Chapter 7: Science Fiction
A spacesuit-clad tech struggles to repair the warcraft's sensors, field generators, and torpedo magazines, even as the vessel suffers another barrage from enemy starfighters. Propelled by a flickering fusion drive, a pilot plunges the spacecraft deep into Jupiter's gravity well, attempting a slingshot maneuver even as the gas giant's atmosphere attempts to drag down another victim. The freighter's weary crew shambles into a neon-drenched spaceport bar, eager for some R&R after their recent escapades on an interdicted moon. The exploration team descends into the lightless chasms of a derelict megastructure, the spotlights of their antigravity harnesses playing across inscrutable machines left behind by a long-dead species of galactic architects.
Science fiction explores imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced technology, space exploration, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, parallel universes, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, possible aftermaths of postapocalyptic annihilation, and much more. This means a near-future setting where aliens attack Earth and a setting on a megastructure halfway across the universe set a few billion years in the future are both science fiction even though the Venn diagram for what's shared between these two games is probably slim.
Despite science fiction's wide-open space, the genre usually focuses on how the situation affects society and especially the characters caught up in the setting. In our case, that means the characters you'll play as you delve into your GM's sci-fi game. You'll face themes related to transhumanism, dystopian societies, extinction, and probably a lot of exploring the unknown, likely using tools and other equipment that lies far beyond modern technology (or tools you've scavenged from a devastated modern world).