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Spider Robinson And The State Of Science Fiction
pcb writes "There is a rather decent
rant in today's Globe & Mail from Spider Robinson (of the
Callahan series fame) regarding the dismal state of science fiction, in
which he laments that the future is not what it used to be. While
attending Torcon 3, the 61st
World SF Convention, he notes that SF readers today seem to prefer the
Tolkienesque fantasies of some forgotten past, rather than the forward-looking works of science and space travel that used to dominate the
genre. Are SF stories from authors like Heinlein, Clarke or Asimov
irrelevant today, as people look into the past to dream rather than the
future? Robinson asks: 'Why are our imaginations retreating from
science and space, and into fantasy?'"
Robinson asks: 'Why are our imaginations retreating from science and space, and into fantasy?'
I was hoping that the article would bring up the obvious answer, but it didn't quite reach it. The essence of fiction is that it is not real, and "science fiction" is supposed to take the idea a step further -- beyond real, if you like. To the unreachable, beyond what we consider possible.
But in this century, what is beyond possible? Exploring the planets? Been there, done that, got pictures. Exploring other star systems? Totally possible, but the centuries-long timescale makes it simply boring. Time travel? Everybody knows that you'll just end up meeting the Borg before you should, or something.
In other words, perhaps science fiction is suffering from too much science!
On the other hand, fantasy worlds like Tolkien's are completely unreachable, unimaginable in reality. Even given billions of dollars, NASA could not create a race of half-orcs in a deep trench (strategically located below a large dam).
Science is possible... fantasy is impossible. Perhaps that's the problem.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
If you think that's bad, you should see the state of science-fiction fans! PEEEEEE-U!
Maybe because despite repeated claims to be ending a series, authors continue to go back to mine tired ideas when nothing else is making them money?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Tolkien had very anti-technology undertones. He constantly refered to the dark clouds of Mordor, the decimation of the forests in Eisengard. That strikes a note with the post-hippie kids of the 70's and 80's.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
UNBELIEVABLE! Anyone who has read Vance's works, please feel free to tell me your favs as I look forward to reading many more, as I've just finished the last of the aforementioned books. I'll give you a million SVU and a bag of Purples for your efforts! :)
A Fire Upon The Deep
A Deepness in the Sky
That's all that needs saying.
There are only so many ways you can fly around in a starship going back and forward in time and mating with green aliens. Technology is no where near as fun as magic and elf chicks
'Why are our imaginations retreating from science and space, and into fantasy?'
Did you watch "the matrix"?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
Compared to the earlier-mid parts of the 20th century, we see science all around us. Medical breakthroughs, technological innovations, etc.
We used to have to wait decades for great discoveries. Now they theorize and prove within short years. Fantasy brings people into a world that can't exist. Sci-Fi stories may one day be true and aren't as escapist.
Trolling is a art,
Maybe it is because Liv Tyler is a lot hotter than whoever plays Dave Bowman.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Robinson asks: 'Why are our imaginations retreating from science and space, and into fantasy?'
Well, I guess that's because of the big hype around the Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter. Before LOTR I never saw a fantasy movie, however, after seeing LOTR, I'm looking forward to see the next episode. The same goes for Harry Potter.
I actually like sci-fi alot better when it, at least, slightly adheres to the laws of science. Stupid stuff like made-up elements and lasers that don't obey the laws of light do grate on my nerves.
Recently watched the Cowboy Bebop movie, and I was actually surprised that it was almost 100% possible. I won't spoil the plot... but I finally was glad that I wasn't watching some dumb thing about "norpisum coated armored skeletons with GDH3829K-#7 laser blaster rifles that look like flamethrowers!"
And if this is all irrelevant, it's because I didn't RTFA.
Spellchecked with OOo!
I love sci-fi fantasy, where you have a completely different universe with some sci-fi and some fantasy aspects (i.e. magic).
Dune fits into this, as does Star Wars..
There are other great books as well, although I can't really remember their names.
Any tips?
Will code a sig generator for food
yeah, stephenson's gone to historical fiction and simmons is retreading greek mythology :D greg egan's putting out good work tho!
there's been so many bad sci-fi shows on TV that maybe the audience in general feels sci-fi has little to offer. If you look at the latest crop of Sci-fi shows on TV, most of them suck. There was one good show on Showtime called Odyssey 5, but showtime cancelled the show. It might be a chicken and the egg problem, but there does seem to be a pattern.
The traditional Sci-Fi of rocket ships, blaster guns, and aliens may be on decline, but there many new sci-fi (not fantasy) books coming out all the time.
The focus of much of the Sci-Fi these days is on the relationship of the technology to society and the long term effects of the technology on the path of humanity.
Take a look at Vernor Vinge, John Varley, John Wright, Cory Doctorow, John Barnes, Bruce Sterling, Ken MacLeod, and Dan Simmons if you are interested in some recent sci-fi. No elves or magic swords there.
Just because it's not 60s style, libertarian - free love stuff of the past doesn't mean it's not sci-fi.
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Well that's not hard to figure out, people want to dream of better happier times.
To a greater degree, that is a fantasy past when times were simple and there was wonder in the universe.
Today the future is gloomy, assuming you will even have a job in the future, and space is empty and far away - no you can't go faster then light, so no space for you!. Noone has to wonder about anything at all, the answers to life the universe and everything are a google search away.
The easter bunny, santa clause, and the american dream are all R.I.P.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
she publishes her Sci-fi at Baen.. books available eltectronically through http://www.webscription.net/ with no DRM!
. htm
a sample available at.. http://www.baen.com/library/1011250002/1011250002
it's a short story without the space battle-cruisers.. but the rest of her stuff has 'em.. and so much more.
--iamnotayam
I find there is a distinct lack of good science fiction. I buy both fantasy and hard SF. The last really good sf I found was John Barnes' TimeLine Wars with "Patton's Spaceship", "Washington's Dirigible", and "Caesar's Bicycle". Most of the rest seem to be largely space opera. I don't mind space opera, but I don't want to buy sf to have the sf merely the background to a soap opera. I don't care for some of these supposedly sf books where the protagonist merely travels to another planet to find out why his girlfriend/princess no longer likes him.
>I was hoping that the article would bring up the obvious answer, but it didn't quite reach it. The essence of fiction is that it is not real, and "science fiction" is supposed to take the idea a step further -- beyond real, if you like. To the unreachable, beyond what we consider possible.
Actually, today's author doesn't want to bother to research what science already understands as background for the story. By going with fantasy (swords and sorcery) they avoid all that work, and still get paid the same.
And you get to write the same plot over and over again. "Rescue the Prince(ss) from the GREAT EVIL".
It's a reflection of taste that we are moving from the tech driven SF genre into the character driven fantasy world. At least in fantasy, they aren't trying to explain HOW the magic works. They simply use it to get around a peculiar problem, or to leverage the abilities of the protagonist against an otherwise overwhelming foe.
Damn it. I'm starting to sound like Campbell.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Prehaps it mightbe with the success or LOTR people are becoming more interested and with the general level of recent SCI-FI films (which IHMO is a bit below par) they are looking for something decent.
There are only so many science base scenarios you can have. Either aliens, end of the world or robots. Its a bit of a generalisation but with fanstasy you can create anything your imagination can concieve
Just my 0.02
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Where does this runny-cheese fake science fiction author get off criticizing the state of science fiction? His Callahan's Crosstime Saloon Smurf stories did FAR more damage than anything he can point to today. Even his "harder" fiction is more softcore pornography than SF.
Stephen Baxter. Greg Bear. Neal Stephenson.
What a dick.
Funny, I rarely found the science part of science fiction interesting.
I find the ideas that the author has are the intriguing people.
Heinlein in "The moon is a Harsh Mistress" exposed me to many ideas I've never thought of before. It also provides a stark contrast to Lord of the Flies and the nature of man.
The Forever war was a blast, what is this world coming to?
Enders game, interesting solutions, and some of the hows. Starship troopers had some interesting political ideas.
Lifeline was yet another interesting expression of a though, and reflection on change.
FWIW Tolkein is just as much about politics and psychology and history of the day as much as any good sci-fi story.
They were wrong about flying cars by the year 2000. Once bitten, twice shy.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Perhaps it has to do with the popular media recient portrayal of science not as a good thing, but as somethin that will turn on us as a species. When was the last time you turned on the alphabet soup networks, and saw science presented in a positive light?
What was it?
What was the last real original non-franchise piece of Sci-Fi you took up?
In an age of nano-technology and an interconnected networked world, I thought that people like Gibson and Stephenson were the real deal answers to men like Asimoz and Bradbury.
Was I so wrong?
ACK
You know, this reminds me of why I always preferred space Legos to the other series; we KNOW that in the current day, cars and trucks and houses and what not weren't covered with little dots, same with castles and pirates and all of that; but the future...the FUTURE...those little dots might be what keeps it all together!
Actually, that kind of applies to why I liked scifi over fantasy in general.
Steampunk is an interesting crossover genre, I jsut discovere Steam Trek, a mapping of Star Trek onto the "what if the Victorians got space travel" theme.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
If we go back in time say 500 years, things didn't really change all that much from one generation to the next and so there was no concept of "the future" as we have it today. Imaginary images often revolved around religous "places" such as heaven or hell.
In the golden age of science fiction writing, which for most people I think is the 50's and 60's, in the future amazing things seemed possible and there was am optimism that things like space travel, flying cars, robots etc. might actually happen for ordinary people, perhaps even within the lifetime of the young people that read the fiction.
I think we're a bit more cynical nowadays, and thus the future doesn't seem so exciting. We've learnt that things don't change as fast as we would like them to, and the actual changes are mostly quite dull.
Imagine if a 50's science fiction writer had thought of the web. A story about buying a book on Amazon from your cubicle at work (most peoples reality today) somehow doesn't seem as exciting as flying to another planet with a cheeky robot.
I went to a presentation/speaking appointment by Terry Goodkind a few weeks ago, and he mentioned something on the subject. I won't get into his whole philosophical thing here, but he thought that the reason that sci-fi had taken a rear seat to fantasy was "moral clarity". 99% of fantasy out there deals with good vs evil, on a very basic level, whereas sci-fi tends not to as much. It may make social commentary, or pose interesting problems, but very rarely in sci-fi is there an archetypal hero, and that this is something that people really crave in today's society... a person (even if they're fictional) that a reader can admire, and be inspired by.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
This is nonsense. While it's true that the groundfish stocks have been decimated by awful mismanagement, there are plenty of fishing vessels running out of Cape Cod and the rest of Massachusetts. What's changed in Provincetown is that it has become entirely an enclave for wealthy gays, and the fishermen can no longer afford to live there and have been displaced to less fashionable harbors.
That aside -- I'd be more impressed if he had cited a few examples of what his imagination might produce, instead of just telling us how lame we all are. For that matter, has Spider Robinson ever done anything besides a gimmicky knockoff of the Canterbury Tales?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The future was supposed to be here a long time ago. It never showed. Space travel stalled out, cars still basicly act like the cars of 80 years ago, personal flight systems never appeared, the great suprising technology is in miniature computers and the internet... turns out these are great for massive personal and communal consensual fantasies (online games). In many cases technology actually turned out to be poisonous (PCBs, RSI, DDT, contaminated environment, blah blah). Once you understand technology the way we have grown up with it, dreaming of cooler technology is unappealing, and escapism is much more attractive.
Just a wild guess.
Looking at 'how many people read what' is not useful for telling what is great, let alone best. Tolkien provides a world a lot of people would like to travel to, but someone like Jeff Noon (Vurt, etc.) makes you think a little more about the nature of reality.
The thing that bothers me about Robinsons critique is, like a lot of genre writers, he seems to feel that 'setting is destiny'. Science fiction is not a religion, though naive futurism makes it look like one. It's awkward to watch a writer of good-natured stuff from back in the days trying to deal with the fact it's not 1960 anymore. LOTR is popular. SFW? There's still a lot of great new hard sci-fi being written, even if it's not Heinleins macho bullshit.
My Days in the Show
"I was in the show once, best 21 days of my life. You know you don't carry your bags in the show? You hit white balls for batting practice, the stadiums are like cathedrals, and the women all have long legs and brains."
Recently, I was in the show. It wasn't a goal of mine to get to the show, it just happened, through luck or talent or both. It's not like you have a progress-bar to the show, to show how close or far you are. But one day, I showed up to read about ol' Ike, and there it was: 'you've been granted access to the show'.
Now, I'm not going to say I was Mr. Cool about it. It was a nice little surprise, so I read the link on how to act in the show and quickly went out and got stinking drunk, had sex, and woke up with an 85 year old woman. Yes, like that first grope in the back seat of Dad's Buick 88, I was spent before the bra was off. And so I sat, staring at my new wife -- with a tattoo I don't remember getting -- smoking a Kool Menthol asking, "Was it good for you too?" Naturally, my first experience in the show was a bust.
But that's the problem with the show, you know what to do technically, but you don't know the art of it. I endeavored to do a better job next time. But a better job at what? What exactly am I supposed to do? And that's what all the veterans know and all the rooks don't: the key is to influence the show.
Now I figured after such a spectacular flameout, I'd never get back to the show...
But then it happened again. And this time it was going to be different. I kept up with the flow, trying to route the conversation, looking for wicked turn-of-phrase, or a pun, or deep insight, and then I found it. Like Cap' Ahab, I said 'harpoon that som' bitch thar!' So I threw +1, and waited. And waited. And waited. And as the thundering herd came towards me I realized that the show would not turn for me, and I had a made a critical error. I was stampeded by pre-pubescent pimpled youngsters in Star Trek T-Shirts. I pulled myself from the muck to watch the thundering herd move farther and farther out of sight. I tried this again and again, to the same results. Needless to say, I ended up in the same seedy motel, waking and rolling to the same sight. I relit a used Kool and took a deep drag. My ass hurt and I had a sinking suspicion that my other buttocks said 'boat' which would have delighted the tattoo artist no end to finish his partially completed 'love'. I dared not look.
I had become the Gary Coleman of the show. I was starting to learn Spanish or French or whatever language is appropriate to disappear to the fringes of civilization. And disappear I did.
Arthur C. Clarke said all things come in threes, it's the way of the universe, ultimate karma, triple redundancy I think. And as the old man predicted, the random seed generator came up with my social, and beyond belief, it was time for a comeback to the show.
This time would be different, really. This time I would commit. The third base coach is telling me take a pitch, but I'm digging in for a big cut. That's what I didn't realize before: you have to commit. You have to go all in. You have to be willing to risk all in one swing in the show; you have to bend steel with your mind. The next Shakespeare or Dickens or Simmons is out there, and I'm going to find them, so I set the filter to -1 Uncut and Raw and step into the light...
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
You can't write a space story without a friggin PhD today. It was easy 50 years ago to talk about visiting planets and alien races and genetic engineering, artificially intelligent robots, but now we have the science to actually do that stuff, or it's looming on the horizon. If you aren't up on your tech, you're novel will be picked apart and you labelled a hack.
It's much easier to write about a fantasy world that never has, or will, exist. Plus, people have always been fascinated by the concept of "magic".
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Most *good* sci-fi I see any more is from amatuer or indy writers. Most of what's published in the last few years has been crap, and what's not crap is usually cautionary rather than expectant.
Compare 3001 (Clarke) to 2001 or 2010. 3001 was a boring, unexciting book. What parts were interesting were so cautionary, they weren't fun to read.
Here's a good site with a few amatuer authors.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
One factor I'll bring up is that fantasy has a lot of testing time in the field, so to speak.
Tolkien's works are very heavily based on Norse mythology, as an example, and the ideas there have survived in a meme sense for thousands of years. Similar to a genetic algorithm to find the best stories running since the time of early civilizations.
This is a big competitive advantage for a SF writer to overcome, and in fact, many SF stories are really mythological themes overlaid with "space" stuff as a setting.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
"My genre has always had its ups and downs, but this is by far its worst, longest downswing. Sales are down, magazines are languishing, our stars are aging and not being replaced. And the reason is depressingly clear: Those few readers who haven't defected to Tolkienesque fantasy cling only to Star Trek, Star Wars, and other Sci Fi franchises."
There are two different points here; I'll address each separately.
1. Sales are down. BFD. Just because the slide is a bit longer than average is no reason to panic. Granted, it's a couple of years since I picked up fiction (Lois McMaster Bujold excepted), but Robinson is harping on like there hasn't been a good book in a decade. I'm not the only one who could name six or seven authors who are truly excellent and still writing. Just because sales are down doesn't mean the fiction is there; it just means people are diverting their attention elsewhere. Which brings me to point two...
There is, I suspect, no relation between the increase in media-driven novels and 'proper' ones. People who read Star Trek novels aren't interested in proper SF; I suspect the same holds true for other franchises. If there is a problem with these books, it's that they're included in SF totals, making the SF book industry look healthier than it is.
Robinson's point seems to be that there's a feedback loop between space exploration and SF; I personally have my doubts. I've not doubt whatsoever that SF does indeed foster an interest in space, but is the reverse true? I sort of doubt it.
SF isn't in decline. Quality SF as a percentage of teh total volume of merchandising masquerading as product may be, but so what? Just buy the good stuff, and leave the crap to the trekkies. Or buffyites. Or whatever.
Since Apollo, we've done little visionary work in exploring our solar system. Sure, probes and landers and telescopes have been launched, some quite successful, some dismal failures. But, in most cases, the human element has been missing. There has been no bold adventurer out there, blazing a trail across the cosmos for others to follow. Humankind today has come to realize that Buck Rogers in not just a generation away, and that it will be centuries, if ever, that man is able to travel to and explore other worlds at will as is the case with so much sci fi.
Like Cringley posited the other day, there is no invention, rather, just innovation. New technologies and frontiers are not being pushed today like they were in the 30's-60's, and we've allowed space exploration to stagnate under the weight of governmental bureacracy.
People are realizing that sci fi IS fantasy, and are using the pure escapism of fantasy to, well, escape into a world where right and wrong and reality and fantasy can be so much more easily defined.
I really want to see the data--has this trend he's upset about been going on long enough to actually be a trend? And has he picked up anything by Kim Stanley Robinson, Iain Banks, or David Brin lately? Society has taken a different turn than the Golden Age writers predicted, and our speculative fiction is mirroring this. SF isn't dying, Spider, it's just changing form.
(Flamebait: And I don't know why he's talking about "his" genre. The Callahan books aren't SF; they're Chicken Soup for the Geek's Soul.)
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
my opinion is that authors of past SF works (stuff before 1970) often described SF and SF tasks in a manor such that anyone can understand what it does and were less interested in giving it a cool name. books like 1984 come to mind. however these days a lot of authors try to be more realistic in their writing so when they use DNA in a SF book it can be very tiring or boring for the read who may not understand DNA topics. where as fantasy relies on the only thing that everyone has. our imagination. ask a kid to draw a dragon or a bird-man and you get an individual result. fantasy entertains the mind and excites us. SF (to me anyway) sees like they are trying to educate rather then inspire
The old space operas posited FTL travel. It was assumed that you could get around your own solar system, but needed some FTL to get to the next one. Well, even the assumption of easy access to local space is proving wrong. It's difficult, expensive and risky to move mass from the surface of the Earth into near orbit and prohibitively expensive to move it further than that. A Mars expedition looks more and more infeasable and the old space themes of colonizing the moon or Mars or mining the asteriods are proving to be just so much wishful thinking.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Of course, I could be completely wrong.
Jack
Do yourself a favor and read his entire collection not just the non-OOP ones.
ok fine so right now I only have half of his total works, the second half will not ship until next year.
Vance writes forward-looking SF (but please do not ever call him a SF writer, he hates that!) as well as beautiful detailed fantasy, not to mention some mysteries and verse on the side.
The Matrix is not scifi? Hmm..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I'm thinking of Orson Well's Time Machine where Alexander goes 800,000 years into the future. That future civilization is much more archaic than any of the other civilizations in the past within the book.
-redptam-
Think about it a little. We have laws such as the DMCA that basically divide our current tech into little fiefdoms. Innovators are sued, hacking existing tech is quickly becoming a crime, and the existing players encourage passive use of their tech --not understanding.
Many of the ideals that make SF what it is are being marginalized today. Sort of depressing really.
Combine this with our present science and we know enough that reaching another star system will not happen in our lifetimes. Though Mars should --if it doesn't its political, not technical.
Almost smells like a plot to put all the smart ones back underground where they belong so the real business of making money today --right now, can get done...
Maybe I am just being a little too alarmist this morning. I personally enjoy SF and share the view of the author. Maybe nobody is really exploring SF because fantasy is easier or something...
BTW, what is the genre of "The Reality Disfunction" by Peter F. Hamilton? Seems to be SF, but does have some other elements. Any ideas?
Blogging because I can...
There may be several reasons that "hard" science-fiction is no longer in vogue, replaced with fantasy or space opera.
1) It is not as though "hard" science-fiction has always had mass appeal. It has always had a specialized genre feeling. What passes for science fiction movies today are generally no more than shoot-em-up's in space. More like futuristic action. This is what appeals to the movie-going audience. "Hard" science fiction is too "hard" (must think...hurts brain) and is probably not profitable.
2) Fantasy pops into the human need for myth. Mythology (not necessarily incorrect or unfactual) exists traditionally in historical and religious traditions, Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Christian, etc. creation myths and such, and with the modern push to explain everything scientifically, a major piece of how people function (i.e. mythology in life) disappears, thus a longing for mythos appears, which fantasy seems to fill better than analytical science fiction.
3) The idea of a "bright, happy, future" seems to be relegated to naivety and a cynical "dystopia" seems to have set in (thus apocalyptic movies, etc), and this view seems to be pushed by many media outlets (i.e. bad news sells). We apparantly will pollute ourselves to death in 50 years, the world will be completely controlled by corporations, etc.
4) Finally, the largest bastion of future hope for science, at least in the US, NASA, has gone from getting a man on the moon in 10 years, to losing orbiters in Mars, as one magazine article put it, on the 30th anniversary of Apollo (paraphrasing) "We want NASA to be a precursor to Starfleet, but they are more like a bad post office."
These several things go to explain the loss of interest in "Golden Age" science fiction
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Perhaps the direction technology is taking us scares
the hell out of us. The future apparently holds
fewer rights, less privacy, more commercials, etc.
Who wants to fantasize about that???? Not me!!!
Tell me how do we get off this world thats heading
down the toilet?
At least fantasy still provides hope that good can
still prevail against evil. With techonology the
question is which evil state of afairs wins over
some other evil state of afairs. Mind you the
heros may be good vs evil but the world in which
they live still sucks!
Thats my point....
Just a guess.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
The lucky thing is that this loss of interest in science fiction or space travel doesn't seem to apply to the whole world. Maybe it applies to the western culture, but where I live (Czech Republic, anyway) I wouldn't observe anything right that.
This is still quite close, so maybe in few years time this seatback will also reach us, but then there's still asia left and maybe the inspiration from them can some day sparkle the inspiration back in the west.
"Two beers or not two beers. That's the question." -- Shakesbeer
Since when has Science Fantasy had anything to do with sound science? Sci-Fi writers are notoriously shallow when it comes to true science understanding. I also hardly associate interest in Science Fiction with interest in real science. When I was a kid I loved model rockets and aviation, but I found Star-Trek patently retarded.
I think the real deal here is that the scientific understanding of the general public has grown enough to outpace that of sci-fi writers. It is hard to write good science fiction when the premise of your book is considered impossible by modern physics and all of your readers know it.
I don't think Tolkein is better than science fiction. Gandalf is considered by everybody to be the greatest wizard in the Lord of the Rings, but he can only cast three level two spells in a day. Even a common phaser can shoot over and over and sometimes even in the dark!
frolic in brine, goblins be thine
I think the problem is the authors are more concerned abt creating series which thay can then sell to make a show ;than abt telling a story. e.g Asimovs Foundation series started out as a series of short stories each one powerfull in itself. Only later did it become one series.
;))
On the other hand authors like David Webber try from the start to make each story a universe in which they(or their assistants) can keep writing endless series (serii?). (On the positive side Weber does write abt the Future though all his futures have the US as the victor
This problem is common to both novels written with an aim at the television market as well as those serialized on websites like Webscriptions
**Life is too short to be serious**
Though I don't have any numbers, I believe there are more fantasy authors active today and as a result of this increased competition, the top end of the fantasy genre is better than the top end of the sci-fi genre (on average). I remember growing up reading Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Shannara, Eddings, etc and I just don't remember seeing the equivalent types of books for sci-fi. Sci-fi seemed to slow down after the Assimov/Herbert eras(of course there are the Orson Scott Cards who are the exception, but they are exceptions).
BTW, I'm not holding these up as great pieces of literature, but they are fun guilty-pleasures that are many people's entry point to fantasy and also illustrate the higher proliferation of fantasy.
If you try and look back over your old SF collection, as I've tried to, you'll find things weren't much better in the "good old" days. The characeristaion was non-existent (try and characterise a single Asimov hero- they were all as bland as STNG characters) - the writing was often childlike and way too simple, or became bogged down in its own cleverness (who has managed to read ther whole Rama series without trying to skip some pages) and the often quoted great classics of SF were often closer to fantasy than hard science - Dune being a good example. There were very few good hard-science SF books, and the problem is not taht there are fewer now, but that they are swamped by the increase in all the other types of books which, let's face it, for a non-scientist as most writers are, aer much easier to churn out!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Quite honestly, I think it's the higher level of violence available through fantasy. My son and I read many books at the same time, but they are mostly of the fantasy genre. I've urge sci-fi books on him but they get a pretty cold reception. As we discuss the books we do have in common, it's the fighting and butt-kicking that comes to the top of the conversations. When you get right down to it, that element is almost completely missing from SF. Just look at how Helms Deep was emphasized in the Two Towers.
Phoenix
Another equally plausible explaination is future shock. As a software engineer who is perpetually needing to cram new technologies into my brain just to tread water, I tend to feel that I get enough of technology in the real world. Even the most technically disinclined are being forced to interact with machines on a daily basis.
Our world has become a perpetual learning curve. If I want escapism, I turn to magic, which defies comprehension and, therefore, requires no thought.
Mythological Beast
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
I used to be a hard-SF junkie, and still read a few authors (Banks, Varley) religiously. But my enthusiasm for the genre has waned considerably over the last few decades. I think the main reason for this is that I'm too depressed by the state of our space program (and by 'our' I mean humanity's, not any particular nation) to be able to really enjoy an old-fashioned planet hopping yarn. The simple fact that we haven't been back to the moon since the Apollo program died with a whimper is enough to sour me on thinking about space at all.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
A quick look at the fantasy realm and in particular, popular works, and you will notice that the amount of violence is staggering.
This is not the sort of distant, cold violence of guns, lasers, torpedoes, bombs, etc., but personal, in your face, watching your enemies die gasping their last breaths impaled upon your blade type of violence.
Perhaps the attraction to this sort of violence is a commentary upon what youth yearn for in today's kinder, gentler society. Maybe inflicting this sort of personal level of violence is more gratifying to the savage inside which we have had to reign, in our daily lives.
(see other comment)
It may be that proportionally more publi$hing is fantasy, but that doesn't mean that we aren't forward looking. Maybe everyone is just a cheapskate like me: going to the library instead of buying new.
postmodernsideshow.com
Computer control systems were almost unheard of, and used only on system of fantastic proportions like Nuclear reactors and weapon targeting systems.
Don't forget that technology was largely credited at the time for winning the war. It also brought an end to many plagues affecting americans: smallpox and polio. 50 years ago was a much different time.
50 years ago technology WAS magic. Few who used it understood it. Those that made it happen were wizards in labcoats.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
As far as I can tell, the only thing that John Varley has written in years has been Red Thunder, which is very much a traditional, almost Tom Sawyer romp.
The problem with sci-fi today is that nothing is fresh. Well, ok, very little is fresh. The space fantasy has been done to death. Star Wars, Star Trek, Asimov, AC Clarke... hell, even Buck Rogers and the like. Also, the dragon-slaying, wizards and warriors D&D fantasy genre has been done to death (but has aged well). Sticking your work in either of these genres pretty much guarantees that you will be overlooked in the MILLIONS of other books in the genre.
The freshest stuff in sci-fi in the last 20 years is the cyberpunk genre. This is, IMHO, the cutting edge of sci-fi. Set in the near-future, incorporating a lot of today's tech, the stories are not out of touch with today's reality and the genre hasn't been over-exploited (yet). They make for fresh sci-fi worlds but can easily touch on themes and stories that we can relate to.
If you haven't looked into cyberpunk, pick up some books by Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, or William Gibson. Esp. Neuromancer, Diamond Age and Snow Crash. Definately worth your time.
It depends on your perspective. Something obvious like the Wheel of Time could easily take place in the future, it just sorta looks like the past because there's farmers and kings and stuff. That's what the story is all about, cycles of time...the rise and fall of civilizations.
In fact, with our current political and economic structures designed to maximize profit for large corporations, I doubt there's going to be a future like the one the Sci-Fi books describe. It will be post-apocalyptic type stuff where everyone lives as farmers and they're weirdly mutated into different species. Kinda like "Fantasy" books, but without the magic.
There are only so many ways you can go back and forth between the realm of flesh and the realm of magic and hump elven chicks(Though I must say elven chicks might use their magic to make positions impossible due to gravity possible ;))
**Life is too short to be serious**
Knowledge of technology is kind of a double-edged sword. It's often useful to have, but can be a bit deflating when you think that we still don't have video on demand, reliable and long lasting batteries, or an effective way to truly stamp out spam - never mind cars that can fly ...
I think one of the problems is that a lot of so-called "science fiction" that deals with science and space is so bad scientifically that it's basically fantasy. If I want escapist fantasy, I prefer the works of Tolkien and similar writers who at least do not attempt to label their works "science" fiction.
... and even pop stuff like Star Trek
If you look at old classic SF, the stories were often really covers for introducing some fascinating new ideas. There have been some recent books that have been just as good, but SF seems to have retreated into such far-out domains as to become fantasy like.
For a sampling of *real* science fiction, consider these:
Anything by Arthur C. Clarke
The Foundation Trilogy by Issac Asimov
Pretty much anything else by Asimov
Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash
Phillip K. Dick's Blade Runner
The real test of true *science fiction* is that at least some of the ideas put forward in terms of science or technologies are at least plausible within currently understood laws of physics. The ultimate test is whether any of these ideas ever end up actually being invented. Illustrative cases include:
Space Travel
Satellites
Nuclear Power
The Internet
Biotech
Little handheld "Spock calling Kirk" comm devices (currently made by Nokia, Motorola, etc.)
etc...
The best SF introduces novel new technological ideas or scientific paradigms within the context of a good (even by literary standards) story.
SF is important in the advance of technology for the same reason that medieval grail stories were important for the maintainence of feudal order. The defining spiritual characteristic of Industrial and post-Englightenment civilization is that we place our ideal kingdoms in the future rather than the past or in some abstract otherwordly realm. This causes us to be industrious and to actually try to realize these dreams rather than just pining for a lost "golden age" that never really was.
Budding science fiction writers: the revolution needs you!
I've never understood why fantasy and sci-fi are joined at the hip. Sure there are examples where someone crossed the lines a bit, but that's true of many genres. The fantasy genre has always struck me as the lazy man's path to fiction. I find it far more formulaic than sci-fi.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Here's the problem with SF, though. Go through the SF section at a big chain bookstore, and skip all the books that aren't fantasy, aren't reprints, and aren't movie-related. What's left? Maybe 5% of the SF section.
There are good hard SF writers - David Weber, Alan Cole, Chris Bunch. But they all write fantasies too, to bring in the money.
- Greg Egan
- Iain (M.) Banks
- Alistair Reynolds
- Ken MacLeod
- Richard Morgan
- Peter F. Hamilton
- Plus one of the old masters back at work: M. John Harrison
All of whom write better fiction than any Heinlein (bar perhaps "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress") plus golloups of enough up-to-date science as would make the Good Doctor proud.-- Nothing unusual happened today
Spider Robinson, the living definition of the hack SF author who survives purely by pandering to his arrested-adolescent fanbase and recycling the same appallingly trite scenario into an endless stream of identical "novels," is complaining about the state of modern SF writing?
Oh! The! Irony!
If speculative fiction needs to be saved from anything, it's the Spider Robinsons, Mercedes Lackeys and Piers Anthonys of the world. If they're complaining, that's probably a good sign -- hopefully that people are starting to spend their money on books by authors with actual talent rather than the 2,387th entry in the Callahan's Cross-Time Dragonquest for Telepathic Cats series.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
It's difficult, expensive and risky to move mass from the surface of the Earth into near orbit and prohibitively expensive to move it further than that. A Mars expedition looks more and more infeasable and the old space themes of colonizing the moon or Mars or mining the asteriods are proving to be just so much wishful thinking.
This has been said about just about every achievement of man. Too expensive, impractical, unfeasible. And we continue to surprise ourselves. Never say never. Just because a thing is difficult today doesn't mean it can't be made easy. I wonder how many objects in your home were claimed to be impossible in the past?
Science Fiction is one of the fuels for the man's desire to innovate. In science fiction, you see ideas that aren't feasible yet or proven applied to challenging situations. You can have your no-possibilities world. As for me, I'll continue to dream and try to push the envelope. Because that envelope might just give a little bit.
-- $G
The recent Lord of the Rings movies has swung our interests from sci-fi to fantasy. The Star Wars and Star Trek franchises have focused our imaginations on sci-fi for the past twenty-odd years, but now we're getting bored of them. The LOTR movies come along, they're new and very well done, they tell a great story, and so we start focusing on fantasy instead. In a few years, after the LOTR hubbub has settled down, when someone comes out with a great new sci-fi movie, one that either tells a new story or re-casts an old one in a different light, we will swing back to sci-fi.
I think SciFi is suffering from the "close-up" syndrome. As my teacher used to say, "The beauty of a woman is inversely proportional to the distance from which she still seems beautiful". We came way too close to the future, and we realized that the science is not going to change people. In other words, the properties of people affect the future more than the properties of technology. And, if you set out to explore people, you may as well use the geanre that has been around very long and has proven itself successful. Such as medieval tale, for example. Hasn't changed since Shakespeare. Stivenson used it, Poe used it. Why not others?
I like reading works with magic in it. I'd love to read something of possible magic instead of entirely fanstsy universes.
Has anyone ever read Perry Rhodan novels? Those had magic in them. O.k. really really advanced tech. I believe anything is possible. People don't want space novels like 2001, boring boring boring. No real plot. People want space novels like Honor Harrington or March Up Country.
Most don't care about cool tech just to have a story about tech. They want good/great stories that just so happen occur else where.
Let's start with some classic responses. Problem 1.) You are a faceless Coward. Answer 1.) Even the lowest forms of intelligence refuse to get into a verbal argument with someone who possess the language skills of your first paragraph, and then refuses to make his identity public. Problem 2.) It's off topic Answer 2.) I came here to read about the possible death of Futuristic Sci-Fi, Not to get into an argument with someone who only knows how to act like a teenager. Problem 3.) The likely reply. Answer 3.) While I am taking a chance here, your reply to this post will 90% of the time be just as childish as the starting comments of this thread. Problem 4.) Making fun of other people. Answer 4.) The net gives us one power we don't have in face to face confrontation. The ability to ignore, and slashdotters ignore ignorant posts better than the rest. Problem 5.) Browsing at 3 Answer 5.) The ability to browse at 3 or higher gives me the best reading pleasure than anything else, so why should i take the time to have my mind raped by such a coward with a limited vocabulary and nothing productive to contribute. Problem 6.) I am actually replying to this. Answer 6.) After I hit the submit button you will be forced to reply yourself and now there are 3 posts that have nothing to do with this article and force more people into wasting 2 minutes of there life on something they didn't want to read to begin with. Problem 7.) Confusing Statements. Answer 7.) I have no clue what you are stating because it is interlaced with trival and meaningless context. State what you want to say with personal opinions interlaced. Thanks com.socug@dbricker
My new title at the office is "Vice-President of Everything Else"
is the projection of a fantasy. In the case of science fiction it is the projection of the present into what we percieve as an alternate, and hopefully better, tomorrow.
For those of us that grew up reading SF in the 50's and 60's that meant a bright future of computing, robots, philosophy, colonies on Mars and all with the ever present possiblility of actually coming into contact with an alien race.
Now we're living in that future and it didn't work out quite the way we imagined it. Not only is Mars virtually dead but so is the Moon. We've had to come to grips with the fact that universe is so vast we aren't actually likely to meet anyone else, possibly ever. Superstition is on the ascendent among the proles and the visions of the future expressed in 1984 and Brave New World turns out to be the most accurate of the predictions. Robots took our jobs, but we aren't allowed to become philosphers unless we wish to starve. The TV watches us.
The projection of the current state into a happy future seems to realistically revolve around clone wars that are likely to be resolved by turning us all into computer controled worker bees earning our "living" by tossing rocks over walls just so we can walk to the other side and toss them back.
Is it any wonder that people would prefer their fantasies to revolve around Liv Tyler's little elf tits?
In the medieval fantasy a the single strong man with a sword we all imagine ourselves to be can change the world.
In the future fantasy the same man is declared to be suffering from a pathological syndrome and is locked away with milk, cookies and bottle of Prozac.
KFG
I've gone into a bookstore looking for a new SF book to read and what I often find is something along the lines of: Spiro's Spear: Book #27 in the Spiro Saga or something along those lines. Often I just want to buy a stand-alone, entertaining, provocative science fiction story. I don't want to have to read a story that reminds me of walking into a movie theatre when the film playing is already half over. For those of us who are writers, we write because we love writing. We are writers from our skin through to our bone marrow. Authors? That's a very exclusive club anymore and not one where many people make a living at it. Those of us with fertile imaginations and an ability to churn out an entertaining sentence with proper grammar often have bills to pay and a family to care for as well. Writing is the holiest of chores it is said. I would love nothing better than to write day in and day out, but I must also eat to stay alive.
Science and technology are no longer clean perfect solutions to our social problems. In fact, as technology and science progress, we realize we just keep getting stuck in the same shite over and over.
Anyone writing a far future epic novel that glorifies technology in the ways Asimov and Heinlein just wouldn't be taken seriously. We can sort of look at cyberpunk as the beginning of the end. For escapism, we now look to 'a different time and place' such as fantasy realms or superhero realms.
This is not permanent. Given time, a manned mission to Mars, a scientific breakthrough in cancer treatment, development of useful nanotechnology and suddenly Hard Core Sci-Fi will be the rage once again.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
All the big SF ideas have already been done.
No, really. I pick up the occasional SF book now, and don't see much that wasn't covered in Astounding / Analog back in the 50's and 60's. Robots, AI, nanotech, genetic modification, big scale, small scale, space opera, it's all been done.
It's not all doom and gloom. Stephen Baxter produces hard science fiction, and has the background to pull it off. David Brin does likewise, but he's rather shot his bolt by moving the scope of his work far beyond the human scale. Ian M. Banks is keepin' it real by mixing SF with fantasy by making the technology so sufficiently advanced that the SF part is observing the fantasy part rather than participating, but, hey, Helliconia got there first.
There are others, but it's a few names, producing irregular books. There simply isn't the groundswell of new ideas, because it's becoming harder to come up with new ones, and SF, unlike fantasy, relies on invention rather than re-hashing.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It's getting harder to find well written science-fiction (or at the very least entertaining science-fiction) on network TV these days. It seems that the same tired cookie-cutter sitcoms (produced by clones of the same three writers) or cheap reality shows dominate the airwaves. One network has a crime or medical drama, we see it in tripicate on different networks.
Looking back about 20 years, science fiction actually had a chance in network prime time. Some shows were a bit silly, but they did have a following (Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Greatest American Hero, V and V:The Final Battle mini-series).
These days any science-fiction is either dumped into the death-slot (9pm on Friday -- they must think geeks have no social life) or are under-publicized, preempted or shuffled around to the point that no one knows when they're airing anymore.
I feel bad for the current TV generation. They have no idea what they are missing. For that matter afternoon and Saturday morning cartoons are a in a similar predicament -- a wasteland.
-Crolis
First off, Spier's one of the few real SF writers still going to WorldCon. Look at a list of top SF writers, and note that they all went to DragonCon instead, or just didn't show to any con on Labour Day. WorldCon is so damned pretentious that the folks writing decent SF don't want anything to do with it.
And sales are down? Last I heard, Baen Books, the last bastion of Heinlein-esque SF is ramping up it's runs, because Baen's last couple of newbies are selling real well (Ringo and Flint specifically). I would suspect it is the pre-eminence of boring intellectual literature from most SF publishing houses that is killing sales, while Baen's exploding spaceships and rednect time-travellers continue to entertain. And sadly, Spider himself has fallen to this disease, his newer works simply do not compare to the original Callahan's and Lady Sally's books.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
The last major SF trend I saw was cyberpunk, and the world it painted (say, Neuromancer) wasn't a particularly pleasant place.
While fantasy (elves and everything) has some unpleasant chunks (Mordor or its analogues), it at least doesn't treat those as the best we have to look forward too.
Fiction reflects the world we live in, and in a world where the US government has clearly been hijacked by thieves (and liars) in high places -- who feel free to invade countries to generate new sources of corporate welfare, and who feel free to decrease civil rights thorughout the world -- we need Fiction that gives us a better place.
Until science stops being an excuse to oppress people (farmers, people who want to listen to music, normal folk), SF isn't going to be able to be all that fun.
I grew up on "forward looking" scifi like Asimov and Heinlein. Great stuff. The authors looked at how things were... then... and showed a future possibility. Embracing technology will benefit mankind.
:wq
These authors grew up during times where it looked like new technology was going to solve all the world's problems and right every wrong. Today we see technology CREATING problems (or rather, how it is misued).
So then it's all the more disappointing to see how it's used now, and the types of technology we're developing. Gone are the days where "the public" funded technology research. Or rather, we still fund it with tax breaks... we just hand over the patents to create monopolies.
Technology will not eliminate starvation. It will however create GM crops that produce sterile seeds. These are not necessarily better crops... but you might trick or bribe a few poor countries into using this "low cost" seed. The first dose is always free.
Technology will not eliminate overpopulation. In fact it will do more to enhance overpopulation. One only needs to look at how much "first world" nations like the USA spend on "fertility treatments", compared to what they spend on caring for (or placement of) unwanted children. I'd bet more is spent on anti-abortion advertisements than providing help to orphans.
(Funnier still, most US health insurance plans "cover" fertility treatments. Yet more practical issues like oral health are not covered.. you need extra "dental" insurance, which many employers cannot afford to offer.)
Technology will not create employment -- it will simply shift it to world regions where people are more tolerant (or desperate) for harsher and harsher working conditions. Lowest bidder wins.
A bright future we have, eh? No wonder folks romantically pine for the days of old (forgetting about short lifespans, sickness, low literacy and superstitious beliefs).
The world of Star Trek is a crack pipe.
Sincerely,
Anonymous (-and- a Coward)
(Anonymous because technology allowed an employer to "harvest" employee postings on the Internet, and Coward because I'll don't feel like the right of free speech and association is worth fighting over).
Look at the state of the world today and ask anyone what their outlook on the future is. People already have their ideas about what is going to happen down the road, and many of them are dismal, isolationist and dominated by technology. Many also have been disappointed by the lack of whizz-bang sci-fi ideas/inventions that were thought to have come about by now. IMHO I think that people would rather read about some fantasy world not parallel to ours or some story about a kinder, gentler (or really, more interesting, human and engaging) past then some bleak oratory of the future. I know that I would rather read a Tolkein type book rather than yet another 'The year is 3156...' type.
Ditto Vinge- anytime he publishes something it sells big. Neal Stephenson is getting writeups even before his next book is out.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
It's sad really, but the human condition is based so much around conflict. The moral clarity of the Tolken type characters allows each of us to pick a side and enjoy the ride. Where as a lot of the future fantasies blur the distinction by adding some moral twist.... "Wiping out planet A as a mistake so we must wipe ourselves out" etc....
SF has far from died out though... for me it's become more epic. David Drakes - Hammer Slammers, Chris Bunch (forgot co author) and The eternal Empiror (STEN!). David Weber/Eric Flint and the Honor Harrington series... These are worlds where clarity of morals exist for me as well and I find just as enjoyable. I just wish there were more stories written for each of these.
One final thought, in an era where information is at your finger tips is it that SF just isn't produced fast enough? I read/reread a book every two days.... that's ~180 a year.... Does the lack of constant new material give a false impression of decline? Yep.
In my opinion, the answer can be summed up nicely by Chuck Palahniuk's quote: When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?
The fact is that that we can only escape into the past... the future no longer offers escapist fantasies. It's going to be more like 1984 than like 2001, and in our hearts, we all know it.
Neither of their (Gibson and Stephenson) latest works have been strictly sci-fi. Pattern Recognition has no technology other than what you or I use during the course of our day. There's not even a 'nodal point', the world is still the same at the end of the book.
Cryptonomicon is likewise a great story, but sci-fi? Really? It's technical, it's brilliant, but it doesn't really strike me as 'sci-fi'.
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
Perhaps you should be become more familiar with Dr. Robert Zubrin (Site) before suggesting that a Mars expedition looks more and more infeasible. Just because the "popular" (and there in the sense of most people, not highest opinion) viewpoint is that it can't be done now or soon doesn't mean that is necessarily the case.
If there is a shift recently towards Fantasy, I would say it is due to the success of the Lord of the Rings movies and Harry Potter. It is much easier for different types of people to relate to fantasy, while it becomes more difficult for people to relate to Science Fiction because it is so forward-looking.
For people with open minds that can imagine machines thinking and can see people living in virtual worlds, science fiction is easy to swallow. Whereas you have technically illiterate people like my Mother that simply can't understand some of the Sci-Fi concepts.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
There's 2 obvious reasons's for the decline he talks about:
1. There doesn't seem to be as many good books out there. I've found some, but they're getting harder to find, at least for what appeals to me. I find myself retreating to the past searching for Heinlein's, Asmov's, Niven's, etc. that I don't alreay have.
2. SF books are a luxury. So like the Record industry has found, purchases for these items are among the first things cut in a down economy. Being out of work for 7 months taught me what I really need, and SF books aren't on that list. Besides, when I have $8 to spend on books, I can go get 1 new paperback, or goto the used book store and buy 2-4 used paperbacks. And I bet that money isn't counted in any stats used by the industry.
I've really been hoping ebooks would save us, by allowing cheaper books, and therefore allow a wider sampling of new authors. They may be helping a little bit, but it may be too little too late; ebooks still aren't cheap enough. But if they were, that might be 1 thing that would help pick up the SF industry.
The bright age of science and technology rode a wave of optimism and hope. We'd split the atom, attained flight, done the impossible -- the first 3/4s of the 20th Century can be defined by a long list of extraordinary accomplishments and advancements.
And then it all fell apart, in a blaze of disappointment.
The flying cars never appeared; the human condition didn't improve; lunar landings brought back a few rocks that were more important politically than scientifically. We found that our technologies had dark sides -- nuclear waste, ozone holes, deforestation, (maybe) global warming -- and the bright future of science faded.
Science fiction, even in its darkest forms, is a result of optimism, an assumption that humanity could conquer anything. Once that dream was perceived as myth, science was no longer trendy, or fun, or even desirable. Education (in the U.S., at least) has deteriorated, and a pervasive malaise spread across the world.
The state of science fiction reflects a deep, world-wide depression. We've retreated into fantasies; we find more comfort with swords and magic than we do in beakers and machines. Even our science fiction is anti-technology, with frightening futures underlying the Matrix, Terminator, and other SF "icons."
Much as I have loved science fiction, I lament more the passing of human adventure, the can-do spirit, the desire to break rules, to reach beyond our boundaries and discover. Without those fundamental desires, humanity walks an increasingly tired road.
All about me
A number of things is at work here.
1) "It's not a patch on the old..." People like what is familiar. If you grew up loving Heinlein and Brunner "Red Spider White Web" will be alien.
2) The book publishing industry is in a serious, possibly permanent slump. Publishers have to find what wins and stick with it. There is less room for experimentation. In the past 30 years we've seen the end of the mid-line author - the writer who would come out with the occaisional book.
3) Social control. Back in the late 40s through early 60s it was not acceptable to deal with a lot of social issues or criticisms of the fairly repressive state of society in regular literature. Science fiction was all blasters and bug eyed monsters. You could deal with dangerous themes safely if it was kid-fluff about aliens or the far far future. A lot of this drive and fire has been directed into other fields of late. Or completely snuffed out in our era of hard Right Republican political orthodoxy. But that's another discussion...
4) We won. Things that would have been science fiction a decade or two ago are now common literary tropes. Dan Brown writes about anti-matter bombs. Jurassic Park achieves breakout success with cloning and dinosaurs. The distinction between the sci-fi ghetto and literary uptown has become kind of blurred. Authors who want greater recognition and money can use the material without the label.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Why do book stores always have one section they call sci-fi / fantasy?
They may as well create "Business / Cheap romance" and "Health / Quack doctors" sections while they're at it. What do they have to do with each other? I can tell you what: Anybody who can't distinguish sci-fi and fantasy is simply displaying a deplorable ignorance of science.
I understand that many people can't distinguish between those two, and I'm pretty sure most of them live in the Hollywood area. I accept that, but PLEASE don't propose to make a fantasy work (Star Wars desecrates that boundary) and call it sci-fi. Most of all, don't put that #$*(&#@ in the same section as my sci-fi!!!
Actually the Ents(Big Trees) had to move a river in order to drown Isengard.
Just some book vs movie knowledge.
Soon, computing will stall out too. We're nearing the end of optical lithography on flat silicon and the limits of power dissipation. The SIA roadmap says the end comes before 2013. There's no new technology in the pipe likely to replace these technologies. There's no clamor for it, either - the next things expected in computing are the Pentium N+1, Windows N+1, Palm N+1, and cellphone generation N+1. Yawn. It's like waiting for the 1957 Chevy to come out with bigger tailfins.
Outside of biotech, it's hard to find any bright spots.
I've always found that Ian M Banks writes some good imaginative stuff. The whole idea of the Culture and its associated mythos can take you anywhere you want to go in space or planet based SF. Even to the extent of visiting Earth as in one of his short stories.
Both of Richard Morgan's books ("Altered Carbon" and "Broken Angels") back to back, and am eagerly awaiting the third. They don't involve spaceships, per se, but do have an interesting take on interstellar travel and what is shaping up to be an interesting, if violent, universe. Look him up.
Actually, look up several authors and try their works. Here's what I do every several months that led me to Richard Morgan:
- Go to Amazon.
- Search for a book / author I really like.
- Skip past the details and look at the "People who also bought this..." section.
- List the authors and titles on a piece of paper (or equivalent).
- Repeat steps 2-4 several times.
- Investigate the results that generate repeat hits more closely. I usually buy then, but you might prefer the library.
- Profit!!!! (intellectually, anyway)
So far, I've found several new authors in a variery of genres like this, sure there has been a few books I've not got into, but the successes far outweigh those. If Amazon have a patent on this idea; then they deserve this one in my opinion, because it really does work.I don't think it's that SciFi is dying, it's more that we are in a kind of generation gap. The old guard is passing away, and the new generation is still building up momentum, but there is a *lot* of good stuff out there if you look.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Robinson asks: 'Why are our imaginations retreating from science and space, and into fantasy?'"
I think we're a little more cynical than we used to be. Corporate and government abuses are wider-published, the gap between the rich and poor is steadily increasing, and although we've made amazing progress in computing power, the promised future of days past never arrived (e.g. "Dude, where's my flying car?") Why should we not be depressed about the future?
This isn't about the cynicism in my generation. It's about the driving ideas behind the sci-fi genre which now seem cliched and cheesy:
* Cheap, available space travel?
* Space trade/space pirates?
* Sexy aliens?
* Apocalyptic mad-max futures with cybernetic implants and laser weapons?
* Terraforming planets?
* Cyborgs?
* Space mining?
It's all rubbish.
I used to read a lot of Sci-Fi (e.g., Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, etc.), but frankly, I'd be embarassed to buy any of those novels today. These days I'm into Tom Robbins' novels and the Illuminatus Trilogy. At least they have fresh ideas, believable characters, and good writing.
I find the 48-year-old Disney theme parks to be a record of our changing idea of the "future".
First was Tommorrow Land from the mid-1950s that contained rocket-rides and advanced cars and appliances, etc. This was a world's fair view of a machine-dominated future.
Then in the early 1970s came the Epcot Dome with a "touchy-feely" view of the future. The Dome ride empahsizes ecology and psychology. e.g. communicating with dolphins. This vision grew after the burnouts of Apollo and Vietnam and the concerns of Earth Day.
Then came the "digital future". This isnt a formal area in Disneyworld, but a number of side areas in Epcot about telcom and PCs are going to change the world, plus the ubiquitous video arcades. This is a less tangible future that the other kinds. Perhaps the world is ready to move beyond this after a decade of dot-com hype.
Of interest is the newest Disney attraction called "Mission Space". This may be a return to classic futurism influenced by the Star Wars and Star Trek space operas and as NASA shuttles and probes.
The reason Sci-Fi is leaning that way is because people are smart enough to know what's technologically bunk. You can't just say 'the computer did it' or super-duper xyz drive lets us travel 10x the speed of light and still move millions of lightyears in 2 hours. People realize that space is immense, robotics is hard, computers are complicated, and just writing complicated issues off without explanation breaks the suspension of disbelief. This worked in past because Average Joe didn't understand computers, robotics, and to a lesser extent, space travel.
Now these fantasy sci-fi things... hell, it's all just written off to magic and 'the way the world used to be back then'. How else could you explain wizards and walking talking trees. Which is cool because the fantasy writer can concentrate on the story while the futuristic sci-fi guy kinda has to explain why they can do what they can do.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Thank you for your consideration.
Yep that's it I blame star wars. just chew on that for a while.
I like things that are sweet and not things that are lame. --
You didn't read the book did you?
About the only thing in common between the two was that they were at war in the future.
Most of the best parts were ripped out.
the 21st century has let us down. we, as a collective, had high expectations from the century, and they have been crushed.
Now, if somebody could write a series of books where starnge people get together in a bar. Perhaps the protagonist may have found this bar shrtly after a personal tragidy... now that would make a good story! especially if the bar had barstools with backs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Used to read his stuff in Analog about 10 years back. Realy annoying shite. The two most outstanding memories of his series I have are of a sentient dog who nailed chicks (mmm, creamy bestiality filling) and the assertation that Nixon was responsible for the Vietnam war. What a putz.
You're doing it wrong--http://youredoingitwrong.mee.nu
Great SciFi!
Excession, Consider Phlebas, Look to windward, Player of the games,...
I especially like the names of the space ships ("Poke it with a stick", "Just Read The Instructions", "No More Mr Nice Guy", "Kiss My Ass", "Not Invented Here").
Fun and a lot of ideas...
A certain Narn said the future isn't what it used to be. I think he suggested we go back. :-)
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
because Fantasy's world is not messed up by technology.
...
Even if there are evil things and persons (which were, which are, which will be), the world as a whole seems to be desirable and worth defending.
In many SF stories, almost everything is already messed up. Society, environment, technology,
There is no sense for (comm)unity, everyone is on its own, pollution is a problem, technology is literally everywhere, and "the power" is concentrated, only a few people actually control what is going on.
Just like today... Well, I do not like many things happening these decades, and having visions about a future that is even worse is not always entertaining.
IMO, we need less of the blue-sky SF of years gone by, and even less of the current Tolkein-esque fantasy, and more highly socially relevant fiction, like that of George Zebrowski. Yes, he gets more than a little political and pedantic, but he's one hell of a writer, and his work definitely rewards those who take the time to think about it, instead of reading it while channel surfing.
All humor aside, there still are some people writing science fiction, but a lot of it is the space opera that might just as well be fantasy. There are still a few great and grand science fiction writers: Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Bear, Cory Doctorow. But they are few and far between these days, and that's a painful thing.
While I enjoy the Space Opera of David Weber, Weber is certainly no KSR.
- Tom
I don't know what else to add.
ON TEH SPOKE!~!!!`1
the industry is hurt for Sci-fi stories. as a matter of afact, it is the onle genre I can think of that allows submitting the same work to multiple publishers at the same time.
replcing a 'magic spell' with 'fururistic do dad' does not make it a science fiction story. just a story set in the future.
'Lethal Weapon' as a buddy cop movie. If you replaced the cars with hover cars, and there guns with blaster, it would still be a buddy cop movie.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
People have less understanding of the commonly used technology in their lives than they did 50 years ago.
50 years ago Americans were justly proud of the ability of most undereducated American farmboys to fix damn near anything - including crystal radio sets, foreign-made tanks, you name it.
Now, science is religion for most, and magic for some. But people don't expect to be able to understand it.
Which is why they fail to do so.
Robert Heinlein:
1. Double Star
2. Starship Troopers
3. Stranger In A Strange Land
4. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
All Hugo winners for best novel.
Just thought you might like to know
Sci fi is just slowing down for the 'moment'. We don't have any really great 'inspiriation' for science fiction. Back in the 20th century, more precisely WW1, 2, and the cold war, there was plenty of inspiration for science fiction authors. The 'doomesday' scenario was really popular for almost the entire century. From Jules Verne to 'Terminator'.
You can't solve any of today's problems with science anymore. ie terrorism. Are you going to nuke an entire country? Sounds like 'Damnation Alley' or 'Mad Max' to me... Sorry, been done already.
Whats next? 'Joe sixpack' wants escapism, but SF is just 'too out there' right now. Ringworld? Whats that? Sorry, but the current crop of readers and movie goers don't 'get' it.
LOTR, they 'get', sort of... Ok, ok, Liv just looks sooo good.
Star trek is out, Lord of the Rings is the 'new' escapism for the masses.
The masses don't have to exert their inteligence and imagination too strenuously to read the 'new' sci fi/fantasy out there.
people are latching onto comic book stories en masse right now too. does that actualy -mean- anything? or is it just coincidence that a good adaptation of two of Marvel's biggest comic franchises struck box office gold? could it be that a quirky little shallowly philosophic, comic-styled cyberpunk story blew the industry's doors off?
comic movies were a dead topic before singer's xmen, after superman's 20+ year absence and schumachers murder of batman. yet here they are again.
primarily the main problem is the mass media 'me too' syndrome. where, if one studio picks up a sci-fi flick, the others all do the same (which leads to the duplicate blockbuster craze, swat vs bad boys 2, armageddon vs deep impact, matrix vs 13th floor vs existenz, dantes peak vs volcano, etc). it guarantees that things come in huge publishing trends. (don't think the other media aren't watching too)
right now, the mass market pendulum has swung toward fantasy. why? because a brittish lady figured out how to get children to read 900 page novels. because peter jackson has rendered the best possible mass market version of one of the best 20th century fantasy series. because the star wars and star trek franchises are ridiculously misfiring. because a group of fantasy fans worked out a mathetmatical goldmine in strategy card games. because a huge star made an epic movie that hit all the right archetypal chords with a roman empire backdrop.
its just the way the mass market is leaning currently. do people -like- scifi less now? i doubt it. where was fantasy even 5 years ago? When films like Contact, the Matrix, Twelve Monkees and Dark City held paramount visibility?
its not the market he should lament - they're clearly just looking for a -good- story.
he should be complaining that no-one is willing to defend a sci-fi property as the tolkien estate defends its.
The prime example of the problem with Sci-fi in this current media cycle? they're putting a motorcycle chase scene into the will smith starring movie adaptation of 'I, Robot'. I am not joking. I wish I were.
No-one is insisting on treating the topic with serious weight. No-one seems to be delivering the human stories within a scifi universe that really resonate. No-one's refusing the bastardization of the classics.
but in the end, just give it a couple more years. people will forget how angry star wars and star trek made them. LotR will be just a memory. Harry Potter will wind down as its core audience hits high school. Even the comic trend is bound to taper off. Shlock like daredevil and the hulk get churned out and the WB execs only want to pay for big money sequels for so long. The quality drops, the audience disappears, and the execs start buying up something 'different'... and around we go again.
just have a little patience.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Based upon the no-nonsense tone of your post, I would heartily recommend the Science section of the bookstore for your next trip. You will find it to be convieniently free of the literary devices known as "plot," "characters," "symbolism," "theme," and "dialogue," among others. People with an interest in Real Science (such as yourself) should not have to bother with such sophistries.
==========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
...the driving force of sci-fi is things that seem almost sci-fi going on in the real world, and then extending that idea...however there is practically none of this going on, people don't care about reading about our future in space anymore, because we are not drving to get there like we used to...it was easy to imagine going to another world when NASA, and the USSR, where actually doing things to make it possible...now its routine and boring, we circle the earth endlessly, but we never fucking go anywhere!
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
If "The Road Ahead" is anything to go by, I'd much rather be running around the country-side slaying dragons and rescuing fair maidens.
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
The line is mostly flat until 1900, when increasing balloon aviation and the Wright Flyer make areonautics a viable career path. From there, the graph zooms upward until peaking at the Apollo moon landing. From there it descends and levels off at the intermediate orbital-habitation of cosmonauts.
A human's perception of technological possibility is based on his own experience of progress. The amazingly fast 60-year race from Kitty Hawk to Luna was the time of greatest apparent progress this planet has ever known. For people who remembered that time, their natural inclination would be to predict that technological advancement (especially as relating to space travel) will continue to proceed at the rate to which they were accustomed.
Naturally, as the decades passed and no serious effort was made to exceed (or even maintain) the spaceflight levels of the 1960s, it became harder for the common imagination to accept Buck Rodgers-style spacetravel as occuring in the forseeable future.
I say that the common SF interpretation of the future is an extrapolation of a time-lasped view of the curve of apparent technological progress. Stories written while the curve was on an upswing predicted glorious adventure at distant stars. Once the curve flattened and began to sink, we switched to a smaller quantity of inwardly-focused, pessimistic cyberpunk. (This latter being neither popular nor prolific enough to make up a major genre like "Space Opera" had)
Simply stated, tech overload. I have at least four different products that all do the same thing, Sure, I'm a gadget guy but who really needs to use thier phone to change the channels on TV. Who really needs a 7 remotes on their coffee table. We used to escape into high tech fantasy, now we escape into no tech fantasy because we're simply overwhelmed by the stuff we already have. Perhaps we'e seeing the beginning of a low tech renaissance. Right now I'd take a charmed harp over the latest gee-whiz device.
Give me authors like Heinlein, Clarke or Asimov anyday!
what?
...for fellows whom it hurts to think, as A.E. Housman said.
Fantasy is like that. SF done right is hard work, and requires actual thought. People today want escapism.
Spider Robinson complaining about the state of SF is nothing new. When he (or Norman Spinrad, or any other struggling once-popular writer) say "no-one buys good SF anymore", what they are really saying is "no-one buys my stuff anymore." And people don't. In Robinson's case because he hasn't written anything but for tired retreads in quite a few years.
Science Fiction is alive and well. More people buy more books (even setting aside media tie-ins) than ever before. It's true that most individual titles sell fewer total copies but that happens for two reasons, neither of which has anything to do with quality:
First, there are far, far more SF&F novels (both good and bad) being published. So even though the total number of sales has increased, the average title sells fewer copies. Secondly, the old distribution channels have collapsed. SF paperbacks used to be sold in drug stores, supermarket racks, and so on. Now only the very, very best sellers are often sold in this fasion. So paperback sales for the midlist have fallen, indeed, to maybe a third of what they once were.
But, on the other hand, far greater numbers of SF novels are being published in the more "prestigious" hardcover and trade paperback formats, and sales of those formats are much higher than they used to be. That's good for both author and publisher. Authors are paid more per copy for those formats, and publishers don't have to sell as many copies in as short a timeframe to break even.
As to the health of SF versus fantasy, I direct Spider Robinson to any of the following names: Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod, Jon Courteney Grimwood, Lois Bujold, Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, Michael Swanwick, Charlie Stross, Ted Chiang, Gene Wolfe, John C. Wright, Jon Meaney, John Barnes, Alastair Reynolds... I could go on.
My advice to Spider Robinson: STOP WRITING CRAP. Then perhaps the SF market won't look so awful to you.
In mid-20th-century, The Historical Inevitability of Progress was a religion. Now, we are disillusioned and skeptical, because we have lost The Faith. That's the diff.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
"Retreating"?
What an asshole.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
It's kind of interesting to think about some of the challenges of space travel, even in the solar system, that I didn't know about when I was a kid. I mean, I knew that fuel, food, and water was going to be an issue, but I had no idea about bone density loss due to zero-gravity, or how we'd do w/ solar radiation outside of earth's protective magnetic field.
Y'know, it sounds a little unpatriotic and has some geopolitical ramifications I don't want to think about, but I'm kind of rooting for the Chinese and Indians w/ some of these ideas.
On the other hand, I'm kind of nervous about the idea of accesibility to orbit letting some terrorist put an EMF weapon up way high...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The reason of the so called "stagnant" state of sci-fi today is mainly because the people that understand science are way to busy working it up while writers sad attempts to describe it are pathetic. Just rented latest sci-fi SOLARIS, what a pice of junk! Science and technology have reached a pervasive complex level that most of the writers today trying to harness it fall way short, even the Wachowski brothers and Spielberg trying attempting to portray AI and humans relatonships fall way short to what Kubrick achieved(way more intrinsic, real, introspective). To talk about the future you have to live it. Is stupid to think we will fight a computer with kung-fu (cool looking but stupid nevertheless). Is stupid to think that computers in the future will be looking for their mothers and their daddy's(touching, but stupid nevertheless). I think for sci-fi to catch on again the general audience has to get smarter..fat chance!!
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
Gene Wolfe that is
Book of the Long Sun, Book of the Short Sun and the Book of the New Sun are masterpieces.
-- Back to the shadows again...
for quite sometime i think.
though i find it interesting that spider is the one to point it out. I've never felt him to be scifi, if anything he straddles the fence between the genre.
but it is definitely a continue trend and the causes are still the same. i think one big thing is stale plot devices and poor character development. Its come to the point that when i want characters with depth i find myself leaning more towards fantasy. but i have found some nice middle ground like gene wolfe, jack vance,and china mieville.
I think you have actually hit on something important here.
I am a collector and reader of old sci-fi. The ~vast majority~ of golden and silver age sci-fi are short stories (usually reprinted from magazines) and short novels. There are, of course, series and serials, but the majority of the works are stand alone stories.
When I walk into a Barnes and Noble, I see two kinds of sci-fi. One is the wall of spin-off series. You know, the hundereds of Star Trek, Star Wars, Battletech, etc. series, which are usually written by many different authors, using the same characters and ideas. There is nothing wrong with this: its fun, and occasionally good stuff comes from it. However, when it dominates the market, there is a lack of new ideas being expressed - which is what brought us to sci-fi in the first place.
On the other side of the aisle, I see the regular sci-fi authors. About a third of the books I see are series. Now, I love a good trilogy, but if you compare a 1000 page trilogy with a thousand pages of short stories, which do you think is going to have more ~ideas~?
At its core, sci-fi is about ideas. Yes, good characters, good plot, good scenery are all nice, but in the end I want to hear something NEW. And I don't care whether it takes you 1000 pages or 10 to tell me. But authors get paid by the page, and publishers get paid by the book.
I wonder if it's not that we have less sci-fi ideas, but that they are padded more these days. Is that the price of popularity?
and dont forget zindell's lovely work: Neverness and the triology Requiem for homosapiens. the focus is on religious/social debate and characters are extremely well developed rather than describing a laser weapon for 10 pages. it's very romantic actually. but one of the best scifi books ever. imo. zindell thank you so much :)
oh and btw .. i believe his most recent work is of the fantasy kind ... could this mean something? :/
I was raised on a good bit of sci-fi, starting with Asimov, moving up to Herbert and Heinlein in my early teens. I'm soon to be 25, and I think the term that can best describe my attitude towards space and 'the future in general,' is cynicism.
Look at the tone of sci-fi 40 years ago, and compare it to 15-20 or so years ago. The old-fashioned, nigh-unto-faultless 'epic' hero is pretty much dead, replaced with the flawed hero, the 'anti-hero', etc. The 'pioneer' feel of humanity expanding through space has been replaced with the future of cyberpunk, in all it's zaibatsu controlled glory.
And which future does the present bear out? Hell, since the end of the Cold War brought NASA under public scrutiny and the space budget to a screeching halt, we can barely keep the ISS in order, as pretty much all participants have balked on promises along the line. Present space is getting stale, with little hope for advancement, except through... commercial investment. Which points back to the cyberpunk future, in a world where we already see commercial interests influencing laws of nations (and all you non-US readers, don't be so quick to comdemn us kettles as black, you pots), proposals to electronically track citizens, the broadening suppression of individual rights 'in the interest of the State', the list goes on.
Basically, the world is far from Utopia, and many of us generally see it staying the same or getting worse in the future. Science and technology are only tools. Sure, they may be able to do new things, but they'll just be employed as means to millenia-old ends...
A flying car for every family! We'll have humaniform androids! Space will be colonized!
Yeah, I can see the results...
The future will be an an interesting place.
Yeah, right, you keep saying that, I'll go read my Tolkien to keep my mind off of how the world's on the road to oblivion...
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
Every science-fact article in mainstream magazines sounds like science-fiction. The author takes a few interviews with an MIT grad student on a hot new tech, and brainstorms about all of the possibilities. If you like the "hard-science" part of science fiction, you can get your fix every day by reading the news and imagining a world with all the wonderful tech that _could_ exist. But won't because it's only been developed for 3 years, and is going to need 15 more years of work before it will be available at all, and most likely will not quite work as flawlessly as predicted.
I think it's not so much that we've lost the 50's optimism, but that we don't need science fiction writers to show us the future any more. Lots of more mainstream authors enjoy having the chance to speculate on the future today.
On the other hand, Ray Bradbury wrote about worlds that weren't too far different from our own. Just a few smatterings of new technology here and there--rockets, living on Mars (exactly like Cornville, Iowa, except it's on Mars), robot butlers. Then, compare that to William Gibson or Neal Stephenson. The amount of world-building that these guys have to do in comparison is huge. I think that an author who wrote about worlds as uninteresting as Bradbury's would be unpublished because editors would fear that there wasn't a market for such "un-science-y" science fiction. You need fantastic immersive worlds to sell sci-fi today. Not everyone can/wants to write about that.
It may be like porn. It used to be that grainy pictures of half-exposed breasts were enough to get the Victorian man excited. Now, there's a race on for more extreme, graphic and erotic pictures because people have gotten used to the daily deluge of T & A. With a lot of science fiction being offered in mainstream magazines, the hard-core sci-fi fans need crazier, more technologically packed stories on which to spend their money.
> he notes that SF readers today seem to prefer the Tolkienesque fantasies of some forgotten past, rather than the forward-looking works of science and space travel that used to dominate the genre.
Ah, so he longs for the days of some forgotten past...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I can only speak of the United States here, even though what I say may apply elsewhere. The short answer is: because society has changed.
Good science fiction fired the imagination with what could be based on what we currently know or think. Back then, people were encouraged to explore the world by their parents, teachers, and others. Back then, you could get a real chemistry set, an electronics set, etc., which you could use to perform experiments limited only by your imagination.
Today the only kinds of things you can get are prepackaged junk, where the "experiments" have essentially already been done for you and all that's left for you to do is to combine the (pre-allocated) ingredients. The exploration angle is gone, replaced with protection from oneself. And all in the name of "liability concerns".
We've become a society of frightened children, afraid to go out into the world and learn about it because to do so requires taking risks. If you try to build and sell something that requires some intelligence (or at least common sense) to use and will hurt you if you don't exhibit even a rudimentary amount of care, society will deem that you must pay, and the only exceptions to this are those things that have always been sold to the public, like automobiles, that are too useful to eliminate.
Science fiction doesn't sell because people are no longer interested in learning about the world, but are rather much more interested in being sheltered from it -- and in sheltering their children from it, as well. Part of being sheltered from the world is ignorance of the world, because to learn about the world requires taking risks. Science fiction isn't terribly interesting if one doesn't even understand the basics of the science behind it.
I can't help but think that perhaps some of this is intentional: an ignorant, frightened population is more easily controlled, after all.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Neal Stephenson
Peter F Hamilton
There are good SF authors out there,
On the othger hand, go to any SF section in a bookshop and you'll see about a zillion franchise books: Dr Who, Star Wars, Star Trek...
the problem seems to be that no one is willing to invest in an author that doesn't have a ready-made audience. That means either a well established author, usually doing sequels of ancient but well loved ideas, or else newbies doings hackwork for corporate properties.
It's nto a lack of talent - it's just getting anything remotely original published
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
One of the problems we face today in writing 'real' Science Fiction is our understanding of science itself. In the golden age of SF you could write about rockets to Mars built in their back yards and piloted by guys with slide rules and you weren't far off from what was known to be possible. Nowdays we have the capability to actually do it and we know you can't build it in your backyard. In fact we know that the cost is far more than a jaded populace is willing to support right now.
Sure fantasy stories dressed up in science fiction clothing still hold peoples attention, but they aren't really the Science Fiction. But they are what die-hard hard-SF fans like myself derisivly refer to 'Sci Fi' (or 'skiffy' in the SF fan parlence). Moreover what was once Science Fiction in every sense of the phrase is now 'Sci Fi'.
The kind of stories that once filled us with wonder (partly because we could imagine ourselves in them) are now out of reach in reality; whether due to cost or due to the actual science being wrong. Once again, relying on SF Fannish phrasing, the sensawunda is no longer there, so we end up with stories based on implausible or impossible technology where plot points are based around plasma fires in the transporter. No sensawunda, but the special effects are cool.
The other problem with modern SF was first articulated by Vernor Vinge in his paper The Singularity: "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
Whether Vinge's Singularity comes to pass as envisioned or not, the core point is certainly valid; at the very least the future, even the near future, is probably going to be unimaginable by anyone living today. Why? Because sometime soon, perhaps not within thirty years but certainly within a century, we are going to have the ability to create intelligences orders of magnitude smarter than we are. It doesn't matter if we enhance human intelligence or create machine intelligence, either way the result is the same. Either way something that is to us as we are to mice is going to be calling the shots.
This scenario is pretty damming to SF; after all most of the familiar tropes of SF go out the window. Rocket ships? Well, they might exist, but we have no idea what they would look like or who would be on them. Alien contact? Hell, the aliens would be right here. Humans colonizing other star systems? Even if humanity survives into this post-human future it will change so as to be unrecognizable to us now anyway. How can you write stories about beings who don't share your basic motivations? (Not that this is impossible, but it certainly demands more from the reader, therefore making the book harder to sell.)
As of now no-one has successfully answered Vinge's question, other than several attempts to dismiss it out of hand. Vinge himself, because he wanted to write space operas, ended up thrusting the problem of ultra-intelligence aside by creating a magic 'slow zone' in the galaxy that limits intelligence to a maximum inside the zone.
However a few writers have tried to honestly deal with the problem of the Singularity by writing a new kind of fiction I refer to as 'Transhuman' SF. Cyberpunk was the progenitor of this SF form with stories set right on the edge of the Singularity. Writers like Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Kathleen Goonan, John Varley, Ian M. Bainks, Ken MacCleod, Greg Egan, Cory Doctorow and others have written SF set either just over that edge, or millions of years past it. Although the level to which they are honest in their presentation of transhumanism varies greatly, probably because the more you extrapolate the harder it is to make the story coherent and interesting.
Transhuman SF does require much from the reader. Unless the writer constantly stops the action for 'As you know Bob.' sequences to explicate things the reader must have a wide ranging knowledge of genetics,
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
We are proud both of our VCRs, and our claimed inability to program them.
Huh?
I rip DVDs to a Shuttle PC that I pump video-out to my DVD I also download flash animations and CG demo reals to watch, there is video on demand, Tivo (freevo), DVDs, etc. If you are still writing and thinking about VCRs than this may be the problem.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
______________
The The press coverage from the Globe and Mail might not be quite what we want, but please remember that it's written by a non-fan, for non-fans.In my view, the nastiest thinga about it was the suggestion that the outside world has almost caught up with Science fiction. Problem is, that's pretty much true.
Think for a moment about classical science fiction: With the exception of hyper-drive and teleporters, there's very little that was thought of 30 years ago that isn't either already invented or earnedtly being developed, whereas in the golden years of science fiction, it really WAS fiction...
Space was generally considered inaccessible, pocket-sized radio phones were a dream, TVs weighed about 80pounds; The idea of a computer capable of speech fitting on your waist, much less your wrist was a pipe dream and the sound-barrier was still considered a real barrier.
Nowadays we know that Venus is hot enough to melt your lead miniatures, Mars has slightly more water than the Saharah Desert, one of Jupiters moons *might* have some liquid water on it.
I mean, if you look at the Space Family Robinson now, the least believable part of the whole thing is that all the kids are still living with both biological parents!
Age has caught up with many SF con-goers, and so has the world. Coming up with seriously fictional science fiction is now much harder than it was. In many ways, I'd say that the article is an acknowledgement of the forethought of those who were in Science fiction in the early days. That current science fiction seems paler in comparison is simply a result of the world catching up to us.
This leads to the question then: Now that the world has caught up to us, where do we go? (or, rather where are we going?) In my mind, speculative fiction has always been about the what if: What if technology was like this? What if society tilted in that direction? What if we moved to a world where the biology was just a little bit different?
The advantage of the world having caught up with us is that our market is larger.. Where the Matrix might have been a low budget film 30 years ago, they were now able to rent an Australian city.for filming. Goth culture has caught up with Buffy and Star Trek is such big business that it's almost unstoppabe.
These were things that we were fighting for a generation or so ago. Now that they've been achieved, we're upset that they're now considered almost passe. Simply put: that's part of the cost of success.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
What's the cause of this current 'crisis' in SciFi? Is it that nobody wants to read good science fiction anymore and the audience is shrinking, or was it that there was a lack of good science fiction for years, and people have given up on finding it again?
Now, I think that it may be that Spider Robinson is right. Babylon 5 is one of the greatest science fiction stories I've ever read or watched, but it's a 'cult' classic show. The general viewing public didn't want a great SciFi story. Maybe they still don't.
On the other hand, how many current excellent SciFi authors can you name? Most people will name great writers from the past...the masters of great space opera or political science fiction like Heinlein, Asimov, E.E Doc Smith, etc., etc. I know of and read several good contemporary authors, like Peter F. Hamilton, Michael Marshal Smith, and Chris Bunch, but finding new science fiction authors that are worth anything is a hard thing to do.
We need a NEW science fiction series that really captures the imagination of people, like 'The War of the Worlds' did, or Star Trek or Star Wars. People can't seem to break away from those molds, but I think that's what the community needs.
For a while now, I've noticed that "the far future" has been coming closer and closer to the present.
H. G. Wells sent his protagonist in "The Time Machine", if memory serves me, billions of years into the future. (If not that, then certainly many millions.) I like "Golden Age" science fiction (which I mean, loosely, late 1930s to the early 1960s), and if anybody was timetraveling back from the future, it would be many tens or hundreds of thousands of years hence. A careful reading of Dune shows it to be tens of thousands of years in the future, with thousand of years between God Emperor of Dune and the next two books (which is basically one book cut in two).
The farther ahead you come, the closer the horizon gets, with rare exceptions. Much of this can probably attributed to the general recognition of the Singularity arguments; even if you don't agree with their logical conclusion, change is accelerating.
Most of those exceptions I've seen tend to involve some form of ultimate limit of technology; "A Fire Upon The Deep" has the "Zones of Thought", where where you are in the galaxy controls the ultimate height of your technology. (And we're in the "Slow Zone", where FTL is fundamentally impossible.) It takes place an indefinate period in the future, but probably many thousands to tens of thousands of years in the future.
Considering sci-fi as "future literature" (a definition I do not generally hold to and only adopt for the purposes of this post), it has become extremely difficult to look even 50 years into the future and see anything like what we would call "humanity" looking back at you. A few authors are still gamely trying, and I enjoy them, but I wonder if part of the reason we are retreating into fantasy is that we've despaired of predicting the future; if your book takes two years to write (reasonable for a truly good effort), your real world can shift right out from underneath you! ("Oh yeah, high temperature superconductors, they ARE possible." "Oh, hey, the universe IS expanding at an accelerating pace; there goes my 'Big Crunch' story! Shit!" I think it was Asimov who placed a story on a Mercury that was tidally locked to the sun as a critical part of the story, and between printing and distribution, it was revealed that Mercury's day is 2/3 of a year (or something like that, not looking it up). Oops! That's gotten more common.)
I think "the far future" has simply contracted to be about 10 years from now. I don't know about you, but I'm about to turn 25, and while on the one hand I've noticed a week going by is certainly going faster then when I was 10, I'm hearing followups to stories from 3 months ago and saying to myself, "My gosh, that was only 3 months ago? So much has happened since then! That feels like two or three years ago." The 2004 Presidential campaign alone seems to have generated more news to me then the 1996 campaign did by its conclusion, and we're not even really close to the end of 2003! (Think the "Dean" story.)
I'd pity later historians of this era, but it's only getting worse; historians may someday retreat into studying the relative calm of the 20th century, already almost as exciting as the entire rest of human history combined.
Is it any wonder so few authors care to dare these waters, and only do so if they can reasonably limit the turbulence somehow (Zones of Thought, wars or other events holding back progress for a significant period of time.)? At least Fantasy doesn't change before you can publish the book!
IMHO, Scientists today are missing that little bit of fantasty that makes the impossible come true.
Stop telling people it can't be done, all you're doing is discouraging the young from even trying to do what you think (or have been told?) is not possible.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Hard SF looks a little way into the future and it sees nanotechnology, AI way beyond human intelligence building its own communities in space, and humanity either wiped out by plagues or at best bypassed by the wave of progress.
From the human perspective, the future looks bleak. We've got 50 to 200 years until obsolescence.
From the AI perspective, well, how is the writer going to simulate someone 1000x smarter than themselves? Probably not well. And even if they succeed, how do you get the reader to relate?
advances in psychology/sociology are not as easy to quantify and thus don't make as noticible splashes when they arrive as do technologies which create new toys for the boys to play with.
...
and
we need a break for a while.. a quiet time so the insertion of unique ideas can have a lower threshold of competition.
--
don't kill the merchants, but do make sure they are restricted from causing others harm in their trivial activities.
I find it surprising that Robinson says, "They no longer instinctively lust to go to space." He is rather limiting the scope of Science Fiction, and not suprisingly, his pessamistic view eliminates some good material. Jurassic Park anyone? Definitely SF, but with an emphasis on biology, instead of space travel. Who states that SF is only to be Space Fiction? Nonetheless, I found JP the book rather entertaining, even though I found the movie of the stuff that results from the use of infra-sonic weapons on humans.
/. ground.
Perhaps the sub-genre of space fiction is dwindling because it's been beaten into the ground. After all, it's been popular (among SF writers) since the 1930s.
Also, social trends seem to be making the current crop of young SF writers a conduit to pump out politically-correct, socialist dogma. Outside of the institutions of the far-left academia, it isn't that appealing, (okay, so SF never was appealing to a broad range of readers.) But from ST:TNG onward, I've been hearing the same ideals about the future, or how we will live. I find no variety in the major SF picture or published franchises, (with the exception of that Canadian show with the flying bug -- which was more fantasy than science.) I picked up a book by the highly-recommended Orson Scott Card, only to put it down after the tedium of reading through his carefully constructed descriptions fitting tightly with the current politically-correct views. It was hideous. It made me want to puke. Likewise, the current crop of SF shows are all remarkably similar. I won't go into further detail, since I will be treading on holy
Maybe another factor is that it is difficult to keep up with the science, in order to take it a step further into the realm of fiction. Authors who don't understand the science behind it are universally ridiculed by those in the know, (e.g. William Gibson.) General goofiness and gelatinous aliens aren't accepted as serious elements of a story. If you have a chance, read some of the stuff published in the old Galaxy serials. Most of it was goofy, but it lacked the rigid PC worldview present in today's SF literature, so it was fun.
The migration to fantasy is probably a reaction to the fact that creativity in SF has been traded for continuity with academic future ideals. Fantasy, still having a little wiggle-room left (although a lot of it rips off Tolkein), lets the writer and reader wander a little, without need for scientific validity.
I mean, honestly, look at how the SW franchise deteriorated. It was once a fun mix of fantasy, where the majority of it was contrived during production. Now it is as interesting as a 10,000 page report from some government agency. It seems as though fans of the franchise care more about the details of the various "mecha," and social order, than they do story telling. Nearly every SW fan is an accountant of the minor details of the Star Wars universe. It's like the most important part of the SW experience was collecting and organizing the action figures and playsets.
People are smarter about space and and have more knowledge about what to expect than we did 50 years ago.
With movies like LOTR, it's a fantasy, but it's done with a plausible feel. There have been few futuristic movies that are plausible and stretch the mind in the last 10-15 years. The Matrix being one of course.
My problem with most futuristic movies is they go beyond plausible fantasy, and right into rediculous science fiction. Those types cannot capture my attention and put me IN the movie.
There are several reasons for the decline of "hard" sci-fi.
One is the rise of fashionable pessimism. In order to fit in, people today now say there are no technological solutions to problems. They say this without thinking through the implication of what they are saying. The implication is we should roll back the clock to before the stone age to a time when humans did not use technology (aka tools). When the inevitable protest is made that some level technology is a good thing, it is made apparent their grasp of logic is seriously flawed. Just what year should technology be rolled back to? Is 1491 OK but 1492 not OK?
Another thing is that science and engineering are hard and have rapidly gotten harder as the 20th century passed and technology advanced. People don't like things which makes their heads hurt. That's why magic is popular: you don't need to actually work at it, it's a natural force like moving your arm -- it just happens if you have the inate skill. Sure, some study supposed to be required to become really good but the hero of such tales is usually exempted from real study due to having the right parents or having come from another dimension or some other deus ex machina slight of hand.
The shift towards fantasy mirrors the general trend of society: no one needs to think through the implications of their actions, there is always a fairy godmother (i.e., a federal program) to kiss it and make everything all better.
I predict hard sci-fi will continue to decline so long as society continues in its current direction of diminishing personal responsibility. Going to the stars is definitely going to involve discomfort, hardship, and death. Hard study and tedious research is going to be required. 99.999% of the work is not going to be glamorous, sexy, or suitable for entertainment.
I beleive the real reason why peoples' imaginations are retreating from science and space, and into fantasy is becuase, as already mentioned, the future does seem to be here. Science fiction seems to have lost it's mystery as generations of scientists have slowly reduced fantastic tales of black holes, into a bunch of numbers and statistics.
That isn't enough a reason though, for it doesn't explain what motivates people to move towards fantasy. I beleive the explanation for that lies in what we beleive the future and the past hold. Years ago the world thought of the future as endless possibilities, with technology drawing mankind closer together, and closer to their dreams. That differs wildly from what most believe today. I, for one, see the future as a place where technology rules, and people have been dehumanized by technological innovation; reduced to components in a machine. That is what drew me to fantasy.
In fantasy, the people are the heroes, rather than the technology. In a day and age where most people are slaves to a cubicle, people want to be able to retreat into a world where there is still mystery and where heroes still live. In a day and age where the closest thing we have to a hero is the guy two cubicles over who got us the 5 cent raise; people want something more.
I think that's why peoples' imaginations are retreating from science and space, and into fantasy.
"We had gay burglars the other night. They broke in and rearranged the furniture." -Robin Williams
lately I've been reading some British sci-fi authors and man, they're -REALLY- good.
Peter F. Hamilton: The reality dysfunction (6 books here in NA), Fallen Dragon (standalone book, read this first to get an idea of his writing style)
Michale Morgan: Altered Carbon, Fallen Angels
I've gone through a 'fantasy' period a little while ago, but it's started boring me: there are -some- good non-typical fantasy books (I especially liked the Seyonne series in the Carol Berg trilogy Revelation/Transformation/Restoration) but a lot of them simply rehash the usual 'magical fedex' formula (aka, travel to find about powerful item, then travel to find it, then travel to use it).
I swear, I don't think I've ever been able to find a fantasy book that had 'instantaneous' travelling: for some reason most authors seem to enjoy writing about endless trips through the countryside...
-- the cake is a lie
If you're looking for space-opera sci-fi that's worth your time, you can do no better in my opinion than Alastair Reynolds. Pick up Relevation Space, then the next two books in the series, Chasm City and Redemption Ark. This fall the final novel in the series, Absolution Gap, should be on shelves.
This is some great writing folks. Get reading.
I used to read sci-fi to read about interesting worlds and socities. However, what I found is that I like books, regardless of the genre that are both imaginative, believable and plausible.
What would I suggest?
The Peshawar Lancers by S. M. Stirling. About an adventure in a victorian post-comet strike world where the civilized world moved to the Near East. A lot of steam-punk elements.
Alternative history by Harry Turtledove. Not really sci-fi nor fantasy, however, you'll be
drawn in to the "world" that is created. It gives characters and POVs from all sides. You REALLY know the setting when you get through one of his books. Creates characters you care about as well, because of this..even the ones you hate.
The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld. This is a great sci-fi read. It vividly shows a society on the virge of destruction because of it's own folly. (In this case, eternal life/I.P and it's effects on innovation and progress)
The best book by Robinson is Telempath. A post apocolyptic society comes to terms with the world it now lives in.
Card's best Ender books are the Bean based books, not the Ender ones.
There's not just much else out there that is good. Too many authors substitute Tolkien-esque detail for actual depth. Which is a shame if you ask me.
Well, when mainstream authors write science fiction stories, they claim they're not writing SF because there's no spaceships blowing up or little green men: I'm referring specifically to "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood, but similar things apply to Michael Crichton (the most anti-science science fiction writer out there).
Aside from the authors already mentioned, if you want to see the future of SF, check out the women writing:
Lois McMaster Bujold: Space opera in the classic vein, with more humor than you can shake a stick at.
C.J. Cherryh: Although she still cranks out the occasional fantasy or fantasy-in-sf-garb books such as her "Rider" series, her "Invader" series and the long-running Union/Alliance books are some of the best space stuff going.
Linda Nagata: Her distant-future stories "The Bohr Maker," "Deception Well" and "Vast" are amongs the most mindblowing far space stories out there, incorporating nanoscale and galactic scale concepts in the same book.
Nancy Kress: continually putting out solid hard sf, often with a biotech basis.
Not to knock the guys writing out there, but I thought the ladies should be mentioned too.
Design for Use, not Construction!
lately I've been reading some British sci-fi authors and man, they're -REALLY- good.
Peter F. Hamilton: The reality dysfunction (6 books here in NA), Fallen Dragon (standalone book, read this first to get an idea of his writing style)
Michael Morgan: Altered Carbon, Fallen Angels
I've gone through a 'fantasy' period a little while ago, but it's started boring me: there are -some- good non-typical fantasy books (I especially liked the Seyonne series in the Carol Berg trilogy Revelation/Transformation/Restoration) but a lot of them simply rehash the usual 'magical fedex' formula (aka, travel to find about powerful item, then travel to find it, then travel to use it).
I swear, I don't think I've ever been able to find a fantasy book that had 'instantaneous' travelling: for some reason most authors seem to enjoy writing about endless trips through the countryside...
-- the cake is a lie
1. Authors tend to think that if they come up with some nifty idea, that is enough. The characters are one-dimensional, plot is secondary, everything takes a back seat to the 'cool idea.'
2. Most of the interesting ideas have been hashed over a million times.
3. Authors tend to gravitate to where the cash is. I.e., fantasy.
That said, there's some real crap out there sold under the fantasy label, and I know there are plenty of sci-fi writers who should get more attention. Just look at the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Lots of the latter, very little of the former. And what sci-fi there is in there, is usually pretty poor.
A great sci-fi book I recently read is Warchild by Karin Lowachee. Great, fresh new writer. Check it.
And that hope was dashed away when the man who sent us to the moon was killed by an assassin's bullet, and the men who planned the assassination not only went unpunished, but are now running the country, and essentially, the world.
It's now all about politics and profit. There's no profit in the stars. The profit is in keeping a captive population enslaved for as long as possible, then disposing them when they're no longer needed.
I think that's why X-Files became the popular Science Fiction of the 1990's. And now, we don't dare to dream anymore.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
(1) an Armageddon style battle. Not a Last battle, but a huge, all-out, good-vs-evil battle. I think people are just getting a feeling, though they're looking externally when they should be looking internally.
(2) Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Catholic work (sorry if I sound to some like I'm not being humble. I'm quoting Tolkein when I say that.) That is, it goes back to orthodox Christianity.
(3) Lord of the Rings is about internal moral struggles.
(4) Lord of the Rings upholds that the right will be victorious.
(5) Lord of the Rings gave birth to whole genres of fiction, storytelling, games, and so on.
Now, #5 explains why it was ready as the work of choice to come into film. But those others all relate to something that is lacking in our society, today, and in our lives, today. And since that lack is destroying us both internally and externally in real life, we make up for it in fantasy.
Contrast that with the 50's, when our major lack was in technology, and our fantasies (for that's what sci-fi really is) played out in that field.
Of course, better than a fantasy that fulfills your feeling of lack, is a reality that makes it right. Which fact should make a lot of people think if maybe the Catholic Church has something after all...
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
"Air travel hasn't progressed in 30 years."
I can get a flight from London to Amsterdam for under ten pounds - excluding tax. I can fly to Barcelona or Athens for twelve pounds.
Air travel certainly has progressed in 30 years; it is far cheaper. Journey times are not any shorter, but who really cares. Airlines would buy faster planes and cut journey times if people were willing to pay for it but they prefer cheap flights.
If they'd just stop handing out Hugos for all that fantasy crap and only for Scifi - yeah! :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Now THAT was a good one. Mod up...
One of the panels at TorCon3 was "Has Science Fiction Failed as a Fiction of Science?" The various panellists decided that SF hasn't so failed, and then proceeded to give explanation after explanation of why, in fact, it has. Lets face it, to any sophisticated reader, most SF written today is not written about a possible future, but about what we once thought might be a possible future. Scientific and technological progress has passed by most of today's authors and left them in the dust. Reading even well-written 'SF' like that of Czerneda or Bujold IS reading fantasy and has much the same feel as reading 1930's SF where everything is done with massive vacuum tubes. The story may be well told and the characterization is great, but the setting makes no sense. Where are the AIs? Where are the hugely extended lifetimes? Where is the nanotechnology? Where are the body modifications? Whaere are the ubiquitous microscopic computers? Where is the brain uploading? Where are any number of technologies we are working towards today that don't show up in most contemporary SF? Spider laments that readers prefer Fantasy to SF. Maybe they just prefer that their fantasy be overt.
Now, all is not lost, some authors such as Walter Jon Williams, Charlie Stross, Linda Nagata, Ian M Banks, Greg Egan and others have embraced the new future that is appearing in front of us, but they are the exceptions. Until most SF authors are actually writing about possible futures again, SF will be in an inevitable decline.
I find it rather ironic that Spider Robinson wrote this rant. I, for the most part, have found his work to be more fantasy than science.
While I agree that the state of Science Fiction is rather dim as of late, i don't think I agree with the why, which he doesn't actually explore. If one considers Golden Age Science Fiction, it is to some extent very fantasy. I can't even begin to count hown many authors just evented some new law of physics to help the plot device. Even the greats like Heinlein resorted to this tactic (5th Column). I would attest that most Golden Age Science Fiction is Fantasy in a Futuristic setting.
Today's Authors cannot get away with that to the most extent. While there are many good authors writing today, they do not seem to sell as well as Fantasy. I have been bemoaning for over a decade that I can find more "Fantasy" in the Science Fiction section of most bookstores than actual SF. While I am a huge Tolkien fan and have read the first two Eddings series as well as Feist, for the most part, I avoid Fantasy. Okay, I'll also admit to Pratchett and a couple others. What upsets me about this, is that if this trend continues, it will become a disencentive for new writers. Why write good hardcore Science Fiction, when the money is in Fantasy? How much has Robert Jordan raked in with his Wheel of Time? (which I haven't read)
As for good SF. I think that Robert Charles Wilson is greatly underappreciated. If you haven't read him, do so. However, I think many of his earlier works are out of print. Also of note is Neal Stephenson. His psedononymous novel written as Stephen Bury, Interface, is classic. I am of course waiting anxiously for the sequel to Cryptonomicon.
There are a whole slew of other authors writing of course, though I have noticed most new SF is military oriented. The question however, is how well they sell. Robert Charles Wilson's works seem to disappear from stock within a year. If these works don't sell, they won't be stocked, if they aren't stocked they can't sell, and eventually we are left with a Sceince Fiction section of the bookstore which is actually all fantasy.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
First off, I love Baen Books. I check their site regularly to see what they have coming up.
However, I have to argue with you about them publishing good sci-fi, unless by that you mean fantasy/science fantasy/science fiction. They publish the occasional science fiction book, and while they are all enjoyable reads, most are nothing really excellent. I wouldn't put any of their current catalog in the same class as Asimov and Clark. (Though they are also acquiring the rights for and re-releasing older works.) The largest class of their catalog is science fantasy, usually in the space opera style. Very readable, but not really thought provoking. Mostly it is just a way to get a bigger explosion when something goes 'boom'.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Buying books at Amazon could be exciting if written well. For example, I think the some of the best sci-fi is coming out of the cyberpunk genre, where "buying a book from your cubicle at work" is mentioned in an offhand way that intrigues the reader just because it is so offhand. Look at Neil Stephenson's work; he could be classed as sci-fi. True, it's not talking robots and FTL travel, but it's every bit as exciting. Why? The technology, somewhat; the society, a little bit more; but mostly, because it uses the methods of sci-fi and fantasy. All the feats performed in the genre are used to solve a problem, not "just because". It's also not fully explained -- this is fiction and you're supposed to use your imagination.
As a brief aside, the next time I hear someone bitching about a science fiction movie or book because it didn't fully explain all the technology, I'm going to smack him around in exactly the same manner that a pimp-daddy smacks around his hoes. Back to the rant.
I think the real reason is that the science fiction market has not evolved yet. For us to be continuing with concepts straight from Buck Rogers, Star Trek, or Star Wars makes about as much sense as creating a character such as Sherlock Holmes or Lord Peter Wimsey and using them to solve modern-day crime. They had their day, they made sense for a while, then the world changed and we got cooler, harder, and more realistic characters such as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Read Raymond Chandler's essay "The Simple Art of Murder" to see the same change in the murder mystery during the 40s that is appearing now in the sci-fi story.
The language changes. The nineteenth-century novel used long, florid sentences and lots of asides. The 20th-century novel got a lot leaner and more compact. In sci-fi, we don't need any more conversations between characters that explain the whole thing such as some of the old masters used; that worked then, but is just annoying now. We need to hint at it, and let the reader guess it from context.
Finally, the sad fact is that sci-fi is a lot like romance, mystery, and horror, in that there are a few good authors and a lot of talentless, formulaic hacks. You want to write a book that's quick and simple, something that'll put some food on the table perhaps. You have some masters who laid the groundwork: Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. You watched a few movies directed by some more contributors: Lucas (yeah, I know it's really "space opera", but let's not be purists about this), Roddenbury. You have all the material they used before, and now you can write your book. It's easy.
This last can only be solved through good writing. I am convinced that science fiction needs no amazing talent in science (look at how much Orson Scott Card knew when he wrote Ender's Game), but like every other genre, it does need good writers, one who is interested in the "craft" of writing, as Stephen King would say. With good writing, even a bad concept can be pretty interesting; with bad writing, it doesn't matter how good the concept is -- the story will still stink.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
Haven strikes me as 18th-Century French equivalent, even down to the various names in commmon use. Obviously there are also parallels to Soviet Russia (insert your own joke here) but a little googling about Robespierre (Rob Pierre, anyone?) will clear up any confusion about Weber's template.
I guess if you had a really twisted rightist worldview, you could make some kind of claim that billions of people on welfare = the future of the US, but then there are things like political orthodoxy officers and regular regime changes by coup that are not generally associated with the US.
The Sollies seem to be more like the UN than anything else. There are haves and have-nots and the Sollies can't seem to get anything accomplished because no group within it has the political capital to pass laws or whatever.
At least, that's what I got from things.
From a historical standpoint, there might also be something to a Manties = UK, Haven = France, Sollies = Spain (predominant naval power of the day, had a huge empire in the new world), Andies = Prussia.
I thought the Dahak books had a couple more stories, at least.
Yes, I am off-topic. I'm modding myself down. You don't have to.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
How many sci-fi stories predicted a return to ignorance and fear? The politically approach to technology being taught today, coupled with media sensationalism, is merely helping lead us in that direction.
So, once again, science fiction may have successfully predicted the future. We are well on the way to beooming a planet of anti-technology (and hence anti-science) masses with a small, "elite" group trying to forge ahead. (Those in each group aren't always the nice little stereotypes some folks want them to be, either.)
I hope I'm wrong. But I'm not holding my breath.
[I'm a techno-geek who loves sci-fi *and* fantasy!]
It seems to me like he is asking for his 'heydey' back again - his 'percieved golden age of science fiction'
There is most certainly an amazing amount of innovatio
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Because the populace has been trained to think (or emote?) as post-modernists, where everything is socially-constructed, or the will to power, and the modernist and pre-modernist belief in an objective reality and the right of Man to till the garden has been rejected.
As for me, I'll continue to dream and try to push the envelope.
What have you done to disprove Einstein today?
Suppose that it was possible to deduct money and pay the artist for whatever you were looking at.
Would art get better or worse?
Given the lowest common denominator, would we see a lot more porn being presented as "art". It would generate the most payments for the "artist".
What about advertising? If they could measure how long your looked at an ad, what changes would take place on those ads?
Would the market eventually slide into porn? If not, why not? What effect would there be on people if every billboard had 20' tall graphic depictions of sex acts? What about commercials on TV? If the billboards
That is what Science Fiction is about (no, not the porn). Taking a simple idea and expanding that into how it affects society and the individual.
I've noticed that a lot of friends of mine that have never read a SF book in their lives are big fans of things like Star Trek NG and Star Wars.
If you look at the SF section of any bookshop, you can see this reflected in what is being stocked, about 25% SF by popular SF authors like Dick and Asimov, 25% fantasy (I think because it's not popular enough to justify it's own section), and 50% SF 'lite' (tv and film tie-ins).
The good news is the SF section is now bigger, and I suspect a lot more popular than it's ever been.
The bad news is that most of the books stocked are not for readers actualy interested in SF.
I post, therefore I am!
It's difficult, expensive and risky to move mass from the surface of the Earth into near orbit and prohibitively expensive to move it further than that. A Mars expedition looks more and more infeasable and the old space themes of colonizing the moon or Mars or mining the asteriods are proving to be just so much wishful thinking.
Based on what, exactly? I'll grant you there's a significant overhead in establishing the infrastructure for a space-centric economy. But once you have the orbital platforms and once you have access to the natural resources available in the asteroid belt, the cost of manufacturing and exploration drops through the floor.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
>> ... The essence of fiction is that it is not real, and "science fiction" is supposed to take the idea a step further -- beyond real...
I disagree. Given the "suspension of disbelief" conceit, science fiction is clearly about what might be possible. That's what make science fiction inspiring, or frightening, or amusing. Fantasy is clearly impossible, and, as such, has no similar resonance with real experience.
>> But in this century, what is beyond possible?
Many, many things remain "beyond possible" for humans. Immortality? Faster-than-light travel? Societies that do not wage war?
>> Exploring the planets? Been there, done that, got pictures.
Who's been there? No one that I know. Just a few little machines. They don't count.
>> Science is possible... fantasy is impossible. Perhaps that's the problem.
I don't understand. I read science fiction not because it is impossible, but because it presents a world that is, plausibly, possible. Likewise, I can't tolerate fantasy because it is, well, fantasy. A story that has no plausibility holds no interest for me.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Yep, pissed me off. Made him look like a complete idiot.
That along with losing Quickbeam.
The ents actually built the dam, not Saruman.
They dammed off the river where it flowed out of Isengard, using the walls of Isengard itself as part of the dam to flood him out. A clever solution, I thought.
Anyone who doesn't realize this clearly hasn't been following the news.
Back when I was growing up (born in '70), cartoons were much more focused on slapstick, irony, plot, character, morals/ethics and what not. Nowadays, it's gone largely over to cheapo animation and garish colors to paint painfully obtuse pictures of someone's acid-trip techno-dreams. I think this is why a lot of folks turn to anime...some difficult-to-follow dialogues in some of it, but it was never about purely graphics pizazz (at least from my perspective).
Seems like a fair portion of the SF stuff has gone the same route, with the notable exception of writers such as Vernor Vinge. Character development and the human side of things has traditionally been much more prevalent in the Fantasy/SF genre than in pure "hard-core" SF. With the general trends toward dehumanization and loose morals these days, it really doesn't surprise me that good ol' chivalry and dragonslayers are regaining popularity.
'Why are our imaginations retreating from science and space, and into fantasy?'
Well, Science Fiction used to be about fantasy. Now it isn't anymore (except for a few scarcities like The Matrix). Science Fiction now tries to fit as much as possible of our current world view in a futuristic technological setup. Our daily, (overly) rational world view in techno-suits with blinking lights everywhere.
Our current short sighted (and flawed IMO) world view doesn't capture any imagination. It excels at validating the ego and that's about it. It would seem that blinking lights also get boring after a while.
Science Fiction producers need to stop producing that self-validating, narcissistic, but politically correct crap, and replace it with something that leaves us wondering in awe.
'Forward-looking works of science' are not interesting when we look forward and it reminds us of that not-so-interesting today.
I highly recommend Stephen Baxter to anyone who's looking for truly visionary science fiction - work that reflects the dreams and ambitions of our generation the way Asimov and Clarke's finest works reflected theirs. His 'Space' trilogy (Time, Space, Origin) is among the most thought-provoking and downright entertaining material I've ever read, and 'Titan' is a superb space adventure story that loses nothing through trying to remain scientifically plausible. (I haven't read his Xeelee novels yet but they're definitely on the list.)
Once you're done with that lot, read 'Deep Future' (a collection of non-fiction essays based on the research and interviews he did for the Space trilogy) and marvel at how much of this stuff is actually (theoretically!) possible, if only we could all stop fighting long enough to do some *real* science :)
-- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.
Writing that lacks character development is indicative of bad writing, whatever the genre. I'm sure that the fantasy shelves have their share of atrocious writing, too. (Especially considering that many authors trade in both arenas.)
Fantasy may be about magic, but science fiction is very definitely not about magic. Science fiction is about the plausible. Magic is impossibe. To me, that alone is the single clearest demaraction between fantasy and science fiction.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
We have seen the future, and it sucks. The future is big corporations staking claims on every facet of your life (with the full support of the political parties funded by these corporations), and you become a mere consumer unit.
Is it any wonder that people would rather escape into a world in which you could hop on a horse and ride for a day or two to escape from oppressive laws, and where being a corporate drone isn't a viable career option?
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
What happens if China establishes the first moonbase?
They have stated that they're pushing for it.
"I believe with all my heart that the pendulum will return, that ignorance will become unfashionable again one day"
1. We (I) aren't stupid enough to enjoy SciFi anymore.
2. It is really hard to write good SciFi now because of our lack of ignorance.
Because the hard-science-fiction works of great writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, George O. Smith, Robert A. Heinlein and others of their generation can really be best appreciated by someone that actually understands the math and science that they worked so hard to present accurately, or who at least has an intuitive understanding of it. If Arthur C. Clarke said that a spacecraft would spend two weeks in a Hohmann orbit to reach planetfall, you would find that if you worked through the orbital machanics that, gee, it would take two weeks. People that do understand and enjoy the details involved appreciate and require that level of detail to find the imaginary worlds created by these great men believable. This is true whether the author is writing about spacecraft, self-aware computers, advanced medicine, weather control or any other topic. Even if the story is about technologies or sciences that don't yet exist, as long as the foundation is solid the stories will have believability.
... well. The truth is that, if you find basic math difficult and simply don't care or know whether the author's work is well grounded, you will probably find fantasy just as acceptable as true science-fiction. You probably won't be able to tell the difference. Certainly the people that run my local bookstores can't ... I have to search through rows and rows of fantasy novels to find a single good sci-fi. Of course, it's not entirely their fault: most publishers don't seem to bother properly labeling their products either.
On the other hand, when you look at the sorry state of modern education (here in the United States), at the number of truly innumerate people that don't have a clue what a decimal point means or even understand scientific notation
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
While the difficulty in distinguishing magic and advanced technology is a good point, I don't think it is the right point. Consider, for example, that the typical SF enthusiast of the postwar period was MUCH MORE likely to understand some basic physics and chemistry than the average reader. Doc Smith went on and on about the presumed physical reasons for FTL travel, and made working through the implications a major part of his works.
What exactly is different between the FTL technologies which are presumed for much SF, and magic? For that matter things like teleportation and telepathy appear in both SF and fantasy. These phenomena are equally fantastical in either setting when compared to what we know is possible.
I think the difference is that there is a presumed sociological framework in which the effects are acheived in SF. We presume that FTL will be possible because of some kind of technological infrastructure and societal processes that will make the required discoveries possible.
In fantasy, it is psychology that makes the fantastic effect possible. Indeed, I think the big difference between SF and fantasy have to do with their model for how the human mind is enmeshed with the world. In SF, the human mind is effective in the world because of its senses and control of the body's phsyical faculties, combined with the contributions of everyone else. Telekinesis, telepathy etc in an SF world are merely extensions of the mundane senses and facluties. In fantasy, the mind can directly effect the world through the process of magic. It immediately follows that fantasy is about symbolism and SF is about mechanism.
It's a mistake to make value judgements between the types of literature; they both reflect different preoccupations that occur at different times, and no doubt the pendulum will swing the other way. I think the swing towards fantasy is a shift towards psychological rather than sociological preoccupations. We have adapted to and accept technological change as a given. We are less interested in the consequences of change and how we fit into a changed world. Instead, we are more interested in issues of meaning. Tolkien captured this, in a more judgemental way than I would, when he dismissed SF being about "improved means to diminished ends".
Looking at Tolkien's work, the reason for its appeal is crystal clear to me. It's not about escapism; it's about issues of death, hope, courage and responsibility to our brethren. Asimov's works are much more about how a world with robots of near human capabilities might work.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
50 years ago technology was seen as a way that an individual could gain power, and make the world be more as he thought it should be. Today very few see the world that way.
Technology is used by governments and corporations against individuals, and they have no recourse. Why then should they hope for more of it?
I still have dreams of escape, but I know them to be dreams. I have dreams of creating something new and powerful in the way of software, and I think it possible, if unlikely. But how many can even say that much?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What passes for science fiction movies today are generally no more than shoot-em-up's in space.
Thats why I usually hate sci-fi movies.
Its also why my wife hates going to sci-fi movies, its mostly shoot-em-up with none of the 'chick-flick' stuff that makes for interesting stories or characters.
Maybe the net-distributed indy films will start filling in these areas in the next few decades. Rendered actors and sets are improving at an amazing rate. I'd be willing to trade some of the polish of Hollywood for some good sci-fi with less-than perfect effects.
Let me sum up this article: "If you don't read my science fiction, then the terrorists have already won. (P.S. D&D is for losers.)
Did anyone else notice that this is all based on an impression, no facts, no data? I mean, it isn't even mentioning whether there are less sci-fi books being written or read, just a feeling. So, sorry, not interested. I don't "feel" like this is true, so it isn't, since my "feeling" is just as valid an argument as his. Enjoy your discussion about a non-phenom.
Your's, and other posts, seem to take as a premise the notion that science fiction is read simply because it expresses "dreams", and that it will not be read if those "dreams" don't come true. IN other words, that science fiction readers are looking only for accurate predictions, not good story telling.
To the contrary, science fiction is read for the same reason all literature is read: It tells a good story about interesting characters. If a science fiction story simply lays out a series of predictions and extrapolations, wrapping them around an implausible plot and cardboard characters, that's the fault of the author, not the genre.
I agree with Robinson that the health of science fiction has been better, but I suspect that it is to the authors, not the readers, we should look for the cause.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I've noticed that our entire society leans more toward fantasy, mysticism, and mythology, lately. Reality, or possible future realities, is becoming rare in any form of mass media. Even 'Reality TV' is horribly far from reality.
It has been suggested that we are entering a new 'Dark Ages', of sorts. This is perhaps in response to the fear, rational or not, of what near-future technology may bring - human cloning and a list of other 'scaries'.
What I find very interesting is this: In ages past, man feared nature, because of what he did not know. In this age, man is beginning to fear science, because of what he can know.
On a side note, a question that I'd like to ask, which is somewhat related:
How would you classify works such as OSC's Ender series? Obviously set in the future, but after Ender's Game (and a few pieces here and there in the next 3 books), they are mainly focused on personal, moral, and geopolitical issues, with little or no mention of any technologies or lifestyle changes. Even the 'nets' are simply categorized hub-style Internet groupings. It seems to me that the Ender books set in the near future (as opposed to the 3000-years-ahead future) read more like modern fantasy... almost like what you would get if you took the politics and war-making in the Lord of the Rings, and set them in modern times, while ignoring the rest of the story.
"The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants." --Thomas Jefferson
I think there's no question there - the new authors on the scene are superb, particularly the Brits. I love the work of Reynolds and Banks is achieving GrandMaster status.
The problem is the genre is obviously to blame.
Al.
Sci-Fi and fantasy have always had one thing in common: they rely heavily on escapism. As long as both consisted of pleasant fantasies, like cruising freely among the stars or roaming a countryside with your merry companions, all was well. But now we no longer envision cruising through space freely in our (or our children's) future, instead imagining bleak 1984/Farenheit451/Brave New World style futures.
/. :)
Sci-Fi is no longer escapist, it's cautionary. And I get enough of that from reading
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
featuring anti-heros possessing uncontrolled "hot throbbing rods"
The most interesting scifi In run into these days is more inward looking than outward looking. I think we're closer to altering ourt own nature (through genetic engineering and stuff) than we are to exploring the stars. Ted Chiang has done some great short stories about the interesting possibilities of enhancing yourself. What would it really be like to be superintelligent, or be able to have direct control of your brain?
Of course, fantasy isn't what it used to be either. My personal favorite author right now is Jonathan Lethem, who wrote in the sci-fi/fantasy domain for a while, but has moved towards more inward examinations of freakishness. Instead of the freakish world, the freakish self. Motherless Brooklyn is a great example.
Though pure escapism doesn't interest me as much as good writing, and good questions explored through storytelling. So maybe it's just me.
'In knowledge is power, in wisdom humility.'
At Torcon 3, I caught up with Michael Lennick, co-producer of a superb Canadian documentary series about manned spaceflight, Rocket Science. His next project examines the growing phenomenon of people who refuse to believe we ever landed on the moon. Not because he sees them as amusing cranks . . . but because they're becoming as common as Elvis-nuts. And it's hard to argue with their logic: It beggars belief, they say, that we could possibly have achieved moon flight . . . and given it up.
... and frightening. It puts into stark relief what kind of a society we have become. There are no big dreams that aren't tied to wealth and its acquisition. We are navel gazing away the new millenium on our tiny planet in an unfashionable part of the galaxy.
I had never heard that argument but it rings true
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
What have you done to disprove Einstein today?
:)
That would make a kick ass bumper sticker
Finkployd
Also try C.S. Friedman's In Conquest Born and The Madness Season.
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
Iain Banks or Alastair Raynolds?
//c rocked, so did my best friend's Amiga!
Sure, I can remember the thrills of reading Asimov, Vance and many other "old timers" for the first time, but before putting out statements like that, you might also take into account that the first sloppy kiss was the best, they don't make cars like they used to, the weather has all turned to shit and erections were better in my days...
And to talk to the crowd here, my Apple
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Let's ignore for a minute the prohibitive cost of actually moving material from the asteroid belt to the Earth. Do you actually think for a minute that anyone in their right mind is going to let people manipulate huge masses in the vicinity of the Earth? If someone fails to convert meters to miles and a probe strikes Mars instrad of going into orbit, no big whoop. But if someone screws up handling an asteroid and plops it in the middle of the Pacific Ocean instead, that's a very big deal. It is realities like this which make this kind of economic activity UNeconomic.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Spider Robinson has himself provided one reason for the decline in the older forms. It's the title piece in his collection "Melancholy Elephants". And a bitter diatribe against the indefinite extension of copyrights. And, to my mind, quite moving.
The short form is:
1) There are only so many ways of telling a story that people find enjoyable.
2) Copyright extension causes it to be impossible to rework an older form, and, even more corrosively, it becomes difficult to avoid accidental plagerism. (Just consider the effect that SCO is trying to achieve.)
3) So people progressively move to uncluttered fields. But there are only so many forms that are enjoyable.
4) Creative activity slows...and slows...and slows
I don't do the story justice. Find it and read it. It's a sufficient explanation for this, and many other problems.
(I have given other explanations for this problem, and they are also true.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Of course, in London we're used to being jammed into a tube.
1) It is not as though "hard" science-fiction has always had mass appeal. It has always had a specialized genre feeling. What passes for science fiction movies today are generally no more than shoot-em-up's in space. More like futuristic action. This is what appeals to the movie-going audience. "Hard" science fiction is too "hard" (must think...hurts brain) and is probably not profitable.
I'm trying so very hard, but failing to find an interview from years ago (Late 70s? Early 80s? Maybe even the early 90s, but I believe it was earlier.) that was done with a major author (whose name escapes me, which is probably why I can't find it) in which he railed against the differences between 'Sci Fi' and 'Science Fiction'.
Now, his definition of Sci Fi was what fits your comment of 'shoot-em-ups in space' -- what Phillip K. Dick termed space adventures and havewhat others called space operas. This author's definition of science fiction fell somewhere between the 'hard' science fiction (but encompassed it) and the space operas that he felt was discrediting the genre.
Wish I could find it, it was a good interview. I know Spider Robinson did an article for the Globe and Mail in the late 90s on the same subject, but I can't even find that now.
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
I read the book too and was impressed. It was a good crime/noir novel that just happened to be written in a sci-fi setting.
Well worth the read.
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
"We want NASA to be a precursor to Starfleet, but they are more like a bad post office."
HAHAHHAH. Thats the funniest thing I've heard all day.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Well, most of his arguments seem to be about sci-fi in the english-speaking world. How's sci-fi doing in the rest of the world? Are there any fresh ideas brewing in other languages that haven't made it over here yet? I was glad to hear a while back that Tezuka Osamu's Hinotori (or "Phoenix") comics were going to be translated into english, as they're really trippy sci-fi. However, I doubt it's going to make much of an impact here, especially as it's in comic form.
Sturgeon
)
Science fiction poses 'what if'
Fantastic literature bends your mind (leguin on genres: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/AlternateTitles.html
Fantasy is escapism.
Huxley - real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.
We've exhausted much of the 'what if' story lines. robots, genes, nanotech, AI, space opera, drugs, alien sex, bug eyed monsters, apocolypse, distopia, utopia, gender, time travel. For someone to come up with new what if idea *and to write well about it* is few and far between. Kage Baker's Corporation series was the last series I read with anything novel (heh) in it, and she first published that series 6+ years ago.
We in technology business have taken ideas in SF and made them reality. However, society at large has not taken the rest of the ideas in SF and made them reality. We've done the easy part. The hard part is in pushing people to utopia. Why do we need money? When we can feed everyone on the planet with advances in tech, why do people starve? When we have so many advances in productivity and efficiency, why are people on the street?
Because society has not kept up with tech, and tech has only served to further stratify the differences between the haves and have nots.
It is incumbant upon us in tech to push for the great society, where everyone has food and robots and a place to live and the kitchen of tomorrow. And yeah, some people will be lazy, but some will be the kind who will push the human race forward, but were unable to because they were exhausted from working 3 jobs to barely feed their families.
Unfortunately most of the engineers in tech (I am generalizing) suscribe to the ayn rand libertarian I'm smarter than you therefore I should have more and screw you anyway cuz you beat me up in grade school mentality.
When technology has mostly served to screw people over, why should they want more of it? When an technologically based meritocracy asks more of you than a despotically arranged society ala lord of the riungs, why should you want it, unless the people suggesting the technologically based meritocracy make it more seductive than someone telling you what to do with your life.
Or, if you've spent all day trying to make a technologically based meritocracy, perhaps it's nice to escape sometimes into a romantic ideal. Or, if you've consumed all the mind bending fantastic literature, perhaps it's nice to escape into something where the rules make sense. Or, if you spend all day listening to reports of the pf'ers in DC dismantling previous generation's attempts at building a technologically based meritocracy, perhaps all you want to do is escape.
Being a doozer is hard.
My point is that things which looked possible in the 50s and 60s are looking much less possible today. The future *has* failed to live up to our dreams. Since most SF is an extrapolation of current and near future trends, and since it dosn't look like we'll be doing much space exploration other than looking through ever stronger telescopes, the SF reflects those near-term trends.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Let me hasten to add that fantasy isn't sitting still either. Just try anything by Jasper Fforde or China Mieville if you want to be jolted totally out of your usually tracks.
This lament about the death of SF gets repeated every few years. It's less true now than it ever was.
Author of Permanence and Ventus, co-author of The Claus Effect and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing SF.
Dude. Barnes and Noble puts it all in the same section anyway- it's clear to them there's no distinction between Fantasy or Sci-Fi. It's a preference- you want your dragons with scales or hyperdrive motivators?
That said, science fiction has an alarming tendency to ooze semen out of its pants whenever technology comes up. Frankly, it's fucking dull. Fantasy, conversly, rarely gets ubertechnical- at least what I've read- and consequently, is better for it, as the author's hitting pagecount on plot and not technical description.
That said, the fact that Trek and Star Wars have gotten so damned BAD that you can HEAR the suck coming out of the TV says something- the sci-fi franchises that I grew up with in the 80s have peaked and are in a state of active decline- and we finally have the technology to go about making realistic looking fantasy movies. Hence the success of LOTR.
Why Lucas is spending tens of millions fucking up Star Wars is beyond me- I'd love it if he'd drop a few million on cleaning up the end of Willow, plzkthks.
Anyway.
Sci-fi in decline? Bull. Shit. You could make the case for everything being in decline. Fantasy has the public limelight in entertainment because sci-fi has resoundly DROPPED THE FUCKING BALL. Sci-fi has failed to give people what they want.
With the single exception of Transmetropolitan, which is easily one of the best comic books I've read. Ever. Blows away any sci-fi novel I've read in the last ten years, easily.
>> But in this century, what is beyond possible?
Many, many things remain "beyond possible" for humans. Immortality? Faster-than-light travel? Societies that do not wage war?
I would think that anything you might want to classify as "beyond possible" would be something that we don't know now, we don't know how to do it, and we don't know how to get to the point where perhaps we could figure out how to do it.
Faster than light travel is currently one of those things that fits into "beyond possible". Other examples would be gates to other universes (or even being able to detect the existences of such).
The other two examples you give I do not think necessarily fit, though it depends on how you'd want to define "immortality". If you mean guaranteed to live forever, then yes, because of end-of-the-universe stuff and all that. However, if you mean unbounded lifespans, then that's in the possible area, because there appear to be means to get to that point. And societies without war are definitely in the possible area.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Because the rationalism of the modern world has left us without any hope. Alot of comments express alot of pessimism in the future. The modern view of the world is a stark view of the world without any spirituality and moral underpinnings. People have learned that the modern view was lacking. Sci-Fi is a product of the modern world. We are now in a post-modern world and Sci-Fi is therefore not as popular.
Try picking up a copy of Harry Turtledove's Worldwar: In the Balance.
Here's a quickie synopsis:
It's 1942. The United States is recovering from the suprise attack on Pearl Harbor, The Desert Fox is battling the British on North Africa, Hitler has given up on Britian and has betrayed Stalin, and in China the Japanese, the Kuomintang, and Red Army battle for control.
Unbeknownst to mankind, orbiting above the earth is the Conquest Fleet of the Race of Tau Ceti II. The sent a couple of probes to Earth back in the twelth century, to see if mankind has advanced much since the probe a few hundred years before.
Twenty years ago the Race, a small reptilian species, sent the Conquest Fleet to earth filled with tanks, fighter aircraft, and nuclear missles expecting to best savages on horseback. Fortunately for us, we developed radio, internal combustion, and firearms in the veritable blink of a nictitating membrane, and we're on our way to developing nuclear weapons on our own.
The Race has no idea what surprises are in store for them until they come out of cold sleep. The Race, and the two other species they've assimilated are slow moving beings like themselves. The Race's history is 50,000 years deep. It took them millenia to develop radio and television, and they expected us to need the same.
What was the last real original non-franchise piece of Sci-Fi you took up?
... personally I think there's more SF out there right now than there has been in years.
I'm currently reading the Cassandra Complex by Brian Stableford. I found an anthology by Dozois called "Supermen: Tales of the Posthumous Future" which gave me lots of leads on current, good, hard SF writers. Try Ted Chiang for some really hard to classify short stories.
Although I really enjoyed the early Callahan stories, Callahan's Key was a useless gosh-aren't-I-clever wankfest with a hacked on plot just to justify the book. I have yet to read Callhan's Con. If Spider thinks SF is dying, perhaps he should try looking for some instead of claiming "the sky is falling".
Further evidence: Egan, Baxter, Reynolds, McAuley,
It beat Star Trek to death. I know at least 20 sci-fi fans, and none admit to watching 'Enterprise' regularly. Star Wars has been turned into a merchandising machine. "Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the REAL money from the movie is made." - Yogurt.
My advice is just be patient. Pop culture takes obscure stuff, thows it into the mainstream, then dumps it for something new a year or two later. Now Tolkien is all the rage. Just wait, in time people will become tired of that too and eventually new and fresh ideas will come back to Sci-Fi. Or someone will do a "Foundation" movie series that will make LOTR look like a bedtime story.
I think most of our planet has stopped dreaming. I the 60s and 70s most of the population was thrilled with the possibility of space exploration and "going where no-one has gone before". Nowdays it is getting more money than anyone has got before. To most people: technology = Bill Gates = big bucks.
Look just at the way investors think -- if it doesn't pay off in 2 years they are not going to invest. Space exploration takes decades. Let us not kid ourselves -- with the pace of space exploration in the 60s, we could put the man on Mars in a decade and probably start colonizing the Moon in the 2 decades.
The productivity and the wealth of the world are
enought to both solve the world hunger, education and space exploration.
The system encourages people who are best at accumulating capital not to spend it on long term goals. Look just at John Carmack vs. Bill Gates.
John Carmack is a dreamer, hence the X-Prize project involvement -- Bill Gates is not.
The unregulated free market system unfortunately prefers the later.
Most of the very creative people in the world cannot even pursue their creativity because of the economic system.
At least for me, it is the opposite: give me hard SF, that which uses 'known' physics (and not that of, say, Star Trek) ANYDAY over pixies and elves and dragons and magic.
I'd like to emphasize though, 'hard' science fiction (focussing on real science and definitely possible outcomes) requires a certain amount of education to read. Children of the last decade are being educated poorly - and their imaginations suffer for it. Literate people dream BIG. Illiterate people dream cartoons.
The Apollo program was motivated by everything but science; it was the single most important propaganda effort of the cold war. Even most shuttle missions, I believe, have been of military nature. NASA has made its share of mistakes since putting a man on the moon, but putting the blame solely on NASA for the lack of progress in space travel is not exactly fair. If the US government threw its full weight behind a Mars program, things would look very different. Whether this would make scientific sense or whether Apollo-like spending is sustainable in the long term are different matters. The cold war is over and it is painfully obvious that the US is the sole surviving superpower even if it does not send its soldiers to other planets.
The last two books I have picked up, from "new and exciting authors" (because you can only read the Masters so many times), have been from authors that have been more concerned with politics than telling a story.
Rob Sawyer's "Hominids" has a kernel of an idea for a great story, but Sawyer acts as if the story is an inconvenience and he just wants to tell you how great his liberal fantasy world is. I know your philosophy, Rob, I watch TV. I don't need ~800 pages to review the philisophy. If I wanted a political discussion I'll go to the Current Affairs section of the bookstore. I wanted a SciFi _STORY_. Your book was in the SciFi section, why was there no story in your book?
Then there was a time travel book I picked up and read in-store (it was short). I was by a gay author. Now I don't care of you're gay. I have other things to worry about than how you have sex with. But if you're going to be a fiction author, I expect you to tell a story. Instead the author wanted to talk about being gay. Once again, could we move those books that don't tell a story out of the fiction section?
Frankly, science fiction has always been about breaking barriers, exploring new ideas. Because of this fact true Sci-Fi either tends to be shades of gray, or challenge the status quo in which so many look for security. The problem is people don't want grey, people don't want their pre-packaged ideas about society to be challenged. Society is just begging to see what a dark and scary place the world still is, they want a world that is black and white, where good triumphs over evil, even when they're not really sure what either of those mean anymore.
Hi!
Happy Monday! Why is Science Fiction called out as its own category in the Duey Decimal system? Joseph Campbell is my understanding. I'm not sure how many years ago Campbell died but Science Fiction had no torch passing, unfortunately. Heinlien, Herbert, Daw, Zelazny all had ties to Campbell. Mainly in Campbells editorial review of Sci Fi magazines. Who buys Sci Fi magazines these days? Or Sci Fi stories? Roger Zelzany started his own publishing company because he said back in the 1980's the book publishers cracked down and declared a 300 page minimum per book. Prior to that many "books" were nothing but elongated Sci Fi stories or a collection of stories. These books were only 100 pages and sold for $2.
Campbell required research into mythology, religion, history and science as the foundation for a good Sci Fi story. Unfortunately, that's a lot of work. But you can still find it. Try out one of the later series by Jerry Pernoule and Larry Niven. Lots of science and history. You learn something via a good Sci Fi story. Essentialy, Campbell had a Sci Fi community established that has since dissolved into history.
The Greens are the Taliban of the west. They want to regress our society to an immagined older one that never existed.
writes about very hard SF, full scale space-opea. Banks is about the same ahe as MacLeod. The interesting thing is that Banks writes conventional fiction as well.
See my journal, I write things there
Older works, however (e.g. Golden Age SF or Renisance portraiture) have had the advantage of seeing the worst of the garbage fall away (Heck, did *you* save the crappy poetry you wrote in 7th grade?). As a result, we tend to forget the garbage that came before it and treat the current crop more critically ("Back in *my* day the music was better..."). It's an ongoing process you can see it today if you turn to any oldies station - more Santana and less Partidge Family. The ratio is definately different than the actual play and sales ratios you saw when the songs were new.
Just something to think about...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
What makes people yearn so for the future? What makes them think it will be any different than the present, really, or make them happy? What is everybody trying to escape from? Why can't people see that all the "new" "cutting edge" shit is just the same old shit, only moreso?
I appreciate technology. I am NOT a luddite. But technology is not what is going to "save us", as one post has it. What will "save us" is taking a breather, thinking some things through, asking questions like "what's the point?".
Be here now.
In the back of Dragon Magazine.
Some bit about the differences between Science Fiction and Fantasy. His take, no difference.
Except in Science Fiction you have access to a lot more power.
It ends in a tavern (where else) with two guys.
"Look, mutants".
"Naw, they're trolls."
"Mutants!"
"Trolls!"
"Well, maybe they're mutant trolls?"
"I'll buy that."
Waitress: "You guys are looking in the mirror again!"
I'm wandering over a blasted landscape (radiation? wild magic?) with my pointy-eared companion (Vulcan? Elf?) looking for an artifact (alien? magic?) to defeat the mindless minions (robotic? zombie?) of the evil Lord Antagonist?
In most of the stories, there isn't any difference. Too many of the plot devices (that's all they are) can be switched between genres.
The only differences are that in good Science Fiction, you don't have to explain the plot devices because people will understand them based off of their current knowledge.
1: The genre is swamped with juvenile series books!
Sorry, the genre has always been swamped with juvenile series books. The name Captain Future mean anything to you? The problem is not the volume of low end material that's being published, the problem is that there doesn't seem to be much of a high end. The question is why.
2: Authors are too interested in setting at the expense of character! ... they were ok, but they weren't in even remotely the same league as Proust or Dickens).
If anything, I'd say it was the opposite. Characters in SF, even the good stuff, have rarely been well developed. This is perfectly appropriate: SF writers have to spend a much higer percentage of words sketching in the background landscape than do mainstream writers. Consequently they tend to rely more on character "types" than do their mainstream counterparts. The problem is that SF writers are expected to present more well-rounded characters than they were in the past, with the result that we get a lot of tacked on sentimentality that really adds nothing to the stories. (And don't try to tell me that classic sf writers like Asimov, Heinlein & Clarke had great characters
3. Science has caught up with SF! ... ... which is to say that science has tended to kill off genre conventions faster than it replaced them.
There's probably some truth to this, in the sense that science has made it harder for us to project our fantasies on to the future in ways that make dramatic sense.
4. It's all been done!
Not strictly true, but it's probably safe to say that most of the low hanging fruit has been picked. It's a lot harder to come up with anything original now than it was back when nothing had been written yet.
5. People are a lot more pessimistic about technology now. SF is all about optimism! ... until those commies got there first with Sputnik. DDT was great for getting rid of those pesky insects ... and birds too, as Rachel Carson pointed out in Silent Spring (early 60s). None of which stopped a whole lot of great sf from being written during those decades, much of it far from the rah-rah gung ho optimism one might find in, say, the collected works of E.E. "Doc" Smith.
People have always had a love/hate relationship with technology. Yeah, the atom bomb hastened the end of WWII, but it also led to an arms race that a whole lot of people figured would probably result in the end of the world. Space travel was a pleasant fantasy
Here's my suggestion as to why good written sf has been in decline lately.
Economics: The Thor Power Tools decision essentially killed the careers of many mid-list authors. Most of the interesting sf writers were mid-list authors. Follow the money ...
I am a faceless coward because I do not want to get moderated down for having unpopular opinions or get added to the foes list of a person who disagrees with what I have said. That tends to be the childish response of most Slashdotters. They ignore what they don't like even if what they don't like is perfectly valid. Problem 2.) It's off topic
I made it clear in my original post that it is off topic. But that give no one the right to ignore it if the ideas expressed within are valid. Again, the typical Slashbot response is to stick one's head in the sand or cover one's ears while yelling "I CAN'T HEAR YOU! I CAN'T HEAR YOU..." Answer 3.) While I am taking a chance here, your reply to this post will 90% of the time be just as childish as the starting comments of this thread.
I believe you've just encountered one of the exceptions to the rule. I only made the opening salvo to get people's attention and perhaps annoy the kinds of people who would be annoyed by such talk. Frankly, the people who don't like profanity or trollish behavior are probably fairly uniniteresting and unimaginitive sorts. They should be chased away from communities that are trying to encourage free thinking. Profanity can be a beautiful and powerful way of expressing ones feelings. Too many people fall for the arrogant view that profanity is the sign of low intelligence or immaturity. Certainly this just isn't true. Answer 4.) The net gives us one power we don't have in face to face confrontation. The ability to ignore, and slashdotters ignore ignorant posts better than the rest.
Again, another allusion to the ridiculously childish behavior that is the hallmark of the worst Slashdot citizens. "I don't like that, so I'm going to ignore you now! I'm not paying attention to you. See??!! " How completely infantile. If you can't face the things you dislike about the world around you, how are you ever going to make any difference? The best and most responsible approach is to take the bull (or the troll) by the horns and pummel the hell out it. It will either die and cease to be a problem, or become enlightened enough to see your point of view. But alas! This is the problem with "geeks". They don't have enough fortitude to be able to confront that which they don't agree with. I, speaking as a bonafied true geek, DO have the aggressive nature needed to make a difference in the world. Problem 5.) Browsing at 3
Yes. Browsing at 3 is certainly a problem. I did it myself for a few months and found that it took all the interesting and intelligent posts out of view. Most of what I was left with was stupid, humorless, opinionated windbags who consider themselves experts on nearly any subject you throw at them even though their abilities in any venue are clearly lacking. Ever since I went back to browsing at -1 again, Slashdot became a lot more fun. That's the worst side effect of browsing at 3, you lose most of the good humor on Slashdot. The only things that tend to get modded up as Funny tend to be things that are clearly only funny to socially retarded and humor impaired buffoons. I can't tell you how many lame jokes and comments I've seen modded up to Funny, while some of the best stuff gets modded down to -1 all the time. Folks, do yourself a favor and browse at -1. You will clearly see what you are missing and will never want to go back to browsing at 3. Unless, of course, you are a complete twit. Problem 6.) I am actually replying to this.
I am happy that you took the time to reply to this because it gives me the opportunity to validate what I posted initially. It shows that someone can post something controversial and perhspa still have it discussed regardless of the feelings it engenders in the target audience. So I thank you for giving me this opportunity. 7.) Confusing Statements.
I'm not sure what was confusing about what I said. I was pret
fuck off
This post should be rated +10 funny since I spit my coffee out while writing it.
The real problem that written science fiction is facing is the same one that all genres of printed fiction are currently facing: books have doubled in price in the last 10 years.
This has meant that most consumers are less willing to take risks, because if you get a Shemp, you're out twice as much cash. So they tend to stick with their favorites and not take chances on newcomers.
The publishers have played to this by pushing their A-list authors as much as possible to maximize their profits.
The problem is, this only works in the short term. Hot authors don't stay hot forever, and if you don't have a healthy mid-list of up-and-coming writers, your market will eventually hit a downturn as the A-list makes less and less money and there is no mid-list to step up and become the new A-list authors. Currently, the mid-list sucks, and being a newcomer really sucks.
One possible solution may be electronic publishing, particularly of short fiction. It would have a low cost threshold for publishing, which would allow low cost distribution while still maintaining modest profits. It could be a great way for writers to get exposure. They just have to keep it cheap (buck a story? penny a page?) and let the user wind up owning a copy in some halfway convenient open format.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
...is another name to throw out as an up-and-coming writer.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
As a total tangent, some of the best written examples of flawed, but still good characters I have come across are in Tim Powers' books. In The Strength of Her Regard he has a an addict as a protagonist (the whole book treats Vampirism as an addiction). In Declare, his OSS agent commits all kinds of horrid acts to prevent even worse from happening. Finally, his character in On Stranger Tides is a puppeteer (!) who finds himself completely out of his depth with pirates and occult magic, yet finds the strength to persevere, even when at one point when he literally all he wants to do is sit down in the mud and cry.
None of these protagonists could be considered selfish or amoral, their failings driven by fear or hopelessness. But by stepping past these flaws, they become heroes in the classic sense.
And usually, the get the girl, too. (*GRIN*)
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
If the growth of technology is exponential (i.e., our rate of technological advance is proportional to our level of technology), humanity passes through an age where it takes more than a generation to advance significantly, through an age where technology advances each generation, to an age where technology advances constantly. Only in the middle of these ages does thinking about the future make sense. Before, you think about what could change in the present, because you won't live to see the future. After, you think about what you can change, because when you have thought of it, the future is here.
In fifty years, people won't make predictions about the next fifty years, because anything they predict will either be a bad idea and therefore never done, or will be a good idea, and done in less than fifty years.
This means that the equivalent of SF in the future is very different from the SF of the 20th century. I expect it will be largely counterfactual (like Babel-17; stories based on a discreditted scientific theory which ask what it would be like if it were true) or shade quickly into fiction, where anything they mention that's not an obvious fantasy is available as a tie-in product.
As for space, there's less to it than SF authors once thought. For that matter, some SF authors realized this. If you look critically at Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, you'll see an insightful work of SF set on Mars. But there's nothing important in the series actually about Mars or space. It is a story about scientists working in isolation from the rest of humanity, about social structures which could be created, about foreseeable technologies, about the range of human nature, about teasing apart different potential goals of environmentalism, about possible polical structures, and about change overtaking the ability of humans to guide it. Oh, and there's a little bit about Mars. Someday, we'll go to Mars, to the rest of the solar system, to other stars. And we'll find that it's largely more of the same; we might as well have gone to New Mexico or Antarctica.
The only frontier which we will never domesticate is human social interaction, which will forever remain untame due to being disrupted by the very research which seeks to tame it. This frontier can be explored in the isolation of space (or New Mexico), or in New York City, or even in the countryside, wastelands, and battlefields of New Zealand.
Silly? Sure. That's why it's great. Giant steam-powered mechanical spiders rock my British Empire.
Current Karma Status: Roadkill
Science fiction and fantasy are just different forms of entertainment, and I don't think the fact that the collective taste is swinging toward fantasy right now reflects anything significant about our culture.
If you want to see how our society stands in the realm of science, why not look at science fact instead of science fiction? If "young people no longer find science admirable", why has our society made more scientific progress in the past 50 years than the past 50,000? Is a nanotech scientist who enjoys Tolkien an indication of how ignorant we are becoming?
So no one reads or writes corny space opera any more. There are more interesting things to think about like nanotech, information processing, genetics, the human brain, and the biology of our own planet (maybe including how to put cod and haddock back in the Grand Banks!).
Thanks again.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Moderators: please note that Spider Robinson has posted numerous times to this topic, MOD HIM UP!
thanks.
Damn those pesky terrorists
the heros may be good vs evil but the world in which they live still sucks!
Sorry, I won't be sticking around here to debate this question, but I *think* I have an answer for Spider.
It helps to remember the words of G. Santanyana. He's the one who said "He who pays no attention to his History is doomed to live it again."
Spider, if you're reading this, I would only say to you that if we don't go back an re-examine our roots once in awhile, then how will we be able to gauge our forward progress?
Thanks for listening. I'm outta here for the nonce.
A.C.
If you've read Robinsons latest book and compared it to the rest of his Callahan's series, you might start to understand why there is less sci-fi being read. His latest book sucked big time from many standpoints.
On Sci-Fi, a big problem is the lack of creativity in most authors lately. No real new plots, or twists or anything really interesting for a while now. Theres very little good sci-fi out there.. look as hard as you can and you'll see it as well.
Altered Carbon was the last one I read that was worth a damn. Why? Becuase good sci-fi isn't just about all kinds of new and unthinkable wizzer tech and star trek-esque technobabble. It makes you look around and see not just the technology but the people, the culture and everything else and how they realte. Oh wait, that would be backgound and character development and so on. Can't have that in sci-fi, it takes too much room away from technobabble and gizmos.
Incredible. Spider reminds us that there are no cod left in the Grand Banks and that America has taken over the world, but can't figure out why people like escapist fantasy and don't care as much about space travel as they used to.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
Just as we've committed ourselves inextricably to a high-tech world (and thank God, for no other kind will feed five billion) (emphasis added).
Okay, maybe it's a petty gripe, but in an article about how we're no longer dream about the future, I gotta say: HEY SPIDER! The earth's population crossed the SIX BILLION mark in 1999!
Yeesh. Are we talking about the future or the past?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Passing the Turing Test may not be as far away as you think.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
1) dead right....but I'm afraid that with a VERY few exceptions, science fiction movies have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with written science fiction, which is what I was discussing. Two different things. It's like the difference between reality TV and James Joyce's ULYSSES. They both claim the same subject...but one is lying. 2) ...but science fiction IS fantasy. It is simply the kind of fantasy that does not believe history ended with the Industrial Revolution, which does not convulsively repudiate science and technology, which acknowledges other, perhaps life-bearing worlds. It is that fantasy which is not afraid of knowledge, not suspicious of intellect. In most heroic fantasy, the hero (as Larry Niven astutely pointed out) is the swordsman: an ignoramus. In sf, the hero is more likely to be the wizard, who at least went to school. Myth should reflect truth. If our myths have no connection with reality, they become harmful, psychotic dreams.
Ignorance really is death. Time for myth to realize that.
3) Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had that bullshit in my day, too. We called it Nuclear Winter. The Russian Threat. Before that it was the Axis Menace. There are ALWAYS morons screaming that it's all hopeless and we're doomed...because if true, it's OKAY to be lazy and irresponsible. Bo-ring....
4) Voting NASA a fifty-cent budget (and you did, you did, you all DID) and then criticizing its cheap two-dollar performance is as fair as cutting off a man's feet and then calling him Shorty. It's as fair as stacking the deck against black people and then criticizing their behavior--or legally forbidding gays to form stable families and then blasting their promiscuity.
You will GET a "precursor to Starfleet"...the very SECOND you tell your elected representatives that you're willing to kick their asses out of office if you DON'T get it, and damned quick! You got the moon by dumb luck: if you want the rest, then PAY FOR IT.
As Robert Heinlein said, TANSTAAFL. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
Jo Clayton
CS Freidman
I am completely with you here. Yes, both authors have fantasy aspects to the storylines but the drive of the bulk of the work is science related. Clayton's Skeen series could be seen both as science enabled smuggler amoung the native aliens AND as high fantasy.
What I do think has gotten lost is a gloss of glamous and edgy sexiness to science fiction. It just doesn't make the same press anymore.
(Long time lurker and still fairly new to this. Have mercy or be lucid. Thanks.)
1, 3, 4 emphatically. 2 is much more interesting -- B5's atheistic creator wrote honorable and sympathetic religious characters, respected his characters's beliefs, and wrote a deeply spiritual story.
On Wednesday it appears that UPN is re-making the Bionic Man as a teen angst series. In this case the young man acquires special powers through accidental nano-technology, rather than military augmentation. I presume when you replace adult superheroes by teens, you exchange crime-fighting and spy plots by identity-searching and budding-romance. Will this series say anthing new that Roswell, Smallville, and Spiderman havent said yet?
Yes, the timescale is centuries. But if you believe that the prospect (however long it takes) of meeting other intelligent beings is "boring" then either you have no imagination whatsoever, or no intelligence whatsoever.
:)
Not exactly on-topic, but this question made me wonder... were I to be faced with the choice, which would I rather lose: my imagination, or my intelligence? Would I rather be a dreamy idiot, or a rocket scientist with no dreams at all?
I'd have to go for the "dreamy idiot". Although, there are those who say the choice has already been made, in my case.
I think I'll submit that as a poll question:
If you were forced to give up a personality trait, what would it be?
* Intelligence
* Imagination
* Wisdom
* Insight
* Personality? What's that?
* I can't give up CowboyNeal
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Tolkein: been there, done that.
I would add Kay Kenyon to the list as well. And, although NOT a newbie, try John Dalmas for fantastic military science fiction
Perhaps I misread your essay earlier.
I do agree that more people need to read science fiction. I would hazard a guess that people are reading less overall now-a-days.
People need to see the challenge of the future. A goal bigger than a single person that requires the effort of an entire nation or world to undertake. Sadly, the leadership is not there to help the people see the importance of venturing into the unknown.
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
If you don't have a net worth of over $1,000,000,000 , you are not one of them.
These people have decided without exception that instead of a future where our electric power , our heavy industry, and most of our other indusrial resources come from space, they have chosen for us a one-planet reality in which there is no future for humanity.
Our technology is under their control, because they decide through VC investments what gets funded, both in the private sector and in the public sector through the politicians they 0wN.
They have decided this on the basis of short-term profit regardless of its impact on either the current reality or the future one.
What about their children? One can only infer from their conduct that they figure that the families with the most money will be able to make the most of whatever technology-based comforts are available, even if the rest of civilization turns into something even worse than the worst the Third World has to offer today.
People are retreating into the past because the trends they see are not of a glorious future where humanity moves out into the universe, but of a future where a few industrialized nations fight to the death over the last few billion barrels of oil, followed by the end of technological civilization.
Utopian futures just aren't credible any more. Dystopian futures are no fun to read about.
While the average young person doesn't know why, the average young person does know that the jobs in the professional career he/she is planning will probably be outsourced to a foriegn land, which is not a great incentive to pursue careers in the creation of new technology.
The only rational personal path to pursue is one that involved amassing great wealth through cooking the books so one can join the wealthy in making the best of the dystopia in store for the world.
The X-Prize is great, but unless the trillions of dollars in public and private investment is made in order to have somewhere for earth-to-LEO vehicles to go, to build a space-based industrial and tourist infrastructure, private space doesn't have much of a future.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Thank you, Spider.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
All these great posts about how society has changed, or how science has failed our visions of the future, etc., but it seems so much more simple to me.
A person walking into a bookstore to buy a book sees a few things on the SF/Fantasy shelves. There's the SF books, the books based on a series, and the fantasy books. So why are the later two categories the ones that are selling? They're known quantities.
Someone picking up a Star Trek book knows basically what that book contains in terms of characters and story. Same for fantasy books: there are a limited number of themes that are repeated, with minor variations.
The SF books are all wildly different, and just by picking up the book and reading the blurbs on the back, you don't know what you're getting. Will this SF book be mostly about the science (hence potentially boring), or all character driven with stupid science that makes no sense, or will the average reader even be able to understand the future world the writer has created?
This means that, for a reader just looking for a bit of entertaining reading, the SF books is a much more risky investment of money and time, than the series books or fantasy books. And money is tight these days, so SF books drop off in sales first.
Nothing more complex or profound than that.
Good SF is difficult to write, and when done really well it should make your brain want to crawl out of your ears as it fizzes with ideas and implications. Greg Egan, Iain M Banks, Bruce Sterling, Ken Macleod, Neal Stephenson, Stephen Baxter - all of these authors are continuing to push the genre forwards. Egan in particular is joyously brain-stretching.
Good Fantasy, in my book, is comic fantasy. Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Tom Holt succeed in parodying a genre that became a self-parody without anyone noticing (apparently).
Science fiction and fantasy have been embraced by the mainstream media. Most of the top ten grossing films for 2002 could be called F&SF. Perhaps because they conveniently allow a stage where there is no editorial control, no bothersome minority complaining about misrepresentation, and where hack authors can spout rubbish at an uncritical audience. (Anyone who nods knowingly and says "1950's pulp magazines" to himself gains a bonus point.)
On TV, what works best? Thoughtful plotlines about the societal effect of pervasive DNA technology ("Gattaca"), or things blowing each other up at the slightest provocation (virtually everything else)?
And are you tired of continually having to justify your tetrion field emissions, or you quantum flux inverters, or whatever? No bother - just transliterate the whole story into fantasy-land.
No geeks complaining that your gravity whip couldn't be used to create a closed spacelike trajectory - just use a magic book and save yourself (and your consumers) the bother of having to think. Problem? Just whack it on the head. Supernatural forces capable of dissociating the whole of reality from the atomic level up? Use a bit of 2nd-rate karate and you'll have them banished back to Unconvincia before your makeup gets smudged.
Theodore Sturgeon once said, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." I'd add another "9" these days to take in all the media tie-ins, the Power Rangers, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Spell-Book Diaries, the unimaginitive by-catch in the trawl net of popular culture.
So, to sum up this off-the-cuff rant, what's the reason that most SF is fantastic rather than speculative these days? Because speculative can't be dumbed down. And that's what the unwashed masses appear to want.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Then don't put your manufacturing facilities in the neighborhood of Earth - put them in Lagrange orbits, maybe. At the rate we're going now, by the time an asteroid takes matters into its own hands, we'll still be arguing about how to get something up into space. . .
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
IMHO the best science fiction of the past was always of the one-step-beyond variety. It took what we know, and looked one step farther out. It guessed about the new situations that people would face in that world, and wrote stories that showed what it would be like to live in that world.
The problem with doing that now, is that one step beyond is beyond what people *can believe*.
We are faced with the real possibility of physical immortality. People do not believe that.
We are faced with the complete restructuring of the economy and redefinition of the value of the individual due to the development of robots. This problem was first described and dicussed in R.U.R, the book in which the word "robot" was first used as we use it today. But, now it is just one step beyond. Very few people are even aware that the change is coming or how fast it will happen when it does.
We are faced with nanotechnology. The first discussion of the topic happened (AFAIK) in the second half of the 20th century and wasn't seriously dicussed until the late '80s. But, nanotech is already showing up. The majority of people have not yet even heard of nanotechnology.
I could go on and on.
One step beyond is now so far out that most people, even SF fans, can no longer accept it.
About 15 years ago I wrote to complain to the editor of my favorite science fiction magazine because one of the stories was not science fiction. It was about everyday things like a guy using email to interact with other people to solve a problem with a robotic assembly cell.
15 years ago the editor thought my letter was astounding. To him, everything in the story was pure science fiction. Stuff he didn't ecpect to every see.
Stonewolf
My belief is that sci-fi is becoming less popular because the future is looking increasingly dystopian to many people. The future looks much more like Neuromancer, Blade Runner, Running Man, Equilibrium, or THX-1138 than Star Trek. Such dystopian visions are enjoyable from a distance, but when it starts to look so similar to everyday life it quickly loses its appeal. I would speculate that people are turning to fantasy instead as an escape. One more point: given the level of technology now the present is now quite fascinating in its own right -- Bruce Sterling and William Gibson have both recently written novels set in the present.
I remember a friend telling me a about a French author who wrote about automobiles some 50 years before they became common place, the interesting thing was not that he wrote about cars but that he wrote about traffic accidents.
Technology and science didn't change human nature when they invented agriculture, bronze, glass, the windmill, gunpowder, the Davy lamp, the zeppelin, or the liquid-crystal display. Thousands of years later, it would still not surprise any of us to hear that somewhere nearby a man had beaten another man to death with a rock.
Human nature has never changed, and never will change, no matter how many toys we have to play with. A single human's behavior might. That is the lesson that religion teaches. But people who believe that technology and science are all too often applied to "material things and useless junk" note that the last hundred years has seen staggering advances in technology, and an almost unmitigated collapse in social institutions.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
From my perspective, as the author of a handful of unpublished SF novels, the difficulty is that the major publishing houses right now have little interest in producing works outside of perceived "mainstream" genres. The large publishing groups want works that will immediately hit the marketplace and sell 100,000 copies -- and that spells doom for the new SF author.
The reason there are no new "icons" in SF is because the publishers have not given any new authors a chance at a wide audience, and responding with sentiments about "making the novels free" does not cut the mustard because the internet has distribution problems of its own. Just ask John Sundman.
That is the point Spider is trying to make.
Oh, and BTW, the "Stardance" trilogy (by Spider and his wife Jeanne) is fantastic sci-fi. Great characters, mostly set in space on artificial satellites or habitats, the science figures directly in the plot.
"Runny-cheese fake science fiction author", indeed. Check your facts next time you post.
This is my quick and dirty list of characteristics to categorize SF stories:
- Near vs. Far future science fiction- people like us reacting to one major science change vs. people in a significantly different or distant future society.
- Standard future vs. Singularity future science fiction: whether or not a singularity exists or is coming.
- Fantasy (standard) vs. science fiction.
- Alternate histories (contrafactuals), and 'Other fantasy' (magic realism and other non-traditional fantasy).
I think that by SR's standards, standard fantasy is bad, "standard near future" science fiction is neutral, and far-future or singularity fiction is good. i.e. if a piece of SF writing has far-future (Vinge, Reed, Egan) or singularity (Egan, Stross, Doctorow) elements, then it isn't what Robinson is complaining about. So, looking at the top stories I count that:Based on the Hugo nominations I'm not too worried about the future of SF. The numbers for far-future or pre/post-singularity stories are much, much larger than the numbers for traditional fantasy.
I would be very surprised to know that it was possible to prove this "fact". Is he mentioned in the Congressional debates for funding NACA, the precursor to NASA?
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Terrible events in my life, listed in descending order of their personal importance, abridged:
1. Death of my father.
2. Hit by taxicab in Philadelphia.
3. Dumped by first girlfriend in junior high school.
4. Held up at gunpoint.
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57. Bicycle stolen.
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1,294. Embarrassing facial blemish on night of big date.
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7,837,129. Recipient of pathetically obvious "so how many books have you published, huh?" flame on slashdot by the author of "Lady Slings the Booze" or, as likely, a fanboy using his name.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
1) It is not as though "hard" science-fiction has always had mass appeal. It has always had a specialized genre feeling. What passes for science fiction movies today are generally no more than shoot-em-up's in space. More like futuristic action. This is what appeals to the movie-going audience. "Hard" science fiction is too "hard" (must think...hurts brain) and is probably not profitable.
Don't diss the audience, man. Before a movie can be good SF it first has to be a good movie.
The problem with translating hard SF into a movie is that it tends to be very expository. They establish the rules and then play by them, but unless you want to leave people behind you have to explain a lot of stuff for it to make sense. A typical hard SF novel, Niven's Ringworld for example, spends a lot of time explaining how this works and that works, and why this happens but that doesn't happen. You can skip it and ask people to take it all on faith, but that seems like cheating.
It's hard to do that in a movie. The easiest solution, long talky sections stuck in between the action, not only ruin the pace but are usually hard to follow. It can be done, but it isn't easy. Since most movies can barely manage a coherent plot when they're set in the real world, I suspect that most of today's moviemakers are ill-equipped for that challenge.
3) The idea of a "bright, happy, future" seems to be relegated to naivety and a cynical "dystopia" seems to have set in (thus apocalyptic movies, etc), and this view seems to be pushed by many media outlets (i.e. bad news sells). We apparantly will pollute ourselves to death in 50 years, the world will be completely controlled by corporations, etc.
Yes, that is a popular perception, but it's probably wrong. We don't live in The Jetsons, but it isn't 1984, either. (No, it really, really isn't.) A book set in Horrible Corporatized Polluted Future #7,845 is as much a lazy hack as the most naive utopian fantasy. Knowing that, what self-respecting writer would continue to churn them out?
Older SF really wasn't all cheerfulness and smiles, either. Yeah, we might have moon colonies and space stations to look forward to, but we also had alien invasions, nuclear wars, natural disasters, monsters created by careless science, cultural decay, planetwide plagues, genocide, etc. Yet somehow or another the authors all managed to talk about these issues while still writing good stories that people enjoyed reading. Go figure.
Though Bush has been successful in screwing up the U.S. economy, accusing him of rendering the geopolitical order more unstable than any time in history is just giving him way too much credit.
People are more interested in fantasy because all they see in SF is more of what we already have. And what we have is a society and a world that is corrupt to the core.
Most SF takes what exists in the present and projects that into the future. Since what we have sucks, most projected futures suck. Also, most people are living out their lives trapped as cogs in corporate machines. Project that into the future and it's not SF anymore, it's horror.
Fantasy offers two things: 1) a world where an individual can still make a change in the way things are/will be, and 2) a story where the corrpution is fought against and overcome. Most people would change the corruption in our present world if they could... but they know they can't. Fantasy lets them at least read stories about one or a few people who can change the world, for the better.
SF only offers better views of the cold hard rocks in an uncaring universe where your life is lived to no purpose and your death is meaningless. Bleh.
The truth can be funny sometimes, but that doesn't make it any less true.
You raise an excellent point, geektourist, and I have taken heart from your encouraging words. Thank you. I hope the publishers will, as they have in the past, pay heed as the readers tell them what they want to buy. Therein lies the Golden Power of the Hugos: of all the arts awards I know save the Nova Scotia Fiddle Championship, they are the ONLY one awarded, NOT by an elite body of self-appointed, mutual-back-scratching experts...but by the cash customers: by anyone on earth who cares to bother voting. That makes them worth ten times their weight in Oscars or Booker Prizes. Were you listening this year, publishers? Please say yes...
A couple of suggestions (the first based on when I've seen other writers / famous people Slashdotted):
1. Don't give into the temptation to respond to anyone who hasn't been moderated to 2 or more. First of all, few will read it-- there just isn't time to read threads that never get moderated above the baseline. Second, the conversation will be much more interesting if you write back to good writers: writing back to the (score: 1) people usually ends in a dead thread. Third, this place has trolls and flamers: people who write simply and only for provoking emotion, not for provoking thought- you want to ignore them rather than giving them what they want.
2. A couple of your paragraphs are too long for easy reading- more carriage returns would be easier on the eyes.
In the early '70s, science fiction was discarded as a reactionary cultural trope, in the same way that short haircuts and baseball had been denigrated.
So when George Lucas was shopping around his space opera, and nobody would buy it, he finally found someone who had at least enough temerity to share the risk with him. And in the process ceded him the rights. But assuming that risk forced him to trim the story to the leanest and most forceful form he could manage, creating one of the best-crafted stories ever told.
Its purity resonated in our hearts, and we of course went off on creative tangents, thinking that the movie's value was in its special effects, or the space stuff, or sci-fi in general. But it also created a new era of basic storytelling in film.
The sad part is, Lucas himself thought the attributes of his creation were more significant than the spine, and the 4 (5?) following episodes exist as eye candy, movie-star exploitations, and merchandising platforms.
But what I hope will happen is that the constraint of unpopularity of science fiction in this era of formulaic junk-movies will again breed creativity, and will bear us a new era of quality. Jackson's effort to bring LOTR to the screen may be consuming some of that. Nobody said it had to be Science Fiction to be good.
Talk about "Pot-Kettle-Black."
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
It was more than optimism, it was romanticization. It's very hard for us now to romanticize technology because it's so quotidian! Frankly, we live in a SF world.
SF has always been about evoking a sense of wonder. That's one of the oldest saws in the field of SF. But it's damn hard to get all exited about technology when it's such an every-day thing. In the "golden age" of SF, new inventions, new technologies, simple novelty was a big deal. Today it's ho-hum. It's not that the changes are dull, it's that it's an excitement we're accustomed to -- "Dude, look at this new wireless gadget I got!" -- not an excitement which sparks any sort of wonder.
Thank goodness. I'd rather live SF than read SF!
Furthermore, we now all suspect -- from our experiences of going through the information revolution -- that flying to another planet, when it happens, will be as exciting as taking a bus, and that traveling with a cheeky robot will be as romantic as any other irritatingly mis-configured consumer electronics!
We're (to quote Kipling) "Too wonder-stale to wonder."
I don't entirely see that as a bad thing. When I was but an egg, I read SF and covetted living in the worlds there depicted. Now I do.
Yippee!
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Good book. if I may horribly corrupt his ideas, that people used to look to the future in that it would make their lives *better*, in a pragmatic way like better automobile tires, better ways to get around, etc.
I believe we are jaded and now pessimistically know that anything dramatic like free energy or a real space station or human adventure, for the sake of itself, simply won't happen, at least if we leave it to our existing institutionality. Our expectations have changed; do we really want a world where we fly around or live on mars? Great fantasy. Or is a car or bike or segway pretty good for our real lives here on earth (which isn't so bad for some, not good for others) where we can make it better for many more lives first?
Books by Maxine MacArthur - "Time Present" and sequels "Time Past" and "Time Future" (not positive of the order of these, or of her age) - reminded me of Babylon 5, but novels instead of TV series. Has both interesting characters and interesting ideas.
Books by Catherine Asaro - "The Last Hawk" and "Primary Inversions" among others. I think she's about my age (36)? Not sure. Maybe in her 40s. Romance-y SF like Anne McCafferty used to do, maybe with some CJ Cherryh "men in jeopardy" stuff thrown in.
Kage Baker writes time travel series, and I just enjoyed "Signal to Noise" by Eric Nylund also. They're fairly new writers.
As for older writers writing strong books still, I loved "Kiln People" which I bought recently, by David Brin, and "Probability Moon" by Nancy Kress. I second the recommendation of John Barnes, too, though I don't like everything he writes, the most recent book of his that I read, "The Merchants of Souls," was very good, a lot like 'golden age' SF in some ways, but completely contemporary as well. And Ursula Le Guin is going through a downward track in her writing but her zenith was too esoteric for me, I'm enjoying her return to the Hain world type of stories. "The Telling" was the one I most recently bought.
All very good recent science fiction that I sincerely recommend everyone to buy. And which I did buy new myself.
Writing is the only socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. (E. L. Doctorow)
I think the problem is that we feel today, like we are living in the future already. There are so many amazing things happening in science that it's impossible to keep up, to make predictions about what's going to happen NEXT YEAR let alone 50, 100, 1000 years from now. I feel like there are so many variables that could completely change the way we live already moving today that science fiction is almost pointless.
simon
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Are genre books selling at all? In other words, is this a bigger problem than Science Fiction?
:-)
Just a few years ago I could sometimes find Science Fiction books in Costco; but I haven't seen one there for the last couple of years. I would have said the same about Wal-Mart, but I just bought a new Orson Scott Card paperback the other day; the exception that proves the rule, I guess.
It seems that Society is now geared to supply millions of copies of the latest fad, and nothing else. Technology has made it possible to produce much more variety at the same cost; but companies have instead used it wring every bit of profit out of the latest big thing. Bigger stores don't stock more variety any more; they just stock more copies of the same thing (and put smaller stores out of business). Movies now seem to drive the whole system. Movies lead to video games, novelizations, limited-edition prints, cereal box prizes, you name it. Since movie sci-fi tends to be pathetic, so are the tie-ins. Where is the market for anything but the latest and greatest?
I agree with your point that there doesn't seem to be any room in S.F. for anything but the reliable moneymakers; but I think you are wrong that it is a problem for S.F. only. Bookstores are adding coffee shops and giftware, not more bookshelves; record stores are stocking less and less, but their stores sure look pretty. Variety is out, quantity is in, and pity anyone whose tastes are not completely mainstream. I think the whole sorry publishing business is going to have to fail before things get better. After the current system fails, maybe technology (cheap reproduction and distribution) can be harnessed to improve the lives of writers and readers instead of the middleman.
Hey, isn't there a Science Fiction story in this? New technology gets exploited by those currently in power, until plucky underdogs overturn the system and distribute the benefits to everyone. I'd love to read that sort of escapist fiction
-- Pot is safer than Beer
You forgot one thing. In the early days of Sci-fi when space was young and new to us, Sci-fi movies had a lot more fantacy in them. They contained visions of possiblities--both technological and physical. Hard core Sci-fi has removed a lot of these things. You get bogged down with stuff like "you can't do that in real world" or "that's not true according science". All possibility that some new could be true has been cut off like a cancer.
Sci-fi used to predict cool technology and stuff. Now it doesn't. It has gotten dragged down with the rules of science that exist today without leaving the door open for future the future possiblity that it could be true.
That is where Fantacy comes in to the scene. It has take the place of Sci-fi in stiring the immaginations of movie goers and book readers a like. When guessing about laws and rules of the real world and the Universe was removed, they removed a big part of the equation that stirred peoples imagination. So what if it is correct by todays scientific standards--the standards change almost on a daily basis with new discoveries.
Without the stirring of the imagination, there is little left to interest most people. This is why fantacy movies, and other media outlets, have become more popular. I think the boundary between sci-fi and fanctacy should be removed once more.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
"It's difficult, expensive and risky to move mass from the surface of the Earth into near orbit and prohibitively expensive to move it further than that. A Mars expedition looks more and more infeasable and the old space themes of colonizing the moon or Mars or mining the asteriods are proving to be just so much wishful thinking."
Wrong on all counts. We're just using the wrong technologies to do these things. You bet sending men to Mars with chemical rockets is silly and risky, but just remember that we could have built a technology that might have sent a manned mission to Saturn by the year 1970.
Two things need to be done- get off of our reliance on chemical propulsion and develop better propulsion technologies, and plan on "living off the land" as much as possible wherever we go.
Water has been found on the moon- that water can be used to support a manned outpost as well as manufacturing as well as propulsion systems (steam rockets, for one). Build a base on the moon, then go to the asteroids. It's do-able. Just probably not do-able by our currrent NASA. And not do-able so long as the space program is nothing more than a cash cow for large aerospace companies with great incentive to continue using 30+ year old chemical rockets.
And water has been found on Mars. Water is the key to any sort of settlement- if it exists where you are going, it's feasable to go there and build. If it isn't it might well be too expensive. When you go to the moon, build with lunar concrete- don't take a prefabbed "living quarters module."
We're in a recession. During recessionary periods, nostalgic fantasy dominates the cultural landscape.
The recession of 2001 ended over two years ago.
The Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 defines a recession as either of two events: (1) if either the director of OMB or CBO determines that real economic growth is or will be negative during any two consecutive quarters over a six-quarter period starting with the quarter before the current quarter and continuing through the four quarters after the current quarter or (2) if the Department of Commerce announces that the rate of real economic growth for the current quarter and the immediately preceding quarter is less than 1 percent. Either of these two events can trigger a suspension of most of the key Budget Enforcement Act provisions.
Of course John Ashcroft probably went back and changed all the economic data.
Over the past 10 years espically, we are seeing the fuition of many of the standard Sci-Fi ideals...yet we also seem to be continuously choosing the path the sci-fi writers have been warning about for years. That's depressing. At the same time, we still are having terrorist attacks, school/work shootings, massive blackouts, and natural disasters at a shockingly increasing rate. Fantasy is begining a comeback be cause people realize that we will never control everything...so how we deal with what we're delt is more important than what "might" come.
-- and Science has been declining as a career choice for quite some time now. It only logical that as the pool of science-trained people shrinks, the pool of "hard" science fiction writers must inevitably follow.
People prefer to eschew the details and go for the "big Picture". Take Slashdot, for instance. A supposed haven of computer geeks and science-oriented people, but how many are actually are capable of writing assembler code? Or any language? How many remember enough calculus to solve high-school calculus problems? My guess is that the answer to both questions is well under half.
To be a "geek" in today's world is to be able to set the clock on your VCR and make it through a Linux installation. Wire-wrapping is not in the skillset of the modern geek (at least not in the mainstream of geek-dom). And I'm not berating Slashdotters, they ARE geeks compared to the Clueless Teeming Masses.
But the cold hard fact is that if you find math and science intimidating, you're going to appreciate fiction like Star Wars or Tolkien much more than something that requires a certain level of understanding of fundamental principles to appreciate the plot constraints. And there are fewer and fewer writers who have the background to write sci-fi (reflected by the fact that there are fewer and fewer of all of us in the technically well-versed boat).
Maybe the next generation of sci-fi will come from one of the nations to which much of the technical employment is moving, but I suspect that cutural differences will make such fiction unappealing to Western cultures.
...you didn't like the new prequels ;)
So if it's such a bad, noncommercial book, why have people sent me more than a thousand dollars in TIPS? I'd say the publishing industry is broken.
Publishers publish thousand-page trilogies because they're more predictable, so writers write them and readers read them because they're comfortable but muchmoreso because they're there. The problem with those exciting dangerous ideas is that we focus on the exciting part while businessmen focused on the bottom line focus on the dangerous part. And as long as that drives the industry, then yes break-in authors such as myself will see professional writing as a way to die broke.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I dunno, maybe because the majority of newer SciFi that is coming out these days is dreck. Not that a lot of the newer fantasy coming out isn't also dreck, but there still seems to be more quality and creativity in Fantasy as compared to SciFi these days (it's a fine line).
Maybe if authors started writing better SciFi, people would read it! What a concept! Then again, we have asshats like the RIAA/MPAA that think that just because they make shitty music/movies that people should still pay for them.
Me, I've about given up on movies, except where the girlfriend is concerned. As for music, I still look around the mod scene for original stuff. The last really good books I've read were "Diaspora" by Greg Egan (for SciFi), "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson (for Cyberpunk, which is increasingly replacing SciFi in my library) and "The Belgariad" by David Eddings (for Fantasy). If you want me to read your books, take some cues from the three masters I mentioned above.
Most of us into scifi have watched our technology expand at warp speed(yes, painful nerd joke, buhahaha), and we see a future that, even though we are helping to bringing it about, will be controlled by lying warmongering assholes who will use it for power and financial subjugation, instead of the betterment of humanity. That's one reason I don't do IT anymore, and started my own online store. Why should I work to advance humanity when it will simply be used by the rich and powerful to become more rich and more powerful? Fuck them. I'll get mine while I can because that's what everyone else is doing.
For me, Asimov, Heinlen, Poul Anderson, and alot of the other people who inspired me as I grew up, will always have a place in my heart. But in todays reality, they just serve as a reminder that peace and the good will advancement of humanity are just crack dreams in nerds like me heads. In the real world, none of us has the balls to stand up to the powers that be to demand that we strive to reach our species full potential. How can I enjoy being reminded what a retarded and cowardly generation I'm a part of?
So fuck it. I'll bury myself in the past, where I won't be reminded what a retarded generation I'm a member of. We stood at the door to eden, and instead of having the balls to "live free or die", we bent over, took it up the ass by our corporate masters, and now live lives of indifference as our corrupt government uses our technology to advance the cause of its corporate backers.
If you go to the bookstore, you'll see
- wrote
Callahan's something-or-other
Callahan's something-else
Callahan's other-thing
Callahan's thing
Callahan's some-other-thing
Callahan's 1
Callahan's 2
Callahan's 3
Callahan's 4
Something-else-you-wrote
Some-other-thing-you
Maybe-something-else-you-wrote
In my opinion, the only decent Callahan book was the first one.
So someone is most likely to pick up one of your less-than-wonderful books and form an opinion based upon that. That's just the way the books are arranged at the bookstore.
The same with Piers Anthony. You're more likely to pick up one of his crappy works rather than one of his decent books just because the crappy ones will be arranged to take up the most visual space on the shelf.
At least 5 books every month.
I prefer hardbacks because they last longer and they look nicer on my shelves, but mostly I get paperbacks because that's what's available.
And I have not purchased a Star Trek book in over 20 years. Nor have I ever purchased a Star Wars book. But I did have a very nice collection of Perry Rhodan books when I was younger.
I can't believe that nobody brought up The Singularity sooner - as an avid reader of the good hard science fiction throughout childhood, I have found no better explanation of the state of Sci-Fi, and really no cooler sci-fi idea itself... truly amazing.
Beyond that, you added far more insightful commentary than I would have expected on Slashdot.
Thanks.
Oh, and for anyone out there who read the parent comment, *seriously* go check out the link to the Singularity - it's worth it. Additionally, the short story on there is the single best piece of of fiction text I've ever read online.
Classic SF was based on the impact of technological advancement. The heros could be geeks (like Hari Selden) or action heroes who merely wielded technology. But the crux seems to be victory through scientific cleverness. And in the 50s and 60s, that was credible; scientific cleverness was giving the US the dominant role.
But now the tables are turned. Scientific cleverness is no longer worth very much - only business/legal cleverness is. The US will go from an exporter to an importer of technical know-how, while remaining the leader in marketing that know-how. No new invention will rock the world. If an established interest is threatened by a new invention, it will demand government intervention and get it, either by special legislative action or through lawsuits and IP enforcement. There is no more room for Promethean technical endeavors.
The US has reached stasis, like "Directive 10-289" in Atlas Shrugged. We know that our "upper ranks" are riddle with corruption. The badly run businesses with bad products are winning, due to increased market inefficiencies and barriers to entry. The wrongdoers in high places are not punished.
This puts us in a backwards-looking mood. Rather than the unlimited future, we want to find our way back to sanity. We want Aragorn to ride up and strike Darl McBride's head from his shoulders in one blow. We want sturdy Hobbit archers to invade the ICANN meeting and send the scoundrels packing.
All the ingredients of classic SF - computers, robots, space travel - have lost their charm. Their future development will only benefit corporations. The idea that technology could alter the power structure is over. We look to the past, even a mythical past, because the future does not look good.
I agree completely. There are a host of talented people writing great SF today, particular among the Brits.
I don't think Spider is complaining about the writers though, he's complaining about the readers he saw at Torcon, and how their tastes reflect a scary trend of ignorance and lack of imagination in society in general. Great SF makes you think, but apparently less and less people want to be bothered to do that, so they don't want to read anything that challenges them. And he's right, that's sad.
It's a sad situation, but the upside is that at least we have found the solution to the Fermi Paradox.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Conspiracy theoretic bullshit. Electrical power, heavy industry, and most other industrial resources aren't coming from space because that would be completely economically ludicrous. The cost of supporting a worker in space is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of supporting him on the ground. It would be like trying to grow bananas at the south pole -- yes, you could do it, but it would be ruinously uncompetitive.
I quit reading most of it many years ago for this very reason. However, Cory Doctorow's Disney story gives me hope. Science Fiction is a normal story placed in a setting where science that the author believes may be possible is present. Of course, physicists have squashed the worm hole as time machine idea, but it's a pretty fine distinction.
The public gets what it wants, whether it is a recognizable genre or something new. Just make sure you don't read spam or crappy SciFi.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
They all seem to be medieval (+magic) in nature. Why not have some MMPGs based in the future: Traveler 2300 as an MMPG anyone?
I was the person being indirectly slammed in that post, and I thought that it was funny. Lighten up, eh?
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
The premise is completely wrong.
When I was growing up, you hid your SF books more securely than the "Playboy" because SF was almost universely scorned.
What have been some of the hottest books, movies, and television in recent years:
Star Wars
Star Trek
Matrix
Core
5th element
Farside
Babylon 5
etc.........
If anything we have a wealth of authors across the entire gendre.
If you're looking for hard science science fiction try:
James P. Hogan or Robert L. Forward
Lighter science, SF, try: Steven Gould
Mixed Fantasy, Romance, & SF try: Miller&Lee
The "Good OL Days" are not gone, they've just arrived.
Philip Dick is a case in point. But that doesn't mean good science fiction is not being written or read. Making money has never been the only point. I've read science fiction for 45 years and today's SF is flat out better. Any novel by Greg Bear can stand up against any of the classics. I thought Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling was just an astonishing novel, though I am not quite sure that the new one by Gibson, Pattern Recognition, is really science fiction.
Actually, a great deal of what we call classic science-fiction is merely societal commentary tricked out with some plausible-at-the-time science projection. The best Heinlein ("The Man Who Sold the Moon", "Waldo", THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS) is about political and philosophical ideas, not science.
There are plenty of writers still working in this vein. Neal Stephenson's DIAMOND AGE comes to mind, as does Varley's RED THUNDER, and almost anything Ken Mcleod writes.
However, one very big difference exists. There is almost no market for short stories now, but in the "Golden Age" writers had oodles of outlets. This allowed them to experiment with ideas and styles, and polish their writing while making some small amount of money. Now the pulp outlets like Asimov's and Analog have pitifully small circulation, and many other pulp outlets no longer exist. Even in the "slick" magazine world, outlets for short fiction are almost non-existent. My guess is that this will restrict young writers a great deal; they will be sucked into writing things like television scripts instead.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
includes both elements of fantasy and those of reality. Consider the many works of Frank Herbert...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I agree with your reasons for wanting to finish the series. I found that mix of elements interesting as well. The ending worked for me.
One thought comes to mind though. Perhaps authors, such as Hamilton, are beginning to explore other tech that just does not have the hard feel to it, but is still relevant in the same way the early SF was.
I am thinking of his 'bitek' construct. An interesting meld of biology and traditional technology. Perhaps we might head this same direction as we did with computers and other such things we take for granted today.
The possible directions might be somewhat mushy depending on the mix used. I am not saying fantasy is really SF, but maybe some SF might easily get mixed up with the fantasy depending on the bent and skill of the author creating the work...
Blogging because I can...
I'm surprised by the lack of mention of his work in the replies here. The Mars trilogy is undoubtedly one of the greats of modern science fiction. I'm working my way through "The Martians" companion stories right now. If anyone hasn't read the Mars books yet, get to it!
... A. Because We Don't Have One.
... squandered on a massive bureaucracy that is unable to launch anything without spending billions of dollars, and is still unable to launch anything that is really useful, like a goddamn factory or habitat.
Their mission of launching people into space was lost to the more preferred mission of launching money into people's pockets.
... lost in fear and loathing as the Western World's flagship (America) heads straight towards wrecking upon the reef of Empire.
Profit motives have displaced the Human condition, and a vast hole in Human culture is still growing.
It can crash all Human civilization for many generations.
America had been aligned into an Orwellian world of constant terror of the rest of the world, from the Cold War onward, and we have the utter gall to wonder why the future is not appealing?
Education systems in America are producing the best educated morons the world has probably ever seen since the British Empire, and there we are with a finger up our collective nose, lamenting the lack of workable foresight?
Generations of space development have been so obviously wasted on producing a welfare system for aerospace companies, the US Air Force, and NASA in general, and yet we still hem and haw and demand that practical applications still exist?
I'm not buying the lies, I won't honor the ignorance, and I won't tolerate the frauds any-friggin'-more. My eyes are now as open as my mouth, and it can only take death to close them.
Space development is gone
Cultural development is gone
We have dared to put a price tag on a child's smile. We are done. Any fool can see this. Hopefully some microculture somewhere in South America, Africa or Asia will arise from our (probably radioactivity- and bacteria-infested) ruins and build a better world.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Someone (?) wrote an article on how science fiction is always viewing the present through the lens of the future. 1984 with burned out buildings and anonymous superpowers is 1948. The Lensmen an enormous world with layers of evil gangs (30s with the mob). Someone else (Bruce Sterling?) wrote a few years ago that we don't need science fiction anymore, we have the NASDAJ) Combined with the inability of the story tellers to move into the new medium (hypertext). We have science fiction writers now. They're called kernel hackers.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I wrote to spidey, and he wrote back. But what he is saying is that the fan base is drying up. The writers are just as good as they ever were, but the same numbers of people are not interested any more, when you take out the franchises (star wars, star trek).
That concerns him, for it makes him think that the great masses of people are internalizing, and going from staring at the stars to staring at our belly buttons.
Search for some of my other comments on this topic to see what I think is happening, instead, if it interests you... but his concern isn't about the quality of sci-fi at all.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
this is utter bullshit. There are tons of great hard SF books coming out lately. What with all the hard SF that's been coming out in the last few years based around the latest revolution in scientific theories, many authors in the Hard SF sub-genre are starting to view it as a "new golden age of Hard SF".
Try reading Peter F. Hamilton books. How about Gregory Benford? Or Stephen Baxter? These guys have some GREAT ideas about the future. Especially Baxter. Many of his books deal with the FAR FAR future (trillions of years), and it's really quite a fascinating read. Like his book "The Time Ships", which is an authorized sequel to the Time Machine. Well I'll tell you, it was a trillion and one times better than the steaming pile of crap that was the "Time Machine" movie, that's for sure.
So to say people are retreating to Fantasy is I think more just a reaction to the re-sale of the Lord of The Rings books, as well as the immense popularity of Harry Potter, more than anything else. If this Spider guy had bothered to actually look at whats on the shelves, and past pure numbers, maybe he'd see a different SF world.
Shame on all of you- there is indeed a cure, and it was handed to us almost 50 years ago in one of the best SF short stories written. That story is "The Marching Morons," and it tells us EXACTLY how to rid ourselves of these nitwits .
I have a huge collection of Golden Age and slightly later SF, acquired when I was in my teens and 20s. A couple decades later I tried rereading some of it... and was surprised to realise that most of it sucks, including that by Big Names Of The Era. It's not well-written by any standard, and it tends to rehash the same small clutch of ideas endlessly. After I started writing and editing myself, it looked even worse.
... dull. I've seen it 100 times before, and I just don't want to see it again. Obviously, if a lot of other fen feel the same way (and I doubt I'm alone), this does nothing to encourage the market.
:)
That said... in its day it seemed fresh and new, and we were so hungry for anything that wasn't Here And Now, that if it more or less smelled like SF, we read it, and *liked* it, and hungered for more. Now -- the space program is old hat and no longer exciting, and hardware SF (and the "new worlds to explore" ideas that go along with it) seems equally old hat and unexciting. Worse, the newly-written hard SF that's come along has struck me as
Over the past few years I've found it's the same with TV as well. Frex, I've already seen every cop show I ever want to, and no matter how "good" a new cop show is, I just can't work up any interest in it. It feels old, tired, and boring, because I've already seen decades worth of it.
Fantasy is getting well into its own rut, as the proliferation of stuff like the Wheel of Time brickset illustrates. I used to read a LOT of fantasy, yet now, if I never see another witch or elf or dragon, it will be too soon.
So what do I read, anyway? about all that's left is character driven stuff, which means mainly Bujold- or Cherryh-style space opera, and George R.R. Martin- or Melanie Rawn-style fantasy.
What's really happened is that I've outgrown event-driven stories, regardless of their venue.
I know I had a point when I started writing this, but I think I left it in the 1930s.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
A good choice. As an added bonus, if you are a roleplayer, you'll recognize a peculiar characteristic of the magic spells in Dying Earth. They vanish from the caster's memory when they are cast, so he has to relearn them every time.
Which is of course where Gary Gygax swiped it from when he created D&D.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Because the promise of science fiction becoming reality didn't happen. The real world let me down. Sure we have PCs, ATMs, more reliable cars and a host of electronic entertainment gizmos, but my perception of the progress of the last 50 years is that its main effect has been to streamline business and increase the pace of the economy, making everything lean and mean, just in time, downsized, right-sized, smart-sized, and dragging our personal lives along with it.
So at some point in my life the idea of a low-tech fantasy world started to seem more appealing. A world where mighty deeds might be accomplished by people without MBAs or attorneys. Maybe part of the appeal is that there's no expectation that it might ever really come true -- no promise to be broken.
This is logically unsound(in at least one way). A comparison between a popular genre (SF today) and an unpopular genre (SF in the 50's). The "correct" analysis is not neccessarily that people don't care about new science as much--maybe it's just that everyone who writes SF books isn't trying to be a niche market(for us geeks), like I'm under the impression it was in the 50's.
A closer guess at the state of original SF might be to look at the incomes of authors who come up with original ideas, and compare them to the incomes of 50's authors. As I understand the BEST 50's authors didn't make much--I know that Asimov didn't have a bestseller until the 80's.
Having computers and now genetic engineering shoved down many people's throats is making high-tech (and by extension, science) very unappealing.
And it's all done nowadays with a very unapologetic and crooked corporate centrism, which is taking-over research at universities. Learning and discovery are now to serve the corporate bottom-line and nothing else. As exploitation shifts into hyper-drive, people see little hope from science for the things they want: belonging, purpose, a healthy and natural environment, not to mention privacy and freedom.
Oddly, the world of fantasy and magic are becoming our preferred expression of human hope. This change is at the same time encouraging, and also rather sad.
...can perhaps be best explained by the phenomenon of the recently (Well, a year ago, or 6 months ago.... depends on whose version you believe) cancelled space opera FARSCAPE. This was a show that was intelligent, witty, original, and just plain fun... all the earmarks of great television. Yet, at the height of its popularity, the SciFi Channel chose to cancel (in a most underhanded fashion) what was then it's flagship show... In favor of such fantastic (sic) programming as Crossing Over, Tremors, Scare Tactics, and regurgitated episodes of Stargate SG1, a show its own creators had decided had outlived it's usefulness.
This seems foolhardy... until you realize why. Before SciFi was bought out by media conglomerate Vivendi, they were a niche network which catered to a relatively small market who were by nature usually intelligent and educated - hardcore Science Fiction fans. The market they were born in was that of clear-broadcast satellite TV - by nature outside the channels even considered by that great equalizer of average stupidity, the Nielsen rating. Somehow they still managed to sell advertising without the Nielsens... and eventually grew large enough to become a target for acquisition. Once they came under the hand of this mainstream media conglomerate, of course the only means of valueing a show became the Nielsens... and soon they began the process of dismantling one of the greatest SciFi lineups ever created.
The real kicker there is that they have been rewarded for this abhorrent behavior; by presenting drivel that is accessible to those gifted with the Nielsen box (Notoriously known to be placed in regions with the lowest possible average IQ) they find themselves syrocketing in ratings, which of course means the only thing important to entertainment executives - advertising revenue. And there is a reason for that too... advertisers know that these are the types of viewers who, no matter how little they are really interested in a product, will eventually buy that product if you bludgeon them enough times with repetitve advertising. So once again, intelligent viewers are left in the cold... and we produce yet another generation of pablum TV to keep the mooing masses mollified. Pitiful.
So, the demise of Science Fiction in the popular media is not hard to understand. It's just another aspect of the same old dog and pony show... There is not enough profit in making people think for their entertainment.
I think it was Harlan Ellison, but I can't back that up.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
> Well, even the assumption of easy access to
> local space is proving wrong. It's difficult,
> expensive and risky to move mass from the
> surface of the Earth into near orbit and
> prohibitively expensive to move it further than
> that.
getting mass into space is difficult and expensive.
moving it around once it's up there is relatively cheap (especially if you're in no great hurry for it to arrive somewhere and don't want to change course too often).
even getting it up there *could* be made cheap if we gave enough of a damn about it. current estimates are that we could build a space elevator within 15 years for around $10 billion USD, if we wanted to (and that's without assuming any breakthrough technological developments).
to put that into perspective, that's a miniscule fraction of what was spent just recently destroying the civilian infrastructure in Iraq.
there's any amount of money available for blowing things up, very little for creating things.
I am displeased at the number of paper back fantasies I have to look past to find any science fiction at all. However, there is good, IMHO, science fiction being written and published. I'm primarily interested in good character development and interesting situations. I grabbed a sampling of authors I hold in good regard from a couple of our bookcase shelves.
Stephen Baxter, Charles Sheffield (sadly deceased, but with a number of good novels left behind), Sean Williams & Shane Dix, Jack McDevitt, Jeffrey Carver, Michael Flynn, Frederick Pohl, William Barton & Michael Capobianco, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, David Brin, and Allen Steele. Several others have already been mentioned. Look for them instead of whining and bitching.
Also check Analog and Fantasy & Science Fiction. These tend to stack up on me because I prefer novels, but they do have some good stuff.
If you want an ending to beat all endings read David Brin's "Earth". You will need at least 6 book marks to keep track of the plot threads. I usually wasn't done with a thread when he switched so I'd stick a book mark in (those tiny postit notes were ideal) and skip ahead to where he resumed, put another bookmark in and commence reading. When I got to what I thought was a good place to stop (usually the middle of the chapter - I got wise to you Brin), I'd put another bookmark in and skip back to the first one...
Another good standalone Brin is "the practice effect". I haven't seen any concept like it anywhere else. That book didn't require so many postits. If any.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
LOL!
It's the same old pie-in-the-sky story which ignores any of the real problems. Sure. There is water on the moon and Mars. We still don't know how difficult it will be to extract. No one has ever made "lunar concrete" so no one knows if it's reliable enough to build a habitat out of. And where will people live until they build their habitat? You rant at chemical propulsion, but it's the only way we have to get stuff off of the surface of the Earth. We've used other technologies in solar orbit but they can't push around the kind of masses we're talking about.
Your dream is a 1950s dream and we're not any closer to it now than we were 50 years ago. And that's my whole point.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
No one has ever made "lunar concrete" so no one knows if it's reliable enough to build a habitat out of. No, someone has made lunar concrete- a research outfit in Cleveland OH working with some of the returned Apollo soil samples. They found it was very viable. Do I need to track down a reference to that?
"You rant at chemical propulsion, but it's the only way we have to get stuff off of the surface of the Earth. We've used other technologies in solar orbit but they can't push around the kind of masses we're talking about."
Chemicals are the only current way to put stuff in orbit- but there has been research done on laser launch systems that suggests that they may be very viable. The rockets in use now are cash cows for the aerospace companies- better, more cost effective boosters can be designed. NASA might even try dusting off some of Phil Bono's old plans and studying them for cost effectiveness.
There is alot of room for improvement in propulsion systems designed for use in deep space. Systems which are tremendously more effective than chemical propulsion are available, and many of them have been studied in depth.
In fact, I have heard both quotes - Sturgeon's (as I stated) and also Donaldson's. I was unable to remember the specifics of either well enough to have Google give me hits to correctly attribute.
Thanks for the catch.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
No, because whatever they've done, it's insufficient.
We learned at least one thing from Biodome and that is uncured concrete soaks up a whole lot of oxygen. What we don't know about lunar concrete and it's chemistry and its long term durability and how to work with it in low-G and hard vacuum is more than enough to give anyone pause.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Of course standard concrete is porous. that's why you put additives in or paint it. Additives like certain polymers. Some talk in the world about concrete submarines- reported briefly on in PS Mag. Now, given that a concrete submarine can be made to be waterproof while withstanding the pressure of water at several thousand feet depth, don't you think it's possible that concrete can be made to work in the lunar environment?
This reminds me of the discussion I had a few months ago on sci.space and a few of its sister newsgroups. I suggested that the shuttle astronauts could have been rescued. And was promptly flamed by all sorts of fellows waving their so-called Shuttle FAQ. Well, look at the recent headlines- the shuttle astronauts could indeed have been rescued. If only the will had existed.
"...with it in low-G and hard vacuum is more than enough to give anyone pause."
My gosh...Christopher Columbus and crew could have sailed right off the edge of the world if the world had been flat! It takes a little initiative and some experimentation to do important things....
I have no doubt it could be made to work given enough time and materials. But you've advocated not sending a module but having the colonists rely on unproven technology to provide their living space. That is just unsound engineering.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
You made the assertions, you back them up.
Hint: the numbers change drastically once the infrastructure is put into space by some method cheaper than the shuttle, LEO railguns and space elevators are the leading candidates.
Supporting industrial facilities in the American West would have been "ruinously uncompetitive" before transcontinental rail lines were available.
Now go buy an SCO license or something.
Tech Public Policy stuff
"I have no doubt it could be made to work given enough time and materials. But you've advocated not sending a module but having the colonists rely on unproven technology to provide their living space. That is just unsound engineering."
No, I did not, since I didn't sketch out any complete plan for the implementation of living quarters. By saying that you can cut weight by not sending pre-fabbed living quarter modules, one would tend to assume that I was not referring to the construction phase of operations.
But if you want to split hairs, most of this stuff- the testing as well as construction of living quarters on the lunar surface (more likely underneath the surface) could be handled by robots tele-operated from earth or lunar orbit. As for "materials," well, water, lunar surface material, and some polymer plus the construction machines could make it all possible. We can build a tunnel on earth and line it with concrete- I don't see why it would be that much harder to do on the moon.
"It's difficult, expensive and risky to move mass from the surface of the Earth into near orbit and prohibitively expensive to move it further than that. A Mars expedition looks more and more infeasable and the old space themes of colonizing the moon or Mars or mining the asteriods are proving to be just so much wishful thinking. "
Do you understand anything at all about the mechanics of planetary travel? The BIG part of the job is getting the mass from the surface of earth into space. Once you're in orbit, you are halfway to any place in the solar system, in terms of energy expenditure. That's why you don't need to put a Titan or Atlas or whatever booster into orbit to send your mass of robot payload to Mars.....
The only thing that would make it "prohibitively expensive" is to have NASA running the show.
Having had to sit through numerous presentations and suffer Spider's attempts at humor, I would be leery of taking anything he said too seriously. Some authors toss important ideas out there for discussion, but Spider is not one of the intelligent, insightful few.
The terrible truth is: we won, and it's a pyrrhic victory. Foundation magazine in England said, look around. The movies that have been the biggest money-makers in the last 15 or 20 years have all been fantasy and science fiction. The best parts of science fiction and fantasy have all been subsumed into contemporary fiction. We won, in that respect. But all the crap is now called sci-fi? -- Battlestar Galaxative, Independence Day, and all these dumb movies. (But then, movies are almost always dumb.) I suppose it's like catching a downfield pass for 75 yards and running into the end zone which is at the lip of an abyss, and as you make the touchdown, you fall over and go directly to the innermost circle of Hell and burn forever.
n .html">this page.
Yes, it said "Battlestar Galaxitive". From A HREF="http://www.locusmag.com/2001/Issue07/Elliso
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Guh. I should know better than to fail to preview at eight in the morning.
The page is here.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Now I *know* you're just yanking my chain. The lag of communicating from Earth makes controlling machinery which dosn't have a lot of local smarts completely impractical. Astronauts have enough trouble spending 6 months in micro-G protected from much radiation by the Van Allen belts. Six months in lunar orbit would expose anyone to more radiation than we've ever deliberately exposed anyone to.
I repeat my initial assertion. Your ideas are all pie-in-the-sky and have no grounding in practical reality.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Damn fine article. Thanks!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Things reached a peak in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. With the growth of science and technology, people began to assume that space travel would happen some day, but not all of them assumed that it would happen soon. In the 30s and 40s, there were writers like Heinlen who had some grasp of rocket technology, and were sure things would get going in their own lifetimes. (I never caught Heinlen's color commentary of Apollo 11, but I'm sure he delivered it with a certain feeling of vindication.) But the mainstream imagination didn't grasp space travel as something that could happen any time soon. The Buck Rogers serials were set 5 centuries in the future. Olaf Stapledon's post-humans don't get around to it for millions of years!
Then the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite and all of a sudden space travel became a means of Soviet-American mutual oneupmanship. With actually rocket ships blasting off, everybody suddenly believed in space travel, aliens, and all the other stuff that used to be marginalized "fantasy".
Then reality set in. Probes of other planets found no ancient Martians or Venusian swamp dwellers. Only nasty environments seemingly devoid of life, or even the ability to support it. Even the old assumption that such an unimaginably huge universe had to have intelligent life somewhere came to be doubted.
Worst of all, the space race turned out to work against space becoming "the final frontier". It had the wrong goals. Instead of working on practical technologies for exploring space, we invented fearsomely expensive vehicles whose only virtue was that they "put a man on the moon" before JFK's deadline. People saw that big expensive Saturn rocket, with its teeny tiny payload, and decided that it was all a big stunt. And despite various half-assed efforts (Skylab, that "Strategic Defense" snake oil, our current limited and unsafe shuttle fleet), and short-lived enthusiasm every time there's some interesting accomplishment, that's still the underlying attitude. And space travel is now back to being "fantasy."
You won't be disappointed. Varied works, highly imaginative, incredibly creative, and just great reads all around. His stuff is hard to find, if you can find it used, buy everything you can and never let it go!
Yeah, you know I think you really can fly when you jump off that cliff if you REALLY believe you can! Why don't you try it?
As for your claims about what scientists are saying, listen to what they're really saying. No scientist, unless he's dealing with some loser dressed upn as a Jedi Knight, will say that FTL travel is impossible. They'll say that it's inconsistent with the known laws of physics, that FTL travel breaks causality in the same way as ttime travel, etc.... but that our physical models are not only possibly wrong, they're known to be wrong when you get to quantum gravity. If you then say "warp drive" he'll kick you out of your office, but if you grab a book on tensor analysis you'll see stuff that would make the wildest fantasy seem pedestrian.
But that's the rub. A "Golden Era" story could have a bright HS student who taught himself basic calculus, or had it at a decent HS. Today's story would need to tensor analysis or heavy computational mathematics, stuff that makes college seniors flinch if they know it at all.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Ok, but I think Kitty Hawk SC is a good place to do it..
Anyways, the rest of your comment is quite logical, but unfortunately doesn't agree with what I've been exposed to. (Mainstream Scientists allowing for possibilities outsite their known spectrum)
I sincerely hope you're right, and I'm wrong.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I couldn't deal with Al Capone and barely disguised Madonna a second longer.
I'm working through Philip K. Dick's works (finally being reissued gradually by Vintage over the past few years).
Most recently read? The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
Some recently published non-series sci-fi I've read...
Dennis Danvers' "The Watch" (he is a local (Richmond, VA, USA) professor/author) -- Peter Kropotkin is transported (by a mysterious man from the future) from Russia at the moment of his death to present day Virginia, restored to his youthful vigor -- a philosophical work, well-written, character driven, giving a fresh perspective on the things we take for granted
Connie Willis' Passage -- doctors studying near death experiences, hoping to understand them and to discover a way to save patients who code (in the medical sense) -- unlike most of her work, it does NOT involve time travel (though she does manage to channel her love of history through discussions of the Titanic and other disasters)
The response from the theives and kings website was a little more disturbing than usual though. Like so many dangerous arguments his seems valid, but it really isn't. I remember reading "The War of the Worlds" and being astonished by how closely the future depicted therein was to our present time. We didn't stop looking towards the future when we achieved and surpassed what Wells had predicted, we simply thought out new and more wonderous things and then we achieved some of them too. Now, people have chosen the impossible realms of middle-earth to drown out their God-given intelligence. His Bilbo Baggins quote sums up the modern mentality well, people these day would rather pretend something is not there before they have to pull their heads out of their behinds to see it.
Of course, we haven't achieved everything that stories like Star Trek had predicted, we have yet to aquire common sense, a sense of long-term self-preservation and civilization.
yes... I put a zine for world-con 3. yes, there was hard sf... (get the picture yet?) in it. yes, there were cartoons too. no, i didn't get any fan/author/ editor response. so? life is tough... then you die.if papulm is what they want, feed 'em paplum pat
packrat ; writer-informer. http://packrat.comicgenesis.com http://www.youtube.com/area163 https://www.smashwords.com/
"... we know enough that reaching another star system will not happen in our lifetimes."
It's not about what we do know; it's about what we don't know yet. In the golden age, we didn't know how to do it, and now we still don't know how to do it. Gee. Sounds like the same condition to me.
I think you can believe me when I assert that virtually no one in the golden age thought there would be interstellar flight in their lifetimes. You're right that if anything we're more pessimistic about the timeline now, but that's not the point. Then, as now, it was all about hope and enthusiasm for the future. Not knowing the details of how to make that future happen is no reason not to have hope and entusiasm. There have to be other reasons for this.
P.S. - you're dead on target about the DMCA and the rest of the medieval-thinking crap.