14 ms·

Where did all the starships go?

226 points by speckx 9mo ago

anovikov 9mo ago
Quite naturally - 1960s were the time when we discovered that Solar System is a pretty barren place. Mariner IV sent back pictures of craters on Mars - proving it couldn't have an atmosphere dense enough for people. Venera series probes proved at about same time that Venus surface was unsurvivable for anything we could recognise as "life". Stars are too far away. That was about it. Many people don't get the origins of enthusiasm of first years of the space era, it wasn't because of politics, it was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now. And almost total surety of finding at least some form of complex, multicellular life. Disappointment when the real data came in, was massive. That's why space program went nowhere after Apollo, becoming a politicised clown show - by the time Apollo 11 landed, it was abundantly clear there wasn't much to see or do in the Solar System.
- ahazred8ta 9mo ago
  In 1965, Clarke, Asimov, and other science writers were at NASA watching the first images appear. "Craters. Duh, it's right next to the asteroid belt, of course it has craters. Not that any of us thought of it beforehand..."
  - eesmith 9mo ago
    Do you have a reference for that account? I hadn't heard it before, and it doesn't sounds quite right. They certainly knew the Earth and Moon had craters, so proximity to the asteroid belt isn't required. I suspect they thought the atmosphere on Mars was thicker and like Earth, where the high rate of erosion erases evidence. Digging around through archive.org I found https://archive.org/details/sim_popular-astronomy_1944-05_52_5/mode/2up?q=%22martian+crater%22 https://archive.org/details/sim_popular-astronomy_1944-05_52... from Popular Astronomy 1944 > The following extracts are taken from pp. 49 and 50: > “The recent dominance of the meteoritic impact theory of crater origin makes timely a review of the oases-crater question of Mars. In this treatise, these conclusions have been pointed out: > “I, Meteorite craters are known on the Earth and Moon; therefore, craters exist on Mars. > “2. The circular oases on Mars are the size, shape, and number of comparable lunar craters. > “3. Crater depressions form a natural reservoir, accounting for the intense vegetation in the Martian oases, > “4. The random distribution of crater oases is apparent, indicating that the canal system was adapted to this haphazard arrangement. The reviewer of the above points out > “Why didn’t someone think of the crater theory sooner? The answer is simple. Someone did. Back in 1892, at Arequipa, Peru, W. H. Pickering not only discovered the small black spots on Mars, but he also recognized their similarity to the circlets on the Moon. Because lunar craters were then believed to be volcanic, Pickering may be forgiven for implying that the Martian craterets also were of volcanic origin. We now know these crater oases were not real. My point is only that some people proposed meteoric craters on the Moon before the 1960s. BTW, the SF of the pre-Mariner era does have volcanic craters on Mars, like https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v15n01_1941-01_cape1736/page/n49/mode/2up?q=crater https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v15n01_1941-01_c... and https://archive.org/details/Startling_Stories_v07n03_1942-05_urf-sas/page/n71/mode/2up?q=%22crater%22 https://archive.org/details/Startling_Stories_v07n03_1942-05... . I also found https://archive.org/details/exploringmars0000rich/page/150/mode/2up?q=craters https://archive.org/details/exploringmars0000rich/page/150/m... saying in 1954 "no irregularities due to shadows have ever been observed along the terminator—the line dividing daylight from dark—such as would be produced by Martian craters." The author was an American astronomer and also a SF writer in the 1950s. By this we know astronomers were already considering there might be craters on Mars as there are on the Moon.
- mrec 9mo ago
  Yup. One early Arthur C Clarke story had plants growing natively on the Moon.
- Animats 9mo ago
  It was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now. Yes. Von Braun wrote an otherwise realistic novel in which earth's explorers find intelligent life on Mars.[1] Heinlein wrote realistically of native intelligent life on Mars and Venus, with far more benign environments then they actually have. But once probes got there, we got to see how bleak they are. There's a little hope for extrasolar planets, now that we can detect some of them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
weregiraffe 9mo ago
Where did all the starships go, Long time passing...
thomasguide 9mo ago
FYI, this is about the titles of these books, not the textual content of the books themselves. The implication of the article is that sci-fi is losing relative standing to fantasy, but another interpretation is that science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.
- tialaramex 9mo ago
  Yeah, I think at most very literal titles would be a stylistic phase. Even "The Martian" is more a play on words than just a literal title for what it's about. Taking favourite novels which are within arm's reach: Sure "Rainbows End" is Science Fiction which doesn't involve space travel etc. but "Incandescence" is also SF but that's deeply about space travel. Banks' "Whit" and "Surface Detail" are both sat here. One of those is set in a lightly fictionalized Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to several of the most significant space battles of her era. But like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which? Now, Banks wasn't a hard SF writer. Unlike say Egan's "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.
  - rybosworld 9mo ago
    A bit of an off-topic observation: Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.
    - Ekaros 9mo ago
      As cynic I would imagine eventual collapse to be more likely. Probably slow degradation back to some sort of semi-advanced agricultural society. Say kinda post-apocalyptic world(without proper apocalypse) with larger societal structures still existing. Slow degradation of industrial output until some balance level is reached. Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or most selling one.
wiredfool 9mo ago
Fantasy is certainly big, but it’s not like there isn’t space sf or space opera out there. Authors in my library who’ve released space sf stuff in the last few years — Anne Leckie, Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, John Scalzi, Martha Wells, James Corey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal. To be fair, some of them get into philosophy or fantasy, or even romance. But the settings are SF.
- Freak_NL 9mo ago
  And you're not even getting into Baen and Tor books territory, where the hard military scifi lives (David Weber et al). (Scalzi is always fun.)
- mygrant 9mo ago
  Maybe 50% of my audiobook listening is the Expeditionary Force series by Craig Alanson. So dumb, so much fun, and all spaceships.
  - Maultasche 9mo ago
    Yeah, that's a good one. "Dumb and fun" is a good description. Craig Alanson also wrote a fantasy trilogy a while back that proved much better than I was expecting. It started off as what appeared to be an uninteresting juvenile fantasy book, but quickly got better and darker. I very much enjoyed reading those.
delichon 9mo ago
The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sideways into fantasy gained the popularity lost by escapes into the future. I predict a correlation between space-based scifi sales and polls on whether the country is heading in the right direction.
- Den_VR 9mo ago
  I still find myself quite taken by some sci-fi writing. Iain M Banks works, Rajaniemi, and Joan Slonczewski. The “problem” is that they are not popular the way Harry Potter or isekai are.
  - jrmg 9mo ago
    I’m also a fan of Banks - but he’s hardly current. He died thirteen years ago.
- chasil 9mo ago
  Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do not yet have the technology for a complete survey of nearby habitable planets. It is not an encouraging line of thought.
  - lotsofpulp 9mo ago
    > we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible Would any of the stories about the characters’ relationships with people not traveling with them be entertaining given the effects of time dilation?
PaulHoule 9mo ago
Anime went from science-fiction dominated in the 1980s (Gundam) to fantasy-dominated (Friern) today. The strange thing about fantasy was it lived under the shadow of Tolkien and Lewis which I think suppressed it for half a century.
- JuniperMesos 9mo ago
  This is way too reductive; there was plenty of fantasy anime in the 80s, and they're still making Gundam today, among other sci-fi shows.
doctorhandshake 9mo ago
My theory about this aligns with my theory about the disappearance of ‘futurists’ from the popular conversation - we’re living in science fiction. The future is arriving every day. It no longer feels necessary to speculate about a changed world - you need only look out the door. I say this as someone that still loves (and writes a little) speculative fiction. Just a guess as to what’s happening.
- eesmith 9mo ago
  The 20th century was a period of wild change. Someone born before the first powered airplane flight in their lifetime could have flown on a jet plane to Europe and watched the first moon landing live on TV. Vaccines put an end to endemic diseases which killed so many children every year. The birth control pill catalyzed the sexual revolution. We had a treatment for diabetes, which was once a death sentence. The 1950s and onward saw huge changes in how businesses are organized due to computerization. In the US, cheap automobiles, cheap gas, the federal highway system, and subsidies transformed how most people live, including white flight into suburbia. Plastic was a wonder material. Materials like nylon and polyester transformed the clothing industry.
- esafak 9mo ago
  Futurist Michio Kaku once gave a talk at my company five years ago and though I forgot the details, I remember the audience found his vision quite dystopian.
- TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
  9/11 was the turning point. We'd been fed a future "in the year 2000." When we got there, that future turned into a nostalgic vision of the past. It's still possible to imagine new bright futures, but that kind of imagination is very much against a cultural tide that's fervently regressive and nostalgic.
- chasil 9mo ago
  The original "futurists" were Italian, eventually under Mussolini. That is a loaded term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_architecture
NoboruWataya 9mo ago
The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related. I wonder if the trend is space-specific or if other sci-fi topics suffered the same fate (like robots, computers, technology, etc). It does seem to me like society generally became less interested in space exploration after the moon landing (though I wasn't around then so that is really just what I gather from watching/reading things about western society in the latter half of the 20th century). On the other hand, fantasy includes vampires and werewolves. I guess you could call them fantasy but to me they are quite a different niche to Tolkien. Traditionally vampires and werewolves would probably be considered horror rather than fantasy, though it's a bit more complicated now as Twilight is clearly not horror. I think the author's point stands regardless, as there has been a resurgence across all of those keywords, but I do think the reasons for the resurgence in magic and dragons aren't necessarily the same as the reasons for the resurgence in vampires and werewolves.
- masklinn 9mo ago
  > The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related. Worse, half are confined to the solar system.
Freak_NL 9mo ago
That Berlin bookstore (Otherland) also has great staff for recommendations. The resident scifi attendant was quite knowledgeable about original scifi written in German (as opposed to translated works). That's quite useful if your knowledge of the field is limited to the obvious Andreas Esbach (unsurpassed) and Perry Rodan (pass).
- pfdietz 9mo ago
  I enjoyed The Carpet Makers (which is available in English.) Sometimes translated works rub the wrong way because of cultural differences, but in that one the differences enhanced the experience.
jmclnx 9mo ago
I have been seeing the trend of Fantasy slowly taking over SF for a while, maybe as long as 30 years :( Real Science based SF seems to have disappeared completely, at least based upon the only Book Store left in my area, Barnes and Noble.
- flohofwoe 9mo ago
  > Barnes and Noble ...this might be the main problem (same with Thalia in Germany), those large book store chains are aggressively optimized for monetization, and that kicks off a death spiral of filling the available space with cheap industrially produced trash. The good stuff might still be there, but it's much harder to find, and you need to know where to look (same thing that happened to music basically).
  - Ekaros 9mo ago
    Not to forget being linked to main-stream publishers that have different editorial goals compared to era when these works were released. Not saying there were not biases back then. But now the biases are different and thus the published output is as well.
    - pfdietz 9mo ago
      There was also the "death of the mid-list" which cut out a lot of SF books. The Thor Power Tool decision in the US had a big effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commissioner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commiss... "The Thor decision caused publishers and booksellers to be much quicker to destroy stocks of poorly-selling books in order to realize a taxable loss. These books would previously have been kept in stock but written down to reflect the fact that not all of them were expected to sell." Today, I understand mass market paperbacks are dying.
pfdietz 9mo ago
A great deal of science fiction is just fantasy with spaceships. It uses technological tropes to seem like it isn't fantasy, but that's just surface gloss.
- flohofwoe 9mo ago
  Which is unfortunately true, but also just illustrates how far science-fiction has fallen - not sure when it started but I guess Star Wars played an important role to remove the 'science' from 'science-fiction'.
  - pfdietz 9mo ago
    It's been there since day one. What, you thought early era SF used accurate science? No, they used made-up rules based on whether they could tell a good story. Science fiction usually doesn't conform to how the world actually works in the same way pornography usually doesn't conform to the way sexual relationships work. They are both there to tell titillating stories, not describe reality.
    - krapp 9mo ago
      For instance: Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics aren't based on any practical science, they exist as a plot device for setting off mystery stories with robots and morality plays about hubris. And the reason robots have positronic brains is that positrons were recently discovered at the time, and it sounded cool. Yet people will swear Asimov is one of the hardest SF authors around. Sometimes you might get a SF author who's an expert in a particular field or has a specific hyperfixation, and that one aspect of their stories might be grounded somewhat in plausibility, but everything else turns out to be complete nonsense.
    - flohofwoe 9mo ago
      > What, you thought early era SF used accurate science? It depends on the author I guess. Stanislaw Lem for instance mostly separated his "silly-fiction universes" (e.g. the Ijon Tichy and 'robot fairytales' novels) from his "hard sci-fi" universes (for instance the Pilot Pirx novels) - and there it was mostly about the restrictions of space travel (where space travel is usually just plain old cargo hauling), Pirx never left the solar system because it simply wasn't possible during his lifetime (part of him eventually did - maybe - in his last book 'Fiasco'), instead the Pirx novels were mostly occupied with typical 'space trucker' problems like oil leaks on his rocket boosters, wrestling with space harbour bureaucracy or the occasional humanoid robot going into a mode that could be described as 'mad' or 'depressed'.
fpsvogel 9mo ago
Fantasy appeals to a wider audience (see the "Romantasy" genre) and seems to overlap more with YA fiction so captures more young readers.
- Animats 9mo ago
  Yes. What's popular with teens varies over time, of course. At peak Twilight, the Barnes and Noble at Hillsdale Mall had seven bookcases of Teen Paranormal Romance. I mentioned this to one of the store Goths, and she told me that vampires were on the way out and the next thing was probably going to be zombies. The Monster Hunter thing had a brief moment. Then we had the survival period - Harry Potter overlapped the Hunger Games and Divergent eras, all of which produced too many spinoffs. This moved into the Game of Thrones spinoffs. Now, dragons seem to be out, except that Anne McCaffery is back on the shelves. The latest shift is driven by "booktok" on TikTok. I just saw teenage girls giggling over the new books in the Romance section, while avoiding the YA section. The Dark Romance subgenre is in, and now has its own shelf space. Hard SF? Other than the Expanse series, not much recently.
xtiansimon 9mo ago
That was fun. I recall an early editorial of the podcast Escaped Pod describing science fiction as a means to more directly engage with topics of the human condition by using the conceits of science fiction. _Have a difficult time discussing your relationship with your parents? Write a story about orphans raised by space aliens._ That sort of thing. Maybe something is going on with our human condition that science fiction is not as productive a foil as it once was? I don’t know. I’m not a fiction writer. But I can say that since I bought my second motorcycle (back on a moto after 20 years away) I am enjoying spaceships in my science fiction.
hdivider 9mo ago
Wait till the Chinese land on the Moon first in this new space race. There will be a Sputnik moment, massive additional investment, and this will inevitably impact sci-fi. Just like in the previous space race, we had to fall quite a bit behind first before we wake up -- and then, we go all-out. I also don't agree with the general dystopian or cynical view quite prevalent here on HN these days, frankly. It's always been so, but it seems to have gotten darker, such that I think a lot of old-timers like me pretty much avoid HN these days. It's not all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and out into the real world. Looking outward, rather than inward, can lead to the kind of desire for discovery and progress which underpinned the Apollo era. The world out there is in extreme disarray too -- but to an optimist, it presents opportunity to do good.
- paulryanrogers 9mo ago
  > It's not all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and out into the real world. Real world seems to be getting bleaker, especially for the young ones coming up today.
HPsquared 9mo ago
Space Age, mid-50s to mid-70s.
metalman 9mo ago
Texas.
HPsquared 9mo ago
The succession is steampunk, dieselpunk (which includes art deco, internal combustion), then atompunk (which includes atomic energy, apocalyptic possibilities, space, sci-fi, martians etc), then I dunno, regular punk (age of mass single-stream media), then our current era of cyberpunk.
gostsamo 9mo ago
Scifi as a space based genre failed due to the end of the space race. The generation that grew in the post WWII era aged and died. The lack of big scientific breakthroughs for the last fifty years added to the lack of new dreams. The future is here, just it's not exciting. For the last few decades the culturally significant fiction has been in anime and manga. Lots of it is trash, but lots of it captures the ya themes of friendship and adventure. Some of it captured better the ideas of the cyber age, I suppose. If one explores those genres with a bit of background, you can see how they have been inspired by the traditional sf works, but repackaged them for new audiences without the introspection and conventions of yesterday. I'm not sure if it is all bad. Definitely, science is not an aspiration any more and those works lack the grounding hard scifi taught us. On the other hand, there is still romanticism in those stories and they teach kids to dream for the impossible. I choose to believe that this is still something to base some optimism on.
Dove 9mo ago
In the 1950s, and perhaps to some degree in the 1990s, it seemed possible to believe technology was limitless and miraculous and conducive to human thriving. As a result, breathlessly hopeful and exciting stories about the wonders of the future made sense. It is hard to feel that way in the 2020s. Technology seems oversold, scammish, dystopian, inhuman. Everything is slop and skinner boxes. It impoverishes rather than enriches, and it seems to be getting worse. It is easy to feel that the Amish, nay perhaps even the medievals, have a point. Worse, the science fiction oriented around starships took its cues from our experience of the naval - journeys of days or weeks would take you to alien places teeming with new and interesting and enriching life. Foods you couldn't eat anywhere else. People you couldn't meet at home. But now the globe seems smaller, explored, and conquered. Those faraway goods are easily shipped to your door, and those faraway people show up in your comments section and they're just people. The excitement of the seas is no longer such a part of our outlook that reskinning it in fantasy speaks to us. Not only is the excitement of the seas greatly diminished, the more we have learned about the universe, the worse the naval analogy seems. The distant stars no longer seem like tropical islands, but rather hopelessly distant and inhospitable. In 1958, Heinlein wrote a wonderful short story about scout troops in the verdant jungles of Venus back when that was a reasonable expectation[1], but it seems like a silly thing to write now. https://xkcd.com/2202/ https://xkcd.com/2202/ seems to capture the current expectation well. Several decades ago it was easy to get excited about the march of scientific discovery and technological progress. But now we're asking why science seems to have slowed down so much, and new technology seems about as exciting as new mechanisms for dependence and dystopia. Atheism is weakening and religion is rising. The imagined global society of the UN that was reimagined at a larger scale as The Federation may have seemed like the way of the future for a few decades, but now that dream looks foolish and the globe is visibly fracturing. The classic science fiction trope that progress will better us as people, that leisure will lead to fitness, that access to information will make us wise scholars, that we will use the convenience of machines to free ourselves for the pursuit of virtue... it makes for an inspiring story. I had my suspicions about how true all of that was back before the internet. I am now very sure that Wall-E and Idiocracy are nearer to the mark. The human-like AIs of Star Wars' robots or Star Trek's androids or innumerable superintelligent computers from Asimov to Heinlein seem further away every year. AI is part of everyday life now, and our major concern is how to keep it from catastrophically failing at mundane research, not whether it should have voting rights or makes humans obsolete. Ambulatory human-like AI seems unlikely when data centers the size of small cities struggle with emdashes. The hope and promise of a generation of robot children and citizens seems as misguided as the forests of Venus. I could go on. We GOT a lot of the wonders science fiction predicted, or things so much more powerful that our most audacious futurists didn't dare to imagine them. And yet it doesn't feel like the promised land. Science fiction promised instant video conferences across the globe, but when we got it, it didn't look like all the world's best researchers collaborating on its hardest problems. It looked like all of the miscreants with their dick pics and the dreary business meetings and school lessons suddenly having access to your home. I don't mean to imply it's all bad, but the difference between imagination and reality has been stark on many fronts. I really think the truth is that in a thousand ways, the tropes of the genre no longer speak to the moment. [1] https://writingatlas.com/story/3984/robert-a-heinlein-a-tenderfoot-in-space/ https://writingatlas.com/story/3984/robert-a-heinlein-a-tend...
deadbabe 9mo ago
People didn’t travel as much back in those days. Visiting a foreign country or too might as well be like a trip to the moon. But now, we basically live in the climax of the jet age, we can be anywhere in the world within 24 hours. And there’s so much of the world to see and stories to discover, not really worth the bother to imagine space travel to far off distant empty worlds, which will inevitably be used to further extend capitalism and just live the same lives we live here on Earth, just on a different world. The lack of any other interesting extraterrestrial civilizations to interact with makes it all pretty pointless. Going very far into space is mostly for exploration as a sport, like cave diving or something.
buildsjets 9mo ago
It turned out that the aliens live in inner space, not outer space.
giorgioz 9mo ago
Some new sci-fi books among the stars: We are Bob Red rising Murderbot
- RustyRussell 9mo ago
  You're writing this from a dystopian future where punctuation is banned? :) For those like me who still require parsing assistance : - We are Bob - Red Rising - Murderbot
  - giorgioz 9mo ago
    Hehe when I write it I separated them by return \n but Hacker News strips the single new lines. It's not very WYSIWYG
ralfd 9mo ago
Because most men stopped reading and most women don’t care much about sci-fi . https://archive.is/I1QyW https://archive.is/I1QyW > Beyond the bookstore, much of the architecture of book discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber… #BookTok, the vast community on TikTok that has become a best-seller machine, is largely populated by women recommending books by other women, like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us.” In a sense this is just a regression to mean, normality, because the literary boys club of the 20th century was the exception: > In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by women for a female audience. Their output was considered “paltry entertainment,”
- TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
  Reading has become a strongly gendered lifestyle and supposed status marker. Most of the books are indeed paltry entertainment - soapy and saccharine romances, formulaically transgressive erotica, fantasies about unlimited witchy powers, and perfect book boyfriends - but it's still a huge market. Men moved to video games and chan culture. Which are a different kind of paltry entertainment. It's curious how there was a shift from male dominated niches, like Lovecraftian fantasy and heroic fantasy, through the imperial sci-fi peak in the 50s to 70s, through the Hollywood-influenced 80s, then into slow decline from the 90s onwards. With a few exceptions, a bold imagination became more of a liability than an asset. This is a culture which has no idea where it's going and would prefer not to get there.
- Evenjos 9mo ago
  Yeah. As a sci-fi author, I have strong opinions about this. Made an authortube video on the topic: https://youtu.be/THVpdcgTYrQ https://youtu.be/THVpdcgTYrQ But tl;dr: Gatekeepers in big/mainstream publishing have outsourced their slush-piles to underpaid interns, most of whom are young and ambitious women. They tend to like certain things. Also, big/mainstream publishing is chasing data trends, like all other big businesses, which leads to a staleness cycle where they only publish what worked in the last two years. They're afraid to take financial gambles on unproven ideas or new IP. The good sci-fi these days is mostly indie and mostly underground, IMO. You really have to dig for it. Personally, I find good stuff via Reddit r/powerprogression, but even there, you may have to dig to find gems that speak to you. I joke that I'm a male author and reader, even though I'm female. The first book of my epic series (which is fully published) is Majority: Torth Book 1.
LanceH 9mo ago
I'm of the opinion that the teen novel has stunted literature in general. As a kid beginning to read in the 70's I jumped from what were clearly kids books to Lord of the Rings (pure chance -- I liked the cover). There wasn't that watered down in between. It was a jump to real books with real consequences (spoilers: Boromir dies). I've witnessed the rise of the teen section and seen how kids -- who are reading less in general -- never leave it. It feels like the fantasy adventure lends itself a lot more to these teen novels and has a knock on effect into the mainstream. I for one could do without anther book about someone born to be a prince(ss) up against the evil realm who can't choose their way out of their romantic triangle. I'm not knocking anyone's choices. There are more books already than I'll ever read. But it should would be a blast to get another Dune out of nowhere.
- cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
  I would posit that the issue lies not with YA novels or fantasy in general, but with the continuously declining sense of agency, opportunity, and self-realization among teens and adults. There are deep-seated needs that reality can increasingly no longer meet, which results in rising dependency on simplistic escapism.
- watwut 9mo ago
  I remeber reading tons of junk and pulp as a teen decades ago. If anything, the teen section is more complex then pure hero fantasies and repetitive scary stories that used to make the bulk of reading. Yes, lord of the rings was popular before and now. But the stuff people read en masse was not lord of the rings and certainly not some kind of smart complex stuff. What used to be read a lot was literary equivalent of a sitcom or slash fantasy.
johngossman 9mo ago
I speculate that a lot of sci-fi reflects the cutting edge of science and technology at the time it is written. For well over a century a lot of that frontier was transportation: and we got "Around the World in 80 Days" and "20000 Leagues under the Sea" and then a lot of books about space. We also got "Canticle for Leibowitz" and other post-apocalyptic books out of the age when nuclear weapons and energy was top of mind. Then, in the 70s and 80s computer technology became the center of innovation and we got cyberpunk and a lot of sci-fi turned inward to virtual worlds and the like. Given we're in a new space age, maybe sci-fi will start to follow? I'm certainly seeing a new wave of AI centric fiction.
- danny_codes 9mo ago
  I don't see how anything substantive has changed vis-a-vis space. There are some hard sci-fi recently, like the Expanse, that tackle a more realistic space expansion. But fundamentally nothing has changed tech-wise in space technology since chemical rockets, at least not for people-sized space-endeavours.
- noosphr 9mo ago
  My favourite part of a Canticle for Leibowitz is the manual auto regressive model the old monk is using to recover damaged books. I remember reading the gpt2 paper and thinking hang on...
  - johngossman 9mo ago
    I just re-read Canticle after decades. It's startlingly well written, at least the first two parts. Head and shoulders above most 50s pulp. A masterpiece really. It was assigned reading in my high school. I wonder if anyone under 40 reads it anymore
bowsamic 9mo ago
No one thinks the future is in space anymore. We realised that there’s a lot wrong with us culturally and spiritually
dmix 9mo ago
I figure with Andy Weirs movies getting so big that there'd be an increase in scifi readship after the new movie comes out.
qwertyuiop_ 9mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV Set in "the near future" (the year 2018 in the first season), seaQuest DSV originally mixed high drama with realistic scientific fiction.
eschneider 9mo ago
They didn't go anywhere. Lots of excellent starship/space opera novels out there with more coming out each year. There's just lots there stuff too. :)
jmyeet 9mo ago
The popularity of a genre is deeply tied to the historical context of what's going on in the real world. In the 1950s and 1960s you obviously had the Space Race, which itself was a product of the Cold War. Some commments view this as optimism. I disagree. I view it as an expression of patriotism. I view this patriotism as a crutch in uncertain times. Another example of this is the rise of the superhero genre in the 21st century. Marven was skirting with bankruptcy in the 1990s. A perpetual Spiderman license was sold for a fraction of what it would today. And I think it's no coincidence that the superhero genre ascended post-9/11. I used to read a lot of fantasy but many years ago I pretty much switched almost entirely to sci-fi. For me the reason was because sci-fi asked questions. I mean there's also space opera and it scratches the same itch as fantasy (IMNHO) but my personal interest in sci-fi is more in the "what if" category. That's a very broad category that goes all the way from, say, the Iain M. Banks Culture series, which really poses the question of what an ultra-high tech post-scarcity civilization looks like to something like The Handmaid's Tale (yes, that's sci-fi). We've also had some superb sci-fi on the screen in recent years like Severance, Silo and The Expanse. For me, fantasy is a far more limited genre. Like I'm trying to read Brandon Sanderson recently and while he's a good writer, it's just not hooking me yet in the same way that, say, Revelation Space did. I think the last fantasy series to really hook me was A Song of Ice and Fire. The first three books are some of the finest books ever written. But as for the decline of starships, I think that the readership has evolved too. More vintage sci-fi simply projected the era of exploration and colonization onto space and it's become pretty clear how unrealistic that is because of the vast distances involved. You have to remember that popular media in the 1960s expected Moon bases and such in the not-too-distant future. Star Trek was really the last gasp of this and, interestingly, Star Trek is fundamentally socialist, which is noteworthy given that it originated in the Cold War. Star Wars on the other hand was a tale of the resistance to imperialism. George Lucas has said he modeled the resistance on the North Vietnamese. Cyberpunk came about in the 1980s (eg Neuromancer, Blade Runner) that had nothing to do with starships but they really reflected a societal pessimism. Cyberpunk is inherently xenophobic (ie because of fears of the Japanese). I wonder if the popularity of fantasy is fundamentally escapist and an expression of helplessness. Think about it: fantasy usually revolves around the outsized impact of individual actions, of a hero or heroine.
nephihaha 9mo ago
I've never really agreed with putting SF together with Fantasy, because they are slightly different genres. Some science fiction writers have used genuine science to underpin their writings, one of the more recent examples of that would be "the Martian". Fantasy doesn't need that kind of technical detail. It parallels other developments. There is an increasing scepticism around science, and a significant number of people do not believe in the Moon landing. The heroic age of space travel has been replaced by school teachers and guys busking in tin cans in near Earth orbit. It's become mundane and the most exciting things in space exploration are being done by probes not humans nowadays.
GregDavidson 9mo ago
Realistic Hard SF has to deal with Accelerating Change making technology vastly powerful yet still limited. The hardest thing to write about is cognitively enhanced humans or any other entities (AI, aliens, etc.) exceeding human cognitive limits. JW Campbell famously said it couldn't be done, but without that depictions of the future or wider universe fall flat. Vernor Vinge became the master of such SF and showed several ways to do it. I recommend everything he wrote! Good Hard SF requires an author who has a good grasp of science without that stifling their imagination. It's easy if you cheat but Science Fantasy is unreadable by the science literate folks who frequent HN. Good Hard SF is out there, with and without spaceships, but you'll have to hunt for it - and thanks for all the recommendations here!
- int_19h 9mo ago
  Speaking of hard SF with imagination, Hal Clement's "Mission of Gravity" is a good example.
indubioprorubik 9mo ago
We wont go to space in the forseabe future. The brink archievment we might pull off is longterm civilizational stability, in ressource scarce, chaotic environments. Basically a oldfolkshome where we grow wise and vulcan enough to goto the stars. If we fallback into regressive behaviour call it facism, islamism, polpotism, whateverism and nuke ourselves - or decay into rotting landempires ala 1984, then we will never goto space today- and slowly downgrade back into very smart animals, with suprsingly sturdy DNA. The Trap St.Fermi predicted is a two pronged one, made of technological progress and the inability to recognize ones true nature while not under ressource duress - until you walked over the cliff of no return. All those utopias, all those we shall overcome by education promises, hid the permadamage we have from ourselves. ICE, ISIS, decomplexification by redistribution fantasies, war-chieftains and permanently sending the young and hopeless into fights, that is what we really are. Not some excemption, but the braindamaged norm under enough stress to trigger the "shizzoid" mode. Its sad, its real - and well how about we for once say thank you. Thank you Peter for dealing with reality, while the rest of us got high. Thank you for the panopticon, forcing us to stay civil. All of us. Thank you for doing a material stress test on humanity, while the climate change was not yet in full force upon us. Thank you for moving down all the capability lanes in parallel, instead of doing the retarded one king, one plan, one tribe, mono-lane approach towards doom. Thank you to the grown ups, shame on the retarded toddlers, the retarded nationalists and utopian idealists, shitting the diapers! Bravo! Now for the final push- why not say it! We are going to have cooperate families - aka cloning by cooperations for loyal employees. All the other roads have proven dysfunctional under stress and the dysfunction is very plain to see. And the final building block, the ones willing too switch sides for this freedom are also in plain sights. Its going to be a weird mixture of cooperate lgbtq+ and conservatives- in an forced alliance with the retarded withering away in traditional hive societies unable to adapt.
- paulryanrogers 9mo ago
  "cloning by cooperations for loyal employee" corporations?
schmichael 9mo ago
Is the number of books with “space” in the title a meaningful indicator of anything other than how many books have “space” in the title? Sure Murderbot may not be as big as Game of Thrones, but these statistics seem more about linguistic trends than genres.
alexitorg 9mo ago
Here are a few ideas trends that are affecting this: -Publishing is getting less profitable so there are less books being published by the big companies. -Publishing companies are grow 70-80% woman and are choosing female preferred books -Most published fiction readers are female (I'm not sure what came first women reading more books or publishes publishing less male friendly books) -Romance is the biggest genre fiction and that has heaps of dragons, werewolves and vampires (hence why those terms haven't dropped off) -Self published books aren't included in isfdb, lots of male authors self publish -Amazon best selling sci/fi, cyberpunk lists now have heaps of self-published books (maybe most) -Most of this stuff is pretty pulpy, but it is really common to have starships and space travel in these books.
- spaceoperareadr 9mo ago
  ISFDB has tens of thousands of self-published books listed. Since it's a volunteer project, and since specific self-published books are not necessarily easy to find if you don't know the title or the author name, they only get added when an editor there runs across them somewhere. And if something isn't listed there, you can always create an account and add publications yourself.
FrankBooth 9mo ago
What has changed on the publishing and awards side of the equation that could explain this?
gcanyon 9mo ago
Funny, I've been working on an SF novelette (probably) for a couple months now, involving a starship even. I guess I should write faster :-)
kristianp 9mo ago
I just noticed that russian wikipedia loves that first image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GAX-447.jpg#globalusage https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GAX-447.jpg#globalus... Edit: actually it doesn't appear on some of the pages cited there.
- zamadatix 9mo ago
  I think it's just because the image is used in the common navbax for the "Колонизация космоса" category many of those pages belong to (roughly "Space Colonization" according to some random translation tools).
jackcosgrove 9mo ago
It's far more practical to adapt life to space and other planets, than it is to adapt space and other planets to human life. The problem with writing a story about artificial life exploring the universe is that it's unrelatable without humans in it. I think humans are stuck on earth permanently because there are no other environments in the solar system we can live in as easily as earth. Traditional sci-fi explained this away using overpopulation pressures, but overpopulation is fading as a reality and plausible narrative device. And forget about interstellar travel, it's too dangerous and takes too long. If intelligent DNA-based life is still around on earth when it starts getting too hot because of the sun's expansion and it all needs to flee, it will have continued to evolve such that it will be unrecognizable and unrelatable to us. And by then I expect artificial life to have spread to such an extent that biological life on earth is basically a historical footnote. I actually think life in the broadest sense will spread from earth to other places in the galaxy, but it will be completely alien compared to human life.
- voidfunc 9mo ago
  Our trajectory is to meld ourselves with machines. Fleshy humans may he stuck on earth but our machines have no such restrictions and can be engineered for all kinds of extremes. We will eventually figure out how to imprint our consciousness into a chip. Maybe not for another thousand years but weve been building machines our entire existence to conquer nature. We will figure it out.
  - kulahan 9mo ago
    If there's not a constant stream of consciousness throughout the entire process, I'm just assuming that's gonna be nothing more than a copy. What else could it be? When "you" wake up, it'll be 100% convincing either way, so I assume you can only prove it going in. I'm not great at philosophy though. Edit: biology is pretty efficient though. We might as well just start growing new bodies/parts for people, enhancing it over time. There are already functionally immortal species on Earth.
    - hdgvhicv 9mo ago
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Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
Good Sci-fi is hard to write, as it is too easy to fall for silly plot devices, gimmicks, and tired clichés. Space cowboys were replaced with thinly veiled dogma, meaningless cycles of ritualized tribal violence, and cheap nostalgic production grifts. Those that write about speculative Futures, are almost always talking about the present worlds flaws. Anyone can publish now, and people simply stopped asking if they should. =3
KolmogorovComp 9mo ago
I wonder why it’s an issue for readers. Has anyone of you read all past great sci-fi books?
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hit8run 9mo ago
They are „Rust“ing here: https://starship.rs/ https://starship.rs/
LightBug1 9mo ago
Starships are exciting to see in real life, but absolutely boring in fiction now and overall generally leave me with a distinctly disgusting aftertaste. Whereas once Starships were a sign of an exciting story, or perhaps hope and optimism ... now they're just the sole purview of wanker tr/billionaires.
ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
I think that science has advanced to the point, where we no longer consider there to be “unexplored” realms, in science. We haven’t gotten there, yet, but we can see it, from here. There’s the old adage (maybe it was Carl Sagan that said it?), that any sufficiently advanced science, appears to be magic, but we no longer think of it as “magic.” It’s just a point further down the road. More importantly, we now know about a lot of the “hard limits,” in science. For myself, I’ve always been more of a fan of fantasy. That’s simply because I prefer the way the narrative is driven. In Science Fiction, the real protagonist is the speculative science, and the characters are simply decorative elements. The stories are about the “grand idea” science. In Fantasy, the stories are really about characters, in a fantastical context. The stories are about people.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
  > science has advanced to the point, where we no longer consider there to be “unexplored” realms, in science It’s interesting that the last time this vividly happened was on the eve of massive technological advancement, social change and a world war.
- decremental 9mo ago
  [dead]
Earw0rm 9mo ago
Starships were mostly an analogy for WW2-style global naval operations. In some cases explicitly so, in some ways implicit. The fighters and capital ships combat setup makes no sense in space.
rudolftheone 9mo ago
I say this as someone who loves SF and deeply mourns its decline: I think the genre painted itself into a corner by focusing too much on "Hard SF." In my view, an obsession with technology has often been a crutch for weaker storytelling. The genre works best when it serves as a pretext to examine the human condition—like Vonnegut or P.K. Dick did. By betraying the ideals of humanist writing in favor of technical accuracy, SF has been cannibalized by genres that actually focus on the inner lives of individuals, such as the booming "romantasy" sector.
- zozbot234 9mo ago
  "Hard SF" is the defining characteristic of the genre, though. Soft SF is just another name for fantasy/magical thinking. Which is fine on its own but not really what sci-fi is about.
accidentallfact 9mo ago
Too much of sci-fi has become reality, and space alone isn't interesting. So, you can fly to another planet? What are you going to do there? Talk with computers, like you do with your phone?

226 points by speckx 9mo ago

Quite naturally - 1960s were the time when we discovered that Solar System is a pretty barren place. Mariner IV sent back pictures of craters on Mars - proving it couldn't have an atmosphere dense enough for people. Venera series probes proved at about same time that Venus surface was unsurvivable for anything we could recognise as "life". Stars are too far away. That was about it. Many people don't get the origins of enthusiasm of first years of the space era, it wasn't because of politics, it was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now. And almost total surety of finding at least some form of complex, multicellular life. Disappointment when the real data came in, was massive. That's why space program went nowhere after Apollo, becoming a politicised clown show - by the time Apollo 11 landed, it was abundantly clear there wasn't much to see or do in the Solar System.

ahazred8ta 9mo ago
In 1965, Clarke, Asimov, and other science writers were at NASA watching the first images appear. "Craters. Duh, it's right next to the asteroid belt, of course it has craters. Not that any of us thought of it beforehand..."
- eesmith 9mo ago
  Do you have a reference for that account? I hadn't heard it before, and it doesn't sounds quite right. They certainly knew the Earth and Moon had craters, so proximity to the asteroid belt isn't required. I suspect they thought the atmosphere on Mars was thicker and like Earth, where the high rate of erosion erases evidence. Digging around through archive.org I found https://archive.org/details/sim_popular-astronomy_1944-05_52_5/mode/2up?q=%22martian+crater%22 https://archive.org/details/sim_popular-astronomy_1944-05_52... from Popular Astronomy 1944 > The following extracts are taken from pp. 49 and 50: > “The recent dominance of the meteoritic impact theory of crater origin makes timely a review of the oases-crater question of Mars. In this treatise, these conclusions have been pointed out: > “I, Meteorite craters are known on the Earth and Moon; therefore, craters exist on Mars. > “2. The circular oases on Mars are the size, shape, and number of comparable lunar craters. > “3. Crater depressions form a natural reservoir, accounting for the intense vegetation in the Martian oases, > “4. The random distribution of crater oases is apparent, indicating that the canal system was adapted to this haphazard arrangement. The reviewer of the above points out > “Why didn’t someone think of the crater theory sooner? The answer is simple. Someone did. Back in 1892, at Arequipa, Peru, W. H. Pickering not only discovered the small black spots on Mars, but he also recognized their similarity to the circlets on the Moon. Because lunar craters were then believed to be volcanic, Pickering may be forgiven for implying that the Martian craterets also were of volcanic origin. We now know these crater oases were not real. My point is only that some people proposed meteoric craters on the Moon before the 1960s. BTW, the SF of the pre-Mariner era does have volcanic craters on Mars, like https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v15n01_1941-01_cape1736/page/n49/mode/2up?q=crater https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v15n01_1941-01_c... and https://archive.org/details/Startling_Stories_v07n03_1942-05_urf-sas/page/n71/mode/2up?q=%22crater%22 https://archive.org/details/Startling_Stories_v07n03_1942-05... . I also found https://archive.org/details/exploringmars0000rich/page/150/mode/2up?q=craters https://archive.org/details/exploringmars0000rich/page/150/m... saying in 1954 "no irregularities due to shadows have ever been observed along the terminator—the line dividing daylight from dark—such as would be produced by Martian craters." The author was an American astronomer and also a SF writer in the 1950s. By this we know astronomers were already considering there might be craters on Mars as there are on the Moon.
mrec 9mo ago
Yup. One early Arthur C Clarke story had plants growing natively on the Moon.
Animats 9mo ago
It was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now. Yes. Von Braun wrote an otherwise realistic novel in which earth's explorers find intelligent life on Mars.[1] Heinlein wrote realistically of native intelligent life on Mars and Venus, with far more benign environments then they actually have. But once probes got there, we got to see how bleak they are. There's a little hope for extrasolar planets, now that we can detect some of them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale

weregiraffe 9mo ago

Where did all the starships go, Long time passing...

thomasguide 9mo ago

FYI, this is about the titles of these books, not the textual content of the books themselves. The implication of the article is that sci-fi is losing relative standing to fantasy, but another interpretation is that science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.

tialaramex 9mo ago
Yeah, I think at most very literal titles would be a stylistic phase. Even "The Martian" is more a play on words than just a literal title for what it's about. Taking favourite novels which are within arm's reach: Sure "Rainbows End" is Science Fiction which doesn't involve space travel etc. but "Incandescence" is also SF but that's deeply about space travel. Banks' "Whit" and "Surface Detail" are both sat here. One of those is set in a lightly fictionalized Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to several of the most significant space battles of her era. But like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which? Now, Banks wasn't a hard SF writer. Unlike say Egan's "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.
- rybosworld 9mo ago
  A bit of an off-topic observation: Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.
  - Ekaros 9mo ago
    As cynic I would imagine eventual collapse to be more likely. Probably slow degradation back to some sort of semi-advanced agricultural society. Say kinda post-apocalyptic world(without proper apocalypse) with larger societal structures still existing. Slow degradation of industrial output until some balance level is reached. Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or most selling one.

wiredfool 9mo ago

Fantasy is certainly big, but it’s not like there isn’t space sf or space opera out there. Authors in my library who’ve released space sf stuff in the last few years — Anne Leckie, Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, John Scalzi, Martha Wells, James Corey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal. To be fair, some of them get into philosophy or fantasy, or even romance. But the settings are SF.

Freak_NL 9mo ago
And you're not even getting into Baen and Tor books territory, where the hard military scifi lives (David Weber et al). (Scalzi is always fun.)
mygrant 9mo ago
Maybe 50% of my audiobook listening is the Expeditionary Force series by Craig Alanson. So dumb, so much fun, and all spaceships.
- Maultasche 9mo ago
  Yeah, that's a good one. "Dumb and fun" is a good description. Craig Alanson also wrote a fantasy trilogy a while back that proved much better than I was expecting. It started off as what appeared to be an uninteresting juvenile fantasy book, but quickly got better and darker. I very much enjoyed reading those.

delichon 9mo ago

The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sideways into fantasy gained the popularity lost by escapes into the future. I predict a correlation between space-based scifi sales and polls on whether the country is heading in the right direction.

Den_VR 9mo ago
I still find myself quite taken by some sci-fi writing. Iain M Banks works, Rajaniemi, and Joan Slonczewski. The “problem” is that they are not popular the way Harry Potter or isekai are.
- jrmg 9mo ago
  I’m also a fan of Banks - but he’s hardly current. He died thirteen years ago.
chasil 9mo ago
Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do not yet have the technology for a complete survey of nearby habitable planets. It is not an encouraging line of thought.
- lotsofpulp 9mo ago
  > we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible Would any of the stories about the characters’ relationships with people not traveling with them be entertaining given the effects of time dilation?

PaulHoule 9mo ago

Anime went from science-fiction dominated in the 1980s (Gundam) to fantasy-dominated (Friern) today. The strange thing about fantasy was it lived under the shadow of Tolkien and Lewis which I think suppressed it for half a century.

JuniperMesos 9mo ago
This is way too reductive; there was plenty of fantasy anime in the 80s, and they're still making Gundam today, among other sci-fi shows.

doctorhandshake 9mo ago

My theory about this aligns with my theory about the disappearance of ‘futurists’ from the popular conversation - we’re living in science fiction. The future is arriving every day. It no longer feels necessary to speculate about a changed world - you need only look out the door. I say this as someone that still loves (and writes a little) speculative fiction. Just a guess as to what’s happening.

eesmith 9mo ago
The 20th century was a period of wild change. Someone born before the first powered airplane flight in their lifetime could have flown on a jet plane to Europe and watched the first moon landing live on TV. Vaccines put an end to endemic diseases which killed so many children every year. The birth control pill catalyzed the sexual revolution. We had a treatment for diabetes, which was once a death sentence. The 1950s and onward saw huge changes in how businesses are organized due to computerization. In the US, cheap automobiles, cheap gas, the federal highway system, and subsidies transformed how most people live, including white flight into suburbia. Plastic was a wonder material. Materials like nylon and polyester transformed the clothing industry.
esafak 9mo ago
Futurist Michio Kaku once gave a talk at my company five years ago and though I forgot the details, I remember the audience found his vision quite dystopian.
TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
9/11 was the turning point. We'd been fed a future "in the year 2000." When we got there, that future turned into a nostalgic vision of the past. It's still possible to imagine new bright futures, but that kind of imagination is very much against a cultural tide that's fervently regressive and nostalgic.
chasil 9mo ago
The original "futurists" were Italian, eventually under Mussolini. That is a loaded term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_architecture

NoboruWataya 9mo ago

The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related. I wonder if the trend is space-specific or if other sci-fi topics suffered the same fate (like robots, computers, technology, etc). It does seem to me like society generally became less interested in space exploration after the moon landing (though I wasn't around then so that is really just what I gather from watching/reading things about western society in the latter half of the 20th century). On the other hand, fantasy includes vampires and werewolves. I guess you could call them fantasy but to me they are quite a different niche to Tolkien. Traditionally vampires and werewolves would probably be considered horror rather than fantasy, though it's a bit more complicated now as Twilight is clearly not horror. I think the author's point stands regardless, as there has been a resurgence across all of those keywords, but I do think the reasons for the resurgence in magic and dragons aren't necessarily the same as the reasons for the resurgence in vampires and werewolves.

masklinn 9mo ago
> The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related. Worse, half are confined to the solar system.

Freak_NL 9mo ago

That Berlin bookstore (Otherland) also has great staff for recommendations. The resident scifi attendant was quite knowledgeable about original scifi written in German (as opposed to translated works). That's quite useful if your knowledge of the field is limited to the obvious Andreas Esbach (unsurpassed) and Perry Rodan (pass).

pfdietz 9mo ago
I enjoyed The Carpet Makers (which is available in English.) Sometimes translated works rub the wrong way because of cultural differences, but in that one the differences enhanced the experience.

jmclnx 9mo ago

I have been seeing the trend of Fantasy slowly taking over SF for a while, maybe as long as 30 years :( Real Science based SF seems to have disappeared completely, at least based upon the only Book Store left in my area, Barnes and Noble.

flohofwoe 9mo ago
> Barnes and Noble ...this might be the main problem (same with Thalia in Germany), those large book store chains are aggressively optimized for monetization, and that kicks off a death spiral of filling the available space with cheap industrially produced trash. The good stuff might still be there, but it's much harder to find, and you need to know where to look (same thing that happened to music basically).
- Ekaros 9mo ago
  Not to forget being linked to main-stream publishers that have different editorial goals compared to era when these works were released. Not saying there were not biases back then. But now the biases are different and thus the published output is as well.
  - pfdietz 9mo ago
    There was also the "death of the mid-list" which cut out a lot of SF books. The Thor Power Tool decision in the US had a big effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commissioner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commiss... "The Thor decision caused publishers and booksellers to be much quicker to destroy stocks of poorly-selling books in order to realize a taxable loss. These books would previously have been kept in stock but written down to reflect the fact that not all of them were expected to sell." Today, I understand mass market paperbacks are dying.

pfdietz 9mo ago

A great deal of science fiction is just fantasy with spaceships. It uses technological tropes to seem like it isn't fantasy, but that's just surface gloss.

flohofwoe 9mo ago
Which is unfortunately true, but also just illustrates how far science-fiction has fallen - not sure when it started but I guess Star Wars played an important role to remove the 'science' from 'science-fiction'.
- pfdietz 9mo ago
  It's been there since day one. What, you thought early era SF used accurate science? No, they used made-up rules based on whether they could tell a good story. Science fiction usually doesn't conform to how the world actually works in the same way pornography usually doesn't conform to the way sexual relationships work. They are both there to tell titillating stories, not describe reality.
  - krapp 9mo ago
    For instance: Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics aren't based on any practical science, they exist as a plot device for setting off mystery stories with robots and morality plays about hubris. And the reason robots have positronic brains is that positrons were recently discovered at the time, and it sounded cool. Yet people will swear Asimov is one of the hardest SF authors around. Sometimes you might get a SF author who's an expert in a particular field or has a specific hyperfixation, and that one aspect of their stories might be grounded somewhat in plausibility, but everything else turns out to be complete nonsense.
  - flohofwoe 9mo ago
    > What, you thought early era SF used accurate science? It depends on the author I guess. Stanislaw Lem for instance mostly separated his "silly-fiction universes" (e.g. the Ijon Tichy and 'robot fairytales' novels) from his "hard sci-fi" universes (for instance the Pilot Pirx novels) - and there it was mostly about the restrictions of space travel (where space travel is usually just plain old cargo hauling), Pirx never left the solar system because it simply wasn't possible during his lifetime (part of him eventually did - maybe - in his last book 'Fiasco'), instead the Pirx novels were mostly occupied with typical 'space trucker' problems like oil leaks on his rocket boosters, wrestling with space harbour bureaucracy or the occasional humanoid robot going into a mode that could be described as 'mad' or 'depressed'.

fpsvogel 9mo ago

Fantasy appeals to a wider audience (see the "Romantasy" genre) and seems to overlap more with YA fiction so captures more young readers.

Animats 9mo ago
Yes. What's popular with teens varies over time, of course. At peak Twilight, the Barnes and Noble at Hillsdale Mall had seven bookcases of Teen Paranormal Romance. I mentioned this to one of the store Goths, and she told me that vampires were on the way out and the next thing was probably going to be zombies. The Monster Hunter thing had a brief moment. Then we had the survival period - Harry Potter overlapped the Hunger Games and Divergent eras, all of which produced too many spinoffs. This moved into the Game of Thrones spinoffs. Now, dragons seem to be out, except that Anne McCaffery is back on the shelves. The latest shift is driven by "booktok" on TikTok. I just saw teenage girls giggling over the new books in the Romance section, while avoiding the YA section. The Dark Romance subgenre is in, and now has its own shelf space. Hard SF? Other than the Expanse series, not much recently.

xtiansimon 9mo ago

That was fun. I recall an early editorial of the podcast Escaped Pod describing science fiction as a means to more directly engage with topics of the human condition by using the conceits of science fiction. _Have a difficult time discussing your relationship with your parents? Write a story about orphans raised by space aliens._ That sort of thing. Maybe something is going on with our human condition that science fiction is not as productive a foil as it once was? I don’t know. I’m not a fiction writer. But I can say that since I bought my second motorcycle (back on a moto after 20 years away) I am enjoying spaceships in my science fiction.

hdivider 9mo ago

Wait till the Chinese land on the Moon first in this new space race. There will be a Sputnik moment, massive additional investment, and this will inevitably impact sci-fi. Just like in the previous space race, we had to fall quite a bit behind first before we wake up -- and then, we go all-out. I also don't agree with the general dystopian or cynical view quite prevalent here on HN these days, frankly. It's always been so, but it seems to have gotten darker, such that I think a lot of old-timers like me pretty much avoid HN these days. It's not all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and out into the real world. Looking outward, rather than inward, can lead to the kind of desire for discovery and progress which underpinned the Apollo era. The world out there is in extreme disarray too -- but to an optimist, it presents opportunity to do good.

paulryanrogers 9mo ago
> It's not all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and out into the real world. Real world seems to be getting bleaker, especially for the young ones coming up today.

HPsquared 9mo ago

Space Age, mid-50s to mid-70s.

metalman 9mo ago

Texas.

HPsquared 9mo ago

The succession is steampunk, dieselpunk (which includes art deco, internal combustion), then atompunk (which includes atomic energy, apocalyptic possibilities, space, sci-fi, martians etc), then I dunno, regular punk (age of mass single-stream media), then our current era of cyberpunk.

gostsamo 9mo ago

Scifi as a space based genre failed due to the end of the space race. The generation that grew in the post WWII era aged and died. The lack of big scientific breakthroughs for the last fifty years added to the lack of new dreams. The future is here, just it's not exciting. For the last few decades the culturally significant fiction has been in anime and manga. Lots of it is trash, but lots of it captures the ya themes of friendship and adventure. Some of it captured better the ideas of the cyber age, I suppose. If one explores those genres with a bit of background, you can see how they have been inspired by the traditional sf works, but repackaged them for new audiences without the introspection and conventions of yesterday. I'm not sure if it is all bad. Definitely, science is not an aspiration any more and those works lack the grounding hard scifi taught us. On the other hand, there is still romanticism in those stories and they teach kids to dream for the impossible. I choose to believe that this is still something to base some optimism on.

Dove 9mo ago

In the 1950s, and perhaps to some degree in the 1990s, it seemed possible to believe technology was limitless and miraculous and conducive to human thriving. As a result, breathlessly hopeful and exciting stories about the wonders of the future made sense. It is hard to feel that way in the 2020s. Technology seems oversold, scammish, dystopian, inhuman. Everything is slop and skinner boxes. It impoverishes rather than enriches, and it seems to be getting worse. It is easy to feel that the Amish, nay perhaps even the medievals, have a point. Worse, the science fiction oriented around starships took its cues from our experience of the naval - journeys of days or weeks would take you to alien places teeming with new and interesting and enriching life. Foods you couldn't eat anywhere else. People you couldn't meet at home. But now the globe seems smaller, explored, and conquered. Those faraway goods are easily shipped to your door, and those faraway people show up in your comments section and they're just people. The excitement of the seas is no longer such a part of our outlook that reskinning it in fantasy speaks to us. Not only is the excitement of the seas greatly diminished, the more we have learned about the universe, the worse the naval analogy seems. The distant stars no longer seem like tropical islands, but rather hopelessly distant and inhospitable. In 1958, Heinlein wrote a wonderful short story about scout troops in the verdant jungles of Venus back when that was a reasonable expectation[1], but it seems like a silly thing to write now. https://xkcd.com/2202/ https://xkcd.com/2202/ seems to capture the current expectation well. Several decades ago it was easy to get excited about the march of scientific discovery and technological progress. But now we're asking why science seems to have slowed down so much, and new technology seems about as exciting as new mechanisms for dependence and dystopia. Atheism is weakening and religion is rising. The imagined global society of the UN that was reimagined at a larger scale as The Federation may have seemed like the way of the future for a few decades, but now that dream looks foolish and the globe is visibly fracturing. The classic science fiction trope that progress will better us as people, that leisure will lead to fitness, that access to information will make us wise scholars, that we will use the convenience of machines to free ourselves for the pursuit of virtue... it makes for an inspiring story. I had my suspicions about how true all of that was back before the internet. I am now very sure that Wall-E and Idiocracy are nearer to the mark. The human-like AIs of Star Wars' robots or Star Trek's androids or innumerable superintelligent computers from Asimov to Heinlein seem further away every year. AI is part of everyday life now, and our major concern is how to keep it from catastrophically failing at mundane research, not whether it should have voting rights or makes humans obsolete. Ambulatory human-like AI seems unlikely when data centers the size of small cities struggle with emdashes. The hope and promise of a generation of robot children and citizens seems as misguided as the forests of Venus. I could go on. We GOT a lot of the wonders science fiction predicted, or things so much more powerful that our most audacious futurists didn't dare to imagine them. And yet it doesn't feel like the promised land. Science fiction promised instant video conferences across the globe, but when we got it, it didn't look like all the world's best researchers collaborating on its hardest problems. It looked like all of the miscreants with their dick pics and the dreary business meetings and school lessons suddenly having access to your home. I don't mean to imply it's all bad, but the difference between imagination and reality has been stark on many fronts. I really think the truth is that in a thousand ways, the tropes of the genre no longer speak to the moment. [1] https://writingatlas.com/story/3984/robert-a-heinlein-a-tenderfoot-in-space/ https://writingatlas.com/story/3984/robert-a-heinlein-a-tend...

deadbabe 9mo ago

People didn’t travel as much back in those days. Visiting a foreign country or too might as well be like a trip to the moon. But now, we basically live in the climax of the jet age, we can be anywhere in the world within 24 hours. And there’s so much of the world to see and stories to discover, not really worth the bother to imagine space travel to far off distant empty worlds, which will inevitably be used to further extend capitalism and just live the same lives we live here on Earth, just on a different world. The lack of any other interesting extraterrestrial civilizations to interact with makes it all pretty pointless. Going very far into space is mostly for exploration as a sport, like cave diving or something.

buildsjets 9mo ago

It turned out that the aliens live in inner space, not outer space.

giorgioz 9mo ago

Some new sci-fi books among the stars: We are Bob Red rising Murderbot

RustyRussell 9mo ago
You're writing this from a dystopian future where punctuation is banned? :) For those like me who still require parsing assistance : - We are Bob - Red Rising - Murderbot
- giorgioz 9mo ago
  Hehe when I write it I separated them by return \n but Hacker News strips the single new lines. It's not very WYSIWYG

ralfd 9mo ago

Because most men stopped reading and most women don’t care much about sci-fi . https://archive.is/I1QyW https://archive.is/I1QyW > Beyond the bookstore, much of the architecture of book discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber… #BookTok, the vast community on TikTok that has become a best-seller machine, is largely populated by women recommending books by other women, like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us.” In a sense this is just a regression to mean, normality, because the literary boys club of the 20th century was the exception: > In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by women for a female audience. Their output was considered “paltry entertainment,”

TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
Reading has become a strongly gendered lifestyle and supposed status marker. Most of the books are indeed paltry entertainment - soapy and saccharine romances, formulaically transgressive erotica, fantasies about unlimited witchy powers, and perfect book boyfriends - but it's still a huge market. Men moved to video games and chan culture. Which are a different kind of paltry entertainment. It's curious how there was a shift from male dominated niches, like Lovecraftian fantasy and heroic fantasy, through the imperial sci-fi peak in the 50s to 70s, through the Hollywood-influenced 80s, then into slow decline from the 90s onwards. With a few exceptions, a bold imagination became more of a liability than an asset. This is a culture which has no idea where it's going and would prefer not to get there.
Evenjos 9mo ago
Yeah. As a sci-fi author, I have strong opinions about this. Made an authortube video on the topic: https://youtu.be/THVpdcgTYrQ https://youtu.be/THVpdcgTYrQ But tl;dr: Gatekeepers in big/mainstream publishing have outsourced their slush-piles to underpaid interns, most of whom are young and ambitious women. They tend to like certain things. Also, big/mainstream publishing is chasing data trends, like all other big businesses, which leads to a staleness cycle where they only publish what worked in the last two years. They're afraid to take financial gambles on unproven ideas or new IP. The good sci-fi these days is mostly indie and mostly underground, IMO. You really have to dig for it. Personally, I find good stuff via Reddit r/powerprogression, but even there, you may have to dig to find gems that speak to you. I joke that I'm a male author and reader, even though I'm female. The first book of my epic series (which is fully published) is Majority: Torth Book 1.

LanceH 9mo ago

I'm of the opinion that the teen novel has stunted literature in general. As a kid beginning to read in the 70's I jumped from what were clearly kids books to Lord of the Rings (pure chance -- I liked the cover). There wasn't that watered down in between. It was a jump to real books with real consequences (spoilers: Boromir dies). I've witnessed the rise of the teen section and seen how kids -- who are reading less in general -- never leave it. It feels like the fantasy adventure lends itself a lot more to these teen novels and has a knock on effect into the mainstream. I for one could do without anther book about someone born to be a prince(ss) up against the evil realm who can't choose their way out of their romantic triangle. I'm not knocking anyone's choices. There are more books already than I'll ever read. But it should would be a blast to get another Dune out of nowhere.

cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
I would posit that the issue lies not with YA novels or fantasy in general, but with the continuously declining sense of agency, opportunity, and self-realization among teens and adults. There are deep-seated needs that reality can increasingly no longer meet, which results in rising dependency on simplistic escapism.
watwut 9mo ago
I remeber reading tons of junk and pulp as a teen decades ago. If anything, the teen section is more complex then pure hero fantasies and repetitive scary stories that used to make the bulk of reading. Yes, lord of the rings was popular before and now. But the stuff people read en masse was not lord of the rings and certainly not some kind of smart complex stuff. What used to be read a lot was literary equivalent of a sitcom or slash fantasy.

johngossman 9mo ago

I speculate that a lot of sci-fi reflects the cutting edge of science and technology at the time it is written. For well over a century a lot of that frontier was transportation: and we got "Around the World in 80 Days" and "20000 Leagues under the Sea" and then a lot of books about space. We also got "Canticle for Leibowitz" and other post-apocalyptic books out of the age when nuclear weapons and energy was top of mind. Then, in the 70s and 80s computer technology became the center of innovation and we got cyberpunk and a lot of sci-fi turned inward to virtual worlds and the like. Given we're in a new space age, maybe sci-fi will start to follow? I'm certainly seeing a new wave of AI centric fiction.

danny_codes 9mo ago
I don't see how anything substantive has changed vis-a-vis space. There are some hard sci-fi recently, like the Expanse, that tackle a more realistic space expansion. But fundamentally nothing has changed tech-wise in space technology since chemical rockets, at least not for people-sized space-endeavours.
noosphr 9mo ago
My favourite part of a Canticle for Leibowitz is the manual auto regressive model the old monk is using to recover damaged books. I remember reading the gpt2 paper and thinking hang on...
- johngossman 9mo ago
  I just re-read Canticle after decades. It's startlingly well written, at least the first two parts. Head and shoulders above most 50s pulp. A masterpiece really. It was assigned reading in my high school. I wonder if anyone under 40 reads it anymore

bowsamic 9mo ago

No one thinks the future is in space anymore. We realised that there’s a lot wrong with us culturally and spiritually

dmix 9mo ago

I figure with Andy Weirs movies getting so big that there'd be an increase in scifi readship after the new movie comes out.

qwertyuiop_ 9mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV Set in "the near future" (the year 2018 in the first season), seaQuest DSV originally mixed high drama with realistic scientific fiction.

eschneider 9mo ago

They didn't go anywhere. Lots of excellent starship/space opera novels out there with more coming out each year. There's just lots there stuff too. :)

jmyeet 9mo ago

The popularity of a genre is deeply tied to the historical context of what's going on in the real world. In the 1950s and 1960s you obviously had the Space Race, which itself was a product of the Cold War. Some commments view this as optimism. I disagree. I view it as an expression of patriotism. I view this patriotism as a crutch in uncertain times. Another example of this is the rise of the superhero genre in the 21st century. Marven was skirting with bankruptcy in the 1990s. A perpetual Spiderman license was sold for a fraction of what it would today. And I think it's no coincidence that the superhero genre ascended post-9/11. I used to read a lot of fantasy but many years ago I pretty much switched almost entirely to sci-fi. For me the reason was because sci-fi asked questions. I mean there's also space opera and it scratches the same itch as fantasy (IMNHO) but my personal interest in sci-fi is more in the "what if" category. That's a very broad category that goes all the way from, say, the Iain M. Banks Culture series, which really poses the question of what an ultra-high tech post-scarcity civilization looks like to something like The Handmaid's Tale (yes, that's sci-fi). We've also had some superb sci-fi on the screen in recent years like Severance, Silo and The Expanse. For me, fantasy is a far more limited genre. Like I'm trying to read Brandon Sanderson recently and while he's a good writer, it's just not hooking me yet in the same way that, say, Revelation Space did. I think the last fantasy series to really hook me was A Song of Ice and Fire. The first three books are some of the finest books ever written. But as for the decline of starships, I think that the readership has evolved too. More vintage sci-fi simply projected the era of exploration and colonization onto space and it's become pretty clear how unrealistic that is because of the vast distances involved. You have to remember that popular media in the 1960s expected Moon bases and such in the not-too-distant future. Star Trek was really the last gasp of this and, interestingly, Star Trek is fundamentally socialist, which is noteworthy given that it originated in the Cold War. Star Wars on the other hand was a tale of the resistance to imperialism. George Lucas has said he modeled the resistance on the North Vietnamese. Cyberpunk came about in the 1980s (eg Neuromancer, Blade Runner) that had nothing to do with starships but they really reflected a societal pessimism. Cyberpunk is inherently xenophobic (ie because of fears of the Japanese). I wonder if the popularity of fantasy is fundamentally escapist and an expression of helplessness. Think about it: fantasy usually revolves around the outsized impact of individual actions, of a hero or heroine.

nephihaha 9mo ago

I've never really agreed with putting SF together with Fantasy, because they are slightly different genres. Some science fiction writers have used genuine science to underpin their writings, one of the more recent examples of that would be "the Martian". Fantasy doesn't need that kind of technical detail. It parallels other developments. There is an increasing scepticism around science, and a significant number of people do not believe in the Moon landing. The heroic age of space travel has been replaced by school teachers and guys busking in tin cans in near Earth orbit. It's become mundane and the most exciting things in space exploration are being done by probes not humans nowadays.

GregDavidson 9mo ago

Realistic Hard SF has to deal with Accelerating Change making technology vastly powerful yet still limited. The hardest thing to write about is cognitively enhanced humans or any other entities (AI, aliens, etc.) exceeding human cognitive limits. JW Campbell famously said it couldn't be done, but without that depictions of the future or wider universe fall flat. Vernor Vinge became the master of such SF and showed several ways to do it. I recommend everything he wrote! Good Hard SF requires an author who has a good grasp of science without that stifling their imagination. It's easy if you cheat but Science Fantasy is unreadable by the science literate folks who frequent HN. Good Hard SF is out there, with and without spaceships, but you'll have to hunt for it - and thanks for all the recommendations here!

int_19h 9mo ago
Speaking of hard SF with imagination, Hal Clement's "Mission of Gravity" is a good example.

indubioprorubik 9mo ago

We wont go to space in the forseabe future. The brink archievment we might pull off is longterm civilizational stability, in ressource scarce, chaotic environments. Basically a oldfolkshome where we grow wise and vulcan enough to goto the stars. If we fallback into regressive behaviour call it facism, islamism, polpotism, whateverism and nuke ourselves - or decay into rotting landempires ala 1984, then we will never goto space today- and slowly downgrade back into very smart animals, with suprsingly sturdy DNA. The Trap St.Fermi predicted is a two pronged one, made of technological progress and the inability to recognize ones true nature while not under ressource duress - until you walked over the cliff of no return. All those utopias, all those we shall overcome by education promises, hid the permadamage we have from ourselves. ICE, ISIS, decomplexification by redistribution fantasies, war-chieftains and permanently sending the young and hopeless into fights, that is what we really are. Not some excemption, but the braindamaged norm under enough stress to trigger the "shizzoid" mode. Its sad, its real - and well how about we for once say thank you. Thank you Peter for dealing with reality, while the rest of us got high. Thank you for the panopticon, forcing us to stay civil. All of us. Thank you for doing a material stress test on humanity, while the climate change was not yet in full force upon us. Thank you for moving down all the capability lanes in parallel, instead of doing the retarded one king, one plan, one tribe, mono-lane approach towards doom. Thank you to the grown ups, shame on the retarded toddlers, the retarded nationalists and utopian idealists, shitting the diapers! Bravo! Now for the final push- why not say it! We are going to have cooperate families - aka cloning by cooperations for loyal employees. All the other roads have proven dysfunctional under stress and the dysfunction is very plain to see. And the final building block, the ones willing too switch sides for this freedom are also in plain sights. Its going to be a weird mixture of cooperate lgbtq+ and conservatives- in an forced alliance with the retarded withering away in traditional hive societies unable to adapt.

paulryanrogers 9mo ago
"cloning by cooperations for loyal employee" corporations?

schmichael 9mo ago

Is the number of books with “space” in the title a meaningful indicator of anything other than how many books have “space” in the title? Sure Murderbot may not be as big as Game of Thrones, but these statistics seem more about linguistic trends than genres.

alexitorg 9mo ago

Here are a few ideas trends that are affecting this: -Publishing is getting less profitable so there are less books being published by the big companies. -Publishing companies are grow 70-80% woman and are choosing female preferred books -Most published fiction readers are female (I'm not sure what came first women reading more books or publishes publishing less male friendly books) -Romance is the biggest genre fiction and that has heaps of dragons, werewolves and vampires (hence why those terms haven't dropped off) -Self published books aren't included in isfdb, lots of male authors self publish -Amazon best selling sci/fi, cyberpunk lists now have heaps of self-published books (maybe most) -Most of this stuff is pretty pulpy, but it is really common to have starships and space travel in these books.

spaceoperareadr 9mo ago
ISFDB has tens of thousands of self-published books listed. Since it's a volunteer project, and since specific self-published books are not necessarily easy to find if you don't know the title or the author name, they only get added when an editor there runs across them somewhere. And if something isn't listed there, you can always create an account and add publications yourself.

FrankBooth 9mo ago

What has changed on the publishing and awards side of the equation that could explain this?

gcanyon 9mo ago

Funny, I've been working on an SF novelette (probably) for a couple months now, involving a starship even. I guess I should write faster :-)

kristianp 9mo ago

I just noticed that russian wikipedia loves that first image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GAX-447.jpg#globalusage https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GAX-447.jpg#globalus... Edit: actually it doesn't appear on some of the pages cited there.

zamadatix 9mo ago
I think it's just because the image is used in the common navbax for the "Колонизация космоса" category many of those pages belong to (roughly "Space Colonization" according to some random translation tools).

jackcosgrove 9mo ago

It's far more practical to adapt life to space and other planets, than it is to adapt space and other planets to human life. The problem with writing a story about artificial life exploring the universe is that it's unrelatable without humans in it. I think humans are stuck on earth permanently because there are no other environments in the solar system we can live in as easily as earth. Traditional sci-fi explained this away using overpopulation pressures, but overpopulation is fading as a reality and plausible narrative device. And forget about interstellar travel, it's too dangerous and takes too long. If intelligent DNA-based life is still around on earth when it starts getting too hot because of the sun's expansion and it all needs to flee, it will have continued to evolve such that it will be unrecognizable and unrelatable to us. And by then I expect artificial life to have spread to such an extent that biological life on earth is basically a historical footnote. I actually think life in the broadest sense will spread from earth to other places in the galaxy, but it will be completely alien compared to human life.

voidfunc 9mo ago
Our trajectory is to meld ourselves with machines. Fleshy humans may he stuck on earth but our machines have no such restrictions and can be engineered for all kinds of extremes. We will eventually figure out how to imprint our consciousness into a chip. Maybe not for another thousand years but weve been building machines our entire existence to conquer nature. We will figure it out.
- kulahan 9mo ago
  If there's not a constant stream of consciousness throughout the entire process, I'm just assuming that's gonna be nothing more than a copy. What else could it be? When "you" wake up, it'll be 100% convincing either way, so I assume you can only prove it going in. I'm not great at philosophy though. Edit: biology is pretty efficient though. We might as well just start growing new bodies/parts for people, enhancing it over time. There are already functionally immortal species on Earth.
  - hdgvhicv 9mo ago

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Joel_Mckay 9mo ago

Good Sci-fi is hard to write, as it is too easy to fall for silly plot devices, gimmicks, and tired clichés. Space cowboys were replaced with thinly veiled dogma, meaningless cycles of ritualized tribal violence, and cheap nostalgic production grifts. Those that write about speculative Futures, are almost always talking about the present worlds flaws. Anyone can publish now, and people simply stopped asking if they should. =3

KolmogorovComp 9mo ago

I wonder why it’s an issue for readers. Has anyone of you read all past great sci-fi books?

deleted 9mo ago

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hit8run 9mo ago

They are „Rust“ing here: https://starship.rs/ https://starship.rs/

LightBug1 9mo ago

Starships are exciting to see in real life, but absolutely boring in fiction now and overall generally leave me with a distinctly disgusting aftertaste. Whereas once Starships were a sign of an exciting story, or perhaps hope and optimism ... now they're just the sole purview of wanker tr/billionaires.

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago

I think that science has advanced to the point, where we no longer consider there to be “unexplored” realms, in science. We haven’t gotten there, yet, but we can see it, from here. There’s the old adage (maybe it was Carl Sagan that said it?), that any sufficiently advanced science, appears to be magic, but we no longer think of it as “magic.” It’s just a point further down the road. More importantly, we now know about a lot of the “hard limits,” in science. For myself, I’ve always been more of a fan of fantasy. That’s simply because I prefer the way the narrative is driven. In Science Fiction, the real protagonist is the speculative science, and the characters are simply decorative elements. The stories are about the “grand idea” science. In Fantasy, the stories are really about characters, in a fantastical context. The stories are about people.

JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
> science has advanced to the point, where we no longer consider there to be “unexplored” realms, in science It’s interesting that the last time this vividly happened was on the eve of massive technological advancement, social change and a world war.
decremental 9mo ago
[dead]

Earw0rm 9mo ago

Starships were mostly an analogy for WW2-style global naval operations. In some cases explicitly so, in some ways implicit. The fighters and capital ships combat setup makes no sense in space.

rudolftheone 9mo ago

I say this as someone who loves SF and deeply mourns its decline: I think the genre painted itself into a corner by focusing too much on "Hard SF." In my view, an obsession with technology has often been a crutch for weaker storytelling. The genre works best when it serves as a pretext to examine the human condition—like Vonnegut or P.K. Dick did. By betraying the ideals of humanist writing in favor of technical accuracy, SF has been cannibalized by genres that actually focus on the inner lives of individuals, such as the booming "romantasy" sector.

zozbot234 9mo ago
"Hard SF" is the defining characteristic of the genre, though. Soft SF is just another name for fantasy/magical thinking. Which is fine on its own but not really what sci-fi is about.

accidentallfact 9mo ago

Too much of sci-fi has become reality, and space alone isn't interesting. So, you can fly to another planet? What are you going to do there? Talk with computers, like you do with your phone?