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.
Spoken like someone who's never read Tau Zero
Well, that could be worked around in the world building. My favorite SF-friendly scenario would be if life originated in the Sun's natal cluster (perhaps not around the Sun itself), with tens of thousands of star systems, and spread between them before the cluster dispersed. Presumably panspermia would be much easier in such a situation because the stars are closer together and because maybe residual gas could help particles get trapped near other young systems. In this case all the "infected" systems could have the same coding.
A nice consequence of this scenario is it's compatible with the Fermi argument: even if origin of life is unlikely, it just had to happen once here, and so it not happening elsewhere in the galaxy (or even visible universe) is not a problem.
Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.
Someone like Asimov never considered his books to be fantasy and that he could just insert whatever he wanted with no justification. In fact, he never considered sci-fi to be a genre, he always argued it was a setting and that his most famous stories were detective stories in a sci-fi setting. But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
It’s the exact same thing as a speculative story in the 1920s discussing supersonic flight, even though the jet engine hadn’t been invented yet.
For instance “Tunnel in the Sky” bypassed the whole issue in the 50’s, later imitated by “Stargate”…
And I'm sorry but that thing is too goofy looking to be considered a dragon.
* Space Station that lasts 25 years
* 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service
* Mars rovers that run for 10+ years
* Flying helicopters on Mars
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.)
Realistically even getting to the nearest star in less than 400 years experienced time is way way WAY out of reach for now.
Something roughly along these lines was believable enough for the Altered Carbon universe.
Not necessarily insoluble, but a massive unsolved problem.
Just in that first paragraph:
- How do you stop at the other end? There won't be a large laser array at the receiving end and a laser probe will not have enough stored energy to decelerate itself.
- How exactly do you download a mind to be transmitted? We can't do it right now to be sure, and it's not clear we could ever accurately do that depending on how finely detailed a human brain is.
- How do you transmit it reliably over several hundred light years? Background radiation alone is enough to drown out any signal after a few dozen light years no matter how good your transmission is. Also, when do you start sending? You cannot possibly know which probes survived. (you DID send out at least a few hundred probes right? Don't forget to multiply laser energy requirements by the amount of probes)
- How does the receiving end download a mind into a robot body? We can't even begin to do that on Earth, not even with worms or flies. Humans are right out.
- How do we power the lasers? Conservative estimates have put required laser power at several gigawatts at least. Current laser systems can do that in pulsed mode but only with extremely low duty cycles. Getting enough power together to supply millions of homes would be tricky to say the least. (and see the note above about needing multiple probes just to be on the good side of probability)
- How does the probe survive decades of ultrahard radiation? What about dust it will encounter at high-subluminal speeds, also for decades? The shielding for that won't be lightweight, but the heavier the probe gets the more difficult it will be to accellerate.
- The satellite which is light enough to be powered by lasers also contains the most magical 3d printer anyone has ever seen. You can't just pull the molecules for advanced processors and energy generation equipment out of the air, such a probe would need to set up significant mining industries all on its own without any human interaction.
- A basic robot body. Keep in mind that "picking up a keychain and choosing the right key out of it without dropping the whole keychain" is already a challenge for modern robots.
In short, it'll be several centuries before humanity even gets close to such a project. I'd like to be wrong, but it seems extremely unlikely anyone of us will see such a thing in our lifetime.
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.
One new instrument could upset our grand understanding and models. Maybe we should wait until they get better hardware to marry ourselves to their prognostications of the end of time.
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 had no mortal enemy, tremendous wealth, and "keeping up with the Joneses" became the new operating protocol.
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. Even today we're still better off than a hundred years ago, yet everyone focuses on how bad things are.
Maybe a return to hardship will make us dream again.
We don't know why the expansion is accelerating. For that we have only speculation.
When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment. When areicebo fell and was not immediately rebiult, i realized that most people just dont care about ever meeting another civilization. Even if we did find one it wouldnt change much here on earth. Most people dont care about climate change. They dont care about anything beyond their own lifetime. What matter will aliens be if they are a thousand lightyears away? So people dream now about other things, about grimy politics and alternative history.
• The LIGO methodology is to look for hyper-specified patterns in voluminous reams of apparent 'noise'. It wouldn't be unfair to call it an extensively aggravated search for what one is looking for. That's okay, so long as they provide the stats to back up the non-noisiness of what they turn up. (I'm not a stats person and can't debate that, and. I trust their caliber enough that I don't feel the need to). But to your point, if there are other signatures lurking in LIGO data _that they don't know already how to look for_, then there is no reason why a paper would have gotten produced describing it since the first GW detection in 2015.
• Now, take this for what it's worth in terms of fragmentary information relaying - But at the first Sol Symposium in 2023 at Stanford, I can tell you that in podium-level banter between talks (perhaps it was Q&A and the like IIRC) it was asserted that the LIGO consortium was not allowing studies (read: not allowing access to its data) where the investigator's intension was related to UFO / UAP phenomena (like, extrapolating here, looking for signatures correlated with external reports of UAP sightings). If that claim was borne out, than perhaps the LIGO consortium is just doing preemptive reputation protection in not allowing such studies to kick off with its name associated with it. (One could attempt to follow up with astronomer Beatriz Villaroel for a lead on who said that or if there's substance to that research policy claim)
But my point is, between these two bullet points, you are afforded a complete 'empty set' - and decidedly not a 'negative result' - on whether or not LIGO has detected signatures of a 'warp drive' or other some such non-prosaic phenomenon.
I visited Arecibo a decade before it collapsed. It was impressive and of great historical value, but could repair be cost-effective?
Edit: It did have some unique features.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
Would any of the stories about the characters’ relationships with people not traveling with them be entertaining given the effects of time dilation?
The inner systems become hidebound as they continue to reach out they find that not only has someone beaten them there, they have become Other as well as antagonistic and expansionist.
Now should be a productive time for music in the US then, and possibly elsewhere if things continue on the same trajectory.
Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the evolutionary pressure to produce great literature that requires an interested and intelligent reader to decode the hidden messages written between the lines ;)
The more we look for alien civilizations and come up empty, the more I feel like they were on to something. For all we know, life is exceedingly rare in the universe.
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.
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.
Egan's "The Amalgam" is an SF society which could in principle descend in part from some future humanity, and I suppose if you like Banks' setting for its utopianism you'd be satisfied with the Amalgam. Its citizens tend to live long, full lives in which they're definitely mostly concerned with the upper parts of Maslow's pyramid and their practical needs are fulfilled as a matter of course in most cases.
I must say, to the extent we have any future at all, I think probably of Egan's "Dream Apes". An Orangutan-like self-engineered future humanity who have arranged that there are no apex predators above them, there's an abundance of resources for their relatively modest population, and they just chill, believing that if there is something out there it's not their concern. Of course in the story the Dream Apes are all annihilated by a cataclysmic event which destroys Earth, but hey, it's pretty quick.
no publisher was there to tell author "wtf did you name it, you'll get ignored" or smth?
Really, I think the most significant trend here is that, between 1950 and 1980 or so, the sci-fi genre grew up and stopped relying on painfully literal titles.
Not even abstract, just not completely on the nose. Just as a lot if fantasy is not: only two discord novels would match the author’s search terms even though you’ll find all five inside the pages. None for Malazan. Or Nix’s old kingdom.
And worse, 40% of the sci-fi terms pretty only allow settings of “future solar system”. Not one of the Foundation books would match. Pretty much no classic sci-fi either. Wells’s fucking The War of the Worlds would not, because for some reason (of having any sort of taste) it was not titled “the day Mars invaded planet earth through space and then was beaten” like some lone star light novel.
In that sense I think it's less an overall literary trends and more reflecting the pretty basic way of marketing pulpy stories to teens means putting "vampire" rather than "planet" in big letters in the title. Also, people still writing fantasy novels about alien civilizations aren't setting them on the moon or Mars any more, for reasons...
- mystery, - horror, - fantasy, - and sci-fi have lots of overlap. - And XKCDs What-If-Books even.
But as someone who hates fantasy and loves sci-fi, the biggest difference for me comes from plausibility: "a witch did it" as Occam's fantasy razor for things being the way they happened, and the underlying physics engine means for me: either this is soft "sci-fi", or they better explain with hard rules the limitations and effects of their magic system.
Since (low-sorcery) fantasy RPGs even have torches that would never work, when historical torched looked completely differently, suspension of disbelieve hardly sets in for me in fantasy books.
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.
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.
Craig Alanson also wrote a fantasy trilogy a while back that proved much better than I was expecting. It started off as what appeared to be an uninteresting juvenile fantasy book, but quickly got better and darker. I very much enjoyed reading those.
(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.
It's still possible to imagine new bright futures, but that kind of imagination is very much against a cultural tide that's fervently regressive and nostalgic.
Vaccines put an end to endemic diseases which killed so many children every year. The birth control pill catalyzed the sexual revolution. We had a treatment for diabetes, which was once a death sentence.
The 1950s and onward saw huge changes in how businesses are organized due to computerization. In the US, cheap automobiles, cheap gas, the federal highway system, and subsidies transformed how most people live, including white flight into suburbia.
Plastic was a wonder material. Materials like nylon and polyester transformed the clothing industry.
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.
It depends on the author I guess. Stanislaw Lem for instance mostly separated his "silly-fiction universes" (e.g. the Ijon Tichy and 'robot fairytales' novels) from his "hard sci-fi" universes (for instance the Pilot Pirx novels) - and there it was mostly about the restrictions of space travel (where space travel is usually just plain old cargo hauling), Pirx never left the solar system because it simply wasn't possible during his lifetime (part of him eventually did - maybe - in his last book 'Fiasco'), instead the Pirx novels were mostly occupied with typical 'space trucker' problems like oil leaks on his rocket boosters, wrestling with space harbour bureaucracy or the occasional humanoid robot going into a mode that could be described as 'mad' or 'depressed'.
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…
Edit: Highlights include Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse, The Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, Pushing Ice (and other titles by Alastair Reynolds), Interstellar (debatable, but it's good), Project Hail Mary, For All Mankind, and many more.
I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV shows, but I haven't seen them yet.
If you've already read most of the well-known ones, I could give you some recommendations from less well-known authors and self-published authors you probably haven't heard of yet. Though it would help to have some general direction of what you're looking for (military/space opera/other, ftl/aliens?, etc). Allowing for limited FTL handwavyness opens up a lot of space opera titles that elect to otherwise play by hard sci-fi rules.
* Some may recommend "Pushing Ice" over this one for being more "hard" sci-fi, but personally House of Suns was a much more satisfying read.
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.
Worse, half are confined to the solar system.
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.
Yes. Von Braun wrote an otherwise realistic novel in which earth's explorers find intelligent life on Mars.[1] Heinlein wrote realistically of native intelligent life on Mars and Venus, with far more benign environments then they actually have. But once probes got there, we got to see how bleak they are.
There's a little hope for extrasolar planets, now that we can detect some of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
They certainly knew the Earth and Moon had craters, so proximity to the asteroid belt isn't required.
I suspect they thought the atmosphere on Mars was thicker and like Earth, where the high rate of erosion erases evidence.
Digging around through archive.org I found https://archive.org/details/sim_popular-astronomy_1944-05_52... from Popular Astronomy 1944
> The following extracts are taken from pp. 49 and 50:
> “The recent dominance of the meteoritic impact theory of crater origin makes timely a review of the oases-crater question of Mars. In this treatise, these conclusions have been pointed out:
> “I, Meteorite craters are known on the Earth and Moon; therefore, craters exist on Mars.
> “2. The circular oases on Mars are the size, shape, and number of comparable lunar craters.
> “3. Crater depressions form a natural reservoir, accounting for the intense vegetation in the Martian oases,
> “4. The random distribution of crater oases is apparent, indicating that the canal system was adapted to this haphazard arrangement.
The reviewer of the above points out
> “Why didn’t someone think of the crater theory sooner? The answer is simple. Someone did. Back in 1892, at Arequipa, Peru, W. H. Pickering not only discovered the small black spots on Mars, but he also recognized their similarity to the circlets on the Moon. Because lunar craters were then believed to be volcanic, Pickering may be forgiven for implying that the Martian craterets also were of volcanic origin.
We now know these crater oases were not real. My point is only that some people proposed meteoric craters on the Moon before the 1960s.
BTW, the SF of the pre-Mariner era does have volcanic craters on Mars, like https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v15n01_1941-01_c... and https://archive.org/details/Startling_Stories_v07n03_1942-05... .
I also found https://archive.org/details/exploringmars0000rich/page/150/m... saying in 1954 "no irregularities due to shadows have ever been observed along the terminator—the line dividing daylight from dark—such as would be produced by Martian craters." The author was an American astronomer and also a SF writer in the 1950s. By this we know astronomers were already considering there might be craters on Mars as there are on the Moon.
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.
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.
What used to be read a lot was literary equivalent of a sitcom or slash fantasy.
Then we had the survival period - Harry Potter overlapped the Hunger Games and Divergent eras, all of which produced too many spinoffs. This moved into the Game of Thrones spinoffs. Now, dragons seem to be out, except that Anne McCaffery is back on the shelves.
The latest shift is driven by "booktok" on TikTok. I just saw teenage girls giggling over the new books in the Romance section, while avoiding the YA section. The Dark Romance subgenre is in, and now has its own shelf space.
Hard SF? Other than the Expanse series, not much recently.
Set in "the near future" (the year 2018 in the first season), seaQuest DSV originally mixed high drama with realistic scientific fiction.
> 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,”
Most of the books are indeed paltry entertainment - soapy and saccharine romances, formulaically transgressive erotica, fantasies about unlimited witchy powers, and perfect book boyfriends - but it's still a huge market.
Men moved to video games and chan culture. Which are a different kind of paltry entertainment.
It's curious how there was a shift from male dominated niches, like Lovecraftian fantasy and heroic fantasy, through the imperial sci-fi peak in the 50s to 70s, through the Hollywood-influenced 80s, then into slow decline from the 90s onwards.
With a few exceptions, a bold imagination became more of a liability than an asset.
This is a culture which has no idea where it's going and would prefer not to get there.
But tl;dr: Gatekeepers in big/mainstream publishing have outsourced their slush-piles to underpaid interns, most of whom are young and ambitious women. They tend to like certain things. Also, big/mainstream publishing is chasing data trends, like all other big businesses, which leads to a staleness cycle where they only publish what worked in the last two years. They're afraid to take financial gambles on unproven ideas or new IP.
The good sci-fi these days is mostly indie and mostly underground, IMO. You really have to dig for it. Personally, I find good stuff via Reddit r/powerprogression, but even there, you may have to dig to find gems that speak to you.
I joke that I'm a male author and reader, even though I'm female. The first book of my epic series (which is fully published) is Majority: Torth Book 1.
We are Bob Red rising Murderbot
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commiss...
"The Thor decision caused publishers and booksellers to be much quicker to destroy stocks of poorly-selling books in order to realize a taxable loss. These books would previously have been kept in stock but written down to reflect the fact that not all of them were expected to sell."
Today, I understand mass market paperbacks are dying.
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.
Long time passing...
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.
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.
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...