Is Cowboy Bebop science fiction?

Recently, I've been on a Cowboy Bebop kick, so I figured I'd address it in this week's blog post. For the uninitiated, Cowboy Bebop is an anime series revolving around the exploits of a team of bounty hunters in a spaceship called the "Bebop." It's set in 2071, when Earth has been decimated by a terrible accident, leading its inhabitants to terraform and colonize the solar system's other planets. In addition, it has one of the most fantastic soundtracks of any TV series, ever. Is it awesome? Absolutely. But is it science fiction? Unfortunately, no.


So why isn't it science fiction?

Well, because it's an adventure that just happens to be set in space; more specifically, it's a western. It's a story about vigilantes traveling between scattered colonies, visiting saloons, being mysterious, pondering lost loves, etc. I mean, it's called Cowboy Bebop for a reason; just about every episode ends with a message reading "See you, space cowboy." And whether or not any of this is actually related to the content of the show, each and every episode could be transposed with little difficulty into just about any setting other than science fiction. Examples:

• Episode 16 - Prisoners take control of the ship transporting them and attempt to escape. Jet (one of the show's bounty hunters) hooks up with his old police partner to hunt them down.
• Episode 19 - The Bebop is attacked by pirates, and the team must work together to hunt them down and bring them to justice.
• Episode 21 - Jet receives a message from an old friend, sent after his friend died. He teams up with his friend's daughter to solve the mystery.

Etc. As you should be able to see, not one of these plots relies on the science fiction setting in any meaningful way. I should point out, in the interest of covering my bases, that Cowboy Bebop shares all of these traits with a very similar, American, live-action TV show: Joss Whedon's Firefly. Joss Whedon himself has admitted that he wasn't aiming for science fiction so much as "space western" and in fact inserted the following shot into the show's opening title sequence to represent what he was aiming for:


If you can't see it very well because of the poor quality of my screen capture, it's Firefly's titular Firefly-class transport vessel buzzing a herd of wild horses. If that's not representative of "space western," I don't know what is. Not that I have any problem with space westerns. The original Star Trek certainly contains space western elements (i.e. "Space: the final frontier"), and Star Wars too (the film opens by introducing a farm boy, on a homestead, in the desert), and endless others: Titan A.E., the classic computer game Starcraft, even the recent Avatar (cowboys and Indians, anyone?). All this should demonstrate is just how easy it is to create something the masses will call science fiction by setting it in space. Certainly, western elements lend themselves incredibly well to a space-y or futuristic context. Space, like the old west or even the "high seas" of pirate stories, has the potential to be lightly colonized and loosely governed, and because of this, lends itself well to the same kinds of stories. It has even provided enough flair and distinguished itself enough as an interesting setting to establish itself as its own sub-genre within the realm of adventure plots. Hence, Cowboy Bebop is a lovely show, a pinnacle of achievement in the space western sub-genre. But being a space western doesn't make it science fiction; that makes it an adventure story, with western elements, set in space.

...With one notable exception. In episode 23, "Brain Scratch," the team unravels the mystery behind a cult. The cult revolves around convincing people to digitize their consciousnesses, then commit suicide, thus making them immune to death and unhindered by debt, possessions, bodies, or any of those other physical... impediments. Already, it should be obvious that this story would not be possible as a western or even modern-day tale; it uses its setting to create a conflict and to ask questions that would not be possible in any more normal setting. Is a "person" wholly encapsulated in his/her consciousness? Is a person without a body truly a person at all? If you've got 25 minutes free, you can watch the episode here. Then you can ask those questions for yourself, and listen to Cowboy Bebop's truly amazing soundtrack.