Why are Our Imaginations Retreating from Science and Space, and into Fantasy?

The Globe and Mail (Canada) ^ | Monday, September 8, 2003 | SPIDER ROBINSON

[anymouse]

I've recently returned from Torcon 3, the 61st World Science Fiction Convention, held at the end of August in Toronto. I left it deeply concerned for the future -- not merely of my chosen genre or my chosen country, but my species.

I served this Worldcon as its toastmaster, and presiding over our annual Hugo Awards ceremony required me to make a speech. This being the 50th year that Hugos have been given for excellence in SF, I devoted my remarks to the present depressing state of the field. Three short steps into the New Millennium, written SF is paradoxically in sharp decline.

My genre has always had its ups and downs, but this is by far its worst, longest downswing. Sales are down, magazines are languishing, our stars are aging and not being replaced. And the reason is depressingly clear: Those few readers who haven't defected to Tolkienesque fantasy cling only to Star Trek, Star Wars, and other Sci Fi franchises.

Incredibly, young people no longer find the real future exciting. They no longer find science admirable. They no longer instinctively lust to go to space.

Just as we've committed ourselves inextricably to a high-tech world (and thank God, for no other kind will feed five billion), we appear to have become nearly as terrified of technology, of science -- of change -- as the Arab world, or the Vatican. We are proud both of our VCRs, and our claimed inability to program them.

I'm not knocking fantasy, but if we look only backward instead of forward, too, one day we will find ourselves surrounded by an electorate that has never willingly thought a single thought their great-grandparents would not have recognized. That's simply not acceptable. That way lies inconceivable horror, a bin Laden future for our grandchildren.

SF's central metaphor and brightest vision, lovingly polished and presented as entertainingly as we knew how to make it, has been largely rejected by the world we meant to save. Because I was born in 1948, the phrase I'll probably always use to indicate something is futuristic is "space age."

There were doubtless grown adults at Torcon 3 who were born after the space age ended. The very existence of the new Robert A. Heinlein Awards, given for the first time at Torcon to honour works that inspire manned exploration of space, proves a need was perceived to foster such works.

About the only part of our shared vision of the future that actually came to pass was the part where America just naturally took over the world. But while it's prepared to police (parts of) a planet, the new Terran Federation is so far not interested enough to even glance at another one.

Inconceivable wealth and limitless energy lie right over our heads, within easy reach, and we're too dumb to go get them -- using perfectly good rockets to kill each other, instead.

The day Apollo 11 landed, I knew for certain men would walk on Mars in my lifetime. So did the late Robert Heinlein -- I just saw him say so to Walter Cronkite last weekend, on kinescope.

I'm no longer nearly so sure. The Red Planet is as close as it's been in 60,000 years -- and the last budget put forward in Canada contained not a penny for Mars. (Please, go to http://www.marssociety.com and sign the protest petition there.)

At Torcon 3, I caught up with Michael Lennick, co-producer of a superb Canadian documentary series about manned spaceflight, Rocket Science. His next project examines the growing phenomenon of people who refuse to believe we ever landed on the moon. Not because he sees them as amusing cranks . . . but because they're becoming as common as Elvis-nuts. And it's hard to argue with their logic: It beggars belief, they say, that we could possibly have achieved moon flight . . . and given it up.

On the other hand, I take heart that SF still exists, 50 years after the first Hugo was awarded. My wife's family are Portuguese fisherfolk from Provincetown, Mass., where every summer they've held a ceremony called the Blessing of the Fleet, in which the harbour fills with boats and the archbishop blesses their labours. The 50th-ever blessing was the last. There's no fishing fleet left. For the first time in living memory, there is not a single working fishing boat in P-town . . . because there are no cod or haddock left on the Grand Banks. For all its present problems, science fiction as a profession seems to have outlasted pulling up fish from the sea.

I believe with all my heart that the pendulum will return, that ignorance will become unfashionable again one day, that my junior colleagues are about to ignite a new renaissance in science fiction, and that our next 50 years will make the first 50 pale by comparison, taking us all the way to immortality and the stars themselves. If that does happen, some of the people who will make it so were in Toronto.

People still believe that men fished the Grand Banks, once. Some even dream of going back. SF readers have never stopped dreaming. We can't, you see. We simply don't know how.

B.C. writer Spider Robinson's latest novel is Callahan's Con.

[tiamat]

It's not you. "Thomas Covenant" bites.

Been there, tried that, couldn't finish What a waste.

Tia

[foto]

"The reason for this is that it is simply impossible to develop new stories that have not already been told within the confines of the hard SF genre."

Thats a joke. Sounds like the old "nothing new under the sun". Try reading the old Greg Bear before he sold out to
the fantasy crowd, obviously for money. Blood Music, Forge of God, and Moving Mars. Some of the best new ideas out there but follow up books by other writers never took the material to the next level.
I think the biggest problem facing Science Fiction is not lack of new material that has been covered but by its reliance on a group of writers who are essentially lay people. In the old days a lay person could come up with new stuff based on their understanding of current science.
Today Science has advanced to the point that writers as a group cannot keep up with it nor understand its intricasies, let alone lay people. The writers cannot understand the technology except for the blurbs they hear coming from science journals, which is after the fact. None of them are forecasting anything different from what the editors at popular science and discover are forecasting. To get real science fiction in this day and age requires a writer with actual understanding of the cutting edge of technology. How many writers can actually understand AI or physics to a greater degree than an expose in Discover magazine provides to the general public.
Unlike in the past where sci fi writers were the most forward looking group, the only people nowadays who can give us a real "theorteical glimps into a possible future based on the current technology are buried somewhere in an IBM lab, japanese conglomerate, or raising funds to create some new genetic monstrosity. Look back and you can see how personal computers were so new and so available to the general public that it was easier for people like gibson to fully understand the current tech, be on the cutting edge and then imagine new possibilities. Same with Asimov in the old days, he was there for the birth of computers and the "nuclear age" and it showed in his writing. The science was not advanced enough at the time to disprove his ideas or confirm them. As the sciences mature it becomes harder for lay people to imagine the possibilities other than what the techs tell them and it shows in the writings. Either a new technology has to arrive that we can all understand completely at least until it matures beyond our general abilites or us readers and the writers
must get much better informed and educated on the technology and truly understand the possibilities. IMHO.
take care and check out Moving Mars if you haven't read it, great book that really gives you a chock full of new ideas.

[JenB]

Oh, but this is a silly argument! Spider Robinson should know better.

SF and fantasy are two aspects of the same thing. They're concerned with ideas bigger than life. Whether it's the asteroid belt, Luna City, Middle-Earth or Westeros, the point of the story is (or should be) some aspect of humanity, or of one man, that simply cannot be illustrated with a "conventional" story.

And as for good science fiction written in the last decade or so: try Tad Williams (Otherland), Connie Willis (Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog), John Ringo (A Hymn Before Battle and sequels). The "Dune" prequels. Lois McMaster Bujold's "Miles Vorkosigan" novels. It's out there. There may not be as much of it as we wish but want to know a secret? There never was! I haunt used bookstores and I can tell you, there was some dreck published twenty, thirty, forty years ago. The thing is we only remember the good stuff because it's stood the test of time.

And as a side note, everyone who says "Thomas Covenant" was a waste of ink and trees is horribly right. I don't know why I bothered to finish reading the first trilogy. Perhaps I simply thought it couldn't get worse.

[Prof Engineer]

ping

[NewRomeTacitus]

Our arts reflect our “societal soul”. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were caught up in a world being changed by the Industrial Revolution where science promised a shining future. World War I saw a surge in the fantasy and adventure genres (Doyle, Burroughs, Howard, Lovecraft). The Great Depression generated the vigilante heroes of pulp and comics who reflected qualities most people of the time could only hope to aspire to. Science fiction in movie serials suffered from inadequate budgets and cheap tinfoil. WWII brought the beginnings of all that was portrayed before into the realm of possible reality (radar, rockets, jets, madmen playing with eugenics).
Our generations have seen the glory of the Apollo program reduced to this planets most expensive truck service. Today the promises of science are brought down as a matter of course and the sciences have to dance for corporate (and the ever-popular military) sponsorship. How many potential careers have gone unanswered by a generation of youth who glory in ignorance and tribalistic behavior? They are proud to read nothing at all and are confused by the simplest Lucas-style concepts. Bring up dark matter and most seem to think you’re discussing race relations!
Optimism springs eternal for me and I hope I’m just living through a down cycle of science fiction and the real thing’s potential.
Now excuse me while I compose a phat beat: “Yo yo yo, the parabola exceeds the inertia...”
Thank you all for a great read.

[handk]

[Rose in RoseBear]

Sturgeon's Law, Jen. "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud."

[anymouse]

Well said.

I guess you could call Joules Verne the first ludidite sci-fi writer. ;)

Blame it on Sir Arthur C. Clark's HAL2000 computer villain. :)

Blame it on "Metropolis" vintage 1930s. :)

The difference is that these earlier writers saw technology as a tool to be used for good or evil, not just as something to dread and avoid.

[kuma]

I believe it has much to do with junk science. It's weary work to sift through all the junk to get to the science. When you talk to someone online who is involved in the Fantasy Genre they insist on details and others knowing them as well.

My point? The types of people who spend ours on genres like details. They are not satisfied with massive unproven theories aka junk science. Not to mention the fact that most new science these days presented to the public sounds like nothing more than a sales pitch for a guberment grant. While I don't know much personally about the science genre, I would imagine it's based largely on newer sciences?

[El Gato]

In an age of chemical rockets and bound by a speed of light barrier,

So why limit yourself to chemical rockets??? In Niven's known space universe, nearby stars are settled by people traveling in nuclear powered (fusion) Bussard Ramjets. Kinda slow, but you can get from here to there in less than a lifetime, when relativistic effects are included. The Traveler Filip(sic?) (Baby Elephants in Pink Elevator Shoes!) in Niven and Pournelles "Footfall" come to the Solar System in a similar ship, and we go to defeat them in "old bang bang" a ship powered by exploding nuclear devices. (Project Orion showed it would work, in the 1960s).

Those were real hard science fiction. As was "Lucifer's Hammer". I'm reading a couple of the more recent installments of the Man Kzin war series. With the exception of FTL ships, which did not exist at the beginning of the war, those are hard science fiction as well.

I must admit I'm partial to the Honor Harrington series as well, but recognize that its pretty old formulae stuff, just well written and entertaining. OTOH, that's what I want.

Then there is the Harry Turtledove series that started with the "World at War" series. (I think of them as the Lizard books). Nothing impossible going on in them either, although some improbable things perhaps.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Because the Globe has "Spider-man" writing their articles?

[foto]

Didn't see your post, same ideas except you managed to say it in a short, clear and vastly superior manner.

[El Gato]

Almost every month brings the discovery of new planets around other stars. Our technology isn't yet good enough to "see" earth sized plantes in the "water zone" of even the closest stars, but it soon will be. There seem to be planets just about everywhere we look. This increases the chances of their being aliens out their somewhere, and perhaps not so very far away. It also adds additional stress to the question of "if they are out there, why the heck haven't we detected them yet? SETI could find an earthlike world several 10s of light years away, IIRC, but they've come up a big zero so far. Why? (IMVHO, we are looking in the wrong place, spectrum wise) (The question could lead to interesting story as well, something beyong MIB or even ARM type explanations. :) )

[BlazingArizona]

But other than that, and despite that, I really liked a heap of what he wrote. I even remember a short story I read when I was a kid, And He Built a Crooked House written by him. I think Stranger in a Strange Land was his best, though. Mainly because it was just a really good literary idea: "What if a human came into our culture as a complete psychological alien?"

And don't forget The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, which of all his works is the most likely to appeal to FReepers.

[per loin]

A feminized society will naturally tend toward "witchy" rather than sci-fi entertainment. Lots of magic powers instead of rational development.

[the rifleman]

Yeah, the whitegold wielder, a leper in love. Man did that story suck.

I read only nonfiction now too. Freerepublic and the Bible.

[Forgiven_Sinner]

I read Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" in third grade in 1965. I think I've read all his work, short stories and novels. After a while, I realized he only had a limited set of characters. He was a great story teller and the characters he had were really interesting.
He was an odd combination of a libertarian and authoritarian. He wanted a strong military, a meritocracy, and unlimited personal freedom. He would have really liked FR. Many of his stories have side arms and dualing prominently shown.

Being a child of the 60's I was gung ho for space travel. I was excited to live into the "future"--which for me meant the 70's. I knew space travel had suffered a mortal blow when we allowed SkyLab to fall, rather than boosting into a geosynchronous orbit. I knew we HAD to have a space station as a way point to build interplanetary space craft. They couldn't be launched from earth with any energy efficiency.

Alternatively, you could build them on the moon--but that was a far higher platform than a geosynchronous orbit. Had we kept SkyLab, expanded it, we could have had Hubble 5-10 years sooner. We could have a moon base now. We could have landed on Mars by 2000.

This is where politics enters in. Nixon resigned in '74 the oil embargo hit in '73, and we generally had poor economic policies throughout the '70's. The Congress, in a rare act of frugality, killed the space program.

I think President Reagan did as much as he could. We got the shuttle going and researched star wars. We need a President to commercialize space.

My dream is, and I think I should write a hard SF story about it, is to build a large energy generation plant over the US and make us completely energy independent. Just beam down solar power in the form of lasers or microwaves and thumb our noses at the Middle East.