Here is an interesting article in Popular Science asking "Is Science Fiction About to go blind?"
Wandering through the exhibition room at a science- fiction convention in Boston a few months ago, I saw plenty of reprints of golden-age SF classics for sale. But I also encountered paintings of half-naked people battling dragons, vendors hawking crystals and a folk musician warming up for a recital. Where is the science in science fiction? I wondered. Whatever happened to envisioning the future? Anthropologist Judith Berman, who recently surveyed a crop of science fiction published in 1999, has a grim answer: Many modern stories are nostalgic, wary of new technologies rather than enthusiastic about them.
They also mentioned a soon-to-be-published novel called Accelerando where a group of people have their brains uploaded into a spaceship the size of a tin can.
Accelerando is the story of three generations of a dysfunctional family living through the Singularity. What makes the novel unusual is not the size of the ship or the strange cocktails or even the sexual metaphors—a coital act culminates with the transfer of “source code”
Being the Catholic nerd that I am – I wondered if in that case would a firewall be a contraceptive act? Would emptying the recycle bin after this act be abortive.
2 comments
First of all, that was indeed pretty nerdy and I congratulate you for it. 🙂
Secondly, I think think there’s always been a strong cautionary bent to science fiction. Classic authors embraced science and technology in the sense that they took modern idea and ran with them, taking them to the limits of sanity and beyond. Science fiction has always been a medium for discussing the moral and ethical dimensions of technolgy.
If SF is loosing its way, it not because of nostalgia, but rather because so much information is readily available to readers that interesting story ideas dry up as the public first poses all the interesting questions, then attempts to answer them in some half-arsed way, and ultimately becomes bored with the topic du jour.
As a PopSci subscriber, I’ve already read the entire article a couple times. Funky Doug, the premise is not that nostalgia is the cause of SF losing its way, but a symptom. As you suggest, the speed of information is part of the cause.
Good questions about the e-contraception; I hadn’t thought of that! In such a world, would spam be a form of rape? Or mass murder? Would if be moral to ‘delete’ a killer for the safety of the network?
OTOH, when you have your brain uploaded, you continue to be a fleshy human with a functioning brain, so would the uploaded ‘you’ even have a soul?