Is Science Fiction About The Future Anymore? 377
An anonymous reader writes "A recent Globe and Mail article looked at the state of science fiction and concluded that the future is bleak. Fantasy and science fantasy are popular but near-future predictions are not. But author Robert J. Sawyer says, 'Science fiction has never been about the future, it's always been about the present day...' 'People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort -- and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular.'"
Fantasy vs SF (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't find in the real world? (Score:5, Insightful)
Star Trek Univserse has gotten corrupted... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't stand the present Star Trek: Enterprise because it's so wrong... It constantly uses technology that was not present in the Star Trek series, despite being placed in timeline order as a prequel to the original series.
I hope the series finalie of Star Trek: Enterprise comes soon and declares that the entire series was a dream sequence so that it is ejected from the "cannonical" Star Trek Universe and gets parked right next to the licenced-but-not-official Star Trek books.
This is funny (Score:5, Insightful)
"Regrettably, with 2001 having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying: 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well, we all waited till that year and we didn't get anything at all like that . .
And a while later he does it himself:
Sawyer hopes science fiction will continue as a form of sociological commentary, but worries that by 2030, the genre may be a thing of the past, even if its trademarks are gradually being co-opted into the mainstream: Witness Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize-nominated Oryx and Crake, for instance, which dealt with a future world suffering from genetic engineering gone virulently wrong.
Not so smart, that. Never predict anything concerning science or science fiction. You will always be wrong.
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:3, Insightful)
Fantasy sounds like religion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Poop-dupe? (Score:3, Insightful)
SF doesn't make predictions about the next century because much of what will happen in the next century appears hidden behind a veil called the "singularity." Change happens so fast that human minds have trouble keeping up.
Slashdot has run an article about SF's trouble with the singularity [slashdot.org].
Re:Not necessarily true (Score:2, Insightful)
Moreover, half the effort of writing those books goes into worldbuilding, and that's less effort that can go into building characters, developing plot, etc. Perhaps that's also why some people complain that SF/fantasy seems to read the same way every time. Or that SF/fantasy reads shallow to them.
Hogwash! (Score:3, Insightful)
That right there is a very useful tool.
Not so worried myself. (Score:4, Insightful)
What i see it's that we had very high-quality standarts set in the past for sci-fi, while most modern publications, while not bad, are simply regular (i haven't read everything published, of course - this is just my experience). In that sense, sci-fi might be experiencing a "creativity crisis", but saying the genre is dying is overreacting.
Re:Fantasy sounds like religion? (Score:3, Insightful)
Problem not just in the genre (Score:4, Insightful)
The big problem with science fiction isn't specific to the genre; instead, it is a problem in the whole publishing world. Books aren't being edited [cjr.org] like they once were. Major chains are giving shelf space to the next Harry Potter or Da Vinci Code, and don't have the time or energy to edit books that will have far smaller circulations. That being said, authors aren't coming up with work that is both intelligent and massively popular; the last example of that was probably Neuromancer, and maybe Snow Crash.
True Sci Fi (Score:3, Insightful)
Just like something about say, robots. What kind of rights they should get, if they should be equal, what we would do if they became more intelligent tha us. I'm thinking the robot situation might turn out something like the holocaust, a small minority of humans wanting to eradicate a sentient robot population because they would be "tainting" humanity. I'm sure nerds would love pondering how to handle that dilemma, and it would be the same issue that a lot of our ancestors dealt with in trying to put an end to slavery.
Really, I think Science fiction is just modern literate targetted at nerds. We like techie things, and the future, but the only way we'll look at ethical problems and such is if they take place in the future with robots and lasers
Questions you can't ask ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gulliver's Travels by Swift is an obvious example. By placing his stories in fantastical places, he could poke fun at people who could have his head cut off otherwise.
Star Trek is another example. All kinds of racial stereotypes are presented but because they are alien races, it's ok.
Much of the science fiction I read as a kid predicted the social conditions we see today. Orwell's 1984 seems to have predicted that our government would embroil us in a permanent war and use that to squash our civil liberties. He also predicted the surveillance society that we now find ourselves in.
Science fiction is by no means dead. It's a very useful vehicle for saying important things.
Re:Fantasy sounds like religion? (Score:2, Insightful)
At least the geeks aren't constantly trying to convert people.
When anybody on Slashdot asks anybody else to read a particular SF book, that's just as much converting somebody as asking an unbeliever to read the Bible.
bah! (Score:3, Insightful)
Bah.
It has nothing to do with the genre or predicting the future. If there's a decline in science fiction readership it's due to the inability of writers (and publishers and editors) to give us really good stories. Science fiction as a genre might have a hard time because of the increasing sophistication of the audience, but the ray guns and the flying broomsticks should just be the background to a good story. If the industry is going to continue publishing tons of books of which 98% are caca, then yeah people are going to lose interest in the genre and look elsewhere for their mind-stretching stories.
b-lou
www.comiccritique.com
Sci fi NOT about future (Score:5, Insightful)
but as a place in literature SCI fi is a context for decontextualization! It is a platform on which you can strip and re-arrange a society and see what happens when new rules are present. It allows you to make an imaginative metaphor and make it a physical possiblity. Then analyze its workings or if nothing else drive a plot.
To pick a favorite of slashdot, consider the movie blade runner which most people mistakenly believe is an updated "do androids dream of electric sheep". In fact its the merger with a second Philip K Dick book, "the man in the high castle". The plot is from "electric sheep" but the society is from "high castle". To me the two most interesting parts of the movie are never actaully stated in the movie. First this is earth after all the vibrant heathly best and brightest have left. The future is space and what remains on earth are those who cannot leave. The buildings where the ordinary folks live are mostly empty from the population drain and decaying. The markets have become asian bazarres where all is for sale and the passges tight and twisty and everyone is hustling. there is sense of just hanging on and hustling for thenext day but not a lot of prospects for advancement through career. How would this be like to live in? ridely scott decided the closest thing we had here was the Noir era so thats how he shot it. The other question the movie asks--which is pure philip K dick- was what it the nature of reality. As I drone on on this world how do I know I'm even human. The scene where harrison ford alone tinkles on the piano keys and stars at his own photographs has no words but you realize he is questioning his own human ness. could he ba a machine too or is humanness the sum of your memories and your struggle to live on. Whether or not fords character was intended to be actualy human or actually an android is moot to that issue.
the point is that SCI fi allowed the world to be stripped of certain thngs we take for granted that frame 90% of our lives. Going to school to succeed for example probably has occupied most slashdotters. But why bother in that world? Here was a man living in a world where the only people left either had no sense fo purpose--merely existance-- or were impaired in other ways and left behind to make the best their talents. we can ask what drives us, and what makes us humans in such contexts?
that is sci fi.
or it can be simple metaphors come to life like in startrek and the classic episode of the two races of people who are both half black and half white and hate each other for it. Or THX1138 where drug evasion is a crime and the masses must be contented. If you ever read bradubury's epilouge to 451 then you know his themes were the rise of political correctness leading to a society where anyhting confrontational is a crime. books and the effect they have on the mind had to be stopped. SCI fi let him take this to the extreme and create this contenment society. of course the whole plot and action is a consequence of a dissident act. but the context it what makes it interesting.
That is the beauty of sci-fi. its decontextualization of our own society so we can see it for what it it. It is in fact the closets thing to the POP art movement I can think of. Andy Warhols Soup can was art because itrecontextualized an ordinary object and made us think about how it and its design came to be and what it means to us when something so nromally invisble becomes the dominant theme.. Its not really possible to do that in traditionl fiction which build characters who live in real world with our normal rules.
Why Nosferatu, Not Metropolis? (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that Metropolis [imdb.com] would proved more furtile for analysis of German culture during that period, particularly as I find your points of comparison a litte stretched. Out of interest, what was the rationale behind the choice of Nosferatu? [imdb.com]
As a layman, my guess is that Metropolis may have been done to death..
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:3, Insightful)
Everybody sees something a little different for future tech, what surprises people are the stuff you can't see coming??? Combining computers, and everything is slowly changing HOW we work. As we step away from hardwired controls, to software controls, how are things going to interact?
What really needs to be done is for us to learn how to use the tech we have in a better manner.
Science Fiction is not about science (Score:5, Insightful)
Sci-fi isn't dead, good sci-fi authors are dead (or not born yet)
Re:Science Fiction is not about science (Score:2, Insightful)
ScFi is dying because the fiuture is bleak. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then things just stopped. We never went back to the Moon. The Concorde stopped flying. We no long dream of flying higher, faster, better. The Shuttles blew up or were lost, space exploration was curtailed.
Sure, there has been much progress in the area of computers, but not as much as hoped (Hal 9000 anyone?). And the progress there is just makes Orwell look more prescient than, say, Heinlein or Clarke. The future we have isn't so exciting, and certainly isn't worth writing much about. At least not if your aim is to excite young kids about adventure, science and exploration.
It's a matter of frontiers - before SciFI there were Westerns; different setting, same basic idea. SciFi will come back if we ever enter a new age of exponential progress in exploration. Until then, the stories will be escapist fantasy...
Re:Can't find in the real world? (Score:2, Insightful)
Good : us
Bad : The USA
Or is you happen to be in the US
Good : us
Bad : the rest of the world
Re:Fantasy sounds like religion? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes they're worse than the Jeovah's witnesses...
Starship Troopers deserves more credit (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason the characters have no depth, the reason everything they say is just a corny throwaway line delivered in a manner more suitable to a porn movie (which is not far off in some of the scenes in S.T.) is actually part of the portrayal of a fascist dystopia. The society in Starship Troopers is a shallow one, but still an interesting one. Its nationalist (although based on a race, not a nation) values and its martial focus is explored by the brainless way the characters go through their roles. The baseness of the action scenes are comparable to the movies described in 1984 (such as the one with the helicopter and the boat) and the pointless nudity is similar to the erosion of social values found in Brave New World, so the sheer gratuitous nature of the entire film is what makes it almost as deep as those two books.
If you don't believe me, watch it again and try to comprehend the subtleties of it, like who exactly caused the war to start with. If you watch closely, it also gives quite a bit of information about the new feudal system and the military based "citizen" overclass that they had created. Try to pick out the little lies in the propaganda film and notice the spin it gives for the leaders doing some very immoral things.
I think social forecasts such as the dystopia in Starship Troopers to be some of the best Sci-fi out there, because it gives a useful warning for the present. Especially after the world trade center attacks where violence to avenge violence is seen as a social priority, movies like that help show that having a martial society destroys the parts of ourselves that we hold dear more than the enemy (whether giant bugs or saudi-terrorists) could ever do.
Re:Fantasy sounds like religion? (Score:3, Insightful)
When I see a recommendation for a SF book on slashdot, I think someone is recommending some way to be entertained for a few hours. You must take your SF waaaaaaaaaaay too seriously.
Article is way off mark - has no perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, in screenwriting you read about fads too, one screenplay analyst said "If I read one more story about a journalist chasing a Pulitzer prize I'll gag!", does that mean that all screenwriting is now centered on journalists chasing Pulitzer Prizes? No!
The article has no perspective - there are citations of declining readership, stale storylines, stale this, stale that. Well duh - EVERY genre has its high and low points, but trending towards a low point does NOT mean the sky is falling, nor does it mean that a new high will never be reached.
Some try to argue that "we've done everything Sci-Fi used to promise would be in the future, so there are no more predictions to make." Excuse me? The 1900 patent bureau chief called, he wants his statement back.
I must really have slacked off on reading the news lately, because I've missed all the stories about us being able to
- Travel in time
- Travel interstellarly (But hey, we've been to the moon!
- Concquer all disease (But we're really close!)
- Extract energy in totally novel ways (Like using decay heat to boil water to drive a steam turbine!)
So in short, what's "wrong" with sci-fi today is that a few fads have been wrung to death, and those with novel ideas have been sidelined. Their time will come, and I predict that in the future, we will still have good, thought-provoking, evocative sci-fi.
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:2, Insightful)
SF isn't dead, it's just resting (Score:2, Insightful)
SF isn't dying. We've had some peaks in our history, we've had some valleys. We've seen the market change and evolve. But SF isn't dying. Change is not death, it's change.
One thing that is true - and it's a thing that many folks miss - is quite simply that SF is a minority literature, and always has been. Star Wars and Star Trek and all those others aren't SF at all; they're adventure stories that have coopted the SF vocabulary.
Real SF is about the impact zone between humanity and science, where collisions of spirit and rationality occur like subatomic particles creating the fusion of new elements. Only a very small part of humanity is interested in that particular domain of imagination - because it's hard work. But the proportion is stable. The evidence isn't just in the circulation numbers of Analog, it's in the circulation numbers of all the other magazines as well - Popular Science, Discovery, Omni, Wired, and Scientific American.
Sidebar: one of the things that has drawn away a large part of SF's key demographic is the computer game. The 13 year old boys who used to read Heinlein are now playing Doom and Half-Life, going for the vicarious visceral adventure in the sci-fi virtual reality instead of exercising their imaginations in books. One possible future of SF - a future that has not yet been invented - will be the computer game that lets you explore a new world without having to shoot everything you see. The goal will be discovery, not mayhem.
But even with the computer games as part of our brave new reality, SF will continue to exist as a prophylactic, prophetic, and prescriptive literature - because those who are interested in science are also interested in what it means. The "decline" in science fiction, if there is one, is not a decline in science fiction as much as it is a cultural neglect of science.
In my not terribly humble opinion.
David Gerrold
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, some SF books explore an SF world, pointing out all the wonders and tragedies that have and will occur. But many of them build a SF world and then intertwine a story with that world, in many cases doing such a good job of it that the story itself is not truly SciFi but more of a cross-genre story that just happens to have it's environment in (and be affected by) a futuristic setting.
Love stories, detective stories, horror stories, etc. They have all been represented in the SF world. I often find the most amazing SF books to be the ones that build an entire environment but then center the story on the characters living inside that environment, not really ignoring it, but treating it like an environment instead of "hey look, it's a laser blaster!".
There are even cross-genre books between science fiction and fantasy (Stasheff's Wizard and Warlock series's?).
I don't think Scifi or Fantasy is dead. Other genres cover the past and present, Sci-Fi and Fantasy cover the future and the never-have-been, it's a much wider territory.
I am no less interested in reading these genres now then when I was a kid. If the argument (from article) was that kids these days don't read enough and that it will dwindle due to a smaller and smaller reading (and thus writing) population, I might give it a little credit, but running out of ideas is not something I have seen even begin to occur yet. And dwindling reader base woul affect a lot more then just SciFi, if the author chose SciFi in order to get the greatest response then he is belied by his own goals. You don't choose the one of the biggest audiences and say they don't exist, it ain't logical
-T
Playground for theoretical physics (Score:3, Insightful)
But good fiction of any kind is always about the present. If it cannot provide insight about the present, then what good is it?
Unintended Consequences (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless Bradbury was complaining about his title being associated with a particular political point of view. In that case, more power to him.
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry if this is harsh, but, come on! This is the appropriate response assuming you're not a troll.
What sci-fi is.... (Score:4, Insightful)
What would a human be if you removed this trait? Characters like vulcans are humans with emotions removed. Other "aliens" are likewise variations of humans, with human traits/foibles either removed, or dialed up to 11.
Book stores are flooded with junk books, like The Davinci Code or the for dummies series. Publishers are pushing these books and as gresham's law would put it, bad books are driving out good books. As someone who spends about $200 per month on books, I have seen this decline in what is available for quite some time. The amount of money that publishers spend on promoting fad books (like the davinci code) is appalling. It is becoming like the record industry where good musicians get pushed aside, so that this month's fad band can get all the promotion. I find more new science fiction books at the library than I do at the bookstore.
Books about elves and wizards sell very well, thanks to the Lord of the Rings. They just are not sci-fi.
Are book sales down? In the 1970s, paperbacks sold for around 50cents (some less, some more). Nowadays, everything is $6.99 or $7.99.
I do not believe that Caldwell actually reads sci-fi. She thinks Singularity created the idea that technology would grow so fast that people could not cope, but instead that idea came from a 1970 book by Alvin Toffler called Future Shock. She thinks 2001 was bad because it had a date in the title? How about 1984? Perhaps she should look into the trend of publishing stories after the author dies. Ghost writing with a oiuja board, I guess.
Are the modern sci-fi books dystopic? Yes, and that is not a new trend. Is it because that is all the publishers will publish? I don't know. In 1972, The Sheep Look Up was published, and that is about as dystopic a story as I have ever read. I don't remember a single book by Phillip Dick (some of whose books were turned into Bladerunner and Total Recall) having a happy ending. If you want a happy ending, watch tv. If you want to think, read a book.
Disconnect between article and reality (Score:3, Insightful)
Science fiction, other than pulp, has never been about a clear cut division between good and evil. Interesting stories come from complex situations. Read any old Niven, most Heinlein, modern GRR Martin, Robert J Sawyer, Bruce Sterling, John C Wright, Greg Egan, Stephen Gould,
*Of course* science fiction is based on current culture - people can't relate to anything too alien, and thus it doesn't sell. The same is true for every other kind of fiction. You never see fantasy books trying to get us to relate to people who kill peasants for talking back to them as good guys, but I'm pretty sure virtually every knight would have considered that appropriate. We are never given a culture of good guys in which the firstborn child is drowned if it's a girl, but certainly major cultures that considered themselves good, and were good in many ways, did so.
The thesis that science fiction is dying is a load of crap. I've found several good new authors over the past several years (Stephenson, Egan, Gould, etc), a few within the last few months (Sawyer, Wright) and many of the oldies but goodies are still producing (Niven, Sterling).
This looks like a big troll. I guess I bit.
Re:Not necessarily true (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree strongly with this statement. I do a lot of world-building for my science fiction novels, and my wife does a lot for her fantasy novels. You cannot just set it up and have them exist in it. With good, realistic world-building (and this really extends to everything, clothing, social courtesies, transportation, economics, etc.), the "existing" part reinforces the world through every single page of the book. I'm not talking about diversions to explain tangential technology (although this can be well done or badly done, depending on the story and how tangential the tech really is).
There's some great writing in the science fiction field, but there's also some less than stellar writing. I would submit that there are so few writers who can pull off the world-building effectively that publishers forgive them their other weaknesses, at least to some extent.
Re:Hogwash! (Score:3, Insightful)
First, there's a whole wave of modern space opera, for want of a better term, led by British authors primarily. Alastair Reynolds, for instance. I'm happy for my own work to get mentioned with theirs.
Then there's a movement being called "The New Weird." China Meieville's name comes up often there. In a few years of course, the new weird will be the old weird and people will say that the field is dead.
Re:Some religions, yes. (Score:4, Insightful)
Fiction is commonly written with historical elements used as context. For instance, "Silence of the Lambs" wrote about the FBI, which we both agree is 100% accurate historical context. This in no way makes Silence of the Lambs non-fantasy.
In other words, historians can cross check history against the bible's use of historical context until most, or even every, contextual reference(s) are verified, and they will still not have succeeded in any way, to any degree, in showing the bible's core story elements - god, jesus and supernatural events - are not fantasy.
Those elements, by their very nature, stand completely outside any use of historical context.
Re:Not necessarily true (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Getting Old (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummm, it's called Triumph of the Will [imdb.com]. And yes, it was considered a documentary, despite obviously being propoganda. Not to mention the WWII documentaries from the allied side that were just as skewed, but won oscars nonetheless.
You don't think the typical American romantic comedy that's all about getting the promotion, money, success, whatever, and then getting the girl isn't propaganda for American capitalist values?
Every film has a bias. Take a film class (or hell, any literature or other media class for that matter), and learn to think critically about EVERYTHING you see. You'll probably be impressed with how up front Moore is with his values, at least.
We covered Roger and Me in my film class, and his only really major crime against the documentary was mixing the four traditional modes of documentary style to pull the viewer in unexpected directions. He pretty much helped to establish a fifth style, that yes, is far more direct about it's political intentions.
The problem isn't a lack of ideas... (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine a world where we all have incredibly high bandwidth data connections wired directly into our brains. We can call up huge computational resources whenever we need to and have the entire world's library of knowledge at ready recall. It is difficult to explain such a world without being overly technical, and it is hard for us to identify with a character whose very thought-processes are likely to be incredibly different from our own. This character will live in a world that has very little in common with our own. And that one piece of technology won't exist in a vacuum -- there will be many other equally revolutionary changes coming up.
There's plenty of stories to set in the future -- it's just that if they do a good job of portraying how completely revolutionary technical change is becoming, they also tend to be little fun. In the end, don't we really look for fiction to be fun?
Amidst all the tooth gnashing... (Score:3, Insightful)
These days their back list inventory of printed books is considered a TAXABLE item instead of a deductible cost. That means they have to blow out as much of their print run as possible within the tax year or get hit with a tax on unsold product.
So in the old days they could sit on 10,000 unsold copies for a few years, but now they can't. They have to do small runs, and if the small run doesn't fly off the shelf they remainder it and don't do a re-print.
Avant garde books are notorious for not flying off the shelves, even the Lord Of The Rings didn't sell huge when it first came out.
That built in systematic bias will have a stultifying effect on Sci Fi in print.
Another bias present in the USA is that basically there are two bookstores, Barnes & Noble and Borders. Here in Canada there's ONE store, Chapters. If a book doesn't make their inventory for whatever reason, it doesn't get sold.
This is not a conspiracy theory you understand, more like gravity. An uncaring and accidental force that constrains movement.
Change the above constraints, change the type of stories you get.
So basically I think Mr. Sawyer has a good chance of being wrong in his assumptions. The result he predicts may actually hold up.
Or the whole publishing biz could go electronic or "just in time" printing. That would really shake things up.
Re:Science Fiction is not about science (Score:4, Insightful)
Science fiction is a form of fiction which deals principally with the impact of imagined science and/or technology upon society or individuals.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction
The job of SF is to ask "what if", and examine the effects. It's a way of auditioning scientific priorities socially. Remove the science and you just have fiction.
[Rant]
This attitude infuriates me for two reasons: First, it anti-intellectual to regard the whole of science; all mathematics, physics, information theory, sociology, cosmology,
Re:' In 2004 Bush is President and my Penis is 12" (Score:3, Insightful)
In the case of jesus, god and the supernatural events described in the bible, the only support for these story elements is the story itself. Supernatural events are not known to occur.
Although this would in many quarters be considered sufficent to raise enough doubt to create a working assumption of fiction, we don't have to do that in this case.
The reason for this is that the bible says that god is immortal - hence currently extant. The bible also says that god is omnipotent - hence able to do anything god chooses to do. Therefore, instead of having to rely upon the bible itself to determine if the core story is fictional, we can instead, with great confidence, turn to demonstrations from god him/her/itself for our confirmation. Until/unless such demonstrations are manifested, we can quite confidently assume that the bible is either actually fiction, or that we are supposed to think it is fiction, and in the latter case, that's what we'd better think, because that's what god obviously wants and as the Christians will happily inform you, working at cross-purposes to god is not advisable.
Personally, I'd take a solid and demonstrably miraculous smiting of George W. Bush as good evidence. I want locusts, boils, and the waters of Cape Cod to part just wide enough to drop his fishing-boat to the bottom and smash it to itty-bitty pieces. If Cheney should turn into a pillar of salt at the same time, I would take that as a definitive "so there." After which a "burning Bush" would be awesome. I require miraculous transportation so that I may witness the above events, foreknowledge in the form of a description from on high prior to the events, and a box seat on top of a miraculous fog, with an ineffable season ticket so I can watch similar events for all the rest of our politicians.
Until then, it's just a work of fiction to me. A collection of poorly written, inconsistant, manipulative, inciteful (not insightful) tales written, as near as I can tell, to help manage those who look at the life in the world and shake in fear, instead of fill with curiosity and wonder.
Re:Some religions, yes. (Score:3, Insightful)