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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...
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.
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.