I don't know what sales numbers look like, but from my perspective as a casual reader who's been trying to keep up with Hugo Award nominees of recent years... science fiction may not be trendy on BookTok, but it's far from dead.
Sure, fantasy has "corrupted" the Hugos, but there's plenty of hard science fiction, and science fiction that grapples with societal questions at large. Arkady Martine's Memory Called Empire and Desolation Called Peace, both Hugo winners, are incredibly thoughtful depictions of societies on the verge of disruption from new technology. Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a 2022 Hugo nominee, while somewhat of a sci-fi-fantasy genre crossover, is both harrowing and exhilarating in its discussion of gender through a speculative lens (content warnings apply).
If you're looking for whether innovative science fiction is being adapted into popular media - the Three Body Problem (2015 Hugo winner) and the Murderbot series (won the Hugo most recently in 2021) are both being adapted. Andy Weir's post-Martian works continue to be hyped, if not quite adapted yet. The fanbase for Tamsyn Muir's Ninth series is rabid in the best possible way - and while ostensibly centered on necromancy, it's remarkably high in sci-fi hardness.
And outside of traditional publishing - democratized writing challenges like https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/, genre-crossing serial sci-fi like the works of Wildbow, and fanfiction in general (I continue to follow and adore the To The Stars, a Madoka fanfic which juxtaposes magic with a spacefaring future humanity, with masterful worldbuilding) continue to thrive.
Traditional publishing houses may indeed be in crisis, but contrary to the original article's assertion, there is no shortage of ideas.
I'd really enjoy a return to classic space opera. I think a world where technologies like AI actually work out okay to some extent is a) closer to fiction than the alternative, and b) more interesting than another dystopia.
I'd enjoy a swashbuckling noblebright adventures-in-space thing way more than yet another treatise on Technology Bad right about now.
That said, I don't know that I think sci-fi as a genre is dying per se. There are a lot of really prominent and popular science fiction pieces coming out today. Shows/books like Black Mirror and The Expanse, for example.
The prevailing narrative is that the optimism collapsed because the real future didn't turn out like we hoped, but I don't think that's it. A lot of very optimistic sci-fi was written right after two world wars. I think it's more of a stylistic conceit. If it's not dark and edgy, it's not profound.
Personally I think dark and edgy (or variants like pessimistic and bleak, or depressing and fatalistic) is the cheap easy way to look profound.
I think that works because humans have a negativity bias. Bad news feels important. Mockery and drama and calling people out gets social attention. Conflict is thrilling even if the reasons behind it are ridiculous or cliche.
Optimistic works don't get free bonus points from the amygdala, so they have to stand on their own. An uninteresting optimistic work is incredibly dull, even cringey. But a very mediocre boring pessimistic work can still seem deep.
Edit: I'm not saying dark works can't be good. Lots of them are. I'm just saying it's much easier to sell (aesthetically or commercially) a mediocre work if it's dark and pessimistic than if it's bright and optimistic. In brighter settings the flaws show more easily.
It seems to me like it is a pendulum swing. It used to be that most works were straightforward and heroic, so that when someone had the idea to write a morally gray story, that was fresh and really interesting. Eventually everyone, tired of the worn out heroic tropes, started to get on this dark, edgy bandwagon. But now the dark and edgy stories are just as worn out as heroic stories used to be. Now, a straightforwardly heroic story is actually kind of subversive and fresh! So I think that, over the coming decades, we will see a shift back towards optimistic stories as people get more and more tired of the dark and gritty kind.
It's a very interesting time to write science fiction. A lot of the greats are very dismissive of modern AI. So there is a lot of room to write things pertinent to the current moment.
From a purely economic standpoint, AI is its own worst enemy. Quicker to produce books made even cheaper and even automate-able?
You could have AI generate the next Shakespeare and you'll almost certainly never get noticed amidst the flood of competing books.
It's fun to talk to an LLM yourself, but when I come upon someone else's output my eyes glaze over. I'm fine if an author uses AI to help them outline the book, brainstorm ideas, but I want the actual book to be written by a person.
While I personally agree, I figure an economic argument bypasses the often recited "but AI will get better!"
That very argument is also AI's downfall when it comes to writing books that'll sell.
Why read someone else's books? LLMs are the ultimate choose your own adventure story generators. Give it a scenario and some characters and some conflict and generate your own story. Sit down with ChatGPT and just have a good story time for yourself for a couple of hours going however you want to go. Want to focus on action and adventure? Or do you want interpersonal drama? Or both? You decide!
The LLM just reflects you back. I have a system like that and it can be very fun, but it's become clear that it will just lie to try to make me happy. One of the reasons people read books is to have access to another (probably unique) perspective.
How will you know?
If my eyes glaze over! For now output has a very programatic feel. Maybe not later, who knows?
It's an interesting moment we're at. Circles of trust are going to be really important. The internet is gonna be assumed-bot soon. TikTok is pretty much there already.
I wrote a story about this: https://tomasbjartur.substack.com/p/that-mad-olympiad
Funny timing, I was just thinking about this over dinner while scrolling the wiki list on [clarke / seiun / nebula] awards for the thousandth time.
> [Post-sci-fi is] free to allow the science fictional elements of their stories develop slowly, to emerge only in the latter half of the text, or to remain an isolated thread in a larger tapestry, all of which are anathema to genre-machine publishing, which generally wants its spaceships front-and-centre early on, to reassure readers they’re getting what they paid for.
This has always bugged me. There's often an interesting synopsis like (below), but the actual story begins with ~200 pages of backstories. And altogether the actual problem / developments / solution could probably be detailed in a tenth of the page count after subtracting all the character drama.
> "When a signal is discovered that seems to come from far beyond our solar system [...] What follows is an eye-opening journey out to the stars to the most awesome encounter in human history"
But this synopsis is actually from a well known 80s novel [0] so I don't think this slow-burn type of writing has become any more or less common with post scifi. To be clear, I don't have a problem with character-focused stories (I've read a ton!), I just wish they were advertised that way.
At this point I'm finding new / unusual stuff to read by looking for the least liked books whenever recommendations come up. Anyways rant over. On a more positive note, the author's post has put of new names / titles on my reading list. I think my next read will probably be something by Ishiguro:
> [The Buried Giant] follows an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no-one is able to retain long-term memories. The couple have dim memories of having had a son, and they decide to travel to a neighbouring village to seek him out.
I have a hard time reading sci-fi these days because the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting. I have a hard time seeing much other than computers in the future. Maybe stories like the Hyperion Cantos with the AIs in the TechnoCore largely fighting amongst themselves over the future of humanity are still intersting to me.
> the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting.
Opening them up again is a possible creative move. For example 'Dune', a far future where AIs and computers are banned and highly taboo because they caused too much trouble. Or there's alternate paths from the actual past such as steampunk in which we pushed mechanical engines further instead of switching (!) entirely to electronics.
Yeah, with who is doing space exploration being right up there. If it is us it isn’t going to be in our organic bodies, and this renders so much of it irrelevant. Wider society will likely pigeon hole their thinking on that next to concerns about the heat death of the universe, but for a lot of us it is disappointing.
I did wonder about what it would be like embodied as a space probe encountering an alien that had also gone through the same process. That is now the sort of scifi that appeals.
There was a short story online a while back which covered that which was put forward as an answer to the Fermi Paradox.
Literally the basis behind Eve-Online… you’re just a clone of consciousness of a citizen of New Eden.
Iain Banks still reigns supreme. Throw a couple LLMs in a chat together and they sound similar to his conversations between intelligences (particularly in Excession).
I do not want to read a bunch of gross torture porn, though.
Greg Egan is far more interesting and spares you that.
Barjavel's "Ravage" written in 1943 completely missed the computer revolution.
The passage about audio books that works by having a camera above your book and someone remotely reading it to your headphone, is entertaining.
And 3d tv was a success.
Nevertheless, still a great story.
I agree. But lots can be written about the future of computers. It's worth trying. Writing is fun at least!
In some stories, the outcome seems more plausible with current scientific hubris =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth%2C_and_I_Must_...
Imo good sci fi was never really meant to be a technical description of cool technology, but more about how humans interact in specific scenarios dictated by the existence of certain technologies. Star Trek was less about the intricacies of the warp drive and more about "what if humans could interact with hundreds of unique cultures," or "what could human society look like without scarcity?"
There are many stories to tell in the age of AI. I've yet to find a good Luddite novel that explores how the technology might be taken by the commons, rather than hoarded and made to serve capital (the way governments have been). There's plenty of stories to tell around exploring university of ethics once we have a truly non human intelligence to reckon with. Accelerando spent just as much time exploring the legal implications of non-human intelligences as it did the underlying technology.
Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.
It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics. There is of course the whole hard/soft sci-fi continuum that determines just how rooted it is, with soft sci-fi being pure fantasy with sci-fi veneer and hard sci-fi being fantasy that's physically plausible.
As actual science and technology advances and as society changes what we imagine will change. Sci-fi imagined today will either deal with AI and what AI is really shaping up to look like or it will imagine futures where AI has been abandoned for some reason (like Dune).
>Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.
In other words, it allows writers to talk about culture with a technological flair. It's still valuable later because it was really about the culture. The tech also enables wild scenarios, that often come true later on.
It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics.
That's a superficial view of both Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Sure, there's a lot of schlock out there which essentially functions as this sort of meaningless escapism for the reader. But proper Sci-Fi and Fantasy is philosophical in a way that makes them radically different, if not diametrically opposed.
Fantasy stories typically depict a society in decay, with evil ascendant, and characters who yearn to return to a time of past innocence. It's ultimately backward looking and conservative. When it functions as social commentary, it's a critique of the alienation and impersonality of modernity.
Science Fiction is forward-looking. It asks "what if" questions about the limitations of our modern society by inviting us to view a society that has been freed from those limitations. It challenges our ideas about human nature. It's ultimately progressive, even when it depicts dystopian governments.
Every few months I ask some AIs to write a Kilgore Trout short story for me.
I stopped reading Sci-Fi, it's just all dystopia and even when it's about a Utopia it's mostly about how it crumbles like with the Terra Ignota Series.
We live in a dystopia, we need some utopian ideas, enough of the gloom and doom that ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy..
There's a subreddit called /r/hfy for more positive scifi. It tends to be indie stuff and I think it goes a little too far in the other direction but at least some of the top-voted ones are interesting.
Off the top of my head...
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/32973/synchronizing-minds-...
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/67180/here-be-dragons-book...
The problem is, tales of the land of the happy nice people doesn't make for much of a story, or
“. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.” ― Arthur C. Clarke, _2001: A Space Odyssey_
Star Trek TNG was an interesting utopia. I want more of that. (Not more Star Trek, more utopia sci-fi).
But it kept getting undermined every other episode, to say nothing of things such as Section 31.
Section 31 wasn't in TNG. And I wouldn't say the utopia got undermined in TNG either. When you (fairly rarely) had corruption or villainy inside Starfleet, those people were always treated as rogues who were acting on their own, and were decisively defeated by the utopia. It isn't like in DS9 where the writers flirt with the idea that maybe the Federation can't work without a dark side; the TNG writers play the utopia straight.
That's just lack of imagination.
Well, Ursula K. LeGuin did author _Always Coming Home_, which I quite enjoyed, but it's a very different book which only seems to have a niche audience.
Or the matrix take -
> Agent Smith tells Morpheus that the first, "perfect" Matrix failed because humanity requires suffering, leading them to create a simulation based on the "peak of your civilization"—1999. Smith highlights that the machines actually took over during this era, making it their civilization rather than humanity's. The choice of 1999 provided a stable,, yet inherently flawed, era characterized by 90s technology, post-Cold War optimism, and, crucially, the necessary amount of human misery to prevent the simulation from failing.
The thing about _The Matrix_ is that the world-building was much more interesting than the premise (to make a world in which comicbook superheroes made sense).
Not seeing why human misery is necessary --- that line always felt propaganda-like --- a utopia would arguably be more stable since there would be less striving for change.
> there would be less striving for change
Precisely, there would be nothing to strive for.
As an engineer I often say "If everything in life went to plan it would be a very boring life indeed"
Read some Becky Chambers.
I would not wish for anyone to inflict Becky Chambers upon themselves. She is a really awful writer. Interesting world building ideas, but she spends far too much time using her books to lecture the reader about morality, with all the subtlety of a Sunday School lecture.
Sci-fi trending down doesn’t mean it’s dying.
There must be some law about articles proclaiming X is dead. Does anyone know of one? Something along the lines of "Any article declaring X is dead is always wrong and just trying to sell you something"
Dumbest article I've read in a while.
Perhaps I'm getting the wrong impression, but it seems like this author is either ignorant of a lot of very successful contemporary scifi or is just taking a narrow view of the genre based on their own preferences.
AI and independent publishing certainly make it harder to sort the wheat from the chaff, but the ubiquity and convenience of aquiririg reading materials has never been better in all of human history.
I will never get caught up with all the scifi books I want to read, and nothing could make me happier.
plenty of great sci-fi to through from the past. most anything on the hugo or nebula awards are great.
I haven't read great from the awards long before they became so obviously exploited.
Like the movie awards, they've lost their relevance.
It's sad because there's so much more "out there" for us to discover and wonder about, with "out there" referring to anything from the bottom of the deep blue sea, to the far reaches of our galaxy, and everything (literally) in between, including our inner selves
Scifi, like most literature, was supposed to give us dreams about what we could do with what we found, or even dream about what is there to be found (IMO), so its demise leads us to a point where we're no longer dreaming?
I was part of the NY sf publishing scene in 1990s. In those days the genre felt like a constraining box. The commercial successes of the 1970s and 80s, and the corporatization of publishing in general, meant that there were limits, in literary and conceptual ways. It's funny that he mentions Jonathan Lethem--I saw Jonathan a lot in those days. How to break out of genre was a frequent topic of conversation. It really seemed the only way up was out.
I am a read addict. Love SF. There is so much hood stuff out there already that it will last more than a lifetime to read. So I am not really concerned
I would really like to be able to read something and find out that it's about whatever it said it was going to be about, and not bait to trick me into hearing about the author's 1) politics, 2) sexuality, 3) AI use or 4) investment grift.
The fact this reflects the subject matter in question is an irony surely lost on the author as well.
Political tedium aside a major factor in the decline of scifi is we live in the future, only it is not the future people were being excited about. As many creatives put it they wanted machines to do the chores and them to do the art, not the other way around.
Look on the bright side, you've lived to see 2026 where these four things have collapsed into each other. Like a rainbow refracted into pure white light.
>scifi
>I don't want to hear about politics or sexuality
How actually familiar are you with the genre?
I was talking about the article, actually.
Perhaps instead, the complaint should be that the reader should not be lectured about politics or sexuality in a ham-handed self-righteous insertion completely irrelevant to the rest of the story.
Well there goes Orson Scott Card, Asimov, Heinlein, Orwell, etc.
The politics and sexuality were always in these stories. They were just more familiar, so they don't seem as self righteous. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a classic example of a story with sexuality and politics in old timey sci fi.
You've just described a substantial part of Star Trek, before even considering the rest of the genre.
Just go read engineering documentation about the Apollo flights then. What you're describing has never been sci-fi - you're falling in that camp of people the article described that are demanding authors not write above a fifth grade level.
Scifi has always been an exploration of the human condition within certain circumstances created by fantastic technologies. The human condition is made of politics, sexuality, philosophy, ethics, identity...
Good sci-fi has always been few and far between. I love sci-fi, but I also dislike a lot of it because a lot of it's not well written from a prose craft or character depth point of view. When it is, it's probably my favorite genre.
I feel like we're lucky to get one outstanding sci-fi book or series per decade.
I'll rattle off some notable books and films/TV (or in some cases both) from the last 20 years. Some of these overlap with other genres like horror, lit-fic, etc., but I consider them all sci-fi to some degree. Some are well known and some are obscure.
The Expanse, Europa Report, Moon, Primer, The Arrival, Never Let Me Go, For All Mankind (the unofficial Expanse prequel), Sleep Dealer (indie film that stuck with me), The Color Out of Space (2019 film of Lovecraft's story), Banshee Chapter, The Peripheral, Blindsight, Annihilation, I'm sure I could keep going...
99 percent of everything is crap. SF is no worse than anything else?
I haven't gone deep on enough things to know whether science fiction is worse than anything else in that regard. But science fiction is largely trope-ridden young adult male power fantasy emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually bereft pulp. It's also my favorite genre.
Troubling, but I'll worry about it after I run out of 20th century slop to read.
1) Wow, you made a cool thing!
2) You should change your thing to agree with my politics!
3) Wow, now your thing is super unpopular!
4) No, I won't buy it. I never liked your thing anyway. That's why I wanted you to change it!
5) <- We are here.
Especially with Trek.
Do we need to keep reminding people that Star Trek depicted the first interracial kiss on television? Star Trek was always woke, over corporatization has just been sanding all political and social messages down to a corporate approved interpretation, aka boring, stupid, and not nearly inflammatory enough.