Gothic science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction that, as the name suggests, also involves gothic conventions.
Some of the more obvious examples of the subgenre feature vampires explained in a science fiction context, commonly that vampires are aliens or those infected by a disease as in (Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend), or products of parallel evolution (George R. R. Martin's novel Fevre Dream) or in (Kate Nevermore's novel Blood of the Living). Some feature entire planets of vampires, or vampire-like creatures (such as the comic book Vampirella).
In his history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss contends that science fiction itself is an outgrowth of gothic fiction-- pointing to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein as an example." Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science) and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode." The blend can also be detected quite explicitly in Jules Verne's novel Le Château des Carpathes.
Other examples of the subgenre feature other traditionally gothic tropes in new settings, such as:
- Damsels in distress in faraway future
- Gothic planetary romance
- Gothic futuristic romance
Famous quotes containing the words science fiction, gothic, science and/or fiction:
“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “Science Fiction” ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)