alt Hacker NewsWhere did all the starships go?
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FYI, this is about the titles of these books, not the textual content of the books themselves. The implication of the article is that sci-fi is losing relative standing to fantasy, but another interpretation is that science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.
I speculate that a lot of sci-fi reflects the cutting edge of science and technology at the time it is written. For well over a century a lot of that frontier was transportation: and we got "Around the World in 80 Days" and "20000 Leagues under the Sea" and then a lot of books about space. We also got "Canticle for Leibowitz" and other post-apocalyptic books out of the age when nuclear weapons and energy was top of mind. Then, in the 70s and 80s computer technology became the center of innovation and we got cyberpunk and a lot of sci-fi turned inward to virtual worlds and the like. Given we're in a new space age, maybe sci-fi will start to follow? I'm certainly seeing a new wave of AI centric fiction.
I figure with Andy Weirs movies getting so big that there'd be an increase in scifi readship after the new movie comes out.
Fantasy is certainly big, but it’s not like there isn’t space sf or space opera out there.
Authors in my library who’ve released space sf stuff in the last few years — Anne Leckie, Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, John Scalzi, Martha Wells, James Corey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal.
To be fair, some of them get into philosophy or fantasy, or even romance. But the settings are SF.
My theory about this aligns with my theory about the disappearance of ‘futurists’ from the popular conversation - we’re living in science fiction. The future is arriving every day. It no longer feels necessary to speculate about a changed world - you need only look out the door.
I say this as someone that still loves (and writes a little) speculative fiction. Just a guess as to what’s happening.
They didn't go anywhere. Lots of excellent starship/space opera novels out there with more coming out each year. There's just lots there stuff too. :)
A great deal of science fiction is just fantasy with spaceships. It uses technological tropes to seem like it isn't fantasy, but that's just surface gloss.
Anime went from science-fiction dominated in the 1980s (Gundam) to fantasy-dominated (Friern) today. The strange thing about fantasy was it lived under the shadow of Tolkien and Lewis which I think suppressed it for half a century.
The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related. I wonder if the trend is space-specific or if other sci-fi topics suffered the same fate (like robots, computers, technology, etc). It does seem to me like society generally became less interested in space exploration after the moon landing (though I wasn't around then so that is really just what I gather from watching/reading things about western society in the latter half of the 20th century).
On the other hand, fantasy includes vampires and werewolves. I guess you could call them fantasy but to me they are quite a different niche to Tolkien. Traditionally vampires and werewolves would probably be considered horror rather than fantasy, though it's a bit more complicated now as Twilight is clearly not horror.
I think the author's point stands regardless, as there has been a resurgence across all of those keywords, but I do think the reasons for the resurgence in magic and dragons aren't necessarily the same as the reasons for the resurgence in vampires and werewolves.
Quite naturally - 1960s were the time when we discovered that Solar System is a pretty barren place. Mariner IV sent back pictures of craters on Mars - proving it couldn't have an atmosphere dense enough for people. Venera series probes proved at about same time that Venus surface was unsurvivable for anything we could recognise as "life". Stars are too far away. That was about it.
Many people don't get the origins of enthusiasm of first years of the space era, it wasn't because of politics, it was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now. And almost total surety of finding at least some form of complex, multicellular life. Disappointment when the real data came in, was massive. That's why space program went nowhere after Apollo, becoming a politicised clown show - by the time Apollo 11 landed, it was abundantly clear there wasn't much to see or do in the Solar System.
I've never really agreed with putting SF together with Fantasy, because they are slightly different genres. Some science fiction writers have used genuine science to underpin their writings, one of the more recent examples of that would be "the Martian". Fantasy doesn't need that kind of technical detail.
It parallels other developments. There is an increasing scepticism around science, and a significant number of people do not believe in the Moon landing. The heroic age of space travel has been replaced by school teachers and guys busking in tin cans in near Earth orbit. It's become mundane and the most exciting things in space exploration are being done by probes not humans nowadays.
That was fun.
I recall an early editorial of the podcast Escaped Pod describing science fiction as a means to more directly engage with topics of the human condition by using the conceits of science fiction. _Have a difficult time discussing your relationship with your parents? Write a story about orphans raised by space aliens._ That sort of thing.
Maybe something is going on with our human condition that science fiction is not as productive a foil as it once was?
I don’t know. I’m not a fiction writer. But I can say that since I bought my second motorcycle (back on a moto after 20 years away) I am enjoying spaceships in my science fiction.
Fantasy appeals to a wider audience (see the "Romantasy" genre) and seems to overlap more with YA fiction so captures more young readers.
I'm of the opinion that the teen novel has stunted literature in general.
As a kid beginning to read in the 70's I jumped from what were clearly kids books to Lord of the Rings (pure chance -- I liked the cover). There wasn't that watered down in between. It was a jump to real books with real consequences (spoilers: Boromir dies).
I've witnessed the rise of the teen section and seen how kids -- who are reading less in general -- never leave it.
It feels like the fantasy adventure lends itself a lot more to these teen novels and has a knock on effect into the mainstream. I for one could do without anther book about someone born to be a prince(ss) up against the evil realm who can't choose their way out of their romantic triangle.
I'm not knocking anyone's choices. There are more books already than I'll ever read. But it should would be a blast to get another Dune out of nowhere.
The succession is steampunk, dieselpunk (which includes art deco, internal combustion), then atompunk (which includes atomic energy, apocalyptic possibilities, space, sci-fi, martians etc), then I dunno, regular punk (age of mass single-stream media), then our current era of cyberpunk.
That Berlin bookstore (Otherland) also has great staff for recommendations. The resident scifi attendant was quite knowledgeable about original scifi written in German (as opposed to translated works). That's quite useful if your knowledge of the field is limited to the obvious Andreas Esbach (unsurpassed) and Perry Rodan (pass).
It turned out that the aliens live in inner space, not outer space.
Because most men stopped reading and most women don’t care much about sci-fi .
> Beyond the bookstore, much of the architecture of book discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber… #BookTok, the vast community on TikTok that has become a best-seller machine, is largely populated by women recommending books by other women, like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us.”
In a sense this is just a regression to mean, normality, because the literary boys club of the 20th century was the exception:
> In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by women for a female audience. Their output was considered “paltry entertainment,”
Some new sci-fi books among the stars:
We are Bob Red rising Murderbot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV
Set in "the near future" (the year 2018 in the first season), seaQuest DSV originally mixed high drama with realistic scientific fiction.
No one thinks the future is in space anymore. We realised that there’s a lot wrong with us culturally and spiritually
I have been seeing the trend of Fantasy slowly taking over SF for a while, maybe as long as 30 years :(
Real Science based SF seems to have disappeared completely, at least based upon the only Book Store left in my area, Barnes and Noble.
The popularity of a genre is deeply tied to the historical context of what's going on in the real world. In the 1950s and 1960s you obviously had the Space Race, which itself was a product of the Cold War. Some commments view this as optimism. I disagree. I view it as an expression of patriotism.
I view this patriotism as a crutch in uncertain times. Another example of this is the rise of the superhero genre in the 21st century. Marven was skirting with bankruptcy in the 1990s. A perpetual Spiderman license was sold for a fraction of what it would today. And I think it's no coincidence that the superhero genre ascended post-9/11.
I used to read a lot of fantasy but many years ago I pretty much switched almost entirely to sci-fi. For me the reason was because sci-fi asked questions. I mean there's also space opera and it scratches the same itch as fantasy (IMNHO) but my personal interest in sci-fi is more in the "what if" category.
That's a very broad category that goes all the way from, say, the Iain M. Banks Culture series, which really poses the question of what an ultra-high tech post-scarcity civilization looks like to something like The Handmaid's Tale (yes, that's sci-fi). We've also had some superb sci-fi on the screen in recent years like Severance, Silo and The Expanse.
For me, fantasy is a far more limited genre. Like I'm trying to read Brandon Sanderson recently and while he's a good writer, it's just not hooking me yet in the same way that, say, Revelation Space did. I think the last fantasy series to really hook me was A Song of Ice and Fire. The first three books are some of the finest books ever written.
But as for the decline of starships, I think that the readership has evolved too. More vintage sci-fi simply projected the era of exploration and colonization onto space and it's become pretty clear how unrealistic that is because of the vast distances involved. You have to remember that popular media in the 1960s expected Moon bases and such in the not-too-distant future. Star Trek was really the last gasp of this and, interestingly, Star Trek is fundamentally socialist, which is noteworthy given that it originated in the Cold War.
Star Wars on the other hand was a tale of the resistance to imperialism. George Lucas has said he modeled the resistance on the North Vietnamese. Cyberpunk came about in the 1980s (eg Neuromancer, Blade Runner) that had nothing to do with starships but they really reflected a societal pessimism. Cyberpunk is inherently xenophobic (ie because of fears of the Japanese).
I wonder if the popularity of fantasy is fundamentally escapist and an expression of helplessness. Think about it: fantasy usually revolves around the outsized impact of individual actions, of a hero or heroine.
Space Age, mid-50s to mid-70s.
Scifi as a space based genre failed due to the end of the space race. The generation that grew in the post WWII era aged and died. The lack of big scientific breakthroughs for the last fifty years added to the lack of new dreams. The future is here, just it's not exciting.
For the last few decades the culturally significant fiction has been in anime and manga. Lots of it is trash, but lots of it captures the ya themes of friendship and adventure. Some of it captured better the ideas of the cyber age, I suppose. If one explores those genres with a bit of background, you can see how they have been inspired by the traditional sf works, but repackaged them for new audiences without the introspection and conventions of yesterday.
I'm not sure if it is all bad. Definitely, science is not an aspiration any more and those works lack the grounding hard scifi taught us. On the other hand, there is still romanticism in those stories and they teach kids to dream for the impossible. I choose to believe that this is still something to base some optimism on.
Where did all the starships go,
Long time passing...
Wait till the Chinese land on the Moon first in this new space race. There will be a Sputnik moment, massive additional investment, and this will inevitably impact sci-fi. Just like in the previous space race, we had to fall quite a bit behind first before we wake up -- and then, we go all-out.
I also don't agree with the general dystopian or cynical view quite prevalent here on HN these days, frankly. It's always been so, but it seems to have gotten darker, such that I think a lot of old-timers like me pretty much avoid HN these days. It's not all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and out into the real world. Looking outward, rather than inward, can lead to the kind of desire for discovery and progress which underpinned the Apollo era. The world out there is in extreme disarray too -- but to an optimist, it presents opportunity to do good.
Texas.
People didn’t travel as much back in those days. Visiting a foreign country or too might as well be like a trip to the moon.
But now, we basically live in the climax of the jet age, we can be anywhere in the world within 24 hours. And there’s so much of the world to see and stories to discover, not really worth the bother to imagine space travel to far off distant empty worlds, which will inevitably be used to further extend capitalism and just live the same lives we live here on Earth, just on a different world. The lack of any other interesting extraterrestrial civilizations to interact with makes it all pretty pointless. Going very far into space is mostly for exploration as a sport, like cave diving or something.
In the 1950s, and perhaps to some degree in the 1990s, it seemed possible to believe technology was limitless and miraculous and conducive to human thriving. As a result, breathlessly hopeful and exciting stories about the wonders of the future made sense.
It is hard to feel that way in the 2020s. Technology seems oversold, scammish, dystopian, inhuman. Everything is slop and skinner boxes. It impoverishes rather than enriches, and it seems to be getting worse. It is easy to feel that the Amish, nay perhaps even the medievals, have a point.
Worse, the science fiction oriented around starships took its cues from our experience of the naval - journeys of days or weeks would take you to alien places teeming with new and interesting and enriching life. Foods you couldn't eat anywhere else. People you couldn't meet at home. But now the globe seems smaller, explored, and conquered. Those faraway goods are easily shipped to your door, and those faraway people show up in your comments section and they're just people. The excitement of the seas is no longer such a part of our outlook that reskinning it in fantasy speaks to us.
Not only is the excitement of the seas greatly diminished, the more we have learned about the universe, the worse the naval analogy seems. The distant stars no longer seem like tropical islands, but rather hopelessly distant and inhospitable. In 1958, Heinlein wrote a wonderful short story about scout troops in the verdant jungles of Venus back when that was a reasonable expectation[1], but it seems like a silly thing to write now. https://xkcd.com/2202/ seems to capture the current expectation well.
Several decades ago it was easy to get excited about the march of scientific discovery and technological progress. But now we're asking why science seems to have slowed down so much, and new technology seems about as exciting as new mechanisms for dependence and dystopia.
Atheism is weakening and religion is rising.
The imagined global society of the UN that was reimagined at a larger scale as The Federation may have seemed like the way of the future for a few decades, but now that dream looks foolish and the globe is visibly fracturing.
The classic science fiction trope that progress will better us as people, that leisure will lead to fitness, that access to information will make us wise scholars, that we will use the convenience of machines to free ourselves for the pursuit of virtue... it makes for an inspiring story. I had my suspicions about how true all of that was back before the internet. I am now very sure that Wall-E and Idiocracy are nearer to the mark.
The human-like AIs of Star Wars' robots or Star Trek's androids or innumerable superintelligent computers from Asimov to Heinlein seem further away every year. AI is part of everyday life now, and our major concern is how to keep it from catastrophically failing at mundane research, not whether it should have voting rights or makes humans obsolete. Ambulatory human-like AI seems unlikely when data centers the size of small cities struggle with emdashes. The hope and promise of a generation of robot children and citizens seems as misguided as the forests of Venus.
I could go on. We GOT a lot of the wonders science fiction predicted, or things so much more powerful that our most audacious futurists didn't dare to imagine them. And yet it doesn't feel like the promised land. Science fiction promised instant video conferences across the globe, but when we got it, it didn't look like all the world's best researchers collaborating on its hardest problems. It looked like all of the miscreants with their dick pics and the dreary business meetings and school lessons suddenly having access to your home. I don't mean to imply it's all bad, but the difference between imagination and reality has been stark on many fronts.
I really think the truth is that in a thousand ways, the tropes of the genre no longer speak to the moment.
[1] https://writingatlas.com/story/3984/robert-a-heinlein-a-tend...
The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sideways into fantasy gained the popularity lost by escapes into the future.
I predict a correlation between space-based scifi sales and polls on whether the country is heading in the right direction.