I think the negative portrayal of science in the popular press has something to do with it. Plus the declining science literacy in general. It makes non-dystopian sci-fi difficult to relate to and seem too fantastic.

See this FRED chart, which shows real median family income in the USA:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/

Family income hits a peak in 1999 and then is stagnant or declining for the next 15 years, hitting a low point in 2014. It does not recover till 2018.

And this is certainly one of the biggest shocks about the Internet: that it did not lead to prosperity. I'm old enough to remember the optimism and confidence of the late 1990s, we were all certain that the Internet was about to usher in the biggest economic boom in human history.

Exactly the opposite happened: we experienced 19 years of stagnation of family income, the longest stretch in the history of the USA.

So, we've all learned some things, and some of the things we learned have been humbling. Deindustrialization was a bigger deal than we realized, and the cyber economy was a smaller deal than we realized, and competition from China was a bigger deal than we realized.

Between 1870 and 1970 the dramatic advance of science and technology contributed to rapidly rising standards of living. And it was fascinating to speculate about where such trends would go in the future. And that fascination expressed itself in part through science-fiction.

But what kind of science-fiction would appeal today? We've already been saturated by dystopian science-fiction, how much darker should it get? Would people necessarily be interested in a bleak science-fiction that suggests everything is going to get worse and worse forever?

I suspect real-life trends have to resume an upward march of progress before the public is again intrigued by this kind of speculative fiction.

Science fiction is hard to do now.

If interested, see my profile for details and contact.

> Just finished Theft of Fire by @Devon_Eriksen_, and it was a great read — hard SF by a retired engineer. If his About page resonates at all, you will probably enjoy it: https://devoneriksen.com/about

I read a remark somewhere, maybe on HN, that a nation's output of sci-fi seems to correlate with whether or not they are in a boom. Does this ring true to you guys?

I'm not deeply into sci-fi (I wish I read more) but I think it could be true. America had their famous boom after WWII of course, and the Chinese have had every reason to be optimistic for the past decades.

I also wonder if there's a correlation with output of historical fiction. Reaching back into the past.

Older sci-fi especially seems to often just be 20th century society with teleporters, or the united nations, at galactic level, and so on.

But we are now living in a sci-fi era, where it's clear the real issues are around culture itself, and only a small percentage of sci-fi deals with that, and often not well.

Sci-fi purports to reflect our current society and illuminate aspects of possible societies, but I'd say in some ways it has been overtaken by reality.

Sure we can't FTL to Vega minor, or whatever. But if we could, should we? Who should get to go anyway? What would they do there? What are the implications for the rest of society? What about if they have children? Etc, etc.

I am a big fan of Frank Herbert's other books, particularly The Santaroga Barrier, Under Pressure, Destination Void, Eyes of Heisenberg, Whipping Star and the Dosadi books. I can't stand Dune but for some reason people read it over and over again and don't get into the rest of Herbert never mind any other authors.

I'd also blame Tor press for the downfall of sci-fi. Some of their books were groundbreaking like Ender's Game and Forge of God but because they represented a counter-reformation to the "new wave" which made Smith look cool again (great!) but really diminished the range of stories people would tell instead of expanding it. There was also the expansion of fantasy megaseries like Xanth (way too squicky for visual adaptation) and Discworld (too bad visual adaptations stopped when Pratchett passed away, but at least I can go to a Hogfather showing on the epiphany and cosplay as Twoflower)

I kinda feel about Vinge the way I feel about Niven, he didn't quite continue the promise he showed in his early career in his late career. Same with Charlie Stross, who became as bad a left wing nut (sees a fascist under every rock) as Niven was a right wing nut and gave up on the promising Eschaton series for just plain tiring series like The Merchant Princes (Xanth envy without the notes at the end about how much the author hates writing them?)

I liked the self-published We are Legion (We are Bob) which I found at the Salvation Army. Also

https://www.amazon.com/Terraformers-Annalee-Newitz/dp/125022...

for a very recent book.

The media landscape is a lot more competitive. Vastly so. Of course, with the internet, video games, social media, older forms of entertainment will lose market share.

The number of well supported niches in fantasy is ever growing, some with business models that cut out traditional publishers altogether.

If it's 30 year old people reading, sci fi lost its audience.

And probably so: mistb14 year olds would rather play a phone/mmo than read

As others have pointed out here, the premise is based on a linked Washington Post survey that doesn't even really suggest that sci-fi is unpopular (at least no less popular than other "genre" fiction). Also, cyberpunk and other "near-future capitalism-dystopia" stories are only a subset of science fiction.

Honestly, I think we're still working through the psychic trauma of Donald Trump's 2016 victory over Clinton. The literary class was SO caught off guard and stunned by that unexpected outcome, that it lost its mind and has yet to recover.

I don't remember "Silicon Valley" being used as a scare phrase, or regarded all that negatively, prior to 2016. But immediately afterward, stunned people desperate for explanation latched onto whatever theories they could find. We ended up with Clinton losing "because Russia posted on Facebook too much", and overnight Silicon Valley became a bugbear. Then Elon messed with the rage echo chamber on Twitter, and immediately went from "pot-smoking goofball troll" to robber baron and devil incarnate.

In other words, the sort of people who write articles about books are feeling really down on social media companies and tech entrepreneurs these days. And transfer those feelings onto sci-fi, because they're not really into sci-fi themselves anyway, and therefore see all that as one and the same.

That's why detectives are so often protagonists in general, but especially in scifi. The other common approach is the fish out of water, where you introduce someone not used to the scifi society at all and use them as an excuse to explain why the scifi is the way it is. That one tends to have much heavier reader self-insert tendencies though, so writers tend to shy away from it.

Detective novels in space can still be good, and much better than the current crop of Hollywood garbage. I'm still quite bitter about what Amazon did to The Expanse. First legit sci-fi we get in years, and they devolved it into "muscle bound hero shoots aliens with laser gun" within one season of acquiring it from SyFy.

One thing that stuck with me for many years is Joss Whedon saying that the Serenity flies at the speed of the plot. It's more important to understand how people interact in situations than it is to know how fast the ship can go. It can either get there with plenty of time, just in time, or we can't make it - and how that affects the people.

The problem really is those who have the background to do it are (1) struggling to survive in the current market with their degrees without selling out to finance, (2) desiring to contribute to the compendium of human knowledge... So yeah, to get some solid sci-fi ideas you would have to share an alluring slice of the pie... The people who could do it, aren't going to do it for salaries comparable to those in their fields, or even 20-30% above their salaries. It's gotta be multiples with some level of security in the long term.

You may want to check books in the Culture universe by Ian M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds' House or Sun or the Commonwealth universe from Peter F. Hamilton (which also as a fantasy like arc). Not sure we're getting humans meshing into spacetime soon.

Not dystopian, not utopian, just an adventure.

Generalizing that into 'tech is depressing' is understandable since it is literally designed to occupy our attention, but I don't think it's an accurate view of the world.

I think popular SF books are important for bringing the genre to a wider audience. Someone who is not familiar with the genre might pick up Dune because of the films, and sure, maybe that's all they'll read, but maybe they'll enjoy it and pick up some more.

Tor didn't start until 1980, by which time the new wave was long dead. (Also which "Smith" do you mean? E.E.'Doc'? L.Neil? Cordwainer? Clark Ashton?)

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

I like so-called "hard sci-fi", where effort is made into thinking through the details and the sci-fi bit is not just a backdrop for a regular story, or a way to validate neuroses du jour. Both of these are definitely in my top-10 sci-fi books of all time.

I get the feeling 3 body problem is considered one of the best sci-fi books only by people who don't read sci-fi.

Not really recent but I'd recommend Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds (but I'm partial to Reynolds after the Revelation Space series and House of Suns) or if you like military sci-fi Marko Kloos' Frontline series.

It looks like there is a movie in the works called "Mickey 17".

- Adam Roberts: New Model Army (2010?)

- Hiroshi Sakurazaka: All You Need is Kill (2005?)

- Mike Resnick: The Dark Lady (2015?)

- KC Alexander: Necrotech (2015?)

- Gary Gibson: Stealing Light, Nova War, and Empire of Light (2013?)

- Linda Nagata: The Last Good Man (2015?)

Adrian Tchaikovsky's children of time series, as well as his terrible worlds novelas

Anne leckie's ancillary justice series

Martha Wells Murderbot diaries

Andy Weir's project hail mary

John scalzi's old man's war trilogy (technically more than a trilogy, but they fall off after the first 3)

These books take into account recent developments and events so they don't sound anachronistic like some of sci-fi classics. Maybe they'll lose that appeal in few decades and will be harder to read for our grandchildren, but I do enjoy all the cultural references from my time.

I wasn't surprised to see that sales of classics/reprints in science fiction haven't gone down but it's all new publishing that has.

Science Fiction is plagued with all the same problems facing comic books and tabletop gaming: the entire publishing industry only cares about representation and winning industry accolades for said representation and it isn't resonating with fans so sales are cratering. The industries are focused on people who aren't already customers and they aren't attracting them as customers either.

Disney keeps doing this absolutely baffling thing where they purchase male-dominated (by fandom) IPs and run them into the ground (Star Wars, Marvel, and I assume Epic Games' catalog soon-enough). They've acknowledged in previous years annual statements that their marketing primarily targets girls and that they have problems marketing to boys and men. These big IP buys were an attempt to diversify and all they've done is double down on their exisiting customer.