Explore the history of science fiction and humanism
A virtual exhibit from the Humanist Heritage projectThere’s no chaplain on board the USS Enterprise. In 1966, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry left one off the crew on purpose. In the future he imagined, humanity had outgrown the need.
Like humanist writers before him and since, Roddenberry saw the genre as a powerful way to explore big ideas about human nature and ask questions about how we as human beings can better shape our present and our shared future.
Explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilisations…
…and boldly go where no one has gone before.
Science fiction still gets dismissed as escapism, but its history runs from Enlightenment satire through the Gothic laboratory, the scientific romance, and the great dystopias, and out into film, television, and comics — and at a surprising number of its turning points stands a freethinker. There was no rule that the genre had to develop this way. It has kept doing so anyway, and it is worth asking why.
Part of the answer lies in the kind of question the genre asks. ‘What if’ only becomes a serious question once you accept that the future is not fixed by providence. If history is in human hands, then imagining other worlds becomes a way of testing our values against circumstances that have not yet arrived.
The tour
Read straight through, or jump in anywhere.
- 01 Before science fiction Satirists, utopians, and freethinking poets
- 02 Mary Shelley Where it all began
- 03 H. G. Wells The scientific romance and the rights of man
- 04 Between the wars Robots, world-minds, and the machine that stops
- 05 Huxley and Orwell The two futures we still argue about
- 06 The rocket age Card-carrying humanists at the typewriter
- 07 Conflict and liberation Whose interests do our ‘natural’ arrangements serve?
- 08 The screen Mushroom clouds, thinking machines, and a five-year mission
- 09 Secular heavens and warning lights The genre’s most explicit utopia, and its warning tradition
- 10 The weekly what-if machine When the thought experiment acquired a schedule
Listen on our podcast
When you’re finished with the tour, why not learn more from the science fiction and humanism episode of our Unholy Histories podcast?