Science fiction has always been the genre most willing to ask the uncomfortable questions. Not just the technological ones — what if we could live forever, what if we built something smarter than ourselves — but the human ones. What would we do with that power? Who would we become?
At its best, gritty sci-fi — the kind that doesn’t flinch from violence, moral failure, and the hard arithmetic of survival — is one of the most honest genres we have for exploring the masculine journey. Not because men belong in space, or because the future is masculine, but because the pressure-cooker conditions of the genre strip away every comfort and convenience and leave a character with nothing but their choices.
That is where character lives. In the choices made under pressure.
When I wrote 3VE, I wanted Jacob Riley to exist in a world that had made it as easy as possible to be a coward. Dystopian Denver isn’t a place that rewards integrity. The system is corrupt, the incentives are inverted, and the people with power are using it badly. The question the novel asks — and that I think gritty sci-fi asks best — is what a man does when the world has stopped holding him accountable to anything.
The answer, if the fiction is doing its job, is that he holds himself accountable. Not because it’s easy, or because the world will thank him for it, but because he has decided — somewhere along the line — what kind of man he is going to be.
This is the masculine journey in its essential form: not the accumulation of power or the conquest of enemies, but the forging of a self under conditions designed to make self-forging difficult. The genre of gritty sci-fi, with its collapsing institutions and moral ambiguity and relentless external pressure, is almost perfectly designed to put that journey on the page.
A few principles I’ve found essential when writing it:
Let the world be genuinely bad. Don’t soften the conditions. If the setting is dystopian, make it dystopian — not as backdrop, but as active force. The world should push back against every good impulse your protagonist has. That’s not nihilism; it’s the right kind of pressure.
Make virtue cost something. The moment where a character chooses the harder right over the easier wrong only means something if the easier wrong is genuinely tempting. If integrity is cheap, it’s not worth reading about.
Earn the resolution. The masculine journey doesn’t require a happy ending — it requires an honest one. The protagonist who endures, who holds to something worth holding, doesn’t need to win. He needs to have been tested in a way that reveals who he is.
That’s the story worth writing. That’s the story worth reading.