
Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction. Why Can’t We Move Past Cyberpunk? - pseudolus
https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/hopepunk-cyberpunk-solarpunk-science-fiction-broken.html
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freshhawk
The whole premise of this piece is the same as the deluded "hopepunk" premise.

Cyberpunk is sticky because it got so many things right. Both in terms of
political/economic/social predictions and in terms of an attractive aesthetic.
And technologically it is now an alternate present where we went with VR
instead of smartphones and private military commandos instead of strategic
media campaigns.

Saying that SF is "broken" because of this, or pushing thoughts-and-prayers-
punk trash, is taking the Bannon view that "politics is downstream from
culture". That the worth of a genre of fiction is measured by its value as
motivational propaganda.

I wonder what sub-genre of SF has something to say about the people who are
pushing "consume this corporate media that makes you feel happy and hopeful
instead of angry" as a response to social problems?

Of course the other reason for cyberpunk's staying power is that it is an
established genre and media companies know how that established genres are
safer investments (best investment: reboot/sequel to something people already
like).

I wonder what sub-genre of SF had a lot to say about the result of
corporate/economic influences on popular art?

Gee, what a mystery.

~~~
narrator
>That the worth of a genre of fiction is measured by its value as motivational
propaganda.

It's the manifest destiny of the culture war that absolutely EVERYTHING has
its cultural value purchased and liquidated for it's political propaganda cash
value.

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com2kid
I am confused, modern Science Fiction has gone way beyond Cyberpunk. It takes
into consideration what having real AI might mean for the world, or what a
post-scarcity society might look like, or how horrible/painful the transition
to that post scarcity society might be, as all the current holders of power do
everything they can to maintain their grip on the world.

Modern science fiction describes worlds where people can clone their
consciousness 50 times over, where it is possible to adjust the perception of
time, and where plans take millennia to come to fruition.

Accelerando by Charles Stross. Recursion by Tony Ballantyne. Down and Out in
the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.

Yes, these are all evolutions of previous ideas, but Science Fiction has
always built on itself.

~~~
CodeMage
You're not confused, the article is confused. It boils down to a gripe against
the suffix "-punk" and it tries to make some connection between that and the
lack of originality that is to be expected when art meets mass-market.

~~~
stubish
And then at the end, it blames the authors! "You may need to drop the -punk
suffix". The authors I know hate the categorizations, but fans keep sticking
labels on them. At least the labels publishers and bookstores attach are broad
brushes like 'Science Fiction', 'Romance', or good old 'Literature' for the
works that have managed to shake off their burdens.

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Cpoll
> By 1992, they could be hilariously parodied by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash
> (a novel often mistaken as an example of the subgenre it meant to mock).

Citation needed. While this is under open debate amongst fans of the genre, I
don't think Stephenson has stated it's a parody? And deliberate parody or not,
I feel it brings a lot of ideas into the fold and observes the spirit of the
genre. It's not a mistake to cite it as an example of the genre.

~~~
crooked-v
The main character's name is literally "Hiro Protagonist".

~~~
Cpoll
Being tongue-in-cheek, self-aware, and even being a deliberate parody don't
preclude a work from being an exemplar of the genre it's parodying.

~~~
freshhawk
That is perfectly reasonable, but I think it is also perfectly reasonable to
say "parody of X" is the genre most related to but still distinct from genre
"X".

In a lot of contexts that is a useful taxonomy to use, because it ends up
being more clear.

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eli_gottlieb
To give my extremely opinionated opinion: because science, politics, and
philosophy haven't advanced past the assumptions that made cyberpunk look like
a plausible vision of the future.

And you can't necessarily just solve this "politically" with "activist scifi".
You have to actually figure out which scientific and philosophical foundation-
stones of our present social and technological orders are _false assumptions_
, and figure out how to open them to question and speculation. Then you have
to tell an interesting story about it all!

(I often find that many of the people trying to "critique" our social order
haven't taken that essential step of asking _what the counterfactuals are_ to
the false assumptions they critique. They think just by criticizing, you open
some vast untapped field of techno-social possibilities. Nah, once you've
grabbed the steering wheel, you still need to have _somewhere to steer
towards_ , a map of how to get there, and a map of why you _want_ to go
there.)

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api
Cyberpunk and its derivatives are indeed going on an almost 40 years' reign.
What this article forgets is that so-called "golden age" space opera or
swashbuckling space privateer style sci-fi had a longer reign from maybe the
1920s until the 1980s. The cyberpunk paradigm is comparatively young.

I don't agree with Ursula LeGuin that novelists shouldn't or can't imagine the
future. The early cyberpunks certainly did imagine aspects of the future like
the importance of cyber-security, individuals vs. massive multinational
entities, social fragmentation, and the decay of the nation state. SpaceX's
shiny rocket currently taking shape shows that some of the "golden age" space
sci-fi writers imagined certain aspects of the future too. The greatest sci-fi
is about both the present and the future.

~~~
arbitrage
No reason why a 40-year old and a 60-year old could not both be considered ...
well, old

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zokier
Only tangentially related to the title, but one thing that I have noticed
about space scifi is that it is very difficult to find novels that do not
venture into very fantastical elements and instead would root themselves into
known science _and engineering_. Almost every novel seems to be filled with
aliens of all sorts, FTL, omnious superhuman AIs, nanobots that are
practically magic, and whatnot. The thing I found so refreshing about _The
Martian_ (despite its other shortcomings) was how everything was just so
believable; pretty much the same as what Musk is promising to deliver in the
very near future. Why can't more novels be like that?

~~~
jmelloy
I'd check out The Expanse. The core is a world rooted in relatively real-world
engineering, and the fantastical builds pretty slowly (and is generally
terrifying).

~~~
XorNot
The Expanse is a low-down and dirty description of near future humanity
running headlong into an Outside Context Problem.

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kochikame
Cyberpunk still resonates and has cultural value for many reasons (the
aesthetic not the least among them) but primarily because it is very much
human-centered, messy, broken and glitched, or, to put it another way,
realistic.

Previous SF genres had shiny futures, technology that worked, bad guys who
were bad and good guys who were good... cyberpunk turned that all on its head
and asked "What if everything is as broken and shitty in the future as it is
now? What if it's even shittier? Never mind the captains and the heroes, what
will the lowlifes and the junkies and the scoundrels do in the future? What if
technology is no solution but just a source of more problems?"

These questions remain as relevant and compelling as ever, and so the genre
endures.

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horsawlarway
He claims that sci-fi can't move past Cyberpunk, but I think there's a much
more reasonable take on this -

Modern day society looks a lot like the sci-fi novels from the 80s. Novels
that use modern day as a kick-off point will naturally have elements of that
embedded within them. That sure as hell doesn't make them "punk" novels.

I think modern sci-fi has gone a LONG way past "punk" and is pretty firmly in
the "post-apocolyptic" realm right now (which I find marginally entertaining
and relatively scary depending on my mood any given day).

That said, I think another large reason is that we're still in early days for
many of the technological themes presented in those punk novels.

Human-machine interfaces are still in infancy.

AI is breaking ground, but just barely.

Power generation is basically the same story (although modern fusion is
looking more and more compelling).

We have SO much untapped potential there that it's absolutely obvious why
people continue to write different takes of it.

Alternatively, the author just has a fetish for punk styled novels and hasn't
quite realized it yet.

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yongjik
Tangential as a lukewarm SF fan - I liked some cyberpunk stories, but whenever
I read one I can't help thinking "Wait, but what about bandwidth?"

I mean, I can sorta buy over-intelligent AI, human-computer interface, and all
that cool shit, but the bits have to flow from here to there somehow. And all
cyberpunk stories I've read just assume that information magically teleports.
Just like that awful Avatar (which isn't really cyberpunk, but still) - we
have rogue humans running around in an undeveloped alien planet and somehow
they enjoy ultra-4K instant VR experience over the air? Who's maintaining that
connection?

~~~
escardin
I have the same concerns about power. In the expanse they spend pretty much a
whole book griping about how little sunlight there is to grow plants on a moon
of Jupiter, and yet they have fusion powered star ships that can maintain 1g+
indefinitely without running out of fuel for a trip basically anywhere in the
solar system.

~~~
headcanon
I can't speak to that discrepancy, but I like the expanse as an example of
hard sci-fi primarily because it makes very few tech jumps to build its
universe. Ignoring the alien tech, the only real innovation that appears
outlandish to us now that they gloss over in the series are those fusion
starships.

But as with any sci-fi, you have to have some amount of suspension of
disbelief when talking about new tech. If the author knew everything about the
tech they talk about, they wouldn't be writing science fiction because they
would have invented it, and we'd be reading nonfiction instead.

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znpy
I started to enjoy reading stuff from the solarpunk movement. And the memes,
they're awesome.

Hopefully someday there will be a landmark solarpunk movie/book that will
definitely set it as a recurring theme and general direction for new thinkers
to embrace.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's the second time I see this genre mentioned on HN, in the space of a
~month. Do you have any recommendations of what solarpunk works to read or
see?

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coldtea
Because there's no vision for our future that's really good and people really
believe in it.

~~~
pseudolus
I think it's more likely that the author of the piece appears to be obsessed
with any fiction to which "punk" is appended and appears to be excluding a
great deal of other material that disproves his thesis such as the late Iain
M. Banks' Culture series, Alastair Reynold's "Revelation Space" series, Neal
Asher's Polity series, Cixin Liu's trilogy, many of Peter Hamilton's books and
even authors such as China Miéville (Embassytown).

------
CryptoPunk
>>We are still, in many ways, living in the world Reagan and Thatcher built—a
neoliberal world of growing precarity, corporate dominance, divestment from
the welfare state, and social atomization.

There has been a massive increase in social welfare spending since 1982.

The continual mischaracterizations of history by writers at media outlets like
Slate is really unethical.

Also, the economy is substantially more regulated, and the government's
control through omni-surveillance and legal inventions like National Security
Letters, has grown by leaps and bounds.

The increasingly constrained, legalistic and centralized structure of the
economy is one reason people's lives in the developed world haven't improved
more since 1982.

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egypturnash
I've been spending the past year working on a space opera comic told with
cartoon animals, so whatevs. I roll my eyes every time someone comes up with a
manifesto for their new microgenre and dubs it "somethingpunk".

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drannex
I for one, am hoping for far more cyberpunk content.

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bitxbitxbitcoin
My favorite cyberpunk word derivation: cypherpunk.

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gHosts
Sci fi is a vision of possible futures...

..our present is locking us into a narrow range of dystopian futures.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Our present ain't locking us _that_ hard yet; I'd say that people being fed
gloomy visions is a big contributor to the risk of bad future materializing,
because it sabotages the only thing people can use against things going along
the path of least resistance - the human capacity to decide to do things
differently, short-term economic interest be damned.

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InclinedPlane
Read this twitter thread commentary instead:
[https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1085230966833065984](https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1085230966833065984)

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CryptoPunk
I consider Rick and Morty to be revolutionary as far as science fiction goes.

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dhodges
This seems to me like an editor fishing at the bottom of the barrel for a
story idea and then handing it to a junior writer. Saying that Sci-fi is
"broken" is ludicrous.

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topologie
Stanislaw Lem provided some good foundations for this. It suffices to read,
say, Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy.

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pthomas551
To quote MST3K...

Can't we just get beyond Thunderdome?

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mbrodersen
Obviously the author of the article haven't read Iain M. Banks (the Culture
series).

