Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
Stanislaw Lem quit writing SciFi because he saw the early promise of space exploration evaporating to what we see today. It's pretty clear that we're not making much progress, and there isn't much political will to do so, so expansion into space has dropped from the zeitgeist to idle fantasy. It's no surprize that many have turned elsewhere to do their dreaming.
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The zeitgeist might have changed, but I personally still see a lot of potential for space expansion. NASA, the EU and Japan have launched numerous probes to other planets, asteroids and into deep space, probes that can do more science cheaper than a manned mission; private enterprises are in final testing for a space capsule that can rendevouz with the International Space Station; and a private firm wants to mine asteroids. Add to that continuous breakthroughs in material science, bioscience, 3D printing and nanoscale engineering and I think there's more than enough fuel for any scifi writer.
The problem could simply be a combination of: (i) science education is better now than it was in the "golden age" of science fiction, so the most far out ideas just aren't believable to a more educated and skeptical public (e.g. psychic powers, FTL travel, etc.); and (ii) hard science is getting harder as we've begun to understand far more complex phenomenon.
Or maybe it's simply that the rate of scientific advancement has begun accelerating to the point where tomorrow's breakthrough is less easily predicted, making science fiction that much harder to write.