Discussion
Science Fiction is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?
MarkusQ: I would really like to be able to read something and find out that it's about whatever it said it was going to be about, and not bait to trick me into hearing about the author's 1) politics, 2) sexuality, 3) AI use or 4) investment grift.
throwpoaster: 1) Wow, you made a cool thing!2) You should change your thing to agree with my politics!3) Wow, now your thing is super unpopular!4) No, I won't buy it. I never liked your thing anyway.5) <- We are here.
throwpoaster: Especially with Trek.
TomasBjartur: It's a very interesting time to write science fiction. A lot of the greats are very dismissive of modern AI. So there is a lot of room to write things pertinent to the current moment.
october8140: Sci-fi trending down doesn’t mean it’s dying.
api: Good sci-fi has always been few and far between. I love sci-fi, but I also dislike a lot of it because a lot of it's not well written from a prose craft or character depth point of view. When it is, it's probably my favorite genre.I feel like we're lucky to get one outstanding sci-fi book or series per decade.I'll rattle off some notable books and films/TV (or in some cases both) from the last 20 years. Some of these overlap with other genres like horror, lit-fic, etc., but I consider them all sci-fi to some degree. Some are well known and some are obscure.The Expanse, Europa Report, Moon, Primer, The Arrival, Never Let Me Go, For All Mankind (the unofficial Expanse prequel), Sleep Dealer (indie film that stuck with me), The Color Out of Space (2019 film of Lovecraft's story), Banshee Chapter, The Peripheral, Blindsight, Annihilation, I'm sure I could keep going...
throwaway9980: Look on the bright side, you've lived to see 2026 where these four things have collapsed into each other. Like a rainbow refracted into pure white light.
arcticfox: I have a hard time reading sci-fi these days because the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting. I have a hard time seeing much other than computers in the future. Maybe stories like the Hyperion Cantos with the AIs in the TechnoCore largely fighting amongst themselves over the future of humanity are still intersting to me.
bradleyankrom: Every few months I ask some AIs to write a Kilgore Trout short story for me.
ausbah: plenty of great sci-fi to through from the past. most anything on the hugo or nebula awards are great.
rockskon: From a purely economic standpoint, AI is its own worst enemy. Quicker to produce books made even cheaper and even automate-able?You could have AI generate the next Shakespeare and you'll almost certainly never get noticed amidst the flood of competing books.
operatingthetan: It's fun to talk to an LLM yourself, but when I come upon someone else's output my eyes glaze over. I'm fine if an author uses AI to help them outline the book, brainstorm ideas, but I want the actual book to be written by a person.
TomasBjartur: I wrote a story about this: https://tomasbjartur.substack.com/p/that-mad-olympiad
TomasBjartur: I agree. But lots can be written about the future of computers. It's worth trying. Writing is fun at least!
api: Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics. There is of course the whole hard/soft sci-fi continuum that determines just how rooted it is, with soft sci-fi being pure fantasy with sci-fi veneer and hard sci-fi being fantasy that's physically plausible.As actual science and technology advances and as society changes what we imagine will change. Sci-fi imagined today will either deal with AI and what AI is really shaping up to look like or it will imagine futures where AI has been abandoned for some reason (like Dune).
operatingthetan: >Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.In other words, it allows writers to talk about culture with a technological flair. It's still valuable later because it was really about the culture. The tech also enables wild scenarios, that often come true later on.
JoeAltmaier: 99 percent of everything is crap. SF is no worse than anything else?
Finnucane: I was part of the NY sf publishing scene in 1990s. In those days the genre felt like a constraining box. The commercial successes of the 1970s and 80s, and the corporatization of publishing in general, meant that there were limits, in literary and conceptual ways. It's funny that he mentions Jonathan Lethem--I saw Jonathan a lot in those days. How to break out of genre was a frequent topic of conversation. It really seemed the only way up was out.
zouhair: I stopped reading Sci-Fi, it's just all dystopia and even when it's about a Utopia it's mostly about how it crumbles like with the Terra Ignota Series.We live in a dystopia, we need some utopian ideas, enough of the gloom and doom that ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy..
readthenotes1: I haven't read great from the awards long before they became so obviously exploited.Like the movie awards, they've lost their relevance.
crooked-v: >scifi>I don't want to hear about politics or sexualityHow actually familiar are you with the genre?
FpUser: I am a read addict. Love SF. There is so much hood stuff out there already that it will last more than a lifetime to read. So I am not really concerned
mosura: Yeah, with who is doing space exploration being right up there. If it is us it isn’t going to be in our organic bodies, and this renders so much of it irrelevant. Wider society will likely pigeon hole their thinking on that next to concerns about the heat death of the universe, but for a lot of us it is disappointing.I did wonder about what it would be like embodied as a space probe encountering an alien that had also gone through the same process. That is now the sort of scifi that appeals.
WillAdams: The problem is, tales of the land of the happy nice people doesn't make for much of a story, or“. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.” ― Arthur C. Clarke, _2001: A Space Odyssey_
zouhair: That's just lack of imagination.
MathMonkeyMan: I haven't gone deep on enough things to know whether science fiction is worse than anything else in that regard. But science fiction is largely trope-ridden young adult male power fantasy emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually bereft pulp. It's also my favorite genre.
ivraatiems: I'd really enjoy a return to classic space opera. I think a world where technologies like AI actually work out okay to some extent is a) closer to fiction than the alternative, and b) more interesting than another dystopia.I'd enjoy a swashbuckling noblebright adventures-in-space thing way more than yet another treatise on Technology Bad right about now.That said, I don't know that I think sci-fi as a genre is dying per se. There are a lot of really prominent and popular science fiction pieces coming out today. Shows/books like Black Mirror and The Expanse, for example.
api: The prevailing narrative is that the optimism collapsed because the real future didn't turn out like we hoped, but I don't think that's it. A lot of very optimistic sci-fi was written right after two world wars. I think it's more of a stylistic conceit. If it's not dark and edgy, it's not profound.Personally I think dark and edgy (or variants like pessimistic and bleak, or depressing and fatalistic) is the cheap easy way to look profound.I think that works because humans have a negativity bias. Bad news feels important. Mockery and drama and calling people out gets social attention. So loading up a story with these things is a short cut to making it look deep and serious.Optimistic works don't get free negativity points from the amygdala, so they have to be better than pessimistic works to overcome that. Pessimistic works get a free pass.
robotresearcher: How will you know?
operatingthetan: If my eyes glaze over! For now output has a very programatic feel. Maybe not later, who knows?
robotresearcher: It's an interesting moment we're at. Circles of trust are going to be really important. The internet is gonna be assumed-bot soon. TikTok is pretty much there already.
whynotmaybe: Barjavel's "Ravage" written in 1943 completely missed the computer revolution.The passage about audio books that works by having a camera above your book and someone remotely reading it to your headphone, is entertaining.And 3d tv was a success.Nevertheless, still a great story.
readthenotes1: Perhaps instead, the complaint should be that the reader should not be lectured about politics or sexuality in a ham-handed self-righteous insertion completely irrelevant to the rest of the story.
ahhhhnoooo: Well there goes Orson Scott Card, Asimov, Heinlein, Orwell, etc.The politics and sexuality were always in these stories. They were just more familiar, so they don't seem as self righteous. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a classic example of a story with sexuality and politics in old timey sci fi.
awesome_dude: Or the matrix take -> Agent Smith tells Morpheus that the first, "perfect" Matrix failed because humanity requires suffering, leading them to create a simulation based on the "peak of your civilization"—1999. Smith highlights that the machines actually took over during this era, making it their civilization rather than humanity's. The choice of 1999 provided a stable,, yet inherently flawed, era characterized by 90s technology, post-Cold War optimism, and, crucially, the necessary amount of human misery to prevent the simulation from failing.
defrost: You've just described much of the "Golden Age of Sci Fi" - as peers have pointed out, Heinlein et al rarely shut up about identity and politics.
komali2: Do we need to keep reminding people that Star Trek depicted the first interracial kiss on television? Star Trek was always woke, over corporatization has just been sanding all political and social messages down to a corporate approved interpretation, aka boring, stupid, and not nearly inflammatory enough.
rockskon: While I personally agree, I figure an economic argument bypasses the often recited "but AI will get better!"That very argument is also AI's downfall when it comes to writing books that'll sell.
komali2: Just go read engineering documentation about the Apollo flights then. What you're describing has never been sci-fi - you're falling in that camp of people the article described that are demanding authors not write above a fifth grade level.Scifi has always been an exploration of the human condition within certain circumstances created by fantastic technologies. The human condition is made of politics, sexuality, philosophy, ethics, identity...
chongli: It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics.That's a superficial view of both Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Sure, there's a lot of schlock out there which essentially functions as this sort of meaningless escapism for the reader. But proper Sci-Fi and Fantasy is philosophical in a way that makes them radically different, if not diametrically opposed.Fantasy stories typically depict a society in decay, with evil ascendant, and characters who yearn to return to a time of past innocence. It's ultimately backward looking and conservative. When it functions as social commentary, it's a critique of the alienation and impersonality of modernity.Science Fiction is forward-looking. It asks "what if" questions about the limitations of our modern society by inviting us to view a society that has been freed from those limitations. It challenges our ideas about human nature. It's ultimately progressive, even when it depicts dystopian governments.
komali2: Imo good sci fi was never really meant to be a technical description of cool technology, but more about how humans interact in specific scenarios dictated by the existence of certain technologies. Star Trek was less about the intricacies of the warp drive and more about "what if humans could interact with hundreds of unique cultures," or "what could human society look like without scarcity?"There are many stories to tell in the age of AI. I've yet to find a good Luddite novel that explores how the technology might be taken by the commons, rather than hoarded and made to serve capital (the way governments have been). There's plenty of stories to tell around exploring university of ethics once we have a truly non human intelligence to reckon with. Accelerando spent just as much time exploring the legal implications of non-human intelligences as it did the underlying technology.
Frotag: Funny timing, I was just thinking about this over dinner while scrolling the wiki list on [clarke / seiun / nebula] awards for the thousandth time.> [Post-sci-fi is] free to allow the science fictional elements of their stories develop slowly, to emerge only in the latter half of the text, or to remain an isolated thread in a larger tapestry, all of which are anathema to genre-machine publishing, which generally wants its spaceships front-and-centre early on, to reassure readers they’re getting what they paid for.This has always bugged me. There's often an interesting synopsis like (below), but the actual story begins with ~200 pages of backstories. And altogether the actual problem / developments / solution could probably be detailed in a tenth of the page count after subtracting all the character drama.> "When a signal is discovered that seems to come from far beyond our solar system [...] What follows is an eye-opening journey out to the stars to the most awesome encounter in human history"But this synopsis is actually from a well known 80s novel [0] so I don't think this slow-burn type of writing is unique to post scifi. To be clear, I don't have a problem with character-focused stories (I've read a ton!), I just wish they were advertised that way.At this point I'm finding new / unusual stuff to read by looking for the least liked books whenever recommendations come up. Anyways rant over. On a more positive note, the author's post has put of new names / titles on my reading list. I think next read will probably be something by Ishiguro:> [The Buried Giant] follows an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no-one is able to retain long-term memories. The couple have dim memories of having had a son, and they decide to travel to a neighbouring village to seek him out.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)
WillAdams: Well, Ursula K. LeGuin did author _Always Coming Home_, which I quite enjoyed, but it's a very different book which only seems to have a niche audience.
WillAdams: The thing about _The Matrix_ is that the world-building was much more interesting than the premise (to make a world in which comicbook superheroes made sense).Not seeing why human misery is necessary --- that line always felt propaganda-like --- a utopia would arguably be more stable since there would be less striving for change.
modeless: Star Trek TNG was an interesting utopia. I want more of that. (Not more Star Trek, more utopia sci-fi).
WillAdams: But it kept getting undermined every other episode, to say nothing of things such as Section 31.
