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Comment by Veuxdo | Hacker News Reader

I find that more often than not, when I pick up a sci-fi novel, it turns out to just be a detective novel innn spaaaaace

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That one is mostly the result of how useful detectives are for alien/non-regular day settings in general. A lot of scifi stories are in part about well, the science part of the science fiction. You need a character to explore that world/explain the tech and detectives kinda exist orthogonal to the scifi societies - a detective can walk into a slum or into a rich people mansion in the same story and it would fit the job regardless. Having tech explained at them works because you can write them as knowing about the tech, but explaining it makes sense for the sake of solving a case.

That's why detectives are so often protagonists in general, but especially in scifi. The other common approach is the fish out of water, where you introduce someone not used to the scifi society at all and use them as an excuse to explain why the scifi is the way it is. That one tends to have much heavier reader self-insert tendencies though, so writers tend to shy away from it.

> I find that more often than not, when I pick up a sci-fi novel, it turns out to just be a detective novel innn spaaaaace

Detective novels in space can still be good, and much better than the current crop of Hollywood garbage. I'm still quite bitter about what Amazon did to The Expanse. First legit sci-fi we get in years, and they devolved it into "muscle bound hero shoots aliens with laser gun" within one season of acquiring it from SyFy.

To be clear, we're talking about Roberta Draper here right?

Just every character of the main crew in general. The SyFy seasons were very Firefly-esque; regular people doing their best to get by and fulfill their own personal goals. Then all of the sudden it's just "OK, we're all space marines on an epic mission to save the galaxy now".

It's kinda how the books went too. Nemesis Games and so on were very much about the personal war between Holden and a certain other person.

Have you actually read the books? That TV series was one of the most true to its adapted source material.

Amazon didn't pivot from a detective story to an action story. Abraham and Franck (aka James S.A. Corey), the authors, did. After the arc from the first trilogy of books wrapped up.

>Amazon didn't pivot from a detective story to an action story. Abraham and Franck (aka James S.A. Corey), the authors, did. After the arc from the first trilogy of books wrapped up.

Well then I don't know what to think now. This seems to be a problem for artists in general. You spend your entire life coming up with an incredible work, and once its released to the world and everyone agrees that it's incredible, now there's all this pressure to followup. The second story arc comes off as just completely sophmorish in every possible sense of the word.

They actually planned for the three major overtones and the nine minor theme variations from the start. You may disagree with the results, but it wasn't modified due to outside pressure.

Most "SciFi" on the shelves is just setting. Which frankly, is the way it should be. To a certain kind of person reading about how the whatever warp drive works is really interesting, but story-telling is about people.

One thing that stuck with me for many years is Joss Whedon saying that the Serenity flies at the speed of the plot. It's more important to understand how people interact in situations than it is to know how fast the ship can go. It can either get there with plenty of time, just in time, or we can't make it - and how that affects the people.

I think the issue is that the sci-fi "setting" has to be materially different than the modern world, otherwise you get the "____ in space" effect. This isn't an issue with historical settings, like the wild West or medieval Europe, since the differences are baked-in.

Only sort-of. One of my favorite series has a situation where a terrorist is trying to destroy a wormhole - the only practical route for one particular planet to the rest of the galaxy. While the analogy is imperfect, it's basically permanently filling the only narrow channel that a ship can get through to the outside world. It's burning the bridge to the outside world. The Wormhole part of it is immaterial.

Consider that a lot of the best Star Trek stories are merely allegory for our own struggles. Some of them are pretty thinly veiled (The half-black-half-white people hate the half-white-half-black people) but even a kid can pierce that veil and understand and say "Oh... racism is stupid"

I think the "____ in space" effect is probably more related to poor writing then a specific component of the genre.

Heh. We have had tons of these in Spain in the 70's/80's. Cheap pulp detective novels rehashed as scifi ones, and Far West tales converted into cheap police/action 'a dime' novels. More than often the same author covered several genres with very little.

Try Daniel Suarez's books. They've been one bright light for me in recent years.

I really liked Delta-V and Critical Mass. It was nice to read a good hard sci-fi novel.

I made the mistake of starting Delta-V on a worknight and literally wouldn't allow myself to put the book down until I finished it somewhere close to 7am...

Check out Adrian Tchaikovsky

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