Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?

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. That's why I wanted you to change it! 5) <- We are here.

october8140

Sci-fi trending down doesn’t mean it’s dying.

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.

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.

bradleyankrom

Every few months I ask some AIs to write a Kilgore Trout short story for me.

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.

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...

mikkupikku

Troubling, but I'll worry about it after I run out of 20th century slop to read.

ausbah

plenty of great sci-fi to through from the past. most anything on the hugo or nebula awards are great.

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

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..

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.

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.

nevster

There must be some law about articles proclaiming X is dead. Does anyone know of one? Something along the lines of "Any article declaring X is dead is always wrong and just trying to sell you something" Dumbest article I've read in a while.

daoboy

Perhaps I'm getting the wrong impression, but it seems like this author is either ignorant of a lot of very successful contemporary scifi or is just taking a narrow view of the genre based on their own preferences. AI and independent publishing certainly make it harder to sort the wheat from the chaff, but the ubiquity and convenience of aquiririg reading materials has never been better in all of human history. I will never get caught up with all the scifi books I want to read, and nothing could make me happier.

awesome_dude

It's sad because there's so much more "out there" for us to discover and wonder about, with "out there" referring to anything from the bottom of the deep blue sea, to the far reaches of our galaxy, and everything (literally) in between, including our inner selves Scifi, like most literature, was supposed to give us dreams about what we could do with what we found, or even dream about what is there to be found (IMO), so its demise leads us to a point where we're no longer dreaming?

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 has become any more or less common with 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 my 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)

btown

I don't know what sales numbers look like, but from my perspective as a casual reader who's been trying to keep up with Hugo Award nominees of recent years... science fiction may not be trendy on BookTok, but it's far from dead. Sure, fantasy has "corrupted" the Hugos, but there's plenty of hard science fiction, and science fiction that grapples with societal questions at large. Arkady Martine's Memory Called Empire and Desolation Called Peace , both Hugo winners, are incredibly thoughtful depictions of societies on the verge of disruption from new technology. Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars , a 2022 Hugo nominee, while somewhat of a sci-fi-fantasy genre crossover, is both harrowing and exhilarating in its discussion of gender through a speculative lens (content warnings apply). If you're looking for whether innovative science fiction is being adapted into popular media - the Three Body Problem (2015 Hugo winner) and the Murderbot series (won the Hugo most recently in 2021) are both being adapted. Andy Weir's post- Martian works continue to be hyped, if not quite adapted yet. The fanbase for Tamsyn Muir's Ninth series is rabid in the best possible way - and while ostensibly centered on necromancy, it's remarkably high in sci-fi hardness. And outside of traditional publishing - democratized writing challenges like https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/ , genre-crossing serial sci-fi like the works of Wildbow, and fanfiction in general (I continue to follow and adore the To The Stars , a Madoka fanfic which juxtaposes magic with a spacefaring future humanity, with masterful worldbuilding) continue to thrive. Traditional publishing houses may indeed be in crisis, but contrary to the original article's assertion, there is no shortage of ideas.

mancerayder

One recent phenomenon for me was falling in love with Tchaikovsky's Children of Time trilogy, which explores very long-term colony ships sent out with thousands of cryogenically sleeping people of various skillsets, and planets seeded with a virus that artificially causes non-human beings to develop a certain kind of intelligence of being able to transmit complex ideas to each other, leading to technological evolution. There's so much depth to this series it's breaktaking. So when I finished the books and explored his fantasy series (City of Lost Chances?), I had to check three times that I in fact had the same author. It's full of regurgitated fantasy tropes, the writing and characters seem simple, and there's a forced world building with what feels like an infinite and boring back story, with no movement to justify it. Maybe the author was trying to capitalize on the fantasy popularity? His sci-fi is otherwise genius.