Quote:
Originally Posted by BeccaPrice
I've run into a couple of blogs lately on the future of SF/F:
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I'd love to read any comments people here would have.
Me, other than select authors, I've pretty much stopped reading most SFF because it's all so grim. And it seems like there are two kinds of mysteries these days: cute cozies that relate to cats, bookstores, and/or cooking, or antiheroes and grimness.
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I suspect we're seeing the death-throes of SF (not SFF, though) as a genre, because "
science fiction is the one really distinctive form of fiction created by industrial civilization. ... the sales of science fiction novels peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then began a decline that still continues, and a genre that had once exercised a potent gravitational force on the collective imagination turned back into just another option in the smorgasbord of mass-produced popular entertainment."
I just spent over a half-hour looking for a chart I'd seen once, showing a list of popular/award-winning SF books, with Year Written on one axis and Year Setting on another, and noting that they keep getting closer and closer to now... and may be moving backwards.
(I'd thought the chart was an XKCD, but apparently I was wrong.)
Asimov's Foundation series are set a couple-thousand years in the future. The Forever War spans thousands of years. 2001 was set a few decades in the future, in a time that's already past. Cyberpunk novels are set as close to tomorrow as they can get. And now we're getting steampunk: science fiction based on times already gone.
We don't feel comfortable speculating about the future anymore. We know that any book set 20-50 years from now will quickly become anachronistic, made obsolete by whatever tech or social changes the author missed; books set a thousand years in the future but somehow holding to 20th century white-middle-class-American social mores and family structures no longer seem remotely plausible.
And that's all a depressing set of thoughts, so have a
happy picture.