Where did all the starships go?
datawrapper.de
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I predict a correlation between space-based scifi sales and polls on whether the country is heading in the right direction.
Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way).
We also do not yet have the technology for a complete survey of nearby habitable planets.
It is not an encouraging line of thought.
Would any of the stories about the characters’ relationships with people not traveling with them be entertaining given the effects of time dilation?
The 2020s have not been known as reasons for great optimism. The pandemic and AI culling clades of the job market have been traumatizing experiences.
We don't even know that this isn't a simulation. Not non-falsifiable, sure. But we're convinced we're bound to this solar system with our crude tools and limits of detection.
One new instrument could upset our grand understanding and models. Maybe we should wait until they get better hardware to marry ourselves to their prognostications of the end of time.
During the postwar years of plenty, people stopped dreaming. We had bold dreams before WWII, but people stopped looking at how far we'd come and started comparing themselves to everyone else. We had no mortal enemy, tremendous wealth, and "keeping up with the Joneses" became the new operating protocol.
We have more than we did in the past. The manufacturing wealth of 1940-1970 was a fluke. The trade wealth of 1980-2020 was a fluke. We were upset over an unfair advantage that won't last forever. Even today we're still better off than a hundred years ago, yet everyone focuses on how bad things are.
Maybe a return to hardship will make us dream again.
We don't know why the expansion is accelerating. For that we have only speculation.
It explains nothing. It's just tacked on the end there.
Everyone you knew on earth would be dead by the time you got back, but if it's just about you, the speed of light is no limitation at all. (The rocket equation, however, presents stupendous engineering challenges.)
Realistically even getting to the nearest star in less than 400 years experienced time is way way WAY out of reach for now.
Something roughly along these lines was believable enough for the Altered Carbon universe.
Not necessarily insoluble, but a massive unsolved problem.
Just in that first paragraph:
- How do you stop at the other end? There won't be a large laser array at the receiving end and a laser probe will not have enough stored energy to decelerate itself.
- How exactly do you download a mind to be transmitted? We can't do it right now to be sure, and it's not clear we could ever accurately do that depending on how finely detailed a human brain is.
- How do you transmit it reliably over several hundred light years? Background radiation alone is enough to drown out any signal after a few dozen light years no matter how good your transmission is. Also, when do you start sending? You cannot possibly know which probes survived. (you DID send out at least a few hundred probes right? Don't forget to multiply laser energy requirements by the amount of probes)
- How does the receiving end download a mind into a robot body? We can't even begin to do that on Earth, not even with worms or flies. Humans are right out.
- How do we power the lasers? Conservative estimates have put required laser power at several gigawatts at least. Current laser systems can do that in pulsed mode but only with extremely low duty cycles. Getting enough power together to supply millions of homes would be tricky to say the least. (and see the note above about needing multiple probes just to be on the good side of probability)
- How does the probe survive decades of ultrahard radiation? What about dust it will encounter at high-subluminal speeds, also for decades? The shielding for that won't be lightweight, but the heavier the probe gets the more difficult it will be to accellerate.
- The satellite which is light enough to be powered by lasers also contains the most magical 3d printer anyone has ever seen. You can't just pull the molecules for advanced processors and energy generation equipment out of the air, such a probe would need to set up significant mining industries all on its own without any human interaction.
- A basic robot body. Keep in mind that "picking up a keychain and choosing the right key out of it without dropping the whole keychain" is already a challenge for modern robots.
In short, it'll be several centuries before humanity even gets close to such a project. I'd like to be wrong, but it seems extremely unlikely anyone of us will see such a thing in our lifetime.
This is confusing science fiction with physical reality. See e.g. https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/... for a reality check.
It's a huge limitation, even just getting propelled to "big enough speed", say 1/10 the speed of light.
We barely do 1/1500 the speed of light, in unmanned probes, and only because we sling shot on Solar gravity, not as propulsion or anything, and at 1400 o Celcius, plus deadly radiation, not to mention any micro-meteor as big as a particle of dust could kill someone there).
If you can't even get up to 1/10 the speed of light, then you wish the speed of light was a huge limitation, but it's actually not affecting you at all.
I guess you're technically correct though: the speed of light is not an issue, if 1/10th the speed of light is already unachievable.
If earth is big enough for fantasy, then the solar system is plenty big enough for science fiction.
If you wanted to watch hard science fiction I would recommend watching anthrofuturism on YouTube who focuses exclusively on the moon.
Well, that could be worked around in the world building. My favorite SF-friendly scenario would be if life originated in the Sun's natal cluster (perhaps not around the Sun itself), with tens of thousands of star systems, and spread between them before the cluster dispersed. Presumably panspermia would be much easier in such a situation because the stars are closer together and because maybe residual gas could help particles get trapped near other young systems. In this case all the "infected" systems could have the same coding.
A nice consequence of this scenario is it's compatible with the Fermi argument: even if origin of life is unlikely, it just had to happen once here, and so it not happening elsewhere in the galaxy (or even visible universe) is not a problem.
Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.
And I'm sorry but that thing is too goofy looking to be considered a dragon.
One could stick on those classified as such in western culture - which is where the fantasy novel about dragons and knights and spells and the rest are based on.
And in there, dragons have quite specific characteristic and vibes, as evidenced from medieval iconography of St George to countless fantasy book covers and illustrations.
That definition would imply that sufficiently large flying dinosaurs qualify as dragons. And at least personally I think I agree with that conclusion. Dragons aren't purely fantasy, they're merely extinct (and never breathed fire IRL).
Someone like Asimov never considered his books to be fantasy and that he could just insert whatever he wanted with no justification. In fact, he never considered sci-fi to be a genre, he always argued it was a setting and that his most famous stories were detective stories in a sci-fi setting. But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
It’s the exact same thing as a speculative story in the 1920s discussing supersonic flight, even though the jet engine hadn’t been invented yet.
For instance “Tunnel in the Sky” bypassed the whole issue in the 50’s, later imitated by “Stargate”…
It was just hard to engineer a manned plane that could do it. For example during WWII the V2 rockets travelled much faster than sound. They were just unmanned. Or more simple, bullets were supersonic for longer too.
What I mean is, nobody thought the sound barrier was a hard limit we could never break.
A magic unobtainium drive which works in a consistent way is fine, just call it “hyperspace” or whatever
There’s a difference between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi, but they are both still sci-fi, you can tell optimistic stories of the future with a “battle drive”, as long as you keep it consistent. If the drive cancels relativity effects and allows travel at 5000c that’s fine. Just ensure you travel at 5000c, no hoping across the galaxy in a few days, but travelling to another star in a few days or even hours is fine.
Agreed but only because "some effort" could be as little as a single paragraph.
> But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
If you only change a tiny bit, this isn't a major issue.
> The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
That specific story falls apart but you could have lots of thematically similar stories with FTL. No need for "serious justification" unless you're trying to pull it out of nowhere halfway through the plot. If it's there from the start, there's no problem.
Yeah I think most readers care more about consistency than realism. Being completely realistic makes consistency easy but a harder sell in terms of entertainment.
Maybe one way to view consistency is modelling the story world as a network of criss-crossing character threads. Where one axis is time and the other(s) are uh something? Anyways, consistency is how predictable (smooth / linear) the thread is. We follow the main character's thread pretty closely so that thread is allowed to suddenly curve (plot twist) without risk of losing the reader. We only catch glimpses of the supporting cast / antagonist so those have to be either predictable or the narrator has to backtrack and reveal any twists where necessary. And maybe how intricate yet well-behaved this network appears is what gives the feeling of stories coming alive. Or maybe I'm just on too much caffeine and ranting.
The typical poorly received uses aren’t when the cre beams down from orbit, or even when they can’t beam down, it’s when they de age people and retrieve their pattern from the buffer to cure an illness, and never do it again, or when they beam light years away for a throw away story element.
No, it just has to be grounded in something consistent and if the book starts by explaining the mechanics of the world(or is in a world with known mechanics), a detective story very well can work.
Indeed, but that is always the challenge of a writer. But if you introduce magic in your story, and you do it in a way to show the limitations and what is roughly possible, then you can give hints later, if there was a murder with the help of a magic trick. But I actually think I only ever read one detective fantasy story
https://www.der-spurenfinder.de/
(just in german as far as I know)
It mostly works, but in one instance there was a surprise fantasy ability, that I could have not guessed before. But the actual murderer in the end, there were enough hints that gave them away despite magic, as the skills were explained and then you could combine.
These are interesting problems to think about, right now they are solidly SF but dragons are and always will be fantasy because physics says they can't exist in the way they are described. But you can't 100% rule out that one day descendants of humanity will visit the stars in person, assuming we don't blow ourselves up first.
That's one of the main reasons I dislike Musk so much: he takes people motivated by positive dreams (a clean planet, off-world travel and living) and then subverts their energy for grift. But 'DOGE' has shown the world who he really is, the mask is off now and anybody still empowering that asshole is co-responsible.
If we assume advanced genetic as well as bio engineering that admits the possibility of self reproducing cybernetic organisms that closely match many or all of the key characteristics. I'm not sure it's actually a cyborg if the lineage is fully independent without involving any technology external to the species but I use the term there because that's the easiest way to communicate the idea.
We've already got examples of dinosaurs that come fairly close to qualifying so I'm sure something vaguely in the ballpark is within the realm of possibility. Exactly how close to the mark though I have no idea.
For example, what would you make of something visually resembling a massive western dragon but with a largely hollow body? I don't think that would disqualify it in most people's eyes. Pushing the concept a bit farther could yield something vaguely like a living cross between a hot air balloon and a deep-sea anglerfish with a weaponized tail.
Vaguely related to that hypothetical, we've got examples in the fossil record of 2 foot wide dragonflies estimated to have weighed in at under 150 grams. There's a pretty large solution space to explore here.
Archaeopteryx would have you for lunch long before you realized that it doesn't spit fire.
I'm not even clear what the criteria are. We've got examples in fiction that run the gamut. Even limited to fairly traditional post-Tolkien western high fantasy examples of creatures with a long neck, two wings, a distinct abdomen, and a tail we've still got concrete examples ranging in size from a small lap dog up to larger than a McMansion. Plenty of reasonably canonical examples don't spit fire (although being able to certainly furthers the general vibe). And weight? As I said earlier, that's (imo) solidly in the domain of secondary characteristics.
Semantic arguments aren't any fun (and are largely pointless). Is Pluto a planet or not? Unless it's a technical discussion where the distinction matters for some reason, who cares? What matters is if Pluto fits the pattern that you (ie the people conversing) care about.
Hence my posing the example of a particularly buoyant variety of dragon. I think most people would consider it to fit the pattern well enough but I'm sure there would be at least some disagreement.
Also as long as we're talking about wild far future sci-fi possibilities such as visiting other stars in person then you can't rule out dragons in the form of a wildly advanced, needlessly decadent military technology show piece. Something like a nuclear powered bio engineered cyborg for use as some sort of fighter jet. (Apologies if I just inadvertently ripped off some anime I've never heard of.)
It was "science fiction" and not merely "space fiction".
No, but we've become increasingly superstitious, and cultish. A lot of the day to day parts of sci-fi (screens everywhere , instant communication) have become reality so it's not as exciting anymore. Sci-fi no longer serves as escapism. Anymore, it reminds us of our limitations.
No, because one is theoretically impossible while the other is theoretically possible.
When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment. When areicebo fell and was not immediately rebiult, i realized that most people just dont care about ever meeting another civilization. Even if we did find one it wouldnt change much here on earth. Most people dont care about climate change. They dont care about anything beyond their own lifetime. What matter will aliens be if they are a thousand lightyears away? So people dream now about other things, about grimy politics and alternative history.
I visited Arecibo a decade before it collapsed. It was impressive and of great historical value, but could repair be cost-effective?
Edit: It did have some unique features.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
• The LIGO methodology is to look for hyper-specified patterns in voluminous reams of apparent 'noise'. It wouldn't be unfair to call it an extensively aggravated search for what one is looking for. That's okay, so long as they provide the stats to back up the non-noisiness of what they turn up. (I'm not a stats person and can't debate that, and. I trust their caliber enough that I don't feel the need to). But to your point, if there are other signatures lurking in LIGO data _that they don't know already how to look for_, then there is no reason why a paper would have gotten produced describing it since the first GW detection in 2015.
• Now, take this for what it's worth in terms of fragmentary information relaying - But at the first Sol Symposium in 2023 at Stanford, I can tell you that in podium-level banter between talks (perhaps it was Q&A and the like IIRC) it was asserted that the LIGO consortium was not allowing studies (read: not allowing access to its data) where the investigator's intension was related to UFO / UAP phenomena (like, extrapolating here, looking for signatures correlated with external reports of UAP sightings). If that claim was borne out, than perhaps the LIGO consortium is just doing preemptive reputation protection in not allowing such studies to kick off with its name associated with it. (One could attempt to follow up with astronomer Beatriz Villaroel for a lead on who said that or if there's substance to that research policy claim)
But my point is, between these two bullet points, you are afforded a complete 'empty set' - and decidedly not a 'negative result' - on whether or not LIGO has detected signatures of a 'warp drive' or other some such non-prosaic phenomenon.
And to the extent that the -1701 patrolling Mars-Venus might manage to ‘stick out like a sore thumb’, what about the relative blip of a Sh'Raan class embarking on some fresh surveying out of 40 Eridani A?
* Space Station that lasts 25 years
* 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service
* Mars rovers that run for 10+ years
* Flying helicopters on Mars
A small station, hosting a small number of people, orbiting very close to the surface of the Earth.
> 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service
…very close to the surface of the Earth.
> Mars rovers that run for 10+ years
On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on. Notably, we have nothing but melted slag on Venus.
> Flying helicopters on Mars
On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on.
I don’t mean to detract from the achievements of our space programs. But we have to be realistic: we’re exploring the easiest bits of our local neighborhood, that’s all.
Spoken like someone who's never read Tau Zero
I really find it hard to understand how people confuse science fiction with reality. I love Tau Zero - I first read it over 40 years ago - but it’s fiction, ffs.
That Bussard Ramjet, though, is thoroughly discredited. It can't possibly work. Hydrogen hydrogen fusion is a terribly slow nuclear reaction and if you had to stop the gas to give it enough time to react, you'd end up stopping the rocket not accelerating it. In fact, the most credible use of that kind of magnetic scoop is as a brake!
Plus, even Tau Zero's initial premise is a pipe dream.
You mean Sweden as a world superpower? :P
They travel across the known universe in less than the span of a human lifetime.
OP said "tens of thousands of years of travel".
Or are you being deliberately obtuse about relativistic time dilation?
At this speed, the time dilation is slightly above 3%, so you're still not going to reach even Alpha Centauri in one human lifetime, or maybe you barely can.
There likely won’t be any planet better than the very low bar of Mars for human habitation, in fact maybe even worse due to binary perturbations.
If humanity survives to a high enough tech level, someone will do it just because they can...
> A trip there to do… what?
Well, except that you changed below lethal to already lethal.
A radiation hardened, self healing computer could.
But importantly that's not us leaving. Some distant future descendent of humans could have engineered itself to leave, but it's not us and we shouldn't fixate on that distant and unknowable future.
Two things baffle me:
1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system.
2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
Like what? (There are always ethical issues with new medical technology.)
> It might be good for certain medical stuff
Yes, like giving sight to the blind! What a monster Musk is!
P.S. two of my largest medical fears are becoming paralyzed or going blind. Neuralink has promise in making these treatable. I'm all for it!
Like mind control, thought surveillance, neural torture (the last one would be easiest).
I think these are inevitable technologies, I don't blame Neuralink in particular.
Glad we’re on the same page.
When I was using Zortech C++ in the ‘80s, I never imagined I’d be talking to the author nearly half a century later about his support for a fascist Nazi near-trillionaire.
Wtf is wrong with you.
The man is deeply unwell and desperate for approval and accolades. From anyone.
He says why he does it - over and over - to save humanity by spreading it out into space.
> desperate for approval and accolades. From anyone.
If true, it is rather common behavior, not deeply unwell. Politicians 100% fall into that category. So do movie stars. So does every Olympic athlete. So what.
> If true, it is rather common behavior.
Wanting approval is normal. Most people would not support nazis for approval.
That's not how that works.
Musk is, by many definitions well across the line distinguishing the 'fascist nazi's' from the rest of us.
Normalization of deviance slowly shifts the window to the point where his behavior is excused. Some people think it is acceptable because of all of the (potential) good a person could do or has already done. That's roughly the equivalent of 'Hitler was a vegetarian, and liked animals, how bad could he be?'. But The country that spawned the movement (so I think they get to make the call) thinks he is. And Musk's support for the German AfD (which is a thin layer of veneer over a despicable group) speaks volumes, yes, let's 'Make Germany Great Again' ffs. Even the Neo Nazi's think he is a Nazi. Elon has made Twitter (sorry, 'X') into a safe haven for the alt-right and various hate groups.
If it quacks like a Nazi and moves like a Nazi it probably is a Nazi. Whether you support him or not changes nothing about Elon but it does say something about you that you continue to support him despite everything he has already undeniably done and I'm disappointed, to put it mildly.
"never meet your heroes".
Maybe you're using the definition from a reddit story about a nazi bar?
If yes, then you shouldn't have any problem with me calling you a soviet?
The problem is that you are giving away access to your mind, one of the last private spaces. That means your thoughts can be stolen (think AI scraping but worse), or advertising put in your dreams. Perhaps even used to reprogram your mind etc.
Given how smartphones have percolated society, I fear you may have a point, but I think that might be the slippery slope fallacy.
That "river" is still vast and nothing we want is on the other side.
>1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system.
It's less the idea that Terran life is toxic and more that we're still hoping to find some forms of primitive life elsewhere in the solar system, and don't want those efforts thwarted by cross-contamination. You decided the rest of the solar system is dead, not the scientific community.
>2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
If you really can't comprehend the reason why Elon Musk is villified by people then there's no point in trying to explain it to you.
Suffice to say that owning a rocket company doesn't absolve a person of their sins to everyone, even on Hacker News.
Wow.
> You decided the rest of the solar system is dead, not the scientific community.
The odds are heavily stacked against other life existing, and get worse with every probe. Of course, nobody can prove there is no other life. And it's not very credible that Terran life will out-compete locally evolved life.
And the idea that preserving some slime mold on Pluto justifies us constraining ourselves to Earth is just sad.
> If you really can't comprehend the reason why Elon Musk is villified by people then there's no point in trying to explain it to you.
I once asked another Musk-hater on HN why? All he could come up with is Musk called a diver a pedo-boy. I pointed out that Musk only did that because the diver went on national TV and told Musk to shove his submarine up his backside.
If you've got a better reason, I'd love to hear it!
You’re equivocating a childish insult with insisting that a person is a pedophile and hiring a private investigator to prove so and then writing scathing emails to reporters because they refuse to repeat claims uncritically. This is an appalling failing of morality on your part.
I’m frankly not inclined to dive into why I, previously a big fan of Elon Musk, find him personally repugnant because I expect you to apply the same standards to everything he does. That doesn’t take away from SpaceX, but we shouldn’t overlook his failings just because rockets are cool.
Only after being sued. When you sue someone, they're going to try to defend themselves.
Both of them should have just shrugged it off.
> then writing scathing emails
doesn't make someone evil. The whole incident was childish from both sides, but nobody was actually hurt.
You left out the part where he claimed a person was a pedophile and when asked if it was just an insult basically said “no I really think he’s a pedophile”, and started stating made up bullshit about child brides as fact. He only backtracked when he was sued. That is NOT the same as just throwing insults.
"Mr. Musk made these statements based on reports he received from a private investigator he hired to investigate Mr. Unsworth in preparation for the litigation that Mr. Unsworth had already threatened. Unbeknownst to Mr. Musk, the investigator’s reports were fabricated, and the investigator himself turned out to be a convicted felon who had gone to prison for fraud."
"Mr. Musk’s tweet was the culmination of an argument between two people that was punctuated by insults—not a factual accusation of the crime of pedophilia. The firm also demonstrated that Mr. Unsworth had not suffered any injury."
There's more: https://www.quinnemanuel.com/the-firm/our-notable-victories/...
Childish behavior - sure (on both sides). Anybody hurt - no.
Hmm..
> “Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for,”
Hmm..
> “Will be in the BVI/St Bart’s area over the holidays. Is there a good time to visit?”
Hmm..
> “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”
Hmm..
> The emails between the two moguls come years after Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor in Florida.
Yup, sounds like a "better reason" to me.
2) Musk is putting a lot of money into these things but he is still heavily subsidised by US government money and facilities (a loophole in the Outer Space Treaty allows individuals and corporations to claim other planets but not countries.)
Yes, I've been hearing that forever. Every probe shrinks the envelope on the possibility.
> Earth life could be destructive to native life in these places,
Better us than slime mold.
> and vice versa (since they would likely be extremophiles) resulting in invasive species.
Perhaps. If anyone was transporting things back from there, there'd be a long space voyage where any such toxicity to the astronauts would be pretty clear.
2. Musk is not getting subsidies. He does get government contracts, where he exchanges rockets for money. That is not a subsidy, like if I make boxes and sell them to the government I am not getting a subsidy.
2. Tax credits - the tax code is full of various credits. Anyone can use those credits.
3. Other subsidies - like what?
> which literally would not be possible without the US government
The US government buying launches at prices far cheaper than NASA is not a subsidy.
The overwhelming amount of the work is done by NASA, ESA, CNSA (China, going to the Moon), and other space agencies. Musk has built orbital rockets.
> routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
That's disingenuous and you know it. Why make such claims?
Musk has built lots of cheap orbital rockets. That changes everything.
> That's disingenuous and you know it. Why make such claims?
See the other responses in this thread.
There were books before Gutenberg, but only for the rich. His printing press made them cheap enough to print newspapers. That changed everything.
Before Bessemer, making steel was extremely expensive and rarely one. With the Bessemer Process, vast quantities of steel could be cheaply made. That changed everything. Google says:
"The process revolutionized the industry by reducing costs and increasing production, making steel accessible for major infrastructure projects in the 19th and early 20th centuries."
It's valuable for sure. It's nothing like, "The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds". There are many others, and many are doing more (again, NASA, etc.). JPL's homepage says "Our missions have flown to every planet and the Sun ...", and that they've been on Mars for four years, so let's be serious and not throw wild absurd claims at the wall (very Musk-like, though!).
Now that Musk led the way, sure. People laughed at Musk when he started out.
> NASA
Has sent a handful of probes out, only a handful because they are so costly. Now NASA can send out legions of them. There was a previous discussion here about why only one JWST was made and launched, at a cost of $10B. We all hope and pray it doesn't break down. Now with Musk's rockets we can launch lots of them and make N times the discoveries!
(With cheap launches, we don't have to make single machines that must be super reliable. We can make cheap machines at fractions of the cost, and so what if a few of them fail.)
Lowering costs by an order of magnitude changes everything.
NASA has launched about 200 probes since the 1950s. That's maybe 3 probes a year.
> What is the point of writing that?
Building one-offs is extremely expensive, meaning few will be built.
> And there is far more to cost of missions and their hardware than launching them. How much of JWST's cost was the launch?
Cost goes down dramatically when you build a twin. Maybe even by 90%. And then you get twice the science done! After all, twin Voyagers were made and launched, and twice the science indeed happened. Makes you wonder what we'd have learned if the twins had more siblings!
For contrast, 9600 Starlink satellites have been launched.
2. Which guy?
That things moved from that to outright vilification is entirely due to how he behaved since then.
That is or was essentially the mission of the US government's Artemis program, as I understand it. Some elements of the plan are (or were):
'Civilize' (my word) the Moon - build PNT, situational awareness, communication infrastructure, bases, permanent human presence etc. Bring it within a normalized region of operations, like Earth orbit (though obviously much more expensive and less utilized). A benefit is developing plans for infrastructure and operations on Mars, in a much more friendly and less expensive environment. What does it take to support humans efficiently and reliably on another body?
Also conduct experiments and develop technology for Mars in cislunar regions - again, much friendlier and less costly.
The best hope for that is to send the one thing to Mars that people absolutely refuse to send to Mars which is bacteria and yeast and microbes. That could be a synthetic biology platform that could make pretty much all the molecules you need and then you assemble them with 3D printing or something like that.
And you could cut those numbers 10x and still have a huge variety of manufacturing capabilities.
I don't see why we would need a near-magic factory box just to build a colony.
https://www.amazon.com/Pencil-History-Design-Circumstance/dp...
Those big machines have lots of little parts and if you have to wait three years to get a spare part that’s a big problem. (Never mind anything that Earth sends to a Mars colony is a gift because it is inconceivable that it would be profitable to bring anything back)
Anyone who starts sketching out what a space manufacturing complex looks like (e.g. Drexler, myself [1]) comes to the same conclusion Drexler did —- there is this diverse residue of difficult to manufacture small but complex things. The good news is that we have molecular assemblers, they built you, and now that people are decoding the “junk DNA” we are getting a handle on genetic regulation networks and will be able to make them much more productive and reliable.
[1] unpublished study on manufacturing sunshades on an asteroid which is rich in something which is more-or-less “coal”, out of a lack of imagination I assumed it was going to use a pyrolysis system like https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/Coal/energy-systems/gasifi... and I can tell you that sort of thing on Earth has almost as many things that can go wrong with it as a fast reactor
And for every fifty people on mars you can have a thousand people back on earth figuring out the best way to make every component.
The hard part is building chemical stocks of all these different things. And while that's a huge task, it's so much less hard than a make-anything machine. Once you have graphite, clay, rubber, and wood, making it into a pencil is simple. Cut, mix, extrude, clamp. Wood (and rubber if that's the easiest way) can be grown on-site, wood can be turned into graphite, and clay shouldn't be amazingly hard to get from martian soil. Oh and glue, we can figure out a glue.
A species with that kind of capability would be able to visit another solar system in 10,000 or so years but might care less to mess around with dry little solar system bodies like the Earth. The case against "grabby" aliens is that Ceres and Pluto are still here, not that we can't find evidence of them on Earth.
I like to imagine that if that kind of interstellar traveler were to visit Earth it might take them a few decades to perfect a "reverse space-shuttle" because they'd gone 10,000 years without doing anything like that... And they can't just 3-d print one out of 10,000 year old plans because they've improved their 3-d printers to print the stuff they've been printing all that time better.
This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time.
It rarely has to do with the possibility of the genre actually happening in reality. A story is good because it is riveting and the backdrop (whether sci-fi or fantasy) is just icing on the cake. Look at Harry potter and practically every fantasy story out there.... none of those stories have any chance of happening in our current reality... yet they are popular.
I think the answer for as to why there's less interest in sci-fi is pretty mundane. It's like genetic drift, but this one is cultural. For no reason at all our interests just shift because of luck. There happened to be more good stories written in the fantasy genre and that's the direction everything shifted.
Tbf though the MCU was more sci fi than anything and that every genre out of the water in every medium all the way up until endgame. Say what you want about it but the popularity of that universe dwarfed everything else in the last decade... which goes to show that it's likely mostly just drift.
Here's one such example: [The Destination Star by Gregory Marlow](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-destinatio...)
I haven't read many military books, but to me this book is the perfect demonstration of the ultimate futility of war.
Pessimistic views see those as insurmountable problems that shouldn't be bothered with, making the stories seem more ridiculous.
I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL? I've no doubt there's a handful of works but this is hardly a plausible explanation for a _recent_ decline in these topics.
I bet very little. We didn’t really know how enormous the universe is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax: “Being very difficult to measure, only about 60 stellar parallaxes had been obtained by the end of the 19th century”), and we hadn’t known for long that the speed of light is an absolute speed limit.
(Of course, these same constraints apply in a relative sense to the outer regions of planetary systems.)
We won't be crossing interstellar distances to look for habitable planets — we'll do it to mine material to build more of our own habitats, to spread further. We don't need to find planets to live on.
Are you seriously saying that people realizing that FTL travel is impossible makes people more interested in stories about magic?!?
Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the evolutionary pressure to produce great literature that requires an interested and intelligent reader to decode the hidden messages written between the lines ;)
The more we look for alien civilizations and come up empty, the more I feel like they were on to something. For all we know, life is exceedingly rare in the universe.
Now should be a productive time for music in the US then, and possibly elsewhere if things continue on the same trajectory.
Bandcamp, substack… local bands, probably other places i am too lazy to seek out.
The inner systems become hidebound as they continue to reach out they find that not only has someone beaten them there, they have become Other as well as antagonistic and expansionist.
Also, Foundation takes place in a future where society is about to collapse and regress into dark ages. It's a borderline dystopian world.
Interesting POV because Star Trek and Foundation both have recent, big budget streaming series while new Terminator movies were flops and Neuromancer has never seen any development(?)
FWIW, Amazon made a show based on "The Peripheral" by Gibson which is way more bleak than Neuromancer, and it was crazy good, but they canceled it after one season.
Being a part of a Q continuum, a disembodied consciousness that can appear wherever whenever, while still retaining a memory/sense of "self" is a far more interesting a dream.
Starships titillate people who tinker with machines. Not very optimistic if we are dragging along service jobs to explore the cosmos.
(Space travel, of course, is a major part of many of them, like Project Hail Mary or the Pierce Brown stuff. Not nearly as much in the Star Trek utopian vein, of course, as the parent commenter pointed out.)
Feels like folks like Blake Crouch or Mick Herron are filling similar spots as Cussler or Clancy these days, but again shifted to today's general worldview. Not as verbose as Clancy, though.
Without fantasy -- Lord of the Rings being the chief example -- the "post-God" world has no means of developing said faculties outside of fantasy (the genre), and art - which, as a whole, is a form of fantasy.
How does the Three Body Problem fit into this? On one hand, it’s Chinese. On the other hand, it’s literally mocking optimism.
Although remember that Neuromancer, despite kicking off the generally spaceship-free cyberpunk genre, did have spaceships and even orbital cities!
Taking favourite novels which are within arm's reach: Sure "Rainbows End" is Science Fiction which doesn't involve space travel etc. but "Incandescence" is also SF but that's deeply about space travel. Banks' "Whit" and "Surface Detail" are both sat here. One of those is set in a lightly fictionalized Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to several of the most significant space battles of her era. But like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which?
Now, Banks wasn't a hard SF writer. Unlike say Egan's "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.
no publisher was there to tell author "wtf did you name it, you'll get ignored" or smth?
Really, I think the most significant trend here is that, between 1950 and 1980 or so, the sci-fi genre grew up and stopped relying on painfully literal titles.
SF used to excel at selling "dreams" to humanity. By trying too hard to be seen as "serious" or scientifically airtight, authors sacrificed the sense of wonder that allows for mainstream success. We traded mass appeal for academic validation.
Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.
Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or most selling one.
Egan's "The Amalgam" is an SF society which could in principle descend in part from some future humanity, and I suppose if you like Banks' setting for its utopianism you'd be satisfied with the Amalgam. Its citizens tend to live long, full lives in which they're definitely mostly concerned with the upper parts of Maslow's pyramid and their practical needs are fulfilled as a matter of course in most cases.
I must say, to the extent we have any future at all, I think probably of Egan's "Dream Apes". An Orangutan-like self-engineered future humanity who have arranged that there are no apex predators above them, there's an abundance of resources for their relatively modest population, and they just chill, believing that if there is something out there it's not their concern. Of course in the story the Dream Apes are all annihilated by a cataclysmic event which destroys Earth, but hey, it's pretty quick.
We have no experience with the extremely asymmetrical relationships which would result. Lem tries to imagine this in Golem XIV - what happens when humans who are used to thinking of themselves as smart are talking with a categorically more intelligent machine - and it doesn't work very well even though it's only a sketch.
"Tatja Grimm's World" has a neat trick where Vinge is able to sidestep this because [[SPOILER]] although Tatja is much smarter than everybody else from her world, that's not because she's smarter than we are, almost everyone born on her planet is an idiot for reasons the story justifies.
However the word can also mean, and does in the case of the novel, a person who merely lives on the planet Mars, as Mark Wayney does.
Another interpretation might be that as fewer books are released in a subgenre, their titles also become more abstract, which would increase the effect seen in the data presented as well.
But I would hesitate to believe that the observed effect should be chalked up to only title abstraction, and not a decline in popularity. Occam’s razor.
Not even abstract, just not completely on the nose. Just as a lot if fantasy is not: only two discord novels would match the author’s search terms even though you’ll find all five inside the pages. None for Malazan. Or Nix’s old kingdom.
And worse, 40% of the sci-fi terms pretty only allow settings of “future solar system”. Not one of the Foundation books would match. Pretty much no classic sci-fi either. Wells’s fucking The War of the Worlds would not, because for some reason (of having any sort of taste) it was not titled “the day Mars invaded planet earth through space and then was beaten” like some lone star light novel.
In that sense I think it's less an overall literary trends and more reflecting the pretty basic way of marketing pulpy stories to teens means putting "vampire" rather than "planet" in big letters in the title. Also, people still writing fantasy novels about alien civilizations aren't setting them on the moon or Mars any more, for reasons...
- mystery, - horror, - fantasy, - and sci-fi have lots of overlap. - And XKCDs What-If-Books even.
But as someone who hates fantasy and loves sci-fi, the biggest difference for me comes from plausibility: "a witch did it" as Occam's fantasy razor for things being the way they happened, and the underlying physics engine means for me: either this is soft "sci-fi", or they better explain with hard rules the limitations and effects of their magic system.
Since (low-sorcery) fantasy RPGs even have torches that would never work, when historical torched looked completely differently, suspension of disbelieve hardly sets in for me in fantasy books.
I say this as someone that still loves (and writes a little) speculative fiction. Just a guess as to what’s happening.
Vaccines put an end to endemic diseases which killed so many children every year. The birth control pill catalyzed the sexual revolution. We had a treatment for diabetes, which was once a death sentence.
The 1950s and onward saw huge changes in how businesses are organized due to computerization. In the US, cheap automobiles, cheap gas, the federal highway system, and subsidies transformed how most people live, including white flight into suburbia.
Plastic was a wonder material. Materials like nylon and polyester transformed the clothing industry.
It's still possible to imagine new bright futures, but that kind of imagination is very much against a cultural tide that's fervently regressive and nostalgic.
That is a loaded term.
Authors in my library who’ve released space sf stuff in the last few years — Anne Leckie, Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, John Scalzi, Martha Wells, James Corey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal.
To be fair, some of them get into philosophy or fantasy, or even romance. But the settings are SF.
(Scalzi is always fun.)
Craig Alanson also wrote a fantasy trilogy a while back that proved much better than I was expecting. It started off as what appeared to be an uninteresting juvenile fantasy book, but quickly got better and darker. I very much enjoyed reading those.
Science fiction usually doesn't conform to how the world actually works in the same way pornography usually doesn't conform to the way sexual relationships work. They are both there to tell titillating stories, not describe reality.
Sometimes you might get a SF author who's an expert in a particular field or has a specific hyperfixation, and that one aspect of their stories might be grounded somewhat in plausibility, but everything else turns out to be complete nonsense.
It depends on the author I guess. Stanislaw Lem for instance mostly separated his "silly-fiction universes" (e.g. the Ijon Tichy and 'robot fairytales' novels) from his "hard sci-fi" universes (for instance the Pilot Pirx novels) - and there it was mostly about the restrictions of space travel (where space travel is usually just plain old cargo hauling), Pirx never left the solar system because it simply wasn't possible during his lifetime (part of him eventually did - maybe - in his last book 'Fiasco'), instead the Pirx novels were mostly occupied with typical 'space trucker' problems like oil leaks on his rocket boosters, wrestling with space harbour bureaucracy or the occasional humanoid robot going into a mode that could be described as 'mad' or 'depressed'.
Interestingly there’s also “high” fantasy to differentiate between earth like and non earth like subject worlds, and then even “historical fiction” to describe books that try to be faithful to some degree to some historical time period on earth.
Anyway, this is all to say maybe “how far science-fiction has fallen” might be a narrow interpretation of what’s been happening to fiction in general over the past 75 years. More options than ever, maybe…
The fear of humans being replaced by computers (TOS: The Ultimate Computer) was speculative but also germane back then and is perhaps even more germane today.
Edit: Highlights include Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse, The Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, Pushing Ice (and other titles by Alastair Reynolds), Interstellar (debatable, but it's good), Project Hail Mary, For All Mankind, and many more.
I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV shows, but I haven't seen them yet.
If you've already read most of the well-known ones, I could give you some recommendations from less well-known authors and self-published authors you probably haven't heard of yet. Though it would help to have some general direction of what you're looking for (military/space opera/other, ftl/aliens?, etc). Allowing for limited FTL handwavyness opens up a lot of space opera titles that elect to otherwise play by hard sci-fi rules.
* Some may recommend "Pushing Ice" over this one for being more "hard" sci-fi, but personally House of Suns was a much more satisfying read.
- valuable humans in transit by qntm
- the old axolotl by Jacek Dukaj (skip the tv show, it is very different from the book)
- the Agent Cormac series by Neal Asher
- the night’s dawn trilogy by peter f hamilton (his books are borderline fantasy, but he writes such deliciously monstrous villains)
Even a cursory analysis at the time of writing would have ruled out Alpha Centari.
It was shockingly bad research.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/inside-the-proton-the-most-co...
While the triple star Alpha Centauri does not have mass ratios between its stars that are compatible with the story plot, I think that ignoring this technical detail is a much less serious plot hole than those of the majority of the non-fantastic Hollywood movies, which are supposed to happen in the real world, but they still contain a lot of impossible actions.
This is perhaps similar to the pursuit of "unobtainium" in Avatar.
Both just seem lazy.
On the other hand, fantasy includes vampires and werewolves. I guess you could call them fantasy but to me they are quite a different niche to Tolkien. Traditionally vampires and werewolves would probably be considered horror rather than fantasy, though it's a bit more complicated now as Twilight is clearly not horror.
I think the author's point stands regardless, as there has been a resurgence across all of those keywords, but I do think the reasons for the resurgence in magic and dragons aren't necessarily the same as the reasons for the resurgence in vampires and werewolves.
Worse, half are confined to the solar system.
Many people don't get the origins of enthusiasm of first years of the space era, it wasn't because of politics, it was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now. And almost total surety of finding at least some form of complex, multicellular life. Disappointment when the real data came in, was massive. That's why space program went nowhere after Apollo, becoming a politicised clown show - by the time Apollo 11 landed, it was abundantly clear there wasn't much to see or do in the Solar System.
They certainly knew the Earth and Moon had craters, so proximity to the asteroid belt isn't required.
I suspect they thought the atmosphere on Mars was thicker and like Earth, where the high rate of erosion erases evidence.
Digging around through archive.org I found https://archive.org/details/sim_popular-astronomy_1944-05_52... from Popular Astronomy 1944
> The following extracts are taken from pp. 49 and 50:
> “The recent dominance of the meteoritic impact theory of crater origin makes timely a review of the oases-crater question of Mars. In this treatise, these conclusions have been pointed out:
> “I, Meteorite craters are known on the Earth and Moon; therefore, craters exist on Mars.
> “2. The circular oases on Mars are the size, shape, and number of comparable lunar craters.
> “3. Crater depressions form a natural reservoir, accounting for the intense vegetation in the Martian oases,
> “4. The random distribution of crater oases is apparent, indicating that the canal system was adapted to this haphazard arrangement.
The reviewer of the above points out
> “Why didn’t someone think of the crater theory sooner? The answer is simple. Someone did. Back in 1892, at Arequipa, Peru, W. H. Pickering not only discovered the small black spots on Mars, but he also recognized their similarity to the circlets on the Moon. Because lunar craters were then believed to be volcanic, Pickering may be forgiven for implying that the Martian craterets also were of volcanic origin.
We now know these crater oases were not real. My point is only that some people proposed meteoric craters on the Moon before the 1960s.
BTW, the SF of the pre-Mariner era does have volcanic craters on Mars, like https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v15n01_1941-01_c... and https://archive.org/details/Startling_Stories_v07n03_1942-05... .
I also found https://archive.org/details/exploringmars0000rich/page/150/m... saying in 1954 "no irregularities due to shadows have ever been observed along the terminator—the line dividing daylight from dark—such as would be produced by Martian craters." The author was an American astronomer and also a SF writer in the 1950s. By this we know astronomers were already considering there might be craters on Mars as there are on the Moon.
Yes. Von Braun wrote an otherwise realistic novel in which earth's explorers find intelligent life on Mars.[1] Heinlein wrote realistically of native intelligent life on Mars and Venus, with far more benign environments then they actually have. But once probes got there, we got to see how bleak they are.
There's a little hope for extrasolar planets, now that we can detect some of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
For the last few decades the culturally significant fiction has been in anime and manga. Lots of it is trash, but lots of it captures the ya themes of friendship and adventure. Some of it captured better the ideas of the cyber age, I suppose. If one explores those genres with a bit of background, you can see how they have been inspired by the traditional sf works, but repackaged them for new audiences without the introspection and conventions of yesterday.
I'm not sure if it is all bad. Definitely, science is not an aspiration any more and those works lack the grounding hard scifi taught us. On the other hand, there is still romanticism in those stories and they teach kids to dream for the impossible. I choose to believe that this is still something to base some optimism on.
It parallels other developments. There is an increasing scepticism around science, and a significant number of people do not believe in the Moon landing. The heroic age of space travel has been replaced by school teachers and guys busking in tin cans in near Earth orbit. It's become mundane and the most exciting things in space exploration are being done by probes not humans nowadays.
Real Science based SF seems to have disappeared completely, at least based upon the only Book Store left in my area, Barnes and Noble.
...this might be the main problem (same with Thalia in Germany), those large book store chains are aggressively optimized for monetization, and that kicks off a death spiral of filling the available space with cheap industrially produced trash.
The good stuff might still be there, but it's much harder to find, and you need to know where to look (same thing that happened to music basically).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commiss...
"The Thor decision caused publishers and booksellers to be much quicker to destroy stocks of poorly-selling books in order to realize a taxable loss. These books would previously have been kept in stock but written down to reflect the fact that not all of them were expected to sell."
Today, I understand mass market paperbacks are dying.
I think humans are stuck on earth permanently because there are no other environments in the solar system we can live in as easily as earth. Traditional sci-fi explained this away using overpopulation pressures, but overpopulation is fading as a reality and plausible narrative device. And forget about interstellar travel, it's too dangerous and takes too long.
If intelligent DNA-based life is still around on earth when it starts getting too hot because of the sun's expansion and it all needs to flee, it will have continued to evolve such that it will be unrecognizable and unrelatable to us. And by then I expect artificial life to have spread to such an extent that biological life on earth is basically a historical footnote.
I actually think life in the broadest sense will spread from earth to other places in the galaxy, but it will be completely alien compared to human life.
We will eventually figure out how to imprint our consciousness into a chip. Maybe not for another thousand years but weve been building machines our entire existence to conquer nature. We will figure it out.
Edit: biology is pretty efficient though. We might as well just start growing new bodies/parts for people, enhancing it over time. There are already functionally immortal species on Earth.
On the other hand dementia eats away at memories and personality. My grandmother doesn’t remember having children (who are now in their late 70s), a husband (she had two), but does remember (mostly) life as a child. She wasnt unconscious though.
(It’s basically the inevitable same end game as the rom com “50 first dates”)
As you say it’s philosophical - a bit like Triggers Broom. Or 1 minute Time Machine in a way.
I like the answer to ship of Theseus (define the ship by the keel or whatever), If you were to replace every cell in your body are you still the same person? That happens multiple times over your life. What if you were to replace some cells with non human parts - a false leg, a pig heart. When do you stop being “you”
If you replace every neuron in your brain with a synthetic neuron, one at a time, a there a point you no longer exist. Is it a continuous reduction. What if those neurons are put together elsewhere, which is you. Both? Neither? A fraction of each?
Then the heat must be removed.
Then, stacking has to happen.
Do we reach a synthetic neuron?
I like this approach. It's plausible based on the assumptions made by the story, lets people in space have the benefits of mostly-normal gravity and radiation exposure (as compared to, say Mars), and keeping things local to the Earth means you don't need to be too concerned with the distances involved. Where they really lose the plot, though, is with population; Gundam claims that, in less than 100 years, billions of people--in fact, the large majority of humanity--have moved to space. I can't even begin to fathom what kind of effort would be needed to build that many space colonies, and then shuttle the people up there to populate them.
This is not practical in terms of microgravity environments. You just have to read the space shuttle manual to learn how to correct a broken toilet before you understand how poorly equipped we are to handle this challenge. If you can't fix it you're back to the Apollo style bags. The toilet has a 21 day lifetime anyways. Reading the manual further shows why. Turns out lots of holes between the inside and outside are so terrible you'd rather hold onto your waste than build a convenience. Even so turds at suborbital velocities are a terrifying thought on every level.
Any loose item in the ship is an _immediate_ choking hazard. There's no gravity. Surface tension does strange things. Even to your throat. You have to trust that every person on board is going to reliably capture and contain all debris at all times. God help you if you have to fire the engines for a short period because suddenly there's "gravity" again. You can rotate a space station but you can't go anywhere really.
Medically you can't do any imaging other than weak ultrasound. No X-Rays even. Surgery is effectively impossible without gravity anyways. Not that you'll ever get that close to the effort. It's absurd how brightly we paint this dim picture in our culture and our military style propaganda.
Until we have artificial gravity I personally think we have no business in space as a civilian effort and we're not going to get particularly far from Earth because of it.
I recall an early editorial of the podcast Escaped Pod describing science fiction as a means to more directly engage with topics of the human condition by using the conceits of science fiction. _Have a difficult time discussing your relationship with your parents? Write a story about orphans raised by space aliens._ That sort of thing.
Maybe something is going on with our human condition that science fiction is not as productive a foil as it once was?
I don’t know. I’m not a fiction writer. But I can say that since I bought my second motorcycle (back on a moto after 20 years away) I am enjoying spaceships in my science fiction.
Then we had the survival period - Harry Potter overlapped the Hunger Games and Divergent eras, all of which produced too many spinoffs. This moved into the Game of Thrones spinoffs. Now, dragons seem to be out, except that Anne McCaffery is back on the shelves.
The latest shift is driven by "booktok" on TikTok. I just saw teenage girls giggling over the new books in the Romance section, while avoiding the YA section. The Dark Romance subgenre is in, and now has its own shelf space.
Hard SF? Other than the Expanse series, not much recently.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GAX-447.jpg#globalus...
Edit: actually it doesn't appear on some of the pages cited there.
Set in "the near future" (the year 2018 in the first season), seaQuest DSV originally mixed high drama with realistic scientific fiction.
Long time passing...
There’s the old adage (maybe it was Carl Sagan that said it?), that any sufficiently advanced science, appears to be magic, but we no longer think of it as “magic.” It’s just a point further down the road. More importantly, we now know about a lot of the “hard limits,” in science.
For myself, I’ve always been more of a fan of fantasy. That’s simply because I prefer the way the narrative is driven.
In Science Fiction, the real protagonist is the speculative science, and the characters are simply decorative elements. The stories are about the “grand idea” science.
In Fantasy, the stories are really about characters, in a fantastical context. The stories are about people.
It’s interesting that the last time this vividly happened was on the eve of massive technological advancement, social change and a world war.
The fighters and capital ships combat setup makes no sense in space.
But now, we basically live in the climax of the jet age, we can be anywhere in the world within 24 hours. And there’s so much of the world to see and stories to discover, not really worth the bother to imagine space travel to far off distant empty worlds, which will inevitably be used to further extend capitalism and just live the same lives we live here on Earth, just on a different world. The lack of any other interesting extraterrestrial civilizations to interact with makes it all pretty pointless. Going very far into space is mostly for exploration as a sport, like cave diving or something.
> Beyond the bookstore, much of the architecture of book discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber… #BookTok, the vast community on TikTok that has become a best-seller machine, is largely populated by women recommending books by other women, like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us.”
In a sense this is just a regression to mean, normality, because the literary boys club of the 20th century was the exception:
> In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by women for a female audience. Their output was considered “paltry entertainment,”
Most of the books are indeed paltry entertainment - soapy and saccharine romances, formulaically transgressive erotica, fantasies about unlimited witchy powers, and perfect book boyfriends - but it's still a huge market.
Men moved to video games and chan culture. Which are a different kind of paltry entertainment.
It's curious how there was a shift from male dominated niches, like Lovecraftian fantasy and heroic fantasy, through the imperial sci-fi peak in the 50s to 70s, through the Hollywood-influenced 80s, then into slow decline from the 90s onwards.
With a few exceptions, a bold imagination became more of a liability than an asset.
This is a culture which has no idea where it's going and would prefer not to get there.
But tl;dr: Gatekeepers in big/mainstream publishing have outsourced their slush-piles to underpaid interns, most of whom are young and ambitious women. They tend to like certain things. Also, big/mainstream publishing is chasing data trends, like all other big businesses, which leads to a staleness cycle where they only publish what worked in the last two years. They're afraid to take financial gambles on unproven ideas or new IP.
The good sci-fi these days is mostly indie and mostly underground, IMO. You really have to dig for it. Personally, I find good stuff via Reddit r/powerprogression, but even there, you may have to dig to find gems that speak to you.
I joke that I'm a male author and reader, even though I'm female. The first book of my epic series (which is fully published) is Majority: Torth Book 1.
The publishing industry hasn't been killed by women, but by risk aversion. Truly groundbreaking SF requires betting on bold, novel, and often weird ideas. Financial departments and algorithms inherently favor safe, repetitive patterns (like romantasy formulas). You can't simulate the next "Dune" or "Neuromancer" on a P&L sheet, so publishers stopped trying.
As a kid beginning to read in the 70's I jumped from what were clearly kids books to Lord of the Rings (pure chance -- I liked the cover). There wasn't that watered down in between. It was a jump to real books with real consequences (spoilers: Boromir dies).
I've witnessed the rise of the teen section and seen how kids -- who are reading less in general -- never leave it.
It feels like the fantasy adventure lends itself a lot more to these teen novels and has a knock on effect into the mainstream. I for one could do without anther book about someone born to be a prince(ss) up against the evil realm who can't choose their way out of their romantic triangle.
I'm not knocking anyone's choices. There are more books already than I'll ever read. But it should would be a blast to get another Dune out of nowhere.
What used to be read a lot was literary equivalent of a sitcom or slash fantasy.
By betraying the ideals of humanist writing in favor of technical accuracy, SF has been cannibalized by genres that actually focus on the inner lives of individuals, such as the booming "romantasy" sector.
Space cowboys were replaced with thinly veiled dogma, meaningless cycles of ritualized tribal violence, and cheap nostalgic production grifts. Those that write about speculative Futures, are almost always talking about the present worlds flaws.
Anyone can publish now, and people simply stopped asking if they should. =3
We are Bob Red rising Murderbot
For those like me who still require parsing assistance :
- We are Bob
- Red Rising
- Murderbot
I also don't agree with the general dystopian or cynical view quite prevalent here on HN these days, frankly. It's always been so, but it seems to have gotten darker, such that I think a lot of old-timers like me pretty much avoid HN these days. It's not all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and out into the real world. Looking outward, rather than inward, can lead to the kind of desire for discovery and progress which underpinned the Apollo era. The world out there is in extreme disarray too -- but to an optimist, it presents opportunity to do good.
Real world seems to be getting bleaker, especially for the young ones coming up today.
The Trap St.Fermi predicted is a two pronged one, made of technological progress and the inability to recognize ones true nature while not under ressource duress - until you walked over the cliff of no return. All those utopias, all those we shall overcome by education promises, hid the permadamage we have from ourselves. ICE, ISIS, decomplexification by redistribution fantasies, war-chieftains and permanently sending the young and hopeless into fights, that is what we really are.
Not some excemption, but the braindamaged norm under enough stress to trigger the "shizzoid" mode. Its sad, its real - and well how about we for once say thank you. Thank you Peter for dealing with reality, while the rest of us got high.
Thank you for the panopticon, forcing us to stay civil. All of us.
Thank you for doing a material stress test on humanity, while the climate change was not yet in full force upon us.
Thank you for moving down all the capability lanes in parallel, instead of doing the retarded one king, one plan, one tribe, mono-lane approach towards doom.
Thank you to the grown ups, shame on the retarded toddlers, the retarded nationalists and utopian idealists, shitting the diapers! Bravo!
Now for the final push- why not say it! We are going to have cooperate families - aka cloning by cooperations for loyal employees. All the other roads have proven dysfunctional under stress and the dysfunction is very plain to see. And the final building block, the ones willing too switch sides for this freedom are also in plain sights. Its going to be a weird mixture of cooperate lgbtq+ and conservatives- in an forced alliance with the retarded withering away in traditional hive societies unable to adapt.
corporations?
Whereas once Starships were a sign of an exciting story, or perhaps hope and optimism ... now they're just the sole purview of wanker tr/billionaires.
I view this patriotism as a crutch in uncertain times. Another example of this is the rise of the superhero genre in the 21st century. Marven was skirting with bankruptcy in the 1990s. A perpetual Spiderman license was sold for a fraction of what it would today. And I think it's no coincidence that the superhero genre ascended post-9/11.
I used to read a lot of fantasy but many years ago I pretty much switched almost entirely to sci-fi. For me the reason was because sci-fi asked questions. I mean there's also space opera and it scratches the same itch as fantasy (IMNHO) but my personal interest in sci-fi is more in the "what if" category.
That's a very broad category that goes all the way from, say, the Iain M. Banks Culture series, which really poses the question of what an ultra-high tech post-scarcity civilization looks like to something like The Handmaid's Tale (yes, that's sci-fi). We've also had some superb sci-fi on the screen in recent years like Severance, Silo and The Expanse.
For me, fantasy is a far more limited genre. Like I'm trying to read Brandon Sanderson recently and while he's a good writer, it's just not hooking me yet in the same way that, say, Revelation Space did. I think the last fantasy series to really hook me was A Song of Ice and Fire. The first three books are some of the finest books ever written.
But as for the decline of starships, I think that the readership has evolved too. More vintage sci-fi simply projected the era of exploration and colonization onto space and it's become pretty clear how unrealistic that is because of the vast distances involved. You have to remember that popular media in the 1960s expected Moon bases and such in the not-too-distant future. Star Trek was really the last gasp of this and, interestingly, Star Trek is fundamentally socialist, which is noteworthy given that it originated in the Cold War.
Star Wars on the other hand was a tale of the resistance to imperialism. George Lucas has said he modeled the resistance on the North Vietnamese. Cyberpunk came about in the 1980s (eg Neuromancer, Blade Runner) that had nothing to do with starships but they really reflected a societal pessimism. Cyberpunk is inherently xenophobic (ie because of fears of the Japanese).
I wonder if the popularity of fantasy is fundamentally escapist and an expression of helplessness. Think about it: fantasy usually revolves around the outsized impact of individual actions, of a hero or heroine.
It is hard to feel that way in the 2020s. Technology seems oversold, scammish, dystopian, inhuman. Everything is slop and skinner boxes. It impoverishes rather than enriches, and it seems to be getting worse. It is easy to feel that the Amish, nay perhaps even the medievals, have a point.
Worse, the science fiction oriented around starships took its cues from our experience of the naval - journeys of days or weeks would take you to alien places teeming with new and interesting and enriching life. Foods you couldn't eat anywhere else. People you couldn't meet at home. But now the globe seems smaller, explored, and conquered. Those faraway goods are easily shipped to your door, and those faraway people show up in your comments section and they're just people. The excitement of the seas is no longer such a part of our outlook that reskinning it in fantasy speaks to us.
Not only is the excitement of the seas greatly diminished, the more we have learned about the universe, the worse the naval analogy seems. The distant stars no longer seem like tropical islands, but rather hopelessly distant and inhospitable. In 1958, Heinlein wrote a wonderful short story about scout troops in the verdant jungles of Venus back when that was a reasonable expectation[1], but it seems like a silly thing to write now. https://xkcd.com/2202/ seems to capture the current expectation well.
Several decades ago it was easy to get excited about the march of scientific discovery and technological progress. But now we're asking why science seems to have slowed down so much, and new technology seems about as exciting as new mechanisms for dependence and dystopia.
Atheism is weakening and religion is rising.
The imagined global society of the UN that was reimagined at a larger scale as The Federation may have seemed like the way of the future for a few decades, but now that dream looks foolish and the globe is visibly fracturing.
The classic science fiction trope that progress will better us as people, that leisure will lead to fitness, that access to information will make us wise scholars, that we will use the convenience of machines to free ourselves for the pursuit of virtue... it makes for an inspiring story. I had my suspicions about how true all of that was back before the internet. I am now very sure that Wall-E and Idiocracy are nearer to the mark.
The human-like AIs of Star Wars' robots or Star Trek's androids or innumerable superintelligent computers from Asimov to Heinlein seem further away every year. AI is part of everyday life now, and our major concern is how to keep it from catastrophically failing at mundane research, not whether it should have voting rights or makes humans obsolete. Ambulatory human-like AI seems unlikely when data centers the size of small cities struggle with emdashes. The hope and promise of a generation of robot children and citizens seems as misguided as the forests of Venus.
I could go on. We GOT a lot of the wonders science fiction predicted, or things so much more powerful that our most audacious futurists didn't dare to imagine them. And yet it doesn't feel like the promised land. Science fiction promised instant video conferences across the globe, but when we got it, it didn't look like all the world's best researchers collaborating on its hardest problems. It looked like all of the miscreants with their dick pics and the dreary business meetings and school lessons suddenly having access to your home. I don't mean to imply it's all bad, but the difference between imagination and reality has been stark on many fronts.
I really think the truth is that in a thousand ways, the tropes of the genre no longer speak to the moment.
[1] https://writingatlas.com/story/3984/robert-a-heinlein-a-tend...