Wait. Hold your horses. Can you explain the coming singularity event? And, is there a chance you learned of this event from a long-dead Mayan Astrologist?
Personally I don't really think any of those points are actually the reason. And what singularity event?! :O
Singularity was first coined by SF writers like Vinge and futurologists like Kurzweil - it's the tipping point where machines & human intelligences increase in size & speed, resulting in a true paradigm shift. After the cyberpunk era, the present changed too quickly for anyone to keep up. If writers couldn't keep up, then how could they imagine the future, particularly the post-human future? That is why there is no longer any connection between the experiences and the perceptions of the present.
See my reply to Mithrandir. Personally, I don't see why my points aren't the reason why - other than your ipse dixit.
1. The previous paradigm of "cool," science fiction, is somewhat in a rut, because it cannot apprehend the future well anymore. Our world changes way too quickly, that by the time the book is out, it's already dated. Moreover, the coming singularity event promises a post-human experience utterly unlike anything we can understand. I think it must very very rare that by the time a book comes out it'll already be dated. Also Scifi isn't always to do with technology, or something that can actually happen. For example in a book called "Roadside Picnic" aliens come to earth and when they leave they left messed up places(Called visitation zones in the book) where there is many things that go against physics. I doubt that will happen anytimes soon. 2. If science fiction is exhausted with the future, then writers whose antenna is hyper-tuned will sense this and move to the next available genre, fantasy. But recent books show that they are smudging the boundaries between the two. I am not exactly sure by what you mean by that 3. By losing faith in the future, writers develop a sense of nostalgia with alternate histories, which is a nice way of saying that if only the past was different, then perhaps we wouldn't be in this quandary. I don't think that many people lose faith in the future, and if they did it would make even more sense to write scifi where the future is how they want it. And also I think you are looking into this too deeply. I write scifi because I find it exciting and fun. Not because I actually expect those things to happen or I have some sort of hope for the future. 4. Many writers are not from Anglo-American backgrounds - which makes them more concerned with politics than future speculation. Basically writers from heretofore marginalized countries have insider views of other countries, and develop or join genres not dominated by straight white males (space age scifi, at least). Uhh... once again you are reading into this too deeply. Writers write what they enjoy, I don't think where they live or where they are from suddenly make them want to make themselves standout from "straight white males". I'm not from Anglo-American background (I'm Polish) and I can tell you that we do like our future speculation. 5. The world has become more science fictional, encouraging writers to step away from the direction of neoliberalism, and towards a wholly different reality.Science fiction doesn't have to have neoliberalism, and the world hasn't become so science fictional as you think. We are not even close to getting to how advanced some technology is in some books.
Great book, I read it years ago, and you can even find the entire MS online. I also understand that this year (it may already have happened) this novel is being reissued in good ol' book form. Anywhoo, I agree with Ouroboros on all the rest, though I too am skeptical of the singularity. Could happen, tho. I'm much more inclined to believe that civilization will collapse in the next hundred years due to overpopulation, energy depletion and global warming, and we'll be back in a stone-age era with small numbers of people. The Internet and all our other technomagic will be distant memories, and the fodder of future religions.
Scifi is not dead just yet. A much better reply than your previous handwave. My claim is not that all science fiction from the 50s till now are irrelevant, because technology has arrived. It is that Scifi is NOW exhausted, because scifi no longer generates insight into the future, and has responsed by internalizing and celebrating an aesthetic that no longer engages the world for the sake of different ways of creativity. See recent awards short lists and Year's Best anthologies. Anotehr way to look at it is that scifi has become irrelevant because genre writers found other things to write about. The failure to engage the future is also part of our culture as a whole. Critics like Jameson and Zizek claim that our culture is so utterly beholden to the principles of neoliberal democracy that writers can no longer imagine what it's like to live under a NON-capitalist system. Hence the conceptual blockage, hence the refugee to safer terrain like fantasy. Just that scifi has never figured a way around the blockage - it just turned inward, produce stories with ironic detachment. Ask yourself why writers like Gibson and Ballard left scifi in order to write meaningfully about the future? Check out the blurbs on recent genre fiction: This book challenges traditional genre boundaries! Critics are now looking at new ways to celebrate this status quo by conceptualizing new ways to look at now-blurred genres: they are different iterations of the same literary form. John Clute calls this single category "fantastika" where different genres were split apart by the Enlightenment, and now this convergence is a homecoming, a return to the source. Alright. Our idea of "Humanity" has changed over time. During the early 20th century, writers like Verne and Wells in their depiction of prehistoric man, in their denial of humanity's capacity for violence, led them to emphasize the tremendous size and simian-like features of the Neanderthal, and judge them as cruel, inhuman beasts. Once culture attitudes changed, our vision of human nature shifted, therefore, current writers of prehistory accepted human savagery, leading them to judge the Neanderthal, though different, yet human. Another way to look at it: Steampunk is a convenient excuse for the middle class white people to accept a fictional past that is not tainted with white liberal guilt. Steampunk Victorian Empire is usually absent of sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, etc. Therefore, by adopting fictional antecedent in lieu of the embarrassing heritage of our Western civilization (colonialism, social snobbery), we are distancing from our baggage. This willingness to rewrite history and replace ugly truths with empowerment myths is part of our postmodern detachment from history and political realities of the day. I will grant you on that point, but I was looking at a broader culture point. The attempt at inter-cultural communication (universal humanity) has its problems: the universal elements of an aesthetic vocabulary is almost always determined by social means and therefore dependent on the same inequalities the society that produced them. By keeping traditional Western tropes locked in place, and allowing the non-western or non-anglo-american writer to use them, Western culture is dominating a level playing field for publication, and presumes that its tropes speak equal to everyone, no matter the fact that there exist different cultural heritages. I grant that my original point was a cliche, but it's amazing to consider how much scifi writers got right: E.G., Twitter: Eastern Standard Tribe by Doctorow, predicted a community that exists in a bunch of different places. But too few contemporary scifi novels even considered the existence of social media, not to mention the social/psychological changes within that community. E.G., soldiers in danger: Americans are now relying on remote controlled drones to impose political hegemony around the world. The drones resemble those of Culture novels by Banks, but he only predicted a fantastical backdrop that resembles Vinge's Zone of Thought. Basically, it's not the case that scifi stopped commenting about our reality. The works that do, do not get as much attention as those that ignore our reality. The writers who do science or the future are now on the periphery, instead of the foreground. That is why I think scifi should rediscover its heritage of engagement and prediction.
This is false. I write science fiction and can certainly imagine a future, multiple futures in fact. Technology isn't changing all that fast; all recent amazing leaps of technology were perfectly obvious from the invention of computers. Industrialized society is not all-powerful -- it cannot create AI's (almost impossible from a software point of view), it cannot make humans more intelligent (no really, it's actually not all that helpful), and it cannot create a monumental shift in human society. Current technology is simply a better set of spears and hammers; it hasn't changed us. What is a post-human future? And why would sci-fi writers need imagine it to write sci-fi? I'll clarify a bit. Think of the industrial revolution like a latch-key moment. We found a particular key for a particular door. Similar moments occurred at the invention of language, fire, cities, the number zero, and the wheel. After each of these, there was a frenzied rush to adopt and utilize the new technologies. Things changed at a rapid pace, and the full conceptual potential of these inventions was realized within a couple hundred years. We are at such a moment, but that doesn't mean that technology will continue to advance at the same rate in the future. Eventually, we will reach the physical limitations of computing power (quite soon actually), find the functional utility of genetic knowledge, and realize the limits of current transportation technology. It is faulty to assume that simple trends (the trends of the past couple decades) can predict scientific results in the long term.
A singularity is a mathematical term, defining a domain value in an otherwise continuous function that has no finite function value. In physics, a black hole fits that mathematical definition in more than one aspect, so singularity has come to be an alternate name for a black hole. The Big Bang is also such a physical phenomenon, and is a fixed event, so the Big Bang is referred to as a singularity event. In that light, referring to a transition to digital intelligence dominance seems more than a little hyperbole, whether or not anyone finds that transition credible.
As you know, Ray Kurzweil co-opted the term "singularity" to denote the emergence of super-intelligence through technological means. So Kurzweil is using the word metaphorically. It's worth noting that singularities, in physics, are considered failures of scientific models, and that it is believed that there is no actual singularity at the Big Bang or at the center of black holes. To banish such singularities requires reconciling quantum physics with general relativity, which no one has done yet.
Not all scientists feel that way. There's a natural tendency to be uncomfortable with mathematical extrema, and to assume that the apparent existence of one must be in error. Therefore, many, even scientists, refuse to accept (for example) that the question of what came before the Big Bang is meaningless, because time itself began with that event. It's both true and false that black holes are a true mathematical singularity. Quantum tunneling does permit some information (and matter/energy) across the event horizon, but it also remains true that an object's trajectory toward the event horizon will never reach it, and will experience a gravitational gradient that will increase without bound. Any matter will, perhaps mercifully, be torn asunder by tidal forces in finite time, long before any close approach (whatever that means) to the event horizon.
I think the problem is that since we do not have a theory that marries general relativity to QM, anything we say about the Big Bang era is pure speculation. There are, however, mathematical Platonists, like the physicist Max Tegmark, who hold that mathematical structures are isomorphic with reality, and that therefore there are a vast number of universes in the multiverse that physically obey or are isomorphic with mathematical equations.
dont know Jannert, to be honest, im not a huge fan of fantasy despite probably being considered a 'new writer' then again, ive always done things a lil different
I told myself I was going to read the whole thread before replying, but I had to stop when I got to this one. Some small levels of many of the aspects discussed fall into my fantasy writing - escapism, what I know and enjoy, the blank canvas, the epic creativity requirements, etc. - this one doesn't even fall remotely close. The first fantasy setting I really started getting into writing (which I sadly lost everything I wrote about) had a literal 0 chance of a solution. The daemon lords of hell were unbeatable and could only be contained. Even if the goods guys managed to win out in this universe, there are still multiple other universes that the daemon lords had control of, there was still crime and poverty, warlords and savages and evil gods that manage to keep screwing things up just because they can. The next fantasy setting I worked on, the bad guy was the protagonist. And there were no good guys. I thankfully still have this writing saved away and will continue it after I flesh out the fantasy world a bit on my blog and with help from this forum. The one I'm focused on right now and the only one I've really fleshed out into a true setting with vastly more work to do doesn't even come remotely close to that. Daemons control the Old World and humanity can only be redeemed if the Big Guy Upstairs decides that humanity deserves redemption. Assuming the daemons in the Old World could be dealt with, there's still the very terrifying gods of the New World and the nature spirits to deal with, along with pathetic human nature among their own ranks. Older fantasy and newer bad fantasy certainly tend towards this element, but it's not like it's a requirement. ASOIAF goes nowhere near this, for instance.
I haven't read through the whole thread but I'd like to add a thought as to why fantasy is so appealing. I think that the research side of writing is incredibly important but also incredibly daunting. Topics that are related to fantasy writing are more accessible for research than a lot of real world topics. I'll use Jeffrey Deaver as an example. Deaver does a LOT of research for his crime novels and I think it shows in his writing. He probably has a whole database now of people he can ask about certain topics etc. It also helps that he was a lawyer and can draw on that experience. It can be very intimidating for a young beginning writer with no clout behind them to take that first step towards the kind of research needed for a believable story set in the present day. Many years ago I wanted to write something with soldiers and wanted to make sure that I had the military ranks right etc. I went to the barracks in my town and very nervously asked someone for some information relating to that. He was helpful enough but what he gave me wasn't anything more than what I could have found on the internet. I wanted to ask more probing questions but didn't want to impose on someone that I didn't know. Without the personal experience or someone that I already know in a particular field (especially someone that I'm comfortable confiding in that I'm trying to write a novel) it can be very difficult to write that believable novel. I'm not sure that I'm getting my point across clearly here, but there are more books, websites, encyclopaedias, documentaries etc. on things that happened in the past (be it 100, 500 or 1000 years ago) so writing something that is a combination of your own creation plus some research which you are comfortably able to do at home without imposing on others or taking you out of your comfort zone is probably very appealing to young writers in particular. Did I just ramble?
Fantasy is an important factor in writing. I think that a writer needs it to improve is imaginative skills, its nearly the factor of success. it can combine the feelings of the past and the future together; uniting them. So all people need this unity, especially in the times where tradition is calling us.
Rreminds me of Thomas Mann and his books about three generations of seller family set in northern Germany. Not that I read that, only popped in my mind while reading your post. I think that labelling a book with a genre is as important as it is completely unimportant, as long as the book is catchy and gives you something to ponder/process.
Not at all, I do completely agree with you. It was much easier for Arthur Conan Doyle to dive into the plethora of technical and other details concerning human physiology, physics and chemistry due to the simple fact that he was a talented physician than it would be for me, a complete laymen at that. The same holds true of war correspondents and intelligence agents. Forsyth and Simmel did write amazing books full of pretense and tension only because they had the personal experience and could successfully draw on it. Another reason may be that we tend to point at Tolkien, saying "look, he didn't live in Middle Earth and yet, his stories are believeable and fantastic". But he, too, had the advantage of an amazing scope of knowledge of germanic folklore, so he could let his imagination work. Undoubtedly, one needs to have personal experience with something, anything, for that matter, as writers write more or less about life, no matter the form. Take King, for instance, it's amazing how many specific details he is able to give you in one book. Mostly, it's about observing people's behavior, reacitons, desires and wickedness. How he does it, I have no idea. He probably goes around police stations, hospitals, offices and patrol stations, sit on a stool with a big sombrero and takes notes.
I disagree, technology has made us more connected but at the same time more enstranged to each other, it is slowly--in some instances--surpassing the real-life communication and generally it's made the world faster, which cannot possibly leave us unchanged. Take the scepticism of post modernism--they certainly did question authorities and God based on findings of science and at that time technology was not as far as it is now. Technology hasn't changed us physically (although it is argued that overusing of internet does change the structure of the brain), it has rather chnaged us in sociological terms, which dialogue alone (between science/technology and its impact on society) would take here much more than the scope of a comment.
