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 gothic, science and/or fiction:
“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Being is a fiction invented by those who suffer from becoming.”
—Coleman Dowell (1925–1985)