OP is a sci-fi writer himself, so he’s in a good position to comment. The TLDR of this piece is that most sci-fi is produced by commercial writers trying to earn a living by producing relatively formulaic work that follows genre conventions. The problem is some of today’s tech-billionaires are acting as if these books are bibles of future prediction.
Oddly, people seem less influenced by the positive, utopian sci-fi visions. ‘Star Trek’ depicted a humanity that moved beyond money, and where society was devoted to exploration and the advancement of knowledge. You rarely see billionaires go on about making the world like it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as there were no billionaires (or any need for them) in ‘Star Trek’.
That’s why as a (really small and unknown) sci-fi writer I want everyone to write utopia and beautiful futures instead of dark dystopia where life is a nightmare.
Because if sci-fi has any influence, make it a good one, solar punk Star Trek style or whatever. What is the point of fighting for the future if you strongly believe it will be worse than today.
The dystopian novels serve a purpose too, usually of what to avoid.
In theory yes, much like History.
But then one day you have people thinking “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a user manual.
Oh god, has that happened? I’ve mostly just seen continued growth of the ideas that inspired it.
No, not yet ? I don’t think so but I stopped reading bad news to live in my own lemmy wholesome bubble made of food, sci-fi and cats.
Ah, okay. Shits crazy out here, but there’s nobody in the West suggesting fertility slaves or abolishing female literacy.
They must have seen S1E26 of TNG where Picard tells the rich asshole he needs to get a job and thought “well fuck that.”
‘Star Trek’ depicted a humanity that moved beyond money, and where society was devoted to exploration and the advancement of knowledge.
And this is, tbh, considered really unrealistic, even by the mayority of the fanbase itself.
But there is a problem: SF authors such as myself are popular entertainers who work to amuse an audience that is trained on what to expect by previous generations of science-fiction authors. We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but to earn a living: any foresight is strictly coincidental.
This may be true for Mr. Stross. I don’t believe Farenheit 451 or Nineteen Eighty-Four were written just because the authors needed a pay day.
Well, I don’t know about Ray Bradbury, but Orwell wasn’t trying to predict the future either. More just explore the madness of totalitarianism in a setting his fellow Englishmen could relate to. His other most famous book was about talking farm animals.
Maybe a better general rule is that authors aren’t futurologists, but artists, who may intend to either illuminate or entertain. A possible future is simply a choice of setting.
I don’t think I disagree with you about any point in particular.
The author of the article tries to make a case that these billionaires are stupid (and likely fascists) for chasing ideas from science fiction. For the finishing touch, he torpedoes his own credibility by saying science fiction writers like him are untalented pandering hacks who just recycle ideas and material. They don’t know anything about science or bring new ideas to the table.
But there is a problem: SF authors such as myself are popular entertainers who work to amuse an audience that is trained on what to expect by previous generations of science-fiction authors. We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but to earn a living: any foresight is strictly coincidental. We recycle the existing material—and the result is influenced heavily by the biases of earlier writers and readers. The genre operates a lot like a large language model that is trained using a body of text heavily contaminated by previous LLMs; it tends to emit material like that of its predecessors. Most SF is small-c conservative insofar as it reflects the history of the field rather than trying to break ground or question received wisdom.
Science fiction, therefore, does not develop in accordance with the scientific method. It develops by popular entertainers trying to attract a bigger audience by pandering to them.
I don’t know Mr. Stross beyond this article. However, this strikes me very much like what Paul Krugman said about the internet. I think this sort of stuff comes from people who lack vision and can’t imagine the potential of ideas.
It’s an interesting point, but doesn’t that imply a science fiction tradition grown from a more benign history would feature totally different technologies?
My natural intuition is that available technologies that could be developed are a pretty rigid consequence of the laws of physics and our current economic situation. Campbell may have been racist, but neither he nor Asimov invented the idea of robotics and AI.
As for TESCREAL, it doesn’t seem like a natural group to me. EA says send mosquito nets to Africa. Extropianism says send Elon Musk to Mars instead. There’s not much overlap really, except in that they have opinions, and that they have a following in the same industry-subculture.
