The Mechanical Language of Science Fiction
- PUBLISHED
- 5 July 2024
- READ TIME
- 8 min
- TAGS
- Philosophy · Sci-fi
Science fiction proposes futures, but its objects reveal assumptions. Every rivet pattern, panel line, and joint system is a theory about what humanity will need, and what it will have forgotten.
OBJECTS AS IDEOLOGY
Every designed object encodes a theory about the world. A military object encodes theories about threat and response. A medical object encodes theories about the body and its failures. A domestic object encodes theories about how people live and what they value. These theories are rarely stated. They exist in the geometry.
Science fiction objects are unusual because they encode theories about futures that do not yet exist. The designer must invent not just the object but the conditions that would produce it — the industrial base, the material science, the cultural priorities, the ergonomic assumptions. This is a more demanding brief than designing for the present, and the objects produced by that brief are correspondingly more revealing.
When a science fiction film gets its objects right, it does so by being internally consistent about the theory of the future it has chosen. The objects feel like they grew from the same conditions. When it gets them wrong, you can usually identify the failure as a theory breakdown: objects that could not coexist in the same world, because they imply contradictory histories.
THE RIVET PATTERN PROBLEM
Consider the rivet. In contemporary aerospace and military vehicle design, riveted construction is declining — replaced by bonded joints, welded assemblies, and advanced fastening systems. But in science fiction visual language, the rivet persists as a signal of seriousness, of industrial weight, of mechanical authenticity.
This creates a tension. A spacefaring civilization capable of the propulsion systems implied by the narrative would almost certainly not be fastening hull sections with patterns of steel rivets. The rivet is an anachronism borrowed from the aesthetic vocabulary of a period — roughly 1940 to 1970 — that readers and viewers associate with serious industrial capability.
The solution is not to eliminate the rivet but to understand what it is doing. It is signaling a specific theory of technological aesthetics: that capability and robustness are expressed through visible material assembly. Accepting this, you can use rivets consciously, as part of a coherent visual language, rather than defaulting to them as a reflex.
WHAT WE BUILD WHEN WE BUILD THE FUTURE
The most interesting science fiction objects are the ones that imply a plausible but non-obvious industrial history. They suggest that certain problems were solved by different means than we would expect, and that the solutions produced different geometric vocabularies.
I think about this when designing for science fiction productions. What is the manufacturing ecology of this civilization? What processes are cheap and what are expensive? What materials are abundant? What tolerances can their fabrication achieve? These questions shape the objects before I draw a single line. They determine what joinery looks like, what surface finish implies, what repair history reads as.
An object designed this way carries a background that the viewer senses without reading. They do not know the manufacturing history. But they feel that it exists. That feeling is the difference between a prop and an artifact.