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who killed the world?
This is a prototypical world in a 1950s sci-fi film.
It takes place in a world similar to one in which the viewer lives.
But there’s an existential threat looming in the background. It’s mysterious, scary – and a bit exciting.
In the narrative, the protagonists explore this mysterious phenomenon.
They use science and technology to learn more about it.
And even though the story presents the possibility of failure, the protagonists figure it out.
It feels like the triumph of humanity.
I analyzed the top 200 sci-fi films and tv shows every decade from the 1950s to present day.1 What I found was that sci-fi narratives from yesteryear were quite different from today’s stories.
In the 1950s, only a few sci-fi films and shows took place in the future, like the Fire Maidens of Outer Space (1956) which is a film about astronauts landing on one of Jupiter’s moons. For the most part, these stories were set in the audience’s present day – so, the 1950s.
(Hover on a box for details)In these 1950s stories, the world is often upended by an existential threat.
But in the majority of films, the protagonists figure it out – and leave the world better than the beginning of the story.
Sci-fi is an amazing genre.
It helps us explore our feelings about the unknown, the future, and the possible. It lets us imagine “what if” scenarios, and then build out rich worlds that our minds can occupy. It depicts dystopias we should fend off and utopias we should seek – and it teases us with the scintillating possibility that humans may actually be able to build the world we want.
But over the last few generations, it’s been harder for us to imagine this better world – and our sci-fi reflects that.
This is a prototypical sci-fi setting in more recent years.
We’re in the near future – often a world that looks like ours, but with hints that something has already gone terribly wrong.
Today’s sci-fi is more likely to depict a world that is worse than our reality.
It’s maybe even a dystopian or post-apocalyptic world
This world is almost always marked by economic inequality, human suffering, and sometimes even a militarized, authoritarian society.
In this world, the protagonists face an existential threat.
And to defeat the threat, we must face societal conflicts that feel insurmountable – and we must face conflicts within ourselves that make us question who we are and what we’re doing .
Ultimately, the story is likely to be a commentary on today’s social issues. It’s a warning of what is to come – or a reflection of a current reality that we’ve tried hard to ignore.
The changes to sci-fi stories didn’t happen overnight. Sci-fi slowly evolved over the last few generations.
There’s been a steady increase in sci-fi stories that take place in the future – and it’s usually the near future, like the 2013 film Her – a world where a man falls in love with an artificial intelligence.
Even plots that take place in the present could be interpreted as the near-future.
The stakes are still the same as before; these sci-fi stories still present existential threats.
But we’re now more likely to face these existential threats in a dystopian or post-apocalyptic world, like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). In the film, the world is a desert wasteland ruled by a warlord who enslaves several women to produce his offspring. When the women escape, in hopes of finding a preserved paradise, they leave behind a message:
“Who killed the world?”
This dystopian society is more likely to be marked by inequality – gaps in opportunity, wealth, and basic rights.
This often leads to a world marked by great amounts of suffering.
And increasingly, sci-fi stories depict militarized societies – although we might be seeing that trend turn around this decade.
There’s almost always a “bad guy” – a human antagonist who tries to kill the world or at least gets in the way of saving the world.
But these days, it’s much more likely that protagonists also have to overcome societal forces – political movements, systemic inequality, rampant capitalism.
These are basically things that seem too big to fix.
It’s also far more likely that the narrative explores inner conflicts – moral dilemmas, identity crises, and wrestling with our understanding of what it means to be human.
We don’t just face outside threats; we also face threats within ourselves.
Ultimately, today’s sci-fi stories are far more likely to be a commentary on current social issues. These might be critiques of political ideologies, runaway capitalism, irresponsible innovation, human apathy, or eroding mental health.
But even though the narrative arc starts us off in a terrible place, the protagonists make the world better over the course of the story. Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton argued that this is necessary: “Futuristic science fiction tends to be pessimistic. If you imagine a future that’s wonderful, you don’t have a story.”
It’s often framed as the triumph of humanity.
But it certainly doesn’t feel triumphant. It often feels pessimistic – and it’s something that critics have noticed.
I think it’s because today’s sci-fi is set in a world where humans have already screwed up, and the narrative arc is basically the protagonists digging out of that hole.
But as we walk out of the theater, we’re thrust back into reality – a world where we’re still facing existential threats like climate change, authoritarianism, devious technology, and war. And if these sci-fi stories are prescient, it means that we will soon experience those existential threats; the world will soon turn into a dystopian hellscape; and only after that do we figure it out.
In other words, the worst is still ahead of us.
News stories constantly remind us that we’re headed for trouble. Children are being murdered, authoritarianism is on the rise, and Earth is inevitably going to warm so much that it will likely kill millions of people. Given this, how could we possibly imagine a less bleak future?
But maybe that’s what sci-fi can explore.
Author Neal Stephenson wrote in 2011: “Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place.” Journalist Noah Smith argues that optimistic sci-fi needs to have “several concrete features corresponding to the type of future people want to imagine actually living in.”
So, what if we figure it out?
What if we create spaceships that explore further than we could have ever imagined?
What if we embrace our natural curiosity and work toward discovering more and more of this wondrous universe?
What if we ensure that even the least fortunate among us have reliable housing, food, and healthcare?
What if we reject the notion that an economy must produce more and more, but rather embrace the idea that a functioning society is only as successful as its least privileged soul?
What if we build civilizations that don’t try to conquer nature, but rather try to be a part of it?
What if our technological innovations didn’t come from efforts to decimate each other, but rather from a constant desire to better each other’s lives?
I know, I know.
Right now, it’s hard to see that future. We see terrible things all around us – hunger, disease, mass murder, greed, an increasingly uninhabitable planet.
But unlike the world of Mad Max, our world has not yet been killed. There are still monumental efforts to stop hunger, to limit disease, to build more resilient governments, to wake us from the hypnosis of war, to sail deeper into the galaxy and to see closer into the atom. We can still create a world where the patches of paradise blossom into the wastelands.
I admit it’s hard to see. In fact, I admit that I’ve spent most of my journalism career telling a narrative about the wastelands bleeding into our lives – a sort of fear-mongering, I suppose.
But maybe that’s why it’s so important for us to imagine a different future – precisely because people like me made it so hard to see.
After all, if we can’t see paradise, how can we possibly navigate toward it?