I have. There are still people publishing books that go in the SF section of the bookstore, but I could count off on one hand the number of authors I can remember who are feeding people hope instead of stylish postmodern cynicism.
“SF don’t inspire hope anymore” does not imply “SF has collapsed as a literary genre”; I’m not aware of “inspiring hope” being a factor in judging the existence of a literary genre.
However, I think a relevant data point in favor of Thiel’s claim is this: where is our 2001: A Space Odyssey? That is, a work of hard-core sci-fi (10 on the “Mohs scale” of sci-fi) that’s achieved mainstream success and entered the broader culture.
This could be a dispute about the definition of SF: if you consider the core of SF to be something antithetical to “stylish postmodern cynicism,” then maybe it has come on rough times. If you use the same definition the bookstores do, on the other hand, it’s doing fine.
I cannot see how can anyone see 2001 as “inspiring hope”.
Set in crapsack world of overpopulation, famine and imminent nuclear war, where human race was from the beginning a toy of omnipotent aliens. What hope?
Our world in 2001 was not like in “2001”, it was much better.
The lack of such in the last few years may be more of an indication that that niche has simply already been filled? If someone did a hard scifi space story how inevitable is it that it will be compared to 2001?
Does it matter whether there is hope or not in the stories? We are less hopeful about this precisely because things haven’t been nearly as impressive in the last fifty years as we thought they would be. A story set fifty years in the future with big Mars and Moon colones won’t look hopeful, it will look at best overly optimistic, and possibly naive.
Moreover, this may actually be a signal that the genre has reached real maturity, that it isn’t just gee-whiz look at that stories.
The claim that the genre has collapsed simply isn’t born out when one looks at how popular Greg Egan, Charlie Stross, Alastair Reynolds, and Cory Doctorow are among others. The genre is in fact much more successful now. Fifty years ago, book shops didn’t have separate sections for science fiction. Now they have large sections. Science fiction also is one of the most popular genres judging by the sales of used books. Science fiction is also far more accepted as a literary genre by academia, to the point where there’s a separate area of study devoted to it. I have to wonder how much of what you are seeing is just the decline in average quality that occurs when a small thing becomes popular.
Just because the genre conventions have changed from your preferred form doesn’t mean that the genre has collapsed. This sounds a bit akin to fans who when something in their favorite franchise changes become convinced that it has been Ruined Forever. (Not linking to TVTropes for obvious reasons).
More like DisContinuity, I would say. Which isn’t surprising, given that EY’s favorite TV shows are “All four seasons of Babylon 5 and all three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
(Both of those shows have more seasons than that, but are generally agreed to be of declining quality.)
Although, I wouldn’t have guessed someone capable of writing Three Worlds Collide would be so much in favor of hopeful!SF versus stylishly!cynical!SF. But maybe I’m reading it wrong?
Edit: To clarify, I’m not accusing TWC of being stylishly cynical, precisely, but… while it is one of the best-written iterations of “humanity makes First Contact, overcomes communication barrier in record time only to immediately discover irreconcilable differences that inevitably result in the deaths or brainwashing of billions” I’ve ever read, one must recognize that is what it is, and that’s not exactly what I would describe as “feeding people hope”.
If you consider the contemporary struggle between Enlightenment values and Postmodern cynicism, Three Worlds Collide is definitely in the former camp. Its message is that no matter what happens, there is still a difference between right and wrong. I don’t know what a postmodern answer to Three Worlds Collide would look like (someone should write one, please) but I imagine it would use moral error theory in place of moral realism.
Fifty years ago, book shops didn’t have separate sections for science fiction. Now they have large sections.
I can’t speak to fifty years ago, but I can tell you that 47 years ago Bookland, a smallish and not extremely ambitious bookstore in a suburb of Wilmington, Delaware definitely did have a science fiction section.
One man’s bitter cynicism is another man’s gritty realism and one man’s hope is another man’s delusionary dream.
Looking at another literary genre, did the emergence of hardboiled school “collapsed” crime fiction?
A great proportion of science fiction has always been predictions that science will kill us all. Are the cynics stealing market share from the doomsayers, or from the hopeful?
Hmm, that essay is interesting. But it has clear problems. One part that jumped out at me:
But to grasp just how far our current mindset is from being able to attempt innovation on such a scale, consider the fate of the space shuttle’s external tanks [ETs]. Dwarfing the vehicle itself, the ET was the largest and most prominent feature of the space shuttle as it stood on the pad. It remained attached to the shuttle—or perhaps it makes as much sense to say that the shuttle remained attached to it—long after the two strap-on boosters had fallen away. The ET and the shuttle remained connected all the way out of the atmosphere and into space. Only after the system had attained orbital velocity was the tank jettisoned and allowed to fall into the atmosphere, where it was destroyed on re-entry.
At a modest marginal cost, the ETs could have been kept in orbit indefinitely. The mass of the ET at separation, including residual propellants, was about twice that of the largest possible Shuttle payload. Not destroying them would have roughly tripled the total mass launched into orbit by the Shuttle. ETs could have been connected to build units that would have humbled today’s International Space Station. The residual oxygen and hydrogen sloshing around in them could have been combined to generate electricity and produce tons of water, a commodity that is vastly expensive and desirable in space. But in spite of hard work and passionate advocacy by space experts who wished to see the tanks put to use, NASA—for reasons both technical and political—sent each of them to fiery destruction in the atmosphere. Viewed as a parable, it has much to tell us about the difficulties of innovating in other spheres.
The idea here is interesting. But by the time the shuttle was already being designed there was some understanding of the dangers of space debris (although Kessler’s seminal work would not have been done for a few years). The problem of having very large objects in near optimal orbits would have been obvious. And since the shuttle flew at a fairly low orbit, one would actually have these deorbit and renter soon after launch anyways without giving them a massive boost. Spent fuel containers are also not optimal for later storage. They don’t have the same characteristics that one generally wants unless one modifies them massively. So even if one could boost them even higher for free, it isn’t at all clear you’d want them for construction without massive amounts of changes. Sure it might have been nice to have it as an option, but the main reason the shuttle didn’t succeed was that it had so many different jobs it had to do. For example, the military wanted it to be able to launch into a polar orbit and come back down after a single orbit.
This also doesn’t seem to appreciate at the time how incredibly innovative an actually reusable space plane was. It was perfectly reasonable in 1970 for this to be innovative. The fact that all the shuttle replacement proposals are basically copies of the shuttle or minor variants seems to be a much stronger argument that there’s a real problem.
The fact that all the shuttle replacement proposals are basically copies of the shuttle or minor variants seems to be a much stronger argument that there’s a real problem.
The space shuttle did not actually work—hence a new version that actually does work is the correct thing to do.
An actually useful space shuttle would be capable of frequent flights, say once a day, would not need crew to push the big button, and would land like the rocket it actually is instead of justifying NASA’s air force affiliation with a few seconds of normal flight like a plane.
Since it would fly once a day, it would necessarily transport smaller cargoes to space: There just is not enough demand yet. So it would be capable of carrying one reasonably slim passenger plus his life support. Larger objects would have to be taken up in bits an assembled in space by a robot.
The current proposals aren’t anything like this. They won’t be anything that could fly once a day. They aren’t proposing anything like that. The current proposed replacement will be able to launch if everything goes well slightly more frequently than the shuttle did. It won’t be nearly as replaceable (crew launch will be an essentially Apollo-style system). The total lift mass will be higher than the shuttle eventually but not for the early versions.
The main systems that are coming from the shuttle are the shuttle booster rockets, and it would have a similar external fuel tank. There’s no engineering reason for doing this. The primary reason is that certain contractors lobbied Congress so that they could keep their contracts for the parts they get to build. There’s a proposal to eventually give the SLS a new set of booster rockets that use more advanced technology and are built to actually optimize the new SLS requirements, but I’m skeptical that this will happen. And if it does happen, there’s only one guess about what company will make the new booster rockets.
This isn’t about taking a flawed plan, learning from it, and making a new version that doesn’t suffer from the old flaws. This is mainly about keeping the same small number of big aerospace companies happy.
I have. There is very little good science fiction today; most is military, political, or adventure fiction with a gloss of Star Trek level science fiction (Weber, Ringo, Scalzi). Or like a lot of Egan’s or Stross’s, it’s plain weird stuff with an “explanatory” gloss of poorly understood “science”.
In the article, Peter says:
I can’t say I have noticed that one.
Update 2011-10-05: Some concrete evidence from Google NGRAM offers little support for Peter’s position.
I have. There are still people publishing books that go in the SF section of the bookstore, but I could count off on one hand the number of authors I can remember who are feeding people hope instead of stylish postmodern cynicism.
“SF don’t inspire hope anymore” does not imply “SF has collapsed as a literary genre”; I’m not aware of “inspiring hope” being a factor in judging the existence of a literary genre.
However, I think a relevant data point in favor of Thiel’s claim is this: where is our 2001: A Space Odyssey? That is, a work of hard-core sci-fi (10 on the “Mohs scale” of sci-fi) that’s achieved mainstream success and entered the broader culture.
This could be a dispute about the definition of SF: if you consider the core of SF to be something antithetical to “stylish postmodern cynicism,” then maybe it has come on rough times. If you use the same definition the bookstores do, on the other hand, it’s doing fine.
I cannot see how can anyone see 2001 as “inspiring hope”.
Set in crapsack world of overpopulation, famine and imminent nuclear war, where human race was from the beginning a toy of omnipotent aliens. What hope? Our world in 2001 was not like in “2001”, it was much better.
The lack of such in the last few years may be more of an indication that that niche has simply already been filled? If someone did a hard scifi space story how inevitable is it that it will be compared to 2001?
Does it matter whether there is hope or not in the stories? We are less hopeful about this precisely because things haven’t been nearly as impressive in the last fifty years as we thought they would be. A story set fifty years in the future with big Mars and Moon colones won’t look hopeful, it will look at best overly optimistic, and possibly naive.
Moreover, this may actually be a signal that the genre has reached real maturity, that it isn’t just gee-whiz look at that stories.
The claim that the genre has collapsed simply isn’t born out when one looks at how popular Greg Egan, Charlie Stross, Alastair Reynolds, and Cory Doctorow are among others. The genre is in fact much more successful now. Fifty years ago, book shops didn’t have separate sections for science fiction. Now they have large sections. Science fiction also is one of the most popular genres judging by the sales of used books. Science fiction is also far more accepted as a literary genre by academia, to the point where there’s a separate area of study devoted to it. I have to wonder how much of what you are seeing is just the decline in average quality that occurs when a small thing becomes popular.
Just because the genre conventions have changed from your preferred form doesn’t mean that the genre has collapsed. This sounds a bit akin to fans who when something in their favorite franchise changes become convinced that it has been Ruined Forever. (Not linking to TVTropes for obvious reasons).
More like DisContinuity, I would say. Which isn’t surprising, given that EY’s favorite TV shows are “All four seasons of Babylon 5 and all three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
(Both of those shows have more seasons than that, but are generally agreed to be of declining quality.)
Although, I wouldn’t have guessed someone capable of writing Three Worlds Collide would be so much in favor of hopeful!SF versus stylishly!cynical!SF. But maybe I’m reading it wrong?
Edit: To clarify, I’m not accusing TWC of being stylishly cynical, precisely, but… while it is one of the best-written iterations of “humanity makes First Contact, overcomes communication barrier in record time only to immediately discover irreconcilable differences that inevitably result in the deaths or brainwashing of billions” I’ve ever read, one must recognize that is what it is, and that’s not exactly what I would describe as “feeding people hope”.
If you consider the contemporary struggle between Enlightenment values and Postmodern cynicism, Three Worlds Collide is definitely in the former camp. Its message is that no matter what happens, there is still a difference between right and wrong. I don’t know what a postmodern answer to Three Worlds Collide would look like (someone should write one, please) but I imagine it would use moral error theory in place of moral realism.
I can’t speak to fifty years ago, but I can tell you that 47 years ago Bookland, a smallish and not extremely ambitious bookstore in a suburb of Wilmington, Delaware definitely did have a science fiction section.
One man’s bitter cynicism is another man’s gritty realism and one man’s hope is another man’s delusionary dream. Looking at another literary genre, did the emergence of hardboiled school “collapsed” crime fiction?
A great proportion of science fiction has always been predictions that science will kill us all. Are the cynics stealing market share from the doomsayers, or from the hopeful?
Curiously, what are their names?
A literary agent recently told me that the field is doing well.
Recourse to authority:
http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/fall2011/innovation-starvation
(these memes seem to be highly correlated, I hence discount them)
Hmm, that essay is interesting. But it has clear problems. One part that jumped out at me:
The idea here is interesting. But by the time the shuttle was already being designed there was some understanding of the dangers of space debris (although Kessler’s seminal work would not have been done for a few years). The problem of having very large objects in near optimal orbits would have been obvious. And since the shuttle flew at a fairly low orbit, one would actually have these deorbit and renter soon after launch anyways without giving them a massive boost. Spent fuel containers are also not optimal for later storage. They don’t have the same characteristics that one generally wants unless one modifies them massively. So even if one could boost them even higher for free, it isn’t at all clear you’d want them for construction without massive amounts of changes. Sure it might have been nice to have it as an option, but the main reason the shuttle didn’t succeed was that it had so many different jobs it had to do. For example, the military wanted it to be able to launch into a polar orbit and come back down after a single orbit.
This also doesn’t seem to appreciate at the time how incredibly innovative an actually reusable space plane was. It was perfectly reasonable in 1970 for this to be innovative. The fact that all the shuttle replacement proposals are basically copies of the shuttle or minor variants seems to be a much stronger argument that there’s a real problem.
The space shuttle did not actually work—hence a new version that actually does work is the correct thing to do.
An actually useful space shuttle would be capable of frequent flights, say once a day, would not need crew to push the big button, and would land like the rocket it actually is instead of justifying NASA’s air force affiliation with a few seconds of normal flight like a plane.
Since it would fly once a day, it would necessarily transport smaller cargoes to space: There just is not enough demand yet. So it would be capable of carrying one reasonably slim passenger plus his life support. Larger objects would have to be taken up in bits an assembled in space by a robot.
The current proposals aren’t anything like this. They won’t be anything that could fly once a day. They aren’t proposing anything like that. The current proposed replacement will be able to launch if everything goes well slightly more frequently than the shuttle did. It won’t be nearly as replaceable (crew launch will be an essentially Apollo-style system). The total lift mass will be higher than the shuttle eventually but not for the early versions.
The main systems that are coming from the shuttle are the shuttle booster rockets, and it would have a similar external fuel tank. There’s no engineering reason for doing this. The primary reason is that certain contractors lobbied Congress so that they could keep their contracts for the parts they get to build. There’s a proposal to eventually give the SLS a new set of booster rockets that use more advanced technology and are built to actually optimize the new SLS requirements, but I’m skeptical that this will happen. And if it does happen, there’s only one guess about what company will make the new booster rockets.
This isn’t about taking a flawed plan, learning from it, and making a new version that doesn’t suffer from the old flaws. This is mainly about keeping the same small number of big aerospace companies happy.
It’s the only thing I saw in the article which seemed like nonsense. Additional nonsense has been located.
I do think there’s less science fiction relative to fantasy than there used to be, but that’s a much milder claim.
I have. There is very little good science fiction today; most is military, political, or adventure fiction with a gloss of Star Trek level science fiction (Weber, Ringo, Scalzi). Or like a lot of Egan’s or Stross’s, it’s plain weird stuff with an “explanatory” gloss of poorly understood “science”.