Hard SF discussion

Much is said about how sci-fi is dying. I chip in with my 2c worth on the website of science fiction author Marianne de Pierres ('Sentiens of Orion' and 'Parrish Plessis' series).

http://www.mariannedepierres.com/blog...

It's a topic that impacts us all and I'd be interested in hearing people's views.

I'm tired of all these 'SF is dying' reports,usually made by people who don't read SF I bet! SF isn't dying its just changing! People will always want a sensawunda,will always look to the stars and imagine what's out there,and as long as they do that there will be SF!

I'm a science guy. I like hard SF. But I know it's not for everyone. As the end of Graham's article said, SF is where cutting edge visions of potential futures are explored, examined and (in a sense) debated - and it's important that continues among one section of the SF community.

Aside from that one part of the SF community, why has SF been selling less compared to fantasy and such?

(1) I doubt we've ever had such a shortage of space opera and other no-baffling-science SF that readers were pushed away from SF because of that shortage.

(2) I doubt it's a shortage of new ideas in SF. Mainstream personal drama fiction can't have more truly new ideas than SF, but people still read it.

(3) Most readers may be unable to identify with transhumans, but as I said in (1) there were always other SF books with just regular humans.

I tend to think the changes in book sales are a more general cultural trend [hopefully not permanent:]. Fewer people think or plan personal or society futures. More seek immediate gratification and escapism. Conservative religious currents are stronger. These are mindsets that are more comfortable with old-time themes of fantasy. Stories of us versus them also fit in more. And it's less inclined to worlds only one's children will see.

Of course, this is just a matter of shifting percentages. There's still SF sales and community, just not as big of a market share.

Fantasy will always outsell SF as its perceived as being easier, more accesible to the 'common man' as it were,plus all of the endless multi volume series that fantasy puts out!

@Larry I worry sometimes that the 'sesawunda' factor has been usurped by fantasy. I look back at some of the old SF tales and find that a lot of the open speculation about aliens and possible technologies that writers indulged in back then has been shut down by modern science. 'Beings of pure energy', 'psi abilities', 'matter transfer', and so on, all look sort of quaint now. Yes, I know some sci-fi writers still use this kind of techno-magic, but the place to look to find all this and more, still going strong, is in fantasy.

@David, I'm a science guy too, and a hard SF fan, but I wonder if those two things are more closely aligned than they used to be and if that isn't a problem for the genre. I'm reading 'Ark' by Stephen Baxter just now and I think a lot of people would be put off by the detail he includes on theoretical physics. I'm familiar with all the science he mentions and I still thought it was over the top. Contrast it with 'Pushing Ice' by Alastair Reynolds. There the sci-fi is just as hard but it isn't anywhere near so in your face. (And the 'sensawunda' factor is pretty high, too.)

It would never occur to me to think that SciFi is dying — if asked, I would have thought it as alive as ever, with the increasing centrality of technology to our society bringing SciFi with it.

But as Graham Storrs says in the essay (Marianne de Pierres just hosted it):

Cyberpunk and the later themes of transhumanity and 'the singularity' probed the social and psychological consequences of the changes we are going through and heading towards. But I think it was a bridge too far for the general reader, even for most sci-fi fans. The protagonists in a transhuman, post-singularity, virtualised future, seem barely human any more. The worlds being painted were too big a stretch for most people – just as the very world we live in now is impossible to grasp for some.

Well, I guess I might agree that while this isn't "too big a stretch" for me, it might very well be for most people. My recent favorites do tend to push the envelope in terms of complexity and post-humanism.

But what do the sales figures say? If people are buying this stuff, then maybe the problem is that the definition of SciFi is shifting with the times. Folks looking for less sociologically complex tales of Asimov, Niven or Heinlein might feel like SciFi is in the doldrums because the field has moved beyond their tastes, even if it is vibrant to other tastes.

Perhaps the SciFi that impressed me the most in the past year was Peter Watts' Blindsight , which had plenty of "wonder" for me. He certainly had too much techno for many, but it was so well blended with how technology can twist sociology that I can't see him dumbing it down.

For me, this division is nothing new: the part I hated most about Clarke's 2001 was the psychodelic ending, which was all sensawunda with nothing to keep it anchored to techno-scientific plausibility.

Have the sales figures for SciFi versus Fantasy versus mainstream fiction shifted much over the years? Anyone got some graphs?

You know, I bet it's almost impossible to get SF vs Fantasy figures. The bookshops lump them together and so do the publishers. There is loads of anecdote on the blogs suggesting a very big shift to Fantasy over the years. Certainly a glance at a bookshop shelf would suggest perhaps a five or ten to one ratio (depending how you classify sci-fi), with more new authors among the Fantasy books and most of the blockbusters there too. If you do a graph of how many blogs mention 'sci-fi' or 'science fiction' as opposed to 'horror' or 'fantasy' (as I did a few months ago) 'horror' and 'fantasy' are at least three times the other two. The market for SF&F in 2007 was about 8% of the whole fiction market. Couple that with the mentions ratios and you get sci-fi being about 2% of the fiction market. (Which could explain why it's so hard to find an agent :-) )Sadly, I have no data on trends - except all those anecdotes.

@Graham, I don't think such things look quaint now, I believe there's a lot of stuff we don't know about-in science we have barely scratched the surface. But to say SF is dying is ridiculous. The only celestial body we've visited is our own moon,and all that happened there was a few rocks collected and a game of golf! Aside from the inner planets there's exciting possibilities surrounding places like Europa, Titan or Triton! And i'd love to see Pluto depicted as other than a hard cold rock-I actually have an idea for story surrounding that body but I'm no SF writer!

@Larry, I would never say that SF was dying! The phrase I used was 'in the doldrums' - i.e. temporarily becalmed. And I agree that exploring the solar system is exciting - even with robots! I hope Obama is right that the way to get this moving again is to encourage private enterprise. Governments have demonstrated that it's a slow, stop-start process if we leave it in their fickle hands.

@Graham sorry I didn't mean to pick at you, I just meant in general there are people saying that SF is dying,and as in my earlier comment I remarked that its often non-SF readers that make such claims. That rules you out cos you're here! :)

I agree that hard SF and expositions of sophisticated physics isn't for many SF readers. There is a section of the SF community it is important to. Perhaps, Baxter's Ark took it to excess (I haven't read it). However, most SF writers couldn't overburden the reader with physics even if they wanted to - they just don't have the background.

So, to me, the question is: Why has there been a shift among readers who never read hard SF from reading not-too-much-physics SF to Fantasy and such. I tend to believe there's a connection between what I see in our political/social world and changes in reading. For instance, consider shifts within SF - the increase in military SF during the last 20 years. I believe this is consistent with a tendency of people to be less introspective about our society's strengths and weaknesses, and therefore a greater appeal for "us versus them" stories.

No, I don't have solid data saying the market share for fantasy has grown compared to SF. However, I do have the impression it's true. Back in the late 1960's and 1970's there was a re-popularization of Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings. As best as I can recall, there wasn't a huge selection of new fantasy for readers to move onto after reading that. There certainly were a few, for instance about Merlin, but it doesn't seem like today's vast quantities.

Let me make a highly biased statement which shouldn't be take over-literally. I think there are differences between fantasy and SF which make it easier for more authors to crank out endless book series of fantasy compared to the extent of SF series. I think part of this is that even working in the framework of sloppy science in SF it's more difficult than the less restrictive framework of magic. Over the last few decades, businesses of all sorts have been worrying more about the bottom line, so publishers have found it convenient to encourage book series (in hopes of acquiring a captive audience which will continue to buy a string of books from the same publisher). So, the publishing industry may have played a role as well - increasing the number of series in both SF and fantasy, but more in fantasy.

I'm no scientist but I like the S in SF! I like the stuff in Gregory Benford's Galactic Centre novels,and his novel Cosm, and I'm of the opinion that to write good SF you need to know the science-generally,not always.

@Larry, I couldn't agree more that good sci-fi needs good science behind it. (Obviously, there are exceptions. I love The Martian Chronicles dearly, but it wasn't good science!) about a year ago, I wrote myself a 'manifesto' - a set of principles to guide my own sci-fi writing. It boiled down to this:

1. Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real.
2. Be honest about what is real and what is not real.
3. Do not write if you have nothing important to say.
4. Write in a clear, simple style, so as to be understood.
5. Look forward and outward from where we are to where we might one day be.

I explain what I mean at length (here) but points 1 and 2 are about getting the science right.

Staying consistent with science is a good idea in general, and an important factor in what I prefer for my personal reading [I run hardsf.org:]. But that doesn't change the fact that many SF writers don't have a true scientific understanding of the tech and science in their stories. So, all SF is never going to have overly-baffling physics - many of the writers can't do more than some techno-babble. This might not be the books you or I choose, but it's out there for readers who don't want the long physics explanations. As long as readers have that choice, I don't believe the physics talk in some SF is forcing readers to stop reading all SF.

By the way, a thought for you writers. I just finished John Cramer's Twistor. He includes an afterword in which he tells which of the science in the book was well-established, which was being seriously discussed new theories and which were Cramer's additions for the purposes of the story. In the story itself he didn't get into complex explanations.

Graham wrote: "1. Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real."

Hold on — perhaps my knowledge of physics isn't up to par, but can time travel be foreseen based on what is "real", today? And doesn't TimeSplash play with time travel?

Should #1 be more like "Write only about what is real, or about what does not contradict and might plausibly be consistent with what is known today"?

@Richard, you are dead right. I wrote that guideline after I'd written TimeSplash. It was the second time travel book I'd written in a row and I suppose I was feeling a bit guilty about it. :-)

@David, I like what Cramer did. For myself, I'd rather put it online than in the book. For TimeSplash, I have written on the book's blog about how I went about choosing the time travel 'model' for the story. I prefer it when writers keep all that additional material out of the book and put it on their websites instead.

Thinking more about this question, it occurred to me to consider the market shares of SF and fantasy in major films. Hollywood films aren't known for being concerned with scientific accuracy, but we can still distinguish between not-hard SF and fantasy. Personally, it would be convenient to me if there were more SF movies. However, I don't have as strong an impression of a shifting market share from SF to fantasy in movies. (And if there has been, it may be specific to the Harry Potter series, rather than a general trend.)

Do the rest of you have the same impression? (I don't have hard data on this.) Have ideas on why there might be more of a trend in books than film for more fantasy? I could speculate that the importance of special effects in today's films might be an advantage for SF.

I also have an impression that there is less SF on TV - assuming we use a definition of SF that deals with space exploration, events occuring considerable years in our future and the like. If one counts the number of SF TV shows including Lost, Fringe and X-Files kinds of shows, the count will be higher. Fast Forward is still kind of murky about how much of a role the science and tech actually play, and how much will be more mysterious.

In any case, if the trends in these different media are moving at different rates, perhaps understanding why would shed some light on this issue.

David Brandt

David, if you're looking at trends in other media, you should probably bring games and 'graphic novels' into the discussion too. I suspect that young boys in particular are getting their sci-fi fix from their Wii where you and I might have got it from the local library.

I'm not familiar enough with the games, comics, graphic novels, etc. to have any impressions from them. However, your mention of the ages of boys playing the games may be relevant. A lot of movies are oriented to pre-teen and teen audiences. Differences in trends in books, films and other media could be influenced by which age groups are the main audience of each medium.

There is a fine line to tread between "reality" and story telling in SF. Too much scientific explanation tends to halt the story and bore the non-technical reader. Especially if the author is faking it (such as an explanation of how the hero's hyperdrive works).

Good SF can assume the fake science because the average guy on the street has no idea of why his car engine works. He may know how to fix it, but the physics of combustion may be beyond him. So, spaceman spiff can jump into his Ford Interstellar Speedster, turn the key, and put the peddle to the metal without annoying the reader one bit.

What's most important, as in any type of fiction, is the actual story. SF is just a setting. As long as the stories coming out of the publishing houses are good, there will be people to read them.

Fads come and go. A couple of decades ago, just about every 5th TV series was a horse opera. You can't find one today. It's all cop shows. Until a couple of years ago, there were a fair collection of SF shows (Stargate, StarTrek spinoffs, Battlestar Gilhoolie, etc.). Next decade it may be horse operas or sitcoms that replace today's cops and un-reality shows. And just as surely, hard SF will be back on TV and SF book sales will increase again. But the SF books will not die off.

If you're worried because your particular book isn't making you rich, it might be because so many competing SF titles are being produced every year. Overall, there are over 300,000 new book titles published annually. That's a lot of competition for the reader's attention and wallet.

Overall, there are over 300,000 new book titles published annually. That's a lot of competition for the reader's attention and wallet.

And it will get worse. As well as the 300K commercially-published works, there is an equal number of self-published works. The latter number climbing fast.

It seems that the novels that get nominated for hugos are pretty low key SF stuff. They dont sound inspiring at all!

I agree with Al about the waves of genres. I think we may be in a sort of "rest period" in mass media science fiction. We actually had quite a glut of space opera on TV from 1990 to 2005. We had four different Star Treks, two Stargates, Babylon 5 and its spin-offs, Space Above and Beyond, X-Files, Battlestar, Firefly, Farscape, the ongoing Star Trek movies, the Star Wars revival, and The Matrix. Not only did we have a lot of it, but it was fairly popular and profitable stuff. I think the producers followed the money, and when the money moved on, so did they. It will come back, eventually.

SF books will truck along, as ever, mostly on the fringe until one piece touches on a social issue in just the right way and blows up into a phenomenon, and then the copycats will revive interest (and investment) in SF stories for a while. I wouldn't worry about the long term.