10 ms·

Nobody Wants to Buy the Future: Why Science Fiction Literature Is Vanishing

37 points by jalev 3y ago

PaulHoule 3y ago
I see overread books like Dune and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Back in the 1980s there were so many "sci-fi fans" who had read Hitchhiker 20 times but never read Asimov or Heinlein or Dick or Smith or LeGunn or Pohl or... I am a big fan of Frank Herbert's other books, particularly The Santaroga Barrier, Under Pressure, Destination Void, Eyes of Heisenberg, Whipping Star and the Dosadi books. I can't stand Dune but for some reason people read it over and over again and don't get into the rest of Herbert never mind any other authors. I'd also blame Tor press for the downfall of sci-fi. Some of their books were groundbreaking like Ender's Game and Forge of God but because they represented a counter-reformation to the "new wave" which made Smith look cool again (great!) but really diminished the range of stories people would tell instead of expanding it. There was also the expansion of fantasy megaseries like Xanth (way too squicky for visual adaptation) and Discworld (too bad visual adaptations stopped when Pratchett passed away, but at least I can go to a Hogfather showing on the epiphany and cosplay as Twoflower) I kinda feel about Vinge the way I feel about Niven, he didn't quite continue the promise he showed in his early career in his late career. Same with Charlie Stross, who became as bad a left wing nut (sees a fascist under every rock) as Niven was a right wing nut and gave up on the promising Eschaton series for just plain tiring series like The Merchant Princes (Xanth envy without the notes at the end about how much the author hates writing them?) I liked the self-published We are Legion (We are Bob) which I found at the Salvation Army. Also https://www.amazon.com/Terraformers-Annalee-Newitz/dp/1250228018 https://www.amazon.com/Terraformers-Annalee-Newitz/dp/125022... for a very recent book.
- liveoneggs 3y ago
  Top tier old school gatekeeping here. Love it :)
- ramesh31 3y ago
  Sci-fi as a literary genre is so great because it's like Broadway; if you're being snobbish about it you're missing the point entirely. It comes from the tradition of mass market serials that have always been considered low-brow. Half the authors you mention began their careers writing throwaway pulp for ten cent magazines. It's a folk art form through and through.
  - crooked-v 3y ago
    That folk art part of things also gets a little extra literal when you consider the long history of typically folk-style filk songs based on scifi and fantasy works.
  - anthk 3y ago
    This. Gutenberg has Astounding Stories as the prime example: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/198 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/198
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    [dead]
  - arkh 3y ago
    So we should expect our next diamonds to come from areas like r/hfy, royalroad, archive of our own. Lot of young writers there but there's always some gems. And the daily / weekly release cycles most use is really reminiscent of old-school serialized publications.
- burnte 3y ago
  Niven's been one of my favorite authors. Amazing mind. The Bobiverse Books by Dennis Taylor are great, as is everything he's written. The Outland series is shaping up, and Roadkill was a joy.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    I still think Neutron Star is one of the best sci-fi books of all time as it is a short story collection that reads like a novel. I liked Ringworld when I was a kid but fell out of love with it slowly over decades, particularly in that the world of the story was much much much smaller than the Ringworld would have been physically. If Pritchett could get almost 50 novels out of the Discworld, Niven should have been able to get 50,000,000 at least out of the Ringworld but Niven really struggled with the sequel novels.
    - burnte 3y ago
      He was never a character driven author, just plot driven, which I preferred more. Things happen to people rather than people happen to people; I get enough relationship drama in real life. If you really want a deep dive, go reread the 4 Ringworld books, then read the 5 book Fate of Worlds saga, which takes us back to the Ringworld. Amazing books he cowrote this century.
- deleted 3y ago
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- irb 3y ago
  If the problem is that not many people read SF, how can popular SF books be part of the problem? Are you supposing that if not for popular books like Dune, people would read a wider variety of other SF works? I don't think that's how it works. I think popular SF books are important for bringing the genre to a wider audience. Someone who is not familiar with the genre might pick up Dune because of the films, and sure, maybe that's all they'll read, but maybe they'll enjoy it and pick up some more.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    As a kid I read a Tom Swift book than read all of them, and then started reading Asimov and many other authors. I don’t know what it is but people who read Dune and Hitchhiker just don’t move on to other books and authors. And it’s just those two series. I can look down on Xanth but people I’ve met who’ve read that have read other fantasy books like the Deryni books or the Narnia books. I think it is that people feel socially pressured to read Dune and Hitchhiker and come to conclusions like “reading science fiction is like watching protons decay” or “reading science fiction is being compelled to laugh at jokes that aren’t really funny”.
- bigbillheck 3y ago
  > because they represented a counter-reformation to the "new wave" which made Smith look cool again (great!)= Tor didn't start until 1980, by which time the new wave was long dead. (Also which "Smith" do you mean? E.E.'Doc'? L.Neil? Cordwainer? Clark Ashton?)
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Mainly “Doc”, but I’d pick any of those Smiths over Adams any day. (God it so cringey though when Virgil Sams says something about “our white race” in First Lensman; it’s enough that he’d have to be cast as Black if there was ever a visual adaptation though it seems today that there will never be)
pier25 3y ago
What about fantasy or horror? Maybe it's the whole speculative fiction genre that's dying.
- zwieback 3y ago
  Author says that sci-fi readers are voracious readers and have moved to fantasy, romantasy and non-fiction.
- busterarm 3y ago
  I've mostly switched from reading science fiction to horror. I think horror fiction is actually having a bit of a boom, mainly because authors still take risks in horror. I wasn't surprised to see that sales of classics/reprints in science fiction haven't gone down but it's all new publishing that has. Science Fiction is plagued with all the same problems facing comic books and tabletop gaming: the entire publishing industry only cares about representation and winning industry accolades for said representation and it isn't resonating with fans so sales are cratering. The industries are focused on people who aren't already customers and they aren't attracting them as customers either. Disney keeps doing this absolutely baffling thing where they purchase male-dominated (by fandom) IPs and run them into the ground (Star Wars, Marvel, and I assume Epic Games' catalog soon-enough). They've acknowledged in previous years annual statements that their marketing primarily targets girls and that they have problems marketing to boys and men. These big IP buys were an attempt to diversify and all they've done is double down on their exisiting customer.
  - spencerflem 3y ago
    This is completely wrong re: tabletop which is in its first golden age right now almost exclusively because it is now much more accessible. I have a friend who studied this academically, and the act of roleplaying is especially popular among people questioning themselves and their place in society. As for the lack of risks, check out itch.io for new table top RPGs, there's never been more variety! Its a really exciting time for it, with tons of new voices doing interesting things, with games ranging from super crunchy tactics to super free form one-page narrative games, and everything in between. Happy to offer any reccomendations
zwieback 3y ago
"Sci-fi readers have moved to adjacent genres and non-fiction because the current tech landscape is so depressing" makes a lot of sense to me.
- Supermancho 3y ago
  I think it's more about the decline of popularity in reading books, than popularity of genres. People who are interested in technology, use technology. I don't have to read Silo, when I can watch it. I watch Severance, not read the unwritten book.
  - zwieback 3y ago
    I was wondering about that too. To answer that question we'd need normalized numbers, e.g. sci-fi as a percentage of total sales. It does seem likely that people who read sci-fi 20 or 50 years ago are now gaming, tinkering or cosplaying.
  - arkh 3y ago
    I feel like for really "out there" sci-fi, books are a lot more free to go crazy than shows or video games. Ships fighting by lobbing planets at each other? Or anything in the Culture universe? Good luck putting it on screen. Or just the short novel Diamond Dogs.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  I blame JJs and Kurtzman's Star Trek for this. They dropped Roddenberry's amazing idea of a future that was hard earned, but worthy to aspire towards - not just as society but also as individuals. On top of that they replaced the competency-porn role-models with Hollywood's desire to have loveable goofs and misfits everywhere, as if everyone in their audience was an idiot loser and could otherwise not identify with the characters. It definitely killed my interest in this kind of future.
  - krapp 3y ago
    That future wasn't hard earned, it was handwaved into being (on the back of a world war against genetically engineered mutants and colonization by alien benefactors at that.) The real world is fundamentally cruel. Therein lies the challenge. Loveable goofs and misfits struggling against the odds to live up to their ideals are relatable, and that future can actually be aspired to. A future which requires humans to be paragons of virtue that have evolved beyond greed, vice and want, in a universe of infinite free energy and abundance, is unattainable. Neither human nature nor the laws of physics can bend that far. Also the new Star Trek series are incredibly popular, even among many fans of old Trek, many of whom seem to be able to reconcile it with the franchise's espoused values. I guess it doesn't work for you, but you seem to be in a minority among the fanbase in that regard.
srackey 3y ago
It’s not just a sci-fi, it’s all books. And movies. and TV. and theater. And… The media landscape is a lot more competitive. Vastly so. Of course, with the internet, video games, social media, older forms of entertainment will lose market share.
Veuxdo 3y ago
I find that more often than not, when I pick up a sci-fi novel, it turns out to just be a detective novel innn spaaaaace
- ramesh31 3y ago
  > I find that more often than not, when I pick up a sci-fi novel, it turns out to just be a detective novel innn spaaaaace Detective novels in space can still be good, and much better than the current crop of Hollywood garbage. I'm still quite bitter about what Amazon did to The Expanse. First legit sci-fi we get in years, and they devolved it into "muscle bound hero shoots aliens with laser gun" within one season of acquiring it from SyFy.
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    To be clear, we're talking about Roberta Draper here right?
    - ramesh31 3y ago
      Just every character of the main crew in general. The SyFy seasons were very Firefly-esque; regular people doing their best to get by and fulfill their own personal goals. Then all of the sudden it's just "OK, we're all space marines on an epic mission to save the galaxy now".
      - throwway120385 3y ago
        It's kinda how the books went too. Nemesis Games and so on were very much about the personal war between Holden and a certain other person.
  - StevePerkins 3y ago
    Have you actually read the books? That TV series was one of the most true to its adapted source material. Amazon didn't pivot from a detective story to an action story. Abraham and Franck (aka James S.A. Corey), the authors, did. After the arc from the first trilogy of books wrapped up.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
Honestly, I think all the dystopian sci-fi is hitting too close to home for people lately. It's intriguing and thrilling when it's some far-off distant future that seems like a thought experiment. It's depressing when it reads like the natural conclusion of the events that are unfolding in the current day
- t888 3y ago
  Also worth noting that dystopian sci-fi isn't really a thought experiment. It's just a boring formula these days.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >It's just a boring formula these days Kind of like news and social media rage baiting the world into self destruction? I mean humankind has created immensely powerful technology, and we use it to show ads to each other. Why shouldn't we be depressed in general about this?
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Well, I'd say that's the problem with sci-fi. We don't know how to use the tech we already have, so there's no point in dreaming with more. It's a bit like a billionaire dreaming about winning the lottery.
    - t888 3y ago
      > Kind of like news and social media rage baiting the world into self destruction? Exactly like this. I almost mentioned it. It's cheaper to sell fear than hope.
sybercecurity 3y ago
If this means it's also the end of the YA "future-dystopia-only-the-teen-chosen-one-can-end" genre, maybe there is a silver lining. There is only so much dystopian stories to tell before they all run together. The market is saturated. I think the negative portrayal of science in the popular press has something to do with it. Plus the declining science literacy in general. It makes non-dystopian sci-fi difficult to relate to and seem too fantastic.
- deleted 3y ago
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- redavni 3y ago
  Agreed. The bookshelves have been full of terrible sci-fi for over a decade now. I have given up on the book sellers and the awards (Hugo, Nebula etc). I do read sci-fi almost every day though still. Almost all of it from Kindle Unlimited. This article could probably be summarized as "People don't read anymore".
- busseio 3y ago
  Many YA readers also just lived through a global pandemic. Changes the expectations around "fiction", perhaps.
thorum 3y ago
The article’s premise is based on a linked Washington Post survey that shows 12% of readers read scifi in the last year, fantasy 15%, and romance 11%. This is not compelling evidence that scifi is unpopular. Perhaps people are just more diversified in their reading habits now across the board. It would be nice to see some more in-depth data showing trends across time before we leap to the conclusions this article does.
- idoubtit 3y ago
  This is too restrictive. The article claims 3 facts are the proof that the genre is ill: (1) 12% of US readers read sci-fi in the last year, (2) current sci-fi best sellers are old books or not really sci-fi, and (3) in the 80s, SF novels were sometimes best sellers. I agree with you that the first fact is a dubious proof. Unfortunately, the others aren't better. The 2013 list of sf best-sellers (the oldest list in the wayback machine from the same source as the article) also contained old books. For instance "Dune" is a best-seller both in 2013 and 2023. And some books were heroic fantasy, not SF, e.g. "Sword Art Online". For the last claim, I could only find 4 SF novels that match the article's claim, out of the 100 of the decade. 3 were related to movies, and 1 to a TV star (Carl Sagan). In the 2010s, there were one novel related to a movie and another SF book. Hardly conclusive. A striking tendency in the recent years is that many of the best-sellers are children books. Young adult novels are also more present. I suspect that, since fewer people read novels, books are very often a gift, something one does not read but buys for others. And for children and teenagers, there's obviously the innuendo that reading books is good for their education.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    people only enjoy reading something when it’s written several levels below their actual highest obtained reading level. So anything that goes beyond a 6th grade reading level is going to have an exponentially smaller potential customer base.
colechristensen 3y ago
I think it was in Skyfall where Q says to 007 "We don't do that kind of thing any more" ... because it wasn't really possible for the writers to come up with exciting tech gadgets. It was just entirely believable that there was already an app for anything they could think of. We have jetpacks, flying cars are going to show up literally in a year or two, Internet comes from space, "AI robot vacuum" is an entirely mundane product, we've got government investigations of robot cars running people over... what kind of thing could a sci-fi writer imagine that you couldn't see a startup selling in a couple of years? Science fiction is hard to do now.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  Sorry, we have jetpacks? I don't have one!
  - colechristensen 3y ago
    Yup, apparently they're doing races in Dubai now? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn5W19sdyf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn5W19sdyf4 Lots of videos of military applications, etc.
  - gwill 3y ago
    https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkazgy/peru-aliens-illegal-miners-with-jetpacks https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkazgy/peru-aliens-illegal-m...
- throwway120385 3y ago
  Maybe we don't dream as much as we used to.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    That or most of the things we thought were sci-fi are sci-fantasy. "Actually no, we can't rip open wormholes in space". This said, the converse may be true. "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must make sense". There is such a massively huge amount of fiction now that it's like being tossed into the middle of the Pacific without a raft. We're not looking for an escape from reality INTO technology. It's more likely we are looking for an escape from reality FROM technology.
brolumir 3y ago
[flagged]
- acdha 3y ago
  If you think that’s “hard left”, it suggests you might want to reconsider your media diet. Two of those are statements of fact and the last two are definitely left but not exactly that far out of the mainstream even in the United States.
yurytom 3y ago
Any recommendations for sci-fi books written recently? 3 body problem, anything else?
- aardvark179 3y ago
  Maybe look at something like the Locus list of 2023 books. SF is such a broad genre that you are better off finding reviewers or other sources who you can use to guess at what you might like.
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I like so-called "hard sci-fi", where effort is made into thinking through the details and the sci-fi bit is not just a backdrop for a regular story, or a way to validate neuroses du jour. Both of these are definitely in my top-10 sci-fi books of all time.
  - gwill 3y ago
    I'm an odd one and didn't enjoy Project Hail Mary. If you're like me I'd recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts
- doctorwho42 3y ago
  Children of time, the expanse series, project hail Mary, the Martian. Almost all of these were written within the last 10 years.
- grujicd 3y ago
  Dennis Taylor's "Bobiverse" series. Also Daniel Suarez's books - "Delta V" for the start. Devon Eriksen "Theft of fire" - this one is a bit raw and can offend some people. These books take into account recent developments and events so they don't sound anachronistic like some of sci-fi classics. Maybe they'll lose that appeal in few decades and will be harder to read for our grandchildren, but I do enjoy all the cultural references from my time.
  - 3y ago
tomohawk 3y ago
It's disappearing because it caters to a very niche, elitist subset of society.
- dabbledash 3y ago
  Do you think it used to be more populist?
  - tomohawk 3y ago
    You used to see sci-fi paperbacks in the hands of people of all walks of life. Lit majors used to look down on it because it was not high falutin enough. Sci-fi used to speak to things most people cared about. Then it went fringe. I and several people I know went from consuming all things sci-fi to alarm at how fringe it was getting, to just ignoring it.
DrBazza 3y ago
In the UK bookshops, helpfully put sci-fi books in the "Sci-Fi AND Fantasy" section. Because, of course, people that want to read about aliens and FTL want to wade through hundreds of vampire-werewolf-human-love-triangle books first.
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  That has always annoyed me too, glad I'm not the only one.
dageshi 3y ago
I couldn't find anything I enjoyed in scifi and ended up moving to fantasy instead. The number of well supported niches in fantasy is ever growing, some with business models that cut out traditional publishers altogether.
bamboozled 3y ago
It’s because we made it to the future, we are here.
lkrubner 3y ago
I think most people continue to have a primitive association between prosperity and "the Mandate of Heaven." If something is good, it leads to economic growth, and this reflects that the gods are happy about that thing. Of course, I'm exaggerating slightly, but it is almost certain that some people do engage in a certain amount of guilt-by-association during bad times, versus a happier praise-by-association during good times. See this FRED chart, which shows real median family income in the USA: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/ Family income hits a peak in 1999 and then is stagnant or declining for the next 15 years, hitting a low point in 2014. It does not recover till 2018. And this is certainly one of the biggest shocks about the Internet: that it did not lead to prosperity. I'm old enough to remember the optimism and confidence of the late 1990s, we were all certain that the Internet was about to usher in the biggest economic boom in human history. Exactly the opposite happened: we experienced 19 years of stagnation of family income, the longest stretch in the history of the USA. So, we've all learned some things, and some of the things we learned have been humbling. Deindustrialization was a bigger deal than we realized, and the cyber economy was a smaller deal than we realized, and competition from China was a bigger deal than we realized. Between 1870 and 1970 the dramatic advance of science and technology contributed to rapidly rising standards of living. And it was fascinating to speculate about where such trends would go in the future. And that fascination expressed itself in part through science-fiction. But what kind of science-fiction would appeal today? We've already been saturated by dystopian science-fiction, how much darker should it get? Would people necessarily be interested in a bleak science-fiction that suggests everything is going to get worse and worse forever? I suspect real-life trends have to resume an upward march of progress before the public is again intrigued by this kind of speculative fiction.
RaoulP 3y ago
From what I've heard, sci-fi is popular in China nowadays. I read a remark somewhere, maybe on HN, that a nation's output of sci-fi seems to correlate with whether or not they are in a boom. Does this ring true to you guys? I'm not deeply into sci-fi (I wish I read more) but I think it could be true. America had their famous boom after WWII of course, and the Chinese have had every reason to be optimistic for the past decades. I also wonder if there's a correlation with output of historical fiction. Reaching back into the past.
niceice 3y ago
If you're looking for something non-dsytopian, John Carmack had a recommendation recently https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1757428929088872801 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1757428929088872801 > Just finished Theft of Fire by @Devon_Eriksen_, and it was a great read — hard SF by a retired engineer. If his About page resonates at all, you will probably enjoy it: https://devoneriksen.com/about https://devoneriksen.com/about
readthenotes1 3y ago
"The golden age of science fiction is 14." If it's 30 year old people reading, sci fi lost its audience. And probably so: mistb14 year olds would rather play a phone/mmo than read
StevePerkins 3y ago
This article seems to stem from a desire to dunk on "evil Silicon Valley robber barons" more than anything else. As others have pointed out here, the premise is based on a linked Washington Post survey that doesn't even really suggest that sci-fi is unpopular (at least no less popular than other "genre" fiction). Also, cyberpunk and other "near-future capitalism-dystopia" stories are only a subset of science fiction. Honestly, I think we're still working through the psychic trauma of Donald Trump's 2016 victory over Clinton. The literary class was SO caught off guard and stunned by that unexpected outcome, that it lost its mind and has yet to recover. I don't remember "Silicon Valley" being used as a scare phrase, or regarded all that negatively, prior to 2016. But immediately afterward, stunned people desperate for explanation latched onto whatever theories they could find. We ended up with Clinton losing "because Russia posted on Facebook too much", and overnight Silicon Valley became a bugbear. Then Elon messed with the rage echo chamber on Twitter, and immediately went from "pot-smoking goofball troll" to robber baron and devil incarnate. In other words, the sort of people who write articles about books are feeling really down on social media companies and tech entrepreneurs these days. And transfer those feelings onto sci-fi, because they're not really into sci-fi themselves anyway, and therefore see all that as one and the same.
thangalin 3y ago
I've been working on a hard sci-fi novel for the last seven years or so. During that time, I developed a cross-platform plain text Markdown editor (https://keenwrite.com/ https://keenwrite.com/) to help me write the novel. I could use some alpha readers. If interested, see my profile for details and contact.
wetpaws 3y ago
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pokerface_86 3y ago
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jacknews 3y ago
I think social media and so on has caused a bit of a shift of focus to 'inner space'. Older sci-fi especially seems to often just be 20th century society with teleporters, or the united nations, at galactic level, and so on. But we are now living in a sci-fi era, where it's clear the real issues are around culture itself, and only a small percentage of sci-fi deals with that, and often not well. Sci-fi purports to reflect our current society and illuminate aspects of possible societies, but I'd say in some ways it has been overtaken by reality. Sure we can't FTL to Vega minor, or whatever. But if we could, should we? Who should get to go anyway? What would they do there? What are the implications for the rest of society? What about if they have children? Etc, etc.

37 points by jalev 3y ago

I see overread books like Dune and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Back in the 1980s there were so many "sci-fi fans" who had read Hitchhiker 20 times but never read Asimov or Heinlein or Dick or Smith or LeGunn or Pohl or... I am a big fan of Frank Herbert's other books, particularly The Santaroga Barrier, Under Pressure, Destination Void, Eyes of Heisenberg, Whipping Star and the Dosadi books. I can't stand Dune but for some reason people read it over and over again and don't get into the rest of Herbert never mind any other authors. I'd also blame Tor press for the downfall of sci-fi. Some of their books were groundbreaking like Ender's Game and Forge of God but because they represented a counter-reformation to the "new wave" which made Smith look cool again (great!) but really diminished the range of stories people would tell instead of expanding it. There was also the expansion of fantasy megaseries like Xanth (way too squicky for visual adaptation) and Discworld (too bad visual adaptations stopped when Pratchett passed away, but at least I can go to a Hogfather showing on the epiphany and cosplay as Twoflower) I kinda feel about Vinge the way I feel about Niven, he didn't quite continue the promise he showed in his early career in his late career. Same with Charlie Stross, who became as bad a left wing nut (sees a fascist under every rock) as Niven was a right wing nut and gave up on the promising Eschaton series for just plain tiring series like The Merchant Princes (Xanth envy without the notes at the end about how much the author hates writing them?) I liked the self-published We are Legion (We are Bob) which I found at the Salvation Army. Also https://www.amazon.com/Terraformers-Annalee-Newitz/dp/1250228018 https://www.amazon.com/Terraformers-Annalee-Newitz/dp/125022... for a very recent book.

liveoneggs 3y ago
Top tier old school gatekeeping here. Love it :)
ramesh31 3y ago
Sci-fi as a literary genre is so great because it's like Broadway; if you're being snobbish about it you're missing the point entirely. It comes from the tradition of mass market serials that have always been considered low-brow. Half the authors you mention began their careers writing throwaway pulp for ten cent magazines. It's a folk art form through and through.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  That folk art part of things also gets a little extra literal when you consider the long history of typically folk-style filk songs based on scifi and fantasy works.
- anthk 3y ago
  This. Gutenberg has Astounding Stories as the prime example: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/198 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/198
- Semaphor 3y ago
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- arkh 3y ago
  So we should expect our next diamonds to come from areas like r/hfy, royalroad, archive of our own. Lot of young writers there but there's always some gems. And the daily / weekly release cycles most use is really reminiscent of old-school serialized publications.
burnte 3y ago
Niven's been one of my favorite authors. Amazing mind. The Bobiverse Books by Dennis Taylor are great, as is everything he's written. The Outland series is shaping up, and Roadkill was a joy.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I still think Neutron Star is one of the best sci-fi books of all time as it is a short story collection that reads like a novel. I liked Ringworld when I was a kid but fell out of love with it slowly over decades, particularly in that the world of the story was much much much smaller than the Ringworld would have been physically. If Pritchett could get almost 50 novels out of the Discworld, Niven should have been able to get 50,000,000 at least out of the Ringworld but Niven really struggled with the sequel novels.
  - burnte 3y ago
    He was never a character driven author, just plot driven, which I preferred more. Things happen to people rather than people happen to people; I get enough relationship drama in real life. If you really want a deep dive, go reread the 4 Ringworld books, then read the 5 book Fate of Worlds saga, which takes us back to the Ringworld. Amazing books he cowrote this century.
deleted 3y ago
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irb 3y ago
If the problem is that not many people read SF, how can popular SF books be part of the problem? Are you supposing that if not for popular books like Dune, people would read a wider variety of other SF works? I don't think that's how it works. I think popular SF books are important for bringing the genre to a wider audience. Someone who is not familiar with the genre might pick up Dune because of the films, and sure, maybe that's all they'll read, but maybe they'll enjoy it and pick up some more.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  As a kid I read a Tom Swift book than read all of them, and then started reading Asimov and many other authors. I don’t know what it is but people who read Dune and Hitchhiker just don’t move on to other books and authors. And it’s just those two series. I can look down on Xanth but people I’ve met who’ve read that have read other fantasy books like the Deryni books or the Narnia books. I think it is that people feel socially pressured to read Dune and Hitchhiker and come to conclusions like “reading science fiction is like watching protons decay” or “reading science fiction is being compelled to laugh at jokes that aren’t really funny”.
bigbillheck 3y ago
> because they represented a counter-reformation to the "new wave" which made Smith look cool again (great!)= Tor didn't start until 1980, by which time the new wave was long dead. (Also which "Smith" do you mean? E.E.'Doc'? L.Neil? Cordwainer? Clark Ashton?)
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Mainly “Doc”, but I’d pick any of those Smiths over Adams any day. (God it so cringey though when Virgil Sams says something about “our white race” in First Lensman; it’s enough that he’d have to be cast as Black if there was ever a visual adaptation though it seems today that there will never be)

pier25 3y ago

What about fantasy or horror? Maybe it's the whole speculative fiction genre that's dying.

zwieback 3y ago
Author says that sci-fi readers are voracious readers and have moved to fantasy, romantasy and non-fiction.
busterarm 3y ago
I've mostly switched from reading science fiction to horror. I think horror fiction is actually having a bit of a boom, mainly because authors still take risks in horror. I wasn't surprised to see that sales of classics/reprints in science fiction haven't gone down but it's all new publishing that has. Science Fiction is plagued with all the same problems facing comic books and tabletop gaming: the entire publishing industry only cares about representation and winning industry accolades for said representation and it isn't resonating with fans so sales are cratering. The industries are focused on people who aren't already customers and they aren't attracting them as customers either. Disney keeps doing this absolutely baffling thing where they purchase male-dominated (by fandom) IPs and run them into the ground (Star Wars, Marvel, and I assume Epic Games' catalog soon-enough). They've acknowledged in previous years annual statements that their marketing primarily targets girls and that they have problems marketing to boys and men. These big IP buys were an attempt to diversify and all they've done is double down on their exisiting customer.
- spencerflem 3y ago
  This is completely wrong re: tabletop which is in its first golden age right now almost exclusively because it is now much more accessible. I have a friend who studied this academically, and the act of roleplaying is especially popular among people questioning themselves and their place in society. As for the lack of risks, check out itch.io for new table top RPGs, there's never been more variety! Its a really exciting time for it, with tons of new voices doing interesting things, with games ranging from super crunchy tactics to super free form one-page narrative games, and everything in between. Happy to offer any reccomendations

zwieback 3y ago

"Sci-fi readers have moved to adjacent genres and non-fiction because the current tech landscape is so depressing" makes a lot of sense to me.

Supermancho 3y ago
I think it's more about the decline of popularity in reading books, than popularity of genres. People who are interested in technology, use technology. I don't have to read Silo, when I can watch it. I watch Severance, not read the unwritten book.
- zwieback 3y ago
  I was wondering about that too. To answer that question we'd need normalized numbers, e.g. sci-fi as a percentage of total sales. It does seem likely that people who read sci-fi 20 or 50 years ago are now gaming, tinkering or cosplaying.
- arkh 3y ago
  I feel like for really "out there" sci-fi, books are a lot more free to go crazy than shows or video games. Ships fighting by lobbing planets at each other? Or anything in the Culture universe? Good luck putting it on screen. Or just the short novel Diamond Dogs.
sigmoid10 3y ago
I blame JJs and Kurtzman's Star Trek for this. They dropped Roddenberry's amazing idea of a future that was hard earned, but worthy to aspire towards - not just as society but also as individuals. On top of that they replaced the competency-porn role-models with Hollywood's desire to have loveable goofs and misfits everywhere, as if everyone in their audience was an idiot loser and could otherwise not identify with the characters. It definitely killed my interest in this kind of future.
- krapp 3y ago
  That future wasn't hard earned, it was handwaved into being (on the back of a world war against genetically engineered mutants and colonization by alien benefactors at that.) The real world is fundamentally cruel. Therein lies the challenge. Loveable goofs and misfits struggling against the odds to live up to their ideals are relatable, and that future can actually be aspired to. A future which requires humans to be paragons of virtue that have evolved beyond greed, vice and want, in a universe of infinite free energy and abundance, is unattainable. Neither human nature nor the laws of physics can bend that far. Also the new Star Trek series are incredibly popular, even among many fans of old Trek, many of whom seem to be able to reconcile it with the franchise's espoused values. I guess it doesn't work for you, but you seem to be in a minority among the fanbase in that regard.

srackey 3y ago

It’s not just a sci-fi, it’s all books. And movies. and TV. and theater. And… The media landscape is a lot more competitive. Vastly so. Of course, with the internet, video games, social media, older forms of entertainment will lose market share.

Veuxdo 3y ago

I find that more often than not, when I pick up a sci-fi novel, it turns out to just be a detective novel innn spaaaaace

ramesh31 3y ago
> I find that more often than not, when I pick up a sci-fi novel, it turns out to just be a detective novel innn spaaaaace Detective novels in space can still be good, and much better than the current crop of Hollywood garbage. I'm still quite bitter about what Amazon did to The Expanse. First legit sci-fi we get in years, and they devolved it into "muscle bound hero shoots aliens with laser gun" within one season of acquiring it from SyFy.
- throwway120385 3y ago
  To be clear, we're talking about Roberta Draper here right?
  - ramesh31 3y ago
    Just every character of the main crew in general. The SyFy seasons were very Firefly-esque; regular people doing their best to get by and fulfill their own personal goals. Then all of the sudden it's just "OK, we're all space marines on an epic mission to save the galaxy now".
    - throwway120385 3y ago
      It's kinda how the books went too. Nemesis Games and so on were very much about the personal war between Holden and a certain other person.
- StevePerkins 3y ago
  Have you actually read the books? That TV series was one of the most true to its adapted source material. Amazon didn't pivot from a detective story to an action story. Abraham and Franck (aka James S.A. Corey), the authors, did. After the arc from the first trilogy of books wrapped up.

pcthrowaway 3y ago

Honestly, I think all the dystopian sci-fi is hitting too close to home for people lately. It's intriguing and thrilling when it's some far-off distant future that seems like a thought experiment. It's depressing when it reads like the natural conclusion of the events that are unfolding in the current day

t888 3y ago
Also worth noting that dystopian sci-fi isn't really a thought experiment. It's just a boring formula these days.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >It's just a boring formula these days Kind of like news and social media rage baiting the world into self destruction? I mean humankind has created immensely powerful technology, and we use it to show ads to each other. Why shouldn't we be depressed in general about this?
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Well, I'd say that's the problem with sci-fi. We don't know how to use the tech we already have, so there's no point in dreaming with more. It's a bit like a billionaire dreaming about winning the lottery.
  - t888 3y ago
    > Kind of like news and social media rage baiting the world into self destruction? Exactly like this. I almost mentioned it. It's cheaper to sell fear than hope.

sybercecurity 3y ago

If this means it's also the end of the YA "future-dystopia-only-the-teen-chosen-one-can-end" genre, maybe there is a silver lining. There is only so much dystopian stories to tell before they all run together. The market is saturated. I think the negative portrayal of science in the popular press has something to do with it. Plus the declining science literacy in general. It makes non-dystopian sci-fi difficult to relate to and seem too fantastic.

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redavni 3y ago
Agreed. The bookshelves have been full of terrible sci-fi for over a decade now. I have given up on the book sellers and the awards (Hugo, Nebula etc). I do read sci-fi almost every day though still. Almost all of it from Kindle Unlimited. This article could probably be summarized as "People don't read anymore".
busseio 3y ago
Many YA readers also just lived through a global pandemic. Changes the expectations around "fiction", perhaps.

thorum 3y ago

The article’s premise is based on a linked Washington Post survey that shows 12% of readers read scifi in the last year, fantasy 15%, and romance 11%. This is not compelling evidence that scifi is unpopular. Perhaps people are just more diversified in their reading habits now across the board. It would be nice to see some more in-depth data showing trends across time before we leap to the conclusions this article does.

idoubtit 3y ago
This is too restrictive. The article claims 3 facts are the proof that the genre is ill: (1) 12% of US readers read sci-fi in the last year, (2) current sci-fi best sellers are old books or not really sci-fi, and (3) in the 80s, SF novels were sometimes best sellers. I agree with you that the first fact is a dubious proof. Unfortunately, the others aren't better. The 2013 list of sf best-sellers (the oldest list in the wayback machine from the same source as the article) also contained old books. For instance "Dune" is a best-seller both in 2013 and 2023. And some books were heroic fantasy, not SF, e.g. "Sword Art Online". For the last claim, I could only find 4 SF novels that match the article's claim, out of the 100 of the decade. 3 were related to movies, and 1 to a TV star (Carl Sagan). In the 2010s, there were one novel related to a movie and another SF book. Hardly conclusive. A striking tendency in the recent years is that many of the best-sellers are children books. Young adult novels are also more present. I suspect that, since fewer people read novels, books are very often a gift, something one does not read but buys for others. And for children and teenagers, there's obviously the innuendo that reading books is good for their education.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  people only enjoy reading something when it’s written several levels below their actual highest obtained reading level. So anything that goes beyond a 6th grade reading level is going to have an exponentially smaller potential customer base.

colechristensen 3y ago

I think it was in Skyfall where Q says to 007 "We don't do that kind of thing any more" ... because it wasn't really possible for the writers to come up with exciting tech gadgets. It was just entirely believable that there was already an app for anything they could think of. We have jetpacks, flying cars are going to show up literally in a year or two, Internet comes from space, "AI robot vacuum" is an entirely mundane product, we've got government investigations of robot cars running people over... what kind of thing could a sci-fi writer imagine that you couldn't see a startup selling in a couple of years? Science fiction is hard to do now.

BobaFloutist 3y ago
Sorry, we have jetpacks? I don't have one!
- colechristensen 3y ago
  Yup, apparently they're doing races in Dubai now? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn5W19sdyf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn5W19sdyf4 Lots of videos of military applications, etc.
- gwill 3y ago
  https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkazgy/peru-aliens-illegal-miners-with-jetpacks https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkazgy/peru-aliens-illegal-m...
throwway120385 3y ago
Maybe we don't dream as much as we used to.
- pixl97 3y ago
  That or most of the things we thought were sci-fi are sci-fantasy. "Actually no, we can't rip open wormholes in space". This said, the converse may be true. "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must make sense". There is such a massively huge amount of fiction now that it's like being tossed into the middle of the Pacific without a raft. We're not looking for an escape from reality INTO technology. It's more likely we are looking for an escape from reality FROM technology.

brolumir 3y ago

[flagged]

acdha 3y ago
If you think that’s “hard left”, it suggests you might want to reconsider your media diet. Two of those are statements of fact and the last two are definitely left but not exactly that far out of the mainstream even in the United States.

yurytom 3y ago

Any recommendations for sci-fi books written recently? 3 body problem, anything else?

aardvark179 3y ago
Maybe look at something like the Locus list of 2023 books. SF is such a broad genre that you are better off finding reviewers or other sources who you can use to guess at what you might like.
kspacewalk2 3y ago
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I like so-called "hard sci-fi", where effort is made into thinking through the details and the sci-fi bit is not just a backdrop for a regular story, or a way to validate neuroses du jour. Both of these are definitely in my top-10 sci-fi books of all time.
- gwill 3y ago
  I'm an odd one and didn't enjoy Project Hail Mary. If you're like me I'd recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts
doctorwho42 3y ago
Children of time, the expanse series, project hail Mary, the Martian. Almost all of these were written within the last 10 years.
grujicd 3y ago
Dennis Taylor's "Bobiverse" series. Also Daniel Suarez's books - "Delta V" for the start. Devon Eriksen "Theft of fire" - this one is a bit raw and can offend some people. These books take into account recent developments and events so they don't sound anachronistic like some of sci-fi classics. Maybe they'll lose that appeal in few decades and will be harder to read for our grandchildren, but I do enjoy all the cultural references from my time.
- 3y ago

tomohawk 3y ago

It's disappearing because it caters to a very niche, elitist subset of society.

dabbledash 3y ago
Do you think it used to be more populist?
- tomohawk 3y ago
  You used to see sci-fi paperbacks in the hands of people of all walks of life. Lit majors used to look down on it because it was not high falutin enough. Sci-fi used to speak to things most people cared about. Then it went fringe. I and several people I know went from consuming all things sci-fi to alarm at how fringe it was getting, to just ignoring it.

DrBazza 3y ago

In the UK bookshops, helpfully put sci-fi books in the "Sci-Fi AND Fantasy" section. Because, of course, people that want to read about aliens and FTL want to wade through hundreds of vampire-werewolf-human-love-triangle books first.

MattPalmer1086 3y ago
That has always annoyed me too, glad I'm not the only one.

dageshi 3y ago

I couldn't find anything I enjoyed in scifi and ended up moving to fantasy instead. The number of well supported niches in fantasy is ever growing, some with business models that cut out traditional publishers altogether.

bamboozled 3y ago

It’s because we made it to the future, we are here.

lkrubner 3y ago

I think most people continue to have a primitive association between prosperity and "the Mandate of Heaven." If something is good, it leads to economic growth, and this reflects that the gods are happy about that thing. Of course, I'm exaggerating slightly, but it is almost certain that some people do engage in a certain amount of guilt-by-association during bad times, versus a happier praise-by-association during good times. See this FRED chart, which shows real median family income in the USA: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/ Family income hits a peak in 1999 and then is stagnant or declining for the next 15 years, hitting a low point in 2014. It does not recover till 2018. And this is certainly one of the biggest shocks about the Internet: that it did not lead to prosperity. I'm old enough to remember the optimism and confidence of the late 1990s, we were all certain that the Internet was about to usher in the biggest economic boom in human history. Exactly the opposite happened: we experienced 19 years of stagnation of family income, the longest stretch in the history of the USA. So, we've all learned some things, and some of the things we learned have been humbling. Deindustrialization was a bigger deal than we realized, and the cyber economy was a smaller deal than we realized, and competition from China was a bigger deal than we realized. Between 1870 and 1970 the dramatic advance of science and technology contributed to rapidly rising standards of living. And it was fascinating to speculate about where such trends would go in the future. And that fascination expressed itself in part through science-fiction. But what kind of science-fiction would appeal today? We've already been saturated by dystopian science-fiction, how much darker should it get? Would people necessarily be interested in a bleak science-fiction that suggests everything is going to get worse and worse forever? I suspect real-life trends have to resume an upward march of progress before the public is again intrigued by this kind of speculative fiction.

RaoulP 3y ago

From what I've heard, sci-fi is popular in China nowadays. I read a remark somewhere, maybe on HN, that a nation's output of sci-fi seems to correlate with whether or not they are in a boom. Does this ring true to you guys? I'm not deeply into sci-fi (I wish I read more) but I think it could be true. America had their famous boom after WWII of course, and the Chinese have had every reason to be optimistic for the past decades. I also wonder if there's a correlation with output of historical fiction. Reaching back into the past.

niceice 3y ago

If you're looking for something non-dsytopian, John Carmack had a recommendation recently https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1757428929088872801 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1757428929088872801 > Just finished Theft of Fire by @Devon_Eriksen_, and it was a great read — hard SF by a retired engineer. If his About page resonates at all, you will probably enjoy it: https://devoneriksen.com/about https://devoneriksen.com/about

readthenotes1 3y ago

"The golden age of science fiction is 14." If it's 30 year old people reading, sci fi lost its audience. And probably so: mistb14 year olds would rather play a phone/mmo than read

StevePerkins 3y ago

This article seems to stem from a desire to dunk on "evil Silicon Valley robber barons" more than anything else. As others have pointed out here, the premise is based on a linked Washington Post survey that doesn't even really suggest that sci-fi is unpopular (at least no less popular than other "genre" fiction). Also, cyberpunk and other "near-future capitalism-dystopia" stories are only a subset of science fiction. Honestly, I think we're still working through the psychic trauma of Donald Trump's 2016 victory over Clinton. The literary class was SO caught off guard and stunned by that unexpected outcome, that it lost its mind and has yet to recover. I don't remember "Silicon Valley" being used as a scare phrase, or regarded all that negatively, prior to 2016. But immediately afterward, stunned people desperate for explanation latched onto whatever theories they could find. We ended up with Clinton losing "because Russia posted on Facebook too much", and overnight Silicon Valley became a bugbear. Then Elon messed with the rage echo chamber on Twitter, and immediately went from "pot-smoking goofball troll" to robber baron and devil incarnate. In other words, the sort of people who write articles about books are feeling really down on social media companies and tech entrepreneurs these days. And transfer those feelings onto sci-fi, because they're not really into sci-fi themselves anyway, and therefore see all that as one and the same.

thangalin 3y ago

I've been working on a hard sci-fi novel for the last seven years or so. During that time, I developed a cross-platform plain text Markdown editor (https://keenwrite.com/ https://keenwrite.com/) to help me write the novel. I could use some alpha readers. If interested, see my profile for details and contact.

wetpaws 3y ago

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pokerface_86 3y ago

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jacknews 3y ago

I think social media and so on has caused a bit of a shift of focus to 'inner space'. Older sci-fi especially seems to often just be 20th century society with teleporters, or the united nations, at galactic level, and so on. But we are now living in a sci-fi era, where it's clear the real issues are around culture itself, and only a small percentage of sci-fi deals with that, and often not well. Sci-fi purports to reflect our current society and illuminate aspects of possible societies, but I'd say in some ways it has been overtaken by reality. Sure we can't FTL to Vega minor, or whatever. But if we could, should we? Who should get to go anyway? What would they do there? What are the implications for the rest of society? What about if they have children? Etc, etc.