‘Boldly Going’ – Episode 3: Sci-Fi Comedy

You may recall from my article on Evil Dead 2 that wonderful results can come from two seemingly disparate genres blending together.

In the case of Evil Dead 2, we were talking about combining horror and comedy, which seems almost impossible, like an overdressed Alaskan or a Sacramento Kings fan sick of all the winning…

Well, science fiction has a (somewhat deserved) reputation for taking itself too seriously. So anytime an author blends comedy with sci-fi, it’s a breath of fresh air. All this world-building, getting your science right, keeping track of all the alien species’ environmental requirements – who has time to throw some yuks in there too?

Fear not fellow travelers! Several authors have pulled off the sci-fi / comedy blend in the perfect ratios to allow both to coexist.

Reflecting back to Andy Weir’s The Martian from the premire Hard Sci-Fi article:

Many authors have room for some jokes or some comedy. But to make it part-and-parcel of the whole is much harder to pull off.

Without a doubt, the reference point – the gold standard for sci-fi comedy – is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams.

The series (increasingly inaccurately labeled a ‘trilogy’) consists of five books:

(There is a so-called sixth book in the series called And Another Thing… written in 2009 by Eoin Colfer with the permission of Douglas Adams’ widow, but we don’t talk about Eoin…)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was originally a radio comedy series broadcast on BBC Channel 4. From there, it was adapted into novels…

The story follows Arthur Dent, an English everyman, rescued just before the destruction of Earth by the Vogons to make room for a galactic superhighway. Arthur’s story intersects with Ford Prefect (author of the eponymous guide), Zaphod Beeblebrox (two-headed galactic President), Trillian (formerly Tricia McMillan, who Arthur once met at a party and the sole other surviving human), and Marvin the Paranoid Android (robot suffering from depression).

I probably don’t need to tell you the plot – either you know it, or it’s kind of irrelevant. The Earth is a supercomputer designed to calculate the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. After many millennia, with grand pomp and ceremony, it gives the result:

So then the Earth supercomputer takes several more millennia to reveal the question to which “42” is the answer, but is destroyed moments before it was to give the answer.

The quotes and vignettes are what make these stories absolute classics:

• In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

• “You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”
  “Why, what did she tell you?”
  “I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”
  
• A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
  
• For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.
  
• It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

I could write this whole article on Douglas Adams, but I imagine most of you have at least a passing familiarity with his work.

Now, I’ll pivot to some more recent sci-fi comedy and let you breathe a sigh (sci?) of relief that Adams’ legacy is going strong. with the new sci-fi comedy talent that’s on display.

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Space Opera (2018) – Catherynne M. Valente4

Funny enough, the novel Space Opera is not, in fact, a space opera.

A washed-up glam rock band with only two surviving members is selected as Earth’s representative in an galaxy-wide song competition. As long as they aren’t in last place, Earth survives, but if they end up dead last – competing against more advanced alien species – then our home planet is toast. Betrayal, misanthropic cats, cross-species sex and hijinks fly from every direction.

It succeeds because she writes vivid prose and commits to the bit, not afraid to let the story go in absurd directions, but keeping it all coherent. Some quotes to give you a taste:

• “Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays.
  
• As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of all-annihilating flames to help you follow along.”
  
• “When the aliens come, there’ll be one queue to fight them and one queue to f*ck them, and the second one’ll be longer by light-years.”
  
• “What was magical at two in the morning was tawdry and cheap and dangerous to your health at two in the afternoon.”
  
• “Americans all acted like they were trying to pretend they hadn’t just chased a fistful of ecstasy with a noseful of coke to save themselves from a police officer only they could see.”

Like Douglas Adams, Valente makes only the slightest attempts to keep actual science in the story. The prose is florid – every sentence potentially hides a double meaning or clever description that kicks you in the gonads. So it’s not a quick beach read. It’s like a bottle of scotch, to be savored slowly and carefully.  Consider this quote describing one of the alien species:

• “A Smaragdin looks very much as though someone built the most unnecessarily elaborate set of eighteenth-century Spanish plate armor out of bleached ivory and quartz, gave it a head of blue-white hair like a 1970s shampoo commercial, stretched the whole thing out to nine or ten feet like particularly stern and judgmental taffy, then thought it might be a bit intimidating and painted a bit of pastel green and lavender on the joint-blades for a more festive spring look.”

Valente is writing for the brainy, referential burnout with a heart of gold – a demographic I think many of us would gladly cop to. Rumor has it, Valente is currently working on a sequel named Space Oddity. This could be a good time to check her out, in time for the follow-up (due out in late May).

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Kaiju Preservation Society (2022) – John Scalzi

I just discovered John Scalzi a few months ago, and I think he’s going to be my next sci-fi obsession.

The two books of his that I’ve read are stand-alone comic journeys. Starter Villain (2023) was a blast – an unemployed substitute teacher inherits his dead uncle’s business as a supervillain – but it’s more of a comic version of a spy novel. Kind of sci-fi in some elements (e.g. unionizing dolphins) but more of a stretch to consider it science fiction.

This one is much more clearly in the science fiction vein. In this case a down-on-his-luck delivery driver is offered a very well-compensated job with an “animal rights organization.” Little does he know that his job is on an alternate dimension version of Earth and the animals he’s caring for are supergiant creatures – essentially the real-life kaiju of every Godzilla movie.

Scalzi has created a funhouse mirror of a Michael Crichton book like Jurassic Park. It definitely has enough of a scientific foundation to not come off as complete BS. If you’ll allow for the possibility that a nuclear explosion could open a door to a parallel Earth, then you can get on board with the pseudo-scientific flourishes that form the backbone of the KPS. The characters face plenty of dangerous circumstances throughout the book – main characters even die – but the stakes feel pretty low in spite of it all. The characters are all relatable brainiacs sparring with dialogue that’s in turn self-deprecating or razor-sharp..

While Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera is a drink to savor luxuriously, Scalzi’s work is a tasty beer you want to chug. The story flies by – I think I read it in two or three days. Again, I’ll put some choice quotes so you can get a hint of the flavor of John Scalzi’s sci-fi comedy chops:

• “I tried being a vegan for a while, but I couldn’t live without cheese.”
  “They have vegan cheese.”
  “No, they don’t. They have shredded orange and white sadness that mocks cheese and everything it stands for.”
  
• “It’s the twenty-first century; no one goes by Betsy anymore,” Tom said. “But even if they did, there’s usually context. If you’re saying, ‘Betsy has the results from the lab,’ it’s probably the human. If it’s ‘Betsy just got pissed off and burned down twenty thousand acres of jungle,’ it’s probably the kaiju.”
  
• “Go ahead and eat all you want, but avoid excessively fatty foods, since one of these is going to tell your body to purge fats in a way that absolutely challenges normal sphincter control.”
  “That’s . . . not great.”
  “It’s a mess. Seriously, don’t even think about trying to fart for the next eighteen hours. It’s not a fart. You will regret it.”
  
• “You seem tense,” Kahurangi said to them.
  “Of course I’m tense,” Niamh snapped back. “We have a stupid plan.”
  “You’re just saying this because it’s my plan.”
  “I’m not just saying it because it’s your plan, and also, yes.”
  
• “The last Gold Team geologist decided to retire after we basically had to reattach a limb. For a second time.”
  “Oh.”
  “Well, that’s not completely accurate. It wasn’t the same limb twice. They were different limbs.”
  
• “I was just thinking that Edward’s Tumescent Cloaca would have been an excellent band name.”
  “Emo, obviously,” Kahurangi said.
  “Their first album glistened with promise, but their follow-up was a little flaccid.”
  “Their third album was really shitty.”
  “To be fair, the competition was stiff that year.”
  “I just thought that they should have showed more spunk.”

I think of Kaiju Preservation Society as being what The Martian would have been if Mark Watney had been marooned with four or five other astronauts just as smart and sarcastic as him. If that sounds like a fun time, it absolutely is.

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On Earth as It Is on Television (2023) – Emily Jane

On Earth as It Is on Television is the debut novel from Emily Jane.

This novel is set more-or-less in present day. Aliens arrive on Earth, stay a few days without exiting their ship or communicating in any way, then depart. What did they want? What does it mean? On Earth as It Is on Television follows three separate storylines of people impacted by this mysterious arrival then departure.

• A guy wakes up from a coma 20 years after a car accident and starts following a telepathic cat for reasons he can’t comprehend.
• A fed-up spoiled teenager wants to escape her perfect family and figure her life out.
• A close knit family with dad, supermom, two half-feral kids and a cat plan a sudden trip to Disney World.

Wait, this doesn’t sound like a comedy… are you joshing me Pauly?

I don’t want to spoil too much, but it’s weird, it’s heartwarming, and it puts the stakes where they belong – not with the fate of the planet, but with the love that binds a family (including fur children). Plus it’s got the best cat nicknames put to print (you are commanded to rub the chumbis of your chonky boi). If you want to avoid anything too dark or deep and prefer an alien invasion story that’s wholesome and warm, I highly recommend this novel.

I’d say as a larger genre, sci-fi is not the most comedy-forward. But when you find authors who find that sweet spot – who can make you laugh and tickle your inner geek simultaneously – that’s a treasure worth seeking. Who are some sci-fi authors who’ve given you a guffaw or two over the years?

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Next week, we’ll wrap up with a column about Hopepunk, but I’d like to close with a shout-out to my local library.

About 2/3 of the books featured in these columns I checked out from the library.

Support your local library (both as a patron and donor) and you’re doing good in the world.

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