SF Is Dead, Long Live Science
Over at Discover Magazine, the improbably named Bruno Maddox has written a fantastic and doubtlessly contentious article on the obsolescence of science fiction as a delivery system for big, world-changing ideas.
It's the kind of article that you can love while passionately disagreeing with his points: there's just many fine moments, from his description of a catfight between Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, to the swift evisceration of Michael Crichton. But broadly, the idea is this: science fiction is meaningless because there have been no real sci-fi classics in the last decade. Ergo, this proves that the future is charging ahead at such a breakneck pace that fiction can't keep up with imagining realities that science can not conquer.
It's a disingenuous argument: a decade lull in earth-shaking sci-fi ideas equals the death of a genre. Many of the classics that Maddox cites took their time to establish themselves on the minds of men. Anyway, science-fiction is only outpaced by science in the microcosm: big problems like time travel, FTL travel, terraforming, etc. aren't any closer to being conquered now than they were a hundred years ago.
Plus, I don't think it's true that science-fiction has stopped putting forward large ideas, but the boundaries of the genre are more nebulous than before. Sci-fi isn't dead, it's just mainstream, and consequently, a lot of people who love sci-fi don't realize they are reading or watching it at all.
Blinded by Science: Fictional Reality [Discover Mag, via SF Signal, via Christopher Paul Carey]
There are few things more enjoyable than watching Michael Crichton being shredded. He is awful.
That said, the best point of that article was SF's increasing dilution -- the "speculative fiction" moniker, and the increased prevalence of fantasy sharing (and then overcrowding) the bookshelves. I've been saying for years that we, as science fiction fans, need to call a spade a spade and firmly differentiate -- Star Wars is a great story, sure, but it's swords and sorcery wrapped in a thin outer shell of technology. Nothing at all is wrong with liking it, even as a science fiction fan, but it just plain isn't the same genre. The flipside of this is that if something is science fiction, we need to call it as such (Margaret Atwood, I'm looking at you).
And ten years without a classic is a pretty ridiculous claim. There have been plenty of great SF books written in the last 10 years; there have been plenty written in the last 2 years for that matter (Vinge's Rainbow's End and Peter Watts's Blindsight, which Bjorn and I both plugged in ectotweets and which is well worth your time, come to mind immediately). Other, not so recent books include Diaspora, by Greg Egan (very dense science -- but one of the most awe-inspiring books I've read), and Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear. Surely those are not alone, but I've been remiss in my readings lately -- but I've heard a lot of great things about Charles Stross, John Scalzi, Alistair Reynolds, and Ken Mcleod. Of course, it's hard for anything these days to reach the status of The Time Machine, or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or even 1984 -- after all, these are books that have been around longer than most science fiction readers have been alive, and at the time they were published none of them had nearly as many other great stories to compete with. There was a time when being a SF fan meant you could (and likely would) read everything that was published; these days it is a challenge to read everything good, so it's harder for anything to stick out in the way some earlier works did.
There's also a good point about blogging in there -- something that might have made a great short story can also make a great blog post, especially if it's a harder science idea, rather than something character driven.
The link you provided takes you to Page 2 of the article.
The point that our own world is too strange, and changing too swiftly, for most SciFi authors to be able to accurately predict the next 10 minutes, much less the next 10 decades is an interesting one. It brings to mind William Gibson's latest scifi book, which is set one year ago. Perhaps things are moving so fast, we need the predictive power of hard sci fi to look at where we've been, in case we missed something.