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."

Comments

Spider Robinson on SF? Huh?

[topham]

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.

Re:Spider Robinson on SF? Huh?

[srmalloy]

What makes Spider Robinson a commentator on SF, Sci-Fi or anything else other than pablum?

You mean besides winning a Locus award for Best Critic? Besides being book reviewer for Galaxy, Analog and New Destinies magazines for nearly a decade, and continuing to write occasional book reviews and a regular Op-Ed column, "Future Tense," for The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper.? Nothing, I guess...

And as for the 'Speculative Fiction', well, he isn't a writer of that either.

The people who voted to award him three Hugo awards (science fiction's top honor), a Nebula award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the E.E. "Doc" Smith Memorial Award (Skylark), the Pat Terry Memorial Award for Humorous Science Fiction, and a second Locus award for Best Novella would appear to disagree with you. But you can always define 'speculative fiction' to be whatever you want, and set up your definition to exclude what he writes.

Re:Spider Robinson on SF? Huh?

[Robotech_Master]

Uhm...not necessarily to disagree with most of your points, but I guess that since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won a Hugo, it must be science fiction too, right?

Get off his ass

[Klinky]

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.

Re:Get off his ass

[Sparks23]

Not only that, but many genres suffer from dilution. When there's a dozen people writing in a genre or producing for it, it's far easier to separate the wheat from the chaff. I think today, there's more wheat, but there's also more chaff.

Today when I go to the bookstore and look at the science-fiction section, I see all these new books, half of which are by authors I've never heard of before. Brand-new, first-time writer, or someone who's just not gotten coverage, or whatever. And every book has testimonials on the cover, someone saying the author is 'The most promising new writer to enter the genre since...' or whatever. So really, the only way to know what's good is to read it yourself... and since there's so much out there these days, there's much more chaff to sort through to find the wheat.

I think it's true with anime, too -- the growing popularity over the past few years has made a number of anime pop up which, honestly, aren't all that worthy, to reference the Miyazaki quote. It's true of almost any medium of fiction and expression when the field becomes crowded; it's not necessarily that the number of worthy things has decreased, but that the number of things /overall/ has increased.

That said, it's nice to see M'Oak get some linkage. Maybe it'll spur a few more T&K fans. :)

Re:Get off his ass

[Artifex]

I think it's true with anime, too -- the growing popularity over the past few years has made a number of anime pop up which, honestly, aren't all that worthy, to reference the Miyazaki quote.

And, to make things worse, Newtype USA pushes some of the most pathetic anime series through its monthly DVD (ADV Films has some real garbage). Unfortunately, new fans pick up the magazine and think, "Cool! Translated, and all about anime!" They may read about some cool anime coming out in Japan, but what gets offered here isn't always the best, but whatever is easiest or cheapest to make. And this is killing new interest in the genre.

Most people will never hear of works like Grave of the Fireflies (reference here, here, and of course Roger Ebert); they've been turned off by countless screens of tentacle porn, giant robots, and fantasy heroes with fill-in-the-blank special powers, not to mention the ubiquitous card game of the month merchandising. And as long as we settle for paddling around in the "shallow" end of the pool, we'll never get more chances to immerse ourselves in the "deep."

Brilliant

[Autistic_Treat]

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.

The demise of sci-fi

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

It was not really a disagreement

[Henry V .009]

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.

Re:It was not really a disagreement

[RestiffBard]

I... I can't even conjure a proper response to that. I'll try.

Firstly, Thomas Paine was a twit who only wrote one piece worth mentioning, Common Sense, after which he was an utter waste.

Capitalism, in its present form, wasn't really codified until Wealth of Nations. I'm quite aware, written by a Brit.

Freedom may have been around forever, as a concept, but the United States made it happen. All those theories and concepts that everyone was coming up with, not just the Brits, were actually implemented in the United States.

As for being a "blinkered fucking USian patriot" you might in the future consider not being such a blinkered fucking anti-american. There's 300 million of us. Do you honestly believe that all of us share the same mind on all matters?

As for Bush. It is my opinion that Bush is the greatest threat to freedom, democracy and capitalism in the history of my country. It's my fear that my people will be condemned to decades trying to reverse many of the policies that Bush has implemented.

Something that I don't understand and that I think a great many Americans don't understand is why so many of you hate us. We don't hate you. We make jokes about Canadian speech patterns, British food, French snobbery but we don't hate you. We don't go to sleep at night dreaming of the downfall of Chretien. Most of us don't even know who he is. Not because we're stupid. Because we don't care. Americans care about raising their kids, getting a nice house, seeing a good movie. In the back of our minds we consider that somewhere someone is suffering so that we can have all our luxuries. We, at times, feel bad about it.

Why don't we do anything? If we feel so bad for the people in sweat shops why don't we stop that practice? Why don't the people in the sweat shops rise up on their own? Why do they need our help? Americans may not have many hard fast beliefs but I believe we all trust in self-determination and self-reliance. Those are the values my nation was built on. No one helped us win the Revolution until the French late in the game (for that I honor the French and Lafayette).

So, in the future, get your head out of your ass. Meet some real Americans. Get a different view on the world than the one you cling to in which the United States is now the Evil Empire. Visit us. Spend some time with some of us. Get to know us. Come see a movie.

I completely agree with Robinson...

[CrayHill]

...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!

But...why?

[Otter]

Both the original and this completely beg the basic question -- in much of the 20th century people had a very vivid picture of The Future, accurate or inaccurate. Today, that sense has completely disappeared. Why?

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.

Re:But...why?

[Daniel_Staal]

Here's an answer for you: because they are having enough trouble imagining the now. We work, day to day, to just keep up with the pace of change; we don't have time or energy to spare to try to push that change beyond the immediate necessity. It is not that the sense has disappeared, so much as it is already in use.

For a good exploration of this idea, I would suggest the book 'Future Shock'. A very good read.

Re:But...why?

[Otter]

That certainly seems reasonable.

A couple of other things that occurred to me as I started thinking about it.

1) The notion of reinventing humanity has mostly died out, after the most popular schemes accomplished little and killed 100 million or so people. On the whole that's good, but visions like, "Overalls seem practical. In the future, everyone shall wear overalls! Gray overalls!" are gone with them.

2) There was a logical progression from airplanes to spaceships to space travel that made up a large part of the future vision. We followed that path to the moon, at which point the real obstacles that had been brushed off in fiction ("Mr. Sulu, warp 3!") came into play.

I'm sure there's plenty more.

Re:But...why?

[John Miles]

We work, day to day, to just keep up with the pace of change; we don't have time or energy to spare to try to push that change beyond the immediate necessity. It is not that the sense has disappeared, so much as it is already in use.

That's a really good point. In Asimov and Heinlein's heyday, we didn't have appliances that were smarter than their users. No VCRs blinking an endless noon; no DVD players that insult their owners. Our cars didn't have an average of a dozen CPU chips each, and we didn't have hundred-million transistor personal computers that only a few dozen people on the planet can honestly say they understand through and through. The ubiquitous Joe Six-Pack could still assimilate the technological content of his life as late as the mid-Seventies, and he had time left over on the weekends to think about what it all meant and where it was going.

But then the Japanese figured out how to fit 10 pounds of shit in a 5-ounce box. The sales graphs at Heathkit flatlined, Radio Shack started selling toys, and some hippie named Wozniak dragged a weird-looking piece of hardware to a club meeting in a forgotten basement in Sunnyvale. We quit making stuff in the Western world, both personally and industrially speaking, around the time of the last Apollo mission. When subscriptions to Popular Electronics started to decline, how long could Asimov's Magazine of Science Fiction hold out?

Maybe this is why the few examples of really-successful modern SF have been escapist fantasies rather than celebrations of futuristic hardware and intellectual conquest. I really liked this guy's essay, and I suspect he's a lot closer to the truth than Spider Robinson is. Fantasy hasn't replaced SF; it's just less optional today.

Re:But...why?

[ericman31]

But the interesting ideas of the near future are in communication and thought -- things that will change *us*

Of the "modern" writers, I like Greg Bear best. He is actually exploring the new frontiers of science, like genetics and evolution in "Darwin's Radio" but keeping to the tradition of great SF writing. Take a single idea about something new and explore how it impacts society and people. Gordon Dickson, a bit older, did the same thing in The Childe Cycle stories.

Thieves & King Website

[Anonymous Coward]

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

He mistakes science fiction

[ishmaelflood]

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 like spiders stuff but

[Crashmarik]

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.

Re:I like spiders stuff but

[junkgoof]

Exactly. There are some great older authors (simak, Wyndham, Wells etc.) and lots of nostalgically overrated crap. Movies like "Pulp Fiction" get by just making fun of similar junk, the parodies work, the serious attempts end up like the original "Little Shop of Horrors."

A number of more recent authors, such as Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, are as good as any of their predecessors, and in part because they take writing more seriously than science fiction ("Asimov has interesting ideas, but his writing! I wouldn't let him write junk mail!" --Douglas Adams). Quite a number of sci-fi authors, including some who still sell well (and not just the ones who write "Star Wars" adaptaions) just cannot write good English. Heinlein, Asimov, Anthony (OK, he writes kid stuff now, but he used to write "seriously", he just did it awkwardly). Not to say these authors did not produce good stories, they just did it without grace and poetry (and don't look for any in my posts, I'm a critic, not an artist).

Come to think of it there are even sci-fi authors (or were recently) who wrote well enough they could make junk mail readable. People like Douglas Adams, Donaldson (who works hard at making the subject material unpleasant), Gibson (who also has great ideas)... Compare what recent authors put out to the crap Heinlein wrote for most of his career (OK, I haven't read much of his older stuff, but there is a good reason for that), and see what you prefer.

90% of sci-fi has always been crap, just like 90% of most things (especially entertainment things) is crap. I think the top 10% today is as good as the top 10% 30 years ago. Nostalgia is just another way of revising history.

Re:I like spiders stuff but

[Flamerule]

Compare what recent authors put out to the crap Heinlein wrote for most of his career (OK, I haven't read much of his older stuff, but there is a good reason for that), and see what you prefer.

As the great quote from Wolfgang Pauli goes, "I think what you said is not even wrong."

Your statement is turned around 100% from reality. You call Heinlein's output for "most of his career" "crap", and then stunningly declare "I haven't read much of his older stuff, but there is a good reason for that". No, there isn't. Ask 99% of SF fans (and by that, I mean all but 5 guys), and they will tell you that it is Heinlein's later output that is crap. His early stuff is the foundation of science fiction, and it is fantastic. For our purposes, we can call 1973's Time Enough for Love the dividing line. Before that we have The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Starship Troopers, among many other notables.

Those 3 novels are classic, classic, CLASSIC. The opposite of crap. And what else do we have? How about Double Star, and a wealth of excellent juveniles (Space Cadet, Red Planet, Starman Jones, Tunnel in the Sky, Time for the Stars). A large library of excellent stories.

I think we can safely poll science fiction readers, and determine that no, the writing of recent authors has not magically become literary nirvana, while that of the first Grand Master is suddenly tripe.

Now, if you want to discuss writing quality, you have a point about the increasingly meritorious literature that the genre is seeing, as opposed to what was often a lack of "grace and poetry" in the old masters. However, calling it "crap" is 100% completely and totally unacceptable.

Since you do seem to have a knowledge of SF, as you mention Simak, Wells, Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson and others, you obviously are well-versed in the genre. But please don't mistake your personal preference for absolute truth.

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything in the arts has been pronounced dead: theatre, the poem, the novel, the symphony, photography, paintings etc. You name it, at some point someone has worried about stagnation. And then embarrassed by their comments in retrospect. This is a non-story and a non-issue. In any case, it would be a mistake to uncritically equate the health of an artistic form with sales.

BSD on the other hand is a actually dead of course... a hundred thousand troll posts can't be wrong!

Wolf is right

[Anonymous Coward]

The future is here and most science fiction dates badly. If I recall correctly, Larry Niven's first science fiction story was obsolete just before publication because of new data abour Mercury.

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.

5...4...3...2...

[dswensen]

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...

The state of SciFi today is just fine

[ekuns]

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.

Re:But...why? Other references

[HiThere]

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

There's still some decent science fiction...

[emtilt]

it's just hard to find. I suggest reading The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, but you'll have to read it online.

Re:The difference being

[RestiffBard]

what I'm saying is that Rome's conquest was, too them, complete, and lasted centuries longer then we've been around. When Democratic-Republic/Capitalism has been around longer then the Roman Empire or the Persian Empire or any other empire that pretty much thought they had this whole conquest thing sewn up then I'll get cocky. In the meantime some economist/poli-sci student is out there inventing the new world and preparing for the revolution.

How to find the good stuff?

[TMLink]

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?

How politcally correct of you

[RLiegh]

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.

>>In roman times, not even half of the world had been explored...

> ... by europeans.

By anyone. Did the aboriginees know about egypt, or the chinese know about madagascar?

Re:How politcally correct of you

[Flamerule]

Probably not, but they had universities when the anglo-saxons were still living in grass huts.

Funny thing about Chinese civilization. The quickly reached their peak, then stayed there ossified for the next 1500 years.

Oh please, Brandybuck.

Your single number is fucked up. "1500 years"? 1500 years ago is 500 CE. I hate to tell you this, but the dynasty of the Later Han collapsed in 220 CE. The Sui didn't reunite China until 589 CE, and China didn't really get going again until the Tang attained full control in 626 CE. Now, the universities grandparent was referring to were the imperial universities of the Han, already with 3,000 students in 8 BCE. We should consider that a peak -- and it doesn't correspond to your schedule.

So your date isn't a peak at all, but a trough in one of the many interregnums between Chinese dynasties.

You see, China's history is largely a story of the cyclic rise and fall of dynasties, one after the other. There has never been a time when Chinese civilization was allowed to ossify for such a long time as you posit -- dynasties collapsed much faster than that. And as far as "peak"s are concerned, China has had many peaks. The Han, the Tang, the Song, the Ming...

If you want objective evidence, instead of subjective cultural achievements, let me point you to Admiral Zheng He's 15th-century maritime voyages -- which the following article is referring to when it says "during the Song dynasty, China developed the world's largest and most technologically sophisticated merchant marine and navy". That article should be edifying as to why, despite its invention of gunpowder, printing, and the compass, China never conquered the world.

Well, this comment hasn't been flawless, but no, yuri benjamin, Brandybuck isn't right. Hope you enjoyed my theory, though.

Re:How politcally correct of you

[Jonathan]

Probably not, but they had universities when the anglo-saxons were still living in grass huts.

Only for a very, very, very loose definition of "universities". A bunch of people studying together doesn't quite cut it. It's like claiming the ancient Chinese or Egyptians had "science", when they didn't even understand the difference between induction and deduction -- they just some technological tricks that they learned more or less by trial and error, and even those were mixed with a lot of mystic nonsense. There's no question that today China has some first class universities like Beijing University where they do first-class science, but both those concepts came from the West.

Re:How politcally correct of you

[jefflinwood]

Have you ever heard of the Aztec, Maya, or Incan empires?

I don't know who or what was contemporary with the Roman empire at that point in time, but there certainly were organized societies even in your world of "savages"

I still think it's funny...

[Cody Hatch]

...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.

Good Modern Sci-Fi Author List

[anagama]

I've always loved Sci-Fi and I just can't imagine it completely dying out. And I think there are some good modern authors too. Here's a short list of authors I've enjoyed who published works in the last decade:

• Ian M. Banks (the Culture stuff - not the fantasy stuff)

• Kage Baker (The Company Series is rather fun).

• William Gibson ... obviously.

Who else should be here?

It's actually quite simple, and logical, too...

[BadElf]

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).

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 /.'ers

it's the exploration, stupid

[Ellen Ripley]

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."

Plenty of future still...

[jiri B]

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

It's not the gadgets ....

[ericman31]

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.

20th Century SF foundations are gone

[dlm3]

At the risk of injecting politics into this discussion, it seems to me that one point has been missed.

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.

Re:But...why? Other references

[ppanon]

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?)

The purpose of science fiction?

[Jherico]

When I was in high school I had an english teacher who told the class that science fiction served only one purpose. To warn us about the dangers of the future and technology. I didn't really believe her, but I didn't say anything. I didn't speak up and say "I read science fiction, and not so I can be warned about the future". I so wish I had. But it was high school and there are a million things I wish I could have done differently, knowing what I know now. But this one is a gem, because I already pretty much knew that she was speaking out of her ass.

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.

So long as there are heroines, (and hormones), there will be romance novels. Not so with Science Fiction. No hormones there.

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.

The need for stories examining all the possibilities of science and technology isn't really there anymore either.

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