I don't know what sales numbers look like, but from my perspective as a casual reader who's been trying to keep up with Hugo Award nominees of recent years... science fiction may not be trendy on BookTok, but it's far from dead.
Sure, fantasy has "corrupted" the Hugos, but there's plenty of hard science fiction, and science fiction that grapples with societal questions at large. Arkady Martine's Memory Called Empire and Desolation Called Peace, both Hugo winners, are incredibly thoughtful depictions of societies on the verge of disruption from new technology. Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a 2022 Hugo nominee, while somewhat of a sci-fi-fantasy genre crossover, is both harrowing and exhilarating in its discussion of gender through a speculative lens (content warnings apply).
If you're looking for whether innovative science fiction is being adapted into popular media - the Three Body Problem (2015 Hugo winner) and the Murderbot series (won the Hugo most recently in 2021) are both being adapted. Andy Weir's post-Martian works continue to be hyped, if not quite adapted yet. The fanbase for Tamsyn Muir's Ninth series is rabid in the best possible way - and while ostensibly centered on necromancy, it's remarkably high in sci-fi hardness.
And outside of traditional publishing - democratized writing challenges like https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/, genre-crossing serial sci-fi like the works of Wildbow, and fanfiction in general (I continue to follow and adore the To The Stars, a Madoka fanfic which juxtaposes magic with a spacefaring future humanity, with masterful worldbuilding) continue to thrive.
Traditional publishing houses may indeed be in crisis, but contrary to the original article's assertion, there is no shortage of ideas.
Also on the TV/movie front science fiction is doing quite well right now.
Apple TV seems to have made producing good scifi series one of their main selling points. Lots of famous scifi series are getting TV adaptations and apple TV is producing wholly new scifi series as well.
Foundation, Murderbot, Silo, For All Mankind (and the upcoming Star City), Severence, Dark Matter, Monarch, Pluribus, and Neuromancer to name some of the current and upcoming series.
And of course if my theory is right I suspect the upcoming Firefly announcement will be that Apple TV is picking them up for a continuation as well.
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But also scifi has a lot of other avenues for exploring their ideas now (such as via interactive media/video games). I'd argue some of the best scifi works of the current generation come from interactive media/video games rather than television or movie. Ex: Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle 1&2, Nier, VA-11 Hall-A, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Deus Ex, etc.
Like frankly television and movie are massively expensive and books are way harder to sell now than they ever were (as discoverability and reach are poor) but video games as a more visual medium are easier to sell but at the same time the entry point for making them is an order of magnitude lower than TV or movies. So it's not terribly surprising to see scifi flourish with games where other mediums have found themselves in a slump.
One recent phenomenon for me was falling in love with Tchaikovsky's Children of Time trilogy, which explores very long-term colony ships sent out with thousands of cryogenically sleeping people of various skillsets, and planets seeded with a virus that artificially causes non-human beings to develop a certain kind of intelligence of being able to transmit complex ideas to each other, leading to technological evolution. There's so much depth to this series it's breaktaking.
So when I finished the books and explored his fantasy series (City of Lost Chances?), I had to check three times that I in fact had the same author. It's full of regurgitated fantasy tropes, the writing and characters seem simple, and there's a forced world building with what feels like an infinite and boring back story, with no movement to justify it.
Maybe the author was trying to capitalize on the fantasy popularity? His sci-fi is otherwise genius.
I don't like any of his fantasy, but like you, felt that children of time was marvelous.
It's really weird, I keep not starting Tyrant Philosphers because I am terrified it'll be awful and might lead me to not continue with his wonderful sci fi.
> It's full of regurgitated fantasy tropes, the writing and characters seem simple, and there's a forced world building with what feels like an infinite and boring back story, with no movement to justify it.
Maybe it's because he published 7 books that year (2021). Maybe it's also a coincidence that I remember not liking Children of Memory and he published 6 books that year, compared to Children of Time which was 2015 / 2 books.
Also just checked and looks like the fourth book (Children of Strife) is releasing in 2 weeks!
I completely agree. Tchaikovsky's at his best in the standalone novels, sci-fi or otherwise - I feel that his series are written with an eye to generate a long lasting income whereas his standalones are where he explores new ideas,which makes the vastly more interesting to me. Cage of Souls, Alien Clay and Service Model are some of his finest.
I thought Children of Time was very good, although the third book was out there. The themes explored and the world building felt like three books was justified. Shroud is the only standalone I read from him, I enjoyed it and plan on taking your suggestions.
I have a hard time reading sci-fi these days because the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting. I have a hard time seeing much other than computers in the future. Maybe stories like the Hyperion Cantos with the AIs in the TechnoCore largely fighting amongst themselves over the future of humanity are still intersting to me.
> the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting.
Opening them up again is a possible creative move. For example 'Dune', a far future where AIs and computers are banned and highly taboo because they caused too much trouble. Or there's alternate paths from the actual past such as steampunk in which we pushed mechanical engines further instead of switching (!) entirely to electronics.
I agree that opening up opportunities for other futures is good, but I don't think Dune was a good example of that even if you like the story -- Dune simply avoided the issue by assuming the future would implausibly turn into the past and that technology would be rejected and medieval feudalism and centralized religious control would return. A better, more plausible, future would show, as is often the case, that the technology we think is so ground-breaking today, just is integrated into daily life and hardly thought about rather than disappearing (which basically never happens).
Iain Banks still reigns supreme. Throw a couple LLMs in a chat together and they sound similar to his conversations between intelligences (particularly in Excession).
It's definitely _alluded_ to in Player of Games, mostly as a method of emphasising how unpleasant the Azad society is, but I don't think we ever really _see_ any of it?
(I may just be forgetting; it's probably at least a decade since I last read it.)
If I remember correctly, Gurgeh's internal narrative reveals what he observes in one of the secret channels that are restricted to the upper class. Unpleasant is quite the understatement. lol
But yeah, I don't think we actually see it firsthand, it's more disturbing than gory.
Imo good sci fi was never really meant to be a technical description of cool technology, but more about how humans interact in specific scenarios dictated by the existence of certain technologies. Star Trek was less about the intricacies of the warp drive and more about "what if humans could interact with hundreds of unique cultures," or "what could human society look like without scarcity?"
There are many stories to tell in the age of AI. I've yet to find a good Luddite novel that explores how the technology might be taken by the commons, rather than hoarded and made to serve capital (the way governments have been). There's plenty of stories to tell around exploring university of ethics once we have a truly non human intelligence to reckon with. Accelerando spent just as much time exploring the legal implications of non-human intelligences as it did the underlying technology.
Yeah, with who is doing space exploration being right up there. If it is us it isn’t going to be in our organic bodies, and this renders so much of it irrelevant. Wider society will likely pigeon hole their thinking on that next to concerns about the heat death of the universe, but for a lot of us it is disappointing.
I did wonder about what it would be like embodied as a space probe encountering an alien that had also gone through the same process. That is now the sort of scifi that appeals.
I'd be very interested in any recommendations in that vein. I've been really enjoying the themes of embodiment in the new Marathon, where your body is disposable, woven silk with unfamiliar organs, while your consciousness is totally owned by a corporation.
Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.
It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics. There is of course the whole hard/soft sci-fi continuum that determines just how rooted it is, with soft sci-fi being pure fantasy with sci-fi veneer and hard sci-fi being fantasy that's physically plausible.
As actual science and technology advances and as society changes what we imagine will change. Sci-fi imagined today will either deal with AI and what AI is really shaping up to look like or it will imagine futures where AI has been abandoned for some reason (like Dune).
>Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.
In other words, it allows writers to talk about culture with a technological flair. It's still valuable later because it was really about the culture. The tech also enables wild scenarios, that often come true later on.
It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics.
That's a superficial view of both Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Sure, there's a lot of schlock out there which essentially functions as this sort of meaningless escapism for the reader. But proper Sci-Fi and Fantasy is philosophical in a way that makes them radically different, if not diametrically opposed.
Fantasy stories typically depict a society in decay, with evil ascendant, and characters who yearn to return to a time of past innocence. It's ultimately backward looking and conservative. When it functions as social commentary, it's a critique of the alienation and impersonality of modernity.
Science Fiction is forward-looking. It asks "what if" questions about the limitations of our modern society by inviting us to view a society that has been freed from those limitations. It challenges our ideas about human nature. It's ultimately progressive, even when it depicts dystopian governments.
I'd really enjoy a return to classic space opera. I think a world where technologies like AI actually work out okay to some extent is a) closer to fiction than the alternative, and b) more interesting than another dystopia.
I'd enjoy a swashbuckling noblebright adventures-in-space thing way more than yet another treatise on Technology Bad right about now.
That said, I don't know that I think sci-fi as a genre is dying per se. There are a lot of really prominent and popular science fiction pieces coming out today. Shows/books like Black Mirror and The Expanse, for example.
The prevailing narrative is that the optimism collapsed because the real future didn't turn out like we hoped, but I don't think that's it. A lot of very optimistic sci-fi was written right after two world wars. I think it's more of a stylistic conceit. If it's not dark and edgy, it's not profound.
Personally I think dark and edgy (or variants like pessimistic and bleak, or depressing and fatalistic) is the cheap easy way to look profound.
I think that works because humans have a negativity bias. Bad news feels important. Mockery and drama and calling people out gets social attention. Conflict is thrilling even if the reasons behind it are ridiculous or cliche.
Optimistic works don't get free bonus points from the amygdala, so they have to stand on their own. An uninteresting optimistic work is incredibly dull, even cringey. But a very mediocre boring pessimistic work can still seem deep.
Edit: I'm not saying dark works can't be good. Lots of them are. I'm just saying it's much easier to sell (aesthetically or commercially) a mediocre work if it's dark and pessimistic than if it's bright and optimistic. In brighter settings the flaws show more easily.
It seems to me like it is a pendulum swing. It used to be that most works were straightforward and heroic, so that when someone had the idea to write a morally gray story, that was fresh and really interesting. Eventually everyone, tired of the worn out heroic tropes, started to get on this dark, edgy bandwagon. But now the dark and edgy stories are just as worn out as heroic stories used to be. Now, a straightforwardly heroic story is actually kind of subversive and fresh! So I think that, over the coming decades, we will see a shift back towards optimistic stories as people get more and more tired of the dark and gritty kind.
That’s a great point, though I would add the caveat that I do find moral complexity interesting. But that doesn’t require grey or outright antiheroes. A hero can be complex, or can be someone who was once more grey or even a villain and it’s a redemption arc.
I think this is exactly it, and it's frustrating, because some of the most profound works of science fiction are things like Star Trek, which are idealistic and hopeful. They still raise questions about humanity and morality and philosophy that are deeply interesting and worth engaging with.
It's a very interesting time to write science fiction. A lot of the greats are very dismissive of modern AI. So there is a lot of room to write things pertinent to the current moment.
It's fun to talk to an LLM yourself, but when I come upon someone else's output my eyes glaze over. I'm fine if an author uses AI to help them outline the book, brainstorm ideas, but I want the actual book to be written by a person.
Why read someone else's books? LLMs are the ultimate choose your own adventure story generators. Give it a scenario and some characters and some conflict and generate your own story. Sit down with ChatGPT and just have a good story time for yourself for a couple of hours going however you want to go. Want to focus on action and adventure? Or do you want interpersonal drama? Or both? You decide!
The LLM just reflects you back. I have a system like that and it can be very fun, but it's become clear that it will just lie to try to make me happy. One of the reasons people read books is to have access to another (probably unique) perspective.
It's an interesting moment we're at. Circles of trust are going to be really important. The internet is gonna be assumed-bot soon. TikTok is pretty much there already.
Well, as a sci-fi fan, I can say that there are not many good stories around, those that when you read the first pages, you know it'll be a fantastic trip. I think that sometimes authors try to make it so complex, along with the narrative and way or writting.
Having said that, I believe people don't really look for, maybe, hidden gems from other countries or languages.
Don't lose hope, there are many authors that still have that touch that makes you feel you are in some other world or dimension.
This week I started to watch Apple TV's series "Metabot". I'm giving it a try, and it's ok by now. I wasn't able to find something similar to The Three-Body Problem, The Expanse,or Battlestar Galactica so far.
I was part of the NY sf publishing scene in 1990s. In those days the genre felt like a constraining box. The commercial successes of the 1970s and 80s, and the corporatization of publishing in general, meant that there were limits, in literary and conceptual ways. It's funny that he mentions Jonathan Lethem--I saw Jonathan a lot in those days. How to break out of genre was a frequent topic of conversation. It really seemed the only way up was out.
A friend recently related the life of Robert E. Howard in a really fascinating way, and one of the points he made about how he got into writing Conan really stuck with me.
Howard started out writing historical fiction, but the research was pretty grueling and the outcomes mediocre, so he switched to a sort of adventurous self-insert character in historical fantasy settings, which later turned into Conan.
When I consider notable science fiction authors, they all seem to start with some understanding of a facet of the natural universe, then tease ideas into explorations of those points. To the layman on reflection, this might seem like some sort of predictive exercise, but I see it as a sort of rote process of extrapolation. Contrast that to science fantasy authors who focus on theme and aesthetic, imagining Westerns in future-space with gadgets or contemporary plots in scifi-associated settings, and there's quite a vast and exciting landscape left to be explored.
> Written science fiction is dying. Long term trends see fewer books making their way to shelves in the sci-fi section.
As in, physically published? I'm really not sure you can read _too_ much into that, these days.
As a science fiction reader, I'd have thought it was pretty healthy these days, really.
> In recent years, the winners [of the Clarke award] have increasingly been writers who are outsiders to the genre, who write on both sides of the divide, or who simply don’t acknowledge that a divide exists at all. Almost none of them are published by sci-fi imprints.
Is... this what they're complaining about? I mean, I don't think that's a defining characteristic.
It's sad because there's so much more "out there" for us to discover and wonder about, with "out there" referring to anything from the bottom of the deep blue sea, to the far reaches of our galaxy, and everything (literally) in between, including our inner selves
Scifi, like most literature, was supposed to give us dreams about what we could do with what we found, or even dream about what is there to be found (IMO), so its demise leads us to a point where we're no longer dreaming?
I am a read addict. Love SF. There is so much hood stuff out there already that it will last more than a lifetime to read. So I am not really concerned
Good sci-fi has always been few and far between. I love sci-fi, but I also dislike a lot of it because a lot of it's not well written from a prose craft or character depth point of view. When it is, it's probably my favorite genre.
I feel like we're lucky to get one outstanding sci-fi book or series per decade.
I'll rattle off some notable books and films/TV (or in some cases both) from the last 20 years. Some of these overlap with other genres like horror, lit-fic, etc., but I consider them all sci-fi to some degree. Some are well known and some are obscure.
The Expanse, Europa Report, Moon, Primer, The Arrival, Never Let Me Go, For All Mankind (the unofficial Expanse prequel), Sleep Dealer (indie film that stuck with me), The Color Out of Space (2019 film of Lovecraft's story), Banshee Chapter, The Peripheral, Blindsight, Annihilation, I'm sure I could keep going...
I haven't gone deep on enough things to know whether science fiction is worse than anything else in that regard. But science fiction is largely trope-ridden young adult male power fantasy emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually bereft pulp. It's also my favorite genre.
If you like good indie sci-fi make sure you see Sleep Dealer, Primer, Banshee Chapter, and Moon.
Going back further I’d add Pi.
This one’s not quite sci-fi but if you like indie and very weird and cultural references that are really deep cuts check out an indie series called Hellier. If you’d like to see some hipsters try to talk to aliens with transcranial magnetic stimulation equipment, then it’s for you. Kind of ghostsploitation meets sci-fi meets conspiracy occult weirdness, all played straight Blair Witch style. The music and cinematography are great. I’ve compared it to Primer in terms of cost/originality/quality trifecta.
Funny timing, I was just thinking about this over dinner while scrolling the wiki list on [clarke / seiun / nebula] awards for the thousandth time.
> [Post-sci-fi is] free to allow the science fictional elements of their stories develop slowly, to emerge only in the latter half of the text, or to remain an isolated thread in a larger tapestry, all of which are anathema to genre-machine publishing, which generally wants its spaceships front-and-centre early on, to reassure readers they’re getting what they paid for.
This has always bugged me. There's often an interesting synopsis like (below), but the actual story begins with ~200 pages of backstories. And altogether the actual problem / developments / solution could probably be detailed in a tenth of the page count after subtracting all the character drama.
> "When a signal is discovered that seems to come from far beyond our solar system [...] What follows is an eye-opening journey out to the stars to the most awesome encounter in human history"
But this synopsis is actually from a well known 80s novel [0] so I don't think this slow-burn type of writing has become any more or less common with post scifi. To be clear, I don't have a problem with character-focused stories (I've read a ton!), I just wish they were advertised that way.
At this point I'm finding new / unusual stuff to read by looking for the least liked books whenever recommendations come up. Anyways rant over. On a more positive note, the author's post has put of new names / titles on my reading list. I think my next read will probably be something by Ishiguro:
> [The Buried Giant] follows an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no-one is able to retain long-term memories. The couple have dim memories of having had a son, and they decide to travel to a neighbouring village to seek him out.
Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun are both fantastic. The first is exploring the life's of humans that are only bred to be organ donors to the rich and the second the life of a robot after it was deemed unuseful. In the same vein as Klara, a superb book is Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill.
Our societies used to look towards space and evolution, but today they are broken, retreating into their shells and clinging to the past. Much like post-WWII Japan, they seek refuge in fantasy worlds to escape reality, having abandoned the drive for progress.
Most people don't realise just how damaging all of this is...
It doesn’t help that the people in the news for space-related things are mostly Elon Musk, claiming every so often that we’re really really close to be on Mars just to kicking the date further out as it approaches or Jeff Besoz who doesn’t have much better to offer than a space trip for Katy Perry and friends
Yeah, maybe that too, but the real point it's the people who don't dream anymore: once upon a time, kids dreamed of becoming astronauts, and teenagers of having their own private spaceship to roam the universe like nomads. Nowadays, they dream of being influencers...
That's what's changed, not so much the physical actions of some giant or government. It's the mindset, the dreams, and the desires of the masses.
Is that happens maybe because recent reality has shown some forms of traditional Sci-Fi? AI, humanoid robots, post apocalyptic climate, trillionairs, the USA vs the world, diminishing populations. I don't need any more Sci-Fi.
I gotta agree. All we need is corporate-run militaries and we're living in Heinlein's Friday. All the other dystopian predictions seem to be happening at once.
I stopped reading Sci-Fi, it's just all dystopia and even when it's about a Utopia it's mostly about how it crumbles like with the Terra Ignota Series.
We live in a dystopia, we need some utopian ideas, enough of the gloom and doom that ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy..
There's a subreddit called /r/hfy for more positive scifi. It tends to be indie stuff and I think it goes a little too far in the other direction but at least some of the top-voted ones are interesting.
> Agent Smith tells Morpheus that the first, "perfect" Matrix failed because humanity requires suffering, leading them to create a simulation based on the "peak of your civilization"—1999. Smith highlights that the machines actually took over during this era, making it their civilization rather than humanity's. The choice of 1999 provided a stable,, yet inherently flawed, era characterized by 90s technology, post-Cold War optimism, and, crucially, the necessary amount of human misery to prevent the simulation from failing.
The thing about _The Matrix_ is that the world-building was much more interesting than the premise (to make a world in which comicbook superheroes made sense).
Not seeing why human misery is necessary --- that line always felt propaganda-like --- a utopia would arguably be more stable since there would be less striving for change.
Yes, so the "computer" would continue running in this state without change --- which is presumably what the machines in charge wanted --- if there's supposed to be a reason which makes stress pleasing to the machines please state it in plain and simple terms (English is not my mother-tongue).
In the original draft, the machines were using human brains as a networked computer. The simulation is necessary because sensory input and simulation is how human brains compute - it's for the humans, not the machines. Unfortunately the studios thought that was too complicated and we wound up with "lol batteries" and none of it makes any sense.
Also, I mean, because without that there wouldn't be a movie.
Yeah - the whole point of the simulation was to keep the brains engaged. A distraction if you will, from the fact that they aren't actually doing anything.
Section 31 wasn't in TNG. And I wouldn't say the utopia got undermined in TNG either. When you (fairly rarely) had corruption or villainy inside Starfleet, those people were always treated as rogues who were acting on their own, and were decisively defeated by the utopia. It isn't like in DS9 where the writers flirt with the idea that maybe the Federation can't work without a dark side; the TNG writers play the utopia straight.
One of the earliest books to look at this in an interesting way was John M. Ford's _How Much for Just the Planet?_ (depending on how one looks at it and one's tolerance for humour)
Well, Ursula K. LeGuin did author _Always Coming Home_, which I quite enjoyed, but it's a very different book which only seems to have a niche audience.
I disliked _Always Coming Home_, substantially because it felt misandrous though the less optimistic setting probably also played a role (a post-industrial Earth with a rape victim as the "protagonist" and not a heroic victim who transforms evil and suffering into good). It did seem to be exceptional in literary quality, a strong extension of the divided story mechanism in _The Dispossessed_ (and _The Left Hand of Darkness_? — I do not remember how that novel was laid out). I did not listen to the audio produced for the books, so I did not receive the full experience, but the literary quality of the novel was excellent (in my opinion). (I especially liked the simple squirrel drawing, an odd bit of trivia to remember.)
(I thought the acknowledgement of life when killing a mosquito was an interesting cultural aspect.)
I did kind of wish that a monastic-like community (or university?) had been presented as seeking more benefit from the City of Mind. Unlike the tribe that asked how to make airplanes (which failed in their military objective), the monks/scholars would train to ask good questions, seeking to restore the land and encourage communication and cooperation among humans. Having even a small bunch of humans interested in such larger issues would have been more optimistic (and perhaps realistic as the existence of an actual Oracle might encourage some people to be scholars, making connections and asking questions). Of course, a ten volume novel would have been even less popular, and LeGuin clearly was motivated to write a more gritty novel.
I would not wish for anyone to inflict Becky Chambers upon themselves. She is a really awful writer. Interesting world building ideas, but she spends far too much time using her books to lecture the reader about morality, with all the subtlety of a Sunday School lecture.
Do you have any examples? I've read all her work, and while I'm familiar with the phenomena you describe generally, I didn't find it that notable in Chambers. Yes, some characters have neopronouns (xe/xir, iirc?), but there's no "And this is why anyone who doesn't respect pronouns is a bad person." They just are used for aliens whose genders are more complex than ours.
Maybe monk and robot has more of this, being a post industrial, solarpunk story about a tea monk bicycling across the countryside with a robot who wants to learn what humanity is?
There must be some law about articles proclaiming X is dead. Does anyone know of one? Something along the lines of "Any article declaring X is dead is always wrong and just trying to sell you something"
Perhaps I'm getting the wrong impression, but it seems like this author is either ignorant of a lot of very successful contemporary scifi or is just taking a narrow view of the genre based on their own preferences.
AI and independent publishing certainly make it harder to sort the wheat from the chaff, but the ubiquity and convenience of aquiririg reading materials has never been better in all of human history.
I will never get caught up with all the scifi books I want to read, and nothing could make me happier.
I would really like to be able to read something and find out that it's about whatever it said it was going to be about, and not bait to trick me into hearing about the author's 1) politics, 2) sexuality, 3) AI use or 4) investment grift.
The fact this reflects the subject matter in question is an irony surely lost on the author as well.
Political tedium aside a major factor in the decline of scifi is we live in the future, only it is not the future people were being excited about. As many creatives put it they wanted machines to do the chores and them to do the art, not the other way around.
Look on the bright side, you've lived to see 2026 where these four things have collapsed into each other. Like a rainbow refracted into pure white light.
Perhaps instead, the complaint should be that the reader should not be lectured about politics or sexuality in a ham-handed self-righteous insertion completely irrelevant to the rest of the story.
Well there goes Orson Scott Card, Asimov, Heinlein, Orwell, etc.
The politics and sexuality were always in these stories. They were just more familiar, so they don't seem as self righteous. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a classic example of a story with sexuality and politics in old timey sci fi.
> They were just more familiar, so they don't seem as self righteous.
I mean, I think it's maybe just that a certain subset of the readership are now unhappy with any discussion of sexuality (I suspect that people like this simply didn't really read sci-fi in the past). In particular, look at Heinlein; a lot of his stuff would be very out there _today_ (the Moon is a Harsh Mistress is quite mild by Heinlein-weird-sex-stuff standards).
The complaint about politics is too silly to take seriously at all; sci-fi has _always_ been about politics, to the point where it is difficult to come up with non-YA examples of politics-free sci-fi.
I do not remember any of those books stopping for a several page lecture unrelated to any plot point.
Most of what I remember is the author using the action of the story to carry the point across.
The same is true of Star Trek ToS, and most of what I remember from deep space nine.
It is not that I am opposed to the ideas of flexing sexuality and politics in science fiction- quite the opposite. Take for instance, the culture series by Iain Banks. Fantastic work where If there is some lecturing done, it seems to fit smoothly into the flow of the work.
Just go read engineering documentation about the Apollo flights then. What you're describing has never been sci-fi - you're falling in that camp of people the article described that are demanding authors not write above a fifth grade level.
Scifi has always been an exploration of the human condition within certain circumstances created by fantastic technologies. The human condition is made of politics, sexuality, philosophy, ethics, identity...
Actually no, he hasn't. Star Trek (back when it was good) worked because the writers were smart enough to trust the viewers to draw their own conclusions. They would set up a dilemma, let the characters give arguments on both sides, and then not openly take a side. Even when you could guess which side the writers were on, it almost never felt like they were lecturing you like a child.
I am perfectly happy for science fiction to offer commentary on social issues. That's one of the strengths of the genre! But to do that, you need to be subtle and lots of modern authors don't even try to be subtle any more. And as a result, their attempts at social commentary are absolutely insufferable to sit through.
Star Trek openly took sides from the start, unless you think the episode with the people who are half-black-half-white and the people who are half-white-half-black counts as "subtle".
Do we need to keep reminding people that Star Trek depicted the first interracial kiss on television? Star Trek was always woke, over corporatization has just been sanding all political and social messages down to a corporate approved interpretation, aka boring, stupid, and not nearly inflammatory enough.
No, Star Trek was never "woke" like it was today. The writers actually were willing to depict moral dilemmas and let the audience members draw their own conclusions. These days they openly preach at the audience and then wonder why nobody wants to watch their stories any more.
People said the same thing about the interracial kiss or the "left side white, right side black" episode. You're suffering from recency bias and rose tinted glasses.
I don't know what sales numbers look like, but from my perspective as a casual reader who's been trying to keep up with Hugo Award nominees of recent years... science fiction may not be trendy on BookTok, but it's far from dead.
Sure, fantasy has "corrupted" the Hugos, but there's plenty of hard science fiction, and science fiction that grapples with societal questions at large. Arkady Martine's Memory Called Empire and Desolation Called Peace, both Hugo winners, are incredibly thoughtful depictions of societies on the verge of disruption from new technology. Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a 2022 Hugo nominee, while somewhat of a sci-fi-fantasy genre crossover, is both harrowing and exhilarating in its discussion of gender through a speculative lens (content warnings apply).
If you're looking for whether innovative science fiction is being adapted into popular media - the Three Body Problem (2015 Hugo winner) and the Murderbot series (won the Hugo most recently in 2021) are both being adapted. Andy Weir's post-Martian works continue to be hyped, if not quite adapted yet. The fanbase for Tamsyn Muir's Ninth series is rabid in the best possible way - and while ostensibly centered on necromancy, it's remarkably high in sci-fi hardness.
And outside of traditional publishing - democratized writing challenges like https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/, genre-crossing serial sci-fi like the works of Wildbow, and fanfiction in general (I continue to follow and adore the To The Stars, a Madoka fanfic which juxtaposes magic with a spacefaring future humanity, with masterful worldbuilding) continue to thrive.
Traditional publishing houses may indeed be in crisis, but contrary to the original article's assertion, there is no shortage of ideas.
Also on the TV/movie front science fiction is doing quite well right now.
Apple TV seems to have made producing good scifi series one of their main selling points. Lots of famous scifi series are getting TV adaptations and apple TV is producing wholly new scifi series as well.
Foundation, Murderbot, Silo, For All Mankind (and the upcoming Star City), Severence, Dark Matter, Monarch, Pluribus, and Neuromancer to name some of the current and upcoming series.
And of course if my theory is right I suspect the upcoming Firefly announcement will be that Apple TV is picking them up for a continuation as well.
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But also scifi has a lot of other avenues for exploring their ideas now (such as via interactive media/video games). I'd argue some of the best scifi works of the current generation come from interactive media/video games rather than television or movie. Ex: Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle 1&2, Nier, VA-11 Hall-A, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Deus Ex, etc.
Like frankly television and movie are massively expensive and books are way harder to sell now than they ever were (as discoverability and reach are poor) but video games as a more visual medium are easier to sell but at the same time the entry point for making them is an order of magnitude lower than TV or movies. So it's not terribly surprising to see scifi flourish with games where other mediums have found themselves in a slump.
Project Hail Mary is getting a major movie release in a couple weeks.
One recent phenomenon for me was falling in love with Tchaikovsky's Children of Time trilogy, which explores very long-term colony ships sent out with thousands of cryogenically sleeping people of various skillsets, and planets seeded with a virus that artificially causes non-human beings to develop a certain kind of intelligence of being able to transmit complex ideas to each other, leading to technological evolution. There's so much depth to this series it's breaktaking.
So when I finished the books and explored his fantasy series (City of Lost Chances?), I had to check three times that I in fact had the same author. It's full of regurgitated fantasy tropes, the writing and characters seem simple, and there's a forced world building with what feels like an infinite and boring back story, with no movement to justify it.
Maybe the author was trying to capitalize on the fantasy popularity? His sci-fi is otherwise genius.
I don't like any of his fantasy, but like you, felt that children of time was marvelous.
It's really weird, I keep not starting Tyrant Philosphers because I am terrified it'll be awful and might lead me to not continue with his wonderful sci fi.
> It's full of regurgitated fantasy tropes, the writing and characters seem simple, and there's a forced world building with what feels like an infinite and boring back story, with no movement to justify it.
Maybe it's because he published 7 books that year (2021). Maybe it's also a coincidence that I remember not liking Children of Memory and he published 6 books that year, compared to Children of Time which was 2015 / 2 books.
Also just checked and looks like the fourth book (Children of Strife) is releasing in 2 weeks!
Children of Memory was out there compared to the first two!
Looking forward to Children of Strife, though I didn't realize how many books he was spitting out.
I completely agree. Tchaikovsky's at his best in the standalone novels, sci-fi or otherwise - I feel that his series are written with an eye to generate a long lasting income whereas his standalones are where he explores new ideas,which makes the vastly more interesting to me. Cage of Souls, Alien Clay and Service Model are some of his finest.
I thought Children of Time was very good, although the third book was out there. The themes explored and the world building felt like three books was justified. Shroud is the only standalone I read from him, I enjoyed it and plan on taking your suggestions.
I have a hard time reading sci-fi these days because the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting. I have a hard time seeing much other than computers in the future. Maybe stories like the Hyperion Cantos with the AIs in the TechnoCore largely fighting amongst themselves over the future of humanity are still intersting to me.
> the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting.
Opening them up again is a possible creative move. For example 'Dune', a far future where AIs and computers are banned and highly taboo because they caused too much trouble. Or there's alternate paths from the actual past such as steampunk in which we pushed mechanical engines further instead of switching (!) entirely to electronics.
I agree that opening up opportunities for other futures is good, but I don't think Dune was a good example of that even if you like the story -- Dune simply avoided the issue by assuming the future would implausibly turn into the past and that technology would be rejected and medieval feudalism and centralized religious control would return. A better, more plausible, future would show, as is often the case, that the technology we think is so ground-breaking today, just is integrated into daily life and hardly thought about rather than disappearing (which basically never happens).
Iain Banks still reigns supreme. Throw a couple LLMs in a chat together and they sound similar to his conversations between intelligences (particularly in Excession).
I do not want to read a bunch of gross torture porn, though.
Greg Egan is far more interesting and spares you that.
That's _mostly_ just Consider Phlebas and Surface Detail.
Some of Player of Games, too. Use of Weapons has a creative piece of furniture. You gotta excuse Banks, he was also a horror writer.
It's definitely _alluded_ to in Player of Games, mostly as a method of emphasising how unpleasant the Azad society is, but I don't think we ever really _see_ any of it?
(I may just be forgetting; it's probably at least a decade since I last read it.)
If I remember correctly, Gurgeh's internal narrative reveals what he observes in one of the secret channels that are restricted to the upper class. Unpleasant is quite the understatement. lol But yeah, I don't think we actually see it firsthand, it's more disturbing than gory.
Imo good sci fi was never really meant to be a technical description of cool technology, but more about how humans interact in specific scenarios dictated by the existence of certain technologies. Star Trek was less about the intricacies of the warp drive and more about "what if humans could interact with hundreds of unique cultures," or "what could human society look like without scarcity?"
There are many stories to tell in the age of AI. I've yet to find a good Luddite novel that explores how the technology might be taken by the commons, rather than hoarded and made to serve capital (the way governments have been). There's plenty of stories to tell around exploring university of ethics once we have a truly non human intelligence to reckon with. Accelerando spent just as much time exploring the legal implications of non-human intelligences as it did the underlying technology.
Yeah, with who is doing space exploration being right up there. If it is us it isn’t going to be in our organic bodies, and this renders so much of it irrelevant. Wider society will likely pigeon hole their thinking on that next to concerns about the heat death of the universe, but for a lot of us it is disappointing.
I did wonder about what it would be like embodied as a space probe encountering an alien that had also gone through the same process. That is now the sort of scifi that appeals.
I'd be very interested in any recommendations in that vein. I've been really enjoying the themes of embodiment in the new Marathon, where your body is disposable, woven silk with unfamiliar organs, while your consciousness is totally owned by a corporation.
There was a short story online a while back which covered that which was put forward as an answer to the Fermi Paradox.
Literally the basis behind Eve-Online… you’re just a clone of consciousness of a citizen of New Eden.
In some stories, the outcome seems more plausible with current scientific hubris =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth%2C_and_I_Must_...
Barjavel's "Ravage" written in 1943 completely missed the computer revolution.
The passage about audio books that works by having a camera above your book and someone remotely reading it to your headphone, is entertaining.
And 3d tv was a success.
Nevertheless, still a great story.
Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.
It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics. There is of course the whole hard/soft sci-fi continuum that determines just how rooted it is, with soft sci-fi being pure fantasy with sci-fi veneer and hard sci-fi being fantasy that's physically plausible.
As actual science and technology advances and as society changes what we imagine will change. Sci-fi imagined today will either deal with AI and what AI is really shaping up to look like or it will imagine futures where AI has been abandoned for some reason (like Dune).
>Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.
In other words, it allows writers to talk about culture with a technological flair. It's still valuable later because it was really about the culture. The tech also enables wild scenarios, that often come true later on.
It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics.
That's a superficial view of both Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Sure, there's a lot of schlock out there which essentially functions as this sort of meaningless escapism for the reader. But proper Sci-Fi and Fantasy is philosophical in a way that makes them radically different, if not diametrically opposed.
Fantasy stories typically depict a society in decay, with evil ascendant, and characters who yearn to return to a time of past innocence. It's ultimately backward looking and conservative. When it functions as social commentary, it's a critique of the alienation and impersonality of modernity.
Science Fiction is forward-looking. It asks "what if" questions about the limitations of our modern society by inviting us to view a society that has been freed from those limitations. It challenges our ideas about human nature. It's ultimately progressive, even when it depicts dystopian governments.
I agree. But lots can be written about the future of computers. It's worth trying. Writing is fun at least!
I'd really enjoy a return to classic space opera. I think a world where technologies like AI actually work out okay to some extent is a) closer to fiction than the alternative, and b) more interesting than another dystopia.
I'd enjoy a swashbuckling noblebright adventures-in-space thing way more than yet another treatise on Technology Bad right about now.
That said, I don't know that I think sci-fi as a genre is dying per se. There are a lot of really prominent and popular science fiction pieces coming out today. Shows/books like Black Mirror and The Expanse, for example.
The prevailing narrative is that the optimism collapsed because the real future didn't turn out like we hoped, but I don't think that's it. A lot of very optimistic sci-fi was written right after two world wars. I think it's more of a stylistic conceit. If it's not dark and edgy, it's not profound.
Personally I think dark and edgy (or variants like pessimistic and bleak, or depressing and fatalistic) is the cheap easy way to look profound.
I think that works because humans have a negativity bias. Bad news feels important. Mockery and drama and calling people out gets social attention. Conflict is thrilling even if the reasons behind it are ridiculous or cliche.
Optimistic works don't get free bonus points from the amygdala, so they have to stand on their own. An uninteresting optimistic work is incredibly dull, even cringey. But a very mediocre boring pessimistic work can still seem deep.
Edit: I'm not saying dark works can't be good. Lots of them are. I'm just saying it's much easier to sell (aesthetically or commercially) a mediocre work if it's dark and pessimistic than if it's bright and optimistic. In brighter settings the flaws show more easily.
It seems to me like it is a pendulum swing. It used to be that most works were straightforward and heroic, so that when someone had the idea to write a morally gray story, that was fresh and really interesting. Eventually everyone, tired of the worn out heroic tropes, started to get on this dark, edgy bandwagon. But now the dark and edgy stories are just as worn out as heroic stories used to be. Now, a straightforwardly heroic story is actually kind of subversive and fresh! So I think that, over the coming decades, we will see a shift back towards optimistic stories as people get more and more tired of the dark and gritty kind.
That’s a great point, though I would add the caveat that I do find moral complexity interesting. But that doesn’t require grey or outright antiheroes. A hero can be complex, or can be someone who was once more grey or even a villain and it’s a redemption arc.
> If it's not dark and edgy, it's not profound.
I think this is exactly it, and it's frustrating, because some of the most profound works of science fiction are things like Star Trek, which are idealistic and hopeful. They still raise questions about humanity and morality and philosophy that are deeply interesting and worth engaging with.
It's a very interesting time to write science fiction. A lot of the greats are very dismissive of modern AI. So there is a lot of room to write things pertinent to the current moment.
From a purely economic standpoint, AI is its own worst enemy. Quicker to produce books made even cheaper and even automate-able?
You could have AI generate the next Shakespeare and you'll almost certainly never get noticed amidst the flood of competing books.
It's fun to talk to an LLM yourself, but when I come upon someone else's output my eyes glaze over. I'm fine if an author uses AI to help them outline the book, brainstorm ideas, but I want the actual book to be written by a person.
While I personally agree, I figure an economic argument bypasses the often recited "but AI will get better!"
That very argument is also AI's downfall when it comes to writing books that'll sell.
Why read someone else's books? LLMs are the ultimate choose your own adventure story generators. Give it a scenario and some characters and some conflict and generate your own story. Sit down with ChatGPT and just have a good story time for yourself for a couple of hours going however you want to go. Want to focus on action and adventure? Or do you want interpersonal drama? Or both? You decide!
The LLM just reflects you back. I have a system like that and it can be very fun, but it's become clear that it will just lie to try to make me happy. One of the reasons people read books is to have access to another (probably unique) perspective.
How will you know?
If my eyes glaze over! For now output has a very programatic feel. Maybe not later, who knows?
It's an interesting moment we're at. Circles of trust are going to be really important. The internet is gonna be assumed-bot soon. TikTok is pretty much there already.
I wrote a story about this: https://tomasbjartur.substack.com/p/that-mad-olympiad
Great story thanks for sharing
Well, as a sci-fi fan, I can say that there are not many good stories around, those that when you read the first pages, you know it'll be a fantastic trip. I think that sometimes authors try to make it so complex, along with the narrative and way or writting. Having said that, I believe people don't really look for, maybe, hidden gems from other countries or languages. Don't lose hope, there are many authors that still have that touch that makes you feel you are in some other world or dimension.
This week I started to watch Apple TV's series "Metabot". I'm giving it a try, and it's ok by now. I wasn't able to find something similar to The Three-Body Problem, The Expanse,or Battlestar Galactica so far.
I was part of the NY sf publishing scene in 1990s. In those days the genre felt like a constraining box. The commercial successes of the 1970s and 80s, and the corporatization of publishing in general, meant that there were limits, in literary and conceptual ways. It's funny that he mentions Jonathan Lethem--I saw Jonathan a lot in those days. How to break out of genre was a frequent topic of conversation. It really seemed the only way up was out.
A friend recently related the life of Robert E. Howard in a really fascinating way, and one of the points he made about how he got into writing Conan really stuck with me.
Howard started out writing historical fiction, but the research was pretty grueling and the outcomes mediocre, so he switched to a sort of adventurous self-insert character in historical fantasy settings, which later turned into Conan.
When I consider notable science fiction authors, they all seem to start with some understanding of a facet of the natural universe, then tease ideas into explorations of those points. To the layman on reflection, this might seem like some sort of predictive exercise, but I see it as a sort of rote process of extrapolation. Contrast that to science fantasy authors who focus on theme and aesthetic, imagining Westerns in future-space with gadgets or contemporary plots in scifi-associated settings, and there's quite a vast and exciting landscape left to be explored.
> Written science fiction is dying. Long term trends see fewer books making their way to shelves in the sci-fi section.
As in, physically published? I'm really not sure you can read _too_ much into that, these days.
As a science fiction reader, I'd have thought it was pretty healthy these days, really.
> In recent years, the winners [of the Clarke award] have increasingly been writers who are outsiders to the genre, who write on both sides of the divide, or who simply don’t acknowledge that a divide exists at all. Almost none of them are published by sci-fi imprints.
Is... this what they're complaining about? I mean, I don't think that's a defining characteristic.
It's sad because there's so much more "out there" for us to discover and wonder about, with "out there" referring to anything from the bottom of the deep blue sea, to the far reaches of our galaxy, and everything (literally) in between, including our inner selves
Scifi, like most literature, was supposed to give us dreams about what we could do with what we found, or even dream about what is there to be found (IMO), so its demise leads us to a point where we're no longer dreaming?
I am a read addict. Love SF. There is so much hood stuff out there already that it will last more than a lifetime to read. So I am not really concerned
Good sci-fi has always been few and far between. I love sci-fi, but I also dislike a lot of it because a lot of it's not well written from a prose craft or character depth point of view. When it is, it's probably my favorite genre.
I feel like we're lucky to get one outstanding sci-fi book or series per decade.
I'll rattle off some notable books and films/TV (or in some cases both) from the last 20 years. Some of these overlap with other genres like horror, lit-fic, etc., but I consider them all sci-fi to some degree. Some are well known and some are obscure.
The Expanse, Europa Report, Moon, Primer, The Arrival, Never Let Me Go, For All Mankind (the unofficial Expanse prequel), Sleep Dealer (indie film that stuck with me), The Color Out of Space (2019 film of Lovecraft's story), Banshee Chapter, The Peripheral, Blindsight, Annihilation, I'm sure I could keep going...
99 percent of everything is crap. SF is no worse than anything else?
I haven't gone deep on enough things to know whether science fiction is worse than anything else in that regard. But science fiction is largely trope-ridden young adult male power fantasy emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually bereft pulp. It's also my favorite genre.
Thanks for the recs, I will always trust anyone who has enjoyed Europa Report as much as I did.
If you like good indie sci-fi make sure you see Sleep Dealer, Primer, Banshee Chapter, and Moon.
Going back further I’d add Pi.
This one’s not quite sci-fi but if you like indie and very weird and cultural references that are really deep cuts check out an indie series called Hellier. If you’d like to see some hipsters try to talk to aliens with transcranial magnetic stimulation equipment, then it’s for you. Kind of ghostsploitation meets sci-fi meets conspiracy occult weirdness, all played straight Blair Witch style. The music and cinematography are great. I’ve compared it to Primer in terms of cost/originality/quality trifecta.
Funny timing, I was just thinking about this over dinner while scrolling the wiki list on [clarke / seiun / nebula] awards for the thousandth time.
> [Post-sci-fi is] free to allow the science fictional elements of their stories develop slowly, to emerge only in the latter half of the text, or to remain an isolated thread in a larger tapestry, all of which are anathema to genre-machine publishing, which generally wants its spaceships front-and-centre early on, to reassure readers they’re getting what they paid for.
This has always bugged me. There's often an interesting synopsis like (below), but the actual story begins with ~200 pages of backstories. And altogether the actual problem / developments / solution could probably be detailed in a tenth of the page count after subtracting all the character drama.
> "When a signal is discovered that seems to come from far beyond our solar system [...] What follows is an eye-opening journey out to the stars to the most awesome encounter in human history"
But this synopsis is actually from a well known 80s novel [0] so I don't think this slow-burn type of writing has become any more or less common with post scifi. To be clear, I don't have a problem with character-focused stories (I've read a ton!), I just wish they were advertised that way.
At this point I'm finding new / unusual stuff to read by looking for the least liked books whenever recommendations come up. Anyways rant over. On a more positive note, the author's post has put of new names / titles on my reading list. I think my next read will probably be something by Ishiguro:
> [The Buried Giant] follows an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no-one is able to retain long-term memories. The couple have dim memories of having had a son, and they decide to travel to a neighbouring village to seek him out.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)
Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun are both fantastic. The first is exploring the life's of humans that are only bred to be organ donors to the rich and the second the life of a robot after it was deemed unuseful. In the same vein as Klara, a superb book is Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill.
Every few months I ask some AIs to write a Kilgore Trout short story for me.
So it goes.
Our societies used to look towards space and evolution, but today they are broken, retreating into their shells and clinging to the past. Much like post-WWII Japan, they seek refuge in fantasy worlds to escape reality, having abandoned the drive for progress.
Most people don't realise just how damaging all of this is...
It doesn’t help that the people in the news for space-related things are mostly Elon Musk, claiming every so often that we’re really really close to be on Mars just to kicking the date further out as it approaches or Jeff Besoz who doesn’t have much better to offer than a space trip for Katy Perry and friends
Yeah, maybe that too, but the real point it's the people who don't dream anymore: once upon a time, kids dreamed of becoming astronauts, and teenagers of having their own private spaceship to roam the universe like nomads. Nowadays, they dream of being influencers...
That's what's changed, not so much the physical actions of some giant or government. It's the mindset, the dreams, and the desires of the masses.
Is that happens maybe because recent reality has shown some forms of traditional Sci-Fi? AI, humanoid robots, post apocalyptic climate, trillionairs, the USA vs the world, diminishing populations. I don't need any more Sci-Fi.
I gotta agree. All we need is corporate-run militaries and we're living in Heinlein's Friday. All the other dystopian predictions seem to be happening at once.
I stopped reading Sci-Fi, it's just all dystopia and even when it's about a Utopia it's mostly about how it crumbles like with the Terra Ignota Series.
We live in a dystopia, we need some utopian ideas, enough of the gloom and doom that ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy..
There's a subreddit called /r/hfy for more positive scifi. It tends to be indie stuff and I think it goes a little too far in the other direction but at least some of the top-voted ones are interesting.
Off the top of my head...
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/32973/synchronizing-minds-...
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/67180/here-be-dragons-book...
The problem is, tales of the land of the happy nice people doesn't make for much of a story, or
“. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.” ― Arthur C. Clarke, _2001: A Space Odyssey_
Or the matrix take -
> Agent Smith tells Morpheus that the first, "perfect" Matrix failed because humanity requires suffering, leading them to create a simulation based on the "peak of your civilization"—1999. Smith highlights that the machines actually took over during this era, making it their civilization rather than humanity's. The choice of 1999 provided a stable,, yet inherently flawed, era characterized by 90s technology, post-Cold War optimism, and, crucially, the necessary amount of human misery to prevent the simulation from failing.
The thing about _The Matrix_ is that the world-building was much more interesting than the premise (to make a world in which comicbook superheroes made sense).
Not seeing why human misery is necessary --- that line always felt propaganda-like --- a utopia would arguably be more stable since there would be less striving for change.
> there would be less striving for change
Precisely, there would be nothing to strive for.
As an engineer I often say "If everything in life went to plan it would be a very boring life indeed"
Yes, so the "computer" would continue running in this state without change --- which is presumably what the machines in charge wanted --- if there's supposed to be a reason which makes stress pleasing to the machines please state it in plain and simple terms (English is not my mother-tongue).
Your thinking that its the machines being pleased by the state is 100% wrong.
WHY would a machine need a simulation at all?
In the original draft, the machines were using human brains as a networked computer. The simulation is necessary because sensory input and simulation is how human brains compute - it's for the humans, not the machines. Unfortunately the studios thought that was too complicated and we wound up with "lol batteries" and none of it makes any sense.
Also, I mean, because without that there wouldn't be a movie.
Yeah - the whole point of the simulation was to keep the brains engaged. A distraction if you will, from the fact that they aren't actually doing anything.
Star Trek TNG was an interesting utopia. I want more of that. (Not more Star Trek, more utopia sci-fi).
But it kept getting undermined every other episode, to say nothing of things such as Section 31.
Section 31 wasn't in TNG. And I wouldn't say the utopia got undermined in TNG either. When you (fairly rarely) had corruption or villainy inside Starfleet, those people were always treated as rogues who were acting on their own, and were decisively defeated by the utopia. It isn't like in DS9 where the writers flirt with the idea that maybe the Federation can't work without a dark side; the TNG writers play the utopia straight.
Fair point.
One of the earliest books to look at this in an interesting way was John M. Ford's _How Much for Just the Planet?_ (depending on how one looks at it and one's tolerance for humour)
That's just lack of imagination.
Well, Ursula K. LeGuin did author _Always Coming Home_, which I quite enjoyed, but it's a very different book which only seems to have a niche audience.
I disliked _Always Coming Home_, substantially because it felt misandrous though the less optimistic setting probably also played a role (a post-industrial Earth with a rape victim as the "protagonist" and not a heroic victim who transforms evil and suffering into good). It did seem to be exceptional in literary quality, a strong extension of the divided story mechanism in _The Dispossessed_ (and _The Left Hand of Darkness_? — I do not remember how that novel was laid out). I did not listen to the audio produced for the books, so I did not receive the full experience, but the literary quality of the novel was excellent (in my opinion). (I especially liked the simple squirrel drawing, an odd bit of trivia to remember.)
(I thought the acknowledgement of life when killing a mosquito was an interesting cultural aspect.)
I did kind of wish that a monastic-like community (or university?) had been presented as seeking more benefit from the City of Mind. Unlike the tribe that asked how to make airplanes (which failed in their military objective), the monks/scholars would train to ask good questions, seeking to restore the land and encourage communication and cooperation among humans. Having even a small bunch of humans interested in such larger issues would have been more optimistic (and perhaps realistic as the existence of an actual Oracle might encourage some people to be scholars, making connections and asking questions). Of course, a ten volume novel would have been even less popular, and LeGuin clearly was motivated to write a more gritty novel.
Read some Becky Chambers.
I would not wish for anyone to inflict Becky Chambers upon themselves. She is a really awful writer. Interesting world building ideas, but she spends far too much time using her books to lecture the reader about morality, with all the subtlety of a Sunday School lecture.
Do you have any examples? I've read all her work, and while I'm familiar with the phenomena you describe generally, I didn't find it that notable in Chambers. Yes, some characters have neopronouns (xe/xir, iirc?), but there's no "And this is why anyone who doesn't respect pronouns is a bad person." They just are used for aliens whose genders are more complex than ours.
Maybe monk and robot has more of this, being a post industrial, solarpunk story about a tea monk bicycling across the countryside with a robot who wants to learn what humanity is?
Sci-fi trending down doesn’t mean it’s dying.
There must be some law about articles proclaiming X is dead. Does anyone know of one? Something along the lines of "Any article declaring X is dead is always wrong and just trying to sell you something"
Dumbest article I've read in a while.
plenty of great sci-fi to through from the past. most anything on the hugo or nebula awards are great.
I haven't read great from the awards long before they became so obviously exploited.
Like the movie awards, they've lost their relevance.
Perhaps I'm getting the wrong impression, but it seems like this author is either ignorant of a lot of very successful contemporary scifi or is just taking a narrow view of the genre based on their own preferences.
AI and independent publishing certainly make it harder to sort the wheat from the chaff, but the ubiquity and convenience of aquiririg reading materials has never been better in all of human history.
I will never get caught up with all the scifi books I want to read, and nothing could make me happier.
I would really like to be able to read something and find out that it's about whatever it said it was going to be about, and not bait to trick me into hearing about the author's 1) politics, 2) sexuality, 3) AI use or 4) investment grift.
The fact this reflects the subject matter in question is an irony surely lost on the author as well.
Political tedium aside a major factor in the decline of scifi is we live in the future, only it is not the future people were being excited about. As many creatives put it they wanted machines to do the chores and them to do the art, not the other way around.
Look on the bright side, you've lived to see 2026 where these four things have collapsed into each other. Like a rainbow refracted into pure white light.
>scifi
>I don't want to hear about politics or sexuality
How actually familiar are you with the genre?
Perhaps instead, the complaint should be that the reader should not be lectured about politics or sexuality in a ham-handed self-righteous insertion completely irrelevant to the rest of the story.
Well there goes Orson Scott Card, Asimov, Heinlein, Orwell, etc.
The politics and sexuality were always in these stories. They were just more familiar, so they don't seem as self righteous. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a classic example of a story with sexuality and politics in old timey sci fi.
> They were just more familiar, so they don't seem as self righteous.
I mean, I think it's maybe just that a certain subset of the readership are now unhappy with any discussion of sexuality (I suspect that people like this simply didn't really read sci-fi in the past). In particular, look at Heinlein; a lot of his stuff would be very out there _today_ (the Moon is a Harsh Mistress is quite mild by Heinlein-weird-sex-stuff standards).
The complaint about politics is too silly to take seriously at all; sci-fi has _always_ been about politics, to the point where it is difficult to come up with non-YA examples of politics-free sci-fi.
No, it's the poor quality of writing, using irrelevant lecture to try to push home a point as opposed to the story doing so seemingly naturally.
I do not remember any of those books stopping for a several page lecture unrelated to any plot point.
Most of what I remember is the author using the action of the story to carry the point across.
The same is true of Star Trek ToS, and most of what I remember from deep space nine.
It is not that I am opposed to the ideas of flexing sexuality and politics in science fiction- quite the opposite. Take for instance, the culture series by Iain Banks. Fantastic work where If there is some lecturing done, it seems to fit smoothly into the flow of the work.
Just go read engineering documentation about the Apollo flights then. What you're describing has never been sci-fi - you're falling in that camp of people the article described that are demanding authors not write above a fifth grade level.
Scifi has always been an exploration of the human condition within certain circumstances created by fantastic technologies. The human condition is made of politics, sexuality, philosophy, ethics, identity...
You've just described a substantial part of Star Trek, before even considering the rest of the genre.
Actually no, he hasn't. Star Trek (back when it was good) worked because the writers were smart enough to trust the viewers to draw their own conclusions. They would set up a dilemma, let the characters give arguments on both sides, and then not openly take a side. Even when you could guess which side the writers were on, it almost never felt like they were lecturing you like a child.
I am perfectly happy for science fiction to offer commentary on social issues. That's one of the strengths of the genre! But to do that, you need to be subtle and lots of modern authors don't even try to be subtle any more. And as a result, their attempts at social commentary are absolutely insufferable to sit through.
Star Trek openly took sides from the start, unless you think the episode with the people who are half-black-half-white and the people who are half-white-half-black counts as "subtle".
[Insert Picard rambling for ten minutes about how horrible money was; this happened multiple times in TNG]
Nothing subtle about Star Trek's political stuff.
ham-handed.
Deep Space 9 touched on similar themes without long lectures
I was talking about the article, actually.
Troubling, but I'll worry about it after I run out of 20th century slop to read.
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Especially with Trek.
Do we need to keep reminding people that Star Trek depicted the first interracial kiss on television? Star Trek was always woke, over corporatization has just been sanding all political and social messages down to a corporate approved interpretation, aka boring, stupid, and not nearly inflammatory enough.
No, Star Trek was never "woke" like it was today. The writers actually were willing to depict moral dilemmas and let the audience members draw their own conclusions. These days they openly preach at the audience and then wonder why nobody wants to watch their stories any more.
People said the same thing about the interracial kiss or the "left side white, right side black" episode. You're suffering from recency bias and rose tinted glasses.