limits, economies, and customs, will be set by the fictional sciences and will be the basis for an inherently Science Fiction setting and mechanics.