Soviet SF was quite illuminating to me (back when anybody cared about the USSR). I’ve always wanted to read a couple of the Soviet equivalent of the James Bond novels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic

Agreed about the melancholy.

it's as upbeat as the title suggests.

"The Doomed City" is one of the best pieces of philosophical scifi I've ever read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomed_City

"Hard to be a God", mentioned below, is a better example. Soviet era Sci-Fi where Star Trek esque space communists try to uplift a medieval society into modern political belief before establishing official first contact.

People literally wake up in The Doomed City when the pandemic has started in 2020, for example.

I consider The Waves Extinguish the Wind their best novel, for its simplicity. But I didn't read any English translation, and it's a big "but".

1. https://www.npr.org/2015/03/19/392634682/mountaineer-is-a-mu...

Others are suggesting Hard to Be a God by the same authors, which is an okay book, but it's not really SF as most people think of SF IMO.

As well as the Roadside picknick, the Doomed city, A billion years before the end of the world, the Ugly swans, etc etc - really most of their books - it’s a good literature and not a sf in its usual sense.

Worth noting that a video game [2] based on the novel (which looks very well produced) is releasing in November.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo7Ca6kXz08

For a more recent take on a similar theme, see also „Blindsight“ by Peter Watts.

https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

SF is often speculative fiction that extrapolate current trends into the future - frequently taking them to their logic conclusion - to explore and critique. Good SF anyway.

Whether that's worth reading depends on you. It's a big genre too, different authors and works don't all cover the same themes. If you want to see someone experience about what it's like to be a foreigner in a racist society, Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series explores that. If you want to read an optimistic vision of how computation could look and what ethical implications follow from that (set against a massive backdrop of geopolitics), read Ian Banks's Culture series. If you want to read a discussion of how society shapes our thoughts and beliefs, read pretty much anything by Ursula K. Guin (though The Dispossessed comes especially to mind). If you just want to explore the implications of different physical laws, Greg Egan.

And of course, there's plenty of the campy stuff too. You don't always need to read high-minded narrative philosophy with sci-fi if you don't want to.

In the Culture all real agency humanity has is lost to machines (Minds).

Humans have about as much say in important matters in the Culture as dogs do in ours, when anything really important happens (e.g. the events of Excession) they're not even involved.

For any individual human it's a utopia, I'd probably prefer to live in the Culture, but whether it's a good thing to aspire to is something the reader needs to decide for themselves.

The Culture is explicitly a direct democracy, it's just that the books are mostly about what is effectively a somewhat-rogue intelligence agency's activities in other civilizations.

> Politics in the Culture consists of referenda on issues whenever they are raised; generally, anyone may propose a ballot on any issue at any time; all citizens have one vote. Where issues concern some sub-division or part of a total habitat, all those - human and machine - who may reasonably claim to be affected by the outcome of a poll may cast a vote. Opinions are expressed and positions on issues outlined mostly via the information network (freely available, naturally), and it is here that an individual may exercise the most personal influence, given that the decisions reached as a result of those votes are usually implemented and monitored through a Hub or other supervisory machine, with humans acting (usually on a rota basis) more as liaison officers than in any sort of decision-making executive capacity; one of the few rules the Culture adheres to with any exactitude at all is that a person's access to power should be in inverse proportion to their desire for it. The sad fact for the aspiring politico in the Culture is that the levers of power are extremely widely distributed, and very short (see entry on megalomaniacs, above). The intellectual-structural cohesion of a starship of course limits the sort of viable votes possible on such vessels, though as a rule even the most arrogant craft at least pretend to listen when their guests suggest - say - making a detour to watch a supernova, or increasing the area of parkland on-board.

> The Culture is explicitly a direct democracy

It's not, and what you've quoted at length only reinforces my point.

Sure, humans get a vote in the design of their habitats, and even input on where the ship might fly.

But that's like saying that a modern nuclear power is a democracy because people get to vote on where their local park benches are located.

I'm saying that humans have no say on anything of consequence in the Culture. Anything that matters is decided upon by sentient hyperintelligent machines.

For the campy stuff, people seem to really enjoy The Expanse, both the books and the tv show.

Where would you start with Neal Stephenson? Have you read Iain M. Banks?

As far as The Three Body Problem - it's ok and starts off really strongly, but then just completely falls apart.

I have not read Iain M. Banks, what do you recommend as a start?

If you like Consider Phlebas, you'll almost certainly love the rest. It's a strange start to the series, not least because it presents the Culture as the antagonists quite explicitly, but it's good for introducing some of the technology. The series as a whole is my favourite series of books, it's remarkable.

OK, so some of it is campy adventure pulp, but fortunately someone's collated the best and most long-lived works into the SF Masterworks series for people to pick from.

Phillip K Dick would probably get the same kind of praise as Joyce if he hadn't been ghettoized as "SF".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz

I can't comprehend this. Scifi is famously occupied with the future, and not the current day. Space travel, advanced technologies, artificial intelligences, and generally things that don't yet exist are par for the course. Most of SF is literally not about the present.

Do you mean to say that SF's subtext reflects the zeitgeist at the time/place of its writing?

Read as a prediction of the future, it’s kinda shit. Unremarkable at best.

Read as a way to show us the time when it came out (roughly now—it’s not so old) from a perspective skewed enough that it might prompt us to re-evaluate our own normal, it’s pretty damn good.

An author's scifi "gimmick" (it can be a technology, a societal norm, an alien encounter, etc) is often the way in which the author develops and extrapolates a preoccupation about the real world, be it war, or invasion, or social alienation, or consumerism, etc.

The most obvious (but least interesting) example of this is how all those "Mars attacks" / alien invasion / body snatcher stories really were about the Red Scare, basically "what if Communism was infiltrating our society!"

* Or at least it used to. Most of today’s Cyberpunk media seems to have lost sight of that motif and really just ape the aesthetic (e.g. neon lights everywhere) - a hollow shell really.

> Most of today’s Cyberpunk media seems to have lost sight of that motif and really just ape the aesthetic

“The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” has a similarly grand super-villain scheme. And with more locations and glamor.

I'm not sure that's true, although in the past two decades or so it may have been.

But going back to the classics of 1960s and 1970s SF, I just don't see it. Sure, The Forever War is a thinly veiled allegory of Vietnam, but how are Lord of Light, Dreamsnake, The Left Hand of Darkness, or even Dune about their "current days"?

Dune seems prescient today because of its focus on natural resources, but back when it was written (long before the Oil Crisis) that wasn't really a political hot topic, or even something that most people thought about at all.

I agree that the extent of the commentary varies, and Dune is light handed in terms of political hot topics, but it was certainly there.

An extractive industry moves into in the desert for an extremely valuable substance that is vital for transport, while the indigenous inhabitants are overlooked. Religious fervour and holy war. I think that the Middle-east and oil are the most obvious parallels.

It is indeed "commenting on the contemporary problems of its day".

NG You know, I was in China in 2007, and it was the first ever state-sponsored, Party-approved science-fiction convention. They brought in some people from the west and I was one of them, and I was talking to a number of the older science-fiction writers in China, who told me about how science fiction was not just looked down on, but seen as suspicious and counter-revolutionary, because you could write a story set in a giant ant colony in the future, when people were becoming ants, but nobody was quite sure: was this really a commentary on the state? As such, it was very, very dodgy.

I took aside one of the Party organisers, and said, “OK. Why are you now in 2007 endorsing a science-fiction convention?” And his reply was that the Party had been concerned that while China historically has been a culture of magical and radical invention, right now, they weren’t inventing things. They were making things incredibly well but they weren’t inventing. And they’d gone to America and interviewed the people at Google and Apple and Microsoft, and talked to the inventors, and discovered that in each case, when young, they’d read science fiction. That was why the Chinese had decided that they were going to officially now approve of science fiction and fantasy.

https://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/neil-gaiman-kazuo-ishig...

More reflectively, it is such a shame to see the current situation because as Joseph Needham's classic series shows, the China region is perhaps historically the longest serving and arguably in many ways the most significant bastion of human inventive potential, period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...

https://en.chengduworldcon.com/

That is a serious choke point.

The ideologue brain is incompatible with big weird scifi ideas.

We see that in the west too.

Here is an interesting symmetry as reflected by ideological mirrors. In NK, the state sanctioned imaginal worlds lack others that are superior, and superheroes are loyal technocrats. Here in the West, "market driven" Hollywood insists superheroes are distinct tiny subset of humanity and that it is to our benefit that they are hidden but highly organized. And no, you can't just become one of the special superheroes. Both are aiming to pacify the target society.

You should read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chompsky. Most of what seems to be a conspiracy in western media is not actually organized as a conspiracy, but is emergent behavior in a system in which individual actors have aligned incentives. Acting individually without coordination, people hire and promote people who think like them, and ape then adopt the beliefs of their superiors.

I said usually western writers don't take direct orders from the government because sometimes they do, and this isn't even a secret. Hollywood lets the US military rewrite movies whenever they want access to military hardware and facilities. And during wartime, the US government employs writers to produce propaganda. Superhero comics in particular have their roots in overt war propaganda.

If you look for a conspiracy in everything, you're going to find it in everything. Entertainment is generally just entertainment and this sort of overanalysis of things to push an agenda has been part of what has made so much of modern entertainment so cookie cutter.

Also lets not forget that CIA was very active in Hollywood for many decades with light and not so light touches here and there, I mean its the propaganda tool for US hegemony and spreading western view on society, values, 'american dream' etc. If you want to shoot say an action movie with real US planes landing on real aircraft carriers, US navy will have non-trivial impact on your movie and its story (so most end up as over-patriotic to the point of being unwatchable for many non-US viewers).

Its all natural and logical, all humans like to see or hear stories that make us feel good even if its not proper truth, much more than stories telling some ugly hard truths.

I have not proposed a conspiracy to create movies like this, I don't think there's a cabal of billionaires who dreamed up and coordinate this as a deliberate propaganda campaign. I assert that the Hollywood system creates movies like this because because of the way it is structured and the nature of making movies. People who fit the mold and are naturally inclined to make movies like this get promoted and given opportunities by like-minded people. People who don't jive with the crowd never have the opportunity to make movies of their own, because making movies (particularly blockbusters) requires access to a system with lots of capital and manpower.

I'm not the one looking for conspiracies. You're looking for a conspiracy in what I'm saying so that you can dismiss it. Read Manufacturing Consent.

My fundamental disagreement is that I don't care about what an obviously biased guy has to say about the media, I think a superhero movie is just a superhero movie and that of course Chomsky sees propaganda in everything, it'd be like expecting a politician anywhere in the world to not try to imply that all things wrong in the world are their opponent's fault.

To bring in a lighthearted example of the impression I have, regarding the sexualized outfit worn by characters in Nier Automata, there's been tons of analysis and whining, and mocking all that and to the satisfaction of most fans of the game, the author, when asked about the decision, pretended to be giving some complex reasoning before just straight up saying that he just likes girls.

It's the same with superhero stuff, the biggest takeaway from Iron Man isn't that irl billionaires are good guys, it's that an exoskeleton that can fly and shoot lasers is really fucking cool.

That's not disagreement, that's just covering your ears and going la la la. You're barking up the wrong tree, that book is a good primer for you to find out how, if you don't read it you're still barking up the wrong tree.

> I assert that the Hollywood system creates movies like this because because of the way it is structured and the nature of making movies.

You respond to that with

> I get that you're trying to pull the popular claim these days about things being "systemic"

And go on to talk to yourself some more. You just aren't equipped to even read that comment, much less that book and others exploring the same issues.

Yes, indirectly.

Is the government the one dictating that?

Absolutely not.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-30/top-gun-mav...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theaters_of_War

Pay No Attention to the G-Man Behind the Curtain

https://www.theatlantic.com/membership/archive/2018/03/pay-n...

In the ‘90s the U.S. Government Paid TV Networks to Weave “Anti-Drug” Messaging Into Their Plot Lines. Here Are the Worst Examples.

https://www.columnblog.com/p/in-the-90s-the-us-government-pa...

Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law

https://web.archive.org/web/20100722051019/http://www.usatod...

https://www.gao.gov/products/b-305368

There is hundreds of thousands of hours of all sorts of content added to the internet every day from all over the world.

Western governments have nowhere near the sort of control over what their people can see to pull off anything anywhere near comparable to NK's attempts at controlling their people's entertainment.

What doesn't get money doesn't get views.

If your content is good, it takes 5 minutes to get it to the entire world for free.

Whether your audience can find your work is a separate matter … it is available.

"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/04/how-creative-writing-...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4x3vg3/how-the-cia-turned-am...

Worse: You aren't such a superhero, but by random chance you might be chosen to become one and you are invited to imagine yourself in that situation. Any common person who might want to limit your hypothetical powers is an awful bigot and many of the stories revolve around tension between those with powers who would oppress the plebs vs those with powers who wish to benevolently rule over the plebs (but certainly not cede their power to them.) Also, when the superheroes abuse their position and power it's okay when they're motivated by good intentions, because the ends justify the means and they'll surely revert back to being good once the crisis is over. Power doesn't corrupt everybody who gets it, you can trust the good superheroes with their unchecked power.

All of this mirrors the way Americans are encouraged to think about the ultra-rich, encouraged to believe they might randomly join the ranks of the ultra rich one day. Encouraged to believe that they could be a good and benevolent billionaire, and that the plebs who would limit their wealth are harmful bigots. Taught to believe that the meaningful conflict is between the good billionaires who would benevolently rule, opposed to the bad ones who can only be kept in check by the good ones.

When you assert something hasn't improved, it tells me it hasnt improved according to your personal criteria. I suspect those dont cover the wellfare and health of your society.

Pedo Guy Space Karen is not the billionaire superhero you want him to be, so simp for him elsewhere.

Perhaps to braindead fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I didn't try and push the term. It was used by people further up in the thread.

>He represents the non-billionaire cohort about as well and faithfully as Trump did.

But the question is not about how he represents the non billionaire cohort, is it?

Except not really. The most popular superheroes like Spider-Man has nothing of that sort going on. The tension in his story is the balance of his duty to use his gifts for good (with great power comes great responsibility) and the demands of his everyday life - with the latter often suffering to his detriment.

On DC’s side, Batman is probably the most popular. Frankly, Batman is more a plot device than a character, the most interesting characters in his stories are the villains.

Heck, in most cases, their super powers are not transferable.

Before the income tax, people like Rockefeller would just bail companies out during panics from their personal bank accounts, much to the consternation of bankers like J.P Morgan. Private individuals were massively more economically powerful and that's were people looked for progress. Only Elon Musk comes close to this level of economic power in the modern era, especially because he is a hands on industrialist and not a financier, but there were probably a few hundred who had that level of influence back then and they were mostly industrialists.

To my understanding it was Morgan and not Rockefeller who engaged in these kinds of bailouts.

What intuition? Wasn’t he forced to buy Twitter by the SEC? He bought it at 4x the valuation - Twitter’s ex-shareholders made it out like bandits. Now he is losing money hand over fist thanks to Twitter - as Twitter’s ad revenue has dropped due to his changes (and big mouth) and he is paying to the tune of 1 billion USD a year in interest from the loan to buy Twitter; Twitter’s yearly income on the best of years have come nowhere close to a billion.

In a world where artificial satelites aren't a thing that is a useful good, I doubt that NASA exists.

Did they? The people themselves looked? Or did the private individuals get to fund a large amount of libraries and educational institutions with "[your name here] supports progress" instead?

The peak of this may have been Fordlandia, Ford's attempt at doing a private Latin American colony, which was a spectacular failure.

Interestingly, Verne has a book about private libertarian-separatist rich men: "Propeller Island". It ends in infighting and disaster.

Two of the most iconic superheroes, Batman and Iron Man, are normal human beings who became superheroes from hard work.

You know what the big secret is? Let me tell you. Everything is aiming to pacify the society.

Movies, books, TV shows, video games: obviously tittytainment. Time wasters to waste your time and energy.

Education: to produce workers who are useful for the big system.

Religions: the ultimate form of brainwashing.

Yoga/Meditation/etc: religions but instead of gods we follow some gurus, even worse.

Unemployment: makes you at the mercy of welfare, a.k.a. the government.

Getting a job: becoming a slave for evil cooperations so they can lobby the government more. Also remember to pay your tax.

Voting: makes you feel you're in control and living in a democracy while you're just choosing from two equally bad guys.

Spedning time with your family: there are people you care? Great, now if you ever riot the gov knows who to keep as hostages.

If you swing the hammmer with enough force, you can make everything a nail.

In the West it’s really to make money. No one cares if the target audience is pacified or not - might even be more profitable if they are riled up to spend more money.

This was a more serious flaw in Project Hailmary, in which first contact - a profound event - is treated as a lone man’s engineering puzzle. The book is a good argument for sending poets, or at least properly thoughtful scientists, to meet our first aliens.

(Yes, I know.)

I mean scifi that explores strange ideas. Like Egan, Banks and Hughes.

Rather than the usual dramas with added futuristic technology.

In fact it’s the same as Chinese martial arts movies too. Anyone seen the Ip Man series?