18
votes
Something is broken in our science fiction
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- Title
- Our Sci-Fi Is Broken, and Hopepunk-Whatever That Is-Can't Fix It
- Authors
- Lee Konstantinou
- Published
- Jan 15 2019
- Word count
- 1716 words
I think this is the Crux of the argument, which is expanded on later in the article:
In many ways, our society hasn't much advanced from the 80s. We're still flirting with (falling for) authoritarianism, the machine of government and business is too big for anyone to take on, the only way to register distaste for the status quo is through punkism. So.
That being said, there is some scifi that I think transcends punk, namely Children of Time, Three Body Problem, Fifth Season, etc. Epic opera type tales.
I disagree. We have come a long way, especially with issues such as women's rights, homophobia, transphobia, and general equality. We're nowhere near a perfect world with these things of course, but we have made a lot of progress
That's not really within the context of what this article is talking about, though. Of course there are other societal differences but this article is specifically suggesting that 1982 and 2019 are similar because this story template is still relevant:
Since the dawn of civilization, has there really been a period of history where this template wasn't relevant? It's essentially a version of the classic Hero's Journey pattern, and I have a hard time seeing a world populated by anything recognizably human in which this kind of story isn't still interesting.
You're right in that sense, but the article makes it more clear that the bit about facing a system of power has some specific things that are universal across the *-punk genres that the article is about. I pulled that bit out of context to explain a different thing, it lost that detail in the move.
I suppose my point is that most of the things that are common across the *punk field are also quite common across storytelling generally.
There are certainly some more-or-less particular elements to *punk writing (or else it wouldn't be a meaningful term), as the article mentions there's recurring themes of disenfranchised youth and capitalist-dystopia societies. I'd still argue that stories of disenfranchised youth will find an audience in any generation, and likewise any capitalist society will have an audience for stories of capitalism gone wrong.
I think I may simply not be the target audience for this article. I love science fiction in general and have enjoyed my share of cyberpunk stories, but can't agree with the premise that the SF field is somehow broken or has failed to move past the themes and styles of cyberpunk. There's certainly a lot of *punk still being written (and I hope that remains the case), but there's also a wealth of fresh and creative new stories being told in other corners of the field.
I think my response to the article really just boils down to "if you think we haven't moved past cyberpunk, perhaps it's time to read less *punk and start exploring the rest of the field."
I'm with you on that, there's other kinds of sci-fi that this article has to ignore to make that punchy conclusion.
Oh I agree. I just think that the initial statement in the comment I replied to was too broad
These are cultural improvements, but economically, little has changed. To also quote the article:
We have progressed plenty socially but economically we're still playing the rigged game Reagan gave us with maybe an exception for Obama, which trump has undone.
You're right there -- we are much kinder to each other. But I think the *punk stuff comes out of economic issues, which do still exist, and in many ways are worse now than ever.
So would this be a throwback to Space Opera, or something new built from it?
The books mentioned all have something fairly new to bring to the table. Personally I probably wouldn't put Children of Time in the space opera pile but there are legit reasons you can call it such. Judgement call, nothing more.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "throwback" to space opera? Space opera is just a flavour of sci-fi, I wouldn't say it was a discrete movement which has a start and end. The only defining feature is that it's fairly epic and the music doesn't stop all the way through. Lensman is radically different from Ringworld which is different again from Ancillary Justice.
They're more character-driven than most space opera that I've read, but they're similar in epic scope.
I think the main issue with all of these *-punk labels is that they portray a singular vision of the future. The world and larger universe is too complex to be characterized by a singular vision like this in the present, much less the future.
There are different kinds of SciFi. Some SciFi falls under the umbrella of protest literature, which I think is the appropriate classification for *-punk. Protest literature is obviously concerned about the present and the near future.
There’s another aspect to SciFi that I think is broken which has more to do with the hard/soft distinction. I think a lot more soft SciFi is created and popularized than hard SciFi. I think this is a largely orthogonal dimension to the more social dimension of utopian vs. dystopian visions. As scientific endeavors continue to illuminate the universe, and human understanding collectively grows, hard-SciFi becomes more difficult to synthesize. And the utility of drawing on hard-SciFi to make social commentary diminishes, because we begin to see the long-term effects of technology on society (both good and bad). Making the case that technology is binary good or bad was easier back when it was speculative. Now we can see the good, like medical science curing diseases, and the bad, like hospital IT infrastructure being crippled by ransomware.
In the long run, I think SciFi is losing its ability both to inspire and to caution, because the great inspirations and cautions that SciFi has produced in the past haven’t been appropriately heeded.
Genres, subgenres, and descriptive tags in general serve users by helping to group works that are similar—at varying degrees of similarity depending on the granularity of the term. Two films, like This is Spinal Tap and Booksmart are fairly similar in that they're both comedies, but the former is perhaps more similar to What We Do in the Shadows—another mockumentary— while the latter is more similar to Superbad—another teen comedy. The more specific the descriptor, the more similar works within them tend to be.
I say this to make the point that books under the large umbrella of "science fiction" will all share some attributes: exactly the attributes that are believed to define the term. The subgenre of "cyberpunk" then defines an even narrower set of ideas, and cyberpunk-derivatives (whether we consider them beneath the umbrella of cyberpunk or as variants at the same hierarchical level) are also going to conform to specific sets of constraints.
Now, it seems like the author is making the argument that "science fiction" in the whole is dominated by cyberpunk and its cousins. I don't read a ton of (books marketed as) science fiction, but I'd wager a guess that either the author is considering only a narrow subset of the larger "science fiction" world, or else the term has come to encompass a smaller set of ideas than it once did.
If the latter is the case, it probably has a lot to do with the publishing industry and the publishers' (and readers') appetite for "genre fiction" which effectively fits into a template that there is already a market for. As a result, perhaps the most inventive science fiction being produced is what doesn't get shelved in the sci-fi section or marketed towards the same people—think of works defined as sci-fi when the term may have been broader, like Slaughterhouse Five, or works that explore speculative worlds but are classified as "literary fiction" like The Plot Against America or Never Let Me Go. Maybe whenever a new work is labeled (at the time) as science fiction, that's because it conforms so well to a set of narrowing expectations of what that means, and perhaps down the line scholars will go back and separate what was conceptually an evolution of sci-fi from what publishers categorized as sci-fi at the time.
The author talks about cyberpunk being stuck in the '80s despite being set in the near or nearish future, and I found that that point dovetails nicely with some of the points in Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout, which was just posted here:
The author (of the sci-fi Slate piece) notes that the cyberpunk of today will always feel dated to the extent that it remains defined by certain ideas about the future that are themselves rooted in the past. There's no reason today's science fiction can't embody cyberpunk's ethos of turning technology against powers which use it for oppression (or whatever), but it will continue to feel dated if it reuses the vision of the 1980s to describe the future. Remember that Blade Runner took place in 2019! Furthermore, it should adapt to the tremendous changes in our relationships with technology. The presence of technology in everyday life in the 1980s was microscopic to its presence today, and so fiction seeking to interrogate that relationship (or speculate about its future) needs to evolve.
On a semi-related note, there's a fun xkcd comic that explores the relationship between when works of fiction are set versus when they are produced and how films that were once period pieces stop feeling like period pieces if we're farther from them than they were from their subject material: Stores of the Past and Future.
I must admit a good amount of bias here. I love solarpunk. I think it is so dope, I want to read solarpunk SF, /r/solarpunk is one of my most visited subreddits. Overall I am a huge fan and would love for it to catch on.