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Science fiction, and related or subgenres like sci-fantasy and sci-horror is just much better these days than literary fiction. The literary snobs won't admit
by photochemsyn 1y ago
Science fiction, and related or subgenres like sci-fantasy and sci-horror is just much better these days than literary fiction. The literary snobs won't admit that One Hundred Years of Solitude (which I read years ago and liked) could have been a scifi novel placed not in historical south/central america but instead on a set of planets orbiting a star 100 light years from here. If it had, they wouldn't consider it 'real literature'.
Science fiction is more fun to read, and often more creative - authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems they like, and then the question is whether their world-building skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies.
Yes, people are still reading - but they're reading Adrian Tchaikovsky, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Susanna Clarke and host of others who aren't limited to scenes of 'historical realism' (which to be honest are often distorted pictures of history that were socially acceptable to the publishing houses of their day).
You can still read the classics - Conrad is my favorite late 19th/early 20tth century author - but Lovecraft is just as worth reading.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y ago[dead]
- gherkinnn 1y agoTurning a personal preference (I like sci-fi) in to a universal statement (sci-fi is more fun to read) is so unbecoming.
- lmm 1y agoAnd yet we somehow excuse it when the fans of literary fiction do it.
- com2kid 1y ago99% of science fiction settings are historical fiction but now In Space(tm). I'm not saying that is a bad thing, and some fiction explores forms of government that haven't been tried on earth, and also explores systems of government and commerce that may need to happen on a post scarcity society. That is all good, and arguably those explorations need to happen, but still most sci-fi is just some portion of earth society thrown into space. (Banks explores alternatives, but arguably most Gibson doesn't, though I haven't read anything by him in a decade or more so they may have changed). This is frequently useful as it allows us to examine our existing biased from an outside view. I am definitely less racist/bigoted for having read science fiction. As a final point, it has been noted that a lot of sci-fi has an undertone of "wow isn't this benevolent monarchy great!" Which is rather disturbing if you think about the implications too much.
- schwartzworld 1y ago99% is far overstating it. SF is a wide genre with pretty much every other genre inside it. At this point it’s infiltrated popular culture; just think how many movies and shows are not billed as SF but contain SF ideas or settings.
- jay_kyburz 1y agoI hate when my Science Fiction doesn't have any Science.
- com2kid 1y agoEh, popular sci-fi is zero sci. Star Trek makes 0 effort to explore the impacts of its technology on people. Some good books have been writing exploring what post scarcity means, but ST in general does nothing with the premise except make tea. The novels that do explore a world like what ST posits end up going off the rails very quickly. Fun reads, people who live for eternity spend time terra forming planets (why not) cloning themselves into endless bodies and exploring the universe, or just becoming something not human at all. ST still has people dying, never mind that immortality would be trivial to accomplish with that science level. But that isn't the point of Star Trek.
- rsynnott 1y ago> Some good books have been writing exploring what post scarcity means, but ST in general does nothing with the premise except make tea. The economics of Star Trek are particularly incoherent; it's not even really clear that it _is_ post-scarcity. Really you only have Picard's word for that, and there's a lot of indication to the contrary. Pet theory: the Star Trek tv shows are in-universe propaganda made by the Federation, which is a military dictatorship. They should be taken about as seriously as Stalin-era Soviet propaganda, on economic matters.
- com2kid 1y agoI'm of the belief that the TV and movie sci-fi are a completely different genre than book sci-fi. There are occasional faithful adaptations, but none of the far out stuff ever gets adapted. But even discarding cinema (Star Wars famously being a samurai movie set in space), most sci-fi books written after the golden age, are focused on societal changes and people. Stories are metaphors for our world. That is fine, fiction that cannot be related to rarely gets read. Bobiverse is a nerd's power trip fantasy. 90% of what Heinlein wrote is just "external observations on sociey". Even Greg Egan, who writes super hard sci-fi (his books have footnotes linked to actual science papers!) has his novels largely focus around societies and people (or aliens that are easily related to!) It has honestly been 80 or so years since science fiction was mostly "here are a few poorly fleshed out people, and some really damn good science!" I've read a lot of those stories, they are cool and I kind of miss them, but honestly almost every major plot point possible was already thought up by the boards of scientists turned sci-fi authors of the 1930s through 50s. An occasional new story of that type makes its way out now and then (some of the SCP stories are actually this in a very pure form), but IMHO that genre of pure science writing with minimal focus on people or society is 99.9% dead.
- exmadscientist 1y agoPart of it, I think, is that genre fiction simply has more tools available. That lets an author do their thing a lot easier, and in the hands of a master, is how you get masterworks. (I decided to check The Left Hand of Darkness off my list last week. Its introduction hits intellectually heavier than the last three books I've read put together. The introduction. And it's about five pages long.) Of course, 90% of genre fiction is crap. (Bare minimum, I'll not argue with anyone who wants to argue for more.) But we know that. There's enough of it that I can find something interesting to read. I can't say the same for the last 20 years of literary, non-genre works. (I'll take pointers, though.)
- amacbride 1y agoA well-known observation! “Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating ‘ninety percent of everything is crap’.”
- libraryofbabel 1y agoOh boy, Left Hand of Darkness is a good book. And I always tell people to not skip the introduction, because it is brilliant. “Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.” I get the feeling Ursula Le Guin could have been a pretty successful realist “literary” writer if she’d chosen to. I am grateful that she chose genre instead.
- 7thaccount 1y agoI love that first chapter where the main character meets a politician and says something like "I'd seen his type before, was confident I'd see it again, and would probably see it in hell". I must have reread that line 10x.
- nottorp 1y agoOne Hundred Years of Solitude is "magical realism" :) No, you can't say it has fantasy elements. Then it wouldn't be culture. Marquez is great btw. Blame the critics.
- hotmeals 1y agoEh, I think there's a difference that make both terms useful. Fiction set strictly in the real world with mysterious yet mundane magical/supernatural elements, versus fiction in a fantastical world or a "real world" where the existence of magic™ must be extensively explained. I think the whole "all fantasy/sci-fi is slop" wasn't that big of a thing in LATAM, so the term isn't some euphemism for making it palatable to elitists. I also disagree with GP, a lot of what makes One Hundred Years of Solitude good comes from the Colombian setting and it's cultural context. True, it wouldn't be impossible to translate that to a alien planet, Mars isn't fully Mars The Martian Chronicles after all.
- nottorp 1y ago> versus fiction in a fantastical world or a "real world" where the existence of magic™ must be extensively explained. Well now if we're drifting, I don't consider "fantasy" has to explain everything like it were an AD&D manual. Take Glen Cook's Black Company series where magic just happens without explanation. Compare with something like Brandon Sanderson who describes "magic systems" in great detail always. I find the former enticing and the latter boring. Lord of the Rings didn't explain anything either.
- hotmeals 1y agoSorry, I meant that fantasy usually is in a unrelated-to-our-own fantastical world or it's in the real world (e.g urban fantasy), but the fact that magic exists and the reader "didn't know" about it must be explained (e.g Harry Potter, Dresden Files).
- Dylan16807 1y agoWhat's the alternative to not explaining here? Is it making the magic subtle/weak/uncommon enough that the answer is "you didn't notice, and this is plausible to claim"? If the magic is blatant enough and there's no explanation, the story becomes even less attached to reality than "there's a lot of magic but it's deliberately kept hidden".
- vintermann 1y agoYeah, I can't for the life of me see why Regency/Victorian fiction or US civil war fiction wouldn't be "genre".
- troupo 1y ago> authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems they like, and then the question is whether their world-building skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies. To do that authors need to very well versed in the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, and ancient China, and moden Europe, and... Most modern authors couldn't be bothered to do even basic research. Or can't afford to, because the pay is shit, and the deadlines are tight, and you have to produce a trilogy a year just to survive. I've read a lot of scifi over the past few years. Most books are bad rehashes of existing ideas written in an extremely poor language (nouns and verbs with complete lack of adjectives and adverbs, poor and nonexistent metaphors, middle-school-level sentence structure etc.) Fantasy books fare much better because they can easily borrow and steal "sociopolitical realities" and transfer them to pages wholesale.
- 7thaccount 1y agoWhat sci-fi books are you reading with a "complete lack of adjectives, non-existent metaphors, and middle-school sentence structure"?
- troupo 1y agoHumanity's Fire by Michael Cobley Lightspeed Trilogy by Ken MacLeod Revenger by Alastair Reynolds (the first book started off quite well, but the other two became a boring slog) Rise of the Jain by Neal Asher. This one is just so egregiously bad, I don't know how I managed to finish. If I ever have to read another "erstwhile ship" I'll barf. etc. etc. Since I'm reading a lot of sci fi, I've ran out of top 1% or so of books an authors pretty quickly. Now I feel like I'm running out of middle-of-the-road authors, too. --- Edit. I'll add that most sci fi is incapable of even writing characters that have more distinction than "she's a woman, he's a man". They all talk and behave the same.
- 7thaccount 1y agoI liked reading "this is how you lose the time war" recently if you want something that is essentially sci-fi themed poetry. If you haven't already read it, maybe that'll be a fun break.
- easterncalculus 1y agoIt's comments like this that remind me I'm on HN. Let's be honest for a minute - take a sci-fi book of the shelf, any of them, current (Weir, Pierce Brown, etc) or classic (Asimov, PKD, etc). Almost always, you will find paper-thin characters and themes, written with the crutch of 'worldbuilding'. Here's the lineup - a downtrodden nerd, usually the protagonist, some stereotypical caricature of a woman, like a nagging wife, or ditz, or hag. A few archetypes for a boss, and some equally stereotypical villain. You won't find a Karamazov in sci-fi. This is the problem with sci-fi in a nutshell, the characters fall flat in even the most seminal works. They are nor memorable at all and somewhere between uninspired and just downright bad. It's the status quo. Sci-fi and fantasy fans talk about worldbuilding like it is some esoteric art. In the end worldbuilding is literally just plot, and it's well understood that plot is not the most important part of literature, not compared to deeper themes and characters. Is that because of "literary snobs"? No, it's because when you come back to a book in 20, 50, or 200 years you don't remember whether the protagonist's third neural implant was made of vibranium or aluminum, you remember how that book tackled incredible subject matter with layered characters, and pushed the limits of language in a way only possible in prose. When's the last time you heard of a sci-fi author that wrote like Woolf, or Joyce? Never. Even in more literary sci-fi, for example Dune, the appeal is because it's basically just a medieval story transplanted into space. The focus is on politics and the human experience, not "what if storms lasted longer". It's so obvious that sci-fi stories are generally better suited to the medium of film, they can capture the unreality in a more believable way, visually, and take less advantage of the ambiguity of text. It's not like sci-fi novels are pushing boundaries in prose anyways. It's much more pretentious to say they are by calling them equally "literary" than to just accept that novels which exemplify the medium are instead.
- Karrot_Kream 1y agoGreat comment. Even lots of sci-fi shows and movies suffers from the "talking heads" trope you describe, where a paper thin character mouths dialogue that makes no character sense in order to push the plot forward or to dump a ton of lore onto the watcher/reader to introduce the world. The first few Asimov Foundation novels were notorious for talking heads.
- 1y ago
- a_bonobo 1y agoA related (counter?) point - OP's article talks about the demise of literary magazines. I feel like SF magazines have the same problem? Ut looks like all the SF magazines are on the downward slope, to quote Wikipedia: >[Asimov's] Circulation declined steadily over the life of the magazine and as of 2020 it was below 20,000, more than half of that coming from online subscriptions. If people would still read SF, why do these magazines fail just like the literary magazines?
- rsynnott 1y agoI think the magazine thing is just _wrong_, tbh; serialisation in magazines, as means of distributing novels, is dead. As you say, sci-fi, which used to be particularly heavily dependent on serialisation, has survived this. Litfic's problems lie elsewhere.
- a_bonobo 1y agoI think I agree with you: in the age of the internet, where you can 'sample' SF fiction on every corner, you may not need a middle-man (the SF magazine) going around collating those samples for you. You can find them on your own now! for free!
- rsynnott 1y agoEven before the internet, the magazine serial was dying, tho; its heyday was probably the 60s or so.
- rsynnott 1y agoHonestly I think that some sci-fi has been somewhat accepted at this point; people write serious analyses of sci-fi these days, and you no longer really see sci-fi pretending not to be sci-fi (notably, Atwood did this with Handmaid's Tale, and _at the time_ you can see where she was coming from, because contemporary sci-fi was mostly pretty narrowly trope-bound...)