Has Sci-Fi Run Out of Steam? 479
Barence writes "Science fiction has long inspired real-world technology, but are the authors of sci-fi stories finally running out of steam? PC Pro has traced the history of sci-fi's influence on real-world technology, from Jules Verne to Snow Crash, but suggests that writers have run out of ideas when it comes to inspiring tomorrow's products. 'Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart,' PC Pro claims. Author Charles Stross tells the magazine that he began writing a sci-fi novel in 2005 and 'made some predictions, thinking that in ten years they'd either be laughable or they'd have come true. The weird bit? Most of them came true already, by 2009.'"
Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
Like the TV show Heroes? It's fun to watch but certainly not realistic. For example: How can Sylar pick-up a person and throw him against a wall? Newton's Law dictates that Sylar should be pushed backward with an equal force (recoil). Also where is the energy coming from? Sylar must eat 50,000 calories a day* to maintain that level of "toss people against walls" energy output.
I'd rather stick with SCIENCE fiction, with emphasis on the science and making it not violate known universal laws/theories.
*
* Trivia: Homo neanderthalis ate 10,000 calories a day to maintain his huge bulky body. Then Homo sapiens arrived and effectively starved neanderthal man out of food. That's how you control Sylar. Deprive him of food, and he'll not have enough energy to do his tricks.
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I like SciFi that gives me a good reason for what's happening, with reasons that can be understood. That we will come up with an alloy that is more durable than anything we can produce today is likely. It is also quite imaginable that we will some day be able to tap into new power sources, like cold fusion or, given enough time, pure matter-energy transformation. We might discover the antagonist to gravity and create antigravity. We will be able to colonize other planets (though I would much prefer an explanation other than "because it's there", human tends to be lazy).
But I do want more than a bit of technobabble. That's why I prefer Bab5 to Star Trek. In the latter, there's nothing an inverted polarized tachyon beam, beamed through subspace into a cobalt-balonium matrix cannot accomplish. I can come up with my own deus ex machinas, thank you.
Technobabble backlash (Score:2)
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I agree, I think there's been a backlash against technobabble which is steering scifi away from Star Trek tech-porn towards a more BSG style focused more on people than cool gadgets. I certainly enjoy Star Trek, but they've saturated the gee-whiz-look-at-this-cool-gadget market, and people are ready for something new. Now that we've been exploring space for a few decades, and everyone has cool gadgets, they want more depth in the stories. It's not so much that scifi is running out of steam, it's just evolving as all genres do.
No, it just means that people are starting to realise that scy fy is not science fiction. Science fiction has always been about the people. Read some great science fiction novels: Frank Herbert's "Dune", Greg Bear's "Eon", Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game", Asimov's "The End of Eternity", Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero". In none of these novels are the protagonists problems solved by a technological deus ex machina; in all of them, the technology and speculative scien
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to open another "sci-fi" vs. science fiction debate, but the place that sci-fi (in the sense of science fiction) has always drawn its inspiration is from, well, science. When Asimov wrote Nightfall, he speculated about what would happen on a planet, inhabited by a society not too different from our own, that was surrounded by stars such that the entire planet was constantly illuminated. What would happen, then, if it were later discovered that every 2000 years or so, one of those suns were visible eclipsed? The society had never experienced dark. His inspiration was drawn from not just the physical sciences, but also the social sciences.
When he wrote I, Robot, he hypothesized about a computer brain that operated on positrons, which were recently discovered then.
So look for the sci-fi breakthroughs to occur where the scientific breakthroughs are occurring.
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Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah but just calling them "electronic brains" would not have sounded as sexy.
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:5, Funny)
. I can come up with my own deus ex machinas, thank you.
The correct plural form of deus ex machina is deii ex machina, not deus ex machinas. OMG, they dont seem to teach anything in Latin classes these days. Now etgay utoy foay ymay awnlay.
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm monotheistic but believe in multiple machines, you insensitive clod!
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:5, Informative)
The correct plural form of deus ex machina is deii ex machina, not deus ex machinas. OMG, they dont seem to teach anything in Latin classes these days.
They sure don't! The only Latin plurals that have -ii are the ones where there's already an -i- in the word, like radius => radii.
Deus, as it happens, is one of the very very few irregular nouns in Latin, and the plural [tufts.edu] can be either di or, less often, dei.
In answer to the sibling AC who asked if di ex machina wouldn't imply a whole bunch of gods hanging from a single crane: the answer is no. In Latin that kind of construction is distributive, i.e. the usual implication is that there's one machina for every deus.
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
The plural of mother-in-law IS mothers-in-law [mcwdn.org]. Hence the plural of deus ex machina is di ex machina (deus is irregular when plural (and in the singular vocative). Furthermore, if deus were regular, its plural nominative would be dei.). (That is, the plural of god-from-machine is gods-from-machine.).
Of course, if you really insist on the Latin being correct, then in his sentence it should be dis ex machina, since prepositions take the ablative tense in Latin. In reality, that's retarded. I'll go with di ex machina as being the proper plural when used in English, and deuses ex machina when you never took Latin.
Oh, I almost forgot. Your other forms are also incorrect. In order:
deus ex machina
deus ex machinis
di ex machina
di ex machinis
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Close, but not quite.
Deus ex machinis
Dei ex machina
Dei ex machinis
You need the ablative case with "ex", which is easy to confuse with the nominative in the singular, but not the plural.
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the exact reason I love Alastair Reynolds books. He's said before that if he thinks that something is not possible according to science as we know it today, he won't write it in to the books unless it is absolutely necessary.
In his major trilogy, he only does this twice: inertia suppression machinery and hypometric weapons, both of which were needed to progress the story at an interesting pace. Additionaly, he made it clear that what these devices were doing to space was abhorrently wrong: hypometric weapons gave everyone that looked at them the willies, and inertia suppressors could edit a man out of history entirely, not only killing him but removing any proof he ever existed at all. Both of these were stolen from cultures after many millions of years of space flight. Even his impossibilities begin to seem reasonable.
Also, I put forth Reynolds as the example of Sci-Fi that continues to amaze. His characters are well built, and his plot is beautiful and approachable, even as it accelerates into deep time. It certainly helps that this man clearly knows some physics, and knows what needs to be said to make technologies seem plausible. I mean, when someone detects a spacecraft based on it's specific flavor of neutrino emissions, that's a credit to the author. Even more so when the antagonists begin to use that specific signature to hunt people down one whole book later.
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. Internal consistency is everything.
Take a book like Neal Stephenson's Anathem. A completely made up world and premise, yet it's own logic is so consistent that it's easy to accept it as a world that could exist. The way he takes Platonic ideals and turns them into a real possibility is amazing. It wasn't an easy or fast-moving read, but it's one of the most satisfying books I read this summer. And certainly the book I was most likely to read from aloud to my wife, who's a mathematician. If you've read the book, you'll understand why.
During a summer when the news media was filled with screaming people for whom avoiding education is a badge of honor, it was a refreshing reminder that sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is search for the truth even when it does not correspond with what you've been told. And that nothing is so dangerous as willful ignorance..
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My misgivings about Heroes aside (come on, either going in the past affects the future or it doesn't, you can't have it both ways), the last episode with Peter becoming exhausted from healing people feeds into your idea of energy consumed. As far as everything else, the show has thrown out physics from the very beginning, but if it's ruining your enjoyment of the show just assume that Sylar has the ability to make that recoil energy occur in the deep far off regions of space on tiny dust particles.
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No I enjoy Heroes. But I would never, ever call it science fiction. It's pure fantasy
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> Like the TV show Heroes? It's fun to watch
Are you watching the same series that I stopped watching after season 2?
> but certainly not realistic.
As opposed to transporters or tractor beams? Anyway, anything that depends on mutant powers doing more than letting someone metabolize something new (like cellulose) or synthesize something (like vitamin C), I would call that Fantasy, not SF (unless a heck of a lot of explanation goes along with it, as in Niven's The Magic Goes Away series).
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:4, Informative)
And that's why I liked last year's Moon [imdb.com].
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:5, Funny)
How can Sylar pick-up a person and throw him against a wall? Newton's Law dictates that Sylar should be pushed backward with an equal force (recoil)
I take it you've never been bowling, for fear of being hurled back out through the front doors when you throw the ball down the alley?
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I sincerely hope you don't have a science-based degree, because if you do, you apparently learned nothing. When you throw a bowling ball it DOES impart a force in the opposite. Case in point - My niece who pushed a bowling ball down the lane, and then promptly fell backwards onto her butt.
Actually, yes I do, and physics was one of my favourite subjects. Your niece isn't the best example. When she's older she'll be able to counter-balance and use the friction between her shoes and the floor to offset the "recoil" from throwing something heavy, like the rest of us do.
Even if there was an opposite force on his own body, Psylar wouldn't have to fall over. Especially if he is applying a slight upward force to his enemy, it would just make his own grip on the floor stronger. And what's to stop him
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
You missed the parent's point.
You don't get thrown back because even though the bowling ball exerts a force back on you, you ALSO exert a force on another object, which is to say, the ground, through your feet, which puts forward another opposite reaction counteracting the bowling ball. Since the angles don't match, you also get a net upward force out of the deal, but gravity counteracts that. If this weren't so, you would slowly topple backward (slowly, because you weigh much more than a bowling ball) unless you shot another bowling ball in the opposite direction with the same impulse.
In the same way, Sylar just has to push in the other direction. Be it a fixed object, or even just a light wind across a broad swathe of air. Or, alternatively, he might not even be the anchor for the force at all. He could be influencing some other object (again, likely air) to exert a force against his victims, in the same sense that my garage remote doesn't actually exert a force to open my garage door, but simply influences the internal mechanisms to pull the garage door upward (all without being thrown to the ground!).
I'm not the first in the thread to suggest this, but you haven't been reading, apparently. I don't mean that to be snarky, I certainly don't read all the slashdot comments, I prefer my own self-righteous writing too :).
Heroes is definitely magic and fantastic rather than scientific, and the solar eclipse was not life-accurate, and I hate the pseudoscientific bullshit that spews from Mohinder's mouth. And hyperbole is all well and good, but don't say "there's not an ounce of science in it" and follow up with an anecdote as "proof". The logical flaw is kind of ironic.
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yeah.
The solar eclipse is yet another example of how Heroes is BS, not science fiction. The solar eclipse lasted what? All day? Total eclipses only last approximately 5 minutes.
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
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>>>Back in the old days of Sci Fi, we didn't have everybody and their brother who were "internet experts" on anything and everything.
That's funny because I was just reading an Isaac Asimov book where he published the first letter he ever wrote (from the 1930s). It was criticizing one of the writers in "Amazing" for not telling realistic plots based upon science. Point - Critics have always existed in this genre even in the "dark days" before internet or television. In that case it did result in
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I don't think that Science Fiction has run out of steam completely, but some authors aren't hanging the carrot far enough ahead of the mule so to say, which means that what they "predict" may already have happened.
If you go back to the grand old writers like Asimov, Heinlein and Dickson you will find that they play less on the science than on the social effects on the science as well as they are pushing ideas rather than technology. Sure they use technology to pave the way for a story, so in that way they a
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Yes, sci-fi no longer has steam ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Steam? Next, you'll be wanting a tricorder interface from stone knives and bearskins [memory-alpha.org]!
And yes, you could spend a lifetime just on sci-stories about time travel. Science ain't there yet.
Childhood's End (Score:5, Interesting)
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Too depressing.
I'd like to think we're going to become corpsickles, and become cured at sometime in the future, then zip around the galactic core, and come back to find machines that can make you young again. Thank you, Larry Niven.
Or perhaps we'll enforce Azimov's laws of robotics, finally. Already we have Spacers-- they live in gated communities and must have anxiety disorder.
Or maybe we'll have lots of nudity and sex and strange teleknesis like Heinlein suggested.
My point is that it takes imaginative wri
Re:Childhood's End (Score:5, Funny)
I pray every day.
Jennifer Government works for me (Score:4, Interesting)
I see sci-moving into non-technical direction, with stuff like Max Barry's work (which came to my mind right away) where contemporary social issues that still have some sort of sci-fi aspect to them are being brought into our hands thanks to both the Internet and paperback books.
Ultimately the truth is that today's world is not the world where Snow Crash was created, so the expectations are after all quite different, are they not?
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Personally, I think the focus of SciFi is shifting. Away from technology, towards social problems. Usually reflecting social problems we have, or we might have with certain technology. I don't think that's a bad shift, after all, technology never purely existed for its own sake. Any major invention, any leap in technology, had a tremendous impact on society and social structures. Exploring those can be a lot more interesting than stories that focus on technology. Mostly because it's boring, technology will
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Only some SF has ever been about technology. A lot of the brilliant writers have always had a focus on social issue: Ursula Le Guin, for example. The same is true for most non SF writers who write some SF (Kingsley Amis, Dorris Lessing, CS Lewis - although the latter two are only just SF, and in Lewis case in only one book) or who write a lot of both (Iain Banks).
The point of SF has never been primarily prediction. Its a vehicle a lot of writers have used to say whatever they want.
Cliche'd to death (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is the sci-fi cliches. At some point, there was enough sci-fi for certain elements to become staple.
At that point, writing new sci-fi was a matter of rearranging these cliches into something that appeared to be novel. Unfortunately, you can only do this for so long, before the cliches become exhausted.
Re:Cliche'd to death (Score:5, Insightful)
You just described the Syfy Channel. +1 insightful.
I remember when watching Star Trek or Buck Rogers meant exploring new ideas, new cultures, or new technologies. Not anymore. Now modern scifi is mostly about creating a Futuristic Action flick.
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The most laughable example of conceptual plagiarism is the space-ships Stargate SG-1. Almost every single technology on those ships has an equivalent in Star Trek TNG.
Though, the real problem is bigger than the clicheification. New science fiction needs new basic science. In the first half of the 20th century, we had a ton of new scientific advances just becoming available in computing, electronics, etc. The latter half of the century was spent mostly refining and implementing theories and techniques that a
PC Pro just needs to read more Sci-Fi (Score:4, Informative)
They mentioned Vernor Vinge, but only referenced his earlier work. One of his later stories, Rainbow's End, predicts a ubiquitous Augmented Reality, which we're only starting to see gimmick implementations of now.
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So true.
Most of the tech in the story has the feeling of something just beyond the horizon, something that could come true soon. And still, the effects on society is enormous. It's a bit frightening, for the first time I felt it was possible that I might end up feeling left behind and belonging to the technologically impaired.
We just don't know it yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
To use the Neal Stephenson example, what about "The Diamond Age"? It predicts a very different world in the future, based on the widespread adoption of nanotech. I think it's one of those situations where we can't see the forest for the trees...yet.
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Re:We just don't know it yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed, nanotech often plays prominently in modern sci-fi. Everything from self-assembling structures to epidemiology. In addition, there are many themes that investigate the nature of consciousness and sentience and how that relates to artificial structures (ie. downloading oneself into an artificial construct) and how one might use it to avoid death. In addition, there are various explorations of the intersection of quantum and relativistic phenomenon both on the small scale (Egan et al) and on the large scale (black holes and interstellar travel). Even near-future novels such as Firestar haven't come true yet, since space exploration slowed so dramatically in the last 20 years.
In short, if you're not seeing any new future tech in SF, you're not reading the same stuff I am.
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Stephenson doesn't really write contemporary sci-fi, he writes much closer based on current events with trend-setting events. I'm still working my way through the Cryptonomicon and am enjoying it quite a bit. The biggest issue with most sci-fi these days is that the majority of authors aren't trying for new ideas, what ifs, maybes, or what could happen. It's been done by their predecessors of the genre so they're building off of it. There's a pile of room in innovation, no one is sure what direction to
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Out of steam? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that's why everybody's switching to steampunk. Plenty of steam.
Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy (Score:5, Insightful)
I think not.
IMHO, what was once considered SciFi (Tech related) has moved more mainstream and become, in some cases, traditional fiction.
As well, I believe that SciFi authors continue to present not only technically challenging new idea, but moral questions around the use of technology. An era of tech enlightenment forthcoming?
Lastly, I'd offer up that fewer SciFi authors are being published because SciFi is being muddled with Fantasy. I don't know why they're doing it, perhaps that hard SciFi traditionally had a predominately male readership; while fantasy has broader appeal?
I believe we see less innovative SciFi books not because they're not being written, but because they're not being published.
There's less competition in the book world, or at least it seems that way from where I sit. Amazon, B&N, Walmart... I sometimes find hard SciFi at my local supermarket.
When Snow Crash was published, it was a different market.
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>>>what was once considered SciFi (Tech related) has moved more mainstream and become, in some cases, traditional fiction.
Ahhh... like the CBS network:
- CSI
- NCIS
- CIA
Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy (Score:5, Interesting)
I read somewhere, many years ago, that sci-fi is popular in good times, when people in general are looking forward to the future, and fantasy is popular in bad times when people are afraid of the future.
Considering that "fearing the future" has become the norm for most of even the "enlightened" societies, I'd expect that sci-fi would be sinking into obsurity for at least the next generation.
Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. For many people, the worst parts of previous generations' speculative fiction appears to be coming true.
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The giant corporations are winning. Ask people if they think it more likely that genetic research will result in exciting new medical treatments or be used by enormous health insurance companies to deny coverage.
What people think is not the same as reality. In the U.S. at least, using genetic information to deny insurance coverage is illegal [wikipedia.org]. Of course, people will believe what they want to believe, which just emphasizes the GP's point. I'm sure plenty of my beliefs are wrong, too.
Re:Reality closer to SciFi, SciFi != Fantasy (Score:5, Insightful)
One point at a time:
* The giant corporations are winning. (Agreed but they still can't kill us, or jail us, like government can.)
* The Luddites are winning. (Disagree - today's college-aged persons are more tech-saavy than ever.)
* The problems keep turning out to be harder than most people thought. (yep)
* nuclear waste (We have a solution. It's the same one Asimov proposed 60 years ago. Bury it deep underground.)
* Many economists now believe that the Baby Boomers' kids will be the first generation in the US with a lower standard of living than their parents.
Only because of economic stupidity, not tech limitations. We're going to have ~$200,000/home national debt by 2016, and that's just simple stupidity. The Romans did the same thing, spent themselves into bankruptcy, about 1600 years ago. Human beings haven't changed in that respect.
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I'm not sure that people are talking about the "Fantasy" bookshelves, but the fact that plots of SciFi toss out realistic concepts of technology, instead just using science to replace magic in fantasy plots. Like Star Trek... where most of the stories were fantasy plots and the implications of technology were mostly glossed over.
I think the unrealistic science is really what makes the difference between the two genres. Fantasy, you don't question that the dragons breathe fire. In Sci-fi, you should que
Unfair (Score:2)
Re:Unfair (Score:5, Insightful)
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I predict that in a week from now, there will be a Slashdot article predicting the death of PC gaming. :-)
And we'll all be around to mod that bad boy Dupe.
REAL Change (Score:3, Interesting)
If I'm wrong, no one will remember; but, if I'm right, I'm a frickin' genius!
For all the technologies that SciFi imagined and helped create, tehre are thousands more that just didn't happen. So of the thousands upon thousands of SciFi stories being written every year, i think you will be able to find some that accurately predicted the rise in tech. They just may not be the mainstream, big name ones. That is perhaps the difference.
I think this is a false premise (Score:2)
"the history of sci-fi's influence on real-world technology, from Jules Verne to Snow Crash"
Sci-Fi influencing real world technology? Do you really think we went to the moon or invented the computer because someone wrote a fictional story about it a hundred years earlier? Not hardly.
Re:I think this is a false premise (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, said he was inspired by Jules Verne and other early scientifiction stories.
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Anyway, a good part of science fiction is more about us than about technology, how we will behave or think in a different environment, or take another point of view to our c
90% of everything... (Score:2)
90% of everything is crap. It's easy to look back and see the 10% of sci-fi that inspired real-world technology, it's a lot harder to look at the writing today and see how it is affecting things.
Plenty mainstream TV shows (Score:2, Informative)
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CSI has a lot of MovieOS flashy gadgets, I give you that (though I'd break the programmer's fingers for wasting so much computing time on eye candy, every time they look up a fingerprint the system first flashes through a thousand wrong ones, why should they get displayed...), but SciFi?
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Flashy graphics means lots of horsepower wasted on eye candy. This is NOT what I'd expect in a forensic tool, or any professional tool. I can see the need for a colorful, easy to use interface. What I can't see is displaying every wrong search result (honestly, even retrieving the full file set from the database is a waste, let's not even talk about displaying it for a split second only to retrieve the next mismatch and display it). Or wasting valuable screen real estate for nonsensical rubbish. No wonder they need 100" see-through touch screen displays (which I'd love to see rationalized next time the budget comes up).
A lot of that is actually great narrative storytelling through visuals. They are showing the audience what the tool is doing (sorting through a database) without adding words to the script. Just like if a super slow-motion camera were to follow a bullet into a human, you wouldn't really be able to see the internal organs and bones that clearly. It's meant to be impressionistic.
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Don't forget 24 with it's magical triangulation, databases of everybody and all those other useful technological advances (that most of the audience believes are 100% real).
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Hmmm. Could you beam..... I mean upload your copy of Bones over to me? 'k thanks.
For me, SciFi died (Score:2)
they day they dropped MST3K. Bastards...
It's not fortune-telling. (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of SF isn't fortune-telling. As with any commercial, genre fiction, its main purpose is to entertain, and it may also have some secondary purposes like social commentary, examination of philosophical issues, etc.
The huge change in SF since I first started reading it in the 70's is that these days, movie/TV SF is a gigantic, popular commercial enterprise, utterly dwarfing written SF. Also, a lot of the commercial activity in written SF these days revolves around stuff like Star Trek and Star Wars novels, novels written in the Dune universe, etc.; there didn't used to be such a clear division between highbrow and lowbrow SF. Among teenagers, there is much less of a focus nowadays on non-series written SF. If you look at the young adult section in a book store, you'll see very little real SF; you'll mainly see fantasy. I think part of what's going on is that girls seem to buy a lot more books than boys, and they seem (on the average) more interested in fantasy (e.g., the Twilight books) than in core SF.
Another change in the last couple of decades is that distribution channels have changed. You don't see SF magazines and paperbacks on wire-rack shelves in the drugstore any more. As in all of publishing, there has been a tendency for books to go out of print more quickly, so that it's even harder than before for novelists to make a living by writing. You'd be surprised how few of the SF authors whose books you see on the shelves at Barnes and Noble pay the rent by writing. The magazines are also much less influential than they used to be.
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Indeed. And SF's 'ability' to predict the future is based on cherry picking from among (tens of? hundreds of?) thousands of 'predictions' to find the ones that came true - while ignoring those that didn't.
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>>>The purpose of SF isn't fortune-telling.
Ph.D. Isaac Asimov would disagree with you. He viewed science fiction as a source of ideas that could be developed for the real world.
Not enough predictions, try John Scalzi (Score:3, Informative)
Stories. Really GOOD stories (Score:2)
the most important thing about sci-fi is not the technology itself, but the stories that use sci-fi blended into the background. the mistake of "Glorifying" technology is more often made by hollywood film directors than it is by sci-fi writers.
so, yes: sci-fi is often predictive of the near future (stephenson, gibson), and comes up with "the goods" but to be honest that's quite a specific genre of sci-fi, leaving out a whole range of books that are absolutely mind-blowing (asimov, reynolds and hamilton to
Beyond Imagination (Score:2)
Science is going beyond the ability to imagine. Already we have areas of science so specialized that scientists can not communicate to each other as to the details of their expertise. It becomes difficult for those gifted with writing skills to catch on to the image and potential of these areas and bring them into popular formats such as sci-fi.
Dr. Who (Score:2)
It's been going since 1963, and I'm still entertained. You don't have to be a nerd, it's not overly sentimental, and I can enjoy with my gal.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it hasn't.
Science fiction isn't about "telling the future", it's about making commentary about the Human Condition, putting together entertaining yarns, looking at what-if scenarios in society. Do you think PKD really believed any of the futuristic technology he talked about (read Ubik for a nice example) was really possible? Who knows - it's just a necessary condition to set up the scenario in which we can see interesting ideas play ouy.
Any quick read of the New Masters of SF (china mieville, ian macdonald, iain m banks, ken mcleod, dan simmons) will show you that the genre is alive, kicking, and more literary than ever before.
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Well, what you mentioned are more of fantasy authors (or, 'new weird'), not really SF there.
You could, however, mention John Scalzi. True new blood, Old Man's War for example shows it.
Yep. All the good ideas are used up. Go home. (Score:2)
Yep. All the good ideas are used up. Go home.
Damn, I wish I could use mod points on TFA instead of just comments.
I would also add social issues (Score:2)
And before a bunch of techno-utopians get their knickers in a bunch, I'm pointing out DEGREES of things, not some idiotic blinkered 1/0 true/false Bullcrap. Perceptions, whether true or false, are perception
All good sci-fi is... (Score:2)
lots of fi, minimal sci, except where necessary.
Good sci-fi, like all good literature, is about people, not technology.
Why does sci-fi need to predict a technology? (Score:2)
Tell me what, exactly, does Foundation realistically predict? It was a retelling of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in space with funny maths, glowey nuclear bits and, most importantly, damn good writing.
It was entertaining without being preachy or predictive. Not all sci-fi need tell us what we should develop. In my opinion, that's what's causing so much of the crap sci-fi bulk shit I see in bookstores now: They focus too much on showing us this "cool idea for a toy" the author had instead of try
Re: (Score:2)
Well, typos notwithstanding...
Re: (Score:2)
Anyway, replaying history in future terms gives another meaning to the phrase "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
Today's sci-fi is not sci-fi (Score:2)
Sci-fi was attacked from all sides by mega-movie plexes, formulamatic (committee) design headed by investors, and the cult of Scientology.
In short, sci-fi is NOT made for geeks anymore.. it's made for mainstream teenagers and stupid parents who couldn't tell you the difference between "fusion" and "fission".
They're the only ones who don't object to Will Smith being in what should be sci-fi classics, dumbed down to the Super-Size McDonald's drive through crowd.
Good sci-fi (movies anyway) tapered off in the l
The Future has Arrived, why bother inventing one? (Score:3, Insightful)
To an author, I think the attraction of Science Fiction is that it allows them to put a veneer of plausibility on settings which would otherwise be too fantastic to be credible. This allows them the freedom to explore ideas or situations which couldn't possibly occur if set in "the real world."
But the current world has become sufficiently complex and interesting that writers such as William Gibson and Margaret Attwood no longer need to set their stories in some near-future dystopia - our current dystopia is sufficient to tell the stories they want to tell.
Gibson's last few books have been set in, effectively, the present day. There's no need for him to go to 2030 or beyond to explore the idea of immersive, ubiquitous computing and communication: we all have smart-phones in 2009. Everyone I see on the streets of San Francisco is walking around in a trance, like they're jacked into Cyberspace.
There's no need for Margaret Attwood to set The Handmaiden's Tail in 2195, there's plenty of opportunity to explore theocracy and coercive reproduction in the crazy, polluted and Balkanized world of the present day.
I think that Science Fiction writers who rely on the old cliches of Warp-drive and alien worlds simply aren't trying hard enough.
21st Century Earth IS an alien world... all you have to do is pay attention.
-Sean
The problem is we can see the future (Score:2)
First of all, the idea that science-fiction is about predicting advances in technology is retarded.
Secondly, at this stage in human's technological development, we kind of know what the next step is, and that step is artificial intelligence. And the step after that is unknowable. Vernor Vinge has lots to say about this.
Why SF is dead. (Score:5, Interesting)
The real problem is that most of the big themes in classical SF require vast amounts of energy. And that's not happening. There hasn't been a new source of energy in fifty years, just marginal improvements in the old ones. This matters.
That's why space travel is a bust. With chemical fuels, it will never be more than an overly expensive, marginal enterprise. The better '50s SF writers all knew this; read Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon". They just assumed that, somehow, the energy problem would be cracked. Didn't happen. So space travel remains an expensive ego trip for countries and billionaires.
Industrial civilization is only 200 years old. 1808, the first time someone bought a train ticket on a commercial railroad and went someplace, is a good starting point. Industrial abundance, being able to make more stuff than people could consume, only goes back to WWII.
During most of the 20th century, "progress" was a big theme. We don't hear that phrase used much any more. The number by which one measures "progress" for the average Joe, "per capita median real income for urban wage earners", peaked in 1973. (Median income, not average income; the average is biased by wealth concentration to rich people.) Back then, a guy without a high school diploma could get a job at GM and make enough to buy a house, two cars, a boat, and an education for his kids. That's over. (You don't see that number mentioned much any more. It was heavily publicized back when the US boasted "the highest standard of living in the world".)
Now we're starting to run out of energy and raw materials. Nobody serious thinks there's enough left to sustain current output for another century, let alone bring China and India up to US levels of consumption.
It's hard to write good SF about "the great winding down". It's been done, but it's not read much. The glory days of SF coincide with the period during which "progress" was a win for the little guy.
That's why SF is dead. The plausible future sucks.
Re:Why SF is dead. (Score:4, Interesting)
The real problem is that most of the big themes in classical SF require vast amounts of energy. And that's not happening. There hasn't been a new source of energy in fifty years, just marginal improvements in the old ones. This matters.
That's why space travel is a bust. With chemical fuels, it will never be more than an overly expensive, marginal enterprise. The better '50s SF writers all knew this; read Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon". They just assumed that, somehow, the energy problem would be cracked. Didn't happen. So space travel remains an expensive ego trip for countries and billionaires.
Industrial civilization is only 200 years old. 1808, the first time someone bought a train ticket on a commercial railroad and went someplace, is a good starting point. Industrial abundance, being able to make more stuff than people could consume, only goes back to WWII.
During most of the 20th century, "progress" was a big theme. We don't hear that phrase used much any more. The number by which one measures "progress" for the average Joe, "per capita median real income for urban wage earners", peaked in 1973. (Median income, not average income; the average is biased by wealth concentration to rich people.) Back then, a guy without a high school diploma could get a job at GM and make enough to buy a house, two cars, a boat, and an education for his kids. That's over. (You don't see that number mentioned much any more. It was heavily publicized back when the US boasted "the highest standard of living in the world".)
Now we're starting to run out of energy and raw materials. Nobody serious thinks there's enough left to sustain current output for another century, let alone bring China and India up to US levels of consumption.
It's hard to write good SF about "the great winding down". It's been done, but it's not read much. The glory days of SF coincide with the period during which "progress" was a win for the little guy.
That's why SF is dead. The plausible future sucks.
I think you're right, in a lot of ways. However, I suspect a chunk of the problem is that the best path to better energy begins with that N word people are so afraid of embracing. Our society has discovered a new form of fire, and it scares us. Until we're willing to actually embrace it (dangers of use and all), we're going to be stuck in our caves.
--Jimmy
The Borg (Score:2)
The product is not enough (Score:3, Insightful)
PC Pro has traced the history of sci-fi's influence on real-world technology, from Jules Verne to Snow Crash, but suggests that writers have run out of ideas when it comes to inspiring tomorrow's products
To Buy n' Large everything was a product.
But it was the machines who chose to remain - or become - human - and more than passive consumers of tech.
It's impossible to imagine Eve and Wall-E being content with the illusions of the The Veldt. Ray Bradbury's early and prophetic foreshadowing of the Matrix and Holodeck.
Science has narrowed a bit (Score:2)
Looking at some of the science fiction of the pre-70s, it was full of possibility. Things could shrink and grow, turkeys could be formed in matter dispensers, radiation might give you powers, you could 'reverse your polarity' and become antimatter and, instead of just exploding like we know antimatter would now, we could throw lightning bolts (okay, I'll fess up - I got the Space:1999 Megaset for my birthday).
Besides all the "expired" science possibilities, there's a real gamble to be made trying to second-
Short Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Sci-Fi lost the last of its steam when it switched from being Science Fiction to being Sci Fi. It's been part of a continuing downward spiral where while there have been more offerings recently, especially in mainstream culture, these offerings are increasingly more and more derivative and uninspired.
Give me media that is challenging, that is new, that is alien, give me speculative fiction, good writing, things that make me go hmmmmmm. Or get off my fucking lawn and go make your garbage elsewhere.
*Disclaimer: I know science fiction was never as great as I'd like to think it was. But I've read things and seen movies that really were great for their time, and for ours. This is what should have driven the direction of Science Fiction. Call an action movie in space what it is, an action move in space (or the future, or an alternate reality, or any other tired setting.)
Maybe it's the publishing side that's the problem (Score:4, Informative)
This is based partially on what I see in bookstores and partially on my own experience, which I discuss extensively in Science fiction, literature, and the haters [jseliger.com]. It begins:
If the publishing system itself is broken and nothing yet has grown up to take its place (I have no interest in trolling through thousands of terrible novels uploaded to websites in search of a single potential gem, for those of you Internet utopians out there), maybe the source of the genre's troubles isn't where PC Pro places it.
Of course not (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of authors have dealt with societies where changing sex is easy, for example, something that we've barely begun to make possible. But does this lead to a truly egalitarian society where men and women stand at exactly the same level, or a strictly segregated one where women stay home with the kids and make dinner? If we develop interstellar travel but the speed of light is still the limit, can you have an actual society where travel time between worlds is measured in centuries? Imagine that robots get to the point where they can fulfill your every need as soon as you ask for it- is there a point in living without struggle?
This is also why SF tends to age less well than other genres of fiction- once the technology actually shows up, we get to see how people react, and then it's just part of everyday life. To quote my 8-year-old, "Boooring"
Sci-fi publishers should close up (Score:3, Funny)
...and talking of predictions (spoiler) (Score:2)
...concerns about apparently philanthropic plans by big business to put the world's libraries online turning out to be a plot to control access to the world's knowledge?
Ain't gonna happen!
Oh, wait...
At least Google seems to have mastered the art of non-destructive scanning (but best not to give them ideas!)
I wish to God that it WOULD "run out of steam"... (Score:3, Insightful)
Steampunk is so very, very tired.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Vampire romance novels, to specify the particular sub-genre correctly. There is also a book about a girl and her love for her zombie boyfriend and dealing with those evil living people who think that a girl should not date the dead.