Science fiction and the law: beyond mere courtroom drama

Christopher Brown is a lawyer and science fiction writer; his debut, 2017's Tropic of Kansas, was an outstanding novel of authoritarianism and resistance, and his next book, Rule of Capture (out on Monday, watch for my review!) is a legal thriller about disaster capitalism, climate catastrophe, and hard-fought political change.

In a tremendous and thoughtful essay for Tor.com, Brown explores the role that law plays in science fiction and fantasy, where, despite a wealth of writers who are formally trained in the law, the majority of "legal" drama is courtroom drama that is "about lawyers and almost never about the law" -- instead, they're about "facts -- about the bad things people do to each other, and about the process of finding out whos guilty or innocent."

But some of the most interesting legal sf is about the laws themselves: how they're passed, what changes they wreak on the world, how they get repealed. At its best, sf can subject laws to the same thought experiments it uses when considering gadgets, using narrative to figure out what changes, what stays the same, and who benefits and who loses.

Part of the problem is cultural. A genre that creates safe spaces to express difference from prevailing norms is wary of suits telling them what the rules are, as opposed to what they could be. The bigger problem is one of plausibilitylawyers dont feel like the future. The legal system we have is an immense labyrinth of code and procedure that reflects all the myriad complexity of modern life, but its also one of the most extant vestiges of our primitive rootsa system created by our ancient forebears to regulate disputes through a means other than violence.