Nobody Wants to Buy the Future: Why Science Fiction Literature Is Vanishing(typebarmagazine.com) |
Nobody Wants to Buy the Future: Why Science Fiction Literature Is Vanishing(typebarmagazine.com) |
I agree with you that the first fact is a dubious proof. Unfortunately, the others aren't better.
The 2013 list of sf best-sellers (the oldest list in the wayback machine from the same source as the article) also contained old books. For instance "Dune" is a best-seller both in 2013 and 2023. And some books were heroic fantasy, not SF, e.g. "Sword Art Online".
For the last claim, I could only find 4 SF novels that match the article's claim, out of the 100 of the decade. 3 were related to movies, and 1 to a TV star (Carl Sagan). In the 2010s, there were one novel related to a movie and another SF book. Hardly conclusive.
A striking tendency in the recent years is that many of the best-sellers are children books. Young adult novels are also more present. I suspect that, since fewer people read novels, books are very often a gift, something one does not read but buys for others. And for children and teenagers, there's obviously the innuendo that reading books is good for their education.
So anything that goes beyond a 6th grade reading level is going to have an exponentially smaller potential customer base.
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.
This article could probably be summarized as "People don't read anymore".
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.
Kind of like news and social media rage baiting the world into self destruction?
I mean humankind has created immensely powerful technology, and we use it to show ads to each other. Why shouldn't we be depressed in general about this?
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
Sci-fi used to speak to things most people cared about. Then it went fringe. I and several people I know went from consuming all things sci-fi to alarm at how fringe it was getting, to just ignoring it.
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.
Amazon didn't pivot from a detective story to an action story. Abraham and Franck (aka James S.A. Corey), the authors, did. After the arc from the first trilogy of books wrapped up.
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.
This said, the converse may be true. "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must make sense". There is such a massively huge amount of fiction now that it's like being tossed into the middle of the Pacific without a raft. We're not looking for an escape from reality INTO technology. It's more likely we are looking for an escape from reality FROM technology.
Lots of videos of military applications, etc.
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.
What is depressing is the current effect it has on society and a large percentage of sci-fi describes new ways humans make each other miserable. I can believe (but have no numbers) that that kind of sci-fi has become less popular.
Are books about war popular in war times or do they become popular afterwards? I think there may be something unique about speculative fiction vs. depressing stuff about the present time, which I find myself drawn to.
Ships fighting by lobbing planets at each other? Or anything in the Culture universe? Good luck putting it on screen. Or just the short novel Diamond Dogs.
Loveable goofs and misfits struggling against the odds to live up to their ideals are relatable, and that future can actually be aspired to. A future which requires humans to be paragons of virtue that have evolved beyond greed, vice and want, in a universe of infinite free energy and abundance, is unattainable. Neither human nature nor the laws of physics can bend that far.
Also the new Star Trek series are incredibly popular, even among many fans of old Trek, many of whom seem to be able to reconcile it with the franchise's espoused values. I guess it doesn't work for you, but you seem to be in a minority among the fanbase in that regard.
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.
And it’s just those two series. I can look down on Xanth but people I’ve met who’ve read that have read other fantasy books like the Deryni books or the Narnia books.
I think it is that people feel socially pressured to read Dune and Hitchhiker and come to conclusions like “reading science fiction is like watching protons decay” or “reading science fiction is being compelled to laugh at jokes that aren’t really funny”.
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?)
And the daily / weekly release cycles most use is really reminiscent of old-school serialized publications.
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.
I have a friend who studied this academically, and the act of roleplaying is especially popular among people questioning themselves and their place in society.
As for the lack of risks, check out itch.io for new table top RPGs, there's never been more variety! Its a really exciting time for it, with tons of new voices doing interesting things, with games ranging from super crunchy tactics to super free form one-page narrative games, and everything in between. Happy to offer any reccomendations
How does this square with, for example, the Dragon Awards? These kicked off after the initial 'sad puppy' Hugo drama, and many of the early winners were from that group, but in the last couple years once they've become more widely known outside that demographic they're looking a little more like the other big popular-vote award.
At this point, in the Star Wars and Marvel universes, it all feels pretty formulaic. The stories have already been told, but now they have to keep producing something in order to make this quarter's earnings numbers. None of it feels essential to watch.
Exactly like this. I almost mentioned it. It's cheaper to sell fear than hope.
Consider that a lot of the best Star Trek stories are merely allegory for our own struggles. Some of them are pretty thinly veiled (The half-black-half-white people hate the half-white-half-black people) but even a kid can pierce that veil and understand and say "Oh... racism is stupid"
I think the "____ in space" effect is probably more related to poor writing then a specific component of the genre.
Awards are always going to be dominated by things that have nothing to do with the work being voted on.
It's easy to read what I'm saying that way but that's not really it. It's more about who the authors are and who the awards committees bend over backwards to exclude.
There's been tons of Hugo Award controversies related to authors, excluded authors and content the last....15 years or so. (Although, to be fair, controversy and Hugos go back as long as the awards have been around).
In scifi literature the formulaic over-told stories aren't even being published anymore. It's more like stuff that's barely even science fiction...
Again, the sales numbers show that the classics in the genre are still selling. It's the new content that isn't moving.
Usually creatives will do something that resonates with them personally and sometimes this touches people universally. This isn't something you can create artificially IMO.
What isn't a given like you tried to say. A saturated segment just means it won't grow. They could have kept all of it forever if they handled it well.
Well then I don't know what to think now. This seems to be a problem for artists in general. You spend your entire life coming up with an incredible work, and once its released to the world and everyone agrees that it's incredible, now there's all this pressure to followup. The second story arc comes off as just completely sophmorish in every possible sense of the word.
'Big Tech' as you call it, in the last decade, enabled us to work from home during the pandemic via zoom calls, and still shop and get food delivered.
Is that 'inspiring'? I guess that depends on what inspires you.
WebRTC is nice and I like it. Work from home is lovely.
I think the internet is having a rough time with things, and that in general corporations have become more greedy and more bold, which overshadows the smaller improvements.
Being able to summon a car to my location at the push of a button and to be able to track it as it arrives is amazing.
Being able to make money at any time by giving people rides in my car is great too.
The legal system of distinctions of different kinds of workers that allows Uber to exploit drivers - not so great.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls090972183/?sort=user_rating,desc...
But if that's the game you want to play, here are rankings by Rotten Tomatoes[0] that say otherwise.
[0]https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/star-trek-tv-by-t...
I get how this is hard to understand for today's young people, who did not grow up with the old shows. We had a whole generation growing up with a future worth working towards and aspiring to. I feel really sorry you didn't get something similar.
But that's weird because they're a completely different genre. They're closer to Star Wars (the one dumb people liked, cuz that's where the $$$ is) than Star Trek.
The Kelvin timeline films have this problem, especially the first two; the third, while definitely not the classic trek series feel, felt more like a Trek movie.
The newer series (excl. prodigy, which I simply haven’t watched) have variable quality (SNW, IMO, is the strongest Trek series since DS9 and the most classic Trek feel since TNG, Discovery was up and down but overall no worse than Enterprise, Picard was good, but more like 3 long Trek movies than classic series Trek), but I wouldn't describe any of them feeling more like Star Wars.
Give strange new worlds a shot you won't regret it.
Nothing comparable to the older stuff until SNW - and Anson Mount in particular is very good. Oh, and The Orville is better ST than much recent ST ever was.
And despite everything going on in the industry right now, D&D is still an enormous, inescapable gravity well. I would say even more so than 20 years ago. We have more games and better games than ever, but I had an easier time finding groups to play not-D&D then versus now. Across multiple cities.
I have over a thousand role playing books in my collection, was very involved in The Forge when it mattered, have been a vendor at the biggest RPG conventions and know lots of authors and artists in the industry. probably half of the popular systems out there right now I have played with some of their creative teams --- not exactly a clueless normie here.
That always puts a smile on my face.