
Has sci-fi run out of steam? - nreece
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/353485/the-sci-fi-legends-who-shaped-todays-tech
======
unalone
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.

~~~
randallsquared
_Science fiction's not about the technology._

Well, except that some of it is. I get the impression that what you're calling
pulp includes all the sensawunda, which is all that really separates science
fiction from other genres (since other than that, most science fiction is _in_
another genre... fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, etc -- including Dune,
actually).

~~~
prodigal_erik
This. For _Ringworld_ , Niven invented several coherent non-human
intelligences that set titanic forces in motion, and explored what the results
would be like to live in. For a writer to merely "examine ourselves" seems
almost lazy in comparison, and not at all what's unique to science fiction.
_Dune_ in particular was so dominated by mysticism and politics that I think
it would have worked better as fantasy set in ancient Egypt.

~~~
cturner

        Dune in particular was so dominated by mysticism and
        politics that I think it would have worked better as
        fantasy set in ancient Egypt.
    

I've never thought of this. Strongly agree. I've grown a distaste for science
fiction because often it's a lot more elaborate than it needs to be to
communicate a point. It trades away the benefit of a completely fictional
setting in that

Scifi requires you to invest a lot of energy in the read, yet a lot of it is
rubbish so the ratios are wrong.

Part of the reason I like Philip K Dick is that for the sort of fiction he
writes, science fiction often _is_ the best medium for communicating. And, he
doesn't mind producing books where part of the story doesn't even make sense
in a rational sense, so long as it's progressing the message.

In _Time Out of Joint_ the game world is implausible. The messages on paper
doesn't make sense. The brainwashed characters seems like a big thing to be
taken for granted. The edge of the world doesn't add up. However, the
protagonist's attempts to come to terms with the world he's in is believable.

Dick writes fiction as I seek to hack. "Am I solving the problem I care
about?"

The benefit of the lack of context is that scifi can serve as a literary
equivalent of a rapid development environment. The author is able to summon
technology or magic in order to create settings that exercise the characters.
_Ubik_ uses not-subtle examples of this in order to explore the ideas it cares
about - precognition and a variation of brain-in-the-vat.

Unfortunately, the mainstream culture of fiction and fantasy epic (Lord of the
Rings, Dune) actively fights this flexibility. They try to construct castles
in the air - worlds that take significant energy to build and comprehend, and
which thereby become limited by the same barriers that affect tales set in
real settings. Having done all this work, many then tell stories about
princesses, knights and dragons. Dune managed to rise some way out of that.

~~~
prodigal_erik
For many, the world building is the point. While your favorites throw in just
enough tech to make the plot work, mine throw in just enough plot to take us
through the world. There are authors who take such pride in this they go to
conventions and seminars with other authors just to design shared worlds from
scratch.

And "summon technology or magic" is where a lot of bad sci-fi fails. Magic can
have ridiculously arbitrary rules attached, but technology has to work
systematically. If you add technology but omit all the effects it obviously
should have had on your society (especially on other technology), readers like
me are going to quit in disgust.

<http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WallBanger>

------
randallsquared
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

~~~
billswift
I haven't read "Halting State" yet, but Stross's "Accelerando" is pretty good.
You might also try Vinge's "Rainbows End".

~~~
randallsquared
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. :)

------
igorlev
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.

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jacquesm
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
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.

------
JCThoughtscream
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...

------
arasakik
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>

------
rglovejoy
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fact#Circulation)).
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
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/> 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).

------
rbanffy
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.

------
lsd5you
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.?

~~~
Retric
I think these could stand up to that list:

    
    
      The Diamond Age  (1995)
      Cryptonomicon (1999)

~~~
smokinn
To those I'd add:

The Orphanage series (starting in 2004) and The Old Man's War series (starting
in 2005)

~~~
rsaarelm
Am I missing something about Old Man's War? Everbody seems to think it's a
great piece of contemporary SF, but to me it read like it was written for
people who read Heinlein as teenagers in the 50s, and whose worldview pretty
much hasn't developed since.

The science parts are handwavey plot conveniences, the books drop their main
interesting bit of looking into the psychology of soldiers with 70 or zero
years of life experience by treating the characters as generic clever 20-year
olds, and the bleak xenophobic backdrop mixed with the juvenile war adventure
plots makes the whole thing feel like a weird, unironic war propaganda piece.

~~~
billswift
I like the "Old Man's War" series about as much as I do Weber's and Ringo's
books - they are interesting stories but the science is seriously hand-wavey.
Unlike Heinlien who had military and politics in serious science fiction,
these authors produce primarily military and political stories with science-
fictiony backdrops.

------
jimfl
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>

~~~
cma
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
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.

