What's the Future of Science Fiction

[Sandi]

Yesterday, I got an ultrasonic bone growth stimulator to heal a nonunion fracture that I'm dealing with. Once again, I got to thinking that we are living in the future that was promised to us by the science fiction writers of the Fifties through the Eighties. I am connected to the world via the internet. I have a phone that goes everywhere I go and looks suspiciously like Captain Kirk's communicator. I now have a device that will heal a broken bone.

So, now that so much of what has been predicted by science fiction of the past has come to pass, what does the future hold?

Ian McDonald has written many novels with genetic engineering as the basis for the science. Is genetics the next frontier? Or, will we stick with FTL space travel? What other interesting possiblities are there?

A related question would be: Is the growth of the fantasy genre a result of an increasingly technological society in which science reality is now what science fiction used to be?

[Cairnraiser]

Someone has to say it, so it might as well be me... "I'm still waiting for my flying car!" 8-)

I agree that a lot of the things we have today would seem like sci-fi if we could bring a person forward in time from the 70's. But I still think sci-fi as a genre has a long way to go.
It might be that some of the things that seemed likely to happen - like commercial spaceflight probably seemed to be just around the corner for the people who watched the moon landing in '69. This has shown itself to be prohibitively expensive, or to have other problems that would delay it. Or other technologies and trends has come to light which has supplanted space flight as the primary plot point for sci-fi.

The early days of internet nurtured the growth of cyberpunk as a subgenre of sci-fi, see Gibson's Neuromancer. While biotech spawned books such as Bear's Blood Music, don't know if there's a name for that.

I guess what I'm trying to say that is that sci-fi as a purely space based genre may be declining somewhat, as a speculative genre based on the possibilities opened to us by new and developing technologies I still see a long future for sci-fi.

[Robert]

I have to agree with Cairnraiser. Sci-fi has a lot it can do, and we need to trust in the authors to make us believe it. Space travel is still not outside it's purvey, for while we have achieved it, we are severely limited in it. We are nowhere near the level of technology of novels like Dune and The Stars Like Dust. Hell, we don't even have a bi-pedal robot in every home yet. So the old themse are still viable, they just have to be looked at in new ways.

As for new themes, Cyberpunk is a good example. A novel like Snow Crash would never have been written in the 50's, too many of the concepts and basic technology is new to the 90's and later. And as new technology is developed, there will always be themes that expand on that technology. Imagine a novel centered around the outcome of cellphones 100 years from now. Or based off of MP3 players 200 years from now.

As long as there is Science, the will be Science Fiction. Whether it's technology, bio-engineering, space travel, or good ol' fashioned robots, we will still love reading about it.

[Reads with Scotch]

Space travel/flight would be a lot further along if it was open to free enterprise. Something NASA finally figured out. If you only have a small group working on problems progress comes really slow. One of our main problems in progressive techs is we tend to over engineer first gen techs. Look at the rail system. Some of those rail bridges will be here after the apocalypse. This generally benefits a tech. But when dealing with a high tech field like space flight over engineering is really bad, there is simply too much stuff to go wrong. Michio Kaku had a really interesting article a year or so ago, Damn I can’t find it. Anyway he comes up with some really neat ideas of how to speed us along.

[Ruth]

Well, I for one think that space travel is finally starting to get somewhere what with Rutan, et. al. and the various X Prizes. I actually got a brochure in the mail a week or so ago from a local travel agent for a 10 minute flight to 100,000 ft. Apparently they are already booking trips. Now if they can just keep from killing their first few passengers...

It doesn't hurt that China has huge plans with manned spaceflight either...

[Cairnraiser]

I can't help but feel that people have chosen to interpret my comment in a way that it was never meant to.
I never meant to say that commercial spaceflight would never happen, just that it didn't happen in the time that people at the time expected it to. Couple that with a number of new emerging technologies which in and of themselves had the potential to change the way we view the world and ourselves, and writers of speculative fiction had rich new fields to reap from.

[Shannon]

I always have to laugh when I watch sci-fi movies made in the 90s but set in 2011, say, and have technology way in advance of what's feasible. Hover cars, things like that. I think in the 90s people had even higher expectations for the speed of things to come/be invented, than was realistic.

But I see us living in a sci-fi world now, the scary kind. Whenever you read or hear about people being forced to have medicals before being hired for a job, or having identity chips placed in their babies, or the tightened security at airports even - all of the things that make those sci-fi worlds like in Gattaca seem almost familiar.

Because things tend to happen gradually, it's hard to separate them from what's ordinary, normal etc., and see them as incredibly inorganic, invasive, downright bizarre. What I mean is, there's so much happening in the world today that no longer even fazes us, things that make you think that the world of 1984 wasn't so far off the mark after all, that we're no longer good judges of how far into the crap we've gone. There's a song where a line is "The future is now" - not an original line, granted, but apt nonetheless (I think it's on Yoshimi Battles the Robots).

I think this is one of the reasons why I prefer fantasy over sci-fi :)

[Sandi]

Shannon, I think you completely got my question. This is exactly what I was trying to say.

I've always loved science fiction and have never been a big fan of fantasy. I couldn't even make it through "The Lord of the Rings". But, when I go to the book store, it seems that 3/4 of the books are big, epic fantasy series. There is still some very good, imaginative science fiction being written. But, I think it's more difficult for writers to write and for readers to read now that we do live in the "future".

[M.D.]

Donna,

I completely agree with you. Although science is now evolving faster than speculative fiction authors can imagine it, there is still plenty of room for "what ifs." One of my "new" favourites is Robert Charles Wilson's Spin, from a couple of years ago. Robert Sawyer, Elizabeth Moon, Richard Morgan, to name only another three contemporary authors, all write interesting, science-based stories.

The big difference I see in speculative fiction when I look at the SF of the 50's is that science used to drive the story. Now it's used to support character-driven stories and although integral to the plot does not necessarily drive it. Since I prefer character-driven stories, I find the "new" SF much more rewarding to read.

[Sandi]

M.D., I agree with everything you just said.

("Spin" really kept me turning pages.)

[M.D.]

Donna,

I love to find people who love the same authors as I do. It tells me they are intelligent, astute, and discerning. :-)

[M.D.]

I agree. The SF books that have endured were more about people than science. Today, the genre is more and more mixed, especially on the Fantasy side. I'm more attracted to Charles de Lint than David Eddings, although I don't read a lot of Fantasy.

[Sandi]

M.D., I'm in agreement with you the Fantasy side. I definitely prefer Charles de Lint and China Mielville to the traditional epic quests with magic and swords kind of fantasy. I'm trying to read "A Game of Thrones" for the June discussion and am just getting bogged down. There are too many characters and the plot just isn't taking off. (I'm only on page 86 though.) If I don't get involved with either the characters or the plot within a few chapters, I have a really hard time staying with a book these days.

[Justin]

I've always disagreed that anything set in the future or in space or with modern or futuristic weapons should be considered science fiction. I tend to consider only stories written within the realm of accepted science (with a little room for speculative science) to be science fiction. All else should be considered fantasy. I use both the Star Wars and Star Trek stories as examples of fantasy that are frequently mislabeled as science fiction. Both stories involve force fields, teleportation, and FTL technologies that are still highly speculative, in fact most of our science suggests they can't be done as portrayed in the stories.

For science fiction to be good it needs both science and good characters. Without good characters it's not interesting (not a story) and without the science it's not science fiction. My favorite modern novels have both. So far I haven't discovered anyone besides Alastair Reynolds who's really good at both, but I don't doubt there are others. I like Niven a lot too, but he's only mediocre with his characters, even though he's a master at the science. He used to have scientists look over his stories before publishing them.

I think there will be a lot of new space-based science fiction and fantasy in the near future simply because we're once again 'really close' to commercial spaceflight.

[M.D.]

Justin,

I tend to agree, along with probably 90% of writers in this field, that science fiction is a misnomer. That's why more and more the term speculative fiction is used. This encompasses not only the traditional definitions of science fiction and fantasy, but also all the mixes-and-matches in between. Robert Charles Wilson, for instance, uses very real science in his book Spin (it won a Hugo) but in a contemporary fantasy setting; China Miéville writes about fantastic worlds that mix genetic engineering with robotics. Richard Morgan blends space travel, teleportation, and advanced surgical procedures.

The world of SF is more and more blurred and it cannot be called simply science fiction.

[Justin]

Yes, I'm strict, but only about the language. I don't have anything against fantasy, in fact I really like some of it. I also like both Star Wars and Star Trek, just think they're mislabeled. On a slightly related note I've long been a champion of no longer calling Pluto a planet. It just makes more sense.

I always added in the condition of the science at the time a piece was written. There are some great stories that were hard sci-fi at their publication but have since been discredited. One that comes to mind is He Who Shrank, which was all about the idea that the smallest things we could see (at the time atoms and some of their components) were actually enormous clusters of galaxies for 'the next world down'. Thus the main character shrinks through a series of cosmoses as the story progresses. Fun read still, but it would certainly be fantasy if written today.

Was that Asimov who first said the 'magic and technology' quote? I love it, I think I even put it on my High School yearbook page, but forget who first said it.

[M.D.]

My grandmother, now dead, was born in 1898. She not only saw men walk on the moon, but the discovery of DNA. As a child, if she'd read about those, she would have taken them for science fiction.

The next "real" science fiction, à la Justin, might be looking inward instead of out. I've recently finished Lisa Randall's Warped Passages and although it discusses real science (quantum mechanics) it sure sounds like science fiction. Strings, anyone?

[Terri]

Re. Star Trek, I always loved Harlan Ellison's comment that the show really was just a western set in space

[Jeff]

Ellison's comment on Star Trek smacks of a liiittle bit of envy to me. Hugh Nibley, ancient studies scholar, made an observation about the stories humans tell and have been telling: There are only a handful of plots/types of stories, we just dress them up with different accessories and settings. In light of that observation, I agree with Harlan, but then we must include all other stories!

[[deleted user]]

So much one could say.

Matthew Dickerson attempted a firm division between SF and fantasy in From Homer to Harry Potter, a nonfiction work on fantasy. I'd like to set it up as a bonus book of the month for discussion sometime, maybe during a SF month. [Please let me know if this sounds good to anyone.] His point was that the difference lies in the author's philosophical approach to phenomena. Is it purely naturalistic? Then the work is SF. Otherwise, the author has written fantasy.

I'm sympathetic to Justin's strict definition of SF, but the only genre division that really makes sense to me is "fiction."

I'm very hopeful about SF when I see "serious" literary authors like Kazuo Ishiguro writing SF novels. Admittedly, the stigma of genre fiction remains--Ishiguro and Atwood don't have rocket ship stickers at my library.