Science fiction has no boundaries or limits.
One enduring appeal of science fiction stories, for me, is the universal nature of the genre. You can explore big ideas and ponder deep, meaningful questions in science fiction. Whatever your imagination can conceive becomes real.
Another reason I love science fiction is the fact it blends so seamlessly with other genres. Elements from westerns, mysteries, fantasy, and horror all find a second home in many science fiction stories. Threads from history, folklore, religion, and philosophy weave through sci-fi narratives to create works that are both familiar and innovative, drawing on the past and present to paint a picture of possible futures.
One genre blending that grabs my attention as an author and a reader is the intersection between science fiction and horror.
Fear's Final Frontier
Science fiction offers fertile ground for exploring the unknown. The whole theme driving Star Trek, for example, is the notion of exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, and boldly going where no one has gone before. Horror takes those same explorations to dark places.
Alien is a perfect example of this meshing of genres. It is the quintessential horror movie in space. The antithesis of classic Star Trek. The crew of a corporate spaceship comes across a derelict spaceship on a planetoid containing a new lifeform. Their encounter infects their ship with an aggressive alien creature who uses humans as incubators for its reproductive cycle. The newly discovered alien, called a xenomorph, hunts the crew down and kills them until only one human and the ship's cat remain.
You see other examples in classic and modern sci-fi literature. Stories like The Island of Dr. Moreau and Frankenstein introduce the mad scientist trope that blends horror concepts with science. H.G. Wells explores applying science to alter a person's DNA to make them more animal than human. Mary Shelly draws on science as a means to reanimate the dead. Michael Crichton is a master at blending horror and science fiction. The Andromeda Strain explores the idea of an alien invasion coming in the form of a highly lethal extraterrestrial disease. Jurassic Park lets loose monstrous predators on modern humans through cloning preserved DNA to bring back dinosaurs.
Horror and science fiction work so well together because they often explore the same questions from different angles.
Science and Horror Unite
My love for both science fiction and horror means an inevitable cross pollination between the two genres in some stories. Exploring new frontiers occasionally means encountering dark and scary things. It also means dealing with moral and ethical quandaries created with misapplication of science.
One central plot thread in my novel Under a Fallen Sun concerns alien invaders from the planet Rubrum experimenting on residents of a small Texas town. Rubrumians seek a new homeworld after fleeing their dying planet. Their extreme photosensitive reaction to the Sun's rays compels these alien newcomers to lay siege to the town and abduct residents for experimentation as they seek to alter their own DNA and adapt their bodies to conditions on Earth. Tampering with DNA results in turning many residents of Travis, Texas into nightmarish monsters.
Adding horror elements through genetic manipulation underscores broader ethical and philosophical questions posed within the pages of Under a Fallen Sun related to survival. These dilemmas, along with the horror elements, resurface later in my other sci-fi stories like Dark Metamorphosis and Hollow Planet where characters are forced to confront nightmarish consequences of actions from an antagonist.
Fear isn't reserved for haunted houses and vampires. It can encompass aliens and spaceships with equal effectiveness. Horror and science fiction are parallel paths to the same destination.