Has Sci-Fi Run Out of Steam?

Barence writes "Science fiction has long inspired real-world technology, but are the authors of sci-fi stories finally running out of steam? PC Pro has traced the history of sci-fi's influence on real-world technology, from Jules Verne to Snow Crash, but suggests that writers have run out of ideas when it comes to inspiring tomorrow's products. 'Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart,' PC Pro claims. Author Charles Stross tells the magazine that he began writing a sci-fi novel in 2005 and 'made some predictions, thinking that in ten years they'd either be laughable or they'd have come true. The weird bit? Most of them came true already, by 2009.'"

Comments

Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Culture20]

Time to look to bulk fantasy for invention inspiration. Indistinguishable from magic and all that rot.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[commodore64_love]

Like the TV show Heroes? It's fun to watch but certainly not realistic. For example: How can Sylar pick-up a person and throw him against a wall? Newton's Law dictates that Sylar should be pushed backward with an equal force (recoil). Also where is the energy coming from? Sylar must eat 50,000 calories a day* to maintain that level of "toss people against walls" energy output.

I'd rather stick with SCIENCE fiction, with emphasis on the science and making it not violate known universal laws/theories.

*
* Trivia: Homo neanderthalis ate 10,000 calories a day to maintain his huge bulky body. Then Homo sapiens arrived and effectively starved neanderthal man out of food. That's how you control Sylar. Deprive him of food, and he'll not have enough energy to do his tricks.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

what the hell is wrong with you?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or to the beginning, with Frankenstein and The Time Machine. SF has never been about inventing new products.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Opportunist]

Personally, I like SciFi that gives me a good reason for what's happening, with reasons that can be understood. That we will come up with an alloy that is more durable than anything we can produce today is likely. It is also quite imaginable that we will some day be able to tap into new power sources, like cold fusion or, given enough time, pure matter-energy transformation. We might discover the antagonist to gravity and create antigravity. We will be able to colonize other planets (though I would much prefer an explanation other than "because it's there", human tends to be lazy).

But I do want more than a bit of technobabble. That's why I prefer Bab5 to Star Trek. In the latter, there's nothing an inverted polarized tachyon beam, beamed through subspace into a cobalt-balonium matrix cannot accomplish. I can come up with my own deus ex machinas, thank you.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, y'know, that little thing called "Being able to tap in to 'casimir force' to be used as useful energy"
Or maybe he has somehow tapped in to some field that permeates all around the universe.
Or countless other things.

It is called Science Fiction for a reason.
And not to mention the fact that it could very well be possible.
Don't even begin to think the human race knows that much about the universe, we are as clueless as lemmings even today despite having been in to space and other planets. (directly or indirectly)

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Krahar]

All the powers disappeared during the solar eclipse in one episode, suggesting that the power is coming from the sun, though clearly not in the form of visible light since the powers also work in-doors. There is no physical contradiction in Sylar's telekinesis, since the law of action-reaction merely requires an opposite force being exerted *somewhere*, it is not required that Sylar's body be the place for that reaction to occur. E.g. his power could work by pushing against a large volume of air, buildings nearby or deep into the ground. This is exactly the same principle of how someone in a crane can move heavy things without his body being crushed - his body just controls the movement, while the real action happens somewhere outside the crane driver's body.

The actual unrealistic part of Heroes is that there just isn't any mechanism for the human body to acquire such powers without some kind of outside intervention, but that is clearly part of the setting and the kind of thing you have to accept to be able to enjoy most super hero stories.

As for the people responding to you saying "what the hell is wrong with you", I would say that anyone watching something like Heroes and NOT having thoughts like "where is the power coming from?" pop into their mind... they should ask for a refund on any education they may have (not) participated in.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[WCguru42]

My misgivings about Heroes aside (come on, either going in the past affects the future or it doesn't, you can't have it both ways), the last episode with Peter becoming exhausted from healing people feeds into your idea of energy consumed. As far as everything else, the show has thrown out physics from the very beginning, but if it's ruining your enjoyment of the show just assume that Sylar has the ability to make that recoil energy occur in the deep far off regions of space on tiny dust particles.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[dwye]

> Like the TV show Heroes? It's fun to watch

Are you watching the same series that I stopped watching after season 2?

> but certainly not realistic.

As opposed to transporters or tractor beams? Anyway, anything that depends on mutant powers doing more than letting someone metabolize something new (like cellulose) or synthesize something (like vitamin C), I would call that Fantasy, not SF (unless a heck of a lot of explanation goes along with it, as in Niven's The Magic Goes Away series).

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about his a?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[commodore64_love]

Oh yeah.

The solar eclipse is yet another example of how Heroes is BS, not science fiction. The solar eclipse lasted what? All day? Total eclipses only last approximately 5 minutes.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[commodore64_love]

No I enjoy Heroes. But I would never, ever call it science fiction. It's pure fantasy

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Z00L00K]

I don't think that Science Fiction has run out of steam completely, but some authors aren't hanging the carrot far enough ahead of the mule so to say, which means that what they "predict" may already have happened.

If you go back to the grand old writers like Asimov, Heinlein and Dickson you will find that they play less on the science than on the social effects on the science as well as they are pushing ideas rather than technology. Sure they use technology to pave the way for a story, so in that way they are writing Science Fiction.

And don't forget that science is progressing - in leaps. And sometimes the technology is already there before it is known that it is there. It did take a while before the SR-71 and U2 were known to the public. Sometimes it's because it's used for covert ops, sometimes it's because the inventor isn't ready and sometimes its because others are jealous and don't want to allow that discovery/technology to be the right way. (Think of the continental drift theory)

But another factor that also causes Science Fiction to go over the edge is all those extreme special effects that Hollywood are pouring into the movies without consideration for the general story. Some Science Fiction movies/shows seems to be more of a special effects masturbation than support for the story. Just compare the Episode IV-VI of Star Wars with Episode I-III of Star Wars. In a way the special effects in the earlier movies weren't overwhelming us with "awesomeness" but kept on the level of necessity.

Another example of a well carried out story is Babylon 5 (R.I.P. Richard Biggs) where the special effects are a bit crude, but they weren't taking over the show. Even the old Star Trek had special effects, but some of them were a bit too crude to keep up to par with the expectation of realism. But the stories weren't bad, which is why we actually can enjoy the old classic episodes even today. So my advise to whoever is writing - don't play so much with the special effect, use various subplots and have things happen in the background. You never know when a subpart may come in handy. And if you are working with actors and write as the show goes on you may have great use for a subplot if one of your main actors suddenly is unavailable. Of course, you don't have to worry about missing actors when you write a book.

Too many Science Fiction stories of today are also focused heavily on action and less on the afterthought part. It's a bit too much about good person v.s. evil person and less about the inner conflict or different perspective. Just keep in mind the Heinlein quote: "Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind, it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate--and quickly."

Anyway - there are authors of today that are keeping Science Fiction vital; Jack McDevitt, Mike Resnik, Sarah Zettel, Eric Brown, Ann Aguirre, Iain M. Banks...

And there are writers that are writing Science Fiction, but that isn't playing that much with general ideas - like David Weber, Elisabeth Moon, David Drake...

The main thing here isn't really the individual story, but some stories is just a story and doesn't contain a deeper core of an idea aside from the story idea which ends when the book ends. The point is to get a core idea in a story which allow us to see, feel and visualize when the book / show has ended and we want to see more - and know that we ourselves may be a part of that "more". The idea can be a question "Are we alone - and what can we do to see if we are or not?" And questions like this can awake seekers that catches on to an idea and plays with it. If they play hard enough they may actually end up with an awesome result.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I agree with you. Most of what passes for science fiction is essentially "space fantasy". It is all the same old story but the props are different. Take a medieval knights and dragons story and replace Excalibur with light sabre, horses with space ships, strange countries with strange planets and you get what passes for Sci-Fi. Real science fiction where the props are much less important, (and the story teller goes out of his way to make them more prosaic and commonplace) but the theme, the storyline etc is science based is very difficult to find. The likes of Asimov and Clarke do not find big audiences. Even Chrichton had some decent half science stories. It is George Lucas and his clones with stunted imagination rule the roost in the SciFi genre.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[morgan_greywolf]

Not to open another "sci-fi" vs. science fiction debate, but the place that sci-fi (in the sense of science fiction) has always drawn its inspiration is from, well, science. When Asimov wrote Nightfall, he speculated about what would happen on a planet, inhabited by a society not too different from our own, that was surrounded by stars such that the entire planet was constantly illuminated. What would happen, then, if it were later discovered that every 2000 years or so, one of those suns were visible eclipsed? The society had never experienced dark. His inspiration was drawn from not just the physical sciences, but also the social sciences.

When he wrote I, Robot, he hypothesized about a computer brain that operated on positrons, which were recently discovered then.

So look for the sci-fi breakthroughs to occur where the scientific breakthroughs are occurring.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

. I can come up with my own deus ex machinas, thank you.

The correct plural form of deus ex machina is deii ex machina, not deus ex machinas. OMG, they dont seem to teach anything in Latin classes these days. Now etgay utoy foay ymay awnlay.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[jmccay]

Sci-Fi ran out of steam when the writers started putting more emphasis on sex and bottom of the barrel characters that represent the worst of society.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[tagno25]

and only occur on a small line, not the entire planet.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[avilliers]

Like the TV show Heroes? It's fun to watch but certainly not realistic. For example: How can Sylar pick-up a person and throw him against a wall? Newton's Law dictates that Sylar should be pushed backward with an equal force (recoil). Also where is the energy coming from? Sylar must eat 50,000 calories a day* to maintain that level of "toss people against walls" energy output.

I'd rather stick with SCIENCE fiction, with emphasis on the science and making it not violate known universal laws/theories.

IMHO these complaints are overly fastidious, and not just because it's just a silly show.

I always thought it was obvious, to science fiction nerds, that if you're writing about telekinesis or similar nonsense you simply assume that the bulk of the force is between the victim and some object (like the ground, or a wall) and that the energy comes not directly from Sylar's biochemistry but from some ability to tap into other energy sources. A normal human, as an analogy, can bring down the side of a mountain--by starting a landslide. Looked at simplistically, it "violates" the principles you mention (where does the energy come from? how does he exert the force?) far worse than tossing a guy across the room, but obviously if the conditions are right and you understand what's really happening it's not just plausible, but trivial to explain.

Good, fun hard SF for me is coming up with inventive, lively explanations of why the conditions are right for whatever cool thing they want to have happen. Not that I have any desire to have a good writer waste time on psychic powers these days, which are overdone, old and cliched, but there are other things just as superficially unlikely should still make appearances.

What makes Heroes non-science fiction is not any one example--which could hand-waved quite adequately by a good SF writer. The Heroes problem is their utter indifference to *any* explanation, which is partly tone and also leads to wild inconsistencies in logic and consistency.

Is anyone writing SF like that these days? It seems to have stopped in the '70s or early '80s. Maybe it's just what my reading habits are these days, but I'd love a writer with the approach to science (and a better approach to plot and characters) of a vintage Larry Niven.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't that only apply to multiple gods from a single machine, rather than a single god from many machines, or many gods from many machines?

Those would be, in order:
"Deii ex machina"
"Deus ex machinae" and
"Deii ex machinae"

Additionally, if one takes the phrase "Deus ex machina" in and of itself as the noun, as is the case with many hyphenated words, like "mother-in-law", which plurals as "Mother-in-laws", and not "Mothers-in-law", then "Deus ex machinae" would be the more correct pluralism for the phenomenon.

Oh, and get off my lawn. (little brats...)

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the TV show Heroes? It's fun to watch but certainly not realistic. For example: How can Sylar pick-up a person and throw him against a wall? Newton's Law dictates that Sylar should be pushed backward with an equal force (recoil). Also where is the energy coming from? Sylar must eat 50,000 Kilocalories a day* to maintain that level of "toss people against walls" energy output.

I'd rather stick with SCIENCE fiction, with emphasis on the science and making it not violate known universal laws/theories.

*
* Trivia: Homo neanderthalis ate 10,000 Kilocalories a day to maintain his huge bulky body. Then Homo sapiens arrived and effectively starved neanderthal man out of food. That's how you control Sylar. Deprive him of food, and he'll not have enough energy to do his tricks.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Courts Martial.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[McNally]

OMG, they dont seem to teach anything in Latin classes these days. Now etgay utoy foay ymay awnlay.

Apparently they don't even teach Pig Latin correctly anymore. Eeshshay!

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[BKX]

The plural of mother-in-law IS mothers-in-law. Hence the plural of deus ex machina is di ex machina (deus is irregular when plural (and in the singular vocative). Furthermore, if deus were regular, its plural nominative would be dei.). (That is, the plural of god-from-machine is gods-from-machine.).

Of course, if you really insist on the Latin being correct, then in his sentence it should be dis ex machina, since prepositions take the ablative tense in Latin. In reality, that's retarded. I'll go with di ex machina as being the proper plural when used in English, and deuses ex machina when you never took Latin.

Oh, I almost forgot. Your other forms are also incorrect. In order:
deus ex machina
deus ex machinis
di ex machina
di ex machinis

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

A normal human, as an analogy, can bring down the side of a mountain--by starting a landslide. Looked at simplistically, it "violates" the principles you mention (where does the energy come from? how does he exert the force?)

Um, no it doesn't. The energy is store as potential energy (height of the slope), and it is entirely possible for a rock (small enough for a human to move) to start a chain-reaction, bumping into other rocks and sending them down the slope. All this is simple physics.

Now, where is the 'energy slope' that allows throwing someone across the room in violation of Newtons laws?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

The very essence of *fiction* is that it is not real and would that it will VIOLATE your precious laws.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[roguetrick]

Oi, comeon, the positronic brain was just a plot device for the ramifications of an Intelligence governed by the laws.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Muros]

But I do want more than a bit of technobabble.

Technobabble has its place. Look at the writings of Peter F. Hamilton. Very little solid science behind any of it, mostly pure space opera. I think it still has valid technology predictions. Ideas about what might be possible are more important than a plausible explanation of how to get there, at least in fiction stories.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Opportunist]

I'm monotheistic but believe in multiple machines, you insensitive clod!

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[somersault]

How can Sylar pick-up a person and throw him against a wall? Newton's Law dictates that Sylar should be pushed backward with an equal force (recoil)

I take it you've never been bowling, for fear of being hurled back out through the front doors when you throw the ball down the alley?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

ahem...

"etgay utoy FFoay ymay awnlay"

Someone wasn't paying attention in their pig latin class... I wonder if you can get swine flu from that...

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[mad_minstrel]

I just ate a cookie. The above line is fiction, yet it doesn't violate any laws that I know of. It is, at worst, simply untrue.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now etgay utoy foay ymay awnlay.

Iway eesay atwhay ouyay idday erethay

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[mad_minstrel]

As usual, I forgot Slashdot ignores line breaks.... Forgive me, oh benevolent gods of Preview!

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[somersault]

Ah, his power is telekinesis. As others have pointed out, even if he is the anchor for this power, he could just push in the opposite direction at the same time..

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Muros]

W His inspiration was drawn from not just the physical sciences, but also the social sciences.

I agree, social sciences should be included in sci-fi. My favourite Asimov story is "The Martian way", which is pretty much all about human nature, wrapped up in a futuristic scenario.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Deanalator]

Meh, most superhero powers derive from some sort of telekinesis, and bank on the idea that some day, people are going to evolve fancy telekinesis neurons that are able to interact with remote particles.

Bullshit? Of course! But never impossible.

There have been reports of telekineses since the dawn of man, and while I don't have those particular powers, and I doubt anyone I know has those powers, you show a distinct lack of imagination by saying that it's impossible. Telekinetic neurons are no less realistic than tractor beams or warp speed, so quit pretending that your make believe fantasy world is any more "realistic" than anyone else's.

Also, in heroes in particular, overuse of powers does exhaust the person, so they aren't drawing from some zero point energy vortex etc.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the idea behind "deus ex machinas" is of multiple gods from multiple machines, so the correct Latin would therefore be dei ex machinis. Whether or not you agree about machinis, there's still only one i in the plural of deus. Se retrahe nunc ex agro meo.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[eggnoglatte]

The plural of mother-in-law IS mothers-in-law. Hence the plural of deus ex machina is di ex machina (deus is irregular when plural (and in the singular vocative). Furthermore, if deus were regular, its plural nominative would be dei.). (That is, the plural of god-from-machine is gods-from-machine.).

Well, "law" in this case is not countable (it refers to "law" as in "The Law", not as in "one of many laws").

Machines are countable so the plural interpretation of many gods from different machines is perfectly valid (i.e. "... ex machinae").

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Romani ite domun

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, multiple gods from multiple machines, which is what I believe "deus ex machinas" intends, would be dei ex machinis. Whether or not you agree about machinis, there's only one i in the plural of deus. Agro a meo nunc se retrahe.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Imrik]

So because you understand the conditions for one event doesn't violate the laws, but since you don't understand the other it does?

Heroes doesn't try to explain how it works, and it shouldn't, for them to do so would require that someone in the series know how it works.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Imrik]

The essence of fiction is that it is not real. The essence of fantasy is that it is implausible. (which is generally true of things that violate the laws)

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Imrik]

Also, in heroes in particular, overuse of powers does exhaust the person, so they aren't drawing from some zero point energy vortex etc.

Not necessarily, it could also be that drawing energy requires some energy from their body, just not as much as is actually released.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[PopeRatzo]

your a fucking idiot

comm64,

The AC does have you pegged. His grammar may be faulty, but you can't argue with his conclusion.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[hitmark]

do that say more about the creator or the audience?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pig latin classes are failing, too. You don't move the vowels!

Ownay ouyay etgay offay ymay awnlay!

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

De ex machina. Don't they teach any Latin to kids these days? (Alternatives are d or di, but not deii. I've seen the first one a lot in compounds.)
Back to the subject: Science fiction has always been more fiction than science; it missed more often than it hit, judging from the vintigage scifi bundles I've been reading. And you know what? It's fine that way. A writer is free to create any backdrop he wants as long as he tells an interesting story. So, and now you're off my lawn I'll go watch some Makoto Shinkai.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[misexistentialist]

I agree with your pluralization, but think dei is OK too http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deus

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[SydShamino]

And that's why I liked last year's Moon .

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[timeOday]

You talk as if fantasy were a bad thing. If you don't want any, read peer-reviewed journals like Science and Nature. Sci-Fi is just fantasy with a bit of science. Science fiction rarely invents anything; at best it is good prognostication, which is still not to say it actually influences science, just as predicting the outcome of a football match isn't what makes it so.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[damburger]

The idea of a positronic brain was not inspired by science, it was inspired by picking a word from physics then doing whatever Asimov wanted with it. In reality, the brains of Asimov's robots would probably emit enough high energy gamma radiation to make people around them get sick.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[damburger]

"Romanes eunt domus"? "People called Romanes they go the house"?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. It should be dei ex machina or even di ex machina. Kind of like Romanes eunt domus.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[agrif]

This is the exact reason I love Alastair Reynolds books. He's said before that if he thinks that something is not possible according to science as we know it today, he won't write it in to the books unless it is absolutely necessary.

In his major trilogy, he only does this twice: inertia suppression machinery and hypometric weapons, both of which were needed to progress the story at an interesting pace. Additionaly, he made it clear that what these devices were doing to space was abhorrently wrong: hypometric weapons gave everyone that looked at them the willies, and inertia suppressors could edit a man out of history entirely, not only killing him but removing any proof he ever existed at all. Both of these were stolen from cultures after many millions of years of space flight. Even his impossibilities begin to seem reasonable.

Also, I put forth Reynolds as the example of Sci-Fi that continues to amaze. His characters are well built, and his plot is beautiful and approachable, even as it accelerates into deep time. It certainly helps that this man clearly knows some physics, and knows what needs to be said to make technologies seem plausible. I mean, when someone detects a spacecraft based on it's specific flavor of neutrino emissions, that's a credit to the author. Even more so when the antagonists begin to use that specific signature to hunt people down one whole book later.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[KitFox]

Machines are countable so the plural interpretation of many gods from different machines is perfectly valid (i.e. "... ex machinae").

The "machine" in this case is the contrivance of the world by the writer. Thus it is a singular machine in all essence. Deus ex machina uses machina as opposed to machos, which is what it really should use.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[PopeRatzo]

I like SciFi that gives me a good reason for what's happening

Yes. Internal consistency is everything.

Take a book like Neal Stephenson's Anathem. A completely made up world and premise, yet it's own logic is so consistent that it's easy to accept it as a world that could exist. The way he takes Platonic ideals and turns them into a real possibility is amazing. It wasn't an easy or fast-moving read, but it's one of the most satisfying books I read this summer. And certainly the book I was most likely to read from aloud to my wife, who's a mathematician. If you've read the book, you'll understand why.

During a summer when the news media was filled with screaming people for whom avoiding education is a badge of honor, it was a refreshing reminder that sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is search for the truth even when it does not correspond with what you've been told. And that nothing is so dangerous as willful ignorance..

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[PopeRatzo]

Apparently they don't even teach Pig Latin correctly anymore. Eeshshay!

And the swine flu may wipe it out entirely.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[PopeRatzo]

I'm not sure that great science fiction has to be predictive.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[commodore64_love]

Yeah but just calling them "electronic brains" would not have sounded as sexy.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[commodore64_love]

Season 3 was almost as good as season 1. Season 4 is too early to tell, but so far it's crap

>>>As opposed to transporters or tractor beams?

I don't recall saying Star Trek was science fiction.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[commodore64_love]

>>>You talk as if fantasy were a bad thing.

No. He talk as if MISlabeling "fantasy" as science fiction is a bad thing. It's an insult to the science profession to equate magic with science. I still enjoy the fantasy shows like Xena, Buffy, and so on, even though I know they couldn't possibly be real.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[commodore64_love]

>>>IMHO these complaints are overly fastidious

It's not fastidious to object to equating magic with science. It's an insult to science's goals (reality not superstition, understanding not invented fairy tales). Also your defense of Skylar's telekinesis doesn't explain-away the day long solar eclipse. Real total eclipses only last about 5 minutes... and only affect a small strip of land not the whole planet.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Fallingcow]

It's worth noting that Asimov wrote of sci-fi having three stages of development, according to their focus (these are my names standing in for his longer descriptions):

Adventure
Devices
People

He considered sci-fi that focused on the human condition to be the most mature form of it. If you go back and read even some of the "best" of that gadget-inspired sci-fi, it's easy to see why--almost all of it is complete garbage, even if you've already filtered it to a couple hundred of the top stories. As for the adventure-focused sci-fi, it's mostly Swiss Family Robinson in space, which can be fun but isn't especially valuable in a fiction-as-art sort of way.

Most of the greatest sci-fi is great either because it anticipates/inspires something technological (though that doesn't mean the story or its prose are necessarily any good) or because it comments well on the human condition. Unless you're lucky or prescient, writing tech-focused stories is a good way to churn out crap and a bad way to make a mark on literary history.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[commodore64_love]

>>>>>How can Sylar pick-up a person and throw him against a wall? Newton's Law dictates that Sylar should be pushed backward with an equal force (recoil)

>>I take it you've never been bowling, for fear of being hurled back out through the front doors when you throw the ball down the alley?

I sincerely hope you don't have a science-based degree, because if you do, you apparently learned nothing. When you throw a bowling ball it DOES impart a force in the opposite. Case in point - My niece who pushed a bowling ball down the lane, and then promptly fell backwards onto her butt.

Same applies to Sylar. If he's throwing a body up against the wall, then there will be an opposite equal force pushing back against Sylar. Now some have said he moves the air, but that doesn't change anything. There'd still be an opposite force pushing back against Sylar.

Heroes is all magic. There's not an ounce of science in it. (As proof I point to the day-long solar eclipse.)

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[commodore64_love]

Yeah okay. I admit it. I earned three college degrees by bribing the Dean. You caught me. Happy?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

And that is exactly what Asimov said in one of his essays. He basically used the word positronic because it sounds cool.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[selven]

Close, but not quite.

Deus ex machinis
Dei ex machina
Dei ex machinis

You need the ablative case with "ex", which is easy to confuse with the nominative in the singular, but not the plural.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Petrushka]

The correct plural form of deus ex machina is deii ex machina, not deus ex machinas. OMG, they dont seem to teach anything in Latin classes these days.

They sure don't! The only Latin plurals that have -ii are the ones where there's already an -i- in the word, like radius => radii.

Deus, as it happens, is one of the very very few irregular nouns in Latin, and the plural can be either di or, less often, dei.

In answer to the sibling AC who asked if di ex machina wouldn't imply a whole bunch of gods hanging from a single crane: the answer is no. In Latin that kind of construction is distributive, i.e. the usual implication is that there's one machina for every deus.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[mgblst]

And, get this, don't cause super powers. A small point, I know, but since we are being picky.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

For the love of...

Heroes is a superhero show, not scifi. Superhero shows aren't about technology or science, the powers are just mechanisms to move the plot forward. It's not about *how* they do what they do, it's about what a world where people could do those things would be like...

It's *MAGIC*

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

C64, you don't make anyone happy. Just stop.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Petrushka]

Of course, if you really insist on the Latin being correct, then in his sentence it should be dis ex machina, since prepositions take the ablative tense in Latin.

1. Ablative is a case, not a tense. "Tense" refers to verbs and their temporal aspect (i.e. whether a verb is past, present, future, etc.).
2. Only some Latin prepositions take the ablative.
3. "With" isn't a Latin preposition, it's an English preposition. English prepositions don't take an ablative. English doesn't have an ablative.
4. (Prepositions did take other cases in Old English, but OE wið took the dative, not the ablative.)
5. If you do want to treat "with" as though it's in Latin too, then you'd better treat the whole verb phrase "come up with" as being in Latin. The Latin for "come up with" would be something like pervenire ad, and that would take the accusative.

In reality, that's retarded.

Yes.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[hey!]

Well, for *any* story to entertain, it has to make sense.

Even fantasy.

The problem with technobabble (as you point out) is that it undermines the logic of a science fiction story. When the writer can pull a reverse polarization tachyon burst rabbit out of his main deflector array hat whenever he needs to get the hero out of trouble, he is signaling that he'll resort to anything to get the hero where he wants him by the end of act 3. As a reader, one has to wonder, "why am I bothering to *understand* all this stuff if it can be changed whenever it's expedient?" That problem isn't limited to the purported explanation of the technology; rampant use of technobabble to solve plot dilemmas undermines the characterization and story itself.

Now personally, I don't have any fixed opinions on whether a Deus Ex Machina is a bad thing. Lord of the Rings climaxes with what could be reasonably characterized as D.E.M.: Frodo fails in the quest, and Gollum's treachery allows him to succeed. Now I realize a counter-argument could be asserted that Frodo condemned Gollum to throw himself into the fire when he showed Gollum mercy, but lets set that aside for a bit. LotR *had* to end with Frodo *morally* failing, otherwise the ending would fail to demonstrate Tolkien's entire point. Really, LotR is the last salvo in the Reformation/Counter-Reformation debate: it's about the relationship of good works and grace in salvation. It is the duty of every conscious, moral being to give the last full measure of devotion, and for Frodo that is not a euphemism for "death". It literally means he must give *all* the devotion is capable of giving to his task before grace becomes operative.

The point is, it's not only logically *consistent*; it's *necessary* for the task to exceed Frodo's ability to achieve through his own strength and cleverness. Therefore something like a D.E.M. is *mandated* for that story; it is not *utterly* unconnected to the Frodo's past actions, but that's true in most cases where blatant uses of D.E.M. occur. Having the hero succeed through consequences he is not conscious of violates the particular standards of taste that absolutely ban the use of D.E.M. People who insist on that as a hard and fast rule usually don't like LotR.

So fantasy and science fiction *both* have to be logical. The kind logic is different. When a science fiction character straps on an anti-grav belt, we assume that there is not just the *physics* to back that up -- after all how is that different from magic? We also assume the existence of that device implies a whole bunch of social science we're perfectly familiar with. We assume there is an economic system which produces them according to the same supply and demand rules that drives *our* world to manufacture and market pogo sticks. We assume that there are industrial entities that specialize in various aspects of the belt, from the chemical companies that produce the polymer webbing fabric to the companies that specialize in the switches and knobs. There's probably an industrial designer who figured out what geometry would be most ergonomic for the control pad.

What's more, we assume the belt comes with standard *psychology*. We don't assume the belt works differently depending on the wearer's state of mind -- or if it does, we insist on a consistent sounding explanation (even if it is technobabble, it becomes a *rule* for our universe).

Do people who have fear of heights have trouble using the anti-grav belt? Maybe, or maybe not, but it's a point that has to be dealt with if a character uses it for the first time (we can assume the Galactic Patrol Academy has dealt with those problems as far as its cadets are concerned). Jules Verne brought this very issue up in his book "Robur the Conquerer", which was kind of like 20,000 leagues under the sea but with an airship rather than a submarine. He points out that people with acrophobia by in large *don't* suffer from ascending in a balloon the way they suffer at the edge of a cliff, and

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its mind over matter - 'mericans dont mind if they have too much matter in their bellies.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[hey!]

No, the use of "positron" was completely technobabble. However, once he used the term, he used it consistently throughout every work in which it appeared. That's the key.

The real innovation was the three laws. There is no *physically* plausible reason that these laws could not be violated by a working positronic brain. One gets the idea that it's just more trouble than its worth to go back to the basic design. Indeed many of the story seem to suggest that there are ways around the three laws for clever humans, so why invent a whole new technology? That's psychologically and economically plausible.

But really the laws themselves are more technobabble, but it's *consistently used*. It is *never* violated. Ever.

And there are good storytelling reasons for this. The three laws are thematically necessary, because otherwise we'd be constantly looking for the standard "rampaging robot" stories and solutions. It adds pleasing complications that readers can anticipate and understand.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Opportunist]

Ok, then leave it open. Postulate that something is possible and that it has become so commonplace that there's no need to explain it as something special. Take Gibson for example. He never explains how his future works. It does. And it's been accepted as so mundane that nobody bothers explaining, so why should the author? Actually, sometimes it seems that Gibson's figures don't know exactly why their technology works either...

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[somersault]

I sincerely hope you don't have a science-based degree, because if you do, you apparently learned nothing. When you throw a bowling ball it DOES impart a force in the opposite. Case in point - My niece who pushed a bowling ball down the lane, and then promptly fell backwards onto her butt.

Actually, yes I do, and physics was one of my favourite subjects. Your niece isn't the best example. When she's older she'll be able to counter-balance and use the friction between her shoes and the floor to offset the "recoil" from throwing something heavy, like the rest of us do.

Even if there was an opposite force on his own body, Psylar wouldn't have to fall over. Especially if he is applying a slight upward force to his enemy, it would just make his own grip on the floor stronger. And what's to stop him from applying an equal force in the opposite direction, ie bracing himself against a wall?

But yes, it's just a TV show, and telekinesis is pure fantasy.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Your.Master]

You missed the parent's point.

You don't get thrown back because even though the bowling ball exerts a force back on you, you ALSO exert a force on another object, which is to say, the ground, through your feet, which puts forward another opposite reaction counteracting the bowling ball. Since the angles don't match, you also get a net upward force out of the deal, but gravity counteracts that. If this weren't so, you would slowly topple backward (slowly, because you weigh much more than a bowling ball) unless you shot another bowling ball in the opposite direction with the same impulse.

In the same way, Sylar just has to push in the other direction. Be it a fixed object, or even just a light wind across a broad swathe of air. Or, alternatively, he might not even be the anchor for the force at all. He could be influencing some other object (again, likely air) to exert a force against his victims, in the same sense that my garage remote doesn't actually exert a force to open my garage door, but simply influences the internal mechanisms to pull the garage door upward (all without being thrown to the ground!).

I'm not the first in the thread to suggest this, but you haven't been reading, apparently. I don't mean that to be snarky, I certainly don't read all the slashdot comments, I prefer my own self-righteous writing too :).

Heroes is definitely magic and fantastic rather than scientific, and the solar eclipse was not life-accurate, and I hate the pseudoscientific bullshit that spews from Mohinder's mouth. And hyperbole is all well and good, but don't say "there's not an ounce of science in it" and follow up with an anecdote as "proof". The logical flaw is kind of ironic.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[bigstrat2003]

I'd rather stick with SCIENCE fiction, with emphasis on the science and making it not violate known universal laws/theories.

You're in the minority, so you're probably going to be out of luck (in the realm of TV and movies, at least, where a high production cost necessitates mass appeal). Most people (including myself) find a devotion to the laws of science to be soul-crushingly boring. That's not fiction any more, that's real life. I can look around and soak up my surroundings if I want to get that.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having one college degree or one hundred college degrees does not make a person intelligent. The only thing that proves is that you stayed in school and were perhaps a bit frightened to leave academia and enter the real world.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Opportunist]

"Even" fantasy? Fantasy and Sci-Fi differ mainly in the use of magic vs. technology. When you look at it closely and only at what it basically means to the writer, technology is to sci-fi what magic is to fantasy. Both are open ended and give you freedom because both can be used to do what in today's world is not possible. And with both, it's tempting to abuse them.

Both need consistent rules and limitations, though. Without them, if magic as well as technology are able to solve any problem, why bother writing a book? It's not the strengths of a character, a society, a setting or a plot that make them interesting, it's their shortcomings and limitations, and the question how they overcome them. Characters in a book need a problem. Because, well, if everything is peachy, it usually makes a pretty dull story. If magic or technology are then used to simply wipe the problem off the table, it leaves a pretty hollow feeling. It makes me wonder why bother with a solution, technology/magic can take care of everything anyway.

Also, what is often forgotten is that certain stories make no sense with certain technology/magic available. In a world where resurrection is possible, a murder mystery makes little sense. Rez the victim and ask him. Also, murder would not necessarily be a big crime. It's basically a matter of paying the fine associated with undoing the damage (i.e. restoring the person you killed to live). That's just an example of the implications of magic/technology for a world. A good writer should be aware of it and take care that there are no inconsistencies left, that his characters are familiar with the possibilities (at least when they spent their life in this setting).

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[RubberDogBone]

It's not just that Trek has inverted polarized tachyon beams, it's that they JUST HAPPEN to have come up with it in the very episode where the thing is needed.

Example: (something happens) and the only way to save the day is for Geordi to convince the Captain to use the handy gadget or beam he had invented that day. Wow what timing. Ship goes home.

My favorite was one of the season-ending cliff hangers in which the whole thing was going to hell with the Borg -UNTIL they used some new shielding Geordi had just invented, which turned out to be the exact trick they needed. They never had it before. Never used it after that one episode. It was just the gimmick of the week.

ST:NG got very very bad about and Voyager was headed that way when I quit watching it.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[hey!]

I only agree partially. There seems to be a sense that "anything goes" in fantasy, and I think we're on the same page on that.

As for fantasy being sci-fi with "magic" substituted for "technology"; I disagree, but I recognize we can define the categories any way we want. If there is a *meaningful* and *useful* distinction between them, then I think there has to be a difference other than how we label things we don't know how to do in *our* world. That doesn't mean that anything goes in fantasy, it means that the rules are different.

As an extreme example, consider fairy tales. If you have three sons who set out to fulfill a task and the first two fail, the third *must* succeed. He is also expected to do things in a certain different way. The third son is not only "virtuous", his key attribute is open-mindedness. It is an absolute, firm rule that he must be open minded where his brothers are closed minded. He must attempt the way they think impossible; he must accept the advice they reject; he must face what they ignore, be it a strange little man by the side of the road, or the ogre in his lair. It's absolutely, positively *necessary*.

In my view, a true fantasy has to have these kinds of constraints, although they may not be as well established by tradition as the third son succeeds rule.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Telekinesis may not be pure fantasy. Try this, run the tap in your kitchen sink, then run a comb through your hair about twenty times, then hold the comb near the water flow and watch the stream of water bend. If you want to eliminate the tool (comb) from this you could probably do the same thing with your hand through your hair and then hold your hair near the water, or maybe even your hand and the effect would still be there, though less noticeable.
So, I've just proven that moving things at a distance without touching them directly is possible even without using tools (if you allow tools, I can prove it with an RC car). That's telekinesis by the most basic, literal definition. Ok, the energy used comes originally from your muscles, but this is just proving the most basic case. The point is that living organisms, like humans can generate electromagnetic/electrostatic fields that can be used to move objects at a distance. It's even conceivable, though pretty unlikely, that an organism could develop mutations creating tissue groups or organs allowing them to directly do so. The evolutionary advantages are pretty hard to see though. A few years down the road though, I'd say that it's pretty much a certainty that we could engineer something like that if we wanted to. Once again, the practicality wouldn't be that much, but it would still be neat to have people who can pull that screwdriver that's just a foot out of reach to their hand with organic electromagnetism.
So, the kind of telekinesis you're talking about isn't "pure fantasy", just wacky hyperbole. Something that could be called telekinesis is clearly in the realm of the possible. That's actually the insidious thing about it. Lots of scientists who should have known better have been taken in by frauds claiming to have telekinetic powers (Yuri Gellar, anyone?) because their basic scientific honesty made them acknowledge that the fundamental idea is at least possible. Far out and wacky, but possible.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Cillian]

Regarding the last note, read Altered Carbon - interesting book on that topic - murder in a world of resurrection.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[advance512]

What bugged me the most in Heroes was a minor character called Hana Gitelman.

http://heroeswiki.com/Hana_Gitelman

Her special power was that she "... had the ability to intercept, generate and interpret electronic wireless transmissions".

I don't mind accepting that she can intercept satelite transmissions, that she can pair with her Bluetooth ear phones, etc.

I just can't, for the life of me, figure out how she implements checksums in the communications she generates!
Can she perform CRCs in her head? :)

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[zary]

You're wrong. deus is actually a quite regular noun, and so is machina. It's never di, ever. In the context of: . I can come up with my own deus ex machinas, thank you. 'deus ex machina', Englished, then pluralized, would be Gods from Machines, because anything else sounds just plain wierd. Therefore, in latin, it's Dei ex Machinas. And, Ablative is not a tense, and we're not talking about the vocative. Obviously, if 'from' took the ablative case in english, it's retarded, because WE DON'T HAVE AN ABLATIVE CASE. And, when cicero said "O di immortales," that's the vocative.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are lots of possible answers. Let's try geologic stress released as geomagnetic energy. That works well with the landslide analogy. Or, how about siphoning off, or somehow concentrating, the earths magnetic field to create a powerful localized magnetic effect. No-one has ever proven that it's impossible to do that with the earth's magnetic field that I'm aware of. How about gravity nullification? Once again, I don't think anyone has ever proven that it's impossible (once again, not very likely, but hey). Block the Earth's gravity but not the moons and the moon is behind him, guy goes flying backwards, maybe? Vacuum collapse energy? Whatever. There are lots of ways you can explain things so that someone can toss someone around without using their own personal power.
Of course, that's assuming that an explanation is required that doesn't draw the power from the bodies own personal power stores. I weigh about 220 pounds. I know for a fact that I have enough stored energy to run back and forth, wall to wall, across a 20 foot room, coming to a full stop each time, hundreds of times, quite possibly thousands (I'm not going to claim I won't be exhausted, just that I know I have the stored energy). So, logically, if I have a telekinetic method of propelling things that's as efficient as running, I can throw hundreds, or maybe thousands of guys 20 feet just using my bodies stored energy. Or, if there aren't any limits on the rate I can use the energy, easily 10 (or a 100) cars 20 feet, or one (or 10) car 200 feet, etc. This is a bit like saying that if I can defeat one person in combat, I can defeat an army, but all I'm trying to prove is that the energy clearly is there without having to pull in external sources.
This goes back to something that has always bothered me: Superman and solar energy. The original assertion that Superman is solar powered came from the letters page of action comics when a boy wrote a letter complaining, with calculations to back it up, that Superman would have to eat a ridiculous number of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (I believe that was his basic food unit with a given number of calories) just to have the energy to lift one twenty ton train car over his head. That always seemed like a bogus calculation to me since that's equivalent to lifting 10 pounds over your head 4000 times, which is hardly impossible and could easily be done without stopping to eat. I'm pretty sure that boy confused food Calories (kilocalories) with regular calories in his calculations. Still, Superman obviously did need a power source other than regular food to perform such feats of strength over and over again throughout a day, especially since Superman became a quintillion or so times more powerful over the years (to the point they had to have Crisis on Infinite Earths to depower him) but still, the calculations were bogus. And it resulted in yet another bogus explanation being forwarded: solar power, despite the fact that Superman obviously doesn't have the surface area. Of course, if you aren't hung up on a real-world scientific explanation for Supermans powers, then there's no problem, you can come up with something pseudo-scientific.
In any case, those back of the envelope calculations "proving" something is impossible almost always turn out to be wrong and based on ridiculously incomplete models. People have proven that kangaroos use more energy than they consume. Same with various kinds of fish. Also, bumblebees can't fly, etc. I remember reading an article in an educational math magazine when I was a child explaining why dragons can't exist. The explanation was that, in order to produce enough downward thrust to counteract its weight, the dragon could never flap its wings hard enough regardless of wing surface area. There were all sorts of assumptions in it about things like the maximum strength of muscles, maximum strength of bones, dragons body weight, etc. At the time, the math was irrefutable, and an adult wrote it, and I accepted it, even though it rubbed me the wrong way. Today, of course,

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Opportunist]

Not only that, they also just happen to have the right experts on board for the crisis at hand.

And let's not mention that something like the holodeck would have never passed any safety tests considering how often it fails dangerously. Can anyone explain to me why they don't solve holodeck problems by beaming people out of it? It's quite possible to communicate with people inside the holodeck (we've seen it happen more than once), so calling for help (something that never happens either when something goes wrong) is quite possible. Not to mention the question why it's impossible to end the program. If everything fails, pull the plug.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cyrano de Bergerac was writing space travel stories back in 1655, 200 years before Verne, and I'm not sure he's even the earliest writer in the genre. And hey, guess what, we have space travel today. Verne, of course, speculated about space travel, submarines and all kinds of inventions that have become real.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[BKX]

No, deus is irregular when plural (and the vocative); look it up.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[tolkienfan]

Lol gets a +1 insightful??
Although, I admit, I did chuckle.
But insightful? Lol? No,

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's still this year. Great movie, though.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[rockNme2349]

Actually, yes I do, and physics was one of my favourite subjects. Your niece isn't the best example. When she's older she'll be able to counter-balance and use the friction between her shoes and the floor to offset the "recoil" from throwing something heavy, like the rest of us do.

Just to be nitpicky, when I go bowling generally it's friction that is pushing me back away from the lane after I throw the ball. When I throw the ball I am already moving forward with a certain momentum, and when I throw the ball forward it takes a larger share of the initial momentum than I do. I usually don't completely stop without stopping myself.

Although it's very possible that's not proper form.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Vastad]

An enthusiastic bravo to Iain M. Banks being mentioned.

In his Culture series, he's got Artificial Intelligences that are god-like, apparently descended from computers left behind by a civilization so old and so advanced they literally "ascended" to the next plane of existence. They can be planetoid in size, enjoy non sequiturs for names and are so far off the end of the I.Q. scale that the speed of light itself became a limiting factor so their "CPUs" - if they could even be called that anymore - exist in a pocket dimension of hyperspace carried around within their main core.

Genetic Engineering is practically into the realm of magic, with geriatrism being a lifestyle choice rather than an inevitability, individuals regularly switch genders every few decades and have children - even as males complete with pseudo-womb - and in one story at least, completely changed species for ambassadorial purposes.

All this happens in a sandbox known as a Post-scarcity universe, which in itself is a fascinating social concept. Boredom is the last great enemy.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole effect of explaining sci-fi technobabble is suspension of disbelief, at least until they get around to babbling that far. Hmm. Intellectual property, gravity, magnetic fields, compasses, Maybe abilities are some kind of flux gate. Maybe I watch too much tv...

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[TapeCutter]

"Actually, sometimes it seems that Gibson's figures don't know exactly why their technology works either..."

I would call that astute social commentry. The same idea is taken to the extreme in H G Well's Time Machine, the Eloi(?) have no idea about or interest in the world around them.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[steve_bryan]

Positrons were predicted by Paul Dirac in 1928 and discovered by Carl Anderson in 1932. Asimov was 8 and 12 respectively so how young was he when he wrote I, Robot?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[MikeFM]

I think somewhat that is true. I can think of lots of good ideas for sci fi but the general population is to stupid to grasp the ideas other than calling them magic because the amazing changes in the near future and going to be small and fiddly. I think the last great sci-fi books are things like The Diamond Age, Distraction, and The Bohr Maker. As you get more into genetics, nanotechnology, and beyond things reach more into the realm of magic.

Of course that's why I expect the near future to be pretty fractured. Most of our society isn't ready for what is about to happen to it.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Fallingcow]

Some of the jokes surrounding the

[SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]

French character had me doubled over laughing. "Laterre" and "Magna Feeks" or whatever. Hilarious.

Liked the book a lot. The ending fell apart a little (especially the heavily foreshadowed last major plot event/action sequence that never materialized) but it was still pretty good. I think Cryptonomicon is still my favorite of his novels, but Anathem is solidly second.

However, I (finally) read A Canticle for Leibowitz just prior to reading Anathem as I'd heard that they were similar (not so much, as it turns out) and didn't want my reading of the earlier novel to be tainted by the later one, and... well, it's in a whole different class, aside from bearing only a passing resemblance in terms of story. I haven't read everything by Stephenson yet, but I doubt he's got anything that's even close to it. It's one of the few sci-fi books I've read that I could have read right after tackling one of the canonical literary classics without being jarred by the sudden drop in quality of prose and general execution of the story and themes.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[nbates]

"How can Sylar pick-up a person and throw him against a wall? "

Static friction?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

easy fix.. enzymes that can go cold fusion on deuterium-- heavy water.. and kidneys that increase the concentration.
Or enzymes than can catalyze a Protium reaction which means that 50k-kcal is nothing..
Tk is invisible, presumably sylar could brace in the alternate direction.

but heroes is a universe where they dont consider the ramifications of the powers.

'Claire blood brings noah back from a brain splatter.. does she just forget this with nathan? jacked up,,
Time travel peter to the past to re-load his powers, later if theres a problem.. he can freeze time, and steal powers from whatever opponent..

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[mcvos]

> Like the TV show Heroes? It's fun to watch

Are you watching the same series that I stopped watching after season 2?

I stopped watching after season 1, but season 1 was absolutely fantastic.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[geminidomino]

Did you just use "superhero show" and "plot" in the same sentence?

How who's the one taking artistic license?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[MPolo]

This is correct. Dei is found, but di is more common in Nom. Sg. Vocative singular is "deus" rather than the regular "dee" -- "Deus meus, ut quid me dereliquisti?" Because the dative and ablative plural of "dea" (goddess) would look the same as the form for "deus", this form is regularly substituted with "deabus". Gods in general produce a lot of irregularities in Latin. The genitive of Iuppiter (Jupiter) is Iovis (Jovis). Hence, we say "Jumping Jupiter!", but "By Jove!"

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[PeterBrett]

Sci-Fi ran out of steam when the writers started putting more emphasis on sex and bottom of the barrel characters that represent the worst of society.

Sorry, what? Go read some real science fiction.

I assume that you're basing your assertion on the crap that you see on TV and in the cinemas, right?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[BikeHelmet]

Like the TV show Heroes?

Heroes has other problems. Like all modern shows, it suffers from shitty inconsistent plot syndrome - also known as confused writer syndrome.

Oh look, that guy just turned into dust when his power was taken away. It sure would be dumb of us to mention a few episodes later that eclipses have taken away powers in the past. I mean, obviously losing his powers before didn't turn him into dust, but now it should.

Oh, and lets make Sylar unkillable. Now we'll kill him, and bring him back in some crazy way... and kill him again, then bring him back... kill him, bring him back...

Seriously? Give me some good writing. Heroes makes me want to shout insults at the characters... about as much as Stargate Universe.

OMG - it's refueling! NOBODY saw that coming? You're supposed to be smart characters. Almost ANY viewer could figure it out before the end of the LAST episode!

OMG! A time loop, at a known point in time! We can't use this to dupe organic stuff like food or antibiotics, but wouldn't it be a good time to stock up on guns? Maybe even try duping our clothes a few times, because I'm sure they'll start to degrade... OH! And a dozen kino surfboards! Yeah!

Nope, nope - it's far too much to ask. TV annoys me.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

"making it not violate known universal laws/theories"

In that case, these days, it is unlikely to be science fiction at all. This is because in some fields we are reaching the practical limits of engineering and need new science to make further engineering breakthroughs (genetics/molecular biology being an exception). We're already reaching the limits of conventional electronics (for eg). Other people have pointed out that chemical fuel space travel makes a joke out of near-light speeds or getting anywhere much out of our star system let alone Galaxy.

SF has always imagined science before the science existed. That is its defining feature in my view. Otherwise it is just space opera or social/political fiction with technology thrown in.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[ShakaUVM]

Maybe it is a consistent world, but the wall of terminology Stephenson throws at the reader at the start of Anathem is just plain bad writing. Opposite of his openings in other books, really.

Charlie Strauss seems to be begging for attention with this. His books are so ridiculously out there - Accelerando, I'm looking at you - that it seems like he bases his novels on nothing more than a misunderstood issue of Pop Sci. Doing things like hand-waving the problem of qualia and the nature of consciousness really turned me off on him.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[wdef]

Exactly. Chrichton was no great stylist but he did outstanding background research and usually had a point about society in mind.

George Lucas is a huge disappointment. He started out making great films (eg American Graffiti) then went down the tube with the moronic Star Bores endless sequels which are space opera not SF.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Nabbler]

Sylar's telekinesis is the one you have most issues with? What about the guy that stops time... Think what would happen, light would not reach your eyes, air would stop and you could not breath, it would also become equal to absolute zero for you, or would it since your own thermal energy could not dissipate, but then you instead would overheat. Plus the air would not get out of the way, thus locking you into position, the list of issues with that silly thing is just endless but in fact rather interesting if you try to think of it, you could go on for days. And even the 'simple' thing of a guy that can fly, even if you think up some excuse for the possibility how come he doesn't freeze and faint due to lack of air. And the speed thing, not only doesn't moving instantly at several times the speed of sound not ruffle their hair or heat them up or flatten them with the impact of the air, but it also doesn't cause a sonic bang or any kind of shockwave, and how convenient their reaction speed nicely speeds up too, going faster than a neuron can physically enervate actually, and the inertia, try going at 10 times the speed of sound and do a sharp turn and be unaffected. Really you should not even try to link any physical laws to the 'heroes' universe, it's not scifi, it's and adult fairytale.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[bkk_diesel]

[Brian is writing graffiti on the palace wall. The Centurion catches him in the act]

Centurion: What's this, then? "Romanes eunt domus"? People called Romanes, they go, the house?

Brian: It says, "Romans go home. "

Centurion: No it doesn't ! What's the latin for "Roman"? Come on, come on !

Brian: Er, "Romanus" !

Centurion: Vocative plural of "Romanus" is?

Brian: Er, er, "Romani" !

Centurion: [Writes "Romani" over Brian's graffiti] "Eunt"? What is "eunt"? Conjugate the verb, "to go" !

Brian: Er, "Ire". Er, "eo", "is", "it", "imus", "itis", "eunt".

Centurion: So, "eunt" is...?

Brian: Third person plural present indicative, "they go".

Centurion: But, "Romans, go home" is an order. So you must use...?

[He twists Brian's ear]

Brian: Aaagh ! The imperative !

Centurion: Which is...?

Brian: Aaaagh ! Er, er, "i" !

Centurion: How many Romans?

Brian: Aaaaagh ! Plural, plural, er, "ite" !

Centurion: [Writes "ite"] "Domus"? Nominative? "Go home" is motion towards, isn't it?

Brian: Dative !

[the Centurion holds a sword to his throat]

Brian: Aaagh ! Not the dative, not the dative ! Er, er, accusative, "Domum" !

Centurion: But "Domus" takes the locative, which is...?

Brian: Er, "Domum" !

Centurion: [Writes "Domum"] Understand? Now, write it out a hundred times.

Brian: Yes sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir.

Centurion: Hail Caesar ! And if it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

All the above semi-raving about energy and calories does not prove any point about Science Fiction writing or stories. It does show people how little thought went in to writing it. Your argument is not about science but about your lack of imagination and reasoning skills. You neglect to mention the possibility that the energy used by a character in a science fiction television program does not come from said character but from an alternative source which might be OK by the laws of physics.

I can brighten a room with a flick of my finger. Does that energy for light come from me? Do I have to have a special diet in order for the room to be brighter? No. The energy source is external to me but I know how to manipulate it. I speculate that the writers of Heroes are thinking along the same lines with the "tricks" in the show.

Personally, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for any book, television program, or movie that is entertaining even if my B.S. degree in Physics is screaming in the back of my mind that it is not possible -- just because I don't understand how, doesn't mean it is not possible, just highly improbable.

So instead of proclaiming science fiction is much less science that fiction, how about trying to think of an alternative explanation. Oh but I'm sure you'd rather be spoon fed than to think for yourself. Good luck trying to produce anything in your lifetime that is original and/or thought provoking.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[commodore64_love]

It always amazes me how fanatics (especially Trekkies) bend-over backwards and kiss their own ass in order to justify a show that is CLEARLY false science. The amount of force that would be needed move a ~200 pound human body horizontally and across the room would exceed the amount of friction provided by Sylar's sneakers. He would quite literally slide backwards. Do a fucking Free Body Diagram, and you can verify that for yourself
.

>>>telekinesis is pure fantasy.

This is what I've been saying all along. You can't justify what Sylar does with science, so why do you keep trying?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[commodore64_love]

Well if you stood perfectly still (as Sylar does when he does his 'throw person across room' trick), the force you impart to the bowling ball has to be counteracted by an opposite force. That force is the friction between your shoes and the floor.

My point is what Sylar is doing is equivalent to throwing a ~200 pound ball. If a bowler did that he's slide backwards, and likewise Sylar should be sliding backwards.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[commodore64_love]

>>>In the same way, Sylar just has to push in the other direction.

Yes but he's doing the equivalent of throwing a 200 pound bowling ball. That would exceed the amount of friction between his shoes and the floor, and he'd slide backwards.
.

>>>He could be influencing some other object (again, likely air) to exert a force against his victims

I don't hear any "whooshes" of hurricane force air throwing the victim across the room, so no, that isn't it. I think the difference between me and the other posters is I drew a FBD, and I can see the amount of force against Sylar would push him backwards. The rest of ye have not taken the time to do that.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[HermMunster]

NO SciFi has not, but lets all hope deep down in our heart and with all the intellect we can muster that SyFy has.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[XDirtypunkX]

The force doesn't have to come from Psyler's direction (meaning the reaction doesn't need to be directed at Psyler) and he could easily be in charge of some other energy source. If we take some science fiction staples and recent inventions: Why not fusion powered nano-bots controlled via a wireless EEG controller. In fact, the controller could be other nano-bots on Psyler's skin.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[0xdeadbeef]

but the wall of terminology Stephenson throws at the reader at the start of Anathem is just plain bad writing.

Thus proving you didn't understand it. None of the invented words was used casually, as a "smeerp".

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[morgan_greywolf]

Recent is obviously a relative term. We often talk about 11-dimensional string theory being a recent development in cosmology and quantum physics, but 11-dimensional string theory stretches back to 1995 and is, hence, nearly 15 years old.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[roguetrick]

There is one robot that was developed with a modified version of one of the three laws, I believe it was about inaction causing harm. The psychiatrist said that the robot could drop a large object, knowing full well that it could hit the person below but also knowing that he would be able to catch it in time. Then, instead of catching it in time, he would just decide to not act.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

The plural of mother-in-law IS mothers-in-law. Hence the plural of deus ex machina is di ex machina (deus is irregular when plural (and in the singular vocative). Furthermore, if deus were regular, its plural nominative would be dei.). (That is, the plural of god-from-machine is gods-from-machine.).

Of course, if you really insist on the Latin being correct, then in his sentence it should be dis ex machina, since prepositions take the ablative tense in Latin. In reality, that's retarded. I'll go with di ex machina as being the proper plural when used in English, and deuses ex machina when you never took Latin.

Oh, I almost forgot. Your other forms are also incorrect. In order:
deus ex machina
deus ex machinis
di ex machina
di ex machinis

Understand? Now, write it out a hundred times. And if it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[somersault]

The amount of force that would be needed move a ~200 pound human body horizontally and across the room would exceed the amount of friction provided by Sylar's sneakers

Like I said it would also push down a bit if he threw them up and across. But I have also said a couple of times that he could be pushing a wall with an opposing force at the same time. If you're looking to pick an argument over nothing, you'll have to do it elsewhere.. otherwise if you're going to keep replying, please pay attention.

>>>telekinesis is pure fantasy.

This is what I've been saying all along. You can't justify what Sylar does with science, so why do you keep trying?

Probably for the same reason that you wondered about it in the first place. And like I said, myself and others have already pointed out the flaws in your own reason for why his power couldn't work.. the are more obvious problems like how can he control external objects directly with his mind, never mind why he doesn't appear to have to balance out the forces involved..

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[ShakaUVM]

>>Thus proving you didn't understand it. None of the invented words was used casually, as a "smeerp".

How does that prove I didn't understand it? I actually had up the Anathem wiki while I read the book, looking up the different words. I didn't say they were meaningless, just bad writing to throw so many new words at the reader at once.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[PaganRitual]

In reality, that's retarded.

Words to live by.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[PopeRatzo]

I actually had up the Anathem wiki while I read the book

That was your first mistake. When there is the kind of consistent persistent world that Stephenson creates in Anathem, you don't need a cheat sheet, you just need the willingness to open up your mind a little bit.

And the "wall of terminology" in Anathem was much less than was required by A Clockwork Orange. Stephenson's skillful ear made the words he creates explain themselves. How hard is it to figure out that "Arth" is standing in for "Earth"?

I can see how it might have been a challenging book to read for the first hundred pages, but so are Pale Fire, Moby Dick, DeLillo's Underworld, and even James Ellroy's White Jazz, and fully eight out of ten from anyone's list of great works of fiction.

When you read a novel, relax a little bit and don't expect everything to be explained up front. That's not the way life is and it's not the way art is.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[sootman]

See? This is why I still come to Slashdot. Not only do we have a joke about Latin getting a +5 but there are currently THREE +5 replies to it--another joke and (deus help us) TWO Latin grammar Nazis. (Nazii? Nazae?) LOVE IT! Keep it up Slashdotters! You're what make this place great.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[ShakaUVM]

Moby Dick was a terrible book. Not because it threw a wall of terminology at the reader, but because Melville tried to write a documentary on the whaling industry side by side with a book of fiction (alternating chapters between fiction and non-fiction) which really didn't work. He also couldn't maintain plot tension for the whole novel, leaving it a horribly boring mess.

I read pretty much exclusively fantasy and sci-fi these days, so I'm used to having new concepts and terms thrown at me, but Anathem was simply too much to take.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[jipn4]

The correct plural form of deus ex machina is deii ex machina

No, it's not. The regular plural of "deus" is "dei". Rare, irregular plurals are "di" and "dii".

Deus-ex-machinas is a reasonable plural of deus-ex-machina in English; I recommend hyphenation.

OMG, they dont seem to teach anything in Latin classes

Apparently not. Neither do they seem to teach English very well.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Moon was quite well done, but not without it's own scientific inconsistencies. It is never explained why there is Earth-like gravity on the lunar station. Also, the station itself is strangely tremendous. Even that far in the future hauling materials up to the moon (or even manufacturing them there) has to be expensive and time consuming. Why then would they build nearly empty hallways that are 4 meters wide for an operation requiring one person? The answer I think is that it's easier and too maneuver the camera in there. It was a small detail, but distracting.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[kalirion]

Heroes is about as scientific as the X-Men or Superman. It's a comic book on the small screen, and has little internal consistency, much less consistency with our laws of physics.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[elrous0]

Is anyone writing SF like that these days? It seems to have stopped in the '70s or early '80s.

There are still tons of good "hard" science fiction writers out there working: Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan (to name a few). You'll still find plenty of hard science fiction in Asimov's, Analog, and Dozois's annual "Years Best Science Fiction" collection.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[vnaughtdeltat]

The plural of mother-in-law IS mothers-in-law

Luckily nobody ever has more than one.

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Reziac]

Latina est langua mortua,
In arena jacet.
Prima necavit Romanas,
Nunc nos interfacit!

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Nicolay77]

Machos like Mexicans with big mustaches and hats?

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the post to which you replied was stating that he may well be simultaneously applying an equal force in the opposite direction (eg. against a wall, or just a large mass of air behind him) in order to apply a counter-force to support him while doing the visible pushing. In this case the amount of friction generated by his own feet on the floor isn't even particularly relevant.

This would be comparable to bracing your back against a solid object so that you can move something large & heavy while on a slippery surface.

That said I don't recall the show displaying any of the collateral damage you might expect with this sort of system if the bracing force isn't applied carefully enough (eg. knocking over objects on things behind him).

Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough?

[Nicolay77]

I do agree with you in principle.

But I think of a possible counterexample: The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.

In the world of this novelette some technology exists that really can solve any problem. And life is generally peachy, only problem is boredom. In fact, it is also a world were resurrection is possible.

But the history is so far from being boring even with that premise that you really have to appreciate it. It can however be disturbing if you have some conservative world views.

are you kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a ridiculous question. Steampunk is all the rage these days!

Childhood's End

[Da_Reapa]

Our time line seems similar to that of Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End"

Re:Childhood's End

[Anonymous Coward]

The sort of complacency you seem to be referring to has the redeeming value of being self-correcting: a nation of people can be lazy and self-serving for only so long.

Re:Childhood's End

[postbigbang]

Too depressing.

I'd like to think we're going to become corpsickles, and become cured at sometime in the future, then zip around the galactic core, and come back to find machines that can make you young again. Thank you, Larry Niven.

Or perhaps we'll enforce Azimov's laws of robotics, finally. Already we have Spacers-- they live in gated communities and must have anxiety disorder.

Or maybe we'll have lots of nudity and sex and strange teleknesis like Heinlein suggested.

My point is that it takes imaginative writers, and with the pace of technology change we have (with SciFi as an inspiration), it takes some Hollywood visionaries to fund SciFi. Right now, it's expensive to do because of the enormous out-do-each-other budgets that funded movies and TV shows in the early 2000's. That and the fact that the book publishers prefer funding cheap Star Trek books rather than really original fiction.

Re:Childhood's End

[PopeRatzo]

Or maybe we'll have lots of nudity and sex and strange teleknesis like Heinlein suggested.

I pray every day.

Re:Childhood's End

[imhennessy]

That book was easy to read, but hard to care about.

It also featured a little disclaimer at the beginning, distancing the author from the views expressed. I hope we can do better.

Jennifer Government works for me

[vvaduva]

I see sci-moving into non-technical direction, with stuff like Max Barry's work (which came to my mind right away) where contemporary social issues that still have some sort of sci-fi aspect to them are being brought into our hands thanks to both the Internet and paperback books.

Ultimately the truth is that today's world is not the world where Snow Crash was created, so the expectations are after all quite different, are they not?

Re:Jennifer Government works for me

[Opportunist]

Personally, I think the focus of SciFi is shifting. Away from technology, towards social problems. Usually reflecting social problems we have, or we might have with certain technology. I don't think that's a bad shift, after all, technology never purely existed for its own sake. Any major invention, any leap in technology, had a tremendous impact on society and social structures. Exploring those can be a lot more interesting than stories that focus on technology. Mostly because it's boring, technology will eventually solve all technical problems we have. It's the social problems it creates that are interesting to imagine.

Re:Jennifer Government works for me

[Anonymous Coward]

> I see sci-moving into non-technical direction

I, for one, welcome this trend. Sci-fi used to be too scientific and detached from day-to-day reality.
Much better all those crime-scene-whatever series -- all 200, from early in the day to dawn.

Re:Jennifer Government works for me

[the_womble]

Only some SF has ever been about technology. A lot of the brilliant writers have always had a focus on social issue: Ursula Le Guin, for example. The same is true for most non SF writers who write some SF (Kingsley Amis, Dorris Lessing, CS Lewis - although the latter two are only just SF, and in Lewis case in only one book) or who write a lot of both (Iain Banks).

The point of SF has never been primarily prediction. Its a vehicle a lot of writers have used to say whatever they want.

Re:Jennifer Government works for me

[Anonymous Coward]

This is because Science Fiction authors aren't engineers anymore -- they're English majors.

(Said with derision from someone at a 75% engineering university)

Re:Jennifer Government works for me

[digitig]

in Lewis case in only one book

Which one? "Out of the Silent Planet", "Perelandra", "That Hideous Strength" or "The Dark Tower and Other Stories"?

Re:Jennifer Government works for me

[digitig]

I think that just shows that you don't know much about current science firction authors. For example, Simon Morden isn't an engineer or an English major -- he has degrees in geology and planetary geophysics, which mean he's probably better at the real science than an engineer would be (and I write as an engineering major currently studying for an English degree).

Re:Jennifer Government works for me

[PopeRatzo]

This is because Science Fiction authors aren't engineers anymore -- they're English majors.

Hey! My mother was an English major, you...

Not so much sci-fi but sci-fi publishers...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's so much that Sci-Fi is running out of steam, I'm more thinking that publishers and mainstream media are becoming far more restrictive on what will actually get to the presses.

Re:Not so much sci-fi but sci-fi publishers...

[asm2750]

If publishers won't publish a story what is stopping an author from using booksurge or lulu? I'm surprised these two outlets haven't taken off yet for print and e-book media.

Re:Not so much sci-fi but sci-fi publishers...

[digitig]

Yes. The authors are doing that. How do you find the good ones amongst the dross? I don't have time to read them all.

Re:Not so much sci-fi but sci-fi publishers...

[PopeRatzo]

Tor has a decent e-newsletter that often includes some pretty good stories for free download, and jpegs of some great cover art.

Cliche'd to death

[Eudial]

The problem is the sci-fi cliches. At some point, there was enough sci-fi for certain elements to become staple.

At that point, writing new sci-fi was a matter of rearranging these cliches into something that appeared to be novel. Unfortunately, you can only do this for so long, before the cliches become exhausted.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[commodore64_love]

You just described the Syfy Channel. +1 insightful.

I remember when watching Star Trek or Buck Rogers meant exploring new ideas, new cultures, or new technologies. Not anymore. Now modern scifi is mostly about creating a Futuristic Action flick.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[Eudial]

The most laughable example of conceptual plagiarism is the space-ships Stargate SG-1. Almost every single technology on those ships has an equivalent in Star Trek TNG.

Though, the real problem is bigger than the clicheification. New science fiction needs new basic science. In the first half of the 20th century, we had a ton of new scientific advances just becoming available in computing, electronics, etc. The latter half of the century was spent mostly refining and implementing theories and techniques that already existed.

The scientific landscape today doesn't really look all that different from the scientific landscape 50 years ago. Until there is some sort of paradigm shift in basic science, there really isn't a whole lot new sci-fi to be written.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[PieSquared]

I find it perhaps telling that you consider modern sci-fi to only include television and other video mediums.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[fredklein]

Exactly- 50 years ago, there were no 'personal' computers , no cell phones, no GPS, no Internet. (Well, you know what I mean). So, when these things were invented, whole new vistas opened up.
But the last 5 to 10 years, what advances have been made in computers? Making them a little bit faster, a little bit smaller? What advances in Cellphones? A little faster, a little smaller, a camera, maybe a 'full' keyboard for texting. But these things are just minor refinements of the original ideas, not new ideas in their own right. We are lacking in 'new' ideas.
It reminds me of the history of the USA. Europeans came over, found this whole continent just ripe for the taking. Huge expanses of land to explore, resources to use, room to expand. But these days, there is no 'new' land to explore- it's all been claimed. The new frontier is Space- there are lots of planets, asteroids, etc, and lots more other stellar systems out there. But, like the Native Americans in their canoes, we have little chance of traveling to Europe and conquering them, we'll just have to wait for someone to sail over here and conquer us.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[Cramit]

What advances in Cellphones? A little faster, a little smaller, a camera, maybe a 'full' keyboard for texting.

I'd argue that cellphones have really started to make the just from mobile phone to personal mobile computer. Every year it becomes easier to use them to truely intergrate the online world into our personal life. They are becoming the Tricorder or Hitchhikers Guide. The next few years the features of the high end phone will become common for all users. Data will be a standard addition to every cell phone plan.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[fredklein]

True, the line between 'cell phone' and 'handheld organizer' and '(laptop) computer' are blurring. But the point is there's nothing 'new' or 'innovative' there, just a merging of different ideas.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[ThousandStars]

If SF has become as cliched as you imply, I think a fair amount of the blame can be laid at the doorstep of publishers, as I discuss in more detail in this comment.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[perlchild]

You're confusing technology and science anyways. Advances in how you use a cellphone aren't advances in the science of the cellphone. Although touch interfaces are new enough to be new technology based on "newer" science. New science in cellphones really means "non-radio waves" cellphones, which haven't happened yet.

No wonder sci-fi is dying, so few people, even on slashdot, even know what it's about, and it has to fight off space opera/space fantasy to boot.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[commodore64_love]

A cellphone will never be suitable for watching movies, or updating your resume and printing it out.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[grumbel]

Making them a little bit faster, a little bit smaller?

While these are just incremental improvements, having more speed and memory available does open up new possibilities. With storage for example we are crossing a threshold where we can store things faster then we can consume them. $1500 in harddrives for example have enough storage to store your complete life 24/7 in good quality MP3 or Youtube-video quality. And mobile phones are getting fast enough that realtime video streaming from the phone to the Internet gets possible. Battery life so far is still an issue, but we have essentially reached a point where you can record a persons life for cheap. Add to that some GPS tracking and some GoogleMaps/Photosynth and you could have in a few years a realtime 3D map of the earth. Add some speech recognition and automatic translation to it and the whole thing would be searchable and understandable for everybody.

It would be of course still "just" be an incremental improvement, but only because we are living right now when all this is happening around us. Its hard to recognize the big technological improvements when they are part of everyday life.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[izomiac]

I used to be irked at how Sci-Fi and Fantasy were generally lumped into a signal category. Nowadays I realize that for the bulk of "Sci-Fi" there's really no difference. There's no science in violating the laws of physics without explanation. In most settings the spaceships and the other cliches lack any plausible technical details, and the story is entirely about the characters rather than the technology. Not that that's bad, it just completely lacks the "Sci" part of "Sci-Fi".

Re:Cliche'd to death

[Anonymous Coward]

Star Trek was boring, I'm sorry to say.

I have never understood why people think incredibly long and boring talking scenes suddenly passed off as a good TV show. To be honest, I enjoyed TNG, mostly due to Patrick Stewart and slightly lowered amounts of hammy acting.

And let's not even start on the force fed philosophical junk.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[Anonymous Coward]

. Until there is some sort of paradigm shift in basic science, there really isn't a whole lot new sci-fi to be written.

Basically, we (the readers) need the likes of Darwins and Einsteins to create the necessary premise in science to stimulate the imagination of the writers of fiction, preferably of those with sociological and political insight and critical thinking.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[Anonymous Coward]

Mobile phones are just a merging of two different ideas - radios and landline telephones. Very few nascent technologies are completely new in every way.

Re:Cliche'd to death

[msgyrd]

Projectors are becoming smaller and smaller (see that new Nikon camera). Bendable/rollup displays are in R&D. Displays quality keeps improving. TV-Out is old news and HD capable phones are already just around the corner. Mobile HD displays are just a matter of time. Hell, current top-tier cellphones have better resolution than SDTVs.

And I can already update my resume on Google Docs from my phone. Printing it out is only an issue of interfacing. There's no technological barrier to it right now, there's just no demand. Some HP printers already connect to Google Maps, it's perfectly conceivable that any network enabled printer could be accessed via a phone.

Never is a strong word. Unless by 'cellphone' you mean it in the most literal sense of the word, a cellular phone sans other capabilities, your statement is already false.

PC Pro just needs to read more Sci-Fi

[Anonymous Coward]

They mentioned Vernor Vinge, but only referenced his earlier work. One of his later stories, Rainbow's End, predicts a ubiquitous Augmented Reality, which we're only starting to see gimmick implementations of now.

Re:PC Pro just needs to read more Sci-Fi

[Ost99]

So true.

Most of the tech in the story has the feeling of something just beyond the horizon, something that could come true soon. And still, the effects on society is enormous. It's a bit frightening, for the first time I felt it was possible that I might end up feeling left behind and belonging to the technologically impaired.

Re:PC Pro just needs to read more Sci-Fi

[Fallingcow]

I loved the vision of the future in that book and find myself thinking/talking about it frequently, but I thought the story itself failed to be even a little bit compelling and the writing was, to put it mildly, sub-par.

I guess it won all those awards for Vinge's creative ideas about technology and not for the writing? Or were the other Hugo contenders that year actually that bad?

Incidentally, can anyone tell me whether I can expect more of the same mediocre work in A Fire Upon the Deep, or is it better? I mean, I don't demand perfection (I read Neal Stephenson for god's sake, I love E.M. Forster for his flaws, and Jack London wrote some of my favorite low-calorie brain candy) but I have to maintain some standards or I'd be buried in a mountain of mostly-shit reading material.

Re:PC Pro just needs to read more Sci-Fi

[Anonymous Coward]

can anyone tell me whether I can expect more of the same mediocre work in A Fire Upon the Deep, or is it better?

I also found Rainbow's End slightly dull. The sociological things were nice, but... meh. A Fire Upon the Deep is excellent, though. The Zones of Thought are an interesting concept, the aliens are excellent and... heck, just read it. It's followed by even better prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, with one of the slimiest villains I've encountered. Vinge's background in computer science shows in these works.

Check out also his Peace War and Marooned in Realtime, collected together in Across Realtime. Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge is a mixed bag, I suggest borrowing it from a library.

Re:PC Pro just needs to read more Sci-Fi

[Max Romantschuk]

I just read Rainbow's End. If there ever was a well written story about the potential of augumented reality, networked everyting, and the power of knowledge Vinge's book is one to read.

Unfortunately it will probably take another ten years or so until the people growing up with this tech end up in writer positions in the entertainment industry.

Re:PC Pro just needs to read more Sci-Fi

[metaconcept]

A Fire Upon the Deep is definitely better, as is A Deepness in the Sky. Both are very well worthwhile; in fact both number among my favourite science fiction novels.

We just don't know it yet...

[Fanglord]

To use the Neal Stephenson example, what about "The Diamond Age"? It predicts a very different world in the future, based on the widespread adoption of nanotech. I think it's one of those situations where we can't see the forest for the trees...yet.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Diamond Age is actually set in the same universe as Snow Crash, only several decades on. One the characters even mentions being a thrasher in her youth.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[gmuslera]

Living in a country where all school children have an XO, all having access to wikipedia, i'd say that root of that history is already made real, or at least, close enough.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[samkass]

Indeed, nanotech often plays prominently in modern sci-fi. Everything from self-assembling structures to epidemiology. In addition, there are many themes that investigate the nature of consciousness and sentience and how that relates to artificial structures (ie. downloading oneself into an artificial construct) and how one might use it to avoid death. In addition, there are various explorations of the intersection of quantum and relativistic phenomenon both on the small scale (Egan et al) and on the large scale (black holes and interstellar travel). Even near-future novels such as Firestar haven't come true yet, since space exploration slowed so dramatically in the last 20 years.

In short, if you're not seeing any new future tech in SF, you're not reading the same stuff I am.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[Mashiki]

Stephenson doesn't really write contemporary sci-fi, he writes much closer based on current events with trend-setting events. I'm still working my way through the Cryptonomicon and am enjoying it quite a bit. The biggest issue with most sci-fi these days is that the majority of authors aren't trying for new ideas, what ifs, maybes, or what could happen. It's been done by their predecessors of the genre so they're building off of it. There's a pile of room in innovation, no one is sure what direction to go.

But someone will have a mindblowing(throbbing forehead vein to go with it too) thought one of these days that will reshape it all, that's usually what happens.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

More of a hat tip than anything else, wasn't it?

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[chocobot]

Has anyone read Anathem yet? It is a difficult read, mainly because Stephensons goes on a 100-page philosophical tangent, but it is very rewarding. It also contains the most realistic space battle description evar. Definitely my favourite science fiction novel, although I am not a big sci fi fan. I tried reading Asimove short stories, and found myself bored out of my mind. Well, science fiction does not age well.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[thoughtfulbloke]

Of course, with nanotechnology the trees will be tiny, tiny trees. So we will be more likely to see the forest than the trees.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[arethuza]

I read it once, got to the end and started again and read it through again. It really is an excellent work.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[tweek]

I had to put it down. Maybe I went in with a different expectation but it was SUCH a hard slog the first part of the book. I'll probably restart it over the holidays and get through it. It's good to know that it gets better.

I love his work in general. Snow Crash is one of my all time favorite books. I had no problem absolutely devouring the System of the World series yet Anathem just felt "hard" to get in to.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a bit of an Elephant in the room when it comes to modern science fiction. The more you try to predicted the effects of future technology on the human condition the more alien it starts to look. For example it gets a bit dicey to try and predicated what human social would look like when humananity starts to argument there own intelligence.

For example how would you talk about a post human socity where an individual person can multitask thousands of concurrent lines of councessness each with perfect recall and instant access to any piece of information on the net. From a science fiction prespective I can't even imagen how a socity like that would even begin to work. Nor even guess at what would motive such a person.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[Fallingcow]

Asimov's short stories are shit, mostly. Clarke's short stories are at least much better, if not reliably good. If you must read Asimov, I recommend his scientific essays, which are amazing (there are a couple dozen collections of them floating around). His writing on literature is also very good--I have his guides to Shakespeare and The Bible, and they're both engaging, informative, fun reads. Generally, stick to his non-fic. I still haven't tried his novels (his short stories turned me off so much from his fiction) but his non-fic is solid.

If you want to read older sci-fi, I can personally recommend:

• just about anything by Bradbury
• at least some of Clarke (so far, I can only vouch for The City and the Stars and Childhood's End)
• Atwood when she ventures in to the genre (and when she doesn't, for that matter)
• W.M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz. I cannot stress enough how good this book is. I don't mean "good for sci-fi"; I mean good.
• Vonnegut. All of it (well... almost all of it). I actually like him best when he's not writing sci-fi, but that seems to be a minority opinion. Personal favorites are Deadeye Dick, Bluebeard, and Mother Night, but the closest thing to a canonical "big three" for him is Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions (though some would probably sub The Sirens of Titan in BoC's place)
• Orson Scott Card's novella Ender's Game is what I'd call top-notch (and I mean top) juvenile fiction. Haven't read the later novel-length version, so I can't comment on it.
• Dune. I like it all the way to the end of God Emperor of Dune, at which point I feel the story is over and the remaining books are just an author wanking over a universe he can't let go. The writing's at least serviceable throughout (I can't say that for some of his other books) and, if nothing else, the series is fun for a game of "spot the socio-cultural reference"

Most of these can stand on the same shelf as any contemporary literature and not be (overly) dwarfed.

Others I've heard are on the same level, but haven't yet read:

• P.K. Dick (ok, ok, make fun of me all you want, I know it's a geek sin that I haven't read him yet)
• Le Guin

As for Stephenson, I've read Snow Crash, Anathem, and Cryptonomicon, in that order, and my preference is the exact reverse of that order, if that helps you choose your next Stephenson read (assuming you haven't read it already). SC was OK but I doubt I'd have kept reading him if Anathem hadn't been better, and Cryptonomicon was so good that I've decided to dedicated a big chunk of time to reading The Diamond Age and his big trilogy.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[mcvos]

To use the Neal Stephenson example, what about "The Diamond Age"?

Exactly! I was very surprised by the summary's quote: 'Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart,'. What kind of impact did Snow Crash have? There are almost no novel concepts in that book. Metaverse -> Second Life maybe, but that's it. The Diamond Age is a far more visionary book, but nanotech is much to young to see what kind of impact it may have, or whether it's way off base.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[PeterBrett]

Has anyone read Anathem yet? It is a difficult read, mainly because Stephensons goes on a 100-page philosophical tangent, but it is very rewarding. It also contains the most realistic space battle description evar. Definitely my favourite science fiction novel, although I am not a big sci fi fan. I tried reading Asimove short stories, and found myself bored out of my mind. Well, science fiction does not age well.

From my point of view, Anathem is one of the best novels I've ever read, and certainly the best published in the last couple of years. Unfortunately, you do need to be highly-educated to understand parts of it. A good grounding in mathematics and the philosophy of science is essential!

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[doom]

Exactly! I was very surprised by the summary's quote: 'Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart,'. What kind of impact did Snow Crash have? There are almost no novel concepts in that book. Metaverse -> Second Life maybe, but that's it.

The trouble is that the Virtual Reality stuff had been introduced by Vinge ("True Names"), and done with style by Gibson ("Neuromancer") long before "Snow Crash" got on to the scene. "Snow Crash" is certainly an okay book, but the way young geeks obsess over it is almost certainly a reflection of what's not there rather than what is. Some people found "cyberpunk" too emotionally cold, and they like the jokey satiric version that Stephenson came up with better... but it's very much a third generation, toned-down, work.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[meta-monkey]

Agreed. People need to read some Alistair Reynolds. Entirely plausible, novel, and not yet come to pass.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[Nicolay77]

What about Heinlein?

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[Fallingcow]

I've only read his Starship Troopers, which struck me as decent but nothing special, in terms of prose, story, or thematic presentation.

Incidentally, I'm reading another Asimov novel now (I forgot that I'd read A Pebble in the Sky when writing that last post); it's The Stars, Like Dust, and it's kind of crappy. Maybe I'll see the light when I read his foundation novels, but so far he's failed to impress me and it makes me kind of sad that he's often considered the major sci-fi author. Am I reading the wrong stuff? Is this aimed at 6th-8th graders, while some of his other stuff is more mature?

His non-fiction, though--freakin' amazing.

Re:We just don't know it yet...

[Nicolay77]

Starship Troopers also seems nothing special to me. From Heinlein feel free to try 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress', 'Stranger in a Strange Land' and 'The Door into Summer'.

About Asimov, I would start with 'The end of Eternity' and then go with 'The Gods Themselves'. And the original Foundation trilogy.

I believe most Asimov novels are dry and soulless, but from time to time one of those makes you feel that he's really the cat's meow. I don't recommend Foundation sequels past the three main. Prequels are ok.

Out of steam?

[Blakey Rat]

Yeah, that's why everybody's switching to steampunk. Plenty of steam.

Re:Out of steam?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... Alastair Reynolds has a steampunk novel coming out December 1st.

Re:Out of steam?

[fabioalcor]

I think they ran out of antimatter.

Re:Out of steam?

[Anonymous Coward]

My view is that to look further out that a few years now (with any degree of originality or insight)... you are going to have to get seriously weird. See Greg Egan. And weird doesn't sell all that well... if you need 15 pages of invented physics (like his recent book) explained to you before you get to the story, then your book isn't going to be massively popular.

Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Marble68]

I think not.

IMHO, what was once considered SciFi (Tech related) has moved more mainstream and become, in some cases, traditional fiction.

As well, I believe that SciFi authors continue to present not only technically challenging new idea, but moral questions around the use of technology. An era of tech enlightenment forthcoming?

Lastly, I'd offer up that fewer SciFi authors are being published because SciFi is being muddled with Fantasy. I don't know why they're doing it, perhaps that hard SciFi traditionally had a predominately male readership; while fantasy has broader appeal?

I believe we see less innovative SciFi books not because they're not being written, but because they're not being published.

There's less competition in the book world, or at least it seems that way from where I sit. Amazon, B&N, Walmart... I sometimes find hard SciFi at my local supermarket.

When Snow Crash was published, it was a different market.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Nekomusume]

They've pretty much always been shelved together, and right now fantasy sells much better than SF.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[commodore64_love]

>>>what was once considered SciFi (Tech related) has moved more mainstream and become, in some cases, traditional fiction.

Ahhh... like the CBS network:

- CSI
- NCIS
- CIA

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Dr. Evil]

I'm not sure that people are talking about the "Fantasy" bookshelves, but the fact that plots of SciFi toss out realistic concepts of technology, instead just using science to replace magic in fantasy plots. Like Star Trek... where most of the stories were fantasy plots and the implications of technology were mostly glossed over.

I think the unrealistic science is really what makes the difference between the two genres. Fantasy, you don't question that the dragons breathe fire. In Sci-fi, you should question the implications of artificial gravity and how the ships in Star Trek have it all. Ditto for universal translators, massive humanoid predominance, force fields, human command of bridges, predominantly manned exploration, predominantly manned warships, etc.

There are lots of exceptions where Star Trek had some sci-fi plots, like the morality of Data deciding not to be dismantled, or ... I'm sure there's more... they're not very common.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[CrimsonAvenger]

Lastly, I'd offer up that fewer SciFi authors are being published because SciFi is being muddled with Fantasy. I don't know why they're doing it, perhaps that hard SciFi traditionally had a predominately male readership; while fantasy has broader appeal?

I read somewhere, many years ago, that sci-fi is popular in good times, when people in general are looking forward to the future, and fantasy is popular in bad times when people are afraid of the future.

Considering that "fearing the future" has become the norm for most of even the "enlightened" societies, I'd expect that sci-fi would be sinking into obsurity for at least the next generation.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of a discussion I had with a startrek zombie about the ramifications of widespread inertial dampening technology.

The point of inertial dampening is that you exert an energy field to make some random bit of matter have a different acceleration curve than the one it's mass usually implies it should have. (Specifically, it makes this acceleration curve much higher, so that less energy is needed to accelerate it, and conversely, less energy is transferred when it stops suddenly.)

What happens when you focus such a device on.. oh... Say THE SUN?

Guess what! The Gravity VS Fusion energy equilibrium of the star, which determines it's radius, RADICALLY CHANGES, because the particles inside the sun can accelerate faster!

That's right, the bread and butter staple of "Makes you not turn into jelly on the wall" would also make a damn fine doomsday device!

Likewise, artificial gravity generators being widely used without some means of "insulating" the artificial gravity wells would make starships that employ them "Very attractive" to cosmic dust and gas, and would promptly grow a shroud of atmosphere, and accumulate dirt on the hull.

Moreover, the pointmass needed to simulate 1 "earth gravity", with REAL gravity, would be insane! The well you would generate would have deleterious effects on natural gravity in a planetary system. The artificial gravity could tug small moons and asteroids out of orbit, or subtly change the orbital periods of larger, heavily visited bodies over time. ...

Needless to say, the conversation with said zombie did not go over well. :D

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[michael_cain]

I read somewhere, many years ago, that sci-fi is popular in good times, when people in general are looking forward to the future, and fantasy is popular in bad times when people are afraid of the future.

Indeed. For many people, the worst parts of previous generations' speculative fiction appears to be coming true.

• The giant corporations are winning. Ask people if they think it more likely that genetic research will result in exciting new medical treatments or be used by enormous health insurance companies to deny coverage.
• The Luddites are winning. Polls show that almost as many Americans believe in creationism as evolution. I find it disturbing that "If This Goes On--" could be Heinlein's most accurate social forecast.
• The problems keep turning out to be harder than most people thought. LEO is still a bloody expensive place to get to. Commercial nuclear fusion is always 30 years away. We'll probably never get flying cars.
• The general attitude towards engineering seems to have changed. We went from the neutron as a theoretical particle to 100 commercial reactors in 50 years; but nuclear waste is regarded is a problem that engineers won't solve even if given hundreds of years.
• The Club of Rome's forecasts are turning out to be depressingly accurate. Many economists now believe that the Baby Boomers' kids will be the first generation in the US with a lower standard of living than their parents.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[fredklein]

What happens when you focus such a device on.. oh... Say THE SUN?

Nothing. Unless you have a power source large enough to expand your inertial dampening field to a significant enough size compared to the sun.

Having a field that encompasses a spaceship (say 4,500,000 tons for the Star Trek Enterprise D, from The Next Generation) is a far cry from having one that can affect the sun (somewhere around 2,192,409,010,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons). You'd need a device that was 487,202,002,000,000,000,000 times more powerful.

So, yeah...

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[digitig]

perhaps that hard SciFi traditionally had a predominately male readership; while fantasy has broader appeal?

Yeah, being a fan of sword and sorcery stuff has always been good for pulling babes. Er...

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[digitig]

I'm not sure that people are talking about the "Fantasy" bookshelves, but the fact that plots of SciFi toss out realistic concepts of technology, instead just using science to replace magic in fantasy plots.

You mean like Doctor Who's magic wand^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H sonic screwdriver? I always expect him to shout a fake-Latin incantation whenever he uses it!

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[digitig]

Likewise, artificial gravity generators being widely used without some means of "insulating" the artificial gravity wells would make starships that employ them "Very attractive" to cosmic dust and gas, and would promptly grow a shroud of atmosphere, and accumulate dirt on the hull.

You mean like the Moon has?

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Ghostworks]

I agree that prognostication gets harder as technological progress accelerates (as do gripping science fiction premises), and that science fiction is becoming less fantastical because we are so familiar with technology similar to what we find in those stories. What seems to be missing these days, however, is the social, human element. For example, growing up I read a lot of golden age science fiction, most of the technology of which has been either now realized, or seems utterly laughable. (As an odd result of this, I've spent the better part of the decade thinking of myself as "living in the future".) In most of those stories, the technology featured prominently as a MacGuffin, a starting point for the real story.

So you have cheap nuclear power, enough to waste in broadcasting it wirelessly, and everyone says its safe. How do you know? What do you do when you find out it's not, and the most transformative 20 years in history prove a colossal mistake? So you have institutionalized slavery (robots), not just over bodies, but minds. How do you keep the system running? Is it even moral to enslave something you've built from the ground up? So your entire economy has come to rely in some way on a single cheap service. To what extent are the people offering that service entitled to run your society? Most of these questions have been touched on and answered again and again in science ficition, but the common element is not technology. Rather, the common element is how people cause and react to change on a grand scale.

Unfortunately, many readers tend to fixate on the technology itself, and the social message (the real meat of the tale) gets lost. After that, you degrade into what we have now: science fantasy. Exercises in world-building for the sake of world building, exotic new toys like lightsabers, super-science that acts as an instant stand-in for magic, and all the other little bits that used to be just scenery moving center stage. There's just enough there to look like science fiction, when all it really is is adventure fantasy.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[arotenbe]

The giant corporations are winning. Ask people if they think it more likely that genetic research will result in exciting new medical treatments or be used by enormous health insurance companies to deny coverage.

What people think is not the same as reality. In the U.S. at least, using genetic information to deny insurance coverage is illegal. Of course, people will believe what they want to believe, which just emphasizes the GP's point. I'm sure plenty of my beliefs are wrong, too.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[tftp]

In the U.S. at least, using genetic information to deny insurance coverage is illegal.

But it is incredibly profitable, and so it will be done anyway. The insurance company only needs to cite some other factors while rejecting the application.

A business can already, for example, refuse to hire black people (which is illegal) by simply not explaining why they were rejected. And if there is a lawsuit the business owner can always say "it's because some other applicant did better at the interview" and that's that. It would take a smoking gun, like an HR memo spelling out the "no blacks" policy, to lose the court case.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Narpak]

Seeing as the topics of genre and Neal Stephenson has been raised I will link this lecture by mister Stephenson. Neal Stephenson: Science Fiction as a Literary Genre; were he talks about SF and the idea of genres in general.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[commodore64_love]

One point at a time:

        * The giant corporations are winning. (Agreed but they still can't kill us, or jail us, like government can.)
        * The Luddites are winning. (Disagree - today's college-aged persons are more tech-saavy than ever.)
        * The problems keep turning out to be harder than most people thought. (yep)
        * nuclear waste (We have a solution. It's the same one Asimov proposed 60 years ago. Bury it deep underground.)
        * Many economists now believe that the Baby Boomers' kids will be the first generation in the US with a lower standard of living than their parents.

Only because of economic stupidity, not tech limitations. We're going to have ~$200,000/home national debt by 2016, and that's just simple stupidity. The Romans did the same thing, spent themselves into bankruptcy, about 1600 years ago. Human beings haven't changed in that respect.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[couchslug]

". I don't know why they're doing it, perhaps that hard SciFi traditionally had a predominately male readership; while fantasy has broader appeal?"

Fantasy doesn't require much thought from the reader, while science does. The public, by and large, are anti-science (despite the fact science has given them almost everything of value in the modern world!), uneducated, and would rather fap to fantasy than think.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

Repeat after me, "It is just a show."

IT. IS. JUST. A. SHOW.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

The moon has 1/6 the earth's gravity. ;) Thus, it is ,166666..., compared to 1.0 for the sake of the argument.

Something with enough gravitational attractiveness to hold a human to the decking with 1-earth gravity, would be 6 TIMES more attractive than the entire mass of the moon. ;)

Granted, it might only be this way over a small distance (since the formula for gravitational attractiveness is based on distance between centers of mass), but within that influence, it would be pretty powerful.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Kjella]

The giant corporations are winning. Ask people if they think it more likely that genetic research will result in exciting new medical treatments or be used by enormous health insurance companies to deny coverage.
The Luddites are winning. Polls show that almost as many Americans believe in creationism as evolution. I find it disturbing that "If This Goes On--" could be Heinlein's most accurate social forecast.
The problems keep turning out to be harder than most people thought. LEO is still a bloody expensive place to get to. Commercial nuclear fusion is always 30 years away. We'll probably never get flying cars.
The general attitude towards engineering seems to have changed. We went from the neutron as a theoretical particle to 100 commercial reactors in 50 years; but nuclear waste is regarded is a problem that engineers won't solve even if given hundreds of years.
The Club of Rome's forecasts are turning out to be depressingly accurate. Many economists now believe that the Baby Boomers' kids will be the first generation in the US with a lower standard of living than their parents.

1. Pass a law against it. Say genetic == racial discrimination, or simply just do it. It's many things you can't ask in a job interview, likewise there should be things the insurance company can't ask.
2. Only in the US, in most other parts of the world people are getting a much more relaxed relationship to religion and the Church as institution in particular. It's more about tradition and community than faith.
3. Some things are harder, some easier. Show me someone imagining cell phone video cameras directly uploaded to YouTube for everyone on the Internet to see 50 years ago, and they'd be in a room with padded walls.
4. Because the last generation lived by accumulating debt and passing the bill. If the children of the Baby Boomers are in the mud, it's because their parents stepped on them to reach a little taller.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont think the OP implied it needed to make the whole sun expand, so much as it could be used to cause a spontaneous solar prominence of fairly large magnitude. A solar flare is only a small percentage of the star's mass, but contains enough ionizing radiation to cause serious problems for planets and ships in it's flight path.

However, there is still a fault with your logic, in that gravitational force is related to the square of the distance between the gravitating bodies, so, the further apart the bodies got, the less their gravity would interract after they left the field effect, so at least potentially a constellation of these devices in formation around a star could cause run-away coronal mass ejection, and make the sun disintegrate (rather than explode). (assuming the devices could withstand being in a sun's corona that is..)

Alternatively, a "corridor" of these devices arranged so that particles stay at the accellerated velocity until well beyond the star's capture ability would allow you to bleed the star to death, through the creation of a permanent solar flare at the site that the field intersects the star's corona.

It would make a very nifty "Solar flamethrower" that could nuke a planet in minutes.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us live in civilised countries where health care is free for all (although you can pay privately to get more individual attention, exclusive conditions or avoid waiting lists).

People don't really change - I do not beleive today is better or worse than in the past for superstition and lack of trust in science. Things have always only been "understood" by the few, despite our education systems (admittedly, perhaps mid 20th century was better until people threw all that boring crusty old concepts of looking up to the authority/experts out the window to be "free").

Those problems may be harder than expected, but plenty has turned out to be easier than expected or easy for it to become a commodity. I don't think people really expected our current IT situation by just 2009.

Again, the problem with engineering is a lack of respect for expertise. Contrary to the idea that this empowers the ignorant, it merely allows politicians and businessmen to get away with just about anything and rule the "socially free" masses.

The US is broken - not enough socialism or rather "social democracy" (i.e. a good mixture of everything we've tried out but staying fairly conservative and consistent). The US has not had to learn the hard lessons that countries in Europe have - that you have to provide minimum standards for the masses if you want to ensure they don't eventually get sick of taking it, and rise up against the government.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[digitig]

Yes, but in deep space, dust particles are a long way apart so the atmosphere would accrete very slowly. In orbit around a planet with an atmosphere it would have a major tidal effect on the atmosphere but surely it would have to go fairly close in to start sucking particles across the gap.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[mcvos]

I think the unrealistic science is really what makes the difference between the two genres. Fantasy, you don't question that the dragons breathe fire. In Sci-fi, you should question the implications of artificial gravity and how the ships in Star Trek have it all. Ditto for universal translators, massive humanoid predominance, force fields, human command of bridges, predominantly manned exploration, predominantly manned warships, etc.

The problem is that lack of manned ships, aliens we can relate to and universal translators, makes it a lot harder to tell some stories.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[mcvos]

I read somewhere, many years ago, that sci-fi is popular in good times, when people in general are looking forward to the future, and fantasy is popular in bad times when people are afraid of the future.

Considering that "fearing the future" has become the norm for most of even the "enlightened" societies, I'd expect that sci-fi would be sinking into obsurity for at least the next generation.

I've always loved both SF and fantasy. Somewhere in the late '80s or early '90s, I wondered why there were so many great SF movies, and so very few great fantasy movies. Nowadays it seems to be the other way around.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

The Luddites are winning. (Disagree - today's college-aged persons are more tech-saavy than ever.)

They might be tech-saavy but do they care about having a self-consistent world view? Human knowledge and culture in general and science in particular are fragmenting. That in itself could be a starting point of an interesting scifi story. Fragments of this observation are already plentiful in various books.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[doom]

I believe we see less innovative SciFi books not because they're not being written, but because they're not being published.

Try actually talking to some editors. They tend to tell you they're not publishing hard SF because they're not getting submissions of it, and the reason is pretty simple: it's hard to write well, and if you know enough to do it, you probably know enough to do something else that's going to pay better and will usually seem like more important work.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[doom]

* The giant corporations are winning. Ask people if they think it more likely that genetic research will result in exciting new medical treatments or be used by enormous health insurance companies to deny coverage.

An obvious either/or fallacy, don't you think?

* The Luddites are winning. Polls show that almost as many Americans believe in creationism as evolution. I find it disturbing that "If This Goes On--" could be Heinlein's most accurate social forecast.

Don't forget the attack of the killer NONES, predicted in the near future: American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population, NONES - google's quickview (By the way: "luddites"? I can't say I see what christian fundamentalism has in common with a labor vs. automation conflict. Saying that both "coporations" and "luddites" are winning in the same breath is... odd.)

* The problems keep turning out to be harder than most people thought. LEO is still a bloody expensive place to get to. Commercial nuclear fusion is always 30 years away. We'll probably never get flying cars.

And you're whining about this using a communications medium that was unthinkable a few decades ago. (Damn, no flying cars! But I'd rather have the conveyor belts, myself).

* The general attitude towards engineering seems to have changed. We went from the neutron as a theoretical particle to 100 commercial reactors in 50 years; but nuclear waste is regarded is a problem that engineers won't solve even if given hundreds of years.

There are two long-term nuclear waste repositories operating in the United States. Clearly a solved problem, as far as technical issues go.

* The Club of Rome's forecasts are turning out to be depressingly accurate. Many economists now believe that the Baby Boomers' kids will be the first generation in the US with a lower standard of living than their parents.

The Club of Rome's predictions were laughably bad (Paul Erhlich lost his bet, remember)? We do indeed seem to be moving back toward the Great Gatsby era, but resouce limitations have very little to do with it.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Whorhay]

Engineers already did find a good viable solution to nuclear waste. But it's politically forbidden. Breeder reactors would reduce the amount of dangerous waste in a huge way. Unfortunately they could also be used to make weapons grade nuclear materials. Which is of course why we don't want countries like Iran developing them.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[alexo]

The giant corporations are winning. (Agreed but they still can't kill us, or jail us, like government can.)

That is like saying that a mugger can't kill or injure you, like his weapon can.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

        * The giant corporations are winning. (Agreed but they still can't kill us, or jail us, like government can.)

Unfortunately you are wrong, given the right circumstances corporations can do anything a government can. In the USA many prisons are privately owned and run, the only reason why this hasn't extended to the ability to arrest and hold a trial is because the citizenry don't want it and the various levels of US government are strong enough to prevent it. As for killing, there are people willing to kill people they don't know just for money, and if you research the cases it can be depressing just how little they want for it. Again, the reason this doesn't become a standard corporate tactic is because the public would be against it and the government is enough of a threat to anyone who tried to use murder on a wide-spread scale. Change either the public's views or drastically reduce ability of the government to curtail large corporations and you would see private detention and/or murder by corporations to better achieve their ends become common place within a generation.

To sum it up, you always want a participatory government to be more powerful than any single corporation or group of them. That doesn't require a huge omnipotent state, just weaker corporations than we have now.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[Nekomusume]

He lives in a quasi-living time machine that always defaults to an old british police box in appearance, and turns into a different person whenever he dies, and you pick on his screwdriver?

Your suspension-of-disbelief needs some tuning.

Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy

[digitig]

Well, time travel is a sci-fi staple, as are cloaking devices (the Doctor's just happens to be jammed. He regenerates instead of dying, so that can be read as an extreme alien healing process linked to the sci-fi (and fantasy, I grant) staple of polymorphs. But the screwdriver he just points and it does whatever the plot requires. It's a magic wand.

Unfair

[symes]

It is a bit disingenuous to say SciFi has run out of steam because it isn't predicting what will happen in ten years time. And thankfully there's plenty of great SciFi that, I am pleased to say, has not predicted what will happen in ten years time. Admittedly, the genre could use a bit of a refresh but I'm sure even Shakespeare had his more reflective periods.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting point.

I bet, that in _every_ creative focus, someone comes along every x years to proclaim the death of the media. Whether it's video games, science fiction, movies, music, etc... Someone always comes along and says:

a. things are not the way that they used to be
b. the way that things used to be is the only way things can be
c. it's all been done before and,
d. therefore, the thing I hold dear is officially dead.

The cool thing about art is this: It doesn't care. It can't care. It's not a living being. It just exists.

I just ignore the heralds of the entertainment apocalypse.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet, that in _every_ creative focus, someone comes along every x years to proclaim the death of the media.

I predict that in a week from now, there will be a Slashdot article predicting the death of PC gaming. :-)

Re:Unfair

[Lakitu]

Netcraft confirms it: sci-fi is dying.

Re:Unfair

[WCguru42]

I bet, that in _every_ creative focus, someone comes along every x years to proclaim the death of the media.

I predict that in a week from now, there will be a Slashdot article predicting the death of PC gaming. :-)

And we'll all be around to mod that bad boy Dupe.

Re:Unfair

[Xiaran]

It's not just disingenuous it's just just plain wrong. SF has never been about predicting the future. SF is an extremely broad genre but if I had to put it into a sound bite I would say it is about positing a "what if" and writing a story about it(this leave out a bunch of SF subcategories I know)... what if advanced aliens showed up tomorrow. What if we all had computers in our brains. What if we could travel quickly across the galaxy. What if there was an evil dystopic government that monitored our every move. They are all clichés in SF... but the stories written around them are about how human beings react to the changes. SF in a literacy genre that is an obvious reaction to the rapid changes in technology in the last several hundred years. And sometimes there are green slave girls involved.

Re:Unfair

[nyctopterus]

I've seen this a few times before, but unfortunately virtually ALL fiction is "what if...". What if a man's shyness made him look like a bit of a jerk, when really he was okay (Pride and Prejudice), what if two star-crossed lovers yada yada yada. "What if ..." is a hopeless definition of science fiction.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, science fiction isn't that different from other fiction, just the "what if..." part involves new technologies in some significant way.

Re:Unfair

[Old97]

Good Sci Fi is not about science and never has been. The GP is correct, but maybe wasn't specific enough for you. The "what if"s in Sci Fi tend to be science or pseudo-science oriented, or futuristic. The point is that the use of science, pseudo-science or the future is to provide a premise so the author can explore issues about human nature and such like ethics, morality, our place in the universe, free will, what democracy means, the value of "truth", etc. Other

Re:Unfair

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

Aristotle stated in Poetics that every story that could ever be told has already been told, and then there's the line in the Bible which states that there is nothing new under the sun.

I actually tend to agree with these positions in that the fundamental structure of the stories is hardly changed, and even the elements of human nature revealed have been revealed before. The fun in the reading of the stories is exploring human nature, not for the sake of being completely creative, but for exploring how that nature presents itself through various circumstances. That is why in my opinion the MacGuffin should always be kept properly in the background, which, ironically, flies directly in the face of the article.

It's all subjective, but for me, BSG was one of the best works of science fiction that I've seen because we hardly saw nor understood the inner workings of any of the technologies they were surrounded with, yet the stories seemed fresh and relevant - especially the season that covered occupation, which aired during the peak of the Iraq War. I was reminded of how science fiction has a way of putting perspective on modern issues and it really got me back into reading science fiction again from traditional literature.

Re:Unfair

[sayfawa]

A work of fiction is basically a creation of an extraordinary situation (the "what if..") with one or more protagonists. It is usually an extraordinary situation or else the story would be boring. The author then writes about how the protagonists deal with it, and how it all plays out. The story isn't really about the situation, it's about the human reaction to the situation. That's where we get our vicarious fix. Does the protagonist deal with it the way she does because she is an amazing human being? Or because she has fatal flaws? How would we deal with the situation?, etc. One of the challenges is to have the protagonists behave in a believable manner. That is a challenge because, this being an extraordinary situation, it's not one that we get to observe often.

The *only* difference with science-fiction is that the situation is even more extraordinary. So extraordinary that it's never happened, probably never will, and may be physically impossible. But the story is *still* about how the protagonist deals with the situation, not about the aliens/black-hole/time-machine. Our human reaction to the entirely-unheard-of situation is the interesting part of science-fiction, not the situation itself. And the fact that it's a situation which may only exist in the author's mind makes the challenge to make the human reaction believable even harder.

Re:Unfair

[PeterBrett]

It's not just disingenuous it's just just plain wrong. SF has never been about predicting the future. SF is an extremely broad genre but if I had to put it into a sound bite I would say it is about positing a "what if" and writing a story about it(this leave out a bunch of SF subcategories I know)... what if advanced aliens showed up tomorrow. What if we all had computers in our brains. What if we could travel quickly across the galaxy. What if there was an evil dystopic government that monitored our every move. They are all clichés in SF... but the stories written around them are about how human beings react to the changes. SF in a literacy genre that is an obvious reaction to the rapid changes in technology in the last several hundred years. And sometimes there are green slave girls involved.

Exactly. Science fiction is not about science, or technology, or trying to predict the future. Science fiction is about people, and regularly points out that people are people no matter what technological toys you hand them.

Re:Unfair

[mcvos]

What if there was an evil dystopic government that monitored our every move.

This one doesn't really count as SF anymore.

Re:Unfair

[alexo]

SF has never been about predicting the future. SF is an extremely broad genre but if I had to put it into a sound bite I would say it is about positing a "what if" and writing a story about it

This is called "Speculative Fiction", of which Science Fiction is a subcategory (that usually has something to do with science).

Sci-fi still fi

[Anonymous Coward]

Show me a flying car and I'll be a bit more inclined to buy this jargon

One word.

[joocemann]

Kinda.

influence, or prediction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Science fiction has long inspired real-world technology

I'm not sure about that. I think technology is advancing regardless of science fiction. We would still have space rockets and cell phones without Jules Verne and Star Trek.

Re:influence, or prediction?

[jedidiah]

>> Science fiction has long inspired real-world technology
>
> I'm not sure about that. I think technology is advancing regardless of science fiction. We would still have space rockets and cell phones without Jules Verne and Star Trek.

Yes. But Goddard and Von Braun were specifically inspired by Jules Verne.

Hey!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was spelled SyFy from now on?

Re:Hey!

[symes]

The did that to see if they could get women to watch stargate

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REAL Change

[Shadow Wrought]

That's because in ten years we will be moving away from technology and into the realm of latent psychic abilities.

If I'm wrong, no one will remember; but, if I'm right, I'm a frickin' genius!

For all the technologies that SciFi imagined and helped create, tehre are thousands more that just didn't happen. So of the thousands upon thousands of SciFi stories being written every year, i think you will be able to find some that accurately predicted the rise in tech. They just may not be the mainstream, big name ones. That is perhaps the difference.

Re:REAL Change

[Anonymous Coward]

"in ten years we will be moving away from technology and into the realm of latent psychic abilities."

Technology is likely more reliable. Sheldrake reported something like a 40% success rate on a test of esp using phone calls, which is higher than the expected 33% chance value, but not as good as the 90%? rate of caller ID...

Re:REAL Change

[nyctopterus]

Sheldrake reported something like a 40% success rate on a test of esp using phone calls, which is higher than the expected 33% chance value [...].

And also almost certainly bullshit. This stuff isn't real. We've been testing it for decades, and it's come to nothing, because there's nothing there.

Re:REAL Change

[Anonymous Coward]

Why go for latent abilities when humans have problems with their present ones?

Most of mankind still cling to thoughts of physical possessions, turfs, spreading their genes, sexuality and the social game around it. They fear death, the unknown, diseases, shame and personal failures.

Whatever sci-fi authors bring up, if they won't alter above mentioned things, the books are going to be yet more of the modern-day-man-in-the-far-far-future type.

Re:REAL Change

[PeterBrett]

Sheldrake reported something like a 40% success rate on a test of esp using phone calls, which is higher than the expected 33% chance value [...].

And also almost certainly bullshit. This stuff isn't real. We've been testing it for decades, and it's come to nothing, because there's nothing there.

You can't prove a negative. We can assert that we have so far been unable to detect any such effects, which merely puts telepathy on a par with the Higgs boson and gravitational waves.

Re:REAL Change

[nyctopterus]

You can't "prove" anything in the natural world. At some point, we should stop beating dead horses and pursue more promising (or pressing) lines of inquiry.

Re:REAL Change

[PeterBrett]

You can't "prove" anything in the natural world. At some point, we should stop beating dead horses and pursue more promising (or pressing) lines of inquiry.

No argument there!

syfy

[Anonymous Coward]

if the cable channel has to rename itself, then ya it's over.

I think this is a false premise

[rudy_wayne]

"the history of sci-fi's influence on real-world technology, from Jules Verne to Snow Crash"

Sci-Fi influencing real world technology? Do you really think we went to the moon or invented the computer because someone wrote a fictional story about it a hundred years earlier? Not hardly.

Re:I think this is a false premise

[Anonymous Coward]

And no one invented a good way to prevent your redundant post, science fiction or real. Oh wait you could just read the comments before you post.

Re:I think this is a false premise

[commodore64_love]

Yes. Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, said he was inspired by Jules Verne and other early scientifiction stories.

Re:I think this is a false premise

[gmuslera]

Sometimes a popular sci-fi story makes ground on certain concept to help it being approved by the people that fund projects. Would satellites or so popular if ACClarke didnt wrote about them a lot of years ago? Submarines could had went from small test to the use we are giving them now without Nautilus? What about future space elevators?

Anyway, a good part of science fiction is more about us than about technology, how we will behave or think in a different environment, or take another point of view to our current one. That it could be possible by our current knowledge is a plus, a way to not just throw away all we know because anything could happens as is just fantasy.

Re:I think this is a false premise

[Anonymous Coward]

And how many inventions were prevented by science fiction because sometimes it inspired people to go into dead ends?

Re:I think this is a false premise

[Anonymous Coward]

and here i am thinking Van Braun had something to do with rocketry... silly me

Re:I think this is a false premise

[c_sd_m]

We went to the moon because a lot of people believed in it and thought it was the right thing to do. They grew up dreaming about it and in many cases sci-fi was the first place they came across the possibility.

Re:I think this is a false premise

[Overzeetop]

Werner von Braun, and much of the WWII rocketry from Germany, was based on the designs of Robert Goddard - and von Braun eas clear about the origins of his work after the war. In fact, Dr. Goddard approached the US military before WWII and they dismissed his work as not being useful. The Germans saw the "value" which the US did not recognize in the early work.

90% of everything...

[MozeeToby]

90% of everything is crap. It's easy to look back and see the 10% of sci-fi that inspired real-world technology, it's a lot harder to look at the writing today and see how it is affecting things.

Re:90% of everything...

[Lvdata]

Wil McCarthy started http://ravenbrick.com/ after inventing programmable matter for his Queendom of Sol series, and then realizing that current tech would allow a start with this new kind of matter.
 

Plenty mainstream TV shows

[oldhack]

Numb3rs, CSIs, all are a lot more of sci-fi than typical TV shows. I noticed Bones, especially, have sci-fi style humor.

Re:Plenty mainstream TV shows

[Opportunist]

CSI has a lot of MovieOS flashy gadgets, I give you that (though I'd break the programmer's fingers for wasting so much computing time on eye candy, every time they look up a fingerprint the system first flashes through a thousand wrong ones, why should they get displayed...), but SciFi?

Re:Plenty mainstream TV shows

[oldhack]

Hm... does SciFi have to be about futuristic/bogus science?

Re:Plenty mainstream TV shows

[WCguru42]

Don't forget 24 with it's magical triangulation, databases of everybody and all those other useful technological advances (that most of the audience believes are 100% real).

Re:Plenty mainstream TV shows

[commodore64_love]

Hmmm. Could you beam..... I mean upload your copy of Bones over to me? 'k thanks.

Re:Plenty mainstream TV shows

[Opportunist]

No, exactly. What CSI represents, at least in the form of their computer science (I can't talk about the rest they do, neither biology nor law is my forte) is bogus. No sane person would develop any computer tools that works like the ones used in CSI.

My main beef, what really makes me cringe every time I have to watch it, is their flashy gadgets. Flashy graphics means lots of horsepower wasted on eye candy. This is NOT what I'd expect in a forensic tool, or any professional tool. I can see the need for a colorful, easy to use interface. What I can't see is displaying every wrong search result (honestly, even retrieving the full file set from the database is a waste, let's not even talk about displaying it for a split second only to retrieve the next mismatch and display it). Or wasting valuable screen real estate for nonsensical rubbish. No wonder they need 100" see-through touch screen displays (which I'd love to see rationalized next time the budget comes up).

I liked the early shows. They were partly really well researched. Recently, it all degenerated into more and more glitter and eye candy and the occasional deus ex machina to wrap the whole goop up when no clue led anywhere.

Re:Plenty mainstream TV shows

[shmlco]

You mean, all of those databases that the government wants you to believe that aren't real???

Seriously though, how complete and accurate a picture of you and your activities could I create with complete and total access to your credit history? Bank and credit card statements? Health and medical records? Phone and SMS text records? Amazon purchases and NetFlix rentals? Credit cards linked with grocery store loyalty cards and purchases? Access to your Gmail and Facebook and Twitter accounts? Your ISP's logs of every web site you've visited?

Sobering, if you stop to think about it.

Re:Plenty mainstream TV shows

[arb phd slp]

Flashy graphics means lots of horsepower wasted on eye candy. This is NOT what I'd expect in a forensic tool, or any professional tool. I can see the need for a colorful, easy to use interface. What I can't see is displaying every wrong search result (honestly, even retrieving the full file set from the database is a waste, let's not even talk about displaying it for a split second only to retrieve the next mismatch and display it). Or wasting valuable screen real estate for nonsensical rubbish. No wonder they need 100" see-through touch screen displays (which I'd love to see rationalized next time the budget comes up).

A lot of that is actually great narrative storytelling through visuals. They are showing the audience what the tool is doing (sorting through a database) without adding words to the script. Just like if a super slow-motion camera were to follow a bullet into a human, you wouldn't really be able to see the internal organs and bones that clearly. It's meant to be impressionistic.

Re:Plenty mainstream TV shows

[tftp]

Seriously though, how complete and accurate a picture of you and your activities could I create with complete and total access to your [*] ?

You can create a fairly decent picture of a law-abiding person. However a terrorist would present the same profile to you, and you can't tell the difference. He'd be paying cash for his nefarious goods; he will be walking or taking a taxi to meetings of conspirators; he would not use his home computer to contact his terorist superiors, or he'd use a method that is untraceable. If he must use a webmail he will pick a foreign one, not Google. He may even drive to a random residential neighborhood, connect to a non-encrypted AP and send his message, then leave - all within minutes.

This means that a total surveillance society is not any safer than a zero surveillance society. Criminals simply need to work around the surveillance that is there; it may take more work to do it, but they are patient: "The guard may forget that he is watching a prisoner, but the prisoner cannot forget that he is being watched."

Re:Plenty mainstream TV shows

[oldhack]

Well, you know, it is a fiction. But the one thing that I can't stand is that always sunglass-wearing douchebag in CSI: Miami, David something. That dude busts the douchemeter with one sight across a football field.

For me, SciFi died

[Megaweapon]

they day they dropped MST3K. Bastards...

Re:For me, SciFi died

[Blakey Rat]

MST3K wasn't even really sci-fi. Only about half the movies they did were sci-fi in the first place, and most of those were horror movies that just used sci-fi to generate their "monster-of-the-week," which hardly count.

But it kind of depends on what you consider sci-fi-- would you say Squirm, worms that become carnivores after being struck by lightning, is sci-fi? How about A Touch of Satan which features supernatural powers? I wouldn't say so, personally.

To be fair, they did some real sci-fi. Parts: The Clonus Horror comes immediately to mind, as does Time Chasers.

But in general, MST3K is much, much more about making fun of movies, not about sci-fi.

Re:For me, SciFi died

[Megaweapon]

It was a joke.

Re:For me, SciFi died

[Blakey Rat]

Uh... ha ha?

It's not fortune-telling.

[bcrowell]

The purpose of SF isn't fortune-telling. As with any commercial, genre fiction, its main purpose is to entertain, and it may also have some secondary purposes like social commentary, examination of philosophical issues, etc.

The huge change in SF since I first started reading it in the 70's is that these days, movie/TV SF is a gigantic, popular commercial enterprise, utterly dwarfing written SF. Also, a lot of the commercial activity in written SF these days revolves around stuff like Star Trek and Star Wars novels, novels written in the Dune universe, etc.; there didn't used to be such a clear division between highbrow and lowbrow SF. Among teenagers, there is much less of a focus nowadays on non-series written SF. If you look at the young adult section in a book store, you'll see very little real SF; you'll mainly see fantasy. I think part of what's going on is that girls seem to buy a lot more books than boys, and they seem (on the average) more interested in fantasy (e.g., the Twilight books) than in core SF.

Another change in the last couple of decades is that distribution channels have changed. You don't see SF magazines and paperbacks on wire-rack shelves in the drugstore any more. As in all of publishing, there has been a tendency for books to go out of print more quickly, so that it's even harder than before for novelists to make a living by writing. You'd be surprised how few of the SF authors whose books you see on the shelves at Barnes and Noble pay the rent by writing. The magazines are also much less influential than they used to be.

Re:It's not fortune-telling.

[DerekLyons]

The purpose of SF isn't fortune-telling. As with any commercial, genre fiction, its main purpose is to entertain, and it may also have some secondary purposes like social commentary, examination of philosophical issues, etc.

Indeed. And SF's 'ability' to predict the future is based on cherry picking from among (tens of? hundreds of?) thousands of 'predictions' to find the ones that came true - while ignoring those that didn't.

Re:It's not fortune-telling.

[commodore64_love]

>>>The purpose of SF isn't fortune-telling.

Ph.D. Isaac Asimov would disagree with you. He viewed science fiction as a source of ideas that could be developed for the real world.

Re:It's not fortune-telling.

[MollyB]

False dichotomy? "a source of ideas that could be developed for the real world" != fortune telling.
Fortune telling is saying what will happen no matter what, and the former could be called 'brainstorming' exotic solutions to real problems.

Re:It's not fortune-telling.

[Opyros]

That doesn't sound much like what he said; or at least, not in his essay "Prediction as a Side Effect". The essay begins:

It is not really the business of science fiction writers to predict the future. It is particularly not our business to predict trivia. If we could foresee, with accuracy, the minor details of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, we wouldn't waste our time in that most insecure of all occupations—free-lance writing. We would play the stock market and the horses, instead, and grow rich.
The fact is that the science fiction writer's first aim is to tell an interesting and exciting story that will amuse the reader[...]

(The essay is collected in Today and Tomorrow and... for anyone who wants to look it up.)

Not enough predictions, try John Scalzi

[Tangential]

Try reading John Scalzi's "Old Man's War" and ponder his fighting man of the future. Lots of tech futurism in that. If that's not enough, try Ian Douglas's "Inheritance Trilogy" He's got worlds of amazing new technology as well. Lots of nanobots, cloning, quantum power taps, consciousness transfers, etc.. in these books.

Re:Not enough predictions, try John Scalzi

[Phrogman]

Gotta give a huge thumbs up to John Scalzi's "Old Man's War"

No need,

[Anonymous Coward]

it's been done to death.

Re:No need,

[ground.zero.612]

Has science run out of steam?

Re:No need,

[Tellarin]

Hmmmm....

So the clear answer to go ahead is... steampunk!

Re:No need,

[Chris Mattern]

Nonsense! The world will be saved...BY STEAM!

Re:No need,

[Nefarious Wheel]

Nonsense! The world will be saved...BY STEAM!

It already has. Or is that you, Mr. Babbage, speaking to us via your intricate brass time machine?

Re:No need,

[GrpA]

No need. Steampunk is it's own genre now. The problem isn't with a lack of ideas or inspiration - it's been caused by many publisher's lack of willingness to publish new and innovative new stories and ideas.

Now that the Science Fiction sub-genre of Speculative Fiction is so popular, publishers are looking for more of the same of formula that sells well - not new and untested ideas that may or may not sell ( ie, Just like the Science Fiction of old...)

That tends to lead them away from new, unpublished writers with ideas that don't fit the pattern established by the predecessors.

If you want to gain a glimpse into what is leading edge for science fiction, visit somewhere like critters.org and offer to criticise a few recent stories... Four out of five you get are somewhat average but then you'll read something by an unheard of writer who is creating great science fiction and has new ideas.

Not only will you get to read some great science fiction by brilliant writers, much of which will probably never be published, but you can contribute to the future of fiction by providing worthwhile feedback to the writer.

After all, good science fiction was never mainstream... And nothing as changed.

GrpA

Sci-Fi isn't about product-ification

[MikeTheGreat]

TFA is actually pretty interesting, as it mostly re-caps certain sci-fi ideas/novels that have been made into (or made it into) pop culture & various products. It isn't really till the last page of the article that they say that "Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart"

FWIW, I think this is the way things are supposed to be - sci-fi is about taking a new, interesting, novel, science-based idea & exploring it; it's not about trying to predict what next year's phone will look like or what computer technology will be driving the market 5 years from now.

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

[platykurtic]

If you're looking for a near-future cool technology book this is my recommendation. It's augmented reality, which is only now beginning to exists in any semi-useful form, taken to the limits. The author is a computer science professor, so most of his technology is written with an idea of what's possible the whole story is very cool. It's definitely a world I could envision coming to be in a few decades

Is that the goal of sci-fi writers?

[knifeyspooney]

Science fiction may inspire inventors. The technology it depicts, whether or not the author intended it as prediction, may ultimately be invented in the reader's lifetime. One gets a profound feeling when it happens that way!

But good science fiction imagines the effects of advanced technology on the human condition. The inventions it depicts should be theoretically feasible, and the year in which it is set should be appropriate to the level of scientific advancement that would be needed. But verisimilitude is only a tool for telling a good story about people, which is the true metric of any fiction, science- or otherwise.

If the advancements depicted in a sci-fi work never take place, should that disqualify it from greatness? Is Star Trek TNG only any good if the advancements it portrays occur in real life, along the same timeline?

And if a work inspires no one to invent, then so what? What of dystopic sci-fi? Heaven forbid a great science-fiction novel like 1984 inspired anyone to develop the technology it portrays! (Although, in that case, the author was definitely making technological predictions, which happened to come true.)

Peter Watts

[Anonymous Coward]

and the rifter trilogy.

Stories. Really GOOD stories

[lkcl]

the most important thing about sci-fi is not the technology itself, but the stories that use sci-fi blended into the background. the mistake of "Glorifying" technology is more often made by hollywood film directors than it is by sci-fi writers.

so, yes: sci-fi is often predictive of the near future (stephenson, gibson), and comes up with "the goods" but to be honest that's quite a specific genre of sci-fi, leaving out a whole range of books that are absolutely mind-blowing (asimov, reynolds and hamilton to name just three).

Beyond Imagination

[b4upoo]

Science is going beyond the ability to imagine. Already we have areas of science so specialized that scientists can not communicate to each other as to the details of their expertise. It becomes difficult for those gifted with writing skills to catch on to the image and potential of these areas and bring them into popular formats such as sci-fi.

Re:Beyond Imagination

[Anonymous Coward]

I just had an idea for a scifi story that revolves around this dilemma..

If the scientists cannot communicate with each other effectively using written or spoken language, they will have to invent or develop alternative communication mediums to more directly impart hard data and fundamental axioms of complex datasets.

If you were looking for a good reason for cyberization, besides 'Duh, I wantz da pornz in mah brainz!", this looks like a good one.

What would be the ramifications of widespread adoption? Would scientifically inclined people's interpersonal abilities with non cybernetic people be greatly halted? Would it create impassible social hurdles? How would it effect politics, if true meaning could be conveyed in a "speech" instead of clouding it with ambiguity, and what would the reaction of the status quo be to this kind of change?

Language is a fundamental human feature, and removing verbal and written language for a more abstract, and direct communication medium would create "monsters" in the eyes of currently functioning persons. (Much like our technologies we have today would make all of us "Witches and wizards" to somebody from 400 years ago.)

This is how hard science fiction is born! You take a curious observation about the current world, consider its repercussions, then run with it! It isn't about contriving plot devices so people can fuck in ever new and elaborate settings, with new and ever more elaborate persons. (EG, Kirk and green alien sex slaves.)

Re:Beyond Imagination

[waives]

You might enjoy "The Evolution of Human Science", by Ted Chiang, a short story from "Stories of Your Life and Others". It explores the role of human researchers in a future where benevolent but disinterested artificial intelligences have far surpassed human intellectual potential.

Re:Beyond Imagination

[PeterBrett]

Already we have areas of science so specialized that scientists can not communicate to each other as to the details of their expertise.

Haha. You might be interested in this short science fiction story, then: "Babel II" by Christopher Anvil

(If you enjoyed that, check out the Webscriptions website -- loads of DRM-free science fiction and fantasy e-books)

Snow Crash?

[Bieeanda]

I think the author of that article's thinking of Neuromancer. The metaverse is nothing more than a reskinned cyberspace, care of William Gibson's old typewriter.

On another note, if you're looking to science fiction as a predictive medium, look deeper than the shiny chrome and blinkenlichten. Technology is a sideline in good sci-fi: it's the cultural commentary that makes the work visionary. Or did people seriously think that Fahrenheit 451 was supposed to presage the development of six-legged robot dogs?

Re:Snow Crash?

[bonze]

And to boot Gibson offers a scene involving an interactive, immersive cyber-reality in Count Zero (1986, nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards) six years before Snow Crash was published (1992).

Snow Crash is amusing but has some amazingly stupid bits in it. Scenarios in Gibson's books maintain some relationship to plausible realities...

Dr. Who

[Malc]

It's been going since 1963, and I'm still entertained. You don't have to be a nerd, it's not overly sentimental, and I can enjoy with my gal.

No

[wembley fraggle]

No, it hasn't.

Science fiction isn't about "telling the future", it's about making commentary about the Human Condition, putting together entertaining yarns, looking at what-if scenarios in society. Do you think PKD really believed any of the futuristic technology he talked about (read Ubik for a nice example) was really possible? Who knows - it's just a necessary condition to set up the scenario in which we can see interesting ideas play ouy.

Any quick read of the New Masters of SF (china mieville, ian macdonald, iain m banks, ken mcleod, dan simmons) will show you that the genre is alive, kicking, and more literary than ever before.

Re:No

[Hybrid-brain]

It's also about politics as well, and how we perceive them as well. Take a look at the new V series. It's set after 9/11 when we've become suspicious of everything different, where we value security, and those that aren't with us, must be destroyed. This new series once again explores the unknown, (and yes it sucks majorly right now because they need a writing staff that's more qualified to do justice,) but at the same time it explores how our ideologies are. Think about this as well, charismatic and "peaceful" beings who want to share with us their tech and heal us. It's also about religion. The old series didn't have a priest who was questioning everything that the V said. That's what makes this series so good, is that it has more depth to it then the original series. Plus the role of Anna, she has a hidden agenda, and while I am a democrat, I can see huge allusions to Obama and his presidential reign. The old series was directed more towards the whole Cold War era, in a time where we didn't know where we were going or what we were doing. In this new series, we have 9/11 and terrorists and sleeper cells.

Re:No

[zwei2stein]

Well, what you mentioned are more of fantasy authors (or, 'new weird'), not really SF there.

You could, however, mention John Scalzi. True new blood, Old Man's War for example shows it.

Re:No

[R2.0]

"more literary than ever before."

Thanks for the warning.

Re:No

[mpe]

It's also about politics as well, and how we perceive them as well. Take a look at the new V series. It's set after 9/11 when we've become suspicious of everything different, where we value security, and those that aren't with us, must be destroyed. This new series once again explores the unknown, (and yes it sucks majorly right now because they need a writing staff that's more qualified to do justice,) but at the same time it explores how our ideologies are.

There's also the idea that the aliens have been manipulating events on Earth on a global scale. The aliens's disguise appears be more "Terminator" than the original series in some ways.

Think about this as well, charismatic and "peaceful" beings who want to share with us their tech and heal us.

It's a bit suprising that nobody has queried that the aliens insist on mentioning "peace" so often.

It's also about religion. The old series didn't have a priest who was questioning everything that the V said. That's what makes this series so good, is that it has more depth to it then the original series. Plus the role of Anna, she has a hidden agenda

But it is as much hidden from her own people (except possibly her family) as it is from the human. Indeed several of the aliens appear to have hidden agendas.

In this new series, we have 9/11 and terrorists and sleeper cells.

As well as it being unclear who is on which "side" even exactly what sides there are. Maybe some of the blanks will be filled in by the Ryan Nichols character telling the priest and the FBI agent both about why he was sent to Earth and why he became a rebel.

I agree!

[PlantPerson]

Sci-fi has indeed run out of steam! Luckily, science fiction is still quite healthy.

Yep. All the good ideas are used up. Go home.

[CFD339]

Yep. All the good ideas are used up. Go home.

Damn, I wish I could use mod points on TFA instead of just comments.

...and talking of predictions (spoiler)

[itsdapead]

...concerns about apparently philanthropic plans by big business to put the world's libraries online turning out to be a plot to control access to the world's knowledge?

Ain't gonna happen!

Oh, wait...

At least Google seems to have mastered the art of non-destructive scanning (but best not to give them ideas!)

I would also add social issues

[Ralph Spoilsport]

contribute to the decline. SF (often) comes from a techno-utopian world view of unlimited resources and unlimited growth. Present conditions seem to contradict that, and there is a greater awareness of the downside of industrialism. As a consequence, SF of a techno-utopian variety has less credibility.

And before a bunch of techno-utopians get their knickers in a bunch, I'm pointing out DEGREES of things, not some idiotic blinkered 1/0 true/false Bullcrap. Perceptions, whether true or false, are perceptions, and if people are seeing things like flat oil production since 2005, it doesn't take Einstein to figure out we're in deep doo doo.

RS

Gimme a minute

[Zixaphir]

Got four books in the backburner, looking for a publisher. If you keep telling them Sci-Fi is dead, you think they're gonna wanna publish my damn books?

Re:Gimme a minute

[PeterBrett]

Got four books in the backburner, looking for a publisher. If you keep telling them Sci-Fi is dead, you think they're gonna wanna publish my damn books?

Have you approached Baen Books?

All good sci-fi is...

[mikeage]

lots of fi, minimal sci, except where necessary.

Good sci-fi, like all good literature, is about people, not technology.

Why does sci-fi need to predict a technology?

[sabernet]

Tell me what, exactly, does Foundation realistically predict? It was a retelling of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in space with funny maths, glowey nuclear bits and, most importantly, damn good writing.

It was entertaining without being preachy or predictive. Not all sci-fi need tell us what we should develop. In my opinion, that's what's causing so much of the crap sci-fi bulk shit I see in bookstores now: They focus too much on showing us this "cool idea for a toy" the author had instead of trying to tell an engaging story.

Do I need to know how the pocket raygun works? No. Will I be entertained just the same if the author states its use like this:

"Blinded by the flash, [protagonist] waits for his eyes to readjust. 'Dammit....' was the only thing he could think to utter while his mind was tackling the sheer whiteness his eyes continued to show him as well as the hot and cold sensations that followed the initial nova. At last, he could make out a hazy image of his nemesis, still wielding the phasegun and still directing its barrel at what had previously been a quite sturdy wall, the edges of of new hole glowing red hot while frost accumulated on the tip of the pistol."

Presumably.

Re:Why does sci-fi need to predict a technology?

[sabernet]

Well, typos notwithstanding...

Re:Why does sci-fi need to predict a technology?

[gmuslera]

The concept of psycohistory maybe? predicting with large groups of people will probably do? Is more plausible now than when was written? That concept existed before, and in that extent?

Anyway, replaying history in future terms gives another meaning to the phrase "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

Re:Why does sci-fi need to predict a technology?

[amorsen]

The Foundation series is based on the theory that the universe flows forward in a generally predictable way, except for once in a while when "tipping points" appear where just a little shift can make a large difference to history. Chaos theory has shown us that this view is false, that every moment is a tipping point.

Re:Why does sci-fi need to predict a technology?

[doom]

sabernet (751826) wrote:

Tell me what, exactly, does Foundation realistically predict? It was a retelling of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in space with funny maths, glowey nuclear bits and, most importantly, damn good writing.

The whole notion of science fiction as prediction is a red herring, the issue at hand is science fiction as a source of inspiration.

Notably, Paul Krugman admits that Asimov's "psychohistory" was one of the things that inspired him as a kid to go on to do work in macroeconomics: TWISTED_PATHS

I think you'll find that the typical young physicist these days got involved in the game because they wanted to discover hyperdrive.

Re:Why does sci-fi need to predict a technology?

[sabernet]

I wonder how much of that is due to the massive migration away from original stories and properties towards those horrifically unoriginal and mass produced licensed works.

Seriously, more and more I see people buying the newest Halo, Star Wars, Star Trek or Warcraft book then trying out new, original fiction. Readers tend to gravitate to the comfortable rather then the possibly mind-blowing.

This will only get worse if borrowing books is made tedious by ebook DRM.

Technobabble backlash

[Brad Mace]

I agree, I think there's been a backlash against technobabble which is steering scifi away from Star Trek tech-porn towards a more BSG style focused more on people than cool gadgets. I certainly enjoy Star Trek, but they've saturated the gee-whiz-look-at-this-cool-gadget market, and people are ready for something new. Now that we've been exploring space for a few decades, and everyone has cool gadgets, they want more depth in the stories. It's not so much that scifi is running out of steam, it's just evolving as all genres do.

Re:Technobabble backlash

[PeterBrett]

I agree, I think there's been a backlash against technobabble which is steering scifi away from Star Trek tech-porn towards a more BSG style focused more on people than cool gadgets. I certainly enjoy Star Trek, but they've saturated the gee-whiz-look-at-this-cool-gadget market, and people are ready for something new. Now that we've been exploring space for a few decades, and everyone has cool gadgets, they want more depth in the stories. It's not so much that scifi is running out of steam, it's just evolving as all genres do.

No, it just means that people are starting to realise that scy fy is not science fiction. Science fiction has always been about the people. Read some great science fiction novels: Frank Herbert's "Dune", Greg Bear's "Eon", Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game", Asimov's "The End of Eternity", Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero". In none of these novels are the protagonists problems solved by a technological deus ex machina; in all of them, the technology and speculative science is merely a barely-explained canvas upon which a human drama is played out.

BSG wasn't considered "good" science fiction because "focussing on the people" was a new and clever evolution of the genre; rather, it was "good" because it went back to the form that made science fiction great.

Re:Technobabble backlash

[Phantasmagoria]

EXACTLY. You, my friend have just summarized what is the absolute truth. True science fiction is not fully focused on the fictional science. It's a story involving drama, action, mystery, or what not in a fictional science setting.

Ender's Game was a war story, Dune was about a prophet, the I Robot series was a detective series. They all took place in a fictional science setting. THAT is science fiction.

Re:Technobabble backlash

[Nefarious Wheel]

Read some great science fiction novels: Frank Herbert's "Dune", Greg Bear's "Eon", Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game", Asimov's "The End of Eternity", Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero".

Zounds! Add Niven's "Ringworld" to that and it would make a fine intro-to-hard-SF syllabus.

Re:Technobabble backlash

[Nefarious Wheel]

Ender's Game was a war story, Dune was about a prophet, the I Robot series was a detective series. They all took place in a fictional science setting. THAT is science fiction.

And the Niven-Pournelle "Footfall" saw that the role of science fiction - and science fiction writers - would also extend into the future, in a science fiction setting (a bit broken fourth-wall, but meta- or not, it worked). The following TFA quote:

Does sci-fi really have that great an impact on the technology that emerges from the labs of the world's biggest technology companies? Labs that are so well funded (Microsoft alone spent $8 billion on research last year) that they can afford to scoop up the brightest talent emerging from MIT and beyond? Indeed it does, according to Bruce Hillsberg, director of storage systems at IBM Research in Almaden. For him, the value of science fiction is that it "paints visions of the future that cause people to think about possibilities beyond what is possible today".

...was reminiscent of the Footfall "two war rooms" think tanks that were populated entirely with science fiction authors, for very good reasons. Read the book if you haven't yet, it's hard SF at it's hardest.

I found particularly poignant the reference to the Heinleins, when "The Ansons walked in. Man, the President doesn't get that kind of deference."

This stuff needs to continue. I'm going to log off WoW tonight and read a book.

Re:Technobabble backlash

[PeterBrett]

Read some great science fiction novels: Frank Herbert's "Dune", Greg Bear's "Eon", Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game", Asimov's "The End of Eternity", Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero".

Zounds! Add Niven's "Ringworld" to that and it would make a fine intro-to-hard-SF syllabus.

Interestingly enough, it's sitting next to "Dune" on my bookshelf. Maybe it's time it got another read!

No

[noir_lord]

No. Iain M Banks and Neal Asher among others are writing good thought provoking and enjoyable books.

Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

But my cock will never run out of cum.

Today's sci-fi is not sci-fi

[Sleepy]

Sci-fi was attacked from all sides by mega-movie plexes, formulamatic (committee) design headed by investors, and the cult of Scientology.

In short, sci-fi is NOT made for geeks anymore.. it's made for mainstream teenagers and stupid parents who couldn't tell you the difference between "fusion" and "fission".
They're the only ones who don't object to Will Smith being in what should be sci-fi classics, dumbed down to the Super-Size McDonald's drive through crowd.

Good sci-fi (movies anyway) tapered off in the late 80's.

If we're talking sci-fi games, Fallout (even the remake) have stayed true to their roots.

Books? I haven't come across any modern sci-fi I liked. I'm a stranger in a strange land...

Re:Today's sci-fi is not sci-fi

[shmlco]

"Good sci-fi (movies anyway) tapered off in the late 80's."

Oh, I don't know. Children of Men was a good Sci-Fi "what if" kind of story. The Matrix (not the sequels) was a great "what's the nature of reality" story. GATTACA (cloning), Contact (SETI), Final Cut and Strange Days (recording memories and images), Sunshine (should man continue), and Phenomenon (how we might react to paranormal abilities).

Even The Island and Paycheck and Deja Vu (human cloning and memory erasure and time travel), while over the top only as Bay and Woo and Scott can do, still offered some interesting insights into the consequences of those actions.

Science fiction is the genre of the "what if", presented in a plausible form.

Re:Today's sci-fi is not sci-fi

[PeterBrett]

Even The Island and Paycheck and Deja Vu (human cloning and memory erasure and time travel), while over the top only as Bay and Woo and Scott can do, still offered some interesting insights into the consequences of those actions.

I use Paycheck as my favourite example of how a really good idea for a science fiction movie can go horribly wrong due to a hammy script.

Fuel

[dandart]

Your sci-fi still runs on steam? Mine runs on antimatter!

The Future has Arrived, why bother inventing one?

[cutecub]

To an author, I think the attraction of Science Fiction is that it allows them to put a veneer of plausibility on settings which would otherwise be too fantastic to be credible. This allows them the freedom to explore ideas or situations which couldn't possibly occur if set in "the real world."

But the current world has become sufficiently complex and interesting that writers such as William Gibson and Margaret Attwood no longer need to set their stories in some near-future dystopia - our current dystopia is sufficient to tell the stories they want to tell.

Gibson's last few books have been set in, effectively, the present day. There's no need for him to go to 2030 or beyond to explore the idea of immersive, ubiquitous computing and communication: we all have smart-phones in 2009. Everyone I see on the streets of San Francisco is walking around in a trance, like they're jacked into Cyberspace.

There's no need for Margaret Attwood to set The Handmaiden's Tail in 2195, there's plenty of opportunity to explore theocracy and coercive reproduction in the crazy, polluted and Balkanized world of the present day.

I think that Science Fiction writers who rely on the old cliches of Warp-drive and alien worlds simply aren't trying hard enough.

21st Century Earth IS an alien world... all you have to do is pay attention.

-Sean

Bogged down with realism.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I read 50's and 60's sci fi it seems a lot more experimental and weird than most of today's.
The concepts were so far from being possible that the writers don't seem to bother so much with explanations, or tying the plot to a scientific theory.

I think the problem today is that science is so capable, that writers have to spend half their time making explanations or excuses to fit in with what is 'possible'. So you end up with pages of roughly scientific explanations which are still mumbo jumbo in the end anyway.

Sci fi writers should forget about realism so much, as that just bogs down the plot, looks dated very quickly, and in the end is almost always impossible fantasy anyway. I've got in the habit of skipping most of the explanations with recent sci fi.

With the older sci fi if someone said there was a gaseous intelligence shaped like a sphere you just accepted it. Adding pages of explanation about quantum circuitry and dio-foamic nano modules does not improve the book or the concepts one whit.

The problem is we can see the future

[realmolo]

First of all, the idea that science-fiction is about predicting advances in technology is retarded.

Secondly, at this stage in human's technological development, we kind of know what the next step is, and that step is artificial intelligence. And the step after that is unknowable. Vernor Vinge has lots to say about this.

 

Re:The problem is we can see the future

[jeffb (2.718)]

This. I don't like the "singularity" metaphor, but it does carry value. There isn't a single precipice beyond which "mere humans" can't see -- it's more like a parabolic curve. For each decade we progress, we can see a little bit further "around the curve", but the horizon does seem to be getting closer.

Or maybe, just a little bit further around the curve, there is a precipice. Can't tell.

Cold fusion is by definition no energy source

[Anonymous Coward]

If cold fusion works it's either unusable(to few energy produced) or not so cold after all (aka hot fusion).

Re:Cold fusion is by definition no energy source

[ppc_digger]

"Cold fusion" doesn't mean cold enough to touch, it means cold compared to the sun, somewhere in the range of a modern nuclear reactor.

Re:Cold fusion is by definition no energy source

[Muros]

Indeed. Nuclear fusion releases energy; the "cold" bit merely refers to the fact that it is controlled.

Why SF is dead.

[Animats]

The real problem is that most of the big themes in classical SF require vast amounts of energy. And that's not happening. There hasn't been a new source of energy in fifty years, just marginal improvements in the old ones. This matters.

That's why space travel is a bust. With chemical fuels, it will never be more than an overly expensive, marginal enterprise. The better '50s SF writers all knew this; read Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon". They just assumed that, somehow, the energy problem would be cracked. Didn't happen. So space travel remains an expensive ego trip for countries and billionaires.

Industrial civilization is only 200 years old. 1808, the first time someone bought a train ticket on a commercial railroad and went someplace, is a good starting point. Industrial abundance, being able to make more stuff than people could consume, only goes back to WWII.

During most of the 20th century, "progress" was a big theme. We don't hear that phrase used much any more. The number by which one measures "progress" for the average Joe, "per capita median real income for urban wage earners", peaked in 1973. (Median income, not average income; the average is biased by wealth concentration to rich people.) Back then, a guy without a high school diploma could get a job at GM and make enough to buy a house, two cars, a boat, and an education for his kids. That's over. (You don't see that number mentioned much any more. It was heavily publicized back when the US boasted "the highest standard of living in the world".)

Now we're starting to run out of energy and raw materials. Nobody serious thinks there's enough left to sustain current output for another century, let alone bring China and India up to US levels of consumption.

It's hard to write good SF about "the great winding down". It's been done, but it's not read much. The glory days of SF coincide with the period during which "progress" was a win for the little guy.

That's why SF is dead. The plausible future sucks.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[crazyjimmy]

The real problem is that most of the big themes in classical SF require vast amounts of energy. And that's not happening. There hasn't been a new source of energy in fifty years, just marginal improvements in the old ones. This matters.

That's why space travel is a bust. With chemical fuels, it will never be more than an overly expensive, marginal enterprise. The better '50s SF writers all knew this; read Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon". They just assumed that, somehow, the energy problem would be cracked. Didn't happen. So space travel remains an expensive ego trip for countries and billionaires.

Industrial civilization is only 200 years old. 1808, the first time someone bought a train ticket on a commercial railroad and went someplace, is a good starting point. Industrial abundance, being able to make more stuff than people could consume, only goes back to WWII.

During most of the 20th century, "progress" was a big theme. We don't hear that phrase used much any more. The number by which one measures "progress" for the average Joe, "per capita median real income for urban wage earners", peaked in 1973. (Median income, not average income; the average is biased by wealth concentration to rich people.) Back then, a guy without a high school diploma could get a job at GM and make enough to buy a house, two cars, a boat, and an education for his kids. That's over. (You don't see that number mentioned much any more. It was heavily publicized back when the US boasted "the highest standard of living in the world".)

Now we're starting to run out of energy and raw materials. Nobody serious thinks there's enough left to sustain current output for another century, let alone bring China and India up to US levels of consumption.

It's hard to write good SF about "the great winding down". It's been done, but it's not read much. The glory days of SF coincide with the period during which "progress" was a win for the little guy.

That's why SF is dead. The plausible future sucks.

I think you're right, in a lot of ways. However, I suspect a chunk of the problem is that the best path to better energy begins with that N word people are so afraid of embracing. Our society has discovered a new form of fire, and it scares us. Until we're willing to actually embrace it (dangers of use and all), we're going to be stuck in our caves.

--Jimmy

Re:Why SF is dead.

[King_TJ]

I don't think I agree with you.....

Dystopian science fiction is some of my favorite to read or watch in movie form. Everything from 1984 and Brave New World (soon to be made into a movie, last I heard, with Leonardo DeCapprio signed on to play a role) to Minority Report.... None of these really paint a rosy picture of the future, or pretend that we've found some gigantic new energy source.

The plausible future might suck, but good writers can make entertaining stories about that, just as well as they can write "happy, feel-good" stories about our great success.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that people want science fiction to take place in a comfortable, "safe" future.

Any such future would be boring beyond tolerance.

Indeed, people WANT the future to be safe and happy, which is why we elect people into office like the ones we have always elected: the ones that promise peace, prosperity, security, and an easy and cozy ride.

A safe world is safe because nothing happens, and nothing ever changes. No new ideas come up to threaten the established order; no new discoveries threaten the human delusion of perfect knowledge.

People want to sit on their couch, turn on the TV, watch football/soccer/rugby/cricket/whatever, eat fattening food that has been rendered harmless by chemical processing (idealism, remember-), and do nothing.

Nothing gets invented, no new ideas get created. New things are not safe things. Security is more important than innovation.

That is the current trend of today's industrialized world. Extrapolation on this trend results in a horribly distopic future filled with obese people who need machines to reproduce because they are too fat to have sex, filled with regurgitated literature and recycled movies, and where new technologies are impulsively feared because they bring the chaos of change.

The ONLY reason we don't have that kind of world right now, and why people leave their fucking houses *AT ALL*, is BECAUSE of the energy consumption problem. If infinite energy were to be discovered by our society, it would NOT lead to runaway innovation-- it would facilitate runaway sedation.

Don't believe this is the case? When was the last time you played a TRULY innovative video game? When was the last time Hollywood released a truly innovative, and original movie? A new snack food that isn't an "improved" rehash of an old one? What do your co-workers talk about on break?

Hell, when was the last time you threw a dart at a map, and drove there?

That's what I thought.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Blakey Rat]

And science fiction writers are more responsible than anybody for making people afraid of Nuclear power. Scary radiation made a great story theme for lazy writers.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

the plausible future does suck. without the ability to create an energy source of both an order of magnitude larger in output and smaller in size there's just nowhere for gadgetry to go outside of very limited capacity with mostly terrestrial consequence. any plausible future requires a slimming down of total consumption without one.

the process of slimming will not be pretty and will make amazing fodder for a variety of fiction. assuming there's enough paper to print it on, and enough power to digitally read it. in the 70's 'soylent green' was a bit of a gut punch and based on a 1966 book called 'make room!make room!' by harry harrison. it's interesting that despite being at the peak of u.s. earning ability and the 'freedom' that provided; energy sources were considered to be at risk due to the oil embargo. /dammit out of time with more to say. happy trails.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[quercus.aeternam]

Could you trim next time?

Re:Why SF is dead.

[NikolaiKutuzov]

During most of the 20th century, "progress" was a big theme. We don't hear that phrase used much any more. The number by which one measures "progress" for the average Joe, "per capita median real income for urban wage earners", peaked in 1973. (Median income, not average income; the average is biased by wealth concentration to rich people.) Back then, a guy without a high school diploma could get a job at GM and make enough to buy a house, two cars, a boat, and an education for his kids. That's over. (You don't see that number mentioned much any more. It was heavily publicized back when the US boasted "the highest standard of living in the world".)

That's why SF is dead. The plausible future sucks.

Although I would offhand agree with a lot of things you said, the US census bureau seems to dissagree with you and sees raising median real incomes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States, specifically
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Household_income_65_to_05.png

Maybe you're over 35 too, from here on, the world will always be a worse place than when we were young :D

But seriously, there was a lot of gloom and doom in the seventies and eighties, when everyone expected we'll die from pollution or simply exterminate ourselves in an atomic war (I have several dozen novels dealing with that possibility alone). Still there was lots of great SF.

I don't think there is less good SF around, its just that the future has become more complicated. I mean, these days William Gibson is not writing SF anymore, he's writing plain novels."At some point there, we left the present and entered the future" (http://xkcd.com/652). I'd say its the abundance of progress, which makes predictions so hard. Come one, compare the youth of someone in the 80ies to todays kids: always online? always being able to chat, mail, watch porn, play, flirt, and reserach for homework? Time is moving fast. Regards

Re:Why SF is dead.

[mpe]

The problem is that people want science fiction to take place in a comfortable, "safe" future.
Any such future would be boring beyond tolerance.

This dosn't just apply to science fiction. Conflict is very much a part of drama. Just about any story about a "safe future" would be likely concerned about the "people" (be they human, alien, AI, cybernetic or whatever) responsible for making sure that things stay "safe".

Re:Why SF is dead.

[crdotson]

I just love how people like you assume that no technological progress will be made and that the problems of today will be the same as the problems in 50 years, only worse.

We haven't "cracked the energy problem" because energy has been cheap and plentiful enough not to need to, for the most part. Now that people are worried about it, it will happen, although it will take time. (Also, I think it would be incorrect to say that no energy advances have been made since 1960.)

We'll have plenty of problems in 50 years, but it won't be the things that people are worrying about today (with a few exceptions). I grew up in the cold war era -- how many people are worried every day about nuclear war now? Do you still think we're all likely to 'splode any second? No, now it's that we'll take our stupid lines and extrapolate out on the graph for 100 years without any regard for technological progress to X or Y horrible fate.

I will never convince you, but you'll convince yourself eventually. Save your post for a few years and re-read it.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you're joking because the energy problem is not a technological one. I don't understand why this is such a difficult concept for people. Probably because we're still in a cheap energy society for now. Look, all we had to do was drill a hole in the ground and this goop came out of the ground, concentrated for us by nature for millions of years.

You may be in denial, but every single item that is around you got there because we had CHEAP ENERGY, not because of technology.

When the oil runs out, THERE ARE NO OTHER SOURCES OF ENERGY that even come close to what oil represented. And it's NOT a technological problem, it's GEOLOGICAL.

Is it sinking in yet?

Re:Why SF is dead.

[hitmark]

not helping that the economic leadership is clinging to 200 year old ideas of economy, when things have moved in a very different direction (why produce centrally at a large system, and ship in costly ways, when one can send over the plans and have it built locally, most likely modified to use local resource?).

ok, some see it, but want to be the landlord of the new economy by slapping rent on all the forms creativity takes.

end result, ACTA and "friends"...

as they say, give a man a fish, and he is not hungry for that day, teach the same man to fish and he will never go hungry (as long as there is fish to be caught). Problem is when someone wants to get "rent" for each time someone fishing technique is used and/or taught...

Re:Why SF is dead.

[crdotson]

You're right. Once oil runs out, there's certainly nothing out there like nuclear fusion possible. Why, if ANYONE can walk out in the sunlight and point to a working fusion source of energy, I'd be shocked.

And fuel is certainly a problem. I mean, how can you find hydrogen around here?

I'm not saying we'll lick fusion in 20 years. I'm just saying there are plenty of alternatives.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Regarding household income, it's only higher because more women are working than before. Per worker, median income isn't so rosy. It used to be a man could be the breadwinner and the woman could be a housewife. Today, this isn't even a choice. Most mothers have to work so the household can keep up with the Joneses. I'm not saying women should stay home, but often they can't even if they wanted to. Maybe it's because they're servicing that ridiculously large second mortgage they took a few years back to buy that SUV and 50 inch babysitter.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fusion? Have you actually done five seconds of research into the subject? Do you understand the immense engineering obstacles that are in the way? Do you realize we have not generated one joule of fusion energy yet over the input energy, except for H-bombs?

Hydrogen is not a fuel. You have to make it. Guess with what? With whatever we have around right now. Hydro and coal and nuke powered electric plants, none of which have remotely the capacity to generate the amount of energy we need to replace oil. Not. even. close.

Not to mention the current electrical grid will collapse like cotton candy in the rain if we wanted to switch to 100% electricity.

But you probably just think we should build more wires. Were's the copper going to come from? Mining? With diesel powered equipment? Refining? Transporting? Building?

You are eerily naive and scarily ignorant of the reality of our situation.

Just the fact that you mentionned hydrogen like it was a fuel is terrifying to me. The shocking ignorance of that statement makes my head spin.

You have a computer, USE IT. Learn something instead of denying reality and living in la-la land.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Never having posted before, I have to respond to this utterly ignorant and pessimistic post. If it was sarcasm, I'm sorry I missed it. Please read the outstanding and only slightly dated factual treatise on inner solar system exploration - using chemical fuels - called "Mining the Sky", written by John S. Lewis.

And please find somewhere else to spout your completely unfounded pessimism, this is /. after all!

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Fantastic Lad]

Nope.

Nuclear is old hat. But the society which holds that future tech is also holding the keys to our cage and doesn't want to share. Read Richard Dolan.

It is rare that I read a sci-fi novel as fantastic as the one we're currently living in the middle of but which most people are too scared to look at.

-FL

Re:Why SF is dead.

[crdotson]

Well, you can keep calling names all you like, but you're still wrong.

I do understand, probably better than you (I'm not a specialist in the field, but you clearly aren't), the immense engineering obstacles in the way of using nuclear fusion as an energy source for humans to use. (Directly, not via solar panels.) That's why I said "I'm not saying it will be licked in 20 years". I take it that your position is that nuclear fusion is impossible, or at best so far off that it's of no hope to us? I'd love to see some reasons for this position. How about 100 years, smartass? Think of what we had in 1909, and note that the rate of advancement has not been steady but has continually increased.

Hydrogen is absolutely a fuel for nuclear fusion. Two hydrogen atoms fuse into one helium atom and the leftover mass is released as energy. It's how the sun works -- I suppose I was too subtle on that point. There's a very abundant element on the earth that contains hydrogen. Since I was too subtle last time, I will not keep you in suspense -- it's water, which has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom in each molecule. The amount of energy it takes to separate these is small compared to the amount of energy you get from fusing them into helium. (I'll try to find a reference for you if you like). That said, it's not that simple, of course, and any working fusion design wouldn't necessarily work with elemental hydrogen. If it were easy, it would already be done.

Hmm, the electrical grid. Boy, that's a tough one. It's a shame that there's nothing on the horizon, like superconductivity, that would help with electricity transmission. Even without that, "Various estimates of existing copper reserves available for mining vary from 25 years to 60 years, depending on core assumptions such as the growth rate." per a reference on Wikipedia. So there's some time, even presuming a steady growth rate, before copper shortages become a problem. Some thought might also bring you to the conclusion that other things can be used to conduct electricity and that copper is simply the cheapest and most effective one to use now.

Again, I didn't say that finding another cheap energy source is easy, simply that it's possible and will be accomplished eventually.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

Don't you know that robots are going to destroy most of humanity? None of the things you describe are going to stop the development of the AI.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[fritsd]

People tend be conservative in their beliefs. Until now there was always oil, therefore there will always be oil. It is difficult to grasp an abstract concept (Peak Oil, for example) and translate it to your own real lifestyle in the real world, when everybody agrees it's going to happen but can't imagine it's actually going to happen to *THEM* if they live long enough.
The only recourse is really to teach people what EROEI means, and that open-pit-mining shale, crushing the rock and boiling the petroleum out of it may be very possible but not necessarily a useful idea.
I recommend The Oil Drum.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[mrmeval]

I think you're right, in a lot of ways. However, I suspect a chunk of the problem is that the best path to better energy begins with that N word people are so afraid of embracing. Our society has discovered a new form of fire, and it scares us. Until we're willing to actually embrace it (dangers of use and all), we're going to be stuck in our caves.

The US is getting 10 percent of it's electricity from old Russian nukes and are in competition for the rest of the world for that supply. We've played out most easily mined uranium. This has happened faster than predicted. Nuclear is not going to be a viable option unless more sources of uranium or other radioactives are found.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ you're a deluded idiot. You're so totally into techno-fantasies you're completely disconnected from reality.

It's obvious you have no clue and are just repeating half-truths and complete falsehoods. Why are you in denial? We burn oil for our technology. This is what we do. Fusion is so far out you might as well forget about it. Do you have the slightest idea of the conditions we need to create for controlled over-unity fusion? You mentionned the Sun earlier, you realize we need to use temperatures about 10 times higher than the core of the Sun?

Do you understand about material activation? Do you understand about thermal blankets? You do realize all modern fusion power proposals are nothing more than a fancy steam turbine with a monstrously complex heat source? We can't even get fission breeders to work reliably at 500 degrees, and you're smoking the fusion weed?

As for copper, like oil, we already took the easiest to get stuff out of the ground. If you want to get the rest of it, and now suddenly your barrel of oil costs ten times more, well, I'd think you're in trouble, wouldn't you?

Superconductors? You just keep throwing more irrelevant things into the mix! We haven't seen any advances in decades. Hint: we still use liquid helium for any superconductors of note. Guess what? They all require the support of our oil-driven society to work.

I'm curious as to why you think we're not in trouble? Sure, fusion is easy, we have fusors since decades. No one has created any electrical power out of it though.

Hydrogen is a fuel for fusion? Are you sure about that? The H-H reaction is about the hardest one to get to ignite. You sure *I'm* the one who's ignorant?

You talk about fusion as if it's a done deal. It isn't. Not even close.

I think that you believe you know what you're talking about, but you don't. I'm studying physics, I don't know what you're studying, but I think you need to study harder. It's not sinking in.

You are deluded. You are like the fish in a bowl, you can't conceive of anything beyond the bowl. Everything around you, everything you touch, all you eat, your house, your clothes, your car, even your computer all came into being because of OIL.

Get it through your head. We can't replace it. You can't eat electricity. Our present and foreseeable energy sources all depend on the oil base of our technology.

There are no solar-powered solar cell factories. There are no wind-powered windmill factories. Nothing will replace oil.

The breakthroughs we'll need to do so are stupendous and not likely to happen.

Get used to living a much more modest existence in the decades to come.

It's actually not a bad thing. There will not be a fusion-powered superconductor future. There will be solar cell and windwill towns with drastically reduced car travel.

And airplanes? Care to explain how we can continue transcontinental flights without the amazing energy density of kerosene and the magic of the gas turbine?

A superconducting proton fusing Airbus of the future?

You're charmingly naive about the world, I'll give you that. Now go to bed and forget to turn off the lights powered by falling water, not fusion.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[crdotson]

Wow, you've got a lot of anger built up there.

I'm very impressed you're studying physics -- you must be very wise in the ways of the world. It's even more impressive that you can look so far into the future and predict that no breakthroughs will happen. I guess we should tell all those PHDs with (collectively) millions for budgets on energy research that Anonymous Coward, probably a physics undergrad or grad student, has it all figured out and they should go home.

I clearly said that fusion wouldn't use elemental hydrogen, but your studies should have indicated that Deuterium and Tritium are isotopes of hydrogen.

YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT. The point is that cheap energy is technically possible (after oil), and that humans will invent it because there will be a need for it as oil becomes more scarce and expensive. If not fusion, then fission will become cheaper, or some other technology. One reason that we haven't invented it yet is because we already have cheap energy so there's not as much incentive. Humans have been off researching microchips and other things instead (many of which will probably help with energy research).

Again, take a look at the world of 1909. If I have to get used to living a more modest existence, it will be because the US is unable to compete in the world, not because of a lack of energy or any other item that it's physically possible to produce.

And, as a side note, do you really think we'll pump the last drop of oil out of the ground on, say, Jan 3 2015 and then we'll just be screwed? Oil prices will gradually continue to increase as it becomes more expensive to produce, and as that happens, more resources will go into energy research.

As I said to the original poster, I can't ever convince you of this. But keep your messages and read them in 20 years and you'll convince yourself. Technology can't solve all of the world's problems (and when it solves some it causes others) but energy is one problem we'll lick sooner or later. And when we do it will probably cause some other problem that our children or grandchildren will think is unsolvable.

Oh, and I don't believe I ever said that we would use zero oil. A high-energy-density chemical fuel is the clear (and only for the foreseeable future) choice for airplanes. Note that high-energy-density chemical fuels can be made through other means than geologic, but it's not particularly cost-effective to do so right now.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[MrKaos]

That's why SF is dead. The plausible future sucks.

SF isn't dead - people's imaginations have been dulled to death by this vapid, empty society. The masses are interested in entertainment that mimics fast food, cheap, tasty but ultimately unsatisfying. The plausible future only sucks because all of the interesting advancements are locked up in patent vaults of the largest corporations in the world where they are traded to maintain the status quo and market share.

Science Fiction is a discourse about possibilities, therefore it is a dangerous idea because it makes people believe change is a possibility. Change imposes a disruptive force which is associated with risk, something that modern economists demonstrated recently they have great difficulty handling competently. Worst of all Science Fiction allows the possibility of hope, which means Science Fiction is being killed.

Because hope is the biggest threat to any established power.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Animats]

Right. Look at per-capita real median income. The "household" trend is up, but the individual trend is almost flat. $28,100 in the 1970s, $30,513 in 2004. That's not much of an increase, 8% over 30 years, and it's biased upward by three factors. First, the U.S. Government's cost of living index understates housing costs. (This changed in the Reagan years.) The runup in housing prices is not reflected in those numbers. Second, the population is aging, and income tends to increase with age during the working years. Income for people at the same age has decreased. Third, 2004 was a boom year, before the big recession. When figures for 2009 are available, the numbers for 2000-2010 will clearly be lower.

Now look at the change between 1950 and 1970, from $17,077 to $28,100. That's a 65% increase in 20 years. That was real progress, and that was the golden age of optimistic science fiction.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

the best path to better energy begins with that N word people are so afraid of

Amen to that. The urban black community has embraced it- why can't the rest of us?

Re:Why SF is dead.

[0xdeadbeef]

I think you're missing the point. You are taking it as an article of faith that the energy problem will be solved, that the universe will provide the magic bullet as soon as we really start looking for it. That's nonsense. You can't make any assumptions based on knowledge you don't have. You're promoting a religion.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[doom]

Animats (122034) wrote:

The real problem is that most of the big themes in classical SF require vast amounts of energy. And that's not happening. There hasn't been a new source of energy in fifty years, just marginal improvements in the old ones. This matters.

That's why space travel is a bust. With chemical fuels, it will never be more than an overly expensive, marginal enterprise. The better '50s SF writers all knew this; read Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon". They just assumed that, somehow, the energy problem would be cracked. Didn't happen. So space travel remains an expensive ego trip for countries and billionaires.

Nope, you're pretty much completely wrong here. My understanding is that the energy required to get into low-earth orbit is roughly the same required by a transcontinental plane flight. And further, once you are in LEO, energetically you're around half-way to anywhere else in the solar system.

A "free energy scenario" wouldn't hurt, but really if you're wondering why we don't rule the solar system at this point, you're going to have to look elsewhere.

During most of the 20th century, "progress" was a big theme. We don't hear that phrase used much any more. The number by which one measures "progress" for the average Joe, "per capita median real income for urban wage earners", peaked in 1973. (Median income, not average income; the average is biased by wealth concentration to rich people.) Back then, a guy without a high school diploma could get a job at GM and make enough to buy a house, two cars, a boat, and an education for his kids. That's over. (You don't see that number mentioned much any more. It was heavily publicized back when the US boasted "the highest standard of living in the world".)

One suspects that the powers that be didn't much like the political unrest generated in the affluent 60s. Best to keep people feeling a bit desperate and hungry, eh?

But you know, just for argument's sake... why would anyone in their right minds care about that crap? A two-car house in the burbs? Please, give me a bicycle in a real city any day.

Now we're starting to run out of energy and raw materials. Nobody serious thinks there's enough left to sustain current output for another century, let alone bring China and India up to US levels of consumption.

Methinks you've been listening too much to the "peakies". The people who really believe in the peak oil scenario are people who want to believe that it's true (why exactly do they keep ignoring the Caspian sea area? What do they think we're doing in Afghanistan, anyway?). The oil companies aren't arguing with them too much, I suspect because this general belief is a great excuse for price gouging... Exxon has been doing great with "the energy crisis" part II.

It's hard to write good SF about "the great winding down". It's been done, but it's not read much. The glory days of SF coincide with the period during which "progress" was a win for the little guy.

A couple of things here:

1. As I just mentioned to someone else: you're whining about how nothing cool ever happens anymore on a medium that didn't exist 15 years ago. Hell, 15 years ago, people were still having trouble with the idea of email.
2. The idea that Science Fiction is a literature of optimism is fundamentally crazy. Just to pick an example: one of Heinlein's first works was about a United States under the thumb of a religious dictatorship. In general, utopian fiction has always been a regarded as a boring exception to the rule: cautionary tales about things going wrong in the brave new world of the future.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[doom]

Science Fiction is a discourse about possibilities, therefore it is a dangerous idea because it makes people believe change is a possibility. Change imposes a disruptive force which is associated with risk, something that modern economists demonstrated recently they have great difficulty handling competently.

I think it's the other way around. Science Fiction flourished when the idea of change was off the table, and the people who were interested in it needed an outlet to talk through the ideas. Now that it's pretty much understood that 25 years from now things are going to be way different, talking about how they're going to be different isn't restricted to a weird pulp fiction ghetto.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[crdotson]

Well, that's true to some extent. However, I prefer to think of it as a rational extrapolation of what technological progress has accomplished to date. That is, there are very few technological problems I can see that humans haven't been able to develop some solution to, given enough time. Nobody seems to have any problem with extrapolating various doomsday scenarios based on NO technological progress, but as soon as you want to assume some sort of progress, everyone screams "magic". Can I tell you for sure that a breakthrough will occur, or when? No. However, I think that the probabilities strongly favor it.

Turning it around, aren't you taking it as an article of faith that another cheap energy source (besides oil) ISN'T possible within a few generations? You're making the same assumptions based on knowledge you don't have (knowledge of advancements.) For that matter, the term 'assumption' kind of implies that I don't have the knowledge. :)

I hear all sorts of reasons why it's not possible today, or within 10 or 20 or 30 years -- and many of those are very valid and I know we can't do it today! However, what annoyed me is that the original poster seemed to imply this was simply the law of the universe -- that energy is scarce -- and that we've just been lucky for a couple hundred years to have a good source. I disagree. There's lots of indications that there are a energy sources out there that can produce much larger amounts of energy than what the human race is currently using, if we can just figure out how to tap them.

By the way, I love your handle.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, Jimmy, but you're a racist. Suggesting we burn black people for fuel is beyond the pale.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[Deliveranc3]

For some good negative Sci-Fi check out Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin... while it's definitely written for a teenage crowd it does an amazing job of pointing out that without free energy environmentalism is synonymous with population control and the implications of even the most beneficent forms of population control.

I think Tuf's solution to over population might occur proximately with Stephenson's Diamond age... I'm pretty sure we won't get nano technology until it doesn't have the potential for Grey Goo. Which will be never if modern virus authors are any indication.

It's interesting how the real dangers of evolving technology have to be envisioned by dozens of authors.

There is one of every type of exploitative, destructive or just curious evil genius lurking behind every innovation... think of spam.

Re:Why SF is dead.

[crazyjimmy]

Went and looked up what you're talking about, and found this: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/fuel-supply.html It seems that it isn't that there's not enough Uranium (easily mined or otherwise), but that we haven't been mining it, nor have we been effective in enriching what we have. Effectively, this is a supply/demand issue. We haven't built up our supply, so now that demand is increasing, we're setting ourselves up for trouble. But I don't think we're going to run out.

The Borg

[future assassin]

We are heading that way and eventually someone will figure out how to control the synthetic parts of us and the human race will become like a hive. Just don't open up that ups_shipping_quote.zip with your ultra fast instant cranial web access.

Re:The Borg

[1s44c]

We are heading that way and eventually someone will figure out how to control the synthetic parts of us and the human race will become like a hive.

I hope not. Can you imagine the horror of having 3.5 billion voices in your head all telling you that you need more shoes?

The product is not enough

[westlake]

PC Pro has traced the history of sci-fi's influence on real-world technology, from Jules Verne to Snow Crash, but suggests that writers have run out of ideas when it comes to inspiring tomorrow's products

To Buy n' Large everything was a product.

But it was the machines who chose to remain - or become - human - and more than passive consumers of tech.

It's impossible to imagine Eve and Wall-E being content with the illusions of the The Veldt. Ray Bradbury's early and prophetic foreshadowing of the Matrix and Holodeck.
 

Science has narrowed a bit

[nimblebrain]

Looking at some of the science fiction of the pre-70s, it was full of possibility. Things could shrink and grow, turkeys could be formed in matter dispensers, radiation might give you powers, you could 'reverse your polarity' and become antimatter and, instead of just exploding like we know antimatter would now, we could throw lightning bolts (okay, I'll fess up - I got the Space:1999 Megaset for my birthday).

Besides all the "expired" science possibilities, there's a real gamble to be made trying to second-guess what physics will discover. We're finding all sorts of nifty quantum effects in quantum computing, but we are hardly much closer to understanding what it "really means" than Niehls Bohr. Care to guess whether MOND will actually come out on top? What the LHC will find in a year or two?

It seems like we're at the point where:

• Somebody's already patented it, feasible or not
• Somebody's already working on it, if it's technically feasible
• Somebody's already made it, but it's really expensive
• We know it will get there, it will just take a lot of time and money
• We're already jaded of hearing about it, if it's been going on for 30 years
• The idea's at a high risk of being based on faulty physics
• It would be great if battery power were portable and infinite, but right now, it's a pain

• Apart from immortality, I don't think I have tons on my personal wish list right now that isn't merely a matter of money or waiting.

  Does anyone still have a long "wouldn't it be cool if" list that's feasible given current science and human nature?

Not enough predictions? DO NOT try stephen king

[cashX3r0]

warning: spoilers ahead: the future as stephen king sees it and reality are quite different. the dark tower series has batteries that last up to 1000 years, with robots (droids, actually) that use them and also last up to 1000yrs, and super sonic trains. and the highest tech of all: dial up modems. at least in our reality, we have broadband. we can always buy another battery.

Short Answer

[chrisG23]

Yes.

Sci-Fi lost the last of its steam when it switched from being Science Fiction to being Sci Fi. It's been part of a continuing downward spiral where while there have been more offerings recently, especially in mainstream culture, these offerings are increasingly more and more derivative and uninspired.

Give me media that is challenging, that is new, that is alien, give me speculative fiction, good writing, things that make me go hmmmmmm. Or get off my fucking lawn and go make your garbage elsewhere.

*Disclaimer: I know science fiction was never as great as I'd like to think it was. But I've read things and seen movies that really were great for their time, and for ours. This is what should have driven the direction of Science Fiction. Call an action movie in space what it is, an action move in space (or the future, or an alternate reality, or any other tired setting.)

Re:Short Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

And it totally sucked after switching to Syfy.

Re:Short Answer

[swillden]

Sci-Fi lost the last of its steam when it switched from being Science Fiction to being Sci Fi. It's been part of a continuing downward spiral where while there have been more offerings recently, especially in mainstream culture, these offerings are increasingly more and more derivative and uninspired.

You need to read some of the good modern sci-fi. Vernor Vinge is the author everyone mentions, but there are others writing some really creative stuff. So creative, in fact, that a lot of people find it too "out there" to read comfortably, which was also the case with Golden Age science fiction. A lot of the recent Hugo and Nebula nominees are excellent, though the winners are typically a little more mainstream.

Re:Short Answer

[chrisG23]

I've heard Verner Vinge come up more than once now in positive reference to his writing (as opposed to him coming up in reference to his ideas) I will check him out. I like reading the kinds of things that are too "out there," do you have any specific recommendations? My favorites that I've read recently include Samuel R. Delaney (even though he has been around for a long time and his last book was written in the 80's, somehow when I was growing up reading science fiction he never came up) and Gene Wolfe for his Book of the New Sun series (Fantasy, not science fiction, but done extremely well and not in a Conan/Tolkien derivative way, and also not exactly new.)

Re:Short Answer

[chrisG23]

Grrrrrr.

Re:Short Answer

[master_p]

The media tycoons do not want stuff that makes people think. The average Joe has been trained to accept shit like the latest Star Trek movie as wonderful pieces of SF. Real SF has no chance.

Re:Short Answer

[swillden]

I've heard Verner Vinge come up more than once now in positive reference to his writing (as opposed to him coming up in reference to his ideas)

His ideas are pretty stunning. I particularly liked the small-group hive mind aliens in "A Fire Upon the Deep". They used natural ultrasonic data links to combine a half-dozen relatively weak individual minds into a persistent collective mind with approximately human-level intelligence. I did find the basically feudal social structure a little unimaginative, but I recognize that there comes a point where the story has to be rooted in some familiar structures, for the readers' sake as much as the writer's. Those very interesting creatures were only one small piece of the book and its ideas.

I like reading the kinds of things that are too "out there," do you have any specific recommendations?

I have to admit that I really haven't been reading sci-fi much lately -- mostly I haven't been reading fiction, just not much time for it between work, family and a couple of "intellectual" hobbies that are absorbing my time (an OSS project, teaching myself functional programming and working my way through the projecteuler.net problems).

Anyway, from what I have read of late:

I'm currently reading Neal Stephenson's "Anathem', and I highly recommend it. Besides Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep", I also read "A Deepness in the Sky" and "Rainbow's End", and they all really impressed me. The first two are in very bizarre settings that are really inventive. The third is a near-future book that's a really interesting extrapolation of current technology, though not as mind-bending as the others. I also recently read Robert Reed's "Sister Alice", and it was quite interesting. Something a little more traditional and cliched that is nevertheless very good is David Weber's "Safehold" series, starting with "Off Armageddon Reef", and, of course, Weber's Honor Harrington series is the first I've ever read that has a scientifically-plausible notion of how battles in the immensity of space could realistically happen. Other than that, the Harrington series is entertaining and well-written, but not groundbreaking.

The end of Sci-Fi

[TwineLogic]

If and when the Singularity occurs, then sci-fi will finally have finished predicting the future. Afterward, only singular sci-fi will.

Re:The end of Sci-Fi

[Anonymous Coward]

If and when the Singularity occurs, then sci-fi will finally have finished predicting the future. Afterward, only singular sci-fi will.

Right, just like Karl Marx declared that the mass implementation of communism would lead to the end history of human history as we know it?

The Rapture of the Nerds requires hard AI, make that really hard AI and we haven't enough progress on that front for the Singularity to be eminent. Sure I read last weeks story about the neural network breakthrough. However, even the researchers don't claim they simulated a complete cat's brain, instead they have something arguably as complex as a cat's brain with a couple areas more or less accurately simulating specific parts of a cat's brain. Wake me when they have a neural network that thinks it is a cat, or at least can behave exactly like a cat from the neuron level up. That is exactly the type of breakthrough that would eventually lead to simulation and downloading of consciousness. Until then we may have the raw hardware capacity necessary for the Singularity in the near future, but it will be like owning a super computer without any sort of OS or machine code to do anything with it beyond turning it off and on!

The future isn't human.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I look at the way technology is moving, I don't believe we will travel to the stars in these ugly bags of mostly water. Building the equipment necessary to transport these fragile shells is an engineering problem best avoided by building better shells. Once we build better bodies, or otherwise unlock the secret of immortality, everything changes. Are we still human?

It's hard to connect with a mainstream audience when your protagonist is a metallic sphere, or a disembodied brain experiencing the the wonder of exploring interstellar space via telepresence.

Speculating on this post-human condition is interesting to some people, but for the general public, who are hot messes of irrational emotion, violent tendencies, and repressed sexual urges, how can you make a compelling film about this? Space marines on LV-426 battling xenomorphs is easy to relate to.

captcha: lifeless

I think you're just shortsighted

[Anonymous Coward]

is it plausible that the writers of the article just arent very open minded? I mean how many years before the creation of the submarine did jules verne write of one? did everybody reading his books immediately think "a submarine! I'll go build one tomorrow!". I doubt it. I'm sure there's plenty of ideas akin to submarines floating around in our current books that just havnt been built yet, like, this seems infathomably short sighted to me. I read this title as "sci-fi is running out of steam because the stuff thats in the books isnt getting built right now".

I wish to God that it WOULD "run out of steam"...

[jeffb (2.718)]

Steampunk is so very, very tired.

Is SF really about technology?

[aleclee]

A long time ago, I took a class examining SF and one of the core principles presented was that science fiction was not so much about technology but rather the interplay/impact of tech and society. It was more about predicting traffic jams that automobiles.

We've seen so much tech as plot device (e.g., ST:TNG) that we've forgotten why tech was compelling in the first place. IMO, it's somewhat analo.gous to the tech bubble in the stock market. People were creating formulaic e-businesses (Selling dog foot on the internet? really?) without really thinking about the business side of things. Similarly, we see a lot of technology-based stories where the emphasis was more on the technology than the story. What made HAL interesting wasn't that he could autonomously manage a space ship or had a voice interface. What was fascinating was that a computer could become neurotic to the point of being homocidal.

When writers start writing stories based on plot and characters rather than some twist on technology, that's when we'll see a resurgence of futurist SF, mainly because the stories will be compelling...to both readers and entrepreneurs.

Re:Stories. Really GOOD stories

[hattable]

So very true (both of you) often have I read stories that will focus too narrowly on the tech not the story, whereas stories that are "Sci-Fi" (in the truest sense) like Ender's Game[, and the other 10 books after the first one], can be more about the story in front of the tech that you get to the end and can't laundry-list the technology that was present in the book, without more closely associating the weaved tale with each 'incident.'

I only really thought this since I stayed up the last 12 hours reading Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead instead of sleeping. Seriously; the best books-possibly ever.

Honest answer

[1s44c]

There hasn't been much real science fiction for years. There have been lots of alien invasions and many, many action movies with captivating visual effects but no real science fiction.

For quality storytelling and a good dose of horror refer to the works of HP Lovecraft. If you haven't read his work go order it on amazon or download it from somewhere, you will be impressed.

Re:Honest answer

[cptnapalm]

Lovecraft did something very odd in creating a pantheon of gods, most of which if not all are aliens, for nihilistic atheists.

You ought to pick up a copy of "Dead but Dreaming", a relatively recent collection of Lovecraftian short stories. Most of them are good and a few are quite excellent, like "Final Draft".

Re:Honest answer

[1s44c]

Lovecraft did something very odd in creating a pantheon of gods, most of which if not all are aliens, for nihilistic atheists.

You ought to pick up a copy of "Dead but Dreaming", a relatively recent collection of Lovecraftian short stories. Most of them are good and a few are quite excellent, like "Final Draft".

Thanks for the recommendation. "Dead but Dreaming" is ordered.

Scifi is becoming mainstream

[u64]

Sci-fi is important for the mainstream, not just to geeks. SF must try to reach the masses.
Firefly was fantastic in that regard. My little sister, who hates space,
was glued to all episodes. Allthough the actual science and sci-fi in Firefly lacked detail.
Still, Firefly and later on BattlestarGalactica did wonders to make sci-fi more mainstream
without beeing bad. (Allthough BSG after season 3,5 was completly worthless)
Star Trek 2009 also tried to have it both ways. The result was that trekkies felt like barf
and women enjoyd it!
And now, Stargate Universe tries to be mainstream. Needless to say, there's a looong way
to go yet...

On the more scary aspect of where sci-fi actually IS dying. Fantasy that tries to look
like Sci-fi: StarWars Heroes X-Men Hitchhiker'sGuide Dollhouse X-Files and on and on...
This is extremly troublesome since better sci-fi lead to better science.

Oh no vampires again?

[nanospook]

Seems like the sci fi section at the book store has been taken over by endless vampire novels for the past 5 years. The problem isn't the writers, its the industry..

Re:Oh no vampires again?

[cptnapalm]

Vampire romance novels, to specify the particular sub-genre correctly. There is also a book about a girl and her love for her zombie boyfriend and dealing with those evil living people who think that a girl should not date the dead.

Sci-Fi hasn't run out of steam yet

[Orion Blastar]

Look at the Sci-Fi role playing games like Traveller out there.

I wanted to write a book about my Traveller character Orion Blastar since 1985, but I haven't gotten permission from GDW/FarFuture etc to use their tech and ideas and background in my books. So I might have to invent my own tech, ideas, and a different background.

There is a lot of Sci Fi stuff that hasn't been touched yet. Rush "2112" has a story about a Red Star of the Solar Federation and the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx that own all of the music and take away freedoms and rights in a Communist type future government, until a man finds a guitar and creates his own music. But the Priests smash his guitar and eventually he commits suicide. But near the end of the song the Elder Race of Man come back to assume control of the planets and free the people from the oppressive Communist government of the Temples of Syrinx. Or that is at least one take on the story. But I am sure it would make a great SyFy series or TV movie, or Hollywood Movie or series of Sci Fi books.

But Sci Fi does not need new and different technology, it just needs better characters, better plots, better stories, better dialog without stealing or borrowing from other Sci Fi elements, unless it is done in the way I wanted to do it in that it is different enough to be interesting. All Traveller Sci Fi books did was choose your own adventures and stuff that was boring. The RPG version is a lot more interesting than the fiction novels.

Linux was not invented by Richard Stallman

[Anonymous Coward]

Stallman re-built clean-room versions of some utilities under the title GNU.

Linus Torvalds created Linux, despite harassment from Richard Stallman.

GNU/Linux does not exist, it is a pathetic attempt to steal credit for the work of others. If Richard Stallman were an academic, he could be sanctioned with the loss of his degrees for making a false, fraudulent claim.

Good Sc-Fi

[fast turtle]

doesn't depend on Tech. Instead as The Foundation Series covered, it was the characters and the society that developed. The Tech was there to facilitate the telling of the story. It's the same with Star Wars. The tech existed but was not the focus of the story and that's what Sci-Fi has always covered. The social impact of technology. A classic that comes to mind is the Multiplex Man. Interesting and a good movie revolving around similar aspects was Johhny Mennomic.

How anyone can say that Sci-Fi is dead/dying is a mystery to me. Someone else mentioned David Webber (Honor Harrington Series) and even though it's Sci-Fi as a Genre, it's actually a damn good Action/Adventure series along the lines of the WWII Movies involving John Wayne and others. The same with David Drake (Hammer's Slammers) and any of the many Military Sci-Fi. None of them revolve around the Tech as the main element of the story. Instead the revolve around the action, character developments and social aspects and yes there's plenty of social commentary in the stories.

Convolutifusion

[DynaSoar]

SF doesn't run on steam. It runs on sales. Look at what's selling now vs. then.

Prediction is still as prevalent. It just has to be further and further out because of the acceleration of technologies. It's harder to hit the single-generation prediction window.

TFA uses technology and computing interchangeably. Computing is a subset. Computing is becoming predictable, and those that write about it are paying more attention to it rather than simply imagining. Not to do so leaves them open to criticism from, well, pretty much the entire audience of TFA and its transfer over here.

There's a lot more very visually descriptive, realistic-science SF now days being used as the basis for social commentary/prediction. Figure those predictions into the field's output and see if things don't even back out.

Other technologies are not being so smoothed, pre-compressed, pre-approved and second guessed. They're not suffering from the prediction deficit. Frinstance, the second place Hugo nominee from 1971 (the first place being "no award") isn't heavy on the details, but the technology necessary is barely less than overt:
"There's a star ship circling in the sky,
it's gonna be ready by 1990.
They'll be building it up in the air,
ever since 1980.
People with a clever plan
can assume the role of the mighty.
Hijack the star ship,
carry 7000 people past the sun."
[Blows Against The Empire -- Paul Kantner/Jefferson Starship]

Finally, it's pretty silly to set a standard and claim other works don't measure up to it unless you can objectively show it to measure out as such. And if it did, the resulting article wouldn't be "isn't it great that subsequent SF is keeping pace with..." it's be saying "what a damn shame that everybody is copying X and riding on its coat tails." Gwan, you know you would. If you want a more interesting and applicable (as well as less predictable) answer, instead of having some techies from a techie magazine try to apply techie tunnelvision so they can sound halfway relevant, ask some SF writers to answer it. Just don't ask those who, despite being credited with helping start a new SF movement (especially a tech based one) did so almost entirely without knowledge of the current tech much less predicted future. If you do, you'll likely get an answer something like "Hell, what did I know? I wasn't predicting, I was writing fiction."

BSG, Dune

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to look to bulk fantasy for invention inspiration. Indistinguishable from magic and all that rot.

When we have the ships or robots of BSG / Caprica perhaps. We can't even get off this silly planet yet.

Or the technology in Dune (or even some of the "hyper-human" abilities). And I'm talking from the original book, and not the sucky adaptions.

Though I could do without the machines turning on us (The Plan and Thinking Machines / Butlerian Jihad).

but... but...

[Anonymous Coward]

where's my flying car?

Since when is sci-fi just about hardware or tech?

[tomhudson]

Back in the days of space opera and pulps, sure, sci-fi was more about the hardware than about characters, society, psychology, or even plot. And a lot of the plots back then were "deus ex machina".

Today, we want to know more than just what great tech is in our future - we want to know how it will affect us. Why we should worry. Why we should ask "whatcanpossiblygowrong". Why we as a planet make one choice and not another, even though we know the first choice is the worse of the two.

Sci-fi is still in its infancy. It'll grow up only as the human race grows up, so it's got either a very long run ahead of it, or, if we don't heed the warnings from the dystopians, a very short one.

Hahaha

[Latinhypercube]

'Humans have run out of ideas' this story is such B.S. Just because the author has a writing block does not mean the rest of humanity does. I read Stross's book ACCELARANDO, and there is NO WAY that most of those ideas will be realized anytime soon. Human imagination is always active, but sometimes the masses are not as exposed to it (ie. Hollywood is sucking ass right now being a franchise whore).

Actually it is the other way around

[Anonymous Coward]

Past Scifi authors have predicted new technologies, that humanity until now was not able to even invent. In the same aspect, humanity has even failed to come up with solutions to the technologies that have been proposed in the scifi novels of long past novels and authors thereof. And by long past I mean authors such as Aldous Huxley (genetics, selection), Stanislaw Lem (space travel, technology), Poul Anderson (space travel, technology), Gene Roddenberry (space travel, technology, sociology), John C. Crowley (genetics, hybrids/cross-breeds), or William Gibson (cybernetics, technology), and others not being mentioned here.

Actually, humanity must first achieve any of the above depicted technologies in order for humanity to create something new in terms of scifi art.

Of course, genetics (hybrids/cross-breeds), cybernetics (prostheses,enhancements,exo-skeletons) and other technologies are on their way. But not until those technologies have become a vital part of our every day living, no real new scifi may be established.

In my opinion, Art/Scifi generates new technology/new ways of thinking based on past/current ways of thinking and past/current technology and current inventions thereof.
And, as soon as that new way of thinking/the new technology becomes available, new Art/Scifi will be generated, unless we deal with some very prophetic and thus very ingenous archetypes
of Scifi authors. But I fear, that we do not have such authors at the moment, and if there were such authors, unrelated individuals or groups of them would know how to prevent such authors from
succeeding in their overall accomplishment, before it even gets published. Unless the author himself or herself would keep the project under full closure, which is, in my opinion, not always possible.
So, if anything leaks from a todays novel project, then the whole world would know about it, and, subsequently some other person would come first presenting the original author's ideas to the public
as his or her own, consequently limiting the achievement of todays or future Artists/Scifi authors to a mere replication of past achievements.

Yes, sci-fi no longer has steam ...

[tomhudson]

... they've graduated to solar power, harvesting dark matter energy, bio-reactors, zero energy, fusion, nuclear, microwave beams from orbit, helium 3, and even dilithium crystals, long before the real world.

Steam? Next, you'll be wanting a tricorder interface from stone knives and bearskins!

And yes, you could spend a lifetime just on sci-stories about time travel. Science ain't there yet.

Re:Yes, sci-fi no longer has steam ...

[camperslo]

Wellfrom the show Merlin (get season 2 episodes from a torrent site near you), I've yet to see the local drug store offering a potion for making trolls attractive. Or does beer count?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/97117914@N00/440043690/

I guess the government did work on some kind of "gay bomb"... something to give enemy soldiers uncontrollable urges to have sex with each other, apparently with some feeling rather uncomfortable about it afterwards.

Something special for the dancers at the Microsoft store? It sure would have spiced up those launch parties.

Has SF run out of steam? Rudy Rucker begs 2 differ

[tjonnyc999]

Programmable plastics. Bionic implants. Mind transfers into hardware and back into "wetware". Superconducting quantum CPU robots with real AI and free will, as well as capacity to self-replicate. "Cost-free" communications using the 4th spatial dimension etc, etc. There's plenty of ideas to be developed. SF is still as full of ideas as back in Jules Verne's day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ware_Tetralogy

So what does modern SF offer...

[itsdapead]

Let's see - couple of examples:

Downloading/simulating human minds: the philosophical and social implications of that are a recurring theme in Greg Egan's work - Permutation City, Diaspora and several of his shorts (such as "Learning to be Me"). If you want a side-order of ultraviolence with that, there's Richard Morgan's "Altered Carbon". Of course, that's never gonna happen.

Post-scarcity economics: Not tech in itself, but the implications of tech. What if we had sufficient resources and robotic "labour" that everybody could just take whatever they reasonably wanted? How would the capitalism/socialism debate change that? This is the basis for Iain Banks' "Culture", but it also crops up a bit in Star Trek TNG.

Ain't never gonna happen. I'd better explain that one: software is a microcosm in which a "post scarcity" economy is possible because the marginal cost of "manufacturing" and distributing software has become negligible.

Near-future space flight: Stephen Baxter wrote a whole series of books on the general thesis "NASA rejected my application to be an astronaut: NASA sucks!". We have Time which had private enterprise saving the space program; Voyage (what would happen if Apollo had stayed on track and gone to Mars) and Titan (what would happen if an anti-science US president didn't replace the shuttle and we suddenly had a good reason for wanting to go to Titan).

Desperately cobbling together a cheap launcher from surplus shuttle components? Going back to an Apollo-style capsule instead of wasting fuel boosting space-planes into orbit? Private spaceflight saving the day? Ain't Never Gonna happen

(Interesting lack of US authors in that list, though...)

Anime

[Aokisensei]

I think a particular medium that shows alot of innovation when it comes to science fiction is anime.

Neon Genesis Evangelion, Serial Experiments Lain, .hack, the Macross series....there's alot of good sci-fi anime. (And no, not all of it is giant-robot based.)

I, in particular, recommend Makoto Shinkai's "Voices of a Distant Star". It's a short film but it's very futuristic and spacey, and the science is actually pretty accurate. It's main premise is the effect that long-distance (interstellar) communication in space has on human relationships. In that effect it's a bit romance-y too, but with a science fiction setting. Might be a little too mushy for some people but it does have a profound effect on most people who watch it.

"It's not realistic enough" is the real killer

[KitFox]

Like the TV show Heroes? It's fun to watch but certainly not realistic.

Disclaimer: The use of parent as an example is in no way an attack on the author in any way. The author simply provided perfect fodder for this example.

Having written and published (badly) some stuff that could be considered "Sci Fi" by some folks, I will say my impression is that the critics are the real killers in this case. People who complain that it's "Not realistic enough" and "Breaks all the rules" are the folks who are killing the genre and the will of the writers in the genre.

Back in the old days of Sci Fi, we didn't have everybody and their brother who were "internet experts" on anything and everything. A concept could break ideas that the average person knew at that time and still be accepted, since the high end scientists learned more about these ideas and "rules" as we went forward in ways that made these outrageous concepts from Sci Fi a decade ago completely normal now. People enjoyed Star Trek because it was FUN. We didn't have a massive group of people who wanted... ahem... "...SCIENCE fiction, with emphasis on the science...". Sure, we don't have communicators that will chirp and allow an instant communication link from orbit, but current cell phones are pretty darn useful and a lot of them are very similar. So we end up with real things that are inspired by the outrageous things.

Improvements in technology and "Sci Fi" writing do go hand in hand, but the moment the writer gets slammed by 'edumacated' folks who seem to think that the scientific rules are a box to stay in and not inconveniences to find a solution around, they give up on these people and don't write.

For example: How can Sylar pick-up a person and throw him against a wall? Newton's Law dictates that Sylar should be pushed backward with an equal force (recoil). Also where is the energy coming from? Sylar must eat 50,000 calories a day* to maintain that level of "toss people against walls" energy output.

This is a box. A person who thinks only this way will have zero success at furthering current technology. A person who sees the facts and rules above and then decides to figure out a way to make it work anyway is the person who will bring about great advances in Science Reality. Will they succeed at accomplishing that specific thing? Maybe. Probably not. But the work they do to try might just have some interesting side effects that are good.

The problem is that there are more and more people who can't think outside the box and slam Sci Fi writers who try to for not being realistic enough to today's box. Creative folks are not easy to come by (which is why copyright law is considered so important to try to help encourage creativity). Slam them and discourage them out of what they were doing and suddenly you've got the loss mentioned above.

Re:"It's not realistic enough" is the real killer

[commodore64_love]

>>>Back in the old days of Sci Fi, we didn't have everybody and their brother who were "internet experts" on anything and everything.

That's funny because I was just reading an Isaac Asimov book where he published the first letter he ever wrote (from the 1930s). It was criticizing one of the writers in "Amazing" for not telling realistic plots based upon science. Point - Critics have always existed in this genre even in the "dark days" before internet or television. In that case it did result in improved story-telling as the genre moved into the 1940s and 50s

Re:"It's not realistic enough" is the real killer

[tyrione]

Too bad I don't have any points to rate you up. The long ago argument about Telekinesis not taking into account weak/strong forces on the quantum level being leveraged via a localized electromagnetic field that can use the Earth and turn one into a point of origin to then radiate out a field both to keep themselves fixed and channel a wave propagation towards another object moving them vectorally in the direction of that emitted Force wave seems not remotely improbable, but just currently not a focus of research. Too bad Tesla had to come along and ruin all the prevailing Scientists of his day and make it possible for us to be here typing on computers, eh?

You're correct. Science demands a boundless imagination to explore the inner and outer limits of existence.

Re:"It's not realistic enough" is the real killer

[commodore64_love]

>>>Science demands a boundless imagination to explore the inner and outer limits of existence.

Precisely. I believe flies spontaneously generate from rotting meat, and I don't care how many times scientists tell me I'm wrong -that flies comes from eggs- I just don't accept that.

/end sarcasm

Maybe it's the publishing side that's the problem

[ThousandStars]

I doubt science fiction has "run out of steam," in terms of authors or imagination any more than science or technology has run out of steam due to a lack of imagination. Rather, I wonder if the science fiction publishing business has either run out of steam or become an active roadblock between writers and readers. It seems that most publishers are trying a play-it-safe approach that demands giving out the same thing over and over again.

This is based partially on what I see in bookstores and partially on my own experience, which I discuss extensively in Science fiction, literature, and the haters. It begins:

Why does so little science fiction rise to the standards of literary fiction?

This question arose from two overlapping events. The first came from reading Day of the Triffids (link goes to my post); although I don't remember how I came to the book, someone must've recommended it on a blog or newspaper in compelling enough terms for me to buy it. Its weaknesses, as discussed in the post, brought up science fiction and its relation to the larger book world.

The second event arose from a science fiction novel I wrote called Pearle Transit that I've been submitting to agents. It's based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness--think, on a superficial level, "Heart of Darkness in space." Two replies stand out: one came from an agent who said he found the idea intriguing but that science fiction novels must be at least 100,000 words long and have sequels already started. "Wow," I thought. How many great literary novels have enough narrative force and character drive for sequels? The answer that came immediately to mind was "zero," and after reflection and consultation with friends I still can't find any. Most novels expend all their ideas at once, and to keep going would be like wearing a shirt that fades from too many washes. Even in science fiction, very few if any series maintain their momentum over time; think of how awful the Dune books rapidly became, or Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series. A few novels can make it as multiple-part works, but most of those were conceived of and executed as a single work, like Dan Simmons' Hyperion or Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (more on those later).

The minimum word count bothers me too. It's not possible for Pearle Transit to be stretched beyond its present size without destroying what makes it coherent and, I hope, good. By its nature it is supposed to be taunt, and much as a 120-pound person cannot be safely made into a 240-pound person, Pearle Transit can't be engorged without making it like the bloated star that sets its opening scene. If the market reality is that such books can't or won't sell, I begin to tie the quality of the science fiction I've read together with the system that produces it.

If the publishing system itself is broken and nothing yet has grown up to take its place (I have no interest in trolling through thousands of terrible novels uploaded to websites in search of a single potential gem, for those of you Internet utopians out there), maybe the source of the genre's troubles isn't where PC Pro places it.

Unusual for SciFi to have better movies than books

[Chatz]

Given we have just had our best year for SciFi movies that I can remember with Star Trek, District 9, and Moon all extremely good I would have thought SciFi was in good hands with some new benchmarks for future movies to aspire to.

change the goal

[Tumbleweed]

Don't read or write science fiction that that aims to change technology. Read or write science fiction that aims to change the way society looks at or uses technology.

Either that, or something that is simply a good read.

The Question Should Be...

[scorpivs]

The statement of fact is in error; sci-fi is not 'running out of steam,' rather
its hard-working labor force of brilliant creators has been replaced and
its definition has been slowly undermined by the poor spelling, grammar
and foresight of changeling-zombies.The question should be, 'How can we
exclude the latent influx of horror, gratuitous sex/anime and 'professional'
wrestling from our midst..."

Fikstit fer ya.

One who still got steam

[zipherx]

Is Ian M. Banks!! He is writing some of the best Sci-Fi these days, one of he's latest is "Matter" wikipedia, do yourself a favor and read all of he's novels, they are so invigorating for the genre.

Vinge Stephenson

[argent]

Snow Crash is overrated. Go back to Vinge's "True Names" for a more credible "Metaverse".

As for ideas, well, speaking of Vinge... as we get closer to the Singularity then you'd expect *near future* SF to start hitting a near future event horizon. But Vinge is still trowing out some interesting stuff... the library eater in Vinge's "Rainbow's End" turns out to be Google, but there's a boatload of ideas in there that haven't come true yet...

Charles H. Duell strikes again!

[DaveV1.0]

I think we have just witnessed the science fiction literature equivalent of Duell's quote:

Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899

Baxter and Bear still not afraid to predict

[Anonymous Coward]

Stephen Baxter and Greg Bear still seem to be able to write science fiction that make bold predictions. I highly recommend both authors.

Skinned

[Anonymous Coward]

One word - Skinned. Robin Wasserman is awesome and takes Sci-Fi come teen novel to a new level.
@timjnx

A local dip in an uptrending curve is not the end

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no earthshaking discoveries. None of the "once a generation, this changes everything" kind of discovery. We're moving quickly, but in entirely conceivable and steady ways. Previous generation had "man landing on the moon". We had "networked PCs".

There will be some scientific discovery, in the next decade. Something of a magnitude that fundamentally alters what is *really* possible. Something that will enter in the public subconscious, making the magical seem altogether possible. This will give imaginitive people a fertile field in which to play again.

Along will come a pop SciFi movie and/or book that will fuel that subconscious spark. It will explode into the minds of a whole new generation of young people, frustrated with the pace of progress and dreaming of the cool things that might be. Just like it did for us, and generations before.

So yes, SciFi is tapped. For us, now.

But what SciFi will the kids who are just being born be hooked on as they come into *their* teens? Stuff that will make ours look like "Flash Gordon" does to us.

Re:all hte above are drame fictions

[stephanruby]

Some authors argue that the music died the first time a professional recording of a performance was made (because as soon as that happened the game became all about getting your hands on the most perfect rendition of a particular performance. And most of the amateur populace which knew how to sing and play an instrument (just not perfectly) stopped playing as soon as this became the norm.). In that case, like it is now, the music didn't die, it just changed. I suspect our music landscape will change again, that's all.

Pardon the heresy

[Provocateur]

But what's in Snowcrash? Isn't that the one with the sword brandishing pizza
delivery guy? I held off on reading it because I have this mental block that
when a sword/light sabre is involved, it crossed that thin line into fantasy
aka space opera. Plus the opinions of some that say that Neal S would write
and write and the book will end when he decides to stop. (or something to that
effect).

Re:Pardon the heresy

[PeterBrett]

But what's in Snowcrash? Isn't that the one with the sword brandishing pizza delivery guy? I held off on reading it because I have this mental block that when a sword/light sabre is involved, it crossed that thin line into fantasy aka space opera.

You need to read it. How can you not read a book that begins:

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

It only gets better.

Plus the opinions of some that say that Neal S would write and write and the book will end when he decides to stop. (or something to that effect).

They're right. But if the worst thing you can say about something is that you wanted more of it, then it must be doing something right.

Of course not

[edremy]

Good SF has never been exclusively about the technology- it's about people, same as any other story since the dawn of storytelling. (And don't bother commenting about aliens- they're people too.) It's about how people react to that technology, how society deals with the changes and all the rest. SF doesn't need to be thinking up new technologies all the time- pretty much anything imaginable has already been done, usually by multiple authors- the interesting story is "What comes next?"

Lots of authors have dealt with societies where changing sex is easy, for example, something that we've barely begun to make possible. But does this lead to a truly egalitarian society where men and women stand at exactly the same level, or a strictly segregated one where women stay home with the kids and make dinner? If we develop interstellar travel but the speed of light is still the limit, can you have an actual society where travel time between worlds is measured in centuries? Imagine that robots get to the point where they can fulfill your every need as soon as you ask for it- is there a point in living without struggle?

This is also why SF tends to age less well than other genres of fiction- once the technology actually shows up, we get to see how people react, and then it's just part of everyday life. To quote my 8-year-old, "Boooring"

If you mean the SciFi channel...

[valley]

...of course it's out of steam. That's why they renamed it SyFy and added wrestling shows and similar nonsense. Appeal to the masses and all that rubbish.

Selling Science Fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect there are great Science Fiction writers out there in the world right now--ready to tell great stories. Problem is that publishers have cut back on how many titles are released per year. With fewer slots for a new book sale, how does the unproven writer get in?

Err. no.

[lobotomir]

The masters of contemporary sci-fi (Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds) are surpassed only by precious few from the celebrated "classics." Those would be Clarke and Herbert.

Heros is a comic book on TV, not sci-fi.

[w3woody]

Heros is not science fiction; it's a superhero comic brought to life.

The comic book conventions and the comic book font used for the opening title sequence should have been a dead give-away, as well as the fact that in the first season, a comic series played an important element in the plot.

To suggest Heros is sci-fi is to suggest the Green Lantern or Superman are sci-fi.

More Knowledge limits plausible fiction...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to wait for science fiction to really die wait for the L.H.C to discover the Higgs Boson, now they have the thing working again.

Once we get that theory of everything and find out that even with that knowledge that we can't do any of SFs big ideas it will be dead!

Space travel - dead already. Stuck to below light speed. Realisation that the power requirements for mathmatically FTL are unobtainable.
Warfare - No interesting concepts left. Any serious conflict means the death of everyone. Whats left is fighting guerillas with robots - but wait, thats happening now in afghanistan!
AIs - Whats the point? You get a theory of everything and can do nothing with it. Now you can reach that conclusion faster with the excess processing power!
Medicine - We aren't that far from understanding all there is to know about the body. What's left is how the brain functions to create a conciousness but it doesn't have many practical implications unless you are a spiritual sort. I mean we already have cheap sentient machines, they are called the working class.

Basically if we reach a point where there aren't many possibilities or unknowns in an area of science, fiction based on it suffers.
Medicine is starting to reach this stage in my opinion. We know enough about AIDS to know that its gonna be a right bitch to cure, if it is even possible for example

No.

[HBI]

Overrated is not subject to M2, Insightful is.

Using Overrated is being a prick in an approved way, and it's the reason why a lot of people I used to correspond with here left.

Not to say M2 is anything but a joke which I opted out of years ago, but still...

Sci fi isn't dead.

[watanabe]

Sci-Fi, the act of writing out speculations on our future, or an alternate one, isn't dead. The Spec-Fiction portion of it isn't dead, at least. The extrapolating current life into the future portion is having trouble, though. Vernor Vinge explains this nicely in his Singularity essays. He claims that sci fi writers have been dealing with the difficulties of making quality predictions for at least a decade, maybe two decades now.

In short, rate of change is speeding up, ergo change is going to be geometric, maybe exponential, ergo there will be some period of time, reasonably short, after which we (as current humans living on earth) will not understand very much about the world.

Vinge (and Ray Kurzweil) call this the Singularity. It's a nice, compelling idea if you're a math guy or gal (and I am a math guy).

Corollary to all this: Either you can write near-term extrapolative fiction or you can write post-singularity fiction, but there's no mid-range future. The mid-range future will happen in like an afternoon one day, and nobody will notice it due to what happens shortly after. This lack of mid-range predictability is what's bugging some people. But, functionally, I don't understand why. Scientists don't need Arthur C. Clarke to dream impossible dreams right now -- IBM neuroscientists are physically simulating a cat brain ALREADY for goodness sake! They don't need to think 'out of the box' about what the future could hold. The world has moved on, and into a space where finance guys will PAY people to IMPLEMENT their crazy sci-fi ideas.

We call the finance guys venture capitalists. They are helping build hotels in space, yadda,yadda,yadda. The future is already here at some level, and the mid-range future is being obsessively considered by inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs and VCs,

The stross quote backs this idea, change is already happening rapidly, and speeding up in a way that surprises a hard-SF writer.

This is why I like the tack Vinge has recently taken: think about INTERFACE to a new world. Think about ethics right around the time of the singularity. These are good places for sci-fi authors, traditionally a pretty thoughtful bunch.

Ghost in the Shell

[Spy der Mann]

Whoever said Sci-Fi ran out of steam should watch all the Ghost in the Shell movies and series. I've never seen a series address technology ethics in such an elaborate way.

Times are changing. Science fiction should just adapt with the current trends and start from it. What dangers await society? What opportunities? In the cyberpunk era, we didn't even imagine open source gaining power. What about SPAM? What about the degeneration of society? What about the growth of social networking? What about the fight between freedom of speech and the copyright police? (We've read 1984, but where are the media companies?)

As you can see, there's a lot of material to work on. It only takes some imagination and connecting the dots.

Re:Maybe it's the publishing side that's the probl

[Anonymous Coward]

People are looking in the wrong places. Sci-Fi has become a mass media commodity. It's been recalibrated for Joe six pack.

Mass publishing is too expensive to take risks, that is, if you're printing on paper.

Blogs and other electronic forms of publishing is where it's at now for cutting edge risk taking authors who are more interested in the story than what Sally shithead can understand.

It's run out of patience

[Anonymous Coward]

"It" is intangible, "it" can be anything and everything we please. Perhaps what inspires writers these days is less the material world and more the artificial intelligence and realms of pure imagination, cyberspace and beyond. Or perhaps you just don't read enough sci-fi.

Writing off the writers

[Anonymous Coward]

So the height of sci-fi, according to the author, ended with Verne? What about Gibson's influence? Asimov's? Are we to discount all the greats who came later and contributed to the inspiration of real world technology?

I'm rather skeptical of anyone who claims that the future of science-fiction could not possibly hold the potential for inspirational or accurate depictions of the future. However, I agree with Xiaran who points out that the job of the novelist is to posit a "what if" scenario, not play oracle. Whether or not a science-fiction novel brings greater ingenuity in technology is irrelvant; we instead must judge each book on its merit to present an intriguing story that explores a question of possibility and its ability to lead us down a new path of thought in a fluid and provocative manner.

--Neversremedy, just another sci-fi writer

Re:Maybe it's the publishing side that's the probl

[PeterBrett]

You need to check out Baen Books -- they're a publisher that still publishes lots of excellent science fiction (as well as some pretty bad stuff too, admittedly) -- and all their books are available as DRM-free e-books. In particular, the Free Library is great.

Some publishers do "get it". Unfortunately, the majority don't.

Exploring Hypothesis is still relevant!

[BlueYoshi]

I like when an author create a context to explore a hypothesis. Isaac Asimov did that on the foundation and robots series with the concepts of psychohistory and robopsychology. Frank Herbert with "Dosadi" shows what is happening when you put a full society into a high-stress condition. With his other books he explores concept like AI, Gods, religion, racism...

Hypothesis exploration is where Science fiction meet Fantasy and their predecessor fantastic. All this genre explore alternative reality where the rules of your world are changed. Uchronie is a sub-genre: "The Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson explorer a divergence reality where the Black Death annihilated European civilization in 1347.

That's why I would say that Sci-fi is still promising not maybe for gadget or tech but for the liberty it gives to the Author (and by extension the reader ^^)

nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Richard K. Morgan

Re:Maybe it's the publishing side that's the probl

[DNS-and-BIND]

I'd blame the author for a crappy book. I've already read Heart of Darkness, do I really need to read it again "in space"? And executed by a lesser author? I wish I had been born 40 years before I was, so I could have been part of a culture that actually created new things instead of looking to the past and imitating it endlessly.

The end?

[jandersen]

Perhaps; I personally think scifi's big problem is that there no longer are great themes to play with concerning the future. For most of the last century we have sort of assumed that mankind could/would overcome all nature could throw at us, so we could on one hand have the optimistic scifi where everything was great and exciting, and we could have the pessimistic sort, that we could comfortably dismiss as "thought provoking". In recent years we have come to realize that this is not a realistic scenario.

Another thing is that science too doesn't seem to make any dramatic and inspiring progress; and how exciting is it to contemplate travel times of hundreds to thousands of years? We have simply run out of science, in a sense.

Finally, I think it has become too predictable with all these aliens that look suspiciously either like dressed up humans or some sort of mindless predator.

The way forward, I think, is to change some of these parameters. Like, explore life that is seriously different; explore physics in a universe where the laws of physics are not what we are used to, but still realistic in the sense that the mechanisms and the logic of the story has been applied thoughtfully and with great consequence.

Or how about exploring the schism between quantum mechanics and general relativity from the other side, in a setting where QM didn't have the "political upper hand", and where physical theories had been pursued more from the perspective of GR - eg. if Niels Bohr hadn't won the discussions with Einstein, and Einstein had been successful in finding a unified theory. Just my thoughts, of course.

The next wave....

[Targon]

When electricity and the telephone were new, the thought that the world would be focused on improvements and technology would be laughable. Inventors were few and far between, so there was a lot of room for just writing about crazy ideas about what the future may hold for new inventions. Once the personal computer became common(beyond the early adopters), the future, and what sort of inventions might come out has really dropped.

So, wireless communications have gone personal in the form of cell phones. Video calls are almost here(it is here, but not common and not good enough for mainstream). Even things like being able to just hop on a plane and be in Europe in 6-9 hours(from the USA) used to be an element of science fiction. So, where do we go from here? Space and space travel. Instant transport(transporter technology from Star Trek) is there. Flying cars as well, and robotics....all have been done before technology has made them possible.

So, what we really need is a new generation that has been raised on the current technology to look forward and come up with something new. In the same way that those older than 40 already should expect that future "the next big thing" will come from those much younger, due to having grown up with technology being EVERYWHERE, when it comes to writing, the same expectation should be there.

It really just comes from the perspective of the writers needing to really REACH to come up with a new idea, writers tend to go from their own experiences, and then extending from there based on the latest scientific releases. Asimov used the positron to explain how robots worked(their "thinking") for example. But, much of what has been in the works for science is really in the hard-core stage, where a lot of particle physics comes into play. Or you see work going on discovering planets around stars, but really, no really new on a conceptual basis has been hitting the news.

Looking for new planets...old
new energy sources....old
flight...old
space travel....old concept, but aside from how it is implemented, not terribly new.

We are seeing the start of people taking a trip into orbit, but even living on other planets, meeting alien life, and so on has been done enough where it just isn't NEW anymore. Even the future evolution of humanity has been done a bit, though "future humans" tend to be very like the humans of today, just with better technology available to them.

So, what new things that have not been thought of yet will come out? It really may take another 50-100 years before Sci-Fi really wakes back up, just because something really really different needs to be invented that will amaze people. Think about it, short of aliens REALLY showing up here on Earth, is there any scientific invention that would really surprise us anymore?

My own expectation for the next few hundred years is more like Babylon 5 than Star Trek....human society and nature have not had a real push to change, and even the idea of "try to be nice to others" seems to be fading away, where there is more encouragement to be an obnoxious ass than a decent person. So, who knows what the future may hold, but the future of society rather than the technology of the future is where there is more room for writing right now.

Sci-fi publishers should close up

[bruthasj]

Time to close scifi publishers. All ideas have been exhausted.

The nature of science today...

[ufoolme]

Science fiction usually explores ideas and themes that are within the realm of current theoretical science, like time machines or nanotechnology.This was great fodder for sci fi writers, but today there simply isn't as of many 'new' revolutionary ideas in science. Most new scienctific discoveries and theories don't lend themselves as the main concept or premise of a story. They simply are not as remarkable or seemingly supernatural to the lay or nerdy crowd. I hope its just my own naïveté, but I fear science is just less theatrical nowdays. Also I say we blame the internet, people who like or would have liked sci fi are just too well informed. Classic SciFi always has science/techology be of equal dramatic force to the social/character driven drama, such equality is just too hard with the nature of science today...

Perhaps we really hate the prediction:

[Herschel Cohen]

Mass societal regression where only a self chosen elite lives well. Looking at the U.S. political scene, such a scenario is just a bit too plausible. From my slight bit of reading of Stephenson's latest, that might well be our future, however, his book focuses upon the distant reawakening of human intellect.

a new form of fire...

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm not worried about that...we're golgafrinchan descendants, after all, so we'll still be debating whether we want nasally-fitted reactors when we burn our last lump of coal;-}

Moore's Law

[gratuitous_arp]

What a ridiculously phrased article. We have "run out of ideas when it comes to inspiring tomorrows products?" D`oh, there are no more ideas. Us cattle better be happy with what we have.

The science fiction writers of the 50s, 60s, and 70s projecting and inventing new technology are the programmers of today. The same creativity is necessary for both good writers and good programmers.

However, this article does dance around a good point. When you consider Moore's Law, as time moves on, it should actually be more and more difficult to predict something that is an "extremely new idea". New technology is closer and closer. The radical ideas of 80 years ago took decades to come around, but the radical ideas of today are relatively right around the corner.

Not Enough Glittering Vampires to Appease People

[Bushido Hacks]

To be quite honest, I haven't seen anything from any recent science fiction films to actually be technologically inspiring.

Surely there is a box full of ideas in some patent office that even though some corporation has them locked up, it can be used to foster the next generation of sci-fi technology novels or films.

Instead we are screwing around with effeminine vampires that glitter and shirtless teen idols who turn into werewolves that draw in gulliable 14 year old girls and mom's over 45.

Where's the science fiction in that? Lord of the Rings has more Sci-Fi inspiration.

I think it is time we try a different approach. Like a steampunk movie where a scientist discovers an alternative energy source that could take down the coal, oil, and natural gas industries. (Of course, that will never happen. Because the people at the coal, natural gas and oil (sorry, no link. corporate censorship) industries never do anything wrong.)

try asking the question the other way...

[doom]

Try asking the question the other way around: why did anyone ever start writing hard science fiction? Doesn't pressing into service the framework of an adventure story to explore the future potential of the human race seem like a strange thing to do?

Science Fiction was an important forum for a certain style of thinking only as long as that mode of thought was considered disreputable... once it became more acceptable to speculate about the future, other forums opened up for it: you can write up your ideas as a "non-fiction" book, or for that matter go shopping for venture capital. It didn't used to be that way...

• THE_SECRET_MASTERS_OF_DESTINY
• LOST_WORLDS_OF_UNKNOWN_TOMORROWS.html

Sci-fi into sci-fact

[Anonymous Coward]

Science fiction evolves along with science fact. I think this is a decent progression from the steam age to today:

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870, Verne)
Submarines had only been around for a few years, and the idea of traveling around the world by air must have been too fantastic back then. Bonus points for early genetic engineering on the part of Nemo.

The First Men in the Moon (1901, Wells)
Martian canals were in vogue in the 1890s, but rocketry was apparently too far out to use to get there. Aliens start appearing in both fictional and serious literature.

Brave New World (1931, Huxley)
Watson and Crick were still 20 years out, but mass-production of humans seemed to be within reach. Little automation, no computers.

Foundation (1951, Asimov)
The future doesn't quite have computers, not as we think of them today. The nuts and bolts of space travel are still hand-waved.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966, Heinlein)
Good orbital dynamics, and computers on the same level of people, although physically vast. The focus is shifting from The Moon to Computing. All technologies that either exist today or almost exist. I think for the purposes of running a moon base, we could replace Mike with a blade center and some network cables.

Ringworld (1970, Niven)
So, maybe the aliens aren't little green men after all? Also, the idea that we could eventually heal (But not really modify or improve) anything with medical technology. Still no Internet. Arguably, the '70s is about where the level of technology in most sci-fi surpasses what exists today (FTL, Autodocs, etc.).

Neuromancer (1984, Gibson)
The Internet has arrived! Although, it's pretty clear that it was still thought of as mostly a communications device with little compute power of it's own. Superhuman AIs live on mainframes. We can modify the human body to an extent.

Snow Crash (1992, Stephenson)
We're just starting to get ubiquitous AI. No space travel to speak of, although it's assumed that things like orbital manufacturing exist. The brain is starting to be thought of as a big computer.

Accelerando (2005, Stross)
Still a good example of "any day now" sci-fi. The major technologies are Figuring Out the Brain (20-50 years out?), Sufficiently Advanced Nanotechnology (50-100+?) and Ubiquitous AI (Arguably here now in a weak form. What would Twain's Connecticut Yankee think of Google?)

inspiration != science

[jipn4]

In my experience, even the best "hard" science fiction usually ends up having lots of problems. Often, they do a nice job on some particular aspect of physics, fudge the rest of physics, and then completely fall apart on economics, sociology, biology, and evolution. Or vice versa.

As for Nightfall, I find it implausible that any technical civilization would be surprised for the concept of "darkness" or that it or the appearance of stars would cause it to fall apart. Civilizations tend to die of much more banal problems.

standard "rampaging robot"

[huckamania]

The Sci-Fi vs Science Fiction debate is like watching two children fight over a toy in a room filled with toys, pointless and sad. It's like complaining about having too many choices in the desert bar at a buffet.

Let us examine the genre of 'standard' rampaging robots. Off the top of my head I can name several movies that feature rampaging robots:

Terminator (Natch), I Robot, RoboCop (ED-209), Star Trek (Nomad, VGER), Battlestar Galactica, 2001: A Space Odyssey ("I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."), Blade Runner (cyborgs count), Alien (same same), Star Wars ("He's more machine now than man; twisted and evil."), the Matrix, Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, Lost in Space, Transformers...

Some of these robots are similar, but in their own way they are all unique and easily identifiable. The robots range from small to ginormous, from human like to obviously machine. In some of the stories the robots are the chief antagonists in others they are the heroes and in a few they might be both or change roles in the sequels.

Obviously rampaging robots are within the realm of Science Fiction, so in that regard, to me, all of these movies are Science Fiction. From another person's perspective, clearly some of these are rather silly and believe should be labeled Sci-Fi. That distinction is really up to each of us to make and argue about.

I would argue for the science fictioness of each of those movies except Lost in Space and Transformers.

The future sux and everyone's an A-hole.

[Script Cat]

How often does Sci-Fi venture outside of the genre "The future sux and everyone's an A-hole". Usually the plot could be in any setting. Just swap the scenery. From horses in the old west, Ships at sea, etc. to Space ships with ray guns. Or LA-triot gang world to seedy space station.

Sci-Fi can be good with situations completely impossible in other types of writing, but no one puts the work into it. It would also help if some of the people doing the writing were scientist or at least versed in modern science.

Nonsense.

[Reziac]

They got it backwards. In reality, technology has run out of the steam required to keep up with science fiction.

If this weren't the case, where are my flying car, my immortality, my starship? ;)

Re:Since when is sci-fi just about hardware or tec

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the days of space opera and pulps, sure, sci-fi was more about the hardware than about characters, society, psychology, or even plot. And a lot of the plots back then were "deus ex machina".

For starters, the whole sub-genre of "space opera" is and was very much about characters. After all, the term started as a somewhat pejorative comparison to "soap opera" (yes there were soap operas in the 30's and 40's, they were radio programs). In that age, there might not have been much deep sociological and psychological explorations, or even character development as modern readers are familiar with, but interaction between characters were always important to space operas.

Also, you've must have read different pulp stories than I've come across... Many of the SF pulps at the time played fast and loose with science, that's what is referred to as "super-science". However, that in and of itself is not what "deus ex machina". The really egregious use of super-science is when it is simply pulled out of someone's posterior as needed without any reference to existence beforehand, and that's when it becomes a form of deus ex machina. Furthermore the type of pulps where you'll find the most use of the deus ex machina plot device are action/adventure pulps, and to a lessor extent detective pulps. Usually if the hero has some wonderful gizmo or whiz-bang raygun that can get him out of impossible situations, it's mentioned within the first 10 pages of a super-science type of pulp."

Today, we want to know more than just what great tech is in our future - we want to know how it will affect us. Why we should worry. Why we should ask "whatcanpossiblygowrong". Why we as a planet make one choice and not another, even though we know the first choice is the worse of the two.

Right that has never been part of speculative fiction before the last few decades. Too bad Mary Shelley never explored the "whatcanpossiblygowrong" angle in her book about a scientist trying to create a man from the reanimated parts of corpses.:p If you want something closer to the time you are talking about, some of the works of H. G. Wells deal with these themes, as do even some pulp stories (though usually in "one-off" stories).

Sci-fi is still in its infancy. It'll grow up only as the human race grows up, so it's got either a very long run ahead of it, or, if we don't heed the warnings from the dystopians, a very short one.

This is the first line you wrote that I can really agree with. However, the rest of your post has a tinge of the modern chauvinism (Note: I'm using #2 from the first definition of the link) that's makes some people think it's impossible for the ancient Egyptians to build pyramids without help from magic aliens.

Too much PC

[Nicolay77]

That is: too much political correctness.

The great Science Fiction writers where not afraid of imagine alternative societies, strange marriage rules, etc.

Today everything is so sterilized of any politically charged stuff that of course imagination is effectively blocked too.