81–90 of 116 posts
Most people don't realise just how damaging all of this is...
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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).
I do not want to read a bunch of gross torture porn, though. Greg Egan is far more interesting and spares you that.
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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.
I mean, I think it's maybe just that a certain subset of the readership are now unhappy with any discussion of sexuality (I suspect that people like this simply didn't really read sci-fi in the past). In particular, look at Heinlein; a lot of his stuff would be very out there _today_ (the Moon is a Harsh Mistress is quite mild by Heinlein-weird-sex-stuff standards).
The complaint about politics is too silly to take seriously at all; sci-fi has _always_ been about politics, to the point where it is difficult to come up with non-YA examples of politics-free sci-fi.
As in, physically published? I'm really not sure you can read _too_ much into that, these days.
As a science fiction reader, I'd have thought it was pretty healthy these days, really.
> In recent years, the winners [of the Clarke award] have increasingly been writers who are outsiders to the genre, who write on both sides of the divide, or who simply don’t acknowledge that a divide exists at all. Almost none of them are published by sci-fi imprints.
Is... this what they're complaining about? I mean, I don't think that's a defining characteristic.
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The thing about _The Matrix_ is that the world-building was much more interesting than the premise (to make a world in which comicbook superheroes made sense). 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.
> there would be less striving for change Precisely, there would be nothing to strive for. As an engineer I often say "If everything in life went to plan it would be a very boring life indeed"
Our societies used to look towards space and evolution, but today they are broken, retreating into their shells and clinging to the past. Much like post-WWII Japan, they seek refuge in fantasy worlds to escape reality, having abandoned the drive for progress. Most people don't realise just how damaging all of this is...
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Do we need to keep reminding people that Star Trek depicted the first interracial kiss on television? Star Trek was always woke, over corporatization has just been sanding all political and social messages down to a corporate approved interpretation, aka boring, stupid, and not nearly inflammatory enough.
No, Star Trek was never "woke" like it was today. The writers actually were willing to depict moral dilemmas and let the audience members draw their own conclusions. These days they openly preach at the audience and then wonder why nobody wants to watch their stories any more.
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From a purely economic standpoint, AI is its own worst enemy. Quicker to produce books made even cheaper and even automate-able? You could have AI generate the next Shakespeare and you'll almost certainly never get noticed amidst the flood of competing books.
I wrote a story about this: https://tomasbjartur.substack.com/p/that-mad-olympiad
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 the…