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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Peter Thiel warns of upcoming (and current) stagnation - Less Wrong
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Comments (119)
In the article, Peter says:
I can't say I have noticed that one.
Update 2011-10-05: Some concrete evidence from Google NGRAM offers little support for Peter's position.
I have. There are still people publishing books that go in the SF section of the bookstore, but I could count off on one hand the number of authors I can remember who are feeding people hope instead of stylish postmodern cynicism.
"SF don't inspire hope anymore" does not imply "SF has collapsed as a literary genre"; I'm not aware of "inspiring hope" being a factor in judging the existence of a literary genre.
However, I think a relevant data point in favor of Thiel's claim is this: where is our 2001: A Space Odyssey? That is, a work of hard-core sci-fi (10 on the "Mohs scale" of sci-fi) that's achieved mainstream success and entered the broader culture.
I cannot see how can anyone see 2001 as "inspiring hope".
Set in crapsack world of overpopulation, famine and imminent nuclear war, where human race was from the beginning a toy of omnipotent aliens. What hope? Our world in 2001 was not like in "2001", it was much better.
This could be a dispute about the definition of SF: if you consider the core of SF to be something antithetical to "stylish postmodern cynicism," then maybe it has come on rough times. If you use the same definition the bookstores do, on the other hand, it's doing fine.
The lack of such in the last few years may be more of an indication that that niche has simply already been filled? If someone did a hard scifi space story how inevitable is it that it will be compared to 2001?
A great proportion of science fiction has always been predictions that science will kill us all. Are the cynics stealing market share from the doomsayers, or from the hopeful?
Curiously, what are their names?
Does it matter whether there is hope or not in the stories? We are less hopeful about this precisely because things haven't been nearly as impressive in the last fifty years as we thought they would be. A story set fifty years in the future with big Mars and Moon colones won't look hopeful, it will look at best overly optimistic, and possibly naive.
Moreover, this may actually be a signal that the genre has reached real maturity, that it isn't just gee-whiz look at that stories.
The claim that the genre has collapsed simply isn't born out when one looks at how popular Greg Egan, Charlie Stross, Alastair Reynolds, and Cory Doctorow are among others. The genre is in fact much more successful now. Fifty years ago, book shops didn't have separate sections for science fiction. Now they have large sections. Science fiction also is one of the most popular genres judging by the sales of used books. Science fiction is also far more accepted as a literary genre by academia, to the point where there's a separate area of study devoted to it. I have to wonder how much of what you are seeing is just the decline in average quality that occurs when a small thing becomes popular.
Just because the genre conventions have changed from your preferred form doesn't mean that the genre has collapsed. This sounds a bit akin to fans who when something in their favorite franchise changes become convinced that it has been Ruined Forever. (Not linking to TVTropes for obvious reasons).
One man's bitter cynicism is another man's gritty realism and one man's hope is another man's delusionary dream. Looking at another literary genre, did the emergence of hardboiled school "collapsed" crime fiction?
More like DisContinuity, I would say. Which isn't surprising, given that EY's favorite TV shows are "All four seasons of Babylon 5 and all three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
(Both of those shows have more seasons than that, but are generally agreed to be of declining quality.)
Although, I wouldn't have guessed someone capable of writing Three Worlds Collide would be so much in favor of hopeful!SF versus stylishly!cynical!SF. But maybe I'm reading it wrong?
Edit: To clarify, I'm not accusing TWC of being stylishly cynical, precisely, but... while it is one of the best-written iterations of "humanity makes First Contact, overcomes communication barrier in record time only to immediately discover irreconcilable differences that inevitably result in the deaths or brainwashing of billions" I've ever read, one must recognize that is what it is, and that's not exactly what I would describe as "feeding people hope".
If you consider the contemporary struggle between Enlightenment values and Postmodern cynicism, Three Worlds Collide is definitely in the former camp. Its message is that no matter what happens, there is still a difference between right and wrong. I don't know what a postmodern answer to Three Worlds Collide would look like (someone should write one, please) but I imagine it would use moral error theory in place of moral realism.
I can't speak to fifty years ago, but I can tell you that 47 years ago Bookland, a smallish and not extremely ambitious bookstore in a suburb of Wilmington, Delaware definitely did have a science fiction section.