Science Fiction Used to Promise Us Something

The same director made Close Encounters and E.T. This summer he made a movie whose entire pitch is a question: would proof of alien life frighten you? Somewhere between those films the genre quit dreaming, and the kids stopped looking up.

By Brian Bullock | Everyone Knows | brianbullockwriter.com

In 1977 Steven Spielberg made a film about ordinary people who saw lights in the sky and could not stop thinking about them. It ended with a man walking up a ramp into a ship, leaving Earth behind, because the thing he had found was more interesting than the life he had. Five years later he made a film about a boy who found something in his shed and hid it from the adults, because the adults would ruin it. Both films are about contact. Both are about wonder. Neither one asks you to be afraid.

This June, the same man released Disclosure Day. The logline is a question: if you found out we weren't alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you?

Same director. Same subject. Forty nine years apart. The first two assumed the answer was awe. The third opens by asking whether you can handle it.

That is not a criticism of the movie. It is a measurement of the distance we traveled while nobody was watching the odometer.

The Genre Traded Blueprints for Warnings

Science fiction used to be an engineering catalog with a plot attached. Clarke worked out geostationary satellites in a technical paper in 1945 and then spent a career writing stories about what we would do once we had them. Heinlein wrote competent men solving hard problems with slide rules and stubbornness. The genre assumed the future was a place we were going to build, and it spent its pages arguing about how.

Read what gets published and greenlit now. Collapse. Surveillance. Corporations that own your body. A rich man in a bunker. The last people alive walking through the ruins of something better. Even the good work, and there is plenty of good work, has largely stopped asking what we should build and started asking who we should blame.

Both modes are legitimate. Warning is a real job and the genre has always done it, from Wells forward. But a literature that only warns produces readers who only brace. Nobody ever built anything because a novel told them what would go wrong.

Here is the part that ought to keep the honest ones up at night. My generation grew up on rockets that worked and men who came home. The generation coming up grew up on the ruins. Then we wonder why they do not want to go anywhere.

And look at what the generation now in its twenties actually read growing up. The Hunger Games. Divergent. The Maze Runner. Three enormous franchises, all aimed at teenagers, all built on the same skeleton: the system is rigged, the adults running it are lying to you, and the only honorable move is to burn it down. Millions of American kids had that as their formative encounter with speculative fiction. Not a ship. Not a colony. Not a problem solved by somebody who knew how the machine worked. A rebellion against a machine designed to eat them.

I am not blaming novels for anything. But you cannot feed a generation that story for fifteen years and then wonder why the default posture toward the future is a flinch.

The Pendulum Has Swung Before

Before anyone accuses me of shouting at clouds, this cycle has run at least once already, and it ran the other direction.

The 1950s were a golden age of invasion paranoia. The flying saucer landed and something came out of it that wanted to kill you or replace you. Body snatchers. War of the Worlds. The thing in the ice. Cold War fear wearing a rubber suit. That was the dominant mode for a decade and a half.

What broke it was Close Encounters, in 1977, followed by E.T. in 1982. Two films by one director that flatly refused the premise, and the audience went with them. The paranoia did not win. It got answered.

So the current mood is not permanent and it is not proof of decline. It is a mood, and moods turn when somebody with talent decides to turn them. That is worth remembering before we write the eulogy.

But there is a difference between then and now, and it matters. In 1977 the culture was already doing the thing. We had been to the Moon eight years earlier. Voyager launched that same year. The wonder in those films was reflecting something real that was happening outside the theater. Today the movies are the only place most people encounter the future at all.

Ask a Twelve Year Old

If you want to know where this lands, do not ask a critic. Ask a kid what he wants to be.

LEGO commissioned the Harris Poll to survey three thousand children between eight and twelve in the United States, Britain and China, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the Moon landing. In America, 29 percent said they wanted to be a YouTuber. Eleven percent said astronaut. Three to one.

In China, 56 percent said astronaut. Eighteen percent said influencer. Same age. Same questionnaire. Opposite answer.

It has not improved since. A 2024 survey of American twelve to fifteen year olds put YouTuber at the top at 32 percent, TikTok creator second at 21, with video game developer at 19 and entrepreneur at 17. Astronaut did not make the top of the list.

Now hold two things at once, because the honest version of this argument requires it. That same LEGO study found three in four children believe humans will eventually live in space or on another planet. Ninety six percent of the Chinese kids. Sixty three percent of the British ones. So it is not that American and British children think the future is impossible. They think it is going to happen. They just do not think it has anything to do with them.

That is a stranger and worse result than simple pessimism. Pessimism you can argue with. What we have produced is a generation that believes in the future the way people believe in weather. It will arrive. Somebody else will handle it.

They Are Not Lazy. They Are Aimed at the Screen.

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this column is an old man complaining that kids do not want to work, and that version is boring and wrong.

Watch a fourteen year old build a channel. He writes, shoots, lights, edits, scores, designs a thumbnail, studies his own retention graph and reshoots the opening because viewers dropped at eleven seconds. That is production discipline. It is more sustained technical effort than most of us put into anything at that age. The energy is there and it is real.

What changed is where it points. Every one of those skills is aimed at the screen and at the response that comes back within the hour. Nothing in it is aimed at a physical object that has to survive contact with the world.

And the incentives are honest about it. Being a creator pays now, sometimes immediately, and the feedback loop is measured in minutes. Engineering pays in fifteen years and the feedback loop is a program that might get canceled before you see it fly. When one path rewards you tonight and the other asks for a decade on faith, faith is the thing that has to be supplied from somewhere else. That used to be the job of the stories.

The Chinese numbers matter here because they rule out the easy excuses. Those children are not richer than ours and they are not smarter. What they have is a country visibly putting hardware in the sky and telling them constantly that it is going somewhere. The story is being supplied. Ours is not.

Nobody Builds What Nobody Imagined

And this is where it stops being a question about taste and becomes a question about capacity.

The engineers who built Apollo were, to a striking degree, boys who read. They read Verne and Wells and the pulps, and they went to work on the thing they had been reading about since they were nine. Wernher von Braun read Hermann Oberth. Every generation of American rocketry has a paper trail back to a bookshelf.

That pipeline is not mystical. A child reads something that makes a future feel real and desirable, carries it for a decade, and eventually picks a major. Change what the child reads and you change what he majors in. Change what he majors in and you change what the country can build twenty years later.

We are currently running that experiment in reverse and we will get the results on schedule.

None of it requires a movement or a manifesto. It requires writers who are willing to be caught believing in something. That is harder than it sounds, because irony is safe and hope is embarrassing. A dystopia cannot be wrong. Nobody reviews a warning and says the author was naive. Write a story where the thing gets built and the crew comes home, and somebody will call it propaganda.

I would take that trade. I have been taking it.

That is most of why I write the books I write. The Sentinel universe has wars in it and it has people who lose. What it does not have is the assumption that the effort was pointless. Somebody in those stories is always trying to fix the thing, and sometimes they manage it, and I refuse to treat that as a childish position. It is the position every functioning civilization has held about itself right up until the moment it stopped.

There is a practical version of this and it is not sentimental. Twenty years from now, one of these countries is going to have more propulsion engineers than the other. That will not be settled by a budget line. It was settled by what a nine year old was handed to read, and by whether anybody bothered to tell him the future was his to build rather than his to survive.

The Question Underneath the Question

Go back to Spielberg's logline one more time. Would that frighten you?

It is a good question and it makes a good trailer. But notice what it takes for granted. It assumes the natural human response to discovering we are not alone is fear, and that the interesting part is watching us handle it badly.

The 1977 version of that same man assumed something different. He assumed that if you showed an ordinary electrical lineman from Indiana proof that the universe was bigger than he thought, he would drop everything and go find out. Not because he was brave. Because he was curious, and curiosity is the strongest thing people have.

That assumption built the space program. It is the same instinct that put a man on a boat headed west with bad maps. We did not stop having it. We just stopped writing it down.

THE END

— Brian Bullock / Everyone Knows Podcast | Starborne Studios | brianbullockwriter.com | @EveryoneKnws1