Comments | silk_noir: Dancing on that Grave in a Red Dress

silk_noir

Dancing on that Grave in a Red Dress

Mar 07, 2011 08:54

So lately I've been talking with some friends about whether or not SF is dead. Well, for me, that's asking what they think, and then listening. And then I get all firey and pugnacious and slam my onager jawbone in the dirt and say by gum, someone just needs to revive the sucker. (And because I'm half insane, I frequently intimate that Ta-da! ( Read more... )

passion, reading, positive thinking, science fiction, writing, question

Comments 17

martinhesselius March 7 2011, 15:05:23 UTC

I'm reading a lovely light-but-hard SF book at the moment, that combines the aesthetics of wine and cloth with nanotech, interstellar expansion (albeit everything's set in one city so far), and even passing references to brane theory, etc. So it's not dead, just displaced, IMNSHO?

martinhesselius March 7 2011, 15:09:05 UTC

Tangent --
http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4769125-glas

Post script:
It doesn't help SF that both the media and certain political groups hate science.
(And I'm not slamming any one party, both have Luddite factions.)

sartorias March 7 2011, 15:07:57 UTC

I've been hearing that since I was a teen, so when it comes up again, I tiptoe away.

jamiam March 7 2011, 15:22:42 UTC

I'll say it again: the people who say SF is dead are simply the people who didn't want SF to change.

(Have you read The Year of the Flood yet? I have to go read Oryx and Crake still...)

ccjohn March 7 2011, 17:14:30 UTC

Yeah. Oryx and Crake. That sounded pretty damn good. Me too.

maggotpunk March 8 2011, 06:22:29 UTC

I've read them both. I think they are Margaret Atwood's best works since Handmaid's Tale.

gxdm March 7 2011, 16:55:28 UTC

As I think on what you say, I think it requires a definition of Sci-Fi. It used to be a fairly clear cut difference. Fantasy was Tolkienesque, and Sci-Fi was hard sci-fi.

These days, the two genres seem to comingle pretty easily. I set forth as an example a lot of stuff by CJ Cherryh, any number of things by Elizabeth Bear, and quite a few things by C.S. Friedman. There are also a number of "space operas" that could go either way as to whether they are scifi or fantasy.

So I think it depends on your definition. Hard Sci-Fi is still being written, but for anything else, the boundaries are not clear anymore.

userpic -- look familiar? ;) ccjohn March 7 2011, 17:13:03 UTC

SF dead? NFW! You might inspire me. I walk around all day, usually two or three flickers, "hey that could be a story."

I'm sick of vamps, zombies, painfully earnest teen romances and dopey "Raewen, daughter of the wizard Oelthorpe looked out from her tower. It was grey, she was betrothed to Lord Loser who she found disgusting." The dominant genres have all been worked to death. All I see is crap. That's negative space we can fill.

Your story about the singer and the native woman, I liked it very much. You involved me with the characters. No way did I see that ending coming. Slam that onager jaw in the sand, man, break stuff with it.