I'd really enjoy a return to classic space opera. I think a world where technologies like AI actually work out okay to some extent is a) closer to fiction than the alternative, and b) more interesting than another dystopia.
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.
The prevailing narrative is that the optimism collapsed because the real future didn't turn out like we hoped, but I don't think that's it. A lot of very optimistic sci-fi was written right after two world wars. I think it's more of a stylistic conceit. If it's not dark and edgy, it's not profound.
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.
It's a very interesting time to write science fiction. A lot of the greats are very dismissive of modern AI. So there is a lot of room to write things pertinent to the current moment.
It's fun to talk to an LLM yourself, but when I come upon someone else's output my eyes glaze over. I'm fine if an author uses AI to help them outline the book, brainstorm ideas, but I want the actual book to be written by a person.
It's an interesting moment we're at. Circles of trust are going to be really important. The internet is gonna be assumed-bot soon. TikTok is pretty much there already.
I have a hard time reading sci-fi these days because the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting. I have a hard time seeing much other than computers in the future. Maybe stories like the Hyperion Cantos with the AIs in the TechnoCore largely fighting amongst themselves over the future of humanity are still intersting to me.
> the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting.
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.
Yeah, with who is doing space exploration being right up there. If it is us it isn’t going to be in our organic bodies, and this renders so much of it irrelevant. Wider society will likely pigeon hole their thinking on that next to concerns about the heat death of the universe, but for a lot of us it is disappointing.
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.
Iain Banks still reigns supreme. Throw a couple LLMs in a chat together and they sound similar to his conversations between intelligences (particularly in Excession).
Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.
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).
>Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.
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.
Perhaps I'm getting the wrong impression, but it seems like this author is either ignorant of a lot of very successful contemporary scifi or is just taking a narrow view of the genre based on their own preferences.
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.
I stopped reading Sci-Fi, it's just all dystopia and even when it's about a Utopia it's mostly about how it crumbles like with the Terra Ignota Series.
We live in a dystopia, we need some utopian ideas, enough of the gloom and doom that ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy..
> 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.
I was part of the NY sf publishing scene in 1990s. In those days the genre felt like a constraining box. The commercial successes of the 1970s and 80s, and the corporatization of publishing in general, meant that there were limits, in literary and conceptual ways. It's funny that he mentions Jonathan Lethem--I saw Jonathan a lot in those days. How to break out of genre was a frequent topic of conversation. It really seemed the only way up was out.
There must be some law about articles proclaiming X is dead. Does anyone know of one? Something along the lines of "Any article declaring X is dead is always wrong and just trying to sell you something"
It's sad because there's so much more "out there" for us to discover and wonder about, with "out there" referring to anything from the bottom of the deep blue sea, to the far reaches of our galaxy, and everything (literally) in between, including our inner selves
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?
I am a read addict. Love SF. There is so much hood stuff out there already that it will last more than a lifetime to read. So I am not really concerned
I would really like to be able to read something and find out that it's about whatever it said it was going to be about, and not bait to trick me into hearing about the author's 1) politics, 2) sexuality, 3) AI use or 4) investment grift.
The fact this reflects the subject matter in question is an irony surely lost on the author as well.
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.
Look on the bright side, you've lived to see 2026 where these four things have collapsed into each other. Like a rainbow refracted into pure white light.
Perhaps instead, the complaint should be that the reader should not be lectured about politics or sexuality in a ham-handed self-righteous insertion completely irrelevant to the rest of the story.
Well there goes Orson Scott Card, Asimov, Heinlein, Orwell, etc.
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.
Good sci-fi has always been few and far between. I love sci-fi, but I also dislike a lot of it because a lot of it's not well written from a prose craft or character depth point of view. When it is, it's probably my favorite genre.
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...
I haven't gone deep on enough things to know whether science fiction is worse than anything else in that regard. But science fiction is largely trope-ridden young adult male power fantasy emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually bereft pulp. It's also my favorite genre.
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.
You could have AI generate the next Shakespeare and you'll almost certainly never get noticed amidst the flood of competing books.
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.
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.
Greg Egan is far more interesting and spares you that.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth%2C_and_I_Must_...
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.
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.
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.
Like the movie awards, they've lost their relevance.
Dumbest article I've read in a while.
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?
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.
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...
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.