I'm not saying that is a bad thing, and some fiction explores forms of government that haven't been tried on earth, and also explores systems of government and commerce that may need to happen on a post scarcity society. That is all good, and arguably those explorations need to happen, but still most sci-fi is just some portion of earth society thrown into space. (Banks explores alternatives, but arguably most Gibson doesn't, though I haven't read anything by him in a decade or more so they may have changed).
This is frequently useful as it allows us to examine our existing biased from an outside view. I am definitely less racist/bigoted for having read science fiction.
As a final point, it has been noted that a lot of sci-fi has an undertone of "wow isn't this benevolent monarchy great!" Which is rather disturbing if you think about the implications too much.
Star Trek makes 0 effort to explore the impacts of its technology on people. Some good books have been writing exploring what post scarcity means, but ST in general does nothing with the premise except make tea.
The novels that do explore a world like what ST posits end up going off the rails very quickly. Fun reads, people who live for eternity spend time terra forming planets (why not) cloning themselves into endless bodies and exploring the universe, or just becoming something not human at all.
ST still has people dying, never mind that immortality would be trivial to accomplish with that science level. But that isn't the point of Star Trek.
The economics of Star Trek are particularly incoherent; it's not even really clear that it _is_ post-scarcity. Really you only have Picard's word for that, and there's a lot of indication to the contrary.
Pet theory: the Star Trek tv shows are in-universe propaganda made by the Federation, which is a military dictatorship. They should be taken about as seriously as Stalin-era Soviet propaganda, on economic matters.
But even discarding cinema (Star Wars famously being a samurai movie set in space), most sci-fi books written after the golden age, are focused on societal changes and people. Stories are metaphors for our world.
That is fine, fiction that cannot be related to rarely gets read.
Bobiverse is a nerd's power trip fantasy. 90% of what Heinlein wrote is just "external observations on sociey".
Even Greg Egan, who writes super hard sci-fi (his books have footnotes linked to actual science papers!) has his novels largely focus around societies and people (or aliens that are easily related to!)
It has honestly been 80 or so years since science fiction was mostly "here are a few poorly fleshed out people, and some really damn good science!"
I've read a lot of those stories, they are cool and I kind of miss them, but honestly almost every major plot point possible was already thought up by the boards of scientists turned sci-fi authors of the 1930s through 50s. An occasional new story of that type makes its way out now and then (some of the SCP stories are actually this in a very pure form), but IMHO that genre of pure science writing with minimal focus on people or society is 99.9% dead.
Greg Egan is a very good example of a novelist who is a GOAT but will be dismissed by most critics of lit-fic because "his characters don't have arcs" or some such.
Maybe the Dune sequels, if you're willing to really, _really_ stretch the definition of 'good'.
Of course, 90% of genre fiction is crap. (Bare minimum, I'll not argue with anyone who wants to argue for more.) But we know that. There's enough of it that I can find something interesting to read. I can't say the same for the last 20 years of literary, non-genre works. (I'll take pointers, though.)
I get the feeling Ursula Le Guin could have been a pretty successful realist “literary” writer if she’d chosen to. I am grateful that she chose genre instead.
“Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating ‘ninety percent of everything is crap’.”
No, you can't say it has fantasy elements. Then it wouldn't be culture.
Marquez is great btw. Blame the critics.
I think the whole "all fantasy/sci-fi is slop" wasn't that big of a thing in LATAM, so the term isn't some euphemism for making it palatable to elitists.
I also disagree with GP, a lot of what makes One Hundred Years of Solitude good comes from the Colombian setting and it's cultural context. True, it wouldn't be impossible to translate that to a alien planet, Mars isn't fully Mars The Martian Chronicles after all.
Well now if we're drifting, I don't consider "fantasy" has to explain everything like it were an AD&D manual.
Take Glen Cook's Black Company series where magic just happens without explanation. Compare with something like Brandon Sanderson who describes "magic systems" in great detail always. I find the former enticing and the latter boring.
Lord of the Rings didn't explain anything either.
Yeah, and LOTR is in Middle-Earth, a fantastical world that isn't Earth. The point of the term "magical realism" is that there is still "realism". It's about what happens when something impossible or absurd happens to you and you have to deal with the ramifications in the real world. No one would read The Satanic Verses, think about the themes involved and compare it to LOTR.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is just too depressing. The closest I got was playing through Kentucky Route Zero, which is kind of like a theatrical play in video game form with lots of references to Marquez. A phenomenal game.
To do that authors need to very well versed in the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, and ancient China, and moden Europe, and... Most modern authors couldn't be bothered to do even basic research. Or can't afford to, because the pay is shit, and the deadlines are tight, and you have to produce a trilogy a year just to survive.
I've read a lot of scifi over the past few years. Most books are bad rehashes of existing ideas written in an extremely poor language (nouns and verbs with complete lack of adjectives and adverbs, poor and nonexistent metaphors, middle-school-level sentence structure etc.)
Fantasy books fare much better because they can easily borrow and steal "sociopolitical realities" and transfer them to pages wholesale.
Lightspeed Trilogy by Ken MacLeod
Revenger by Alastair Reynolds (the first book started off quite well, but the other two became a boring slog)
Rise of the Jain by Neal Asher. This one is just so egregiously bad, I don't know how I managed to finish. If I ever have to read another "erstwhile ship" I'll barf.
etc. etc.
Since I'm reading a lot of sci fi, I've ran out of top 1% or so of books an authors pretty quickly. Now I feel like I'm running out of middle-of-the-road authors, too.
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Edit. I'll add that most sci fi is incapable of even writing characters that have more distinction than "she's a woman, he's a man". They all talk and behave the same.
This is the problem with sci-fi in a nutshell, the characters fall flat in even the most seminal works. They are nor memorable at all and somewhere between uninspired and just downright bad. It's the status quo.
Sci-fi and fantasy fans talk about worldbuilding like it is some esoteric art. In the end worldbuilding is literally just plot, and it's well understood that plot is not the most important part of literature, not compared to deeper themes and characters. Is that because of "literary snobs"? No, it's because when you come back to a book in 20, 50, or 200 years you don't remember whether the protagonist's third neural implant was made of vibranium or aluminum, you remember how that book tackled incredible subject matter with layered characters, and pushed the limits of language in a way only possible in prose. When's the last time you heard of a sci-fi author that wrote like Woolf, or Joyce? Never.
Even in more literary sci-fi, for example Dune, the appeal is because it's basically just a medieval story transplanted into space. The focus is on politics and the human experience, not "what if storms lasted longer".
It's so obvious that sci-fi stories are generally better suited to the medium of film, they can capture the unreality in a more believable way, visually, and take less advantage of the ambiguity of text. It's not like sci-fi novels are pushing boundaries in prose anyways. It's much more pretentious to say they are by calling them equally "literary" than to just accept that novels which exemplify the medium are instead.
The first few Asimov Foundation novels were notorious for talking heads.
Yeah well if you dismiss more literary SF because it focuses on human experience rather than vibranium or whatever, it's not surprising that what remains has flat characters. Don't you see the circular logic?
It reminds me of Sturgeon's law.
I feel like SF magazines have the same problem? Ut looks like all the SF magazines are on the downward slope, to quote Wikipedia:
>[Asimov's] Circulation declined steadily over the life of the magazine and as of 2020 it was below 20,000, more than half of that coming from online subscriptions.
If people would still read SF, why do these magazines fail just like the literary magazines?
Science fiction is more fun to read, and often more creative - authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems they like, and then the question is whether their world-building skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies.
Yes, people are still reading - but they're reading Adrian Tchaikovsky, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Susanna Clarke and host of others who aren't limited to scenes of 'historical realism' (which to be honest are often distorted pictures of history that were socially acceptable to the publishing houses of their day).
You can still read the classics - Conrad is my favorite late 19th/early 20tth century author - but Lovecraft is just as worth reading.