5 Science Fiction Classics We’d Love to See Revisited

The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Russ came to prominence as a sci-fi writer during the latter part of the ‘60s, a time when much of popular science fiction was written exclusively by and for men. She wasn’t the only woman to break through during that time, but she was one of the best. She was also overtly feminist, an out lesbian, and a socialist, brandishing a fiery temperament and anger that bled through to her work. Any of these factors could have relegated her to the fringes, so it’s even more notable that she achieved the success that she did, particularly with her best known work: 1975’s The Female Man. It’s the story of four women, Janet, Jeanine, Joanna, and Jael, each from a different parallel Earth with significant historical differences—there’s an Earth where all the men died off long ago, one where the Great Depression went on indefinitely, crystalizing the societal norms of the ’30s; another much like our own Earth of the ’70s; and one in which men and women have been at war for 40 years. It all makes for a clever way to dissect gender norms of the era, and it would be fascinating to see what a similarly talented writer of 2016 would do with the same material. How much has society changed over the past 40 years? How much is the same? Have we gone backwards in some ways?

”With Folded Hands” (and The Humanoids) by Jack Williamson
Williamson’s name doesn’t carry the caché of some of the rockstar talents from SF’s golden age, though he collaborated with many famous writers. Nonetheless, he had a brilliant career that stretched from the late 1920s until just before his death in 2006 (at the age of 98!). “With Folded Hands” (later expanded into The Humanoids; the short story’s title is infinitely better) is a creepy novella from 1947 that takes us to the town of Two Rivers, where a dealer in robots designed for menial tasks discovers that he’s being undercut by the competition, a store that markets “Humanoids,” highly advanced machines that work for free and begin fulfilling virtually every human need, while adhering to a strict code to guard mankind from harm. Naturally, this protection takes on disturbing implications, as the robots prevent any form of activity that might be even remotely harmful; even suicide is disallowed when people begin to weary of the drudgery of a machine existence. The story had a lot to say about its own era, as well as ours. I’m not sure that mechanization carries quite the creep factor that it did in the ’40s. In today’s world, artificial intelligence might be a more potent threat, but I’d vote for something even closer to home: our reliance on social media for news, entertainment, and interaction carries with it the potential for a wide variety of alarming consequences. We spend a lot of time in digital worlds that seem very real, but are carefully crafted in order to encourage particular behaviors. (Buy this! Vote for me!)

Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
Heinlein’s cult classic tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human born and raised by Martians on Mars who returns to Earth as a type of celebrity savior who teaches us to “share water” and generally “Grok” life. Though Heinlein’s politics are, per usual, incredibly tough to pin down, and way too complicated to easily summarize, the book both foresaw and heralded the free love era of the ’60s with critiques of organized religion, sexual Puritanism, and materialism (even while being a bit less progressive when it comes to gender equality and homosexuality). It’s one that I’d love to see get a modern sequel, even if the late author is perhaps the only one who could write it. Smith had a lot to say about the state of American culture coming out of the 1950s, and it would be absolutely fascinating to find out what he’d tell us about the 21st century. Nothing about the ending of the original novel precludes the possibility of our favorite Martian’s possible return.
Bonus Heinlein: Though it’s a very different book, a Starship Troopers sequel would be fascinating for a similar reason: Heinlein’s unique, seemingly contradictory politics. Troopers is fairly strident in suggesting that service to country, particularly military service, is an essential function of citizenship. Would he feel the same way now, so many decades removed from the Cold War and the fresher memories of World War II?

The Big Jump, by Leigh Brackett
This book represents any number of science fiction novels from the golden age—in this case, 1953—in which science takes a back seat to pure, operatic storytelling. That’s not in any way a bad thing, and there are plenty of stories that wouldn’t survive our more modern understanding of space travel and the solar system (Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars stories—or Ray Bradbury’s, for that matter—come to mind). Doubtless there are hard science fiction stories being written right now, and by the most diligently conscientious and science-minded of authors, that won’t stand up to the scrutiny of the next few decades’ worth of discoveries. No one is demanding verisimilitude from those classic ’60s stories, and Brackett was a writer of space opera and romance, not of scientific treatises. Still, it would be a fun exercise to tweak a few of the details of this novella about mankind’s first trip to Barnard’s Star to bring them in line with more modern ideas about space travel.

I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel has, in some ways, already been done to death (pun totally intended). Even though it doesn’t feature zombies as such, it made a huge impact on pretty much every zombie story that followed it, including George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. It’s also been made into a film four times, with wildly varying success and widely diverging takes on the material; none of them quite capture the essence of Matheson’s masterpiece. Given all that, why would anyone crave a sequel? Because the book ends on a fascinating note (spoilers coming): the pandemic that’s ravaged the planet has run its course, wiping out the last remnants of mankind 1.0. What remains is an entirely new species that’s begun to develop it’s own social structure. Though we’ve identified with the last human, Robert Neville, throughout the text, there’s a sense of ambiguity to the conclusion. The infected (vampires, essentially) have been the bad guys all along; by the end, though, they’re more of a conquering civilization, building a new society on the ashes of the old. I’d love to know how that goes. What will rise up to challenge them?
What classic would you like to see revisited?