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.
>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.
This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time.
It rarely has to do with the possibility of the genre actually happening in reality. A story is good because it is riveting and the backdrop (whether sci-fi or fantasy) is just icing on the cake. Look at Harry potter and practically every fantasy story out there.... none of those stories have any chance of happening in our current reality... yet they are popular.
I think the answer for as to why there's less interest in sci-fi is pretty mundane. It's like genetic drift, but this one is cultural. For no reason at all our interests just shift because of luck. There happened to be more good stories written in the fantasy genre and that's the direction everything shifted.
Tbf though the MCU was more sci fi than anything and that every genre out of the water in every medium all the way up until endgame. Say what you want about it but the popularity of that universe dwarfed everything else in the last decade... which goes to show that it's likely mostly just drift.
> >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.
>
>This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time.
> and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way).
Well, that could be worked around in the world building. My favorite SF-friendly scenario would be if life originated in the Sun's natal cluster (perhaps not around the Sun itself), with tens of thousands of star systems, and spread between them before the cluster dispersed. Presumably panspermia would be much easier in such a situation because the stars are closer together and because maybe residual gas could help particles get trapped near other young systems. In this case all the "infected" systems could have the same coding.
A nice consequence of this scenario is it's compatible with the Fermi argument: even if origin of life is unlikely, it just had to happen once here, and so it not happening elsewhere in the galaxy (or even visible universe) is not a problem.
The weird thing about this is that interstellar space ought to actually be very hospitable to cold, highly efficient computational substrates. (This is for standard thermodynamic reasons: reliable computation must be free of noise, and low-temperature means low noise.) So there might be 'life' of a sort in interstellar space that's extremely smart and naturally long-lived compared to humans or even ordinary room-temperature AIs, but just can't do all that much in the outside world (i.e. has very low agency), except very slowly and with exceptional effort.
(Of course, these same constraints apply in a relative sense to the outer regions of planetary systems.)
With D-D fusion it might be possible to "live off the land" between the stars which probably have numerous interstellar objects of various sizes between them with a much larger cumulative mass than planets orbiting stars -- and it may be possible to completely disassemble those kind of bodies which are much richer overall in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen than terrestrial planets.
A species with that kind of capability would be able to visit another solar system in 10,000 or so years but might care less to mess around with dry little solar system bodies like the Earth. The case against "grabby" aliens is that Ceres and Pluto are still here, not that we can't find evidence of them on Earth.
I like to imagine that if that kind of interstellar traveler were to visit Earth it might take them a few decades to perfect a "reverse space-shuttle" because they'd gone 10,000 years without doing anything like that... And they can't just 3-d print one out of 10,000 year old plans because they've improved their 3-d printers to print the stuff they've been printing all that time better.
Exactly. Those kind of people could support much larger populations than the Earth with a lifestyle they find comfortable in interstellar space and would look at living on Earth at best the way we look at living on Mars.
Science Fiction doesn't have to be fantasy, it can be speculative. But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative.
Someone like Asimov never considered his books to be fantasy and that he could just insert whatever he wanted with no justification. In fact, he never considered sci-fi to be a genre, he always argued it was a setting and that his most famous stories were detective stories in a sci-fi setting. But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
"But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real."
No, it just has to be grounded in something consistent and if the book starts by explaining the mechanics of the world(or is in a world with known mechanics), a detective story very well can work.
True but at that point objects travelling faster than sound had been demonstrated.
It was just hard to engineer a manned plane that could do it. For example during WWII the V2 rockets travelled much faster than sound. They were just unmanned. Or more simple, bullets were supersonic for longer too.
What I mean is, nobody thought the sound barrier was a hard limit we could never break.
A magic unobtainium drive which works in a consistent way is fine, just call it “hyperspace” or whatever
There’s a difference between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi, but they are both still sci-fi, you can tell optimistic stories of the future with a “battle drive”, as long as you keep it consistent. If the drive cancels relativity effects and allows travel at 5000c that’s fine. Just ensure you travel at 5000c, no hoping across the galaxy in a few days, but travelling to another star in a few days or even hours is fine.
> But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative.
Agreed but only because "some effort" could be as little as a single paragraph.
> But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
If you only change a tiny bit, this isn't a major issue.
> The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
That specific story falls apart but you could have lots of thematically similar stories with FTL. No need for "serious justification" unless you're trying to pull it out of nowhere halfway through the plot. If it's there from the start, there's no problem.
> No need for "serious justification" unless you're trying to pull it out of nowhere halfway through the plot. If it's there from the start, there's no problem.
Yeah I think most readers care more about consistency than realism. Being completely realistic makes consistency easy but a harder sell in terms of entertainment.
Maybe one way to view consistency is modelling the story world as a network of criss-crossing character threads. Where one axis is time and the other(s) are uh something? Anyways, consistency is how predictable (smooth / linear) the thread is. We follow the main character's thread pretty closely so that thread is allowed to suddenly curve (plot twist) without risk of losing the reader. We only catch glimpses of the supporting cast / antagonist so those have to be either predictable or the narrator has to backtrack and reveal any twists where necessary. And maybe how intricate yet well-behaved this network appears is what gives the feeling of stories coming alive. Or maybe I'm just on too much caffeine and ranting.
Start trek transporters work because of a Heisenberg compensator. Great, no idea how it could possible work but it’s enough to know it does.
The typical poorly received uses aren’t when the cre beams down from orbit, or even when they can’t beam down, it’s when they de age people and retrieve their pattern from the buffer to cure an illness, and never do it again, or when they beam light years away for a throw away story element.
30s to 60s, sci-fi wasn't just driven by the "makes for great stories", but by the optimism for scientific advacements and the idea that these could get within reach in the future.
It was "science fiction" and not merely "space fiction".
Creating some sort of genetically-engineered dinosaur-derived ‘dragon’ may be more plausible than actually reaching another star system. It’s not going to breathe fire though.
Hence eco-systems, yes. But that's probably a harder problem than radiation shielding + hibernation. You'd still need the radiation shielding but it would be far, far more of it (because non-local).
These are interesting problems to think about, right now they are solidly SF but dragons are and always will be fantasy because physics says they can't exist in the way they are described. But you can't 100% rule out that one day descendants of humanity will visit the stars in person, assuming we don't blow ourselves up first.
That's one of the main reasons I dislike Musk so much: he takes people motivated by positive dreams (a clean planet, off-world travel and living) and then subverts their energy for grift. But 'DOGE' has shown the world who he really is, the mask is off now and anybody still empowering that asshole is co-responsible.
> physics says they can't exist in the way they are described
If we assume advanced genetic as well as bio engineering that admits the possibility of self reproducing cybernetic organisms that closely match many or all of the key characteristics. I'm not sure it's actually a cyborg if the lineage is fully independent without involving any technology external to the species but I use the term there because that's the easiest way to communicate the idea.
No, then it still wouldn't work. Not until you use that other thing to get you to a planet where gravity is low enough that a dragon would be able to take off. The whole power-to-weight and wing-surface-area-to-weight ratio simply does not work. It (barely) works for bats though some of them can be of impressive size. The idea that something the size of a dragon can fly with that size wings on Terra is something that I do not believe is supported (hah!) by physics.
I think you're making an awful lot of assumptions there and have failed to provide even ballpark specifications for the thing you're supposedly refuting. Weight seems to be a secondary characteristic related only to size. There are also plenty of examples of "small" dragons in fantasy literature.
We've already got examples of dinosaurs that come fairly close to qualifying so I'm sure something vaguely in the ballpark is within the realm of possibility. Exactly how close to the mark though I have no idea.
For example, what would you make of something visually resembling a massive western dragon but with a largely hollow body? I don't think that would disqualify it in most people's eyes. Pushing the concept a bit farther could yield something vaguely like a living cross between a hot air balloon and a deep-sea anglerfish with a weaponized tail.
Vaguely related to that hypothetical, we've got examples in the fossil record of 2 foot wide dragonflies estimated to have weighed in at under 150 grams. There's a pretty large solution space to explore here.
> Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic?
No, but we've become increasingly superstitious, and cultish. A lot of the day to day parts of sci-fi (screens everywhere , instant communication) have become reality so it's not as exciting anymore. Sci-fi no longer serves as escapism. Anymore, it reminds us of our limitations.
Presumably these are equally likely because you could build a DNA-printer and thereby create a dragon of some sort (not sure if it could have fully functional fire breathing though)?
Dragons are physically impossible in many more ways than the firebreathing. For one, things that large would probably struggle to fly. We can make larger things fly, but have to cheat using jet (or rocket!) engines to generate incredible thrust in ways not typically accessible to living beings.
And now I'm picturing a dragon with bombardier-beetle style pulsed jet boosters. And while I'd typically question your assumptions of how big dragons need to be in order to deserve the name, I'll assert that quetzocoatlus nothropi[1] was big enough.
"Dragon" as a classification is odd, because when you look at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays, sometimes from cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept, you find that they have little in common beyond some vaguely reptilian vibe and being scary.
And I'm sorry but that thing is too goofy looking to be considered a dragon.
That's begging the question. We don't need to look "at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays" from "cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept".
One could stick on those classified as such in western culture - which is where the fantasy novel about dragons and knights and spells and the rest are based on.
And in there, dragons have quite specific characteristic and vibes, as evidenced from medieval iconography of St George to countless fantasy book covers and illustrations.
But if we do expand the set under consideration then I'd suggest they do in fact have specific things in common. Large flying carnivorous reptiles. That won't cover all the various edge cases but I think it describes the vast majority of the popular usage of the term.
That definition would imply that sufficiently large flying dinosaurs qualify as dragons. And at least personally I think I agree with that conclusion. Dragons aren't purely fantasy, they're merely extinct (and never breathed fire IRL).
I really find it hard to understand how people confuse science fiction with reality. I love Tau Zero - I first read it over 40 years ago - but it’s fiction, ffs.
Also they have trouble stopping in Tau Zero so they have no choice going further than they planned. It's one of the best sci-fi novels of all time, read it!.
That Bussard Ramjet, though, is thoroughly discredited. It can't possibly work. Hydrogen hydrogen fusion is a terribly slow nuclear reaction and if you had to stop the gas to give it enough time to react, you'd end up stopping the rocket not accelerating it. In fact, the most credible use of that kind of magnetic scoop is as a brake!
> Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible
I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL? I've no doubt there's a handful of works but this is hardly a plausible explanation for a _recent_ decline in these topics.
> I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL?
I bet very little. We didn’t really know how enormous the universe is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax: “Being very difficult to measure, only about 60 stellar parallaxes had been obtained by the end of the 19th century”), and we hadn’t known for long that the speed of light is an absolute speed limit.
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.)
Time dilation and space contraction only matter if you can reasonably achieve speeds of a significant portion of the speed of light. AFAIK nobody has even come up with a reasonable way to achieve this for lightweight probes, let alone for hundred-ton ships capable of carrying humans. And let's not forget the practical problems like all photons incoming from the front being blueshifted into ultrahard radiation that would make a point blank nuclear bomb seem like a small candle.
Realistically even getting to the nearest star in less than 400 years experienced time is way way WAY out of reach for now.
Laser accelerate a lightweight probe, probe lands on alien planet and self replicates a receiver and basic robot body. Send mind in the form of information at speed of light and download into robot body.
Something roughly along these lines was believable enough for the Altered Carbon universe.
Landing from relativistic speed would be a massive engineering problem, since you won't have a laser de-celerator on the other end. And landing on a planet would seem to require a rocket, which cannot be lightweight.
Not necessarily insoluble, but a massive unsolved problem.
So what? Dilithium + antimatter + magic space warping was enough for the Star Trek universe. The sky is the limit for science fiction.
Just in that first paragraph:
- How do you stop at the other end? There won't be a large laser array at the receiving end and a laser probe will not have enough stored energy to decelerate itself.
- How exactly do you download a mind to be transmitted? We can't do it right now to be sure, and it's not clear we could ever accurately do that depending on how finely detailed a human brain is.
- How do you transmit it reliably over several hundred light years? Background radiation alone is enough to drown out any signal after a few dozen light years no matter how good your transmission is. Also, when do you start sending? You cannot possibly know which probes survived. (you DID send out at least a few hundred probes right? Don't forget to multiply laser energy requirements by the amount of probes)
- How does the receiving end download a mind into a robot body? We can't even begin to do that on Earth, not even with worms or flies. Humans are right out.
- How do we power the lasers? Conservative estimates have put required laser power at several gigawatts at least. Current laser systems can do that in pulsed mode but only with extremely low duty cycles. Getting enough power together to supply millions of homes would be tricky to say the least. (and see the note above about needing multiple probes just to be on the good side of probability)
- How does the probe survive decades of ultrahard radiation? What about dust it will encounter at high-subluminal speeds, also for decades? The shielding for that won't be lightweight, but the heavier the probe gets the more difficult it will be to accellerate.
- The satellite which is light enough to be powered by lasers also contains the most magical 3d printer anyone has ever seen. You can't just pull the molecules for advanced processors and energy generation equipment out of the air, such a probe would need to set up significant mining industries all on its own without any human interaction.
- A basic robot body. Keep in mind that "picking up a keychain and choosing the right key out of it without dropping the whole keychain" is already a challenge for modern robots.
In short, it'll be several centuries before humanity even gets close to such a project. I'd like to be wrong, but it seems extremely unlikely anyone of us will see such a thing in our lifetime.
It is very unlikely indeed, because we are not trying. We have a world set up so as to allow a few people to accrue wealth they couldn't possibly need, by impoverishing everyone else. Where are they going to make money out of this?
>but if it's just about you, the speed of light is no limitation at all
It's a huge limitation, even just getting propelled to "big enough speed", say 1/10 the speed of light.
We barely do 1/1500 the speed of light, in unmanned probes, and only because we sling shot on Solar gravity, not as propulsion or anything, and at 1400 o Celcius, plus deadly radiation, not to mention any micro-meteor as big as a particle of dust could kill someone there).
> It's a huge limitation, even just getting propelled to "big enough speed", say 1/10 the speed of light.
If you can't even get up to 1/10 the speed of light, then you wish the speed of light was a huge limitation, but it's actually not affecting you at all.
If the point argued is solely "the speed of light is a huge limitation" (and not: "getting anywhere near the speed of light is a big issue"), I'd say accepting that "even basic much lesser speed is a huge problem" is hardly a refutation of that. Nor is it an argument towards the feasibility of the actual feat being discussed (interstellar travel).
I guess you're technically correct though: the speed of light is not an issue, if 1/10th the speed of light is already unachievable.
Don't even need to do time dilatation - just make you lifetime longer by techjlnical means (ideally almost infinite) and you will be in the next star sumystem before you figure out how to exit your VIM session.
That would only rule out stories based on interstellar travel, which is a tiny subset of what you can do in space. After all, you'll just end up inside another solar system that won't be much different from ours. The planets will be in different orbits but there will most likely be an asteroid belt and the effects of temperature will remain the same even if the planets are in different temperature ranges from our planets.
If earth is big enough for fantasy, then the solar system is plenty big enough for science fiction.
If you wanted to watch hard science fiction I would recommend watching anthrofuturism on YouTube who focuses exclusively on the moon.
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.
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.
It’s well understood that the expansion of the universe is not “due to general relativity”. General relativity does explain some details of that expansion.
The universe is expanding due to general relativity... in the sense that Einstein literally wrote "... plus the expansion of the universe" into his equations.
Stop to consider them for what purpose? Thinking they're cool? Yeah they're cool. But they have very little to do with interstellar travel, in the way that a canoe has little to do with investigating deep-sea vents.
A small station, hosting a small number of people, orbiting very close to the surface of the Earth.
> 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service
…very close to the surface of the Earth.
> Mars rovers that run for 10+ years
On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on. Notably, we have nothing but melted slag on Venus.
> Flying helicopters on Mars
On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on.
I don’t mean to detract from the achievements of our space programs. But we have to be realistic: we’re exploring the easiest bits of our local neighborhood, that’s all.
You don’t need to go faster than light. Once you approach anywhere near the speed of light, time slows down so much that journey time becomes irrelevant.
Interstellar space contains neutral hydrogen atoms. Hitting a spaceship, they would produce electromagnetic radiation. When the collision speed goes past about 0.25c, the radiation becomes hard gamma rays which are dangerous to living things, and cannot be efficiently shielded against.
At this speed, the time dilation is slightly above 3%, so you're still not going to reach even Alpha Centauri in one human lifetime, or maybe you barely can.
Right, we are never leaving. We should get comfortable here, and take better care of the only habitable planet, rather than doing insane things and justifying that as "Don't worry, we'll make Mars habitable" and other silliness.
Even if we do leave, it's unlikely that we do so for a very long time so taking care of the planet makes sense even if you intend to discard our crib. Similarly in the nearer term if we had a unified goal to colonize a near planet/moon that's still going to take a huge long term effort to do more than the equivalent of putting a tent up on an island off the coast to get that colony established (if it can ever be self-sufficient).
Well, things like the eventual expansion of our own star or the probability of a sizeable asteroid/comet hitting earth tells me, that we should at least keep thinking about leaving. Even if the current tech is nowhere near good enough.
I think you should assume that the radiation hardened, self healing computer would consider itself alive.
But importantly that's not us leaving. Some distant future descendent of humans could have engineered itself to leave, but it's not us and we shouldn't fixate on that distant and unknowable future.
There is a scene in Pirates of the Carribean where captain jack is stuck in a void surrounded by duplicates of himself. It is his hell. As we have biult better and better telescopes we realize that as we expand into space we will be stuck talking only to ourselves, at least for a few thousand generations.
When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment. When areicebo fell and was not immediately rebiult, i realized that most people just dont care about ever meeting another civilization. Even if we did find one it wouldnt change much here on earth. Most people dont care about climate change. They dont care about anything beyond their own lifetime. What matter will aliens be if they are a thousand lightyears away? So people dream now about other things, about grimy politics and alternative history.
>When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment.
• The LIGO methodology is to look for hyper-specified patterns in voluminous reams of apparent 'noise'. It wouldn't be unfair to call it an extensively aggravated search for what one is looking for. That's okay, so long as they provide the stats to back up the non-noisiness of what they turn up. (I'm not a stats person and can't debate that, and. I trust their caliber enough that I don't feel the need to). But to your point, if there are other signatures lurking in LIGO data _that they don't know already how to look for_, then there is no reason why a paper would have gotten produced describing it since the first GW detection in 2015.
• Now, take this for what it's worth in terms of fragmentary information relaying - But at the first Sol Symposium in 2023 at Stanford, I can tell you that in podium-level banter between talks (perhaps it was Q&A and the like IIRC) it was asserted that the LIGO consortium was not allowing studies (read: not allowing access to its data) where the investigator's intension was related to UFO / UAP phenomena (like, extrapolating here, looking for signatures correlated with external reports of UAP sightings). If that claim was borne out, than perhaps the LIGO consortium is just doing preemptive reputation protection in not allowing such studies to kick off with its name associated with it. (One could attempt to follow up with astronomer Beatriz Villaroel for a lead on who said that or if there's substance to that research policy claim)
But my point is, between these two bullet points, you are afforded a complete 'empty set' - and decidedly not a 'negative result' - on whether or not LIGO has detected signatures of a 'warp drive' or other some such non-prosaic phenomenon.
If LIGO can detect mergers at billions of lightyears, i doubt they could ignore the "sound" of the NCC-1701 passing through our solar system. Proper access or not, there are enough scifi geeks with access to LIGO data that someone would get the word out.
Again, raw LIGO data is sheer noise. They have to interrogate the dataset with their hypothesized candidate signal signature, natural or otherwise, and see if it ‘responds’ with a hit. In the case of black hole mergers, they had an idea - a candidate model - of what to look for. In the case of a warp drive, could they even guess a signature to interrogate the dataset with?
And to the extent that the -1701 patrolling Mars-Venus might manage to ‘stick out like a sore thumb’, what about the relative blip of a Sh'Raan class embarking on some fresh surveying out of 40 Eridani A?
Rebuilding it would cost maybe half a billion dollars. Give ICE an unpaid week off and job done. Maybe not the absolute best way to spend that money on science, but I fear the actual outcome is “it’s not cost effective so we’re not going to spend it on any science.”
I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now. There would have to be considerable R&D, and willpower, and it would be very expensive but I think it is within our powers. Humans would have to live underground and deal with dust, maybe microbes in the case of Mars, but we could do it. The spaceships to go to Mars would have to be big but they could more easily be built on the Moon due to the lower gravity.
It's easy if you can build some kind of machine like what Eric Drexler talked about that could manufacture absolutely everything. Otherwise it's impossible.
The best hope for that is to send the one thing to Mars that people absolutely refuse to send to Mars which is bacteria and yeast and microbes. That could be a synthetic biology platform that could make pretty much all the molecules you need and then you assemble them with 3D printing or something like that.
We could send ten thousand workshop machines, a thousand huge forges and presses and reactors, and enough people to run them and all the farms and chemical vats they use those machines to build. Is that not enough manufacturing capability?
And that takes, what, a million of those "Starships?" To be plausible you have to be able to get it a lot smaller than that. If you can fit it into someone's hand the rocketry gets to be trivial.
Those big machines have lots of little parts and if you have to wait three years to get a spare part that’s a big problem. (Never mind anything that Earth sends to a Mars colony is a gift because it is inconceivable that it would be profitable to bring anything back)
Anyone who starts sketching out what a space manufacturing complex looks like (e.g. Drexler, myself) comes to the same conclusion Drexler did —- there is this diverse residue of difficult to manufacture small but complex things. The good news is that we have molecular assemblers, they built you, and now that people are decoding the “junk DNA” we are getting a handle on genetic regulation networks and will be able to make them much more productive and reliable,
> I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now.
That is or was essentially the mission of the US government's Artemis program, as I understand it. Some elements of the plan are (or were):
'Civilize' (my word) the Moon - build PNT, situational awareness, communication infrastructure, bases, permanent human presence etc. Bring it within a normalized region of operations, like Earth orbit (though obviously much more expensive and less utilized). A benefit is developing plans for infrastructure and operations on Mars, in a much more friendly and less expensive environment. What does it take to support humans efficiently and reliably on another body?
Also conduct experiments and develop technology for Mars in cislunar regions - again, much friendlier and less costly.
And yet we still have a solar system, empty of life other than Earth, we can expand to. Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is across the river?
Two things baffle me:
1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system.
2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
There are a lot of ethical issues surrounding Neuralink and how it would be used. It might be good for certain medical stuff but I can see how it can be abused.
Mean people already do these things. Other people are already trying to use AI to decode your brainwaves and thoughts. There's no evidence Neuralink is doing anything unethical.
Neuralink has various potentials. One of them is that it becomes obligatory or even mandatory... If you don't get it, you'll be accused of being a luddite. It will probably start as a medical tool and progress to there.
The problem is that you are giving away access to your mind, one of the last private spaces. That means your thoughts can be stolen (think AI scraping but worse), or advertising put in your dreams. Perhaps even used to reprogram your mind etc.
When I was using Zortech C++ in the ‘80s, I never imagined I’d be talking to the author nearly half a century later about his support for a fascist Nazi near-trillionaire.
> I wouldn't support Musk if he was a fascist nazi.
That's not how that works.
Musk is, by many definitions well across the line distinguishing the 'fascist nazi's' from the rest of us.
Normalization of deviance slowly shifts the window to the point where his behavior is excused. Some people think it is acceptable because of all of the (potential) good a person could do or has already done. That's roughly the equivalent of 'Hitler was a vegetarian, and liked animals, how bad could he be?'. But The country that spawned the movement (so I think they get to make the call) thinks he is. And Musk's support for the German AfD (which is a thin layer of veneer over a despicable group) speaks volumes, yes, let's 'Make Germany Great Again' ffs. Even the Neo Nazi's think he is a Nazi. Elon has made Twitter (sorry, 'X') into a safe haven for the alt-right and various hate groups.
If it quacks like a Nazi and moves like a Nazi it probably is a Nazi. Whether you support him or not changes nothing about Elon but it does say something about you that you continue to support him despite everything he has already undeniably done and I'm disappointed, to put it mildly.
I think we can agree that Musk is strongly motivated. He works insanely hard and takes huge personal risks with his fortune.
He says why he does it - over and over - to save humanity by spreading it out into space.
> desperate for approval and accolades. From anyone.
If true, it is rather common behavior, not deeply unwell. Politicians 100% fall into that category. So do movie stars. So does every Olympic athlete. So what.
I think if you materially support the nazis, you are a nazi, regardless of what might be your internal justification. This is a distinction without a difference.
1) There may well be other biospheres in the solar system. There is some indirect and inconclusive evidence of microbial life on Mars, and even in the Venusian atmosphere. This dates back to results from the Viking and Venera, as well as more recent research. Earth life could be destructive to native life in these places, and vice versa (since they would likely be extremophiles) resulting in invasive species.
2) Musk is putting a lot of money into these things but he is still heavily subsidised by US government money and facilities (a loophole in the Outer Space Treaty allows individuals and corporations to claim other planets but not countries.)
> There is some indirect and inconclusive evidence of microbial life on Mars, and even in the Venusian atmosphere. This dates back to results from the Viking and Venera, as well as more recent research.
Yes, I've been hearing that forever. Every probe shrinks the envelope on the possibility.
> Earth life could be destructive to native life in these places,
Better us than slime mold.
> and vice versa (since they would likely be extremophiles) resulting in invasive species.
Perhaps. If anyone was transporting things back from there, there'd be a long space voyage where any such toxicity to the astronauts would be pretty clear.
2. Musk is not getting subsidies. He does get government contracts, where he exchanges rockets for money. That is not a subsidy, like if I make boxes and sell them to the government I am not getting a subsidy.
There are possibilities of invasive species either way. Think of how Australia etc have struggled with various plants and animals that have taken over. We may find that some Earth life likes Mars too much and becomes an uncontrollable pest there (after some mutation), or that some microbe etc from Mars finds the Earth environment more hospitable and starts being invasive here. (Already predicted by HG Wells' "Red Weed".) That would not be unlikely as if Mars used to be more habitable then there could be life hibernating or waiting for a break, and Earth might offer it all the things it needs to reproduce quickly...
2. How do you define loans, tax credits and other subsidies then? You claim it’s this person specifically advancing space faring capabilities- which literally would not be possible without the US government. So please elaborate, as you’re not making sense.
>Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is across the river?
That "river" is still vast and nothing we want is on the other side.
>1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system.
It's less the idea that Terran life is toxic and more that we're still hoping to find some forms of primitive life elsewhere in the solar system, and don't want those efforts thwarted by cross-contamination. You decided the rest of the solar system is dead, not the scientific community.
>2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
If you really can't comprehend the reason why Elon Musk is villified by people then there's no point in trying to explain it to you.
Suffice to say that owning a rocket company doesn't absolve a person of their sins to everyone, even on Hacker News.
> You decided the rest of the solar system is dead, not the scientific community.
The odds are heavily stacked against other life existing, and get worse with every probe. Of course, nobody can prove there is no other life. And it's not very credible that Terran life will out-compete locally evolved life.
And the idea that preserving some slime mold on Pluto justifies us constraining ourselves to Earth is just sad.
> If you really can't comprehend the reason why Elon Musk is villified by people then there's no point in trying to explain it to you.
I once asked another Musk-hater on HN why? All he could come up with is Musk called a diver a pedo-boy. I pointed out that Musk only did that because the diver went on national TV and told Musk to shove his submarine up his backside.
If you've got a better reason, I'd love to hear it!
Musk said in 2019 that Epstein was “obviously a creep” and claimed that Epstein “tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island. I declined.”
Hmm..
> “Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for,”
Hmm..
> “Will be in the BVI/St Bart’s area over the holidays. Is there a good time to visit?”
Hmm..
> “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”
Hmm..
> The emails between the two moguls come years after Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor in Florida.
Notwithstanding the other myriad of reasons to not like Elon Musk (of which there are many)…
You’re equivocating a childish insult with insisting that a person is a pedophile and hiring a private investigator to prove so and then writing scathing emails to reporters because they refuse to repeat claims uncritically. This is an appalling failing of morality on your part.
I’m frankly not inclined to dive into why I, previously a big fan of Elon Musk, find him personally repugnant because I expect you to apply the same standards to everything he does. That doesn’t take away from SpaceX, but we shouldn’t overlook his failings just because rockets are cool.
He hired the private investigator before he was sued.
You left out the part where he claimed a person was a pedophile and when asked if it was just an insult basically said “no I really think he’s a pedophile”, and started stating made up bullshit about child brides as fact. He only backtracked when he was sued. That is NOT the same as just throwing insults.
"Mr. Musk made these statements based on reports he received from a private investigator he hired to investigate Mr. Unsworth in preparation for the litigation that Mr. Unsworth had already threatened. Unbeknownst to Mr. Musk, the investigator’s reports were fabricated, and the investigator himself turned out to be a convicted felon who had gone to prison for fraud."
"Mr. Musk’s tweet was the culmination of an argument between two people that was punctuated by insults—not a factual accusation of the crime of pedophilia. The firm also demonstrated that Mr. Unsworth had not suffered any injury."
This level of defense seems highly inappropriate when you consider that the the unimpressive billionaire doesn't stoop down to this level, has a functional moon lander, ISRU technology that can manufacture solar panels on the moon and a long term plan for getting rid of SLS while the more impressive billionaire is struggling to get to orbit.
There were cars before the Model T, but only for the rich. Ford made cars affordable for everyman. That changed everything.
There were books before Gutenberg, but only for the rich. His printing press made them cheap enough to print newspapers. That changed everything.
Before Bessemer, making steel was extremely expensive and rarely one. With the Bessemer Process, vast quantities of steel could be cheaply made. That changed everything. Google says:
"The process revolutionized the industry by reducing costs and increasing production, making steel accessible for major infrastructure projects in the 19th and early 20th centuries."
It's valuable for sure. It's nothing like, "The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds". There are many others, and many are doing more (again, NASA, etc.). JPL's homepage says "Our missions have flown to every planet and the Sun ...", and that they've been on Mars for four years, so let's be serious and not throw wild absurd claims at the wall (very Musk-like, though!).
Now that Musk led the way, sure. People laughed at Musk when he started out.
> NASA
Has sent a handful of probes out, only a handful because they are so costly. Now NASA can send out legions of them. There was a previous discussion here about why only one JWST was made and launched, at a cost of $10B. We all hope and pray it doesn't break down. Now with Musk's rockets we can launch lots of them and make N times the discoveries!
(With cheap launches, we don't have to make single machines that must be super reliable. We can make cheap machines at fractions of the cost, and so what if a few of them fail.)
Lowering costs by an order of magnitude changes everything.
That doesn't add up. Plenty of Philip K Dick novels and stories have spaceships, while also being existential nightmares of the collapse of human identity. Ursula Le Guin, the quintessential new wave sci-fi author, mostly wrote about space travel (though usually as a mechanism for doing cultural anthropology).
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.
There are a heap of self published sci-fi and fantasy novels that fill the top selling lists on amazon in their respective niche. These are not included in the database that this analysis used. Space travel, multiple worlds and aliens are all really common tropes in those, even if the book is a pulpy progression fantasy or litrpg. The other top sellers are Romantasy which are published professionally. These have lots of dragons, were-wolves and vampires for sexy reasons.
The professional fiction publishers are 70-80% women publishing for a majority female fiction reader fan base. Even old best selling men's action authors like Clive Custler and Tom Clancy would probably have to self publish if they were writing today.
Poking around on Amazon's Kindle books for Science Fiction and the "popular" list seems to be all established names at this point? Some of them got their start self-publishing, ofc, like Dungeon Crawler Carl or Andy Weir's books but didn't stay that way. They don't make it particularly easy to sort/inspect the popularity stats, and I'm sure there are some super niche sub-genres out there, but for the genre as a whole I'm not seeing any surprises.
(Space travel, of course, is a major part of many of them, like Project Hail Mary or the Pierce Brown stuff. Not nearly as much in the Star Trek utopian vein, of course, as the parent commenter pointed out.)
Feels like folks like Blake Crouch or Mick Herron are filling similar spots as Cussler or Clancy these days, but again shifted to today's general worldview. Not as verbose as Clancy, though.
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 ;)
You've no argument from me there. Lem was unhappy with aspects of Tarkovsky's version saying he had not written about people's sex problems in space. Nonetheless it is often a very beautiful film.
> Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer.
Interesting POV because Star Trek and Foundation both have recent, big budget streaming series while new Terminator movies were flops and Neuromancer has never seen any development(?)
Neuromancer is currently in development at Apple+ :)
FWIW, Amazon made a show based on "The Peripheral" by Gibson which is way more bleak than Neuromancer, and it was crazy good, but they canceled it after one season.
I think I would argue that we already see the sea change in the later Dune books
The inner systems become hidebound as they continue to reach out they find that not only has someone beaten them there, they have become Other as well as antagonistic and expansionist.
Starships are a boring transport layer, implementation detail.
Being a part of a Q continuum, a disembodied consciousness that can appear wherever whenever, while still retaining a memory/sense of "self" is a far more interesting a dream.
Starships titillate people who tinker with machines. Not very optimistic if we are dragging along service jobs to explore the cosmos.
Fantasy is not a downgrade from sci-fi; the genre serves an altogether different purpose which is equally valuable, if not moreso - the development of spiritual faculties of perception. It is the neglect of those faculties which leads to societal decay -- the current nadir we are in is STILL the fallout of the "death of God" (as Nietzsche put it) -- man's recognition that the Sky Daddy myth is no longer enough to explain the world led to a vacuum of a cohesion between metaphysics and morality. In its absence, materialism - hedonism in the realm of the senses - is all that that there is to derive hope or reason for living from.
Without fantasy -- Lord of the Rings being the chief example -- the "post-God" world has no means of developing said faculties outside of fantasy (the genre), and art - which, as a whole, is a form of fantasy.
I kinda have the same feeling for music as well, the best phases for metal and punk music are usually when stuff is going to shit. When everything looks bright and good the music just doesn't have the same quality, people are not angry all the time.
A lot of the old stuff isn't so much about escaping Earth, as outgrowing it. A feeling that it's our destiny to expand to the stars, just as it was life's destiny to come out of the oceans.
The more we look for alien civilizations and come up empty, the more I feel like they were on to something. For all we know, life is exceedingly rare in the universe.
YA Dystopia novels probably had a hand in that. They almost certainly sucked all the air out of the genre, and it’ll take a long time for serious authors to see a viable path forward with publishers with anything that vaguely resembles them.
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.
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.
The Culture can't happen. It requires Faster Than Light spaceships and that's not a thing in our universe. Also, and I know it's not what you meant, but in Banks' fiction "State of the Art" is specifically a novella about a Culture visit to Earth in the 1970s. They're not us.
Egan's "The Amalgam" is an SF society which could in principle descend in part from some future humanity, and I suppose if you like Banks' setting for its utopianism you'd be satisfied with the Amalgam. Its citizens tend to live long, full lives in which they're definitely mostly concerned with the upper parts of Maslow's pyramid and their practical needs are fulfilled as a matter of course in most cases.
I must say, to the extent we have any future at all, I think probably of Egan's "Dream Apes". An Orangutan-like self-engineered future humanity who have arranged that there are no apex predators above them, there's an abundance of resources for their relatively modest population, and they just chill, believing that if there is something out there it's not their concern. Of course in the story the Dream Apes are all annihilated by a cataclysmic event which destroys Earth, but hey, it's pretty quick.
The part where superintelligent computers keep humans around as pets in a powerful and happy civilization is plausible. The part where there’s hyperdrive and energy grids and fields and effectors, less so.
IIRC Banks insisted in interviews that the culture's citizens aren't pets. The exact relationship is, like the FTL travel and indeed teleportation, very vague and only sketched in where needed to advance the plot.
We have no experience with the extremely asymmetrical relationships which would result. Lem tries to imagine this in Golem XIV - what happens when humans who are used to thinking of themselves as smart are talking with a categorically more intelligent machine - and it doesn't work very well even though it's only a sketch.
"Tatja Grimm's World" has a neat trick where Vinge is able to sidestep this because [[SPOILER]] although Tatja is much smarter than everybody else from her world, that's not because she's smarter than we are, almost everyone born on her planet is an idiot for reasons the story justifies.
I don't think anyone's failing to recognize modern sci-fi novels because they aren't called "The Space Martians Go To The Moon In Their Starship" or whatever.
Really, I think the most significant trend here is that, between 1950 and 1980 or so, the sci-fi genre grew up and stopped relying on painfully literal titles.
I’d argue that SF should never have "grown up." Look at the works considered classics today, like Heinlein, or even Star Trek. At the time of release, they were often dismissed as unserious (TOS famously had scientific blunders like planets at -290°C), yet they remain cultural touchstones because they prioritized vision over rigor.
SF used to excel at selling "dreams" to humanity. By trying too hard to be seen as "serious" or scientifically airtight, authors sacrificed the sense of wonder that allows for mainstream success. We traded mass appeal for academic validation.
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.
> science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.
Not even abstract, just not completely on the nose. Just as a lot if fantasy is not: only two discord novels would match the author’s search terms even though you’ll find all five inside the pages. None for Malazan. Or Nix’s old kingdom.
And worse, 40% of the sci-fi terms pretty only allow settings of “future solar system”. Not one of the Foundation books would match. Pretty much no classic sci-fi either. Wells’s fucking The War of the Worlds would not, because for some reason (of having any sort of taste) it was not titled “the day Mars invaded planet earth through space and then was beaten” like some lone star light novel.
In that sense I think it's less an overall literary trends and more reflecting the pretty basic way of marketing pulpy stories to teens means putting "vampire" rather than "planet" in big letters in the title. Also, people still writing fantasy novels about alien civilizations aren't setting them on the moon or Mars any more, for reasons...
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.
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.
Not one of the culture books either, even though several have spaceships as main characters. And only a handful of Hamilton books. And I reckon a single Polity book.
The genre where we find the "fantasy/sci-fi" books right next to usually mystery books in our German book stores usually is speculative fiction:
- mystery,
- horror,
- fantasy,
- and sci-fi have lots of overlap.
- And XKCDs What-If-Books even.
But as someone who hates fantasy and loves sci-fi, the biggest difference for me comes from plausibility: "a witch did it" as Occam's fantasy razor for things being the way they happened, and the underlying physics engine means for me: either this is soft "sci-fi", or they better explain with hard rules the limitations and effects of their magic system.
Since (low-sorcery) fantasy RPGs even have torches that would never work, when historical torched looked completely differently, suspension of disbelieve hardly sets in for me in fantasy books.
I speculate that a lot of sci-fi reflects the cutting edge of science and technology at the time it is written. For well over a century a lot of that frontier was transportation: and we got "Around the World in 80 Days" and "20000 Leagues under the Sea" and then a lot of books about space. We also got "Canticle for Leibowitz" and other post-apocalyptic books out of the age when nuclear weapons and energy was top of mind. Then, in the 70s and 80s computer technology became the center of innovation and we got cyberpunk and a lot of sci-fi turned inward to virtual worlds and the like. Given we're in a new space age, maybe sci-fi will start to follow? I'm certainly seeing a new wave of AI centric fiction.
My favourite part of a Canticle for Leibowitz is the manual auto regressive model the old monk is using to recover damaged books. I remember reading the gpt2 paper and thinking hang on...
I don't see how anything substantive has changed vis-a-vis space.
There are some hard sci-fi recently, like the Expanse, that tackle a more realistic space expansion. But fundamentally nothing has changed tech-wise in space technology since chemical rockets, at least not for people-sized space-endeavours.
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.
Yeah, that's a good one. "Dumb and fun" is a good description.
Craig Alanson also wrote a fantasy trilogy a while back that proved much better than I was expecting. It started off as what appeared to be an uninteresting juvenile fantasy book, but quickly got better and darker. I very much enjoyed reading those.
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.
9/11 was the turning point. We'd been fed a future "in the year 2000." When we got there, that future turned into a nostalgic vision of the past.
It's still possible to imagine new bright futures, but that kind of imagination is very much against a cultural tide that's fervently regressive and nostalgic.
Futurist Michio Kaku once gave a talk at my company five years ago and though I forgot the details, I remember the audience found his vision quite dystopian.
The 20th century was a period of wild change. Someone born before the first powered airplane flight in their lifetime could have flown on a jet plane to Europe and watched the first moon landing live on TV.
Vaccines put an end to endemic diseases which killed so many children every year. The birth control pill catalyzed the sexual revolution. We had a treatment for diabetes, which was once a death sentence.
The 1950s and onward saw huge changes in how businesses are organized due to computerization. In the US, cheap automobiles, cheap gas, the federal highway system, and subsidies transformed how most people live, including white flight into suburbia.
Plastic was a wonder material. Materials like nylon and polyester transformed the clothing industry.
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.
Alpha Centauri is a triple star, even if it is not the kind of three body system depicted in that story (mainly because one of the 3 stars is much smaller than the other 2, so it orbits stably around them like a very big and distant planet).
While the triple star Alpha Centauri does not have mass ratios between its stars that are compatible with the story plot, I think that ignoring this technical detail is a much less serious plot hole than those of the majority of the non-fantastic Hollywood movies, which are supposed to happen in the real world, but they still contain a lot of impossible actions.
For literature: House of Suns* if you feel like strapping in for a wild ride with nevertheless believable 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). Allowing for limited FTL handwavyness opens up a lot of space opera titles that elect to otherwise play by hard sci-fi rules.
* 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.
Alas I think I've read/watched everything on your list. I'll try a useful echo response. I read the two big Arkady Martine books, and much of Ann Leckie's work. I thought they were all pretty good. Martine because the Aztec's in space genre is new to me, and she writes so well about people, Leckie because her galaxy spanning empire of genetically cloned god-kings and spaceships with transferrable personalities is clever and disconcerting.
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.
> What, you thought early era SF used accurate science?
It depends on the author I guess. Stanislaw Lem for instance mostly separated his "silly-fiction universes" (e.g. the Ijon Tichy and 'robot fairytales' novels) from his "hard sci-fi" universes (for instance the Pilot Pirx novels) - and there it was mostly about the restrictions of space travel (where space travel is usually just plain old cargo hauling), Pirx never left the solar system because it simply wasn't possible during his lifetime (part of him eventually did - maybe - in his last book 'Fiasco'), instead the Pirx novels were mostly occupied with typical 'space trucker' problems like oil leaks on his rocket boosters, wrestling with space harbour bureaucracy or the occasional humanoid robot going into a mode that could be described as 'mad' or 'depressed'.
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…
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.
Here are a few ideas trends that are affecting this:
-Publishing is getting less profitable so there are less books being published by the big companies.
-Publishing companies are grow 70-80% woman and are choosing female preferred books
-Most published fiction readers are female (I'm not sure what came first women reading more books or publishes publishing less male friendly books)
-Romance is the biggest genre fiction and that has heaps of dragons, werewolves and vampires (hence why those terms haven't dropped off)
-Self published books aren't included in isfdb, lots of male authors self publish
-Amazon best selling sci/fi, cyberpunk lists now have heaps of self-published books (maybe most)
-Most of this stuff is pretty pulpy, but it is really common to have starships and space travel in these books.
I think that science has advanced to the point, where we no longer consider there to be “unexplored” realms, in science. We haven’t gotten there, yet, but we can see it, from here.
There’s the old adage (maybe it was Carl Sagan that said it?), that any sufficiently advanced science, appears to be magic, but we no longer think of it as “magic.” It’s just a point further down the road. More importantly, we now know about a lot of the “hard limits,” in science.
For myself, I’ve always been more of a fan of fantasy. That’s simply because I prefer the way the narrative is driven.
In Science Fiction, the real protagonist is the speculative science, and the characters are simply decorative elements. The stories are about the “grand idea” science.
In Fantasy, the stories are really about characters, in a fantastical context. The stories are about people.
Realistic Hard SF has to deal with Accelerating Change making technology vastly powerful yet still limited. The hardest thing to write about is cognitively enhanced humans or any other entities (AI, aliens, etc.) exceeding human cognitive limits. JW Campbell famously said it couldn't be done, but without that depictions of the future or wider universe fall flat. Vernor Vinge became the master of such SF and showed several ways to do it. I recommend everything he wrote! Good Hard SF requires an author who has a good grasp of science without that stifling their imagination. It's easy if you cheat but Science Fantasy is unreadable by the science literate folks who frequent HN. Good Hard SF is out there, with and without spaceships, but you'll have to hunt for it - and thanks for all the recommendations here!
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.
It's far more practical to adapt life to space and other planets, than it is to adapt space and other planets to human life. The problem with writing a story about artificial life exploring the universe is that it's unrelatable without humans in it.
I think humans are stuck on earth permanently because there are no other environments in the solar system we can live in as easily as earth. Traditional sci-fi explained this away using overpopulation pressures, but overpopulation is fading as a reality and plausible narrative device. And forget about interstellar travel, it's too dangerous and takes too long.
If intelligent DNA-based life is still around on earth when it starts getting too hot because of the sun's expansion and it all needs to flee, it will have continued to evolve such that it will be unrecognizable and unrelatable to us. And by then I expect artificial life to have spread to such an extent that biological life on earth is basically a historical footnote.
I actually think life in the broadest sense will spread from earth to other places in the galaxy, but it will be completely alien compared to human life.
Our trajectory is to meld ourselves with machines. Fleshy humans may he stuck on earth but our machines have no such restrictions and can be engineered for all kinds of extremes.
We will eventually figure out how to imprint our consciousness into a chip. Maybe not for another thousand years but weve been building machines our entire existence to conquer nature. We will figure it out.
If there's not a constant stream of consciousness throughout the entire process, I'm just assuming that's gonna be nothing more than a copy. What else could it be? When "you" wake up, it'll be 100% convincing either way, so I assume you can only prove it going in. I'm not great at philosophy though.
Edit: biology is pretty efficient though. We might as well just start growing new bodies/parts for people, enhancing it over time. There are already functionally immortal species on Earth.
What is a continuous stream. I was knocked unconscious for a few minutes in 2007 when I came off a bike. Am I the same person today as I was in 2005?
On the other hand dementia eats away at memories and personality. My grandmother doesn’t remember having children (who are now in their late 70s), a husband (she had two), but does remember (mostly) life as a child. She wasnt unconscious though.
(It’s basically the inevitable same end game as the rom com “50 first dates”)
As you say it’s philosophical - a bit like Triggers Broom. Or 1 minute Time Machine in a way.
I like the answer to ship of Theseus (define the ship by the keel or whatever), If you were to replace every cell in your body are you still the same person? That happens multiple times over your life. What if you were to replace some cells with non human parts - a false leg, a pig heart. When do you stop being “you”
If you replace every neuron in your brain with a synthetic neuron, one at a time, a there a point you no longer exist. Is it a continuous reduction. What if those neurons are put together elsewhere, which is you. Both? Neither? A fraction of each?
I don't think we'll ever populate a planet beyond the solar system, but I think at some point we'll leave Earth. The sun has an expiration date, after all. Maybe the space-flotilla species was the most accurate outcome after all, Mass Effect!
I always appreciated the Mobile Suit Gundam approach (U.C. timeline, to be specific): humans in space largely live in O'Neill Cylinder-style space colonies arranged in constellations at Earth-Moon Lagrange points, allowing them to a) be built from materials gathered from space and b) once built, manufacture things from those materials without having to land them on Earth first. There are large settlements on the Moon, and while they are important manufacturing and research centers, they're not the primary population centers in space. Mars is, to the best of my knowledge, uninhabited. As far as the outer solar system goes, only Jupiter has a permanent human presence as the primary source of humanity's helium-3 (Gundam predates the proposal of mining the Moon for helium-3 instead).
I like this approach. It's plausible based on the assumptions made by the story, lets people in space have the benefits of mostly-normal gravity and radiation exposure (as compared to, say Mars), and keeping things local to the Earth means you don't need to be too concerned with the distances involved. Where they really lose the plot, though, is with population; Gundam claims that, in less than 100 years, billions of people--in fact, the large majority of humanity--have moved to space. I can't even begin to fathom what kind of effort would be needed to build that many space colonies, and then shuttle the people up there to populate them.
This is not practical in terms of microgravity environments. You just have to read the space shuttle manual to learn how to correct a broken toilet before you understand how poorly equipped we are to handle this challenge. If you can't fix it you're back to the Apollo style bags. The toilet has a 21 day lifetime anyways. Reading the manual further shows why. Turns out lots of holes between the inside and outside are so terrible you'd rather hold onto your waste than build a convenience. Even so turds at suborbital velocities are a terrifying thought on every level.
Any loose item in the ship is an _immediate_ choking hazard. There's no gravity. Surface tension does strange things. Even to your throat. You have to trust that every person on board is going to reliably capture and contain all debris at all times. God help you if you have to fire the engines for a short period because suddenly there's "gravity" again. You can rotate a space station but you can't go anywhere really.
Medically you can't do any imaging other than weak ultrasound. No X-Rays even. Surgery is effectively impossible without gravity anyways. Not that you'll ever get that close to the effort. It's absurd how brightly we paint this dim picture in our culture and our military style propaganda.
Until we have artificial gravity I personally think we have no business in space as a civilian effort and we're not going to get particularly far from Earth because of it.
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.
It was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now.
Yes. Von Braun wrote an otherwise realistic novel in which earth's explorers find intelligent life on Mars.[1] Heinlein wrote realistically of native intelligent life on Mars and Venus, with far more benign environments then they actually have.
But once probes got there, we got to see how bleak they are.
There's a little hope for extrasolar planets, now that we can detect some of them.
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..."
> The following extracts are taken from pp. 49 and 50:
> “The recent dominance of the meteoritic impact theory of crater origin makes timely a review of the oases-crater question of Mars. In this treatise, these conclusions have been pointed out:
> “I, Meteorite craters are known on the Earth and Moon; therefore, craters exist on Mars.
> “2. The circular oases on Mars are the size, shape, and number of comparable lunar craters.
> “3. Crater depressions form a natural reservoir, accounting for the intense vegetation in the Martian oases,
> “4. The random distribution of crater oases is apparent, indicating that the canal system was adapted to this haphazard arrangement.
The reviewer of the above points out
> “Why didn’t someone think of the crater theory sooner? The answer is simple. Someone did. Back in 1892, at Arequipa, Peru, W. H. Pickering not only discovered the small black spots on Mars, but he also recognized their similarity to the circlets on the Moon. Because lunar craters were then believed to be volcanic, Pickering may be forgiven for implying that the Martian craterets also were of volcanic origin.
We now know these crater oases were not real. My point is only that some people proposed meteoric craters on the Moon before the 1960s.
I also found https://archive.org/details/exploringmars0000rich/page/150/m... saying in 1954 "no irregularities due to shadows have ever been observed along the terminator—the line dividing daylight from dark—such as would be produced by Martian craters." The author was an American astronomer and also a SF writer in the 1950s. By this we know astronomers were already considering there might be craters on Mars as there are on the Moon.
I say this as someone who loves SF and deeply mourns its decline: I think the genre painted itself into a corner by focusing too much on "Hard SF." In my view, an obsession with technology has often been a crutch for weaker storytelling. The genre works best when it serves as a pretext to examine the human condition—like Vonnegut or P.K. Dick did.
By betraying the ideals of humanist writing in favor of technical accuracy, SF has been cannibalized by genres that actually focus on the inner lives of individuals, such as the booming "romantasy" sector.
"Hard SF" is the defining characteristic of the genre, though. Soft SF is just another name for fantasy/magical thinking. Which is fine on its own but not really what sci-fi is about.
I think it's just because the image is used in the common navbax for the "Колонизация космоса" category many of those pages belong to (roughly "Space Colonization" according to some random translation tools).
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.
Is the number of books with “space” in the title a meaningful indicator of anything other than how many books have “space” in the title? Sure Murderbot may not be as big as Game of Thrones, but these statistics seem more about linguistic trends than genres.
Yes. What's popular with teens varies over time, of course. At peak Twilight, the Barnes and Noble at Hillsdale Mall had seven bookcases of Teen Paranormal Romance.
I mentioned this to one of the store Goths, and she told me that vampires were on the way out and the next thing was probably going to be zombies. The Monster Hunter thing had a brief moment.
Then we had the survival period - Harry Potter overlapped the Hunger Games and Divergent eras, all of which produced too many spinoffs. This moved into the Game of Thrones spinoffs.
Now, dragons seem to be out, except that Anne McCaffery is back on the shelves.
The latest shift is driven by "booktok" on TikTok. I just saw teenage girls giggling over the new books in the Romance section, while avoiding the YA section. The Dark Romance subgenre is in, and now has its own shelf space.
Hard SF? Other than the Expanse series, not much recently.
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.
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 (age of mass single-stream media), then our current era of cyberpunk.
I'm of the opinion that the teen novel has stunted literature in general.
As a kid beginning to read in the 70's I jumped from what were clearly kids books to Lord of the Rings (pure chance -- I liked the cover). There wasn't that watered down in between. It was a jump to real books with real consequences (spoilers: Boromir dies).
I've witnessed the rise of the teen section and seen how kids -- who are reading less in general -- never leave it.
It feels like the fantasy adventure lends itself a lot more to these teen novels and has a knock on effect into the mainstream. I for one could do without anther book about someone born to be a prince(ss) up against the evil realm who can't choose their way out of their romantic triangle.
I'm not knocking anyone's choices. There are more books already than I'll ever read. But it should would be a blast to get another Dune out of nowhere.
I would posit that the issue lies not with YA novels or fantasy in general, but with the continuously declining sense of agency, opportunity, and self-realization among teens and adults. There are deep-seated needs that reality can increasingly no longer meet, which results in rising dependency on simplistic escapism.
I remeber reading tons of junk and pulp as a teen decades ago. If anything, the teen section is more complex then pure hero fantasies and repetitive scary stories that used to make the bulk of reading. Yes, lord of the rings was popular before and now. But the stuff people read en masse was not lord of the rings and certainly not some kind of smart complex stuff.
What used to be read a lot was literary equivalent of a sitcom or slash fantasy.
> Beyond the bookstore, much of the architecture of book discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber… #BookTok, the vast community on TikTok that has become a best-seller machine, is largely populated by women recommending books by other women, like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us.”
In a sense this is just a regression to mean, normality, because the literary boys club of the 20th century was the exception:
> In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by women for a female audience. Their output was considered “paltry entertainment,”
I wouldn't blame the demographic shift on female readers; I’d blame the accountants.
The publishing industry hasn't been killed by women, but by risk aversion. Truly groundbreaking SF requires betting on bold, novel, and often weird ideas. Financial departments and algorithms inherently favor safe, repetitive patterns (like romantasy formulas). You can't simulate the next "Dune" or "Neuromancer" on a P&L sheet, so publishers stopped trying.
Reading has become a strongly gendered lifestyle and supposed status marker.
Most of the books are indeed paltry entertainment - soapy and saccharine romances, formulaically transgressive erotica, fantasies about unlimited witchy powers, and perfect book boyfriends - but it's still a huge market.
Men moved to video games and chan culture. Which are a different kind of paltry entertainment.
It's curious how there was a shift from male dominated niches, like Lovecraftian fantasy and heroic fantasy, through the imperial sci-fi peak in the 50s to 70s, through the Hollywood-influenced 80s, then into slow decline from the 90s onwards.
With a few exceptions, a bold imagination became more of a liability than an asset.
This is a culture which has no idea where it's going and would prefer not to get there.
Yeah. As a sci-fi author, I have strong opinions about this. Made an authortube video on the topic: https://youtu.be/THVpdcgTYrQ
But tl;dr: Gatekeepers in big/mainstream publishing have outsourced their slush-piles to underpaid interns, most of whom are young and ambitious women. They tend to like certain things. Also, big/mainstream publishing is chasing data trends, like all other big businesses, which leads to a staleness cycle where they only publish what worked in the last two years. They're afraid to take financial gambles on unproven ideas or new IP.
The good sci-fi these days is mostly indie and mostly underground, IMO. You really have to dig for it. Personally, I find good stuff via Reddit r/powerprogression, but even there, you may have to dig to find gems that speak to you.
I joke that I'm a male author and reader, even though I'm female. The first book of my epic series (which is fully published) is Majority: Torth Book 1.
...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.
"The Thor decision caused publishers and booksellers to be much quicker to destroy stocks of poorly-selling books in order to realize a taxable loss. These books would previously have been kept in stock but written down to reflect the fact that not all of them were expected to sell."
Today, I understand mass market paperbacks are dying.
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.
I've never really agreed with putting SF together with Fantasy, because they are slightly different genres. Some science fiction writers have used genuine science to underpin their writings, one of the more recent examples of that would be "the Martian". Fantasy doesn't need that kind of technical detail.
It parallels other developments. There is an increasing scepticism around science, and a significant number of people do not believe in the Moon landing. The heroic age of space travel has been replaced by school teachers and guys busking in tin cans in near Earth orbit. It's become mundane and the most exciting things in space exploration are being done by probes not humans nowadays.
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.
We wont go to space in the forseabe future. The brink archievment we might pull off is longterm civilizational stability, in ressource scarce, chaotic environments. Basically a oldfolkshome where we grow wise and vulcan enough to goto the stars. If we fallback into regressive behaviour call it facism, islamism, polpotism, whateverism and nuke ourselves - or decay into rotting landempires ala 1984, then we will never goto space today- and slowly downgrade back into very smart animals, with suprsingly sturdy DNA.
The Trap St.Fermi predicted is a two pronged one, made of technological progress and the inability to recognize ones true nature while not under ressource duress - until you walked over the cliff of no return.
All those utopias, all those we shall overcome by education promises, hid the permadamage we have from ourselves. ICE, ISIS, decomplexification by redistribution fantasies, war-chieftains and permanently sending the young and hopeless into fights, that is what we really are.
Not some excemption, but the braindamaged norm under enough stress to trigger the "shizzoid" mode. Its sad, its real - and well how about we for once say thank you. Thank you Peter for dealing with reality, while the rest of us got high.
Thank you for the panopticon, forcing us to stay civil. All of us.
Thank you for doing a material stress test on humanity, while the climate change was not yet in full force upon us.
Thank you for moving down all the capability lanes in parallel, instead of doing the retarded one king, one plan, one tribe, mono-lane approach towards doom.
Thank you to the grown ups, shame on the retarded toddlers, the retarded nationalists and utopian idealists, shitting the diapers! Bravo!
Now for the final push- why not say it! We are going to have cooperate families - aka cloning by cooperations for loyal employees. All the other roads have proven dysfunctional under stress and the dysfunction is very plain to see. And the final building block, the ones willing too switch sides for this freedom are also in plain sights. Its going to be a weird mixture of cooperate lgbtq+ and conservatives- in an forced alliance with the retarded withering away in traditional hive societies unable to adapt.
Good Sci-fi is hard to write, as it is too easy to fall for silly plot devices, gimmicks, and tired clichés.
Space cowboys were replaced with thinly veiled dogma, meaningless cycles of ritualized tribal violence, and cheap nostalgic production grifts. Those that write about speculative Futures, are almost always talking about the present worlds flaws.
Anyone can publish now, and people simply stopped asking if they should. =3
People didn’t travel as much back in those days. Visiting a foreign country or too might as well be like a trip to the moon.
But now, we basically live in the climax of the jet age, we can be anywhere in the world within 24 hours. And there’s so much of the world to see and stories to discover, not really worth the bother to imagine space travel to far off distant empty worlds, which will inevitably be used to further extend capitalism and just live the same lives we live here on Earth, just on a different world. The lack of any other interesting extraterrestrial civilizations to interact with makes it all pretty pointless. Going very far into space is mostly for exploration as a sport, like cave diving or something.
Starships are exciting to see in real life, but absolutely boring in fiction now and overall generally leave me with a distinctly disgusting aftertaste.
Whereas once Starships were a sign of an exciting story, or perhaps hope and optimism ... now they're just the sole purview of wanker tr/billionaires.
The popularity of a genre is deeply tied to the historical context of what's going on in the real world. In the 1950s and 1960s you obviously had the Space Race, which itself was a product of the Cold War. Some commments view this as optimism. I disagree. I view it as an expression of patriotism.
I view this patriotism as a crutch in uncertain times. Another example of this is the rise of the superhero genre in the 21st century. Marven was skirting with bankruptcy in the 1990s. A perpetual Spiderman license was sold for a fraction of what it would today. And I think it's no coincidence that the superhero genre ascended post-9/11.
I used to read a lot of fantasy but many years ago I pretty much switched almost entirely to sci-fi. For me the reason was because sci-fi asked questions. I mean there's also space opera and it scratches the same itch as fantasy (IMNHO) but my personal interest in sci-fi is more in the "what if" category.
That's a very broad category that goes all the way from, say, the Iain M. Banks Culture series, which really poses the question of what an ultra-high tech post-scarcity civilization looks like to something like The Handmaid's Tale (yes, that's sci-fi). We've also had some superb sci-fi on the screen in recent years like Severance, Silo and The Expanse.
For me, fantasy is a far more limited genre. Like I'm trying to read Brandon Sanderson recently and while he's a good writer, it's just not hooking me yet in the same way that, say, Revelation Space did. I think the last fantasy series to really hook me was A Song of Ice and Fire. The first three books are some of the finest books ever written.
But as for the decline of starships, I think that the readership has evolved too. More vintage sci-fi simply projected the era of exploration and colonization onto space and it's become pretty clear how unrealistic that is because of the vast distances involved. You have to remember that popular media in the 1960s expected Moon bases and such in the not-too-distant future. Star Trek was really the last gasp of this and, interestingly, Star Trek is fundamentally socialist, which is noteworthy given that it originated in the Cold War.
Star Wars on the other hand was a tale of the resistance to imperialism. George Lucas has said he modeled the resistance on the North Vietnamese. Cyberpunk came about in the 1980s (eg Neuromancer, Blade Runner) that had nothing to do with starships but they really reflected a societal pessimism. Cyberpunk is inherently xenophobic (ie because of fears of the Japanese).
I wonder if the popularity of fantasy is fundamentally escapist and an expression of helplessness. Think about it: fantasy usually revolves around the outsized impact of individual actions, of a hero or heroine.
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. As a result, 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. Everything is slop and skinner boxes. It impoverishes rather than enriches, and it seems to be getting worse. 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. In 1958, Heinlein wrote a wonderful short story about scout troops in the verdant jungles of Venus back when that was a reasonable expectation[1], 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 classic science fiction trope that progress will better us as people, that leisure will lead to fitness, that access to information will make us wise scholars, that we will use the convenience of machines to free ourselves for the pursuit of virtue... it makes for an inspiring story. I had my suspicions about how true all of that was back before the internet. I am now very sure that Wall-E and Idiocracy are nearer to the mark.
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. Ambulatory human-like AI seems unlikely when data centers the size of small cities struggle with emdashes. The hope and promise of a generation of robot children and citizens seems as misguided as the forests of Venus.
I could go on. We GOT a lot of the wonders science fiction predicted, or things so much more powerful that our most audacious futurists didn't dare to imagine them. And yet it doesn't feel like the promised land. Science fiction promised instant video conferences across the globe, but when we got it, it didn't look like all the world's best researchers collaborating on its hardest problems. It looked like all of the miscreants with their dick pics and the dreary business meetings and school lessons suddenly having access to your home. I don't mean to imply it's all bad, but the difference between imagination and reality has been stark on many fronts.
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.
>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.
This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time.
It rarely has to do with the possibility of the genre actually happening in reality. A story is good because it is riveting and the backdrop (whether sci-fi or fantasy) is just icing on the cake. Look at Harry potter and practically every fantasy story out there.... none of those stories have any chance of happening in our current reality... yet they are popular.
I think the answer for as to why there's less interest in sci-fi is pretty mundane. It's like genetic drift, but this one is cultural. For no reason at all our interests just shift because of luck. There happened to be more good stories written in the fantasy genre and that's the direction everything shifted.
Tbf though the MCU was more sci fi than anything and that every genre out of the water in every medium all the way up until endgame. Say what you want about it but the popularity of that universe dwarfed everything else in the last decade... which goes to show that it's likely mostly just drift.
> >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. > >This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time.
Here's one such example: [The Destination Star by Gregory Marlow](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-destinatio...)
Also great on the same topic - The Forever War by Joe Holdeman[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War
This one messed me up. I couldn't put it down and finished it in one sitting.
I haven't read many military books, but to me this book is the perfect demonstration of the ultimate futility of war.
That was fantastic thanks for sharing.
> and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way).
Well, that could be worked around in the world building. My favorite SF-friendly scenario would be if life originated in the Sun's natal cluster (perhaps not around the Sun itself), with tens of thousands of star systems, and spread between them before the cluster dispersed. Presumably panspermia would be much easier in such a situation because the stars are closer together and because maybe residual gas could help particles get trapped near other young systems. In this case all the "infected" systems could have the same coding.
A nice consequence of this scenario is it's compatible with the Fermi argument: even if origin of life is unlikely, it just had to happen once here, and so it not happening elsewhere in the galaxy (or even visible universe) is not a problem.
The weird thing about this is that interstellar space ought to actually be very hospitable to cold, highly efficient computational substrates. (This is for standard thermodynamic reasons: reliable computation must be free of noise, and low-temperature means low noise.) So there might be 'life' of a sort in interstellar space that's extremely smart and naturally long-lived compared to humans or even ordinary room-temperature AIs, but just can't do all that much in the outside world (i.e. has very low agency), except very slowly and with exceptional effort.
(Of course, these same constraints apply in a relative sense to the outer regions of planetary systems.)
With D-D fusion it might be possible to "live off the land" between the stars which probably have numerous interstellar objects of various sizes between them with a much larger cumulative mass than planets orbiting stars -- and it may be possible to completely disassemble those kind of bodies which are much richer overall in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen than terrestrial planets.
A species with that kind of capability would be able to visit another solar system in 10,000 or so years but might care less to mess around with dry little solar system bodies like the Earth. The case against "grabby" aliens is that Ceres and Pluto are still here, not that we can't find evidence of them on Earth.
I like to imagine that if that kind of interstellar traveler were to visit Earth it might take them a few decades to perfect a "reverse space-shuttle" because they'd gone 10,000 years without doing anything like that... And they can't just 3-d print one out of 10,000 year old plans because they've improved their 3-d printers to print the stuff they've been printing all that time better.
A true spaceborne civilization, assuming anti-gravity isn't in there bag of tricks, probably wouldn't bother with the gravity well planets.
Exactly. Those kind of people could support much larger populations than the Earth with a lifestyle they find comfortable in interstellar space and would look at living on Earth at best the way we look at living on Mars.
Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic?
Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.
Science Fiction doesn't have to be fantasy, it can be speculative. But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative.
Someone like Asimov never considered his books to be fantasy and that he could just insert whatever he wanted with no justification. In fact, he never considered sci-fi to be a genre, he always argued it was a setting and that his most famous stories were detective stories in a sci-fi setting. But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
"But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real."
No, it just has to be grounded in something consistent and if the book starts by explaining the mechanics of the world(or is in a world with known mechanics), a detective story very well can work.
FTL starships in an SF story don’t need a detailed explanation, just a new invention.
It’s the exact same thing as a speculative story in the 1920s discussing supersonic flight, even though the jet engine hadn’t been invented yet.
For instance “Tunnel in the Sky” bypassed the whole issue in the 50’s, later imitated by “Stargate”…
True but at that point objects travelling faster than sound had been demonstrated.
It was just hard to engineer a manned plane that could do it. For example during WWII the V2 rockets travelled much faster than sound. They were just unmanned. Or more simple, bullets were supersonic for longer too.
What I mean is, nobody thought the sound barrier was a hard limit we could never break.
Just specify an Alcubierre drive. Job done.
Massive implications from that
A magic unobtainium drive which works in a consistent way is fine, just call it “hyperspace” or whatever
There’s a difference between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi, but they are both still sci-fi, you can tell optimistic stories of the future with a “battle drive”, as long as you keep it consistent. If the drive cancels relativity effects and allows travel at 5000c that’s fine. Just ensure you travel at 5000c, no hoping across the galaxy in a few days, but travelling to another star in a few days or even hours is fine.
> But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative.
Agreed but only because "some effort" could be as little as a single paragraph.
> But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
If you only change a tiny bit, this isn't a major issue.
> The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
That specific story falls apart but you could have lots of thematically similar stories with FTL. No need for "serious justification" unless you're trying to pull it out of nowhere halfway through the plot. If it's there from the start, there's no problem.
> No need for "serious justification" unless you're trying to pull it out of nowhere halfway through the plot. If it's there from the start, there's no problem.
Yeah I think most readers care more about consistency than realism. Being completely realistic makes consistency easy but a harder sell in terms of entertainment.
Maybe one way to view consistency is modelling the story world as a network of criss-crossing character threads. Where one axis is time and the other(s) are uh something? Anyways, consistency is how predictable (smooth / linear) the thread is. We follow the main character's thread pretty closely so that thread is allowed to suddenly curve (plot twist) without risk of losing the reader. We only catch glimpses of the supporting cast / antagonist so those have to be either predictable or the narrator has to backtrack and reveal any twists where necessary. And maybe how intricate yet well-behaved this network appears is what gives the feeling of stories coming alive. Or maybe I'm just on too much caffeine and ranting.
Start trek transporters work because of a Heisenberg compensator. Great, no idea how it could possible work but it’s enough to know it does.
The typical poorly received uses aren’t when the cre beams down from orbit, or even when they can’t beam down, it’s when they de age people and retrieve their pattern from the buffer to cure an illness, and never do it again, or when they beam light years away for a throw away story element.
30s to 60s, sci-fi wasn't just driven by the "makes for great stories", but by the optimism for scientific advacements and the idea that these could get within reach in the future.
It was "science fiction" and not merely "space fiction".
> Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon
No, because one is theoretically impossible while the other is theoretically possible.
Creating some sort of genetically-engineered dinosaur-derived ‘dragon’ may be more plausible than actually reaching another star system. It’s not going to breathe fire though.
Stomach full of natural gas or oil of some sort. Surely nature has examples of creatures that can produce a spark?
These two examples are not equally unlikely. They are of different orders of unlikelihood, the one is extremely unlikely, the other simply impossible.
Genetically engineering and then riding a dragon actually sounds easy in comparison to creating FTL travel.
It's not FTL that will get you to the stars. It's patience, eco systems, hibernation and radiation shielding.
Or building a very big spaceship and have generations live on it until they reach the end of the journey.
Hence eco-systems, yes. But that's probably a harder problem than radiation shielding + hibernation. You'd still need the radiation shielding but it would be far, far more of it (because non-local).
These are interesting problems to think about, right now they are solidly SF but dragons are and always will be fantasy because physics says they can't exist in the way they are described. But you can't 100% rule out that one day descendants of humanity will visit the stars in person, assuming we don't blow ourselves up first.
That's one of the main reasons I dislike Musk so much: he takes people motivated by positive dreams (a clean planet, off-world travel and living) and then subverts their energy for grift. But 'DOGE' has shown the world who he really is, the mask is off now and anybody still empowering that asshole is co-responsible.
> physics says they can't exist in the way they are described
If we assume advanced genetic as well as bio engineering that admits the possibility of self reproducing cybernetic organisms that closely match many or all of the key characteristics. I'm not sure it's actually a cyborg if the lineage is fully independent without involving any technology external to the species but I use the term there because that's the easiest way to communicate the idea.
No, then it still wouldn't work. Not until you use that other thing to get you to a planet where gravity is low enough that a dragon would be able to take off. The whole power-to-weight and wing-surface-area-to-weight ratio simply does not work. It (barely) works for bats though some of them can be of impressive size. The idea that something the size of a dragon can fly with that size wings on Terra is something that I do not believe is supported (hah!) by physics.
I think you're making an awful lot of assumptions there and have failed to provide even ballpark specifications for the thing you're supposedly refuting. Weight seems to be a secondary characteristic related only to size. There are also plenty of examples of "small" dragons in fantasy literature.
We've already got examples of dinosaurs that come fairly close to qualifying so I'm sure something vaguely in the ballpark is within the realm of possibility. Exactly how close to the mark though I have no idea.
For example, what would you make of something visually resembling a massive western dragon but with a largely hollow body? I don't think that would disqualify it in most people's eyes. Pushing the concept a bit farther could yield something vaguely like a living cross between a hot air balloon and a deep-sea anglerfish with a weaponized tail.
Vaguely related to that hypothetical, we've got examples in the fossil record of 2 foot wide dragonflies estimated to have weighed in at under 150 grams. There's a pretty large solution space to explore here.
Dragons are fantasy but drakes are real. The thorny devil looks super cool.
Slap some wings on that and you have a legitimate dragon. I don't know about riding it though.
There's one creature that knows how to dress sharply.
Except for the power-to-weight problem. Would need very big wings!
> Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic?
No, but we've become increasingly superstitious, and cultish. A lot of the day to day parts of sci-fi (screens everywhere , instant communication) have become reality so it's not as exciting anymore. Sci-fi no longer serves as escapism. Anymore, it reminds us of our limitations.
Presumably these are equally likely because you could build a DNA-printer and thereby create a dragon of some sort (not sure if it could have fully functional fire breathing though)?
Dragons are physically impossible in many more ways than the firebreathing. For one, things that large would probably struggle to fly. We can make larger things fly, but have to cheat using jet (or rocket!) engines to generate incredible thrust in ways not typically accessible to living beings.
That's ok, we just need to put them on the moon or somewhere else with lighter gravity.
Less gravity has its own issues. Nothing can fly on the moon :)
And now I'm picturing a dragon with bombardier-beetle style pulsed jet boosters. And while I'd typically question your assumptions of how big dragons need to be in order to deserve the name, I'll assert that quetzocoatlus nothropi[1] was big enough.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus
"Dragon" as a classification is odd, because when you look at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays, sometimes from cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept, you find that they have little in common beyond some vaguely reptilian vibe and being scary.
And I'm sorry but that thing is too goofy looking to be considered a dragon.
That's begging the question. We don't need to look "at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays" from "cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept".
One could stick on those classified as such in western culture - which is where the fantasy novel about dragons and knights and spells and the rest are based on.
And in there, dragons have quite specific characteristic and vibes, as evidenced from medieval iconography of St George to countless fantasy book covers and illustrations.
But if we do expand the set under consideration then I'd suggest they do in fact have specific things in common. Large flying carnivorous reptiles. That won't cover all the various edge cases but I think it describes the vast majority of the popular usage of the term.
That definition would imply that sufficiently large flying dinosaurs qualify as dragons. And at least personally I think I agree with that conclusion. Dragons aren't purely fantasy, they're merely extinct (and never breathed fire IRL).
Dragons are dinosaurs, that is, closer to birds then contemporary reptiles.
You can make a setting with denser air and less gravity too.
> the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology.
Spoken like someone who's never read Tau Zero
Stephen Baxter's short story "Pilot" is another good one:
https://www.stephen-baxter.com/stories.html#pilot
Nothing about Tau Zero refutes what the parent wrote. It reinforces it.
Plus, even Tau Zero's initial premise is a pipe dream.
> even Tau Zero's initial premise is a pipe dream
You mean Sweden as a world superpower? :P
Spoken like someone who’s never read the Relativistic Rocket: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/...
I really find it hard to understand how people confuse science fiction with reality. I love Tau Zero - I first read it over 40 years ago - but it’s fiction, ffs.
Also they have trouble stopping in Tau Zero so they have no choice going further than they planned. It's one of the best sci-fi novels of all time, read it!.
That Bussard Ramjet, though, is thoroughly discredited. It can't possibly work. Hydrogen hydrogen fusion is a terribly slow nuclear reaction and if you had to stop the gas to give it enough time to react, you'd end up stopping the rocket not accelerating it. In fact, the most credible use of that kind of magnetic scoop is as a brake!
> Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible
I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL? I've no doubt there's a handful of works but this is hardly a plausible explanation for a _recent_ decline in these topics.
> I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL?
I bet very little. We didn’t really know how enormous the universe is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax: “Being very difficult to measure, only about 60 stellar parallaxes had been obtained by the end of the 19th century”), and we hadn’t known for long that the speed of light is an absolute speed limit.
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.)
Time dilation and space contraction only matter if you can reasonably achieve speeds of a significant portion of the speed of light. AFAIK nobody has even come up with a reasonable way to achieve this for lightweight probes, let alone for hundred-ton ships capable of carrying humans. And let's not forget the practical problems like all photons incoming from the front being blueshifted into ultrahard radiation that would make a point blank nuclear bomb seem like a small candle.
Realistically even getting to the nearest star in less than 400 years experienced time is way way WAY out of reach for now.
Laser accelerate a lightweight probe, probe lands on alien planet and self replicates a receiver and basic robot body. Send mind in the form of information at speed of light and download into robot body.
Something roughly along these lines was believable enough for the Altered Carbon universe.
Landing from relativistic speed would be a massive engineering problem, since you won't have a laser de-celerator on the other end. And landing on a planet would seem to require a rocket, which cannot be lightweight.
Not necessarily insoluble, but a massive unsolved problem.
"lightweight probe" and "self replicates" don't go together. Nanobots are just as much fantasy physics as FTL is.
So what? Dilithium + antimatter + magic space warping was enough for the Star Trek universe. The sky is the limit for science fiction.
Just in that first paragraph:
- How do you stop at the other end? There won't be a large laser array at the receiving end and a laser probe will not have enough stored energy to decelerate itself.
- How exactly do you download a mind to be transmitted? We can't do it right now to be sure, and it's not clear we could ever accurately do that depending on how finely detailed a human brain is.
- How do you transmit it reliably over several hundred light years? Background radiation alone is enough to drown out any signal after a few dozen light years no matter how good your transmission is. Also, when do you start sending? You cannot possibly know which probes survived. (you DID send out at least a few hundred probes right? Don't forget to multiply laser energy requirements by the amount of probes)
- How does the receiving end download a mind into a robot body? We can't even begin to do that on Earth, not even with worms or flies. Humans are right out.
- How do we power the lasers? Conservative estimates have put required laser power at several gigawatts at least. Current laser systems can do that in pulsed mode but only with extremely low duty cycles. Getting enough power together to supply millions of homes would be tricky to say the least. (and see the note above about needing multiple probes just to be on the good side of probability)
- How does the probe survive decades of ultrahard radiation? What about dust it will encounter at high-subluminal speeds, also for decades? The shielding for that won't be lightweight, but the heavier the probe gets the more difficult it will be to accellerate.
- The satellite which is light enough to be powered by lasers also contains the most magical 3d printer anyone has ever seen. You can't just pull the molecules for advanced processors and energy generation equipment out of the air, such a probe would need to set up significant mining industries all on its own without any human interaction.
- A basic robot body. Keep in mind that "picking up a keychain and choosing the right key out of it without dropping the whole keychain" is already a challenge for modern robots.
In short, it'll be several centuries before humanity even gets close to such a project. I'd like to be wrong, but it seems extremely unlikely anyone of us will see such a thing in our lifetime.
It is very unlikely indeed, because we are not trying. We have a world set up so as to allow a few people to accrue wealth they couldn't possibly need, by impoverishing everyone else. Where are they going to make money out of this?
>but if it's just about you, the speed of light is no limitation at all
It's a huge limitation, even just getting propelled to "big enough speed", say 1/10 the speed of light.
We barely do 1/1500 the speed of light, in unmanned probes, and only because we sling shot on Solar gravity, not as propulsion or anything, and at 1400 o Celcius, plus deadly radiation, not to mention any micro-meteor as big as a particle of dust could kill someone there).
> It's a huge limitation, even just getting propelled to "big enough speed", say 1/10 the speed of light.
If you can't even get up to 1/10 the speed of light, then you wish the speed of light was a huge limitation, but it's actually not affecting you at all.
If the point argued is solely "the speed of light is a huge limitation" (and not: "getting anywhere near the speed of light is a big issue"), I'd say accepting that "even basic much lesser speed is a huge problem" is hardly a refutation of that. Nor is it an argument towards the feasibility of the actual feat being discussed (interstellar travel).
I guess you're technically correct though: the speed of light is not an issue, if 1/10th the speed of light is already unachievable.
Don't even need to do time dilatation - just make you lifetime longer by techjlnical means (ideally almost infinite) and you will be in the next star sumystem before you figure out how to exit your VIM session.
> Time dilation and space contraction mean that you can get there in as little time as you desire.
This is confusing science fiction with physical reality. See e.g. https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/... for a reality check.
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.
If you think this is something that started in the 2020s you need to review the chart.
That would only rule out stories based on interstellar travel, which is a tiny subset of what you can do in space. After all, you'll just end up inside another solar system that won't be much different from ours. The planets will be in different orbits but there will most likely be an asteroid belt and the effects of temperature will remain the same even if the planets are in different temperature ranges from our planets.
If earth is big enough for fantasy, then the solar system is plenty big enough for science fiction.
If you wanted to watch hard science fiction I would recommend watching anthrofuturism on YouTube who focuses exclusively on the moon.
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.
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.
It’s well understood that the expansion of the universe is not “due to general relativity”. General relativity does explain some details of that expansion.
The equations of general relativity fully model the expansion of the universe, so you’d need to explain what you mean.
yeah, that extra bit that Einstein was very embarrassed about having to write, the bit that says "... plus the expansion of the universe"
It explains nothing. It's just tacked on the end there.
The universe is expanding due to general relativity... in the sense that Einstein literally wrote "... plus the expansion of the universe" into his equations.
Optimistic views of the future see those as problems that can be solved, which helps the consumer engage with the story.
Pessimistic views see those as insurmountable problems that shouldn't be bothered with, making the stories seem more ridiculous.
That's true, but stop to consider all the things we ARE doing...
* Space Station that lasts 25 years
* 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service
* Mars rovers that run for 10+ years
* Flying helicopters on Mars
Stop to consider them for what purpose? Thinking they're cool? Yeah they're cool. But they have very little to do with interstellar travel, in the way that a canoe has little to do with investigating deep-sea vents.
We call it a "space" station. It's a glorified LEO station.
> Space Station that lasts 25 years
A small station, hosting a small number of people, orbiting very close to the surface of the Earth.
> 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service
…very close to the surface of the Earth.
> Mars rovers that run for 10+ years
On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on. Notably, we have nothing but melted slag on Venus.
> Flying helicopters on Mars
On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on.
I don’t mean to detract from the achievements of our space programs. But we have to be realistic: we’re exploring the easiest bits of our local neighborhood, that’s all.
The Kurzgesagt video on teraforming Venus is interesting. It only takes a thousand years, assuming perfect execution.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI
You don’t need to go faster than light. Once you approach anywhere near the speed of light, time slows down so much that journey time becomes irrelevant.
Interstellar space contains neutral hydrogen atoms. Hitting a spaceship, they would produce electromagnetic radiation. When the collision speed goes past about 0.25c, the radiation becomes hard gamma rays which are dangerous to living things, and cannot be efficiently shielded against.
At this speed, the time dilation is slightly above 3%, so you're still not going to reach even Alpha Centauri in one human lifetime, or maybe you barely can.
Alpha Centauri is only 4.2 light years away. 0.25c is definitely enough to reach it. You could even do a round trip in only your adult years.
Yeah, if you take the highly unlikely and already lethat 0.25c achievability as a given.
That is the context the above comments are talking in.
Well, except that you changed below lethal to already lethal.
A trip there to do… what?
There likely won’t be any planet better than the very low bar of Mars for human habitation, in fact maybe even worse due to binary perturbations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_jYOubJmfM
Why do people row across the ocean?
If humanity survives to a high enough tech level, someone will do it just because they can...
Right, we are never leaving. We should get comfortable here, and take better care of the only habitable planet, rather than doing insane things and justifying that as "Don't worry, we'll make Mars habitable" and other silliness.
Even if we do leave, it's unlikely that we do so for a very long time so taking care of the planet makes sense even if you intend to discard our crib. Similarly in the nearer term if we had a unified goal to colonize a near planet/moon that's still going to take a huge long term effort to do more than the equivalent of putting a tent up on an island off the coast to get that colony established (if it can ever be self-sufficient).
Well, things like the eventual expansion of our own star or the probability of a sizeable asteroid/comet hitting earth tells me, that we should at least keep thinking about leaving. Even if the current tech is nowhere near good enough.
Life cannot leave, no.
A radiation hardened, self healing computer could.
I think you should assume that the radiation hardened, self healing computer would consider itself alive.
But importantly that's not us leaving. Some distant future descendent of humans could have engineered itself to leave, but it's not us and we shouldn't fixate on that distant and unknowable future.
But when it returns, would it say 404 or 42?
Not if you want to go back home to the place you once knew though
Maybe, but the most compelling scifi to me personally is the generation ship stuff, like Ring by Steven Baxter.
And then there’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. (Anthony Doerr)
There is a scene in Pirates of the Carribean where captain jack is stuck in a void surrounded by duplicates of himself. It is his hell. As we have biult better and better telescopes we realize that as we expand into space we will be stuck talking only to ourselves, at least for a few thousand generations.
When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment. When areicebo fell and was not immediately rebiult, i realized that most people just dont care about ever meeting another civilization. Even if we did find one it wouldnt change much here on earth. Most people dont care about climate change. They dont care about anything beyond their own lifetime. What matter will aliens be if they are a thousand lightyears away? So people dream now about other things, about grimy politics and alternative history.
>When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment.
• The LIGO methodology is to look for hyper-specified patterns in voluminous reams of apparent 'noise'. It wouldn't be unfair to call it an extensively aggravated search for what one is looking for. That's okay, so long as they provide the stats to back up the non-noisiness of what they turn up. (I'm not a stats person and can't debate that, and. I trust their caliber enough that I don't feel the need to). But to your point, if there are other signatures lurking in LIGO data _that they don't know already how to look for_, then there is no reason why a paper would have gotten produced describing it since the first GW detection in 2015.
• Now, take this for what it's worth in terms of fragmentary information relaying - But at the first Sol Symposium in 2023 at Stanford, I can tell you that in podium-level banter between talks (perhaps it was Q&A and the like IIRC) it was asserted that the LIGO consortium was not allowing studies (read: not allowing access to its data) where the investigator's intension was related to UFO / UAP phenomena (like, extrapolating here, looking for signatures correlated with external reports of UAP sightings). If that claim was borne out, than perhaps the LIGO consortium is just doing preemptive reputation protection in not allowing such studies to kick off with its name associated with it. (One could attempt to follow up with astronomer Beatriz Villaroel for a lead on who said that or if there's substance to that research policy claim)
But my point is, between these two bullet points, you are afforded a complete 'empty set' - and decidedly not a 'negative result' - on whether or not LIGO has detected signatures of a 'warp drive' or other some such non-prosaic phenomenon.
If LIGO can detect mergers at billions of lightyears, i doubt they could ignore the "sound" of the NCC-1701 passing through our solar system. Proper access or not, there are enough scifi geeks with access to LIGO data that someone would get the word out.
Again, raw LIGO data is sheer noise. They have to interrogate the dataset with their hypothesized candidate signal signature, natural or otherwise, and see if it ‘responds’ with a hit. In the case of black hole mergers, they had an idea - a candidate model - of what to look for. In the case of a warp drive, could they even guess a signature to interrogate the dataset with?
And to the extent that the -1701 patrolling Mars-Venus might manage to ‘stick out like a sore thumb’, what about the relative blip of a Sh'Raan class embarking on some fresh surveying out of 40 Eridani A?
The Chinese built a much larger spherical telescope, so what was the point of rebuilding Arecibo?
I visited Arecibo a decade before it collapsed. It was impressive and of great historical value, but could repair be cost-effective?
Edit: It did have some unique features.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
Rebuilding it would cost maybe half a billion dollars. Give ICE an unpaid week off and job done. Maybe not the absolute best way to spend that money on science, but I fear the actual outcome is “it’s not cost effective so we’re not going to spend it on any science.”
ICE isn't actually getting paid, and in fact owes the government money if they ever quit or get fired, so...
I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now. There would have to be considerable R&D, and willpower, and it would be very expensive but I think it is within our powers. Humans would have to live underground and deal with dust, maybe microbes in the case of Mars, but we could do it. The spaceships to go to Mars would have to be big but they could more easily be built on the Moon due to the lower gravity.
It's easy if you can build some kind of machine like what Eric Drexler talked about that could manufacture absolutely everything. Otherwise it's impossible.
The best hope for that is to send the one thing to Mars that people absolutely refuse to send to Mars which is bacteria and yeast and microbes. That could be a synthetic biology platform that could make pretty much all the molecules you need and then you assemble them with 3D printing or something like that.
We could send ten thousand workshop machines, a thousand huge forges and presses and reactors, and enough people to run them and all the farms and chemical vats they use those machines to build. Is that not enough manufacturing capability?
And that takes, what, a million of those "Starships?" To be plausible you have to be able to get it a lot smaller than that. If you can fit it into someone's hand the rocketry gets to be trivial.
I was thinking less than 2000. One each for the huge machines, a few hundred for the smaller machines, a hundred to few hundred full of people.
And you could cut those numbers 10x and still have a huge variety of manufacturing capabilities.
I don't see why we would need a near-magic factory box just to build a colony.
Manufacturing is hard, even for something “simple” like a pencil:
https://www.amazon.com/Pencil-History-Design-Circumstance/dp...
Those big machines have lots of little parts and if you have to wait three years to get a spare part that’s a big problem. (Never mind anything that Earth sends to a Mars colony is a gift because it is inconceivable that it would be profitable to bring anything back)
Anyone who starts sketching out what a space manufacturing complex looks like (e.g. Drexler, myself) comes to the same conclusion Drexler did —- there is this diverse residue of difficult to manufacture small but complex things. The good news is that we have molecular assemblers, they built you, and now that people are decoding the “junk DNA” we are getting a handle on genetic regulation networks and will be able to make them much more productive and reliable,
> I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now.
That is or was essentially the mission of the US government's Artemis program, as I understand it. Some elements of the plan are (or were):
'Civilize' (my word) the Moon - build PNT, situational awareness, communication infrastructure, bases, permanent human presence etc. Bring it within a normalized region of operations, like Earth orbit (though obviously much more expensive and less utilized). A benefit is developing plans for infrastructure and operations on Mars, in a much more friendly and less expensive environment. What does it take to support humans efficiently and reliably on another body?
Also conduct experiments and develop technology for Mars in cislunar regions - again, much friendlier and less costly.
> 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?
And yet we still have a solar system, empty of life other than Earth, we can expand to. Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is across the river?
Two things baffle me:
1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system.
2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
I remember Musk being much more popular hereabouts and in my IRL circles 10 years ago.
That things moved from that to outright vilification is entirely due to how he behaved since then.
2. I’m a big fan of the guy, except he went completely off the rails on political stuff… It’s hard that both can be true at the same time.
There are a lot of ethical issues surrounding Neuralink and how it would be used. It might be good for certain medical stuff but I can see how it can be abused.
> There are a lot of ethical issues surrounding Neuralink and how it would be used
Like what? (There are always ethical issues with new medical technology.)
> It might be good for certain medical stuff
Yes, like giving sight to the blind! What a monster Musk is!
P.S. two of my largest medical fears are becoming paralyzed or going blind. Neuralink has promise in making these treatable. I'm all for it!
> Like what? (There are always ethical issues with new medical technology.)
Like mind control, thought surveillance, neural torture (the last one would be easiest).
I think these are inevitable technologies, I don't blame Neuralink in particular.
Mean people already do these things. Other people are already trying to use AI to decode your brainwaves and thoughts. There's no evidence Neuralink is doing anything unethical.
Neuralink has various potentials. One of them is that it becomes obligatory or even mandatory... If you don't get it, you'll be accused of being a luddite. It will probably start as a medical tool and progress to there.
The problem is that you are giving away access to your mind, one of the last private spaces. That means your thoughts can be stolen (think AI scraping but worse), or advertising put in your dreams. Perhaps even used to reprogram your mind etc.
> One of them is that it becomes obligatory or even mandatory...
Given how smartphones have percolated society, I fear you may have a point, but I think that might be the slippery slope fallacy.
> What a monster Musk is!
Glad we’re on the same page.
When I was using Zortech C++ in the ‘80s, I never imagined I’d be talking to the author nearly half a century later about his support for a fascist Nazi near-trillionaire.
Wtf is wrong with you.
I wouldn't support Musk if he was a fascist nazi. My personal views are libertarian.
> I wouldn't support Musk if he was a fascist nazi.
That's not how that works.
Musk is, by many definitions well across the line distinguishing the 'fascist nazi's' from the rest of us.
Normalization of deviance slowly shifts the window to the point where his behavior is excused. Some people think it is acceptable because of all of the (potential) good a person could do or has already done. That's roughly the equivalent of 'Hitler was a vegetarian, and liked animals, how bad could he be?'. But The country that spawned the movement (so I think they get to make the call) thinks he is. And Musk's support for the German AfD (which is a thin layer of veneer over a despicable group) speaks volumes, yes, let's 'Make Germany Great Again' ffs. Even the Neo Nazi's think he is a Nazi. Elon has made Twitter (sorry, 'X') into a safe haven for the alt-right and various hate groups.
If it quacks like a Nazi and moves like a Nazi it probably is a Nazi. Whether you support him or not changes nothing about Elon but it does say something about you that you continue to support him despite everything he has already undeniably done and I'm disappointed, to put it mildly.
"never meet your heroes".
How would you define the terms "fascist nazi" and "libertarian"?
I'm fine with the google definitions.
What are they?
I don’t think he is a fascist nazi either. But I do think he is happy to support them as long as they make him feel special, and that’s bad enough.
The man is deeply unwell and desperate for approval and accolades. From anyone.
I think we can agree that Musk is strongly motivated. He works insanely hard and takes huge personal risks with his fortune.
He says why he does it - over and over - to save humanity by spreading it out into space.
> desperate for approval and accolades. From anyone.
If true, it is rather common behavior, not deeply unwell. Politicians 100% fall into that category. So do movie stars. So does every Olympic athlete. So what.
I think if you materially support the nazis, you are a nazi, regardless of what might be your internal justification. This is a distinction without a difference.
I don't really see anyone complain about Jeff Bezos these days?
1. It is, until proven otherwise
2. Which guy?
1) There may well be other biospheres in the solar system. There is some indirect and inconclusive evidence of microbial life on Mars, and even in the Venusian atmosphere. This dates back to results from the Viking and Venera, as well as more recent research. Earth life could be destructive to native life in these places, and vice versa (since they would likely be extremophiles) resulting in invasive species.
2) Musk is putting a lot of money into these things but he is still heavily subsidised by US government money and facilities (a loophole in the Outer Space Treaty allows individuals and corporations to claim other planets but not countries.)
> There is some indirect and inconclusive evidence of microbial life on Mars, and even in the Venusian atmosphere. This dates back to results from the Viking and Venera, as well as more recent research.
Yes, I've been hearing that forever. Every probe shrinks the envelope on the possibility.
> Earth life could be destructive to native life in these places,
Better us than slime mold.
> and vice versa (since they would likely be extremophiles) resulting in invasive species.
Perhaps. If anyone was transporting things back from there, there'd be a long space voyage where any such toxicity to the astronauts would be pretty clear.
2. Musk is not getting subsidies. He does get government contracts, where he exchanges rockets for money. That is not a subsidy, like if I make boxes and sell them to the government I am not getting a subsidy.
There are possibilities of invasive species either way. Think of how Australia etc have struggled with various plants and animals that have taken over. We may find that some Earth life likes Mars too much and becomes an uncontrollable pest there (after some mutation), or that some microbe etc from Mars finds the Earth environment more hospitable and starts being invasive here. (Already predicted by HG Wells' "Red Weed".) That would not be unlikely as if Mars used to be more habitable then there could be life hibernating or waiting for a break, and Earth might offer it all the things it needs to reproduce quickly...
2. How do you define loans, tax credits and other subsidies then? You claim it’s this person specifically advancing space faring capabilities- which literally would not be possible without the US government. So please elaborate, as you’re not making sense.
1. A loan is not a subsidy. Loans get paid back with interest.
2. Tax credits - the tax code is full of various credits. Anyone can use those credits.
3. Other subsidies - like what?
> which literally would not be possible without the US government
The US government buying launches at prices far cheaper than NASA is not a subsidy.
>Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is across the river?
That "river" is still vast and nothing we want is on the other side.
>1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system.
It's less the idea that Terran life is toxic and more that we're still hoping to find some forms of primitive life elsewhere in the solar system, and don't want those efforts thwarted by cross-contamination. You decided the rest of the solar system is dead, not the scientific community.
>2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
If you really can't comprehend the reason why Elon Musk is villified by people then there's no point in trying to explain it to you.
Suffice to say that owning a rocket company doesn't absolve a person of their sins to everyone, even on Hacker News.
> nothing we want is on the other side
Wow.
> You decided the rest of the solar system is dead, not the scientific community.
The odds are heavily stacked against other life existing, and get worse with every probe. Of course, nobody can prove there is no other life. And it's not very credible that Terran life will out-compete locally evolved life.
And the idea that preserving some slime mold on Pluto justifies us constraining ourselves to Earth is just sad.
> If you really can't comprehend the reason why Elon Musk is villified by people then there's no point in trying to explain it to you.
I once asked another Musk-hater on HN why? All he could come up with is Musk called a diver a pedo-boy. I pointed out that Musk only did that because the diver went on national TV and told Musk to shove his submarine up his backside.
If you've got a better reason, I'd love to hear it!
Musk said in 2019 that Epstein was “obviously a creep” and claimed that Epstein “tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island. I declined.”
Hmm..
> “Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for,”
Hmm..
> “Will be in the BVI/St Bart’s area over the holidays. Is there a good time to visit?”
Hmm..
> “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”
Hmm..
> The emails between the two moguls come years after Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor in Florida.
Yup, sounds like a "better reason" to me.
Notwithstanding the other myriad of reasons to not like Elon Musk (of which there are many)…
You’re equivocating a childish insult with insisting that a person is a pedophile and hiring a private investigator to prove so and then writing scathing emails to reporters because they refuse to repeat claims uncritically. This is an appalling failing of morality on your part.
I’m frankly not inclined to dive into why I, previously a big fan of Elon Musk, find him personally repugnant because I expect you to apply the same standards to everything he does. That doesn’t take away from SpaceX, but we shouldn’t overlook his failings just because rockets are cool.
> hiring a private investigator
Only after being sued. When you sue someone, they're going to try to defend themselves.
Both of them should have just shrugged it off.
> then writing scathing emails
doesn't make someone evil. The whole incident was childish from both sides, but nobody was actually hurt.
He hired the private investigator before he was sued.
You left out the part where he claimed a person was a pedophile and when asked if it was just an insult basically said “no I really think he’s a pedophile”, and started stating made up bullshit about child brides as fact. He only backtracked when he was sued. That is NOT the same as just throwing insults.
More nuance:
"Mr. Musk made these statements based on reports he received from a private investigator he hired to investigate Mr. Unsworth in preparation for the litigation that Mr. Unsworth had already threatened. Unbeknownst to Mr. Musk, the investigator’s reports were fabricated, and the investigator himself turned out to be a convicted felon who had gone to prison for fraud."
"Mr. Musk’s tweet was the culmination of an argument between two people that was punctuated by insults—not a factual accusation of the crime of pedophilia. The firm also demonstrated that Mr. Unsworth had not suffered any injury."
There's more: https://www.quinnemanuel.com/the-firm/our-notable-victories/...
Childish behavior - sure (on both sides). Anybody hurt - no.
This level of defense seems highly inappropriate when you consider that the the unimpressive billionaire doesn't stoop down to this level, has a functional moon lander, ISRU technology that can manufacture solar panels on the moon and a long term plan for getting rid of SLS while the more impressive billionaire is struggling to get to orbit.
Ironically, thanks to the recent releases of the Epstein files,now we know that Musk is a pedo–boy.
> The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds
The overwhelming amount of the work is done by NASA, ESA, CNSA (China, going to the Moon), and other space agencies. Musk has built orbital rockets.
> routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
That's disingenuous and you know it. Why make such claims?
> Musk has built orbital rockets.
Musk has built lots of cheap orbital rockets. That changes everything.
> That's disingenuous and you know it. Why make such claims?
See the other responses in this thread.
It changes the price and speed of satellite internet. Apart from that...?
There were cars before the Model T, but only for the rich. Ford made cars affordable for everyman. That changed everything.
There were books before Gutenberg, but only for the rich. His printing press made them cheap enough to print newspapers. That changed everything.
Before Bessemer, making steel was extremely expensive and rarely one. With the Bessemer Process, vast quantities of steel could be cheaply made. That changed everything. Google says:
"The process revolutionized the industry by reducing costs and increasing production, making steel accessible for major infrastructure projects in the 19th and early 20th centuries."
And now travel to Mars is affordable for everyone! Oh, wait, no it's not.
> lots of cheap orbital rockets
It's valuable for sure. It's nothing like, "The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds". There are many others, and many are doing more (again, NASA, etc.). JPL's homepage says "Our missions have flown to every planet and the Sun ...", and that they've been on Mars for four years, so let's be serious and not throw wild absurd claims at the wall (very Musk-like, though!).
> There are many others
Now that Musk led the way, sure. People laughed at Musk when he started out.
> NASA
Has sent a handful of probes out, only a handful because they are so costly. Now NASA can send out legions of them. There was a previous discussion here about why only one JWST was made and launched, at a cost of $10B. We all hope and pray it doesn't break down. Now with Musk's rockets we can launch lots of them and make N times the discoveries!
(With cheap launches, we don't have to make single machines that must be super reliable. We can make cheap machines at fractions of the cost, and so what if a few of them fail.)
Lowering costs by an order of magnitude changes everything.
That doesn't add up. Plenty of Philip K Dick novels and stories have spaceships, while also being existential nightmares of the collapse of human identity. Ursula Le Guin, the quintessential new wave sci-fi author, mostly wrote about space travel (though usually as a mechanism for doing cultural anthropology).
Many of us authors are still trying to write optimistic Sci-Fi, we are just getting lost in the noise, and the algorithm. Look harder :-)
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’m also a fan of Banks - but he’s hardly current. He died thirteen years ago.
> starships left with the optimism
How does the Three Body Problem fit into this? On one hand, it’s Chinese. On the other hand, it’s literally mocking optimism.
There are a heap of self published sci-fi and fantasy novels that fill the top selling lists on amazon in their respective niche. These are not included in the database that this analysis used. Space travel, multiple worlds and aliens are all really common tropes in those, even if the book is a pulpy progression fantasy or litrpg. The other top sellers are Romantasy which are published professionally. These have lots of dragons, were-wolves and vampires for sexy reasons. The professional fiction publishers are 70-80% women publishing for a majority female fiction reader fan base. Even old best selling men's action authors like Clive Custler and Tom Clancy would probably have to self publish if they were writing today.
Poking around on Amazon's Kindle books for Science Fiction and the "popular" list seems to be all established names at this point? Some of them got their start self-publishing, ofc, like Dungeon Crawler Carl or Andy Weir's books but didn't stay that way. They don't make it particularly easy to sort/inspect the popularity stats, and I'm sure there are some super niche sub-genres out there, but for the genre as a whole I'm not seeing any surprises.
(Space travel, of course, is a major part of many of them, like Project Hail Mary or the Pierce Brown stuff. Not nearly as much in the Star Trek utopian vein, of course, as the parent commenter pointed out.)
Feels like folks like Blake Crouch or Mick Herron are filling similar spots as Cussler or Clancy these days, but again shifted to today's general worldview. Not as verbose as Clancy, though.
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 ;)
There are some brilliant SF writers from the eastern bloc. They had to write to get around censorship and the official line. Stanislaw Lem is great.
Why was George Clooney persuaded to make such a bad adaptation of Solaris?
You've no argument from me there. Lem was unhappy with aspects of Tarkovsky's version saying he had not written about people's sex problems in space. Nonetheless it is often a very beautiful film.
> Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer.
Interesting POV because Star Trek and Foundation both have recent, big budget streaming series while new Terminator movies were flops and Neuromancer has never seen any development(?)
Neuromancer is currently in development at Apple+ :)
FWIW, Amazon made a show based on "The Peripheral" by Gibson which is way more bleak than Neuromancer, and it was crazy good, but they canceled it after one season.
Oh I saw that one. It was good, too bad they canceled it
I think I would argue that we already see the sea change in the later Dune books
The inner systems become hidebound as they continue to reach out they find that not only has someone beaten them there, they have become Other as well as antagonistic and expansionist.
Starships are a boring transport layer, implementation detail.
Being a part of a Q continuum, a disembodied consciousness that can appear wherever whenever, while still retaining a memory/sense of "self" is a far more interesting a dream.
Starships titillate people who tinker with machines. Not very optimistic if we are dragging along service jobs to explore the cosmos.
Athwart? These posts really bring out the try-hards.
Fantasy is not a downgrade from sci-fi; the genre serves an altogether different purpose which is equally valuable, if not moreso - the development of spiritual faculties of perception. It is the neglect of those faculties which leads to societal decay -- the current nadir we are in is STILL the fallout of the "death of God" (as Nietzsche put it) -- man's recognition that the Sky Daddy myth is no longer enough to explain the world led to a vacuum of a cohesion between metaphysics and morality. In its absence, materialism - hedonism in the realm of the senses - is all that that there is to derive hope or reason for living from.
Without fantasy -- Lord of the Rings being the chief example -- the "post-God" world has no means of developing said faculties outside of fantasy (the genre), and art - which, as a whole, is a form of fantasy.
Stated with a different spin, the detached-from-reality takes of Campbell-era SF finally became too strained to enjoy.
I kinda have the same feeling for music as well, the best phases for metal and punk music are usually when stuff is going to shit. When everything looks bright and good the music just doesn't have the same quality, people are not angry all the time.
> best phases for metal and punk music are usually when stuff is going to shit.
Now should be a productive time for music in the US then, and possibly elsewhere if things continue on the same trajectory.
Why did people want to escape Earth though? Maybe they felt Earth was past saving.
A lot of the old stuff isn't so much about escaping Earth, as outgrowing it. A feeling that it's our destiny to expand to the stars, just as it was life's destiny to come out of the oceans.
The more we look for alien civilizations and come up empty, the more I feel like they were on to something. For all we know, life is exceedingly rare in the universe.
This doesn't explain why pessimistic and dystopian sci-fi has declined.
Also, Foundation takes place in a future where society is about to collapse and regress into dark ages. It's a borderline dystopian world.
YA Dystopia novels probably had a hand in that. They almost certainly sucked all the air out of the genre, and it’ll take a long time for serious authors to see a viable path forward with publishers with anything that vaguely resembles them.
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.
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.
"The future is socialism or barbarism" (Rosa Luxemburg). I fear we have chosen the latter.
The Culture can't happen. It requires Faster Than Light spaceships and that's not a thing in our universe. Also, and I know it's not what you meant, but in Banks' fiction "State of the Art" is specifically a novella about a Culture visit to Earth in the 1970s. They're not us.
Egan's "The Amalgam" is an SF society which could in principle descend in part from some future humanity, and I suppose if you like Banks' setting for its utopianism you'd be satisfied with the Amalgam. Its citizens tend to live long, full lives in which they're definitely mostly concerned with the upper parts of Maslow's pyramid and their practical needs are fulfilled as a matter of course in most cases.
I must say, to the extent we have any future at all, I think probably of Egan's "Dream Apes". An Orangutan-like self-engineered future humanity who have arranged that there are no apex predators above them, there's an abundance of resources for their relatively modest population, and they just chill, believing that if there is something out there it's not their concern. Of course in the story the Dream Apes are all annihilated by a cataclysmic event which destroys Earth, but hey, it's pretty quick.
The part where superintelligent computers keep humans around as pets in a powerful and happy civilization is plausible. The part where there’s hyperdrive and energy grids and fields and effectors, less so.
IIRC Banks insisted in interviews that the culture's citizens aren't pets. The exact relationship is, like the FTL travel and indeed teleportation, very vague and only sketched in where needed to advance the plot.
We have no experience with the extremely asymmetrical relationships which would result. Lem tries to imagine this in Golem XIV - what happens when humans who are used to thinking of themselves as smart are talking with a categorically more intelligent machine - and it doesn't work very well even though it's only a sketch.
"Tatja Grimm's World" has a neat trick where Vinge is able to sidestep this because [[SPOILER]] although Tatja is much smarter than everybody else from her world, that's not because she's smarter than we are, almost everyone born on her planet is an idiot for reasons the story justifies.
so... it might be a marketing problem?
no publisher was there to tell author "wtf did you name it, you'll get ignored" or smth?
I don't think anyone's failing to recognize modern sci-fi novels because they aren't called "The Space Martians Go To The Moon In Their Starship" or whatever.
Really, I think the most significant trend here is that, between 1950 and 1980 or so, the sci-fi genre grew up and stopped relying on painfully literal titles.
I’d argue that SF should never have "grown up." Look at the works considered classics today, like Heinlein, or even Star Trek. At the time of release, they were often dismissed as unserious (TOS famously had scientific blunders like planets at -290°C), yet they remain cultural touchstones because they prioritized vision over rigor.
SF used to excel at selling "dreams" to humanity. By trying too hard to be seen as "serious" or scientifically airtight, authors sacrificed the sense of wonder that allows for mainstream success. We traded mass appeal for academic validation.
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.
> science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.
Not even abstract, just not completely on the nose. Just as a lot if fantasy is not: only two discord novels would match the author’s search terms even though you’ll find all five inside the pages. None for Malazan. Or Nix’s old kingdom.
And worse, 40% of the sci-fi terms pretty only allow settings of “future solar system”. Not one of the Foundation books would match. Pretty much no classic sci-fi either. Wells’s fucking The War of the Worlds would not, because for some reason (of having any sort of taste) it was not titled “the day Mars invaded planet earth through space and then was beaten” like some lone star light novel.
Yep.
In that sense I think it's less an overall literary trends and more reflecting the pretty basic way of marketing pulpy stories to teens means putting "vampire" rather than "planet" in big letters in the title. Also, people still writing fantasy novels about alien civilizations aren't setting them on the moon or Mars any more, for reasons...
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.
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.
I was thinking that, for example Caves of steel, Childhood Ends, Spin and many others have no starships or space related terms in their title.
All I know is that sci-fi is still producing some great ideas from talented individuals.
Like none of The Expanse books would appear...
Not one of the culture books either, even though several have spaceships as main characters. And only a handful of Hamilton books. And I reckon a single Polity book.
I was disappoints to go into a large Waterstones in Peterborough last year and not see any Peter F Hamilton books.
The genre where we find the "fantasy/sci-fi" books right next to usually mystery books in our German book stores usually is speculative fiction:
- mystery, - horror, - fantasy, - and sci-fi have lots of overlap. - And XKCDs What-If-Books even.
But as someone who hates fantasy and loves sci-fi, the biggest difference for me comes from plausibility: "a witch did it" as Occam's fantasy razor for things being the way they happened, and the underlying physics engine means for me: either this is soft "sci-fi", or they better explain with hard rules the limitations and effects of their magic system.
Since (low-sorcery) fantasy RPGs even have torches that would never work, when historical torched looked completely differently, suspension of disbelieve hardly sets in for me in fantasy books.
I speculate that a lot of sci-fi reflects the cutting edge of science and technology at the time it is written. For well over a century a lot of that frontier was transportation: and we got "Around the World in 80 Days" and "20000 Leagues under the Sea" and then a lot of books about space. We also got "Canticle for Leibowitz" and other post-apocalyptic books out of the age when nuclear weapons and energy was top of mind. Then, in the 70s and 80s computer technology became the center of innovation and we got cyberpunk and a lot of sci-fi turned inward to virtual worlds and the like. Given we're in a new space age, maybe sci-fi will start to follow? I'm certainly seeing a new wave of AI centric fiction.
My favourite part of a Canticle for Leibowitz is the manual auto regressive model the old monk is using to recover damaged books. I remember reading the gpt2 paper and thinking hang on...
I don't see how anything substantive has changed vis-a-vis space. There are some hard sci-fi recently, like the Expanse, that tackle a more realistic space expansion. But fundamentally nothing has changed tech-wise in space technology since chemical rockets, at least not for people-sized space-endeavours.
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.
Maybe 50% of my audiobook listening is the Expeditionary Force series by Craig Alanson. So dumb, so much fun, and all spaceships.
Yeah, that's a good one. "Dumb and fun" is a good description.
Craig Alanson also wrote a fantasy trilogy a while back that proved much better than I was expecting. It started off as what appeared to be an uninteresting juvenile fantasy book, but quickly got better and darker. I very much enjoyed reading those.
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.)
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.
9/11 was the turning point. We'd been fed a future "in the year 2000." When we got there, that future turned into a nostalgic vision of the past.
It's still possible to imagine new bright futures, but that kind of imagination is very much against a cultural tide that's fervently regressive and nostalgic.
The original "futurists" were Italian, eventually under Mussolini.
That is a loaded term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_architecture
Futurist Michio Kaku once gave a talk at my company five years ago and though I forgot the details, I remember the audience found his vision quite dystopian.
The 20th century was a period of wild change. Someone born before the first powered airplane flight in their lifetime could have flown on a jet plane to Europe and watched the first moon landing live on TV.
Vaccines put an end to endemic diseases which killed so many children every year. The birth control pill catalyzed the sexual revolution. We had a treatment for diabetes, which was once a death sentence.
The 1950s and onward saw huge changes in how businesses are organized due to computerization. In the US, cheap automobiles, cheap gas, the federal highway system, and subsidies transformed how most people live, including white flight into suburbia.
Plastic was a wonder material. Materials like nylon and polyester transformed the clothing industry.
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.
The Three Body Problem is not even close to hard science fiction.
Three Body Problem in the book set the alien world in Alpha Centari, which is not a three body system.
Even a cursory analysis at the time of writing would have ruled out Alpha Centari.
It was shockingly bad research.
Alpha Centauri is a triple star, even if it is not the kind of three body system depicted in that story (mainly because one of the 3 stars is much smaller than the other 2, so it orbits stably around them like a very big and distant planet).
While the triple star Alpha Centauri does not have mass ratios between its stars that are compatible with the story plot, I think that ignoring this technical detail is a much less serious plot hole than those of the majority of the non-fantastic Hollywood movies, which are supposed to happen in the real world, but they still contain a lot of impossible actions.
Never mind that; how about sentient (AI) protons?
Recommendations?
For literature: House of Suns* if you feel like strapping in for a wild ride with nevertheless believable 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). Allowing for limited FTL handwavyness opens up a lot of space opera titles that elect to otherwise play by hard sci-fi rules.
* 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.
Alas I think I've read/watched everything on your list. I'll try a useful echo response. I read the two big Arkady Martine books, and much of Ann Leckie's work. I thought they were all pretty good. Martine because the Aztec's in space genre is new to me, and she writes so well about people, Leckie because her galaxy spanning empire of genetically cloned god-kings and spaceships with transferrable personalities is clever and disconcerting.
Other book recommendations:
- valuable humans in transit by qntm
- the old axolotl by Jacek Dukaj (skip the tv show, it is very different from the book)
- the Agent Cormac series by Neal Asher
- the night’s dawn trilogy by peter f hamilton (his books are borderline fantasy, but he writes such deliciously monstrous villains)
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.
> What, you thought early era SF used accurate science?
It depends on the author I guess. Stanislaw Lem for instance mostly separated his "silly-fiction universes" (e.g. the Ijon Tichy and 'robot fairytales' novels) from his "hard sci-fi" universes (for instance the Pilot Pirx novels) - and there it was mostly about the restrictions of space travel (where space travel is usually just plain old cargo hauling), Pirx never left the solar system because it simply wasn't possible during his lifetime (part of him eventually did - maybe - in his last book 'Fiasco'), instead the Pirx novels were mostly occupied with typical 'space trucker' problems like oil leaks on his rocket boosters, wrestling with space harbour bureaucracy or the occasional humanoid robot going into a mode that could be described as 'mad' or 'depressed'.
Early SF would be a couple decades before Lem.
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…
I suggest you rewatch star trek. Plot and complexity wise, they are basically childrend stories plus technobable.
Maybe if we reverse the polarity of the plot holes it will make more sense.
Technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, after all.
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.
> The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related.
Worse, half are confined to the solar system.
Here are a few ideas trends that are affecting this: -Publishing is getting less profitable so there are less books being published by the big companies. -Publishing companies are grow 70-80% woman and are choosing female preferred books -Most published fiction readers are female (I'm not sure what came first women reading more books or publishes publishing less male friendly books) -Romance is the biggest genre fiction and that has heaps of dragons, werewolves and vampires (hence why those terms haven't dropped off) -Self published books aren't included in isfdb, lots of male authors self publish -Amazon best selling sci/fi, cyberpunk lists now have heaps of self-published books (maybe most) -Most of this stuff is pretty pulpy, but it is really common to have starships and space travel in these books.
I think that science has advanced to the point, where we no longer consider there to be “unexplored” realms, in science. We haven’t gotten there, yet, but we can see it, from here.
There’s the old adage (maybe it was Carl Sagan that said it?), that any sufficiently advanced science, appears to be magic, but we no longer think of it as “magic.” It’s just a point further down the road. More importantly, we now know about a lot of the “hard limits,” in science.
For myself, I’ve always been more of a fan of fantasy. That’s simply because I prefer the way the narrative is driven.
In Science Fiction, the real protagonist is the speculative science, and the characters are simply decorative elements. The stories are about the “grand idea” science.
In Fantasy, the stories are really about characters, in a fantastical context. The stories are about people.
> science has advanced to the point, where we no longer consider there to be “unexplored” realms, in science
It’s interesting that the last time this vividly happened was on the eve of massive technological advancement, social change and a world war.
Realistic Hard SF has to deal with Accelerating Change making technology vastly powerful yet still limited. The hardest thing to write about is cognitively enhanced humans or any other entities (AI, aliens, etc.) exceeding human cognitive limits. JW Campbell famously said it couldn't be done, but without that depictions of the future or wider universe fall flat. Vernor Vinge became the master of such SF and showed several ways to do it. I recommend everything he wrote! Good Hard SF requires an author who has a good grasp of science without that stifling their imagination. It's easy if you cheat but Science Fantasy is unreadable by the science literate folks who frequent HN. Good Hard SF is out there, with and without spaceships, but you'll have to hunt for it - and thanks for all the recommendations here!
Speaking of hard SF with imagination, Hal Clement's "Mission of Gravity" is a good example.
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.
This is way too reductive; there was plenty of fantasy anime in the 80s, and they're still making Gundam today, among other sci-fi shows.
Starships were mostly an analogy for WW2-style global naval operations. In some cases explicitly so, in some ways implicit.
The fighters and capital ships combat setup makes no sense in space.
It's far more practical to adapt life to space and other planets, than it is to adapt space and other planets to human life. The problem with writing a story about artificial life exploring the universe is that it's unrelatable without humans in it.
I think humans are stuck on earth permanently because there are no other environments in the solar system we can live in as easily as earth. Traditional sci-fi explained this away using overpopulation pressures, but overpopulation is fading as a reality and plausible narrative device. And forget about interstellar travel, it's too dangerous and takes too long.
If intelligent DNA-based life is still around on earth when it starts getting too hot because of the sun's expansion and it all needs to flee, it will have continued to evolve such that it will be unrecognizable and unrelatable to us. And by then I expect artificial life to have spread to such an extent that biological life on earth is basically a historical footnote.
I actually think life in the broadest sense will spread from earth to other places in the galaxy, but it will be completely alien compared to human life.
Our trajectory is to meld ourselves with machines. Fleshy humans may he stuck on earth but our machines have no such restrictions and can be engineered for all kinds of extremes.
We will eventually figure out how to imprint our consciousness into a chip. Maybe not for another thousand years but weve been building machines our entire existence to conquer nature. We will figure it out.
If there's not a constant stream of consciousness throughout the entire process, I'm just assuming that's gonna be nothing more than a copy. What else could it be? When "you" wake up, it'll be 100% convincing either way, so I assume you can only prove it going in. I'm not great at philosophy though.
Edit: biology is pretty efficient though. We might as well just start growing new bodies/parts for people, enhancing it over time. There are already functionally immortal species on Earth.
What is a continuous stream. I was knocked unconscious for a few minutes in 2007 when I came off a bike. Am I the same person today as I was in 2005?
On the other hand dementia eats away at memories and personality. My grandmother doesn’t remember having children (who are now in their late 70s), a husband (she had two), but does remember (mostly) life as a child. She wasnt unconscious though.
(It’s basically the inevitable same end game as the rom com “50 first dates”)
As you say it’s philosophical - a bit like Triggers Broom. Or 1 minute Time Machine in a way.
I like the answer to ship of Theseus (define the ship by the keel or whatever), If you were to replace every cell in your body are you still the same person? That happens multiple times over your life. What if you were to replace some cells with non human parts - a false leg, a pig heart. When do you stop being “you”
If you replace every neuron in your brain with a synthetic neuron, one at a time, a there a point you no longer exist. Is it a continuous reduction. What if those neurons are put together elsewhere, which is you. Both? Neither? A fraction of each?
It won't be a chip, as higher densities are required.
Then the heat must be removed.
Then, stacking has to happen.
Do we reach a synthetic neuron?
I don't think we'll ever populate a planet beyond the solar system, but I think at some point we'll leave Earth. The sun has an expiration date, after all. Maybe the space-flotilla species was the most accurate outcome after all, Mass Effect!
Warhammer 40,000 did it earlier with the Aeldari Craftworlds, and Battlestar Galactica did it before that.
I always appreciated the Mobile Suit Gundam approach (U.C. timeline, to be specific): humans in space largely live in O'Neill Cylinder-style space colonies arranged in constellations at Earth-Moon Lagrange points, allowing them to a) be built from materials gathered from space and b) once built, manufacture things from those materials without having to land them on Earth first. There are large settlements on the Moon, and while they are important manufacturing and research centers, they're not the primary population centers in space. Mars is, to the best of my knowledge, uninhabited. As far as the outer solar system goes, only Jupiter has a permanent human presence as the primary source of humanity's helium-3 (Gundam predates the proposal of mining the Moon for helium-3 instead).
I like this approach. It's plausible based on the assumptions made by the story, lets people in space have the benefits of mostly-normal gravity and radiation exposure (as compared to, say Mars), and keeping things local to the Earth means you don't need to be too concerned with the distances involved. Where they really lose the plot, though, is with population; Gundam claims that, in less than 100 years, billions of people--in fact, the large majority of humanity--have moved to space. I can't even begin to fathom what kind of effort would be needed to build that many space colonies, and then shuttle the people up there to populate them.
> practical to adapt life to space
This is not practical in terms of microgravity environments. You just have to read the space shuttle manual to learn how to correct a broken toilet before you understand how poorly equipped we are to handle this challenge. If you can't fix it you're back to the Apollo style bags. The toilet has a 21 day lifetime anyways. Reading the manual further shows why. Turns out lots of holes between the inside and outside are so terrible you'd rather hold onto your waste than build a convenience. Even so turds at suborbital velocities are a terrifying thought on every level.
Any loose item in the ship is an _immediate_ choking hazard. There's no gravity. Surface tension does strange things. Even to your throat. You have to trust that every person on board is going to reliably capture and contain all debris at all times. God help you if you have to fire the engines for a short period because suddenly there's "gravity" again. You can rotate a space station but you can't go anywhere really.
Medically you can't do any imaging other than weak ultrasound. No X-Rays even. Surgery is effectively impossible without gravity anyways. Not that you'll ever get that close to the effort. It's absurd how brightly we paint this dim picture in our culture and our military style propaganda.
Until we have artificial gravity I personally think we have no business in space as a civilian effort and we're not going to get particularly far from Earth because of it.
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.
It was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now.
Yes. Von Braun wrote an otherwise realistic novel in which earth's explorers find intelligent life on Mars.[1] Heinlein wrote realistically of native intelligent life on Mars and Venus, with far more benign environments then they actually have. But once probes got there, we got to see how bleak they are.
There's a little hope for extrasolar planets, now that we can detect some of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
In 1965, Clarke, Asimov, and other science writers were at NASA watching the first images appear. "Craters. Duh, it's right next to the asteroid belt, of course it has craters. Not that any of us thought of it beforehand..."
Do you have a reference for that account? I hadn't heard it before, and it doesn't sounds quite right.
They certainly knew the Earth and Moon had craters, so proximity to the asteroid belt isn't required.
I suspect they thought the atmosphere on Mars was thicker and like Earth, where the high rate of erosion erases evidence.
Digging around through archive.org I found https://archive.org/details/sim_popular-astronomy_1944-05_52... from Popular Astronomy 1944
> The following extracts are taken from pp. 49 and 50:
> “The recent dominance of the meteoritic impact theory of crater origin makes timely a review of the oases-crater question of Mars. In this treatise, these conclusions have been pointed out:
> “I, Meteorite craters are known on the Earth and Moon; therefore, craters exist on Mars.
> “2. The circular oases on Mars are the size, shape, and number of comparable lunar craters.
> “3. Crater depressions form a natural reservoir, accounting for the intense vegetation in the Martian oases,
> “4. The random distribution of crater oases is apparent, indicating that the canal system was adapted to this haphazard arrangement.
The reviewer of the above points out
> “Why didn’t someone think of the crater theory sooner? The answer is simple. Someone did. Back in 1892, at Arequipa, Peru, W. H. Pickering not only discovered the small black spots on Mars, but he also recognized their similarity to the circlets on the Moon. Because lunar craters were then believed to be volcanic, Pickering may be forgiven for implying that the Martian craterets also were of volcanic origin.
We now know these crater oases were not real. My point is only that some people proposed meteoric craters on the Moon before the 1960s.
BTW, the SF of the pre-Mariner era does have volcanic craters on Mars, like https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v15n01_1941-01_c... and https://archive.org/details/Startling_Stories_v07n03_1942-05... .
I also found https://archive.org/details/exploringmars0000rich/page/150/m... saying in 1954 "no irregularities due to shadows have ever been observed along the terminator—the line dividing daylight from dark—such as would be produced by Martian craters." The author was an American astronomer and also a SF writer in the 1950s. By this we know astronomers were already considering there might be craters on Mars as there are on the Moon.
Yup. One early Arthur C Clarke story had plants growing natively on the Moon.
I figure with Andy Weirs movies getting so big that there'd be an increase in scifi readship after the new movie comes out.
I say this as someone who loves SF and deeply mourns its decline: I think the genre painted itself into a corner by focusing too much on "Hard SF." In my view, an obsession with technology has often been a crutch for weaker storytelling. The genre works best when it serves as a pretext to examine the human condition—like Vonnegut or P.K. Dick did.
By betraying the ideals of humanist writing in favor of technical accuracy, SF has been cannibalized by genres that actually focus on the inner lives of individuals, such as the booming "romantasy" sector.
"Hard SF" is the defining characteristic of the genre, though. Soft SF is just another name for fantasy/magical thinking. Which is fine on its own but not really what sci-fi is about.
I wonder why it’s an issue for readers. Has anyone of you read all past great sci-fi books?
I just noticed that russian wikipedia loves that first image:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GAX-447.jpg#globalus...
Edit: actually it doesn't appear on some of the pages cited there.
I think it's just because the image is used in the common navbax for the "Колонизация космоса" category many of those pages belong to (roughly "Space Colonization" according to some random translation tools).
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.
Is the number of books with “space” in the title a meaningful indicator of anything other than how many books have “space” in the title? Sure Murderbot may not be as big as Game of Thrones, but these statistics seem more about linguistic trends than genres.
Fantasy appeals to a wider audience (see the "Romantasy" genre) and seems to overlap more with YA fiction so captures more young readers.
Yes. What's popular with teens varies over time, of course. At peak Twilight, the Barnes and Noble at Hillsdale Mall had seven bookcases of Teen Paranormal Romance. I mentioned this to one of the store Goths, and she told me that vampires were on the way out and the next thing was probably going to be zombies. The Monster Hunter thing had a brief moment.
Then we had the survival period - Harry Potter overlapped the Hunger Games and Divergent eras, all of which produced too many spinoffs. This moved into the Game of Thrones spinoffs. Now, dragons seem to be out, except that Anne McCaffery is back on the shelves.
The latest shift is driven by "booktok" on TikTok. I just saw teenage girls giggling over the new books in the Romance section, while avoiding the YA section. The Dark Romance subgenre is in, and now has its own shelf space.
Hard SF? Other than the Expanse series, not much recently.
Funny, I've been working on an SF novelette (probably) for a couple months now, involving a starship even. I guess I should write faster :-)
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.
They didn't go anywhere. Lots of excellent starship/space opera novels out there with more coming out each year. There's just lots there stuff too. :)
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 (age of mass single-stream media), then our current era of cyberpunk.
What has changed on the publishing and awards side of the equation that could explain this?
They are „Rust“ing here: https://starship.rs/
It turned out that the aliens live in inner space, not outer space.
I'm of the opinion that the teen novel has stunted literature in general.
As a kid beginning to read in the 70's I jumped from what were clearly kids books to Lord of the Rings (pure chance -- I liked the cover). There wasn't that watered down in between. It was a jump to real books with real consequences (spoilers: Boromir dies).
I've witnessed the rise of the teen section and seen how kids -- who are reading less in general -- never leave it.
It feels like the fantasy adventure lends itself a lot more to these teen novels and has a knock on effect into the mainstream. I for one could do without anther book about someone born to be a prince(ss) up against the evil realm who can't choose their way out of their romantic triangle.
I'm not knocking anyone's choices. There are more books already than I'll ever read. But it should would be a blast to get another Dune out of nowhere.
I would posit that the issue lies not with YA novels or fantasy in general, but with the continuously declining sense of agency, opportunity, and self-realization among teens and adults. There are deep-seated needs that reality can increasingly no longer meet, which results in rising dependency on simplistic escapism.
I remeber reading tons of junk and pulp as a teen decades ago. If anything, the teen section is more complex then pure hero fantasies and repetitive scary stories that used to make the bulk of reading. Yes, lord of the rings was popular before and now. But the stuff people read en masse was not lord of the rings and certainly not some kind of smart complex stuff.
What used to be read a lot was literary equivalent of a sitcom or slash fantasy.
Because most men stopped reading and most women don’t care much about sci-fi .
https://archive.is/I1QyW
> Beyond the bookstore, much of the architecture of book discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber… #BookTok, the vast community on TikTok that has become a best-seller machine, is largely populated by women recommending books by other women, like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us.”
In a sense this is just a regression to mean, normality, because the literary boys club of the 20th century was the exception:
> In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by women for a female audience. Their output was considered “paltry entertainment,”
I wouldn't blame the demographic shift on female readers; I’d blame the accountants.
The publishing industry hasn't been killed by women, but by risk aversion. Truly groundbreaking SF requires betting on bold, novel, and often weird ideas. Financial departments and algorithms inherently favor safe, repetitive patterns (like romantasy formulas). You can't simulate the next "Dune" or "Neuromancer" on a P&L sheet, so publishers stopped trying.
Reading has become a strongly gendered lifestyle and supposed status marker.
Most of the books are indeed paltry entertainment - soapy and saccharine romances, formulaically transgressive erotica, fantasies about unlimited witchy powers, and perfect book boyfriends - but it's still a huge market.
Men moved to video games and chan culture. Which are a different kind of paltry entertainment.
It's curious how there was a shift from male dominated niches, like Lovecraftian fantasy and heroic fantasy, through the imperial sci-fi peak in the 50s to 70s, through the Hollywood-influenced 80s, then into slow decline from the 90s onwards.
With a few exceptions, a bold imagination became more of a liability than an asset.
This is a culture which has no idea where it's going and would prefer not to get there.
Yeah. As a sci-fi author, I have strong opinions about this. Made an authortube video on the topic: https://youtu.be/THVpdcgTYrQ
But tl;dr: Gatekeepers in big/mainstream publishing have outsourced their slush-piles to underpaid interns, most of whom are young and ambitious women. They tend to like certain things. Also, big/mainstream publishing is chasing data trends, like all other big businesses, which leads to a staleness cycle where they only publish what worked in the last two years. They're afraid to take financial gambles on unproven ideas or new IP.
The good sci-fi these days is mostly indie and mostly underground, IMO. You really have to dig for it. Personally, I find good stuff via Reddit r/powerprogression, but even there, you may have to dig to find gems that speak to you.
I joke that I'm a male author and reader, even though I'm female. The first book of my epic series (which is fully published) is Majority: Torth Book 1.
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.
There was also the "death of the mid-list" which cut out a lot of SF books. The Thor Power Tool decision in the US had a big effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commiss...
"The Thor decision caused publishers and booksellers to be much quicker to destroy stocks of poorly-selling books in order to realize a taxable loss. These books would previously have been kept in stock but written down to reflect the fact that not all of them were expected to sell."
Today, I understand mass market paperbacks are dying.
Where did all the starships go,
Long time passing...
Space Age, mid-50s to mid-70s.
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.
Some new sci-fi books among the stars:
We are Bob Red rising Murderbot
You're writing this from a dystopian future where punctuation is banned? :)
For those like me who still require parsing assistance :
- We are Bob
- Red Rising
- Murderbot
I've never really agreed with putting SF together with Fantasy, because they are slightly different genres. Some science fiction writers have used genuine science to underpin their writings, one of the more recent examples of that would be "the Martian". Fantasy doesn't need that kind of technical detail.
It parallels other developments. There is an increasing scepticism around science, and a significant number of people do not believe in the Moon landing. The heroic age of space travel has been replaced by school teachers and guys busking in tin cans in near Earth orbit. It's become mundane and the most exciting things in space exploration are being done by probes not humans nowadays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV
Set in "the near future" (the year 2018 in the first season), seaQuest DSV originally mixed high drama with realistic scientific fiction.
Texas.
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.
> It's not all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and out into the real world.
Real world seems to be getting bleaker, especially for the young ones coming up today.
We wont go to space in the forseabe future. The brink archievment we might pull off is longterm civilizational stability, in ressource scarce, chaotic environments. Basically a oldfolkshome where we grow wise and vulcan enough to goto the stars. If we fallback into regressive behaviour call it facism, islamism, polpotism, whateverism and nuke ourselves - or decay into rotting landempires ala 1984, then we will never goto space today- and slowly downgrade back into very smart animals, with suprsingly sturdy DNA.
The Trap St.Fermi predicted is a two pronged one, made of technological progress and the inability to recognize ones true nature while not under ressource duress - until you walked over the cliff of no return. All those utopias, all those we shall overcome by education promises, hid the permadamage we have from ourselves. ICE, ISIS, decomplexification by redistribution fantasies, war-chieftains and permanently sending the young and hopeless into fights, that is what we really are.
Not some excemption, but the braindamaged norm under enough stress to trigger the "shizzoid" mode. Its sad, its real - and well how about we for once say thank you. Thank you Peter for dealing with reality, while the rest of us got high.
Thank you for the panopticon, forcing us to stay civil. All of us.
Thank you for doing a material stress test on humanity, while the climate change was not yet in full force upon us.
Thank you for moving down all the capability lanes in parallel, instead of doing the retarded one king, one plan, one tribe, mono-lane approach towards doom.
Thank you to the grown ups, shame on the retarded toddlers, the retarded nationalists and utopian idealists, shitting the diapers! Bravo!
Now for the final push- why not say it! We are going to have cooperate families - aka cloning by cooperations for loyal employees. All the other roads have proven dysfunctional under stress and the dysfunction is very plain to see. And the final building block, the ones willing too switch sides for this freedom are also in plain sights. Its going to be a weird mixture of cooperate lgbtq+ and conservatives- in an forced alliance with the retarded withering away in traditional hive societies unable to adapt.
"cloning by cooperations for loyal employee"
corporations?
Good Sci-fi is hard to write, as it is too easy to fall for silly plot devices, gimmicks, and tired clichés.
Space cowboys were replaced with thinly veiled dogma, meaningless cycles of ritualized tribal violence, and cheap nostalgic production grifts. Those that write about speculative Futures, are almost always talking about the present worlds flaws.
Anyone can publish now, and people simply stopped asking if they should. =3
No one thinks the future is in space anymore. We realised that there’s a lot wrong with us culturally and spiritually
People didn’t travel as much back in those days. Visiting a foreign country or too might as well be like a trip to the moon.
But now, we basically live in the climax of the jet age, we can be anywhere in the world within 24 hours. And there’s so much of the world to see and stories to discover, not really worth the bother to imagine space travel to far off distant empty worlds, which will inevitably be used to further extend capitalism and just live the same lives we live here on Earth, just on a different world. The lack of any other interesting extraterrestrial civilizations to interact with makes it all pretty pointless. Going very far into space is mostly for exploration as a sport, like cave diving or something.
Starships are exciting to see in real life, but absolutely boring in fiction now and overall generally leave me with a distinctly disgusting aftertaste.
Whereas once Starships were a sign of an exciting story, or perhaps hope and optimism ... now they're just the sole purview of wanker tr/billionaires.
The popularity of a genre is deeply tied to the historical context of what's going on in the real world. In the 1950s and 1960s you obviously had the Space Race, which itself was a product of the Cold War. Some commments view this as optimism. I disagree. I view it as an expression of patriotism.
I view this patriotism as a crutch in uncertain times. Another example of this is the rise of the superhero genre in the 21st century. Marven was skirting with bankruptcy in the 1990s. A perpetual Spiderman license was sold for a fraction of what it would today. And I think it's no coincidence that the superhero genre ascended post-9/11.
I used to read a lot of fantasy but many years ago I pretty much switched almost entirely to sci-fi. For me the reason was because sci-fi asked questions. I mean there's also space opera and it scratches the same itch as fantasy (IMNHO) but my personal interest in sci-fi is more in the "what if" category.
That's a very broad category that goes all the way from, say, the Iain M. Banks Culture series, which really poses the question of what an ultra-high tech post-scarcity civilization looks like to something like The Handmaid's Tale (yes, that's sci-fi). We've also had some superb sci-fi on the screen in recent years like Severance, Silo and The Expanse.
For me, fantasy is a far more limited genre. Like I'm trying to read Brandon Sanderson recently and while he's a good writer, it's just not hooking me yet in the same way that, say, Revelation Space did. I think the last fantasy series to really hook me was A Song of Ice and Fire. The first three books are some of the finest books ever written.
But as for the decline of starships, I think that the readership has evolved too. More vintage sci-fi simply projected the era of exploration and colonization onto space and it's become pretty clear how unrealistic that is because of the vast distances involved. You have to remember that popular media in the 1960s expected Moon bases and such in the not-too-distant future. Star Trek was really the last gasp of this and, interestingly, Star Trek is fundamentally socialist, which is noteworthy given that it originated in the Cold War.
Star Wars on the other hand was a tale of the resistance to imperialism. George Lucas has said he modeled the resistance on the North Vietnamese. Cyberpunk came about in the 1980s (eg Neuromancer, Blade Runner) that had nothing to do with starships but they really reflected a societal pessimism. Cyberpunk is inherently xenophobic (ie because of fears of the Japanese).
I wonder if the popularity of fantasy is fundamentally escapist and an expression of helplessness. Think about it: fantasy usually revolves around the outsized impact of individual actions, of a hero or heroine.
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. As a result, 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. Everything is slop and skinner boxes. It impoverishes rather than enriches, and it seems to be getting worse. 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. In 1958, Heinlein wrote a wonderful short story about scout troops in the verdant jungles of Venus back when that was a reasonable expectation[1], 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 classic science fiction trope that progress will better us as people, that leisure will lead to fitness, that access to information will make us wise scholars, that we will use the convenience of machines to free ourselves for the pursuit of virtue... it makes for an inspiring story. I had my suspicions about how true all of that was back before the internet. I am now very sure that Wall-E and Idiocracy are nearer to the mark.
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. Ambulatory human-like AI seems unlikely when data centers the size of small cities struggle with emdashes. The hope and promise of a generation of robot children and citizens seems as misguided as the forests of Venus.
I could go on. We GOT a lot of the wonders science fiction predicted, or things so much more powerful that our most audacious futurists didn't dare to imagine them. And yet it doesn't feel like the promised land. Science fiction promised instant video conferences across the globe, but when we got it, it didn't look like all the world's best researchers collaborating on its hardest problems. It looked like all of the miscreants with their dick pics and the dreary business meetings and school lessons suddenly having access to your home. I don't mean to imply it's all bad, but the difference between imagination and reality has been stark on many fronts.
I really think the truth is that in a thousand ways, the tropes of the genre no longer speak to the moment.
[1] https://writingatlas.com/story/3984/robert-a-heinlein-a-tend...