All the Types of Science Fiction
A funny listicle by Horst Smokowski for McSweeney’s:
- Check this place out, it’s dope
- Technology solves problems 🤩 (future good)
- Technology creates problems 😕 (future bad)
- A world much like our own where some subtle differences highlight humanity/reality/society/perception
- What if your cock was a bomb?
- Rockets are not phallic, please stop saying that
- Here is why religion is bad
- Homestuck
- Four thousand pages on the adventures of Prentiss Plum, a space pirate, scientist, and award-winning Virgo
- Winking parody that doubles down on sexbots
- Cory Doctorow’s most recent night terror
- “Me am play god”
- Tracy Chapman’s A New Beginning
- A list of legally non-binding patents disguised as a narrative
- There is a secret number and it’s pissed
- The Strugatsky brothers do not like Stalin
- Star Trek, but they smash
- Time, considered as a helix of semiprecious stoners
- It is 1860, let us go to the Moon
- Basically Mein Kampf
- Bomb Cock 2: Mutually Assured Destruction
- The franchise equivalent of findom
- A power fantasy that focuses on maintaining the status quo (Supercop)
- Your happiness, as a commodity
- Margaret Atwood, sharing with us her gift of prophecy
- Science monster
- An alien who’s just really nice with it
- Young adult
- Hung adult
- Fear & Loathing in Arcturus
- Ansible only good for sexting
- Apocalyptic
- Apocalypso
- Post-apocalypso
- Post-scarcity
- Multi-planetary
- Suckpull
- A thought experiment, taken literally
- Multiversal polycule
- An obvious yet powerful allegory
- David Cronenberg has something to show you
- The Turing Test, but sexy
- 1980s pop culture as understood by Dan Quayle
- I Have No Friends and I Must Infodump (narrative tension is a sin)
- A plot that should have stayed in the fanfic
- A fun twist on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
- Oops! The author got high and watched Akira
- One where you can’t tell whether the optimism is naïve or revolutionary
- Bomb Cock 3: World War Chindo
- Secretly just a treatise on economics