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Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?

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Re: Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?

#91

Post by mancerayder »

frm88 wrote: post #79
mancerayder wrote: post #71

One recent phenomenon for me was falling in love with Tchaikovsky's Children of Time trilogy, which explores very long-term colony ships sent out with thousands of cryogenically sleeping people of various skillsets, and planets seeded with a virus that artificially causes non-human beings to develop a certain kind of intelligence of being able to transmit complex ideas to each other, leading to technological evolutio…

I completely agree. Tchaikovsky's at his best in the standalone novels, sci-fi or otherwise - I feel that his series are written with an eye to generate a long lasting income whereas his standalones are where he explores new ideas,which makes the vastly more interesting to me. Cage of Souls, Alien Clay and Service Model are some of his finest.

I thought Children of Time was very good, although the third book was out there. The themes explored and the world building felt like three books was justified. Shroud is the only standalone I read from him, I enjoyed it and plan on taking your suggestions.

Re: Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?

#92

Post by mancerayder »

Frotag wrote: post #74
mancerayder wrote: post #71

One recent phenomenon for me was falling in love with Tchaikovsky's Children of Time trilogy, which explores very long-term colony ships sent out with thousands of cryogenically sleeping people of various skillsets, and planets seeded with a virus that artificially causes non-human beings to develop a certain kind of intelligence of being able to transmit complex ideas to each other, leading to technological evolutio…

> It's full of regurgitated fantasy tropes, the writing and characters seem simple, and there's a forced world building with what feels like an infinite and boring back story, with no movement to justify it. Maybe it's because he published 7 books that year (2021). Maybe it's also a coincidence that I remember not liking Children of Memory and he published 6 books that year, compared to Children of Time which was 201…

Children of Memory was out there compared to the first two!

Looking forward to Children of Strife, though I didn't realize how many books he was spitting out.

Re: Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?

#93

Post by api »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #66
api wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prevailing narrative is that the optimism collapsed because the real future didn't turn out like we hoped, but I don't think that's it. A lot of very optimistic sci-fi was written right after two world wars. I think it's more of a stylistic conceit. If it's not dark and edgy, it's not profound . Personally I think dark and edgy (or variants like pessimistic and bleak, or depressing and fatalistic) is the cheap ea…

It seems to me like it is a pendulum swing. It used to be that most works were straightforward and heroic, so that when someone had the idea to write a morally gray story, that was fresh and really interesting. Eventually everyone, tired of the worn out heroic tropes, started to get on this dark, edgy bandwagon. But now the dark and edgy stories are just as worn out as heroic stories used to be. Now, a straightforwar…

That’s a great point, though I would add the caveat that I do find moral complexity interesting. But that doesn’t require grey or outright antiheroes. A hero can be complex, or can be someone who was once more grey or even a villain and it’s a redemption arc.

Re: Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?

#94

Post by WillAdams »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #67
WillAdams wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it kept getting undermined every other episode, to say nothing of things such as Section 31.

Section 31 wasn't in TNG. And I wouldn't say the utopia got undermined in TNG either. When you (fairly rarely) had corruption or villainy inside Starfleet, those people were always treated as rogues who were acting on their own, and were decisively defeated by the utopia. It isn't like in DS9 where the writers flirt with the idea that maybe the Federation can't work without a dark side; the TNG writers play the utopi…

Fair point.

One of the earliest books to look at this in an interesting way was John M. Ford's _How Much for Just the Planet?_ (depending on how one looks at it and one's tolerance for humour)

Re: Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?

#95

Post by jaybrendansmith »

tsoukase wrote: post #90

Is that happens maybe because recent reality has shown some forms of traditional Sci-Fi? AI, humanoid robots, post apocalyptic climate, trillionairs, the USA vs the world, diminishing populations. I don't need any more Sci-Fi.

I gotta agree. All we need is corporate-run militaries and we're living in Heinlein's Friday. All the other dystopian predictions seem to be happening at once.

Re: Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?

#96

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

btown wrote: post #65

I don't know what sales numbers look like, but from my perspective as a casual reader who's been trying to keep up with Hugo Award nominees of recent years... science fiction may not be trendy on BookTok, but it's far from dead. Sure, fantasy has "corrupted" the Hugos, but there's plenty of hard science fiction, and science fiction that grapples with societal questions at large. Arkady Martine's Memory Called Empire…

Also on the TV/movie front science fiction is doing quite well right now.

Apple TV seems to have made producing good scifi series one of their main selling points. Lots of famous scifi series are getting TV adaptations and apple TV is producing wholly new scifi series as well.

Foundation, Murderbot, Silo, For All Mankind (and the upcoming Star City), Severence, Dark Matter, Monarch, Pluribus, and Neuromancer to name some of the current and upcoming series.

And of course if my theory is right I suspect the upcoming Firefly announcement will be that Apple TV is picking them up for a continuation as well.

---------

But also scifi has a lot of other avenues for exploring their ideas now (such as via interactive media/video games). I'd argue some of the best scifi works of the current generation come from interactive media/video games rather than television or movie. Ex: Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle 1&2, Nier, VA-11 Hall-A, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Deus Ex, etc.

Like frankly television and movie are massively expensive and books are way harder to sell now than they ever were (as discoverability and reach are poor) but video games as a more visual medium are easier to sell but at the same time the entry point for making them is an order of magnitude lower than TV or movies. So it's not terribly surprising to see scifi flourish with games where other mediums have found themselves in a slump.

Re: Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?

#97

Post by ahhhhnoooo »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #70
ahhhhnoooo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read some Becky Chambers.

I would not wish for anyone to inflict Becky Chambers upon themselves. She is a really awful writer. Interesting world building ideas, but she spends far too much time using her books to lecture the reader about morality, with all the subtlety of a Sunday School lecture.

Do you have any examples? I've read all her work, and while I'm familiar with the phenomena you describe generally, I didn't find it that notable in Chambers. Yes, some characters have neopronouns (xe/xir, iirc?), but there's no "And this is why anyone who doesn't respect pronouns is a bad person." They just are used for aliens whose genders are more complex than ours.

Maybe monk and robot has more of this, being a post industrial, solarpunk story about a tea monk bicycling across the countryside with a robot who wants to learn what humanity is?

Re: Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?

#98

Post by api »

sph wrote: post #89
api wrote: post #10

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…

Thanks for the recs, I will always trust anyone who has enjoyed Europa Report as much as I did.

If you like good indie sci-fi make sure you see Sleep Dealer, Primer, Banshee Chapter, and Moon.

Going back further I’d add Pi.

This one’s not quite sci-fi but if you like indie and very weird and cultural references that are really deep cuts check out an indie series called Hellier. If you’d like to see some hipsters try to talk to aliens with transcranial magnetic stimulation equipment, then it’s for you. Kind of ghostsploitation meets sci-fi meets conspiracy occult weirdness, all played straight Blair Witch style. The music and cinematography are great. I’ve compared it to Primer in terms of cost/originality/quality trifecta.

Re: Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?

#100

Post by rsynnott »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #72
crooked-v wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just described a substantial part of Star Trek, before even considering the rest of the genre.

Actually no, he hasn't. Star Trek (back when it was good) worked because the writers were smart enough to trust the viewers to draw their own conclusions. They would set up a dilemma, let the characters give arguments on both sides, and then not openly take a side . Even when you could guess which side the writers were on, it almost never felt like they were lecturing you like a child. I am perfectly happy for scienc…

[Insert Picard rambling for ten minutes about how horrible money was; this happened multiple times in TNG]

Nothing subtle about Star Trek's political stuff.

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