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 sideways into fantasy gained the popularity lost by escapes into the future.
I predict a correlation between space-based scifi sales and polls on whether the country is heading in the right direction.
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 yet have the technology for a complete survey of nearby habitable planets.
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 through scientific and engineering arguments.
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.)
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 understanding and models. Maybe we should wait until they get better hardware to marry ourselves to their prognostications of the end of time.
During the postwar years of plenty, people stopped dreaming. We had bold dreams before WWII, but people stopped looking at how far we'd come and started comparing themselves to everyone else. We had no mortal enemy, tremendous wealth, and "keeping up with the Joneses" became the new operating protocol.
We have more than we did in the past. The manufacturing wealth of 1940-1970 was a fluke. The trade wealth of 1980-2020 was a fluke. We were upset over an unfair advantage that won't last forever. Even today we're still better off than a hundred years ago, yet everyone focuses on how bad things are.
Maybe a return to hardship will make us dream again.
I don't think it's motivated pessimism so much as a shifting tastes and changes in media. There are tons of SF stories with starships in movies, games and streaming platforms. It just happens to be the case that fantasy is more popular then SF at the moment where books are concerned.
I still find myself quite taken by some sci-fi writing. Iain M Banks works, Rajaniemi, and Joan Slonczewski. The “problem” is that they are not popular the way Harry Potter or isekai are.
I don't know, to the East of the Iron Curtain science fiction wasn't mostly about future optimism (at least after the initial "we're building a better society" optimism had been brutally murdered during the 1950s and 60s), but often a critical mirror of then-current society transported into the future to escape state censorship.
Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the evolutionary pressure to produce great literature that requires an interested and intelligent reader to decode the hidden messages written between the lines ;)
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.
The sad state of the 'science fiction corner' in German book chains is completely real though. Over the last two decades or so you could literally see it shrink on each visit and what little remains is filled with mass produced trash (Star Wars novels etc). The fantasy section right next to it has been eating into the science-fiction shelf space but is filled with the same trash, just replace your laser-toting space troopers with vampires, werewolves and dragons.
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 of those is set in a lightly fictionalized Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to several of the most significant space battles of her era. But like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which?
Now, Banks wasn't a hard SF writer. Unlike say Egan's "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.
Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.
As cynic I would imagine eventual collapse to be more likely. Probably slow degradation back to some sort of semi-advanced agricultural society. Say kinda post-apocalyptic world(without proper apocalypse) with larger societal structures still existing. Slow degradation of industrial output until some balance level is reached.
Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or most selling one.
Publishers make choices the author had no say in all the time. One of the things commonly mentioned about Phil Dick is that while the movies you've probably seen based on his work (such as "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall") have different titles than the stories they are based on, those stories weren't published under his proposed name in many cases either.
I wouldn’t expect only one fiction subgenre to have such a dramatic increase of proportion of abstract titles while other related subgenres did not. In other words, I would expect all of these graphs to have a negative correlation with time due to a general abstraction of titles across all fiction subgenres. I would be surprised if there was enough consumer differentiation to support abstraction in one subgenre but not the others.
Another interpretation might be that as fewer books are released in a subgenre, their titles also become more abstract, which would increase the effect seen in the data presented as well.
But I would hesitate to believe that the observed effect should be chalked up to only title abstraction, and not a decline in popularity. Occam’s razor.
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 latter half of the 20th century).
On the other hand, fantasy includes vampires and werewolves. I guess you could call them fantasy but to me they are quite a different niche to Tolkien. Traditionally vampires and werewolves would probably be considered horror rather than fantasy, though it's a bit more complicated now as Twilight is clearly not horror.
I think the author's point stands regardless, as there has been a resurgence across all of those keywords, but I do think the reasons for the resurgence in magic and dragons aren't necessarily the same as the reasons for the resurgence in vampires and werewolves.
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 settings are SF.
The succession is steampunk, dieselpunk (which includes art deco, internal combustion), then atompunk (which includes atomic energy, apocalyptic possibilities, space, sci-fi, martians etc), then I dunno, regular punk, then our current era of cyberpunk.
I recall an early editorial of the podcast Escaped Pod describing science fiction as a means to more directly engage with topics of the human condition by using the conceits of science fiction. _Have a difficult time discussing your relationship with your parents? Write a story about orphans raised by space aliens._ That sort of thing.
Maybe something is going on with our human condition that science fiction is not as productive a foil as it once was?
I don’t know. I’m not a fiction writer. But I can say that since I bought my second motorcycle (back on a moto after 20 years away) I am enjoying spaceships in my science fiction.
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.
A great deal of science fiction is just fantasy with spaceships. It uses technological tropes to seem like it isn't fantasy, but that's just surface gloss.
Really though? Seems to me that the only sub-genre of space science fiction that is surviving relative to others is hard space science fiction. There's an abundance of high quality titles to choose from even (compared to the previous millennium).
Edit: Highlights include Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse, The Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, Pushing Ice (and other titles by Alastair Reynolds), Interstellar (debatable, but it's good), Project Hail Mary, For All Mankind, and many more.
For literature: House of Suns* if you feel like strapping in for a wild ride that nevertheless avoids doing unspeakable things to the laws of physics. Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse if you're looking for a more "down to Earth" setting. Children of Time if you want an alien experience. Avoid reading summaries of any of these books beforehand. They're best enjoyed going in blind.
I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV shows, but I haven't seen them yet.
If you've already read most of the well-known ones, I could give you some recommendations from less well-known authors and self-published authors you probably haven't heard of yet. Though it would help to have some general direction of what you're looking for (military/space opera/other, ftl/aliens?, etc).
* Some may recommend "Pushing Ice" over this one for being more "hard" sci-fi, but personally House of Suns was a much more satisfying read.
Which is unfortunately true, but also just illustrates how far science-fiction has fallen - not sure when it started but I guess Star Wars played an important role to remove the 'science' from 'science-fiction'.
It's been there since day one. What, you thought early era SF used accurate science? No, they used made-up rules based on whether they could tell a good story.
Science fiction usually doesn't conform to how the world actually works in the same way pornography usually doesn't conform to the way sexual relationships work. They are both there to tell titillating stories, not describe reality.
For instance: Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics aren't based on any practical science, they exist as a plot device for setting off mystery stories with robots and morality plays about hubris. And the reason robots have positronic brains is that positrons were recently discovered at the time, and it sounded cool. Yet people will swear Asimov is one of the hardest SF authors around.
Sometimes you might get a SF author who's an expert in a particular field or has a specific hyperfixation, and that one aspect of their stories might be grounded somewhat in plausibility, but everything else turns out to be complete nonsense.
I believe people use the word “hard” to differentiate more scientifically rigorous scifi. I’m not well-versed enough to know when that started being a term, or what the status quo was before it was a term.
Interestingly there’s also “high” fantasy to differentiate between earth like and non earth like subject worlds, and then even “historical fiction” to describe books that try to be faithful to some degree to some historical time period on earth.
Anyway, this is all to say maybe “how far science-fiction has fallen” might be a narrow interpretation of what’s been happening to fiction in general over the past 75 years. More options than ever, maybe…
Anime went from science-fiction dominated in the 1980s (Gundam) to fantasy-dominated (Friern) today. The strange thing about fantasy was it lived under the shadow of Tolkien and Lewis which I think suppressed it for half a century.
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 of enthusiasm of first years of the space era, it wasn't because of politics, it was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now. And almost total surety of finding at least some form of complex, multicellular life. Disappointment when the real data came in, was massive. That's why space program went nowhere after Apollo, becoming a politicised clown show - by the time Apollo 11 landed, it was abundantly clear there wasn't much to see or do in the Solar System.
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..."
That Berlin bookstore (Otherland) also has great staff for recommendations. The resident scifi attendant was quite knowledgeable about original scifi written in German (as opposed to translated works). That's quite useful if your knowledge of the field is limited to the obvious Andreas Esbach (unsurpassed) and Perry Rodan (pass).
I enjoyed The Carpet Makers (which is available in English.) Sometimes translated works rub the wrong way because of cultural differences, but in that one the differences enhanced the experience.
Scifi as a space based genre failed due to the end of the space race. The generation that grew in the post WWII era aged and died. The lack of big scientific breakthroughs for the last fifty years added to the lack of new dreams. The future is here, just it's not exciting.
For the last few decades the culturally significant fiction has been in anime and manga. Lots of it is trash, but lots of it captures the ya themes of friendship and adventure. Some of it captured better the ideas of the cyber age, I suppose. If one explores those genres with a bit of background, you can see how they have been inspired by the traditional sf works, but repackaged them for new audiences without the introspection and conventions of yesterday.
I'm not sure if it is all bad. Definitely, science is not an aspiration any more and those works lack the grounding hard scifi taught us. On the other hand, there is still romanticism in those stories and they teach kids to dream for the impossible. I choose to believe that this is still something to base some optimism on.
...this might be the main problem (same with Thalia in Germany), those large book store chains are aggressively optimized for monetization, and that kicks off a death spiral of filling the available space with cheap industrially produced trash.
The good stuff might still be there, but it's much harder to find, and you need to know where to look (same thing that happened to music basically).
Not to forget being linked to main-stream publishers that have different editorial goals compared to era when these works were released. Not saying there were not biases back then. But now the biases are different and thus the published output is as well.
Wait till the Chinese land on the Moon first in this new space race. There will be a Sputnik moment, massive additional investment, and this will inevitably impact sci-fi. Just like in the previous space race, we had to fall quite a bit behind first before we wake up -- and then, we go all-out.
I also don't agree with the general dystopian or cynical view quite prevalent here on HN these days, frankly. It's always been so, but it seems to have gotten darker, such that I think a lot of old-timers like me pretty much avoid HN these days. It's not all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and out into the real world. Looking outward, rather than inward, can lead to the kind of desire for discovery and progress which underpinned the Apollo era. The world out there is in extreme disarray too -- but to an optimist, it presents opportunity to do good.
In the 1950s, and perhaps to some degree in the 1990s, it seemed possible to believe technology was limitless and miraculous and conducive to human thriving, so breathlessly hopeful and exciting stories about the wonders of the future made sense.
It is hard to feel that way in the 2020s. Technology seems oversold, scammish, dystopian, inhuman. It is easy to feel that the Amish, nay perhaps even the medievals, have a point.
Worse, the science fiction oriented around starships took its cues from our experience of the naval - journeys of days or weeks would take you to alien places teeming with new and interesting and enriching life. Foods you couldn't eat anywhere else. People you couldn't meet at home. But now the globe seems smaller, explored, and conquered. Those faraway goods are easily shipped to your door, and those faraway people show up in your comments section and they're just people. The excitement of the seas is no longer such a part of our outlook that reskinning it in fantasy speaks to us.
Not only is the excitement of the seas greatly diminished, the more we have learned about the universe, the worse the naval analogy seems. The distant stars no longer seem like tropical islands, but rather hopelessly distant and inhospitable. Heinlein wrote a wonderful short story about scout troops in the verdant jungles of Venus back when that was a reasonable expectation, but it seems like a silly thing to write now. https://xkcd.com/2202/ seems to capture the current expectation well.
Several decades ago it was easy to get excited about the march of scientific discovery and technological progress. But now we're asking why science seems to have slowed down so much, and new technology seems about as exciting as new mechanisms for dependence and dystopia.
Atheism is weakening and religion is rising.
The imagined global society of the UN that was reimagined at a larger scale as The Federation may have seemed like the way of the future for a few decades, but now that dream looks foolish and the globe is visibly fracturing.
The human-like AIs of Star Wars' robots or Star Trek's androids or innumerable superintelligent computers from Asimov to Heinlein seem further away every year. AI is part of everyday life now, and our major concern is how to keep it from catastrophically failing at mundane research, not whether it should have voting rights or makes humans obsolete. The hope and promise of a generation of robot children and citizens seems as misguided as the forests of Venus.
I could go on. But I really think the truth is that in a thousand ways, the tropes of the genre no longer speak to the moment.
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 sideways into fantasy gained the popularity lost by escapes into the future.
I predict a correlation between space-based scifi sales and polls on whether the country is heading in the right direction.
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 yet have the technology for a complete survey of nearby habitable planets.
It is not an encouraging line of thought.
Maybe, but the most compelling scifi to me personally is the generation ship stuff, like Ring by Steven Baxter.
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 through scientific and engineering arguments.
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.)
I have upvoted you, and perhaps you are right that there are shades of pessimism in this perspective.
The 2020s have not been known as reasons for great optimism. The pandemic and AI culling clades of the job market have been traumatizing experiences.
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 understanding and models. Maybe we should wait until they get better hardware to marry ourselves to their prognostications of the end of time.
During the postwar years of plenty, people stopped dreaming. We had bold dreams before WWII, but people stopped looking at how far we'd come and started comparing themselves to everyone else. We had no mortal enemy, tremendous wealth, and "keeping up with the Joneses" became the new operating protocol.
We have more than we did in the past. The manufacturing wealth of 1940-1970 was a fluke. The trade wealth of 1980-2020 was a fluke. We were upset over an unfair advantage that won't last forever. Even today we're still better off than a hundred years ago, yet everyone focuses on how bad things are.
Maybe a return to hardship will make us dream again.
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.
I don't think it's motivated pessimism so much as a shifting tastes and changes in media. There are tons of SF stories with starships in movies, games and streaming platforms. It just happens to be the case that fantasy is more popular then SF at the moment where books are concerned.
> we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible
Would any of the stories about the characters’ relationships with people not traveling with them be entertaining given the effects of time dilation?
Why would people want to escape Earth though? Maybe they felt Earth was past saving.
Stated with a different spin, the detached-from-reality takes of Campbell-era SF finally became too strained to enjoy.
I still find myself quite taken by some sci-fi writing. Iain M Banks works, Rajaniemi, and Joan Slonczewski. The “problem” is that they are not popular the way Harry Potter or isekai are.
I don't know, to the East of the Iron Curtain science fiction wasn't mostly about future optimism (at least after the initial "we're building a better society" optimism had been brutally murdered during the 1950s and 60s), but often a critical mirror of then-current society transported into the future to escape state censorship.
Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the evolutionary pressure to produce great literature that requires an interested and intelligent reader to decode the hidden messages written between the lines ;)
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.
The sad state of the 'science fiction corner' in German book chains is completely real though. Over the last two decades or so you could literally see it shrink on each visit and what little remains is filled with mass produced trash (Star Wars novels etc). The fantasy section right next to it has been eating into the science-fiction shelf space but is filled with the same trash, just replace your laser-toting space troopers with vampires, werewolves and dragons.
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 of those is set in a lightly fictionalized Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to several of the most significant space battles of her era. But like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which?
Now, Banks wasn't a hard SF writer. Unlike say Egan's "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.
A bit of an off-topic observation:
Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.
As cynic I would imagine eventual collapse to be more likely. Probably slow degradation back to some sort of semi-advanced agricultural society. Say kinda post-apocalyptic world(without proper apocalypse) with larger societal structures still existing. Slow degradation of industrial output until some balance level is reached.
Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or most selling 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?
Publishers make choices the author had no say in all the time. One of the things commonly mentioned about Phil Dick is that while the movies you've probably seen based on his work (such as "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall") have different titles than the stories they are based on, those stories weren't published under his proposed name in many cases either.
I wouldn’t expect only one fiction subgenre to have such a dramatic increase of proportion of abstract titles while other related subgenres did not. In other words, I would expect all of these graphs to have a negative correlation with time due to a general abstraction of titles across all fiction subgenres. I would be surprised if there was enough consumer differentiation to support abstraction in one subgenre but not the others.
Another interpretation might be that as fewer books are released in a subgenre, their titles also become more abstract, which would increase the effect seen in the data presented as well.
But I would hesitate to believe that the observed effect should be chalked up to only title abstraction, and not a decline in popularity. Occam’s razor.
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 latter half of the 20th century).
On the other hand, fantasy includes vampires and werewolves. I guess you could call them fantasy but to me they are quite a different niche to Tolkien. Traditionally vampires and werewolves would probably be considered horror rather than fantasy, though it's a bit more complicated now as Twilight is clearly not horror.
I think the author's point stands regardless, as there has been a resurgence across all of those keywords, but I do think the reasons for the resurgence in magic and dragons aren't necessarily the same as the reasons for the resurgence in vampires and werewolves.
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 settings are SF.
And you're not even getting into Baen and Tor books territory, where the hard military scifi lives (David Weber et al).
(Scalzi is always fun.)
The succession is steampunk, dieselpunk (which includes art deco, internal combustion), then atompunk (which includes atomic energy, apocalyptic possibilities, space, sci-fi, martians etc), then I dunno, regular punk, then our current era of cyberpunk.
That was fun.
I recall an early editorial of the podcast Escaped Pod describing science fiction as a means to more directly engage with topics of the human condition by using the conceits of science fiction. _Have a difficult time discussing your relationship with your parents? Write a story about orphans raised by space aliens._ That sort of thing.
Maybe something is going on with our human condition that science fiction is not as productive a foil as it once was?
I don’t know. I’m not a fiction writer. But I can say that since I bought my second motorcycle (back on a moto after 20 years away) I am enjoying spaceships in my science fiction.
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.
A great deal of science fiction is just fantasy with spaceships. It uses technological tropes to seem like it isn't fantasy, but that's just surface gloss.
Really though? Seems to me that the only sub-genre of space science fiction that is surviving relative to others is hard space science fiction. There's an abundance of high quality titles to choose from even (compared to the previous millennium).
Edit: Highlights include Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse, The Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, Pushing Ice (and other titles by Alastair Reynolds), Interstellar (debatable, but it's good), Project Hail Mary, For All Mankind, and many more.
Recommendations?
For literature: House of Suns* if you feel like strapping in for a wild ride that nevertheless avoids doing unspeakable things to the laws of physics. Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse if you're looking for a more "down to Earth" setting. Children of Time if you want an alien experience. Avoid reading summaries of any of these books beforehand. They're best enjoyed going in blind.
I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV shows, but I haven't seen them yet.
If you've already read most of the well-known ones, I could give you some recommendations from less well-known authors and self-published authors you probably haven't heard of yet. Though it would help to have some general direction of what you're looking for (military/space opera/other, ftl/aliens?, etc).
* Some may recommend "Pushing Ice" over this one for being more "hard" sci-fi, but personally House of Suns was a much more satisfying read.
Which is unfortunately true, but also just illustrates how far science-fiction has fallen - not sure when it started but I guess Star Wars played an important role to remove the 'science' from 'science-fiction'.
It's been there since day one. What, you thought early era SF used accurate science? No, they used made-up rules based on whether they could tell a good story.
Science fiction usually doesn't conform to how the world actually works in the same way pornography usually doesn't conform to the way sexual relationships work. They are both there to tell titillating stories, not describe reality.
For instance: Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics aren't based on any practical science, they exist as a plot device for setting off mystery stories with robots and morality plays about hubris. And the reason robots have positronic brains is that positrons were recently discovered at the time, and it sounded cool. Yet people will swear Asimov is one of the hardest SF authors around.
Sometimes you might get a SF author who's an expert in a particular field or has a specific hyperfixation, and that one aspect of their stories might be grounded somewhat in plausibility, but everything else turns out to be complete nonsense.
I believe people use the word “hard” to differentiate more scientifically rigorous scifi. I’m not well-versed enough to know when that started being a term, or what the status quo was before it was a term.
Interestingly there’s also “high” fantasy to differentiate between earth like and non earth like subject worlds, and then even “historical fiction” to describe books that try to be faithful to some degree to some historical time period on earth.
Anyway, this is all to say maybe “how far science-fiction has fallen” might be a narrow interpretation of what’s been happening to fiction in general over the past 75 years. More options than ever, maybe…
Technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, after all.
Anime went from science-fiction dominated in the 1980s (Gundam) to fantasy-dominated (Friern) today. The strange thing about fantasy was it lived under the shadow of Tolkien and Lewis which I think suppressed it for half a century.
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 of enthusiasm of first years of the space era, it wasn't because of politics, it was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now. And almost total surety of finding at least some form of complex, multicellular life. Disappointment when the real data came in, was massive. That's why space program went nowhere after Apollo, becoming a politicised clown show - by the time Apollo 11 landed, it was abundantly clear there wasn't much to see or do in the Solar System.
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..."
Yup. One early Arthur C Clarke story had plants growing natively on the Moon.
That Berlin bookstore (Otherland) also has great staff for recommendations. The resident scifi attendant was quite knowledgeable about original scifi written in German (as opposed to translated works). That's quite useful if your knowledge of the field is limited to the obvious Andreas Esbach (unsurpassed) and Perry Rodan (pass).
I enjoyed The Carpet Makers (which is available in English.) Sometimes translated works rub the wrong way because of cultural differences, but in that one the differences enhanced the experience.
Fantasy appeals to a wider audience (see the "Romantasy" genre) and seems to overlap more with YA fiction so captures more young readers.
Scifi as a space based genre failed due to the end of the space race. The generation that grew in the post WWII era aged and died. The lack of big scientific breakthroughs for the last fifty years added to the lack of new dreams. The future is here, just it's not exciting.
For the last few decades the culturally significant fiction has been in anime and manga. Lots of it is trash, but lots of it captures the ya themes of friendship and adventure. Some of it captured better the ideas of the cyber age, I suppose. If one explores those genres with a bit of background, you can see how they have been inspired by the traditional sf works, but repackaged them for new audiences without the introspection and conventions of yesterday.
I'm not sure if it is all bad. Definitely, science is not an aspiration any more and those works lack the grounding hard scifi taught us. On the other hand, there is still romanticism in those stories and they teach kids to dream for the impossible. I choose to believe that this is still something to base some optimism on.
Space Age, mid-50s to mid-70s.
Texas.
I have been seeing the trend of Fantasy slowly taking over SF for a while, maybe as long as 30 years :(
Real Science based SF seems to have disappeared completely, at least based upon the only Book Store left in my area, Barnes and Noble.
> Barnes and Noble
...this might be the main problem (same with Thalia in Germany), those large book store chains are aggressively optimized for monetization, and that kicks off a death spiral of filling the available space with cheap industrially produced trash.
The good stuff might still be there, but it's much harder to find, and you need to know where to look (same thing that happened to music basically).
Not to forget being linked to main-stream publishers that have different editorial goals compared to era when these works were released. Not saying there were not biases back then. But now the biases are different and thus the published output is as well.
Wait till the Chinese land on the Moon first in this new space race. There will be a Sputnik moment, massive additional investment, and this will inevitably impact sci-fi. Just like in the previous space race, we had to fall quite a bit behind first before we wake up -- and then, we go all-out.
I also don't agree with the general dystopian or cynical view quite prevalent here on HN these days, frankly. It's always been so, but it seems to have gotten darker, such that I think a lot of old-timers like me pretty much avoid HN these days. It's not all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and out into the real world. Looking outward, rather than inward, can lead to the kind of desire for discovery and progress which underpinned the Apollo era. The world out there is in extreme disarray too -- but to an optimist, it presents opportunity to do good.
Where did all the starships go,
Long time passing...
In the 1950s, and perhaps to some degree in the 1990s, it seemed possible to believe technology was limitless and miraculous and conducive to human thriving, so breathlessly hopeful and exciting stories about the wonders of the future made sense.
It is hard to feel that way in the 2020s. Technology seems oversold, scammish, dystopian, inhuman. It is easy to feel that the Amish, nay perhaps even the medievals, have a point.
Worse, the science fiction oriented around starships took its cues from our experience of the naval - journeys of days or weeks would take you to alien places teeming with new and interesting and enriching life. Foods you couldn't eat anywhere else. People you couldn't meet at home. But now the globe seems smaller, explored, and conquered. Those faraway goods are easily shipped to your door, and those faraway people show up in your comments section and they're just people. The excitement of the seas is no longer such a part of our outlook that reskinning it in fantasy speaks to us.
Not only is the excitement of the seas greatly diminished, the more we have learned about the universe, the worse the naval analogy seems. The distant stars no longer seem like tropical islands, but rather hopelessly distant and inhospitable. Heinlein wrote a wonderful short story about scout troops in the verdant jungles of Venus back when that was a reasonable expectation, but it seems like a silly thing to write now. https://xkcd.com/2202/ seems to capture the current expectation well.
Several decades ago it was easy to get excited about the march of scientific discovery and technological progress. But now we're asking why science seems to have slowed down so much, and new technology seems about as exciting as new mechanisms for dependence and dystopia.
Atheism is weakening and religion is rising.
The imagined global society of the UN that was reimagined at a larger scale as The Federation may have seemed like the way of the future for a few decades, but now that dream looks foolish and the globe is visibly fracturing.
The human-like AIs of Star Wars' robots or Star Trek's androids or innumerable superintelligent computers from Asimov to Heinlein seem further away every year. AI is part of everyday life now, and our major concern is how to keep it from catastrophically failing at mundane research, not whether it should have voting rights or makes humans obsolete. The hope and promise of a generation of robot children and citizens seems as misguided as the forests of Venus.
I could go on. But I really think the truth is that in a thousand ways, the tropes of the genre no longer speak to the moment.