

Is science fiction dying? - awt
http://mobile.salon.com/books/feature/2010/12/16/21st_century_science_fiction/index.html

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nl
SciFi might not be dying, but reading that prose nearly killed me. Anyway...

 _Does the genre continue to have new and useful things to say?_ I still
remember when I first came across the idea of recreational engineered viruses
as a substitute for drugs (I think it was in a Richard Morgan book?). I think
SciFi is becoming more original, not less.

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PostOnce
Giant wall of text, so I skimmed, but I think, no. Art never dies, it just
finds a niche when the general public finds a new fad.

Commercially, sci-fi seems to be doing well. Moon, District 9, Avatar, Star
Trek. As a forecast of tech-to-come, who can say if it's as accurate as it
once was, we'll have to wait for the future to arrive to really know, right?

Aside from an enjoyable read, sci-fi is still inspiring people to get involved
in the sciences. So sci-fi, I think, is doing fine on many fronts.

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iwwr
For due diligence:

"Where is my flying car?" <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMPH0tlC5K4>

Sci-fi generally fails at future predictions.

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varjag
You don't really read sci-fi for predictions though?

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iwwr
No, which is the point. (as a reply to derefr)

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stupidsignup
I am a hardcore sci-fi fan. Although I basically grew up in a library, the
most fascinating part of it were the two or three racks nobody frequented than
me: the racks were full of hardcore sci-fi like heinlein, asimov, pkdick,
silverberg, leguin, pohl, you name them. In that sense, Sci-Fi is actually
dying, because in the last 10 years, I hardly found something that even
remotely compares with the great work of these guys except for the works of
one author, Iain. M. Banks.

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Symmetry
If you like Banks you might consider checking out the other two members of the
"Scottish Clique", Ken Macleod and Charles Stross. Both write some really good
stuff.

Other new good hard SF writers might be Cory Doctorow, Michael Chabon, Rachel
Swirsky, Sara Genge, Geoffrey Landis, Elizabeth Bear, Ted Chiang, Paolo
Bacigalupi, Aliette de Bodard, Mary Robinette Kowal, Charlie Jane Anders,
Felicity Shoulders, and Ian Tregillis. I haven't read them all, but they're
all at least on my reading list for good hard SF due to recommendations from
friends I trust.

And I'll second the Alistair Reynolds recommendation too.

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ninguem2
Greg Egan should be on this list.

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Symmetry
He's certainly good, I really loved Distress, but I guess I don't think of him
as new. Which is sort of silly I guess, given that he's still putting out
stuff. If we're including him might as well do Bruce Sterling as well. I'm
rereading "Distraction" at the moment and it hold up pretty darn well - except
for failures of understanding about the economics of software development.

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martey
For some reason, this is linking to Salon's mobile version. The standard
version is available at
[http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/12/16/21st_century_s...](http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/12/16/21st_century_science_fiction/index.html)

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Rantenki
SciFi in 1920:

|==now==|=======================future=====================|

SciFi today:

|=====================now===================|====future====|

See? The problem is that we are out of land! We have so much science now that
would have been fiction before, that you can write a totally scifi novel that
is just seen as contemporary fiction. Take a gander at the newer William
Gibson books (Pattern Recognition for example). They are set a bit closer to
present, but if they had been written in the 70s, they would have been totally
scifi (laptop computers, cellular phones, realtime video editing, etc).

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dedward
I don't know - the most recent "Year's best science fiction" was a bit of a
letdown (And if the editor, Gardner Dozois is reading this, please don't take
it personally). I'f that's the best out there (I trust the editor) then, well,
maybe we could do a bit better, yeah?

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westinghouse
Science fiction is fine it's just going through a bit of a lull at the moment.
The current big market is contemporary fantasy aimed at a female readership,
and that's where publishers are putting their money, which means there is less
to spend on other similar (and I use the word loosely) genres. They are simply
going after what sells to the widest audience.

I think sci-fi is also suffering from the decline in interest of the sciences
in general. It's a shame but that's the way it is.

Quality rises to the top eventually, it will return.

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iwwr
When Syfy is adding shows about the paranormal, there is reason to worry.

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ComputerGuru
No, it's picking a name like "Syfy" that's hurting sci-fi ;)

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iwwr
That may be for Google optimizations. _Sci-fi_ is generic, _Syfy_ is specific.

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rationalbeaver
Likely more for trademark and brand protection than Google (although it
doesn't hurt there either).

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kgutteridge
Theres loads of seemingly good sci fi books being self published for the
Amazon Kindle, which might open up a new avenue for the niche and instill some
new ideas into the genre

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bhoung
Skim the article and jump to comments to find that everyone else has done the
same. How delightful. Shame the article didn't match the title. Doesn't appear
that there is any reason to suggest sci-fi is dying.

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DanielBMarkham
I find any discussion of sci-fi has to start with terms.

To me, sci-fi is fiction based in science that asks "what if"

What if we had time travel? What if we could read minds?

When you string together many such what-ifs, you end up in fantasy, which is
what a lot of people today confuse with sci-fi.

Early Star Trek to me was sci-fi because there were believable contemporary
characters engaged in asking and exploring around clear "what if" questions.
Yes, there was a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but it mostly stayed out of the way.
Soon, though, the Trek universe became so full of mumbo-jumbo, futuristic
societies that could never exist (really? no money? Just how would that work?)
and reversing the warp drive through the deflector grid nonsense that it
quickly ended up in full space fantasy land.

I just got through with Hull Zero Three, and while I liked it, it struck me as
a dark nightmare from a soulless author (I know nothing of the author, that's
just my impression). I _think_ there was a clear "what if", which was only put
to the reader at the end. Therefore, I'd qualify it as sci-fi. Pretty good
book, but dark.

But a lot of the crap, er, stuff I'm seeing that folks think is sci-fi is just
long-format futuristic fantasy -- social commentary at an epic scale written
with blasters and hyperdrives. Nothing wrong with that, but (to me) once you
lose track of exploring that simple what-if question, it's more like
commentary than analysis. You spend more time learning how the author views
the universe than you do questioning you beliefs in how things are put
together and what depends on what. Good stuff, certainly, but not sci-fi.

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weavejester
_(really? no money? Just how would that work?)_

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the Star Trek universe, but there
are other works of science fiction that explore this idea in a more plausible
fashion. Iain M. Banks has written a number of novels about a post-scarcity
civilisation called the Culture, which also lacks any sort of a financial
system.

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thezeus18
It's a good question, but keep in mind that people have been asking it for the
last 20 years.

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metageek
From the article:

> _Such statements regarding the death of SF are eternal. In 1960, for
> instance, a famous seminar was conducted under the heading "Who Killed
> Science Fiction?"_

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metageek
Skim it for the descriptions of new books. I came away with half a dozen to
look into.

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oceanician
Stargate Universe ... that's allllll I'm saying...

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InclinedPlane
Science fiction is not prognostifiction, it's not an attempt to predict the
future, and never has been.

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J3L2404
Not as long as Cory Doctorow is around.

