5 ms·

Has sci-fi run out of steam?

39 points by nreece 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago
Absolutely not. The old guard has mostly died, but there are lots of very good new writers, have a look at Charles Stross. Neal Stephenson writes beautiful stuff, there is Ian M. Banks, Greg Bear and on and on... I'm sure Stallman will be psyched that he's labeled the creator of "GNU Linux" in the article.
- cma 17y ago
  Charles Stross was interviewed for the article... when people make headlines that end in a question mark it baits this kind of response, but come on, we can do better.
rbanffy 17y ago
Well... Asimov and Clarke pretty much did run out of steam. Too bad - I think we could simulate them at 10% real-time in a couple decades, had they resisted, but there are some folks writing pretty relevant (and inspiring) sci-fi today. And at least one of them is known for hanging around HN.
jimfl 17y ago
Charlie Stross anticipated this news story about a simulated brain about as complex as a cat's with his Aineko character in Accelerondo, suggesting to me, that no, SciFi has not fallen behind actual tech advances. http://www.mercurynews.com/valley/ci_13809715 http://www.mercurynews.com/valley/ci_13809715
- cma 17y ago
  Charlie Stross is quoted in the orignal article. I think a decent standard for a top-level comment here is that you should have read the article. In the sub-levels, it can make sense not to.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    You keep saying that. I think a decent standard for any comment is to not repeat yourself without good cause. The title is close to the format of an "Ask HN" without the prompt. Just speaking for myself here, but it was 4:30 in the morning when I saw that, wrote an answer to the question, then realized that it was actually a link to a site, read the article and had received an upvote by the time I got around to adding the bit about Stallman. I figured there are two things wrong with removing Charles Stross from my comment, first that may have been the reason I got the upvote, second I think plugging Charles Stross where ever the demise of modern SF is mentioned is a good thing to do. Misleading titles lead to confusion, conclusion, yes, we can do better and not post articles that have a question as the title, because chances are people will simply answer the question.
unalone 17y ago
Of course it hasn't. The problem is that science fiction split into two factions. The people who thought sci-fi was about the pulp stories went on to write pulp stories. The people who understood the real idea behind science fiction became more commonly accepted as literature and get ignored by the so-called science fiction elite. Science fiction's not about the technology. It's about creating a hypothetical situation and using it to examine ourselves. In good sci-fi, the only technology that exists is there to mirror us. Look at Dune, the greatest sci-fi I've ever read, for the ultimate example: It deals with ecological scarcity, religious fanaticism, chemical addiction, and a plethora of other topics, and merges them all together to create the core universe in which it takes place. What makes it good is how every bit of information about the universe is relevant both to the plot and to the social issues it talks about. We still have that today. The problem is it's been co-opted by "serious" writers who include Herbert and Dick as literary canon. Doris Lessing, Michael Cunningham, a slew more whose work is science fiction but for the fact that it bears about it the pretenses of more literate fiction, so that it's ignored by people looking for the low-fi attitude of earlier science fiction, before it was commonplace.
- sethg 17y ago
  Joe Haldeman: "Science fiction isn't about the future; it's about the present."
  - dunstad 17y ago
    Ender's Game is the best science fiction story (or story in general) I've ever read, and much of what makes it science fiction fades into the background as you read. The important thing when I read is the character, whom I can relate to, not the technology itself, which I can't.
    - unalone 17y ago
      You need to get into more sci-fi and more literature. Ender's Game is just intro-level. It's got a plethora of problems, too: The more you read it, the more you realize what a deeply sick worldview it and its author have. I can still read some of the later books in the series, but Ender's Game nauseates me a little more every time I try. That said: Orson Scott Card is an excellent teacher, and his story collection Maps In A Mirror unveils a lot of his tips for writing well.
JCThoughtscream 17y ago
I am rather amused at the juxtaposition of a steam-era metaphor when discussing internet-age science fiction. It's rather akin to complaining about the quality of today's race horses when everybody else's checking out NASCAR. Meanwhile, I'll be (metaphorically) hanging out with the likes of Stross, Scalzi and Banks. Scifi hasn't died - it never needed reviving. It's just that it's harder and harder every year to distinguish it from reality...
randallsquared 17y ago
I think the main problem with science fiction today is that it's really, really difficult to write believable hard science fiction. It's relatively easy to write about the future as seen from the 1940s to 1960s (and lots of SF writers continue to do that... Bova, Niven, Pournelle, even Varley, these days), but it's really hard to write about a medium-distance future that plausibly follows from our world. The only book I've read recently that mostly managed it was Halting State, and it was set only ten years from now. More and more, the kind of "SF" I find myself reading is stuff that doesn't even try; it's just fantasy with science fiction trappings, and while that can be briefly entertaining, it doesn't have the "something like this could really happen" of the midtwentieth SF I used to read. Edit: awkward flow of text
- warwick 17y ago
  The weird part for me was that Halting State took me more than one read to feel like I 'got' what the book was about, much like Neuromanancer did. Science Fiction of the rocket ship and little green men variety is easy to imagine. A realistic world ten years from now, less so.
- billswift 17y ago
  I haven't read "Halting State" yet, but Stross's "Accelerando" is pretty good. You might also try Vinge's "Rainbows End".
  - randallsquared 17y ago
    Yeah, Accelerando was a book I thought important, and wanted to love, but only like. Rainbows End was entertaining, but not like Vinge's earlier stuff, in my opinion. Ah, well. :)
  - ido 17y ago
    I read many of Stross's and liked them, but I can't help but feel most (all?) are pretty similar to one another.
arasakik 17y ago
I think Ted Chiang is amazing. His ratio of awards won to stories written is impressive. One of his short stories, "Understand" was recommended to me recently. It's fantastic: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm
igorlev 17y ago
Science Fiction as a genre came to life during a time when science was making enormous changes in people's everyday lives within a relatively short time. Railroads, electrification, long distance communication, mechanization, flight, etc. all either appeared or went "mass market" in a few generations. This may well have been the first time when science and technology were brought to people's attention as something that actually had a direct effect on what they did. While before you could live in the same village for your entire life and not see much change, now everyone saw the impact of science when a railroad came through your town, or when you got an electric light. Because of this, there developed a large market of people who were interested in both producing and consuming the "what if" scenarios and analysis provided by sci-fi. Today, the idea of change brought on by technology and science is not only an accepted idea, it's pretty much a given. Sci-fi hasn't run out of steam, it's just that the function that it provided has now diffused into every single other form of media. It still reappears as a distinct form from time to time, accompanying major inventions such as the internet(Neuromancer, etc.) but more and more I think that it will just stop being a distinct genre and blend in with everything else.
lsd5you 17y ago
Yes. In my view it probably did so about 20 years ago. Are there any works from the last 2 decades that could be even mentioned in the same breath as dune, foundation, ender's game, neuromancer, hyperion ...etc.?
- Dobbs 17y ago
  anathem. There are some decent scifi in the last decade or so but not on the level of foundation and friends. Also there has been some amazing scifi in other mediums, like television and movies.
- randallsquared 17y ago
  Island in the Sea of Time was published in 1998, and spawned a sub-genre. Speaking of Stirling, his series The Domination is in the same class as Ender's Game and Dune, at least, for world-building, and the first one was published in 1988, per wikipedia. Accelerando has more scope than most of those you mention. Other books in that class would include Snow Crash, A Fire Upon the Deep and the sequel A Deepness in the Sky... Hm. It's true that most of those I can think of right now are from the early part of the last 20 years (or the first one of the series is). Maybe that's because that was the end of the SF era, as you suggest, or maybe it's for some other reason (I've been an adult a little less than 20 years, which may bias me; it may be that lots of books of the past ten years will be considered important, but they require distance; something else?).
- Retric 17y ago
  I think these could stand up to that list: The Diamond Age (1995) Cryptonomicon (1999)
  - smokinn 17y ago
    To those I'd add: The Orphanage series (starting in 2004) and The Old Man's War series (starting in 2005)
    - Xichekolas 17y ago
      I recently really enjoyed the Revelation Space series by Alistair Reynolds. Also, Greg Bear's books about The Way (Legacy, Eon, etc) make a great series.
rglovejoy 17y ago
I would say that science fiction has run out of steam in the sense that hardly anyone reads real SF anymore. Just go down to Border's or Barnes & Noble to see what I mean. You will find some titles by Heinlein and Clarke, but a lot of the shelfspace in the SF section will be devoted to various media tie-ins, such as Star Trek, Star Wars and X-Men. There will also be plenty of fantasy novels, mostly dealing with vampires or with settings that Tolkien first created more than half a century ago. You will need to look very hard to find something interesting. The situation with short stories is also dire. For example, Analog went from 115,000 issues per month in the early 1980s to a little over 30,000 in 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fact#Circulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fact...). In recent months, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had to switch to a bimonthly schedule in order to rein in their costs. Part of the problem is that people don't read for pleasure as much as they used to. Editors and publishers want to print what they think the public wants. Right now, it seems that the public wants Tolkien knock-offs, manga and Batman. The average person's exposure to SF is through the movies, television or video games, not the written word.
- cstross 17y ago
  You're confusing the outer manifestations of a sick mass market distribution chain with an inferred cause ("people don't read for pleasure as much as they used to"). We're actually living through the golden age of reading right now -- HN is symptomatic of this; can you imagine HN existing in the pre-web or pre-usenet era? -- but there's a lot more noise in the system, and the existing distribution networks are crumbling in the face of competition (just as with the record and movie businesses before them). Borders and B&N aren't healthy businesses. And as for the mass market paperback distribution ecosystem, it nearly collapsed completely back in late 2008. But that doesn't mean there's no demand for the product; all it means is that some intermediate stages in the supply chain are borked. (And no, Amazon is not the answer -- at least, not from the writers or publishers point of view. Shudder.) Of course F&SF and Asimov's are showing declining newsstand circulation. What's interesting is that they're both on the rise in ebook editions ... and nobody's talking about http://www.tor.com/ http://www.tor.com/ and their fiction-publishing habits (which, ahem, pay rather more than the traditional monthlies, suggesting that there's money in the vertical integration/social network model they're pursuing).
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

39 points by nreece 17y ago

Absolutely not. The old guard has mostly died, but there are lots of very good new writers, have a look at Charles Stross. Neal Stephenson writes beautiful stuff, there is Ian M. Banks, Greg Bear and on and on... I'm sure Stallman will be psyched that he's labeled the creator of "GNU Linux" in the article.

cma 17y ago
Charles Stross was interviewed for the article... when people make headlines that end in a question mark it baits this kind of response, but come on, we can do better.

rbanffy 17y ago

Well... Asimov and Clarke pretty much did run out of steam. Too bad - I think we could simulate them at 10% real-time in a couple decades, had they resisted, but there are some folks writing pretty relevant (and inspiring) sci-fi today. And at least one of them is known for hanging around HN.

jimfl 17y ago

Charlie Stross anticipated this news story about a simulated brain about as complex as a cat's with his Aineko character in Accelerondo, suggesting to me, that no, SciFi has not fallen behind actual tech advances. http://www.mercurynews.com/valley/ci_13809715 http://www.mercurynews.com/valley/ci_13809715

cma 17y ago
Charlie Stross is quoted in the orignal article. I think a decent standard for a top-level comment here is that you should have read the article. In the sub-levels, it can make sense not to.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  You keep saying that. I think a decent standard for any comment is to not repeat yourself without good cause. The title is close to the format of an "Ask HN" without the prompt. Just speaking for myself here, but it was 4:30 in the morning when I saw that, wrote an answer to the question, then realized that it was actually a link to a site, read the article and had received an upvote by the time I got around to adding the bit about Stallman. I figured there are two things wrong with removing Charles Stross from my comment, first that may have been the reason I got the upvote, second I think plugging Charles Stross where ever the demise of modern SF is mentioned is a good thing to do. Misleading titles lead to confusion, conclusion, yes, we can do better and not post articles that have a question as the title, because chances are people will simply answer the question.

unalone 17y ago

Of course it hasn't. The problem is that science fiction split into two factions. The people who thought sci-fi was about the pulp stories went on to write pulp stories. The people who understood the real idea behind science fiction became more commonly accepted as literature and get ignored by the so-called science fiction elite. Science fiction's not about the technology. It's about creating a hypothetical situation and using it to examine ourselves. In good sci-fi, the only technology that exists is there to mirror us. Look at Dune, the greatest sci-fi I've ever read, for the ultimate example: It deals with ecological scarcity, religious fanaticism, chemical addiction, and a plethora of other topics, and merges them all together to create the core universe in which it takes place. What makes it good is how every bit of information about the universe is relevant both to the plot and to the social issues it talks about. We still have that today. The problem is it's been co-opted by "serious" writers who include Herbert and Dick as literary canon. Doris Lessing, Michael Cunningham, a slew more whose work is science fiction but for the fact that it bears about it the pretenses of more literate fiction, so that it's ignored by people looking for the low-fi attitude of earlier science fiction, before it was commonplace.

sethg 17y ago
Joe Haldeman: "Science fiction isn't about the future; it's about the present."
- dunstad 17y ago
  Ender's Game is the best science fiction story (or story in general) I've ever read, and much of what makes it science fiction fades into the background as you read. The important thing when I read is the character, whom I can relate to, not the technology itself, which I can't.
  - unalone 17y ago
    You need to get into more sci-fi and more literature. Ender's Game is just intro-level. It's got a plethora of problems, too: The more you read it, the more you realize what a deeply sick worldview it and its author have. I can still read some of the later books in the series, but Ender's Game nauseates me a little more every time I try. That said: Orson Scott Card is an excellent teacher, and his story collection Maps In A Mirror unveils a lot of his tips for writing well.

JCThoughtscream 17y ago

I am rather amused at the juxtaposition of a steam-era metaphor when discussing internet-age science fiction. It's rather akin to complaining about the quality of today's race horses when everybody else's checking out NASCAR. Meanwhile, I'll be (metaphorically) hanging out with the likes of Stross, Scalzi and Banks. Scifi hasn't died - it never needed reviving. It's just that it's harder and harder every year to distinguish it from reality...

randallsquared 17y ago

I think the main problem with science fiction today is that it's really, really difficult to write believable hard science fiction. It's relatively easy to write about the future as seen from the 1940s to 1960s (and lots of SF writers continue to do that... Bova, Niven, Pournelle, even Varley, these days), but it's really hard to write about a medium-distance future that plausibly follows from our world. The only book I've read recently that mostly managed it was Halting State, and it was set only ten years from now. More and more, the kind of "SF" I find myself reading is stuff that doesn't even try; it's just fantasy with science fiction trappings, and while that can be briefly entertaining, it doesn't have the "something like this could really happen" of the midtwentieth SF I used to read. Edit: awkward flow of text

warwick 17y ago
The weird part for me was that Halting State took me more than one read to feel like I 'got' what the book was about, much like Neuromanancer did. Science Fiction of the rocket ship and little green men variety is easy to imagine. A realistic world ten years from now, less so.
billswift 17y ago
I haven't read "Halting State" yet, but Stross's "Accelerando" is pretty good. You might also try Vinge's "Rainbows End".
- randallsquared 17y ago
  Yeah, Accelerando was a book I thought important, and wanted to love, but only like. Rainbows End was entertaining, but not like Vinge's earlier stuff, in my opinion. Ah, well. :)
- ido 17y ago
  I read many of Stross's and liked them, but I can't help but feel most (all?) are pretty similar to one another.

arasakik 17y ago

I think Ted Chiang is amazing. His ratio of awards won to stories written is impressive. One of his short stories, "Understand" was recommended to me recently. It's fantastic: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm

igorlev 17y ago

Science Fiction as a genre came to life during a time when science was making enormous changes in people's everyday lives within a relatively short time. Railroads, electrification, long distance communication, mechanization, flight, etc. all either appeared or went "mass market" in a few generations. This may well have been the first time when science and technology were brought to people's attention as something that actually had a direct effect on what they did. While before you could live in the same village for your entire life and not see much change, now everyone saw the impact of science when a railroad came through your town, or when you got an electric light. Because of this, there developed a large market of people who were interested in both producing and consuming the "what if" scenarios and analysis provided by sci-fi. Today, the idea of change brought on by technology and science is not only an accepted idea, it's pretty much a given. Sci-fi hasn't run out of steam, it's just that the function that it provided has now diffused into every single other form of media. It still reappears as a distinct form from time to time, accompanying major inventions such as the internet(Neuromancer, etc.) but more and more I think that it will just stop being a distinct genre and blend in with everything else.

lsd5you 17y ago

Yes. In my view it probably did so about 20 years ago. Are there any works from the last 2 decades that could be even mentioned in the same breath as dune, foundation, ender's game, neuromancer, hyperion ...etc.?

Dobbs 17y ago
anathem. There are some decent scifi in the last decade or so but not on the level of foundation and friends. Also there has been some amazing scifi in other mediums, like television and movies.
randallsquared 17y ago
Island in the Sea of Time was published in 1998, and spawned a sub-genre. Speaking of Stirling, his series The Domination is in the same class as Ender's Game and Dune, at least, for world-building, and the first one was published in 1988, per wikipedia. Accelerando has more scope than most of those you mention. Other books in that class would include Snow Crash, A Fire Upon the Deep and the sequel A Deepness in the Sky... Hm. It's true that most of those I can think of right now are from the early part of the last 20 years (or the first one of the series is). Maybe that's because that was the end of the SF era, as you suggest, or maybe it's for some other reason (I've been an adult a little less than 20 years, which may bias me; it may be that lots of books of the past ten years will be considered important, but they require distance; something else?).
Retric 17y ago
I think these could stand up to that list: The Diamond Age (1995) Cryptonomicon (1999)
- smokinn 17y ago
  To those I'd add: The Orphanage series (starting in 2004) and The Old Man's War series (starting in 2005)
  - Xichekolas 17y ago
    I recently really enjoyed the Revelation Space series by Alistair Reynolds. Also, Greg Bear's books about The Way (Legacy, Eon, etc) make a great series.

rglovejoy 17y ago

I would say that science fiction has run out of steam in the sense that hardly anyone reads real SF anymore. Just go down to Border's or Barnes & Noble to see what I mean. You will find some titles by Heinlein and Clarke, but a lot of the shelfspace in the SF section will be devoted to various media tie-ins, such as Star Trek, Star Wars and X-Men. There will also be plenty of fantasy novels, mostly dealing with vampires or with settings that Tolkien first created more than half a century ago. You will need to look very hard to find something interesting. The situation with short stories is also dire. For example, Analog went from 115,000 issues per month in the early 1980s to a little over 30,000 in 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fact#Circulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fact...). In recent months, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had to switch to a bimonthly schedule in order to rein in their costs. Part of the problem is that people don't read for pleasure as much as they used to. Editors and publishers want to print what they think the public wants. Right now, it seems that the public wants Tolkien knock-offs, manga and Batman. The average person's exposure to SF is through the movies, television or video games, not the written word.

cstross 17y ago
You're confusing the outer manifestations of a sick mass market distribution chain with an inferred cause ("people don't read for pleasure as much as they used to"). We're actually living through the golden age of reading right now -- HN is symptomatic of this; can you imagine HN existing in the pre-web or pre-usenet era? -- but there's a lot more noise in the system, and the existing distribution networks are crumbling in the face of competition (just as with the record and movie businesses before them). Borders and B&N aren't healthy businesses. And as for the mass market paperback distribution ecosystem, it nearly collapsed completely back in late 2008. But that doesn't mean there's no demand for the product; all it means is that some intermediate stages in the supply chain are borked. (And no, Amazon is not the answer -- at least, not from the writers or publishers point of view. Shudder.) Of course F&SF and Asimov's are showing declining newsstand circulation. What's interesting is that they're both on the rise in ebook editions ... and nobody's talking about http://www.tor.com/ http://www.tor.com/ and their fiction-publishing habits (which, ahem, pay rather more than the traditional monthlies, suggesting that there's money in the vertical integration/social network model they're pursuing).

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]