Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where did all the starships go?

datawrapper.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 369 posts

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#71

Post by masklinn »

Timshel wrote: post #69
thomasguide wrote: post #4

FYI, this is about the titles of these books, not the textual content of the books themselves. The implication of the article is that sci-fi is losing relative standing to fantasy, but another interpretation is that science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.

Like none of The Expanse books would appear...

Not one of the culture books either, even though several have spaceships as main characters. And only a handful of Hamilton books. And I reckon a single Polity book.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#72

Post by Animats »

fpsvogel wrote: post #30

Fantasy appeals to a wider audience (see the "Romantasy" genre) and seems to overlap more with YA fiction so captures more young readers.

Yes. What's popular with teens varies over time, of course. At peak Twilight, the Barnes and Noble at Hillsdale Mall had seven bookcases of Teen Paranormal Romance. I mentioned this to one of the store Goths, and she told me that vampires were on the way out and the next thing was probably going to be zombies. The Monster Hunter thing had a brief moment.

Then we had the survival period - Harry Potter overlapped the Hunger Games and Divergent eras, all of which produced too many spinoffs. This moved into the Game of Thrones spinoffs. Now, dragons seem to be out, except that Anne McCaffery is back on the shelves.

The latest shift is driven by "booktok" on TikTok. I just saw teenage girls giggling over the new books in the Romance section, while avoiding the YA section. The Dark Romance subgenre is in, and now has its own shelf space.

Hard SF? Other than the Expanse series, not much recently.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#74

Post by masklinn »

thomasguide wrote: post #4

FYI, this is about the titles of these books, not the textual content of the books themselves. The implication of the article is that sci-fi is losing relative standing to fantasy, but another interpretation is that science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.

> science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.

Not even abstract, just not completely on the nose. Just as a lot if fantasy is not: only two discord novels would match the author’s search terms even though you’ll find all five inside the pages. None for Malazan. Or Nix’s old kingdom.

And worse, 40% of the sci-fi terms pretty only allow settings of “future solar system”. Not one of the Foundation books would match. Pretty much no classic sci-fi either. Wells’s fucking The War of the Worlds would not, because for some reason (of having any sort of taste) it was not titled “the day Mars invaded planet earth through space and then was beaten” like some lone star light novel.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#75

Post by ralfd »

Because most men stopped reading and most women don’t care much about sci-fi .

https://archive.is/I1QyW

> Beyond the bookstore, much of the architecture of book discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber… #BookTok, the vast community on TikTok that has become a best-seller machine, is largely populated by women recommending books by other women, like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us.”

In a sense this is just a regression to mean, normality, because the literary boys club of the 20th century was the exception:

> In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by women for a female audience. Their output was considered “paltry entertainment,”

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#76

Post by mlinhares »

delichon wrote: post #7

The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sidewa…

I kinda have the same feeling for music as well, the best phases for metal and punk music are usually when stuff is going to shit. When everything looks bright and good the music just doesn't have the same quality, people are not angry all the time.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#77

Post by masklinn »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #13

The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related. I wonder if the trend is space-specific or if other sci-fi topics suffered the same fate (like robots, computers, technology, etc). It does seem to me like society generally became less interested in space exploration after the moon landing (though I wasn't around then so that is really just what I gather from watching/reading things about western society in the…

> The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related.

Worse, half are confined to the solar system.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#78

Post by eesmith »

doctorhandshake wrote: post #10

My theory about this aligns with my theory about the disappearance of ‘futurists’ from the popular conversation - we’re living in science fiction. The future is arriving every day. It no longer feels necessary to speculate about a changed world - you need only look out the door. I say this as someone that still loves (and writes a little) speculative fiction. Just a guess as to what’s happening.

The 20th century was a period of wild change. Someone born before the first powered airplane flight in their lifetime could have flown on a jet plane to Europe and watched the first moon landing live on TV.

Vaccines put an end to endemic diseases which killed so many children every year. The birth control pill catalyzed the sexual revolution. We had a treatment for diabetes, which was once a death sentence.

The 1950s and onward saw huge changes in how businesses are organized due to computerization. In the US, cheap automobiles, cheap gas, the federal highway system, and subsidies transformed how most people live, including white flight into suburbia.

Plastic was a wonder material. Materials like nylon and polyester transformed the clothing industry.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#79

Post by dboreham »

bot403 wrote: post #66
chasil wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do…

Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic? Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.

Presumably these are equally likely because you could build a DNA-printer and thereby create a dragon of some sort (not sure if it could have fully functional fire breathing though)?

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#80

Post by DennisP »

HPsquared wrote: post #42
delichon wrote: post #7

The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sidewa…

Why did people want to escape Earth though? Maybe they felt Earth was past saving.

A lot of the old stuff isn't so much about escaping Earth, as outgrowing it. A feeling that it's our destiny to expand to the stars, just as it was life's destiny to come out of the oceans.

The more we look for alien civilizations and come up empty, the more I feel like they were on to something. For all we know, life is exceedingly rare in the universe.

Post reply on HN