I've been reading this Marvel Comics series called Annihilation - it's a story that involves intergalactic empires, creatures that want to destroy the universe, unimaginable energies, etc. A far cry from Spiderman and the Green Goblin and similar human-scale conflicts.

It made me think about how a lot of science fiction suffers from a sort of power-level inflation in longer stories. Some examples - the Uplift Saga by David Brin - 6 books, starting with Sundiver, where the big deal is a ship that can travel to the inside of the sun, that finds relatively plausible creatures living inside, and ending with Heaven's Reach, which includes creatures living in "quantum foam" and the mimetic realm.

Or E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series - if I remember correctly (which is never a safe assumption) the books start with a character tinkering with his sewing machine and watching it fly out the window at extremely high speed (having just invented FTL travel or something like that) and ending with people throwing stars at each other using the power of their minds. Or am I mixing in elements of Pel Torro's "Galaxy 666"? Anyway, at the end of the Lensman books I know somebody was using mental powers to do something with stars.

Other examples include the Dune books, Riverworld, Dragon Ball, and lots of others. The point is that every entry in the series has to top the previous one in terms of scope and power of characters.

This doesn't seem to happen in other genres where series are the rule. As Agatha Christie's books go on, Miss Marple doesn't go from solving a murder in her small village to foiling international villains, 007-style. The Sopranos didn't go from controlling Northern New Jersey to taking over South American countries and building nuclear arsenals. Even Scooby Doo didn't move up to fighting galactic infestations of zombies, Peter Hamilton-style.

I wonder if this is because Sci Fi isn't constrained by what actually is plausible, but rather what could be, with the restriction that it not obviously violate known laws of science. Or maybe because Sci Fi readers and writers are optimistic by nature about the possible limits of human power and ingenuity? Or because science in general is about advancement and progress, while other genres are primarily concerned with human nature, which as we know doesn't change.