Slashdot Mirror
Response to Spider Robinson on the State of Sci-Fi
Garund writes "A day or so ago Slashdot posted a story on Spider Robinson and his lament for Science Fiction. Well, other people, including Mark Oakley, publisher of one of my favorite independant comics, posted a response to Spider on his Thieves & Kings website (scroll about a third of the way down the page). Interesting take on it, I thought."
What makes Spider Robinson a commentator on SF, Sci-Fi or anything else other than pablum?
He doesn't write science fiction, he writes fantasy staged in the non-existant future.
And as for the 'Speculative Fiction', well, he isn't a writer of that either.
hand him back his toke and send him on his way.
he's done.
Any community is going to experience points of stagnation and critics who bitch about it. I think people need to face the facts that community as a whole loses that shiny interesting effect on them. Everything is no longer "WOW!", it's "Oh I've seen that before". This has happened with Anime. Miyazaki said the state of anime was critical and that less and less worthy series are being made. Well the same can be said for movies. The same can be said for Sci-Fi. The same could be said for alot of things. The thing is instead of bitching about it, he needs to get off is ass and go right some create some new great genre defining novel, or whatever.
I guess you have to be smart to write science fiction, but attributing lower sales to the fact that people like other sci-fi/fantasy titles better is sheer genius.
I'll certainly grant that sci-fi isn't what it was when I began reading it a number of years ago. I'll grant that a lot of the gadgets described as futuristic then exist now. But this theme which says there's nothing else which can be imagined as a future invention reminds me of the patent clerk who quit around the turn of the last century because there was nothing left to invent!
A rather amazing reply. In essence he says: "You're right. We don't care about the future anymore. But that is because this is the future now, and there is nothing much down the road."
Reminds me of Francis Fukuyama in a way. The important decisions of history have been made, and things will not got significantly better or worse than they are right now. Democracy and capitalism have conquered the world.
...that the genre of SF (as many other artistic endeavors) is having creative difficulty. Walk into a bookstore these days, pick up an interesting-looking book, and see that it is 12th in a series of 18. Come on, if the authors cannot deal with new character development, like they did 40 years ago for virtually every novel, something is wrong!
What does Enterprise have to do with Science Fiction? Spider Robinson is a writer. He's talking about other people's writing. TV, movies, and their various spinoffs are irrelevant.
"Why are our imaginations retreating from science and space, and into fantasy?"
Well, mainly because we live in a sci-fi age. There are very few revolutionary discoveries now - and fewer groundbreaking ideas - most are evolutionary. We are at a point where science is getting smaller and less accessible to the average reader. Consequently, this doesn't make good reading, so we're still reduced to reading about warp cores and wormholes.
What I'd like to do is read more books about the impact of technology on society and it's effects. Science fiction needs to step back and look at things from a different angle.
Fair comment.
Just saying over and over that it's so, as this response does and most of the comments here last time did don't explain WHY it's so.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
So. . .
.
.
.
Spider Robinson is depressed about the state of Science Fiction.
He cites dropping sales and no new authors replacing the old, as well as a mass defection of readers to 'Tolkienesque' fantasy.
You can read his article/rant here.
I can understand where he's coming from. Heck, I've heard his lament on the lips of numerous other Sci-Fi writers. To be part of a fading industry isn't exactly inspiring, seeing fellow creators slip from view, watching the dizzying excitement of a once lunatic market place die down to something which actually makes sense. . . (Well, I don't know if the paperback book market could ever really be described as 'lunatic' in quite the same way comics were for a while. . . Nobody I knew ever sealed away paperbacks in vinyl bags for posterity!) In any case, I do feel for Mr. Robinson.
Moreover, though, it got me wondering. .
And, ohhh, but this is a can of worms like none other!
I'll start off small. First of all, I should explain that I have always felt Science Fiction, from the day it first began to materialize, has had an expiry date stamped across its forehead. I'm not just reiterating the tried and true, "Sci-Fi will be pointless when when there really are people walking around in space suits and zipping back and forth between the stars."
No, no. It's much simpler than that.
See, I think stories have only two basic purposes and that everything else is just turkey trimming. Ahem. .
"I believe that stories exist for no other reason than to explore and share ideas."
It works like this; when people become curious about a subject, there is a desire to examine and to consider that subject. When desire grows enough, somebody will inevitably sit down at a keyboard and hammer out a book about it. Ideas flow, you see, whether we want them to or not, and they must be contained! Recorded. Sifted through. Shared. --And if the subject is fascinating enough, why then a lot of somebodies will hammer out a whole lot of books!
Look at teen romance novels for instance; because there are always young women clamoring to know everything they can about love and relationships, there is a more or less permanent market for 150 page paperback novels with sappy covers about dating and first love and all that. --When young women grow up, then we see the far more prolific 'grown up' romance novels for slightly different reasons, but still driven by the desire to spin around and absorb certain sets of ideas. So long as there are heroines, (and hormones), there will be romance novels.
Not so with Science Fiction. No hormones there. (Well, actually, there were quite a lot, but that wasn't Science Fiction's reason for being.) No. Science Fiction came into existence because the millions of minds living through the first two thirds of the twentieth century were besieged with the growing awareness that technology and industry could, and very likely would achieve terrifying and spectacular wonders! --The kinds of wonders which would change the very shape of humanity itself into something new!
But crikey, if people had only the dimmest clue of what that something would be. .
Indeed, people had only the most vague notions, but with Hydroelectric dams being built, telescopes probing ever more deeply into space, rockets being erected, new materials being developed, and all manner of new technological powers being discovered. . , people quickly began to realize that whatever the change was going to be, it was going to be Big with a capital 'B' --and that they'd better start thinking about it right smart quick!
But no fear; the trusty human mind has ways to deal with this kind of scenario. Why, the human mind when faced with sudden shocking possibilities, will Think About Them A Lot, thank you very much. --The mind will swim in new ideas and jump around with great excitement, examining the problem from every angle as though it wer
Spider Robinson's article was about science fiction, not specifically about books or writing (although that was the point he focused on.) TV and movies are completely relevant; he was addressing science fiction in all its forms.
I will admit, though, that Enterprise isn't really science fiction. Some of the other Star Trek series/movies were, but Enterprise is a completely lost cause.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Nice response, and far more sensible than the whine that sparked it off.
However, he is describing hard science fiction, ie technology extrapolation and the use and abuse of physical laws, SF is much bigger than that. There are also all the other parts of the science fiction field- for instance PKD is still completely out there. A Scanner Darkly is a technology proof novel.
I like his point that we are living in the future. I've always extended it to "We are living in the future and it is slightly crap". My cell phone is often out of range. My whizzy looking car has a 30 year old chassis. Passenger aircraft got bigger, and less comfortable, not faster. 'We' fly to the moon. But not often. (Damn these anti-curmudgeon pills are wearing off).
I have never considered him a science fiction writer. His work is much more on the order of screwball comedies. He usually starts off with with some urban legend type material a bunch of crazy characters, and he finishes up with see how good things are when we get along ? In the callahans stuff he generally winds up with in the future people will be alot nicer and regularly violate the laws of physics because of the fact.
Its not science fiction, its very good, I enjoy it a heck of alot and have bought just about everything he has written.
His rant about science fiction dieing was annoying the first time it had been done back in the 60's when hard scince fiction writers griped about the new wave kids.
Theres alot of great science fiction being written today more than I have ever seen before It just doesn't look like what it did 50 years ago. Theres a reaon The future isn't what it used to be. Look at the recent works out there by Greg bear, Greg egan,Ian macleod, Rosemary Kirsten, Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Dan Simmons, The list goes on. Its very high quality stuff and shows a greater understanding of underlying science than 90% of the golden age authors could manage.
What Mr. Spinrad misses is that there are things that just won't fly in the genre anymore. It's no longer possible to take a crap story toss in a few bug eyed aliens a spaceship and a girl in a brass bikini and expect people to read the story. Its also not enough to do a techno gimmick story anymore. As much as I loved George O Smiths stories, they don't read well anymore.
Elves and mythical pasts don't compete with science fiction. Theres always going to be a future and theres always going to be people speculating about it. How well the genre does will depend how well the authors bring the future to life.
BSD on the other hand is a actually dead of course... a hundred thousand troll posts can't be wrong!
I will admit, though, that Enterprise isn't really science fiction. Some of the other Star Trek series/movies were, but Enterprise is a completely lost cause.
I wouldn't say that. At the least, it's a neruotic attempt to explore the possible ramifications of time travel.
If you post to slashdot again i'm going to send them to deal with you. If you post again I'll know and you will have to face the consequences.
But I think Wolf and Robinson ignore the the new paradigm of computers and virtual environments. Science fiction was the perfect literature for the burgeoning of science and technology in peoples' lives. However, with cyberspace, I think that a better model, a better metaphor, is magic. Think about what's the most popular virtual community: Everquest. All of the progress of the scientific worldview to make not just computers, but the Internet, and the best interaction is a magical world. It fits.
Any day now Bruce Sterling should be along to write a snarky editorial on how he predicted all this stuff years ago, and no one listened to his infinite wisdom...
If you SERIOUSLY think that THEY are any match for HIM, then feel free to BRING THEM ON.
Don't remember what happeened LAST TIME do you?
In roman times, not even half of the world had been explored, and they had conquered that. In our times, the entire world has been mapped out and america has conquered it, economically if not physically (physically, in the cases of afghanistan, iraq and syria).
The high price of paperbacks may, as much as anything else, discourage purchases. I still buy books faster than I can read them and I continue to discover new authors who I consider to be breaking new ground.
The character of Good SciFi changes with time, and some people do not like that. But life isn't static. I see this argument as akin to those who think that music stopped being good in the 60s (or 70s or 80s or pick your favorite era). How can anyone reasonably expect any genre to remain static and still remain interesting? Perhaps Spider is holding on to older times and doesn't want to live in the actual future! :)
OK, I probably read more fantasy than I used to, as a percentage. Perhaps some of the creative energy has moved in that direction. (Jim Butcher for example) But for recent SciFi how about Lyda Morehouse, Greg Egan, James Hogan (still publishing interesting stuff), Urulsa K LeGuin (anyone read The Telling?) and John Barnes.
There is a lot of good stuff out there. There is also a lot of drek. That's just life. Maybe the people who complain that SciFi is no longer interesting are those who are just not finding the good stuff. It's out there.
I find the genre of hard SciFi continues to improve with time.
For those who aren't holding onto older times and those who are willing to look through the stacks to find the good stuff, maybe some of those left who complain just don't like the direction and the ideas being investigated in current SciFi. I continue to be amazed at the interesting and new directions that SciFi authors take stories.
Ahh, but as Fukuyama notes, democracy+capitalism presents a self-correcting system able to incoroporate valid critiques of itself, the first and only such system that human social communities have discovered.
Of course, Fukuyama's latest book admits that the Hegelian notion of self embedded in this argument is invalid in the face of biotechnology, particularly biotechnology's promise to allow us to tamper with the human genome and, in doing so, to change the 'essential' human nature that drives the whole Hegelian historical enterprise.
I think he has a point, insofar as people believe this to be the case. But that doesn't make it so. It's entirely possible that some grand upheaval could yet undermine global corporate hegemony. I'll grant you that the extreme capitalist dystopia has been done to death in scifi these days, but that just means that scifi writers need to broaden their own horizons a bit.
Vernor Vinge: The Technological Singularity.
Another work is: The Spike. (I forget the author.)
Vernor Vinge also uses the basic concepts in some of his fiction. I particularlly like Across Realtime
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
it's just hard to find. I suggest reading The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, but you'll have to read it online.
Although, I don't really agree that in order to comment on a field you have to be a practitioner in it. I feel qualified to comment on SF, I've never written any. I just don't expect people to take my comments very seriously.
one that will supplant science fiction in content, but not in perspective.
Having just returned from an utterly serious debate on whether or not humanity will be extinct within 100 years, I'm convinced that even though we may have stepped over a significant boundary as far as technology is concerned, other questions about the future will emerge.
Whereas before, the question was "what type of robots will there be", the new question will be "now what?" We have a weird, weird future ahead of us (well, those of us who aren't dying from AIDS), and imaginations will soar again, just not about stupid goddamn robots anymore.
If I could make this sig kill you, I would.
It is disheartening to think that SciFi is a dying genre, because the "Future" is here. Science fiction can serve to both challenge our minds and inspire our imaginations. Case in point: Joseph F. Engelberger, founder of Unimation, Inc., and author of Robotics in Practice: Management and Application of Industrial Robots, credits the robot stories of Isaac Asimov in creating his interest in robots. It was Asimov himself who first used the term "robotics" in 1942. I agree that we have not experienced any revolutionary technology advances in the last few decades, but it would be arrogant to think the future is Now.
So what of his did you read? Try the short story collections, "The Menace from Earth," "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hog," etc. Any of the future history short stories are great. The juveniles, 1945 through 1960 or so are also wonderful if you can appreciate them. Many of them are fun adventure stories, written to be serialized in Boy's Life, they're entertaining, and the science, for the time, is pretty damn good. If you only like Gibson-esque books, then its not going to appeal to you, but if you can appreciate good old fashioned futurism, then they're a blast.
Don't dismiss him on the basis of the half dozen books from the very end of his career, most written while he was actively in the process of dying of TB, and he never got to edit properly.
What a daft comment to make. His notion that we are somehow at the end of the road in terms of sciene is complete bollocks. Yes, 20 years ago we were dreaming about going to the moon, jumpsuits, and zipping around from planet to planet. In some ways yes we can do that now. So what happens now? well we start dreaming about the next thing. We start dreaming about parallel universes or blackholes or whatever. To suggest we are somehow in the future, is as stupid as saying that tommorow is today. There will always be more technological advancements, always new things to discover and therefore always new things for sci-fi to write about. Sci-fi is about the sciene of the future, not about one particular milestone of sciene in the future.
Only one of those books/concepts mentioned is actually conceivable given the current global context.
Welcome to Oceania, Winston!
I think you're right, but it does bring up the question "How do you find the good stuff?" With so much being published these days, it takes more effort to weed through it to find what's interesting to you.
Same with music. The increase in the number of bands out there seriously trying to make it, compounded by less diversity on the radio, makes it harder to find new bands that are doing stuff that you're interested in. I used to be able to use what was on the radio to not only directly find new bands, but to also jump off into new directions to find bands that might not be on the radio. Of course that kind of exploration can still be done today, it just takes more time to do so. Time that just isn't there (for me at least). More content out there to weed through, less time to do so.
So yeah, I state the problem and then don't offer up a solution. But what is the solution? Is it just finding several critics that seem to enjoy the same content that you do? Or is there another solution that just hasn't come to fruition yet?
Every time a guy gets a threesome, somewhere in heaven an angel gets his wings. --Cary Tennis
given your predeliction for making statements of a PC nature, I imagine you probably buy into the "benevolent savage" myth. That being the case, or even if it isn't, I think that you have to agree that the aboriginees and the indians were not creating vast empires that encompassed their world.
... by europeans.
>>In roman times, not even half of the world had been explored...
>
By anyone. Did the aboriginees know about egypt, or the chinese know about madagascar?
If -- and it's a very big and doubtful if -- science fiction is in trouble, it is due to a dearth of good writers and good writing, not to any "end of history", "the future is now" nonsense.
It is arrogantly stupid for anyone in the year 2003 to imagine that we've plumbed the depths of science and technology Not that that has anything at all to do with good writing, but some folks seem to think that because we can do a few of the things that H.G. Wells and Jules Verne wrote about a century ago, we've reached the end of our tether.
Even judging by the bogus rockets and robots yardstick, we've only managed to get to the next nearest stellar body -- the Moon, and our robots are lucky to be able to vacuum the floor. Getting to the Moon is rather like the first sailors paddling 100 yards out into the surf and coasting back in. And we're a very long way from needing Asimov's laws.
Science fiction isn't dead, but some readers' hopes and imaginations seem to be.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
is that what all this bitching is about?
How about this. No one is interested in Sci-Fi, because Sci-Fi is about people facing the future, and in the real future, a person is not important (except maybe to themselves). We are slowely but surely becoming less independant creatures and more cells of the colony. We are merging into a super-organism that really doesn't care much about us... maybe it will read sci-fi.
Well, you heard it folks. This 'future' thing we've been striving for is here. Now there, you naughty scientists, pack all that up. You don't need to think about theses things anymore; If people really wanted to live on moon colonies, don't you think they would be by now? I'm sorry, but if you really wanted flying cars you should have spoken up before. We've achieved the future. It's too late to go changing things now.
...for Spider Robinson to be saying this. I don't really consider him a sci-fi author, and I don't much care for his books. Indeed, to the extent that there is a decline in sci-fi, I've always thought of him as a prime exhibit. His stories are so...soft. Fluffy. Fantastic (in the very litteral sense).
That being said, I don;t think there's really any crunch coming for sci-fi. What Spider is saying is that the type of sci-fi he likes (and that he writes) is disapearring. This is true! But sci-fi is the reflection of tomorrow on today, and is constantly changing. In times past, post-apocalytpic wastelands, or psi powers, or laser printers, or time machines, or Martians, or portable phones almost as small as your fist were fantasies that appealled. Sometimes the world moved on, sometimes we learnt they weren't plausible, sometimes they happened - but in any case, they're now no longer suitable for sci-fi.
There's plenty of great sci-fi being written today (Baen Books publishes several good authours (and should in any case be supported for pioneering a content distribution model that doesn't rely on DRM. They give away some titles on their website, sell others cheaply, and include CDs with some hardbacks with dozens more.)
But it's not the same kind of sci-fi as was being written 20 or 30 years ago (and it would be pretty worrying if it was). For some, that puts it beyond the pale - it isn't "real" sci-fi. It's space opera, or military sci-fi, or too soft, or too hard, or whatever. For these people, intent on living in the past, I suppose the appeal of Fantasy isn't too surprising. But that's not the same thing as saying sci-fi is declining. Sci-fi is where it's always been - slightly on the edge, asking question some people would rather ignore.
People have had the future crammed down their throats for the last 50 odd years and can't handle the present, much less think about the future. I see this all the time (IT at small college) with faculty, staff, and, yes, students, not being able to use all the cool gadgets they think they need. Hell, there's still the blinking VCR thing happening.
Very few people can hold or get a handle on the change in the world and project forward. To be able to do this and write and interesting book, with well developed characters is really rare.
I drank what? -- Socrates
There are some interesting ideas to be had in the article, but his overall premise--that we've lost interest in exploring the future because we pretty well understand where we're going--seems wrong. I've read too many well-meaning letters to the editor explaining how a clone would be born without a soul, too many half-cocked attempts to disprove "evilution", too many faked-moon-landing conspiracies, and too much scaremongering over relatively straightforward issues like genetically modified foods, to ever be convinced that our species "gets it".
It's simple: for many people, the time when science fiction was most inspirational was back when it told us exactly what we wanted to hear. Infinite wealth, fast space cruisers, bold heroes who always got the bad guy and the girl (though not in the same way), and jet packs for the taking. But now sci-fi has gotten somewhat more realistic, and more grounded in the plausible. By doing so, it's lost at least a bit of that critical component of escapism.
If we've lost interest in sci-fi, it's not because we're finally getting comfortable with where this locomotive is headed. It's because we never had the nerve to even look out the window.
Second, there is vast difference between the death of SciFi and the decline of SciFi sales. The later is a distinct possibility, given that most people don't read real novels to begin with. The former is merely a matter of perception. It reminds me of the periodic statements by the educated ignorant that the end of science is nigh. Everything that can be discovered has been discovered. The reality is that though the technology is matured, the problems and possibilities still exists. We have moved from robots as, etymological, slaves to the questions of what makes a sentient being, or, as in the United Nation lingo, a person (see Can Animals and Machines be Persons, Leiber). We have the question of what does it mean to be human when we are no longer unique. Questions of culture, beyond the white human centric model pushed by the popular writers, are also up for grabs.
We must also acknowledge that the past is gone. As Andrei Condrescu stated on a recent editorial on NPR concerning the death of Teller and Riefenstahl, the 20th century is over. From a Science fiction point of view, we get the same from the death of Rodenberry and Heinlein, and the metaphorical deaths of Star Trek and Star Wars. The classic age of Science Fiction is gone. Complaining that the present is not like the past has to be one of the silliest thing for a SciFi fan to do.
And modern science fiction reflects this. The genre has not, like the romance novel, stagnating in a perpetual adolescents. It has grown, matured, and become complex. It is as unrecognizable as the friend that one has not seen since childhood. The very nature of that complexity limits the audience. No longer can it be completely understood by the child. No longer is a pulp medium to be passively consumed. It is literature.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Who else should be here?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Good until:
Then, the best case the entire world gets is a hellride as the First and fastest growing Third World economies go to war over the last few billion barrels of oil. Maybe the species stabilizes at a population where hunter-gathering will keep it going, though I'm not optimistic even about that. Modern war has nasty effects on the ecosystem.
Of course, a human race that agrees with Mark Oakley deserves such a fate. Let some other species that deserves it expand into the galaxy and long-term survival.
Mark doesn't know any better. A guy whose world is defined by his computer and a broadband connect and graphic art set in imaginary sword and sorcery worlds doesn't have to do the kind of research it takes into science, engineering, economics and a dozen other fields it takes to write decent hard SF.
We are the people who make technology. We are supposed to know better.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Sci-fi was (and is) a method for exploring the possibilities of existing and theoretical technologies. We are a much more techno-savvy populace now. Even my Grandmother knows what a laser is (it'll fix her eyes).
/.'ers
Society today, however, though tech-savvy, wants -- no, *needs* -- to find some reason or purpose to life other than just "moving forward" (whether toward the stars, the moon, etc.). Whenever society reaches a critical mass of "understanding" of the "known and accepted potentialities" of technology, it reverts to the "spiritual".
This is why the fantasy stories are obliterating sci-fi. People already *know* what will most likely happen tech-wise within their lifetime. What they *don't* know is whether there is a "god", or "gods", or whatever else you can dream up in the "spiritual" realm. IMHO, the fantasy genre is more important to the average reader today than sci-fi because fantasy texts address the questions and concerns that today's readers are really interested in.
Sci-fi is very extro-spective -- focusing on what might happen based on current scientific knowledge and theory. Sci-fi generally ignores or poo-poo's the spiritual/human concerns of us carbon-based entities, instead pushing either techno-utopian agendas, or techno-hell agendas.
Fantasy, on the other hand, is very intro-spective -- focusing on the (usually) historic, spiritual planes of thought and existence. Fantasy doesn't care about the future, as long as it can describe a believable past.
In a nutshell, I think what's happening is that people know enough (and have been let down enough) by technology to not have faith in the hypothetical futures described in sci-fi. Instead, these same people want an altruistic world like Tolkein offers (all is black or white, very little grey) that has the semblance of "history" or "religion", and doesn't require buying in to a specific school of futurism.
Of course, I'm probably full of shit and don't know my own ass from a hole in the ground, but that's what I think about this.
Peace, my fellow
I don't know that Oakley addressed Robinson's main point: "Those few readers who haven't defected to Tolkienesque fantasy cling only to Star Trek, Star Wars, and other Sci Fi franchises." Most people don't want a challenge, they want to sit back and relax. Brightly-colored fantasy like Tolkien is just more soothing than the unknown future you have to construct for yourself.
In the meantime, there's a news piece once a month on advances in carbon nanotubes to build a space elevator. On orbit for $5 a pound, coming right up, ma'am.
In the meantime, there's a considerable subset of the population that wants Mars so bad we can already taste her oxidized sands. A few billion dollars (perhaps 10% of what we've spent on the war in Iraq) and ten years and we could be there.
And no one seems to care. Where is this planet spending it's collective dollars, pounds and rubles?
"... using perfectly good rockets to kill each other, instead."
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
At which is the heart of current Sci-Fi, that being, its a fantasy. 60's Star Trek was great for everyone because it was nice stories, possibly relevent to the then current world in which the viewers lived, but it still was a fantasy.
It will never happen, there will never be faster-then-light travel i'm told because some old man in a patent office said so with no real proof of it, he just liked the idea. There can be no time travel because you would be able to undo what your just then doing and that just couldnt be possibe.
People seem to be reading more fantasy because you just realized that all Science Fiction is a fantasy. I dont recall eating people this morning for breakfast, or asking my computer for a drink at dinner. I've never had a sword of light flung in my face or a huge ass engine destroy space to bring these far flung parts together.
Sci-Fi is and always has been a fantasy, and that will never change. Why do we still read of space ships fly faster then light, or threw other 'layers' of space? Because the world and physics is quite boring, they say it cant be done. So a Sci-Fi writer has to stick to the magic that has been created before he ever started writing.
Sci-Fi and Fantasy are one and the same, only the setting differs.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
On an exponential curve, every place is "the beginning of the really steep bit".
In the last few years, mobile phones have gone from a rare and expensive device to a ubiquitous one. Similarly the Internet has become "universal" (in the West, at least).
The future *is* happening, and it will keep on happening, and it will happen faster than it's ever happened before. There will always be a place for science-fiction.
Jiri
-- Hi! I'm the "Good Times" signature virus. Copy me into your Sig!
Theatre, the poem, the symphony, and paintings are dead. Those art forms are in the "sucking mud" stage that science fiction writing is in now - latter-day nonnovators who are hoping to get paid to produce vague imitations of what was "cutting edge" fifty years or more previously.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Okay, again, same comment here as with Spider's little piece. What facts, what statistics, what anything can these people point to that shows the "decline of Science Fiction" as anything near reality? Some of the best science fiction I have EVER read has come out in the last three years. What the hell are these people smoking?
Okay so I've only read 2/3rds of the comments and responses, however after skimming through the rest I have not seen the simple take on the whole subject. 1st...popular genres come and go. Mainly because what's popular is capitalized upon, and over-saturation kills a market. To the point it becomes 'Old Hat' and boring. 2nd...Media outlets other than Print contribute to the over saturation. Too many movies, TV Shows etc; which while are of a certain quality (some could argue, but let us keep it simple), over-extend conceivable imagination to the point everything seems outright ridiculous (hence Star Trek reverting to a Prequel with Enterprise since the last couple series just took it too far). 3rd...And this is my most important observation. The very article discussing the demise of futuristic Sci/Fi is a bit late. Actually I find it to be quite the opposite. Too many authors; Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind (and these are the most recent), etc...have over extended their welcome into the Fantasy Genre and have made their books boorish. Not because they've lost talent in writing so much as because they've lost the ability to expand upon a story in a way which has not already been done over and over and over again. Me personally, I'd love to see a new book from C.S. Freidman, Larry Niven, J. Pournell, etc...
It's kind of amazing, historically speaking, that it's now possible to make the assertion that one is a more mature and stable individual because one reads Sci-Fi. The shades of a thousand pulp writers gasp in astonishment.
Let's try standing that assertion on its head:
Most people don't want to think about philosophy and human nature, they want to sit back, relax, and think about rocket ships. Brightly-colored science fiction like Asimov and Robinson is just more soothing than the unknown present you have to figure out for yourself.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
If only we'd build rocket ships out of bamboo, the future would be now!
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
People realizing the possibility of spaceflight brought us space opera novels.
People realizing the possibility of nuclear annihilation brought us post-apocalyptic wasteland novels.
People realizing the potential for computer networks to revolutionize the way we live brought us cyberpunk novels.
When the someone realizes the potential of some new development, we get a new batch of fresh science fiction novels. Sooner or later, something will be made or discovered that creates thousands of interesting possibilities. When that happens, science fiction writers will write about those possibilities in exciting new works. Until then, we're stuck with book 18 of a 93 book series.
I'll grant that a lot of the gadgets described as futuristic then exist now.
One of the things I always found great about science fiction is that the best stories weren't about the gadgets. The best SF writers took one speculative idea and turned it into a story. They explored how the world and people would be different because of that idea. But at the core, the story was about ..... people, just like any other great story. I'm talking about authors like Heinlein, Asimov, Clark, Pournelle, Gordon Dickson, Greg Bear, and Jules Verne.
And when you go back and read their stories again sometimes the science and the gadgets are dated, but the great stories stand the test of time. "Stranger in a Strange Land", the Foundation Trilogy, "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", the Childe cycle, "2001: A Space Odyssey" will always be great reads, because they don't depend on the gadgets.
In my universe I'm perfectly normal, it's not my fault you don't live in my universe.
Most hard-core SF was written during and in the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War. All of it escapist, much of it focusing on how humanity carries on after the dawn of the 21st century and presumably civilization as we know it has been destroyed.
For people looking beyond the horrifying news on the television, SF was a ray of hope.
Unfortunately (for SF), the Cold War ended and the world as we know it was utterly changed - but not because of world war or nuclear conflict. It was changed largely by the collapse of Communism (outside China and its satellites), removing the immediate threat, and thus the foundation for much of the SF we've all grown to know and enjoy.
Lacking the need for escape from our current situation into the future, and given the high-tech world that has been thrust upon us in the past decade (as has been noted elsewhere), it seems not unreasonable that Fantasy fiction, especially that espoused by Tolkien and Rowling, would take the fore over hard SF, at least for the moment.
Someone will probably point out that 9-11 and its aftermath are in fact World War III (or IV, depending upon how you count it), and this should be driving us to some sort of outlet that frees us from the daily drumbeat in the news.
But instead of Heinlein and Asimov, we're getting Harry Potter and a fish called Nemo... And it works, because these depict simpler themes of good and evil, courage and fear, and the ability of ordinary people (or young wizards or, well, fish) to overcome incredible obstacles placed before them.
This is not the first time such a thing has happened. During the peak of the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800's, amid motorcars, steam-powered factories, and crazy folk attempting to fly like birds, there was counter-revolution of sorts where people looked for craftsmanship and simplicity in their homes and furnishings, first in England, later in the U.S. It banished the sameness of mass-production and replaced it with objects that had the appearance of being, or were in fact, unique.
We live in similar times - only now the personal computer and the internet are the invading technology. It should come as no surprise that people have had enough and need an escape to simpler, less stressful things.
But I would also predict that this is only temporary. We're taking a breather as the next phase of technological development gathers itself together. When it will happen, I don't know, but when it comes to Sci-Fi, I would suggest that a gentleman and his team working in the Mojave desert of all places may unleash the next wave. Or maybe not. We'll see.
This pretty much speaks for itself- Spider's idealistic and hopeful view of the future... that someday people will care about more than what's in front of their face and the immediate problems of today. That maybe we'll care about going out into this huge universe and really stretching the limits of the human race.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Mark Oakley is an idiot if he believes that the past, the present, and the imaginary are all there is to write about. Hell... you could create a whole sub-genre of literature just about writing about the future adventures of Ted Williams' head. Oakley's "this is the future" viewpoint is about as accurate as the predictions that Bob Beamon's long jump record would never be equaled... and just as foolish.
I went to Tower Books recently to look for a book by William Faulkner. The store had on the shelf exactly, and only, three books by Faulkner. But on the next aisle, ah, there were 10 shelves of Star Trek pablum. All of it mechanically-written stumbling crap written by 10th-graders for easy-listening zombies. Our society's equivalent of the dime novel, disposable. The kind of person who reads this mediocre crap is a consumer, not a thinker.
But this extends to most media now. Comics for one. Consider Batman. Batman has reached a point where the character has been so overmarketed it has become passe, unentertaining. Nothing new, same old same old.
On Spider's point about loss of interest in space travel, I agree. Kids grow up watching Trek explore the universe in a star-travelling plush hotel, encountering the alien forehead-of-the-week. There is a combined deplacement of reality and desensitization that occurs. This flashy shiny 'everything is neatly tied up in the 38 minutes left between commercials' absorbs the edge of curiosity that would normally drive people to genuinely engage in furthering real life space travel.
I compare Star Trek versus real space travel to excessive masturbation versus real sex. It's too easy for the easy gratification to replace the real thing. And it's far inferior.
Mark Oakley's "Thieves and Kings" website, including the editorial linked in the article, is also at the official mirror site.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
http://www.glasswings.com/
Vernor Vinge also uses the basic concepts in some of his fiction. I particularlly like Across Realtime
Across Realtime was a combination of two novels, The Peace War, and Marooned in Realtime, and a novelette, The Ungoverned. Both novels were much better than his Hugo-winning "A Fire upon the Deep" (which is probably one of his weaker novels, IMO). Each lost the Hugo because they (respectively) went up against Card's "Ender's Game" and "Speaker for the Dead". I won't contest the Ender's Game award, however I think MiR was much better than Speaker for the Dead. Both of the later novels were SF/Mystery cross-overs and MiR is more effective in both genres.
I still haven't figured out if "Fire upon the Deep" won the later Hugo because voters wanted to compensate for the earlier decision, or because FUtD used Internet references just when the Internet was gaining mass market penetration. Probably a combination of both.
IMO, the best new novelist of the last decade in the Hard SF genre is Wil McCarthy. Check out The Collapsium, The Wellstone, or even his earlier Bloom. I think his stories have more of a Clarke/Asimov flavour, but with better plotting and characterization. If you like Vinge's Across Realtime, chances are you'll like Wil McCarthy's stuff too. While he's got some too-cool technology ideas, he also tackles some interesting issues (i.e. how will new generations make their place in a world with widespread immortality where the old farts refuse to relinquish power and position?)
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
The RIAA will be gone. While there may be a trade organization to replace it, this will be a normal political lobbying group, not an attack dog. The "surviving" labels will be under new management and ownership that decided to keep the old name in the hopes of restoring the brand someday. Possible, remember Tylenol?
Tech Public Policy stuff
you better listen the fuck up! im tired of this motherfuckling shit youre pulling! and im warning you! you fuckling piss me any more you little prick and i will hunt you down and kill you your wife and your kids! i'm not playing fuckling games! that fukngi mr ???? is also dead ! you better get the fuck out of the country!
YOU'RE NOT GOING TO KICK ME OUT OF THAT CHAT ROOM!
NO ONE IS!!!
I still haven't figured out if "Fire upon the Deep" won the later Hugo because voters wanted to compensate for the earlier decision, or because FUtD used Internet references just when the Internet was gaining mass market penetration.
Actually I think it was because it was an amazingly good book. I guess you just didn't like it? Sure, the net references were timely (and the grey-goo based stuff almost prescient), but it's the way things like the tine's civilisation was built so convincingly from the one really nice idea about pack communication, and the implications of zones and sublimed ancients that made it great book.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
The T&K website response reminds me of that teacher. It says that stories are tools to share and explore ideas, and then seems to go on to say essentially 'Science fiction serves only one purpose, to explore ideas related to all the emergent technology of the 20th century.' The T&K website is speaking out of its ass.
Granted, I'll agree with the statement that stories are tools to share and explore ideas. They can be used for other things. They're often used to inspire emotions, or to entertain, which is essentially the same thing.
T&K seems to take the position that the paltry foray's we've made into integrating new technology into our lives represent some sort of plateau, if not pinnacle of achievement. Its as if to say, we've got cell phones, we've got GPS, we can occasionally send a probe to mars and not have it crash, hoorah, the future is here.
Sorry, the future is NOT here. Never will be. We will always remain in the present, always, because if we start living in the future, we stop trying to get there. Sure, cell phones are nice, but wouldn't a subcutaneous direct neural link to all of human knowledge and all other humans be nifty? Or perhaps dangerous. I'm not sure. Lets explore and share ideas. What? You say the future is here and this is the way it will always be? Oh, perhaps I should write a book about navel gazing then.
I don't know about the author of this statement, but I've definately experience a thrilling rush reading about engineering on a scale I never imagined before, like a gigantic spinning ring around a sun. Or how about one of the myriad ways of defeating death, poverty, and inequality I've read about, couched in science fiction terms.
100 years ago no one could have imagined the way the world would change with the automobile. 50 years ago no one could have imagined the way the world would change with computers. We can't imagine how the world will be in 50 years, but we can try.
Sure, today's technology is growing mature, but science fiction is like a nebula. For those who don't know, nebulas are the results of a star exploding, and are the birthplace of new stars. The remnants of a pervious generation giving birth to the next. That works for ideas as well. Maybe some of today's technology was born in some science fiction writer's mind, and maybe the next generation which we can't even imagine yet is being born right now, slowly drawing itself together.
The idea of readers defecting to 'fantasy'. Trying to draw a line in the sand between science fiction and fantasy is like trying to nail jello to a tree. Most people call Star Trek science fiction, but its not. Not to me. Star Trek has always been about people, at least when its been good. If you watch the 5 series you'll see that they're each set in the era they were produced in. Watch the original and look at the way people act and interact and try to believe you're not in the 60's. Look at 'Enterprise' and try to believe you're not living in an America that is living in fear of terrorists. The fact is that technology molds society just as much as socie
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
I think Mark Oakley is quite right. At least his ideas look believable. We switch from sci-fi describing technologies to sci-fi and fantasy describing revolutionary social change, because that's what we are going to see.
Still, I think not enough attention is (and was) paid to the technological side of things. There simply wasn't enough sci-fi describing the reality (not the fiction) of modern technologies, such as genomics, nanotechnology, AI, etc. Yes, there is much more certainty now, but that doesn't mean the need for sci-fi went away. We can't use 50-year old "blueprints" (like Childhood's End) to explain how technology would work to people, because now we know better.
So I still don't see the answer. Why hard sci-fi becomes less popular (and this isn't an American phenomenon, this happens in other countries too and is discussed there as well).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Oh please. Every series of Star Trek has had the occasional snippet of a new idea in it, but by and large, every show has had the guts to ask the bold question 'What if we had faster than light travel and teleporters, but society was exactly like it was today despite this?' In terms of exploring the idea of what the future will actually be like, Star Trek is, and always has been, utter bullshit.
Don't jump on me for being a Trek basher either. I'm a total trekkie, and I've seen every episode of every series, but its just entertainment. Well, granted, in the case of Voyager and Enterprise, its more like some sort of self-inflicted punishment I can't turn away from. A concept all the more disturbing when you consider that since the addition of 7of9, there has always been a dominatrix character on the show. You know, the utterly icy yet undeniably desirable babe with the bondage fetish clothes on?
Don't even get me started on 'The blue room'.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Jherico
P.S. I hate SCO and Microsoft SOOOOO much. There. Now I sound like everyone else again
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
I have also plotted and started writing a sequel, inspired to some degree by many of the comments about the original novel.
I did not guess when I put MOPI online that the experiment would come to anything like the success it has seen. I put at least part of the blame on the publishing industry. In the 70's there were dozens of publishers, all of whom had at least one person dedicated to reading the slush pile; now there are only a few mega-publishers who would all rather publish the sure thing 12th installment in some safe series than strike out in a new and potentially unprofitable direction.
It has not become as hard to find an agent (that is, a good agent with the right connections who can actually get stuff read) as it once was to find a publisher. And we wonder why all the stuff on bookstore shelves looks the same. Sheesh.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Oops. It will not be going off-line when printed copies become available.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
No new technological change ahead, huh? Read much SF about superstring theory? There's between 10 and 26 dimensions in spacetime if the math supporting superstring theory is correct. Riiiiight. There's nothing new out there we could possible wanna write about.
Part of the problem SF is facing is facing literature as a whole. The whole population reads and writes with less skill than it used to. With a less skilled population, you get fewer standout works. So why the explosion of fantasy? All the dungeonmasters have hit book writing age. There were ALWAYS far, far more fantasy role players than SF players because TSR marketed D&D better than GDW marketed Traveller. D&D was also much more fleshed out. Traveler's small thin books always seemed so skeletal (pardon the pun) in comparison. Cranking out book 17 of the latest fantasy saga is little more work than preparing for the weekly hack n' slash session the writers used to run.
The thing that defines sci-fi is not the fiction part. Anyone can make up any old story and it's fiction. What makes it science fiction is supposed to be when *science* plays a major role in the story. Mark Oakley makes a big to-do about how science and industry have given us just about all they're going to, and so that's why science fiction is diminishing.
He's wrong. Science will always be with us. The "industry" part may have played itself out (capitalism might be dying, too), but science won't go away. It was even around when we didn't know what to call it! Plato's Republic was science, perhaps even science fiction. Moore's Utopia was Science Fiction.
Look, we haven't discovered everything yet. Every civilization at its apex thinks it knows all, and perhaps we're at the height of ours, so we think we're masters of the universe.
I bet India or China would have something to say about that.
Science fiction as we knew it in the mid-20th century - that masturbatory festival of industry, power and teenaged wet dreams - that sci-fi is gone. Because the world that it imagined us developing from is gone. The future of that world *is* here, and Oakley is right in that respect.
But we, here and now, we still have a future, and there are many bright minds writing about it. It may seem hard to grasp who the bright minds are, because there aren't only one or two sources telling us who they are like in the 50s when you had a couple of well known sci-fi magazines. Now the soapboxes are everywhere, and so are the authors.
Modern scifi knows that the current questions about our unknown future are: what will the political human landscape be like (yes, that's a scientific question)? What will biological studies bring us? Will the economic world change? Will multinationals just grow and grow? (That question has been with us since Neuromancer, and probably before, and it hasn't yet gone away.)
Some questions are still unanswered. We still don't know enough about physics to truly state if we'll ever be able to travel from one point to another instantaneously, or develop artificial intelligence.
As long as there are still questions to be asked about the interconnect of science and society, there will be sci-fi. It's just that the questions change, and people still looking for stories about questions to which we already know the answer, or questions in which few today are interested (yes, fashion plays a role), will find few examples to satisfy them, and so they will proclaim the death of their genre.
Yet there are still great sci-fi authors out there right now, asking today's important questions. Ken MacLeod is one of my favorites, along with Kim Stanley Robinson. Robert Charles Wilson is good, too. And there are many more...
It will never happen, there will never be faster-then-light travel i'm told because some old man in a patent office said so with no real proof of it, he just liked the idea. There can be no time travel because you would be able to undo what your just then doing and that just couldnt be possibe.
.9c or something.
There are posulated conjectures about how FTL could work and still not violate Einstein's theory of relativity. Bendng space, quantum entangled gateways--and the very easy conjecture that Einstein's just missing a principle that kicks in at
(FWIW, 'Trek's "warp" system actually does fit in, in an accidential kind of way, with relativity.)
Sci-Fi is and always has been a fantasy, and that will never change.
Science Fiction is an expression of ideas.
Fantasy is telling epic tales about different places.
There is a LOT of overlap, but there are also easly spotted differences. Asimov wasn't fantasy--if a fantasy writer wrote as badly as he did, they'd be sacked. Tolkien wasn't science fiction--he managed to not have a single new idea, and his writing added a bit too many extraneous details.
Back when television and direct -ial long-distance were the highest tech that most people came in contact with, futuristic science was a niche genre for a very few people with imaginations to see what might be.
Because book editors pretty well reflect the trailing edge of technology, they were quick to pigeon-hole anything to do with science.
Now that people are surrounded by technology and its consequences, from GPS, cellphones, and genetically-modified corn in the nacho chips, science is a mainstream thing.
I've written 19 published books and the degree to which they deal with technology would have put me in the science fiction genre 30 years ago. Now my stuff is in mainstream fiction, although I still do a fair number of signings from fantasy and science fiction specialty bookstores.
What will everyone do when 3/4 of the world is no longer struggling to obtain the basic needs in life?
You know, people keep asking that, and we still have vast misery, poverty and hunger in this world. I think we'll deal with the problem of arbitrary abundance when we get to it.
On the other hand, for someone in this county, food, shelter and clothing can be taken care of by someone working minimum wage. If you make an order of magnitude more than that, you spend it on gadgetry, larger versions of everything that wage-slave owns, entertainment of various sorts and broadband.
Oh, and big SUVs.
Don't fool yourself; we will always have a way to set the haves apart from the have-nots.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
sf? as idea, educational or problem solving. philosopy of western (tech) world) content driven, in other words... rather than character or action.. nice thought. BUT.... veg city lives. **** I zine, cartoon, atempt to comic write play etc. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/13/191221 7&mode=thread&tid=186&tid=214
for the thread at slashdot.
pat
http://mywebpage.netscape.com/Patr44PDonovan
packrat ; writer-informer. http://packrat.comicgenesis.com http://www.youtube.com/area163 https://www.smashwords.com/
Where did you get the idea that Heinlein ever had tuberculosis? He had a debilitating stroke, but surgery helped him to recover until he finally died in 1988 of heart failure on a Sunday.
Some of his work was fuzzy and incomprehensible while he was recovering from his stroke, but he was just as bright and lucid in his waning years as he had been earlier... that is, if you can stand what a dirty old man he was...
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Bah. Shows what I get for posting quickly and angrily. Heinlein did have TB; it caused him to get booted from the Navy in the mid-1930s.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
To preface this, I'll admit that I'm only somewhat of a science fiction fan, but I've been reading the stuff since I was a little tyke. I haven't read any Vinge, so I can't comment on Fire Upon the Deep, either.
On the other hand, I'll note that just because something is popular doesn't mean it's crap, and just because something is science fiction, that doesn't mean it has anything profound to say about the world.
To my mind, the fourth Harry Potter volume (and probably the third and fifth volumes, as well) have at least as much to say about the world as does Ender's Game. The latter is effectively a political novel, and does indeed have great stuff to say about the organization of society, the power of electronic information networks, and the value or lack thereof of coercive strategies for raising children, among other issues. I enjoyed reading it immensely.
In fact, the novel is a great companion to Harry Potter: they're both about kids who are effectively orphaned and subsequently raised by adults to take sides in a war about which they haven't had a chance to form their own opinions.
In the early novels, it's simplistic, but in the last couple of volumes, I believe that Harry Potter has become a profound meditiation on good and evil, and what lies between them. I believe that, as a novel about morality rather than politics, Rowling is every bit as profound a thinker as Card, if not more so.
So... what are Vernor Vinge, Iain M. Banks and Neal Stephenson producing vague imitations of that was cutting-edge in the 1940s and 1950s?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, I'm convinced.
That woud be Damien Broderick, who shamefully I have never read (bar a couple of short stories a decade or more ago), despite his being a research fellow at my uni!
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
I'd thought of that. :-)
Tech Public Policy stuff
Wow! You must read pretty fast to have gone through all those Trek books in one sitting.