Social science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction, usually (but not necessarily) soft science fiction, concerned less with technology or space opera and more with speculation about society. In other words, it "absorbs and discusses anthropology" and speculates about human behavior and interactions.[1]
Social fiction is a broad term to describe any work of speculative fiction that features social commentary (as opposed to, say, hypothetical technology) in the foreground.[2] Social science fiction is a subgenre thereof, where social commentary (cultural or political) takes place in a sci-fi universe. Utopian and dystopian fiction is a classic, polarized genre of social science fiction, although most works of science fiction can be interpreted as having social commentary of some kind or other as an important feature. It is not uncommon, therefore, for a sci-fi work to be labeled as social sci-fi as well as numerous other categories.
Thomas More's book Utopia (1516) represents an early example of the genre.[citation needed] Another early classic writer, Jonathan Swift, penned critical views on current society—his most famous work, Gulliver's Travels (1726), is an example of a novel that is partially social science fiction (with such classic sci-fi elements as pioneering in strange new worlds and experimenting with variations of the human anatomy) and partially high fantasy (e.g., fantastical species that satirize various sectors of society).
One of the writers who used science fiction to explore the sociology of near-future topics was H. G. Wells, with his classic The Time Machine (1895) revealing the human race diverging into separate branches of Elois and Morlocks as a consequence of class inequality: a happy pastoral society of Elois preyed upon by the Morlocks but yet needing them to keep their world functioning—a thinly veiled criticism of capitalist society, where the exploiter class, or the bourgeoisie, is symbolized by the useless, frivolous Elois, and the exploited working class, or the proletariat, is represented by the subterranean-dwelling, malnourished Morlocks. Wells' The Sleeper Awakes (1899, 1910) predicted the spirit of the 20th century: technically advanced, undemocratic and bloody. Next to prognoses of the future of society if current social problems persisted, as well as depictions of alien societies that are exaggerated versions of ours (exemplified by The War of the Worlds of 1897), Wells also heavily criticized the then-popular concept of vivisection, experimental "psychiatry" and research that was done for the purpose of restructuring the human mind and memory (clearly emphasized in The Island of Doctor Moreau, 1896).
In the U.S., the new trend of science fiction away from gadgets and space opera and toward speculation about the human condition[citation needed] was championed in pulp magazines of the 1940s by authors such as Robert A. Heinlein and by Isaac Asimov, who invented the term "social science fiction" to describe his own work.[3] The term is not often used presently except in the context of referring specifically to the changes that occurred during the 1940s,[citation needed] but the subgenre it references is still a major part of science fiction.
Some movies speculate about human behavior and interactions placed in extreme and strange environment like Cube (1997), Cube Zero (2004), Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) or Platform (2019).
