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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.'"
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.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
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.
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
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.
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.
Find free books.
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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
lol
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.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Has science run out of steam?
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
> 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).
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.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
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.
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.
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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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
No I enjoy Heroes. But I would never, ever call it science fiction. It's pure fantasy
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
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.)
and only occur on a small line, not the entire planet.
Steampunk is so very, very tired.
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.
This message composed using 100% recycled electrons.
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..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
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.
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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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..
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah but just calling them "electronic brains" would not have sounded as sexy.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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"
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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.
which is totally what she said
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.
Pirate Party UK