One question to ask is: Why do science-fiction writers seem to hate space and space travel so much? Outside of existing properties like Star Wars, Star Trek, and other non-bookbased, cross-media properties, I fail to see where this 'horrible' morass of easy FTL space travel is coming from. People say they are tired of reading about 'easy space travel' and 'space opera', but I'm having a heck of a time finding out what books they're talking about that they dislike so much. Okay, fine so we don't have warp-speed or hyperspace, that doesn't mean we should discredit stories that include them. As for the idea of them not being explained how they would work, well if anyone could actually do that, then we would have them already! It wouldn't be sci-fi, it just be reality. And frankly most of this social sci-fi, that seems to have this erroneous idea that it is better because it is better explained doesn't stop if from still being FICTION. The biggest problem I find with sci-fi writing these days is too much of an inward looking at ourselves, too much Earth, too much focus on digital tech, and too little imagination about finding those strange new worlds and lifeforms, and too little imagination to boldly go where no man has gone before. Instead it's all this pretentious social sci-fi, that possesses too little imagination, and too much crippled emo 'Facebook' look at me and my digital tech storyteling. There are some 200 billion stars in our galaxy, and easily as many galaxies beyond ours. Like much of our Western society, we need to stop looking inward, and start looking outward. Light years are just a matter of distance and how fast we can traverse them. Saying that we're not supposed to write about doing so in an easy(ier) fashion, at least in fiction, is the exact type of self-censorship that has so destroyed the optimism and fun (yes fun, any of you know what that is?) that made so many of us science fiction fans in the first place.

But his Hieroglyph project is pessimistic! It says not to engage speculative technologies and no talk of them. In fact, he requires the use of "steel" - that people should only use technologies that are available today and not to waste time thinking about future possibilities. Now, there is a logic to this but in the end Stephenson is anti-future and anti-visionary. Why? This trend in cyberculture SF writers is a backlash from their own guilt for having been so dystopic. I wish they would get out of the way of the rest of us who are visionary and want to solve problems on a large scale.

Science fiction isn't really about people in the future, it really is about us in the present. Science fiction is a device to project our present hopes and fears a comfortable distance away. In times when people are feeling upbeat, you get science fiction that is mostly "optimistic", while when people are downbeat you tend to get dystopian visions of the future. Things haven't been going that well for us lately, which is undoubtedly why sci fi has taken such a pessimistic turn. Unfortunately, and contrary to the thesis of this article, I suspect that sci fi follows rather than leads. Optimistic sci fi isn't going to be written until there is a market for it, and there isn't going to be a market for it until times get better and people are feeling more upbeat again.

The answer to this is simple. Not only is it a reflection of how we feel and the world we currently exist in, but the simple fact of the matter is nihilistic and dystopian futures provide something that stories need to be interesting. CONFLICT. In a perfect world, where everything is happy and shiny, guess what? NOTHING HAPPENS. People just live their happy lives and there's no story to tell. Logan's Run is supposed to be an idyllic future, yet it isn't really, there's a darker truth to it. Same with The Time Machine, paradises don't have conflict or obstacles to over come. The simple fact of the mater is that even the most perfect of futures is going to have darkness. The world ISN'T a nice place, it's full of death, corruption, greed and horror. Fiction in general reflects that. That isn't going to chance, regardless of how hard you "authors" complain about it, because stories about ideal futures go ignored and unread because they just aren't interesting to read about.

i love you neal.x

Two problems with much of “futurism” and science fiction is that they tend to assume there is a technological fix for human problems, while also ignoring the cost of their “solutions,” not only in money, but in natural resources. It is possible to devise optimistic futurism and science fiction, but even dystopian writers are frequently too optimistic, in that humans are often saved from a dystopian planet by earthlings blasting off into space. A dystopian civilization would no longer have the resources and social-scientific wherewithal to send themselves zipping off into space, which would also need to include the gargantuan cost of resettlement. Another convenient escape hatch frequently popping up in sci-fi is when the hero and his significant other will, as in one version of Blade Runner, escape into some vast lush limitless Eden–somehow still existing on a burned-out dystopian planet? Also often ignored is that in a future world that would continue today’s runaway overpopulation, particularly that of the USA, now almost totally fueled by post-1965 in-migration and offspring, temporary technological fixes tend only to make it possible for population numbers to continue their skyrocketing arc in a position of ever greater resource overshoot, becoming ever more unsustainable, making the eventual population crash ever more devastating–and not just for humans. In other words, realistic futurism rewards. Utopian futurism kills.

Hey Neal, love your books--Snow Crash and The Diamond Age helped restore my faith in science fictional wonder.

Now, I'm an author with two books out (Winning Mars from Prime Books--near future positive SF, and Mecha Corps from Penguin/ROC--big robot mid-future with a very interesting universe to play in.) I've long been a proponent of positive SF (and have been ostracized for it.) Check out my Positive Science Fiction Manifesto at http://strangeandhappy.com/2008/09/27/stranger-and-happier-a-positive-science-fiction-manifesto/

Also check out the Shine anthology, edited by Jetse de Vries, who shares a lot of our same points of view.

I think there are reasons a lot of SF ends up dystopic these days.

First, it's easier to write. Lots more potential for gut-wrenching conflict when you're launching off the current crisis du jour. It's an easier sell, too. Publishers want stuff that resonates with the stuff people are angsting about. And yeah, it can be a signpost to warn us off Really Bad Outcomes. But there's a whole lot of it.

Second, the authors have changed. In the past, most SF was written by people working in technology, seeing the massive changes around them firsthand. Now it's typically written by people with lots of literary cred (or looking for same), who may not ever have been in a development lab at all. Again, it's a reflection of what publishers want--visionary stuff that doesn't pass muster on the lit side of things doesn't win SF awards.

Here's to more positive SF!

Whoa, WHoa, WHOA! Just ran across the reason why post-apocalyptic entertainment is all the rage today. (I saw "The Hunger Games" last week and can attest that this genre is alive and well). It's because people have lost faith in the future. I said "faith" because as it turns out you need a reason to think that the future will be brighter and better. A Christian belief system that focuses on Jesus' promise to return to earth and take his followers to heaven matches that requirement precisely. It also fits with the Biblical view of time as linear. Both are requirements for science to develop. So it stands to reason that since much of Western Civilization has given up its faith in Christianity, it has ultimately lost its faith in progress and linear time, and therefore science and a better tomorrow. In which case Neal Stephenson's project is doomed to failure.

The "no magical technologies" works fine for the very near future, but when you get farther out? Imagine it's 1890 and you're a physical scientist. Someone approaches you with the following: "I have here two lumps of a material called Uranium 235. If you slam them together correctly, they will release energy with the explosive force of more than one hundred million sticks of dynamite." You'd laugh at him. The very idea is preposterous. First off, what's this "235" business? Uranium is Uranium. It doesn't come in types. You're familiar with the atomic theory of matter, right? Atomic. From the Greek atomos. It means "indivisible. A Uranium atom is a Uranium Atom is a Uranium atom. And this ridiculous release of energy? Energy can neither be created or destroyed. You've can convert from one form to another but that's about it. If there was so much energy, whether chemical or mechanical, in Uranium to do as you suggest, it would tend to go off at the slightest provocation--Like, say, sneezing anywhere in the same county. What you suggest is flat out theoretically impossible. Now, instead, suppose someone approached you with the following instead: "You know, if you applied a force to something, like say with a rocket, and continued applying it for long enough, there is no ultimate bar to how fast it could go. Enough force, for enough time, and one could travel between the stars in weeks, if not days. Of course that much acceleration would crush most things and the engineering challenges are probably prohibitive, but there's no theoretical bar to it." You'd probably have to agree. After all speed is simply acceleration over time, and acceleration is simply force divided by mass. Enough force, applying enough acceleration, for enough time and any speed could be achieved without limit, at least theoretically. more at: http://thewriterinblack.blogspot.com/2012/03/science-science-fiction-and-possible.html

The real problem is not that Science Fiction Writers are so pessimistic. The problem (from what I've heard) is that too many of the publishers want pessimistic Science Fiction.

Contrary to the last poster's conclusion, there is nothing 'realistic' about assuming that what happened yesterday will happen tomorrow or the day after that. Indeed, technology has given us the tools to know that the mode of living we have constructed over the past few decades is entirely unsustainable. In light of this, it isn't really a reason to feel optimistic that in the rich West progress has been achieved on the measures the last poster mentions, because this mode of living cannot be sustained. By all means this isn't to say cultural progress requires the hugely wasteful system we have currently, and can't be done (better) without it, but it is to say that the last few decades have been a rebuke to technological optimism. Far from solve our problems, in that time technology has only exacerbated our unsustainable practices. Perhaps this is why sci-fi writers have such trouble envisaging future techno-utopias. We need a cultural-political solution underpinned by technology, not determined by it. I suspect the hard part for intelligent sci-fi writers trying to be optimistic is, in our claimed "post-ideological" times, imaging such solutions. Its very easy to look at the data and conclude capitalism has no future. Imagining its replacement when we've had 30 years being told "there is no alternative" is the hard part.

We need a constant reminder that technology is a double edged sword. It increases both our capacity to do good for one another and to harm one another. It is important that we have these novels as reminders of what technology will eventually be capable of, so we can avoid these outcomes and work towards doing more good with technology. To anyone here who loves the dystopian/apocalyptic novel, but of a different variety, read the book Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. She terms the genre as speculative fiction, because the technology is mostly that which we have now which is cutting edge (genetics and energy), simply developed and made widespread.

I felt the same way I began to write a recently published sci-fi story. I am tired of stories where the space ships just go to "jump speed" (faster than light speed) without explanation. I set out to go beyond the tech improvements to the discoveries in astrophysics (proof of a multiverse system) that allows a ship to travel in space at a faster speed than we can now imagine at this time and the paradoxes it creates. I hope to see other sci-fi writers do this. Hieroglyph Project is a go for me. Let's see some stretching the imaginations and going beyond horror and space opera.

The indisputable fact is that mankind has progressed over time and continues to progress both technologically and culturally. Whether your view takes in the last 40,000 years or only the last 400 years the result is the same. It is not steady progress or universal by any means. There have been temporary declines, but the trend has been toward peace, prosperity, mutual respect, and discovery.
Now may be the most peaceable time in our species’ existence. People today have a much lower chance of being the victims of violence than at any time in history, or probably even prehistory. Individuals regardless of their social class, beliefs, gender, or ethnicity are almost universally regarded as having the same basic rights. Think of things not only common but considered normal not all that long ago such as slavery, genocide, the burning of heretics, gruesome executions, blood sports, debtors’ prisons, foot-binding, torture, mutilation, animal cruelty, wars of conquest, colonialism, and subjugation. Now think about how such things are considered today.
The rejection of acts such as these, which I think most of us would see as barbaric, did not happen all at once. From a historical perspective it has been fairly rapid, though, and each of these cultural advancements has been built on those that came before it. We didn’t go from genocide to racial and ethnic equality or from the Inquisition to religious freedom in one step but we did get there. Humanity seen on the large scale has progressed and continues to progress.
Much of current science fiction, if not fiction in general, seems to take the opposite stand, that continued progress is either unlikely or will lead to irresolvable problems. Despite the fact that history shows otherwise, these dark tales are often touted by critics as being more realistic. Clearly, they are not. Based on what mankind has accomplished and continues to accomplish, fiction that carries a positive mood and image of humanity is more realistic.