Severance is Good Science Fiction According to C.S. Lewis

Using CSL's SF Criteria to Analyze Severance

Severance is a show on AppleTV and it’s good science fiction. It’s really good science fiction. But why think that?

In this post, I’ll utilize some insights from C.S. Lewis on the nature of science fiction in order to show why Severance is such good science fiction—and it really is!

I’m basically going to be arguing that it’s mythopoeic SF and I’ll try to explain what on earth that means according to C.S. Lewis. Then I’ll show some of the modern myths Severance employs in order to back up my point. I was going to add insights from Ursula K. Le Guin also but this post had already grown far too big before I ever got to her stuff. So this post will be why Severance is good SF according to Lewis and I’ll do a part 2 “according to Le Guin”—so dibs on that!

Let’s get into it.

Okay, so Severance is good science fiction, but how so? Well, Severance is good fiction and it’s a good thriller show, so maybe that’s why it’s good science fiction?

Nah, that’s not it because neither of those guarantees good science fiction.

A good thriller show may not even guarantee a good fiction. I’m thinking of another AppleTV show called Presumed Innocent with Jake Gyllenhall, which has all the marks of a great thriller—lots of misdirection, suspense, suspicion, quick pace, who done it, etc.—but which ultimately destroyed its plausibility with the number of red herrings it spammed out at the viewer along the way. It paid for its success as a thriller with a currency that undermined its over all plot. By the time you finish and catch your breath, the viewer is left thinking “sure, it was a bingeable thiller, but I’m not sure it was actually all that great of a story.” So the concepts of good fiction and good thrillers can come apart.

Likewise, you could have a good fiction story set in a ‘sci-fi’ world or thrown into a technologically advanced future, which nonetheless is not good science fiction.

In his Cambridge English Club talk-turned-essay called “On Science Fiction”, C.S. Lewis covers something like 6 different sub-species of science fiction and he calls the worst of these sub-species “fiction of the displaced persons”. Lewis says this sub-species is “radically bad” science fiction because the authors of such, the so-called ‘displaced persons’, are “commercial authors who did not really want to write science fiction at all, but who availed themselves of its popularity by giving a veneer of science fiction to their normal kind of work.”[1]

These displaced authors would rather write a straight up love story or swashbuckler tale but for one reason or another, decided to make their love story about a spaceship captain and an evil space scientist’s lovely daughter, or slap a quick coat of space language over their nautical terms.

These veneered science fiction stories may be good stories in the genres where they actually belong, but they’re not good science fiction (SF from here on out, or I will die rewriting those words a thousand times). Why not? Because the ‘machines’ of SF aren’t actually integral to the stories, they’re slapped on to try and shoehorn the story into the genre.

The Science Fiction Machine

Good SF, according to Lewis, utilizes ‘machines’ in order to “enable[] the author to develop a story of real value which could not have been told (or not told so economically) in any other way.”[2] That’s the key. The story doesn’t necessarily need to be all about the machine, but the machine needs to play an integral part in the story such that if you took it away, you’d lose the story.

Now by ‘machines’, Lewis doesn’t just mean our modern understanding of ‘machine’ as technological hardware, though in most SF the machines at play are those kinds of machines. Instead, Lewis has the “Neo-Classical” concept of ‘machine’ in mind—it’s a broader concept including ‘means’, ‘device’, ‘contrivance’, ‘engine’, ‘remedy’—it’s actually kind of hard to describe this older meaning because we’ve reduced so many of the other related concepts down to material science-y, industrial age, technological understandings from their own broader range as well. Let me just tag Lewis back in for some help.

Lewis says that in good SF, indeed in his favorite sub-species of SF,

…the pseudo-scientific apparatus is to be taken simply as a ‘machine’ in the sense which that word bore for the Neo-Classical critics. The most superficial appearance of plausibility—the merest sop to our critical intellect—will do. I am inclined to think that frankly supernatural methods are best. I took a hero once to Mars in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus.[3]

So, for Lewis, what sets his favorite style of SF story apart from the worst kind is the importance of the ‘machines’ at play. SF machines can be high-tech artifacts like the spaceship in Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, but they don’t have to be physical, mechanical artifacts at all. The machines can be spiritual beings like angels, as Lewis used for transportation in his Perelandra, or preternatural powers like newly realized telepathy or teleportation, like Alfred Bester used in The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, or even revelatory psychedelic space-worm byproduct, like Frank Herbert used in Dune.

The particular kind of SF contrivance doesn’t matter all that much, but whatever the chosen machine is, it does have to be essential in the story—if you can tell the story without the SF machine, it’s not good SF, even if it is good fiction. On this, I’m in total agreement with Lewis—and actually so are SF magazines like Analog: Science Fiction/Science Fact, which uses a similar line in the guidance for submissions:

We publish science fiction stories in which some aspect of future science or technology is so integral to the plot that, if that aspect were removed, the story would collapse. Try to picture Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein without the science and you’ll see what I mean. No story![4]

The Severance Chip

Okay, so the SF machine is important. Does Severance make good use of theirs? Yes! This is actually the crux of what makes Severance so good.

I don’t want to cover all the backstory to the show—if you’re reading this you probably already know it, and writing detailed summaries kills my soul—but here’s a super brief overview just in case you are totally unfamiliar: there’s a big weird, culty company called Lumon which deals in… well we don’t really know what they’re actually up to, but it’s mysterious and important secret stuff, or so we’re told. It’s so secret that Lumon has a department of employees who have been cut off from all of their memories of the world and their past outside of the workplace, they’ve been “severed” from their outside memories.

They come to work as their regular selves, but when they enter the elevator to descend down to the severed floor, something changes in them and they lose access to their outside memories and most of their outside personality too. They do their work all day as their “innie” selves, forming new memories and experiences down on the severed floor, mostly of monotonous tedium, but then when they enter to elevator to depart for the day, they revert back into their regular “outtie” selves, with no access to any of their innie’s memories.

So how does the show explain the severance process and daily switch from outtie to innie back to outtie? Well, they utilize a super simple SF machine, which is easy to grasp, yet doesn’t strain credulity. It’s literally just this thing called a “severance chip”. The severance chip is inserted into the employee’s brain in an outpatient procedure. It clicks on, and boom, the employee is “severed” into an innie-self and an outtie-self.

So how does it work?

The show explains that upon being severed, the employee’s perceptual chronologies are surgically split and access to memories become spatially dictated. The procedure is meant to be a comprehensive and irreversible. Annnd that’s pretty much it…

It’s as if the creator of Severance, Dan Erickson, is saying “How does it work? It just goes in your brain and severs your perceptual experience and your access to your memories. Just grant us that and we’ll give you a wonderful story.”

In episode 1 of the Severance Podcast, executive producer and director, Ben Stiller, notes how simple the SF machine is and it almost leads him to miscategorize the show.

“…it’s so simple, it’s not really science fiction, the only science fiction part of it is there’s this chip and maybe ethereal, mystical qualities…” - Ben Stiller [5]

I was totally taken aback when I heard him say that. I definitely yelled at my phone, “Ben, that’s what makes it good SF!”

But I understand what he was thinking. To Ben, and lots of others, SF or “sci-fi”, is probably more like laser blasters, space operas, futuristic tech, aliens, cyber punk-y dystopias, and androids. And if it doesn’t include those kinds of tropes, then it needs to be more S than Severance is, that is, more science-y—explain the SF machine in (excruciating) detail, make it really plausible, and definitely throw in some ‘quantum’ language, you can’t go wrong if you push it all into the quantum terminology!

If that’s what SF is, then Severance is not.

What Kind of Science Fiction is Severance?

There are a lot of different types of SF today, with lots of different distinctions which aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive or jointly exhaustive, and Severance certainly fits in at least one of them, and indeed one of the best of them.

There’s an older but still sneakily relevant distinction in SF between Golden Age and New Wave SF. Golden Age SF mostly consisted of pulp magazine stories about an übermensch saving the babe, and potentially all of humanity. The science present in Golden age stories was mostly the hard science, STEM stuff. It’s said that while the Golden Age focused on STEM and outer space, the New Wave SF incorporated other sciences like psychology, ecology, sociology, etc., and focused on “inner space”, i.e., the nature of the human person.

If Ben Stiller had the Golden Age in mind, it would make sense why he wouldn’t think Severance fits as SF. But if these are the only options, then Severance is clearly New Wave with its exploration of psychology and pseudo-psychology (think of the four tempers of the soul: woe, frolic, dread, malice). And New Wave is generally better than Golden Age SF anyways, so good on Severance!

There’s also a distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ science fiction. Hard SF focuses more on scientific accuracy and logic, and Soft SF focuses on human emotions and character development more than scientific accuracy and/or plausibility (these terms are polysemous though, sometimes they refer to something more like the Golden Age/New Wave distinction where ‘hard’ picks out the hard sciences and ‘soft’ picks out the soft sciences).

If Stiller has hard SF in mind, then yeah, the show’s passing wave at the science which makes severance possible definitely doesn’t fit. But Severance is obliviously soft SF, focusing more on the humanity at play than the accuracy of the science. And again, soft SF is generally better than hard SF anyways, so again, all the better for Severance (I said what I said).

The story doesn’t obsess over the details of the Severance chip, but it couldn’t be told without it (or some close analog) functioning as its SF machine. Their use of the chip follows Lewis’s explanation, cited above, to a T: “…the pseudo-scientific apparatus is to be taken simply as a ‘machine’ in the sense which that word bore for the Neo-Classical critics. The most superficial appearance of plausibility—the merest sop to our critical intellect—will do.”[6] The chip is plausible enough for us to get on with the real meat of the story while still setting up interesting and important philosophical puzzles and dilemmas. It’s wonderfully employed!

Since I’ve already mentioned one or two of Lewis’s six sub-species of SF from his 1955 essay, “On Science Fiction”, I might as well broach the rest of them here to help further categorize Severance in the genre. If you’re interested in reading about these in more detail, check out my Substack post on them here.

Before we jump back in with Lewis, let me note that Lewis wrote his essay in 1955 and he passed away in 1963 (the same day that JFK was assassinated. Coincidence??). So, naturally he missed out on the other sub-species of SF which developed later on, like Cyber Punk SF, which was influenced by Bester’s The Stars My Destination and Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, UBIK, and probably much more, maybe all of PKD’s corpus? He likewise wouldn’t have known too much about Space Opera SF which has gobbled up a huge portion of SF territory in the public psyche thanks to Star Wars, but which owes lots and lots to Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and Herbert’s Dune. But even still, Lewis was a genius and his categorization of SF has been immensely beneficial to me and I want to share it with you. It will help us understand Severance better and why it’s such a great SF show.

Okay, back to it. Again, the first sub-specie, the Fiction of the Displaced Persons, is SF written by authors who slap SF veneers onto their stories but who don’t actually use SF machines to do any of the heavy lifting. Recall, this one is not good SF because it’s not really SF. It takes more than a SF setting, props, or furniture to make a story SF—use the machines!

Then there’s SF of Engineers, which is written by authors primarily interested in giving plausible depictions of space-travel or some other SF theme, which isn’t prima facie impossible (this tracks with Golden Age & Hard SF).

Then there’s Speculative Travel SF which is a more detailed and novelized exercise in what scientists naturally do in presenting and extending their own findings. For example, prior to walking on the moon, scientists would explain what it might be like given the conditions on the moon. A SF author writing in this sub-specie, would do something similar but run with it until it’s a full-blown story.

Then there’s Dystopian SF. Lewis breaks this down further into satirical dystopian SF and prophetic dystopian SF—think Idiocracy for satirical dystopian SF and Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 for prophetic dystopian SF (though Idiocracy is turning out to be more prophetic by the day).

Next up, there’s Eschatological SF. This sub-specie of SF is related to the Dystopian SF in that both jump forward in time to show us mankind’s future, but while Dystopian SF is about a future of humanity based on political or social trends or ideologies, Eschatological SF is about the ultimate destination of the human species, mankind during the eschaton, the last times. Here he gives Well’s Time Machine as an example (where the neo-classical ‘machine’ and the modern ‘machine’ are one). In this sub-species, authors will often give pseudo-histories of the human race and may step off the typical notion of a ‘novel’. These stories are meant to give us a collective memento mori for our human race. Lewis says, “if memento mori is sauce for the individual, I do not know why the species should be spared the taste of it.”[7]

Finally, we get to Lewis’s favorite SF which I never named above: Mythopoeic SF (or fantastic SF). While I think Severance may fit well under the dystopian SF sub-specie, I think it fits even better under this one. The particular retro-futuristic cultish bureaucracy present in Severance has become its own kind of Western mythos today, especially in the US, thanks in large part to 1984 and Brave New World but also thanks to eschatological SF like Asimov’s The End of Eternity—which informs hit shows like Loki and Umbrella Academy (if you like those, you MUST read The End of Eternity! Don’t walk, run!).

But Severance is also informed by comedies like Office Space and other mythopoeic SF like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and finds some commonalities with Stranger Things and even the paranoid inner circle, demonic bureaucracy of Lewis’s own That Hideous Strength.

I could be wrong here—or anywhere else in this post for that matter—but today’s giant market for this beige-futurism or retro-futurism, wherein work is hades and your boss is the devil in a stiff suit with a twisted smile, has moved deeper into the American psyche than just a mere entertaining trope. It’s become an American myth, and Severance in turn is mythopoeic SF. But what is that? What is mythopoesis?

In the essay, Lewis gave a nod to the old American pulp magazine, Fantasy and Science Fiction, as being the best on offer because it included space-travel stories alongside stories of gods, ghosts, ghouls, fairies, demons, monsters, etc. He argued that what makes these kinds of stories great is that they deal in myth-making and myth-building. They use pseudo-scientific machines (again the neo-classical sense) to merely satisfy our critical intellects so that we could experience the full weightiness of the myth on offer. He further adds that this mythopoeic sub-species of SF ought to be judged by the same standards as all other mythopoeia, since it’s merely a SF incarnation of that broader phenomena. Myth-making is “an imaginative impulse as old as the human race working under the special conditions of our own time.”[8]

Lewis says that mythopoesis (myth-making) is easier to accomplish the less human beings know about their own world, but as geographical knowledge grows, it becomes harder and harder to hide your myths in an unexplored forest and hence it’s harder to explore strange new regions with new marvels. Thus, mythopoeic SF often takes its readers to new worlds or dimensions, where the “wonders, beauty, or suggestiveness” are in full focus, and where old myths are reconfigured or remade and new myths are crafted. He adds that this kind of SF does things such as “represent[ing] the intellect, almost completely free from emotion, at play” or in the case of Severance, representing the human soul as resettable, devoid of one’s personal chronology. Here, scientific probabilities aren’t as important as wonder, beauty, and mythos. As such, we might consider mythopoeic SF soft science fiction.

Lewis argues elsewhere (in his review of Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring) that mythopoesis runs deeper than mere allegory, for in myth “There are not pointers to a specifically theological, or political, or psychological application. A myth points, for each reader, to the realm he lives in most. It is a master key; use it on what door you like.”[9] It is as such that Lewis describes mythopoeia as “not the most, but the least, subjective of activities”.[10]

I love that description of myth and I think it makes my point about Severance. What is Severance about? Is it about late stage capitalism? The corporatification of the work place? Corporate capture of our political and legal systems? Corporatism? Man’s alienation from himself? From nature? Is it a psychological exploration of the unconscious? The collective unconscious? An examination of nature vs. nurture on the development of one’s personality? A commentary on the transcendence of love? On the soul? On the relationship between the mind and the brain? Is it a satire of the ‘work wife’ phenomena and the bifurcation of the true self and the public image self? Or perhaps it’s an exposition on the terror we all experience when faced with the sinisterly sanguine HR rep? Is it a critique of comfort culture or our lopsided work-life imbalance? Is it a jape on our cult-like devotion to our employers or on New Age Guru teachings that corporations co-opt to keep their employees from revolt? Is it a modern portrayal of the myth of Sisyphus blended with Plato’s allegory of the cave with a dash of Icarus? No, maybe it’s a retelling of Zeus sending Hermes down into the underworld to rescue Persephone from Hades?

Yes. Probably all of those and some!

You can read into it what you like. Why? Because myth hits you were you live most and Severance is good mythopoeic SF.

Severance is good SF because it utilizes its SF machine, the Severance Chip, perfectly. The show provides enough detail for us to accept the premise but not so much that it bores the audience with hard SF tedium or gets out over its skis in appropriating a modern scientific theory that could hamper the show if refuted. It really strikes a great balance. On top of this, it’s a good fiction, a good love story, and an exciting thriller.

So that’s a bit about what makes Severance good SF. In the next post, I plan to cover some of the philosophical puzzles, dilemmas, and concepts explicit and implicit in the show and give a Le Guinian (Ursula K. Le Guin-ian) analysis of what makes Severance good philosophical SF. So stay tuned for that and leave me a comment letting me know you’d want to read that so I can force myself to write it.

---

[1] C.S. Lewis, “On Science Fiction” in C.S. Lewis Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces (London: HaperCollinsPublishers, 2000), 452.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 457.

[4] https://www.analogsf.com/contact-us/writers-guidelines/

[5] ~36 min mark of S1E1 of the Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott.

[6] C.S. Lewis, “On Science Fiction” in C.S. Lewis Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces (London: HaperCollinsPublishers, 2000), 457.

[7] C.S. Lewis, “On Science Fiction” in C.S. Lewis Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces (London: HaperCollinsPublishers, 2000), 456.

[8] Ibid., 455-6.

[9] C.S. Lewis “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” in CSL: Collected Essays, pg. 521.

[10] Ibid., 522.