What the Hell Is Spy-fi?

One subgenre that I really adore is what some call spy-fi, a hybrid of the espionage thriller and science fiction. Others refer to this breed of story as “future noir.” Writers who spring to mind when I think of spy-fi include Richard Morgan, Michael Marshall, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Paul McAuley.

This month’s The Flux Capacitor column at the pop-culture site 411mania is devoted to spy-fi. In it, writer Owain J. Brimfield remarks on a number of my favorite science-fiction thrillers, including the grossly underrated Cypher (2002):

Perhaps the most overtly SF spy movie is Vincenzo Natali’s Cypher. You may remember Natali from his innovative, if undeniably cheap-looking, debut movie Cube, making him probably the only director in my DVD collection whose entire film output can be organized identically in both alphabetized and chronological formats. Er ... anyway, without revealing too much about my closet obsessive-compulsive disorder, Cypher is arguably the foremost example of contemporary spy-fi, with a plot that requires a large emphasis on SF technologies to further its espionage storyline--there are numerous and extensive uses of cognitive programming involved in the high-pressure world of corporate spying the film presents, and one of its major locales is an underground database bunker that could easily have stepped from a hundred years in the future (manned, incidentally, by David Hewlett, who portrayed the only really interesting character in Cube).

For all its high-gloss sheen though, Cypher is a spy movie first and foremost, with the SF elements rarely taking the limelight away from all the espionage that’s going on. It’s of course in the nature of any SF “subgenre” as a whole that, since it’s not an attempt at pure science fiction, [it] relies heavily on whatever neat twist or gimmick it’s placing its money on, but it’s interesting that spy-fi seems to embody this idea more than most other sub-categories of science fiction. In Cypher, it’s Morgan Sullivan’s attempt to circumvent his own brainwashing and work out just which side is playing who against what (and if you think that sentence fragment is confusing, try watching the film) that provides the focal point of interest. Although the characters themselves aren’t especially compelling--Lucy Liu excepted of course, but then I suppose it’s not her character that’s the compelling aspect--it’s the thrill of the chase, the suspense and the mind-games that are the defining characteristics of spy-fi as we have known it, much like its non-SF-entwined counterpart the suspense thriller.

You’ll find Brimfield’s full report here.

Many other contemporary films have employed the dynamics of the spy-fi subgenre, among them The Matrix, Total Recall, Impostor, Johnny Mnemonic, and the James Bond movies. And of course, the biggest spy-fi venture of all is The X-Files, which promises a return of agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully to the big screen this summer.

To see just how pervasive spy-fi has become, click here.