Sunday, January 20, 2013

Is Science Fiction Tired?


There is much more to say about extrasolar planets, especially given the Kepler findings that are now rolling in. And I intend to say some of it in due course. For now, however, this blog's attention has been distracted by a remark in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
THE OVERWHELMING SENSE ONE GETS, working through so many stories that are presented as the very best that science fiction and fantasy have to offer, is exhaustion.
Yes, a book review based in Tinseltown is an invitation to snark, however unfair. And the author of the review quoted, Paul Kincaid, is pretty grumpy even by the standards of critics, for whom grumpiness is arguably part of the job.

The review deals with several 'Year's Best' anthologies, and as the quoted line suggests, officially it deals with fantasy as well as SF. But the line that most got my attention is specific to SF:

The problem may be, I think, that science fiction has lost confidence in the future.

Which brings us to the question of a decelerando. But before proceeding, go read Kincaid's article. This blog post will still be here when you get back.



Okay, then. Also a confession before proceeding: I have read almost no SF written in this millennium. But that should be no bar to this discussion - after all, I'm not purporting to analyze works of science fiction, only a discussion about science fiction.

(Meta is sooo handy!)

Science fiction as we know it came into being in the decades bracketing the turn of the last century - roughly speaking, from Jules Verne to John W. Campbell. Not by coincidence, this period - as I have suggested here before - was the real Accelerando.

There is a natural tendency to suppose that if the great accelerando brought SF into being, the (relative) decelerando of the current era is killing it. Take the particular example of space travel, simply because it is so awesomely cool. At midcentury, in the rocketpunk era, it was easy to project the technologies of aviation and high-performance rocketry forward, and suppose that in a few more decades we could fly to orbit and beyond as easily and economically as we were then beginning to fly across oceans.

It turned out to be not so easy and not at all economical. Which makes interplanetary travel more problematic as a story element. The reader doesn't need to be convinced that it is possible, as it certainly is, but that it can be cheap, which at a minimum can't be demonstrated with high school physics. (Or else the story has to accept expensive space travel.)

Kincaid, as it happens, does not blame the exhaustion of SF on a decelerando, but nearly the opposite: SF, he argues, "has lost confidence that the future can be comprehended." And, to be sure, that is one of the big arguments that swirls around Singularitanism. A post-Singularity world of super-genius computers (or hybrid cyborgs, or whatever) would be incomprehensible to us unevolved apes.

But not all SF is Singularitan, and Kincaid makes another argument that strikes me as more to the point. SF has become less interested in 'the future' than in its own tropes.

Space fighters, anyone?

As much as I have beaten up on space fighters here, in the broader picture I don't think there is anything so dreadful about classic SF tropes. And this blog, like the Atomic Rockets website, is largely devoted to one such trope, Realism [TM]. Which by no means implies that all SF need adhere to that particular trope.

To climb up on one of this blog's oldest soapboxes, SF, fantasy, and their kindred genres are all subgenres of Romance, which cheerfully admits to its ranks everything from whimsy to hardboiled detective stories.

Which, by the way, answers another of Kincaid's grumps, about stories that in his view didn't 'need' to be science fiction or fantasy. Romance lends itself readily to genre-bending, which is why efforts to pin down what SF is all about are so inconclusive. Subgenres of Romance that are plot-centric are rather easier, such as mysteries or for that matter romance in the usual sense. SF and fantasy, whose identities are more setting-centric, lend themselves to ambiguity.

Whatever happens to SF as such, Romance - including Romance with space settings - will probably continue to do just fine.

In fact, a cheerier essay on SF, in Britain's Grauniad, suggests on the one hand that SF is going mainstream, and on the other hand that space-oriented SF could be due for a comeback. Points which need not be mutually contradictory.

Discuss.





The image of the Hugo award is from Flickr, apparently Cory Doctorow's pages.

113 comments:

Mangaka2170 said...

Actually, I would argue that science fiction isn't so much tiring out as branching out into different subgenres, all the while being written by the same people who have been writing science fiction since its heyday, and their imitators. Science fiction hasn't done a very good job of catching up to reality, while the reverse has proven to be true. Many technologies that were science fiction a generation ago are quickly becoming mainstream, functional feats of engineering (granted, there are distinct differences between the devices described in fiction and the genuine articles, but only because reality is writing real life).

I agree with the premise that science fiction will eventually make a comeback, but I believe that will only happen once writers who have grown up familiar with modern technology become renowned writers in their own rights. As it stands, much of today's science fiction is either written by people who have been writing since before the Internet formed (and in some cases, before electronic computers became familiar technology), or it's mostly a reboot of old and popular settings, or it's being written by people who don't seem to believe that science fiction can be written in any way other than the way it has been done in decades past.

Additionally, the vast amount of new technology that has become commonplace in the past 20 years isn't considered science fiction when it makes up an element of a story set in the modern day. For example, Dick Tracy's wristwatch radio and Star Trek's communicators were considered futuristic in their day, while we have smartphones today that can do just about everything those fictional technologies could do and more, and yet because they are a part of everyday life, they are not considered to be devices of fantasy their literary predecessors are when used in a story set in the modern day.

Or, let's look at this from another perspective: What would be considered science fiction in the Plausible Mid-Future?

Unknown said...

Similarly, there's Jonathan McCalmont's
"Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost the Future" covers the same ground, with more emphasis on blaming the authors. We discussed that and came to the conclusion that current SF is either a confused response to an ever-more rapidly changing world, or ham-strung by Western capitalism's need to justify itself, or both at the same time. What it isn't is cowardly, lazy, ironic, or exhausted. If any reviewer finds themselves reading SF with those qualities, then they're reading the wrong books.

Brett said...

We had space opera before real spacecraft, so I'm not really surprised that it lingers in the present. Its attraction was only partially in the "science" side of it, with much of it being in the great melodrama and vast scale (as with Star Wars).

That said, I get the opposite impression versus Kincaid: Serious Writing in Science Fiction has become increasingly colored by Cyber-Punk and fears of what the present might hold in terms of environmental and societal calamity. Or rather, aside from climate change, it's become much more colored by 1970s and 1980s fears of what the future might hold in terms of calamity.

@Rick

Space fighters, anyone?

As much as I have beaten up on space fighters here, in the broader picture I don't think there is anything so dreadful about classic SF tropes. And this blog, like the Atomic Rockets website, is largely devoted to one such trope, Realism [TM]. Which by no means implies that all SF need adhere to that particular trope.


I think the standard of that kind of rocketpunk/space opera is changing over time, as the influence of new technologies start to influence it. Some of the old stories had robots and AI, but they felt off. The newer stories (particularly in video games and some books) tend to increasingly incorporate that stuff.

Sean said...

It's very difficult to agree with the idea that science fiction is tired when the best selling exclusive video game title of 2012 was Halo 4 and you have to remember with 2009 came Avatar, the highest grossing film of all time. While contemporary science-fiction literature might be lacklustre, the genre is dominating other forms of media.

Cambias said...

I don't want to agree with Kinkaid's essay, but I'm having a hard time disputing anything he says. I've noticed myself that SF seems to spend a lot of time contemplating its own roots and playing with old tropes -- when it isn't shunting off into imaginary alternate worlds or pure fantasy.

Unfortunately, SF has to face the fact that the future isn't ours anymore -- if "we" are the Anglophone white dudes who still buy most science fiction. Oh, sure, there's lots of research and development going on in North Carolina, Silicon Valley, and Route 128 -- but how much of the cutting-edge is being done by visiting researchers from east or south Asia?

If you're just going to be a passenger in the future, there's no real appeal in reading about it. I think it's telling that one of the most popular subgenres right now is Steampunk, which consciously harks back to the era when Anglophone white dudes really could use new technology to seek riches and adventure in exotic places.

Neal Stephenson's essay "Innovation Starvation" considers SF the chicken and technology the egg -- if we can re-inspire SF writers to imagine audacious, enticing futures, then that in turn may inspire budding technologists to turn their ideas into reality. I don't know if that's correct or even possible, but I'm willing to give it a try myself.

Brett said...

To clarify what I said up-thread, I think that a lot of the not-deliberately-cheesy space opera science fiction is starting to look more and more different from the "modern world with starships and energy weapons" that it used to be like.

Sean brought up Halo, which has a touch of that. A lot of it still looks like what I mentioned above, but you have things like the Spartans themselves (heavily modified cyborgs), the "neural implants" that Captain Keyes had in Halo 1, and so forth. And that's a relatively conservative game series.

Battlestar Galactica, meanwhile, broke the Tyranny of Energy Weapons in space opera - ironically at the same time that they're starting to become more important in real life. I'm still waiting for someone to show a realistic-looking laser weapon in action in visual SF.

Rob Lopez said...

The cycle rolls again. Someone asks, 'Is SF dying?', and another answers, 'No it isn't, in fact it's becoming more accepted.'

SF may not be tired, but the arguments over its demise/uplift certainly are. There'll be another one in a few months.

Kincaid seems to be saying that he wants SF to 'confidently' tell him what the future will look like. Sounds a bit needy to me.

And the Guardian article is just another in a long line of Guardian articles obsessed with SF being Literary and accepted. Accepted by whom? The mass reading public? No, just the booker prize judges. Not exactly mainstream.

The Romance element trumps all. Majority of readers in all genres want to read about people (like them) doing things. Cyborgs and such are just people with window dressing. Vulcan ears and Elf ears are interchangable. Exploration of actual concepts will always be a minority interest.

If SF really did go 'mainstream', I suspect the Kincaids of the world would hate it and complain that SF needs to get back to the ghetto and rediscover its 'purpose'.

Newsflash: it never had a purpose. It's a genre, not a manifesto.

Rob Lopez said...

Forgot to bookmark.

Anonymous said...

I get the feeling that SF is currently at a point where its searching for a new direction; the rockets-aliens-empires of the 50's through the 70's gave way to the Cyberpunk of the 80's and 90's, and now, for the last couple of decades SF has gone through a 'where to now?' phase; where the next phase will take the genre, who knows? Maybe stories about realistic colonies on distant worlds will come to the fore, perhaps stories about artificial life forms will become popular, or ones about exploring alternate universes. It might become evedent this year, or in a couple of decades, but I'm willing to bet that the great majority of my fellow readers of this blog will live to see the new direction in SF.

Ferrell

Sean said...

Ferrell said: "It might become evedent this year, or in a couple of decades, but I'm willing to bet that the great majority of my fellow readers of this blog will live to see the new direction in SF."

At nineteen I should certainly hope so, but as an avid fan and amateur writer of SF I don't really think the genre's destination matters provided that it continues to exist as an agent of analysis - exploring contemporary issues through redshifted glasses. Ultimately it doesn't matter if visions of the future or of alternate realities are absurd (though respecting science would be nice, as science fiction can serve as an informative and educational tool), what does matter is that the strength of science-fiction, its ability to study and criticize the human condition and to ask the big questions of life, remains intact.

And speaking of cyberpunk, I think I need augmented vision to read the captcha.

Rob Lopez said...

Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Conrad, Tennessee Williams, Leonard Cohen: these have all explored the human condition. It's not a SF monopoly, or even specialism.

I think the accelerando/decelerando argument has it to a tee. People once thought living in space was just round the corner. Now they don't. Since then SF has diversified in a big way, and stories in space have become the minority. A lot of SF isn't even set in the future. I don't think it's a matter of whether SF takes off in a new and fresh direction, but rather which bits of it. So much of the discussion about SF still treats it as a unified genre, with commentators standing in one particular wing of a franchise seeing the future only of their particular branch, while ignoring (or not being aware of) all the others.

SF may 'take off'. But it could just as well disintegrate and splinter into different parts, which is essentially the path it's been heading along for the past three decades. We may witness the balkanisation of SF. The stories about space that we here are chiefly interested in may well no longer be called science fiction - it might even be called rocketpunk, who knows? But the SF umbrella term may be stretched so far as to become useless as a description - at which point it will pass out of common usage.

Under the circumstances, talking about the future of SF may be irrelevant. The disparate elements of SF may or may not have a future as they work to survive in a darwinian fashion, each with their own fates. SF however may become just a historical term that each of the elements can trace their DNA back to.

Sean said...

Rob Lopez said: "Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Conrad, Tennessee Williams, Leonard Cohen: these have all explored the human condition. It's not a SF monopoly, or even specialism."

I'm sorry if that's how my argument came across, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make. Whilst other genres are perfectly suited and tailored to studying the human condition, I'm just saying it's a serious strength of science-fiction - not that it's monopoly or specialism - like I said in my post, SF can also be an educational tool or it can serve as cautionary medium (Michael Crichton springs to mind).

But I think you're spot on about the balkanization of SF, some authors that would traditionally be described as 'SF writers' have even gone so far as to distance themselves from the label. For example, the Handmaid's Tale is very similar to 1984, a science-fiction novel, in many regards but I recall Margaret Atwood protested her work being described as such (and even going so far as to use language the upset the SF community, despite having being awarded the first Arthur C. Clarke Award).

Rob Lopez said...

Yes the Margaret Atwood case is an interesting one, when she said that she was a speculative fiction writer, not a science fiction writer, because science fiction was about 'spaceships and monsters'. She took a lot of stick for that, but the same kind of snobbery exists in abundance inside the SF 'community', with Space Opera frequently lambasted for its 'sins'.

During its (very) brief existence, the Mundane movement also had a go at Space Opera, using different terms but for essentially the same reason

Alastair Reynolds recently declared himself a penitant on his blog when he said he would be less likely to write far-future 'fantasy' space opera after reading Kincaid's article. I asked him whether this was because he had tired of his (Revelation Space style) fantasy, or because he felt it necessary to purge fantasy 'for the sake of SF's future'. He acknowledged the latter. Don't know how long he will keep it up, as the hair shirt will undoubtedly chafe, but there you have it.

With Steampunk slightly at odds with Dystopian Future SF, and with all of them muttering some dismay with Military SF, the potential for break-up is there, and growing. And that's without mentioning the various political groups who have set up stalls in the genre.

If SF was a country, I'd be evacuating all foreign nationals and embassy staff out now. Or at least putting plans in place.

Anonymous said...

Hmmm...maybe my argument and Rob and Sean's aren't mutually exclusive; maybe what we're about to see is an explosion of SF subgenres like Romance earlier gave rise to so many other types of stories, all going in their own directions.
Maybe 'speculative fiction' would be a better term for 'SF'.

Ferrell

Grognak said...

I would say SF is suffering from the same illness - if illness it is, which I doubt - than fantasy, western, horror, crime or detective fiction. In the past there were very strict if unwritten rules defining what was a western story, a crime story or a SF story. Actually in some cases the rules defining a genre were so neatly defined and generally accepted that they were written, see "Twenty rules for writing detective stories" by S. S. Van Dine, from 1928.

Perhaps those rules, and the resulting chasms between genres, came from the pulp magazines specializing in one genre: the famous 'Black Mask' did crime stories only, 'Western Stories Magazine' westerns (what else?), Astounding SF stories, etc, etc... there were even magazines specialized in aircraft stories and railroad stories!

Today the borders between genres, and between genres and "mainstream" literature are so blurred that they are almost non existent anymore. That has been a good thing generally speaking, at least in my opinion, but some confusion is unavoidable.

Regarding SF I would go so far as to say it has managed the transition much better than most genres (certainly much better than westerns!) but in addition to this phenomenon SF has been hit by the future becoming present and not including ray guns, cheap rocket passages to Mars and jet packs for everyone - where 'everyone' means young adult white males - but cheap tablets, smartphones and Internet for literally everyone in the world - where everyone truly means everyone. No wonder SF seems quite confused these days, but confusion is not exhaustion.

Rob Lopez said...

"Maybe 'speculative fiction' would be a better term for 'SF'."

That's already happened, essentially as the peace deal between fantasy and SF. The New Wavers back in the 70's wanted to move away from the Campbellian influences and become more 'literary', so speculative fiction was seen as a more grown up and respectable term - and 30 years later Atwood still reflects that view. Speculative fiction is now supposed to mean science fiction, fantasy and horror, but far from being a peaceful federation of co-existence, it simply resulted in a power struggle with groups seeking to be the ultimate embodiment of speculative/science fiction. Considering its (literally) utopian origins, it's ironic that SF felt it necessary to have a hierarchy. Characters like Kincaid consider themselves to be at the top of the hierarchy, in the SF boardroom so to speak, tasked with steering the mighty ship through rough seas, towards sunlit shores. The frustration evident in such articles is that the board members cannot understand why the plebs below them don't listen to their instructions. Because of course, the 'plebs' don't see their role that way.

Considering how small SF actually is in comparison with other genres (most of which are the mainstream), the resulting friction is in fact a punch-up in a rowing boat. It's not a happy federation at all, and when sales drop, everyone blames everyone else for not rigging up the sail, in spite of the fact that the boat was not designed with a mast.

Tony said...

I know this is going to piss a lot of you young guys off, but hang in there...

I think what's missing from this discussion (both here specifically and in a more general since) is a sense of perspective. We have people accusing SF of political and religious apologia, as if that's a sin of the genre and not a sin of writers in general, in both fat and fiction. We have people who say that SF wirters missed the smart phone. Gotta call straight BS on that -- see the "pocket computer" in the The Mote In God's Eye (1974) and the authors' open admission -- in a simultaneously appearing "making of" article in Galaxy magazine -- would essentially kill off the "how did we forget that" plot device. It just takes perspective.

The real problem SF has in
is not structural. It's fundamental. The future
is here, and it doesn't need a PR flack, much less a whole crew of them. If you want, SF's collapse is just another casualty of the death of Modernism. I'ts been a long time coming, but it's here.

For example, I used to judge a book store on the size and variety of it's SF section. Note that it was a science fiction section much more than a fantasy one, even if the shelf placards read "Science Fiction and Fantasy". Nowdays it's almost all fantasy, and the bigger it is, the higher the ratio of fantasy to SF. Even what is billed on the cover as SF is mostly fantasy in space opera drag. You know -- telepathy, mystical aliens,* etc.

[*Or, worse, magical negro aliens -- yeah, I know Chewie, you're not Han's n****r.]

I think we have to face that SF has a lost it's identity, and probably won't get it back. There'll be things tat look like SF used to look, but they won't be SF, because it will all be some species of fantasy -- high, space, catastrophe, whatever.

Grognak said...

Tony, first of all I'm not young anymore - unless 50 is young... I would say that's so only in the Vatican - and I'm not pissed off. I just think you are wrong.

First of all Niven and Pournelle could have 'pocket computers' (by the way, Heinlein did already have cell phones in 'Space Cadet', 1948) but no one did foresee how many things cell phones, smartphones, Internet, and other cheap, advanced electronic devices would change.

For example it's relatively easy to foresee cheap digital cameras, very difficult to foresee that cheap cameras would mean _everything_ from amateur porn to a cute kitty playing and Gaddafi's death gets "captured" and "uploaded" to the "net" where everyone in the world can "download" the images to their "home PC".

Second, I would say it's quite daring to say SF has collapsed when 2012 has seen 'Iron Sky', 'Total Recall' (the remake), 'The Hunger Games', 'Dredd', 'John Carter' and 'Prometheus' and 2013 will see 'Ender's Game', 'Oblivion', 'Iron Man 3' (I'm not including other superhero movies, but if 'Iron Man' isn't SF, what is?), 'Star Trek into darkness', 'Pacific Rim', 'Elysium' and 'Gravity'. Not to mention video games. SF has never been in better health.

On the other hand, written SF has a serious problem, and we should ask ourselves why so many people watch the movies and play the games but don't buy the novels. That's the billion dollars question.

Oh, and I think it's quite unfair to say Chewbacca is a "magical negro alien". If he is, Robin is Batman's "magical negro sidekick". Heaven knows I'm not 'Star Wars' biggest fan - rather the opposite, I started hating the franchise from 'Return of the Jedi'. But... closet racism? I don't think so.

Rob Lopez said...

Tony said: Nowdays it's almost all fantasy, and the bigger it is, the higher the ratio of fantasy to SF

Which brings us neatly back to the point that has been made on this blog before - that SF is a subset of Romance.

Grognak said: On the other hand, written SF has a serious problem, and we should ask ourselves why so many people watch the movies and play the games but don't buy the novels. That's the billion dollars question.

That is the billion dollar question, so rarely asked. The short answer I suppose is that written SF doesn't give enough people what they want.

Your mention of The Hunger Games is an interesting example. Here we have a wildly successful breakout novel that has topped the mainstream charts and attracted a whole slew of new young readers to the genre. But it never gets mentioned in the fandom debates. Apparently it's not that kind of SF they wish to debate, or even acknowledge.

The question needs to be asked: do the hardcore fans and critics want science fiction to remain technical and esoteric, or do they want it to be popular? They can't have it both ways, and none of the proposed 'solutions' that I've seen look like any way 'forward' at all - they're just the personal preferences of the same small group of people who seem to think that they are the embodiment of what science fiction is, was, and always should be. The fact is, for science fiction to conform to their vision, it needs to stay small and geeky, because the majority of people out there beg to differ on what they like in their fiction (hence the complaints about fantasy and 'mere' entertainment). Drop the protectionist walls of the genre and the free trade (of ideas) will eviscerate what some see as the core identity of science fiction. Tony has it right with the Death of Modernism. Society has changed. I think those who complain about science fiction's direction need to be careful what they wish for. Any change may well take the genre (or genres) further away from what they want.

On an additional note, I find the whole circular rationalisation about modern gadgets making the genre obsolete
a bit suspect. Science Fiction was never just a future Radio Shack catalogue. Having a few techy gadgets doesn't mean the future has arrived. In an age of rampant consumerism, shiny gadgets may seem like a big deal, but they're just derivative toys. I'm sure that anyone concerned with futurism will be looking at bigger, deeper things. If futurism really is an intrinsic part of science fiction (and it may not be)then the gadgets will only count as minor adornments.

Anonymous said...

As one poster suggested, SF is becoming accepted by a broader audience. But in the "Western" world, who is this audience? It is a subset of an increasingly jaded, increasingly cynical, post-modernist society.

In the 40's and 50's, Progress was the watchword that excited people at all levels of society. But now Progress is viewed with increasing scepticism: the more things change, the more things stay the same. Case in point: the eradication of malaria in the American south was viewed as a profound victory over disease. Now it is often depicted as the poisoning of the environment with DDT only to make way for new diseases like West Nile virus, etc. The final Victory Over Disease, once an exciting goal of Progress and a seeming possibility, has never seemed further away, or less likely.

In the 60's and 70's, the idea of social revolution -a new form of Progress - was all the rage. But now many people seem to suspect that social progress has only led to more rules, more drugs (prescription and other), more social mis-fits, and more people having more time to watch Jersey Shore. And by the way, old demons ilike unfairness, greed and corruption seem as plentiful as ever!

The 80's at least had a threat for us to worry about and model in our SF; but with the breakup of the Soviet Union, the idea of an existential threat isn't so compelling anymore. And with it came the final realization that the disappearance of the Evil Empire just makes way for other, if smaller, Bad Dudes. Witness the dreary succession of sordid brushfire conflicts, and the dreary succession of Star Wars novels in which Rebel victory led to an endless string of crises, rather than well-earned peace.

In short, too many people have given up on the ideal of Progress, and the notion of a Final Victory.

I submit that if SF seems to have lost its vision and its sense of wonder a bit, it is only because the society that nurtures it has, too.

I wonder: as China and India develop, will they produce an outpouring of hopeful, visionary SF? I don't know enough about the cultures to evaluate the possibility. But unless our own society rediscovers its Faith, that may be the best chance for the old, exciting, forward-looking SF to make its comeback.

-James

Rob Lopez said...

That, James, would be the Humanist view of the 20th Century and beyond. Enlightenment Humanism (still battling Romanticism) was a major feeder for SF.

Perhaps some aspects of the current argument reflect that old Humanism vs Romanticism struggle.

I don't know how society can reclaim its faith without some evidence that faith is warranted. Your account of progress (rightly) suggests that the evidence is bound to dismay, and with Western Humanism gradually giving up on human beings as a species, I'm not sure where the hope is going to come from.

As for China and India, well since Humanism is in fact a Christian creation with Judeo/Greco roots, it's likely that their idea of a science fiction future may not be recognisable to us. India is a Hindu culture of cycles, and China is simply concerned with its reinstatement as a primary civilization in harmony with the forces of (its) history. They may not be interested in striving for Utopia because, as a Western Construct, it may make no sense to their way of thinking.

Unless of course they've absorbed enough westernism to add another branch to their rich cultural heritage. I don't know enough about their current trends to answer that one.

 Ashley said...

As always a good post and lots of interesting comments to provoke the little grey brain cells. I actually happen to know Paul en passant as it were from SF fandom here in the UK. He's a nice guy, and some of what I sense here is that British cultural sensibilities are not the same as American.

Anyway, when I were young, there were Three Rs for SF: Rockets, Robots & Rayguns, but to paraphrase Theodore Sturgeon, 90% of SF is crud. In my opinion we have a hard time discerning that what we love is crud, and try to defend it as not being crud. For definitions of crud that we be ego-centric for each person.

So SF the future, where does it need to go? Great question, wish I knew. All I do know is that writers will write stories that speculate on the effects from the impact of future technology has upon mankind, which will lead to novels that are recognizable as working within the genre of SF. I also know that there will be lots of books that use the Tropes of SF, but are really romances. I think the genre is large enough to contain both.

Thucydides said...

Some interesting commentary.

Since most people define SF differently, there will always be a disagreement over if it is improving, dying, better or worse etc. What I define as SF (if you remove the SFNal element of the story, then the story ceases to be) is probably far different from what you define as SF. Star Trek is widely acknowledged to be SF, even if at its heart it is Horatio Hornblower in Spaaaaaace. The USS Enterprise could be the 1775 wooden Man o'War or the nuclear aircraft carrier CVN-65 and most of the stories could be quickly and easily rewritten to take place in that setting on those ships without losing the essence of the story.

The second issue is some of the finest Science Fiction really is literature (such as "A Clockwork Orange", "1984" or "Brave New World"), demonstrating the nexus between "good" and "popular" is going to be difficult to reach, much less bridge. This is very much dependent on the skill of the writer more than the actual genre being written in (Read George Orwell's other works to see what I am talking about).

The movement of SF from the primarily written media to the visual media is probably more of an artifact of the ready avalability of studio quality film and editing tools, backed by widespread and relatively cheap distribution channels, with an assist by your local educators who have downgraded teaching the arts of writing, composition and grammer. Writing is hard work (even writing non fiction reports and returns), so sending people oout there without the tools needed to write makes it far harder for good books and magazine stories to come into being.

My .02

Brett said...

@Thucydides
Star Trek is widely acknowledged to be SF, even if at its heart it is Horatio Hornblower in Spaaaaaace. The USS Enterprise could be the 1775 wooden Man o'War or the nuclear aircraft carrier CVN-65 and most of the stories could be quickly and easily rewritten to take place in that setting on those ships without losing the essence of the story.

Star Trek is an interesting, ambiguous case. If you define actual Science Fiction as stories centered around how "futuristic" ideas or technology shape people and societies, then Star Trek really isn't your show - unless you define the mere fact that it was a starship exploring a universe with a great dose of optimism SF-ish.

That said, it's not as clear as with Star Wars, which is more or less straight-up fantasy with starships (albeit with some interesting aesthetic choices, like the "used universe" concept for technology).

Rob Lopez said...

If we take that as the ultimate definition of what science fiction is, then it would be interesting to go through the available works, pruning away what doesn't count, and seeing what we're left with. Would it be much? Begs the question then that, if most SF is in fact fantasy, is SF just a subset of fantasy? And if the rump of 'true' SF turns out to be really small, is it worthy of its own classification at all?

Is it in fact all fantasy, with just the odd few novelists using fantasy to make a particular point?

Geoffrey S H said...

Some of the background fluff/manuals for SW do have some interesting ideas. The fact that they usually focus on space craft, empires and emphasize the sheer size of the empires involved (and difficulties in running them), whilst ignoring space fighters, mystical powers etc does help.
One interesting idea is that a sensor array can also double as a shield generator (if such things can be invented). Both emit certain types of radiation for a specific purpose. Why not save space by piggybacking one use onto another?

As a historian, the way various historical events have been thrown together is also of interest- so many ideas have been used (the empire being nixonian America, nazi Germany and feudal Japan with dashes of the British empire) that the combination they make I certainly find interesting.

Certain aspect of the development/fictional history of SW spacecraft design I also have found a little interesting whenever I've found myself browsing wikipedia out of boredom.

Of course, the aesthetics of SW is one of its main strengths. Whatever the fantasy nature of the whole thing, at least its space dreadnoughts have sensor domes, reaction engines and semi-plausible looking airlocks. That's something a lot of copy-cat franchises/stories never bothered with. I'd argue that it is in fact these and computer games that have done some of the worst damage to the reputation of SF tbh, but that's another post for another time.

Tony said...

The primary conceit of SF, as far as I can tell after reading it for 40 years, is that it contemplates a possible future. What has killed it as a genre is that there is no longer a possible future that people are particularly interested in. So SF is really just another flavor of fantasy.

Brett said...

It's more that most current visions of our future that many people hold are

1. Cyber-Punk-ish nightmares with gross inequalities of wealth and access to technology, corporate hegemony, mass unemployment and poverty, etc.

2. The revenge of the environment as Peak Oil, Climate Change, Ecosystem Collapse, bio-warfare, or some other apocalyptic factor brings us back down to a lower level and crushes all those comforts we take for granted.

3. Optimistic but exceedingly strange and hard to predict more than a few decades out, like Singularitarian fare.

#1 is being done a lot these days, but it's a drag after a while. #2 gets done occasionally, but it's not really much fun, and I suspect a lot of people don't really consider it SF. #3 doesn't lend itself quite so easily to fictional stories as Space Opera, at least now without becoming the author's pedestal for technobabble.

Anonymous said...

So, it seems that SF may be in the middle of a 'creative lull', that will work itself out in its own good time. Or, it won't. It really depends on what the public wants, because even though writers are supposed to write for themselves, they have to be aware of their readers' wants and needs. If they don't want or need it, it probably won't get written.

Ferrell

Rick said...

Welcome to a couple of new commenters!

Who picked a really great comment thread to jump into - even more than usual this one affirms the point that most of this blog's value is in the comment threads.

(Which is directly contrary to the widely held view that Internet comment threads are a wasteland.)


Which brings us neatly back to the point that has been made on this blog before - that SF is a subset of Romance.

That's possibly the *main* point made on this blog, to the extent that there is one. As distinct with my having to come up with something to feed the beast.

But one of the striking themes in this thread is that a fair number of people argue that SF can/should be something more/other than a subgenre of Romance.

I don't think there is a real equivalent in other (sub)genres - frex, I don't think the well developed mystery critical community makes any equivalent argument, or fantasy, etc.

Which is sort of interesting.

Grognak said...

Thank you, it's nice to feel welcomed, most places in the Net are quite less friendly!

And regarding comments thread, I have always believed most of them are true diamond mines, i.e. you have to spend weeks digging and pass a comb trough several thousands tons of useless dirt to find one or two diamonds!

Another comment, dirt or diamond: Isn't phantasy equally confused, tired if you prefer that term?

Warning: Here be spoilers! And dragons too!

Works like 'A Song of Fire and Ice' enjoy a wild success, but can it be described as phantasy as the genre used to be understood? True, it has got knights, princesses, kings, dragons... but the world Martin has created is well into a 'Dung Age' and things are going to get worse, the old king was a rapist and a drunkard, the queen is a hateful harpy walking toward madness, the new king was a sadist psychopath, the beautiful princess Sansa is dumb as a brick, his courageous and chivalric brother got himself killed because he let his... eeeeh... romantic nature to rule him, the best knight in the kingdom is an incestuous murderer perfectly able to crack a joke while he throws a kid by the window (tough lately he's getting softer), the warrior maid is uglier than a toad... the list never ends! Martin actually is writing the most sarcastic subversion of the genre ever written, a sort of modern Don Quixote!

Oh, and I suspect Westeros is on another planet as will be revealed in the last volume... would that make it SF?

Geoffrey S H said...

R Scott Bakker's "The Darkness that Comes Before" is ostensibly fantasy with knights, crusades, etc, but seems to be set on another world too- it even has aliens manipulating things behind the scenes...

Grognak said...

Geoffrey provides another example of what I wanted to say but really didn't: Phantasy is expansive, most fans see no problem whatsoever in absorbing in the genre vampires, werewolves and mummies, which traditionally belonged to horror. In contrast too many SF fans and critics seem obsessed with keeping SF pure by purging the genre of works that claim to be SF but according to them aren't.

When some people even coin a term (a 'Dust Barstow'? I can't remember) for stories that shouldn't be considered SF because their basic plot can work in another genre - for example, 'Blade Runner' wouldn't be SF but a film noir or a thriller because it has a detective in a manhunt and the androids could be mafia hitmen escaped from prison seeking revenge against their boss - that trend becomes a problem.

Anonymous said...

Setting, plot, characters, theme...any or all of these things could be or have SF elements; even without any 'pruning', SF seems to be pretty deverse even without going into details.

Ferrell

jollyreaper said...

Put me in the camp that scifi reflects the zeitgeist. Scifi is dark and inward-turning now because our future seems bleak. It's hard to believe in the concept of progress and continual improvement since we see everything backsliding at this point. Hope is dead.

So instead of a positive speculation set in a plausible future intended to be a potential reality, people go for the escapism instead. But, oddly, these are worlds few would want to escape to. I wouldn't want ot live in Westeros as a peasant or king.

jollyreaper said...

track

Tony said...

Well, that's another discussion we've had before. There's no unique science fiction plot, character, or setting. (Even space is really just a different kind of sea, and alien planets just far away places.) So, once again, the only thing science fiction can really claim is the future, and it has to be at least passingly plausible. That's not a real fertile playground anymore, as more an more people get used ot the idea that the future is just more of today, possibly sutainably, or going downhill. Might as well read fantasy or detective fiction, if you're going to read fiction at all.

jollyreaper said...

The one thing science fiction can do is bring fantasy into the realm of the plausible, substituting pure magic for technology that seems, if not within immediate technical grasp, within the grasp of our imagination.

The first Frankenstein stories were about alchemists creating homunculi and arguably rabbis creating golem. Those were fairly magical operations, knowledge that was occult. But the difference between hocus pocus knowledge and real scientific learning became clear in the age of reason.

I think the real difference now is that themes that were fantasy and fairy tale fodder now come to seem like matters that could have real impact in our near future. That's the big difference, even if the stories can remain superficially similar to past tales.

Anonymous said...

The problem some people have with SF is that what makes something Science Fiction is so subjective; mood and tone, flavor if you like, is what makes something an SF story; kind of like a stew. Everyone has their own recipe and their own preferences. What is SF and where is it going are tough to answer, because there are so many right answers. I know that'll bug some people, but I think that it's true.

Ferrell

frgough said...

I think a lot of folks have danced around the real problem with modern written SF but haven't nailed it. Modern SF writing is so filled with such miserable angst that it is totally depressing to read. Every story is some sort of dark dystopian future of political corruption, environmental catastrophe, societal injustice, etc. etc. etc. SF movies, on the other hand are just the opposite. Even Avatar with its silly and predictable Americans are a bunch of evil capitalist pigs message was essentially upbeat in its overall storyline.

The present may be rotten, but that doesn't mean the future has to be. Yes, space travel is expensive now, but that's politics, not physics (nuclear power makes space travel cheap; we're just too afraid of it to use it). But SF writers are so stuck in their perpetual pessimism that they can't write an optimistic future.

Anonymous said...

I think that frgough has it right; so many people today have such a dim view of the present that they can no longer see the bright, shiny future that we use to back in the late 20th century. That, of course, also applies to writers, SF writers included. I'm hoping that this situation reverses itself sometime soon.

Ferrell

M. D. Van Norman said...

The opportunity for a grand spacefaring civilization in the plausible near future has passed. We have yet to find a unified replacement for that vision, so the future is perhaps less clear to us than ever before. Will the technological accelerando continue, bringing material prosperity to all? Will the slide from liberal democracy to authoritarian democracy continue, bringing a new kind of oppression and corruption upon the greater mass of the people? Will some ecological or political catastrophe destroy our current order, bringing about a historical reset? Or will the present post-millennial angst simply drag on indefinitely, bringing us to an unremarkable future defined by long-term stagnation?

Rick said...

The mid-20th century had its own pessimism. They hadn't come up with eco-catastrophes yet, but nuclear warfare ... totalitarianism ... overpopulation ... plenty of grimdark to go around.

Grognak's remark on the Westeros 'verse as a satire is interesting! But if GRR Martin's intent was to undermine epic fantasy tropes, it doesn't seem to be working.

I wonder if grimdark may be just one of those cycle things that people will get tired of. In which case it will fade, until of course it eventually comes back into fashion again.

Rick said...

Forgot to welcome yet another new commenter!

Interesting point that Hollywood seems to be going in the opposite direction. In the 50s, when written SF was full of the cool stuff, Hollywood scifi was mostly downbeat and horror-esque.

Admitting that giant ants, etc., were sort of cool at the same time.

jollyreaper said...

I don't see Westeros as satire so much as an attempt to tell a sweeping fantasy story with the tropes of history rather than fairy tales. With Tolkien, pretty equals good, ugly equals evil, good triumphs, there will be a happy ending for some but not all, there is hope even in the loss.

Someone once said history is nothing but a catalog of crimes by the strong against the weak. That's where I think Martin was going, the same way kid-friendly westerns sanitized of all moral ambiguity were what later directors rebelled against, going for gritty in search of what they felt was a greater authenticity.

Where I think Martin is making a mistake is that people can still accept a lot of pain and suffering for their characters so long as they can come through it. Not many people enjoy watching someone come from humble beginnings and struggle to succeed and sacrifice everything for victory just to be crushed to death slowly, with great agony, beneath inexorable wheels.

Would that be a subversion of the expected? Only in the past. Going super dark is just another cliche now.

I agree that it's going to be a fashion thing in part. The next generation of writers wants to break away from the one that inspired them to do something new. If two generations ago did happy stories, the last generation rebelled to do sad ones. Now this generation will rebel by replicating the moods of happier times, revival.

Geoffrey S H said...

Maybe there is room for sf that has man get into space just after the pmf after a period of limited technological advancement and then a flowering of new discoveries. That was you can take into account the lack of progress today without sliding into pessimism and a future history full of decelerandos and dictatorships.

Essentially make it like some '60s "man conquers space" paperback, only with different cultures.

jollyreaper said...

Most people don't even get hung up on anachronisms. That's mainly the concern of the geeks who also get upset when, say, the reciprocating engines on WWI biplanes don't really spin right in the movies. Some people well and truly don't care about the little details. Most people, really.

I think most of us here thought the last Trek movie was terrible for plot holes and illogical character motives and such and for most people it didn't even register. That sort of complaint seems as pointless as bitching about the wrong pattern on the china in a historic mansion set.

frgough said...

Disagree on the 1950s SF. The point wasn't that bad things were happening (that's always happening in any story). The difference is in basic attitude.

Let's use The Day The Earth Stood Still as an example.

In the original, the American government is cooperative, Klaatu finds people to be essentially good, kind and caring, and his final message is essentially: If you want to come join us, grow up.

Now, consider the remake. Klaatu is taken prisoner. He's interrogated. The government is dark and sinister and attempts to destroy his vessel. His message is basically that human EXISTENCE is a mistake that must be corrected and that our very way of life is an abomination that must be rectified.

In the original, the bad was the exception, could be overcome with a little effort, and we could be full partners with others in the galaxy, but that if we didn't want to, that was fine; we'd be left to ourselves, but simply not allowed to leave our world.

In the remake, our very NATURE was an affront, and we were to be cleansed, like a virus or an infection, and the only way we could survive is if we comported our way of life and behavior to that of the morality of our alien overlords.

Now, which story would you rather read? The one where all we have to do is calm it down a bit and we can be equal partners in the galaxy, or one where we have to continually prove our very worthiness to exist to an alien society, essentially acknowledging them as our eternal masters?

I don't know about you, but that second story is downright depressing, and I wouldn't have any desire at all to read it. And considering how poorly the remake did at the box office, I would say most people agree.

So, to sum up the really long post, the pessimism isn't in the story material, but in the attitude toward humanity and civilization that expresses itself in the story.

frgough said...

Regarding Tolkien, the analysis that good=pretty is patently false. In fact, Tolkien was very aware that the worst evil is that which seems fair to the eye. Sauron was very fair to behold and used his charm and appearance to seduce the elves. Saruman disguised his evil behind a mask of wisdom and compassion. Boromir's fall into evil was the result of good intentions gone awry. Strider was physically rather ugly, but had a noble spirit. In fact, he comments to Frodo that an agent of the Enemy would "Look fairer and feel fouler."

The ring itself, an object of utter evil, was terrifyingly beautiful.

One of the reasons I'm such a huge fan of LOTR, is that Tolkien does an excellent job of examining the nature of evil, how it manifests, how it gains purchase in the hearts of men, and the cost it exacts.

Tony said...

Let's see...

1. Shakespeare does significantly better than Tolkien in examining human psychology -- like, real comedy and sex -- with far less agenda.

2. "[A] flowering of new discoveries" is an invocation of magic.

3. Shakespear could get away with a certain amount of anachronism, because he was just that good. Joe Shmoe the movie producer can't.

Geoffrey S H said...

@Tony:

"2. "[A] flowering of new discoveries" is an invocation of magic."

Well, yes:

a) I stated in my last post that the time after the pmf would be a better time for stories of man getting a larger foothold in space. This being the pff, there might be magitek involved. It seems unlikely there will be any serious development in space technology for the time being-so waiting 500 years to revisit such a setting might at least make it more plausible, if unlikely.

b) “flowering of discroveries” does not have to mean a load of them at once, but a series of innovations of a period of decades/ centuries. The “Flowering” is compared to previous centuries of zero significant progress.

c) Currently we need magic to get anything large up into space. Magitek being magitek, any such discoveries look to be very unlikely. In short I agree with you Tony, but I’m sick of all these attempts to put space colonisation only a century or two from the time the story was written. What’s wrong with creating a setting in which we have to wait a little longer? It would be a mere background detail.

Tony said...

Geoffrey S H:

"c) Currently we need magic to get anything large up into space. Magitek being magitek, any such discoveries look to be very unlikely. In short I agree with you Tony, but I’m sick of all these attempts to put space colonisation only a century or two from the time the story was written. What’s wrong with creating a setting in which we have to wait a little longer? It would be a mere background detail."

It's not waiting a while that I'm dubious of. It's invoking magic at all.

M. D. Van Norman said...

I should add that even the dour visions of the future have silver linings, which is certainly where some of the fictional draw lies. The evil, totalitarian empire can be overthrown by the good, plucky rebellion. The catastrophic historical reset can allow for the building of a new, utopian civilization with or without sage kings and fairy princesses.

That said, I’m also fairly confident that the grim views are also exaggerated. The nuclear threat of the late 20th century turned out to be overstated in all dimensions. I strongly suspect that the current ecological alarmism will turn out to be equally overwrought.

Tony said...

As an author, if you establish utopia, you've killed future income from sequels.

Also, I don't think there's a whole lot of audience anyway for utopia as the protagonists, objective.

WRT ecological alarmism, I've been exposed to it since before I could read. It strikes me as nothing more than the post-modern version of the moral panic.

Grognak said...

@Rick
"But if GRR Martin's intent was to undermine epic fantasy tropes, it doesn't seem to be working".

So very true... actually I'm starting to guess Martin's supposed penchant for nasty surprises - like the infamous Red Wedding - and the Song of Fire and Ice cycle growing longer and longer could be both born from his frustration. He doesn't want to be obvious but no one "gets it"!

@Jollyreaper
"I don't see Westeros as satire so much as an attempt to tell a sweeping fantasy story with the tropes of history rather than fairy tales".

I will be the first to say that most supposedly historical novels don't include so many details extracted from the Middle Ages, and get more things wrong than GRR Martin; he knows the medieval period in depth. But, while that would explain many things, it doesn't explain others. For example, elves (because the Others in the novels are most definitely Elves; tall, slender, beautiful, elegant night creatures... but very much against disappearing gracefully, leaving the world to mortal Men) and working, powerful magic; GRR Martin seems bent on using every epic phantasy trope only to subvert them. Another example would be Brienne of Tart; maid warriors aren't exactly a history trope; in epic phantasy they abound but I can't remember one of them that wasn't a killing beauty, other than Brienne.

Returning to SF I don't think anything like this has ever been written. But then again, epic phantasy was asking for it; SF initially was equally dependent on an equally limited set of cliches (the mad scientist, the wondrous invention, the Galactic Empire, the Space Legion, the rebel computer, the alien visitor on Earth...) but I would say SF did outgrow them long ago.

Grognak said...

Ooops... I meant "unlike Brienne", no "other than Brienne".

Geoffrey S H said...

@Tony:

"It's not waiting a while that I'm dubious of. It's invoking magic at all."

I pretty much now see any improvement on what we have already as "magic"; something has to be pulled from the hat to make an innovation wrt space to work, be it an economic rabbit or a technological one.

That said, I am interested (within limits) in seeing how humans would set up an interplanetary civilisation, so even if I see such a thing as an impossibility in reality, I'm willing to invoke magic to imagine it in fantasy.

Lighter rocket materials, better, cheaper propellants, space elevators and the presence of things up there to mine/ successfully colonise. Even a slight increase in space activity such as lagrange labs and moon outposts. All are "magic" or fantastical ideas in some form or another. Nothing wrong with writing a semi-realistic fantasy about them eh?
I just wonder if there are any significant writers that have imagined a near/far future society on earth without any significant space travel (discounting utopian/distopian works)?

Geoffrey S H said...

Actually no, Lagrange missions and moon bases are incredibly difficult missions to even comprehend let alone undertake. Perhaps a better example would be improved sounding rockets and new types of satellites beyond what we have now. Not much of a step forward, but ultimately still slightly fantastical in scope. Moon bases (and indeed more moon missions) are probably just talk and always will be talk.

Jim Baerg said...

Geoffrey S H:
"I just wonder if there are any significant writers that have imagined a near/far future society on earth without any significant space travel"

Surprisingly Heinlein did. In _Beyond This Horizon_ the society has good enough space craft to have a permanent moon base, but nothing beyond earth is worth enough to have more than exploratory expeditions.

Thom S said...

It has been said before, but bears repeating:
The majority of the gatekeepers of SF are, for lack of a better word, old. As in crotchety, get-off-my-lawn old.
This is not a bad thing in general, but given SF's background as crystal ball to the new (whatever that may mean at any given moment) it carries an obvious penalty in this case.
As an example, the most likely futures that have been outlined in this thread seem to consist of the world going to hell (I think the word 'backsliding' was actually used), stagnating into ennui or becoming strange and incomprehensible. It reads like some sort of archetypal reaction of the old: that the world is changing to fast, or too slow (but not for the better,either way) and becoming too confusing to boot.

I'm no science fiction author; but I can envisage a number of legitimate, hard SF scenarios in my field alone that would be none of these things. The fact that space flight would be an incidental aspect to almost all of them is just a consequence of how the economics of the whole thing work.

tl;dr: Please don't mistake the social mechanics of the genre as some sort of deep indicator of the global Zeitgeist.

Tony said...

Geoffrey S H:

"I pretty much now see any improvement on what we have already as "magic"; something has to be pulled from the hat to make an innovation wrt space to work, be it an economic rabbit or a technological one."

That' not what I'm talking about. It's the suggestion that magitech could somehow follow from our real world of today. That's cheating. What's not cheating is invoking magic outright, honestly, and owning it. In point of fact, that's one thing that makes Trek not so objectionable to me as supposedly "hard" SF magitech. In Trek, here we are in the future and we just have all of these technologies. In other works you have authors trying to make these things actually happen by some scientific discovery that should somehow be plausible, or some economic or social change, or both. While being obviously more detailed and thought out -- in terms of science and technology, but rarely in terms of plot -- it's way less honet with the reader.

Tony said...

Thom S:

"It has been said before, but bears repeating:
The majority of the gatekeepers of SF are, for lack of a better word, old. As in crotchety, get-off-my-lawn old."


Once again, what us old farts possess is perspective. We know the difference between hope and reality, and how the two are (mostly not) related. When I was in my twenties, we all (for certain definitions of "we all") thought that manned spaceflight would progress becuase there would be great advances in the physical sciences and resulting engineering practice. We never thought about what would happen with computers. We now carry in our poscket or on our belts more computing power than NASA used to put men on the Moon. Turns out that rocket technology has hardly advanced at all, because physics hasn't advanced to enable that. And while you could use reasonably well-designed smart phone apps to do just about everything that the NASA's real-time computing capabilities di in 1968-72, you don't even need to.

Which is to say that the gross physical engineering of spaceflight matured and that was that. Technology took off in another direction, because all of the room at the top had been occupied, and there was still plenty of room at the bottom.

In any case, there are no gatekeepers of science fiction. Just varying opinions of what it should be. If you don't like older people's opinions, stick around for a couple of decades -- you'll probably get the point. It has nothing to do with backward-looking, but everything to do with being able to understand the difference between hope and reality.

"I'm no science fiction author; but I can envisage a number of legitimate, hard SF scenarios in my field alone that would be none of these things. The fact that space flight would be an incidental aspect to almost all of them is just a consequence of how the economics of the whole thing work."

What field, and what developments do you in particular envision?

"tl;dr: Please don't mistake the social mechanics of the genre as some sort of deep indicator of the global Zeitgeist."

Is thi supposed to mean anything at all? Every genre has the same social mechanics at roughly the same time, because the paying customers are part of the surrounding society. Even if they're interested in vampires instead of detective, or spacehip's instead of bodice-ripping, they still all want an entertaining story. And the rules of entertainment are the same everywhere.

Thom S said...

Hi Tony,

Thanks for responding to my comment, especially as I'm a) necro-ing the thread and b) being a bit cheeky into the bargain.

My comments about social hierarchies and gatekeepers simply refers to the fact that there are some voices that are allowed to shape the public discourse surrounding a given topic more than others. Spielberg, for instance, is much more likely to be able to state his opinion via an op-ed in the Times, or an interview on prime-time tv than Joe Shmoe just-graduated-from-film-school. This is by no means a bad thing: Spielberg has earned his right to talk in the times about what he thinks is really a movie.

The problem is that in a genre like SF, whose forward-thinking nature is pretty much its guiding light, having all your gatekeepers becoming old results in the exact conversation we are hashing out right now.

As to liking older people's opinions, I totally get it. I'm in my late 20's, but even a little bit of teaching-related work (which is sort of mandatory, as I'm still stuck in academia) rapidly clues you in to just how dumb you were ten years ago. It also prepares you to realise just how dumb you are now in a few years time.
To use your own phrasing, the problem with understanding reality is that you generally lose hope. And the optimistic science fiction we all seem to be mourning runs of a lot of hope.

Thom S said...

In regards to my field; I'm a molecular biologist. Well, technically a plant biotechnologist, but we're all molecular biologists to one degree or another now.
Anyay, just of the top of my head, I can think of a realistic scenario where someone develops an advanced metal hyperaccumulator, completely altering how extractive economies work and thus driving the conflict of a plot.

If you wanted more of a conventional SF angle, the idea of custom microorganisms is rapidly turning into a very real possibility now that we can do whole-genome synthesis. Dropping an ecosystem onto a planet in the form of a bacterial package sounds both plausible and classically sci-fi.

Our growing ability to do useful things with microorganisms may also have strange payoffs. For instance, I know of a few attempts to make what amounts to a simple transistor out of bacterial cell processes. The end result would be that, with sufficiently robust architecture and culturing, you could make yourself a true wet computer. This, along with the possibility of actual computer viruses, has to be worth a few stories at least.

As another idea, some advances in cell culturing and 3-D printing would allow one to print a whole organism, completely bypassing the whole ball of string that is development. This suggests everything from biological robots to artificial people, with the inherent variation in biological systems providing scope for actual plots.

For a more esoteric possibility, you could look to the advances neural interfacing. I know that telepathy has been done in SF, but very few works have been able to bring it out of 'magic' territory. Fewer still have taken a deep look at what such a technology would do to a society (loss of individual identity, the formation of hive-minds, a complete reworking of the idea of an 'individual' entity and so on).

Where things get really interesting is if bio-systematics (the attempt to abstract and simplify biological information into something approaching a conventional circuit design) ever takes off. This is a bit more of an ask, but something that may happen in the next two hundred years rather than the next twenty. If so, it would open up the possibility of designing a complex organism in the same way that we design a car. Here the imagination can run a bit wild, with the obvious proviso that the laws of thermodynamics still apply.

Bear in mind that, except for the last idea, all of these concepts are going to be explored in the real world, to some extent, within the next twenty years. This is a real accellerando, playing out in our lifetimes. And, as the last idea makes clear, we're actually still in the 'tinkering' stage when it come to biotech.

Thom S said...

Finally, for another perspective on the future: I have a good friend making a foray into automation. The thing that scares him most? A team of ex-MIT folks who started a company, went very quiet for a few years and just released a robot that can work next to people on the line. Its safe to be around, smart/dexterous enough to do almost everything that a normal worker can (in terms of using its arms, at least) and will cost $20000 or so once mass production kicks in. You program it by literally telling it to watch you, then doing the action that needs to be done on that part of the line.

This machine, if it works as advertised, has the possibility to complete the process of line automation.
My friend reckons that this device (or something like it) may change the world a lot more in the next few years than anything else.

jollyreaper said...

Technological unemployment along with resource depletion, peak oil and climate change will be the biggest problems we face in the near future.

The bioaccumulator idea you mentioned is something I'd thought of before. First time I saw it used in fiction was tiberium in Command and Conquer but I'm sure there were prior examples.

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

He also wrote a novella exploring the big questions of what a high-automation future could mean. I think there's plenty of room for good debate about his speculative solutions but I have trouble arguing with the problems he lays out.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

The problem we're facing right now is what do we do with the capable workers who are now discarded as useless eaters? You work to earn your pay, that's axiomatic. If there's no work, what value do you have?

Real work is going overseas. It's replaced by service sector crap and that's going to be automated away. Our best and brightest are struggling to find work, where does that leave the everyman? Where does that leave the over-50 crowd who get downsized and nobody will hire?

There are some huge questions that need to be asked and I think the best solutions will gore a lot of oxen. I think we're going to need national health care, a national basic income, and a reevaluation of how we live our lives.

Thom S said...

Jollyreaper,

I think automation has big implications for the economy, although I'm not certain about the idea that we'll end up with ten rich guys lording it over the unemployable serfs.
Rather, I think the prime mover of the economy will become the things that cannot be automated.

For instance, Mc-Ds had a fully automated kitchen project ages back, but discontinued because its cheaper to train teenagers to do the relevant jobs and the customers actually want a human face to interact with. I mean, you could get rid of waiters at restaurants tomorrow if you felt like it (replace them with an order intercom and moveable tray), but part of the experience of eating out is having someone to take the order, ask if everything is okay and serve you food.

My vision of a more automated future is more of a slow transition towards an economy of intangibles (ideas, entertainment, art of all forms), with the end result that most of the workforce would resemble a giant commune. This would obviously not be a smooth process, but I don't expect it to get quite so... pointed as the piece you linked to.

I don't expect this to really take off within our lifetimes, however. Technology may change rapidly, but society takes generations to fully work through the ramifications of a new concept. We've just gotten used to books, after all.

jollyreaper said...

The way I see it, there's practical tipping points. We'd been messing around with heavier than air flight for hundreds of years before the the necessary advances in multiple fields were far enough to put together a practical aircraft. Skeptics naturally had good reason to be skeptical.

Here's a short list of other ideas:

Printing Press : While the designs date back to AD 200, the first modern printing press came in 1439.

Submarines : The first published design was in 1573 by William Bourne. The first submarine which was used in naval combat was turtle, which was invented in 1776 by David Bushnell

Light Bulb: Started as early as 1802 by Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the invention of a modern light bulb goes to Thomas Edison in 1879.

Telephone: In 1831 Michael Faraday proved that vibrations of metal could be converted to electrical impulses . It was not before March 10, 1876 , Bell's experiments with his assistant Thomas Watson finally proved successful.

Hand Help Calculator : French mathematician Blaise Pascal invented the first adding machine in 1642. The hand-held pocket calculator was invented at Texas Instruments in 1966

Anonymous said...

Thom S said:"For a more esoteric possibility, you could look to the advances neural interfacing. I know that telepathy has been done in SF, but very few works have been able to bring it out of 'magic' territory. Fewer still have taken a deep look at what such a technology would do to a society (loss of individual identity, the formation of hive-minds, a complete reworking of the idea of an 'individual' entity and so on)." Check out the later "Robot" stories by Asamov; some of the last ones (I believe), deal with a human colony that bioengineer themselves to have a biological radio in their brains (among other changes), so that they can directly interface with each other and their world's version of the internet (he didn't call it that, of course). I don't think he had the time to fully explore the concept, however. He did imply that the possibility was very high for a war between the 'old' and 'new' humans.
The other possibilities in bio-tech you mentioned seem like they'll make for an interesting future.

Ferrell

Thucydides said...

Automation and advanced technologies work in strange ways. A recent post at NextBigFuture showed a warehouse inverting the usual scheme of workers picking and placing orders from shelves for a robot to package to robots picking and placing for a worker to check and package. The inverted warehouse had a productivity gain of 6X, which no corporation on earth would turn their nose up at.

OTOH, as has been pointed out here and in other places, much of the economy is "shrinking" towards customization , individualized services and people using their own capital and knowledge in order to service their own needs, which makes the idea of super sized warehouses (no matter how efficient) somewhat moot.

Education can now be delivered over the Internet (brick and mortar schools may still exist to provide services difficult to do over the net, like science labs, workshops with high end tools and theater arts, for example).

What these examples show is a reordering of the economic "ecosystem", as various niches close and others open up. If we stand in the way and subsidize the inefficient (or allow crony capitalists to steal our capital by using taxation to transfer wealth to them), then the ultimate shake out will resemble the K-T event that ended the age of the Dinosaurs.

Geoffrey S H said...

We've already had the development stage with rockets though- small "prototypes" in the form of Chinese and British Congreve rockets. Maybe there is no more room for advancement in the tech, and therefore we'll be stuck on this rock forever until the funding for space probes dries out. Then other progression will stagnate in addition to the loss of knowledge of the past that occasionally occurs (or disinclination to look backward). And that is that.

Thucydides said...

The thing about a lot of these "development" stages was they were conceptualized using not only the materials of the day,but also the mindset of the times.

Steam engines can be dated back to the 1rst century AD, but mechanical devices tended to be looked upon as toys or "special effects" for temples and theaters.

The Babbage Machine, had it been completed, would have led us down a path of greatly centralized computing with large staffs (including a "black gang" to keep the steam engine going), rather than portable digital devices like we have today.

Experimentalists "knew" that to achieve heavier than air flight, we had to mimic birds (or in the case of Clément Ader, a bat). Leonardo's designs were recently reanalyzed using high quality scans to bring up 500 year old details, and demonstrated a keen understanding of the 3 dimensional movement of a bird's wings. It is a good thing he invented the parachute as well...

The point here is we have people trying to squeeze marginal improvements out of rockets (or invoking magitech like metastable metallic hydrogen as a fuel), but are only minimally investigating alternatives from tethers to beam propulsion to momentum exchange. I am willing to bet SpaceX has spent as much as all the serious non rocket experiments combined to put their hardware into orbit, using (as Tony likes to point out) freshened up 1950's technology that would not be too out of place on an R-7 booster like the one that launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit.

So don't be too pessimistic about rockets; go to Buzz Aldrin's site if you want to be cheered up with the possibilities of classical rocketry.

Rick said...

Welcome to another new commenter!

Again I don't have much to add to this thread, which is covering a lot of interesting ground.

But I will break in anyway to note that there's a new front page post: A Force of Nature.

Tony said...

Let's see...

I'm not particularly impressed with the direction biotechnology is taking. Most of it sounds too good to be true -- which of course means that it is.

Automation is catching up to the availability of computing power. When you can't miniaturize or cheapen the technology any more, you hit a wall. I'm seeing that coming sooner rather than later.

There's also the very real problem of having enough skilled humans to program the automation. For example, just yesterday I was working on 15 year old software. That software is still in use today, and is likely to be in use for at least another five years. Why? It works well enough, and it would cost entirely too much to upgrade it.

Now, imagine that problem with trying to program humans out of jobs more complex than we've already automated. Who's going to pay for it? Humans do good enough and, for most jobs, humans simply cost less than the programming effort to replace them, even if the robots cost zero dollars. Humans are just too versatile and easy to teach, compared to paying some guy high five or low six figures to figure out how to explain the same job to a machine.

I know -- people keep telling me that once you have a job programmed, you never have to program it again. True, for the kind of software I was working on yesterday. For a new software module to do a new job, it's a different story. And on the modern production line, jobs change substantially from year to year, sometimes from month to month or week to week.

Thom S said...

Tony,

I'm only going to address the first sentence of that, because to be frank I don't know enough about programming to make anything other than an opinion statement.

You're being an idiot.

'I don't believe it, so it isn't true?'
Really, that's your argument? From a person with no understanding of the field? That's just arrogant, especially given that you yourself are something of a champion of the concept of naive authors listening to hard-bitten experts when it comes to things like rocketry.

Before I get too steamed up, how about we do this again. You provide something more substantive than 'I do not believe', preferably about a single topic and I'll do my best as someone in the field to give you a straight answer.

Fair warning: biology is a big, big discipline and there will most likely be areas where I am only marginally more qualified than a lay person. If so, then I will tell you so.

jollyreaper said...

Thom S, let me explain how internet discussions work: they don't. :)

But more specifically, we get into this kind of debate loop all the time. Someone mistakes personal experience and opinion for incontrovertable fact. Sometimes this means an otherwise rational person embraces crazy woo, other times they're completely dismissive of things they aren't really qualified to talk about.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo

I like to keep an open mind concerning future speculation. We have plenty of examples of where we were too radical in our speculation and other cases where we weren't radical enough.

Thom S said...

Jollyreaper,

True, although one can always hope for the mythical rational discussion :)

I'm well aware of the problem of confounding 'he's been doing it for years' with 'he's right'. But when talking about a field in which you manifestly don't know anything it is polite to at least give the expert opinion consideration.
Especially when demanding the exact same for yourself.

Anyway, there are plenty of examples of over(and under!)-hyped technologies that deserve to be discussed on their own merits, rather than dismissed with a sweeping generalization.

jollyreaper said...

Agreed. The difficulty is that a lot of people already know what they believe and won't let any contrary evidence get in the way. I know I have my biases but, even for things I think are damn near divine truths, I'm willing to entertain the alternative case. If there's one thing I'm capable of, it's being completely wrong about something.

Anonymous said...

Thom S and jollyreaper: I couldn't agree more!

Ferrell

Tony said...

Thom S:

"I'm only going to address the first sentence of that, because to be frank I don't know enough about programming to make anything other than an opinion statement.

You're being an idiot.

'I don't believe it, so it isn't true?'
Really, that's your argument? From a person with no understanding of the field? That's just arrogant, especially given that you yourself are something of a champion of the concept of naive authors listening to hard-bitten experts when it comes to things like rocketry."


Try responding to what I wrote, not what you think you read, please. I said that things that sound to good to be true usually are. I didn't deprecate any particular prediction or claim. I simply said, in effect, that if it sounds like magic, don't bet your house on it.

To riff on something you yourself said, I didn't make any detailed claims or crticisms precisely because I don't know that much about biotechnology. But I do know one whole heck of a lot about technology in general. In general, technologies that are maturing, but not yet matured, make outrageous claims that never come true. That's certainly been the case with astronautics* and computers. (For all that we've done in the computing and automation field, we still don't have true artificial intelligence or autonomous, self-aware automotons.) I see no reason to believe that bioltechnology is any different.

*Since you brought it up, unrealistic expectations is the basis of my criticisms of much of fictional astronautics as well.

Thom S said...

Tony,

Well, so much for trying again.
I think the point you were missing is that waving away an entire field with "I'm not too impressed, sounds too good to be true, therefore it is" is both vague and, not to put too fine a point on it, insulting to folk who actually work in a field.

Of course a lot of it is overblown. But some of it has the potential to change things on a fundamental level. And isn't one of the purposes of SF to speculate on which is which?

To take some of the trains of thought here and collide them, I wonder how much of the 'good' science fiction has come from the fact that not enough was known about reality? Which is to say: in addition to youthful optimism, how much of the stuff we all seem to be mourning came from the fact that you could fudge the details in the name of a story.

This leads to the sad thought that its the reality-obsessed folks (us basically) who are slowly strangling the field. Or at least forcing it deeper and deeper into fantasy.

Tony said...

Thom S

"Well, so much for trying again.
I think the point you were missing is that waving away an entire field with 'I'm not too impressed, sounds too good to be true, therefore it is' is both vague and, not to put too fine a point on it, insulting to folk who actually work in a field."


If that's so, then I've insulted a whole heck of a lot of people in my own field as well. The point you are missing is that I'm not dismissing a field as being useful or directionless, I'm dismissing all of technological hyperbole on the very sound principle that it's largely BS.

"Of course a lot of it is overblown. But some of it has the potential to change things on a fundamental level. And isn't one of the purposes of SF to speculate on which is which?"

1. When people start using terms like fundamental change, my hyperbole sensor just turns me off.

2. SF writers can speculate all they want. I don't have to read the wilder flights of fancy.

Rick said...

How does one define 'fundamental change?'

I would argue that the industrial revolution as a whole has made for pretty fundamental change - post-industrial human life is about as different from life in the agrarian age as agrarianism itself was from hunting and gathering.

Just something to think about - I have in mind a (somewhat meta) post on this subject.

Tony said...

Rick:

"How does one define 'fundamental change?' "

Ya got me there.

My point was that the term has become nothing more than a rhetorical signal that the reader get all excited and believe, for the umpteenth time, in unicorns farting rainbows.

jollyreaper said...

Charlie Stross had a funny bit with mind uploads in a computronium spaceship heading out to the stars and they're debating over when the singularity happened. One holds out that it still hasn't happened yet.

Thom S said...

Rick,

"How does one define fundamental change?"

I'd say by first defining the fundament. It's not something we think of much, but the base of most societies is agriculture (and, in the modern era, basic extraction and processing). Change how we feed ourselves, extract materials or produce basic industrial goods and you've changed society on a pretty deep level.

Thom S said...

Tony,

I'm glad you get to pick and choose only the most grounded and realist stories for your flights of fancy. Having done so, however, I think you'll find you're reading historical fiction rather than SF.

Just something to think about as we keep debating terms.

Christopher Phoenix said...

I guess I'm coming a bit late to this discussion, seeing as there have been 87 comments already. :-)

There are two sides to this "is SF tired?" discussion- one is that SF is is living on in movies, games, etc. A whole generation is growing up who were exposed to SF by video games and media, not books- let alone magazines titled "Amazing Stories!!" Where would modern games be without aliens and powered armor? Certainly SF is pretty popular in gaming.

But, within the written SF field, and particularly so-called "hard SF", the general attitude is one of pessimism. Where once the focus was on the wonder and promise of space travel, and discussions of what it would be like once we had a summer home on Venus (or whatever), nowadays the discussion is about how difficult and expensive space travel is and how to justify it existing in any widespread form at all. Instead of imagining fearsome death rays that kill through atomic disintegration, a modern group of SF fans are likely to argue over whether a laser weapon is useful at all.

Nowadays, instead of coming up with new ideas and worlds to explore, it seems that a lot of SF fans are picking over their favorite SF tropes (like space battleships) and trying to defend them within the constraints of "hard SF". No actual speculation is going on- instead of extrapolating from our current research to imagine what the future may actually hold, a modern fan retroactively defends favored SF settings from earlier stories.

The future is already made, already cut and dried, and it is this alien millennium that eats at it and shoots a Heinlein-esque Mars colony full of holes. A lot of discussion related to SF seems to be not "things to come" but "how the heck do we justify a whole lot of old SF tropes?". No offense, but this blog is a good example of this in general- after all, is a opera-esque future full of clashing forces in great space battles likely within the "plausible midfuture"? Sorry!! But you have mentioned this once or twice before.

My feeling is that enticing, exciting speculative settings are going to come out of the left field, and break with the old formulas. Instead of grasping at FTL to hold to the classic image of a "space future" (chanting in Welsh, anyone?) the new writer or artist will imagine how we might actually try to reach the stars, or what (if anything) we might end up doing instead. And, unless someone discovers the tesseract, we will end up with STL starships- but think of how many interesting stories could play out on such craft!!

On a closing note, I don't agree with you that SF is a subgenera of "Romance" (we are allowed to have dissenting views, aren't we?). Certainly a lot of SF stories are adventure tales, but a lot is not. SF is more of a setting, than it is a type of story. Take Stanislaw Lem's stories (Solaris, Return From the Stars, etc., or Clifford D. Simak's classic novel CITY, or Orwell's 1984, for heaven's sake. A SF story has a speculative setting. That does not mean we must be saving the galaxy or declaring ourselves Emperor of the Universe by page 345. And, after I conquer all of space, what then? The really exciting stories deal with what people think and feel, not just what they do.

I must admit I love the classic spaceships and monsters story, as in A.E. Van Vogt's The Voyage of the Space Beagle. Complaining about being called a "SF author" when you wrote a SF book because SF is about monsters and spaceships, totally Not Cool. All aboard for the great spiral nebula in Andromeda!!

Tony said...

Thom S:

"'How does one define fundamental change?'

I'd say by first defining the fundament. It's not something we think of much, but the base of most societies is agriculture (and, in the modern era, basic extraction and processing). Change how we feed ourselves, extract materials or produce basic industrial goods and you've changed society on a pretty deep level."


What you've changed is the amount of accessible wealth for those that can take advantage of the changes. A peasant in Africa or South America can nip at the fringes, like maybe use a community cell phone or watch TV at the local bar, but he still eats off of subsistence agriculture. If he can get his hands on the products of biotechnology, it's usually at a price that he can only afford if he turns his truck garden and family staple land to a cash crop. But if he does that, he's still no better off, because he doesn't have that much land to begin with, and still owes rent on top of his seed price. I see no fundamental change there, just sucking another person into the global economy at no advantage to himself.

(All of which is no to make an anti-globalism statement -- just to point out that it takes more than GM foods and cell phones to fundamentally change the world.)

"I'm glad you get to pick and choose only the most grounded and realist stories for your flights of fancy. Having done so, however, I think you'll find you're reading historical fiction rather than SF.

Just something to think about as we keep debating terms."


Argumentum ad absurdum.

Thom S said...

Tony,

The point was that, once you've eliminated every conceivable advance on the grounds that it is speculation, the only thing left is whatever technology we have now. At this point you are effectively reading historical fiction.

Thom S said...

GM just means 'genetically modified', so you'd have to define what sort of genetic modification we're talking about.

Regardless, if there was some sort of cash crop that small-scale (rather than subsistence) farmers could grow and was price stable then it would definitely make their lives easier. Because the major issue small scale farmers have is that price fluctuations make it hard to accumulate capital.

The fact that the world economic system is currently set up to be protectionist at one end and open on another just makes the problem worse.

To be fair, the end result in both cases (with and without a cash crop) is probably the amalgamation of small farms into larger ones and the continuation of the urbanization process that is sweeping through the developing world.
But at least in the latter case the small farmer gets to transition in a stable fashion rather than being driven out once he hits rock bottom to become a migrant worker or serf on his former land.

Tony said...

Thom S:

"The point was that, once you've eliminated every conceivable advance on the grounds that it is speculation, the only thing left is whatever technology we have now. At this point you are effectively reading historical fiction."

Still argumentum ad absurdum. I said "wilder" flights of fancy, not all of them. If you don't accept that in SF there is a sliding scale of the fantastic, why are we even having this discussion?

"GM just means 'genetically modified', so you'd have to define what sort of genetic modification we're talking about."

GM foods, like cell phones, was (pretty obviously, I think) an exemplar, not a comprehensive.

The point being (of course) that changing economic relationships is not fundamental change. Fundamental, IMO, would be on the order of actually extending the human lifespan indeifinitely, or changing humans so that they could gain nourishment from simple exposure to sunlight.

Damien Sullivan said...

"Oh, and I suspect Westeros is on another planet as will be revealed in the last volume... would that make it SF?"

I've read Martin has stated outright that the seasons are driven by supernatural causes, not wacky planetary dynamics.

I know little about Chinese or Indian (or continental European!) SF, but Japan seems to have a healthy scene. Not just manga/anime, but various novels such as those translated by the Haikasoru publishing line.

"The nuclear threat of the late 20th century turned out to be overstated in all dimensions. I strongly suspect that the current ecological alarmism will turn out to be equally overwrought"

Uh, those are incomparable things. The *threat* of nuclear weapons was/is huge, but they were never used after WWII. Basically binary: WWIII or not? Whereas global warming and other environmental degradation are ongoing.

"I just wonder if there are any significant writers that have imagined a near/far future society on earth without any significant space travel"

Clarke, _The Deep Range_. His _Imperial Earth_ did have significant space travel, but might as well not have as far as Earth's society went.

"I'm dismissing all of technological hyperbole on the very sound principle that it's largely BS."

Missing the forest for the trees. Out of many early claims of some promising technology, most will fizzle or turn out to be hype. But past experience indicates that not all of them well. Anticipating no change is in a sense less realistic than expecting one particular change.

Same goes for future history. The most likely future will include some event that we'd have considered pretty unlikely.

But which? There's the problem.


As far as healthy SF media goes, there's also webcomics. Freefall and Schlock Mercenary are great. Outrim was light but amusing and had some interesting if disturbing ideas. A Miracle of Science had some silliness and magictech but the Mars groupmind was really interesting.

Damien Sullivan said...

"No actual speculation is going on"

People I know don't like it and I haven't read it, but _The Windup Girl_ had speculation and popularity.

"we will end up with STL starships- but think of how many interesting stories could play out on such craft"

_Chasm City_. _Learning the World_. _Diaspora_. _Schild's Ladder_. _House of Suns_.

"I see no fundamental change there, just sucking another person into the global economy at no advantage to himself."

You're apparently unaware of economic growth in Africa and South America, and declining economic inequality in at least South America. Also rising life expectancy in both continents. (SouthAmer being much richer and better off.)

jollyreaper said...

I consider changes in world view to be significant. The shift from magic to technology is profound. The development of alternative governments to sheer autocracy is profound. The idea that we can be debating these things on the net is profound. Sure, we all still eat and crap just like we had to since forever but we eat clean, wonderful food and use sanitary bathrooms. Again, I consider these to be profound changes.

I think fundamental changes in the human condition would probably involve genetic engineering, in our own biology. But I think that we have hit upon something important in western democracies. Self-serving forces are trying to destroy what has been built and it may yet fall to ruin but we might yet pull it out of the fire.

And for the record, I do consider our business-criminal class to be modern-day barbarians at the gates, though they come from within the very civilizations they seek to destroy. Tony will of course scoff at this. I see your scoff and raise you a LIBOR scandal.

Damien Sullivan said...

Changes: not having half your kids die in childhood. Cheap and effective birth control. Universal literacy. Information traveling faster than people or goods. Flight and submarines and space probes and the knowledge that we could go to space if we had reason to.

At Boskone this weekend Vernor Vinge gave a talk on "group minds". Not people connected by Borg or Conjoiner or Martian brain implants, but people whose language-enabled collaborative powers are greatly enhanced by computer memory and automated workflow logic. He's really impressed by Wikipedia and other crowdsourcing projects, and in his own words is more sympathetic to large human populations as an unprecedented intellectual resource. (Also, grudgingly, to the invention of the State as a tool of organizing people, as he said in response to my suggestion of bureaucracy as primitive AI with human processors.) (Parenthesis is more significant if you know Vinge's anarcho-capitalist leanings.)

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"And for the record, I do consider our business-criminal class to be modern-day barbarians at the gates, though they come from within the very civilizations they seek to destroy. Tony will of course scoff at this. I see your scoff and raise you a LIBOR scandal. "

I don't scoff at the fact that powerful people need to be watched and ocassionally brought to grief. But your continued use of cliched epithets to describe a groups of powerful people for whom you hold (pretty obviously fanatical) disdain is just evidence of intellectual laziness.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"Missing the forest for the trees. Out of many early claims of some promising technology, most will fizzle or turn out to be hype. But past experience indicates that not all of them well. Anticipating no change is in a sense less realistic than expecting one particular change."

Argumentum ad absurdum. I said "largely", not "totally".

"Changes: not having half your kids die in childhood. Cheap and effective birth control. Universal literacy. Information traveling faster than people or goods. Flight and submarines and space probes and the knowledge that we could go to space if we had reason to."

But are any of these fundamental? Are they not really just changes in the availability and distribution of wealth?

And who is the "we" in "we could go to space if we had reason to"? a very small few of us could, given the technology we have. But certainly not "we" as a whole, or even significant part.

"At Boskone this weekend Vernor Vinge gave a talk on 'group minds'. Not people connected by Borg or Conjoiner or Martian brain implants, but people whose language-enabled collaborative powers are greatly enhanced by computer memory and automated workflow logic. He's really impressed by Wikipedia and other crowdsourcing projects, and in his own words is more sympathetic to large human populations as an unprecedented intellectual resource. (Also, grudgingly, to the invention of the State as a tool of organizing people, as he said in response to my suggestion of bureaucracy as primitive AI with human processors.) (Parenthesis is more significant if you know Vinge's anarcho-capitalist leanings.)"

As a computer programmer, I have much greater faith in people enabled by technology than technoligcal replacement of people.

Damien Sullivan said...

"Argumentum ad absurdum. I said "largely", not "totally"."

So you did, but that seemed an intellectual fig leaf, over an argument that any big but unlikely change was 'magic' that shouldn't be in SF. But the difference between 'largely' and 'totally' is that there *will* be some big unlikely change.

"But are any of these fundamental? Are they not really just changes in the availability and distribution of wealth?"

One can have five or more children and have *none* of them die and this is not even *unusual*. Yes, that's a fundamental change, in combination with the huge reduction in deaths by violence in Western cultures. Death changes from something striking repeatedly and tragically in every family to something mostly on the news, or in the hospital when one's grandparents finally break down.

Not sure how birth control is a change in the distribution of wealth, let alone changes in information speeds. It's not like rich people before 1800 had a special ability to find out global news. The telegraph is fundamental.

Rick said...

bureaucracy as primitive AI with human processors

Bureaucracy as a technology is greatly underrated! Organizations can indeed display a sort of intelligence. And without bureaucracy the industrial revolution probably would not have gotten very far. Imagine trying to run a railroad without bureaucracy.

It is remarkable to me how many people in the SF fandom culture - including libertarian types - tend to respect military organizations (and effectively ignore their bureaucratic nature) while badmouthing 'bureaucracy.'


In any case, a new front page post is up, 'inspired by real events' (namely this thread): Technology Revolutions, Trends, and Twists.

Tony said...

Damien Sullivan:

"So you did, but that seemed an intellectual fig leaf, over an argument that any big but unlikely change was 'magic' that shouldn't be in SF. But the difference between 'largely' and 'totally' is that there *will* be some big unlikely change."

Sorry Damien, but for yet another time, I have to remind you that I write precisely what I mean to say. I dismiss hype not because it never predicts accurately, but because the signal-to-noise ratio is too low. To put it another way, the ROI on paying attention to it just not attractive.

"One can have five or more children and have *none* of them die and this is not even *unusual*. Yes, that's a fundamental change, in combination with the huge reduction in deaths by violence in Western cultures. Death changes from something striking repeatedly and tragically in every family to something mostly on the news, or in the hospital when one's grandparents finally break down."

We'll have to face the fact that you and I have substantially different idea of the fundamental. I suspect it has to do with how we got into this discussion. No one thing -- no tightly grouped collection of things -- fundamentally changes the world. Over time, and through synergy between many advances, it might be possible to reasonably claim a fundamental difference between some definite yesterday and today. But snap, crackle, pop? Nope.

Brett said...

@Jollyreaper

I'll have to disagree with you there. Our modern day financial criminals look bad, but they're nothing compared to some of the stuff that financial manipulators used to pull off back in the Gilded Age. Heck, a lot of the standard business practice back then would get you imprisoned for securities fraud today.

@Damien Sullivan

Definitely agree with "great reductions in mortality", "universal literacy", and "effective birth control". I'd also add "massive improvements in sanitation" and "effective anti-bacterial medicine".

Just look at all those incredibly low life expectancies for ancient populations - most of that came from very high childhood mortality rates, deaths from childbirth, and infections. If you dodged those, then you could live into your 60s even back then, or longer. Now that's more or less regular even in "middle income" countries, and a lot of poorer ones - it's only the incredibly poor and/or war-torn countries that still have very high childhood mortality rates.

@Tony

Yes, they're fundamental, not just "changes in the distribution of wealth". Rich children may have had a slightly better chance of surviving early childhood because of better food and easier work, but they still died in droves compared to even poor people today. Look at Queen Anne's lack of surviving children despite a double-digit number of pregnancies.

And cities back then were death zones for children, entirely dependent on inflows of people from the countryside to make up for the fact that so few children born in cities survived to adulthood (I think it was less than 1 in 2 in pre-19th century London).

jollyreaper said...

@brett

Which business practices can't they get away with today? If you're talking about children losing fingers in looms, those machines are all overseas now. Those conditions still exist, just not for white folk in this country. Migrant kids working in the fields picking our food are born with horrific birth defects.

Food quality out of Sinclair Lewis' the Jungle? I point to the recent horse meat scandal in Europe. We have no idea what's going on with our food from China. Our spinach is pretty deadly.

I'll grant you that we aren't seeing 19th century conditions out in the streets right now but that's because so much of the worst work has been offshored. What does remain here can be pretty grim, especially if you are migrant workers, but there are few people who will tell their stories.

In terms of relative dollars and percentage of the economy boosted by fraud and deceit, I'd have to check the numbers but I have a feeling in terms of percentage of GDP we are right up there with the worst of the past.

But supposing that it really isn't as bad as the worst of the past, how bad is acceptable? What level of corruption are we willing to tolerate?

Brett said...

I'm talking about stuff like the Credit Mobilier Scandal.

jollyreaper said...

@brett

Credit Mobilier doesn't sound any different from standard operating practice these days. Bribe politicians by selling them stock at a steep discount from the face? That's called selling options. It's very common to sell IPO shares at the initial price when a lift is seen as inevitable, thus allowing the person who exercises the option to have a lift. Likewise, options can be given at a certain price and exercised when the current pride exceeds the option price. Now this seems reputable enough if you say "you have an option to buy at $10 and if the company does well it will be higher." What you aren't supposed to do is take a $12 stock and offer an open backdated to when it was $10. Shouldn't. But it happens all the time.

Did you know it's not illegal for congress critters to trade on inside information? If you or I did we'd be doing Martha Stewart time.

I know it's common to be myopic about these things, is the term historic exceptionalism? The belief that you are living in an unprecedented period in history, something pivotal, that nothing like this has been before. It's also easy to overlook the sins of the past, especially if you are only familiar with the official story, and therefore consider the dirt and corruption you know of now to be far worse.

These scandals seem to come to a head every three generations, about time when those who were lost hurt the last time around are dying off, the hard lessons oasis from living memory. There's a new generation of suckers who don't know any better yet but they will, oh they well.

The economist Galbraith had an idea of trying to guesstimate the amount of economic activity siphoned ff from the economy due to fraud and deception. It's pretty much a crime tax. It would be interesting if we could even try to back into that calculation across different eras to get a sense of just how bad things are. I'm not sure if it could be done with any real rigor.

Rick said...

(we are allowed to have dissenting views, aren't we?)

Yes. At least in principle - in practice, I can't promise I won't get grumpy. But I have never (yet) elfed any comments except outright spam.

See also jollyreaper's observation, in this thread, about how internet discussions work.


To the actual point, it is certainly true that SF is more about the setting than any particular sort of plot. In that regard it is not at all parallel to mysteries, or 'romance' in the usual more restrictive sense.


I'd argue that exotic / speculative settings are themselves broadly a Romance trope. Having said that, SF certainly has roots also in utopian fiction - dystopians being a now more popular spinoff.

Utopias themselves, I imagine, are a spinoff of allegories, moral fiction. Which makes me think of Tolkien's preference for 'history, real or feigned, with its varied applicability.'


On another note, John Kenneth Galbraith back-coined the term 'bezzle' (from embezzle) for the amount of money that has been embezzled out of the economy, and which is often discovered only when a crisis leaves a lot of embezzlers caught out at once.

Cordwainer said...

SF is Romanticism or a genre of Romanticism which is partly why the books aren't selling most modern SF in my opinion is dry boring and not well written. This though has nothing at all to do with the setting but with what the author is trying to convey and how they are conveying it. The junior SF of the 50's and 60's is more fun to read than some of the schtick I see lately. While the balkanization of SF has been occurring for some time this doesn't explain the lack of book sales. As stated before people still buy the movies and games with SF tropes. As for whether Asia will produce tales based on post-modern Romanticism it already has. Japan, China and India put out some very good science fiction. Japanese anime and Taiwanese action movies are full of SF tropes and a sense of Romanticism. The idea of utopia is a universal one in fact are Shangrila and Xanadu not examples of asian utopias. Admittedly these were expressed to us through European authors with Western biases, but the stories are based on Asian legends. The idea of the Mandate of Heaven itself is very progressive in feel particularly if you look at the writings of Mohism and Neo-Confucianism. Also my alias on this blog Cordwainer Smith wrote some great Science Fiction based on Asian history and mythology. He was the Pentagon's expert on Asian culture for a number of years.

Cordwainer said...

Last time I checked it is illegal for Congressmen to trade insider information and they are rules regarding a hiatus period between working for a corporation or non-governmental institution upon leaving political office. The difference is that these laws are usually not enforced and when they are they tend to be handled by civil courts and not criminal courts. Considering the grey areas that a politician/businessman might encounter it makes sense to some extent but these laws should be more readily enforced and we should have more restrictions regarding special interests, fewer non-government organizations with more centralized governmental control over those organizations and an elevated level of public funding to free the hold corporate special interest have and allow a wider mileu of political representatives than just those from the top economic tiers of our society. THrowing out the one-man-one vote ruling for local elections and going to an SNLVT or plurality vote at the local level would also allow for more representation from minor parties. Some states allow plurality voting due to common law practices in those states constitutions that existed before the U.S. Constitution so it would make sense to make these laws uniform as part of the agreement of contracts clause in the Constitition. Similarly I think the 2nd Amendment's aim to support a well regulated militia gives the Federal Government the power to preempt State Firearms laws. I think creating more sensible and uniform laws in regards to open and concealed carry could be used as a carrot to goad Congress into enacting better gun control laws like universal background checks and high capacity magazine bans. That and do away with the stupid and badly made Assault Weapons ban and concentrate on magazine capacity only.

Anonymous said...

What's wrong with how many cartridges a magazine can hold? If someone has demonstrated that they are a responsible person, (by passing a background check) I see no reason for further regulation. That would be like banning high capacity/extended range fuel tanks for vehicles. Besides, prohibition doesn't work and costs a lot.

Also, I'm assuming we're talking about 30rnd magazines, which most people I work worth consider to be "standard issue" and standard capacity(At least for the AR-15/M-16family of rifles) . I have no idea where the media got the idea that more than 10 is somehow "high capacity". That's just convienent political labelling that everyone seems to be buying into.

Cordwainer said...

Yes that is standard issue for military firearms, but even 30 round magazines work better with a 20 round load since it lowers stresses on the spring and makes it easier for the bolt to chamber a round. I'm a firm believer that if you want to maintain a well regulated militia that you should not ban assault weapons. Also many non-assault style weapons offer the same benefits of high-capacity and rapid fire. The 10-round limit comes from prior legislation that was part of the Brady Bill and was meant to reduce the casualty inducing ability of a cop killer, suicidal shooter, sniper or spray and pray drive by type attacker. I'm not saying that responsible people can't handle firearms but not all gun owners are responsible owners. Also high capacity firearms could increase safety risks in other situations like hunting/outdoor use as well as in self-defense scenarios. I'm not espousing we go to a 10 round limit on all firearms just on High Powered Rifle rounds. That I think would be a fair compromise that would not impact the pistol carbine or cowboy action shooting markets. Restricting pistol rounds to 15 to 20 rounds would be reasonable and have little effect on the gun markets or the "fun factor" and self defense concerns of many gun owners. You are correct that prohibition is expensive and many magazines would be grandfathered due to ex post facto laws but these weapons and magazines would be phased out and become obsolescent over time. Most of the former British Empire has created similar laws and been successful in reducing the use of such weapons. Of course to really reduce gun violence we would have to do as other countries have done. Either restrict use to the point that 2nd amendment rights would become non-existent or tax the ownership of guns to the point where they are a privilege for the wealthy not a right. I believe this would be anathema for most Americans so I only offer the more reasonable solutions for reducing violence. The most reasonable course of action would be to implement the aforementioned reforms.
1)Universal background checks.
2)Some sort of high capacity ban.
3)More uniform carry laws with some sort of required safety and self defense training(at least for concealed carry permits and hunting licenses). If you keep a gun in your home or on your property for self defense requiring such training might be considered an impediment to ownership and a violation of privacy laws. Where as public health and safety laws would supercede in cases where it was necessary to gain a license for public carry.
4)Increases on some gun taxes or a new tax on ammunition to pay for above training as well as an anti-violence campaign in our schools and State Universities.
Personally I would not be adverse to civil liability laws being created to make irresponsible gun owners liable for irresponsible actions, or having High School and College students take monthly risk assessments like they do in the Army. But, I believe those are solutions are best left to Private institutions, States and local governments.

Cordwainer said...

Gotta disagree with Tony on the "one thing or group of many things cannot bring a fundamental change"(maybe he's wording it badly or I am). If that assumption is correct then fundamental changes only come about through small gradual improvements by large groups is a little chicken before the egg. The change has to come about from someone or some promotional groups ideas in the beginning then be adopted on a large scale. If Tony's social group history theory is correct then changes in society would only be bottom up through some sort of collective venture, I don't think peasants had telepathy and the hundredth monkey has to start with one monkey. I defer to Tony a lot when it comes to the physical sciences but your understanding of social science seems suspect.

Great thread and response by Brett by the way very succinct, as for jollyreaper's criticisms most of the studies I've seen suggest that the vast majority of the population is better off then in the 19th century in terms of quality of life and economic freedom. Sanitation and medicine even in Third World countries is vastly improved, peonage still exists but to a lesser degree than in the past and most countries have some type of labor laws even if they are not always properly enforced by their corrupt governments. Most developing countries have (Costa Rica, Haiti, Thailand, Ghana,India, war-torn Spanish Sahara and the Congo) some form of electrical grid and relatively modern communications network. As for the level of government and corporate corruption being more severe today then in the past, I seem to remember seem to remember the Tulip Bulb and Land Tenancy schemes of certain scheiters in the 18th century causing economic fallout that would be considered large by even modern standards and can anyone say Tea Pot Dome Scandal.

J.R. said...

Well I’m late to the party, seeing as this is an old blog post, but hopefully someone will find it. Since I am not quite dedicated enough to read every post on here, I am replying to the original topic.
I think the problem with today’s Science Fiction runs a bit deeper than SF itself. (SF=SCIENCE Fiction) The problem is not a disappearance of science fiction from the media, but rather a shift in cultural consciousness that runs counter to the essence of SF itself. Written SF is held to a different standard then Visual SF, where fancy effects, dizzying action sequences, and big explosions bring in the $$$. Instead, it tends to be subject to literary fashion, which has been increasingly shunning Hope.
That is the problem. As a culture and a world, we are losing hope. The great SF stories of the past, from Asimov’s foundation to Clarke and 2001, even in the midst of tragedy we are offered great hope for the future. We believe that man will advance, and the future will be better than the now. If you think that attitude is “unrealistic” or “impossible”, then you may be part of the problem. Sure, we make fun of the optimism of Star Trek, but as humans, peace, prosperity and progress is what we really want, and SF has the unique ability to imagine it for us.
For some reason, however, that element of hope is very rare these days. You will be hard pressed to find an author anywhere that proposes anything sounding remotely like: “Humanity ultimately overcomes the obstacles, make’s peace with itself, and rules the universe.” Instead, we are left with the decline or destruction of humanity, as in the case of the numerous “post-apocalyptic” stories, or increasingly bizarre dystopias that are the new “human advancement”.
This manifests itself in various ways, from the stagnation of the “TechLevel” (Just read the “guide”) of everyday living in every SF TV series I can think of. (In Battlestar Galactica, for example, were we can warp through space and create AI, but we are still powerless against breast cancer.) Sure technology advances at different rates, (We have IPhones now, but not flying cars) but in far future scenarios it often seems taboo to imagine solutions to today’s problems.
So we are left with two possibilities for the future. We either (A) don’t solve any of our problems, and they destroy us instead. Or (B) we break the light barrier, but everything else stays the same.
I would assign the blame to writer’s lack of Imagination, but maybe it is really because being “hopeful” is just seen as too “western”, “humanist”, “politically incorrect“, “implausible”, or “already been done” by the critics. We know that happy endings sell plenty of movies and vampire books, so I’m sure this isn’t a matter of audience demand.
I think that my theory also explains the shift to fantasy. Whereas SF proposes possible futures, “Fantasy” doesn’t pretend real possibility, so the taboos against hope are not so strong. (Even though we are certainly doomed as a species, we can still be hopeful in our dreams.) That said, there isn’t much hope in fantasy either.
The difference is that “Science” in SF implies some sort of progress, and it is hard to both have great progress and great hopelessness at the same time. In today’s written SF, the hopelessness is winning out, and as a result, imaginative futures are crushed.
It is really a shame. With the age of computers, we have come to a new technological peak, we can see new possibilities and new futures that the older SF could never imagine.
Yes, not all futures are good, but what we seemed to have missed is that not all futures are bad either. To make great, new, science fiction, we can’t re-walk old trails, or simply project today’s problems onto a world with space ships. I hope that writers will realize, as previous generations did, that hopelessness is ultimately a choice, not a destiny. It is time to imagine progress again, because without progress, SF is dead.

Damien Sullivan said...

There's a fair bit of current SF that does have solutions to problems, like mortality or scarcity (plausible or not). Or that sees possibilities in computers... the whole Singularity thing, or AI/uploading in general.

As for hope, it's been noted that SF optimism during the economic good times of the long boom, 1945-1970, when household income doubled, and lots of household gadgets were invented or old ones became more affordable.

Then we got the crises of the 1970s, and the median stagnation since 1980, and fewer gadgets, plus less sense of human-scale 'discovery', even while living in a more SFnal world in various ways. (Computers, cell phones, flying around the world in a day.)

SF may simply reflect the current times. In 1950 your children were obviously going to have a better life than you were, in 2013 not so much.