time, science fiction epic
I've been trying to zero in on the qualities that evoke the concept 'science fiction epic' or 'classic science fiction'... what do we mean by science fiction? What makes a classic, or an epic?
Science fiction as a genre points towards a genre of fiction sometimes written by scientists, often dealing with imagined technologies or speculative concepts, sometimes looking towards the future and asking 'what if...?'.
Science fiction has a healthy relationship with science. Jules Vernes's late 19th century stories about riding arocket to the moon inspired young people to take an interest in the topic, people like Werner Von Braun and X, who eventually succeeded in doing the impossible and making science fiction a reality.
The term 'hard science fiction' is sometimes used to refer to stories with a more exacting approach to known physical laws, stories that attempt to honor what is known to be possible. Science fiction also often refers to stories involving spaceships, flying cars, laser swords and rayguns, monsters and mayhem.
For a science fiction to be considered a classic it has to last for a while in popular memory, it needs to find an audience and engage them, and perhaps a true classic doesn't show its age too much, it can still be understood and can still resonate years later.
For a science fiction to be considered an epic it probably needs a broad ensemble cast, its story would include the broad sweep of history over the course of time, with events in a wide variety of locations, some of them vast. Above all, a science fiction epic needs to feel broad and deep, presenting a universe with a scope and a history all its own.
What are some relevant examples?
2001: A Space Odyssey is a pretty solid contender for 'science fiction epic'.
In the mid-sixties, the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick set out to create 'the proverbial good science fiction film'. He met Arthur C. Clarke, himself a scientist and an author of science fiction, and the two began to imagine a project that would eventually become '2001: A Space Odyssey'. This film is still considered a classic. I've admired it ever since I saw it on VHS in the 1990s, but I gained a newfound appreciation for the film when I saw it in the cinema with its original aspect ratio and at a size appropriate to the film's vision.
So... why is this film still considered a classic?
A book I remember fondly from when I was reading science fiction in my pre-teen years was Isaac Asimov's Foundation. It's a slim volume, less a novel and more a collection of brief interconnected short stories. I remember the book for its approach, its structure, its big ideas... and much of this comes from its time-skipping structure. Each story revolves around a protagonist and a series of events he (and in this book it is always a 'he') witnesses or is involved in, but then the story ends, and those events are a part of the historical record, and the next story is maybe fifty years in the future. We may follow the same character, but he is no longer a young man, and his role in the world has shifted in interesting ways. Often we are introduced to an entirely new character who is responding to or dealing with events set in motion in a previous story. With this structure we follow a population of scholars who are initially tasked with creating the 'encyclopedia britannica', who are exiled to a faraway planet at the edge of a galaxy. As we skip ahead in time we see in the background a galactic empire decay and fall, and we watch the colony of the scholars, known as 'the foundation', shift from meager colony, to a lone democratic city in a chaotic world, to the seat of a religion that masks modern technolgoy as mystical sorcery. The book ends before reaching any particular conclusion.
Time and space. But not time travel.