A Bigger Bang for the Book?
[ by Charles Cameron — apocalypse out-movied, science fiction overwhelmed, what in the world is the world coming to? and whither SF? ]
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I could hardly be expected not to share with you my delight in this, from the Onion [turn down your volume control before you click, it’s preset to wake the dead]:
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But I don’t think the Book (of the Revelation of St John on Patmos) is the only thing that’s getting out-gunned these days. Consider this tweet from Caitlin Fitz Gerald aka @caidid:
The thing is — aside from terraforming Mars [Frederick Turner, Kim Stanley Robinson] or visiting spaces deeper out, we’ve accomplished or are accomplishing much of what “hard” (ie science-based) science fiction imagined for us. And to my mind, that suggests the possibility that writing hard SF will be getting a whole lot more difficult, and that character and culture will increasingly be what divides the best from the bland.
Still plenty of room for the likes of Jack Vance and his brilliant and beautiful Moon Moth, though.
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So, will the End Bang be bigger than the Big Bang? Or is there a principle of symmetry that makes them exquisitely equal and opposite?
August 10th, 2012 at 6:51 pm
This has been much discussed in sf circles. Writers like Charlie Stross have both tried hard to imagine short- and medium-term futures, while wondering how sf can proceed.
The flip side is how badly we’ve realized earlier sf dreams. Human spaceflight, jetpacks and flying cars, artificial intelligence (that works), not to mention improvements in human society (with all possible hedges around that).
I’ve been expecting sf writers to go big, aiming for far-future sf, a la Olaf Stapledon.