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.
Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology.
Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way).
We also do not yet have the technology for a complete survey of nearby habitable planets.
This is motivated pessimism. We knew in the 50s that breaking the speed of light was highly unlikely. We dreamed of the stars anyway. Now we refuse to dream, or to even attempt to solve the problems (a common pattern when discussing spaceflight is people who are blatantly searching for problems, rather than solutions), because we are pessimistic, devoid of imagination, and seek to legitimise our collective depression through scientific and engineering arguments.
You don't need to break the speed of light to get to the stars. Time dilation and space contraction mean that you can get there in as little time as you desire.
Everyone you knew on earth would be dead by the time you got back, but if it's just about you, the speed of light is no limitation at all. (The rocket equation, however, presents stupendous engineering challenges.)
Our astrophysicists don't even know why the universe is expanding, don't know that Lambda CDM is correct, don't know if things are universally consistent, yet we're so damned sure this is it.
We don't even know that this isn't a simulation. Not non-falsifiable, sure. But we're convinced we're bound to this solar system with our crude tools and limits of detection.
During the postwar years of plenty, people stopped dreaming. We had bold dreams before WWII, but people stopped looking at how far we'd come and started comparing themselves to everyone else.
We have more than we did in the past. The manufacturing wealth of 1940-1970 was a fluke. The trade wealth of 1980-2020 was a fluke. We were upset over an unfair advantage that won't last forever.
Maybe a return to hardship will make us dream again.
I don't think it's motivated pessimism so much as a shifting tastes and changes in media. There are tons of SF stories with starships in movies, games and streaming platforms. It just happens to be the case that fantasy is more popular then SF at the moment where books are concerned.
I don't know, to the East of the Iron Curtain science fiction wasn't mostly about future optimism (at least after the initial "we're building a better society" optimism had been brutally destroyed during the 1950s and 60s), but often a critical mirror of then-current society transported into the future to escape state censorship.
Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the evolutionary pressure to produce great literature that requires and intelligent reader to decode the hidden messages written between the lines ;)
I still find myself quite taken by some sci-fi writing. Iain M Banks works, Rajaniemi, and Joan Slonczewski. The “problem” is that they are not popular the way Harry Potter or isekai are.
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.
The sad state of the 'science fiction corner' in German book chains is completely real though. Over the last two decades or so you could literally see it shrink on each visit and what little remains is filled with mass procuded trash (Star Wars novels etc). The fantasy section right next to it has been eating into the science-fiction shelf space but is filled with the same trash, just replace your laser-toting space troopers with vampires, werewolves and dragons.
I wouldn’t expect only one fiction subgenre to have such a dramatic increase of proportion of abstract titles while other related subgenres did not. In other words, I would expect all of these graphs to have a negative correlation with time due to a general abstraction of titles across all fiction subgenres. I would be surprised if there was enough consumer differentiation to support abstraction in one subgenre but not the others.
Another interpretation might be that as fewer books are released in a subgenre, their titles also become more abstract, which would increase the effect seen in the data presented as well.
But I would hesitate to believe that the observed effect should be chalked up to only title abstraction, and not a decline in popularity. Occam’s razor.
Yeah, I think at most very literal titles would be a stylistic phase. Even "The Martian" is more a play on words than just a literal title for what it's about.
Taking favourite novels which are within arm's reach: Sure "Rainbows End" is Science Fiction which doesn't involve space travel etc. but "Incandescence" is also SF but that's deeply about space travel. Banks' "Whit" and "Surface Detail" are both sat here. One of those is set in a lightly fictionalized Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to several of the most significant space battles of her era. But like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which?
Now, Banks wasn't a hard SF writer. Unlike say Egan's "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.
Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.
As cynic I would imagine eventual collapse to be more likely. Probably slow degradation back to some sort of semi-advanced agricultural society. Say kinda post-apocalyptic world(without proper apocalypse) with larger societal structures still existing. Slow degradation of industrial output until some balance level is reached.
Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or most selling one.
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.
Really though? Seems to me that the only sub-genre of space science fiction that is surviving relative to others is hard space science fiction. There's an abundance of high quality titles to choose from even (compared to the previous millennium).
Highlights include Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse, The Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, House of Suns, a dozen other titles by Alastair Reynolds and Adrian Tchaikovsky, Interstellar (debatable, but it's good), Project Hail Mary, For All Mankind, and many more.
Which is unfortunately true, but also just illustrates how far science-fiction has fallen - not sure when it started but I guess Star Wars played an important role to remove the 'science' from 'science-fiction'.
It's been there since day one. What, you thought early era SF used accurate science? No, they used made-up rules based on whether they could tell a good story.
Science fiction usually doesn't conform to how the world actually works in the same way pornography usually doesn't conform to the way sexual relationships work. They are both there to tell titillating stories, not describe reality.
For instance: Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics aren't based on any practical science, they exist as a plot device for setting off mystery stories with robots and morality plays about hubris. And the reason robots have positronic brains is that positrons were recently discovered at the time, and it sounded cool. Yet people will swear Asimov is one of the hardest SF authors around.
Sometimes you might get a SF author who's an expert in a particular field or has a specific hyperfixation, and that one aspect of their stories might be grounded somewhat in plausibility, but everything else turns out to be complete nonsense.
I believe people use the word “hard” to differentiate more scientifically rigorous scifi. I’m not well-versed enough to know when that started being a term, or what the status quo was before it was a term.
Interestingly there’s also “high” fantasy to differentiate between earth like and non earth like subject worlds, and then even “historical fiction” to describe books that try to be faithful to some degree to some historical time period on earth.
Anyway, this is all to say maybe “how far science-fiction has fallen” might be a narrow interpretation of what’s been happening to fiction in general over the past 75 years. More options than ever, maybe…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I enjoyed The Carpet Makers (which is available in English.) Sometimes translated works rub the wrong way because of cultural differences, but in that one the differences enhanced the experience.
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.
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.
In 1965, Clarke, Asimov, and other science writers were at NASA watching the first images appear. "Craters. Duh, it's right next to the asteroid belt, of course it has craters. Not that any of us thought of it beforehand..."
...this might be the main problem (same with Thalia in Germany), those large book store chains are aggressively optimized for monetization, and that kicks off a death spiral of filling the available space with cheap industrially produced trash.
The good stuff might still be there, but it's much harder to find, and you need to know where to look (same thing that happened to music basically).
Not to forget being linked to main-stream publishers that have different editorial goals compared to era when these works were released. Not saying there were not biases back then. But now the biases are different and thus the published output is as well.
I predict a correlation between space-based scifi sales and polls on whether the country is heading in the right direction.
Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way).
We also do not yet have the technology for a complete survey of nearby habitable planets.
It is not an encouraging line of thought.
Everyone you knew on earth would be dead by the time you got back, but if it's just about you, the speed of light is no limitation at all. (The rocket equation, however, presents stupendous engineering challenges.)
The 2020s have not been known as reasons for great optimism. The pandemic and AI culling clades of the job market have been traumatizing experiences.
We don't even know that this isn't a simulation. Not non-falsifiable, sure. But we're convinced we're bound to this solar system with our crude tools and limits of detection.
During the postwar years of plenty, people stopped dreaming. We had bold dreams before WWII, but people stopped looking at how far we'd come and started comparing themselves to everyone else.
We have more than we did in the past. The manufacturing wealth of 1940-1970 was a fluke. The trade wealth of 1980-2020 was a fluke. We were upset over an unfair advantage that won't last forever.
Maybe a return to hardship will make us dream again.
Would any of the stories about the characters’ relationships with people not traveling with them be entertaining given the effects of time dilation?
Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the evolutionary pressure to produce great literature that requires and intelligent reader to decode the hidden messages written between the lines ;)
Another interpretation might be that as fewer books are released in a subgenre, their titles also become more abstract, which would increase the effect seen in the data presented as well.
But I would hesitate to believe that the observed effect should be chalked up to only title abstraction, and not a decline in popularity. Occam’s razor.
Taking favourite novels which are within arm's reach: Sure "Rainbows End" is Science Fiction which doesn't involve space travel etc. but "Incandescence" is also SF but that's deeply about space travel. Banks' "Whit" and "Surface Detail" are both sat here. One of those is set in a lightly fictionalized Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to several of the most significant space battles of her era. But like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which?
Now, Banks wasn't a hard SF writer. Unlike say Egan's "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.
Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.
Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or most selling one.
no publisher was there to tell author "wtf did you name it, you'll get ignored" or smth?
Highlights include Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse, The Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, House of Suns, a dozen other titles by Alastair Reynolds and Adrian Tchaikovsky, Interstellar (debatable, but it's good), Project Hail Mary, For All Mankind, and many more.
Science fiction usually doesn't conform to how the world actually works in the same way pornography usually doesn't conform to the way sexual relationships work. They are both there to tell titillating stories, not describe reality.
Sometimes you might get a SF author who's an expert in a particular field or has a specific hyperfixation, and that one aspect of their stories might be grounded somewhat in plausibility, but everything else turns out to be complete nonsense.
Interestingly there’s also “high” fantasy to differentiate between earth like and non earth like subject worlds, and then even “historical fiction” to describe books that try to be faithful to some degree to some historical time period on earth.
Anyway, this is all to say maybe “how far science-fiction has fallen” might be a narrow interpretation of what’s been happening to fiction in general over the past 75 years. More options than ever, maybe…
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.
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.
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.
(Scalzi is always fun.)
I say this as someone that still loves (and writes a little) speculative fiction. Just a guess as to what’s happening.
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.
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.
Real Science based SF seems to have disappeared completely, at least based upon the only Book Store left in my area, Barnes and Noble.
...this might be the main problem (same with Thalia in Germany), those large book store chains are aggressively optimized for monetization, and that kicks off a death spiral of filling the available space with cheap industrially produced trash.
The good stuff might still be there, but it's much harder to find, and you need to know where to look (same thing that happened to music basically).
Long time passing...