Fantasy and Sci-fi can be very good for teaching critical thinking skills. The set up still exists to say something about our condition but it’s often occluded by the genre tropes forcing the reader to dig for meanings and interpretations.

You’ll see this done with Literary books all the time. People search through descriptions and bits looking for deeper meaning. But the same people often say it doesn’t exist in speculative fiction because they’re so used to looking at the small scale that they don’t know how to look at the large scale as well.

For instance my favorite book is a speculative fiction book about a species with sex differentiated brains and racial memory. Males can remember everything that their male ancestors knew up to the moment of their conception. Females can remember everything their female ancestors knew in the same way. So their culture is ancient and static. There are essentially no crossover skills between the sexes and they treat each other as fundamentally different because they are fundamentally different by accumulation. And then one human child is introduced who has no ancestral memories and doesn’t have a sex limitation on skills. The human child has to adapt to their alien ways in order to survive with them. These are the surface facts of the book.

Scratch under the surface and deny the metaphor that they are a different species from us and suddenly every choice in the story becomes a commentary about our own beliefs about gender, gender differences, and their naturalness. You can interrogate the author’s choices about what it means to a man or a woman and how they should relate to each other. You don’t have to agree. The author leans toward the idea that human nature isn’t confined that way since the identified human child is not confined in the way her people are. But the author still gives the little girl many strong desires that we would consider feminine, suggesting that those ARE natural. As she grows up she has problems adapting to the ways of her people which without the metaphor becomes an argument that most of how we treat gender is unnatural and has to be forced onto people which lets the reader in turn analyze how social forces are used to enforce gender compliance. It ends up getting as deep as dealing with the idea of individual choice itself vs. cultural demands and influences.

Back when I taught that book along with other speculative fiction texts in college, the first tip I gave my students was to “deny the metaphor.” The book will have magic or aliens or whatever but if you treat what does not exist as if it is a metaphor for something that does exist in our own world right now, what would it be a metaphor for? Now think about what the book is saying about that. And the book suddenly lends itself to all the tools of analysis and critical thought that you can use on every other text. Even relatively simple books become deeper narratives.

A well known example (and my last one) is X-Men, who are knowingly used as a metaphor for marginalized groups. It’s just action superhero rock-em-sock-em but deny the metaphor and there are just as deep meanings to be mined. As just one example you have Scott Summers as Cyclops who has magical laser blast eyes which require special equipment to maintain so he never directly looks at something and destroys it. Deny the metaphor and his marginalized gaze is dangerous and destructive, for everyone’s safety he must never directly look at anything without careful controls. The metaphor is easily interpreted as a combination of uncontrollable rage and submission. And Scott is the teacher’s pet, he’s the most rules oriented person, so he must always follow the rules because he can’t contain himself if he looks past them. So the reader can question this in racially charged relations. How does he comment on the disrespectfulness of giving someone the eye? How does he comment on people who are tight laced and supportive of the system when they themselves are oppressed by it? And again, you don’t have to agree. You can assemble an author’s argument and then rebut it, teaching you to interrogate the messages that texts are trying to send you and have a different opinion instead.