Why has science fiction declined so much over the past 2 decades?

Because its focus has strayed away from speculation and towards Star Wars. Basically, sci-fi/fantasy is now elf-fantasy/vulcan-fantasy

That said, there are still good sci fi authors. They've just been outnumbered by the bad ones.

>>5124355
why is she so hot

also does the culture series count as good sci-fi?

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>>5124365

Who are the good moderns?

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>>5124365
>Implying Science Fiction has to be speculative to be good.

Nobody really knows where the fuck to take it. After post-New Wave and cyberpunk, almost no one had any idea what was next, no one had anything to do or any story to tell that could be told better as science fiction than in any other genre. I think also part of the problem is that there's been a turn towards the contemporary - towards the moment, and towards the specifics of the present condition, and away from speculation and generality.

It's worth pointing out that a significant part, I would say the majority, of the interesting science fiction that's come out over the past ~25 years has been backwards-looking, paying homage to or trying to revive older kinds of science fiction, whether that be space opera or cyberpunk. People want to write science fiction, but they don't have any new ideas about what to do with the genre.

>>5124515
It has to. It's the only qualitative thing separating the classics (Roadside Picnic, Solaris, Asimov etc) from fantasy.
>>5124524
This somewhat, although in my opinion Alastair Reynolds still has his gaze on the future and he's not 100% full of shit. Africa could be the next superpower if they collectively tame their inner nigger. Mechanics is a bit of a rehash of Icarus from DX1, but still a current dream of good government.

>>5124540
meant to say quantitative

>>5124495
She's hot because it's just an inherent truth of her being.
Tetra just is hot.

>>5124540
Reynolds was one of the people I had in mind w/ 'interesting science fiction', but he's also someone who is recapitulating past forms of science fiction IMO, specifically space opera.

Also IMO speculation and thinking about the future are two different things. The decline in speculation isn't because people aren't thinking about the future, and speculation doesn't have to be about the future. I mean, a lot of the great New Wave works of SF are not really serious predictions about the future at all. But they're still fundamentally speculative - they're speculating about human existence and 'what could be but is not'. So it's not that the future has gone away, it's that speculation has. (also this theory is still in development and I haven't figured out, eg, what precisely differentiates fantasy from science fiction so yeah)

I like speculating about mankind and its relation to the future, but I don't get why that must always be "SCI-fi." The title of the genre itself seems to resign itself to the authority of science...wouldn't "speculative fiction" open more doors (and close a lot of lesser entryways)?

Meh, I don't know. I'm drunk and barely read sci-fi.

>>5124570
>>5124570
People have been arguing about what to call the genre for like 50 or 60 years. Historically a lot of people (including a lot of really good writers) agree with you that science fiction is a bad name and speculative fiction would be better. There's also been some arguments that different names like SF, sci-fi, science fiction, and speculative fiction should be used to refer to different kinds of fiction.

But TBH these days most people use them all interchangeably because no one gives a shit anymore and it's easier.

>>5124509
Alastair Reynolds and Ian M banks

>>5124365
Good sci-fi writers (or really any kind of writer) have always been outnumbered by the bad ones. For every Philip K Dick or Ray Bradbury, there are five no-names who had one printing of their crappy, sci-fi fantasy novel that's rotting in the back of a goodwill. There hasn't been enough time to filter out the recent crap.

>>5124355
Hey look, you posted the same thread again, even though your old one got plenty of responses and just died a couple of hours ago. You didn't even manage to make your OP more interesting this time around. Great job.

>>5124540
Then why is Dune so great if everybody knows space-travel using Cinnamon Toast Crunch is impossible?

>>5125949

spoilers: there's no hard and fast difference between sci-fi and fantasy. Book of the New Sun, Dune, Canopus in Argos and many many others give the lie to any hard&fast dichotomy. the more seriously someone takes such dichotomy, the more they enforce their own genre ghetto and cheapen fantastic works of every stripe.

>>5125957
m8 I'm agreeing with you but the anon I replied to was implying otherwise

>>5125877
This. It's also good to mention that the print magazine has collapsed because of television, making literature far more niche activity, attempted by the passionate. There's also, more and more since Star Wars, the lure of screenwriting, which offers young sci-fi authors the chance to make something visual or fail awfully and give it up instead of getting paid for mediocre short stories in pulp mags until they improved.

I don't know but Tetra is fucking cute as hell. She is my waifu

>>5125949
Can't really answer that since Dune is shit.

>>5124355
Because urban living is shit. Also nerds are now even less masculine.

>>5124524
The new wave will be religious-centric, mark my words.

>>5126699
same here!

>>5124509
Ted Chiang

>>5124355
Because cp has become more readily available in the past 2 decades, so real geeks are busy fapping to that rather than writing.

>>5128685
Really?

>>5125957
that is 2deep4me

>>5124355
run out of ideas, a lot of ideas are being repeated but executed in a different way but it still feels tedious

>>5128730
I didn't write that but Ted Chiang's fucking great, check out his short story Exhalation for some god-tier science fiction (pdfs are easy to find online). I also just finished Blindsight by Peter Watts which I think is also "Great" sci-fi. Oryx & Crake might be in this category too, I don't know.

I like sci-fi a lot, it's definitely my favorite genre for light reading, but yea most of it isn't great. E.g. Culture series gets held up a lot, but let's be honest, they're not great ruminations on the human condition that are going to be read and talked about half a century from now. They're fun action-adventure books filled giant robots and really cool space ships.

There's nothing wrong with liking a book or an author or a genre because it's fucking FUN. You can enjoy Pynchon and Danielle Steele at the same time, if that's your thing. Why lie to yourself about it? You're just making yourself unhappy.

I, personally, despise fantasy, I think it's garbage and it makes me roll my eyes. But that's ME, what gets my dick hard is lasers and super computers, and I don't try to pretend otherwise.

The whole discussion about renaming sci-fi "speculative fiction" is so fucking stupid. It doesn't matter what in the fuck you call it. There's always going to be bad speculative-fiction or bad future-writing-fiction or bad space-monster-bookie-things, and there's always going to be "great" post-present-fiction and there's always going in-between not-now-and-not-the-past-and-not-non-fiction. Trying to rename a genre is just an excuse to try to run-away from the unpopular bits, to lie to yourself and say "oh but it's OK, i'm still respectable because I only like the GOOD fantasy/sci-fi/romance/whatever"

Just like what you like, who gives a shit what it's called. If you want to find good sci-fi, it's out there.

>>5124355
Because you never heard of Damasio

Because it's generic mass production trash. Every NEET neckbeard has watched and read tons of it and then has to contribute his own low quality drivel.

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>>5130949
>All these buzzwords

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>>5124355
It hasn't, you just weren't around to see the bad writing that got buried in history.

>>5130469
Oryx and Crake is crap Sci-Fi though. Good characters, crap sci-fi.

It's really not worse though. If you actually compare the recent award winners like 2312 and Ancillary Justice to early award winners and a lot of the golden age stuff, there is a comical difference in quality. We are getting some of the best SF right now.

>>5131597
buzzword is a buzzword

>>5124355

It's exhausted itself.

>>5131785
Bumble bee phrases

>>5130469
good point

>>5124355
Read Vox Day's blog and get red-pilled about Pink SFF.

As usual, cultural Marxism is to blame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC5IRl9vLOw

>>5133163
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

>>5133163
mai waifu ~

>>5133163
that video gave me autism

>>5126914
nigger i will fight u

>>5124540
I started Revelation Space the other night and I'm loving this. It's so easy to read. I don't know why. I read the Wiki articles for his books a month or two ago, and hard sci-fi really intrigues me mainly because Clarke's Third Law is my favorite concept of anything.

So much enjoyment. I'm happy to actively be reading again.

>>5134880
Bring it on.
*unsheaths katana*

>>5124355
>implying Sci-fi was good in the first place.

Licensed Media Tie-In Novels have taken over the midlists
Star Trek, Star Wars, rpg/wargame/computer game, etc
They occupy the sales positions authors like Gene Wolfe once held
So unless you're a big name author its hard to get sales and that means its hard for them to get signed, and the only to become a big name is to get signed

The second reason would be the collapse of the short story market
Traditionally authors would hone their craft and make their name by first writing for years in the various short story magazines and paperback anthologies, even make it their exclusive avenue for output for some authors
Starting out writing short stories allows through its constraint an author to learn how to pace a story and structure the plot and develop characters
Right up til the late 70s/early 80s there were about 5 or 6 magazines in North America, 1 or 2 in the UK, and numerous paperback anthologies of original material (Damon Knights Orbit series is a good example)
Now there are three magazines that nobody reads cause they're not stocked anywhere, and no anthologies except years best-ofs and retrospectives and retro throwbacks (the latter two filled with big names cause thats the only way they can get published)
So with nowhere to learn or develop you're supposed to write a trilogy of brick-sized novels as your first time sale. Or sign up to write a licensed novel which drains your creativity through the inability for anything to happen to the characters or universe.

At first, sci-fi was optimistic about the future. Then it was pessimistic. Now we don't even want to think about the future.

>>5124355
Because science non-fiction is catching up.