City of dreadful dusk

Fantastic fiction loves contrasts made explicit: Eloi and Morlocks, orcs and elves, and above all humans battling vampires, Martians or robots. Small wonder that Claude Lévi-Strauss specifically invoked science fiction for his theory of ‘binary opposition’.

Sometimes these tensions are in the mise-en-scene — not just Earth vs. outer space, but settings — Lilliput and Brobdingnag, say — which try to make themes concrete. Classics of that sort are Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (set in two dimensions) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. But cases where the artificial contrasts that have been in some way codified and based on abstract notions such as age (Logan’s Run), temperament (the Divergent series) or even days of the week (Dayworld) can seem too contrived, even for speculative fiction. (Anyone who thinks that complaints of artificiality in genre are a bit rich has never encountered Game of Thrones or Star Trek fans when they think something’s improbable within their universes.)