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> SF is pretty much always about the current day. I can't comprehend this. Scifi is famously occupied with the future, and not the current day. Space travel, a
by rexpop 3y ago
> SF is pretty much always about the current day.
I can't comprehend this. Scifi is famously occupied with the future, and not the current day. Space travel, advanced technologies, artificial intelligences, and generally things that don't yet exist are par for the course. Most of SF is literally not about the present.
Do you mean to say that SF's subtext reflects the zeitgeist at the time/place of its writing?
- anon25783 3y agoSF is set in the future. But its meaning is more directly relevant to the time in which it is written than the time in which it is set. Take for example, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. If people in the actual literal 25th century are able to read about Buck Rogers at all, they will probably be reading it to better understand the 20th century, not their own.
- hotnfresh 3y agoOne of my favorite examples is Black Mirror’s “Fifteen Million Merits”. Read as a prediction of the future, it’s kinda shit. Unremarkable at best. Read as a way to show us the time when it came out (roughly now—it’s not so old) from a perspective skewed enough that it might prompt us to re-evaluate our own normal, it’s pretty damn good.
- totetsu 3y agoA good demonstration of this is the differences present in any sci-fi that got a remake 10-20 years after it was first written. The setting may well still be the far future .. or long long ago.. but that future has changed to match the present. The foundation TV series comes to mind. it's veeery different from the original novels.
- the_af 3y agoIt means the future elements in scifi (when it is about the future at all; some scifi doesn't even pretend to be futuristic) are an extrapolation of the current time and used to explore an idea about today. An author's scifi "gimmick" (it can be a technology, a societal norm, an alien encounter, etc) is often the way in which the author develops and extrapolates a preoccupation about the real world, be it war, or invasion, or social alienation, or consumerism, etc. The most obvious (but least interesting) example of this is how all those "Mars attacks" / alien invasion / body snatcher stories really were about the Red Scare, basically "what if Communism was infiltrating our society!"
- worrycue 3y agoBlade Runner and the entire Cyberpunk genre* extrapolate Reagan’s America where corporations are completely unfettered, dominating the landscape and people’s everyday life in nearly every way. * Or at least it used to. Most of today’s Cyberpunk media seems to have lost sight of that motif and really just ape the aesthetic (e.g. neon lights everywhere) - a hollow shell really.
- the_af 3y agoAgreed with your whole comment. Especially this: > Most of today’s Cyberpunk media seems to have lost sight of that motif and really just ape the aesthetic
- jvb1000 3y agoEven if it's not true of all science fiction (especially the pulp traditions of American sci-fi), it is arguable that the origins of science fiction are thought experiments that exist to help think through and critique the present. A lot of influential writers have said exactly this, including Le Guin, Gibson, Vandermeer, Doctorow, and Palmer to name a few of the top of my head.
- jvb1000 3y agoAlongside this, there are also several international traditions of sci-fi (Russian, French, Indian, Chinese) that imagined modernization in supposedly under developed countries to contrast a possible future against the very real modernization of developed neighbours.