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Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

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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I agree - the article kind of lost purpose midway in the first paragraph, so I skimmed it too and found it with an atrocious closing paragraph.

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.

SF is a writing style, not a set of technologies. Hence why Neal Stephenon's Baroque Cycle is SF despite including no SFnal technologies (except maybe an allusion to just one), and why The Time Traveller's Wife is mainstream, despite being about time travel, the most outlandishly SFnal concept there ever was.

While I basically agree with you, the literary nazi in me must say that SF is a genre, not a writing style. The Baroque cycle crosses the historical fiction and SF genres into a lovely mutant child that could be called Historical Science Fiction. The Time Traveller's Wife also crosses genres, with a heavier focus on the Romance than the SF.

As a forecast of tech-to-come, it seems like science fiction hasn't managed to really predict anything radically different than it was predicting in back in 1990 or so. The accuracy has gone up because everything is now "five minutes in the future" rather than "in the year 5000." Even if we look further ahead, today's far future is just like yesterday's far future: filled either with spaceships (albeit carrying ems, ala Accelerando or Diaspora) or grey goo, and with not much room for real retroactively-falsifiable speculation, which I think is the key to good sci-fi.

The accuracy has gone up because everything is now "five minutes in the future" rather than "in the year 5000."

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.

For due diligence:

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

Sci-fi generally fails at future predictions.

Google maps, cellphones, talking computers, speech recognition, robots, autonomous vehicles, nuclear weapons, space travel, alternative biochemistry, touch screens, GPS, handheld translators, etc.

Yup. Sci-fi generally fails at predicting future tech.

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

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

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