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The art of imagining the distant future and the faraway depths of space has evolved over the past couple of centuries, but many ideas stay the same. Some aesthetics fall out of favor, but shaking up the current trends with some of the old ones might be an interesting way to keep things fresh within the ever-expanding sci-fi genre.

Old science fiction looks drastically different from the genre's current iteration. There are a lot of time-honored tropes that give the genre its distinct flavor. The modern iteration is dominated by a few big names with far more interesting developments in the independent space. Perhaps the past holds a few interesting notes to introduce to the genre.

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Swashbucklers in Space

Harrison Ford Han Solo Shrug Star Wars

There's a time-honored tradition of taking genre fiction and firing it into the depths of space to create a new twist on science fiction material. Currently, the hottest version of that technique is the venerable space western subgenre. From The Mandalorian to Cowboys & Aliens, the outer depths of the void stand as a perfect mirror to the western frontier. Consequently, a ton of modern space heroes are recoded gunslingers or lawmen. The space western subgenre is enduringly popular, and it deserves its positive reception, but it's not the only concept that could benefit from being shot into space.

Swashbucklers are perhaps best personified by the main characters in The Three Musketeers, The Mask of Zorro, or Wesley from The Princess Bride. Thanks to the once-popular "planetary romance" genre, swashbuckling stories were once the default narrative framework for soft sci-fi stories. Dashing heroes would have impractical sword fights with aliens, and the society of far-off planets would often be the central moving force of the narrative. The outer space swashbuckler was once best depicted in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom franchise, which was unsuccessfully adapted into Disney's John Carter. Though that film was uninspired and unpopular, the genre could still occupy a wonderful space in the genre.

Psychics

Dune Zendaya Timothée Chalamet

A bit of fantasy in science fiction often opens up a world of new ideas and possibilities. All speculative fiction loves to equip mankind with abilities or tools they don't have access to in real life. When sci-fi wants to give a character skills or capabilities beyond those of their peers, they often lean into cybernetic augmentation or alien physiology. Early sci-fi creators often simply made their main characters comically good at everything with or without narrative justification. A great alternative to those classics might be psychic powers.

The best-known examples of sci-fi characters wielding psychic powers are likely the Jedi of Star Wars fame, or Paul Atreides from Dune. Psychic powers are more common in superhero fantasy today, but traveling to space or living in the future could still be made more interesting through the lens of these unique gifts. Asimov's Foundation series and Herbert's aforementioned Dune did incredible things with characters capable of glimpsing the future. In a sci-fi framework, psychic powers can even be explained by hyper-advanced science or neural implants. Introducing psionics to a sci-fi story might not be a common decision in the modern-day, but it opens up a ton of interesting narrative directions.

Sentient Spaceships

HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Sci-fi characters often reach the highest echelon of beloved fictional figures, but old sci-fi used to make the vessel part of the cast. Spaceships are distinct and important identifiers that often become as iconic to a work's aesthetic as the heroes or villains that pilot them. Star Trek's Enterprise and Star Wars' Millennium Falcon are both beloved designs that fans would never accept the franchise without. This ties into more popular tropes of artificial intelligence and rebellious machines. Tying in the spaceship to the cast and making it a sentient character could add a great deal of interaction and dynamic to a story about exploring the void.

The go-to living space vessel is HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but there are a few more big-screen examples. The Nostromo from the original Alien was run by a sentient AI named Mother, who pilots the vessel and wakes up the crew just in time to visit the Xenomorph. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy featured sentient ships like the Heart of Gold. Both Star Wars and Star Trek feature sentient vessels in their extended universe novelizations. The concept isn't as common or popular as others, but there is something uniquely old-world about it. The living spaceship would see a great return nowadays, in the age of the Amazon Echo and Apple Siri. A world in which people talk to their electronics has a lot to mock through the medium of science fiction, and sentient electronics are a great part of that concept.

Old-fashioned sci-fi often serves as an inspiration for all kinds of modern stories. The genre constantly innovates on classic tropes to create new ideas, but some ideas can survive the passage of time and remain unaltered. The past's idea of the future hides a few great ideas.

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