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Where did all the starships go?

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Re: Where did all the starships go?

#91

Post by duskwuff »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #19
tialaramex wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think at most very literal titles would be a stylistic phase. Even "The Martian" is more a play on words than just a literal title for what it's about. Taking favourite novels which are within arm's reach: Sure "Rainbows End" is Science Fiction which doesn't involve space travel etc. but "Incandescence" is also SF but that's deeply about space travel. Banks' "Whit" and "Surface Detail" are both sat here. One…

so... it might be a marketing problem? no publisher was there to tell author "wtf did you name it, you'll get ignored" or smth?

I don't think anyone's failing to recognize modern sci-fi novels because they aren't called "The Space Martians Go To The Moon In Their Starship" or whatever.

Really, I think the most significant trend here is that, between 1950 and 1980 or so, the sci-fi genre grew up and stopped relying on painfully literal titles.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#92

Post by notahacker »

masklinn wrote: post #74
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…

Yep.

In that sense I think it's less an overall literary trends and more reflecting the pretty basic way of marketing pulpy stories to teens means putting "vampire" rather than "planet" in big letters in the title. Also, people still writing fantasy novels about alien civilizations aren't setting them on the moon or Mars any more, for reasons...

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#93

Post by WJW »

jfengel wrote: post #47
Alex-Programs wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is motivated pessimism. We knew in the 50s that breaking the speed of light was highly unlikely. We dreamed of the stars anyway. Now we refuse to dream, or to even attempt to solve the problems (a common pattern when discussing spaceflight is people who are blatantly searching for problems, rather than solutions), because we are pessimistic, devoid of imagination, and seek to legitimise our collective depression…

You don't need to break the speed of light to get to the stars. Time dilation and space contraction mean that you can get there in as little time as you desire. Everyone you knew on earth would be dead by the time you got back, but if it's just about you, the speed of light is no limitation at all. (The rocket equation, however, presents stupendous engineering challenges.)

Time dilation and space contraction only matter if you can reasonably achieve speeds of a significant portion of the speed of light. AFAIK nobody has even come up with a reasonable way to achieve this for lightweight probes, let alone for hundred-ton ships capable of carrying humans. And let's not forget the practical problems like all photons incoming from the front being blueshifted into ultrahard radiation that would make a point blank nuclear bomb seem like a small candle.

Realistically even getting to the nearest star in less than 400 years experienced time is way way WAY out of reach for now.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#94

Post by Recurecur »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #84
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.

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…

FTL starships in an SF story don’t need a detailed explanation, just a new invention.

It’s the exact same thing as a speculative story in the 1920s discussing supersonic flight, even though the jet engine hadn’t been invented yet.

For instance “Tunnel in the Sky” bypassed the whole issue in the 50’s, later imitated by “Stargate”…

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#95

Post by eesmith »

ahazred8ta wrote: post #3
anovikov wrote: post #2

Quite naturally - 1960s were the time when we discovered that Solar System is a pretty barren place. Mariner IV sent back pictures of craters on Mars - proving it couldn't have an atmosphere dense enough for people. Venera series probes proved at about same time that Venus surface was unsurvivable for anything we could recognise as "life". Stars are too far away. That was about it. Many people don't get the origins o…

In 1965, Clarke, Asimov, and other science writers were at NASA watching the first images appear. "Craters. Duh, it's right next to the asteroid belt, of course it has craters. Not that any of us thought of it beforehand..."

Do you have a reference for that account? I hadn't heard it before, and it doesn't sounds quite right.

They certainly knew the Earth and Moon had craters, so proximity to the asteroid belt isn't required.

I suspect they thought the atmosphere on Mars was thicker and like Earth, where the high rate of erosion erases evidence.

Digging around through archive.org I found https://archive.org/details/sim_popular-astronomy_1944-05_52... from Popular Astronomy 1944

> The following extracts are taken from pp. 49 and 50:

> “The recent dominance of the meteoritic impact theory of crater origin makes timely a review of the oases-crater question of Mars. In this treatise, these conclusions have been pointed out:

> “I, Meteorite craters are known on the Earth and Moon; therefore, craters exist on Mars.

> “2. The circular oases on Mars are the size, shape, and number of comparable lunar craters.

> “3. Crater depressions form a natural reservoir, accounting for the intense vegetation in the Martian oases,

> “4. The random distribution of crater oases is apparent, indicating that the canal system was adapted to this haphazard arrangement.

The reviewer of the above points out

> “Why didn’t someone think of the crater theory sooner? The answer is simple. Someone did. Back in 1892, at Arequipa, Peru, W. H. Pickering not only discovered the small black spots on Mars, but he also recognized their similarity to the circlets on the Moon. Because lunar craters were then believed to be volcanic, Pickering may be forgiven for implying that the Martian craterets also were of volcanic origin.

We now know these crater oases were not real. My point is only that some people proposed meteoric craters on the Moon before the 1960s.

BTW, the SF of the pre-Mariner era does have volcanic craters on Mars, like https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v15n01_1941-01_c... and https://archive.org/details/Startling_Stories_v07n03_1942-05... .

I also found https://archive.org/details/exploringmars0000rich/page/150/m... saying in 1954 "no irregularities due to shadows have ever been observed along the terminator—the line dividing daylight from dark—such as would be produced by Martian craters." The author was an American astronomer and also a SF writer in the 1950s. By this we know astronomers were already considering there might be craters on Mars as there are on the Moon.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#96

Post by Recurecur »

jfengel wrote: post #49
echelon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our astrophysicists don't even know why the universe is expanding, don't know that Lambda CDM is correct, don't know if things are universally consistent, yet we're so damned sure this is it. We don't even know that this isn't a simulation. Not non-falsifiable, sure. But we're convinced we're bound to this solar system with our crude tools and limits of detection. One new instrument could upset our grand understandin…

We do know why the universe is expanding. That's due to general relativity. That's well attested to high confidence. We don't know why the expansion is accelerating. For that we have only speculation.

It’s well understood that the expansion of the universe is not “due to general relativity”. General relativity does explain some details of that expansion.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#98

Post by boothby »

WJW wrote: post #89
dboreham wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And now I'm picturing a dragon with bombardier-beetle style pulsed jet boosters. And while I'd typically question your assumptions of how big dragons need to be in order to deserve the name, I'll assert that quetzocoatlus nothropi[1] was big enough.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#99

Post by Evenjos »

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…

Yeah. As a sci-fi author, I have strong opinions about this. Made an authortube video on the topic: https://youtu.be/THVpdcgTYrQ

But tl;dr: Gatekeepers in big/mainstream publishing have outsourced their slush-piles to underpaid interns, most of whom are young and ambitious women. They tend to like certain things. Also, big/mainstream publishing is chasing data trends, like all other big businesses, which leads to a staleness cycle where they only publish what worked in the last two years. They're afraid to take financial gambles on unproven ideas or new IP.

The good sci-fi these days is mostly indie and mostly underground, IMO. You really have to dig for it. Personally, I find good stuff via Reddit r/powerprogression, but even there, you may have to dig to find gems that speak to you.

I joke that I'm a male author and reader, even though I'm female. The first book of my epic series (which is fully published) is Majority: Torth Book 1.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#100

Post by hinkley »

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 think I would argue that we already see the sea change in the later Dune books

The inner systems become hidebound as they continue to reach out they find that not only has someone beaten them there, they have become Other as well as antagonistic and expansionist.

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