Lessons of the Future: Relatability in Science Fiction (TiMER)

Science fiction seems to always be serious but it doesn’t have to be. I would suggest making Science fiction as laid back as possible or even create satire or comedy. One of the plagues of science fiction is that it has the smallest demographic and is the most difficult to relate to.

If we can make science fiction more relatable, then perhaps we can increase our audience size. We can do this with a slice of life storyline, satire, comedy, and romance. The most important thing to communicate in science fiction is humanity. How human can you make the characters seem? How relatable are we to the characters we have created? This seems to be a problem for science fiction when we create non-human characters, super intelligent characters, or robotic characters. Our characters don't have to be strictly human, but emotionally we have to convenience the audience that they are. To do this we have to have them do something relatable. In a romance, you would show love. In comedy, you would show humor. In satire, you would show sarcasm and irony. A robot that falls in love but doesn't actually have a heart or brain. An alien that is a standup comedian. A god-like creature with a name that’s easily made fun of. We have to show human emotions to make our stories entertaining. In the movie TiMER (which I don’t suggest. It’s About Time is a much better watch.) we see a romance with the same problems as any romance. Its story question is "how do I know that I’m not wasting my time with my current significant other?" "How can I be certain that this is the one?" This is solved with wrist implants that have a timer on it telling you the exact day when you will meet your soul mate. (It’s like Black Mirror meets rom-com.) We watch a relatable romance unfold and latch on to its conflicts and humanity.

We need to keep relatability in our works so that we don’t bore our audience. Remember, even when creating non-human characters, we are human and want to relate to other humans. If we keep the humanity in our characters we keep the relatability in our story.