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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.
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
A Fire Upon The Deep
A Deepness in the Sky
That's all that needs saying.
'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
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.
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.
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/
>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".
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.
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.
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!!!!
"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.
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.
Ah. Why does science-fiction have to happen in the future? I have no doubt that the Baroque cycle will be sci-fi esque, just like cryptonomicon. The best example of this, however, is Drake's Belisarius series. Set in Rome, it's a really fun look at what the Romans would have been like if they were accelerated technologically. (And AFAIK, at least the first two books are available from the Baen free library, which is just wonderful.)
::Shrug:: A genre is how you define it. If you ask a healthy and diverse sampling of people to pigeonhole a sum of books, I can almost guarentee that each persons' definition of a genre will differ to a greater or lesser degree with other people's.
Sci-fi, as others have stated, is a state of mind. Stephenson's Diamond age is a good example of this. Yes, it has nanotech, but the main focus of the book is on the culutral implications of technology -- which is why it is just a great read, if you want military sci-fi, Ringo's works are quite fun, as well as Weber's.
Aruging semantics makes for such fun.
I think the point is that those authors you list aren't selling very many books, which is a good estimate of the popularity of their writing (yes I know Cory's book is freely downloadable). What's selling is Star Trek and fantasy. Even the big 'space opera' books that are selling well now are arguably more influenced by Fantasy than science fiction. The Big Trends in sci-fi just aren't looking forward the way they used to. And of the ones that are looking forward, most of them are horribly bound up in jargin and technobabble and lose touch with what made science fiction good in the first place, a sense of humanity.
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
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 -----------------------------------
"From the tech driven SF genre into the character driven fantasy world."
Which fantasy world are you on?
Seriously. That horrific overgeneralization is just plain wrong. In both genres, you've got some stories that are character driven, and some that are there to explore how "X" would affect a society... whether "X" is the ability of a select few to conjure fire out of the air, or the technology to travel faster than the speed of light. Whatever.
And, in both genres, some stories have neither interesting characters, nor an interesting "X". Such stories tend to suck.
Fooz Meister
I'm sorry, but your list mostly proves Spider's point.
Vernor Vinge -- born in 1944
John Varley -- born in 1947
John Wright -- unable to Google birthdate, but is a *retired* attorney and newspaper editor
Cory Doctorow -- born in 1971
John Barnes -- born in 1957
Bruce Sterling -- born in 1954
Ken MacLeod -- born in 1954
Dan Simmons -- born in 1948
With the exception of the 32-year-old Doctorow, it appears that all these people will never see forty five again. This is the new wave? Is no one in their twenties writing real SF any more? Note that I don't object to the presence of older people--I'm past forty myself. But the total lack of *younger* people is disturbing...
Chris Mattern
The interesting aspect of Bujold's SF is not her space battles (read David Weber's Honor Harrington books if you're into that) but her biological technologies (uterine replicators, genetic engineering from chromosomal-level sex changes to producing new species) and how well she describes their impact on society. Her focus is on Barrayar, a planet formerly isolated from the wider human civilization but which is working feverishly to catch up in much the way Japan did after it emerged from its isolation in the 19th century. Barrayar is a feudal society overlaid with a new parliamentary democracy, with vastly more military technology than civilian. Yet for all the power of the men and their weapons, their society is changing out from under them as the women gain access to advanced genetic technologies, including one woman who challenges her cousin's succession by becoming a man and thus gaining a place for herself despite the rule of male primogeniture.
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.
Here we are 50 years later, and nothing has changed...except that 50 years ago almost everyone knew how to spell "calculus". :-/
For most people today, even a toaster is way beyond their comprehension. That problem is getting worse, not better. There is an increasing lack of interest in or respect for learning in general, IMO.
That is all helped right along by our consumer/pop culture, which is far more interested in the travails of the current hot celebrity rather than the latest advances in science. Sad, really.
I think if things continue this way for an extended period, the U.S. will lose it's leadership position in technology. It doesn't help that scientists and technologists have been getting screwed economically for years...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
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...
I think that you are close...
... pessimism.
The real answer (possibly) is
To me, it would seem that most people reading this know a bit about science and technology. The way that we envision the future is a bunch of megacorporations overly worried about not getting enough money. Everybody has a camera strapped to their heads. When they go to the bank, if they stare at the painting on the wall for more than 5 seconds, some money gets deducted from their account and sent to the artist. In this future, the average person is just a sheep for the fleecing by governments and corporations.
In short, we have seen the future. And unless something changes, the future will suck.
Compared to this, a fantasy seems great! If you see a lawyer, cast a fireball spell. And then you go to defeat the great demon of SCO.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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.
Ie; Set in the future, the crew of spaceship whatever battles aliens on the planet who-gives-a-crap. To me, sci-fi has never been a true "genre", just a word to describe books with the same basic plot.
Actually, I find there's generally much more plot diversity in sci-fi than there is in fantasy. If I had a nickel for every lowly apprentice that is secretly the next great wizard/king/warlord, I could retire.
Having said that, your second point is very true... there is a very blurry line (at best) between fantasy and science fiction. I think alot of the fringe stuff, or crossover etc... tends to get lumped in with fantasy anyways.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
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.
Well said, and I think that's a very good point. But I think it's imporant to note that the appeal of heroic figures is hardly something new or unique to today's society. The problem isn't that society changed, it's that many modern writers decided that there was no room in "serious" writing for childish concepts as good and evil. In doing so they lost their core readership, real people who immediately knew that something very important was missing from these stories.
I began to lose interest in modern SF when the good guys and the bad guys were all replaced by characters who were narcassistic, amoral jerks. And the rest of the world just seemed to be a tedious backdrop constructed purely to justify their nacissitic, amoral jerkiness. Why would I want to read about that?
I don't mean to say that it all must be black-and-white. SF has always had it's share of antiheroes, after all, or characters who were ultimately misguided. But the characters have to appeal to me on some level or I'm not interested.
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.
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?
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.
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)
(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
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...
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.
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.
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.
Cheaper? For me, it's FAR cheaper to pile in the car and drive six hours rather then fly down to Knoxville, TN from Columbus, OH. It costs $279 or 176.73 Pounds to fly from Columbus to Knoxville. Add the 2 hour lead time that you have to have to get through security and it now takes 5 hours and 55 minutes to get to Knoxville by airplane. It takes about that time to DRIVE it! Plus you have more fun and you can transport whatever you frickin want and don't have the hassles of security barring the cavity checks when you stop as a store to buy something. Best Buy and some Walmart greaters may as well give you a cavity check anyway! :) In any case, it's not worth the extra cash to fly here in the states unless your multiple states away. I mean never mind that I would fly to Knoxville MULTIPLE times in a year if the price was lower. The US Airline industry is indeed in sorry shape. Last flight I was on I did not even get a can of Pepsi! Boy if it only cost me 12 bucks to get to Knoxville from Columbus I would be there like every other weekend. HINT HINT! We'll fly MORE if we can get a good rate!
BTW, where are you getting these flights? I just checked and it looks like to go from Heathrow to Amsterdam and came up with 131 dollars. I'd like to know where you got that price.
Air travel is stuck back in the 60's. When will airlines get it that we are happier when we are comfortable! Bad enough to be stuck in a tube for 2-3 hours or longer but now your jammed in a seat with two other people next to you for the entire time and all you get (even though you'd be willing to pay) to eat is some dry pretzels and half a cup of pepsi. What I want to know is....where is the security system that they used in Total Recall? If you remember that, you could just stroll through and if you had a firearm or anything else like a bomb on you it set off klaxons....it even was able to see in our bags and stuff. Just walk right past and you were ok if you had nothing bad. Not like know...take yoru shoes off, take your laptop out of your bag.....all the guads saw was your skeleton.
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.
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.
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.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke
Sturgeon
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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.
...and we'll have about forty to fifty years longer than my grandfather did, in which to COMPLAIN of our empty lives filled with useless junk INSTEAD OF unceasing warfare, routine childbirth mortality, universal absence of liberty, and everpresent starvation, the way God intended. How can people NOT get that it is high technology that ENDED the decimation of the forests in Eisengard and cut in half the smoke emanating from Mordor? Burning trees or pieces of black rock, as Tolkien happily did in his day, is LOW technology. Social unrest is the blessed privilege of those who are not broken slaves. If we have more today it is because we don't get beheaded for complaining. And since we ARE free, most social unrest reduces to the grumbling of people with no real problems. Empty lives filled with useless junk are INFINITELY preferable to short ones filled to the brim with agony and helplessness, without even amusing junk for comfort. And that IS the choice. The Good Old Days are bullshit. They never existed. Today is infinitely better than 1948, when I was born, and 2060 will be so much better than this, superlatives become ineffective. The sky is NOT the limit--EXCEPT in fantasy stories, where nothing larger than this planet exists. It never was. Only the gloomy mind is a limit.
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.
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."
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.
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
It's even worse than that...we're in the middle of a politically-correct rewriting of history that will have untold effects. Also, there is an Orwellian twisting of our textbooks that no one seems to recognize as such.
Here in California, there was recently a law passed that will require the replacement of most of the elementary and high school textbooks in the state.
"Founding Fathers" was found to be too sexist - now it must be "Framers" (as in "framers" of the Constitution). Mount Rushmore is too sexist - every President pictured is a man, so it must be banned from all California textbooks. There is a preponderance of DWM (Dead White Men) in the current textbooks, so in the interests of race and gender equality we'll have a female poet replace the Wright Brothers in textbooks from now on. Thomas Edison is another one - no more mention for him, an ethnic example who made a much more minor contribution from society must be used. It is completely sickening.
Oh, also, all mention of fast food and other unhealthy items (such as soda) has been banned from textbooks.
All this textbook replacement is also happening during the worst budget crisis in state history. Nice.
So, aside from whatever lack of decent core curriculum we now have (my son was not taught a science class in fourth grade last year) we have to deal with the consequences of the ill-advised leading the ill-informed. What fun.
Fortunately, I'm headed for another state soon. ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
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?