The primary problem facing sci-fi as a genre is that the future is rapidly shrinking. Sci-fi as a genre vs. mainstream lit with sci fi characteristics is firmly about imagined futures. But it's really set in in the past 20 years that humanity likely is never going to leave the solar system.
It's one reason why a lot of tech billionaires have gone insane. At a more general level, the rapid aging of the human population is also a dagger aimed at the idea of human dynamism. Basically: how do you imagine a world in 2100 that is meaningfully different than the world of today?
Though there is an outside shot that AI companies revive the dynamism of old school cyberpunk, depending on the degree to which the gigaslop machine is allowed to infect society.
Did they “go” insane? Or were they already insane, But their wealth and popularity Gave them permission to Let their freak flag fly In public? #deepfakethoughts
Not sure if you've read it, but Against a dark background by Iain banks explored this idea. Didn't go very happily.
Not exactly. We can freeze fully viable embryos not just eggs and sperm. We’ve found ways to have viable, genetic embryos from homosexual pairs reflecting their genes and no one else’s. If we make artificial wombs humanity can travel the stars. Just not, us.
It will be the biblical thing of “no one who ha seen Egypt will see the promised land.” But that’s not the depressing part - in order for that to work society needs to trust that what educates their frozen spawn will be … not evil. Or should we say “have faith”? Or power? 2/3 options default to bad
Sci fi isn’t failing it’s depressed.
Nah, there's alternate history & lots of other kinds of SF & there's fiction set in the future that isn't SF (eg Margaret Atwood) A genre is a bunch of stories in conversation with each other. As long as people want to riff off or respond to earlier SF, it continues as a genre
Please say more about that last sentence? What specifically caused that consensus shift since the Bush era?