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)
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:2)
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:3, Interesting)
Ironic that it's pastoralism that we dream of now, isn't it? David Brin deals with this as something of a side issue in his Glory Season, making the story metascience fiction. I suppose somebody had to take that step and better Brin than most.
Not that there's anything unique to the present about dreaming of pastoralism. Many of the great writers of the Industrial Revolution did that. What's different is t
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.
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:3, Funny)
You need to work on your imagination.
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
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:4, Funny)
It wasn't real when he wrote them, so he wrote fantasy. You can't change it to, for example, historical fiction retroactively.
Clarke used the science at the time and its progress to fairly accurately predict the near future. That's not fantasy. Fantasy is when you write, "From under her cloak and behind the cascade of golden hair, gossamer double wings appeared, spread outwards and vibrated, lifting her tiny, green-velvet clad feet a man's height above the courtyard's rough-hewn stone paving as she intoned in a lilting elven accent, 'Luser.'"
Be it right or wrong facts doesn't matter.
That has to be one of the all-time best AC quotes. Ever.
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:5, Funny)
That's why you're not an author.
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:4, Interesting)
So far I haven't seen any convincing arguments for why this decline is occurring. It's not even clear it's a decline so much as a shift; fantasy seems to be going strong, and Harry Potter is the poster child for a whole new generation of fantasy fiction.
If I were to speculate (after all, we're talking about what they used to call speculative fiction) I would suggest that the Baby Boomers with their hugely influential buying habits have shifted away from the science fiction of their youth in the 50's, 60's, and 70's and are busy raising kids, saving for their retirement, and vegging out in front of the 300-channel home theater every night. There's just no time anymore for science fiction. They have grown beyond it.
I got back into sci-fi during the 90s after a long hiatus, and while I enjoy some of it, I find the overall literary quality to be below that of mainstream fiction. I still love a good yarn but very, very few authors are capable of building a truly convincing world--Vinge comes close, Asimov is forever, I like David Brin's scientific underpinnings if not his shallow characters, a few others. Philip K. Dick and Clifford Simak are for me the greats of the 60s-70s era; they wrote straight sci-fi yarns with vision, and they chose not to get bogged down in scientific details as some of the newer "techie" authors make the mistake of doing.
The pendulum will swing back again. The Harry Potter generation will branch out and "discover" science fiction next to the fantasy books and reinvigorate the genre. Magazines don't do very well anymore in any field, and people would rather surf the web than read, so perhaps in the future we'll read Acrobat files for $2.99. Who knows. The future is wide open.
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)
Re:Science Fiction is not about science (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, at some level. I've just pitched a large grant proposal to the NSF for my astronomical research (on quasars). The NSF demands significant public outreach/education efforts as well. I strive for accurate science in my own novels, and do want to teach science while I entertain. I learned about relativity first from THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman, and tidal forces from NEUTRON STAR by Larry Niven. I want to learn things when I read.
The main focus of the educational component
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: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
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:4, Funny)
"Stargate" was "What if there were portals that could allow people to travel between planets".
Oh, so that's what Stargate is about; I've always wondered. I thought it was about taking the worst parts of Dr. Who's transportation, Star Trek's aliens (and alien crystal devices/controls) with costumes from the original Planet of the Apes, the nasty Dune movie's silly weirding weapons, and the military expertise of Gomer Pyle in No Time for Sergeants and mixing it all together. My mistake.
Re:Fantasy vs SF (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.lneilsmith.com/bulgaria.html [lneilsmith.com]
Bob-
Can't find in the real world? (Score:5, Insightful)
Virtual States, etc. (Score:2)
It is diffuclut to maintain an optimistic view of the potentials while keeping in mind and being wary of all the screwups that people can come up with. As an example:
Some people try to make the real world like that nevertheless."Either you're with us, or you are with the terrorists" ring any bells?
Probably is more of an example of a typical reaction to a novel political situation, Virtual States [stephanaschwartz.com], using outmoded strategic
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
Is Science Fiction About The Future Anymore? (Score:5, Funny)
_________________
Getting Old (Score:5, Funny)
Bradbury must be getting old if he can't remember the titles of his own books.
Re:Getting Old (Score:5, Funny)
Tim
Re:Getting Old (Score:2)
<exaggeration for the sake of comedy>Bradbury looking for information on Fahrenheit, intends on dialing "411" but dials "451" instead, writes the book, and the rest is history. </exaggeration for the sake of comedy>
<comedy explanation>I stated that he MISDIALED, which strongly suggests that he dialed something OTHER than "411." This seems pretty clear to me that I knew that he'd blown it.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I was playing along with the ignorance of the grandp
Ray Bradbury has talked to Michael Moore. (Score:2, Informative)
For the record, Bradbury opposes Moore's theft of Bradbury's title.
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: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, suc
Re:Getting Old (Score:3, Informative)
Dictionary.com has this definition:
"A work, such as a film or television program, presenting political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner and often consisting of actual news
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.
Re:Star Trek Univserse has gotten corrupted... (Score:4, Informative)
well, you have to consider that today the technology we have was not imagined by Gene in 1967 but to make it a believable future you need to incorporate some tech that appears to have evolved from our world today.
I think it was a mistake to make a pre-series because it had to reflects an evolution of todays society. Gene knew that and that is why his next series, TNG, took place 250 years after TOS.
but for the non anal of us, the continuity is fine.
Re:Star Trek Univserse has gotten corrupted... (Score:3, Funny)
for your huge breach of star trek canon, your nerd license is revoked.
But for the really pedantic among us... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
lost technology... (Score:2)
Maybe the Star Trek universe lost some technologies.
I remember watching the original shows and everytime the control panels sparked up, I was thinking, damn, don't they have circuit breakers, or at least a fuse box somewhere. ;-)
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:This is funny (Score:5, Funny)
Is that a prediction?
Re:This is funny (Score:2)
Not necessarily true (Score:2, Interesting)
If you take into account that Goerge R. R. Martin' Song of ice and fire series, this statement doesn't hold water. No one is so clear cut black and white in his novels and IMO that's why he has such a huge pool of readers.
Re:Not necessarily true (Score:2, Funny)
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 tha
Re:Not necessarily true (Score:2)
People who say that unambiguous evil does not exist in the real world need to get a clue. Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hussein, bin Laden, all evil. Nothing complicated, they are just evil.
If you tell me that unambiguous good does not exist in the real world, then m
Re:Not necessarily true (Score:3, Interesting)
A book that spends page afte page
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.
2020 Singularity (Score:3, Funny)
Fantasy sounds like religion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fantasy sounds like religion? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fantasy sounds like religion? (Score:2)
That is why Nostradamus bored me long ago. The exact same quatratains exactly predicted all sorts of different events depending on what era the commentator came from. Come to think of it, much has been made of the predictive power of SF. The problem there is that the seeming hits are trumpeted to the stars and no one remembers the misses. In the case of Trek, designers just emu
Some religions, yes. (Score:4, Funny)
Historians have successfully cross-checked so much of the Christian Bible against historical facts that I'd think twice before calling it a fantasy story.
Re:Some religions, yes. (Score:4, Informative)
Matthew claims that the birth of Jesus occurred during the reign of Herod the Great of Judea, a puppet king of the Romans, whom we know died in 4 B.C. Luke also tells us that Jesus' birth happened during Herod's reign. Luke even adds what appears to be detailed and historical evidence of the period. He writes that Jesus was born during a census or registration of the populace ordered by emperor Augustus at the time that Quirinius (Cyrenius) was Roman governor of Syria (Luke 2:1-3). In reality, this has to be a fabrication because Quirinius was not governor of Syria and Judea during Herod's kingship. Direct Roman rule over the province of Judea, where Bethlehem was located, was not established until 6 A.D. In other words, ten years separated the rule of Quirinius from Herod.
Taken from http://www.religioustolerance.org/xmas_lib.htm [religioustolerance.org] Granted, it's a site that would be tough to claim is free from bias, however I went with the first link from google that confirmed what I was taught in college, it is a fact that is agreed on by many historians... this alone of course doesn't make the Bible a fantasy story... just not a completely historically accurate story.
Re:Some religions, yes. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Some religions, yes. (Score:3, Interesting)
There are a great many lessons for those who wish to live a harmonous life with others. There is a great deal of ammunition for those who wish to perform selective literal extraction, usually for the p
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:' 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 qua
Re:Some religions, yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fantasy sounds like religion? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Fantasy sounds like religion? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes they're worse than the Jeovah's witnesses...
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.
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].
What about Raistlin? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about Raistlin? (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhm no, Raistlin is a popular character for the same that every wizard in a MUD is mysterious and powerful. Raistlin speaks to the 12 year old boy in all of us who loves Batman and Wolverine and wants to be a ninja.
The character of Raistlin does not explore any sort of moral boundary, he is adventure story wish fulfillment in raw form.
Re:What about Raistlin? (Score:3, Funny)
If this was true, Raistlin wouldn't be such a popular character.
Only on Slashdot would a statement like this be made. The remaining 99.99% of the world would be scratching their heads asking "Raistlin who?".
Hogwash! (Score:3, Insightful)
That right there is a very useful tool.
Re:Hogwash! (Score:2)
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 societ
Re:Hogwash! (Score:5, Funny)
That's so true. I want to return to the 1930s, when all the science fiction on the big screen was much less crappy. I mean, Flash Gordon. Buck Rogers. Intellectually fulfilling stuff, that -- the men were men, the alien women were knockouts, and the bad guys were Chinese.
Well, okay, maybe the 1940s. Yeah. "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man." "The Invisible Woman." "One Million B.C." That's more like it.
No? How about the 1950s, which gave us dozens of cinematic classics about giant ants/scorpions/spiders on a rampage, along with "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein," "Devil Girl From Mars," "Jungle Moon Men," "The Man From Planet X," and "Monster From the Ocean Floor?" (Everyone's from somewhere!)
But surely the 1960s are the good old days. I mean, hey, "Barbarella" -- no cheese there. "Gill Women of Venus." "How To Make a Doll." "Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster."
Well, okay. The 1970s gave us "Star Wars," so that's gotta be the oasis in the cinematic desert. Surely that outweighs "Meteor," "Starcrash," "The Giant Spider Invasion," "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth," and "Dracula Versus Frankenstein" (damn that Mary Shelley and her interminable sequels!)
The 1980s certainly produced a lot more science fiction movies than earlier decades, thanks to "Star Wars." But were they good movies? Some were. But I also remember "Interface." "Alien From L.A." "Space Raiders." And the inimitable Scott Baio's "Zapped!" -- what a masterpiece that one was.
Then we get to the 1990s. Surely the advent of really good special effects must have led to an explosion of quality in science-fiction filmmaking. But no -- in fact all of your examples of crappy films are from the 1990s.
So when did "lately" start again?
Sturgeon's Law [jargon.net] doesn't have an expiration date or a start date, I'm afraid.
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
i liken it to Nosferatu (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe we find it empowering when Bruce Willis is fighting terrorists and beats them with his American moxie... Opiate of the masses indeed!
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..
SF is bleak (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally don't think it's because people in general don't like to read about real life where nobody is 100% good or evil. Well, maybe if you're a teenager, but even so - most teenagers I have talked to recently (friends of my children - I'm THAT old;) think a lot about good and evil and are not at all convinced that things can be painted in broad strokes of black and white.
No, I think the problem is more that there aren't any brilliant writers and/or subjects any more. Last I read SF I gave up halfway through; I believe it was one of Iain Banks, whom I normally like, but it just seemed like some dreary humdrum - like yet another replay of the same old theme, the same old political and religious prejudices and thin science. At least in phantasy there's a chance you might see a new idea, but I must say my recent experience leaves much to be desired.
The most exciting and inspired literature I read nowadays seems to be Chinese literature. Maybe this is a question for everyone: Do you also feel that Western literature as a whole has landed in the doldrums? Have you tried something else, like eg. East Asian or perhaps Middle Eastern literature?
Re:SF is bleak (Score:2)
Neal Stephenson (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Not so worried myself. (Score:2)
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.
Just stagnated for now (Score:5, Interesting)
Current generation of Sci-Fi would be writers saw recession, budget cuts, unemployment, NASA becoming a big bureaucrat.
Hopefully the XPrize will inspire the next to crank out some new and interesting ideas.
Re:Just stagnated for now (Score:3, Interesting)
Huh? Trek was first aired in the mid '60's (i.e. pre-moon landing). It seems unlikely that the creators "were kids during the Gemini, Apollo runs" since it was created (not by kids) in the middle of those programs.
Philip K. Dick, the man who wrote "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (aka Bladerunner) was born in 1928. And I'd hardly call the future depicted in either the book or movie the prod
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
Simplicty? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The Genre (Score:3, Interesting)
No. (Score:2)
fantasy v. sci fi (Score:2)
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
it is relationships. (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact what we may be seeing is a maturing of science fiction. The great master melded all the relationship together, even sometimes focusing on sex, into a good story that was set in the future to allow the freedom created by unfamiliarity, in the same way that novel might be set in the past. Now authors like KS Robinson and the like are creating tales that rival the greatest literature, with the aspect of future or past being a critical part of the story.
Simplicity is everywhere in literature. We can only keep tract of some many variables, like 3-7, encapsulated, so the relationships in literature are simplified. I also believe that readers will further simplify a situation to meet their mental capacity, so even if a character or story is complex, the reader will simplify it down to their needs.
The key difference between today and 50 or so years ago is that we are literally paying for our unhealthy relationship with technology. We have massively polluted areas of the world, obese children with adult diseases, an irrational fear of drinking tap water, among other ailments. Each of these cost us untold amounts of resources, and raises the question of whether we can develop the technology to save or get us off this planter before we use it all up.
This is all very US centric. Godzilla clearly predicted the price we pay for the misuse of technology. But even in American writers, like Pohl, have focused on the devastating effects of unhealthy relationships.
My definition of fantasy (Score:3, Interesting)
I read SF & Fantasy (the one about wzards), and other books rich in fantasy, to keep growing instead of starting getting old.
It worked quite well for the first 40 years :-)
Science Fiction Dead? (Score:2, Interesting)
Looking through the original source article in Popular Science and looking through the article, it all looks pretty depressing. Of course, purely from my own experience, I know that there is a great deal of new and interesting SF coming out, primarily set in a near-future dystpia.
From Morgan to Stephenson to Gibson or Macleod, the world's current condition spawns a quite wide variety of near-future dyspotian visions. This might well be a statement of the perception of now. Even reasonable fantasy is in
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...
Science Fiction is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Science Fiction is a generic term used for fiction that takes place in the future or using technology that doesn't currently exist.
When you computer-chair critics try to state authoritatively that "Science Fiction is about how technological advances affect people," or whatever other label you want to use, you put an artificial limitation on something that is supposed to be free-ranging and unlimited. Our imagination and creativity are beautiful, precious things, and attempting to shoehorn the unborn manuscripts of budding authors who want to write their story their way is just plain wrong.
Science Fiction can be...
- An exploration of possible technological advances
- Shoot'em'ups in space
- The affect of future technology on society/politics/individuals/religion
- Pulp trash
- Satire
- Comedy
- And lots more..
Any writing can be written any way the author wants. The results will be according to its worth, hopefully. The only real problem is there's so much competition to be published that good manuscripts can sit in the slush pile for years.
Of course current fashions and trends are going to affect what gets published. Ultimately, most book publishing is for the entertainment of the ordinary person, and the book publishing industry succeeds in doing that.
Publishing "important" work with real literary impact is a hit-and-miss proposition, and always will be, regardless of the genre.
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.
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?
Mixed feelings...! (Score:3, Interesting)
There does exist, surely, science fiction with the intent of predicting the future and not much else, at least not overtly. But there is certainly a subtext present, if only to inform the minds who must enter this future world.
My first novel, Star Dragon, got great reviews, particularly at scifi.com. One of the points that the reviewer made there was that my future was NOT bleak, and that this was a refreshing change from most recent books. Certainly there is a long tradition of cautionary tales (Soylent Green based on Make Room Make Room!) comes to mind, but there is also an optimistic tradition of mankind using its intelligence and technology to flourish across the stars.
Somehow in recent years, and cyberpunk is probably to blame, at least in part, the dark futures of the cautionary tales have become standard even in stories not explicitly made out to be cautionary tales. Cyberpunk is style as much as content. Dark and gritty settings have emerged across the entire culture, not just in science fiction. Dragnet and NYPD Blue are both cop shows, but no one would confuse the two.
As long as the field of science fiction is diverse enough that the interested readership can find what they like, things will be okay there. You get stories like this when there is the perception that the diversity has vanished, which would be a crime. One of the joys about reading science fiction is that you always have a chance of getting something new and wonderous.
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.
"Sort of" correct (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also definitely true that nobody can predict what kind of culture new devices will give rise to. (E.g., nobody predicted that the automobile would cause the sexual revolution. And they had decades with all the facts in front of them.)
And sometimes people WON'T predict things that are staring them in the face. E.g., the sexual revolution lead to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Science Fiction and fantasy are often safe ways to address this point.
Science Fiction and Fantasy are also frequently used as safe ways to make political points. And to warn about "if this goes on
But Science Fiction is also about addressing plausible futures, and seeing what they imply about "absolute ethics". This is what the best science fiction usually deals with (my bias!). Fantasy doesn't work the same way here, because it doesn't say anything about reality, but only about how we feel about reality. (OTOH, the line can be quite narrow between the genres. There's a series of 4 book called "The Dance of Gods", starting with volume 1 == Catastrophe's Spell (by Mayer Alan Brenner) which starts off as clearly fantasy. Magicians, elves, etc. Even Gods! And ends up by volume 4 as some of the hardest of hard Science Fiction. (I won't give it away, and I don't find the science totally convincing. But it's certainly plausible enough to hang a story around.)
What makes a story Science Fiction is the background. (And time can turn a story from science fiction into fantasy..as we gain in knowledge.) Conventional artifices don't make a story science fiction. Stories about FTL starships, unless they are based around some novel premise, fail the test. And this includes Star Trek and Star Wars and their derivitives. They are, at best, Science Fantasy. (Note that they could be redeemed by a bit of fast talking, and a few new theories...but nobody bothers to. So this is clear evidence that they don't CARE that it's Science Fantasy rather than Science Fiction. It sells, and that's what they care about.)
Genuine Science Fiction has always been quite rare, even within the genre. It's too easy to take some conventional solution (e.g., hyperspace drive) and use it to tell the story that you want. Even Hal Clement's "Mission of Gravity" does this, and both he and that work in particular had the reputation of writing/being "Hard Science Fiction".
One excellent exception is George Zebrowski's "Macrolife". There've been several (10? 15?) in the last few decades, but naturally I tend to remember the earlier ones, because they are the ones that I formed the concept around. Without them, I wouldn't have known that interesting "Hard Science Fiction" was possible. And even in those, I'm fairly sure that if you looked carefully you would see fantasy elements.
People spin fantasies by nature, and enjoy them. Anyone who doesn't, won't be able to stand most literature, much less science fiction (non-capitalized!) And without reading a *LOT* of science fiction, one won't encounter ANY examples of Hard Science Fiction. It's a continuua. (plural! There's more than one dimension.) When you say something is science fiction you are pointing in a direction in literature space, and saying "I mean the stuff you find over there", but as you look more closely "the stuff over there" breaks into a myriad of different sub-categories (mostly unnamed...where would you put Terry Prachett's Diskworld?) Science fiction and fantasy share a way of looking at the world. They aren't totally similar, but the entire spectrum has a lot of shared elements.
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.
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.
The real reason... (Score:3)
Seriously. The genre has become much more elitist about what qualifies as bona fide science fiction and what is mere fantasy in a futuristic setting. If Asimov's Foundation series was written today, I doubt it would make it into the club.