I see overread books like Dune and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Back in the 1980s there were so many "sci-fi fans" who had read Hitchhiker 20 times but never read Asimov or Heinlein or Dick or Smith or LeGunn or Pohl or...
I am a big fan of Frank Herbert's other books, particularly The Santaroga Barrier, Under Pressure, Destination Void, Eyes of Heisenberg, Whipping Star and the Dosadi books. I can't stand Dune but for some reason people read it over and over again and don't get into the rest of Herbert never mind any other authors.
I'd also blame Tor press for the downfall of sci-fi. Some of their books were groundbreaking like Ender's Game and Forge of God but because they represented a counter-reformation to the "new wave" which made Smith look cool again (great!) but really diminished the range of stories people would tell instead of expanding it. There was also the expansion of fantasy megaseries like Xanth (way too squicky for visual adaptation) and Discworld (too bad visual adaptations stopped when Pratchett passed away, but at least I can go to a Hogfather showing on the epiphany and cosplay as Twoflower)
I kinda feel about Vinge the way I feel about Niven, he didn't quite continue the promise he showed in his early career in his late career. Same with Charlie Stross, who became as bad a left wing nut (sees a fascist under every rock) as Niven was a right wing nut and gave up on the promising Eschaton series for just plain tiring series like The Merchant Princes (Xanth envy without the notes at the end about how much the author hates writing them?)
I liked the self-published We are Legion (We are Bob) which I found at the Salvation Army. Also
Sci-fi as a literary genre is so great because it's like Broadway; if you're being snobbish about it you're missing the point entirely. It comes from the tradition of mass market serials that have always been considered low-brow. Half the authors you mention began their careers writing throwaway pulp for ten cent magazines. It's a folk art form through and through.
That folk art part of things also gets a little extra literal when you consider the long history of typically folk-style filk songs based on scifi and fantasy works.
So we should expect our next diamonds to come from areas like r/hfy, royalroad, archive of our own. Lot of young writers there but there's always some gems.
And the daily / weekly release cycles most use is really reminiscent of old-school serialized publications.
Niven's been one of my favorite authors. Amazing mind. The Bobiverse Books by Dennis Taylor are great, as is everything he's written. The Outland series is shaping up, and Roadkill was a joy.
I still think Neutron Star is one of the best sci-fi books of all time as it is a short story collection that reads like a novel. I liked Ringworld when I was a kid but fell out of love with it slowly over decades, particularly in that the world of the story was much much much smaller than the Ringworld would have been physically. If Pritchett could get almost 50 novels out of the Discworld, Niven should have been able to get 50,000,000 at least out of the Ringworld but Niven really struggled with the sequel novels.
He was never a character driven author, just plot driven, which I preferred more. Things happen to people rather than people happen to people; I get enough relationship drama in real life. If you really want a deep dive, go reread the 4 Ringworld books, then read the 5 book Fate of Worlds saga, which takes us back to the Ringworld. Amazing books he cowrote this century.
If the problem is that not many people read SF, how can popular SF books be part of the problem? Are you supposing that if not for popular books like Dune, people would read a wider variety of other SF works? I don't think that's how it works.
I think popular SF books are important for bringing the genre to a wider audience. Someone who is not familiar with the genre might pick up Dune because of the films, and sure, maybe that's all they'll read, but maybe they'll enjoy it and pick up some more.
As a kid I read a Tom Swift book than read all of them, and then started reading Asimov and many other authors. I don’t know what it is but people who read Dune and Hitchhiker just don’t move on to other books and authors.
And it’s just those two series. I can look down on Xanth but people I’ve met who’ve read that have read other fantasy books like the Deryni books or the Narnia books.
I think it is that people feel socially pressured to read Dune and Hitchhiker and come to conclusions like “reading science fiction is like watching protons decay” or “reading science fiction is being compelled to laugh at jokes that aren’t really funny”.
Mainly “Doc”, but I’d pick any of those Smiths over Adams any day. (God it so cringey though when Virgil Sams says something about “our white race” in First Lensman; it’s enough that he’d have to be cast as Black if there was ever a visual adaptation though it seems today that there will never be)
I've mostly switched from reading science fiction to horror. I think horror fiction is actually having a bit of a boom, mainly because authors still take risks in horror.
I wasn't surprised to see that sales of classics/reprints in science fiction haven't gone down but it's all new publishing that has.
Science Fiction is plagued with all the same problems facing comic books and tabletop gaming: the entire publishing industry only cares about representation and winning industry accolades for said representation and it isn't resonating with fans so sales are cratering. The industries are focused on people who aren't already customers and they aren't attracting them as customers either.
Disney keeps doing this absolutely baffling thing where they purchase male-dominated (by fandom) IPs and run them into the ground (Star Wars, Marvel, and I assume Epic Games' catalog soon-enough). They've acknowledged in previous years annual statements that their marketing primarily targets girls and that they have problems marketing to boys and men. These big IP buys were an attempt to diversify and all they've done is double down on their exisiting customer.
This is completely wrong re: tabletop which is in its first golden age right now almost exclusively because it is now much more accessible.
I have a friend who studied this academically, and the act of roleplaying is especially popular among people questioning themselves and their place in society.
As for the lack of risks, check out itch.io for new table top RPGs, there's never been more variety! Its a really exciting time for it, with tons of new voices doing interesting things, with games ranging from super crunchy tactics to super free form one-page narrative games, and everything in between. Happy to offer any reccomendations
tabletop publishing is a viper's den of liars, bullies and trolls who live by the mantra of "cancel or be cancelled". I'm not going to bring up individuals and wade into that controversy but "The Worst People You Have Never Met" is a great summary of what's out there.
And despite everything going on in the industry right now, D&D is still an enormous, inescapable gravity well. I would say even more so than 20 years ago. We have more games and better games than ever, but I had an easier time finding groups to play not-D&D then versus now. Across multiple cities.
I have over a thousand role playing books in my collection, was very involved in The Forge when it mattered, have been a vendor at the biggest RPG conventions and know lots of authors and artists in the industry. probably half of the popular systems out there right now I have played with some of their creative teams --- not exactly a clueless normie here.
Not gonna disagree with you re: D&D. Its funny, I see people playing "hacks" or "homebrews" of d&d that strip it to the bone, no feats no weapon damage, just roll a d20 and higher is better. And those players won't consider running a different system actually designed for that style.
I think the problem is not so much that the stories feature characters who are not white men, but more so that they've completely saturated the market for those IPs.
At this point, in the Star Wars and Marvel universes, it all feels pretty formulaic. The stories have already been told, but now they have to keep producing something in order to make this quarter's earnings numbers. None of it feels essential to watch.
> I think the problem is not so much that the stories feature characters who are not white men
It's easy to read what I'm saying that way but that's not really it. It's more about who the authors are and who the awards committees bend over backwards to exclude.
There's been tons of Hugo Award controversies related to authors, excluded authors and content the last....15 years or so. (Although, to be fair, controversy and Hugos go back as long as the awards have been around).
In scifi literature the formulaic over-told stories aren't even being published anymore. It's more like stuff that's barely even science fiction...
Again, the sales numbers show that the classics in the genre are still selling. It's the new content that isn't moving.
Yeah the fundamental problem is that a committee of suits have taken over the creative reins of big franchises trying to please the population at large. This is never going to work long term as it feels completely fake.
Usually creatives will do something that resonates with them personally and sometimes this touches people universally. This isn't something you can create artificially IMO.
Oh, they brought the IPs already saturated. They are losing ground on almost all of it.
What isn't a given like you tried to say. A saturated segment just means it won't grow. They could have kept all of it forever if they handled it well.
> Science Fiction is plagued with all the same problems facing comic books and tabletop gaming: the entire publishing industry only cares about representation and winning industry accolades for said representation and it isn't resonating with fans so sales are cratering. The industries are focused on people who aren't already customers and they aren't attracting them as customers either.
How does this square with, for example, the Dragon Awards? These kicked off after the initial 'sad puppy' Hugo drama, and many of the early winners were from that group, but in the last couple years once they've become more widely known outside that demographic they're looking a little more like the other big popular-vote award.
I'm not sure our statements really connect with each other.
I think the industry's navel-gazing is a huge part of the problem. I don't give a shit about awards or what work wins them and I don't think other people should either. The same way I don't care about the Grammies and their impact on what music I listen to.
Awards are always going to be dominated by things that have nothing to do with the work being voted on.
I think it's more about the decline of popularity in reading books, than popularity of genres. People who are interested in technology, use technology. I don't have to read Silo, when I can watch it. I watch Severance, not read the unwritten book.
I was wondering about that too. To answer that question we'd need normalized numbers, e.g. sci-fi as a percentage of total sales. It does seem likely that people who read sci-fi 20 or 50 years ago are now gaming, tinkering or cosplaying.
I feel like for really "out there" sci-fi, books are a lot more free to go crazy than shows or video games.
Ships fighting by lobbing planets at each other? Or anything in the Culture universe? Good luck putting it on screen. Or just the short novel Diamond Dogs.
I blame JJs and Kurtzman's Star Trek for this. They dropped Roddenberry's amazing idea of a future that was hard earned, but worthy to aspire towards - not just as society but also as individuals. On top of that they replaced the competency-porn role-models with Hollywood's desire to have loveable goofs and misfits everywhere, as if everyone in their audience was an idiot loser and could otherwise not identify with the characters. It definitely killed my interest in this kind of future.
That future wasn't hard earned, it was handwaved into being (on the back of a world war against genetically engineered mutants and colonization by alien benefactors at that.) The real world is fundamentally cruel. Therein lies the challenge.
Loveable goofs and misfits struggling against the odds to live up to their ideals are relatable, and that future can actually be aspired to. A future which requires humans to be paragons of virtue that have evolved beyond greed, vice and want, in a universe of infinite free energy and abundance, is unattainable. Neither human nature nor the laws of physics can bend that far.
Also the new Star Trek series are incredibly popular, even among many fans of old Trek, many of whom seem to be able to reconcile it with the franchise's espoused values. I guess it doesn't work for you, but you seem to be in a minority among the fanbase in that regard.
I don't know where you get your claims from, but if you look at user ratings on imdb [1] then SNW is the only new show to even come close to the old ones. Interestingly enough, it also comes closest to the original values and themes. So I guess it is actually you who seems to be in a minority.
You got it wrong. The list is only compiled by a user in the sense that he selected the shows included. The order displayed is generated automatically by imdb ratings, which the user had zero influence on. And for Rotten Tomatoes you would get pretty much exactly the same order if you actually looked at audience ratings. Except DS9, which ranks higher on RT. So I could see some argument that RT audiences are slightly younger. But I'm pretty confident no actual Trekkie would ever say that Prodigy is better than DS9 like your random "critic" listing would imply.
I get how this is hard to understand for today's young people, who did not grow up with the old shows. We had a whole generation growing up with a future worth working towards and aspiring to. I feel really sorry you didn't get something similar.
You're delusional. Anything is "incredibly popular" nowadays, like all the Marvel movies and nostalgia reboots. I don't know how any old Trek fan can stomach the new Treks. But I guess you can since you're defending them and know the lore. ;p
But that's weird because they're a completely different genre. They're closer to Star Wars (the one dumb people liked, cuz that's where the $$$ is) than Star Trek.
Which nu trek? I mean Discovery is to me nearly unwatchable and I activly dislike almost all of the characters. Strange New Worlds on the other hand feels like classic trek with a better budget it is well cast and well written. Picard... I liked parts of it, it got better the farther along it went. Season one was actively bad, bad with good moments though. Season two was better Q stole every moment he was on screen. Season three legitimately was great star trek. Lower decks... if it weren't considered cannon it would be better, as is it a fun adult cartoon comedy. Prodigy is a kids show that I put on for my small children but could not be bothered to actually fallow. The Nu trek movies are brainless popcorn flicks written by people that wish they were writing starwars/fast&the furious crossover fanfiction instead.
Give strange new worlds a shot you won't regret it.
Agreed. TOS, Voyager, and DS9 were great (at their best; obviously some awful episodes/seasons mixed in there). The films after Khan were missable. Never got on with the whiny characters in TNG. Discovery is endless noise. Picard looked promising, but ultimately disappointed as (and here we disagree) I wish Q had never been created; can't stand him.
Nothing comparable to the older stuff until SNW - and Anson Mount in particular is very good. Oh, and The Orville is better ST than much recent ST ever was.
> But that's weird because they're a completely different genre. They're closer to Star Wars (the one dumb people liked, cuz that's where the $$$ is) than Star Trek.
The Kelvin timeline films have this problem, especially the first two; the third, while definitely not the classic trek series feel, felt more like a Trek movie.
The newer series (excl. prodigy, which I simply haven’t watched) have variable quality (SNW, IMO, is the strongest Trek series since DS9 and the most classic Trek feel since TNG, Discovery was up and down but overall no worse than Enterprise, Picard was good, but more like 3 long Trek movies than classic series Trek), but I wouldn't describe any of them feeling more like Star Wars.
Personally I think it's a weak take. The current tech landscape is mostly depressing because of addictive social media corroding the cultural sphere.
Generalizing that into 'tech is depressing' is understandable since it is literally designed to occupy our attention, but I don't think it's an accurate view of the world.
Its certainly how I feel. Nothing 'Big Tech' has done in the last decade has been inspiring. Its all, subscriptions for car warmers, and new ways to show ads, and 'the metaverse' which science fiction fans have known to be ghoulish since at least the 70s.
I guess? Uber and grubhub are tech insofar as paying their not-technically-workers less is only legal when its done through an app. Can't deny its convenient though.
WebRTC is nice and I like it. Work from home is lovely.
I think the internet is having a rough time with things, and that in general corporations have become more greedy and more bold, which overshadows the smaller improvements.
Tech is unbelievably fantastic: GPS, wireless, lithium batteries, high end displays, etc. have given us extremely useful tools for everyday life. Tech itself is not depressing at all.
What is depressing is the current effect it has on society and a large percentage of sci-fi describes new ways humans make each other miserable. I can believe (but have no numbers) that that kind of sci-fi has become less popular.
Not sure, maybe I didn't distill out the author's position correctly but it seems intuitive to me.
Are books about war popular in war times or do they become popular afterwards? I think there may be something unique about speculative fiction vs. depressing stuff about the present time, which I find myself drawn to.
Or maybe they just moved to video games where they can live the dystopian future rather than read about it. For a few decades I was a voracious sci-fi and fantasy reader. Now with my limited time I would rather read the net and get my sci-fi/fantasy hit through an open world video game.
It’s not just a sci-fi, it’s all books. And movies. and TV. and theater. And…
The media landscape is a lot more competitive. Vastly so. Of course, with the internet, video games, social media, older forms of entertainment will lose market share.
> I find that more often than not, when I pick up a sci-fi novel, it turns out to just be a detective novel innn spaaaaace
Detective novels in space can still be good, and much better than the current crop of Hollywood garbage. I'm still quite bitter about what Amazon did to The Expanse. First legit sci-fi we get in years, and they devolved it into "muscle bound hero shoots aliens with laser gun" within one season of acquiring it from SyFy.
Just every character of the main crew in general. The SyFy seasons were very Firefly-esque; regular people doing their best to get by and fulfill their own personal goals. Then all of the sudden it's just "OK, we're all space marines on an epic mission to save the galaxy now".
Have you actually read the books? That TV series was one of the most true to its adapted source material.
Amazon didn't pivot from a detective story to an action story. Abraham and Franck (aka James S.A. Corey), the authors, did. After the arc from the first trilogy of books wrapped up.
>Amazon didn't pivot from a detective story to an action story. Abraham and Franck (aka James S.A. Corey), the authors, did. After the arc from the first trilogy of books wrapped up.
Well then I don't know what to think now. This seems to be a problem for artists in general. You spend your entire life coming up with an incredible work, and once its released to the world and everyone agrees that it's incredible, now there's all this pressure to followup. The second story arc comes off as just completely sophmorish in every possible sense of the word.
They actually planned for the three major overtones and the nine minor theme variations from the start. You may disagree with the results, but it wasn't modified due to outside pressure.
I made the mistake of starting Delta-V on a worknight and literally wouldn't allow myself to put the book down until I finished it somewhere close to 7am...
Heh. We have had tons of these in Spain in the 70's/80's. Cheap pulp detective novels rehashed as scifi ones, and Far West tales converted into cheap police/action 'a dime' novels. More than often the same author covered several genres with very little.
That one is mostly the result of how useful detectives are for alien/non-regular day settings in general. A lot of scifi stories are in part about well, the science part of the science fiction. You need a character to explore that world/explain the tech and detectives kinda exist orthogonal to the scifi societies - a detective can walk into a slum or into a rich people mansion in the same story and it would fit the job regardless. Having tech explained at them works because you can write them as knowing about the tech, but explaining it makes sense for the sake of solving a case.
That's why detectives are so often protagonists in general, but especially in scifi. The other common approach is the fish out of water, where you introduce someone not used to the scifi society at all and use them as an excuse to explain why the scifi is the way it is. That one tends to have much heavier reader self-insert tendencies though, so writers tend to shy away from it.
Most "SciFi" on the shelves is just setting. Which frankly, is the way it should be. To a certain kind of person reading about how the whatever warp drive works is really interesting, but story-telling is about people.
One thing that stuck with me for many years is Joss Whedon saying that the Serenity flies at the speed of the plot. It's more important to understand how people interact in situations than it is to know how fast the ship can go. It can either get there with plenty of time, just in time, or we can't make it - and how that affects the people.
I think the issue is that the sci-fi "setting" has to be materially different than the modern world, otherwise you get the "____ in space" effect. This isn't an issue with historical settings, like the wild West or medieval Europe, since the differences are baked-in.
Only sort-of. One of my favorite series has a situation where a terrorist is trying to destroy a wormhole - the only practical route for one particular planet to the rest of the galaxy. While the analogy is imperfect, it's basically permanently filling the only narrow channel that a ship can get through to the outside world. It's burning the bridge to the outside world. The Wormhole part of it is immaterial.
Consider that a lot of the best Star Trek stories are merely allegory for our own struggles. Some of them are pretty thinly veiled (The half-black-half-white people hate the half-white-half-black people) but even a kid can pierce that veil and understand and say "Oh... racism is stupid"
I think the "____ in space" effect is probably more related to poor writing then a specific component of the genre.
Honestly, I think all the dystopian sci-fi is hitting too close to home for people lately. It's intriguing and thrilling when it's some far-off distant future that seems like a thought experiment. It's depressing when it reads like the natural conclusion of the events that are unfolding in the current day
Kind of like news and social media rage baiting the world into self destruction?
I mean humankind has created immensely powerful technology, and we use it to show ads to each other. Why shouldn't we be depressed in general about this?
Well, I'd say that's the problem with sci-fi. We don't know how to use the tech we already have, so there's no point in dreaming with more. It's a bit like a billionaire dreaming about winning the lottery.
If this means it's also the end of the YA "future-dystopia-only-the-teen-chosen-one-can-end" genre, maybe there is a silver lining. There is only so much dystopian stories to tell before they all run together. The market is saturated.
I think the negative portrayal of science in the popular press has something to do with it. Plus the declining science literacy in general. It makes non-dystopian sci-fi difficult to relate to and seem too fantastic.
Agreed. The bookshelves have been full of terrible sci-fi for over a decade now. I have given up on the book sellers and the awards (Hugo, Nebula etc). I do read sci-fi almost every day though still. Almost all of it from Kindle Unlimited.
This article could probably be summarized as "People don't read anymore".
The article’s premise is based on a linked Washington Post survey that shows 12% of readers read scifi in the last year, fantasy 15%, and romance 11%. This is not compelling evidence that scifi is unpopular. Perhaps people are just more diversified in their reading habits now across the board. It would be nice to see some more in-depth data showing trends across time before we leap to the conclusions this article does.
This is too restrictive. The article claims 3 facts are the proof that the genre is ill: (1) 12% of US readers read sci-fi in the last year, (2) current sci-fi best sellers are old books or not really sci-fi, and (3) in the 80s, SF novels were sometimes best sellers.
I agree with you that the first fact is a dubious proof. Unfortunately, the others aren't better.
The 2013 list of sf best-sellers (the oldest list in the wayback machine from the same source as the article) also contained old books. For instance "Dune" is a best-seller both in 2013 and 2023. And some books were heroic fantasy, not SF, e.g. "Sword Art Online".
For the last claim, I could only find 4 SF novels that match the article's claim, out of the 100 of the decade. 3 were related to movies, and 1 to a TV star (Carl Sagan). In the 2010s, there were one novel related to a movie and another SF book. Hardly conclusive.
A striking tendency in the recent years is that many of the best-sellers are children books. Young adult novels are also more present. I suspect that, since fewer people read novels, books are very often a gift, something one does not read but buys for others. And for children and teenagers, there's obviously the innuendo that reading books is good for their education.
I think it was in Skyfall where Q says to 007 "We don't do that kind of thing any more" ... because it wasn't really possible for the writers to come up with exciting tech gadgets. It was just entirely believable that there was already an app for anything they could think of. We have jetpacks, flying cars are going to show up literally in a year or two, Internet comes from space, "AI robot vacuum" is an entirely mundane product, we've got government investigations of robot cars running people over... what kind of thing could a sci-fi writer imagine that you couldn't see a startup selling in a couple of years?
That or most of the things we thought were sci-fi are sci-fantasy. "Actually no, we can't rip open wormholes in space".
This said, the converse may be true. "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must make sense". There is such a massively huge amount of fiction now that it's like being tossed into the middle of the Pacific without a raft. We're not looking for an escape from reality INTO technology. It's more likely we are looking for an escape from reality FROM technology.
No, 100 years ago there was all of this brand new fundamental science and technology and it was easy to imagine things that could be... today we're in the late stages of filling in all the gaps, we've explored all of the spaces and the most exciting things we could imagine are the things we already have working somewhat better than they already do. The scifi that gets made is either fantasy (this will never exist because it's impossible) or retro-futurism (old scifi imagining, essentially, the present).
General nanomanufacturing and the genius who founds a new nation in the pacific because of it, complete with geopolitical intrigue and a war because of an upset in the balance of power.
Gotta hire some physicists, and pay them great salaries to get them away from the kind of contributions to society they like doing... If you paid me $400k++++ a year to do it, I could go wild coming up with seemingly plausible, as well as just on the edge of disbelief required from STEM educated people, sci Fi technologies.
The problem really is those who have the background to do it are (1) struggling to survive in the current market with their degrees without selling out to finance, (2) desiring to contribute to the compendium of human knowledge... So yeah, to get some solid sci-fi ideas you would have to share an alluring slice of the pie... The people who could do it, aren't going to do it for salaries comparable to those in their fields, or even 20-30% above their salaries. It's gotta be multiples with some level of security in the long term.
You may want to check books in the Culture universe by Ian M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds' House or Sun or the Commonwealth universe from Peter F. Hamilton (which also as a fantasy like arc). Not sure we're getting humans meshing into spacetime soon.
If you think that’s “hard left”, it suggests you might want to reconsider your media diet. Two of those are statements of fact and the last two are definitely left but not exactly that far out of the mainstream even in the United States.
Maybe look at something like the Locus list of 2023 books. SF is such a broad genre that you are better off finding reviewers or other sources who you can use to guess at what you might like.
I like so-called "hard sci-fi", where effort is made into thinking through the details and the sci-fi bit is not just a backdrop for a regular story, or a way to validate neuroses du jour. Both of these are definitely in my top-10 sci-fi books of all time.
Dennis Taylor's "Bobiverse" series. Also Daniel Suarez's books - "Delta V" for the start. Devon Eriksen "Theft of fire" - this one is a bit raw and can offend some people.
These books take into account recent developments and events so they don't sound anachronistic like some of sci-fi classics. Maybe they'll lose that appeal in few decades and will be harder to read for our grandchildren, but I do enjoy all the cultural references from my time.
It's hard to explain without spoiling. You might feel uncomfortable in some parts. There's quite a bit of sexual arousal and violence, sometimes happening at the same time. Not hardcore erotic, but definitely R-rated. On the other hand it's a mix of Martian-style problem-solving with some space pirating, interesting take on AI, some resemblance to Expanse... Interesting read.
Children of Time (Adrian Tchaikovsky), The Expanse (James S. A. Corey), Broken Earth (N. K. Jemisin), Locked Tomb (Tamsyn Muir), A Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine), Murderbot (Martha Wells), The Light Brigade (Kameron Hurley), The Wayfarers series (Becky Chambers), and The Calculating Stars (Mary Robinette Kowal) are some of my favorites. Brandon Sanderson’s Skyward series is also worth a read.
Mickey 7: People try to colonize an alien planet and the main character's job is to do all the very dangerous tasks. When he dies, his body is cloned and his memories are copied.
It looks like there is a movie in the works called "Mickey 17".
I would not recommend 3 body problem. It may be because the French translation is bad but it felt really subpar.
I get the feeling 3 body problem is considered one of the best sci-fi books only by people who don't read sci-fi.
Not really recent but I'd recommend Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds (but I'm partial to Reynolds after the Revelation Space series and House of Suns) or if you like military sci-fi Marko Kloos' Frontline series.
Only recent in relation to the classics, but I really enjoyed the following (the years are approximate). There are others, but I've listed these ones specifically because those others have already been recommended elsewhere in the thread whereas these may get missed.
- Adam Roberts: New Model Army (2010?)
- Hiroshi Sakurazaka: All You Need is Kill (2005?)
- Mike Resnick: The Dark Lady (2015?)
- KC Alexander: Necrotech (2015?)
- Gary Gibson: Stealing Light, Nova War, and Empire of Light (2013?)
You used to see sci-fi paperbacks in the hands of people of all walks of life. Lit majors used to look down on it because it was not high falutin enough.
Sci-fi used to speak to things most people cared about. Then it went fringe. I and several people I know went from consuming all things sci-fi to alarm at how fringe it was getting, to just ignoring it.
In the UK bookshops, helpfully put sci-fi books in the "Sci-Fi AND Fantasy" section. Because, of course, people that want to read about aliens and FTL want to wade through hundreds of vampire-werewolf-human-love-triangle books first.
I think most people continue to have a primitive association between prosperity and "the Mandate of Heaven." If something is good, it leads to economic growth, and this reflects that the gods are happy about that thing. Of course, I'm exaggerating slightly, but it is almost certain that some people do engage in a certain amount of guilt-by-association during bad times, versus a happier praise-by-association during good times.
See this FRED chart, which shows real median family income in the USA:
Family income hits a peak in 1999 and then is stagnant or declining for the next 15 years, hitting a low point in 2014. It does not recover till 2018.
And this is certainly one of the biggest shocks about the Internet: that it did not lead to prosperity. I'm old enough to remember the optimism and confidence of the late 1990s, we were all certain that the Internet was about to usher in the biggest economic boom in human history.
Exactly the opposite happened: we experienced 19 years of stagnation of family income, the longest stretch in the history of the USA.
So, we've all learned some things, and some of the things we learned have been humbling. Deindustrialization was a bigger deal than we realized, and the cyber economy was a smaller deal than we realized, and competition from China was a bigger deal than we realized.
Between 1870 and 1970 the dramatic advance of science and technology contributed to rapidly rising standards of living. And it was fascinating to speculate about where such trends would go in the future. And that fascination expressed itself in part through science-fiction.
But what kind of science-fiction would appeal today? We've already been saturated by dystopian science-fiction, how much darker should it get? Would people necessarily be interested in a bleak science-fiction that suggests everything is going to get worse and worse forever?
I suspect real-life trends have to resume an upward march of progress before the public is again intrigued by this kind of speculative fiction.
From what I've heard, sci-fi is popular in China nowadays.
I read a remark somewhere, maybe on HN, that a nation's output of sci-fi seems to correlate with whether or not they are in a boom. Does this ring true to you guys?
I'm not deeply into sci-fi (I wish I read more) but I think it could be true. America had their famous boom after WWII of course, and the Chinese have had every reason to be optimistic for the past decades.
I also wonder if there's a correlation with output of historical fiction. Reaching back into the past.
> Just finished Theft of Fire by @Devon_Eriksen_, and it was a great read — hard SF by a retired engineer. If his About page resonates at all, you will probably enjoy it: https://devoneriksen.com/about
This article seems to stem from a desire to dunk on "evil Silicon Valley robber barons" more than anything else.
As others have pointed out here, the premise is based on a linked Washington Post survey that doesn't even really suggest that sci-fi is unpopular (at least no less popular than other "genre" fiction). Also, cyberpunk and other "near-future capitalism-dystopia" stories are only a subset of science fiction.
Honestly, I think we're still working through the psychic trauma of Donald Trump's 2016 victory over Clinton. The literary class was SO caught off guard and stunned by that unexpected outcome, that it lost its mind and has yet to recover.
I don't remember "Silicon Valley" being used as a scare phrase, or regarded all that negatively, prior to 2016. But immediately afterward, stunned people desperate for explanation latched onto whatever theories they could find. We ended up with Clinton losing "because Russia posted on Facebook too much", and overnight Silicon Valley became a bugbear. Then Elon messed with the rage echo chamber on Twitter, and immediately went from "pot-smoking goofball troll" to robber baron and devil incarnate.
In other words, the sort of people who write articles about books are feeling really down on social media companies and tech entrepreneurs these days. And transfer those feelings onto sci-fi, because they're not really into sci-fi themselves anyway, and therefore see all that as one and the same.
I've been working on a hard sci-fi novel for the last seven years or so. During that time, I developed a cross-platform plain text Markdown editor (https://keenwrite.com/) to help me write the novel. I could use some alpha readers.
If interested, see my profile for details and contact.
I think social media and so on has caused a bit of a shift of focus to 'inner space'.
Older sci-fi especially seems to often just be 20th century society with teleporters, or the united nations, at galactic level, and so on.
But we are now living in a sci-fi era, where it's clear the real issues are around culture itself, and only a small percentage of sci-fi deals with that, and often not well.
Sci-fi purports to reflect our current society and illuminate aspects of possible societies, but I'd say in some ways it has been overtaken by reality.
Sure we can't FTL to Vega minor, or whatever. But if we could, should we? Who should get to go anyway? What would they do there? What are the implications for the rest of society? What about if they have children? Etc, etc.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadI am a big fan of Frank Herbert's other books, particularly The Santaroga Barrier, Under Pressure, Destination Void, Eyes of Heisenberg, Whipping Star and the Dosadi books. I can't stand Dune but for some reason people read it over and over again and don't get into the rest of Herbert never mind any other authors.
I'd also blame Tor press for the downfall of sci-fi. Some of their books were groundbreaking like Ender's Game and Forge of God but because they represented a counter-reformation to the "new wave" which made Smith look cool again (great!) but really diminished the range of stories people would tell instead of expanding it. There was also the expansion of fantasy megaseries like Xanth (way too squicky for visual adaptation) and Discworld (too bad visual adaptations stopped when Pratchett passed away, but at least I can go to a Hogfather showing on the epiphany and cosplay as Twoflower)
I kinda feel about Vinge the way I feel about Niven, he didn't quite continue the promise he showed in his early career in his late career. Same with Charlie Stross, who became as bad a left wing nut (sees a fascist under every rock) as Niven was a right wing nut and gave up on the promising Eschaton series for just plain tiring series like The Merchant Princes (Xanth envy without the notes at the end about how much the author hates writing them?)
I liked the self-published We are Legion (We are Bob) which I found at the Salvation Army. Also
https://www.amazon.com/Terraformers-Annalee-Newitz/dp/125022...
for a very recent book.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/198
And the daily / weekly release cycles most use is really reminiscent of old-school serialized publications.
I think popular SF books are important for bringing the genre to a wider audience. Someone who is not familiar with the genre might pick up Dune because of the films, and sure, maybe that's all they'll read, but maybe they'll enjoy it and pick up some more.
And it’s just those two series. I can look down on Xanth but people I’ve met who’ve read that have read other fantasy books like the Deryni books or the Narnia books.
I think it is that people feel socially pressured to read Dune and Hitchhiker and come to conclusions like “reading science fiction is like watching protons decay” or “reading science fiction is being compelled to laugh at jokes that aren’t really funny”.
Tor didn't start until 1980, by which time the new wave was long dead. (Also which "Smith" do you mean? E.E.'Doc'? L.Neil? Cordwainer? Clark Ashton?)
I wasn't surprised to see that sales of classics/reprints in science fiction haven't gone down but it's all new publishing that has.
Science Fiction is plagued with all the same problems facing comic books and tabletop gaming: the entire publishing industry only cares about representation and winning industry accolades for said representation and it isn't resonating with fans so sales are cratering. The industries are focused on people who aren't already customers and they aren't attracting them as customers either.
Disney keeps doing this absolutely baffling thing where they purchase male-dominated (by fandom) IPs and run them into the ground (Star Wars, Marvel, and I assume Epic Games' catalog soon-enough). They've acknowledged in previous years annual statements that their marketing primarily targets girls and that they have problems marketing to boys and men. These big IP buys were an attempt to diversify and all they've done is double down on their exisiting customer.
I have a friend who studied this academically, and the act of roleplaying is especially popular among people questioning themselves and their place in society.
As for the lack of risks, check out itch.io for new table top RPGs, there's never been more variety! Its a really exciting time for it, with tons of new voices doing interesting things, with games ranging from super crunchy tactics to super free form one-page narrative games, and everything in between. Happy to offer any reccomendations
And despite everything going on in the industry right now, D&D is still an enormous, inescapable gravity well. I would say even more so than 20 years ago. We have more games and better games than ever, but I had an easier time finding groups to play not-D&D then versus now. Across multiple cities.
I have over a thousand role playing books in my collection, was very involved in The Forge when it mattered, have been a vendor at the biggest RPG conventions and know lots of authors and artists in the industry. probably half of the popular systems out there right now I have played with some of their creative teams --- not exactly a clueless normie here.
That always puts a smile on my face.
At this point, in the Star Wars and Marvel universes, it all feels pretty formulaic. The stories have already been told, but now they have to keep producing something in order to make this quarter's earnings numbers. None of it feels essential to watch.
It's easy to read what I'm saying that way but that's not really it. It's more about who the authors are and who the awards committees bend over backwards to exclude.
There's been tons of Hugo Award controversies related to authors, excluded authors and content the last....15 years or so. (Although, to be fair, controversy and Hugos go back as long as the awards have been around).
In scifi literature the formulaic over-told stories aren't even being published anymore. It's more like stuff that's barely even science fiction...
Again, the sales numbers show that the classics in the genre are still selling. It's the new content that isn't moving.
Usually creatives will do something that resonates with them personally and sometimes this touches people universally. This isn't something you can create artificially IMO.
What isn't a given like you tried to say. A saturated segment just means it won't grow. They could have kept all of it forever if they handled it well.
How does this square with, for example, the Dragon Awards? These kicked off after the initial 'sad puppy' Hugo drama, and many of the early winners were from that group, but in the last couple years once they've become more widely known outside that demographic they're looking a little more like the other big popular-vote award.
Awards are always going to be dominated by things that have nothing to do with the work being voted on.
Ships fighting by lobbing planets at each other? Or anything in the Culture universe? Good luck putting it on screen. Or just the short novel Diamond Dogs.
Loveable goofs and misfits struggling against the odds to live up to their ideals are relatable, and that future can actually be aspired to. A future which requires humans to be paragons of virtue that have evolved beyond greed, vice and want, in a universe of infinite free energy and abundance, is unattainable. Neither human nature nor the laws of physics can bend that far.
Also the new Star Trek series are incredibly popular, even among many fans of old Trek, many of whom seem to be able to reconcile it with the franchise's espoused values. I guess it doesn't work for you, but you seem to be in a minority among the fanbase in that regard.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls090972183/?sort=user_rating,desc...
But if that's the game you want to play, here are rankings by Rotten Tomatoes[0] that say otherwise.
[0]https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/star-trek-tv-by-t...
I get how this is hard to understand for today's young people, who did not grow up with the old shows. We had a whole generation growing up with a future worth working towards and aspiring to. I feel really sorry you didn't get something similar.
But that's weird because they're a completely different genre. They're closer to Star Wars (the one dumb people liked, cuz that's where the $$$ is) than Star Trek.
Give strange new worlds a shot you won't regret it.
Nothing comparable to the older stuff until SNW - and Anson Mount in particular is very good. Oh, and The Orville is better ST than much recent ST ever was.
The Kelvin timeline films have this problem, especially the first two; the third, while definitely not the classic trek series feel, felt more like a Trek movie.
The newer series (excl. prodigy, which I simply haven’t watched) have variable quality (SNW, IMO, is the strongest Trek series since DS9 and the most classic Trek feel since TNG, Discovery was up and down but overall no worse than Enterprise, Picard was good, but more like 3 long Trek movies than classic series Trek), but I wouldn't describe any of them feeling more like Star Wars.
Generalizing that into 'tech is depressing' is understandable since it is literally designed to occupy our attention, but I don't think it's an accurate view of the world.
'Big Tech' as you call it, in the last decade, enabled us to work from home during the pandemic via zoom calls, and still shop and get food delivered.
Is that 'inspiring'? I guess that depends on what inspires you.
WebRTC is nice and I like it. Work from home is lovely.
I think the internet is having a rough time with things, and that in general corporations have become more greedy and more bold, which overshadows the smaller improvements.
Being able to summon a car to my location at the push of a button and to be able to track it as it arrives is amazing.
Being able to make money at any time by giving people rides in my car is great too.
The legal system of distinctions of different kinds of workers that allows Uber to exploit drivers - not so great.
What is depressing is the current effect it has on society and a large percentage of sci-fi describes new ways humans make each other miserable. I can believe (but have no numbers) that that kind of sci-fi has become less popular.
Are books about war popular in war times or do they become popular afterwards? I think there may be something unique about speculative fiction vs. depressing stuff about the present time, which I find myself drawn to.
The media landscape is a lot more competitive. Vastly so. Of course, with the internet, video games, social media, older forms of entertainment will lose market share.
Detective novels in space can still be good, and much better than the current crop of Hollywood garbage. I'm still quite bitter about what Amazon did to The Expanse. First legit sci-fi we get in years, and they devolved it into "muscle bound hero shoots aliens with laser gun" within one season of acquiring it from SyFy.
Amazon didn't pivot from a detective story to an action story. Abraham and Franck (aka James S.A. Corey), the authors, did. After the arc from the first trilogy of books wrapped up.
Well then I don't know what to think now. This seems to be a problem for artists in general. You spend your entire life coming up with an incredible work, and once its released to the world and everyone agrees that it's incredible, now there's all this pressure to followup. The second story arc comes off as just completely sophmorish in every possible sense of the word.
That's why detectives are so often protagonists in general, but especially in scifi. The other common approach is the fish out of water, where you introduce someone not used to the scifi society at all and use them as an excuse to explain why the scifi is the way it is. That one tends to have much heavier reader self-insert tendencies though, so writers tend to shy away from it.
One thing that stuck with me for many years is Joss Whedon saying that the Serenity flies at the speed of the plot. It's more important to understand how people interact in situations than it is to know how fast the ship can go. It can either get there with plenty of time, just in time, or we can't make it - and how that affects the people.
Consider that a lot of the best Star Trek stories are merely allegory for our own struggles. Some of them are pretty thinly veiled (The half-black-half-white people hate the half-white-half-black people) but even a kid can pierce that veil and understand and say "Oh... racism is stupid"
I think the "____ in space" effect is probably more related to poor writing then a specific component of the genre.
Kind of like news and social media rage baiting the world into self destruction?
I mean humankind has created immensely powerful technology, and we use it to show ads to each other. Why shouldn't we be depressed in general about this?
Exactly like this. I almost mentioned it. It's cheaper to sell fear than hope.
I think the negative portrayal of science in the popular press has something to do with it. Plus the declining science literacy in general. It makes non-dystopian sci-fi difficult to relate to and seem too fantastic.
This article could probably be summarized as "People don't read anymore".
I agree with you that the first fact is a dubious proof. Unfortunately, the others aren't better.
The 2013 list of sf best-sellers (the oldest list in the wayback machine from the same source as the article) also contained old books. For instance "Dune" is a best-seller both in 2013 and 2023. And some books were heroic fantasy, not SF, e.g. "Sword Art Online".
For the last claim, I could only find 4 SF novels that match the article's claim, out of the 100 of the decade. 3 were related to movies, and 1 to a TV star (Carl Sagan). In the 2010s, there were one novel related to a movie and another SF book. Hardly conclusive.
A striking tendency in the recent years is that many of the best-sellers are children books. Young adult novels are also more present. I suspect that, since fewer people read novels, books are very often a gift, something one does not read but buys for others. And for children and teenagers, there's obviously the innuendo that reading books is good for their education.
So anything that goes beyond a 6th grade reading level is going to have an exponentially smaller potential customer base.
Science fiction is hard to do now.
Lots of videos of military applications, etc.
This said, the converse may be true. "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must make sense". There is such a massively huge amount of fiction now that it's like being tossed into the middle of the Pacific without a raft. We're not looking for an escape from reality INTO technology. It's more likely we are looking for an escape from reality FROM technology.
Not dystopian, not utopian, just an adventure.
The problem really is those who have the background to do it are (1) struggling to survive in the current market with their degrees without selling out to finance, (2) desiring to contribute to the compendium of human knowledge... So yeah, to get some solid sci-fi ideas you would have to share an alluring slice of the pie... The people who could do it, aren't going to do it for salaries comparable to those in their fields, or even 20-30% above their salaries. It's gotta be multiples with some level of security in the long term.
You may want to check books in the Culture universe by Ian M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds' House or Sun or the Commonwealth universe from Peter F. Hamilton (which also as a fantasy like arc). Not sure we're getting humans meshing into spacetime soon.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
I like so-called "hard sci-fi", where effort is made into thinking through the details and the sci-fi bit is not just a backdrop for a regular story, or a way to validate neuroses du jour. Both of these are definitely in my top-10 sci-fi books of all time.
These books take into account recent developments and events so they don't sound anachronistic like some of sci-fi classics. Maybe they'll lose that appeal in few decades and will be harder to read for our grandchildren, but I do enjoy all the cultural references from my time.
It looks like there is a movie in the works called "Mickey 17".
Adrian Tchaikovsky's children of time series, as well as his terrible worlds novelas
Anne leckie's ancillary justice series
Martha Wells Murderbot diaries
Andy Weir's project hail mary
John scalzi's old man's war trilogy (technically more than a trilogy, but they fall off after the first 3)
I get the feeling 3 body problem is considered one of the best sci-fi books only by people who don't read sci-fi.
Not really recent but I'd recommend Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds (but I'm partial to Reynolds after the Revelation Space series and House of Suns) or if you like military sci-fi Marko Kloos' Frontline series.
- Adam Roberts: New Model Army (2010?)
- Hiroshi Sakurazaka: All You Need is Kill (2005?)
- Mike Resnick: The Dark Lady (2015?)
- KC Alexander: Necrotech (2015?)
- Gary Gibson: Stealing Light, Nova War, and Empire of Light (2013?)
- Linda Nagata: The Last Good Man (2015?)
Sci-fi used to speak to things most people cared about. Then it went fringe. I and several people I know went from consuming all things sci-fi to alarm at how fringe it was getting, to just ignoring it.
The number of well supported niches in fantasy is ever growing, some with business models that cut out traditional publishers altogether.
See this FRED chart, which shows real median family income in the USA:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/
Family income hits a peak in 1999 and then is stagnant or declining for the next 15 years, hitting a low point in 2014. It does not recover till 2018.
And this is certainly one of the biggest shocks about the Internet: that it did not lead to prosperity. I'm old enough to remember the optimism and confidence of the late 1990s, we were all certain that the Internet was about to usher in the biggest economic boom in human history.
Exactly the opposite happened: we experienced 19 years of stagnation of family income, the longest stretch in the history of the USA.
So, we've all learned some things, and some of the things we learned have been humbling. Deindustrialization was a bigger deal than we realized, and the cyber economy was a smaller deal than we realized, and competition from China was a bigger deal than we realized.
Between 1870 and 1970 the dramatic advance of science and technology contributed to rapidly rising standards of living. And it was fascinating to speculate about where such trends would go in the future. And that fascination expressed itself in part through science-fiction.
But what kind of science-fiction would appeal today? We've already been saturated by dystopian science-fiction, how much darker should it get? Would people necessarily be interested in a bleak science-fiction that suggests everything is going to get worse and worse forever?
I suspect real-life trends have to resume an upward march of progress before the public is again intrigued by this kind of speculative fiction.
I read a remark somewhere, maybe on HN, that a nation's output of sci-fi seems to correlate with whether or not they are in a boom. Does this ring true to you guys?
I'm not deeply into sci-fi (I wish I read more) but I think it could be true. America had their famous boom after WWII of course, and the Chinese have had every reason to be optimistic for the past decades.
I also wonder if there's a correlation with output of historical fiction. Reaching back into the past.
> Just finished Theft of Fire by @Devon_Eriksen_, and it was a great read — hard SF by a retired engineer. If his About page resonates at all, you will probably enjoy it: https://devoneriksen.com/about
If it's 30 year old people reading, sci fi lost its audience.
And probably so: mistb14 year olds would rather play a phone/mmo than read
As others have pointed out here, the premise is based on a linked Washington Post survey that doesn't even really suggest that sci-fi is unpopular (at least no less popular than other "genre" fiction). Also, cyberpunk and other "near-future capitalism-dystopia" stories are only a subset of science fiction.
Honestly, I think we're still working through the psychic trauma of Donald Trump's 2016 victory over Clinton. The literary class was SO caught off guard and stunned by that unexpected outcome, that it lost its mind and has yet to recover.
I don't remember "Silicon Valley" being used as a scare phrase, or regarded all that negatively, prior to 2016. But immediately afterward, stunned people desperate for explanation latched onto whatever theories they could find. We ended up with Clinton losing "because Russia posted on Facebook too much", and overnight Silicon Valley became a bugbear. Then Elon messed with the rage echo chamber on Twitter, and immediately went from "pot-smoking goofball troll" to robber baron and devil incarnate.
In other words, the sort of people who write articles about books are feeling really down on social media companies and tech entrepreneurs these days. And transfer those feelings onto sci-fi, because they're not really into sci-fi themselves anyway, and therefore see all that as one and the same.
If interested, see my profile for details and contact.
Older sci-fi especially seems to often just be 20th century society with teleporters, or the united nations, at galactic level, and so on.
But we are now living in a sci-fi era, where it's clear the real issues are around culture itself, and only a small percentage of sci-fi deals with that, and often not well.
Sci-fi purports to reflect our current society and illuminate aspects of possible societies, but I'd say in some ways it has been overtaken by reality.
Sure we can't FTL to Vega minor, or whatever. But if we could, should we? Who should get to go anyway? What would they do there? What are the implications for the rest of society? What about if they have children? Etc, etc.