As my readers may have deduced, I read a lot of science fiction. It happens that I also seek out and enjoy material I tend to think of as SFF-adjacent, books that share some important theme or element with science fiction and fantasy. Perhaps examples will make what I am talking about clearer…
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Singin’ in the Rain would conventionally be classified as an American musical (romantic comedy) film. Directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, it stars Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen, Millard Mitchell, and Cyd Charisse. Briefly put, the film follows a close-knit (but not always friendly) group of actors as they navigate their way through the production of what promises to be a memorably wretched film. There is a possible solution, but not one that will please vain and vindictive leading lady Lina Lamont.
The movie feels SF-adjacent (at least to me) because the entire plot is set into motion by a dramatic technological shift. Whereas previously moving picture shows were silent, now sound is part of the equation. Navigating the new demands placed on cast and crew is vital. Those who cannot adapt—for example Lina, whose voice is grating—risk abrupt unemployment.
Hec Ramsey (1972-74)
Hec Ramsey ran for ten episodes over two seasons from 1972 to 1974. Starring Richard Boone as the title character, Hec Ramsey could be mistaken at first glance as yet another television western, like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and How the West Was Won. On closer examination, there was a driving element reminiscent of many science fiction novels: social and technological change.
The social change was the end of the old West in which Hec made his reputation gun-slinging. Forced to adept to 1901’s realities, Hec reinvents himself as the local forensic examiner. Where he used to rely on his quick draw technique, now Hec uses cutting-edge forensic science to catch the bad guys. Of course, even by 1972’s standards, 1901’s cutting edge is rudimentary, but it’s exciting new technology to Hec and company.
One especially memorable episode involved a different sort of novel technology: a criminal is aghast to learn he is scheduled to be executed by the new-fangled electric chair, rather than hanged like a respectable crook. Hijinks ensue.
Shōgun by James Clavell (1975)
In James Clavell’s Shōgun, English pilot John Blackthorne and his shipmates find themselves shipwrecked in a land somewhat based on the historical Japan. Japan at this time is not terribly eager for foreign contact, having well-founded suspicions about imperialist visitors. As well, being on the brink of a nation-altering civil war, the Japanese do not need outside distractions. Nevertheless, Blackthorne is in Japan, and some role will need to be found for him, even if only as a cautionary example.
SF is filled with stories about travelers shipwrecked in unfamiliar cultures. Clavell’s tale happens to be based on a real historical event. While it would be easy to snark at some length about Clavell’s rather lurid and simplified version of pre-Shogunate Japan, which has a violent death rate for which no reasonable birthrate could possibly compensate, the novel did do one thing unusual for stories of its sort, which is to resist the so-called “Mighty Whitey” trope in which the visitor from our culture easily dominates his new homeland. Blackthorne is and remains a very minor player. Had he drowned off Japan, it would not have altered history at all.
All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward (1974)
Bernstein and Woodward’s All the President’s Men details the journalistic investigation that followed the arrest of a number of Republican-affiliated operatives caught breaking into Democratic Party offices in the Watergate Office Building. The trail leads back to the Oval Office and to the then-President. Ultimately, the break-in and the revelations that follow doom Nixon’s presidency.
Bernstein and Woodward’s account is a close cousin to all those power fantasy stories in which one or more nobodies stumble over a dark secret and by exposing the secret to the light of day, bring down a powerful man. King’s The Dead Zone would be one example. A moment’s consideration suggests that what would actually happen is a passing scandal followed by business as usual. The fact that the Watergate Scandal did end Nixon’s presidency just goes to show that actual history is not required to be plausible.
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No doubt there are many non-SFF works that also have parallels to science fiction unmentioned above. Feel free to mention your favorites in comments.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
Someone (possibly Jo Walton?) defined a technothriller as “a SF novel in which one of the characters is the President of the United States” – and certainly things like The Hunt for Red October are very close to SF. One new fairly plausible technology, with clearly defined limits, whose effects on society are carefully worked out, and a plot that depends fundamentally on the technology.
Margaret Atwood isn’t a science fiction author, but things like The Handmaid’s Tale have SF elements as well; the near-future setting, the plot driven by some very SF considerations, and unfortunately the clunky writing and unintentionally hilarious neologisms like “Particicution” and “Econowife”.
@1 Margaret Atwood is so an SF author, at least some of the time (at the least, The Handmaid’s Tale and Madd Adam trilogy, not to mention The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home). She just hates to be called an SF author. I love her, but we will continue to disagree on this!
I can’t believe I have ZERO memory of Hec Ramsey. Did I skip every 4th week of the NBC Mystery Movie? I certainly remember all the “McCloud,” “McMillan & Wife,” and “Columbo” episodes.
As I recall, Atwood uses or used a very narrow, idiosyncratic definition of SF. A bit weird since she read pulp SF as a kid and more respectable SF now but she’s hardly the only SF author to insist on a definition that didn’t get her relegated to the SF shelf.
Just about any Wes Anderson movie, which are uncannily gorgeous, curiously staged, and have an internal logic that is somewhat fantastical, not really matching what we think of as quotidian reality. The most SFnal might be his forthcoming film, ‘Asteroid City’, filled with 1960s pastel colors and classic Space Race tropes.
I haven’t read Emma Donoghue’s original novel, but the movie version of Room feels like science fiction to me, at least from the kid protagonist’s point of view. The scene where he experiences the outside world for the first time is a terrific depiction of “conceptual breakthrough,” on a par with Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” and Robert A. Heinlein’s “Universe”.
The Austin Powers movies feature so many classic sci-fi tropes (time travel, cryogenics and frickin’ laser beams to name a few) that I’ve often thought they were as much science fiction as spy spoof. Come to that, many of the James Bond films they were riffing on had plenty of science fiction elements too.
An African in Greenland is the memoir of Tete-Michel Kpomassie. a citizen of Togo. He describes how a book about Greenland captured his imagination. It took
Woops. Should have included “It took eight years to make his way from Togo to Greenland.”
7: I read that last year! Taking his time to get there had at least one advantage. By the time he got to Greenland, he was experienced at adapting to other cultures.
(The main reason, for people not familiar with his travels, was that he feared if he got a job that paid well enough to get him to Greenland quickly, it would be too difficult to walk away from the job once he had sufficient cash)
“The Gods Must Be Crazy” hits some of the same notes as Independence Day, and any other sf movie where “backwards” humans have to navigate and ove the “advanced” society and its technology.
John D. MacDonald’s Green Ripper has a brief foray into futurism before focusing on McGee’s core mission of murdering his way through a (humanized) terrorist community:
In this context, that’s somewhere between 1984 and 1991.
re footnote 2: USian TV had occasional attempts to be highbrow in its early days (e.g., appearances by Leonard Bernstein, productions by John Houseman, commissioned operas by Copland and Menotti). Some of this was spurred by Minow’s 1961 speech denouncing TV as a “vast wasteland”; the Michelson episode of Bonanza was first aired on March 18, 1962 (says the listing in Wikipedia) and so might have been a response to Minow.
re footnote 4: or if he’d had better minions; the cowboys and clowns who did the actual deeds of and around Watergate are a classic example of Rosten’s Maxim.
nit: there were several shogunates. I haven’t read or watched Shōgun but assume from the dating that you mean the Tokugawa shogunate
I’d add the CSI franchise as a sci-fi series as well. Just about everything in that show just reeks of old Pulp sci-fi tropes.
chip137 (@12): Former FCC Chair Newton Minow died on May 6, age 97. I did not discover if he had changed his opinion of USan television, but I would say that in my lifetime the wasteland has shrunk from “vast” to, maybe, “half-vast”.
The first season of Mr. Robot is cyberpunk without any speculative element. The setting is present day and the technology is all currently available, but there are hackers, street tech, mysterious women, and evil corporations on every corner.
Bones wasn’t intended as SF but the forensic technology was not limited to plausible modern-day devices.
I would say that that amazingly-popular movie (and now television) phenomenon, Star Wars is SF-adjacent.
I would like to again point out the 1980s YA slice of life cyberpunk novel “I Am Princess X”. There’s a select few who insist on calling this a late 20teens technothriller by Cherie Priest, but the way the protectionists and antagonists make use of the ubiquitous “cell phone” in ways the designers obviously didn’t account for, is right up there in “The Street Finds it’s Own Uses for Things” descriptions. Likewise the depiction of Seattle’s underground culture is obviously reminiscent of Gibson’s look at street life. So a little matter like publication date shouldn’t invalidate the essential cyberpunk nature of the book.
See also “The Truman Show.” The tech behind Truman’s dome and its surveillance was a logical advance over what could actually have been available in 1998. And given that the world outside the dome looked no different from present-day Earth, one could make the case that it was an alternate-Earth where such technology would have been available then.
Amusingly, I bought Neal Stephenson’s technothriller Zodiac from a local bookshops. It was in the SF section. This was before Snow Crash, but the bookshop must have sensed SF cooties
I haven’t read any Clavell, but I find a lot of those big, fat historical novels (Gary Jennings’ Aztec or The Journeyer, e.g., or Nicholas Guild’s The Assyrian or Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth) scratch much the same itch as big, fat fantasy novels.
The Manchurian Candidate is basically science-fiction. The “one difference” common to definitions of the genre being mind control that is still impossible (despite the tragic best efforts of the CIA to discover what they though the Eastern Bloc had discovered).
Various novels about Hernan Cortes overthrowing the Aztec Empire are written from the perspective of the Mesoamericans (half of The Serpent and the Eagle, for example), making them alien-invasion-story adjacent. Some is non-fiction, even (e.g., Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl’s Relación)
@20
He had previously published The Big U, which was mostly a satire of campus life at a big university, but has enough sci-fi elements to ne put in that section. It was kind of a flop, and isn’t that great, but by the time Zodiac came out Stephenson had already been shunted into the sci fi section.
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov certainly isn’t SF or fantasy, but there’s something about its detached tone, unreliable narrator, and worldbuilding (including a fanciful country with a constructed language) that gives it something of an SFF feel. There’s even a character named Charles Xavier, who is not a mutant, but one wonders if Stan Lee read the novel and snagged the name. The novel was also a favorite of actual SF writer Gene Wolfe.
Just this weekend at a con, I heard someone talking about *Singing in the Rain* as SF.
My family watched the NBC Mystery Movie religiously. I do not remember Hec at all! I shall look for him. My favorite was Banacek, because he was local to us.
@26: Likewise: I watched Quincy, Columbo, Snoop Sisters, McCloud, all of them – but apparently not Hec.
William T Vollmann’s books have always felt science-fictional to me. It’s a combination of his writing style and topics. It blooms into a clinical esotericism that is almost alien in its observation and musings. Kissing The Mask, for instance. Noh theatre and the portrayal of femininity and beauty.
There was a consensus at rasfw (usenet) that Moby Dick was a classic which appealed to sf fans. Presumably the infodumps did it.
Mary Renault’s historical novels show the sfnal talent of giving you the perfect detail which implies a lot about the world. I recommend her _The Persian Boy_.
Michener’s big historical novels are also somewhat sfnal in the sense of historical change and sometimes geology being important.
I would like to add NETWORK to this list! Lumet’s film always felt like an inspiration for Robocop in a lot of ways.
If there is one film or TV series I absolutely, positively never expected to see referenced at Tor.com, it’s Hec Ramsey. From the comments here, it appears that our distinguished author and I may be the only living souls who remember it. Understandable, as it did not have the longevity of its NBC Mystery Movie compatriots. Richard Boone said that Ramsey was just an “older, fatter Palidin,” his character from Have Gun, Will Travel. Paladin didn’t really use cutting-edge science, but he was certainly the thinking-man’s gunslinger (ok, he shot a lot of people too).
While we’re on the subject, is The Wild, Wild West (the TV series, not the Will Smith movie) SF adjacent, or full-on SF?
@22 Not the Aztecs, but Randall Garrett’s “Despoilers of the Golden Empire” tells a very similar story of gold-mad explorers making violent first contact on a terrestrial planet, making comparable use of local politics as a force multiplier.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24091
I saw the Bonanza episode with Michelson when I was quite young, but someone explained his significance to me. It must have stuck, because I always remembered the episode when the M-M experiment came up in high school and college.
I’ve at least been told that wooden boxes in the old physics building used by Michelson at my alma mater for the experiment (not its original instance, but a later repetition) were later repurposed for network cabling. So (if it’s not just a campus legend) part of the infrastructure used to disprove the existence of the ether later carried Ethernet.
Clifford Stoll’s _The Cuckoo’s Egg_ is quite a technothriller, despite being a factual account.
The recent Poker Face series seems to be SF adjacent. Recommended, *especially* if you like Columbo. Down to the yellow titles. Same producer as Glass Onion and Knives Out. It’s on Netflix.
John Styles mentioned Zodiac, and I think that William Gibson’s Blue Ant books are definitely similar – no explicit SF elements, but definitely an SF feel to them. Unfamiliar, if not non-existent technology drives the plots of all three books.
I would consider The Wild Wild West to straddle the borderland between SF TV shows and Western TV series. Its basic concept is, after all, “James Bond on a horse.”
FYI, Ray Bradbury called Singin’ in the Rain his favorite science-fiction movie.
@24: Nabokov’s later novel “Ada” is more explicitly speculative, taking place in an alternate history that’s more technologically limited and where Russia is more dominant than our own, and where some people have an unexplained mental awareness of an alternate world which seems to be ours.
@22 See also Seven Days in May (1964). The movie (screenplay by Rod Serling) was based on novel published in 1962 that was supposed to be set ten years in the future. However, there is no indication in the movie that it is not set in the “present” of 1964, although the scenes in the Pentagon involving apparent “livestreaming” of video feeds from military sites around the country, and two-way video conferencing, were beyond the technology of the time.
It could be argued that most political thrillers are “alternate history” since they most frequently involve fictional US presidents, senators and congressmen while set in the “present” in which they were written.
The Third Policeman is a brilliant, surreal, darkly funny novel by Flann O’Brien. Written in 1939 and 1940, not published until 1967, it is a portrait of Irish country life that can be compared to “—And He Built a Crooked House—” and Dhalgren.
I’m surprised that nobody mentioned Pynchon. His earlier novels, particularly Gravity’s Rainbow and V., had sf and fantasy aspects to them
Now that I think about it, every James Bond movie, from Dr. No to No Time to Die, exists on the borderland of science fiction.
Finnegans Wake is at least a little sf– there’s a television in a bar before there were televisions in bars.
I found the Canadian television show ‘The Murdoch Mysteries’ to definitely fall into this category.
As far as Tom Clancy, I think Cardinal of the Kremlin is the closest he came to actual SF (positing, as it does, a working orbital laser that can hit ground targets, IIRC). And maybe the super secret stealth drive in Red October.
@@@@@ 32. mschiffe
@@@@@22 Not the Aztecs, but Randall Garrett’s “Despoilers of the Golden Empire” tells a very similar story of gold-mad explorers making violent first contact on a terrestrial planet, making comparable use of local politics as a force multiplier.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24091
Yes, it was the Aztecs.
The final line reads: “And thus died Francisco Pizarro, the Conqueror of Peru.”
In his afterward, Garrett says he got the idea from John W. Campbell, who claimed there were occasional supermen in human history. He used Pizarro’s conquest of the Aztec empire with fewer than 500 men as an example.
@46 Pizarro conquered the Inca, not the Aztecs.
44 beat me to mentioning Murdoch Mysteries, and the Bonanza episode in a footnote is very like what is in that great Canadian show.
@47. Dan Blum
@46 Pizarro conquered the Inca, not the Aztecs.
True. My mistake.
@45
The tunnel drive in the book The Hunt For Red October wasn’t very sf-nal, being a pump-jet sort.
The Magneto Hydrodynamic Drive aka Caterpillar Drive in the movie OTOH, is something being worked on. Apparently the primary problem is corrosion. And that the most successful prototype made 8.1 knots as its top speed.
DARPA apparently announced the other day that they’ll be looking into it again, this time using superconducting magnets for a stronger magnetic field.
@50 — It’s been so long since I read the books that I didn’t remember the details of the drive, or that they’d changed it for the movie.
Allow me to suggest that in the borderlands of Fantasy (rather than those of SF per se) resides (among many other works ) The Wind in the Willows. The main characters are animals. The Mole, The Water Rat, trh Badger, and Mr Toad are the major characters. Sometimes these seem to be somewhat realistic; Rat lives in a hole in the river bank, for example, but in many cases they are more hum,ans with fur: Toad can drive an automobile (although not well) and be mistaken for a (human) washerwoman when wearing a dress and bonnet. The others have fireplaces in their homes, wear boots and jackets, Rat has a boat with oars and a picnic basket, Mr Badger typically reads a newspaper, and in the final crisis all four carry pistols and swords to throw out the rifle-carrying stoats who have taken over Toad hall (which is made of brick. Yet the importance of scent to an animal is stressed in some detail at several places in the book, particularly the chapter “Dulce Domum”. These are neither the somewhat realistic animals of Watership Down, nor the purely Humans in Disguise of Aseop or Animal Farm. They are something in between. And so is the book, Long considered a “children’s classic” I would suggest it is well worth a reread as an adult.
It could be argued that most political thrillers are “alternate history” since they most frequently involve fictional US presidents, senators and congressmen while set in the “present” in which they were written.
At this point, you might as well include all fiction. “Frasier” is set in an alternate history in which there is a Seattle psychiatrist called Frasier Crane who has a radio show. “Pride and Prejudice” is set in an alternate history where there’s a stately home called Pemberley.
The Finnegans Wake comment reminds me that Cold Comfort Farm is set in the future – but doesn’t have an SF feel at all…
For stuff like the more out there side of James Bond, Austin Powers, the Avengers, (the British one with John Steed), Totally Spies, etc. that shades into science fiction, there is actually a term: Spy-fi, which implies a mostly normal world except for this technological version of the urban fantasy masquerade complete with secret wars.
@53/ ajay – it’s subjective, but surely it’s how divergent the timeline becomes. Fraser and his talk show don’t deviate from our timeline in any observable way. The West Wing bends itself in knots to have a progressive President while not departing from our timeline in any significant way.
The sort of techno thrillers genre that’s being referred to tends to diverge rapidly from our timeline, not just by having politicians with different names and appearances. Unlike the West Wing, they don’t tie themselves in knots to avoid the consequences of having people with different personalities and priorities in charge.
For instance, Executive Orders by Tom Clancy starts with a terrorist wiping out, except for the Designated Survivor, the entire US Federal government (judiciary, legislative and executive), along the party apparatus for both the Democratic and Republicans, as well as the lobbyists for all the interest groups that attempt to influence the federal government. The new government the new US President has to assemble has not of the baggage from the entrenched political establishment, so in the short term things get done. The weakness of the US results in a bio weapon being deployed against the US, leading to martial law, and a global realignment of geo-politics, with a Chinese/Indian alliance against a Russian/American alliance in a proxy war in the Middle East.
So, significantly different from our timeline. 🤠
@30/Damian – agreed. NETWORK was contemporary but definitely feels in look and attitude, like a prequel to Robocop.
@55 — I’d say the major Clancy timeline divergence begins with Debt of Honor (we get into a shooting war with a Sino-Japanese-Indian alliance, which leads directly into the events of Executive Orders). And then, beginning with Executive Orders, it just gets wilder from there. (The last book of his that I read had us allying with Russia when they got in a shooting war with China.)
@55/@57: The events of *Sum of All Fears* ought to have caused a significant divergence from our timeline, but there seems to be a resetting back to close to our timeline from time to time. Interestingly the book you mention about the US/Russia alliance has some slight discrepancies with Debt of Honor.
The Wire is an interesting example. The first series centres around a group of police trying to break the new technology (pagers!) used by the criminals and future seasons deal with how methods have to change as technology changes – pagers get replaced by burner phones. The technology is an integral part of the story, at least in the early storylines, which makes it SFnal to an extent.
Ben H Winters The Last Policeman trilogy contains no sfnal elements, if you ignore the giant meteor which will devastate the planet 6 months after the trilogy begins. I guess this might be more alternate history than sf. The lack of supertechnologies to deal with the meteor and the fact that the attempts to either survive the impact or divert the meteor are all background events that get no screet time makes this sf adjacent to me.
The first series centres around a group of police trying to break the new technology (pagers!) used by the criminals and future seasons deal with how methods have to change as technology changes – pagers get replaced by burner phones.
If you watched The Wire in the UK, it had quite the opposite feel. The first few episodes, which I saw in the mid-2000s, had the detail trying to break into a pager/public phone network, drinking and driving, beating suspects, and typing out search warrants on a typewriter. I honestly thought it was meant to be a period piece set in the 1980s – like Life on Mars – until one of the characters mentioned 9/11 and I realised that, no, it was present day.
ajay @@@@@ 53:
At this point, you might as well include all fiction. “Frasier” is set in an alternate history in which there is a Seattle psychiatrist called Frasier Crane who has a radio show. “Pride and Prejudice” is set in an alternate history where there’s a stately home called Pemberley.
The gaming writer Kenneth Hite made a similar observation in one of his Suppressed Transmission columns (“Slightly Alternate History”): “The Prisoner of Zenda takes place in The Real World With Ruritania. The Horatio Hornblower novels take place in The Real World With Hornblower.”, etc.
@53 It’s true that Cold Comfort Farm, despite actual SFF touches (personal airplanes, video phones, made-up words, etc.) doesn’t feel like SF at all. That said, the novel (and particularly its protagonist, Flora Poste) struck me as having an almost Miyazaki quality.
I remember Hec Ramsey with great fondness. You have the timeline right. There are dvd/blu-ray collections of McMillan, Columbo and McCloud (I have both Mc’s in my collection), but NOT Hec Ramsey.
I probably saw 6 out of 10 episodes when they came out. The TV channel they were on had lots of reasons to pre-empt regularly scheduled programming, including none at all. My parents-in-law at the time had a color TV, so I’d go over there every Sunday night when Hec was supposed to appear on TV–when it was on it was a great experience.
If there were a collection of Hec I’d snap it up in a New York second!
Belately thinking of the Harry Turtledove story “Hindsight” in which a modern (1980ish) person goes back to the 1940s and writes SF stories – some per-plagiarized, and some adapted from real events of the future – like “Three Mile Island” and “Watergate”