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 It's great and all but considering SF is a product of the Industrial Revolution, it's almost out of date.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!
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?
-Uberhund
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?
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.
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.
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?
That's so true. I want to return to the 1930s, when all the science fiction on the big screen was much less crappy. I mean, Flash Gordon. Buck Rogers. Intellectually fulfilling stuff, that -- the men were men, the alien women were knockouts, and the bad guys were Chinese.
Well, okay, maybe the 1940s. Yeah. "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man." "The Invisible Woman." "One Million B.C." That's more like it.
No? How about the 1950s, which gave us dozens of cinematic classics about giant ants/scorpions/spiders on a rampage, along with "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein," "Devil Girl From Mars," "Jungle Moon Men," "The Man From Planet X," and "Monster From the Ocean Floor?" (Everyone's from somewhere!)
But surely the 1960s are the good old days. I mean, hey, "Barbarella" -- no cheese there. "Gill Women of Venus." "How To Make a Doll." "Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster."
Well, okay. The 1970s gave us "Star Wars," so that's gotta be the oasis in the cinematic desert. Surely that outweighs "Meteor," "Starcrash," "The Giant Spider Invasion," "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth," and "Dracula Versus Frankenstein" (damn that Mary Shelley and her interminable sequels!)
The 1980s certainly produced a lot more science fiction movies than earlier decades, thanks to "Star Wars." But were they good movies? Some were. But I also remember "Interface." "Alien From L.A." "Space Raiders." And the inimitable Scott Baio's "Zapped!" -- what a masterpiece that one was.
Then we get to the 1990s. Surely the advent of really good special effects must have led to an explosion of quality in science-fiction filmmaking. But no -- in fact all of your examples of crappy films are from the 1990s.
So when did "lately" start again?
Sturgeon's Law doesn't have an expiration date or a start date, I'm afraid.
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.