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?'"

Comments

Jack Vance!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Do yourself a favor and read the Demon Princes books (5 in all) and the Planet of Adventure series (4 books in all).

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! :)

Three words: Lois McMaster Bujold

[Anonymous Coward]

she publishes her Sci-fi at Baen.. books available eltectronically through http://www.webscription.net/ with no DRM!

a sample available at.. http://www.baen.com/library/1011250002/1011250002. htm

it's a short story without the space battle-cruisers.. but the rest of her stuff has 'em.. and so much more.

--iamnotayam

Re:Three words: Lois McMaster Bujold

[Drakin]

Actually, I recomend most of the stuff that's published by Baen as good sci-fi. Though, I am biased, due to the love I have for military sci-fi, as well as the fact Baen treats customers as valued assets (IE, their bonus CD's)

9FYI, Spider Robinson has had some stuff published by Baen)

Re:Three words: Lois McMaster Bujold

[penguinland]

This is absolutely correct. With the possible exception to Douglas Adams (whose work is in a completely different genre anyway), McMaster-Bujold is one of the greatest SF writers of all time. She has won 2 Nebula awards and an unprecedented 4 Hugo awards (in contrast, Asimov only got 3, and he's dead now, so he won't be getting any more). As an introduction to her work, I would like to reccomend Cordelia's Honor. It has everything a good book needs - lots of futuristic SF stuff, well developed characters, a love story, fantastic battles (it takes place during an interplanetary war), political trickery... the list goes on and on.

One of my favorite things about McMaster-Bujold is that she writes believable characters. Tolkien and Asimov have good worlds, but their individual characters are fairly flat and one-dimensional. Bujold, on the other hand, writes as though these people were real - they have fears, insecurities, hopes, dreams, and they change and mature as the characters are put into new situations.

Bottom line - if you haven't checked out Lois McMaster-Bujold, you don't know what you're missing.

The Opposite is True

[Karl_D_Schroeder]

There's two books coming out of Tor this year, The Hard SF Rennaissance and the Space Opera Rennaissance, which show just how wrong Spider is. In fact, there's a whole new crop of SF writers out there who are doing exciting things: Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, Alaister Reynolds, Ken Macleod, Peter Watts, just for instance. My own novel *Permanence* has just won the 2003 Aurora Award, one of Canada's two top honors for SF; and *Permanence* is loaded with new ideas, including an entirely new take on interstellar civilization (around Brown dwarf stars) as well as a new system for interstellar travel, all hard SF based... people seemed to love it, hence the award. There's tons of new areas to explore; I'm using cognitive science, emergent systems (and emergent democracy), General Selection theory and distributed cognition in what I'm writing now. Most of these ideas weren't even on people's radar five years ago, and a lot of them are just gaining ground now. It's a perfect time to be writing SF, there's lots of exciting directions to go in.

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.