Old Sci-Fi Tropes That Should Make A Comeback

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The art of imagining the distant future and the faraway depths of space has evolved over the past couple of centuries, but many ideas stay the same. Some aesthetics fall out of favor, but shaking up the current trends with some of the old ones might be an interesting way to keep things fresh within the ever-expanding sci-fi genre.

Old science fiction looks drastically different from the genre's current iteration. There are a lot of time-honored tropes that give the genre its distinct flavor. The modern iteration is dominated by a few big names with far more interesting developments in the independent space. Perhaps the past holds a few interesting notes to introduce to the genre.

How This Old-School Visual Effect Informs Sci-Fi Film & TV Today

There's a time-honored tradition of taking genre fiction and firing it into the depths of space to create a new twist on science fiction material. Currently, the hottest version of that technique is the venerable space western subgenre. From The Mandalorian to Cowboys & Aliens, the outer depths of the void stand as a perfect mirror to the western frontier. Consequently, a ton of modern space heroes are recoded gunslingers or lawmen. The space western subgenre is enduringly popular, and it deserves its positive reception, but it's not the only concept that could benefit from being shot into space.

Swashbucklers are perhaps best personified by the main characters in The Three Musketeers, The Mask of Zorro, or Wesley from The Princess Bride. Thanks to the once-popular «planetary romance» genre, swashbuckling stories were once the default narrative framework for soft sci-fi stories. Dashing heroes would have impractical sword fights with aliens, and the society of far-off planets would