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Is Science Fiction About The Future Anymore?
An anonymous reader writes "A recent Globe and Mail article looked at the state of science fiction and concluded that the future is bleak. Fantasy and science fantasy are popular but near-future predictions are not. But author Robert J. Sawyer says, 'Science fiction has never been about the future, it's always been about the present day...' 'People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort -- and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular.'"
Overall, I think SF has run out of ideas. It's great and all but considering SF is a product of the Industrial Revolution, it's almost out of date. People deal with technology and science daily, love it or hate it. Overall, people want escapism that makes them think and fantasy that can set itself apart from the rest, fun to read, and not about tech will be popular for awhile.
I guess only time will tell!
_________________
Huh?
Bradbury must be getting old if he can't remember the titles of his own books.
Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation had very tight continuity between the two series despite the fact that they were produced decades apart. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine started off well, but seriously derailed when Gene Roddenbury died and therefore the franchise got run by people hired by Paramount who clearly didn't share the same vision.
I can't stand the present Star Trek: Enterprise because it's so wrong... It constantly uses technology that was not present in the Star Trek series, despite being placed in timeline order as a prequel to the original series.
I hope the series finalie of Star Trek: Enterprise comes soon and declares that the entire series was a dream sequence so that it is ejected from the "cannonical" Star Trek Universe and gets parked right next to the licenced-but-not-official Star Trek books.
First Sawyer says:
.," said Sawyer. "So part of it is that the readership has bailed."
"Regrettably, with 2001 having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying: 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well, we all waited till that year and we didn't get anything at all like that . .
And a while later he does it himself:
Sawyer hopes science fiction will continue as a form of sociological commentary, but worries that by 2030, the genre may be a thing of the past, even if its trademarks are gradually being co-opted into the mainstream: Witness Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize-nominated Oryx and Crake, for instance, which dealt with a future world suffering from genetic engineering gone virulently wrong.
Not so smart, that. Never predict anything concerning science or science fiction. You will always be wrong.
-- Cheers!
If you take into account that Goerge R. R. Martin' Song of ice and fire series, this statement doesn't hold water. No one is so clear cut black and white in his novels and IMO that's why he has such a huge pool of readers.
Is that when I get my flying car?
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Science Fiction is suddenly worried about being POPULAR? OK, that's funny.
The whole deliniation of good and evil being a comfort sounds like what it preached every Sunday across the US. Does that make religion a practice of fantasy?
SF doesn't make predictions about the next century because much of what will happen in the next century appears hidden behind a veil called the "singularity." Change happens so fast that human minds have trouble keeping up.
Slashdot has run an article about SF's trouble with the singularity.
-Uberhund
It's just that there have been made so many "crappy" science fiction movies lately that people are becoming disenfranchised with the genre. Look at Armageddon, Mars Attacks, Independence Day, Starship Troopers, etc...to name a few. There are still good science fiction books out there being written I am sure. Also, I want to know if the decline in science fiction book readership is due also to other forms of entertainment that cry for our attention. Game consoles, computers, Tivos, satellite TV, cell phones, PDA's, internet, PC's, and so on. There is just more competing leisure devices. I didn't see the story publish numbers for other book genres. It only suggested that fantasy-type books like Harry Potter and the like were being purchased or read more. I also think it may be true that the really great science fiction writers are coming to an end. Now, let me introduce another idea. How about comic books. Wouldn't some of those be considered science fiction. Aren't they extrememly popular still? Or is this discussion only about novels? Anyways, I feel that Science Fiction is not dying per say. It may be losing focus right now, but it wil always be there as a genre to delight people who as the article said, "want toperform a mental excercise to see what happens if present society continues."
That right there is a very useful tool.
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
I wrote a paper in college comparing the elements present in the seminal German film Nosferatu to conditions in the Weimar republic at the time, and I certainly came to the same conclusion, that is, audiences using movies to cope with troubles in reality land. The parallels of the ending of the First World War with the movie's seeming rejection of moderninity (the girl offers herself as a sacrifice to slay Nosferatu), the blow of the Spanish Flu which had ravished Germany (the vampire makes his presence known in the town as a plague), and the villification of totalitarinism (all characters ultimately must bow before the relentless dread of the vampire, plus Harker is sent to Transylvania by a cruel boss, and he sets out as on a lark, but we know what became of him. I found it to be fairly interesting.
Maybe we find it empowering when Bruce Willis is fighting terrorists and beats them with his American moxie... Opiate of the masses indeed!
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Perhaps the explanation is not so much that the future is looking complicated, but simply that science fiction has itself become a tedious and bleak rattling around in repetitive platitudes?
I personally don't think it's because people in general don't like to read about real life where nobody is 100% good or evil. Well, maybe if you're a teenager, but even so - most teenagers I have talked to recently (friends of my children - I'm THAT old;) think a lot about good and evil and are not at all convinced that things can be painted in broad strokes of black and white.
No, I think the problem is more that there aren't any brilliant writers and/or subjects any more. Last I read SF I gave up halfway through; I believe it was one of Iain Banks, whom I normally like, but it just seemed like some dreary humdrum - like yet another replay of the same old theme, the same old political and religious prejudices and thin science. At least in phantasy there's a chance you might see a new idea, but I must say my recent experience leaves much to be desired.
The most exciting and inspired literature I read nowadays seems to be Chinese literature. Maybe this is a question for everyone: Do you also feel that Western literature as a whole has landed in the doldrums? Have you tried something else, like eg. East Asian or perhaps Middle Eastern literature?
Is the first exception I can think of to this. His writing on nanotechnology and the effects of technological advancement on society is definitely predictive. And I'd be interested to see how the sci-fi reading numbers compare to any other genre. How much of the drop in readership is accounted for by people reading less in general?
Sci-fi it's not meant to be a predictive oracle. It's literature, and good sci-fi it's story driven. The setting and underlying ideas are important, of course, but none of that matters if it's boring to read.
What i see it's that we had very high-quality standarts set in the past for sci-fi, while most modern publications, while not bad, are simply regular (i haven't read everything published, of course - this is just my experience). In that sense, sci-fi might be experiencing a "creativity crisis", but saying the genre is dying is overreacting.
Historians have successfully cross-checked so much of the Christian Bible against historical facts that I'd think twice before calling it a fantasy story.
The big problem with science fiction isn't specific to the genre; instead, it is a problem in the whole publishing world. Books aren't being edited like they once were. Major chains are giving shelf space to the next Harry Potter or Da Vinci Code, and don't have the time or energy to edit books that will have far smaller circulations. That being said, authors aren't coming up with work that is both intelligent and massively popular; the last example of that was probably Neuromancer, and maybe Snow Crash.
Its hard to imagine the future or an ideal futuristic world when we have no heros. Star Wars, Trek, Blade Runner, etc... were all created by people that were kids during the Gemini, Apollo runs, possibly inspiring them and dreaming infinite possibilities and helping create the technology we have today.
Current generation of Sci-Fi would be writers saw recession, budget cuts, unemployment, NASA becoming a big bureaucrat.
Hopefully the XPrize will inspire the next to crank out some new and interesting ideas.
I've always believed True Science Fiction deals with the problems or issues of today, but during a futuristic timeframe. But also applying how things may be different in the future. Also, a lot of Science Fiction stories are written based on how things happened in the past and how they were handled.
:)
Just like something about say, robots. What kind of rights they should get, if they should be equal, what we would do if they became more intelligent tha us. I'm thinking the robot situation might turn out something like the holocaust, a small minority of humans wanting to eradicate a sentient robot population because they would be "tainting" humanity. I'm sure nerds would love pondering how to handle that dilemma, and it would be the same issue that a lot of our ancestors dealt with in trying to put an end to slavery.
Really, I think Science fiction is just modern literate targetted at nerds. We like techie things, and the future, but the only way we'll look at ethical problems and such is if they take place in the future with robots and lasers
Maybe the mass market is looking for simplicity, but the best of both SF and Fantasy has typically been heavy on metaphor, abstraction, ambiguity, and often features the sort of conspiracies that would made Machiavelli proud. I think it is more that people are looking for the strange and wonderful, non-thinking simplicity can be found anywhere - the intentional simplicity of a well crafted story world provides a stage to present ideas you can think about for quite some time.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
By placing a story far away in space and time, you can say things you can't get away with saying otherwise.
Gulliver's Travels by Swift is an obvious example. By placing his stories in fantastical places, he could poke fun at people who could have his head cut off otherwise.
Star Trek is another example. All kinds of racial stereotypes are presented but because they are alien races, it's ok.
Much of the science fiction I read as a kid predicted the social conditions we see today. Orwell's 1984 seems to have predicted that our government would embroil us in a permanent war and use that to squash our civil liberties. He also predicted the surveillance society that we now find ourselves in.
Science fiction is by no means dead. It's a very useful vehicle for saying important things.
Anyone one who claims that those who are not 'with you' are 'against you' is indeed living in a fantasy world.
The original Star Trek series, while highly enjoyable, had very little continuity with itself, let alone Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was also science fantasy at best -- so many people remember only the gems and overlook episodes like Charlie X, Who Mourns for Adonais? and so forth.
I'm not saying the series was bad at all, because it was enjoyable and ground-breaking, but I can't blame TNG (and yes, TNG broke away significantly, right in season 1), DS9, Voyager and Enterprise for breaking away a bit from the story that (for instance) had Earth all but destroyed in the 1990s.
That article is pap and pablum. Mainstream media in its representation of science fiction has NEVER been about the social issues that need to be explored. It's mostly been about the laser blasters and the battle between good and evil with the well-defined bad guy and his maniacal laugh. It's difficult to represent the true evil of the future in an hour or two on the big screen, which will be rooted in the same place it is now. Secret government activities, secret civilian organizations (militias with weapons), and disgruntled, twisted individuals in their basements with chemistry sets and soldering irons. You're never gonna see a bad guy with white skin, green hair, and a purple suit making things bad for people. Sci-fi has always had it's silly side, but Arthur C. Clarke held things up nicely, and William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson are still writing and cranking out the ideas in print that make me ponder just fine. I don't need two hours of laser blasters and popcorn munching to satisfy my appetite for sci-fi. The writer of that article seems too impatient to research the subject he writes of. Any other authors I'm missing?
I was reading an anthology recently (one of the "Year's Best Science Fiction" volumes, from a few years ago), and was struck by the fact that the majority of the stories in the volume were very, very light on the science fiction. For the most part, they were just straight fiction that happened to be set a dozen years from now, or had a plot that was incidentally related to aliens / robots / nanotechnology / other random SF topic. It left me wondering: what happened to the science?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I think that in part fantasy and sci fi are always in a conflict. fantasy is about eden. it is about the time before when heroes were heroes and everything was better. sci fi is about progress and about how things will be better in the future. (inknow there lots of sci fi is about a world that is worse but what im talking about is really the interest in scifi and in fantasy) so when the future dries up and it looks like it is going to get pretty bad people go back to fantasy. people want to live in the world of the late 1990s when money flowed and terrorists were not around. -it flowed for some and terrorists have always been around the media just has a way of shaping perception and thus thought- Of course when the past looks horrible, as it did after the civil rights movement and after the holocaust sci fi will thrive. people see a better future ahead that will somehow make the terrible past have some meaning. the pendulum will swing back to sci fi at some point and fantasy will be the one which is in 'trouble'.
Bah.
It has nothing to do with the genre or predicting the future. If there's a decline in science fiction readership it's due to the inability of writers (and publishers and editors) to give us really good stories. Science fiction as a genre might have a hard time because of the increasing sophistication of the audience, but the ray guns and the flying broomsticks should just be the background to a good story. If the industry is going to continue publishing tons of books of which 98% are caca, then yeah people are going to lose interest in the genre and look elsewhere for their mind-stretching stories.
b-lou
www.comiccritique.com
In fact what we may be seeing is a maturing of science fiction. The great master melded all the relationship together, even sometimes focusing on sex, into a good story that was set in the future to allow the freedom created by unfamiliarity, in the same way that novel might be set in the past. Now authors like KS Robinson and the like are creating tales that rival the greatest literature, with the aspect of future or past being a critical part of the story.
Simplicity is everywhere in literature. We can only keep tract of some many variables, like 3-7, encapsulated, so the relationships in literature are simplified. I also believe that readers will further simplify a situation to meet their mental capacity, so even if a character or story is complex, the reader will simplify it down to their needs.
The key difference between today and 50 or so years ago is that we are literally paying for our unhealthy relationship with technology. We have massively polluted areas of the world, obese children with adult diseases, an irrational fear of drinking tap water, among other ailments. Each of these cost us untold amounts of resources, and raises the question of whether we can develop the technology to save or get us off this planter before we use it all up.
This is all very US centric. Godzilla clearly predicted the price we pay for the misuse of technology. But even in American writers, like Pohl, have focused on the devastating effects of unhealthy relationships.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
but as a place in literature SCI fi is a context for decontextualization! It is a platform on which you can strip and re-arrange a society and see what happens when new rules are present. It allows you to make an imaginative metaphor and make it a physical possiblity. Then analyze its workings or if nothing else drive a plot.
To pick a favorite of slashdot, consider the movie blade runner which most people mistakenly believe is an updated "do androids dream of electric sheep". In fact its the merger with a second Philip K Dick book, "the man in the high castle". The plot is from "electric sheep" but the society is from "high castle". To me the two most interesting parts of the movie are never actaully stated in the movie. First this is earth after all the vibrant heathly best and brightest have left. The future is space and what remains on earth are those who cannot leave. The buildings where the ordinary folks live are mostly empty from the population drain and decaying. The markets have become asian bazarres where all is for sale and the passges tight and twisty and everyone is hustling. there is sense of just hanging on and hustling for thenext day but not a lot of prospects for advancement through career. How would this be like to live in? ridely scott decided the closest thing we had here was the Noir era so thats how he shot it. The other question the movie asks--which is pure philip K dick- was what it the nature of reality. As I drone on on this world how do I know I'm even human. The scene where harrison ford alone tinkles on the piano keys and stars at his own photographs has no words but you realize he is questioning his own human ness. could he ba a machine too or is humanness the sum of your memories and your struggle to live on. Whether or not fords character was intended to be actualy human or actually an android is moot to that issue.
the point is that SCI fi allowed the world to be stripped of certain thngs we take for granted that frame 90% of our lives. Going to school to succeed for example probably has occupied most slashdotters. But why bother in that world? Here was a man living in a world where the only people left either had no sense fo purpose--merely existance-- or were impaired in other ways and left behind to make the best their talents. we can ask what drives us, and what makes us humans in such contexts?
that is sci fi.
or it can be simple metaphors come to life like in startrek and the classic episode of the two races of people who are both half black and half white and hate each other for it. Or THX1138 where drug evasion is a crime and the masses must be contented. If you ever read bradubury's epilouge to 451 then you know his themes were the rise of political correctness leading to a society where anyhting confrontational is a crime. books and the effect they have on the mind had to be stopped. SCI fi let him take this to the extreme and create this contenment society. of course the whole plot and action is a consequence of a dissident act. but the context it what makes it interesting.
That is the beauty of sci-fi. its decontextualization of our own society so we can see it for what it it. It is in fact the closets thing to the POP art movement I can think of. Andy Warhols Soup can was art because itrecontextualized an ordinary object and made us think about how it and its design came to be and what it means to us when something so nromally invisble becomes the dominant theme.. Its not really possible to do that in traditionl fiction which build characters who live in real world with our normal rules.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Jaymzter,
It seems to me that Metropolis would proved more furtile for analysis of German culture during that period, particularly as I find your points of comparison a litte stretched. Out of interest, what was the rationale behind the choice of Nosferatu?
As a layman, my guess is that Metropolis may have been done to death..
Let's face it, with every passing year machines and computers are capable of doing more and more jobs that people used to do. The economic value of a human being is decreasing; it will eventually reach a threshhold low enough that capitalism, at least between human beings, will fail. In time, machines will be doing all of the work.
It's like the Matrix. The only difference is that in the Matrix, people could be used as batteries, so they were relevant. In the real future, people will be completely irrelevant.
There are three basic possibilities, mankind's selection of which will probably be seen as the answer to the fundamental question of whether human nature is innately creative, destructive, or indifferent.
1) People will build machines to serve them, and live happily ever after until entropy takes its toll.
2) The power elite will build machines to serve them. Warrior robots will decimate a rioting population. The power elite will will live happily ever after, or continue warring amongst themselves, until humanity anihilates itself by machine proxy or entropy takes its toll.
3) We'll screw up. The machines will decide the fate of humanity by their own free will.
Each of the above three can be modified by the possibility that people will integrate machines into their bodies and become cyborgs. In this case, people will essentially be telepathic (direct brain-to-radio link, the logical progression from the cell phone).
The machines will build huge space elevators into the heavens and wander about the galaxy freely. They, more likely than us, will know the purpose of the universe (if it has any purpose).
This is why no one wants to write science fiction. You either have to lie about the future or be honest and really depressing.
----
My boss was talking the other day about social security. Another boss suggested that we should take all of the money out of social security and give it back to the people.
I explained that, no, the social security administration doesn't have any money. They borrow money every year. Furthermore, the first people to draw from social security didn't pay into it, and the baby boomer generation most likely has paid into it but won't get anything out. You don't actually pay into the system and then get your money back out -- you pay the bills of your parents and your children will pay yours.
Besides, even if we had plenty of money, there won't be enough doctors to take care of all the old people.
So, he asks, "How do you fix it?"
"Robot doctors. They work for free, and don't make any mistakes."
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
For the record, Bradbury opposes Moore's theft of Bradbury's title.
"It's just that there have been made so many "crappy" science fiction movies lately that people are becoming disenfranchised with the genre."
Present day SF is playing to a more cynical audiance. Idealism is dead.
now that is a better essay than bradburys....
Maybe the Star Trek universe lost some technologies.
I remember watching the original shows and everytime the control panels sparked up, I was thinking, damn, don't they have circuit breakers, or at least a fuse box somewhere. ;-)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
nobody watches or reads science fiction to learn about the future. Science Fiction is usually a present day story told in the future. Good and bad sci-fi movies totally depend on how well it is told. Take minority report for example. Even non sci-fi fans enjoyed this movie not because of the sci-fi elements but because it was a good story. Compare that to a movie like "The Red Planet" another boring space movie that brings out the yawns. Unforunately critics tend to bitch about the technology in bad scifi movies that the actual story itself.
Sci-fi isn't dead, good sci-fi authors are dead (or not born yet)
did you forget to take your meds?
It is diffuclut to maintain an optimistic view of the potentials while keeping in mind and being wary of all the screwups that people can come up with. As an example:
Some people try to make the real world like that nevertheless."Either you're with us, or you are with the terrorists" ring any bells?
Probably is more of an example of a typical reaction to a novel political situation, Virtual States, using outmoded strategic thinking from past conflicts. See this 1996 doc on the topic, (slightly dated, probably some poor solutions, but with some useful insights)
Both Bush and Kerry show signs of not grasping the magnitude of what is going on, and how this differs from the past. (see some open source theory on this here) If Kerry were more familiar with this concept, he could use it to sandbag Bush in a debate. and vice versa.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I'm writing a novel about a terrible near-future where humanity is so fucked up, most people think The Matrix is a good movie. I know it may be too horrible for people to believe this might happen, but I expect the thought will cause many sleepless nights.
I read SF & Fantasy (the one about wzards), and other books rich in fantasy, to keep growing instead of starting getting old.
It worked quite well for the first 40 years :-)
Ciao
----
FB
Looking through the original source article in Popular Science and looking through the article, it all looks pretty depressing. Of course, purely from my own experience, I know that there is a great deal of new and interesting SF coming out, primarily set in a near-future dystpia.
From Morgan to Stephenson to Gibson or Macleod, the world's current condition spawns a quite wide variety of near-future dyspotian visions. This might well be a statement of the perception of now. Even reasonable fantasy is increasing grim and morally ambiguous, Parker and Martin and Erikson are all perfect example of these with recent or upcoming books.
Back to the article though, the idea that the world has been disillusioned due to the disparity of 3 years ago and 2001 the movie is laughable. The other 'fact' of decreasing magazine subscriptions is obviously a feature of decreasing literacy rates, and sound-bite attention spans. Magazines in general have seen decreasing circulations, even the ones that aren't mainly pictures.
In short, the article is has shaky foundations, wild conclusions, and strikes me of only having relevance on slashdot so the similarly patterened 'Apple is Dead' articles can have some company. Of course, Apple isn't dead either.
Nihil Illegitemi Carborvndvm
Then things just stopped. We never went back to the Moon. The Concorde stopped flying. We no long dream of flying higher, faster, better. The Shuttles blew up or were lost, space exploration was curtailed.
Sure, there has been much progress in the area of computers, but not as much as hoped (Hal 9000 anyone?). And the progress there is just makes Orwell look more prescient than, say, Heinlein or Clarke. The future we have isn't so exciting, and certainly isn't worth writing much about. At least not if your aim is to excite young kids about adventure, science and exploration.
It's a matter of frontiers - before SciFI there were Westerns; different setting, same basic idea. SciFi will come back if we ever enter a new age of exponential progress in exploration. Until then, the stories will be escapist fantasy...
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Compare Dante's 'Inferno', to his 'Paradisio'. Which has become a clasic? Do we end up in traffic jams because of beautiful flowers by the side of the road, or car accidents? This is human nature.
John Campbell (1910 - 1971) may have tweaked the mix in that strange moment in time when he ruled science fiction, but the last few decades are seeing a return to normalcy, where optimism and wonder are trumped by cynicism and dark visions.
Robert Sawyer isn't helping matters by presenting bi-sexual peacenik neanderthals living in a horrific totalitarian eco-state as some sort of alternate-world liberal utopia.
It's how we warn ourselves unconsciously about the future. Cloning was science fiction at one time. Skynet was science fiction at one time. And the really messed up part about it was that the first Terminator movie was made before the Star Wars program was created.
Science fiction can easily be based on true, classified, covered up stories too. But the believer is descreditted to the point that he's laughed at by science. Remember the remake of the movie "The Blob"? Who's to say that our government didn't do an experiment with an organism on a satellite that unexpectedly crashed? It could have happened. If the media didn't cover it, no one would believe it. Those who witnessed such events, know that the majority of people who watch science fiction movies won't look for the possibility of there being more science than fiction. But they also know that there will always be those who will.
People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world.
Then there are those of us that think the real world really is pretty clearly delineated, only we tend to make things more complex when they need not be.
This guy has obviously not been reading any Hard SF or "far future" tales. I've seen more and more of these kinds of books coming out. Ever since scientists found that the universe is accellerating and will not collapse, a lot of books have started coming out which look ahead to what life might be like billions, even TRILLIONS of years in the future.
For a good example, read Stephen Baxter's "Manifold" trilogy, which is just from the last 3 years. If that's not about the future, I don't know what is.
There are still good science fiction books out there being written I am sure
Maybe books are grabbing the attention of potential readers in the way they used to. I have a collection (three boxes) of Sci-fi short stories and novels from the 50's to late 80's. The most obvious aspect about these books is that they have incredibly detailed artwork on the front cover. Books based on movies more or less have the promotional advert as the cover.
Looking through the bookstores today, and the sci-fi books all seem to have an abstract pattern with no indication of what the characters or plot is about.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
"never" is never absolute! you figure it out!
____________________
Huh?
The reason the characters have no depth, the reason everything they say is just a corny throwaway line delivered in a manner more suitable to a porn movie (which is not far off in some of the scenes in S.T.) is actually part of the portrayal of a fascist dystopia. The society in Starship Troopers is a shallow one, but still an interesting one. Its nationalist (although based on a race, not a nation) values and its martial focus is explored by the brainless way the characters go through their roles. The baseness of the action scenes are comparable to the movies described in 1984 (such as the one with the helicopter and the boat) and the pointless nudity is similar to the erosion of social values found in Brave New World, so the sheer gratuitous nature of the entire film is what makes it almost as deep as those two books.
If you don't believe me, watch it again and try to comprehend the subtleties of it, like who exactly caused the war to start with. If you watch closely, it also gives quite a bit of information about the new feudal system and the military based "citizen" overclass that they had created. Try to pick out the little lies in the propaganda film and notice the spin it gives for the leaders doing some very immoral things.
I think social forecasts such as the dystopia in Starship Troopers to be some of the best Sci-fi out there, because it gives a useful warning for the present. Especially after the world trade center attacks where violence to avenge violence is seen as a social priority, movies like that help show that having a martial society destroys the parts of ourselves that we hold dear more than the enemy (whether giant bugs or saudi-terrorists) could ever do.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I've been reading all these responses by self-assumed authorities on science fiction or literature who claim to know what science fiction "is".
Science Fiction is a generic term used for fiction that takes place in the future or using technology that doesn't currently exist.
When you computer-chair critics try to state authoritatively that "Science Fiction is about how technological advances affect people," or whatever other label you want to use, you put an artificial limitation on something that is supposed to be free-ranging and unlimited. Our imagination and creativity are beautiful, precious things, and attempting to shoehorn the unborn manuscripts of budding authors who want to write their story their way is just plain wrong.
Science Fiction can be...
- An exploration of possible technological advances
- Shoot'em'ups in space
- The affect of future technology on society/politics/individuals/religion
- Pulp trash
- Satire
- Comedy
- And lots more..
Any writing can be written any way the author wants. The results will be according to its worth, hopefully. The only real problem is there's so much competition to be published that good manuscripts can sit in the slush pile for years.
Of course current fashions and trends are going to affect what gets published. Ultimately, most book publishing is for the entertainment of the ordinary person, and the book publishing industry succeeds in doing that.
Publishing "important" work with real literary impact is a hit-and-miss proposition, and always will be, regardless of the genre.
I do agree with you that they have been pulling out 'modern' tech before they were supposed to exist.., however keep in mind if they were really 100% true to the 'timeline' it would make for a really lame show to the masses, who expect lots of 'flash and techno'.
They were fighting a loosing battle impossible to win, as there is no way to be true to the original, and produce a modern show that has viewers..
Personally, I thought they did a good balancing act in the beginning, at least until that idiot got into that temporal-war kick and ran what was left of the show into the ground...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, in screenwriting you read about fads too, one screenplay analyst said "If I read one more story about a journalist chasing a Pulitzer prize I'll gag!", does that mean that all screenwriting is now centered on journalists chasing Pulitzer Prizes? No!
The article has no perspective - there are citations of declining readership, stale storylines, stale this, stale that. Well duh - EVERY genre has its high and low points, but trending towards a low point does NOT mean the sky is falling, nor does it mean that a new high will never be reached.
Some try to argue that "we've done everything Sci-Fi used to promise would be in the future, so there are no more predictions to make." Excuse me? The 1900 patent bureau chief called, he wants his statement back.
I must really have slacked off on reading the news lately, because I've missed all the stories about us being able to
- Travel in time
- Travel interstellarly (But hey, we've been to the moon!
- Concquer all disease (But we're really close!)
- Extract energy in totally novel ways (Like using decay heat to boil water to drive a steam turbine!)
So in short, what's "wrong" with sci-fi today is that a few fads have been wrung to death, and those with novel ideas have been sidelined. Their time will come, and I predict that in the future, we will still have good, thought-provoking, evocative sci-fi.
--I am Sun Tzu of the Borg. Resistance is feudal.
Part of the problem may be that SF in the main print markets is having to serve a different market than where most of the readership is - which is online. Of course, as this shows, I may be biased :-)
TNG wasn't 250 years after the original series. It was placed about 90 years after the end of the series (or about 70 years after the last movie).
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
SF isn't dying. We've had some peaks in our history, we've had some valleys. We've seen the market change and evolve. But SF isn't dying. Change is not death, it's change.
One thing that is true - and it's a thing that many folks miss - is quite simply that SF is a minority literature, and always has been. Star Wars and Star Trek and all those others aren't SF at all; they're adventure stories that have coopted the SF vocabulary.
Real SF is about the impact zone between humanity and science, where collisions of spirit and rationality occur like subatomic particles creating the fusion of new elements. Only a very small part of humanity is interested in that particular domain of imagination - because it's hard work. But the proportion is stable. The evidence isn't just in the circulation numbers of Analog, it's in the circulation numbers of all the other magazines as well - Popular Science, Discovery, Omni, Wired, and Scientific American.
Sidebar: one of the things that has drawn away a large part of SF's key demographic is the computer game. The 13 year old boys who used to read Heinlein are now playing Doom and Half-Life, going for the vicarious visceral adventure in the sci-fi virtual reality instead of exercising their imaginations in books. One possible future of SF - a future that has not yet been invented - will be the computer game that lets you explore a new world without having to shoot everything you see. The goal will be discovery, not mayhem.
But even with the computer games as part of our brave new reality, SF will continue to exist as a prophylactic, prophetic, and prescriptive literature - because those who are interested in science are also interested in what it means. The "decline" in science fiction, if there is one, is not a decline in science fiction as much as it is a cultural neglect of science.
In my not terribly humble opinion.
David Gerrold
Ha, kinds like that Pay it Forward faux science fiction film.
;-)
Everything will be just fine.
My you be eaten first
Read a book, already. (One that's not based on a movie or TV show.)
This topic came up with a co-worker of mine. He feels that the Star Wars world is not science fiction, but fantasy. The reasoning here is that nothing in the Star Wars technology world follows what we on earth have coming up in the future. SInce there is no relation to earth in the Star Wars world, there is nothing to determine what is 'fictional science.' therefore, he considers it fantasy. I'm still not completely convinced of his viewpoint, but it has caused me to think about it some more... It would seem that for anything to be considered truly 'Science Fiction' there must be a relation to Earth somewhere in it's world.
One thing Sci-Fi will always have a purpose for is that of authors with a passion for the sciences. Ideas in theoretical physics are always decent sources for interesting plots or complications. In the hands of a skilled author, SF based on this kind of thing is, IMHO, a great way to explore the implications of an invention before we can invent it.
But good fiction of any kind is always about the present. If it cannot provide insight about the present, then what good is it?
Philip K Dick summarizes what is sf quite well in the preface to 'The short happy Life of the brown oxford and other classic stories by PKD' isbn 0-8065-1153-2.
"This ~science fiction world~ must differ from the given in at least one way, and the one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society -- or in any known society present or past. There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation; that is, the dislocation must be a conceptual one, not merely a trivial or bizarre one -- this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation the society so that a result a new society is generated in the author's mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader's mind, the shock of dysrecognition. he knows that it is not his actual world that he is reading about."
Also:
"It ~SF~ cannot be defined as `a story (novel or play) set in the future."
I'm a professional science fiction writer, and I have the same publisher and agent as Robert Sawyer. He's correct, to a great degree. Good science fiction -- like the literature it is -- informs us about the human condition and conveys basic truths that inform the lives of those who read it.
There does exist, surely, science fiction with the intent of predicting the future and not much else, at least not overtly. But there is certainly a subtext present, if only to inform the minds who must enter this future world.
My first novel, Star Dragon, got great reviews, particularly at scifi.com. One of the points that the reviewer made there was that my future was NOT bleak, and that this was a refreshing change from most recent books. Certainly there is a long tradition of cautionary tales (Soylent Green based on Make Room Make Room!) comes to mind, but there is also an optimistic tradition of mankind using its intelligence and technology to flourish across the stars.
Somehow in recent years, and cyberpunk is probably to blame, at least in part, the dark futures of the cautionary tales have become standard even in stories not explicitly made out to be cautionary tales. Cyberpunk is style as much as content. Dark and gritty settings have emerged across the entire culture, not just in science fiction. Dragnet and NYPD Blue are both cop shows, but no one would confuse the two.
As long as the field of science fiction is diverse enough that the interested readership can find what they like, things will be okay there. You get stories like this when there is the perception that the diversity has vanished, which would be a crime. One of the joys about reading science fiction is that you always have a chance of getting something new and wonderous.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
SF is technology marketing. It started as short stories in radio parts catalogs to encourage subscriptions. After 20th Century life was revolutionized by technology, and practically every economy switched from an agriculture to a technology base, real technology marketing has replaced much SF in that role. As a fan of "hard" SF, where the scientific speculation is plausible, I'm encouraged by the prospect of a "die off" of lots of SF twaddle that can't compete with the real marketing. More interesting tech speculation, like Greg Egan (a programmer, quantum physicist, and skilled author) writes, and excellent character development through simple, compelling plots like in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, are possible now that SF doesn't have to reintroduce the speculative framework with each book, or risk missing a large audience containing sophisticated readers. Maybe SF looks bleak today because today is so screwed up that the future itself looks bleak. Well, hope springs eternal, so someone will inevitably write some SF that explores a future more inspiring than the possible futures so dissapointing now. It might not be in a familiar paperback - it might be on a webpage, an email, a chain SMS, or a medium just now being imagined. Get to work!
--
make install -not war
I was browsing at B&N and noticed the Fahrenheit 451 is out with a 50th anniversary edition. After bitching about Moore appropriating his title, guess who's going to cash in on the buzz associated with the name these days?
Unless Bradbury was complaining about his title being associated with a particular political point of view. In that case, more power to him.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
I seem to be in the minority here, but I think there is still plenty of content for SF. I agree that too much has been about over-officification of humanity or offending ET, but there is plenty that can be done.
What we need to do is overturn Star Trek. Trek was great, but it has lost appeal after too many failed attempts. What needs to be done is to write a new future for humantiy using different technologies, since we have a clearer view of what they might be. No more dilithium crystals or tachyon mystery particles.
The best example of this that I know of is the Alterntiy RPG from WotC, which I can't find a good link to for the life of me. Just Alternity.net. Alternity is a favorite of mine that never had the popularity it deserved. If SF took this route I see its future renewed.
We need a new future!
The best science fiction has always been about the future, not about today. I enjoy Sawyer's books, but they belong to the same sub-genre with Michael Crichton's novels: unusual things set in a comtemporary setting are given a patina of scientific justification. Hence, Neanderthals with neuroses and islands crawling with dinosaurs. Interesting, but certainly lacking in the "sense of wonder" area.
The best science fiction project human existence into a future that has been fundamentally altered by technology, either for the better or for the worse. When the author is up to it, and the concept itself is up to it, the reader can experience a transcendent realization of the wonder of the Universe and our place, for good or ill, in it. That, for example, is what I take away from a novel like Clarke's Childhood's End. That is what distinguished the Star Trek franchise: the occasional ability to whack us on the head with the insight that there really is no reason why, a few centuries from now, humans can't be living peacefully in something like the Federation in a galaxy peopled with other sentient species. That is a very hopeful message; it is not surprising that the franchise was born in the sixth decade of a century largely given over to war, death and fear.
Admittedly, I'm not a fantasy fan, but the few times I've tried it the novels seem like pure escapism, comic books without pictures telling impossible stories of elves and magic.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Phantom Menace or the one where America deploys a 53 billion dollar missile defense shield that doesn't work.
What would a human be if you removed this trait? Characters like vulcans are humans with emotions removed. Other "aliens" are likewise variations of humans, with human traits/foibles either removed, or dialed up to 11.
Book stores are flooded with junk books, like The Davinci Code or the for dummies series. Publishers are pushing these books and as gresham's law would put it, bad books are driving out good books. As someone who spends about $200 per month on books, I have seen this decline in what is available for quite some time. The amount of money that publishers spend on promoting fad books (like the davinci code) is appalling. It is becoming like the record industry where good musicians get pushed aside, so that this month's fad band can get all the promotion. I find more new science fiction books at the library than I do at the bookstore.
Books about elves and wizards sell very well, thanks to the Lord of the Rings. They just are not sci-fi.
Are book sales down? In the 1970s, paperbacks sold for around 50cents (some less, some more). Nowadays, everything is $6.99 or $7.99.
I do not believe that Caldwell actually reads sci-fi. She thinks Singularity created the idea that technology would grow so fast that people could not cope, but instead that idea came from a 1970 book by Alvin Toffler called Future Shock. She thinks 2001 was bad because it had a date in the title? How about 1984? Perhaps she should look into the trend of publishing stories after the author dies. Ghost writing with a oiuja board, I guess.
Are the modern sci-fi books dystopic? Yes, and that is not a new trend. Is it because that is all the publishers will publish? I don't know. In 1972, The Sheep Look Up was published, and that is about as dystopic a story as I have ever read. I don't remember a single book by Phillip Dick (some of whose books were turned into Bladerunner and Total Recall) having a happy ending. If you want a happy ending, watch tv. If you want to think, read a book.
Is it remotely possible that the solar system has entered an interstellar cloud that inhibits writing? (See Brain Wave by Poul Anderson, IIRC) Most of the books written in the last decade or so have been such tripe compared with what I read in the 60's & 70's that I didn't bother to finish them, and I've pretty much stopped trying. Of course, the number of people able to read and comprehend has dropped pretty sharply too. Bad Cloud!
Granted, writing is harder now than it used to be: more important than a decent story, decently presented, is making something the publishing bean counters (who don't/can't read themselves) will risk their money on. An editor reportedly said that the best route to publication is picking something that did sell and imitating it it as closely as possible. That can actually work (Grisham, Turow) but it's the kiss of death for science fiction, pretty much by definition.
It probably doesn't help that the future does look so bleak. Unfortunately, any future that doesn't resemble The Postman or Mad Max pretty much has to include happenings in the very near future that are pretty hard on the old suspension of disbelief.
The article seemed to be saying that science fiction would become a thing of the past because in 20 years or so, according to Vernor Vinge, the pace of technological progress would become so rapid that any attempt at predicting the future of scientific discovery would be swamped by the mass of innovation.
First, like many other posters seem to believe, I think innovation is slowing down right now (at least percievably) rather than speeding up and can't really give Vinge's theory any credance (although his novels are some of the best SF I've read)
Second, science fiction and fantasy have basically the same appeal to me. They are thought experiments (like the article said) that create alternate worlds to our own by adding or taking away some functional properties of our current world (magic, space travel, alternate historical events, etc.). The only difference, for me, between SF and fantasy is that the SF world of any given novel has the potential to be the state of the author's world in the future. That said, I evaluate the quality of SF and fantasy the same way: Has the author created a world that I can believe in? The answer to this question takes into account a variety component aspects of the work such as: overall writing quality, realistic characters, the consistency of behavior of those characters with the state of the world, the general concept that makes the SF world system different from our own, and, also, how relevant the subject matter is to me now (what does it say about our world today). Third, even if everything doesn't add up perfectly, it doesn't necessarily make an SF novel bad or good. Take Dune, for example. In some ways, it's hard to believe that force shields and the spice could create a world with both space ships and lasguns, while the combat seems primarily hand to hand knife fighting (I consider this somewhat of an inconsistency, yet it is certainly debatable). The knife fighting, however, also serves to emphasize the feudal social structure of the Dune world (as well as the differences between Fremen and civilized culture) and enables the novel to become more socially cohenent. But this is just an example. Another thing I would note is that although Dune is considered one of the classic SF novels, it certainly has aspects of a fantasy: most of Dune technology doesn't seem like it could ever exist, despite its label technology (ex. Ghola genetic memory, off the top of my head). If this is what the article would call "degeneration" of the SF genre into fantasy, then I wouldn't necessarily be disappointed.
It's silly to use sales figures, as they do, to determine whether a certain type of literature is healthy or not. Moby Dick took something like 50 years to sell out of its first printing.
I think a lot of what's going on now is simply that publishers have figured out how to sell large numbers of fantasy books: publish lots of trilogies. Having the author pad a story to make a 240,000-word trilogy means that the publisher makes three times more money than if the author had simply written a nice, tight, 65,000-word novel.
The fantasy folks also deserve some credit for bringing fresh readers into the field. It's relatively easy for a new fantasy reader to jump into one of the formulaic swords-and-sorcery series, because they already know about Tolkein's elves and dwarves and wizards. There was a similar thing with westerns in the 50's, which were written to tight specifications.
As far as magazines, the quality of stories in Asimov's is actually extremely high. I don't see any sign that the field is dying. They quote low circulation figures for Analog, but the plain truth is that the quality of what Analog publishes just isn't consistently as good as what goes in its competitors. (Analog is also hard sf, of course, but people also publish hard sf in Asimov's.)
Find free books.
The popularity of fantasy novels over sci-fi could be a product of the second industrial revolution we are undergoing. Technology that once existed only in the imagination (and sci-fi novels) is now integrated into everyday life. Perhaps, like the Romantic poets, people want a counter-environment --some place to go for relief, a different way of living they can compare to a normal 21st century life.
(to plagiarize Yogi Berra).
The big problem with literal interpretation is the self contradictions in the stories, the multiple political directives, the politically motivated translations
What look like self-contradictions in religious texts are often artifacts of translation by imperfect humans. Many recognize this; the Italian word for "translator" sounds like the word for "traitor". For maximum fidelity to the original texts (Hebrew and Aramaic for the Tanach; Greek for the New Testament; Arabic for the Qur'an), get a study edition that lists the original words in footnotes at tricky parts.
101 Bible contradictions cleared up
Well at least the Christian Bible is more self-consistent than some speculative fiction novels I've read.
I have to say I strongly disagree with the presumption that people enjoy stories with "clearly deliniated good and evil" because it gives us some kind of "break" from reality.
Not too long ago, Slashdot was discussing classic sci-fi movies, with Bladerunner being near the top of the list -- and people commented that it was a favorite precisely BECAUSE it didn't go into the cliche "good guy/bad guy" thing. Rather, you were forced to confront the fact that it's much more convoluted than that.
That being said, there's nothing WRONG with telling a good story about "good versus evil" - but the key is, it has to be a well told story with interesting, well-developed characters!
I've noticed that in general, people seem to like stories that are either based on real-life events, or believable enough that one can imagine they *could* eventually happen in real life to someone - where in the end, someone stands out as a "hero". This really has nothing to do with making things a simplistic "good/bad" -- but rather, gives us a "warm fuzzy feeling" inside that humanity really can triumph over difficult odds - and reminds us to believe in ourselves.
In good sci-fi, I think the same basics apply. Sure, it's a make-believe "future world" - but good sci-fi will let the viewer accept that the scenario really *could* take place someday. And again, interesting characters you're compelled to *care about*, plus a story involving these characters overcoming difficult obstacles makes it a good story almost automatically.
The idea of the sci-fi genre introducing us to new ideas about technology we hadn't had before is really just "icing on the cake". If an author has a unique vision and wants to roll that into the storyline - then great! It's one more thing of interest. Otherwise, so what? That's no requirement for staging a story in a fictional futuristic world!
It's definitely true that the basic plot of a science fiction story has to be intelligible to people of the culture that it's sold to.
..." (to quote a Heinlein title).
It's also definitely true that nobody can predict what kind of culture new devices will give rise to. (E.g., nobody predicted that the automobile would cause the sexual revolution. And they had decades with all the facts in front of them.)
And sometimes people WON'T predict things that are staring them in the face. E.g., the sexual revolution lead to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Science Fiction and fantasy are often safe ways to address this point.
Science Fiction and Fantasy are also frequently used as safe ways to make political points. And to warn about "if this goes on
But Science Fiction is also about addressing plausible futures, and seeing what they imply about "absolute ethics". This is what the best science fiction usually deals with (my bias!). Fantasy doesn't work the same way here, because it doesn't say anything about reality, but only about how we feel about reality. (OTOH, the line can be quite narrow between the genres. There's a series of 4 book called "The Dance of Gods", starting with volume 1 == Catastrophe's Spell (by Mayer Alan Brenner) which starts off as clearly fantasy. Magicians, elves, etc. Even Gods! And ends up by volume 4 as some of the hardest of hard Science Fiction. (I won't give it away, and I don't find the science totally convincing. But it's certainly plausible enough to hang a story around.)
What makes a story Science Fiction is the background. (And time can turn a story from science fiction into fantasy..as we gain in knowledge.) Conventional artifices don't make a story science fiction. Stories about FTL starships, unless they are based around some novel premise, fail the test. And this includes Star Trek and Star Wars and their derivitives. They are, at best, Science Fantasy. (Note that they could be redeemed by a bit of fast talking, and a few new theories...but nobody bothers to. So this is clear evidence that they don't CARE that it's Science Fantasy rather than Science Fiction. It sells, and that's what they care about.)
Genuine Science Fiction has always been quite rare, even within the genre. It's too easy to take some conventional solution (e.g., hyperspace drive) and use it to tell the story that you want. Even Hal Clement's "Mission of Gravity" does this, and both he and that work in particular had the reputation of writing/being "Hard Science Fiction".
One excellent exception is George Zebrowski's "Macrolife". There've been several (10? 15?) in the last few decades, but naturally I tend to remember the earlier ones, because they are the ones that I formed the concept around. Without them, I wouldn't have known that interesting "Hard Science Fiction" was possible. And even in those, I'm fairly sure that if you looked carefully you would see fantasy elements.
People spin fantasies by nature, and enjoy them. Anyone who doesn't, won't be able to stand most literature, much less science fiction (non-capitalized!) And without reading a *LOT* of science fiction, one won't encounter ANY examples of Hard Science Fiction. It's a continuua. (plural! There's more than one dimension.) When you say something is science fiction you are pointing in a direction in literature space, and saying "I mean the stuff you find over there", but as you look more closely "the stuff over there" breaks into a myriad of different sub-categories (mostly unnamed...where would you put Terry Prachett's Diskworld?) Science fiction and fantasy share a way of looking at the world. They aren't totally similar, but the entire spectrum has a lot of shared elements.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Look around in the same paragraph. Revelation 11:8-9, NKJV:
Sort of reminds me of how TV news media around the world were covering the World Trade Center attacks for three-and-a-half days straight, using live satellite feeds.
Let me start by saying I did not RTFA... the summary was too full of shit for me to follow the link.
... basically any author I would call good. While there may be a clear good and evil side, it is not a requirement. And when there is a clear good & evil, the interesting part and the focus of the story is the characters in between and their struggle. Flash Gordon and the Lensmen are not the sum total of science fiction.
Science fiction, other than pulp, has never been about a clear cut division between good and evil. Interesting stories come from complex situations. Read any old Niven, most Heinlein, modern GRR Martin, Robert J Sawyer, Bruce Sterling, John C Wright, Greg Egan, Stephen Gould,
*Of course* science fiction is based on current culture - people can't relate to anything too alien, and thus it doesn't sell. The same is true for every other kind of fiction. You never see fantasy books trying to get us to relate to people who kill peasants for talking back to them as good guys, but I'm pretty sure virtually every knight would have considered that appropriate. We are never given a culture of good guys in which the firstborn child is drowned if it's a girl, but certainly major cultures that considered themselves good, and were good in many ways, did so.
The thesis that science fiction is dying is a load of crap. I've found several good new authors over the past several years (Stephenson, Egan, Gould, etc), a few within the last few months (Sawyer, Wright) and many of the oldies but goodies are still producing (Niven, Sterling).
This looks like a big troll. I guess I bit.
Read Usula K. Le Guin's introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness.
I have to agree with this poster. Moore's movies are crafted to pursuade, not to inform. They exceed the boundary of what we would call a "documentary" and move into the territory of "Political Infomercials", similar to the O'Reilly factor and almost any other program shown on Fox.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Not only because the dialogue is crisp between interesting characters, but the story is really a fun story set in the Earth's near future... it seems to contradict the point of the entire article.
I guess it must not have sold very much.
We are currently getting over the fact that the future was not 2000. A lot of people felt let-down when 2000 came along, and we did not have "flying cars".
We will get over it and Sci-Fi will have a great come-back in around 10 years. The same has happened with Rock over the years.
That is, the spiritual side. Every religious framework of note in the world contains in it means to access the spiritual aspects of life - through prayer, contemplation, meditation, fasting, etc.
Now, let's step back. Many people in the world seem to have a "spiritual sense" that makes things like prayer and contemplation have meaning to them. Many people also don't seem to have it. The contemporary thinking on the matter would say, there isn't anything there. But what about an inversion of that -- let's say there _is_ a spiritual matrix in all the world, and some people have a sensory perception of it, and some don't. Like colorblindness versus color-sightedness. Then, it isn't a matter of imagination, any more than the color of the sky is imagination.
What has led me to this line of thinking is that for me and my spirituality, there is no "faith" or "belief" in it. My spirituality is based on hard perception and reflection on that perception. I don't "believe" that there is a spiritual force at work in living things, I just know it as well as I know the sky is blue. It's such an ordinary part of my working existence, you couldn't convince me that it was mere imagination any more than you could convince me that the view out a car window was only a television projection. Thing is, I'm also not alone. I haven't met many people who could elaborate their thinking like this, but I have met people for whom their spiritual sense is so strong, that they've hamfistedly come around to the same sorts of thinking by force of sensory perception.
As for specific religions, I'm not sure which ones have pegged out significant pieces of the truth, but I suspect they've all got something of merit. Well, most of them. The raelians could just be smoking something.
"Sawyer... worries that by 2030, the genre may be a thing of the past"
Doesn't that seem a little ironic? I mean, who would actually predict the demise of their own profession?
Oh wait, this is Slashdot... nevermind.
Hear, hear!!! Somebody mod this parent up insightful!
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
What we have here is something that you see a lot of from freshly minted English and Journalism majors who have a preconceived view that popular (inferior) genres such as SF/fantasy/comic books are not true literature and have never recovered from the fact that Tolkien is more revered by readers than Nabokov. If you read the article - there is a clear slant from the writer which is not really supported by the experts she so selectively quotes, paraphrases and ignores. While Sawyer is telling her that science fiction is not about the future, she goes on in the next breath to say that the mainstream literary works by authors like Atwood, whom she respects, co-opt science fiction techniques failing to realize that they are science fiction. To her science fiction is the narrow hardcore predictive pulp that Sawyer and others admit might be dying out. But to equate that with the whole genre dying is as absurd as saying that poetry is dead because people no longer read limericks...
/. which are replacing traditional print media as sources of informed commentary. At least now you get a lot of different biases and agendas to choose...
Sadly, you see this type of shoddy research in pages other than weekend filler where the writers have clear biases and agendas (ironically, often unknown and unintentional) which they selectively pursue rather than trying to understand and communicate what they are being told - (science and technology articles are the best examples - and the weekend technology section in the Globe is particularly bad). Good thing for blogs and
Perhaps he is aware that making a prediction (or meta prediction if you prefer) in public automatically makes it go the other way.
Of course, that would make him predict that his prediction would go wrong, which would put us again at the starting point.
I enjoyed reading that post.
Also, wanted to recommend THE HARD SF RENAISSANCE, an anthology edited by Hartwell and Cramer, featuring hard sf stories from the past decade.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Say you wrote a book with this claim in it. According to your logic, 2000 years from now people would read it and remark "Why, George Bush WAS president then! Therefore this author MUST have had a 12" penis!".
Hmmm...maybe I should start writing...
Blar.
You obviously haven't read any L. Neil Smith. Not only is his work very much "Science Fiction" as opposed to fantasy, the future is up-beat and positive.
Challenging? Heck yes, but not gloomy.
Maybe you're just reading writers who have run out of ideas.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
The problem is that we can now see that the future is likely to be so starkly different from the present that it is difficult to create plot lines that are (a) easy enough to follow without entire chapters of background information and (b) emotionally connected to the issues of our own lives (required in order for the reader to empathize with the characters).
Imagine a world where we all have incredibly high bandwidth data connections wired directly into our brains. We can call up huge computational resources whenever we need to and have the entire world's library of knowledge at ready recall. It is difficult to explain such a world without being overly technical, and it is hard for us to identify with a character whose very thought-processes are likely to be incredibly different from our own. This character will live in a world that has very little in common with our own. And that one piece of technology won't exist in a vacuum -- there will be many other equally revolutionary changes coming up.
There's plenty of stories to set in the future -- it's just that if they do a good job of portraying how completely revolutionary technical change is becoming, they also tend to be little fun. In the end, don't we really look for fiction to be fun?
Life is short: void the warranty.
The Heritage Trilogy by "Ian Douglas," along with the Legacy Trilogy he's curerntly working on. The first book (Semper Mars) starts in the middle of the Twenty-First Century in a world recognizable to the people of today. The author didn't take the usual cop-out of some great cataclysm that makes that future world completely different from the one we live in (i. e. nation-states as we know them haven't quite been eliminated) and tried to extend historical and current trends (social and technological) out to the near-future while still throwing in a few monkey wrenches (scientific proof that extraterrestrials visited earth in early pre-history) to keep the stories interesting.
Has anyone considered there might be a bias in the publishing environment? Sci Fi publishing and books in general have had their tax environment changed over the last few years in the USA.
These days their back list inventory of printed books is considered a TAXABLE item instead of a deductible cost. That means they have to blow out as much of their print run as possible within the tax year or get hit with a tax on unsold product.
So in the old days they could sit on 10,000 unsold copies for a few years, but now they can't. They have to do small runs, and if the small run doesn't fly off the shelf they remainder it and don't do a re-print.
Avant garde books are notorious for not flying off the shelves, even the Lord Of The Rings didn't sell huge when it first came out.
That built in systematic bias will have a stultifying effect on Sci Fi in print.
Another bias present in the USA is that basically there are two bookstores, Barnes & Noble and Borders. Here in Canada there's ONE store, Chapters. If a book doesn't make their inventory for whatever reason, it doesn't get sold.
This is not a conspiracy theory you understand, more like gravity. An uncaring and accidental force that constrains movement.
Change the above constraints, change the type of stories you get.
So basically I think Mr. Sawyer has a good chance of being wrong in his assumptions. The result he predicts may actually hold up.
Or the whole publishing biz could go electronic or "just in time" printing. That would really shake things up.
I have a friend who wrote an amazing science fiction book, yet has had a very hard time getting it published. I believe it's not the authors or the lack of ideas. It's the publishers loosing touch with non-reality
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SF writing has gotten a lot harder than before because we have an increasing familiarity and sophistication with technology on all levels, not just scientific but economic, political and social issues. That raises the bar for what science fiction writers have to worry about when they build a new world.
It used to be that science fiction writers would only have to worry about the physics of what they were inventing, or make it scientific enough to sound plausible. They could afford only to look at the obvious consequences of their technology. Quite consistantly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, certain inventions were believed quite seriously by some people to bring in a new golden age for mankind.
In modern times, we understand all too well that the fundamental problems to creating a golden age for mankind are not technological but social. We also understand how a piece of technology can have social impacts that are not entirely positive, or at least very disruptive. The automobile, television, the Internet, while these all have had positive aspects to them, only the most deluded would deny negative impacts.
And given all the social, economic and political issues about technological developments these days, one of the first things an SF author who has someone invent a new piece of technology has to worry about are who funded the technology and how do they intend to economically exploit it to get their research funds back. They also have to look at how people are going to be abusing the technology and the disruptive social impacts of said technology as well.
Email leads to spam and overloaded channels of communication. All of a sudden you have to deal with filtering mechanisms and means, technological, legal and social to cope with those things (which we still need to figure out). You invent something spiffy and all of a sudden there are consequences all over the place.
I sincerely doubt that's the reason why fantasy is so popular. Fantasy, which thirty years ago had some pretty slim pickings in terms of full-length novels, has exploded over the last fifteen years or so, filling whole sections in book stores.
But take a look at most of these so-called fantasy novels. Easily recognized Black Hat bent on conquering/destroying the kingdom/world? Check. White Hat who is often misunderstood by his/her own people/oppressed/victimized? Check. Standard prophesy which calls the White Hat something along the lines of "Chosen One" and spells out in rather clumsy poetry everything that's going to happen (completely destroying any idea of free will)? Check. Obvious love interest for hero, who's physically somewhere close to supermodel status and mentally would give Einstein a run for his money? Check. Incredibly predictable plot involving 'trials and tribulations' for our hero, but ultimately resulting in his/her destruction of the Black Hat, followed by a 'happily ever after' with the love interest? Check.
These fantasy novels which seem to make up about 90% of the offerings you find in the bookstore are FORMULA novels. Like romance novels their appeal is that they're simple-minded and the ending is never in doubt. Unlike the real world it's easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys and the good guys always win. And the reader readily identifies with the hero because the reader has never gotten over the juvenile "nobody understands me" phase, or the geek belief that if they could travel to such a world THEY would be the hero that everyone worships, rather than the common nobody they are on our own Earth.
The reader doesn't want a world anywhere close to reality, because if they actually could travel to such a world and it in any way reflected reality they know they wouldn't be the hero - they'd be the bit character crying for their mama until, five minutes into the novel, some nameless bad guy impaled them on a spear.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Substitute "passed beyond its most vital and interesting period" for "dead", and you probably have it. Classic sf (say 1930 through 1965) was artless and direct, but that didn't matter: the best of it could take you to some pretty strange and interesting places. Even a lot of the second-rate stuff had plenty of those "sense of wonder" moments.
... ) but it still showed us pretty much the same future as the previous generation, just seen through different eyes. Ultimately though they couldn't invent a future to replace the one they were critiquing ... at least not one that readers wanted to spend a lot of time exploring.
Its artlessness reflected the viewpoint of a particular generation of technological optimists: Progress is good. The future will have its share of problems, to be sure, but resourceful men (all of them white, age 35 or thereabouts) will prevail. So let's charge ahead and explore the universe and not give a tinker's damn about what's driving it all.
It was a mindset reflected in a lot of other areas of cultural activity of the period; architectural modernism and socialist utopianism to name a couple. Its mythic moment came in 1945, when science and technology delivered us from the Nazis. The vindication of the technocrats!
That worldview was pretty limited, but in hindsight I think it was a key factor that allowed sf to flourish; an interesting (albeit highly criticizable) combination of technological sophistication and sociological naivete.
It didn't survive the massive attitudinal shift that happened in the 60s, although for a time it looked as though it might. Some of that countercultural sf was pretty good (Dick, Delany, Brunner
SF made the leap to film and TV around the same time that print was drying up, but in terms of stories and ideas it was mostly a rehash of classic era print sf, dressed up and dumbed down for a mass audience, most of whom couldn't care less that its key assumptions had long been superceded.
Modern SF began with Gernsback and it ended with Gibson. What came before, and what comes after, are fundamentally something else.
It was always about entertainment, and is still about entertainment.
Many authors don't seem to understand this and desperatly try to be pseudo-realistic and desperatly try to justify their writing and invented technology with some pseudo-science. They try so hard to look like scientists, but they forget the basic thing, a good storry.
And that's why the majority of SciFi is rubbish.
"...Just like something about say, robots. What kind of rights they should get..."
None, the same as any other utensil or posession. Maybe the right to be recycled rather than scrapped, but that's for the benefit of society, rather than the robot.
"... if they should be equal..."
Equal to what? Their creators? They could say that they're losing their mind, and sing "Daisy, Daisy" until the cows come home - you're talking about a machine here. Turn 'em off and toss 'em in the garbage, Hank!
"...what we would do if they became more elligent tha[n] us..."
Just let Hitachi or Daewoo or whoever know that they need to dial back a bit on the intelligence settings of their positronic brains. This is basic stuff, what are they teaching kids in "Robotics 101" these days?
"...I'm thinking the robot situation might turn out something like the holocaust..."
And that would be a terrible thing. About as terrible as a holocaust on the great toaster nation.
Life's complicated and hard already without devising new - and non-existant - dilemmas.
T&K.
Political language
1) Rob Sawyer is a clueless hack.
2) Predictive science fiction is as alive as ever.Its greatest practitioner, Greg Egan, is still in his prime. His works range from vear human near-future (Quarantine, Teranesia, Distress) with requisite sociopolitical commentary to majestic far-futures (Diaspora and Schild's Ladder) that are unequalled in brilliance and tend to require a degree in physics to fully appreciate.
Other notables, such as Greg Bear and Gregory Benford, are also still plugging along. Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy rocked the Nineties and it is anything but predictive.
3) Science fiction has seldom emphasized prediction. Many of the great classics -- Asimov's Foundation, Herbert's Dune, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land -- say next to nothing about the things to come. Okay, Heinlein had carpets of genetically engineered grass. That's about it.
4) Mainstream thrillers of the sort written by Crichton and such ilk have plenty of off-the-cuff predictive elements.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
It's a continuua. (plural! There's more than one dimension.)
They are continua.
I hate when people fill bandwidth with grammatical corrections; yet, I find myself compelled to do just that. What does this mean??
In the case of jesus, god and the supernatural events described in the bible, the only support for these story elements is the story itself. Supernatural events are not known to occur.
Although this would in many quarters be considered sufficent to raise enough doubt to create a working assumption of fiction, we don't have to do that in this case.
The reason for this is that the bible says that god is immortal - hence currently extant. The bible also says that god is omnipotent - hence able to do anything god chooses to do. Therefore, instead of having to rely upon the bible itself to determine if the core story is fictional, we can instead, with great confidence, turn to demonstrations from god him/her/itself for our confirmation. Until/unless such demonstrations are manifested, we can quite confidently assume that the bible is either actually fiction, or that we are supposed to think it is fiction, and in the latter case, that's what we'd better think, because that's what god obviously wants and as the Christians will happily inform you, working at cross-purposes to god is not advisable.
Personally, I'd take a solid and demonstrably miraculous smiting of George W. Bush as good evidence. I want locusts, boils, and the waters of Cape Cod to part just wide enough to drop his fishing-boat to the bottom and smash it to itty-bitty pieces. If Cheney should turn into a pillar of salt at the same time, I would take that as a definitive "so there." After which a "burning Bush" would be awesome. I require miraculous transportation so that I may witness the above events, foreknowledge in the form of a description from on high prior to the events, and a box seat on top of a miraculous fog, with an ineffable season ticket so I can watch similar events for all the rest of our politicians.
Until then, it's just a work of fiction to me. A collection of poorly written, inconsistant, manipulative, inciteful (not insightful) tales written, as near as I can tell, to help manage those who look at the life in the world and shake in fear, instead of fill with curiosity and wonder.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
First, as I recently wrote, SF SF isn't about prediction. It rarely claims to be, and the prediction-style books are rarely the gems. Its about how we might react to new circumstances (ordinary life which just happens to be set in the 2060's), how trends- if amplified- could affect us, and most importantly, its about Sensawunda. Atwood wasn't predicting Fundies taking over the US, but she captured the feel of the Taliban taking over Afghanistan. We don't have a cyberpunk life, but SF has given us premonitions of what DRM, the Induce act, and Axciom can do once they get powerful enough.
Much of the best new SF is near term work. Charlie Stross reads like the next 30 years of slashdot stories are on his hard-drive. Kress, Egan, Marusek, Stephenson... they've got plenty of stories set 10-40 years away, not hundreds or thousands.
And then focusing on Sawyer-- they've bought into his self-promotion. He's ok, but he isn't the only Canadian SF writer (as also recently written there are several Canadian writers who could take him on even with the "e" key missing on their keyboards). And someone like Stross has more throwaway / background predictions in his near future stories (for example in the 2010's setting for Lobsters) than Sawyer can make in an actual "predictions" article (see 2nd link above).
SF is NOT about predicting the future - SF is (and always has been) a way of *extrapolating* the "what if" of NOW into the "what might happen" of sometime - 1984 was written as a political commentary on the policy in force at the BBC in 1948 (see what he did there? - non UK readers may not "get" the added humour quotient there...) Remember not to confuse the "soft" SF of say Star Wars or Star Trek (also known as Science Fantasy/Space Opera) with the "harder" SF of - say - Blade Runner/Jonny Mnemomic/Solyent Green) William Gibson "created" the cyberpunk genre, really aren't we just looking for the next NEW THING? I love Trek, Stargate, even Quantum Leap - but are they really SF? In my mind only vaguely they're more Sci Fantasy.... To me On The Beach is SF, Asimov's robots are SF, even Alien is SF. Solyent Green is definetly SF and so is Farenheit 451. The first Planet of the Apes film is a debatable point as is probably Aliens But this is just my opinion.... Interestingly good "fantasy" often addresses current MORAL/SOCIAL dilemmas by taking away the *current* confusions and presenting the same problems in a *different* light. Don't flame me regarding cheap/rubbish "fantasy" which is just pulp fiction dressed up with silly elf/dwarf/hero stereotypes.. In my opinion all GOOD fantasy/SF/take your pick (actually good literature in general as opposed to your blockbuster junk) should reflect current society plus add *either* a level of social comment or a *mildly* warning note of *what if* PS that isn't to knock your purely entertaining genres... Everything has its place and I wouldn't want to eat nothing but potatoes - if you get my point.... Cheers
'People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort -- and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular.'
And now due to intensely aligned and "mono-" viewpoints the world is becoming more black and white. People (in the US, certainly) no longer need to escape into a story to see the world as good and evil, since we (our government) valiantly crusade out to smite the evils of the hinterlands.
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-shpoffo
Also, the correct rules of the game (which bad SF doesn't follow) are that the technology or science must have an internal consistency and coherence. This is why ST in many incarnations has been baloney under Brannon-Braga; you cannot throw in bafflegab terms at random to explain pulling rabbits out of a hat. Which they are partial to.
Fantasy stories are based on the intrusion of the supernatural into life, and they should have at least an internal consistency of logic. But a lot of fantasy fails, too, because the writer is lazy and fails to maintain a mental rigor. The reader then spots inconsistencies and cannot maintain dispension of disbelief. SF stories, on the other hand, must be designed to support belief in the technological concepts used in the framework of the story. So how does this relate to prediction? -- Any predictions made must be believable to a rational person. The writer must set up a context in which they are acceptable.
SF authors have discussed the problem thoroughly and often - it's Vinge's singularity. Most SF authors are convinced that the world is going to change so radically in the next 20 years (max) that they don't want to speculate about it, because they CAN'T speculate about it. The future will be so differrent that we can't even imagine what it will be like./ 0,125 43,676265,00.html
One article online that discusses this is:
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article
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The whole deliniation of good and evil being a comfort sounds like what it preached every Sunday across the US. Does that make religion a practice of fantasy?
That's what athiests tell themselves, yes, to make themselves feel smart and superior.
In reality, it is the unwillingness to face the reality of good and evil that is simplistic and childish. Recognizing that good and evil are real means work - it means you have to do something about it, within yourself and within the world. So much easier to convince yourself that everything is a shade of gray, and that morality means whatever you feel like doing anyway.
The real reason we're seeing less Science Fiction is: its all been reclassified as science fantasy.
Seriously. The genre has become much more elitist about what qualifies as bona fide science fiction and what is mere fantasy in a futuristic setting. If Asimov's Foundation series was written today, I doubt it would make it into the club.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Most of the classic SF themes, like alien first contact, have been done so many times that it's hard to come up with a new approach. (But see First Contract.)
Another problem is that space travel didn't work. There's no place in the Solar System worth going. Mars is almost airless, Venus is superheated steam, and everything else is worse. We can't even get stuff into orbit cheaply after forty years of trying, and we're not getting any better at it.
Computers, as a subject, have been done to death. Nanotechnology looks too much like magic. Telepathy, ESP, etc. have been overdone. (There's a classic short story that more or less ended the Campbell era of ESP enthusiasm. All the ESP adepts get together and build a spaceship powered by mental levitation. Years of mental training are required. They all get splitting headaches whenever they run the thing. "Give me an old-fashioned machine where I can push buttons", one says. Once it gets out that the adepts are doing this, other people figure out how to do it with hardware, antigravity goes commercial, and the adepts are left out of the ensuing boom.)
This kind of limits what you can write about.
The dimensions aren't discretely chunked, but are, rather, continuous. (More like the real numbers than the integers.)
And even by saying this, I'm weaseling. Different people see different axii as dimensions. E.g., to some people one of the axii is the amount of sex (with sub-dimensions of a: how much, b: how explicit, c: how conventional, d: etc.). Others will concern themseleves more with violence (with a similar range of sub dimensions). Some will be more interested in what roles are played by women. (I won't guess what sub dimensions they might use.) et multitudinous cetera.
Literature doesn't exist on as a simple linear arrangement along a scale, and can only be put into such an arrangement by doing gross violence to its genuine nature.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
that book irritated the hell out of me. Not in the least because of its blaming the woes of the world on men, of course, but there were just huge gaping holes in the logic of whatsername's argument (Leyos? Who was the matriarch again?) that frankly, I expected Brin to plug in some insightful or unique way.
Bah. It was comforting to see that it was one of his earliest works.
+++ATH0
The "Stories We See Too Often" list referenced in the article can be found at this link.
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People don't change much, actually, so trying to explain the crisis of SF by anything other than bad books is silly. Vernes books were popular 150 years ago, I was fascinated with them in the 1980s, there is simply no reason why (correctly packaged and marketed) they should not sell like hot pancakes today. :) There is also no reason why other authors today can't repeat the success of Wells or Asimov. And the fact is that many are very successful.
Now the question is - why the decrease in readership and shelfspace? I think the answer is very simple, but not acceptable to the "old farts". The quality of science fiction churned out today sucks. And it doesn't suck because they have bad character development - it was always dreadful. It doesn't suck because people want to read fantasy - they always wanted to read both. And it doesn't suck because the world has changed, because it was changing like mad for the last two centuries and it hasn't prevented SF from being popular. The reason why it sucks is that writers are frightened by the future - those very people that were supposed to lead us there are scared of it. Of course, they invent and propagate lies about sci-fi "always never being about the future" (3 comments in this discussion with the same argument are already moderated to +5).
This is utterly stupid, like saying that woman's novels never being about love or detectives never being about murder. Don't overanalyse - people read SF because they want to read a story based on predictions - a story about future. I hate everyone who keeps spreading lies about humanity being scared of GM food or terrorists - we aren't! We are proudly looking into tomorrow and we want our SF to be about tomorrow, not yesterday. 52% of Europeans believe that science and technology will solve any problem we are faced with (2003 Eurobarometer study). If this is not an indication of technooptimism in our society, I don't know what is.
The solution is simple - write good SF about the future, make it solid hard science, add some passable character development and story and woo us with your informed speculation about expected developments. Make the reader excited to live, make him strive for a better world tommorrow - and your books will sell, SF magazines will increase their circulation again and everyone will be happy.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Sorry, not really a response to your post but ... is it just me or is Stross' Singularity Sky modelled on the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5? Outpost of a decrepit empire is attacked [Port Arthur], in response they send their outmoded main fleet on an unprecendently epic journey to repel the invaders, on the way accidentally destroy civilian ships from a neutral power [Dogger Bank], and when they arrive at their destination get annihilated in short order [Tsushima]. Even many of the names are Russian and there is an ancien regime Europe feel to the setting too.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
The idea of clearly-delineated good & evil is a fantasy, not something to look for in reality. Of course!
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
The plural of axis is axes. "axii" just looks daft.
But your point is correct -- it is all a single multidimensional continuum. Trying to arrange on any single line gives pointless results.