Ethics and Science Fiction – Perfect Dance Partners?
Kolby Granville is editor-in-chief of After Dinner Conversation, an independent nonprofit publisher fostering meaningful discussions to promote truth-seeking, reflection, and respectful debate. After Dinner Conversation publishes philosophical and ethical short story fiction accompanied by discussion questions.
Are science fiction and ethics perfect dance partners?
For the last five years I have run the monthly short story magazine, After Dinner Conversation. It publishes “accessible examples of abstract ethical and philosophical ideas…across genres.” On our submission page, we clearly state that we will accept any genre that poses an ethical or philosophical question.
But what do we mean by an “ethical or philosophical question?” To us, it means a story in which two reasonable people reasonably disagree about what a “good” person would do.
Imagine a story about family pet that is sick with an uncurable disease and in constant pain. Should you put it down to end its suffering? That’s a “hard” question but it probably not an ethical question because there is no question what a “good” person would do, just what a typical person would do. If this line seems confusing, I encourage you to read a free sample magazine from our website or Substack. You will quickly have our niche figured out.
For us, great stories don’t simply entertain but make you want to discuss and debate – because there are two reasonable options.
And yet, after several years editing the publication, I realized that over 80% of the two thousand submissions could be classified as science fiction. In fact, we read so many science fiction submissions that we decided to print “good enough” non-science fiction stories instead of really good science fiction stories just to keep ourselves from being thought of as a science fiction magazine.
Why is the science fiction/philosophy partnership so strong?
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not, at its core, a story about a human creation. Rather, it uses a human creation to ask the question of what it means to be human. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells is not a story about time travel to the distant future. It uses time travel to ask questions about the nature of industrial divisions of work and its long-term cultural issues.
Cinema has a long history of mixing science fiction and ethics/philosophy as well. Think of Gattaca, Ex-Machina, Blade Runner, Minority Report, Looper, Eternal Sunshine On the Spotless Mind, A Clockwork Orange (both book and movie), Her, The Matrix, and 2001 – and this ishardly an exhaustive list.
Perhaps this pairing is so common, I’ve begun to think, because all you need to do is start your story with, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…” and then you can make up whatever world-building rules you need to approach the idea you really want to discuss.
Of course, questions of ethics and philosophy are not only found in science fiction. Additionally, not all science fiction stories have a strong ethical focus. However, it is impossible to deny the correlation.
But why not write a story using an “Allegory of The Cave” example that would fit in the American Western genre? What about a story focusing on a high school romance in which the success of the relationship hinges on the different ways the two teenagers view reality? Surely Kierkegaard’s ideas could be explored in an erotic story: for goodness’ sake, the man built a cupboard to keep the letters and remembrances of a woman to whom he was briefly engaged! The story practically writes itself!
No doubt philosophy, and specifically ethics, are all around us in our non-science fiction life. Do you return the shopping cart to its holding location? Do you, as Chidi Anagonye discusses in The Good Place, continue to use almond milk after reading that almond growing is bad for the environment?
What do you think? Why are science fiction and philosophy/ethics so often paired in books, TV, and cinema? Is that the only genre where characters are forced to ask themselves what a “good” person would do? Surely there are characters in westerns, romance, and other genres that have decisions where was a “good” person would do could go either way?
We publish monthly and welcome you to submit your story on our website. Every story you read in our magazine was written by someone just like you.
And if your story is accepted, it will be published in a magazine that was ranked #1 for published fiction in the 2024 Chill Subs Community Favorites Best Lit Mag Awards and the Most Popular Fiction Magazine by Chill Subs Authors. (Chills Subs is an organization that “celebrates magazines and editors who go above and beyond to build strong communities and publish great writing.”)
“3:10 to Yuma” asks the same question as the last story ADC published on Substack, “The Devil You Know”: “Must you always fight evil, even when you know you can’t win?”
https://open.substack.com/pub/afterdinnerconversation/p/the-devil-you-know-by-david-wiseman?r=schg4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false