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Has modern Science Fiction lost its way?
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I'd argue that star trek as a whole was a comprehensive guidebook on how to violate the prime directive
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I more or less agree with this; this is why, I think, ToS and TNG were forced to focus on the interaction of the Enterprise with non-ideal alien societies. If we confined our focus to the intra-ship dynamics, it would just be a bunch of people being swell. The result was a sort of monster-of-the-week type show--and there's nothing wrong with that, but people also look for other things in fiction, and one of those other things they look for is characters being put through the sort of emotional trials which are familiar from our own lives. For instance, we are living in a time where we are by necessity familiar with the conflict between principles of civilian rule and those of military expediency; seeing them play out on a Battlestar naturally spoke to us. There were times TNG got into that sort of thing, but those also tended to be times they departed most sharply from the utopian view of the federation--as, for instance, in The Measure of a Man.
In any case, I think there is some significant breathing room for thoughtful work in between utopian romp and grimdark dystopia. In particular, I would recommend LeGuin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. They strike me as being genuinely speculative--seriously thinking about the ways society could be--while nonetheless not losing sight of human nature. It is probably not an accident that they have that rare combination, given LeGuin's significant exposure to anthropology. They are also neither utopian nor dystopian: their picture is one of a universe where utopia is not given by technology. Instead, it is a genuine, but tenuous, possible future that if we are lucky we might struggle to realize.
Of course, they were written in the 60s and 70s. But I don't think that so much shows that science fiction has gotten worse as it goes to show that they were truly exceptional books. After all, I can't think of anything before them that measured up either.
TNG - A sink-or-swim philosophy that is aimed to prevent more gangster\nazi worlds that were created by TOS era meddlers but is often ignored because a freaking meteor is going to wipe out a planet and damn it all Piccard won't let that happen without a kick ass speech.
Voyager and beyond - A perversion of dogma that is used to excuse the actions of genocidal captains.
In nearly all media with these utopias, all the action is occuring at the fringes of that utopian society: Star Fleet exploration in Star Trek (not to mention the whole of DS9), Special Circumstances being up to things in Culture novels, and so on.
SF doesn't have to be all gritty and edgy and dark, but it needs to be recognisably human. Take something like Lois Macmaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series. It's the far future and the books are often light, fun and generally 'up', but the world is still fraught, conflicted and full of problems. Barrayar is no one's idea of a utopia, but it's an interesting, fertile world out of which excellent SF can spring. Utopias seem sterile in comparison.
And it turned out William Gibson, not Gene Roddenberry, called the shape of the future the best.
This is also the reason Star Trek and alot of sci-fi TV/movies in general avoid transhumanism for the most part.
It's difficult for the audience to connect with people we don't quite recognize as human anymore.
But it's interesting to see what authors miss too. This interview with William Gibson is very interesting.
Maybe we are just bored of hearing the same old stuff, utopian or dystopian, with or without anthropomorphized alien species that want to kill us/examine us/be our bestest buds and tell us how special we are. Perhaps the closer our reality meets the standards of science fiction, the less of an impact the genre has on us, and we end up looking at it as quaint and antiquated.
Hmmm, it's possible to do, but very dangerous ground.
I'm not reading a hundred pages of quivering tentacle.
But in the end, if it isn't about Humanity, it won't be good. All great media is about how people work rather than the weird shit that happens.
Except for Kafka sometimes.
But fuck that guy.
Could work, but is unlikely to be marketable without something to relate to the audiance.
Also I'm sure there's like a hundred of these kind of stories written in French.
it'd be kind of like watching Alien
only, imagine that the xenomorphs are the protagonists
yeah, it's kind of amazing how banal a lot of the episodes are, in hindsight. Banal's not really the right word, but for a show about exploring the galaxy on giant space ships they sure came up with a lot of mundane circumstances for their morality plays.
what's that picard speech about how the real final frontier is the self? Now I gotta go find it on youtube
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
Dragon's Egg is written from the perspective of alien microbes developing on a neutron star, with brief asides to a human astronaut crew mapping it's surface. It's a fun read.
I think that was a Q speech.
also i'll just drop this off: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
relevant to the "imagine that the xenomorphs are the protagonists"
I'm sure we can come up with something in time, and I am kind of that guy attempting to make a story not about humans, but as you said, it's hard to do and needs to click with a human audience while being different. That's probably why it hasn't been done before, to my knowledge. Maybe we just need to get to a point where we are actually in space doing the Star Trek thing before we can find new soil to reap.
It could easily work. And has been done before several times. (The Pride of Chanur just off the top of my head)
The issues are it's either difficult to relate to or it's just humans with fur or some such.
And on top of that, even if you make it relatable, just the fact that the characters look alien will turn many people off, although that's exclusively a marketing/finding-an-audience thing.
A sufficiently alien culture wouldn't be identifiable as a culture. So, short of that, you're just talking about oddly shaped humans with an unusual culture, and I think that's fine.
If the Dragon's Egg protagonists behaved like paramecium, the reader couldn't experience their unique environment and scale. It would not be interesting. Likewise, it would still be interesting if they were tiny humans living on a star with an accelerated perception of time, it isn't overly important that they are or are not human beings. It the unusual perspective and the setting that make the notion of an 'alien' protagonist interesting.
I do agree that scifi in general has lost sight of the sort of things that make it great: human perseverance in the face of the unknown, speculative fiction which tries to build a vision of a real, possible future, and addressing the science part of scifi instead of just the fiction part. In its place, we've got tired stories and recycled characters transplanted into what amounts to tech-oriented fantasy.
But it's also important to note that the field of scifi has had more than its fair share of garbage for a long time now; it's hardly a new thing. There is a lot of scifi out there which is, frankly, astonishingly bad, to the point where I really don't know how a lot of it gets published. Not just in terms of story, but just everything about the writing is shoddy and poor. I read an article not too long back where the author talked about how it's almost impossible for anybody to get into scifi once they get older. Why? Because somebody who doesn't know what to look for has a far, far better chance of pulling a piece of trash off the shelf than anything remarkable. And I'm inclined to agree with the guy, even though the article was written ten years ago; there's so much garbage out there that it's hard for a scifi fan to find the good stuff, much less people who have no familiarity with the genre.
As someone half way through writing a SF novel, I'd like to admit that I perfectly solved all the issues of this thread and welcome my future as the next AsimovEeer, that is, from a growing author's perspective: Science fiction has significant barriers to entry that can be very intimidating. My book plays into a lot of transhumanism and biology....and I did not get a degree in Biology or Genetics. This adds a great deal of extra work to try and keep things in the "loosely plausible" realm.
Actually, let's backpedal. Every story needs intensive research. If you write a story about San Antonio where the Riverwalk is a gleaming alabaster paradise of high end boutiques and cafes...anyone from San Antonio is probably going to laugh at you. So every genre really needs to Do the Research.
Science fiction, however, got its birth in geek culture and bored engineering majors, so I would hazard a guess that the degree of expectation regarding research standards is much higher. (Example: Every thread in the XKCD forums ever). I remember reading a rather long explanation of quarks in Voyage to Yesteryear more or less right out of the blue.
I don't think SciFi has lost its way so much as it has transgressed the original cultural markers which solidified its identity in its formative years. Combine the selective pressure that only the "best" scifi books stick around 40 years later with the way modern Hollywood is cannabilizing anything with a pulse for a film version, and...
then am I all around confused on how we even define "Science fiction" to begin with.
Brb, eating own tail.
I never said it should be "utopian." Not even once. I said there should be more out there with positive themes about how we might have progressed past a 20th/21st century mindset. Yes, there will still be conflicts in the future. I want to know about FUTURISTIC conflicts. Not ships broadsiding each other and sending boarding parties like it's the 16th century.
I also said it should be more about exploring existential possibilities. Time dilation, meeting something truly alien with a completely different understanding of morality based on a completely different set of evolutionary circumstances. Not humans with misshaped foreheads or "exotic" skin colors.
How exactly would this be boring? If anything, this would be more exciting and pushing the boundaries in the way sci-fi was originally intended.
Exploration and discovery as well as a study of the human condition when placed in entirely unprecedented circumstances were always more interesting than generic action shlock IN SPACE.
Honestly, utopian isn't even part of the equation here so I'm wondering why everyone is suddenly dropping it like a buzz word. Did the opposite of "dumbed-down" become utopian all of a sudden?
The Fifth Element isn't the most perfect example, but it's one that I'll bring up specifically because it used a futuristic setting to do things that otherwise wouldn't be possible in a past or contemporary backdrop. It wasn't just using the future as a gimmick or a way to drop some deus ex machina or one-note lip-service. And was that boring or utopian?
Moon, Gattaca and Solaris are other examples. Granted they weren't always exhilarating or action-packed but they weren't utopian by any stretch.
Utopias Are Boring, and Utopias Actually Being Dystopias are not SF tropes - the same ideas have been coming up in theological discussions of heaven ever since, well, we have been allowed to critique religion without getting tortured to death.
Yup. William Gibson doesn't write about science either.
I think you are just massively cherry-picking your examples. Or you just simply haven't read or watched much SF.
Try reading "The First Men in the Moon," "The Time Machine, and "A Story of the Days To Come." H. G. was pretty open about having no idea how any of his crap worked.
The difference between "Death Star" and "dragon" is that, at face value, we might someday be able to construct a Death Star, but dragons do not and will never exist. You can change sci-fi into fantasy or fantasy into sci-fi with explanations ("How could you build a battle-station this large?" "Wizards" or "Where did these dragons come from?" "Centuries of genetic engineering"), and you can also use scientific detail to make sci-fi "harder" (/more plausible) ("This Death Star is constructed according to the principles of Newtonian physics based on an alloy of..."). But those explanations are not required for the work to fall into the sci-fi genre so long as the setting or plot element(s) are at face value things which might one day be possible.
And if we stopped to care about their opinions, the world would fall apart.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Social Science.
Really, the big issue is that sci-fi has come to be represented by Star Wars, which is just a fantasy with a bad layer of chrome.
It's largely irrelevant anyway. Real science is a harsh unforgiving bitch who has continually, consistently and ruthlessly stomped on the dreams of every sci-fi writer who ever lived.
Most just gave up and accepted it was never gonna happen.
And if that's a distinction that's important to you, I feel bad for you son. I got 99 problems, but a physicist ain't one.
Star Wars is a verbatim rendition of the monomyth that takes place "a long time ago." What does that sound like to you?
My nerd fantasies happen to be FTL travel, galaxy-spanning civilizations, city-planets, and body replacement/cyborg prosthesis.
Star Wars has all of these things (although my cyborg thing is more of a Ghost in the Shell flavor) and makes no attempt whatsoever to explain any of them. It pretty firmly exists within the realm of pure fantasy. Just because the characters are riding on hoverbikes instead of palominos doesn't mean it's not a generic sword-and-sorcery tale.