Is Science Fiction dead?

[Rizla]

The Death of Science Fiction

Is it dead? I can't work it out. You only have to read these boards to see how many fans like Science-fiction, but where is the new science-fiction? Look in the bookstore under the now tiny fantasy / science-fiction section, and you'll see it's 90% epic wannabe-Tolkien fantasy. Virtually no Science-fiction, and what I do see there is old or spiritless.

There is good science-fiction out there, but it's not recognized. Look at the author of the above link, a very successful Canadian author named Robert J. Sawyer. No offense Mr. Sawyer, you seem like a good guy, but I tried one of your books and I didn't finish it. Whereas I found Darwinia by the little known Robert Charles Wilson and was blown away. I then found Spin by the same author and was reminded of the greats, of Childhood's End. Yet he has little recognition.

So what happened? Did people stop believing in the future? We went to the Moon, or America did anyway, and never went back. Has our love affair with the final frontier ended because you can't make any money out of it?

[jgaiser]

First off.. The article you're linking to was written 17 years ago.

Second.. There's plenty of good science fiction being written these days. *My* bookstore has aisles upon aisles of science fiction and of course fantasy. I think both you and Robert J. Sawyer aren't trying hard enough.

[mcrow24]

SF is certainly not dead. All of our B&N stores here in the Minneapolis area have large SF/Fantasy sections. We have one indie start that's quite large and carries only SF & Fantasy novels.

[caleb72]

Originally Posted by Rizla

Whereas I found Darwinia by the little known Robert Charles Wilson and was blown away. I then found Spin by the same author and was reminded of the greats, of Childhood's End. Yet he has little recognition.

I'm not sure what constitutes little known but Wilson has been nominated and has won several awards over the years including a Hugo for Spin.

[Xanthe]

Yup, that is an out-of-date article. Like any genre, the interest in SF waxes and wanes; that might have been written during one of SF's lulls. Though IIRC, the Borders that I went to during that time had a humongous SciFi/Fantasy section that was heavily SciFi.

I think, too, that the focus of SciFi periodically shifts. There's the emphasis on the whiz-bang new technology, then the emphasis shifts to how human- or alien-kind is dealing with the technological and social changes. Sort of like how we had the movies where the scientists and their tech could solve even the most horrendous alien monster attack, and then we get something like Star Trek which told us that maybe all alien monsters aren't really monsters (or that alien) after all.

I think that Sawyer either has forgotten or doesn't know that a lot of scifi writers have done their early work writing Star Trek novels - the same novels that include all those characters he is lamenting that have gone missing from the films. And though they were "...spending what are traditionally one's most productive years turning out work in the mold of other writers, instead of developing their own voices..." many of them went on to become successful scifi writers in their own right and developed their own voices.

I looked up Sawyer's DOB, which is 1960. By the time he was in high school, the "big three" of the scifi world had already become accepted as part of the literature curriculum in those grades. That would explain why most people are more familiar with their work than with current scifi authors.

Just thinking back to when I was a kid, my library didn't break out scifi as a separate category with its own shelves; those books were mixed in with the general fiction. I remember discovering Poul Anderson by accident.

[Fbone]

My public library stopped buying science fiction books. They also removed many of those they had. Now they have 3 little shelves left. When I inquired the staff said no one reads them. They still purchase fantasy, vampire and paranormal items but not the hard or military style sci-fi.

[dworth]

My local bookshop in the UK has a big sci-fi section and there's always new stuff coming out. Maybe you're looking the wrong places. Certainly in the UK, sci-fi has never been healthier. Iain M Banks, China Mieville, Peter F Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds have all had new titles out in the past twelve months, to name but a few. Then there's the military sci-fi juggernaut that is the Warhammer 40,000 universe that seems to produce new titles every few months (albeit of widely varying quality).

[DixieGal]

I think that scifi, along with everything except children's books, is going through growing pains while adapting to the e-marketplace. Authors are attempting to self-publish. Publisher are more skittish and sticking to established bestselling writers. Anything new is risky.

In my opinion, the best scifi is in the monthly magazines, like Asimov's. That is where authors try out new themes that they may be contelating turning into a novel.

Hopefully the sexy vampire fad will pass quickly, and we can get back to some good speculative fiction.

[pwalker8]

As said above, SF waxes and wanes. There is a reason that many mid-list authors write in a number of different genres.

When I first started buying SF, back in the mid 70's (I started reading several years earlier when I was in grade school), SF&F was under going a big revival, you had such authors as Roger Zelazny, James Hogan, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Michael Moorcock and a host of others. This burst lasted up through the mid 80's and then by the early 90's, the market for SF&F decreased quite a bit.

It was still being written and there were still some very good active authors, David Weber and Lois Bujold for example, but the number of new books definitely dropped quite a bit with only a few publishers really pushing it (Baen, Tor). The 00's have seen the paranormal SF start to dominate the book shelves partially driven by the success of Laurell Hamilton's books starting from the mid 90s.

Obviously it doesn't break out nearly as cleanly as there is a lot of overlap. You still have some top authors writing who have been writing continuously since the 80's. There is quite a bit of hard SF and military SF being written - David Weber, Jack Campbell, David Drake are writers who come to mind, and there are certainly others. But the trends come and go.

I think it will be interesting to see how things break out in the ebook world with SF&F. There is a pretty big group of writers, who have enough fan appeal and name recognition that they could easily make it as an independent like some of the music groups do now. It should be interesting.

[crich70]

Also Science Fiction and Fantasy are two sides of the same coin. The first Science Fiction story was written several thousand years ago and dealt with a trip to the moon. Now days it is seen more as Fantasy due to some of the elements in the story, but it was in accord with knowledge at the time it was written. Science Fiction deals with what could be while Fantasy usually deals with what can't be and of course in Science Fiction you push a button to do x while in Fantasy you wave a wand to do it.

[pdurrant]

Short form science fiction is doing well.

The established magazines (Analog, Asimov's) have seen falling circulation, but there are several other magazines out there, several electronic-only ones.

There's the UK's Interzone, the semi-pro Clarkesworld and even the free Hub Magazine, Clarkesworld.

The longer form does seem to have fewer titles coming out — paranormal is certainly the current fashion, and epic fantasy is still going strong.

But I don't see it dying out anytime soon.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Although the article laments the influence of media--mostly movies--as participating in the decline of SF--always considered as only legitimate in book form--the dated article obviously couldn't see into the future of media, and so couldn't predict that the Star Trek series that it considered dead would, in fact, continue on for several more movies and do stunningly well.

In fact, since STVI's debut in 1991, we have had some excellent SF representations in media: 12 Monkeys, The Matrix, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Time Traveler's Wife, The Thirteenth Floor, Jurassic Park, Ghost In The Shell, The Fifth Element, Dark City, The Truman Show, A.I., Moon, Vanilla Sky, Minority Report, Cowboy Bebop, Serenity, Solaris...

Sure, there were many others that fit the "90% of SF is crap" quote (and we can argue which movies fit into the 90 or the 10 percentile 'til the cows come home), but the point is that there is plenty of good SF in media, and many people who see those movies will want to check out books in similar genres at some point.

But I think the most important thing to note is that, as indicated above, SF isn't just books. In my area, SF shelves are shrinking fast. But as I can always pull out my Firefly or Farscape DVDs and have a ball--something that wasn't as readily available in 1991--I'd say that SF is still doing very well. It's just shifting its presentation priorities lately, skewing more towards material like movies, TV shows and other digital content that's available online.

Does this bode well or badly for books? I can't tell. I do think digital books will come to dominate printed books soon... on the other hand, the lack of security afforded ebooks will make it very hard for all but the highest-list authors to be profitable, so we might see a decline in available ebooks until they can become more secure.

But until that problem is worked out, the media that have already created working sales models--TV, movies and DVDs--will carry the torch for SF for the immediate future. Nothing wrong with that.

[Penforhire]

I don't seem to have a shortage of recent SF novels ahead of me to read.

Crich's point is valid though. Speculative fiction can tilt either way, SF or fantasy. Sure, there are "hard SF" stories whose educational, factual content, and "raison d'etre" would be lost in a fantasy translation but I read fiction for the stories, not the facts. The genious of great fiction is in the characters and how I get immersed into the tale, regardless of genre.

Maybe you can question whether or not we're in a golden age of SF, in decline, or at the start of a swell. That has more to do with society's relationship to science and scientists, out of authors' control.

We live in an age of miracles (cell phones, nuclear power, space flight, internet) where the public has very little understanding of the effort or personalities of the people responsible for bringing us this lifestyle. I think of it as the corporate age. Instead of celebrating Thomas Watson we admire IBM. Instead of thinking of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard we recognize HP or Agilent. Instead of mourning the death of Dr Arnold Beckman (who funded Shockley's transistors) we follow the fate of Silicon Valley.

Funny how we supposedly elevate the individual in America but that small sample of our founding fathers of technology is hardly recognized by people today. We bow to the corporations. They endure after the founders pass on. Of course it is unknown yet whether that will be true of Apple without Steve Jobs but it seems likely.

Anyway, that change in how the public imagination is captured, by corporations not adventurous individuals, probably dominates the SF scene.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

Maybe you can question whether or not we're in a golden age of SF, in decline, or at the start of a swell. That has more to do with society's relationship to science and scientists, out of authors' control.

Very true: Society has a different relationship with science than it had during most of the 20th century; it isn't considered the "miracle" that it once was, and after a century of science giving us pollution, health problems, conspicuous consumption, landfills and keeping up with the "cutting edge," science and technology have lost much of their public sheen. This has even tainted new SF, leaving the general feeling that even the most advanced technologies "probably have something wrong with them, even if we don't know what yet." And it's certainly the reason for the rise of steampunk, a throwback to a more innocent age.

Personally, I think authors could exert more control over that relationship; it depends on what they write, and how well they write it.

[JSWolf]

Star Trek books are still quite good SF.