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Has Sci-Fi Run Out of Steam?

Posted by Soulskill on from the what-about-steampunk dept.

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.'"

42 of 479 comments (clear)

  1. Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by Culture20 · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    1. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    2. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
    3. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by commodore64_love · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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
    4. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    5. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      My blog
    6. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Funny

      . 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.

      --
      sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    7. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by tagno25 · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    8. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by BKX · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

    9. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    10. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by somersault · · Score: 5, Funny

      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?

      --
      which is totally what she said
    11. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by SydShamino · · Score: 3, Informative

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

      --
      It doesn't hurt to be nice.
    12. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by damburger · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      --
      If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
    13. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by agrif · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    14. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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..

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    15. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by commodore64_love · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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
    16. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by Petrushka · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    17. Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? by Your.Master · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. Childhood's End by Da_Reapa · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    1. Re:Childhood's End by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      I pray every day.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
  3. Jennifer Government works for me by vvaduva · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  4. Cliche'd to death by Eudial · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!
    1. Re:Cliche'd to death by commodore64_love · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  5. PC Pro just needs to read more Sci-Fi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. We just don't know it yet... by Fanglord · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:We just don't know it yet... by samkass · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      E pluribus unum
    2. Re:We just don't know it yet... by thoughtfulbloke · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  7. Out of steam? by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    Comment of the year
  8. Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy by Marble68 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...
    1. Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    2. Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy by michael_cain · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.
    3. Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  9. It's not fortune-telling. by bcrowell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  10. Re:I think this is a false premise by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  11. No by wembley+fraggle · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  12. Re:No need, by ground.zero.612 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Has science run out of steam?

    --
    "Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
  13. Re:Unfair by Xiaran · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  14. Why SF is dead. by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Why SF is dead. by crazyjimmy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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

  15. Short Answer by chrisG23 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.)

  16. Yes, sci-fi no longer has steam ... by tomhudson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... 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.

  17. Maybe it's the publishing side that's the problem by ThousandStars · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.