The Death of Science Fiction

[Myrhaf]

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Lately I’ve been reading two books of science fiction short stories from the 1950’s, In the Beginning by Robert Silverberg and The Masque of Manana by Robert Sheckley. I’ve been struck by how unrealistic the science is. In every other story characters hop on a spaceship and zip off to Fomalhaut IV or Betelgeuse III (as if people would give a planet a number according to its order from the star instead of a name). Really, the science is sheer fantasy.

Three of the most common tropes from Golden Age science fiction are fantasy: faster than light travel, time travel (going back in time) and telepathy. If you took away those three ideas, you would wipe out most 20th century science fiction, and all three are impossible. What we think of as classic science fiction is for the most part as fantastic as elves, magic and unicorns, but because it uses scientific concepts it has a veneer of plausibility – until you think about the science.

Science fiction today is much more believable. Serious SF does not glibly zip characters off to Aldebaran V, unless the author is making some self-conscious, postmodern homage to the old stuff. The purest expression of the contemporary naturalism in science fiction is a movement called Mundane SF. If the science is far-fetched, then it’s out.

Much of today’s SF is believable and naturalistic. It is also bad. It is often mind-numbingly boring, anti-heroic and plotless. It has all the traits of mainstream modern literature that intellectuals love, or pretend to love, and readers hate.

In such magazines as Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s we are watching the slow suicide of SF by naturalism. The process started in the 1960’s with the New Wave and the wave continues to this day. The New Wave brought modern literature to science fiction, making it naturalistic and conscious of style. Since then it has been increasingly difficult to take the tropes of Golden Age SF seriously.

This suicide by naturalism is ironic as SF has taken over movies, TV and video games. Visual media love whooshing spaceships, ray guns, aliens and all those giddy concepts from the Golden Age. The science in Star Wars is comparable to 1930’s written SF.

Since the late 1970’s readers have been abandoning science fiction for what used to be its neglected little sister, fantasy. Readers don’t want plotless non-stories about a neurotic scientist suffering a mid-life crisis as he discovers some form of pollution that will destroy mankind. They don’t care if the science is realistic, they want an interesting story about heroes who are fascinating to contemplate. They want romanticism. Today they know they’re more likely to find it in a paperback with a sorcerer on the cover than one with a spaceship or a cover with some modern smears of color on it.

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[DavidV]

I'm sceptical that science fiction is "dying." I can't argue against the claim that most of today's scifi is naturalistic because I don't read bad scifi. On the other hand, I haven't found a shortage of good scifi to read. Furthermore, it's difficult for a subject dedicated to portraying a world different from our own to be entirely naturalistic. Not impossible, but not attractive to naturalists. If I had to complain about the state of scifi, it would be about the influence of environmentalism and socialism - hardly a new or exclusive phenomena.

Personally, I'm a fan of "hard" scifi. I enjoy learning about science and technology sufficiently that the plot can become secondary. This does not make a work a great work of literature, but perhaps that wasn't the authors goal. Which is not to say that it's not possible to do both. Atlas Shrugged can be seen as a work of science fiction, which excels in plot, characterization, and communicating ideas.

It's interesting that you mention television, because the worst examples of scifi naturalism I'm aware of are the tv shows "The Other Limits" and "Battlestar Galactica." Both are full of loathing for humanity.

[Moebius]

First of all, realism and an interesting story aren't mutually exclusive. You can argue that SF overall has gotten worse as a genre, but I don't see it as having anything to do with the fact that the science in SF is becoming more realistic.

Second of all, there are still plenty of good science fiction that are both interesting and realistic that aren't written in the early to mid 1900's. Case in point are writers like William Gibson and Neil Stephenson, whose stories regarding the emergence and impact of cyberspace are both realistic and interesting.

[D'kian]

I cut my teeth with the Big Three: Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. Since then, I've read, and enjoyed, Larry Niven, Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg and Clifford Simak. All these men either began to write in the Golden Age or were strongly influenced by it. Furthermore, they're all optimistic in their outlook, accepting the benevolent universe premise implicitly (even if their politics and ethics are all wrong).

I've only sampled modern writers sparingly. Mostly those who write Trek or B5 fiction. Some have a good, clear style. But overall I find the newer stuff does not quite measure up to the old.

As far as scientific realism goes, all that SF really needs are two things: 1) science and technology that are either plausible or can be made to seem plausible, and 2) the science, regardless of how fanciful it is, must be treated as science (ie if the nebula interferes with the bad guy's sensors, it must mess up the good guy's too).

You can write a story that is 100% scientifically accurate, and it can even be grandiose in its own way. but you won't have much in the way of interstellar politics, war, trade, etc; nor time travel, teleportation, telepathy, etc etc.

Either approach is fine, as long as the story or characters are interesting.

Oh, while AS might be called science fiction, I think Rand's only real SF work is Anthem (the play "Think Twice" also has fanciful SF elements, like the Vitamin X separator).

Edited to add this:

Romaticism portrays man as he could be and as he should be. Naturalism portrays him as he is, but even then, in my judgement, it seems to take pains to make man more ordinary and evil than he really is (Niven's Louis Wu is muddled that way).

I think SF offers unique opportunities to portray man as he should be. Certainly it provides many settings for grandeur, like the conquest of whole worlds (conquest as in settling and terraforming worlds), building structures like a Space Elevator, traveling to other galaxies, etc.

Moreover, naturalism would seem to have no palce there, since few of the achievements portrayed in SF even exist today. And maybe in the 2700s a two hundred year old explorer is an ordinary kind of man, but to the audience reading about him he's extraordinary. We may not think much of climbing on a jet and completing in a few hours a journey that took Lewis and Clark years, but when you stop to think of it you do realize what a modern-day miracle air travel really is (spend a few minutes pondering what things must have been like before TV, the PC, the internet, electric light, cars, planes and even trains existed; I can barely recall when cell phones were not as common as they are now!) One thing I liked about Futurama was Fry's semi-constant delight in the future (even if some things were absurd or pointless).

No, I don't expect to see Captain Picard constantly saying "Wow! 300+ light years in two days!" But if he does describe a voyage, he should do so in a way that the audience will react with amazement, or delight, or wonder.

Edited March 23, 2007 by D'kian

[Korthor]

Wow! I strongly disagree. I have no doubt you could point to terrible contemporary SF, but with research I could no doubt come up with terrible SF from the 1950s. The real question is whether or not there's good post-1979 SF out there. Here are some examples

1. Stephen R. Donaldson "Gap Series."

2. Octavia Butler, especially the "Xenogenesis" seires

3. Tad Willaims's "Otherland" series

4. C.S. Friedman's "Coldfire" trilogy

5. That whole "Cyberpunk" thing from the 1980s, especially William Gibson

6. Samuel Delany

And that's just with 3 minutes of thought...

Two additional (no doubt controversial) points.

1. I think the genre has improved now that it is no longer limited to white males... not because white males are evil (after all, some of my best friends are white males), but because more people from more backgrounds> more diversity of perspective> a more interesting genre.

2. I've written elsewhere about the need for Objectivists to put away their "Romanticism-o-meters," or at least not rely exclusively on them when judging literature. Certainly "realism" shouldn't be a dirty word. If you want to debate me on this point, see my posts here

http://forum.ObjectivismOnline.com/index.php?showtopic=8877

[Scott_Connery]

I ama huge fan of Niven and Pournelle, and I think they often counter your arguments. They have written some "hard sci-fi that is quite hero-driven.

David Weber is not as hard science based, but I still think he manages a decent level of realism combined with good stories.

I have read a few John Ringo books and they are more military oriented, but I think you might enjoy them. I have read a few Michael Z Williamson books, and I think he has potential. He also hangs out on a couple of the forums that I do.

[Prometheus98876]

I think the genre has improved now that it is no longer limited to white males... not because white males are evil (after all, some of my best friends are white males), but because more people from more backgrounds> more diversity of perspective> a more interesting genre.

That is a rather presumptious claim. It does not follows that the a more diverse background when it comes to the authors will result in a more "interesting" genre. An interesting genre is defined by the ability of the authors in the genre, which in no real is accurately reflected by the races of the authors.

Even if it neccesarily followed that "more backgrounds> more diversity of perspective", it does not mean that a greater diversity of persceptive results in more interesting content. Diversity does not neccesarily lead to something being more "interesting'.

[Strangelove]

I few points:

Lately I’ve been reading two books of science fiction short stories from the 1950’s, In the Beginning by Robert Silverberg and The Masque of Manana by Robert Sheckley. I’ve been struck by how unrealistic the science is. In every other story characters hop on a spaceship and zip off to Fomalhaut IV or Betelgeuse III (as if people would give a planet a number according to its order from the star instead of a name). Really, the science is sheer fantasy.

This is a very grand and incorrect generalization we are making here for an entire decade. The 50's also included Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series which is nothing like the novels you describe. I am not familier with those works but they sound like they are more or less inspired by Buck Rodgers type sci-fi.

Three of the most common tropes from Golden Age science fiction are fantasy: faster than light travel, time travel (going back in time) and telepathy. If you took away those three ideas, you would wipe out most 20th century science fiction

You forgot robots. And even then, there is some science fiction that does not utilize any of these things.

and all three are impossible

For now.

What we think of as classic science fiction is for the most part as fantastic as elves, magic and unicorns, but because it uses scientific concepts it has a veneer of plausibility – until you think about the science.

I think this is something very different from talking about unicorns. I think that a key idea is that unlike fantasy, science fiction almost always talks about the future, something that fantasy can not. This adds an element of to the story telling that is just not possible with a story about dragons. Usually, this comprises of the science fiction novel acting as a warning or a prediction about a development within society.

Science fiction today is much more believable. Serious SF does not glibly zip characters off to Aldebaran V, unless the author is making some self-conscious, postmodern homage to the old stuff. The purest expression of the contemporary naturalism in science fiction is a movement called Mundane SF. If the science is far-fetched, then it’s out.

Much of today’s SF is believable and naturalistic. It is also bad. It is often mind-numbingly boring, anti-heroic and plotless. It has all the traits of mainstream modern literature that intellectuals love, or pretend to love, and readers hate.

In such magazines as Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s we are watching the slow suicide of SF by naturalism. The process started in the 1960’s with the New Wave and the wave continues to this day. The New Wave brought modern literature to science fiction, making it naturalistic and conscious of style. Since then it has been increasingly difficult to take the tropes of Golden Age SF seriously.

Can you please give some examples about the titles you are refering to? The genre is so large that its possible for me to think up a few counter examples unless I have a more specefic idea of what you are talking about. For example, some very recently written and good Sci-fi could include Ender's Game or Hyperion, or the many Ian M. Banks novels.

Also, I believe the movement you are refering to is the self described "Hard Sci-fi" genre, is that what you are thinking of?

This suicide by naturalism is ironic as SF has taken over movies, TV and video games. Visual media love whooshing spaceships, ray guns, aliens and all those giddy concepts from the Golden Age. The science in Star Wars is comparable to 1930’s written SF.

You treat Star Wars far to simply if you imply that it only draws from the 1930's. In addition to being self described "Science Fantasy", George Lucas also set out to make his vision of the future less "clean" and more "gritty" and even more "real." The whole point was to make his vision plausible and realistic within common frames of reference that his viewers can understand. The focus of the science if not just the implausible woooshing spaceships, but also the fact that they have age on them, and look worn and used. In contrast, most 1930's Buck Rodgers type ships looked clean and impecable.

Since the late 1970’s readers have been abandoning science fiction for what used to be its neglected little sister, fantasy. Readers don’t want plotless non-stories about a neurotic scientist suffering a mid-life crisis as he discovers some form of pollution that will destroy mankind. They don’t care if the science is realistic, they want an interesting story about heroes who are fascinating to contemplate. They want romanticism. Today they know they’re more likely to find it in a paperback with a sorcerer on the cover than one with a spaceship or a cover with some modern smears of color on it.

1. Plots about mad scientists are very much a cold-war era type story. They just don't get told anymore.

2. Fantasy has been struggling as a genre because so much of it is a knock-off of Tolkien. The reason Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, and Neil Gaimen's "American Gods" stand out is because they are not the same old story about Lords of Darkness and Armies of Light and the smashing together of Elf and Orc armies. I see no evidence that Fantasy in the conventional sense is popular.

With regard to TV, I am only going to say that although Objectivists hate on Battlestar Galactica, that the show is one of the most intriguing, exciting, and that it brings a very welcomed dose of "realism" into the genre. It's existence has been a generally positive development for the genre as the whole because it shows TV executives that the audience want complex plots, interesting characters, and well written dialogue. The more seriously they think their views are, the more likely we are to get better programming.

I love the original Star Trek and its romantic view of humanity, but one of the failings of the series (more often in TNG then my personal favourite, DS9) was that none of the characters were interesting or worth being invested in because they were all boringly perfect. They did not even develop in any sort of direciton. Geordi stayed as Geordi, Riker stayed as Riker, and Troi only real change was that everntually she stopped making the obvious comments such as "I sense that those people shooting at us are angry."

In fact, I would go further and say that having a series with realistic characters with problems (such as Adama or Roslyn) makes the series better for those moments when they achieve victories beacause you know that they had to work to achieve it and you are impressed when they achieve it well.

Edited March 24, 2007 by Strangelove

[khaight]

In such magazines as Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s we are watching the slow suicide of SF by naturalism. The process started in the 1960’s with the New Wave and the wave continues to this day. The New Wave brought modern literature to science fiction, making it naturalistic and conscious of style. Since then it has been increasingly difficult to take the tropes of Golden Age SF seriously.

It seems to me that you are bemoaning the death of the SF sub-genre known as "space opera", which in the modern sense of the term refers to stories that may play fast and loose with scientific detail, but are writ on a grand-scale canvas. In their recent anthology The Space Opera Renaissance, David Hartwell and Katheryn Cramer describe the new space opera as "colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action and usually set in the relatively distant future and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes."

Suffice it to say that this kind of SF is definitely not dying, if you know where to look. If you can't stand Battlestar Galactica, try watching Stargate: Atlantis instead, or Heroes. Or, if you're looking for literary SF, pick up a copy of the anthology I mentioned above. It's 900+ pages of this sort of thing, covering a time span ranging from the 1920's through to cutting-edge authors like Charles Stross. After reading that, track down work by authors in it that you liked and read more. (I recommend Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds, as well as Vernor Vinge. Charles Stross is also a lot of fun.)