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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.'"
Our time line seems similar to that of Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End"
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!
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.
Yeah, that's why everybody's switching to steampunk. Plenty of steam.
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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.
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.
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.
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. 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
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
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.