Where did all the starships go?

The succession is steampunk, dieselpunk (which includes art deco, internal combustion), then atompunk (which includes atomic energy, apocalyptic possibilities, space, sci-fi, martians etc), then I dunno, regular punk (age of mass single-stream media), then our current era of cyberpunk.

In the 1950s, and perhaps to some degree in the 1990s, it seemed possible to believe technology was limitless and miraculous and conducive to human thriving. As a result, breathlessly hopeful and exciting stories about the wonders of the future made sense.

It is hard to feel that way in the 2020s. Technology seems oversold, scammish, dystopian, inhuman. Everything is slop and skinner boxes. It impoverishes rather than enriches, and it seems to be getting worse. It is easy to feel that the Amish, nay perhaps even the medievals, have a point.

Worse, the science fiction oriented around starships took its cues from our experience of the naval - journeys of days or weeks would take you to alien places teeming with new and interesting and enriching life. Foods you couldn't eat anywhere else. People you couldn't meet at home. But now the globe seems smaller, explored, and conquered. Those faraway goods are easily shipped to your door, and those faraway people show up in your comments section and they're just people. The excitement of the seas is no longer such a part of our outlook that reskinning it in fantasy speaks to us.

Not only is the excitement of the seas greatly diminished, the more we have learned about the universe, the worse the naval analogy seems. The distant stars no longer seem like tropical islands, but rather hopelessly distant and inhospitable. In 1958, Heinlein wrote a wonderful short story about scout troops in the verdant jungles of Venus back when that was a reasonable expectation[1], but it seems like a silly thing to write now. https://xkcd.com/2202/ seems to capture the current expectation well.

Several decades ago it was easy to get excited about the march of scientific discovery and technological progress. But now we're asking why science seems to have slowed down so much, and new technology seems about as exciting as new mechanisms for dependence and dystopia.

Atheism is weakening and religion is rising.

The imagined global society of the UN that was reimagined at a larger scale as The Federation may have seemed like the way of the future for a few decades, but now that dream looks foolish and the globe is visibly fracturing.

The classic science fiction trope that progress will better us as people, that leisure will lead to fitness, that access to information will make us wise scholars, that we will use the convenience of machines to free ourselves for the pursuit of virtue... it makes for an inspiring story. I had my suspicions about how true all of that was back before the internet. I am now very sure that Wall-E and Idiocracy are nearer to the mark.

The human-like AIs of Star Wars' robots or Star Trek's androids or innumerable superintelligent computers from Asimov to Heinlein seem further away every year. AI is part of everyday life now, and our major concern is how to keep it from catastrophically failing at mundane research, not whether it should have voting rights or makes humans obsolete. Ambulatory human-like AI seems unlikely when data centers the size of small cities struggle with emdashes. The hope and promise of a generation of robot children and citizens seems as misguided as the forests of Venus.

I could go on. We GOT a lot of the wonders science fiction predicted, or things so much more powerful that our most audacious futurists didn't dare to imagine them. And yet it doesn't feel like the promised land. Science fiction promised instant video conferences across the globe, but when we got it, it didn't look like all the world's best researchers collaborating on its hardest problems. It looked like all of the miscreants with their dick pics and the dreary business meetings and school lessons suddenly having access to your home. I don't mean to imply it's all bad, but the difference between imagination and reality has been stark on many fronts.

I really think the truth is that in a thousand ways, the tropes of the genre no longer speak to the moment.

[1] https://writingatlas.com/story/3984/robert-a-heinlein-a-tend...

Alas I think I've read/watched everything on your list. I'll try a useful echo response. I read the two big Arkady Martine books, and much of Ann Leckie's work. I thought they were all pretty good. Martine because the Aztec's in space genre is new to me, and she writes so well about people, Leckie because her galaxy spanning empire of genetically cloned god-kings and spaceships with transferrable personalities is clever and disconcerting.

If you think this is something that started in the 2020s you need to review the chart.

The Culture can't happen. It requires Faster Than Light spaceships and that's not a thing in our universe. Also, and I know it's not what you meant, but in Banks' fiction "State of the Art" is specifically a novella about a Culture visit to Earth in the 1970s. They're not us.

Egan's "The Amalgam" is an SF society which could in principle descend in part from some future humanity, and I suppose if you like Banks' setting for its utopianism you'd be satisfied with the Amalgam. Its citizens tend to live long, full lives in which they're definitely mostly concerned with the upper parts of Maslow's pyramid and their practical needs are fulfilled as a matter of course in most cases.

I must say, to the extent we have any future at all, I think probably of Egan's "Dream Apes". An Orangutan-like self-engineered future humanity who have arranged that there are no apex predators above them, there's an abundance of resources for their relatively modest population, and they just chill, believing that if there is something out there it's not their concern. Of course in the story the Dream Apes are all annihilated by a cataclysmic event which destroys Earth, but hey, it's pretty quick.