Classic vs modern science fiction

Thanks, a most interesting and informative talk.

A few more examples of great modern space opera writers: Neal Asher, Jack McDevitt, Alan Dean Foster , Greg Bear 🙂

Dude, that Apple LED Cinema Display! A man of culture, I see!

Classic sci is a lot more optimistic about the future.
While modern sci Fi is a lot more pessimistic about the future.

I like Damon Knight's expression, the golden age of science fiction is twelve.

The nuances is the meat and potatoes and the writing.

Dune is largely hypothetical psychology blended with fantasy, philosophy, science fiction and theology and it scavenges various ancient civilisations and combines them to wonderful effect. I think it might be more worthwhile to speak about 'speculative fiction' like Margaret Atwood does.

Classic sci-fi was still finding its way as a genre (with both triumphs and missteps along the way). Modern sci-fi has taken all those established tropes and homogenized them. I think for sci-fi to grow out of its current state of stagnation it needs to sever itself from the past and reinvent itself as something other than a lifestyle companion.

You overlooked "This Immortal" By Roger Zelazny. It tied Dune for the hugo In 1966

Somewhere between 2010 and 2014 the Hugos ceased to be anything but a participation award. After those dates you should ignore it for your purposes.

Jules Verne's books can seem ridiculous today (dinosaurs at hundreds of kilometres under the surface? Travelling to the Moon shooting a box with dynamite?) But they also tell us what were the beliefs of their time, and give us perspective about then and today as much as reading the works of James Joyce or Mark Twain.

I think Heinlein was an exception when it comes to character development. Starship
Troopers is an example.

"Repeating tropes are repeating because readers like them" is an unfortunate oversimplification of the problem, which can also be analysed in a completely different light - from the angle of how the last four decades of neoliberal capitalism have hollowed out film, music and literature (the topic of analyses by Mark Fisher, Fredric Jameson and others) and caused this inability to invent new futures today, which means a self-repeating nostalgia of the decades of the 20th century when the high pace of modernist tech advances and more stable economic circumstances enabled people to really open up their imagination of where the world was going. In the debt-ridden world of today, where people are struggling to put food on the table and aren't sure if their jobs will be there the following month, it is inescapable that artistic imagination reflects that condition of being stuck, and leads to repeating tropes and sequels in culture.

Modern sci-fi authors have delusions of grandeur. Character development is over-emphasized. We do not need the complete childhood in order to follow the story. I think most new writers try to cover short-comings in plot with layers of exposition and "development".

you're a really good writer, man. good stuff, very helpful.

If a person feels that way, that they can't handle ideas and thoughts presented in a different way, that they may not be politically correct or sensitive to your way of thinking, then maybe books just aren't for you, especially older books.

why read teleprompter cards?

Hyperion is proof that as a genre, SF is dead.....

U ramblin' dude.....!!

Lots of great points. Thanks for this video.

What about the characterisation of the aliens as depicted by Asimov in The Gods Themselves? I'm sure there are such examples from other authors as well. Maybe the characterisations don't reflect present day values and sensibilities - but they are deep and detailed nonetheless.

One of my favourite classic authors is Larry Niven. His first book The world of Ptavvs was incredible and how he brings the influence of their empire and war with the Tnuctip across billions of years is epic.
If i compare that to the Trisolaris trilogy by Cixin Lieu then there are marked differences, there's more politics, less idealism, more infighting and betrayal and yet the focus is different when reading. When i read early Larry Niven then i appreciate the grand concepts unpolluted by character nuance but when i read Cixin Lieu i appreciate the grand concepts with character nuance. A story for me is a self contained universe that sets out it's own rules, and im quite happy to abide by those rules.

You summed up some superficial appearances/tropes in the winners comparison. What's really at the heart of a story may not be the same as the appearance.

Like a lot of things: Classic sci-fi, the writers wrote more from the heart as it was of interest to them personally. Today the genre is more about writing professionally for career purposes.

Geez, you can’t go 5 minutes with out people start to talk about diversity and representation. If you don’t like something, don’t do it or read it. Instead, people are twisting and distorting things to fit “their” personality…….or even worse, what THEY think other people SHOULD be thinking or feeling. Seems like a good vid and channel, but I’m not continuing to watch. Advice for future: leave politics out. Do you take a shit and make it political also?

Space colonization, ecology or militarism are all very complex themes, with so much to explore and so many possible points of view there's nothing inherently unoriginal or cliche about revisiting them (as long as the writer is actually writing their own book and not just copy-pasting someone else's off course)

Gender ideology is pure fiction, there is no such thing as transgender. If I read a book, I don't want to see basic denial of logic.

Conforming to the trans agenda is actually intellectual regression.

Stories & poetry involving the human condition are universal and timeless no matter the genre. Love, death, longing, despair, triumph, defeat, and moral challenges get readers interested. These themes also keep us interested in fictional characters who are strangers at first. "What would I do in his/her place?" If it sings true in your heart, you'll keep reading.

Some authors like Heller & Dostoyevski show us characters who consistently make the wrong moral choices every step of the way, and by so doing hold up a mirror and make us consider our own values and choices. It's never too late for a good story well told to change someone's life. These are the stories we remember long after the last page is turned.

Not to say Older is better, because bothe have their merits, but I feel a lack of Wonder and Horror from modern Sci-Fi which in turn seems to prioritise Action or Dystopic themes.

If a Classic story had humans encounter an Alien race, that's a whole ass Alien race there are so many implications we could explore or hilariously ignore.

Whereas today it seems modern Sci-Fi skims over that part to get to what importance these aliens have to the plot or themes, if any, sometimes it's just set dressing.

I love all sorts... I love the clinical exploration of Rama and the concept of a reverse-internal-world spaceship, as much as I did the development of John Perry in the Old Man's War series.
And I loved reading/watching Original Star Trek as much as I loved reading Redshirts. (Maybe too much Scalzi in these examples... but you get my point)

Hi! I just met your channel. Sci-Fi is one of the few genres I read (I prefer watch a series). Greetings from Spain.

In Collapsing Empire, Scalzi has admitted that the F-word woman was his favorite character. She's worse than a Mary Sue. She was obviously intended to pander towards ball busting feminists with a teenage girl boss power fantasy. It was immature even before it was written.

I appreciate your recognition of the constraints placed on earlier SF owing to the medium and the contemporary society - it echoes some of my own contentions, but I take things a bit farther:

first, characters without all of the detail you reference (they didn't get a cookie when they were young) are, in many respects, MORE relatable to a wider range of readers than one whose got all kinds of personal baggage, for the simple reason that very few readers are going to share the same baggage with the character. Why do characters like Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Professor Quartermass continue to endure over the decades (despite changing audiences)? Because there are fewer details for the reader to get hung up on.

Additionally, readers of the pulps were all very familiar with character stereotypes (a lot of people these days criticize these earlier works for "cardboard" characters) so there was little to no need to "waste space and wordage" on detail that it was unnecessary to convey to a reader: we knew what kind of person the Engineer was; we knew what characteristics the "Evil Rival" would have.

Third, I've come to believe that one of the changes between "classic" and "Modern" SF is the loss of the "gedanken experiment" mode of writing. Yes, that privileges the science/gadgets over characters (why in the heck do people want to watch the interpersonal, emotional turmoil of other people, don't they have enough in their own lives already?); such fiction was, I think, the true expression of the definition of the genre - positing a technological change and following its development to some conclusion: the tech is going to be used, by people, but the people who use it really hardly matter, do they? The tech will affect EVERYONE - what does it matter how it affects one small handful? Starship Troopers is a good example of a Gedanken Experiment in literature - positing a different form of "franchise" in an otherwise liberal society and seeing where it leads - but BECAUSE readers are focused on "character" these days, the impression of that novel has morphed into accusations of fascism on the part of the characters.

Judging classics by todays standards is a surefire signature of low IQ and emotional incontinence.

Back in the 60s, Asimov wrote about a woman (in the Robot series) who experienced an orgasm merely from the touch of the main character's hand, having never actually touched another person's naked flesh; this was/IS way more advanced than the petty issues marring and confusing society today---I won't say politics, as diversity and "identity" have become too absurd to consider fit for discussion, let alone any damn form of governance.

I don't find combining the Golden Age and the New Wave as well as Cyberpunk with contemporary SF very useful, among other smaller movements that were missed entirely here.
Most contemporary SF is difficult for me to read because it really is just recycling ideas that have already occurred only through a contemporary lens, which means a storytelling style that mirrors fantasy more than SF. This is part of the problem Dune created when becoming as popular as it did.

Also, the New Wave, while not all of it was very progressive, many of the ideas involving diversity that you speak of in contemporary work was already being accomplished and in much better fashion at that time. Even that aspect isn't new. That's also another reason conflating the New Wave with the Golden Age just doesn't work.

Good enough for a sub

We sure are not living in a Golden Age, if we have "uncomfortable words", those who play along with that narrative are anti cultural neo-calvinists and should be ignored. Nevertheless, the women in Asimov's books are funny and almost refreshing to read from today's perspective.

Well written essay, thanks for that.

Space Opera - have you ever hears of E. E. {Doc] Smith]?

The innovation in tropes is why authors like M. Shelley, A. Asimov, F. Herbert, P. k. Dick, U. Le Guin, and W.Gibson were really important. I would Even placed there the work of C.Liu, with the Dark Forest hypothesis. The innovation in tropes is the hardest to find, but the more exciting to read.

When does modern sci fi become classic?

I miss the granduer and optimistism of older science fiction. One thing that is probably a draw for so many with the game Star Citizen is the granduer and optimism of the game. The way where one can visit so many fascinating places and work themselves from a simple space ship to what amounts to a floating palace with the space yact. And each ship looks liveable.

I hope you are right about the swearing. It is no wonder the "uncomfortable" words set people off now, since swearing happens too much and has lost all impact.

I have been going through the Sherlock Holmes books lately and love the more refined speech and respect. I would say modern times feel more cringy to me because people are deluding themselves. It is no wonder modern sci-fi is so depressing!

Where is the picture from 7.52 from? It was used in a Latin American edition of Tuf Voyaging and I know it has nothing to do with that book, which always upsets me XD

I think the golden age of science Fiction ended at Star Wars.

Science fiction always decribes the prevailing mindset of the period in which It is written. Capitalism has intentionally turned the majority into preprogrammed haters of the biggest minority which cannot defend itself to take the intention away from the real culprits. So we are fed with egotism, decadence, violence, distopia’s, fear of aliens, etc. in stead of starstruck exploration of wonderfull worlds.