Fable & The Verbivore

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Episode 138: The Science Fiction Genre

Bethany Stedman

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Ep 139: The Science Fiction Genre Fable & The Verbivore

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Today, Fable and the Verbivore are excited to explore science fiction and some of the common elements of the genre.

We start by talking about speculative fiction and how science fiction fits within that overarching category. We touch on how it typically deals with some form of technology and often asks some big questions. Things like: Who are we? Where are we going? Where have we been? What are we capable of? What does the future hold?

The fascinating and awe-producing elements of science fiction can also allow us to explore and grapple with painful, heavy, and frightening things from within the range of human experience in a more distanced way and therefore in what feels like a safer space.

In this episode, we explore six common areas of story that fall under sci-fi:

  • Dark Futures

  • Aliens

  • Space

  • Monsters

  • Intelligent Machines / AI

  • Time Travel

These boiled down elements were taken from James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction exploration series. We also acknowledge that science fiction stories can include more than one of these elements or none, but this framework encapsulates a wide selection of the genre.

In our exploration, we include a lot of film examples. The reason is so that most people will have at least a passing familiarity with at least one or two of our examples for each area of storytelling we cover.

As we end this conversation, we give a brief preview for our next conversation where we’ll dig into the differences between Science Fiction and Fantasy, and talk about Magic Vs. Technology in story. Tune in next week!

We hope you enjoy this episode. Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

This conversation that explores some of the common elements of science fiction isn’t meant to be exhaustive. It’s a brief overview of the landscape of science fiction storytelling while acknowledging that the area is vast and overlaps with other areas of speculative fiction.

Here are some articles and videos that we found helpful in preparation for this conversation:

We touch on several of our previous podcast episodes. They are as follows:

Books and Movies Mentioned:

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)