Has sci-fi run out of steam? | Hacker News Reader

Has sci-fi run out of steam?

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39 pointsnreece50 comments

Of course it hasn't. The problem is that science fiction split into two factions. The people who thought sci-fi was about the pulp stories went on to write pulp stories. The people who understood the real idea behind science fiction became more commonly accepted as literature and get ignored by the so-called science fiction elite.

Science fiction's not about the technology. It's about creating a hypothetical situation and using it to examine ourselves. In good sci-fi, the only technology that exists is there to mirror us. Look at Dune, the greatest sci-fi I've ever read, for the ultimate example: It deals with ecological scarcity, religious fanaticism, chemical addiction, and a plethora of other topics, and merges them all together to create the core universe in which it takes place. What makes it good is how every bit of information about the universe is relevant both to the plot and to the social issues it talks about.

We still have that today. The problem is it's been co-opted by "serious" writers who include Herbert and Dick as literary canon. Doris Lessing, Michael Cunningham, a slew more whose work is science fiction but for the fact that it bears about it the pretenses of more literate fiction, so that it's ignored by people looking for the low-fi attitude of earlier science fiction, before it was commonplace.

Joe Haldeman: "Science fiction isn't about the future; it's about the present."

Ender's Game is the best science fiction story (or story in general) I've ever read, and much of what makes it science fiction fades into the background as you read. The important thing when I read is the character, whom I can relate to, not the technology itself, which I can't.

You need to get into more sci-fi and more literature. Ender's Game is just intro-level. It's got a plethora of problems, too: The more you read it, the more you realize what a deeply sick worldview it and its author have. I can still read some of the later books in the series, but Ender's Game nauseates me a little more every time I try.

That said: Orson Scott Card is an excellent teacher, and his story collection Maps In A Mirror unveils a lot of his tips for writing well.

While I haven't read Maps In A Mirror, I did read Card's Characters and Viewpoint, and found it rather lackluster in its advice compared to Stephen King's memoir. Considering that I like Ender's Game more than most of King's work, I thought that was a bit odd.

In response to your edit: sick in what way? I never got that sense.

If you don't see anything wrong with Ender's Game, for your own sake, don't read anything of Card's past Speaker for the Dead. I loved Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow - but it gets harder to read them the more you're aware of Card's, uh, political stances.

There's such thing as knowing an author too well. Namely, when it starts effecting your interpretation of his earlier works.

I have to agree that On Writing was surprisingly good. I've read a few Stephen King novels and have mixed feelings about him, but that was probably the most helpful writing advice I've yet come across.

King's one of the great 80s writers. He's not at his peak anymore, but when he started he was one of the best.

Ender's Game can be read as a genocide apologist novel. I don't totally buy that, but it does espouse a universe in which smart people are allowed to kill their enemies gruesomely and not be punished. It's also almost sociopathic in the way it revolves around Ender. He's the center of the entire universe.

Card's politics don't shine out as much in it, which is why it's only slowly decayed with many, many rereads, but it's there. He's very xenophobic — he excuses disliking foreigners with the excuse of "Other people think I'm xenophobic but secretly they're all very evil", but it's straightfaced enough that you don't notice it until you've read his later bigoted stuff and come back to it. It does avoid his religion and his sexism, though, which is good; later parts of the series aren't spared.

Not to say the series isn't a great young adult read: Speaker For The Dead introduced me to maturer themes in SF/F in the first place, and the Bean parallel novels are delightful fun military strategy reads. But they're very flawed, sometimes irreparably so.

sick in what way?

I think the primary characteristic of Card's writings is that he likes to explore the nasty, and a lot of the time he's apologizing for it. Ender's Game is about murder writ small and large, and the provocative question it asks is whether you can blame Ender for what he did. Hart's Hope does that with adultury; Pastwatch with slavery and cultural imperialism. Even when he's not that provocative, the world just tends to be nasty and not always in a very redeeming way. Kingsmeat and Unaccompanied Sonata may be the worst offenders.

Asimov's stories are about reason triumphing over puzzles, and Heinlein's are about facing tough decisions with a bold face. But Card's are about characters who wrestle with the guilt and psychological problems they inherit from living through twisted circumstances in a twisted world and can you really blame them for what they did?

As a teenager, I thought that was interesting. I thought it was deep and morally provocative and philosophically enlightening, I thought the characters were even admirable. As an adult, I mostly find it tragic and morally hasty. I'd rather read about heroes and courage and reason and responsibility than guilt and pain and evasion.

I actually thought "Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory" was "worse" than Unaccompanied Sonata. Still I wish he'd write more short stories like that...they're more engaging than the novels I've seen recently from him.

Fair. It depends on what bothers you, I suppose. Now that I think about it, "A Thousand Deaths" was also pretty disturbing.

I suppose I shouldn't be so judgmental in my description. Whether you like or dislike those types of stories, they are good illustrations of why some people find Card's writing disturbing. Then again, some people like to be disturbed. I might go so far as to say that is the point of his stories in the first place.

Yeah I think Card is at best a mediocre writer. And I thought that before I knew he was an ultra-right-wing nutjob.

The problem with sci-fi and fantasy is that because they're so niche, and because so many people are predisposed to liking them based on subject area alone, the average successful writer makes even Dan Brown look like Charles Dickens. That makes Card look good by comparison because he isn't a bad writer (certainly far better than Brown) and most in the genre are.

That's a good way of putting it. For all his flaws, Card is an actual writer. Many of his contemporaries never were.

Of course, there's legitimate literate science fiction out there that's among the best literature of the century. Frank Herbert and Philip Dick are going to be known as some of the greatest forces in writing; Isaac Asimov wasn't a brilliant prosist but conceptually he was in a league of his own.

The original novella was better than the novel, which I don't often say, I like all the extra little details that work their way into longer works. Card just got worse and worse as he went along.

Science fiction's not about the technology.

Well, except that some of it is. I get the impression that what you're calling pulp includes all the sensawunda, which is all that really separates science fiction from other genres (since other than that, most science fiction is in another genre... fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, etc -- including Dune, actually).

This. For Ringworld, Niven invented several coherent non-human intelligences that set titanic forces in motion, and explored what the results would be like to live in. For a writer to merely "examine ourselves" seems almost lazy in comparison, and not at all what's unique to science fiction. Dune in particular was so dominated by mysticism and politics that I think it would have worked better as fantasy set in ancient Egypt.

    Dune in particular was so dominated by mysticism and
    politics that I think it would have worked better as
    fantasy set in ancient Egypt.

I've never thought of this. Strongly agree. I've grown a distaste for science fiction because often it's a lot more elaborate than it needs to be to communicate a point. It trades away the benefit of a completely fictional setting in that

Scifi requires you to invest a lot of energy in the read, yet a lot of it is rubbish so the ratios are wrong.

Part of the reason I like Philip K Dick is that for the sort of fiction he writes, science fiction often is the best medium for communicating. And, he doesn't mind producing books where part of the story doesn't even make sense in a rational sense, so long as it's progressing the message.

In _Time Out of Joint_ the game world is implausible. The messages on paper doesn't make sense. The brainwashed characters seems like a big thing to be taken for granted. The edge of the world doesn't add up. However, the protagonist's attempts to come to terms with the world he's in is believable.

Dick writes fiction as I seek to hack. "Am I solving the problem I care about?"

The benefit of the lack of context is that scifi can serve as a literary equivalent of a rapid development environment. The author is able to summon technology or magic in order to create settings that exercise the characters. _Ubik_ uses not-subtle examples of this in order to explore the ideas it cares about - precognition and a variation of brain-in-the-vat.

Unfortunately, the mainstream culture of fiction and fantasy epic (Lord of the Rings, Dune) actively fights this flexibility. They try to construct castles in the air - worlds that take significant energy to build and comprehend, and which thereby become limited by the same barriers that affect tales set in real settings. Having done all this work, many then tell stories about princesses, knights and dragons. Dune managed to rise some way out of that.

For many, the world building is the point. While your favorites throw in just enough tech to make the plot work, mine throw in just enough plot to take us through the world. There are authors who take such pride in this they go to conventions and seminars with other authors just to design shared worlds from scratch.

And "summon technology or magic" is where a lot of bad sci-fi fails. Magic can have ridiculously arbitrary rules attached, but technology has to work systematically. If you add technology but omit all the effects it obviously should have had on your society (especially on other technology), readers like me are going to quit in disgust.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WallBanger

You might like Hal Clement's work, especially "Mission of Gravity", "Close to Critical", and "Cycle of Fire". "Iceworld" and his next to last "Half Life" are interesting but not as well written as some of his others. "The Nitrogen Fix" isn't paritcularly well written either, but is an interesting near future, post-unexpected-apocalypse novel. Note Clement was a high school science teacher, and tried to make all his science at least plausible though sometimes he goofed, like the shape of Mesklin.

I think the main problem with science fiction today is that it's really, really difficult to write believable hard science fiction. It's relatively easy to write about the future as seen from the 1940s to 1960s (and lots of SF writers continue to do that... Bova, Niven, Pournelle, even Varley, these days), but it's really hard to write about a medium-distance future that plausibly follows from our world. The only book I've read recently that mostly managed it was Halting State, and it was set only ten years from now.

More and more, the kind of "SF" I find myself reading is stuff that doesn't even try; it's just fantasy with science fiction trappings, and while that can be briefly entertaining, it doesn't have the "something like this could really happen" of the midtwentieth SF I used to read.

Edit: awkward flow of text

The weird part for me was that Halting State took me more than one read to feel like I 'got' what the book was about, much like Neuromanancer did. Science Fiction of the rocket ship and little green men variety is easy to imagine. A realistic world ten years from now, less so.

I haven't read "Halting State" yet, but Stross's "Accelerando" is pretty good. You might also try Vinge's "Rainbows End".

Yeah, Accelerando was a book I thought important, and wanted to love, but only like. Rainbows End was entertaining, but not like Vinge's earlier stuff, in my opinion. Ah, well. :)

I read many of Stross's and liked them, but I can't help but feel most (all?) are pretty similar to one another.

Science Fiction as a genre came to life during a time when science was making enormous changes in people's everyday lives within a relatively short time. Railroads, electrification, long distance communication, mechanization, flight, etc. all either appeared or went "mass market" in a few generations.

This may well have been the first time when science and technology were brought to people's attention as something that actually had a direct effect on what they did. While before you could live in the same village for your entire life and not see much change, now everyone saw the impact of science when a railroad came through your town, or when you got an electric light.

Because of this, there developed a large market of people who were interested in both producing and consuming the "what if" scenarios and analysis provided by sci-fi. Today, the idea of change brought on by technology and science is not only an accepted idea, it's pretty much a given. Sci-fi hasn't run out of steam, it's just that the function that it provided has now diffused into every single other form of media.

It still reappears as a distinct form from time to time, accompanying major inventions such as the internet(Neuromancer, etc.) but more and more I think that it will just stop being a distinct genre and blend in with everything else.

Absolutely not. The old guard has mostly died, but there are lots of very good new writers, have a look at Charles Stross. Neal Stephenson writes beautiful stuff, there is Ian M. Banks, Greg Bear and on and on...

I'm sure Stallman will be psyched that he's labeled the creator of "GNU Linux" in the article.

Charles Stross was interviewed for the article... when people make headlines that end in a question mark it baits this kind of response, but come on, we can do better.

I am rather amused at the juxtaposition of a steam-era metaphor when discussing internet-age science fiction. It's rather akin to complaining about the quality of today's race horses when everybody else's checking out NASCAR.

Meanwhile, I'll be (metaphorically) hanging out with the likes of Stross, Scalzi and Banks. Scifi hasn't died - it never needed reviving. It's just that it's harder and harder every year to distinguish it from reality...

I think Ted Chiang is amazing. His ratio of awards won to stories written is impressive.

One of his short stories, "Understand" was recommended to me recently. It's fantastic: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm

I would say that science fiction has run out of steam in the sense that hardly anyone reads real SF anymore.

Just go down to Border's or Barnes & Noble to see what I mean. You will find some titles by Heinlein and Clarke, but a lot of the shelfspace in the SF section will be devoted to various media tie-ins, such as Star Trek, Star Wars and X-Men. There will also be plenty of fantasy novels, mostly dealing with vampires or with settings that Tolkien first created more than half a century ago. You will need to look very hard to find something interesting.

The situation with short stories is also dire. For example, Analog went from 115,000 issues per month in the early 1980s to a little over 30,000 in 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fact...). In recent months, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had to switch to a bimonthly schedule in order to rein in their costs.

Part of the problem is that people don't read for pleasure as much as they used to. Editors and publishers want to print what they think the public wants. Right now, it seems that the public wants Tolkien knock-offs, manga and Batman. The average person's exposure to SF is through the movies, television or video games, not the written word.

You're confusing the outer manifestations of a sick mass market distribution chain with an inferred cause ("people don't read for pleasure as much as they used to"). We're actually living through the golden age of reading right now -- HN is symptomatic of this; can you imagine HN existing in the pre-web or pre-usenet era? -- but there's a lot more noise in the system, and the existing distribution networks are crumbling in the face of competition (just as with the record and movie businesses before them).

Borders and B&N aren't healthy businesses. And as for the mass market paperback distribution ecosystem, it nearly collapsed completely back in late 2008. But that doesn't mean there's no demand for the product; all it means is that some intermediate stages in the supply chain are borked. (And no, Amazon is not the answer -- at least, not from the writers or publishers point of view. Shudder.)

Of course F&SF and Asimov's are showing declining newsstand circulation. What's interesting is that they're both on the rise in ebook editions ... and nobody's talking about http://www.tor.com/ and their fiction-publishing habits (which, ahem, pay rather more than the traditional monthlies, suggesting that there's money in the vertical integration/social network model they're pursuing).

Well... Asimov and Clarke pretty much did run out of steam. Too bad - I think we could simulate them at 10% real-time in a couple decades, had they resisted, but there are some folks writing pretty relevant (and inspiring) sci-fi today.

And at least one of them is known for hanging around HN.

Yes. In my view it probably did so about 20 years ago. Are there any works from the last 2 decades that could be even mentioned in the same breath as dune, foundation, ender's game, neuromancer, hyperion ...etc.?

anathem. There are some decent scifi in the last decade or so but not on the level of foundation and friends. Also there has been some amazing scifi in other mediums, like television and movies.

Island in the Sea of Time was published in 1998, and spawned a sub-genre. Speaking of Stirling, his series The Domination is in the same class as Ender's Game and Dune, at least, for world-building, and the first one was published in 1988, per wikipedia.

Accelerando has more scope than most of those you mention.

Other books in that class would include Snow Crash, A Fire Upon the Deep and the sequel A Deepness in the Sky... Hm. It's true that most of those I can think of right now are from the early part of the last 20 years (or the first one of the series is). Maybe that's because that was the end of the SF era, as you suggest, or maybe it's for some other reason (I've been an adult a little less than 20 years, which may bias me; it may be that lots of books of the past ten years will be considered important, but they require distance; something else?).

I think these could stand up to that list:

  The Diamond Age  (1995)
  Cryptonomicon (1999)

To those I'd add:

The Orphanage series (starting in 2004) and The Old Man's War series (starting in 2005)

I recently really enjoyed the Revelation Space series by Alistair Reynolds.

Also, Greg Bear's books about The Way (Legacy, Eon, etc) make a great series.

I somewhat enjoyed Greg Bear's Blood Music book, but not enough to buy another from him. I'll definitely give him another change and check out the ones you recommend though, thanks.

Yeah, Blood Music was alright... not one of my favorites either.

If you read The Way books, do it in the order they were written (Eon, Eternity, Legacy). Legacy is a prequel, so some are tempted to read it first, but it would basically ruin all the mystery of the other two if you did so.

Am I missing something about Old Man's War? Everbody seems to think it's a great piece of contemporary SF, but to me it read like it was written for people who read Heinlein as teenagers in the 50s, and whose worldview pretty much hasn't developed since.

The science parts are handwavey plot conveniences, the books drop their main interesting bit of looking into the psychology of soldiers with 70 or zero years of life experience by treating the characters as generic clever 20-year olds, and the bleak xenophobic backdrop mixed with the juvenile war adventure plots makes the whole thing feel like a weird, unironic war propaganda piece.

I like the "Old Man's War" series about as much as I do Weber's and Ringo's books - they are interesting stories but the science is seriously hand-wavey. Unlike Heinlien who had military and politics in serious science fiction, these authors produce primarily military and political stories with science-fictiony backdrops.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)

Blindsight by Peter Watts and Ted Chiang's short fiction are pretty good.

Ah, I forgot Blindsight. That does qualify, I think.

Ian McDonald's _Brasyl_ is up there. Hard to find but worth it. Does suffer from the "quantum effects are magical pixie dust" disease but this can be overlooked.

Charlie Stross, _Glasshouse_. Yes, _Halting State_ is good too, but in _Glasshouse_ Stross manages to get his temptation to wink at the reader under control and as a result writes a classic. Has a funny throwaway bit about DRM, too: "For some reason the ancients encrypted all their records and threw away all the keys, that's why we don't know anything about them..."

Ken MacLeod, _The Star Fraction_/_The Cassini Division_/_The Stone Canal_/_The Sky Road_ (Fall Revolution Series). Yes, there sure are a lot of Trotskyists! in! Spaaaaaace! but there's also serious exploration of how technological change affects social structures on the personal and political level. Overview from Reason magazine http://reason.com/archives/2000/11/01/anarchies-states-and-u...

and that's just things that unambiguously classify as SF. If you make things a little broader, then you can include novels like the 2008 Hugo winner, _The Yiddish Policeman's Union_, which is classic Michael Chabon applied to alt history.

Robinson's Mars trilogy, Watts' Blindsight, Sterling's Heavy Weather and Distraction, Vinge's Rainbows End.

Off the top of my head.

Charlie Stross anticipated this news story about a simulated brain about as complex as a cat's with his Aineko character in Accelerondo, suggesting to me, that no, SciFi has not fallen behind actual tech advances.

http://www.mercurynews.com/valley/ci_13809715

Charlie Stross is quoted in the orignal article. I think a decent standard for a top-level comment here is that you should have read the article. In the sub-levels, it can make sense not to.

You keep saying that.

I think a decent standard for any comment is to not repeat yourself without good cause.

The title is close to the format of an "Ask HN" without the prompt. Just speaking for myself here, but it was 4:30 in the morning when I saw that, wrote an answer to the question, then realized that it was actually a link to a site, read the article and had received an upvote by the time I got around to adding the bit about Stallman.

I figured there are two things wrong with removing Charles Stross from my comment, first that may have been the reason I got the upvote, second I think plugging Charles Stross where ever the demise of modern SF is mentioned is a good thing to do.

Misleading titles lead to confusion, conclusion, yes, we can do better and not post articles that have a question as the title, because chances are people will simply answer the question.

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