Is science fiction dying?

http://mobile.salon.com/books/feature/2010/12/16/21st_century_science_fiction/index.html

by awt • 16 years ago

27 55 16 years ago

mobile.salon.com

PostOnce2• 16 years ago

Giant wall of text, so I skimmed, but I think, no. Art never dies, it just finds a niche when the general public finds a new fad.

Commercially, sci-fi seems to be doing well. Moon, District 9, Avatar, Star Trek. As a forecast of tech-to-come, who can say if it's as accurate as it once was, we'll have to wait for the future to arrive to really know, right?

Aside from an enjoyable read, sci-fi is still inspiring people to get involved in the sciences. So sci-fi, I think, is doing fine on many fronts.

derefr• 16 years ago

As a forecast of tech-to-come, it seems like science fiction hasn't managed to really predict anything radically different than it was predicting in back in 1990 or so. The accuracy has gone up because everything is now "five minutes in the future" rather than "in the year 5000." Even if we look further ahead, today's far future is just like yesterday's far future: filled either with spaceships (albeit carrying ems, ala Accelerando or Diaspora) or grey goo, and with not much room for real retroactively-falsifiable speculation, which I think is the key to good sci-fi.

randallsquared• 16 years ago

The accuracy has gone up because everything is now "five minutes in the future" rather than "in the year 5000."

Er, this seems exactly backwards to me, unless you're including near-future thrillers in "SF". Of stuff on the SF shelf at the bookstore, the majority appears to be fantasy (and much of that contemporary fantasy, now), and of the ones that are not explicitly fantasy, many are far future space opera -- Drake, Weber, etc -- which has the same characteristics as fantasy. There's a whole subgenre that's now missing: the medium-term, realistic future. I think it's become clear even to people who shout down the singularity concept that it's become impossible to put together a detailed-yet-believable future of fifty years from now.

electromagnetic4• 16 years ago

I agree - the article kind of lost purpose midway in the first paragraph, so I skimmed it too and found it with an atrocious closing paragraph.

My wife is generally averse to sci-fi, so what I always make sure to do is point out when an 'ordinary' movie is using sci-fi and it becomes disturbingly long.

I like to point out movies like Inception (being a big one people don't see as sci-fi even though it is pure sci-fi), Donnie Darko (a movie about time travel), V for Vendetta, Frankenstein, Jurassic Park and the funniest I've had to point out has been E.T. And that's without even having to step out into the 'grey area' where movies are using sci-fi 'concepts' or just using mild sci-fi elements.

It also works to point out that almost 3/4 of horror movies are still solidly sci-fi.

I think sci-fi's death will be when it becomes so mainstream it's rarely differentiated from regular fiction, which with a lot of movies it's still hard to convince people it's sci-fi. I mean 'Click' with Adam Sandler is a great example. It's sci-fi through and through, but because it's using only 1 element people won't believe it's sci-fi.

jl6• 16 years ago

SF is a writing style, not a set of technologies. Hence why Neal Stephenon's Baroque Cycle is SF despite including no SFnal technologies (except maybe an allusion to just one), and why The Time Traveller's Wife is mainstream, despite being about time travel, the most outlandishly SFnal concept there ever was.

iwwr7• 16 years ago

For due diligence:

"Where is my flying car?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMPH0tlC5K4

Sci-fi generally fails at future predictions.

PostOnce2• 16 years ago

Google maps, cellphones, talking computers, speech recognition, robots, autonomous vehicles, nuclear weapons, space travel, alternative biochemistry, touch screens, GPS, handheld translators, etc.

Yup. Sci-fi generally fails at predicting future tech.

varjag• 16 years ago

You don't really read sci-fi for predictions though?

martey• 16 years ago

For some reason, this is linking to Salon's mobile version. The standard version is available at http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/12/16/21st_century_s...

iwwr7• 16 years ago

When Syfy is adding shows about the paranormal, there is reason to worry.

CallMeV• 16 years ago

It's their cancelling shows that bothers me.

iwwr7• 16 years ago

Like what?

electromagnetic4• 16 years ago

That doesn't bug me, fantasy goes hand in hand with sci-fi and whilst it's a watering down of the station it's nothing compared to putting fucking wrestling on the channel.

ComputerGuru• 16 years ago

No, it's picking a name like "Syfy" that's hurting sci-fi ;)

jokermatt999• 16 years ago

I know it's juvenile, but I've been pronouncing it "Siffy" since they made the change. Then again, they really don't seem to be a sci-fi channel anymore (wrestling, paranormal), so I guess it makes more sense.

Still, they occasionally have good programming still. I was pleasantly surprised to see Children of Men was on last weekend when I flipped by it. (Of course, I flipped back for that)

iwwr7• 16 years ago

That may be for Google optimizations. Sci-fi is generic, Syfy is specific.

nl• 16 years ago

SciFi might not be dying, but reading that prose nearly killed me. Anyway...

Does the genre continue to have new and useful things to say? I still remember when I first came across the idea of recreational engineered viruses as a substitute for drugs (I think it was in a Richard Morgan book?). I think SciFi is becoming more original, not less.

kgutteridge• 16 years ago

Theres loads of seemingly good sci fi books being self published for the Amazon Kindle, which might open up a new avenue for the niche and instill some new ideas into the genre

westinghouse• 16 years ago

Science fiction is fine it's just going through a bit of a lull at the moment. The current big market is contemporary fantasy aimed at a female readership, and that's where publishers are putting their money, which means there is less to spend on other similar (and I use the word loosely) genres. They are simply going after what sells to the widest audience.

I think sci-fi is also suffering from the decline in interest of the sciences in general. It's a shame but that's the way it is.

Quality rises to the top eventually, it will return.

bhoung• 16 years ago

Skim the article and jump to comments to find that everyone else has done the same. How delightful. Shame the article didn't match the title. Doesn't appear that there is any reason to suggest sci-fi is dying.

stupidsignup5• 16 years ago

I am a hardcore sci-fi fan. Although I basically grew up in a library, the most fascinating part of it were the two or three racks nobody frequented than me: the racks were full of hardcore sci-fi like heinlein, asimov, pkdick, silverberg, leguin, pohl, you name them. In that sense, Sci-Fi is actually dying, because in the last 10 years, I hardly found something that even remotely compares with the great work of these guys except for the works of one author, Iain. M. Banks.

robotomir• 16 years ago

You should check Alastair Reynolds, specifically the Revelation Space series.

GeneralMaximus• 16 years ago

How do you find Neal Stephenson? He's not exactly SF, but his stories do have a SF element to them.

stupidsignup5• 16 years ago

It's not bad, but hardly hardcore sci-fi.

srd• 16 years ago

And Neal Asher, or Charles Stross (although his great Laundry series is more geeky-thriller-and-urban-horror-with-some-scifi-elements).

And honestly, compared to Reynolds, Asher, Stross and Banks I find the old 'hard-core' SciFi by Dick and Heinlein rather... dull. Not entirely sure what it is, but the classics are less gripping to me.

But then: The gold age of SciFi is between 8 and 12 :)

stupidsignup5• 16 years ago

"The gold age of SciFi is between 8 and 12"

Only someone who doesn't truly love Sci-fi can say that ... Also, if you are saying that Dick is dull (by the way, Dick is totally different from Heinlein), than you have no clue and your opinion does not count. :-)

Symmetry3• 16 years ago

If you like Banks you might consider checking out the other two members of the "Scottish Clique", Ken Macleod and Charles Stross. Both write some really good stuff.

Other new good hard SF writers might be Cory Doctorow, Michael Chabon, Rachel Swirsky, Sara Genge, Geoffrey Landis, Elizabeth Bear, Ted Chiang, Paolo Bacigalupi, Aliette de Bodard, Mary Robinette Kowal, Charlie Jane Anders, Felicity Shoulders, and Ian Tregillis. I haven't read them all, but they're all at least on my reading list for good hard SF due to recommendations from friends I trust.

And I'll second the Alistair Reynolds recommendation too.

ninguem2• 16 years ago

Greg Egan should be on this list.

awt• 16 years ago

Vernor Vinge

stupidsignup5• 16 years ago

Thanks for the list, I will check it out. I think I read something by Reynolds, but it didn't stick. Will look at it again.

recoil• 16 years ago

Although he's technically Finnish, Hannu Rajaniemi might also count as being part of that "Scottish clique", I suppose, since he's based in Edinburgh. I thought his "The Quantum Thief", which came out earlier this year in the UK, was a terrific sci-fi novel, especially when you consider that it's his first. The bloke's got a PhD in string theory so one assumes he knows his stuff, too.

elblanco• 16 years ago

I found the Gap Cycle rather good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gap_Cycle

and really quite enjoyed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nights_Dawn_Trilogy

and found pretty much everything in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe to be as good as anything I've read by Heinlein, Clark et al.

Honestly, there's tons of good stuff out there, but it's just hard to separate it from the pulp. With the oldie goldies it's relatively easy because we have a few decades of people assessing those books.

stupidsignup5• 16 years ago

Got to reply to myself here. I forgot to mention Joe Haldeman who still writes and is one of my forever SciFi heroes because of "The Forever War". And now I discovered that Ridley Scott (Bladerunner, Alien) is going to do "The Forever War" in 3D! So, yes, Sci-Fi is dying, but as long as true fans of the pure art like Ridley Scott are around, there is hope.

J3L2404• 16 years ago

Not as long as Cory Doctorow is around.

dedward• 16 years ago

I don't know - the most recent "Year's best science fiction" was a bit of a letdown (And if the editor, Gardner Dozois is reading this, please don't take it personally). I'f that's the best out there (I trust the editor) then, well, maybe we could do a bit better, yeah?

oceanician• 16 years ago

Stargate Universe ... that's allllll I'm saying...

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

I find any discussion of sci-fi has to start with terms.

To me, sci-fi is fiction based in science that asks "what if"

What if we had time travel? What if we could read minds?

When you string together many such what-ifs, you end up in fantasy, which is what a lot of people today confuse with sci-fi.

Early Star Trek to me was sci-fi because there were believable contemporary characters engaged in asking and exploring around clear "what if" questions. Yes, there was a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but it mostly stayed out of the way. Soon, though, the Trek universe became so full of mumbo-jumbo, futuristic societies that could never exist (really? no money? Just how would that work?) and reversing the warp drive through the deflector grid nonsense that it quickly ended up in full space fantasy land.

I just got through with Hull Zero Three, and while I liked it, it struck me as a dark nightmare from a soulless author (I know nothing of the author, that's just my impression). I think there was a clear "what if", which was only put to the reader at the end. Therefore, I'd qualify it as sci-fi. Pretty good book, but dark.

But a lot of the crap, er, stuff I'm seeing that folks think is sci-fi is just long-format futuristic fantasy -- social commentary at an epic scale written with blasters and hyperdrives. Nothing wrong with that, but (to me) once you lose track of exploring that simple what-if question, it's more like commentary than analysis. You spend more time learning how the author views the universe than you do questioning you beliefs in how things are put together and what depends on what. Good stuff, certainly, but not sci-fi.

weavejester• 16 years ago

(really? no money? Just how would that work?)

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the Star Trek universe, but there are other works of science fiction that explore this idea in a more plausible fashion. Iain M. Banks has written a number of novels about a post-scarcity civilisation called the Culture, which also lacks any sort of a financial system.

bpyne• 16 years ago

I could be taking your comments wrong, but they make Fantasy seem like bad SciFi. Well told fantasy stories explore the world in an introspective way. The "magic" systems provide drama, "color", and a vehicle representing power but typically the character development and introspection are the important aspects.

Taking Steven Erikson as an example of a top-of-the-craft Fantasy author, he explores moral ambiguity with a scientific approach. Quite often he turns my beliefs upside down and sideways so that I'm confused by them.

I can see Fantasy as a string of what-if's if it's in the sense of exploring people and society.

thezeus18• 16 years ago

It's a good question, but keep in mind that people have been asking it for the last 20 years.

metageek2• 16 years ago

From the article:

>Such statements regarding the death of SF are eternal. In 1960, for instance, a famous seminar was conducted under the heading "Who Killed Science Fiction?"

metageek2• 16 years ago

Skim it for the descriptions of new books. I came away with half a dozen to look into.

Rantenki• 16 years ago

SciFi in 1920:

|==now==|=======================future=====================|

SciFi today:

|=====================now===================|====future====|

See? The problem is that we are out of land! We have so much science now that would have been fiction before, that you can write a totally scifi novel that is just seen as contemporary fiction. Take a gander at the newer William Gibson books (Pattern Recognition for example). They are set a bit closer to present, but if they had been written in the 70s, they would have been totally scifi (laptop computers, cellular phones, realtime video editing, etc).

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

Science fiction is not prognostifiction, it's not an attempt to predict the future, and never has been.

Is science fiction dying?

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