Slashdot Mirror
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 It's great and all but considering SF is a product of the Industrial Revolution, it's almost out of date.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!
Is that when I get my flying car?
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
A good scifi writer's world-building efforts don't consume much word-count though -- the outlines are set up in a page or two, then the characters simply exist in it.
I disagree strongly with this statement. I do a lot of world-building for my science fiction novels, and my wife does a lot for her fantasy novels. You cannot just set it up and have them exist in it. With good, realistic world-building (and this really extends to everything, clothing, social courtesies, transportation, economics, etc.), the "existing" part reinforces the world through every single page of the book. I'm not talking about diversions to explain tangential technology (although this can be well done or badly done, depending on the story and how tangential the tech really is).
There's some great writing in the science fiction field, but there's also some less than stellar writing. I would submit that there are so few writers who can pull off the world-building effectively that publishers forgive them their other weaknesses, at least to some extent.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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.