The Importance of Big Cool Sci-Fi Stuff

I finished watching Turn A Gundam recently, and it’s already cemented itself as one of my favorite Gundam shows and anime in general. But one detail I appreciate is that, even with its Americana setting, it still works in some interesting, immense technological set pieces that give a great sense of scale to the show in the portions where it heads to outer space. To put it bluntly, I appreciate it when science fiction has what I like to call “Big Cool Sci-Fi Stuff,” both for the novelty but also realizing the unique potential the medium has to create a unique sense of wonder. 

A key plot point in the middle of Turn A is an orbital base called the Sackträger, which functions as a giant rotating space catapult flying around the Earth that docks and launches ships with enough momentum to overcome the Earth’s gravity and maintain inertia to reach the Moon. It doesn’t feature for many episodes, and in hindsight it mostly exists to set up the need for the journey to the Moon to take some time and thus more episodes.

But as a set piece on its own, it’s really fun. There’s drama as the ship tries to position itself so the speeding catapult can catch it, which it only manages as Loran and Harry use their mecha to boost the ship’s thrust. The rest of the episode deals with the tension created by two enemy ships being docked so close that neither can risk attacking without destroying the station and thus their chance to get to the moon first. There are even moments where Loran and Sochie explore the size of the station with their mecha, with them and enemy mecha holding on to belted handles to traverse the immense structure. These details make the Sackträger a more unique and even characterized location with its different rules that affect the way the characters act, which also makes the episode more memorable on its own despite the location not getting revisited afterwards.

The show has similar set pieces in the later episodes, from a drifting agricultural colony to giant lunar data pods, and this got me thinking about what these design choices all accomplish; it’s all Big Cool Sci-Fi stuff. Sci-Fi is easy to do as a generic coat of paint where there’s some futuristic vehicles, spaceships, or robots. But one potential that I love, most so with media dealing with space, is the freedom to play around with massive structures and scales, technological or otherwise, that are much harder to do in other genres. Fantasy comes close at points, but visual science fiction has the added benefit of getting to use advanced technology to add to the size of these things that makes them more distinct. Space stations and larger ships, advanced towers and fortresses, natural megastructures, ruins, or even astronomical phenomena like nebulae can all fit under the umbrella of Big Cool Sci Fi Stuff, though from my view it best fits more with technological structures.

A similar anime example that stands out to me is the Sveto city from Heavy Metal L-Gaim. Without getting into too many spoilers, the enemy capital of Sveto is a giant floating city that shifts around the surface of the oceanic planet Gustgal, but it also has huge sprawling foundations and corridors that give off a great sense of scale. Again, there wouldn’t be that much difference to the broad strokes of story if this was just a tech city on a continent, but these facets of its design give a great sense of the city’s technological and size scale.

Big Cool Sci Fi Stuff is fairly common across science fiction and especially mecha anime, from the Zentradi fortress in Macross, and even the Macross itself, the Babylon project in Patlabor, the space elevator in Orguss, the Buff Clan’s Gando Rowa from Ideon, and the Iserholm Forteess from Legend of the Galactic Heroes to name a few. It’s not just any regular space station or structure, but one whose size is made a point within the story and used to stage different situations. The technological-enabled size of all of these structures makes them interesting locations on their own and also gives way to many different aesthetics used to render their scale compared to everything else.

My personal favorite example from growing up was seeing the myriad illustrations from the Terran Trade Authority books at my grandparents’ house. I mostly didn’t bother reading the actual stories or descriptions a lot of the time because I was so enthralled by the detailed and colorful illustrations on their own, and many of them conveyed that sense of wonder to me by how immense these varying spacecraft and stations were.

Aside from just wonder, Big Cool Sci Fi Stuff can also evoke larger feelings of mystery and dread as well. From the immense size and near endless internal rows of the Borg Cubes in Star Trek, the hulking derelict ship at the start of Alien, the unknown giant lenses from Story of your Life/Arrival, or the immense innards of the Citadel in Half Life 2, these all use the smallness of the humans present to instill the size of the forces within that could possibly wipe out mankind. Even the Death Star in Star Wars works on that same logic in-story as a symbol of fear by being a massive, moon-sized station that dwarfs every possible challenger and can annihilate civilizations.

More than anything else, just seeing small humans or even large spacecraft and mecha dwarfed by these towering megastructures is an engaging experience because it’s something far beyond the normal scope of humanity. Even without going into the precise scientific details of how they work, and perhaps not all of them are entirely plausible, the sense of scale alone gives a great sense of wonder that’s really only possible in science fiction. Not every science fiction work needs Big Cool Sci Fi Stuff to achieve wonder on its own, but it’s always something I appreciate whenever it's worked in.