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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 am

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?
- foobarbecue 9mo ago
  Maybe, but the most compelling scifi to me personally is the generation ship stuff, like Ring by Steven Baxter.
  - wiredfool 9mo ago
    And then there’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. (Anthony Doerr)
- Alex-Programs 9mo ago
  This is motivated pessimism. We knew in the 50s that breaking the speed of light was highly unlikely. We dreamed of the stars anyway. Now we refuse to dream, or to even attempt to solve the problems (a common pattern when discussing spaceflight is people who are blatantly searching for problems, rather than solutions), because we are pessimistic, devoid of imagination, and seek to legitimise our collective depression through scientific and engineering arguments.
  - chasil 9mo ago
    I have upvoted you, and perhaps you are right that there are shades of pessimism in this perspective. The 2020s have not been known as reasons for great optimism. The pandemic and AI culling clades of the job market have been traumatizing experiences.
    - binary132 9mo ago
      If you think this is something that started in the 2020s you need to review the chart.
  - krapp 9mo ago
    I don't think it's motivated pessimism so much as a shifting tastes and changes in media. There are tons of SF stories with starships in movies, games and streaming platforms. It just happens to be the case that fantasy is more popular then SF at the moment where books are concerned.
  - echelon 9mo ago
    Our astrophysicists don't even know why the universe is expanding, don't know that Lambda CDM is correct, don't know if things are universally consistent, yet we're so damned sure this is it. We don't even know that this isn't a simulation. Not non-falsifiable, sure. But we're convinced we're bound to this solar system with our crude tools and limits of detection. One new instrument could upset our grand understanding and models. Maybe we should wait until they get better hardware to marry ourselves to their prognostications of the end of time. During the postwar years of plenty, people stopped dreaming. We had bold dreams before WWII, but people stopped looking at how far we'd come and started comparing themselves to everyone else. We had no mortal enemy, tremendous wealth, and "keeping up with the Joneses" became the new operating protocol. We have more than we did in the past. The manufacturing wealth of 1940-1970 was a fluke. The trade wealth of 1980-2020 was a fluke. We were upset over an unfair advantage that won't last forever. Even today we're still better off than a hundred years ago, yet everyone focuses on how bad things are. Maybe a return to hardship will make us dream again.
- pfdietz 9mo ago
  > and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). Well, that could be worked around in the world building. My favorite SF-friendly scenario would be if life originated in the Sun's natal cluster (perhaps not around the Sun itself), with tens of thousands of star systems, and spread between them before the cluster dispersed. Presumably panspermia would be much easier in such a situation because the stars are closer together and because maybe residual gas could help particles get trapped near other young systems. In this case all the "infected" systems could have the same coding. A nice consequence of this scenario is it's compatible with the Fermi argument: even if origin of life is unlikely, it just had to happen once here, and so it not happening elsewhere in the galaxy (or even visible universe) is not a problem.
- bot403 9mo ago
  Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic? Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.
  - dboreham 9mo ago
    Presumably these are equally likely because you could build a DNA-printer and thereby create a dragon of some sort (not sure if it could have fully functional fire breathing though)?
    - WJW 9mo ago
      Dragons are physically impossible in many more ways than the firebreathing. For one, things that large would probably struggle to fly. We can make larger things fly, but have to cheat using jet (or rocket!) engines to generate incredible thrust in ways not typically accessible to living beings.
      - boothby 9mo ago
        And now I'm picturing a dragon with bombardier-beetle style pulsed jet boosters. And while I'd typically question your assumptions of how big dragons need to be in order to deserve the name, I'll assert that quetzocoatlus nothropi[1] was big enough. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus
        krapp 9mo ago
        "Dragon" as a classification is odd, because when you look at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays, sometimes from cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept, you find that they have little in common beyond some vaguely reptilian vibe and being scary. And I'm sorry but that thing is too goofy looking to be considered a dragon.
        PaulHoule 9mo ago
- sandworm101 9mo ago
  There is a scene in Pirates of the Carribean where captain jack is stuck in a void surrounded by duplicates of himself. It is his hell. As we have biult better and better telescopes we realize that as we expand into space we will be stuck talking only to ourselves, at least for a few thousand generations. When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment. When areicebo fell and was not immediately rebiult, i realized that most people just dont care about ever meeting another civilization. Even if we did find one it wouldnt change much here on earth. Most people dont care about climate change. They dont care about anything beyond their own lifetime. What matter will aliens be if they are a thousand lightyears away? So people dream now about other things, about grimy politics and alternative history.
  - chasil 9mo ago
    The Chinese built a much larger spherical telescope, so what was the point of rebuilding Arecibo? I visited Arecibo a decade before it collapsed. It was impressive and of great historical value, but could repair be cost-effective? Edit: It did have some unique features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope#Comparison_with_Arecibo_telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
    - wat10000 9mo ago
      Rebuilding it would cost maybe half a billion dollars. Give ICE an unpaid week off and job done. Maybe not the absolute best way to spend that money on science, but I fear the actual outcome is “it’s not cost effective so we’re not going to spend it on any science.”
      - direwolf20 9mo ago
        ICE isn't actually getting paid, and in fact owes the government money if they ever quit or get fired, so...
  - ricksunny 9mo ago
- HoldOnAMinute 9mo ago
  That's true, but stop to consider all the things we ARE doing... * Space Station that lasts 25 years * 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service * Mars rovers that run for 10+ years * Flying helicopters on Mars
  - antonvs 9mo ago
    > Space Station that lasts 25 years A small station, hosting a small number of people, orbiting very close to the surface of the Earth. > 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service …very close to the surface of the Earth. > Mars rovers that run for 10+ years On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on. Notably, we have nothing but melted slag on Venus. > Flying helicopters on Mars On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on. I don’t mean to detract from the achievements of our space programs. But we have to be realistic: we’re exploring the easiest bits of our local neighborhood, that’s all.
    - chasil 9mo ago
      The Kurzgesagt video on teraforming Venus is interesting. It only takes a thousand years, assuming perfect execution. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI
  - coldtea 9mo ago
    We call it a "space" station. It's a glorified LEO station.
    - theandrewbailey 9mo ago
      It's more like a laboratory, and less like a ship/bus/train "station".
  - Dylan16807 9mo ago
    Stop to consider them for what purpose? Thinking they're cool? Yeah they're cool. But they have very little to do with interstellar travel, in the way that a canoe has little to do with investigating deep-sea vents.
- davedx 9mo ago
  > the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Spoken like someone who's never read Tau Zero
  - 0xf00ff00f 9mo ago
    Stephen Baxter's short story "Pilot" is another good one: https://www.stephen-baxter.com/stories.html#pilot https://www.stephen-baxter.com/stories.html#pilot
  - antonvs 9mo ago
    Spoken like someone who’s never read the Relativistic Rocket: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/rocket.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/... I really find it hard to understand how people confuse science fiction with reality. I love Tau Zero - I first read it over 40 years ago - but it’s fiction, ffs.
    - PaulHoule 9mo ago
      Also they have trouble stopping in Tau Zero so they have no choice going further than they planned. It's one of the best sci-fi novels of all time, read it!. That Bussard Ramjet, though, is thoroughly discredited. It can't possibly work. Hydrogen hydrogen fusion is a terribly slow nuclear reaction and if you had to stop the gas to give it enough time to react, you'd end up stopping the rocket not accelerating it. In fact, the most credible use of that kind of magnetic scoop is as a brake!
  - coldtea 9mo ago
    Nothing about Tau Zero refutes what the parent wrote. It reinforces it. Plus, even Tau Zero's initial premise is a pipe dream.
    - klez 9mo ago
      > even Tau Zero's initial premise is a pipe dream You mean Sweden as a world superpower? :P
- MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
  You don’t need to go faster than light. Once you approach anywhere near the speed of light, time slows down so much that journey time becomes irrelevant.
  - wolvoleo 9mo ago
    Not if you want to go back home to the place you once knew though
  - nine_k 9mo ago
    Interstellar space contains neutral hydrogen atoms. Hitting a spaceship, they would produce electromagnetic radiation. When the collision speed goes past about 0.25c, the radiation becomes hard gamma rays which are dangerous to living things, and cannot be efficiently shielded against. At this speed, the time dilation is slightly above 3%, so you're still not going to reach even Alpha Centauri in one human lifetime, or maybe you barely can.
    - gpm 9mo ago
      Alpha Centauri is only 4.2 light years away. 0.25c is definitely enough to reach it. You could even do a round trip in only your adult years.
      - MichaelZuo 9mo ago
        A trip there to do… what? There likely won’t be any planet better than the very low bar of Mars for human habitation, in fact maybe even worse due to binary perturbations.
        gpm 9mo ago
        Why do people row across the ocean? If humanity survives to a high enough tech level, someone will do it just because they can...
        andrekandre 9mo ago
        > A trip there to do… what? to play golf, what else? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_jYOubJmfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_jYOubJmfM
- WalterBright 9mo ago
  And yet we still have a solar system, empty of life other than Earth, we can expand to. Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is across the river? Two things baffle me: 1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system. 2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
  - imtringued 9mo ago
    I don't really see anyone complain about Jeff Bezos these days?
  - xixixao 9mo ago
    2. I’m a big fan of the guy, except he went completely off the rails on political stuff… It’s hard that both can be true at the same time.
    - nephihaha 9mo ago
      There are a lot of ethical issues surrounding Neuralink and how it would be used. It might be good for certain medical stuff but I can see how it can be abused.
      - WalterBright 9mo ago
        > There are a lot of ethical issues surrounding Neuralink and how it would be used Like what? (There are always ethical issues with new medical technology.) > It might be good for certain medical stuff Yes, like giving sight to the blind! What a monster Musk is! P.S. two of my largest medical fears are becoming paralyzed or going blind. Neuralink has promise in making these treatable. I'm all for it!
        bananaflag 9mo ago
        > Like what? (There are always ethical issues with new medical technology.) Like mind control, thought surveillance, neural torture (the last one would be easiest). I think these are inevitable technologies, I don't blame Neuralink in particular.
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now. There would have to be considerable R&D, and willpower, and it would be very expensive but I think it is within our powers. Humans would have to live underground and deal with dust, maybe microbes in the case of Mars, but we could do it. The spaceships to go to Mars would have to be big but they could more easily be built on the Moon due to the lower gravity.
  - mmooss 9mo ago
    > I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now. That is or was essentially the mission of the US government's Artemis program, as I understand it. Some elements of the plan are (or were): 'Civilize' (my word) the Moon - build PNT, situational awareness, communication infrastructure, bases, permanent human presence etc. Bring it within a normalized region of operations, like Earth orbit (though obviously much more expensive and less utilized). A benefit is developing plans for infrastructure and operations on Mars, in a much more friendly and less expensive environment. What does it take to support humans efficiently and reliably on another body? Also conduct experiments and develop technology for Mars in cislunar regions - again, much friendlier and less costly.
  - PaulHoule 9mo ago
    It's easy if you can build some kind of machine like what Eric Drexler talked about that could manufacture absolutely everything. Otherwise it's impossible. The best hope for that is to send the one thing to Mars that people absolutely refuse to send to Mars which is bacteria and yeast and microbes. That could be a synthetic biology platform that could make pretty much all the molecules you need and then you assemble them with 3D printing or something like that.
    - Dylan16807 9mo ago
      We could send ten thousand workshop machines, a thousand huge forges and presses and reactors, and enough people to run them and all the farms and chemical vats they use those machines to build. Is that not enough manufacturing capability?
- PaulHoule 9mo ago
  With D-D fusion it might be possible to "live off the land" between the stars which probably have numerous interstellar objects of various sizes between them with a much larger cumulative mass than planets orbiting stars -- and it may be possible to completely disassemble those kind of bodies which are much richer overall in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen than terrestrial planets. A species with that kind of capability would be able to visit another solar system in 10,000 or so years but might care less to mess around with dry little solar system bodies like the Earth. The case against "grabby" aliens is that Ceres and Pluto are still here, not that we can't find evidence of them on Earth. I like to imagine that if that kind of interstellar traveler were to visit Earth it might take them a few decades to perfect a "reverse space-shuttle" because they'd gone 10,000 years without doing anything like that... And they can't just 3-d print one out of 10,000 year old plans because they've improved their 3-d printers to print the stuff they've been printing all that time better.
  - AtlasBarfed 9mo ago
    A true spaceborne civilization, assuming anti-gravity isn't in there bag of tricks, probably wouldn't bother with the gravity well planets.
    - PaulHoule 9mo ago
      Exactly. Those kind of people could support much larger populations than the Earth with a lifestyle they find comfortable in interstellar space and would look at living on Earth at best the way we look at living on Mars.
    - fouc 9mo ago
      I feel like for this reason we should be focused on colonizing asteroids rather than the moon or mars. We can do various tricks to get artificial gravity via centrifugal force. For example if the asteroid is solid enough, we can consider putting it into a spin. If it's not solid enough, we can consider laying a track around the circumference and/or boring a tunnel around the circumference and essentially having the habitat(s) constantly rotating around the asteroid.
- threethirtytwo 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. This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time. It rarely has to do with the possibility of the genre actually happening in reality. A story is good because it is riveting and the backdrop (whether sci-fi or fantasy) is just icing on the cake. Look at Harry potter and practically every fantasy story out there.... none of those stories have any chance of happening in our current reality... yet they are popular. I think the answer for as to why there's less interest in sci-fi is pretty mundane. It's like genetic drift, but this one is cultural. For no reason at all our interests just shift because of luck. There happened to be more good stories written in the fantasy genre and that's the direction everything shifted. Tbf though the MCU was more sci fi than anything and that every genre out of the water in every medium all the way up until endgame. Say what you want about it but the popularity of that universe dwarfed everything else in the last decade... which goes to show that it's likely mostly just drift.
  - jaywcarman 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. > >This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time. Here's one such example: [The Destination Star by Gregory Marlow](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-destination-star/ https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-destinatio...)
    - maximilianthe1 9mo ago
      Also great on the same topic - The Forever War by Joe Holdeman[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War
- BobbyJo 9mo ago
  Optimistic views of the future see those as problems that can be solved, which helps the consumer engage with the story. Pessimistic views see those as insurmountable problems that shouldn't be bothered with, making the stories seem more ridiculous.
- nrds 9mo ago
  > Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL? I've no doubt there's a handful of works but this is hardly a plausible explanation for a _recent_ decline in these topics.
  - Someone 9mo ago
    > I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL? I bet very little. We didn’t really know how enormous the universe is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax: “Being very difficult to measure, only about 60 stellar parallaxes had been obtained by the end of the 19th century”), and we hadn’t known for long that the speed of light is an absolute speed limit.
- zozbot234 9mo ago
  The weird thing about this is that interstellar space ought to actually be very hospitable to cold, highly efficient computational substrates. (This is for standard thermodynamic reasons: reliable computation must be free of noise, and low-temperature means low noise.) So there might be 'life' of a sort in interstellar space that's extremely smart and naturally long-lived compared to humans or even ordinary room-temperature AIs, but just can't do all that much in the outside world (i.e. has very low agency), except very slowly and with exceptional effort. (Of course, these same constraints apply in a relative sense to the outer regions of planetary systems.)
- perilunar 9mo ago
  > the vast distances to other habitable planets We won't be crossing interstellar distances to look for habitable planets — we'll do it to mine material to build more of our own habitats, to spread further. We don't need to find planets to live on.
- danielheath 9mo ago
  Acceleration at 1g lets you get to another galaxy in a single human lifetime (although earth will have been swallowed by the sun by the time you arrive). Relativity is pretty counterintuitive.
- ted_dunning 9mo ago
  This is a very strange argument. Are you seriously saying that people realizing that FTL travel is impossible makes people more interested in stories about magic?!?
pfdietz 9mo ago
Stated with a different spin, the detached-from-reality takes of Campbell-era SF finally became too strained to enjoy.
flohofwoe 9mo ago
I don't know, to the East of the Iron Curtain science fiction wasn't mostly about future optimism (at least after the initial "we're building a better society" optimism had been brutally murdered during the 1950s and 60s), but often a critical mirror of then-current society transported into the future to escape state censorship. Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the evolutionary pressure to produce great literature that requires an interested and intelligent reader to decode the hidden messages written between the lines ;)
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  There are some brilliant SF writers from the eastern bloc. They had to write to get around censorship and the official line. Stanislaw Lem is great.
  - chasil 9mo ago
    Why was George Clooney persuaded to make such a bad adaptation of Solaris?
    - nephihaha 9mo ago
      You've no argument from me there. Lem was unhappy with aspects of Tarkovsky's version saying he had not written about people's sex problems in space. Nonetheless it is often a very beautiful film.
HPsquared 9mo ago
Why did people want to escape Earth though? Maybe they felt Earth was past saving.
- DennisP 9mo ago
  A lot of the old stuff isn't so much about escaping Earth, as outgrowing it. A feeling that it's our destiny to expand to the stars, just as it was life's destiny to come out of the oceans. The more we look for alien civilizations and come up empty, the more I feel like they were on to something. For all we know, life is exceedingly rare in the universe.
mlinhares 9mo ago
I kinda have the same feeling for music as well, the best phases for metal and punk music are usually when stuff is going to shit. When everything looks bright and good the music just doesn't have the same quality, people are not angry all the time.
- ninalanyon 9mo ago
  > best phases for metal and punk music are usually when stuff is going to shit. Now should be a productive time for music in the US then, and possibly elsewhere if things continue on the same trajectory.
  - dripdry45 9mo ago
    Just like the last time, it’s in the little niche places. Bandcamp, substack… local bands, probably other places i am too lazy to seek out.
hinkley 9mo ago
I think I would argue that we already see the sea change in the later Dune books The inner systems become hidebound as they continue to reach out they find that not only has someone beaten them there, they have become Other as well as antagonistic and expansionist.
nearbuy 9mo ago
This doesn't explain why pessimistic and dystopian sci-fi has declined. Also, Foundation takes place in a future where society is about to collapse and regress into dark ages. It's a borderline dystopian world.
- YurgenJurgensen 9mo ago
  YA Dystopia novels probably had a hand in that. They almost certainly sucked all the air out of the genre, and it’ll take a long time for serious authors to see a viable path forward with publishers with anything that vaguely resembles them.
CGMthrowaway 9mo ago
> Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Interesting POV because Star Trek and Foundation both have recent, big budget streaming series while new Terminator movies were flops and Neuromancer has never seen any development(?)
- riffraff 9mo ago
  Neuromancer is currently in development at Apple+ :) FWIW, Amazon made a show based on "The Peripheral" by Gibson which is way more bleak than Neuromancer, and it was crazy good, but they canceled it after one season.
  - CGMthrowaway 9mo ago
    Oh I saw that one. It was good, too bad they canceled it
problynought 9mo ago
Starships are a boring transport layer, implementation detail. Being a part of a Q continuum, a disembodied consciousness that can appear wherever whenever, while still retaining a memory/sense of "self" is a far more interesting a dream. Starships titillate people who tinker with machines. Not very optimistic if we are dragging along service jobs to explore the cosmos.
alexitorg 9mo ago
There are a heap of self published sci-fi and fantasy novels that fill the top selling lists on amazon in their respective niche. These are not included in the database that this analysis used. Space travel, multiple worlds and aliens are all really common tropes in those, even if the book is a pulpy progression fantasy or litrpg. The other top sellers are Romantasy which are published professionally. These have lots of dragons, were-wolves and vampires for sexy reasons. The professional fiction publishers are 70-80% women publishing for a majority female fiction reader fan base. Even old best selling men's action authors like Clive Custler and Tom Clancy would probably have to self publish if they were writing today.
- majormajor 9mo ago
  Poking around on Amazon's Kindle books for Science Fiction and the "popular" list seems to be all established names at this point? Some of them got their start self-publishing, ofc, like Dungeon Crawler Carl or Andy Weir's books but didn't stay that way. They don't make it particularly easy to sort/inspect the popularity stats, and I'm sure there are some super niche sub-genres out there, but for the genre as a whole I'm not seeing any surprises. (Space travel, of course, is a major part of many of them, like Project Hail Mary or the Pierce Brown stuff. Not nearly as much in the Star Trek utopian vein, of course, as the parent commenter pointed out.) Feels like folks like Blake Crouch or Mick Herron are filling similar spots as Cussler or Clancy these days, but again shifted to today's general worldview. Not as verbose as Clancy, though.
throw4847285 9mo ago
That doesn't add up. Plenty of Philip K Dick novels and stories have spaceships, while also being existential nightmares of the collapse of human identity. Ursula Le Guin, the quintessential new wave sci-fi author, mostly wrote about space travel (though usually as a mechanism for doing cultural anthropology).
boznz 9mo ago
Many of us authors are still trying to write optimistic Sci-Fi, we are just getting lost in the noise, and the algorithm. Look harder :-)
popalchemist 9mo ago
Fantasy is not a downgrade from sci-fi; the genre serves an altogether different purpose which is equally valuable, if not moreso - the development of spiritual faculties of perception. It is the neglect of those faculties which leads to societal decay -- the current nadir we are in is STILL the fallout of the "death of God" (as Nietzsche put it) -- man's recognition that the Sky Daddy myth is no longer enough to explain the world led to a vacuum of a cohesion between metaphysics and morality. In its absence, materialism - hedonism in the realm of the senses - is all that that there is to derive hope or reason for living from. Without fantasy -- Lord of the Rings being the chief example -- the "post-God" world has no means of developing said faculties outside of fantasy (the genre), and art - which, as a whole, is a form of fantasy.
JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
> starships left with the optimism How does the Three Body Problem fit into this? On one hand, it’s Chinese. On the other hand, it’s literally mocking optimism.
NuclearPM 9mo ago
Athwart? These posts really bring out the try-hards.
jhbadger 9mo ago
> Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Although remember that Neuromancer, despite kicking off the generally spaceship-free cyberpunk genre, did have spaceships and even orbital cities!

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?
foobarbecue 9mo ago
Maybe, but the most compelling scifi to me personally is the generation ship stuff, like Ring by Steven Baxter.
- wiredfool 9mo ago
  And then there’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. (Anthony Doerr)
Alex-Programs 9mo ago
This is motivated pessimism. We knew in the 50s that breaking the speed of light was highly unlikely. We dreamed of the stars anyway. Now we refuse to dream, or to even attempt to solve the problems (a common pattern when discussing spaceflight is people who are blatantly searching for problems, rather than solutions), because we are pessimistic, devoid of imagination, and seek to legitimise our collective depression through scientific and engineering arguments.
- chasil 9mo ago
  I have upvoted you, and perhaps you are right that there are shades of pessimism in this perspective. The 2020s have not been known as reasons for great optimism. The pandemic and AI culling clades of the job market have been traumatizing experiences.
  - binary132 9mo ago
    If you think this is something that started in the 2020s you need to review the chart.
- krapp 9mo ago
  I don't think it's motivated pessimism so much as a shifting tastes and changes in media. There are tons of SF stories with starships in movies, games and streaming platforms. It just happens to be the case that fantasy is more popular then SF at the moment where books are concerned.
- echelon 9mo ago
  Our astrophysicists don't even know why the universe is expanding, don't know that Lambda CDM is correct, don't know if things are universally consistent, yet we're so damned sure this is it. We don't even know that this isn't a simulation. Not non-falsifiable, sure. But we're convinced we're bound to this solar system with our crude tools and limits of detection. One new instrument could upset our grand understanding and models. Maybe we should wait until they get better hardware to marry ourselves to their prognostications of the end of time. During the postwar years of plenty, people stopped dreaming. We had bold dreams before WWII, but people stopped looking at how far we'd come and started comparing themselves to everyone else. We had no mortal enemy, tremendous wealth, and "keeping up with the Joneses" became the new operating protocol. We have more than we did in the past. The manufacturing wealth of 1940-1970 was a fluke. The trade wealth of 1980-2020 was a fluke. We were upset over an unfair advantage that won't last forever. Even today we're still better off than a hundred years ago, yet everyone focuses on how bad things are. Maybe a return to hardship will make us dream again.
pfdietz 9mo ago
> and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). Well, that could be worked around in the world building. My favorite SF-friendly scenario would be if life originated in the Sun's natal cluster (perhaps not around the Sun itself), with tens of thousands of star systems, and spread between them before the cluster dispersed. Presumably panspermia would be much easier in such a situation because the stars are closer together and because maybe residual gas could help particles get trapped near other young systems. In this case all the "infected" systems could have the same coding. A nice consequence of this scenario is it's compatible with the Fermi argument: even if origin of life is unlikely, it just had to happen once here, and so it not happening elsewhere in the galaxy (or even visible universe) is not a problem.
bot403 9mo ago
Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic? Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.
- dboreham 9mo ago
  Presumably these are equally likely because you could build a DNA-printer and thereby create a dragon of some sort (not sure if it could have fully functional fire breathing though)?
  - WJW 9mo ago
    Dragons are physically impossible in many more ways than the firebreathing. For one, things that large would probably struggle to fly. We can make larger things fly, but have to cheat using jet (or rocket!) engines to generate incredible thrust in ways not typically accessible to living beings.
    - boothby 9mo ago
      And now I'm picturing a dragon with bombardier-beetle style pulsed jet boosters. And while I'd typically question your assumptions of how big dragons need to be in order to deserve the name, I'll assert that quetzocoatlus nothropi[1] was big enough. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus
      - krapp 9mo ago
        "Dragon" as a classification is odd, because when you look at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays, sometimes from cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept, you find that they have little in common beyond some vaguely reptilian vibe and being scary. And I'm sorry but that thing is too goofy looking to be considered a dragon.
        PaulHoule 9mo ago
sandworm101 9mo ago
There is a scene in Pirates of the Carribean where captain jack is stuck in a void surrounded by duplicates of himself. It is his hell. As we have biult better and better telescopes we realize that as we expand into space we will be stuck talking only to ourselves, at least for a few thousand generations. When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment. When areicebo fell and was not immediately rebiult, i realized that most people just dont care about ever meeting another civilization. Even if we did find one it wouldnt change much here on earth. Most people dont care about climate change. They dont care about anything beyond their own lifetime. What matter will aliens be if they are a thousand lightyears away? So people dream now about other things, about grimy politics and alternative history.
- chasil 9mo ago
  The Chinese built a much larger spherical telescope, so what was the point of rebuilding Arecibo? I visited Arecibo a decade before it collapsed. It was impressive and of great historical value, but could repair be cost-effective? Edit: It did have some unique features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope#Comparison_with_Arecibo_telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
  - wat10000 9mo ago
    Rebuilding it would cost maybe half a billion dollars. Give ICE an unpaid week off and job done. Maybe not the absolute best way to spend that money on science, but I fear the actual outcome is “it’s not cost effective so we’re not going to spend it on any science.”
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      ICE isn't actually getting paid, and in fact owes the government money if they ever quit or get fired, so...
- ricksunny 9mo ago
HoldOnAMinute 9mo ago
That's true, but stop to consider all the things we ARE doing... * Space Station that lasts 25 years * 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service * Mars rovers that run for 10+ years * Flying helicopters on Mars
- antonvs 9mo ago
  > Space Station that lasts 25 years A small station, hosting a small number of people, orbiting very close to the surface of the Earth. > 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service …very close to the surface of the Earth. > Mars rovers that run for 10+ years On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on. Notably, we have nothing but melted slag on Venus. > Flying helicopters on Mars On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on. I don’t mean to detract from the achievements of our space programs. But we have to be realistic: we’re exploring the easiest bits of our local neighborhood, that’s all.
  - chasil 9mo ago
    The Kurzgesagt video on teraforming Venus is interesting. It only takes a thousand years, assuming perfect execution. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI
- coldtea 9mo ago
  We call it a "space" station. It's a glorified LEO station.
  - theandrewbailey 9mo ago
    It's more like a laboratory, and less like a ship/bus/train "station".
- Dylan16807 9mo ago
  Stop to consider them for what purpose? Thinking they're cool? Yeah they're cool. But they have very little to do with interstellar travel, in the way that a canoe has little to do with investigating deep-sea vents.
davedx 9mo ago
> the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Spoken like someone who's never read Tau Zero
- 0xf00ff00f 9mo ago
  Stephen Baxter's short story "Pilot" is another good one: https://www.stephen-baxter.com/stories.html#pilot https://www.stephen-baxter.com/stories.html#pilot
- antonvs 9mo ago
  Spoken like someone who’s never read the Relativistic Rocket: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/rocket.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/... I really find it hard to understand how people confuse science fiction with reality. I love Tau Zero - I first read it over 40 years ago - but it’s fiction, ffs.
  - PaulHoule 9mo ago
    Also they have trouble stopping in Tau Zero so they have no choice going further than they planned. It's one of the best sci-fi novels of all time, read it!. That Bussard Ramjet, though, is thoroughly discredited. It can't possibly work. Hydrogen hydrogen fusion is a terribly slow nuclear reaction and if you had to stop the gas to give it enough time to react, you'd end up stopping the rocket not accelerating it. In fact, the most credible use of that kind of magnetic scoop is as a brake!
- coldtea 9mo ago
  Nothing about Tau Zero refutes what the parent wrote. It reinforces it. Plus, even Tau Zero's initial premise is a pipe dream.
  - klez 9mo ago
    > even Tau Zero's initial premise is a pipe dream You mean Sweden as a world superpower? :P
MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
You don’t need to go faster than light. Once you approach anywhere near the speed of light, time slows down so much that journey time becomes irrelevant.
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  Not if you want to go back home to the place you once knew though
- nine_k 9mo ago
  Interstellar space contains neutral hydrogen atoms. Hitting a spaceship, they would produce electromagnetic radiation. When the collision speed goes past about 0.25c, the radiation becomes hard gamma rays which are dangerous to living things, and cannot be efficiently shielded against. At this speed, the time dilation is slightly above 3%, so you're still not going to reach even Alpha Centauri in one human lifetime, or maybe you barely can.
  - gpm 9mo ago
    Alpha Centauri is only 4.2 light years away. 0.25c is definitely enough to reach it. You could even do a round trip in only your adult years.
    - MichaelZuo 9mo ago
      A trip there to do… what? There likely won’t be any planet better than the very low bar of Mars for human habitation, in fact maybe even worse due to binary perturbations.
      - gpm 9mo ago
        Why do people row across the ocean? If humanity survives to a high enough tech level, someone will do it just because they can...
      - andrekandre 9mo ago
        > A trip there to do… what? to play golf, what else? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_jYOubJmfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_jYOubJmfM
WalterBright 9mo ago
And yet we still have a solar system, empty of life other than Earth, we can expand to. Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is across the river? Two things baffle me: 1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system. 2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
- imtringued 9mo ago
  I don't really see anyone complain about Jeff Bezos these days?
- xixixao 9mo ago
  2. I’m a big fan of the guy, except he went completely off the rails on political stuff… It’s hard that both can be true at the same time.
  - nephihaha 9mo ago
    There are a lot of ethical issues surrounding Neuralink and how it would be used. It might be good for certain medical stuff but I can see how it can be abused.
    - WalterBright 9mo ago
      > There are a lot of ethical issues surrounding Neuralink and how it would be used Like what? (There are always ethical issues with new medical technology.) > It might be good for certain medical stuff Yes, like giving sight to the blind! What a monster Musk is! P.S. two of my largest medical fears are becoming paralyzed or going blind. Neuralink has promise in making these treatable. I'm all for it!
      - bananaflag 9mo ago
        > Like what? (There are always ethical issues with new medical technology.) Like mind control, thought surveillance, neural torture (the last one would be easiest). I think these are inevitable technologies, I don't blame Neuralink in particular.
nephihaha 9mo ago
I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now. There would have to be considerable R&D, and willpower, and it would be very expensive but I think it is within our powers. Humans would have to live underground and deal with dust, maybe microbes in the case of Mars, but we could do it. The spaceships to go to Mars would have to be big but they could more easily be built on the Moon due to the lower gravity.
- mmooss 9mo ago
  > I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now. That is or was essentially the mission of the US government's Artemis program, as I understand it. Some elements of the plan are (or were): 'Civilize' (my word) the Moon - build PNT, situational awareness, communication infrastructure, bases, permanent human presence etc. Bring it within a normalized region of operations, like Earth orbit (though obviously much more expensive and less utilized). A benefit is developing plans for infrastructure and operations on Mars, in a much more friendly and less expensive environment. What does it take to support humans efficiently and reliably on another body? Also conduct experiments and develop technology for Mars in cislunar regions - again, much friendlier and less costly.
- PaulHoule 9mo ago
  It's easy if you can build some kind of machine like what Eric Drexler talked about that could manufacture absolutely everything. Otherwise it's impossible. The best hope for that is to send the one thing to Mars that people absolutely refuse to send to Mars which is bacteria and yeast and microbes. That could be a synthetic biology platform that could make pretty much all the molecules you need and then you assemble them with 3D printing or something like that.
  - Dylan16807 9mo ago
    We could send ten thousand workshop machines, a thousand huge forges and presses and reactors, and enough people to run them and all the farms and chemical vats they use those machines to build. Is that not enough manufacturing capability?
PaulHoule 9mo ago
With D-D fusion it might be possible to "live off the land" between the stars which probably have numerous interstellar objects of various sizes between them with a much larger cumulative mass than planets orbiting stars -- and it may be possible to completely disassemble those kind of bodies which are much richer overall in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen than terrestrial planets. A species with that kind of capability would be able to visit another solar system in 10,000 or so years but might care less to mess around with dry little solar system bodies like the Earth. The case against "grabby" aliens is that Ceres and Pluto are still here, not that we can't find evidence of them on Earth. I like to imagine that if that kind of interstellar traveler were to visit Earth it might take them a few decades to perfect a "reverse space-shuttle" because they'd gone 10,000 years without doing anything like that... And they can't just 3-d print one out of 10,000 year old plans because they've improved their 3-d printers to print the stuff they've been printing all that time better.
- AtlasBarfed 9mo ago
  A true spaceborne civilization, assuming anti-gravity isn't in there bag of tricks, probably wouldn't bother with the gravity well planets.
  - PaulHoule 9mo ago
    Exactly. Those kind of people could support much larger populations than the Earth with a lifestyle they find comfortable in interstellar space and would look at living on Earth at best the way we look at living on Mars.
  - fouc 9mo ago
    I feel like for this reason we should be focused on colonizing asteroids rather than the moon or mars. We can do various tricks to get artificial gravity via centrifugal force. For example if the asteroid is solid enough, we can consider putting it into a spin. If it's not solid enough, we can consider laying a track around the circumference and/or boring a tunnel around the circumference and essentially having the habitat(s) constantly rotating around the asteroid.
threethirtytwo 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. This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time. It rarely has to do with the possibility of the genre actually happening in reality. A story is good because it is riveting and the backdrop (whether sci-fi or fantasy) is just icing on the cake. Look at Harry potter and practically every fantasy story out there.... none of those stories have any chance of happening in our current reality... yet they are popular. I think the answer for as to why there's less interest in sci-fi is pretty mundane. It's like genetic drift, but this one is cultural. For no reason at all our interests just shift because of luck. There happened to be more good stories written in the fantasy genre and that's the direction everything shifted. Tbf though the MCU was more sci fi than anything and that every genre out of the water in every medium all the way up until endgame. Say what you want about it but the popularity of that universe dwarfed everything else in the last decade... which goes to show that it's likely mostly just drift.
- jaywcarman 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. > >This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time. Here's one such example: [The Destination Star by Gregory Marlow](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-destination-star/ https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-destinatio...)
  - maximilianthe1 9mo ago
    Also great on the same topic - The Forever War by Joe Holdeman[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War
BobbyJo 9mo ago
Optimistic views of the future see those as problems that can be solved, which helps the consumer engage with the story. Pessimistic views see those as insurmountable problems that shouldn't be bothered with, making the stories seem more ridiculous.
nrds 9mo ago
> Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL? I've no doubt there's a handful of works but this is hardly a plausible explanation for a _recent_ decline in these topics.
- Someone 9mo ago
  > I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL? I bet very little. We didn’t really know how enormous the universe is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax: “Being very difficult to measure, only about 60 stellar parallaxes had been obtained by the end of the 19th century”), and we hadn’t known for long that the speed of light is an absolute speed limit.
zozbot234 9mo ago
The weird thing about this is that interstellar space ought to actually be very hospitable to cold, highly efficient computational substrates. (This is for standard thermodynamic reasons: reliable computation must be free of noise, and low-temperature means low noise.) So there might be 'life' of a sort in interstellar space that's extremely smart and naturally long-lived compared to humans or even ordinary room-temperature AIs, but just can't do all that much in the outside world (i.e. has very low agency), except very slowly and with exceptional effort. (Of course, these same constraints apply in a relative sense to the outer regions of planetary systems.)
perilunar 9mo ago
> the vast distances to other habitable planets We won't be crossing interstellar distances to look for habitable planets — we'll do it to mine material to build more of our own habitats, to spread further. We don't need to find planets to live on.
danielheath 9mo ago
Acceleration at 1g lets you get to another galaxy in a single human lifetime (although earth will have been swallowed by the sun by the time you arrive). Relativity is pretty counterintuitive.
ted_dunning 9mo ago
This is a very strange argument. Are you seriously saying that people realizing that FTL travel is impossible makes people more interested in stories about magic?!?

pfdietz 9mo ago

Stated with a different spin, the detached-from-reality takes of Campbell-era SF finally became too strained to enjoy.

flohofwoe 9mo ago

I don't know, to the East of the Iron Curtain science fiction wasn't mostly about future optimism (at least after the initial "we're building a better society" optimism had been brutally murdered during the 1950s and 60s), but often a critical mirror of then-current society transported into the future to escape state censorship. Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the evolutionary pressure to produce great literature that requires an interested and intelligent reader to decode the hidden messages written between the lines ;)

nephihaha 9mo ago
There are some brilliant SF writers from the eastern bloc. They had to write to get around censorship and the official line. Stanislaw Lem is great.
- chasil 9mo ago
  Why was George Clooney persuaded to make such a bad adaptation of Solaris?
  - nephihaha 9mo ago
    You've no argument from me there. Lem was unhappy with aspects of Tarkovsky's version saying he had not written about people's sex problems in space. Nonetheless it is often a very beautiful film.

HPsquared 9mo ago

Why did people want to escape Earth though? Maybe they felt Earth was past saving.

DennisP 9mo ago
A lot of the old stuff isn't so much about escaping Earth, as outgrowing it. A feeling that it's our destiny to expand to the stars, just as it was life's destiny to come out of the oceans. The more we look for alien civilizations and come up empty, the more I feel like they were on to something. For all we know, life is exceedingly rare in the universe.

mlinhares 9mo ago

I kinda have the same feeling for music as well, the best phases for metal and punk music are usually when stuff is going to shit. When everything looks bright and good the music just doesn't have the same quality, people are not angry all the time.

ninalanyon 9mo ago
> best phases for metal and punk music are usually when stuff is going to shit. Now should be a productive time for music in the US then, and possibly elsewhere if things continue on the same trajectory.
- dripdry45 9mo ago
  Just like the last time, it’s in the little niche places. Bandcamp, substack… local bands, probably other places i am too lazy to seek out.

hinkley 9mo ago

I think I would argue that we already see the sea change in the later Dune books The inner systems become hidebound as they continue to reach out they find that not only has someone beaten them there, they have become Other as well as antagonistic and expansionist.

nearbuy 9mo ago

This doesn't explain why pessimistic and dystopian sci-fi has declined. Also, Foundation takes place in a future where society is about to collapse and regress into dark ages. It's a borderline dystopian world.

YurgenJurgensen 9mo ago
YA Dystopia novels probably had a hand in that. They almost certainly sucked all the air out of the genre, and it’ll take a long time for serious authors to see a viable path forward with publishers with anything that vaguely resembles them.

CGMthrowaway 9mo ago

> Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Interesting POV because Star Trek and Foundation both have recent, big budget streaming series while new Terminator movies were flops and Neuromancer has never seen any development(?)

riffraff 9mo ago
Neuromancer is currently in development at Apple+ :) FWIW, Amazon made a show based on "The Peripheral" by Gibson which is way more bleak than Neuromancer, and it was crazy good, but they canceled it after one season.
- CGMthrowaway 9mo ago
  Oh I saw that one. It was good, too bad they canceled it

problynought 9mo ago

Starships are a boring transport layer, implementation detail. Being a part of a Q continuum, a disembodied consciousness that can appear wherever whenever, while still retaining a memory/sense of "self" is a far more interesting a dream. Starships titillate people who tinker with machines. Not very optimistic if we are dragging along service jobs to explore the cosmos.

alexitorg 9mo ago

There are a heap of self published sci-fi and fantasy novels that fill the top selling lists on amazon in their respective niche. These are not included in the database that this analysis used. Space travel, multiple worlds and aliens are all really common tropes in those, even if the book is a pulpy progression fantasy or litrpg. The other top sellers are Romantasy which are published professionally. These have lots of dragons, were-wolves and vampires for sexy reasons. The professional fiction publishers are 70-80% women publishing for a majority female fiction reader fan base. Even old best selling men's action authors like Clive Custler and Tom Clancy would probably have to self publish if they were writing today.

majormajor 9mo ago
Poking around on Amazon's Kindle books for Science Fiction and the "popular" list seems to be all established names at this point? Some of them got their start self-publishing, ofc, like Dungeon Crawler Carl or Andy Weir's books but didn't stay that way. They don't make it particularly easy to sort/inspect the popularity stats, and I'm sure there are some super niche sub-genres out there, but for the genre as a whole I'm not seeing any surprises. (Space travel, of course, is a major part of many of them, like Project Hail Mary or the Pierce Brown stuff. Not nearly as much in the Star Trek utopian vein, of course, as the parent commenter pointed out.) Feels like folks like Blake Crouch or Mick Herron are filling similar spots as Cussler or Clancy these days, but again shifted to today's general worldview. Not as verbose as Clancy, though.

throw4847285 9mo ago

That doesn't add up. Plenty of Philip K Dick novels and stories have spaceships, while also being existential nightmares of the collapse of human identity. Ursula Le Guin, the quintessential new wave sci-fi author, mostly wrote about space travel (though usually as a mechanism for doing cultural anthropology).

boznz 9mo ago

Many of us authors are still trying to write optimistic Sci-Fi, we are just getting lost in the noise, and the algorithm. Look harder :-)

popalchemist 9mo ago

Fantasy is not a downgrade from sci-fi; the genre serves an altogether different purpose which is equally valuable, if not moreso - the development of spiritual faculties of perception. It is the neglect of those faculties which leads to societal decay -- the current nadir we are in is STILL the fallout of the "death of God" (as Nietzsche put it) -- man's recognition that the Sky Daddy myth is no longer enough to explain the world led to a vacuum of a cohesion between metaphysics and morality. In its absence, materialism - hedonism in the realm of the senses - is all that that there is to derive hope or reason for living from. Without fantasy -- Lord of the Rings being the chief example -- the "post-God" world has no means of developing said faculties outside of fantasy (the genre), and art - which, as a whole, is a form of fantasy.

JumpCrisscross 9mo ago

> starships left with the optimism How does the Three Body Problem fit into this? On one hand, it’s Chinese. On the other hand, it’s literally mocking optimism.

NuclearPM 9mo ago

Athwart? These posts really bring out the try-hards.

jhbadger 9mo ago

> Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Although remember that Neuromancer, despite kicking off the generally spaceship-free cyberpunk genre, did have spaceships and even orbital cities!