7 ms·

Is science fiction dying?

27 points by awt 16y ago

PostOnce 16y ago
Giant wall of text, so I skimmed, but I think, no. Art never dies, it just finds a niche when the general public finds a new fad. Commercially, sci-fi seems to be doing well. Moon, District 9, Avatar, Star Trek. As a forecast of tech-to-come, who can say if it's as accurate as it once was, we'll have to wait for the future to arrive to really know, right? Aside from an enjoyable read, sci-fi is still inspiring people to get involved in the sciences. So sci-fi, I think, is doing fine on many fronts.
- derefr 16y ago
  As a forecast of tech-to-come, it seems like science fiction hasn't managed to really predict anything radically different than it was predicting in back in 1990 or so. The accuracy has gone up because everything is now "five minutes in the future" rather than "in the year 5000." Even if we look further ahead, today's far future is just like yesterday's far future: filled either with spaceships (albeit carrying ems, ala Accelerando or Diaspora) or grey goo, and with not much room for real retroactively-falsifiable speculation, which I think is the key to good sci-fi.
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    The accuracy has gone up because everything is now "five minutes in the future" rather than "in the year 5000." Er, this seems exactly backwards to me, unless you're including near-future thrillers in "SF". Of stuff on the SF shelf at the bookstore, the majority appears to be fantasy (and much of that contemporary fantasy, now), and of the ones that are not explicitly fantasy, many are far future space opera -- Drake, Weber, etc -- which has the same characteristics as fantasy. There's a whole subgenre that's now missing: the medium-term, realistic future. I think it's become clear even to people who shout down the singularity concept that it's become impossible to put together a detailed-yet-believable future of fifty years from now.
- electromagnetic 16y ago
  I agree - the article kind of lost purpose midway in the first paragraph, so I skimmed it too and found it with an atrocious closing paragraph. My wife is generally averse to sci-fi, so what I always make sure to do is point out when an 'ordinary' movie is using sci-fi and it becomes disturbingly long. I like to point out movies like Inception (being a big one people don't see as sci-fi even though it is pure sci-fi), Donnie Darko (a movie about time travel), V for Vendetta, Frankenstein, Jurassic Park and the funniest I've had to point out has been E.T. And that's without even having to step out into the 'grey area' where movies are using sci-fi 'concepts' or just using mild sci-fi elements. It also works to point out that almost 3/4 of horror movies are still solidly sci-fi. I think sci-fi's death will be when it becomes so mainstream it's rarely differentiated from regular fiction, which with a lot of movies it's still hard to convince people it's sci-fi. I mean 'Click' with Adam Sandler is a great example. It's sci-fi through and through, but because it's using only 1 element people won't believe it's sci-fi.
  - jl6 16y ago
    SF is a writing style, not a set of technologies. Hence why Neal Stephenon's Baroque Cycle is SF despite including no SFnal technologies (except maybe an allusion to just one), and why The Time Traveller's Wife is mainstream, despite being about time travel, the most outlandishly SFnal concept there ever was.
    - rationalbeaver 16y ago
      While I basically agree with you, the literary nazi in me must say that SF is a genre, not a writing style. The Baroque cycle crosses the historical fiction and SF genres into a lovely mutant child that could be called Historical Science Fiction. The Time Traveller's Wife also crosses genres, with a heavier focus on the Romance than the SF.
- iwwr 16y ago
  For due diligence: "Where is my flying car?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMPH0tlC5K4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMPH0tlC5K4 Sci-fi generally fails at future predictions.
  - PostOnce 16y ago
    Google maps, cellphones, talking computers, speech recognition, robots, autonomous vehicles, nuclear weapons, space travel, alternative biochemistry, touch screens, GPS, handheld translators, etc. Yup. Sci-fi generally fails at predicting future tech.
  - varjag 16y ago
    You don't really read sci-fi for predictions though?
    - iwwr 16y ago
      No, which is the point. (as a reply to derefr)
martey 16y ago
For some reason, this is linking to Salon's mobile version. The standard version is available at http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/12/16/21st_century_science_fiction/index.html http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/12/16/21st_century_s...
iwwr 16y ago
When Syfy is adding shows about the paranormal, there is reason to worry.
- CallMeV 16y ago
  It's their cancelling shows that bothers me.
  - iwwr 16y ago
    Like what?
    - electromagnetic 16y ago
      Stargate Universe
      - iwwr 16y ago
        Oh, didn't know that. Still, the show has been rather underwhelming, compared to SG1.
        Udo 16y ago
        Only to SG1 fans. But it had attracted a number of new fans that didn't necessarily like SG1 (like me).
        iwwr 16y ago
        It would have been interesting if SG:U would have been more isolated from home (without the transporter stones and the Lucian Alliance story).
        Udo 16y ago
        I agree completely, the show has some weaknesses. I didn't like the stones either, and I'm lukewarm on the Lucian alliance incursion. That said, this show has provided me with many hours of entertainment that I really enjoyed. I even liked the more "hard scifi" episodes of early season 1. Sure, the show had its share of stupidity and missed opportunities, but for me there was enough clever and stimulating content to keep me really invested.
nl 16y ago
SciFi might not be dying, but reading that prose nearly killed me. Anyway... Does the genre continue to have new and useful things to say? I still remember when I first came across the idea of recreational engineered viruses as a substitute for drugs (I think it was in a Richard Morgan book?). I think SciFi is becoming more original, not less.
kgutteridge 16y ago
Theres loads of seemingly good sci fi books being self published for the Amazon Kindle, which might open up a new avenue for the niche and instill some new ideas into the genre
westinghouse 16y ago
Science fiction is fine it's just going through a bit of a lull at the moment. The current big market is contemporary fantasy aimed at a female readership, and that's where publishers are putting their money, which means there is less to spend on other similar (and I use the word loosely) genres. They are simply going after what sells to the widest audience. I think sci-fi is also suffering from the decline in interest of the sciences in general. It's a shame but that's the way it is. Quality rises to the top eventually, it will return.
bhoung 16y ago
Skim the article and jump to comments to find that everyone else has done the same. How delightful. Shame the article didn't match the title. Doesn't appear that there is any reason to suggest sci-fi is dying.
stupidsignup 16y ago
I am a hardcore sci-fi fan. Although I basically grew up in a library, the most fascinating part of it were the two or three racks nobody frequented than me: the racks were full of hardcore sci-fi like heinlein, asimov, pkdick, silverberg, leguin, pohl, you name them. In that sense, Sci-Fi is actually dying, because in the last 10 years, I hardly found something that even remotely compares with the great work of these guys except for the works of one author, Iain. M. Banks.
- robotomir 16y ago
  You should check Alastair Reynolds, specifically the Revelation Space series.
- GeneralMaximus 16y ago
  How do you find Neal Stephenson? He's not exactly SF, but his stories do have a SF element to them.
  - stupidsignup 16y ago
    It's not bad, but hardly hardcore sci-fi.
- srd 16y ago
  And Neal Asher, or Charles Stross (although his great Laundry series is more geeky-thriller-and-urban-horror-with-some-scifi-elements). And honestly, compared to Reynolds, Asher, Stross and Banks I find the old 'hard-core' SciFi by Dick and Heinlein rather... dull. Not entirely sure what it is, but the classics are less gripping to me. But then: The gold age of SciFi is between 8 and 12 :)
  - stupidsignup 16y ago
    "The gold age of SciFi is between 8 and 12" Only someone who doesn't truly love Sci-fi can say that ... Also, if you are saying that Dick is dull (by the way, Dick is totally different from Heinlein), than you have no clue and your opinion does not count. :-)
J3L2404 16y ago
Not as long as Cory Doctorow is around.
dedward 16y ago
I don't know - the most recent "Year's best science fiction" was a bit of a letdown (And if the editor, Gardner Dozois is reading this, please don't take it personally). I'f that's the best out there (I trust the editor) then, well, maybe we could do a bit better, yeah?
oceanician 16y ago
Stargate Universe ... that's allllll I'm saying...
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I find any discussion of sci-fi has to start with terms. To me, sci-fi is fiction based in science that asks "what if" What if we had time travel? What if we could read minds? When you string together many such what-ifs, you end up in fantasy, which is what a lot of people today confuse with sci-fi. Early Star Trek to me was sci-fi because there were believable contemporary characters engaged in asking and exploring around clear "what if" questions. Yes, there was a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but it mostly stayed out of the way. Soon, though, the Trek universe became so full of mumbo-jumbo, futuristic societies that could never exist (really? no money? Just how would that work?) and reversing the warp drive through the deflector grid nonsense that it quickly ended up in full space fantasy land. I just got through with Hull Zero Three, and while I liked it, it struck me as a dark nightmare from a soulless author (I know nothing of the author, that's just my impression). I think there was a clear "what if", which was only put to the reader at the end. Therefore, I'd qualify it as sci-fi. Pretty good book, but dark. But a lot of the crap, er, stuff I'm seeing that folks think is sci-fi is just long-format futuristic fantasy -- social commentary at an epic scale written with blasters and hyperdrives. Nothing wrong with that, but (to me) once you lose track of exploring that simple what-if question, it's more like commentary than analysis. You spend more time learning how the author views the universe than you do questioning you beliefs in how things are put together and what depends on what. Good stuff, certainly, but not sci-fi.
- weavejester 16y ago
  (really? no money? Just how would that work?) This doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the Star Trek universe, but there are other works of science fiction that explore this idea in a more plausible fashion. Iain M. Banks has written a number of novels about a post-scarcity civilisation called the Culture, which also lacks any sort of a financial system.
- bpyne 16y ago
  I could be taking your comments wrong, but they make Fantasy seem like bad SciFi. Well told fantasy stories explore the world in an introspective way. The "magic" systems provide drama, "color", and a vehicle representing power but typically the character development and introspection are the important aspects. Taking Steven Erikson as an example of a top-of-the-craft Fantasy author, he explores moral ambiguity with a scientific approach. Quite often he turns my beliefs upside down and sideways so that I'm confused by them. I can see Fantasy as a string of what-if's if it's in the sense of exploring people and society.
thezeus18 16y ago
It's a good question, but keep in mind that people have been asking it for the last 20 years.
- metageek 16y ago
  From the article: >Such statements regarding the death of SF are eternal. In 1960, for instance, a famous seminar was conducted under the heading "Who Killed Science Fiction?"
metageek 16y ago
Skim it for the descriptions of new books. I came away with half a dozen to look into.
Rantenki 16y ago
SciFi in 1920: |==now==|=======================future=====================| SciFi today: |=====================now===================|====future====| See? The problem is that we are out of land! We have so much science now that would have been fiction before, that you can write a totally scifi novel that is just seen as contemporary fiction. Take a gander at the newer William Gibson books (Pattern Recognition for example). They are set a bit closer to present, but if they had been written in the 70s, they would have been totally scifi (laptop computers, cellular phones, realtime video editing, etc).
InclinedPlane 16y ago
Science fiction is not prognostifiction, it's not an attempt to predict the future, and never has been.

27 points by awt 16y ago

Giant wall of text, so I skimmed, but I think, no. Art never dies, it just finds a niche when the general public finds a new fad. Commercially, sci-fi seems to be doing well. Moon, District 9, Avatar, Star Trek. As a forecast of tech-to-come, who can say if it's as accurate as it once was, we'll have to wait for the future to arrive to really know, right? Aside from an enjoyable read, sci-fi is still inspiring people to get involved in the sciences. So sci-fi, I think, is doing fine on many fronts.

derefr 16y ago
As a forecast of tech-to-come, it seems like science fiction hasn't managed to really predict anything radically different than it was predicting in back in 1990 or so. The accuracy has gone up because everything is now "five minutes in the future" rather than "in the year 5000." Even if we look further ahead, today's far future is just like yesterday's far future: filled either with spaceships (albeit carrying ems, ala Accelerando or Diaspora) or grey goo, and with not much room for real retroactively-falsifiable speculation, which I think is the key to good sci-fi.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  The accuracy has gone up because everything is now "five minutes in the future" rather than "in the year 5000." Er, this seems exactly backwards to me, unless you're including near-future thrillers in "SF". Of stuff on the SF shelf at the bookstore, the majority appears to be fantasy (and much of that contemporary fantasy, now), and of the ones that are not explicitly fantasy, many are far future space opera -- Drake, Weber, etc -- which has the same characteristics as fantasy. There's a whole subgenre that's now missing: the medium-term, realistic future. I think it's become clear even to people who shout down the singularity concept that it's become impossible to put together a detailed-yet-believable future of fifty years from now.
electromagnetic 16y ago
I agree - the article kind of lost purpose midway in the first paragraph, so I skimmed it too and found it with an atrocious closing paragraph. My wife is generally averse to sci-fi, so what I always make sure to do is point out when an 'ordinary' movie is using sci-fi and it becomes disturbingly long. I like to point out movies like Inception (being a big one people don't see as sci-fi even though it is pure sci-fi), Donnie Darko (a movie about time travel), V for Vendetta, Frankenstein, Jurassic Park and the funniest I've had to point out has been E.T. And that's without even having to step out into the 'grey area' where movies are using sci-fi 'concepts' or just using mild sci-fi elements. It also works to point out that almost 3/4 of horror movies are still solidly sci-fi. I think sci-fi's death will be when it becomes so mainstream it's rarely differentiated from regular fiction, which with a lot of movies it's still hard to convince people it's sci-fi. I mean 'Click' with Adam Sandler is a great example. It's sci-fi through and through, but because it's using only 1 element people won't believe it's sci-fi.
- jl6 16y ago
  SF is a writing style, not a set of technologies. Hence why Neal Stephenon's Baroque Cycle is SF despite including no SFnal technologies (except maybe an allusion to just one), and why The Time Traveller's Wife is mainstream, despite being about time travel, the most outlandishly SFnal concept there ever was.
  - rationalbeaver 16y ago
    While I basically agree with you, the literary nazi in me must say that SF is a genre, not a writing style. The Baroque cycle crosses the historical fiction and SF genres into a lovely mutant child that could be called Historical Science Fiction. The Time Traveller's Wife also crosses genres, with a heavier focus on the Romance than the SF.
iwwr 16y ago
For due diligence: "Where is my flying car?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMPH0tlC5K4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMPH0tlC5K4 Sci-fi generally fails at future predictions.
- PostOnce 16y ago
  Google maps, cellphones, talking computers, speech recognition, robots, autonomous vehicles, nuclear weapons, space travel, alternative biochemistry, touch screens, GPS, handheld translators, etc. Yup. Sci-fi generally fails at predicting future tech.
- varjag 16y ago
  You don't really read sci-fi for predictions though?
  - iwwr 16y ago
    No, which is the point. (as a reply to derefr)

martey 16y ago

For some reason, this is linking to Salon's mobile version. The standard version is available at http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/12/16/21st_century_science_fiction/index.html http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/12/16/21st_century_s...

iwwr 16y ago

When Syfy is adding shows about the paranormal, there is reason to worry.

CallMeV 16y ago
It's their cancelling shows that bothers me.
- iwwr 16y ago
  Like what?
  - electromagnetic 16y ago
    Stargate Universe
    - iwwr 16y ago
      Oh, didn't know that. Still, the show has been rather underwhelming, compared to SG1.
      - Udo 16y ago
        Only to SG1 fans. But it had attracted a number of new fans that didn't necessarily like SG1 (like me).
        iwwr 16y ago
        It would have been interesting if SG:U would have been more isolated from home (without the transporter stones and the Lucian Alliance story).
        Udo 16y ago
        I agree completely, the show has some weaknesses. I didn't like the stones either, and I'm lukewarm on the Lucian alliance incursion. That said, this show has provided me with many hours of entertainment that I really enjoyed. I even liked the more "hard scifi" episodes of early season 1. Sure, the show had its share of stupidity and missed opportunities, but for me there was enough clever and stimulating content to keep me really invested.

nl 16y ago

SciFi might not be dying, but reading that prose nearly killed me. Anyway... Does the genre continue to have new and useful things to say? I still remember when I first came across the idea of recreational engineered viruses as a substitute for drugs (I think it was in a Richard Morgan book?). I think SciFi is becoming more original, not less.

kgutteridge 16y ago

Theres loads of seemingly good sci fi books being self published for the Amazon Kindle, which might open up a new avenue for the niche and instill some new ideas into the genre

westinghouse 16y ago

Science fiction is fine it's just going through a bit of a lull at the moment. The current big market is contemporary fantasy aimed at a female readership, and that's where publishers are putting their money, which means there is less to spend on other similar (and I use the word loosely) genres. They are simply going after what sells to the widest audience. I think sci-fi is also suffering from the decline in interest of the sciences in general. It's a shame but that's the way it is. Quality rises to the top eventually, it will return.

bhoung 16y ago

Skim the article and jump to comments to find that everyone else has done the same. How delightful. Shame the article didn't match the title. Doesn't appear that there is any reason to suggest sci-fi is dying.

stupidsignup 16y ago

I am a hardcore sci-fi fan. Although I basically grew up in a library, the most fascinating part of it were the two or three racks nobody frequented than me: the racks were full of hardcore sci-fi like heinlein, asimov, pkdick, silverberg, leguin, pohl, you name them. In that sense, Sci-Fi is actually dying, because in the last 10 years, I hardly found something that even remotely compares with the great work of these guys except for the works of one author, Iain. M. Banks.

robotomir 16y ago
You should check Alastair Reynolds, specifically the Revelation Space series.
GeneralMaximus 16y ago
How do you find Neal Stephenson? He's not exactly SF, but his stories do have a SF element to them.
- stupidsignup 16y ago
  It's not bad, but hardly hardcore sci-fi.
srd 16y ago
And Neal Asher, or Charles Stross (although his great Laundry series is more geeky-thriller-and-urban-horror-with-some-scifi-elements). And honestly, compared to Reynolds, Asher, Stross and Banks I find the old 'hard-core' SciFi by Dick and Heinlein rather... dull. Not entirely sure what it is, but the classics are less gripping to me. But then: The gold age of SciFi is between 8 and 12 :)
- stupidsignup 16y ago
  "The gold age of SciFi is between 8 and 12" Only someone who doesn't truly love Sci-fi can say that ... Also, if you are saying that Dick is dull (by the way, Dick is totally different from Heinlein), than you have no clue and your opinion does not count. :-)

J3L2404 16y ago

Not as long as Cory Doctorow is around.

dedward 16y ago

I don't know - the most recent "Year's best science fiction" was a bit of a letdown (And if the editor, Gardner Dozois is reading this, please don't take it personally). I'f that's the best out there (I trust the editor) then, well, maybe we could do a bit better, yeah?

oceanician 16y ago

Stargate Universe ... that's allllll I'm saying...

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

I find any discussion of sci-fi has to start with terms. To me, sci-fi is fiction based in science that asks "what if" What if we had time travel? What if we could read minds? When you string together many such what-ifs, you end up in fantasy, which is what a lot of people today confuse with sci-fi. Early Star Trek to me was sci-fi because there were believable contemporary characters engaged in asking and exploring around clear "what if" questions. Yes, there was a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but it mostly stayed out of the way. Soon, though, the Trek universe became so full of mumbo-jumbo, futuristic societies that could never exist (really? no money? Just how would that work?) and reversing the warp drive through the deflector grid nonsense that it quickly ended up in full space fantasy land. I just got through with Hull Zero Three, and while I liked it, it struck me as a dark nightmare from a soulless author (I know nothing of the author, that's just my impression). I think there was a clear "what if", which was only put to the reader at the end. Therefore, I'd qualify it as sci-fi. Pretty good book, but dark. But a lot of the crap, er, stuff I'm seeing that folks think is sci-fi is just long-format futuristic fantasy -- social commentary at an epic scale written with blasters and hyperdrives. Nothing wrong with that, but (to me) once you lose track of exploring that simple what-if question, it's more like commentary than analysis. You spend more time learning how the author views the universe than you do questioning you beliefs in how things are put together and what depends on what. Good stuff, certainly, but not sci-fi.

weavejester 16y ago
(really? no money? Just how would that work?) This doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the Star Trek universe, but there are other works of science fiction that explore this idea in a more plausible fashion. Iain M. Banks has written a number of novels about a post-scarcity civilisation called the Culture, which also lacks any sort of a financial system.
bpyne 16y ago
I could be taking your comments wrong, but they make Fantasy seem like bad SciFi. Well told fantasy stories explore the world in an introspective way. The "magic" systems provide drama, "color", and a vehicle representing power but typically the character development and introspection are the important aspects. Taking Steven Erikson as an example of a top-of-the-craft Fantasy author, he explores moral ambiguity with a scientific approach. Quite often he turns my beliefs upside down and sideways so that I'm confused by them. I can see Fantasy as a string of what-if's if it's in the sense of exploring people and society.

thezeus18 16y ago

It's a good question, but keep in mind that people have been asking it for the last 20 years.

metageek 16y ago
From the article: >Such statements regarding the death of SF are eternal. In 1960, for instance, a famous seminar was conducted under the heading "Who Killed Science Fiction?"

metageek 16y ago

Skim it for the descriptions of new books. I came away with half a dozen to look into.

Rantenki 16y ago

SciFi in 1920: |==now==|=======================future=====================| SciFi today: |=====================now===================|====future====| See? The problem is that we are out of land! We have so much science now that would have been fiction before, that you can write a totally scifi novel that is just seen as contemporary fiction. Take a gander at the newer William Gibson books (Pattern Recognition for example). They are set a bit closer to present, but if they had been written in the 70s, they would have been totally scifi (laptop computers, cellular phones, realtime video editing, etc).

InclinedPlane 16y ago

Science fiction is not prognostifiction, it's not an attempt to predict the future, and never has been.