Is science fiction dying?
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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.
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.
Er, this seems exactly backwards to me, unless you're including near-future thrillers in "SF". Of stuff on the SF shelf at the bookstore, the majority appears to be fantasy (and much of that contemporary fantasy, now), and of the ones that are not explicitly fantasy, many are far future space opera -- Drake, Weber, etc -- which has the same characteristics as fantasy. There's a whole subgenre that's now missing: the medium-term, realistic future. I think it's become clear even to people who shout down the singularity concept that it's become impossible to put together a detailed-yet-believable future of fifty years from now.
My wife is generally averse to sci-fi, so what I always make sure to do is point out when an 'ordinary' movie is using sci-fi and it becomes disturbingly long.
I like to point out movies like Inception (being a big one people don't see as sci-fi even though it is pure sci-fi), Donnie Darko (a movie about time travel), V for Vendetta, Frankenstein, Jurassic Park and the funniest I've had to point out has been E.T. And that's without even having to step out into the 'grey area' where movies are using sci-fi 'concepts' or just using mild sci-fi elements.
It also works to point out that almost 3/4 of horror movies are still solidly sci-fi.
I think sci-fi's death will be when it becomes so mainstream it's rarely differentiated from regular fiction, which with a lot of movies it's still hard to convince people it's sci-fi. I mean 'Click' with Adam Sandler is a great example. It's sci-fi through and through, but because it's using only 1 element people won't believe it's sci-fi.
"Where is my flying car?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMPH0tlC5K4
Sci-fi generally fails at future predictions.
Yup. Sci-fi generally fails at predicting future tech.
And honestly, compared to Reynolds, Asher, Stross and Banks I find the old 'hard-core' SciFi by Dick and Heinlein rather... dull. Not entirely sure what it is, but the classics are less gripping to me.
But then: The gold age of SciFi is between 8 and 12 :)
Only someone who doesn't truly love Sci-fi can say that ... Also, if you are saying that Dick is dull (by the way, Dick is totally different from Heinlein), than you have no clue and your opinion does not count. :-)
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.
and really quite enjoyed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nights_Dawn_Trilogy
and found pretty much everything in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe to be as good as anything I've read by Heinlein, Clark et al.
Honestly, there's tons of good stuff out there, but it's just hard to separate it from the pulp. With the oldie goldies it's relatively easy because we have a few decades of people assessing those books.
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SciFi today:
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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).
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.
Still, the show has been rather underwhelming, compared to SG1.
If you get an opportunity in season 2 ep 3 for a great new plot, you might have little to zero opportunity to take advantage of it.
Still, they occasionally have good programming still. I was pleasantly surprised to see Children of Men was on last weekend when I flipped by it. (Of course, I flipped back for that)
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.
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.
Taking Steven Erikson as an example of a top-of-the-craft Fantasy author, he explores moral ambiguity with a scientific approach. Quite often he turns my beliefs upside down and sideways so that I'm confused by them.
I can see Fantasy as a string of what-if's if it's in the sense of exploring people and society.
>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?"