4 ms·

I find that a lot of science fiction tends to project the author's worldview into the future and then comes up with a bunch of magic to explain how it'll inevit

• KirillPanov 3y ago
  Christopher Rowe's The Voluntary State https://nebulas.sfwa.org/nominated-work/the-voluntary-state/ https://nebulas.sfwa.org/nominated-work/the-voluntary-state/ https://www.lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/rowe/rowe1.html https://www.lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/originals/originals_a... Five years ago I would not have called it "realistic", but a lot has changed. Come home, all you commodores, come home...
• pharmakom 3y ago
  Stand in Zanzibar is good - also dystopian, mind The trouble with near future prediction sci fi is that the predictions date quickly!
  • matthewdgreen 3y ago
    Stand on Zanzibar is interesting. The Shockwave Rider, as a novel about a future society dominated by an information network, is actually great. And surprisingly predictive if you give it a little bit of credit for when it was written.
• Scarblac 3y ago
  This is Banks' own essay on the Culture, in case you really don't want to read the books: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm (another page that can use Firefox's Reader Mode). What the books add to all this theorizing is that they're wildly entertaining. To me, they're the best that modern sci-fi has to offer, and Banks is sorely missed.
  • DrBazza 3y ago
    I was looking for something like that because I recall Banks saying something along the lines of 'socialism wins' about his books: > The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it. > Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces. And that feels kind-of Star Trekkie in its optimism that humans can ever live in peace with one another, and that "socialism" (however you care to define it) can ever be successful - capitalism fosters innovation. Perhaps the only way Banks' vision of the future could be successful is do exactly what his books talk about and we just let the machines take over.
    • KirillPanov 3y ago
      > and we just let the machines take over ... but then it's really the machines' Culture, isn't it? And we're just their pets. I'm going to read Consider Phlebas based on the essay linked above, but I think it's a bit dishonest to describe this Culture as belonging to any of its inhabitants other than The Minds. It's The Minds' Culture, and everybody else are just their housecats. Kind of a disappointing future if there's any other option besides self-annihilation. Cozy, but disappointing.
      • arethuza 3y ago
        I can't see how we can avoid eventually creating AIs that are far more powerful than we are - in that case something like the Culture is probably the best we can hope for.
        • 3y ago
• harshreality 3y ago
  I think if you interpret "worldview" broadly enough, that's inevitable. Fiction authors write (what they see as) counterfactuals, but not fiction that's fundamentally at odds with how they think the world works, because they wouldn't be able to inhabit such fictional worlds and write about them believably. The Culture novels postulate a form of luxury space communism for humans, but the plots involve other things. It's not exactly wish-fulfillment; luxury space communism is hardly all good. It seems to me that most post-scarcity futures imply some kind of luxury communism, and if you're writing space operas, they'll necessarily have a mild or extreme form of luxury space communism. You could segregate the haves and have-nots, but then you get something like Elysium (the movie) where the obvious plot involves the have-nots revolting. I guess I don't understand what you're looking for. You don't want the author to project their worldview, but you do want them to try to predict the future, not too optimistically, but also not too pessimistically? A scifi sitcom, where nothing of note happens that's overly positive or negative? Wouldn't that be projecting the author's worldview too? "Maybe life in the future is going to be just like today"? If you just don't like scifi in general, or space operas in particular, that's allowed. Cyberpunk is fairly dystopian, and not really a projection of how the author wishes the future to be, so it's curious that you cite Gibson who wrote proto-cyberpunk, before writers like Morgan and his Kovacs series. Have you looked into those? KSR's Mars trilogy maybe?
  • arethuza 3y ago
    My reaction to the ending of Elysium was pretty much "so that's how our own version of the Culture gets started".
  • keiferski 3y ago
    I'm looking for this kind of book: an author studies current trends, technology, culture, religion, history, etc. deeply, not shallowly. They study how the Printing Press/Industrial Revolution/computer/Internet/etc. changed society, culture, and politics. Then the author uses this knowledge to write a story about how the world will be in 2050, 2100, or 2500. Sci-fi that is merely fantasy with a veneer of spaceships and robots isn't what I'm looking for. I didn't say anything about it being optimistic or pessimistic, just that most writers seem to inject their personal politics into their writing, which is a real distraction from the worldbuilding. Children of Men is particularly pessimistic, and I think anyone reading it would agree.
• satori99 3y ago
  Iain M Banks approach to 'magic' tech in Sci-Fi is to properly consider its full impact on the entire society, rather than it just being used to advance the protagonists plot. So, sure, he makes up a lot of nonsense, but he put serious thought into his nonsense too.
• phreeza 3y ago
  I think your ask (prediction of the future without bias/assumptions from the author) is basically impossible. You can't predict the future without making assumptions. But a somewhat realistic, not completely dystopian sci-fi book that made the rounds last year and that I think is worth reading is Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the future. Most of the science and economics in there are relatively sound, but it is still pretty much a best case scenario for humanities next 100 or so years.
• rsynnott 3y ago
  > how it’ll inevitably happen The Culture is not presented in the books as inevitable _at all_. At least two of them are about major existential threats to it, and another is about where it came from. … Also Children of Men is a pretty weird example of _realistic_ sci-fi; it requires significant magic to set up in the first place (more or less the same magic as Handmaid’s Tale, actually, but even more hand-wave-y and extreme).
  • keiferski 3y ago
    I thought Children of Men was quite realistic, actually. Maybe you could question the initial premise of fertility problems, but the rest of "what would happen if this happened" (societal unrest, surveillance, etc.) I found exceptionally realistic and very much in the "mood" of the modern world. It is miles more realistic than immortal space robots and a post-scarcity society.
• seer 3y ago
  While I agree with the other comments and don’t find Children of Men all that believable, if we take the “magical” premise of the film of no new kids anywhere, I have found it one of the most gripping tales ever put on film. The expanse in my mind comes closest in its attempts to portray a realistic future, with its power dynamics and problems, in the “humans are humans and will take our problems wherever we go” kinda thing. Books better portray this than the show, but the show is also a must watch.
• otikik 3y ago
  Are you sure you want a novel? It seems you are more looking for an essay in speculative futures. In a novel, everything happens how the author "wants". Including in Children of Men.
• goatlover 3y ago
  Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy and 2312. The Expanse books in terms of human political structure (Earth/Mars/The Belt and Outer Planets Alliance), assuming humanity is able to colonize the solar system.
  • hoseja 3y ago
    To call Mars Trilogy not colored by the authors ideology is, well, brave to say the least.
    • ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      I have it on my to-read list because I heard it was interesting socialist sci-fi so it is a bit weird seeing it repeatedly recommended to someone who finds The Culture too lefty.
      • hoseja 3y ago
        It has nice parts but overall it left me feeling icky from its seething marxist rage.
    • rsynnott 3y ago
      Well, I mean, it's a silly request. Everything's coloured by the author's ideology.
    • goatlover 3y ago
      I mean in terms of hard scifi, assuming we start colonizing the solar system. I probably prefer The Expanse authors views over Robinson's.
• atombender 3y ago
  A technicality, perhaps, but the books that the article is about don't actually depict our future. Their civilization did not evolve on Earth and isn't biologically human, and the books are (with the exception of one short story) not set anywhere near Earth or even in our time. The Culture books don't follow the predictive tradition of science fiction. Banks' books are more appropriately called space opera, though Banks has his own spin on things that sets him somewhat apart. What Banks does is dream up a completely new, utopian, post-scarcity civilization, and then explores what kinds of conflicts and moral problems can exist in such an environment where anyone can be anyone, have anything, and go anywhere.
  • A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
    >Their civilization did not evolve on Earth and isn't biologically human, and the books are (with the exception of one short story) not set anywhere near Earth or even in our time. The State of the Art is, in fairness, one of the best things Banks has ever written.
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• chadcmulligan 3y ago
  HG Wells - "the shape of things to come" is like that if I understand what you're after, it was very much like a non fiction book.
• michael1999 3y ago
  Children of Time is pretty fun.
  • tempaway23141 3y ago
    Children of Time is probably the most amazing and tense and satisfying sci-fi novel I've read in years but its not got much to say about near future predictions
• msabalau 3y ago
  Generally, and probably inescapably, science fiction ends up being entangled in the author's worldview. (Either positively, as you note, or negatively, as in the warnings of dystopias, or in an arbitrarily mixed way that still has to be grounded in the author's point of view about society.) The two major periods in time in publishing when that was less visibly true is at the start of the last century when Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo Award is named) was soliciting stories that were basically "what neat new use case could wireless technology address?", which can be viewed as a way of creating a literary prototype of what the reader might see in a few years. Of course, even if these stories might be seen as focused on predicting the near future, Gernsback is also literally organizing his readers into the Wireless Association of America, which directly advocates for political and regulatory decisions. And in the 1940s-1950s, the science fiction mainstream felt the distinguishing feature of their genre was a focus on a scientific conceit, as opposed to melodramatic adventures. This often meant that they ignored how their stories reflected their worldviews. For example in unconsciously repeating their expectations about the gender roles of housewives. But ignoring one's opinions about culture or society doesn't mean they don't exist in what you are writing.
• itishappy 3y ago
  I'd like to put in a recommendation for Andy Weir. The Martian and Project Hail Mary are the two I've read, but I'm told Artemis is also worth it. He does an excellent job at structing novels around very realistic troubleshooting and engineering. They tend to focus on the technical side of things, not the cultural, however, so it may not be what you're looking for.