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Where did all the starships go?

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Re: Where did all the starships go?

#81

Post by Maultasche »

mygrant wrote: post #64
wiredfool wrote: post #6

Fantasy is certainly big, but it’s not like there isn’t space sf or space opera out there. Authors in my library who’ve released space sf stuff in the last few years — Anne Leckie, Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, John Scalzi, Martha Wells, James Corey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal. To be fair, some of them get into philosophy or fantasy, or even romance. But the…

Maybe 50% of my audiobook listening is the Expeditionary Force series by Craig Alanson. So dumb, so much fun, and all spaceships.

Yeah, that's a good one. "Dumb and fun" is a good description.

Craig Alanson also wrote a fantasy trilogy a while back that proved much better than I was expecting. It started off as what appeared to be an uninteresting juvenile fantasy book, but quickly got better and darker. I very much enjoyed reading those.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#82

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ralfd wrote: post #75

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…

Reading has become a strongly gendered lifestyle and supposed status marker.

Most of the books are indeed paltry entertainment - soapy and saccharine romances, formulaically transgressive erotica, fantasies about unlimited witchy powers, and perfect book boyfriends - but it's still a huge market.

Men moved to video games and chan culture. Which are a different kind of paltry entertainment.

It's curious how there was a shift from male dominated niches, like Lovecraftian fantasy and heroic fantasy, through the imperial sci-fi peak in the 50s to 70s, through the Hollywood-influenced 80s, then into slow decline from the 90s onwards.

With a few exceptions, a bold imagination became more of a liability than an asset.

This is a culture which has no idea where it's going and would prefer not to get there.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#83

Post by esafak »

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.

Futurist Michio Kaku once gave a talk at my company five years ago and though I forgot the details, I remember the audience found his vision quite dystopian.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#84

Post by squeaky-clean »

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.

Science Fiction doesn't have to be fantasy, it can be speculative. But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative.

Someone like Asimov never considered his books to be fantasy and that he could just insert whatever he wanted with no justification. In fact, he never considered sci-fi to be a genre, he always argued it was a setting and that his most famous stories were detective stories in a sci-fi setting. But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.

The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#85

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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.

9/11 was the turning point. We'd been fed a future "in the year 2000." When we got there, that future turned into a nostalgic vision of the past.

It's still possible to imagine new bright futures, but that kind of imagination is very much against a cultural tide that's fervently regressive and nostalgic.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#86

Post by LanceH »

I'm of the opinion that the teen novel has stunted literature in general.

As a kid beginning to read in the 70's I jumped from what were clearly kids books to Lord of the Rings (pure chance -- I liked the cover). There wasn't that watered down in between. It was a jump to real books with real consequences (spoilers: Boromir dies).

I've witnessed the rise of the teen section and seen how kids -- who are reading less in general -- never leave it.

It feels like the fantasy adventure lends itself a lot more to these teen novels and has a knock on effect into the mainstream. I for one could do without anther book about someone born to be a prince(ss) up against the evil realm who can't choose their way out of their romantic triangle.

I'm not knocking anyone's choices. There are more books already than I'll ever read. But it should would be a blast to get another Dune out of nowhere.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#87

Post by sandworm101 »

chasil wrote: post #15
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…

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…

There is a scene in Pirates of the Carribean where captain jack is stuck in a void surrounded by duplicates of himself. It is his hell. As we have biult better and better telescopes we realize that as we expand into space we will be stuck talking only to ourselves, at least for a few thousand generations.

When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment. When areicebo fell and was not immediately rebiult, i realized that most people just dont care about ever meeting another civilization. Even if we did find one it wouldnt change much here on earth. Most people dont care about climate change. They dont care about anything beyond their own lifetime. What matter will aliens be if they are a thousand lightyears away? So people dream now about other things, about grimy politics and alternative history.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#88

Post by cosmic_cheese »

LanceH wrote: post #86

I'm of the opinion that the teen novel has stunted literature in general. As a kid beginning to read in the 70's I jumped from what were clearly kids books to Lord of the Rings (pure chance -- I liked the cover). There wasn't that watered down in between. It was a jump to real books with real consequences (spoilers: Boromir dies). I've witnessed the rise of the teen section and seen how kids -- who are reading less i…

I would posit that the issue lies not with YA novels or fantasy in general, but with the continuously declining sense of agency, opportunity, and self-realization among teens and adults. There are deep-seated needs that reality can increasingly no longer meet, which results in rising dependency on simplistic escapism.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#89

Post by WJW »

dboreham wrote: post #79
bot403 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Dragons are physically impossible in many more ways than the firebreathing. For one, things that large would probably struggle to fly. We can make larger things fly, but have to cheat using jet (or rocket!) engines to generate incredible thrust in ways not typically accessible to living beings.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#90

Post by johngossman »

I speculate that a lot of sci-fi reflects the cutting edge of science and technology at the time it is written. For well over a century a lot of that frontier was transportation: and we got "Around the World in 80 Days" and "20000 Leagues under the Sea" and then a lot of books about space. We also got "Canticle for Leibowitz" and other post-apocalyptic books out of the age when nuclear weapons and energy was top of mind. Then, in the 70s and 80s computer technology became the center of innovation and we got cyberpunk and a lot of sci-fi turned inward to virtual worlds and the like. Given we're in a new space age, maybe sci-fi will start to follow? I'm certainly seeing a new wave of AI centric fiction.
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