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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

"Sci-fi readers have moved to adjacent genres and non-fiction because the current tech landscape is so depressing" makes a lot of sense to me.

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Personally I think it's a weak take. The current tech landscape is mostly depressing because of addictive social media corroding the cultural sphere.

Generalizing that into 'tech is depressing' is understandable since it is literally designed to occupy our attention, but I don't think it's an accurate view of the world.

Tech is unbelievably fantastic: GPS, wireless, lithium batteries, high end displays, etc. have given us extremely useful tools for everyday life. Tech itself is not depressing at all.

What is depressing is the current effect it has on society and a large percentage of sci-fi describes new ways humans make each other miserable. I can believe (but have no numbers) that that kind of sci-fi has become less popular.

Other than social media, what is it about tech that is about new ways for humans to make each other miserable?

Its certainly how I feel. Nothing 'Big Tech' has done in the last decade has been inspiring. Its all, subscriptions for car warmers, and new ways to show ads, and 'the metaverse' which science fiction fans have known to be ghoulish since at least the 70s.

It really seems as though you're focussing on the most negative examples, and self-fulfilling prophecies.

'Big Tech' as you call it, in the last decade, enabled us to work from home during the pandemic via zoom calls, and still shop and get food delivered.

Is that 'inspiring'? I guess that depends on what inspires you.

I guess? Uber and grubhub are tech insofar as paying their not-technically-workers less is only legal when its done through an app. Can't deny its convenient though.

WebRTC is nice and I like it. Work from home is lovely.

I think the internet is having a rough time with things, and that in general corporations have become more greedy and more bold, which overshadows the smaller improvements.

Yeah - to me this isn't so much of a problem with tech but with the law in general being based around 1950s notions of employment.

Being able to summon a car to my location at the push of a button and to be able to track it as it arrives is amazing.

Being able to make money at any time by giving people rides in my car is great too.

The legal system of distinctions of different kinds of workers that allows Uber to exploit drivers - not so great.

Or maybe they just moved to video games where they can live the dystopian future rather than read about it. For a few decades I was a voracious sci-fi and fantasy reader. Now with my limited time I would rather read the net and get my sci-fi/fantasy hit through an open world video game.

It seems like such a lazy take. Lots of incredibly popular books were published during terrible times in history, why would this be different?

Not sure, maybe I didn't distill out the author's position correctly but it seems intuitive to me.

Are books about war popular in war times or do they become popular afterwards? I think there may be something unique about speculative fiction vs. depressing stuff about the present time, which I find myself drawn to.

I think it's more about the decline of popularity in reading books, than popularity of genres. People who are interested in technology, use technology. I don't have to read Silo, when I can watch it. I watch Severance, not read the unwritten book.

I was wondering about that too. To answer that question we'd need normalized numbers, e.g. sci-fi as a percentage of total sales. It does seem likely that people who read sci-fi 20 or 50 years ago are now gaming, tinkering or cosplaying.

I feel like for really "out there" sci-fi, books are a lot more free to go crazy than shows or video games.

Ships fighting by lobbing planets at each other? Or anything in the Culture universe? Good luck putting it on screen. Or just the short novel Diamond Dogs.

I blame JJs and Kurtzman's Star Trek for this. They dropped Roddenberry's amazing idea of a future that was hard earned, but worthy to aspire towards - not just as society but also as individuals. On top of that they replaced the competency-porn role-models with Hollywood's desire to have loveable goofs and misfits everywhere, as if everyone in their audience was an idiot loser and could otherwise not identify with the characters. It definitely killed my interest in this kind of future.

That future wasn't hard earned, it was handwaved into being (on the back of a world war against genetically engineered mutants and colonization by alien benefactors at that.) The real world is fundamentally cruel. Therein lies the challenge.

Loveable goofs and misfits struggling against the odds to live up to their ideals are relatable, and that future can actually be aspired to. A future which requires humans to be paragons of virtue that have evolved beyond greed, vice and want, in a universe of infinite free energy and abundance, is unattainable. Neither human nature nor the laws of physics can bend that far.

Also the new Star Trek series are incredibly popular, even among many fans of old Trek, many of whom seem to be able to reconcile it with the franchise's espoused values. I guess it doesn't work for you, but you seem to be in a minority among the fanbase in that regard.

I don't know where you get your claims from, but if you look at user ratings on imdb [1] then SNW is the only new show to even come close to the old ones. Interestingly enough, it also comes closest to the original values and themes. So I guess it is actually you who seems to be in a minority.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls090972183/?sort=user_rating,desc...

Lists by random people on IMDB are not an accurate representation of anything more that that their personal opinion.

But if that's the game you want to play, here are rankings by Rotten Tomatoes[0] that say otherwise.

[0]https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/star-trek-tv-by-t...

You got it wrong. The list is only compiled by a user in the sense that he selected the shows included. The order displayed is generated automatically by imdb ratings, which the user had zero influence on. And for Rotten Tomatoes you would get pretty much exactly the same order if you actually looked at audience ratings. Except DS9, which ranks higher on RT. So I could see some argument that RT audiences are slightly younger. But I'm pretty confident no actual Trekkie would ever say that Prodigy is better than DS9 like your random "critic" listing would imply.

I get how this is hard to understand for today's young people, who did not grow up with the old shows. We had a whole generation growing up with a future worth working towards and aspiring to. I feel really sorry you didn't get something similar.

You're delusional. Anything is "incredibly popular" nowadays, like all the Marvel movies and nostalgia reboots. I don't know how any old Trek fan can stomach the new Treks. But I guess you can since you're defending them and know the lore. ;p

But that's weird because they're a completely different genre. They're closer to Star Wars (the one dumb people liked, cuz that's where the $$$ is) than Star Trek.

> But that's weird because they're a completely different genre. They're closer to Star Wars (the one dumb people liked, cuz that's where the $$$ is) than Star Trek.

The Kelvin timeline films have this problem, especially the first two; the third, while definitely not the classic trek series feel, felt more like a Trek movie.

The newer series (excl. prodigy, which I simply haven’t watched) have variable quality (SNW, IMO, is the strongest Trek series since DS9 and the most classic Trek feel since TNG, Discovery was up and down but overall no worse than Enterprise, Picard was good, but more like 3 long Trek movies than classic series Trek), but I wouldn't describe any of them feeling more like Star Wars.

Which nu trek? I mean Discovery is to me nearly unwatchable and I activly dislike almost all of the characters. Strange New Worlds on the other hand feels like classic trek with a better budget it is well cast and well written. Picard... I liked parts of it, it got better the farther along it went. Season one was actively bad, bad with good moments though. Season two was better Q stole every moment he was on screen. Season three legitimately was great star trek. Lower decks... if it weren't considered cannon it would be better, as is it a fun adult cartoon comedy. Prodigy is a kids show that I put on for my small children but could not be bothered to actually fallow. The Nu trek movies are brainless popcorn flicks written by people that wish they were writing starwars/fast&the furious crossover fanfiction instead.

Give strange new worlds a shot you won't regret it.

Agreed. TOS, Voyager, and DS9 were great (at their best; obviously some awful episodes/seasons mixed in there). The films after Khan were missable. Never got on with the whiny characters in TNG. Discovery is endless noise. Picard looked promising, but ultimately disappointed as (and here we disagree) I wish Q had never been created; can't stand him.

Nothing comparable to the older stuff until SNW - and Anson Mount in particular is very good. Oh, and The Orville is better ST than much recent ST ever was.

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