Update: Thank you, io9 for restoring my faith with a timely post about todays launch!
I usually try to stay out of discussions about whether science fiction is still relevant. To be honest, I just don’t know. For starters, I’d have to know what the people in the discussion think science fiction is. For some people it’s Greg Egan and Gregory Benford and everything else is pulp garbage. For some people, it’s Lost and Heroes. For others it’s superhero comics and Charles Stross. There are dozens of subcultures in scifi with their own definition of what is and isn’t “true” SF and they don’t tend to hold each other in high esteem.
It’s pretty clear that science fiction is alive. But is it any more relevant than say, yesterday’s Britney gossip or last month’s issue of Details? Is science fiction anything more than a collection of esthetic sensibilities now? And I don’t mean because we “live in a science fiction world”. God, I hate that expression.
For instance, the shuttle launched today. What are the headlines around the scifi blogosphere? Well, there are stories about a Japanese aluminum house, the greatest scifi dance routines of all time, a few things about posthumanism and how people who don’t get transhumanism are stupid, a few stories about how we might live in a holographic universe, but can never know for sure. Lots of gadget posts. Lots of “just around the corner” breakthroughs that will change everything posts. Lots of ”We’re all screwed and I can’t wait to watch you all die, stupid humans! Stupid!! STUPID!!” posts. Some talk about the new Trek film and how J.J. Abrams is either wasting his time on a dead franchise, or how he’s going to fuck it up because Lost went off the rails and ended up being the most boring show in television history and we HATES the Abrams now. And so on.
But nothing about the shuttle. Nothing about its launch, its mission, the ISS, the actual real work that is being undertaken to explore the universe. So, loathe as I am to say that scifi is no longer relevant, it’s clear that science fiction seems less interested in the exploration of the real cosmos than it is in who the final cylon will turn out to be. That doesn’t make it any less entertaining by any means. But I’m not sure if scifi can still claim the role of visionary leadership that was once ascribed to it.
“So, loathe as I am to say that scifi is no longer relevant, it’s clear that science fiction seems less interested in the exploration of the real cosmos than it is in who the final cylon will turn out to be.”
I don’t think you can reasonably draw that conclusion, because the Shuttle hardly counts as exploration of the cosmos. It doesn’t even leave Earth orbit, for crying out loud. When we send a human mission to Mars, /that/ will be exploration, and I’ll read the astronauts’ blogs every day.
Place me in the Greg Egan camp, by the way, although I couldn’t care less about Benford. I think you’re unfair to Charlie Stross; he’s the biggest sfnal thinker since Egan.
rwhe@ludism.org
I think I mucked up with some bad writing that might have made it seem like I was lumping Stross in with Superhero comics. I guess what I was trying to suggest was that some scifi people are hard SF purists and have zero tolerance for anything else, others have tastes that range from the bubblegum to the serious. I actually like Stross quite a bit, though the whole transhumanist movement thing is starting to feel as old as cyberpunk now. Not the core concepts, mind you – those have been around for 80 years or more – just the movement aspect of transhumanism.
Would you elaborate on what you dislike about the phrase “live in a science fiction world”? Is it that such a phrase leaves out how far we can still go?
Absolutely, and it invites ridicule from tomorrow’s paleofuturists. The Victorians strutted around proclaiming their mastery of the natural world. Today we have people saying that science fiction is no longer relevant because everything that the classic scifi thinkers of old imagined has now come to pass. I don’t like the phrase because it smells of premature self-congratulation. Either that or some people are easily impressed. When we have a replicator unit in every household, done away with child labor, slavery, hunger and preventable disease and have at least one permanent off-world colony, THEN I’ll be willing to concede that we live in a science fiction world. But by then hopefully, science fiction will be looking even further ahead.