I want to spotlight a subtype of sci-fi: stories that take complex scientific ideas and ground them in the tender, the subtle, the specific, and the personal. They move us, gently yet insistently, to question what it is to be human.
Here are a few of my favourite intimate, melancholy sci-fi works. All of them have stayed with me, their bittersweet, ambiguous endings lingering for months and years afterwards, opening my mind up to new possibilities.
Her (2013)
Spike Jones’s Academy Award-winning movie about a regular guy falling in love with his AI operating system feels scarily prescient—as we turn to generative AI to write letters, plan family events, and soothe our woes. Her reminds us that how we choose to engage with technology can reveal our unmet needs, our unconscious desires. Also, I love that Theodore’s job is to compose handwritten letters for people who struggle to write personal letters on their own!
Scavengers Reign (2023)
This television series about a handful of survivors stranded on an alien planet called Vesta took me completely by surprise. Firstly, the beauty of the animation—it’s a visual feast throughout. Then, the thoughtful characterisation. I adore survival stories for the way they unravel people’s true natures. Finally, the alien landscape: it’s brutal, haunting, complex, and blurs the boundaries between intelligent life, animal, plant, and machine. On Vesta, humans are truly insignificant.
To Be Taught, If Fortunate – Becky Chambers (2019)
To Be Taught, If Fortunate is a standalone novella with a wondrous premise: a close-knit crew adapt their bodies with biological supplements (“somaforming”) to investigate life on exoplanets. Like Scavengers Reign, alien landscapes are a key feature (the ear-shattering sequence on Opera still haunts me!). But the story is intimate and tender, focusing on relationships, life, and the ethics of exploring worlds that don’t belong to us.
Advantageous (2015)
In a near-future metropolis, a single mother struggles to keep her job and send her daughter to a good school. But when she gets “too old” to be a spokesperson for her company, she’s forced to consider an extreme procedure, one that will replace her entire body. This is sci-fi that packs a gut punch, but quietly! Mother-daughter relationships, classism, ageism, female unemployment, the commodification of othered bodies—all make an appearance in this elegant, understated movie.
Mono no aware – Ken Liu (2012)
Mono no aware is the first Ken Liu short story I discovered, and it’s the story that set me down the path of writing my own short speculative fiction.
We follow Hiroto Shimizu, a solar sail technician aboard a spaceship built and run by Americans, speeding away from a meteorite-destroyed Earth. I won’t spoil the plot. The less you know, the more you’ll be moved by the beauty and sadness of impermanence, and by other kinds of heroism.
Toward Eternity – Anton Hur (2024)
Reading Toward Eternity is like drinking a delicate sake while contemplating classical poetry and listening to a symphony—in other words, transcendent! Hur tackles artificial intelligence, nanotechnology (nano-clones!), immortality, the essence of poetry, the love, consciousness…remarkably, all in under 250 pages! Huge sci-fi ideas and profound contemplations about existence, spun out in precise and lovely prose.
Story of Your Life – Ted Chiang (1998) / Arrival (2016)
A melancholy sci-fi list would not be complete without this deserving fan favourite. What if language could change the way you perceive space and time? What could an alien intelligence teach us? Why do we keep choosing love, despite inevitable grief? This tale is a perfect collision of the vast and profound with the deeply personal question: how do we hold our loved ones close to us? A melancholy sci-fi list would not be complete without this deserving fan favourite. What if language could change the way you perceive space and time? What could an alien intelligence teach us? Why do we keep choosing love, despite inevitable grief? This tale is a perfect collision of the vast and profound with the deeply personal question: how do we hold our loved ones close to us?
Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
You might think I’ve given Never Let Me Go the top spot because it’s the 20th anniversary of its publication, but the truth is that Never Let Me Go always has the top spot in my mind. The beginning is unassuming: three children at a boarding school in pastoral England. But gradually, through tiny interactions and specific moments, you’re saturated by indescribable emotions: the bitterness of their limited lives, the sweetness of the hope and love to which they cling.
Never Let Me Go continues to influence and inspire much of my writing, reminding me of the lingering power of small, intimate gestures and melancholy endings.
Grace Chan’s sci-fi novel Every Version of You is available here