This is exactly why I started writing my own hard sci-fi novels: Exploration, Technology, and Optimism. First one was a utopian sci-fi about first person born of a seedship. Second was about a sub under Europa, third is about AI therapy and brainwave data.
@@nathanheineman1352 I'm doing a give-away for my novel about Europa. My First Contact Sci-Fi is almost number 1. One more shirtless-man competitor above it. "A Hardness of Minds: Europan First Contact"
Unfortunately most people's idea of hard scifi is to pick the one area of science they know well and project that forward while pretending all the rest of scientific advancement is just going to stand still resulting in a ludicrous mockery of the future. But few if any can correlate the breakneck advancement in macine learning, AND genetics, AND human machine interfaces, AND robotics, AND how ever cheaper and more capable drones shifting the balance of power in war may change geopolitics, AND social media evolution, AND quantum computing - not just encryption and decryption but also quantum annealing, AND space travel, but even more so how all of these factors will feed into each other.
Issui Ogawa is pretty optimistic. I recommend his novella "Old Vohl's Planet." I remember enjoying his novel "Lord of the Sands of Time" as well, but I've forgotten whether it ends on a positive note or not.
Because the naive 1960s techno optimism has been empirically proven false. Anything optimistic about a science fiction story must have something to do with something completely disconnected from the sci-fi elements, because they are not what makes something optimistic or pessimistic or good or bad
I completely agree. I think there's a lot of wonderful drama stories that have a little hint of sci-fi elements and then they just get classified as sci-fi.
It has ever been thus. Remember EE 'Doc' Smith? (the Lensmen and Skylark series?) That man had some brilliant stories, but his connection to science was ... tenuous at best.
'Speculative Fiction' was originally just a way for academics and 'serious' writers to avoid the low brow reputation Science Fiction had garnered by way of pulp magazines and comic books. In the other direction SF fans created terms like Space Opera to distance themselves from the pulpier bits of SF. With time and pedantry, these and other terms have been fleshed out. Philip K Dick was perhaps the turning point from outward-looking and broadly utopic science fiction to inward-looking, pessimistic and dark material, no doubt helped by living in dystopic fever dream of corporate greed, electronic surveillance, and approaching ecological disaster. The counter-culture response of the last 10+ years has been a sort of puritanical reactiveness to perceived moral transgressions, and a dismissive attitude to history and culture. In their attempts to be fair and open-minded they can cast a net so wide that definitions essentially stop meaning anything. And that's how you get a fantasy book as the best SF book of the year.
Yeah as the last commenter said, the hugo awards have always been for science fiction AND fantasy. The whole second half of your comment abt the "counter-culture" response is first of all just plain old nonsense, and decidedly irrelevant in any case.
We say this is a Modern thing, but forget that in 66’ Foundation beat The Lord of the Rings to get the Hugo for best series. That’s THE Lord of the Rings, nominated for a Hugo.
I think you're over-emphasizing the "rigorous science" of older sci-fi. Sure, there is plenty, but there's also Spice, hyperspace travel, the Mule, psychohistory, Monoliths, time travel, Jaunting, force shields, anti-gravity, and any other handwavium the authors wanted to tell their intended story. Gibson said he knew nothing about computers when he portrayed the Matrix in Neuromancer; it was his clear vision of industry and technology turned toward dystopia that made cyberpunk what it was, not a crunchy examination of real tech.
You need to realise (and I was a research scientist), that 1) Most science fiction writers do not really have much knowledge of real science, and mostly never had (Clarke & Asimov are exceptions, not the rule). 2) That much of what transpires in Sci Fi is actually totally contradictory to what scientists know. E.g. there can be no such thing as faster than light travel or time travel without scientifically unfounded fantasy. 3) That the realities of science and technology should not be allowed to impede the flow and structure of the drama and story telling. They will tend to do that. Star Trek was a great example of minimalist design, where science was never allowed to get in the way of a pacy story. The matter transporter is a dramatic device, not a scientific concept, as is the time machine used in many Sci Fi stories.
I also want to add that the exploration of the impact a technology has on humanity has always been a part of SF. You can't think of sicence without thinking about sociology and philosophy. The strong distinction between speculative fiction and SF made in this video does not make sense to me. Fiction has many aspects and just drawing random borders isn't useful, is it?
@@bhangrafan4480That's why it is called science FICTION. Naturally you couldn't have FTL (faster than light) technology without breaking causality itself. But there are ways you could turn around and play a bit with the themes, and that's something even scientists do, like the Alcubierre's Warp Drive, Quantum tunneling and the Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormholes) and the sci-fi authors just elevate these themes so they can create a good story out of it, that's the fiction part that has unfortunately been put aside for social and political discussions...
The Hugo Award winners are very seldom best-sellers. The voting is done by WorldCon members, and may only consist of a few hundred voters. The “Sad Puppies” project ten years ago demonstrated this disconnect.
What twaddle. All the Sad Puppies"proved" was that they were fools and that the voting system couldn't be gamed by a political agenda. And that most people despise fascist wannabes..
@@nolongeramused8135 That’s a silly and bigoted way to see it. But anyway, for about a century now we’ve given awards to straight white men no matter how bad the writing, so I think it’s okay to switch things up.
Of the 3 key figures you mentioned from last century I think that it is PKD who has come to the fore. His Hugo for Man in the High Castle was clearly speculative. His emphasis on the human condition led him to being a lot less positive about the future than Clarke or Asimov and I believe he more accurately predicted this century. We live in a very Dickian world where the common people have little power and things are often grotesquely absurd. Maybe our literature reflects that. Having said that I agree that a straight out fantasy novel shouldn't win the Hugo.
Hugo nominations have always been open for both scifi and fantasy.... There are no actual rules for determining what kind of story can receive a hugo. They once awarded a hugo for best website ffs...
I feel like sci fi and speculative fiction have always gone hand in hand. If something like Dune was released today wouldn't that count as not sci fi enough by this standard? Very socially focused.
I appreciate your points, and think it is an evolution. If Dune is science fiction, then so is the Fifth Season. Different traditions run through the genre. One thing to consider is that unlike several decades ago the protagonists of modern SF aren't often themselves scientists, at least in the traditional sense.
Per Arthur C. Clark, “technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” That leaves a broad swath of fiction that could be taken as 'science' fiction. The argument between 'hard' scifi, and fantasy has been going on *forever* - just because The Fellowship of the Ring was not Hard SciFi, made it no less enjoyable as Azimov, Herbert and the rest. But people were talking about that in the 1970s when I first was introduced to the genre. Let's take Bradbury, as another example - I started reading SciFi because of "The Martian Chronicles" - and the Martian technology and science was not explained in any meaningful way, making their extinct culture magical in how it could reach through time; many of his novels I would not consider hard science fiction by any stretch of the imagination - and are no less good for it. Even so, "Fahrenheit 451" won a Retro-Hugo for 1954 in 2004. As a result, I don't see the question settled - and perhaps it never will be.
I find Adrian Tchaikovsky has tremendous ideas but terrible payoff. He somehow made a story about sentient space spiders tedious, and it's just gone downhill with each subsequent installment of Children of Time.
I prefer viewing genres more as Tags than as Folders. The folder approach needs a new folder for each genre or subgenre. "Hard sci fi", "Romantic fantasy", etc etc. It's useful for public libraries, but limited. The Tag approach is more like on Good Reads. It's more like "genre elements", because a work doesn't always fit neatly into a subgenre folder. With search engines, you can also search for tags like "hard science" or whatever. It's impossible to lose the "essence" of science fiction (or any other genre). There are still people writing hard science books. There can always be new authors exploring old themes. As long as people know that the concept exists, it cannot be lost. The only question is how well it sells. Admittedly, some authors get more popular postmortem, so current sales numbers aren't even an accurate indication either.
A Rod Sterling quote sums up my position, "It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different thing. Science fiction is the the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the the impossible made probable." So a lot of SF/Sci-Fi/speculative fiction meets that criteria. What we are then left with is taste. My SF is better than your SF because mine has maths/literary merit/deals with serious issues etc. And here is where Sturgeon's Law comes into play, 90% of everything is trash. My perspective is that human beings are not capable of being rational about subjects (see Professor Sapolsky's lectures for the gribbly detail). To simplify, the ideal may be infinite diversity in infinite combination, but humans can't handle an infinite number of diverse combinations. My conclusion led me to write my own SF books, and I can say that what I like to write is not necessarily what people like to read.
Yes, i have noticed something similar. As a scientist myself, I suspect some of the reason might be that science is hard. Many of the old authors were actual scientists, or had strong science background, not sure that is true today.
So by these definitions, was Ursula K LeGuin speculative fiction and not sci-fi all along? Are we starting to split hairs? Though to get into the point itself, I think the shift is less about going from hard science to speculative, and more going from premise driven to character driven. I would attribute that change to the increase of science fiction and fantasy in movies and TV over the last few decades.
@@artlesscalamity You'd be surprised at the number of people that agree with me 100%. Her entire shtick was writing "sci-fi for people that don't read or like sci-fi" and only marginally incorporating any parts of the genre while she wrote. If you'd never read any actual sci-fi then her books would seem like the real deal, but they aren't. Aside from being entirely forgettable, plodding, and poorly edited, her plots were retreads of works done decades before by better authors. She couldn't even write original ideas, or even dress up an old one and keep it interesting. Tolkein, for example, was a boring writer, but had awesome plots and characters. So awesome that much better writers have completely ripped off his stuff and churned out decades-spanning careers in the process. LeGuin sort of did the opposite of that in many respects; she was the type of writer that would now be hired by Disney to do make another shitty Star Wars sequel to be watched by people that never saw the originals.
@@nolongeramused8135 You’d be surprised how little I care about random reactionary opinions. “Doesn’t even write original ideas” - are you high? Le Guin wrote several classics that crossed genre lines and even birthed modern subgenres like solar-punk or the whole wizard-school thing. She brought incredible empathy and progressive curiosity to sci-fi. Her work for me embodies the best of what literature can do. It’s fine if you personally don’t want to read it, but these are some wild takes. Anyway I know better than to argue on UA-cam.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Award nominees and winners are one way to judge the trends. Another would data on consumption, both in retail and library loans.
Imagine if romance books just became horror books instead with pink covers, the audience would reject them wholesale too. Sci-fi without sci-fi is just fiction. My guess is the sci-fi tag gets more sales than the fiction tag would so the need to appropriate the title for unearned sales is needed by corrupt publishers. The award industry has clearly also become just as politically corrupt too. But you can only con somebody once before you lose your reputation forever...
I think you summarized the shift/development/focus over time very well. I come from the readership as a 'Hard SF' fan and books written in the 50.s 60's & 70s :-) Thanks. On a follow-up point I did/do prefer the shorter writing style of those times - written in an economic 150 to 200 pages. Then occasionally reading some epic work or trilogy ie. David Brin's Uplift Series (from the 1990's) Many of the writers I enjoy cut their teeth on short stories or novellas. Maybe that begs the question -or another video from yourself 'Is there such a thing as an ideal length for a work of SF?' :-)
Yes - 60,000 words. Now you find 500 page books with a 60,000 word novel that has been padded with all the elements from main stream fiction to cover up that the writer didn't have enough new or good ideas to fill 500 pages. If I wanted to read the other 340 pages I would have read something else.
@@neilreynolds3858 Regards the padding, that seems to be getting more and more common. It's getting to the point where, if I find I am reading a novel like that, I just abandon it. A recent one (I can't even remember the name) took about 25% of the word length for a character to get prepped to go into a shuttle, fly over to another craft then get out. During it, we got to know all about her hair style, her failing marriage, how much she misses her kids, what food she likes, her favourite overalls, what she is wanting to have for dinner..... Very very little of the word count was taken up with the actual plot. It turned what could have been an intriguing novella into a slog I didn't bother finishing. By the way, there were at least four more novels after it, with more to come.
Really well thought out video. With this sort of topic, it would be easy to fall into reflexive gatekeeping, but I think you resisted this to offer a more nuanced take. I think one thing to note is that we live in an age where many concepts once more or less exclusively found in sci-fi are permeating more mainstream fiction - things like time travel or multiverses. Moreover, I think in general we live in a time of genre bending and blurring to a greater extent than ever before. I think this offers pros and cons, but I also don't think it inherrently precludes purer forms of genre fiction, such as hard sci-fi, from being written. The publishing industry will go where the money is, but as you note we live in a more democratic time where anyone can distribute their work.
i reject the whole premise. i only came here to complain. no i'm not gonna watch it. well, they're judging by the genre, i can judge by thumbnail. if they wanted me to hear their nuance they shouldn't have went all clickbait with it
@@The_Burning_Sensation keeping the gates closed to straight white men, aka who created and sustains the genre. Look at the two Hugo award winners he mentioned: Jemisin is a repulsive, talentless black woman, and Kingfisher is an overweight white woman.
The recent "Hugo Awards" really don't appeal or sell exciting Sci-Fi at all. They seem more like products manufactured to elicit a given idea of sci-fi and/or a judging or voting process that's "gone horribly wrong" in true sci-fi tradition!
I've definitely noticed this. Every time I go to the bookstore and just peruse the shelves, there's less and less sci-fi in the "science fiction" section. Speculative fiction isn't the worst culprit for the dilution though, that would be young adult fantasy fiction.
That's an interesting definition of speculative fiction. As I understand it, speculative fiction is an umbrella term, not a separate genre. The video also reminded me of an old science fiction writing workshop joke (old as in I first heard it about 30 years ago): Question 1: Define "science fiction". Question 2: Name 5 science fiction classics that don't fit the definition.
Science Fiction is a subset entirely contained within Speculative Fiction. So this video doesn't really make sense as it repeatedly asserts that they are "separate genres", when its Fantasy (another subset of Speculative Fiction) and Scifi that are separate genres. (Although they overlap more than they don't)
Yeah, that was my understanding too. It also seemed like this video was trying to present hard sci-fi as the "truest" form of the genre, even though I'm pretty sure that's always been more of a niche. The whole thing just feels weirdly dismissive, if not outright twisting definitions.
Hey Darrel, really interesting video topic! I too wish that there was more high-profile science fiction centering science these days (though I do also think there is good stuff that goes under the radar), but to be honest, the dichotomy of ‘science fiction’ and ‘speculative fiction’ has never seemed particularly useful to me. In particular, I think it’s quite strange to define a genre in an exclusionary manner where the presence of certain themes can ‘disqualify’ a work that clearly meets say, aesthetic criteria. For instance, it makes no sense to me to say that a work that takes place in space in the future but deals primarily with sociological/interpersonal themes is not ‘true’ science fiction. I totally sympathize with those who are saddened to see a decreased focus on one of the key aspects of science fiction, but I also think it’s an incredible disservice to the power of the genre to say that it becomes ‘just another type of fiction’ once the technological focus is removed. From what I know, this debate has basically been raging since the ‘60s, when New Wave SF writers began to become increasingly interested in writing about the social and cultural phenomena of the day, so I think it’s hard to say that SF has begun to lose its essence any more recently than during that time period. In that regard, I think it’s a bit strange to lump Dick, a quintessential New Wave writer, together with Asimov and Clarke. But it’s also not like the latter two didn’t have more humanistic interests: ‘Foundation’ is all about macrohistory, ‘Childhood’s End’ takes a lot from Jungian psychology, etc. All that to say that I think that everything’s a bit more muddled than people often claim, from those angry about the unscientific interlopers of the ‘60s to people today. A couple other small things: - The Hugo Awards have always been for both science fiction and fantasy. It’s true that they were heavily skewed towards science fiction for much of their early history, and I think there's a much deeper rabbit hole about publishing and reader tastes (I remember hearing that the amount of SF published has been declining since the '80s?) that one needs to go down before being able to talk about what fantasy books winning Hugos means for science fiction. - As far as I know, all of the string theory stuff in ‘The Three Body Problem’ is just wild speculation and has no basis in current understandings of the field. I really like the trilogy, but I don’t it’s a great one to cite if we’re saying that science fiction needs to have a basis in real science. The amount of technical language certainly gives the appearance of hard SF for sure and I even think this type of speculation might turn out to have value, but not because it’s super plausible scientifically.
Genres are artificial confines and definitions to a) better market a book towards an audience or b) make oneself feel elitist by dismissing "lesser genres". Whatever label one puts on a book: it doesn't change the content. The more confined an author writes for a specific (sub)genre and towards a target audience, the more formulaic and uninspired their writing becomes - on average.
I have recently bought 30 sci fi books on vintage book sites. Most are from the 50s 60s and 70s. Rarely do new authors interest me. The new books seem to lack freedom of imaginations.
Have you read three body problem? I think its the only recent sci fi that really full of imagination but also filled with some hard science and good (not great) characters
Hasn't this always been the case though? Listening to your comparison of science fiction and speculative fiction, I realized that even going as far back as the sixties these genre classifications seem to have been blurred. A Clockwork Orange is sometimes considered sci-fi but only has one new scientific element.
Another thing to consider is that the line between sci fi and fantasy is increasingly blurry. Dune has people with superhuman abilities with a shaky scientific basis. This trope has spread and in some cases the authors stop bothering to make a scientific justification for the supernatural occurrences. Authors who write both fantasy and sci fi (e.g. Orson Scott Card) sometimes blend the genres so much that even they couldn't tell you which genre their book falls into.
If you’re going to impose the hard sci fi filter on what qualifies, I would argue that the space opera has to go too. Sure, the tropes are all there but the stories aren’t about the technology. They are, at their essence, political thrillers.
I think it has to do with two major factors. One, the major scifi tropes have been mainly explored by masters in the past. Two and this is a major one, the repetitive world crises of the last decade have pushed for a more dystopian view of the future where the state of the human race is the main subject and not the megastructures in which it lives. Larry Niven could get away with frankly mediocre characters in the 70s because his cosmos was full of wonders. His characters were background to the awesome science. But now that it is in the open so to speak, people find more pertinent to ask what of the poor miners on Mars (Red Rising) or AI gone self deterministic (Murderbot).
I agree with your second part - we are living in a dystopia _right now,_ so the focus, at least should be, working on undoing the systems of exploitation which are running rampant throughout all aspects of our lives. It is not until those systems are undone that we can start to imagine fantastical wonders; we're too busy wondering how to keep a roof over our heads at the moment.
@@elonmusksellssnakeoil1744 Today there is less war than in any time in the past. Less violence, less starvation, less racism, less disease. But more wealth, more education, more freedom, more access to advanced heath-care. You are living in the best time period humans have seen. You are one of the most privileged people to have ever existed. In all of history. You have comforts and luxuries past generations never dreamt of. The only things you lack are perspective and self-awareness. "dystopia right now" lol.
@@pkz420, advancements in understanding of health and science do not equate to a lessening of imperialism. The planet is burning more than ever before in human history. There is greater wealth inequality than any point in human history. The US doesn't have healthcare or education or housing or even food as guaranteed basic human rights. That "advanced healthcare" will put anyone into 6, 7, or even 8-figure debt for the rest of their lives. We have no say in what matters or politicians deliberate whatsoever. Police execute more than 3 citizens every day of the year on average in the US. Millions are food insecure. Millions more suffer crippling mental anxiety and drug addiction. There are more people incarcerated in the US today than ever before anywhere on the planet. The US keeps wars going to enrich weapons manufacturers. Women don't have abortion rights. I can go on and on and on. If you don't see a problem with the worsening of all of these atrocities and more, then you are not just blind, you are willfully ignorant, and probably just hate people.
@@pkz420 just because we have all of that doesn't make it any less a dystopia. Cyberpunk very rarely has overt war and yet those are often stories of oppression, exploitation and dehumanization. Physical violence sometimes replaced with fiscal violence.
I noticed this years ago with sci-fi podcasts like Escape Pod that I'd listen to in bed, and noticed the bizarre frequency of pure fantasy being included, and even winning the Hugo for best sci-fi short story while being pure speculative fantasy. It's probably one of the main reasons I didn't actively engage with the community just as I was finding a community.
🚀 Fantastic exploration of the evolving landscape of sci-fi, Daryl! Your insights into the transformation of the genre from its roots to the present were both informative and thought-provoking. I resonate with the sentiment of finding a balance between the traditional and the new in sci-fi literature. The discussion on the Hugo Awards as a litmus test was particularly intriguing, and it got me thinking about how the genre's narrative preferences are indeed shifting. The emphasis on sociopolitical commentary and character development, while valuable, does raise questions about the evolving identity of sci-fi. By the way, your mention of the Hugo Awards reminded me of the dynamic changes in the publishing industry, echoing the sentiments of your previous video on the topic. It's fascinating to witness how a wider pool of voices is reshaping the sci-fi narrative. Smashed the subscribe button after watching your video! BOOM! On a related note, I'll be releasing a sci-fi synthwave album in early 2024! 🎶 Given your keen insights into science fiction, I'm sure you'll find it to be a thought provoking lyrical journey through uncharted sonic realms. Can't wait for you to experience the fusion of science fiction and synthwave vibes. Keep up the stellar work on your videos, books, and looking forward to more captivating discussions! 🌌🎧 #SciFiEvolution #SynthwaveAdventure2024 CHEERS! -Bending Grid
First, looking to the Hugos for guidance is fraught with peril. They're voted on by a self-selected group of people who pay for the opportunity by buying memberships to World Con. As seen during the Sad Puppies debacle, they have a specific and very militant view of what SF should be that doesn't match the views of the actual SF audience (as can be seen by sales of novels.) Let's just say that I haven't had much respect for the Hugos for at least 40 years. But, since you are using the Hugos as a touchstone, let's look at a few other Hugo-Award-winning novels, from a much earlier era: 1956, Double Star, Heinlein - Almost entirely a character study and sociological examination. 1959, A Case of Conscience, Blish - Another sociological examination mostly divorced from science. 1960, Starship Troopers - Some technology, hand-waved science, mostly an examination of politics as revealed through the lens of war and the military. There are several award winners in that same era that I haven't read, so can't comment on, and one year where no best novel award was made, but I don't see any particularly hard SF during the earliest period of the award. Then we come to your examples of "real SF": Dune is almost entirely divorced from science and technology and is rather a fairly deep dive into sociological concepts, set in a far future whose connections to our present are nebulous at best. The same is true of Foundation almost point for point. Neuromancer, while exploring technology more than the other two you mention, is again an examination of society far more than an examination of technology or science. Hard SF, even when it has garnered significant attention (A Mission of Gravity, Clement or Dragon's Egg, Forward, for instance) has never done as well as less rigorously scientific novels. To say otherwise is the worst sort of "kids these days" revisionist history. IMO, your argument is weak at best and cherry-picked with your thesis in mind at worst.
I grew up on hard sci fi among other things. With the moon landing, the atom bombs (then nuclear), cryptography (the Enigma machine), cars, airplanes, photography, TV, video, computers etc the world seems to be leapfrogging into a technological wonderland. I agree with you about retaining hard science in sci fi. But I’m quite worried about where technology is taking us.
By your definition, Asimov's Foundation series isn't Science Fiction, which runs in opposition to your choice to label it classic SF. The definition of just what SF actually has been hotly debated for well over 75 years, and pretty much any definition that honestly covers even just works in the so-called Golden Age of SF (~1935-1960) either includes most mainstream fiction or excludes a huge chunk of the SF published during that period. Gatekeeping has long been considered a very negative trait in Science Fiction and its close neighbors Fantasy and Speculative Fiction.
I may have misunderstood the video, but I've always considered the speculative to be under science fiction. A reader can't deny the speculative elements of Asimov and Clarke's famous stories. And, especially when it comes to the pulp fiction of the 40's, 50's, and 60's, the premises of those short stories are incredibly fantastical. I agree there's a gross conflation between fantasy and sci-fi. We all know what fantasy looks like versus what science fiction looks like. But science fiction has long been fantastical.
Harlan Ellison preferred speculative as he did not want to be confined to the 'ghetto' of science fiction, so at least he felt it was its own thing. The man was a bit of a PITA but I liked him enough to name my second child after him.
Science Fiction isn't what it used to be - but then again, it never was. I think it's important to remember Sturgeon's Revelation here - "90% of everything is crud". More importantly, we tend to forget the 90% after a few years and just remember the gems. For every "Dune" - which arguably hit a perfect balance between scientific world-building, allegories about society and religion and "Macbeth in spaaace!" drama - there were a dozen so-so books that filled a much-needed gap in the literature which are rightly lost in the mists of time. The debate about "hard" vs. "soft" SF is hardly a 21st century phenomenon ("The Handmaid's Tale" which pretty much codifies the "is it really SF" debate was published in 1985!). I remember getting books from the SF section of the local library in the 70s which turned out to be political allegories with no "science" (Don't remember the names since - well, see above - although I do remember at least one had a Chris Foss spaceship on the cover which had absolutely no relevance to the story). I think the ultimate "puts the science into science fiction" form were the "problem solving" stories by the likes of Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Hal Clement et. al that people seem to be pining for were terrific, but were only ever part of the genre (and, also, at their best in the form of short stories). Another question is whether "real SF" is really dying or if its just that "speculative fiction" and fantasy are becoming increasingly popular & groups like the Hugo Awards have decided to embrace them (most SF fans I know are equally into fantasy, social/politicial allegory, alternative history, comic books etc. so maybe lumping it together makes sense). Harder SF is still around if you look for it, although nobody can agree where the line is drawn. Andy Weir has been mentioned - definitely in the "problem solving" genre. SF doesn't get harder than Greg Egan, but even he does social commentary and jokes alongside the links to math journals and computer simulations. "The Expanse" series was pretty rigorous with its science (allowing itself a few bits of fantasy tech and then sticking to the rules) alongside the political allegory. I recently read "Gallowglass" by SJ Morden - again, lots of social comment (and pessimism) but also carefully worked-out plausible tech space exploration and asteroid mining. My litmus test for SF would be "could this story have been re-written as a straight present-day or historical drama without completely changing its nature". I've read and enjoyed books by authors like Arkady Martine, Martha Wells and Becky Chambers who seem to do well at winning awards (2 of whom were mentioned in the video) and nominations and they'd definitely pass my SF test. Also, in recent years there have been several examples of what I regard as "proper science fiction" on TV which have really pushed the envelope. The Expanse TV series (c.f. the usual post star-trek 'morality play in space' fodder) of course - even if it wasn't perfect the attention to science set new standards for TV. Then you have "Black Mirror" - an anthology show which has been mainly about plausible (to varying degrees) extrapolations from current technology (sometimes like PK Dick updated for the C 21st) - and "Love, Death and Robots" - another anthology but mainly straight adaptations of short stories by recognised SF authors. I can't *quite* bring myself to say that about the Foundation adaptation - but then I never liked the book much and think the show would be better if they'd just made the "Game Of Thrones In Spaaace" show that the writers clearly wanted...
I have always read sci-fi and fantasy. I admit that I have now moved away from what is nowadays called sci-fi (but I still have fantasy). One aspect is that we are now missing the cautionary tales of what science evolution could mean. So I wonder if the change in sci-fi has not been engineered to limit the number of people who would be cautious in the way science evolutions impact mankind..
That is why we need more Cyberpunk, but in a more mature and sophisticated form than media tends to present the genre as. We need more cautionary tales warning people of the risks of abuse inherrent in social media, asset digitisation and transhumanism.
@@StarlasAiko I'm running multiple generative AIs on my 3060, I got AIs running other AIs. Like using LLMs to make the perfect prompts for Stable Diffusion(text to image), and another multimodal LLM checks the work and send it back to the first LLM with editing notes until I get a half dozen good results to choose from. Instead of trial and error and going through hundreds of generations to get exactly what you want. And I just started a couple of months ago. I know next to nothing about AI. I use a one click installer and follow UA-cam video tutorials. Science fiction always implied a vision of the future. You know you're in the singularity, when you can't write about the future without getting the present wrong. It's like trying to watch a sci-fi movie when they didn't have cell phones yet. These days sci-fi is anachronistic by the time you get done making it. That's why every good sci-fi going forward either requires an AI revolution, or will require the assistance of an AI to create in the first place. Welcome to the future, Cyberpunk won. It's no longer sci-fi, it's current events.
Halfway through this video and I need to get moving very shortly, sorry if this is already covered. Wouldn't the speculative vs science-fiction divide have "Dune" fall on the speculative side?
My impression is that we have very good hard sci-fi authors like Dennis E. Taylor, who became popular through social media and YT, so that's what I've learned and I tell all budding authors: If you don't have enough mass-market appeal right off the bat to have a publisher on hand, you do need a podcast, a YT channel, something, in order to have reader engagement and build that long tail.
My gateway into SF were the Tom Swift Jr. books my mum bought for me in the late 50s. I still have them. Although I read a spectrum of SF books, Hard SF was, and is, my favourite (Heinlein, Clarke, Poul Anderson, Niven, Cear, Biggles, Clement, to name a few. followed by, and most of the time including military SF (Banks, Bujold, Drake,). To be honest, I love the works of Ray Bradbury, Van Vogt, Niven, Zelazny, Julian May, Leguin, Card, Connie Wilis to name a few more. I am not surprised about the 2023 Hugo Winner. I AM SHOCKED! Good old capitalism at work. Being a purist and pedant 😁 I detest the term Sci Fi. It has too much of an association with reviewers and not true fans. I believe it was Hugo Gernsback that coined the term scientifiction. Well researched and thought out video!
If sci-fi novels are leaning more in the speculative direction, I think maybe it might be because movies, TV, and video games have all been leaning more in the direction of spectacle. That is to say stories where the "science" is mostly just an aesthetic backdrop to otherwise generic action stories that don't really ask the same kind of deep thought-provoking questions of classic sci-fi.
The Hugo Awards have always recognized fantasy in addition to science fiction. Yes, they're awarded by the World Science Fiction Convention, but that's because, when the awards started in the mid-20th Century, fantasy as a publishing category didn't really exist - any attempt at a separate award for just fantasy would only have, like, one or two novels to look at each year. It wasn't until the 1970's that fantasy literature for an adult audience really began to take off, and it took another decade or two for it to be seen as respectable.
I’m probably dating myself here, but at one point the distinction you draw between these sub-genres of SF were referred to as ‘soft sf’ (or sometimes ‘sociological sf’) and ‘hard sf’, with one being more people-focused and one being more technologically focused. In 2015 there was a thoroughly vicious fought war over the Hugo award and its focus and direction (I say this from the perspective of someone unwillingly swept up into it) which might interest you (might even make an interesting video topic, given the themes of this current video).
Classic sci-fi hasn't won a Hugo in years. Most years, I just use the Hugo short list as a guide of books that, since they don't explore strange new worlds with new technology and are usually pessimistic in outlook, I will avoid like the plague. I have tried to read some of the newer "sci-fi", and it just doesn't satisfy. It's like the latest, greatest taste someone comes up with, or a company changing the taste and/or look of a product to generate "excitement": the original was fine, and most people liked it. Sometimes "new and improved" is neither. Good analysis in this video. Thanks for sharing!
Short answer; No. Longer answer? Many of the contentions within this piece are just historically not true. A very quick glance at the history of the Hugo's for best novel for examples, shows that among early previous winners are A Canticle for Leibowitz, and the Man in the High Castle, both of which are hardly optimistic or in keeping with some notion of a 'core exploration of technology and it's implications on mankind'. Witchworld, which is about as Fantasy as you can get, was nominated in 1964., I think the problem is more people not understand what Genre is and expecting hard borders around those Genre's. Or, as others have observed, generating distinctions in order to point to the Books I like as being 'Real' Sci-Fi, and the books I don't aren't 'really' Sci-Fi, or some such nonsense. It's weird to have this conversation in the 2020's, given that it's been ongoing since basically the 1920's. One only has to look at discussions regarding the 'New' Science Fiction of the 60's, often decried for getting away from the Stealy Space Captain and Engineers of the prior error and caring more about social sciences or some such. The complaints that 'Science Fiction isn't the same as it was!' strikes me often as just people no longer being thirteen. Thematic trends are going to change over time, but this 'debate' as it were is false, tired and anachronistic.
Most would disagree with this "no true Scotsman" stuff. Back in the golden age, Frederick Pohl said "science fiction needs to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." SF has always been about the effects on culture and society, not the technology. John Brunner's "Stand On Zanzibar" would be a classic example from the 1960s, that is more relevant now than in the 1990s, before the rise of AI and the internet.
There is always a small market for hard sci-fi, and there are relatively few writers capable of writing in that genre. There is always a much larger market for soft sci-fi / fantasy stories, and a much higher supply of writers. As long as publishers exist to make money, guess which one will get the spotlight by publishers.
Some of the highest rated sci-fi of all time falls into this category you describe, it's not a new thing at all, definitely agree seems more and more common but is it really a bad thing?
But you missed Ursula K. LeGuin, who wrote about society, psychology, gender and sexuality (before that was a thing), and Octavia Butler, whose Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Parable of the Sower" examined both the Black American experience and religion, through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old girl. Yes, that was a long sentence. It would have been longer if I'd taken the time to talk about Neal Stephenson and Gene Wolfe, two of my favorite male authors. Also, I feel you have it in for female authors.. You chastise Arkady Martine for examining the mutual culture shock experienced by Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass. That was a major element of both Hugo Award-winning novels, but the main conceit was the inheritable memory technology developed by The Station and its effect on the Teixcalan Empire. Martha Well's "Robot Diary' novellas are about artificial intelligence. Sorry, but I don't buy your thesis.
Women are, generally speaking, bad writers. And they are especially bad at science fiction and fantasy because they have a hard time relating to characters who aren't very similar to them. That's why Octavia Blackler only writes dumb preachy black "sci-fi," and so on. And Sower is BARELY sci-fi in the first place.
I appreciate your methodical and thoughtful analysis of the modern science fiction/speculative fiction landscape. When considering the genre's current shift, I see multiple influences on the shift from less science-based thesis to more social/emotional-based storytelling. Between MMO games, social media, which is a diabolical science fiction conceit, and broader democratizing socio-cultural changes, the influence on the genre was inevitable and natural. Interestingly, STEM education's rise coincides with this genre shift; science in SF has retreated, becoming light washes in many works. The opposite often occurred with older SF, with washes of emotional and psychological traits shunted to the background. These older, often shorter books tip-toe around or allegorize social or emotional realities or concepts rather than forefront them. I think of Arthur C. Clarke, who is considered excellent at hard science but rubbish at characters (i.e., emotional representations.) Clarke's work, however, thrived on emotional and philosophical explorations of the universe itself ("2001: A Space Odyssey" is the best example). Yet, he wrote polyamorous and bisexual backgrounds into characters in "Rendezvous with Rama" and "Imperial Earth," respectively. Religion, assiduously avoided in SF, was toyed with or dismissed by Clarke in "The Nine Billion Names of God" and "The Star." Overall, the changes in our beloved genre occur for various reasons and pressures, and the current shift is another one of those fluctuations. Representation and diversity in all their forms in SF publishing are long overdue, so hopefully, we can continue to find what piques our interest, emotionally or scientifically, or both, in the endless wave of ideas.
I question the "purity" of scientific basis for scifi novels. A vast proportion of "scifi" throughout the years has had quite limited attachment to rigorous science. Take a series for example like the Xeelee series by Stephen Baxter, most people would classify this as scifi but the science is so advanced that it just becomes space magic and could just have been as easily written in a fantasy setting. David Brin's Uplift series barely mentions a single element of science (other than genetic engineering for uplift) and is mostly a cultural/war space opera but his books won 2 Hugos. Half of Heinlein's work was "rugged American frontiersman ... but in space". Iain Banks Culture series essentially ignores science, its only two major principles are AI + post-scarcity society. I'd still classify all that stuff as scifi. So I'm kinda dubious about constricting scifi just to pure Arthur C Clarkian hard science.
The truth is, science fiction has always been a sub-genre of fantasy. Magic became "science" and "technology". The mechanics of magic became math. But yes, modern sci-fi is mostly a backdrop for dramas. The reason why sci-fi was optimistic is because it was created primarily by humanists, a religion that is slowly dying as we become more aware of reality. It is no longer philosophically viable (rational) to imagine that technology will somehow magically create a utopia or "superior" society. What people have learned (what some of us have always known because we were never caught up in the utopianist fantasy of humanism), is that humans beings are the same as we ever were regardless of technology levels.
As soon as the second iteration of Star Trek came with Picardo, and the overemphasis of human interactions I knew it was over.Days of our Lives on the Enterprise.
Just a note: The last male to win the Hugo for best novel was Cixin Liu in 2015. I think that's a factor in the change of direction from hard sci-fi to fantasy.
There is a crucial issue in all this that you have almost completely missed, in my view. This is the historical identity, according to many 'thought leaders' from the late nineteenth century up until now, of 'hard science' with some form of philosophical materialism. Materialist theories of the mind sit squarely behind much classic sci-fi literature in various ways - Isaac Asimov and Philip K Dick being obvious examples. I have never been drawn to these classic authors for more or less that reason, as I am an uncompromising arguer for the utter falsity of said materialist theories. Moreover, I think they suck all the real meaning out of our lives. I recall trying to read the 'Helliconia' books by Brian W. Aldiss and tossing them down in disgust for exactly that reason. Those people who like the alleged 'realism' of philosophical materialism seem to be great admirers of sci-fi from the 40s to the 60s, whereas people like me are much more into the likes of Ursula Le Guin, classic fantasy and so on. One reason is that we think that truly hard science has solid roots in more idealist philosophical understandings and indeed a rigorous mysticism like that of the founders of quantum theory. Sci-fi that understands this is the kind I want to read!
I can tell you why sci-fi is lagging of late. the research alone buries you under a mountain of drafting and then there's trying to keep the logic if you really care about science, so to speak. it's truly a genre you can't half ass without that voice in your head (that cares about the genre proper) wagging its finger at you. fantasy has a "god of the gaps" cheat that can stick out like a sore thumb in sci-fi.
Great analysis and video. I have not commented for a while, but I understand the concepts discussed here are important. Hard Golden Age Science Fiction frequently discussed memory, identity and belief systems, as well. Just a few examples: Who Goes There - John W. Campbell Jr, The World Of Null A - A E Van Vogt, Anything You Can Do - Randall Garrett, multiple stories by Keith Laumer, many more. SF is a big tent, we have room for everything, but should not exclude anything, either. Monolithic SF is not appealing. As a product of Golden Age SF, which really encouraged education in every field (why my degree is in Electronic Engineering), I still feel that emphasis is important. So many authors felt they should impart the lessons learned from the WW2 era, too. In the March 1982 edition of Amazing, Robert Silverberg discussed this issue briefly and Lester Del Rey at length in his 1976 SF History: The World Of Science Fiction 1926 -1976. Thank you for exploring this topic.
Dune and Foundation series were much more of speculative fiction than sci-fi, so nothing have changed. When I want sci-fi, I look into Seal of Approval and Atomic Novels sections of Atomic Space Rockets site. Just the existence of the latter site makes current time a golden age of Sci-Fi.
One of my favorites is Lexx. I’ve criticized much sifi as being regular drama in space , or shoot ‘‘em up , but in space. Lexx is a fantastic example of what I call science fiction, maybe science fantasy
Lexx was a TV show that threw in lots of hardcore SF ... Mixed with softcore, weird bondage stuff, and mad fantasy. It was hard not to like its sheer Gonzo madness.
@@marcjohnson5991 the entire second season had a backstory of self replicating mantid drones that eventually became so numerous they caused a big crunch.
I am not so comfortable with the split between 'sci-fi' and 'speculative fiction'. I feel that it is all sci-fi - but with sub categories (the name of the overarching parent category could easily be something else though). That one sub category is less popular at the moment is unfortunate - but tastes may change again. If I follow Sci-Fi Odyssey's classification proposed here, then many great works of sci-fi are arguably not sci-fi. Stranger in a Strange Land? Dune? Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion? Lord of Light? etc. None of those novels revolve around actual scientific principles.
It's an interesting discussion, however I feel defining one flavour of scifi as "true" scifi is somewhat arbitrary. It's the same problem with defining what the canon is in literature. It necessarily evolves with time because we as a culture are always changing, and the sources of inspiration for writers always change-in subject matter but also in form and technique. There is more hybridization in genre than ever, with scifi borrowing from literary fiction in style and characterization, and literary fiction borrowing scifi ideas. I'm sure someone will criticize why there are "scifi" books among Booker Prize nominees and that it's not "real" literature about real people or what have you. The Impressionists were criticized for not being real academic painting. And so on. Art always evolves. If anything, scifi seems more visible to me now across all media than ever before, which is wonderful. You might argue it's "speculative" and not "real" scifi, but it feels like splitting hairs. At some point it's no longer helpful to get bogged down in labels. Let the marketers worry about such things. What matters is what blows your mind-and that's always going to be a small percentage of all the books you read. Make your own award and give it to the books you love, and don't worry about the rest. :)
While I do appreciate the research and effort put into the video, as well as its presentation, I think there's more to Sci-Fi than just "Speculative fiction without the themes." Even the stories you chose as examples of classic sci-fi don't really use science for their own sake as much as to look at broader political messages. "War of the Worlds", e.g., directly invokes the British conquest of Tasmania in the first few pages to connect the story to themes of colonialism and militarism.
And this is why I'm so happy about the Panderverse South Park episode, I don't even like Marvel or Star Wars, I don't watch any of that, but this is happening everywhere now, it needs to be stopped.
I noticed this earlier in the year when I read Greg Bear's Eon, a book that was huge when it first came out but has faded. I thought it was going to be an exploration of an alien artifact much like Rendezvous with Rama, which it is often compared. Instead Bear skips that part and goes to human societal interaction and politics. I was disappointed in the result, that's on me. I wanted more hard sci-fi and he gave speculative fiction. Something similar happened a couple years ago when I read Alistair Reynold's "Poseidon's Children" books. Again, I wanted exploration of an alien world and got human politicking in a fleet of space ships, although we did get some of the former. (Only read the first two. I should pick up the third and finish it.) Speculative fiction is all well and fine, but overall I think I prefer more sci-fi elements and explorations.
After reading it since the early 1950s, I lost interest in SF by any name when the editors and publishers demanded 500 page novels when there were only enough ideas to fill 160 pages. They took main stream novels as the ideal to broaden the audience and used that type of material to pad the book out. If I had wanted to read some other kind of fiction, I would have been reading that instead. It was pretty much a decision based on economics - there was a lot more money to be made with the new books that could be sold in much larger quantities to a bigger audience at much higher prices. What was lost was the fun and excitement of a writer who could come up with some idea you never thought of before every few pages. It didn't have to be scientific at all - it had to be new. Harry Whittington didn't write SF at all but he would grab you by the nose in the first sentence and drag you at high speed through 60,000 words without letting you take a breath. That was fun. Plodding through 200,000 words at a snail's pace about your anxiety about your place in society is boring.
From what I remember of the Foundation Series, it would firmly be Speculative Fiction then, no? Very much about cultural/societal shifts in the future? (It’s been a while since I read it, though.)
I'm rather torn on your premise. Sci-fi as a genre has NO FOUNDING TENETS. There's never been a sci-fi manifesto, founding club, etc. So attempting to decide if something is "sci-fi" by said tenets is inherently going to be entirely subjective. I'll allow that sci-fi is distinct from pure fantasy, but Star Wars proves that the line is blurred at best. Part of the problem is that we're living in the time which 1940s to 1960s sci-fi was often targeting. We have no flying cars, there are no extraplanetary colonies, etc. But we're almost ahead of what computing technology was expected to achieve, and the results have been more socio-political than functional. The shift in focus is largely due to the experiences of the society which generates authors. Expecting the genre to not significantly evolve based on society is naive at best, and indicative of orthodoxy at worst. Star Trek is half sci-fi, half speculative, if you take the line that exploring the future of SOCIETY is speculative, and exploring the future of technology is sci-fi. I think this distinction creates more problems than it solves. We tend to forget that sci-fi is more often a setting than anything else. If I write a timeline for the future of technology, is that speculative or is it sci-fi? Just throwing a dart at a line and picking "2063" and writing "warp drive" makes it sci-fi? How do I predict what technologies come next without contemplating the effect on society and the pressures which lead to inventions after this date? Any fiction with aliens at this point is really speculative more than sci-fi... Alternate timelines will have different technological histories as well, with possibly interesting results on societal development. Is that sci-fi or is that speculative? Let's say I write a story where some dude figures out a technological path to accessing what we once called magic. It's technology, but it's also magic (we'll assume I'm screwing with the laws of reality this way). Is that fantasy or sci-fi? Is it both? Anything more than 5 minutes in the future is sci-fi if new tech is the line and the author thinks half a line ahead. We're missing the forest for the trees on this. Admittedly there's more than one forest, but at the same time the gray area where it's a subjective definition is larger than the space where it's objective, and we need to be honest about this. Oh, and as for scientific rigor... No. Hard no. Any new law of physics (or unproven loophole) is already breaking that rule. By this definition, FTL of any kind at this point breaks this rule. So does almost every other "classic" science fiction work. Hard sci-fi has always been the smaller branch. Star Trek is not sci-fi by this definition (which is fine I guess) but now you're really narrowing the field. All of the truly good sci-fi explores the effect of technology on the human condition.
That's a strange thing for the Hugo Awards to do in 2023. If there was no scifi novel good enough to win they should not have chosen any book for that year.
I think it's a case of stories and ideas bleeding into each other. In the past, genres stayed fenced within their own category. And if you wanted to attract a certain reader, you ploughed a narrow path. Now, we have 'domestic' versions of a certain genre. Take "The Time Travellers Wife", it is heavily based on the perils of time travel, exploring the ideas of destiny, determinism, and individual choice. But at its heart, it's a love story. It's a domestic sci-fi novel. I would summize that the vast majority of readers of that novel were not sci-fi fans. And because there's more and more novels like this bleeding genres, both because it allows an author to be more creative and its potential to sell more copies due to its not relying on a niche genres reputation for being po-faced and boring science stuff, is the hard ideas laid out in older sci-fi deteriorating? Are we actually dumbing down? I love Rendezvous with Rama. But it's not the characters that have lived in my memory-it's the ideas. I also love The Sparrow, buts not the first contact, alien world stuff that beguiled me-it was the characters. Cool essay. New subscriber here. First comment.
I've been reading sci-fi since I was a kid in the 70s. I grew up reading the classics. I think sci-fi as a genre is better than ever, mostly because of the new talent and perspectives coming into the genre. That said, I also think I disagree with your premise about sci-fi being a historically pure genre about science-based or science-grounded fiction. Its always been speculative fiction, with many of the best authors and books blurring the line between science and made up stuff for the purpose of ideas. Exhibit A is characters in Dune that can talk to their foremothers and have dreamy visions of the future - that's not based in science. Maybe pop-science of the day. Some of my favorite classic authors bent the genre to do exactly what you say is diluting the genre today - a focus on social problems, human failings, and what if things were a little different. Philip K Dick, Clifford D Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Andre Norton, Samuel R Deleny, Ursula K Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Piers Anthony, all come to mind. I just glanced over the Hugo award winners in the 60s and there are even pure fantasy winners back then! Its really apparent when I look at categories other than novel. Also, having grown up reading the genre, I remember it being replete with telepathy and mind-powers (which, BTW, I loved). Those were not really based in the science at the time - then or now - but a frankly "sciencified" version of magic. I think you are right to point out that the genre has a broader appeal now (not just men and not just white people), and a broader author pool, all leading to a wide range of exploration of the human condition and society as the main focus. But I would argue that the blurred line has always been there, with the Hugo committees of the past giving their winners the benefit of the doubt that their imaginary worlds and people are more grounded in science than fantasy.
I agree and speculative fiction has always been an umbrella term that includes sci-fi, fantasy, and even horror. The monster risen from the dead by the mad scientist could, end game story, apply to all of these labels.
1000% Yes! I find myself arguing with people who say Sci-Fi today is not "Sci-Fi" don't want more science. They don't want to be challenged with new ideas. They want action and adventure dressed up with some shiny new backdrops. They want Master & Commander amongst the Stars. They want James Bond with robots. They don't want to explore identity and causality. They want "heroes" to conquer new worlds and conquest alien women.
The Hugos died many years ago. It's not an evolution, it was a political takeover by a a small group of zealots. I used to love sci-fi. Except for rare examples (outside the mainstream and defintely the hugos) today's work is unreadable
This is something i took into consideration when writing sci fi. The purpose the genre is to explore innovative concepts using imaginative creativity while leaving behind the question as to "What if?" this is possible. While i an using some tropes, such as space opera and aliens, one of the themes im exploring is that of spiritualistic ideas in a scientific lense and how it pertains to the cosmos while presenting itsef to mankind to see that they actually have a place in the grand scheme of thing's. That i think is unexplored ground that could make for some good Sci-Fi
I have often had a problem with science fiction. The science is often just not very good, or incidental. Spaceships cannot go faster than light, but that is too limiting for planet hopping stories, so a technology has been invented but is not adequately explained. Quite often science fiction books are just fantasy. A nuclear war happened thousands of years ago; mutations turned people into elves and dwarfs; history had been reset to zero but it is now the Medieval period again. Then again the science may be very futuristic but that attitudes and values are whatever is in the mind of the author, which may be embarrassingly sexist or horribly woke. Science Fiction should have some science in it in my view, but is it the science that makes it interesting? Does all the science have to be correct and explicable? H.G. Wells described how the Invisible Man made himself invisible, which contained some science, but which is obviously impossible in the way described. What was interesting was the concept of an invisible man. Dune is an incredible book, but it has hardly any proper science in it at all. I read Ubik by Philip K Dick. That is a mind-bending book. Its science is not possible, but it was more a book about perception and how real that perception is.
Fascinating video. How far can a genre change before it turns into something different? H.G. Wells saw his stories as "scientific romances" and now they're seen as the start of science fiction. Maybe in time today's "science fiction" will be seen as the start of something else. Who knows? Interesting stuff.
maybe we need a new genre called "scifi lite", "pop scifi", or even "diet scifi" if the book industry is just now constantly watering down core scifi as a genre
"Pop" scifi strikes me as a very appropriate expression. I believe it has been called "soft" scifi as well as "science fantasy" (a la Star Wars), and encompasses works like Star Trek. And not a thing wrong with "pop" scifi whatsoever ... one just needs to know what they are getting themselves into so they can mentally strap in for that particular flavor of ride.
Speculative Fiction is really an umbrella term that covers fantasy, science-fiction and everything in-between. I tend to think the general lack of emphasis on the sciences at least in the US is part of the reason. I also tend to believe that much of the possibilities from science explored back in the time when Asimov, Clark, Dick etc. were still new to the general public. The first television was produced in 1925, Asimov’s first novel was published around 1950. 25 years is not a long time so the broad scale impact of technology, the wonder about what else was possible was all new and completely unexplored by writers. Today there’s not really undiscovered science that can’t fairly easily fit within the existing tropes/accepted but un-described standards of science-fiction. (People can’t survive in space without proper equipment because there is no air and there is only sub-freezing cold) Aside from that none of this is new. Dune isn’t science-fiction yet it’s always been classified as such.
The thread of "speculative" fiction has always been there to a degree, and celebrated by the Hugos. It was interesting that your list of classic greats didn't include names like Heinlein or Ellison - Henlein at least is littered throughout Hugo history, and while he had his hard science side for sure, it's hard to deny the main focus of books like Starship Troopers or Stranger in a Strange Land is social, political, and personal exploration, not hard science or progress in any real way. The "golden age" and beyond weren't monolithic in their focus ... there has always been lots of variation in SF and reflected in the Hugos. Heinlein's Troopers won in 1960, and Stranger was the winner in 1961 and Stranger, at least, seems clearly intended as an exploration of society and self MUCH more than a "science fiction" story. For Stranger at least, Heinlein just uses a science fiction structure to hang an alternate society story from ... I think there's always been experimentation in what constitutes SF ... lots of commenters of the day asked that about Harlan Ellison, and people are STILL debating some stories by Vonnegut and Heller to one degree or another. I think "science fiction" has always been a broader category than this video makes it out to be. And btw, Asimov's Robot and Foundation stories were literally my gateway drug to the world of SF, so I'm very familiar with the segment of the genre you talk about and love it to bits lol ...
So, was The Machine Stops' (E M Forster 1909) sci-fi? Personally I read it as such some 50 years ago. Although it is hardly optimistic it did foresee much that defines our technological life today. Then there is the classic 'War of the Winged Men' by Poul Anderson that challenged many of the tropes then prevalent in sci-fi. The Hitchikers Guide was, arguably, hard sci fi with delightful devices such as the improbability drive and the same could be said of Bill the Galactic Hero with its bloater drive system. I like 'hard' sci-fi myself and I think you could draw a line where the story is not dependent, contingent or hinged on some basic scientific principles. Doctor Who is a case in point, when it started it was some old duffer who had built a time machine he couldn't control (the original intention was for it to be a historically accurate educational programme). It became a darker more sci-fi for a time, the scenes of the robo-men in tattered clothing using whips on the enslaved humans, also in tattered clothing, would not be considered acceptable today (and were sanitised in the film versions), but when it aired such things were very much a part of living memory. That series has now evolved into some kind of super-being with implausible plot devices (psychic paper? Really?) and a distinct element of 'fashion victim' (remember when they were all running around with a blue-tooth headset, looking like a bunch of marauding taxi drivers. Sigh). Oh and the daleks, formerly confined to the city where they drew power through the metal floors, can now fly..The cybermen were originally 'augmented humans' with bandages and very very creepy but these days they are just another variation on Robbie the Robot, or Tobor. It may be 'progress' but I am unsure as the direction it is progressing. Stanislaw Lem wrote some delightful sci-fi soap operas about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances but as they were often the misfit crew of a space freighter dealing with the associated technical problems it was undeniably sci-fi and personally I found him more interesting than a Superman comic. Perhaps we need greater granularity, defined sub-genres perhaps. That would make selecting books at the library easier.
The reason you see fantasy titles in the Hugo Awards is that a while back, the committee threw up its hands trying to define an enforceable distinction between fantasy and sf - so they gave up, allowed it all in. They're right imho. Given the enormous diversity and huge avalanche of content available, you can find any niche of fiction you want and there's lots of stuff out there, there's even an oversupply of awards including more narrowly defined ones. Last nit-pick: calling traditional sf "rigorous" in terms of science is, well, ahem, stretching it a bit.
I'm sorry but this is bullcrap imho. Fantasy and SciFi are both great, but not comparable. It's pandering to the masses to lump it al in together in the same awards contest. This is detrimetal to developing new ideas and far fetched "science" that may one day inspire the next scientist.
I believe part of the reason why a lot of science fiction now focuses on trying to understand the changes in societal norms stems from the fact that, while we're still pretty much in the gestational development stage of space exploration, the advent of the internet, smartphones and portable computers have really made a lot of what make science fiction awesome into something mundane. We all still live very mundane lives and we're far from having the technology shown in lost of different sci-fi stories, but the basis for all of that already exists and it's just a matter of time. But much like in cyberpunk, we have tons of technology right now, but people still face poverty, wars and hunger. That's why cyberpunk is pretty much the most relevant sci-fi gender out there, because in many ways we're already living in a sic-fi dystopia. And that's why it's understandable that sci-fi now doesn't care that much for the cool tech and space exploring, since the technology we currently have now, which is at it's most advanced in our history, hasn't helped us all have a better life.
Part hair-splitting, part question: Science is more than the natural sciences, the sciences of the mind and society and more are there as well. But I wonder if there are any sf stories that really used the established _science_ of those fields and not just explored those topics from the author's point of view. Do you know of any? That you could recommend?
I think applying your narrower categories we lose older "sciFi" classics like The War of the World's and a hell of a lot of Phillip K Dick. The heart of War of the World is a what if colonialism happened to England. Philip K Dick is mostly what if we took a ton of drugs and had deep conversation about what it means to be human. I am sure if I hadn't just gotten up I could think of others. I know I am a cranky old man but my point isn't just to be contrarian but that this focus on more social scifi is an older phenomena than people suggest.
Thank you. On top of War of the Worlds being about how Social Darwinism wouldn't appeal to nearly so many people if they weren't on top, the Time Machine is about freaking class conflict. The Morlocks are a proletariat driven so deep into the factories that they can no longer bear the sunlight, while the Eloi are a bourgeoisie so pampered that they are childlike, unable to care for themselves, and essentially cattle for the Morlocks. The Foundation Trilogy is about predicting the future, but it's about the societal forces that shape that future and how to manipulate them. Also there's a lot of survivorship bias here. Sure old sci-fi was more intellectual and focused on science instead of emotion, if, of course, you leave out Tom Swift, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, John Carter of Mars and a thousand other pulp adventures.
I don't think the dichotomy you draw between Sci Fi and Speculative Fiction is the right one to be useful. It is probably useful in some cases, but generally does not address the crisis in literature and drama. The true crisis is the way commercialism is allowed to constrain ideas. It is about challenging versus feeding peoples' world views. It is about opening minds rather than closing them. It is about looking outwards versus turning inwards. The corporate controlled shaping of creative production is focused only on profits, not ideas, and is also politically slanted by corporate interests. Today creative production is not used to communicate, it is simply a way to make money. People don't really have much to say in such types of output. I always remember how the "Hitch hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was completely perverted by Hollywood. Not only was the scathing criticism of giant corporations erased and replaced with an attack on government bureaucracy, but it was given new, upbeat "happy ending". How gross. To add insult to injury the massive PR machine of Hollywood even had the temerity to suggest that true original Hitchhiker's guide fans like myself, who listened to it when it was first broadcast in 1978, and who were very critical of how it had been completely perverted, were not 'true fans', but that 'true fans' would prefer their new improved version. A now dead, and so voiceless Douglas Adams, was even invoked as having preferred the new version.
each year, me and my partner l look forward to The Clarke Awards . We try to read as many of the nominees as possible. My current favourite and 'inheritor' of the Clarke mantle is Stephen Baxter. Also, Ursula K Le Guin should be mandatory!
The last true Sci-Fi novel I read was the Ring World Trilogy by Larry Niven so I cannot speak from the newer novels. What makes Sci-Fi to me is a griping story that incorporates futuristic technologies with descriptions that at least seem plausible in light of our current understanding of physics. When authors simply paint pictures without at some point elaborating on the ideas to me that is what I classify as fantasy whether it is set in the future or not. Most movies that I have seen that contain space travel I would classify as total fantasy and not science fiction.
This is exactly why I started writing my own hard sci-fi novels: Exploration, Technology, and Optimism.
First one was a utopian sci-fi about first person born of a seedship. Second was about a sub under Europa, third is about AI therapy and brainwave data.
Looked at your profile on goodreads, I’m going to have to read one of your books some time.
@@nathanheineman1352 I'm doing a give-away for my novel about Europa. My First Contact Sci-Fi is almost number 1. One more shirtless-man competitor above it.
"A Hardness of Minds: Europan First Contact"
Third sounds extremely fascinating wasn't there a game? I think a puzzle game
Unfortunately most people's idea of hard scifi is to pick the one area of science they know well and project that forward while pretending all the rest of scientific advancement is just going to stand still resulting in a ludicrous mockery of the future. But few if any can correlate the breakneck advancement in macine learning, AND genetics, AND human machine interfaces, AND robotics, AND how ever cheaper and more capable drones shifting the balance of power in war may change geopolitics, AND social media evolution, AND quantum computing - not just encryption and decryption but also quantum annealing, AND space travel, but even more so how all of these factors will feed into each other.
@xcyoteex Thanks for the suggestion. It's on my roadmap for this year.
I love your question, "Why is science fiction no longer optimstic?" This is the crux of my struggle to find a scifi novel I actually want to read.
may i recommend, hello moon, if sand to hide your head in is all you want
Issui Ogawa is pretty optimistic. I recommend his novella "Old Vohl's Planet." I remember enjoying his novel "Lord of the Sands of Time" as well, but I've forgotten whether it ends on a positive note or not.
Try "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)" by Dennis Taylor
@mike-williams I love the Bob verse. It does scratch that exploration itch.
Because the naive 1960s techno optimism has been empirically proven false. Anything optimistic about a science fiction story must have something to do with something completely disconnected from the sci-fi elements, because they are not what makes something optimistic or pessimistic or good or bad
I completely agree. I think there's a lot of wonderful drama stories that have a little hint of sci-fi elements and then they just get classified as sci-fi.
Indeed : ((((((((((((
It has ever been thus. Remember EE 'Doc' Smith? (the Lensmen and Skylark series?) That man had some brilliant stories, but his connection to science was ... tenuous at best.
'Speculative Fiction' was originally just a way for academics and 'serious' writers to avoid the low brow reputation Science Fiction had garnered by way of pulp magazines and comic books. In the other direction SF fans created terms like Space Opera to distance themselves from the pulpier bits of SF. With time and pedantry, these and other terms have been fleshed out.
Philip K Dick was perhaps the turning point from outward-looking and broadly utopic science fiction to inward-looking, pessimistic and dark material, no doubt helped by living in dystopic fever dream of corporate greed, electronic surveillance, and approaching ecological disaster.
The counter-culture response of the last 10+ years has been a sort of puritanical reactiveness to perceived moral transgressions, and a dismissive attitude to history and culture. In their attempts to be fair and open-minded they can cast a net so wide that definitions essentially stop meaning anything. And that's how you get a fantasy book as the best SF book of the year.
There have always been fantasy nominees in the Hugo Awards.
Yeah as the last commenter said, the hugo awards have always been for science fiction AND fantasy. The whole second half of your comment abt the "counter-culture" response is first of all just plain old nonsense, and decidedly irrelevant in any case.
We say this is a Modern thing, but forget that in 66’ Foundation beat The Lord of the Rings to get the Hugo for best series. That’s THE Lord of the Rings, nominated for a Hugo.
The same could be said for hyperion as that thing is more like galactic fantasy than sci-fi
I think you're over-emphasizing the "rigorous science" of older sci-fi. Sure, there is plenty, but there's also Spice, hyperspace travel, the Mule, psychohistory, Monoliths, time travel, Jaunting, force shields, anti-gravity, and any other handwavium the authors wanted to tell their intended story. Gibson said he knew nothing about computers when he portrayed the Matrix in Neuromancer; it was his clear vision of industry and technology turned toward dystopia that made cyberpunk what it was, not a crunchy examination of real tech.
You need to realise (and I was a research scientist), that 1) Most science fiction writers do not really have much knowledge of real science, and mostly never had (Clarke & Asimov are exceptions, not the rule). 2) That much of what transpires in Sci Fi is actually totally contradictory to what scientists know. E.g. there can be no such thing as faster than light travel or time travel without scientifically unfounded fantasy. 3) That the realities of science and technology should not be allowed to impede the flow and structure of the drama and story telling. They will tend to do that. Star Trek was a great example of minimalist design, where science was never allowed to get in the way of a pacy story. The matter transporter is a dramatic device, not a scientific concept, as is the time machine used in many Sci Fi stories.
I also want to add that the exploration of the impact a technology has on humanity has always been a part of SF. You can't think of sicence without thinking about sociology and philosophy. The strong distinction between speculative fiction and SF made in this video does not make sense to me. Fiction has many aspects and just drawing random borders isn't useful, is it?
I agree @@Horky_Porky
@@bhangrafan4480That's why it is called science FICTION. Naturally you couldn't have FTL (faster than light) technology without breaking causality itself. But there are ways you could turn around and play a bit with the themes, and that's something even scientists do, like the Alcubierre's Warp Drive, Quantum tunneling and the Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormholes) and the sci-fi authors just elevate these themes so they can create a good story out of it, that's the fiction part that has unfortunately been put aside for social and political discussions...
The Hugo Award winners are very seldom best-sellers. The voting is done by WorldCon members, and may only consist of a few hundred voters. The “Sad Puppies” project ten years ago demonstrated this disconnect.
What twaddle. All the Sad Puppies"proved" was that they were fools and that the voting system couldn't be gamed by a political agenda. And that most people despise fascist wannabes..
I think at this point if the author is black, gay, and/or a woman, they get a Hugo
@@Carnefice If you're a trans woman writing nothing but stories about yourself, you'll get a Hugo, no matter how horrible the writing.
@@nolongeramused8135 yeah I forgot the troons, good catch
@@nolongeramused8135 That’s a silly and bigoted way to see it. But anyway, for about a century now we’ve given awards to straight white men no matter how bad the writing, so I think it’s okay to switch things up.
Of the 3 key figures you mentioned from last century I think that it is PKD who has come to the fore. His Hugo for Man in the High Castle was clearly speculative. His emphasis on the human condition led him to being a lot less positive about the future than Clarke or Asimov and I believe he more accurately predicted this century. We live in a very Dickian world where the common people have little power and things are often grotesquely absurd. Maybe our literature reflects that. Having said that I agree that a straight out fantasy novel shouldn't win the Hugo.
Since when common lil people have power? You’re imagining a fictional past
Hugo nominations have always been open for both scifi and fantasy....
There are no actual rules for determining what kind of story can receive a hugo.
They once awarded a hugo for best website ffs...
I feel like sci fi and speculative fiction have always gone hand in hand. If something like Dune was released today wouldn't that count as not sci fi enough by this standard? Very socially focused.
I appreciate your points, and think it is an evolution. If Dune is science fiction, then so is the Fifth Season. Different traditions run through the genre. One thing to consider is that unlike several decades ago the protagonists of modern SF aren't often themselves scientists, at least in the traditional sense.
Per Arthur C. Clark, “technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” That leaves a broad swath of fiction that could be taken as 'science' fiction. The argument between 'hard' scifi, and fantasy has been going on *forever* - just because The Fellowship of the Ring was not Hard SciFi, made it no less enjoyable as Azimov, Herbert and the rest. But people were talking about that in the 1970s when I first was introduced to the genre. Let's take Bradbury, as another example - I started reading SciFi because of "The Martian Chronicles" - and the Martian technology and science was not explained in any meaningful way, making their extinct culture magical in how it could reach through time; many of his novels I would not consider hard science fiction by any stretch of the imagination - and are no less good for it. Even so, "Fahrenheit 451" won a Retro-Hugo for 1954 in 2004. As a result, I don't see the question settled - and perhaps it never will be.
Adrian Tchaikovsky writes some of the best modern sci-fi today... Children of Time, Dogs of war, the last Architect series... so good
Ah you just reminded me the end of the children of time trilogy is out!
Gareth L Powell too, double winner of best novel by BSFA.
Agreed and his work shows that premise driven sci fi conceptual stories are still being told and are going strong
I find Adrian Tchaikovsky has tremendous ideas but terrible payoff. He somehow made a story about sentient space spiders tedious, and it's just gone downhill with each subsequent installment of Children of Time.
I prefer viewing genres more as Tags than as Folders. The folder approach needs a new folder for each genre or subgenre. "Hard sci fi", "Romantic fantasy", etc etc. It's useful for public libraries, but limited. The Tag approach is more like on Good Reads. It's more like "genre elements", because a work doesn't always fit neatly into a subgenre folder. With search engines, you can also search for tags like "hard science" or whatever.
It's impossible to lose the "essence" of science fiction (or any other genre). There are still people writing hard science books. There can always be new authors exploring old themes. As long as people know that the concept exists, it cannot be lost. The only question is how well it sells. Admittedly, some authors get more popular postmortem, so current sales numbers aren't even an accurate indication either.
Larry Niven FOREVER!!!🛸🚀🌃🌎☄️🌠🌜‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️
I used to like Larry Niven. I also liked his collaborations with Jerry Pournelle.
A Rod Sterling quote sums up my position, "It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different thing. Science fiction is the the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the the impossible made probable."
So a lot of SF/Sci-Fi/speculative fiction meets that criteria.
What we are then left with is taste. My SF is better than your SF because mine has maths/literary merit/deals with serious issues etc. And here is where Sturgeon's Law comes into play, 90% of everything is trash.
My perspective is that human beings are not capable of being rational about subjects (see Professor Sapolsky's lectures for the gribbly detail). To simplify, the ideal may be infinite diversity in infinite combination, but humans can't handle an infinite number of diverse combinations.
My conclusion led me to write my own SF books, and I can say that what I like to write is not necessarily what people like to read.
I would say that science fiction is the possible presented as real, and fantasy is the impossible presented as real.
Yes, i have noticed something similar. As a scientist myself, I suspect some of the reason might be that science is hard. Many of the old authors were actual scientists, or had strong science background, not sure that is true today.
So by these definitions, was Ursula K LeGuin speculative fiction and not sci-fi all along? Are we starting to split hairs?
Though to get into the point itself, I think the shift is less about going from hard science to speculative, and more going from premise driven to character driven. I would attribute that change to the increase of science fiction and fantasy in movies and TV over the last few decades.
She didn't write Sci-Fi at all. And her books were boring as all hell.
@@nolongeramused8135 Ridiculously incorrect.
@@artlesscalamity You'd be surprised at the number of people that agree with me 100%. Her entire shtick was writing "sci-fi for people that don't read or like sci-fi" and only marginally incorporating any parts of the genre while she wrote. If you'd never read any actual sci-fi then her books would seem like the real deal, but they aren't.
Aside from being entirely forgettable, plodding, and poorly edited, her plots were retreads of works done decades before by better authors. She couldn't even write original ideas, or even dress up an old one and keep it interesting. Tolkein, for example, was a boring writer, but had awesome plots and characters. So awesome that much better writers have completely ripped off his stuff and churned out decades-spanning careers in the process. LeGuin sort of did the opposite of that in many respects; she was the type of writer that would now be hired by Disney to do make another shitty Star Wars sequel to be watched by people that never saw the originals.
@@nolongeramused8135 You’d be surprised how little I care about random reactionary opinions.
“Doesn’t even write original ideas” - are you high? Le Guin wrote several classics that crossed genre lines and even birthed modern subgenres like solar-punk or the whole wizard-school thing. She brought incredible empathy and progressive curiosity to sci-fi. Her work for me embodies the best of what literature can do.
It’s fine if you personally don’t want to read it, but these are some wild takes. Anyway I know better than to argue on UA-cam.
@@artlesscalamity I have read her shit novels, that's how I know they are shit.
Run along little troll.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Award nominees and winners are one way to judge the trends. Another would data on consumption, both in retail and library loans.
Imagine if romance books just became horror books instead with pink covers, the audience would reject them wholesale too.
Sci-fi without sci-fi is just fiction. My guess is the sci-fi tag gets more sales than the fiction tag would so the need to appropriate the title for unearned sales is needed by corrupt publishers. The award industry has clearly also become just as politically corrupt too.
But you can only con somebody once before you lose your reputation forever...
I think you summarized the shift/development/focus over time very well. I come from the readership as a 'Hard SF' fan and books written in the 50.s 60's & 70s :-) Thanks. On a follow-up point I did/do prefer the shorter writing style of those times - written in an economic 150 to 200 pages. Then occasionally reading some epic work or trilogy ie. David Brin's Uplift Series (from the 1990's) Many of the writers I enjoy cut their teeth on short stories or novellas. Maybe that begs the question -or another video from yourself 'Is there such a thing as an ideal length for a work of SF?' :-)
Yes - 60,000 words. Now you find 500 page books with a 60,000 word novel that has been padded with all the elements from main stream fiction to cover up that the writer didn't have enough new or good ideas to fill 500 pages. If I wanted to read the other 340 pages I would have read something else.
@@neilreynolds3858 Regards the padding, that seems to be getting more and more common. It's getting to the point where, if I find I am reading a novel like that, I just abandon it. A recent one (I can't even remember the name) took about 25% of the word length for a character to get prepped to go into a shuttle, fly over to another craft then get out. During it, we got to know all about her hair style, her failing marriage, how much she misses her kids, what food she likes, her favourite overalls, what she is wanting to have for dinner..... Very very little of the word count was taken up with the actual plot.
It turned what could have been an intriguing novella into a slog I didn't bother finishing. By the way, there were at least four more novels after it, with more to come.
Really well thought out video. With this sort of topic, it would be easy to fall into reflexive gatekeeping, but I think you resisted this to offer a more nuanced take.
I think one thing to note is that we live in an age where many concepts once more or less exclusively found in sci-fi are permeating more mainstream fiction - things like time travel or multiverses.
Moreover, I think in general we live in a time of genre bending and blurring to a greater extent than ever before. I think this offers pros and cons, but I also don't think it inherrently precludes purer forms of genre fiction, such as hard sci-fi, from being written. The publishing industry will go where the money is, but as you note we live in a more democratic time where anyone can distribute their work.
i reject the whole premise. i only came here to complain. no i'm not gonna watch it. well, they're judging by the genre, i can judge by thumbnail. if they wanted me to hear their nuance they shouldn't have went all clickbait with it
@@intellectually_lazywtf are you even talking about haha
The publishing industry goes where the ESG score is
The zealots who've taken over publishing are very comfortable with gatekeeping.
@@The_Burning_Sensation keeping the gates closed to straight white men, aka who created and sustains the genre. Look at the two Hugo award winners he mentioned: Jemisin is a repulsive, talentless black woman, and Kingfisher is an overweight white woman.
I would argue that dune one of the highest rated sci fi books of all time is 'speculative fiction' as you describe it
The recent "Hugo Awards" really don't appeal or sell exciting Sci-Fi at all. They seem more like products manufactured to elicit a given idea of sci-fi and/or a judging or voting process that's "gone horribly wrong" in true sci-fi tradition!
I've definitely noticed this. Every time I go to the bookstore and just peruse the shelves, there's less and less sci-fi in the "science fiction" section. Speculative fiction isn't the worst culprit for the dilution though, that would be young adult fantasy fiction.
That's an interesting definition of speculative fiction. As I understand it, speculative fiction is an umbrella term, not a separate genre. The video also reminded me of an old science fiction writing workshop joke (old as in I first heard it about 30 years ago): Question 1: Define "science fiction". Question 2: Name 5 science fiction classics that don't fit the definition.
Science Fiction is a subset entirely contained within Speculative Fiction. So this video doesn't really make sense as it repeatedly asserts that they are "separate genres", when its Fantasy (another subset of Speculative Fiction) and Scifi that are separate genres. (Although they overlap more than they don't)
Yeah, that was my understanding too. It also seemed like this video was trying to present hard sci-fi as the "truest" form of the genre, even though I'm pretty sure that's always been more of a niche.
The whole thing just feels weirdly dismissive, if not outright twisting definitions.
Hey Darrel, really interesting video topic! I too wish that there was more high-profile science fiction centering science these days (though I do also think there is good stuff that goes under the radar), but to be honest, the dichotomy of ‘science fiction’ and ‘speculative fiction’ has never seemed particularly useful to me. In particular, I think it’s quite strange to define a genre in an exclusionary manner where the presence of certain themes can ‘disqualify’ a work that clearly meets say, aesthetic criteria. For instance, it makes no sense to me to say that a work that takes place in space in the future but deals primarily with sociological/interpersonal themes is not ‘true’ science fiction. I totally sympathize with those who are saddened to see a decreased focus on one of the key aspects of science fiction, but I also think it’s an incredible disservice to the power of the genre to say that it becomes ‘just another type of fiction’ once the technological focus is removed.
From what I know, this debate has basically been raging since the ‘60s, when New Wave SF writers began to become increasingly interested in writing about the social and cultural phenomena of the day, so I think it’s hard to say that SF has begun to lose its essence any more recently than during that time period. In that regard, I think it’s a bit strange to lump Dick, a quintessential New Wave writer, together with Asimov and Clarke. But it’s also not like the latter two didn’t have more humanistic interests: ‘Foundation’ is all about macrohistory, ‘Childhood’s End’ takes a lot from Jungian psychology, etc. All that to say that I think that everything’s a bit more muddled than people often claim, from those angry about the unscientific interlopers of the ‘60s to people today.
A couple other small things:
- The Hugo Awards have always been for both science fiction and fantasy. It’s true that they were heavily skewed towards science fiction for much of their early history, and I think there's a much deeper rabbit hole about publishing and reader tastes (I remember hearing that the amount of SF published has been declining since the '80s?) that one needs to go down before being able to talk about what fantasy books winning Hugos means for science fiction.
- As far as I know, all of the string theory stuff in ‘The Three Body Problem’ is just wild speculation and has no basis in current understandings of the field. I really like the trilogy, but I don’t it’s a great one to cite if we’re saying that science fiction needs to have a basis in real science. The amount of technical language certainly gives the appearance of hard SF for sure and I even think this type of speculation might turn out to have value, but not because it’s super plausible scientifically.
Very well reasoned statement and it aligns with my thinking about this topic. Thanks for summarizing it much better than I could!
Genres are artificial confines and definitions to a) better market a book towards an audience or b) make oneself feel elitist by dismissing "lesser genres". Whatever label one puts on a book: it doesn't change the content.
The more confined an author writes for a specific (sub)genre and towards a target audience, the more formulaic and uninspired their writing becomes - on average.
I have recently bought 30 sci fi books on vintage book sites. Most are from the 50s 60s and 70s. Rarely do new authors interest me. The new books seem to lack freedom of imaginations.
I know exactly what you mean. I rarely find myself reading any fiction that was written after the 1980s.
Have you read three body problem? I think its the only recent sci fi that really full of imagination but also filled with some hard science and good (not great) characters
AGREE : )))@@jamesbell8120
Good one
indeed@@vijaz5559
Agree : (((@angelspawn9138
I find myself buying older books. (I'm old myself).I want escapism. Not to be reminded of problems I'm trying to get away from.
Thank you for addressing the elephant in the room.
Hasn't this always been the case though? Listening to your comparison of science fiction and speculative fiction, I realized that even going as far back as the sixties these genre classifications seem to have been blurred. A Clockwork Orange is sometimes considered sci-fi but only has one new scientific element.
Another thing to consider is that the line between sci fi and fantasy is increasingly blurry. Dune has people with superhuman abilities with a shaky scientific basis. This trope has spread and in some cases the authors stop bothering to make a scientific justification for the supernatural occurrences. Authors who write both fantasy and sci fi (e.g. Orson Scott Card) sometimes blend the genres so much that even they couldn't tell you which genre their book falls into.
Hello Darrell...love your content and this relaxing ambient music you keep using, what is the title?
What is Dune but a commentary on society?
If you’re going to impose the hard sci fi filter on what qualifies, I would argue that the space opera has to go too. Sure, the tropes are all there but the stories aren’t about the technology. They are, at their essence, political thrillers.
I think it has to do with two major factors. One, the major scifi tropes have been mainly explored by masters in the past.
Two and this is a major one, the repetitive world crises of the last decade have pushed for a more dystopian view of the future where the state of the human race is the main subject and not the megastructures in which it lives. Larry Niven could get away with frankly mediocre characters in the 70s because his cosmos was full of wonders. His characters were background to the awesome science. But now that it is in the open so to speak, people find more pertinent to ask what of the poor miners on Mars (Red Rising) or AI gone self deterministic (Murderbot).
I agree with your second part - we are living in a dystopia _right now,_ so the focus, at least should be, working on undoing the systems of exploitation which are running rampant throughout all aspects of our lives. It is not until those systems are undone that we can start to imagine fantastical wonders; we're too busy wondering how to keep a roof over our heads at the moment.
@@elonmusksellssnakeoil1744 Today there is less war than in any time in the past. Less violence, less starvation, less racism, less disease. But more wealth, more education, more freedom, more access to advanced heath-care.
You are living in the best time period humans have seen. You are one of the most privileged people to have ever existed. In all of history. You have comforts and luxuries past generations never dreamt of.
The only things you lack are perspective and self-awareness.
"dystopia right now" lol.
@@pkz420 Like I said it's the perception of things going sideways. As in the 50s it was the perception that things can only get better.
@@pkz420, advancements in understanding of health and science do not equate to a lessening of imperialism. The planet is burning more than ever before in human history. There is greater wealth inequality than any point in human history. The US doesn't have healthcare or education or housing or even food as guaranteed basic human rights. That "advanced healthcare" will put anyone into 6, 7, or even 8-figure debt for the rest of their lives. We have no say in what matters or politicians deliberate whatsoever. Police execute more than 3 citizens every day of the year on average in the US. Millions are food insecure. Millions more suffer crippling mental anxiety and drug addiction. There are more people incarcerated in the US today than ever before anywhere on the planet. The US keeps wars going to enrich weapons manufacturers. Women don't have abortion rights. I can go on and on and on. If you don't see a problem with the worsening of all of these atrocities and more, then you are not just blind, you are willfully ignorant, and probably just hate people.
@@pkz420 just because we have all of that doesn't make it any less a dystopia. Cyberpunk very rarely has overt war and yet those are often stories of oppression, exploitation and dehumanization. Physical violence sometimes replaced with fiscal violence.
I noticed this years ago with sci-fi podcasts like Escape Pod that I'd listen to in bed, and noticed the bizarre frequency of pure fantasy being included, and even winning the Hugo for best sci-fi short story while being pure speculative fantasy.
It's probably one of the main reasons I didn't actively engage with the community just as I was finding a community.
🚀 Fantastic exploration of the evolving landscape of sci-fi, Daryl! Your insights into the transformation of the genre from its roots to the present were both informative and thought-provoking. I resonate with the sentiment of finding a balance between the traditional and the new in sci-fi literature.
The discussion on the Hugo Awards as a litmus test was particularly intriguing, and it got me thinking about how the genre's narrative preferences are indeed shifting. The emphasis on sociopolitical commentary and character development, while valuable, does raise questions about the evolving identity of sci-fi. By the way, your mention of the Hugo Awards reminded me of the dynamic changes in the publishing industry, echoing the sentiments of your previous video on the topic. It's fascinating to witness how a wider pool of voices is reshaping the sci-fi narrative. Smashed the subscribe button after watching your video! BOOM!
On a related note, I'll be releasing a sci-fi synthwave album in early 2024! 🎶 Given your keen insights into science fiction, I'm sure you'll find it to be a thought provoking lyrical journey through uncharted sonic realms. Can't wait for you to experience the fusion of science fiction and synthwave vibes.
Keep up the stellar work on your videos, books, and looking forward to more captivating discussions!
🌌🎧 #SciFiEvolution #SynthwaveAdventure2024
CHEERS! -Bending Grid
First, looking to the Hugos for guidance is fraught with peril. They're voted on by a self-selected group of people who pay for the opportunity by buying memberships to World Con. As seen during the Sad Puppies debacle, they have a specific and very militant view of what SF should be that doesn't match the views of the actual SF audience (as can be seen by sales of novels.) Let's just say that I haven't had much respect for the Hugos for at least 40 years.
But, since you are using the Hugos as a touchstone, let's look at a few other Hugo-Award-winning novels, from a much earlier era: 1956, Double Star, Heinlein - Almost entirely a character study and sociological examination. 1959, A Case of Conscience, Blish - Another sociological examination mostly divorced from science. 1960, Starship Troopers - Some technology, hand-waved science, mostly an examination of politics as revealed through the lens of war and the military. There are several award winners in that same era that I haven't read, so can't comment on, and one year where no best novel award was made, but I don't see any particularly hard SF during the earliest period of the award.
Then we come to your examples of "real SF": Dune is almost entirely divorced from science and technology and is rather a fairly deep dive into sociological concepts, set in a far future whose connections to our present are nebulous at best. The same is true of Foundation almost point for point. Neuromancer, while exploring technology more than the other two you mention, is again an examination of society far more than an examination of technology or science.
Hard SF, even when it has garnered significant attention (A Mission of Gravity, Clement or Dragon's Egg, Forward, for instance) has never done as well as less rigorously scientific novels. To say otherwise is the worst sort of "kids these days" revisionist history.
IMO, your argument is weak at best and cherry-picked with your thesis in mind at worst.
I grew up on hard sci fi among other things. With the moon landing, the atom bombs (then nuclear), cryptography (the Enigma machine), cars, airplanes, photography, TV, video, computers etc the world seems to be leapfrogging into a technological wonderland.
I agree with you about retaining hard science in sci fi. But I’m quite worried about where technology is taking us.
By your definition, Asimov's Foundation series isn't Science Fiction, which runs in opposition to your choice to label it classic SF.
The definition of just what SF actually has been hotly debated for well over 75 years, and pretty much any definition that honestly covers even just works in the so-called Golden Age of SF (~1935-1960) either includes most mainstream fiction or excludes a huge chunk of the SF published during that period.
Gatekeeping has long been considered a very negative trait in Science Fiction and its close neighbors Fantasy and Speculative Fiction.
You skipped mention of New Wave period...
I may have misunderstood the video, but I've always considered the speculative to be under science fiction. A reader can't deny the speculative elements of Asimov and Clarke's famous stories. And, especially when it comes to the pulp fiction of the 40's, 50's, and 60's, the premises of those short stories are incredibly fantastical. I agree there's a gross conflation between fantasy and sci-fi. We all know what fantasy looks like versus what science fiction looks like. But science fiction has long been fantastical.
Harlan Ellison preferred speculative as he did not want to be confined to the 'ghetto' of science fiction, so at least he felt it was its own thing. The man was a bit of a PITA but I liked him enough to name my second child after him.
Science Fiction isn't what it used to be - but then again, it never was.
I think it's important to remember Sturgeon's Revelation here - "90% of everything is crud". More importantly, we tend to forget the 90% after a few years and just remember the gems. For every "Dune" - which arguably hit a perfect balance between scientific world-building, allegories about society and religion and "Macbeth in spaaace!" drama - there were a dozen so-so books that filled a much-needed gap in the literature which are rightly lost in the mists of time.
The debate about "hard" vs. "soft" SF is hardly a 21st century phenomenon ("The Handmaid's Tale" which pretty much codifies the "is it really SF" debate was published in 1985!). I remember getting books from the SF section of the local library in the 70s which turned out to be political allegories with no "science" (Don't remember the names since - well, see above - although I do remember at least one had a Chris Foss spaceship on the cover which had absolutely no relevance to the story).
I think the ultimate "puts the science into science fiction" form were the "problem solving" stories by the likes of Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Hal Clement et. al that people seem to be pining for were terrific, but were only ever part of the genre (and, also, at their best in the form of short stories).
Another question is whether "real SF" is really dying or if its just that "speculative fiction" and fantasy are becoming increasingly popular & groups like the Hugo Awards have decided to embrace them (most SF fans I know are equally into fantasy, social/politicial allegory, alternative history, comic books etc. so maybe lumping it together makes sense). Harder SF is still around if you look for it, although nobody can agree where the line is drawn. Andy Weir has been mentioned - definitely in the "problem solving" genre. SF doesn't get harder than Greg Egan, but even he does social commentary and jokes alongside the links to math journals and computer simulations. "The Expanse" series was pretty rigorous with its science (allowing itself a few bits of fantasy tech and then sticking to the rules) alongside the political allegory. I recently read "Gallowglass" by SJ Morden - again, lots of social comment (and pessimism) but also carefully worked-out plausible tech space exploration and asteroid mining.
My litmus test for SF would be "could this story have been re-written as a straight present-day or historical drama without completely changing its nature". I've read and enjoyed books by authors like Arkady Martine, Martha Wells and Becky Chambers who seem to do well at winning awards (2 of whom were mentioned in the video) and nominations and they'd definitely pass my SF test.
Also, in recent years there have been several examples of what I regard as "proper science fiction" on TV which have really pushed the envelope. The Expanse TV series (c.f. the usual post star-trek 'morality play in space' fodder) of course - even if it wasn't perfect the attention to science set new standards for TV. Then you have "Black Mirror" - an anthology show which has been mainly about plausible (to varying degrees) extrapolations from current technology (sometimes like PK Dick updated for the C 21st) - and "Love, Death and Robots" - another anthology but mainly straight adaptations of short stories by recognised SF authors. I can't *quite* bring myself to say that about the Foundation adaptation - but then I never liked the book much and think the show would be better if they'd just made the "Game Of Thrones In Spaaace" show that the writers clearly wanted...
I have always read sci-fi and fantasy. I admit that I have now moved away from what is nowadays called sci-fi (but I still have fantasy). One aspect is that we are now missing the cautionary tales of what science evolution could mean. So I wonder if the change in sci-fi has not been engineered to limit the number of people who would be cautious in the way science evolutions impact mankind..
Precisely. Especially now that those plans are currently underway. Can’t have the people thinking critically
That is why we need more Cyberpunk, but in a more mature and sophisticated form than media tends to present the genre as. We need more cautionary tales warning people of the risks of abuse inherrent in social media, asset digitisation and transhumanism.
@@StarlasAiko I'm running multiple generative AIs on my 3060, I got AIs running other AIs. Like using LLMs to make the perfect prompts for Stable Diffusion(text to image), and another multimodal LLM checks the work and send it back to the first LLM with editing notes until I get a half dozen good results to choose from.
Instead of trial and error and going through hundreds of generations to get exactly what you want.
And I just started a couple of months ago. I know next to nothing about AI. I use a one click installer and follow UA-cam video tutorials.
Science fiction always implied a vision of the future.
You know you're in the singularity, when you can't write about the future without getting the present wrong. It's like trying to watch a sci-fi movie when they didn't have cell phones yet. These days sci-fi is anachronistic by the time you get done making it.
That's why every good sci-fi going forward either requires an AI revolution, or will require the assistance of an AI to create in the first place.
Welcome to the future, Cyberpunk won. It's no longer sci-fi, it's current events.
Halfway through this video and I need to get moving very shortly, sorry if this is already covered. Wouldn't the speculative vs science-fiction divide have "Dune" fall on the speculative side?
My impression is that we have very good hard sci-fi authors like Dennis E. Taylor, who became popular through social media and YT, so that's what I've learned and I tell all budding authors: If you don't have enough mass-market appeal right off the bat to have a publisher on hand, you do need a podcast, a YT channel, something, in order to have reader engagement and build that long tail.
"Is today's Sci-Fi even SF?"
Fixed that for you.
Y'all acting like the 1960s and 1970s New Wave didn't happen - Dick, Moorcock, Ballard, LeGuin etc.
In the 2001 Hugo Awards "Harry Potter" beat "Game of Thrones."
Is either one of them sci-fi?
My gateway into SF were the Tom Swift Jr. books my mum bought for me in the late 50s. I still have them. Although I read a spectrum of SF books, Hard SF was, and is, my favourite (Heinlein, Clarke, Poul Anderson, Niven, Cear, Biggles, Clement, to name a few. followed by, and most of the time including military SF (Banks, Bujold, Drake,). To be honest, I love the works of Ray Bradbury, Van Vogt, Niven, Zelazny, Julian May, Leguin, Card, Connie Wilis to name a few more.
I am not surprised about the 2023 Hugo Winner. I AM SHOCKED! Good old capitalism at work.
Being a purist and pedant 😁 I detest the term Sci Fi. It has too much of an association with reviewers and not true fans. I believe it was Hugo Gernsback that coined the term scientifiction.
Well researched and thought out video!
Good sci-fi movies are also much thinner on the ground having been somewhat elbowed aside by the superhero genre.
If sci-fi novels are leaning more in the speculative direction, I think maybe it might be because movies, TV, and video games have all been leaning more in the direction of spectacle. That is to say stories where the "science" is mostly just an aesthetic backdrop to otherwise generic action stories that don't really ask the same kind of deep thought-provoking questions of classic sci-fi.
The Hugo Awards have always recognized fantasy in addition to science fiction. Yes, they're awarded by the World Science Fiction Convention, but that's because, when the awards started in the mid-20th Century, fantasy as a publishing category didn't really exist - any attempt at a separate award for just fantasy would only have, like, one or two novels to look at each year. It wasn't until the 1970's that fantasy literature for an adult audience really began to take off, and it took another decade or two for it to be seen as respectable.
I wish it stayed as pariah literature. Next time nerds need to do a better job gatekeeping their culture.
I’m probably dating myself here, but at one point the distinction you draw between these sub-genres of SF were referred to as ‘soft sf’ (or sometimes ‘sociological sf’) and ‘hard sf’, with one being more people-focused and one being more technologically focused. In 2015 there was a thoroughly vicious fought war over the Hugo award and its focus and direction (I say this from the perspective of someone unwillingly swept up into it) which might interest you (might even make an interesting video topic, given the themes of this current video).
Classic sci-fi hasn't won a Hugo in years. Most years, I just use the Hugo short list as a guide of books that, since they don't explore strange new worlds with new technology and are usually pessimistic in outlook, I will avoid like the plague. I have tried to read some of the newer "sci-fi", and it just doesn't satisfy. It's like the latest, greatest taste someone comes up with, or a company changing the taste and/or look of a product to generate "excitement": the original was fine, and most people liked it. Sometimes "new and improved" is neither. Good analysis in this video. Thanks for sharing!
Short answer; No. Longer answer? Many of the contentions within this piece are just historically not true. A very quick glance at the history of the Hugo's for best novel for examples, shows that among early previous winners are A Canticle for Leibowitz, and the Man in the High Castle, both of which are hardly optimistic or in keeping with some notion of a 'core exploration of technology and it's implications on mankind'. Witchworld, which is about as Fantasy as you can get, was nominated in 1964., I think the problem is more people not understand what Genre is and expecting hard borders around those Genre's. Or, as others have observed, generating distinctions in order to point to the Books I like as being 'Real' Sci-Fi, and the books I don't aren't 'really' Sci-Fi, or some such nonsense.
It's weird to have this conversation in the 2020's, given that it's been ongoing since basically the 1920's. One only has to look at discussions regarding the 'New' Science Fiction of the 60's, often decried for getting away from the Stealy Space Captain and Engineers of the prior error and caring more about social sciences or some such. The complaints that 'Science Fiction isn't the same as it was!' strikes me often as just people no longer being thirteen.
Thematic trends are going to change over time, but this 'debate' as it were is false, tired and anachronistic.
Most would disagree with this "no true Scotsman" stuff. Back in the golden age, Frederick Pohl said "science fiction needs to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
SF has always been about the effects on culture and society, not the technology. John Brunner's "Stand On Zanzibar" would be a classic example from the 1960s, that is more relevant now than in the 1990s, before the rise of AI and the internet.
There is always a small market for hard sci-fi, and there are relatively few writers capable of writing in that genre. There is always a much larger market for soft sci-fi / fantasy stories, and a much higher supply of writers. As long as publishers exist to make money, guess which one will get the spotlight by publishers.
Some of the highest rated sci-fi of all time falls into this category you describe, it's not a new thing at all, definitely agree seems more and more common but is it really a bad thing?
But you missed Ursula K. LeGuin, who wrote about society, psychology, gender and sexuality (before that was a thing), and Octavia Butler, whose Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Parable of the Sower" examined both the Black American experience and religion, through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old girl. Yes, that was a long sentence. It would have been longer if I'd taken the time to talk about Neal Stephenson and Gene Wolfe, two of my favorite male authors. Also, I feel you have it in for female authors.. You chastise Arkady Martine for examining the mutual culture shock experienced by Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass. That was a major element of both Hugo Award-winning novels, but the main conceit was the inheritable memory technology developed by The Station and its effect on the Teixcalan Empire. Martha Well's "Robot Diary' novellas are about artificial intelligence. Sorry, but I don't buy your thesis.
Doesn't sound very science fiction to me. Sounds more like a gender studies dissertation. Not exactly screaming Hugo awards
Women are, generally speaking, bad writers. And they are especially bad at science fiction and fantasy because they have a hard time relating to characters who aren't very similar to them. That's why Octavia Blackler only writes dumb preachy black "sci-fi," and so on. And Sower is BARELY sci-fi in the first place.
Social sciences are still science, lol.
@@whimsylore lol no they aren't
@@whimsylore Social science is pure, unreproducible, theory. It's modern sorcery masquerading as an academic discipline.
I appreciate your methodical and thoughtful analysis of the modern science fiction/speculative fiction landscape. When considering the genre's current shift, I see multiple influences on the shift from less science-based thesis to more social/emotional-based storytelling. Between MMO games, social media, which is a diabolical science fiction conceit, and broader democratizing socio-cultural changes, the influence on the genre was inevitable and natural. Interestingly, STEM education's rise coincides with this genre shift; science in SF has retreated, becoming light washes in many works. The opposite often occurred with older SF, with washes of emotional and psychological traits shunted to the background. These older, often shorter books tip-toe around or allegorize social or emotional realities or concepts rather than forefront them. I think of Arthur C. Clarke, who is considered excellent at hard science but rubbish at characters (i.e., emotional representations.) Clarke's work, however, thrived on emotional and philosophical explorations of the universe itself ("2001: A Space Odyssey" is the best example). Yet, he wrote polyamorous and bisexual backgrounds into characters in "Rendezvous with Rama" and "Imperial Earth," respectively. Religion, assiduously avoided in SF, was toyed with or dismissed by Clarke in "The Nine Billion Names of God" and "The Star." Overall, the changes in our beloved genre occur for various reasons and pressures, and the current shift is another one of those fluctuations. Representation and diversity in all their forms in SF publishing are long overdue, so hopefully, we can continue to find what piques our interest, emotionally or scientifically, or both, in the endless wave of ideas.
I question the "purity" of scientific basis for scifi novels. A vast proportion of "scifi" throughout the years has had quite limited attachment to rigorous science. Take a series for example like the Xeelee series by Stephen Baxter, most people would classify this as scifi but the science is so advanced that it just becomes space magic and could just have been as easily written in a fantasy setting. David Brin's Uplift series barely mentions a single element of science (other than genetic engineering for uplift) and is mostly a cultural/war space opera but his books won 2 Hugos. Half of Heinlein's work was "rugged American frontiersman ... but in space". Iain Banks Culture series essentially ignores science, its only two major principles are AI + post-scarcity society. I'd still classify all that stuff as scifi.
So I'm kinda dubious about constricting scifi just to pure Arthur C Clarkian hard science.
The truth is, science fiction has always been a sub-genre of fantasy. Magic became "science" and "technology". The mechanics of magic became math. But yes, modern sci-fi is mostly a backdrop for dramas.
The reason why sci-fi was optimistic is because it was created primarily by humanists, a religion that is slowly dying as we become more aware of reality. It is no longer philosophically viable (rational) to imagine that technology will somehow magically create a utopia or "superior" society. What people have learned (what some of us have always known because we were never caught up in the utopianist fantasy of humanism), is that humans beings are the same as we ever were regardless of technology levels.
As soon as the second iteration of Star Trek came with Picardo, and the overemphasis of human interactions I knew it was over.Days of our Lives on the Enterprise.
Just a note: The last male to win the Hugo for best novel was Cixin Liu in 2015. I think that's a factor in the change of direction from hard sci-fi to fantasy.
There is a crucial issue in all this that you have almost completely missed, in my view. This is the historical identity, according to many 'thought leaders' from the late nineteenth century up until now, of 'hard science' with some form of philosophical materialism. Materialist theories of the mind sit squarely behind much classic sci-fi literature in various ways - Isaac Asimov and Philip K Dick being obvious examples. I have never been drawn to these classic authors for more or less that reason, as I am an uncompromising arguer for the utter falsity of said materialist theories. Moreover, I think they suck all the real meaning out of our lives. I recall trying to read the 'Helliconia' books by Brian W. Aldiss and tossing them down in disgust for exactly that reason.
Those people who like the alleged 'realism' of philosophical materialism seem to be great admirers of sci-fi from the 40s to the 60s, whereas people like me are much more into the likes of Ursula Le Guin, classic fantasy and so on. One reason is that we think that truly hard science has solid roots in more idealist philosophical understandings and indeed a rigorous mysticism like that of the founders of quantum theory. Sci-fi that understands this is the kind I want to read!
I can tell you why sci-fi is lagging of late.
the research alone buries you under a mountain of drafting and then there's trying to keep the logic if you really care about science, so to speak.
it's truly a genre you can't half ass without that voice in your head (that cares about the genre proper) wagging its finger at you.
fantasy has a "god of the gaps" cheat that can stick out like a sore thumb in sci-fi.
Great analysis and video. I have not commented for a while, but I understand the concepts discussed here are important.
Hard Golden Age Science Fiction frequently discussed memory, identity and belief systems, as well.
Just a few examples: Who Goes There - John W. Campbell Jr, The World Of Null A - A E Van Vogt, Anything You Can Do - Randall Garrett, multiple stories by Keith Laumer, many more.
SF is a big tent, we have room for everything, but should not exclude anything, either. Monolithic SF is not appealing. As a product of Golden Age SF, which really encouraged education in every field (why my degree is in Electronic Engineering), I still feel that emphasis is important. So many authors felt they should impart the lessons learned from the WW2 era, too.
In the March 1982 edition of Amazing, Robert Silverberg discussed this issue briefly and Lester Del Rey at length in his 1976 SF History: The World Of Science Fiction 1926 -1976.
Thank you for exploring this topic.
Dune and Foundation series were much more of speculative fiction than sci-fi, so nothing have changed. When I want sci-fi, I look into Seal of Approval and Atomic Novels sections of Atomic Space Rockets site. Just the existence of the latter site makes current time a golden age of Sci-Fi.
One of my favorites is Lexx. I’ve criticized much sifi as being regular drama in space , or shoot ‘‘em up , but in space. Lexx is a fantastic example of what I call science fiction, maybe science fantasy
Lexx was a TV show that threw in lots of hardcore SF ... Mixed with softcore, weird bondage stuff, and mad fantasy. It was hard not to like its sheer Gonzo madness.
What hard science fiction was there in lexx? (I don’t remember much about the show)
@@marcjohnson5991 the entire second season had a backstory of self replicating mantid drones that eventually became so numerous they caused a big crunch.
I am not so comfortable with the split between 'sci-fi' and 'speculative fiction'. I feel that it is all sci-fi - but with sub categories (the name of the overarching parent category could easily be something else though). That one sub category is less popular at the moment is unfortunate - but tastes may change again. If I follow Sci-Fi Odyssey's classification proposed here, then many great works of sci-fi are arguably not sci-fi. Stranger in a Strange Land? Dune? Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion? Lord of Light? etc. None of those novels revolve around actual scientific principles.
It's an interesting discussion, however I feel defining one flavour of scifi as "true" scifi is somewhat arbitrary. It's the same problem with defining what the canon is in literature. It necessarily evolves with time because we as a culture are always changing, and the sources of inspiration for writers always change-in subject matter but also in form and technique. There is more hybridization in genre than ever, with scifi borrowing from literary fiction in style and characterization, and literary fiction borrowing scifi ideas. I'm sure someone will criticize why there are "scifi" books among Booker Prize nominees and that it's not "real" literature about real people or what have you. The Impressionists were criticized for not being real academic painting. And so on.
Art always evolves. If anything, scifi seems more visible to me now across all media than ever before, which is wonderful. You might argue it's "speculative" and not "real" scifi, but it feels like splitting hairs. At some point it's no longer helpful to get bogged down in labels. Let the marketers worry about such things. What matters is what blows your mind-and that's always going to be a small percentage of all the books you read. Make your own award and give it to the books you love, and don't worry about the rest. :)
While I do appreciate the research and effort put into the video, as well as its presentation, I think there's more to Sci-Fi than just "Speculative fiction without the themes." Even the stories you chose as examples of classic sci-fi don't really use science for their own sake as much as to look at broader political messages. "War of the Worlds", e.g., directly invokes the British conquest of Tasmania in the first few pages to connect the story to themes of colonialism and militarism.
And this is why I'm so happy about the Panderverse South Park episode, I don't even like Marvel or Star Wars, I don't watch any of that, but this is happening everywhere now, it needs to be stopped.
I noticed this earlier in the year when I read Greg Bear's Eon, a book that was huge when it first came out but has faded. I thought it was going to be an exploration of an alien artifact much like Rendezvous with Rama, which it is often compared. Instead Bear skips that part and goes to human societal interaction and politics. I was disappointed in the result, that's on me. I wanted more hard sci-fi and he gave speculative fiction.
Something similar happened a couple years ago when I read Alistair Reynold's "Poseidon's Children" books. Again, I wanted exploration of an alien world and got human politicking in a fleet of space ships, although we did get some of the former. (Only read the first two. I should pick up the third and finish it.) Speculative fiction is all well and fine, but overall I think I prefer more sci-fi elements and explorations.
After reading it since the early 1950s, I lost interest in SF by any name when the editors and publishers demanded 500 page novels when there were only enough ideas to fill 160 pages. They took main stream novels as the ideal to broaden the audience and used that type of material to pad the book out. If I had wanted to read some other kind of fiction, I would have been reading that instead. It was pretty much a decision based on economics - there was a lot more money to be made with the new books that could be sold in much larger quantities to a bigger audience at much higher prices. What was lost was the fun and excitement of a writer who could come up with some idea you never thought of before every few pages. It didn't have to be scientific at all - it had to be new.
Harry Whittington didn't write SF at all but he would grab you by the nose in the first sentence and drag you at high speed through 60,000 words without letting you take a breath. That was fun. Plodding through 200,000 words at a snail's pace about your anxiety about your place in society is boring.
From what I remember of the Foundation Series, it would firmly be Speculative Fiction then, no? Very much about cultural/societal shifts in the future? (It’s been a while since I read it, though.)
Thanks
I'm rather torn on your premise. Sci-fi as a genre has NO FOUNDING TENETS. There's never been a sci-fi manifesto, founding club, etc. So attempting to decide if something is "sci-fi" by said tenets is inherently going to be entirely subjective. I'll allow that sci-fi is distinct from pure fantasy, but Star Wars proves that the line is blurred at best.
Part of the problem is that we're living in the time which 1940s to 1960s sci-fi was often targeting. We have no flying cars, there are no extraplanetary colonies, etc. But we're almost ahead of what computing technology was expected to achieve, and the results have been more socio-political than functional. The shift in focus is largely due to the experiences of the society which generates authors. Expecting the genre to not significantly evolve based on society is naive at best, and indicative of orthodoxy at worst.
Star Trek is half sci-fi, half speculative, if you take the line that exploring the future of SOCIETY is speculative, and exploring the future of technology is sci-fi. I think this distinction creates more problems than it solves. We tend to forget that sci-fi is more often a setting than anything else. If I write a timeline for the future of technology, is that speculative or is it sci-fi? Just throwing a dart at a line and picking "2063" and writing "warp drive" makes it sci-fi? How do I predict what technologies come next without contemplating the effect on society and the pressures which lead to inventions after this date?
Any fiction with aliens at this point is really speculative more than sci-fi... Alternate timelines will have different technological histories as well, with possibly interesting results on societal development. Is that sci-fi or is that speculative? Let's say I write a story where some dude figures out a technological path to accessing what we once called magic. It's technology, but it's also magic (we'll assume I'm screwing with the laws of reality this way). Is that fantasy or sci-fi? Is it both?
Anything more than 5 minutes in the future is sci-fi if new tech is the line and the author thinks half a line ahead. We're missing the forest for the trees on this. Admittedly there's more than one forest, but at the same time the gray area where it's a subjective definition is larger than the space where it's objective, and we need to be honest about this.
Oh, and as for scientific rigor... No. Hard no. Any new law of physics (or unproven loophole) is already breaking that rule. By this definition, FTL of any kind at this point breaks this rule. So does almost every other "classic" science fiction work. Hard sci-fi has always been the smaller branch. Star Trek is not sci-fi by this definition (which is fine I guess) but now you're really narrowing the field. All of the truly good sci-fi explores the effect of technology on the human condition.
That's a strange thing for the Hugo Awards to do in 2023. If there was no scifi novel good enough to win they should not have chosen any book for that year.
Hugo is too for fantasy.
Hugo includes fantasy too
I think it's a case of stories and ideas bleeding into each other. In the past, genres stayed fenced within their own category. And if you wanted to attract a certain reader, you ploughed a narrow path. Now, we have 'domestic' versions of a certain genre. Take "The Time Travellers Wife", it is heavily based on the perils of time travel, exploring the ideas of destiny, determinism, and individual choice. But at its heart, it's a love story. It's a domestic sci-fi novel. I would summize that the vast majority of readers of that novel were not sci-fi fans. And because there's more and more novels like this bleeding genres, both because it allows an author to be more creative and its potential to sell more copies due to its not relying on a niche genres reputation for being po-faced and boring science stuff, is the hard ideas laid out in older sci-fi deteriorating? Are we actually dumbing down? I love Rendezvous with Rama. But it's not the characters that have lived in my memory-it's the ideas. I also love The Sparrow, buts not the first contact, alien world stuff that beguiled me-it was the characters. Cool essay. New subscriber here. First comment.
Excellent video. So Sci-Fi is a sub-genre of Speculative Fiction?
I've been reading sci-fi since I was a kid in the 70s. I grew up reading the classics. I think sci-fi as a genre is better than ever, mostly because of the new talent and perspectives coming into the genre. That said, I also think I disagree with your premise about sci-fi being a historically pure genre about science-based or science-grounded fiction. Its always been speculative fiction, with many of the best authors and books blurring the line between science and made up stuff for the purpose of ideas. Exhibit A is characters in Dune that can talk to their foremothers and have dreamy visions of the future - that's not based in science. Maybe pop-science of the day. Some of my favorite classic authors bent the genre to do exactly what you say is diluting the genre today - a focus on social problems, human failings, and what if things were a little different. Philip K Dick, Clifford D Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Andre Norton, Samuel R Deleny, Ursula K Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Piers Anthony, all come to mind. I just glanced over the Hugo award winners in the 60s and there are even pure fantasy winners back then! Its really apparent when I look at categories other than novel. Also, having grown up reading the genre, I remember it being replete with telepathy and mind-powers (which, BTW, I loved). Those were not really based in the science at the time - then or now - but a frankly "sciencified" version of magic. I think you are right to point out that the genre has a broader appeal now (not just men and not just white people), and a broader author pool, all leading to a wide range of exploration of the human condition and society as the main focus. But I would argue that the blurred line has always been there, with the Hugo committees of the past giving their winners the benefit of the doubt that their imaginary worlds and people are more grounded in science than fantasy.
I agree and speculative fiction has always been an umbrella term that includes sci-fi, fantasy, and even horror. The monster risen from the dead by the mad scientist could, end game story, apply to all of these labels.
1000% Yes! I find myself arguing with people who say Sci-Fi today is not "Sci-Fi" don't want more science. They don't want to be challenged with new ideas. They want action and adventure dressed up with some shiny new backdrops. They want Master & Commander amongst the Stars. They want James Bond with robots. They don't want to explore identity and causality. They want "heroes" to conquer new worlds and conquest alien women.
The Hugos died many years ago. It's not an evolution, it was a political takeover by a a small group of zealots.
I used to love sci-fi. Except for rare examples (outside the mainstream and defintely the hugos) today's work is unreadable
This is something i took into consideration when writing sci fi. The purpose the genre is to explore innovative concepts using imaginative creativity while leaving behind the question as to "What if?" this is possible. While i an using some tropes, such as space opera and aliens, one of the themes im exploring is that of spiritualistic ideas in a scientific lense and how it pertains to the cosmos while presenting itsef to mankind to see that they actually have a place in the grand scheme of thing's.
That i think is unexplored ground that could make for some good Sci-Fi
I have often had a problem with science fiction. The science is often just not very good, or incidental. Spaceships cannot go faster than light, but that is too limiting for planet hopping stories, so a technology has been invented but is not adequately explained. Quite often science fiction books are just fantasy. A nuclear war happened thousands of years ago; mutations turned people into elves and dwarfs; history had been reset to zero but it is now the Medieval period again. Then again the science may be very futuristic but that attitudes and values are whatever is in the mind of the author, which may be embarrassingly sexist or horribly woke. Science Fiction should have some science in it in my view, but is it the science that makes it interesting? Does all the science have to be correct and explicable? H.G. Wells described how the Invisible Man made himself invisible, which contained some science, but which is obviously impossible in the way described. What was interesting was the concept of an invisible man. Dune is an incredible book, but it has hardly any proper science in it at all. I read Ubik by Philip K Dick. That is a mind-bending book. Its science is not possible, but it was more a book about perception and how real that perception is.
Fascinating video. How far can a genre change before it turns into something different? H.G. Wells saw his stories as "scientific romances" and now they're seen as the start of science fiction. Maybe in time today's "science fiction" will be seen as the start of something else. Who knows? Interesting stuff.
maybe we need a new genre called "scifi lite", "pop scifi", or even "diet scifi" if the book industry is just now constantly watering down core scifi as a genre
"Pop" scifi strikes me as a very appropriate expression. I believe it has been called "soft" scifi as well as "science fantasy" (a la Star Wars), and encompasses works like Star Trek. And not a thing wrong with "pop" scifi whatsoever ... one just needs to know what they are getting themselves into so they can mentally strap in for that particular flavor of ride.
I prefer ideological sci-fi as a new category
it's called science fantasy
That’s called fantasy bro
i think people are clearly mistaking my point from an entirely different genre. obviously, i'm still talking about scifi-ish stories and NOT fantasy
Speculative Fiction is really an umbrella term that covers fantasy, science-fiction and everything in-between.
I tend to think the general lack of emphasis on the sciences at least in the US is part of the reason.
I also tend to believe that much of the possibilities from science explored back in the time when Asimov, Clark, Dick etc. were still new to the general public. The first television was produced in 1925, Asimov’s first novel was published around 1950. 25 years is not a long time so the broad scale impact of technology, the wonder about what else was possible was all new and completely unexplored by writers.
Today there’s not really undiscovered science that can’t fairly easily fit within the existing tropes/accepted but un-described standards of science-fiction. (People can’t survive in space without proper equipment because there is no air and there is only sub-freezing cold)
Aside from that none of this is new. Dune isn’t science-fiction yet it’s always been classified as such.
The thread of "speculative" fiction has always been there to a degree, and celebrated by the Hugos. It was interesting that your list of classic greats didn't include names like Heinlein or Ellison - Henlein at least is littered throughout Hugo history, and while he had his hard science side for sure, it's hard to deny the main focus of books like Starship Troopers or Stranger in a Strange Land is social, political, and personal exploration, not hard science or progress in any real way.
The "golden age" and beyond weren't monolithic in their focus ... there has always been lots of variation in SF and reflected in the Hugos. Heinlein's Troopers won in 1960, and Stranger was the winner in 1961 and Stranger, at least, seems clearly intended as an exploration of society and self MUCH more than a "science fiction" story. For Stranger at least, Heinlein just uses a science fiction structure to hang an alternate society story from ...
I think there's always been experimentation in what constitutes SF ... lots of commenters of the day asked that about Harlan Ellison, and people are STILL debating some stories by Vonnegut and Heller to one degree or another. I think "science fiction" has always been a broader category than this video makes it out to be. And btw, Asimov's Robot and Foundation stories were literally my gateway drug to the world of SF, so I'm very familiar with the segment of the genre you talk about and love it to bits lol ...
So, was The Machine Stops' (E M Forster 1909) sci-fi? Personally I read it as such some 50 years ago. Although it is hardly optimistic it did foresee much that defines our technological life today. Then there is the classic 'War of the Winged Men' by Poul Anderson that challenged many of the tropes then prevalent in sci-fi. The Hitchikers Guide was, arguably, hard sci fi with delightful devices such as the improbability drive and the same could be said of Bill the Galactic Hero with its bloater drive system. I like 'hard' sci-fi myself and I think you could draw a line where the story is not dependent, contingent or hinged on some basic scientific principles. Doctor Who is a case in point, when it started it was some old duffer who had built a time machine he couldn't control (the original intention was for it to be a historically accurate educational programme). It became a darker more sci-fi for a time, the scenes of the robo-men in tattered clothing using whips on the enslaved humans, also in tattered clothing, would not be considered acceptable today (and were sanitised in the film versions), but when it aired such things were very much a part of living memory. That series has now evolved into some kind of super-being with implausible plot devices (psychic paper? Really?) and a distinct element of 'fashion victim' (remember when they were all running around with a blue-tooth headset, looking like a bunch of marauding taxi drivers. Sigh). Oh and the daleks, formerly confined to the city where they drew power through the metal floors, can now fly..The cybermen were originally 'augmented humans' with bandages and very very creepy but these days they are just another variation on Robbie the Robot, or Tobor. It may be 'progress' but I am unsure as the direction it is progressing. Stanislaw Lem wrote some delightful sci-fi soap operas about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances but as they were often the misfit crew of a space freighter dealing with the associated technical problems it was undeniably sci-fi and personally I found him more interesting than a Superman comic. Perhaps we need greater granularity, defined sub-genres perhaps. That would make selecting books at the library easier.
The reason you see fantasy titles in the Hugo Awards is that a while back, the committee threw up its hands trying to define an enforceable distinction between fantasy and sf - so they gave up, allowed it all in. They're right imho. Given the enormous diversity and huge avalanche of content available, you can find any niche of fiction you want and there's lots of stuff out there, there's even an oversupply of awards including more narrowly defined ones. Last nit-pick: calling traditional sf "rigorous" in terms of science is, well, ahem, stretching it a bit.
I'm sorry but this is bullcrap imho. Fantasy and SciFi are both great, but not comparable. It's pandering to the masses to lump it al in together in the same awards contest. This is detrimetal to developing new ideas and far fetched "science" that may one day inspire the next scientist.
@@goldenghostincHugo awards was always for sci-fi and fantasy
Having just finished Pantheon (animation) I can say that big, original sci-fi is alive and well
Excellent and insightful, thank you.
I believe part of the reason why a lot of science fiction now focuses on trying to understand the changes in societal norms stems from the fact that, while we're still pretty much in the gestational development stage of space exploration, the advent of the internet, smartphones and portable computers have really made a lot of what make science fiction awesome into something mundane. We all still live very mundane lives and we're far from having the technology shown in lost of different sci-fi stories, but the basis for all of that already exists and it's just a matter of time. But much like in cyberpunk, we have tons of technology right now, but people still face poverty, wars and hunger. That's why cyberpunk is pretty much the most relevant sci-fi gender out there, because in many ways we're already living in a sic-fi dystopia. And that's why it's understandable that sci-fi now doesn't care that much for the cool tech and space exploring, since the technology we currently have now, which is at it's most advanced in our history, hasn't helped us all have a better life.
Part hair-splitting, part question: Science is more than the natural sciences, the sciences of the mind and society and more are there as well. But I wonder if there are any sf stories that really used the established _science_ of those fields and not just explored those topics from the author's point of view. Do you know of any? That you could recommend?
Sure. Read anything by Petter Watts for a heavy dose of neuropsychiatry..
@@ldti Thanks, I will look into it.
Nice video - I see you've earlier looked at hard vs soft sci fi - do you see a difference between soft sci fi and speculative fiction?
I think applying your narrower categories we lose older "sciFi" classics like The War of the World's and a hell of a lot of Phillip K Dick. The heart of War of the World is a what if colonialism happened to England. Philip K Dick is mostly what if we took a ton of drugs and had deep conversation about what it means to be human. I am sure if I hadn't just gotten up I could think of others.
I know I am a cranky old man but my point isn't just to be contrarian but that this focus on more social scifi is an older phenomena than people suggest.
Thank you. On top of War of the Worlds being about how Social Darwinism wouldn't appeal to nearly so many people if they weren't on top, the Time Machine is about freaking class conflict. The Morlocks are a proletariat driven so deep into the factories that they can no longer bear the sunlight, while the Eloi are a bourgeoisie so pampered that they are childlike, unable to care for themselves, and essentially cattle for the Morlocks. The Foundation Trilogy is about predicting the future, but it's about the societal forces that shape that future and how to manipulate them.
Also there's a lot of survivorship bias here. Sure old sci-fi was more intellectual and focused on science instead of emotion, if, of course, you leave out Tom Swift, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, John Carter of Mars and a thousand other pulp adventures.
I don't think the dichotomy you draw between Sci Fi and Speculative Fiction is the right one to be useful. It is probably useful in some cases, but generally does not address the crisis in literature and drama. The true crisis is the way commercialism is allowed to constrain ideas. It is about challenging versus feeding peoples' world views. It is about opening minds rather than closing them. It is about looking outwards versus turning inwards. The corporate controlled shaping of creative production is focused only on profits, not ideas, and is also politically slanted by corporate interests. Today creative production is not used to communicate, it is simply a way to make money. People don't really have much to say in such types of output. I always remember how the "Hitch hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was completely perverted by Hollywood. Not only was the scathing criticism of giant corporations erased and replaced with an attack on government bureaucracy, but it was given new, upbeat "happy ending". How gross. To add insult to injury the massive PR machine of Hollywood even had the temerity to suggest that true original Hitchhiker's guide fans like myself, who listened to it when it was first broadcast in 1978, and who were very critical of how it had been completely perverted, were not 'true fans', but that 'true fans' would prefer their new improved version. A now dead, and so voiceless Douglas Adams, was even invoked as having preferred the new version.
each year, me and my partner l look forward to The Clarke Awards . We try to read as many of the nominees as possible. My current favourite and 'inheritor' of the Clarke mantle is Stephen Baxter.
Also, Ursula K Le Guin should be mandatory!
The last true Sci-Fi novel I read was the Ring World Trilogy by Larry Niven so I cannot speak from the newer novels. What makes Sci-Fi to me is a griping story that incorporates futuristic technologies with descriptions that at least seem plausible in light of our current understanding of physics. When authors simply paint pictures without at some point elaborating on the ideas to me that is what I classify as fantasy whether it is set in the future or not. Most movies that I have seen that contain space travel I would classify as total fantasy and not science fiction.