Whither SF?

[BeccaPrice]

I've run into a couple of blogs lately on the future of SF/F:

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/another_word_05_12/

by Elizabeth Bear, which spawned this by Abi Sutherland on Making Light:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight...79.html#013879

Which spawned these thoughts on how ebooks are changing the future of SF as a genre by Charlie Stross

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/

which led to this link on why so many people are reading YA these days rather than litfic.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...804387216.html

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.

[fjtorres]

We have a whole thread on whether/why SF is pessimistic floating round these parts. I'm commented-out on that side of it.

The Grossman article I like and I have no big beef with (Except the supermarket quip. Supermarkets don't carry *my* kind of fiction).

Now, SF is my go-to reading; 90% or more. I'll sample anything good that hits me on the head but SF I'll ferret out no matter where it may try to hide.

Picking on Harlan Ellison and the New Wave? A bit dated, I think; that's, what?, three paradigms back? Literally the 60's. Two full generations, for sure. Not what I would consider cutting edge SF. (shrug)

More importantly, SF is too broad a field too be encapsulated by any "movement" or literary fad.

Go back to the height of the New Wave lyrical SF fad and you'll still find Harry Harrison's STAINLESS STEEL RAT and BILL, THE GALACTIC HERO. Or Keith Laumer's RETIEF. The 70's gave us a zillion Tolkien wannabe's but they also gave us Brian Daley's CORAMONDE duo. And the first of the many MYTH-ADVENTURES.

At any point in time you can find hard SF, soft SF, (a bit of) Space Opera, (lots of) Adventure SF. Fantasy, Horror, hybrids. And new variants; cyberpunk, steampunk, alternate histories, superheroes... with more to come.
The good stuff is not hard to find; not least because SF has *always* been about the backlist as much as the new releases.

So, on that front I'll have to beg to differ with the estimable Ms Bear.
From a reader's point of view, the field is doing fine.

And ebooks are just the icing on the cake, opening up the backlist and making it easier to track down neglected jewels from the likes of Chad Oliver, Ward Moore, Zenna Henderson, and all the less-than-highly prolific practitioners of decades past.

We're entering a golden age of availability for the serious student of SF&F.

[fantasyISbetter]

I'm a lover of speculative fiction- and I am not running out of old and new books to read. There are plenty of choices and varieties. I think Elizabeth Bear (who will always be dear to my heart for Carnival and New Amsterdam) was just giving a little lecture to SF authors to "cheer up dammit!". And Charles Stross' blog that SF might be getting lost in the e-libraries of the world make me think- why is that so bad? I find new books and authors by following discussions on sites like this, and by doing searches in many, many review sites. I have read and loved a wide variety of spec fic- Connie Willis, Mary Doria Russell, Kage Baker, Daniel Suarez (Daemon), Jasper Fforde, F Paul Wilson, Kristine Katherine Rusch, Richard K Morgan, Sean McMullen, George RR Martin, Ian Tregillis, Amanda Downum, Neil Gaiman, Mira Grant, Harry Connolly, blah blah blah. Not running out of possibilities any time soon.

[jgaiser]

Somebody's favorite genre has been invaded by the new kids and they're not happy.

As a dedicated SF&F reader, this has got to be the greatest time in 50 years of reading for me. So much availability to backlists, so many new authors, so many choices in whatever sub-genre you like. Some dark, some light, all of it fun to read.

Sorry Ms. Bear. I disagree.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

I've run into a couple of blogs lately on the future of SF/F:

...

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.

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.

[jgaiser]

Robert J. Sawyer has a take on this from 2008.

Over in the Fictionwise Yahoo! Groups newsgroup, science-fiction ebook author Darrell Bain has noted that whereas SF titles used to dominate the bestsellers lists at Fictionwise.com (and, indeed, my own work has hit number-one on various lists there in the past), the current top-ten list has only one SF title on it. Darrell asks, "What's happened to all the science-fiction readers"? My response:

The statistician in me says there may have been no reduction in the number of science-fiction readers at Fictionwise, but, rather, as Fictionwise has added depth in more categories, and now that people other than technophilic early adopters (who tend to be SF readers) are widely using ebook technology, larger numbers of readers of other types of fiction have arrived on the scene, overwhelming the SF sales. Note, for instance, the large number of Harlequin Romances now available at Fictionwise.

Alternatively, the fact that there are more SF writers published by major New York houses giving away their electronic content under Creative Commons licenses than there are writers in any other genre of fiction, plus the fact that SF publishers like Baen and now Tor are giving away ebooks by major writers, means the market for actually selling science-fiction ebooks may have become depressed (not that it was ever very big to begin with). Most of those giving away free content in the SF field do it to drive sales of PRINT editions of the same or similar works, not to drive traffic to ebook merchants.

[Joykins]

Sf and Romance readers were the early adopters of ebooks; the romance fans came a little later but are (and were) more numerous than the sf fans. (I read both)

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

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."

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.

[Ninjalawyer]

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.

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.

[xg4bx]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

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.

i'm 34. if you had told me 20 years ago that i'd be using a pocket computer by the time i was 30 i'd have called you a nut.

dr. kaku theorizes that at the rate of advancement in computing the next 50-100 years may see the uploading of human consciousness and essentially the end of death. we're on the cusp of being able to regrow limbs and organs. etc.

sorry, but the gee-whiz spaceships and aliens simply aren't as exciting as what i see around me every day.


edit-2 days ago:

Bionic eyes activate! Microchip gives sight to the blind

"A tiny 3mm microchip has given vision back to the blind. Scientists and doctors in Oxford implanted a new “bionic eye” microchip in the eyes of two blind individuals last month during a grueling eight-hour operation. The chips were placed in the back of the eyes and connected with electrodes. Weeks later, both individuals — Chris James and Robin Millar — have regained ‘useful vision’ and are well on their way to recognizing faces and seeing once again, reports Sky News.

“Since switching on the device I am able to detect light and distinguish the outlines of certain objects which is an encouraging sign,” said James. “I have even dreamt in very vivid colour for the first time in 25 years so a part of my brain which had gone to sleep has woken up! I feel this is incredibly promising for future research and I’m happy to be contributing to this legacy.”

Both patients, previously blind, were able to immediately detect light after the chip/sensor (which isn’t entirely unlike the cameras in in your smartphone) was turned on, as well as detect white objects in a dark background. Their eyes have been improving since. Though they’ll never regain color vision, the chip (designed by a company called Retina Implant) is fitted with 1,500 pixels which pick up light and transmit it to the brain. It gives patients a ”field of vision is limited to a window the size of a CD case held at arm’s length.”


Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-te...#ixzz1u4mx10Iu

[fjtorres]

The last days of SF? Not a subject I'll debate.
But, points of fact:
- Asimov's Foundation timeline extends *tens* of thousands of years into the future. 25,000+
- Plenty of current SF has settings well beyond "a few hundred years". At least three ongoing series from the likes of Weber, Drake, Bujold, etc are set thousands of years in the future.
- The plurality of SF has *always* been set in the present or near future; just ask Dick Seaton and Susan Calvin.
- SF is *not* about technical extrapolation or predicting the future; it is about exploring ideas in a rationalist fashion.
- Setting is just a storytelling element. It doesn't deine the story, much less the genre or the field.
- SF is all around us; just because the marketers don't trumpet it doesn't mean it isn't blooming.

[elcreative]

Originally Posted by xg4bx

i'm 34. if you had told me 20 years ago that i'd be using a pocket computer by the time i was 30 i'd have called you a nut.

dr. kaku theorizes that at the rate of advancement in computing the next 50-100 years may see the uploading of human consciousness and essentially the end of death. we're on the cusp of being able to regrow limbs and organs. etc.

sorry, but the gee-whiz spaceships and aliens simply aren't as exciting as what i see around me every day.

Whilst I take your point about what's happening with real tech, your comment about "gee-whiz spaceships and aliens..." is just as insulting and ill-informed as Margaret Atwood's comments that "she didn't write SF as there were no spaceships and squids..." Star Wars, B-movies, the pulps from the 1920s-40s and other similar material are only a part of SF... and not the major part...

There is much quality material using SF tropes to explore the human condition and look at alternatives to where we are now not to forget the classic "if this goes on..." theme amongst others...

[Apache]

Some Sci Fi is written to explore current humanity and society.
Take Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep for example.
Apache

[Connallmac]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Star Wars, B-movies, the pulps from the 1920s-40s and other similar material are only a part of SF... and not the major part...

There is much quality material using SF tropes to explore the human condition and look at alternatives to where we are now not to forget the classic "if this goes on..." theme amongst others...

Star Wars isn't SciFi. It's got more in common with Arthurian Romance than it does science fiction.

[pwalker8]

Authors and commentators have been saying that SF&F has been dying since the 80's. The odd thing is that when I went by B&N yesterday, the SF section looked just as full. SF&F has changed quite a bit since I first started reading and it does seem to go through cycles - Tolkien knockoffs, Middle ages based fantasy, hard SF, military SF, urban fantasy, cyper-punk, vampire/werewolf fantasies, the list goes on and on.

One thing that I've noticed is that SF&F publishing especially seems to be personality based. Lin Carter, Lester Del Rey's wife Judy-Lynn Del Rey, Jim Baen and several others have all been big in nurturing the SF&F categories and bringing in new authors. I'm not sure who is the current equivalent of those editors/publishers.

It seems to me that the biggest challenge for the future will be how new talent is brought into the field and taught the craft. Baen use to pair new authors with older, established authors. Most new authors at least need a good editor.