I feel it is, largely. I don't feel inspired by it anymore, I find it difficult to write in it and believe in it these days. I don't think it's "over" over, but I think it's over.

It just doesn't feel like it's going anywhere anynmore nor does it feel like it fills the same purpose for our culture anymore. Perhaps those two things are the same.

I think Bill is right, the future arrived, sci-fi lost a lot when it did. I'm sure we'll continue to construct those worlds, but they seem like they may only be genre from now on, just hobby-kits, otaku fetishism.

Many of you still read a lot of sci-fi, does it still do the same thing for you? Is it still fresh, is it still good?

Is it still cool?

it doesn't feel cool anymore to me.

Iain M Banks is still doing interesting things in the genre, and is Charles Stross, in a completely different way.

I feel that it is still 'cool', still relevant, but that the 'science fiction that can be named as such is not the science fiction that is or will be cool and relevant'.

I got in trouble about this time last year with Jack Womack by stating that I, as a reader/writer, couldn't get behind the kind of stuff he was doing.

Although the trouble I got into was because he subjectively misread what I said as if I was dissing him, I wasn't. However, I've only read snatches of Womack, so my comment was ignorant.

What I was really rejecting was the near-future sci-fi conceptual realm. It was totally ignorant of me to say what i did, but my igfnorance was pure: I was just plain sick of the dystopian, absurd, darkly humorous, recursively recognizable near future and what was being done with it. Gib jumped that boat at exactly the right time for me.

As for the other side of the Singularity, which has become almost self-parodic, I have held held more interest.

But lately, the near future interests me again, in ways I can't yet articulate, but know I will be addressing in my novel Augustus Googol.

quote:

Originally posted by Bravus:
Iain M Banks is still doing interesting things in the genre, and is Charles Stross, in a completely different way.

Tell me about Iain, I have been thinking about reading him, what is it he does that you like?

I read some of the synopses on Amazon, but what is it that makes him interesting and other such?

In the same way Bill's novels are about people, and are set in the near future, Iain's are about people but they're set in a galaxy far far away. But he actually *gets* what 'alien' means, in terms of mores and motivations and such (i.e. not just a bumpy forehead), and shows you wonders and horrors. It's a wild ride, and explores technology and economics (and the death thereof) and history and galactic empires and...

Meh, just start with 'Look to Windward' and see how you go from there.

Look to Winward, OK, I will give it a go.

I hope "sci-fi" is dead. I hope that "science fiction" is not.

Should we next argue about the death of the short form? How about the end of cynicism? It's been six months since the industry has had that argument, I'm sure it's about time for the cycle to come up again. Unless you feel like arguing about the death of the printed page, because gosh, we haven't pulled that one off the shelf in *weeks*.

Or maybe we could just say that you don't feel inspired by sf, scifi, sci-fi, skiffy, spec-fic or science fiction anymore, and assume that your tastes have changed or you haven't broadened your reading habits enough to find the good stuff or something innocuous like that. You know, rather than decrying the end of an industry that maybe you don't know enough about to make the call. I'm just asking.

Hey, man, you're just upset cause it's what you write. I didn't say the industry was dead, I'm saying I think sci-fi is dead as a tool that gets at the future.

At least for now.

Maybe you'll revolutionize it, but right now, to me, it's dead space. It's monsters in hulking star ships no one even cares to go in to. It's derivations on Cory Doctorow and Bill, and world builders which hasn't ever really interested me.

I suspect there is a reason that fantasy is kicking its ass.

But hey, you're getting published, that's a great thing. This is just one man's opinion.

quote:

Originally posted by lithos:
I hope "sci-fi" is dead. I hope that "science fiction" is not.

I feel that way too but think they both might be kind of dead in terms of literature. FILMS, NOT SO MUCH.Oops, capslock.

I'm upset because it's an old argument, and we literally see it ever year or so.

I don't know that I write science fiction, actually. I'm not very good at arguing specific definitions of sub-genres and stuff. I guess I just try to write what I enjoy reading, and hope it works out for someone else.

I remember reading something, back in the 90s, before the human genome project had decoded anything, back when they said using all the current computing technology available it would be 2020 or something before they could decode the human genome, an interview (probably Wired before they started sucking) with a geneticist who said that if you wanted to be a gene scientist you had to read constantly, journals, studies, data, emails, just to stay CURRENT, and that this was constant, no time for doing your own research, no time for having a family life, no time for teaching classes. Just reading, constantly, to stay CURRENT.

If sci-fi is based on ideas of speculation about where we are going to be, and if a Phd type in a single field, almost 20 years ago, was unable to keep up, then how can a would-be writer now possibly keep up with enough stuff to actually engage in speculation that won't be totally ridiculous by the time it matters?

That Little Brother book was terrible for instance. And that wasn't even some crazy predictive shit.

So in that sense, the sense of atomic rockets to Mars and laser sword duels at the dawn of the two suns and such....pretty dead.

But then maybe we should unpack or decompose your question a bit, eh, Uber?

When was it alive? In the late 70s and early 80s when His Gibzness was writing the Sprawl for us his devoted slavering hordes?

And what was "alive" then? Inspirational? Original? "Edgy"? Functionally predictive?

What was the "purpose" in our culture you are ascribing to it?

Certainly we are living in the future right now.

But I think perhaps more details are needed from you as to what it used to be before we can speculate (fictitiously?) about what it is now and if it's still breathing.

Sci-fi = porn

Used to be weird underground and naughty.

Now it's just streaming sameness to satisfy an urge.

Maybe the only way out is back into literary SF. The New Wave. New Worlds. Ballard. Aldiss.
Tiptree. It was if as Kafka had been writing for Gernsback. Traditional SF readers (and some writers) deserted the field... Good riddance.
At one point in the early 70s SF looked so weird and twisted that some people got scared and tried to go back to the pre New Wave models. No dice(Altough some people made some money in the process- Niven,Foster,et al.).
Others kept on going into uncharted territory. 70s:The Labor Day Group- Bryant,Effinger,Malzberg, etc..
80s:The Cyberpunks.
90s:The New Weird.
Time to pull the stakes again and light out for the territories.

quote:

I'm saying I think sci-fi is dead as a tool that gets at the future.

Oh, if that's what you're saying, then it might be true but it's irrelevant. The SF that was interesting was *never* about 'getting at the future'. It was always about human behaviour, emotions, possibilities and ideas, using the future as a setting to 'make the familiar strange'. If you're looking for the future, Scientific American or something is more likely to be relevant.

That kinda fits with RUR's post above.

Things like some of the stuff Mary Gentle did in SF, before she went to her amazing alternative histories (Ash, 1610, Ilario). Stross is doing stuff that's closer to traditional 'space opera' in some ways, but enlivened by a real sense for technology and culture and so on.

But if the goal was the future, I'm not sure SF was ever alive.

quote:

Originally posted by Bravus:

Oh, if that's what you're saying, then it might be true but it's irrelevant. The SF that was interesting was *never* about 'getting at the future'. It was always about human behaviour, emotions, possibilities and ideas, using the future as a setting to 'make the familiar strange'. If you're looking for the future, Scientific American or something is more likely to be relevant.

I agree. Much of SF are metaphors, a way chosen by authors for transmitting ideas by distancing the reader from his/hers current preconceptions. Much of SF produced in the post-war (WW2) was really about things related to the cold war ("republic" vs "empire", "humans" vs "klingons", Mars invaders, monkeys ruling, etc). Even Metropolis dealt about the decadence of democratic society in Germany and the arousal of the Nazism.

But SF is not limited to social discussions. In Soliaris, Stanislaw Lem discusses the limits of knowledge and science... Many Soviet writers discussed spirituality and religion using SF as vehicle (religious discussions not being welcome under Uncle Lenin and the (Really) Old Red Boys country.

Yeah, I agree - I knew I was shorthanding it each time I referred to books being 'about people', and kind of winced, but yeah, the best SF is about the infinite variety of all that we can imagine.

I also find that the distinction between science fiction and fantasy is not really applicable to much of the more interesting stuff I want to read - China Mieville very much comes to mind.

Sure, science fiction about rockets and fantasy about elves might be dead, but that's like judging all the music being made today by the Top 40.

quote:

Originally posted by Shadoth:
I'm upset because it's an old argument, and we literally see it ever year or so.

I don't know that I write science fiction, actually. I'm not very good at arguing specific definitions of sub-genres and stuff. I guess I just try to write what I enjoy reading, and hope it works out for someone else.

You'll be marketed as sci-fi though, right?

quote:

Originally posted by Bravus:

quote:

I'm saying I think sci-fi is dead as a tool that gets at the future.

Oh, if that's what you're saying, then it might be true but it's irrelevant. The SF that was interesting was *never* about 'getting at the future'. It was always about human behaviour, emotions, possibilities and ideas, using the future as a setting to 'make the familiar strange'. If you're looking for the future, Scientific American or something is more likely to be relevant.

That kinda fits with RUR's post above.

Well, yes and no. What I mean is, sci-fi was a way of coming to terms with the future, not predicting it. Neuromancer helped a generation of techies get in tune with what their computers could do, it told people in that field about a society that maybe could arise from what was going on right then. It wasn't a prediction, but a reflection of the right then. But, now, to couch the "now" in terms of the future seems antiquated some how.

Getting at the future, to me, doesn't mean tomorrow, but the specter of tomorrow today. I am not sure sci-fi does that anymore, or can.

All books are about people.