Love Across Time: Glimpses of Romance in Science Fiction

Love Across Time: Glimpses of Romance in Science Fiction

With its inherently romantic qualities, love fits naturally within science fiction. Writers and directors of speculative works, with their distinctive vision, either look toward the future or reflect upon the present, creating all kinds of marvelous romantic scenarios. Sometimes these love stories are added to serve the plot; at other times, love itself becomes the central thread of the narrative. Among the many forms of romance explored in science fiction, they can roughly be divided into three categories.

The first category—and perhaps the most emotionally affecting—is love that transcends time. These stories speak directly to human longing and loss in love. As an old verse goes: “You were born before I was born; when I was born, you had already grown old. You regret that I came too late; I regret that you came too soon.” To meet the right person at the right time, in the right place, and have the right story unfold requires enormous coincidence and effort. Much of the regret in love is born from this very difficulty. In science fiction, such regret is magnified through imagination, making it all the more capable of stirring the hearts of viewers and readers.

The Japanese film My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday is a representative example. The heroine meets the hero at fixed intervals of time—every five years—but the two experience time in opposite directions. For one person, what is the most beautiful encounter becomes, for the other, a cruel farewell. This is science fiction, but it is also one of the most unbearable wounds that love can inflict. Compared with My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday, The Time Traveler’s Wife is much gentler in tone. The male protagonist suffers from a condition that causes him to travel involuntarily and unpredictably through time. Because of this, he is able to see his wife at different ages and in different periods of her life. There is something undeniably enviable in that idea. In love, we often feel we met too late and regret not being able to share all the moments before we found each other. Yet the protagonist of this story is fortunate enough to witness the full span of his lover’s life. A similar story appears in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt, where the man and woman keep missing one another within an inverted experience of time—much like lovers who brush past each other in life. In Il Mare, starring Jun Ji-hyun, the protagonists pass their love across time through letters. In the earlier classic Somewhere in Time, time travel itself hovers ambiguously between reality and imagination.

The second category is love that crosses species or forms of being. In our visions of the future, robots remain a timeless theme. This is perhaps rooted in humanity’s innate loneliness and unease in the universe: either we hope there are beings on other planets who can share in our cosmic solitude, or we hope to play God ourselves and create intelligent life. Her is a classic treatment of this theme. Scarlett Johansson, though appearing only as the voice of the AI heroine, won awards for the role—something of a first, perhaps—and her magnetic, seductive voice is unforgettable here. The film explores love between a human and an artificial intelligence. At present, it is still difficult to imagine what it would look like for someone to fall in love with Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana, but in science fiction this theme lends itself naturally to further development, especially as AI advances at a breathtaking pace. No one can say for certain whether Siri or Cortana might one day evolve into something resembling what Her depicts. Similar films about artificial intelligence include Zoe, Bicentennial Man, and Ex Machina, all of which explore a future that feels increasingly plausible. Blade Runner turns to “replicants,” beings closely related to AI, while the acclaimed TV series Westworld blurs the boundary between humans and artificial intelligence even further. Recent news reports that a Japanese civil servant claimed to have married the virtual idol Hatsune Miku made this science-fiction premise suddenly feel much less fictional—almost within arm’s reach of reality.

The third category is broader still. Rather than imagining romance under unusual circumstances, these works are more like reflections on and critiques of social systems. Works such as We, The Left Hand of Darkness, Brave New World, and The Lobster all use seemingly absurd premises to prompt reflection on the present. As the author of The Left Hand of Darkness once put it, science fiction uses lies to tell the truth. In The Lobster, being “single” becomes a literal social danger: if a person cannot find a partner within a set time, they are transformed into an animal and exiled into the wild to fend for themselves. Fortunately, this film has not circulated widely in China—otherwise, parents eager to pressure their children into marriage might have gained a powerful new weapon. Brave New World and We, meanwhile, are reflections in the spirit of Nineteen Eighty-Four, shaped by Cold War thinking, though even more absurd and, in some ways, more profound.

As long as humanity still draws breath, stories and imaginings about love will never come to an end. Science fiction is only the wings of the love story. In all these moving tales, the part that truly touches us is still the feeling between people. Only the sincerest emotions can split stone, cross time and space, transcend race and form, and endure forever.