You could have AI generate the next Shakespeare and you'll almost certainly never get noticed amidst the flood of competing books.
That very argument is also AI's downfall when it comes to writing books that'll sell.
Political tedium aside a major factor in the decline of scifi is we live in the future, only it is not the future people were being excited about. As many creatives put it they wanted machines to do the chores and them to do the art, not the other way around.
>I don't want to hear about politics or sexuality
How actually familiar are you with the genre?
The politics and sexuality were always in these stories. They were just more familiar, so they don't seem as self righteous. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a classic example of a story with sexuality and politics in old timey sci fi.
Scifi has always been an exploration of the human condition within certain circumstances created by fantastic technologies. The human condition is made of politics, sexuality, philosophy, ethics, identity...
It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics. There is of course the whole hard/soft sci-fi continuum that determines just how rooted it is, with soft sci-fi being pure fantasy with sci-fi veneer and hard sci-fi being fantasy that's physically plausible.
As actual science and technology advances and as society changes what we imagine will change. Sci-fi imagined today will either deal with AI and what AI is really shaping up to look like or it will imagine futures where AI has been abandoned for some reason (like Dune).
In other words, it allows writers to talk about culture with a technological flair. It's still valuable later because it was really about the culture. The tech also enables wild scenarios, that often come true later on.
That's a superficial view of both Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Sure, there's a lot of schlock out there which essentially functions as this sort of meaningless escapism for the reader. But proper Sci-Fi and Fantasy is philosophical in a way that makes them radically different, if not diametrically opposed.
Fantasy stories typically depict a society in decay, with evil ascendant, and characters who yearn to return to a time of past innocence. It's ultimately backward looking and conservative. When it functions as social commentary, it's a critique of the alienation and impersonality of modernity.
Science Fiction is forward-looking. It asks "what if" questions about the limitations of our modern society by inviting us to view a society that has been freed from those limitations. It challenges our ideas about human nature. It's ultimately progressive, even when it depicts dystopian governments.
Greg Egan is far more interesting and spares you that.
I did wonder about what it would be like embodied as a space probe encountering an alien that had also gone through the same process. That is now the sort of scifi that appeals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth%2C_and_I_Must_...
Opening them up again is a possible creative move. For example 'Dune', a far future where AIs and computers are banned and highly taboo because they caused too much trouble. Or there's alternate paths from the actual past such as steampunk in which we pushed mechanical engines further instead of switching (!) entirely to electronics.
The passage about audio books that works by having a camera above your book and someone remotely reading it to your headphone, is entertaining.
And 3d tv was a success.
Nevertheless, still a great story.
There are many stories to tell in the age of AI. I've yet to find a good Luddite novel that explores how the technology might be taken by the commons, rather than hoarded and made to serve capital (the way governments have been). There's plenty of stories to tell around exploring university of ethics once we have a truly non human intelligence to reckon with. Accelerando spent just as much time exploring the legal implications of non-human intelligences as it did the underlying technology.
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...
Like the movie awards, they've lost their relevance.
We live in a dystopia, we need some utopian ideas, enough of the gloom and doom that ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy..
“. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.” ― Arthur C. Clarke, _2001: A Space Odyssey_
> Agent Smith tells Morpheus that the first, "perfect" Matrix failed because humanity requires suffering, leading them to create a simulation based on the "peak of your civilization"—1999. Smith highlights that the machines actually took over during this era, making it their civilization rather than humanity's. The choice of 1999 provided a stable,, yet inherently flawed, era characterized by 90s technology, post-Cold War optimism, and, crucially, the necessary amount of human misery to prevent the simulation from failing.
Not seeing why human misery is necessary --- that line always felt propaganda-like --- a utopia would arguably be more stable since there would be less striving for change.
Off the top of my head...
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/32973/synchronizing-minds-...
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/67180/here-be-dragons-book...
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.
Personally I think dark and edgy (or variants like pessimistic and bleak, or depressing and fatalistic) is the cheap easy way to look profound.
I think that works because humans have a negativity bias. Bad news feels important. Mockery and drama and calling people out gets social attention. Conflict is thrilling even if the reasons behind it are ridiculous or cliche.
Optimistic works don't get free bonus points from the amygdala, so they have to stand on their own. An uninteresting optimistic work is incredibly dull, even cringey. But a very mediocre boring pessimistic work can still seem deep.
Edit: I'm not saying dark works can't be good. Lots of them are. I'm just saying it's much easier to sell (aesthetically or commercially) a mediocre work if it's dark and pessimistic than if it's bright and optimistic. In brighter settings the flaws show more easily.
Dumbest article I've read in a while.
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.
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?
> [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.
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.
throwpoaster•1h ago
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.
throwpoaster•1h ago
komali2•43m ago