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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.'"
Pretty much. Since tech and science are already something we see in our daily lives, SF became more of an "alternate reality" than a guess of the future.
-Uberhund
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?
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.
Now we have all the technology we can imagine (well almost) so we have to dream about something else.
Ironic that it's pastoralism that we dream of now, isn't it? David Brin deals with this as something of a side issue in his Glory Season, making the story metascience fiction. I suppose somebody had to take that step and better Brin than most.
Not that there's anything unique to the present about dreaming of pastoralism. Many of the great writers of the Industrial Revolution did that. What's different is that now it's the technologists themselves dreaming that dream.
KFG
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.]
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?
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
There are a great many lessons for those who wish to live a harmonous life with others. There is a great deal of ammunition for those who wish to perform selective literal extraction, usually for the purpose of justifing some horrific action.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
I'm also an aspiring sci-fi writer, halfway through my first novel, which deals with apocalyptic uses of nanotech in the near future (next hundred years or so). I believe the article was referring not so much to the quality of current science fiction but rather the declining interest among the general public. Analog's readership, for example, has declined dramatically, and 100K sales of new titles twenty years ago have declined to 20K today.
So far I haven't seen any convincing arguments for why this decline is occurring. It's not even clear it's a decline so much as a shift; fantasy seems to be going strong, and Harry Potter is the poster child for a whole new generation of fantasy fiction.
If I were to speculate (after all, we're talking about what they used to call speculative fiction) I would suggest that the Baby Boomers with their hugely influential buying habits have shifted away from the science fiction of their youth in the 50's, 60's, and 70's and are busy raising kids, saving for their retirement, and vegging out in front of the 300-channel home theater every night. There's just no time anymore for science fiction. They have grown beyond it.
I got back into sci-fi during the 90s after a long hiatus, and while I enjoy some of it, I find the overall literary quality to be below that of mainstream fiction. I still love a good yarn but very, very few authors are capable of building a truly convincing world--Vinge comes close, Asimov is forever, I like David Brin's scientific underpinnings if not his shallow characters, a few others. Philip K. Dick and Clifford Simak are for me the greats of the 60s-70s era; they wrote straight sci-fi yarns with vision, and they chose not to get bogged down in scientific details as some of the newer "techie" authors make the mistake of doing.
The pendulum will swing back again. The Harry Potter generation will branch out and "discover" science fiction next to the fantasy books and reinvigorate the genre. Magazines don't do very well anymore in any field, and people would rather surf the web than read, so perhaps in the future we'll read Acrobat files for $2.99. Who knows. The future is wide open.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.