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Charles Stross writes:
There is a very large tranche of younger readers who perceive SF in general as boring. (There are exceptions, and I'll deal with them shortly.) The complaint is that it's old hat, it's the stuff their grandfathers read, and it talks to the grandfather's attitudes and outlooks. SF is predicated on a modernist political program. It was, in fact, the fictional agitprop arm of the Technocrat movement, and it carried on marching in lockstep into the radiant future even after Technocracy withered in the 1930s. These days, the beliefs that form the bedrock of this medium have a curiously quaint, archaic feel to them. Technocracy was about central planning, enlightened rational leadership, and utopianism. SF as we know it is descended from a literature that reflects these values, either by amplifying or adopting them, or by explicitly contradicting them — but either way, Technocracy's ghost lies at the core of a multitude of genre conventions.
We've been writing technocracy-influenced fiction for eighty years, whether we knew it or not. You can catch its reflection in the mirror if you don't turn round fast enough; the belief that technological progress cures all ills, that progress is always good, and that rational, educated people will come up with the best solutions to problems are all hallmarks of technocracy. I have some sympathy for these views (I wouldn't be writing what I do if I didn't!), but these days only a lunatic would still argue that a panglossian faith in Technology as the Simple Answer to All Human Problems is a reasonable ideology on which to build anything other than a pile of bleached skulls.
Moreover, the vision of technology that was prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s has changed. No more Mme Curie working in her lab: instead, we have CERN and ITER and the other huge enterprises of Big Science. No Frank Whittle tinkering with a prototype jet engine in the back of a semi-disused foundry. No more lone inventors creating revolutions in their toolsheds: the nearest we've gotten to that in twenty years was Google, and even Sergey and Larry's great idea took $1.1 million to get off the ground. The increasing complexity of the modern technosphere means that the low-hanging fruit have been plucked, and the era of the two-fisted lone gunman engineer uber alles is no more credible than any other wish-fulfilment superhero.
The political and ideological concerns that lay at the core of the original SFnal project don't interest the very people they used to appeal to in the 1940s and 1950s, because they're obsolete. And the outward trappings and glitz that were used to sugar-coat the politics have been adopted with glee by the purveyors of mass visual entertainment. Thus, the emperor has been robbed of his suit.
We've arrived in a different future, and central planning doesn't work. Things are fast, chaotic, cheap, and out of control. Ad hoc is the new plan. There's a new cultural strange attractor at work, sucking in the young, smart, deracinated mechanistically-minded readers who used to be the natural prey of the SF movement. It's geek culture. You can find it in the pages of Wired (although it's a pale shadow of what it used to be) and on Boing!Boing! and Slashdot. You can find them playing MMORPGs and hacking their game consoles. These people have different interests from the old generation of SF readers. And unfortunately they don't buy many [fiction] books, because we aren't, for the most part, writing for them.
This isn't to say that they don't read. There is a literary culture that switches on the geeks: it started out as a branch of SF. Yes, I'm talking about cyberpunk. But while cyberpunk was a seven day wonder within the SF field, which subsequently lost interest, the geeks recognized themselves in its magic mirror and made it their own. This is the future they live in, not the future of Star Wars and its imitators, of the futures of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. And in addition to cyberpunk — the golden age SF taproots of their field — some of us are beginning to address their concerns. Among the quintessentially geek authors, the brightest names are Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow and Douglas Coupland and (in his latest incarnation) Bruce Sterling. (I'd like to append my own name to that list, if only to bask in their reflected glory.)
The authors I listed above are not writing SF for your traditional SF readers. They are writing something quite different, even if the forms are similar, because the underlying assumptions about the way the universe works are different. There's no need for the readers to internalize a bizarrely rehashed bundle of strange ideological preconceptions about the role of science and technology in society, which have accreted remorselessly since the 1930s until much modern science fiction is incomprehensible and alienating to the outside world; that's because they are writing fiction that is based in the world-view of the present day. You don't need to study golden age SF and its literary conventions to get Neal Stephenson, because rather than constantly referring back to it, he references (a) the science fictional zeitgeist in popular culture, and (b) the cultural milieu and outlook of WIRED's readership. Which is why he managed to write a 1100 page novel about cryptography with a plot that didn't quite join up in the middle, and it still outsold everything else on the map. He's got your audience, right here, buddy, right here in the palm of his hand. Thanks to generation slashdot.
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full here
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Sorry, I've been meaning to reply to this for a few days now. Just sooooooooo much to say on this topic.... I'll try not to go overboard here.
I think sci-fi, in order to survive as an ever evolving medium, needs to recognise its true role. I'm bored of cyberpunk, I haven't read any Corey Doctorow (to be honest, the guy's persona on boingboing turned me off him a long time ago), I was never into 'Space Opera'.... Sci-fi for me is a conceptual medium that rises above mere mythologies about technology and human. Sci-Fi is about the unknowns, whatever they may be. And as far as I'm concerned these unknown caverns of speculation have not shifted a whole lot in the past 50/100 years - THEY'VE JUST GOT MUCH MUCH DEEPER!
Consciousness vs Physicality
Identity vs Simulation (simulacra)
Humanity vs The Human
Perception vs Time
These are some of the fundamental areas where good sci-fi resides for me. Man vs Technology is a misnomer - Mankind IS technology, and always has been. Write me a sci-fi story that explores this idea and I'll tear your artificial hand off.
The golden age of technology is indeed over in many senses. The transhuman wants of a few hyper-crazies floating around the cyberplace won't last long. We've been grappling with the same fundamental philosophical problems of 'the human' since the days of Plato and we believe technology will raise us above that? Think again. Sci-fi need not give me ANSWERS I just want MORE QUESTIONS...
Have we lost track of this? Perhaps... I haven't read a new sci-fi books since Michael Marshall Smith started trying to be Stephen King, and you know what? I don't care. The sci-fi of eras past still resonates for me, so what if its sci/tech visions are a little out of cync... They got the questions just right.
No amount of time can cancel out good sci-fi. What do you reckon?
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